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Ukrainian POWs Say Families of Dead Denied Compensation

Nine captive AFU testify: Dead soldiers buried in trenches, wounded not evacuated

DEBORAH L. ARMSTRONG, SEP 8, 2023 https://deborahlarmstrong.substack.com/p/ukrainian-pows-say-families-of-dead?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1192684&post_id=136847336&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&utm_medium=email

Official numbers of Ukrainian casualties have been grossly underreported since Russia first began its Special Military Operation in February, 2022. According to some military analysts, the number of Ukrainian dead is in the hundreds of thousands, and former USMC Intelligence Officer Scott Ritter has put it as high as half a million.

To anyone really paying attention, it’s obvious that Ukraine cannot continue fighting much longer. Most of the healthy young fighting men have already been killed, and male conscripts who couldn’t come up with the thousands of dollars needed to flee their country, have already been forced into the war by the busloads.

But that is not enough for the regime in Kyiv and its power-hungry Western overlords. They are so desperate to keep “weakening Russia” — despite Ukraine’s looming defeat — that they will start calling up women beginning October 1st.

Meanwhile, captured Ukrainian servicemen tell horror stories of dead comrades left behind to rot, or buried in the very trenches they fought in, while commanders force them to sign papers agreeing to the “voluntary abandonment of bodies” in the event of death — a way to avoid paying compensation to the families of the fallen.

Nine Ukrainian POWs gave their testimonies in a video released this week on Telegram. I have translated the video and uploaded it to my channel on YouTube. You may watch it here, but I must warn you that there are extremely graphic images from the war.

In the video, the captive soldiers refer to their dead comrades as “200s” and the wounded are called “300s.” It’s military jargon that is used in Ukraine and Russia, and is believed to have been derived from the numbers on forms that had to be filled out for dead and wounded soldiers in times past. To make the translation easier to understand, I just referred to them as “dead” and “wounded” and left out the numerical designations.

The first POW has a slightly graying beard and looks to be in his 40’s. “All around us there were dead soldiers,” he says, “It was just horrible.”

The video shows the skeleton of a soldier still wearing a helmet.

“Very heavy casualties,” the second soldier says. He is also bearded but looks younger, perhaps in his 30’s. “It was really scary,” he adds.

More carnage is shown as prisoner number 3 is heard. “A lot of bodies were lying around and it was impossible to get them out of there,” he says. His head is shaved, he has a mustache, and looks somewhat emaciated, possibly in his 30’s. “The commanders made us bury the bodies of the dead right in our positions.”

POW number 4 has a gray head of hair and matching beard and looks to be in his 50’s or older. “They wrote reports and buried them right at the position,” he says, “so that they wouldn’t have to pay money to the family and relatives.”

More bodies which look like they have been left to rot for some time. “The dead were lying in the trenches,” says the fifth prisoner, who has bushy brown hair and a beard, and may be in his 20’s or 30’s. “Nobody even took them away or thought of taking them away. The wounded were also in the trenches, they wanted to go to the entrance, but they were told to go back.”

The sixth man is clean-shaven and bald, possibly in his late 20’s or early 30’s. “A guy was shot,” he says, “either he wanted to run away or one of the commanders didn’t like him, so he got drunk. They told us to bury him.”

“There was even one young man who shot himself,” says prisoner number 7, “but they didn’t care about him, they buried him immediately. They’ll write it off as casualties probably and that’s all.” His head is also shaved, but he sports a mustache and closely-cropped beard. A tattoo of a cat paws playfully at a mole on his neck. He, too, looks to be in his 20’s or 30’s.

The 8th man looks like he’s in his 30’s. He’s clean-shaven with scars on his head. “Many, many, very many casualties,” he says. “Lots of bodies on the road. You step over them, you just walk by. There were many dead, many wounded, and still even more. No kind of evacuation.” As he talks, the video shows clumps of bodies tangled together. “We came to the position, right in the trenches were dead soldiers. All around the trenches, there were also bodies lying.”

The ninth and final man looks younger, perhaps in his 20’s, with closely cropped hair and a bushy brown beard. He says that his commander issued a warning, saying “Listen, if anyone runs away, he’ll be shot.” The interviewer asks if he shot people and he answers simply, “yes.”

The Russian Investigative Committee took note of the testimony and reported that fighters in the Armed Forces of Ukraine are being forced to sign agreements stating that, if they are killed, their bodies will not be taken from the battlefield and their families will not receive any compensation from the Ukrainian government.

The agency emphasized that Ukrainian commanders treat their subordinates inhumanely, and that the signatures of the soldiers were collected deliberately in order to deny their families any compensation or allowances.

As you saw, the soldiers also testified that their wounded comrades were not given any aid and that their commanders threatened to shoot them if they abandoned their positions.

With special thanks to Lilya Takumbetova.

About the author:
Deborah Armstrong currently writes about geopolitics with an emphasis on Russia. She previously worked in local TV news in the United States where she won two regional Emmy Awards. In the early 1990’s, Deborah lived in the Soviet Union during its final days and worked as a television consultant at Leningrad Television. 

September 9, 2023 Posted by | PERSONAL STORIES, Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

22 Years of Drone Warfare and No End in Sight

Twenty-two years later, drones continue to be instruments of civilian slaughter and the language deployed by successive administrations to describe such slaughter has served to sanitize that fact. Whether it’s the use of “target” or “collateral damage,” both minimize the reality that human beings are being murdered.  Taken together with a larger war-on-terror narrative in which Muslims have been strikingly demonized and criminalized, the result has been the production of killable bodies whose deaths elicit neither guilt, remorse, nor accountability. 

SCHEERPOST, September 7, 2023 By Maha Hilal / TomDispatch

“………………………………………………………..In 2023, this country’s drone warfare program has entered its third decade with no end in sight. Despite the fact that the 22nd anniversary of 9/11 is approaching, policymakers have demonstrated no evidence of reflecting on the failures of drone warfare and how to stop it. Instead, the focus continues to be on simply shifting drone policy in minor ways within an ongoing violent system.

The Inherent Dehumanization of Drone Warfare

In February 2013, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney justified drone strikes as a key tool of American foreign policy this way:  

“We have acknowledged, the United States, that sometimes we use remotely piloted aircraft to conduct targeted strikes against specific al-Qaeda terrorists in order to prevent attacks on the United States and to save American lives. We conduct those strikes because they are necessary to mitigate ongoing actual threats, to stop plots, prevent future attacks, and, again, save American lives… The U.S. government takes great care in deciding to pursue an al-Qaeda terrorist, to ensure precision and to avoid loss of innocent life.”

More aggressively endorsing the use of such drones, Georgetown Professor Daniel Byman, who has held government positions, emphasized the necessity of such warfare to protect American lives. “Drones,” he wrote, “have done their job remarkably well… And they have done so at little financial cost, at no risk to U.S. forces, and with fewer civilian casualties than many alternative methods would have caused.”

In reality, however, Washington’s war on terror has inflicted disproportionate violence on communities across the globe, while using this form of asymmetrical warfare to further expand the space between the value placed on American lives and those of Muslims. As the rhetoric on drone warfare suggests, the value of life and the need to protect it are, as far as Washington is concerned, reserved for Americans and their allies.

Since the war on terror was launched, the London-based watchdog group Airwars has estimated that American air strikes have killed at least 22,679 civilians and possibly up to 48,308 of them. Such killings have been carried out for the most part by desensitized killers, who have been primed towards the dehumanization of the targets of those murderous machines. In the words of critic Saleh Sharief, “The detached nature of drone warfare has anonymized and dehumanized the enemy, greatly diminishing the necessary psychological barriers of killing.” 

In his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman focuses on the “mechanical distancing” of modern warfare, thanks to “the sterile Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight, or some other kind of mechanical bugger that permits the killer to deny the humanity of his victim.” Scholar Grégoire Chamayou describes this phenomenon in even starker terms. Thanks to the distance between the drone operator and the victim, “One is never spattered by the adversary’s blood. No doubt the absence of any physical soiling corresponds to less of a sense of moral soiling… Above all, it ensures that the operator will never see his victim seeing him doing what he does to him.”  

Needless to say, drone technology has rendered those in distant lands so much more disposable in the name of American national security. This is because such long-range techno-targeting has created a profound level of dehumanization that, ironically enough, has only made the repeated act of long-distance killing, of (not to mince words) slaughter, remarkably banal.  ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Twenty-two years later, drones continue to be instruments of civilian slaughter and the language deployed by successive administrations to describe such slaughter has served to sanitize that fact. Whether it’s the use of “target” or “collateral damage,” both minimize the reality that human beings are being murdered.  Taken together with a larger war-on-terror narrative in which Muslims have been strikingly demonized and criminalized, the result has been the production of killable bodies whose deaths elicit neither guilt, remorse, nor accountability. 

September 9, 2023 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Ukraine used cluster munitions against civilians – Human Rights Watch

 https://www.rt.com/russia/582435-hrw-ukraine-cluster-civilians/ 8 Sept 23

Kiev targeted the population of Russian-held Izyum with the controversial projectiles.

The Ukrainian military used cluster munitions to shell the city of Izyum and caused civilian deaths, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday. The attack happened months before the US provided Kiev with additional cluster shells, overruling the objections of many NATO members.

“We figured this out after the Russians left and our investigators went there to look into the war crimes and atrocities that were committed – and they saw remnants of cluster munitions everywhere,” HRW’s Mary Wareham told RIA Novosti. “After finding out the direction from which the fire came, they established that they had been used by Ukrainian forces.”

The 110-page Cluster Munition Monitor 2022 report, published by HRW this week, lists deployments of such weapons by both sides in the conflict. It notes that the group had first reported on the attack on Izyum in July, but that the Ukrainian Defense Ministry officially denied ever using such munitions in or around the settlement.

Wareham pointed out that HRW had detailed testimonies about civilians who were killed or wounded by cluster bombs.

A HRW report from January also included information about the Ukrainian use of cluster munitions, as well as the targeting of Izyum by ‘Butterfly’anti-personnel mines, which killed 11 civilians and wounded around 50, including five children. HRW said that the Russian military informed the civilians about the danger of the mines, citing testimonials from around 100 local residents.

Wareham pointed out that HRW had detailed testimonies about civilians who were killed or wounded by cluster bombs.

A HRW report from January also included information about the Ukrainian use of cluster munitions, as well as the targeting of Izyum by ‘Butterfly’anti-personnel mines, which killed 11 civilians and wounded around 50, including five children. HRW said that the Russian military informed the civilians about the danger of the mines, citing testimonials from around 100 local residents.

Cluster munitions are abhorrent weapons that are globally banned because they cause both immediate and long-term civilian harm and suffering,” Wareham said while announcing the annual report. “It’s unconscionable that civilians are still dying from cluster munition attacks 15 years after these weapons were outlawed.”

Over the years, the HRW has released a number of reports about the use of cluster munitions in the Ukrainian conflict, stating that both sides were using them. The organization noted, however, that its ability to gather evidence of Ukrainian attacks is hampered because it cannot safely access Russian-controlled territories.

Ukraine, Russia, and the US are not party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), which has sought to ban this type of ordnance, citing its toll on civilians. Earlier this year, Washington rejected objections from several NATO allies who are party to the CMM and sent Kiev 155mm artillery shells loaded with dual-purpose improved conventional munitions (DPICM). 

Some US outlets have reported that the Pentagon receives detailed reports from Ukraine about when and where its DPICM ordnance is used. Russia has documented multiple instances of their use against civilians in Donetsk. 

September 9, 2023 Posted by | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

NATO Chief Openly Admits Russia Invaded Ukraine Because Of NATO Expansion

Stoltenberg’s remarks would probably have been classified as Russian propaganda by plutocrat-funded “disinformation experts” and imperial “fact checkers” if it had been said online by someone like you or me, but because it came from the head of NATO as part of a screed against the Russian president it’s been allowed to pass through without objection.

In reality Stoltenberg is just stating a well-established fact: contrary to the official western narrative, Putin invaded Ukraine not because he is evil and hates freedom but because no great power ever allows foreign military threats to amass on its borders  —  including the United States.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, SEP 9, 2023 https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/nato-chief-openly-admits-russia-invaded?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=136866482&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email

During a speech at the EU Parliament’s foreign affairs committee on Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg clearly and repeatedly acknowledged that Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine because of fears of NATO expansionism.

His comments, initially flagged by journalist Thomas Frazi, read as follows:

The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.

So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.

Stoltenberg made these remarks as part of a general gloat about the fact that Putin invaded Ukraine to prevent NATO expansion and yet the invasion has resulted in Sweden and Finland applying to join the alliance, saying it “demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he’s getting the exact opposite.”

Stoltenberg’s remarks would probably have been classified as Russian propaganda by plutocrat-funded “disinformation experts” and imperial “fact checkers” if it had been said online by someone like you or me, but because it came from the head of NATO as part of a screed against the Russian president it’s been allowed to pass through without objection.

In reality Stoltenberg is just stating a well-established fact: contrary to the official western narrative, Putin invaded Ukraine not because he is evil and hates freedom but because no great power ever allows foreign military threats to amass on its borders  —  including the United States. That’s why so many western analysts and officials spent years warning that NATO’s actions were going to provoke a war, and yet when war broke out we were slammed with a tsunami of mass media propaganda repeating over and over and over again that this was an “unprovoked invasion”.

It would have been so very, very easy to prevent this horrific war. Off-ramp after off-ramp after off-ramp was passed to get us to where we’re at now. Chance after chance after chance to avoid all this pointless death and misery was passed up, both before 2014 and every year since. The US-centralized power structure knowingly chose this war, and it did so to advance its own interests. If people really, deeply understood this, the entire western empire would collapse.

It’s the damnedest thing how you’ll get called a Kremlin agent for saying that this war was provoked by NATO expansionism and that it serves US interests, even when NATO openly says this war was provoked by NATO expansionism and US officials keep openly saying that this war serves US interests.

The latest entry in the latter category came in the form of a Thursday tweet by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, which reads, “Standing with our allies against Russian aggression isn’t charity. In fact — it’s a direct investment in replenishing America’s arsenal with American weapons built by American workers. Expanding our defense industrial base puts America in a stronger position to out-compete China.”

When official authorized narrative-makers acknowledge these things it’s okay, but when normal human beings do it it’s Kremlin disinformation. This is because when the authorized narrative-makers do it they’re doing it to advance the information interests of the US empire — to explain to war-weary Americans how this war benefits their country, or to mock Putin’s failure to stop the enlargement of NATO — whereas when normal people do it it’s to establish what’s true and factual.

This all happens as a study sponsored by the EU with a group funded by US oligarch Pierre Omidyar is being circulated by mass media outlets like The Washington Post finding that Twitter under Elon Musk has not been doing enough to censor “Russian propaganda” on the platform. This would put Musk in violation of the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which requires platforms to restrict such materials.

As Glenn Greenwald has noted, the Digital Services Act defines “Russian propaganda” so extremely broadly that it includes “ideological alignment with the Russian state” in the category of materials that must be censored, which includes people who “parrot the Kremlin’s narratives through originally produced content or by spreading Kremlin aligned narratives to different target audiences and languages.”

Anyone who speaks out against US foreign policy relating to Russia online is always immediately accused of “parroting Kremlin narratives” by empire apologists mindlessly regurgitating what they’ve been told to believe by outlets like The Washington Post, whether they have anything to do with the Russian government or not. I myself have no affiliation or interaction with the Russian state whatsoever, yet I receive many of these accusations every single day online just for criticizing US foreign policy.

If I were the NATO Secretary General publicly gloating about how Putin’s efforts to stop the expansion of NATO have failed, it would be fine for me to acknowledge that NATO expansion provoked this war after our refusal to prevent a needless conflict. But because I am harming the information interests of the western empire instead of helping them, that makes me a Russian propagandist.

This isn’t because the definition of “Russian propaganda” is flawed, but because it is working exactly as intended. The push to marginalize and eliminate “Russian propaganda” has never had anything to do with fighting the actual materials put out by the Russian state (which have essentially zero meaningful existence in the western world); the push has always been about stomping out opposition to US foreign policy. 

Like so much else in this world when examining the behavior of power, it’s ultimately all about narrative control. The powerful understand that whoever controls the dominant narrative about world events actually controls the world, because real power isn’t just controlling what happens but controlling what people think about what happens. That’s the real glue holding the US-centralized empire together, and the world will never have a chance at knowing peace until people start bringing consciousness to it.

September 9, 2023 Posted by | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Ukraine wasted $17 million on faulty drones – media

Rt.com 8 Sept 23

A company managed to supply only one airworthy drone out of a batch of 55 ordered by Kiev, investigative outlet reports

A drone-manufacturing company has failed to deliver on a lucrative contract with the country’s military, Ukrainian investigative outlet Bihus.info reported on Tuesday. Ukrainian Aviation Systems (UAS) failed to meet a deadline to provide the military with 55 HAWK reconnaissance drones in mid-August, delivering just four units, of which just one was deemed airworthy.

The HAWK drone is a small winged reconnaissance UAV capable of reaching speeds of up to 55 kilometers per hour (34mph), according to UAS. Each unit costs more than 14.5 million hryvnias (nearly $400,000), while the whole contract is worth 807 million hryvnias or almost $22 million, with at least $17.6 million paid to the company in advance, according to Bihus.info.

Reporters with the outlet attended ill-fated trials of the drones, during which only one unit managed to show decent performance and was accepted by the military. One of the drones repeatedly lost connection to ground control mid-flight, while another lost its wings and crashed. A third unit failed to take off at all, the outlet reported.

UAS is linked to Borislav Rosenblat, a former MP and close associate of former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko. Rosenblat has repeatedly been involved in various corruption scandals, ending up being stripped of his mandate in 2017 amid an investigation into illegal amber mining and trade……………………………………………………………………………….. more https://www.rt.com/russia/582430-ukraine-faulty-drones-contract/

September 9, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

US Air Force tests nuclear-capable long-range missile

By Michael Callahan, CNN, September 6, 2023

The US Air Force on Wednesday tested an unarmed nuclear-capable long-range missile, according to the Air Force Global Strike Command.

The unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile, equipped with three test reentry vehicles, was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and traveled 4,200 miles to the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands…………………………………………………………………………….

The Minuteman III is traditionally known as the only land-based leg to the US nuclear triad. The other two parts of the triad are the Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile and nuclear weapons carried by long-range strategic bombers.  https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/06/politics/usaf-nuclear-missile-tests/index.html

September 8, 2023 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Senators raise concerns over US missing nuclear submarine target

The Hill, BY FILIP TIMOTIJA – 09/06/23

Senators on the Foreign Relations Committee raised concerns that the U.S. fell short of its nuclear submarine target during a Wednesday morning hearing on a trilateral security partnership.

Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. struck the defense deal AUKUS in September 2021 and announced an arrangement for Australia to acquire “conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered” submarine capability through the partnership in March 2023. As part of that agreement, Australia agreed to invest approximately $3 billion in the first four years of the agreement into U.S. shipbuilding.

The agreement is intended to help Australia develop nuclear-powered submarines while enabling allies to safely share the relevant technology with each other. 

During the hearing, lawmakers questioned whether the U.S. had the bandwidth to sell nuclear submarines to Australia. The U.S. Navy currently has 49 fast-attack submarines, which puts it 17 submarines short of the 66-vessel goal the military branch previously told Congress it needed to reach in order to properly defend the U.S.

“We are grateful that the Australians want to invest $3 billion,” Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) said. “What are we gonna have to invest to get to 66 submarines?”…………………………………………………….  https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4190727-senators-raise-concerns-over-us-missing-nuclear-submarine-target/

September 8, 2023 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

US to Arm Ukraine With Toxic Depleted Uranium Ammunition

The munitions will be used with US-made Abrams tanks

by Dave DeCamp   https://news.antiwar.com/2023/09/03/us-to-arm-ukraine-with-toxic-depleted-uranium-ammunition/

The US is set to arm Ukraine with controversial depleted uranium (DU) ammunition as part of an upcoming arms package for use with US-made Abrams tanks, Reuters reported on Friday.

DU is a heavy metal that’s a byproduct of enriched uranium and is extremely dense, making it a good material for armor-piercing rounds. But DU ammunition is toxic and is linked to cancer and birth defects in places it has been used, including Iraq, where the US used an enormous amount of DU in the Gulf War and the 2003 invasion.

The UK has already provided Ukraine with DU ammunition for use with British-made Challenger 2 tanks, but the US has yet to take the step. Earlier this year, when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced he was deploying nuclear weapons to Belarus, he said it was a response to the UK arming Ukraine with DU.

According to Reuters, the arms package for Ukraine that will include DU ammunition is expected to be announced this week. The first Abrams tanks are due to arrive in Ukraine in the coming weeks.

The Wall Street Journal reported in June that the Biden administration was expected to arm Ukraine with DU. The report said some officials were concerned the move would open up the US to criticism for providing weapons that could cause health and environmental damage.

But at this point in the war, the administration has shown it’s not concerned about damaging Ukraine’s environment. In July, the US started arming Ukraine with cluster bombs, which spread small submunitions over large areas. Unexploded submunitions, or bomblets, can be found by civilians years or decades after use. Because of their history of killing civilians, cluster munitions have been banned by over 100 countries.

September 8, 2023 Posted by | depleted uranium, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Revisiting John Pilger’s 2016 Warnings About US Warmongering Against Russia And China

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, SEP 6, 2023  https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/revisiting-john-pilgers-2016-warnings?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=136786147&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email

In March of 2016 the renowned Australian journalist and filmmaker John Pilger published an article titled “A world war has begun. Break the silence.” which urgently warned of the US empire’s aggressive escalations against Russia and China. Re-reading parts of it in 2023 is like watching someone placing flags next to recently planted seeds that would eventually grow into the towering problems our world now faces. 

It’s like listening to a time traveler warning people from the past about a grave mistake they were about to make. Pilger points to US provocations in Ukraine, NATO militarism, and the encirclement of China and warns of the surging risk of nuclear war, noting that nuclear warhead spending “rose higher under Obama than under any American president.” 

“In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier,” Pilger wrote. “Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.”

“Ukraine — once part of the Soviet Union — has become a CIA theme park,” wrote Pilger. “Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority.”

“In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia — the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons,” Pilger said. “This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.”

“What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against China,” Pilger continued. “The United States is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear-armed bombers. This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific, the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by media; war by media.”

Pilger highlighted the way his home country Australia was being roped into Washington’s war preparations against China, a trend which has since grown much worse as the drums of war grow louder.

“In 2015, in high secrecy, the US and Australia staged the biggest single air-sea military exercise in recent history, known as Talisman Sabre,” he wrote. “Its aim was to rehearse an Air-Sea Battle Plan, blocking sea lanes, such as the Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Straits, that cut off China’s access to oil, gas and other vital raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.”

Pilger wrote all this while preparing to release his excellent film “The Coming War on China”, which would come out later that year. In it, he shows how the US has been surrounding China with war machinery in a way that would be considered an act of war if it was happening near American shorelines, and drives home the seriousness of the prospect of nuclear conflict.

Everything Pilger warned about turned out to be everything he said it was. A war in Ukraine has erupted from the spark of the US-backed coup in 2014 and Russia’s fear of an increasingly expansionist and militaristic NATO, while the US military encirclement of China has been rapidly increasing as hostilities between the two superpowers accelerate toward a breaking point, facilitated in no small part by the continent-sized military base known as Australia. What were only background stories in 2016 now dominate the headlines of today.

I bring this up because I think it’s useful to show that we’ve been on this track toward global conflict between major powers for years, and it’s been unfolding in ways that some saw coming from miles away. Much of Pilger’s work could be called prophetic, but Pilger is no prophet — he’s just a journalist with an ear to the ground who’s been critically scrutinizing the behavior of the empire for decades. He was able to accurately mark the trajectory our world has been on earlier than most, and it has continued along that same trajectory with frightening speed ever since.

If you can see the trajectory that an object is on, you can determine where you need to stand in order to obstruct its path. The fact that we’ve been on a linear trajectory toward global conflict between nuclear-armed states all these years shows that opposing that trajectory is of existential importance for every living organism on this planet. And yet the media still want us focused on celebrity gossip and party politics and Donald Trump.

World war is still closing in on us. We still need to break the silence and oppose it. Our rulers have been steering us in this direction for a long time now, and they’re not going to turn away until we make them.

September 7, 2023 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Nation-States as “Business Models”: Ukraine as Another Neoliberal Privatization Exercise

By Dr. T. P. Wilkinson, Global Research, August 31, 2023  https://www.globalresearch.ca/states-business-models-ukraine-another-neo-liberal-privatization-exercise/5830818

Introduction

Perhaps the leading two veteran critics of US policy in Ukraine, Colonel Douglas MacGregor USA and Major Scott Ritter USMC, have said loud and clear that at least from a military standpoint the Ukrainian armed forces have lost the war against Russia.

There have been numerous voices calling for an end to the conflict, not least because the more than USD 46 billion and counting in military aid alone, has yet to produce any of the results announced as aims of what has finally been admitted is a war against Russia.[i]

If Mr Zelenskyy, the president of the Ukraine’s government in Kiev, is to be taken at face value, then the hostilities can only end when Crimea and the Donbass regions are fully under Kiev’s control and Vladimir Putin has been removed from office as president of the Russian Federation. To date no commentator has adequately explained how those war aims are to be attained. This applies especially after the conservatively estimated 400,000 deaths and uncounted casualties in the ranks of Kiev’s forces since the beginning of the Special Military Operation in February 2022.

Before considering the political and economic issues it is important to reiterate a few military facts, especially for those armchair soldiers who derive their military acumen from TV and Hollywood films.

As MacGregor and Ritter, both of whom have intimate practical knowledge of warfare, have said. Armies on the ground need supplies, i.e. food, weapons, ammunition, medical care for wounded, etc.

These supplies have to be delivered from somewhere.

In ancient times, armies could live off the land. Essentially this was through looting and plunder—stealing their food from the local population as they marched. To prevent the local population from becoming the enemy in the rear and avoid early exhaustion of local supply, generals started paying for what was requisitioned.

To prevent this defending forces would often withdraw the civilian population and destroy what could not be taken. In fact this kind of rough warfare against civilians still occurs although it has been forbidden under the Law of Land Warfare.[ii]

Naturally the soldier in the field can no longer make weaponry and even less plundered from the local inhabitants—unless one comes across some tribe the US has armed with Stingers perhaps.

All the weapons the Ukrainian armed forces deploy have to be imported from countries with factory capacity.

As the two officers among others have said, the capacity is unavailable for the Ukraine.

Obviously it would also be unavailable to NATO forces were they able to deploy in Ukraine in any numbers.

It is illusory to believe that a NATO army can do what the Wehrmacht could not some eighty years ago with three million men under arms and the most modern army of its day.

This was so obvious from the beginning that one has to wonder why this war ever started.

Is it possible that wars are started without any intention of winning them?

If winning the war is not the objective, then what is?

September 7, 2023 Posted by | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Depleted Uranium Won’t Bring Peace to Ukraine

Wednesday, September 6th, 2023, By Robert C. Koehler, http://commonwonders.com/3828-2/

Freedom’s just another word for . . . blowing up your children? Giving them cancer?

Militarism is obsolete, for God’s sake. Its technology is out of control. The latest shred of news that has left me stunned and terror-stricken is this, as reported by Reuters: “The Biden administration will for the first time send controversial armor-piercing munitions containing depleted uranium to Ukraine. . . . It follows an earlier decision by the Biden administration to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine, despite concerns over the dangers such weapons pose to civilians.”

Russia’s war on Ukraine is a disaster at every level. Some 70,000 Ukrainians have died, according to the New York Times, and possibly another 120,000 have been wounded, with Russia’s casualty level actually far higher. The war (like all wars) has to stop, but NATO and the U.S., just like Russia itself, are looking not for peace and conflict resolution but victory. Killing the enemy is what matters, the more the better. War is humanity’s most horrific addiction. When it takes hold of a people’s soul, all environmental and human concerns vanish. And today – indeed, throughout the course of my lifetime – with the development of nuclear weapons, we’ve been at the brink of self-generated extinction. And we’re still playing with it, rather than trying to move beyond it.

Depleted uranium – DU – is one of the playthings of war: At 1.6 times the density of lead, DU shells are the last word in penetration power: locomotives compressed to the size of bullets. The shells ignite the instant they’re fired and explode on impact.

I first started writing about depleted uranium in 2003, when I heard Doug Rokke (who died two and a half years ago) speak in Chicago. Doug, a career soldier, was involved in the first Gulf War, leading a team of soldiers whose job was to clean up the war zones in the aftermath of our bombing raids.

As I wrote then: Depleted uranium “isn’t really depleted of anything. It’s dirty: U-238, the low-level radioactive byproduct of the uranium enrichment process. And when the ammo explodes, poof, it vaporizes into particles so fine — a single micron in diameter, small enough to fit inside red blood cells — that, well, ‘conventional gas mask filters are like a barn door.’

“. . .What’s not to love, if you’re the Pentagon? We pounded Saddam’s army with DU ammo in Gulf War 1 and destroyed it on the ground. Maybe you’ve seen pictures of what we did to it; GIs cleaning up afterward coined the term ‘crispy critters’ to describe the fried corpses they found inside Iraqi tanks and trucks.”

But the horror of DU is what happens after the battles are over. DU stays in the environment, and has been linked to huge rises in cancer and birth defects in the conflict zones. As Doug Rokke said: “You can’t clean it up.”

But so what? According to Sydney Young, writing for the Harvard International Review:

“In the past, leaders did not pay the necessary amount of attention to the risks of depleted uranium. Documents suggest that the United States may have known about the potential consequences of depleted uranium during conflicts in which it was used. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published a 1991 report indicating that deploying depleted uranium in the Gulf War could have caused 500,000 cancer deaths.

“However, the United States still used depleted uranium in the Middle East despite the risks, deeming that its military benefits outweighed the potential civilian impact. This calculus reflects a common trend in which western countries justify human rights abuses under the guise of ‘national interest’ or military necessity.”

Another tactic of the political militarists is to deny there’s any negative consequences to their actions. Young also notes: “Research also faces political barriers. Governments that use depleted uranium have a vested interest in preventing research that suggests it has negative effects on human health. For instance, the United States, United Kingdom, Israel, and France all opposed a 2001 United Nations resolution to document depleted uranium in war.”

There’s a collective human addiction not simply to militarism and war, but to winning: to domination. A focus on winning in the moment obliterates any sense of the larger future. The creation of peace is not a simplistic game. It has no weapons to parade before the public, whose use will obliterate the enemy of the moment and make the world a better place once and for all.

Noting the horrific extent to which the Ukraine war has stalemated, Jeet Heer writes at The Nation: “The time is surely ripe for a diplomatic push. Unfortunately, the passions ignited by war always make negotiations difficult” . . . and, alas “a strong ‘taboo’ against public discussion of diplomacy pervades the NATO countries.”

This is understandable, he notes, considering the criminality of the Russian invasion and the horror it has inflicted on Ukraine: “But an interminable bloodbath on Ukrainian soil is also horrific.”

Humanity has to figure out how to talk to itself, not kill itself.

September 7, 2023 Posted by | depleted uranium | Leave a comment

Russia warns return of US nuclear weapons to UK would be seen as escalation

 https://english.alarabiya.net/News/world/2023/09/05/Russia-warns-return-of-US-nuclear-weapons-to-UK-would-be-seen-as-escalation

Russia would regard any return of US nuclear weapons to bases in Britain as an “escalation and a destabilizing practice,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a briefing on Tuesday.

She also said that such a practice is “openly anti-Russian in nature, as it provides for joint planning and regular training exercises for the prompt delivery of nuclear strikes by members of NATO which is hostile to us against targets in Russia from the territory of non-nuclear European countries.”

“We will continue to demand the return of all American nuclear weapons to US territory, followed by the removal of infrastructure that would allow them to be quickly deployed in Europe,” she added.

September 7, 2023 Posted by | Russia, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Russia linked hackers hit UK Ministry of Defence as security secrets leaked

 Russian hackers suspected to have leaked sensitive UK military and defence
material on the dark web including information about nuclear submarine base
and chemical weapons lab. Sensitive military and defence material has been
stolen by suspected Russian hackers and leaked on to the internet.


Thousands of pages of data about the HMNB Clyde nuclear submarine base,
Porton Down chemical weapons lab and a GCHQ listening post are understood
to have been posted on to the dark web after the hack. Information about a
specialist cyber defence site and some of Britain’s high-security prisons
was also stolen in the raid on Zaun, a provider of fences for maximum
security sites.

 Daily Mail 4th Sept 2023

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12476765/Russian-hackers-leaked-sensitive-UK-military-defence-material-dark-web.html

 Russia linked hackers hit UK Ministry of Defence as security secrets
leaked. Hackers targeted the database of a firm which handles the security
for some of Britain’s most secretive sites – including a nuclear submarine
base and a chemical weapon lab.

 Mirror 2nd Sept 2023

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/russia-linked-hackers-hit-uk-30850139

September 6, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Saudi Arabia could build a nuclear bomb, experts say – and the US might help it

 Resurgent Saudi Arabia ‘could build nuclear bomb’ and America could
help it. Until the vexed issue of Iran’s plans for a nuclear weapon are
resolved, the potential for proliferation in the Middle East will be a
constant threat.

Some had hoped that Saudi Arabia – or at least its
current malign incarnation – would fade into insignificance as its oil
either ran out or became irrelevant in the greener future. But the fossil
fuel industry is not yet on its last legs. More importantly, it’s made
the Gulf state a mountain of cash. Saudi Arabia hopes its giant trust fund
will exceed $2trn by 2030, which would make it bigger than Norway’s .

 iNews 4th Sept 2023

https://inews.co.uk/news/world/resurgent-saudi-arabia-build-nuclear-bomb-america-help-2586059

September 6, 2023 Posted by | Saudi Arabia, weapons and war | Leave a comment

America is not worried about the huge losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

America is not worried about the huge losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine – Judging Freedom  https://rusvesna.su/news/1693656211 4 Sept 23

Washington representatives are absolutely not concerned about the huge losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the economic well-being of US citizens, at the expense of which assistance to Kyiv is paid.

They also don’t really care about the casualties among American soldiers, but they are afraid of internal political pressure, Scott Horton, director of the Libertarian Institute, said in an interview with Judging Freedom.

SCOTT HORTON, Director, Libertarian Institute: Let’s get back to those politicians’ quotes, Judge…

They provide the basis for your book.

SCOTT HORTON: Yes, of course. Listen. I mean that (US Senator Richard – ed.) Blumenthal puts it extremely simply. In other words, Russian soldiers have value. We need to kill them. American soldiers are valuable and we don’t want to lose any of them.
Источник: https://rusvesna.su/news/1693656211

US tax dollars have no value. The fact that you work hard means nothing to a politician. And the lives of Ukrainian soldiers have the same value for American politicians as American taxes, that is, they are worth nothing. 

They openly say that they do not take these costs into account. This would be a cost if American soldiers had to die. And that is only because in this case they (representatives of the Washington establishment – ed. note) would face political pressure, and not because they care more about American cannon fodder than Ukrainians.

They are monsters. That’s who runs the American empire. Judge, they are the worst people in the world.

I’m sorry, but I agree with you. I mean, I’m not sorry to say that I agree with you. I’m sorry that this is the state of affairs. But this is the inevitable conclusion that those of us who observe what is happening come to.

Now the United States and not all, but many of its NATO allies are negotiating some kind of agreement with Ukraine that will come into effect in the next presidency, whether it be Joe Biden’s second term or his successor’s first term. Joe Biden, Tony Blinken and Victoria Nuland seek to prevent future presidents from ending the conflict in Ukraine.

SCOTT HORTON: Yes.

I don’t know how long this will last. I don’t know what his (Biden’s – editor’s note) solution is. He obviously wants to be able to refer to some progress that has taken place in the conflict between now and Election Day.

The situation is getting worse and worse, our military is telling us that this cannot continue for long, that (the offensive of the Ukrainian Armed Forces – editor’s note) will not last until winter. You heard the words of the President of Hungary. But does Joe Biden really think the American public wants an extension of what’s going on?

SCOTT HORTON: Well, I mean, you have to look at the situation from his point of view. There’s this thing with a funny name, Judge. I’m not sure who its author is. James Buchanan probably coined the term “public choice theory.”

It sounds weird and boring, but it really just boils down to the fact that politicians are people and they take care of themselves. In reality, there are no national interests. They do what is in their own interest, in the interest of their agency or department, and their actions have nothing to do with what is good for the American people as a whole.

So, Judge, losing this pre-election conflict is a bad outcome for Joe Biden. George W. Bush faced a similar situation in 2003 and 2004, where the outrage got worse and worse and worse. So what is he going to do, retreat? No, he needs to redouble his efforts and just make sure that things continue after the election. So the promise that we prevented the worst still stands. And this makes no sense.

I mean, The Wall Street Journal published a huge article about what the 2024 spring offensive would look like. Yes, they are teasing! These are the same people who not so long ago said they were going to win with the 2023 spring offensive that turned into an absolute disaster this summer, and they are going to continue.



September 6, 2023 Posted by | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

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