The United States reportedly boosted its import of Russian oil last month, according to official figures from the Energy Information Administration. The extra imported volume accounted for a 43 percent increase.

This is in spite of an executive order by U.S. President Joe Biden on March 8 to ban all energy and hydrocarbon commodities from Russia. That draconian measure was declared in response to Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine that was launched on February 24.

Admittedly, the United States does not rely heavily on Russia for its crude oil supply. Russia is not in the top five suppliers to the U.S., according to the EIA. Nevertheless, the apparent ramping up of U.S. purchase of Russian oil strikes a bizarre chord.

It comes as Washington is demanding European allies to cut energy trade with Russia. And it’s not just the Europeans that are being ordered to do so. India and other Asian countries are also harangued by the Americans to likewise reduce imports of Russian gas, oil and petroleum products.

Given today’s date, one could be forgiven for thinking this is some kind of April Fools joke. It’s not. But it is a laughable illustration of how reckless and ridiculous American hubris has become.

Washington wants its so-called allies to commit economic suicide by cutting off vital energy trade with Russia all in a bid to satisfy its de facto Cold War agenda of trying to isolate Moscow and draw all countries under U.S. hegemony. The same geopolitical agenda applies to China, although that has taken somewhat of a backseat given the immediate tensions with Russia.

The U.S. may not have large dependence on Russian oil and gas, but many other countries do. Russia is among the largest global suppliers of gas, oil and petroleum products. Washington’s attitude is one of demanding others to cut their noses off to spite their face, or put another way, to shoot themselves in the foot. Meanwhile, the American rulers think they can insulate themselves from harm. Although this week, in a sign of how futile this all is, Biden ordered the biggest release of U.S. strategic oil reserves in order to dial down crazy American pump prices.

It is astounding the level of arrogance among American politicians. If so-called allies conform to Washington’s dictates, it would result in immediate devastation of their economies. In the not-so-long run, too, the American economy will also be ruinously impacted from global supply chains.

The global energy crisis and general economic inflation (or poverty in plainer language) has become the central political problem across the world. The Covid-19 pandemic is part of the precipitating cause to accelerate the demise of U.S.-led global capitalism. The tensions between the West and Russia over the conflict in Ukraine have further amplified the problem. The war in Ukraine could have been avoided if the United States and its NATO allies had engaged respectfully with Moscow to resolve its oft-repeated security concerns. But the Western powers repudiated Russia’s proposals and appeals for genuine diplomacy.

There are tentative signs that several rounds of talks between Ukraine and Russia – the latest round hosted by Turkey this week – might be making progress. The Ukrainian side has reportedly accepted Russia’s demands for neutrality from NATO and recognition of Moscow’s historic claim to Crimea as well as the independence of the Russian-speaking Donbass republics. That outcome is similar to what Russia had been demanding in the months before the tensions boiled over into war. The unnecessary suffering is a tragedy that could have been averted if the U.S. and NATO had any reasonable attitude.

It remains to be seen, however, if Washington will cast a veto over the talks making progress since it is supporting the Kiev regime with weapons and financial loans. One suspects peace is not what the United States wants ultimately. It wants, indeed needs, permanent conflict and tensions because that in essence is the way it maintains U.S. global hegemony.

To everyone else though, it should be clear that a political settlement in Ukraine and more generally between the West and Russia is urgently required for peace and long-term security.

It is counterproductive that Washington and its European allies are insisting on harsher sanctions against Russia instead of addressing the root causes of NATO expansionism and U.S.-led transatlantic dominance. This is only leading to a downward spiral in the global economy on a historic scale that will impact every nation, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable, to price shocks.

American hubris and European servility seem to know no bounds. The Western nations froze Russia’s foreign assets amounting to $300 billion. Now Russian President Vladimir Putin has decreed that all future gas purchases must be made in rubles instead of dollars or euros. Failure to meet Russia’s demands will result in gas exports being cut off. The reciprocal move by Moscow is justified. If the Western powers feel entitled to unilaterally change the terms of trade then why shouldn’t Russia?

It is incredible that some European governments seem willing to toe the American line even when that line is leading them over the abyss. The economic repercussions of this masochistic policy are unleashing social mayhem as citizens in Europe and the U.S. bear the brunt of excruciating living costs. The Biden administration and his Democratic Party are facing an electoral backlash in the forthcoming mid-term elections this autumn.

But the sense is that the political repercussions are much bigger than election backlash. The U.S. policy of confrontation with Russia and China and others is re-creating a Cold War global order that is completely untenable and is rapidly breaking down. European lackey governments are going along with this self-defeating ideology out of cowardice or failure of understanding. Even though the upshot is the ruination of their economies and societies.

The United States through its pursuit of hegemony is cratering the foundations of its own power. European allies following this insanity are causing their own demise from economic devastation. The political elites in the West are fomenting social chaos in their own nations.

Russia’s move to price its gas and other commodities in rubles is a tangible step away from the era of reserve currencies of the dollar and euro. China, India and other nations are beginning to embrace a world without Western financial diktat. A new global multipolar order is emerging in which Western powers are no longer tolerated as privileged.

The contradictions that stem from American and European arrogance have finally hit breaking point. Their attitude of, “Do as we say, not as we do”, is the damnedest April Fool joke today.

It was something to behold. Dmitri Medvedev, former Russian President, unrepentant Atlanticist, current deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, decided to go totally unplugged in an outburst matching the combat star turn of Mr. Khinzal that delivered palpable shock and awe all across NATOstan.

Medvedev said “hellish” Western sanctions not only have failed to cripple Russia, but are instead “returning to the West like a boomerang.” Confidence in reserve currencies is “fading like the morning mist”, and ditching the US dollar and the euro is not unrealistic anymore: “The era of regional currencies is coming.”

After all, he added, “no matter if they want it or not, they’ll have to negotiate a new financial order (…) And the decisive voice will then be with those countries that have a strong and advanced economy, healthy public finances and a reliable monetary system.”

Medvedev relayed his succinct analysis even before D Day – as in the deadline this Thursday established by President Putin after which payments for Russian gas by “unfriendly nations” will only be accepted in rubles.

The G7, predictably, had struck a (collective) pose: we won’t pay. “We” means the 4 that are not large Russian gas importers. “We”, moreover, means the Empire of Lies dictating the rules. As for the 3 that will be in dire straits, not only they are major importers but also happen to be WWII losers – Germany, Italy and Japan, still de facto occupied territories. History does have a habit of playing perverted tricks.

Denial didn’t last long. Germany was the first to break – even before industrialists from Ruhr to Bavaria staged a mass revolt. Scholz, the puny Chancellor, called Putin, who had to explain the obvious:  payments are being converted into rubles because the EU froze Russia’s foreign exchange reserves – in a crass violation of international law.

With Taoist patience, Putin also expressed hope this would not represent a deterioration in contract terms for European importers. Russian and German experts should sit down together and discuss the new terms.

Moscow is working on a set of documents defining the new deal. Essentially, that spells out no rubles, no gas. Contracts become null and void once you violate trust. The US and the EU broke legally biding agreements with unilateral sanctions and on top of it confiscated foreign reserves of a – nuclear – G20 nation.

The unilateral sanctions made dollars and euros worthless to Russia. Hysteria fits won’t cut it: this will be resolved – but under Russia’s terms. Period. The Foreign Ministry had already warned that refusal to pay for gas in rubles would lead to a serious global crisis of non-payments and serial global-level bankruptcies, a hellish chain reaction of blocked transactions, freezing of collateral assets and closures of credit lines.

What will happen next is partially predictable. EU companies will receive the new set of rules. They will have time to examine the documents and make a decision. Those that say “no” will be automatically excluded from receiving direct Russian gas shipments – all politico-economic consequences included.

There will be some compromise, of course. For instance, quite a few EU nations will accept to use rubles and increase their gas acquisitions so they may resell the surplus to their neighbors and make a profit. And some may also decide to buy gas on the go on energy exchanges.

So Russia is not imposing an ultimatum on anybody. The whole thing will take time – a rolling process. With some sideway action as well. The Duma is contemplating the extension of payment in rubles to other essential products – such as oil, metals, timber, wheat. It will depend on the collective voracity of the EU chihuahuas. Everyone knows that their non-stop hysteria may translate into a colossal rupture of supply chains across the West.

Bye bye oligarchs

While the Atlanticist ruling classes have gone totally berserk but still remain focused on fighting to the last European to extract any remaining, palpable EU wealth, Russia is playing it cool. Moscow has been quite lenient in fact, brandishing the specter of no gas in Spring rather than Winter.

The Russian Central Bank nationalized foreign exchange earnings of all major exporters. There was no default. The ruble keeps rising – and is now back to roughly the same level before Operation Z.  Russia remains self-sufficient, food-wise. American hysteria over “isolated” Russia is laughable. Every actor that matters across Eurasia – not to mention the other 4 BRICS and virtually the whole Global South – did not demonize and/or sanction Russia.

As an extra bonus, arguably the last oligarch capable of influence in Moscow, Anatoly Chubais, is gone. Call it another momentous historical trickery: Western sanction hysteria de facto dismembered Russian oligarchy – Putin’s pet project since 2000. What that implies is the strengthening of the Russian state and the consolidation of Russian society.

We still don’t have all the facts, but a case can be made that after years of careful evaluation Putin opted to really go for broke and break the West’s back – using that trifecta (imminent blitzkrieg on Donbass; US bioweapon labs; Ukraine working on nuclear weapons)  as the casus belli.

The freezing of foreign reserves had to have been forecasted, especially because the Russian Central Bank had been increasing its reserves of US Treasuries since November last year. Then there’s the serious possibility of Moscow being able to access “secret” offshore foreign reserves – a complex matrix built with Chinese insider help.

The sudden switch from dollars/euros to rubles was hardcore, Olympic-level geoeconomic judo. Putin enticed the collective West to unleash its demented hysteria sanction attack – and turned it against the opponent with a single, swift move.

And here we all are now trying to absorb so many in-synch game-changing developments following the weaponization of dollar assets:  rupee-ruble with India, the Saudi petroyuan, co-badged Mir-UnionPay cards issued by Russian banks, the Russia-Iran SWIFT alternative, the EAEU-China project of an independent monetary/financial system.

Not to mention the master coup by the Russian Central Bank, pegging 1 gram of gold to 5,000 rubles – which is already around $60, and climbing.

Coupled with No Rubles No Gas, what we have here is energy de facto pegged to gold. The EU Chihuahuas and the Japanese colony will need to buy a lot of rubles in gold or buy a lot of gold to have their gas. And it gets better. Russia may re-peg the ruble to gold in the near future. Could go to 2,000 rubles, 1,000 rubles, even 500 rubles for a gram of gold.

Time to be sovereign

The Holy Grail in the evolving discussions about a multipolar world, since the BRICS summits in the 2000s featuring Putin, Hu Jintao and Lula, has always been how to bypass dollar hegemony. It’s now right in front of the whole Global South, as a benign apparition bearing a Cheshire cat’s smile: the golden ruble, or ruble backed by oil, gas, minerals, commodity exports.

The Russian Central Bank, unlike the Fed, does not practice QE and won’t export toxic inflation to the rest of the planet. The Russian Navy not only secures all Russian sea lines, but Russian nuclear-powered submarines are capable of popping up all over the planet unannounced.

Russia is far, far ahead already implementing the concept of “continental naval power”. December 2015, in the Syrian theater, was the strategic game-changer. The Black Sea-based submarine 4th division is the star of the show.

Russian naval fleets may now employ Kalibr missiles across a space comprehending Eastern Europe, West Asia and Central Asia. The Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, linked by the Don-Volga canal, offer a space of maneuver comparable to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf combined. 6,000 km-long. And you don’t even need to access warm waters.

That covers around 30 nations: the traditional Russian sphere of influence; historical borders of the Russian empire; and current political/energy rivalry spheres.

No wonder the Beltway is berserk.

Russia guarantees shipping across Asia, the Arctic and Europe, in tandem with the Eurasia-wide BRI railway network.

And last but not least, don’t mess with a Nuclear Bear.

Essentially, this is what hardcore power politics is all about. Medvedev was not bragging when he said the era of a single reserve currency is over. The advent of a resource-based global reserve currency means, in a nutshell, that 13% of the planet will not dominate the other 87% anymore.

It’s NATOstan vs. Eurasia redux. Cold War 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and even 5.0. It doesn’t matter. All the previous Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) nations see which way the geopolitical and geo-economic winds are blowing: the time to assert their real sovereignty is at hand as the “rules-based international order” bites the dust.

Welcome to the birth of the new world system. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in China, after meeting several counterparts from across Eurasia, could not have outlined it better:

“A new reality is being formed: the unipolar world is irrevocably becoming a thing of the past, a multipolar one is taking shape. It’s an objective process. It’s unstoppable. In this reality, more than one power will “rule” – it will be necessary to negotiate between all the key states that today have a decisive influence on the world economy and politics. At the same time, realizing their special situation, these countries ensure compliance with the basic principles of the UN Charter, including the fundamental one – the sovereign equality of states. No one on this Earth should be seen as a minor player. Everyone is equal and sovereign.”

Very occasionally, a single anecdote can almost completely summate a moment in history. And this one did: In 2005, Zbig Brzezinski, the architect of Afghanistan as quagmire to the Soviet Union, and the author of The Grand Chessboard (which embedded the Mackinder dictum of ‘he who controls the Asian heartland controls the world’ into U.S. foreign policy), sat down in Washington with Alexander Dugin, Russian political philosopher and advocate for a ‘heartland’ cultural and geo-political renaissance.

Brzezinski had already written in his book that, absent Ukraine, Russia would never become the heartland power; but with it, Russia can and would. The meeting had been set with a photo-prop of a chessboard placed between Brzezinski and Dugin (to promote Brzezinski’s book). This arrangement with a chessboard prompted Dugin to ask whether Brzezinski considered Chess to be a game meant for two: “No, Zbig shot back: It is a game for one. Once a chess piece is moved; you turn the board around, and you move the other side’s chess pieces. There is ‘no other’ in this game”, Brzezinski insisted.

Of course, the single-handed chess game was implicit in Mackinder’s doctrine: ‘He who controls the heartland’ dictum was a message to the Anglo powers to never allow a united heartland. (This, of course, is precisely what is evolving at every moment).

And on Monday, Biden channelled Brzezinski out loud, whilst addressing the Business Roundtable in the U.S. His remarks came toward the end of his brief speech where he talked about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and America’s economic future:

“I think this presents us with some significant opportunities to make some real changes. You know, we are at an inflection point, I believe, in the world economy: [and] not just the world economy – in the world [which] occurs every three or four generations. As one of my, as the one of the top military people said to me in a secure meeting the other day, 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946; and since then we established a liberal world order and that hadn’t happened in a long while. A lot of people died, but nowhere near the chaos. And now’s the time when things are shifting. We’re going, there’s gonna be a new world order out there; and we’ve got to lead it and we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.”

Again there is no ‘other’ at the board. When the moves are made, the board is turned around 180º to play from the other side.

The point here is that the carefully deliberated counter-attack on this Brzezinski zeitgeist was formally launched in Beijing with the joint-declaration that neither Russia nor China accept for America to play chess alone with no others at the board. This represents the defining issue of this coming era: The opening-up of geo-politics. It is an issue for which the excluded ‘others’ are prepared to go to war (they see no choice).

A second chess-player has stepped forward and insists to play – Russia. And a third stands ready: China. Others are silently lining up to witness how the first engagement in this geo-political war fares. It seems from Biden’s comments quoted above that the U.S. intends to use sanctions, and the full unprecedented extent of U.S. treasury measures, against Brzezinski dissidents. Russia is to be made an example of that which awaits any challengers demanding a seat at the board.

But it is an approach that is fundamentally flawed. It stems from Kissinger’s celebrated dictum that ‘he who controls money controls the world’. It was wrong from the ‘get go’: It was always ‘he who controls food, energy (human as well as fossil) and money can control the world. But Kissinger just ignored the first two required conditions – and the last has imprinted itself on the Washington mental circuits.

And here is the paradox: When Brzezinski wrote his book, it was a very different era. Today, whilst Europe and the U.S. never have been more closely aligned, the ‘West’ paradoxically has also never been more alone. Opposition to Russia may have seemed at the outset a slam dunk global unifier: That world opinion would so robustly oppose Moscow’s attack, that China would pay a high political price for failing to jump onto the anti-Russia bandwagon. But that is not how it is working out.

“While the U.S. rhetoric pillories Russia for “war crimes” and the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, et al”, former Indian Ambassador Bhadrakumar notes, “the world capitals view this as a confrontation between America and Russia. Outside of the western camp, the world community refuses to impose sanctions against Russia or even to demonise that country”.

The Islamabad Declaration issued on Wednesday after the 45th meeting of the foreign ministers of the fifty-seven member Organisation of Islamic Conference refused to endorse sanctions against Russia. Not a single country in the African continent or West Asian, Central Asia, South and Southeast Asian region has imposed sanctions against Russia”.

There may well be a further factor at play here: For when these latter states hear phrases such as the ‘Ukrainians, through their heroism, have won the right to enter our “club of values”’, they scent a whiff of debilitated ‘white’ Europe clutching at the life-rafts.

The reality is that the sanctions to which Biden referred in his speech have already failed. Russia has not defaulted; the Moscow stock exchange is open; the Rouble is on the rebound; their current account is in rude good health and Russia is selling energy at windfall prices (even after discount).

In short, trade ‘will be diverted’, not destroyed (the benefit of being an exporter of goods almost fully produced locally – ie. a fortress economy).

The second oddity in Biden’s policy is that whilst Clausewitzian doctrine (to which Russia broadly adheres) argues for the dismantling of ‘the enemy’s centre of gravity, to achieve victory’, in this case presumably, the western control of the global reserve currency and payments systems. Today, however, it is Europe and the U.S. that have been dismantling it themselves: and further locking themselves into soaring inflation and contracting economic activity, in some unexplained fit of moral masochism.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard notes in the Telegraph, “What is clear is that western sanctions policy is the worst of all worlds. We are suffering an energy shock that is further inflating Russia’s war-fighting revenues … There is a pervasive fear of a gilets jaunes uprising across Europe, a suspicion that a fickle public will not tolerate the cost-of-living shock once the horrors of Ukraine lose their novelty on TV screens”.

Again, perhaps we can attribute this paradoxical behaviour to Kissinger’s obsession with the power of money, and his forgetfulness of other major factors.

All of this has led to a certain unease creeping into the corridors of power in some NATO capitals over the course that the Ukraine conflict is taking: NATO will not intervene; it will not implement a no-fly zone; and has pointedly ignored Zelensky’s new plea for additional military equipment. Ostensibly, this reflects the ‘selfless’ gesture by the West to avoid a nuclear war. In reality, however, the development of new weaponry can transform geopolitics in a moment (for example, Russia’s Kinzhal hypersonic smart bunker-buster). The fact is that across the board, NATO cannot prevail militarily against Russia in Ukraine.

It seems the Pentagon has – for now – won in the war with State Department and has begun the process of ‘correcting the narrative’.

Contrast these two U.S. narratives:

The State Department on Monday signalled that U.S. is discouraging Zelensky from making concessions to Russia in return for a ceasefire. The spokesman “made it very clear that he is open to a diplomatic solution that does not compromise the core principles at the heart of the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. When asked to elaborate on his point, Price said that the war is “bigger” than Russia and Ukraine. “The key point is that there are principles that are at stake here that have universal applicability everywhere”. Price said Putin was trying to violate “core principles”.

But, the Pentagon “drop[ed] two truth bombs” in its battle with State and Congress to prevent confrontation with Russia: “Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader’s strategic balancing act”, reported Newsweek in an article entitled, “Putin’s Bombers Could Devastate Ukraine But He’s Holding Back. Here’s Why.”

One quotes an unnamed analyst at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) saying, “The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets. A retired U.S. Air Force officer now working as an analyst for a Pentagon contractor, added: “We need to understand Russia’s actual conduct. If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict””.

The second ‘truth bomb’ directly undermines Biden’s dramatic warning about a false flag chemical attack. Reuters reported: “The United States has not yet seen any concrete indications of an imminent Russian chemical or biological weapons attack in Ukraine but is closely monitoring streams of intelligence for them, a senior U.S. defence official said.”

Biden is positioned in the middle, saying ‘Putin’s a war criminal’, but also that there will be no NATO fight with Russia. “The only end game now,” a senior administration official said at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. China has made a huge error in thinking Putin will get away with it”.

There it is – the bottom line: Allow the carnage in Ukraine to continue; sit back and watch the ‘heroic Ukrainians bleed Russia dry’; do enough to sustain the conflict (by providing some weapons), but not enough to escalate it; and play it as the heroic struggle for democracy, in order to satisfy public opinion.

The point is that it isn’t working out that way. Putin may surprise all in DC by exiting Ukraine when Russia’s military operation is complete. (When Putin speaks of Ukraine, by the way, he usually discounts the western part added on by Stalin as Ukrainian).

And it isn’t working out with China. Blinken said in justification of new sanctions imposed on China last week: “We are committed to defending human rights around the world and will continue to use all diplomatic and economic measures to promote accountability”.

The sanctions were imposed because China had failed to repudiate Putin. Just that. The language of accountability and (of atonement) used however, can be understood only as an expression of woke contemporary culture. It is enough to present some aspect of Chinese culture as politically incorrect (as racist, repressive, misogynist, supremacist or offensive), and immediately it becomes politically incorrect. And that means that any aspect of it can be adduced at will by the Administration as meriting sanctioning.

The problem again reverts to the West’s refusal to accept ‘others’ at the chessboard. What can China do, but shrug at such nonsense.

Biden, in his speech to the Roundtable, fore-staged – yet again – a new world order; he suggested that a Great Re-set is coming.

But maybe a ‘Re-set Reckoning’ of a different order is on the cards; one that will return many things to that which, until relatively recently, had actually worked. Politics and geo-politics are metamorphosing at every moment.

The Ukraine war is setting new geopolitical precedents around the world, which is making it hard for analysts to draw up the usual ‘winners and losers’ listicle usually offered. China, without question is looking more like a winner when we consider not only the new deals it has struck both in Russia, buying up oil firms’ assets at bargain prices, but also setting a new paradigm for its relations with Washington which recently sent one of its top mandarins to threaten it, if it continued to assist Russia in its war in the Ukraine. It ignored Washington and has come out of the closet and backed Russia on many levels, firming up the triplet of eastern powers – Russia, China and India – and their positioning in the world’s economy even more.

And then there is Saudi Arabia, whose mercurial leader, the young crown prince called “MBS” has never really got over how Donald Trump abandoned him during a rather awkward baptism of opprobrium from the world’s press over the ghastly murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Fast forward to Joe Biden taking office and the Saudis didn’t lose anytime in opening up channels of diplomacy and cooperation brainstorming with Moscow, confident that when their own people’s uprising kicks off – and it will one day – that Russia might be there for them, as it was in Syria for Assad.

The Saudis are actually doing alright now with much higher oil prices and their relations with China improving every day. As a smack in the face from MBS to Biden, the former recently just ignored his calls to produce more oil as the midterms loom, which will be felt by the Democrats at the polls when votes are lost due to high energy prices blamed on Biden. It’s a similar story with Boris Johnson and MBS who recently sent the British leader away with a flea in his ear when he asked the Crown Prince for a better oil deal. So much for the special relationship with the very country that created the very family – Saud – which now owns what is now called Saudi Arabia. No prisoners, Boris.

With China, it’s a win-win. MBS gets revenge against the U.S. which still wants it to be a lap dog and accept the tenets of U.S. hegemony, while selling more oil to China, in Yuan which hits the U.S. even harder. China also gets to show the Americans that they really aren’t the superpower they think they are by dumping the dollar for oil sales and looking at the new ‘Eastern bloc’ model which is where really the whole Ukraine war is taking us.

A brutal and simple binary world, where everything is neatly divided into two groups, whose people and businesses are discouraged from crossing the line into one and other’s camp. Think new Cold War with Russia, China, India and most of Asia on one side with its own banking system which replaces Swift, its own internet and internet rules, own eBay, own Facebook, own currencies (including crypto) and a new world order which probably dumps U.S. weapons and banking altogether, as well as western energy markets.

But there will be casualties when the body bags are counted and an analysis done. Relations between Russia and Turkey are probably going to be very bad, certainly as long as Recep Erdogan remains in office as Putin is not going to forgive him for supplying deadly Turkish drones to the Ukrainian forces and closing the Bosporus – despite the charade of both countries foreign ministers’ meetings in Moscow. Other divisions will be notable within NATO and EU countries as it becomes clear that both these organisations have deeply rooted cultural and political problems both internally and across the board which simply don’t allow them to take on bold tasks when the moment is presented. The three eastern European countries presently visiting Ukraine will feel very let down by most other EU member states and NATO partners, when their fears are not adhered to. They will inevitably develop stronger ties with the Zelensky administration while becoming more acerbic towards Brussels and its authoritarian manner.

And the EU hardly come out well either. Some may ask, when peace finally comes and it will be the EU expected to bankroll at least 100 billion euros in reconstruction aid, could the EU have done something earlier to have prevented the escalation, given that it was Brussels as far back as 2004 which has been signalling to Ukraine to consider itself a candidate for membership. Let’s not forget also that part of the price of playing tough, the EU will have to accept that its own actions also have led to Moscow dumping euros as part of its cash reserves and using the Chinese clearing system for its banks more and more. We can certainly expect more division and in-fighting, as we saw earlier when EU member states couldn’t agree on the terms of Covid restructuring aid, when it is discussed how much money should go to Ukraine and Zelensky’s deeply corrupt business elite. Putin, in the meantime, has already won the war in Ukraine by Zelensky already conceding that he’s dumped the idea of NATO membership, which is a considerable blow to its credibility as an amalgamation of new countries join the Russia-China-India business/geopolitical bloc. Those who point to Putin and lamely accuse him of being a Soviet anachronism fail to see the irony of the West playing a big role in provoking him since the early nineties when the broken promises of NATOs expansion east begun. Or, for that matter, the Stalinist mentality behind the EU’s decision to cut off Russia’s media from the rest of the world which reminds me of Nazis burning books in the late 30s.

In its triple strike of sanctions on Russia, the EU initially was not looking to collapse the Russian financial system. Far from it: Its first instinct was to find the means to continue purchasing its energy needs (made all there more vital by the state of the European gas reserves hovering close to zero). Purchases of energy, special metals, rare earths (all needed for high tech manufacture) and agricultural products were to be exempted. In short, at first brush, the sinews of the global financial system were intended to remain intact.

The main target rather, was to block the core to the Russian financial system’s ability to raise capital – supplemented by specific sanctions on Alrosa, a major player in the diamond market, and Sovcomflot, a tanker fleet operator.

Then, last Saturday morning (26 February) everything changed. It became a blitzkrieg: “We’re waging an all-out economic and financial war on Russia. We will cause the collapse of the Russian economy”, said the French Finance Minister, Le Maire (words, he later said, he regretted).

That Saturday, the EU, the U.S. and some allies acted to freeze the Russian Central Bank’s foreign exchange reserves held overseas. And certain Russian banks (in the end seven) were to be expelled from SWIFT financial messaging service. The intent was openly admitted in an U.S. unattributable briefing: It was to trigger a ‘bear raid’ (ie. an orchestrated mass selling) of the Rouble on the following Monday that would collapse the value of the currency.

The purpose to freezing the Central Bank’s reserves was two-fold: First, to prevent the Bank from supporting the Rouble. And secondly, to create a commercial bank liquidity scarcity inside Russia to feed into a concerted campaign over that weekend to scare Russians into believing that some domestic banks might fail – thus prompting a rush at the ATMs, and start a bank-run, in other words.

More than two decades ago, in August 1998, Russia defaulted on its debt and devalued the Rouble, sparking a political crisis that culminated with Vladimir Putin replacing Boris Yeltsin. In 2014, there was a similar U.S. attempt to crash the Rouble through sanctions and by engineering (with Saudi Arabian help) a 41% drop in oil prices by January 2015.

Plainly, last Saturday morning when Ursula von der Leyen announced that ‘selected’ Russian banks would be expelled from SWIFT and the international financial messaging system; and spelled out the near unprecedented Russian Central Bank reserve freeze, we were witnessing the repeat of 1998. The collapse of the economy (as Le Maire said), a run on the domestic banks and the prospect of soaring inflation. This combination was expected to conflate into a political crisis – albeit one intended, this time, to see Putin replaced, vice Yeltsin – aka regime change in Russia, as a senior U.S. think-tanker proposed this week.

In the end, the Rouble fell, but it did not collapse. The Russian currency rather, after an initial drop, recovered about half its early fall. Russians did queue at their ATMs on Monday, but a full run on the retail banks did not materialise. It was ‘managed’ by Moscow.

What occurred on that Saturday which prompted the EU switch from moderate sanctions to become a full participant in a financial war à outrance on Russia is not clear: It may have resulted from intense U.S. pressure, or it came from within, as Germany seized an opportune alibi to put itself back on the path of militarisation for the third time in the past several decades: To re-configure Germany as a major military power, a forceful participant in global politics.

And that – very simply – could not have been possible without tacit U.S. encouragement.

Ambassador Bhadrakumar notes that the underlying shifts made manifest by von der Leyen on Saturday “herald a profound shift in European politics. It is tempting, but ultimately futile, to contextually place this shift as a reaction to the Russian decision to launch military operations in Ukraine. The pretext only provides the alibi, whilst the shift is anchored on power play and has a dynamic of its own”. He continues,

“Without doubt, the three developments — Germany’s decision to step up its militarisation [spending an additional euro100 billion]; the EU decision to finance arms supplies to Ukraine, and Germany’s historic decision to reverse its policy not to supply weapons to conflict zones — mark a radical departure in European politics since World War II. The thinking toward a military build-up, the need for Germany to be a “forceful” participant in global politics and the jettisoning of its guilt complex and get “combat ready” — all these by far predate the current situation around Ukraine”.

The von der Leyen intervention may have been opportunism, driven by a resurgence of SPD German ambition (and perhaps by her own animus towards Russia, stemming from her family connection to the SS German capture of Kiev), yet its consequences are likely profound.

Just to be clear, on one Saturday, von der Leyen pulled the switch to turn off principal parts to Global financial functioning: blocking interbank messaging, confiscating foreign exchange reserves and the cutting the sinews of trade. Ostensibly this ‘burning’ of global structures is being done (like the burning of villages in Vietnam) to ‘save’ the liberal Order.

However, this must be taken in tandem with Germany’s and the EU decision to supply weapons (to not just any old ‘conflict zone’) but specifically to forces fighting Russian troops in Ukraine. The ‘Kick Ass’ parts to those Ukrainian forces ‘resisting’ Russia are neo-Nazi forces with a long history of committing atrocities against the Russian-speaking Ukrainian peoples. Germany will be joining with the U.S. in training these Nazi elements in Poland. The CIA has been doing such since 2015. (So, as Russia tries to de-Nazify Ukraine, Germany and the EU are encouraging European volunteers to join in a U.S.-led effort to use Nazi elements to resist Russia, just as in the way Jihadists were trained to resist Russia in Syria).

What a paradox! Effectively von der Leyen is overseeing the building of an EU ‘Berlin Wall’ – albeit with its purpose inverted now – to separate the EU from Russia. And to complete the parallel, she even announced that Russia Today and Sputnik broadcasts would be banned across the EU. Europeans can be allowed only to hear authorised EU messaging – (however, a week into the Russian invasion, cracks are appearing in this tightly-controlled western narrative – “Putin is NOT crazy and the Russian invasion is NOT failing”, warns a leading U.S. military analyst in the Daily Mail. Simply “[b]elieving Russia’s assault is going poorly may make us feel better but is at odds with the facts”, Roggio writes. “We cannot help Ukraine if we cannot be honest about its predicament”).

So Biden, finally, has his foreign policy ‘success’: Europe is walling itself off from Russia, China, and the emerging integrated Asian market. It has sanctioned itself from ‘dependency’ on Russian natural gas (without prospect of any immediate alternatives) and it has thrown itself in with the Biden project. Next up, the EU pivot to sanctioning China?

Will this last? It seems improbable. German industry has a long history for staging its own mercantile interests before wider geo-pollical ambitions – before, even, EU interests. And in Germany, the business class effectively is the political class and needs competitively-priced energy.

Whilst the rest of the world shows little or no enthusiasm to join with sanctions on Russia (China has ruled out sanctions on Russia), Europe is in hysteria. This will not fade quickly. The new ‘Iron Curtain’ erected in Brussels may last years.

But what of the unintended consequences to last Saturday’s ‘sanctions Blitzkrieg’: the ‘unknowable unknowns’ in Rumsfeld’s famous mantra? The unprecedented switch-off affecting a key part of the Globalist system did not download into a neutral, inert context – It developed into an emotionally hyper-charged atmosphere of Russophobia.

Whereas EU states had hoped to spare Russian energy shipments, they did not take account of the frenzy raised against Russia. The oil market has gone on strike, acting as if energy were already in the frame for Western sanctions: Oil tankers had already started to avoid Russian ports because of sanctions fears, and rates for oil tankers on Russian crude routes have exploded as much as nine-fold in the past few days. But now, amid growing fears of falling foul of complex restrictions in different jurisdictions, refiners and banks are balking at purchasing any Russian oil at all, traders and others involved in the market say. Market players fear too that measures that target oil exports directly could be imposed, should fighting in Ukraine intensify.

Commodity markets have been in turmoil since the Special Military Operation began. European natural gas jumped as much as 60% on Wednesday, as buyers, traders and shippers avoid Russian gas. A combination of sanctions and commercial decisions by shippers and insurers to steer clear has cut that contribution to global supplies sharply over the last week. A default cascade by western companies is perfectly possible. And Supply line disruption is inevitable.

Many will be affected by the commodity turmoil, but with Russia providing 25% of global wheat supplies, the 21% hike in wheat and 16% rise in corn prices since 1 January will represent a disaster for many states in the Middle East among others.

All this disruption to markets comes even before Moscow responds with its own countermeasures. They have been silent so far – but what if Moscow demands that future payments for energy are to be made in Yuan?

In sum, the changes set out by von der Leyen and the EU, with surging crude oil costs, could potentially tip global markets into crisis, and set off spiralling inflation. Cost inflation created by energy costs spiralling higher and food disruptions are not so easily susceptible to monetary remedies. If the daily drama of the war in Ukraine starts to fade from public view, and inflation persists, the political cost of von der Leyen’s Saturday drama is likely to be European-wide recession.

“Since well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europeans have been struggling under the weight of runaway energy bills”, OilPrice.com notes. In Germany, for some, one month’s energy costs the same as they used to pay for a whole year; in the UK the government has raised the price cap for energy bills by a whopping 54%, and in Italy a recent 40% domestic energy cost hike could now nearly double.

The New York Times describes this impact on local businesses and industries as nothing short of “frightening”, as all kinds of small businesses across Europe (prior to last week’s events) have been forced to cease their operations as energy costs outweigh profits. Large industries have not been immune to sticker shock either. “Almost two-thirds of the 28,000 companies surveyed by the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry this month rated energy prices as one of their biggest business risks … For those in the industrial sector, the figure was as high as 85 percent.”

One recalls that old prediction from the Middle East, that western values would turn against the West itself, and ultimately devour it.

One of the key underlying themes of the Russia/Ukraine/NATO matrix is that the Empire of Lies (copyright Putin) has been rattled to the core by the combined ability of Russian hypersonic missiles and a defensive shield capable of blocking incoming nuclear missiles from the West, thereby ending Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.)

This has led the Americans to nearly risk a hot war to be able to place hypersonic missiles that they still don’t have on Ukraine’s western borders, and so be within three minutes of Moscow. For that, of course, they need Ukraine, as well as Poland and Romania in Eastern Europe.

In Ukraine, the Americans are determined to fight to the last European soul – if that’s what it takes. This may be the last roll of the (nuclear) dice. Thus the next-to-last gasp at coercing Russia into submission by using the remaining, workable American weapon of mass destruction: SWIFT.

Yet this weapon can be easily neutralized by rapid adoption of self-sufficiency.

With essential input by the inestimable Michael Hudson I have outlined possibilities for Russia to weather the sanction storm. That didn’t even consider the full extent of Russia’s “black box defense” – and counter-attack – as outlined by John Helmer in his introduction to an essay that heralds no less then The Return of Sergei Glaziev.

Glaziev, predictably detested across Atlanticist circles, was a key economic adviser to President Putin and is now the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). He has always been a fierce critic of the Russian Central Bank and the oligarch gang closely linked to Anglo-American finance.

His latest essay, Sanctions and Sovereignty, originally published by expert.ru and translated by Helmer, deserves serious scrutiny.

This is one of the key takeaways:

“Russian losses of potential GDP, since 2014, amount to about 50 trillion rubles. But only 10% of them can be explained by sanctions, while 80% of them were the result of monetary policy. The United States benefits from anti-Russian sanctions, replacing the export of Russian hydrocarbons to the EU as well as China; replacing the import of European goods by Russia. We could completely offset the negative consequences of financial sanctions if the Bank of Russia fulfilled its constitutional duty to ensure a stable ruble exchange rate, and not the recommendations of Washington financial organizations.”

De-offshore or bust

Glaziev essentially recommends:

– A “real de-offshorization of the economy”.

– “Measures to tighten currency regulation in order to stop the export of capital and expand targeted lending to enterprises in need of financing investments”.

– “Taxation of currency speculation and transactions in dollars and euros on the domestic market”.

– “Serious investment in R&D in order to accelerate the development of our own technological base in the areas affected by sanctions – first of all the defense industry, energy, transport and communications.”

And last but not least, “the de-dollarization of our foreign exchange reserves, replacing the dollar, euro and pound with gold.”

The Russian Central Bank seems to be listening. Most of these measures are already in place. And there are signs that Putin and the government are finally ready to grab the Russian oligarchy by the balls and force them to share risks and losses at an extremely difficult for the nation. Goodbye to stockpiling funds taken out of Russia offshore and in Londongrad.

Glaziev is the real deal. In December 2014 I was at a conference in Rome, and Glaziev joined us on the phone. Reviewing a subsequent column I wrote at the time, between Rome and Beijing, I was stunned: it’s as if Glaziev was saying these things literally today.

Allow me to quote two paragraphs:

“At the symposium, held in a divinely frescoed former 15th century Dominican refectory now part of the Italian parliament’s library, Sergey Glaziev, on the phone from Moscow, gave a stark reading of Cold War 2.0. There’s no real “government” in Kiev; the U.S. ambassador is in charge. An anti-Russia doctrine has been hatched in Washington to foment war in Europe – and European politicians are its collaborators. Washington wants a war in Europe because it is losing the competition with China.”

“Glaziev addressed the sanctions dementia: Russia is trying simultaneously to reorganize the politics of the International Monetary Fund, fight capital flight and minimize the effect of banks closing credit lines for many businessmen. Yet the end result of sanctions, he says, is that Europe will be the ultimate losers economically; bureaucracy in Europe has lost economic focus as American geopoliticians have taken over.”

Gotta pay the “tax on independence”

A consensus seems to be emerging in Moscow that the Russian economy will stabilize quickly, as there will be a shortage of personnel for industry and a lot of extra hands will be required. Hence no unemployment. There may be shortages, but no inflation. Sales of – Western – luxury goods have already been curtailed. Imported products will be placed under price controls. All the necessary rubles will be available though price controls – as happened in the U.S. in WWII.

A wave of nationalization of assets may be ahead. ExxonMobil announced it will withdraw from the $4 billion Sakhalin-1 project (they had bailed out on Sakhalin-2, deemed too expensive), producing 200,000 barrels of oil a day, after BP and Norway’s Equinor announced they were withdrawing from projects with Rosneft. BP was actually dreaming of taking all of Rosneft’s participation.

According to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, the Kremlin is now blocking asset sales by foreign investors looking to divest. In parallel, Rosneft, for instance, is bound to raise capital from China and India, who are already minority investors in several projects, and buy them out 100%: an excellent opportunity for Russian business.

What could be construed as the Mother of All Counter-Sanctions has not yet been announced. Deputy Chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev himself hinted all options are on the table.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, channeling the patience of 10,000 Taoist monks, still expecting the current hysteria to fade away, describes the sanctions as “some kind of a tax on independence”,

with countries barring their companies from working in Russia under “huge pressure.”

Lethal counterpunches though are not excluded. Apart from completely de-dollarizing – as Glaviev recommends – Russia may ban the export of titanium, rare earth, nuclear fuel and, already in effect, rocket engines.

Very toxic moves would include seizing all foreign assets of hostile nations; freeze all loan repayments to Western banks and place the funds in a frozen account in a Russian bank; completely ban all hostile foreign media, foreign media ownership, assorted NGOs and CIA fronts; and supply friendly nations with state of the art weapons, intel sharing and joint training and exercises.

What’s certain is that a new architecture of payment systems – as discussed by Michael Hudson and others – uniting the Russian SPFS and the Chinese CHIPS, may soon be offered to scores of nations across Eurasia and the Global South – several among them already under sanctions, such as Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, the DPRK.

Slowly but surely, we are already on the way to the emergence of a sizeable Global South bloc immune to American financial warfare.

The RIC in BRICS – Russia, India and China – are already increasing trade in their own currencies. If we look at the list of nations at the UN that voted against Russia or abstained from condemning Operation Z in Ukraine, plus those that did not sanction Russia, we have at least 70% of the whole Global South.

So once again is the West – plus satrapies/colonies such as Japan and Singapore in Asia – against the Rest: Eurasia, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America.

The coming European collapse

Michael Hudson told me, “the U.S. and Western Europe expected a Froelicher Krieg (“happy war”). Germany and other countries haven’t begun to feel the pain of gas and mineral and food deprivation. THAT’S going to be the real game. The aim would be to break Europe away from U.S. control via NATO. This will involve “meddling” by creating a New World Order political movement and party, like Communism was a century ago. You could call it a new Great Awakening.”

A possible Great Awakening certainly will not involve the NATOstan sphere anytime soon. The collective West is rather in serious Great Decoupling mode, its entire economy weaponized with the aim, expressed in the open, of destroying Russia and even – the perennial wet dream – provoking regime change.

Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the SVR, succinctly described it:

“Masks have dropped. The West is not just trying to enclose Russia with a new ‘Iron Curtain’. We are talking about attempts to destroy our state – its ‘abolition’, as it is now customary to say in the ‘tolerant’ liberal-fascist environment. Since the United States and its allies have neither the opportunity nor the spirit to try to do this in an open and honest military-political confrontation, sneaky attempts are being made to establish an economic, informational and humanitarian “blockade”’.

Arguably the apex of Western hysteria is the onset of a 2022 Neo-Nazi Jihad: a 20,000-strong mercenary army being assembled in Poland under CIA supervision. The bulk comes from private military companies such as Blackwater/Academi and DynCorp. Their cover: “return of Ukrainians from the French Foreign Legion.” This Afghan remix comes straight from the only playbook the CIA knows.

Back in reality, facts on the ground will eventually lead entire economies in the West to become roadkill – with chaos in the commodities sphere leading to skyrocketing energy and food costs. As an example, up to 60% of German and 70% of Italian manufacturing industries may be forced to shut down for good – with catastrophic social consequences.

The unelected, uber-Kafkaesque EU machine in Brussels has chosen to commit a triple hara-kiri by grandstanding as abject vassals of the Empire, destroying any remaining French and German sovereignty impulses and imposing alienation from Russia-China.

Meanwhile, Russia will be showing the way: only self-sufficiency affords total independence. And the Big Picture has also been keenly understood by the Global South: one day someone had to stand up and say, “That’s Enough”. With maximum raw power to back it up.

(Click on the image to enlarge)

The EU ban on RT and Sputnik is simply wrong and the thinking behind it draconian. What more proof do you need to see that the EU is an-anti democratic elite which hates accountability. Even in the Ukraine.

Is media playing a role in the war in Ukraine? And if so, by helping one side, or by even informing a wider international public of the important factors? Or is it feeding the hatred, misinforming the elites and decision makers and pushing Russia and Ukraine further away from any possibility of a ceasefire and talks?

I was recently taken aback by the near comical statement by the EU’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell who said that RT and Sputnik are to be banned from the EU bloc. His reasons, which RT actually broadcasted to its credit, were because “they were champions of information manipulation”.

The irony here is mind-blowing, given that Borrell himself is really a champion of disinformation and manipulating media and knows what he’s talking about when he uses phrases like that or indeed “full-out propaganda war”. In reality, any journalist who has worked in Brussels, accredited to the EU, will tell you that the PR efforts of the EU institutions – in particular the European Commission – amount to a colossal media manipulation which culminates in fake news being pumped out to the masses across the bloc each day, sexing up the relevance and status of the EU as journalists essentially replicate information which is spoon-fed to them and never question its validity.

Borrell’s statement is a triumph of both irony and cheek. The nerve of this socialist politician who hardly has a squeaky clean past himself in his own country, is pretty amazing given that the EU itself spends billions on subsidising production costs of TV journalists and their teams in Brussels to report on the minutia of day-to-day activities in the EU institutions forcing journalists not to ‘bite the hand which feeds them’ when it comes to their reporting.

Moreover, in recent years, with more and more MEPs from far right or populist parties swelling the ranks in the European Parliament, the same institution voted to find more money to pump into the die-hard Europhile news agencies willing to go the extra mile in copy/pasting the tome of EU fodder fed to the journalists each day. There was actually a report in 2016, which was voted on and backed, which became the framework to set up a secret anti-Russia media unit, made up of barking mad MEPs, obsessed with Russia. It’s unclear just how much money though was allocated to it, or even what it specifically does, although it is the author’s view that it funds internet trolls to “inform” the gullible public through the comments sections of online articles and support outlets themselves.

Perhaps more worrying that this obsession with RT is how MEPs have voiced their own opinions through “own initiative reports” to actually fund EU-friendly media outlets with cash outright. The parliament has not officially backed this, but one could argue that the 2016 report was a signal to pour more illicit money the way of broadcasters with production facilities and one has to ask whether the Russia “watchdog” which the MEPs did set up doesn’t do this already. The EU, which claims to be a leader of human rights, liberties and democratic values, is so corrupt and backward that it won’t reveal any of the details about the program.

But what does the move by the EU say about both the war in Ukraine and the attitude of the EU towards how its citizens should be informed (if at all)? I would argue that the West in general is so afraid of its own elites losing their grip of power that they believe an obliteration of any media coverage which doesn’t correspond with their narrative is the only recourse they are able to take. Borrell’s statement showed the EU to be in a particularly weak position, if it needs to stoop so low and try and destroy RT’s coverage and perspective on Ukraine. Borrell wants the EU to control minds, in exactly the way he accuses Putin and being the “Thought Police” on Ukraine, via media manipulation, is how he seeks to achieve this.

We have seen this already happen in Syria. Both the East and West’s governments and leaders found great solace and comfort in a polarised media coverage system which didn’t encourage journalists to “cross a line” to the other side to balance their reporting. The result is that either side’s reporting is tainted at best and vociferously biased at worst. But at least readers could look at both side’s coverage and try and fill in the spaces themselves – hardly an ideal way of reporting or reading about complicated conflicts, but better than nothing.

The decision to ban RT and Sputnik is the “nothing” model which Borrell wants. His goal is to whitewash out any other views whatsoever for European citizens who are searching for facts and want to examine the version of events from the other side. To argue that RT’s perspective is distorted because it represents the Kremlin is stupid, naive and hypocritical; the State Department has been reporting on wars with a fervent U.S. bias for decades, just as the BBC has a British angle, or F24 a French one, or even the Germans at DW. So what that the Russians are biased? The West, by banning them, shows us all how afraid and ineffective such institutions like the European Commission are as if they are to lower themselves to those they supposedly mock and despise, does that not make them the same? For the EU to take this position just states the obvious. It wants to manipulate the news for its own political agenda and it has learnt in Brussels that if you stamp out all descent, you can manipulate a phalanx of journalists to report your views, ideas and bigoted opinions and basically make up the news wholesale. Since 2005, when German investigative journalist Hans-Martin Tillack was arrested – yes, arrested – by Belgian police on dubious charges, simply because he rejected the model which nearly all adhere to on reporting on the EU, not one journalist has assiduously reported on the EU and its corruption ever since.

The model of “disinformation” which Borrell outlines when talks about Russia, is precisely, to the letter, the modus operandi which Brussels has itself.

The EU is, in a nutshell, a champion of fake news and it reacting this way towards RT is a reaction from a losing team, possessed with insecurity, jealousy and petulance and one that hates accountability as much as it hates the truth. So typically EU. Keep a keen eye for EU-organised press junkets direct from Brussels, which I’m sure are going to kick off soon. But don’t expect on air declarations by journalists that their trip was entirely funded by the EU, probably from the secret Russian “watchdog” unit.

Three developments in the past week herald a profound shift in European politics. It is tempting, but ultimately futile, to contextually place this shift as a reaction to the Russian decision to launch military operations in Ukraine. The pretext only provides the alibi, while the shift is anchored on power play and has a dynamic of its own.

Without doubt, the three developments — Germany’s decision to step up its militarisation, the European Union’s (EU) decision to finance arms supplies to Ukraine and Germany’s historic decision to reverse its policy not to supply weapons to conflict zones — mark a radical departure in European politics since World War II.

In a speech Sunday during a special session of parliament in Berlin on Germany’s response to the situation around Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a plan to beef up German military, earmarking for the armed forces an additional €100 billion ($112.7 billion) out of the 2022 budget as a one-time allocation and underscoring his promise to reach the 2% of gross domestic product spending on defence. He said the additional spending would include investments and armaments projects for the German military.

As for the rationale behind the decision, Scholz said, “It’s clear we need to invest significantly more in the security of our country in order to protect our freedom and our democracy.” As it is, Germany has a record high defence budget (€53 billion) for the current year, which is an increase of 3.2% over the previous year. The proposed €100 billion additional financial outlay will boost acquisition of drones, new fighter jets, etc. and fund investments in medium and long term defence build-up. Scholz also committed that the hiked up defence spending of 2% of GDP is going to be a permanent norm.

Germany is belatedly complying with the former U.S. President Donald Trump’s persistent demand! No doubt, the decision will immensely please Washington. It conveys German commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and helps silence the criticism in the U.S. that Germany has lately turned into a disloyal ally.

On the German government’s decision to directly supply weapons to Ukrainian troops, Scholz claimed, “We need to support Ukraine in its hour of desperate need.” He squarely blamed Russia for this important policy reversal. Additionally, Berlin also signalled that third countries could transfer German-made weapons to Ukraine, whereas previously such permission had been denied.

The argument that Germany intends to secure peace in Europe by this policy reversal is spurious but Scholz is getting away with it. In reality, Scholz has overturned a long-standing German policy that was rooted in Germany’s history as an aggressor during World War II and for which there is significant public support still within Germany. To be sure, this clever move will help boost Germany’s performance as an arms exporter in the global market and is a boon to the corporate industry.

Germany already figures as the fourth biggest arms exporter in the world, ahead of China. Germany’s arms exports reached record levels in 2021, following significant sales of maritime and air defence weapons to Egypt last year. Germany exported arms worth 9.35 billion euros ($10.65 billion) last year, an increase of 61% compared to 2020. This topped the previous record amount of 8 billion euros in 2019.

Germany’s military build-up is a poignant issue in European politics, and what trajectory it will take once the dust settles in Ukraine, only time can tell. Of course, there is no question of going back. But with the U.S. in decline and France and Britain becoming much diminished players in recent years, Germany’s surge as a superpower will change the power dynamic. Thus, it is no longer possible to take for granted Germany’s nuclear latency — being a “paranuclear” state with complete technical prowess to develop a nuclear weapon quickly.

The thinking toward a military build-up, the need for Germany to be a “forceful” participant in global politics and the jettisoning of its guilt complex and get “combat ready” — all these by far predate the current situation around Ukraine. What has been happening is that a new generation has appeared at the helm of German politics, replacing the Old Guard. Alongside, the “grand coalitions” running the country have narrowed the ideological divide between the CDU and the SPD.

Today, the SPD is only notionally “left wing” and is actually an enthusiastic promoter of Germany’s rearmament, as much as the CDU. As for the guilt complex, it has vanished from the German political ecosystem. Curiously, Germany’s former defence minister from CDU, Ursula von der Leyen had a Nazi ancestry to claim both on her side and her husband’s side. But that hardly mattered when Angela Merkel assigned to her the job of running the Bundeswehr for seven years.

By the way, von der Leyen’s grandfather was a Nazi who volunteered to fight in 1940, became a staff sergeant in the Wehrmacht and led a so-called “anti-partisan” unit on the eastern Soviet front hunting down resistance groups, participated in the capture of Ukraine’s capital Kiev and took part in the barbaric September 1941 Babi Yar massacre, in which more than 33,000 Jewish inhabitants of Kiev were shot in cold blood. It’s said that “Until his death he would rant about Jews, the French and the perfidious Albion. He never left the country again and he’d be in a near panic when coming close to a border.”

Yet, von der Leyen would co-habit comfortably in the CDU-SPD grand coalition under Merkel with the then Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who was from SPD — the party of Willy Brandt, known as reformists and moderates! In fact, Steinmeier himself maintained — and still does as President of Germany — good personal equations with the leadership of Svoboda, the Neo-Nazi faction in Ukraine.

That is why Germany’s growing stature as the driving force in the EU will remake European politics. Von der Leyen’s current term as the president of the EU Commission, heading the bureaucracy in Brussels, gives her a pivotal role and it runs till December 2024. The body language of her last week’s announcements regarding Ukraine and her performance at the recent Munich Security Conference betrayed that she takes a vicarious pleasure to insult Russia and its leadership, as if it is a private crusade for her to settle scores for the defeat of Nazi Germany at the hands of the Red Army. Unsurprisingly, she has become Washington’s darling in Europe, more important than the German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock or Scholz himself.

However, the big question is: How will Germany’s growing national pride — Deutscher Nationalismus — work with the EU’s consensual politics? It remains to be seen how far the EU can come to terms with the German ambitions, once the genie leaps out of the bottle. Clearly, one alternative will be to divert the explosive energy toward external activities. That is where the EU decision to fund arms supplies to conflict zones and so on opens a new vista.

Without doubt, the EU reaction to the Ukraine situation is by far disproportional. Germany used the present crisis to surge. The EU, in turn, has been lulled into the (false) belief that it now wields the big stick from Brussels — although a European consensus on foreign policy still remains elusive. In normal times, such radical EU moves or the German militarisation itself might have met with some degree of unease or discussion. But France is caught up in an election cycle. And Germany has brusquely crossed the Rubicon when the weather turned favourable.

Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy that “the successor to politics will be propaganda” has happened.  Raw propaganda is now the rule in Western democracies, especially the US and Britain On matters of war and peace, ministerial deceit is reported as news. Inconvenient facts are censored, demons are nurtured. The model is corporate spin, the currency of the age. In 1964, McLuhan famously declared, “The medium is the message.” The lie is the message now.

But is this new? It is more than a century since Edward Bernays, the father of spin, invented “public relations” as a cover for war propaganda. What is new is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream.

The great editor David Bowman, author of The Captive Press, called this “a defenestration of all who refuse to follow a line and to swallow the unpalatable and are brave”. He was referring to independent journalists and whistle blowers, the honest mavericks to whom media organisations once gave space, often with pride. The space has been abolished.

The war hysteria that has rolled in like a tidal wave in recent weeks and months is the most striking example. Known by its jargon, “shaping the narrative”, much if not most of it is pure propaganda.

The Russians are coming. Russia is worse than bad. Putin is evil, “a Nazi like Hitler”, salivated the Labour MP Chris Bryant. Ukraine is about to be invaded by Russia – tonight, this week, next week. The sources include an ex CIA propagandist who now speaks for the US State Department and offers no evidence of his claims about Russian actions because “it comes from the US Government”.

The no-evidence rule also applies in London. The British Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, who spent £500,000 of public money flying to Australia in a private plane to warn the Canberra government that both Russia and China were about to pounce,  offered no evidence. Antipodean heads nodded; the “narrative” is unchallenged there. One rare exception, former prime minister Paul Keating, called Truss’s warmongering “demented”.

Truss has blithely confused the countries of the Baltic and Black Sea. In Moscow, she told the Russian foreign minister that Britain would never accept Russian sovereignty over Rostov and Voronezh – until it was pointed out to her that these places were not part of Ukraine but in Russia. Read the Russian press about the buffoonery of this pretender to 10 Downing Street and cringe.

This entire farce, recently starring Boris Johnson in Moscow playing a clownish version of his hero, Churchill, might be enjoyed as satire were it not for its wilful abuse of facts and historical understanding and the real danger of war.

Vladimir Putin refers to the “genocide” in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. Following the coup in Ukraine in 2014 – orchestrated by Barack Obama’s “point person” in Kyiv, Victoria Nuland – the coup regime, infested with neo-Nazis, launched a campaign of terror against Russian-speaking Donbas, which accounts for a third of Ukraine’s population.

Overseen by CIA director John Brennan in Kyiv, “special security units” coordinated savage attacks on the people of Donbas, who opposed the coup. Video and eyewitness reports show bussed fascist thugs burning the trade union headquarters in the city of Odessa, killing 41 people trapped inside. The police are standing by. Obama congratulated the “duly elected” coup regime for its “remarkable restraint”.

In the US media the Odessa atrocity was played down as “murky” and a “tragedy” in which “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) attacked “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says”.

Professor Stephen Cohen, acclaimed as America’s leading authority on Russia, wrote, “The pogrom-like burning to death of ethnic Russians and others in Odessa reawakened memories of Nazi extermination squads in Ukraine during world war two. [Today] storm-like assaults on gays, Jews, elderly ethnic Russians, and other ‘impure’ citizens are widespread throughout Kyiv-ruled Ukraine, along with torchlight marches reminiscent of those that eventually inflamed Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s …

“The police and official legal authorities do virtually nothing to prevent these neo-fascist acts or to prosecute them. On the contrary, Kyiv has officially encouraged them by systematically rehabilitating and even memorialising Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi German extermination pogroms, renaming streets in their honour, building monuments to them, rewriting history to glorify them, and more.”

Today, neo-Nazi Ukraine is seldom mentioned. That the British are training the Ukrainian National Guard, which includes neo-Nazis, is not news. (See Matt Kennard’s Declassified report in Consortium 15 February). The return  of violent, endorsed fascism to 21st-century Europe, to quote Harold Pinter, “never happened … even while it was happening”.

On 16 December, the United Nations tabled a resolution that called for “combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism”. The only nations to vote against it were the United States and Ukraine.

Almost every Russian knows that it was across the plains of Ukraine’s “borderland” that Hitler’s divisions swept from the west in 1941, bolstered by Ukraine’s Nazi cultists and collaborators. The result was more than 20 million Russian dead.

Setting aside the manoeuvres and cynicism of geopolitics, whomever the players, this historical memory is the driving force behind Russia’s respect-seeking, self-protective security proposals, which were published in Moscow in the week the UN voted 130-2 to outlaw Nazism. They are:

+ NATO guarantees that it will not deploy missiles in nations bordering Russia. (They are already in place from Slovenia to Romania, with Poland to follow)

+ NATO to stop military and naval exercises in nations and seas bordering Russia.

+ Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.

+ the West and Russia to sign a binding East-West security pact.

+ the landmark treaty between the US and Russia covering intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be restored. (The US abandoned it in 2019)

These amount to a comprehensive draft of a peace plan for all of post-war Europe and ought to be welcomed in the West. But who understands their significance in Britain? What they are told is that Putin is a pariah and a threat to Christendom.

Russian-speaking Ukrainians, under economic blockade by Kyiv for seven years, are fighting for their survival. The “massing” army we seldom hear about are the thirteen Ukrainian army brigades laying siege to Donbas: an estimated 150,000 troops. If they attack, the provocation to Russia will almost certainly mean war.

In 2015, brokered by the Germans and French, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France met in Minsk and signed an interim peace deal. Ukraine agreed to offer autonomy to Donbas, now the self declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The Minsk agreement has never been given a chance. In Britain, the line,  amplified by Boris Johnson, is that Ukraine is being “dictated to” by world leaders. For its part, Britain is arming Ukraine and training its army.

Since the first Cold War, NATO has effectively marched right up to Russia’s most sensitive border having demonstrated its bloody aggression in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and broken solemn promises to pull back.  Having dragged European “allies” into American wars that do not concern them, the great unspoken is that NATO itself is the real threat to European security.

In Britain, a state and media xenophobia is triggered at the very mention of “Russia”. Mark the knee-jerk hostility with which the BBC reports Russia. Why? Is it because the restoration of imperial mythology demands, above all, a permanent enemy? Certainly, we deserve better

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