Moon Over Alabama

For years the U.S. committed policies that have left a lot of countries grumbling. Now, as the U.S. needs support to minimize the consequences of ‘punishing’ Russia, those policies come back to bite. So will the secondary effects of sanctions the ‘west’ has imposed on Russia.

Today one report calls news of US controlled bio-weapon laboratories in Ukraine a ‘debunked conspiracy’ while other news says that Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland tells Senators that she is very concerned that ‘research materials’ from these laboratories could fall into Russian hands. If the ‘research material’ is not weapon grade why is she concerned about it?

That does not fit well with the ongoing anti-Russian propaganda campaign.

Nor do these maps.

The first shows the countries which banned Russian airplanes from their airspace. Russia in turn denied its airspace to operators from those countries. It will cost quite a bit for U.S. and EU airlines as their flight times and cost to and from Asia, which typically fly through Russian airspace, will now increase. Carriers from Asian countries will now easily out-compete U.S. and European airlines on these routes.

biggerThe second map shows those countries which enacted sanctions against Russia. The secondary effects of sanctions are likely to hurt these countries as much as they hurt Russia. The absence of African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Central and South American countries is quite telling.

It does not look like ‘the world’ or the ‘international community’ is backing the ‘west’.

biggerThe U.S. also sanctioned all imports of oil products from Russia. President Biden has blamed Russia for the price increase that will inevitably follow. I don’t believe that mid-term voters will accept that reasoning. European countries can not follow that step as their economies depend of imports of oil and gas from Russia and will continue to do so for years to come.

In a move that must have been quite humiliating for the White House the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the UAE declined to take calls from the U.S. president. They want the U.S. to designate the Houthi movement in Yemen, which they have been unsuccessful to suppress, a terrorist group:

One hopes that the Biden administration does not fall for these disgusting bribery schemes but he has backed himself into a corner, cutting off Russian oil to punish Putin for a humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, with no alternative but to horsetrade with autocrats over the fate of Yemenis a half a world away. If this is geopolitics, heaven forgive us.

I don’t think that the above is the only request the Saudis and UAE leaders will have. They are now in a situation in which they can demand ever more.

Likewise humiliating is the administration’s opening of talks with Venezuela which it had sanctioned all around in its attempt to regime change the country. Caracas has released two U.S. nationals from prison. It is willing to talk. But before providing oil to the U.S. market it will demand the lifting of all sanctions and the return of all its assets the U.S. and UK have confiscated. Biden will have difficulties to find a Congress majority in support of such steps.

The return of the nuclear deal with Iran, which would enable more oil output, hangs in balance as Russia demands sanction exemptions for its trade with Iran.

The U.S. had attempted to press Poland to deliver its old Mig-29 fighter jets to the Ukraine. In Russia’s eyes that would have been a direct Polish aggression against it. Warsaw found a smart way to avoid that. It offered to deliver the jets to a U.S. airbase in Germany. The tar baby would thereby stick to the U.S. itself. The Pentagon declined to accept that. The jet transfer is now most likely dead.

The U.S. and Europe are only starting to feel the secondary consequences of the all out economic war they hastily initiated against Russia. The war will cause recessions not only in Russia but also all over the ‘west’. This while Russia has yet to announce its counter sanctions. There are many steps Russia could take to hurt the ‘west’ by withholding this or that resource. It is likely to start slowly to then increase the pressure step by step.

It seems that there was given no thought at all about the secondary effects the ‘western’ sanctions would have.

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Via https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/03/the-sanction-backlash-will-push-the-west-to-accept-russias-demands.html

NWO News

Source: RT

The Russian Ministry of Defense on Wednesday accused “Ukrainian nationalist forces” of committing an “extremely dangerous provocation” by attacking a substation and power lines which provide the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant with electricity. Earlier, Ukrainian authorities claimed that the power cut was Russia’s fault, and could put “Europe in danger.”

“At the moment the Ukrainian side is doing everything possible to avoid the organization of repair and restoration work. In our opinion, this once again confirms the absolutely deliberate and provocative character of the actions of the nationalists,” Deputy Defense Minister Nikolai Pankov said during a special briefing.

Pankov said that Russian specialists have ensured that the plant will be powered by backup diesel generators, while Russian Deputy Minister of Energy Pavel Sorokin indicated that the plant could be hooked up to the Belarusian energy grid to ensure power on a permanent basis.

“We would like to emphasize and warn that any disruption of the work of compressor stations, or provocations against them, is the responsibility of Ukrainian authorities. This is their contractual obligation, it is the responsibility of the Ukrainian side,”Sorokin said.

Russian troops took control of the Chernobyl plant within hours of entering Ukraine, two weeks ago, though sporadic fighting has been reported in the days since.

Ukraine’s nuclear energy firm, Energoatom, warned earlier on Wednesday that communications had been lost with Chernobyl, and that the facility “was fully disconnected from the power grid.” With Russian troops operating in the area, the company claimed that Ukrainian repair workers could not get to the plant to restore power.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba declared that once the plant’s backup diesel generators run out, “cooling systems of the storage facility for spent nuclear fuel will stop, making radiation leaks imminent.” This, he said, would put “entire Europe in danger.”

However, the International Atomic Energy Agency said shortly afterwards that there was “no critical impact on safety” at the plant.

“Due to time elapsed since the 1986 Chernobyl accident, the heat load of the spent fuel storage pool and the volume of cooling water contained in the pool is sufficient to maintain effective heat removal without the need for electrical supply,” the IAEA said in an earlier update.

[…]

Via https://nworeport.me/2022/03/10/ukrainian-nationalists-attempted-to-cut-power-to-chernobyl-russia-claims/

Bradley Blankinship

RT

Seeking to isolate Russia over the Ukraine crisis, the US is turning to a Venezuela government it earlier called ‘illegitimate’

Before announcing a ban on Russian energy imports, the US tried to plug this hole by meeting with representatives from a government they don’t even officially recognize, Venezuela.

Senior State Department and White House officials met with President Nicolás Maduro’s government in Caracas over the weekend to discuss resuming oil imports. It was the highest level communication between Venezuela and the US since they severed diplomatic ties in 2019, after the administration of former President Donald Trump recognized opposition figure Juan Guaidó as the country’s “interim president.” 

It is certainly a positive thing for both sides that there’s rapprochement. The sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the US and its allies had crippled the economy and spurred runaway inflation until recently. Venezuela had only in the past year managed to post decent economic growth, reined in inflation to the single digits and, in fact, is projected to out-compete peers in the region in the near future.

If economic activity resumes with the US this will likely help Venezuela’s economy even more – and, hopefully, the unfair and illegal sanctions may be dropped too. 

But, at the same time, the reason for this rapprochement happening now obviously has to do with the US trying to insulate itself from an oil shortage after it decided to block shipments from Russia. The United States is also trying to isolate Moscow diplomatically, seeing Venezuela as one of Russia’s key partners in the Western Hemisphere. That’s an understandable assessment since Russia has been a lifeline for Venezuela as it grappled with devastating US sanctions. 

It’s for this reason that Venezuelan officials would do well to not see this overture as anything other than ‘strictly business’. In its attempt to isolate Russia, Washington is turning to countries around the world trying to “make a case for the West” while also weakening Russian influence, including now in Latin America. It hopes to do this by providing incentives to woo Venezuela (and other Latin American countries) away from Moscow and back into its orbit. 

This is not to say that Caracas shouldn’t try to restore diplomatic ties with Washington, increase communication and have fruitful economic relations. But joining in with Washington’s isolation of Russia now would be unwise since it’s clear that if the geopolitical circumstances were slightly different, the US would be continuing its siege of Venezuela and its economy.

[…]

Via https://www.rt.com/news/551561-us-replace-imports-venezuelan-oil/

Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland testifies before a Senate Foreign Relation Committee hearing on Ukraine on March 08, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Glenn Greenwald

The neocon’s confession sheds critical light on the U.S. role in Ukraine, and raises vital questions about these labs that deserve answers

Self-anointed “fact-checkers” in the U.S. corporate press have spent two weeks mocking as disinformation and a false conspiracy theory the claim that Ukraine has biological weapons labs, either alone or with U.S. support. They never presented any evidence for their ruling — how could they possibly know? and how could they prove the negative? — but nonetheless they invoked their characteristically authoritative, above-it-all tone of self-assurance and self-arrogated right to decree the truth, definitively labeling such claims false.

Claims that Ukraine currently maintains dangerous biological weapons labs came from Russia as well as China. The Chinese Foreign Ministry this month claimed: “The US has 336 labs in 30 countries under its control, including 26 in Ukraine alone.” The Russian Foreign Ministry asserted that “Russia obtained documents proving that Ukrainian biological laboratories located near Russian borders worked on development of components of biological weapons.” Such assertions deserve the same level of skepticism as U.S. denials: namely, none of it should be believed to be true or false absent evidence. Yet U.S. fact-checkers dutifully and reflexively sided with the U.S. Government to declare such claims “disinformation” and to mock them as QAnon conspiracy theories.

Unfortunately for this propaganda racket masquerading as neutral and high-minded fact-checking, the neocon official long in charge of U.S. policy in Ukraine testified on Monday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and strongly suggested that such claims are, at least in part, true. Yesterday afternoon, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), hoping to debunk growing claims that there are chemical weapons labs in Ukraine, smugly asked Nuland: “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?”

Rubio undoubtedly expected a flat denial by Nuland, thus providing further “proof” that such speculation is dastardly Fake News emanating from the Kremlin, the CCP and QAnon. Instead, Nuland did something completely uncharacteristic for her, for neocons, and for senior U.S. foreign policy officials: for some reason, she told a version of the truth. Her answer visibly stunned Rubio, who — as soon as he realized the damage she was doing to the U.S. messaging campaign by telling the truth — interrupted her and demanded that she instead affirm that if a biological attack were to occur, everyone should be “100% sure” that it was Russia who did it. Grateful for the life raft, Nuland told Rubio he was right.

But Rubio’s clean-up act came too late. When asked whether Ukraine possesses “chemical or biological weapons,” Nuland did not deny this: at all. She instead — with palpable pen-twirling discomfort and in halting speech, a glaring contrast to her normally cocky style of speaking in obfuscatory State Department officialese — acknowledged: “uh, Ukraine has, uh, biological research facilities.” Any hope to depict such “facilities” as benign or banal was immediately destroyed by the warning she quickly added: “we are now in fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, uh, gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the Ukrainiahhhns [sic] on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach”

[…]

Via https://greenwald.substack.com/p/victoria-nuland-ukraine-has-biological