A recent poll found that the number of Ukrainians who want to fight Russia until the end of the war has fallen to 60%. President Volodymyr Zelensky has tight control over media in Ukraine, and his regime has targeted dissenters against fighting the war.
The Gallup survey results released on Monday shows support for “fighting until the war is won” has fallen to 60% from 70% last year. The number of Ukrainians wanting to seek a diplomatic resolution has increased from 25% to 31% over the past 12 months. Support for finding an end to the war is strongest in the regions where fighting is ongoing.
The waning approval of fighting comes as Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive resulted in substantial casualties and minimal territorial gains. Kiev’s Western backers knew the military operations were unlikely to succeed and would result in high casualties. In August, the Washington Post reported the counteroffensive’s failures had blunted morale.
The slipping support for Zelensky’s pledge to retake the Donbas and Crimea through military means comes as Kiev has tight control over Ukrainian media. Shortly after the start of the war, Zelensky nationalized the media and only allowed outlets to operate with state licenses. Additionally, Ukrainian police have rounded up citizens who expressed dissatisfaction with the war.
Approval of aiding the war in Ukraine is shrinking in the US as well. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found 41% of Americans support sending more arms to Ukraine, while 35% oppose further military assistance. When the same survey was conducted in May, 46% of Americans backed sending arms, while 29% were opposed.
I lead today with Hungary’s refusal to ratify Sweden’s access to Nato, despite Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision to go ahead with it.
I was saying yesterday that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is starting to look like Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko by playing bad boy and he has continued in this vein. It gives him real leverage, something that Erdogan also understands by placing himself in the middle between Europe and Russia with enormous success.
Erdogan was playing a similar game after he called Hamas “liberators” yesterday, tearing up two years of diplomacy to improve ties with Israel, which will not take those words kindly.
Orban is also getting chummy with the new PM in waiting in Slovakia, Robert Fico, who campaigned on an anti-Ukraine platform. I don’t think you can read too much into that. Orban needs all the friends he can get but Slovakia is simply too small to make much difference and Fico’s party doesn’t dominate his coalition so actually he will have a lot less say in foreign policy. Slovakia is simply too dependent on EU grants, Brussels’ main enforcement tool, which it is using on Orban by holding back €13bn of post-COVID relief money.
Erdogan’s decision to tear up relations with Israel is a dramatic move. He has thrown in his lot with the Arab world, his backyard. Queen Raina of Jordan gave a very eloquent interview to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour (who is of Persian origin) yesterday calling out Western double standards. One of her most telling points was that the West was outraged by Hamas’ slaughter of Israeli children, but it has failed to condemn the death of over 2,500 children in Gaza in the last week with anything like the same passion.
Putting aside all the emotional arguments on the cause of the war and who is the real villain here, the point of the comments is that the Queen expressed very clearly how the Arab world sees this conflict and it clearly sees it in terms of Western double standards. Last week over 800 of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s staff complained about her partisan pro-Israel position, which is more grist for the mill.
US President Joe Biden’s comments addressed the need to defuse the Palestinian issue when he was in Israel last week, and there was a very good speech by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres who said Hamas attacks “did not happen in a vacuum” and openly called Israel’s bombing of Gaza “collective punishment” but stopped short of calling that a war crime, which it is.
Biden’s efforts to smooth the waters with his necessary comments on the Palestinian woes will count for little with the Arab world. Erdogan will earn credits for coming out against Israel. The leverage the whole Arab world has is increased as the US’ unflagging support of Israel is only weaking it in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.
Taking all this in, now step back and consider how China and Russia view this. Chinese President Xi Jinping has yet to say the word “Hamas” and Putin is playing the statesman, condemning Hamas’ terrorism, but coming out very firmly for a Palestinian state. The difference here is the Arabs believe Putin is sincere, while dismissing Biden’s comments out of hand.
The strength of the Sino-Russia axis was very clearly on display at last week’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) anniversary in Beijing last week. I continue to think driving Moscow into the arms of Beijing was a major strategic blunder by the White House, especially as in my conversations with senior Kremlin officials in the years before made it very clear they wanted to move closer to the EU as Moscow is just as scared of Beijing dominating it as everyone says it should be.
But what was a bipolar axis has been developing. Iran has thrown in its lot with fellow sanctionee Russia and Putin has made deep inroads into the Middle East. One of the other emerging axes that is not much talked about is the rapidly growing cooperation between Russia and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).
Riyadh used to have very close ties with Washington, but since the US went from net importer of oil to exporter following the shale revolution, Riyadh and Washington are now rivals to the extent that OPEC and Russia have cooperated to cut production and drive up prices to the point where the oil price cap sanctions on Russia cease to work. We recently described oil sanctions as a spent cannon.
And now the Middle East is splintering, which will benefit Russia. Turkey remains an ally and KSA will be driven back towards Moscow as an ally against the US’ continued backing of Israel. KSA was a surprise addition to the BRICS+ in August, but two weeks later during the G20 summit it teamed up with India for a new transport corridor from KSA via India to Europe that was seen as an olive branch by Riyadh to Washington and an Indian-backed rival to the BRI. However, that route made heavy use of Israeli ports like Haifa to complete the last step into Europe. Seems that plan is now dead only a month after it was born.
The bottom line is the fractured world is looking a lot more broken up as the conflicts heighten an increasingly extreme and diverse set of national interests. Hungary, Turkey, Russia, KSA, China, the US and the EU are all increasingly butting heads and any solution to any of their problems will be international arbitration. The addition of the six new countries to BRICS with more set to join next year and the expansion of the G20 to include the African Union has seen the rapid growth of non-aligned institutions that hope to challenge the G7 in the long run. Even in the US, the election of Mike Johnson as speaker yesterday undermines America’s internal unity and he has voted against Ukraine in every vote bar the first one. Ukraine’s funding for the war is now in more doubt than ever.
And that is what Putin has been after all along. The US’ power to dictate to the rest of the world has been dramatically undermined. It clearly is no longer in charge. The unipolar setup is already giving way to a multipolar one.
Armenia’s Impending Defection From The CSTO Places Georgia Back In The US’ Crosshairs by Andrew Korybko, Substack, 10/4/23
Armenia’s impending defection from the CSTO will fail to be substantive unless NATO secures reliable access to it via Georgia, but the latter’s incumbent authorities aren’t expected to agree. That’s why another round of Color Revolution unrest is being cooked up on the pretext of “protesting” the liberal-globalist president’s impeachment proceedings.
The Georgian Parliamentary Speaker demanded an explanation from the US after the security services exposed a USAID-funded regime change plot in the capital of Tbilisi. Three Serbs from CANVAS, the organization responsible for organizing their country’s “Bulldozer Revolution” in 2000, were detained late last week on suspicion of teaching local so-called “activists” how to overthrow the government. They left for abroad after questioning, but the scandal suggested a renewed destabilization effort there.
Prior to this latest incident, Georgia accused Ukraine of plotting unrest against its authorities, which Kiev of course denied. As coincidence would have it, however, Ukrainian parliamentarian Aleksey Goncharenko wrote on Telegram over the weekend that “We are ready to be allies of the USA in all military operations more strongly than Britain.” This followed reports that Ukraine carried out drone strikes against allegedly Russian-backed Sudanese rebels, presumably at the US’ behest if true.
Considering this context, the security services’ claims of Ukrainian complicity in their country’s latest regime change intrigue are credible even though Kiev wasn’t directly implicated in last week’s scandal. The question therefore naturally arises of why Georgia is being targeted in the first place seeing as how it’s a pro-Western country that officially want to join both the EU and NATO. What’s happening nowadays is actually the second phase of the same process that was set into motion half a year ago.
Back in March, the US attempted to overthrow the government there on the grounds that its proposed foreign agents legislation modeled off of America’s own was supposedly indicative of a secret desire to pivot towards Russia. There wasn’t any truth to this claim, but it served to provoke an ultimately failed Color Revolution that was aimed at opening a second proxy war front in the New Cold War. The following analyses detail the strategic machinations at play and expose the false pretext behind that plot:
Georgia’s conservative-nationalist government has a surprisingly pragmatic policy towards Russia in spite of still officially wanting to join the EU and NATO, so much so that they refused to impose sanctions against it or saber-rattle over Abkhazia and South Ossetia. For that reason, the West began preparing their liberal–globalist proxies to revolt as punishment with a view towards either pressuring them into reversing their stance or replacing them with more compliant puppets if they still refuse to do so.
This campaign was forced into action prematurely in response to the government’s impending legislation that would have enabled them to better manage these growing liberal-globalist threats and thus eventually neutralize them with time. The West felt that its window of opportunity for opening a second front against Russia via Georgia was rapidly closing, which is why they gave the order to commence HybridWar hostilities in March.
That crisis ended almost as soon as it began after the government promptly withdrew the bill and therefore removed the basis upon which those liberal-globalist groups demanded their resignation. The end result was that a ceasefire of sorts entered into place whereby everyone informally agreed to freeze the situation for the time being out of mutual convenience. The reason why everything thawed over the past month has to do with a combination of domestic and regional developments.
On the home front, the conservative-nationalist government started impeachment proceedings against their country’s liberal-globalist president, which the Western-backed opposition regarded as a power play that violated their informal ceasefire from this spring. At the same time, neighboring Armenia’s liberal-globalist government started to decisively pivot away from Russia towards the West, which represented a regional power play that inadvertently ended the Karabakh Conflict as explained below:
Upon the West’s failure to open up a second front against Russia in the South Caucasus via Georgia, this bloc pivoted towards its “Plan B” of attempting to do this via Armenia by provoking another Karabakh Conflict that could have dragged the Kremlin into a regional conflagration had it not been careful. After this plan also failed, the West then immediately fearmongered about “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide”, which served to scare around 100,000 Karabakh Armenians into voluntarily moving to Armenia.
The purpose behind provoking this large-scale population flow was to utilize these so-called “Weapons of Mass Migration” for pressuring the Armenian government into either completing its pro-Western anti-Russian pivot after it appeared to be getting cold feet or replacing it in a Color Revolution if it refuses. That plan is still in progress, but in the event that it’s successfully implemented and not offset by a truly patriotic-multipolar revolution, then Armenia will likely withdraw from the Russian-led CSTO.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov already made peace with this scenario after recently describing it as that country’s “sovereign choice”, but the regional consequences will remain manageable so long as NATO doesn’t have reliable access to Armenia in the aftermath. Therein lies Georgia’s renewed strategic importance since its pragmatic conservative-nationalist government is unlikely to facilitate that bloc’s power play, ergo why it’s targeted for removal once again and at this particular time too.
In sum, Armenia’s impending defection from the CSTO will fail to be substantive unless NATO secures reliable access to it via Georgia, but the latter’s incumbent authorities aren’t expected to agree. That’s why another round of Color Revolution unrest is being cooked up on the pretext of “protesting” the liberal-globalist president’s impeachment proceedings. If the West wins, then a second front against Russia could open in the South Caucasus, which is why it’s imperative that this latest power play fails.
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A Maidan 2.0 color revolution looms in Georgia by Kit Klarenberg, The Grayzone, 10/6/23
The arrest of US regime change operatives in Tbilisi suggests a coup against Georgia’s government could be in the works. As Ukraine’s counteroffensive fails, the West appears eager to open a new front in its proxy war.
On September 29, in a disclosure ignored by the entire Western media, the US government-run Radio Free Europe’s Russian-language portal Slobodna Evropa revealed that three foreign operatives had been summoned for questioning by the Georgian Security Service, for allegedly assisting opposition elements prepare a Maidan-style regime change scenario in Tbilisi.
The operatives were staffers of the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS) and had been “temporarily staying in Georgia.” CANVAS is a US government-funded organization with close CIA ties which has trained regime change activists from Eastern Europe to Venezuela. The group’s website boasts of having cultivated over 16,000 activists in 52 countries since its founding in 2003, and “inspired” 126 “successful” political “campaigns” the world over.
Slobodna Evropa stated it was unknown whether the operatives’ presence in the country was “due to summons as part of the investigation or for some other reason.” But if CANVAS staff had been present in the country, there can be little doubt about their agenda.
The ruling Georgian dream has been portrayed in the west as a pro-Kremlin government. In reality, it’s simply reverted to a longstanding policy of balancing between East and West. For the neoconservative establishment, its true sin is being insufficiently supportive of the Ukraine proxy war. Thus Ukrainian elements are set to be involved in a possible color revolution. If such an operation succeeds, it would open a second front in that war on Russia’s Western flank.
The development seemingly confirms warnings from local security officials earlier this September. They cautioned “a coup a la Euromaidan is being prepared in Georgia,” referring to the 2014 US-backed color revolution which toppled Ukraine’s elected president and ushered in a pro-NATO government. The purported lead plotters are ethnic Georgians working for the Ukrainian government: Giorgi Lortkipanidze, Kiev’s deputy military intelligence chief; Mikhail Baturin, the bodyguard of former President Mikheil Saakashvili; and Mamuka Mamulashvili, commander of the notorious Georgian Legion.
A September 6 investigation by The Grayzone revealed that Georgian Legion chief Mamulashvili is centrally implicated in a false flag massacre of Maidan protesters, which was pivotal in unseating elected President Viktor Yanukovych. He apparently brought the shooters to Maidan Square to “sow some chaos” by opening fire on crowds, and provided sniper rifles for the purpose.
Georgian officials say that now they’ve uncovered evidence that young anti-government activists are undergoing training near Ukraine’s border with Poland to enact a similar scheme, which would feature a deadly bombing during planned riots meant to take place in Tbilisi between October and December, when the European Commission is expected to rule on whether Georgia can formally become an EU candidate country.
‘More powerful than an aircraft carrier’
The State Security Service of Georgia (SSSG) said in a statement that young activists and a “rather large group of persons of Georgian origin” now fighting in Ukraine are currently being “trained/retrained in the vicinities of Poland-Ukraine state border in a scheme being implemented by the CANVAS operatives, who allegedly sought to topple the government in a bloody coup d’etat purportedly set to unfold in late October or early November. Per the Georgian authorities, the plot would involve the creation of a “tent city” in the capital, “erection of barricades on the central avenues and near strategic objects of Georgia,” occupation and seizure of government buildings, “as well as other illegal actions containing elements of serious provocation.”
The foreign-funded operatives are accused of plotting to carry out a shocking ‘false flag’ bombing in an effort to overthrow the elected government, with Kiev’s February 2014 Maidan “revolutionary scenario” specifically cited as a blueprint.
Under the operation, “an explosive device, which the organizers of criminal acts intend to detonate, will be placed in a pre-selected tent within the territory where the rallies organized by Giorgi Lortkipanidze and Mikheil Baturin will take place, namely in the so-called “Tent city,”” the statement noted. “According to their criminal plan, the abovementioned should cause casualties among the peaceful population participating in the protests and the representatives of the law-enforcement agencies,” continued the SSSG.
From the standpoint of the regime change operatives, the bloody provocation would be useful: “in the event of a terrorist act, destructive forces hope that there will be an indiscriminate shooting between the law-enforcement officers and protestors, which will create a solid ground for further civil confrontation.”
“We would like to inform the public that it is not for the first time when the mentioned provocations are planned by the organizers against Georgia, although, they have been prevented in the past through the effective and preventive response by the law-enforcement officers,” officials added.
But they cautioned that given “the challenges of the current difficult geopolitical situation, unlike previous cases, the current plan represents a much higher risk factor that poses threat to the security of the state, as well as life, well-being, and health of the ordinary citizens of Georgia.”
The SSSG statement says that ““CANVAS” was being “used for the training purposes of the youth group who are supposed to participate in the revolutionary scenario.” As the security service notes, “the core” of is comprised of the remnants of the “organization “Otpor,”” a group which “actively participated in revolutionary processes unfolded in Serbia.”
Now, such operatives “are being regularly used in order to train young people in various countries and involve them in destructive processes,” the statement claims.
CANVAS: the global regime change specialists
The insurrectionary credentials of CANVAS aren’t in question. Wherever the organization goes, color revolutions and “peaceful” attempts to undermine if not overthrow governments inevitably follow. The Center evolved out of Otpor!, a rebellious youth movement in Yugoslavia that sought to oust Slobodan Milosevic in the late 1990s. Through a mix of civil disobedience, non-violent resistance, rock concerts, street humor, and graffiti, they galvanized public opposition to the President, and insidiously promoted a neoliberal future for Serbia.
Otpor! was assisted every step of the way by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US government regime change agency that avowedly does overtly what the CIA once did covertly. Besides doling out enormous amounts of money, Otpor! was trained to undermine government authority through disruptive means, and employed “a wide range of sophisticated public relations techniques, including polling, leafleting and paid advertising” on Washington’s dime. The group’s messaging was informed by US-bankrolled polling.
Once Milosevic was removed in October 2000, Otpor leaders founded CANVAS, and began exporting their revolutionary model elsewhere, including Georgia in 2003. There, they created Kmara, which borrowed heavily from Otpor’s branding and messaging, and received sizable NED funding. The group was instrumental in the downfall of Georgia’s longtime leader Eduard Shevardnadze following the November 2003 election. It built on its regime change template in the so-called Orange Revolution triggered the following year in Ukraine. At the forefront of this operation was Pora – another US-backed youth group emulating Otpor – which aimed to install a Western allied government.
While the media has regularly fetishized the work of CANVAS in heralding an era of supposedly non-violent resistance across the globe, color revolutions usually succeed due to more seismic factors, which are often unseen and unacknowledged. For example, Milosevic’s ouster followed a decade of destructive US-funded proxy wars in the former Yugoslavia, during which time the Serbian economy was shattered by Western sanctions.
Moreover, as the Washington Post revealed in December 2000, American operatives involved in the “anti-Milosevic effort” knew the CIA was simultaneously wreaking havoc in Belgrade, “but had trouble finding out what the agency was up to.” The adjacency of CANVAS to US intelligence was amply detailed in 2011, when leaked emails exposed how Otpor leader and Center founder Srda Popovic worked closely in secret with Stratfor, a private security firm known as “The Shadow CIA”.
Among other egregious acts, the emails showed Popovic had covertly passed information to Stratfor about opposition activists in a number of countries, including individuals harmed or killed by the US-armed Bahraini government, obtained from the Bahrain Center for Human Rights during the regime’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests during the Arab Spring. He also produced a guide for the company on how to unseat Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. As an analyst explained in a May 2010 email:
“The main utility in [Popovic] is his ability to connect us to the troublemakers around the world that he is in touch with…The idea is to gather a network of contacts through CANVAS, contacts that we can then contact independently.”
In another email, the same analyst noted CANVAS were “still hooked into US funding.” He described their mission as, “basically [going] around the world trying to topple dictators and autocratic governments (ones that US does not like)”:
“They just go and set up shop in a country and try to bring the government down. When used properly, [they’re] more powerful than an aircraft carrier battle group.”
Maidan 2.0: a second proxy war front
The Georgian Dream coalition government has been under mounting pressure since last March, when Tbilisi was plagued by incendiary protests. Demonstrators poured into the streets to protest a proposed law requiring NGOs operating in the country to register as “foreign agents” if they received more than 20% of their revenue from overseas. The law would have clearly hobbled the pro-NATO political network established inside the country by Western interests.
The unrest last March seemed to escalate in direct correlation with condemnations of the legislation by US officials. Most of the groups at the forefront of the protests were recipients of NED funding. And just when the angry mobs seemed ready to storm parliament, in a repeat of the Rose Revolution that dislodged Shevardnadze two decades prior, the government changed course and promptly dropped the foreign agent law.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Georgian Dream has been painted by Western media as a vehicle for Kremlin influence. In reality, the government has sought to strike a balance between strengthening Western ties, pushing for EU and NATO membership, and maintaining civil coexistence with its neighbors in Moscow. This act has become ever-untenable over the past 18 months, with Western pressure to impose sanctions on Moscow – one of Tbilisi’s biggest trading partners by far – and send arms to Kiev constantly mounting.
Endeavoring to comply with US and EU sanctions regimes and condemning the invasion at the UN are apparently insufficient for Washington, Brussels, and Kiev. In December 2022, Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili revealed that the Ukrainian government has repeatedly urged him to open a “second front” in the proxy war against Russia, and that his refusal to do so was not well-received.
The accused plotters may have more cynical, self-interested reasons for removing Georgian Dream from power. After being booted from office in the 2013 presidential election, their boss Mikheil Saakashvili fled Georgia. The next year, Tbilisi filed criminal charges against him, and he was subsequently convicted in absentia for ordering brutal attacks on political rivals, and helping one of his ministers cover up a horrific murder they had personally directed.
Saakashvili relocated to Ukraine to support the Maidan movement, was appointed governor of Odessa by President Petro Poroshenko’s personal order in 2015, and granted Ukrainian citizenship. He remained in the post until November 2016, when he dramatically quit, blaming Poroshenko for enabling corruption in Kiev. Thereafter, he bounced around various countries before finally returning to Ukraine in May 2019, after newly elected President Volodymyr Zelenskyy restored his citizenship.
For reasons unclear, Saakashvili announced in October 2021 he would be returning to Georgia, in advance of that year’s local elections. He was arrested the same day in Tbilisi, having illegally entered the country hidden in a truck loaded with dairy products. Ever since, he has festered in a Georgian penitentiary, his health rapidly worsening. Despite this, President Salome Zourabichvili has made clear she will “never” pardon the former leader.
A color revolution in Georgia would free Saakashvili, and install a government more willing to consider declaring war on Russia, delivering the second proxy war front long-sought by Kiev and its Western backers.
As Ukraine’s disastrous counteroffensive peters out, with only a few dozen square kilometers and tens of thousands of young men mutilated and dead to show for its efforts, the need to open a new front is more urgent than ever.
