Thread: How dangerous is Vladimir Putin?

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

So smartarse, you reckon Vlad will give them their islands back do you?

oh shutup with your self-righteous silly outrage, when you fully support murders and wars perpetuated by others

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

So smartarse, you reckon Vlad will give them their islands back do you?

He surely is not so generous like some other country (please no names here) who is giving islands back to the original population. Even those islands they never had owned, however, ruled anyway...

I'm sure the aborigines could spend all their countries money wiser than the immigrants, forced or otherwise.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Russia has suspended its obligations under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, one day after the United States made a similar announcement.


Putin met in Moscow on February 2 with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to discuss Russia's reaction to the long-expected U.S. move.

"We will do as follows," Putin said during the meeting. "We will come up with a tit-for-tat response. Our American partners have announced the suspension of their participation in the treaty, so we will suspend as well."

Putin ordered Lavrov not to begin any new INF talks with the United States, saying Moscow will wait to see if Washington responds to any of Russia's earlier proposals on saving the agreement.

"Over the past several years, we have seen that our partners do not support our initiatives," Putin said. "On the contrary, they are constantly looking for certain pretexts to dismantle the global security system."

Meanwhile, he said the Defense Ministry will begin developing new nuclear-capable missiles, including supersonic ones.

He added that Russia should avoid being drawn into a new and costly arms race and said Moscow would not deploy any new weapons unless the United States did so first.

Lavrov said he believes the U.S. suspension of the INF Treaty jeopardizes other arms-control agreements, including the New START pact, which is set to expire in 2021.

Lavrov also accused the United States of violating the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) by participating in nuclear-weapons exercises with NATO-member countries that are not among the five nuclear-armed states under the NPT.

"That is an outright violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty," Lavrov told Putin.

The foreign minister also said Washington had "lost any interest" in the possibility of joining the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

Earlier in the day, Konstantin Kosachyov, chairman of the Federation Council's International Relations Committee, said Washington had "taken another step toward [the world's] destruction."

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the U.S. withdrawal from the INF Treaty was part of "the strategy of the United States to get out of its international legal obligations in different areas."


Moscow's reaction comes after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that as a result of what he called years of Russian violations, Washington would no longer abide by the key Cold War-era arms-control pact.

"For years, Russia has violated terms of the INF Treaty without remorse," Pompeo said in a news briefing. "To this day, Russia remains in material breach of obligations."

"The United States will therefore suspend its obligations under the INF Treaty effective February 2," Pompeo said.

"We will provide Russia and the other treaty parties with formal notice that the United States is withdrawing from the INF Treaty effective in six months, pursuant to Article 15 of the treaty."

The INF Treaty was signed in 1987 and bans the development, production, and deployment of ground-launched cruise or ballistic missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. The agreement was the first of its kind to eliminate an entire class of missiles.

Pompeo told reporters in Washington that the United States remained open to arms-control negotiations with Russia.

U.S. President Donald Trump issued a written statement saying that "we will not remain constrained by its terms while Russia misrepresents its actions. We cannot be the only country in the world unilaterally bound by this treaty, or any other."

Moscow denies it has violated the treaty and has called on Washington to offer proof of its allegations. Foreign Minister Lavrov on February 2 countered that Washington had violated the treaty by developing combat drones with similar characteristics to the banned ground-based missiles. Putin said U.S. tests of missile-defense weapons also violated the INF agreement.

U.S. officials have expressed concerns that China, which is not party to the INF, has gained a military advantage in Asia by deploying large numbers of missiles with ranges banned by the treaty.

Beijing on February 2 urged Moscow and Washington to come together to preserve the treaty.

"China opposes the United States' move to denounce the treaty and urges the U.S. and Russia to properly settle the differences through efficient dialogues," a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement said.


NATO allies issued a statement saying they "fully support" the U.S. decision to withdraw from the INF Treaty.

"All NATO allies support the U.S. decision today to start the withdrawal process, but it will take six months before that process is completed," NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told the Associated Press.

"We continue, therefore, to call on Russia to come back into compliance and fully respect the INF Treaty,” he added.

The United Nations secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, said he hoped Moscow and Washington use the six-month period to reach a new agreement.

"We have seen the announcement they made today," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. "The secretary-general hopes that the parties will use these six months to resolve their differences. The INF is a very important part of arms-control architecture."

The U.S. action has been expected for months and was virtually assured after last-ditch talks in Beijing on January 31 between Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and U.S. Undersecretary of State Andrea Thompson ended without agreement.

Washington and NATO accuse Russia of breaching the treaty by developing the 9M729 cruise missile, also known as the SSC-8.

The United States first publicly accused Moscow of violating the INF Treaty in 2014. After several years of fruitless talks, Washington began stepping up its rhetoric in late 2017, publicly identifying the missile in question and asserting that Russia had moved beyond testing and had begun deploying the systems.

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-blast.../29746714.html

Why the dangerous Mr. Putin has been threatening them all the time? Now, they have to scrap few more billions for developments of the new missiles. Then, no money left again for the Wall...

(and all the gold of Venezuela has already left either...)

The Russians are winning in the missile game, silly Americans don't know what they are doing, as usual

This is what you can do when you have friendly dictators in charge of your neighbours.

The president of Belarus has said the country is ready to unite with long-time ally Russia, raising the prospect of Moscow absorbing the eastern European dictatorship on the borders of Poland and Lithuania.

And of course...

Putin’s presidential term will end in 2024, and the current constitution prevents him for running again. It has been suggested that he could bypass these restrictions by creating a new nation through a union with Belarus.

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-bela...shenko-1333800

^Why not to make it like another "friendly coup" general (who was never accused of power abuse and liquidating his oponents - unlike other coup general...):

Egypt's Sisi set to dramatically extend presidency, despite previously pledging no changes to constitution

Egyptian lawmakers are pushing ahead for a change to the country's constitution that would enable Sisi to stay in power until 2034. Currently, the former armed forces chief is due to stand down after completing two four-year terms in 2022.

Just last week, a parliamentary committee in Cairo approved proposed constitutional amendments that would increase presidential terms from four to six years and essentially reset the clock, allowing Sisi two additional terms.




https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/egyp...stitution.html

One supposes what with the general acceptance of ignoring international laws, treaties and their own constitutions any country's leader can always jump on the bandwagon with no consequences.

Originally Posted by OhOh

One supposes what with the general acceptance of ignoring international laws, treaties and their own constitutions any country's leader can always jump on the bandwagon with no consequences.

Doesn't apply when you write your own constitution and get your lackeys to rubber stamp it.

Others (please no names here) again do have a constitution (200 years old - they name it differently, don't they?), however, what does it mean? (even the old man Dershowitz is outraged about that)

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Doesn't apply when you write your own constitution

Or not having one at all.

Originally Posted by OhOh

Or not having one at all.

You're correct. If one person can rewrite it as he wishes, you might as well not have one.

It is good that there are honest journalists in this world

He's right there, especially as they have a habit of killing them.

How ingenious, that on any situation somebody (please no names here) has got a clue...

Only in Putin's Russia: A respected information security analyst is charged with crimes to cover up the fact that Russian state intelligence routinely protects hackers so that it can use them and their TTPs. A key witness is a criminal who the analyst helped to convict and jail.

The top secret treason trial of a cybercrime analyst wrapped up this week after months of testimony behind the closed doors of a Moscow military court, with prosecutors reportedly demanding 20 years in a penal colony for the crime of allegedly snitching on Russian cybercriminals to American investigators. A verdict is expected on February 27.

Ruslan Stoyanov is a one-time cybercop who went on to head the computer incidents investigation team at the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab. He stood trial with Col. Sergei Mikhailov, who was second in command in the cybercrime division of Russia’s federal security service, the FSB, until December 2016, when his fellow agents ended an internal meeting by abruptly shoving a black bag over his head and dragging him off to prison.

The men are accused of passing confidential material from a 2010 cybercrime and spam investigation to an analyst at a U.S. security firm. But the trial ended without the court hearing from a key figure in the prosecution’s theory: the analyst herself, who says the Russian military appears to be on the verge of convicting Stoyanov for treason he didn’t commit.

“I formally requested to testify, and they said no,” said Kimberly Zenz, a veteran cybercrime threat analyst who was caught up in the Russian intrigue while working for Verisign’s iDefense threat intelligence division. “You’d think the opportunity to interrogate a ‘spy’ would be exciting for them, but they don’t even bother to pretend.”

The treason case has been closely watched, if seldom observed, since the high-profile arrests in the final days of 2016. The entire matter is considered a state secret in Russia, and with few hard details to go on initial speculation linked the arrests to Russia’s election interference campaign.

Over time, a clear and consistent account of the case has emerged from court leaks and people connected to the events. And it turns out the charges have nothing to do with election interference. Instead they’re uniquely a product of Vladimir Putin’s kleptocratic justice system: the defendants are on trial because eight years ago they allegedly shared confidential documents about a convicted Russian cybercriminal with an American colleague.

Stoyanov’s arrest shocked the computer security community. The Kaspersky analyst is well respected internationally, and has no obvious connection to the swamp of corruption and backstabbing synonymous with Russia’s intelligence agencies. But in a country that routinely protects its criminal hackers, and sometimes conscripts them into state service, cross-border cooperation can evidently amount to high treason.

“Things are going very badly,” said Zenz, a longtime friend of Stoyanov. “Ruslan is an honest guy, he’s a good guy. He does not deserve this.”

The treason charges are rooted in allegations first leveled against Stoyanov and other defendants in 2010 by one of the Russian cybercriminals they were tracking: Pavel Vrublevsky, founder of the credit card payment processor ChronoPay.

Vrublevsky is notorious for, among other things, allegedly running a black market pharmaceutical business that hired hackers and spammers to send billions of marketing emails. His misadventures have been chronicled in some detail over the years by independent journalist Brian Krebs, who wrote a book about Vrublevsky called Spam Nation.

In 2013, a Russian court sentenced Vrublevsky to two and a half years in prison for ordering a sustained denial-of-service attack against a competing payment processor, an attack that shut down e-ticket sales for the airline Aeroflot for two weeks. Vrublevsky was granted early release after serving one and a half years.

To this day, Vrublevsky insists on his innocence. He blames his legal woes on the FSB officer who led the case, and says that same officer colluded for years with outside security researchers to smear and scapegoat him. In his account, it’s all part of an American conspiracy to paint Russia as a hotbed of global cybercrime. (Note: Russia is a hotbed of global cybercrime).

Today that conspiracy theory is at the root of the remarkable treason prosecution. In its broad strokes, Vrublevsky believes that defendant Sergey Mikhaylov, while serving as the deputy chief of the FSB’s anti-cybercrime unit, routinely passed confidential information from the FSB’s ChronoPay probe to the corporate cybercrime analyst Kimberly Zenz.

That’s where Ruslan Stoyanov enters the theory. Stoyanov worked in the Ministry of Interior's cybercrime unit from 2000 to 2006, when he left to begin a cybersecurity startup. He no longer had access to government secrets, but he was a mutual friend of both Zenz and Mikhaylov, the FSB colonel. Vrublevsky has a hunch that Stoyanov served as a middleman in the information transfer.

The information passed to Zenz, he said, informed a series of damning iDefense reports that Zenz wrote about the Russian cybercrime landscape in general, and ChronoPay and Vrublevsky in particular.

Acquired by Accenture in 2017, iDefense was an early player in what today is called the “threat intelligence” marketplace. The firm’s business model involved monitoring cybercrime groups and tracking security vulnerabilities, then producing detailed reports for its clients—largely Fortune 500 companies and the finance industry, as well as U.S. government agencies.

Zenz worked as an analyst at iDefense for a decade beginning in 2006, about a year after it was acquired by Verisign. She specialized in Russian hacker groups, and divided her time between her home in Northern Virginia, where iDefense was based, and a rented apartment in Moscow.

Zenz freely admits a longtime friendship with Stoyanov. “If you deal with Russian cybercrime he was the guy,” she said. “Everybody knows Ruslan.” She showed him around when he visited the States for a week, and, yes, she did frequently discuss Russian cybercriminals with him, including Vrublevsky. But he was out of government service and had no access to secret information, she said. In that respect Stoyanov was no different from any other smart, informed computer security analyst, except that he happened to be Russian. “I asked him all about it, but I didn’t ask him for any material, any secrets,” she told the Daily Beast.

She said it’s understandable that Vrublevsky would harbor some resentment for her. She considered him a significant figure in the world of Russian cybercrime, and made no secret of it. “I talked publicly about him in conferences, so he was very aware that I was out there,” she said. “I was publicly trying to get him arrested, so he’s not wrong. That’s what I wanted.”

But she’s dismayed that the case has swept in Stoyanov, who she’s known for over 10 years. On multiple occasions, she said, she tried to lure Stoyanov into taking a job with her at iDefense, and he always rebuffed her. “He turned down multiple opportunities to make much more money as an anti-cybercrime rockstar in the West because he wanted to serve his country,” she said. “And all of that is being used against him and it’s just wrong.”

Even taking Vrublevsky’s allegations as true, they sound less like espionage and more like the kind of cross-border information-sharing routinely practiced among national law enforcement agencies. But Vrublevsky has more. Much more. He feels strongly that Zenz’s iDefense position was just a cover story for her real job as an undercover spy. ”We investigated Kimberly and saw clear signs of CIA affiliation,” he said. That evidence of Zenz’s double life includes her home address in Virginia. “She lived in the same village where CIA is—McLean,” Vrublevsky noted.

Vrublevsky presumably said the same thing during the three hours of testimony he gave recently in the secret treason trial of Mikhaylov and Vrublevsky—he can’t confirm that because the details of his testimony are also considered a Russian state secret.

To that stew of alleged information-sharing and suspicious street addresses, prosecutors have sprinkled new specifics of their own atop Vrublevsky’s original claims, according to press reports and accounts of people involved in the trial. They charge that the defendants didn’t just share information with Zenz and possibly other Americans, but that they passed along government documents, for which they were collectively paid an astounding $10 million.

The key thread, as alleged by prosecutors, conveniently weaves through three of the defendants back in 2010. That’s when Mikhaylov allegedly loaded up a CD with confidential material from the ChronoPay probe, then gave that CD to his subordinate, Dmitry Dokuchaev, who in turn gave it to Ruslan Stoyanov. Stoyanov allegedly brought the disk with him when he attended Microsoft’s invitation-only Digital Crimes Consortium conference in Montreal, Canada, where he supposedly slipped the disk to Zenz.

Zenz calls this claim ludicrous, and late last year she made a bold offer to the panel of military judges overseeing the trial. From her new home in Germany—she took a new job and left Russia in 2016—she wrote a letter asking to testify at the treason trial. In the letter she affirmed that she didn’t receive documents, on CD or in any other fashion, from her friend Stoyanov, nor did she see him pass a disk to anyone else at the Montreal event. “I was literally with him all day at that conference,” she said. “I was with him all day every day and he didn’t give anyone a CD.”

Zenz wrote the court that she wanted to testify at the trial—a gutsy move for an American now regarded a cunning spymaster by the Russian government. “I requested the option to testify at the embassy here because it’s a lot safer and you’re allowed to do that in the court system there,” she said. “But if I had to, I’d go. I had a big fight with my husband over it.”

To her surprise, the military judges ignored the letter, and she says they also rejected a request from Stoyanov’s lawyer to call Zenz as a witness. “Instead, the main witness is a Russian criminal convicted of breaking Russian laws in Russia, and coincidentally the accused happen to be the people who put him in jail for those crimes,” she said.

Zenz thinks the entire case is a manifestation of infighting between different units of the FSB, and between the FSB and the Russian military intelligence unit, the GRU. Stoyanov himself has cast the prosecution as payback, because he’d been stirring up trouble by criticizing the FSB’s practice of granting effective immunity to hackers willing to do some espionage on the side. “The essence of the deal is that the state gets access to the technologies and information of ‘cyberthieves,’ in exchange for allowing them to steal abroad with impunity,” he wrote in a letterfrom jail made public in 2017.

Ironically, one of Stoyanov’s co-defendants, a black hat hacker turned FSB officer named Dmitry Dokuchaev, has been indicted in the U.S. for doing just that—allegedly letting a well-known hacker go free in exchange for a massive hack into Yahoo that was useful to the FSB’s domestic spying. Dokuchaev and another co-defendant have taken plea deals in the treason case.

Vrublevsky says he finds it “weird” that prosecutors want the 20 year maximum for Stoyanov. “While I am not aware of case details I find it hard to believe that Ruslan indeed was such a self-motivated betrayer,” he said. And he can’t explain why the conspiracy he’s been complaining about since 2010 is suddenly being taken so seriously by the Russian government.

“Nobody knows why they took so long,” Vrublevsky said. “It’s the biggest mystery of them all.”


https://www.thedailybeast.com/kremli...o-go-to-moscow

the US does the same, if you had any inside on security intelligence

so your point is?

Originally Posted by OhOh

THE LORD updated his lackies

FTFY.

Serbia greenlights expansion of Russia’s Turkish Stream gas pipeline




"The Serbian energy regulator has given final approval for the construction of a branch of the Turkish Stream pipeline that will deliver Russian natural gas into Turkey as well as southern and southeastern Europe.

“On March 5 the Energy Agency of the Republic of Serbia made the final decision and responded positively to the Gastrans [company] statement for the implementation of the project,” the Serbian minister of mining and energy, Aleksandar Antic, announced on Thursday. He added that works on the Turkish Stream project, also known as TurkStream, are set to start in April.

Gastrans is responsible for laying the gas transportation branch from Bulgaria to Hungary. The company is owned by Swiss-based South Stream Serbia, of which Russia’s Gazprom holds a 51-percent stake. Serbian gas company Srbijagas holds the remaining 49 percent.

Earlier in the day, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic noted the importance of implementing the gas pipeline project at a meeting with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov in Belgrade.

Russia and Turkey officially agreed on the Turkish Stream, which consists of two lines with annual capacity of 31.5 billion cubic meters, in October 2016. The first branch will deliver Russian natural gas directly to Turkey, while the second stretches to the Turkish-European border to reach European customers.

The project was created as an alternative to the South Stream route through Bulgaria, which ditched the pipeline project amid pressure from the EU and the US. On Thursday, Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said he hopes the Turkish Stream will not share the fate of its predecessor.

“As far as we are concerned, the construction of the section from the Bulgarian border to the border with Serbia is being worked out at all levels, and we hope that it will not turn out as previously, and no country will withdraw from the project,” Dacic told reporters during a joint news conference with Borisov.

Another Russia-led energy project – the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea – has been under scrutiny from Washington and some European states. US President Donald Trump accused Berlin of being “captive to Russia,” and the US later threatened to sanction companies which participate in it, while pushing sales of its own liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe. Both Germany and Russia have repeatedly argued against the claims. Berlin has said it will not bow to pressure in determining its energy and security policies."

https://www.rt.com/business/453316-s...urkish-stream/

Another Russia-led energy project – the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea – has been under scrutiny from Washington and some European states. US President Donald Trump accused Berlin of being “captive to Russia,” and the US later threatened to sanction companies which participate in it, while pushing sales of its own liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe. Both Germany and Russia have repeatedly argued against the claims. Berlin has said it will not bow to pressure in determining its energy and security policies."

Lucky that we live in the globalization era with the Free Trade policy supported by WTO (with some minor exceptions )

Free trade is a trade policy that does not restrict imports or exports; it is the idea of the free market as applied to international trade. In government, free trade is predominately advocated by political parties that hold liberal economic positions, while economically left-wing and nationalist political parties generally support protectionism,[1][2][3][4] the opposite of free trade.

Most nations are today members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) multilateral trade agreements. Free trade is additionally exemplified by the European Economic Area and the Mercosur, which have established open markets. However, most governments still impose some protectionist policies that are intended to support local employment, such as applying tariffs to imports or subsidies to exports. Governments may also restrict free trade to limit exports of natural resources. Other barriers that may hinder trade include import quotas, taxes, and non-tariff barriers, such as regulatory legislation.

There is a broad consensus among economists that protectionism has a negative effect on economic growth and economic welfare, while free trade and the reduction of trade barriers has a positive effect on economic growth.[5][6][7][8][9][10] However, liberalization of trade can cause significant and unequally distributed losses, and the economic dislocation of workers in import-competing sectors.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade

Originally Posted by Jesus Jones

Can't believe in this day and age, with all the illegal activity and atrocities the west has committed on various countries, not to mention the theft of land and resources, people still fall for the west's propaganda bullshit!

And stupid still do They do not know the true facts, they watch to much MSNBC or the rest of the main stream media the only networks which they think tell you the full truth nothing but the truth it's not about facts anymore it's about brain washed by the mess media

A reprint of an article from 2016, Has anything changed?

The Power of “Nyet”




First published on July 17, 2016

The way things are supposed to work on this planet is like this: in the United States, the power structures (public and private) decide what they want the rest of the world to do. They communicate their wishes through official and unofficial channels, expecting automatic cooperation. If cooperation is not immediately forthcoming, they apply political, financial and economic pressure. If that still doesn’t produce the intended effect, they attempt regime change through a color revolution or a military coup, or organize and finance an insurgency leading to terrorist attacks and civil war in the recalcitrant nation. If that still doesn’t work, they bomb the country back to the stone age. This is the way it worked in the 1990s and the 2000s, but as of late a new dynamic has emerged.

In the beginning it was centered on Russia, but the phenomenon has since spread around the world and is about to engulf the United States itself. It works like this: the United States decides what it wants Russia to do and communicates its wishes, expecting automatic cooperation. Russia says “Nyet.” The United States then runs through all of the above steps up to but not including the bombing campaign, from which it is deterred by Russia’s nuclear deterrent. The answer remains “Nyet.” One could perhaps imagine that some smart person within the US power structure would pipe up and say: “Based on the evidence before us, dictating our terms to Russia doesn’t work; let’s try negotiating with Russia in good faith as equals.” And then everybody else would slap their heads and say, "Wow! That's brilliant! Why didn't we think of that?" But instead that person would be fired that very same day because, you see, American global hegemony is nonnegotiable. And so what happens instead is that the Americans act baffled, regroup and try again, making for quite an amusing spectacle.

The whole Edward Snowden imbroglio was particularly fun to watch. The US demanded his extradition. The Russians said: “Nyet, our constitution forbids it.” And then, hilariously, some voices in the West demanded in response that Russia change its constitution! The response, requiring no translation, was “Xa-xa-xa-xa-xa!” Less funny is the impasse over Syria: the Americans have been continuously demanding that Russia go along with their plan to overthrow Bashar Assad. The unchanging Russian response has been: “Nyet, the Syrians get to decide on their leadership, not Russia, and not the US.” Each time they hear it, the Americans scratch their heads and… try again. John Kerry was just recently in Moscow, holding a marathon “negotiating session” with Putin and Lavrov. Above is a photo of Kerry talking to Putin and Lavrov in Moscow a week or so ago and their facial expressions are hard to misread. There’s Kerry, with his back to the camera, babbling away as per usual. Lavrov’s face says: “I can’t believe I have to sit here and listen to this nonsense again.” Putin’s face says: “Oh the poor idiot, he can’t bring himself to understand that we’re just going to say ‘nyet’ again.” Kerry flew home with yet another “nyet.”

What’s worse, other countries are now getting into the act. The Americans told the Brits exactly how to vote, and yet the Brits said “nyet” and voted for Brexit. The Americans told the Europeans to accept the horrendous corporate power grab that is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and the French said “nyet, it shall not pass.” The US organized yet another military coup in Turkey to replace Erdoǧan with somebody who won’t try to play nice with Russia, and the Turks said “nyet” to that too. And now, horror of horrors, there is Donald Trump saying “nyet” to all sorts of things—NATO, offshoring American jobs, letting in a flood of migrants, globalization, weapons for Ukrainian Nazis, free trade…

The corrosive psychological effect of “nyet” on the American hegemonic psyche cannot be underestimated. If you are supposed to think and act like a hegemon, but only the thinking part still works, then the result is cognitive dissonance. If your job is to bully nations around, and the nations can no longer be bullied, then your job becomes a joke, and you turn into a mental patient. The resulting madness has recently produced quite an interesting symptom: some number of US State Department staffers signed a letter, which was promptly leaked, calling for a bombing campaign against Syria in order to overthrow Bashar Assad. These are diplomats. Diplomacy is the art of avoiding war by talking. Diplomats who call for war are not being exactly… diplomatic. You could say that they are incompetent diplomats, but that wouldn’t go far enough (most of the competent diplomats left the service during the second Bush administration, many of them in disgust over having to lie about the rationale for the Iraq war). The truth is, they are sick, deranged non-diplomatic warmongers. Such is the power of this one simple Russian word that they have quite literally lost their minds.

But it would be unfair to single out the State Department. It is as if the entire American body politic has been infected by a putrid miasma. It permeates all things and makes life miserable. In spite of the mounting problems, most other things in the US are still somewhat manageable, but this one thing—the draining away of the ability to bully the whole world—ruins everything. It’s mid-summer, the nation is at the beach. The beach blanket is moth-eaten and threadbare, the beach umbrella has holes in it, the soft drinks in the cooler are laced with nasty chemicals and the summer reading is boring… and then there is a dead whale decomposing nearby, whose name is “Nyet.” It just ruins the whole ambiance!

The media chattering heads and the establishment politicos are at this point painfully aware of this problem, and their predictable reaction is to blame it on what they perceive as its ultimate source: Russia, conveniently personified by Putin. “If you aren’t voting for Clinton, you are voting for Putin” is one recently minted political trope. Another is that Trump is Putin’s agent. Any public figure that declines to take a pro-establishment stance is automatically labeled “Putin’s useful idiot.” Taken at face value, such claims are preposterous. But there is a deeper explanation for them: what ties them all together is the power of “nyet.” A vote for Sanders is a “nyet” vote: the Democratic establishment produced a candidate and told people to vote for her, and most of the young people said “nyet.” Same thing with Trump: the Republican establishment trotted out its Seven Dwarfs and told people to vote for any one of them, and yet most of the disenfranchised working-class white people said “nyet” and voted for Snow White the outsider.

It is a hopeful sign that people throughout the Washington-dominated world are discovering the power of “nyet.” The establishment may still look spiffy on the outside, but under the shiny new paint there hides a rotten hull, with water coming in though every open seam. A sufficiently resounding “nyet” will probably be enough to cause it to founder, suddenly making room for some very necessary changes. When that happens, please remember to thank Russia… or, if you insist, Putin.

https://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2019/...er-of-nyet.htm

US Duplicity over Golan Demolishes Posturing on Crimea




"In a controversial snub to international law, the United States signaled last week that it is moving to officially recognize the Golan Heights as part of Israeli territory. If the US does so, then it forfeits any moral authority to sanction Russia over allegations of “annexing Crimea”.

In its annual US State Department report, the section dealing with the Golan Heights reportedly refers to the contested area as “Israeli-controlled”, not “Israeli-occupied”. The change in wording deviates from United Nations resolutions and international norm which use the term “Israeli-occupied” to designate the land Israel annexed from Syria following the 1967 Six Day War.

Israel has occupied the western part of the Golan since 1967 as a spoil from that war. In 1981, Tel Aviv formally annexed the Syrian territory. However, the UN Security Council in 1981, including the US, unanimously condemned the annexation as illegal. The resolution mandates Israel to return the land to Syria which has historical claim to the entire Golan. The area of 1,800 square kilometers is a strategic elevation overlooking the northern Jordan Valley.

If Washington confirms its recent indications of recognizing the Golan as officially part of Israel, the development would mark an egregious flouting of international law.
But what’s more, such a move totally prohibits Washington from posturing with presumed principle over the issue of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula which since 2014 voluntarily became part of Russia.

Just last month, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeated accusations against Russia of “annexing” Crimea. Pompeo insisted that US sanctions against Moscow would be maintained until Russia “returns Crimea to Ukraine”.

“The world has not forgotten the cynical lies Russia employed to justify its aggression and mask its attempted annexation of Ukrainian territory,” he said. “The United States will maintain respective sanctions against Russia until the Russian government returns control of Crimea to Ukraine.”

Last year, Pompeo’s State Department issued a ‘Crimea Declaration’ in which it was stated that, “Russia undermines a bedrock of international principle shared by democratic states: that no country can change the borders of another by force.” Claims by Washington and the European Union of “illegal annexation” of Crimea by Russia are the central basis for five years of economic sanctions imposed on Moscow. Those sanctions have contributed to ever-worsening tensions with Russia and the build-up of NATO forces along Russia’s borders.

Those claims are, however, highly contestable. The people of Crimea voted in a legally constituted referendum in March 2014 to secede from Ukraine and to join the Russian Federation. That referendum followed an illegal coup in Kiev in February 2014 backed by the US and Europe against a legally elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. Historically, Crimea has centuries of shared cultural heritage with Russia. Its erstwhile position within the state of Ukraine was arguably an anomaly of the Cold War and subsequent break-up of the Soviet Union.

In any case, there is scant comparison between the Golan Heights and Crimea, save, that is, for the latest hypocrisy in Washington. While Crimea and its people are arguably historically part of Russia, the Golan Heights are indisputably a sovereign part of Syria which was forcibly annexed by Israeli military occupation.

The illegality of Israel’s occupation of Golan is a matter of record under international law as stipulated in UNSC Resolution 497. There is no such international mandate concerning Crimea. Claims of Russia’s “annexation” are simply a matter of dubious political assertion made by Washington and its European allies.

The latest move by Washington towards recognizing Golan as part of Israel – in defiance of international law – comes on the back of several other recent developments. US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham made a tour of Israeli-occupied Golan last week in the company of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pointedly transported by an IDF military helicopter. Graham said following his tour that he would recommend the Trump administration to officially recognize the area as under Israeli sovereignty.

Currently, there is legislation going through both the US Senate and House of Representatives which is aimed at declaring the entire Golan as Israeli territory. The stark shift in pro-Israeli bias in Washington under the Trump administration is consistent with the White House declaring at the end of 2017 that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Again, that move by President Trump overturned international consensus and UN resolutions which have stipulated Jerusalem to be a shared capital between Israel and a future Palestinian state, to be worked out by (defunct) peace negotiations.

Why Washington has taken up the Golan issue as a prize for Israel at this time is not precisely clear. It could be seen as the Trump administration giving a political boost to Netanyahu for next month’s elections.

There has been previous speculation that Trump is doing the bidding for a US-based oil company, Genie Oil, which is linked to his administration through his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s family investments. The New Jersey company has a subsidiary in Israel, is tied to the Netanyahu government, and has long been aiming to drill the Golan for its abundant oil resources.

The Golan move could also be retribution meted out to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over his country’s historic defeat of the US-backed covert war for regime change. The nearly eight-year war was also covertly backed by Israel which sponsored jihadist militia operating out of the Golan against the Syrian army. Having vanquished the US regime-change plot, thanks to crucial military support from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, the payback could be Washington stepping up Israeli claims to annex the Golan.

But whatever the background explanation is, the initiative by Washington to legalize the annexation of Golan by Israel is a brazen violation of international law. In doing so, the US is officially sponsoring war crimes and theft of Syria’s sovereign territory. Or as the Crimea Declaration would put it: “changing the borders of another country by force” – supposedly a “bedrock principle” that Washington continually sermonizes about to Russia.

Crimea and Golan are different issues of territorial dispute, as noted already. Nevertheless, the duplicity of Washington over Golan makes its posturing on Crimea null and void. If the Europeans meekly go along with the US move on Golan, then they too should shut their mouths and their moralizing sanctions over Crimea."

https://www.strategic-culture.org/ne...on-crimea.html