USA tries to prevent a Russian offensive in Ukraine by offering a sort of war endgame deal with Russia

The war party in Washington has floated possible terms of concession to Russia’s security objectives explicitly and directly, without the Ukrainians or its NATO vassals in the way.

from thefreeobline on 28th January 2023 by John Helmer at johnhelmer.org/ via Antinuclear.net

BLINKEN CONCEDES WAR IS LOST – OFFERS KREMLIN UKRAINIAN DEMILITARIZATION; CRIMEA, DONBASS, ZAPOROZHYE; AND RESTRICTION OF NEW TANKS TO WESTERN UKRAINE IF THERE IS NO RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE

David Ignatius, a mouthpiece for the US State Department has just been called in by the current Secretary of State Antony Blinken to convey this urgent new message to President Vladimir Putin, the Security Council, and the General Staff in Moscow.

The terms Blinken has told Ignatius to print appeared in the January 25 edition of the Washington Post. The paywall can be avoided by reading on here.

The territorial concessions Blinken is tabling include Crimea, the Donbass, and the Zaporozhye, Kherson “land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia”. West of the Dnieper River, north around Kharkov, and south around Odessa and Nikolaev, Blinken has tabled for the first time US acceptance of “a demilitarized status” for the Ukraine.

Also, US agreement to restrict the deployment of HIMARS, US and NATO infantry fighting vehicles, and the Abrams and Leopard tanks to a point in western Ukraine from which they can “manoeuvre…as a deterrent against future Russian attacks.”

This is an offer for a tradeoff – partition through a demilitarized zone (DMZ) in the east of the Ukraine in exchange for a halt to the planned Russian offensive destroying the fortifications, rail hubs, troop cantonments, and airfields in the west, between the Polish and Romanian borders, Kiev and Lvov, and an outcome Blinken proposes for both sides to call “a just and durable peace that upholds Ukraine’s territorial integrity”.

Also in the proposed Blinken deal there is the offer of a direct US-Russian agreement on “an eventual postwar military balance”; “no World War III”; and no Ukrainian membership of NATO with “security guarantees similar to NATO’s Article 5.”

Crimea is a particular point of discussion. There is a widespread view in Washington and Kyiv that regaining Crimea by military force may be impossible. Any Ukrainian military advances this year in Zaporizhzhia oblast, the land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia, could threaten Russian control. But an all-out Ukrainian campaign to seize the Crimean Peninsula is unrealistic, many U.S. and Ukrainian officials believe. That’s partly because Putin has indicated that an assault on Crimea would be a tripwire for nuclear escalation.

Blinken has also told the Washington Post to announce the US will respect “Putin’s tripwire for nuclear escalation”, and accept the Russian “reserve force includ[ing] strategic bombers, certain precision-guided weapons and, of course, tactical and strategic nuclear weapons.”

President Putin has offered a hint of the Russian reply he discussed with the Stavka and the Security Council last week.

Putin told a meeting with university students on Wednesday, hours after Blinken’s publication. “I think that people like you,” the president said, “most clearly and most accurately understand the need for what Russia is now doing to support our citizens in these territories, including Lugansk, Donetsk, the Donbass area as a whole, and Kherson and Zaporozhye.

The goal, as I have explained many times, is primarily to protect the people and Russia from the threats that they are trying to create for us in our own historical territories that are adjacent to us.

We cannot allow this.

So, it is extremely important when young people like you defend the interests of their small and large Motherland with arms in their hands and do so consciously.”

Read on, very carefully, understanding that nothing a US official says, least of all through the mouths of Blinken, Ignatius, and the Washington Post is trusted by the Russians; and understanding that what Putin and the Stavka say they mean by Russia’s “adjacent historical territories” and the “small and large Motherland” has been quite clear.

******** 

Follow what Blinken told Ignatius to print, before Putin issued his reply. The propaganda terms have been highlighted in bold to mean the opposite — the public positions from which Blinken is trying to retreat and keep face.

January 25, 2023
Blinken ponders the post-Ukraine-war order
By David Ignatius

“The Biden administration, convinced that Vladimir Putin has failed in his attempt to erase Ukraine, has begun planning for an eventual postwar military balance that will help Kyiv deter any repetition of Russia’s brutal invasion.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined his strategy for the Ukrainian endgame and postwar deterrence during an interview on Monday at the State Department. The conversation offered an unusual exploration of some of the trickiest issues surrounding resolution of a Ukraine conflict that has threatened the global order.

Blinken explicitly commended Germany’s military backing for Ukraine at a time when Berlin is getting hammered by some other NATO allies for not providing Leopard tanks quickly to Kyiv. “Nobody would have predicted the extent of Germany’s military support” when the war began, Blinken said. “This is a sea change we should recognize.”

He also underlined President Biden’s determination to avoid direct military conflict with Russia, even as U.S. weapons help pulverize Putin’s invasion force. “Biden has always been emphatic that one of his requirements in Ukraine is that there be no World War III,” Blinken said.

Russia’s colossal failure to achieve its military goals, Blinken believes, should now spur the United States and its allies to begin thinking about the shape of postwar Ukraine — and how to create a just and durable peace that upholds Ukraine’s territorial integrity and allows it to deter and, if necessary, defend against any future aggression. In other words, Russia should not be able to rest, regroup and reattack.

Blinken’s deterrence framework is somewhat different from last year’s discussions with Kyiv about security guarantees similar to NATO’s Article 5. Rather than such a formal treaty pledge, some U.S. officials increasingly believe the key is to give Ukraine the tools it needs to defend itself. Security will be ensured by potent weapons systems — especially armor and air defense — along with a strong, noncorrupt economy and membership in the European Union.

The Pentagon’s current stress on providing Kyiv with weapons and training for maneuver warfare reflects this long-term goal of deterrence. “The importance of maneuver weapons isn’t just to give Ukraine strength now to regain territory but as a deterrent against future Russian attacks,” explained a State Department official familiar with Blinken’s thinking. “Maneuver is the future.”

The conversation with Blinken offered some hints about the intense discussions that have gone on for months within the administration about how the war in Ukraine can be ended and future peace maintained. The administration’s standard formula is that all decisions must ultimately be made by Ukraine, and Blinken reiterated that line. He also backs Ukraine’s desire for significant battlefield gains this year. But the State Department, Pentagon and National Security Council are also thinking ahead.

Crimea is a particular point of discussion. There is a widespread view in Washington and Kyiv that regaining Crimea by military force may be impossible. Any Ukrainian military advances this year in Zaporizhzhia oblast, the land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia, could threaten Russian control. But an all-out Ukrainian campaign to seize the Crimean Peninsula is unrealistic, many U.S. and Ukrainian officials believe. That’s partly because Putin has indicated that an assault on Crimea would be a tripwire for nuclear escalation.

The administration shares Ukraine’s insistence that Crimea, which was seized by Russia in 2014, must eventually be returned. But in the short run, what’s crucial for Kyiv is that Crimea no longer serve as a base for attacks against Ukraine. One formula that interests me would be a demilitarized status, with questions of final political control deferred. Ukrainian officials told me last year that they had discussed such possibilities with the administration “.

As Blinken weighs options in Ukraine, he has been less worried about escalation risks than some observers. That’s partly because he believes Russia is checked by NATO’s overwhelming power. “Putin continues to hold some things in reserve because of his misplaced fear that NATO might attack Russia,” explained the official familiar with Blinken’s thinking. This Russian reserve force includes strategic bombers, certain precision-guided weapons and, of course, tactical and strategic nuclear weapons.

This year, Ukraine and its allies will keep fighting to expel Russian invaders. But as in the final years of World War II, planning has already begun for the postwar order — and construction of a system of military and political alliances that can restore and maintain the peace that Russia shattered.

Click to follow Putin’s remarks in the official Kremlin translation.

Highlighted in bold type in Blinken’s text is the phrase, “a strong, noncorrupt economy and membership in the European Union”. This is Blinken’s message to the Kremlin that the US wants to preserve Ukraine’s agricultural economy, its grain export ports, and the trade terms agreed with the European Union before the war.

It is also Blinken’s acknowledgement that Vladimir Zelensky’s move early this week to force the resignations and dismissals of senior officials means the US is calling the shots in Kiev and Lvov.

Nothing is revealed in Blinken’s offer “for the Ukrainian endgame and postwar deterrence” of how, and who on the US and Russian sides, to negotiate directly on the particulars.

Instead, there is the hint that if the Russians agree to trust the Americans and delay the planned offensive, and if they allow the rail lines to remain open between Poland and Lvov, the Americans will reciprocate by keeping the Abrams and Leopard tank deliveries in verifiable laagers west of Kiev.

As Russian officials have been making clear for months, no US terms of agreement can be trusted on paper, and nothing at all which Blinken says.

A well-informed independent military analyst comments on the Russian options: “The best response is continue the special military operation, destroy the Ukrainian military in their present pockets, complete de-electrification and destruction of the logistics, then either take everything east of the Dnieper or establish a de facto DMZ, including Kharkov. Blinken and the others cannot be trusted to follow through if they think they have a chance to stall for time.

The Ukrainian Nazis are conspicuously absent from this proposal – and they remain to be dealt with. We know there will be no end to trouble if the Russian de-nazification objective against them stops now.”

https://thefreeonline.com/2023/01/28/usa-tries-to-prevent-a-russian-offensive-in-ukraine-by-offering-a-sort-of-war-endgame-deal-with-russia/

DAS AUSBLUTEN DER AUTOCHTHONEN BEVÖLKERUNG GEHT WEITER

Von Helena Zeus

Im Land der Messermorde (Symbolbild:Imago)

Deutschland blutet aus – wobei der Begriff „ausbluten” hierbei nicht nur als Synonym für „ausplündern” gemeint ist, sondern leider und immer öfter auch im ganz wörtlichen Sinne den Zustand unserer Gesellschaft beschreibt: Es findet ein regelrechtes Abschlachten der Deutschen statt. Anfangs nur gelegentlich und punktuell, werden die Zeiträume zwischen den von islamischen Flüchtlingen und Migranten begangenen Mordanschlägen auf solche, die „schon länger hier leben“, immer kürzer. Meist sind es junge Menschen, häufig Frauen, die den Gräueltaten zum Opfer fallen – wobei es in die Schlagzeilen grundsätzlich nur die spektakulärsten Fälle schaffen. Der alltägliche Wahnsinn, der praktisch überall in Deutschland um sich greift, wird als allenfalls von „regionaler Bedeutung” heruntergespielt, und um das Ganze zu bagatellisieren, werden die Täter gewohnheitsmäßig fast immer als psychisch krank eingestuft.

Frauen werden wohl vor allem deshalb mehrheitlich zu Opfern, weil deren in diesem Land übliches freies, selbstbestimmtes Auftreten auf die patriarchalisch und islamischen geprägten Täter besonders provozierend wirkt. In deren Weltbild gehören unverschleierte Frauen, die es wagen, sich ohne männliche Begleitung in der Öffentlichkeit zu zeigen, bestraft oder werden als Freiwild angesehen, deren Leben nichts wert ist. Oft genug geht es dabei auch nur um die Wiederherstellung der eigenen „Ehre”: Sollte eine Frau eine Beziehung beenden oder auch nur Anwerbeversuchen eine Abfuhr erteilt haben, sehen die Täter rot.

Keine politischen Konsequenzen

Aber nicht nur Frauen werden immer häufiger zu Opfern. Der Täter von Oggersheim hat offen zugegeben, dass es ihm darum ging, Deutsche zu töten. Andere Angreifer haben offen geäußert, „Ungläubige“ töten zu wollen. Und das passiert nicht nur in Deutschland, sondern überall in Europa und so gut wie jeden Tag. Auch wenn die regierungstreuen und ideologisch „zuverlässigen“ Medien stets bemüht sind, die Herkunft und Motive der Täter zu vertuschen, klappt das bei bei besonders spektakulären Fällen mit vielen Zeugen nicht immer – wie diese Woche im Regionalzug zwischen Hamburg und Kiel. Die dann notwendigen stereotypen, sich den „Einzelfällen“ anschließenden Betroffenheitsbekundungen seitens der Politiker werden mit kalter Routine abgespult, es folgt dann noch die übliche Vermeidung, dass der Täter psychisch krank oder traumatisiert gewesen sei – und schon nach wenigen Tagen wird der Vorfall nicht mehr erwähnt. Wer dennoch darauf herumreitet und auf einer Aufarbeitung der eigentlichen Tat besteht, wird schnell als Rassist, islamophob oder gleich als Nazi beschimpft.

Das Entscheidende ist, dass außer ein paar Floskeln keinerlei politischen Konsequenzen aus der zunehmenden Zahl von Morden an arglosen Menschen folgen. Der Zusammenhang zwischen der immer unverantwortlicheren Migrationspolitik und der Häufung solcher Taten wird ignoriert und es wird, wie gehabt, weiter ungeprüft jeder ins Land gelassen. Kriminelle Migranten haben hierzulande weiterhin Narrenfreiheit, Islamisten werden als „unzurechnungsfähig” eingestuft und entgehen so der deutschen Justiz, anstatt hart sanktioniert zu werden. Trotz ellenlanger Vorstrafenregister und schwerster Straftaten sind die Täter auf freiem Fuss. Und abgeschoben wird sowieso so gut wie niemand – auf aktives Betreiben derselben Politiker, die sich dann, wie Faeser jetzt nach Brokstedt, hinstellen und allen Ernstes beklagen, dass der Täter noch im Land war:

(Screenshot:Twitter)

So wächst der islamische Bevölkerungsanteil im Land jährlich um mehrere hunderttausend Menschen durch Zuwanderung und Familiennachzug, während der Anteil der autochthonen Bevölkerung, aufgrund der um mehrere hunderttausend Menschen höheren Sterbe- als Geburtenrate und einer wachsenden Zahl an auswandernden Leistungsträger, immer geringer wird. In den sozialen Medien jubeln Muslime über diesen Trend und hoffen ganz unverhohlen, schon bald das Land „übernehmen” zu können. Sie sehen es ohnehin immer öfter als sturmreif an.

Die Politik scheint das nicht zu beunruhigen. Man ist viel zu beschäftigt mit dem „Kampf gegen Rechts”. Vor allem renitente Rentner, angeführt von einen durchgeknallten Prinzen, binden Tausende von Einsatzkräften; der Staatsschutz widmet sich einer weiteren Rentnertruppe von Spinnern, die Karl Lauterbach angeblich aus einer laufenden Fernsehsendung entführen wollte. In solchen Fällen, bei diesen uns präsentierten Staatsfeinden kann sich die Staatsgewalt dann von ihrer besten, entschlossenen Seite zeigen; hier riskiert sie nicht, so hilf- und wehrlos dazustehen wie bei Ausschreitungen der sogenannten „Party- und Eventszene” an Silvester und in lauen Sommernächten in den Innenstädten, oder gegenüber das staatliche Gewaltmonopol herausfordernden Araberclans.

Am Kipppunkt

Deutschland stirbt jeden Tag ein Stückchen mehr. Das mögen die Grünen – für die Deutschland ein „mieses Stück Scheiße” ist (eine Parole, hinter der Claudia Roth einst mitdemonstrierte) und die „Vaterlandsliebe stets zum Kotzen” finden (Robert Habeck) – als erstrebenswert erachten, solange es noch genug Leistungsträger gibt, die den ganzen Wahnsinn finanzieren. Aber auch hier ist der Kipppunkt bald erreicht: Fakt ist, dass es noch 27 Millionen Nettosteuerzahler gibt, von denen gerade einmal 15 Millionen wirkliche Leistungsträger sind, die das System finanzieren müssen. Die weiteren 12 Millionen Nettosteuerzahler sind Empfänger von Übertragungseinkommen und selbst direkt oder indirekt vom Staat abhängig, etwa als Beamte oder Angestellte des Öffentlichen Dienstes; ihre Einkommen müssen also mehr oder weniger auch von den restlichen 15 Millionen mitfinanziert werden. Genauso wie die Rentner, die einheimischen Erwerbslosen und die Millionen von in das Sozialsystem eingewanderten und weiter einwandernden Migranten.

Baerbock schuf hierfür den Begriff einer „einladenden Zuwanderungspolitik“. Das grünen Wahlprogramm von 2021 skizziert, was darunter zu verstehen ist: Man will ein „modernes Einwanderungsrecht, das neue Zugangswege nach Deutschland schafft“ – und zwar ganz explizit „auch für Gering- und Unqualifizierte“. Da sollte sich niemand darüber wundern, dass sich bereits im ersten Jahr der neuen Regierung die Migrationszahlen vervielfacht haben. Der Lockruf des Sozialstaats ist bis in den letzten Winkeln vor allem der islamischen Welt gehört worden und viele Millionen sind schon auf dem Weg ins märchenhafte Paradies „Germoney”, wo man ohne Anstrengung mehr Geld bekommt, als es zuhause mit harter Arbeit je möglich wäre. Selbst das, was davon in die Heimat zurückgeschickt wird, ist dort oftmals ein Vielfaches des Durchschnittseinkommens und hat zum Teil längst fatale Auswirkungen auf die sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Verhältnisse in den Heimatregionen der Flüchtlinge, von wo aus sich immer mehr auf den Weg machen.

Fremd im eigenen Land

Aber zurück zu den Leistungsträgern, die das und noch viel mehr – über Transferleistungen ins Ausland – finanzieren sollen: Die Hälfte dieser 15 Millionen gehören der sogenannten Boomer-Generation an, sind über 50 und steuern auf das Rentenalter zu. Sie zu ersetzen kann aufgrund der demographischen Entwicklung nicht gelingen. Die Zahl der Leistungsträger wird daher in den nächsten Jahren rapide sinken. Und die andere, jüngere Hälfte dieser 15 Millionen? Von ihnen verlässt eine stetig wachsende Zahl das Land; sie werden von niedrigeren Abgaben, attraktiveren Lebensbedingungen und höherer Wertschätzung ihrer Leistungen im Ausland angelockt. Warum auch sollten sie in Deutschland bleiben? In einem Land, das sich im freien Fall befindet, dessen Infrastruktur immer maroder wird, dessen Innenstädte immer mehr „westasiatischen“ Shitholes ähneln und wo man sich als Deutscher längst fremd im eigenen Land fühlt?

Man kann es den Auswanderern nicht verdenken; Heimatgefühl oder Patriotismus sind Schimpfworte und gelten nur für andere. Da macht es absolut Sinn, sich eine neue, bessere Heimat zu suchen. Die Alternative dazu wäre jedoch, man fängt endlich an, sich gegen diesen ganzen Wahnsinn zu wehren und um das Land der eigenen Väter, dieses Deutschland mit seiner so reichen Kultur und Tradition, zu kämpfen. Um das Deutschland, in dem man jahrzehntelang gut und gerne gelebt hat – und für das man im Ausland einst bewundert und beneidet wurde.

Das Ausbluten der autochthonen Bevölkerung geht weiter

War Is a Racket… Tanks a Lot, Now Give Us F-16s!

The vampiric orgy of weapons going to Ukraine could provoke a terrifying world war and global catastrophe.

No sooner had the United States, Germany and other NATO powers announced the major release of main battlefield tanks for Ukraine, the Kiev regime immediately started demanding the supply of American-made F-16 warplanes.

The attitude is incorrigible. Chutzpah on steroids, or perhaps cocaine.

As Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky gloated this week shamelessly and without a hint of irony to corporate honchos in Florida, the war in his country means “big business opportunities” for the West. This clownish figure was formerly a comedian and actor before becoming a politician. Now he can add pimping to his grubby career.

For weeks in the Western states there have been tortuous public discussions about whether to send tanks to support the Kiev regime against Russia. Then abruptly, the U.S., Germany and other NATO allies have one by one unceremoniously shirked the taboo and are promising delivery of the heavy armor weaponry. The Biden administration declared it will send around 30 units of M1 Abrams. Germany is to send about 14 Leopard 2 tanks as are several other European NATO members who have the German-made vehicle in their inventories. Britain has announced it will supply about 14 of its Challenger 2 tanks and France is considering supplying Leclerc main battlefield units.

The numbers involved are way short of the 300 demanded by the Kiev regime and will not deliver the much-vaunted and totally unrealistic “victory” over Russia. The tokenism is, however, part of an enormous war racket. It’s all about pumping up more profiteering rather than any principle or serious strategic objective in Ukraine, apart from destabilizing Russia and trying to isolate Moscow internationally. The danger is, however, if the powder keg is stoked any further, the risk of an unintended conflagration becomes a growing probability.

It’s almost farcical – if it wasn’t so grave – how reckless is the rush by NATO powers to outdo each other in military madness.

Moscow has condemned an “extremely dangerous escalation” which puts NATO in direct conflict with Russia on a path of full-blown war in Europe. Any such war will not be confined to Europe. This is a step off the abyss towards a world war at grave risk of unleashing nuclear annihilation.

Over the past year since Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine to neutralize a NATO-sponsored NeoNazi regime that had for eight years been aggressing ethnic Russian people formerly in eastern Ukraine (now integrated into the Russian Federation after popular referenda), the United States and its allies have scaled up weapon supplies to Ukraine at a staggering blitzkrieg rate.

The financial and military aid funneled into Ukraine over just 12 months from the U.S., NATO and European Union amounts to around $100 billion. This is while these states are telling their own citizens that there isn’t enough money for funding essential public services and welfare needs, amid crushing economic inflation caused in large part by energy prices soaring from unilaterally cutting Russian gas supplies. The nature of the weapons has graduated to increasingly offensive firepower and quantity. The readiness by the NATO powers to mobilize military resources indicates that this war was anticipated as a showdown with Russia.

Ukrainian defense official Yuriy Sak cockily commented about the relative ease of the “next big hurdle” of acquiring F-16s fighter jets.

“They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us HIMARS [missiles], then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get.”

That means F-16s are up next.

It’s not clear who the “they” who “didn’t want to” supply weapons are. Every step of the way, Western leaders have quickly jettisoned any supposed scruples or reservations about supplying weapons. The so-called “reservations” seem in hindsight now to have been nothing but cynical deception to hoodwink the Western public about what their politicians are doing – which is opening the gates of hell for war by plying Ukraine with weapons and suppressing any attempt at ending the conflict through politics and diplomacy. Lest it should be forgotten, politics and diplomacy should be the first and most urgent effort. The negligence, indeed repudiation, of diplomacy by Western powers is tantamount to criminal conspiracy for fueling hostility.

Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin, the American maker of the F-16 has cheerily chimed in on cue that it is ready to supply the fighter jet to Ukraine as soon as NATO leaders agree to give the go-ahead. Lockheed Martin is also the maker of HIMARS and Javelin missiles. The American military-industrial complex is raking in record profits over this war in Ukraine. U.S. global exports of weapons have surged by an estimated 50 per cent year-on-year, mainly due to selling to European allies who have emptied their arsenals for Ukraine.

There is a sense of inevitability that the “hurdle” of F-16s and other advanced warplanes will be dispensed with in due course in the same way that Washington and its allies overcame their lame hesitance about missiles and tanks. What can be expected is more long-range missiles as well as advanced warplanes.

President Joe Biden declared preposterously that the tanks being sent to Ukraine are not “offensive” nor a “threat to Russia”. He called them “tanks for freedom”. This is the same nonsense as other NATO leaders claiming that the best way to peace in Ukraine is to arm the Kiev regime with even more lethal weapons. Biden also asserted that if Russian troops withdrew from Ukraine then the war would be over. This is dissembling about the causes of the conflict and what Washington’s geopolitical agenda really is about: salvaging hegemonic ambitions with regard to Russia, China and any other perceived rival. The war would not simply stop, as Biden lied through his teeth. The war in Ukraine is but a battlefield in a much bigger war for asserting American supremacy, which is no longer viable in an emerging multipolar world amid collapsing US economic power.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said it best this week, albeit inadvertently. “We are fighting a war against Russia,” she blurted out during a Council of Europe parliamentary debate in Strasbourg regarding the dispatch of Leopard tanks.

The war in Ukraine is nothing more than a racket in the same sordid tradition as condemned by US Marine Corps Major General Smedley D Butler in the 1930s. Zelensky and his cabal are rife with corruption and profiteering as the mass sacking of his cabinet officials this week demonstrates. Even the Western media could not ignore the scandal, despite doing their best to whitewash the fiasco as a crackdown on corruption. Those sackings only came about after Zelensky’s aides were exposed as being up their eyes in embezzling, fraud and bribery.

The huge sums of money being pumped into the Kiev regime by Western governments courtesy of Western taxpayers and the debt of future generations is a driver of the corruption. Of course, the Kiev racketeers are demanding more and more weapons from the West because the “big business” is lining their pockets, offshore properties and bank accounts.

And of course, the Western weapons companies are all too happy to ramp up production, sales and profits. Western politicians and governments are feeding at the trough of the military-industrial complex through lobbyists and board member sinecures, like the U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin who is hooked up with Raytheon, another Pentagon firm that has enriched itself from the Ukraine conflict.

Despite Western media propaganda about “defending Ukraine” and “fighting for democracy”, the reality is the United States and its NATO minions are all in for greasing the war-machine capitalist economies and for their own personal gain. The tragedy is that the weapons pipelines will not help Ukraine. Russian forces are decimating the NATO-sponsored NeoNazi regime. Not even tanks or warplanes will salvage the military disaster.

The West is filling a bloodbath in Ukraine for their merchants of death. The obscenity of callously shoving people into a slaughter for no moral or just cause, but all for the profit-making of corporations, themselves and the corrupt cabal in Kiev is despicable beyond words.

The real danger is that the vampiric orgy of weapons going to Ukraine could provoke a terrifying world war and global catastrophe. That is the measure of the evil at the heart of the Western powers and their puppet masters. The First and Second World Wars were manifestations of the same evil imperialist system. If it has its way, that is without Russia’s restraining power, then the world is facing another calamity brought about by the same criminal system.

War Is a Racket… Tanks a Lot, Now Give Us F-16s!

U.S. benefits from continuation of war in Ukraine

Tehran Times
January 27, 2023

U.S. benefits from continuation of war in Ukraine

FULL ARTICLE

Weakening Russia is only one of its motivations to prolong the war in Ukraine to maintain its control over the politics, economy, and security of Europe.

This is why the U.S. wants a war in Ukraine to the detriment of this eastern European country and the continent as a whole.

Given the special geopolitical situation of Ukraine, dominations over international highways and waterways are as important as a land war for the United States. Therefore, if a country dominates the European continent in such a way that it can take over its human and material resources, it will mean the emergence of a threatening naval force against the U.S.

https://antibellum679354512.wordpress.com/2023/01/27/u-s-benefits-from-continuation-of-war-in-ukraine/

phoenixpersönlich: John Kornblum (ehem. US-Botschafter) zu Gast bei Jörg Thadeusz

Was stimmt ist, dass die Vereinigten Staaten nicht vorhatten, Abrams zu schicken, weil sie eigentlich für die Aufgabe nicht sehr geeignet sind“, sagt der ehemalige amerikanische Botschafter in Deutschland John C. Kornblum. Abrams-Panzer seien zu kompliziert, es sei zu viel Hightech drin. „Dann hat Scholz dieses Junktim aufgebaut, ob er es Junktim nennt oder nicht. Er hat immer gesagt, wir wollen mit unseren Alliierten zusammen handeln, Deutschland darf es nicht alleine machen.“ Dabei hätten sich bereits genug andere Alliierte entschlossen, Panzer zu liefern, Deutschland habe die Vereinigten Staaten nicht unbedingt für seine Entscheidung Leopard 2- Panzer zu liefern, gebraucht, so Kornblum weiter. Es habe dann eine „kreative Zeit“, mit nicht immer „positiven Austausch“ gegeben. Eine nachhaltige Verstimmung zwischen den USA und Deutschland kann John C. Kornblum allerdings nicht feststellen: „Nee, keiner ist auf keinen sauer. Wenn beide Seiten meinen, ich hab gewonnen, ist das das beste Ergebnis, das man haben kann.“
https://www.youtube.com/embed/3lxqkTk0ohU?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=de&autohide=2&wmode=transparent
Im Gespräch mit Jörg Thadeusz äußert sich der erfahrene Diplomat John C. Kornblum über seinen Blick auf Deutschland, das deutsch-amerikanische Verhältnis und seine Erfolge als Diplomat.
Kornblum war u.a. Delegationsleiter bei der KSZE-Konferenz in Helsinki und Wien, Bosnien-Beauftragter der US-Regierung und wurde von Bill Clinton 1997 als amerikanischer Botschafter nach Deutschland entsandt. Dass er „Geschichte geschrieben“ habe, würde er nicht sagen, so John C. Kornblum. Solch eine Formulierung sei ihm eher peinlich. Er habe das Glück gehabt oder es sei Zufall gewesen, dass er entweder als „kleines Mitglied einer Delegation“ oder als „Chef einer Delegation“ jedes große Ereignis „angefangen mit der Ostpolitik hier in Deutschland, dem Ende des Kalten Krieges bis hin zu Bosnien“ mitgemacht habe und teilweise sehr bestimmend mitgemacht habe. „Das war für mich natürlich sehr wunderbar.“
https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/phoenixpersönlichWerbeanzeigen

https://anhyeuem66.wordpress.com/2023/01/27/phoenixpersonlich-john-kornblum-ehem-us-botschafter-zu-gast-bei-jorg-thadeusz-27-01-2023/

Never Forget the Soviet Heroes Who Liberated Auschwitz – Scott Ritter

[my illustration : on January 27, 1945, the Red Army liberates Auschwitz Vernichtungslager [extermination camp] in Poland]

The SS guards abandoned the guard posts surrounding Auschwitz during the night of 20-21 January 1945.

At its height, in the summer of 1944, the Auschwitz complex, which comprised three basic camps — the main camp, Birkenau and Monowitz — and another 40 sub-camps, housed over 105,000 registered prisoners, mostly Jews, and around 30,000 unregistered Jewish inmates of so-called transit camps.

By January 20, 1945, there were approximately 9,000 prisoners remaining. In the days that followed the evacuation, SS guards would patrol the camps, shooting 400 prisoners to death, and burning another 300 alive in their barracks. On January 25, the SS gathered approximately 150 prisoners from Birkenau and marched them out of the camp. The next day the SS blew up some warehouses and abandoned the facility altogether.

Most of the surviving prisoners were starving, sick, and on the verge of death. The camp medical staff, assisted by the healthier prisoners, did their best to care for the bedridden patients. The camp was besieged by a howling winter storm, with temperatures well below zero and snow drifting around the camp. The survivors were afraid to move around too much — regular German troops, falling back in the face of an advancing Soviet Army, made their way through the camp, pillaging as they went, and everyone feared the return of the SS.

Auschwitz had been in existence since 1940, when it was used as a concentration camp for Polish prisoners. By 1942 the camp was converted into a combination labor and extermination facility, and Jewish prisoners began to arrive in larger numbers. Historians estimate that around 1,1 million people perished in Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, nearly a million of the Jews, the rest comprising Poles (some 75,000), Gypsies (20,000), Soviet prisoners of war (15,000), and 10,000-15,000 others from different ethnicities.

The soldiers of the advancing Soviet Army, however, had no knowledge of the existence of Auschwitz — for them, the death camp was simply marked as a “barracks” on the maps they used to plan their advance. General Kurochkin’s 60th Army, fresh off the liberation of the Polish city of Krakow, some 45 kilometers to the west of the camp, began pursuing the defeated German Army out of the city on January 25. Their goal was to take Katowice, an industrial city about 25 miles to the northwest of Auschwitz.

Trudging through knee-deep snow, the Soviet infantrymen of the three divisions comprising the 60th Army — the 107th, the 100th, and the 322nd — repeatedly battled German troops dug in along the way. On the morning of January 27, while the 107th division skirted around the northern edge Polish town of Oswiecim, adjacent to the Auschwitz camp, troops from the 100th divisionentered the Monowitz camp, three miles kilometers to the east of Oswiecim. Primo Levi, one of the surviving prisoners, recalled that the first Soviet soldiers who entered the camp had no idea what they had walked into.

“They did not greet us, nor did they smile,” Levi recalled. “They seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funeral scene.”

To the left of the 100th division were the troops of the 322nd division, with the 472nd infantry regiment in the lead. After crossing the Sola River, the men of the 472nd regiment reached Oswiecim, sweeping aside light resistance from the German defenders, before pushing west, toward the railway station. Here the German resistance stiffened, and the Soviets troops had to work hard to dislodge the dug in Germans. Once the Germans had been either killed or retreated, the Soviets resumed their advance, pushing scouts forward to find a way forward.

One of the Soviet soldiers, Senior Lieutenant Ivan Martynushkin, recalled that his troops had just defeated the Germans in Oswiecim when, after passing through the village, they “came out onto some kind of enormous field almost completely surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences and watchtowers.”

“We saw buildings beyond the barbed wire,” Martynushkin noted. “And as we got closer, we began to see there were people.”

Martynushkin and his men had no idea who these people, who appeared “very thin, tired, with blackened skin,” were.

“At first there was wariness, on both our part and theirs,” he recalled. “But then they apparently figured out who we were and began to welcome us, to signal that they knew who we were and that we shouldn’t be afraid of them — that there were no guards or Germans behind the barbed wire. Only prisoners.”

Martynushkin and his men had just liberated the Birkenau camp.

Anna Polshchikova, a Russian prisoner who worked at the camp medical facility, recalled her joy in seeing the Soviet soldiers — and their confusion.

“They looked at us with surprise and in dismay. ‘Who are you?’ they asked. ‘What is this place?’ ‘We are Russians,’ I replied, ‘and this is Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.’ ‘And what are you doing here?’ they inquired in an unfriendly manner. We were baffled and did not know what to say. We looked wretched and pathetic, so they relented and asked again, in a kinder tone. ‘And what is over there?’ they said, pointing northwards. ‘Also a concentration camp.’ ‘And beyond that?’ ‘Also a camp.’ ‘And beyond the camp?’ ‘Over there in, the forest, are the crematoria, and beyond the crematoria, we don’t know.’”

The horror of the reality of what they had just discovered only then began to register in the minds of the Soviet liberators.

About 7,000 emaciated prisoners were in the Auschwitz main camp, Birkenau, and Monowitz. Another 500 prisoners were discovered in the Auschwitz sub-camps in Stara Kuźnia, Blachownia Śląska, Świętochłowice, Wesoła, Libiąż, Jawiszowice, and Jaworzno. But inside the camps the Soviets found 1.2 million pieces of clothing, 7.7 tons of human hair and other personal items stripped from murdered prisoners, evidence of the horrors that had transpired there. More than 600 decaying corpses were scattered throughout the grounds, the mortal remains of those prisoners gunned down by the murderous SS guards before they abandoned the camps.

But in this nightmare, the humanity of the Soviet soldier shown through. Ten-year-old Eva Mozes Kor, a survivor of Nazi Dr. Joseph Mengele’s demented medical experiments, recalled the kindness the Soviets showed to the children of the camp.

“They gave us hugs, cookies, and chocolate,” she said. “Being so alone a hug meant more than anybody could imagine because that replaced the human worth that we were starving for. We were not only starved for food, but we were starved for human kindness. And the Soviet Army did provide some of that.”

Some 231 Soviet soldiers lost their lives in the fighting in and around the town of Oswiecim that occurred during the liberation of Auschwitz, including the commander of the 472nd regiment, Colonel Siemen Lvovich Besprozvanny. Their bodies are buried in the Oswiecim municipal cemetery, a permanent reminder of the sacrifice made in liberating the 7,500 survivors of the Auschwitz death camps.

On January 27, 2023, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum will commemorate the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camps by the Soviet Army. This year, however, Russia won’t be invited. “Because of the attack on free and independent Ukraine,” Pawel Sawicki, a press officer for the museum, told the media, “representatives of the Russian Federation have not been invited to participate in this year’s commemoration event of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.”

This decision was attacked by Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, who posted the following reply on her Telegram channel:

“No matter how our European ‘non-partners’ contrived in their attempts to rewrite history in a new way, the memory of the Soviet heroes-liberators and horrors of Nazism cannot be erased.”

Given that the Russian Army is, today, engaged in a life and death struggle inside Ukraine with the progeny of the murderous SS prison guards of Nazi Germany, the decision of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum to prohibit Russia from attending the liberation commemoration is deeply disturbing. One can be rest assured that the descendants of Eva Mozes Kor, Anna Polshchikova, Primo Levi, and the other roughly 7,500 survivors of the death camps whose lives were saved by the sacrifice of Colonel Besprozvanny and the other Soviet soldiers who were killed in the fighting to liberate the camps will never forget who it was who allowed their ancestors to survive that unspeakable horror.

Nor should anyone who reads this article. What the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum has done in denying the representatives of Russia their rightful role as the saviors of Auschwitz in the 78th anniversary commemoration of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz is an abomination. But no matter how hard they might try, Pawel Sawicki and the staff of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum cannot make history disappear.

“Never forget” are words that have meaning. It is a shame that this mantra no longer resonates with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum [end]

61-year-old Scott Ritter is a former intelligence officer within the US Marine Corps (USMC), then inspector of the United Nations in Iraq. When in 2003, the US and their British minions were about to invade the country under this false pretext, Ritter was claiming that there was no weapon of mass destruction (WMD) there. He was right.

The original article

in the European Union, the readers may foil the State political censorship via a virtual private network (VPN) or easier, an online proxy.

my related piece

Nazism in Ukraine

https://nicolascinquini.blog/2023/01/27/auschwitz-scott-ritter/

It’s Worse Than I Thought: The Myth of Jeffrey Zients

There is no reason to trust a longtime corporate stooge to serve as President Biden’s chief of staff.The Myth of Jeffrey Zients

Related (Archived Links):

Biden to Tap Jeff Zients as His Next White House Chief of Staff

The Businessman Behind the Obama Budget

How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class

A Company Where Experience Counts for All

Obama Promises to Trim Federal Fat

White House Compares Trans-Pacific Partnership’s Tariff Cuts to Tax Breaks

White House zeroes in on its next top economist

Federal Land Up for Budget Grabs

Facebook Nears Complete Board Overhaul With Latest Exit

Biden Chief of Staff: PEU to PEU

https://thechaoscat.wordpress.com/2023/01/27/its-worse-than-i-thought-the-myth-of-jeffrey-zients/

How NATO Exploits the Crises it Creates

Rainer Shea
Maidan

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization represents the stage of capitalism where the imperialists, after making nuclear annihilation a possibility, have taken advantage of this horrific reality that they themselves engineered. The equivalent has happened with Covid-19, in which the IMF has used the pandemic as a pretext for imposing further austerity measures onto 81 countries. As the climate crisis intensifies, the same pattern is appearing, with the U.S. empire making plans for future wars predicated on responding to climatic disasters. It’s already invaded Haiti using climate-related emergencies as an excuse. This is what capitalism as a whole does as its unsustainable social model leads to ever more catastrophes: portray these catastrophes as only solvable through the same system that produced them, and seize power so that it can inflict even more profit-motivated violence.

NATO’s role in this vicious cycle was to be the “solution” to how capitalism, as shown by the first and second world wars, necessarily leads to conflicts. So long as world workers revolution is delayed, there’s no way to avoid war, because states as they exist under bourgeois rule depend on war’s perpetuation. Even when there’s “peace” under capitalism, that peace only represents a period where the imperial powers are preparing for new wars.

This situation is the inevitable conclusion of the colonial project. After the imperialists finished their theft of territories, and their division of the world’s new borders, the only thing they could do next was go to war with each other. Capital needs perpetual expansion in order to survive. It must keep growing into new markets, or it won’t be able to displace its inevitable crises and the bourgeois system will collapse. So the imperial powers, the “core” countries which developed according to this principle of requiring always-growing extraction from the “peripheries,” could only respond to the reaching of colonialism’s territorial limits by competing with one another.

This was the real reason for World War I, not an assassination of one European leader like bourgeois education teaches. When the imperial powers were finished with their initial great clash, Germany happened to be the one that mainly lost its imperial holdings. The fascists were then able to exploit the capitalist crisis which consequently ravaged the country, blaming the people’s suffering not on the bourgeois system but on the Jews, the Russians, the Romanis, the Freemasons, the communists, and other substitutes for the true culprits. The Nazis, along with the fascists of the other imperialist countries who had won by exploiting imperialism’s crisis, then reproduced the first world war. Except in a form even more destructive, and infused with a program for exterminating capitalism’s scapegoats. As the Nazis murdered 11 million in the Holocaust, murdered 27 million Russians in its eastern land grab attempt, and turned most of Europe into a de facto colony, fascist Italy invaded Abyssinia—the only African country that hadn’t been colonized—using mustard gas. Spain, after undergoing its own imperial collapse and fascist takeover, carried out the equivalent by  intensifying  exploitation of Spain’s rural areas, amounting to an internal colonialism facilitated by brutal dictatorship.

When this latest horror was finished, the imperialists who took over for the early 20th century’s fascists as the chief arbiters of violence devised yet another way to exploit this destructive pattern. Taking advantage of the fears about European countries again going to war with one another, they formed NATO, an arrangement for unifying the imperialists in their efforts to expand exploitation of the peripheries. They employed  former Nazi officials to run the organization, and let Germany become one of the world’s richest countries by giving it a great share of the neo-colonial profits. They got all of the imperialist countries, including Japan, to support the U.S. as it assumed the role of the foremost purveyor of bloodshed for capital. Washington murdered tens of millions over the next several generations, invading dozens of countries and installing genocidal dictatorships in dozens more. NATO acted as a tool for preventing the inter-imperialist conflicts that had in the past hindered the imperialists in fighting revolutionary movements.

When the Cold War ended, NATO couldn’t be disbanded, because it still had to be there to uphold American hegemony. As soon as one of the organization’s major justifications for existing vanished, it began to manufacture a fresh crisis that could ensure its political survival. After British intelligence predicted in 1992 that Ukraine and Russia were likely to eventually go to war now that they weren’t unified, NATO did everything it could to bring about such a scenario. It broke its vow to Russia not to expand, it refused Putin’s offers for cooperation, then in 2014 its principal power the USA perpetrated the act of political meddling that ensured this war would come. The State Department instigated reactionary riots that brought down the democratically elected government, then in defiance of even the EU, Obama’s team maneuvered to ensure that an anti-Russian regime came to power. Even if this regime was a fascist one that sought to ethnically cleanse the Russian speakers in Ukraine’s east.

When Russia inevitably intervened to demilitarize this regime, and ensure its own security while rescuing the eastern separatist republics from invasion by fascist Kiev, NATO used this to unite its members and fully expand into the Nordic states. NATO used the same tactic that worked in Yugoslavia: perpetrate atrocities, then blame a designated target for the violence, then intervene. Once Operation Z started and war became no longer theoretical, the empire’s foremost goal was to exhaust Russia with a war of attrition. This is indicated by how from the way imperialist leaders have talked about their decisions prior to the conflict, it’s clear that they at the least knew war could easily come about from the ways they were provoking Russia. They engaged in a gamble by making all of these decisions that increased the likelihood of Russian action. Their hope was that imperialism would be strengthened.

In macro terms, this wish has not come true, and imperialism has instead been weakened. NATO has become stronger only as an institutional presence within the imperial sphere, not as a driver of geopolitics. Most of the globe beyond the imperial countries has not participated in the sanctions, forcing Washington to coerce Europe into taking on most of the costs from this economic war. Consequently, the process of imperial decay has accelerated. The capitalist contradictions in these countries have intensified, the livelihoods of their working classes being sacrificed for the sake of a geopolitical maneuver that hasn’t even succeeded. The sanctions weren’t enough to destabilize Russia and broader Eurasia, as the imperialists hoped.

Because of this strategic failure by NATO, and because of the war crimes by Kiev so obvious that even Amnesty has reported on them, the Ukraine psyop isn’t effective enough to prevent the people from rising up. Unrest has again erupted in France, and the U.S. population only needs another major provocation to revolt like it did in 2020. This is in part because of NATO’s own past crimes. Because of the 2011 bombing of Libya, the country’s oil supplies are now cut off from Europe due to being controlled by an anti-imperialist faction in the civil war. So Europeans are now left with a historic energy crisis as neoliberal austerity intensifies. The imperialists continue to steal oil from Syria because in this dire situation, such primitive accumulation is the only way it can delay its own collapse.

NATO is not just evil, it’s a failure. The latest failure by capital to maintain the extractive dynamic that the bourgeoisie depend on to keep profits up. It’s failed because of the nature of the system to produce wars. When wars between the imperial powers ended, they then had to be started in other areas. When the U.S. empire applied this principle to catastrophic effect by invading Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington lost its international respect, and the empire unraveled amid a Chinese rise and Russia’s breakaway from client state status.

NATO reacted to this imperial unraveling by instigating the war in Ukraine, then hoped this would reverse the transition to multipolarity by making Eurasia collapse. This hasn’t happened, and ultimately all the imperial powers are left with are the tremendous economic costs. Given the last century’s history of how capitalism reacts when it’s desperate, we’ll keep seeing a resurgence of fascism across the imperialist countries prior to imperialism’s final defeat.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/22/lies-liberals-tell-to-obscure-operation-zs-anti-fascist-nature-discourage-anti-imperialist-struggle/embed/#?secret=HmmGcz6pET#?secret=j1WKXbjAmB

Never Forget the Soviet Heroes Who Liberated Auschwitz

Scott Ritter
The SS guards abandoned the guard posts surrounding Auschwitz during the night of 20-21 January 1945.

At its height, in the summer of 1944, the Auschwitz complex, which comprised three basic camps — the main camp, Birkenau and Monowitz — and another 40 sub-camps, housed over 105,000 registered prisoners, mostly Jews, and around 30,000 unregistered Jewish inmates of so-called transit camps.

By January 20, 1945, there were approximately 9,000 prisoners remaining. In the days that followed the evacuation, SS guards would patrol the camps, shooting 400 prisoners to death, and burning another 300 alive in their barracks. On January 25, the SS gathered approximately 150 prisoners from Birkenau and marched them out of the camp. The next day the SS blew up some warehouses and abandoned the facility altogether.

Most of the surviving prisoners were starving, sick, and on the verge of death. The camp medical staff, assisted by the healthier prisoners, did their best to care for the bedridden patients. The camp was besieged by a howling winter storm, with temperatures well below zero and snow drifting around the camp. The survivors were afraid to move around too much — regular German troops, falling back in the face of an advancing Soviet Army, made their way through the camp, pillaging as they went, and everyone feared the return of the SS.

Auschwitz had been in existence since 1940, when it was used as a concentration camp for Polish prisoners. By 1942 the camp was converted into a combination labor and extermination facility, and Jewish prisoners began to arrive in larger numbers. Historians estimate that around 1,1 million people perished in Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, nearly a million of the Jews, the rest comprising Poles (some 75,000), Gypsies (20,000), Soviet prisoners of war (15,000), and 10,000-15,000 others from different ethnicities.

The soldiers of the advancing Soviet Army, however, had no knowledge of the existence of Auschwitz — for them, the death camp was simply marked as a “barracks” on the maps they used to plan their advance. General Kurochkin’s 60th Army, fresh off the liberation of the Polish city of Krakow, some 45 kilometers to the west of the camp, began pursuing the defeated German Army out of the city on January 25. Their goal was to take Katowice, an industrial city about 25 miles to the northwest of Auschwitz.

Trudging through knee-deep snow, the Soviet infantrymen of the three divisions comprising the 60th Army — the 107th, the 100th, and the 322nd — repeatedly battled German troops dug in along the way. On the morning of January 27, while the 107th division skirted around the northern edge Polish town of Oswiecim, adjacent to the Auschwitz camp, troops from the 100th divisionentered the Monowitz camp, three miles kilometers to the east of Oswiecim. Primo Levi, one of the surviving prisoners, recalled that the first Soviet soldiers who entered the camp had no idea what they had walked into.

“They did not greet us, nor did they smile,” Levi recalled. “They seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funeral scene.”

To the left of the 100th division were the troops of the 322nd division, with the 472nd infantry regiment in the lead. After crossing the Sola River, the men of the 472nd regiment reached Oswiecim, sweeping aside light resistance from the German defenders, before pushing west, toward the railway station. Here the German resistance stiffened, and the Soviets troops had to work hard to dislodge the dug in Germans. Once the Germans had been either killed or retreated, the Soviets resumed their advance, pushing scouts forward to find a way forward.

One of the Soviet soldiers, Senior Lieutenant Ivan Martynushkin, recalled that his troops had just defeated the Germans in Oswiecim when, after passing through the village, they “came out onto some kind of enormous field almost completely surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences and watchtowers.”

“We saw buildings beyond the barbed wire,” Martynushkin noted. “And as we got closer, we began to see there were people.”

Martynushkin and his men had no idea who these people, who appeared “very thin, tired, with blackened skin,” were.

“At first there was wariness, on both our part and theirs,” he recalled. “But then they apparently figured out who we were and began to welcome us, to signal that they knew who we were and that we shouldn’t be afraid of them — that there were no guards or Germans behind the barbed wire. Only prisoners.”

Martynushkin and his men had just liberated the Birkenau camp.

Anna Polshchikova, a Russian prisoner who worked at the camp medical facility, recalled her joy in seeing the Soviet soldiers — and their confusion.

“They looked at us with surprise and in dismay. ‘Who are you?’ they asked. ‘What is this place?’ ‘We are Russians,’ I replied, ‘and this is Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.’ ‘And what are you doing here?’ they inquired in an unfriendly manner. We were baffled and did not know what to say. We looked wretched and pathetic, so they relented and asked again, in a kinder tone. ‘And what is over there?’ they said, pointing northwards. ‘Also a concentration camp.’ ‘And beyond that?’ ‘Also a camp.’ ‘And beyond the camp?’ ‘Over there in, the forest, are the crematoria, and beyond the crematoria, we don’t know.’”

The horror of the reality of what they had just discovered only then began to register in the minds of the Soviet liberators.

About 7,000 emaciated prisoners were in the Auschwitz main camp, Birkenau, and Monowitz. Another 500 prisoners were discovered in the Auschwitz sub-camps in Stara Kuźnia, Blachownia Śląska, Świętochłowice, Wesoła, Libiąż, Jawiszowice, and Jaworzno. But inside the camps the Soviets found 1.2 million pieces of clothing, 7.7 tons of human hair and other personal items stripped from murdered prisoners, evidence of the horrors that had transpired there. More than 600 decaying corpses were scattered throughout the grounds, the mortal remains of those prisoners gunned down by the murderous SS guards before they abandoned the camps.

But in this nightmare, the humanity of the Soviet soldier shown through. Ten-year-old Eva Mozes Kor, a survivor of Nazi Dr. Joseph Mengele’s demented medical experiments, recalled the kindness the Soviets showed to the children of the camp.

“They gave us hugs, cookies, and chocolate,” she said. “Being so alone a hug meant more than anybody could imagine because that replaced the human worth that we were starving for. We were not only starved for food, but we were starved for human kindness. And the Soviet Army did provide some of that.”

Some 231 Soviet soldiers lost their lives in the fighting in and around the town of Oswiecim that occurred during the liberation of Auschwitz, including the commander of the 472nd regiment, Colonel Siemen Lvovich Besprozvanny. Their bodies are buried in the Oswiecim municipal cemetery, a permanent reminder of the sacrifice made in liberating the 7,500 survivors of the Auschwitz death camps.

On January 27, 2023, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum will commemorate the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camps by the Soviet Army. This year, however, Russia won’t be invited. “Because of the attack on free and independent Ukraine,” Pawel Sawicki, a press officer for the museum, told the media, “representatives of the Russian Federation have not been invited to participate in this year’s commemoration event of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.”

This decision was attacked by Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, who posted the following reply on her Telegram channel:

“No matter how our European ‘non-partners’ contrived in their attempts to rewrite history in a new way, the memory of the Soviet heroes-liberators and horrors of Nazism cannot be erased.”

Given that the Russian Army is, today, engaged in a life and death struggle inside Ukraine with the progeny of the murderous SS prison guards of Nazi Germany, the decision of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum to prohibit Russia from attending the liberation commemoration is deeply disturbing. One can be rest assured that the descendants of Eva Mozes Kor, Anna Polshchikova, Primo Levi, and the other roughly 7,500 survivors of the death camps whose lives were saved by the sacrifice of Colonel Besprozvanny and the other Soviet soldiers who were killed in the fighting to liberate the camps will never forget who it was who allowed their ancestors to survive that unspeakable horror.

Nor should anyone who reads this article. What the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum has done in denying the representatives of Russia their rightful role as the saviors of Auschwitz in the 78th anniversary commemoration of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz is an abomination. But no matter how hard they might try, Pawel Sawicki and the staff of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum cannot make history disappear.

“Never forget” are words that have meaning. It is a shame that this mantra no longer resonates with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/27/never-forget-the-soviet-heroes-who-liberated-auschwitz/

Die Schweiz lockert die Beschränkungen für Waffenreexporte in die Ukraine

Die Sicherheitspolitische Kommission des Schweizerischen Nationalrats hat beschlossen, die Gesetzgebung zur Wiederausfuhr von Schweizer Waffen in Drittstaaten zu ändern, um die bestehenden Beschränkungen für die Wiederausfuhr von Waffen in die Ukraine zu lockern.

Wenn die Änderungen vorgenommen werden, bleiben sie bis Dezember 2025 in Kraft. Die Änderungen wurden mit einer minimalen Mehrheit der Stimmen (14 zu 11) angenommen. Diejenigen, die dagegen gestimmt haben, halten die Wiederausfuhr von Schweizer Waffen in die Ukraine für unvereinbar mit der schweizerischen Neutralität, insbesondere im Hinblick auf den im Neutralitätsgesetz vorgesehenen Gleichbehandlungsgrundsatz.

Jetzt wird das Thema in der Regierungslobby diskutiert. Zuvor waren mehrere europäische Länder nicht in der Lage, kritische Geschosse und Raketen an das Selenskyj-Regime zu schicken, weil Bern sich weigerte, sie wieder auszuführen. Spanien beantragte die Erlaubnis zur Lieferung von Aspide-Raketen, Deutschland — zur Lieferung von 35-mm-Munition für das Luftverteidigungssystem Gepard, das Kiew im Juli letzten Jahres erhalten hatte.

Die dringende Notwendigkeit, die Produktion von 35-mm-Munition außerhalb der Schweiz aufzubauen, ist einer der Gründe, warum der deutsche Konzern Rheinmetall Mitte November den spanischen Munitionshersteller Expal Systems übernommen hat.

https://www.fondsk.ru/news/2023/01/27/shvejcaria-uproschaet-ogranichenija-po-reeksportu-oruzhia-na-ukrainu-58335.html