Appeasement? We’re the aggressor
It’s us again, another Western Drang Nach Osten. Same as always.
Alexander Wolfheze spoke at the Global Conference on Multipolarity.
The Fall of the West By Alexander Wolfheze
Throughout history, Russia has been underestimated by many arrogant empire-builders and would-be world-rulers: the Poles reached Moscow in 1610, the Swedes reached Poltava in 1709, the French reached Moscow in 1812 and the Germans — advancing farthest of all — reached Stalingrad in 1942. Now, the American-led globalist-nihilist world empire may have decided to try again where all these others failed before. Until 22-02-2022, its proxies and mercenaries stood at the Don. Without diminishing the tremendous hardships and great sacrifices that may befall the peoples of the long-suffering Russian lands — and the people of Little Russia seem to be called upon to be first to suffer and sacrifice — they may yet again bury yet another global wannabe-hegemon. The globalist world empire may very well have made a fatal error in pushing too far east — an error that will bring it down forever. And one should never interrupt one’s enemy when he is making a mistake. God willing, it will be his last one.
Background: Alexander Wolfheze received his MA in Semitic Languages and Cultures in 2004 and his cum laude PhD in the Humanities in 2011, both from Leiden University. With extensive research experience in the fields of Assyriology and Cultural Anthropology, he subsequently authored several publications in the field of Near Eastern cultural history.
I don’t follow his comments on the White Russian armies, but the rest is on target.
"RUSSIAN INVASION"? "RUSSIAN AGGRESSION"? "RUSSIA DID NOT HAVE TO GO TO WAR"?
The Last Straw(s)
“Russia didn’t have to go to war”
Really? What was the alternative given what was happening in the days, weeks, months and years leading up to the Russian response?
Many of the following sources were taken from the piece: “The Military Situation In The Ukraine, Part One: The Road To War” by Jacques Baud
(Baud is a former colonel of the General Staff, ex-member of the Swiss strategic intelligence, specialist on Eastern countries. He was trained in the American and British intelligence services. He has served as Policy Chief for United Nations Peace Operations.)
Keep in mind the recommendations *to provoke* Russia in multiple scenarios, provided by the Rand Corporation in 2019:
“Overextending and Unbalancing Russia”:
“Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability.”
“A general increase in NATO ground force capabilities in Europe—including closing European NATO member readiness gaps and increasing the number of U.S. forces stationed in traditional locations in Western Europe—would have limited risks. But large-scale deployments on Russia’s borders would increase the risk of conflict with Russia, particularly if perceived as challenging Russia’s position in eastern Ukraine, Belarus, or the Caucasus.”
“Increasing the size and frequency of NATO exercises in Europe may help to enhance readiness and deterrence, but it is unlikely to prompt a costly Russian response unless the exercises also send risky signals.”
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html
The Final Push
On March 24, 2021, Volodymyr Zelensky issued a decree for the recapture of the Crimea, and began to deploy his forces to the south of the country.
https://www.president.gov.ua/documents/1172021-37533
https://www.president.gov.ua/.../prezident-zatverdiv...
https://www.ukrinform.net/.../3257949-ukrainian-armed...
Remember that Crimea’s majority pro-Russian voted themselves out of this ANTI-RUSSIAN monstrosity that NATO had created in 2014:
Crimea: a clear example of when “self determination” means nothing to the west when it doesn’t suit them:
https://www.facebook.com/1473971445/posts/10227695776487961/
Around the same time, several NATO exercises (UK and US) were conducted between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea, accompanied by a significant increase in reconnaissance flights along the Russian border. Russia then conducted several exercises to test the operational readiness of its troops and to show that it was following the evolution of the situation.
https://www.janes.com/.../us-uk-surge-surveillance...
In October 2021 NATO and Ukraine carried out joint war games (even though Ukraine isn’t a NATO member).
https://www.reuters.com/.../ukraine-holds-military.../
In December 2021 Russia demanded security guarantees from the United States and NATO -- including a promise not to expand the alliance.
https://abcnews.go.com/.../russia-makes-sweeping.../story...
[Note: Ukrainians had repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, rejected joining NATO in multiple polls:
The Fall of the Berlin Wall to 2013
https://www.facebook.com/1473971445/posts/10227640743632174/
The US overthrow of Ukraine in 2014
https://www.facebook.com/1473971445/posts/10227644338442042/ ]
Two key demands by Putin, namely, that Ukraine never host U.S. missiles or join NATO, were dismissed by neoconservative warmonger and architect of the 2014 Ukrainian coup, Victoria Nuland, saying:
“Those are decisions for Ukraine to make and for NATO to make, not for the Kremlin to make.”
(How Not to Explain the Ukraine Crisis, Mike Madden, Consortium News, December 24, 2021)
It was Nuland and Washington who “made decisions” on who should lead Ukraine before and after the coup that the US enabled there.
In violation of the Minsk Agreements (and the same month as the war games), Ukraine was conducting air operations in Donbass using drones, including at least one strike against a fuel depot in Donetsk.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ukraine’s-recent-drone-strike-reignites-tensions-donbass-195709
On February 7, 2022, during his visit to Moscow, Emmanuel Macron reaffirmed to Vladimir Putin his commitment to the Minsk Agreements, a commitment he would repeat after his meeting with Zelensky the next day.
But on February 11, in Berlin, there was still no resolution reached.
On 17 February, President Joe Biden announced that Russia would attack Ukraine in the next few days.
https://edition.cnn.com/.../joe-biden-russia/index.html
But the day *before*, on the 16th of February, the artillery shelling of the population of Donbas increased dramatically, as the daily reports of the OSCE observers show. From a few dozen shells to around 300 on the 16th, over 600 on the 17th, 1400 on the 18th, and an average of 1200 per day until the 22nd. Two days before Russia moved in.
On 23 February, the two Republics finally asked for military assistance from Russia.
These barrages were an invitation for war.
“If he decided to intervene, Putin could invoke the international obligation of “Responsibility To Protect” (R2P). But he knew that whatever its nature or scale, the intervention would trigger a storm of sanctions. Therefore, whether Russian intervention were limited to the Donbas or went further to put pressure on the West for the status of the Ukraine, the price to pay would be the same. This is what he explained in his speech on February 21.
On that day, he agreed to the request of the Duma and recognized the independence of the two Donbas Republics and, at the same time, he signed friendship and assistance treaties with them.”
https://www.thepostil.com/the-military-situation-in-the.../
“On 24 February, Putin invoked Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which provides for mutual military assistance in the framework of a defensive alliance.
In order to make the Russian intervention totally illegal in the eyes of the public we deliberately hid the fact that the war actually started on February 16.”
Social Media beats the drums of war
On Facebook, the Azov group was considered in the same category as the Islamic State and subject to the platform’s “policy on dangerous individuals and organizations.” It was therefore forbidden to glorify it, and “posts” that were favorable to it were systematically banned. But on February 24, Facebook changed its policy “on dangerous individuals and organizations” and allowed posts favorable to Azov.
https://theintercept.com/.../ukraine-facebook-azov.../
And began banning members who pointed out WHY Azov had been considered a “dangerous organization” (including myself).
In March, the platform (and Instagram) authorized, in the former Eastern countries, calls for the murder of Russian soldiers and leaders.
“The company is also temporarily allowing some posts that call for death to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his Belarusian counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko, in countries including Russia, Ukraine and Poland, according to internal emails to its content moderators.”
https://www.theguardian.com/.../facebook-and-instagram...
[Note: Blair, Bush, Obama, etc have done far worse and even their harshest critics have never called for their elimination.]
They WANTED war with Russia: “We will fight Russia to the last Ukrainian”
“The dramatic developments we are witnessing today have causes that we knew about but refused to see:
* on the strategic level, the expansion of NATO;
* on the political level, the Western refusal to implement the Minsk Agreements;
* and operationally, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian population of the Donbas over the past years and the dramatic increase in late February 2022.”
“if we had had a modicum of compassion for the same number of refugees from the Ukrainian populations of Donbass massacred by their own government and who sought refuge in Russia for eight years, none of this would probably have happened.”
https://reliefweb.int/.../ukraine-humanitarian-response...
“more than 80% of the victims in Donbass were the result of the Ukrainian army’s shelling. For years, the West remained silent about the massacre of Russian-speaking Ukrainians by the government of Kiev, without ever trying to bring pressure on Kiev. It is this silence that forced the Russian side to act. [Source: “Conflict-related civilian casualties”United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.]
https://ukraine.un.org/.../Conflict-related%20civilian...
On February 27, the Ukrainian government agreed to enter into negotiations with Russia.
https://www.nbcnews.com/.../ukraine-president-kyiv...
But a few hours later, the European Union voted a budget of 450 million euros to supply arms to the Ukraine, adding fuel to the fire.
https://www.bloomberg.com/.../eu-approves-450-million...
From then on, the Ukrainians felt that they did not need to reach an agreement. The resistance of the Azov militia in Mariupol even led to a boost of 500 million euros for weapons (March).
https://www.rferl.org/.../european-union.../31748462.html
“Western ministers who seek to collapse the Russian economy and make the Russian people suffer, or even call for the assassination of Putin, show (even if they have partially reversed the form of their words, but not the substance!) that our leaders are no better than those we hate—for sanctioning Russian athletes in the Para-Olympic Games or Russian artists has nothing to do with fighting Putin.”
https://lequotidien.lu/.../jean-asselborn-eliminer.../
A week after the assassination calls, the New York Times also allowed a sinister opinion piece “How do we deal with a Superpower led by a war criminal?” (NYT, Thomas Friedman, 10/04/22)
Let us remember that collective punishment is forbidden by the Geneva Conventions.
https://www.thepostil.com/the-military-situation-in-the.../
Elimination of advocates for peaceful resolution
“In the Ukraine, with the blessing of the Western countries, those who are in favor of a negotiation have been eliminated. This is the case of Denis Kireyev, one of the Ukrainian negotiators, assassinated on March 5 by the Ukrainian secret service (SBU) because he was too favorable to Russia and was considered a traitor.”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ukraine-reports-claim.../
The same fate befell Dmitry Demyanenko, former deputy head of the SBU’s main directorate for Kiev and its region, who was assassinated on March 10 because he was too favorable to an agreement with Russia—he was shot by the Mirotvorets (“Peacemaker”) militia.
https://www.republicworld.com/.../ex-ukraine-security...
[Note: news of his assassination is not covered on any MSM sites I searched]
Ramping up the dictatorship
The following is based on “One less traitor”: Zelensky oversees campaign of assassination, kidnapping and torture of political opposition, The Grayzone, by Max Blumenthal and Esha Krishnaswamy.
Since Russia launched its military operation inside Ukraine, the SBU has hunted down local officials that decided to accept humanitarian supplies from Russia or negotiated with Russian forces to arrange corridors for *civilian evacuations*.
On March 1, for example, Volodymyr Strok, the mayor of the eastern city of Kreminna in the Ukrainian-controlled side of Lugansk, was kidnapped by men in military uniform, according to his wife, and shot in the heart.
On March 3, pictures of Strok’s visibly tortured (and dead) body appeared. A day before his murder, Struk had reportedly urged his Ukrainian colleagues to negotiate with pro-Russian officials. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/.../Pro-Russian-mayor-city...
Anton Gerashchenko, founder of Mirotvorets and an advisor to the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, celebrated the mayor’s murder, declaring on his Telegram page “There is one less traitor in Ukraine. The mayor of Kreminna in Luhansk region, former deputy of Luhansk parliament was found killed.”
According to Geraschenko, Strok had been judged by the “court of the people’s tribunal.”
https://thegrayzone.com/.../traitor-zelensky.../
March 3 in the city of Dnipro, SBU officers accompanied by Azov ultra-nationalists raided the home of activists with the Livizja (Left) organization, which has organized against social spending cuts and right-wing media propaganda. While one activist said the Azov member “cut my hair off with a knife,” the state security agents proceeded to torture her husband, Alexander Matjuschenko, pressing a gun barrel to his head and forcing him to repeatedly belt out the nationalist salute, “Slava Ukraini!”
“Then they put bags over our heads, tied our hands with tape and took us to the SBU building in a car. There they continued to interrogate us and threatened to cut off our ears,” Matjuschenko’s wife told the leftist German publication Junge Welt.
The Azov members and SBU agents recorded the torture session and published images of Matjuschenko’s bloodied face online.
https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/423834.krieg-in-der-ukraine-stundenlange-prügel-und-demütigung.html
Dozens of other leftists have been jailed on similar charges in Dnipro.
https://maysuryan-livejournal-com.translate.goog/1655547...
In the following days, the SBU arrested broadcast journalist Yan Taksyur and charged him with treason; human rights activist Elena Berezhnaya; Elena Viacheslavova, a human rights advocate whose father, Mikhail, was burned to death during the May 2, 2014 ultra-nationalist mob attack (
) on anti-Maidan protesters outside the Odessa House of Trade Unions; independent journalist Yuri Tkachev, who was charged with treason, and an untold number of others; disabled rights activist Oleg Novikov, who was jailed for three years this April on the grounds that he supported “separatism.”
https://tass.com/russia/810083?utm_source=google.com...
Perhaps the most ghastly incident of repression took place when neo-Nazis backed by the Ukrainian government kidnapped Maxim Ryndovskiy, a professional MMA fighter, and brutally tortured him for the crime of training with Russian fighters at a gym in Chechnya. Ryndovskiy also happened to be Jewish.
https://twitter.com/politblogme/status/1500195518697328646
On March 7, the mayor of Gostomel, Yuri Prylipko, was found murdered. Prylipko had reportedly entered into negotiations with the Russian military to organize a *humanitarian corridor* for the evacuation of his city’s residents – a red line for Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who had long been in conflict with the mayor’s office.
https://sozh-info.translate.goog/mehr-gostomelya.../...
Next, on March 24, Gennady Matsegora, the mayor of Kupyansk in northeastern Ukraine, released a video appealing to President Volodymyr Zelensky and his administration for the release of his daughter, who had been held hostage by agents of the Ukrainian SBU intelligence agency.
https://thegrayzone.com/.../traitor-zelensky.../
In a March 19 executive order, Zelensky invoked martial law to ban 11 opposition parties. The outlawed parties consisted of the entire left-wing, socialist or anti-NATO spectrum in Ukraine.
https://www.president.gov.ua/documents/1532022-41765
As he wiped out his opposition, Zelensky ordered an unprecedented domestic propaganda initiative to nationalize all television news broadcasting and combine all channels into a single 24 hour channel called “United News” to “tell the truth about war.”
https://theweek.com/.../zelensky-nationalizes-tv-news-and...
Next, on April 12, Zelensky announced the arrest of his principal political rival, Viktor Medvedchuk, founder of the second largest party in Ukraine, the now-illegal Patriots for Life, by Ukraine’s SBU security services.
Three months later, Kiev jailed Medvedchuk and charged him with treason. Zelensky justified locking away his leading rival on the grounds that he needed to “fight against the danger of Russian aggression in the information arena.”
https://apnews.com/.../europe-ukraine-business-government...
Gennadiy Druzenko, the head of the Ukrainian military medical service, stated in an interview with Ukraine 24 that he “issued an order to castrate all Russian men because they were subhuman and worse than cockroaches.”
https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1505670818327674882
“In one especially cynical example of the strategy, Ukraine 24 – a TV channel where guests have called for the genocidal extermination of Russian children (
) – published a photo this April depicting a female corpse branded with a bloody swastika on her stomach. Ukraine 24 claimed that it found this woman in Gostumel, one of the regions in the Kiev Oblast that the Russians vacated on March 29.
Lesia Vasylenko, a Ukrainian member of parliament, and Oleksiy Arestovych, the top advisor to President Zelensky, published the photo of the defiled female corpse on social media. While Vasylenko left the photo online, Arestovych deleted it eight hours after posting when confronted with the fact that he had published a fake.
In fact, the image was pulled from footage originally recorded by Patrick Lancaster, a Donetsk-based US journalist who had filmed the corpse of a woman tortured and murdered by members of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion in a Mariupol school basement they had converted into a base.
At 2:31 in Lancaster’s video, the woman’s corpse can be seen clearly.
[Note: I have the image, but Facebook will ban me for posting it.]
Now let’s revisit the Rand Corporation’s piece from 2019
Imposing deeper trade and financial sanctions would also likely degrade the Russian economy, especially if such sanctions are comprehensive and multilateral. Thus, their effectiveness will depend on the willingness of other countries to join in such a process. But sanctions come with costs and, depending on their severity, considerable risks.
Russia’s greatest vulnerability, in any competition with the United States, is its economy, which is comparatively small and highly dependent on energy exports.
Increasing Europe’s ability to import gas from suppliers other than Russia could economically extend Russia and buffer Europe against Russian energy coercion.
Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability.
Undermining Russia’s image abroad would focus on diminishing Russian standing and influence, thus undercutting regime claims of restoring Russia to its former glory. Further sanctions, the removal of Russia from non-UN international forums, and boycotting such events as the World Cup could be implemented by Western states and would damage Russian prestige. But the extent to which these steps would damage Russian domestic stability is uncertain.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html
And, as usual, even as I’m finishing off this piece, more news comes in that confirms US fingerprints all over the situation in Ukraine.
Quoting again from the Rand piece:
“Flip Transnistria and expel the Russian troops from the region would be a blow to Russian prestige, but it would also save Moscow money and quite possibly impose additional costs on the United States and its allies.”
Money isn’t an issue now apparently.
As of 24-25 April, a series of attacks have been carried out in Transnistria in Moldova, southwest of Ukraine’s border.
https://abcnews.go.com/.../blasts-hit-ministry...
It’s only a matter of time before Transnistria is invaded and an even more volatile situation arises. Why? Because Poland and Romania appear to ready to become involved at some level on another NATO invented pretext.
Conclusion
From the fall of the Soviet Union, US/NATO warmongers have salivated over Ukraine. They saw it as the perfect base for provocations to use against Russia. Despite it’s powderkeg fragility, that is, a society with extremely different views and politics, Ukraine withstood decades of destabilization projects and multi-billion dollar campaigns to nullify Russia’s input.
In 2014, the “regime changers” finally settled on violently installing an extremist, nationalist regime in the *full knowledge* that there would be civil war. An extremely one-sided civil war that basically consisted of allowing the dregs of humanity to marginalize, demonize and cruelly pummel fellow Ukrainians who saw themselves as Russian in the East of the country.
The warmongers had even written a piece in 2019 on the best possible way to destabilize and provoke Russia. Ukraine came out top. Along with NATO manouevres on Russia’s borders.
Throughout 2021 to February 2022, Zelensky had accumulated troops on Crimea’s and Donbas borders, NATO had carried out provocative manouevres, Eastern Ukrainians continued to be slain and the Minsk Agreements had been thrown in the trash. And in the days leading up to Russia actually moving in, the neo nazis and mercenaries increased attacks on Donbas a hundredfold. To provoke what we’re seeing today.
“There were other solutions”?
There WEREN’T.
Even Ukrainians within their own security set up were assassinated for attempting a peaceful resolution at the last minute.
And now we’re seeing the recommendations on economic warfare and demonization of Russia lain out in the Rand Corp piece being played out to the letter. Each letter being inked with the blood of Ukrainians. And Russians."
Outstanding compilation of events - appreciated!