(John Kerry arrives in Moscow for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin; https://www.rt.com/op-edge/351310-obama-offer-russian-cooperation-syria/)
Veteran international journalist, Finian Cunningham, in a recent oped, wonders if the Obama administrations’s latest offer of cooperation between Washington and Moscow in Syria is too good to be true:
Throughout, despite the Western media disinformation campaign, the Kremlin has remained steadfast in its stated mission: To defend the sovereign state of Syria from an array of terror groups.
And quagmire this ain’t. Russia’s military forces, with relatively few losses, have transformed the five-year war in Syria, helping the Syrian army to put the illegally armed militants decisively on the defensive. Syrian state forces have recaptured huge swathes of territory, and the once seemingly formidable head-chopping jihadists and their so-called Caliphate are staring at defeat.
It may be too early to declare “mission accomplished” for Russia. But the situation on the ground certainly vindicates Putin’s strategy.
US media reports quote US officials as saying that the al-Qaeda-linked jihadists are telling their cadres that the Caliphate is on the brink of collapse. Significantly, too, this is also the context in which Turkey has shifted to a conciliatory position towards Russia and is even proffering a normalization of relations with Syria.
Washington and its regional allies, including Turkey, appear to be tacitly admitting that the covert military operation that they have been fueling for regime change in Syria is all but lost.
This is the context by which to read the latest “offer” from the Obama administration to Russia for military cooperation in Syria. After months of deprecating Russia’s intervention and stubbornly refusing to coordinate “anti-terror” efforts, Washington now appears to be reaching out to assist Russia.
….Leaving aside the question about whether Russia really needs “US assistance” in pursuing its own very effective anti-terror operation, the giveaway condition being demanded by Washington is that it wants the Russian-Syrian offensive to be curtailed. And that is the issue.
Western media claims that terror groups like Nusra and Daesh [ISIS] are “embedded” with “moderate rebels” is a charade. The inference is that the “mingling” is an unfortunate accident, whenever in reality there is negligible distinction between most of the illegally armed groups.
What Washington wants therefore in its “offer for cooperation” is to insert some form of restraint over what is an otherwise successful Russian-Syrian anti-terror campaign – a campaign that has salvaged Syria from a foreign-backed covert war for regime change.
The other giveaway to Washington’s real agenda is the second condition for its “cooperation”. Radio Free Europe reports:“Washington also wants Russia to help start a political transition that would ultimately end the Assad family’s four-decade reign.”
In other words, Obama’s “Syria plan” is less about cooperating with Russia to “defeat terror groups” and all about inveigling Russia to assist unwittingly in its overarching strategic objective of regime change in Syria.
Things looked pretty iffy in Turkey going into the weekend as an attempt was made to oust president Erdogan. It now appears that the coup attempt failed. Here are two analyses presenting somewhat different takes on the coup. The first is from Alexander Mercouris at The Duran. He believes the U.S. had no involvement and that the entire Turkish military supported the failed coup. His analysis can be read at:
The second is from Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge who argues that it was essentially a false flag operation to provide a smokescreen for Erdogan to crack down on critics in the judiciary and other government institutions amid reports of purges of thousands of judges. That analysis can be read at:
The Russian Art Museum, St. Petersburg; photo by Natylie S. Baldwin
Russia Beyond the Headlinesreports that a new poll reveals most Russians view freedom as the ability to pursue the career of one’s choice and freedom of expression.
This as the Russian president signed a new anti-terrorism bill into law, which contains some controversial changes. RTprovided details on some of the main provisions:
The anti-terrorist package of bills was drafted in April 2016 by a group of lower house lawmakers, who described it as a response to the bombing of an A-231 jet liner in Egypt in October 2015 and the terrorist attacks in Paris in November of that year.
The document contains a separate criminal article that orders up to 10 years in prison for anyone engaging in international terrorism, and up to 15 years behind bars for anyone found guilty of financing terrorist groups. Attracting new recruits to a terrorist organization was also criminalized, and will be punished with prison terms of between five and 10 years.
The new bill also lowers the age threshold for terrorist crimes, such as terrorist attacks and hostage taking, to 14 years from the current 16. Presently the age of minors in Russia is 16, with exceptions made for such crimes as murder, rape, kidnapping and several others. For these, criminals are deemed to be responsible from the age of 14.
Another provision stipulates fines of between 300,000 and 1 million rubles ($4,600 – $15,400) or prison terms ranging from five to seven years for public calls to terrorism or justifying terrorist crimes, including via the internet.
Among others, the bill drew criticism from Edward Snowden, who has been given refuge in Russia:
#Putin has signed a repressive new law that violates not only human rights, but common sense. Dark day for #Russia… Signing the #BigBrother law must be condemned. Beyond political and constitution consequences, it is also a $33b+ tax on Russia’s internet.
Parliamentary elections are coming up in September in the lower house (Duma) and Russia will reportedly invite U.S. election monitors to participate in oversight of the polls if Washington agrees to reciprocate and allow Russian monitors to help oversee U.S. elections:
State Duma speaker Sergey Naryshkin has said that monitors from the United States would be welcomed at Russian polls, but added that such steps required mutuality.
“We have no secrets from anyone but of course we would like to see decent and honest people observing our elections. It is evident that there are decent and honest people in the United States, including among their parliamentarians, but still this issue needs to be worked on,” RIA Novosti quoted Naryshkin as saying.
The Duma chief also told reporters that such steps should be mutual, adding that he personally had doubts about the possibility of such cooperation, given the experience that Russian monitors had with previous US elections.
“This is difficult to imagine if we recall some episodes from previous US polls when a state prosecutor threatened to arrest us if we did not keep a distance of at least 20 meters from a polling station,” Naryshkin said.
In late May, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that it plans to invite representatives of four international political blocs and organizations to this year’s parliamentary elections. The invitations will be extended to representatives of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR).
Putin had two important phone calls over the past 10 days, the first with President Obama regarding cooperation in Syria as well as addressing the Ukraine conflict, in which there are still sporadic flare-ups which have worsened recently amid reports of an increased build-up by the Kiev government of troops and weapons near the contact line in Donbass.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the conversation focused mainly on Syria:
The two leaders discussed Syria and Ukraine, according to a White House summary of the phone conversation, as well as efforts to settle the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.
Mr. Obama emphasized U.S. concern that the Syrian regime wasn’t complying with a cease-fire agreement and urged Mr. Putin to press Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government to fully do so. The two also “confirmed their commitment to defeating ISIL and the Nusra Front, al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria,” the White House said.
A Kremlin summary of the call said the two leaders agreed to intensify military coordination in Syria. A senior Obama administration official said Wednesday the U.S. and Russia aren’t currently “conducting or coordinating military operations with Russia, nor is there an agreement to do so.”
Mr. Putin also urged Mr. Obama to help separate moderate opposition forces from Nusra front and other terrorist groups, the Kremlin said.
The U.S. has proposed that Moscow force Mr. Assad to ground Syria’s air force in exchange for the Pentagon’s help with targeting in Syria.
RT, however, reported that, according to the Kremlin’s account of the conversation, the issue of Ukraine was brought up by the Russian president:
Putin also returned to the topic of the Minsk agreements, concerning Ukraine, and called on Kiev to follow the terms of the 18-month-old treaty, which has still not been fully implemented. Specifically, he has called for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to engage in “direct dialog with Donetsk and Lugansk, carry out an amnesty, and award the regions special autonomous status.”
Shortly afterwards, Putin had a telephone conversation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande regarding increased violations of the ceasefire agreed to at Minsk in 2015.
The Moscow Times had the following details:
Putin stressed the “provocative nature” of Ukraine’s military operations in the Donbass region, and called on Merkel and Hollande to pressure Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko into complying with the Minsk agreements.
All three agreed on the need to remove heavy weaponry and the equal withdrawal of forces from the front line.
[Neo-Nazi] Andrey Parubiy, the speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, warned earlier this week that military activity could soon flare up in the Donbass region, the RBC newspaper reported.
“There is a risk that our enemy could strengthen on two fronts. There is an election campaign in the U.S. and Europe is going through a moment of crisis. The Kremlin is also planning to intensify the conflict in this period,” Parubiy said. “On one front we face military attacks and attempts to destabilize the country on the other.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry also warned Wednesday that Kiev could be preparing for a new offensive in the Donbass, expressing its concern over the build up of Ukrainian military forces and volunteer battalions along the front line.
NATO, meanwhile, is continuing with yet more exercises. This time it’s the Sea Breeze 2016 naval drills in the Black Sea, described as follows by RT:
As many as 25 military vessels, two planes, two helicopters and some 1,700 personnel are taking part in the exercise conducted in the international waters, reports Sofia New Agency.
All NATO member states of the Black Sea region, namely Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey, are taking part in the drills, also attended by warships from Greece and Spain. The exercise also involves NATO associates Ukraine and Georgia.
Veteran investigative journalist Robert Parry, over at Consortium News, provides another blistering analysis of the NATO narrative of reality from February of 2014 to the present:
The leaders – at least the key ones – know that there is no credible intelligence that Russian President Vladimir Putin provoked the Ukraine crisis in 2014 or that he has any plans to invade the Baltic states, despite the fact that nearly every “important person” in Official Washington and other Western capitals declares the opposite of this to be reality.
But there have been a few moments when the truth has surfaced. For instance, in the days leading up to the just-completed NATO summit in Warsaw, General Petr Pavel, chairman of the NATO Military Committee, divulged that the deployment of NATO military battalions in the Baltic states was a political, rather than military, act.
“It is not the aim of NATO to create a military barrier against broad-scale Russian aggression, because such aggression is not on the agenda and no intelligence assessment suggests such a thing,” Pavel told a news conference.
What Pavel blurted out was what I have been told by intelligence sources over the past two-plus years – that the endless drumbeat of Western media reports about “Russian aggression” results from a clever demonization campaign against Putin and a classic Washington “group think” rather than from a careful intelligence analysis.
Ironically, however, just days after the release of the British Chilcot report documenting how a similar propaganda campaign led the world into the disastrous Iraq War – with its deadly consequences still reverberating through a destabilized Mideast and into an unnerved Europe – NATO reenacts the basic failure of that earlier catastrophe, except now upping the ante into a confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.
The Warsaw communiqué – signed by leaders including President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and British Prime Minister David Cameron – ignores the reality of what happened in Ukraine in late 2013 and early 2014 and thus generates an inside-out narrative.
I’ve recently been informed that I’ve been nominated for the “One Lovely Blog” award. It is basically a share-the-love type chain letter among bloggers who give a shout-out to their favorite blogs. My friend, J.T., over at Russia Reviewed has bestowed the honor on me. Each recipient nominates their 3 favorite blogs. My 3 faves, in addition to Russia Reviewed are: Pox Americana by Greg Maybury down in Australia, Russia Observer by Patrick Armstrong in Canada, and kulturcritic, who writes on topics ranging from anthropology, ethics and sustainable communities to politics and foreign policy.
Me in Moscow, October, 2015
After nominating other blogs for the award, a nominee is supposed to provide interesting facts about him or herself. So here are 5 about me:
I also write fiction. I have completed one novel, which I will be submitting to agents in a few months, and I am about 2/3 of the way through my second novel. I tend to revisit variations on the theme of humans’ inclination toward self-destructiveness, on both an individual and collective level.
I am an animal lover who has a particular fondness for cats, which I’ve had all of my life. Right now, I have 2: a fat orange tabby and a more svelte tortoiseshell calico. They divide their time by eating, sleeping, strutting around and trying to sit on my keyboard.
I’m an only child.
When I have time, I like to bake gluten-free, vegan goodies. No, I’m not a vegan – I just have multiple food allergies.
My day job is legal secretary. I was considering law school after graduating from college, but decided against it after working in the field and seeing what being a lawyer really required. My vision had been to become a lawyer specializing in international law after seeing the film Judgment at Nuremburg.
Russian President Vladimir Putin addresses UN General Assembly on Sept. 28, 2015. (UN Photo)
Can Russian President Vladimir Putin turn the tables on NATO and the European Union in the Balkan states that are not yet members of the Atlanticist project? According to Filip Kovacevic, a political science professor who specializes in Russia and Eastern Europe, Putin has a plan. Some details were provided in an exclusive report in May on the nascent project by Russia to counter NATO expansion into the remaining Balkan countries that have not yet been swept into the Western alliance.
The plan has its origins in the grassroots movement that arose in the aftermath of the first Cold War, which called for non-alignment and cooperation with both East and West. Kovacevic describes the movement as follows:
“Their members were generally young people who were enthusiastic, honest and genuinely committed to the public good, but were plagued by the lack of funding and faced with frequent media blackout and open discrimination. Nonetheless, their programs articulated the most promising and humane geopolitical vision for the Balkans. They conceptualized the Balkans as a territorial bridge between the West and the East rather than as the place of persistent confrontation, or the ‘line of fire’ as formulated by the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in 2015. They wanted the Balkans to become a force for peace and human dignity in the world. Their vision still remains the best option for the Balkans people.”
This desire for non-alignment is understandable as a continuation of the policy of Tito’s Yugoslavia during the Cold War – the nation that several of the modern day Balkan states were a constituent part of. However, according to Kovacevic, these groups were easily overwhelmed, in terms of both financial and propaganda resources, in the 1990s by pro-NATO forces in the West.
In addition to providing resources to build up pro-NATO sentiment in the media and NGO sectors of these countries, financial resources and pressure was used to sway a large number of politicians to favor NATO membership, often in opposition to the general population’s views. Some of the unsavory forms of incentive or pressure include what amounts to blackmail and bribery, Kovacevic told me in an email interview:
“This is a long-term process. In the U.S. intelligence community it is called ‘seeding.’ The intelligence scholar Roy Godson defines it as ‘identifying potential agents of influence’ at an early stage and then acting to advance their careers. This is typically done covertly, but there have been the historical examples of overt support. …
“In the Balkans, the key role in the process of ‘seeding’ was accomplished by various institutes, conferences, retreats, grants, etc. For instance, I was told by a confidential source who participated in the same U.S.-NATO program, the long-time foreign minister and one-time prime minister of Montenegro, Igor Luksic, was a product of such a process. Luksic was chosen as a very young man to attend various conferences and retreats in Brussels and Washington and, after that, his political career really took off. All the while, he promoted the NATO agenda in Montenegro, even though this went against the will of the majority of the population.
“Another example is Ranko Krivokapic who was the speaker of the Montenegrin Parliament for over a decade. He traveled on official business to the U.S. a few times every year and boasted to others that he had a lot of friends in the State Department and other institutions of the U.S. government. There are examples like these in Serbia, Macedonia, Croatia, etc. All over the Balkans.”
On July 8th, NATO began its 2-day summit during which it was announced that 1,000 U.S. troops would be stationed in Poland, a joint declaration on security between NATO and the EU was also unveiled, and heightened cooperation with Sweden and Finland – both of which are not NATO members and whose populations oppose NATO membership. The Guardianreports:
The US troops will constitute one of Nato’s four multinational combat battalions in eastern Europe intended to reassure the region against the threat of Russian encroachment. The UK is sending 500 soldiers for a battalion based in Estonia, and Canada and Germany will lead two more in Lithuania and Latvia.
Next year, Obama said, a US armoured brigade would also be deployed in Europewith a base in Poland.
Speaking in the Polish capital after a meeting with EU leaders, he argued against exaggerating the impact of Brexit on the transatlantic partnership.
“The vote in the United Kingdom to leave the EU has created uncertainty about the future of European integration. And unfortunately, this has led some to suggest that the entire edifice of European security and prosperity is crumbling,” Obama said.
“There have been those who have been questioning ‘what does this mean for the transatlantic relationship?’ Let me just say, as is often the case in moments of change, this kind of hyperbole is misplaced.”
The US president emphasised the enduring strength of Washington’s relations with the EU, which he called “one of the greatest economic and political achievements of modern times”.
“This is an achievement that has to be preserved,” Obama said, adding that an integrated Europe was a “cornerstone of US relations with the world”.
….The Warsaw summit is expected to announced that a US-built missile defence shield based in Romania, Turkey and Spain is initially operational and under Nato command.
They insist that the defence system is intended to counter a missile threat from Iran and Syria, not to blunt Russia’s deterrent. But analysts warn that there is a risk of Russia overreacting to Nato’s moves, fuelling escalation on the latter’s tense eastern border.
More reporting on the NATO summit is available at New Cold War.org’s website:
Meanwhile, protesters hosted a conference in Warsaw to denounce the NATO buildup and saber-rattling. Protests in other European cities as well as in New York are planned for throughout the weekend. RTreported the following:
The participants of the anti-war summit in Warsaw consider NATO “an aggressive alliance, which bears responsibility for thousands of victims in various conflicts, as well as for the increasing flow of refugees to Europe that causes the growing hysteria nationalism. This NATO policy will eventually lead to the collapse of the European Union,” Ikonovich warned.
“We oppose the deployment of the US and NATO bases in Poland as it will lead to an increased threat to our country,” the activist said, adding that the social sector in Poland will also suffer due to the transfer of funds to military needs.
Protests were reported in Paris, Athens, Naples and elsewhere across Europe ahead of the NATO summit in Warsaw, while New York and Lisbon are among the cities where demonstrations are planned for Saturday.
“If the course on militarization remains, protests in Poland and around the globe will only increase,” Ilkovsky said.
Despite the main topic of the Warsaw Summit being to counter what NATO claims to be a Russian threat, polls reveal that an increased number of Europeans disagree with the bloc’s approach towards dealing with Moscow. Only nine per cent of Germans currently support NATO’s buildup in Eastern Europe, a fresh survey by YouGov revealed.
Two-thirds of respondents also agreed with Germany’s foreign minister, who earlier said the military alliance should abandon its “saber-rattling” on Russia’s doorstep.
In June, the Pew Research Center’s Spring 2016 Global Attitudes Survey showed that most Europeans do not view Russia as a threat, instead naming Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terror group, climate change, economic instability, cyber-attacks and the refugee influx as the main security challenges.
The only two countries that spoke in favor of boosting defense spending turned out to be Poland and the Netherlands.
Earlier this week, polls in Sweden showed a sharp drop in support for the country’s possible NATO membership, with numbers going down from 41 to 33 per cent in less than a year.
The recent delegation of 20 citizen diplomats to Russia, sponsored by the Center for Citizen Initiatives, posted a 3 minute slide show of their trip here:
