Tag Archives: Vladimir Putin

Patrick Lawrence: Biden and the ICC: ‘A New Level of Farce’

Posted on March 25, 2023 | Leave a comment

There are two magical phrases in the world of Joe Biden and his ilk: Orange Man Bad and Putin Bad. Now the International Criminal Court has pronounced the latter. Give it time and it may pronounce the former as well. From Patrick Lawrence at scheerpost.com:

International Criminal Court building (2016) in The Hague. OSeveno, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

There are many things to say about the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin on charges that the Russian president directed the abduction and deportation of thousands of  children from eastern Ukraine in the early months of the intervention that began a year ago. Let us settle on three of these things. 

Straight off the top, the ICC’s action announced on March 17 is ridiculous in any number of ways. Its  legality is questionable at the very least. Its premise appears to bear no relationship with reality; it will have no appreciable effect. It is a political gesture dressed up as law and, as a political gesture dressed up as law, it is sheer propaganda, nothing more. 

If an institution such as the ICC behaves ridiculously in these ways, it is not doing its credibility a great deal of good. To ask what use the ICC serves, despite its elevated purpose when it was founded 25 years ago, seems to be a good question.  

There is a history behind this kind of conduct. This is the second thing to say about what the ICC has just done. If we study this history even briefly, we are likely to be upset, because this history indicates that the many international institutions to which humanity has looked as a source of impartial order for the past 70–odd years do not work as intended. And they were fated not to work as intended so long as the United States insists, as it has since the 1945 victories, on global dominance. This is a case of either/or: We can have a stable world order on the basis of the U.N. Charter or other such instruments of international law, or we can have the American imperium, but we cannot have both. 

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In Moscow, Xi and Putin bury Pax Americana, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on March 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

Welcome to the new world order. From Pepe Escobar at thecradle.co:

In Moscow this week, the Chinese and Russian leaders revealed their joint commitment to redesign the global order, an undertaking that has ‘not been seen in 100 years.’

https://media.thecradle.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Xi-and-Putin.jpg

What has just taken place in Moscow is nothing less than a new Yalta, which, incidentally, is in Crimea. But unlike the momentous meeting of US President Franklin Roosevelt, Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in USSR-run Crimea in 1945, this is the first time in arguably five centuries that no political leader from the west is setting the global agenda.

It’s Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin that are now running the multilateral, multipolar show. Western exceptionalists may deploy their crybaby routines as much as they want: nothing will change the spectacular optics, and the underlying substance of this developing world order, especially for the Global South.

What Xi and Putin are setting out to do was explained in detail before their summit, in two Op-Eds penned by the presidents themselves. Like a highly-synchronized Russian ballet, Putin’s vision was laid out in the People’s Daily in China, focusing on a “future-bound partnership,” while Xi’s was published in the Russian Gazette and the RIA Novosti website, focusing on a new chapter in cooperation and common development.

Right from the start of the summit, the speeches by both Xi and Putin drove the NATO crowd into a hysterical frenzy of anger and envy: Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova perfectly captured the mood when she remarked that the west was “foaming at the mouth.”

The front page of the Russian Gazette on Monday was iconic: Putin touring Nazi-free Mariupol, chatting with residents, side by side with Xi’s Op-Ed. That was, in a nutshell, Moscow’s terse response to Washington’s MQ-9 Reaper stunt and the International Criminal Court (ICC) kangaroo court shenanigans. “Foam at the mouth” as much as you like; NATO is in the process of being thoroughly humiliated in Ukraine.

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Don’t F’ With Putin, by Seymour Hersh

Posted on March 20, 2023 | Leave a comment

Seymour Hersh’s plausible insights concerning the enigmatic Vladimir Putin. For some reason there’s a spiel the last 3:30 by Jim Rickards. It can be ignored.

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Arresting Putin – Or Arresting All-Out Western Public Revolt? by Finian Cunningham

Posted on March 19, 2023 | Leave a comment

This cheap publicity stunt shows how desperate the West is for anything resembling a win against Putin. They’re certainly not getting it on the battlefield. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

If there were any genuine principles of justice, Biden should be in the dock facing war crime charges in connection with America’s illegal wars.

Western propaganda outlets (also known as “news media”) are suddenly full of reports that The Hague-based International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The over-the-top coverage (that is, orchestration) is intended to give the ridiculous legal ploy an impression of gravitas and significance when in reality the so-called arrest warrant is meaningless and oozes with kitsch politicized theater.

Along with Putin, the Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova is also named as a wanted person to face “war crimes” prosecution. The alleged crimes are in connection with the supposed deportation of children to Russia during Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine conducted since February 2022.

The basis for the ICC move is as flimsy as an errant weather balloon. It is also an audacious distortion of reality. Russia has evacuated thousands of civilians, including children, from the regions formerly of eastern Ukraine that are now part of the Russian Federation for the precise reason of taking them out of harm’s way from the NATO-backed Nazi regime in Kiev whose forces have been indiscriminately shelling the Donbass and other areas.Ukraine

If anyone should be facing prosecution for war crimes it is Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and his Nazi-adulating commanders, as well as their sponsors: American, European, and NATO leaders.

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The stage is set for Hybrid World War III, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on March 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

The Russians and Chinese see quite clearly that they stand in opposition to the U.S., and they are determined to build something different and what they regard as better than the American model. From Pepe Escobar at thesaker.is:

A powerful feeling rhythms your skin and drums up your soul as you’re immersed in a long walk under persistent snow flurries, pinpointed by selected stops and enlightening conversations, crystallizing disparate vectors one year after the start of the accelerated phase of the proxy war between US/NATO and Russia.

That’s how Moscow welcomes you: the undisputed capital of the 21st century multipolar world.

A long, walking meditation impregnates on us how President Putin’s address – rather, a civilizational speech – last week was a game-changer when it comes to the demarcation of the civilizational red lines we are all now facing. It acted like a powerful drill perforating the less than short, actually zero term memory of the Collective West. No wonder it exercised a somewhat sobering effect contrasting the non-stop Russophobia binge of the NATOstan space.

Alexey Dobrinin, Director of the Foreign Policy Planning Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Russia, has correctly described

Putin’s address as “a methodological basis for understanding, describing and constructing multipolarity.”

For years some of us have been showing how the emerging multipolar world is defined – but goes way beyond – high speed interconnectivity, physical and geoeconomic. Now, as we reach the next stage, it’s as if Putin and Xi Jinping, each in their own way, are conceptualizing the two key civilizational vectors of multipolarity. That’s the deeper meaning of the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership, invisible to the naked eye.

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Posted in Economics, Economy, Energy, Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Politics

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Patrick Lawrence: Russia’s New Reset with the West

Posted on February 24, 2023 | Leave a comment

The new reset is Russia’s recognition that the West has been double-dealing and cannot be trusted. From Patrick Lawrence at consortiumnews.com:

Putin’s announcement of a suspension of the last extant U.S.-Russia arms-control pact this week was a carefully attenuated move. It was also a big deal, but not in the way Western officials encourage us to think it is.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 23 in Moscow during Defender of the Fatherland Day, which marks the founding of the Red Army. (President of Russia)

News that Russia will suspend its participation in the New START nuclear arms pact, which arrived Tuesday via Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Federal Assembly, had to land hard.

This suspension is not a withdrawal, as various Western media reports initially described it, and it is temporary, as the Russian president described it. It is a carefully attenuated move, then.

But it is a big deal nonetheless, although it is not a big deal in the way Western officials encourage us to think it is. It is a big deal in ways that Western officials do not want us to think about. 

“With today’s decision on New START,” NATO Secretary–General Jens Stoltenberg said at a joint press conference in Kiev with Dmitry Kuleba, the Ukrainian regime’s foreign minister, “the whole arms control architecture has been dismantled.”

This is the baldest, farthest-out-there take on Moscow’s step back I have been able to find. The New York Times initially ran this quotation but dropped it from its news report within a few hours, wisely. Now you have to find it in The Kyiv Independent, the not-independent propaganda daily backed by various Western governments.

What Stoltenberg was doing in Kiev, given NATO claims it is not prosecuting a war against Russia, is a good question. Then again, lots of people of Stoltenberg’s stature travel to Kiev these days.

President Joe Biden just took a train from Poland to Kiev to have a look at the progress or otherwise of the war the U.S. is not waging against Russia. Let us not miss: This kind of thing has much to do with Putin’s New START decision, as he made clear in his remarks Tuesday. 

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, passing through Athens, termed Moscow’s decision “unfortunate and irresponsible”— an improvement on Stoltenberg’s deranged assessment.

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Putin’s ‘civilizational’ speech frames conflict between east and west, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on February 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

The West is not going to destroy Russia, not if Vladimir Putin has anything to do with it. From Pepe Escobar at thecradle.co:

In his Federal Assembly address, President Putin emphasized that Russia is not only an independent nation-state but also a distinct civilization with its own identity, which is in conflict and actively opposes the values of ‘western civilization.’

https://media.thecradle.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Vladimir-Putin-speech-START-treaty.jpg

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s much awaited address to the Russian Federal Assembly on Tuesday should be interpreted as a tour de force of sovereignty.

The address, significantly, marked the first anniversary of Russia’s official recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, only a few hours before 22 February, 2022. In myriad ways, what happened a year ago also marked the birth of the real, 21st century multipolar world.

Then two days later, Moscow launched the Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine to defend said republics.

Cool, calm, collected, without a hint of aggression, Putin’s speech painted Russia as an ancient, independent, and quite distinct civilization – sometimes following a path in concert with other civilizations, sometimes in divergence.

Ukraine, part of Russian civilization, now happens to be occupied by western civilization, which Putin said “became hostile to us,” like in a few instances in the past. So the acute phase of what is essentially a war by proxy of the west against Russia takes place over the body of Russian civilization.

That explains Putin’s clarification that “Russia is an open country, but an independent civilization – we do not consider ourselves superior but we inherited our civilization from our ancestors and we must pass it on.”

A war dilacerating the body of Russian civilization is a serious existential business. Putin also made clear that “Ukraine is being used as a tool and testing ground by the west against Russia.” Thus the inevitable follow-up: “The more long-range weapons are sent to Ukraine, the longer we have to push the threat away from our borders.”

Translation: this war will be long – and painful. There will be no swift victory with minimal loss of blood. The next moves around the Dnieper may take years to solidify. Depending on whether US policy continues to cleave to neo-con and neoliberal objectives, the frontline may be displaced to Lviv. Then German politics may change. Normal trade with France and Germany may be recovered only by the end of the next decade.

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Putin’s speech and what it means. By Guiseppe Filotto

Posted on February 22, 2023 | Leave a comment

Remarkably for a politician, Vladimir Putin is pretty much a straight shooter. From Guiseppe Filotto at gfilotto.com:

Read the whole thing here, direct from the Kremlin, because I would not trust a single Western Media source with telling me the sky is blue at this point.

In essence, however, Putin is doing simply what I stated Russia was and would continue to do, back in October 2022 (well, long before that, but I spelt it out on this blog for the masses then).

And that is: Using verifiable facts (aka known as truth) as their propaganda. Is EVERYTHING Russia says on the level? Maybe not. I am sure some tiny elements here and there might be actual propaganda, but by and large, what Putin says is pretty closely related to the reality of facts, events and objective observations of reality.

In the long term, especially when you are dealing with actual missiles and guns and flying bullets, that kind of “propaganda” is invincible.

Because even the retarded norms start to see it after a while.

Here is a small excerpt of his speech.

The recent Munich Conference turned into an endless stream of accusations against Russia. One gets the impression that this was done so that everyone would forget what the so-called West has been doing over the past decades. They were the ones who let the genie out of the bottle, plunging entire regions into chaos.

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Why BRI Is Back with a Bang in 2023, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on January 7, 2023 | Leave a comment

The Eurasian axis the U.S. is trying to thwart becomes increasingly interconnected and increasingly strong. From Pepe Escobar at unz.com:

The year 2022 ended with a Zoom call to end all Zoom calls: Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping discussing all aspects of the Russia-China strategic partnership in an exclusive video call.

Putin told Xi how “Russia and China managed to ensure record high growth rates of mutual trade,” meaning “we will be able to reach our target of $200 billion by 2024 ahead of schedule.”

On their coordination to “form a just world order based on international law,” Putin emphasized how “we share the same views on the causes, course, and logic of the ongoing transformation of the global geopolitical landscape.”

Facing “unprecedented pressure and provocations from the west,” Putin noted how Russia-China are not only defending their own interests “but also all those who stand for a truly democratic world order and the right of countries to freely determine their own destiny.”

Earlier, Xi had announced that Beijing will hold the 3rd Belt and Road Forum in 2023. This has been confirmed, off the record, by diplomatic sources. The forum was initially designed to be bi-annual, first held in 2017 and then 2019. 2021 didn’t happen because of Covid-19.

The return of the forum signals not only a renewed drive but an extremely significant landmark as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in Astana and then Jakarta in 2013, will be celebrating its 10th anniversary.

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Russia’s Neo-Byzantinism, by Laurent Guyénot

Posted on January 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

Here’s a crazy idea. Maybe before the U.S. gets fully involved in war with Russia, we should learn a little bit about Russian history and culture. It couldn’t hurt. From Laurent Guyénot at unz.com:

There is something irresistibly attractive in Russia’s defense of traditional and religious values (what might be called Russian neo-conservatism if that label had not been usurped by American Jewish warmongers). But where does it really come from? We tend to assume that it is a reaction to Western post-modern decadence. But there is more depth to it.

What is Russia? How does Russia define herself, and how does she conceive of her relationship to Europe? Specifically, from what tradition do Russia’s current ruling elites draw their vision of Russian civilization? I wanted to learn about the Russian thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the Russians themselves have rediscovered since the fall of Communism, and who are said to have a strong influence on Vladimir Putin and his entourage. Here is what I found.

Let’s start, quite logically, with three authors whose books were offered by Vladimir Putin to governors and members of his United Russia party for the New Year 2014 (see here and here):

  • Vladimir Solovyov’s The Justification of the Good
  • Nikolai Berdyaev ‘s The Philosophy of Inequality
  • Ivan Ilyin’s Our Tasks

All three authors are deeply religious and patriotic, and as such committed to Russian Orthodoxy. All three are passionate about Russia, and hold her as “an original and independent civilization,” in the terms used by Vladimir Putin in his October 27, 2022 speech at the Valdai Forum.

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