Biden: (Cackling) Yeah, yeah. Say, did I ever tell you about the time I told old Poroshenko what he better do if he wanted that big fat loan? Boy, I really showed them who was boss then…
American Embassy in Moscow; photo by Natylie S. Baldwin, 2015
In retaliation for alleged interference in the 2020 election and the SolarWinds hack – for which no evidence was provided to the public to substantiate the blame being placed on Russia – the Biden administration announced yesterday that new sanctions would be enacted against Russia, along with the expulsion of 10 diplomats. According to the White House release announcing the sanctions:
Treasury issued a directive that prohibits U.S. financial institutions from participation in the primary market for ruble or non-ruble denominated bonds issued after June 14, 2021 by the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, the National Wealth Fund of the Russian Federation, or the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation; and lending ruble or non-ruble denominated funds to the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, the National Wealth Fund of the Russian Federation, or the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation. This directive provides authority for the U.S. government to expand sovereign debt sanctions on Russia as appropriate.
-The package of sanctions will bar U.S. banks from buying Russian government bonds directly from the the country’s central bank, sovereign wealth fund and ministry of finance beginning June 14, complicating Russia’s ability to raise money in international capital markets. -Six Russian technology companies will be sanctioned for providing support for Russian intelligence’s cyber activities, while 32 entities and individuals will be designated for their role in the Kremlin’s election interference campaign. -Ten intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover in the U.S. will be expelled. -In partnership with the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada, the U.S. will also sanction eight individuals and entities for their role in Russia’s ongoing occupation of Crimea.
It appears that U.S. banks and other investors can still buy Russian bonds in the secondary market.
The administration emphasized that these sanctions were not connected to charges of Russians paying bounties to the Taliban for killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan – a report that was never substantiated and was even undermined by further reporting. The administration said the Bountygate claims would be dealt with through diplomatic and military channels.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova made the following comments in response to the latest move by Washington, as reported by Sputnik News:
“Such a course, as has been repeatedly stressed, does not serve the interests of the people of the world’s two leading nuclear powers, which bear historical responsibility for the fate of the world,” the spokeswoman said.
“In his telephone conversation with the Russian president, Joe Biden expressed interest in the normalization of Russia-US relations. But the actions of his administration [today] testify otherwise,” Zakharova added.
US Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan has been summoned for what are expected to be “difficult” talks, Zakharova said.
She also indicated that US actions Thursday have cast doubt on the practicability of the use of the dollar and the reliability of Western-controlled payment systems.
Some have observed that these punitive measures coming days after the offer of a summit from Biden makes it look like the offer was not sincere and the Biden administration actually hoped it would not be accepted.
Others have raised doubts that members of the administration would allow Putin to observe in person how compromised Biden is in terms of his cognitive ability.
Meanwhile, representatives of the Ukrainian government continue to talk tough. The Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, stated on Thursday that in order to maintain its national security Ukraine would have to either obtain NATO membership in the near future or it would consider acquiring nuclear weapons:
“Ukraine has no other choice: either we are part of an alliance such as NATO and are doing our part to make this Europe stronger, or we have the only option – to arm by ourselves, and maybe think about nuclear status again. How else can we guarantee our defense?” Melnyk added.
The day before that, Leonid Kravchuk – the first president of post-Soviet Ukraine and the representative of the country for the Trilateral Contact Group consisting of Ukraine, Russia and the OSCE – stated, in the context of citing support from the west in any conflict with an aggressive Russia:
“A citizen, a patriot, and a warrior are all part of one. And today I see how people’s awareness is rising in many regions, where people are starting to say that we need to be ready for anything. By saying so, I want to convey to Russia so that they realize, so that the Kremlin realizes, that it will be no parade. If they dare, if they turn insane and go to war against Ukraine, this will mark the start of a large-scale conflict that could escalate into World War 3. It will be no easy movement, as they experienced in Crimea.”
Shout out to Rick Rozoff of Stop NATO who has been monitoring the tensions between Russia and Ukraine. It was through his informative blog that I found out about the above two statements from the Ukrainian ambassador and Kravchuk, respectively.
The US frequently sends warships into the Black Sea, but the planned deployment that Turkey announced last week would have come against the backdrop of heightened tensions in the region between Russia and Ukraine. On Tuesday, Russia warned against the deployment.
According to AFP, Turkish diplomatic sources said a US warship was expected to pass through the Bosphorous Strait, which connects the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, on Wednesday, but the passage did not occur.
There have been a lot of developments in the past couple of days with respect to the high tensions between Ukraine – with its NATO cheerleaders on one side and Russia on the other. Let’s recap what has happened since February.
First, in February, according to respected analyst Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center: “Zelenskiy ordered troops (as part of the rotation process) and heavy weapons (as a show of force) to go near to the conflict zone in Donbas. He did not venture out as far as Poroshenko, who dispatched small Ukrainian naval vessels through the Russian-controlled waters near the Kerch Strait in late 2018, but it was enough to get him noticed in Moscow.”
At the beginning of March, the Zelensky government banned three opposition media outlets with the justification that they were pro-Russian and therefore essentially a source of enemy disinformation. Then on March 24th, Zelensky signed a decree approving a strategy to reintegrate Crimea and the Russian naval base at Sevastopol into Ukraine. Reporting by Telesur at the time stated:
On March 24, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the Decree 117/2021 approving the “strategy of disoccupation and reintegration of the temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the Sevastopol city.”
In practical terms, Ukraine’s decision could trigger actions leading to an armed conflict with Russia in which the United States or other Western countries could become involved.
What’s more, on April 1st, the commander in chief of Ukraine’s armed forces admitted that Ukraine had sent troops to the areas in question:
During an extraordinary session in the Parliament held on April 1, the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Army Ruslan Khomchak said that his troops are present in the “temporarily occupied areas… containing 28 enemy tactical groups.”
“Our armed forces are prepared to give an adequate response both to an escalation of the conflict and to an aggravation of the political-military and strategic-military situation on the border of Ukraine,” he stressed.
As summarized in my post from last week, ceasefire violations in the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine have greatly increased in recent weeks and Russia has amassed troops and military equipment in Crimea and near the border of eastern Ukraine in response to Ukraine’s moves. Moreover, U.S. diplomatic and military leaders were decrying Russian “aggression” and offering “unwavering support” for Ukraine.
(Keep in mind that these tensions are occurring amidst the backdrop of NATO’s Defender Europe 2021 exercises – or war games, depending on your point of view – in the region, including the Balkans and the Black Sea areas).
Late last week, it was reported that the U.S. would be sending two warships, the USS Donald Cook and USS Roosevelt, to the Black Sea. They are set to arrive today and tomorrow. Additionally, the U.S. Navy planned on flying recon flights over the area near Crimea. In response, Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia, Sergei Ryabkov, publicly stated that NATO forces should stay away from Crimea. According to reporting yesterday by the UK’s Daily Mail:
Russia warned the US to keep its warships away from Crimea ‘for their own good’ as it accused Washington and NATO of turning the region into a ‘powder keg’ amid soaring tensions on the Ukraine border.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov called Washington’s decision to deploy two ships to the Black Sea ‘a provocation’ designed ‘to test our nerves’ as he branded the US ‘an adversary’ of Russia, ramping up a war of words between the two nuclear-armed superpowers.
Furthermore, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made a surprise visit to Russian troops near the Ukrainian border and stated that the Russian military would be ready to act in response to any escalation. RTreported:
Two detachments of the Russian Army, along with three airborne units, are ready to act in the event tensions with the West escalate into full-blown fighting, Moscow announced on Tuesday following a surprise inspection of troops.
After paying a visit to the soldiers, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu told journalists that the personnel met the standards required for the situation. “The troops have shown full readiness and ability to fulfill the tasks of ensuring the country’s military security,” he said. “Currently, these associations and formations are engaged in drills and exercises.”
Shoigu said that the redeployments had taken place “in response to the military activity of the alliance that threatens Russia.” The move comes amid escalating tension with the US-led NATO bloc and after bloody fighting in eastern Ukraine between Kiev’s forces and two breakaway republics.
Biden initiated a phone call with Putin yesterday to discuss the situation and offered to have a summit where the two leaders could meet in a third country. There is no confirmation yet as to whether Putin has agreed to the summit, but he reportedly reiterated the Minsk agreements as the basis for settlement of the conflict.
According to Trenin’s analysis from yesterday of the tensions, Russia’s actions include a desire to let Washington and Ukraine know that if they want to play with fire, there is a high chance of getting burned:
The Russian military massed troops along the entire Russo-Ukrainian border, from the north to the east to the south. It did so visibly and made sure that Western observers could analyse the manoeuvres and conclude that they might not necessarily be a drill. Some reports, for example, spoke of field hospitals being brought to the border. In making its move, Moscow was pursuing several objectives:
To intimidate and deter Ukraine’s leaders, whom the Kremlin regards as inexperienced and irresponsible (in Kozak’s disparaging words, “children with matches”);
To send a message to the United States urging Washington to take better care of its wards, lest they get America itself into trouble (there were repeated references to the Mikheil Saakashvili syndrome, referring to the then Georgian leader launching an attack in 2008 against the Russian-protected breakaway region of South Ossetia in the belief that he would be supported by a US military intervention, which never came);
To convince the Germans and the French that supporting everything that Ukraine says or does carries a cost for Europe;
To reassure the people of Donbas that Russia will not abandon them to the Ukrainian army should it attack the two enclaves.
During the crisis, Kozak, who is also the Kremlin’s deputy chief of staff, essentially repeated President Vladimir Putin’s earlier stern warning that a Ukrainian offensive in Donbas would spell the end of Ukrainian statehood.
Having made their points by means of actions on the ground, the Russians were then available to discuss the situation, both with German and French political leaders and the top US military commander. In those conversations, they dismissed out of hand all European criticisms about the troop movements on their own territory and only engaged in a detailed professional discussion with the US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, simply to help him avoid a dangerous miscalculation.
Unfortunately, this situation and the dangerous implications have not been getting the attention they deserve in US media. One exception was Tulsi Gabbard appearing on Tucker Carlson Tuesday night.
An especially dangerous threat to liberty occurs when members of the press collude with government agencies instead of monitoring and exposing the abuses of those agencies. Unfortunately, collusion is an all-too-common pattern in press coverage of the national security state’s activities. The American people then receive official propaganda disguised as honest reporting and analysis.
The degree of collaboration frequently has reached stunning levels. During the early decades of the Cold War, some journalists even became outright CIA assets. Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein’s January 1977, 25,000-word article in Rolling Stone was an extraordinarily detailed account of cooperation between the CIA and members of the press, and it provided key insights into that relationship. In some cases, the “journalists” were actually full-time CIA employees masquerading as members of the Fourth Estate, but Bernstein also confirmed that some 400 bona fide American journalists had secretly carried out assignments for the ClA during the previous 25 years. He noted that “journalists provided a full range of clandestine services – from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs.”
A December 26, 1977, investigative report in the New York Times described the scope of the CIA’s global campaign to influence opinion through media manipulation. “In its persistent efforts to shape world opinion, the C.I.A. has been able to call upon” an extensive network “of newspapers, news services, magazines, publishing houses, broadcasting stations and other entities over which it has at various limes had some control. A decade ago, when the agency’s communications empire was at its peak, [it] embraced more than 500 news and public information organizations and individuals. According to one CIA official, they ranged in importance ‘from Radio Free Europe to a third‐string guy in Quito who could get something in the local paper.’” The CIA funded those foreign “journalistic assets” generously…
…Reforms enacted in the late 1970s after investigative hearings by the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D-ID), supposedly brought an end to such CIA penetration of the press. However, evidence of recent media-intelligence agency collaboration suggests that while the manipulation may have become more subtle, it has not gone away. A startling September 2014 exclusive report in the Intercept confirmed that the problem of excessively close ties between the CIA and certain prominent journalists is not a merely a historical artifact….
