Wereldpolitiek

[fred neerhoff]

Begrip of onbegrip, maar je eet van twee wallen.

[Gerard R.]

Begrip of onbegrip, maar je eet van twee wallen.

Dood, verderf en vernielingen tot het een maanlandschap wordt waar niemand kan wonen omdat de aarde vol met afgeschoten en ontploft of onontploft spul zit. MIJN begrip is er hoor. Dat proberen ze nu met het hele land te doen.
Gelukkig zijn de Chinezen met een eerste stapje tot overleg in de kwestie gekomen. Ik ben benieuwd. Maar ik denk, dat voor er gepraat wordt die Russen eerst weg moeten of bijna weg.

[David Bakker]

Geweldig artikel over Wit-Rusland door Mark Ames: http://exiledonline.com/baldfellas-how- ... -war-plan/

Enkele citaten:

"Lukashenko was scrambling around for an out — how could he maintain dictatorial power without getting swallowed up by one of the two big mafias: the West with its “democracy promotion” machine, or Russia’s overwhelming military-economic power from the east?

As 2020 began, Lukashenko scrambled hard to keep his options open, which in practice meant accelerating his rapprochement with Washington and Brussels.....

In January, his defense chief publicly called for closer ties with NATO. And in February, Secretary of State Pompeo visited Belarus, chumming it up with the dictator and pledging first-ever US crude oil shipments to wean Belarus off Russia....

Meanwhile, frontline NATO countries and Washington had been funding and training pro-democracy Belorussian activists as a Plan B in case Lukashenko didn’t flip. The West wasn’t putting all their chips on Lukashenko doing a Djukanovic turn, but they were pursuing that possibility with more energy than ever. If that failed, there was always the pro-western protesters for leverage....

At first, it seems Washington was caught off guard by the sheer scale of the anti-Lukashenko protests. Many of the apparatchiks in DC were still too invested in their strategy of peeling Lukashenko away from Russia. This confusion was captured in a CNN article three days into the protests headlined, “Major US diplomatic push to counter Russia may be in jeopardy amid Belarus unrest”. The split among Washington foreign policy elites was aired by two leading DC think-tanks — the Atlantic Council, whose deputy director Melinda Haring told CNN that Pompeo should continue with the diplomatic rapprochement: versus the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) called that strategy “dead.”

The protests were too large and too sustained and Lukashenko’s crackdown was too brutal — and it was all headlined too often in the western media — to continue trying the realpolitik strategy pursued by Pompeo and backed by the Atlantic Council. As the protests grew in size and strength, the EU and US hit Belarus with sanctions and unified behind the regime-change protest movement. Whereas Russia opposed the overthrow of Lukashenko, but stayed on the sidelines, waiting for Luk to get desperate enough to come begging Putin for help....

Finally, Lukashenko broke. He had no choice: as more sectors of the country abandoned his regime, he knew he could not survive, quite literally survive, without Russian help. But this time, for Putin, there would be no more games, no more fucking around. The days of Lukashenko yammering about Belarussian sovereignty and playing NATO off against Russia were over. A month into the protests, Lukashenko flew to Russia to publicly supplicate....

As we’ve discussed in RWN, another major political shift happened in the fall of 2020, just as Lukashenko was at Putin’s feet: Ukraine’s president Zelensky, the one-time “peace with Russia” candidate,” made a giant u-turn and was now going all-in with Ukraine’s nationalist hawks and the NATO crowd for maximum confrontation with Russia. Zelensky’s change was coordinated in Washington with people from the incoming Biden Administration and the neocons at the Atlantic Council....

So thanks to the failure of Belarus’s western-backed regime-change movement in the summer-fall of 2020, Putin finally had a window of opportunity to do something really stupid: Launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine centered on subduing Kyiv and forcing into power a friendlier more amenable regime. It didn’t work, but if Ukraine’s leaders are to be believed today, Russia is on the verge of launching another invasion from Belarus any day now."

[fred neerhoff]

Akkoord Saoedi-Arabië en Iran toont China’s opmars https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2023/03/14/ak ... s-a4159409

[Gerard R.]

Akkoord Saoedi-Arabië en Iran toont China’s opmars https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2023/03/14/ak ... s-a4159409

Nou, als ze zaken weten te lijmen dan kan dat best productief zijn..
Of het heilzaam is moet nog blijken.
Nu ook maar eens Ukraine...?

Het Westen en de Russen kunnen het blijkbaar niet.

[David Bakker]

Door de oorlog in Oekraïne is Europa nog meer dan voorheen een vazal van de VS geworden. Dat is de conclusie van een Europese denktank:


"- "Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revealed Europeans’ profound dependence on the US for their security, despite EU efforts at achieving “strategic autonomy.”
- Over the last decade, the EU has grown relatively less powerful than America – economically, technologically, and militarily.
- Europeans also still lack agreement on crucial strategic questions for themselves and look to Washington for leadership.
- In the cold war, Europe was a central front of superpower competition. Now, the US expects the EU and the UK to fall in line behind its China strategy and will use its leadership position to ensure this outcome.
- Europe becoming an American vassal is unwise for both sides. Europeans can become a stronger and more independent part of the Atlantic alliance by developing independent capacity to support Ukraine and acquiring greater military capabilities."

Bron: https://ecfr.eu/publication/the-art-of- ... relations/

[David Bakker]

Interessant artikel over de journalistieke fraudeur Christo Grozev van Bellingcat die actief betrokken was bij een geheime militaire operatie van Oekraïne om Russische vliegtuigen te bemachtigen. Een operatie die hopeloos faalde. Naast dit verhaal ook andere info over Bellingcat:

"Since the war in Ukraine began, Christo Grozev and Bellingcat have played a lead role in disseminating and “verifying” dubious, if not outright fraudulent, material and claims related to the conflict.

Just over a week after Russia’s February 24, 2022 invasion, Grozev confidently declared that Moscow’s war-fighting resources would be spent by March 6th, at which time Russian forces would “collapse.” Over a year later, the gears of the Russian war machine are still churning away.

By the end of March 2022, Bellingcat had fed the Wall Street Journal an entirely bogus tale, asserting that oligarch Roman Abramovich and two Ukrainian negotiators who had been trying to broker peace between their two countries were poisoned."

Bron: https://thegrayzone.com/2023/04/26/bell ... es-killed/

[Gerard R.]

Door de oorlog in Oekraïne is Europa nog meer dan voorheen een vazal van de VS geworden. Dat is de conclusie van een Europese denktank:


"- "Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revealed Europeans’ profound dependence on the US for their security, despite EU efforts at achieving “strategic autonomy.”
- Over the last decade, the EU has grown relatively less powerful than America – economically, technologically, and militarily.
- Europeans also still lack agreement on crucial strategic questions for themselves and look to Washington for leadership.
- In the cold war, Europe was a central front of superpower competition. Now, the US expects the EU and the UK to fall in line behind its China strategy and will use its leadership position to ensure this outcome.
- Europe becoming an American vassal is unwise for both sides. Europeans can become a stronger and more independent part of the Atlantic alliance by developing independent capacity to support Ukraine and acquiring greater military capabilities."

Bron: https://ecfr.eu/publication/the-art-of- ... relations/

Voor mij niets nieuws hoor.
Vroeger las ik wel eens iemand die de Amerikanen de bezetter sinds 1945 noemde.
Europa is erg verknipt al zijn we niet altijd verdeeld, wat je ook niet sterker maakt, en na de Marschallhulp was het
pleit beslecht. In mij ogen dan.
Verder zitten we nog relatief dichtbij de Russen... en Duitsland heeft toch nog steeds 'n tikje posttraumische stress,
wat ik mij wel kan voorstellen.