Ukraine’s ‘Great Game’ surfaces in Transcaucasia

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | JULY 19, 2022

If the metaphor of the “Great Game” can be applied to the Ukrainian crisis, with the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) at it core, it has begun causing reverberations across the entire Eurasian space. The great game lurking in the shade in the Caucasus and Central Asian regions in recent years is visibly accelerating.

Ukraine’s ‘Great Game’ surfaces in Transcaucasia

Guess the CIA has quite a few regime changes, ahead?! Or maybe they’ll leave it to the NED’s color revolutions?! 🤷🏼‍♀️

Nuclear Risks Rise as Russia and the West Prepare for Protracted Conflict

Nuclear Risks Rise as Russia and the West Prepare for Protracted Conflict

As Russia prepares for a new offensive in the eastern Donbass region, the West is doubling down on what has been an unprecedented program of military aid to Ukraine. Washington is not just giving Ukraine weapons but telling it where to point them. According to recent reporting, the Biden administration has significantly loosened internal guidelines with the aim of allowing the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence services to share real-time targeting information with the Ukrainian military. The Biden administration is still reportedly reluctant to provide Ukraine’s armed forces with targeting information against Russian forces in Russia. But with mounting pressure from Republicans and Democrats who argue that the United States is not doing enough to support the Ukrainian war effort, it appears to be only a matter of time until that line is crossed as well.

A majority coalition of Western governments appears to be working not to facilitate a negotiated settlement to end the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Ukraine, but to draw the Kremlin into a years-long quagmire that would make the Afghan mujahideen pale by comparison.

Kiev is being encouraged by its Western benefactors not to consider pragmatic, creative solutions aimed at swiftly ending the bloodshed, but to pursue a maximalist agenda on the battlefield and the negotiating table. Some congressional Republicans are pressuring the Biden administration to facilitate Ukrainian counter-offensives to retake all territories occupied by Russia, including Crimea and the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DNR and LPR). As the fighting shifts eastward, calls to help Ukraine take the fight to Russia will likely grow louder. The intention among many Western lawmakers is to back Moscow into a corner; but what might happen if they succeed?

There is no indication that the Kremlin, which is convinced its existential interests are at stake in the ongoing conflict, has any intention of backing off in the face of the West’s maximum pressure campaign. To the contrary, all current signs point to further escalation. CIA director William Burns warned on Thursday that if Russia proves unable to reverse its military setbacks in Ukraine through conventional means, Moscow could eventually make the decision to employ low-yield tactical nuclear weapons. As hopes for a diplomatic off-ramp fade, the war in Ukraine is poised to roil the European continent—and further destabilize the international system—with no end in sight.

H/T: Natylie’s Place: Understanding Russia

Ukraine And The New Al Qaeda

Ukraine And The New Al Qaeda

As a result of the current escalation of events in Ukraine, it appears inevitable that the effort to use RIM to paint Russia as a driving force behind “transnational white supremacism” are due to resurface. This effort appears to have as one of its goals the minimization of the role that neo-Nazi groups like the Azov Battalion, the Neo-Nazi paramilitary unit embedded within Ukraine’s National Guard, are actively playing in the current hostilities.

In January of this year, Jacobin published an article about the CIA efforts to seed an insurgency in Ukraine, noting that “everything we know points to the likelihood that [the groups being trained by the CIA] includes Neo-Nazis inspiring far-right terrorists across the world.” It cites a 2020 report from West Point which states that: “A number of prominent individuals among far-right extremist groups in the United States and Europe have actively sought out relationships with representatives of the far-right in Ukraine, specifically the National Corps and its associated militia, the Azov Regiment.” It adds that “US-based individuals have spoken or written about how the training available in Ukraine might assist them and others in their paramilitary-style activities at home.”

Related:

MATTHEW HEIMBACH AND THE LEFT’S VULNERABILITY TO FASCIST INFILTRATION

The Battle of Ukraine and the War It’s Part Of

The Battle of Ukraine and the War It’s Part Of

The Russian military is not the Red Army, but the forces opposing it areinclusive of a revanchist army of Hitlerian fascism. The principal actors in this conflict are, on the one side, a rising oligarchic capitalist state trying to create a multipolar world in which it and other rising, (including self-identified socialist) countries can act and grow unconstrained by the hegemon, and, on the other, an oligarchic capitalist and hegemonic imperialist state, plus Nazis. I’m not a fan of either of them, but I know whom I don’t want to win.

And so does China. And Venezuela. And Nicaragua. And Cuba.

If there’s a way out, it’s with them.

Related:

BLACK BOX DEFENCE FOR THE RUSSIAN ECONOMY – DOLLAR DEBT REPAYMENTS BLOCKED; GAS AND OIL DELIVERIES TO GERMANY STOPPED; OLIGARCH ASSETS NATIONALIZED

In general, much remains to be done to strengthen national sovereignty in the economy. American sanctions are the agony of the outgoing imperial world economic system based on the use of force. In order to minimize the dangers associated with it, it is necessary to accelerate the formation of a new – integral – world economic order which restores international law, national sovereignty, equality of countries, diversity of national economic models, principles of mutual benefit and voluntariness in international economic cooperation.”