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Some Additional Bits On Ukraine
Yesterday Russia recognized the Donbas republics. This seems to include all of the Donetsk and Luhansk administrative regions which are largely controlled by the Ukrainian government forces. Here are some bits on the fall-out.
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The German chancellor Olaf Scholz has halted the certification of the Nordstream II pipeline that is supposed to bring natural gas from Russia to Germany. That means higher energy prices for Germany and higher inflation.
Dmitry Medvedev @MedvedevRussiaE – 13:19 UTC · 22 Feb 2022
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has issued an order to halt the process of certifying the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Well. Welcome to the brave new world where Europeans are very soon going to pay €2.000 for 1.000 cubic meters of natural gas!
It is political harakiri and will therefore most likely be reversed.
I wonder why Scholz took this sensational step. The U.S. reaction seems way more muted.
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Showing 'unwavering' support by running away from the conflict:
US relocates Ukraine embassy staff to Poland
"For security reasons, Department of State personnel currently in Lviv will spend the night in Poland. Our personnel will regularly return to continue their diplomatic work in Ukraine and provide emergency consular services," Blinken said in a statement, adding that the U.S. commitment to Ukraine remained "unwavering."
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Ceasefire violation as counted by the OSCE special monitoring mission to Ukraine (note the changes to the Y-axes).
Sunday was a bit calmer than Saturday but the numbers are still at a much higher level than usual.
I find it likely that the sudden increase of artillery explosions from 80 per day to over 1,200 per day over the last week had an effect on the timing of Putin's decision.
Wednesday, 16.2.2022
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Thursday, 17.2.2022
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Friday, 18.2.2022
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Saturday and Sunday, 19.2.2022, 20.2.2022
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Anti-Zelensky op-eds in U.S. media:
- Inside the Biden-Putin Chess Match – Puck news, Jan 25, 2022
The White House and its Democratic allies have just about had it with president Zelensky.
by Julia Ioffe, a veteran of The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Politico
- Ukrainians are wondering if their comedian-turned-president can handle the world stage – CNN, Feb 11, 2022
by Michael Bociurkiw, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council
- The Comedian-Turned-President Is Seriously in Over His Head – New York Times, Feb 21, 2022
by Olga Rudenko, chief editor of The Kyiv Independent
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I agree with this Saker take:
The first thing which I want to point out is that this was a very carefully orchestrated event, and I don’t just mean today’s live meetings and signing. For those of us who follow Russian politics very closely there can be no doubts that all this was prepared long BEFORE the Russian ultimatum to the West.
This is “the plan” which Putin once openly referred to.
Let me make this clear: this recognition should NOT, repeat, NOT, be seen in isolation. It is just ONE PHASE in a PROCESS which began at least a year ago, or more, and there is much more to come.
Next, that must be repeated again, this is NOT about the LDNR, the Donbass or even the Ukraine, this is about a new security architecture on Europe and, therefore, on our entire planet.
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Next, I want to mention four specific threats made by Putin today (note, since the PR folks at the Kremlin are still working at their usual snail’s pace, I will have to make them by memory, please keep that in mind):
- Those responsible for the massacre in Odessa will be punished by Russia.
- Putin is demanding an immediate cessation of the shelling and shooting along the LOC.
- Russia will physically prevent the Ukraine from US/NATO deploying offensive weapons to threaten Russia.
- Russia will show Banderastan how to organize a *real* “decommunization” (after indicating that the Ukraine was created by the CPSU).
Again, I will repeat here what I wrote above: this recognition should NOT, repeat, NOT, be seen in isolation. It is just ONE PHASE in a PROCESS which began at least a year ago, or more, and there is much more to come.
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Address by the President of the Russian Federation – February 21, 2022:
Actually, as I have already said, Soviet Ukraine is the result of the Bolsheviks’ policy and can be rightfully called “Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine.” He was its creator and architect. This is fully and comprehensively corroborated by archival documents, including Lenin’s harsh instructions regarding Donbass, which was actually shoved into Ukraine. And today the “grateful progeny” has overturned monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. They call it decommunization.
You want decommunization? Very well, this suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We are ready to show what real decommunizations would mean for Ukraine.
1654-1917 – various Russian Tsars, 1922 – Lenin, 1945 – Stalin, 1954 – Khrushchev
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Posted by: mwm | Feb 22 2022 15:47 utc | 48
“I have always encouraged Bernhard to explain why Germany seems so submissive to the US.”
“My theory has always been that with the crisis of 2008 and the bailout of DeutscheBank by the Fed, something fundamentally changed…some kind of threat. Since then, EU and Germany only push the Atlanticist agenda,[…]”
As a German myself I pondered this question many times, and will try to provide a few pieces of the puzzle. The answer (for me) is that over the last decades, but especially over the last 20 years, German economy, politics and media have been entangled and corrupted by trans-atlantic power politics more than ever before. So much so that it seems impossible to get rid of it without a major fallout between Germany and the US, which could have substantial, if not fatal consequences.
I think for quite some time now (and it started before Trump, but heated up under him) the US has declared a low level economic war against Germany, trying to keep it under it’s thumb. You mentioned the “Deutsche Bank”, which once was the flagship of German finance and today is all but a mediocre player within hundreds of the same. Why? Because it got bombarded by US lawsuits for doing the same shit Wall Street does every day. There was the so-called “diesel scandal” a few years back, initiated by a small, never-heard-of-before American “NGO”, accusing German car manufacturers of betraying the American people with fraudulent emission stats (btw the same people who are mostly happy to drive cars that weigh 3 tons and use 30l/100km). That was a huge and expensive issue for the reputation of the German industry in general. And there is the example of “Bayer” (chemicals and pharmaceuticals), a global player really, who suddenly and apparently without second thought decided to buy “Monsanto”, an American company facing hundreds of lawsuits with possibly billions in fees for the distribution of harmful pesticides and genetically engineered seeds. Why? I think BlackRock and the likes pressured them into it. BlackRock et al. own at least 5-10% of EVERY major German stock company, probably much more, and have a say in all decisions made. Not that I pity them, Deutsche Bank and Volkswagen and Bayer probably deserve much worse. But I see a significant power grab by American financial forces, enabling them to pressure and blackmail the German industry into making decisions against their own interest. And this would be the connection to Nord Stream 2, since German politics always follow “economic interests”.
Also, and this is public knowledge (or could be, if people here cared): all of the German media is dominated by four or five corporate publishing companies, all of them deeply entangled in a network of trans-atlantic think tanks, “NGOs” and other like-minded entities. Even public service broadcasting (which is huge in Germany) is involved in the same network, making it possible to spread pro-atlanticist propaganda to about 90-95% of the public all the time. And that is exactly what happened in the last 2 decades at least, especially since Maidan though. A relentless brainwashing, conditioning and indoctrination machine. The flagships of German “journalism” have been demonizing Russia and Putin for at least a decade, but it probably started when Putin came into power 20 years ago and at the same time “international terrorism” was the latest hot shit of the fear mongers. I’ve been observing a significant increase since 2014 and it already has been unbearable back then. The worst part: even most of the so-called Left fell for it, I had discussions with very intelligent people who were convinced that Putin follows an imperial agenda of his own and the US is just trying to do some sort of damage control.
As for politicians – we don’t expect much from them anyway, they never really do what the people want. But the difference between today and say 30-40 years ago is that back then at least some appeared to have a genuine interest to change things for the better. All we have today is careerists, at least at the top level. And a lot of them, like Baerbock, are members of the same trans-atlantic networks as the media, and have been in some kind of “leader” programm. Either indoctrinated and brainwashed as well, or doing the bid of their masters because they know it will promote their career. Does it really matter? In the end the result is the same – they are acting against the interest of the people who voted for them.
I don’t remember when exactly, but back when Merkel and Obama were in power, at some point it turned out that the NSA had taps on all the top level politician’s mobile phones. What happened you ask? A very minor outrage for a few days, maybe two weeks, which was swiftly forgotten. A big-eyed announcement that this is “not something friends do to each other”, then silence. The countermeasure: from then on, all politicians had to leave their phones outside when entering an important meeting…
For our new great (“social-democratic”!, which decades ago meant kind of leftist) chancellor you have to know that he was involved in something that here (unaware of English slang, apparently) has been called the “Cum-Ex scandal”. Banksters used a legislative loophole to get tax returns for transactions they never really paid taxes for. The damage has been in the tens of billions – TAX PAYERS MONEY. Most or even all of the crooks got away with a slap on the wrist or even no penalty at all – because it has been dragged out for so long that the statute of limitations expired. And Scholz was in the thick of it, but to what extend, we’ll never know – unless some kind of friendly intelligence agency unwittingly might leak something to the media it controls. You know, unnamed, reliable sources… that might get angry if someone misbehaves…
So there you have it: political careerists, on each of them friendly agencies have a huge file, making them prone to blackmail, would be another big piece of the puzzle.
And here a few small ones:
– By my estimate about 90-95% of all companies and citizens use Microsoft, Apple and/or Android, including probable backdoors. To a lower extend, but close, they use Google, Amazon, Facebook and so on. And a huge amount of data is stored in “clouds” on American server farms. This might as well be the definiton of dependency
– As far as i know, or guess, the internet could be shut off at any time by the US. Since digitization is a must these days, most if not all companies and public infrastructure, not to mention citizens would not only suffer, but collapse in such a case.
– Most or almost all financial transactions go through channels linked with the US one way or another. There is no emergency protocol if Germany would get cut off SWIFT for example, because, you know, we’re friends with the USofA.
-Also, a huge part or most or all of the German gold reserves are deposited in friendly vaults overseas.
– And of course there is the fact that still thousands of American soldiers are stationed in Germany, and their hubs for Africa and the Middle East are located here. And a few handfuls of nukes as well.
I’m sure the list could go on for a while, those are the most obvious things that come to my mind. Any nation openly rebelling against that kind of dependency would suffer extreme consequences, at the minimum economically, probably militarily (the German military is a joke and wouldn’t last a day against American forces). I know it looks spineless, and I hate to admit it, but those overly cautious actions and reactions in Berlin probably stem from some or all of those reasons above, and a few more – and might actually be more beneficial to the German people at the moment than open rebellion on a diplomatic level. Which most citizens don’t expect and wouldn’t understand anyway because of all the brainwashing. Even if the acting politicians wanted to (which they probably don’t – yet), it would take years or maybe decades to get out of that dependency with no harm, with a thousand babysteps. Or one swift and decisive revolution. Which is highly unlikely, for those you have to ask the French 🙂
Posted by: xototox | Feb 22 2022 22:59 utc | 215
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