Q: "I have been following the situation in Ukraine since 2014, but not too closely. I have been following very closely since the end of February 2022. Because of the latter, I think I know the general trends related to the development of SMO since it started. However, what I missed was the year before SMO, i.e., since let' say early 2021 .. "
...
A: " ... Russia likely took all these build ups and provocations very seriously, and saw the writing on the wall that if it didn’t ‘cure’ the Ukrainian sickness once and for all, it would only escalate until Russia was totally surrounded by NATO aggression.

But guess what? The West only continued to escalate. In November (2021) the U.S. brought warships into the Black Sea.
It was a clear show of force and attempt to intimidate Russia. Given all the endless escalations from the Ukrainian side in Donbass, and the increasing rhetoric and ‘shows of force’ of NATO in the Black Sea and elsewhere, Russia began to see the writing on the wall and, as I said before, likely decided that the conflict had to be ended once and for all.

Of course Russia still refused to be the one to pull the trigger first, so after a force build up, they waited. It is then well known that Ukraine began massively shelling Donbass in January and February 2022, as recorded by the OSCE:

And as they say, the rest is history."

#nato #USA #us #britain #pentagon #war #provocation #warmongers #ukraine #ukrainian #history #Russia

In 2022, the Pentagon only managed to account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets. With this failure, the Pentagon has kept its spot as the only US government agency to have never passed a comprehensive audit. It also highlights the US war department's persistent lack of internal financial control, its poor budget estimations and rampant overspending.

A clear example of this is the F-35 program, which has gone over its original budget by $165 billion to build a plane tasked to perform many different tasks, none of which it does well.The Pentagon is slated to buy more than 2,400 F-35s for the Air Force, Marines, and Navy. The estimated lifetime cost for procuring and operating these planes – $1.7 trillion – would make it the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons project ever.

A 2021 Pentagon assessment of the F-35 found 800 unresolved defects in the plane.

For sixth year, Pentagon fails to account for over $3T


Let's remember Zumwalt, it's a total failure there too.
+ U.S. Air Force Secretary Warns Development of Urgently Needed ICBM ‘Struggling’: Program Collapse Possible


With such weapons, the US military is very lucky that the "evil" Russians haven't destroyed them yet.

#us #USA #american #military #warmongers #deepstate #pentagon #fail #weapons #nato #western #economy #money #finance

Chalk this up as one more massive war crime by the United States and NATO. They are accessories to murder. I have summarized the timeline presented in the Funke/Kujat article if you do not have time to read it in its entirety. I also am republishing their piece for your convenience. All of the death and destruction experienced in Ukraine and Russia could have been avoided.
...
March 15-19, 2022 — Only a month after the outbreak of the war, Ukraine and Russia agreed on the broad outlines of a peace settlement. Ukraine promised not to join NATO and not to allow military bases of foreign powers on its territory, while Russia promised in return to recognize Ukraine’s territorial integrity and to withdraw all Russian occupation troops. Special arrangements were made for the Donbas and Crimea.”
...
April 5, 2022 — NATO was firm in its position that continuing the war is preferred to a cease-fire and negotiated settlement: “For some in NATO, it’s better for Ukrainians to keep fighting and dying than to achieve a peace that comes too soon or at too high a price for Kiev and the rest of Europe.”

#deepstate #neocons #western #warmongers #war #fail #ukrainian #vassalage #history

Some assholes say that the USSR would not have defeated the Nazis if not for lend-lease.
The Kiev regime is more than fully provided with lend-lease, so why doesn't it win?
#military #pentagon #USA #us #eu #europe #britain #germany and other american vassals #warmongers #vassalage #war in #ukraine #ukrainian #terrorism #american and #european #weapons and #money for #failstate

#failstate #ukraine is #money for #western #warmongers #blackrock #vanguard #deepstate #capitalism #imperialism #nato

The head of Lockheed-Martin is on the line:

"It makes no sense to keep Israel from a military operation. What is the point? In further developing our industrial complex, which should account for more than 2% of GDP. There are conflicts that need to be resolved with weapons - and we are ready to provide those weapons"

With regard to the war in Ukraine, a similar logic applies. And with regard to a future war in Taiwan, too.
#USA #us #warmongers #weapons for #war #capitalism #imperialism #Israel #ukraine

You have to remember that Western/European leaders risked a huge amount in convincing their public that supporting Ukraine was crucial. They told their public for months that they (the public) would have to endure heavy hardships and burdens in the form of not showering, not heating their house, suffering extremely high inflation, etc., all to “defeat Putin”. The public bought this because they were under the impression that Ukraine was winning. When you feel that victory is close, you will be able to bear such hardships because it feels worth it.

But as soon as victory no longer looks possible, your morale for bearing hardships will dwindle. European support to Ukraine is hinged on the European public believing that the war is winnable or that Ukraine is actively advancing and is “close to winning” in some way, shape, or form.

If Ukraine stopped attacking it would be construed as an admission of defeat, that they can no longer advance. Why would Europeans want to continue withstanding no heating, no showering, record high inflation and unemployment, etc., if there’s no further hope for victory?

So as you can see Ukraine is forced to continue sending waves of men to die just to appease their sponsors and make them believe that some form of progress is being made, all their hardships are not for naught.

#ukraine #ukrainian #vassalage #cannon-fodder for #western #warmongers #europe #nato #mindmanipulation

#USA #pentagon #warmongers #history

BlackRock and the sale of Ukraine to transnational capital

It should be noted here that there is nothing particularly new in the agreement with BlackRock; this agreement only continues and expands the sell-off of strategic sectors of the Ukrainian economy, which was started by the previous head of the Kiev regime, Petro #Poroshenko. The list of Ukrainian companies in which the Black Rock empire was interested includes such giants as Metinvest, DTEK (energy), PrJSC MHP (agriculture), Naftohaz, Ukrzaliznytsya, Ukravtodor, and Ukrenergo.
...
According to these data, in 2022, during the "acquaintance" with BlackRock, Vladimir #Zelensky 's personal fortune more than doubled: it increased from 650 million dollars to 1.5 billion dollars.

#lang_ru
Original: #lang_it
#USA #us #warmongers #blackrock #ukraine #economy #ukrainian #corruption #failstate

#USA #us #nato #pentagon #warmongers #ukraine #Russia

"According to declassified documents made public under the Freedom of Information Act, on the night of December 3, 1949, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission sprayed radioactive iodine-131 (12,000 Curies) and xenon-133 (20,000 Curies) over 500,000 acres of land, including the Washington State towns of Hanford, White Bluff and Richland as part of Project Green Run.

About two thousand square miles of land in Washington State was contaminated. The radioactive cloud spread throughout that state and went into Oregon. The purpose of this exercise was to practice what the military would do after a nuclear strike."



“Fallout from the nuclear tests—radioactive particles that were swept into the atmosphere and fell back down to the earth—found their way into crops and livestock, whose radioactivity humans took on when they consumed milk, meat and produce. Fallout takes many different chemical forms, one of which is iodine-131: an isotope, or version, of iodine that has the usual 53 protons but 78 neutrons instead of the standard 74. Inside the body, the thyroid gland will absorb iodine-131, which eventually decays to produce radiation that can cause thyroid cancer and other problems.”


“The Nuclear Arms Race was the direct result of America’s September 1945 plan to “blow up the Soviet Union”, formulated by the US War Department.
The Soviet Union tested its first nuclear bomb in 1949. Without the Manhattan Project and the War Department’s September 15, 1945 “World War III Blueprint”, the Arms Race would not have occurred.
The September 15, 1945 War Department set the stage for numerous plans to wage World War III against Russia and China:”



“The city leaders were very excited to have a nuclear test site on their doorstep. After all, the tourists showed unprecedented enthusiasm for what was happening in the desert. The first test, code-named Able, which was held Jan. 27, 1951, was celebrated with a musical parade attended by young girls dressed in costumes resembling a nuclear mushroom - says Fuhrer. - "Then a B-50 bomber dropped a nuclear bomb on the range whose power matched the power of both nuclear bombs the Americans dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.”

“Typically, over the next 12 years, tests were conducted every three weeks. Soon they became a real event. Tourists and locals drove to the desert, had picnics and watched the explosion from about 100 km away .”


To add:
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—
— https://blog.vegas.com/las-vegas-attractions/atomic-vegas-sin-city-and-the-bomb-59743/
—
—
—
—

The Pentagon wants to play with nuclear weapons again





#USA #us #american #nuclearbomb #atomicbomb #nuclear #experiments #weapons #history #lang_en #photo #pentagon #warmongers

In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Führer.

She told me that the “patriotic messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the German public.

Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. “Yes, especially them,” she said.

I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.

Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch and better connected.

Are we? Or do we live in a media society where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power?

The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but one of the top ten media companies is based in North America. The internet and social media — Google, Twitter, Facebook — are mostly American-owned and controlled.

In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.

The extent and scale of this carnage are largely unreported, and unrecognised; and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.

In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence.

“US foreign policy,” he said, is “best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.”

In accepting the Nobel prize for literature, Pinter said this: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage — that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the “hypnosis” he referred to was the “submissive void” described by Leni Riefenstahl.“

It’s the same,” he replied. “It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void.”

In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 9/11 the stock prices of the war industry soared. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business.

Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called “forever wars”: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.

Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Nato’s destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that didn’t happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9/11, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan.

Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban are — not that President Joe Biden’s theft of $7-billion of the country’s bank reserves is causing widespread suffering. Recently, National Public Radio in Washington devoted two hours to Afghanistan — and 30 seconds to its starving people.

At its summit in Madrid in June, Nato, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarises the European continent and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes ‘multi-domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitors’. In other words, nuclear war.

It says: “Nato’s enlargement has been a historic success.”

I read that in disbelief.

A measure of this “historic success” is the war in Ukraine, news of which is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, and omission. I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.

In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.

In 2014, the United States sponsored a government coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor who the Americans made clear was their man.

In recent years, American “defender” missiles have been installed in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic, almost certainly aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances all the way back to James Baker’s “promise” to Gorbachev in February 1990 that Nato would never expand beyond Germany.

Ukraine is the frontline. Nato has effectively reached the very borderland through which Hitler’s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23-million people dead in the Soviet Union.

Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals? On 24 February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless America armed and protected Ukraine. This was the final straw.

On the same day, Russia invaded — according to the Western media, an unprovoked act of congenital infamy. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing.

On 25 April, the US defence secretary, General Lloyd Austin, flew into Kyiv and confirmed that America’s aim was to destroy the Russian Federation — the word he used was “weaken”.

America had got the war it wanted, waged by an American bankrolled and armed proxy and expendable pawn.Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” — except one.

When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it?

According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14 000 people have been killed in the Kyiv regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.

Watch an ITV news report from May 2014, by the veteran reporter James Mates, who is shelled, along with civilians in the city of Mariupol, by Ukraine’s Azov (neo-Nazi) battalion.

In the same month, dozens of Russian-speaking people were burned alive or suffocated in a trade union building in Odessa besieged by fascist thugs, the followers of the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stephen Bandera. The New York Times called the thugs “nationalists.”

“The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,” said Andreiy Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battalion, “is to lead the white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

Since February, a campaign of self-appointed “news monitors” (mostly funded by the Americans and British with links to governments) have sought to maintain the absurdity that Ukraine’s neo-Nazis don’t exist.

Airbrushing, a term once associated with Stalin’s purges, has become a tool of mainstream journalism.In less than a decade, a “good” China has been airbrushed and a “bad” China has replaced it: from the world’s workshop to a budding new Satan.

Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and “think tanks,” such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labelled those spreading Chinese influence as “rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows” and called for these “pests” to be “eradicated.”

News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and Southeast Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point-blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a “noose.”

Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the “conflict” of “two narratives.” The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.

The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisers working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.

This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of World War I was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs. In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, CP Scott, confided to Prime Minister Lloyd George: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.”

The refusal to see people and events as those in other countries see them is a media virus in the West, as debilitating as Covid. It is as if we see the world through a one-way mirror, in which “we” are moral and benign and “they” are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.

The history that is a living presence in China and Russia is rarely explained and rarely understood. Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler. Xi Jinping is Fu Man Chu. Epic achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely known. How perverse and squalid this is.

When will we allow ourselves to understand? Training journalists factory-style is not the answer. Neither is the wondrous digital tool, which is a means, not an end, like the one-finger typewriter and the linotype machine.

In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. “Defenestrated” is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.

The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking. When Assange and WikiLeaks could win readers and prizes for the Guardian, the New York Times and other self-important “papers of record,” he was celebrated.

When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the assassination of Assange’s character, he was made a public enemy. Then vice-president Biden called him a “hi-tech terrorist”. Hillary Clinton asked, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”

The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Assange — the UN Rapporteur on Torture called it “mobbing” — brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. We know who they are. I think of them as collaborators: as Vichy journalists.

When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, Globetrotter, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.

And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will filmmakers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?

Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.

Original: https://www.eurasiareview.com/22082023-john-pilger-silencing-the-lambs-how-propaganda-works-oped/
From google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3AmuRBvCCjQIoJ%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.eurasiareview.com%2F22082023-john-pilger-silencing-the-lambs-how-propaganda-works-oped%2F
#western #media #lie #propaganda #USA #warmongers #ukraine

Yesterday, both sides used all the resources - today there is a replenishment. Involuntarily, there was a brief respite. Sympathy does not come to visit on the battlefield, but seeing how much damage the enemy is taking in Harvest, we experienced feelings that are difficult to describe. We lacked infantry and equipment, but we had enough means of destruction to grind up a significant part of what the enemy threw at the capture of the village. Harvest resembled a meat grinder, which included living people, and minced meat came out. The number of destroyed and damaged equipment was not calculated in units. A very specific residue remained: We lost Urozhayne, and at the same time caused such damage that part of our consciousness refuses to understand the motives of the Ukrainian command. So only those who hate them more than ours can drive their own to slaughter.

#nato #USA #us #warmongers #europe #eu #biolabs #ukraine #terrorism #ukrainian #cannon-fodder #Russia #russian #economy

NATO is a club of forced-voluntary buyers of American-made weapons. This is what NATO's lauded standards are, which Ukraine must meet before it is deemed worthy of an invitation to NATO: to meet these standards, its weapons must be mostly American-made. This is also the reason for all these small and seemingly futile wars, from Serbia to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria: they were demonstrations of the power of American weapons, with the additional goal of using up arms and ammunition so that the Pentagon and the rest of NATO would be forced to re-purchase them. The geopolitical reasons for these military conflicts are merely explanations of intentions in hindsight. For example, between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. dropped more than 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos during 580,000 sorties, the equivalent of a B-52 bomber's full complement of ammunition every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. What was the geopolitical background? No one even remembers if there ever was one. But these bombs were coming to the end of their shelf life, and they had to be used up to justify a new defense order to keep the money flowing in the right direction.

#lang_ru https://aftershock.news/?q=node%2F1273311
#USA #us #nato #warmongers #money #pentagon #profit on #war #american #weapons #european #vassalage #capitalism #imperialism