“Ukraine – Russia”

Sergei Lavrov has repeated his warning that World War Three would be nuclear while at the same time accusing the West of fixating on his dire threats of destruction.

The foreign minister also compared the US to Nazi Germany in his latest rant after Russian forces seized the Black Sea regional capital of Kherson in Ukraine, its first major city after a week of fighting.

Vladimir Putin’s lackey said today: ‘It is clear that World War Three can only be nuclear.

#Ukraine 🇺🇦: people in #Starobilsk (N #Luhansk) are blocking the road to prevent Russian invasion forces from advancing any further. pic.twitter.com/Q5OpKRmfeC

— Thomas van Linge (@ThomasVLinge) March 2, 2022

Learn the phrase, for historians will be referencing it for generations to come.

Linguists remind us that Paskudnyak is “THE most potent and offensive insult known to man. It has so much connotation that cannot be truly defined that the closest you can come to its meaning is ‘horrible person’…. Use with caution.”

And so with cluster bombs and shattered hospitals, schools, and apartments, Putin has earned the title of Paskudnyak, a description that will accompany him as long as long as there are historians to record the deeds of despots, dictators, and war criminals, who would crush democracy and freedom.

NATO governments have pledged to crack down on the dealings of Russian oligarchs and companies, but some controversial figures with significant investment ties to Western Canada have so far evaded sanctions from the Canadian government.

Every weekend for most of her youth, while other children were out playing, Natalia Toroshenko attended Ukrainian school, studying the country’s geography, language, its history and national heroes.

“Ukraine, and being Ukrainian, is a deep part of me,” she said. “I wasn’t born there, but it’s my ancestral homeland.”

Toroshenko grew up in Montreal, thousands of kilometres away from the country her father had left to flee famine and conflict. But, she like many other Ukrainian Canadians, has maintained strong connections to the country – and watched horrified as family and friends are trapped in war.

It’s not often that tax can lift people’s spirits but Ukrainian authorities may have done just that, assuring citizens that any Russian military equipment they seize won’t need to be declared for tax purposes.

“Have you captured a Russian tank or armoured personnel carrier and are worried about how to declare it? Keep calm and continue to defend the motherland!” Ukraine’s National Agency for the Protection against Corruption (NAPC) said, according to the Ukraine arm of the Interfax news service.

The agency went on to explain there was “no need to declare the captured Russian tanks and other equipment, because the cost of this … does not exceed 100 living wages (UAH248,100) ($8,298).”

#Ukraine: Locals in #Mykolaiv Oblast found 4 abandoned 2K22M/M1 Tunguska AA vehicles. And burned them down. pic.twitter.com/U3hfBEoxTS

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 3, 2022

Despite Zelenskyy’s urgings, Canada, the U.S. and other members of NATO have repeatedly said they will not enter into a war with Putin and Russia.

That means that at the end of the day, they are prepared to sacrifice Ukraine to Russian aggression.

We all admire Zelenskyy’s bravery. His blunt refusal of an offer by the U.S. to evacuate him to safety declaring: “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride” was Churchillian in its defiance, recalling Winston Churchill’s famous war-time speech: “We shall fight on the beaches.”

Nothing like a nuclear war to stir things up.

Concern is mounting over the movements of a huge column of Russian military vehicles outside Kyiv, amid a lack of fresh information about its position and the threat it poses.

While a US defence official suggested it appeared to have “stalled”, there was also speculation that an estimated 15,000 troops attached to it may be regrouping, and potentially waiting for logistical supplies before an assault on Kyiv.

Efforts to ascertain the status of the convoy and the threat it poses have been set back by recent cloud cover over Ukraine that has prevented Maxar Technologies – which issued the first satellite images of the convoy – from releasing new pictures.

Ukrainian city of Mariupol ‘near to humanitarian catastrophe’ after bombardment

The key Ukrainian port city of Mariupol was “near to a humanitarian catastrophe” on Wednesday after more than 15 hours of continuous bombardment by Russian forces, the city’s deputy mayor told the BBC.

“The Russian army is working through all their weapons here – artillery, multiple rocket launch systems, airplanes, tactical rockets. They are trying to destroy the city,” Serhiy Orlov said.

Mr Orlov said Russian forces were several kilometres from the city on all sides and had launched strikes on key infrastructure, cutting water and power supplies to parts of the city. One densely populated residential district on the city’s left bank had been “nearly totally destroyed”, he said.

Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the western public has been carpet-bombed with the claim that Russian president Vladimir Putin is some sort of unhinged madman. This notion is being feverishly spread by the establishment and those in its pay: the political class, the media and the commentariat, career diplomats and technocrats as well as those connected to the security and intelligence communities.

The most remarkable thing about the Mad Vlad claim is that it is obviously false.

I have observed the national security circus now for fifty years or more. Most of it as a deep state Intelligence denizen. Not necessarily well paid for my efforts, but a career enthusiast nevertheless.

Practicing my craft in Vietnam (twice), at HQ USAF Intelligence, DIA, UN, CIA (on detail), and NSA; I have often thought about motives for and the character of policy.

Indeed, what really drives national security policy?

I sought, over the years to understand that nexus between the lion and the lamb, the policy beast and Intelligence lamb. If I have learned nothing else, I know that the US Intelligence Community is a buffet, so big now that a policy maker can have almost any plate he/she/they/them wants.

IT is Afghanistan that has often been called “the graveyard of empires”.

But as Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war against Ukraine enters its second week, a possibility emerges. Will Ukraine turn out to be the graveyard of Vladimir Putin?

The Russian President has been preparing for this conflict for years, perhaps decades. Over the past 12 months, he has been building up his forces on the Ukrainian borders.

The world watched and waited, divided over whether he was mad enough to do it.

So what are Russian TV viewers seeing of the war? What messages are they hearing over the airwaves? Below is a snapshot of what ordinary Russians would have picked up, on Tuesday 1 March, while channel-hopping across the country’s key TV stations, which are controlled by the Kremlin and its corporate allies.

The master of the Kremlin can barely control his contempt for those woke who light candles, sing hymns and display yellow-blue flags.

“Sure, we won’t do anything.” This was the admission of Claude Cheysson, François Mitterrand’s foreign minister, after the coup in Poland in December 1981. During the Cold War, everyone knew that America and the free countries could not solve every crisis. When the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956 and again when the Soviets used Warsaw Pact forces against Czechoslovakia in 1968, Western leaders recognized that there was little to be done. This did not mean showing moral indifference to the sufferings of the Czechs, Slovaks and Hungarians, who today are among the truest and strongest Europeans in their own identity. Today it is the same behind the big words and the high-sounding slogans of the Western camp, more cowardly than ever, after Putin’s terrible war on Ukraine.

Outraged Western democracies are paper tigers. They will be satisfied with the usual protests and economic sanctions, for which the middle class and small and medium-sized enterprises will pay the entire price.. If the threat is indeed the one described by the European Union and the United States, military mobilization had to be necessary. But, as the French historian Jean-Francois Colosimo says in Le Figaro, “Westerners have no desire to sacrifice the life of a single soldier to defend the integrity of Ukraine”.

The Russian military has massed significant force within Ukraine’s borders and particularly on the northern approaches to Kyiv. But it has a big problem: Russian forces have lost their offensive momentum facing obstinate Ukrainian resistance in the form of mobile anti-tank and anti-air strike teams.

With equipment and tactics designed to confront massed opposing formations, the Russians have been unable to cope with the small, well-armed Ukrainian units attacking them from all sides.