Russia

‘We’ll fight to the end.’ Ukraine defiant in face of Vladimir Putin’s phoney war

The mood last week in Ukraine was eerily calm, despite talk of war. The first winter snow blanketed Kyiv. Many were still celebrating Orthodox Christmas – which falls on 7 January – or had left town for the holidays. Bars and restaurants rang out with Dean Martin’s Let It Snow!, while the fir trees in Independence Square looked like a mini-Narnia.

Sure, Russia might invade at any moment. But, as Ukrainians wearily point out, the country has already been at war for eight long years, ever since Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and kickstarted a brutish conflict in the east of the country, which has claimed nearly 14,000 lives. Friday’s dawn cyber-attack on government websites was merely the latest in a series of hostile acts.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inRussia, Ukraine

Russia-Ukraine tensions: What should Canada do? … Write a sternly worded letter threatening the tears of Justin!

Canada can and should be more engaged in de-escalation efforts at the Ukraine border where Russia is amassing troops but must focus on its diplomatic strengths, says national security experts.

In an interview on CTV’s Question Period airing Sunday, Richard Fadden, former CSIS director and national security adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, said that includes calling out Russian aggression and threatening further sanctions, in union with NATO allies.

“We should be out there beating the bushes with our allies arguing, maybe send some more troops on a rotational basis, make sure sanctions that are now in place are fully respected, argue for bigger sanctions, but I don’t think we can do a great deal on our own,” he said.

There is  nothing material that Canada can do either alone or with our paper tiger NATO.

Sanctions like taxes are for the little people to suffer not Oligarchs.

No one wants a war over this latter day Czechoslovakia, not even Putin. Well maybe Freeland.

Putin will grandstand and wring some gains while showing up NATO for the farce it is.

Joe Biden will get his 10% and Germany will get its Russian gas.

It’s doubtful the western Euro’s would or even could defend themselves if attacked so I see little stomach for a war over Ukraine.

The Ukraine crisis may herald the beginning of a New Europe.

If the EU defence force is still on the table it may signal the end of NATO allowing the refinement of coordinated Eurocentric mass surrender skills untainted by American hegemony.

Good Grief.  Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly to visit Ukraine as it faces threat of Russian invasion

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Russia, Ukraine, WTF?

Anonymous US official: Russia prepping False-Flag pretext for Ukraine invasion

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration has determined a Russian effort is underway to create a pretext for its troops to potentially further invade Ukraine, and Moscow has already prepositioned operatives to conduct “a false-flag operation” in eastern Ukraine, a U.S. official said Friday.

The administration believes Russia is also laying the groundwork through a social media disinformation campaign by framing Ukraine as an aggressor that has been preparing an imminent attack against Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official wasn’t authorized to discuss sensitive intelligence on the record.

I’d ask around if that anonymous official wasn’t named Hunter.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inRussia, Ukraine, USA

Russia, at an Impasse With the West, Warns It Is Ready to Abandon Diplomacy

VIENNA — Russian officials signaled that they could abandon diplomatic efforts to resolve the security crisis surrounding Ukraine, bringing a whirlwind week of European diplomacy to an ominous end and deflating hopes that negotiators could forge a path toward easing tensions in Eastern Europe.

One senior Russian diplomat said that talks with the West were approaching a “dead end,” while another said the Kremlin would wait until it receives written responses next week to its demands from Washington and from NATO before deciding how to proceed.

It was clear that Russia’s next move would be up to President Vladimir V. Putin, who, his spokesman said on Thursday, was being briefed regularly this week on negotiations with the West.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inNATO, Russia, Ukraine

Russia says Ukraine talks hit ‘dead end’, Poland warns of risk of war

VIENNA/MOSCOW, Jan 13 (Reuters) – Poland’s foreign minister said on Thursday that Europe was closer to war than any time in the last 30 years as Russia gave a bleak assessment of diplomatic efforts this week to defuse tensions over Ukraine.

Russia said it was hitting a dead end as it tried to persuade the West to bar Ukraine from joining NATO and roll back decades of alliance expansion in Europe.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inRussia, Ukraine

Whatever Russia Does in Ukraine, China Will Be Watching

While the West ponders whether Vladimir Putin will invade eastern Ukraine, Xi Jinping watches. For China, Ukraine is a convenient proxy for Taiwan. How NATO responds to Russian aggression will serve as a barometer for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to calculate how the United States and its network of Asia-Pacific allies might react to unprovoked Chinese aggression against Taiwan. At the operational and tactical levels, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could gain invaluable insight from how the Russian Armed Forces move against Ukrainian territory. As the Biden administration and NATO engage in security talks over Ukraine with their Russian counterparts, the West should consider the message it intends to send to the Kremlin and Zhongnanhai.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"China - Communist Slave State", Russia

Canada’s Dicey Plan to Build a Munitions Factory in Ukraine

Apparently Canada has a solution to the Ukraine crisis after all. Unfortunately it involves being somewhere else when the trigger, to torture a phrase from Orwell, isn’t pulled. Which won’t save our ally or our credibility.

Back in 1994, as it fled the squalid wreckage of the Soviet Union, various nations promised that if Ukraine gave up the nuclear weapons it inherited, they would ensure that it was never devoured by Russian revanchists. With Russia looking mostly harmless, it seemed like resolve on the cheap. But then along came Vladimir Putin with his characteristically parochial belief that the collapse of the USSR was “the greatest geopolitical disaster in history.” So now what?

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inRussia, Ukraine

Ex-Social Worker Behind Obama Iran Deal To Tackle Putin & The Ukraine

Wendy Sherman, one of the world’s most powerful diplomats, is known as the Silver Fox because of her snowy white mane and her canny deal-making style. On Wednesday, she is helping to lead the US-Russia talks in Europe.

Ms Sherman – the US Deputy Secretary of State, one of the department’s top positions – has been meeting Russian officials this week to discuss Ukraine. The stakes are high.

President Vladimir Putin has deployed around 100,000 Russian troops close to the border with Ukraine, prompting fears of an incursion and warnings from the West.

US officials are hoping to defuse the tense situation through negotiations with the Russians – and Ms Sherman is in her element.

If I were Ukraine I’d get a headstart on designing the new national letterhead etc.

No one is going to war over this “quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inRussia, Ukraine, USA

Canada offers to help U.S. de-escalate Russia-Ukraine crisis with potential deterrence measures

Canada has told the U.S. that it’s willing to help with possible deterrence measures against Russia — which could include sanctions — to de-escalate the crisis in Ukraine, CBC News has learned.

Canada made the offer during a meeting between Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Dec. 31, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.

The source said the message was received well by Blinken.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Russia, Ukraine, USA

Russia’s Putin to NATO: Commit Suicide or Face All-Out War

Russia has threatened war if the United States and its NATO allies fail to comply — unconditionally — with sweeping demands for a new security arrangement in Europe.

The demands, issued by the Russian Foreign Ministry, require the United States to remove its nuclear umbrella from Europe and allow Russia to reestablish its Soviet-era sphere of influence over Eastern Europe.

The Russian demands, which effectively require NATO to commit suicide, are so obviously outrageous and unmeetable that Western analysts are split over interpreting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motives. Some say he is using the impossible list of demands as a pretext to invade Ukraine. Others think he is playing a weak hand to try to divide the West and reorder Europe’s security architecture in Russia’s favor.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inNATO, Russia, Ukraine

Biden Slouches towards Catastrophe in Ukraine

The White House is writing off an ally to appease an enemy.

The situation in Ukraine has become very grave.

On December 17, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin sent U.S. president Joe Biden an ultimatum, effectively demanding that NATO abandon Eastern Europe or face military action. Biden agreed to a phone conversation with Putin to talk it over, giving the Kremlin what it sought: The affected countries were now on the table instead of at the table. When the two then talked on December 30, according to the White House, Biden rejected the ultimatum and informed Putin that if he proceeded to invade Ukraine, he would face strong economic sanctions from the U.S. and its European partners. Putin then countered by saying that such sanctions would result in a “complete rupture in relations” between Russia and the U.S.

This is not a surprise. Ukraine or Taiwan, who will be first?

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inRussia, Ukraine, USA

U.S. Catches Kremlin Insider Who May Have Secrets of 2016 DNC Hack

(Bloomberg) — In the days before Christmas, U.S. officials in Boston unveiled insider trading charges against a Russian tech tycoon they had been pursuing for months. They accused Vladislav Klyushin, who’d been extradited from Switzerland on Dec. 18, of illegally making tens of millions of dollars trading on hacked corporate-earnings information.

Yet as authorities laid out their securities fraud case, a striking portrait of the detainee emerged: Klyushin was not only an accused insider trader, but a Kremlin insider. He ran an information technology company that works with the Russian government’s top echelons. Just 18 months earlier, Klyushin received a medal of honor from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The U.S. had, in its custody, the highest-level Kremlin insider handed to U.S. law enforcement in recent memory.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCybercrime, Russia, USA

Oh please… Canada debriefed on Biden-Putin call as ‘tough’ road lies ahead

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday debriefed Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly on a tough talk between Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin over the Russian troop buildup on the Ukraine border.

Blinken’s office said in a statement that he and Joly discussed “shared priorities, including a strong, united response to further Russian aggression against Ukraine.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Russia, Ukraine, USA

Biden’s call with Putin produced predictably underwhelming results

As was reported yesterday, President Joe Biden took a call from Russian President Vladimir Putin where the two leaders discussed the situation on Russia’s border with Ukraine, among other matters. Despite the best efforts of the State Department to put some positive spin on the discussion, it doesn’t sound as if things went very well. Both sides wound up sticking to their previous positions and Putin sounded increasingly frustrated and belligerent over what he perceives as NATO’s stubborn refusal to comply with his demands.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inRussia, Ukraine, USA

Europe needs to step up to deter Russia in Ukraine

The Ukraine crisis should be a wake-up call for European nations to boost defense spending and finally take seriously France’s calls for European strategic autonomy. And yes, Americans should cheer them on.

Presently, Europe is heavily dependent on decisions made in Washington regarding whether or how to counter the Russian threat, largely because they lack the collective military heft to deal with Russia on their own. Washington, however, has good reason to dither; few have any appetite for a war with Russia, or for “dying for Kyiv.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inEurope, Russia, Ukraine, USA