USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: War Crimes are War Crimes

 

Maybe, as the human world stands at the brink of possible nuclear annihilation given the antiquated launch on warning system of Russia and its 2,000 “small or tactical nuclear weapons” that Putin may have to “use or lose” depending on the fog of war, it is high time to actually consider an “equal protection of the law” approach to resolution.

Joe Biden has called Vladimir Putin a war criminal because under the law of war it is a crime to invade another nation. That is correct: wars of invasion are criminal. President Putin, apparently offended by the charge, has called US diplomats in to challenge the charge.

The facts are clear. A war of invasion has occurred, so what possible challenge could President Putin seek to assert? It has been said “truth is the first casualty of war,” so maybe the truth of this crime is dying unmourned in some bomb crater?

However, some deeper truth underlies President Putin’s attempt at defense to the charge.

I feel compelled to come to President Putin’s defense. But to do so, one must first accept A. Solzhenitsyn’s challenge to “Live not by Lies.” Truth is not relative and must be asserted fully if a rational basis for assessment of the charge can be done.

First truth: Biden and Putin are both empowered without legal restriction to launch nuclear holocaust no matter what the people who elected them desire.

Since no rational person can support nuclear holocaust, the usurpation of that power is entirely illegitimate, amounting to the power to condemn all to death with no input nor recourse under law. This is unconstitutional under both the US and Russian constitutions as well as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other laws and treaties.

Second Truth: Putin has some claim to legitimacy for his criminal invasion. He may rightly cite George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq (the 19th anniversary of which was March 19, 2022), an invasion based entirely on lies as was Mr. Hitler’s Poland invasion, as precedence for almighty leaders’s “rights” to invade other nations. What is just for one Nuclear Dictator is right for another.

Well, Putin may have something here. This arguably creates a conundrum over how to proceed to Peace in Ukraine.

The foundational issue is how to deal with this war criminal charge?

I modestly suggest the following resolution.

The United States, following its obligations under the “law of nations,” agrees to offer up for trial in the Hague the alleged war criminal George W. Bush as well as UK agrees to offer up for trial the other alleged war criminal Tony Blair and Israel all its war criminals upon Russia’s agreement to offer up Vladimir Putin for similar trial and sentencing.

I modestly submit that such a proposal advances the claim of the US to be a “nation of laws” and advances the interest of all humanity in avoiding nuclear war, also known as “omnicide,” because of the potential to exterminate all of humanity.

I further modestly submit such a proposal advances the goal of humanity evidence by the ICAN Treaty outlawing nuclear weapons by rejecting and repudiating the enablers of nuclear holocaust.

Finally, such a modest proposal sends a warning to all want-to-be Nuclear powers: your days are over. Humanity considers you an enemy of all humankind, criminals of the darkest stripe. Give up your lust for absolute power or all humanity declares open season upon you as was done in ages past against pirates and slavers, who could be mercilessly hunted down lawfully by anyone, anywhere, anytime without due process.

A modest proposal to avoid this end is simply exercise of the right of self-determination and self-defense against the worst war criminals. The stark and final truth: One war criminal is no better than the other.

Let’s put all of them on trial at the Hague and put them in the front line of battle. I can assure you that they will end the war on the spot.

USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Russia extends its Hand

 

For the first time the Russia-Ukraine negotiations look as if they might produce a peace deal as a top Russian defence official says that Russia will “dramatically” reduce its military activities around Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv.

This is being done “to create the necessary conditions for future negotiations” according to Alexander Fomin, Russia’s deputy defence minister attending the peace talks in Istanbul.

An agreement looks like a possibility for the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February. Fomin said the withdrawal was taking place because Ukraine has agreed to neutrality and a non-nuclear status.

In recent days, the Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu told top military officials that Russia had largely completed the first stage of its operation and was shifting to “the main goal – the liberation of Donbas.”

The fact that these statements about a peace deal and a Russian pull-back are coming from senior Russian officials make it less likely that they are a propaganda manoeuvre or a delaying tactic, giving time for Russian forces to reorganise themselves after a series of setbacks.

Other Russian officials say that a peace agreement is still far off and it is possible that the Kremlin has decided to fight and negotiate at the the same time.

Whatever the outcome of the peace negotiations in Istanbul, the Russian statements are very different from President Putin’s original demand five weeks ago that the President Volodymyr Zelensky be overthrown and the Ukrainian army lay down its arms.

Since then, the military and international balance of power between Russia and Ukraine has moved sharply – and probably permanently – against the former and in favour of the latter. Putin misjudged the strength of Ukrainian resistance, the power of his own military, and the reaction of Nato.

But although Russia has failed in its strategic objectives and has captured only a couple of Ukrainian urban centres, it still has a powerful military force in Ukraine.

Non-stop pictures of shattered buildings and wrecked bridges met its purpose of horrifying the world, but they mask the grim truth that the level of devastation is still far below the total destruction seen in besieged cities in the Middle East such as East Aleppo, Gaza in Palestine, and the old city of Mosul and Raqqa.

There is no reason why Ukraine should not share the fate of Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, if the fighting goes on for months or years.

Much of what Russia says that it has gained was obtainable without an invasion. Ukraine was unlikely to join Nato and the Nato powers said that none of their soldiers would fight in Ukraine. Russian demands for ‘de-Nazification’, and an end to the genocide of Russian speakers, will be harder to meet, but Putin could claim to have averted them.

The US has been ambivalent about how to keep out of a direct role in the war, but also to supply enough weapons and other assistance to keep Ukraine fighting.

“Such is the tenuous balance the Biden administration has tried to maintain as it seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential paths to de-escalation,” says the New York Times in an analysis of US policy.

Of course, the war is not over yet. Zelensky prefer to see his country destroyed than capitulate. He keeps asking for more weapons and less discussion, despite Russia’s effort to de-escalate around Kyiv.

I must explain that all information you read about Ukrainian victories and Russian defeats come from the Ukrainian side, the position on the battlefield is not as clear cut as presented by the western media.

The Kremlin rightfully feel that it has been outmanoeuvred by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has hypocritically offered compromises, given the false impression of moderation and stressed his wish to end the war, which was never his intention, ever. His proposals are a bitter pill for the Russians to accept because they include security guarantees for Ukraine which would be more effective than membership of Nato.

Ukraine may seem stronger than it was before the war and Russia considerably weaker. However, it is a broken country that will never mend and will be divided sooner or later. Successful peace negotiations will ultimately wrongly reflect a new balance of power between Ukraine and Russia and Russia and the world. But it will be a false idea, as Russia is shaping a new balance of power with the BRICS and its allies. And Ukraine will be stuck with its neo nazis from the Azov militia whose role has been down played by the main stream media.

USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: You cannot fool all the people

 

Not ganging up on a country that’s been thoroughly demonized like never before takes backbone. Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) has plenty of that. On March 10, AMLO announced that Mexico would not sanction Russia over its frightening invasion of Ukraine. This action is consistent with most of the Global South – China, India, Southwest Asia, Africa and Latin America – which opted for neutrality and refused to sanction Russia.

For many of these countries, Moscow’s attack on Ukraine does not look any different from Washington’s 2003 attack on Iraq. They stayed out of that and are staying out of this, despite the wall-to-wall coverage, the comparisons to Pearl Harbor and the media frenzy over this assault on a country whose citizens are white (and therefore apparently deserve more compassion than the millions of non-European Afghans starved by U.S. sanctions or the over 377,000 brown Yemenis slaughtered with U.S. weapons), with breathless claims that nothing like this has happened in Europe since World War II. USA’s and UK’s propaganda outlets that call themselves media have apparently forgotten NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. For some unexplained reason, that didn’t count. Except of course to the Serbs – another demonized ethnic group, though I doubt their magnificent composers were banned from the repertoires of western orchestras, that their conductors and sopranos were ordered to revile their country or be fired or that their immortal novelists, like Dostoevsky, were deleted, if temporarily, from curricula at the University of Milan.

There’s nothing easier than denouncing a national enemy. More arduous is attempting to regard something objectively awful – the Russia/Ukraine war – with clear eyes and without succumbing to the required Two Minutes Hate. Few do that in the west. Any western news report, any politician’s speech, even casual conversation about this conflict zooms quickly to Two Minutes Hate. Furious tirades against Moscow and Putin explode everywhere, are the norm, expected and those who don’t indulge thus are suspect at the least and very likely considered treasonous. Nothing nowadays comes more naturally or facilely than this western and European hatred of all things Russian. But that is not the case in the Global South.

So the U.S., EU, UK and a few other nations ferociously sanctioned Russia, in an attempt to destroy the country economically – something that certainly did not happen to the U.S. when it committed the war crime of invading and destroying Iraq, criminality that Joe Biden voted for with lots of cheerleading. Back then corporations did not disinvest from America en masse nor did Europe close its airspace to U.S. planes. But European and American hypocrisy is rampant, enabled by the chicanery called the “rules-based international order,” which posits one set of rules for Washington and another for everybody else. However, plenty of folks have caught on, and behave wisely by turning to negotiations. “We’re not going to take any type of economic reprisal,” AMLO told reporters regarding Russia, then explaining, according to the Fresno Bee, that Mexico would work “to end the conflict through diplomacy and dialogue.”

Needless to say, the conflict could have terminated last week, with a written guarantee of Ukraine’s neutrality, forswearing that it would ever join NATO and the recognition that Crimea remains Russian and the Donbass independent. Kiev’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky was in fact elected on a peace platform. Candidate Zelensky promised to proclaim Ukraine neutral and end the threat of war with Russia. Kind of the opposite happened. And all he keeps asking is for more weapons. At the beginning it was not entirely his fault. He was between a rock and a hard place, namely Russia and NATO, aka the U.S. and its desire to fight Moscow to the last Ukrainian.

Mexico’s neutrality is not, to say the least, the approach of the west. The U.S. has now imposed more sanctions on Russia than any other country – and that’s saying something, because the U.S. hands out sanctions like candy at a party. Russia joins Cuba, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and others in having its economy attacked by Washington. Unlike some of these other countries, Russia prepared for this onslaught, but they still cripple much of its economy.

Moscow responded by announcing March 8 that all corporate deals with unfriendly countries must be approved by a government commission. Earlier, on March 5, Russia decided to pay foreign currency debts to unfriendly countries in rubles. That list includes the EU and all NATO members. Needless to say, these nations will not be delighted to be paid in a currency they’ve rendered worthless.

It gets worse. On March 16, Russia owed $117 million in interest or default on its debt after a 30-day grace period. By the skin of its teeth, Moscow skirted default on its external debt that would have been “its first since the Bolsheviks failed to recognize the Tsar’s debt following the 1917 revolution,” Al Jazeera reported March 16, comparing the situation to Argentina in 2020, although “the Russian government is actually not that indebted. Part of their ‘fortress Russia’ strategy was to build up Moscow’s balance sheet, primarily with foreign exchange reserves and some gold…” It’s also worth noting that Argentina weathered another default, the one in 2001, successfully. Many thought that collapse would cause stagnation and render the nation “a pariah in the world’s financial markets for a long period of time,” as Werner Baer and two others noted in a 2011 paper. “This did not occur.”

Many neutral African nations regard the Russia/Ukraine war “as a proxy battle between Russia and the west,” think tanker Aanu Adeoye told NPR on March 15. “So many leaders have decided that it would be in their best interest to stay neutral in this fight.” Also, many African countries “consider Russia to be a good friend and a good ally,” some of whom date this amity to the Soviet era, when the USSR supported countries in southern Africa “during their fight against colonial and imperial rule.” As a result, no African country piled on with sanctions.

Sanctions and demonization have been a western affair, driving Russia further into the BRICS alliance. Now, or in the very near future, all Russia’s wheat, energy and metals will go to China. Though Moscow’s March 15 counter sanctions on Biden, Blinken and other U.S. politicos will have little effect, it’s the thought that counts. And the thought perforce includes the redirection of its imports and exports. Or so it should for anyone in the west with a brain. In a related move, Putin announced March 23 that “unfriendly” countries, namely the U.S., the UK and the EU would have to pay for Russian gas in rubles.

Russia has repeatedly said it will not weaponize energy. Gas flows to Europe, despite the economic war.  But the EU has sanctioned Russia like there’s no tomorrow. It declared economic war. So should Moscow’s attitude on energy change, things could deteriorate rapidly in the west. If Moscow cuts energy supplies to Europe, which gets 40 percent of its gas from Russia, life there will grind to a halt. But apparently European leaders are willing to risk that, as opposed to nuclear holocaust –a false choice, but one that allows the EU to punish Russia for its war, instead of coming to the table and conceding, in writing, that Ukraine won’t join NATO. However, abjuring atomic Armageddon is a bit of sanity we should all be thankful for. Better to shiver in a cold house in December because there’s no gas or oil, than starve and freeze in a cold house during nuclear winter.

Germany gets over half its gas, a third of its coal and a quarter of its oil from Russia. That Russian gas is much cheaper than the proposed U.S. substitute (which explains American politicos’ obsession with destroying Nordstream 2, something they succeeded at when Russia invaded, thus proving that this war greatly benefits U.S. arms and energy corporations). But Germany’s energy trade with Russia hasn’t stopped demonization of Moscow. This is unfortunate, because as Patrick Cockburn observed in CounterPunch March 15, it’s very difficult to ratchet down tensions or compromise with those who’ve been demonized. And compromise, negotiation and diplomacy are what’s desperately needed to save lives.

Let’s just hope NATO – which co-hosted with the USA this whole disaster by stubbornly insisting on Ukraine’s right to join – hasn’t backed itself into a corner. That corner entails losing face. Which is a big part of what this whole war is about: the west can’t lose face by agreeing to neutrality for Ukraine. Because God forbid NATO and the U.S. should believe they lost face. Both might well prefer atomic apocalypse to that. Russia too has its non-negotiable pride. And if the parties to this war aside from Ukraine do at any point consider themselves decisively humiliated, it’s lights out not just for Europe, but, as those Global South nations insisting on neutrality have recognized from the get go, for everyone.

USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine : USA's need of an Enemy

 

Can anyone really believe that if Russia were again to place nuclear capable missiles anywhere in the Western hemisphere that Washington would not envision a threat identical to that felt by Russia today and act as aggressively and dangerously as it did in 1962? Or imagine a scenario wherein Canada or Mexico aligned itself with China and invited Chinese military advisers and their advanced weapons into its territory.

Those of us of an age remember all too well the first time our species faced self-extinction. Understand too that the missiles of that time were mere toys compared to the weapons that exist today. 

Yes, the Russian war on Ukraine is atrocious but note that it has yet to approach the scale of deaths and destruction the US and NATO and Israel have wreaked upon numerous peoples across the Middle East, and even Europe, as in Serbia and Kosovo. Armed by the U.S. Saudi Arabia has been visiting identical horrors on it victims in Yemen for years with little opposition in the halls of power or among ordinary citizens.  As one who has taken to the streets over many years to condemn our own nation’s atrocities I could not but notice the scarcity of my fellow citizens in our demonstrations against the monstrous transgressions committed by our own nation and, yes, our own war criminals. Our double standard makes a travesty of our proclaimed commitment to human rights and international law. The immeasurable tragedy is that this war was wholly preventable.

When Mikael Gorbachev announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 sighs of relief surged across the globe for it appeared that the extremely precarious Cold War would be peacefully concluded. Now looming threats like climate change might be cooperatively and transnationally addressed. Yet Washington moved almost immediately and aggressively to weaken the new Russian state. Democrats and Republicans competed to outdo each other. Clinton moved to enlarge NATO despite the guarantees of Bush I not to do so. He also terminated the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Bush II enabled former Baltic Soviet republics to enter NATO at Russia’s very border and dissolved the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Obama installed “defensive” missiles that can readily be redeployed as offensive nuclear weapons in Poland and Romania, and Trump annulled the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.

How else but threatening and foreboding was Russia to interpret these measures?

When NATO was formed in 1949 it encompassed twelve nations. Today it comprises thirty. American citizens were told that the alliance was necessary to prevent the dictatorial and repressive Soviet Union from moving ever westward by military means. The coterminous fall of China was claimed to prove that global communism was on the offensive and could be contained only by American military supremacy shared with western European allies and undergirded prominently by advanced weapons and U.S. possession of the Atomic Bomb. The U.S. public was and has been propagandized incessantly to believe that their nation’s role was limited to the “defense” of the Atlantic liberal civilization (Oceania?) and the salvation of “democracy” and human rights throughout the globe. At the close of World War II the U.S. had suffered the fewest combat losses and was the only intact belligerent with no devastation to its national territory.  Russia, by extreme contrast, had suffered 27 million dead, 70 of its largest cities lay in utter ruin, its roads, railways and industries demolished, and its agricultural base in Ukraine a burnt wasteland.  By what metric could Russia invade Western Europe? What was the evidence that it would? Russia occupied much of eastern Europe because the Soviet army was the primary actor in the defeat of Nazi Germany and The Yalta and Potsdam Agreements signed by the U.S. Russia and Britain affirmed that occupation. While Winston Churchill soon conjured the term “Iron Curtain” to condemn the USSR, he had also signed a separate secret agreement with Stalin that endorsed Russian control in its already acknowledged sphere in exchange for keeping Greece in the western orbit.

There was no military threat from the Soviet Union. Over the decade after 1945, in contradistinction to official claims of Russian desires ruthlessly to expand, the USSR voluntarily withdrew the Red Army from Austria, Iran, Manchuria and Korea. American forces have never been withdrawn anyplace they occupied territory after WWII. FDR’s Vice President, Henry Wallace was convinced that American and Russian cooperation was possible if Washington would acknowledge Russia’s security apprehensions. The Soviets made clear their concern to enforce a “cordon sanitaire” between themselves and any possible future invasion from the west. The European Recovery Plan, the Marshall Plan, of the post-war is celebrated as an act of generosity by the U.S. to rebuild the ruined economies of Europe but especially western Germany, occupied by American and British forces. But Wallace dubbed it the “Martial Plan” because many of its major beneficiaries were U.S. banks and arms corporations that had profited tremendously from the war and would subordinate western Europe’s future economic development to Wall Street via the new institutions of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Germany was critical to recovery plans for the U.S. because its industrial capacities and potential markets were the linchpin for general European revitalization and extremely worrisome for the Soviets because twice in one generation that nation had invaded Russia with disastrous consequences. Known also to the Soviets, and secret to most American citizens, was the fact that the same U.S. banks and corporations had assisted Germany to re-arm the Nazis after World War I. Nor would Russia disremember the uninhibited statement made by President Truman (then a senator) before U.S. entry into the war in 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”

The American corporate media has long ignored the revelation by General Leslie Groves, the military commander of the A-Bomb project, who stated  ”That there was never from about the time I took charge of this project any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted on that basis”among much else lost to public historical awareness was the unease of Charles Wilson, CEO of General Electric, and the “czar” of American weapons procurement during the war. Facing the cessation of American arms production, a world unable to trade with the U.S., and the return of more than ten million G.I’s to possible mass unemployment, Wilson said  ”what we need is a permanent war economy.”

A permanent war economy would require permanent enemies. NATO’s enlargement became its elemental foundation.

The new members of NATO became the purchasers and recipients of American arms, ostensibly to thwart the alleged aims of Stalin to conquer western Europe. Instead, the Soviet dictator saw NATO as a new and extreme threat to a weakened Soviet Union. The Cold War was on full throttle.

A recent op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times dared to reveal the lengthy extent of CIA involvement in Ukraine. In the same year that NATO was formed the agency infiltrated trained Ukrainian anti-communists, some of whom had also been pro-Nazi collaborators, to “use Ukrainians to bleed the Soviet Union,” a gambit that “demonstrated a cold ruthlessness on the part of the CIA” because the agency knew that the Ukrainian resistance had no hope of success without wider American military involvement. So “America was in effect encouraging Ukrainians to go to their deaths.” Why then has the U.S. encouraged Ukraine to believe it can win with American support. Continued NATO arms shipments only bring down ever more death, destruction and homelessness for the Ukrainian people. Thus does history repeat itself … but hardly as farce.

From 1949 to 1991 the global arms race made a mockery of the United Nations avowed intent to uphold international peace and law. Its charter stipulates that its rules and obligations are binding on all members and take precedence over all other treaties. Yet, as we know its five most powerful members (The U.S., Russia, China, Britain, and France) of the Security Council, have violated this contract at will.

The collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union was celebrated as the “victory” of liberal democracy and free market capitalism and the basis for the establishment of future peaceful and beneficial friendship with our erstwhile enemies. For a time, during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, Russia allowed American economic “experts” free reign to establish “free market capitalism” which soon led to the collapse of the social welfare system, high unemployment and a drastic decline in life spans. This newly implemented capitalism enriched a new class of “oligarchs,’ largely attendant to the desires of their western tutors and this led immediately to extensive socio-economic dislocation and colossal and corrupt fortunes at the top. These new oligarchs were trained by their American equivalents to serve American interests. Then Putin and his confederates stepped in to re-arrange Russian capitalism to serve his version of Russian interest. Given that the Cold War Soviets had posed no military menace to western Europe the actual threat perceived by American oligarchs was that the vast area of the USSR and its satellites was all but closed to American capital penetration…at least on American terms. Now Russia’s capitalism competed with Wall Street’s version and stifled its vision of a globalized capitalized and yet more profitable world. In 1997 the Pentagon issued its plan for “full spectrum dominance” over the future of planet earth.

Thus, despite the guarantee that NATO would not move “one inch” eastward to encroach on the former Soviet sphere when it controverted that promise Russia declared categorically that the admission of Ukraine and Georgia would be a “red line” and absolutely intolerable..

It was incomprehensible that responsible leaders could in 1962 deliberately walk the world into doomsday. How had this come to pass? The answer presented by the establishment press (there was no other of which I was aware in ultra-Cold War America) was that the Commies were singularly to blame. For thirteen days in October I watched in growing apprehension. So eventually did the those most responsible for the deadlock that daily brought the world to the brink.  President Kennedy, over the contemptuous objections of his military chieftains, secretly enabled a compromise with Khrushchev, to remove American missiles from Turkey and Italy, while the Soviets would do the same in Cuba. Later it became apparent that the U.S. had the Soviets virtually encircled with nukes. Many Americans still do not comprehend just how close we came to utter self-extinction. Robert McNamara was reputed to have said that he went to bed on the last night of the crisis not knowing whether he would see the dawn. Khruschhev is claimed to have uttered words to the effect that we must never allow such a near miss again: In the aftermath of nuclear war “the living would envy the dead.”

The current crisis daily brings us again to such an impasse and the civilians of Ukraine, and the  world, needs immediate compromise. Russia is declaring now that it will stop its attacks if specific demands are met. If the ever escalating death and destruction is to cease Ukraine must repudiate any future desire to enter NATO, sever the CIA relationship with the truly neo-Nazi Azov battalion, and banish all U.S. military “advisers” from Ukraine. President Biden himself, always otherwise a hawk, warned against the expansion of NATO when he was a senator as did many of the otherwise most hawkish cold warriors so we cannot say that we were not warned of the present horrific outcome, and its potential for global nuclear destruction Nevertheless, Washington has continued its martial strut right up to Russian borders. As Ray McGovern, a lifetime CIA Soviet analyst and presidential briefer, and now one of the most knowledgeable critics of his former agency, laments “U.S. and NATO profiteers are willing to fight to the last Ukrainian.”

U.S. decision makers clearly do not want the war to cease. According to the State Department the war is “bigger” than Russia and Ukraine. “There are principles that are at stake here…” They will have their way and Ukrainians will be the sacrificial victims. What McGovern labels the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think Tank – (MICIMACC) will continue to reap measureless windfalls but we might do well to recall that the first Cold War brought us to the brink of nuclear holocaust on more occasions than one.

USA & NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Kyiv Warmongers

Logically, there are two basic things you can do with a war, continue it or end it. Typically you end it by negotiating an agreement. Russia has always claimed, honestly or not, that if Ukraine would meet certain clear specific conditions it would end the war.

Ukraine, meanwhile, has avoided stating clearly what it would take. Ukraine could announce its own demands to match Russia’s. It could include anything. But Ukraine won’t do that. Ukraine is opposed to negotiating anything. Zekenskyi and every single non-ethnic Russian Ukrainian Member of Parliament oppose any negotiations. They just want more weapons. They preferre a war that could destroy Ukraine — and even life on Earth — to any consideration of independence for any part of Donbass or other ethnic Russian oblast.

And not just Ukraine, but ordinary people across the Western world. The idea that Ukraine should negotiate anything at all is deemed insane. Why should it? You can’t negotiate with Satan. Russia must be defeated. One “progressive” radio host told me the only answer was killing Putin. “Peace” activists have told me that Russia is the aggressor and must not be given any demands or be negotiated with.

I may be a lone nut, but I’m not quite entirely alone. Over at the Quincy Institute, Anatol Lieven maintains that Ukraine should meet Russia’s demands and declare victory: “Russia has lost Ukraine. The West should recognize this Russian defeat, and give its full support to a peace settlement that will safeguard Ukraine’s real interests, sovereignty, and ability to develop as an independent democracy. Neutrality, and territories that Ukraine has already in practice lost for the past eight years, are minor issues by comparison.”

Even more so perhaps by comparison to risking nuclear apocalypse. But to whom are they minor issues? Not to the government of Ukraine. Not to U.S. and Western  media outlets. Not to all the people who scream at me — and presumably at Anatol Lieven — how evil and cowardly it is to give away someone else’s territory from the safety of your home.

So, here’s the trick: how — from within this asylum in which trying to end the war is insane, but continuing the war, arming the war, escalating the war, name-calling, threatening, financially punishing is all normal — can one get oneself deemed sane enough to propose a few tweaks?

I can see only two ways, and one of them is unacceptable. Either you have to join in the dehumanization of Putin, which would be counterproductive. The most popular way to refuse to negotiate has always been to pretend there are nothing but monsters to negotiate with. Or you have to join in the deification of of the master of communication Zelensky. That just might work.

What if I were to simply start out by demanding that the U.S. government allow Zelensky to decide when to lift sanctions on Russia?

Then, after swapping photos of Zelensky’s family for a while, we could gradually get around to the question of what Russia ought to pay up in addition to ending the war. There should of course be a list of demands for Russia including reparations and aid  - which has never been asked to Israel and which Russia is ready to give anyway, as it has always done wherever it goes.

So far, so good, right? Not loony yet?

We could then try tacking onto that victory strategy, as modeled by Lieven, the need to throw Russia some scraps, the need to be smarter than the drafters of the Treaty of Versailles. We could quote Woodrow Wilson, not to mention Henry Kissinger, George Kennan, and as many CIA directors as we could stomach.

I feel like some things have flipped upside down. Yet, grasping for a rock to hold onto, it still seems possible that you have to be for either ending a war or keeping it going, and that there must be some way to persuade a few people to favor ending a war before it ends us.

USA&NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Double Standards Worsen the Situation

The branding of Vladimir Putin as a war criminal by Joe Biden, who lobbied for the Iraq war and staunchly supported the 20 years of carnage in the Middle East, is one more example of the hypocritical moral posturing sweeping across the United States. It is unclear how anyone would try Putin for war crimes since Russia, like the United States, does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But justice is not the point. Politicians like Biden, who do not accept responsibility for our well-documented war crimes, bolster their moral credentials by demonizing their adversaries. They know the chance of Putin facing justice is zero. And they know their chance of facing justice is the same.

We know who America’s, Europe’s and Israel’s most recent war criminals are, among others: Tony Blair, Binyamin Netanyahu, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, General Ricardo Sanchez, former CIA Director George Tenet, former Asst. Atty. Gen. Jay Bybee, former Dep. Asst. Atty. Gen. John Yoo, who set up the legal framework to authorize torture; the helicopter pilots who gunned down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in the “Collateral Murder” video released by WikiLeaks. We have evidence of the crimes they committed.

WikiLeaks site is not a US-based publication, is charged under the US Espionage Act for making public numerous US war crimes. Assange, currently housed in a high security prison in London, is fighting a losing battle in the British courts to block his extradition to the United States, where he faces 175 years in prison. One set of rules for Russia, another set of rules for the United States. Weeping crocodile tears for the Russian media, which is being heavily censored by Putin, while ignoring the plight of the most important publisher of our generation speaks volumes about how much the ruling class cares about press freedom and truth.

If we demand justice for Ukrainians, as we should, we must also demand justice for the one million people killed — 400,000 of whom were noncombatants — by US invasions, occupations and aerial assaults in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. We must demand justice for those who were wounded, became sick or died because we destroyed hospitals and infrastructure. We must demand justice for the thousands of soldiers who were killed, and many more who were wounded and are living with lifelong disabilities, in wars launched and sustained on lies. We must demand justice for the 38 million people who have been displaced or become refugees in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria, a number that exceeds the total of all those displaced in all wars since 1900, apart from World War II, according to the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University. Tens of millions of people, who had no connection with the attacks of 9/11, were killed, wounded, lost their homes, and saw their lives and their families destroyed because of our war crimes. Who will cry out for them?

Every effort to hold OTAN members’ war criminals accountable has been rebuffed by the courts, by the media and by the ruling political parties.

In the US, the Center for Constitutional Rights, blocked from bringing cases in US courts against the architects of these preemptive wars, which are defined by post-Nuremberg laws as “criminal wars of aggression,” filed motions in German courts to hold US leaders to account for gross violations of the Geneva Convention, including the sanctioning of torture in black sites such as Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib.

Those who have the power to enforce the rule of law, to hold US war criminals to account, to atone for their war crimes, direct their moral outrage exclusively at Putin’s Russia. “Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, condemning Russia for attacking civilian sites, in the Luhansk region of Ukraine. “These incidents join a long list of attacks on civilian, not military locations, across Ukraine,” he said. Beth Van Schaack, an ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, will direct the effort at the State Department, Blinkin said, to “help international efforts to investigate war crimes and hold those responsible accountable.”

This collective hypocrisy, based on the lies they tell themselves about themselves, is accompanied by massive arms shipments to Ukraine. Fueling proxy wars was a specialty of the Cold War. Tjhe US have returned to the script. If Ukrainians are heroic resistance fighters, what about the the Palestinians who fight and the Iraqis and Afghans who fought as valiantly and as doggedly against a foreign power that was even more savage than Russia?

Why weren’t they lionized?

Why weren’t sanctions imposed on the United States or in Israel?

Why weren’t those who defended their countries from foreign invasion in the Middle East, mainly Palestinians under Israeli occupation, also provided with thousands of anti-tank weapons, anti-armor weapons, anti-aircraft weapons, helicopters, Switchblade or “Kamikaze” drones, hundreds of Stinger anti-aircraft systems, Javelin anti-tank missiles, machine guns and millions of rounds of ammunition? Why didn’t the U Congress rush through a $13.6 billion package to provide military and humanitarian assistance, on top of the $1.2 billion already provided to the Ukrainian military, for them?

Well, we know why. War crimes of the USA & ISRAAEL &OTAN don’t count, and neither do the victims of our war crimes. And this hypocrisy makes a rules-based world, one that abides by international law, impossible.

This hypocrisy is not new. There is no moral difference between the saturation bombing the US carried out on civilian populations since World War II, including in Vietnam and Iraq, and the targeting of urban centers by Russia in Ukraine. Mass death and fireballs on a city skyline are the calling cards the USA have left across the globe for decades. But they wan their adversaries to do the same.

The deliberate targeting of civilians, whether in Baghdad, Kyiv, Gaza, or New York City, are all war crimes. The killing of at least 112 Ukranian children, as of March 19, is an atrocity, but so is the killing of 551 Palestinian children during Israel’s 2014 military assault on Gaza. So is the killing of 230,000 people over the past seven years in Yemen from Saudi bombing campaigns and blocades that have resulted in mass starvation and cholera epidemics. Where were the calls for a no-fly zone over Gaza and Yemen? Imagine how many lives could have been saved.

War crimes demand the same moral judgment and accountability. But they don’t get them. And they don’t get them because we have one set of standards for white Europeans, and another for non-white people around the globe. The western media has turned European and American volunteers flocking to fight in Ukraine into heroes, while Mulsims in the west who join resistance groups battling foreign occupiers in the Middle East are criminlized as terrorists.

Putin has been ruthless with the press. But worse has been US’s ally the de facto Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the murder and dismemberment of my friend and collague Jamal Khashoggi, and who this month oversaw a mass execution of 81 people conivicted of criminal offenses. The coverage of Ukraine, especially after spending years reporting on Israel’s murderous assaults against the Palestinians, is another example of the racist divide that defines most of the western media.

World War II began with an understanding, at least by the allies, that employing industrial weapons against civilian populations was a war crime. But within 18 months of the start of the war, the Germans, Americans and British were relentlessly bombing cities. By the end of the war, one-fifth of German homes had been destroyed. One million German civilians were killed or wounded in bombing raids. Seven-and-a-half million Germans were made homeless. The tactic of saturation bombing, or area bombing, which included the firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo, which killed more than 90,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo and left a million people homeless, and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took the lives of between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, had the sole purpose of breaking the morale of the population through mass death and terror. Cities such as Leningrad, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Coventry, Royan, Nanjing and Rotterdam were obliterated.

It turned the architects of modern war, all of them, into war criminals.

Civilians in every war since have been considered legitimate targets. In the summer of 1965, then-US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara called the bombing raids north of Saigon that left hundreds of thousands of dead an effective means of communication with the government in Hanoi. McNamara, six years before he died, unlike most war criminals, had the capacity for self-reflection. Interviewed in the documentary, “The Fog of War,” he was repentant, not only about targeting Vietnamese civilians but about the aerial targeting of civilians in Japan in World War II, overseen by Air Force General Curtis LeMay.

“LeMay said if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals,” McNamara said in the film. “And I think he’s right…LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose, and not immoral if you win?”

LeMay, later head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, would go on to drop tons of napalm and firebombs on civilian targets in Korea which, by his own estimate, killed 20 percent of the population over a three-year period.

Industrial killing defines modern warfare. It is impersonal mass slaughter. It is administered by vast bureaucratic structures that perpetuate the killing over months and years. It is sustained by heavy industry that produces a steady flow of weapons, munitions, tanks, planes, helicopters, battleships, submarines, missiles, and mass-produced supplies, along with mechanized transports that ferry troops and armaments by rail, ship, cargo planes and trucks to the battlefield. It mobilizes industrial, governmental and organization structures for total war. It centralizes systems of information and internal control. It is rationalized for the public by specialists and experts, drawn from the military establishment, along with pliant academics and the media.

Industrial war destroys existing value systems that protect and nurture life, replacing them with fear, hatred, and a dehumanization of those who we are made to believe deserve to be exterminated. It is driven by emotions, not truth or fact. It obliterates nuance, replacing it with an infantile binary universe of us and them. It drives competing narratives, ideas and values underground and vilifies all who do not speak in the national cant that replaces civil discourse and debate. It is touted as an example of the inevitable march of human progress, when in fact it brings us closer and closer to mass obliteration in a nuclear holocaust. It mocks the concept of individual heroism, despite the feverish efforts of the military and the mass media to sell this myth to naïve young recruits and a gullible public. It is the Frankenstein of industrialized societies. War, as Alfred Kazin warned, is “the ultimate purpose of technological society.” Our real enemy is within.

Historically, those who are prosecuted for war crimes, whether the Nazi hierarchy at Nuremberg or the leaders of Liberia, Chad, Serbia, and Bosnia, are prosecuted because they lost the war and because they are adversaries of the United States, and they are weak, disposable.

There will be no prosecution of Saudi Arabian rulers for the war crimes committed in Yemen or for the UK & US military and political leadership for the war crimes they carried out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, or a generation earlier in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The atrocities we commit, such as My Lai, where 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians were gunned down by US soldiers, which are made public, are dealt with by finding a scapegoat, usually a low-ranking officer who is given a symbolic sentence. Lt. William Calley served three years under house arrest for the killings at My Lai. Eleven US soldiers, none of whom were officers, were convicted of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But the architects and overlords of US industrial slaughter, including Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Gen. Curtis LeMay, Harry S. Truman, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Lyndon Johnson, Gen. William Westmoreland, George W. Bush, Gen. David Petraeus, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are never held to account. They leave power to become venerated elder statesmen.

The mass slaughter of industrial warfare, the failure to hold US & OTAN members to account, to see their own face in the war criminals they condemn, will have ominous consequences.

Author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi understood that the annihilation of the humanity of others is prerequisite for their physical annihilation.

USA & OTAN have become captives to their machines of industrial death. Politicians and generals wield their destructive fury as if they were toys. Those who decry the madness, who demand the rule of law, are attacked and condemned. These industrial weapons systems are the modern idols. They worship their deadly prowess. But all idols, the Bible tells us, begin by demanding the sacrifice of others and end in apocalyptic self-sacrifice.

He/she who has no innocent blood in his hands, let them cast stones at Putin.

USA & Israel & OTAN, stop adding fuel to the fire.

The evil is not Putin. It's the arm industry and USA's fight to control the world..

Horror is not THIS war in Ukraine in particular. It is ALL wars.

USA & FIFA vs Russia in Ukraine, but heedless of Israel's crimes in Palestine

What about Israel's Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine?

As today begins the annual Israeli Apartheid Week, I decided to give myself a little break from Ukraine to come back to my fight for Palestinian human rights, as most of my colleagues seem to believe that the Palestinians belong to the class of “unworthy” people. With no rights.

The proof is the marginalization of Russian Artists and Sport women and men. (It broke my heart to watch the pressure, and further, banishement, of my favourite opera singers, classical musicians, maestros and stage directors from European scene, for the momente. Only because they happen to be Russians and refuse to become renegades.). In 40 years doing this job, I had never seen something like that. Not even during the time of support of South Africa’s struggle against apartheid. Which was, I can assure you, mild compared to what Israel is doing in Palestine.

Ignorance, and double standards, seem to have no limit in the «civilized» West.

Israel’s war on Palestinian sports is as old as the Israeli state itself.

For Palestinians, sport is a critical aspect of their popular culture, and since Palestinian culture itself is a target for the ongoing Israeli attack on Palestinian life in all of its manifestations, sports and athletes have been purposely targeted as well. Yet, the world’s main football governing body, FIFA, along with other international sports organizations, has done nothing to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against Palestinian sports.

Now that FIFA, along with UEFA, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and others have swiftly joined the West’s anti-Russia measures as a result of the latter’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Palestinians and their supporters are puzzled. Years of relentless advocacy to sanction Israel at international sports competitions have paid little or no dividends. This has continued to be the case, despite the numerous documented facts of Israel’s intentional targeting of Palestinian stadiums, travel restrictions on athletes, the cancelation of sports events, the arrest and even killing of Palestinian footballers.

Many Palestinians, Arabs and international activists have already highlighted the issue of western hypocrisy in the case of the Israeli military occupation of Palestine by apartheid Israel within hours of the start of the Russian military operations. Almost immediately, an unprecedented wave of boycotts and sanctions of everything Russian, including music, art, theater, literature and, of course, sports, kicked in. What took the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa decades to achieve was carried out against Russia in a matter of hours and days.

Palestinians are justified to be baffled, since they have been informed by FIFA, time and again, that “sports and politics don’t mix”. Marvel at this hypocrisy to truly appreciate Palestinian frustration: “The FIFA Council acknowledges that the current situation (in Palestine and Israel) is, for reasons that have nothing to do with football, characterized by an exceptional complexity and sensitivity and by certain de facto circumstances that can neither be ignored nor changed unilaterally by non-governmental organizations such as FIFA.”

That was, in part, the official FIFA position declared in October 2017, in response to a Palestinian request that the “six Israeli football clubs based in illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories should either relocate to Israel or be banned from FIFA-recognized competitions”.

Two years later, Israel so callously canceled the FIFA Palestine Cup that was meant to bring Gaza’s top football team, Khadamat Rafah Club, and the West Bank’s FC Balata together in a dramatic final.

Palestinians perceive football as a respite from the hardship of life under siege and occupation. The highly anticipated event would have been a moment of precious unity among Palestinians and would have been followed by a large number of people, regardless of their political affiliation or geographic location. But, and “for no apparent reason”, as reported in the Nation, Israel decided to deny Palestinians that brief moment of joy.

Even then, FIFA did nothing, despite the fact that the event itself carried the name ‘FIFA’. Meanwhile, outright racist Israeli football teams, the likes of Beitar Jerusalem Football Club, are allowed to play unhindered, to travel unrestricted and to echo their favorite racist cheers, “Death to the Arabs,” as if racism in sports is the accepted routine.

FIFA’s double standards are abhorrent, to say the least. But FIFA is not the only hypocrite. On March 3, the International Paralympics Committee (IPC) went as far as denying athletes from Russia and Belarus the right to compete at this year’s Winter Paralympics held in Beijing. The decision was justified on the basis that having these athletes participate in the Games was “jeopardizing the viability” of the events and, supposedly, making the safety of the athletes “untenable,” despite the fact that the Russian and Belarusian athletes were, due to the political context, set to take part as ‘neutrals.’Not only are Israeli athletes welcomed in all international sports events, the mere attempt by individual athletes to register a moral stance in support of Palestinians, by refusing to compete against Israelis, can be very costly. Algerian Judoka Fehi Nourine, for example, was suspended along with his coach for 10 years for withdrawing from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to avoid meeting an Israeli opponent. The same course of action was taken against other players and teams for displaying symbolic solidarity with Palestine, or even fans for merely raising Palestinian flags or chanting for Palestinian freedom.

Mohammed Aboutrika, the former Captain of the Egyptian National Football Team, was censured by FIFA in 2009 for merely displaying a shirt that read, in both Arabic and English, “Sympathize with Gaza”. For that supposedly egregious act, the Confederation of African Football (CAF) – a branch of FIFA – warned him against “mixing politics with sports”.

About the double standards of FIFA, Aboutrika recently said in a media interview that the “decision to suspend Russian clubs and teams from all competitions must be accompanied by a ban on those affiliated with Israel (because Israel) has been killing children and women in Palestine for years.”

It must be stated that the hypocrisy here goes well beyond Palestine and Israel, into numerous situations where those demanding justice and accountability are often affiliated with poor nations from the Global South, or causes that challenge the status quo, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, among others.

But there is much more that can be done aside from merely delineating the double standards or decrying the hypocrisy. True, it took the South African Anti-Apartheid movement many years to isolate the racist Apartheid government in Pretoria at international sports platforms around the world, but that seemingly impossible task was eventually achieved.

Palestinians, too, must now use these channels and platforms to continue pushing for justice and accountability. It will not take days, as is the case with Russia and Ukraine, but they will eventually succeed in isolating Israel, for, as it turned out, politics and sports do mix after all.

Jonathan Cook: https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/russia-ukraine-war-israel-facebook-hate-speech-silence-critics

USA&NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: China unlikeky to let Russia down

With the world’s attention focused on Ukraine in the weeks since Russia began its invasion of the country on February 24, there has been fervent debate among foreign policy experts on how Russia’s relations with the USA&OTAN will be affected. Officials in Moscow and Western capitals have traded barbs at each other in the media, while sanctions and counter-sanctions have already begun to bite.

But the effects of Russia’s invasion on Chinese-Russian relations have been far less discussed. In recent years, both Russia and China have publicly promoted their increasingly strong partnership. Chinese President Xi Jinping has called Russian President Vladimir Putin his “best friend,” while both Xi and Putin have described the current state of Chinese-Russian relations as “the best they’ve been in history.”

This has been reflected in collaborative military drills, increasing weapons and energy deals between China and Russia, and public support for one another across their state-run media outlets and their dealings within international organizations like the UN. Since the previous Ukraine crisis in 2014, Moscow has been particularly eager to promote these developments in its relationship with Beijing to limit the effects of diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions imposed by the US and major OTAN members.

The current crisis in Ukraine is prompting further efforts by China and Russia to confront the U.S. While Russia’s core interest in doing so is in preventing Ukraine from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), China is keen to exploit any opportunity that arises during the conflict between Russia and Ukraine that challenges American influence.

The additional sanctions placed on Russia by OTAN in recent weeks to “cripple Russia’s financial system and hurt its wealthiest citizens” are likely to spur greater investment by China and Russia in developing their own alternatives to U.S.-dominated financial institutions, like the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) payment verification system. Russia and China both began to invest in their own international payments systems after several Russian banks were blacklisted from SWIFT in 2014.

These new international payments systems include Russia’s System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS) and the National Payment Card System (now known as Mir), as well as China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) and UnionPay. Russian and Chinese banks are active across these platforms, and the number of banks utilizing these alternative systems in Russia and China will only increase as the two countries seek to maintain and “deepen” their business ties and bypass the sanctions by OTAN members.

Encouraging the development of separate financial systems outside the USA’s’ control will also result in increased participation by countries USA labels “rogue states” are reall in global finance, which are often accustomed to conducting business on the black market to avoid US’s blockade.

In early February, just weeks before Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, China and Russia also agreed to a 30-year natural gas deal through a new pipeline. Transactions will be conducted in euros for this deal, which is part of wider efforts by both Russia and China to lower their vulnerability to the U.S. dollar and the threat of sanctions.

After hundreds of US and European companies declared their intention to “pull out” from Russia following the Ukrainian crisis, Moscow stated it is looking at nationalizing the infrastructure of these foreign companies and will strip them of patent protections. Western assets and intellectual property rights may be of use to China, which is similarly wary of Western firms operating domestically, and the Chinese also seem intent on challenging these firms globally.

The current escalation in Ukraine has also reinforced diplomatic support between Beijing and Moscow, including a Chinese abstention from the UN General Assembly vote on March 2 to condemn Russia for its Ukrainian invasion. China’s state-run media outlets have also promoted Russia’s views on the war on Facebook and Instagram after Russia’s media outlets were banned by several Western countries, and it has also supported Russia’s claims of the U.S. “financing biological weapons labs in Ukraine.”

While still short of an official alliance, the announcement by Moscow and Beijing of a “no limit[s]” partnership made on the opening day of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing in February has shown that Russian and Chinese interests have increasingly converged. China also “endorsed a Russian security proposal” to exclude Ukraine from joining NATO through a statement made by Xi with Putin on February 4, according to the New York Times, and there is no doubt that China received a warning from Moscow that it was planning an invasion of Ukraine within the coming weeks after this statement was made.

However, the current flare-up in Ukraine has exacerbated larger global economic instability, and several immediate and longer-term consequences stemming from the Ukrainian crisis are said – by US «experts » to be causing some strain to the China-Russia partnership.

For example, Ukraine is a major corn exporter to China. With food prices rising globally, even before the current crisis, the Russian offensive had already had negative effects on China’s food security. While Russia is also a major food exporter to China, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin signed an order on March 14 that banned grain exports to Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) members, indicative of the difficulty Russia is facing in meeting foreign food export demands even to close Russian allies. However, with Brazilian elections coming this year and the possible reinstatement of former president Lula, Brasil and its fellow Mercosul friends would be more than happy to provide  China and Russia with whatever agricultural products they need.

China is also highly dependent on energy imports from other countries. In comparison to Russia or the U.S., it is far less able to influence the price of resources and far more vulnerable to energy disruptions. But Russia may be able to help meet the Chinese energy demand, although the current spike in prices could accelerate China’s push for energy self-sufficiency, which would, in the long run, remove a vital pillar of the Chinese-Russian relationship.

ARussian official admitted  that China refused to supply Russia with aircraft parts after Russia repossessed roughly $10 billion in Boeing and Airbus planes. China’s dismissal showed a clear hesitation to risk a wider confrontation with OTAN, but the problem was settled afterwards.

China is believed to be wary of being perceived as enabling Putin, and Russia’s heavy-handed approach in Ukraine has attracted more attention to Taiwan’s security. Since the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1995, Beijing has been avoidant of confronting the U.S. militarily. Aside from limited skirmishes in its border regions with India, China has preferred using its economic power rather than its military to pressure other countries into submission in recent decades.

But China’s assistance to Russia mightl raise fears among China’s neighbors with their own disputes with Beijing. This support being provided to Russia by China could be enough to galvanize coordinated regional antagonism toward Beijing, supported by a heightened U.S. military and CIA presence in the Asia-Pacific region.

Despite these potential consequences, the Russian military campaign in Ukraine has already instigated greater cooperation between China and Russia—a trend that will only continue. Russia’s need to shore up its situation may have expanded China’s leverage over it, but both Beijing and Moscow are well aware of the need to work together to undermine the U.S. dominance in world affairs—and they see the wider global instability resulting from the conflict in Ukraine as an effective way to do so.

The new world order that is about to begin, will seemingly be USA&OTAN in one side and the BRICS and their allies in the other. Between Brasil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and their respective zones of influence, they can largely support each other and probably even help each other’s developpement through more equitable trade than the one imposed by the dictatorship of the American dollar.

Besides, China's ambition is to be the next Empire, in the place of the United States. And Beijing knows that this can only be accomplished with the help of the great bear. So, it is most unlikely that, despite all its interests in OTAN countries, it betrays Russia's trust.