Tag: Russia

Our Fingers Were Crossed!

The US Secretary of State is attempting to play revisionist talmudics in order to justify the NATO expansion that has both Russia and China on a war footing:

NATO has never promised not to admit new members, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed on Friday, labelling Russia’s demands of the bloc inadmissible. However, long-declassified Western documents suggest otherwise.

“NATO never promised not to admit new members,” the top American diplomat told journalists during Friday’s press briefing, as he commented on Moscow’s proposals to the bloc on security guarantees, ahead of upcoming NATO-Russia meetings next week.

“It could not and would not – the ‘open door policy’ was a core provision of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty that founded NATO,” Blinken added. He then pointed to the fact that both Mikhail Gorbachev – the Soviet leader who’d allegedly received the guarantees of non-expansion from the Western leaders – and the former US Secretary of State James Baker, who allegedly provided them, among others – denied anything like that ever happened.

“There was no promise that NATO wouldn’t expand,” Blinken concluded, adding that, instead, Moscow had itself recognized every European nation’s right to choose its own path in the field of security by joining the Istanbul Charter for European Security in 1999.

Such a position has apparently become commonplace in the bloc after Moscow came up with a set of proposals that it said would alleviate current tensions between Russia and the collective West. The proposals would see the Brussels-based organisation agree to curb its territorial growth as a form of a security guarantee for Russia.

After the proposals were presented to NATO in December 2021, its Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also stated that the bloc had never promised not to expand. Yet, a trove of documents, made public as early as in 2017, suggests that it did.

Russia Today

This is a remarkably stupid game the Fake Biden administration is playing. The neocons are attempting to utilize juvenile narrative-shaping tactics in a world of hardened diplomats and generals who couldn’t care less what a few lawyers assumed back in 1949. It appears the neocons are about to discover that their lawyerly verbal tactics don’t work on people who, unlike Americans and Europeans, are not high-trusting children.

It’s the usual bait-and-switch offered by a deceiver. Even if NATO never made any formal promises not to expand, the leaders of every major Western country at the time promised that NATO would not expand to the EAST, i.e. in the direction of Russia. Which NATO subsequently did after 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union that was the raison d’etre for its existence. If Vladimir Putin were to reassure the world that Russia will not attack NATO, just all of the countries that violated their past assurances to Russia, would anyone find that comforting?

The neocons would do very well to recall that the Russians have never promised not to nuke New York or Jerusalem. The Chinese have never promised not to genocide Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Neither the wisdom nor the rightness of an action relies upon the fact that one has never promised not to do it. The balance of power rests upon capabilities, not contracts. And Russia has promised that it will never permit NATO to reach its borders.

In addition to never promising not to invade Taiwan, China has repeatedly vowed to unify the island with the mainland. Would the US Secretary of State argue that China therefore has a right to do so? Because under his own logic, China has a stronger argument than the one he is presenting in favor of NATO expansion.

UPDATE: Yes, China knows exactly what’s happening in Kazakhstan and who is responsible.

China can offer support in the fields of economic cooperation and assistance, as well as counter-terrorism, to help neighboring Kazakhstan restore stability and realize effective reforms and long-term economic development, according to Chinese analysts, as Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and the government thanked Russia and China, as well as other leaders worldwide and heads of international organizations for support offered to the country amid domestic unrest. The situation in Kazakhstan has the clear characteristics of a “color revolution” and the involvement of foreign forces and the “Three Devils” (terrorism, religious extremism and separatism), said Chinese analysts.

China, Xi said, firmly opposes any force undermining Kazakhstan’s stability, threatening the country’s security, and sabotaging the peaceful lives of the Kazakh people. China also strongly rejects any attempt by external forces to provoke unrest and instigate “color revolution” in Kazakhstan, as well as any attempt to harm the friendship between China and Kazakhstan and disrupt the two countries’ cooperation. And, China is ready to provide necessary support to help Kazakhstan overcome the difficulties.

Global Times

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Color Revolution in Kazakhstan

It’s entirely obvious that the neocons are trying to open a second front against Russia by attempting to turn Kazakhstan into a second Ukraine:

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has explained how he believes the ongoing turmoil unfolded in his country, blaming the widespread street violence and looting on thousands of armed “gangsters and terrorists.”

Tokayev presented a timeline of the crisis, taking to Twitter with a large English-language thread late on Friday. Tokayev said he promptly addressed the initial demand of protesters, who were angered by a sharp hike in liquefied petroleum gas prices. He instructed the government “to regulate the price” on January 2 – effectively as soon as the protests took off.

“Regretfully, the protests in several regions of Kazakhstan and Almaty led to escalation of violence. Therefore, I decided to fire the government and imposed a nationwide curfew,” he added.

This move also failed to stop the unrest, as “the protests led to further escalation of violence all over the country,” Tokayev admitted. The president reiterated his earlier claims that the chaos was a result of “an armed act of aggression, well prepared and coordinated by perpetrators and terrorist groups trained outside the country.”

Tokayev claimed that as many as 20,000 “gangsters and terrorists” were involved in the violence, with the country’s largest city of Almaty enduring “at least six waves of attacks of terrorists.” The rioters were “very well trained, organized and commanded by the special center,” the president alleged, claiming that some of them were apparently foreigners “speaking non-Kazakh languages.”

However, it’s equally clear that Putin and the Russian generals have learned that it’s easier to intervene and put down the revolution than deal with another neocon puppet state on their borders. Because it looks like the neocons are going to get their war on the Eastern Front soon.

The United States and NATO on Friday roundly rejected Russian demands that the alliance not admit new members amid growing concerns that Russia may invade Ukraine, which aspires to join the alliance. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Russia would have no say over who should be allowed to join the bloc. And, they warned Russia of a “forceful” response to any further military intervention in Ukraine.

Their comments amounted to a complete dismissal of a key part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands for easing tensions with Ukraine.

However, don’t be surprised if they get a lot more of it than they are bargaining for. At this point, I would expect Russia, China, and Iran to harmonize their attack on their mutual enemy.

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A Final Warning

Russia clearly doesn’t anticipate the USA will heed its warnings about its intentions of taking military action if NATO does not stop attempting to expand right up to its borders.

Russia is doubtful that its demand to stop NATO’s eastward expansion will gain any traction, and it is highly likely the US-led bloc will simply ignore Moscow’s security concerns, the Russian Foreign Minister said on Monday.

Speaking to journalist Vladimir Solovyov, Sergey Lavrov revealed that Russia published proposals for security guarantees as a way to prevent Western nations from dismissing them, or leaking them selectively.

Experts in Moscow have noted that a contemporary American information tactic is to drop supposedly confidential negotiation points into the public sphere through “anonymous sources” feeding popular news outlets that are considered “on side.”

“We have made our initiative public, as explained by President Putin and the Foreign Ministry, because we are aware of the West’s ability to obfuscate any uncomfortable issues for them,” Lavrov explained. “We have serious doubts that the main thing in our proposals, namely the unconditional demand not to expand NATO to the east, will not be swept under the carpet.”

Lavrov’s comments come almost two weeks after Moscow publicly released two draft documents with a list of promises it wants to obtain from the US and NATO. As well as pledges that the bloc won’t expand eastwards, the proposed treaties also include the end of Western cooperation with post-Soviet countries, the removal of US nuclear weapons from Europe, and the withdrawal of NATO troops and missiles away from the Russian border.

It increasingly looks as if the neocons will finally get their revenge war with Russia. Given the confident way in which Russia and China are addressing these US-created crises, the outcome may not be anything resembling the one that the neocons expected.

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China Isn’t Fooled

The Chinese are paying very close attention to how the USA has created color revolutions around the world, and how it is laying the groundwork for military conflict with Russia over Ukraine:

Washington has painted its geopolitical competition between great powers with a thick layer of ideology. It has tried to portray what is happening on the Russian-Ukrainian border as a tragic story about “aggression” and “counter-aggression,” as well as making Ukraine a pawn on the European chessboard as it pushes eastward. Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, many countries, including Ukraine, have experienced “color revolutions” supported by the US. But most of these countries ended up in tragedy, as the US has neither the will nor the ability to provide them with substantial assistance. The US has been providing huge military aid to Ukraine over the years, weaponizing it from top to toe. However, it has explicitly excluded any possibility of fighting for Ukraine. Washington’s policy of creating crises is likely to turn Ukraine into a regional powder keg.

The US is unreliable. This is true when it comes to not only Ukraine, but also Russia. The essence of the issue is not that Washington is “seeking justice” for Ukraine or Europe, but that it is using NATO as a tool to cannibalize and squeeze Russia’s strategic space. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia had also tried to win acceptance from the US and the West through making political changes. But what it gained is the US’ abandonment of its promise that NATO would not expand eastward if a reunified Germany remained in the bloc. The US has led NATO to engage in five rounds of eastward expansion over the past more than two decades. Moscow sees Ukraine as a red line for security. But now even Ukraine is said to be absorbed into NATO. Russian President Vladmir Putin on December 23 accused NATO of cheating Russia at his annual press conference.

To secure its advantageous position by creating disputes, divisions, conflicts and confrontations is what Washington has always pursued in international affairs. Be it deploying missiles on Russia’s doorstep, conducting “close-in reconnaissance” on China’s coastal areas, or sending warships to sail through the Taiwan Straits, all these actions were taken by Washington to test its two biggest “rivals” and the US is waiting and looking for opportunities to drive a wedge. The US may not plan to start a war with Russia or China, but it hopes to maintain a certain degree of tension and chaos in the surrounding areas of the two opponents. As such, it has kept propagating the “China threat theory” and “Russia threat theory” and at the same time tries to rally allies to exert pressure together in an attempt to force Russia and China to retreat from their core interests.

What is happening in Eastern Europe today has taught the Chinese people a good lesson.

The most important thing to note here is that China is following Russia’s lead in determining that “the US is unreliable”. The significance of this seemingly mild statement is that it means neither major regional power believes there is any point in attempting to negotiate with the USA or attempt to reach mutual understandings because they both know that the USA will break any treaty that they sign with it.

Which really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, as the USA has been a historically treacherous organization from the very start, as it broke its promises to nearly every single counterparty it encountered, from the scores of American Indian tribes with which it signed treaties to the formerly sovereign states of the Confederacy. It’s really rather remarkable that so many Americans genuinely believe that it is Russia and China that are the aggressors today when it is the USA that currently has 173,000 troops in 750 bases occupying 159 countries around the world.

Just to put things in historical perspective, that is more troops than Imperial Rome possessed with its 28 legions during the period of the Principate from 31 BC to 284 AD, which includes the time of the empire’s greatest extent under Trajan in 117 AD.

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Why They Hide History

The reason the Prometheans always advocate maleducation and Zero History ignorance of the past is because it allows them to repeatedly make false predictions about the obvious consequences of their actions. What we’re seeing now, with sudden avalanche of false denials that the USA ever promised Russia that NATO would not expand to Eastern Europe, was not only anticipated, it was foreseen by the builders of the so-called neo-liberal rules-based world order.

In 1998 Thomas Friedman interviewed George Kennan, one of the architects of NATO, and was warned by Kennan that NATO expansion was certain to create a martial response by Russia:

”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. NATO expansion was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.”

”What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,” added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ”X,” defined America’s cold-war containment policy for 40 years. ”I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.

”And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we’ve just signed up to defend from Russia,” said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. ”It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then the NATO expanders will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.”

One only wonders what future historians will say. If we are lucky they will say that NATO expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic simply didn’t matter, because the vacuum it was supposed to fill had already been filled, only the Clinton team couldn’t see it. They will say that the forces of globalization integrating Europe, coupled with the new arms control agreements, proved to be so powerful that Russia, despite NATO expansion, moved ahead with democratization and Westernization, and was gradually drawn into a loosely unified Europe. If we are unlucky they will say, as Mr. Kennan predicts, that NATO expansion set up a situation in which NATO now has to either expand all the way to Russia’s border, triggering a new cold war, or stop expanding after these three new countries and create a new dividing line through Europe.

23 years later, it is clear that the forces of globalization were much weaker and less inevitable than its advocates preached, and that their lack of good fortune has triggered a new cold war that is already threatening to not only go hot, but go global, as the Promethean-occupied World Order finds itself being stared down by the new Nationalist Alliance of Russia, China, Iran, and India.

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Neocons Might Get Their War

Shades of Vietnam, as thousands of NATO “instructors” are reportedly being sent to Ukraine.

As many as 10,000 Western military instructors have been sent to Ukraine to train the Eastern European nation’s soldiers and support its fighting in the Donbass, Moscow has claimed, insisting that 4,000 are Americans. Speaking during a briefing on Friday, Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for Moscow’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, suggested that the presence of foreign military personnel is a sign that Kiev is preparing for a confrontational solution to the ongoing standoff with the two self-declared breakaway republics in the eastern Donbass region.

Meanwhile, if there was ever any doubt as to whether it is the neocons or the Russians who are lying, the Secretary General of NATO has helpfully provided definitive proof of the former.

NATO boss responds to Moscow on bloc’s expansion

NATO “has never promised not to expand,” the bloc’s Secretary General said on Thursday. The Norwegian insisted that the bloc’s founding treaty states that any European nation may join it.

Earlier on Thursday, Putin said during his annual year-end press conference that Moscow was “cheated” by NATO in a “vehement” and “blatant” way as it first swallowed former member states of the Eastern Bloc, which also used to be known as the Warsaw Pact, and then set its eyes on the former Soviet republics.

Stoltenberg denied such promises had ever been made and claimed that even the former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev – the man most commonly associated with the verbal agreement between NATO and Moscow – agreed NATO expansion had never been raised before the reunification of Germany. However, US government documents, declassified in 2017, appear to confirm that assurances were given.

Stoltenberg engaged in a nice little talmudics dance routine there, as the wording of the founding NATO treaty in 1949 says nothing whatsoever about the various assurances about its expansion that were given to the Russians in the 1990s and 2000s.

In early February 1990, U.S. leaders made the Soviets an offer. According to transcripts of meetings in Moscow on Feb. 9, then-Secretary of State James Baker suggested that in exchange for cooperation on Germany, U.S. could make “iron-clad guarantees” that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” Less than a week later, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to begin reunification talks. No formal deal was struck, but from all the evidence, the quid pro quo was clear: Gorbachev acceded to Germany’s western alignment and the U.S. would limit NATO’s expansion.

This is a dangerously stupid word game being played by global imperialists, given that the Russians can quite rightly observe that they never struck a formal deal not to invade Western Europe, and the Chinese can similarly point out that they have never struck a formal deal not to invade Taiwan, Japan, or South Korea.

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The Anti-Globalist Alliance

Knowingly or not, it appears Vladimir Putin and Xi Xinping have responded to Archbishop Vigano’s call for an anti-globalist alliance:

Despite having had tense relations in the past, Moscow and Beijing are now working together on an unprecedented number of issues, including trade, technology, and defense, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.

Speaking to journalists as part of his annual press conference, the Russian leader said that he and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping address each other as “friends.”

“We have very trusting relations and it helps us build good business ties as well,” Putin added, noting that Beijing is an “obvious leader” in the global economy and Asia, meaning that it is only natural that Russia develops relations with China in this field.

Putin stated that Russia is “China’s number one partner,” stressing that they work in a lot of areas, including the energy sector, space exploration, and on humanitarian issues. He said that this “brings us closer together.”

“We are cooperating in the field of security. The Chinese Army is equipped to a significant extent with the world’s most advanced weapons systems. We are even developing certain high-tech weapons together,” the Russian leader went on.

He said that there has been nothing like Russia and China’s current relations in history before, and remarked that this serves as a “stabilizing factor” on the world stage.

Putin’s remarks come after a video conference with Xi last week amid worsening relations between East and West. Yuri Ushakov, the Russian leader’s foreign policy advisor, said after the talks that Moscow and Beijing vowed to develop shared financial structures to enable the two nations to deepen their economic ties, without the interference of third countries.

This is good news, as the evil Empire That Never Ended is presently based in the United States. The fact that the two strongest free nations are joining forces to oppose it is a positive development, regardless what their motivations might be.

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No Heat for You

One step closer to conflict in Europe.

Deliveries of Russian natural gas to Germany through the Yamal-Europe pipeline have been completely halted, data from the country’s transport operator, Gascade, revealed on Tuesday morning. The suspension of the flow comes after a weekend in which the volume being sent through the network dropped significantly, just as demand for energy in both Russia and the rest of Europe reached its winter peak. On Monday, it was reported that state-owned giant Gazprom, the system’s operator in Russia and Belarus, had booked no capacity at all for transiting natural gas on Tuesday.

The Yamal-Europe transnational gas pipeline runs from northwest Siberia to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder in eastern Germany via Belarus and Poland. Last year, around one-fifth of all natural gas sent to Western Europe went via Belarus. Energy supplies through the system vary based on consumption, including within Russia, which Gazprom prioritizes over sending fuel abroad. Temperatures have plummeted in Moscow and other large Russian cities this week.

Flows through the pipeline dropped to 6% of capacity on Saturday and 5% on Sunday, before eventually falling to zero on Tuesday morning. Due to the winter cold and the restricted supply, European energy prices have soared.

Officials in the West have accused Moscow of playing politics with the supply of gas to the rest of Europe, allegedly with the aim of forcing the EU to approve the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is yet to be certified, but is ready to operate. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied these allegations, with Gazprom noting that it continues to fulfill its contracts.

The best case scenario is that this is just pressure to force the German authorities to sign off on Nord Stream 2.

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Remember the Maine!

And the Gulf of Tonkin. And the Lusitania. And Pearl Harbor. And the Kuwaiti incubators. And the Twin Towers. And every other US false flag or prearranged incident that was used to justify more US military action around the globe, before you overreact to another one that will lead to making the military error that is proverbial for stupidity: invading Russia in winter.

US private military companies (PMCs) are preparing a provocation using chemical weapons in troubled and tense eastern Ukraine, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed on Tuesday. Moscow believes there are more than 120 employees of American PMCs operating in the region, where they are working with Ukrainian special forces.

Containers with “unidentified chemical components” have been delivered to the cities of Avdeevka and Krasny Liman in Donbass in order to stage provocations, Shoigu said, at Tuesday’s meeting of the Defense Ministry board, attended by President Vladimir Putin.

The minister provided no further details or evidence of the false-flag chemical attacks that had purportedly been planned.

Tensions have been mounting in eastern Ukraine since last month, when several Western media outlets reported that Russia had been amassing troops near the border and claimed that Moscow was planning a large-scale military invasion into the country.

Since the chemical weapons false flag that was staged in Syria – the notorious White Helmets fraud – it’s unlikely that a similar one will work in Ukraine, especially when Russian intelligence is apparently already onto it. But this won’t be the last one, as it is clear that the globalists are never going to stop trying to spend American blood to accomplish their globalist goals while they still possess any influence in the USA.

“U.S. citizens should be aware of reports that Russia is planning for significant military action against Ukraine,” the State Department said in its travel advisory. “U.S. citizens choosing to travel to Ukraine should be aware that Russian military action anywhere in Ukraine would severely impact the U.S. Embassy’s ability to provide consular services, including assistance to U.S. citizens in departing Ukraine.”

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CIPS+SPFS

The alternative financial system linking the Chinese and Russian economies takes shape:

In 2015, approximately 90% of trade between Russia and China was settled in dollars, and by 2020, dollar-denominated trade between the two Eurasian giants had almost reduced by half, with only 46% of trade in dollars. Russia has also been leading the way in cutting the share of US dollars in its foreign reserves. The mechanisms for de-dollarizing China-Russia trade are also used to end the use of the greenback with third parties – with advancements being seen in places such as Latin America, Turkey, Iran, India, etc. The US has been pumping out dollars to the entire world for decades, and at some point, the tide will change as the sea of dollars return home with increasingly diminished value.

Financial transactions
The SWIFT system for financial transactions between banks worldwide was previously the only system for international payments. This central role for SWIFT began to erode when the US used it as a political weapon. The Americans first expelled Iran and North Korea, and in 2014, Washington began threatening to expel Russia from the system as well. Over the past few weeks, the threat of using SWIFT as a weapon against Russia has intensified.

China has responded by creating CIPS and Russia developed SPFS, both being alternatives to SWIFT. Even several other European countries have banded together with an alternative to SWIFT to curb Washington’s extra-territorial jurisdiction and thus continue trading with Iran. A new China-Russia financial architecture should integrate CIPS and SPFS, and make them more available to third parties. If the US expels Russia, then the decoupling from SWIFT would intensify further.

Development banks
The US-led IMF, World Bank and Asian Development Bank are renowned instruments of US economic statecraft. The launch of the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in 2015 became a watershed moment in the global financial architecture, as all the major allies of the US (except Japan) signed up in defiance of American warnings. The New Development Bank, formerly referred to as the BRICS Development Bank, was a further step towards decoupling from the US-led development banks. The Eurasian Development Bank and future SCO Development Bank are more nails in the coffin of US-controlled development banks.

Synergy effects
China and Russia have also developed their own rating agencies and replaced the dominant position of Visa and Mastercard in their respective countries. This new financial architecture is complemented with an energy partnership and a technological partnership as neither China nor Russia wants to be reliant on American high-tech industries as they move into the fourth industrial revolution.

For those who live outside the USA, it will be wise to find a bank that is utilizing both systems, which will limit one’s exposure to either deplatforming or a collapse of the self-styled “rules-based order” that is, in fact, neither rules-based nor orderly.

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