OMNI

RUSSIA, UKRAINE ANTHOLOGY #15

March 27, 2022

https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2022/03/omni-russia-ukraine-anthology-15-march.html

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology

Omnicenter.org/donate/

CONTENTS

NATO AND wHY DOES uKRAINE mATTER?

Jordan Smith, “They Saw It Coming.”  The New Republic (April 2022).
      Quick Summary of NATO Formation and Expansion (Dick)

Diana Johnstone. “For Washington, War Never Ends.”    Consortium News (March 16, 2022).

Mary Elise Sarotte.  Not One Inch.  Apparently the definitive book on US, NATO,
       Ukraine, and Russia.

WWIII

Caitlin Johnstone.  Report on Steven Starr.  Call to World to Pay Attention to Nuclear
         WWIII.

Bryan Dyne Interviews Steven Starr on WWIII and Nuclear Winter.

Art Hobson.  Pondering Ukraine in Context of Nuclear War.

No Fly Zone: 2 Articles

    Zelensky Calls for No Fly Zone

    Ben Burgis.  No Fly Zone Will Start WWIII

Ukraine’s Wealth Part of the Conflict? but little discussed.

SANCTIONS Add to the Conflict and Hypocrisy.

War, Propaganda, and Hypocrisy:  4 Essays

    Wars are Misinformation and Delusion Machines

    Free Ourselves of Propaganda Tunnels.

    Ukrainian Nazis and Propaganda by Omission
    Lt. Gen. Fabio Mini, Interview on Hypocrisy in Wars the Ukraine/Russia War

Russian or CIA Lied in the Election, Biden’s Laptop

Youtube, US Hypocrisy

IMF Connection

Russia and China

Russia, Ukraine Anthology #14

TEXTS

OMNI: RUSSIA, UKRAINE ANTHOLOGY #15

NATO FORMATION AND EXPANSION

Jordan Michael Smith.  “They Saw It Coming.”  The New Republic (April 2022).  Smith provides a thumbnail history of NATO expansion and Western opposition. 
“Throughout the 1990s and early twenty-first century, critics…warned that U.S. decisions were provoking and humiliating a weakened but still powerful country.”

When the Clinton admin. wished to expand NATO, Charles Kupchan in The New York Times in 1994 warned Western leaders it would inflame Russian nationalism.

In 1995, distinguished diplomats warned in The New York Review of Books that “NATO expansion would be disastrous.”

George Kennan wrote in 1997 that expansion was “a historic error.”

In the 1990s Clinton ignored the warnings.  And in 1998 Senator Moynihan rebuked Senator Biden’s promotion of the addition of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic as full NATO members.

President W. Bush also disregarded the warnings.

At the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, the org. declared that “Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members, over Russia’s threats of retaliation.”  The historian James Goldgeier labeled that “hugely provocative.”

A few months later the Russian-Georgian War erupted.

But the Ukrainian “2014 revolution,” the coup overthrowing the elected pro-Russian president, and the Obama admin. support of  the “pro-Western, anti-Russian forces in Ukraine” was the final threat to Putin.

The result:  Biden v. Putin, a New Hot War and China and Russia
“increasingly cooperating.”

The historian Michael Mandelbaum observed that Putin had learned from this history that Russia had to reinforce its military, and not trust the USA.  –Dick
References cited:

Samuel Charap.  Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia.

James Goldgeier. The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO.

Vladislav Zubok.  Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union.

NATO

For Washington, war never ends.  Editor. Mronline.org ( 3-20-22).  

The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the rearmament of Germany confirmed that for the United States, the war in Europe was not entirely over. It still isn’t.   

West Germany joined NATO in 1955, which led to the formation of the rival Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. (Photo: Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

“For Washington, war never ends.”Consortium News by Diana Johnstone (March 16, 2022 )  |  – Posted Mar 19, 2022
History, Movements, StrategyRussia, Ukraine, United StatesNewswire   
It goes on and on. The “war to end war” of 1914-1918 led to the war of 1939-1945, known as World War II. And that one has never ended either, mainly because for Washington, it was the Good War, the war that made The American Century: why not the American Millenium?
THe conflict in Ukraine may be the spark that sets off what we already call World War III.  . . .
https://mronline.org/2022/03/19/for-washington-war-never-ends/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=for-washington-war-never-ends&mc_cid=4a73f31fd9&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e
The U.S. Seizure of Ukraine

The encirclement of Russia took a qualitative leap ahead with the 2014 seizure of Ukraine by the United States. Western media recounted this complex event as a popular uprising, but popular uprisings can be taken over by forces with their own aims, and this one was. The elected president Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown by violence a day after he had agreed to early elections in an accord with European leaders.

Billions of U.S. dollars and murderous shootings by extreme right militants enforced a regime change openly directed by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (“F___ the EU”) producing a leadership in Kiev largely selected in Washington, and eager to join NATO.

By the end of the year, the government of “democratic Ukraine” was largely in the hands of U.S.-approved foreigners. The new minister of finance was a U.S. citizen of Ukrainian origin, Natalia Jaresko, who had worked for the State Department before going into private business. The minister of economy was a Lithuanian, Aïvaras Arbomavitchous, a former basketball champion. The ministry of health was taken by a former Georgian minister of health and labor, Sandro Kvitachvili.

Later, disgraced former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili was called in to take charge of the troubled port of Odessa. And Vice President Joe Biden was directly involved in reshuffling the Kiev cabinet as his son, Hunter Biden, was granted a profitable position with the Ukrainian gas company Barisma.

The vehemently anti-Russian thrust of this regime change aroused resistance in the southeastern parts of the country, largely inhabited by ethnic Russians. Eight days after more than 40 protesters were burned alive in Odessa, the provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk moved to secede in resistance to the coup.

The U.S.-installed regime in Kiev then launched a war against the provinces that continued for eight year, killing thousands of civilians.

And a referendum then returned Crimea to Russia. The peaceful return of Crimea was obviously vital to preserve Russia’s main naval base at Sebastopol from threatened NATO takeover. And since the population of Crimea had never approved the peninsula’s transfer to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954, the return was accomplished by a democratic vote, without bloodshed. This was in stark contrast to the detachment of the province of Kosovo from Serbia, accomplished in 1999 by weeks of NATO bombing.

But to the United States and most of the West, what was a humanitarian action in Kosovo was an unforgivable aggression in Crimea.

The Oval Office Back Door to NATO

Russia kept warning that NATO enlargement must not encompass Ukraine. Western leaders vacillated between asserting Ukraine’s “right” to join whatever alliance it chose and saying it would not happen right away. It was always possible that Ukraine’s membership would be vetoed by a NATO member, perhaps France or even Germany.

But meanwhile, on Sept. 1, 2021, Ukraine was adopted by the White House as Washington’s special geo-strategic pet. NATO membership was reduced to a belated formality. A Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership issued by the White House announced that “Ukraine’s success is central to the global struggle between democracy and autocracy”–Washington’s current self-justifying ideological dualism, replacing the Free World versus Communism.

It went on to spell out a permanent casus belli against Russia:

In the 21^st century, nations cannot be allowed to redraw borders by force. Russia violated this ground rule in Ukraine. Sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances. The United States stands with Ukraine and will continue to work to hold Russia accountable for its aggression. America’s support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is unwavering.

The Statement also clearly described Kiev’s war against Donbass as a “Russian aggression.” And it made this uncompromising assertion: “The United States does not and will never recognize Russia’s purported annexation of Crimea…” ( my emphasis). This is followed by promises to strengthen Ukraine’s military capacities, clearly in view of recovery of Donbass and Crimea.

Since 2014, the United States and Britain have surreptitiously transformed Ukraine into a NATO auxiliary, psychologically and militarily turned against Russia. However this looks to us, to Russian leaders this looked increasingly like nothing other than a buildup for an all-out military assault on Russia, Operation Barbarossa all over again. Many of us who tried to “understand Putin” failed to foresee the Russian invasion for the simple reason that we did not believe it to be in the Russian interest. We still don’t. But they saw the conflict as inevitable and chose the moment.

Ambiguous Echoes

Putin explaining his reasons for going to war. (Photo: AP screenshot from YouTube)

Putin justified Russia’s February 2022 “operation” in Ukraine as necessary to stop genocide in Lugansk and Donetsk. This echoed the U.S.-promoted R2P, Responsibility to Protect doctrine, notably the U.S./NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, allegedly to prevent “genocide” in Kosovo. In reality, the situation, both legal and especially human, is vastly more dire in Donbass than it ever was in Kosovo. However, in the West, any attempt at comparison of Donbass with Kosovo is denounced as “false equivalence” or what-about-ism.

But the Kosovo war is much more than an analogy with the Russian invasion of Donbass: it is a cause.

Above all, the Kosovo war made it clear that NATO was no longer a defensive alliance. Rather it had become an offensive force, under U.S. command, that could authorize itself to bomb, invade or destroy any country it chose. The pretext could always be invented: a danger of genocide, a violation of human rights, a leader threatening to “kill his own people”. Any dramatic lie would do. With NATO spreading its tentacles, nobody was safe. Libya provided a second example.

Putin’s announced goal of “denazification” also might have been expected to ring a bell in the West. But if anything, it illustrates the fact that “Nazi” does not mean quite the same thing in East and West. In Western countries, Germany or the United States, “Nazi” has come to mean primarily anti-Semitic. Nazi racism applies to Jews, to Roma, perhaps to homosexuals.

But for the Ukrainian Nazis, racism applies to Russians. The racism of the Azov Battalion, which has been incorporated into Ukrainian security forces, armed and trained by the Americans and the British, echoes that of the Nazis: the Russians are a mixed race, partly “Asiatic” due to the Medieval Mongol conquest, whereas the Ukrainians are pure white Europeans.

Some of these fanatics proclaim that their mission is to destroy Russia. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, the United States supported Islamic fanatics, in Kosovo they supported gangsters. Who cares what they think if they fight on our side against the Slavs?

[I have not yet read Not One Inch, but the reviews of it I have read and of her other books praise her scholarly excellence.  I am giving several contacts.   –D]

Mary Elise Sarotte.  Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of the Cold War Stalemate, by the prize-winning historian Mary Elise Sarotte, 
The United States and the NATO Non-extension Assurances …

https://direct.mit.edu › isec › article › The-United-States-a…

Jan 1, 2021 — See Mary Elise Sarotte, “Not One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl, Genscher, Gorbachev, and the Origin of Russian Resentment toward NATO …

The Historical Dispute Behind Russia’s Threat to Invade Ukraine

https://www.newyorker.com › News › Vladimir Putin

Jan 25, 2022 — … is one focus of a new book by the historian Mary Elise Sarotte. … Looming most of all is the question of NATO: Putin considers the …

To grasp what’s going on at the Russia-Ukraine border … – NPR

https://www.npr.org › 2022/02/24 › to-grasp-whats-going…8 days ago — … the Ukraine crisis, NPR’s Leila Fadel talks to Mary Elise Sarotte, … get what Mikhail Gorbachev didn’t get, which was a veto over NATO …

Mary Elise Sarotte and Robert Zoellick — Not One Inch

https://www.belfercenter.org › event › mary-elise-sarott…

Nov 15, 2021 — With these words, Secretary of State James Baker proposed a hypothetical bargain to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin …

The End of the Cold War and the US Offer to Limit NATO …

https://russiamatters.org › analysis › deal-or-no-deal-en…

May 5, 2016 — Mary Elise Sarotte, “Not One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl, Genscher, Gorbachev, and the Origin of Russian Resentment toward NATO Enlargement …

Not One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl, Genscher …

https://academic.oup.com › article-abstract

by ME Sarotte · 2010 · Cited by 51 — … Genscher, Gorbachev, and the Origin of Russian Resentment toward NATO Enlargement in February 1990. Get access Arrow. Mary Elise Sarotte.

NUCLEAR WWIII

Caitlin Johnstone.    “The Huge Gap Between How Serious Nuclear War Is And How Seriously It’s Being Taken.”  Interview of Steven Starr.

Sometimes I’m not sure what presents a greater threat to humanity, nuclear war or the colossal stupidity that has made it possible.

Due to the skyrocketing risk of a world-ending confrontation between the United States and Russia, World Socialist Website is re-releasing a series of interviews it conducted in 2017 with experts on the subject of nuclear war. One of them is with a senior scientist at Physicians for Social Responsibility named Steven Starr, which WSWS has titled “Nuclear winter—the long-suppressed reality of nuclear war”.

Starr discusses the research which has shown that in addition to the unthinkable horrors of flattened cities and nuclear fallout we’ve all been told about, “a war fought with existing US and Russian nuclear arsenals is predicted to make agriculture impossible for a decade or longer, dooming most people to die from a nuclear famine.”

Starr says a false narrative has been spun that the science behind nuclear winter theory is weak, a narrative I’ve had parroted at me from time to time in my commentary on this subject. He says the science is in fact peer-reviewed and robust, and actually makes very conservative estimates of the environmental havoc that would be unleashed by black carbon soot thrown into the stratosphere by a large nuclear exchange. But this science has been actively suppressed and marginalized by a junk science smear campaign and the slashing of research funding.

“After the success of the smear campaign against nuclear winter, most people eventually accepted this narrative and funding for new research dried up,” Starr said. “This had a big impact on the public, who got the impression that the nuclear winter theory had been disproven. As a result, this issue is hardly ever talked about now in the mainstream media.”

“One of the reasons for this is that over the years, trillions of dollars have been spent on nuclear weapons,” Starr adds. “If the conclusions of the nuclear winter research—that nuclear war is suicide for all peoples and nations—had gained widespread acceptance and understanding, it is likely that the whole nuclear weapons industry would have been shut down.”

Indeed, when you’re talking about the movement of trillions of dollars (Obama committed $1 trillion to modernizing America’s nuclear arsenal for the explicit purpose of better confronting Russia), you’re talking about the kind of money that any amount of underhanded gangster tactics would be employed to secure.

But I think another major part of it is the much more basic fact that if people truly understood how dangerous nuclear war is for everyone on this planet, nobody would consent to the kinds of cold war games that the drivers of empire have been intending to play with these weapons.

If people truly understood that their life and the lives of everyone they love are being gambled like poker chips in nuclear brinkmanship maneuvers geared toward securing unipolar planetary hegemony for an undeclared empire loosely centralized around the United States, those few empire architects would soon find themselves on the losing end of a tooth-and-claw fight against the entire human species. The ability to win cold war power struggles is dependent on the mainstream public not thinking too hard about what nuclear war is and why it is being risked.

So I think we’re seeing a broad lack of awareness among the general public of just how close to the precipice we are for the same reason nuclear winter theory has been suppressed: because if everyone deeply understood how dangerous these unipolarist grand chessboard power plays are, and how they deliver no real benefit to ordinary people, they wouldn’t permit them to happen.

A responsible news media would be educating the public about things like nuclear winter, and how easy it would be for a nuclear war to be triggered by a malfunction, miscommunication, misunderstanding, or miscalculation in the chaos and confusion of soaring cold war escalations as nearly happened many times during the last cold war. A “news” media whose job is not to report the news but to manufacture consent for imperial agendas will do everything it can to prevent people from paying attention to those things.

This is why, if you really understand nuclear war and what it means and how close we are to its emergence, it feels so surreal and dissonant looking around at the things people are talking about today. How ungrounded in reality it all is, how unseriously people are taking this thing, how willing they are to consent to things like no-fly zones and other direct military action against Russia. It’s because people are prevented from seeing and understanding this reality. You can’t have the riff raff interfering in the mechanics of the imperial machine. Unipolar hegemony is too important to be left to democratic processes. Keep the local fauna confused and distracted while you roll the dice on nuclear armageddon with the hope of ruling the world.

These people are like mobsters, knowing they’ll probably die a violent death but willing to risk it all for a chance at living the high life. There’s not the slightest iota of wisdom guiding their actions. Just the primitive impulse to dominate and control. They’re living their lives and making their decisions essentially on autopilot, guided by unconscious impulses they themselves don’t understand.

In the aforementioned interview Starr also touches on the ease with which a nuclear war could be set off by a technical malfunction, and what the earliest moments of a nuclear war will likely look like:

If the US early warning systems detect a missile launch, the President can order a launch of retaliatory nuclear strike before incoming nuclear warheads take out communication systems and weapons. Of course, if this is a false warning of attack, then the “retaliatory” strike becomes a first-strike and a nuclear war has started.

 Moreover, if somebody has launched a nuclear strike against the silos in which your nuclear weapons are housed in, you don’t retaliate by targeting their empty silos. You target their cities. Russia only has about 230 cities with a population greater than 100,000 and the US has 312. So it’s not that hard to wipe out a couple hundred cities in an initial salvo.

Starr also discusses the insane belief that Russia will probably back down when threatened with the possibility of nuclear war, a line of thinking that’s becoming so common today that it’s almost its own genre of natsec punditry:

The strategists often say, “Oh, well, Russia will back down.” What if they don’t? And why would they back down on their own border? Any US/NATO-Russian direct military conflict will very likely lead to a full-scale nuclear war.

In another 2017 World Socialist Website interview, this one with Los Alamos Study Group secretary and executive director Greg Mello, we get some more insight into the reality of the nuclear threat:

To a first approximation, in a nuclear war between the US and Russia, everybody in the world would die. Some people in the southern hemisphere might survive, but probably not even them.

…

The imagination cannot encompass nuclear war. Nuclear war means nuclear winter. It means the collapse of very fragile electronic, financial, governmental, administrative systems that keep everyone alive. We’d be lucky to reboot in the early 19th century. And if enough weapons are detonated, the collapse of the Earth’s ozone layer would mean that every form of life that has eyes could be blinded. The combined effects of a US-Russian nuclear war would mean that pretty much every terrestrial mammal, and many plants, would become extinct. There would be a dramatic biological thinning.

The gulf between these expert analyses and what people are consuming in the news could not possibly be wider. People simply don’t understand what’s being done with their lives by powerful people who care only about imperial domination, and the powerful intend to keep it that way.

It doesn’t need to be like this. There’s no reason our planet needs to be dominated by any one single power structure, especially if doing so means risking complete annihilation. We should all be pushing for de-escalation, diplomacy and detente, and for the nations and peoples of this world to begin working together for the good of everyone.

“Nuclear winter—the long-suppressed reality of nuclear war.”  Verbatim interview of scientist and anti-nuclear activist Steven Starr by Bryan Dyne.  13 March 2022.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/14/nucl-m14.html  

Bryan Dyne

“I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” – attributed to Albert Einstein

In 2017, the World Socialist Web Site published a series of interviews with leading experts on the subject of nuclear war. They spoke on both the inherent dangers of such a conflict, even of a “limited” nuclear exchange, as well as the decades-long effort by the American military, media and political establishment, to conceal the true horror that such a war would bring.

Today we are republishing the first of these interviews, in which Steven Starr, a senior scientist at Physicians for Social Responsibility who maintains the website Nuclear Famine, spoke on the fallacy that any country could somehow “win” a nuclear war.

The threat of nuclear war is now more acute than at any time in history. The continuous eastward expansion of NATO following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 has culminated in the US-NATO provocation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has already had immense global repercussions.

Thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed in Ukraine and nearly 3 million people have been displaced. The Western media and sections of the political establishment recklessly demand that NATO impose a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine, in which NATO aircraft would attempt to shoot down their Russian counterparts. This would immediately provoke a direct confrontation between the world’s two largest nuclear-armed powers, with incalculable consequences.

Amid the war in Eastern Europe, the coronavirus pandemic continues unabated. According to estimates of excess deaths, between 18 and 20 million people have likely died directly or indirectly from COVID-19 during the past two years. A nuclear war would raise such a scale of death from the millions to the billions.

The pandemic—which amounts to a social crime of staggering dimensions—has proven once again the willingness of the capitalist ruling elites to sacrifice the lives of millions of people, as took place in World War I and World War II. The same ruling elites are entirely capable of starting a nuclear war, which could quickly snuff out all human life and potentially all life on Earth.

The fundamental conclusion that must be drawn from the present drive to World War III and the ongoing pandemic is that capitalism is a bankrupt social system which threatens the health and very existence of humanity. The international working class must overthrow world capitalism and build a new society upon socialist foundations, based on nuclear and military disarmament, social equality and scientific planning.

All workers who understand the present dangers and the need to build a revolutionary movement to stop the drive to war and stop the pandemic should make the decision to join and build the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) as the world party of socialist revolution.

* * * * *

Bryan Dyne: First, could you tell me something about your background and how you became so involved in exposing the full consequences of nuclear war?

Steven Starr: I’ve been fixated on nuclear war ever since experiencing the Cuban Missile Crisis in third grade. I remember the teachers huddled around a little black and white TV set and telling us to not look at the flash and to sit against the interior of the walls. All the duck-and-cover drills left an imprint on me.

Later on, I came across Carl Sagan’s book A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race which was published in 1990. In it, Sagan talks about the atmospheric research that was done in the 1980s that shows the climatic and environmental consequences that would be caused by a nuclear war. Sagan and four other NASA scientists looked at the data collected on the global dust storms on Mars and specifically were looking at the difference of the Martian surface temperature when there was a dust storm and when there wasn’t. Then they asked, “What could cause something similar on Earth?” The answers they came up with are volcanic eruptions or nuclear war.

A nuclear fireball lights up the sky (Photo: Federal government of the United States, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

This made me realize just how dangerous the nuclear arsenals of the US and Russia really were. Even with the simple atmospheric models of the 1980s, it was clear that the massive firestorms created by a nuclear war would produce enough smoke and black carbon soot to block the majority of sunlight from reaching the surface of Earth. The original nuclear winter research predicted that a war fought with the nuclear arsenals of the 1980s would create temperatures colder than those experienced at the height of the last Ice Age 18,000 years ago. This would leave the Earth virtually uninhabitable. The recent research found that the original studies actually underestimated the consequences of nuclear war. . . .  MORE    https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/14/nucl-m14.html

BD: You mention in one of your articles that the US is “sleepwalking towards nuclear war.” Is this sleepwalking or a deliberate policy?

SS: That’s a legitimate question. I agree with you. “Sleepwalking” was the most polite way I could say it.

To give an example, Foreign Affairs published an article in 2006 written by Keir Lieber and Daryl Press called “The Rise of Nuclear Primacy.” It was very disquieting, basically claiming that the weapon systems in the US had gotten to the point where it could undertake a first strike against Russia and Russia would lose any ability to retaliate. Nuclear primacy conveyed the idea that the US could “win” a nuclear war against Russia should the US attack first—except that Lieber and Press took no account of the environmental consequences of such a first strike. Robock and Toon tell us that the resulting nuclear famine from such a nuclear first strike would kill the inhabitants of the side that “won” the war.

Russia also fears that the US/NATO Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) that has been deployed at sea and on land surrounding Russia could be used as part of a US first-strike. This is because Russia considers BMD to have offensive capabilities, that it could be used as a “mop up” system to take out any surviving Russian missiles not destroyed in a nuclear first strike.

This has led to Russia targeting the US/NATO Ballistic Missile Defense sites that the US has set up in Eastern Europe, including the operational system in Romania and the one being built in Poland. Russia also sees a special threat from these facilities because they can also be used to launch nuclear-armed cruise missiles. This fact has been widely discussed on Russian mass media and the Russian people are demanding that Putin take some action against these sites.

BD: Given how dangerous nuclear war is, what do you think of the increasingly hysterical denunciations of Russia and the Russian government in the US media and by the Democrats and Republicans?

SS: It’s very disconcerting to see the leadership of both the Democrats and Republicans to come out with this type of thinking. These anti-Putin and anti-Russian stories keep coming up on thousands of different media sources simultaneously, including the New York Times and Washington Post, which are supposed to be the newspapers of record, and it acts like a smear campaign. Almost all such stories are based on no information or false information and they have created a narrative that is pushing us toward war with Russia. There are no two ways about it.

A war with China wouldn’t be any better. China happens to be a strategic partner of Russia. They also have 20-30 ICBMs that carry three-megaton warheads; each warhead could set 600 square miles on fire. China also has submarine-launched ballistic missiles that can be armed with nuclear warheads.

Yet there is no discussion of the existential threat of nuclear war in the US. This has to be the starting place for any discussion on nuclear weapons. If we have the best scientists in the world telling us that a nuclear war would wipe out most of the human race, that should be our primary concern. Why should these arsenals even be allowed to exist?

ART HOBSON: As the planet remains on high alert, does it make sense to risk global destruction to preserve Ukraine’s option to join NATO?

Pondering the effects of nuclear war by Art Hobson | March 15, 2022

https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2022/mar/15/opinion-art-hobson-as-the-planet-remains-on-high/

On Feb. 8, during a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an alarming answer to a reporter’s question: If Ukraine joined NATO, and if war erupts between Russia and Ukraine, then NATO will join with Ukraine against Russia. In this case, Russia would be unable to match NATO’s military might, and would need to resort to nuclear weapons.

As outlined in several recent columns, a certain segment of Russian culture, including Putin, is paranoid about attack from the West. It’s an obsession born of such terrifying experiences as invasions by Hitler and Napoleon.

If this all seems bizarre, you aren’t alone. Will we really risk the end of civilization so that Ukraine can retain the option to possibly, at some uncertain future date, join NATO?

It’s time for all of us to note a few realities:.

In 1979, the U.S. government published “The Effects of Nuclear War.” Among other things, it reported on the effects of a single one-megaton nuclear bomb dropped on the center of a typical city such as Detroit. There would be over one million immediate casualties, half of them fatalities, in this city of 4 million (in 1979). This excludes longer-term casualties due to radioactivity on the ground and in dust lofted into the mushroom cloud that later falls out downwind. Nothing significant will be left standing out to two miles (in all directions) from the central point on the ground. At five miles out, 50 percent of the people suffer casualties and most structures, such as the automobile plants, are destroyed or severely damaged. There is significant damage and casualties out to 10 miles from the center.

Starting about an hour after the blast, radioactive fallout begins in some areas, depending on wind speed, wind direction and rain. In these areas, and during at least the first week, fallout is fatal within a few hours of outdoor exposure. Nuclear radiation will remain dangerous out to 10 miles from the center for about 10 years, after which it will slowly decay to lower levels comparable to the natural radiation we all receive daily from our environment.

A one megaton nuclear fusion bomb or “hydrogen bomb” packs the energy of 60 fission bombs, or “atomic bombs,” of the type that destroyed the city of Hiroshima in 1945, killing 200,000 — 50 percent of the city’s population. Today’s nuclear weapons are somewhat smaller than one megaton. Russia, for example, has 2,565 nuclear weapons including 500 in the 0.5-0.8 megaton range and most of the remainder at 0.1 megaton (six Hiroshimas) or less. The U.S. has a similar arsenal.

For further perspective, consider a single U.S. Navy Trident submarine. It can carry 24 intercontinental ballistic missiles, each packing eight hydrogen bombs (“re-entry vehicles”) that can be directed to different locations. Each bomb releases 0.12 megatons of energy. Thus one Trident submarine can destroy 192 targets, each target receiving the equivalent of seven Hiroshima bombs.

The United States has 18 missile-launching submarines, of which 14 are Tridents. Generally, four are deployed underwater at any one time, although more would be deployed under high alert. They are essentially invulnerable.

Russia and the U.S. both have a “strategic triad” of nuclear-weapons vehicles: Land-based missiles, submarine-based missiles and bombers. Russia and presumably the U.S. have now put their triads on high-alert — a kind of hair trigger that is dangerous even if there is no war.

War between the U.S. and Russia could destroy much or all of what we are pleased to call “civilization.” Humankind is treading perilous territory. Right now, the greatest danger lies in the skies above the battlefield. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has appealed to NATO to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and strongly criticized NATO’s rejection of this request. A no-fly zone would bring NATO, and hence the United States, into battle with Russia.

Alarmingly, on Sunday, Russia began shelling an airbase in western Ukraine only 15 miles from Poland’s (and thus NATO’s) border. Although NATO supplies a steady flow of weapons to Ukraine, U.S. Security Advisor Jake Sullivan warned America would respond if Russia’s strikes traveled outside Ukraine and hit any NATO members, even accidentally.

There is one ray of sunshine. Zelensky recently told Germany’s Bild newspaper “We are ready to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine … and, of course, for the security of Russia.” This touches on what Russia has asked for all along but we have foolishly ruled a “non-starter”: a Ukrainian pledge of neutrality.

NO FLY ZONE

Zelenskyy calls for no-fly zone over Ukraine in emotional plea to U.S. Congress

MARCH 16, 2022 / 10:28 AM / CBS NEWS

https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/zelensky-congress-ukraine-no-fly-zone/

Washington — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a plea directly to members of Congress on Wednesday for the U.S. to help create a no-fly zone over Ukrainian skies and to provide more weapons to bolster Ukraine’s ability to combat Russia’s airpower as Moscow continues its bombardment of the country.

In a virtual address before both chambers of Congress, Zelenskyy invoked key events in U.S. history, including the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and September 11, 2001, terror attacks to urge members to provide his country with more assistance to beat back Russia’s aggression.

“Just like nobody else expected it, you could not stop it,” he said. “Our country experienced the same every day, right now at this moment, every night, for three weeks now.”

Russia, he continued, “has turned the Ukrainian sky into a source of death for thousands of people.”

Speaking through a translator for the first portion of his speech, Zelenskyy asked whether it is “too much to ask” for the U.S. to create a no-fly zone over his country and provide air defense systems such as the Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile systems. He also called for the U.S. to impose new packages of sanctions, including on all Russian lawmakers, “until the Russian war machine stops” and pushed lawmakers to pressure businesses in their districts who have continued operating in Russia to cease doing so.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addresses U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday, March 16, 2022.CBS NEWS

“‘l have a dream,’ these words are known to each of you today,” he said. “I have a need, a need to protect our sky. I need your help.”…Continued

NO FLY ZONE AND WWIII

A No-Fly Zone in Ukraine Would Start World War III. It’s the Worst Idea Possible.

BY BEN BURGIS

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/03/no-fly-zone-ukraine-russia-us-war

A growing chorus of voices is calling for Joe Biden to establish a no-fly zone — an action that would risk the future of human civilization.

I’m not much of an R.E.M. fan, but I’ve had “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” stuck in my head for days. A disturbing number of high-profile voices have been calling for President Joe Biden to establish a no-fly zone in Ukraine. To his credit, he’s steadfastly refused to do so. But these forces are only going to get louder as the Russian invasion drags on. My boiling-hot take is that — and hear me out on this — starting World War III would be a bad thing.

Biden’s State of the Union was interrupted by chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” A member of the US House of Representatives has proposed deporting all Russian students from the United States. A prominent United States senator has publicly urged the assassination of Russian president Vladimir Putin. The political atmosphere in the United States has quickly turned xenophobic, bloodthirsty, and dark.

While the United States has provided a great deal of military aid to Ukraine, direct action by the American government has so far been mostly restricted to economic sanctions. It’s worth noting that not all sanctions are the same. Putin’s government is waging a monstrous imperial war. While we should oppose any sanctions that add to the misery of working-class Russians, targeted sanctions against individual Russian oligarchs are a different issue — just as it would have been hard to object if other powers had responded to the invasion of Iraq with targeted sanctions on politically connected American billionaires.

But there’s a pervasive atmosphere of jingoistic fervor, a sense of urgency that the United States “do something.” On the level of civil society, this has expressed itself through absurdities like the International Cat Federation banning Russian-bred cats from competition and petty or not-so-petty cruelties ranging from calls in the mixed martial arts world to ban Russian fighters to the Oncology Network pulling out of Russia. I guess if you can’t punish Vladimir Putin, you can at least punish cancer patients who live in his country.

Most disturbing, though, has been the parade of calls for American military intervention. In most cases, this takes the form of calls for the United States to set up a no-fly zone in Ukraine. A sitting US congressman has made that call. So has a senator. Dan Hodges of the Mail on Sunday, the biggest-selling Sunday paper in the UK, has said that not establishing a no-fly zone would be “an act of appeasement no different to our appeasement of Hitler in 1938.”

Calls for a no-fly zone are calls for a war between the United States and Russia.

A few prominent figures have gone even further. Former world chess champion and fierce Putin critic Garry Kasparov breezily explained that World War III has “already” started, so direct NATO fighting in Ukraine would be fine. NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel publicly mused that it might be a good idea for “the US/NATO” to “destroy” Russian forces on the ground in Ukraine.

Given how much of the twentieth century was defined by collective terror about the likely consequences of a war between the United States and Russia, it’s remarkable how cavalier all these commentators and politicians have been about starting one now. And make no mistake: calls for a no-fly zone are calls for a war between the United States and Russia.

It could be argued that the Russian government would simply make a rational calculation and back off in the face of direct American military intervention. But the invasion of Ukraine was itself a wildly irrational act. And I wouldn’t trust the American government not to engage in potentially catastrophic future escalation if the Russian military directly involved itself in a war against American forces.

In a just released poll, 74 percent of American respondents said they would support a no-fly zone. I hope most of them don’t understand what that would actually mean.

“No-fly zone” is a combination of words that might not sound innately alarming. If Russian planes are participating in a horrific war of aggression, what’s wrong with prohibiting them from doing so?

As George Carlin liked to emphasize, euphemistic language is an enemy of both clarity and basic humanity. Let’s call things what they are. Calls for a “no-fly zone” are calls for the United States to shoot down Russian planes.

Take a beat to really think about how the phrase “the United States shooting down Russian planes” would have sounded during the decades of the Cold War. And then remember that the two nations’ gigantic nuclear stockpiles, enough to blow up the entire world multiple times over, haven’t gone anywhere.

Starting a war with Russia could indeed be the end of the world as we know it. As the world confronts that slim but real possibility, I don’t trust anyone who feels fine.

The Ukraine Economy adds to uS/nato v. russia conflict over ukraine

[The great natural resources and agricultural and industrial wealth of Ukraine might make it an inevitable source of conflict between East and West.  Following are the statistics from my friend Tami.  I have not yet found even a short essay on this subject.  Is this a war over natural resources?  –Dick] 

For those who ask “Why does Ukraine matter? “

How the nation of Ukraine ranks:

1st in Europe in proven recoverable reserves of uranium ores;

2nd place in Europe and 10th place in the world in terms of titanium ore reserves;

2nd place in the world in terms of explored reserves of manganese ores (2.3 billion tons, or 12% of the world’s reserves);

2nd largest iron ore reserves in the world (30 billion tons);

2nd place in Europe in terms of mercury ore reserves;

3rd place in Europe (13th place in the world) in shale gas reserves (22 trillion cubic meters)

4th in the world by the total value of natural resources;

7th place in the world in coal reserves (33.9 billion tons)

Ukraine is an agricultural country:

1st in Europe in terms of arable land area;

3rd place in the world by the area of black soil (25% of world’s volume);

1st place in the world in exports of sunflower and sunflower oil;

2nd place in the world in barley production and 4th place in barley exports;

3rd largest producer and 4th largest exporter of corn in the world;

4th largest producer of potatoes in the world;

5th largest rye producer in the world;

5th place in the world in bee production (75,000 tons);

8th place in the world in wheat exports;

9th place in the world in the production of chicken eggs;

16th place in the world in cheese exports.

Ukraine can meet the food needs of 600 million people.

Ukraine is an industrialized country:

1st in Europe in ammonia production;

2-е Europe’s and 4th largest natural gas pipeline system in the world (142.5 bln cubic meters of gas throughput capacity in the EU);

3rd largest in Europe and 8th largest in the world in terms of installed capacity of nuclear power plants;

3rd place in Europe and 11th in the world in terms of rail network length (21,700 km);

3rd place in the world (after the U.S. and France) in production of locators and locating equipment;

3rd largest iron exporter in the world

4th largest exporter of turbines for nuclear power plants in the world;

4th world’s largest manufacturer of rocket launchers;

4th place in the world in clay exports

4th place in the world in titanium exports

8th place in the world in exports of ores and concentrates;

9th place in the world in exports of defence industry products;

10th largest steel producer in the world (32.4 million tons).

SANCTIONS

Sanctions anyone? Imperialist contradiction or the unintended consequence of involuntary decolonization.  Editor.  Mronline.org (3-19-22).

In support of the white supremacist Ukrainian puppet government, many U.S. and European companies have been withdrawing from doing business in Russia.   

MEDIA

WAR, PROPAGANDA, AND MISINFORMATION

Homicidal drives: U.S. dreams of killing Putin
Editor.  Mronline.org (3-19-22). 

Wars disturb and delude. The Ukraine conflict is no exception. Misinformation is cantering through press accounts and media dispatches with feverish spread.   

War in Ukraine: Dispatch of Weapons and Propaganda.   Editor.  Mronline.org  (3-19-22).

Italian Lieutenant General Fabio Mini.  Originally published: United World by l’AntiDiplomatico (March 12, 2022 )  |  – Posted Mar 18, 2022

WarItaly, Russia, Ukraine, United StatesInterviewItalian Lieutenant General Fabio Mini

The following interview with the Italian Lieutenant General Fabio Mini, General of the Corps of the Italian Army and former Chief of Staff of NATO’s Southern Command, was first published by l’AntiDiplomatico.it. The original interview can be read here.

Translation was provided by l’AntiDiplomatico, with editing from United World International. Subheadings were set by UWI.

Italian Lieutenant General Fabio Mini concludes:  “Negotiate, stop being only focused only on one thought and on propaganda, help Ukraine to coming to her senses and provide Russia a chance to get out of the tunnel of the encirclement syndrome–not with plain talks but with concrete acts”.  This is the thought of Fabio Mini, Lieutenant General of Corps of the Italian Army, “And when the crisis is overcome, hoping to be still alive then, Italy and Europe will have to make a serious commitment to conquer that autonomy, dignity and strategic independence that guarantees European security regardless of the interests of others.”

It has been correctly written that generals are the most sensible voices in a landscape of one-sided propaganda, as they know well how to weigh words at times like these. As L’AntiDiplomatico, we had the honor of being able to interview one of the most authoritative of them.

l’AntiDiplomatico: From the Gulf of Tonkin to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq–and even going back a long way in history–you have brilliantly reconstructed in your book [?]“Why are we so hypocritical about war?” the forgeries that have determined the pretext for the outbreak of several wars. What is the hypocrisy and falsehood behind the ongoing conflict in Ukraine?

FM: The false claim is that the war began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In reality, this invasion is not even the final act of a war between Russia and Ukraine, a war that began in 2014 with the insurrection of the provinces of Donbass, which later declared independence. Since then, Ukrainian forces have battered the Russian-speaking population on the verge of the massacre and no one has said anything. For that population in revolt against the Ukrainian regime, the expression ‘war of liberation’ or self-determination, so dear to some international observers, was not even used.

It was sufficient for them to state that “Putin’s Russia” wanted to return to the tsarist empire–and the issue was settled. Hypocrisy is the attitude of pro-Ukrainian Western propaganda, which, recognizing that there is a war, pretends not to know who and what caused it. Instead, that propaganda is surprised that someone shoots, someone else dies and many are forced to flee. The hypocrisy even more serious than the propaganda is the conspiratorial silence of those who disregard the fact that since 2014, the United States and NATO have poured billions in aid almost entirely destined to arm Ukraine and thousands of war professionals. Extremist groups and neo-Nazis were trained and enriched.
“NATO’s deliberate goal was to turn Ukraine into an outpost against Russia”  MORE   https://mronline.org/2022/03/18/war-in-ukraine/ 

Looking for the casus belli to justify war in Ukraine – Il …

https://global.ilmanifesto.it › looking-for-the-casus-belli… 

Jan 24, 2022 — … belli,” let us remember – as NATO General Fabio Mini writes in his great and forgotten pamphlet “Why are we so hypocritical about war?

REPORTING OF UKRAINIAN NEW-NAZIS

JOHN MCEVOY.  Western Media Fall in Lockstep for Neo-Nazi Publicity Stunt in Ukraine.  FAIR, Extra! (Feb. 23, 2022). 

Media resolve the issue of the integration of neo–Nazis into the Ukrainian military by ignoring this inconvenient fact altogether.

When the corporate media push for war, one of their main weapons is propaganda by omission.

In the case of the recent crisis in Ukraine, Western journalists have omitted key context about the expansion of NATO since the end of the Cold War, as well as US support for the Maidan coup in 2014 (FAIR.org, 1/28/22).

A third and crucial case of propaganda by omission relates to the integration of neo-Nazis into the Ukrainian armed forces (FAIR.org, 3/7/14, 1/28/22). If the corporate media reported more critically about Western support for the neo-Nazi-infested Ukrainian security services, and how these forces function as a front-line proxy of US foreign policy, public support for war might be reduced and military budgets called into greater question.

As recent coverage demonstrates, one way of resolving this issue is by not mentioning the inconvenient matter of Ukrainian neo-Nazis altogether.

The Azov Battalion

The Azov Battalion’s Nazi-inspired logo can be seen in an MSNBC segment (2/14/22).

In 2014, the Azov Battalion was incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU) to assist with fighting against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.At the time, the militia’s association with neo-Nazism was well documented: The unit used the Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel symbol as its logo, while its soldiers sported Nazi insignia on their combat helmets. In 2010, the Azov Battalion’s founder declared that Ukraine should “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen.”The Azov Battalion is now an official regiment of the NGU, and operates under the authority of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs.

‘A granny with a gun’

Pointing out that people training the 79-year-old woman to use an assault weapon (London Times,  2/13/22) were members of a fascist force would have spoiled the heart-warming aspect of the image.

In mid-February 2022, as tensions mounted between the US and Russia over Ukraine, the Azov Battalion organized a military training course for Ukrainian civilians in the port city of Mariupol.

Images of Valentyna Konstantynovska, a 79-year-old Ukrainian learning to handle an AK-47, soon featured across the Western broadcast and print media.

The figure of a pensioner lining up to protect her homeland made for an emotive image, collapsing the conflict into a simple good versus evil binary, while adding weight to US and British intelligence assessments forecasting an immediate full-scale Russian invasion.

Such a narrative was not to be ruined by reference to the neo-Nazi group training her. Indeed, mention of the Azov Battalion was largely erased from mainstream coverage of the event.  The BBC (2/13/22), for instance, showed a clip of “civilians lining up for a few hours’ military training with the National Guard,” with International Correspondent Orla Guerin describing Konstantynovska endearingly as “a granny with a gun.” Though Azov Battalion insignia was visible in the report, Guerin made no reference to it, and the report ends perversely with an NGU combatant helping a child to load an ammunition magazine.
The BBC (2/13/22) depicts a young boy getting a lesson on how to load ammo—without mentioning that the training was sponsored by a far-right paramilitary.

The BBC (12/13/14) has not always been so reluctant to discuss the Azov Battalion’s neo-Nazism. In 2014, the broadcaster noted that its leader “considers Jews and other minorities ‘sub-human’ and calls for a white, Christian crusade against them,” while it “sports three Nazi symbols on its insignia.”

Both MSNBC (2/14/22) and ABC News (2/13/22) also reported from Mariupol, showing similar video footage of an Azov Battalion member teaching Konstantynovska to use a rifle. As with the BBC, no mention was made of the regiment’s far right association.

Sky News updated its initial report (2/13/22) to include mention of the “far right” trainers (2/14/22), while Euronews (2/13/22) made a rare mention of the Azov Battalion in its initial coverage.

RUSSIAN OR CIA LIES IN US ELECTION

The NYT now admits the Biden laptop – falsely called “Russian Disinformation” – is authentic.  Glenn Greenwald.  Mronline.org (3-20-22).

The media outlets which spread this lie from ex-CIA officials never retracted their pre-election falsehoods, ones used by Big Tech to censor reporting on the front-runner.   

Ukraine War Exposes US Hypocrisy, Double Standards …

https://www.youtube.com › watch 

Mar 1, 2022 — … the US has been called the “United States of Amnesia.” The same leaders who invaded Iraq and killed a million people, who are starv…

 The IMF CONNECTION WITH THE UKRAINE CRISIS

Prabhat Patnaik.  Mronline.org (3-8-22).

THE security concerns of Russia arising from Ukraine’s intentions of joining NATO have been widely discussed in the media. But the IMF’s link with Ukraine which is a parallel issue has scarcely received much attention.   

RUSSIA AND CHINA
Context to China: What do Chinese citizens say about Ukraine?

Editor.  Mronlline.org (3-20-22)

Chinese people and the Chinese government are two different things on this issue. Among Chinese people there’s been huge energetic support for Russia, there was even a movement among people to buy all the Russian products from online shops in China and everything sold out very quickly.   

END #15 RUSSIA/UKRAINE , NEWSLETTER/ANTHOLOGY—
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