Strategic Culture Foundation Editorial

The leaders of the European Union, as with those of the United States and NATO, seem to be criminally insane.

The European Union’s summit of foreign ministers this week formally committed the bloc to training Ukrainian military forces on EU territory to fight against Russia. That inescapably makes the 27-nation EU a party to war in Ukraine.

Nearly two months ago, in a previous Strategic Culture Foundation weekly editorial published on August 19, we postulated that the conflict in Ukraine had already metastasized into a Third World War. That warning has been corroborated by the dramatic escalation of military involvement by the United States-led NATO alliance and the European Union in Ukraine.

This week, the European Union’s Council on Foreign Affairs announced a Military Assistance Mission (EUMAM) to Ukraine which would involve training of up to 15,000 Ukrainian troops over the next two years. Germany and Poland are to be major training hubs. The headquarters for the EUMAM is to be in Brussels. This indicates long-term planning for war and, lamentably, the spurning of any kind of diplomatic solution.

The EU-wide training program is but the formal, comprehensive adoption of missions that had up to now been undertaken more discreetly at national, bilateral level. The United States, Canada and Britain have had military advisors in Ukraine since 2014 where they have been mentoring NeoNazi formations such as the Azov Battalion. Training of Ukrainian troops has also been conducted in France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Estonia and the other Baltic states.

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Strategic Culture Foundation Editorial

The United States and its allies are guilty of perpetrating a deliberate war of aggression against Russia that has long been in the planning works.

A study by the Rand Corporation published more than three years ago demonstrates incontestably that the war in Ukraine is in fact the manifestation of a bigger willful confrontation against Russia whereby the United States is attempting to weaken and subjugate Moscow.

What is happening is without doubt the culmination of U.S. long-held planning. That puts a wholly different meaning on the current conflict in the Ukraine – now in its eighth month. This is not, as the Western governments and media would make out, an “unprovoked” assault on Ukraine and “Western democratic values” by “Russian aggression”. The conflict has been deliberately fomented, stoked and now exacerbated by policy choices made by Washington and its NATO partners.

The Rand Corporation is one of the oldest think tanks in the U.S., established in 1948. One of its cofounders was air force commander General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic holocaust at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. LeMay was an arch-Cold War hawk who advocated preemptive nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union to President John F Kennedy in the early 1960s. The corporation he set up, Rand, is funded by the U.S. government and in some ways can be seen as the public brains and mouth of the Pentagon and CIA.

The study cited above, entitled ‘Overextending and Unbalancing Russia’ and published in April 2019, has caught the attention recently of many independent observers (see, for example, a recent episode of the Jimmy Dore show in the U.S.). What makes it topical is how real, current events are unfolding in a way that the American planners envisaged.

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Finian Cunningham

Neo-feudalism is what we are being offered in place of the “American dream”. This is why we are seeing growing efforts of workers to organize unions.

The following interview is a follow-up to an earlier one conducted this month with American writer and veteran labor rights activist Bruce Gagnon. He explains the current U.S.-led NATO conflict against Russia in a historical context. U.S.-dominated Western capitalism is addicted to war as a modus operandi going back to its original genocidal conquest and foundations in slavery through its colonial wars and other wars of aggression over the past century and more. The current conflict playing out in Ukraine is but a continuum of class war against the workers of the United States and other Western states.

American workers, however, are fighting back in the form of a resurgence in unionizing and strike actions. The crisis in capitalism is driving the U.S. ruling class and its European NATO associates to war against Russia, and ultimately a Third World War. The struggle for real democracy in the U.S. (and Europe) is part of the same challenge to defeat American-led Western imperialism. What’s at stake is the very future of the planet.

Bruce Gagnon coordinates the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He began his political career in 1978 organizing Florida fruit pickers for the United Farm Workers Union (UFW). While working for the UFW, he served on the union team negotiating contracts between the Coca-Cola Corporation (Minute Maid orange juice) and the UFW. He writes a daily blog called Organizing Notes.

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Wayne Madsen

[This article has previously been posted on Another World Is Possible (December, 2014). Due to its relevance to the war that is going on in Ukraine today, we thought we would make sure this article is shared with more people.]

The Times of Israel, an independent Israeli newspaper that counts among its staff a number of former reporters for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, published a fascinating but largely overlooked story datelined Jerusalem and Zhitomir, Ukraine, March 16, 2014, and which was written by its respective Russian and Ukrainian correspondents, Hirsh Ostropoler and I. Z. Grosser-Spass, citing a secret report provided to the Israeli government. The report, written by a select panel of scholars of Jewish history drawn from academia and other research centers, concluded that that European Jews are in fact descended from Khazars, a war-like Mongol-Tatar group that ruled over Ukraine and southern Russia, which mass-converted to Judaism in the eighth century AD.

Zionists have long argued that the land claimed by Israel was the biblical birthright of the Jewish people who were forced from the land in a so-called «diaspora» after repeated conquests by various empires. Proof that Ashkenazi Jews, which make up a majority of the Israeli Jewish population, have no historical link to Palestine would call into question the entire premise of Israel as the historical «5,000-year old» homeland of the Jewish people.

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Strategic Culture Foundation Editorial

The silence of Western media on the causes of confrontation and the criminal involvement of their own governments is complicity in creating conditions for war.

Russia provided more evidence this week that NATO and the Kiev regime were planning a deadly offensive on Donbass, which Russia pre-empted with its military intervention beginning on February 24. Russia has called its intervention a special military operation, while Western states have condemned it as “an unprovoked invasion” of Ukraine.

One senses that it is absolutely imperative for Western media to deny all Russian claims for why it took military action. To do so might lead to some acknowledgement that Russia has just cause, as well as attribute onerous responsibility to Western governments.

It should also be noted, although this is denied too in Western media, that Moscow assiduously tried to address its security concerns through dialogue with the United States and its NATO partners. But those efforts were continually rebuffed. Moscow was treated like it was a non-entity whose long-held security concerns were non-existent or a figment of its imagination.

Russia’s latest information this week substantiating its claims involves a grave multidimensional national security threat. The gravity of the threats makes them impossible to ignore, which makes Western media silence all the more damnable. Moscow says its security analysts are still processing the full extent of information and it will provide more details at a future date. Suffice to say that so far, Russia has identified three major areas where its national security was being threatened by the U.S. and NATO-backed regime in Ukraine. Those threats were greater and more pressing than previously understood, which then presaged the military conflict that is underway in Ukraine.

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Alastair Crooke

Putin means what he says: Russia’s back is to the wall, and there is nowhere to which Russia can now retreat – for them it is existential.

The collective West was already angry. And it is apoplectic after President Putin shocked western leaders by ordering a special military operation in Ukraine, which is being widely described (and perceived in the West) as a declaration of war: ‘a shock and awe assault affecting cities widely across Ukraine’. So angry in fact is the West that the information space has literally bifurcated into two: It is all black and white, with no greys. For the West, Putin has comprehensively defied Biden; he has unilaterally and illegally ‘changed the borders’ of Europe and acted as a ‘revisionist power’, attempting to change not just the borders of Ukraine, but the current world order. “Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, we are facing a determined effort to redefine the multilateral order,” the EU High Representative, Josep Borell, warned. “It’s an act of defiance. It’s a revisionist manifesto, the manifesto to review the world order”.

Putin is characterised as a new Hitler, and his acts asserted to be ‘illegal’. It is claimed that it was he who tore up the Minsk II Accord (yet the Republics declared their independence in 2014, signed Minsk in 2015, and it was Russia who never signed the accord – and therefore cannot be in breach of it). Indeed, it is the US effectively that has vetoed the Minsk process since 2014, and Russia’s publication of diplomatic correspondence in November 2021 exposed that France and Germany too, had little intention of pressurising Kiev on any meaningful implementation. And so, having concluded that a negotiated settlement – as stipulated in the Minsk Accords – would simply not happen, Putin determined that there was no point in waiting any longer before implementing Russia’s red line.

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Strategic Culture Foundation Editorial

Washington and its NATO allies are jeopardizing peace in Europe. They are creating the conditions for war between nuclear powers.

American President Joe Biden said this week he thinks Russia will invade Ukraine. Only days ago, Biden and his top aides were not sure, saying they didn’t know if that would happen. If the highest-ranking members of the U.S. executive can’t agree on a coherent thought process, then there is strong reason to conclude that they are clueless and what they are claiming is baseless. In short, lies.

Deplorably, however, this cluelessness is inciting war in Europe. For nearly two months now, the Biden administration, aided and abetted by Western media, has been pummeling the public with the message that Russia is planning to invade Ukraine. This is not innocent cluelessness. It is criminal incitement of war and crimes against peace.

All of this propaganda – for that’s what it is – relies on a toxic Cold War mentality, as well as Russophobia, arrogant assertions bereft of any substance, and dodgy data. Satellite imagery purportedly of a Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s border actually shows established bases hundreds of kilometers inside Russia’s territory.

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Wayne Madsen

The 10-day NATO exercise code named «BREEZE 2014» has ended in Black Sea. The exercise, which included the use of electronic warfare and electronic intelligence aircraft such as the Boeing EA-18G Growler and the Boeing E3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS), coincided with the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine, some 40 miles from the Russian border. NATO ships and aircraft had the Donetsk and Luhansk regions under total radar and electronic surveillance.

MH-17 was shot down over a region where Russian-speaking separatist forces have been battling against the alliance of the Ukrainian armed forces and a private mercenary force answerable to a Ukrainian-Jewish billionaire oligarch.

The U.S. Army has revealed that the 10-day exercise involved «commercial traffic monitoring». Because of the sophistication of the electronic warfare and intelligence used during SEA BREEZE, it can be assumed that commercial traffic monitoring included monitoring the track of MH-17.

Past NATO-Ukraine exercises in Crimea were called «SEA BREEZE». This year's annual SEA BREEZE exercise with Ukraine, approved by the rump Ukrainian Parliament, is clouded in mystery with the Pentagon saying it was only «in the planning stage and we can't announce dates yet». However, 200 U.S. Army personnel normally assigned to bases in Germany were in Ukraine during the time of the MH-17 fly-over. They were participating in NATO exercise RAPID TRIDENT II. Ukraine's Ministry of Defense led the exercise.

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Wayne Madsen

The Times of Israel, an independent Israeli newspaper that counts among its staff a number of former reporters for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, published a fascinating but largely overlooked story datelined Jerusalem and Zhitomir, Ukraine, March 16, 2014, and which was written by its respective Russian and Ukrainian correspondents, Hirsh Ostropoler and I. Z. Grosser-Spass, citing a secret report provided to the Israeli government. The report, written by a select panel of scholars of Jewish history drawn from academia and other research centers, concluded that that European Jews are in fact descended from Khazars, a war-like Mongol-Tatar group that ruled over Ukraine and southern Russia, which mass-converted to Judaism in the eighth century AD.

Zionists have long argued that the land claimed by Israel was the biblical birthright of the Jewish people who were forced from the land in a so-called «diaspora» after repeated conquests by various empires. Proof that Ashkenazi Jews, which make up a majority of the Israeli Jewish population, have no historical link to Palestine would call into question the entire premise of Israel as the historical «5,000-year old» homeland of the Jewish people.

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Vladislav Gulevich

The independent Ukraine boasts a rather short history. The relations with minorities have never been a feather in the hat of Kiev authorities. The real state of things was largely muted to make it a smouldering problem. The «national revolution» has exacerbated the situation to the boiling point, especially talking about Hungarians and Romanians.

Romanians are the second largest group in Bucovina (historically the region has been Russian, now the northern part of it belongs to Ukraine). 97% Romanians live in Chernovitsy (115 thousand) and Transcarpathia (32 thousand). According to CEMES (Centre for European Migration and Ethnic Studies), the main problems faced by the Romanian community are social development and their low representative proportion in higher education and in professional work. Numerous reports from Romanian-based sources raise concerns for the situation of the Romanian minority in Ukraine and specifically criticize the availability of educational opportunities in the Romanian language. The 2012 law «On the principles of the state language policy» was abolished as a result of the 2014 coup pouring even more fuel on the discontent among Ukrainian Romanians. Kiev refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing when reproached for its neglect of Romanian culture. This attitude makes the situation worse. In June 2014 the Bessarabia Romanians held a convention in Odessa with assistance of Romanian Cultural Institute (Romania). There were many voices raised calling for opening new Romanian cultural centers (there are too few of them and quite often the staff has no command of the language). The head of Odessa regional national-cultural association Bessarabia said that the main problem for the Romanian community in the Odessa region is the availability of schools teaching in Romanian language and their funding.

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