First Significant Victories Of Ukrainian ArmySouth Front: On March 3, on the 8th day of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU)... Russian General killed.
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First Significant Victories Of Ukrainian ArmySouth Front: On March 3, on the 8th day of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU)... Russian General killed.
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The crisis, and especially the reaction of the 'west' to it, is much worse than I had feared.
The U.S. government and 'western' media claim that the World condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
That is however far from reality. It is only true if true if you believe 'the world' solely exists of the 5-eye spying cooperation (U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), the European Union, Switzerland, Japan and Singapore.
The view differs when you zoom out.
The much bigger 'rest of the world' has not condemned Russia but understands how the conflict came about. They blame, like political scientist John Mearsheimer, the U.S. for causing the crisis. This includes, as far as I can tell, all of Africa (54 states), South America, Central America, the Middle East, and all of Asia ex Japan and Singapore.
This rest of the world that did not condemn Russia includes several notable U.S. allies and 'partners' like Turkey (Nato's second biggest army!), India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Israel.
The case shows how much the standing of the once unilateral superpower has been diminished.
Since 2014 the war in east Ukraine against the people of the Donbas regions has cost more than 14,000 lives. Some 10,000 of those were civilians on the Donbas side. The dying there continues as the Ukrainian army and its nazi battalions continue to shell the cities of Donetzk and Luhansk:
At least 136 civilians have been killed, including 13 children, and 400 have been injured since Russia invaded Ukraine last week, a United Nations agency said on Tuesday."The real toll is likely to be much higher," Liz Throssell, a spokesperson for the U.N. human rights office (OHCHR), told a briefing, adding that 253 of the casualties were in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions in eastern Ukraine.
Over the last days I also read several commentators claiming that that the Russian 'regime change' incursion into Ukraine would not have the support of the Russian people and would set them up against their president. Here is news for them:
Maxim A. Suchkov @m_suchkov - 19:14 UTC · Mar 1, 2022
Meanwhile #Putin's approval rating has raised from 60% to 71% (survey by FOM)
The sanctions put up against Russia will hurt its people. But due to global price increases they will be probably felt stronger in Europe and the United States and they may even cause mass starvation and revolutions in poorer countries of the 'third world'.
Mark Sleboda has served as nuclear engineer in the U.S. Navy. He has studied at the London School of Economics. He has married a woman from Crimea and now lives in Moscow as a Russian citizen. He is a frequent commentator in Russian media. Sleboda has previously criticized president Putin for being too soft with the 'west'.
His analyses and predictions are more dire than mine but he is probably right (thread edited for readability):
Mark Sleboda @MarkSleboda1 - 8:53 UTC · Mar 2, 2022This is #theGreatDecoupling between the West and Russia. Economic linkages will be cut down to only energy and a few other commodities & chemicals that Europe is dependent on Russia for. The West controls and has weaponized their entire economy in their war to break Russia.
Political, social and cultural linkages will also be severed to a high degree. Weaning Russia off this dependence will be hard and immiserating. But with Chinese and some other Eurasian support, Russia may just weather it. The entire global economy will suffer as well.
But once the dust has settled and new domestic and import substitution formed - Russia will at least be economically & financially independent from the West. They will never again be able to weaponize their economic hegemony to coerce, blackmail, or wage war on Russia.
The same weaponized economic war too will also soon be turned on China and the Rest of the world's holdouts from US-led Western Hegemony. The Unipolar world will truly be over, but the Multipolar world will be stillborn by US attempts to hang on to their hegemony. Instead US/Western pressure will directly result in the formation of an anti-Western bloc led by China and Russia for survival and independence. Neutrality will be difficult to maintain. A new Bipolar world is coming into being, just decades after the last ended.
The Golden Age of the Global Internet is also now over resulting not from Russia closing itself off, but by censorship and exclusion by Western and the social media platforms and the internet fixtures they control - because they don't trust their own people to hear alternative perspectives and narratives and judge on their own. The world's internet will now break down into regional spheres with limited connectivity. It will be a new, much smaller, less connected, more localized and divisive world.
We are of course already seeing the physical connections around the world break down - with closures of entire swathes of the globe's surface to each others' airlines and global shipping connections being severed one by one as we speak. Global distribution networks will be disrupted & chaos result for months. Because Russia & Ukraine are primary sources of so many of the world's commodities - energy & food costs around the world will skyrocket. In the First world prices will go up, in the Third - starvation.
Ultimately the cause was the US-led West trying to maintain and extend their Hegemony, while they can and Russia resisting it. NATO expansion east in waves, US meddling and hybrid warfare to bring into power pro-Western/anti-Russian governments in formerly neutral, unaligned, national identity-divided post Soviet states was the endgame of this NATO expansion to geopolitically consolidate all of Europe under US-led Western Hegemony up to Russia's borders.
Russia resisted this geopolitical flipping by color revolution in Georgia, Belarus & Ukraine. And now the ultimate target of this economic war on Russia is forcing regime change in Russia itself for having the temerity to resist the Hegemon's geopolitical expansion right on her very borders.
The great Realist IR scholar Mearsheimer foresaw all of this. As did Kissinger, George Kennan, US Ambassador John Matlock and many others. They tried to warn what the consequences of the US trying to geopolitically flip Ukraine would be, but to no avail.
For Russia the only path forward, the goal to survive is, must be - separation, autarky (self-sufficiency), and independence from US-led Western Hegemony.
Posted by b on March 2, 2022 at 14:46 UTC | Permalink
Since this publication is blocked from most western MSM, (MainStreamMedia), I personally feel it shouldn't be.
Therefore, I publish one of their stories, which hopefully can acquire a western audience. Please support Southfront if possible. Thank-you.
Written by Gavin O’Reilly
Since early last Thursday, in what has seemingly finally brought an end to the two-year long COVID-19 corporate media narrative, a Russian military intervention in neighbouring Ukraine, launched in response to almost nine years of NATO provocations following Kiev coming under the rule of the successive pro-Western governments of Petro Poroshenko and Voldymyr Zelensky since the 2014 Euromaidan colour revolution, has dominated media headlines worldwide –with Moscow coming in for levels of global condemnation not seen since the Cold War.
US President Joe Biden, in tandem with the other G7 members, immediately announced wide-ranging sanctions targeting the Russian economy, President of the European Commission Ursula Von Der Leyen banned Russian broadcasters RT and Sputnik News across the EU’s 27 member states, and in the wake of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s earlier suspension of the proposed Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Germany and Russia, following Moscow’s formal recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk’s People’s Republics last Monday, more than 140 staff were laid off by the pipeline’s Swiss-based operator Nord Stream 2 AG in the wake of wider sanctions following the Russian intervention, with the company considering an outright declaration of bankruptcy altogether.
Of course, the obvious reaction to these sanctions by onlookers familiar to the actions of the US-NATO hegemony would be to ask why nothing similar was carried out when allied states were carrying out war crimes, such as Israel’s Summer 2014 bombardment of Gaza, leading to the deaths of more than 2,000 Palestinians over the space of seven weeks, or Saudi Arabia’s now seven year long war and blockade against neighbouring Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab Peninsula, and one which has now suffered the largest Cholera outbreak in recorded history and a famine resulting in the deaths of more than 85,000 children owing to Riyadh’s Western-backed actions – with perhaps the most demonstrable display of this hypocrisy being Monday’s declaration by football world governing body FIFA that Russia would be suspended from the upcoming 2022 World Cup, due to be held in a country that has played a key role in the now eleven year long Western proxy war against Syria resulting in an estimated 350,000 deaths – Qatar.
In 2009, following a refusal by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to allow US-allied Doha to build a pipeline through his country, one which would have undermined his relationship with key ally Russia, a plan was quickly hatched by the US, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Israel to instigate a violent coup in the Arab Republic in order to remove Assad’s government and replace it with a Western-friendly leadership.
In March 2011, one month after a similar Western-orchestrated regime change operation took hold in Libya, the CIA’s Timber Sycamore initiative would see Salafist terrorists groups, armed, funded and trained by the West and its allies, launch a brutal terrorist campaign against Damascus – one that would see vast swathes of the secular nation coming under their control, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of groups such as Christians and Shia Muslims.
In June 2013, Iran and Hezbollah intervened at the request of the Syrian government, with Tehran knowing that the toppling of Assad’s rule would embolden the regime change lobby to quickly place the Islamic Republic in its sights, an intervention that played a key role in defending the Arab Republic from NATO-backed terrorist groups, though what would perhaps be the most decisive factor in turning the tide in Damascus’ favour would come in September 2015 – an air campaign launched by Russia against the terrorist groups, again at the official request of Damascus, and which ensured that eleven years on, the government of Bashar al-Assad still remains in place.
This is not to discount the devastation inflicted on Syria since 2011 however, with thousands killed and billions of pounds worth of damage caused to vital Syrian infrastructure – devastation that Qatar, via its funding and arming of the terrorists who carried it out, played a key part in, though in stark contrast to the wide-ranging sanctions imposed in the Western response to the Russian intervention in Ukraine, has been rewarded with the hosting of a prestigious sporting tournament instead.
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