RUSSIA & NOVOROSSIYA

MoA—The most interesting with the above statement is the list of U.S. allied countries which declined to support it, “Most core EU countries, especially France, Spain, Italy and Germany, are missing from it. As is the Five-Eyes member New Zealand. India, a U.S. ally in the anti-Chinese Quad initiative, also did not sign. This list of signatories of the Joint Statement is an astonishingly meager result for a U.S. ‘joint’ initiative. It is unprecedented. It is a sign that something has cracked and that the world will never be the same.” The first months of he Biden administration saw a rupture in the global system. First Russia admonished the EU for its hypocritical criticism of internal Russian issues. Biden followed up by calling Putin a ‘killer’. Then the Chinese foreign minister told the Biden administration to shut the fuck up about internal Chinese issues. Soon thereafter Russia’s and China’s foreign ministers met and agreed to deepen their alliance and to shun the U.S. dollar.

PEPE ESCOBAR—The imperialist West and its infernal hypocrisy are driving the world toward war, suggests Pepe Escobar. And to think that in a not so distant past there used to be some flashes of lucidity emanating from the US establishment.

Very few will remember that in 1993 James Baker, former Secretary of State under Daddy Bush, advanced the idea of expanding NATO to Russia, which at the time, under Yeltsin and a gang of Milton Friedmanesque free marketeers, was devastated, but ruled by “democracy”. Yet Bill Clinton was already in power, and the idea was duly discarded.

Six years later, no less than George Kennan – who invented the containment of the USSR in the first place – determined that the NATO annexation of former Soviet satellites was “the beginning of a new Cold War” and “a tragic mistake”.

MoA—There is an additional passage of interest which sets out rules for future talks that I have not seen reported in ‘western’ media:

I know that the United States and its leaders are determined to maintain certain relations with us, but on matters that are of interest to the United States and on its terms. Even though they believe we are just like them, we are different. We have a different genetic, cultural and moral code. But we know how to uphold our interests. We will work with the United States, but in the areas that we are interested in and on terms that we believe are beneficial to us. They will have to reckon with it despite their attempts to stop our development, despite the sanctions and insults. They will have to reckon with this.

We, with our national interests in mind, will promote our relations with all countries, including the United States.

THE FINNISH BOLSHEVIK—After one hundred years of controversy, the Kronstadt rebellion continues to cause controversy and divide the left, proof of its confusing and largely falsified history, much of it intentional, notes The Finnish Bolshevik, and we agree.

N. BALDWIN—The Putin government does seem to be aware that there is dissatisfaction among Russians about the economic stagnation they have been enduring or several years. Ben Aris, a journalist who has been covering Russia fairly since the 1990’s, recently reported that there has been a major meeting to revamp the National Projects infrastructure and investment program, spearheaded by Mishustin and with some of the same people who helped Putin with his economic plan in the first years of his presidency, including Alexei Kudrin and German Gref, among others: