Entente Cordiale
French and British enthusiasm for placing their troops in Ukraine provides further confirmation that Russia was right to - was compelled to - launch the SMO in February 2022. How could anything apparently so relatively trivial as Ukrainian membership of NATO (still not extended to Ukraine, incidentally, given that its economy is nearly bankrupt) justify NATO and Europe’s readiness to sacrifice the lives, so far, of around one million dead, another million wounded and many million more displaced?
Because this was never about Ukraine. It was always about the right of the Russian Federation to its own existential, historical claim to the largest national territory in the world, including an important percentage of the Arctic (Russian land makes up 53% of the Arctic coastline, and since 2007 Russia has reopened at least 150 Soviet-era military outposts) and the collective West’s greed to obtain privileged and corrupt access to the riches of that territory and its markets. Greed is coupled with intensifying anxiety about the inability of the collective West to undertake the necessary action, with the necessary urgency, to halt climate change and global warming, its preference apparently being to risk nuclear war in an effort to grab another country’s wealth and benefit from new trade corridors opened up by global warming, rather than upset the vested interests of the fossil fuel industries (which of course also include Russia and other BRICS powers).
The collective West’s three decade violation of the agreement it reached with Gorbachev in 1990 never to move NATO further east than eastern Germany also reminds us that Westerm imperialism never ended. The political independence of former colonies never represented the end of Western imperialism, and the former colonies, even when colonies, fell far short of the actual extent of Western imperialism.
Yes, a part of Macron’s insistence on trying to drag the rest of NATO, including the USA, back into the furnace of Ukraine (despite strong German resistance to the idea, resistance too from Hungary and Slovakia, and increasing doubts in Spain and Italy) by risking the lives of French and English troops so as to force the hand of the US to intervene is, as suggested earlier today by Alexander Mercouris, a matter of Macron’s vanity and hurt pride over Russia’s almost incidental expulsion of French interests out of the Sahel. But mainly, it is about so much more.
End of NATO, Rise of the BRICS
The idea of a victory by the collective West is preposterous. The size of British and French armies is puny. Col. Douglas McGregor asserts today that in a land war with NATO forces Russia would win hands down. He notes that most of the world beyond the collective West (well, OK, Japan, the Philippines and perhaps Indonesia are still US vassals) favors Russia, and that the BRICS (which currently has nine member countries, including giants China, Russia, India and Brazil and, with accession of Iran and Saudi Arabia, most of the oil producing global economy, and another 84 countries wanting to join) stands for an end to the financial dominance of the West over the affairs of the Rest and a return to the gold standard. As for an air war, Alexander Mercouris today cites the consensus of unnamed experts that the collective West would be taking a very grave risk in embarking on such a venture, one that might very well destroy its own forces and precipitate nuclear war.
The $61 Billion Question
We still await firmer indications of what Republican House leader Mike Johnson intends with respect to the $61 billion aid package that the Senate voted through some weeks ago. Ukrainian leader Zelenskiy has said that Ukraine will lose the war if the package is not passed. Some believe that in recent comments Johnson has seemed to be hardening his opposition to it, mirroring growing US voter disaffection from the project.
Few knowledgable commentators seem to think that even were the $61 billion voted through Congress it would make much difference in the battlefield. The shortages of weapons that Ukraine is experiencing, they say, is not so much a reflection of the lack of cash, as it is of the lack of Western production capability, and its capability to produce weapons, in good time and at a cost that is anything other than self-cripplingly outrageous. A great deal of the $61 billion would go to the weapons manufacturers who probably would be unable to produce anything before 2025. By next year there is a very good chance that Donald Trump will be President and that Trump will favor a concentration of the dwindling US weapons stocks on what he believes is the main enemy, China. China meanwhile is laughing at the evidence of US resilience or lack therefore in fighting a two-front war (I call it a counterrevolution against multipolarity) in Ukraine and the Middle East, knowing that US rhetoric in favor of independence for Taiwan is the waddle of a paper tiger.
This week there has been a barrage of Western complaints about supposed Chinese support for Russia. Of course, this support exists and is rapidly increasing at the level of normal trade and commerce. It is also the result of a symmetry of interest between both partners on the global stage, one that was consolidated on February 4, 2022 when Putin visited Xi Jinping in Beijing to secure Chinese’s consent to the Russian SMO.
Chinese support to Russia in the field of weaponry seems as unlikely as it is unnecessary, given the vast and rapid expansion of Russia’s military-industrial complex over the past two years. Western commentators cannot seem to agree on the precise nature of China’s military support to Russia, just as they cannot seem to agree on whether the Chinese economy is in a state of crisis (clearly an absurd proposition when one takes into account that China is responsible for 35% of global manufacturing, among many other super impressive statistics) or whether China, as Janet Yellen, US Treasury Secretary, seemed to think a few days ago when visiting Beijing, is a threat to the debt-swamped USA on account of the fact, as she claimed in effect, that China produces too much and doesn’t allow the US enough space to compete. (Who started the trade war?) Similar cries of pained privilege are directed to Russia when Washington complains that Russia is exporting too much LNG to Europe (its major customer for LNG gas - for which Europe pays far more than it did before its 2022 application of sanctions against Russian pipeline exports and US sabotage of Nord Stream), while Biden, presumably out of concern about the environmental consequences of fracking, is trying to hold US LNG exports (more expensive than Russian) and export terminals to current levels.
ZPNN and the Battlefields
Russian advances are approaching completion of operations in Pervomaiske, Krasnohorivka, Vuhledar, Novomikhailivka, Bohdanivka, Keramik (north of Avdiivka) and Ocheretyne, to name the main but not the only east Ukrainian settlements (i.e. the pro-Russian Donbass region, now integrated into the Russian Federation) to which Russian control will likely soon extend. This will release large numbers of Russian troops for redeployment to what many commentators expect will be Russia’s major offensive after mid-May. It looks like the Kharkiv region is being emptied as a result of Ukrainian formal evacuations, and Russian destruction of energy and military facilities. This is very likely a prelude to a major ground operation. But there is also scope for the development of a cauldron stretching from Keramik down to Chasiv Yar, and/or a major Russian offensive on the areas of Kherson that lie on the west of the Dnieper and from which Russia withdrew in 2022.
Ukraine has been targeting drone swarms on the Zapporizhzhian Nuclear Power Plant over several days, so far without causing major damage to the facility.
Palestine
A humanitarian flotilla of ships is headed to Israel with cargo (food, medical equipment etc.) with a view to breaking the Israeli seige of Gaza, and to saving the two million lives of Palestinians that are under dire threat of annihilation by Israeli Zionist policies of starvation, genocide and expulsion. Former State Department official, Matthew Hoh, tells Judge Napolitano today that this is an Israeli policy of siege that has been executed not since October 7 2023 but since the intifada of 2007. Israeli first started attacking such flotillas in international waters, killing and deporting the participants. Turkey was deeply implicated in the first flotilla as some of its citizens were murdered by Israeli forces, and is now curtailing Turkish exports to Israel, an example that it would be helpful were other nations to follow. Otherwise, Turkey’s President Erdogan has seemed to the Turkish electorate as more engaged in anti-Israel rhetoric than in practical activity to save Palestinians. The changing balance of power in Turkey at local level, albeit in favor of the pro-West Republican party, may yet express itself in a more forceful policy on Palestine, given that the far majority of Turks veer towards the East, not the West.
Nicaragua, meanwhile, has initiated action this week in the International Court of Justice, accusing Germany of being complicit in Israeli genocide by continuing to supply Israel with arms. The new Irish Fina Gael prime minister Simon Harris, installed today, has also made comments critical of Israel.
This week sees the end of Ramadan. Now is the time when reactions to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians - which should be understood as Israel’s illegal action to enforce a greater Israel at the expense of Palestine, Iraq, Syria and the Lebanon - from both sunni (Hamas), and shia (Houthi, Hezbollah and Iranian) forces will begin to take firmer shape. Asked today how Iran might retaliate for Israel’s strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus last week and the consequent slaying of top Iranian commanders and their allies, former Trump adviser Col. Douglas McGregor reminds his interviewer, Judge Napolitano, that Iran can yet close down the Strait of Hormuz, through which 30% of the world’s traffic in fossil fuel must pass. This, together with Houthi action on Israeli-related shipping in the Red Sea, would create havoc for global trade. McGregor also warns that in taking on Hezbollah (which he expects Israel will do once it has completed its action in Rafah) Israel may well resort to tactical nuclear weapons (less than 5 kilotons).
Thanks for this excellent update. Irish twitter says their PM / Taoiseach Simon Harris is all talk, no action re Israel.