RUSSIA DESK

Update on Russian operations in Ukraine for April 15, 2022:
1. Russian guided-missile cruiser Moskva sinks after a fire and explosion on board, Ukraine claims it was the result of “2 Neptune cruise missiles but provided no evidence;
2. The cruiser’s loss will have a minimum impact strategically;
3. Pentagon admits Russia is “shaping the battlefield;”
4. The US is sending weapons Ukraine is unfamiliar with, affording them only “days” of training when weeks or even months are required to use these systems effectively;
5. Ukraine is carrying out non-strategic attacks on Russian territory, resulting in Russia ramping up more aggressive target selection for Ukraine’s command and control.

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DW (Deutsche Welle is Germany’s official public tv channel/news service. It has now joined the lynching mob against Russia, so this documentary is an anomaly. It aims to show the “militarisation” of the Russian people on account of the Western menace, which the documentarian, in typical NATO-approved fashion, implicitly derides as a myth.  In fact, wide-scale political mobilization was a reality in the Soviet Union, given its nonstop struggle against internal enemies, saboteurs, etc., many paid and organized by the West, and its ever-present external enemies, including the Anglo-American alliance, and later fascist Germany itself. But the camera cannot lie 100%, so with all the deformations we find in its presentation, it shows some important truths about life in Russia and the former USSR, and the price paid by the Russian/Soviet people for the repugnant war —economic, political, diplomatic, informational, and kinetic (shooting)—incessantly waged on them by the Western powers, led by the Anglo-Americans.

Michael Hudson: Russia is very careful to do everything according to international law – which, of course, has a wide variety of precedents and excuses, and whose courts tend to be dominated by U.S. judges backing U.S. versions of what is legal under whatever it announces to be the “rules-based order of the day” instead of the “rule of law” along UN lines.  To the extent that NATO investors abandon their assets in Russia, these may be sold – perhaps at a distress discount – to buyers who promise to maintain the business. Russia might impose severe fines for abandonment, as when landlords abandon buildings causing local expenditures on cleanup costs. Abandonment causes a “public nuisance.”

In accordance with the decision of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief since February 24 this year. The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are conducting a special military operation.

Its main goal is to provide assistance to the people of the Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics, who have been subjected to genocide by the Kiev regime for 8 years.

It was impossible to achieve this goal by political means. Kiev has publicly refused to implement the Minsk agreements. The Ukrainian leadership twice in 2014 and 2015 tried to solve the so-called Donbass problem by military means, was defeated, but did not change its plans on resolving conflict by force in the East of the country. According to reliable data, the Armed Forces of Ukraine were completing the preparation of a military operation to take control of the territory of the people’s republics.

In these conditions, it was possible to help the Donetsk and Lugansk republics only by providing them with military assistance. Which Russia has done.