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Ukraine: As Economic War Escalates, Fighting May Resume Soon
The ceasefire of Minsk between the Ukrainian coup-government and the federalists of east Ukraine was something both sides needed.
The Ukrainian army was on the verge of completely loosing it. It was temporarily defeated and needed to rearm and reorganize. While the federalist insurgents were successful and probably able to continue their fight for a few days their forces were overstretched and needed to consolidate.
But many on the insurgent side did not like the ceasefire. It did not give them the federal autonomy they demanded. The neo-nazi "national-guard" battalions on the other side also criticized the ceasefire. They want the total destruction of their enemy and ethnic cleansing of all Russia-affine Ukrainians.
Russia had pressed for the ceasefire to avoid further sanctions. It was an offer to the "western" side to step back from the cliff of an economic war. Obama and NATO tried to sabotage the ceasefire through false claims of a Russian invasion and other propaganda. But the Ukrainian president had to ignore the pressure from Washington and Brussels or he would have lost another city, Mariupol, to the insurgents.
The main Russian reason to support the ceasefire, to hold back sanctions, has now vanished. Three days ago the EU, against the will of several of its members, decided on new sanctions on Russia:
The European Union adopted new sanctions against Moscow on Monday despite the leaders of Russia and Ukraine vowing to uphold a truce aimed at halting a devastating five-month war.
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In Brussels, the EU formally approved fresh sanctions against Russia but said they would not come into force for a few more days, effectively delaying the measures to see if the current truce will hold.
The truce held and despite that facts and its earlier claims the EU today announced that the new sanctions will be implemented immediately:
The European Union has agreed to impose further sanctions on Russia on Friday over its role in the Ukraine crisis, diplomats say.
The move is aimed at maintaining pressure on Russia, the sources said.
Russia says it is preparing a response "commensurate with the economic losses" caused by the EU sanctions.
This is another catastrophic and escalating EU move with regards to Ukraine and Russia. This turns the conflict into an economic war between the EU and Russia in which no side can win. Only the United States and China will profit from it.
Additonally Poland had the crazy idea of supplying gas which it purchases from Russia to Ukraine which is not willing or able to pay for direct deliveries from Russia. This is a breach of contract as the deliveries from Russia to Poland are not allowed to be resold to other Russian gas customers. Russia allegedly responded by lowering the volume of gas it supplies to Poland and Poland immediately folded and stopped the reverse gas flow to Ukraine:
Russia’s OAO Gazprom limited natural gas flows to Poland, preventing the European Union member state from supplying Ukraine via so-called reverse flows.
Polskie Gornictwo Naftowe i Gazownictwo SA, or PGNiG, got 20 to 24 percent less fuel than it ordered from Gazprom Export over the past two days and is compensating flows with alternative supply, the company said today in an e-mailed statement.
Poland halted gas supply to Ukraine at 3 p.m. Warsaw time today, according to Ukraine’s UkrTransGaz.
We can be not sure that this is the whole story though. Gazprom says it provides all the gas Poland ordered through its pipelines but hints that Ukraine, where those pipelines cross, may be the party which is taking the gas:
Russia has denied that its state-run gas giant Gazprom has been limiting flows to Poland.
"Reports by news agencies on the reduction of volumes of gas supplies by Gazprom to Poland's PGNiG are incorrect,” Itar-Tass reported Gazprom spokesman Sergey Kupriyanov as saying. “The same volume of gas as in previous days – 23 million cubic meters a day – is being supplied to Poland now."
Before Gazprom issued its statement, Uktransgaz’s Prokopiv blamed Russia for trying to “derail” the plan for Poland to supply Ukraine with “reverse” gas, while Ukraine refused to pay its debt to Gazprom and is currently cut off from Russian supplies, and accused Russia of limiting the supply of gas.
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In August, Russia’s energy minister, Aleksandr Novak, warned that in the upcoming winter Ukraine may begin siphoning off Russian supplies intended for Europe if it fails to build up its reserves.
There is more conflicting news. The Ukrainian president Poroshenko claimed that most of the "Russian troops", which no one, including the OSCE observers in the area, has ever seen, have left Ukraine:
“Based on the latest information I have received from our intelligence services, 70 percent of the Russian troops have moved back across the border,” Poroshenko said. “This bolsters our hope that the peace initiatives enjoy good prospects.”
NATO, likely fearing that Poroshenko was again moving towards a peaceful solution, disputed the claim:
"The reported reduction of Russian troops from eastern Ukraine would be a good first step, but we have no information on this. The fact of the matter is there are still approximately 1,000 Russian troops in eastern Ukraine with substantial amounts of military equipment and approximately 20,000 troops on the Russian border with Ukraine," the NATO military officer said.
Push, push, push for war …
But some parts of the "western" media are slowly waking up to the fact that not all is well with Ukraine and the "western" strategy. They note that Ukraine can not afford the IMF's 'Shock Therapy' and needs money without conditions which it will likely never pay back:
Absent this "bail-in" of foreign creditors, Ukraine will simply be taking on more debt that it lacks the capacity to service, risking a long-term compound debt spiral for the country and practically guaranteeing a wholesale default down the road — and continuing political instability.
After months of ridiculing anyone who pointed to neo-nazis within Ukraine's regime and military forces as "Putin lover" reports about those neo-nazis now pop up in several "western" media.
Russia best reason to hold the insurgents in east Ukraine back from further fighting has vanished. The economic war is escalating no matter what Russia does or does not do. As the media have more time to look into the real issues in Ukraine the state of the sorry affair will become more clear and "western" public support for Ukraine will decline. This is a threat to "western" warmongering and to again escalate to fighting is the best method to suppress such news.
Hawks on both sides now have reason to restart the fighting. Expect the ceasefire to completely fail very soon.
Bloodletting Lady Europe
“Only the United States and China will profit from it”
Nobody will profit from this except perhaps several thousand top war profiteers, and a few military careerists, and EU and NATO flunkies. The US is rapidly destroying whatever precious credibility it has left before the now almost incredulous and horrified world stage, and money coming in from other nation’s lost business is but a trickle in an austere bucket full of holes. What China gains in time and influence, it loses in business with the US. China badly wants stability to grow, and so will continue to throw away its hard earned cash, buying worthless US t-notes to ensure it.
“If the Empire will just dissolve gracefully, we will do everything possible to aid it.” This is what other countries are thinking, even as they come to understand that hope is not a policy. “Disarming” must become more than a party compliment; it must grow into a real and hard strategy, if it is to succeed and save the world.
But that is not what is happening — the Empire, a wild bloodied beast, refuses to go gracefully. Rather, the Empire has been panicked into the desperate rear-guard action of a final play to regain its lost hegemony (which, by its very nature is a zero sum game), upon the surface of what is now a slowly deflating global balloon. Should the balloon deflate before a winner is declared, all will lose.
Several week ago, I detailed Merkel’s bloody body being impaled upon the ideological fence she was attempting to straddle. It seems NATO has finally mercilessly pulled her off and onto their side, in the nick of time, while there is still some life left in her much diminished political figure. Germany will lie with the devil for now.
European agriculture is dead — planting decisions will have to be made in just five months time. They will have no export markets for a second year in a row. Concerns will merge and eventually be bought off by big agribusiness and GMO firms for pennies on the dollar. Hurray Syngenta! With no real home market to protect, ironically, subsidies to giant agribusiness will increase, as in the US.
And Toivo, yes, while I admire your honesty, you should realize by now that everyone is bought off. Everyone with real power, at least. Everyone to the last soul — if they still have one, that is. If they refuse the blandishments of their betters, they are simply disappeared, as Denk details, or if they are lucky, only McKinney’ed. Buying off the entire political class of Europe could cost what, several billion a year in newly printed fiat dollars? (10,000 people x $1M/yr. = 10 B/yr., or 100,000 people x $100k/yr., or even more for far less, all = 10 B/yr.) The Empire doesn’t even blink at spending several hundred billion a year on prosecuting hot wars; so why should it leave anything to chance? With literally trillions in drug money (remember the first act after 9-11 was cornering the opium/heroin market in Afghanistan and then growing it exponentially, while protecting it with US forces), stolen money, QE money, arbitrage money, derivatives money, and all manner of funny money sloshing around in the pockets of those who own the world, why would they not own the one thing that is important, namely, power? The same logic goes for the media. True resistance only lies with the general population, which has been systematically ripped off to pay off those corrupted at the top. But we can keep waiting for the next glam/glib politician to save us if we insist on believing that hope is a pro-active policy, even after have been fleeced by the flim-flam man, Barak Obama.
Democracy, if she ever existed as more than a reified aspirational meme, intended to stand lithe and seductively clad in our imaginations beside her hallowed companion muses: Kalliope, Kleio, Thaleia, and Melpomene in flowing gowns of grace, has now become commoditized into another grungy, soul-less, chthonic, profit-making industry. Money is to be donated, ads are to be run, products pushed and sold, and everything, from beliefs in hope and change, to campaign hot dogs are to be consumed until sickness overtakes satiety and good sense.
If there are any Gods left to us after our modern day Demiurges have worked their monetary magic upon the power aspiring class, it is the rare soul who refuses to stay bought and silenced; the puppet who like Shakespeare’s jester-fool, against all odds, manages to talk sense to the senseless; or the proud and incorruptible general who stays loyal to his unbuyable leader, Assad. These, it should be obvious, are as rare and valuable as live oysters after the Deepwater Horizon spill.
It should be obvious by now that NATO and the banks function as one overweening hegemonic totalitarian force. Think tanks, too — thus the formulation “Banks ‘n Tanks.” The propaganda system is like the emperor’s resplendent robes. (And only very few of us have the power to see through them.) Large traditional manufacturers, who once had some say, are now just the banker’s bitches. Much new technology, like cell phones, is ideological in nature, and hence, just a physical subset of the propaganda system. Only the energy giants have the capital, reach, power and vision to defy their governments.
Yet, much is going on deep below the surface, which we can’t see. There is a conflict of unprecedented dimensions raging among the elite in Europe. Atlanticists are fighting with Eurasianists for supremacy. The intellectual class is split. There are some small splits within the media. Those with the power of vision in Europe know that the old order is dying, and that the sooner they jump on the bus of the new order, the better they will be.
If there still exists a productive ownership class (a nationalist bourgeoisie) separate from the globalist finance class on top, then it must choose to go against its instincts and, to survive, ally with the working class to throw off their controllers — otherwise there is no hope. The finance class is not interested in pan-Asiatic railroads they cannot finance and control, but Germany’s tool manufacturing industry should be. The nationalist elements within the military (the power behind Chavez’s unlikely rise, for instance) must be persuaded to break with their NATO trainers and paymasters.
But those are the elements which must unite to avert a World War: Nationalist and Eurasian elements of the bourgeoisie, big energy, the media, and the military, along with anti-austerity populist movements. Those are the configurations we should be supporting in a move towards a poly-centric world.
Then, and only then, is real change is possible. Populist movements alone are not strong enough these days. Their power, when threatening, is too easily sidetracked into schismatic identity movements, like Scottish independence, which refuse to address change of alignment as a core value. One might as well change ponies on a merry-go-round.
At the present, the NATO Atlanticists hold sway, while the other factions sit on the fence and watch. Are the Atlanticists being given enough rope to hang themselves? Must they prove their dominion in battle? There is always the problem of the battle escalating beyond control, perhaps due to an unexpected coup. Do the Eurasianists hold an unexpected trump card up their sleeve? And whom does Father Time favor?
As the snows of winter approach, Lady Europe lies helplessly passive to her fate — almost somnolent, like a medieval patient upon the pure white sheets of her destiny. She is in that initial state that the poet Syvia Plath once described as “Stasis in darkness.” The cure of blood-letting has been prescribed by Dr. NATO, and the Nazi-bred leeches of war and austerity are to be affixed and stuck hard to her body. They will not be removed until complete submission is achieved. Are the Atlanticists monitoring the blood loss? Do they even care if the patient survives? After all, they have been planning to consume the remains regardless of what happens to the patient.
Is there any chance for the patient to miraculously come to her senses, and throw off those sucking the very blood out of her? Can she then escape from the sexual predations of the evil Dr. NATO? Could she then still have the energy to find the presence of mind within her, and run headlong into the warm awaiting arms of her betrothed (in a union foretold by propinquity), virile Asia — in what promises to be a glorious marriage?
Ah, well, there is a true romantic in all of us geomancers, I guess.
Posted by: Malooga | Sep 12 2014 9:18 utc | 70
Malooga put it in an almost perfect way, however still no one can really see how All of this develop.
Personally in such cases I study the Holy Koran, which according to various interpretation says :
http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=8&verse=30
AND [remember, O Prophet,] how those who were bent on denying the truth were scheming against thee, in order to restrain thee [from preaching], or to slay thee, or to drive thee away: thus have they [always] schemed: but God brought their scheming to nought-for God is above all schemers. zoom
M. M. Pickthall And when those who disbelieve plot against thee (O Muhammad) to wound thee fatally, or to kill thee or to drive thee forth; they plot, but Allah (also) plotteth; and Allah is the best of plotters. zoom
Shakir And when those who disbelieved devised plans against you that they might confine you or slay you or drive you away; and they devised plans and Allah too had arranged a plan; and Allah is the best of planners. zoom
Yusuf Ali (Saudi Rev. 1985) Remember how the Unbelievers plotted against thee, to keep thee in bonds, or slay thee, or get thee out (of thy home). They plot and plan, and Allah too plans; but the best of planners is Allah. zoom
Yusuf Ali (Orig. 1938) Remember how the Unbelievers plotted against thee, to keep thee in bonds, or slay thee, or get thee out (of thy home). They plot and plan, and God too plans; but the best of planners is God. zoom
Dr. Laleh Bakhtiar And mention when those who were ungrateful plan against thee to bring thee to a standstill or to kill thee or to drive thee out. And they plan and God plans, but God is Best of the ones who plan. zoom
Wahiduddin Khan Remember how those who bent on denying the truth plotted against you to imprison you or kill you or expel you: they schemedbut God also schemed. God is the best of schemers. zoom
T.B.Irving Whenever those who disbelieve plot against you, to pin you down or kill you or exile you, they plot away while God is plotting too, and God is the best Plotter! zoom
[Al-Muntakhab] And remember O Muhammad how the infidels, with cleverness in circumventing, had recourse to stratagem tending to take you as prisoners and keep you in bondage or kill you, and in His plan did Allah also have recourse to stratagem, and who can gain advantage on Allah zoom
[The Monotheist Group] (2011 Edition) And the rejecters plot against you to arrest you, or to kill you, or to expel you. And they plot, and God plots, and God is the best of plotters. zoom
Abdel Haleem Remember [Prophet] when the disbelievers plotted to take you captive, kill, or expel you. They schemed and so did God: He is the best of schemers. zoom
Abdul Majid Daryabadi And recall what time those who disbelieved were plotting against thee to confine thee or to slay thee or to drive thee forth: they were plotting and Allah was plotting, and Allah is the Best of plotters. zoom
Ahmed Ali Remember, when the infidels contrived to make you a prisoner or to murder or expel you, they plotted, but God also planned; and God’s plan is the best. zoom
Aisha Bewley When those who are kafir were plotting against you to imprison you or kill you or expel you: they were plotting and Allah was plotting, but Allah is the Best of Plotters. zoom
Ali Ünal And (recall, O Messenger,) how those who disbelieve schemed against you to take you captive, or kill you, or drive you away (from Makkah). Thus were they scheming, but God put His will into effect (and brought their scheme to nothing). God wills what is the best (for His believing servants) and makes His will prevail. zoom
Ali Quli Qara’i When the faithless plotted against you to take you captive, or to kill or expel you. They plotted and Allah devised, and Allah is the best of devisers. zoom
Hamid S. Aziz And when those who disbelieved plotted against you to detain you in bonds, or slay you, or drive you forth – they plotted, but Allah also plotted, for Allah is best of Plotters…..
Posted by: Sufi | Sep 12 2014 11:44 utc | 82
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