Uncharted Waters

by Israel Shamir

President Putin and Lukashenko. Ties have warmed, again, as Lukashenko is trusting Putin better than before.

Note: Israel Shamir is controversial, to put it mildly, and many of his statements, though probably spot on, are flippant and even frustrating, like he seems to have a rather cavalier attitude toward global environmental destruction, which is quite real and pervasive. The fact the Western elites should be speaking in fake progressive tones about this long (and still) neglected issue does not negate the gravity of the problem.—Ed

—The Editor

troops have moved forward to the frontline separating the regime-controlled areas and free Donbas, and they brought with them more of their heavy weaponry. In Donbas, people are in a wretched mood: they feel abandoned by Russia, or rather have returned to the same hell of intermittent shelling they have lived with for years. They haven’t been allowed to join the Russian Federation as they had hoped. In Kiev, they think Putin blinked first. So say the Brits. Prudent Putin does not want war, but he may still get it. What we have now feels like a lull rather than a stable situation.

tried to disobey with “Hell, no, I won’t go” but eventually relented and departed to Washington, together with ten expelled US diplomats. Russians also forbade the US Embassy from hiring local staff, receiving visiting diplomats and travelling freely in Russia, making diplomatic ties rather strained.

During this time, the plot to assassinate President Lukashenko and/or kidnap his sons was uncovered in Moscow. The plotters enjoyed CIA support, said the Belarusian president, asserting that his assassination had been authorised at the highest level of the Biden administration. This disclosure drew Belarus closer to Moscow. A year ago Minsk and Moscow were cold-shouldering each other. Lukashenko had good reason to suspect that the Russian oligarchs were involved in the colour revolution in his country. They hoped to remove the stubborn president, then privatise and buy Belarus’ industry, as this republic is the only one that preserved and improved the legacy it inherited from Soviet days. Since then, Lukashenko realised that Putin is not against him and relations have begun to improve.

Such generosity has Russians worried. It reminded them of those restful hours and the shot of vodka their fathers were given before being sent to attack the German lines – a respite before battle. However, Putin didn’t mention the Kiev regime and the Ukraine even once.

He promised severe retribution to whoever crosses red lines, and compared the Czechs and Poles with “Tabaqui [the Jackal] hanging around [the man-eating tiger] Shere Khan, howling to appease their sovereign”. Shere Khan is certainly the US, the great enemy of Mowgli [Russia], the human child in the jungle. Rudyard Kipling has been cancelled in the US for his White Man’s Burden, and Tabaqui did not appear in the US cinematic versions of the Jungle Book, but Russians know the character as it appears in their cartoon version.

The Czech jackals have occasioned much mirth among Russians by claiming that their arms depot was blown up in 2014 by Petrov and Boshirov, the legendary GRU agents of Skripal fame. Hundreds of memes appeared right away, appealing to the Russian sense of humour.

There are three possible explanations: (1) It was done in order to remove Russia’s Rosatom from the tender for building the nuclear power plant it was poised to win. Without Rosatom, the $5 Billion budget will probably go to the US company Westinghouse, though it is bankrupt and unable to build the plant. (2) To distract attention from the attempt by CIA-connected plotters to kill or kidnap Belarus President Lukashenko and his family. (3) The Czechs are doing what they were told by their American masters, and theirs is not to reason why.

האזעקה שהופעלה הלילה בכפרים סמוך לדימונה pic.twitter.com/Vh5ATizrVu

— almog boker (@bokeralmog) April 21, 2021

A few days ago, Russian Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov went to Teheran and declared that Russia-Iran relations are at an ‘unprecedented’ level. The first fruit of this declaration has been announced. Russian Navy ships will escort Iranian tankers delivering Iranian oil and wheat to Syria. This will prevent Israel or the US from attacking the tankers. Israelis gleefully blabbed that they had sabotaged dozens of Iranian tankers causing immense misery to Syrians. Now it is hopefully over (or maybe not. Or maybe yes).

The Dimona reactor

And just in case Israel won’t take this hint into consideration, there was another hint. A Russian C-200 missile launched by Syrians landed ‘by chance’ near an Israeli nuke factory, the Dimona nuclear centre. Israelis tried to minimise the public impact by concocting an improbable story of an old Syrian ground-to-air missile, launched against an Israeli jet that overflew by some 300 km, falling somewhere in the Negev desert. Syrians and Iranians didn’t object to this explanation and claimed that they just repelled an Israeli air attack. But Israeli social networks revealed that the Israeli public is worried, and rightly so, for the US-made Patriot missile defence system failed to stop the incoming missile. The Russian news agency reported that Russian electronic devices based in Syria had jammed the Israeli missile defence system in 12 districts, thus allowing the missile to reach Dimona. “This was a Russian response to Israeli breaches of our understandings on Syria”, the agency added.

As for Afghanistan, when the Biden regime decided to postpone its proposed withdrawal of troops until September 11, Russian experts I spoke to are convinced that the US will never leave Afghanistan by its own free will. They will keep in place thousands of private military contractors, and retain their positions in the airports if a need arises to recapture any ground.

And now for the climate war. Putin and Xi had been invited (among others) by President Biden to participate at the virtual Leaders Summit on Climate. (Biden was the only one wearing a mask at the virtual summit.) The Covid pandemic smoothly transforms into Global Warming in the plans of our masters. These plans are so outlandish that unhappy Donbas might as well be on another planet. Among others, they include terminating meat production and switching to producing insects for food. “Agriculture is the biggest driver of global biodiversity loss and a major  contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Farmed insects could help tackle two of the world’s biggest problems at once: food insecurity and the climate crisis”, preached the BBC. [Note: This is a case where good and necessary initiatives—meat production is indeed highly damaging to the ecosystem, matching hydrocarbons in sheer magnitude—are given a bad name because they are endorsed hypocritically by evil forces.—Ed].

For Russia, the coldest inhabited country in the world, global warming could only be good (even today, April 25, it’s 2°C in Moscow). Russians are not misled by the US green agenda. “The latest US remark on the green agenda is nothing but blackmail and an attempt to create an environmental and climate screen, and use foreign economic levers to force its partners and clients to pay for modernizing its energy complex”, a top Russian expert said. However, Putin is not the man to go against such a universally accepted agenda. He tries to find a position that will profit Russia and minimise its dangers, while paying lip service to the Biden regime’s demands. Russia is successfully competing against US-supplied LNG [liquefied natural gas] with her own plentiful gas resources. If China is forced to switch from coal to natural gas, Russia will undercut the US and sell her gas to Beijing. Nuclear power plants have no CO2 output, and Russians are the best at nuclear power. Despite overall hostility, Biden welcomed Putin’s contribution to the Green Deal.

At the summit, Putin said Russia has nearly halved its emissions compared to 1990. He didn’t mention that this great achievement had been made by the destruction of the USSR, by the de-industrialisation of Russia and by a huge drop in the living standards of the Russian people. People still shudder when they remember the Nineties with its poverty, and that is what ‘halving of emissions’ means. This is what Biden has prepared for the Americans: poverty, insects for dinner, and workers reduced to delivering packages for Amazon. Perhaps the choice of dying in a nuclear holocaust is not too bad an option.

Mike Whitney recently asked me, why hasn’t Russia’s change from Communist to Capitalist made any difference in Washington’s foreign policy posture? The US is still as relentlessly hostile towards the Russian Federation as it was towards the Soviet Union. It is a good sign. Washington was friendly to Moscow when Boris Yeltsin shelled its own parliament, when Russian scientists sold their belongings in improvised flea markets at railway stations, when Russian girls sold their charms for a few dollars to visiting foreigners – in those days, Russia was popular and loved. Why is Russia treated with such hostility now?

Israel Shamir, currently a Swedish national, was born in Russia to Jewish parents but claims he converted to Orthodox Christianity. He is widely regarded by his enemies as an unapologetic conservative, white supremacist, self-hating anti-semitic Jew.  That said, he still talks about many things already virtually banished from "polite" conversation among Western liberals.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post