Cold War – Old and New

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (on screen) of Ukraine, addresses the Security Council meeting on the situation in Ukraine. “We are dealing with a State that is turning the veto of the United Nations Security Council into the right to die”, President Zelynskyy warned. If it continues, countries will rely not on international law or global institutions to ensure security, but rather, on the power of their own arms. April 2022. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe Thalif Deen January 24, 2023 UNITED NATIONS, Jan 2 2023 (IPS) – A US Senator once described Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, perhaps facetiously, as “a Winston Churchill in a tee shirt”. And last month, when he addressed the US Congress – with the presence of about 100 Senators and 435 Congressmen – he tried to re-live that moment. While most of the Senators and Congressmen were in business suits for the formal occasion, Zelensky opted for green military fatigues and...

Give yourself 38 min, and you’ll understand how extremely self-destructive the NATO/EU world’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been and why all the assumption it made was wrong. Professor Emeritus of Economics (University of Massachusetts) and founder of Democracy at Work, Richard Wolff, talks with brilliant clarity about the economic impact of the Ukraine war. He assesses the impact of Western sanctions on Russia as well as how the war has affected the West economically. And very importantly, he analyses just how destructive arms spending is for the rest of society and the working people. Here are the main themes: 0:00 Introduction 0:32 “Economic War” with Russia? 12:01 Moral significance of Western sanctions 14:20 Economic impact on the United States 21:07 Economic impact of military spending 32:21 Economic impact on Ukraine I cannot recommend this – and the acTVism Munich and The Source Channel – enough. Please share...

Baher Kamal, Human Wrongs Watch January 23, 2023 Or the perversities of the nuclear age priorities. We could help hundreds of millions of children with a fraction of the money that goes into warfare and nukes As if the 100 billion dollars that the United States has so far provided to Ukraine in both weapons and aid were not enough, the US has now started to install in Europe its brand new, more destructive nuclear warheads. The US 100 billion dollars are to be added to all the weapons and aid that 40 Washington’s ‘allies’ –Europe in particular– have been sending to Ukraine since it was invaded by Russia in February 2022. The US spending on the Ukrainian war in less than a year amounts to the desperately needed funding that the United Nations require to partially alleviate some of the horrifying suffering of over one billion human beings over...

Peter Cronau – Declassified Australia January 11, 2023 An Australian university has unearthed millions of Tweets by fake accounts pushing disinformation on the Ukraine war, Peter Cronau reports. The sample size dwarfs other studies of covert propaganda about the war on social media.  Originally published at Consortium News on November 6, 2022 A team of researchers at the University of Adelaide have found that as many as 80 percent of tweets about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine invasion in its early weeks were part of a covert propaganda campaign originating from automated fake “bot” accounts. An anti-Russia propaganda campaign originating from a “bot army” of phony automated Twitter accounts flooded the internet at the start of the war. The research shows that of the more than 5 million tweets studied, 90.2 percent (both bot and non-bot) came from accounts that were pro-Ukraine, with fewer than 7 percent of the accounts being classed as pro-Russian. The university researchers...

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov attending a meeting in Yerevan, Armenia, November 23, 2022. /CFP Glenn Diesen January 3, 2022 The 29th Ministerial Council of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) took place from December 1-2 in Poland. Established in 1994 to develop a common peace in an inclusive Europe, the OSCE has become the largest regional security organization in the world, which includes the U.S. on its western edge and Russia on its eastern. Therefore it could have played a key role in restoring peace amid the Ukraine conflict. However, the peace initiative was abandoned in favour of a hegemonic project facilitated by NATO expansionism. The war in Ukraine and the decline of the OSCE are both symptoms of the collapsing pan-European security order. Originally published at CGTN, December 1, 2022 A common Europe versus continued bloc politics In 1989, then Soviet Union leader Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev...

Martin Jacques December 28, 2022 The West could learn a great deal from China’s system of governance. It is highly unlikely this will happen, at least anytime soon. On the contrary, the West believes that its governance system is the best in the world, cannot be improved upon, and is incomparably superior to that of China. Why then is the West in rampant decline? And why has China, in contrast, enjoyed a dramatic rise over the last four decades. Have these contrasting fortunes got nothing to do with their respective governing systems? Are national success and the system of governance utterly disconnected from each other? Is the system of governance little more than an ornament of decoration, with little bearing on the performance of a nation? This is obviously nonsense. The quality of governance is fundamental to the success or failure of a country. If a country is doing well, then...

Dan Kovalik December 16, 2022 Once a Pittsburgh sister city also known for its steel industry, Donetsk, and the greater Donbas region in which it is located, has been at war since 2014. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, 14,000 people died in this conflict, even before Russia began its military operations in February. I’ve just returned from there. Before Russia’s intervention, the conflict had been between the people of that region and the government in Kiev, after an unconstitutional coup took 2014. This coup, known as “Maidan,” was — as then US Ambassador to Ukraine Victoria Nuland explained in a recorded telephone conversation — managed by the United States. Originally published by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette on November 30, 2022 The coup brought to power a pro-Western, anti-Russian, government, which contained elements which were far-right and even Nazi. The best-known element, as the Nation Magazine reported...

Peter Peverelli, TFF Associate December 7, 2022 (The text is an adaption of an earlier article on Chinasquare.be) As one of the editors of chinasquare.be, the Dutch language site for neutral news about China, I recently set out to write about the possible prohibition by the Dutch government for ASML to export chip-making machines to China, based on a directive from Washington. The Dutch Minister of Foreign Trade has publicly stated about that directive that ‘the Netherlands will not copy the US policy completely’. It is heartening to see that an EU politician is at least willing to give the impression that she is not on an American leash, but I need to add to this statement that the Dutch government had already stopped ASML from selling its high-end Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) technology to China in 2020. This is already hurting ASML’s China business. Reportedly, the number of orders from...

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin welcoming Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to a meeting at the Pentagon, Aug. 31, 2021. (DoD, Jack Sanders) In addition to advancing longstanding U.S. geo-strategic aims, it seems the proxy war in Ukraine is also being used to sharpen the imperial war machine’s claws for a looming hot war with China and/or Russia. Caitlin Johnstone December 5, 2022 Listen to a reading of this article. A surprisingly frank article in The New York Times, “Western Allies Look to Ukraine as a Testing Ground for Weapons” describes how the imperial war machine is capitalising on the U.S. proxy war to test its weapons for future use. “Ukraine has become a testing ground for state-of-the-art weapons and information systems, and new ways to use them, that Western political officials and military commanders predict could shape warfare for generations to come,” writes Lara Jakes. Jakes says “new advances in technology and...

Kenny Stancil November 28th, 2022 This escalation of U.S. hostility comes just days after the Biden administration released a Nuclear Posture Review that nonproliferation advocates said makes catastrophe more, rather than less, likely. Originally posted on Consortium News on October 31st 2022 here In what critics are calling a “dangerous escalation,” the United States is reportedly preparing to deploy up to six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to northern Australia, where they would be close enough to strike China. “The ability to deploy U.S. Air Force bombers to Australia sends a strong message to adversaries about our ability to project lethal air power,” the U.S. Air Force told “Four Corners,” a television program of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), on Sunday. Becca Wasser, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, told ABC that “having bombers that could range and potentially attack mainland China could be very important in sending a...

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, February 1945. Photo: US Army. Richard Falk – TFF Associate November 23, 2022 Disdaining Diplomacy, Seeking Victory Ever since the Ukraine War started on February 24, 2022, the NATO response, mainly articulated and materially implemented by the U.S., has been to pour vast quantities of oil on the flames of conflict, taunting Russian and its leader, increasing the scale of violence, the magnitude of human suffering, and dangerously increasing the risk of a disastrous outcome. Not only did Washington mobilize the world to denounce Russia’s ‘aggression’, but supplied a steady stream of advanced weaponry in great quantities to the Ukrainians to resist the Russian attack and even mount counterattacks. The U.S. did all it could at the UN and elsewhere to build a punitive coalition hostile to Russia but coupled this with a variety of sanctions and the demonization of Putin as a notorious...

Ukraine War Evolves: Disdaining Diplomacy, Seeking Victory Richard Falk October 27, 2022 Prefatory Note This is the third iteration of an essay on the evolution of the Ukraine War, the earlier two versions published online in Transcend Media Service (TMS) and CounterPunch. The essential argument remains: war-mongering geopolitics in the nuclear age imperils species survival and suppresses the necessity for emergency action to restore sustainable forms of ecological habitability to planet earth. Ever since the Ukraine War started on February 24, 2022, the NATO response, mainly articulated and materially implemented by the U.S., has been to pour vast quantities of oil on the flames of conflict, taunting Russia and its leader, increasing the scale of violence, the magnitude of human suffering, and dangerously increasing the risk of a disastrous outcome. Not only did Washington mobilize the world to denounce Russia’s ‘aggression’, but supplied a steady stream of advanced weaponry in...