About the Sale of Russian Gas for Rubles

You have to pay to Russian banks now!

The Presidential Decree published today explaining exactly how to sell and pay for Russian gas was predictably misinterpreted.

The task, first of all, was to transfer all mutual settlements from the American and European control zones to the Russian zone. There is a need to transfer financial transactions to Russian jurisdiction in order to eliminate the risks of payment disruptions and blocking of Russian accounts.

That’s exactly what was done.

For Europeans, of course, it is technically incomprehensible, difficult and undesirable to exchange euros for rubles. Therefore, they were offered an option: they open an account with the Russian Gazprombank, payments will be received in foreign currency, converted at the exchange rate of the Moscow Exchange and transferred to the accounts of counterparties in the same Gazprombank, and from there they will be received as payment.

That is, the Russian side thus guarantees that Gazprom will receive the money. And this is a fundamental point.

The scheme, to which the same Americans pushed the Europeans, was as follows: the money goes to Gazprom’s accounts in Europe and, accordingly, is blocked there. And this is repeated endlessly until the special military operation stops. An uncomplicated financial trap.

For the Russian side, making settlements in the area of domestic jurisdiction is also a profitable step. This may not be the most thorough, but it is still a brick in building a parallel financial system, which has been talked about so much lately.

An alternative payment system is being formed now. This is not a violation of existing contracts in any way. This is a way of adapting to the unprecedented pressure that the Russian side is facing.

Moreover, tying the price of gold from below to equivalent of 75 rubles per dollar (roughly equivalent to the exchange rate pre-invasion) guarantees some immutability of the exchange rate of the euro vs. the ruble. This will need further adjustments if the ruble becomes more desirable.

I’ve Never Heard So Many Lies

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

All wars are full of lies.

Winston Churchill famously said, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

We accept that idea broadly. Secret invasion plans should be closely held. The identities of spies must be kept under wraps. New weapons and defensive tools should not be revealed because enemies will be alerted to their potential and begin offensive workarounds.

Still, just because the government has legitimate reasons to deceive the public in wartime does not mean that citizens don’t have a duty to find the truth to the extent they can.

The Russian-Ukraine kinetic war and the broader U.S.-Russian economic war are full of more lies than any public events I’ve seen in my lifetime including Vietnam, Watergate and the Iraq War.

That’s how big the lies are.

The Bodyguard of Lies

Here’s the official U.S. narrative as echoed by the mainstream media: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, Putin’s three-day blitzkrieg of Kyiv has failed, Russian forces are bogged down and valiant Ukrainian troops are putting up a powerful defense and regaining lost ground with the help of weapons from NATO.

In this version, President Zelenskyy is the new Churchill rallying patriots against an evil dictator. All of that is either entirely or mostly false.

Here’s the real story: Russia’s invasion is the end result of 14 years of provocation by the West, including repeated declarations that Ukraine will join NATO and a U.S.-backed coup d’état in 2014 that displaced a pro-Russian president.

Russia never planned a blitzkrieg on Kyiv. That’s a Western invention intended to make Putin look like a failure. In fact, Russia is slowly and methodically taking territory in the south and east of Ukraine in order to control the seacoasts, eliminate pro-fascist elements in Mariupol and establish pro-Russian autonomous zones in Donbas.

Churchill? Really?

A full assault on Kyiv, if it ever comes, is last on the list. Ukraine may reoccupy a village here and there, but they’re losing ground in Kherson, Mykolaiv, Melitopol, Mariupol, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk and surrounding areas.

Moreover, Zelenskyy is no Churchill.

He’s succeeded in presenting himself as a strong wartime leader, standing up to the big, bad Putin. But in reality, he’s a corrupt oligarch with millions of dollars hidden offshore. His acting skills have enhanced his propaganda efforts, but it doesn’t take much training to see how phony he is.

Innocent civilians, including women and children, are dying under his failed leadership and inability to come to terms with Putin before the invasion began. In a nutshell, Zelenskyy bet on support from Biden and the West and lost.

There is ample evidence from numerous sources to support this analysis. Some of the best sources come from Switzerland, where military experts are infuriated that traditional Swiss neutrality has been cast aside.

Most tellingly, Pentagon leaks say the same thing. The story from inside the Pentagon is that Putin is not acting recklessly but is being patient and methodical. It also says that, despite some civilian casualties, Putin is actually using a restrained approach. Furthermore, there are no signs he is preparing for the use of chemical or biological weapons.

So what about the economic sanctions? Are they working?

The Most Severe Sanctions in History

Payments in and out of Russia have been blocked. The Central Bank of Russia has been banned from the global dollar payments systems. The same is true for the 10 largest Russian banks and a long list of oligarchs and Russian government officials.

Accounts of Russian targets in Western banks have been frozen. Exports of critical technology and high-tech equipment to Russia have been banned. U.S. and European airspace has been closed to Russian airlines.

Secondary sanctions have been imposed so that if another nation like China sells goods to Russia made with U.S. technology or machines, that nation will be punished also. The list goes on.

Economic sanctions of these kinds sound powerful when they’re announced and do have some impact. But in the long run they never work. In the end, the costs are real but the effects of the sanctions are nil. It’s a lose-lose proposition.

Sanctions Against Oligarchs Are Doing Putin a Favor

Some losses are incurred by those whose accounts are frozen or whose businesses are handicapped. A few Russian oligarchs may lose their yachts, but guess what? Putin doesn’t like the oligarchs anyway.

We’re actually doing Putin a favor by clipping the oligarchs’ wings. Putin’s power comes from the military and security services, not the oligarchs.

Tellingly, the strategic goals that justified the sanctions are never achieved. At most, they are slowed down temporarily. It’s just a matter of time before the affected parties devise workarounds to the sanctions.

The bottom line is Russia has not stood still. Russian exports of critical strategic metals such as nickel, titanium, palladium and aluminum have been cut off. Russian (and Ukrainian) wheat and other grains have also been cut off.

This will result in starvation in certain parts of the world and massive food price inflation everywhere. Given the extent of these sanctions and the retaliation, the damage to world trade, supply chains and even the availability of goods will be massive.

But what about the strategic aims of the sanctions?

Sanctions Won’t Stop the Ukrainian War

Here, the sanctions are a complete failure. They have had zero impact on Russian advances on the battlefield and Russian goals in Ukraine. In fact, Putin has proved to be a master chess player as he runs rings around the sanctions.

When the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian banks, the value of the ruble collapsed. Still, oil and natural gas exports from Russia were allowed because Europe is dependent on them and the world is facing an energy shortage independent of the war in Ukraine.

Oil and natural gas are paid for in dollars. In a masterpiece of judo, Putin is now demanding that Russian oil and natural gas bought by states imposing sanctions be paid for in rubles. This mystified many. If Russia needs dollars (they do), why be paid in rubles?

The answer is that the only way for Europe to get rubles quickly is to buy them from the Central Bank of Russia using dollars. Under Putin’s plan, Russia still gets the dollars, still sells oil and natural gas but he has the added benefit of making rubles stronger because Europe has to buy them to pay for the energy exports.

Cutting off Russian exports of oil and natural gas is pointless because Russia will just sell the same energy to China and India. But the price will go up. It’s a world market, after all.

Putin’s Many Moves Ahead of Biden

This is how judo works. You use your enemy’s power against him by avoiding the main attack and turning the tables. Putin’s a judo expert in real life and he just demonstrated that he can practice it in economic warfare. The West will now be engaged in propping up the ruble after they did so much to destroy it.

Putin thinks many moves ahead on the chessboard while Biden is playing pin the tail on the donkey, blindfolded.

Sanctions ultimately harm everyday citizens and consumers most. Inflation is surging in Russia and the United States because of the sanctions. But the pain on the American people has only begun. It’s about to get much worse.

U.S. consumers and investors will suffer as prices soar, growth lags and stocks collapse.

This is all unpleasant news for Western warmongers. But it’s critical for investors to know what’s actually going on so they don’t lose money in the chaos to come.

The best information is that the war in Ukraine will last longer than most expect, will produce supply chain disruptions and will amplify the inflation that’s already present.

In the end, Putin will prevail in Ukraine, while the Ukrainian people and Western consumers will pay the heaviest price.

How Mariupol Will Become a Key Hub of Eurasia Integration

by Pepe Escobar via unz

Mariupol, the strategic Sea of Azov port, remains in the eye of the storm in Ukraine.

The NATO narrative is that Azovstal – one of Europe’s biggest iron and steel works – was nearly destroyed by the Russian Army and its allied Donetsk forces who “lay siege” to Mariupol.

The true story is that the neo-Nazi Azov battalion took scores of Mariupol civilians as human shields since the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, and retreated to Azovstal as a last stand. After an ultimatum delivered last week, they are now being completely exterminated by the Russian and Donetsk forces and Chechen Spetsnaz.

Azovstal, part of the Metinvest group controlled by Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, is indeed one of the biggest metallurgic plants in Europe, self-described as a “high-performance integrated metallurgical enterprise that produces coke and sinter, steel as well as high-quality rolled products, bars and shapes.”

Amidst a flurry of testimonials detailing the horrors inflicted by the Azov neo-Nazis on Mariupol’s civilian population, a way more auspicious, invisible story bodes well for the immediate future.

Russia is the world’s fifth largest steel producer, apart from holding huge iron and coal deposits. Mariupol – a steel Mecca – used to source coal from Donbass, but under de facto neo-Nazi rule since the 2014 Maidan events, was turned into an importer. Iron, for instance, started to be supplied from Krivbas in Ukraine, over 200 kilometers away.

After Donetsk solidifies itself as an independent republic or, via referendum, chooses to become part of the Russian Federation, this situation is bound to change.

Azovstal is invested in a broad product line of very useful stuff: structural steel, rail for railroads, hardened steel for chains, mining equipment, rolled steel used in factory apparatus, trucks and railroad cars. Parts of the factory complex are quite modern while some, decades old, are badly in need of upgrading, which Russian industry can certainly provide.

Strategically, this is a huge complex, right at the Sea of Azov – which is now, for all practical purposes, incorporated into the Donetsk People’s Republic, and close to the Black Sea. That implies a short trip to the Eastern Mediterranean, including many potential customers in West Asia. And crossing Suez and reaching the Indian Ocean, customers all across South and Southeast Asia.

So the Donetsk People’s Republic, possibly part of the future Novorossiya, and even part of Russia, will be in control of a lot of steel-making capacity for southern Europe, West Asia and beyond.

One of the inevitable consequences is that it will be able to supply a real freight railroad construction boom in Russia, China and the Central Asian ‘stans.’ Railroad construction happens to be the privileged connectivity mode for Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). And, crucially, of the increasingly turbo-charged International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).

So, mid-term, Mariupol should expect to become one of the key hubs of a boom in north-south routes – INSTC across Russia and linking with the ‘stans’ – as well as major BRI upgrades east-west as well as sub-BRI corridors.

Interlocked Eurasia

The INSTC’s main players are Russia, Iran and India – which are now, post-NATO sanctions, in advanced interconnection mode, complete with devising mechanisms to bypass the US dollar in their trade. Azerbaijan is another important INSTC player, yet more volatile because it privileges Turkey’s connectivity designs in the Caucasus.

The INSTC network will be progressively interconnecting also with Pakistan – and that means the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a key BRI hub, which is slowly but surely expanding to Afghanistan. Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s impromptu visit to Kabul late last week was to advance the incorporation of Afghanistan to the New Silk Roads.

All that is happening as Moscow – extremely close to New Delhi – is simultaneously expanding trade relations with Islamabad. All three, crucially, are Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) members.

So the grand North-South design spells out fluent connectivity from the Russian mainland to the Caucasus (Azerbaijan), to West Asia (Iran) all the way to South Asia (India and Pakistan). None of these key players have demonized or sanctioned Russia despite ongoing US pressures to do so.

Strategically, that represents the Russian multipolar concept of Greater Eurasian Partnership in action in terms of trade and connectivity – in parallel and complementary with BRI because India, eager to install a rupee-ruble mechanism to buy energy, in this case is an absolutely crucial Russia partner, matching China’s reported $400 billion strategic deal with Iran. In practice, the Greater Eurasia Partnership will facilitate smoother connectivity between Russia, Iran, Pakistan and India.

The NATO universe, meanwhile, is congenitally incapable of even recognizing the complexity of the alignment, not to mention analyze its implications. What we have is the interlocking of BRI, INTSC and the Greater Eurasia Partnership on the ground – all notions that are regarded as anathema in the Washington Beltway.

All that of course is being designed amidst a game-changing geoeconomic moment, as Russia, starting this Thursday, will only accept payment for its gas in rubles from “unfriendly” nations.

Parallel to the Greater Eurasia Partnership, BRI, since it was launched in 2013, is also progressively weaving a complex, integrated Eurasian network of partnerships – financial/economic, connectivity, physical infrastructure building, economic/trade corridors. BRI’s role as a co-shaper of institutions of global governance, including normative foundations, has also been crucial, much to the despair of the NATO alliance.

Time to de-westernize

Yet only now the Global South, especially, will start to observe the full spectrum of the China-Russia play across the Eurasian sphere. Moscow and Beijing are deeply involved in a joint drive to de-westernize globalist governance, if not shatter it altogether.

Russia from now on will be even more meticulous in its institution-building, coalescing the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the SCO and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) – a Eurasian military alliance of select post-Soviet states – in a geopolitical context of irreversible institutional and normative divide between Russia and the West.

At the same time, the Greater Eurasia Partnership will be solidifying Russia as the ultimate Eurasian bridge, creating a common space across Eurasia which could even ignore vassalized Europe.

Meanwhile in real life, BRI, as much as the INSTC, will be increasingly plugged into the Black Sea (hello, Mariupol). And BRI itself may be even prone to re-evaluation in its emphasis of linking western China to western Europe’s shrinking industrial base.

There will be no point in privileging the northern BRI corridors – China-Mongolia-Russia via the Trans-Siberian, and the Eurasian land bridge via Kazakhstan – when you have Europe descending into medieval dementia.

BRI’s renewed focus will be on gaining access to irreplaceable commodities – and that means Russia – as well as securing essential supplies for Chinese production. Commodity-rich nations such as Kazakhstan, and many players in Africa, shall become the top future markets for China.

In a pre-Covid loop across Central Asia, one constantly heard that China builds plants and high-speed railways while Europe at best writes white papers. It can always get worse. The EU as occupied American territory is now descending, fast, from center of global power to the status of inconsequential peripheral player, a mere “struggling market in the far periphery” of China’s “community of shared destiny.”

Psaki Reminds Reporters That Biden Doesn’t Speak For The President Of The United States

via BabylonBee

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WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a tense press conference Monday, Press Secretary Jen Psaki faced pointed questions about several Biden misstatements that led to chaos during his trip overseas. Psaki quickly reassured the gathered press that Biden doesn’t speak for the President of the United States.

“The President has clearly said, and we agree, that Joe Biden does not speak for this administration,” said Psaki to the confused reporters. “Nothing said by Biden should be misconstrued to reflect the official foreign policy of the President. This administration has been clear from the beginning, that we have always been clear about what we have been clear about, clearly.”

“But Jen!” said a feisty Peter Doocy, “Don’t you think these inconsistent statements could cause World War III and unleash CRT on our kids all at once? Why did Biden have to walk back his statements?”

“We would like to walk back the statement that we have ever walked back any statements,” said a frustrated Psaki. “But if you find any statements that we have walked back let me know and we’ll circle back later to walk back our walk-back.”

Sources say Biden is now in his basement on tranquilizers until the administration can clarify what statements need to be walked back.

Note: There might be traces of humor.

Hybrid Warfare and Gaseous Absurdity

The RF has demanded payment in roubles. The response of the EU states is to refuse this demand. The RF has indicated it will terminate the supply of LNG for non-payment. The EU suggests it will seek substitute LNG supply. The EU position represents an absurdist element of Hybrid Warfare. This post sets out some of the issues.

According to the IEA the EU consumed 155 billion cubic metres of LNG in 2021. Of this supply 45% was obtained from Russia ( https://www.iea.org/news/how-europe-can-cut-natural-gas-imports-from-russia-significantly-within-a-year ).

The RF 2021 EU import share was 69.75 billion cubic metres per year or 5.8 billion cubic metres LNG per month. If the EU seeks to substitute for RF LNG this is the approximate monthly quantity required.

The largest LNG tankers are the QMAX class. These can transport 266,000 cubic metres of LNG ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-Max ).

A simple calculation shows the monthly transport of 5.8 billion cubic metres of LNG by vessels with a capacity of 266,000 cubic metres of LNG requires a total of 21,852 shipments per month or approximately 705 shipments per day.

This volume of shipping will saturate the existing EU LNG offloading ports. These ports are already dedicated to handling other LNG imports. The time to unload an LNG cargo is approximately one day. This implies the need to construct 705 new LNG offloading ports because immediately following the day 1 arrival of 705 vessels there will be the Day 2 arrival of another 705 vessels with the same vessel traffic for Day 3 and all following days. The transit from Houston to Rotterdam takes 18 days outbound and 18 days empty return. With one day devoted to loading, and a further day to unloading, each vessel will spend 28 days on voyage. These figures make no allowance for vessel downtime for required maintenance intervals.

The transport of the required monthly volume of LNG will therefore require 705 QMAX x 31 days or total QMAX fleet of 21,855 vessels. Since the available yards are fully booked it is not clear when the full build out of the required fleet will occur. My experience in the offshore industry is that it takes approximately two years to construct an offshore drilling rig (MODU). The complexity of a QMAX may be slightly less than a MODU but even if construction were to require no more than a single year the required time to fleet completion would be 5,463 years if 4 yards were involved in the build out. At present the only yard competent in this vessel construction is in South Korea; the other three required yards would need to be upgraded, or new built. LNG tankers require a speciality steel to address thermal stress issues. This steel has a high nickel content; Russia is a major global supplier of nickel.

Since the EU has voiced the intention to fully eliminate the need for Russian LNG by the year 2030 the time to recover the investment in vessels and related LNG infrastructure is extremely limited. Within 8 years the EU seeks to fully replace the entire volume of LNG represented by Russian imports. The IEA Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Roadmap helps fulfil the European Green Deal, an ambitious plan to eliminate all FF emissions in 28 years.

In 2020, U.S. natural gas production was about 10% greater than U.S. total natural gas consumption. The volume of produced gas surplus to US demand amounts to 91.5 billion cubic feet per day or 2.5 billion cubic metres of natural gas per day. This surplus is already contracted to the following countries:

TOP 10 US EXPORT DESTINATIONS
SOUTH KOREA………………453,483
CHINA……………………449,667
JAPAN……………………354,948
BRAZIL…………………..307,714
SPAIN……………………215,062
INDIA……………………196,218
UK………………………195,046
TURKEY…………………..188,849
NL………………………174,339
FRANCE…………………..170,780

The US is therefore in the position of withdrawing supply from some of the above to punish them for lack of compliance to US demands and to reward vassal states. Looking at the list, which countries do you think will be disfavoured?

The full list of US foreign LNG exports by country is found here:
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/NG_MOVE_EXPC_S1_A.htm

Any commodity gravitates toward the highest price. The peak price is set by the marginal buyer. It is expected that the EU attempt to displace Russian LNG supply will be impossible to achieve in the short term without an extreme impact on price. These price impacts will not only affect EU consumers, they will impact all consumers including those in the US.

The EU will replace dependency on Russia by dependency on the “international rules based order” as interpreted by the global hegemon.

Mea Culpa – Review of Data

I utilized IEA figures for total LNG consumption in the EU and relied on an IEA statement that 45% of this LNG consumption was derived from Russian supply.

In fact Germany receives the majority of its Russian gas as pipeline NG. My error.

The EU presently has 37 operating LNG terminals and the IEA is reporting on LNG received via those terminals. Germany has at present no LNG terminals (3 proposed) but is believed able to obtain NG from an interconnection to the EU pipeline system. I have not yet found the supporting data but suspect some of the LNG unloaded in Rotterdam makes its way to Germany. 

Germany once benefited from the Groningen gas field. It was the depletion of Groningen and problems resulting from land subsidence and earthquakes associated with gas withdrawals (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_gas_field ) that resulted in a decision to cease gas extraction by 2022. This planned cessation has now been postponed until between 2025 and 2028.

The article at this link reports on German requests for additional supply of Dutch gas:
https://www.politico.eu/article/the-netherlands-earthshaking-gas-deal-with-germany/

Gas from the Groningen field has a low calorific value due to a high percentage of nitrogen. It therefore requires a distribution pipeline different from that for regular NG. According to the Politico article, Germany is seeking additional Dutch supply which suggests Germany has a connection to the Groningen gas distribution network. This would be a distribution network distinct from the EU NG pipeline system.

The implication of the correction is that I underestimates the total German demand for LNG imports to replace the existing flow of Russian pipeline NG which flow was not included in the cited IEA statistics for LNG.

The LNG volume is about 593 times less than the piped gas volume, resulting in a requirement for nine 266,000 m3 LNG containers per week to transport the RF supplied volume of 69.75 B m2 of gas over a year. Using a turn-around time of 9 weeks for loading, shipping to EU, unloading and returning to USA, – a spread-sheet indicates that 90 LNG vessles should do the trick. This includes an additional eight ships to cover for peaks, maintenance and other mishaps. So we are looking at a minimum of 90 man years to build the required LNG fleet.

Correction:

21,852 LNG shipments per month –> 81 LNG shipments per month
705 LNG shipments per day –> 2.6 LNG shipments per day
705 new LNG offloading ports –> 3 new LNG offloading ports
QMAX fleet of 21,855 vessels –> 91 vessels
Time to fleet completion 5,463 years –> 20 years

One First Step Towards Ruble Convertibility?

“The Bank of Russia, in order to ensure a balance of supply and demand in the domestic precious metals market, will buy gold from credit institutions at a fixed price starting from March 28, 2022. The price from March 28 to June 30, 2022 inclusive will be 5 thousand rubles per 1 gram, ” the press service of the Central Bank informed.”
https://www.banki.ru/news/lenta/?id=10963561

This is only a bid price price, not an ask price, between March 28th and June 30th. Gold can be sold to the central bank at that price in ruble, but nowhere does it say that the central bank has to do this without limit. The price is also significantly below the current spot price. This is not pegging the currency to gold, as that would require an explicit guarantee that rubles could be exchanged for gold at a fixed price, an ask price, the very opposite of what the Russian central bank is doing.

This IS NOT fixed convertibility, as that would require a fixed price for “on demand” conversion of rubles to gold. The central bank is buying gold at a fixed price, not selling at it. There is no fixed price convertibility.

Machine Translation:
From Monday, (Ed. Note – March 28, 2022) the Central Bank of the Russian Federation will resume buying gold from banks, while the precious metal will be purchased at a fixed price – it is scheduled for the next three months, follows from a message on the regulator’s website.
“In order to balance supply and demand in the domestic market of precious metals, the Bank of Russia will buy gold from credit institutions at a fixed price from March 28, 2022. The price from March 28 to June 30, 2022 inclusive will be 5 thousand rubles per 1 gram,” the press service of the Central Bank informed.
The regulator emphasizes that the established price level allows for a stable supply of gold and the smooth functioning of the gold mining industry this year.
After the specified period, the purchase price of gold can be adjusted taking into account the emerging balance of supply and demand in the domestic market.
Earlier, on March 15, 2022, the Central Bank suspended the purchase of gold from credit institutions to enable them to meet the demand of the population for this asset. The regulator then noted an increased demand from the population for the purchase of physical gold bullion, due, in particular, to the abolition of VAT on these transactions. In addition, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law allowing banks to sell gold bars to citizens for foreign currency.
The US this week expanded its anti-Russian sanctions list to include gold from CBR reserves, and the UK followed up by clarifying that its sanctions on transactions with Russian reserves extend to gold transactions. The Bank of Russia, commenting on the new sanctions, emphasized that all gold from the gold and foreign exchange reserves is located on the territory of the Russian Federation.

Make Nazism Great Again?

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

The supreme target is regime change in Russia, Ukraine is just a pawn in the game – or worse, mere cannon fodder…

All eyes are on Mariupol. As of Wednesday night, over 70% of residential areas were under control of Donetsk and Russian forces, while Russian Marines, Donetsk’s 107th batallion and Chechen Spetsnaz, led by the charismatic Adam Delimkhanov, had entered the Azov-Stal plant – the HQ of the neo-Nazi Azov batallion.

Azov was sent a last ultimatum: surrender until midnight – or else, as in a take no prisoners highway to hell.

That implies a major game-changer in the Ukrainian battlefield; Mariupol is finally about to be thoroughly denazified – as the Azov contingent long entrenched in the city and using civilians as human shields were their most hardened fighting force.

Meanwhile, echoes from the Empire of Lies all but gave the whole game away. There’s no intention whatsoever in Washington to facilitate a peace plan in Ukraine – and that explains Comedian Zelensky’s non-stop stalling tactics. The supreme target is regime change in Russia, and for that Totalen Krieg against Russia and all things Russian is warranted. Ukraine is just a pawn in the game – or worse, mere cannon fodder.

This also means that the 14,000 deaths in Donbass for the past 8 years should be directly attributed to the Exceptionalists. As for Ukrainian neo-Nazis of all stripes, they are as expendable as “moderate rebels” in Syria, be they al-Qaeda or Daesh-linked. Those that may eventually survive can always join the budding CIA-sponsored Neo-Nazi Inc. – the tawdry remix of the 1980s Jihad Inc. in Afghanistan. They will be properly “Kalibrated”.

A quick neo-Nazi recap

By now only the brain dead across NATOstan – and there are hordes – are not aware of Maidan in 2014. Yet few know that it was then Ukrainian Minister of Interior Arsen Avakov, a former governor of Kharkov, who gave the green light for a 12,000 paramilitary outfit to materialize out of Sect 82 soccer hooligans who supported Dynamo Kiev. That was the birth of the Azov batallion, in May 2014, led by Andriy Biletsky, a.k.a. the White Fuhrer, and former leader of the neo-nazi gang Patriots of Ukraine.

Together with NATO stay-behind agent Dmitro Yarosh, Biletsky founded Pravy Sektor, financed by Ukrainian mafia godfather and Jewish billionaire Ihor Kolomoysky (later the benefactor of the meta-conversion of Zelensky from mediocre comedian to mediocre President.)

Pravy Sektor happened to be rabidly anti-EU – tell that to Ursula von der Lugen – and politically obsessed with linking Central Europe and the Baltics in a new, tawdry Intermarium. Crucially, Pravy Sektor and other nazi gangs were duly trained by NATO instructors.

Biletsky and Yarosh are of course disciples of notorious WWII-era Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, for whom pure Ukrainians are proto-Germanic or Scandinavian, and Slavs are untermenschen.

Azov ended up absorbing nearly all neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine and were dispatched to fight against Donbass – with their acolytes making more money than regular soldiers. Biletsky and another neo-Nazi leader, Oleh Petrenko, were elected to the Rada. The White Führer stood on his own. Petrenko decided to support then President Poroshenko. Soon the Azov battalion was incorporated as the Azov Regiment to the Ukrainian National Guard.

They went on a foreign mercenary recruiting drive – with people coming from Western Europe, Scandinavia and even South America.

That was strictly forbidden by the Minsk Agreements guaranteed by France and Germany (and now de facto defunct). Azov set up training camps for teenagers and soon reached 10,000 members. Erik “Blackwater” Prince, in 2020, struck a deal with the Ukrainian military that would enable his renamed outfit, Academi, to supervise Azov.

It was none other than sinister Maidan cookie distributor Vicky “F**k the EU” Nuland who suggested to Zelensky – both of them, by the way, Ukrainian Jews – to appoint avowed Nazi Yarosh as an adviser to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi. The target: organize a blitzkrieg on Donbass and Crimea – the same blitzkrieg that SVR, Russian foreign intel, concluded would be launched on February 22, thus propelling the launch of Operation Z.

All of the above, in fact just a quick recap, shows that in Ukraine there’s no difference whatsoever between white neo-Nazis and brown-colored al-Qaeda/ISIS/Daesh, as much as neo-Nazis are just as “Christian” as takfiri Salafi-jihadis are “Muslim”.

When Putin denounced a “bunch of neo-Nazis” in power in Kiev, the Comedian replied that it was impossible because he was Jewish. Nonsense. Zelensky and his patron Kolomoysky, for all practical purposes, are Zio-Nazis.

Even as branches of the United States government admitted to neo-Nazis entrenched in the Kiev apparatus, the Exceptionalist machine made the daily shelling of Donbass for 8 years simply disappear. These thousands of civilian victims never existed.

U.S. mainstream media even ventured the odd piece or report on Azov and Aidar neo-Nazis. But then a neo-Orwellian narrative was set in stone: there are no Nazis in Ukraine. CIA offshoot NED even started deleting records about training members of Aidar. Recently a crappy news network duly promoted a video of a NATO-trained and weaponized Azov commander – complete with Nazi iconography.

Why “denazification” makes sense

The Banderastan ideology harks back to when this part of Ukraine was in fact controlled by the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Russian empire and Poland. Stepan Bandera was born in Austro-Hungary in 1909, near Ivano-Frankovsk, in the – then autonomous – Kingdom of Galicia.

WWI dismembered European empires into frequently non-viable small entities. In western Ukraine – an imperial intersection – that inevitably led to the proliferation of extremely intolerant ideologies.

Banderastan ideologues profited from the Nazi arrival in 1941 to try to proclaim an independent territory. But Berlin not only blocked it but sent them to concentration camps. In 1944 though the Nazis changed tactics: they liberated the Banderanistas and manipulated them into anti-Russian hate, thus creating a destabilization force in the Ukrainian USSR.

So Nazism is not exactly the same as Banderastan fanatics: they are in fact competing ideologies. What happened since Maidan is that the CIA kept a laser focus on inciting Russian hatred by whatever fringe groups it could instrumentalize. So Ukraine is not a case of “white nationalism” – to put it mildly – but of anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalism, for all practical purposes manifested via Nazi-style salutes and Nazi-style symbols.

So when Putin and the Russian leadership refer to Ukrainian Nazism, that may not be 100% correct, conceptually, but it strikes a chord with every Russian.

Russians viscerally reject Nazism – considering that virtually every Russian family has at least one ancestor killed during the Great Patriotic War. From the perspective of wartime psychology, it makes total sense to talk of “Ukro-nazism” or, straight to the point, a “denazification” campaign.

How the Anglos loved the Nazis

The United States government openly cheerleading neo-Nazis in Ukraine is hardly a novelty, considering how it supported Hitler alongside England in 1933 for balance of power reasons.

In 1933, Roosevelt lent Hitler one billion gold dollars while England lent him two billion gold dollars. That should be multiplied 200 times to arrive at today’s fiat dollars. The Anglo-Americans wanted to build up Germany as a bulwark against Russia. In 1941 Roosevelt wrote to Hitler that if he invaded Russia the U.S. would side with Russia, and wrote Stalin that if Stalin invaded Germany the U.S. would back Germany. Talk about a graphic illustration of Mackinderesque balance of power.

The Brits had become very concerned with the rise of Russian power under Stalin while observing that Germany was on its knees with 50% unemployment in 1933, if one counted unregistered itinerant Germans.

Even Lloyd George had misgivings about the Versailles Treaty, unbearably weakening Germany after its surrender in WWI. The purpose of WWI, in Lloyd George’s worldview, was to destroy Russia and Germany together. Germany was threatening England with the Kaiser building a fleet to take over the oceans, while the Tsar was too close to India for comfort. For a while Britannia won – and continued to rule the waves.

Then building up Germany to fight Russia became the number one priority – complete with rewriting of History. The uniting of Austrian Germans and Sudetenland Germans with Germany, for instance, was totally approved by the Brits.

But then came the Polish problem. When Germany invaded Poland, France and Britain stood on the sidelines. That placed Germany on the border of Russia, and Germany and Russia divided up Poland. That’s exactly what Britain and France wanted. Britain and France had promised Poland that they would invade Germany from the west while Poland fought Germany from the east.

In the end, the Poles were double-crossed. Churchill even praised Russia for invading Poland. Hitler was advised by MI6 that England and France would not invade Poland – as part of their plan for a German-Russian war. Hitler had been supported financially since the 1920s by MI6 for his favorable words about England in Mein Kampf. MI6 de facto encouraged Hitler to invade Russia.

Fast forward to 2022, and here we go again – as farce, with the Anglo-Americans “encouraging” Germany under feeble Scholz to put itself back together militarily, with 100 billion euros (that the Germans don’t have), and setting up in thesis a revamped European force to later go to war against Russia.

Cue to the Russophobic hysteria in Anglo-American media about the Russia-China strategic partnership. The mortal Anglo-American fear is Mackinder/Mahan/Spykman/Kissinger/Brzezinski all rolled into one: Russia-China as peer competitor twins take over the Eurasian land mass – the Belt and Road Initiative meets the Greater Eurasia Partnership – and thus rule the planet, with the U.S. relegated to inconsequential island status, as much as the previous “Rule Britannia”.

England, France and later the Americans had prevented it when Germany aspired to do the same, controlling Eurasia side by side with Japan, from the English Channel to the Pacific. Now it’s a completely different ball game.

So Ukraine, with its pathetic neo-Nazi gangs, is just an – expendable – pawn in the desperate drive to stop something that is beyond anathema, from Washington’s perspective: a totally peaceful German-Russian-Chinese New Silk Road.

Russophobia, massively imprinted in the West’s DNA, never really went away. Cultivated by the Brits since Catherine the Great – and then with The Great Game. By the French since Napoleon. By the Germans because the Red Army liberated Berlin. By the Americans because Stalin forced to them the mapping of Europe – and then it went on and on and on throughout the Cold War.

We are at just the early stages of the final push by the dying Empire to attempt arresting the flow of History.They are being outsmarted, they are already outgunned by the top military power in the world, and they will be checkmated. Existentially, they are not equipped to kill the Bear – and that hurts. Cosmically.

NATO’s Bombing of Serbia: The Unpunished War Crime

by Scott Ritter

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.

It is a travesty of international justice that the 1999 bombing remains unrecognized by the perpetrators and unpunished

Twenty-three years ago, NATO bombed Serbia. This act was the opening round of what was to become a 78-day illegal war of aggression, the repercussions of which haunt the world to this day.

Act One: The Encounter

It was a chance meeting – two men who had crossed paths in Iraq two years past, now running into each other on a stretch of highway connecting Kosovo to Macedonia. The date was March 20, 1999. Monitors assigned to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) were in the process of being withdrawn from their assigned areas of responsibility to the town of Ohrid, in Macedonia, due to the collapse of diplomatic talks with Serbia about the devolving situation in the Serbian autonomous province of Kosovo, where Albanian separatists were engaged in a quasi-civil war with the Serbian authorities.

The British contingent of the KVM was stopped at the border between Kosovo and Macedonia, awaiting final clearance to cross the border. Among the British observers was a former Royal Marine officer who had previously served with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Iraq, helping oversee the dismantling of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs. While he and his fellow observers waited, he watched as other vehicles driven by members of the US observer contingent drove in the opposite direction – into Kosovo. At the wheel of one of these vehicles was a familiar face – a man who was known as ‘Kurtz’.

Kurtz was a man of tremendous experience who was brought into UNSCOM in mid-1997 for the purpose of providing operational planning and leadership. ‘Kurtz’, of course, was not his real name, but rather a nickname derived from the fact that with his shaved head, walrus mustache, and weathered face, he looked like a combination of Robert Duvall’s Colonel Kilgore and Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in the movie ‘Apocalypse Now’. With a wide-brim Stetson, cowboy boots, and an ever-present wad of chewing tobacco stuck in his cheek, he looked every bit the part.

Kurtz was picked for this job in part because of his background, which was embedded in the world of covert special operations. His most recent assignment prior to coming on board at UNSCOM was preparing diplomats for E&E – escape and evasion – from hostile situations. Given the sensitivity of some of the UNSCOM operations taking place in Iraq at that time, it was thought that such training might be ideal for situations the inspectors might find themselves in.

But Kurtz’s background had been his undoing. He was, so to speak, too ‘black’, or covert, for his own good. Even though he was performing wonderfully in Iraq, his managers in Washington began to panic when the situation in Baghdad began to deteriorate in October 1997. The decision was made to pull Kurtz out of Iraq. It was bitter irony – the one man who was best equipped to deal with a hostage situation, to keep not only himself but other, less fully-trained personnel alive and well, was being withdrawn in haste out of fear of his being taken hostage.

Once Kurtz was assigned to UNSCOM, he was technically UN property for the duration of the assignment, and the US could not just simply snap its fingers and bring him home. But snap, they did, with the US ambassador, Bill Richardson, summoning the Australian diplomat who headed UNSCOM, Richard Butler, to the US Mission in New York for a meeting. “One of the personnel provided to you [Kurtz],” Richardson said, “is a bit too exposed by the current situation, and we feel that it would be best for us all if he were withdrawn at this time.”

I oversaw the team in Iraq that Kurtz and the British officer were assigned to. Butler called me up to his office after his meeting with Richardson. “The man’s CIA,” he told me. “The Americans want him out.”

Now, as the Kosovo Monitoring Mission was departing Kosovo, Kurtz was back in action. The Americans, it seemed, wanted this man with the impressive covert operations skill set back in.

The role played by the CIA in the OSCE KVM is quite controversial – at a time when the US and NATO were accusing the Serbian government of committing atrocities, the CIA was using the cover provided by the OSCE observer mission to coordinate with fighters from the Kosovo Liberation Army who were engaged in a guerilla war with the Serbian military. Serbian operations in response to CIA-directed KLA attacks were being characterized by the West as ‘genocide’, and used to justify a planned NATO aerial bombardment of Serbia.

These facts, however, ran counter to the narrative of a Serbian-initiated campaign of ethnic cleansing which the US and NATO were spinning. The British OSCE observers were well aware of the complex reality of what was transpiring inside Kosovo, where legitimate Serbian military operations against known KLA forces were being described as “massacres of innocent civilians” by the Western media. The truth, however, was often inconvenient, which is why at that moment in time, on March 20, 1999, the British observer contingent found itself exiting Kosovo at the same time Kurtz and his fellow CIA officers were going in.

Act Two: The Phone Call

March 24, 1999. 9:20am. In the White House Situation Room, an aid places a phone call to the Kremlin, where Russian President Boris Yeltsin is waiting. The call goes through, and the aid hands the phone to Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States. The conversation started off with a grimnotification: The leaders of NATO, including himself, Clinton said, “have decided we have to launch air strikes against military targets in Serbia soon.”

The problem, Clinton noted, was the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic. “He has displaced 30,000 more people just since last Friday,” Clinton said. “He is killing innocent people. We have reports of summary executions.” Left unspoken was the role played by Kurtz and his fellow CIA operatives in creating the conditions for such actions. Clinton continued. “He [Milosevic] has basically told Russian, EU, and American negotiators that he doesn’t care what any of us think.”

Clinton was getting worked up by the consequences he had triggered by unleashing the CIA on Kosovo. “My God, they [the Europeans] have nightmares they’ll [the Serbs] repeat Bosnia and all the instability and all the problems, and it will spread from Kosovo to Macedonia to Albania and engulf all of their southern flank. They are very, very worried about it. They are right to be worried about it.”

Again, left unsaid was the fact that the very scenario that was giving the Europeans nightmares had been carefully crafted by the CIA, at Bill Clinton’s direction.

Yeltsin wasn’t buying any of it. “It is easy to throw bombs about,” he said, dismissing Clinton’s characterization of the problem and proffered solution. “It is intolerable because of the hundreds of thousands of people who will suffer and die.”

The consequences of any NATO strike, Yeltsin warned Clinton, were dire. “In the name of our future, in the name of you and me, in the name of the future of our countries, in the name of security in Europe, I ask you to renounce that strike, and I suggest that we should meet somewhere and develop a tactical line of fighting against Milosevic, against him personally. And we are wiser, we are more experienced, and we can come up with a solution. That should be done for the sake of our relationship. That should be done for the sake of peace in Europe.”

The Russian leader’s pleas fell on deaf ears. “Well, Boris,” Clinton replied, “I want to work with you to try and bring an end to this, but I don’t believe there is any way to call off the first round of strikes because Milosevic continues to displace thousands of people every day… I don’t want this to be a great source of a split between Russia and Europe and Russia and the US. We have worked too hard. There are too many economic and political things for us to do together, and I regret this more than I can say.”

The American president was outright lying to his Russian counterpart – the events in Kosovo were unfolding along the lines of a carefully scripted game plan that had been in motion for some time. War was inevitable because the US, through the CIA, had shaped the narrative to make it so. Worse, the US president was willing to sacrifice relations between the US and Russia in pursuit of this NATO objective. This fact was driven home by Yeltsin in his closing remarks.

“[O]ur people,” Yeltsin lamented, “will certainly from now on have a bad attitude with regard to America and NATO. I remember how difficult it was for me to try and turn heads of our people, the heads of politicians towards the West, towards the United States, but I succeeded in doing that, and now to lose all that. Well, since I failed to convince the President, that means there is in store for us a very difficult, difficult road of contacts, if they prove to be possible. Goodbye.”

Act Three: The Bomb

On the evening of March 24, 1999, the secretary general of NATO, Javier Solana, a Spanish diplomat, authorized aircraft operating under the auspices of NATO to begin bombing targets in Serbia. It was no coincidence that the first aircraft to drop bombs on Serbia were F/A-18s belonging to the Spanish Air Force.

March 1999, several facts stick out. First is that Spain, as a member of the United Nations, is bound by its commitment to the Charter of that organization. When it comes to the use of force, the UN Charter is quite clear – there are only two acceptable conditions under which such force might be legitimately employed by a member state. One is an enforcement action to maintain international peace and security, carried under the authority of a resolution passed by the Security Council under Chapter VII of the Charter. The other is the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense, as enshrined in Article 51 of the Charter.

As Spanish bombs fell on Serbian soil, two things were quite clear – there was no Chapter VII resolution in existence which authorized an enforcement action against Serbia, and Serbia had committed no act of aggression against either Spain or its NATO allies that would justify any claim of self-defense in explaining the Spanish (and NATO) military assault on Serbia.

In short, by dropping bombs on Serbia, the Spanish Air Force was initiating an illegal war of aggression. “To initiate a war of aggression,”the judges who comprised the International Military Tribunal convened in Nuremburg to judge the crimes of Nazi Germany, declared, “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 accumulative evil of the whole.”

Spain wasn’t alone that night – aircraft from the air forces of the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, and other NATO members participated in this “supreme international crime.” Viewed individually, there is no doubt that each nation involved in the attack on Serbia violated the UN Charter and, as such, is guilty of the crime of initiating an illegal war of aggression.

Not so fast! NATO, it seems, had crafted a novel legal argument built around the notion that it had a right to anticipatory collective self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, and that this right was properly exercised under “normative expectation that permits anticipatory collective self-defense actions by regional security or self-defense organizations where the organization is not entirely dominated by a single member.” NATO, ignoring the obvious reality that it is, indeed, dominated by the United States, postulates that it is, indeed, such an organization, comprised as it is of “a number of powerful states, three of which are permanent members of the Security Council.”

The credibility of the NATO claim of “anticipatory collective self-defense,”however, arises from its characterization of the Kosovo crisis as a humanitarian disaster infused with elements of genocide which created not only a moral justification for intervention, but a moral necessity.

Tell that to Kurtz, the man who, together with his fellow CIA operatives acting under the authority given them by the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, worked to create conditions on the ground inside Kosovo that could then be used to manufacture the very narrative of a humanitarian crisis sufficient in scope and scale to allow NATO to craft its novel legal justification for attacking Serbia.

The problem for NATO is that its legal justification was built on a foundation of lies. The fiction that NATO is an organization not entirely dominated by the United States evaporates the moment one understands the role played by the CIA in preparing the script used by NATO to justify its actions. The fact that this script promulgated outright fabrications of alleged crimes perpetrated by Serbia to justify NATO military intervention only underscores the criminal nature of the entire NATO enterprise.

There is no escaping the fact that when the first bomb dropped by the Spanish Air Force on Serbia that evening 23 years ago to this date impacted on the ground, Spain and every other member of NATO had committed the “ultimate crime.”

That this crime remains unpunished is a travesty of international justice. That this crime remains unrecognized by those who perpetrated it is a testament to the hypocrisy of nations. That this crime set in motion the events that have led to the current state of affairs between the US and NATO on the one hand, and Russia on the other, is a global tragedy.

via RT

“War Criminal” Biden in His Own Words

Screengrab of 2002 Joe Biden address to an Albanian American civic group. - Sputnik International, 1920, 24.03.2022
© Photo : YouTube / HaplogroupE3b1a

Editor’s Note: See the US-led NATO attack on the former Yugoslavia. That war lasted for 78 days during which 10,500 strike sorties were carried out. Some 2,000 civilians are estimated to have been killed. Civilian infrastructure destroyed included 25,000 homes, 20 hospitals, 70 schools, 38 bridges, over 1,000 kilometers of road and railway, 14 airports, as well as water, sewage and power plants.

by Ilya Tsukanov via Sputnik

Thursday marks the 23rd anniversary of the start of the 1999 NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia. In 78 days, NATO jets conducted 2,300 sorties, dropping 420,000 missiles and bombs, including cluster munitions and depleted uranium rounds. Up to 5,700 people were killed, with tens of thousands more diagnosed with cancers in the years that followed.

Before entering the Oval Office as Barack Obama’s vice president and then as president himself, Joe Biden served as a United States senator for over 30 years. Ahead of, during and after the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, Biden was consistently one of the top hawks in Washington pushing for the conflict to be expanded into a full-on ground invasion.

“Look, you have probably the only three people in Washington here who think we should go straight to Belgrade and arrest [Yugoslav president Slobodan] Milosevich,” Biden said in a May 1999 appearance on Meet the Press alongside the now late Republican senator John McCain.
“But let’s not kid each other. We’re the only three people. The rest of this is malarkey. The Republican Congress won’t even vote for the bombing. The NATO forces won’t even go along with the idea of ground troops. And whether or not the president will or will not is not relevant. The question to me is: What is the definition of victory?” Biden complained.

“The definition of victory was all the troops out of Kosovo, the Albanians back in Kosovo and a NATO-led force in Kosovo. That’s not total victory. That’s not the victory I want, that’s not the victory John wants. I’ve been saying we should go in on the ground, we should announce there’s gonna be American casualties. We should go to Belgrade and we should have a Japanese/German-style occupation of that country and we should have public trials in order to strike away this mask of Serbian victimization,” Biden said.

In a second video, dated 1998, before the NATO air campaign began, Biden sparred with Republican lawmaker Joe DioGuardi about the Kosovo crisis, boasting that he had called for Belgrade to be bombed and for US pilots to destroy all bridges on the Drina River during the NATO intervention in Bosnia in 1995, which killed over 150 Bosnian Serbs, destroyed critical civilian infrastructure, and irradiated the region with DU munitions.

In a third video, from an April 2002 gala dinner of the Albanian American Civic League in New York City, an apparently inebriated Biden vowed to continue to support having US troops “on the ground with loaded rifles and drawn bayonets” in the Balkans until US objectives were accomplished.

“I will continue with every fiber in my being to keep America involved with troops that can shoot and kill to protect the rights of the Albanians wherever they reside in the Balkans,” Biden assured. US forces would stay until the “job is finished,” the senator stressed, defining that “job” as putting Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania on the road to NATO and EU membership.


“Why some of you ask have I been so relentless on Serbia and [post-Milosevich President Vojislav] Kostunica who I do not trust? Why have I been so reluctant, so persistent in not providing aid to the people of Serbia who are many good people – why? Because until they look in their hearts they can never cure themselves of the disease that they are the oppressed. And as long as they operate on that standard, this cycle will continue and continue and continue. So that’s why, not for vengeance, but for release – that it’s necessary for them to look the devil in the eye,” Biden said.

Are Russia and China in on the Great Reset? My Response to James Corbett

by  via The Duran


The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of this site. This site does not give financial, investment or medical advice.

Yesterday, I was invited by my friend Hrvoje Morik onto his new show on TNT Radio to discuss a short response to a new viral video that has been produced by James Corbett earlier this week.

Corbett’s video advances the thesis that Russia and China are both controlled opposition to the western unipolar Great Reset Agenda and are actually in cahoots as part of a grand game to enslave the world. The principal device used by Corbett in this video are two February 4th Joint Statements (one on US-Canadian Relations and another on Sino-Russian Relations) which use identical language. Although Corbett may have used this device as a piece of sarcasm to push the thesis of Russia-China complicity in the Great Reset, the fact is that based upon countless comments from viewers who have watched his video on many online platforms, including dozens of subscribers who wrote into me after having watched Corbett, these documents were both treated as factual.

Just to be clear with the many people who were confused about this: the Canadian-US Joint Declaration does not exist.

Despite this, I share interview because the willingness to believe that every nation is controlled by a sociopathic oligarchy out to kill us is tied to a deep cultural sickness of nihilism, pessimism and the belief that humanity is intrinsically corrupt and doomed. That level of cynicism is attractive partially because it alleviates each of us from having to take responsibility for righting injustices or risking our personal security in order to intervene upon an evil self-destructive system (for how could we make something Good which is evil by its very nature?)

This cynical way of thinking also appeals to our own tendency to wish to remain voyeurs watching and commenting upon reality as if each of us were not also integrated into the system which we were voyeuristically trying to watch as if it were reality TV.

My preliminary written remarks (which I feature here below) were shared by our mutual friend Joaquin Flores on his excellent Telegram Channel (T.me/NewResistance), and the discussion with Hrvoje are also featured below.

Listen on Soundcloud

Or watch on Bitchute here

Preliminary Thoughts Upon Watching Corbett’s new Viral Video ‘Shocking Document Reveals Trudeau (Putin and Xi’s) Real Plan’

My preliminary reaction after watching this argument is a bewilderment that Corbett is completely incapable of ever looking at what Russia or China are actually doing in terms of actions which undermine the depopulation agenda. There are currently the largest development projects now underway pulling over 1 billion out of poverty led by China’s Belt and Road Initiative which is in total opposition to the depopulation program yet it’s like none of that exists.

Another paradox that Corbett seems to be happy ignoring: if all sides are all controlled and have been so long, then why didn’t the oligarchy get their technocratic feudalism a LONG time ago. I mean George Soros had his own agent (Zhao Ziyang) in thee highest position of power in China ready to privatize everything under the fourth industrial revolution (in 1983!!) So why was that agent arrested with his allies (a few who evaded arrest by sneaking off to the USA and Canada) and Soros given a lifetime ban from China?

All of Russia was brought under total control during the privatization 1990s of Yeltsin with NATO and Soros taking control of the entire post Soviet space. Today Soros is banned and many of the leading Russian oligarchs created during that time are in sanctuary in London and Florida. Why? Why didn’t that level of influence continue? Why did oligarchs get sent to prison and see their privatized state assets re-nationalized? Why did Russia not let the Syrians get the Iraq treatment or let Venezuela get a regime change in favor of WEF agent Juan Guaido? Why not let Kazakhstan get a Soros regime change treatment a couple of months ago? Why promote National banking when the oligarchy wants all central banks private?

Yes AI and digital currency will be used by Eurasia, but what is their function?

How is the system functioning differently in which such things would be used? Are digital currencies or AI intrinsically evils or is there a principle of function, design and intent that determines whether tools will be used to enslave or support human life?

I get really annoyed with pattern-formation thinking advocated by alt media black pilled libertarian commentators who appear to have giddy-fetishes for dissecting evil to such an extreme degree that when evidence of the Good is right in front of their face, their polarized intellectual lenses cannot see it.

Im going to write something on this with the title “so you’re too smart to hope” or “an ode to the black pilled”

Supplementary Reading Material for those Hungry for More Context:

The Collision of Two Opposing Green Destinies

The Multipolar Alliance as the Last Line of Defense of the UN Charter

How China’s Gorbachev Was Flushed in 1989

Who is Creating a New Chinese Boogey Man? (An Examination of Modern Psychological Warfare)

Beijing, Five Eyes or Something Else: Who’s to Blame for the Covid Pandemic

Today’s Emergencies Act, and Anti-Russian False Flags Echo the Gouzenko Hoax That Unleashed the Cold War

Do Xi Jinping’s Davos Remarks Prove He is a Globalist Shill? “By their fruits ye shall know them”

Debunking Anti-Chinese Psy Ops Part 1: Social Credit as Distasteful Necessity in an Age of Asymmetric Warfare

Debunking Anti-Chinese Psy Ops Part 2: Opium, Synthetic Cults and the Haunting of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

Debunking Anti-Chinese Psy Ops Part 3: Jesuits, Tavistock and the Battle for the Soul of China

Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series and Clash of the Two Americas. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation .