The collective West clinging on its “crumbling dominance” has been the ultimate driver of the crisis, Russian president says
President Vladimir Putin a gave an extensive speech on the Ukrainian crisis on Wednesday, as he met with regional heads to discuss measures of socioeconomic support to counter the wave of anti-Russian sanctions. Putin provided his take on the ongoing conflict with Ukraine, its causes, and the goals Russia pursues.
Conflict was inevitable
Launching the “special military operation” was the only option Russia had left to end the years-long bloodshed in eastern Ukraine, Putin stressed. At the same time, limiting its scope to the breakaway Donbass republics only would only push the “frontline” westwards, rather than defuse the situation, he noted.
While waging the war against the breakaway regions of Donbass, Kiev has been preparing for a broad offensive to re-capture them, Putin said, adding that “almost 14,000 civilians, including children, have been killed” in the conflict. Ukrainian authorities also sought to attack Crimea, which split from the country back in 2014 and joined Russia via a referendum.
“Encouraged by the United States and other Western countries, Ukraine was purposefully preparing for a scenario of force, a massacre and an ethnic cleansing in Donbass. A massive onslaught on Donbass and later Crimea was just a matter of time. However, our Armed Forces have shattered these plans,” Putin said.
Kiev actively sought weapons of mass destruction
Ukrainian authorities have openly stated their goal to obtain weapons of mass destruction, namely nuclear bombs and means of their delivery, Russia’s president has said. Given the extremely hostile attitude of Kiev, such systems would have been used to target Russia once they were ready.
Putin also touched upon the Ukrainian biolab network allegations, raised by the Russian military amid the offensive. The facilities scattered across the country have allegedly been engaged in biological weapons development with direct support of Washington. The allegations, backed by documents published by the Russian military, have been met with varying degrees of denial from the top US officials.
“There was a network of dozens of laboratories in Ukraine, where military biological programs were conducted under the guidance and with the financial support of the Pentagon, including experiments with coronavirus strains, anthrax, cholera, African swine fever and other deadly diseases,” Putin said, adding that now “frantic attempts” are underway to conceal the “traces of these secret programs.”
Ukraine established as ‘anti-Russia’
Over the past few years, under the close guidance of their Western handlers, the Kiev authorities have morphed Ukraine into “anti-Russia”, Putin suggested. The only goal of the incumbent Kiev “regime” is to drag the conflict on for as long as possible, with little regard to the fate of the civilians or destruction that ensues.
“We are seeing again and again that the Kiev regime, for which its Western masters have set the task of creating an aggressive ‘anti-Russia’, is indifferent to the fate of the people of Ukraine themselves,” Putin said.
“It is also obvious that the Western handlers are simply pushing the Kiev authorities to continue the bloodshed. They are supplied with more and more weaponry batches, they are provided with intelligence, they also receive other assistance, including military advisers and mercenaries.”
Kiev & West exhibit ‘shocking cynicism’
Both Ukrainian authorities and the collective West have exhibited “shocking cynicism” amid the conflict, Putin said, offering the ballistic missile strike on the center of Donetsk that occurred on Monday as an example of such behaviour. The strike killed at least 20 civilians.
“They are striking randomly at squares with the fervour of fanatics and the exasperation of the doomed, . . .” Putin said, adding that Kiev had tried to blame the strike on Russia through “blatant lies.”
The attitude of “the so-called civilized world” to the missile strike turned to be “shocking in its extreme cynicism” as well, the president went on.
“The European and American press did not even notice this tragedy in Donetsk, as if nothing happened,” Putin said. “Just like they have been hypocritically looking the other way over the past eight years as mothers buried their children in Donbass, as elderly people were killed. This is simply moral degradation, complete de-humanization.”
Crumbling dominance of the West behind global turmoil
Ultimately, the West’s desire to maintain its global dominance is the root of the ongoing Ukrainian turmoil, as well as crises in the other parts of the globe, Putin believes.
“Today, the entire planet has to pay the price for the ambitions of the West, for its attempts by any means to maintain its crumbling dominance,” he said.
Concerned only with their “vested interests and super profits,” the Western elites led the world into the current situation through “years of mistakes and short-sited decisions.”
For instance, the impact of the anti-Russian sanctions, imposed over the Ukrainian conflict, is already being felt by the common people in the West – while the elites have been bizarrely trying to blame it on Moscow, Putin noted.
Volodymyr Zelensky addresses the UK Joint Expeditionary Force meeting
Ukraine admits it won’t be part of NATO
From Russia Today (RT)
Kiev’s constitution-enshrined bid for membership in the military bloc can’t be realized, Zelensky said.
NATO allies don’t want to see Ukraine among their ranks and Kiev realizes that, President Volodymyr Zelensky told Western leaders on Tuesday. Now Kiev seeks protection from individual member states.
“We’ve been hearing for years that the [NATO] doors were supposedly open, but now we know we won’t enter there. That is the truth, and we must acknowledge that,” Zelensky said during a video call with the UK Joint Expeditionary Force, a meeting of the leaders of Nordic and Baltic nations hosted by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
“I am glad that our people are beginning to understand that and to rely on ourselves and those partners that aid us,” he added.
The Ukrainian leader apparently included the people he was addressing on the list of good friends of Ukraine, despite most of them leading NATO allies. He said the military organization was in no position to offer the security guarantees that his country wants to receive from other nations. But individual states could help Ukraine even with NATO doors closed to it, he suggested, and have been doing so for eight years of what he described as a Ukrainian war against Russia.
Zelensky shamed NATO for not imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine due to concerns that this would escalate the hostilities into a full-blown world war. The refusal to impose it is shared by all members of the organization, with US, its de facto leader, reiterating it on many occasions.
The Ukrainian leader claimed NATO member states “hypnotized themselves” with the fear of a global conflict that would have the potential of ending human civilization. He didn’t hide bitterness over the fact that allies refused to protect Ukraine the way they are bound to defend each other in case of a military attack.
Ukraine made NATO membership a key goal of its foreign policy after the 2014 armed coup in Kiev put an anti-Russian government into power. The aspiration was made part of its national constitution in 2019.
Russia launched a military offensive in Ukraine in late February. President Vladimir Putin stated that NATO’s creeping expansion into Ukraine without its formal accession was a major factor in his decision to order the incursion. Kiev blasted the attack as “unprovoked.”
Western nations mostly agreed but refused to fight for Ukraine militarily. Instead, they ramped up weapons supplies to Kiev and imposed harsh economic sanctions against Russia, expecting them to inflict enough damage to stop the military offensive.
The liberation and de-nazification of Ukraine continues apace. The resistance is strong, and the Russian and Republican Liberators face a desperate and ruthless enemy. The ukrop nazis’ most effective tactic is the use of civilians as human shields in built up urban areas. Russia’s extreme precautions and deliberate pace to avoid the kind of bloody “collateral damage” that is the trademark of every US and NATO invasion, has cost the Russians quite a lot in time, treasure and blood. But the advance continues, and will continue until all Russian strategic objectives are achieved.
As of 3 March official military reports for the entire Russia/Ukraine operation are as follows – Ukrainian soldiers killed and missing – 8395 Russian & Republican soldiers – 498 dead, 1,600 wounded Civilian casualties throughout the area of military operations exceed 300.
• 1,612 targets were hit by Russian artillery and precision missiles including 62 command and control centers and communication centers. • 39 S-300, Buk M-1 and Osa anti-aircraft missile systems as well as 52 radar stations. • 49 military aircraft were destroyed on the ground and 13 in flight. • 606 tanks and other armored fighting vehicles were destroyed. • 67 Multiple Rocket Launchers destroyed. • 227 howitzers and mortars. • 53 drones.
The fake news report about Russians shelling a Ukrainian nuclear site is completely false. On Thursday night, a fire broke out at a building near the six-reactor Zaporozhskaya nuclear power plant, with Ukrainian authorities accusing Russian troops of “shelling” the nuclear site. Moscow had informed the international nuclear authorities on Tuesday that Russian forces had secured the territory around the plant and it was operating normally.
The Russians had already taken the plant under their control, when a Ukrainian sabotage unit fired on a Russian perimeter patrol with small arms. During the attack, a fire started in an office/storage building on the plant grounds but not connected to the actual reactor. The fire was extinguished and the Ukrainian sabotage unit was eliminated. There is currently no danger of radiation leakage or explosion at the plant. The fake news report about Russian forces shelling the Jewish Holocaust Memorial at Babi Yar near Kiev are also completely false. A Russian missile strike was carried out on a main Kiev TV broadcast antenna located about 500 meters from the memorial. The TV antenna was destroyed, the memorial was not hit.
Below is a map of the military situation as of 3 March, 2022 courtesy of Erwan Castel
The strategic city of Khersan has been liberated by Russian forces. Though sporadic fighting continues in the city, it has been liberated and will remain so. The three main areas of active combat operations are currently Kiev, Kharkov and Mariupol.
Kiev is blocked by Russian troops on the north and west, and Russian troops are actually operating inside the north and west parts of the city. Russian troops continue their advance on Kiev from the east, and will soon begin encircling the city in a southern direction, in conjunction with Russian troops to the west. Strategic missile strikes continue to target Ukrainian command centers, troop and equipment concentrations. The Human Shield tactic is being used in Kiev, but to a lesser extent than elsewhere.
The completely unregulated handing out over 18,000 AK assault rifles and ammunition on the street to anyone who walked up and wanted one has resulted in scores, if not hundreds, of murders, accidental and indiscriminate shootings in Kiev in the last few days. This criminally insane act on the part of the Kiev regime was done intentionally to cause chaos and anarchy among the civilians and to make the job of Russian liberators more dangerous and difficult.
Kharkov, Ukraine’s second largest city, has a significant percentage of Russian speakers in the population, but also a strong concentration of regular and nationalist troops who will use ethnic Russians as human shields. Russian troops are advancing on Kharkov from the north, northeast and northwest. They are operating in northern suburbs of the city, but the urban operations have met heavy resistance and difficult terrain. Russian casualties there have been significant.
On the east and west outskirts of Kharkov, Russian units continue to move south to complete the encirclement, which should be complete in the next 48 hours or so. Once the city is surrounded, some Russian troops will be freed to advance towards Poltava to the southwest and Kramatorsk to the southeast. Once Kramatorsk and Zaparozhia are liberated, Russian troops will link up and the bulk of the Ukrainian military on the Donbass Front will be surrounded.
Mariupol remains a heavily contested area. It has been surrounded by Russian and Republican troops, including my comrades in the VOSTOK Battalion. Mariupol, an industrial city on the coast of the AZOV Sea, has been the headquarters and main base of the nazi AZOV Battalion for many years. Other neo-nazi units as well as ISIS units are stationed there as well. These war criminals will fight to the death, because they know the justice that awaits them if they are captured will be harsh and last for the rest of their lives. These are terrorists and murderers who enjoy killing, and will make the most of innocent civilians as last minute victims and human shields. There are multiple videos of cars full of civilians, men, women and children, being murdered by nazis and other terrorists as they try to leave the city. However, as of today, March 4th, some civilians have successfully evacuated via humanitarian corridors.
It has now been officially confirmed by the spokesman of the Donetsk People’s Republic’s Army, Eduard Basurin, that last night the Ukrainian Armed Forces launched a Tochka-U attack on the AZOV headquarters in southwestern Mariupol. According to his information, the reason for the strike was between Azov’s complete refusal to obey AFU command orders to coordinate their actions with the command of the Ukrainian forces. As a result of the strike, more than 20 fighters and 10 units of equipment were destroyed. There are some unconfirmed reports of AZOV terrorists murdering a Ukrainian Army General shortly prior to the missile strike.
My Personal Experiences Of The Last Week
I spent Feb 28th and March 1st on the Front lines deep into territory formerly controlled by the ukrop army. Traveling with Russian war correspondent Alexander Sladkov, we made it as far as the village of Andon, almost 50 Km beyond the former front lines. Fighting is heavy, we saw many blown up ukrop block posts, and armoured vehicles from both sides, but mostly ukrop. It was like something out of a World War 2 newsreel, with shell shocked civilians gathered in town squares, wary of us as we approached, then breaking into tears of joy when they understood who we were. Ukrops are randomly bombing the areas they retreat from as they retreat, apparently equally as willing to hit newly liberated civilians as they are to hit the Russian liberators.
(Unexploded GRAD missile inside civilian house in the village of Andon)
The Russian liberation forces are huge – multi-hundreds of tanks and armoured infantry vehicles, very tough and ready soldiers, led by highly competent officers. The DPR Republican forces are still holding the line along the central Donetsk Front – Donetsk, Makeevka, Yasynuvata, Gorlovka. There are still extremely large and dangerous concentrations of ukrop soldiers on the Front, and while they have been mostly quiet and have not advanced, they are still shelling civilian areas of all our cities daily. One of the major ukrop strongpoints is the Mari’inka area, barely 5 miles from my house in Petrovsky District of Donetsk. There is also a high concentration of nazis and war criminals there, and it will not be taken without a hard fight. Nothing in this war will come easy.
CONCLUSION
In the first week of February, I wrote an article predicting with 90% certainty that before the beginning of March, the Ukraine Army would attack Donbass, and Russia would be forced to react immediately to prevent genocide against the civilians and defenders of the Donbass Republics. With the single exception of Scott Ritter, virtually every other self-styled “expert” and “geopolitical analyst” on the subject of the Donbass War, in both the mainstream and “alt” media not only disagreed, but scoffed at my predictions and even at me personally. And just as in the lead up to the Iraq invasion, these “experts” simply ignored Scott Ritter.
Well, nobody’s right all the time, and I do understand that I have a huge advantage over all the pundits “covering” the war from thousands of miles away, since I am in Donetsk, on the ground, and have been here for the last 8 years. My sources include personal friends who are officers in the DPR Army, including in Spetsnaz units, and people, including myself, who have lived, and live (and die) under ukrop shelling on a daily basis.
I was also the only one to correctly predict the exact plan for the ukrop attack, which I said would involve a massive assault directly into the major cities of the Republics. As confirmed by Russian GRU Military Intelligence and Russian State Duma, (and Pepe Escobar, who also got it wrong until after it happened). The Ukrainian Army, under US/NATO orders, were to attack the Republics on February 23rd (which is a BIG Russian national holiday, The Day of the Defenders of the Fatherland, commemorating the Heroes of the Red Army who smashed the nazi armies in WW2). The attack was planned to include a massive artillery and rocket bombardment of military and civilian targets in the major Donbass cities, followed by a no-holds-barred combined arms assault directly into the densely populated city centers, where the human shields tactic now being used in all other Ukrainian cities would have been used on a massive scale, not as just a tactic, but as one of the strategic elements of the overall attack, while simultaneously carrying out world war 2 style genocidal “cleansing” of the Russian population by the very nazi battalions that Western media now denies even exist.
As more of Ukraine is liberated and de-nazified, just as in the aftermath of WW2, the genuine scope and depths of the nazi depravities and atrocities will become more obvious and undeniable, as will US and NATO complicity in these abominable crimes. It must never be forgotten that it was determined at Nuremberg that those who give the orders for war crimes are even more guilty than those who commit those crimes themselves.
The criminal overthrow of the legitimate government of Ukraine and the installation of a genuine nazi regime in Kiev will soon reach its denouement, thanks to God and Russia, and to the long suffering Russian people in Donbass and Ukraine. Thus the latest of a seemingly interminable list of US and NATO criminal wars of aggression (the supreme war crime) will again end in defeat and shame for the criminals themselves. God grant, along with the help of the Russian military, that justice will be done, and this will be their last.
~Ω~
Thanks to Jeff Rense for carrying this article on his website.
From the Black Sea to the East Med, don’t poke The Russian Bear
By Pepe Escobar
The US shouldn’t have poked the Russian Bear. Now it is fully awake: after Ukraine, the Russians are likely to do a clean sweep of foreign belligerents poking around the East Med and the Black Sea.
Russia endured eight years of NATO provocations in Ukraine before it roared. Now it will clean house in West Asia and beyond.
This is what happens when a bunch of ragged hyenas, jackals and tiny rodents poke The Bear: a new geopolitical order is born at breathtaking speed.
From a dramatic meeting of the Russian Security Council to a UN history lesson delivered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the subsequent birth of the Baby Twins – the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk – all the way to the breakaway republics’ appeal to Putin to intervene militarily to expel the NATO-backed Ukrainian bombing-and-shelling forces from Donbass, it was a seamless process, executed at warp speed.
That would be the equivalent of a nuclear Mexico south of the Hegemon. Putin immediately turned Responsibility to Protect (R2P) upside down: an American construct invented to launch wars was retrofitted to stop a slow-motion genocide in Donbass.
First came the recognition of the Baby Twins – Putin’s most important foreign policy decision since inserting Russian jets into Syria’s airspace in 2015. That was the preamble for the next game-changer: a “special military operation…aimed at demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine,” as Putin defined it.
Up to the last minute, the Kremlin was trying to rely on diplomacy, explaining to Kiev the necessary imperatives to prevent heavy metal thunder: recognition of Crimea as Russian; abandoning any plans to join NATO; negotiating directly with the Baby Twins – an anathema for the Americans since 2015; finally, demilitarizing and declaring Ukraine as neutral.
Kiev’s handlers, predictably, would never accept the package – as they didn’t accept the Master Package that really matters, which is the Russian demand for “indivisible security.”
The sequence, then, became inevitable. In a flash, all Ukrainian military forces between the so-called line of contact and the original borders of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts were re-framed as an occupying army in Russian-allied territories that Moscow had just sworn to protect.
Get Out – Or Else
The Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense were not bluffing. Timed to the end of Putin’s speech announcing the operation, the Russians decapitated with precision missiles everything that mattered in terms of the Ukrainian military in just one hour: Air force, navy, airfields, bridges, command and control centers, the whole Turkish Bayraktar drone fleet.
And it was not only Russian raw power. It was the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) artillery that hit the Armed Forces of Ukraine headquarters in Donbass, which actually housed the entire Ukrainian military command. This means that the Ukrainian General Staff instantly lost control of all its troops.
This was Shock and Awe against Iraq, 19 years ago, in reverse: not for conquest, not as a prelude for an invasion and occupation. The political-military leadership in Kiev did not even have time to declare war. They froze. Demoralized troops started deserting. Total defeat – in one hour.
The water supply to Crimea was instantly re-established. Humanitarian corridors were set up for the deserters. Ukrainian forces remnants now include mostly surviving Azov batallion Nazis, mercenaries trained by the usual Blackwater/Academi suspects, and a bunch of Salafi-jihadis.
Predictably, western corporate media has already gone totally berserk, branding it as the much-awaited Russian ‘invasion.’ A reminder: when [Censored] routinely bombs Syria and when the House of One Saudi routinely bombs Yemeni civilians, there is never any peep in NATO’s media.
As it stands, realpolitik spells out a possible endgame, as voiced by Donetsk’s head, Denis Pushilin: “The special operation in Donbass will soon be over and all the cities will be liberated.”
We could soon witness the birth of an independent Novorossiya – east of the Dnieper, south along Sea of Azov/Black Sea, the way it was when attached to Ukraine by Lenin in 1922. But now it would be totally aligned with Russia, and providing a land bridge to Transnistria.
Ukraine, of course, would lose any access to the Black Sea. History loves playing tricks: what was a ‘gift’ to Ukraine in 1922 may become a parting gift a hundred years later.
It’s creative destruction time
It will be fascinating to watch what Prof. Sergey Karaganov masterfully described, in detail, as the new Putin doctrine of constructive destruction, and how it will interconnect with West Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean and further on down the Global South road.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the ceremonial NATO Sultan, denounced the recognition of the Baby Twins as “unacceptable.” No wonder: that shift smashed all his elaborate plans to pose as privileged mediator between Moscow and Kiev during Putin’s upcoming visit to Ankara. The Kremlin – as well as the Foreign Ministry – don’t waste time talking to NATO minions.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, for his part, had a recent, very productive entente with Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad. Russia, this past weekend, has staged a spectacular strategic missile display, hypersonic and otherwise, featuring Khinzal, Zircon, Kalibr, Yars ICBMs, Iskander and Sineva – irony of ironies, in synch with the Russophobia-fest in Munich. In parallel, Russian Navy ships of the Pacific, Northern and Black Sea fleets performed a series of submarine search drills in the Mediterranean.
The Putin doctrine privileges the asymmetrical – and that applies to the near abroad and beyond. Putin’s body language, in his last two crucial interventions, spell out nearly maximum exasperation. As in realizing, not auspiciously, but rather in resignation, that the only language Beltway Neo-conservatives and ‘humanitarian imperialists’ understand is heavy metal thunder. They are definitely deaf, dumb and blind to history, geography and diplomacy.
So, one can always game the Russian military – for instance, imposing a no-fly zone in Syria to conduct a series of visits by Mr. Khinzal not only to the Turk-protected shady jihadist umbrella in Idlib but also the jihadists protected by the Americans in Al-Tanf base, near the Syria-Jordan border. After all, these specimens are all NATO proxies.
The US government barks non-stop about “territorial sovereignty.” So let’s game the Kremlin asking the White House for a road map on getting out of Syria: after all the Americans are illegally occupying a section of Syrian territory and adding extra disaster to the Syrian economy by stealing their oil.
NATO’s stultifying leader, Jens Stoltenberg, has announced the alliance is dusting off its “defense plans.” That may include little more than hiding behind their expensive Brussels desks. They are as inconsequential in the Black Sea as in the East Med – as the US remains quite vulnerable in Syria.
There are now four Russian TU-22M3 strategic bombers in Russia’s Hmeimim base in Syria, each capable of carrying three S-32 anti-ship missiles that fly at supersonic Mach 4.3 with a range of 1,000 km. No Aegis system is able to handle them.
Russia also has stationed a few Mig-31Ks in Syria’s coastal region in Latakia equipped with hypersonic Khinzals – more than enough to sink any kind of US surface group, including aircraft carriers, in the East Med. The US has no air defense mechanism whatsoever with even a minimal chance of intercepting them.
So the rules have changed. Drastically. The Hegemon is naked. The new deal starts with turning the post-Cold War set-up in Eastern Europe completely upside down. The East Med will be next. The Bear is back, hear him roar.
