America Is Reaping What It Sowed In Ukraine

So what are Americans to believe about the rising tensions over Ukraine? The United States and Russia both claim their escalations are defensive, responding to threats and escalations by the other side, but the resulting spiral of escalation can only make war more likely. Ukrainian President Zelensky is warning that “panic” by U.S. and Western leaders is already causing economic destabilization in Ukraine.     

U.S. allies do not all support the current U.S. policy. Germany is wisely refusing to funnel more weapons into Ukraine, in keeping with its long-standing policy of not sending weapons into conflict zones. Ralf Stegner, a senior Member of Parliament for Germany’s ruling Social Democrats, told the BBC on January 25th that the Minsk-Normandy process agreed to by France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in 2015 is still the right framework for ending the civil war.

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Ajamu Baraka: ‘We Need To Demand The US Cease Operating As A Rogue State’

As the United States, with the aid of Western allies and the corporate media, escalates aggression toward Russia using Ukraine as the vehicle, it is necessary to take time to look at the bigger picture of the United States’ disregard for international law and the impact that is having globally as well as the push to expand NATO and how that is causing significant division within the alliance. Clearing the FOG speaks with Ajamu Baraka, a long time international human rights defender and the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace, about the United States as a rogue state and what that means for Black America. He also discusses the state of the antiwar movement in the US and the black misleadership class, plus what we need to be doing as US hegemony and the white supremacist-based American Exceptionalism that undergirds are being challenged.

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Checkmate In Ukraine

Back in December, Russia sent the U.S. and NATO two draft treaty documents spelling out its demands for security guarantees related to NATO’s posture in Eastern Europe. These demands came in a climate of tension fueled by both a Russian military buildup bordering Ukraine, and U.S. and NATO hysteria over what they deemed an imminent Russian military incursion into Ukraine.

The written replies that arrived on Jan. 22 failed — as expected — to address any of Russia’s concerns, including the red line of continued NATO expansion. Rather, the U.S. and NATO listed alternative pathways to diplomatic engagement, including arms control and limits on military exercises, and they now couch the ongoing crisis as a choice between accepting the diplomatic offramp they dictated, or war.

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Weapons Companies Boast Ukraine-Russia Tensions Are Boon For Business

As the United States weighs more involvement in the growing conflict between Ukraine and Russia, some of the largest weapons companies in the world — Raytheon and Lockheed Martin — are openly telling their investors that tensions between the countries are good for business. And General Dynamics, meanwhile, is boasting about the past returns the company has seen as a result of such disputes.

The statements come as the U.S. government escalates arms shipments to Ukraine, among them the Javelin missiles that are a joint venture between Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. House Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to quickly push through a bill that would significantly increase U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, and impose new sanctions on Russia.

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Call To Action: No War With Russia Over Ukraine

Once again, our world is facing an imminent threat of war between two major nuclear powers. As in the past, the United States is using the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the vehicle to wage war in clear violation of international law and the Charter of United Nations.

The Biden administration is currently flying $200 million worth of weapons and other “lethal aid” to Ukraine and has 8,500 US troops on standby to enter that country. ‘Nonessential’ US diplomatic personnel and their families are being withdrawn from the country. The corporate media is lockstep in its portrayal of Russia as the enemy who is about to invade Ukraine. These actions constitute a de facto declaration of war, while the corporate media fan the flame of war.

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Endless War Is The Empire’s Last Dance

This moment of history will be remembered for the massive shift in global relations currently underway. On one side stands the forces of peace and multipolarity led by China, Russia, and their allies in the Global South. On the other is the forces of empire and conquest spearheaded by the U.S. and its allies. The conflict between these two “camps” is about much more than competing visions for planetary development. World politics have transitioned from a war between socialism and capitalism to a protracted struggle for the survival of humanity itself.

The forces of Empire have reached the following conclusion: the preservation of imperialism requires endless war, no matter how counterproductive.

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A War Only America And Britain Seem To Want

The telephone call between U.S. President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenensky on Thursday was said to have not “gone well,” according to a senior Ukrainian official.

The official said Zelensky urged Biden to “calm down the messaging” on the situation in Ukraine and that Ukrainian intelligence did not see a Russian threat the same way the U.S. did, according to a report on CNN.  It is  “dangerous but ambiguous,” the official quoted Zelensky as telling Biden, and that “it is not certain that an attack will take place.”

At a news conference on Friday, Zelensky said: “They keep supporting this theme, this topic.And they make it as acute and burning as possible. In my opinion, this is a mistake.”

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Media Beats War Drums With Russia While US/Saudis Kill Hundreds In Yemen

Journalists Benjamin Norton and Alan MacLeod join Mnar Adley to discuss how the mainstream media spent the last week beating drums of war with Russia over Ukraine with headlines and talking heads funded and sponsored by Lockheed Martin and NATO.

Meanwhile, there wasn’t a single article covering how the US-Saudi-UAE coalition cut off the internet to Yemen for several days while dropping hundreds of bombs on civilians resulting in hundreds dead and over a thousand injured. Guess which story CNN covered? Both conflicts were brought to you by weapons manufacturers.

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Will Putin Accept Half A Loaf?

The eagerly awaited “written response” from the U.S. and NATO to Russia’s security proposals is now in the hands of President Vladimir Putin. And yet there is no sign the West caved in on Moscow’s insistence that NATO rescind its 14 year-old invitation to Ukraine to join NATO.

Those who expected the Russians to react to the West’s refusal to “redraw the security architecture of Europe” by promptly attacking Ukraine can breathe a bit easier. Although Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters Thursday that the responses from the US and NATO provide “little ground for optimism,” he quickly added “there always are prospects for continuing a dialogue, it’s in the interests of both us and the Americans.”

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Make The Whole World Know That The South Also Exists

On 19 January 2022, US President Joe Biden held a press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC. The discussion ranged from Biden’s failure to pass a $1.75 trillion investment bill (the result of the defection of two Democrats) to the increased tensions between the United States and Russia. According to a recent NBC poll, 54% of adults in the United States disapprove of his presidency and 71% feel that the country is headed in the wrong direction.

The political and cultural divisions that widened during the Trump years continue to inflict a heavy toll on US society, including over the government’s ability to control the COVID-19 pandemic.

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US And Russia Climb Escalation Ladder

The corporate media in the United States are breathlessly covering Russia’s every move right now while U.S. politicians are aggressively pushing new sanctions and arms shipments to Ukraine.

But how is the conflict viewed from the other side? Dr. Oleg Barabanov, Academic Director of the European Studies Institute at MGIMO University, joins the show to bring light to the issues from the Russian perspective.

Ben Chacko, editor of the Morning Star in Britain, explains why people in the West should be paying close attention to the conflict.

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Ukraine And US War Propaganda

The corporate media always carry water for the state, and they are never more dangerous than when the nation is on a war footing. Right now the United States government is sending weapons to Ukraine. One wouldn’t know that because of constant references to “lethal aid.” The euphemisms and subterfuge are necessary for a very simple reason. Everyone except the Washington war party knows that provoking war with Russia is extremely dangerous.

Joe Biden is picking up where he left off, as Barack Obama’s Ukraine viceroy. He and his incompetent foreign policy team have spun a tale about a pending Russian attack on Ukraine. In reality, it is the U.S. that is ginning up war by provoking the Ukrainians to start a fight that they can’t win.

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Ukraine: Biden Administration’s ‘Wag The Dog’ Diversionary War?

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) along with the ANSWER Coalition, CODEPINK, Maryland Peace Action, Popular Resistance, and many other organizations will gather in Washington today at noon in front of the White House as part of an emergency mobilization of anti-war activists to express opposition to the unnecessary and extremely dangerous possibility of war in Ukraine.

With a 39% job approval rating, more deaths from covid than during the Trump administration, and a failure to deliver on most of promises made during the 2020 presidential campaign, the intentional escalation of tensions by the United States with Russia appears as a clumsy attempt by the Biden administration and the Democratic Party to divert attention from the historic failures of the administration’s domestic policies.

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Russia’s Red Line

“They must understand,” Sergei Lavrov said in one of his many public statements last week, “that the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward.”

The Russian foreign minister has repeated this thought almost ad infinitum lately. He speaks, of course, of the Biden administration and the diplomats who bear its messages to others.

Here is another of Lavrov’s recent utterances:

“We are very patient… we have been harnessing [burdens] for a very long time, and now it’s time for us to go.”

I do not know quite what Lavrov means by “harnessing burdens.” I suspect it is a translation problem, and he said something closer to “bearing burdens.”

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Russian Training Exercises Bad, Facilitating British And US Imperialism Good

As the COVID-19 mainstream media narrative steadily disappears from news headlines around the world, following the highly coincidental timing of last week’s Davos Agenda virtual event held by the World Economic Forum, the corporate media has now, in lockstep, moved onto what many commentators predicted they would – an escalation in the current Ukraine crisis, in which Russia has been accused of planning an ‘imminent’ invasion of its smaller Western neighbour, with Kiev having come under the control the US-EU aligned governments of Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky since the 2014 CIA and MI6-orchestrated Euromaidan colour revolution was launched in response to then-President Viktor Yanukoych’s November 2013 decision to suspend a trade deal with Brussels in order to pursue closer ties with Moscow.

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