The war in Ukraine has deepened a crisis in relations between Russia and the West, and Russian officials have said the conflict is entering the most dangerous escalation to date.

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The question preoccupying Europe is whether Russia is on the brink of a surprise breakthrough on the Ukraine battlefield, allowing it to declare a victory on its own terms. The big issue, were this to materialize, is to ask what then?

The artillery battles across the Donbas have recently been going well for the Russian high command. A traditional attack plan has been prosecuted, involving tactics that Russia has favored for almost century. The original presumptions of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leadership are now within its sights.

Having annexed Crimea and sustained the two breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk since the first round of this conflict in 2014, Moscow wants a contiguous strip of south-eastern Ukraine to say that it has secured the future of the Russian-speaking population in the area.

It has also overcome and vanquished the resistance of the neo-Nazi-tainted Azov Battalion after weeks of resistance to a Russian onslaught in Mariupol, the port city on the Black Sea. That means that the Kremlin’s “denazification” justification for the assault on Ukraine – it said the specter of Nazism had risen in the country – can also be defined as a success.

Any such victory declaration would be viewed from several angles.

The western countries that backed Kyiv would be forced to confront the fear that they had not in the end done enough for their ally to withstand the Russia tempest. Yet, for Russia having drawn the broadest aim for its offensive, the resulting gains look awfully puny on a map.

Faced with this, allies of Ukraine are stepping up the weapons shipments. The shoulder-fired missile systems that proved so effective when Russia’s army was advancing in columns and could be picked off are not the game changer they once were.

Ukrainian forces are only now getting access to mobile artillery. The French Caesar howitzer gun has turned up on the battlefield and offered a tantalizing glimpse of what bulk deliveries could do. The US has been trying to get M777-towed 155-millimetre howitzers to Ukraine’s frontline for a month.

The German government is being criticized for not enabling the next step, which is the delivery of main battle tanks. The Ukrainian military desperately needs these to meet the mass of forces that Russia is bringing to bear in a relatively small section of terrain.

Last week, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson called for the delivery of M270 multiple launch rocket systems, or MLRS, to Ukraine after receiving a downbeat assessment from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy regarding how long Kyiv’s forces can hold out in the eastern region.

The introduction of this system has escalatory potential. Reports that US officials opened talks with Kyiv over placing limits on the range of outgoing fire for any donations Washington might make underline this. The MLRS can target as far away as 300 kilometers but the US cannot allow its guns to be striking inside Russia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov came out to warn that the “few sane” minds in the West should think twice.

Intelligence reporting indicates that Russia has lost 1,000 of the tanks it sent to Ukraine. Its new-generation tanks have proved to be sitting ducks.

So it has removed from mothballs the hundreds of T-72s left over from the erstwhile Soviet Union’s Red Army. Pictures of its heavy fire power are telling. Iron armour will now have to do the job that was not done by the smart or next-generation technology that Russia gambled on.

Days before the war was launched, a western think tank expert predicted to me that Russia would not rush to war because the modernization of its armed forces was incomplete. To do so now would be to “waste” the heavy expenditure since 2012 under the New Look reform programme, the expert said. He pointed out that Russia’s army could only say that its pace of change was well behind the target of renewing 70 per cent of its equipment inventory by 2020. It is believed to have been hovering near 50 per cent when the war began.

Western officials view any move by Russia to draw a line north of Crimea and along to Donetsk and Luhansk as unsustainable peace. Not only would Russia have an iron hand on the export of Ukraine’s all-important crops as a result. It is not clear that the boundaries it is currently targeting would guarantee the water supply to Crimea, a key Moscow objective.

Yet, this is the type of outcome Henry Kissinger, the realist diplomatic thinker and former US secretary of state, argued for last week in his controversial intervention in Davos. Mr. Kissinger argued about two things: that Ukraine cede territory to Russia for a peace agreement, and that a humiliating defeat for Russia would endanger Europe’s stability.

Currently serving European officials, instead, argue that a peace deal would be more likely to kick off a new eight-year cycle of rearmament by Moscow. The inevitable result would be a renewed effort thereafter to carve up Ukraine. In such an atmosphere, and with global food shortages, there can be no reliable turning point in the confrontation.

If Russia is able to achieve a short-term comeback, the outcome looks likely to merely open the next phase of a deeply destabilizing situation.

Damien McElroy
Damien is a foreign correspondent who has covered politics and conflict across Europe, the Middle East, the US, Africa and Asia. Before joining The National in 2017, he worked for The Sunday Times and Telegraph titles as an editor and roving reporter. He started his career in China and has a degree in finance.

Source: https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/05/30/what-if-russia-succeeds-in-ukraines-donbas-region/

The post What if Russia succeeds in Ukraine’s Donbas region? first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The warning, issued by Mikhail Popov, deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council, follows an incident last month when British warship HMS Defender exercised what London said were internationally recognized freedom of navigation rules in Ukrainian territorial waters near Crimea.

Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and says the waters around it belong to Moscow now despite most countries continuing to recognize the peninsula as Ukrainian.

It protested strongly against the British move at the time with a coastguard vessel firing warning shots and summoned the British ambassador for an explanation.

Popov, in an interview in the state Rossiiyskaya Gazeta newspaper, said Britain’s behaviour and its subsequent reaction to the incident was bewildering.

In particular, he criticized suggestions from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab, the foreign minister, that the incident could be repeated.

“Similar actions will be thwarted with the harshest methods in future by Russia regardless of the violator’s state allegiance. We suggest our opponents think hard about whether it’s worth organizing such provocations given the capabilities of Russia’s armed forces,” said Popov.

“It’s not the members of the British government who will be in the ships and vessels used for prevocational ends,” he added. “And it’s in that context that I want to ask a question of the same Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab – what will they say to the families of the British sailors who will get hurt in the name of such ‘great’ ideas?”

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/russia-warns-britain-sail-near-crimea-again-your-sailors-will-get-hurt-2021-07-14/?rpc=401&

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President Biden’s national security and foreign policy moves are “failing” early in his administration, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told “Life, Liberty & Levin” in an interview airing Sunday night.

“Here’s my concern,” Ratcliffe told host Mark Levin. “Joe Biden is a guy who — his very close friend Robert Gates, who served as the secretary of defense with him in the Obama administration, said Joe Biden was wrong on every national security and foreign policy decision in the last forty years.

“It’s one thing to be wrong when you’re a United States senator or the vice president, but he’s the president of the United States,” Ratcliffe added, “and he’s very early on reflecting that he’s still making those wrong decisions when it comes to our national security and foreign policy, and foreign leaders see that and they’re taking advantage of it.”

Earlier, Ratcliffe told Levin that Russia’s recent military buildup near the border with Ukraine is an example of a foreign leader “testing” Biden.

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“[Russian President Vladimir] Putin is an ex-KGB thug, but he’s engaging in the same kind of activity that he did in the Obama-Biden administration when he stole Crimea and crossed over Obama’s red line,” Ratcliffe said. “And now, four years later, he’s testing whether or not the president, the new president of the United States that he sees on TV and has made some conclusions about whether or not he thinks he’s a strong leader or not. But he’s going to test — he’s testing him right now, and all of these world leaders are.”

After nearly three months in office, Ratcliffe alleged, the Biden White House is projecting “chaos through weakness.”

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“Look at our own southern border, the border security issues, the immigration crisis, what now looks like [is] going to be a crisis in the Middle East or Ukraine or in the straits outside of China … I fear that that is what our foreign policy is going to look like,” he said. “And what we do is pay attention and see that this is exactly what we don’t want and … what happens when you don’t put America first.

“And, you know, our first opportunity to change that politically will be in two years, and that’s why it’s important to keep talking about these issues and drawing a contrast between the Trump administration policies and the Biden administration policies that, very early, are failing.”

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-wrong-decisions-putin-russia-china-iran-john-ratcliffe

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Tourists in October on the Yankito Plateau on Iturup Island, the largest one of the Kuril Islands, known in Japan as the Northern Territories (Yuri Smityuk/TASS via Getty Images)

The decades-old dispute between Russia and Japan over the status of the Kuril Islands is far from over. Tokyo, which refers to the islands as the Northern Territories, still insists on a peace treaty with Moscow that would result in Russia’s return of at least two out of four islands to Japan, while the Kremlin keeps militarizing the disputed territory.

The chain of islands ­– stretching between the Japanese island of Hokkaido at the southern end and the Russian Kamchatka Peninsula in the north – was conquered by the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War. Ever since, Moscow has considered the Kuril Islands an integral part of Russia. Japan thinks otherwise.

The four islands are variously known in Russia and Japan as either Shikotan, Habomai Islets/Khabomai, Kunashiri/Kunashir and Etorofu/Iturup. In 1956, the Soviet Union and Japan signed a joint declaration providing for the end of the state of war, and for restoration of diplomatic relations between USSR and Japan. The document also included a transfer of Habomai and Shikotan to Japan. But a dispute has lingered with no formal peace treaty between the two nations. Russia is the successor state of the Soviet Union, and it leaders have said on several occasions that they were ready to have territorial talks with Japan on the basis of the joint declaration.

The most recent talks between Russia and Japan over the status of the islands were held in early 2019. Japan’s then prime minister Shinzo Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed to accelerate negotiations based on the 1956 document, which stated that the Habomai islets and Shikotan would be handed back to Japan, and the question of Kunashiri and Etorofu was to be settled during negotiations for a peace treaty.

Indications that the Kremlin was willing to discuss the status of Habomai islets and Shikotan was seen by some Russian nationalists as a treason, particularly in Sakhalin Oblast, the region which comprises the island of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Recent constitutional changes in Russia suggest this view has only hardened. Even though the two islands represent only 7% of the land in question, the new Russian constitution enacted in July this year includes a ban on “any alienation of Russian territories”. This would seem to preclude the return of even one square metre of Russian territory to Japan.

Japanese leaders, on the other hand, claim that the Russian Federation, as the legal successor to the Soviet Union, is obliged to scrupulously observe all of past obligations, including the unfulfilled subparagraph on the territorial issue. Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga recently said Tokyo plans to finalize the talks on the dispute.

“We need to achieve closure in the talks on the Northern Territories, instead of postponing it for future generations,” Suga said, and pointed out that he will strive for “comprehensive development of relations with Russia, including the signing of a peace agreement”.

All this ambition seems likely to go unfulfilled. And such a conclusion doesn’t only spring from more than 60 years of diplomatic stalemate, but also the stubborn facts of control on the ground.

Russian troops periodically conduct military drills on the disputed islands and may indeed go further. The Kremlin reportedly plans to deploy T-72B3 battle tanks to the Kuril Islands, where they can be used to destroy enemy assault forces and small enemy ships. In October, Russia deployed S-300V4 air defense missile systems to the territory for the first time to conduct military exercises. Although no one really expects Japan would invade the islands, Moscow clearly wants to make a show it does not intend to hand them over, either. With thousands of US troops already stationed in Japan, it’s not beyond some Russian analysts to speculate that Washington could establish naval bases in the Kuril Islands once Moscow and Tokyo resolve their territorial dispute.

Plus there is the potential wealth. The islands are surrounded by rich fishing grounds and are thought to have offshore reserves of oil and gas – although the value of such hydrocarbon claims are speculative. In addition, rare rhenium deposits have been found near the Kudriavy volcano on Etorofu.

Finally, a potential return of the Kuril Islands to Japan would be interpreted as a clear sign of Russian weakness, which means that Moscow could also face strong pressure from the West to return Crimea to Ukraine. Such a process would not only mean Russian humiliation in the global arena, but could also result in a serious political crisis that could lead to a breakup of the Russian Federation.

The prospective blow to Russian prestige therefore makes the territory is too important for the Kremlin to hand it over to Japan.

Source: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/why-russia-will-not-return-kuril-islands-japan

The post Why Russia will not return the Kuril Islands to Japan first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The Russian authorities are confused about how to respond to spontaneous public actions. A protest of Islamic activists in front of the French embassy in Moscow, on Thursday (October 29) was allowed, but another one, on Friday, was forcefully dispersed (Kommersant, October 30). The fiercest excoriation of the hard stance taken by Macron in the wake of the wave of Islamist-motivated violence came from Ramzan Kadyrov, who finds it necessary to justify his brutal rule over Chechnya with staunch defenses of Islamic values (Republic.ru, October 28). The Kremlin implored the country’s regional leaders not to interfere in foreign policymaking, which is the prerogative of the president (RBC, October 28). But Kadyrov dared to reject this reprimand and demanded an apology from maverick Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who found it convenient to elaborate on the disapproval expressed by the Kremlin (Moscow Echo, October 30). Despite Kadyrov’s embrace of the Islamic cause, the resistance against his dictatorial rule continues, and in a recent “special operation” in Grozny, three police officers were killed while storming a hideout of suspected terrorists (Kavkazsky Uzel, October 13; see EDM, October 26).

What complicates Putin’s position yet further is the forceful and emotionally charged attack on Macron’s defense of democratic values by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who seeks to claim the leadership role for the cause of political Islam (Russiancouncil.ru, October 25). Disagreements between Moscow and Ankara over the Syrian and Libyan conflicts remain barely manageable, and Putin still cannot find a convincing response to Turkey’s massive support for Azerbaijan in the latter’s already-five-week-long war with Armenia over Karabakh (The Insider, October 23). In a recent phone conversation with Putin, Erdoğan announced that he had drawn a “red line” for Russia in the Caucasus, thus undercutting Moscow’s support for Yerevan and rendering the ongoing Russian diplomatic maneuvers ineffectual (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, October 28). Russia tried to counter by delivering an airstrike against a pro-Turkish militia camp in Syria’s Idlib province, but Erdoğan raised the stakes further by threatening a new offensive in Syria (Kommersant, October 29). Putin could have chosen to try to condemn Turkey’s alleged backing of terrorists and extremists of various sorts, from al-Qaeda offshoots to the Muslim Brotherhood; but he is reluctant to confront his increasingly difficult “strategic partner” (Carnegie.ru, October 30).

Russian nationalists who used to rally around Putin’s flag planted in annexed Crimea are now upset with his failure to cut Erdoğan down to size. However, their anti-Islamic fervor threatens to destabilize the Kremlin leader’s broader regime-entrenching course (Svobodnaya Pressa, October 30). A major challenge to this course keeps growing in Belarus, where embattled President Alyaksandr Lukashenka is now promising to treat the peaceful mass protests as a “terrorist threat” (Newsru.com, October 27). Putin may not be quite ready to subscribe to this definition and may disapprove of Lukashenka’s pledge to “take no prisoners”; but the Russian president has committed to supporting the fellow-autocrat who has relied on brutal violence to prolong his reign (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, October 28). Police power, among other methods, already gained Belarus’s leader nearly three months of extra time since the falsified elections in early August. But the unexpected resilience of Belarusian society in rejecting Lukashenka and withstanding his regime’s violent attacks signify the inevitable near end of this rule by repression (Rosbalt, October 30).

Lukashenka may act as a cornered despot, but Putin is more aware of the grim legacy of state terror in Russia, where October 30 is annually marked to remember the victims of political repressions (Rossiiskaya Gazeta, October 30). The traditional action of reading randomly selected names of people who were executed or perished in Joseph Stalin’s GULAG was organized virtually this year, but it reached millions of Russians via online social networks, which remain uncensored despite many efforts to establish state control (October29.ru, October 29). Tragic family stories thus gain traction with the new generations who have grown up knowing only Putin as the irreplaceable leader and are now experiencing the maturing of his corrupt autocracy (Znak.com, October 30). Putin yearns to ensure the stability of his illiberal regime by branding opposition activists as “extremists,” expecting that selective punishments will suffice to dishearten mass support for these “radicals.” But as some observers note, the ugly shadow of Stalinism grows deeper under his power vertical (Riddle, October 27).

The radicalization of Islamist-indoctrinated youth is a much lesser concern for Putin than the deepening disappointment in his self-serving rule among the increasingly propaganda-resistant populace. He may even find glee in Macron’s troubles and seek to benefit from France’s problems with the Muslim world. Yet his own inability to restrain the arrogant Kadyrov or to confront the ambitious Erdoğan may undercut his residual support even deeper than his courtiers dare to assess. The multiple escalating tensions caused by the unrelenting COVID-19 pandemic is certainly apparent in many societies; but in Russia, it is aggravated by the crisis of a long-underfunded health care system and the failure in leadership caused by the protracted self-isolation of the presumably omnipotent guarantor of stability. Belarus is a striking example of the determination in society to stay the course of peaceful resistance to a regime’s attempts to terrorize it into submission. In Russia, however, the accumulated discontent is so combustible that even an utterly senseless, random terrorist attack could become a trigger for a sequence of violent explosions of anger—a recurrent feature of Russia’s tragic history.

Source: https://jamestown.org/program/new-wave-of-islamic-extremism-adds-to-putins-troubles/

The post New Wave of Islamic Extremism Adds to Putin’s Troubles first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Hungarian scholar George Szamuely tells Ann Garrison that he sees a 70 percent chance of combat between NATO and Russia following the incident in the Kerch Strait and that it is being fueled by Russia-gate.

George Szamuely is a Hungarian-born scholar and Senior Research Fellow at London’s Global Policy Institute. He lives in New York City. I spoke to him about escalating hostilities on Russia’s Ukrainian and Black Sea borders and about Exercise Trident Juncture, NATO’s massive military exercise on Russian borders which ended just as the latest hostilities began.

Ann Garrison: George, the hostilities between Ukraine, NATO, and Russia continue to escalate in the Sea of Azov, the Kerch Strait, and the Black Sea. What do you think the latest odds of a shooting war between NATO and Russia are, if one hasn’t started by the time this is published?

George Szamuely: Several weeks ago, when we first talked about this, I said 60 percent. Now I’d say, maybe 70 percent. The problem is that Trump seems determined to be the anti-Obama. Obama, in Trump’s telling, “allowed” Russia to take Crimea and to “invade” Ukraine. Therefore, it will be up to Trump to reverse this. Just as he, Trump, reversed Obama’s policy on Iran by walking away from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal. So expect ever-increasing US involvement in Ukraine.

AG: NATO’s Supreme Commander US General Curtis M. Scaparrotti is reported to have been on the phone with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko “offering his full support.” Thoughts on that?

GS: There has been a proxy war within Ukraine since 2014, with NATO backing Poroshenko’s Ukrainian government and Russia backing the dissidents and armed separatists who speak Russian and identify as Russian in Ukraine’s southeastern Donbass region. But in the Kerch Strait the hostilities are between Russia and Ukraine, with NATO behind Ukraine.

A shooting war will begin if it escalates to where NATO soldiers shoot and kill Russian soldiers or vice versa. Whoever shoots first, the other side will feel compelled to respond, and then there’ll be a war between Russia and NATO or Russia and a NATO nation.

We don’t know whether NATO would feel compelled to respond as one if Russians fired on soldiers of individual NATO nations—most likely UK soldiers since the UK is sending more of its Special Forces and already has the largest NATO military presence in Ukraine. Russia could defeat the UK, but if the US gets involved, all bets are off.

AG: It’s hard to imagine that the US would allow Russia to defeat the UK.

GS: It is, but on the other hand, the US is the US and the UK is the UK. The United States might well be ready to fight to the last Brit, much as the United States is definitely ready to fight to the last Ukrainian. There are already 300 US paratroopers in Ukraine training Ukrainians, but the British would be well advised that words of encouragement from Washington don’t necessarily translate into US willingness to go to war.

AG: The US Congress passed a law that US troops can’t serve under any foreign command, so that would require US command.

GS: Yes, and without that, any British military defeat could be blamed on traditional British military incompetence rather than US weakness or foolish braggadocio.

AG: This latest dustup between the Russian and Ukrainian navies took place in the Kerch Strait. I had to study several maps to understand this, but basically neither Russian nor Ukrainian vessels, military or commercial, can get to or from the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea without passing through the Kerch Strait. That doesn’t mean that neither could get to the Black Sea, because both have Black Sea borders, but they couldn’t get from ports in the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea and back.

And neither Ukraine nor Russia can get from the Black Sea to Western European waters without passing through the Bosporous and Dardanelles Straits in Turkey to the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas, and then further to the Atlantic Ocean through the Strait of Gibraltar, which is bordered on one side by Spain and the British territory of Gibraltar, and on the other by Morocco and the Spanish territory Ceuta. So there are many geo-strategic choke points where Russian ships, naval or commercial, could be stopped by NATO nations or their allies, and Ukraine has already asked Turkey to stop them from passing through the Bosporus Strait. Thoughts on that?

GS: Well, of course Ukraine can ask for anything it likes. There’s no way in the world Turkey would try to stop Russian ships going through the Bosporus Strait. That would be a violation of the 1936 Montreux Convention and an act of war on the part of Turkey. It isn’t going to happen. As for the Kerch Strait, it is Russian territorial water. Ukraine is free to use it and has been doing so without incident since 2014. The only thing the Russians insist on is that any ship going through the strait use a Russian pilot. During the recent incident, the Ukrainian tug refused to use a Russian pilot. The Russians became suspicious, fearing that the Ukrainians were engaged in a sabotage mission to blow up the newly constructed bridge across the strait. You’ll remember that an American columnist not so long ago urged the Ukrainian authorities to blow up the bridge. That’s why the Russians accuse Kiev of staging a provocation.

AG: There’s a longstanding back channel between the White House and the Kremlin, as satirized in Dr. Strangelove. Anti-Trump fanatics keep claiming this is new and traitorous, but it’s long established. Obama and Putin used it to keep Russian and US soldiers from firing on one another instead of the jihadists both claimed to be fighting in Syria. Kennedy and Khrushchev used it to keep the Bay of Pigs crisis from escalating into a nuclear war. Shouldn’t Trump and Putin be talking on that back channel now, no matter how much it upsets CNN and MSNBC?

GS: Well, of course, they should. The danger is that in this atmosphere of anti-Russian hysteria such channels for dialogue may not be kept open. As a result, crises could escalate beyond the point at which either side could back down without losing face. What’s terrifying is that so many US politicians and press now describe any kind of negotiation, dialogue, or threat-management as treasonous collusion by Donald Trump.

Remember Trump’s first bombing in Syria in April 2017. Before he launched that attack, Trump administration officials gave advance warning to the Russians to enable them to get any Russian aircraft out of harm’s way. This perfectly sensible action on the part of the administration—leave aside the illegality and stupidity of the attack—was greeted by Hillary Clinton and the MSNBC crowd as evidence that the whole operation was cooked up by Trump and Putin to take attention off Russia-gate. It’s nuts.

AG: Most of us have heard Russia and NATO’s conflicting accounts of why the Russian Navy seized several Ukrainian vessels in the Sea of Azov. What’s your interpretation of what happened?

GS: As I said, I think the Russians had every right to be suspicious of the intent of the Ukrainian vessels. The Ukrainians know that these are Russian territorial waters. They know that the only way to go through the Kerch Strait is by making use of a Russian pilot. They refused to allow the Russians to pilot the ships through the strait. Whatever the Ukrainians’ ultimate intent was—whether it was to carry out an act of sabotage, to provoke the Russians into overreaction and then to demand help from NATO, or simply to go through the strait without a Russian pilot in order to enable President Poroshenko to proclaim the strait as non-Russian—whatever Kiev’s intent was, the Russians were entitled to respond. The force the Russians used was hardly excessive. In similar circumstances, the US would have destroyed all of the ships and killed everyone on board. Recall, incidentally, Israel has seized Gaza flotilla boats and arrested everyone on board. In 2010, the Israeli Navy shot nine activists dead during a flotilla boat seizure, and wounded one who died after four years in a coma.

AG: Don’t the US, Ukraine, and the UN Security Council refuse to recognize the Kerch Strait as Russian territory, and insist that Russia’s claim to it violates various maritime treaties? I know the UNSC refuses to recognize the Golan Heights as Israeli territory, not that that does Syria any good.

GS: According to the 2003 agreement, Russia and Ukraine agreed to consider the strait as well as the Sea of Azov as shared territorial waters. From 2014 on, Russia considered the strait as Russian waters, though it’s made no attempt to hamper Ukrainian shipping. The Azov Sea is still shared by Russia and Ukraine. During the recent incident, the Ukrainian Navy acted provocatively, deliberately challenging the Russians. As for what the UNSC accepts, how would NATO respond if Serbia entered Kosovo on some pretext or other?

AG: OK, now let’s go back to NATO’s Exercise Trident Juncture, a massive military exercise on Russia’s Scandinavian and Arctic borders that concluded on November 24, one day before the Kerch Strait incident. The first phase was deployment, from August to October. The second phase was war games from October 25th to November 7th. The war games were based on the premise that Russia had invaded Scandinavia by ground, air, and sea. They included 50,000 participants from 31 NATO and partner countries, 250 aircraft, 65 naval vessels, and up to 10,000 tanks and other ground vehicles, and I hate to think about how much fossil fuel they burned.

The final phase was a command post exercise to make sure that, should NATO forces ever face a real Russian invasion of Scandinavia, their response could be safely coordinated in Norway and in Italy, far from the war zone.

So George, do Scandinavians have reason to worry that Russia might invade any of their respective nations?

GS: Not at all. This is ridiculous. It was the largest military exercise since the end of the Cold War, and why? Why did they do this? Russia isn’t threatening Scandinavia, but it’s more likely that it will if NATO continues conducting war games on its borders. Right now tension between East and West is escalating so fast that a single event could be like a match that triggers an explosion, and then there’ll be a war.

AG: There was a recent Russian exercise, or joint Russian and Chinese exercise, based on the premise that the US had invaded Korea, right?

GS: Right. But it wasn’t anywhere near Europe, so it wasn’t threatening the Europeans. It took place in eastern Siberia, so it shouldn’t have caused panic in NATO countries. It shouldn’t have caused panic in the US either, because the Pacific Ocean separates the US and the Korean Peninsula.

What’s striking about Trident Juncture is that it involved Sweden and Finland, both of whom are traditionally neutral. They were neutral during the Cold War, not joining any alliances. Finlandization came to mean a foreign policy that in no way challenged or antagonized the USSR. So now here’s Finland rolling back that policy and joining NATO in this massive military exercise to stop nonexistent Russian aggression.

AG: Has Russia ever attempted to seize territory outside its own borders since the end of the Cold War?

GS: No. Russia never attempted to seize territory outside its own borders. The case cited by the West is Crimea, but that was really an outstanding issue that should have been addressed during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin, the drunken, incompetent stooge that the US installed, just neglected it.

The Russian-speaking and Russian-identified people of Crimea were unhappy about Ukraine claiming sovereignty over them. They had been an autonomous republic within the USSR, and after its dissolution, they still retained their constitutional autonomy. That’s what gave them the right to hold a referendum to join the Russia Federation in 2014.

If the West is involved in an uprising, as in Ukraine, it recognizes the “independence” of the government it puts in power. It won’t recognize the constitutional autonomy of Crimea, which predated the 2014 Ukrainian revolution or illegal armed coup, whichever you call it, because it wasn’t part of their plan.

AG: The NATO nations and their allies say that Russia invaded and occupied Crimea, violating Ukrainian sovereignty according to international law. Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman referred to the “illegal annexation” of Crimea at least three times after the Kerch Strait incident. How do you explain the presence of Russian soldiers in Crimea prior to the referendum?

GS: They didn’t invade and occupy Crimea. Their forces were there legally, according to a 25-year lease agreement between Russia and Ukraine.

Crimea had been a part of Russia for more than 200 years. For most of the time, during the USSR era, it was an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation. In 1954, Khrushchev transferred some degree of sovereignty over the Crimean Republic to Ukraine. I’m not entirely sure why he did that, but the issue wasn’t that important then because Ukraine, Russia and Crimea were all part of the USSR.

Khrushchev didn’t envisage an independent Ukraine walking off with such a prize piece of real estate. Crimea is not only a huge tourist destination, it is also the site of Russia’s primary naval base on the Black Sea in Sevastopol. Yeltsin failed to address the problem in 1991. Since then, every time Crimeans talked about holding a referendum on their future, Kiev threatened to use force to stop them. Kiev would have used force again in 2014 if the Russians in the Port of Sevastopol had not left their Crimean base and made their presence known.

AG: The US, aka NATO, has an empire of military bases all over the world, and troops right up against Russia’s borders as in Exercise Trident Juncture. Does Russia have anything remotely like it?

GS: No. Russia does not have military bases outside its borders, which are now more or less as they were in 1939, when the USSR was surrounded by hostile states that were more than happy to join Hitler. So it’s ridiculous to tell Russia, “Don’t worry about our troops and war games all over your borders because we don’t really mean any harm.” Washington is calling Russia an existential enemy, and the UK is promising to stand shoulder to shoulder with its NATO allies and partners against “Russian aggression,” which is really Russian defense. So now we have an explosive situation on the Ukrainian and Russian borders that could easily turn into a shooting war.

AG: I read some US/NATO complaints that Russia was conducting exercises on its own side of the border. And last week NATO accused the Russian military of jamming its signals during its rehearsal for a war on Russia’s borders.

GS: Yes, that’s what the US considers Russian aggression, even though its troops and bases are all over the world and all over Russia’s borders.

AG: Competition between US and Russian energy corporations is one of the main undercurrents to all this. The US State Department even said that Europe should abandon the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline project with Russia because of the Kerch Strait incident, but that received a cool response, particularly from Angela Merkel. What are your thoughts about that?

GS: Well, obviously, the Trump administration is determined to push the Europeans to give up on natural gas from Russia and to opt, instead, for US liquefied natural gas (LNG). The problem is that LNG shipped across the Atlantic is much more expensive than natural gas piped to Europe from Russia. So it’s clearly not in the interests of the Europeans to have a bigger energy bill. Look what’s happening in France. Ordinary people are not making so much money that they can afford to shell out more for energy, particularly when there is no need to do so. Some countries such as Poland are so imbued with hostility toward Russia that they’re willing to pay more for gas just to hurt Russia, but Germany won’t go down this path.

AG: Anything else you’d like to say for now?

GS: Yes, I think it’s amazing that this many years after the Cold War we’ve reached a point where there’s almost no public criticism of a policy that has led to the US abandoning a major arms control agreement, namely the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in 1987.

There’s almost no public criticism of the US getting involved in an armed confrontation on Russia’s doorstep, in Ukraine, Syria, Iran, or conceivably even Scandinavia. There’s almost no public criticism of roping formerly neutral European powers like Sweden and Finland into NATO military exercises.

Given the fact that the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that went into effect in 2011 will expire in 2021, and given that there’s nothing on the horizon to take its place, this is an extraordinarily perilous point in time.

And much of this has to be blamed on the liberals. The liberals have embraced an anti-Russian agenda. The kind of liberal view that prevailed during the Cold War was that we should at least pursue arms control agreements. We might not like the Communists, but we need treaties to prevent a nuclear war. Now there’s no such caution. Any belligerence towards Russia is now good and justified. There’s next to no pushback against getting into a war with Russia, even though it could go nuclear.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes Region. She can be reached at ann@anngarrison.com.

Source: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/12/no_author/latest-odds-of-a-shooting-war-between-nato-and-russia/

The post Latest Odds of a Shooting War Between NATO and Russia first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Russian annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, triggering economic sanctions by the European Union and United States and a tense stand-off in the region.

The U.S. said in December it planned to provide Ukraine with “enhanced defensive capabilities”, which officials said included Javelin anti-tank missiles..

Moscow’s latest deployment represents the second division armed with S-400 air defense systems on the peninsula, after the first in the spring of 2017 near the port town of Fedosia.

The new division will be based next to the town of Sevastopol and will control the airspace over the border with Ukraine, the RIA news agency reported.

The new air defense system, designed to defend Russia’s borders, can be turned into combat mode in less than five minutes, Interfax news agency quoted Viktor Sevostyanov, a commander with Russia’s air forces, as saying.

Russia’s defense ministry says the S-400 systems, known as “Triumph”, can bring down airborne targets at a range of 400 kilometers and ballistic missiles at a range of 60 kilometers.

They were first introduced to the Russian military’s arsenal in 2007, the ministry said.

The post Russia deploys more surface-to-air missiles in Crimean build-up first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.