Nothing Putin and team isn’t prepared for.
Putin Recognizes Donbass Republics, Sends Russian Military to 'Denazify' Ukraine
- Thread starter bjorb
- Start date
Nothing Putin and team isn’t prepared for.
Those tanks and vehicles are going to Arrow 22 military exercise, which is held at Niinisalo. That's nowhere near Russia's border, as these type of mechanical unit exercises are held there every year, spring and autumn. Although now there's also visiting forces from UK, US, Latvia and Estonia and the aim of the exercise is "to develop mechanised units’ operating in a multinational environment and the capability for receiving international assistance and providing host nation support." According to Finnish military, participation in these yearly exercises has been open to foreign countries since 2016.
Yeah, this matches the data about the impact of the Russian operation on Ukrainian military. The most notable losses (apart from soldiers) is tanks and artillery, 80% (or more) of each have been destroyed, so no wonder that's what's been resupplied in large quantities to Ukraine. It's not surprising that the Russians targeted the railway hubs last night. Restocking Ukraine with tanks and artillery via railroad is the most direct way that the West is attempting to indefinitely prolong the conflict, like hitting a 'restart' button.
Russia isn't happy about that. There's a good chance that the next few weeks will see an expansion of the conflict outside Ukrainian borders as this attempt at resupply continues. In recent days, Ukraine (aided by the West) has been making moves to attack supply lines inside Russia. If this continues, then it will be seen as 'fair game' for the Russians to do the same to supply lines outside Ukrainian borders.
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Biden’s Dangerous New Ukraine Endgame: No Endgame - Foreign Policy
From SF: The SouthFront team was surprised and at the same time we were encouraged by the fact that the...
southfront.org
BIDEN’S DANGEROUS NEW UKRAINE ENDGAME: NO ENDGAME – FOREIGN POLICY
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U.S. President Joe Biden meets with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and combatant commanders at the White House in Washington on April 20. WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES
Written by Michael Hirsh, a senior correspondent at Foreign Policy.
With his strategy to “weaken” Russia, the U.S. president may be turning the Ukraine war into a global one.
In a dramatic series of shifts this week, U.S. President Joe Biden and his NATO allies have escalated their policy of helping to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression into a policy of undermining the power and influence of Russia itself. In so doing, some observers fear, they are leaving Russian President Vladimir Putin little choice but to surrender or double down militarily, raising the possibility of widening his war beyond Ukraine.
On Thursday, Biden urged Congress to provide $33 billion in additional military, economic, and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine—more than double the previous amount—and said he was sending a clear message to Putin: “You will never succeed in dominating Ukraine.” Beyond that, Biden said in remarks at the White House, the new policy was intended “to punish Russian aggression, to lessen the risk of future conflicts.”
That followed an equally clear declaration this week from U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who after a meeting in Kyiv with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the U.S. objective is now to curtail Russia’s power over the long term so it does not have the “capability to reproduce” its military assault on Ukraine. “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” Austin said in a stopover in Poland.
The shift may have been what prompted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to declare afterward that Washington and the West had entered a “proxy” war with Russia, risking another world war that, Lavrov warned, could go nuclear. “The danger is serious, real. And we must not underestimate it,” Lavrov said. Putin also again suggested this week, as he has since the beginning of his invasion on Feb. 24, that he still had the option of using nuclear weapons against NATO, saying, “We have all the instruments for this [to respond to a direct threat to Russia]—ones nobody else can boast of. And we will use them, if we have to.”
The newly aggressive U.S. approach won plaudits from many quarters—in particular from current and former NATO officials who insist the Russian nuclear counterthreats are only empty rhetoric.
“It’s the only way to go forward,” said former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen in an interview. “In Putin’s thinking it doesn’t make any difference, because he would only claim that the Western policy is to weaken Russia anyway. So why not speak openly about it? The mistake we made in the past was to underestimate the ambitions of Vladimir Putin, to underestimate his brutality. At the same time, we overestimated the strength of the Russian military.”
The new U.S. and NATO strategy is partly based on Ukraine’s continuing battlefield success against Putin, who has been forced to scale down his ambitions from a full takeover of Ukraine to a major new assault in its eastern and southern parts. NATO allies including Germany, which until this week had equivocated on sending heavy offensive weaponry to Ukraine, have ratcheted up their aid in response. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, under political pressure at home and abroad, announced earlier this week that his country would provide 50 anti-aircraft tanks to Ukraine.
Yet other Russia experts expressed worry that the United States and its Western allies are, in effect, crossing the very redlines they have avoided until now. For most of the two-month conflict, Biden has refused to authorize any military support, such as major offensive weapons or a no-fly zone, that might be perceived as putting U.S. or NATO forces in direct conflict with Russia. Now, some observers worry that with the additional aid and tougher economic sanctions, the U.S. president is forcing Putin into a corner in which he can only fight on or surrender. The latter course would mean relinquishing Putin’s career-long aim of strengthening Russia against the West. Yet Putin, who has long said the West’s goal was to weaken or contain Russia, has never been known to surrender during his decade and a half of aggressive moves against neighboring countries, mainly Ukraine and Georgia.
“In the Kremlin’s eyes the West is out to get Russia. It was unspoken before. Now it’s spoken,” said Sean Monaghan, an expert on Europe at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If you combine this with Biden’s comments, at his summit in Poland last month, that ‘this man [Putin] cannot remain in power,’ all that turns this a territorial war into a wider confrontation and might make negotiating a settlement to end the war in Ukraine far more difficult or even impossible at the present.” (Biden officials later said that the president was not seeking regime change in Russia.)
George Beebe, a former chief of Russia analysis for the CIA, said that the Biden administration may be in danger of forgetting that the “the most important national interest that the United States has is avoiding a nuclear conflict with Russia.” He added that “the Russians have the ability to make sure everyone else loses if they lose too. And that may be where we’re heading. It’s a dangerous corner to turn.”
Perhaps the most worrisome turn of events is that there no longer appears to be any possibility of a negotiated way out of the war—despite Putin’s statement to visiting United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres that he still hopes for such a solution.
“It’s one thing to pursue a policy of weakening Putin, quite another to say it out loud. We have to find a way for Putin to achieve a political solution, so perhaps it is not wise to state this,” said one senior European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“It’s getting more dangerous,” said Charles Kupchan, a former senior U.S. official and now a scholar of international relations at Georgetown University. “We need to start moving beyond Javelins and anti-tank missiles and talk about a political endgame.” Or, as Beebe put it, “We need to find a way of somehow discreetly conveying to the Russians that we would be willing to ease sanctions in the context of an international settlement. The military aid to Ukraine could also be used as leverage.”
Yet any such negotiation looks less likely than ever. Both sides appear to be settling in for a long fight. After meeting with Putin and Lavrov on Tuesday, Guterres acknowledged that an imminent cease-fire was not in the cards and that the war “will not end with meetings.”
Only a month ago Zelensky was floating the idea of a neutral Ukraine that did not join NATO, and he suggested that separatist forces in eastern Ukraine should be acknowledged. But Zelensky has since told European Council President Charles Michel that, in light of Russian atrocities, Ukrainian public opinion was against negotiations and favored continuing the war.
Meanwhile, Finland and Sweden have indicated they are interested in joining the NATO alliance, breaking with their longtime policy of nonalignment and potentially creating a new hair-trigger environment along Russia’s northern border. That would deliver a devastating blow to Putin, who has often cited NATO’s eastward expansion as a casus belli for his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
And there is little prospect that any of these tensions will abate anytime soon. Austin also convened a 40-nation “Ukraine Contact Group” this week that was readying itself for what Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley has said is likely a “protracted conflict” that will be “at least measured in years.”
Biden has not said what the U.S. response might be if Putin deploys tactical or strategic nuclear weapons. Moreover, neither side has set any clear rules in the post-Cold War environment for the deployment of nuclear weapons—especially as Cold War-era arms agreements such as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty have been shelved and nuclear weapon delivery systems have become faster and more governed by automatic digitized systems. Under a Kremlin policy known as “escalating to de-escalate”—threatening to go nuclear if the West tries to stop him—Putin has year by year reintroduced nuclear weapons into his conventional war calculations. During his two decades in power, he has authorized the construction of nuclear-powered cruise missiles, transoceanic nuclear-armed torpedoes, hypersonic glide vehicles, and more low-yield nuclear weapons on the European continent.
Yet Putin has never come this close to threatening to use them, nor has he made clear if or how he might do so. Until the Ukraine crisis, U.S. strategists had not considered their deployment to be a credible threat. Most believe Putin would first escalate using cyberattacks or other non-nuclear capabilities.
Many experts also say they don’t believe the Russian president would gain much advantage from the use of tactical nuclear weapons inside Ukraine—and he is considered enough of a rational actor that he would never contemplate launching nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles at the United States. But Putin has also indicated previously that he cannot accept the separation of an independent Ukraine from Russian control, writing in a July 2021 essay that such a development would be “comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us.”
Robert Gallucci, a former senior U.S. nuclear arms negotiator, said the Russian nuclear threats are a new tactic and “should be taken seriously if we were to get involved directly in conflict with Russian forces in or around Ukraine, that is, on or across the Russian border.”
Beebe, who is currently director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said he believed the outcome would most likely stretch into a volatile stalemate—but one that could well be more unstable and dangerous than much of the Cold War. “Most likely we’re going to end up in some sort of long-term unstable confrontation that divides Ukraine and divides Europe where there aren’t rules of the game,” he said. “It’s not so much a new cold war as it is a festering wound in Europe.”
Matters could get even dicier if a newly emboldened West and NATO expand their reach beyond Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific, as British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss suggested in a speech this week. Truss said that “NATO must have a global outlook, ready to tackle global threats. We need to preempt threats in the Indo-Pacific, working with our allies like Japan and Australia to ensure the Pacific is protected. And we must ensure that democracies like Taiwan are able to defend themselves.”
That in turn raises the prospect for a drawn-out global cold war with not only Russia but China as well. And it is one that could easily turn hot, Beebe said, with the United States and its allies faced off against an alliance of “a resource-rich Russia partnered with a technologically and economically powerful China.”
But what is your take on the text posted?
Of course, it's interesting how it all looks from the Estonian forest. Looking from my native "Mordor", the situation in the Baltic States as a whole looks like a complete nightmare. I would argue with the "Horde", but only in terms.
Конечно интересно как все это выглядит из эстонского леса. Глядя из моего родного "мордора" ситуация в прибалтике в целом выглядит полным кошмаром. С Ордой я бы поспорил, но только в формулировках.
Again on the topic- with whom we are at war. I don't even want to post this anymore, but most of them won't see it any other way.
https://rusvesna.su/news/1651597565
Опять на тему- с кем мы воюем. Уже даже не хочется такое постить, но ведь большинство этого совсем не увидит по другому.
Lyndi Lama
Jedi Master
This post is in keeping with youlik's post about A Terrible Find of a torture chamber near Kherson. The ongoing revelation of how really horrible humans are behaving and an awakening to this reality.
The video is of Penny Kelly pulling Tarot cards on the questions: 1. the Russia/Ukraine war; 2. what do U.S. citizens (and Canadian and other Western nations) need to see about their government; and 3. a request for insight into the predicted food shortages.
To my self, as I watch, I say stop wearing out your adrenals while you are navigating this incredible time and open up. That's similar to what I feel reading the recent sessions with the C's. Kelly says it with Tarot Card images that speak to me visually, reaching further into the level of anxiety I wasn't sufficiently aware of to counteract. I don't always feel aligned with Kelly these days, but this video, 45 minutes, summarized below, has been helpful in perspective.
Question #1 is what do we need to see, understand, about Russia/Ukraine war.
Nine of Swords, we will, we have to, wake up to a terrible realization. A card of cruelty.
The Death Card, the second card, repeating colours of black and white as in the Nine of Swords, things will become clear. The fall of the King in the Death Card may mean the fall of the US. U.S. (et al.) have sown seeds of bitterness around the world. The Bishop with a fallen implement could point to the fall of a religion, perhaps the Vatican, she asks. The end of nations and presidents? Upending of control, with a Mad Max period?
Two kneeling girls in the Death card, one faces death and the other one looks away. There is an absence of mature balance. Above, two grey towers on the horizon with the outline of a city, and a sun behind the city. Is this the passing of cities as viable, sustainable ways of living together? Cliffs with a ship of souls sailing by on the River of Death, they are done with life. Major transformation, death and rebirth.
What we need to see and understand is we need to see this war as our personal war, as it will change us in some ways we don't expect.
Question #2, what do we need to see or understand about our governments. Cards - The Tower and the Ace of Swords.
Tower card is a strong statement warning of serious upheaval as with the Ace of Swords. The two cards demand an awakening. So watch out. Tower card - misery, distress, calamity, disgrace and ruin. Human megalomania, unforeseen catastrophe. Only awakening to the reality of our condition will mitigate the Tower card meaning. For our governments there could be a complete lack of power on the world stage. We're being forced into alignment in consciousness, perception and behaviour.
Secondly, Ace of Swords symbolizing the gift of life, Swords are about intellect, creativity, independence and evolution. The card symbolizes learning and clarity. We are handed a gift and are to make something of it. Trees with leaves indicate oneness with nature and with ourselves and others. We heal nature and ourselves. Avoid being drawn into arguments, struggles that aren't important. Practical well-being called for.
Question #3, Request for insight on how to handle food shortages forecast for 6 months from now and how long this will last.
First card, the Ten of Wands, meaning shortages last 10 months starting in 6 months. The card is known as the Lord of Oppression. Wands symbolize fire, will, intuition and the drive to rise from the ashes. Warning: in this situation a total effort of will is needed. Can we see where we're going and take action or wail about the difficulties. We have to drop some of the things we've always done in order to plod forward.
Second card, The Chariot - Dare to steer the course of your own life. Changes presented often hide opportunities that become our passion, or a source of security. If we have to feed ourselves, what changes will come. We started working from home over last two years, how do we feed ourselves from our homes? Learn to manage our appetites before we can go through an evolutionary leap. We can choose paths that nurture as well as keeping protective armour.
The video is of Penny Kelly pulling Tarot cards on the questions: 1. the Russia/Ukraine war; 2. what do U.S. citizens (and Canadian and other Western nations) need to see about their government; and 3. a request for insight into the predicted food shortages.
To my self, as I watch, I say stop wearing out your adrenals while you are navigating this incredible time and open up. That's similar to what I feel reading the recent sessions with the C's. Kelly says it with Tarot Card images that speak to me visually, reaching further into the level of anxiety I wasn't sufficiently aware of to counteract. I don't always feel aligned with Kelly these days, but this video, 45 minutes, summarized below, has been helpful in perspective.
Question #1 is what do we need to see, understand, about Russia/Ukraine war.
Nine of Swords, we will, we have to, wake up to a terrible realization. A card of cruelty.
The Death Card, the second card, repeating colours of black and white as in the Nine of Swords, things will become clear. The fall of the King in the Death Card may mean the fall of the US. U.S. (et al.) have sown seeds of bitterness around the world. The Bishop with a fallen implement could point to the fall of a religion, perhaps the Vatican, she asks. The end of nations and presidents? Upending of control, with a Mad Max period?
Two kneeling girls in the Death card, one faces death and the other one looks away. There is an absence of mature balance. Above, two grey towers on the horizon with the outline of a city, and a sun behind the city. Is this the passing of cities as viable, sustainable ways of living together? Cliffs with a ship of souls sailing by on the River of Death, they are done with life. Major transformation, death and rebirth.
What we need to see and understand is we need to see this war as our personal war, as it will change us in some ways we don't expect.
Question #2, what do we need to see or understand about our governments. Cards - The Tower and the Ace of Swords.
Tower card is a strong statement warning of serious upheaval as with the Ace of Swords. The two cards demand an awakening. So watch out. Tower card - misery, distress, calamity, disgrace and ruin. Human megalomania, unforeseen catastrophe. Only awakening to the reality of our condition will mitigate the Tower card meaning. For our governments there could be a complete lack of power on the world stage. We're being forced into alignment in consciousness, perception and behaviour.
Secondly, Ace of Swords symbolizing the gift of life, Swords are about intellect, creativity, independence and evolution. The card symbolizes learning and clarity. We are handed a gift and are to make something of it. Trees with leaves indicate oneness with nature and with ourselves and others. We heal nature and ourselves. Avoid being drawn into arguments, struggles that aren't important. Practical well-being called for.
Question #3, Request for insight on how to handle food shortages forecast for 6 months from now and how long this will last.
First card, the Ten of Wands, meaning shortages last 10 months starting in 6 months. The card is known as the Lord of Oppression. Wands symbolize fire, will, intuition and the drive to rise from the ashes. Warning: in this situation a total effort of will is needed. Can we see where we're going and take action or wail about the difficulties. We have to drop some of the things we've always done in order to plod forward.
Second card, The Chariot - Dare to steer the course of your own life. Changes presented often hide opportunities that become our passion, or a source of security. If we have to feed ourselves, what changes will come. We started working from home over last two years, how do we feed ourselves from our homes? Learn to manage our appetites before we can go through an evolutionary leap. We can choose paths that nurture as well as keeping protective armour.
XPan
The Living Force
After I listened to this video clip with Tucker Carson, it really punched me deeply into my stomach - and I fell into bed like a fallen tree, entirely exhausted early this morning after work...
Just another one of those typical signs of psychopathy which doesn't align with any normal human sense feel or thought in these peculiar war games... It is strange isn't it, how much that is revealed these days to the ones who somewhat can see, sense and feel of what is going on behind the curtains ? The conglomerate of evil powers which over the last decades have place themselves into many strategic slick positions... playing their strategic games in front of our noses. It truly hurts to look behind the veil... but I'll take it, still, in comparison of staying ignorant and stupid.
Yet, in the end of everything - it is so endless sad to see how everything is unfolding - being fueled by so much evil - way beyond anything i could ever have imagined.
Yeah. It is springtime. Swedish poet Karin Boye once wrote "it hurts when the buds are bursting" in the poem of "For the sake of the tree"
Oh, it surely is bursting... And so is my heart, too. In good and in bad.
We really do live in strange times.
Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko has announced Wednesday that Ukrainian officials no longer have communications contact with the estimated couple thousand Azov fighters still holed up beneath the cavernous Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol.
The mayor confirmed that any contact with those inside has 'gone dark'...
“There has been a public order by the supreme commander [Russian President Vladimir Putin] to cancel the storming; there is no storming,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday.
Peskov explained: “We see that there are aggravations associated with the fact that the militants go to firing positions. These attempts are suppressed very quickly. There is nothing else to say here yet."
www.zerohedge.com
The mayor confirmed that any contact with those inside has 'gone dark'...
“There has been a public order by the supreme commander [Russian President Vladimir Putin] to cancel the storming; there is no storming,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday.
Peskov explained: “We see that there are aggravations associated with the fact that the militants go to firing positions. These attempts are suppressed very quickly. There is nothing else to say here yet."
Ukraine Says Communications With Trapped Fighters In Azovstal Has Gone Dark | ZeroHedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Monsters are multiplying! Now there is also a "Kraken"
Карательный отряд СБУ вошел в поселок под Харьковом
ziutek
Jedi Master
Maria Zaharova is furiously interesting as usual.
An auto-translated interview from Russian that Maria gave at the request of the Spanish newspaper A-Be-Ce and the same newspaper later censored it. What is happening is inconceivable. Although after reading this interview I conclude that it is poisonous to psychopathic brains.
This could not be published in the West:
"04.05.2022 19:42
Interview by M.V. Zakharova, official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, to the Spanish newspaper A-Be-Se
959-04-05-2022
Question: Could you please explain what stage the peace talks with Ukraine are at?
Answer: The Russian-Ukrainian negotiations are continuing. After three face-to-face rounds in Belarus and one in Turkey, they are being held in video format. They are discussing the settlement of the situation in Ukraine, the establishment of its neutral, non-nuclear and non-aligned status, demilitarization and denationalization, as well as security guarantees. Unfortunately, the position of the Ukrainian delegation is very volatile and the negotiation process is accompanied by aggressive rhetoric from Kiev and the West and Western arms deliveries, which does not help to reach agreements.
Question: In your opinion, are international mechanisms applicable to resolve the conflict in Donbas?
Answer: Over the last eight years Russia has been doing its best to resolve the conflict in Donbas by peaceful means. Under our mediation, the "Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements of February 12, 2015" was signed, which was approved by UN Security Council resolution 2202. It provided for a clear sequence of steps leading to the reintegration of Donbas into Ukraine under the conditions of a special status for the region.
However, the Ukrainian leadership categorically refused to do this. Our attempts to force the Kyiv regime to implement the Package of Measures were unsuccessful. The Ukrainian armed formations did not stop shelling Donbas. An inhumane socio-economic and transport blockade was imposed on its inhabitants, placing the region on the brink of survival. This destructive policy of Kiev was actively supported by the United States and its NATO allies, who carried out the military development of Ukrainian territory, encouraged the promotion of aggressive Russophobia and ignored neo-Nazi manifestations, turning the country into a bridgehead against Russia. As it turned out later, the Ukrainian Armed Forces were preparing to seize Donbass by force in March.
As a result, we were left with no choice but to recognize the independence of the DNR and LNR on February 21 of this year and begin a special military operation on February 24 of this year to protect the people living in Donbass, demilitarize and denationalize Ukraine. All of its goals and tasks will certainly be accomplished.
Question: Do you believe that the territorial requirements imposed on Ukraine, specifically on Donbas, complicate the agreements?
Answer: These are already established territorial realities, which Kiev and other countries need to recognize. They arose because of the policies of the Kiev authorities themselves, who came to power through a neo-Nazi coup d'état in 2014. Crimea returned to Russia, the DNR and LNR became independent states. It is necessary to respect the legitimate and informed choice of peoples and the right of nations to self-determination, as enshrined in the UN Charter.
Question: Why was Russia able to use force in Chechnya, Georgia, and now Ukraine, while Kyiv cannot do the same for Donetsk and Luhansk?
Response: Georgian authorities attacked South Ossetia and killed Russian peacekeepers. How interesting to be reminded of the situation in Chechnya. These are completely different situations. Chechen fighters used terrorist methods and carried out terrorist attacks in Chechnya itself and other subjects of the Russian Federation. But they were considered democratic forces and were supported in the U.S. and the EU. Do you remember what the reaction of the international community was? Everybody supported the separatists, although they were not separatists, but international terrorists. The first in Europe, by the way. The U.S., Britain, European countries then called them freedom fighters. Now I have a question: why didn't the West call the inhabitants of Donbass "freedom fighters"? After all, they are not terrorists. It was also difficult to call them separatists, because in the Minsk agreements, signed by the DNR and LNR, Donbass was called a part of Ukraine. And in general, the entire Minsk Package was about how the DNR and LNR would live as part of Ukraine. So why didn't the West support them?
But the inhabitants of Donbass have been killed for eight years. Civilians and children were killed. Children's cemeteries appeared on the territory of Europe by the will of Kiev. Where was the Spanish government, for example? Now everyone in the EU is talking about refugees from Ukraine. Did you know that 1.2 million refugees from Ukraine came to Russia in 2014-2015? And the West was silent again. Not a single sanction has been applied to the Kiev regime to encourage it to stop killing people for eight years.
The Kiev regime came to power by anti-constitutional means and for eight years it used military force against its own people, the civilians of Donbass. It shelled the territory of the DNR and LNR using heavy artillery. Thousands of civilians were killed, including women and children. Houses, water, electricity and gas supplies, hospitals and schools were hit. Kyiv imposed an economic and transport blockade on Donbas, putting its residents on the brink of survival.
We regularly drew the attention of Western countries to the genocide of the population of southeastern Ukraine that had been going on all those years, who refused to accept and support the results of the unconstitutional coup d'état of 2014, who spoke out against the mass violation of the rights of the Russian-speaking population in the country, the policy of forced Ukrainianization, the destruction of Russian culture and the rewriting of history. However, they did not want to hear us.
There was a chance to resolve the internal Ukrainian conflict peacefully. This is the consistent implementation of the aforementioned Package of Measures. But Kiev refused to go this way, and Western countries did nothing to prevent this.
Ukraine's sabotage of the Minsk agreements, the unconcealed desire of its leadership to solve the conflict in Donbas by force, including the use of weapons, equipment and other means provided by NATO countries, forced us to take those steps.
Russia's actions in Chechnya, South Ossetia and now in Ukraine are absolutely legal, while the actions of the Kiev authorities, who have organized the genocide of Donbass and the destruction of all Russians in their own country, are illegitimate, unconstitutional and immoral.
Question: Why was Russia able to sign military cooperation agreements with South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Donetsk and Luhansk, while no one is able to do so with Ukraine?
Answer: What do you mean no one can do that? This is the problem of the Western community - it does not understand what is going on at all. Before 2014, we had a number of agreements with Ukraine, covering a wide range of bilateral relations, including military-technical cooperation. However, after the February 2014 coup in Kiev, the nationalist forces that came to power, with the approval of the West, unilaterally terminated them.
The U.S. and NATO countries wanted a Ukraine that was as detached from Russia as possible. Our concerns about this were simply ignored. We have repeatedly stressed that all countries must respect the principle of the indivisibility of security and not strengthen their security at the expense of others. Russia put forward concrete proposals on legal security guarantees, including non-proliferation of the Alliance to the east and returning its military infrastructure to the configuration of 1997, when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed. But the West ignored them.
By recognizing the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008 after Georgia's aggression against Tskhinvali and in the light of Saakashvili's similar plans for Sukhum, Russia took responsibility for the security of the two young republics of Transcaucasia. This task is still relevant today. Russia has signed a number of bilateral agreements with these countries on military cooperation aimed at creating common defense and security spaces with each of them, as stipulated in the agreements with Abkhazia on alliance and strategic partnership of November 24, 2014, and with South Ossetia on alliance and integration of March 18, 2015.
Thus, the signing and implementation of the mentioned agreements with Sukhum and Tskhinval is dictated by the mutual interest of the parties and is an important factor for peace and stability in this part of the Trans-Caucasus.
Question: How will the issue of international investigation of what happened in Bucha be dealt with, taking into consideration that there are contradictory statements - was there a provocation, or were there war crimes?
Answer: The allegations you cited are not contradictory. The war crime is the Ukrainian provocation itself, which needs to be investigated. On April 3, the Kiev regime staged a cynical staging in Bucha, accusing Russian servicemen of killing civilians. At the same time, our troops left the city as early as March 30, and not a single local resident was harmed by violence during the entire time they were there. And after they left, there were no reports of mass shootings of people for four days, until the arrival of Ukrainian Security Service officers in Bucha.
What the Ukrainians and their Western handlers are trying to present as "Russian military atrocities in Bucha" is, of course, staged. We can affirm this for a number of reasons. You have probably seen the analyses of these staging, which were given by the Russian Ministry of Defense, it quite clearly shows the low quality of Western propaganda fakes.
The important thing is that the West did not come up with anything new this time. These provocations are a mechanism they have already tried, they have already used it, there is evidence that the Nazis used exactly the same false propaganda algorithms against the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War. I will name just two examples.
In October 1944, Soviet troops temporarily occupied and then abandoned the city of Nemmersdorf. Immediately after the city was returned to the control of the Third Reich, German propaganda specialists, including the head of the NSDAP propaganda department in East Prussia, K. Gebhardt, rushed there. They worked for two days, after which the main Nazi newspaper "Völkischer Beobachter" published an article entitled "The Fury of the Soviet Beasts. This article described the "horrors" and "mutilations" allegedly inflicted on civilians in Nemmersdorf by Soviet troops. On October 26, 1944, Otto Dietrich, head of the press service of NSDAP, personally instructed "to expose the nightmarish Bolshevik crimes in East Prussia and comment on them in the sharpest way.
Reich even organized an "international commission," to which he invited representatives of "pocket governments," in particular Estonia. Just a week before the "commission" H. Mäe published a report in which it accused Moscow of everything. The report of H.Mäe at the end of 1944 became one of the most quoted documents of Goebbels propaganda. Copies were sent in foreign languages to all world agencies.
Naturally, after the war this story began to be studied. German war historian B. Fisch, who himself took part in the fighting for Nemmersdorf, admitted that after the discovery of the bodies the German side had not made any attempt to identify them. The published photos showed specially collected bodies of victims from several villages in East Prussia. And already in the 21st century, the German Foreign Ministry acknowledged that Nemmersdorf's falsifications had been specially compiled by Lieutenant Pfeiffer of the Wehrmacht's secret field police, after which they spread through Berlin.
But even the well-known provocation in Nemmersdorf was not the first. Back in 1941, the Ukrainian-language newspaper Krakovskie Vesti, censored and controlled directly by the Third Reich, published an article about "people tortured by 'murderers from the NKVD' who lay in the streets of Lvov" in the abandoned city after the retreat of the Red Army. The emphasis is placed on the nationality of those killed. "Krakovskie Vesti" wrote that "the Bolsheviks shot 1500 ethnic Ukrainians with machine-gun fire in Lutsk. Paradoxically, the Nazi Reich accused the international Soviet Union of genocide!
"Krakovskie Vesti" was well aware of its role in this story - in the context of Ukraine, it was a propaganda guide of Nazi Germany to the whole world. The employees of the Krakowskie Wiesi were explicit about this in the press: their task was to use the victims so that "the word 'Ukraine' would once again appear on the front pages of major periodicals" and to make moral capital for the people out of "the blood of the Ukrainians".
It is exactly the same as it is now. Once again, fascist provocations are used to "put Ukraine on the front pages," and people's lives are just a bargaining chip in this fascist propaganda game.
By the way, you know what the most interesting thing is. The editor of "Krakovskie vesti" was Mikhailo Khomyak, a Ukrainian collaborator and supporter of Hitler. So he is the direct grandfather of the current Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, H. Freeland, one of the key figures among Russophobe circles in the Americas. It is H.Freeland who most often calls for the isolation of our country, citing, among other things, Bucha. Simply repeating after his grandfather what he and his fascist associates failed to do eighty years ago.
Question: Don't you think that the current special operation in Ukraine will bring NATO even closer to Russia's borders, especially if Sweden and Finland join it?
Answer: The posing of the question is incorrect. Russia's special operation in Ukraine should be perceived as a consequence of NATO's aggressive expansionist policy led by the US, not vice versa. The North Atlantic bloc has been moving step by step toward drawing new countries into its orbit, moving ever closer to Russia's borders and ignoring our repeated warnings about the danger of this approach to the entire European security system.
As for Finland and Sweden, the alliance has been actively "treating" them for a long time. In order to radically influence the policy of these Scandinavian states, NATO has been assiduously modeling Russia as an enemy. Although in fact it was the alliance that posed a threat to our country's security. We have been warning our Nordic neighbors that pulling them into NATO's orbit threatens to unbalance the European security system regularly and for quite a long time. This is not "the topic of recent weeks.
I spoke about it in detail long before February 2022. Back in 2015, I warned: "Swedish accession to NATO would have politico-military and foreign policy implications that would require necessary reciprocal steps from the Russian side. In 2016. Russia's Foreign Ministry reported that Scandinavian accession to NATO would disrupt stability and change the balance of power in the region, forcing us to take additional measures to ensure our security. In 2018, we talked about the risks associated with Sweden's and Finland's participation in NATO's Trident Juncture exercises. I also touched on this topic, for example, in a briefing on December 24, 2021. A related piece was also published more recently - in light of recent statements by official Stockholm and Helsinki - on April 15 this year.
We have also kept NATO on the agenda of our contacts with our Finnish and Swedish partners. For example, Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs of Russia A. Grushko discussed it with Ambassador of the Republic of Finland to the Russian Federation A. Helanterus in November 2020 and so on. We have been following the way the Americans and NATO Brussels are progressively pulling the Scandinavians into the events of the alliance for a very long time.
Please understand: geopolitical confrontation with Russia is the essence of NATO's existence. All talk about the defensive nature of this organization is a fiction. NATO's efforts are aimed at radically changing the military and political situation in Europe, undermining the strategic balance of power and deterring our country. If Finland and Sweden join the alliance, they will turn into an area of confrontation between the North Atlantic bloc and Russia, with all the ensuing consequences, including for our time-tested good neighborly relations. Is this what the peoples of Sweden and Finland are striving for?
Q: Are the negative consequences for Russia, including sanctions and battlefield losses, of continued military action in Ukraine not much greater than the benefits?
Answer: We have said many times that the start of the special operation was a forced measure. We were left with no other choice. It is being carried out in order to stop the genocide of the residents of the Donbas republics, who have been living for eight years under conditions of endless Ukrainian shelling, deliberate destruction of water, gas and electricity infrastructure, and a banking, trade and economic blockade. An equally important task of the special operation is to protect Russia itself from the threats that came from the Ukrainian territory as a result of its military development by NATO countries and artificially fuelled Russophobia and hatred towards everything connected with Russia.
Question: How do you see the future of Russian-Spanish relations in the current situation?
Answer: Of course, there is nothing good in the fact that many positive bilateral achievements were undermined by the decision of the Spanish authorities to join the anti-Russian sanctions. At the same time, Madrid did not stop at the economic component of the restrictions - two arms supplies, including lethal ones, have already been made to Kiev. There has been a blow to our diplomatic ties as a result of the Spanish joining the campaign for the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats. Because of the short-sighted actions of our partners, a number of projects in the energy and transport sectors are "hanging up"; the localization of Spanish textile production at Russian light industry enterprises is also in question. Spain's position on the further development of cultural and humanitarian ties does not add to the positive side: it was decided to "freeze" cooperation in science and education, including work on the legal framework documents that are ready to be signed.
We see that Spain, like many other countries, has actively joined the process of destroying everything that has been created in recent decades. We can only hope that the Spanish people's traditionally positive perception of the Russian world will be much stronger than the current militant trend to destroy the basis of bilateral relations, actively supported by official Madrid."
t.me
An auto-translated interview from Russian that Maria gave at the request of the Spanish newspaper A-Be-Ce and the same newspaper later censored it. What is happening is inconceivable. Although after reading this interview I conclude that it is poisonous to psychopathic brains.
This could not be published in the West:
"04.05.2022 19:42
Interview by M.V. Zakharova, official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, to the Spanish newspaper A-Be-Se
959-04-05-2022
Question: Could you please explain what stage the peace talks with Ukraine are at?
Answer: The Russian-Ukrainian negotiations are continuing. After three face-to-face rounds in Belarus and one in Turkey, they are being held in video format. They are discussing the settlement of the situation in Ukraine, the establishment of its neutral, non-nuclear and non-aligned status, demilitarization and denationalization, as well as security guarantees. Unfortunately, the position of the Ukrainian delegation is very volatile and the negotiation process is accompanied by aggressive rhetoric from Kiev and the West and Western arms deliveries, which does not help to reach agreements.
Question: In your opinion, are international mechanisms applicable to resolve the conflict in Donbas?
Answer: Over the last eight years Russia has been doing its best to resolve the conflict in Donbas by peaceful means. Under our mediation, the "Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements of February 12, 2015" was signed, which was approved by UN Security Council resolution 2202. It provided for a clear sequence of steps leading to the reintegration of Donbas into Ukraine under the conditions of a special status for the region.
However, the Ukrainian leadership categorically refused to do this. Our attempts to force the Kyiv regime to implement the Package of Measures were unsuccessful. The Ukrainian armed formations did not stop shelling Donbas. An inhumane socio-economic and transport blockade was imposed on its inhabitants, placing the region on the brink of survival. This destructive policy of Kiev was actively supported by the United States and its NATO allies, who carried out the military development of Ukrainian territory, encouraged the promotion of aggressive Russophobia and ignored neo-Nazi manifestations, turning the country into a bridgehead against Russia. As it turned out later, the Ukrainian Armed Forces were preparing to seize Donbass by force in March.
As a result, we were left with no choice but to recognize the independence of the DNR and LNR on February 21 of this year and begin a special military operation on February 24 of this year to protect the people living in Donbass, demilitarize and denationalize Ukraine. All of its goals and tasks will certainly be accomplished.
Question: Do you believe that the territorial requirements imposed on Ukraine, specifically on Donbas, complicate the agreements?
Answer: These are already established territorial realities, which Kiev and other countries need to recognize. They arose because of the policies of the Kiev authorities themselves, who came to power through a neo-Nazi coup d'état in 2014. Crimea returned to Russia, the DNR and LNR became independent states. It is necessary to respect the legitimate and informed choice of peoples and the right of nations to self-determination, as enshrined in the UN Charter.
Question: Why was Russia able to use force in Chechnya, Georgia, and now Ukraine, while Kyiv cannot do the same for Donetsk and Luhansk?
Response: Georgian authorities attacked South Ossetia and killed Russian peacekeepers. How interesting to be reminded of the situation in Chechnya. These are completely different situations. Chechen fighters used terrorist methods and carried out terrorist attacks in Chechnya itself and other subjects of the Russian Federation. But they were considered democratic forces and were supported in the U.S. and the EU. Do you remember what the reaction of the international community was? Everybody supported the separatists, although they were not separatists, but international terrorists. The first in Europe, by the way. The U.S., Britain, European countries then called them freedom fighters. Now I have a question: why didn't the West call the inhabitants of Donbass "freedom fighters"? After all, they are not terrorists. It was also difficult to call them separatists, because in the Minsk agreements, signed by the DNR and LNR, Donbass was called a part of Ukraine. And in general, the entire Minsk Package was about how the DNR and LNR would live as part of Ukraine. So why didn't the West support them?
But the inhabitants of Donbass have been killed for eight years. Civilians and children were killed. Children's cemeteries appeared on the territory of Europe by the will of Kiev. Where was the Spanish government, for example? Now everyone in the EU is talking about refugees from Ukraine. Did you know that 1.2 million refugees from Ukraine came to Russia in 2014-2015? And the West was silent again. Not a single sanction has been applied to the Kiev regime to encourage it to stop killing people for eight years.
The Kiev regime came to power by anti-constitutional means and for eight years it used military force against its own people, the civilians of Donbass. It shelled the territory of the DNR and LNR using heavy artillery. Thousands of civilians were killed, including women and children. Houses, water, electricity and gas supplies, hospitals and schools were hit. Kyiv imposed an economic and transport blockade on Donbas, putting its residents on the brink of survival.
We regularly drew the attention of Western countries to the genocide of the population of southeastern Ukraine that had been going on all those years, who refused to accept and support the results of the unconstitutional coup d'état of 2014, who spoke out against the mass violation of the rights of the Russian-speaking population in the country, the policy of forced Ukrainianization, the destruction of Russian culture and the rewriting of history. However, they did not want to hear us.
There was a chance to resolve the internal Ukrainian conflict peacefully. This is the consistent implementation of the aforementioned Package of Measures. But Kiev refused to go this way, and Western countries did nothing to prevent this.
Ukraine's sabotage of the Minsk agreements, the unconcealed desire of its leadership to solve the conflict in Donbas by force, including the use of weapons, equipment and other means provided by NATO countries, forced us to take those steps.
Russia's actions in Chechnya, South Ossetia and now in Ukraine are absolutely legal, while the actions of the Kiev authorities, who have organized the genocide of Donbass and the destruction of all Russians in their own country, are illegitimate, unconstitutional and immoral.
Question: Why was Russia able to sign military cooperation agreements with South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Donetsk and Luhansk, while no one is able to do so with Ukraine?
Answer: What do you mean no one can do that? This is the problem of the Western community - it does not understand what is going on at all. Before 2014, we had a number of agreements with Ukraine, covering a wide range of bilateral relations, including military-technical cooperation. However, after the February 2014 coup in Kiev, the nationalist forces that came to power, with the approval of the West, unilaterally terminated them.
The U.S. and NATO countries wanted a Ukraine that was as detached from Russia as possible. Our concerns about this were simply ignored. We have repeatedly stressed that all countries must respect the principle of the indivisibility of security and not strengthen their security at the expense of others. Russia put forward concrete proposals on legal security guarantees, including non-proliferation of the Alliance to the east and returning its military infrastructure to the configuration of 1997, when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed. But the West ignored them.
By recognizing the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008 after Georgia's aggression against Tskhinvali and in the light of Saakashvili's similar plans for Sukhum, Russia took responsibility for the security of the two young republics of Transcaucasia. This task is still relevant today. Russia has signed a number of bilateral agreements with these countries on military cooperation aimed at creating common defense and security spaces with each of them, as stipulated in the agreements with Abkhazia on alliance and strategic partnership of November 24, 2014, and with South Ossetia on alliance and integration of March 18, 2015.
Thus, the signing and implementation of the mentioned agreements with Sukhum and Tskhinval is dictated by the mutual interest of the parties and is an important factor for peace and stability in this part of the Trans-Caucasus.
Question: How will the issue of international investigation of what happened in Bucha be dealt with, taking into consideration that there are contradictory statements - was there a provocation, or were there war crimes?
Answer: The allegations you cited are not contradictory. The war crime is the Ukrainian provocation itself, which needs to be investigated. On April 3, the Kiev regime staged a cynical staging in Bucha, accusing Russian servicemen of killing civilians. At the same time, our troops left the city as early as March 30, and not a single local resident was harmed by violence during the entire time they were there. And after they left, there were no reports of mass shootings of people for four days, until the arrival of Ukrainian Security Service officers in Bucha.
What the Ukrainians and their Western handlers are trying to present as "Russian military atrocities in Bucha" is, of course, staged. We can affirm this for a number of reasons. You have probably seen the analyses of these staging, which were given by the Russian Ministry of Defense, it quite clearly shows the low quality of Western propaganda fakes.
The important thing is that the West did not come up with anything new this time. These provocations are a mechanism they have already tried, they have already used it, there is evidence that the Nazis used exactly the same false propaganda algorithms against the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War. I will name just two examples.
In October 1944, Soviet troops temporarily occupied and then abandoned the city of Nemmersdorf. Immediately after the city was returned to the control of the Third Reich, German propaganda specialists, including the head of the NSDAP propaganda department in East Prussia, K. Gebhardt, rushed there. They worked for two days, after which the main Nazi newspaper "Völkischer Beobachter" published an article entitled "The Fury of the Soviet Beasts. This article described the "horrors" and "mutilations" allegedly inflicted on civilians in Nemmersdorf by Soviet troops. On October 26, 1944, Otto Dietrich, head of the press service of NSDAP, personally instructed "to expose the nightmarish Bolshevik crimes in East Prussia and comment on them in the sharpest way.
Reich even organized an "international commission," to which he invited representatives of "pocket governments," in particular Estonia. Just a week before the "commission" H. Mäe published a report in which it accused Moscow of everything. The report of H.Mäe at the end of 1944 became one of the most quoted documents of Goebbels propaganda. Copies were sent in foreign languages to all world agencies.
Naturally, after the war this story began to be studied. German war historian B. Fisch, who himself took part in the fighting for Nemmersdorf, admitted that after the discovery of the bodies the German side had not made any attempt to identify them. The published photos showed specially collected bodies of victims from several villages in East Prussia. And already in the 21st century, the German Foreign Ministry acknowledged that Nemmersdorf's falsifications had been specially compiled by Lieutenant Pfeiffer of the Wehrmacht's secret field police, after which they spread through Berlin.
But even the well-known provocation in Nemmersdorf was not the first. Back in 1941, the Ukrainian-language newspaper Krakovskie Vesti, censored and controlled directly by the Third Reich, published an article about "people tortured by 'murderers from the NKVD' who lay in the streets of Lvov" in the abandoned city after the retreat of the Red Army. The emphasis is placed on the nationality of those killed. "Krakovskie Vesti" wrote that "the Bolsheviks shot 1500 ethnic Ukrainians with machine-gun fire in Lutsk. Paradoxically, the Nazi Reich accused the international Soviet Union of genocide!
"Krakovskie Vesti" was well aware of its role in this story - in the context of Ukraine, it was a propaganda guide of Nazi Germany to the whole world. The employees of the Krakowskie Wiesi were explicit about this in the press: their task was to use the victims so that "the word 'Ukraine' would once again appear on the front pages of major periodicals" and to make moral capital for the people out of "the blood of the Ukrainians".
It is exactly the same as it is now. Once again, fascist provocations are used to "put Ukraine on the front pages," and people's lives are just a bargaining chip in this fascist propaganda game.
By the way, you know what the most interesting thing is. The editor of "Krakovskie vesti" was Mikhailo Khomyak, a Ukrainian collaborator and supporter of Hitler. So he is the direct grandfather of the current Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, H. Freeland, one of the key figures among Russophobe circles in the Americas. It is H.Freeland who most often calls for the isolation of our country, citing, among other things, Bucha. Simply repeating after his grandfather what he and his fascist associates failed to do eighty years ago.
Question: Don't you think that the current special operation in Ukraine will bring NATO even closer to Russia's borders, especially if Sweden and Finland join it?
Answer: The posing of the question is incorrect. Russia's special operation in Ukraine should be perceived as a consequence of NATO's aggressive expansionist policy led by the US, not vice versa. The North Atlantic bloc has been moving step by step toward drawing new countries into its orbit, moving ever closer to Russia's borders and ignoring our repeated warnings about the danger of this approach to the entire European security system.
As for Finland and Sweden, the alliance has been actively "treating" them for a long time. In order to radically influence the policy of these Scandinavian states, NATO has been assiduously modeling Russia as an enemy. Although in fact it was the alliance that posed a threat to our country's security. We have been warning our Nordic neighbors that pulling them into NATO's orbit threatens to unbalance the European security system regularly and for quite a long time. This is not "the topic of recent weeks.
I spoke about it in detail long before February 2022. Back in 2015, I warned: "Swedish accession to NATO would have politico-military and foreign policy implications that would require necessary reciprocal steps from the Russian side. In 2016. Russia's Foreign Ministry reported that Scandinavian accession to NATO would disrupt stability and change the balance of power in the region, forcing us to take additional measures to ensure our security. In 2018, we talked about the risks associated with Sweden's and Finland's participation in NATO's Trident Juncture exercises. I also touched on this topic, for example, in a briefing on December 24, 2021. A related piece was also published more recently - in light of recent statements by official Stockholm and Helsinki - on April 15 this year.
We have also kept NATO on the agenda of our contacts with our Finnish and Swedish partners. For example, Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs of Russia A. Grushko discussed it with Ambassador of the Republic of Finland to the Russian Federation A. Helanterus in November 2020 and so on. We have been following the way the Americans and NATO Brussels are progressively pulling the Scandinavians into the events of the alliance for a very long time.
Please understand: geopolitical confrontation with Russia is the essence of NATO's existence. All talk about the defensive nature of this organization is a fiction. NATO's efforts are aimed at radically changing the military and political situation in Europe, undermining the strategic balance of power and deterring our country. If Finland and Sweden join the alliance, they will turn into an area of confrontation between the North Atlantic bloc and Russia, with all the ensuing consequences, including for our time-tested good neighborly relations. Is this what the peoples of Sweden and Finland are striving for?
Q: Are the negative consequences for Russia, including sanctions and battlefield losses, of continued military action in Ukraine not much greater than the benefits?
Answer: We have said many times that the start of the special operation was a forced measure. We were left with no other choice. It is being carried out in order to stop the genocide of the residents of the Donbas republics, who have been living for eight years under conditions of endless Ukrainian shelling, deliberate destruction of water, gas and electricity infrastructure, and a banking, trade and economic blockade. An equally important task of the special operation is to protect Russia itself from the threats that came from the Ukrainian territory as a result of its military development by NATO countries and artificially fuelled Russophobia and hatred towards everything connected with Russia.
Question: How do you see the future of Russian-Spanish relations in the current situation?
Answer: Of course, there is nothing good in the fact that many positive bilateral achievements were undermined by the decision of the Spanish authorities to join the anti-Russian sanctions. At the same time, Madrid did not stop at the economic component of the restrictions - two arms supplies, including lethal ones, have already been made to Kiev. There has been a blow to our diplomatic ties as a result of the Spanish joining the campaign for the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats. Because of the short-sighted actions of our partners, a number of projects in the energy and transport sectors are "hanging up"; the localization of Spanish textile production at Russian light industry enterprises is also in question. Spain's position on the further development of cultural and humanitarian ties does not add to the positive side: it was decided to "freeze" cooperation in science and education, including work on the legal framework documents that are ready to be signed.
We see that Spain, like many other countries, has actively joined the process of destroying everything that has been created in recent decades. We can only hope that the Spanish people's traditionally positive perception of the Russian world will be much stronger than the current militant trend to destroy the basis of bilateral relations, actively supported by official Madrid."
Мария Захарова
⚡️ Об интервью официального представителя МИД России М.В.Захаровой испанской газете «А-Бэ-Сэ» 📅 30 марта с.г. в Посольство России в Мадриде поступил запрос на интервью официального представителя МИД России М.В.Захаровой одной из наиболее влиятельных и старейших газет Испании «А-Бэ-Сэ»...
t.me
ziutek
Jedi Master
Here some more links to the Russian and Spanish versions of Zaharova's interview:
It's an interesting situation that I think to date is without precedent.
Imagine you're Russia. You have hypersonic and other weapons that allow you to strike any place on the Earth in less than 2 minutes. Nuclear, conventional, EMP, whatever... You go into Ukraine to secure your country's weak point and for a variety of other reasons.
Okay, now imagine you're the West. You've spent decades "projecting power" and controlling everyone. Russia goes into Ukraine. You are so used to getting your way that the mere idea of Russia's new capabilities jellify your brain. What do you do? Well, you do sanctions, you tell your "partners" to give away their weapons to Ukraine so you can sell them more, blah blah blah... You stage an Information War against Russia because at least everyone will believe lies and that will... change absolutely nothing on the ground! "Well, if WE can't have it, no one can!" So you set about doing very stupid things that begin to truly wreck everything you "created".
You try to make lots of money when (at least deep down) you know that Your Old World is literally falling apart before your eyes. The idea of immunity is gone. You're screwing your own people over, but who cares about them anyway?! Imagine you are a fancy-pants higher-up in the White House, Pentagon, or CIA HQ and you know that at any moment, a missile that you cannot defend against could wipe you out. And the country that could launch it wouldn't even have to leave their own territory. No long-range bombers required, no submarine launches off the coast of America, no aircraft carriers. Just a bunch of really zippy missiles that your sworn enemy apparently developed and built in bulk while you sat back and watched because of your epic hubris...
This is very different from the Mutually Assured Destruction of the Cold War since there is no "mutual" about it anymore. Sure, Russia would not escape unscathed, but the West would lose - badly.
But you don't just have 1 major enemy: there's also China. They are sitting quietly, they have a massive military, massive production capacity, a booming economy, and most likely they also have some new toys. Still waters run deep and all that...
My guess would be that the West, in their completely delusional state, will continue to push and push and push. The East will take the hits, just like the Moskva. And then one day, their Red Line will be crossed - probably when a Western leader does something REALLY unhinged and stupid. At that point, the East will demonstrate their capabilities. Bathrooms in Western halls of power will suddenly be filled to capacity. Not that that will stop them! Crazy people don't suddenly become rational when confronted with their own idiocy and impotence. But the average person fears authority and power. Even in their nutty state, I suspect a clear demonstration of "higher authority" will not go unnoticed or unheeded by the masses - assuming the demonstration is big enough and therefore not "propagandizable" - and the people have been suffering enough due to the moronic actions of their "leaders".
Getting back to Finland, if they do accept "NATO" missiles, and Russia does blow them all up, what will Finland do? Nothing! They can't do anything! What, are they gonna try to invade and conquer Russia?! Of course, Russia knows all of this, so would they even bother to blow them up in the first place?
Well, one things for sure: it's gonna be interesting!!
Very good and interesting summary. I see it similarly although I think 2 minutes is way too fast, even for the Russians.
While the new hypersonic Russian weapons are very fast, they still take much longer than 2 Minutes to reach any place on earth. As far as I remember, Putin presented 6 different new types of weapons and missiles in 2018. The fastest is the „Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle“, which travels at a speed of 20-27 Mach, which translates into 24,695 km/h - 33,339 km/h. The circumference of earth is 40,075 km and half of it is 20,037.5 km. So, even that fastest hypersonic weapon of the Russians can reach the farthest target on the globe (20,037.5 km away) at the maximum speed of 27 Mach, theoretically in 36 Minutes. But in the case of the Avangard, it first needs to be transported via AN ICBM type rocket (a new supersonic weapon below can do it too!) high up into the earth atmosphere on a ballistic trajectory, which likely adds a couple of minutes to that count. And the range of it is uncertain too. Some speculate it is over 6000 km.
The second fastest of those new weapons is RS-28 Sarmat, with a maximum speed of Mach 20.7 = 25,560 km/h (it can deliver an unspecified number of „Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles“!). It has no range limitation.
The third-fastest missile is Kh-47M2 Kinzhal, with a speed between Mach 10 – Mach 12 (12,300–14,700 km/h) and a range of 2000 km.
In addition, a yet unspecified unmanned underwater vehicle was presented which could be some kind of Poseidon in addition to a Laser weapon with the name Peresvet. The max speed of the water vehicle is unclear, but it will likely be around Mach 1 - Mach 2. And the laser weapon obviously can't be counted to the hypersonic missile arsenal and likely can't reach very far targets.
Which leaves one missile, the 9M730 Burevestnik, which might be one of the most interesting ones, since it doesn't follow a ballistic trajectory, is reportedly also hypersonic (Mach 1 or more) and has practically no range limit because it is powered by a small nuclear reactor and can carry a nuclear warhead and can't be intercepted. Theoretically, it should be able to fly "forever" but from what Putin said it doesn't seem to be meant to do that although it theoretically could. So theoretically, if they launch enough of those Burevestnik missiles and let them fly "forever" at the same time in such a way that any single one of those missiles can hit any target on earth within 2 minutes, it might be possible. But I guess that is rather unlikely because something has to eventually wear out in the missile, and it would be quite dangerous with a nuclear warhead.
Having said that, Putin made it clear in that 2018 speech that they have more weapon systems either under development or not disclosed yet. And here we are, 4 years later. So, it could very well be that they have much more up their sleeves...
Just thinking out laud: Theoretically, if they would be able to have a Burevestnik type missile "fly forever" while not having a nuclear warhead, they could launch enough of those and let them fly over the globe constantly and forever which could end the era of "nobody wins a nuclear war" since they could be able to stop any nuclear weapon launch shortly after departure! It could also mean the end of any risk for a nuclear war altogether! Which would be a huge deal. But understandably, they would need to find a very safe way to make those missiles useless in the case of malfunctions and other such risks (like flying them high up in the atmosphere and explode them). Which can never be 100% safe anyway.
Having said that, I also think that what we are witnessing right now is quite unprecedented in known human history and I keep wondering if what we are seeing is exactly what the C's have predicted and kept saying for many years, just in ways we never would have expected to play out!
What is happening is very interesting, that's for sure!
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