By Gilbert Doctorow, 4/25/22

As I have noted previously, there is a firewall between what Western major media are reporting daily about the situation in the Russia-Ukraine War and more generally about Russia versus what one sees on Russian state television and reads in the Russian news agencies. On the advice of a colleague in Washington, I will now as occasion requires post news developments from Russia that Western audiences otherwise are not receiving despite their importance as indicators of where East-West relations are headed and whether we are all likely to survive the coming weeks.

The top such news item in Russia today is the successful capture by the Russian state intelligence agency FSB of a gang of would-be assassins based in Moscow and acting under orders from Kiev to kill the leading Russian talk show host Vladimir Solovyov, about whom I have written these past few weeks. And their ‘kill list’ went on to take in other leading personalities on Russian state television: Dmitry Kiselyov (director of all Russian television news programming), Yevgeny Popov, Olga Skabeyeva and Margarita Simonian (editor-in-chief of RT).

The gang, which appears to consist of White Power and other neo-Nazi elements, was interrogated before video cameras and the videos have been posted on the Russian internet by TASS and other state news agencies.

As might be expected, Russian media have been properly roiled by this news. I caught the discussion on Vyacheslav Nikonov’s afternoon edition of “The Great Game.” His panelists saw this ‘terrorism’ as a new phase in Ukraine’s hybrid war that is being stage managed from Washington. Panelists made the point that the West has been very lucky till now that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has shown great forbearance by not responding in kind to the vicious war being waged by Washington, which always remains one step short of kinetic war in the mistaken belief that these kinds of aggression are water-tight and mutually exclusive. The panelists stressed that at a certain point Putin will indeed respond and the response will be kinetic. The message was addressed to Messrs. Blinken and Austin, who, following their meeting with Zelensky, said at a press conference at the Polish-Ukrainian border, that the goal of the U.S. in the whole matter of the Ukraine-Russian war is to so weaken Russia that it will be incapable of similar actions in the future. In simple English, what they are saying is that the U.S. ambition is to destroy Russia. The masks have been dropped.

Another item in Russian news yesterday and today has been the screening several times a day of videos taken in the United States during Joe Biden’s latest trips across the country to sell his narrative on the economic travails America is now experiencing. Two separate speeches end in Biden’s turning from the lectern and seeking to the shake someone’s hand when there is in fact no one around him. Biden then looks lost and makes a sad retreat from the stage.

Nikonov remarked that these videos have not been aired on major U.S. television, have not been reported on in mainstream print media. My friend in Washington confirms that this is so. Meanwhile, the fact of Biden’s blatant disorientation was denounced by Donald Trump a day ago – so at least he has seen the videos which the Russians take as indicative of the mental degeneration of the U.S. President and a token of the degeneration of the entire U.S. political class. Trump commented that Biden’s disorientation is something the country has never seen before and that the Biden administration has put the U.S. on a path to hell.

Where will all this end?  It is not headed in a good direction.

by James Carden, Asia Times, 4/19/22

Conversations over the past week with current and former US officials about whether, to their knowledge, there is any real debate inside President Joe Biden’s administration over the approach it is taking in Ukraine has produced only slight variations of the same answer: “Not really.”

As of now, what the Biden policy amounts to is a replay along the lines of president Franklin D Roosevelt’s policy toward the war in Europe from 1939 to December 1941, during which the US was a co-belligerent all but in name.

In their public statements, Biden and his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin seem intent on obfuscating the true extent of American involvement. A story in the defense-industry-sponsored Politico quoted unnamed US officials as saying “military options in Ukraine aren’t on the table – echoing Biden’s repeated position of not wanting to spark World War III.”

If taken at face value, Biden’s policy would seem to be at odds with itself. Not wanting to start a third World War is a prudent, appropriate policy objective, but if that’s the goal, the administration is taking the long way around, because whether they admit it or not, the US is, and has been for some time, a co-belligerent in the war.

“We have consistently been sharing intelligence that includes information the Ukrainians can use to inform and develop their military response to Russia’s invasion,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters in March.

On April 13, Biden authorized US$800 million in military assistance to Ukraine, bringing the total amount his administration has spent on aiding Ukraine to roughly $3 billion.

The open spigot of funding has naturally attracted the attention of the defense industry, and last week, the chief executives of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and L3Harris Technologies met at the Pentagon with Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks.

But US involvement goes deeper than arms sales and intelligence sharing. A Pentagon official who requested anonymity told me it is “likely we have a limited footprint on the ground in Ukraine, but under Title 50, not Title 10,” meaning US intelligence operatives and paramilitaries – but not regular military.

Bruce Fein, a constitutional expert and former associate attorney general in the Ronald Reagan administration, told me this week that in his view, “the United States and several NATO members have become co-belligerents with Ukraine against Russia by systematic and massive assistance to its military forces to defeat Russia.”

According to Fein, the US and its NATO allies are now vulnerable to attack by “an enemy belligerent,” meaning Russia, because of their “systematic or substantial violations of a neutral’s duties of impartiality and non-participation in the conflict.”

“Neutrality,” continued Fein, “is violated by permitting a belligerent to violate its territorial integrity (as Belarus and Russia have done to Ukraine), or by supplying warships, arms, ammunition, military provisions or other war materials, directly or indirectly, or supplying military advisers to a belligerent,” as the US has done.

“Under the Declare War Clause of the constitution, co-belligerency, which displaces the status of the United States as neutral, requires a declaration of war by Congress,” said Fein. But instead of fulfilling its constitutional duties, Congress has been aggressively pushing the administration to deepen its involvement in what is clearly now a US-Russian proxy war.

On. March 2, the US House of Representatives voted 425-3 in favor of a non-binding resolution “Supporting the People of Ukraine.” The following week, on March 10, the House overwhelmingly voted to send $14 billion in military funding to Ukraine as part of an omnibus spending package.

And on April 7, the US Senate passed Republican Senator John Cornyn’s Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022, which “temporarily waives certain requirements related to the President’s authority to lend or lease defense articles if the defense articles are intended for Ukraine’s government and necessary to protect civilians in Ukraine from Russian military invasion.”

In the end, Congress and the Biden administration are wading into dangerous waters. Fein warns that the US has “employed the concept of co-belligerency to target for extermination any group or individual who provides material support to al-Qaeda or ISIS” – and there is a real risk that Russia may take a page out of America’s playbook.

Bhadrakumar is a retired Indian diplomat.

By MK Bhadrakumar, Indian Punchline, 4/23/22

An extraordinary thing about British diplomacy is that it continually looks for ways to stay ahead of the curve and provide added value to its customer across the Atlantic, the United States. That makes the remarks on Ukraine conflict by the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his press conference in New Delhi on Friday highly significant.

Johnson brought to mind the evocative lines of Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach on the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” when faith is receding. He was completely at odds with the focus of the US president Joe Biden’s remarks at the White House just the previous day where he vowed

-“to hold Putin accountable for his brutal and bloody war”;

-“to further augment Ukraine’s ability to fight in the east — in the Donbas region”;

-to “repel Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, to beat back Putin’s savagery”;

-“sending an unmistakable message to Putin: He will never succeed in dominating and occupying all of Ukraine. He will not — that will not happen”;

-“to ratchet up the pressure on Putin and further isolate Russia on the world stage”;

-“further to deny Russia the benefits of the international economic system that they so enjoyed in the past”;

-“to continue to stand with the brave and proud people of Ukraine.”

Biden managed to pack all this vitriolic rhetoric in one single speech! In fact, he even rounded off exuding optimism that “There is no evidence yet that Mariupol has completely fallen”.

But Johnson, in sharp contrast, tended to go along with the forecast by British Military Intelligence that the Russians could win in Ukraine. Without any verbal acrobatics, he straight came to the point:

“I think the sad thing is that that (Russian victory) is a realistic possibility. Yeah, of course. Putin has a huge army, he has a very difficult political position … the only option he has now is to continue to try to use his appalling, grinding approach, driven, led by artillery, trying to grind the Ukrainians down. He’s very close to securing a land bridge in Mariupol now. The situation is, I’m afraid, unpredictable. We just have to be realistic about that.”

During his recent visit to Ukraine, Johnson had reportedly advised President Vladimir Zelensky to make a retreat from and form a new defence line but Zelensky had no option but to follow American advice.

For President Biden, of course, there is good enough reason why the war should continue as a forever war. The war rallies Europe behind the US’ weakening transatlantic leadership. Besides, Biden now has an alibi to explain away the high inflation in the US economy. He is placating the military-industrial complex in an election year. Biden announced on Thursday a new $800 million package in military aid for heavy artillery, 144,000 rounds of ammunition and drones, which will be sent “directly to the front lines of freedom” in Donbass.

However, the big question remains: How long will the Western unity behind American leadership hold if Biden seeks a protracted conflict with Russia? The successive defeats in Mariupol and Donbass would not only break the back of the Ukrainian army and seriously dent the credibility of the US but discredit the entire Western triumphalist narrative.

While the western sanctions have hurt the Russian economy, per current indications, Moscow is adjusting to a “new normal.” Contrary to Western expectations, the sanctions have not shifted Russian public opinion against the government. The successful testing last Wednesday of Russia’s next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile Sarmat — which “has no analogues in the world and will not have for a long time to come” (Putin’s words) — is no doubt a defiant assertion.

Meanwhile, Western attempts to “isolate” Russia have no success stories to tell. At the G20 finance ministers meeting in Washington, the “Russia boycott” plank had no takers other than the Western bloc. The US failed to persuade Saudi Arabia to disengage from its OPEC+ cartel with Russia. Above all, in the key area where it matters most — oil and gas — Europe is unable to agree to an embargo. Several EU countries threaten to veto any such move by the Commission.

European economies are in varying stages of meltdown, as the blowback from sanctions begins to hit them. Germany’s central bank warned Friday that a full embargo on Russian energy purchases could could cost 180 billion euros, take 5% off Germany’s expected GDP this year, and tip the economy back into a severe recession. It warned that even the need to find replacement sources of energy would put a rocket under inflation, adding over 1.5% percentage points to this year’s consumer price index and over 2% points to next year’s.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Spiegel on Friday that a gas embargo is ultimately about “avoiding a dramatic economic crisis, the loss of millions of jobs and of factories that would never open again.” He said that given such “huge consequences for our country, for the whole of Europe,.. it’s my responsibility to say: ‘We can’t allow that (embargo)’.”

Europeans are realising sooner rather than later that they are big losers. Aside disruptions in supply chains hampering industrial production, what with the burden of 5 million refugees (so far) and the big impact on food security due to the war in the “breadbasket of Europe” combining with the short supply of the fertilisers that are used to increase crop yields, Europe is feeling the brunt of price hikes.

Even before the war in Ukraine, fertiliser prices were rising rapidly due to the increasing cost of gas, with nitrogen fertiliser costing almost five times as much as it did this time last year. Experts warn that all this could lead to a food crisis. Agitated farmers have led protests calling for concessions.

The Gallup International polls have shown that the biggest concerns of EU citizens at the moment are rising prices, fear of a widening war in Ukraine and possible shortages in energy supply. More than half of EU citizens believe that Europe has already provided sufficient support to Ukraine.

This is where the defeat in Donbass turns into a climactic event calling into question the entire US narrative on Ukraine — NATO expansion, European security, and dialogue with Russia — and, of course, the fixation about Vladimir Putin’s leadership of Russia.

A poll published Thursday by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows Americans’ desire to get involved has waned somewhat. Only 32% say the U.S. should have a major role in the conflict, down from 40% last month. An additional 49% say the US should have a minor role.

While speaking in Delhi, Johnson all but discarded Biden’s narrative. Instead, he called for “setting out a vision for the future of Ukraine in the security architecture of Europe. Where does Ukraine fit in now?”

Johnson said Ukraine needs to be able to answer that question eventually — “what the Ukrainians want eventually.” Interestingly, he didn’t use the word “Ukrainian government.” 

Johnson dilated on “a collection of security guarantees from like-minded countries — security commitments about what we can do to back them up with weaponry, with training, and with intelligence sharing.” But he quickly added that this cannot be “like an Article 5 (NATO) guarantee.” Instead, he said, Ukraine should have “deterrence by denial.” 

Per Johnson’s vision, Ukraine’s NATO membership is inconceivable. Britain anticipates new facts on the ground. Johnson appeared to recognise the emergent political realities as the Russian juggernaut relentlessly “grinds” Kiev’s war machine to dust.

Formerly known as “Land Destroyer,” The New Atlas provides geopolitical analysis by former US Marine Brian Berletic (aka Tony Cartalucci) with a focus on Eurasia, based in Bangkok, Thailand.