20 Years Ago

Dick Cheney

Don Rumsfeld

GW Bush

Michael Ladeen

Bill Kristol

Richard Perle

maybe Colin Powell too - but he's kinda on the bubble.

And a shit load more.

Some these guys are already dead. But the ones who're still around - why aren't these assholes in prison?

In U.S.-Led Iraq War, Iran Was the Big Winner

In the 20 years since the United States invaded Iraq, Iran has built up loyal militias inside Iraq, gained deep political influence in the country and reaped economic benefits. For Washington, these were unintended consequences.

If visitors to Baghdad knew nothing of Iraqi politics, they could be forgiven for thinking that the trim-bearded, green-uniformed man whose larger-than-life photo is everywhere in the Iraqi capital was Iraq’s president.

Along the boulevard that tracks the Tigris River and inside the Green Zone, the seat of Iraq’s government, the likeness of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani towers above roundabouts and stands astride medians. The last person to be so glorified was Saddam Hussein, the dictator deposed and killed in the American-led invasion of Iraq that began almost exactly 20 years ago.

But Mr. Suleimani was Iranian, not Iraqi.

The commander of the Quds Force, the external arm of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps, he achieved near-mythic status in Iraq as an influential force who helped bind Iraq and Iran after the invasion. It was thanks in large part to Mr. Suleimani, whom the United States assassinated in Iraq in 2020, that Iran came to extend its influence into almost every aspect of Iraqi security and politics.

That, in turn, gave Iran outsize influence over the region and beyond. Tehran’s rise exposed the unintended consequences of Washington’s strategy in Iraq, analysts and former U.S. officials say, and damaged the United States’ relationship with its regional allies.

The invasion “was the original sin,” said Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow for Middle East security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British think tank. “It helped Iran bolster its position by being a predator in Iraq. It’s where Iran perfected the use of violence and militias to obtain its goals. It eroded the U.S.’s image. It led to fragmentation in the region.”

The U.S. State Department declined to comment on the impact of the war in Iraq.

“On Iraq specifically, our focus is on the 20 years ahead; less about looking backward,” the department said in an email response to questions. “Our partnership today has evolved far beyond security, to a 360-degree relationship that delivers results for the Iraqi people.”

All of that was enabled by the political changes that the American invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, set in motion. Later on, the 2014 takeover of a large area of northern Iraq by the Islamic State terrorist group prompted Iraq to turn to Iran as well as the United States for help, cementing Iran’s grip.

As destabilizing as the Iranian involvement has been for many Iraqis, it has been at least as unsettling for much of the rest of the region.

Iraq and Iran are the two largest Middle Eastern countries with a Shiite Muslim majority, and Shiites emerged from the Iraq war empowered across the region — often unnerving their ancient sectarian rivals, the Sunni Muslims, who dominate most other Arab countries.

Under the Iraqi dictatorship, the Sunni minority had formed the base of Mr. Hussein’s power; once he was killed, Iran set up loyal militias inside Iraq. It also went on to dismay Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf monarchies and Israel by supporting proxies and partners, such as the Houthi militia in Yemen, that brought violence right to their doorsteps.

Before 2003, it would have been hard to imagine Saudi Arabia, a pillar of the United States’ Middle East policy for decades and a leading Sunni power, showing open anger toward American leaders over their conduct in the region. But the Saudi king at the time did just that in a January 2006 meeting with the American ambassador to Iraq, telling him that the way Washington saw things going in Baghdad reflected “wishful thinking,” according to a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks in 2010.

By the time of that meeting, Iraqis had approved a new Constitution and held parliamentary elections that swept Shiite parties to power, and Sunni-Shiite sectarian tensions had escalated.

Saudi King Abdullah told the ambassador that before Mr. Hussein’s ouster, his kingdom — Iran’s longtime rival for influence in the Middle East — could count on Iraq as another Sunni power keeping Iran in check.

Now, he said, Iraq had been handed to Iran like “a gift on a golden platter.”

The United States, whose military muscle guided its policies, often with little sensitivity for Iraq’s religious and political dynamics, according to analysts, was not the country best placed to make lasting inroads in Iraq.

Iran, by contrast, could build the bonds created by the Shiite faith it shared with many in Iraq’s population.

Iranian and Iraqi clerics, along with millions of pilgrims, frequented Shiite shrines in both countries each year and enjoyed a mutual understanding of each other’s culture. Tribes and families span their nearly 1,000-mile-long border. And the father of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, spent 13 years in Iraq’s Shiite pilgrimage city of Najaf, while Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, was born in one Iranian holy city and educated in another.

In 1980, when Iraq invaded Iran, the United States and other Western countries quietly supported Iraq in the ensuing war.

The eight-year conflict was so devastating that some analysts say it shaped the mentality of an entire generation of Iranian leaders, making them determined to never again allow Iraq to grow strong enough to attack them. That could explain why, under Mr. Hussein’s repressive rule, which empowered Iraq’s Sunni minority over its Shiite majority, Iran gave shelter and support to both Shiites and Kurds in the Iraqi opposition.

When the United States toppled Mr. Hussein, it neutralized Iran’s foremost enemy without Tehran’s having to lift a finger. Afterward, the Americans diminished Sunni power in Iraq by dismantling the country’s army and purging the Sunni-dominated governing elite.

Iran saw opportunity.

“What they were looking for and have been looking for isn’t Iranian control,” Ryan Crocker, a former United States ambassador to Iraq, said of Iran. “It’s Iraqi instability.”

After the 2003 invasion, Iranians streamed into Baghdad and Iraq’s Shiite-dominated south: construction engineers to rebuild Iraqi cities, political consultants to train Shiite activists before the Iraqi elections, media professionals to establish Shiite-owned television channels.

Iranian pilgrims who had been barred in the Saddam Hussein era from visiting Iraq’s Shiite shrines now hurried across the border to the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, where Iranian companies invested in acres of hotels and restaurants for the millions of worshipers, many of them Iranian, who visit the shrines each year.

A good number of the Iraqi leaders who emerged after 2003 also had ties to Iran. The Shiite and Kurdish opposition politicians who had taken refuge there years before returned to Iraq after the invasion. Some of Iraq’s largest Shiite parties had backing and technical support from Iran, putting politicians from those parties in Iran’s debt when they won seats.

The Americans “somehow didn’t make the connection with Iran explicitly and understand that it’s not the Shiites you are giving the upper hand to, it’s the Shiites backed by Iran,” Marwan Muasher, who was then Jordan’s foreign minister, said last week.

Across Iraq’s southern border, Saudi Arabia and its gulf allies watched with growing frustration.

Gulf wariness of Iran dated back centuries. Less than 150 miles of Persian Gulf waters separate Iran from the Arabian Peninsula, a dynamic that has long fueled trade rivalries and territorial disputes. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Sunni gulf monarchies feared that Iran would export its brand of Shiite theocracy across a region traditionally ruled by Sunnis.

Before 2003, the gulf worried about the Iraqi dictator, too. But Western-led sanctions had weakened Iraq, and the Gulf States and the Iraqis shared a common enemy in Iran.

The toppling of Mr. Hussein unleashed what the gulf saw as Iran’s destructive power: Now, Iran was increasing its influence over a major Arab country with enormous oil reserves on Saudi Arabia’s northern border, just as evidence was growing that Iran was developing a nuclear program.

These days, no Iraqi prime minister can take office without at least the tacit approval of both the United States and Iran, an arrangement that often produces prime ministers torn between Washington and Tehran. Iraqis with connections to Iran hold posts throughout the government.

The cost of Iranian influence to Iraqi development and stability has been high.

Cut off from the world economy by sanctions, Iran has found an economic lifeline in Iraq, which buys about at least $7 billion in Iranian exports a year while selling only about $250 million of goods in return. The fine print on many medicines shows that they are Iranian made, and large quantities of Iranian construction materials come stacked on truck convoys across the border every day.

Many Iraqi farmers and businesspeople complain that Iran has suffocated Iraqi manufacturing and farming by dumping large quantities of produce and cheap goods in Iraq.

Although Shiites in Iraq’s political elite tolerated Iran’s activities and respected General Suleimani, resentment of Iran among other Iraqis helped set off mass antigovernment demonstrations in 2019 in which protesters demanded an end to Iran’s interference in Iraqi affairs.

Beyond Iraq, Iran has used every conflict in the region to extend its reach.

It inserted fighters into Syria after the 2011 Arab Spring revolt, aiming to prop up the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. It supported the Houthis in Yemen’s civil war against a Saudi-led coalition, establishing Iranian influence on the southern Saudi border. And it further cemented its position in Iraq and Syria by recruiting and training Shiite fighters against the Islamic State.

“Every opportunity that there was in the region, the dominoes fell in Iran’s favor,” said Vali Nasr, a professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University. Exploiting Iraq’s weakness, he added, gradually turned into “a powerful foreign policy tool for Iran on the regional level.”

Particularly worrisome to its Sunni Arab neighbors was Tehran’s consolidation of influence across a so-called Shiite Crescent stretching from Iran through Iraq and into Syria and Lebanon. Some Sunni governments, chief among them Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, blamed the United States — the country they had long depended on to have their backs — for failing to stop Iran from moving goods, weapons and personnel freely across the region, analysts say.

Later quarrels in the relationship arose over what the gulf saw as the U.S. failure to intervene in Syria or to protect the gulf from Iranian-linked attacks on Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.

The State Department said the United States values its relationship with the gulf and is committed to “to strengthen cooperation, coordination, and consultation with our gulf partners in all fields, including security, counterterrorism, and economic partnership.”

The gulf remains deeply connected to the United States, but since the 2003 invasion it has looked to broaden and deepen its ties to China and Russia as alternative partners. When Saudi Arabia agreed to restore diplomatic relations with Iran last week, for example, it did so in Beijing.

That agreement was the latest sign that Saudi Arabia has decided to try engaging with its adversaries rather than holding them at arm’s length as the gulf monarchies did for years in Iraq.

Despite Iraq and its gulf neighbors’ shared Arab identity, they all but forfeited the competition for influence to Iran: Whereas Iran was the first to establish an embassy in Baghdad after the United States invasion, a Saudi ambassador to Iraq arrived in Baghdad only last week.

Likewise, the Saudis did not open their deep pockets to Iraq until a few years ago, when they began a tentative effort to invest in infrastructure.

“The only thing we can do is to give the Iraqis another choice that isn’t only Iran,” said Hesham Alghannam, a Saudi political scientist. “We can’t corner them and then blame them for going with the Iranians.”

Oops

Call me nutty, but I think the Russians are just totally free-styling at this point. Their invasion of Ukraine is in the crapper, and they don't know what to do about it, so they're just charging around like a bunch of maniacal monkeys, fucking with everybody's bananas, hoping the world will back off because "holy crap - them boys is crazy".

The problem, of course, is that they keep demonstrating a decided shortage of the skills needed to pull off whatever prank they think is a good idea at the time.

And BTW, in the last 130 years, when has it been a good idea to fuck with the US military?

Yes, you can bloody our nose a bit - you can kill some Americans, but the ratio is traditionally about 20:1 in our favor.

This shit is dangerous, and it's almost inevitable that bad shit will happen because some joker decides to pull some stupid glad-hat stunt, or somebody else doesn't get the word to stay cool, or they just get fed up and start shooting at the wrong guys at the wrong time, or whatever.

Nobody gets out this kinda nonsense unburnt.

Pentagon releases video of drone incident after US, Russia trade accusations

Summary

• First known direct U.S.-Russia confrontation since invasion
• Moscow says U.S. directly participating in war
• U.S. accuses Russia of behaving aggressively and irresponsibly

WASHINGTON/KYIV, March 16 (Reuters) - The Pentagon released on Thursday a video showing a Russian military jet intercept a U.S. drone downed over the Black Sea two days ago, in what was the first direct encounter between the world's leading nuclear powers since the Ukraine war began.

The rare Pentagon move came a day after U.S. and Russian defence ministers and military chiefs held phone conversations over the incident, in which the MQ-9 Reaper drone crashed into the Black Sea while on a reconnaissance mission in international airspace.

In the declassified, roughly 40-second video, a Russian Su-27 fighter jet comes very close to the drone and dumps liquid near it, in what U.S. officials say was an apparent effort to damage the American aircraft as it flew over the Black Sea.

It also shows the loss of the video feed after a second pass by a Russian jet, which the Pentagon says resulted from its collision with the drone. The video ends with images of the drone's damaged propeller, which the Pentagon says resulted from the collision, making the aircraft inoperable.

"There is a pattern of behaviour recently where there is a little bit more aggressive actions being conducted by the Russians," General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Wednesday, adding it was unclear whether the Russian pilots had intended to strike the drone.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told his U.S. counterpart that U.S. drone flights near Crimea's coast "were provocative in nature" and could lead to "an escalation ... in the Black Sea zone," a ministry statement said.

JOINT RESPONSIBILITY

Russia, the statement said, has "no interest" in escalation "but will in future react in due proportion" and the two countries should "act with a maximum of responsibility", including by having military lines of communication in a crisis.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin declined to offer any details about his conversation with Shoigu, including whether he criticized the Russian intercept.

However Austin added: "The United States will continue to fly and to operate wherever international law allows. And it is incumbent on Russia to operate its military aircraft in a safe and professional manner."

The incident has been a reminder of the dangers of direct confrontation between the United States and Russia over Ukraine, which Western allies are supporting with intelligence and weapons.

Ukraine

Say his name

Contact with Shadura was lost on 3 February 2023, near the village of Zaliznyanske (Soledar urban hromada, Donetsk Oblast).

As of 6 March 2023, a graphic 12-second video showing an unidentified soldier in camouflage Ukrainian uniform, unarmed, standing in a shallow trench in a winter wood, and smoking a cigarette. As the man is heard saying "Slava Ukraini" ("Glory to Ukraine"), salvos of automatic weapons from multiple sides are heard and seen shooting the man, who collapses.

Voices in Russian are heard saying "Die, bitch".

Слава Україні 

🌎🌏🌍❤️🇺🇦

Punching Back

It was a bad idea to fuck with Ukraine, and Putin keeps getting very strong and very loud messages about it.

So I'll say it again - Putin will not survive this. It's likely going to take a good while longer, but this spells the end for Vladimir Putin.

On the other hand, it could happen a lot more quickly than I expect. The cracks have really begun to show, and in spite of his doubling down - and tripling down, and fourpling down, trying to bull his way through - at some point, which we may or may not be able to see coming, the whole thing could easily collapse in a big fuckin' hurry.

Ukraine has been making some very bold moves. This one reminds me of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in 1942.

Drones fly deep inside Russia; Putin orders border tightened

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Drones that the Kremlin said were launched by Ukraine flew deep inside Russian territory, including one that got within 100 kilometers (60 miles) of Moscow, signaling breaches in Russian defenses as President Vladimir Putin ordered stepped-up protection at the border.

Officials said the drones caused no injuries and did not inflict any significant damage, but the attacks on Monday night and Tuesday morning raised questions about Russian defense capabilities more than a year after the country’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor.

Ukrainian officials did not immediately take responsibility, but they similarly have avoided directly acknowledging responsibility for past strikes and sabotage while emphasizing Ukraine’s right to hit any target in Russia.

Although Putin did not refer to any specific attacks in a speech in the Russian capital, his comments came hours after the drones targeted several areas in southern and western Russia. Authorities closed the airspace over St. Petersburg in response to what some reports said was a drone.

Also Tuesday, several Russian television stations aired a missile attack warning that officials blamed on a hacking attack.

The drone attacks targeted regions inside Russia along the border with Ukraine and deeper into the country, according to local Russian authorities.

A drone fell near the village of Gubastovo, less than 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Moscow, Andrei Vorobyov, governor of the region surrounding the Russian capital, said in an online statement.

The drone did not cause any damage, Vorobyov said, but it likely targeted “a civilian infrastructure object.”

Pictures of the drone showed it was a small Ukrainian-made model with a reported range of up to 800 kilometers (nearly 500 miles) but no capacity to carry a large load of explosives.

Russian forces early Tuesday shot down another Ukrainian drone over the Bryansk region, local Gov. Aleksandr Bogomaz said in a Telegram post.

Three drones also targeted Russia’s Belgorod region on Monday night, with one flying through an apartment window in the capital, local authorities reported. Regional Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said the drones caused minor damage to buildings and cars.

The Russian Defense Ministry said Ukraine used drones to attack facilities in the Krasnodar region and neighboring Adygea. It said the drones were brought down by electronic warfare assets, adding that one of them crashed into a field and another diverted from its flight path and missed a facility it was supposed to attack.

Russia’s state RIA Novosti news agency reported a fire at the oil facility, and some other Russian reports said that two drones exploded nearby.

While Ukrainian drone strikes on the Russian border regions of Bryansk and Belgorod have become a regular occurrence, other strikes reflected a more ambitious effort.

Some Russian commentators described the drone attacks as an attempt by Ukraine to showcase its capability to strike deep behind the lines, foment tensions in Russia and rally the Ukrainian public. Some Russian war bloggers described the raids as a possible rehearsal for a bigger, more ambitious attack.

Andrei Medvedev, a commentator with Russian state television who serves as a deputy speaker of Moscow’s city legislature and runs a popular blog about the war, warned that the drone strikes could be a precursor to wider attacks within Russia that could accompany Ukraine’s attempt to launch a counteroffensive.

“The strikes of exploding drones on targets behind our lines will be part of that offensive,” Medvedev said, adding that Ukraine could try to extend the range of its drones.

Russia hawks urged strong retaliation. Igor Korotchenko, a retired Russian army colonel turned military commentator, called for a punishing strike on the Ukrainian presidential office in Kyiv.

Another retired military officer, Viktor Alksnis, noted that the drone attacks marked the expansion of the conflict and criticized Putin for failing to deliver a strong response.

Also on Tuesday, authorities reported that airspace around St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, was temporarily closed, halting all departures and arrivals at the main airport, Pulkovo. Officials did not give a reason for the move, but some Russian reports claimed that it was triggered by an unidentified drone.

The Russian Defense Ministry said it was conducting air defense drills in western Russia.

Last year, Russian authorities repeatedly reported shooting down Ukrainian drones over annexed Crimea. In December, the Russian military said Ukraine used drones to hit two bases for long-range bombers deep inside Russian territory.

Speaking at Russia’s main security agency, the FSB, Putin urged the service to tighten security on the Ukraine border.

In another development that fueled tensions across Russia on Tuesday, an air raid alarm interrupted the programming of several TV channels and radio stations in several regions. Russia’s Emergency Ministry said in an online statement that the announcement was a hoax “resulting from a hacking of the servers of radio stations and TV channels in some regions of the country.”

- more -

Слава Україні

🌎🌏🌍❤️🇺🇦

We can't let these people down

те ж саме

Very reminiscent of a similar speech, under similar circumstances, a long time ago.

"So, let us not be blind to our differences - but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

--JFK 06-10-1963

Brad Paisley with Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Same Here - те ж саме

Shifting The Blame

Typical. Instead of looking at Russia's invasion of Ukraine and seeing what an asshole Putin is for launching a war of conquest, China says we should look at it and see the big bad American boogey man.

Permanent Standard Disclaimer:

That's not to say the US has nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to fucking with things we have no business fucking with.

But this is not one of those things.

Yes, we have a vested interest in a free and democratic Ukraine, and helping Ukraine in service to that interest is good dual-purpose policy.

The spread of democracy is an all-round good thing in itself. And whenever democracy takes hold anywhere, it works against autocratic dickheads everywhere - like Putin and Xi. And also against plutocratic dickheads like most of the "conservatives" here in USAmerica, Inc.

As always, I maintain a firm belief that forces are at work all over the joint trying to move every country towards a global plutocracy. But that's a slightly different rant.

The focus here is on the way these dickheads try to deflect and shift the blame. They either blame the victim (Putin'a bullshit about "De-Nazification"), or they deflect to something like his secondary rationalization of "NATO is out to get us", which is what Xi is picking up on, with the variation of "everything bad that happens can be blamed on Washington".

Democracy in Ukraine is in fact a "threat to Russian", but it's only a threat to "Putin's Russia", and it's in Xi's best interest to lean in favor of a fellow-autocrat, while trying not to look like he's directly supporting Putin's war. And that's another exercise in selective reasoning because of Xi's ambitions of "taking Taiwan back".

It's been said that Geopolitics is a worldwide poker game where everybody's cheating and everybody knows everybody's cheating. So it should never come as a surprise when some event or series of events reveals what a fucked up mess it really is.

Anyway ...

A year later, China blames U.S. ‘hegemony’ — not Russia — for war in Ukraine

Ahead of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China has launched a public diplomacy offensive to wrest control of the narrative about its role in the conflict, trying to clear itself of accusations that it has sided with Russia while accusing the United States of turning the conflict into a “proxy” war.

Few of the positions staked out by Chinese officials in a flurry of speeches and documents this week are new, but they have underscored why Beijing continues to stand by Moscow even as it professes “deep concern” about the conflict: It considers the United States — not Russia — the progenitor of global insecurity, including in Ukraine.

Beijing insists it is neutral in the conflict, but those claims routinely clash with its rhetorical and diplomatic support for Russia.

That was illustrated this week, with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, arriving in Moscow in a show of solidarity with Russia — especially when contrasted with President Biden’s unannounced trip to Kyiv, where he walked the streets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The China-Russia relationship has stood the test of stormy international circumstances and remained “as stable as Mount Tai,” Wang told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, using a Chinese idiom for rock-solid.

“Crisis and chaos appear repeatedly before us, but within crisis there is opportunity,” he said.

By actively responding to the challenges of the times, the two nations can bring about an even deeper comprehensive strategic partnership, and that relationship “will not be overpowered by a third party’s coercion or pressure” because it is built on a strong economic, political and cultural foundation, Wang added.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is expected to visit Russia some time this year, but the Kremlin declined Wednesday to be drawn on reports that it could be as soon as April.

From the beginning of the war, China has tried to protect its rapidly deepening economic and political ties with Russia at the same time it tried to assure Western audiences that it wants peace and should not be a target for sanctions.

But as China’s role as a lifeline for an isolated Russia grows, it is becoming harder for Beijing to stay on the sidelines.

The Foreign Ministry in Beijing has declined to comment on reports that Xi will deliver a “peace speech” on Friday, exactly one year since Russia launched its invasion, saying only that China will issue a document clarifying its stance on the day.

The problem with China’s story of being an honest broker is that Russia remains a “key ally in the effort to push back against the U.S.-led order,” said Arthur Kroeber, partner at the research firm Gavekal Dragonomics.

“The true purpose of Xi’s speech” — assuming it takes place — “will be to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its European allies, by suggesting that China, not the U.S., is the real advocate of a peaceful resolution of the Russia-Ukraine war,” he wrote in a note on Wednesday.

The latest propaganda blitz also provides a clearer picture of Xi’s foreign policy priorities as he embarks on a third term in power. Bringing about an end to the war is only one item in Xi’s ambitious agenda to reshape the global order so that the United States and its allies cannot slow China’s rise or challenge its territorial claims. And to that end, China remains closely aligned with Russia.

An attempt to justify China’s stance on the war in Ukraine to a conflicted domestic audience, the new wave of propaganda is also a way to rebuff growing concern that Beijing will step up support for Putin’s war effort as it enters its second year.

Beijing has rejected U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s warning that China might be considering providing “lethal” support to Russia as a “wild accusation” and accused the United States of wanting Ukraine to “fight till the last Ukrainian.”

“It’s plain for the world to see who is calling for dialogue and striving for peace and who is adding fuel to the fire, handing out knives and instigating hostility,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Tuesday.

Ding Chun, director of the Center for European Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, said Blinken’s claim was a “strategic statement” meant to warn China. “It’s not a substantive accusation, but rather a part of U.S. strategy to tell China not to have the intention [to do so],” he said.

But it’s not just the United States that is concerned about China’s intentions. Zelensky told the German daily Die Welt this week that he hoped China would make a “pragmatic assessment” and avoid allying itself with Russia’s war effort, because if it did “there will be a world war.”

In response to fears that the conflict could expand, Wang Wen, a professor at Renmin University, said it was wrong for Zelensky to speculate about Beijing’s actions. Instead, “he should thank China for promoting humanitarian aid to Ukraine. If China really were to support Russia, then Zelensky’s life would get even worse,” he said.

(In the month after the invasion, China gave Ukraine $725,000 of humanitarian aid and $1.5 million in other forms of aid. It hasn’t announced additional support since then.)

Seeing the United States as a source of instability — while giving aggression from Russia and other authoritarian states a pass — is a longtime stance of the Chinese Communist Party. But under Xi, it is a worldview that has become more deeply embedded into China’s foreign policy and echoed by its national security establishment.

Lu Xiang, a researcher at the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the true threat to Ukraine’s autonomy is Western support. Having once been part of the Soviet Union means that “if a big country from outside the region uses Ukraine as a chess piece to weaken Russia’s strategic interests, then that means [Ukraine’s] sovereign interests will of necessity be suppressed,” he said.

At the core of Xi’s priorities for promoting China’s security is an effort to counteract the United States’ influence in the international order, often by enlisting countries that share similar grievances.

Chinese complaints about American “abuse of hegemony” in global military, political and economic affairs were listed in a five-page document issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Monday, which called the Ukraine conflict a case of the United States “repeating its old tactics of waging proxy … wars.”

Separately this week, China issued a “concept paper” that staked out positions on global hot-spot issues, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Pacific islands.

China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang, released the document at an event in Beijing, running through a string of broad commitments to uphold the U.N. charter, reject the use of nuclear weapons and protect territorial integrity, while also taking thinly veiled swipes at the United States for “abusing unilateral sanctions” and building security blocs.

The document, which did not mention Russia, made only passing reference to the “Ukraine crisis” as an issue to be resolved through dialogue. It repeated that “legitimate security concerns of all countries” should be taken seriously — a phrase often used by Beijing in defense of Moscow.

Qin also used the event to call for countries to stop “clamoring about ‘Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow.’”

Since the start of the war, China has tried to draw a distinction between Russia’s actions and its own escalating military aggression in the Taiwan Strait. For many in the self-governed island democracy, however, the war has been a wake-up call for the need to be better prepared to repel an attack from China.

Missing from the newly proactive stance China laid out this week is any indication that Beijing is willing to take a leading role in peace negotiations.

“Neither Russia nor Ukraine can defeat each other completely in the short term,” said Fudan University’s Ding. “China has emphasized the need to stop the war and promote peace, but it has not explicitly said that it wants to be a mediator in this war, and it is very difficult to do so in practice. Although China has a better relationship with Russia, it is a question of to what extent Russia will listen to China’s thoughts.”

Putin Speaks

Early this morning, Vladimir Putin delivered more or less the Russian SOTU.

To save time, I've summed it up for y'all - here's what he said:

“The West wants us to suffer. They made us invade Ukraine. The conflict will never end. I'm gonna go play with my nukes for a while. Fuck everybody but us.”

And the crowd went wild!

Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended Moscow’s participation in the last remaining nuclear arms control pact with the U.S., announcing the move Tuesday in a bitter speech where he made clear he would not change his strategy in the war in Ukraine.

In his long-delayed state-of-the-nation address, Putin cast his country — and Ukraine — as victims of Western double-dealing and said it was Russia, not Ukraine, fighting for its very existence.

“We aren’t fighting the Ukrainian people,” Putin said in a speech days before the war’s first anniversary on Friday. “The Ukrainian people have become hostages of the Kyiv regime and its Western masters, which have effectively occupied the country.”

The speech reiterated a litany of grievances that the Russian leader has frequently offered as justification for the widely condemned military campaign while vowing no military let-up in a conflict that has reawakened fears of a new Cold War.

On top of that, Putin sharply upped the ante by declaring that Moscow would suspend its participation in the so-called New START Treaty. The pact, signed in 2010 by the U.S. and Russia, caps the number of long-range nuclear warheads the two sides can deploy and limits the use of missiles that can carry atomic weapons.

- more -

WTF, Ivan?

The stupid wasteful insanity of war.

Guided Missile Killed U.S. Aid Worker in Ukraine, Video Shows

A Times analysis suggests that an intentional strike, not an indiscriminate attack, most likely killed Pete Reed. It is unclear whether the attackers knew he was with a group of aid workers.

Roughly a minute after an American paramedic, Pete Reed, and a team of aid workers began tending to a wounded civilian in the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut on Feb. 2, they were attacked. Mr. Reed, a former U.S. Marine volunteering on the war’s front lines, was killed, and several of his colleagues were wounded.

Volunteers at the scene initially attributed the strike to indiscriminate Russian shelling. But a frame-by-frame analysis of a video taken at the location — and shared with The New York Times — shows that Mr. Reed, who was unarmed, died in a targeted strike by a guided missile almost certainly fired by Russian troops.

A short video shows a missile hitting the white van as the aid workers are nearby.

The weapon that killed Pete Reed was a guided antitank missile most likely fired by Russian troops.

It is unclear if the Russians knew the group was made up of aid workers. But its convoy had markings that should have signaled to the Russians the type of vehicles they were hitting. One of the vehicles was clearly marked with a red cross, and the type of weapon used in the attack — a laser-guided antitank missile — is usually fired when a gunman sees and selects a target.

Still, the target in this case, a white Mercedes-Benz van, did not have any clearly visible medical markings, and while the aid workers were unarmed at least one medic was wearing military-style camouflage.

The video shows Mr. Reed and the group of aid workers standing beside the white van, which they were using to transport humanitarian supplies. A missile flying parallel to the ground directly hits the van, destroying it and killing Mr. Reed.

The footage appears to show that the strike involved a Kornet antitank guided missile, which has a range of around three miles. Mr. Reed and the aid workers were at a slightly elevated position along a street that led toward the Russian front line, around two miles away.

Mr. Laidinen said that his vehicle’s dash camera had also recorded the episode, and that the footage showed a second missile strike, which was aimed at another vehicle but missed its target. The footage has yet to be made public.

A volunteer named Roma, who was standing near Mr. Reed when the missile struck and who was wounded in the blast, told The Times in an interview that there had been no military units nearby. One of the vehicles at the scene was clearly marked as an ambulance, he said.

He provided only his given name because of safety concerns.

A photograph published by The Wall Street Journal shows an injured Norwegian medic running from the scene of the attack. It also shows the ambulance marked with a red cross on a white background across the street from where Mr. Reed and other volunteers were attacked.

Experts said the type of weapon used should have enabled the attacker to identify the nature of the target. With weapons such as these, “you have an expectation that the firer is going to have the ability to differentiate between a medical worker and a combatant,” said Marc Garlasco, a war crimes investigator who is in Poland training Ukrainian teams investigating war crimes.

Mr. Garlasco added that the episode required further investigation, but that on its face it was a “potential war crime.”

A video of the aftermath shows the aid workers’ white van destroyed by the attack. Debris is strewn around the area, and a body is lying lifeless on the ground.

Bakhmut, an industrial city surrounded by salt mines with a prewar population of around 70,000 people, has been under intense bombardment since the summer. In recent weeks, Russian troops have come increasingly close to encircling the city.

With a small population of civilians still present in the city, aid workers like Mr. Reed and his teammates have served as lifelines for people sheltering in basements without heat and with dwindling rations. On Monday, the Ukrainian military said it would no longer allow aid groups into the city.

Mr. Reed and his team were alerted to the wounded civilian by Ukrainian troops that had just returned from the area. The street had been under shelling or missile attack at some point: At least one other vehicle had been destroyed in the same area, though it was unclear when, Roma said.

Ukrainian forces traverse the battlefield in all types of civilian vehicles, including privately owned sedans and school buses. It is therefore possible that Mr. Reed was targeted because his team had simply driven into a kill zone frequently targeted by Russian troops.

Ukraine

Nearly 5,500 Russians Killed Last Week in War: Defense Ministry

The daily and weekly death toll of Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine keeps rapidly climbing, the defense department in Ukraine claims. More than 5,000 Russian soldiers died within the last week alone, the Ukraine Ministry of Defense posted.

As the war rapidly approaches its one-year mark next month, the estimated death count of Russians keeps mounting higher by the week. So far, there have been more than 125,000 dead Russian soldiers since the war began in late February 2022.

Ukraine's Ministry of Defense posted Saturday that another 800 Russian soldiers had been killed the previous day, bringing that estimated total to 125,510 deaths. According to the ministry's numbers, there have been 5,350 casualties within the last seven days. Here are those figures:

• January 22: 600
• January 23: 720
• January 24: 690
• January 25: 910
• January 26: 780
• January 27: 850
• January 28: 800

That's just over 764 Russian casualties per day in the last week. In addition Saturday, Russia lost seven tanks, eight more artillery vehicles, six drones and 26 more vehicle and fuel tanks the previous day.

Russia, despite many losses in the war now in its 12th month, has shifted focus to eastern and southern Ukraine. That includes a strong presence in the Black Sea.

Russia reportedly has three vessels in the Black Sea capable of firing the Kalibr cruise missiles. The Kyiv Independent states that these ships have 20 such missiles on them, and that there are 16 Russian warships positioned in the Black Sea ready to strike at a moment's notice.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has successfully gained a swath of tanks and some air defense systems from western allies that will soon arrive, and now he has reportedly asked the West for fighter jets.

Ukraine is looking for more support to protect itself from things like Kh-22 missiles, which destroyed Dnipro two weeks ago.

Ukraine's office of the Prosecutor General said it was Russia's 52nd Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment.

"According to preliminary information, the Kh-22 missile was used. This type of missile leads to the greatest human casualties, because the missile is extremely inaccurate, has a huge deviation. Therefore, the use of such weapons for targets in densely populated areas is clearly a war crime," the Ukraine office said in a Telegram post. "This type of rocket was used in Sergiivka and Kremenchuk. It can be launched by a single Russian unit - the 52nd Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment."

The Kh-22 missiles were largely responsible for massive destruction and deaths Saturday in Dnipro, located in the contentious Eastern Ukraine, where Russia has already occupied many territories and battles to save that territory.

Newsweek reached out to Russia's Defense Ministry for comment.

Ukraine (via Reddit - NSFW)

Isn't there something in the Russian manual that says even if it's obvious the guy is dead, you should take a moment to get his dog tag or whatever?

To be clear, I don't want in on these fights, but if I did, I sure as hell wouldn't want any of these guys "on my side".

More Ukraine

One of the things humans fear most is being forgotten - thinking we don't count for much when we're alive, and that our passing will mean little to anyone. All we have is a few close friends and family to carry on when we're dead and gone.

There's more than just a possibility that lots of Russians are being forgotten - deprived even of the tiny solace that someone will know of their passing and will mourn them - as they're casually tossed into the meat grinder in eastern Ukraine by a regime in the Kremlin that obviously doesn't give one empty fuck about them.

In Russia, the third wave of recruitment of prisoners to participate in the war against Ukraine has already begun.

Of the first thousand prisoners recruited by the Wagner Group to participate in the war against Ukraine, only 20 returned home. This was stated by the head of the public organization "Seated Russia" Olga Romanova in an interview with the publication "Current Time" .

According to her, the third wave of recruitment of prisoners into the "Wagner group" is now underway in Russia. The first wave came out of the prisons of central Russia from June 26 to September 21, the second - in the Urals and the Far East from September 21 to the end of December. Now the third one has begun, which already covers the whole country, including Chechnya.

“Naturally, for Prigozhin there is also a great convenience in the fact that there is actually no extradition from Chechnya. There he can do some things that he cannot do in the Ryazan region, in the Smolensk region or somewhere else. This is actually extraterritorial education. Therefore, recruitment began in Chechen prisons,” Romanova said.

"I think that they do not count the number of dead - nothing. I think there is no one there. But let's look at the results of the first recruitment. In the very first days of July, about a thousand people were recruited from the Leningrad and Novgorod regions in the zones, but returned 20. Look at the statistics,” she said.

Participation of Russian prisoners in the war against Ukraine

Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin personally traveled to Russian prisons and recruited prisoners into his private army, known as the "Wagner Group" or "PMC Wagner". According to experts , the Wagnerites, among whom the majority are former prisoners, may make up about a quarter of all Russian forces in Ukraine.

At the front, the "Wagner Group" became famous primarily for the fact that it does not spare its soldiers at all and sends them into suicidal attacks for the sake of minimal progress.

The dead Wagnerites are transported around Russia by ordinary truckers, after which they are buried "without too much noise . "

We hear very little about the casualty numbers on either side because governments don't want to give out any information about its wars that it doesn't absolutely have to give out, but the Russians seem to be taking the opportunity to ignore their own losses in order to feel a bit less embarrassed by this latest colossal fuckup in a lengthening series of colossal fuckups.

Ukraine

I'm going on some very loose numbers because it's all so fucking big now, nobody really knows what the numbers actually are, but it seems we're getting a lot of bang for our buck sending aid to Ukraine.

Looking at it from the Geopolitics standpoint, it's an excellent investment.

We should keep in mind that geopolitics is a global poker game where everybody's cheating, everybody knows everybody's cheating, and nobody's playing with their own money. Seeing everything through that filter tends to give us the kind of skewed perspective that's led us to make some unbelievably stoopid decisions.

So far, I think what we're doing in Ukraine is beyond the simple calculus of "what's in it for me", and goes to a place where we're actually thinking in broader terms, and considering a lot more than just waiting for it to play out and then making a deal with the conqueror.

We still have to look at the "business" aspects, though.

We've spent about $50B, which is about 5% of the total US defense budget. And that's a shitload of money that I'd rather spend on practically anything other than war, but this is what we've got so this is what we have to deal with.

The good news is that we get to draw down some excess stocks of equipment, weapons and ammo. Most of that stock is nearing its expiration date, and will be replaced with newer and better stuff. Plus, we get to train the Ukrainians in NATO tactics and test the whole shebang to see if it works the way we've been thinking it'd work. (so far so good)

"The Bottom Line" = each American family is spending about one dollar a day on Ukraine out of a total of 20 dollars we all spend every day on things that blow shit up.

That ain't cheap, but considering the total aid package is less than 0.25% of US GDP, we're getting a pretty good deal.

Of course, let's always be mindful, and never get too casual in our use of words like "good" when we're talking about the bloody truth of war.

"Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all."

Ukraine

The war won't last forever. Russia will leave Ukraine. Putin will be dead or hiding.

There will be a reckoning - of sorts. Probably not to the satisfaction of all who've suffered great loss, but it will be something. And assholes with dreams of empire, and ambitions for conquest will be pushed down again for a while.

'Twas ever thus, and ever thus 'twill be.

Radio Free Europe - Russian atrocities

Population Implosion

Reports of Russia's demise have been exaggerated - but not by a whole lot.

The Infographics Show

Today's Explainer

Here's a guy who kinda knows what he's talking about - as long as we take what he says as an outline of what's happening, and what some of the possible outcomes could be, and not consider him some kind of Magic Eight Ball.

His conclusions about Putin's massive fuckup in Ukraine seem pretty solid. I just wish these guys would try a little harder to stay out of the predictions business.

This is generally centered on Hungary, but as he points out, nobody stands alone.

George Friedman

Today's Russian Atrocity

There has to be a reckoning. This is easily top 5 on the list of the shittiest things any government has ever done to its own people - and I think Russia holds most of those places.

Russians accused of burning bodies at Kherson landfill

Residents and workers say occupying forces used site to burn bodies of fallen Russian soldiers

The landfill site on the edge of Kherson offers some visible hints here and there, among the piles of rubbish, to what locals and workers say happened in its recent past. Russian flags, uniforms and helmets emerge from the putrid mud, while hundreds of seagulls and dozens of stray dogs scavenge around.

As the Russian occupation of the region was on its last legs over the summer, the site, once a mundane place where residents disposed of their rubbish, became a no-go area, according to Kherson’s inhabitants, fiercely sealed off by the invading forces from presumed prying eyes.

The reason for the jittery secrecy, several residents and workers at the site told the Guardian, was that the occupying forces had a gruesome new purpose there: dumping the bodies of their fallen brethren, and then burning them.

The residents report seeing Russian open trucks arriving to the site carrying black bags that were then set on fire, filling the air with a large cloud of smoke and a terrifying stench of burning flesh.

They believe the Russians were disposing of the bodies of its soldiers killed during the heavy fighting of those summer days.

“Every time our army shelled the Russians there, they moved the remains to the landfill and burned them,” says Iryna, 40, a Kherson resident.

Ukraine’s attempts to gain momentum and retake the southern city began at the end of June when long-awaited US-made Himars long-range rockets finally reached one the frontlines there. Kyiv was making good use of them to badly damage bridges across the Dnipro, destroy Russian ammunition dumps and strike enemy artillery and forces.

It was around this time, the residents said, that they first started to fear a new use for the site.

It is not possible to independently verify the claims, and Ukrainian authorities said they could not comment on whether the allegations were being investigated. The Guardian visited the landfill, located on the north-western outskirts of the town, five days after Kherson’s liberation and spoke to employees of the site as well as several more of the town’s residents, who backed up the claims made by others in the summer.

“The Russians drove a Kamaz full of rubbish and corpses all together and unloaded,” said a rubbish collector from Kherson who asked not to be named. “Do you think someone was gonna bury them? They dumped them and then dumped the trash over them, and that’s it.”

He said he did not see if bodies belonged to soldiers or civilians. “I didn’t see. I’ve said enough. I’m not scared, I’ve been fighting this war since 2014. Been to Donbas.

“But the less you know, the better you sleep,” he added, citing a Ukrainian saying. Fear is still alive among the residents who lived for eight months under a police state, in which the Russian authorities did not tolerate the slightest hint of dissent. The price was arrest, or worse: death.

Svitlana Viktorivna, 45, who together with her husband, Oleksandr, has been bringing waste to the landfill for years in their truck, said a Russian checkpoint had been set up at its entrance.

“We were not allowed anywhere near the area of the landfill where they were burning the bodies,” she says. “So let me tell you how it was: they came here, they left some of their soldier-guards, and unloaded and burned. One day my husband and I arrived at the wrong time. We came here while they were doing their ‘business’ and they gave my husband a hard blow in the face with a club.”

“I didn’t see the remains,” she adds. “They buried whatever was left.”

Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, has said that nearly 6,000 soldiers have died in Ukraine, but the Pentagon in late summer estimated that about 80,000 Russian soldiers had been killed or injured.

The workers at the landfill said the Russians had chosen an area on the most isolated side of the landfill. For security reasons, it is not possible to visit. A truck driver working in the landfill said he did not rule out that the Russians may have mined the area or left unexploded devices.

“I heard the story, but I didn’t go that far with my truck to unload rubbish. But I can guarantee you that, whatever they were doing, it smelled so bad, like [rotten] meat” says the truck driver. “And the smoke … the smoke was thick.”

‘Every time our army shelled the Russians there, they moved the remains to the landfill and burned them,’ says Iryna, centre. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

Residents of a large Soviet-era apartment block facing the landfill said that when the Russians had started burning, a large cloud of smoke had risen up filling the air with an unbearable smell of decay, to the point that it had felt impossible to breathe.

“I felt nauseous when I smelled that smoke,” says Olesia Kokorina, 60, who lives on the eighth floor. “And it was scary, too, because it smelled like burnt hair, and you know, it also smelled like at the dentist’s when they drill your tooth before placing a filling. And the smoke was so thick, you couldn’t see the building next door.”

“It just never smelled like this before,” says Natalia, 65. “There were lots of dump trucks and they were all covered with bags. I don’t know what was in them, but the stench from the smoke in the landfill was so bad we couldn’t even open the balcony door. There were days when you couldn’t breathe because of the smell.”

Some believe that burning bodies of their own soldiers was the easiest way to get rid of the corpses as bridges over the Dnipro River when Russians were virtually cut off on its western bank were too fragile to hold trucks.

Dozens of other Kherson residents corroborated the reports of their neighbours, but Ukrainian authorities have not so far spoken. A local official who requested anonymity said: “We are not interested in the burial sites of the enemy. What interests us is to find the bodies of Ukrainians, tortured, killed and buried in mass graves here in the Kherson region.”

Ukraine’s security service believe the bodies of thousands of dead Russian soldiers are being informally disposed of as the Kremlin is logging them as “missing in action” in an attempt to cover up its losses in the war in Ukraine.

An intercepted phone call from a Russian soldier in May said that his comrades had been buried in “a dump the height of a man” just outside occupied Donetsk. “There’s so much Cargo 200 [military code for dead soldiers] that the mountains of corpses are 2 metres high,” he said in the call. “It’s not a morgue, it’s a dump. It’s massive.”

“They just toss them there,” a Russian soldier said in another intercepted call. “And then later it’s easier to make it as if they disappeared without a trace. It’s easier for them to pretend they are just missing, and that’s it.”