By Scott Ritter, Consortium News, 10/3/23

“What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

These words, written by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who in 1989 published “The End of History,” an article that turned the academic world upside down.

“Liberal democracy,” Fukuyama wrote, “replaces the irrational desire to be recognized as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognized as equal.”

“A world made up of liberal democracies, then, should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognize one another’s legitimacy. And indeed, there is substantial empirical evidence from the past couple of hundred years that liberal democracies do not behave imperialistically toward one another, even if they are perfectly capable of going to war with states that are not democracies and do not share their fundamental values. “

But there was a catch. Fukuyama went on to note that, 

“[N]ationalism is currently on the rise in regions like Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union where peoples have long been denied their national identities, and yet within the world’s oldest and most secure nationalities, nationalism is undergoing a process of change. The demand for national recognition in Western Europe has been domesticated and made compatible with universal recognition, much like religion three or four centuries before.”

Global Model 

This growing nationalism was the poison pill to Fukuyama’s thesis regarding the primacy of liberal democracy. The foundational premise of the then-burgeoning neoconservative philosophical construct of a “new American century” was that liberal democracy, as practiced by the United States and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe, would become the model upon which the world would be rebuilt, under American leadership, in the post-Cold War era. 

These paragons of the twisted confluence of capitalism and neoliberalism would have done well to reflect on the words of their arch-nemesis, Karl Marx, who famously observed that,

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

E. Capiro’s 1895 oil painting of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the printing house of their German daily Neue Rheinische Zeitung, published in Cologne at the time of the Revolution of 1848-1849. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

History, it seems, can never end, but rather is reincarnated, over and over, from a foundation of history influenced by the actions of the past, infected as they are with the mistakes that are derived from the human condition.

One of the mistakes made by Fukuyama and the proponents of liberal democracy, who embraced his “end of history” ideal in reaching their conclusion, is that the key to historical progression lies not in the future, which has yet to be written, but in the past, which serves as the foundation upon which everything is built.

Historical foundations run deep — deeper than the memories of most academics. There are lessons of the past that reside in the soul of those most impacted by events, both those recorded in writing and those passed down orally from generation to generation. 

Academics such as Fukuyama study the present time, drawing conclusions based upon a shallow understanding of the complexities of times past. 

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According to Fukuyama, history ended with the conclusion of the Cold War, perceived as a decisive victory of the liberal democratic order over its ideological opponent, world communism. 

But what if the collapse of the Soviet Union — the event seen by most historians as signaling the end of the Cold War — wasn’t triggered by the manifestation of the victory over communism by liberal democracy, but rather by the weight of history defined by the consequences of prior “end of history” moments? What if the sins of the fathers were transferred to the progeny of previous historical failures? 

War & Revived Nationalism 

Of the many points of conflict occurring in the world today, one stands out as a manifestation of the ongoing fascination liberal democracy adherents have with the victory over communism, which they thought was won more than three decades ago, namely, the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Political scientists in the Fukuyama “end of history” school view this  conflict as being derived by the resistance of the remnants of Soviet regional hegemony (i.e., modern-day Russia, led by its president, Vladimir Putin) over the inevitability of liberal democracy taking hold.

But a closer examination of the Russian-Ukraine conflict points to the present conflicts being born of not simply the incomplete divorce of Ukraine from the Soviet/Russian orbit that occurred at the end of the Cold War, but also the detritus from the collapse of previous ruling systems, especially the Tsarist Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires.

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk map showing territory lost by Bolshevik Russia in 1918. (Department of History, U.S. Military Academy, Public domain)

Indeed, the current conflict in Ukraine has nothing to do with any modern-day manifestation of the Cold War bipolarity, and everything to do with the resurrection of national identities which existed, however imperfectly, centuries before the Cold War even began.

To understand the roots of the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, one needs to study  German actions after the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the rise and fall of Symon Petliura and the Polish-Soviet War — all of which predated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the dissection of Galicia that took place in 1939 and 1945. 

These actions were all triggered by the collapse of Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian power, and then united by violent efforts to allow local realities to shape the final disposition of a region frozen in place by the rise of Soviet power.

The dislocation felt by many Ukrainians today from all things Russian can be traced to the failed attempt at forming a nascent Ukrainian nation in the chaotic aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of both Tsarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire – all prior to the consolidation of both Polish and Bolshevik power.

The Brief Rise and Fall of a Ukrainian State, 1918-1921

The Ukrainian People’s Republic, led by the nationalist Symon Petliura, proclaimed its independence from Russia in January 1918. It did so backed the German army, which occupied the Republic after the Central Powers, led by Germany, signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Ukraine in February 1918. (Russia and the Central Powers signed a separate Brest-Litovsk Treaty in March 1918).

The German military occupiers then dissolved the socialist, Ukrainian People’s Republic in April 1918, replacing it with the Ukrainian State, also known as the Second Hetmanate. (The First Hetmanate was a Ukrainian Cossack State that existed in the Zaporizhian region from 1648 until 1764).

Symon Petliura (Wikipedia/Public Domain)

But the Ukrainian State survived only until December 1918, when forces loyal to the deposed Ukrainian People’s Republic, led by Petliura, overthrew the Second Hetmanate, and reclaimed control over Ukraine.

During this time the physical dimensions of the Ukrainian People’s Republic was in constant flux. In the short first tenure of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, two territories claimed as Ukrainian — centered round Odessa and Kharkov — declared their independence from the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and instead opted to join Russia [as four regions today have similarly opted to join Russia]. 

In November 1918 a portion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Galician territories possessing a Ukrainian majority declared its independence, organized itself as the Western Ukrainian Republic, and in January 1919 merged with the Ukrainian People’s Republic.

But upon its creation, the Western Ukrainian Republic found itself at war with a newly independent Poland and, following the merger between the Western Ukrainian Republic and the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the war morphed into a general conflict between Poland and Ukraine.

One of the major battlegrounds of this conflict was the western Galician territory of Volhynia. It was here that Ukrainian troops undertook the slaughter of thousands of Jews, for which Petliura has been blamed.

End of Ukrainian Republic

The Polish-Ukrainian war ended in December 1919 with the defeat of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. One of the major reasons for this defeat was the rise of Soviet power as the Russian Civil War reached its violent conclusions in the territories abutting the Ukrainian People’s Republic, allowing the victorious Red Army to turn its attention to consolidating Bolshevik authority over the territory of Ukraine.

This led to a peace treaty between the Ukrainian People’s Republic and Poland which saw the territories of the former Western Ukrainian Republic turned over to Poland in exchange for Polish assistance against the Bolsheviks.

The alliance between Poland and the Ukrainian People’s Republic, concluded in April 1919, led to a Polish offensive against the Soviet Union which ended with the capture of Kiev by Polish troops in May 1919. A Soviet counterattack in June took the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw, only to be thrown back in August by Polish forces, which began to advance eastward until the Soviets sued for peace, in October 1920.

While various efforts to end the Polish-Soviet conflict had been brokered on the basis of a delineation of territory known as the Curzon Line, named after the British Lord who first proposed it back in 1919, the final demarcation of the border was negotiated via the Treaty of Riga, signed in March 1921, which formally ended the Polish-Soviet war.

The so-called “Riga Line” had Poland taking control of large amounts of territory well east of the Curzon Line, leading to longstanding resentment by Soviet authorities.

The Treaty of Riga imposed boundaries on a region with no regard to the ethnic composition of the people living there, leading to a mixing of populations that were inherently hostile toward one another.

The end of the Western Ukrainian Republic, in 1919, led to the political leadership of that entity going into diaspora in Europe, where they pressed the governments of Europe to recognize the independent status of the Western Ukrainian nation.

Rise of Bandera

Stepan Bandera torchlight parade in Kiev, Jan. 1, 2020. (A1/Wikimedia Commons)

This diaspora worked closely with disaffected Ukrainian nationalists who found themselves under Polish governance in the aftermath of the Polish-Soviet war. Among these Ukrainian nationalists was Stepan Bandera, an adherent of Symon Petliura (assassinated in exile in Paris in 1926 by Jewish anarchist Sholom Schwartzbard who said he was avenging the deaths of 50,000 Jews. Schwartzbard was acquitted.)

Bandera rose to lead the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the 1930’s, eventually allying himself with Nazi Germany following the 1939 partitioning of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union, which ran roughly along the Curzon Line demarcation.

Bandera was the driving force behind Ukrainian nationalist forces operating alongside the German occupying forces after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. These forces participated in the massacre of Jews in Lvov and Kiev (Babyn Yar) and the slaughter of Poles in Volhynia in 1943-44.

When the Soviet Union and the western allies defeated Germany, the Curzon Line was used to demarcate the border between Poland and Soviet Ukraine, putting the western Ukrainian territories under Soviet control.

Reinhard Gehlen (Bundesarchiv/Wikimedia Commons)

Bandera and hundreds of thousands of western Ukrainian nationalists fled to Germany in 1944, ahead of the advancing Red Army. Bandera continued to maintain contact with tens of thousands of Ukrainian nationalist fighters who remained behind, coordinating their actions as part of a resistance campaign managed by Reinhard Gehlen, a German intelligence officer who ran Foreign Armies East, the German intelligence effort against the Soviet Union.

After the surrender of Nazi Germany, in May 1945, Gehlen and his Foreign Armies East organization was subordinated to U.S. Army intelligence, where it was reorganized into what became the BND, or West German intelligence organization.

The Cold War began in 1947, following the announcement by U.S. President Harry Truman of the so-called Truman Doctrine, which aspired to stop the expansion of Soviet geopolitical expansion.

That same year, the newly created C.I.A. took over management of the Gehlen organization. From 1945 until 1954, the Gehlen organization, at the behest of U.S. and British intelligence, worked with Bandera and his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) to direct the efforts of the Banderist fighters who remained on Soviet territory.

They fought in a conflict that claimed the lives tens of thousands of Soviet Red Army and security personnel, along with hundreds of thousands of OUN and Ukrainian civilians. The C.I.A. continued to fund the OUN in diaspora up until 1990.

Link to Today

In 1991, the first year of Ukraine’s independence, the neo-fascist Social National Party, later Svoboda Party, was formed, tracing its provenance directly to Bandera. It had a street named after Bandera in Liviv, and tried to name the city’s airport after him. 

In 2010, pro-Western Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko declared Bandera a Hero of Ukraine, a status reversed by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was later overthrown. 

More than 50 monuments, busts and museums commemorating Bandera have been erected in Ukraine, two-thirds of which have been built since 2005, the year the pro-American Yuschenko was elected.

At the time of the 2014 overthrow of the elected Yanukovych, Western corporate media reported on the essential part the descendants of Petliura and Bandera played in the coup. 

As The New York Times reported, the neo-Nazi group, Right Sector, had the key role in the violent ouster of Yanukovych. The role of neo-fascist groups in the uprising and its influence on Ukrainian society was well reported by mainstream media outlets at the time.  

The BBC, the NYT, the Daily Telegraph and CNN all reported on Right Sector, C14 and other extremists’ role in the overthrow of Yanukovych.

Thus today’s Ukrainian nationalism draws a direct link to the history of extremist nationalists beginning with the post World War I-period.  

Where Does History Begin?

Almost every discussion about the historical roots of today’s Russian-Ukrainian conflict begins with the partition of Poland in 1939, and the subsequent demarcation that took place at the end of the Second World War, solidified by the advent of the Cold War.

However, anyone searching for a solution to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict that is grounded in post-Cold War policies will run afoul of the realities of history that pre-date the Cold War, and which continue to manifest in the present day by reincarnating still unresolved issues.

They all have a precedent that dates to the tumultuous period between 1918-1921.

The reality is that the collapse of the Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian empires had a far greater influence on the history of modern-day Ukraine than did the collapse of the Soviet Union.

History, it seems, will never end. It is folly to think so, with those embracing such a notion simply prolonging and promoting the nightmares of the past, which will forever haunt those who live in the present.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Link here.

By Tarik Cyril Amar, Substack, 10/17/23

Tarik Cyril Amar is an expert on Ukraine and Russia. A historian based in Istanbul and trained at Oxford, the LSE, and Princeton, he speaks both Ukrainian and Russian and has lived in Ukraine for five years.

October 2023 is likely to be remembered as either a historic turning-point or a last chance humanity missed before stumbling into World War Three. Here’s why:

Two important developments are unfolding before our eyes. First, while Israel is committing massive atrocities against Palestinians (especially but not only in Gaza), the United States leads the West in enabling the extreme-right-Zionist settler regime by providing diplomatic cover and arms. While Western publics show some signs of resistance and solidarity with the Palestinian victims of the Israeli massacre, Western governments and media are digging in their heels. Israel may not achieve all its aims, namely the ethnic cleansing of Gaza (and then the West Bank) by genocidal means. But if Israel fails, that failure will be due to Palestinian resistance and, perhaps, intervention from other states in the Middle East. The West will have done its worst, meanwhile, to help Israel win and preserve its total immunity against the claims of international law and elementary ethics.

(“Zeitenwende” Germany, weak as it is, is playing a particularly perverse and revolting role, hiding behind its historic Holocaust guilt to leave Palestinians to their fate at the hand of a genocidal regime. Indeed, many Germans seem to positively enjoy the massacring of Gazans in a manner reminiscent of their parents and grandparents who saw nothing wrong with, for instance, the siege and bombarding of Leningrad. German “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” has failed.)

Second, even while making yet another horrific crisis worse, Washington is now backing out of its preceding fiasco, namely its proxy war in Ukraine. And it is America’s fiasco, for two reasons. Concerning how it happened, Russia’s invasion in February 2022 broke international law. Yet Moscow did offer a perfectly viable off-ramp at the end of 2021, and, as the General Secretary of NATO Jens Stoltenberg has now blurted out, the West – of course with Washington calling the shots – knowingly rejected Russia’s offer to negotiate instead of fighting it out. Rather than finally cease to provoke Moscow by deliberately infringing on its elementary security interests, the USA decided to go for broke.

Then, apart from the causes of the war, there is the outcome: That as well is a fiasco for the West, because Russia is winning. Whereas a compromise in 2021 would have left the status quo intact, the defeat of Ukraine and its Western backers will greatly damage the Western position overall: The West has done its worst to Russia, and it has not been enough. Now Moscow knows how strong it really is, and it also knows how weak the West really is. And the rest of the world knows, too. This defeat will not be like the Western rout in Kabul, grotesque as that was. This one the West will not just be able to walk away from. This one will hurt and keep hurting.

These two Western failures, over Ukraine and Palestine, have three features in common. They confirm the USA’s “leadership” in the sense that the West – i.e., most of Europe, NATO, and the EU, plus several odd cases such as Canada or Japan – obey Washington’s orders, often with sickening enthusiasm. They also show that this “leadership” is now severely circumscribed: No one outside this “West” is going along anymore, and insofar as they do, then only out of a fear that is diminishing rapidly. And finally, and most importantly, both failures ultimately stem from the USA’s shortsighted refusal to adjust to the fact that its post-Cold War “unipolar moment” is over and that it will now have to find a place as one important but no longer dominant state among others.

Washington 2023 is, in other words, radically different from Moscow 1986. Back then, the still powerful yet crisis-ridden Soviet Union was not merely ready but took the initiative to end the Cold War with a compromise instead of a hot war. Indeed, within less than a decade, the Soviets would acquiesce not only to the loss of superpower status but of their whole state. Whatever you think about Soviet history, the Soviets lost their empire peacefully and reasonably and at great cost. They did not have to. They could have fought and taken us all with them.

The American empire in decline is very different. This is not the place for analyzing why. For that, things are too urgent. What we must do now is face the fact that Washington’s “elites” are very likely to fight and fight again – and then some more – to prevent the inevitable, the end of their global power. That is why we need to think beyond multipolarity even now. Valdimir Putin and Xi Jinping are correct when they tell us that a multipolar world order is emerging whether Washington likes it or not.

Yet the real danger is that, instead of finding its place in that new world order, the USA will keep provoking, instigating, and starting wars, until we finally reach one, big overarching cataclysm. The only way to prevent this is to contain and deter Washington. Those states who understand that the survival of humanity is more important than the “Manifest-Destiny” and “Indispensability” delusions of the USA will have to do more than just bypassing Washington. They will have to form a global coalition to threaten it into accepting its decline no less peacefully than the Soviets had to accept theirs.

Link here.

By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 10/16/23

In the past week, I have been interviewed several times by Indian television and asked about the present situation and immediate path ahead in the Israeli-Hamas war. I have replied on air, though I felt uncomfortable going outside my area of core competence. I do not present myself as an expert on the Near East. My added value is specifically in the following: to take readings of Russian governmental and public thinking about the most important international events of our times, of which the Mideast war is today number one. And that is what I offer in the essay below.

What I am about to say first is drawn from last night’s Vladimir Solovyov show, which gave the microphone to some of the most capable panelists in his stable of regulars. The key issue was how Russians view the concept of collective responsibility applied to whole nations or ethnic groups as the Israeli government is now doing in its approach to Gaza by proceeding on a mission to root out and destroy Hamas. Solovyov put on the screen the latest speech by Israeli president Isaac Herzog which reflected the doctrine of collective responsibility in no uncertain terms.

“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said at a press conference on Friday. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”

Solovyov also showed the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant saying that Israel is fighting against “human animals.”

Solovyov himself condemned unreservedly the brutal murders perpetrated by Hamas militants on 7 October just as he condemned any attempts to justify the brutal Israeli heavy bombardment of Gaza and their planned horrific land invasion of Gaza in the immediate future.

For his part, Solovyov used the issue to highlight the difference between the Russian way of war, as seen in the ongoing Special Military Operation in Ukraine, and the Israeli way of war which we are now witnessing 24/7 on television. Russians could have smashed Kiev, bombed the main boulevard downtown, the Kreshchatik, but did not. They were/are not targeting residential districts.

Surely some readers will disagree and say that the distinction is more blurry, but please note this is the Russian self image. Said Solovyov to further drive home his point: during our Chechen wars in the 1990s we only denounced the terrorist groups, not the entire Chechnya nation.

 In fact, the whole issue of applying collective responsibility to peoples has a special meaning in Russia which the Western public would not necessarily know. And this came out in the eloquent, uninterrupted 10 minute speech of RT directress Margarita Simonyan.

I have in the past criticized Simonyan for the concept behind RT programming, for its hiring has-been Western journalists to hold up a mirror to American society instead of presenting the much more sophisticated and interesting domestic Russian news programming in English translation for global audiences. However, as she made clear last night, Margarita Simonyan, the journalist is a top quality intellectual as well as a Russian patriot. Her lengthy quotations from the poetry of Anna Akhmatova on how you should stay in the country of your birth and make the best of it were entirely germane to the discussion of Russians who left the country at the time of the mobilization of reservists last autumn. I will get to the subject of these “relocants” as they have been dubbed in Russian social networks further on.

But first I point to the bit of Simonyan family history that she shared with the audience last night. She said that she understood very well the terrible side of collective responsibility as reflected in the various expulsions of ethnic groups from one or another region of the Soviet Union during Stalin’s reign. Her own family was based in Crimea until Stalin ordered the deportation of all Armenians there. Still more obnoxious was Stalin’s deportation of Crimean Tatars, the native population, which was only reversed after the fall of the USSR.

The uniform condemnation of what Israel is doing in Gaza on the Solovyov show last night was contradicted by one panelist, Yaakov Kedmi, who was brought in by remote from Jerusalem. Kedmi is a former Soviet citizen, a ‘refusenik’ who long ago emigrated to Israel and made a career in the intelligence services. Retired, he has for several years appeared in the Moscow studios of the Solovyov show, where he often presented himself as a super patriot for Russia, recommending a very aggressive posture abroad, to the point that I thought at times he was an agent provocateur.

Appearing last night on the Solovyov show, Kedmi looked fatigued, distressed and made a weak case for Israel’s right to self-defense, whatever action against Gaza that it entailed because Hamas had to be torn up by the roots. As for collective responsibility, Kedmi at first denied that the Israeli president had ever spoken in terms of applying the principle against Palestinian civilians for the Hamas atrocities, then relented and said that the president had acted stupidly and did not represent the views of the broad Israeli public. He went on longer than the program host wished defending the noble behavior of the Israeli Defense Force. Kedmi insisted that the IDF was engaged in precision, not wanton bombing; that it telephoned the residents of apartment buildings twenty minutes before a planned raid to give them time to get out. This sweet story strained credulity as you could see on the faces of other panelists.

I have in the past called attention to the former military officer, present day Duma member Andrei Gurulyov who appears fairly often on the Solovyov show. Last night he had a lot to say about both the situation in Israel and about President Putin’s remarks earlier in the day that the Russians had now entered a phase of “active defense,” meaning the daily incremental capture of land in Ukraine-occupied Donbas at the line of confrontation so as to get control of commanding heights and other tactically important positions. However, his most important remarks last night were with respect to Iran. Russian television had reported on the meeting of the Iranian foreign minister with Hamas leaders in Qatar on Saturday, during which the Iranian spoke of their “red line,” meaning that Iran will not stand idly by if Israel proceeds with its planned full invasion of Gaza. I add that today the Iranian parliament issued a declaration to the same effect. Said Gurulyov, the Iranians are not loquacious; when they speak, they mean what they say. Moreover, the Iranian armed forces are, in his estimation, very capable and they are equipped with fully modern weapons.

The subject of “relocants” has been highly topical on Russian television and social media this past week. It arose in connection with the arrival back in Moscow of some highly visible scoundrels who had been living in Israel and departed hastily after the Hamas attacks. The question became very hot after Vyacheslav Volodin, Speaker of the Duma, the lower house in Russia’s bicameral legislature, told reporters that upon their return to Russia, such people should be sent directly to Magadan, a port city in the Russian Far East that was a notorious transit point of Gulag internees in the Stalinist years.

That really sent tongues wagging and the question popped up in a press conference that Putin gave during his Central Asian travels later in the week. Putin said directly that everyone holding a Russian passport has the right to leave the country and take up residence in any destination of his or her choosing; moreover, they all have the right of return. The only issue which could subject them to legal investigation is if they used their time abroad to defame Russia.

In her ten minutes at the microphone, Margarita Simonyan gave a more detailed answer, saying that indeed many men who left Russia a year ago following the mobilization orders did so because the mobilization was not conducted with uniform professionalism. In some cases, the local mobilization personnel ignored the legal exemptions from service that reservists may have had for reasons of their profession, for reasons of health or family circumstances. As far as the Russian government is concerned, it stood ready to leave in place IT specialists who were more useful to the nation sitting at home by their computers with a latte at their side than if they were sent to the front. However, there were also those who had left Russia after the start of the SMO who never had any affection for Russia and Russians, but covered it up in the past by a fig leaf of pacifism or reproaches over authoritarianism. Now these same fine folks, from their perches in Israel or elsewhere abroad, are posting on social networks their expressions of full support for “our boys,” meaning the IDF. Such people will indeed get a fast track to Magadan if they return.

                                                                    *****

Before closing, I note that Russian news programs yesterday and today have broadcast a considerable amount of information that you should know to better understand our chances of surviving the Middle East conflict but will not hear about in major Western media.

For example, the arrival in Berlin of the Qatari emir for talks with Chancellor Scholz on Thursday was indeed mentioned in our media. The content of their talks was not. However, per Russian news the emir told Scholz openly that if the Europeans persist in giving unqualified support to Israel for its pending land invasion of Gaza then the emirate will halt all further deliveries of natural gas to Europe. It bears mention that Qatar accounts for 13% of global LNG sales and its planned deliveries to Europe are critical for the Old Continent to maintain energy security this winter under conditions of the sanctions applied to the traditional supplier, Russia.

Another important news item was released by the Russian Ministry of Defense today, namely that Russian deaths in the Ukraine war are in 1:8 ratio to Ukrainian deaths. This may sound fine, but if Ukraine has lost 400,000 soldiers so far in the war, that means the Russians have lost 50,000. Remember that the United States lost 58,000 solidiers in the five most active years of the Vietnam war ending in 1973. Also consider that the Russian population today is approximately one half of the U.S. population during the Vietnam war. These simple facts should make it manifestly clear why Russia will reject any U.S. attempt now to “freeze the conflict” and buy time for a future continuation at America’s choosing. No, the Special Military Operation will likely continue until the objectives are reached or the Ukrainians capitulate, whichever comes first.

Finally, I call attention to Vladimir Putin’s arrival in Beijing this morning for his meeting with President Xi and participation in the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative. I fully expect the two leaders to issue a joint declaration demanding that the parties to the Israeli-Hamas war immediately agree to a cease-fire and allow humanitarian aid to be delivered to the residents of Gaza. There is still time for these powers to provide mediation which the United States is patently incapable of delivering. Failing that, should the situation cross Iran’s red lines, all hell may break out. All hell also means chaos in energy markets that will immediately sting the whole developed world.