Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks

The six month ‘anniversary’ of the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine

I normally just post the likes of the link below only on my Ukraine – what you’re not being told page. If they were published in a post that would mean an avalanche of post notifications which would soon, possibly, become annoying.

However, I am following a different approach with this link.

The British, especially, seem to be obsessed with anniversaries, particularly those which are related to military conflicts and wars. The 24th August 2022 is the six-month ‘anniversary’ of Russia’s Special Military Operation in the Ukraine so it seems to be an appropriate time to publish, more widely, a discussion which basically reviews the last six months, from its military, political and economic aspects. The discussion provides an intelligent analysis of the events of the last six months (together with reference to the events and decisions leading up to the Russian incursion into Ukraine) and posits thoughts on what will be the consequences of the war and the changes it has caused in the international situation.

The participants, from the start, all agree that Russia is winning (indeed, has already won) the war – but that doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the fighting. The ‘west’ wants the war to go on and on and the Ukrainians – for some bewildering reason – are still prepared to be the cannon fodder for western capitalist interests. That means the discussion will come over as ‘pro-Russian’ – although I believe the three involved are looking at the actual situation in an objective manner and are discussing what is happening and not what they would like to happen, as is the theme of ‘western’ propaganda.

This is not a brief discussion – as it’s just under two hours in length – but if people want to make comments and accept decisions and actions taken on their behalf by their governments then it is incumbent upon them to make those decisions based on as much information as possible. If proof was needed of the mendacious politicians we have accepted to be in ‘leadership’ and the shameful, supine media that exists in most of Europe then the events since February 24th have provided it in bucket loads.

If you still think (or have ever thought) that; Ukraine is an incorruptible bastion of democracy and old style liberalism; that Zelensky is a Churchillian demi-god; that more than a third of Ukrainian land hasn’t been privatised and now under the control of just three giant US companies; that workers rights in the Ukraine aren’t being systematically abolished; that Nazis aren’t (or weren’t before their destruction by the Russian army) a major player in Ukrainian life; that Ukraine won’t turn more towards state terrorism in growing desperation at its failures on the battlefield; that the Buffoon is anything more than just that; that the words ‘Truss’ and ‘leader’ on the same page let alone the same sentence isn’t an abuse of the English language; that ‘Sleepy Joe’ isn’t vying for the position of the most pathetic and ineffectual of US Presidents in a field with stiff competition; that the EU is not the organisation which, through its muddled and confused actions in relation to Russia, hasn’t created the bulk of the crisis that is about to hit the populations of the continent; that NATO isn’t a warmongering organisation, led by psychopathic cretins, hell-bent on bringing the world to nuclear annihilation; that the majority of the other world leaders aren’t more akin to spoilt kindergarten children than leaders with ideas, a programme and a strategy to achieve it – then don’t click on the link below. It will just be a waste of your time.

Glenn Diesen interviews Scott Ritter and Alexander Mercouris.

To understand the process the participants went through to come to these conclusions see previous links on Ukraine – what you’re not being told.

There’s been enough death (apart from the Nazis) and destruction on both sides and it’s now time for the ‘western’ powers to use their influence and instead of sending over more and more weapons – which don’t aid the Ukrainians but just means more of them will die – to push for talks that will lead to the end of hostilities. In such a situation they also have to moderate their demands – there is no way that Russia will give up what it has already seized as trust between Russia and the ‘west’ doesn’t really exist any more. Many stated very soon after hostilities took a step up in February that the ‘west’ looked ready to take this war ‘until the last Ukrainian’. That situation doesn’t look that far away now.

View of the world

Ukraine – what you’re not told

Ukrainian servicemen on patrol

View of the world

Ukraine – what you’re not told

Bob Dylan, Masters of War and the Ukraine Crisis

[The article below was first published on the Common Dreams website on 22nd February 2022. It’s reproduced here as part of the anti-war campaign that must develop to prevent matters getting out of hand. This in no way means support for Putin’s actions (although there is an understanding of the threat the Russians feel from expansive NATO) but also highlights the overwhelming hypocrisy and lies that are emanating from both the Americans and the British.]

Bob Dylan, Masters of War and the Ukraine Crisis

by Norman Solomon

Red-white-and-blue chauvinism is running wild. Yet there are real diplomatic alternatives to the collision course for war.

Fifty-nine years ago, Bob Dylan recorded “With God on Our Side.” You probably haven’t heard it on the radio for a very long time, if ever, but right now you could listen to it as his most evergreen of topical songs:

I’ve learned to hate the Russians
All through my whole life
If another war comes
It’s them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side

In recent days, media coverage of a possible summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin has taken on almost wistful qualities, as though the horsemen of the apocalypse are already out of the barn.

Fatalism is easy for the laptop warriors and blow-dried studio pundits who keep insisting on the need to get tough with “the Russians,” by which they mean the Russian government. Actual people who suffer and die in war easily become faraway abstractions. “And you never ask questions / When God’s on your side.”

During the last six decades, the religiosity of U.S. militarism has faded into a more generalized set of assumptions—shared, in the current crisis, across traditional political spectrums. Ignorance about NATO’s history feeds into the good vs. evil bromides that are so easy to ingest and internalize.

On Capitol Hill, it’s hard to find a single member of Congress willing to call NATO what it has long been: an alliance for war (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya) with virtually nothing to do with “defense” other than the defense of vast weapons sales and, at times, even fantasies of regime change in Russia.

The reverence and adulation gushing from the Capitol and corporate media (including NPR and PBS) toward NATO and its U.S. leadership are wonders of thinly veiled jingoism. About other societies, reviled ones, we would hear labels like “propaganda.” Here the supposed truisms are laundered and flat-ironed as common sense.

Glimmers of inconvenient truth have flickered only rarely in mainstream U.S. media outlets, while a bit more likely in Europe. “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized—NATO enlargement—there has been no American diplomacy at all,” Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Financial Times as this week began. “Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”

As Sachs noted, “Many insist that NATO enlargement is not the real issue for Putin and that he wants to recreate the Russian empire, pure and simple. Everything else, including NATO enlargement, they claim, is a mere distraction. This is utterly mistaken. Russia has adamantly opposed NATO expansion towards the east for 30 years, first under Boris Yeltsin and now Putin…. Neither the U.S. nor Russia wants the other’s military on their doorstep. Pledging no NATO enlargement is not appeasement. It does not cede Ukrainian territory. It does not undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.”

Whether or not they know much about such history, American media elites and members of Congress don’t seem to care about it. Red-white-and-blue chauvinism is running wild. Yet there are real diplomatic alternatives to the collision course for war.

Speaking Monday on Democracy Now!, Katrina vanden Heuvel—editorial director of The Nation and a longtime Russia expert—said that implementing the Minsk accords could be a path toward peace in Ukraine. Also, she pointed out, “there is talk now not just of the NATO issue, which is so key, but also a new security architecture in Europe.”

Desperately needed is a new European security framework, to demilitarize and defuse conflicts between Russia and U.S. allies. But the same approach that for three decades pushed to expand NATO to Russia’s borders is now gung-ho to keep upping the ante, no matter how much doing so increases the chances of a direct clash between the world’s two nuclear-weapons superpowers.

The last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union before it collapsed, Jack Matlock, wrote last week: “Since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.”

But excluding Russia from security structures, while encircling it with armed-to-the-teeth adversaries, was a clear goal of NATO’s expansion. Less obvious was the realized goal of turning Eastern European nations into customers for vast arms sales.

A gripping chapter in “The Spoils of War,” a new book by Andrew Cockburn, spells out the mega-corporate zeal behind the massive campaigns to expand NATO beginning in the 1990s. Huge Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin were downcast about the dissolution of the USSR and feared that military sales would keep slumping. But there were some potential big new markets on the horizon.

“One especially promising market was among the former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact,” Cockburn wrote. “Were they to join NATO, they would be natural customers for products such as the F-16 fighter that Lockheed had inherited from General Dynamics. There was one minor impediment: the [George H. W.] Bush administration had already promised Moscow that NATO would not move east, a pledge that was part of the settlement ending the Cold War.”

By the time legendary foreign-policy sage George F. Kennan issued his unequivocal warning in 1997—“expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era”—the expansion was already happening.

As Cockburn notes, “By 2014, the 12 new members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons.”

If you think those weapons transactions were about keeping up with the Russians, you’ve been trusting way too much U.S. corporate media. “As of late 2020,” Cockburn’s book explains, NATO’s collective military spending “had hit $1.03 trillion, or roughly 20 times Russia’s military budget.”

Let’s leave the last words here to Bob Dylan, from another song that isn’t on radio playlists. “Masters of War.”