Russia has set Space Station exit timetable

Russia has decided when it will pull out of the International Space Station (ISS), and will give a year’s notice to its partners, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin said on Saturday.

In an interview with the Rossiya-24 TV channel, the head of the space agency said that although a timeframe has been set, the authorities “are not obliged to speak about it publicly.”

Rogozin earlier said Western sanctions imposed over Russia’s military offensive on Ukraine are preventing Roscosmos from proceeding with “business as usual” when it comes to joint work with the US and other Western countries on the ISS. He also said that if he could he would already have cased cooperation.

  • In the interview he noted that the terms of Russia’s activity on the ISS are determined by the government and the president, and that the agency is currently allowed to continue operations on the ISS through 2024.

“I can only say one thing: in accordance with our obligations, we will warn our partners a year in advance about the end of work on the ISS,” he said.

  • Rogozin also explained that during its remaining time on the ISS, Russia “will demonstrate its readiness to deploy the Russian Orbital Service Station (ROSS).”

He said the ROSS will be multifunctional and that development plans are already underway.

“When it is presented… we will begin to create this ‘smart hardware’ and prepare its launch into space, the deployment of the station,” Rogozin said.

Earlier the Roscosmos chief predicted that the ISS, where NASA planned to operate until 2030, would “fall apart” by that time unless “huge amounts of money” are invested in its repair, but that in the current geopolitical environment, work on the ISS is no longer effective for Russia.

In mid-March Rogozin said the “hostile” geopolitical situation could force Russia to make ROSS “militarily applicable.”

It will mean, according to Rogozin, that “there will be no one” on ROSS besides the Russian cosmonauts, who will “service the target equipment installed at this station.”

Since Russia launched its military offensive in Ukraine in late February, many countries have imposed sweeping sanctions on Moscow, targeting its banks, finances, and the import of sensitive technology, among other things.

Source: RT

Donbass: ‘I’m Alive!’ Mariupol survivors of Ukrainian attacks find shelter

“It’s the Azov battalion. They forced people out of their houses and into basements. Then tanks started shooting from here, from there,” a Mariupol resident shared her story with the film crew.

Over 400,000 people in Mariupol had to go underground because they couldn’t leave the city.

The film tracks stories of people who had to survive in Mariupol under Ukrainian shelling.

Sheltering in cellars and watching Ukrainian tanks firing at residential buildings. They have all gone through hell and back. Now they’re happy to be alive and hope for a new beginning.

A Russian military officer drives across shelled Mariupol to distribute humanitarian aid. A volunteer from Texas, who came to Donbass eight years ago, as he refused to believe American propaganda, helps reunite families separated during the evacuation. A hieromonk who was taken hostage by Azov members and tortured miraculously survived and dedicated his life to studying the origins of nazism in Ukraine. A courageous OB-GYN who runs a maternity ward helped give birth to 25 women during the bombing.

Hundreds of people who got a chance to be evacuated lost connections with the rest of their families who stayed. With no cell service and internet connection, their only hope was to get a word through Russian soldiers who would find relatives and friends and relay their messages.

France shuts down 50% of nuclear reactors amid energy crunch

France, one of Europe’s leading electricity exporters, has taken 28 of its 56 atomic reactors offline due to defects or maintenance.

The step comes amid a months-long energy crunch, one of the worst in European history.

The 1,300-megawatt Golfech-2 reactor run by Electricite de France (EDF) in the south of country was shut down on Friday for maintenance until Saturday, the company said in a filing with grid operator RTE.

The suspension, due to extended outages after corrosion issues were found at some sites, is expected to force EDF to purchase electricity from the European grid at a time of soaring demand exacerbated by natural gas shortages.

  • Checks and repairs, along with scheduled halts for refueling and regular maintenance, have reportedly sunk French nuclear output to its lowest level in more than 10 years.

The shutdowns are expected to aggravate Europe’s supply problems, with nuclear power accounting for more than two thirds of French electricity generation.

Daily prices for electricity in France in 2022 have averaged nearly 30% more than in Germany, which relies more heavily on gas and coal to run its plants.

  • They are reportedly four times higher than in the same period of 2021.

French imports of electricity were nearly equal to exports in the first quarter, versus net exports of roughly eight terawatt-hours to Britain, Italy, Germany and Switzerland in the same period of 2021, according to data from research institute Fraunhofer ISE.

Source: RT

Watch: Third British Mercenary Captured by Russian Forces in Ukraine

On April 29, RT aired an interview with the mercenary who identified himself as Andrew Hill.

  • After being wounded while fighting with Kiev forces near the city of Nikolaev, Hill, a native of Plymouth in England, surrendered to the Russian military.

The Russian military moved Hill to a safe location, where he was provided with the medical care he desperately needed.

In an interview, Hill said that he first came to Ukraine to work as a volunteer on the border with Poland. While working on the border he was offered a chance to go to the frontline and fight the Russian military. Hill took on the offer. He was given an assault rifle and thrown into the frontline soon after.

Hill admitted that he was promised money for “help”. However, he claimed that he and the rest of his group didn’t receive any money in the end.

  • “They need to really think about it … This does not involve us,” Hill said answering a question about what he would like to say to other Brits who would like to go fight in Ukraine.

Hill is the third British mercenary to be captured by the Russian military.

British mercenaries Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner, who were fighting in the ranks of the Ukrainian 36th Marine Brigade, were both captured in the city of Mariupol early on in April.

  • Other Western mercenaries were not as lucky as Hill, Aslin and Pinner. On April 28, British mercenary Scott Sibley, a former service member of the UK army, was killed by the Russian military.
  • On April 29, Russian forces killed American mercenary Willy Cancel, a former marine who was fighting with a private military contracting company in Ukraine.

More than 20,000 foreign mercenaries are reportedly fighting in the ranks of Kiev forces.

Russia warned that foreign mercenaries will not be treated as prisoners of war. These mercenaries will likely be tried in the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Luhansk People’s Republic or even in Russia for war crimes.

Source: SOUTHFRONT

In Israel, some Holocaust survivors from Ukraine feel little solidarity with Kyiv

As a Holocaust survivor from Ukraine, Yaakov Zelikovich is heartbroken over the human suffering in his country of birth, which is under assault by Russia.

“As a Jew and as a person, I feel bad for the children, the women, the anguish,” Zelikovich, an 83-year old grandfather of four.

And yet, even though he was born and raised in Ukraine and speaks Ukrainian well, he has been living in Israel since 1974, and feels little solidarity with his native land.

“On the national level, I think that it’s their problem, not mine. Believe me, it’s certainly not my problem,” said Zelikovich, citing widespread collaboration by Ukrainians with the Nazis during World War II as the reason for his indifference.

Zelikovich’s antagonism is typical of the ambivalence felt by some Holocaust survivors and others as both Ukraine and Russia consistently reference the Holocaust to rally support for their respective sides during the current conflict. Zelikovich, who lives in Karmiel, spoke with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Thursday, Yom Hashoah — the Jewish day of commemoration for the victims of Holocaust, when much of the ambivalence has risen to the surface.

Although some Ukrainians helped save Jews during the Holocaust, “it’s well known that other Ukrainians helped the Germans,” Zelikovich said.

“In some cases, by the time the Germans came in, their work had been done for them: Ukrainians killed the Jews to a person and looted their homes.”

  • Ukraine’s checkered record during the Holocaust, the prevalence of Nazi collaboration there and the glorification of collaborators today make for a complicated and often conflicted attitude toward that country by Holocaust survivors from the country and their descendants.

To Ida Rashkovich, an 86-year-old survivor from the Ukrainian city of Vynnitsa who now lives in Holon, Israel, this is not some abstract discussion about history and geopolitics. Several of her relatives were murdered because of local Ukrainian collaborators, she told JTA.

“Of course I had relatives killed by Ukrainians. But other Ukrainians also saved Jews. It’s a very mixed picture,” she said, adding that she strongly opposes Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “monstrous actions.”

Zelikovich recalls being marched as a child to a mass grave in the woods flanked by Ukrainians police officers, who under the auspices of the Nazi-aligned Romanian occupiers, rounded up the Jews of his town of Tomashpil.

At a certain point, his grandmother, who was marching alongside him, picked him up and carried him toward their would-be execution place. But the Romanians decided to spare adults with children, which is why he and his grandmother, Ida Dolbur, were allowed to return home.

Having narrowly escaped being executed along with more than 200 victims who died that day outside Tomashpil, Zelikovsky’s family went into hiding and survived. Dolbur died in 1953.

“It’s especially hurtful that the leaders of the collaborationists are now celebrated as heroes in Ukraine,” he said.

Ukraine’s fight against the Russian aggressors and the leadership of Ukraine’s president, Vlodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, have inspired the West, and undermined Putin’s propaganda describing his war goals as the “denazification” of Ukraine.

  • Before the war, tens of thousands of Jews lived in Ukraine, enjoying a network of synagogues and schools and joining their non-Jewish neighbors in denouncing and resisting the Russian forces.
  • “Over 30 years we built an amazing community,” Avraham Wolff, a Chabad rabbi in Odessa, told The Washington Post in March. “And it’s a shame that it has come to this.”

Still, over the past decade, Ukrainian society has seen mainstream attempts to glorify World War II collaborators like Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych — Ukrainian nationalists who at least for a time worked with the Nazis against the dreaded Soviet Union.

Their troops are believed to have murdered thousands of Jews during the Holocaust.

State-sponsored honors to Nazi collaborators are a new development in Ukraine, where about 15% of the population are ethnic Russians.

The phenomenon grew as Ukrainian nationalism consolidated itself politically, and exploded following the 2014 invasion of Ukraine by Russia and Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

  • In 2017, the city of Lviv held a festival in Shukhevych’s honor. The following year, the same city sponsored a parade in which participants marched in the uniform of a Nazi-led unit of Ukrainian conscripts: the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, or the 1st Galician.
  • In parallel, historical figures like Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the 17th-century Cossak leader whose army killed countless Jews, are also being celebrated. A gold-tinted statue of Khmelnitsky is on display in a central avenue of Kyiv named for him.
  • The Ukrainian National Guard also includes a volunteer unit called the Azov Battalion, which according to its commanders includes a significant portion of neo-Nazis, and whose logo is a neo-Nazi hate symbol.

Zelensky did not help matters when he compared the Russian invasion to the Holocaust, at a time when the fighting was brutal but not genocidal under accepted definitions of the term.

  • In a speech to Israeli lawmakers last month, Zelensky defended the comparison. “I have the right to this parallel and to this comparison,” he said, prompting protests by Israeli officials.

References to the Holocaust, on both sides, make the fight against its distortion “an uphill battle,” said Mark Weitzman, chief operating officer of the World Jewish Restitution Organization and one of the initiators of the definition of Holocaust distortion by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance — a forum of dozens of countries.

There are some Israeli Holocaust survivors from Ukraine who have felt patriotic solidarity with Ukraine during the war.

“I grew up there, I went to school there, I went to university there. It’s impossible to stay indifferent,” said Avraham Sharnopolsky, a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor from the town of Ilyintsy in Ukraine’s west, and later Donetsk in the east. “I feel a lot of solidarity with Ukraine as a country and with Ukrainians as a people, even though Ukrainians have killed countless Jews.”

The pogroms and collaboration, he said, “don’t erase centuries of coexistence. It’s very complex and tragic at times but that doesn’t mean I’m not Ukrainian,” said Sharnopolsky, who immigrated to Israel in 1995 and lives in Jerusalem.

Sharnopolsky also said that comparisons with the Holocaust are “inevitable” in light of the scale of devastation by Russia of some Ukrainian cities.

Yet in Israel and elsewhere, the back and forth featuring Holocaust comparisons, as well as bitter memories of antisemitic persecution by Ukrainians and Russians during the 20th century, has left some Holocaust survivors from Ukraine feeling indifferent.

  • “The Ukrainian people who are suffering have done nothing wrong and I feel sorry for them,” one Israeli Holocaust survivor from Donetsk, Boris Shatanov, told JTA.

“But the Ukrainian people as an entity has none of my sympathies.”

Shatanov, who is 91 and immigrated to Israel in 1990, said his cousin was raped and murdered by a “gang of drunken Ukrainians even before the Germans ever got to her village” in 1941.

“As for the Russians, I’m not too favorable on them either,” added Shatanov, who said he was not accepted to university because he was Jewish under communism, and had to travel to Kazan, a city 500 miles east of Moscow, to study to be an engineer there.

“I am a Jew, I’m an Israeli, I’m a Holocaust survivor and I was done with their wars a long time ago,” Shatanov said.

Source: Arutz Sheva

Confusion, Chaos on Annapurna: Who is Missing, Who is Safe?

Mishaps are piling up as climbers descend from the summit of Annapurna. A few hours ago, a helicopter airlifted an Indian climber with AMS from Camp 3 in critical condition. (A second Indian climber was evacuated from Kangchenjunga for the same reason.)

On Annapurna, Captain Alaister Hopper performed the risky long-line rescue. He picked up the sick climber and carried him dangling from the helicopter to Base Camp, Kailash Helicopter Services reported. Once there, the climber continued by helicopter to the hospital in Kathmandu.

Missing climbers?

Lack of details and sketchy, sometimes conflicting information has created an intense rumor mill on the mountain.

When Kristin Harila returned to Base Camp after her successful summit, she mentioned “missing climbers” on Instagram.

However, it is unclear whether she was referring to the Italian just rescued, who is sick but not missing, Gianpaolo Corona, or someone else. (…) News circulated yesterday that Corona was missing, but that turned out to be untrue. A helicopter spotted him today at 7,400m, seemingly healthy and descending under his own power. However, there is no further news on his whereabouts.

Alive and descending

 

Fortunately, the pilots spotted the Italian climber at 7,400m, slightly below Camp 4. They were able to establish radio contact with him.

“I am well and don’t need any support for now,” he told the rescuers, according to The Himalayan Times. The rescue operation was called off and Corona is descending.

The concern is focused on both Corona and the other two climbers who went up without O2 or Sherpa support — Tim Bogdanov and Hans Wenzel. The three of them had hired Seven Summit Treks only for Base Camp logistics. Neither the agency nor SST expedition leader Chhang Dawa Sherpa has publicly spoken since announcing the summits yesterday.

As we mentioned earlier today, outfitters are cautious when trouble occurs on a mountain, at least until they notify the families. However, there comes a point when rumors from other climbers spread so widely that confusion escalates, and some response is necessary. We — and that includes the families, most of all — need to know not just who is in trouble, but who is safe.

Source: Angela Benavides – Explorersweb

Header: The Anapurna range from above Pokhara, Nepal. Phewa lake (below) and Machapucharé, Annapurna III, Annapurna IV, Annapurna II and Lamjung Himal (from left to right) on the horizon. Jean-Marie Hullot.

Report reveals extent of Poland’s military aid to Ukraine

Poland has provided neighboring Ukraine with a whopping $7 billion worth of military aid since the outbreak of the conflict between Kiev and Moscow, Polskie Radio has reported.

The weapon deliveries to Ukraine included 200 Soviet-designed T-72 tanks, dozens of Gvozdika howitzers, Grad multiple rocket launchers, missiles for MIG-29 and Su-27 warplanes, as well as other munitions and Polish-made reconnaissance drones, according to the outlet.

  • The journalists pointed out that the NATO country had around 400 tanks in its arsenal before the Ukrainian conflict, meaning that Warsaw has already parted with around half of its armor fleet in favor of Kiev.
  • Some of the Polish tanks were upgraded in 2019, but Ukraine only got the vehicles that weren’t covered by the modernization program, Polskie Radio said.

The country’s deputy defense minister, Wojciech Skurkiewicz, has confirmed to the outlet that Poland has been supporting Ukraine militarily since the beginning of the hostilities.

Warsaw has been among the most active backers of Kiev amid the conflict, urging tougher sanctions on Russia than other EU members – up to a total ban on trade with the country – and calling for a NATO peacekeeping mission to secure western arms shipments to Ukraine.

However, on Thursday, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) said it learned about plans by Poland and US to use the ongoing conflict for Warsaw to regain control of areas in western Ukraine that the Poles had lost after WWII, but still consider as “historically belonging” to them.

The plotters are allegedly hoping to achieve the split of Ukrainian land by sending a non-NATO mission of Polish peacekeepers to the country.

Arriving under the pretext of “protection from Russian aggression,” they would actually focus on recapturing control of key facilities from the local troops, according to the agency.

Poland has denied those claims as a “Russian information operation” aimed against Warsaw and Washington. But SVR reiterated on Friday that its statement on the Polish peacekeeping operation in Ukraine “wasn’t an assumption, but an intelligence data, obtained from several reliable sources.”

Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, following Kiev’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, first signed in 2014, and Moscow’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German and French brokered Minsk Protocol was designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state.

The Kremlin has since demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join NATO.

Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.

Source: RT

Preparation of Military Operation by NATO countries and Ukraine against Transnistria

Ukrainian saboteurs have staged several terrorist attacks on the territory of the republic. Hostile forces are being drawn towards Transnistria.

From the west, NATO units are moving towards Moldova’s borders.

If a few days ago there was information about redeployment of Romanian and Polish units, according to the latest information, large units of the USA, Portugal and other NATO countries are also moving.

  • There are no NATO troops on Moldovan territory yet.

From the east, AFU troops and a group of thousands of foreign mercenaries, including at least 1,000 fighters from the Turkish far-right organisation Grey Wolves, Canadian, Croatian units and fighters from Scandinavian countries, are concentrated.

On 29 April, Ukrainian and Russian sources reported that Ukrainian President Zelenski allegedly offered Russia, through closed channels, to exchange Nazis from Azovstal for de-escalation in Transnistria.

  • If this information is true, such an offer should only be perceived as an attempt to obtain additional benefits before the start of hostilities in the Transnistrian region.

During the conflict in eastern Ukraine, which has lasted more than 8 years, Kiev has not fulfilled any commitments on significant issues.

On 29 April, the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry urged compatriots to leave Moldova in view of the “difficult situation” in the country and around Transnistria. Following Bulgaria, the US, Canadian, French, German, British and Israeli authorities advised their citizens not to enter Transnistria and, if possible, to leave Moldova.

It is noteworthy that the Moldovan leadership is trying its best to avoid opening hostilities in the region. Chisinau understands that the outbreak of hostilities in Transnistria will lead to a war on the territory of Moldova itself. Also, Chisinau has no alternative to Russian gas, which the republic receives at a fixed price, much lower than the market one. A large number of Moldovan citizens are working in the Russian Federation.

At the same time, Moldova’s political leadership is not independent in its decision-making. If Washington orders a military operation against Transniestria, Chisinau will be forced to obey.

In the meantime, on 28 April, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Naryshkin, said that Washington and Warsaw were planning to deploy a Polish “peacekeeping contingent” in the western part of Ukraine.

Today, the FIS said that Naryshkin’s statement was not a version, but intelligence information obtained from several reliable sources.

  • “According to information received by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Washington and Warsaw are working on plans to establish tight military and political control over ‘their historical possessions’ in Ukraine,” Foreign Intelligence Service spokesman Sergei Naryshkin said.
    According to the FIS, the first stage of the “reunification” should be the introduction of Polish troops into the western regions of Ukraine under the guise of their “protection against Russian aggression”. Modalities for the upcoming mission are being discussed with the Biden administration. “According to preliminary agreements, it will take place without a NATO mandate, but with the participation of ‘willing states’. Warsaw has not yet been able to agree on potential participants in a ‘coalition of like-minded’,” the FIS said.
    At the same time, the FIS pointed out, the Polish leadership is not interested in “unnecessary spies” in its operation. “The so-called peacekeeping contingent is planned to be deployed in those parts of Ukraine where the threat of direct clash with the Russian Armed Forces is minimal. And the priority “combat tasks” of the Polish military will include gradual interception of control over strategic objects located there from the National Guard of Ukraine. Polish special services are already searching for “agreeable” representatives of the Ukrainian elite to form a Warsaw-oriented “democratic” counterweight to the nationalists,” the FIS said in its report.
    According to the Polish administration’s estimates, a preventive entrenchment in western Ukraine is highly likely to split the country. Warsaw will essentially gain control of the territories where “Polish peacekeepers” will enter. Essentially, it is an attempt to repeat the historical “deal” for Poland after the First World War, when the collective West, represented by the Entente, recognized Warsaw’s right first to occupy part of the Ukraine to protect its population from the “Bolshevik threat”, and then to incorporate those territories into the Polish state. The events that followed were a clear illustration of the colonial order and forced polonisation as the main methods of building a ‘Greater Poland’,” the FIS concluded.
  • In May 2022, Warsaw announced large-scale military exercises, mainly in the northern regions of the country. At the same time, exercises by NATO countries are planned in the region.

Apparently the Polish Armed Forces will be ready to conduct a military operation in Ukraine near the end of May.

During the same period, we should expect a dramatic escalation of the situation around Transnistria.

Source: SOUTHFRONT

Details of Hitler’s last hours revealed

  • Russia’s Federal Security Service (the successor of the KGB) has declassified documents from the case file of Adolf Hitler’s personal pilot on Friday, revealing details of the final hours of the Nazi dictator.

Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, just days before Soviet troops captured Berlin, effectively ending World War II in Europe. His body had been doused with gasoline and burned.

Lieutenant General Hans Baur who worked for Hitler for more than a decade, was captured by Soviet soldiers on May 2, 1945, and faced trial in Moscow. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) published previously classified documents from Baur’s file. The papers from the FSB’s Novgorod region branch include Baur’s handwritten autobiography and its translation from German, as well as his testimony.

Baur described his last conversation with Hitler which took place on April 30, 1945, shortly before the Nazi leader and his wife Eva Braun took their own lives. According to Baur, during his final days Hitler almost never left his quarters, looking old and fragile. His hands, as Baur claimed, trembled, and his intention was clear.

“Hitler met me in the hall and led me to his room. He gave me his hand and said: ’Baur, I want to say goodbye to you, I want to thank you for all the years of service,’” the pilot recalled.

Then, according to Baur’s testimony,

  • Hitler wanted to give him his favorite painting – Rembrandt’s portrait of the Prussian King Frederick the Great – as a gift.

Baur, in his turn, tried to persuade Hitler not to commit suicide saying that in this case “everything would fall apart.”

“My soldiers cannot and do not want to hold out any longer. I can’t take it anymore,” was Hitler’s response.

He revealed to Baur that he had ordered to burn his and Braun’s corpses “immediately” after death. Hitler explained this wish by the fear that their bodies would have a similar fate to that of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress whose bodies, after their April 1945 execution, were hung up for public viewing in Milan.

A couple of hours after the conversation, which he spent burning the documents and preparing to leave Berlin, Baur returned to collect the Rembrandt masterpiece and found out that “everything was over:” Hitler and Braun’s corpses had already been set on fire.

“Several SS guards ran up and down excitedly. I asked, ‘Is it over?’ – ‘Yes’. ‘Where are the bodies?’ ’They [the bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun] have been wrapped in blankets, doused with gasoline, and they are already burning upstairs in the garden of the Imperial Chancellery. Then I was told that Hitler had shot himself. <…> Someone said: ‘We need to wipe up the pools of blood’…”

  • On May 13, 1945, employees of the Smersh counterintelligence department in the garden of the Reich Chancellery discovered the burial place of the charred corpses of A. Hitler and E. Braun, “the authenticity of which was confirmed by numerous forensic medical examinations,” the FSB said, commenting on the declassified documents.
  • Hans Baur was sentenced to 25 years in prison in the Soviet Union in 1950 but was released five years later. He was imprisoned by the French for about two years until 1957. Later that year he returned to West Germany where he died in 1993 at the age of 95.

Over the years, Hitler’s suicide story has been disputed. In 2009, American researchers claimed that the skull fragment shown at an exhibition in Moscow was not Hitler’s. The head of the FSB’s archives, Vasily Hristoforov refuted those claims at the time saying that the Soviet forensic investigation had clearly proved the authenticity of the remains.

Hitler’s remains were buried in Magdeburg, Germany in 1946, but the Soviet government grew concerned that the burial site could become a shrine for Hitler’s followers, so it secretly exhumed the grave in 1970 and destroyed its contents. Moscow decided to keep the fragments of the skull and jaw that had been used to identify the Nazi leader.

Source: RT

Header: Hans Baur (1897 – 1993) German Luftwaffe pilot, private pilot to Adolf Hitler. S.P. 3.5 x 5.5 b/w, an image of Baur in uniform.

Notes:

The Untold Back Story Of Hitler’s Death

What did Macron promise Muslims to get their votes?

“Is the Muslim vote decisive?”, the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud asked himsel in the French weekly Le Point.

Yes, judging by Macron’s victory (85 per cent of Muslims voted for him) and seeing what had happened the week before the second round vote.

Speaking with The New York Times, Éric Coquerel, an MP from Mélenchon’s party who won 69 percent of the Islamic vote in the first round, said Muslim voters would benefit Macron.

For Julien Talpin, sociologist at the National Center for Scientific Research, the mobilization of Muslims is “something completely new”.

  • On Friday, the Grand Mosque of Paris organized a dinner after Ramadan, the iftar, for Macron’s re-election. “How can a president who never wishes a Merry Christmas to the French people, in this country of Christian origins, go to the great mosque in Paris for the end of the Ramadan fast?”, some users wondered. No bishop could have said to the faithful about him “vote for him”, it would have been considered an “interference”. But the Islamic vote now dominates France.

Also in the mosque in Paris was Christophe Castaner, Macron’s former interior minister and president of his party. Rugby star Frédéric Michalak invited votes for Macron by posting a photo of his sister, who converted to Islam. For his part, Macron on Friday evening courted the Islamic vote with a visit to the great banlieue of Saint-Denis. Earlier, Macron had complimented a Muslim girl, “veiled and feminist”. And as sociologist Mathieu Bock-Côté explained, “Macron wants to send the message that the veil is a symbol of openness to tolerance to target the electorate of the Muslim community”. French newspapers, such as Le Parisien, interviewed Muslim voters after Macron’s reconfirmation: “My mother will be able to wear the veil …”.

In the first round, 69 percent of Muslims had voted for Mélenchon’s left.

Votes then went to Macron (in Saint-Denis, Macron got 70 percent of the votes).

Even Islamist Amar Lasfar, leader of the Muslims of France and who previously defended Sharia law and accused Jews of “subjugating the West”, asked to vote Macron.

The rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris also called for a vote for Macron in the second round. The “Muslims of France”, the abbreviation of the Muslim Brotherhood, appealed to vote Macron. And even the current Minister of the Interior, Gerald Darmanin, paid a visit to the Grand Mosque to praise the conversion of a general of Napoleon to Islam.

And the votes for Macron have arrived.

Trappes voted for Macron 74 percent, twenty points above the national average. In Roubaix, 70 percent for Macron. In Grigny, 70 percent for Macron. And 77 percent in La Courneuve, 74 percent in Bondy, 80 percent in Colombes, 83.5 percent in Les Lilas, 75.5 percent in Bobigny… These are the symbolic cities of Saint-Denis.

Like the provincial cities, Trappes:

“70 percent Muslims, 40-50 different nationalities which take on the appearance of some Lebanese localities, microworlds enclosed within the perimeter of another religious reality and civilization. The ethnic grid of the Balkans is also not far away ”.

And Roubaix, the city already 40 per cent Muslim…

In Trappes in the first round Mélenchon had made it through with 60.61 per cent and Macron had remained stuck at 16.6. In the second round, Macron at 74.1 … Among the great factors of the re-election, therefore, Macron had the votes of Mélenchon which in turn represent up to 80 percent of the votes of the suburbs and other Islamic strongholds such as the “93 ”(Saint-Denis), Roubaix, Trappes…. In Mulhouse, where the Muslim community is already 25 per cent of the population, Macron had 65 per cent of the votes.

  • In the northern districts of Marseille, which had largely voted Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round, it is Macron who wins. These are the neighborhoods where a large part of the Islamic community lives (30 percent of the total population of the city) and which group together a quarter of all the inhabitants of the city. Just read from Le Figaro: “The northern districts of Marseille, a ‘small country’ where communitarianism is a daily reality …”.

“Muslims are not afraid to take a political position unlike the Catholic Church,” writes Christine Boutin. “Yup ! The Great Substitution is on the way ”. And in fact, in an article on the elections in France, entitled “Algeria has chosen its field”, the Algerian newspaper El Watan writes that “the two candidates in the second round are aware that Algerians can change the outcome of the elections” .

And in exchange for votes, just to give an example, the communities obtain the necessary permits to open mega mosques.

  • The Mirail mosque, which can accommodate 4,000 worshipers, opened in Toulouse on Monday. Larger than that of Empalot, inaugurated in 2018 and which can accommodate 2,800 faithful, or that of Al Salam (3,500 faithful), “the Mirail mosque becomes the largest place of worship in Toulouse, all faiths put together”. A 22-meter minaret that lights up during prayer. Three prayer rooms (which can accommodate 1,500, 1,300 and 600 people respectively), nine Arabic classrooms, meeting rooms, a library, offices, kitchens, ablution rooms for men and women, and even … a gym … 6,500 faithful were present at the inauguration.

“Voters will have to choose between pursuing an ‘open society’, defended by macronism in the name of globalization and universalism, or returning to the priority nation”, Ivan Rioufol wrote yesterday in Le Figaro.

  • “France in 2050 will not have the same fate depending on whether it has accepted or not to merge into the ethnic and cultural diversity brought by the spirit of the times, but rejected by the nationals”.

Political Islam only has everything to gain from what they call an “open society”, which in reality, as Jerome Fourquet said, is more of an “archipelago”.

This is demonstrated by the weekly Marianne, which on presidential day informs us that the French advertising companies have given up promoting a book on the Muslim Brotherhood, considering the subject too “political” for the electoral period. While an agreement was reached, advertising companies JCDecaux and Insert canceled a poster campaign in Paris.

On page 217 of Submission by Michel Houellebecq, who imagined France in 2022 in this 2015 novel, we read:

“Europe that was the pinnacle of human civilization literally committed suicide within a few decades”.

In 2027, perhaps, we will look back and think back to 2022 as the last chance for France. And I fear it will be too late.

Source: Giulio Meotti via Arutz Sheva

Was COVID-19 a springboard for the West’s war against Russia in Ukraine? Part 1

Russia/China war drills in Siberia.

  • “The result of a war (against Russia) would never result in the destruction of the main power of Russia, which rests upon millions of Russians of the Greek [Orthodox] confession. Even if separated by treaty, these would just as soon reunite, like the parts of a splattered drop of mercury.” – Otto Von Bismarck
  • “Whatever the rationale, it’s imperative that the United States suppress any lingering desire to bring Ukraine (and Georgia) into the NATO alliance. Nothing is more likely to bring large numbers of Russian boots onto the Ukrainian ground than the idea that Washington wants to have NATO troops right on the Russian border and in spitting distance of the country’s historic Black Sea naval base in Crimea.” – William Blum 2014
  • “It would be impossible to list the promising areas of cooperation between Russia and China (…) when the West is most flagrantly eroding the entire bedrock that the international system stands on, we… two great powers have to think about our future in this world.” – Sergey Lavrov 2022

The world has been plunged into uncertainty and increased economic hardship in Europe since February 24th when Russia took the decision to push back against NATO expansionism and conduct an incursion into Ukraine. Since this date the Western-centric information war has been savage, deleting Russian or Russia-sympathetic channels from our media sphere in the very early days. The US-led economic/sanction war has been swift and unilaterally sadistic and with equally devastating rebound from Russia that will decimate the Global North energy markets and perhaps fatally wound global dollar supremacy.

In the early days of the Russian military operation debates raged over the legality of such action and many in the independent media were already dismissing the Russian military intervention as nothing more than another measure to further subjugate the “little people” and to ensure the “Great Reset” in the West following on from the demise of the COVID-19 narrative and the rise of the Resistance, particularly the Truckers Freedom Rally 2022 originating in Canada that had thrown a spanner in the Great Reset wheel.

According to these pundits the West and Russia, China were all “in it together” to impose a technocratic tyranny that would erase nation state sovereignty and unify the transnational oligarchy cabal in the depopulation, AI, digital surveillance, ID2020, Agenda 2030 program.

My purpose in compiling the information in this series of articles or resource collection (this is part one of a two or three part series) will be to propose alternative theories to this “all one bloc” theory and to offer the idea that perhaps the Covid19 two year hiatus had a hybrid purpose – including the paving of the road to war with Russia by a Western-dominated health/technocratic and supremacist predator class.

In Part One I will explore the legality of the Russian special operation in Ukraine, the more recent origins and the historic background which will also be expanded upon in subsequent parts of the series.

The legality of the Russian military campaign in Ukraine

According to Christopher Black, international criminal and human rights lawyer who is Chair of the Legal Committee for the International Committee for the Defence of Slobodan Milosevic and vice-chair of the overall committee, and was Lead Defence Counsel, at the Rwanda War Crimes Tribunal in the case of General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, Chief of Staff, Rwanda Gendarmerie and won his acquittal on all charges in 2014 – Russia was operating within international law:

In my opinion Russia acted in accordance with international law under Article 51 of the UN Charter for the following reasons;

  • First, the Kiev regime was mounting a major offensive with NATO’s help against the Donbass Republics with the intent of destroying them. Intensive shelling had already begun days before Russia acted, the shelling of civilian buildings and infrastructure, which resulted in scores of thousands of civilians fleeing into Russia. During that period the Kiev regime also attempted to assassinate a leader of the Republics with a car bomb. Russia had no choice but to protect the Donbass peoples and since the Security Council could do nothing, and the EU and NATO were supporting the Kiev offensive against the Donbass, Russia was the only nation that could act.

Black points out the hypocrisy of NATO accusations that Russia was acting aggressively and without provocation detailing the lawlessness of US-dominated “rules based international order” that is beholden to US allied rules rather than to any true justice-based central jurisdiction that the UN ceased to provide long ago. Black argues:

Have any of the other American wars been legal? None of them All of them are in violation of Article 2(4). The list is long. When I first drafted this I set out all the invasions of nations the Americans conducted since then but to list them here would turn this into a thick book of American crimes, from Korea to Vietnam, from Cuba to Congo, from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Latin America, to Yugoslavia, Syria, Lebanon. But one crime must be added to all their war crimes and aggressions, the crime of hypocrisy. For all of their aggressions were conducted for reasons of domination and exploitation of resources and peoples, for profit. There was never any legal justification ever offered, as there were none. None of them were conducted in self-defence, whereas Russia’s action clearly is.

Black goes on to say that the Russian operation was justified under the auspices of the Caroline Doctrine established in 1837 by the US and UK to allow the right of a sovereign nation to self defence if the following two conditions were met:

1. The use of force must be necessary because the threat is imminent and thus pursuing peaceful alternatives is not an option, and,

2. The response must be proportionate to the threat.

In this case the threat was more than imminent. It was on-going and increasing. The only effective and proportional defensive response was to destroy the offensive forces being deployed. These forces include not only Kiev regime government forces but also the nationalist, Nazi brigades supporting and spearheading the Kiev offensive and all the NATO equipment being supplied to them to conduct the Kiev offensive.

Dmitry Orlov, Russian-American engineer and geopolitical analyst was equally convinced of Russia’s right to self-defence:

  • Russia had the full legal right to invade the Ukraine from several perspectives: to defend its allies in Donetsk and Lugansk; to defend itself against Ukrainian WMDs, which the Ukrainian president threatened to start producing at the Munich Security Conference; and to stop NATO from continuing its advance toward Russian borders in violation of its previous commitment of “not an inch to the east.” Russia exercised its right of self-defense under article 51 of part 7 of the UN Charter. The Ukraine had forfeited its right to territorial integrity under the 1970 UN Declaration by refusing to honor the rights of its Russian-speaking population. It also refused to renew its Friendship Treaty with Russia and therefore no longer had a defined border with Russia that Russia was obligated to honor.

The origins of the Russian military campaign

The root causes of the war in Ukraine were expertly summarised by Swiss journalist and politician, Guy Mettan:

  • In 2020, the escalation of tensions is being held back by COVID and the US election campaign. Then events get heated in 2021 with the inauguration of Joe Biden, who played a pivotal role with John McCain in the Maidan putsch, and whose son Hunter did juicy business in Kiev during the Poroshenko era. A downward spiral begins:
  • March 17, 2021: Biden calls President Putin a killer • March 18/19, 2021: Blinken and Sullivan try to dissuade the Chinese from allying with Russia • March 24, 2021: Zelensky says he will retake Crimea and Donbass • March 25: Russia begins gathering troops near the Ukrainian border • April 13: Biden recalls his warships in the Black Sea and calls Putin to propose a summit in Geneva • June 16: Biden-Putin summit in Geneva, without result • December 15: Putin and Xi Jinping say their alliance goes beyond an alliance. On the same day, Russia proposed two peace treaties to the United States and demanded a written response (to avoid falling into the trap of the oral commitments given to Gorbachev in 1991). Ukrainian drones are fired at civilian populations in Donbass and near Crimea. The Russians are massing their troops.
  • February 4 2022: Putin and Xi Jinping claim that their friendship has no limits and that there is no forbidden area of cooperation between China and Russia.
  • February 7-12: French and German mediations fail, because neither Macron nor Scholz are willing/able to convince Zelensky to implement the Minsk agreements, the last chance for peace. • February 24: The Russians launch their military operations in Ukraine to « denazify, demilitarize and neutralize » the country.

I have added emphasis to the timeline in that the Biden-driven escalation started in 2021 just as the Covid project was gathering momentum after its launch in March 2022 – a project designed to drive the anti-war movement, such as it is, underground and to redirect focus into the realm of combatting a manufactured and state-media-amplified personal health terror threat. Even before President Biden’s presidency and pre-2020 we had seen the rise of Russophobia in the US, EU and UK. In the US there was Russiagate and the Magnitsky Act, in the UK the Skripal poisoning mystery and in the EU the MH17 tragedy blamed on Russia – I will be going into more depth with reference to the timing of these events in Part 2.

Many other researchers and analysts have also covered this background to the Russian “denazification” project in Ukraine. I would recommend a study carried out by Maxim Grigoriev – Director of the Foundation for the Study of Democracy – into the war crimes and ethnic cleansing pogroms carried out by Ukrainian ultra-nationalist and Nazi forces against the people of Lugansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine since the US-led violent regime change in 2014. The PDF version of this forensic report can be found here.

Western media had previously highlighted the rise of Nazism and Ultra-nationalism in Ukraine post 2014 but since February 24th they have been increasingly dishonest in their portrayal of events, effectively disappearing the threat of a Nazi renaissance to Russian speaking civilians in Ukraine and Crimea and dishonestly reporting on the conflict. The (London) Times even went so far as to help shift the Nazi label onto the Russian forces and fash-wash the real Nazi brigades.

Another excellent source of background especially to the CIA and Israeli involvement in the fostering of Nazism in Ukraine since WW2 is “Ukraine and the New Great Game”, written by David Livingstone. Excerpt from this very well researched essay:

  • As is well known, the CIA thought highly of various former Nazis who they believed could be employed during the Cold War to fight their shared enemy: communism. To that end, thousands of Nazi scientists were brought over in Operation Paperclip. The CIA hired Reinhard Gehlen, who was chief of the military intelligence service for the Nazis on the eastern front during World War II, after which he was sponsored by the CIA to establish the anticommunist Gehlen Organisation, before becoming founding president of the BND, West Germany’s federal intelligence service.[17] The CIA helped free Hitler’s favorite commando, Otto Skorzeny, who worked closely with Gehlen, and whose activities during the Cold War ranged from Franco’s Spain to South America, including a stint working for Mossad, the Israeli secret service.[18] Skorzeny was a key figure in the network known as the Fascist International, composed of various right-wing extremists, who serviced the CIA’s covert activities around the world, including Condor in South America, the Golden Triangle heroin trade in South-East Asia, and Operation Gladio in Italy.[19]

A more recent statement from Turkish analyst Mehmet Ali Güller in an article published by the Turkish edition of Cumhuriyet:

  • “The United States tried to encircle Russia from the west and south: starting from the Baltic region, descending from Eastern Europe to the western Black Sea coast, from there along the Black Sea through Georgia to the Caucasus. It was assumed that this line would reach Kazakhstan and Central Asia when certain conditions for this would arise,”

Guller considered the Russian operation to be a pre-emptive strike against the US-led NATO siege of Russia’s western flank. The analyst also described the US strategy to encircle China in a wide arc descending into Central Asia, Pakistan, India and the Indian Ocean and with potential to extend into Japan.

Professor Emeritus in the Department of Russian Studies Stephen Cohen explains regarding the possibility of a thermonuclear war between the US and Russia:

If the civil war in Ukraine starts again. military aspect. If the ceasefire fails. If Kiev again attacks the Donbass. If Russia feels the need to help Donbass again by military means, then NATO is discussing the possibility of NATO forces entering Western Ukraine. What will it mean? That would mean American-led NATO troops in western Ukraine, whether on the ground or in the air, it doesn’t matter. Russian troops in the air or on the ground – and this will be a modern version of the Cuban missile crisis. ( Cohen 2014)

Historic background to the Russian special operation in Ukraine

In this section I would like to provide insights and links to resources detailing the CIA/MI6 operations to occupy Ukraine and encircle Russia with a Nazi and Ultra-nationalist threat to national security since WW2.

I highly recommend watching Ukraine on Fire (2016) directed by Oliver Stone – it is being disappeared from NATOTube of course but can be found on other platforms like Odysee. The unofficial follow-up, Revealing Ukraine (2019) can be watched here.

Taken from ‘Ukraine and the Great New Game’

  • The United States collaborated with Chiang Kai-shek and South Korean intelligence in founding the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL) established in South Korea in 1954. The WACL emerged in 1966, when the APACL merged with another fascist organization, the Anti-Bolshevik Block of Nations (ABN), a co-ordinating center for anti-Communist émigré political organizations from Soviet and other socialist countries.[23]
  • The ABN took its current name in 1946 and claims direct descent from the Committee of Subjugated Nations, which was formed in 1943 by Hitler’s allies, including the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The roots of the OUN/UPA may be traced to the militantly anti-Communist and nationalist Ukrainian underground founded by Colonel Eugen Konovalets in the 1920s. Although opposed to Stalinism, the group was Fascist, with strong links to the German intelligence service of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. The League of Nations had publicly condemned the OUN as a terrorist syndicate and Polish courts had handed down death sentences to OUN leaders Mykola Lebed (1909 – 1998) and Stepan Bandera (1909 – 1959) for their roles in the 1934 murder of Polish Interior Minister General Bronislav Pieracki, among others. Once released in 1939, after his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, Bandera organized OUN sympathizers into armed squadrons under an Abwehr program code-named Nachtigall, or Nightingale.

Journalist Wayne Masden wrote in 2016:

  • The recent declassification of over 3800 documents by the Central Intelligence Agency provides detailed proof that since 1953 the CIA operated two major programs intent on not only destabilizing Ukraine but Nazifying it with followers of the World War II Ukrainian Nazi leader Stepan Bandera.

“The purpose of Project AERODYNAMIC is to provide for the exploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance for cold war and hot war purposes. Such groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (UHVR) and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN), the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (ZPUHVR) in Western Europe and the United States, and other organizations such as the OUN/B will be utilized”.

The CIA admitted in a 1970 formerly secret document that it had been in contact with the ZPUHVR since 1950.

The Last American Vagabond – Not Just Azov: Documents Prove The CIA Has Been Cultivating Fascism In Ukraine Since At Least 1948.

-Dropping atomic bombs on major cities of the Soviet Union

In 1976, Paul Wolfowitz [1] was one of the architects of the “Team B” charged by President Gerald Ford with assessing the Soviet threat [2]. He issued a delirious report accusing the Soviet Union of preparing to take over “global hegemony”. The Cold War changed its nature: it was no longer a question of isolating (containment) the USSR, it had to be stopped in order to save the “free world”.

Prof. Michel Chossudovsky – targeting the USSR – While the US and the Soviet Union were allies during WWII, Prof. Alex Wellerstein documents U.S. “war preparations” against the USSR which took place in August 1945 “before the war was officially over”. And then what happened: The formulation of a diabolical project released by the War Department (declassified) on September 15, 1945 which consisted in dropping atomic bombs on major cities of the Soviet Union.

William Blum – Ukraine and the Myth of Soviet Expansionism (2014)

Excerpts from William Blum’s article:

Dick Cheney – one starting point that can be considered is what former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Robert Gates says in his recently published memoir:

  • “When the Soviet Union was collapsing in late 1991, [Defense Secretary Dick Cheney] wanted to see the dismemberment not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.”

That can serve as an early marker for the new cold war while the corpse of the old one was still warm. Soon thereafter, NATO began to surround Russia with military bases, missile sites, and NATO members, while yearning for perhaps the most important part needed to complete the circle – Ukraine.

President Obama recently declared: “The strong condemnation that it’s received from around the world indicates the degree to which Russia is on the wrong side of history on this.” Marvelous … coming from the man who partners with jihadists and Nazis and has waged war against seven nations. In the past half century is there any country whose foreign policy has received more bitter condemnation than the United States? If the United States is not on the wrong side of history, it may be only in the history books published by the United States.

Most Americans and members of Congress have convinced themselves that the US/NATO encirclement of Russia is benign – we are, after all, the Good Guys – [..] Washington thinks in terms of who could pose a barrier to the ever-expanding empire adding to its bases and other military necessities.

1974 – The Kissinger Report – Exposing the Global Depopulation Control Agenda

  • The worldwide application of the strategies recommended in The Kissinger Report has resulted in regional population growth rates decelerating so fast that they are already causing severe economic and social problems in Europe, the former Soviet Union, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. Many developing nations are now aging even more rapidly than the developed world, which foretells even more severe problems for their relatively underdeveloped economies. The developed nations had the opportunity to become rich before they became old; if a nation becomes old first, it will never become rich. – Brian Clowes PhD

1997 Zbigniew Brezinsky – The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives

Brezinsky in 1976 – Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technotronic Era:

  • The technotronic era suggests the gradual emergence of a more controlled society. Such a society will be dominated by an elite that is not limited by traditional values. It will soon be possible to organize almost continuous monitoring of each citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about a citizen. These files will be subject to immediate transfer to the authorities.

The former national security advisor to Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981 and top foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama, Brzezinski wrote that US policy should be “unapologetic” in perpetuating “America’s own dominant position for at least a generation and preferably longer still.” (AntiWar)

The Grand Chessboard proposes the balkanisation of Russia and its forced decoupling from any EU trade collaboration with an emphasis on Germany. Brezinsky’s Chessboard holds the keys to the origins of this conflict, he wrote:

  • “Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”
  • “However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.”

2004 – ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine

Washington’s proxy regime in Ukraine was finalised after the 2014 coup but powerful members of that regime had already been fostered during the so-called Orange Revolution ten years prior.

Andriy Parubiy who is a co-founder of the Neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine (subsequently renamed Svoboda) was appointed Secretary of the National Security and National Defense Committee (RNBOU). A key position which overseas the Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces, Law Enforcement, National Security and Intelligence. The RNBOU is central decision-making body. While it is formally headed by the President, it is run by the Secretariat with a staff of 180 people including defense, intelligence and national security experts.

Parubiy was one of the main leaders behind the Orange Revolution in 2004. His organization was funded by the West. He is referred to by the Western media as the “kommandant” of the EuroMaidan movement.

Andriy Parubiy together with party leader Oleh Tyahnybok is a follower of Ukrainian Nazi Stepan Bandera, who collaborated in the mass murderer of Jews and Poles during World War II. (Michel Chossudovsky)

  • “Ukraine’s was the second “coloured revolution” in the former Soviet Union after the “rose revolution” in Georgia a year earlier. Washington’s plans to trigger a domino effect in the Russia-friendly regimes in the former Soviet states faltered in Kyrgyzstan. The “tulip revolution” staged in that Central Asian state in March 2005 helped topple the government but failed to change Kyrgyzstan’s pro-Moscow orientation.
  • Georgia and Ukraine became linchpins in the U.S. strategy of encircling Russia with pro-Western “new democracies”. Washington vigorously lobbied to grant North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) membership to both countries and used them to infuse new life into GUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova), the loose pro-Western grouping of the former Soviet states. GUAM was to play the double role of acting as a cordon sanitaire between Europe and Russia and as a new energy corridor to transport Caspian oil and gas to Europe by bypassing Russia.” (Vladimir Radyuhin)

2009 – The Good Club

Members of the Good Club (GC) were fourteen of the world’s most powerful oligarchs led by Bill Gates to “save the world”.

  • The names of some of the members are familiar figures: Bill Gates, George Soros, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, David Rockefeller and Ted Turner. But there are others, too, like business giants Eli and Edythe Broad, who are equally wealthy but less well known. All told, its members are worth $125bn. (Guardian)
  • Recent developments suggest that “Depopulation” is an integral part of the so-called COVID mandates including the lockdown policies and the mRNA “vaccine”. Flash back to 2009. According to the Wall Street Journal: “Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population”. In May 2009, the Billionaire philanthropists met behind closed doors at the home of the president of The Rockefeller University in Manhattan. This Secret Gathering was sponsored by Bill Gates. They called themselves “The Good Club” (Chossudovsky)

It is worth noting that Russia had no representatives in the Good Club- this same group of GC billionaires have been actively involved in designing the COVID-19 lockdown policies globally, the mRNA vaccine program and the “Great Reset”. (Rielpolitik)

2014 – Wesley Clark on the Cold War and American foreign policy in relation to Russia and Syria

In 2014 General Wesley Clark was interviewed by Salon to talk about his recently published book ‘Don’t Wait for the Next War: Rethinking America’s Global Mission’. Salon asked Clark to explain how Washington has adjusted to the post-Soviet era, Clark responded :

  • For 40 years, during the Cold War, the basic construct of American foreign policy, which President Eisenhower had laid out, basically said that even though Democrats and Republicans differed, they had to put those differences aside enough to be able to work together to overcome [the Soviet Union]. […] At the end of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union in 1991, there were three contrasting views: there was the Democratic view that said … we’ve probably got too many [military forces], but as long as they’re here, let’s use them to stop conflict, save people’s lives and do good works around the world. The Republican mainstream view was: We won; it’s over; let’s bring these forces home. And there was also a minority Republican view that said:…minority Republican view that said:
  • “What we learned in the Gulf War was that we can now use military force; we don’t have to follow a military strategy of deterrence. We can actually use these forces like we did in kicking Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. We can finish the job on him and … get rid of these old Soviet surrogate states in the Middle East before the next great superpower comes along.” (emphasis added)
  • Then 9/11 happened. Now we had an enemy. America came back together again. But, unfortunately, it was that minority Republican view that seemed to take hold and grip the nation.

This interview was in 2014, in September 2015 Russia intervened in Syria where a beleaguered Syrian government, military and allied forces had been defending themselves against a US/UK-led proxy terrorist invasion and confronting the West’s barbarism in the form of economic sanctions. Suddenly Syria became the stage upon which Russia would demonstrate its superpower capability militarily and in diplomacy. The window of opportunity to prevent exactly this, as described by Clark, had slammed shut. Washington and London had squandered billions on a regime change project in Syria that had failed and empowered their nemesis – Russia.

2018 – Leaked diplomatic cable written by Benjamin Norman a British representative in charge of Middle East Affairs at the U.S Embassy in Washington DC.

Benjamin Norman – reports in a confidential diplomatic telegram of the first meeting of the “Small American Group on Syria” (United States, Great Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and Jordan), held in Washington on January 11, 2018. Hugh Cleary (Head of the Near and Middle East Department of the Foreign Office ), Jérôme Bonnafont (Director ANMO / North Africa and Middle East at the Quai d’Orsay), David Satterfield (US Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East) and Jordanian Nawaf Tell and Saudi Jamal al-Aqeel attended the January 11 meeting in Washington. The American opened the meeting, stating that a second meeting would be held in Paris on January 23. (Global Research)

  • Unrestricted agreement of all members of the “Small Group” meeting to “no longer be satisfied with Lavrov’s honeyed words, in order to put Moscow under pressure”. For Satterfield, it is about getting the Russians to let Assad go, “through meetings of the Security Council and a broad public communication campaign,” believing that the announced re-election of Vladimir Putin positively undermined the Russian position.

***

In Part Two I will explore the sequence of events that led to Washington’s 2014 coup in Ukraine and the aftershocks that hit the region. This will include the unprecedented expansion of the soft-power complex in Ukraine led by the International Monetary Fund. I will look at the events just prior to the launch of the Covid “pandemic” project that might suggest that it was to be weaponised to condition and isolate Western populations leading up to NATO’s long planned provocations in Ukraine and the war with Russia. This is not to distract from the purpose of COVID as a portal to usher in the Great Reset and Agenda 2030 etc. Finally I will examine the evidence that might persuade us that Russia is in fact opposing Western globalism and the Western technocratic “Great Reset” and forming a non-aligned Eastern bloc to topple US unipolarity in favour of a multipolar world. Food for thought.

  • At the end of the Cold War in 1991, columnist Charles Krauthammer writing in Foreign Affairs, declared that the United States was the unchallenged superpower and was enjoying a “unipolar moment.” Francis Fukuyama (channeling Hegel) envisioned the “end of history” where democracy would be universal. Others predicted that there would be no more “great power wars.” And the George H.W. Bush administration in its defense planning guidance in 1992 (largely written by Paul Wolfowitz) suggested that the primary goal of U.S. national security policy was “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,” meaning “to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.” (Francis P Sempa)
  • The East will continue its accelerated rise. The balance of the world will gravitate towards this new magnetic pole and away from the West’s New World Order, its gigantic hypocrisy, war fanaticism, extortionate austerity initiatives and its hyper-gangsterism. (Natalie Baldwin)

Source: Vanessa Beeley

Sweden to reject referendum on NATO membership

Sweden does not plan to hold a referendum on the subject of NATO membership if its Parliament approves of the measure, Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson announced on Thursday, suggesting that putting the matter to a vote would be a “bad idea.”

“I don’t think it is an issue that is suitable for a referendum,” the Swedish leader told reporters, implying that Parliament’s support was sufficient.

“There is a lot of information about national security that is confidential, so there are important issues in such a referendum that cannot be discussed and important facts that cannot be put on the table,” she explained.

The Swedish parliament is conducting an overview of security policy with plans to release a report on the subject by the middle of next month.

With a majority of Parliament reportedly backing membership in NATO, Andersson’s own party, the Social Democrats, are considered the primary obstacle to Stockholm signing on to the 30-country alliance. However, Ulf Kristersson, head of the leading opposition party, the Moderates, agrees that a referendum is a bad idea.

“Voters … are not naive about Russia,” he told Aftonbladet earlier in the week during a debate with the head of the Left Party, Nooshi Dadgostar, claiming it was “very clear the Swedish voters have understood what happened” on the day Russia invaded Ukraine “and have drawn their conclusions.”

The Left Party is against joining NATO, and Dadgostar argued Swedes should have a say in the matter, stating that it “has to go back to the voters, there has to be very strong democratic support in this question.”

  • A poll published by Aftonbladet last week indicated 57% of Swedes supported NATO membership, a 6% increase from the previous month.

Sweden and Finland are planning to simultaneously submit membership applications to NATO in mid-May, local media have reported, citing government sources.

The Nordic countries’ leaders claim Russia’s invasion of Ukraine altered the “whole security landscape” of the region. Moscow, however, has warned against such a move, suggesting it will be forced to strengthen its regional defenses should NATO expand to its borders. While Sweden had initially planned to wait until the end of the month to publish its security analysis, Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde cited Finland’s already-published report as the reason for stepping up her country’s timetable, declaring that “there is now a lot of pressure” for Stockholm to release its own conclusions.

  • However, polls indicate Finnish support for NATO membership is markedly higher (68%) than it is in Sweden.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared on Thursday that the alliance was prepared to back Ukraine’s fight against Russia for “years” and to update the nation’s weapons systems to modern “NATO-standard weapons and systems that will also require more training,” even as Russia warned that continuing to supply heavy weaponry to Kiev would pose a threat to European security and “provoke instability.”

Moscow earlier this week accused NATO of “essentially going to war with Russia through a proxy and arming that proxy” following the destruction of a Ukrainian arms depot packed with foreign weapons in Zaporozhye. The Pentagon rejected the claim.

The alliance has doubled down on its support for Kiev, with the US hosting a 40-country meeting in Germany to bring even non-NATO nations on board to support the conflict.

Source: RT

EU state halts COVID vaccination

Denmark has declared an end to its COVID-19 vaccination drive for now, becoming the first country to formally halt inoculations as officials point to increasingly strong immunity among residents.

The Danish Health Authority announced the decision earlier this week, saying that due to vaccinations and infections, “total immunity of the population is therefore high,” and that its vaccine drive would be wound down over the coming weeks.

“Spring has arrived, vaccine coverage in the Danish population is high, and the epidemic has reversed,” the agency said in a statement.

“Therefore, the National Board of Health is now ending the broad vaccination efforts against COVID-19 for this season.”

  • Though it added that those who wished to complete their current round of vaccines would be able to do so, the health authority said it would no longer invite residents to make appointments for the shot beginning May 15.

However, officials continued to recommend “vaccination for people at particularly increased risk,” who will have access to certain immunization sites that will remain open across Denmark, and warned that a new vaccine campaign may be launched next fall.

“The Danish Health and Medicines Authority’s assessment is that there will probably be a need to vaccinate against COVID-19 again in the autumn,” the statement said, noting that the agency also expects to see “an increase in infection again as we go from autumn to winter.”

The country’s vaccination campaign was launched in late 2020 and has immunized a sizable majority of its 5.8 million citizens to date, according to the government, while 3.6 million have received booster doses.

Copenhagen scrapped most of its pandemic restrictions back in February, arguing the virus no longer posed a serious threat to its healthcare system, and has now become the first nation in the world to end its mass vaccination program – at least for the moment.

Despite the warnings about the fall and winter, senior health official Bolette Soborg voiced optimism, arguing that Denmark is currently “in a good place” and has “control of the epidemic, which seems to be subsiding.”

Source: RT

Meta profits crash

Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms has reported a 21% drop in profits for the first quarter of this year, the company’s slowest revenue growth since going public a decade ago.

According to the First Quarter 2022 Results released on Wednesday, the company’s profit was $7.5 billion as opposed to $9.5 billion during the same period last year.

Income from operations plummeted by 28%. Total revenue however rose 7% to $27.9 billion.

  • The results follow Meta’s bleak financial report for the Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 released in February, when the company also posted an 8% drop in profits and slowing user growth.
  • The figures led to Meta’s stock plummeting more than 20% and its market value plunging more than $230 billion in the company’s biggest-ever one-day crash.

The losses in the two quarters are the company’s first back-to-back profit declines in over a decade, with a growth rate now below levels seen since it went public in 2012.

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg remained upbeat, however, saying that “We made progress this quarter across a number of key company priorities and we remain confident in the long-term opportunities and growth that our product roadmap will unlock.”

  • The social media network reported a slight increase in the number of active users logging on daily and monthly, which helped prop up the revenue, with Zuckerberg saying that he was “proud of how our products are serving people around the world.”
  • The company recently changed course and bet on virtual reality with the launch of the Metaverse, an online video game that allows people to build and explore virtual worlds.

Meta started spending heavily on related products like virtual-reality goggles.

However, augmented reality hasn’t demonstrated solid returns yet.

Earlier this month Meta Platforms announced it would charge Metaverse creators around 47.5% on sales of digital assets and experiences made inside the firm’s virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds.

Source: RT

Musk may fail in Twitter mission – Kremlin

Billionaire entrepreneur and the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk is unlikely to bring the “free speech” he had promised to the platform, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said, expressing doubts whether a “full palette” of opinions could be presented on any Western social media.

“Russia’s attitude towards this company is based on the actions of this company, on censorship, selective repressive actions against the company’s clients, on the distortion and manipulation of information,” Peskov stated on Thursday.

“There’s a question about whether a full free palette of different points of view is possible on Western social networks. We doubt this.”

“Let’s see what happens under the new owner. Now, given that this is a global company, we have already heard official voices from Europe that they will not allow absolute freedom there,” Peskov added, apparently referring to a warning made by EU Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton to Musk.

  • The senior EU official cautioned the billionaire against being too lax on content moderation, suggesting the platform could face a continental ban should it fail to abide by the bloc’s rules.

The EU has recently adopted the so-called ‘Digital Services Act’, a package of regulations designed to force social network platforms to police their content much more aggressively and to cooperate closer with regulators.

  • “We welcome everyone. We are open but on our conditions. At least we know what to tell him: ‘Elon, there are rules. You are welcome but these are our rules. It’s not your rules which will apply here,’” Breton told The Financial Times.

Elon Musk bought the social media platform for a staggering $44 billion on Monday, proclaiming himself a “free speech absolutist” and pledging to return Twitter to its roots as “the free speech wing of the free speech party.”

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement announcing the purchase.

The entrepreneur tuned down the rhetoric just a day later, explaining that the platform would still abide by laws restricting certain content.

“By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law,” he explained.

“If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.”

Source: RT