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Another Zelensky Lie Debunked – White House Says Ukraine Must Give Up Territory
Yesterday I mentioned the burning shopping center in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, of which the Ukrainian president Zelensky falsely claimed that thousand people had been inside.
I asked:
Satellite pictures show that the shopping center is right next to the large Kredmash machine plant. Was that the real target of the attack with the shopping center being an unintended casualty?
It has now been confirmed that the answer to my question is 'yes'.
Today's report on the war by the Russian Defense Ministry says:
On June 27, in Kremenchug (Poltava region), Russian Aerospace Forces launched a high-precision air attack at hangars with armament and munitions delivered by USA and European countries at Kremenchug road machinery plant.
High-precision attack has resulted in the neutralisation of west-manufactured armament and munitions concentrated at the storage area for being delivered to Ukrainian group of troops in Donbass.
Detonation of the storaged munitions caused a fire in a non-functioning shopping centre next to the facilities of the plant.
Ahhh – "don't trust the Russians!" you say. Well, don't trust anyone I say, just scrutinize the facts.
The Ukrainians have published surveillance video from a park catching the moments of the two explosions. A large flash appears and people are running away as some debris falls down.
The park is around an artificial lake with an island in the middle that can be reached by a bridge. There is a small round building on the island.
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Here is a Google satellite view of the whole scene.
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The light gray shopping center roof can be seen south of the large Kredmash machine plant in the center. The small park from which the surveillance videos come is directly north of it. Google has marked it in green as some special recreational space. The factory has direct rail access at its southern side with several rail tracks for loading and unloading machinery. Rail access makes it an ideal space for preparing or repairing heavy weapons. It seems that the railway area was one of the two targets.
Still not convinced? Well, here is video from a Ukrainian TV station taken on the factory grounds. It is showing a crater and the debris of the factory. The areas where it was hit are pretty much destroyed.
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According to the Ukrainian emergence services the attack has caused the death of 16 people and wounded 59. So most of Zelensky's 'thousand' people inside the shopping center must have either survived or never existed at all with the later being the more likely case.
The shopping center was obviously as empty as its large empty parking space I mentioned yesterday. It somehow came on fire after the factory next door was bombed. Those who died were most likely soldiers or factory workers who were preparing 'western' weapons for delivery to the front.
Zelensky's lie has been debunked just as the other horror fictions he has told about Russians.
Meanwhile the White House is preparing for a retreat from Ukraine. CNN headlines:
Biden officials privately doubt that Ukraine can win back all of its territory
The piece is by the 'deranged conspiracy theorist and scandal plagued CIA propagandist' Natasha Bertrand. That makes it an official administration position.
That 'counteroffensive later this year' seems very unlikely to me. When the Russian forces see any buildup for one they will destroy it before it can take off.
The Ukraine will not regain any of the territory that the Russians do not want it to regain. It isn't in the position to do so militarily nor through negotiations. It will simply have to accept defeat and give up on the east and south and accept the loss of the source of 70-80% of its former GDP.
All this was completely foreseeable since the very first day of the war.
An interview in Gazeta, lately highly Russo-hate Polish MSM. It is long, but interesting.
Gen. Mieczysław Gocuł: the NATO summit is to convince us that we will win the war with Russia if, or rather when, it breaks out
I am very concerned that the NATO summit in Madrid is going in the wrong direction. Instead of looking for ways to win peace, because this is the essence of the problem of the eastern flank, the summit is to convince us that we will win the future war if, or rather when, it happens – says Gen. Mieczysław Gocuł, former Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Army.
First of all: NATO at the 2014 summit in Newport, by creating the Readiness Action Plan, increased the Response Force to 40,000. soldiers – including land, sea, air, space and cyber components. Now, in 2021-22 (because the Russians mobilized their forces for this war in October last year) we have a war. And what happened on NATO’s eastern flank? US troops arrived, but importantly, the NATO Response Force did not arrive. And yet, if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine close to our borders did not cause a reaction by the NATO Response Force, then it is necessary to ask the head of NATO whether the Alliance’s crisis response procedures have been launched at all.
If the Pact triggered them, after the initiating phase (conflict detection), it would be necessary to move on to the next phase: strategic assessment by the commander of the combined NATO forces in Europe. Such an assessment should be presented by the commander at a meeting of the North Atlantic Council (NAC – NATO’s most important decision-making body). After all, this assessment would be simple: Russia brought out over 150,000. soldiers and launched an invasion of Ukraine. It was therefore to be expected that the NAC would share the commander’s assessment. The next step in NATO’s crisis response should be to use Response Options Development. But nothing like that happened. We in Poland and the Baltic states understand the threat, but the approach of other NATO states is diametrically different.
Unfortunately, even those US troops now on the eastern flank have never been placed under NATO command. Thus, the Alliance’s nerve, or command structure, has not been mobilized to coordinate the actions of the NATO Response Force, which also has not been deployed. So what if we have 40,000 in NATO? The Response Forces if they haven’t moved?
And have you heard that the famous NATO Spearhead (Very High Readiness Joint Task Force – VJTF) appears in Poland or in the Baltic States? Also not. And yet it was created in 2014 – after Russia’s war in the Donbas and the annexation of Crimea – and was supposed to react within 72 hours.
Since 40 thousand. did not move, it’s 300,000 it won’t move either. Since even the spearhead has not moved with the current state of leadership in the member states and NATO itself?
Yes. It is not a question of the number of declared forces, but of the lack of a decision. It is similar with our army – the key is not whether we have 100 or 300 thousand. soldiers, but what capabilities the military has and whether it has the ability to stop the Russian invasion. Let’s forget about numbers. When humans flew with stone spears, the actual number was decisive. But not now.
You complain, and Jens Stoltenberg announces: “The NATO summit in Madrid will be groundbreaking. With a new strategic concept, we will make a fundamental change in NATO’s deterrence and defense.”
Before the NATO summit in Warsaw (2016), at the Pact’s military committee, I asked Stoltenberg: what will be the guarantees for the eastern flank? He replied with a question: what else does Poland expect? I said straight: security and prosperity, which is what the rest of the sitting at table wants.
Just like then, I hear the same slogans today, such as “do more with less”, and there are also other nice-sounding calls, but these are only political slogans calculated for a positive social perception and minimizing costs – but they do not really bring any political and military solutions.
No breakthrough in NATO, even if there is a real risk of a war with Russia?
If Stoltenberg says it will be a turning point, it is probably just for him. Because it will be the last summit with him as the head of the Pact. The summit will definitely not be a breakthrough, because – first of all – NATO does not want to take a big step forward.
What should happen for a breakthrough to become a reality?
Let’s be honest: if there is to be a breakthrough, we should have 360 degrees of security for the Alliance – on each of its borders. And let’s also honestly answer the question: is the eastern flank safe – are Poland and the Baltic states safe? Well, we are not safe – NATO does not give us security now and the current summit in Madrid will not change that. And yet such slogans – of complete security – had already been spoken at the previous summits of the Pact in Brussels, Warsaw and Newport. It always ended up with security slogans. This time it will also be like that.
Now the tension between Russia and Lithuania is growing, because the sanctions are blocking the Kaliningrad Oblast more and more. Could this be a hotspot?
If Putin wanted to start the war further and decided to cut a corridor through the Balts to the Kaliningrad District at the Suwałki Isthmus, what forces could stop him? Could the forces of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Poland stop Putin? Well not. Putin will not be stopped by the Americans, who are present on the eastern flank only in small numbers. I repeat, Russia talks and counts only with strong countries and organizations. And NATO in our region is weak.
NATO is not strong on the eastern flank, but does it have enormous potential, which it does not want to transfer to our region?
NATO has military potential, but does not have the political potential to use it to build real security in our part of Europe. European leaders are not equal to the task. I don’t want to criticize individual leaders, but the role of statesmen is to make difficult but necessary decisions.
These leaders do not seem to understand that the war in Ukraine has already caused hundreds of billions of euros in damage, and will still bring trillions of damage to the entire global world. It will also bring hunger and the millions of victims of hunger that Russia is blackmailing the world with. If the leaders thought seriously, they would very quickly make decisions about the forward and enhanced presence of NATO on the eastern flank, so that it could carry out specific operational tasks, which we are able to precisely define to ensure security. However, for this to be possible, a NATO division should be stationed in Poland.
After the NATO summit in Warsaw (2016), we formally created an international division in Poland – it should be linked to the chain of command and be subordinate to the Multinational Corps Northeast in Szczecin, which is a rapid reaction corps. And this corps should be subordinate to the Allied Command of NATO’s Joint Forces in Brunssum, so that NATO would be responsible for the security of the eastern flank.
And what would result from this?
And the fact that the allied troops arriving on the eastern flank would be tied to the NATO chain of command. Today, after all, the battalion battle groups present in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia as a result of the NATO summit in Warsaw are not even commanded by NATO, but by individual member states. Everything should be tense, but it isn’t.
The Estonian prime minister says: “Estonia (in the event of an attack by Russia) would be wiped off the map of Europe and its capital razed to the ground”, and NATO’s strategy follows the principle of “lose and then liberate”. And this is what it would be like in the event of the Russian invasion of the Baltic states?
This, unfortunately, is true.
But let’s start with the basic thing: what is the definition of security? It is the freedom to choose the path of development of the country. After all, what we have today on the eastern flank – in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia – is a contradiction of security. There is no free development, there are a lot of restrictions, there is a huge pressure to increase defense spending. And if there is no security, it means that NATO is not meeting the goals set out in the Washington Treaty, so NATO is not a strategic concept today.
The gradation in the validity of the documents is clear: the Washington Treaty, NATO’s strategic concept and MC400 (Military Implementation of the Alliance’s Strategic Concept), i.e. the military implementation of the Alliance’s strategic concept.
And in your opinion today is it fiction?
If Stoltengerg is reading correctly the Treaty and the Charter of the United Nations, to which the preamble to the Treaty refers, then he should be aware: NATO was not created to reflect NATO territory. And today it would be forced to do so, because it is not able to defend the territory of not only Estonia, but also Poland. It must be emphasized that NATO was created to defend NATO territory – to prevent the conflict from escalating and, as a result, from taking over at least part of NATO territory by the enemy.
However, there was already a lot of declarations that NATO would defend every scrap of the territory of a member state. In fact, it is impossible?
Today, NATO is actually saying that we will not give up any land to Russia. However, this is a story of fairy tales, and Putin probably laughs at it. Because what did NATO – apart from rhetoric and many Stoltenberg conferences – do about the war in Ukraine? NATO has a spearhead – did not send. NATO has a Response Force of 40,000. soldiers – they didn’t move. NATO has a command system – it has not moved. And if NATO wants to increase its Response Force to 300,000 and whoever thinks it will be OK, it sounds like a joke, because 300,000 wouldn’t move either.
One should also pay attention to the condition of our army, which would also have trouble moving. The operational units are stripped by the territorial defense forces, we have a shortage of officer cadres, problems with mobilization, and a broken crisis response system. We have announcements of huge purchases of weapons and the propaganda creation of a new division, but I dare to suspect that we are not able to deploy as many highly completed units as we declare for the NATO table of forces.
You paint a dramatic picture of the lack of determination and strength of NATO and the Polish army.
And the direction in which the NATO summit in Madrid is going will absolutely not ensure the security of the eastern flank. Even if there will be 300 thousand. Declared Response Forces, with 30-day supplies, ready to go to operational on the eastern flank, they will continue to be stationed where they are now stationed.
Is Poland and the Baltic states today – in a threatening situation – satisfied with the fact that somewhere in Spain or Italy there are units that are to arrive when Putin starts the war and enters our territories? After all, our waiting will be at least two weeks before the Forces take off, another two weeks before they sail or come, a week before they integrate. By then, it will be swept away, NATO will recapture the ruins and uncover the crimes of the Russians.
At the plenary session of the NATO military committee – before the summit in Warsaw – I argued to the Americans: if you want a NATO Response Force in Spain, they will sleep in their shoes and with rifles in their hands, and they will come to Poland too late anyway. I proposed: the forward presence of these troops on the eastern flanks is needed, so that the soldiers sleep in their pajamas, train and relax, but if there is a threat, they will get dressed in one day, have time to eat, get their equipment and go to the front.
It took Putin over a year to collect 150,000 soldiers on the border with Ukraine – maybe this is the time to transfer NATO troops from Spain or Italy to the eastern flank?
I will answer, without violating the official secrecy. There used to be an incident in the Baltic Sea: over 30 Russian ships suddenly appeared on it. Total surprise. And yet ships at sea are not a tank that can be hidden in the forest. If more than 30 such ships went to sea and NATO knew nothing about it, will NATO be able to react quickly enough when Putin really wants to attack?
There were also the Zapad 2013 exercises. The Russians declared 12.5 soldiers, and gathered 140,000 soldiers. – the entire industrial and defense complex of Russia. Out of nowhere. What was the Alliance’s response? In 2013, NATO organized exercises on the eastern flank – how many NATO soldiers exercised? 1.3 thousand soldiers from the French Rapid Reaction Corps from Lille trained in Drawsko.
So are NATO guarantees mostly on paper and little response capacity?
If anyone says that by increasing the declared number of soldiers of the NATO Response Force to 300,000 and also that we want to increase the size of our own army to 300,000, we will ensure our own safety, says nonsense. If someone says that the Polish army will be so strong that it will win the war with Russia, that is also gibberish. Well, with the same NATO forces on the eastern flank and our army, the Russians will demolish the country.
I am very concerned that the NATO summit in Madrid is going in the wrong direction. Instead of looking for ways to win peace, because this is the crux of the eastern flank problem, the summit is to convince us that we will win the future war if, or rather when, it occurs. This rhetoric ended as we see it in Ukraine.
However, it is to increase support for the eastern flank.
But it will only cement the status quo. And the status quo is that NATO has done nothing to prevent a future war between Russia and NATO on the eastern flank.
Posted by: ostro | Jun 28 2022 20:11 utc | 113
Sounding a Fanfare!! Ta-Da!! Introducing “The Tin Curtain,” Pepe Escobar!!
Once upon a time, there existed an Iron Curtain which divided the continent of Europe. Coined by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the term was in reference to the then-Soviet Union’s efforts to create a physical and ideological boundary with the west. The latter, for its part, pursued a policy of containment against the spread and influence of communism.
Fast forward to the contemporary era of techno-feudalism, and there now exists what should be called a Tin Curtain, fabricated by the fearful, clueless, collective west, via G7 and NATO: this time, to essentially contain the integration of the Global South.
Within Pepe’s narrative is a reminder of Xi’s announced Global Development Initiative made at last years UNGA Debate. Perhaps the best analysis of Xi’s proposal was done by this Pakistani news outfit earlier this year. The catch for any nation wanting to participate is they must be sovereign, not be a colony of the Outlaw US Empire, which disqualifies many EU nations that sorely need the sort of help the GDI could provide:
In a nutshell, the GDI aims to turbo-charge international development cooperation by supplementing financing to a plethora of bodies, for instance the South-South Cooperation Fund, the International Development Association (IDA), the Asian Development Fund (ADF), and the Global Environment Facility (GEF).
Priorities include “poverty reduction, food security, COVID-19 response and vaccines,” industrialization, and digital infrastructure. Subsequently, a Friends of the GDI group was established in early 2022 and has already attracted over 50 nations.
BRI and GDI should be advancing in tandem, even as Xi himself made it clear during the BRICS summit that “some countries are politicizing and marginalizing the developmental agenda by building up walls and slapping crippling sanctions on others.”
Perhaps Pepe’s most provocative revelation for the uninformed is the undemocratic nature of the EU and how it colonizes European nations to it which then allows its master the Outlaw US Empire to exert its interests over those of all EU members:
As many as 60 European ‘directives’ are issued every year. They must be imperatively transposed into internal law of each EU member-state. In most cases, there’s no debate whatsoever.
Then there are more than 10,000 European ‘rulings,’ where ‘experts’ at the European Commission (EC) in Brussels issue ‘recommendations’ to every government, straight out of the neoliberal canon, regarding their expenses, their income and ‘reforms’ (on health care, education, pensions) that must be obeyed.
Thus elections in every single EU member-nation are absolutely meaningless. Heads of national governments – Macron, Scholz, Draghi – are mere executants. No democratic debate is allowed: ‘democracy,’ as with ‘EU values,’ are nothing than smokescreens.
Is it any wonder why the Polish general is confused?
Will Europeans awaken from their Through the Lookingglass Dream and realize they’re now in servitude before they slide further underwater?
As for the Global South, they just need to continue to ignore the Outlaw US Empire and continue their march forward into solidarity and freedom.
Posted by: karlof1 | Jun 28 2022 21:41 utc | 138
The catch for any nation wanting to participate is they must be sovereign [states], not be a colony [“overseas territory”] of the Outlaw US Empire [or EU27 member state], which disqualifies many EU nations [LOL!] that sorely need the sort of help the GDI [LOL!] could provide:
Posted by: karlof1 | Jun 28 2022 21:41 utc | 140
What spokespersons for CN foreign ministry have said for the umpteenth time is:
GDI is an initiative put forward by China to support the development of developing countries, promote global economic recovery in the post-pandemic era and strengthen international development cooperation.
LOL! EU27 are model advance economies, developed countries, modern democracies which have cornered, ahem, life-saving pharmaceutical products and IPR licenses, routinely converted pledges in “aid” for “low-income” countries into DSSI relief, and attach European FDI for resource-rich “host” nations into perpetual corporate leaseholds and taxshelters. So. Some European nations and their allies need a mental health “intervention”, or as the ministry often says, time to reflect on their wicked ways and not their imaginary deprivations, slavery, and vassalage.
Escobar: As many as 60 [Council of the] European [Union] ‘directives’ are issued every year. They must be [LoL!] imperatively transposed into internal law of incorporated and ratified by each EU member-state. In most cases, there’s no [parliamentary?] debate whatsoever.
FALSE. See “opt-outs”–EEA, EFTA members in good-standing. See imminent prodigal UK return to a NEW! “political union”. See Macronism Today. See Italy on epic constitutional CRISES and florid “debates”. See Hangry and Po-land on … Everything you always wanted to know about infringement procedures – but were afraid to ask, last updated Oct 2019
What happens when a country does not respect its legal obligations towards the EU? Which countries are the least diligent? What is the area with the highest number of offences recorded? Our partners from OpenPolis developed InfringEye, a data-driven tool that makes it easier for journalists and citizens to understand the EU’s infringement mechanisms, and to monitor past and ongoing procedures.
Which, I gather, is the uhh subject of Escobar’s gonzo journal entry flaunting RF’s SMO:
Then there are more than 10,000 European [EU] ‘rulings,’ where ‘experts’ at College of Commissioners who constitute the European Commission (EC) in Brussels issue ‘recommendations’ to every government EC president and Council of the European Union, of which European Parliament quorum, straight out of the neoliberal canon, regarding their expenses, their income and ‘reforms’ … that must be obeyed.
Posted by: sln2002 | Jun 29 2022 0:28 utc | 179
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