Is the Donbass under threat of a new attack from Ukraine?

Is the Donbass under threat of a new attack from Ukraine?

It is to be hoped that the threat of Russian intervention in the event of an attack on Donbass by Ukraine will prevent Kiev from going through with this bloody plan. For the Ukrainian authorities have forgotten one thing: unlike the inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh, already more than 300,000 inhabitants of the DPR and LPR have received Russian citizenship and passports. This would justify Russian intervention to defend its citizens in the event of a Ukrainian offensive. Let those who have ears to hear, hear.

Beijing Offers Dialogue With NATO After Alliance Identifies China as Threat

Beijing Offers Dialogue With NATO After Alliance Identifies China as Threat

On Tuesday, China said it hopes to engage in dialogue with NATO after news of a new report from the alliance that identifies China as an emerging threat. Hua Chunying, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, said Beijing does not practice coercion and intimidation as the NATO report suggests.

On Orwell

On Orwell

The only people who misunderstand George Orwell’s 1984 are those that go around trying to imagine it has a “leftist” message. It is mistaken to imagine that children in the English-speaking world get his work drilled into them like a mantra because, somehow, genuine socialists managed to sneak his work past a censor that banishes the likes of Karl Marx and Malcolm X.

Trump Exits Open Skies Treaty, Moves to Discard Observation Planes

Trump Exits Open Skies Treaty, Moves to Discard Observation Planes

In a move that could complicate President-elect Joe Biden’s options if he sought to re-enter the agreement, the Trump administration is taking steps to dispose of the two specially equipped OC-135B planes the U.S. has used to carry out Open Skies flights.

A senior U.S. official said the planes are being designated as “excess defense articles,” which means they can be given to foreign partners at reduced or no cost.

“We’ve started liquidating the equipment,” the official said. “Other countries can come purchase or just take the airframes. They are really old and cost-prohibitive for us to maintain. We don’t have a use for them anymore.”

H/T: Thom Hartmann on YouTube

20 YEARS OF TALKING WITH US PRESIDENTS HAVE BEEN A WASTE OF RUSSIAN BREATH

“HELLO BILL, THANK YOU BILL, GOODBYE BILL” – 20 YEARS OF TALKING WITH US PRESIDENTS HAVE BEEN A WASTE OF RUSSIAN BREATH

The release of the White House records of telephone and face-to-face conversations with Putin from 1999 to 2001 ought to have begun a decade ago, according to the archive notes at the Clinton presidential library. But declassification was delayed until 2019; public release was postponed until last month.

Clinton’s conversations with Yeltsin, and the opinion of Yeltsin which Clinton shared in secret with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, were revealed at the start of 2016. They told each other Yeltsin was an ingratiating fool whom they could rely on to do what they wanted so long as his health held. When it didn’t, they were happy to see him out of the way by staging, as they planned, his succession by Victor Chernomyrdin. That regime-changing scheme failed; read the story in the Clinton-Blair papers here.