Anglozionism

Twilight of the Oligarchs?

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by Andrew Joyce, Ph.D. via The Occidental Observer

Russian Jewish Oligarchs, from left: Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven, Moshe Kantor,
Roman Abramovich

The subject of Jews and money is controversial and essential, and yet not without its darkly comic aspects. Back in November I wrote an essay on criticism of Bram Stoker’s Dracula for its alleged anti-Semitic qualities, and noted one scholar’s angst about a scene in which Jonathan Harker slashes at Dracula with a knife, cutting the vampire’s coat and sending a flood of cash to the floor. Instead of fleeing immediately, Dracula snatches up handfuls of money before sprinting across the room. The offended scholar, Sara Libby Robinson, complained that “This demonstration of putting the preservation of one’s money on par with the preservation of one’s life shows that stereotypes regarding Jews and their money were alive and well in the late nineteenth century.”

Those who spend enough time observing Jews, however, will know that the curious thing about them is that associated stereotypes have an uncanny habit of finding constant empirical confirmation. Take, for instance, a recent news article pointing out that Israel has experienced an influx of Jewish refugees since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24. The punchline is that the influx has involved many more economic refugees from Russia, who are seeking relief from Western sanctions and dropping currency values, than Ukrainian Jews seeking safety from violence. Faced with warfare, Jews really are “putting the preservation of one’s money on par with the preservation of one’s life.” In one of my favorite anecdotes from the Ukraine crisis thus far, the Russian-Israeli immigration lawyer Eli Gervits claims to have received thousands of calls from Russian Jews issuing an appeal he calls SOS: “Save our Savings.” This remarkable story is emblematic of the fact Putin’s war in Ukraine is a net negative for the Russian-based international Jewish oligarchy, and the international Jewish networks that survive and thrive on their patronage.

The Fall of Moshe Kantor

Few things have raised my spirits in recent times like the news the UK government has finally imposed sanctions on Moshe Kantor. Russian billionaire, pernicious oligarch, and one-time president of no less than the European Jewish Congress, the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation, the World Holocaust Forum Foundation, the European Jewish Fund, and the Policy Council of the World Jewish Congress, Kantor is the quintessential strongly-identified Jewish activist, fully committed to the advancement of the interests of his ethnic group. A devoted Zionist, Kantor is a citizen of Israel, as well as both Russia and the UK. Kantor, with his curious blend of citizenships, didn’t so much straddle East and West as use plunder in the former to fuel activism in the latter. One of his primary projects in recent years has been to lobby the European Union for greater restrictions on individual freedom and for the imposition of a vast, draconian apparatus for the protection and enforcement of multiculturalism across the continent. In his treatise Manifesto for Secure Tolerance, Kantor writes with Orwellian flair that “Restrictions are necessary for the freedom to live a secure life.” Reading between the lines, the message becomes clearer: “Restrictions on Europeans are necessary for the freedom of Jews to live a secure life.” Among Kantor’s proposals was the creation of a continent-wide apparatus for internet surveillance targeting opponents of multiculturalism, enforced promotion and ‘education’ on multiculturalism across Europe, and a significant increase in prison sentences for all infractions against the cult of diversity.

Kantor escaped the wave of Western sanctions on Russian (often Jewish) elites until last week, but was finally targeted because of his role as the largest shareholder of the fertilizer company Acron, which has strategic ties to the Russian government. Needless to say, the sanctioning of yet another one of their hugely influential oligarchs is sending shockwaves through international Jewish institutions reliant on the wealth and influence of such figures. On April 6, the European Jewish Congress, Kantor’s primary vehicle for the advance of his war on European freedoms, issued a statement stressing that it was

Deeply shocked and appalled by the decision today of the British government to sanction Dr Moshe Kantor, President of the European Jewish Congress, the World Holocaust Forum Foundation and the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation. The decision is misguided and lacks any factual or evidence-based merit. Dr Kantor is a British citizen who has lived for over three decades in Western Europe, many years of which has been in the UK. He is a long-standing and respected Jewish leader, who has dedicated his life to the security and wellbeing of Europe’s Jewish communities and the fight against antisemitism, racism and xenophobia. … We call for this decision to be reversed as soon as possible.

Moshe Kantor hobnobs with the boss

The most recent statement issued by the British government is low on detail, stating only that Kantor will be subject to an “asset freeze.” Since Kantor owns, and spends much time in, a substantial mansion on London’s Winnington Road, where property prices average over $8 million, this is sure to be a sore point for the oligarch. Much more worrying for Kantor is that the European Union followed suit a few days later, issuing its own asset freezes and travel bans. His bank accounts, homes, and other economic interests across the continent have been locked down.

Hungary and Austria, influenced by Zionist sympathies, both attempted to save Kantor from sanctions, with the Hungarian envoy expressing “surprise at the blacklisting of somebody he described as a highly decorated man.” However, Kantor’s fence-sitting strategy of being an Eastern kingpin and Western multiculturalist preacher has been demolished by the Ukraine conflict. Like a game of musical chairs, he finds that the music has stopped and he’s left standing, his hands full of Russian assets that were once so precious and central to his power. Ironically, the envoys of Estonia and Lithuania, two countries accused of anti-Semitism and fascism by Russia, successfully urged their partners not to remove Kantor, one of the most influential Jewish activists in Europe, from the list. And so poor Moshe, who once proposed that restrictions were a pathway to freedom, will now have to live by his own words. As his homes and possessions are seized by European governments, as the value of his companies declines, and as he finds himself with fewer places to go, I can only offer to Moshe the reassurance of his own dictum: Restrictions are necessary for the freedom to live a secure life!

Stadtlans in the Spotlight

As leader of so many groups and mover in so many high circles, Kantor fulfils the qualifications of the early modern stadtlan—Court Jews of the early modern period who boasted of significant wealth and intensive relationships with non-Jewish elites. And he exemplifies many of the same qualities, acting always in un-elected but highly-influential intercessory roles, seeking to improve the tactical and material advantages of his tribe. Look at any country of significance and you will find not only a Jewish clique ensconced in the heart of its political machinery, but often also a small number of Jewish individuals so influential that they can be regarded as political actors in their own right. These figures are the tip of the spear of Jewish activism, and in the past such men and their families have been so impactful on the course of history that their names have passed into common parlance — Rothschild, Schiff, Warburg, and more modern corollaries such as Soros, Adelson, and the constellation of Jewish billionaires infesting Ukraine and orbiting Vladimir Putin.

For these eastern Jewish elites, the war in Ukraine has had the doubly concerning effect of impacting their finances and raising their profile. Petr Aven, Mikhail Fridman, German Kahn, Roman Abramovich, Alexander Klyachin, Yuri Milner, Vadim Moshkovich, Mikhail Prokhorov, Andrey Rappoport, Arkady Rotenberg, Boris Rotenberg, Igor Rotenberg, Viktor Vekselberg, God Nisanov, Oleg Deripaska, Alexander Abramov, Gavril Yushvaev, Zarakh Iliev, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, Arkady Volozh, Eugene Schvidler, Leonid Simanovskiy, Yuri Shefler, Kirill Shamalov, Aleksandr Mamut, Lev Kvetnoy, Yevgeniy Kasperskiy, Yuriy Gushchin, Oleg Boyko, Leonid Boguslavskiy, are just some of those who have hidden in plain sight for some time, but now find themselves not only discussed, sanctioned, and blacklisted, but also grouped together in lists that highlight the startling patterns of their wealth accumulation and ethnic partnership.

In 2018 the U.S. Treasury department published a list of Russians they were considering for sanctions, and the list has continued to cause unease in Jewish circles. The Times of Israel recently tried to downplay the Jewish prominence by arguing that “At least 18 of the figures on [the Treasury list] are Jewish oligarchs,” while adding that the list consists of 210 names (meaning a Jewish representation of 8.5%). But they don’t mention that the Treasury separated their list into 114 politicians and 96 oligarchs, and there are in fact 29 confirmed Jewish oligarchs in the latter list, with a further two (Aras Algarov and Alisher Usmanov) married to Jews and raising Jewish children. In other words, at least 30% of Russia’s most influential oligarchs are Jews in a country in which Jews comprise an estimated 0.1% of the population. One cannot honestly speak of the eastern oligarchs without on some level discussing the Jews.

Russia’s billionaire Jews might be almost untouchable, but they have a history of worrying that their Jewishness might become a topic of public discussion. In 1998, the Irish Times published an article outlining the beginning of the end of the Yeltsin era. Titled “Russia Bows to the Rule of the Seven Bankers,” the article explained that Russia had fallen largely into the hands of six Jewish financiers (Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Guzinsky, Alexander Smolensky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Fridman and Vitaly Malkin), and a token gentile (Vladimir Potanin). The most interesting part of the piece is the discussion of the old Jewish strategy of using a European frontman to disguise the Jewish nature of the power structure:

In the run-up to the 1996 election, the tycoons contributed millions of dollars to Yeltsin’s re-election campaign, spurred on by Berezovsky, who later boasted that the seven members of the club controlled half of Russia’s economy. It was an overstatement but reflected their hubris. After the election, according to several sources, the tycoons met and decided to insert one of their own into government. They debated who — and chose Potanin, who became deputy prime minister. One reason they choose Potanin was that he is not Jewish, and most of the rest of them are. They feared a backlash against Jewish bankers.

Putin’s Increasing Control of the Jewish Oligarchs

As with Yeltsin, the seven bankers, especially Berezovsky, initially claimed to have promoted Putin and insisted on his candidature as a Prime Minister and President. As the Guardian pointed out in 2013, Berezovsky’s fatal flaw was simple: he misread Putin:

Berezovsky met Putin in the early 1990s, when the KGB spy was working for St Petersburg’s mayor. The two socialised and even skied together in Switzerland. By the late 1990s, Putin had become head of the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency. Yeltsin’s entourage was seeking a successor to the ailing president. They dispatched Berezovsky to offer the job to Putin — who became prime minister in the summer of 1999, succeeding Yeltsin as acting president six months later. Berezovsky had reckoned that his friend would be a pliable successor — and that he, the ultimate Kremlin insider, would continue to pull the strings. It quickly became apparent that Putin had his own vision of Russia: a darker, less democratic place, in which the country’s spy agencies would play a vanguard role, and with Putin unequivocally in charge. The two clashed; Putin seized Berezovky’s ORT TV station; and Berezovsky decamped to London. Their feud was nasty and would lead ultimately to Berezovsky’s death at the age of 67 in exile.

Other members of the Semibankirschina (Seven Bankers) were either exiled or brought to heel. Gusinsky left Russia in 2000 following accusations of misappropriation of funds. Khodorkovsky was arrested by Russian authorities in 2003 and charged with fraud. He served 10 years in prison, during which time his wealth was decimated, and he fled to Switzerland and then London upon his release. Alexander Smolensky sold off many of his assets, lowered his profile, and reportedly moved to Vienna. Vitaly Malkin became an outward Putin loyalist, while trying for almost 20 years to relocate to Canada, investing millions in Toronto, and taking Israeli citizenship. Curiously, Vladimir Potanin, the lone gentile among the Semibankirschina, prospered most under Putin, becoming Russia’s wealthiest man.

Ukraine-born Mikhail Fridman has steered a mostly steady course, focusing on financial matters, cultivating an East-West persona from his London mansion, and avoiding political confrontations. The wheels have recently started to come off for Fridman, however, thanks to the Ukraine conflict and his desire to avoid personal financial repercussions. Fridman was one of the first oligarchs to make clear his opposition to the war, and in a later interview with Bloomberg he admitted that his statement decrying the conflict as a tragedy “could make it dangerous for him to return to Russia.” The Bloomberg interview highlights the shock that Fridman felt on finding himself frozen out of the Western sphere despite, like Moshe Kantor, investing years in careful networking:

None of this helped him avoid the fate of some fellow Russian tycoons. Nor did his years of networking in the U.S. and Europe. On Feb. 28 his lawyer pulled him out of a meeting with the news that the European Union had sanctioned him and his longtime business partner, Petr Aven [also Jewish], who was heading Alfa-Bank, Russia’s largest privately held bank and a key part of Fridman’s Alfa Group Consortium. The lawyer started to rattle off what it meant: travel bans, frozen accounts. Fridman could barely register the words. “I was in shock,” he tells me. “I almost didn’t understand what he was saying.”

Fridman claims that sanctions are politically useless because the oligarchs have no influence over Putin, only business relationships:

What’s clear to him now, he says, is that the EU doesn’t get how power actually works in Russia. If the point of sanctions is to motivate people like him to apply pressure on Vladimir Putin, he says, that’s worse than unrealistic. “I’ve never been in any state company or state position,” Fridman says. “If the people who are in charge in the EU believe that because of sanctions, I could approach Mr. Putin and tell him to stop the war, and it will work, then I’m afraid we’re all in big trouble. That means those who are making this decision understand nothing about how Russia works. And that’s dangerous for the future.”

Sanctions and other economic impacts of the war have already wiped out a third of Fridman’s wealth, and although he’s still incredibly rich, he is more or less trapped in London and has no access to cash. Stephanie Baker, interviewing Fridman for Bloomberg, points out that “he now must apply for a license to spend money, and the British government will determine if any request is ‘reasonable.’” Jewish organizations in Ukraine keep calling him asking about progress on a $10 million donation he promised them but can no longer fulfil. Baker adds,

Fridman’s argument that he’s not positioned to exercise influence over the Kremlin reflects how the role of Russia’s billionaires has been turned on its head since the 1990s. Back then, Fridman was one of the original seven oligarchs, the semibankirschina. As a group they backed President Boris Yeltsin’s reelection campaign and had sway over the Kremlin. When Putin came to power in 2000, he imposed his own model: The new deal was that if they stayed out of politics, they could continue running their businesses. Putin destroyed oligarchs who violated that arrangement.

Fridman’s inability to contain his frustration at sanctions, and willingness to express opposition to the war, may well mark the end of his direct involvement in Russian life. Perhaps more than any other oligarch, his actions provoked the now infamous speech in which Putin attacked anti-war oligarchs seeking after their own economic interests:

The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and will simply spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths — spit them out on the pavement. … I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to respond to any challenges.

“A natural and necessary self-purification of society”

News that thousands of Russian Jews are fleeing to Israel to protect their money, and the ongoing signs that many Jewish oligarchs now outside Russia may never return, are suggestive that Putin’s “natural and necessary self-purification of society” will involve a reduction in the Jewish presence, in Jewish wealth, and in Jewish influence in the country. As well as the oligarchs already mentioned, there are several Jewish billionaires, including the recently sanctioned Boris Mints, on Russian most-wanted lists, for a variety of crimes including embezzlement and fraud. Leonid Nevzlin, a Jewish oligarch, friend of the exiled Khodorkovsky, and former oil tycoon who fled to Israel from Russia 20 years ago in order to escape a life sentence for murder and financial crimes, recently undertook the symbolic act of renouncing his Russian citizenship. Russian requests for Nevzlin’s extradition have been repeatedly ignored by Israel. Nevzlin recently told a journalist: “I was one of the first to be hit by Putin. He threw my friends in jails, and killed some of them.”

One of the most fascinating aspects of Putin’s political career is that it combines an often flamboyant rhetorical and performative philo-Semitism with actions that directly harm or obstruct Jewish interests. As mentioned in a previous essay, Putin is one of Europe’s foremost promoters of the Holocaust narrative, but it is a Holocaust narrative significantly less useful to Jews than the Hollywood/Spielbergian version we are so used to in the West. It’s a Holocaust narrative stripped of Jewish exclusivity, imbued with geopolitical moral codes favorable primarily to Russia, and unashamedly directed by, and for, Moscow rather than Jerusalem. In another curious example of rhetoric clashing with reality, in 2016 Putin invited Jews to come and settle en masse in Russia, presumably knowing full well that thousands of Jews were already leaving Russia at an increasingly rapid pace. In 2014, more than double the number of Jews left Russia than in any of the previous 16 years.

One of Putin’s strengths in overcoming Jewish financial power at the highest level, which he has unquestionably done, might have its basis in the fact he is not an anti-Semite in the classical understanding. He may well not think in racial terms, but, as a former member of the secret service, he is finely tuned to cliques, intrigue, subversion, and the subtleties of identity — the standard hallmarks of Jewish activism in European cultures. He appears fully capable of eliminating such strategies when he confronts them on an individual basis and with autocratic power. He can depose a Berezovsky, for example, not on the grounds of Jewishness, but, nonetheless, on certain behaviors and associations that are an outgrowth of Jewishness. They say a broken clock will still be right twice a day, and in the same way if one sets out to eliminate opposing, group-based strategies, even in a “race blind” manner, then confrontations with Jews become inevitable. In this way, Putin is a kind of accidental, or rather incidental, anti-Semite who has dominated or eliminated Jewish financiers in his country in a way probably not seen since the days of the Court Jews and the rise of parliamentary democracy.

Jews as Warmongers and Pacifists

There is an irony in the latest predicament of Russia’s Jewish financiers given that war, historically, has been very good for Jews. For this reason, it is worth looking for some historical precedent and parallels. Derek Penslar, in his Princeton-published Jews and the Military (2013), points out that Jews might be notorious for shirking actual military service, but have been prolific in profiting from conflicts all over the world:

Jews were prominently involved in an international banking system that derived considerable profit from lending funds directly to governments or packaging and selling government debt. Much of this activity took place during or in the wake of wars. During the American Civil War, the Union government’s debt skyrocketed from $65 million to $3 billion, some 30 percent of the Union’s gross domestic product. Much of that debt was marketed in the form of government bonds in small denominations and bought by ordinary citizens. The Rothschilds had pioneered this practice in France during the 1830s, and the banker Joseph Seligman picked it up in the United States during the Civil War. After the war, the Seligmans, along with the bankers Mayer Lehman and Jacob Schiff, energetically marketed U.S. bonds as well as those of cash-strapped southern-state governments.[1]

It was Schiff who provided some $200 million in loans to Japan to fuel its expansionist aims in the Far East against a Czarist Russia that was much hated by Jews, and it was the Seligmans who “encouraged the United States’ intervention in Colombia in 1903 to carve out a quasi-independent Panama, where the Seligmans had invested in land along the prospective route of the canal.”[2] One of the most obvious and notorious examples of a war for Jewish interests is of course the Boer War, 1899–1902. South Africa had been regarded as a rural backwater by the Jews until a diamond strike in 1884 and the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand in 1887. Following these events there was a substantial influx of Jewish traders, who quickly became a clique of millionaires. Claire Hirschfeld, writing in the Journal of Contemporary History, describes how Jews “were able in a relatively short period of time to create powerful financial syndicates and extended empires within a Boer republic of farmers still clinging to a pastoral life-style.”[3] Financial power soon evolved into a desire to achieve political domination, which required the toppling of the Boers. This would require the use of the British army, and Hirschfeld points out that much of the fever for war was whipped up by a British press dominated by Jews: Oppenheim’s Daily News, Marks’ Evening News, Steinkopf’s St. James Gazette, and Levi-Lawson’s Daily Telegraph. One of the foremost opponents of the war was the English Marxist Henry M. Hyndman, who accused “Semitic lords of the press” of hounding the government into a “criminal war of aggression” in South Africa. He was joined by the editor of Reynolds’ Newspaper, W. H. Thompson, who wrote at the beginning of the war:

At the bottom of the war are the Jewish syndicates and millionaires … counting the chickens shortly to be hatched. … The Stock Exchange pulls the strings and the government dances. But behind the Stock Exchange is the sinister figure of the financial Jew who is gradually enmeshing the world in the toils of the money-web which day and night the great racial freemasonry is spinning in every corner of the globe.

Penslar agrees that Jews worked together to profit from war, writing that “it is a fact, not an antisemitic fantasy, that Jews played vital roles in coordinating the allocation of raw materials during the First World War, not only in Germany but also in the United States.”[4] This involved overlapping cliques of Jews profiting from every aspect of war production.

Conversely, Jews can flip the pacifist switch when it is judged that war can harm their interests. Penslar points out that the Rothschilds worried in 1914 that “a war could divide the great banking dynasty,” while Max Warburg began hastily dumping his shares in companies trading on the Vienna exchange. Baron Rothschild pleaded with The Times to tone down its anti-German rhetoric, only for the editor to publicly retort at this “dirty German-Jewish financial attempt to bully us into advocating neutrality.” The German-Jewish shipping magnate Albert Ballin looked on despondently when his merchant fleet sank to the bottom of the Atlantic.

Conclusion

The present war in Ukraine carries more echoes of Ballin than of the war against the Boers. Faced with the Russian invasion and the perennial question “is it good for the Jews?” the scattered Jewish oligarchs of Russia would probably answer a resounding “No.” The most important reason would, of course, be the decline in their individual and collective wealth. Billions have been wiped from their accounts, their businesses have been hobbled, their movement and ability to do business is restricted, and their access to cash is limited. The nature of international finance — politically, philosophically, and technologically — has evolved to such an extent that Jewish profiteering in the old style is more difficult than ever. In addition, it’s also made the individual targeting of financiers in the context of conflict and war not only feasible, but easy and immediate.

The oligarchs find themselves between a rock and hard place, viewed with hostility and suspicion by the West, despite years of Holocaust promotion and Jewish philanthropy (as if this actually contributes anything to the West), and increasingly distant from, and fearful of, the Kremlin. The natural settling place for most of them is Israel, which itself tries to cultivate a relationship with both East and West, dropping one and fawning at the other according to the winds of its needs. Even Israelis, however, are viewing the oligarchs as “toxic,” and have been warned by the US government about taking in “dirty money.”

Forbes has discussed speculation from some experts that Putin is secretly happy about the twilight of the oligarchs. Sanctions may force them into asset sales that ultimately benefit his security agencies. Or they may return to Russia and be forced not only to invest in the Russian economy rather than spread their wealth globally (like property empires in London, opulent yachts etc.), but also to adopt an even more servile position under Putin. Diminished oligarchs will lead to a vast diminishment in the coffers of international Jewish organizations. A key financial well will have dried up. Putin’s war may well have breathed some truth into an edited version of Moshe Kantor’s dictum: Restrictions on Jewish financiers are necessary for the freedom to live a secure life.

Military Affairs

Why Russia’s Intervention in Ukraine is Legal Under International Law

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By Daniel Kovalik via RT

Daniel Kovalik teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and is author of the recently-releasedNo More War: How the West Violates International Law by Using “Humanitarian” Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests.

The argument can be made that Russia exercised its right for self-defense

For many years, I have studied and given much thought to the UN Charter’s prohibition against aggressive war. No one can seriously doubt that the primary purpose of the document – drafted and agreed to on the heels of the horrors of WWII – was and is to prevent war and “to maintain international peace and security,” a phrase repeated throughout.

As the Justices at Nuremberg correctly concluded, “To initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” That is, war is the paramount crime because all of the evils we so abhor – genocide, crimes against humanity, etc. – are the terrible fruits of the tree of war.

In light of the above, I have spent my entire adult life opposing war and foreign intervention. Of course, as an American, I have had ample occasion to do so given that the US is, as Martin Luther King stated, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” Similarly, Jimmy Carter recently stated that the US is “the most war-like nation in the history of the world.” This is demonstrably true, of course. In my lifetime alone, the US has waged aggressive and unprovoked wars against countries such as Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, Libya, and Somalia. And this doesn’t even count the numerous proxy wars the US has fought via surrogates (e.g., through the Contras in Nicaragua, various jihadist groups in Syria, and through Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the ongoing war against Yemen).

Indeed, through such wars, the US has done more, and intentionally so, than any nation on earth to undermine the legal pillars prohibiting war. It is in reaction to this, and with the express desire to try to salvage what is left of the UN Charter’s legal prohibitions against aggressive war, that a number of nations, including Russia and China, founded the Group of Friends in Defense of the UN Charter.

In short, for the US to complain about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a violation of international law is, at best, the pot calling the kettle black. Still, the fact that the US is so obviously hypocritical in this regard does not necessarily mean Washington is automatically wrong. In the end, we must analyze Russia’s conduct on its own merits.

One must begin this discussion by accepting the fact that there was already a war happening in Ukraine for the eight years preceding the Russian military incursion in February 2022. And, this war by the government in Kiev against the Russian-speaking peoples of the Donbass – a war which claimed the lives of around 14,000 people, many of them children, and displaced around 1.5 million more even before Russia’s military operation – has been arguably genocidal. That is, the government in Kiev, and especially its neo-Nazi battalions, carried out attacks against these peoples with the intention of destroying, at least in part, the ethnic Russians precisely because of their ethnicity.

While the US government and media are trying hard to obscure these facts, they are undeniable, and were indeed reported by the mainstream Western press before it became inconvenient to do so. Thus, a commentary run by Reuters in 2018 clearly sets out how the neo-Nazis battalions have been integrated into the official Ukrainian military and police forces, and are thus state, or at least quasi-state, actors for which the Ukrainian government bears legal responsibility. As the piece relates, there are 30-some right-wing extremist groups operating in Ukraine, that “have been formally integrated into Ukraine’s armed forces,” and that “the more extreme among these groups promote an intolerant and illiberal ideology… ”

That is, they possess and promote hatred towards ethnic Russians, the Roma peoples, and members of the LGBT community as well, and they act out this hatred by attacking, killing, and displacing these peoples. The piece cites the Western human rights group Freedom House for the proposition that “an increase in patriotic discourse supporting Ukraine in its conflict with Russia has coincided with an apparent increase in both public hate speech, sometimes by public officials and magnified by the media, as well as violence towards vulnerable groups such as the LGBT community.” And this has been accompanied by actual violence. For example, “Azov and other militias have attacked anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, media outlets, art exhibitions, foreign students and Roma.”

As reported in Newsweek, Amnesty International had been reporting on these very same extremist hate groups and their accompanying violent activities as far back as 2014.

It is this very type of evidence – public hate speech combined with large-scale, systemic attacks on the targets of the speech – that has been used to convict individuals of genocide, for example in the Rwandan genocide case against Jean-Paul Akayesu.

To add to this, there are well over 500,000 residents of the Donbass region of Ukraine who are also Russian citizens. While that estimate was made in April 2021, after Vladimir Putin’s 2019 decree simplified the process of obtaining Russian citizenship for residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, this means that Russian citizens were being subjected to racialized attack by neo-Nazi groups integrated into the government of Ukraine, and right on the border of Russia.

And lest Russia was uncertain about the Ukrainian government’s intentions regarding the Russian ethnics in the Donbass, the government in Kiev passed new language laws in 2019 which made it clear that Russian speakers were at best second-class citizens. Indeed, the usually pro-West Human Rights Watch (HRW) expressed alarm about these laws. As the HRW explained in an early-2022 report which received nearly no coverage in the Western media, the government in Kiev passed legislation which “requires print media outlets registered in Ukraine to publish in Ukrainian. Publications in other languages must also be accompanied by a Ukrainian version, equivalent in content, volume, and method of printing. Additionally, places of distribution such as newsstands must have at least half their content in Ukrainian.”

And, according to the HRW, “Article 25, regarding print media outlets, makes exceptions for certain minority languages, English, and official EU languages, but not for Russian”(emphasis added), the justification for that being “the century of oppression of … Ukrainian in favor of Russian.” As the HRW explained, “[t]here are concerns about whether guarantees for minority languages are sufficient. The Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s top advisory body on constitutional matters, said that several of the law’s articles, including article 25, ‘failed to strike a fair balance’ between promoting the Ukrainian language and safeguarding minorities’ linguistic rights.” Such legislation only underscored the Ukrainian government’s desire to destroy the culture, if not the very existence, of the ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

Moreover, as the Organization of World Peace reported in 2021, “according to Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council Decree no. 117/2021, Ukraine has committed to putting all options on the table to taking back control over the Russian annexed Crimea region. Signed on March 24th, President Zelensky has committed the country to pursue strategies that . . . ‘will prepare and implement measures to ensure the de-occupation and reintegration of the peninsula.’” Given that the residents of Crimea, most of whom are ethnic Russians, are quite happy with the current state of affairs under Russian governance – this, according to a 2020 Washington Post report – Zelensky’s threat in this regard was not only a threat against Russia itself but was also a threat of potentially massive bloodshed against a people who do not want to go back to Ukraine.

Without more, this situation represents a much more compelling case for justifying Russian intervention under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine which has been advocated by such Western ‘humanitarians’ as Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice, and which was relied upon to justify the NATO interventions in countries like the former Yugoslavia and Libya. And moreover, none of the states involved in these interventions could possibly make any claims of self-defense. This is especially the case for the United States, which has been sending forces thousands of miles away to drop bombs on far-flung lands.

Indeed, this recalls to mind the words of the great Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, who opined years ago in his influential work, ‘Culture and Imperialism’, that it is simply unfair to try to compare the empire-building of Russia with that of the West. As Dr. Said explained, “Russia … acquired its imperial territories almost exclusively by adjacence. Unlike Britain and France, which jumped thousands of miles beyond their own borders to other continents, Russia moved to swallow whatever land or peoples stood next to its borders … but in the English and French cases, the sheer distance of attractive territories summoned the projection of far-flung interest …” This observation is doubly applicable to the United States.

Still, there is more to consider regarding Russia’s claimed justifications for intervention. Thus, not only are there radical groups on its border attacking ethnic Russians, including Russian citizens, but also, these groups have reportedly been funded and trained by the United States with the very intention of destabilizing and undermining the territorial integrity of Russia itself.

As Yahoo News! explained in a January 2022 article:

“The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials.

The program has involved ‘very specific training on skills that would enhance’ the Ukrainians’ ‘ability to push back against the Russians,’ said the former senior intelligence official.

The training, which has included ‘tactical stuff,’ is ‘going to start looking pretty offensive if Russians invade Ukraine,’ said the former official.

One person familiar with the program put it more bluntly. ‘The United States is training an insurgency,’ said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how ‘to kill Russians.’” (emphasis added).

To remove any doubt that the destabilization of Russia itself has been the goal of the US in these efforts, one should examine the very telling 2019 report of the Rand Corporation – a long-time defense contractor called upon to advise the US on how to carry out its policy goals. In this report, entitled, ‘Overextending and Unbalancing Russia, Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options’, one of the many tactics listed is “Providing lethal aid to Ukraine” in order to “exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability.”

In short, there is no doubt that Russia has been threatened, and in a quite profound way, with concrete destabilizing efforts by the US, NATO and their extremist surrogates in Ukraine. Russia has been so threatened for a full eight years. And Russia has witnessed what such destabilizing efforts have meant for other countries, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria to Libya – that is, nearly a total annihilation of the country as a functioning nation-state.

It is hard to conceive of a more pressing case for the need to act in defense of the nation. While the UN Charter prohibits unilateral acts of war, it also provides, in Article 51, that“[n]othing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense… ” And this right of self-defense has been interpreted to permit countries to respond, not only to actual armed attacks, but also to the threat of imminent attack.

In light of the above, it is my assessment that this right has been triggered in the instant case, and that Russia had a right to act in its own self-defense by intervening in Ukraine, which had become a proxy of the US and NATO for an assault – not only on Russian ethnics within Ukraine – but also upon Russia itself. A contrary conclusion would simply ignore the dire realities facing Russia.

Western Hegemony's Collapse

The End of Western Domination

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by Thierry Meyssan via Voltaire Net

No one ever imagined that they would isolate themselves to die.

The Western sanctions against Russia, decided unilaterally by Washington, are presented as a just punishment for the aggression against Ukraine. But, without mentioning their illegality under international law, everyone can see that they do not reach their target. In practice, the United States is isolating the West in the hope of maintaining its hegemony over its allies.


For Thucydides, the ambition of Sparta and Athens was the same and could only lead them to war. On the contrary, the Russian and Chinese leaders envisage a multipolar world in which each could have different ambitions. Nothing would push them to go to war.

The United States, which was a late participant in the World Wars and suffered no losses on its territory, emerged victorious from the world conflicts. Inheriting the European empires, it developed a system of domination that made it the “world’s policeman. However, their hegemony was fragile and could not resist the development of large nations. As early as 2012, political scientists began to describe the “Thucydides trap” by analogy with the Greek strategist’s explanation of the wars between Sparta and Athens. According to them, China’s rise to power also made a confrontation with the United States inevitable. Noting that, if China had become the first world economic power, Russia had become the first military power, Washington decided to fight them one after the other.

It is in this context that the war in Ukraine took place. Washington presents it as “Russian aggression”, adopts sanctions and forces its allies to take them too. The first thing that comes to mind is that the United States, knowing that it is militarily inferior but economically superior, decided to choose its battlefield. However, an analysis of the forces involved and the measures taken belies this reading of events.

Washington assassinated Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Libyan leader Muamar Gaddafi because they dared to question the dominance of the dollar. Then they looted their central banks.

THE WORLD ECONOMIC SYSTEM

The global economic system was created by the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944. They aimed to establish a framework for capitalism beyond the crisis of 1929, for which Nazism had not been the solution. The United States imposed its currency as a gold-convertible benchmark. Neither the Soviet Union nor China participated in the conference.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon decided to unofficially end the dollar’s parity with gold. This allowed him to finance the war in Vietnam. In practical terms, there were no longer any fixed exchange rates. The measure was not formalized until after the war, in 1976. It was also at this time that China formed an alliance with the Anglo-Saxon multinationals. The European Community (the forerunner of the European Union) adapted by regulating the now-floating exchange rates in 1972 (the “currency snake”), and then by creating the euro.

From 1981 onwards, the United States began to let its debt slip away. It went from 40% of its GDP to 130% today. They tried to globalize the world economy, i.e. to impose their rules on the solvent countries and to destroy the state structures of the remaining countries (the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy). To pay their debt, they printed dollars, spied on the companies of their allies and stole all the reserves of two big oil states, Iraq and Libya. Nobody dared to say anything, but from 2003 onwards, the US economic system was no longer what it claimed to be. Officially they were still liberal, but everyone could see that they were no longer producing their own food and necessities, and that they were living on rapine.

The US economy, which was one third of the world economy when the USSR dissolved, is now only one tenth.

Many states anticipated the end of the Bretton Woods rules and thought about a new deal. In 2009, Brazil, Russia, India and China, soon joined by South Africa for Africa, created the BRICS. These countries have set up financial institutions which, unlike the IMF and the World Bank, do not make their loans conditional on structural reforms or political commitments to align with Washington. They prefer to invest on a leasing basis, with the host country becoming the owner of the investment when it is profitable.

In 2010, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia, soon joined by Armenia, founded the Eurasian Economic Union. These border countries established a free trade zone with Egypt, China, Iran, Serbia, Singapore and Vietnam. They could be joined by South Korea, India, Turkey and Syria.
In 2013, China began its vast “New Silk Roads” project. The following year, when its GDP surpassed that of the United States at purchasing power parity, Beijing created the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and in 2020, it regulated foreign capital.

In 2021, the European Union devised its Global Gateway to compete with China and impose its political model. But this demand was seen as colonial overreach by many countries and was rejected en masse.

Gradually, the Russian and Chinese blocs have come closer together thanks to the joint project of the Great Eurasian Global Partnership (2016) within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The aim is to develop the whole space by creating balanced communication channels on the ideological bases defined by Kazakh Sultan Nazerbayev: inclusiveness, sovereign equality, respect for cultural and socio-political identity, openness and readiness to integrate other ensembles.

Washington’s attempt to destroy this emerging entity has no chance of success. It is striking that :
the economic attack began not with the invasion of Ukraine, but two days before.
it is primarily directed against Russian banks, Russian billionaires and the Russian gas industry and not at all against the new Eurasian communication system. Finally, it aims at excluding Russia from international organizations, but does not concern the states that refuse to condemn Russia. Therefore it will push them into the arms of Beijing.

In other words, the US is not isolating Russia, but it is isolating the West (10% of humanity) from the rest of the world (90% of humanity).

U.S. President Joe Biden came to effectively chair the European Council on March 24, of which the United States is not a member. According to the European treaties, it is NATO that ensures the security of the European Union.

THE PROCESS OF SEPARATING THE WEST FROM THE REST OF THE WORLD

0. The very day after Moscow recognized the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (February 21, 2022), the United States launched an economic attack on Russia (February 22). The European Union followed suit the day after (February 23). Vnesheconombank and Promsvyazbank were excluded from the global financial system.

Vnesheconombank (VEB.RF) is a regional development bank. It could have helped the Donbass. Promsvyazbank (PSB) invests mainly in the defense sector. It could have played a role under the Mutual Assistance Treaty.

1. As Russia started a special military operation in Ukraine (February 24), the United States extended the exclusion of the first two banks from the global financial system to all Russian banks (February 25). The European Union followed suit (February 25).

2. In order to prevent as many states as possible from joining Russia, Washington extended the trade bans to Belarus. The European Union began to deny Russian banks access to the SWIFT system as previously instructed by the United States, extended sanctions to Belarus and censored the Russian state media, Russia Today and Sputnik (March 2)

3. Washington began to target wealthy Russian citizens (erroneously called “oligarchs”) with bad relations with the Kremlin (March 3) and to ban imports of Russian energy sources (March 8). The European Union followed suit, but resisted a ban on the import of much-needed Russian gas (March 9).

4. Washington extended financial sanctions in the IMF and World Bank, expanded the list of oligarchs and bannned the export of luxury goods to Russia (March 11). The European Union followed suit (March 15).

5. Washington ensuref that members of the Duma and oligarchs no longer have any rights in the West; that Russia would no longer be able to use its assets in the USA to pay its debts to the USA; and that it would no longer be able to use its gold to pay its debts abroad (24 March). The European Union followed in these prohibitions. It pronounced a ban on the import of Russian coal and oil, but still no ban on gas.

The table below summarizes the communications from the White House and Brussels.

On February 4, 2022, Russian and Chinese Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping signed a joint statement outlining their vision for sustainable economic development. The day after the Russian army entered Ukraine on February 25, they confirmed by phone that the U.S. reaction would not change their agreement.

THE REST OF THE WORLD’S RESPONSE

It is an extremely surprising phenomenon to observe: the U.S. has managed to sway a majority of states to its side, but these states are the least populous in the world. It is as if they have no means of putting pressure on countries capable of independence.

Due to the unilateral actions of the Anglo-Saxons and the European Union, the world is being divided into two heterogeneous spaces. The era of economic globalization is over. The economic and financial bridges are being broken one by one.

Reacting swiftly, Russia has convinced its BRICS partners to stop trading in dollars and to eventually create a common virtual currency for their exchanges. Until then, they will proceed in gold. This currency should be based on a basket of BRICS currencies, weighted according to the GDP of each member state, and on a basket of commodities listed on the stock exchange. This system should be much more stable than the current one.

Above all, Russia and China appear to be much more respectful of their partners than the West. They never demand structural reforms, neither economic nor political. The Ukrainian affair shows that Moscow does not seek to take power in Kiev and occupy Ukraine, but to push back NATO and fight the Banderites (the “neo-Nazis” according to Kremlin terminology). Nothing but very legitimate, even if the method is brutal.

In practice, we are witnessing the end of four centuries of domination by Westerners and their empires. It is a confrontation between different ways of thinking.
Westerners now think only in terms of weeks. With this short-sightedness, they may have the impression that the United States is right and the Russians wrong. On the contrary, the rest of the world thinks in decades, even centuries. In this case, there is no doubt that the Russians are right and the West as a whole is wrong.
Moreover, the West rejects international law. They attacked Yugoslavia and Libya without the authorization of the Security Council and lied to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. They only accept the rules they make. On the contrary, the other states aspire to a multipolar world in which each actor would think according to their own culture. They are aware that only international law would make it possible to preserve peace in the world as they dream of it.

Rather than confronting Russia and China, the United States has chosen to withdraw into its empire: to isolate the West in order to maintain its hegemony.

Since 2001, all world leaders have viewed the West, and particularly the United States, as wounded predators. They do not dare to confront them and look for ways to accompany them gently to the cemetery. No one ever imagined that they would isolate themselves to die.

Translation
Roger Lagassé

The End is Here

Biden: “America as a nation can be defined as a single word: f*%#€£”

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Saving Ukrainians from Themselves

US, EU Sacrificing Ukraine To ‘Weaken Russia’: fmr. NATO Adviser

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Former Swiss intelligence officer and NATO adviser Jacques Baud on the roots of the Ukraine-Russia war and its growing dangers.

US, EU Sacrificing Ukraine To ‘Weaken Russia’: fmr. NATO Adviser 1

Watch the video below:


US, EU Sacrificing Ukraine To ‘Weaken Russia’: fmr. NATO Adviser 1
Guest: Jacques Baud. Former intelligence officer with the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service who has served in a number of senior security and advisory positions at NATO, the United Nations, and with the Swiss military.
Watch the video below:

TRANSCRIPT

Excerpt
AARON MATÉ:  Welcome to Pushback.  I’m Aaron Maté.  Joining me is Jacques Baud.  He has served in a number of senior security and advisory positions at NATO, the UN, and with the Swiss military.  He is also a former strategic intelligence officer with the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service.  Jacques, thank you for joining me.
JACQUES BAUD:  I thank you for inviting me.
AARON MATÉ:  Let me just start by asking you to talk more about your background and how it has informed your visibility into the crisis in Ukraine.

JACQUES BAUD:  Well, as you just said, I’m a strategic intelligence officer.  I used to be in charge of the Warsaw Pact forces in strategic…that was during the Cold War, but still, I have a good visibility on what’s going on in Eastern Europe.  I used to speak and read Russian as well, so that gives me some access to some documents.  And recently I had been seconded to NATO as head of the struggle against proliferation of small arms.  And in that capacity, I was involved in several projects from 2014 onwards with NATO in Ukraine.  And so, I know the context quite well.  I was also monitoring the possible influx of small armaments in the Donbas in 2014.  And I have also worked—because in my previous assignment in the UN, I used to work on the restoration of armored forces, so when the Ukrainian armed forces got some problems with personnel issues, with suicide, with all these kind of things that you had in 2014, also problems in recruiting military—I was asked to participate on the NATO side on several projects in restoring Ukrainian armed forces.  And so that’s a little bit, in a nutshell, my background regarding this area.

AARON MATÉ:  You’ve written a lengthy article which I will link to in the show notes for this segment, and you lay out the causes of the Ukraine conflict in three major areas.  There is the strategic level, the expansion of NATO; the political level, which is what you call the Western refusal to implement the Minsk agreements; and operationally, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian population of the Donbas over the past years and the dramatic increase in late February 2022.

Let me ask you to start there.  Talk about what you call the dramatic increase on civilians inside the Donbas in February, the period that led to the Russian invasion, immediate period, and how this escalation of attacks, as you say, helped lead to this war, this Russian invasion.

JACQUES BAUD:  Well, I think we have to understand, as you know, that the war in fact hasn’t started on 24 February this year.  It started already in 2014.  But I think that the Russians always hoped that this conflict could be solved on a political level, in fact; I mean the Minsk agreements and all that.  So, basically what led to the decision to launch an offensive in the Donbas was not what happened since 2014.  There was a trigger for that, and the trigger is two things; I mean, it came in two phases, if you want.

The first is the decision and the law adopted by [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy in March 2021—that means last year—to reconquer Crimea by force, and that started a build-up of the Russian armored for…not the Russian, [rather] the Ukrainian armored forces in the southern parts of the country.  And so, I think the Russians were perfectly aware of this build-up.  They were aware that an operation was to be launched against the Republics of the Donbas, but they did not know when, and, of course, they were just observing that, and then came the real trigger.
You may remember that—I think it was on the 16th of February—Joe Biden, during a press conference, told that he knew that the Russians would attack.  And how would he know that?  Because I still have some contacts, and nobody actually thought that the Russians—before end of January, beginning of February—I think nobody thought that the Russians would attack Ukraine.  So, there must have been something that made Biden aware that the Russians would attack.  And this something, in fact, is the intensification of the artillery shelling of the Donbas starting on the 16th of February, and this increase in the shelling was observed, in fact, by the [Border] Observer Mission of the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe], and they recorded this increase of violation, and it’s a massive violation.  I mean, we are talking about something that is about 30 times more than what it used to be, because the last eight years you had a lot of violations from both sides, by the way.  But suddenly on the 16th of February you had a massive increase of violation on the Ukrainian side.  So, for the Russians, Vladimir Putin in particular, that was the sign that the operation—the Ukrainian operation—was about to start.

And then everything started; I mean, all the events came very quickly.  That means that if we look at the figures, you can see that there’s, as I said, a massive increase from the 16th-17th, and then it reached kind of a maximum on the 18th of February, and that was continuing.

And the Russian parliament, the Duma, also was aware of this possible offensive, and they passed a resolution asking Vladimir Putin to recognize the independence of the two self-proclaimed Republics in the Donbas.  And that’s what Putin decided to do on the 21st of February.  And just after adopting the decrees, the law recognizing the independence of the two Republics, Vladimir Putin signed a friendship and assistance agreement with those two Republics.  Why did he do that?  So that would allow the Republics to ask for military help in case of attack.  And that’s why, on the 24th of February when Vladimir Putin decided to launch the offensive, it could invoke Article 51 of the UN Charter that provides for assistance in case of attack.

AARON MATÉ:  And as you noted, the OSCE documented a big increase in ceasefire violations, artillery firing on the rebel-held side, but do you think, based on what you observed of the positioning of Ukrainian troops, do you think that the threat of an imminent invasion or assault by the Ukrainian forces was real?  Can you gauge that from how they were positioned on the other side of the front line?

JACQUES BAUD:  Yes.  Absolutely.  I mean, we had reports, and those reports were available during the last couple of months.  Since last year we knew that the Ukrainians were building up their forces in the south of the country, not on the eastern border with Russia but on the border with the contact line with Donbas.  And, as a matter of fact, as we have seen from the 24th of February, the Russians had almost no resistance in the start of the offensive, especially in the north.  And so, they could, what they have done since then, they could surround the Ukrainian forces in the south, in the southeast part of the country—that means between the two Republics of the Donbas and the Ukraine mainland, if you want.  And that’s where the bulk of the Ukrainian forces are today.  And according to the…that’s exactly the Russian doctrine to fight, I mean operational doctrine.  Their main offensive was on the south, clearly, because the objective stated by Vladimir Putin—we can probably come back on these details later on—but this was demilitarization and denazification.
Both objectives, in fact, were about to be done or to be reached in the south of the country, and that’s where the main efforts of the offensive was done.  In the offensive order, the effort against Kiev is a so-called secondary effort, and it had, as a fact, you had two functions basically.  First of all, to put some pressure on the political leadership in Kiev because the name of the game is to bring the Ukrainians to the negotiations.  That was the first objective of this second effort.

The second objective of this second effort was to bind or to pin down the rest of the Ukrainian armored forces so that they could not reinforce the main forces which are in the Donbas area.  And that worked quite well.  So that means that the Russians could surround, as I said, the main forces, the bulk of the armed forces—the Ukrainian armed forces.  Once they have achieved that they could withdraw some troops from Kiev, and that’s what they have done since end of March.  They have pulled several units in order to reinforce what they want; I mean their own forces to carry on under the main battle in the Donbas area.  So now they are pulling, and they have pulled these troops from the Kiev area, and these troops will now help to flank for the vanguard, the offensive against the main forces in the Donbas.  And that’s what some called the ‘mother of all battles’ that is currently going on in the Donbas area, where you have—nobody knows exactly the number of Ukrainian troops; estimates vary from sixty thousand to eighty thousand who are surrounded—and the forces would be cut in smaller cauldrons and then destroyed or neutralized.

AARON MATÉ:  It’s pretty clear to me that Zelenskyy’s government had no interest in serious diplomacy on all the critical issues that could have avoided a war, and I think the main factor is what I presume to be US pressure behind the scenes, which we can’t fully prove now.  But I imagine evidence of that might come out later.  And certainly, the open hostility of Ukraine’s far right, who essentially threatened Zelenskyy’s life if he made peace with Russia.  And these threats have dogged him throughout his presidency and continued right up to the eve of the invasion, and it led to people like his top security official saying in late January that the implementation of the Minsk accords would lead to Ukraine’s destruction—after Zelenskyy was elected on a platform of implementing Minsk—and that carried over to the final talks on implementing the Minsk accords that were brokered by Germany and France.

At those talks in February, Zelenskyy’s government all of a sudden refused to even speak to the representatives of the rebels, which makes an accord possible.  And meanwhile you had developments like this, which we just learned about from The Wall Street Journal, which was that the German chancellor [Olaf] Scholz on February 19th told Zelenskyy that, quote, “Ukraine should renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal between the West and Russia.”  And this pact Scholz proposed would be signed by Biden and Putin, but Zelenskyy rejected this—rejected out of hand.

But my question is, because I think it’s pretty conclusive that the Zelenskyy-Ukraine side sabotaged diplomacy, but what about Russia?  Do you think Russia exhausted all of its diplomatic options to avoid a war?  For example, why not go to the UN and ask for a peacekeeping force in the Donbas?  And second of all, if the aim is to protect the people of the Donbas, why invade far beyond the Donbas and not just go there?
JACQUES BAUD:  Well, I think the Russians have totally lost faith in the West.  I think that’s the main thing.  They don’t trust the West anymore, and that’s why I think now they rely on a total victory on the military side in order to have some benefits in the negotiation.
I think Zelenskyy…I’m not sure exactly if he’s so reluctant to have peace.  I think he cannot do it.  I think from the very beginning he was caught between his…remember that he was elected with the idea of achieving peace in the Donbas.  That was his objective; that was his program as president.  But I think the West—and I would say the Americans and the British didn’t want this peace to occur.  And of course, the Germans and the French who were the guarantors of the Minsk agreement for the Ukrainian side, they never really implemented this—their function.  I mean, they have never done their job, clearly.  And especially France, which is simultaneously a member of the Security Council.  Because I will just remind you that the Minsk agreements were also part of a resolution of the Security Council.  So, meaning that they have not only the signature of the different parties that was done in Minsk, but you have also the members of the Security Council who were responsible for implementation of the agreement, and nobody wanted to have this agreement made.  So that means that, I think, there was a lot of pressure on Zelenskyy so that he wouldn’t even talk to the representatives of the two breakaway Republics.
And after that we have seen, by the way, that we have several indications that Zelenskyy was not completely, or is not completely, in control of what’s going on in Ukraine.  I think the extreme, let’s say, nationalist extreme right—I don’t know exactly what is the right term because it’s a mixture of everything—but these forces definitely prevent him, or prevented him, so far to do anything.  And we can see also that he’s back and forth regarding peace.  As soon as he started, you may remember that at the end of February, as soon as Zelenskyy indicated that he might be willing to start negotiations, this was the time where these negotiations were to take place in Belarus.  Within hours after Zelenskyy decided that, the European Union came with a decision providing for half a billion arms to Ukraine, meaning that the Americans, certainly, but I think the West as a whole, made every possible effort to prevent a political solution to the conflict, and I think the Russians are aware of that.

Now we have also to understand that the Russians have a different understanding of how to wage a war on the Western powers, especially the US.  That means that in the West we tend to, if we negotiate, we negotiate up to a certain point and then negotiations stop, and we start war.  And that’s war, period.  In the Russian way of doing things, it’s different.  You start a war, but you never leave the diplomatic track, and you go on both ways, in fact.  You put mental pressure and you try to achieve an objective, also with diplomatic means.  This is very much a Clausewitzian approach to war—when [Prussian general and military theorist Carl von] Clausewitz, as you know, defined war as the continuation of politics with other means.

That’s exactly how the Russians see that.  That’s why during the whole offensive, and even at the very beginning of the offensive, they started, or they indicated they were willing, to negotiate.  So, the Russians certainly want to negotiate, but they don’t trust the Western countries—I mean the West at large—to facilitate that negotiation.  And that’s the reason why they didn’t come to the Security Council.  By the way, they know that, probably, because, as you know, this physical war that we witness now is part of a broader war that was started years ago against Russia, and I think, in fact, Ukraine is just…I mean, nobody is interested in Ukraine, I think.  The target, the aim, the objective is to weaken Russia, and once it will be done with Russia, they will do the same with China, and you can already see.  I mean, we have seen that now, the Ukrainian crisis has overshadowed the rest, but you could have a very similar scenario happening with Taiwan, for instance.  So, the Chinese are aware of that.  That’s the reason why they don’t want to give up their, let’s say, relationship with Russia.
Now, the name of the game is weakening Russia, and you know that there have been several studies done by the Rand Corporation on extending Russia, overextending Russia, and so on, and where the whole scenario is…
AARON MATÉ:  Just to explain that for people who aren’t familiar with it, Rand is a Pentagon-type think tank, and they did a study in 2019 looking at all the different ways in which the US could overextend and unbalance Russia, and the top option was to send weapons to Ukraine to fuel a conflict there that could draw Russia in, which is exactly what’s happened.
JACQUES BAUD:  Absolutely.  And I think that this is a complete design for weakening Russia, and that’s exactly what we see unfolding right now.  We could have anticipated that, and I think Putin anticipated that.  And I think he understood that, if on the end of February, I mean, on the 24th of February, or let’s say just before because he had to make the decision before, but in the days before deciding on the offensive, he understood that he could not do nothing.  He had to do something.  The Russian public opinion would never have understood why Russia would remain just observing the Donbas Republics being invaded or destroyed by Ukraine.  So, nobody would have understood that.  So, he was obliged to go.  And then, I think…and that’s what, if you remember what he said on the 24th of February, he said regardless of what he would do, the amount of sanctions he will receive would be the same.  So basically, he knew that the slightest intervention in the Donbas would trigger a massive launch of sanctions, so he knew that.  So, then he decided, ‘Okay, then I have to go for the maximal option,’ because one option would have been just to reinforce, don’t mess with the Republics and just defend the Republics on the line of contact.  But he decided to go for the larger option, which is to destroy those forces that threatened Donbas.
And that’s where you have those two objectives.  Demilitarization, which is not the whole demilitarization of all Ukraine, but it was to suppress the military threat that was on the Donbas; that’s the main objective of that.  There’s a lot of misunderstanding of what he said and, of course, he was not very clear, but that’s part of the Russian way of communicating and doing things.  They want to keep options open, and that’s the reason why they say the minimum things and they just say what’s necessary.  And this is exactly what Putin meant on the 21st, what he said about suppressing the military threat against the Donbas.  Denazification had nothing to do with killing Zelenskyy or destroying the leadership in Kiev.  That was definitely not the idea, and, as a matter of fact, as I said, the main way they conceive war is to combine a physical action and diplomatic action.  So that means that in such a way of doing you have to keep a leadership and you have to keep them in order to negotiate, and that’s why there was no way you would kill or destroy the leadership in Kiev.
So, denazification was basically not about the 2.5 percent of the extreme right in Kiev.  That was about the 100 percent of Azov people in Mariupol and Kharkov, and this kind of thing.  So, we tend to misunderstand because some people said, ‘Well, but, you know, why denazify?  Because there is only 2.5 percent of political rightwing parties, only 2.5 percent or something like that, so it’s meaningless.  So, why denazify?  It makes no sense.’  But it was not about that.  It was definitely about those groups that were in fact recruited from 2014 by the Ukrainians in order to, let’s say, I would say pacify or control.  I don’t know exactly what’s the right word for that, but to fight in Donbas.  These people were extremists, fanatics, and these people were dangerous.
AARON MATÉ:  And one of the points you make in your article, which I didn’t know, is that part of the reason why Ukraine had this need for militias, far-right militias and foreign mercenaries, is because of a high rate of defection inside its own military ranks, people not wanting to serve, and even defecting to the other side of the rebellion in the Donbas.
JACQUES BAUD:  Exactly.  In fact, I noticed that, as I told you, I was in NATO and was monitoring the influx of weapons in the Donbas, and what we noticed is that we couldn’t identify import of weapons or export of weapons from the Russian side to the Donbas.  But what we could see is that you had a lot of Ukrainian units who defected, in fact, and complete battalions.  And in 2014, most of the heavy artillery that the Donbas gained were from defectors.  The whole units defected with ammunition and people and all that.  The reason is that the Ukrainian army was based on a territorial…was manned and organized on a territorial way.  That means you had a lot of Russian-speak[ers] in the armed forces.  Once they were sent to fight in the Donbas, they didn’t even want to fight their own colleagues and Russian-speaking people, so they preferred to defect.
And in addition to that you had in 2014, I mean in 2014 to 2017, in that period the leadership of the Ukrainian army was extremely poor.  You had a lot of corruption.  I’m not sure that the military was prepared for such a kind of war, in fact, because the war that was fought at that time by the rebels was very similar to what you can see in the Middle East today, or in the last years.  That made very mobile units moving around very rapidly, much faster than the heavy units that the Ukrainian army had, and, as a result, if we see the pattern of the different battles that were fought in 2014, 2015, you could see that the Ukrainians could never lead.  They had never the initiative.  The initiative was always with the rebels.  And it was not guerrilla.  That’s important to say.  It was kind of extremely mobile warfare.  And in addition to that you had, I think, the army was not really prepared to fight in general.  So, you had a lot of suicides, you had a lot of alcohol problems, you had a lot of accidents, you had a lot of murders within the Ukrainian army.

And that led a lot of young Ukrainians to leave the country, because they didn’t want to join the army.  And what I’m saying is, I mean, it was recorded and reported by official reports in the UK and the US, I think.  They made some very interesting reports on the low rate of recruitment of individuals, because people didn’t want simply to join the army.  And that’s the reason why NATO was involved, and I was involved in such a program, trying to reshuffle the image of the army and find solutions to improve the recruitment condition of the army, and things like that.

But the solutions that were provided by NATO were in fact institutional solutions that would take time, and in order to compensate with lack of personnel and probably to have more aggressive military personnel, they started to use internationalists and mercenaries, as a matter of fact.  Nobody knows exactly the number of these paramilitaries or extreme rights militias.  Reuters put the figure at one hundred thousand.  I’m not able to verify that, but that was a figure given by Reuters.  And that seems to fit what we can observe now in the different regions of the country.  So, these paramilitaries took a major role not in mobile warfare, and I would say [not in] the normal field warfare, but they were used in maintaining order within cities.  And that’s exactly what you have today in Mariupol, for instance, where you had those people, because they are not equipped for field operations.  They are equipped for urban warfare.  They have light equipment, they have some armored vehicles, but they don’t really have tanks, anything like this.
So, this is definitely units that are meant for urban warfare.  That’s what they do in major cities.  And these guys are extremely fanatic, we can say, and they are extremely dangerous.  And that explains the way Mariupol, the battles and the extremely brutal fights that you have in Mariupol as an example, and we probably will see the same thing in Kharkov, for instance.
AARON MATÉ:  As we wrap, I want to ask you about some of the recent atrocities that we’ve seen reported.  There were reports of mass civilian killings by Russia inside the town of Bucha and also killings of Ukrainian forces, and then you had the attack on the train station in Kramatorsk.  I’m wondering if you’ve evaluated both of these incidents and what you make of them.
JACQUES BAUD:  Well, there are two things in that.  And the first is that the indication we have on both incidents to me indicates that the Russians were not responsible for that.  But, in fact, we don’t know.  I think that’s what we have to say.  I mean, if we’re honest, we don’t know what happened.  The indications we have, everything, all the elements we have tends to point at Ukrainian responsibilities, but we don’t know.

What disturbs me in the whole thing is not so much that we don’t know, because in war there’s always such situations, there are always situations where you don’t know exactly who is really responsible.  What disturbs me is that Western leaders started to make decisions without knowing what’s going on and what happened.  And that’s something that disturbs me quite deeply, that before having any result of any kind of inquiry, of investigation, and I mean international, impartial investigation, without having that we start already to take sanctions, to make decisions, and I think that illustrates how the whole decision-making process in the West was perverted.  Since February or even before, in fact, because we had a similar thing after the hijacking—or not hijacking, by the way, it was not a hijacking—but the incident in Belarus with this Ryanair flight.  You may remember last May, last year, that people started to react just minutes after the incident was reported in the press, even they didn’t know what was going on!  So, that’s this way of doing from the political leadership in Europe, I mean the European Union, but also in European countries.  That disturbs me as an intelligence officer.  How can you make a decision with such impact on populations or on whole countries that disturbs even our own economies?  So, it tends to backfire on us.  But we take decisions without even knowing what’s going on, and that, I think, indicates an extremely immature leadership that we have in the West in general.  That’s certainly the case in the US, but I think in this example of the Ukraine crisis shows that the European leadership is not better than what you have in the US.  It’s probably even worse, I think, sometimes.  So, that’s what should worry us, that you have people deciding based on nothing, and that’s extremely dangerous.

AARON MATÉ:  Jacques Baud, he is a former strategic intelligence officer with the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service, also served in a number of senior security and advisory positions at NATO, the UN, and the Swiss military.  Jacques, thank you very much for your time and insight.
JACQUES BAUD:  Thank you for everything.  Thank you.
Aaron Maté is a journalist and producer. He hosts Pushback with Aaron Maté on The Grayzone. In 2019, Maté was awarded the Izzy Award (named after I.F. Stone) for outstanding achievement in independent media for his coverage of Russiagate in The Nation magazine. Previously, he was a host/producer for The Real News and Democracy Now!. This article was originally published on The Grayzone.

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

Shanghai Descends into Chaos

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by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

Reports coming out of Shanghai show riots now breaking out among desperate people fighting back against police forcing people into quarantine concentration camps, and horrible side effects from the Sinovac COVID-19 vaccines where people are reportedly dropping dead soon after the shots.

In nearby Taiwan, the military is taking unprecedented measures by distributing a 28-page public emergency handbook to prepare their citizens to handle an imminent Chinese invasion. (Source.)

Meanwhile, here in the U.S. the corporate media continues to focus on Ukraine, while many in the Alternative Media have been distracted for the past few days on “snake venom” that is allegedly infecting municipal water supplies.

Many people have emailed me asking me to cover this story, but not only am I not going to cover that story, I am not even going to bother watching the videos because it is nothing more than a huge distraction right now, as everyone should be stocking up on food and preparing for what comes next in the implementation of the Great Reset and New World Order that is unfolding before our very eyes in China.

And if you think I am exaggerating, this was the headline earlier this week in a major German publication boasting 23 million readers and 417 million page views a month. Notice the point size of their headline and use of the word “Apokalypse.”

Shanghai is China’s largest city and largest port, and what happens there affects the rest of the world, especially in regards to the collapsing supply chain.

Here is a video report that is from our Bitchute channel. It is also on our Odysee channel and Telegram channel.

People locked down in their apartment buildings are developing a barter system to try to stave off starvation.

Military Affairs

Uki Prisoners

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Comment:

What I see are men who are defeated and know it. Next, they realize from first moment of contact these Russians are treating them with respect and with fellowship. It is unmistakable even when you don’t know the language. My God, wounded promptly get care where the Uke army would shoot them.

Speaking as an ex-prison inmate I see lots of stuff. The prisoners are eating with metal utensils and no one is counting or tracking that in any way. If they wanted to make shivs there it is, the Russians know these guys are not making any shivs. They are all wearing heavy coats with infinite possibility for concealing contraband. Again the Russians are not worried about contraband. The prisoners walk around with their hands in those coats. Sometimes allowed minutes after surrender. The prisoners and the jailers are brothers and they know it. Ukes figure that one out immediately.

Prisoners are telling stories about surrendering because all their officers vanished. And they do not know what to do without command. Finding another Uke unit to join could be plain dangerous. Otherwise to surrender they have to kill the political officers in their platoon, company, battalion. I do not know if that is happening, if it is the Russians would sure know which side the prisoners are on.

Some number of prisoners have been interviewed, fed, asked to sign a paper saying they won’t fight again. They are handed traveling food and sent home. Even given that opportunity some want to stick around, going home could be dangerous in wartime. So there is video of work crews barely supervised handling tools that would make fine weapons, disposing of ordnance that would make fine bombs.

The surrendered are going to go home and tell the family and neighbors what great guys the Russians are. That the Russians treated them better than Kiev ever did.

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

CDC Says Public Transportation Mask Mandate No Longer In Effect

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Bloomberg reports that the CDC says the national mask requirement on public transportation is no longer in effect, citing a Florida court ruling against the measure.

The CDC says it will not enforce the mask order but continues to recommend that people wear masks in indoor public transportation settings.

As a reminder, the U.S. Senate voted 57-40 last month to overturn the public health order requiring masks on airplanes and other forms of public transportation, drawing a veto threat from President Joe Biden.

Military Affairs

Why Russia Did Not and Will Not Run Out of Precision Missiles

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via RT

The country’s defense industry did extensive modernization for years, says the Russian Vice Prime Minister in charge of the process.

Contrary to Western expectations, Russia hasn’t run out of precision munitions during the now almost two-month-long conflict in Ukraine. RT spoke to Yury Borisov, Russian vice prime minister in charge of defense procurement, about the state of the nation’s defense industry and the impact of Western sanctions on it.

RT: Mr. Borisov, the West has imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia, measures that the Kremlin has dubbed an overt economic war. Can you tell us how state defense procurements are functioning under this pressure?

Yury Borisov: We don’t see any serious threats that could undermine our work on the planned tasks in state defense procurement. Perhaps this is a result of our Western partners keeping us on our toes since 2014. We have had plenty of time to adapt to the continuous sanctions they have been introducing against Russia. We now have import substitution policies in place, and we have accumulated a necessary reserve stock of critically important materials and components. Therefore, Russia’s current state defense procurement program is under no threat.

I would say that today’s situation in defense procurement is even better compared to the previous years. We already have contracts for 88% of our annual commitments. In previous years, we would not normally get to this figure before the end of May. And the cash execution of the state budget looks really good.

This has to do primarily with the fact that given the current situation around the sanctions against Russia’s financial institutions, which necessitated an increase in the key rate, we are trying to use the budgetary resources appropriated for the defense procurement program as much as we can.

The customers of state defense procurement and acquisition – mainly Russia’s defense Ministry, but also other government agencies – actively employ the 100% prepaid model for procurement of basic electronic components, basic materials and component parts. This provides hedging of risks related to nonperformance and helps build up a reserve stock. We are absolutely certain that by the end of this year, the mean annual share of completed contracts will reach 97-98%. This has become our standard already. However, all outstanding obligations to the key customers are usually cleared in the first quarter of the following year.

RT: Import substitution must now be among the top priorities, and more urgent than ever before, especially when it comes to the defense industry. Just an example, from my own experience, I was recently near Kiev, and the military vehicles that were taking us, the reporters, on assignments were Typhoons. They are impressive vehicles, but…

Yury Borisov: There are several variants. Which one were you using, was it a four-by-four armored vehicle?

RT: No, it was a six-by-six.

Yury Borisov: So it was a KAMAZ Typhoon vehicle, I see. (KamAZ-63968 Typhoon-K – RT).

RT: Yes, absolutely, it was a KAMAZ Typhoon vehicle, right. But, for instance, it has Michelin tires. The transmission gearbox is imported too, and lots of other parts, so that the mechanics say they don’t even know how it’s going to be now regarding spare parts. And, as far as I know, Typhoons are not the only example of a really great Russian vehicle that people are now having questions about in terms of maintenance. Do you have an answer to these questions?

Yury Borisov: Of course, I do. We had a number of meetings with major manufacturers regarding both Russia’s state defense procurement program and the automotive industry on the whole.

It surely is a very challenging situation for our automotive industry now that some key components are no longer available.

If we consider the entire range of the vehicles we produce, from trucks to buses, including passenger buses, we will see that the extent of locally manufactured content is very different. The share of foreign-made components can be very different. This industry is undergoing a considerable change today, just like Russia’s entire economy and all other industries. Changes are being introduced into the supply chains; we’re bringing in new suppliers. Of course, it means that production will slow down, obviously. We are open about this.

But transitioning to new suppliers and opening new supply channels to ensure we get the necessary parts will ensure a more sustainable production in the future.

In some cases, it will mean that manufacturers will have to downgrade a little, to use less sophisticated components, for example, to go back to a manual gearbox rather than an automatic one. In some cases, the scope of provided features will have to be reduced, but none of that will seriously affect the operational qualities and consumer experience.

KAMAZ, for one, is about to fully localize production of its K-5 flagship model. This truck will soon drive Volvo and Mercedes from the market, making KAMAZ number one on the market for transport trucks.

As for military equipment and vehicles, I recall that in May 2014, back when I served as deputy defense minister, we launched a ministry initiative, proposed at meetings in Sochi, to phase out all imports of Ukrainian- and NATO-produced components.

Back then, we made two lists of all imported components that were critical to Russia’s state defense procurement program. And we kept working, step-by-step, to phase out all such imports from Ukraine. Back in the day, there were Ukrainian components we couldn’t do without, for example, marine engines and turbines manufactured by Zorya-Mashproyekt and Ivchenko Progress. The same was true for Motor Sich-produced aircraft engines and some other components for the aviation industry. That was because Russia’s military air transportation fleet at the time consisted mostly of Soviet models, as it still does, and many were co-developed by the Ukraine-based Antonov design bureau.

By the end of 2018, we successfully phased out most of the Ukrainian imports in military technology.

I believe Russia only benefited from this. It means that we have secured all our future operations and are no longer relying on supplies from Ukraine. Ukraine, on the other hand, has lost a large market. Those several billion dollars the country could have made in recent years could have boosted the Ukrainian economy.

But what’s done is done. We’re on the same track to phase out imports from so-called ‘unfriendly countries, ‘the member states of NATO. The progress here is, however, slow, as the task is more challenging. They supply mostly electronic components, where cutting edge technologies are applied, both for civil and military purposes.

One example that has made the headlines is the Irkut MC-21 airliner. We started off by switching to the locally produced composite materials, and that’s done now. More recently, pressured by the new round of sanctions introduced in response to the operation in Ukraine, we have almost completely phased out all imports of parts such as Pratt & Whitney engines for our flagship projects. We’re really stepping up our transition efforts.

RT: Speaking of this, I have a question for you about the PD-14 engine and the SSJ-100 jet.

Yury Borisov: The PD-14 turbofan engine is already used in the Russian MC-21 airliner. Today, when foreign engine producers have cut off their supplies, this option is no longer on the table for us. You see, in the past there used to be two options – our jets either used foreign-made engines or PD-14s. So now we will have to start mass production of jets equipped with the Russian-made PD-14 engine. And we will have to find substitutes for a number of critically important avionic onboard systems. In late 2024, early 2025, we will have to move on to ramping up mass production of MC-21, which is a fully Russian-made airliner, made up of exclusively domestic components.

Russia plans to make the Superjet-100 aircraft fully independent of imported components by 2023, and starting from 2024, to launch mass production of at least 20 jets per year. This will meet the expected domestic market demand for this model in the foreseeable future. It will be a fully Russian-made aircraft, the Superjet-100-New. And in late 2024, early 2025, we will have to move on to ramping up mass production of the MC-21, which is a fully Russian-made airliner, made up of exclusively domestic components.

I am sure we will learn from this situation, draw the right conclusions that will serve us in the future. We are not on the moon, so we can’t stay clear of the global division of labor, so to speak. And we don’t mean to do this, either. Fortunately for us, the world is not limited to the US and Europe, which keep slapping us with unprecedented sanctions. Most countries, in fact, did not support these sanctions and are prepared to work with Russia. The largest BRICS economies are among them, China, India, Brazil, and a number of Arab countries continue to work with us, too. Russia is on the lookout for new suppliers right now. I believe that the Russian economy will manage to withstand the effect of these sanctions and the pressure, which is very hard for us, of course. However, this situation has its advantages that we have seen put into practice already. In particular, if it were not for the sanctions introduced back in 2014, Russia’s agriculture sector would not be where it is now. And as it is, we are able to cover the domestic need for all basic agriculture products on our own. And not only that, Russia’s cereal imports have increased in recent years. We don’t only provide for ourselves, we are practically feeding the world today.

The main bonus that comes with import substitution is that new niches are created in the economy. It’s a challenge and an opportunity for Russian industry, for Russian design and engineering, for research and development centers to use their own modern technology and products in order to fill these niches and not give them up. I can say that such niches have opened in almost every systemically important sector of Russia’s economy.

It’s a serious challenge. But, on the other hand, it’s an excellent opportunity for companies to massively increase their presence on the domestic market and lay solid groundwork for entering global markers in the future.

RT: Speaking about aircraft engineering, what is the current status of the IL-496 project?

Yury Borisov: The IL-496 aircraft, or IL-96-400, is due to be completed this year. So far, as you know, we’ve had the IL-96-300 produced in a small series and used for a number of purposes, mostly for the special flight squadron, which carries the president and the prime minister, and conducts special military flights.

A limited serial production could be launched if needed, two to four aircraft per year, to ensure long-range flights. This hasn’t been necessary so far. But I think this model is a very good one, praised by all the pilots. It has had virtually no accidents throughout its lifetime. So, there will be demand.

RT: Let’s talk more about Russia’s military capabilities. US intelligence was quick to report that Russia was out of its entire stock of Kalibr missiles within the first week or so of the special operation. And yet, they are still operational, successfully delivering precision strikes on enemy targets. I fully understand that most of the information regarding our weapons is top secret, however. What I would like to ask is whether our defense industry is up to the task of re-supplying all the weapons our troops have used up already, like the Kalibr, Iskander and Kinzhal missiles. How is it doing in this regard?

Yury Borisov: First of all, these missiles that you mentioned, as well as some others including Kh-101 air-launched cruise missiles, and Bastion and Bal coastal defense missile systems, as well as the above mentioned sea-launched cruise missiles, the Kalibr, Iskander and Kinzhal, all fall into the category of high-precision weapons. Modern warfare favors the use of high-precision weapons, starting from the Yugoslav wars in the late 20th century.

High-precision weapons are to a certain extent more humane, if that can be said about any weapon at all; and that’s because they can be used to eliminate military targets, such as parked vehicles, arms depots, command posts, infrastructure targets, and so on. High precision munitions have the error probability of just a few meters. They can travel hundreds of kilometers and have next to zero CEP.

As a result, they are much more efficient than the weapons of the past that are becoming obsolete. They cause too much destruction and too many civilian deaths, which is unacceptable in such conflicts.

During this operation, Russian troops are making sure to avoid civilian casualties. That’s their priority. Our fight is not with the civilian population. Our fight is to ensure a future for the Russian-speaking civilian population.

I would like to say that high-precision weapons, used by the Russian forces, ensure that we achieve our military goals with the desired level of efficiency.

Now, back to your question. From as early as 2011, all our defense procurement programs have focused on the production and deployment of high-precision weapons. All this time, we have also been building up our manufacturing capacities. As a result, today, we can fully meet the demand of Russia’s armed forces for precision weapons.

Since you mentioned the seaborne Kalibr cruise missile, the fact is that almost all Russian ships and Project 636.6 diesel submarines carry Kalibr missiles. Deployed in the Black Sea, they can strike military targets anywhere in Ukraine. The same is true for other types of missiles, including the Kh-101 airborne missile carried by the Sukhoi Su-30 and Su-35 fighter-bombers. We have a wide range of air-to-surface munitions with a different effective range and power to hit different types of targets. Because of that, Russia dominates the sky in Ukraine. Russia’s Air Force ensures this with its efficient air-launched weapons.

Russia’s major defense manufacturers have contracts for high-precision weapon production until 2030 or, in some cases, 2033. Those enterprises are doing well. They can plan for the long term and adjust their capacities accordingly. They also keep developing upgrades for these weapon systems. It’s a well-built, sustainable operation, with great future potential. That’s what’s going on in Russia in terms of modern weapons production.

RT: How would you assess the performance of these new, state of the art, high-precision weapons on the battlefield? Not in military exercises, but in actual conflict.

Yury Borisov: As you know, we’ve acquired a lot of experience during the Syrian conflict, where we’ve already put our key weapons to the test.

RT: In the Syrian Arab Republic…

Yury Borisov: Yes. We piloted the key weapons systems in that conflict. And I don’t mind saying that we made corrections as we went on, adjusting the specifications based on our experience. It is the result of cooperation between our military and the defense industry.

Representatives of the military-industrial complex were present on the ground in Syria, supporting all the combat operations, collecting statistics on the performance of various kinds of weapons against their specifications. So this close cooperation yielded very good results, which has already been apparent during the special military operation in Ukraine.

RT: Tell us about the current state of commercial and military shipbuilding in Russia, please. What measures have the government put in place to mitigate the effect of sanctions and support commercial and military shipbuilding?

Yury Borisov: As for military shipbuilding, Russia has very solid positions as far as its strategic nuclear-powered submarine fleet is concerned. I mean strategic Borei and Borei-A class submarines and also Yasen class multi-purpose nuclear-powered submarines. We have enough of those. Our needs are fully met in this respect, both in terms of quantity and quality. The composition of our strategic nuclear forces is very advanced, state of the art.

In the past, there was a pronounced lack of open ocean vessels in Russia, which mainly focused on small corvette class warships and guided missile ships. As a result, these types of vessels are very modern and upgraded. Over the past three to four years, we have employed a system of loans to finance open ocean vessels, primarily frigates and corvettes.

As for aircraft carriers, such questions are often discussed at defense meetings in Sochi. In general, the development of high-precision and hypersonic weapons sometimes renders aircraft carrier groups useless, overshadowing their potential.

And besides, the US may need a powerful aircraft carrier group, since they are far away and need to cross the ocean before they reach any theater of operation on this continent. Russia, on the contrary, has always pursued a defense strategy, so the need for these types of vessels is debatable. But I think that you can’t just stop using this type of naval equipment altogether, you must think about it all the time. But this costs a lot of money.

At the same time, it’s possible to achieve the goals set for the Russian Navy in a more economical way – by opting for cheaper models, if we are talking of open ocean vessels, for example, and achieve a similar effect. So, it’s up to the military to determine what they really need. Even when I worked at the defense ministry, I never deemed it possible for myself to teach military professionals which types of weapons are best for them. They will decide on their own.

RT: Besides, an aircraft carrier is an easy target…

Yury Borisov: It’s a target, yes. But, of course, it’s protected. It is equipped with anti-aircraft and missile defense systems. Now, let’s talk about commercial ships.

Since Soviet times, all our ships had been manufactured in countries like Finland, or in former COMECON countries, such as Poland. Only recently have we started developing our own key shipbuilding assets, such as the United Shipbuilding Corporation.

In the Far East, we have the Zvezda Shipbuilding Complex, which specializes in large-capacity vessels, because those are used for the Northern Sea Route and because that region is a source of hydrocarbons.

Hydrocarbons are mostly transported by sea, using various kinds of ships, such as Aframax vessels, bulk carriers, coal carriers and tankers for liquid hydrocarbons.

This is evidently a new territory for Russian shipbuilders. And, of course, we have established and are developing partnerships with leading shipbuilding countries, starting with South Korea, which is a well-recognized leader in the construction of large-capacity ships. China, which is also a potential partner of ours, is now approaching their level of expertise.

So, we’ll continue manufacturing all these types of ships in the Far East, at the Zvezda shipyard. But we admit that we’ll have to restructure the whole supply chain here as well and look for new partners because two major ship engine makers, MAN and Wartsila, have refused to work with us. We’ll have to find other solutions, including by leveraging our own resources. Sinara and Transmashholding have made some advances in diesel shipbuilding. So we will develop our own expertise, maybe work together with a new R&D alliance.

We will also need fishing and crabbing vessels. It’s a matter of food security. All the recent policies, such as handing out fishing quotas to companies that invest in fleets, have been helpful and spurred demand for such vessels.

Military Affairs

Coalition of the “Willing” vs. the Cowed

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via Sputnik

President says he would be praised as “the biggest democrat” if he turned against Moscow

It has cost Serbia a lot to defy the West’s push to impose sanctions on Russia over its military operation in Ukraine, President Aleksandar Vucic said on Sunday.

He believes he would be celebrated by the West and hailed as a hero had Belgrade backed the economic restrictions against Moscow.

“It costs us a lot not to have imposed sanctions on Russia. But if we imposed them, it would cost us our principle of not supporting sanctions against anyone, because we know from our own experience that sanctions are immoral and inefficient,” Vucic told Pink TV.

“They’re saying that I’m a traitor. A traitor? The only one in Europe who hasn’t imposed sanctions on Russia, and from such a small country. Call me whatever you want, but the people have shown what they think [during the election].”

Vucic was re-elected with 58% of the vote earlier this month. He repeatedly said that Belgrade has been under serious pressure and “blackmailing” to join in on the restrictions placed on Russia after it launched a large-scale offensive against Ukraine in late February.

“If I wanted to become the world’s number one hero, it would be enough to say something against Putin, and everyone would give me awards and call me the biggest democrat in the world.”

The president also said that banning oil and gas from Russia would cripple the Serbian economy. “On a day-to-day basis, we must make decisions that benefit the citizens of Serbia.”

Vucic also accused Kiev and an unnamed EU state of a series of false bomb threats to Air Serbia passenger planes. More than a dozen planes were forced to return to Belgrade or Moscow, while other flights had been delayed, and Belgrade’s airport was evacuated at least three times over the past several weeks. “Foreign [intelligence] services of two countries are doing that. One is an EU country, and Ukraine is another,” the president said.

The bomb threats began after Serbia refused to back an EU ban on Russian flights. “We are continuing these flights literally out of principle because we want to show that we are a free country and we make our own decisions. Do not decide for us when to cancel flights,” Vucic said.

“Did you cancel your flights when 19 countries were bombing Serbia? At least 30 countries – NATO member states – are now helping one country. No one helped us when we were attacked by the 19 strongest nations,” he added, referring to the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

Russia attacked the neighboring state in late February, following Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, first signed in 2014, and Moscow’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German and French brokered protocols were designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state.

The Kremlin has since demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.