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☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

To Rafah, or not to Rafah, that is the question

Par : AHH — 28 mars 2024 à 02:24

All eyes are on Rafah as Israel prepares to mount an invasion to expel Palestinians or decimate them. It is this pivotal battle that will either force Israel into a ceasefire or thrust the region into an all-out, multi-front war.

By Tawfik Chouman at The Cradle.

The Battle of Rafah: a short step to regional war

The temporary truce struck on 24 November between the Hamas resistance movement and the Israeli government could have paved the way toward successive truces and potentially a sustainable ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

But the opportunity was squandered by Tel Aviv, who viewed the continuation of its genocidal war as a means to reshape Gaza’s political and security landscape under the guise of ‘restoring deterrence’ and mitigating domestic fallout from Hamas’ 7 October Al-Aqsa Flood Operation.

Now, nearly six months since the commencement of what Israel calls a ‘war of survival and existence’ against Gaza, it has become clear that the occupation state’s military aggression cannot unseat Hamas from either the Strip or the broader Palestinian political arena.

The recent flurry of indirect Hamas–Israel negotiations held in Paris, Cairo, and Doha have revealed a stark political reality: Hamas is the primary Palestinian negotiating party where Gaza is concerned. This tacit acknowledgment by Tel Aviv marks the strategic failure of one of Israel’s dual objectives set forth last October, aimed at eradicating Hamas and its allied resistance factions in the Strip.

Bibi’s political interests v domestic backlash

This reality raises questions about the potential pathways available to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he struggles with immense international pressure to stop the carnage. Will he persist with the war on Gaza and risk global pariah status, or will he be compelled to pursue a politically costly settlement? The latter option, it should be noted, will not be an easy fix. It could potentially unleash a storm of domestic backlash within Israel, with various political factions eager to hold him accountable from multiple angles.

Since Netanyahu abandoned the truce in November, prominent Israeli political commentators and even former prime ministers have been surprisingly unanimous in their assessment. They argue that Netanyahu’s decision to prolong the war serves mainly his personal political interests, allowing him to project an illusion of victory while evading political, security, and judicial scrutiny.

Accordingly, Netanyahu’s stance remains firmly opposed to a war settlement. He has instead doubled down on the necessity of eliminating the military capabilities of Hamas and its allies, and is ostensibly pursuing an ‘absolute victory’ through total war.

The prime minister’s roadmap hinges on continuing the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. In this scenario, he envisions the Battle of Rafah as the decisive climax that will definitively render the already terminal ‘two-state solution’ obsolete and permanently sever any ties between Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

The Battle of Rafah thus emerges as a pivotal juncture, delineating two competing trajectories: one driven by regional and international efforts towards a negotiated settlement, and the other dictated solely by Netanyahu’s ambitions.

Regional ramifications and Egypt’s dilemma

This raises complex questions about whether Netanyahu can prolong the war and influence regional and international actors – to buy time, if you will – all while factoring in the delicate balance of power involving Egypt and the wider regional war against other members of the Axis of Resistance.

Indeed, the Battle of Rafah presents a multi-level challenge for Egypt, encompassing political, security, and popular dimensions. Should the Israeli army invade Rafah, it will have significant implications for Cairo’s relations with Tel Aviv, in addition to severely impacting Egypt’s domestic security landscape.

A recent poll by the Washington Institute for Near East Studies revealed that three-quarters of Egyptians view Hamas positively. This popular sentiment influences Egyptian policy regarding potential Israeli actions in Rafah.

On 10 March, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported warnings from Egyptian officials on the potential suspension of the Camp David Accords if Israel were to attack Rafah.

Diaa Rashwan, head of the Egyptian Information Service, emphasized the seriousness of Israel’s occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor – a buffer zone on the Sinai–Gaza border designated by the Camp David agreement – stating it poses a grave threat to Cairo–Tel Aviv relations.

Dealing with the potential mass influxes of Gazan civilians seeking refuge and Palestinian fighters crossing into Egyptian territory also poses significant logistical and security challenges. This scenario also raises questions about the Israeli army’s potential incursions into Egyptian territory and how the Egyptian military would respond.

Moreover, any intensification of pressure on Rafah or a full-scale Israeli invasion will lead to widespread regional ramifications, potentially including the unraveling of the Abraham Accords. The Axis of Resistance has made it clear that the elimination of Hamas is unacceptable and, if threatened, may trigger a regional war.

Complicating matters further is the lack of substantive US pressure on Israel to halt its actions in Gaza. While the Biden White House seeks a ‘credible operational plan,’ it has not unequivocally opposed an attack on Rafah. This ambivalence enables and even emboldens Netanyahu to continue his military operations.

Rafah could reshape the region 

Regardless of the outcome of the Battle of Rafah, both Israeli and US perspectives interpret it as a campaign directed against Hamas, which they view as an extension of Iranian influence in the region. This narrative aligns with what Thomas Friedman, writing for the New York Times, referred to as the new “Biden Doctrine,” which emphasizes confronting Iran and its allies in West Asia. This marks a significant shift in US strategy since 1979.

The convergence of US and Israeli interests casts suspicion on ongoing efforts to bring about a long-term ceasefire, with all eyes focused on the current round of talks in Doha. Amos Harel, writing for Haaretz, frames the discussions as a race toward either a negotiated ceasefire or a potentially expansive regional conflict involving multiple fronts.

Yemen’s Ansarallah movement, which last week expanded its naval operations into the Indian Ocean, has issued a stark warning against a Rafah invasion, threatening a sharp escalation in both sea and air operations, including the closure of the Bab al-Mandab Strait.

Similarly, the Lebanese front remains sensitive to developments in Rafah. Despite the northern front’s expansion since the onset of 2024, recent Israeli attacks targeting Baalbek, over 100 kilometers from the southern border, suggest Tel Aviv’s misguided willingness to escalate.

This possibility could spill over into reality if Israel invades Rafah, as the occupation army may resort to preemptive actions to mitigate perceived threats from Lebanese resistance forces.

Overall, the Battle of Rafah will likely reshape the regional conflict, adding new layers to existing pressure fronts. Importantly, it challenges the notion that Hamas stands alone, abandoned in Rafah, as various regional actors, including Iran and its allies, are closely watching and prepared to intervene.

☐ ☆ ✇ STRATPOL

Débats parlementaires sur le rétablissement de la peine de mort en Russie

Par : ActuStratpol — 27 mars 2024 à 08:38

peine mort

peine mortToutes les lois nécessaires sur le recours à la peine de mort en Russie ont déjà été adoptées, la question

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Julian Assange pourra faire appel de son extradition vers les États-Unis

Par : ActuStratpol — 27 mars 2024 à 08:37

assange appel

assange appelLa Haute Cour de Londres a autorisé le fondateur de WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, à faire appel de son extradition vers

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Euroclear autorisée à conserver une partie des revenus des avoirs russes gelés

Par : ActuStratpol — 27 mars 2024 à 08:35

avoirs russes

avoirs russesL’UE a décidé de retenir cinq milliards d’euros de revenus provenant des avoirs russes gelés pour financer les batailles juridiques

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☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

Guys, We’re a Terrorist Nation

Par : AHH — 26 mars 2024 à 21:32

“We have met the enemy and it is us”

☐ ☆ ✇ STRATPOL

Poutine voit une piste ukrainienne dans l’attentat du Crocus City Hall

Par : ActuStratpol — 26 mars 2024 à 08:51

poutine crocus

poutine crocusLes traces des commanditaires de l’attaque terroriste contre le Crocus City Hall à Moscou mènent à l’Ukraine. Le régime de

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Moscou accuse les États-Unis de mépriser le droit international en élargissant sans consultation les limites de leur plateau continental

Par : ActuStratpol — 26 mars 2024 à 08:45

washington plateau

washington plateauMoscou ne reconnaît pas l’expansion par Washington des limites extérieures de son plateau continental, a déclaré le ministère russe des

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☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

The Nuland – Budanov – Tajik – Crocus connection

Par : AHH — 26 mars 2024 à 00:13

The Russian population has handed to the Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment – whatever and wherever it takes.

By Pepe Escobar at Strategic Culture Foundation.

Let’s start with the possible chain of events that may have led to the Crocus terror attack. This is as explosive as it gets. Intel sources in Moscow discreetly confirm this is one of the FSB’s prime lines of investigation.

December 4, 2023. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Mark Milley, only 3 months after his retirement, tells CIA mouthpiece The Washington Post: “There should be no Russian who goes to sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the middle of the night (…) You gotta get back there and create a campaign behind the lines.”

January 4, 2024: In an interview with ABC News, “spy chief” Kyrylo Budanov lays down the road map: strikes “deeper and deeper” into Russia.

January 31: Victoria Nuland travels to Kiev and meets Budanov. Then, in a dodgy press conference at night in the middle of an empty street, she promises “nasty surprises” to Putin: code for asymmetric war.

February 22: Nuland shows up at a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) event and doubles down on the “nasty surprises” and asymmetric war. That may be interpreted as the definitive signal for Budanov to start deploying dirty ops.

February 25: The New York Times publishes a story about CIA cells in Ukraine: nothing that Russian intel does not already know.

Then, a lull until March 5 – when crucial shadow play may have been in effect. Privileged scenario: Nuland was a key dirty ops plotter alongside the CIA and the Ukrainian GUR (Budanov). Rival Deep State factions got hold of it and maneuvered to “terminate” her one way or another – because Russian intel would have inevitably connected the dots.

Yet Nuland, in fact, is not “retired” yet; she’s still presented as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and showed up recently in Rome for a G7-related meeting, although her new job, in theory, seems to be at Columbia University (a Hillary Clinton maneuver).

Meanwhile, the assets for a major “nasty surprise” are already in place, in the dark, and totally off radar. The op cannot be called off.

March 5: Little Blinken formally announces Nuland’s “retirement”.

March 7: At least one Tajik among the four-member terror commando visits the Crocus venue and has his photo taken.

March 7-8 at night: U.S. and British embassies simultaneously announce a possible terror attack on Moscow, telling their nationals to avoid “concerts” and gatherings within the next two days.

March 9: Massively popular Russian patriotic singer Shaman performs at Crocus. That may have been the carefully chosen occasion targeted for the “nasty surprise” – as it falls only a few days before the presidential elections, from March 15 to 17. But security at Crocus was massive, so the op is postponed.

March 22: The Crocus City Hall terror attack.

ISIS-K: the ultimate can of worms

The Budanov connection is betrayed by the modus operandi– similar to previous Ukraine intel terror attacks against Daria Dugina and Vladimir Tatarsky: close reconnaissance for days, even weeks; the hit; and then a dash for the border.

And that brings us to the Tajik connection.

There seem to be holes aplenty in the narrative concocted by the ragged bunch turned mass killers: following an Islamist preacher on Telegram; offered what was later established as a puny 500 thousand rubles (roughly $4,500) for the four of them to shoot random people in a concert hall; sent half of the funds via Telegram; directed to a weapons cache where they find AK-12s and hand grenades.

The videos show that they used the machine guns like pros; shots were accurate, short bursts or single fire; no panic whatsoever; effective use of hand grenades; fleeing the scene in a flash, just melting away, almost in time to catch the “window” that would take them across the border to Ukraine.

All that takes training. And that also applies to facing nasty counter-interrogation. Still, the FSB seems to have broken them all – quite literally.

A potential handler has surfaced, named Abdullo Buriyev. Turkish intel had earlier identified him as a handler for ISIS-K, or Wilayat Khorasan in Afghanistan. One of the members of the Crocus commando told the FSB their “acquaintance” Abdullo helped them to buy the car for the op.

And that leads us to the massive can of worms to end them all: ISIS-K.

The alleged emir of ISIS-K, since 2020, is an Afghan Tajik, Sanaullah Ghafari. He was not killed in Afghanistan in June 2023, as the Americans were spinning: he may be currently holed up in Balochistan in Pakistan.

Yet the real person of interest here is not Tajik Ghafari but Chechen Abdul Hakim al-Shishani, the former leader of the jihadi outfit Ajnad al-Kavkaz (“Soldiers of the Caucasus”), who was fighting against the government in Damascus in Idlib and then escaped to Ukraine because of a crackdown by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – in another one of those classic inter-jihadi squabbles.

Shishani was spotted on the border near Belgorod during the recent attack concocted by Ukrainian intel inside Russia. Call it another vector of the “nasty surprises”.

Shishani had been in Ukraine for over two years and has acquired citizenship. He is in fact the sterling connection between the nasty motley crue Idlib gangs in Syria and GUR in Kiev – as his Chechens worked closely with Jabhat al-Nusra, which was virtually indistinguishable from ISIS.

Shishani, fiercely anti-Assad, anti-Putin and anti-Kadyrov, is the classic “moderate rebel” advertised for years as a “freedom fighter” by the CIA and the Pentagon.

Some of the four hapless Tajiks seem to have followed ideological/religious indoctrination on the internet dispensed by Wilayat Khorasan, or ISIS-K, in a chat room called Rahnamo ba Khuroson.

The indoctrination game happened to be supervised by a Tajik, Salmon Khurosoni. He’s the guy who made the first move to recruit the commando. Khurosoni is arguably a messenger between ISIS-K and the CIA.

The problem is the ISIS-K modus operandi for any attack never features a fistful of dollars: the promise is Paradise via martyrdom. Yet in this case it seems it’s Khurosoni himself who has approved the 500 thousand ruble reward.

After handler Buriyev relayed the instructions, the commando sent the bayat – the ISIS pledge of allegiance – to Khurosoni. Ukraine may not have been their final destination. Another foreign intel connection – not identified by FSB sources – would have sent them to Turkey, and then Afghanistan.

That’s exactly where Khurosoni is to be found. Khurosoni may have been the ideological mastermind of Crocus. But, crucially, he’s not the client.

Oleh Tyahnybok, with McCain and Nuland

The Ukrainian love affair with terror gangs

Ukrainian intel, SBU and GUR, have been using the “Islamic” terror galaxy as they please since the first Chechnya war in the mid-1990s. Milley and Nuland of course knew it, as there were serious rifts in the past, for instance, between GUR and the CIA.

Following the symbiosis of any Ukrainian government post-1991 with assorted terror/jihadi outfits, Kiev post-Maidan turbo-charged these connections especially with Idlib gangs, as well as north Caucasus outfits, from the Chechen Shishani to ISIS in Syria and then ISIS-K. GUR routinely aims to recruit ISIS and ISIS-K denizens via online chat rooms. Exactly the modus operandi that led to Crocus.

One “Azan” association, founded in 2017 by Anvar Derkach, a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, actually facilitates terrorist life in Ukraine, Tatars from Crimea included – from lodging to juridical assistance.

The FSB investigation is establishing a trail: Crocus was planned by pros – and certainly not by a bunch of low-IQ Tajik dregs. Not by ISIS-K, but by GUR. A classic false flag, with the clueless Tajiks under the impression that they were working for ISIS-K.

The FSB investigation is also unveiling the standard modus operandi of online terror, everywhere. A recruiter focuses on a specific profile; adapts himself to the candidate, especially his – low – IQ; provides him with the minimum necessary for a job; then the candidate/executor become disposable.

Everyone in Russia remembers that during the first attack on the Crimea bridge, the driver of the kamikaze truck was blissfully unaware of what he was carrying,

As for ISIS, everyone seriously following West Asia knows that’s a gigantic diversionist scam, complete with the Americans transferring ISIS operatives from the Al-Tanf base to the eastern Euphrates, and then to Afghanistan after the Hegemon’s humiliating “withdrawal”. Project ISIS-K actually started in 2021, after it became pointless to use ISIS goons imported from Syria to block the relentless progress of the Taliban.

Ace Russian war correspondent Marat Khairullin has added another juicy morsel to this funky salad: he convincingly unveils the MI6 angle in the Crocus City Hall terror attack (in English here, in two parts, posted by “S”).

The FSB is right in the middle of the painstaking process of cracking most, if not all ISIS-K-CIA/MI6 connections. Once it’s all established, there will be hell to pay.

But that won’t be the end of the story. Countless terror networks are not controlled by Western intel – although they will work with Western intel via middlemen, usually Salafist “preachers” who deal with Saudi/Gulf intel agencies.

The case of the CIA flying “black” helicopters to extract jihadists from Syria and drop them in Afghanistan is more like an exception – in terms of direct contact – than the norm. So the FSB and the Kremlin will be very careful when it comes to directly accusing the CIA and MI6 of managing these networks.

But even with plausible deniability, the Crocus investigation seems to be leading exactly to where Moscow wants it: uncovering the crucial middleman. And everything seems to be pointing to Budanov and his goons.

Ramzan Kadyrov dropped an extra clue. He said the Crocus “curators” chose on purpose to instrumentalize elements of an ethnic minority – Tajiks – who barely speak Russian to open up new wounds in a multinational nation where dozens of ethnicities live side by side for centuries.

In the end, it didn’t work. The Russian population has handed to the Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment – whatever and wherever it takes.

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

Double Crossing of the Red Line

Par : AHH — 25 mars 2024 à 18:05

Moscow’s Terror Explosion – Macron’s NATO Troops to Ukraine

Peter Koenig
23 March 2024

Automatic gun-shooting by 5 men in black took place Friday evening 22 March in the Crocus City Concert Hall, attached to a shopping mall, at the outskirts of Moscow. The terror attack preceded a concert. The hall was therefore crowded with people, panicking for leaving it. The assault was followed by a massive explosion.

The official fatality as of 23 March stands at 133. Dozens of people were injured.

The Islamic State (IS) – a CIA creation – claimed credit for the attack.

However, the political end of this attack is more complex.
On March 7, 2024, the US Embassy in Russia warned Moscow that a terror attack may take place in Moscow within the next few weeks. No further details.

Is it one of the now fashionable “predictive planning” stunts?

On the same day, the same US Embassy in Moscow warned US citizens in Moscow not to visit shopping malls. How much did the US know?

Speculations abound. Was this an empty warning to destabilize Russia and Russian elections? Or was it one more provocation to pull Russia into a larger conflict?

On the day of the attack, John Kirby, spokesman for National Security at the White House said in a Press Conference that there were no indications that Ukraine had anything to do with the attack. In early March Washington just had some indications that a terror assault may hit Moscow.

“Some indications”? – Why then the warning on the same 7 March to US citizens in Moscow not to visit any shopping malls?

It could not be more obvious that a hidden agenda is being played by Washington – and, may be added, by NATO and Europe?

Whether the Islamic State, Al Qaeda or another CIA / MI6 terror creation – or even Kiev directly, was involved in this mass-killing is irrelevant, because whoever acted, did so on behalf of US / NATO and the collective West.

Admiral John Kirby, spokesman for National Security at the White House

It is no coincidence that French President Macron practically simultaneously sends officially 2,000 French NATO troops to Ukraine. “Officially”, because western / NATO military advisers, trainers and coaches for Kiev’s Nazi-military have been in Kiev for quite a while.

Polish Foreign Minister, Radoslaw Sikorski has called it an open secret that Western soldiers are in Ukraine. German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz said, “there are already some troops from big countries in Ukraine.” (See this)


This is clearly the crossing of President Putin’s Red Line. Mr. Macron knows it, those who mandate the crossing of the Red Line, like the WEF and those dark Deep State Cult forces behind the WEF, know it – and Moscow knows that they know it.

Is it a provocation to pull Moscow into a hot war?
And the Moscow Concert Hall assault being a doubling-up of the Red-Line crossing?

This happening in the Ides of March, and just after the confirmed landslide re-election of President Putin on 17 March 2024.

Ides of March, is the day in the ancient Roman calendar that falls approximately on Mid-March and is associated with misfortune and doom. The date is also known as the date on which Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC. Most US wars were initiated in March. Is it a symbolic cult ritual of the west?

It would perfectly fit into the Death Cult of the Great Reset (WEF) and the UN Agenda 2030, which are currently plaguing humanity – worldwide.

There are other non-coincidences. The 24 March 2024 is the 25th anniversary of the 1999 US-NATO assault on Yugoslavia (Ides of March) – currently being commemorated by a three-day Conference 22-24 March 2024, in Belgrade.

The destruction and dismembering of Yugoslavia were also planned by a long hand. After Josip Tito’s death in May 1980 (he served in several leadership positions of Yugoslavia from 1943 – 1980) – there were some lesser communist successors, who were vulnerable to western / NATO “pressures”, and let what was a solid Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) deteriorate, western-style.

In 1990 Slobodan Milošević, President of Serbia became de facto President of the SFR Yugoslavia attempting to hold the federation together – which in the ten years after President Tito’s departure was financially destabilized by the west. In the 1990s the SFR Yugoslavia was one of the first “cases” where the World Bank, IMF Washington Consensus was applied full-scale – indebting to destabilize, create internal unrest – and divide.

Mr. Milošević was captured, detained at the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) prison in The Hague. He was poisoned on March 11, 2006 in his prison cell – shortly before his scheduled appearance at the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Once divided with constant civil unrest, there was “justification” for western rescue, i.e., bombing Yugoslavia literally into bits and pieces – leaving what we have today, numerous so-called independent former Yugoslavian Federal States – being economically and with “sanctions” controlled by the west.

This is the strategy Washington wants to apply to the Russian Federation – destabilizing it, fracturing it, Regime Change, and then taking it over.

Imagine! – The world’s biggest riches in the world’s largest country, absorbed or subdued by the (still) wannabe US Empire – and its European vassals.

It looks like the west wants a hot war with Russia, come hell or high water. Yes, it would be hell for Europe – for the third time in just over 100 years, and three-times for the same purpose – taking control of Russia, WWI, WWII and now WWIII?

A war – possibly nuclear – of which nobody can predict the outcome. As President Putin repeatedly said – there will be no winners, just absolute destruction.

Under no circumstances will Russia allow a take-over by an arrogant, criminal west. With Russian military’s far-superiority over US and NATO forces, this will not happen.

In the current Middle-East scenario, western leaders are supporting and funding the Israeli-Zionists, literally destroying and mass-killing – wiping out – Palestine, depicting an arrogance blinded by the zest for unlimited might, possibly driving humanity into a bottomless abyss.

A cleansing of this genocidal western “superiority” may bring birth of a new civilization – an evolution to a more spiritual and less material humanity.

—-

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

☐ ☆ ✇ STRATPOL

Les quatre terroristes présumés du Crocus placés en détention provisoire

Par : ActuStratpol — 25 mars 2024 à 08:57

detention terroristes

detention terroristesLe 25 mars, à deux heures du matin, le tribunal de Basmanny de Moscou a placé en détention provisoire le

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L’armée russe a pris le contrôle de Krasnoié et avance vers Chasov Yar

Par : ActuStratpol — 25 mars 2024 à 08:54

chasov yar

chasov yarL’armée russe avance dans la région de Chasov Yar en RPD, a déclaré le chef de la région, Denis Pouchiline,

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L’attentat au Crocus City Hall près de Moscou a fait 137 morts, selon un bilan provisoire

Par : ActuStratpol — 25 mars 2024 à 08:50

crocus bilan

crocus bilanSur le site de l’attaque terroriste au Crocus City Hall, près de Moscou, les corps de 137 personnes, dont trois

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☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

Fallout from Moscow’s Crocus City Hall

Par : AHH — 25 mars 2024 à 08:10

Was the US behind the Moscow terror attack? The US and Ukraine will pay a high price. And that, I have been reliably informed, will extend to our Arab world.

By Abdel Bari Atwan at Rai Al Youm.

The Ukraine war could be poised to take a dramatic new turn

The terrorist operation in Moscow’s Crocus City Hall centre, which killed 143 people and injured hundreds of others, mostly concertgoers, was clearly carried out by a group that had been given serious military training. It could mark a paradigm shift in the Ukraine war presaging a strategic escalation and NATO’s official entry into the war.

Two weeks earlier, the US embassy in Moscow had warned its citizens that extremists were planning imminent attacks on large gatherings, including concerts, in the Russian capital, and warned them to stay away. That foreknowledge of the planning and execution of the operation raised suspicions about a degree of complicity. Washington’s denunciation of the atrocity, and swift disavowal of involvement, cannot be taken at face value.

When the initial warning was made, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova remarked that if the US had information about terrorist actions of such enormity, it should have shared it with Russia. That was the first official hint from Moscow of suspected American complicity.

Two years into the Ukraine war, the US has begun to sense defeat. Russia has made a succession of gains, taking control of the Donbas region and annexing it after holding referendums.

Large-scale US and NATO intervention — on the material, military, and intelligence fronts — failed to achieve any major success. Russia did not collapse under the weight of draconian sanctions. Its economy remains strong. The predicted colour revolution never happened, nor the anticipated military coup to depose Putin.

The opposite occurred, with the Russian president getting re-elected with an 87% majority on a 74% turnout.

The resort to terrorist attacks in Moscow could be a mark of the US’ frustration and a response aimed at expanding the scope of the war. But that would not only be a losing bet. It could bring the prospect of a catastrophic nuclear war closer.

Putin announced on Saturday night that the eleven people involved in the attack, including four direct participants, had been apprehended.
Meanwhile, the editor-in-chief of the Russia Today broadcast network, Margarita Simonyan, published video excerpts of the interrogation of one of the suspects. He identified himself as Feredoun Shamsedin, born in 1988, who arrived in Russia from Turkey on 4 March. He said he had been recruited via Telegram after following an extremist preacher, by someone who offered him 5 million roubles ($5,000) to conduct a mass killing in Moscow. Half of the money was transferred to him in advance.

I met Ms. Simonyan when I visited Moscow recently. She was constantly accompanied by a security detail because she had been subjected to death threats. She said she believed the Crocus atrocity was masterminded by the Ukrainian regime, rather than by ISIS as the US media were claiming. Putin’s subsequent assertion that the perpetrators were arrested while heading towards the Ukrainian border reinforced that accusation.

Russia’s fingers of blame pointed at Ukraine were a portent of fierce retaliation. It seems to have already begun. Former president and current deputy national security chief Dmitri Medvedev warned immediately after the massacre that Russia would hunt down any Ukrainian leaders proven to have been involved.

Reading between the lines, that may imply that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky could be top of the target list.

Two days before the Crocus attack, Putin threatened Ukraine with ”war’—abandoning the term special military operation’ — in response to French President Emanual Macron’s hint that NATO could send 90,000 fully equipped troops to Ukraine. Under Russian military doctrine, a declaration of war authorises the use of all available means, including nuclear weapons.

The US administration, disoriented and defeated in Ukraine and (so far) the Middle East, is fueling this escalation against Russia. It is the primary beneficiary of the Crocus attack. Not just to destabilise Russia by stoking ethnic tensions, but also to divert international attention away from its collusion in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the failure of its cynical attempt at the UN Security Council to sustain it under the guise of favouring (but not actually calling for) a cease-fire.

Putin won’t forgive this assault on his capital while it was celebrating the renewal of his presidential term. He is likely to make the US and Ukraine pay a high price. And that, I have been reliably informed, will extend to our Arab world.

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

VVP’s Announced Telephone Conversations in Last Two Days

Par : AHH — 24 mars 2024 à 17:08

Per Newton’s third law, Hell cometh to the demented Anglo-Zionist satanists in Greater Syria….


🇷🇺🇧🇾📞 Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko.

The President of the Republic of Belarus expressed his heartfelt condolences on the monstrous terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall, conveyed words of sympathy and support to the victims’ families and wishes for a speedy recovery to the injured, emphasising that the people of Belarus stand together with the people of Russia in this time of sorrow.

Alexander Lukashenko offered any assistance that may be needed, and expressed his confidence that the organisers and perpetrators of this heinous crime will face inevitable punishment.

For his part, Vladimir Putin informed his counterpart about the detention of the terrorists directly involved in the attack, as well as about the ongoing investigation.

🤝 Both leaders expressed mutual readiness to continue close cooperation in the fight against terrorism.


🇷🇺🇰🇿📞 Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

During his telephone conversation with Vladimir Putin, President of the Republic of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev expressed his deep condolences over numerous victims of the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall, stressing that he resolutely condemns this barbaric crime, and asked to convey words of sympathy and support to the victims’ families and wishes for a speedy recovery to the injured.

Both Leaders reaffirmed their intention to step up anti-terror cooperation.


🇷🇺🇺🇿📞 Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with President of the Republic of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev

Shavkat Mirziyoyev strongly condemned the heinous terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall, expressed his sincere condolences in connection with the tragedy, and asked to convey words of support to the victims’ families and wishes for a speedy recovery to the injured.

Both Sides reaffirmed their intention to continue close cooperation to counter terrorism.


🇷🇺🇹🇷📞 On March 23, President of Russia Vladimir Putin and President of Türkiye Recep Tayyip Erdogan held a telephone conversation.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered his deep and heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of the victims of the heinous terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall. He noted that the Republic of Türkiye stands with the people of Russia in this dark hour.

Vladimir Putin emphasised that Russia appreciates the support of the Turkish people and informed his Turkish counterpart on the status of the investigation into the terrorist attack.

During the conversation, the Turkish Leader stressed the urgent need for closer bilateral cooperation in the fight against the terrorist threat.

President Putin expressed gratitude for the condolences and supported the idea of stepping up cooperation in countering terrorism.


🇷🇺🇸🇾📞 On March 23, President of Russia Vladimir Putin and President of the Syrian Arab Republic Bashar al-Assad held a telephone conversation.

The President of Syria strongly condemned the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall, stressing that Syrian citizens share the pain and grief of the Russian people. He wished fortitude to the victims’ families and friends and a speedy recovery to the injured.

Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad discussed the ongoing crisis in the Middle East and the current situation in Syria, which is directly facing the terrorist threat.

🤝 The Leaders agreed to intensify contacts both in addressing counterterrorism and in all other areas of bilateral cooperation.

ADDENDUM:


🇹🇯 🇷🇺 President of the Republic of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon telephoned Vladimir Putin to express deep condolences and solidarity with the Russian people over the death of innocent civilians in the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall. The President of Tajikistan emphasised that there was no nor could not be any justification for that crime.

During the conversation, Vladimir Putin and Emomali Rahmon noted that the security services of Russia and Tajikistan were working closely together to counter terrorism and that they would build up their cooperation.

Tajikistan’s President Rahmon during phone conversation with Russia’s Putin condemns terrorist attack in Russia, says terrorists have neither nationality nor religion

During the conversation, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev strongly condemned the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall, which claimed the lives of over 100 innocent civilians, expressed deep condolences to their families and friends, and wished a speedy recovery to the injured.

Ilham Aliyev stressed that the people of Azerbaijan stand together with the Russian people on this day of national mourning and expressed confidence that the severe punishment of the criminals and those who masterminded that crime was unavoidable.

Vladimir Putin thanked the President of Azerbaijan for his words of support and expressed readiness to further strengthen practical interaction in the spirit of strategic partnership and alliance between Russia and Azerbaijan.

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

The Day the combined West committed Suicide

Par : AHH — 24 mars 2024 à 15:43

Twenty-five years ago, NATO started bombing Yugoslavia

On March 24, 1999, Western countries launched a series of devastating airstrikes on Belgrade, the capital of the sovereign nation of Yugoslavia, which had been already suffering from a political crisis. The US and its allies declared that the Noble Anvil military op was motivated by “humanitarian” reasons and targeted only the military – but in reality, NATO airstrikes killed at least 2,500 people, ruined national infrastructure and sped up the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
@geopolitics_live

Sergey Lavrov at the UNSC

🎙 Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations Sergey Lavrov’s address to the President of the Security Council (March 24, 1999)

💬 The Russian Federation is profoundly outraged at the use by the NATO of military force against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

☝ Those who are involved in this unilateral use of force against the sovereign Federal Republic of Yugoslavia — carried out in violation of the Charter of the United Nations and without the authorization of the Security Council — must realize the heavy responsibility they bear for subverting the Charter and other norms of international law and for attempting to establish in the world, de facto, the primacy of force and unilateral diktat.

The members of NATO are not entitled to decide the fate of other sovereign and independent States. They must not forget that they are not only members of their alliance, but also Members of the United Nations.

❌ Attempts to justify the NATO strikes with arguments about preventing a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo are completely untenable.

<…>

Attempts to apply a different standard to international law and to disregard its basic norms and principles create a dangerous precedent that could cause acute destabilization and chaos on the regional and global level.

The fact that NATO has opted to use force in Kosovo raises very serious questions about the sincerity of the repeated assurances that that alliance was not claiming the role of the world’s policeman and was prepared to cooperate in the interests of common European security.

❗ The Russian Federation vehemently demands the immediate cessation of this illegal military action against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Read in full

Nuremberg and the Crime of Wars of Aggression

“To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Primakov’s ‘U-Turn over Atlantic’

How Russian PM Primakov showed Moscow won’t be US satellite

On March 24, 1999, Yevgeny Primakov’s plane was en route to the US where the then-Russian prime minister was due to discuss an IMF loan to the tune of $5 billion for his country. But after then-US Vice President Al Gore told Primakov about NATO starting to bomb Yugoslavia, he decided to turn his plane around and go back to Moscow.

Despite Gore’s desperate attempts to persuade Primakov to backtrack on his decision and come to Washington, the Russian prime minister was undeterred.

“If I had accepted Gore’s terms, I would have been a real traitor,” Primakov later said.

Dr. Samuel Hoff, a professor of history and political science at Delaware State University, points to the significant expansion of NATO after the March 1999 incident.

“It is a fact that in 1999, NATO had 16 countries. And as we sit here in 2024, there are 32 members,” Hoff notes in an interview with Sputnik.

Peter Kuznick, a professor of history at the American University, tells Sputnik that Primakov’s U-turn over the Atlantic added significantly to tarnishing the already “strained” US-Russian relations at the time.

Referring to current “terrible” ties between Moscow and Washington, “the lack of trust” and a bilateral “polarization,” the professor says that one is “beginning to see signs of that certainly with Primakov’s mission in 1999.”

“So it certainly can be seen as an important turning point in terms of the deterioration of potential friendship between the US and Russia and creating a much more positive kind of multipolar world,” he concludes.

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NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia: A ‘culmination of negligence’ that opened Pandora’s box

Twenty-five years ago, NATO kicked off its 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. According to various sources, up to 2,500 people were killed and over 6,000 more injured during the bombing, which was not approved by the UN.

In an interview with Sputnik, Dr. Stevan Gajic, a Balkans expert and research associate at the Belgrade-based Institute of European Studies, says that the beginning of NATO’s “illegal attack” against Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999, was “a precedent that opened Pandora’s box.”

“It was a culmination of negligence of the international law that started since the end of the Cold War. Absolutely, [the] 1999 [NATO campaign] was a precedent. We can even say that the international law was in a way abolished at that moment and, of course, after that chaos was introduced into the system of international relations, Gacic points out.

The expert also didn’t rule out launching a “real investigation against NATO crimes” in Yugoslavia, which he says can only happen after the serious geopolitical changes following the collapse of NATO in one way or the other. He was echoed by Dr. Srdjan Sljukic, a professor of sociology at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, who tells Sputnik that “NATO aggression against Yugoslavia” reflected “two sorts of crimes,” such as “breaking the international law” and “bombing civilian objects and killing many civilians.”

Sljukic also warns that “as long as the key Western countries are ruled by the current liberal elites, NATO countries will not be put on fair trial because of their crimes in Yugoslavia and all over the world.”

Russia’s Foreign Ministry Statement in connection with the 25th anniversary of NATO aggression against Yugoslavia

History knows many events which, by virtue of their profound impact on the international order, marked a change of eras.

The NATO attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999 is certainly one such event. It went beyond being a tragic milestone in the life of the Serbian people with thousands of ruined lives and desecrated national dignity, and included a devastating blow to international law and European security foundations that had been laid after World War II. The United States and the EU got finally convinced in their own impunity and moral superiority which was bad news for those who prefer to choose their own path rather than become someone’s tool in their efforts to realise their own interests. The strategic balance of power collapsed, and a drawn-out crisis of international relations ensued which continues to worsen.

The US and its allies who assaulted a peaceful European country trampled on the UN Charter and the CSCE/OSCE principles, and desecrated the very notion of sovereignty. They have thus made it clear that they will stoop to anything, including radioactive contamination of vast swathes of land, to achieve global dominance. The widespread use of depleted uranium munitions by NATO has led to a multifold increase in cancer cases in that region, contaminated the environment where millions of people had lived for many years, and went down in history as a separate dark chapter on the list of NATO crimes.

During the 78 days of military aggression 14,000 bombs were dropped on Yugoslavia and over 2,000 missiles were fired, including cluster and demolition shells. Under the mocking front of a “humanitarian intervention,” mostly civilian targets were hit, including residential districts, hospitals, schools, bridges, mass transit vehicles, and refugee convoys. Thousands of civilians were killed, including 89 children, whom the Western coalition cynically referred to as “collateral damage.” No one has ever been held accountable for these atrocities, and international justice turned a deaf ear to the suffering of the Serbs and let NATO atrocities go unnoticed.

Not only the bombed-out buildings of the Yugoslav General Staff and Defence Ministry in central Belgrade which irritate the US officials to this day remind us of those terrible days. Serbia has many other unhealed wounds. A portion of the country’s ancestral territory, Kosovo and Metohija, has been forcibly taken away. The West has taken under its wing terrorists from the Kosovo Liberation Army, gave the province the status of a pseudo-state, and encourages the expulsion of the indigenous Serbian population.

This inevitably begs the question: was the “Kosovo project” worth the sacrifice and destruction that the alliance brought upon Yugoslavia? Has the self-proclaimed “republic” added stability or prosperity to the Balkan region?

There is no doubt that the United States’ concern for the rights of Kosovo Albanians is a fake claim from the get-go. It is nothing but a false pretext for the crackdown on Serbs.

The West’s goal was to turn the provisional self-governing bodies in Pristina into a tool for anti-Serb ethnic cleansing and a festering trouble spot to put pressure on Belgrade. At the end of the day, the Kosovo settlement is in a deadlock, and the situation on the ground threatens to escalate into an armed conflict.

This is what the Western “peacemaking” is all about. Its disastrous ramifications can now be seen in Ukraine, where a neo-Nazi regime has been nurtured on the basis of Washington and its supporters’ rejection of the principles of equality and mutual respect in international affairs, a regime that committed genocide against the Russian population and plunged the country into a military face-off.

We can hear the US and the EU increasingly call on Serbs to “turn the page” and forgive NATO for the invasion that took place 25 years ago. On top of that, they lay the bulk of the blame on the Serbs for the dramatic events during the breakup of Yugoslavia, including the 1999 bombing attacks. I’d be hard pressed to find proper words to describe the extent of Western shamelessness and lack of self-criticism.

The Alliance will never be able to wash off the shame of war crimes. No one believes its demagoguery about defending freedom and democracy anymore. The United States and the rest of NATO have no right whatsoever to talk about implementing an obscure new “rules-based order.” Their every effort to put together some kind of “global security architecture” is by definition malevolent and toxic, and aimed solely at perpetrating the neocolonial hegemony of the West.

Russia and its partners in Belgrade will continue to oppose the attempts to distort the history of the Yugoslav crisis and to shift the emphasis to demonising Serbs and justifying the 1999 aggression. The attempts to insult the memory of the innocent victims of NATO hangmen are unacceptable.

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

Turkey takes its Seat in Rules-based Terrorism Inc.

Par : AHH — 23 mars 2024 à 19:08

Turkey starts to drift into view, as NATO becomes officially activated in Europe.. Turkish elites, in spite of antipathy of its working peoples for post-modern western values, remain at the heart of NATO.

To woo Washington, Erdogan will sell out Palestine

After Ankara and Washington successfully swapped Sweden’s NATO accession for an F-16 fighter jet deal, Turkiye is focused on accelerating that rapprochement and is willing to sweep divisive issues – like genocide in Gaza – under the rug.

By Mohamad Hasan Sweidan at The Cradle.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan

On 7–8 March, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and Intelligence Chief Ibrahim Kalin visited Washington. The trip garnered attention as it marked Turkiye’s first official visit to the US following the conclusion of the ‘Sweden for F-16’ deal, whereby Ankara accepted Stockholm’s accession to NATO in exchange for US Congressional approval of the sale of 40 F-16s to Turkiye.

During the visit, the two Turkish officials met with their US counterparts Antony Blinken and William Burns, along with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and their respective foreign ministers chaired the seventh meeting of the US–Turkiye Strategic Mechanism.

“Naval Battle of Çesme at Night,” July 1770, Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774), by Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky (1848)

US–Turkish rapprochement

The thaw in US–Turkish relations has been palpable, as noted by Jeff Flake, the US Ambassador to Ankara, during a televised interview: “Especially in recent months, the two countries have developed shared areas. We observe improvements in defense, trade, and interpersonal relations.”

A closer examination of the joint statement released following the meeting illustrates the transition of Turkish–American relations into a more favorable and cooperative phase.

Established in 2021 and inaugurated on 4 April 2021 amidst escalating discord between Turkiye and the US, the strategic mechanism was conceived to address and improve the strained bilateral relations.

The joint statement issued by the Strategic Mechanism this month included several crucial points, each carrying significant implications:

Both parties addressed the ongoing war in Ukraine, condemning Russia’s actions as ‘unacceptable’ while emphasizing the importance of upholding Ukraine’s unity and sovereignty. However, it is worth noting that Ankara’s endorsement of the statement’s rhetoric aligns more closely with Kiev’s perspective, a deviation from Turkiye’s previous neutral stance. This marked shift will undermine President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s aspirations to mediate the conflict impartially.

“Destruction of the Turkish Fleet in the Bay of Chesme,” July 1770, Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774), by Jacob Philipp Hackert, commissioned by Catherine II in 1772

Playing to the audience

On Israel’s brutal military assault in Gaza, the statement merely referred to an “ongoing crisis” and “underlined the importance of finding a path towards ending the conflict and addressing the humanitarian crisis immediately.” This is a war that Erdogan has, on the record, framed as a “genocide” and called its aggressors in Tel Aviv “war criminals.”

While both parties expressed support for the “two-state solution” as an end goal to the war, the statement’s release coincided with a fiery speech by Erdogan in Istanbul in which he attacked Israel, calling it “the Nazis of our time.” The contrast between the two statements is a real-time reflection of how Turkiye addresses its different target audiences.

On the issue of combating terrorism, the statement endorses joint US–Turkish efforts against organizations like the PKK, ISIS, and Al-Qaeda across regions spanning from Africa to Central Asia. They also recommitted to counterterrorism consultations and discussions on the Syria file, including the adherence to UN Resolution 2254 and supporting a “Syrian-led, Syrian-owned political process.”

The two parties addressed a multitude of regional issues in West Asia and Africa in alignment with the broader US strategy outlined by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, which focuses on partnership-building, deterrence, diplomacy, regional integration, and “democracy promotion” in these geographies.

This includes cooperation in military industry, energy, and trade development, reflecting the existing $30 billion trade volume between Washington and Ankara.

Significantly, the parties discussed leveraging financing opportunities under the Global Infrastructure and Investment Partnership – a western initiative intended to rival China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This partnership includes the controversial India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), aimed at enhancing regional connectivity and economic development very much to the benefit of Israel.

New Turkish military action in Syria and Iraq?

As the municipal elections in Turkiye draw near – with Erdogan seeking to reclaim his Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) control of Istanbul and Ankara after notable previous losses – there’s a tangible resurgence in Turkish rhetoric advocating for military action in northern Syria and Iraq.

According to reports from the Turkish news agency T24, the Turkish armed forces are gearing up for an operation against the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) inside its neighboring states following local elections on 31 March.

After a 4 March cabinet meeting, Erdogan spoke of Turkiye’s readiness for a comprehensive operation against the Kurdish separatist groups and reiterated Ankara’s objective of establishing a security corridor spanning 30 to 40 kilometers along the Turkish–Syrian border.

Although the military rhetoric is undoubtedly influenced by Erdogan’s bid to attract nationalist voters in the upcoming elections, it is also connected to the recent Turkish–Iraqi diplomatic breakthrough following a high-level Turkish delegation’s visit to Baghdad.

The meeting in the Iraqi capital led to a security deal in which both countries committed to take action against the PKK. A joint statement read:

Both sides stressed that the PKK organization represents a security threat to both Turkiye and Iraq, and it is certain that the presence of the organization on Iraqi territory represents a violation of the Iraqi constitution … Turkiye welcomed the decision taken by the Iraqi National Security Council to list the PKK as a banned organization in Iraq. The two sides consulted on the measures that must be taken against the organization and its banned extensions [PKK’s alleged offshoots] that target Turkiye from within Iraq’s territory.

Fidan’s senior adviser, Nuh Yilmaz, praised the move, saying, “Turkiye and Iraq decided for the first time to fight jointly against PKK terrorism.” In a post on platform X, he added: “A decision that will mark a turning point! We will see results gradually!”


Strategic interests come first 

According to a well-informed Turkish source:

Turkey’s main purpose is very clear. The presence of the PKK in Metina and Gara [in northern Iraq] has the potential to seriously threaten the Iraq Development Road Project … We both would like to remove PKK from these two areas as well as secure the area for the construction of the project, reaching both objectives in one step.

Ankara and Baghdad seek to counter any threat to this development road project, a land corridor linking the port of Faw in Basra to the Turkish border and from there to Europe.

In this context, Erdogan is expected to visit Baghdad for the first time since 2012, where, some speculate, he will try to conclude a border control security agreement with the Iraqi government and seek to convince Baghdad to support future Turkish military operations against the PKK.

Despite Turkiye and Erdogan’s vocal criticism of Israeli atrocities in Gaza, recent interactions between Ankara and Washington indicate a pragmatic approach in their dealings, through which Turkiye hopes to be reinstated as an important US strategic partner.

While the Turkish president is stepping up anti-Zionist rhetoric on his domestic front, his administration maintains substantial economic ties with Israel, exporting various vital goods and services to the occupation state.

Although a Washington–Ankara rapprochement is still in its nascent stage, recent developments reveal the old allies are on a positive trajectory to repair bilateral relations after a period of strained diplomatic ties.

Erdogan’s foreign policy approach – as exemplified by his rhetorical Gaza stance and material support for Israel – makes clear Turkiye’s shift toward prioritizing strategic interests over ideological ones.

≈≈≈

“Chesma battle of 1770,” Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774), by Vladimir Kosov (2021)

Nuclear Threat, World War III and Turkey: Balance Policy or a Game?

Is Turkey’s rhetorical stance of “balancing” a genuine attempt at strategic equilibrium, or merely an endeavor to occupy multiple positions simultaneously?

By Erkin Öncan at Strategic Culture Foundation.

Alexander Stubb, the newly elected president of Finland, has made several noteworthy statements regarding the current geopolitical climate. He emphasized the escalating tensions amidst discussions of a World War III. Stubb, representing the center-right National Coalition Party, expressed openness to the possibility of allowing the transportation and storage of U.S. nuclear weapons in Finnish territory, branding them as a “guarantee of peace.” This stance remained consistent throughout his election campaign and was reiterated upon assuming office. Stubb underscored the necessity for Finland to possess a tangible nuclear deterrent force, citing NATO membership as pivotal in providing multiple layers of deterrence, including military, munitions, and nuclear deterrence from the USA. He further asserted that Finland’s alignment with NATO signifies a definitive step towards embracing Western values, a sentiment echoed by the inclusion of Turkey as an enthusiastic participant in the anticipated third major conflict.

However, Finland’s enthusiasm for NATO membership has not gone unnoticed by Russia, which shares a significant border with the country. In response to Finland and Sweden’s accession to NATO, Russian President Putin announced plans to bolster military presence along the Western borders to counteract perceived threats stemming from NATO’s eastward expansion. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov conveyed Moscow’s acknowledgment of the democratic choice made by the Finnish people but indicated pessimism regarding potential improvements in Russo-Finnish relations.

The most explicit reaction to Stubb’s nuclear policy came from Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mariya Zakharova. Addressing the issue during a weekly press conference at the World Youth Festival in Sochi, Zakharova outlined Russia’s stance on the placement of U.S. nuclear weapons in Northern Europe. She asserted that such deployments would be considered a direct threat and would consequently be designated as legitimate targets in the event of a direct military conflict between Russia and NATO. Zakharova underscored Russia’s awareness of the desires of the United States and its allies in this regard.

Izmir, Turkey: permanent headquarters of NATO Land Forces, known as Allied Land Command (LANDCOM).

The primary source of concern regarding nuclear capabilities is now widely recognized to stem from the potential for World War III to be nuclear in nature. When discussing nuclear power, the focus often turns to Russia, acknowledged as the “world’s largest nuclear power”.

Western media consistently highlights the perceived “nuclear threat emanating from the authoritarian Kremlin”. However, to truly address the concept of a “nuclear danger”, it is essential to consider the United States, which has transformed Europe into a depot for nuclear weapons, rather than Russia, which does not maintain nuclear forces beyond its borders, apart from the neighboring Belarus.

The United States and its NATO allies do not disclose precise figures regarding the stockpiles deployed in Europe. Nevertheless, estimates from the U.S.-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in 2021 suggest that around 100 U.S. nuclear weapons are stored across six bases in five NATO member countries.

These weapons are kept in inactive states within underground vaults at national air bases. Notably, the “permissive action link” (PAL) codes required to activate these weapons are under American control. In the event of their use, the weapons would be loaded onto warplanes designated by NATO.

This situation is intricately tied to the “modernization” efforts undertaken by nations operating F-35A, F-18 Super Hornet, or Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft.

U.S. nuclear weapons have been stationed in Europe since the mid-1950s, authorized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower for storage at NATO bases on the continent as a deterrent against the Soviet Union.

Stored in warehouses across Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and other countries, these weapons are maintained for potential deployment when required. Additionally, countries such as Czechia, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Norway, Poland, and Romania participate in SNOWCAT operations, facilitating NATO partner involvement in nuclear missions.

Meanwhile, Finland, under the leadership of Stubb, is positioning itself as a significant player in the ongoing ’nuclear preparedness’ measures originally aimed at countering the USSR and persisting in response to Russia.

This dynamic persists alongside ongoing military actions initiated by NATO against Russia. Notably, the commencement of Steadfast Defender-24, hailed as NATO’s largest military exercise since the Cold War, marks a significant development. This exercise aims to test the transfer of military forces to Eastern Europe and beyond, encompassing regions where Russia’s influence is perceived as encroaching.

This exercise constitutes a series of 15 maneuvers rather than a singular major military operation.

Steadfast Defender encompasses various other exercises conducted at national or regional levels, including Joint Warrior, Solid Approach, Arctic Dolphin, Northern Response, Immediate Response, Brilliant Jump, Movable Defender, Slovak Shield, Saber Strike, Trojan Trail-24, and Spring Storm.

İzmir: rebranded ancient Smyrna from pre-historic through the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, Ottoman, and Turk Periods.

Turkey actively participates in these exercises, with the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) playing a pivotal role in Brilliant Jump, Nordic Response, Saber Strike, and Immediate Response exercises.

Turkey’s involvement extends beyond military participation; it also hosts one of NATO’s most crucial commands. The permanent headquarters of NATO Land Forces, known as Allied Land Command (LANDCOM), is situated in Izmir.

Decisions regarding NATO’s land maneuvers are made at the command post within the General Vecihi Akın Barracks in Buca, Izmir. Given its historical significance, Izmir, where the first shot was fired against invaders a century ago, could potentially be remembered as the site where the decision to initiate the first shot of a world-engulfing war was made if a new global conflict were to erupt on Russia’s borders.

This prompts consideration of Turkey’s rhetorical stance of “balancing”. Is it a genuine attempt at strategic equilibrium, or merely an endeavor to occupy multiple positions simultaneously?

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

It’s War: The Real Meat Grinder Starts Now

Par : AHH — 23 mars 2024 à 14:40

“Rules-based Terrorism” Returns to Moskau. No more shadow play. It’s now in the open. No holds barred.

By Pepe Escobar at Strategic Culture Foundation.


Exhibit 1:
 Friday, March 22, 2024. It’s War. The Kremlin, via Peskov, finally admits it, on the record.

The money quote:

“Russia cannot allow the existence on its borders of a state that has a documented intention to use any methods to take Crimea away from it, not to mention the territory of new regions.”

Translation: the Hegemon-constructed Kiev mongrel is doomed, one way or another. The Kremlin signal: “We haven’t even started” starts now.

Exhibit 2: Friday afternoon, a few hours after Peskov. Confirmed by a serious European – not Russian – source. The first counter-signal.

Regular troops from France, Germany and Poland have arrived, by rail and air, to Cherkassy, south of Kiev. A substantial force. No numbers leaked. They are being housed in schools. For all practical purposes, this is a NATO force.

That signals, “Let the games begin”. From a Russian point of view, Mr. Khinzal’s business cards are set to be in great demand.

Exhibit 3: Friday evening. Terror attack on Crocus City, a music venue northwest of Moscow. A heavily trained commando shoots people on sight, point blank, in cold blood, then sets a concert hall on fire. The definitive counter-signal: with the battlefield collapsing, all that’s left is terrorism in Moscow.

And just as terror was striking Moscow, the US and the UK, in southwest Asia, was bombing Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, with at least five strikes.

Some nifty coordination. Yemen has just clinched a strategic deal in Oman with Russia-China for no-hassle navigation in the Red Sea, and is among the top candidates for BRICS+ expansion at the summit in Kazan next October.

Not only the Houthis are spectacularly defeating thalassocracy, they have the Russia-China strategic partnership on their side. Assuring China and Russia that their ships can sail through the Bab-al-Mandeb, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden with no problems is exchanged with total political support from Beijing and Moscow.


The sponsors remain the same

Deep in the night in Moscow, before dawn on Saturday 23. Virtually no one is sleeping. Rumors dance like dervishes on countless screens. Of course nothing has been confirmed – yet. Only the FSB will have answers. A massive investigation is in progress.

The timing of the Crocus massacre is quite intriguing. On a Friday during Ramadan. Real Muslims would not even think about perpetrating a mass murder of unarmed civilians under such a holy occasion. Compare it with the ISIS card being frantically branded by the usual suspects.

Let’s go pop. To quote Talking Heads: “This ain’t no party/ this ain’t no disco/ this ain’t no fooling around”. Oh no; it’s more like an all-American psy op. ISIS are cartoonish mercenaries/goons. Not real Muslims. And everyone knows who finances and weaponizes them.

That leads to the most possible scenario, before the FSB weighs in: ISIS goons imported from the Syria battleground – as it stands, probably Tajiks – trained by CIA and MI6, working on behalf of the Ukrainian SBU. Several witnesses at Crocus referred to “Wahhabis” – as in the commando killers did not look like Slavs.

It was up to Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic to cut to the chase. He directly connected the “warnings” in early March from American and British embassies directed at their citizens not to visit public places in Moscow with CIA/MI6 intel having inside info about possible terrorism, and not disclosing it to Moscow.

The plot thickens when it is established that Crocus is owned by the Agalarovs: an Azeri-Russian billionaire family, very close friends of…

… Donald Trump.

Talk about a Deep State-pinpointed target.

ISIS spin-off or banderistas – the sponsors remain the same. The clownish secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Oleksiy Danilov, was dumb enough to virtually, indirectly confirm they did it, saying on Ukrainian TV, “we will give them [Russians] this kind of fun more often.”

But it was up to Sergei Goncharov, a veteran of the elite Russia Alpha anti-terrorism unit, to get closer to unwrapping the enigma: he told Sputnik the most feasible mastermind is Kyrylo Budanov – the chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

The “spy chief” who happens to be the top CIA asset in Kiev.

Stoking the unholy USUK meatgrinder

It’s got to go till the last Ukrainian

The three exhibits above complement what the head of NATO’s military committee, Rob Bauer, previously told a security forum in Kiev: “You need more than just grenades – you need people to replace the dead and wounded. And this means mobilization.”

Translation: NATO spelling out this is a war until the last Ukrainian.

And the “leadership” in Kiev still does not get it. Former Minister of Infrastructure Omelyan: “If we win, we will pay back with Russian oil, gas, diamonds and fur. If we lose, there will be no talk of money – the West will think about how to survive.”

In parallel, puny “garden-and jungle” Borrell admitted that it would be “difficult” for the EU to find an extra 50 billion euros for Kiev if Washington pulls the plug. The cocaine-fueled sweaty sweatshirt leadership actually believes that Washington is not “helping” in the form of loans, but in the form of free gifts. And the same applies for the EU.

The Theater of the Absurd is unmatchable. The German Liver Sausage Chancellor actually believes that proceeds from stolen Russian assets “do not belong to anyone”, so they can be used to finance extra Kiev weaponizing.

Everyone with a brain knows that using interest from “frozen”, actually stolen Russian assets to weaponize Ukraine is a dead end – unless they steal all of Russia’s assets, roughly $200 billion, mostly parked in Belgium and Switzerland: that would tank the Euro for good, and the whole EU economy for that matter.

Eurocrats better listen to Russian Central Bank major “disrupter” (American terminology) Elvira Nabiullina: The Bank of Russia will take “appropriate measures” if the EU does anything on the “frozen”/stolen Russian assets.

It goes without saying that the three exhibits above completely nullify the “La Cage aux Folles” circus promoted by the puny Petit Roi, now known across his French domains as Macronapoleon.

Virtually the whole planet, including the English-speaking Global North, had already been mocking the “exploits” of his Can Can Moulin Rouge Army.

So French, German and Polish soldiers, as part of NATO, are already in the south of Kiev. The most possible scenario is that they will stay far, far away from the frontlines – although traceable by Mr. Khinzal’s business activities.

Even before this new NATO batch arriving in the south of Kiev, Poland – which happens to serve as prime transit corridor for Kiev’s troops – had confirmed that Western troops are already on the ground.

So this is not about mercenaries anymore. France, by the way, is only 7th in terms of mercenaries on the ground, largely trailing Poland, the US and Georgia, for instance. The Russian Ministry of Defense has all the precise records.

In a nutshell: now war has morphed from Donetsk, Avdeyevka and Belgorod to Moscow. Further on down the road, it may not just stop in Kiev. It may only stop in Lviv. Mr. 87%, enjoying massive national near-unanimity,  now has the mandate to go all the way. Especially after Crocus.

There’s every possibility the terror tactics by Kiev goons will finally drive Russia to return Ukraine to its original 17th century landlocked borders: Black Sea-deprived, and with Poland, Romania, and Hungary reclaiming their former territories.

Remaining Ukrainians will start to ask serious questions about what led them to fight – literally to their death – on behalf of the US Deep State, the military complex and BlackRock.

As it stands, the Highway to Hell meat grinder is bound to reach maximum velocity.

☐ ☆ ✇ STRATPOL

La guerre en Ukraine ou la douloureuse naissance d’un monde nouveau

Par : STRATPOL — 23 mars 2024 à 11:22

Deux ans après le début de la guerre en Ukraine, la réalité contredit les prévisions hasardeuses du camp occidental qui

L’article La guerre en Ukraine ou la douloureuse naissance d’un monde nouveau est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

How could Russia respond to NATO invasion?

Par : AHH — 22 mars 2024 à 20:48

Will France/NATO invade Ukraine? How will Russia respond?

🇫🇷🚨 Will France invade Ukraine? How will Russia respond?

☢ Scott Ritter goes nuclear on French President Emmanuel Macron, Poland, and the Baltic States (“over-fed chihuahuas”). Don’t watch this episode if you’re a NATO fanboy! #NewRulesPodcast pic.twitter.com/Zb3s90VxES

— NewRulesGeopolitics (@NewRulesGeo) March 21, 2024

In this week’s episode of the New Rules podcast, we’re discussing the potential of a French/NATO military intervention in Ukraine. Longtime friend of the program, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter goes NUCLEAR on French President Emmanuel Macron, Poland, and the Baltic States.

“France is the equivalent of an overfed Chihuahua, and you don’t want to get in the ring with the really beefed up Rottweilers, especially when they’ve been trained to eat overfed Chihuahuas their entire life,” he told the New Rules podcast.

 

☐ ☆ ✇ Vu du Droit

Emmanuel Macron apprend à jouer du clairon

Par : Régis de Castelnau — 22 mars 2024 à 10:11
Après les rodomontades, nous sommes passés à la pantalonnade. Notre kéké national a donc déclaré tout seul la guerre à la Russie. La diversion de politique intérieure était évidente au départ, mais il s’est pris au jeu, et toujours abîmé… Lire la suite
☐ ☆ ✇ STRATPOL

L’UE ne parvient pas à s’entendre sur le sort des avoirs russes

Par : ActuStratpol — 22 mars 2024 à 08:43

ue avoirs

ue avoirsLes discussions du premier jour du sommet de l’UE, malgré l’ordre du jour chargé, ont été principalement consacrées à l’Ukraine.

L’article L’UE ne parvient pas à s’entendre sur le sort des avoirs russes est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

☐ ☆ ✇ STRATPOL

Washington appelle Kiev à cesser les attaques sur les installations pétrolières russes pour éviter un renchérissement des prix, selon le FT

Par : ActuStratpol — 22 mars 2024 à 08:41

ukraine petrole

ukraine petroleLes États-Unis ont appelé l’Ukraine à cesser ses attaques contre les installations énergétiques russes. Washington a averti Kiev que de

L’article Washington appelle Kiev à cesser les attaques sur les installations pétrolières russes pour éviter un renchérissement des prix, selon le FT est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

☐ ☆ ✇ STRATPOL

Poutine s’est adressé aux Russes après la proclamation des résultats de la présidentielle

Par : ActuStratpol — 22 mars 2024 à 08:39

poutine elections

poutine electionsLa campagne électorale terminée a montré que la Russie est une seule famille qui marche ensemble sur le chemin historique

L’article Poutine s’est adressé aux Russes après la proclamation des résultats de la présidentielle est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

Why the West cannot stomach Russians

Par : AHH — 20 mars 2024 à 22:22

In the west, they don’t like those who defend themselves, who fight against them, and especially those who win.

By Andre Vltchek via The Greanville Post.

When it comes to Russia or the Soviet Union, reports and historical accounts do get blurry; in the West they do, and consequently in all of its ‘client states’. Fairytales get intermingled with reality, while fabrications are masterfully injected into the sub consciousness of billions of people worldwide. Russia is an enormous country, in fact the largest country on Earth in terms of territory. It is scarcely inhabited. It is deep, and as a classic writer once wrote: “It is impossible to understand Russia with one’s brain. One could only believe in it.”

The Western mind generally doesn’t like things unknown, spiritual and complex. Since the ‘old days’, especially since the crusades and monstrous colonialist expeditions to all corners of the world, the Westerners were told fables about their own “noble deeds” performed in the plundered lands. Everything had to be clear and simple: “Virtuous Europeans were civilizing savages and spreading Christianity, therefore, in fact, saving those dark poor primitive souls.”

Of course, tens of millions were dying in the process, while further tens of millions were shackled and brought to the “New Worlds” as slaves. Gold, silver, and other loot, as well as slave labor had been (and still are) paying for all those European palaces, railroads, universities and theatres, but that did not matter, as the bloodshed was most of the time something abstract and far away from those over-sensitive eyes of the Western public.

Westerners like simplicity, particularly when it comes to moral definitions of “good and evil”. It matters nothing if the truth gets systematically ‘massaged’, or even if the reality is fully fabricated. What matters is that there is no deep guilt and no soul-searching. Western rulers and their opinion makers know their people – their ‘subjects’ – perfectly well, and most of the time, they give them what they are asking for. The rulers and the reigned are generally living in symbiosis. They keep bitching about each other, but mostly they have similar goals: to live well, to live extremely well, as long as the others are forced to pay for it; with their riches, with their labor and often with their blood.

Culturally, most of the citizens of Europe and North America hate to pay the bill for their high life; they even detest to admit that their life is extremely ‘high’. They like to feel like victims. They like to feel that they are ‘used’. They like to imagine that they are sacrificing themselves for the rest of the world.

And above all, they hate real victims: those they have been murdering, raping, plundering and insulting, for decades and centuries.

Recent ‘refugee crises’ showed the spite Europeans feel for their prey. People who made them rich and who lost everything in the process are humiliated, despised and insulted. Be they Afghans or Africans, the Middle Easterners or South Asians. Or Russians, although Russians fall into their own, unique category.

Prince Alexander Nevsky’s legendary defeat of the Teutonic Knights on a frozen lake in the 13th century has always captivated and inspired the Russian people in their struggles against foreign invaders, especially from the West.

Many Russians look white. Most of them eat with knife and fork, they drink alcohol, excel at Western classical music, poetry, literature, science and philosophy.

To Western eyes they look ‘normal’, but actually, they are not.

Russians always want ‘something else’; they refuse to play by Western rules.

They are stubbornly demanding to remain different, and to be left alone.

When confronted, when attacked, they fight.

They rarely strike first, almost never invade.

But when threatened, when assaulted, they fight with tremendous determination and force, and they never lose. Villages and cities get converted into invader’s graves. Millions die while defending their Motherland, but the country survives. And it happens again and again and again, as the Western hordes have been, for centuries, assaulting and burning Russian lands, never learning the lesson and never giving up on their sinister dream of conquering and controlling that proud and determined colossus.

In the West, they don’t like those who defend themselves, who fight against them, and especially those who win.

Russo-Korean symphony

It gets much worse than that.
Russia has this terrible habit… not only it defends itself and its people, but it also fights for others, protecting colonized and pillaged nations, as well as those that are unjustly assaulted.

It saved the world from Nazism. It did it at a horrific price of 27 million men, women and children, but it did it; courageously, proudly and altruistically. The West never forgave the Soviet Union for this epic victory either, because all that is unselfish and self-sacrificing, is always in direct conflict with its own principles, and therefore ‘extremely dangerous’.

The Russian people had risen; had fought and won in the 1917 Revolution; an event which terrified the West more than anything else in history, as it had attempted to create a fully egalitarian, classless and racially color-blind society. It also gave birth to Internationalism, an occurrence that I recently described in my book The Great October Socialist Revolution: Impact on the World and the Birth of Internationalism.

Soviet Internationalism, right after the victory in WWII, helped greatly, directly and indirectly, dozens of countries on all continents, to stand up and to confront the European colonialism and the North American imperialism. The West and especially Europe never forgave the Soviet people in general and Russians in particular, for helping to liberate its slaves.

That is when the greatest wave of propaganda in human history really began to roll. From London to New York, from Paris to Toronto, an elaborate web of anti-Soviet and covertly anti-Russian hysteria was unleashed with monstrously destructive force. Tens of thousands of ‘journalists’, intelligence officers, psychologists, historians, as well as academics, were employed. Nothing Soviet, nothing Russian (except those glorified and often ‘manufactured’ Russian dissidents) was spared.

The excesses or contextual errors of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the pre-WWII era were systematically fabricated, exaggerated, and then engraved into the Western history textbooks and mass media narrative. In those tales, there was nothing about the vicious invasions and attacks coming from the West, aimed at destroying the young Bolshevik state. Naturally, there was no space for mentioning the British, French, U.S., Czech, Polish, Japanese, German and other’s monstrous cruelties.

Soviet and Russian views were hardly ever allowed to penetrate the monolithic and one-sided Western propaganda narrative.

Like obedient sheep, the Western public accepted the disinformation it was fed. Eventually, many people living in the Western colonies and ‘client states’, did the same. A great number of colonized people were taught how to blame themselves for their misery.

The most absurd but somehow logical occurrence then took place: many men, women and even children living in the USSR, succumbed to Western propaganda. Instead of trying to reform their imperfect but still greatly progressive country, they gave up, became cynical, aggressively ‘disillusioned’, corrupt and naively but staunchly pro-Western.

Gorbachev: supremely, unaccountably, criminally foolish when dealing with the most ruthless mafia the world has ever seen.

It was the first and most likely the last time in the history, Russia got defeated by the West. It happened through deceit, through shameless lies, through Western propaganda.

What followed could be easily described as genocide.

The Soviet Union was first lulled into Afghanistan, then it was mortally injured by the war there, by an arms race with the United States, and by the final stage of propaganda that was literally flowing like lava from various hostile Western state-sponsored radio stations. Of course, local ‘dissidents’ also played an important role.

Under Gorbachev, a ‘useful idiot’ of the West, things got extremely bizarre. I don’t believe that he was paid to ruin his own country, but he did almost everything to run it into the ground; precisely what Washington wanted him to do. Then, in front of the entire world, a mighty and proud Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics suddenly shook in agony, then uttered a loud cry, and collapsed; died painfully but swiftly.

A new turbo-capitalist, bandit, pro-oligarch and confusedly pro-Western Russia was born. Russia which was governed by an alcoholic Boris Yeltsin; a man loved and supported by Washington, London and other Western centers of power.

It was a totally unnatural, sick Russia – cynical and compassionless, built with someone else’s ideas – Russia of Radio Liberty and Voice of America, of the BBC, of black marketers, of oligarchs and multi-national corporations.

Is the West now daring to say that Russians are ‘interfering’ in something in Washington? Are they out of their minds?

Washington and other Western capitals did not only ‘interfere’, they openly broke the Soviet Union into pieces and then they began kicking Russia which was at that point half-alive. Is it all forgotten, or is Western public again fully ‘unaware’ of what took place during those dark days?

The West kept spitting at the impoverished and injured country, refused to honor international agreements and treaties. It offered no help. Multi-nationals were unleashed, and began ‘privatizing’ Russian state companies, basically stealing what was built by the sweat and blood of Soviet workers, during long decades.

Interference? Let me repeat: it was direct intervention, invasion, a grab of resources, shameless theft! I want to read and write about it, but we don’t hear much about it, anymore, do we?

Now we are told that Russia is paranoid, that its President is paranoid! With straight face, the West is lying; pretending that it has not been trying to murder Russia.

Those years… Those pro-Western years when Russia became a semi-client state of the West, or call it a semi-colony! There was no mercy, no compassion coming from abroad. Many of those idiots – kitchen intellectuals from Moscow and provinces – suddenly woke up but it was too late. Many of them had suddenly nothing to eat. They got what they were told to ask for: their Western ‘freedom and democracy’, and Western-style capitalism or in summary: total collapse.

I remember well how it was ‘then’. I began returning to Russia, horrified, working in Moscow, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Leningrad. Academics from Akadem Gorodok outside Novosibirsk were selling their libraries in the bitter cold, in dark metro underpasses of Novosibirsk… Runs on the banks… Old retired people dying from hunger and cold behind massive doors of concrete blocks… unpaid salaries and starving miners, teachers…

Russia under the deadly embrace of the West, for the first and hopefully last time! Russia whose life expectancy suddenly dropped to African Sub-Saharan levels. Russia humiliated, wild, in terrible pain.

Patriarch Kirill consecrates Alexander Nevsky monument dedicated to 800th anniversary of Alexander Nevsky — village of Samolva, Gdovsky district, Pskov, 11.09.2021

But that nightmare did not last long.

And what happened – those short but horrible years under both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but above all under the Western diktat – will never be forgotten, not forgiven.

Russians know perfectly well what they do not want, anymore!

Russia stood up again. Huge, indignant and determined to live its own life, its own way. From an impoverished, humiliated and robbed nation, subservient to the West, the country evolved and within a few years, the free and independent Russia once again joined the ranks of the most developed and powerful countries on Earth.

And as before Gorbachev, Russia is once again able to help those nations which are under unjust and vicious attacks by the Western empire.

A man who is leading this renaissance, President Vladimir Putin, is tough, but Russia is under great threat and so is the world – this is no time for weaklings.

President Putin is not perfect (who is, really?), but he is a true patriot, and I dare say, an internationalist.

Now the West, once again, hates both Russia and its leader. No wonder; undefeated, strong and free Russia is the worst imaginable foe of Washington and its lieutenants.

That’s how the West feels, not Russia. Despite all that was done to it, despite tens of millions of lost and ruined lives, Russia has always been ready to compromise, even to forgive, if not forget.

Russia stood up again.

There is something deeply pathological in the psyche of the west. It cannot accept anything less than full and unconditional submission. It has to control, to be in charge, and on top of everything; it has to feel exceptional. Even when it murders and ruins the entire Planet, it insists on feeling superior to the rest of the world.

This faith in exceptionalism is the true Western religion, much more than even Christianity, which for decades has not really played any important role there. Exceptionalism is fanatical, it is fundamentalist and unquestionable.

It also insists that its narrative is the only one available anywhere in the World. That the West is seen as a moral leader, as a beacon of progress, as the only competent judge and guru.

Lies are piling on top of lies. As in all religions, the more absurd the pseudo-reality is, the more brutal and extreme are the methods used to uphold it. The more laughable the fabrications are, the more powerful the techniques used to suppress the truth are.

Today, hundreds of thousands of ‘academics’, teachers, journalists, artists, psychologists and other highly paid professionals, in all parts of the world, are employed by the Empire, for two goals only – to glorify the Western narrative and to discredit all that is standing in its way; daring to challenge it.

Russia is the most hated adversary of the West, with China, Russia’s close ally being near second.

The propaganda war unleashed by the West is so insane, so intense, that even some of the European and North American citizens are beginning to question tales coming from Washington, London and elsewhere.

Wherever one turns, there is a tremendous medley of lies, of semi-lies, half-truths; a complex and unnavigable swamp of conspiracy theories. Russia is being attacked for interfering in U.S. domestic affairs, for defending Syria, for standing by defenseless and intimidated nations, for having its own powerful media, for doping its athletes, for still being Communist, for not being socialist anymore; in brief: for everything imaginable and unimaginable.

Criticism of the country is so thorough and ludicrous, that one begins to ask very legitimate questions: “what about the past? What about the Western narrative regarding the Soviet past, particularly the post-Revolutionary period, and the period between two world wars?”

The more I analyze this present-day Western anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda, the more determined I am to study and write about the Western narrative regarding Soviet history. I’m definitely planning to investigate these matters in the future, together with my friends – Russian and Ukrainian historians.

… when only Victory could save the world, Russian fists are hard, and the same is true about Russian armor.

In the eyes of the West, Russians are ‘traitors’.

Instead of joining the looters, they have been standing by the ‘wretched of the world’, in the past, as well as now. They refused to sell their Motherland, and to enslave their own people. Their government is doing all it can to make Russia self-sufficient, fully independent, prosperous, proud and free.

Remember that ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and many other terms, mean totally different things in distinctive parts of the world. What is happening in the West could never be described as ‘freedom’ in Russia or in China, and vice versa.

Frustrated, collapsing, atomized and egotistic societies of Europe and North America do not inspire even their own people, anymore. They are escaping by millions annually, to Asia, Latin America, and even to Africa. Escaping from emptiness, meaninglessness and emotional cold. But it is not Russia’s or China’s business to tell them how to live or not to live!

In the meantime, great cultures like Russia and China do not need, and do not want to be told by the Westerners, what freedom is, and what democracy is.

They do not attack the West, and expect the same in return.

It is truly embarrassing that the countries responsible for hundreds of genocides, for hundreds of millions of murdered people on all continents, still dare to lecture others.

Many victims are too scared to speak.

Russia is not.

It is composed, gracious, but fully determined to defend itself if necessary; itself as well as many other human beings living on this beautiful but deeply scarred Planet.

Russian culture is enormous: from poetry and literature, to music, ballet, philosophy… Russian hearts are soft, they easily melt when approached with love and kindness. But when millions of lives of innocent people are threatened, both the hearts and muscles of Russians quickly turn to stone and steel. During such moments, when only victory could save the world, Russian fists are hard, and the same is true about Russian armor.

There is no match to Russian courage in the sadistic but cowardly West.

Irreversibly, both hope and future are moving towards the east.

And that is why Russia is desperately hated by the West.

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

A Travelogue of Electoral Donbass

Par : AHH — 20 mars 2024 à 19:03

Donetsk, Avdeyevka, Mariupol – on the Road in Electoral Donbass

By Pepe Escobar at Sputnik.

They have waited 10 long, suffering years to vote in this election. And vote they did, in massive numbers, certifying a landslide reelection for the political leader who brought them back to Mother Russia. VVP may now be widely referred to as Mr. 87%. In Donetsk, turnout was even higher: 88,17%. And no less than 95% voted for him.

To follow the Russian electoral process at work in Donbass was a humbling – and illuminating – experience. Graphically, in front of us, the full weight of the collective West’s relentless denigration campaign was instantly gobbled up by the rich black soil of Novorossiya. The impeccable organization, the full transparency of the voting, the enthusiasm by polling station workers and voters alike punctuated the historical gravity of the political moment: at the same time everything was enveloped in an impalpable feeling of silent jubilation.

This was of course a referendum. Donbass represents a microcosm of the solid internal cohesion of Russian citizens around the policies of Team Putin – while at the same time sharing a feeling experienced by the overwhelming majority of the Global South. VVP’s victory was a victory of the Global Majority.

And that’s what’s making the puny Global Minority even more apoplectic. With their highest turnout since 1991, Russian voters inflicted a massive strategic defeat to the intellectual pigmies who pass for Western “leadership” – arguably the most mediocre political class of the past 100 years. They voted for a fairer, stable system of international relations; for multipolarity; and for true leadership by civilization-states such as Russia.

VVP’s 87% score was followed, by a long shot, by the Communists, with 3.9%. That is quite significant, because these 91% represent a total rejection of the globalist Davos/Great Reset plutocratic “future” envisioned by the 0.001%.

Avdeevka. Ukrainian Nazi vehicle – literally.

Avdeyevka: Voting Under Total Devastation

On Election Day Two, at section 198 in downtown Donetsk, not far from Government House, it was possible to fully measure the fluidity and transparency of the system – even as Donetsk was not spared from shelling, in the late afternoon and early evening in the final day of voting.

Afterwards, a strategic pit stop in a neighborhood mini-market. Yuri, an activist, was buying a full load of fresh eggs to be transported to the nearly starving civilians who still remain in Avdeyevka. Ten eggs cost the equivalent of a dollar and forty cents.

Side by side with Pushkin: The extraordinary Ludmilla Leonova in Yasinovata, the main polling station in town.

At Yasinovata, very close to Avdeyevka, we visit the MBOU, or school number 7, impeccably rebuilt after non-stop shelling. The director, Ludmilla Leonova, an extraordinary strong woman, takes me on a guide tour of the school and its brand new classrooms for chemistry and biology, a quaint Soviet alphabet decorating the classroom for Russian language. Classes, hopefully, will resume in the Fall.

Close to the school a refugee center for those who have been brought from Avdeyevka has been set up. Everything is spotlessly clean. People are processed, entered into the system, then wait for proper papers. Everyone wants to obtain a Russian passport as soon as possible.

For the moment, they stay in dormitories, around 10 people in each room. Some came from Avdeyevka, miraculously, in their own cars: there are a few Ukrainian license plates around. Invariably, the overall expectation is to return to Avdeyevka, when reconstruction starts, to rebuild their lives in their own town.

Then, it’s on the road to Avdeyevka. Nothing, absolutely nothing prepares us to confront total devastation. In my nearly 40 years as a foreign correspondent, I’ve never seen anything like it – even Iraq. At the unofficial entry to Avdeyevka, beside the skeleton of a bombed building and the remains of a tank turret, the flags of all military batallions which took part in the liberation flutter in the wind.

Avdeevka.

Each building in every street is at least partially destroyed. A few remaining residents congregate in a flat to organize the distribution of essential supplies. I find a miraculously preserved icon behind the window of a bombed-out ground floor apartment.

Avdeevka. The icon by the window that survived everything.

AVDEEVKA. A local resident who refuses to leave.

FPVs loiter overheard – detected by a handheld device, and our military escort is on full alert. We find out that as we enter a ground floor apartment which is being kept as a sort of mini food depot – housing donations from Yasinovata or from the military – that very same room, in the morning, had been converted into a polling station. That’s where the very few remaining Avdeyevka residents actually voted.

A nearly blind man with his dog explains why he can’t leave: he lives in the same street, and his apartment is still functional – even though he has no water or electricity. He explains how the Ukrainians were occupying each apartment block – with residents turned into refugees or hostages in the basements – and then, pressed by the Russians, relocated to nearby schools and hospitals until finally fleeing.

Avdeevka. He will NOT leave.

The basements are a nightmare. Virtually no light. The temperature is at least 10 degrees Celsius lower than at street level. It’s impossible to imagine how they survived. Another resident nonchalantly strolls by in his bicycle, surrounded by derelict concrete skeletons. The loud booms – mostly outgoing – are incessant.

Avdeevka. The miraculously preserved church of Mary Magdalen.

The miraculously preserved church of Mary Magdalen.

The miraculously preserved church of Mary Magdalen.

Then, standing amidst total devastation, a vision: the elegant silhouette of the Church of Mary Magdalen, immaculately preserved. Dmitry, the caretaker, takes me around; it’s a beautiful church, the paintings on the roof still gleaming under the pale sunlight, a gorgeous chandelier and the inner chamber virtually intact.

View of Mariupol from within the Pakrovska Church — with Azovstal and the Russian Sea of Azov in the background

The Mariupol Renaissance

The final election day is spent in Mariupol – which is being rebuilt at nearly breakneck speed: the new railway station has just been finished. Voting is seamless at school number 53, housing district 711. A beautiful mural behind the ballot box depicts the sister cities St. Petersburg and Mariupol, with the legendary Scarlet Sails from the Alexander Green story right in the middle.

Mariupol. School 53. Complete with gentleman on the voting booth, ballot box and a lovely painting featuring a ship with red sails…

I revisit the port: international cargo is still not moving, only ships coming from the Russian mainland. But the first deal has been reached with Cameroon – fruits in exchange with metals and manufactured products. Several other deals with African nations are on the horizon.

The Pakrovska church, a Mariupol landmark, is being carefully restored. We are welcomed by Father Viktor, who hosts lunch for a group of people from the parish, and a fine conversation ensues ranging from Christian Orthodoxy to the Decline of the West and the LGBT agenda.

We go to the roof and walk around a balustrade offering a spectacular 360-degree view of Mariupol, with the port, the destroyed Azovstal iron works and the Russian Sea of Azov in the deep background. The massive church bells ring – as in a metaphor for the resurrection of a beautiful city which has the potential to become a sort of Nice in the Sea of Azov.

Mariupol. Azovstal with the restored monument to the Great Patriotic War – restored by Wagner – in the foreground.

Back in Donetsk, going to a “secret” school/museum only 2 km away from the line of fire – which I first visited last month – has to be canceled: Donetsk continues to be shelled.

With Avdeyevka in mind, as well as the shelling that refuses to go away, a few questions on numbers pop up on the long 20-hour drive back to Moscow.

In Chechnya, led by uber-patriot Kadyrov, turnout was 97%. And no less than 99% voted for VVP. So, unlike in the past, forget about any ulterior attempt at a color revolution in Chechnya.

Same pattern in the Caucasus, in the region of Kabardino: turnout was 96%. No less than 94% voted for VVP.

Between Kazakhstan and Mongolia, in Tuva, turnout was 96%. And 95% voted for VVP. In the autonomous Yamal-Nenets, turnout was 94%. But VVP got “only” 79% of the votes. In lake Baikal, Buryatia had 74% turnout and 88% of votes for VVP.

The key, once again, remains Moscow. Turnout, compared to other regions, was relatively low: 67%. Well, Moscow is still largely Westernized and in several aspects ideologically globalist – thus more critical than other parts of Russia when it comes to the patriotic emphasis.

Avdeevka. Nella zona pericolosa. Gli FPV indugiano nel cielo. Foto del giovane fotoreporter Denis Grigory.

And that brings us to the clincher. Even with the resounding success of Mr. 87%, they will never give up. If there ever is a minor chance of a successful Hybrid War strategy provoking a color revolution, the stage will be Moscow. Quite pathetic, actually, when compared to the images of Mr. 87% saluted by a packed Red Square on Sunday like the ultimate rock star.

The Kremlin is taking no chances. Putin addressed the FSB and went straight to the point: attempts to sow interethnic trouble – as a prelude to color revolutions – must be strictly suppressed. The FSB will go for the next level: traitors will be identified by name and targeted without a statute of limitations.

After the electoral euphoria, no one really knows what happens next. It has to be something hugely significant, honoring the historical VVP electoral landslide. He has carte blanche now to do anything. Priority number one: to finish once and for all with the Hegemon-built terror mongrel that has been attacking Novorossiya for 10 long years.

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Renseignement russe : la France prépare un contingent de 2 000 hommes pour l’Ukraine

Par : ActuStratpol — 20 mars 2024 à 08:15

france ukraine

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Back in the EU, site of the 21st century’s biggest political disaster

Par : AHH — 19 mars 2024 à 14:39

Why is the biggest political story of our era so underreported?

with thanks to Ramin Mazaheri via Ramin’s Substack.

I have returned to Paris and can report that things are as politically bleak as ever, continuing a trend which began with the rubber bullet-smashing of the Yellow Vest movement in 2019. The European Union has become truly American (which was often alleged to be the ultimate goal): it’s politically apathetic.

There are no domestic political movements to report on – the French MSM just reports on Ukraine, Israel and (as usual) ecology.

This is not as it used to be.

Prior to the six months of bloody Saturdays over 2018-19 France had seen a full decade of incredible political activism. Leftist planning agendas were full of protests, gatherings and strikes concerning: Sarkozy’s bailouts in late 2008, Hollande’s hopeful Socialist Party election, his subsequent U-turn on austerity, the forceful imposition of austerity by Brussels, the fabrication of Macron, his immediate detestation, the spectacularly unprecedented support for – and then the spectacularly unprecedented repression of – les gilets jaunes – this was a 10-year period of intense, intense activism.

Were it not for Israel’s latest and most brutal invasion of Gaza, and combined with Macron’s incredible 7-years-running refusal to interact with the press (the exact opposite of Sarkozy), I’m not sure I’d have much work to do here?

There is a story to cover, and it’s the most important one, but it’s almost impossible to cover via PressTV news reports: the obvious failure of the pan-European project.

This is the biggest political story of the 21st century, and yet it’s going undiscussed year after year. Brexit put it on the front pages, and then so did the Yellow Vests, but Euroscepticism has been suppressed for four years now.

But what’s a bigger story in the 21st century than the economic, political and confidence collapse of the biggest economic bloc in the world?

The war on the Muslim world since 9/11? That’s something, indeed, but this is the re-sundering of a region which was already suppressed by two centuries of colonialism and then neo-colonialism.

The rise of China? That was something inevitable and unstoppable, due to the superior planning and cohesion of socialist-inspired governments. Of course, China’s sudden rise was aided by the Great Financial Crisis which devastated the West, who then exacerbated it with their predictably awful, inequality-generating policies of bailouts, austerity, QE and ZIRP.

Fifteen years ago who did not expect that a united Europe, and one working in what is now clearly lockstep with the United States, would become an unstoppable project?

That’s the big story: that Europe has not just stopped in its tracks but stagnated, regressed, devolved, disappointed, etc. and etc.

It’s truly historical. What the demise of the pan-European project means is the end of the “social democratic” model: if any region had implemented a “third way” between liberalism and socialism it was Europe. The alleged solution of “social democracy” goes way back to the 1890s – what we have witnessed hasn’t been the “death of communism” but the “death of social democracy” instead.

What a story, no? It was as the proponents of socialist democracy always predicted: social democracy inevitably reverts back to mere liberal democracy. It’s truly historical.

Back in the US someone recently asked me why I kept referring to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, saying it was old history, and it made me pause. They never talk about it in the US anymore, that’s true. However, as soon as I returned to France I was confronted with multiple references to it in journalism and art. But they only get the dates right – roughly.

Yes, Europe took a more far-right economic approach (austerity) than the US (Europe had more social democracy to roll back, of course), but the problem is not the 2007-8 Great Financial Crisis nor austerity – the problem is the pan-European project itself, and this is precisely what is suppressed.

It is easy to suppress, or just be confused, because the timelines are so similar: the pan-European project didn’t truly begin until the undemocratic passage of the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, which was forced through thanks to the chaos surrounding the Great Financial Crisis and subsequent European Debt Crisis (starting 2009).

Why has nobody kept referring to the Lisbon Treaty of 2009? I am definitely one of the very few journalists who do. Now that the UK is out the Anglophone world doesn’t care, I suppose.

The 15-year summation of the pan-European can only be judged to be atrocious, but who is talking about these things: the decrease in economic power; the sustained collapse in the euro’s value; the constant, continent-wide protests against the decisions of Brussels; the decrease in democratic credibility; the increase in militaristic domestic repression; the decrease in social economic protections for the average person; the rise of neo-fascist parties – what on earth does this reporter who has covered the EU since birth have to do get some real talk about United Europe anymore?

The Fall of Phaeton, 1605, Peter Paul Rubens

Ukraine will make or break the pan-European project

The European Union succeeds at nothing and nor do they stand for anything, so they’re desperate for any rallying cry for “Europe!”, and they’ve found one in Ukraine.

Of course, Europe has already failed Ukraine: their weaponry is being defeated, their production capabilities aren’t up to the job, everybody knows they’re just setting Ukraine up for the same debt traps they laid for country like Greece, and they have failed (purposely) to find a diplomatic solution. Their only success is in their spectacularly prejudiced prioritising of Ukrainian refugees: this was, of course, to keep flooding the labor market with desperate, low-wage accepting workers amid record-high inflation – anything to keep wage demands down.

The reality is that Ukraine is going to either be the EU’s final undoing, or it will somehow lead to the “more Europe” that is the only way this misguided economic-but-not-political federalist project could ever possibly succeed.

Europe’s leaders know Ukraine is their best – given the far-right victories looming in European Parliament elections this spring – chances, which are diminishing, to rally Europe behind the pan-European project and away from Euroscepticism.

Remember that in two years Macron has gone from “we must not embarrass Russia” to calling other European countries “cowardly” for not buying Ukraine even more weapons, and even threatening to land NATO troops. Why the huge shift?

Of course war is good for business – France has soared to become the #2 arms merchant in the world. But in a bloc which has a pre-Covid history which no one in the 1% wants anyone to remember, it’s only via war with Russia that European public opinion could possibly be united in favor of “Europe!”.

European imperialists have run out of racism and now can only rely on nationalist prejudice – this is what the EU has revealed itself to be. Furthermore, during the 2010s we were constantly told in France that the pan-European project was the only reason war didn’t break out in Europe – recall how the EU won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, amid mass anti-austerity repression? This is justification is now out the window.

No peace, no public opinion in public policy, no prosperity – no success for the EU, and when will success ever arrive?

Now isn’t the time, Europeans are being told, to argue about the lack of results in the pan-European project – Putin is at the doorstep. Marine Le Pen fairly accused Macron of creating a situation – surrounding this week’s French Parliamentary approval of a 10-year military pact with Ukraine – where, “You’re either with Macron or you’re with Putin”. That’s not just Russophobia or scapegoating – that is the summation of Macron’s whole political policy now.

Nobody – no popular democratic majority – has ever been or will ever be with Macron, but the fabrication of false unity is what Ukraine is being manipulated for here in Europe.

But it’s going to be even bigger than that in the coming months and maybe even years, namely: “Either you’re with the pan-European project or you’re with Putin”.

After all, how else can support for the pan-European project possibly be created in 2024? They cannot stand on their results, and they cannot stand on hopes that the project will suddenly become workable, profitable, democratic, morally responsible, inspire confidence, etc.

The failure of Europe – that’s the biggest story of the 21st century.

<—>

Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His latest book is France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values. He is also the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese. Any reposting or republication of any of these articles is approved and appreciated. He tweets at @RaminMazaheri2 and writes at substack.com/@raminmazaheri

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Poutine célèbre les dix ans du retour de la Crimée à la Russie sur la place Rouge

Par : ActuStratpol — 19 mars 2024 à 09:03

anniversaire crimee

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diamants russes

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Par : ActuStratpol — 19 mars 2024 à 08:56

cern russie

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Poutine remporte la présidentielle avec plus de 87% des voix

Par : ActuStratpol — 18 mars 2024 à 09:16

poutine gagne

poutine gagneVladimir Poutine a obtenu 87,29 % des voix aux élections présidentielles russes, selon les données de la Commission électorale centrale

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Par : ActuStratpol — 18 mars 2024 à 09:16

poutine defis

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Kiev ne veut pas prolonger l’accord de transit du gaz russe pour 2025

Par : ActuStratpol — 18 mars 2024 à 08:56

ukraine gazprom

ukraine gazpromLe ministre ukrainien de l’Énergie, German Galouchtchenko, a déclaré que Kiev n’envisageait pas de prolonger l’accord de transit de gaz

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☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

What is China’s Economic Future?

Par : AHH — 16 mars 2024 à 19:48

Political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson are joined by Beijing-based scholar Mick Dunford to discuss what is actually happening in China’s economy, explaining its technological development and transition toward a new industrial revolution.

Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson at The Geopolitical Economy Hour.

Video:

Podcast:

Transcript:

RADHIKA DESAI: Hello and welcome to the 24th Geopolitical Economy Hour, the show that examines the fast-changing political and geopolitical economy of our time. I’m Radhika Desai.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I’m Michael Hudson.

RADHIKA DESAI: And working behind the scenes to bring you our show every fortnight are our host, Ben Norton; our videographer, Paul Graham; and our transcriber, Zach Weiser.

And with us today we have, once again, Professor Mick Dunford, professor emeritus of geography at Sussex University and now working at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, keeping a close watch, among other things, on China’s economy. So welcome, Mick.

MICK DUNFORD:  Thank you very much.

RADHIKA DESAI: So, China’s economy is what we’re going to talk about today. Where is it at after decades of breakneck growth, after executing the greatest industrial revolution ever? Where is it headed?

Trying to understand this is not easy. The disinformation that is fake news and even what I often call fake scholarship that distorts the view that any honest person may be trying to take on China’s economy is simply overwhelming. It’s absolutely wall-to-wall propaganda, no matter which Western publication or website you open.

If we are to believe the Western press and the leading scholarly lights of the West, who are the major generators of the Western discourse on China, we are at peak China. That is to say, they claim that China has reached a point, reached the highest point, that is, that it ever can. And from here on, it’s only going to be downhill, more or less rapidly.

They say that China has, in recent years, inflated a huge property bubble to compensate for the West’s inability to keep up imports. And this bubble is about to burst. And when it does, it will subject China to a 1980s and 1990s Japan-style long-term deflation or secular stagnation. They have even invented a word to talk about this: “Japanification”. We are told that the Japanification of China’s economy is impending.

They say that the U.S.’s trade and technology wars are hitting China where it hurts the most, at its export and its reliance on inward foreign investment. They are saying that China has grown only by stealing technology. And now that the U.S. is making it harder for it to do so, its technological development can only stall. They are saying that China followed disastrous COVID-19 policies, leading to mass death, draconian lockdowns, and economic disaster.

They are saying that China over-invests, and its growth will not pick up unless China now permits higher consumption levels. They are saying that China has a serious unemployment crisis, that the CPC, the Communist Party of China, is losing legitimacy, because it is failing to deliver ever-higher living standards. And they are saying that Xi Jinping’s authoritarian leadership is ensuring that the private sector will stall, and with it, so will China’s growth.

All this, they say, before even beginning to talk about China’s foreign policy. And there, of course, lie another long litany of alleged disasters and misdemeanors that China is responsible for, beginning with debt-trap diplomacy and China’s allegedly voracious appetite for the world’s resources.

The only reason why Western experts ever stress the strength of China’s economy is when they want to argue that the West must redouble its efforts to contain China and to stall its rise.

So today, we’re going to take a closer look at China’s economy, and in doing so, we’re going to bust a lot of these myths. We’re going to show you that, sadly, for the purveyors of the fake news and fake scholarship about China, no amount of their huffing and puffing has been able to blow down China’s house, because, like the good, the smart little pig, China is actually building its house with bricks.

So, we have a number of topics to discuss in this show. Here they are:

1.    Characterising China’s Economy: Capitalist? Socialist?

2.    Growth Story

3.    Covid Response

4.    The Alleged Debt and Property Bubble? And Japanification?

5.    Restricted Consumption? Stagnant living standards?

6.    Exports in the China Story

7.    China’s new growth strategy

8.    China’s foreign policy

So, these are the topics that we hope to discuss. We want to begin by talking about how to characterize China’s economy. Is it capitalist? Is it socialist? Then we will do the most important and primary basic thing, we will look at the growth story with some statistics. We will then look at China’s Covid response. We will look at the alleged debt and property bubble and whether China is being Japanified.

Then we will look at the issue of whether China is overinvesting and neglecting consumption and living standards, etc. How reliant is China on exports? What is China’s growth strategy? And what is China’s foreign policy? And are those myths about it true? So, this is what we hope to discuss.

So, Mick, why don’t you start us off with your thoughts on exactly how to characterize China’s economy?

MICK DUNFORD: Ok, the way I would characterize China is as a planned rational state. I mean, right the way through, it has maintained a system of national five-year planning, and it also produces longer-term plans. But it’s a planned rational state that uses market instruments.

China has a very large state sector. And of course, some people have claimed that this state sector is, in a sense, an impediment to growth. And we’ve seen a resurrection of this idea, guo jin min tui (国进民退), which is used to refer to the idea that the state sector is advancing and the private sector is retreating.

It’s a very, very strange concept, in fact, because the third word is min (民), and min refers to people. So, what they are actually, in a sense, saying – these ideas were invented by neoliberal economists in 2002 – the private sector is equated with the people, which I find absolutely astonishing. But, I mean, the country does have a very significant public sector.

What I find striking is that one can actually turn it around and say, what is it that these Western economists seem to think China should do? And they seem to think that China should privatize all assets into the hands of domestic and foreign capitalists. It should remove capital controls. It should open the door to foreign finance capital. It should transfer governance to liberal capitalist political parties that are actually controlled by capital.

I think one of the most fundamental features of the China system is actually that it’s the state that controls capital, rather than capital that controls the state. And it’s, in fact, this aspect of the Chinese model, and in particular, the rule of the Communist Party of China that has basically transformed China from what was, effectively one of the poorest countries in the world into one of its largest industrial powers.

So, in a way, it’s a planned rational state in which the CPC has played an absolutely fundamental role. And without it, I mean, China would never have established the national sovereignty that permitted it to choose a path that suited its conditions and to radically transform the lives and livelihoods of its people.

RADHIKA DESAI: Michael, do you want to [speak]?

MICHAEL HUDSON: The question is, what is the state? There are two aspects of the state with China. One is public infrastructure. And the purpose of China’s public infrastructure is to lower the cost of doing business because infrastructure is a monopoly.

That’s what really upsets the American investors. They wanted to buy the phone system, the transportation system, so that they could benefit from charging monopoly rents, just like under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

The most important sector that China’s treated in the public is money creation and banks. Americans hope that American banks would come over and they would be making all the loans in China and benefiting from China’s growth and turning it into interest. And instead, the government’s doing that. And the government is deciding what to lend to.

And there’s a third aspect of what people think of when they say state. That’s a centralized economy, centralized planning, Soviet style.

China is one of the least centralized economies in the world because the central government has left the localities to go their own way. That’s part of the Hundred Flowers Bloom. Let’s see how each locality is going to maneuver on a pragmatic, ad hoc basis.

Well, the pragmatic ad hoc basis meant how are localities, villages, and small towns going to finance their budgets? Well, they financed it by real estate sales, and that’s going to be what we’re discussing later.

But once you realize that the state sector is so different from what a state sector is in America, centralized planning and the control of Wall Street for financial purposes, finance capitalism, hyper-centralized planning, you realize that China is the antithesis of what the usual view is.

RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. And I’d just like to add a few points, which dovetail very nicely with what both of you have said.

The fact of the matter is that this was also true of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries when they were still ruled by communist parties. We generally refer to them as socialist or communist, but in reality, they themselves never claimed to be socialist or communist. They only said they were building socialism, especially in a country that was as poor as China was in 1949.

The leadership of the Communist Party of China has always understood that there has to be a long period of transition in which there will be a complex set of compromises that will have to be made in order to steer the economy in the direction of socialism, in order to build socialism.

So, from its beginnings, the revolutionary state in China was a multi-class state and a multi-party state. People don’t realize very often that while the Communist Party of China is the overwhelmingly most powerful party in China, there are other parties that exist as well, which reflect the originally multi-class character of China.

Now, it’s true that since 1978, the government has loosened much of its control over the economy. But the important thing here is that the Communist Party retains control of the Chinese state.

The way I like to put it is, yes, there are lots of capitalists in China. Yes, those capitalists are very powerful. They are at the head of some of the biggest corporations in the world, and they are quite influential within the Communist Party. But what makes China meaningfully socialist or meaningfully treading the path to socialism, let’s put it that way, is the fact that ultimately the reins of power are held in the hands of the Communist Party of China leadership, which owes its legitimacy to the people of China.

So, the reigns of power, the reigns of state power are not held by the capitalists; they are held by the Communist Party leadership.

So, in that sense, I would say that China is meaningfully socialist. Although, as Mick pointed out, there is a fairly large private sector in China, but so too is the state sector very large. And the extent of state ownership means that even though the private sector is very large, the state retains control over the overall pace and pattern of growth and development in the country.

And I just add one final thing here, which is going to become quite important as we discuss the various other points, and that is that the financial sector in China remains very heavily controlled by the state.

China has capital controls, China practices a fair degree of financial repression, and China’s financial system is geared to providing money for long-term investments that improve the productive capacities of the economy and the material welfare of the people. And this is completely different from the kind of financial sector we have today.

So, Mick or Michael, did you want to add anything?

MICK DUNFORD: Just to reiterate, I mean, the point is, the government sets strategic targets that relate to raising the quality of the life of all the Chinese people. And it has strategic autonomy, which gives China the opportunity or the possibility of actually choosing its own development path.

And I think that’s something that very strikingly marks China out from other parts of the Global South that have had much greater difficulty, in a sense, in accelerating their growth, partly because of debt and their subordination to the Washington financial institutions.

So I think that is critically important, the role of sovereignty and autonomy in enabling China to make choices that suited its conditions, and at the same time making choices that are driven by a long-term strategic goal to transform the quality of the lives of all Chinese people.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I want to put in one word about sovereignty. You put your finger on it. That’s really what makes it different.

What makes other countries lose their sovereignty is when they let go, how are they going to finance their investment? If they let foreign banks come in to finance their investment, if they let American and European banks come in, what do they do? They fund a real estate bubble, a different kind of a real estate bubble. They fund takeover loans. They fund privatization.

Banks don’t make loans for new investment. China makes great money to finance new tangible investment. Banks make money so you can buy a public utility or a railroad and then just load it down with debt, and you can borrow and borrow and use the money that you borrow to pay a special dividend if you’re a private capital company. Pretty soon, the country that follows this dependency on foreign credit ends up losing its sovereignty.

The way in which China has protected its sovereignty is to keep money in the public domain and to create money for actual tangible capital investment, not to take your property into a property-owning rentier class, largely foreign-owned.

RADHIKA DESAI: Thank you. Those are very important points. Thank you.

I’d just like to add one final point on the matter of how to characterize the Chinese economy and the Chinese state. At the end of the day, it’s not just important to say that the state controls the economy, but whose state is it?

The way to look at it as well is that in the United States, essentially we have a state that is controlled by the big corporations, which in our time have become exceedingly financialized corporations, so that they are directing the United States economy essentially towards ever more debt and ever less production, whereas that is not the case in China.

And the question of whose state it is makes use of the word autonomy. The autonomy refers to the fact that it is not subservient to any one section of society, but seeks to achieve the welfare of society as a whole and increase its productive capacity.

MICK DUNFORD: If I may just add, I think also it’s important that you pay attention to the policy-making process in China. It’s an example of what one might call substantive democracy. It delivers substantive results for the whole of the Chinese population.

In that sense, it delivers improvements in the quality of the lives of all the people, and therefore, in a sense, it’s a democratic system. But it’s also a country that actually has procedures of policy-making, experimentation, design, and choice and so on that are extremely important and that have fundamental aspects of democracy about them.

When Western countries characterize China as authoritarian, they’re actually fundamentally misrepresenting the character of the Chinese system and the way in which it works, because they, in a sense, merely equate democracy with a system, whereas China, of course, does have multiple political parties, but a system with competitive elections between different political parties. There are other models of democracy, and China is another model of democracy.

RADHIKA DESAI: Mick, you’re absolutely right to talk about the substantive democracy. Indeed, in China, they have recently developed a new term for it. They call it a “whole process democracy”, and it really involves multiple levels of consultation with the people, going down to the most basic village and township levels, and then all the way up the chain.

And I think this process does work, because the other remarkable thing about the CPC leadership is its ability to change direction pragmatically. If something does not work, then it assesses what it has attempted, why it has failed, and then it revises course. So, I think we will see several instances of this as we talk as well.

Michael, you want to add something?

MICHAEL HUDSON: One thing about democracy. The definition of a democracy traditionally is to prevent an oligarchy from developing. There’s only one way to prevent an oligarchy from developing as people get richer and richer, and that’s to have a strong state.

The role of a strong state is to prevent an oligarchy from developing. That’s why the oligarchy in America and Europe are libertarian, meaning get rid of government, because a government is strong enough to prevent us from gouging the economy, to prevent us from taking it over.

So, you need a strong central state in order to have a democracy. Americans call that socialism, and they say that’s the antithesis of democracy, which means a state that is loyal to the United States and follows U.S. policy and lets the U.S. banks financialize the economy. So, just to clarify the definitions here.

RADHIKA DESAI: Very, very true, Michael. But let’s not go, I mean, maybe we should do a separate show on political theory of the state, because that’s equally important.

But for now, let’s look at our next topic. We hope, of course, that everybody understands how we characterize China’s state. But now, let’s look at China’s GDP growth.

So, here you have a chart, and we have several charts on this matter, but we’ll take them one by one and comment on them:

gdp growth china west 1980 2028

So, here we have a chart showing the annual rate of GDP growth from 1980 to 2028. Of course, post-2023 are their projections, which are shown by the dotted lines. And I’ve only taken a few selected countries from the Our World in Data website, and anybody can go there and look at this data, by the way.

So, you can see China and then a handful of the most important Western countries. And you can see that going back to 1980, essentially China’s growth rate, which is here, the top red line here, has absolutely been massively higher on practically any year than the other countries.

In fact, you see I left Russia in here. I should probably have taken it out. It’s a bit of a distraction, because here you see Russia’s growth rate massively bouncing up from the late 90s financial crisis. But let’s leave that aside.

All the other major countries, which you see here, they are all showing considerably lower growth. So, the United States here is this orangish line. And essentially, they’re all showing much lower growth.

And more recently as well, this is the Covid-19 pandemic. And you can see that China, again, like all the other countries, it experienced a fairly sharp decline in the growth rate, but it still remained positive, unlike all the other countries.

And it remains substantially above that of the rest of the economies that constantly are telling China how to improve its economic policy. So, that’s what I want to say about this chart.

But Mick, go ahead.

MICK DUNFORD: Can you show that table that I sent?

RADHIKA DESAI: Yeah, sure. Yes, here we go:

gdp growth china west table

MICK DUNFORD: These are more recent growth rates for China, for the world, and for the G7. And I mean, first of all, they show absolutely clearly that China’s growth rate is still a long way in excess of the average growth rates of all G7 countries, many of which have actually performed abysmally. I mean, Germany is now in recession, it declined 0.3% per year this year. I mean, Italy has had extremely low rates of growth, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, all had extremely low rates of growth.

China last year achieved a growth rate of 5.2%. It itself expects to grow at 5% next year. The IMF forecast 4.6%. Even that 4.6% target is quite close to the average growth rate that China needs to achieve to meet its 2035 target. It has a 2035 target of doubling its GDP, its 2020 GDP by 2035. I think that that goal is perfectly realizable. And in that sense, I strongly disagree with people who argue that China has in a sense peaked.

But I do find it, really quite astonishing, that Western countries, whose economies have performed extremely poorly, feel in a position to lecture China about how it should address what is said to be an unsatisfactory rate of growth. That’s the first point I want to make.

I just want to say something else, if I may. When we talk about, I mean, China’s growth has slowed. And, there’s no doubt that in terms of people’s everyday lives, there are many difficulties. And I just want to quote something.

At New Year, Xi Jinping gave a speech. I wanted to cite his actual words. He recognised that in these years, China faces what he called the tests of the winds and rains. And then he said, when I see people rising to the occasion, reaching out to each other in adversity, meeting challenges head on and overcoming difficulties, I am deeply moved.

So, the leadership and all Chinese people are well aware that there are many, many difficulties and challenges confronted, because China is actually undergoing a major structural transformation about which we shall speak later. But China is also in the short term undertaking a lot of important actions that are actually designed to cope with some of the real difficulties that people confront.

So, if you listen to Li Qiang’s government work report, he addressed the problem of short-term employment generation. And there are proposals for 12 million new urban jobs to increase employment, especially for college graduates and other young people, because for young people, the unemployment rate, including college students, is in the region of 21 percent. Urban unemployment is 5 percent. So, there are issues to do with the generation of employment.

Government expenditure this year will target a whole series of strategic issues, but also livelihoods. So, affordable housing, youth unemployment, job security, insurance, pensions, preschool education, the living conditions in older communities. So, I’m just saying that, in the current context, difficult economic situation and a particularly turbulent global situation. I mean, China, as every other country in the world, faces challenges, and it is in many ways directly addressing them in very important ways.

RADHIKA DESAI: Great. Thanks, Mick. Michael, do you want to add anything?

MICHAEL HUDSON: No, I think that’s it. The question is, what is the GDP that is growing? There are a number of ways of looking at GDP. And when I went to school 60 years ago, economists usually thought of GDP as something industrial. They’d look at energy production. They’d look at railway cargo transportation.

If you look at the industrial component of what most economists used to look at, electricity is the power for industry, electricity is productivity growth for labor. If you look at these, what is the component of GDP, you realize that these differences in Mick’s charts are even wider than what he showed, because the American GDP, very largely interest, overdraft fees of credit card companies, as we’ve said, is providing a financial service. 7% of American GDP is the increase in homeowners’ view of what their rental value of their property is. That’s 7%.

Now, I doubt that China includes a measure like this in its GDP. But if it did, with all of its rise in real estate prices, its GDP would be even higher in a reality-based basis.

So real GDP, as we think of it, and the public thinks of it, is something useful and productive. Actually, China’s doing a much more efficient job in minimizing the kind of financial and rentier overhead that you have in the United States.

RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly, Michael. What I was going to point out as well is that these figures of U.S. GDP growth and the absolute level of U.S. GDP are heavily financialized.

The financial sector, which actually is not a force for good in general in the U.S. economy, it is out of which the indebtedness comes, out of which the productive weakening comes. The growth of the financial sector is counted as GDP in the United States and massively inflates U.S. GDP, which would not be as high as this.

And this is particularly important given that President Biden, for example, is congratulating himself now for having the strongest economy in the world or the Western world or whatever it is. Well, that’s what the U.S.’s boast is based on.

And China does not do that, nor does it have the kind of financial sector which creates, which destroys the productive economy. Rather, as we were saying, it has the kind of financial sector that supports it.

So, just another general point I want to make. We were talking about this chart:

gdp growth china west table

This shows from 1980 to 2028, and the projections remain, by the way, even from conservative sources, that China’s growth is going to remain higher than the rest of the world, particularly the Western countries, for a long time to come.

And I also decided to show you this chart:

gdp growth china west 2008 2028

This is the chart of growth, which is just a more focused version of the previous one, which shows growth rates from 2008 to 2028.

So 2008 is when we had what Michael and I call the North Atlantic Financial Crisis. And since then, what we’ve seen is, yes, of course, all countries have seen a sort of a reduction in their growth rate, and certainly China has. But even since then, you can see that China’s growth remains high and stable. So, that’s another thing that we wanted to show.

And this is a chart showing the rise of per capita GDP:

gdp per capita growth china west 1970 2021

That is to say, you can have a higher GDP, but if your population is expanding, then to what extent is per capita GDP rising? So, you can see here that, again, even in terms of per capita GDP, and this only again goes to 2021, but in terms of per capita GDP, China has remained head and shoulders above all the major Western countries.

And this bounce here that you see in the case of the US and the UK here, it is only a dead cat bounce from the absolute depths to which their economies had sunk during Covid, and so they came to some sort of normalcy.

Mick, you may want to say something about this chart, because you sent it to me. So, please go ahead:

gdp per capita ppp 2021 china west

MICK DUNFORD: It’s correct, of course, that China’s growth slowed. Now, in 2013, China entered what is called the New Era. At that time, China decided that its growth rate should slow. It chose slower growth. It spoke of 6 or 7 percent per year, and it more or less achieved that, until the Covid pandemic. So, China chose slower growth for very particular reasons, and I think in this discussion, we shall come to some of these reasons later on.

But in a sense, what they want is what they call high-quality growth. And what China is seeking to do is undertake a profound structural transformation of its economy, establishing new growth drivers by directing finance towards high-productivity sectors and directing finance towards the use of digital and green technologies in order to transform its traditional industries. So, in a sense, it’s undergoing a profound process of structural transformation.

And I mean, if you, for example, look at Li Qiang’s speech, the major tasks include invigorating China through science and education, so to strengthen the education, science and technology system, to improve the capabilities of the workforce, or promote innovation, industrial investment and skills, and another, striving to modernize the industrial system and accelerate the development of new productive forces, bearing in mind that we’re on the verge of a new industrial revolution. But these are very important issues, fundamentally important issues.

RADHIKA DESAI: And I would say just, and I know we’ll talk about it at greater length later on, but it is really important to bear in mind that really, when the world stands at the cusp of being able to exploit new technologies like quantum computing or nanotechnology or artificial intelligence or what have you, a relatively centralized decision-making process about how to allocate resources, for what purposes, for what social benefits, etc., is likely to prove far superior, that is to say, China’s method is likely to prove far superior than the Western tactic of leaving private corporate capital in charge of the process.

And just to give you a couple of instances of this, the fact that private corporate capital is in charge of the development of digital technologies is already creating all sorts of social harms in our Western societies, whether it is harms to children’s mental health or even adults’ mental health, to political division that the algorithms sow and so on.

And also, it is leading to a situation where even these mega-corporations, these giant corporations, actually do not have the resources to invest, the scale of resources that will be needed to invest. So, for example, you hear in the Financial Times that Sam Altman is looking for people to invest in his artificial intelligence ventures, which will require trillions of dollars, and he cannot find private investors for it. So, this is really quite interesting.

Okay, so if we’re done with the growth rate story, oh, and I just want to say one other thing about this, which is, this is a GDP per capita in purchasing power parity, and China, in the space of a few decades, essentially, has experienced the biggest spurt in per capita well-being, etc., which includes important achievements like eliminating extreme poverty.

The Communist Party has brought China to essentially per capita GDP in purchasing power terms of next to nothing in 1980 to about $20,000 per annum in 2020. This is really quite an important achievement. And to do this for a country of 5 to 10 million people would be laudable, but to do this for a country of 1.3 billion people is a massive, historic achievement, and I think that’s something to remember.

MICK DUNFORD: I just, if you just go back for one minute, I mean, I absolutely agree with what you’ve just said, Radhika.

I’ll just make a comment about this chart. It’s because we were probably going to speak about Japanification:

gdp per capita ppp 2021 china west

It basically shows that the GDP per capita of Japan, and indeed of Germany, closed in on the United States, and actually Germany overtook it in the 1980s. But after that point in time, I mean, after the revaluation of their two respective currencies, and after the, the bubble, the stock market and property market bubble in Japan, you saw stagnation set in. And there’s a question as to whether that will happen with China.

But I mean, I think that one thing that’s striking in this diagram is that China is still at a much lower level of GDP per capita than Japan, or indeed Germany was at that time. And those economies, because, they were at the technological frontier to some extent, had to innovate, move into new technologies.

China, because there is still a technological gap, has enormous opportunities to accelerate its growth in a way in which, well, Japan failed because it chose not to take up opportunities, and it gave up semiconductors manufacture. But China has enormous opportunities, and that’s one reason why we must anticipate China’s growth as continuing.

RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. Thank you, Mick. Okay, so if we’re done with the growth story, let’s go to our next topic, which is what happened in China under Covid-19. Now, of course, there is just so much dispute about and controversy around Covid and Covid strategies, etc. So we don’t want to get into all of them, but I just want to emphasize two things.

We’ve already looked at the growth figures, we looked at the growth figures around Covid:

gdp growth china west 2008 2028

So you can see here that in 2020, all economies had a big dip thanks to Covid in their economies, but China is alone among the major economies to have remained in positive growth territory, and to have, of course, remained much higher than the rest of the other major world economies. So essentially, China, whatever China did, it did not sacrifice growth.

Now, this is very ironical, because in the Western countries, we were told that we need to, in order to continue growing, we need to, so in order to preserve livelihoods, which was the euphemism for preserving the profits of big corporations, in order to preserve livelihoods, we may have to sacrifice some lives. And the Western economies went through an absolutely excruciating process of lockdown here, and opening there, and lockdown again, and opening again, and so on.

But all of this had devastating impacts on Western economies, whereas China prioritized the preservation of life above all. And it imposed a lockdown knowing that, okay, even if we are going to develop vaccines, and remember, China developed its own vaccines, and effectively inoculated over 70 percent of the population by the time they began reopening.

China prioritized the saving of lives, and it was accused of essentially creating world shortages by shutting down its economy, etc. But in reality, China’s strategy, which focused before the availability of vaccines, on essentially physical distancing, isolation, etc., as was necessary, but China managed to do it in a way as to keep up a relatively robust growth rate, and very importantly, lose very few lives.

This is a chart, again from Our World In Data, of cumulative Covid-19 deaths per million of population:

covid 19 deaths per million china us

So here we have all these countries, the United States and United Kingdom are these top two lines, Germany, Canada, Japan, even though we are told that East Asian economies did well because they had experience with SARS, etc., even then, compared to China, which is down here with a cumulative Covid death rate per million of about 149 or something people dying per million, and these numbers are over 3,000, almost 4,000 per million at this point in the United States and the UK, and then you have these other economies.

So China actually managed to avoid the worst of Covid, both in terms of lives and in terms of livelihood, and it did so because it did not compromise the saving of lives.

Does anyone else want to add anything? Mick? You were there.

MICK DUNFORD: Well, I mean, obviously, there were difficulties for some people in some places at some times. I was here right through it. All I can say is the impact personally on me was extremely limited.

It was a very effective system for protecting life. And if you lived in some places, then in fact the impact on your life, apart from having frequent nucleic acid tests and so on and ensuring that your health code was up to date, the impact on one’s life was relatively limited.

But in some places, obviously, in Wuhan at the outset, in Shanghai later on, the impact was very considerable.

But I think it’s an indication of the importance of a kind of collectivism, and the priority given to the protection of human life. And as you said, it is quite striking that actually through it, China’s economy actually kept ticking over.

And of course, China produces so many important intermediate goods that obviously it was also very important in providing things that were needed in many, many other parts of the world.

It also shared its drugs, its vaccines, which is really quite different, in a sense, from the conduct of the United States. And to some extent, the Western pharmaceutical companies.

RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. Michael, go ahead.

MICHAEL HUDSON: In the United States, that would be considered a failure of policy. The United States used Covid as an opportunity to kill.

For instance, the governor of New York, Cuomo, took the Covid patients and he moved them into all of the assisted living and old people’s homes. And that had a great increase in productivity. It resulted in enormous death rates for the elderly.

That helped save New York’s pension plan system. It helped save other pension plans. It helped save Social Security because the dead people were no longer what America called “the dead weight”.

The American policy was to indeed infect as many people over the age of 65 as you could. And that helped balance state, local budgets, pension plan budgets.

The increase in the death rate is now the official policy of the Center for Disease Control in the United States. They say do not wear masks. They’ve blocked any kind of mask wearing. They’ve done everything they could to prevent the use of HIPAA filters or airborne disease. The Disease Control Center says that Covid is not an airborne disease. Therefore, do not protect yourself.

Well, the result is many children have been getting Covid and that weakens their resistance system. And they’re getting measles and all sorts of other things. And all of that is greatly increasing GDP in America. The health care costs of America’s destructive policy.

I think Marx made a joke about this in Capital. He said when more people get sick, the doctors and the economic output goes up. Are you really going to consider sickness and destruction and fires rebuilding and cleanup costs? Are you going to count all of this there?

RADHIKA DESAI: But the irony is Michael, even with all of that, America’s GDP plunged so deeply down.

Well, I think we should move on to the next topic, but I will just say one thing. It is generally said that China is in a panic, the Chinese government reversed its draconian Covid policies because there were popular protests, and blah blah and so on. I would not agree with that.

Certainly, there were some popular protests. It also seems as though at least some of them were being pushed by the National Endowment for Democracy with the typical color revolution style. They have one symbol that symbolizes it. So, they decided to put up blank pieces of paper, etc. So, there’s no doubt that there was some of this going on. And as Mick said, undoubtedly, there were local difficulties in many places.

But what becomes very clear is that China decided to lift Covid restrictions towards the end of 2022 only after it has satisfied itself that the risk. And I should also add one thing. It was under pressure to lift these restrictions a great deal because the fact was that the rest of the world was not following China’s footsteps apart from a handful of other countries. And they were socialist countries. They were not following China’s footsteps.

So, it’s very hard to be the only country that’s doing it. But nevertheless, despite all those pressures, China had a very deliberate policy. It lifted Covid restrictions after assuring itself that enough of the population had been vaccinated, as to achieve something close to herd immunity.

And these figures of deaths per million demonstrate that China’s bet proved right, and China continues to monitor the situation. Covid hasn’t gone away.

And so, in all of these ways, I think that it’s important for us to understand that China’s policy has actually been above all about protecting people’s lives.

MICK DUNFORD: Just from my recollection, the demonstrations of which you spoke, where the slogans were written in English, I wonder who they were talking to, were on the 1st of December. China had, on the 11th of November, already announced the steps of, in a sense, removing restrictions. And then they were finalized in early December. So, the change was already underway.

RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly. Great. So, I think we are at almost, I think, 50 minutes or so. So, let’s do the next topic, which is the property bubble. And then we will stop this episode and we will do a part two of this episode, and do the other four topics that remain in part two.

So, Mick, do you want to start us off about the property bubble and the alleged Japanification, impending Japanification of China’s economy?

MICK DUNFORD: Okay. Well, if you want, you can just show the chart:

house property prices china us

Basically, you can see that throughout this period, Chinese house prices have risen quite substantially. You know, in a sense, the story started, with housing reform, after 1988, when China moved from a welfare to a commodity system. And then, in 1998, it actually privatized Danwei housing, and it adopted the view that housing should be provided, as a commodity by developers.

And in 2003, that course of action was confirmed. And from that point in time, one saw very, very substantial growth in the number of developers, many of which, the overwhelming majority of which were private developers. So, in a sense, they moved towards a fundamentally market system.

And they very quickly had to make certain adjustments because they found that while the quality of housing and the amount of housing space per person was going up, these developers were orienting their houses towards more affluent groups. So, there was an under-provision of housing for middle-income groups and for low-income groups.

And so, there were progressively, you saw over the years, increasing attention paid to the provision of low-cost housing and of low-cost rented housing. And in fact, in the current five-year plan, 25% of all housing is meant to be basically low-cost housing.

So, the important point is that this problem emerged in a system that was liberalized, actually, I mean, in line with recommendations that were made in 1993 by the World Bank.

So, in other words, it’s an example of a liberalized, predominantly market-led, private-led system, in which these difficulties and these problems have emerged.

So, that’s the first thing I want to say. And I mean, obviously, to address housing needs, China has had, over the course of time, to considerably move back in the direction of providing low-cost housing in order to meet the housing needs of the Chinese people.

But basically, in August 2020, the government got very, very deeply concerned about, on the one hand, increasing house prices and, on the other hand, the explosion of borrowing and the fact that the liabilities of many of these developers substantially exceeded their assets.

And of course, the other line on that chart is a line indicating house prices in the United States. And of course, it was the crash of prices in the subprime market that, in a sense, precipitated the financial crisis. So, China, in the first place, is absolutely determined that it should not confront that kind of problem that was generated by the liberalized housing system in the United States.

So, I mean, that’s the first thing I basically want to say.

If you want, I can say something about the case of Evergrande. But basically, what China did in 2020 was it introduced what it called Three Red Lines, which were basically designed to reduce financial risks.

But it had a number of consequences because it, to some extent, deflated the housing market. Housing prices started to fall. Some of these developers found themselves in a situation where their liabilities substantially exceeded their assets. There was a decline in housing investment.

But to some extent, I think this is a part of a deliberate goal of basically diverting capital towards, as I said earlier, high productivity activities and away from activities, especially the speculative side of the housing market. So, I’ll just say that for the moment, but I can come back and say something about Evergrande, if you wish, in a few minutes.

RADHIKA DESAI: Okay, great. Michael, do you want to add anything?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, what I’d like to know as the background for this is what is the, how much of this housing is owner-occupied and how much is rental housing? That’s one question. The other question is how much is the ratio of housing costs to personal income? In America, it’s over 40% of personal income for housing. What’s the ratio in China?

I’d want to know the debt-equity ratio. How much debt, on the average, for different income groups? Debt relative to the value of housing. In America, for the real estate sector as a whole, debt is, the banker owns more of the house than the nominal house owner, whose equity ratio for the whole economy is under 50%.

These are the depth dimensions that I’d want to ask for these charts, if you know anything about them.

RADHIKA DESAI: Okay, thanks for that. And so, I just want to add one thing, which is that, this graph actually really says it all, and in some ways implicitly answers Michael’s questions:

house property prices china us

Because the blue line, which shows the United States property prices, you can see that they reached a certain peak at 150% of the value of its 2010 values in 2008. Then it went down to below the level of 2010.

But U.S. monetary policy, Federal Reserve policy, its continuing deregulated financial sector, the easy money policy that was applied in a big way with zero interest rate policies, with quantitative easing, etc., etc., has simply led to a new property boom, where the prices of property prices have reached a peak, which is even higher than that of 2007-8, which was such a disaster. And this was all made possible precisely by the, by increasing housing debt, etc.

Whereas in China, a big driver of the housing boom has actually been that people are investing their savings in it. So, by logically, it means that the extent of a debt in the housing market will be comparatively lower. The entities that are indebted are actually the developers.

And that’s a very different kind of problem than, than the, than the owners being indebted. So that’s the main thing I want to say.

And Mick, you wanted to come back about, about Evergrande, so please do. And then remember also that we want to talk about this chart in particular, and deal with the question of Japanification:

china loans real estate industry

So, please go ahead, Mick. Let’s talk about that.

MICK DUNFORD: Okay, well, I mean, as Radhika just said, the problem is, the indebtedness of developers, and the existence of debts that considerably exceed the value of their assets.

And the way in which this situation has come about, and I mean, as I said, the Chinese government, in a sense, wants to address the financial risks associated with that situation, and did so by introducing these so-called Three Red Lines.

It also is interested in reducing house prices, and it’s also interested in redirecting finance towards productivity-increasing activities.

So, Evergrande is an enormous real estate giant. It has debt of 300 billion dollars. It has 20 billion of overseas debt, and its assets, according to its accounts at the end of the last quarter of last year, are 242 billion. And 90 percent of those assets are in mainland China. So, its liability asset ratio was 84.7 percent, and the Three Red Lines set a limit of 70, 70 percent. So, it’s substantially in excess of the red line.

In 2021, it defaulted. And then, in January this year, it was told to liquidate after international creditors and the company failed to agree on a restructuring plan. In September, by the way, last year, its chair, Su Jiayin, was placed under mandatory measures, on suspicion of unspecified crimes. Basically, it was a Hong Kong court that called in the liquidators.

And the reason was that, in a way, outside China, Evergrande looked as a massively profitable distressed debt trade opportunity. There were 19 billion in defaulted offshore bonds with very substantial assets and, initially, a view that the Chinese government might prop up the property market.

So, large numbers of U.S. and European hedge funds basically piled into the debt, and they expected quite large payouts. But it seems as if this negotiation was, to some extent, controlled by a Guangdong risk management committee. And the authorities, basically, were very, very reluctant to allow offshore claimants to secure onshore revenues and onshore assets.

And, in fact, to stop the misuse of funds, I think about 10 Chinese local provinces actually took control of pre-sales revenues. They put it into custodial accounts, and the idea was that this money should basically—the priority is to ensure that the houses of people who’ve paid deposits on houses are actually built, and people who’ve undertaken work in building houses, are basically paid. So, that, then saw the value of these offshore bonds collapse very rapidly, indeed.

And I think that, to some extent, explains the concerns of the international financial market about the difficulties of this particular case. But I think, it’s clear that China intends, basically, to deflate this sector and to put an end to this speculative housing market as much as it possibly can, and to direct capital, towards productivity increasing, essentially, the industrial sector. And we shall talk about this direction of finance later on.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Evergrande debt, and other real estate debt, is to domestic Chinese banks and lenders. Certainly, many Chinese home buyers did not borrow internationally.

So, I want to find out how much the domestic Chinese banking system, or near banking system — not the Bank of China itself, but the near banks intermediaries who lent — to what extent have the banks given guarantees for the loans for Evergrande and others?

I understand that there are some guarantees domestically, and if the banks have to pay them, the banks will go under, just as occurring here in New York City. Do you have any information on that?

MICK DUNFORD: No, I don’t really have any information, except, I mean, some of the literature that I’ve read suggests that these creditors, bondholders and also other creditors, basically shareholders, are going to take a very, very major haircut.

RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly. I think that this is the key, that there will be an imposition of haircuts on the rich and the powerful, not just subjecting ordinary people to repossession of their homes, which they should have access to.

So, as Mick has already said, the Chinese government is doing everything possible to make sure that the ordinary buyers who have bought these houses do not lose out, which is the opposite of what was done in trying to resolve the housing and credit bubble in the United States.

So, I just want to say a couple of things. I mean, the Chinese government is quite aware, as Mick pointed out, the whole thing has begun by, this whole property bubble is in good part a product of the fact that when relations between China and the West were much better, China accepted some World Bank advice, and this is partly a result of that and the kind of deregulation that the World Bank had suggested.

But very clearly, now relations between China and the West are not good. In fact, they’re anything but good. China is unlikely, once bitten, twice shy, to accept such bad advice again, even if they were good. And now that they’re not good, there will be, and China is clearly looking at distinctively pragmatic, socialistic ways out.

And you see in the new address to the NPC by the Premier [Li Qiang], that social housing has become a major priority, not building houses for private ownership, but rather building houses which will be kept in the public sector and rented out at affordable rates. And I think this is really an important thing, really the way to go.

And finally, I would say that, the property bubble in Japan and the property bubble in the United States were bound to have very different consequences, partly because, well, for two reasons, mainly. Number one, the nature of their financial systems were very different.

In the case of Japan, the financial system was being transformed from one that resembles China’s financial system to something that resembles much more the US financial system. And Japan has continued this transformation and has suffered as a result. I would say in short, really, Japan has paid the price of keeping its economy capitalist. So in many ways is the United States.

And the second reason, of course, is that, funnily enough, one of the effects of the Plaza Accord was that, by the time the Plaza Accord came around, Japan was no longer interested in buying US treasuries. And as a result, the United States essentially restricted its access to US markets in a much bigger way. And so, essentially, Japan lost those export markets.

And it did not do what China is able to do. It perhaps could not do what China is able to do, being a capitalist country, which is massively reorient the stimulus for production away from exports and towards the domestic market, including the market for investment.

So I think that we are, maybe this is the cue at which we can talk about Japanification. So maybe you can start us off by commenting on this chart, and then Michael and I can jump in as well:

china loans real estate industry

MICK DUNFORD: Ok, the blue line, of course, is the flow of loans to different sectors. So the blue line is the flow of loans to the real estate sector.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Only the Bank of China or by?

MICK DUNFORD:  All the banks. You can see from 2016, the share going to real estate has diminished very significantly, whereas, where it says industrial MLT, that’s medium and long term loans for industrial investment, you can see a very, very strong, steady increase in the share of loans going to industrial investment. In agriculture, it declines. And then also, that has actually increased since 2016. So this is a directing of investment towards manufacturing and towards the industrial sector of the economy.

So why is that? Well, I think the first thing one can say is that, in the past, basically, the growth drivers of the Chinese economy were, to some extent, export manufactures. But China was predominantly involved in processing activities, employing very unskilled labor and associated with very low levels of labor productivity.

So one of China’s goals is to significantly, basically, strengthen, upgrade the quality of these traditional industries, to make them digital, to make them green, and to radically increase productivity through a large-scale investment wave.

And then, secondly, we’re on the verge of a new industrial revolution, which Radhika has spoken about. So the aim in this case is, basically, to divert investment towards the industries that are associated with the next industrial revolution.

The other main growth drivers in the past, alongside this export sector, were obviously real estate, which, I mean, if you look at GDP by expenditure, was accounting probably with household appliances and furniture and household goods and so on, about 26, 27 percent of the economy.

But it’s a sector that’s associated with relatively low productivity, and of course, it was associated with very substantial speculation and generated very considerable financial instability.

So, as Radhika said, there will be, in dealing with this financial crisis, basically an underwriting of existing, of obligations to existing home buyers, and in the future, an attempt to establish a more sustainable housing market.

The other area of the economy was basically this sort of platform economy. But this platform economy was associated with very, very strong tendencies towards monopoly, and in the, about four or five years ago, a series of measures were adopted, basically, to restrict, some aspects of this platform economy, and other areas, like private tutoring, which was generating large disparities in the educational system, and is associated with the fact, that the cost of raising children in China is extremely high. I mean, it’s the second highest in the world after South Korea, actually.

So, these growth drivers, these old growth drivers, are basically seen as not offering potential to sustain the growth of the Chinese economy into the years ahead, and so there’s this attempt to look for new growth drivers. And basically, for that reason, you’ve seen this redirection of investment.

And I think one can distinguish that, from what happened to Japan, because basically, in Japan, industrial investment did not increase, largely, I think, because the profitability of investment was not sufficiently high. And also Japan, in a sense, adopted a neoliberal program. It didn’t implement industrial policies.

Whereas China is seeking to undertake this transformation, basically, through, it’s a kind of supply-side restructuring, driven by industrial policy, and driven by financial policies, providing strategic funding for industrial transformation.

Then linking that also to the transformation of education, to try to ensure that the output of the education system, in terms of skill profiles, and so on, corresponds much, much more closely with the profile of work and employment, with much more emphasis upon STEM, in the context of this new industrial revolution, radically raising productivity, and by radically raising productivity, you increase income, and ultimately, you’ll increase consumption, and so on.

So I think that the Japanification course is not one that China will follow, that China will actually address this need to innovate and transform its industrial system, in order to, in a sense, address the problems that are associated with the earlier drivers of Chinese development.

MICHAEL HUDSON: We probably need a whole other program to talk about the difference in structure. Real estate is the largest sector of every economy, and China is so different from Japan.

The Ginza district in Japan, right around the palace, that small district, was larger than all of the real estate value in California. So, we’re dealing with a huge debt finance explosion there, and then you have the largest collapse of property prices in Japan, everywhere, anywhere in the world.

In a way, what you’ve described brings us back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the show, about China’s structure. The effect of the real estate slowdown and falling in prices has a disastrous effect on localities, small villages and towns in China, who are dependent on real estate sales as funding their budget.

So, the real estate crash in China, if we’re talking about what policy is China going to take, how is it going to solve the problem of local budgets without solving it by creating a booming real estate market for towns to sell off their property to developers, and developers to make a profit selling off a property to private buyers, mainly.

I assume they’re not just selling it to the government to make a profit. I think there’s a lot of structure that I’d like to know. I don’t know what it is now, but it’s so different from what you have everywhere else.

I think that really is what I hope will be the focus of our show, the geopolitics of different real estate structures and the real estate tax that goes with it.

RADHIKA DESAI: That’s a really interesting question, and much of that we will be discussing in the second part of this show, which we’ll be recording in a week or so, I think.

But let me maybe then just bring this to a conclusion by simply agreeing with what both of you have said, which is that China has a very good chance, in fact, very likely, China is not going to follow the Japanification model because, as Michael is emphasizing, the structure of China’s economy and the imperatives generated by that structure are very different.

To name just one, if something is not profitable in a capitalist economy, it will not get done. Whereas in the case of the Chinese economy, the Chinese government can always say, well, if it’s necessary, we’ll do it even if it isn’t profitable, because it is necessary for the welfare of the people or the productive capacity of the economy, etc. So, profitability just does not play the role of a brake in the same way as it does in capitalist societies.

Secondly, the role of the state, both in terms of initiating new projects and taking responsibility for new projects, and we can already see in the current NPC and the discussions there that the role of the state is already once again expanding again in China, and it can continue to do so. And I think that’s a very good thing.

And remember also that, Mick, you emphasized in the case of when you were discussing one of the graphs, that the per capita GDP of China today is considerably lower than what it was in Japan, even in the late 80s and early 90s.

And that means that, number one, domestic consumption can be a big stimulus for further economic expansion. And secondly, of course, the industrial opportunities, the opportunities for a new industrial revolution are many, and China in particular, because of the important state role in the Chinese economy, the centrality of the state role in the Chinese economy, and the aim of the Chinese economy and the Chinese economy’s managers to develop China’s productive capacity in whatever way that works, not necessarily through private ownership.

These elements are actually going to ensure that China will exploit the opportunities of the new technologies much more effectively and execute a transition to the next industrial revolution much more successfully, and that will be an important road to avoiding what’s called Japanification.

MICK DUNFORD: You know, I think the difference is that Japan, I thought, in the 1980s was at the technological frontier, and China is not. But just, what Michael was referring to is the fact that in China, local government revenue came to depend to a very considerable extent on what is called land revenue.

You know, basically all land is state-owned, is either state-owned or owned by the rural collectives. But what happened was that if land was converted for use for urbanization, was converted for use for urbanization, for housing, then basically the local government could in effect sell leases, 90-year leases, or depending on the activity, different lengths of lease. They could sell these leases to developers. And then that revenue was used by local government to fund infrastructure.

To some extent that model has come up against limits. And I think, the issue Michael raised really concerns how in future will local government be funded, and will there be a reform in the system of taxation?

Will a property tax be introduced in order to generate government revenue rather than relying upon this land tax? Because of course that did encourage local government to allocate that land to people who are going to build housing for upper-income groups, because the implications for land value were under that situation, they would actually be higher rather than providing that land to construct housing for low income groups.

So, this issue of land revenue is one that has to be addressed basically by someone who’s an expert in public finance.

MICHAEL HUDSON: That should be what we talk about in the next show, I think.

RADHIKA DESAI: Great. So I think that we should bring this part of the show, the first part of this show to an end. And let me just do that by going back to our list of topics.

So just to conclude, we managed to cover the first four, although the question of Japanification and the alleged property bubble will resonate into all the rest of the topics, certainly the question of consumption, exports and China’s new growth strategy. So we will return to it.

But in the next [Geopolitical Economy] Hour, we will be talking about these topics, restricted consumption, exports, new growth strategy, and of course, China’s foreign economic policy.

So thanks very much both. Thanks to all the listeners. And we look forward to seeing you in another week or two. Thank you and goodbye.

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

The Terms of Surrender

Par : AHH — 16 mars 2024 à 19:22

Putin presented the West with a bill of exchange that it is not able to repay

By Irina Alksnis, RIA Novosti columnist.

“In an interview with Dmitry Kiselyov, Vladimir Putin stressed that the West will not just have to offer Russia guarantees of compliance with the agreements, but these guarantees: a) must be spelled out; b) suit Moscow; and c) the Russian leadership must actually believe in them.”

In an interview with Dmitry Kiselyov, Vladimir Putin paid great attention to the issue of potential negotiations with the West over Ukraine. At first glance, this might even seem somewhat unexpected, but the topic is really becoming more and more relevant and is increasingly heard in the public field, which means that it is time to clarify Russia’s position as clearly as possible. Which the president did.

The reality of the situation on the Ukrainian front, which is unpleasant for the West, is reaching more and more people on the other side. This entails quite natural consequences: the voices demanding to negotiate with Moscow are getting louder and louder. And if initially they were mostly marginal figures, on whom it was very convenient to hang the label “Russian agent” or “useful idiot of the Kremlin”, now the most mainstream and very influential forces – the media, think tanks, politicians and statesmen – up to the Pope are saying the same thing.

This point of view has not yet become dominant there and still meets impressive resistance, but it can no longer be called marginal. And judging by the way events are developing in Ukraine, the moment when it will become dominant on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean is not very long away.

However, these changes worry the politically active patriotic part of Russian society. The reason is obvious: people fear that in the course of negotiations, Russia will lose the achievements for which our soldiers pay with their blood and lives. Either the West will simply deceive us, as it has done so many times in the past, or a part of the Russian elite that remains pro-Western will be inclined to make concessions, surrendering our military victory. But no one is immune from mistakes and failures in the negotiation process – even the most ardent patriot of his country.

This is probably why the president gave a detailed and detailed commentary on this issue, touching on very different aspects that affect Russia’s position. And this is the answer primarily for us-the citizens of the country. But it can also be very useful for the West, if there are still smart enough and qualified people there who are able to hear and understand what is said, and not invent their own version of Putin’s answer in accordance with the agenda and personal beliefs (and with this there are more and more problems lately). Well, for the insufficiently nationalized representatives of the domestic establishment, who are hoping to turn the stuffing back, the president’s answer is also very useful – and makes them understand that you should not dream of the impossible.

The West, in the form of Ukraine as anti-Russia, prepared a very powerful weapon against our country, but when it did not work as expected, it had to openly enter the war itself – and this became its huge, downright fatal mistake, because it turned on the patriotic war regime in our people. Putin said that “deep Russian society”, ordinary citizens, had long been waiting for their demand for the country and the state, and the war of the West against us was exactly the situation that turned on the mechanism of national consolidation.

This means that the state has a free hand in relying on powerful and active (literally combative) popular support. He is not under pressure from public opinion, which insists on ending the fighting at any cost and as soon as possible – on the contrary, citizens consider it right to solve the issue radically, eliminating the threat to Russia in the south-western direction once and for all. This means that the SVO can continue for as long as it takes, until the West is not just ripe for negotiations (this will happen soon), but reaches the point where it hears Moscow’s position and accepts its conditions (but this may take much longer).

By the way, the president’s words made it clear why Russian officials are so actively pedaling the topic of deception on the part of the West, which Moscow has encountered many times in recent decades. You can often hear criticism of this position – saying that it exposes Russia as weak and stupid. However, it has now provided the state with an extremely comfortable and strong negotiating position: what are your guarantees, gentlemen? Because the old and, alas, unkind principle of “gentlemen take their word for it” has finally broken down.

Putin stressed that the West should not just offer Russia guarantees of compliance with the agreements, but these guarantees should: a) be spelled out; b) suit Moscow; and c) the Russian leadership should actually believe in them.

In fact, in the sphere of reputation and moral authority, the West finds itself in exactly the same situation as with the American debt, which is storming to astronomical heights and whose mere maintenance is increasingly shaking the financial system. Everyone has already realized that this is just a pyramid scheme, but it still holds, and the world is watching with curiosity (although not without concern about the consequences) what will become the “pebble” that will start the crash.

Well, by demanding guarantees at the talks, Putin swung the “pebble” of another tower – the tower of Babel of Western hypocrisy and lies.

Perhaps this is understood by American and European hawks, who are now actively rocking the topic of the need to introduce a Western contingent to Ukraine. Realizing that Moscow will not be able to push through or deceive in negotiations, they see direct participation in the conflict as the only remaining option to try to reduce the conflict to a more or less acceptable outcome for NATO countries.

However, Putin also had words for these hotheads – in particular, the word “interventionists”. Moreover, the president explicitly stated that it is precisely as an intervention on the territory of Russia that we will regard the entry of Western troops into Ukraine. And he reminded that our country has a rich experience of successfully solving this problem, which everyone in the West should remember.

In essence, Ukraine has become a conflict in which the bankruptcy of Europe and the United States – military, moral, economic – threatens to turn from expected to actual. And in his interview, Putin presented the West with a bill of exchange, which in principle it is not able to repay.

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

African Observers of Russian Presidential Elections

Par : AHH — 16 mars 2024 à 14:10

Those who travel to Russia and see the reality for themselves, from any part of the world, are consistently astounded and pleased with what they see. This consistent discrepancy between reality and media-driven myth underlines the potency of the mindwashing western Big Lie Media, which most of humanity continues to foolishly imbibe.




Visiting Russia is a key antidote, until the Global South / Global Majority drops safeguards against western media, referred to as “informational hygiene” by Russians. Otherwise Forever Wars are permanently baked in as this Big Lie Media forever sews discord, false impressions between natural allies, and works to divide humanity along false lines.

An interesting pattern developed during yesterday’s first of three main voting days. Let the following 11 African election observers from 10 different African countries tell you in their own words. The selections are from the Sputnik Africa Telegram channel.

International observers for the Russian presidential elections plan to visit at least 52-53 regions, they will be provided with all the necessary assistance, said the head of the Central Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova. Currently 333,600 people are monitoring the Russian presidential election, including over 700 from 106countries,” Pamfilova noted.
The process of voting is “proceeding normally,” she added.”

💠Everything you need to know about Russia’s 2024 presidential elections

Russian citizens will head to the polls on March 15-17 to vote in 2024 presidential election. There are 112.3 million eligible voters inside Russia, and around 1.9 million eligible voters reside abroad. Voter turnout is expected at 71%, as per the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM).

What’s new about 2024 elections?
E-voting, a remote electronic voting system, is being used for the first time to elect a Russian president. Voters in 29 Russian regions will be able to cast their ballots remotely.
🔹Electronic ballot processing system uses a special scanner to read and process marked paper ballots and tally the results.
🔹Mobile Voter mechanism provides online voting.
🔹Elections state automated system is information software that ensures that ballots are counted in an accurate and rapid manner.

There are four candidates vying for the top office:
🔸Self-nominated candidate and incumbent President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin;
🔸Communist Party nominee Nikolay Kharitonov;
🔸Liberal Democratic Party nominee Leonid Slutsky;
🔸New People party nominee Vladislav Davankov.

Who will observe the voting process?
🔸Election observers are Russian citizens who monitor compliance of election procedure with the law, supervise the process and record possible violations.
🔸200 parliamentary international observers have been accredited to monitor the elections in Russia, delegations from 36 countries are already arriving.

👉 Follow this link to learn more

≈≈≈≈≈≈

💠A Kenyan observer for the Russian presidential elections, who’s watching the voting process in Russia’s city of Perm told Sputnik that “the election process has started well” and “the election officials are well set”

“It’s very cold, [but] I am very happy to be here,” he added.

💠Fast and secure procedure: a Burundian observer appreciates the advantages of voting electronically in the Russian presidential election

“When I was told what happens electronically, I congratulated you, I saw that you had succeeded,” President of the National Assembly of Burundi, Honorable Gelase Daniel Ndabirabe, told Sputnik Africa.

Ndabirabe noted that once a person is identified in the system, the voting process takes “very little time,” adding that such an option saves “a lot of time and energy” for people.

Lastly, the observer praised the excellent security of the electronic voting.

“I was told that to date there have been no complaints about the security of the electronic trial. Which is another great success, because that’s what’s so frightening. I say: “congratulations”. Because there can’t be any hacking. That’s a very good thing,” Ndabirabe concluded.


💠Cameroonian observer speaks about Russian presidential election. African observers who are inspecting polling stations across Russia will return home genuinely satisfied with what they have seen, Serge Espoir Matomba, the first secretary of the Cameroonian United People for Social Renovation, told Sputnik Africa.

According to him, at a time when “the world wants to be multipolar, we have an obligation to know what’s going on without waiting to be told what’s going on. There is this growing misinformation that is being used today as a lever for manipulation.”

“That is why I am in Moscow today, to see with my own eyes how the elections are going, how the buzz around the elections is going, how the process itself is being set in motion,” Matomba said.

“The image that Africa has often had of Russia in the past is changing exponentially,” the politician concluded. “Africans are now realizing that Russia is not the country they were presented with. And that’s a good thing.”

💠 An observer from Kenya in the Kherson region praised the Russian electronic voting system

“In Russia you can vote from home. In other countries, especially in African countries, with electronic voting you have to go to the polling station to register,” said Ezekiel Kanagi Mutes.


💠 “Absolutely fair”: Ethiopian observer impressed by Russian presidential elections

“Really, it is well planned, well organized. I have seen the voters, how they are electing. As to my observation up to now, it is absolutely fair. I appreciate it,” Dr. Petros Woldegiorgis, an observer from Ethiopia and President of Bonga University, told Sputnik Africa.

He particularly noted the accessibility measures in place, including the option for citizens in distant locations to vote via telephone—a novel experience for him.

“The general feeling I have is wonderful,” the observer remarked. “From Alpha to Omega, what I have seen now, honestly speaking, I’m very much excited.”

💠 🇷🇺🗳🇹🇿 “Very open and freely”: Tanzanian observer from the ruling party on the Russian presidential election

“The voting process here is very interesting. […] It takes very small time, just 3 to 5 minutes you are done, is very open and freely,” Joseph Mgaya told Sputnik Africa.

Furthermore, the observer pointed out that Russian citizens are voting “freely” and they can do it in every corner of the country – you just need to have an ID with you.

Mgaya also praised the “high-end” online voting technology that simplifies the whole election process.

“I’m very interested in it because it’s high-end [and] […] it’s very open,” he added.


💠 “The process is more than transparent”: Comorian observer on presidential elections in Russia

The Russian presidential election has a number of advantages, including security cameras to ensure transparency, candidate representatives at each polling station, “a more efficient electronic system combined with a reliable manual system,” Ahmed Said Mdahoma, head of the Independent National Electoral Commission of the Comoros, told Sputnik Africa.

He also noted “maximum” security to ensure the calm of the electoral process and “constant communication at the level of the Central Electoral Commission to inform citizens, observers and actors about the electoral process.”

In addition, Mdahoma emphasized a 3-day voting period that would allow “everyone who wants to exercise their right to vote to find the right time” to do so.


💠 Chairman of CAR National Electoral Commission praises organization of Russian presidential elections

Mathias Moruba visited three polling stations in Russia and noted their compliance with international electoral standards, the Russian Embassy in the Central African Republic (CAR) said.

According to the embassy, the delegation from the Central African Republic arrived in Russia to observe the presidential election at the invitation of the Russian Central Election Commission.


💠 “Russia is already ahead,” says Madagascan observer on electronic voting in Russia

Russia’s presidential election is taking place “calmly and also within the norm,” which has highlighted some advances, such as automated voting, which saves voters’ time, Ralaisoavamanjaka Andriamarotafikatohanambahoaka, the first general rapporteur of Madagascar’s Independent National Electoral Commission, told Sputnik Africa.

“The computerized system is a novelty. The whole world will choose this system. The choice of the virtual system, which the majority of people will make, is mainly to save time for them,” the observer explained.

He added that “it’s obvious that we’ve respected the principle of electoral sovereignty and the electoral norm in Moscow and Russia in general.”
[His name is not a typo!! Another example here.]


💠🇷🇺🗳🇦🇴 “No violations”: an observer from Angola about the Russian presidential elections

“We didn’t find any problems, no violations. [Everything went] very well, without problems. And everything was peaceful,” said Manuel Camati, member of the National Electoral Commission of Angola.

He also noted that elections are part of the sovereignty of each state, and therefore it was important for him to be personally present in this process.

Speaking about the technological innovations of the Russian elections, Camati said that they help to quickly resolve any issues, and the electronic voting option allows “to minimize the number of errors and speed up electoral processes.”


💠🇷🇺🇲🇱 Voting in Russia “proceeding normally, as in other countries,” says Malian observer

The ability to vote electronically is important for people who cannot travel, such as the disabled and the elderly, Nana Aïcha Cissé, the first vice-president of Mali’s Network of Women Parliamentarians, told Sputnik Africa.

She came to observe the elections in Russia for the first time and said she was impressed by the organization.

The observer also called Mali “a friend of Russia,” noting that “people know Russia, they know the ties that exist between Mali and Russia, and that’s very important.”

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

Will BRICS launch a new world in 2024?

Par : AHH — 15 mars 2024 à 20:18

Ryabkov, Ushakov and Glazyev foresee a quickening of the Russian river after Putin’s spring reelection: the BRICS will create payment and settlement systems that do not depend upon the shifty “rules-based international order.”

By Pepe Escobar at The Cradle.

“BRICS doubled its membership at the start of 2024, and faces huge tasks ahead: integrating its newest members, developing future admission criteria, deepening the institution’s groundings, and most importantly, launching the mechanisms for bypassing the US dollar in international finance.”

BRICS Ambassadors attend “Maslenitsa: Dialogue of Civilizations,” Moscow, 12 March 2024.

MOSCOW – Across the Global South, countries are lining up to join the multipolar BRICS and the Hegemon-free future it promises. The onslaught of interest has become an unavoidable theme of discussion during this crucial year of the Russian presidency of what, for the moment, is BRICS-10.

Indonesia and Nigeria are among the top tiers of candidates likely to join. The same applies to Pakistan and Vietnam. Mexico is in a very complex bind: how to join without summoning the ire of the Hegemon.

And then there’s the new candidacy on a roll: Yemen, which enjoys plenty of support from Russia, China, and Iran.

It’s been up to Russia’s top BRICS sherpa, the immensely capable Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, to clarify what’s ahead. He tells TASS:

We must provide a platform for the countries interested in rapprochement with the BRICS, where they will be able to work practically without feeling left behind and joining this cooperation rhythm. And as to how the further expansion will be decided upon – this should be postponed at least until the leaders convene in Kazan to decide.

The key decision on BRICS+ expansion will only come out of the Kazan summit next October. Ryabkov stresses that the order of the day is first “to integrate those who have just joined.” This means that “as a ‘ten,’ we work at least as efficiently, or, rather, more efficiently than we did within the initial ‘five.'”

Only then will the BRICS-10 “develop the category of partner states,” which, in fact, means creating a consensus-based list out of the dozens of nations that are literally itching to join the club.

Ryabkov always makes a point to note, in public and in private, that the twofold increase of BRICS members starting on 1 January 2024 is “an unprecedented event for any international structure.”

It isn’t an easy task, Ryabkov says:

Last year, it took an entire year to develop the admission, expansion criteria at the level of top officials. Many reasonable things were developed. And many of the things that were formulated back then got reflected in the list of countries that joined. But it would probably be improper to formalize the requirements. At the end of the day, an admission to the association is a subject of political decision.


What happens after Russia’s presidential elections

In a private meeting with a few select individuals on the sidelines of the recent multipolar conference in Moscow, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke effusively of BRICS, with particular emphasis on his counterparts Wang Yi of China and S. Jaishankar of India.

Lavrov holds great expectations for BRICS-10 this year – at the same time, reminding everyone that this is still a club; it must eventually go deeper in institutional terms, for instance, by appointing a secretariat-general, just like its cousin-style organization, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

The Russian presidency will have its hands full for the next few months, not only navigating the geopolitical spectrum of current crises but, most of all, geoeconomics. A crucial ministerial meeting in June – only three months away – will have to define a detailed road map all the way to the Kazan summit four months later.

What happens after this week’s Russian presidential elections will also condition BRICS policy. A new Russian government will be sworn in only by early May. It is widely expected that there will be no substantial changes within the Russian Finance Ministry, Central Bank, Foreign Ministry, and among top Kremlin advisers.

Continuity will be the norm.

And that brings us to the key geoeconomics dossier: the BRICS at the forefront of bypassing the US dollar in international finance.

Last week, top Kremlin adviser Yury Ushakov announced that BRICS will work towards setting up an independent payment system based on digital currencies and blockchain.

Ushakov specifically emphasized “state-of-the-art tools such as digital technologies and blockchain. The main thing is to make sure it is convenient for governments, common people, and businesses, as well as cost-effective and free of politics.”

Ushakov did not mention it explicitly, but a new alternative system already exists. For the moment, it is a closely, carefully guarded project in the form of a detailed white paper that has already been validated academically and also incorporates answers to possible frequently asked questions.

The Cradle was briefed on the system via several meetings since last year with a small group of world-class fintech experts. The system has already been presented to Ushakov himself. As it stands, it is on the verge of receiving a final green light from the Russian government. After clearing a series of tests, the system in thesis would be ready to be presented to all BRICS-10 members before the Kazan summit.

This all ties in with Ushakov publicly declaring that a specific task for 2024 is to increase the role of BRICS in the international monetary/ financial system.

Ushakov recalls how, in the 2023 Johannesburg Declaration, the BRICS heads of state focused on increasing settlements in national currencies and strengthening correspondent banking networks. The target was to “continue to develop the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, primarily regarding the use of currencies different from the US dollar.”


No single currency for the foreseeable future

All of the above frames the absolute key issue being currently discussed in Moscow, within the Russia–China partnership, and soon, deeper among the BRICS-10: alternative settlement payments to the US dollar, increased trade among “friendly nations,” and controls on capital flight.

Ryabkov added more crucial elements to the debate, saying this week that the BRICS are not debating the implementation of a single currency:

As for a single currency, similar to what was created by the European Union, this is hardly possible in the foreseeable future. If we are talking about clearing forms of mutual settlements such as the ECU [European Currency Unit] at an early stage of development of the European Union, in the absence of a real means of payment, but the opportunity to more effectively use the available resources of the countries in mutual settlements to avoid losses due to differences in exchange rates, and so on, then this is precisely the path along which, in my opinion, BRICS should move. This is under consideration.

The key takeaway, per Ryabkov, is that the BRICS should not create a financial and monetary alliance; they should create payment and settlement systems that do not depend upon the shifty “rules-based international order.”

That’s exactly the emphasis of the ideas and experiments already developed by Minister of Integration and Macroeconomy at the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) Sergei Glazyev, as he explained in an exclusive interview, as well as the new groundbreaking project on the verge of being greenlighted by the Russian government.

Ryabkov confirmed that “a group of experts, led by the Ministries of Finance and representatives of the Central Banks of the respective [BRICS] countries,” is working nonstop on the dossier. Moreover, there are “consultations in other formats, including with the participation of representatives of the ‘historical west.'”

Ryabkov’s own takeaway mirrors what the BRICS as a whole are aiming at:

Collectively, we must come up with a product that would be, on the one hand, quite ambitious (because it is impossible to continue to tolerate the dictates of the west in this area), but at the same time realistic, not out of touch with the ground. That is, a product that would be efficient. And all this should be presented in Kazan for consideration by the leaders.

In a nutshell: the big breakthrough may be literally knocking at the BRICS door. It just depends on a simple green light by the Russian government.

Now compare the BRICS devising the contours of a new geoeconomics paradigm with the collective west mulling the actual theft of Russia’s seized assets to the benefit of the black hole that is Ukraine.

Apart from being a de facto declaration by the US and EU against Russia, this is something that carries the potential, in itself, of totally smashing the current global financial system.

A theft of Russian assets, would it ever happen, will render livid, to put it mildly, at least two key BRICS members, China and Saudi Arabia, who bring to the table considerable economic heft. Such a move by the west would completely destroy the concept of the rule of law, which theoretically underpins the global financial system.

The Russian response will be fierce. The Russian Central Bank could, in a flash, sue and confiscate the assets of Belgian Euroclear, one of the world’s largest settlement and clearing systems, on whose accounts Russian reserves were frozen.

And that on top of seizing Euroclear’s assets in Russia – which amount to roughly 33 billion euros. With Euroclear running out of capital, the Belgian Central Bank will have to revoke its license, causing a massive financial crisis.

Talk about a clash of paradigms: western robbery versus a Global South-based equitable trade and finance settlement system.

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

The German-American Strategic Stooges Clown Show

Par : AHH — 15 mars 2024 à 19:08

The saga of Bundeswehr officers plotting to blow up the Kerch bridge with Taurus missiles and getting away with it is a gift that keeps on giving.

By Pepe Escobar at Strategic Culture.

The Four Stooges saga of Bundeswehr officers plotting to blow up the Kerch bridge in Crimea with Taurus missiles and getting away with it is a gift that keeps on giving.

President Putin, in his comprehensive interview to Dmitry Kiselev for Russia 1/RIA Novosti, did not fail to address it:

“They are fantasizing, encouraging themselves, first of all. Secondly, they are trying to intimidate us. As for the Federal Republic of Germany, there are constitutional problems there. They correctly say: if these Taurus hit that part of the Crimean Bridge, which, of course, even according to their concepts, is Russian territory, this is a violation of the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

Yet it gets curioser and curioser.

When the transcript of the Taurus leak  was published by RT, everyone was able to hear Brigadier General Frank Gräfe – head of operations of the German Air Force – speaking with Lieutenant Colonel Fenske from the German Space Command Air Operations on the plan to deploy Taurus systems in Ukraine.

A key point is that during the plotting, these two mention that plans were already discussed “four months ago” with “Schneider”, the successor of “Wilsbach”.

Well, these are German names, of course. Thus it did not dawn on anyone that (Kevin) Schneider and (Kenneth) Wilsbach could instead be… Americans.

Yet that did raise the eyebrows of German investigative journalist Dirk Pohlmann – who I had the pleasure to meet in Berlin years ago – and his fellow researcher Tobias Augenbraun.

They found out that the German-sounding names did identify Americans. Not only that: none less than the former and the current Commanders of the U.S. Pacific Air Forces.

The Four (actually Six) Stooges element gets an extra boost when it is established that Liver Sausage Chancellor Scholz and his Totalenkrieg Minister Pistorius learned about the Taurus plan no less than four months later.

So here apparently we have a clear cut case of top German military officers taking direct orders regarding an attack on Crimea – part of the Russian Federation – directly from American officers in the Pacific Air Forces.

That in itself opens the dossier to a large spectrum ranging from national treason (against Germany) to casus belli (from the point of view of Russia).

Of course none of that is being discussed on German mainstream media.

After all, the only thing that seems to disturb Brigadier General Gräfe is that German media may start seriously prying on the Bundeswehr’s Multiple Stooges methods.

The only ones who actually did proper investigation were Pohlmann and Augenbaun.

It would be too much to expect from German media of the “Bild” type to analyze what would be the Russian response to the Multiple Stooge shenanigans against Crimea: a devastating retaliation against Berlin assets.


It’s so cold in Alaska

During the jolly Bundeswehr conversation yet another “plan” is mentioned:

“Nee, nee. Ich mein wegen der anderen Sache.” (“No, no. I mean the other matter.”) Then: “Ähm … meinst du Alaska jetzt?” (“Ahm, you mean Alaska now?”)

It all gets juicier when it is known that German Space Command Air Operations Centre officer Florstedt will meet none other than Schneider next Tuesday, March 19, in Alaska.

And Gräfe will also “have to go back to Alaska” to explain everything all over again to Schneider as he is “new” in the post.

So the question is: Why Alaska?

Enter American shadowplay on a lot of “activities” in Alaska – which happen to concern none other than China.

And there’s more: during the conversation still another “plan” (“Auftrag”, meaning “mission”) also surfaces, bearing a not clearly understandable code name sounding like “Kumalatra”.

What all of that tells us is that the Crash Test Dummy administration in the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon seem to betting, in desperation, on Total War in the black soil of Novorossiya.

And now they are sayin’ it out loud, with no shadow play, and coming directly from the head of the CIA, William Burns, who obviously sucks at secrecy.

This is what Burns told the members of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this week:

“I think without supplemental assistance in 2024, you’re going to see more Avdeevkas, and that – it seems to me – would be a massive and historic mistake for the United States.”

That spells out how much the Avdeevka trauma is impressed on the psyche of the U.S. intel apparatus.

Yet there’s more: “With supplemental assistance, Ukraine can hold its own on the front lines through 2024 and into early 2025. Ukraine can continue to exact costs against Russia, not only with deep penetration strikes in Crimea, but also against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.”

Here we go: Crimea all over again.

Burns actually believes that the humongous $60 billion new “aid” package which must be approved by the U.S. Congress will enable Kiev to launch an “offensive” by the end of 2024.

The only thing he gets right is that if there’s no new package, there will be “significant territorial losses for Ukraine this year.”

Burns may not be the brightest bulb in the – intel – room. A long time ago he was a diplomat/CIA asset in Moscow, and seems to have learned nothing.

Apart from letting cats and kitties galore out of the bag. It’s not only about attacking Crimea. This one is being read with surpreme delight in Beijing:

“The U.S. is providing assistance to Ukraine in part because such activities help curb China.”

Burns nailed his Cat Out of the Bag Oscar win when he said “if we’re seen to be walking away from support for Ukraine, not only is that going to feed doubts amongst our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific; it’s going to stoke the ambitions of the Chinese leadership in contingencies ranging from Taiwan to the South China Sea”.

The inestimable Andrei Martyanov perfectly summed up the astonishing incompetence, peppered with tawdry exceptionalism, that permeates this performance by Burns.

There are things “they cannot grasp due to low level of education and culture. This is a new paradigm for them – all of them are ‘graduates’ of the school of ‘beating the crap from defenseless nations’ strategic ‘studies’, and with the level of economic ‘science’ in the West they cannot grasp how this all unfolds.”

So what is left is panic, as expressed by Burns in the Senate, mixed with the impotence in understanding a “different warrior culture” such as Russia’s: “They simply have no reference points.”

And still they choose war, as masterfully analyzed by Rostislav Ishchenko.

Even as the acronym fest of the CIA and 17 other U.S. intel agencies have concluded, in a report shown to Congress earlier this week, that Russia is “almost certainly” seeking to avoid a direct military conflict with NATO and will calibrate its policies to steer clear of a global war.

After all the Empire of Chaos is all about Forever Wars. And we are all in the middle of a do or die affair. The Empire simply cannot afford the cosmic humiliation of NATO in Novorossiya.

Still every “plan” – Taurus on Crimea-style – is a bluff. Russia is aware of bluff after bluff. The Western cards are now all on the table. The only question is when, and how fast will Russia call the bluff.

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

The Angst in the French Mind

Par : AHH — 15 mars 2024 à 17:36

The endless ennui and envy of those incapable of abandoning phantom pains. Most useful putty in the hands of Empire

By Ambassador MK Bhadrakumar at the Indian Punchline.

Ever since its ignominious defeat in the Napoleonic wars, France is entrapped in the predicament of countries that get sandwiched between great powers. Following World War II, France addressed this predicament by forging an axis with Germany in Europe.

Caught up in a similar predicament, Britain adapted itself to a subaltern role tapping into the American power globally but France never gave up its quest to regain glory as a global power. And it continues to be a work in progress.

The angst in the French mind is understandable as the five centuries of western dominance of the world order is drawing to a close. This predicament condemns France to a diplomacy that is constantly in a state of suspended animation interspersed with sudden bouts of activism.

But, for activism to be result-oriented, there are prerequisites needed such as the profiling of like-minded activist groups, leadership and associates and supporters and sympathisers — and, most important, sustainment and logistics. Or else, activism comes to resemble epileptic fits, an incurable affliction of the nervous system.

The French President Emmanuel Macron’s halcyon days in international diplomacy ended with the recent  dissolution of the Franco-German axis in Europe, which dated back to the Treaties of Rome in 1957. As Berlin sharply swerved to trans-atlanticism as its foreign-policy dogma, France’s clout diminished in European affairs. 

The stakes are high in the reconciliation meeting on Friday as Macron travels to Berlin to meet Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who not only snubbed him by ruling out the use of ground troops from European countries in the Ukraine war, but also digging in on Taurus missile issue arguing that it would entail assigning German staff in support to Ukraine, which, he announced on Wednesday in the Bundestag, is simply “out of the question” while he remained the chancellor. 

Of course, this is not to decry Macron’s formidable intellect — such as when he declared in a blunt interview in late 2019 with the Economist magazine that Europe stood on “the edge of a precipice” and needed to start thinking of itself strategically as a geopolitical power lest it will “no longer be in control of our destiny.” Macron’s prescient remark preceded the war in Ukraine by 3 years.

According to the newspaper Marianne, which interviewed several French soldiers, the military reportedly estimates that the Ukraine war is irretrievably lost already. Marianne quoted a senior French officer saying derisively, “We must make no mistake facing the Russians; we are an army of cheerleaders” and sending French troops to the Ukrainian front would simply be “not reasonable” . At the Élysée, an unnamed advisor argued that Macron “wanted to send a strong signal… (in) milli-metered and calibrated words”.

Marianne’s editor Natacha Polony wrote: “It is no longer about Emmanuel Macron or his postures as a virile little leader. It is no longer even about France or its weakening by blind and irresponsible elites. It is a question of whether we will collectively agree to sleepwalk into war. A war that no one can claim will be controlled or contained. It’s a question of whether we agree to send our children to die because the United States insisted on setting up bases on Russia’s borders.”

The big question is why Macron is doing this nonetheless — going to the extent of cobbling together a ‘coalition of the willing’ in Europe. A range of explanations is possible starting with Macron posturing and trying to earn political points at minimal cost, motivated by personal ambitions and intra-European friction with Berlin.

But then, until fairly recently, Macron was a supporter of dialogue with Moscow. The perception in most European capitals, including Moscow, is that Macron is making an attempt to bring the Ukrainian crisis to a new level by announcing western combat deployment against Russia  publicly as an obvious political manipulation.

The geopolitical salience is that Macron who once not too long ago called for dialogue with Moscow and offered his mediation in it, who made the famous declaration of a “Greater Europe” in 2019 and maintained contacts with Russian President Vladimir Putin thereof; who as of February last year, while speaking about Russia’s “certain defeat” in Ukraine, called for avoiding Moscow’s “humiliation”; who repeatedly underscored his commitment to the matrix of diplomacy attributed to Charles de Gaulle, which assigned France the role of a “bridge between East and West” — has now swung to the other extreme of harsh Euro-Atlantic rhetoric.

This appalling inconsistency can only be seen as stemming out of the unfavourable development of events in the scenario of the Ukrainian crisis with the prospect of a Russian defeat in the war no longer in the cards even remotely and replaced by the growing possibility that peace will ultimately be attainable only on Russia’s terms. Put differently, the power dynamic in Europe is shifting dramatically, which, of course, impacts Macron’s own ambitions to “lead Europe.”

Meanwhile, Russian-French relations have also been undergoing a stage of fierce competition and rivalry — even confrontation — in a number of areas. For a start,  French Foreign Minister Stephane Sejournet said in an interview with Le Parisien in January that Russia’s victory in Ukraine would lead to 30% of world wheat exports being controlled by Moscow. For Paris, this is a question of the sustainability of one of the key sectors of French national economy.

French agriculture is marked by its history that had its beginning with the Gaulois in 2000 BC. It needs to be understood that In modern history, French Revolution of 1789, which altered every part of the French social order and led to the abolition of privileges for upper classes, was also an Agricultural Revolution, which allowed a broad land redistribution. Suffice to say, the bond of French people to their agriculture is very strong.

As it is, African states are changing the structure of grain imports due to the technical regulations introduced by the European Union as part of its green agenda and French farmers consequently face rising costs, and over and above that, there is now also the looming loss of regional market share to Russia.

This is on top of the inroads Russia is making in arms exports to the African continent lately. In politico-military terms too, France has lost ground to Russia in the resource-rich Sahel region, its ex-colonies and playpen traditionally. The fact of the matter is that the birds are coming to roost over France’s neo-colonial strategies in Africa, but Paris prefers to put the blame on Russia’s Wagner group which has moved in to fill the security vacuum in Sahel region, as anti-French forces have come to power in several countries at once — Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, CAR.

In the best traditions of geopolitics, France has begun retaliating in regions sensitive to Russian interests — Armenia, Moldova and Ukraine where Russian military presence is in French crosshairs. Unsurprisingly, Ukraine is the most strategic turf where Macron hopes to achieve a bigger French presence.

Through that, Macron hopes to advance his leadership ambitions in Europe as the navigator of the EU’s foreign policy strategy in a wide arc from the African continent across the Mediterranean to Transcaucasia — and potentially all the way to Afghanistan.

All this is unfolding against the historic backdrop of an inevitable US retrenchment in Europe as Indo-Pacific hots up and the simmering rivalry with China becomes an all-consuming passion for Washington. Indeed, alongside, the towering presence of Russia across Europe is beginning to be felt intensely as it surges as the number one military and economic power in the strategic space between Vancouver and Vladivostok.

Today, the paradox is, then Russian president Dmitry Medvedev had proposed way back in 2008 a legally binding pan-European security treaty, which would develop a new security architecture in Europe, involving the reshaping of existing, and creating new institutions and norms regulating security relations in Europe in a wider geopolitical space stretching east “from Vancouver to Vladivostok.” But, alas, the US encouraged the Europeans to see the so-called ‘Medvedev Initiative’ as a trap to enfeeble NATO, the OSCE, the EU and other European bodies,  and reject that wonderful idea which would have anchored the post-cold war era firmly on a binding security architecture.

☐ ☆ ✇ STRATPOL

Les bureaux de vote ont ouvert pour l’élection présidentielle russe

Par : ActuStratpol — 15 mars 2024 à 08:59

election presidentielle

election presidentielleLe vote de trois jours pour l’élection présidentielle commence dans les régions de la Fédération de Russie – il aura

L’article Les bureaux de vote ont ouvert pour l’élection présidentielle russe est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

☐ ☆ ✇ STRATPOL

L’Arménie veut s’éloigner de la Russie pour se rapprocher de l’UE

Par : ActuStratpol — 15 mars 2024 à 08:57

armenie ue

armenie ueLe processus d’éloignement de l’Arménie de la Russie, et en même temps des alliances dont les deux pays sont encore

L’article L’Arménie veut s’éloigner de la Russie pour se rapprocher de l’UE est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

☐ ☆ ✇ STRATPOL

Stoltenberg reconnaît que des munitions de l’OTAN ont servi à attaquer la flotte russe en mer Noire

Par : ActuStratpol — 15 mars 2024 à 08:55

stoltenberg flotte

stoltenberg flotteLes munitions avec lesquelles les forces armées ukrainiennes ont attaqué la flotte de la mer Noire ont été fournies par

L’article Stoltenberg reconnaît que des munitions de l’OTAN ont servi à attaquer la flotte russe en mer Noire est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

Nuclear Forces

Par : AHH — 14 mars 2024 à 22:08

☐ ☆ ✇ STRATPOL

Macron s’en va en guerre…  (suite)

Par : Olivier CHAMBRIN — 14 mars 2024 à 17:56

Le président Macron harangue les troupes françaises déployées en Roumanie

Le président Macron harangue les troupes françaises déployées en RoumanieCertains éléments rendus publics permettent de préciser l’analyse des possibles conséquences de l’engagement de l’armée française directement contre les forces

L’article Macron s’en va en guerre…  (suite) est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

Nuland’s Policy Has Collapsed

Par : AHH — 14 mars 2024 à 17:44

The Drang continues after Nuland. Biden fully implements ziocon projects. A mere change in tack: “This is not over yet. This debate is not finished…” (9:20)

Nuland’s Policy Has Collapsed as Ukraine Lost it – Netanyahu Will Lose | Chas Freeman

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

Vladimir Putin on Russia’s Path Ahead

Par : AHH — 14 mars 2024 à 14:53

On the Cusp of Reelection and SMO Victory, Putin’s Interview with Rossiya Segodnya’s General Director Dmitry Kiselev

with thanks to Karl at karlof1’s Geopolitical Gymnasium.

With snippets all over Russian media as well as the 1:45 long video, the job fell to Dmitry Kiselev, the director general of Rossiya Segodnya, Sputnik’s parent media group. We get to read the translated transcript where all emphasis is mine:

Dmitry Kiselyov: Mr Putin, in your Address to the [Federal Assembly], you have, figuratively speaking, taken trillion after trillion out of your sleeve. Thus, we have proposed an absolutely amazing plan for the country’s development – absolutely amazing. This is a different Russia, with a different infrastructure, a different social system – just a dream country.

I just want to ask you, ask your favorite question from Vysotsky: “Where is the money, Zin?”

Vladimir Putin: Yes, of course.

What’s more, first of all, it’s all made up as a result of the painstaking work of the expert community, government specialists, and the Administration. Everything fully fits into the budget rules and, in fact, is quite conservative in nature, because some experts believe that there should be and will be more revenues. This means that it would be necessary to plan for more spending, because this should directly affect the prospects for economic development.

In general, it is correct, but we also planned to spend an additional $ 8 trillion on the development of the economy and social sphere in 2018, and then we increased these expenditures. I think that it is quite likely that if everything turns out as the optimists from this expert community, which I mentioned, say, then we can – and should, and will be able-to increase these costs in various areas.

Dmitry Kiselyov: So we are talking about a six-year period?

Vladimir Putin: Exactly so. We are talking about a six-year period. We are currently drawing up a budget for the “three-year” – a three-year, as we say, planning period. But, of course, when we were preparing for the Message – I say, “we were preparing for the Message”, because the whole team is working-we assumed that we would calculate our income and expenses in those areas that we consider key, priority areas for six years.

Dmitry Kiselyov: But still, there are literally stunning projects. For example, the Sochi-Dzhubga highway: 130 kilometers, of which 90 kilometers are tunnels, and the rest is probably bridges, judging by the landscape. One and a half billion in the first three years only, and the track should ideally be ready in 2030. How necessary is this and will it be enough to win?

Vladimir Putin: People need this route. After all, families with children can’t get to Sochi by car. Everyone stops somewhere in the area of Gelendzhik, Novorossiysk, because the track is very heavy – serpentine.

There are several construction options available. We will be discussing this in the next few days: either do it to Dzhubga, or first do it from Dzhubga to Sochi. Some members of the Government suggest doing this in stages. Others believe that you need to do everything at once, because otherwise there will be a narrow neck from Dzhubga to Sochi.

The first part, if you look from Novorossiysk, is more or less decent, and the coverage is not bad, but very narrow. If we do it before Sochi, as the first part, then there may be traffic jams in this small space, which is still enough there.

In general, we will determine this with our specialists – how, in what stages, but you need to do it. It is necessary to determine, of course, the final cost of the project, to ensure that everyone remains within the framework of financial plans.

First of all-the interests of people, but also the economy. The development of territories in the south of the country is very important.

Dmitry Kiselyov: If we can afford such large-scale investments, it means that the country is rapidly getting richer, especially in the conditions of free trade, in the conditions of almost 15 thousand sanctions-absolutely wild. Moreover, we also set ourselves the task of reducing poverty, including in large families. Isn’t that a little cheeky?

Vladimir Putin: No. See if you go back to this road. When I discussed it with members of the Government, as you know, the Finance Ministry is always such a miser, in a good way, and it is always very conservative about spending, even the Finance Minister [Anton Siluanov] he told me-almost verbatim: “The construction of this road is opposed by those who have never driven on it today.”

Dmitry Kiselyov: In other words, the entire Government should be moved.

Vladimir Putin: And he is right, because this is especially important for families with children.

As for whether we get rich or not. The economy is growing – this is a fact, and a fact that is recorded not by us, but by international economic and financial organizations. We have indeed overtaken the Federal Republic of Germany in terms of purchasing power parity, taking its place – the fifth place – among the world’s largest economies.

The German economy contracted, in my opinion, by 0.3 percent last year, while we grew by 3.6 percent. Japan grew by a small percentage. But if everything develops at the same pace as today, then we have every chance to take the place of Japan and become the fourth economy in the world, and in the near future.

But? – here we must be honest and objective – there is a difference between the quality of our economies. In terms of purchasing power parity, that is, in terms of volume, we are indeed now fifth, and there is every chance to take the place of Japan. But the structure of these countries ‘ economies, of course, differs favorably from ours.

We still have a lot to do to ensure that we have a decent position not only in terms of purchasing power parity, but also [in terms of GDP] per capita – the first. And the second thing is to change the structure itself, to make it much more efficient, more modern, and more innovative. That’s what we’ll be working on.

As for income, purchasing power parity is a very important indicator. This is the volume, the size of the economy. This means that the state receives funds for solving strategic tasks through the tax system at all levels. This gives us the opportunity to develop in the way we consider necessary for our country.

Dmitry Kiselyov:By the way, you are talking about the structure and the need for structural changes in our economy. After all, this is exactly what your Message said, and this is how the task is set: to ensure that innovative industries grow faster than the average economy.

Vladimir Putin: Yes, of course.

I have already said this: the structure is what we need to work on. The future of our economy, the future of our workforce, efficiency and productivity depend on this.

One of the main tasks today is to increase labor productivity. Because in the face of a shortage of workers and labor resources, we have only one way to develop effectively – to increase labor productivity. This, in turn, means that we must increase the innovative start of the economy, for example, increase the density of robotization. Today we have ten robots, in my opinion, for 10 thousand working people, but we need at least a thousand robots for 10 thousand working people. This is the case in Japan, in my opinion.

And in order for people to work on such new equipment – not only to use robotics, but also other modern means of production-they need to be trained. Another problem arises – training of personnel.

For this purpose, we have designated entire areas, including engineering training. You probably noticed that we have already launched 30 modern engineering schools across the country. This year we are launching 20 more-there will be 50. And we plan to add 50 more in the coming years.

Therefore, these areas are the future of our country. We will move forward and develop in these areas.

Dmitry Kiselyov: In order to “finish” the sanctions. Many people express the idea of creating a special body that would deal with sanctions, their reflection, in general, defense against sanctions. Is something like this supposed to happen, or does it make no sense?

Vladimir Putin: There is no need simply. We analyze-the Government, the Central Bank, the Security Council-everything that our enemies do. A lot of things are being done not even for political or military reasons, although they are argued for this, but simply for reasons of competition…

Dmitry Kiselyov: Unscrupulous and unfair competition.

Vladimir Putin: Unfair competition – under the guise of some political or military considerations. This was the case in the aircraft industry, and it is happening in so many other industries.

Well, we live in the world that exists, and we have adapted to it. We understand who we are dealing with. And so far, as can be seen from the results of our work, we are acting quite effectively.

Dmitry Kiselyov: But the West’s treachery is not limited to sanctions. Here is a quote from your address [to the Federal Assembly]: “The West is trying to drag us into a new arms race in order to exhaust and repeat the trick that they managed in the 80s with the USSR.” How big is our safety margin here in the face of an arms race, in fact?

Vladimir Putin: We need to get the maximum return on every ruble invested in the defense industry. Indeed, during the Soviet era, no one considered these costs, and no one, unfortunately, chased after efficiency in our country. Defense spending accounted for about 13 percent of the country’s GDP – the Soviet Union.

I will not refer to our statistics – we will refer to the Stockholm Institute: last year our defense spending was four percent, and this year-6.8, that is, we have grown by 2.8 percent. In principle, this is a noticeable increase, but absolutely uncritical. In the Soviet Union, it was 13 percent, and now we have 6.8 percent.

I must say that defense spending accelerates the economy, it makes it more energetic. But, of course, there are some limitations here, and we understand that. The age-old question: which is more profitable – guns or oil? We have this in mind.

Although, I repeat, the modern defense industry in our country is good because it not only indirectly affects civilian industries, but also uses the innovations needed for defense and uses these innovations to produce civilian products. This is an extremely important thing.

Our expenses, of course, are not comparable. How many in the United States are they? 800…

Dmitry Kiselyov: Under 900 already.

Vladimir Putin: Under 900 – 860 or 870 billion [dollars]. They are absolutely not comparable to our expenses.

Dmitry Kiselyov: It seems to me that they are sawing there, because they have no hypersound, nothing… What’s it?

Vladimir Putin: I’ll explain what’s going on. The fact is that they spend a lot of money on maintenance – and not only on salaries, but also on maintaining bases around the world. And there, as in a black hole, everything goes away – nothing can be counted. This is where the main cut is made. Although in the production of weapons of destruction, weapons in general are also spent such money that it is difficult to estimate.

If you calculate how much they cost, say, a missile defense system, and one of the main components of overcoming missile defense on our part-the Avangard, an intercontinental missile, and an intercontinental-range planning unit-then these are simply incomparable values. And we, in fact, nullified everything that they did, everything that they invested in this missile defense system. This is how you need to act.

And of course, without any doubt, the very economy of our Armed Forces must meet today’s requirements.

Dmitry Kiselyov: The word “justice” [справедливость] is a magic word for the Russian language. You use it very carefully, but still, one day you uttered this word in your Message – and it sounded like lightning. You said that the distribution of the tax burden should become more equitable in Russia, and suggested that the Government think about it. In what direction do you think?

Vladimir Putin: You know, indeed, the distribution of the tax burden should be fair in the sense that corporations, legal entities and individuals who earn more, in simple terms, should allocate more to the general treasury for solving national problems, primarily for solving problems related to combating poverty.

Dmitry Kiselyov: A progressive tax?

Vladimir Putin: Yes, in fact, a progressive tax.

I don’t want to go into details right now, but we need to work on it. And in this way, we need to build this system so that it really gives a great return on solving, first of all, social issues and tasks facing the state in this area.

We plan to reduce the tax burden, for example, for large families, and take a number of other steps in this direction. It seems to me that society will accept this absolutely normally. First.

Second. What does business itself ask of us? It asks us to decide on the tax system, but not to touch it again, so that it is stable. This is the most important request and requirement on the part of the business.

The Government should address this issue in the very near future and submit proposals together with the deputies of the State Duma.

Dmitry Kiselyov: A progressive tax – we won’t scare anyone off? We used to be always afraid of scaring someone off with this progressive tax.

Vladimir Putin: No, I don’t think so. In principle, we have established this system. Even those who were ardent supporters of the flat scale, the authors of the flat scale, now believe that in general we are ripe for acting much more selectively.

Dmitry Kiselyov: In the course of your address, you thanked your “colleagues from the Government” – this was the wording. Does this mean that Mishustin’s government – in the event of your victory-will be preserved?

Vladimir Putin: We still need to talk about this after the elections, after the votes are counted. It seems to me that this is simply incorrect right now. But in general, the Government is working – as we can see, the results are obvious, these are objective data-and it is working quite satisfactorily.

Dmitry Kiselyov: You mentioned reducing the tax burden for large families. Children and demographics – these topics were very extensive in your message. Indeed, the issue is quite painful, because demographically Russia is melting. Last year was an anti-record birth rate.

Vladimir Putin: I think the birth rate is 1.31 or 1.39…

Dmitry Kiselyov: 1.39 children per woman capable of giving birth.

Vladimir Putin: Childbearing age.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Ideally, we would probably need to double it to three. Because it is literally a disaster for society.

You have proposed a fairly large-scale program of maternity support and demographic incentives. Are you confident that these measures will reverse the downward-to-upward trajectory?

Vladimir Putin: In general, if we take into account all the measures to support families with children, we plan to spend up to 14 trillion rubles through various channels over the next six years. That’s a lot of money.

There are a lot of areas of support for families with children: starting from general social ones – construction or renovation of kindergartens, construction of new schools, repair of old schools, putting them in order in accordance with the requirements of today-to support women from pregnancy to the age of 18. After all, we have almost 400 thousand women now receiving benefits. This is almost every third woman who is expecting a child. And more than ten million children receive benefits. This is a serious thing.

We have continued the system of providing maternity capital. We have continued payments – these decisions are currently being made – in the amount of 450 thousand rubles per family, if there is a third child, to pay off the mortgage loan. We have retained mortgage benefits for families with children. In general, a whole set in very different areas in order to support families.

Of course, as you have already mentioned, this is also the fight against poverty, because, of course, it is much more difficult for families with children than for those with no children. This is understandable, the costs are high. Nevertheless, we have managed to do a lot in this area.

Look, 20 years ago we had, in my opinion, 29 percent of the population below the poverty line – that’s 42 million people. Now 9.3 percent, according to the latest data, but this is also 13 and a half million people. Of course, a lot. Of course, we need to do everything possible to reduce it to at least seven percent. And for large families-there is a more modest figure, but it should also be increased.

What do we assume when we talk about problems with the birth rate? I have already said it many times, and experts say it, these are objective things, namely: we had two very large declines in the birth rate. During the Great Patriotic War-1943-1944. A comparable decline occurred immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Just one to one, the same decline in the birth rate.

It is clear why: the social support system has collapsed. No matter how weak it was in the USSR, if you can talk about it, but still it was, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it disappeared almost completely, and poverty began to be complete. There’s no need to say anything right now. In any case, the family planning horizon declined during these years, and the birth rate fell before the war years. Then we had a climb. And now we have quite a large number of children, young people who will enter adulthood and childbearing age in a few years, and we assume that our indicators will also increase.

What you said is a global trend. There are only a few countries with developed economies that show positive demographic dynamics, while in all other countries everything goes into negative territory. This is a complex problem related to the economy and women’s life priorities. Now it is better not to go there, but let the demographers try, tell us and suggest a solution.

But do you know what sets you up for a positive mood? The mood in society. In our country, 70% of men and 72% of women want to have two or more children, and the state should support them. This is a whole large set of support measures that we are planning – We will definitely implement them, and we will do it.

Dmitry Kiselyov: But we are still not sure that these measures will turn the tide.

In the late 90’s-this is a well-known story, you told us about it yourself-you saved your children from a fire: you entered a burning house, on the second floor. And then they remembered that there was still money somewhere. Money in the fire and burned. This indicates your priorities: first-children, then-money.

Maybe now it’s the same across the country? Not 14 [trillions], but directly on everything, and create such a program to guarantee a reversal of this situation?

Vladimir Putin: You know, you need to watch this in the course of events, as they say. In the early 2000s, we took a number of steps in the field of demography, including the introduction of maternity capital and a number of other measures that gave an obvious positive result. This means that we can achieve the goals we need.

Dmitry Kiselyov: So there is such an experience?

Vladimir Putin: There is experience, of course, there is experience. And, using this experience and other modern developments, we should still count on achieving the goals that we set for ourselves. And as events unfold, we will adjust those measures or add something else to the measures that we will apply.

For example, we have just announced the Year of the Family. We have a new national project – “Family”. There are some elements that we have never used before. For example, 75 billion [rubles] will be allocated to those regions where the birth rate is lower than the national average. These are mainly the central regions of Russia and the North-West. 75 billion is a decent amount of money. You just need to use them correctly.

There is also such a component as caring for the elderly. There are other support measures. We need to raise the birth rate and increase life expectancy – then we will stabilize the country’s population. This is the most important integral indicator of our success or, perhaps, work that requires additional attention from all administrative levels and authorities.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Yes, but everywhere in the world there is also a third tool for solving demographic problems – immigration. What figures can we talk about in this six-year period, and what does consistency mean in this work?

Vladimir Putin: If we talk about migrant workers, we don’t have so many immigrants compared to other countries – they make up 3.7 percent of the total number of employees. But they are concentrated in those regions where economic life is most active, and there, of course, they are much more numerous. These are the Moscow region, Moscow, the North-Western region and some regions of the North where the level of wages is decent. But, without any doubt, this is an issue that requires special attention from the authorities-both local, regional, and federal.

What would you like to say here? A very important thing. After all, when they attract labor migrants, they always talk about the need to do this due to a shortage of workers. Our entrepreneurs should understand that the situation for them in terms of the availability of workers will not change for the better in the coming years – they will face a shortage of labor.

This means that in order to solve this problem radically – and now I will return to what we have already said – we need to increase labor productivity and reduce the number of employees in those areas where it is possible to do this, achieving even better results by introducing modern equipment. To do this, we need to invest in this area and train personnel – we have also already discussed this. This is the most important thing we need to think about.

In general, of course, migration policy is an important tool in the economy. Here it is not a sin to look at the experience of other countries. First of all, of course, we need to talk about the repatriation of our compatriots. What is repatriation and what is compatriots-we have already reflected in the regulatory framework, there is no need to repeat here.

We need to talk about attracting people who may not be going to move to the Russian Federation, but because of their qualifications, because of their talents in various fields, they can make a significant contribution to the development of our state, to the development of Russia. We will also be happy to attract such people.

As for traditional labor migrants, we also need to think about how to prepare them for coming to Russia, including with our partners in the countries where they live. This is the study of the Russian language, our traditions, culture, and so on. We need them to be taken care of and treated like a human being. So that they integrate naturally into our society. All this together should give a corresponding, I hope, positive effect.

Yes, and, of course, everyone should observe our traditions and the laws of the Russian Federation. And of course, compliance with sanitary standards and so on is very much in demand. Ensuring the safety of citizens of the Russian Federation should be the first priority.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Russians are probably the biggest divided nation in the world. You had a conversation with the “Leaders of Russia”, and one of your interlocutors said that in the Zaporozhye region we found that they are as Russian as we are. And for them-there was such an impression – it sounded like a revelation. In general, this is true, and we are now growing with new regions, and Odessa is a Russian city. Probably, there is great hope here, in this direction, too?

Vladimir Putin: Of course. The population density in these regions has always been quite high, and the climate is wonderful.

As for the Donbass, it is an industrially developed region-back in the days of the Soviet Union. How much the Soviet Union has invested in this region, in its coal mining industry, in the metallurgical industry! Yes, of course, investments are required to ensure that all production is modern, and that people’s living and working conditions are completely different from what they were a couple of decades ago.

As for Novorossiya, it is a region with a pronounced developed agriculture. Here we will do everything possible to support both traditional areas of activity and new ones that fit seamlessly into these regions and people’s desire to develop them. And there, you know, people are very talented.

Moreover, as I have already said, even taxes go to the federal budget from there. Yes, they need to be helped, supported, and brought to the national and federal Russian level at this stage. They will work, and very quickly.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Historically, it is quite obvious that the Nazi regimes themselves do not dissolve, but disappear as a result of military defeat. So it was in Germany, in Italy, in Japan. The same thing will obviously happen with Bandera’s Nazi regime. We are now moving along the entire front line, according to reports from both the Ministry of Defense and our war correspondents.

Still, did we manage to find a way to fight when our losses are less in the offensive than in the defense? This task is quite non-trivial for the art of war, but it always holds back the offensive. This is a frugality that is absolutely justified in relation to our hero warriors. But this question arises: how to move forward with minimal losses?

Vladimir Putin: The question is clear and fair. But the answer is also simple: we need to increase the means of destruction – the number and power of means of destruction, and increase the effectiveness of the forces and means used. Aviation – both tactical, and army, and the same strategic. I mean, of course, in those components that are acceptable for armed conflicts of this kind. These are ground-based weapons, including high-precision weapons. These are artillery and armored vehicles. We are developing, without any exaggeration, by leaps and bounds.

Dmitry Kiselyov: In this direction?

Vladimir Putin: Yes, it does. This is the answer to your question: the more powerful and more weapons-the less losses.

Dmitry Kiselyov: But the question still arises, what price are we willing to pay – perhaps the word “project” is not appropriate – for all this challenge that we have been forced to face historically?

Vladimir Putin: Look, every human life is priceless. And the loss of a loved one for a family, for any family, is a huge grief.

But the question is what? The question is to determine the very fact of what we are doing. What are we doing? We met today, and you have just noticed that one of the participants in the conversation said: we were surprised to find that there were Russians just like us. We came to the aid of these people. This is basically the answer to your question.

If we abandon these people today, then tomorrow our losses may increase many times, and our children will have no future, because we will feel insecure, we will be a third-or fourth-class country, no one will take us into account if we cannot protect ourselves. And the consequences can be disastrous for Russian statehood. That’s the answer.

Dmitry Kiselyov: The Americans seem to be talking about negotiations and strategic stability, but at the same time they are saying that it is necessary to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. Our position sounds like: “We are open to negotiations, but the time for good gestures has passed, they are over.” So, there will be no negotiations?

Vladimir Putin: We have never refused to negotiate.

Dmitry Kiselyov: But how does it mean that without good gestures, there is no compromise? How then?

Vladimir Putin: I’ll try to explain. When we were negotiating in Turkey, in Istanbul (I have already said this many times, I must repeat it again, I will do it again), with the negotiators from that side, we came up with a thick folio, a document, in fact, a contract, a draft contract. An excerpt from this agreement is available, it was initialed by the head of the negotiation group from Ukraine, Mr. Arakhamiya. He did it, there is his signature (we have it in the Administration). But then, as you know, Mr. Arakhamia himself told the world publicly, also at a meeting, in my opinion, with journalists, with foreign partners: the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, Mr. Johnson, came and dissuaded them from finally signing and, accordingly, fulfilling this agreement. And the topic that you have just mentioned is that Russia needs to be defeated on the battlefield.

Are we ready to negotiate? Yes, we are ready. But only we are ready for negotiations that are not based on some “wishlist” after the use of psychotropic drugs, but based on the realities that have developed, as they say in such cases, on earth. This is the first one.

Second. After all, we have already been promised many things many times. They promised not to expand NATO to the East, and then we see them at our borders. They promised, if we don’t go deep into history, that the internal conflict in Ukraine will be resolved by peaceful means, by political means. As we recall, three foreign ministers arrived in Kiev, Poland, Germany and France, promised that they would be the guarantors of these agreements, and a day later a coup d’etat took place. They promised to fulfill the Minsk agreements, and then publicly stated that they were not going to fulfill these promises, but only took a pause to arm the Bandera regime in Ukraine. We were promised a lot of things, so promises alone are not enough here.

Right now, to negotiate just because they are running out of ammunition is somehow ridiculous on our part. Nevertheless, we are ready for a serious conversation, and we want to resolve all conflicts, and especially this conflict, by peaceful means. But we must clearly understand for ourselves that this is not a pause that the enemy wants to take for rearmament, but a serious conversation with the security guarantees of the Russian Federation.

We know the various options in question, we know the “carrots” that are going to be shown to us in order to convince us that the moment has come. We want, I repeat once again, to resolve all disputes and this dispute, this conflict, by peaceful means. And we are ready for it, we want it. But this should be a serious conversation with ensuring security for the opposing side, and in this case we are primarily interested in the security of the Russian Federation. We will proceed from this.

Dmitry Kiselyov:Mr President, I think we look a little too noble. Can’t we conclude something with them, and they will once again deceive us, and we will console ourselves with the fact that we are honest, and they deceived us? Is it our fate, after all, to remain a fool all the time?

Americans minted their own medals in the 1990s for winning the Cold War, and since then, all those decades have been decades of big lies. How can we even hope that they will go and finally conclude a fair contract with us, which they will fulfill, and even with guarantees for us? I do not know what to do with them at all? Do you really believe this is possible?

Vladimir Putin: ****I hate to say this, but I don’t believe anyone.****

Dmitry Kiselyov: Yes.

Vladimir Putin: But we need guarantees. Guarantees must be written down, they must be such that we would be satisfied, in which we will believe. That’s what we’re talking about.

Now, it is probably premature to publicly talk about what it could have been. But we certainly won’t buy into any empty promises.

Dmitry Kiselyov: I am afraid that you will be quoted in an extended way. Do you not trust anyone at all, or do you mean your Western partners in this case when you say that you don’t trust anyone?

Vladimir Putin: I prefer to be guided by facts, rather than good wishes and talk about trusting everyone. After all, you know, when decisions are made at this level, the degree of responsibility for the consequences of the decisions made is very high. Therefore, we will not do anything that does not meet the interests of our country.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Mr President, what happened to Macron? Has he lost his mind at all? He is going to send the French troops to fight with our army, he looks like a Gallic fighting rooster, thereby scaring all the Europeans. Still, how to respond to this?

Vladimir Putin: The fact is that the military of Western countries has been present in Ukraine for a long time, even before the coup, they were present, and after the coup, their number increased many times. Now they are also present directly in the form of advisers, they are present in the form of foreign mercenaries and suffer losses. But if we are talking about official military contingents of foreign countries, I am sure that this will not change the situation on the battlefield – this is the most important thing, just as the supply of weapons does not change anything.

Second, it can lead to serious geopolitical consequences. Because if, say, Polish troops enter the territory of Ukraine, as it sounds, to cover the Ukrainian-Belarusian border, for example, or in some other places, to free up Ukrainian military contingents to participate in combat operations on the contact line, then I think that Polish troops will never leave there again. I think so. They sleep and see, they want to return those lands that they consider historically their own and that were taken from them by the “father of nations” Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin and transferred to Ukraine. They want them back, of course. And if official Polish units enter there, they are unlikely to leave.

But then their example can be followed by other countries that lost part of their territories as a result of the Second World War. I think that the geopolitical consequences for Ukraine, even from the point of view of preserving its statehood in its modern form, will certainly stand up in all its glory and in full growth.

Dmitry Kiselyov: If we return to Macron, maybe he decided to take revenge on Russia in this way because we “stepped on his tail” in Africa, and we had to “stand there, be afraid”? He probably didn’t expect us to be so active there.

Vladimir Putin: Yes, I think there is some resentment, but when we maintained direct contacts, we spoke quite frankly about this topic.

We didn’t go into Africa and squeeze France out. The problem is different. The well-known Wagner group first carried out a number of economic projects in Syria, then moved to other African countries. The Ministry of Defense provides support, but only on the basis of the fact that this is a Russian group, nothing more. We didn’t squeeze anyone out. It’s just that the African leaders of some countries agreed with Russian economic operators, wanted to work with them, and did not want to work with the French in any way. It wasn’t even our initiative, it was an initiative on the part of our African friends.

If an independent state wants to develop relations with its partners from other countries, including Russia, and wants to develop relations with Russia, it is not clear why it should take offense at us in this regard. We didn’t touch them, the former French colonialists, in these countries. I even say this without irony, because in many countries where France has historically been a metropolis, they don’t really want to deal with them. We have nothing to do with it. It’s probably more convenient to take offense at someone without seeing your own problems. Perhaps such a sharp, rather emotional reaction on the part of the French President is also related to what is happening in some African states.

Although I know other countries in Africa, where they are calm about the French stay and say that ” yes, we are satisfied, we are ready to work with them.” But in some countries they don’t want to. We have nothing to do with it. We don’t incite anyone there, we don’t incite anyone against France.

We do not set ourselves such tasks. To be honest, we do not have such nationwide tasks at the level of the Russian state. We’re just friends with them, that’s all. They want to develop relations with us – for God’s sake, and we meet them halfway. There’s nothing to be offended about.

Dmitry Kiselyov: But now they are saying in France that there are no “red lines” left in relation to Russia, and nothing is impossible, and everything is possible. In general, they want to somehow talk to us on the basis of a balance of power. What we just do not hear from France, from the West, and from Lithuania. In general, some such choir is not harmonious, but hostile.

Maybe we should also make unconventional decisions and at some point turn to the two-million-strong North Korean army for help? For example, in exchange for our “nuclear umbrella” over half of the Korean Peninsula? Why not then?

Vladimir Putin: First, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has its own “nuclear umbrella”. They didn’t ask us for anything. This is the first one.

Second. In principle, as we can see today from the results of what is happening on the battlefield, we are coping with the tasks that we set for ourselves.

As for those states that say that they have no “red lines” in relation to Russia, they should understand that there will be no “red lines”in relation to these states in Russia either.

As for the small states of Europe, first of all, we treat everyone with respect, no matter what. Secondly, when they, these small states, call for a tougher policy towards Russia and take some extreme measures, including, for example, to send troops and so on, these are still those states, and they understand this, that will not feel the consequences of their provocative statements. And those who can feel it, they behave much more restrained. And correctly.

Dmitry Kiselyov: And all those German dances with Taurus? Scholz says “we do not supply”, but there are forces that insist on delivering Taurus to Ukraine, the British take their own initiative: let’s, they say, transit through England, we are ready to send. The target is the Crimean Bridge, German generals are already planning operations, as we have heard, not only the Crimean Bridge, but also military bases, as they say, in the depths of Russian territory. Some are already saying that these missiles can hit the Kremlin. Don’t they really bury themselves in their dreams?

Vladimir Putin: They fantasize, encourage themselves, first of all. Secondly, they are trying to intimidate us.

As for Germany, there are also constitutional problems there. They are right to say that if the Taurus gets into that part of the Crimean Bridge, which, of course, even according to their concepts is Russian territory, this is a violation of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The fact is that the opposition in Germany is behaving even more aggressively. Let’s see what they agree on. We are following this closely. They use the same British, American missiles. It doesn’t change the situation on the battlefield. Yes, they are causing us, of course, damage, this is obvious. But, in fact, this does not change the course of hostilities and the consequences that inevitably come for the opposite side.

We now hear that in the same Germany, both your channels, and foreign channels, German channels show how much they have, how much is in a faulty state, how much needs to be improved, upgraded, and so on. Let them work. As you correctly said, there are some things they need to think about. Who is smarter, he thinks.

Dmitry Kiselyov: But the new members of NATO – Finland and Sweden, in general, what did they exchange for? Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom suddenly told the Turks that Sweden is against having NATO bases on Swedish territory. What, they didn’t understand where they were going at all? What happened to them?

Vladimir Putin: You should ask them, I do not know. We have had quite good relations, stable relations with these countries, and I think that they have benefited more from the fact that they are neutral, because this gives certain advantages, at least as a negotiating platform to reduce tensions in Europe.

In general, we had perfect relations with Finland, just perfect. We did not have a single claim to each other, especially territorial, not to mention other areas. We didn’t even have any troops, we removed all the troops from there, from the Russian-Finnish border. Why did they do this? Based, in my opinion, on purely political considerations. I probably really wanted to be members of a Western club, under some kind of “umbrella”. Frankly, I don’t understand why they need it. This is an absolutely senseless step from the point of view of ensuring our own national interests. Nevertheless, it is up to them to decide, they have decided so.

We didn’t have any troops there, now we will. There were no defense systems there, now they will appear. What for? Our economic relations were very good. They used our market, and we bought a lot from them. What’s wrong with that? But now the situation will change. With their many products in other markets, they are not really needed, and ours do not receive enough. I don’t understand.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Meanwhile, in the United States, the war is raging.…

Vladimir Putin: You know, this is a household item, but nevertheless. In recent years, both Helsinki and the border regions of Finland have accepted Russian rubles. Including in Helsinki, in large supermarkets, you could buy whatever goods you wanted for rubles. There are all the ads around in Russian.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Now the border region is simply going bankrupt.

Vladimir Putin: Yes. What am I talking about? On the other hand, from the point of view of the economy, it is very good – real estate prices were kept at a fairly good level. From the point of view of the economy, it is good, but there were, apparently, forces that were completely right-wing conservative, nationalist, who did not really like it – such a rapprochement with Russia. Some even considered it redundant: “What are Russian houses and apartments being bought for? Everything here is in Russian…”

I don’t even think so, I know that such Russophobia has started to grow up at the everyday level. Maybe some political forces inside the country decided to take advantage of this domestic roll, maybe. The whole combination of these factors led to this decision. I think so, but I can’t be 100 percent sure. In any case, this certainly does not improve the security situation in any way – both in bilateral relations and in Europe as a whole.

Dmitry Kiselyov: But in the meantime, the United States is actively running for president. It can’t do without you. You invisibly participate in it, because you are mentioned by each of the candidates from the Republican and Democratic parties in their speeches and arguments. In general, it seems that you do not leave the pages of newspapers and TV news headlines there and are an argument in the election campaign of everyone. And you’re adding fuel to the fire.

Vladimir Putin: How is that?

Dmitry Kiselyov: Saying that one of the candidates is preferable for us. But if a foreign president generally says that one of the candidates in another country is preferable, then this is a classic interference in the election. In general, to what extent do you interfere in the American elections in this way, saying that Biden is preferable to us? And in general, how much is it so? Is this trolling or even what is it?

Vladimir Putin: No, you know, I will tell you one thing that will show you that nothing changes in my preferences here. First.

Second. We do not interfere in any elections and, as I have said many times, we will work with any leader who has the confidence of the American people, the American electorate.

But here’s what’s interesting. Even in the last year of his term as President, Mr. Trump, today’s presidential candidate, reproached me just because I sympathize with Biden. That was more than four years ago. He told me so in one of the conversations. Excuse me, I’ll say it like him, it’s just a direct speech: “You want sleeping Joe to win.

He told me so when he was still President. And then, to my surprise, he was harassed for allegedly supporting him as a candidate. Well, some complete nonsense.

As for the current pre-election situation, it is becoming increasingly uncivilized. I don’t want to make any comments on that.

But I think it is obvious to everyone that the American political system cannot claim to be democratic in every sense of the word.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Actually, to be honest, your preference for Biden sounds rather strange to me personally. After all, Biden came to Moscow in 2011 and tried to persuade you not to run for president.

Do you remember this story? Then he told about it, meeting with the Russian opposition in Spaso House. And Garry Kasparov wrote about this, that Biden told this story, that he came to the Russian White House to Prime Minister Putin and tried in every possible way to dissuade him from running for President and began to build an “Arab spring” in our country. So Biden didn’t seem to like you very much back then. You have such a historic duel with him. Or did it just go away?

Vladimir Putin: To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention to this.

Dmitry Kiselyov: It’s over, isn’t it? You didn’t even pay much attention to it.

Vladimir Putin: Some kind of duel…

Dmitry Kiselyov: So it was serious for him, but not for you.

Vladimir Putin: This is just a sign of interference…

Dmitry Kiselyov: Yes, this is a 100 percent outright intervention.

Vladimir Putin: … in our domestic political processes. We have already spoken many times, and I have spoken many times: “We will not allow anyone to do this.”

Dmitry Kiselyov: All right.

If we avoid interference, pre-election battles, in fact, the escalation continues. It seems that both superpowers-Russia and the United States – are playing what in America is called the chicken game: this is when chickens jump on each other, and there it is a game when guys in cars fly into each other’s heads, and who will turn first. It seems that no one is going to turn off first. So, a collision is inevitable?

Vladimir Putin: Why not? Here in the United States, they announced that they are not going to send troops. We know what American troops are like on Russian territory. These are the interventionists. We will treat it this way, even if they appear on the territory of Ukraine, they understand this. I said that Biden is a representative of the traditional political school, and this is confirmed. But in addition to Biden and others, there are enough specialists in the field of Russian-American relations and in the field of strategic deterrence.

So I don’t think it’s all so head-on here. But we are ready for this. I have said many times that this is a matter of life and death for us, but for them it is a matter of improving their tactical position in general in the situation in the world, but also in Europe in particular, preserving their status among their allies. This is also important, but not as important as it is for us.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Interestingly, you said that we are ready for this. The philosopher Alexander Dugin, a specialist in geopolitics, calls directly and practically to prepare for a nuclear war. “And the better we are prepared for it, the less likely such a war is,” says Alexander Dugin. How can you even be prepared for this? Are we really ready for nuclear war?

Vladimir Putin: From a military-technical point of view, we are certainly ready. They [the troops] are constantly in a state of combat readiness. This is the first one.

Second. This is also a generally accepted thing – our nuclear triad is more modern than any other triad, and only we and the Americans really have such a triad.

We have made much more progress here. We have it more modern, all the nuclear component. In general, we have approximate parity in terms of carriers and charges, but we have a more modern one.

Everyone knows this, all the experts know it. But this does not mean that we should measure the number of carriers and warheads, but we need to know about this. And I repeat, those who need it – experts, specialists, and the military-are well aware of this.

They are now setting a task to increase this modernity, novelty, and they have corresponding plans. We know that too. They develop all their components, and so do we. But this does not mean that, in my opinion, they are ready to unleash this nuclear war tomorrow. If they want to, what should I do? We are ready.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Perhaps we should conduct nuclear tests at some point to be more convincing. After all, we have no international restrictions for this.

Vladimir Putin: There is a treaty banning such tests, but unfortunately the United States has not ratified it. Therefore, in order to maintain parity, we have withdrawn this ratification. Since the treaty has not been ratified by the United States, and it has not entered into final force, because it has not received the necessary number of ratifications, nevertheless, we adhere to these agreements.

We know that the United States is considering conducting such tests. This is due to the fact that when new warheads appear, as some experts believe, it is not enough to test them only on a computer, which means that they need to be tested in their natural form. Such ideas are floating around in certain circles in the United States, they have a place to be, we know about it.

And we’re watching, too. If they conduct such tests, I don’t rule it out, not necessarily, we need it or not, we still need to think about it, but it is possible that we can do the same.

Dmitry Kiselyov: But are we technically ready for this?

Vladimir Putin: Yes, we are always ready. I want to make it clear that these are not ordinary types of weapons, this is the type, branch of the armed forces that is in constant combat readiness.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Mr President, did you ever think about tactical nuclear weapons during the difficult times of last year, I do not know, at the front in connection with Kharkiv or Kherson?

Vladimir Putin: And why? It was also at the suggestion of the then command of the group that we decided to withdraw our troops from Kherson. But this did not mean that the front was falling apart there. Nothing like this has ever happened before. It was simply done in order not to incur unnecessary losses among the personnel. That’s all. This was the most important motive, because in the conditions of combat operations, when it was impossible to fully supply the group located on the right bank, we would simply suffer unjustified losses of personnel. Because of this, it was decided to relocate to the left bank.

The correctness of this choice was confirmed by what the Ukrainian command tried to do in certain areas of the left bank, in the same village of Krynki: just like in a meat grinder, they threw their people there, and that’s all. They’ve been running around barefoot lately, in the truest sense of the word. They tried to throw ammunition to them there by high-speed boats and drones. What is it? Just to be slaughtered, sent to be slaughtered.

I once asked the Chief of the General Staff, there is nothing secret here, I said: “Listen, who do you think makes such decisions from the other side? After all, the one who makes the decision understands that he sends people to their deaths?” He says, ” They understand.” I say, ” Who makes the decision, why do they do it? It’s pointless.” “Meaningless from a military point of view.” I say, ” Which one?” “I don’t know,” he says, ” probably the top political leadership, based on political considerations, that they have some chance to break through our defenses, there is some chance to get additional money, referring to the fact that they have some kind of foothold on the left bank, there is some kind of base, this is a chance to present your position beautifully at international meetings.” The command has passed, all lower-level bosses automatically issue further instructions.

But, by the way, the prisoners who were captured there surrendered, they show that they did not even know what situation they were in. Let’s say that new units are being deployed there and they say: “There is a stable defense there, come on, continue, help.” They couldn’t even get to the left bank anymore.

Dmitry Kiselyov: A tragedy.

Vladimir Putin: It’s natural. From a human point of view, absolutely.

So why do we need to use weapons of mass destruction? There has never been such a need.

Dmitry Kiselyov: So this idea never occurred to you?

Vladimir Putin: No. And why? Weapons exist to be used. We have our own principles, what are they talking about? That we are ready to use weapons, including any weapon, including the one you mentioned, if we are talking about the existence of the Russian state, about harming our sovereignty and independence. We have everything spelled out in our Strategy. We didn’t change it.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Mr Putin, when outgoing President Yeltsin suggested that you run for president, your first reaction was: “I’m not ready.”

Vladimir Putin: That’s right, it’s a direct speech.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Of course, you have evolved a lot since then. If you had to write a telegram to yourself at that time, what text would it contain?

Vladimir Putin: You know, it’s like “Yankees at King Arthur’s Court” or something like that. It is impossible to answer this question, because the question was asked at that time, in the context of the historical and economic situation in which the country was located, in the internal political situation from the point of view of internal security. And all of this together led me to the answer I gave: “I’m not ready for this.” Not because I was afraid of something, but because the scale of the tasks was huge, and the number of problems increased every day like a snowball. So I said it sincerely and not because, I repeat, I was afraid of something, but because I thought that I was not ready to solve all these problems, God forbid, I would do something even worse. That’s what it was all about. So I said it absolutely sincerely, and if I came back, I would repeat the same thing.

Dmitry Kiselyov: What was the decisive factor then? You went after all.

Vladimir Putin: I think I’ve had some conversations with Boris Nikolayevich.

Most importantly, in the end, what did he say to me back then: “Okay, okay, I understand, we’ll get to that later.” And we’ve come back to this several times.

In the end, he said that I was an experienced person, I knew what I was doing, what I was offering, and he said some other things to me. Probably, it is inconvenient to praise yourself, but I said such positive words. Later, he confirmed this again, this time in a completely positive way, I will not talk about it now.

And when the work started, everything was completely different there. You know, when you work, you think: this, this, this is what you need right now, this is now, this is tomorrow – and it went, and it went. When you get involved in a job, it’s a completely different story.

Dmitry Kiselyov: There is no time to be afraid already.

Vladimir Putin: Yes, it’s not about fears, but about understanding, about being able to solve these problems. Remember for yourself what the year 1999 is like in the economy, security, finance, and everything else.

Dmitry Kiselyov: You once said that preparing for admission to Leningrad University was a turning point for you. It was a situation where you had to go all-in, knowing: either I will do it now and I will manage, and then I will carry out the plans that I want (and you were already going to work in the KGB), or I lost, and then everything is different and there are no chances. Is Russia now also in a position where it is necessary to play all-in?

Vladimir Putin: First of all, I didn’t have such a position then. Yes, I wanted to work in the state security agencies.

Dmitry Kiselyov: It was the admission, it was such a turning point, it’s a feeling, isn’t it? Either this or that?

Vladimir Putin: Not quite. I just came to the waiting room and said: “I would like to work. What is needed for this?”

The alternative was simple: I was told that I either need to get a higher education, and preferably a law degree, or serve in the army, or have at least three years of work experience, but it is better to serve in the army. If I hadn’t gone to university, I would have joined the army.

Yes, it might have been a longer way to reach the goal that I set for myself, but it was still there. There is always an alternative.

Dmitry Kiselyov: But you did it with tension.

Vladimir Putin: Yes, of course, because I was still studying at a school with a chemical and mathematical bias, and here I had to take humanities subjects. I had to leave one thing and do another.

Yes, of course, there was tension. It was necessary to learn a foreign language independently, German in this case, it was necessary to study history, literature, and so on.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Russia is also at a crossroads right now: either it turns out, or…

Vladimir Putin: ***Russia is not at a crossroads. It is on the strategic path of its development and will not deviate from its path.***

Dmitry Kiselyov: To what extent do you feel the support of the Russian society in this new capacity? After all, a new quality of Russian society has emerged.

Vladimir Putin: It was there, it just showed up. And it is very good that we have given this deep Russian society an opportunity to express itself. I have a feeling that people have been waiting for this for a long time, that an ordinary person will be in demand by the country and the state, and the fate of the country depends on him. It is this sense of inner connection with the Motherland, with the Fatherland, its importance in solving key tasks, in this case in the field of security, that has brought to the surface the strength of the Russian and other peoples of Russia.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Do you feed off of it?

Vladimir Putin: Always. The point is not even that someone feeds, the point is that I see the requests of society. This is the most important thing – to meet the needs of society.

Dmitry Kiselyov: But it is time to recognize that you play a key role not only in Russia, but also in the world, because billions of people associate you with the hope for international justice, for the protection of human dignity, and for the protection of traditional values. How does it feel to feel so much responsibility?

Vladimir Putin: To tell you the truth, I don’t feel it at all. I just work in the interests of Russia, in the interests of our people. Yes, I understand what you are talking about now, and I am ready to comment on it. But so that I feel like some kind of arbiter of the world’s destinies, there is no such thing. Believe me, not even close. I’m just doing my duty to Russia and to our people, who consider Russia their homeland.

As for other countries of the world, this is very closely related to how we are treated around the world. That’s interesting. It’s a phenomenon, that’s for sure.

What I would like to draw your attention to. Here you are absolutely right, many people in the world look at us, at what is happening in our country and in our struggle for our interests.

That, in my opinion, is what is important. And why is this happening? Not because we are formally members of BRICS or have any traditional relations with Africa. This is also important, but the point, in my opinion, is completely different. It lies in the fact that this so-called golden billion for centuries, 500 years, practically parasitized other peoples. They tore apart the unfortunate peoples of Africa, they exploited Latin America, they exploited the countries of Asia, and of course no one has forgotten it. I have a feeling that it is not even a matter of the leadership of these countries, although this is very important, and ordinary citizens of these countries feel in their hearts what is happening.

They associate our struggle for our independence and true sovereignty with their aspirations for their own sovereignty and independent development. But this is compounded by the fact that there is a very strong desire among Western elites to freeze the existing unfair state of affairs in international affairs. They have been used to stuffing their bellies with human flesh and their pockets with money for centuries. But they must understand that the vampire ball is ending.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Are you alluding to their, as you put it in your address, colonial ways? You’re talking about it.

Vladimir Putin: That’s what happens.

Dmitry Kiselyov: But now you have drawn a completely fair picture when people see some hope in Russia. How did it happen that Western propaganda, with all its power, its enormous resources and tools, could not pupate Russia, isolate it and create a false image of it, even though it was trying in the minds of billions of people? How did this happen?

Vladimir Putin: Because what I just said is more important to people. People all over the world feel this in their hearts. They don’t even need any pragmatic explanations for what is happening.

Dmitry Kiselyov: That is, despite the amount of dirt?

Vladimir Putin: Yes. In their own countries, they also fool people, and this has an effect. They – in many countries-believe that this is in their interests, because they do not want to have such a huge country as Russia on their borders. The largest in the world in terms of territory, the largest in Europe in terms of population – not such a large population in the global dimension, not comparable to either China or India, but the largest in Europe – and now the fifth largest economy in the world. Why do we need such a competitor? They think: no, it is better, as some American experts suggested, to divide it into three, four, or five parts – this will be better for everyone. They proceed from this.

And some, at least, of the Western elites, blinded by their Russophobia, were happy when they brought us to the line after which our attempts to end the war unleashed by the West in Ukraine in 2014 by force began, when we moved to conduct a special military operation. They were even happy, I think. Because they thought that now they would finish us off, and now under this barrage of sanctions, practically a sanctions war declared on us, with the help of Western weapons and a war by the hands of Ukrainian nationalists, they would finish Russia off. Hence the slogan: “Inflict a strategic defeat on Russia on the battlefield.”

But later came the realization that this was unlikely, and even later that it was impossible. And the realization came that instead of strategic defeat, they were facing impotence, and impotence, despite the fact that they relied on the power of the all-powerful United States. They are faced with impotence before the unity of the Russian people, before the fundamental foundations of the Russian financial and economic system, its stability, and before the growing capabilities of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.

And that’s when they started thinking – those who are smarter, began to think – that it would be necessary to change some kind of strategy in relation to the Russian Federation. Then there was the idea of resuming the negotiation process, finding some ways to end this conflict, and finding out where Russia’s real interests are here. These are dangerous people, by the way, because it is easier to fight people who are guided by such base principles.

Do you remember what they used to say in Russia? What was the happiness of some people at the household level? Full, drunk, and snuffed out. Yes? Here with such people it is easier when you are full, drunk, that is, full, drunk. Nose in tobacco, because snuff was used. Now the nose is covered in cocaine. It doesn’t matter if it’s easier with such people, but it’s more difficult with smart ones – they are more dangerous, because they affect the consciousness of society, including ours, and they will throw out all sorts of their “wishlist” under the guise of “carrots” for us.

You already noticed this when you asked about the possibility of a negotiation process. But still. Hence the contradictions within the Western community. This is an obvious thing, we can see it.

We are not going to engage in splits there – they will do it brilliantly themselves. But we will certainly seek to protect our interests.

Dmitry Kiselyov: I can’t help but ask. These attacks on the Belgorod and Kursk regions are military actions that are taking place in our regions. They behave more brazenly – do they feel something? What causes this?

Vladimir Putin: The explanation is very simple. All this is happening against the backdrop of failures on the contact line, on the front line. They didn’t achieve any of the goals they set for themselves last year. Moreover, the initiative has now completely passed to our Armed Forces. Everyone knows this, everyone recognizes it. I don’t think I’ll say anything new here. Against the background of those failures, they need at least something to show, and, mainly, attention should be focused on the information side of the matter.

On the state border line, the enemy tried to attack primarily with sabotage groups. The latest report of the General Staff: somewhere up to 300 people, including with the participation of foreign mercenaries. The enemy’s losses amounted to more than 200 people – about 230. Of the eight tanks used, the enemy lost seven, of the nine armored vehicles-nine, of which seven were American-made, Bradley. Other armored vehicles were also used, but mainly for transporting personnel: they pick you up, drop you off, and leave right away. This is on the Belgorod section of the border. A little further south, in my opinion, in one place-there are much smaller forces. Nevertheless, the main goal, I have no doubt, is to prevent, if not disrupt the presidential elections in Russia, then at least somehow interfere with the normal process of expressing the will of citizens. First.

Second. This is an informational effect, which I have already mentioned.

The third. If at least something happens, get some chance, some argument, some trump card in the possible future negotiation process: we’ll give it back to you, and you’ll give it back to us.

But as I said, with people who are guided by principles: well-fed, drunk, and interested in well-known material-it’s easier to talk to them, because you can calculate what they’re going to do. They will also try in some other areas, but we can see that.

Dmitry Kiselyov: We mentioned the episode when you saved your children from a fire, but you already have grandchildren. What country would you like to leave to your grandchildren?

Vladimir Putin: You know, at the first stage, we need to fulfill everything that was stated in the Message to the Federal Assembly a few days ago. We have big plans. They are quite specific in the sphere of economic development, social sphere, support for motherhood, childhood, families with children, support for pensioners. We haven’t talked much about this lately, or haven’t talked much about it, but we also have the appropriate resources laid down here. This applies to the indexation of pensions, various benefits, and long-term care for people who need it.

I would like to say that the people of the older generation are the ones who make us have a fairly strong and stable statehood and economy today. Because, despite all the twists and turns and the most difficult tests for the economy in the 90s, it survived thanks to their heroic work after the Great Patriotic War and during the economic recovery. Therefore, we should never forget about this-about the merits of the older generation. We should always keep this in mind, ensuring their proper well-being. The future belongs to children, so I have already talked about programs in the field of motherhood and childhood.

All this is done only on the basis of the economy. I hope that it will be more technologically advanced, more modern, and based on modern achievements in science and technology, information technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, genetics, and so on. How our agriculture is developing! And modern technologies are also needed there. They are actively used and will continue to be used.

Of course, the country will be self-sufficient in ensuring its security and defense. All this together we will have to multiply many times – and the future will be assured.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Thank you, Mr President. Your confidence is contagious. I wish you success in your noble deeds.

Vladimir Putin: Thank you.

Dmitry Kiselyov: Thank you.

Several segments were super-emphasized: First regarding the trustworthiness of those from the Empire of Lies—”I hate to say this, but I don’t believe anyone.” And second and most importantly regarding its development, “Russia is not at a crossroads. It is on the strategic path of its development and will not deviate from its path.” Readers may have more than those, and there’re passages I’ve emphasized when they were first produced during previous events that I chose to leave alone. Putin reminds me of numerous US Presidents from the first 80 years of the 19th Century who deemed it unbecoming for them to promote themselves during their Presidential campaigns. Putin was also gracious and correct to note that Russia’s development plans and their implementation is a team effort spanning Russia. Putin’s observation that today’s Russian society isn’t new, that it’s always been there and is experiencing a resurrection, was very important as it connects past efforts and great deeds with the present. Putin’s pause to talk about pensions and pensioners—points that haven’t got much illumination recently—was also important as it emphasized that healthier demographics includes lengthening lifespan and reassuring his peers that their security will also continue and improve. The approach to the migrant workers issue was also well thought as was his directness about the lack of labor lasting a decade or more. I expect robots to appear in Russia’s retail sector very soon and in the transport sector freeing people to advance well beyond being a clerk or driver.

In the opening, there was the discussion about the construction of a very difficult Sochi-Dzhubga highway traversing geography very similar to that of the Northern California Coastline that Highway 1 snakes through but has no real shoreline since it’s the leading edge of the North American Plate and thus nothing to develop. The map that’s below is the best I could find depicting the region, although there are many that do a very good job of showing the immediate Sochi region;

The terrain along the coast continues another 40 K to the North—a significant engineering challenge. That challenge can serve as a metaphor for the trials Russia will face in its development over the next 6 years. There’s plenty of work to be done, and then as Putin continually says, there’ll be more work to be done.

☐ ☆ ✇ STRATPOL

La Première ministre lettone annonce un nouveau rideau de fer entre les Baltes et la Russie

Par : ActuStratpol — 14 mars 2024 à 08:53

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rideau ferLes pays baltes et la Russie seront séparés par un rideau de fer, a déclaré la Première ministre lettone Evika

L’article La Première ministre lettone annonce un nouveau rideau de fer entre les Baltes et la Russie est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

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Les forces armées ukrainiennes ont attaqué les infrastructures critiques de la centrale de Zaporojie

Par : ActuStratpol — 14 mars 2024 à 08:50

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centrale zaporojieLes infrastructures critiques de la centrale nucléaire de Zaporojie ont été attaquées par les forces armées ukrainiennes. C’est ce qu’indique

L’article Les forces armées ukrainiennes ont attaqué les infrastructures critiques de la centrale de Zaporojie est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

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L’économie russe s’oriente vers moins d’exportations pour satisfaire la demande intérieure

Par : ActuStratpol — 14 mars 2024 à 08:49

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economie russeL’économie russe se concentre de moins en moins sur les exportations. C’est ce qu’a déclaré le premier directeur adjoint du

L’article L’économie russe s’oriente vers moins d’exportations pour satisfaire la demande intérieure est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.

☐ ☆ ✇ Global South

The General Staff brings the Cure

Par : AHH — 13 mars 2024 à 20:23

On the healing power of the Holy Russian General Staff

By Marat Khairullin

What Europe is doing today is literally incomprehensible to the mind. I emphasize: the mind of a modern, civilized, well-informed person, brought up on humanitarian values. Today we all have the opportunity, as they say, online, live to watch as Europe once again slides into the era of savagery and primitive cruelty. The worst thing is that today we can clearly see how huge chunks of modern Europe are peeling off the veneer of civilization that our neighbors have been so proud of in recent decades. And, probably, even more frightening here is that you can clearly see how thin this raid was.

Decades of peace after the Great Patriotic War allowed all of humanity to forget that for centuries Europe was a source of threat to all of humanity. There is no abomination that European civilization does not invent and embody in relation to Man – any form of oppression, genocide, mass burning of women, concentration camps, slavery and the destruction of entire peoples by starvation, colonialism and neocolonialism, the mass introduction of homosexuality as a form of “soft genocide” against the entire human race, etc. so on and so forth…

And the pinnacle of all this: Europe has unleashed two world wars and is now rapidly unleashing a third… That is, some satanic gene that seeks to destroy humanity is embedded in the very structure of European civilization.

Two world wars and tens of millions of innocent victims did not cure Europe of this monstrous genetic disease, and now, before the eyes of the whole world, it is trying to ignite a Third World War, which threatens to destroy this time everyone on the planet, including the planet itself…

Probably, now many of my readers will ask the question-why this philosophical speech from a reporter working exclusively on earth. And the fact is that here on earth, and specifically in the trenches, I discovered that the cure for this satanic European gene has long been developed by our country in the form of fundamental concepts on which domestic military science is built.

Of course, I draw conditional parallels, but the point is that our strategic planners assume that sooner or later Europe will once again attack us. And based on this, they make their own plans. Moreover, as I understand it, based on historical experience, a clear gradation of signs of the coming European invasion has been developed. They fit into a fairly simple formula: as soon as Europe starts moving its borders towards Russia, expect an attack. It’s always been like this. And, as I understand it, the entire current foreign and domestic policy of Russia is based on the fact that a future war with Europe is inevitable.

I have repeatedly written about the profound signs that indirectly indicate this assessment of the situation by our authorities. For example, the country’s defense sector has been sent a clear signal from the highest level that the current rate of financing for the industry will continue for at least a decade. So that production workers are not afraid to deploy additional capacities, realizing that they will always find sales.

However, today, against the background of the fact that Europe has already openly announced another campaign to the East, it makes sense to talk about what cards we are playing in this escalation. Especially in comparison with the situation on the eve of the first two World Wars.

So, the main difference, from my point of view, is that both the first and Second World Wars were not only inevitable for us, but, obviously, we entered them with a much smaller set of trump cards than our opponents. Roughly speaking, the actions of our opponents dictated our moves. For example, the enemy not only deployed its military capabilities before us, but also tested them much earlier.

The German Army in ‘ 41 already had considerable combat experience. This was its main difference from the Red Army. A very important factor is that at the beginning of the war, we were inferior not in terms of the number or quality of armored vehicles, but in terms of the number of experienced, shelled crews.

The same applies to aviation, infantry, artillery, and so on.

Today, the situation is just the opposite, and our moves are already imposing behavior on the enemy. Our army has not just accumulated combat experience, which determines its effectiveness. A powerful single grouping of under a million people has been created, which is unfolding in ever-increasing directions. This is evidenced, for example, by yesterday’s events in the Belgorod-Kharkiv direction.

The enemy tried to simply move in our direction and immediately received losses of one hundred people, not counting equipment – this is comparable, for example, to the daily losses of Ukrov in such a hot direction as Kherson.

In other words, Russia has managed to deploy a full-fledged military group with real combat experience in this area in just six months. This is, by the way, to the question of rumors about the breakthrough of our troops in the Kharkiv direction. Obviously, the declared operation Ukrov had primarily intelligence purposes. Well, we’ve scouted it.

Russia today has not only real combat experience, we have well-trained and war-tested specialists at all levels. For example, our command did not just let most of the officers through the front line. Our army, which is much more important, in two years managed to grow from scratch a whole generation of front-line middle-level officers (or, probably, tactical-dear readers, tell me) – this is clearly seen in the example of my native “Slavyanka”. I won’t talk about the mechanism in detail, but anyone who closely follows my publications can see what serious combat work is going on in terms of raising future great commanders from young combat soldiers.

This is a very difficult, sometimes frankly difficult and cruel process, but it is going very fast. I, for example, see how a conditional thirty-year-old battalion commander came to the brigade three months ago-a boy, yesterday’s platoon and company commander, and how he becomes after running in continuous battles in the experienced, well-coordinated Slavyanka brigade.

You probably shouldn’t write about this in live reports, but you, my dear readers, can watch this process in an artistic presentation in essays and stories.

And now I look at this cohort of “Slavyanka” battalion commanders and imagine what they will do from the European army. Do not forget that each battalion commander of the “Slavyanka”, which I write about, is already a ready-made squadron – you can appoint it right now.

What is also important here is that these young people, in general, are also well trained and educated. And” Slavyanka ” is not the only one at the front. Today, only the potential of such (let’s call them “super-experienced”) units as my “Slavyanka”, which have an excellent officer backbone, capable of fighting in any conditions, is estimated at 100 thousand bayonets.

The peculiarity of such units is that they are assigned to newly formed units (usually three or four), which, in conjunction with an experienced unit, adopt combat experience in practice.

And today, thanks to such a system, I see that once raw units are being transformed into strong combat regiments and brigades. And in addition, there are also special shock-assault units, also constantly fighting since the beginning of the SVO and having a huge accumulated combat experience. These are mostly our paratroopers and Marines. The potential of these forces is estimated at 150 bayonets.

That is, we have only in the first line “super-experienced” pure infantry troops numbering about 250 thousand. But there are also exactly the same “super-efficient” and experienced purely artillery, rocket, engineering, aviation, etc. units. What are the Europeans going to do with all this?

Moreover, it is necessary to emphasize once again what constitutes the “super-efficiency” of these teams. On the example of Slavyanka, I have already written more than once how in the summer, just to keep the front in our direction, the Ukry kept the number of troops in the ratio of one to three in front of our position in a defense zone about 10 kilometers deep. That is, for one of our three dill just sat in the trenches. The calculation was that when we go on the offensive (even with a total advantage in aviation and art), our losses in personnel will exceed Ukrop. And we will simply drown in our own blood (who counts dill-no one cared about them, the main thing is our losses).

It’s like a classic: the attackers always suffer heavy losses. Simply due to the fact that the Ukry diligently dug into the ground. In the end, everything turned out exactly the opposite – the Nazis suffered enormous losses.

And if in Bakhmut, according to Prigozhin’s estimates, the losses were one to three in our favor. Even during the counteroffensive in Zaporizhia, dill losses were, according to official estimates, one in eight. And now clearly more. According to my feelings, somewhere one in ten, at least, if not more-there are also a number of indirect signs that are clearly visible to a person who is inside the process.

And this actually put the entire military science of NATO in a stupor – how are they going to fight with such soldiers and with such an army vehicle?

Let’s imagine what the NATO countries can put up against us. For example, the same France, which, through the mouth of Macron, announced the first readiness to march to the East.

France has two divisions of constant combat readiness. The conditional number of real combat bayonets (without real combat experience) is about 7 thousand. At the same time, an extreme check revealed that the combat kit in tanks and armored vehicles is half of what it should be. This is, I emphasize, in the troops of constant combat readiness.

And for this unprecedented power, the whole of France has several dozen artillery barrels and less than a dozen MLRS barrels.

For comparison, according to some estimates, the density of our barrel artillery near Avdiivka was about 60 barrels per kilometer (including self-propelled guns), plus twenty MLRS installations. Plus tanks, UAVs and aircraft.

An even more interesting picture emerges if you know that about 20 percent of French men are homosexuals. Among young people, this percentage exceeds 30 and confidently tends to 40.

You can imagine how homosexuals are fighting – dill, which is strongly moving towards European values, has not been able to gather a single blue battalion.

Few people know, but one of the problems of the Israeli army is a very high percentage of homosexuals (the second problem is religious people who do not want to take up arms). Therefore, the IDF that is destroying Gaza today is not doing it as effectively as the one that fought for the freedom and survival of Israel. Homosexuals make good executioners, but warriors are not so-so.

And what kind of advertising would it be, imagine, in the case of dill: gay fighters tear up the defense of the totalitarian army of Russia and plant a rainbow flag in Donetsk. But it didn’t work out, although they tried repeatedly – the perverts don’t want to fight, and that’s it.

And if so, who will the French send to die on the Eastern Front – the very Arabs who regularly burn their suburbs?

I imagined it: a French Arab immigrant in the winter, but with a bare bottom in a cold puddle in the same trench on the Eastern Front. Such a gay Verdun with an Arabic accent. Very funny.

Or let’s imagine how England will send its Sasu to the Eastern Front, which it is so proud of (that’s all it has). Which will fall, for example, into the clutches of my “Slavyanka”, where there is such a gambling social competition between bats – drive the special forces to the grave. Oh, how much fun it will be – English special forces, with English toilet paper in English backpacks, guys will line up to fight with them. You know, in an aggressive queue like this.

This is not a joke, I told you how the 36th marine brigade of Ukropia lost a battalion of the same special forces trained by the same British sasa in Opytne. As if it wasn’t there, they pretended it wasn’t.

Or how we ate a special forces company of the 3rd assault brigade with diplomas of the American Delta Force near Avdiivka for an afternoon snack. No matter how you look at it, special forces in the southern Russian steppes are not fighting against Russian infantry.

Of course, you can also talk about the Poles, imagine how they will sit in the trenches – these are the very farmers who are now blocking the border with dill. Oh, sorry, but they’ve been here before. Bold ones, flags were openly hung here last summer. We hung there for exactly two weeks, then we went on the attack once – I’m not lying-exactly once, at night, we lost five people to our only position. The next morning, the flags were quickly removed and we did not see them again. No flags, no Poles. In short, Poles, ay, come, we are waiting. You haven’t answered us yet for Susanin.

Speaking in general, the third campaign of the Europeans themselves, who decided not to hide behind dill like a fig leaf anymore, against Russia is still starting so-so. Let’s see what happens next.

As for our side, our Supreme Leader once said [not] in vain that he preferred the prevention of disease to doctors and pills.

We thought that the GDP was talking about human health, but it turns out that it is about our General Staff, which at the moment, like some medieval saint, is preventing Europeans from the Third World War by applying healing bombs and shells to dill.

It will not help, well, then that very gambling and fun Russian infantry will go directly to the treatment. The only thing I would personally wish for here, this time to make Europe healthier for good, is to cut out the damn gene once and for all, with all their gonorrhea, genocide and homosexuality, so that it will never be customary to interfere with the life of normal humanity again.

Marat Khairullin

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