The price of gas from the Middle East is high – in the long term.
“Gas as a holy war. Gas as a new fantasy of revenge on the West. It is the ‘gift of Allah’. There is a desire for conquest “. So writes with irony Kamel Daoud, the celebrated Algerian writer, in the French weekly Le Point.
Saudi Arabia (which is also financing the first mosque in Cuba at the moment) was the first stop on a recent tour of the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz which included the Emirates and Qatar.
After Russia’s chaotic retreats in Kherson – less than a week after Vladimir Putin illegally annexed the Ukrainian province alongside three others – the region’s Moscow-appointed governor, Kirill Stremousov, sought to calm the mood.
Far from a rout, the withdrawal was a tactical “regrouping” to “deliver a retaliatory blow”, Stremousov said on Wednesday.
His comments – among the first public admissions of Russia’s retreats in Kherson – attempted to mask what even many vocal supporters of the war now say: the situation is the most dire the Russian army has found itself in since the start of the invasion seven months ago.
Russian BMP crew surrendered to Ukrainian Forces 🇺🇦 #UkraineRussiaWar #RussianArmy #NAFO pic.twitter.com/sEtbZjpluQ
— Ukraine War Now ✙ (@uarealitynow) October 5, 2022
When Russians took over the city of Balakliya, eastern Ukraine, they turned the central police station into a base for brutality.
During the six months it spent under enemy occupation, scores of local residents were locked in overcrowded cells in the basement. Survivors told of being dragged to a torture chamber where they were beaten, electrocuted and forced to endure mock executions.
The interrogations were carried out by officials from Russia’s Federal Security Service, according to documents retrieved after the town’s recapture last month during Ukraine’s stunning counter-offensive.
A Russian soldier in Kherson tried to surrender but was shot in the back by his comrades, a Ukrainian soldier has told The Telegraph.
“One of them fell to the ground at the sight of us and shouted ‘just don’t kill please, I want to live’,” said Oleksiy*, describing the moment he came face to face with Russia’s forces. “His guys started shooting from behind his back, hitting him.”
Oleksiy, a 20-year-old from a small town in Luhansk whose name has been changed for safety reasons, is fighting on the frontline in Kherson as part of Ukraine’s fastest advances of the war so far.
The old adage that cheaters never win is proving itself true once again.
Washington — Whatever happened to the Russian Army? For that matter, whatever happened to the Russian Air Force or the Russian Navy, whose flagship is now at the bottom of the Black Sea? The answer is nothing. Nothing has happened to the Russian military for 50 years, and President Vladimir Putin should have thought twice before heaving his armed forces into a war.
#Ukraine: Intense footage of Ukrainian troops moving on Humvees under heavy Russian fire somewhere in #Kherson Oblast – and at least one HMMWV can be seen destroyed. pic.twitter.com/7vsogkozIM
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) October 5, 2022
Every suspect has the means, a motive and a desire to keep the truth hidden.
Both the old Nord Stream gas pipeline and its newer, never-opened counterpart, Nord Stream 2, were severely damaged last month, just off the Danish island of Bornholm. The incidents were almost immediately deemed an act of sabotage.
In the old days, someone – an international terrorist group, say – might have ‘claimed responsibility’ for such a daring and effective attack. This time, though, there have been only accusations, counter-accusations and denial. And all have been somehow less fierce and less definitive than might have been expected as a response to an attack on a major piece of international infrastructure.
The US’s decision to send more military aid to Ukraine “increases the danger of a direct military clash” between Russia and the West, Moscow has warned.
Russia’s ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, said it was an “immediate threat” to Moscow, describing the US as “a participant of the conflict”.
Earlier, the US announced another $625m (£547m) in military aid to Ukraine.
Advanced US weaponry has been credited with helping Ukraine build momentum against occupying Russian forces.
A common line of argument between Russian state propaganda and American conspiracy circles is proliferating these days, namely: the war in Ukraine was allegedly fomented by the Americans to destroy Europe.
For example, the American conspiracy website Revolver News easily refers to the geostrategic considerations of a leading expert on the war in Ukraine, Andrew Korybko. Incidentally, Korybko is also a ‘Moscow-based analyst’ financed by Russia’s autocratic government: a mere detail.
In this thesis, which charges Europe with being the victim of an American plot, everything is false. It is a childish and disempowering falsehood — which makes it attractive to unquestioning minds.
We recently looked at all of the finger-pointing going on over the mysterious “leaks” that shut down the Nord Stream pipelines under the Baltic Sea. Most western leaders continue to suggest that Russia did it, though none are offering any hard evidence to support that claim. But economist Jeffrey Sachs, the Bloomberg TV host and director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University isn’t jumping on that bandwagon. Yesterday he told another host on the same network that most of the world believes that the pipelines were blown up in some sort of covert operation between the United States and Poland. The reason most Americans aren’t aware of this, at least according to Sachs, is that the possibility is almost never mentioned on American news networks.
A Deep State that attempted to bring down a sitting president with the Russia Collusion hoax is every bit dangerous enough to have sabotaged the pipelines.
OTTAWA — In January, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest the world has been to a nuclear apocalypse in its view, since it was set up by former Manhattan Project scientists in 1945.
A poll by the outspoken billionaire Elon Musk asking Twitter users to weigh in on a plan to end the Ukraine war has sparked a flurry of criticism, including from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The controversial “peace” proposal put forward by the entrepreneur behind Tesla Inc and SpaceX included United Nations-supervised elections in the four Ukrainian regions recently annexed by Russia, and recognising Crimea as Russian territory.
For weeks now, on the uncensored Telegram channels of hard-line nationalists and Russian military bloggers, there’s been a litany of angry criticism of Russia’s military commanders amid a stunning Ukrainian counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region and elsewhere resulting in substantial Russian losses.
Now with the Ukrainians’ weekend victory in Lyman, a Donetsk region city and strategic rail hub southeast of Kharkiv, that criticism is bursting into wider public view, hitting the front pages of some of Russia’s biggest newspapers.
That’s a serious problem for Russia’s military brass — and potentially for the Kremlin.
Ukrainian sniper takes out a Russian infantry from a distance of 550m.#Russia #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/uZV9ZWM4wC
— BlueSauron👁️ (@Blue_Sauron) October 3, 2022
The last time I saw Mariana Zhaglo, war was still a rumour. It was January 24, a full month before the Russian invasion, and she stood in her kitchen in Kyiv with the Zbroyer Z-15 hunting carbine she had bought to defend her city against possible Russian attack.
Few of her neighbours believed the Russians would really invade, and Mariana’s preparations — the pickles and tins of fish and ham she had stashed as emergency rations, together with boxes of ammunition — seemed zealously pre-emptive.
#Ukraine: A Russian Ural 4320 truck was ambushed by Ukrainian forces in #Donetsk Oblast, and was destroyed. pic.twitter.com/RW5zOwjepQ
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) October 2, 2022
… If Ukrainian troops, armed with an array of Western weapons, continue their counteroffensive, they will pose a threat to the Russian homeland in the form of its newly acquired territories. Putin will respond by doing what he has repeatedly warned he would do: employ nuclear weapons. Whether such a use is against a target in Ukraine or just a demonstration shot, the effects would be the same. Such a move would undoubtedly undermine Western support for Kyiv, given that the United States and NATO are virtually certain not to respond in kind. It could also lead to the collapse of the NATO alliance. In essence, Putin might win by losing.
