Intellinews, 3/14/25

Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to enjoy the trust of 83% of the Russian populace, according to a poll by the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), conducted between March 7 and 9, TASS reported on March 14.

The trust rating was up 2% increase from the previous survey. Similarly, the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) reported that 79.3% of participants affirmed their trust in the president, reflecting a 0.6% uptick.

In terms of job performance, 83% of those surveyed by FOM approved of Putin’s actions, while VCIOM’s data showed a 77.2% approval rating, a 0.5% rise.

The Russian government’s management of the country received a 57% approval rating in the FOM poll, with 59% endorsing Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin’s performance. VTsIOM findings were slightly lower, with 52.4% approving of the government’s handling of affairs and 53.1% supporting the prime minister’s efforts.​

Support for political parties also showed notable improvements. FOM’s research indicated that backing for the ruling United Russia party increased by 2%, reaching 46%. Conversely, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) experienced a 2% decline, settling at 7%, while the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) saw a 1% decrease to 8%. The A Just Russia-For Truth party maintained steady support at 3%, and the New People party observed a 1% rise to 3%.

VTsIOM’s data presented a slightly different picture: support for United Russia stood at 34.9%, a 0.4% decrease; the KPRF’s backing increased by 0.4% to 10.4%; the LDPR experienced a 0.7% decline to 10.5%; A Just

Russia-For Truth saw a 0.4% increase to 4.4%; and the New People party’s support remained constant at 6.6%.

By Craig Murray, Consortium News, 3/14/25

There is a logical fallacy that dominates European neoliberal “thinking” at the moment. It goes like this: 

“Hitler had unlimited territorial ambition and proceeded to attempt conquest of all Europe after annexing the Sudetenland. Therefore Putin has unlimited territorial ambition and will proceed to attempt conquest of all Europe after annexing Eastern Ukraine.”

This fallacious argument gives no evidence of President Vladimir Putin’s further territorial ambition. For evidence of Putin’s threat to the U.K., Prime Minister Keir Starmer risibly refers to the Salisbury “novichok” affair, perhaps the most pathetic propaganda confection in history.

But even if you were to be so complacent as to accept the official version of events in Salisbury, does an assassination attempt on a double agent credibly indicate a desire by Putin to launch World War 3 or invade the U.K.?

Hitler’s territorial ambitions were not hidden. His desire for lebensraum and, crucially, his view that the Germans were a superior race who should rule over the inferior races, was plain in print and in speeches.

There is simply no such evidence for wide territorial ambition by Putin. He is not pursuing a crazed Nazi ideology that drives to conquest — or for that matter a Marxist ideology that seeks to overthrow the established order around the world.

The economic alignment project of BRICS is not designed to promote an entirely different economic system, just to rebalance power and flows within the system, or at most to create a parallel system not skewed to the advantage of the United States.

Neither the end of capitalism nor territorial expansion is part of the BRICS project.

There is simply no evidence of Putin having territorial goals beyond Ukraine and the tiny enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It is perfectly fair to characterise Putin’s territorial expansion over two decades as limited to the reincorporation of threatened Russian-speaking minority districts in ex-Soviet states.

[See: Russian Imperialism?]

That it is worth a world war and unlimited dead over who should be mayor of the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking city of Lugansk is not entirely plain to me.

Secessionists barricade in Luhansk in June 2014. (Qypchak / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0)

The notion that Putin is about to attack Poland or Finland is utter nonsense. The idea that the Russian army, which has struggled to subdue small and corrupt, if Western-backed, Ukraine, has the ability to attack Western Europe itself is plainly impractical.

The internal human rights record of Putin’s Russia is poor, but at this point it is marginally better than that of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine. For example the opposition parties in Russia are at least allowed to contest elections, albeit on a heavily sloped playing field, whereas in Ukraine they are banned outright.

Still less convincing are the arguments that Russia’s overseas political activities in third countries require massive Western increases in armaments to prepare for war with Russia.

Western Meddling & Destruction  

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Jan. 22 in European Parliament addressing Ukraine, EU-U.S. relations and the EU’s global role. (European Parliament, Flickr, CC-BY-4.0)

The plain truth is that the Western powers interfere far more in other countries than Russia does, through massive sponsorship of NGOs, journalists and politicians, much of which is open and some of which is covert.

I used to do this myself as a British diplomat. Revelations from USAID or the Integrity Initiative leaks give the public a glimpse into this world.

Yes, Russia does it too, but on a much smaller scale. That this kind of Russian activity indicates a desire for conquest or is a cause for war, is such a shallow argument it is hard to believe in the good faith of those promoting it.

I have also seen Russian military intervention in Syria put forward as evidence that Putin has plans of world conquest.

Russian intervention in Syria prevented for a time its destruction by the West in the same way that Iraq and Libya were destroyed by the West. Russia held back the coming to power of crazed Islamist terrorists, and the massacre of Syria’s minority communities. Those horrors are now unfolding, in part because of the weakening of Russia through the Ukraine war.

For those nations that destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya to argue that Russia’s intervention in Syria shows Putin to be evil, is dishonesty of the highest degree. The United States has had a quarter of Syria under military occupation for over a decade and has been stealing almost all of Syria’s oil.

Pointing at Russia here is devoid of reason.

Strangely, the same “logic” is not applied to Benjamin Netanyahu. It is not argued by neoliberals [neocons] that his annexations of Gaza, the West Bank and Southern Lebanon mean he must have further territorial ambitions. In fact, they even fail to note Netanyahu’s aggressions at all, or portray them as “defensive” — the same argument advanced much more credibly by Putin in Ukraine, but which neoliberals  [neocons] there outright reject.

[Related: Israel’s Threatening Colonialism]

A Transformed EU

The economies of Western Europe are being realigned onto a war footing, led by the utterly transformed European Union. The enthusiastic proponents of genocide in Gaza, who head the EU, are now  channelling an atavistic hereditary hatred of Russia.

The foreign policy of the EU is propelled by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen [Germany] and Vice President Kaja Kallas (Estonia). The fanatical Russophobia these two are spreading, and their undisguised desire to escalate the war in Ukraine, cannot help but remind Russians that they come from nations which were fanatically Nazi.

To Russians this feels a lot like 1941. With Europe in the grip of full-on anti-Russian propaganda, the background to Trump’s attempt to broker a peace deal is troubled and Russia is understandably wary.

The U.K. continues to play the most unhelpful of roles. They have despatched Morgan Stanley’s Jonathan Powell to advise Zelensky on peace talks. As former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Powell played a crucial role in the illegal invasion of Iraq. 

Wherever there is war and money to be made from war, you will find the same ghouls gathering. Those involved in launching the invasion of Iraq should be excluded from public life. Instead Powell is now the U.K.’s national security adviser.

I am not a follower of Putin. The amount of force used to crush Chechnya’s legitimate desire for self-determination was disproportionate, for example. It is naive to believe that you get to be leader of the KGB [sic] by being a gentle person.

But Putin is not Hitler. It is only through the blinkers of patriotism that Putin appears to be a worse person than the Western leaders behind massive invasion and death all around the globe, who now seek to extend war with Russia.

Here in the U.K., the Starmer government is seeking actively to prolong the war, and is looking for a huge increase in spending on weapons, which always brings kickbacks and future company directorships and consultancies for politicians.

To fund this warmongering, New Labour are cutting spending on the U.K.’s sick, disabled and pensioners and cutting aid to the starving overseas.

Labour Friends of Israel has published a picture of Starmer meeting with Israeli President Herzog, six months after the International Court of Justice’s interim ruling quoted a statement by Herzog as evidence of genocidal intent.

The Starmer government was voted for by 31 percent of those who bothered to cast a vote, or 17 percent of the adult population. It is engaged in wholesale legal persecution of leading British supporters of Palestine, and is actively complicit in the genocide in Gaza.

I see no moral superiority here.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. 

YouTube link here.

By John Wight, Consortium News, 3/13/25

The real enemy of any government or regime, in the last analysis, is its own people. They are who rulers fear most.

That is accordingly why so much effort is devoted by rulers to propaganda, primarily designed to sustain the myth there exists a national interest to which all are bound, regardless of socioeconomic status or one’s actual life experience. 

In truth there is no such thing as a  “national interest.” Only the interests of the dominant class of rulers matters.  Thus heavy lies the crown, and lightly is tread the line between legitimacy and illegitimacy.

This dynamic is most pronounced in time of war. Men with guns sent to fight other men with guns are never more dangerous than when the initial, warm glow of patriotism, responsible for them readily marching towards their own demise, is replaced by the grim reality of suffering and slaughter. 

It is then when that most dangerous of all things for rulers emerges:  a still-armed soldier who starts to reflect.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 is the historical example, tout court, of how poor soldiers, thrown into the maw of combat, develop a revolutionary consciousness which supersedes the national one they’d set out to defend. 

Civil unrest also erupted in France and Germany after this war to end all wars, though in both cases capital’s forces proved strong enough to overcome the threat from below.  

A Turning in Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin talking with Alexei Smirnov, acting governor of Kursk, on Aug. 8, 2024, about the Ukrainian incursion. (Kremlin.ru / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0)

Ukraine has lost the First World War of our time. Kiev’s Kursk offensive and occupation of Russian territory has at this writing turned into a disastrous rout.  Further still, Ukraine’s manpower shortage has reached critical mass. No amount of European Union and U.K. financial and material support will be able to salvage or alter the reality on the ground without the deployment of European troops. 

The governing regime of any country reduced to literally kidnapping young men off the street, as the Ukrainians have been, to send into combat  can be said to have relinquished any claim of legitimacy.

Ukraine, after three years of unremitting conflict, is no longer a sovereign state.  It is a proxy of NATO and Brussels.  It is a failed experiment in ethno-nationalism and ethno-fascism. It is the Israel of eastern Europe and equally reactionary. The country’s president, Volodomyr Zelensky, when viewed in this light, has been nothing more than a convenient agent of Western imperialism.

Zelensky with President Donald Trump in the White House on Feb. 28. (White House / Flickr)

To witness him being dressed down by President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance in the Oval Office was to see how power operates. The khaki-clad, diminutive leader of this corrupt state was by that point used to being feted like some touring rock star in Western capitals across the world. Now, suddenly, there he was being reduced to his “actual” status as Washington’s footstool, useful only until his usefulness has expired.

To Trump’s credit at least, he comes to the table shorn of illusions as to the machinations of the warmongering, Western security establishment that would apparently prefer WWIII to peace in our time. 

From the very same establishment flows the sordid and squalid values of the mortuary. The deaths of a million young men is for them a sacrifice worth paying in the name of hegemony and legacy.

It is why EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron et al. are the worst possible leaders in place at the most critical time.

In every bombastic speech that von der Leyen delivers — during which she relentlessly attempts to paint Russia as the repository of a Mongol Horde intent on global domination — you are left with the indelible impression of a woman who has never forgiven the Red Army for storming the gates of Berlin in 1945. 

“Raising a flag over the Reichstag” May 13, 1945. (Yevgeny Khaldei/ Adam Cuerden / mil.ru / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

Starmer has made a virtue of lacking any. This pumped-up, local bank manager is Tony Blair — without the laughs. He is a tragedy middle England produced, a man so wooden he doesn’t put his suit on in the morning. His suit puts him on.

As for Macron, this centrist popinjay is a king without a throne. To watch him bestride Europe like an aspiring Colossus is to be reminded of Napoleon’s observation that “In politics stupidity is not a handicap.”

Russia under President Vladimir Putin has never been forgiven, and will never be forgiven, for the “crime” of recovering from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. 

A weak and pliant Moscow has long been the default position of those in the West who view geopolitics as a struggle for domination, no matter the consequences, instead of the need for co-operation with the desire to forestall such consequences in mind.

Ukrainian men and women have been sacrificed on the chopping block of NATO expansionism. They have been fed into the meat grinder fashioned in the name of the zero sum game of power politics, with the bastards responsible for so much death and destruction in need of being held to account, and soon.

The Bolsheviks understood this need and acted upon in it in the context of the killing fields of WWI. 

Indeed, Ukraine has its Alexander Kerensky in the shape of Zelensky. In other words, a failed leader doing his utmost to continue a losing war in the name of power for power’s sake.

Ukraine, as things stand — and with the former historical comparison in mind — is in desperate need of its Vladimir Lenin.  But there is none in sight. Nor any organized revolutionary party. There are some Ukrainian soldiers furious with Kiev, however.  

In 2025, the guns of the Ukrainian soldiers, shivering and freezing in the trenches, are pointed in the wrong direction. As the man said: “War happens when the government tells you who the enemy is. Revolution happens when you figure it out for yourself.”

The sooner the long suffering troops of the Ukrainian armed forces figure it out for themselves, the better it would be for all of us.

John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else.  Please consider making a donation in order to help fund his efforts. You can do so here. You can also grab a copy of his book, This Boxing Game: A Journey in Beautiful Brutality, from all major booksellers, and his novel Gaza: This Bleeding Land from same. Please consider taking out a subscription at his Medium site.

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

By Aaron Mate, Substack, 3/24/25

…At home, Zelensky faces the traditional obstacle of Ukraine’s radical and heavily armed far-right, which remains steadfastly opposed to any negotiated solution with Russia. According to a 2024 survey, fifteen percent of soldiers and veterans would join an armed revolt if Ukraine and Russia reached a peace deal on unfavorable terms.

As the Financial Times noted last year, Zelensky’s “biggest domestic problem… might come from a nationalist minority opposed to any compromise, some of whom are now armed and trained to fight.” Entering “any negotiation” with Russia, a Ukrainian official said, “could be a trigger for social instability. Zelensky knows this very well.” Oleksandr Merezhko, chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a member of Zelensky’s political party, was even more blunt. “There will always be a radical segment of Ukrainian society that will call any negotiation capitulation. The far right in Ukraine is growing. The right wing is a danger to democracy,” Merezhko said.

The view that Ukrainian extremists pose an obstacle to peace has newly been confirmed by an unlikely source. In a recent interview, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson acknowledged that Zelensky was undercut by radicals who stood in the way of the Minsk Accords, the UN Security Council-endorsed pact for ending the post-2014 Maidan coup civil war. Zelensky, Johnson explained, “was elected as a peacenik,” and “in 2019, he tried to do a deal with Putin.” But “his basic problem was that Ukrainian nationalists couldn’t accept the compromise.” That compromise was predicated on granting the Russian-backed Donbas rebels limited autonomy inside of Ukraine and effectively abandoning hopes of joining NATO…

Read the full article here. This article is behind a paywall, but I highly recommend paying the $5/month subscription for Aaron’s Substack, if you’re not already. His articles are worth it. – Natylie