Middling to Zero Good News

World War III On the Agenda

Witkoff’s change of position is almost certainly the consequence of pressure from Trump who likely calculates that the only way in which he is going to be able to get his neocon adversaries to accept some kind of US exit from Ukraine is if he gives them what they want in Iran. What they want in Iran is war. So Witkoff’s new terms are such as to force Iran to reject them: they totally contravene its national sovereignty; the return to a discourse of “weaponization” flies in the face of all the best of intelligence services who say that Iran has no program for the weaponization of its nuclear assets; and the mention of missiles is a slap in the face of Iranian sources who have said that the question of missiles is non-negotiable.

Iran should feel supported in walking once more to the precipice, since it is now a member of the BRICS, its has a strategic partnership with Russia and a close relationship with China, which imports some 30%-40% of its oil from Iran.

Genociding the Middle East

It remains to be seen whether al-Sisi’s Egypt will show more resolve in helping Israel genocide the Palestinians (blocking their entry, depriving them of assistance or through other means) than in finally standing up to its Western backers and to Israel and doing what the majority of Egyptians want it to do: protect Palestine, collaborate with Yemen and other Arab parties, and bring this horrific narrative to a kinder, more honorable and ennobling end. Don’t hold your breath.

Two-thirds of the Palestinian population of Gaza is either under active displacement orders or within no-go zones. Some refuse to leave. 400,000 have been newly displaced in the space of a month. The scene is being set for one of the world’s most grotesque war crimes by an Israeli prime minister who is under threat of criminal charges and imprisonment at home, with the support of a US President whose campaign was financed by billionaire Zionists and whose cabinet is Zionist through and through.

Zelenskiy Glares

So Witkoff, charming and billionaire he may be, knowledgable beyond the realm of real estate, perhaps no, and his own man, not so much:

How will this play out in Ukraine? Zelenskiy - who has not observed Witkoff’s over-hyped achievement of a 30 days partial cease fire with respect to attacks on Russian energy facilities, much to the delight of Europe which wants to keep the US enmeshed in the Ukraine imbroglio for ever and which has made a Black Sea ceasefire impossible - has presented bills to the RADA that will extend the period of marial law by another 90 days (extending his illegal presidency for the same period, of course) from May 9th to August 6, along with more mobilization. Ukrainian MP Maryana Bezuhla has called for Ukraine to break off diplomatic relations with the US.

Trump is furious with Zelenskiy and complains, not for the first time, that the battle in Ukraine is “Biden’s War,” although in his first term Trump did much to beef up Ukrainian defenses and forces in preparation for this war, and has not put an end to the flow of US weapons and intelligence to Ukraine.

Zelenskiy has made it clear that he is not going to agree any unconditional ceasefire on Russian terms and probably on no terms that do not involve Russia giving back all the territory that it has acquired.

Russia has made it clear that it is not going to agree any unconditional ceasefire on Ukrainian or on European terms. Zelenskiy has not even revoked the October 2022 decree that forbids any Ukrainian from negotiating with Putin.

The US has yet to put up a proposal that looks like one that either Russia or Ukraine would be willing to accept or even one that Russia would be content to see the US impose on Ukraine. And Russia, which reportedly recruits between 1,000 and 1,400 men each day, has recently launched a major offensive that takes in advances in the Chernihiv and Sumy areas in the north, the Kupyansk, Lyman, Siversk, Toretsk, Pokrovsk and Zapporizhzhia areas further south.

Negotiations over Ukraine are challenging enough, and Trump makes them a grest more complicated with absurd proposals about US owning Ukrainian mineral rights, pipelines and, essentiually, Ukraine, and somewhat more sensible but not totally Ukraine-related issues about the normalization of relations between the US and Russia.

And all this comes amidst the outrageous lunacy of a gargantuan global tariff policy` that will not actually, in the long term, if in any term, actually benefit the US (actually, the reverse) on the basis of no sensible public debate whatsoever and that involves an economic and possibly a hot war against the second strongest (actually the strongest in PPP terms) economy on the globe. It cannot work, as Trump fondly imagines, to re-industrialize the US, because all the infrastructure to support such a policy has wasted away and China is light-years ahead. This is not about cheap labor; it is about superior technology, strategic know-how, purposeful education and excellence of tactics. Trump is at least a quarter to half a century too late.

European Flatulence

Leader of this cabal, Britain’s Keir Starmer, whose poll rating is sinking at the fastest rate in British history only nine months of becoming Prime Minister, can boast of an army of only 70,000, some planes, a few dozen tanks, a few ships (not all of them seaworthy) and submarines (its nuclear weapons requiring US parts and permission to use), its missile stockpiles denuded by free handouts to Ukraine, is having difficulty keeping Britain’s last, unprofitable, Chinese owned, steele blast furnace alight.

But this doesn’t stop the British and British intelligence from supporting Israeli genocide and general meddling around in Central Europe, the Balkans and the Middle East (as Alex Kraimer has recently argued) with the hope of igniting new fronts against Russia, whether this be taking over the role of USAID in promoting anti-Russian sentiment in Georgia, or advising Romania how to pervert free elections, or encouraging resistance in Bosnia-Herzegovina to Bosnian Serbian defection, and stoking an uprising against Vucic in Serbia, who overseas one of the fastest rates of economic growth in Europe.

Blame China for All Western Incompetence!
OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT

Greetings. My post yesterday may not have gone out to all subscribers so I am reposting it again, below. But, of course, nothing stays still so I shall first add a quick update.

On Russia, I believe we have further confirmation of a split in the Trump team between the Witkoff model, which goes along with US acceptance of the complete absorption of the four critical oblasts (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zapporizhzhia) into the Russian Federation, and which recognizes that there is no possibility under the sun that Russia will tolerate a NATO presence in Western Ukraine…as against the Kellogg model, which would cede only the territory occupied by Russia and would have a NATO peace-keeping or resiliency force in Western Ukraine. Russia has launched or appears about to launch a major new offensive that reportedly focuses on the northern oblasts closest to Kiev, so does not appear to be entertaining any kind of ceasefire when it has a chance to continue westwards in a more concerted bid to take the remaining territory of the critical four oblasts that it does not yet occupy. The longer the war continues, the more likely it becomes that Kharkiv and Odessa will be added to the list of Russian military goals.

For as long as US weapons and intelligence flow into Ukraine there is absolutely no good reason for Russia to do anything other than continue fighting.

Zelenskiy appears to have turned away from any kind of ceasefire. While he crazily rejects elections and prepares to renew emergency war powers, he is sensibly rebuffing Trump’s absurd bid to put Ukraine’s mineral wealth under US control (though Zelenskiy could go along with a 50-50 deal).

We dont yet know how he will react to the latest Trump audacity, which is a proposal that the US should take ownership of the Ukrainian-owned pipeline that until recently connected the supply of Russian gas from Sudzha to western Ukraine and on to customers in Europe, including Hungary and Slovakia. It is difficult to imagine that Russia is indifferent to the possibility of a US hand around the throat of Ukraine in terms of mineral wealth and its pipeline connections to Russia, even though the US is not providing Ukraine with any other security guarantees.

Europe is doing whatever it can to put a spoke in the wheels of peace talks between the US and Russia. So far, their strategy is working. European rhetoric has furtrher escalated its hysterical anti-Russian fervor, spearheaded by the UK and France and Europe’s smallest (Baltic) members. The crisis of British Steel meanwhile, in which the UK government is moving towards nationalization of the plant following a failure to persuade its Chinese owner to keep the furnaces blazing abjectly underlines the weakness of the British economy and the sheer silliness of all its big talk about brother Ukraine.

The partial 30 days’ ceasefire is a joke. Ukraine continues to attack Russian energy targets with abandon, while accusing Russia of doing the same. Renewal of the Black Sea grain deal is unlikely, given Europe’s refusal to cooperate in lifting sanctions, and impediments to the banking and SWIFT connections that would be required to make a deal possible. None of this has prevented the US and Russia continuing to find ways of normalizing relations which for Europe should be read as a dangerous signal that the US could end up actively opposing Ukrane and supporting Russia (which the US might believe, incorrectly, would be a smart way of putting a barrier between Russia and China).

So, no ceasefire anyway. Both Ukraine and Europe look under every rock to find ruses to keep the US in the war and in NATO (so that they are not forced to pay for their own “defense,” which, in this case, is pretty offensive from a European perspective). The latest ruse is to blame China for everything. The logic is pretty simple. Since the US wants the world to know that its real enemy is China and that this is why the US needs to leave Ukraine in the shaky hands of Europe, then Europe has to persuade the world that the crisis in Ukraine is really China’s fault because behind Russia stands China. As “proof,” of this charge, Ukraine has produced two Chinese soldiers it says it has captured in the battlefield, in possession, strangely, of credit cards who, assuming they actually are Chinese, could just as well be, and probably are mercenaries. The “Chinese in Ukraine” fiction rivals only “North Koreans in Ukrine” for its absurdity of propaganda convenience. As for China the reality is that China has been remarkably balanced on Ukraine and is frequently the only international voice of sanity with respect to the handling of this conflict.

In choosing an economic war with China, likely leading, if allowed, to a military war and the end of the human species, Trump-the-Brilliant, has chosen a war that cannot be won, a war that could so easily have been avoided with the application of a modicum of real smartness. Wessie du Toit explains why in UnHerd (China).

On Iran, the latest reports that I have seen confirm, of course, that there was a meeting Saturday between Witkoff and Iranian foreign minister Araghchi in Oman, a meeting that was arranged, incidentally, by Russia (explaining Witkoff’s visit to meet with Dmitriev and Putin in Moscow on Friday), one that started out as an “indirect” negotiation but finished with an actual encounter of the two principal protagonists.

That the two sides have agreed to a further meeting (next Saturday) indicates we shall be able to enjoy our cereal on Monday morning, and may further suggest a fruitful outcome of Iran’s strategy to get around Trump’s two-month deadline by persuading the US to accept an “interim” deal, that would be sufficient to avoid what is otherwise an automatic re-imposition of UN tariffs in June. Most sources that I respect regard the final outcome will be something along the lines of the original JCPOA. I do not believe that Iran will accept violation of its right to peaceful nuclear energy, or to its right to possess any kind of missiles short of nuclear, and I do not believe that Moscow or that China would do anything other than support Iran’s national sovereignty in those respects.

There can be no surprise that Israeli atrocities throughout Gaza and the Middle East continue and US atrocities in Yemen continue unabated. Murtaza Hussain in Drop Site News (Drop Site News) repots of severe unrest in the Syrian city of Daraa, as a massive public funeral took place to mourn ten Syrians who had been killed in Israeli attacks the previous day.

“The public mourning gave way to demonstration, as the crowd raised chants lionizing the “martyrs of freedom” and “the martyrs of Gaza,” in reference to ongoing killings by the Israeli military in the besieged coastal enclave. Amid Israel’s ongoing war against the Palestinians of Gaza, and its military assault in Lebanon, Syria has rapidly become a new front, with airstrikes and ground attacks escalating in recent weeks. The Israeli military has now established bases on Syrian soil that it has vowed to not vacate, while conducting increasingly aggressive raids and incursions beyond a self-defined buffer zone on the border that the Israeli government has unilaterally created.

Israeli leaders have demanded that the new Syrian government completely demilitarize the south of the country, even vowing to take escalated military action as far north as the Damascus suburbs and directly threatening the rule of the new government. In a statement at a military ceremony in February, Netanyahu stated, "We demand the complete demilitarization of southern Syria, including the Quneitra, Daraa and Suwayda provinces.”

The illegal government of Syria, controlled by Turkish-backed terrorist organization HTS, has attempted to de-escalate. But Israel’s expanding military presence on the ground in southern Syria comes amid a broader air campaign carried out against targets across the country.

The Not-So-Terrifying European C.O.W.

Ahead of the pack, Great Britain, once the world’s imperial superpower, now a rusty, fading economy, led by a party that at one time stood for class justice and national interest and now only stands for Ukraine (and is now likely to nationalize British Steel, having failed to convince its Chinese owner (!) to keep it going), in league with France, a country whose most popular party the country’s fading neocon elites cannot dare allow near the seat of power, along with know-nothing Denmark and three insane Baltic States whose zealous suppression of their own Russian-speakers at home fires their hatred for Russia like white racism feeds anti-African disdain in the US.

They call themselves Coalition of the Willing (yes, appropriately somehow, C.O.W. - bovine, dumb, easily led, reared for milk and slaughter). The term is most curiously, tacklessly, and tastelessly adopted from its originating fiasco, the Western illegal and murderous invasion of a sovereign country, on a totally false pretext, WMD, in 2003.

Even Europe’s own murderous escapades must on American models most slavishly be based. But this escapade is beginning to take the form of a positioning of some 30,000 to 60,000 NATO soldiers (the number varies considerably) in Ukraine, following some form of ceasefire. The possibility of any ceasefire gets more remote every day, the more apparent it becomes that the US does not even understand the idea that a real solution to the crisis of Ukraine can only come about by dealing with the root causes of the conflict.

Its impossibility lies in the stout, nay wooden, resistance of this noble race of NATO warriors to conceiving of root causes that are rooted in their own bullsh*t propaganda of so many decades’ duration. To avoid the shame and social division that so much intense introspection must yield, they would rather do anything, anything - send out tens of thousands ofmore young men to die on their behalf in the name of……yes, the latest grand delusion….in the name of training those simpleton Ukrainians to fight, because apparently only noble bearers of the true European civilization know how to fight like REAL men and must therefore, noblesse oblige, impart their glorious and superior fighting skills to the less fortunate.

And for how long? Yes, for FIVE years, which is what they reckon it will take for Russia to violate their beloved ceasefire-without-resolving-root-problems, as though they could never, ever, violate anything themselves, much. By then of course the beyond-contemptuous European elites who spout such nonsense will likely have long since exchanged their sinecures for writing good-food guides from the comfort of their fincas in Portugal and Provence. They have, after all, fought and lost a war in Ukraine; they have trained and trained their darling Ukrainian proteges only for failure; they have drawn up countless battle plans that only fail; they have poured weapon after useless weapon into Ukraine and nothing very much has happend other than more and more resolute Russian production of superior weaponfare.

They say they are doing it for democracy but their chosen “democrat” is turned tyrant, under Banderite pressure, who has to pressgang soldiers off the street, ban political parties, “disappear” his domestic opposition, close down the country’s most popular church and is still refusing to hold elections, is short of soldiers, and dare not risk another mobilization. All the time, Russian forces slowly advance along the front lines, their total numbering some 635,000, adding 30,000 contracted new soldiers each month, and are perhaps even now preparing for or have already launched a major new offensive.

Are the Europeans salivating at the thought that the tariff crisis might somehow provide an opportunity to seize the $200 billion of actual Russian assets that they have already frozen, the interest on which they are already stealing? It is not clear why they think this but if, while they think about it, they will find it may pay to reflect on the scope for Russian retaliation, the cost of endless law suits, the unwillingness of the Belgians (whose EuroClear holds the funds) to agree to this and the negative impact on the willingess of foreign investors to deposit money in Europe ever again.

The Other Meetings

Trump’s peace envoy, Steve Witkoff (the charmer, he who knows about business but not so much about anything else) has meet Kirill Dmitriev (head of the Russian Foreign Investment Fund) in Russia, earlier on Friday April 11) and with President Putin in Saint Petersburg on the same day that President Putin celebrated the major expansion and modernization of the Russian navy.

They discussed Ukraine. Perhaps Witkoff heard from Putin all about Ukraine’s violations of the supposed partial 30 days’ ceasefire in the matter of attacking energy and energy facilities, and perhaps they talked about the difficulties that Europe is putting in the way of the US proceeding with the proposed ceasefire to protect Black Sea shipping and trade, and about the difficulties in general of policing any kind of ceasefire without having first identified the root causes of the conflict and determined how best these can be addressed.

Witkoff favors a Ukraine solution that allows Russia the four oblasts that it has already absorbed. This differs considerably from the plan of Trump’s other “peace” envoy, General Kellogg, who wants to see Ukraine split between a western portion that is policed by NATO troops, a middle portion policed by the Ukrainian army, and the eastern portion that is made up of whatever territories Russia currently controls. Ukraine meanwhile doesn’t want a settlement of any kind, wants to keep on fighting with all the usual, stale dysfunctional equipment that Europe, at least, will continue sending it (at least this helps Europeans clear their back yards), and Zelenskiy wants to go on being dictator by extending martial law for a further six months of illegal rule.

They likely talked about Iran, perhaps reviewing all the good evidence that Iran is no nuclear threat, and that some re-invention of JCPOA and a lifting of sanctions would likely suffice to achieve an agreement - if, indeed, the conflict with Iran really did having anything whatsoever to do with nuclear power, which it does not (did I mention Israel?) because nothing the US says it fights for has any meaning whatsoever. Putin’s spokesman Peshkov said there would probably be no “decisive” results from the day’s meetings.

The day before, on April 10th, there was a meeting in Istanbul between Russia’s new ambassador to the the US, Alexander Darchiyev, and U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Russia and Central Europe, Sonata Coulter, in which they discussed the normalization of operations of their diplomatic missions, including such issues as the hiring of local staff, diplomatic visas, the return of confiscated diplomatic property, and the potential for lifting sanctions on Russia’s airline Aeroflot.