U.S. President Joe Biden came to Europe last week riding high on European deference towards America’s leadership. Then he went to Warsaw to make a victory lap speech at the weekend which was billed as marking the high point in galvanizing European and NATO unity towards Russia.

But the climax cratered like a house of cards. As the president was boarding Air Force One to take him home, the much-vaunted transatlantic unity was in disarray from Biden’s cack-handed big moment.

It reminds one of former President Barack Obama’s cautionary words in appraising Biden. “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” said Obama of his former vice president and his gaffe-prone big mouth.

Biden’s speech in Warsaw was a carefully crafted rousing one. It was of course littered with mangled words as is Biden’s rambling style, and laden with the usual banal American arrogance about leading the free world against evil dictators. Nevertheless, he also appeared to succeed in rallying the unity of the U.S. and its allies in facing down alleged Russian aggression. That unity certainly seemed remarkable with regard to NATO’s and the European Union’s response to Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine. The Europeans have ratcheted up economic sanctions against Russia at the behest of Washington; they are buying up U.S. weapons and set to import American energy instead of Russian.

It was all going swimmingly well until the very end of the speech when Biden suddenly went off script and, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin, declared: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

There it is. Regime change, according to Biden. European allies have recoiled in embarrassment over the clumsy admission. Britain, France, Germany and the European Union have all said they repudiate the objective. The distancing from Washington is not so much out of principle but rather out of the bad political look.

After weeks of an intense Western media campaign projecting the policy as supposedly defending Ukraine (and European democracy), the U.S. president was letting it be known that the real endgame is regime change in Moscow.

Just like the Biden order to pull out from Afghanistan last year, the European leaders are left looking like bystanders at a bus stop. Washington calls the shots without even the pretense of consulting its vassals.

At the end of a European tour deemed up to that point to be a stunning success for the American president owing to the fawning deference he was shown days before, and just at the very end of a set-piece address choreographed for the history books, Joe Biden blew it.

The White House immediately swung into damage-limitation mode, urgently clarifying that the president did not actually mean regime change. Biden himself denied that he was referring to regime change when he got back to the U.S. But even sycophantic news outlets admitted the difficulty in trying to spin any other literal meaning.

Biden’s knack for putting his foot in his mouth has been around for a long time during 50 years as a politician. It can’t be simply explained as a sign of senility although the recent frequency of gaffes suggests his mental acuity is waning with his 79-year-old age. During his first year-and-half as 46th president, administration aides have countless times had to clean up sloppy remarks. In one notorious clanger, he appeared to repudiate Washington’s decades-old One China Policy, saying the U.S. would militarily defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion from the mainland.

The laugh is Biden touts himself as a “foreign policy expert” from his many years as a Senator and roving ambassador before he entered the White House, first as vice president under Obama and now as the president.

If this is American expertise, then what does incompetence look like? At a time of extremely sensitive U.S.-Russian relations, Biden has called Putin “a killer” and “war criminal”. On the weekend before his regime-change manifesto was announced, he labeled the Russian president a “butcher” and compared the Kremlin with the Third Reich.

The hypocrisy of Biden is bad enough. He has endorsed endless criminal U.S. wars and regime-change operations that have resulted in millions of deaths and whole nations destroyed. For Biden to call anyone a war criminal and butcher is too nauseating for irony.

But it is contemptible that the Ukraine conflict is reduced by Biden to simplistic caricatures in total denial of how the U.S.-led NATO alliance has largely created the confrontation with Russia.

Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken was among the damage-limitation squad over the weekend’s incendiary remarks. Blinken had the temerity to say: “We don’t have a strategy of regime change in Russia or anywhere else.” That’s from Blinken who helped engineer the regime-change wars in Libya and Syria while Biden was vice president.

The Ukraine conflict is only a part of a bigger picture of U.S. hostility towards Russia. Washington and its European minions have tried to portray NATO’s eastward expansion over the years as an innocent development of a defensive nature.

Moscow has repeatedly denounced NATO’s stance as aggressive and an existential threat to Russian national security. When the Kremlin proposed a security treaty at the end of last year, it was rebuffed by Washington and NATO. That inevitably led to the war in Ukraine as a defensive counter-measure by Russia.

Biden just ripped off the wrapping on the policy. In one fell swoop, he just proved what Russia has been saying. His admission of regime change against Russia is an admission of violating the UN Charter and international law. The European leaders are aghast not because they are against such criminality. Their concern is that they too are exposed as being complicit in a criminal conspiracy. They fear how their public will react to that imperial agenda. Is this what economic sanctions and resulting energy price inflation are for?

Good old Joe, screwing it up – again. Just when Uncle Sam had the Europeans corralled under supposed American leadership, the imperial agenda blows up in their face.

This also explains why the Zelensky regime in Kiev is procrastinating and avoiding political settlement of the conflict. Settlement is not in Washington’s interest. It wants the proxy war to continue because the real aim is to use Ukraine as a cat’s paw to destabilize Russia. Zelensky and Kiev can’t make the peace because that’s not what their handlers in Washington are after. Washington wants and needs permanent tensions and conflict (short of all-out war) with Russia.

After Biden’s charade-busting admission, however, it will be difficult politically to maintain US-European “unity” over such a flagrant imperial agenda.

U.S. President Joe Biden flew to Europe this week with the presidential nuclear codes on display by his entourage. Among the fleet of presidential aircraft was the “doomsday plane” – a specially fitted-out Boeing 747 capable of withstanding nuclear radiation and serving, if-needs-be, as a “Pentagon in the sky”.

Biden attended three back-to-back emergency summits of the G7, NATO and the European Union leaders in Brussels. It was reportedly the first time an American president has ever been invited to attend such an EU leaders’ summit.

There was a palpable sense of over-the-top contrived drama regarding the ongoing war in Ukraine. Russia’s military intervention in that country is now in its fourth week. Moscow has claimed reasons of self-defense and protection of Russian-speaking people in Donbass from a NATO-backed Nazi regime in Kiev.

The Western media and their governments, on the other hand, have claimed Russia’s actions are unprovoked aggression and the worst episode of barbarism since the Second World War. There is feverish Western media fears of Russia deploying chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. There are also hysterical fears of Russia next attacking Poland, the Baltics, and the rest of Europe.

Western media are portraying Biden’s visit to Europe as a replay of the supposed American defense of Europe from Nazism and Communism.

This is an incredible distortion by the Western media. The whole background of the conflict in Ukraine fomented by the U.S. and NATO over the past three decades has been scrubbed into a memory hole. So too scrubbed is the U.S. and NATO blitzkrieg on Yugoslavia whose 23rd anniversary occurred this week. The aggressive expansionism of NATO and hostility towards Russia have culminated in the present war in Ukraine. Yet Western media present this as due to alleged one-sided Russian aggression and maniacal tyranny in Moscow.

During his half-century career as a politician, Joe Biden fervently backed the U.S. and NATO war in Yugoslavia, as well as countless other criminal imperialist wars and regime-change operations. He is personally responsible for fomenting the coup regime in Kiev from 2014 onwards. The U.S. and NATO weaponization of Ukraine, including the functioning of Pentagon-sponsored biowarfare laboratories, is associated with Biden’s direct involvement in supporting the anti-Russian Kiev regime and its Nazi paramilitaries.

The irony of Biden warning about Russia using WMDs in Ukraine is sickening beyond words. The jihadist terrorists whom the US backed in Syria were responsible for atrocities with chemical weapons as provocations for NATO bombing of Syria. Biden’s son, Hunter, is implicated in funding bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine through his Pentagon-connected capital investment firm, Seneca.

And yet despite this flagrant imperial corruption and criminality, Biden was welcomed this week by European leaders who are demonstrating beyond doubt that they are nothing but an embarrassing collection of vassals.

The upshot is that Biden is selling massively more American weapons to Europe than ever before. He is sending more U.S. troops to European bases. The EU has imposed way more sanctions on Russia than the United States has, thus inflicting much more damage on European economies than the American one. Biden is to sign new deals with Europe on supplying American gas exports that are more expensive than Russian gas. The killing off of European-Russian energy trade is the crowning achievement for American imperialist interests.

Across the European Union, draconian media censorship has blacked out entirely the Russian news outlets Sputnik and RT. European citizens are being denied any alternative information or analysis. What the EU is doing is far more repressive than what the U.S. is even doing in terms of censoring media. European so-called democracy is coming out of the closet as proto-fascism.

It is a pathetic spectacle. European governments are prostrated before the American empire.

It is blatant what President Biden is asserting. A new Cold War that is reshaping Europe under American hegemony, selling weapons and expensive gas to Europe while excluding Russia from developing any normal relations with its continental neighbors. The war in Ukraine has been a long time coming because of U.S. policies facilitated by politicians like Joe Biden and Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State who led the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, who died this week.

It is incredible that not one of the incumbent European Union leaders has voiced criticism or dissent from the U.S.-contrived new Cold War. Of course not. They are bought and paid for like the whores they are, while their populations suffer from poverty, militarism, and the shadow of nuclear war.

The European leaders are like quislings licking the boot of their master. Their abject subjugation is emboldening American imperial warmongering against Russia. They seem willing to let their own people suffer the consequences of U.S.-led conflict, even to the point of facilitating a Third World War in Europe.

There is a misconception that fascism in Europe was somehow a unique development in Nazi Germany. The Third Reich had many European collaborators in Poland, the Baltics, Italy, France, Spain, and other covert sources like the British establishment during the 1930s.

U.S. and Western media present Biden and the European so-called leaders as a model of democracy and righteousness. The truth is we are seeing the return to fascism in Europe under the leadership of U.S. hegemony. When Biden took up office in the White House in January 2021, he declared, “America is back”. For anyone paying attention to history and U.S. power ambitions that kind of jingoistic bragging was seen as ominous. It’s becoming more ominous from every step the U.S. takes to wind up reckless tensions with Russia and indeed China.

America is back all right, and the European vassals are on their backs, and also their fronts… because, you know, we have to be gender pluralist in our new touchy-feely fascist era.

What’s even more shameful is the European political class is acting as a doormat for American imperialism against the urgent interests of European citizens. The ultimate interest is one of having peace. That contradiction is a harbinger of massive social upheaval across Europe in revolt against their treacherous leaders.

Only three days before NATO military chiefs met in Brussels, they saw in a ferocious display what would happen if they continue pumping weapons into Ukraine. A key base used by the U.S.-led alliance for training and as a hub for weapons supply to Ukraine was completely destroyed.

What’s more, the devastating airstrike on the Yavoriv base only 25 kilometers from the Polish border was carried out with cruise missiles launched from Russian airspace. That means the missiles traveled up to 1,000 km across Ukraine from east to west and were able to pinpoint the target.

The destruction of the large installation occurred on March 13. The NATO defense chiefs met in Brussels on March 16. Subsequent rather flat statements from Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary-general, on what the alliance would offer Ukraine in further military support suggests the Russian strike hit home.

NATO has been pumping weapons and trainers into Ukraine over the past year. The facility at Yavoriv in the western Lviv Oblast was a major training center where troops from the United States, Britain, Canada and other NATO members had been mentoring Ukrainian forces. This relentless weaponization of Ukraine by Western powers and the undermining of a peace deal with Russian separatists in the Donbass region inevitably led to the ongoing military intervention by Russia, now in its third week.

Only hours before the air raid on the NATO staging post in Yavoriv, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov warned that any arms shipments into Ukraine from neighboring NATO countries would be viewed as legitimate targets.

The Russian military claimed that the airstrike killed 180 foreign mercenaries as well as a large amount of NATO weaponry. Western media reported “35 people” dead and over 100 injured. Note how Western media seem to play down the otherwise well-documented presence of Neo-Nazi mercenaries who have come from all over the world to Ukraine to fight as NATO foot-soldiers.

It is not known if NATO officers were among the dead. The alliance claims that it has no personnel currently in Ukraine, having withdrawn them in mid-February before the Russian intervention began on February 24.

It can be gleaned, however, from Western media reports that the flattening of the large base was a fearsome display of Russia’s modern firepower. Reports cited Ukrainian military sources as claiming that most of the incoming missiles were shot down. That seems implausible considering the images in Western media reports of widespread destruction at the large facility.

A Reuters report quoted a Ukrainian officer Colonel Leonid Benzalo who survived the strike. He told how the dormitory and dining area were destroyed and how he was thrown across the room.

Another person, Dukhnych Vitalii, a 19-year-old student, who lives near the base told the BBC how he was awakened by the explosions and the “sky turning red”. He said there were no warning sirens before the attack.

Those observations indicate the base was hit in surprise. No sirens, no defensive systems triggered. All missiles struck the target. The cruise missiles flew across Ukraine from Russian airspace undetected and hit their target with spectacular precision. That’s consistent with earlier Russian claims of having knocked out all Ukrainian air defenses.

The fact of Yavoriv base being so close to the Polish border and the Russians carrying out the strike suggests they were confident that there would be no stray missiles. If one had hit Poland by mistake then that could be invoked as a casus belli for NATO to get involved under its collective defense provision.

What this means is that Russia just gave the U.S. and its NATO allies a clear and grave warning. Any weapons or mercenaries being sent into Ukraine no matter how far removed from Russia’s main forces in the east of Ukraine and no matter how close to NATO borders, we will destroy – completely.

That warning seemed to have been registered with the NATO military leaders. Their summit in Brussels this week produced mealymouthed platitudes of supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia but not much else in practical measures.

This leaves the United States and its allies with a huge conundrum. This week President Joe Biden announced another $1 billion in military aid to the Kiev regime. This “unprecedented” support is on top of an estimated $1 billion in military aid that the Biden administration has already funneled into Ukraine over the last year. The president said there would be thousands more units of long-range anti-aircraft munitions and anti-tank Javelin missiles on the way.

U.S. government-owned Radio Free Europe reported: “Biden said Ukraine will receive an additional 800 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, 9,000 anti-tank weapons, 7,000 light weapons, and 20 million rounds of ammunition.”

Following the shock-and-awe Russian air raid on Yavoriv, the White House also indicated that foreign fighters sent to Ukraine may be trained in “third countries”.

That still leaves Washington and NATO supporters of the Kiev regime with a massive logistical problem. How to get all those weapons and would-be foreign fighters into Ukrainian territory without being blown apart by Russian cruise missiles?

Unless, of course, the calculus is a willingness by the U.S. and its allies to go to war with Russia. That seems remote because Washington knows it would lead to nuclear annihilation. Hence the continued rejection of Kiev’s appeals for a NATO-enforced No Fly Zone in Ukraine.

In that case, there is only one viable course to take. The United States and its NATO allies need to stop the flow of weapons to Ukraine and let the Kiev regime know that it must negotiate a peace settlement with Moscow.

Polish shenanigans over sending fighter jets to Ukraine earned a sharp rebuke from the Pentagon. And then as if to underline the awkward ramifications of the spat, Vice President Kamala Harris was quickly flown to Warsaw on a damage-limitation task to patch up NATO unity.

It looks like both the Americans and the Poles got cold feet about a ploy to send fighter jets into Ukraine to contest airspace with Russian forces. With the Russian command claiming to have knocked out 90 percent of Ukrainian military airbases since its incursion on February 24, any such supply of warplanes from NATO members would be tantamount to a kamikaze mission.

Moreover, the move would mark a dangerous escalation of NATO involvement in a war with Russia, potentially pitting both sides in direct conflict. That could result in a Third World War. Notably, this risk of being embroiled in a wider war was highlighted by Polish President Andrzej Duda on March 1 in a joint press conference with NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg.

However, something changed in that wary calculus. Last weekend, the U.S. and Poland were reportedly having deep discussions about a plan to send MiG-29 fighter jets from the Polish Warsaw Pact inventory for deployment in Ukraine. The Soviet-era MiGs are what Ukrainian pilots are trained to fly. Washington was keen on the idea because it was being presented as a “sovereign decision” by Poland to assist Ukraine on a bilateral level. That meant that the U.S. and NATO would be distanced from the supply of warplanes.

A second incentive for Washington was that the Polish MiG fleet would be “backfilled” by U.S. F-16s. From a cynical point of view, the deal looked lucrative as well as tactical. The Polish MiGs flown by Ukrainians might cause some combat problems for Russia in the short term, but even if they were destroyed by Russian forces the replacement of the Polish fleet with new F-16s would be a boon for the U.S. military-industrial complex in the long term.

Somehow though the Poles suddenly got cold feet, perhaps realizing that their involvement on a “sovereign bilateral basis” could leave them potentially vulnerable to Russian counter-attack without the insurance policy of NATO’s Article V collective defense. Trustworthiness is not exactly Uncle Sam’s strong point.

Then came the embarrassing switch that caught Washington off-guard. Without consulting the Americans, the Poles offered to send the MiG-29s first to the U.S. airbase in Germany’s Ramstein and from there on to Ukraine.

The Pentagon’s slap-down to Warsaw was swift and emphatic. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told his Polish counterpart that such an idea was “untenable” and he “stressed that we do not support the transfer of additional fighter aircraft to the Ukrainian air force at this time, and therefore have no desire to see them in our custody either.”

Evidently, Washington got leery about the prospect of sending warplanes from one of its bases into a battle zone with Russia. Up to now, the U.S. has been transferring billions of dollars worth of weapons to the Kiev regime which have in turn been deployed against Moscow-backed Russian separatists in Ukraine’s southeast Donbass region (now independent republics recognized by Moscow as of February 21). Nevertheless, Washington could claim that the military aid so far is defensive weaponry. Sending warplanes, however, from a U.S. airbase is taking the involvement to a higher level risking escalation.

Moreover what seems to have irked the Americans though is how the Poles maneuvered to set them up. Obviously, the Poles didn’t trust what Washington was assigning them to do, and then the Americans were hacked off when the Poles came up with an alternative plan for deploying warplanes to Ukraine that might jeopardize the U.S..

Following the Pentagon rebuke, Poland’s ambassador to the United States Marek Magierowski alluded to the shenanigans in an interview with CNN on March 9. He said Poland was “acutely aware” of the consequences – meaning possible armed conflict with Russia.

Pointedly, the Polish envoy revealed: “We were under immense pressure on the part of our allies, and public opinion also here in the United States. And we were acutely aware of all technical, legal, and diplomatic consequences of such a move, which was risky, of course. That is why we came up with a logical, conscionable solution [of going via the U.S. base in Germany]. Our American partners rejected this proposal because they have come to the conclusion that it was too escalatory [sic]. Well, we understand this, and I believe that we can continue coordinating our joint efforts with our American partners and with other NATO members in order to help the Ukrainians defend themselves as effectively as possible.”

What this means is the Poles didn’t trust the Americans over the idea of “sovereign bilateral” involvement, as Washington was initially recommending regarding the supply of MiGs to Ukraine. And when the Poles sought to find American cover by involving the U.S. as the warplane conduit, the Biden administration balked big time and with a big measure of contempt for Warsaw trying to get smart on Uncle Sam.

Kamala Harris, the U.S. Vice President, has been dispatched in a hurry to Warsaw to patch up any ill-feeling. Such is the desperation in the Biden administration to project NATO unity towards Russia. Given her ineptitude, it would be imprudent to count on Harris succeeding in smoothing things over.

It can also be reasonably conjectured that Berlin was not pleased either by the U.S.-Polish ploy to send warplanes against Russia from its territory. The Germans can feel aggrieved that NATO allies were putting a target on their back.

But this is not the end of it. The Americans and their NATO partners are reportedly going back to the drawing board to find more inventive ways of sending warplanes to Ukraine for combat against Russia without overt NATO involvement. This might involve sending plane parts that are assembled in Ukraine or Ukrainian pilots flying fighter jets from NATO countries. The British too are this week sending new inventories of anti-aircraft weapons. NATO is sliding towards open conflict with Russia.

As the first waves of at least 2,000 US troops began arriving in Poland at the start of this week as part of the mission to bolster NATO’s ‘eastern flank’ amid Washington fears that Russia is poised to invade Ukraine “any day now” – the Western military alliance says its mulling a longer term military presence in Eastern Europe.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg indicated Monday that a “longer term” presence may be needed in Eastern Europe and that Brussels is reviewing the strategy as part of its force posture in face of Russia.

“We are considering more longer-term adjustments to our posture, our presence in the eastern part of the alliance. No final decision has been made on that but there is a process now going on within NATO,” Stoltenberg said at a press conference alongside Polish President Andrzej Duda.

Talking ‘tough’ at a moment France’s Macron was seeking a diplomatic breakthrough in his Monday summit with Putin in Moscow, Stoltenberg said, “If Russia really wants less NATO close to the borders, they get the opposite.”

This would mean that NATO troops rotated into the region would stay longer, or on a more permanent basis. Stoltenberg described NATO is considering the “deployment of additional battlegroups to the south-eastern part of the Alliance” a reference to Black Sea countries of Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey.

While meeting with President Duda, Poland confirmed that troops from the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division began arriving near the country over the weekend, touching down at a base near the Poland-Ukraine border.

Stoltenberg hailed the fresh US deployment as “a powerful demonstration of American commitment to our alliance. Other allies are also contributing more forces to NATO on land, in the air, and at sea.” This also as the UK has committed a few hundred additional troops to Poland.

Ministry of National Defense of Poland: Successive transports of U.S. equipment and troops reach Poland https://t.co/HAaUGp04XQ via @MON_GOV_PL pic.twitter.com/tNX9kwieDa

— Liveuamap (@Liveuamap) February 8, 2022

So far, however, a matter of a few thousand extra troops Biden has ordered deployed to Eastern Europe is still just enough for symbolic posturing, and could do little to deter an actual Russian invasion of Ukraine if it ever materialized. The Kremlin has insisted there are no plans for such an offensive.

zerohedge.com

(Click on the image to enlarge)

In the depths of eastern Europe’s bitter winter, Polish troops fired tear gas and thousands of litres of icy water from vehicle-mounted cannon brought up to the border with Belarus where hundreds of refugees from the Middle East were trying to get into civilised Europe via Poland. The refugees, already trembling with cold in freezing temperatures, were soaked to the skin. Their plight was indescribable. And the U.S.-Nato military alliance reacted to the humanitarian crisis by increasing the level of its confrontation with Russia.

Secretary General Stoltenberg held a meeting of European defence ministers and declared “We stand in solidarity with Poland and other affected allies” while the U.S. official outlet, Radio Free Europe (annual government allocation $124 million) reported in justification of Poland’s water-cannon barrage that “The impact of a stone thrown by a migrant was so forceful that one officer’s helmet was damaged, police said following similar clashes in recent days.”

Make no mistake, the ruler of Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko, is a malevolent lamebrain whose approach to human rights and society is entirely negative. But at least he didn’t order his troops to spray freezing water over unarmed civilians whose suffering should have attracted sympathy and energetic assistance rather than lip-smacking publicity statements from such as Lithuania’s foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, who declared on November 15 that “it is very likely that Ukraine could be attacked while we are dealing with the situation on the Polish, Lithuanian and Belarusian border.” But they are not “dealing” with any situation as it effects the iced-over refugees, because this would be much less attractive than trying to persuade the outside world to believe that the whole thing has been contrived by Russia in order to invade Ukraine.

U.S. News and World Report weighed in to the fantasy of Russian involvement by headlining that “Russia Deploys Commandos to Belarus as Migrant Crisis, Ukraine Tensions Spark Western Fears” and went on to assert that “Russia has orchestrated the deployment of special operations troops to the northern border of Belarus to see how sudden surges of migrants to the area are straining neighbouring NATO countries’ ability to respond, a source familiar with local governments’ assessments tells U.S. News — the latest development in Moscow’s troubling campaign of destabilization against Europe. It was not immediately clear whether the commandos came from Russia or from Belarus, says former U.S. Army Europe Commander Ben Hodges, who says senior officials in Latvia believe the deployments are at least for reconnaissance, if not some other form of nefarious distraction.” The story is so absurd it was not carried by the western mainstream media, and even the likes of the New York Times confined themselves to reporting such snippets as “As the Polish government pressed ahead with legislation that would extend the country’s most sweeping state of emergency in modern history, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told the German publication Bild that ‘by defending the Polish border, we defend the whole of Europe’.”

Presumably Poland’s prime minister meant that he and his water-cannon troops are defending Western Europe against an invasion by what Reuters stated on November 16 are “Up to 4,000 migrants, mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan” [emphasis added] who “are now waiting in freezing forests on what is not only Poland’s frontier but is also the external border of the EU and NATO, the Western military alliance.”

It is far from surprising that Poland is trying to get as much as it can out of this dreadful humanitarian crisis because Warsaw is trying to deflect Europe’s attention from its ongoing swing to ultra-right wing policies, including government control of the judiciary. As the BBC told us on October 27, before the refugee emergency, Poland rejected the primacy of EU law, which action was described by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as “a direct challenge to the unity of the European legal order.”

While Poland’s rebuff of the EU is a serious matter, the other thing that Warsaw wants to keep quiet is the coalmining crisis on Poland’s border with the Czech Republic. As with the Polish refusal to stand by legal rules it had undertaken to follow by joining the EU, it is now refusing to phase out coal power as agreed at the COP26 climate conference. On November 4 it was reported that “Poland has joined a coalition of 190 countries and organisations in a new commitment to phase out coal power in line with the science of the Paris Climate Agreement” — but the following day there was “clarification” that “The Polish government has confirmed it still intends to produce energy from coal until 2049 despite signing a declaration at COP26 that some hoped meant Warsaw would part with the fossil fuel earlier.”

This is in line with the account in the Guardian in September that despite an EU Court of Justice directive to cease operations at the opencast coalmine at Turów, adjacent to the Czech Republic, the Polish government announced it would continue mining “arguing that its suspension would put the country’s energy security at risk. The mine fuels a power station providing about 7% of the country’s electricity supply. It employs about 3,600 people.”

President Lukashenko is no humanitarian, and has been using the refugees cynically as a political tool in his domestic and international antics, but the fact remains that this tool was promptly seized by people such as Nato’s Stoltenberg and his acolytes in order to hype a non-existent Russian threat to Ukraine. The chief of Britain’s armed forces, General Carter, actually declared that Russia is in a “hybrid playbook where you link disinformation to destabilisation and the idea of pushing migrants on to the European Union’s borders is a classic example of that sort of thing”. He followed this gibberish by saying it was “most likely” that the Belarus and Ukraine border situations were “classic distraction” by the Russian government of the type that had been going on “for years and years and years”.

What Carter and Stoltenberg and their directors in the Pentagon refuse to acknowledge is that the Poland-Belarus “border distraction” was caused by pitiable, wretched refugees who had fled countries that had been invaded (Afghanistan and Iraq) or bombed and rocketed to devastation (Libya) by U.S./Nato forces. Further, the situation along the Russia-Ukraine border has nothing whatever to do with the U.S.-Nato military grouping which continues to search for some sort of justification for its existence.

The “Strategic Partnership” between the U.S. and Ukraine is an uncompromising agreement that signals western preparedness to ramp up confrontation with Russia, and in one of its signals of aggression it claims there are “humanitarian and security costs of Russia’s occupation of Crimea” which is a risible allegation. In spite of energetic efforts on the part of agencies of the U.S.-Nato military alliance, there has been no uprising in Crimea, the majority of whose residents are entirely supportive of Russia (as indicated in a referendum) and know only too well that they would suffer enormously under a Kyev regime. As to humanitarian and security “costs”, it must be disappointing for the West’s anti-Moscow clique that Russian troops aren’t drenching unarmed Crimean citizens with tear gas and ice-cold water or that its government isn’t extending operation of health-hazarding open-cast coalmines contrary to international agreements.

Coal production and refugees are only two of the many economic and social problems in Europe, and the EU is trying its best to solve them, with moderate success. But it would achieve much more if it could persuade the Pentagon to cease its confrontational policies and encourage the Washington administration to come to the conference table. Refugees must be treated with compassion and coal-mining phased out. And conflict must be avoided.

We have all seen the rather strange cinematic clashes at the Polish border in which migrants, supposedly appearing due to blowback in Afghanistan, are trying to storm the eastern front of the European Union. Both the Western and Russian news media have been mostly focussing on the details that make up the facade of this issue rather than on the greater context of what this event means to today’s Poland.

The current narrative that Lukashenko is petty and wants revenge against the EU for trying to organize a “Maidan” in his backyard is very naive. This isn’t to say that he or any powerful leader are above allowing their pride to affect their actions. Vengeance could be at play, but sending a few hundred migrants into the West from the woods is a very pathetic form of revenge indeed, that wouldn’t satisfy the ego of even the most narcissistic bean-counter president.

Image: Protestors in Minsk unaware that they are doing a fantastic job of ensuring permanent integration with Russia.

The attempted Color Revolution against Lukashenko ended his longtime balancing act, forcing Belarus to look east and finally get about 20 years of bureaucratic stagnation over with in terms of creating the “Union State” with Russia. The final plan for this project was signed on “People’s Unity Day” 2021. No matter what the Mainstream Media may tell you there are no true dictators. Just because orders are issued, that doesn’t mean they will be followed, especially in countries with large Russian-speaking populations. Lukashenko probably wants to make sure that with actions like downing of an airplane to arrest one “dissident” or allowing this new border strife to happen (if they indeed are allowing it to happen) will only serve to cut off any last strands binding Belarus to the EU.

Just because Lukashenko and Putin made some paperwork does not mean the Union State concept cannot be aborted or reversed. Long story short, whether the Belarussian government had anything to do with the migrants getting to the border, this situation is driving the East/West rift further apart quickly and that certainly works in the interests of a rising Russian civilization.

On the other hand, Poland finds itself in the strange position of being the guardians of a European civilization that despises itself. Even if Lukashenko is the mastermind behind this crisis, it is the “Liberalness” and nanny states of Germany, France and Scandinavia that are the real reason these foreign people want to jump over barbed wire fences to live in countries they passionately despise. Poland is actually being put in a tough spot, not by Belarus but by Brussels as we cannot forget that if it were not for EU bureaucracy and a bizarre interpretation of the concept of “Human Rights” the Poles could have settled this problem in a more blunt message-sending manner. Using cutesy poo water cannons to annoy foreigners from storming the border, some of them armed with melee weapons, shows just how straightjacketed Warsaw really is.

We also cannot forget that officially this angry mob came thousands of miles to escape a post American Afghanistan. America did save Poland from the numerous culturally destructive downsides of Communism (state enforced atheism being one of them) but the gift of American Liberalism is proving to be just as destructive, but in a different way. Perhaps Poland’s greatest weakness is having the terrible geography of being right on the open highway between Russian and Western Civilizations. Poland is always forced to be part of some alliance in order to survive. This fact of life may be unchangeable, i.e. this nation will always be stuck being part of an alliance, but whom Poland is going to be allied with could be the real question that is now up for debate as serving Moscow during the Cold War and Washington till present have both been losing options for Warsaw.

Image: The quiet before the storm.

This madness in the woods around the borderlands is yet another call for the Visegrad nations (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia with the potential for others to join) to become their own entity outside of the EU. Within the Brussels framework they are not only losers destined to send their young people to London and Paris to clean toilets, but are also bound to tolerate supposedly “European Values” that they consider to be completely illogical, foreign and Anti-European. If there was an East and West EU perhaps everyone could be ideologically happy, but as it stands today most of what is considered Central Europe is held ideologically captive by the degenerated intellectual offspring of the Anglo-French Enlightenment.

The nations considered traditionally “Western” have dropped the “European” ball and it is time for the Poles, Hungarians and whoever else is floating around Central Europe with an old school attitude, to pick it up. Perhaps now is the time for Poland to stop seeing itself as the protectors of a Europe that does not want to save itself. Poland’s idea that it is saving the greatest society on Earth from being tainted by Mongol-Russian hordes is obsolete at best. Perhaps Warsaw should just declare themselves the new epicenter of Europe. Why not? The West has begun to hate its Europeanness anyways.

Within the framework of a Visegrad Supernation Poland would neither be the victim of EU ideological madness or a potential Russian threat that they are sure is coming. Poland is always going to be stuck as part of some alliance but at least it should finally become an equal partner along with other weaker nations that could make up a mighty block. This madness at the border should be a wake up call or at least a mirror for Poland to look into to see that it is again part of a destructive alliance and things need to change.

Europe should give up supplies of natural gas from Russia and instead defend Ukraine and Poland. That’s the plucky advice of Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson who counts wartime leader Winston Churchill as one of his political heroes.

Addressing a City of London banquet this week, Johnson warned Germany, France, Italy and other European governments: “We hope that our friends [in Europe] may recognize that a choice is shortly coming between mainlining ever more Russian hydrocarbons in giant new pipelines and sticking up for Ukraine and championing the cause of peace and stability.”

Note the pejorative use of the word “mainlining” which implies Europe’s trade with Russia for gas is a sordid addiction, rather than a mutual commercial partnership.

Johnson also pointed to British troops being deployed to Poland helping that country construct barbed-wire barriers for halting the flow of refugees from Belarus as an example of “defending Europe”.

In the facile, elitist world of Boris, whose slapstick hairstyle is a reflection of disarray in the grey matter beneath, he has an “easy” solution for Europe’s energy supply shortages and soaring prices. That is, cut off potentially abundant, affordable exports of natural gas from Russia – which will plunge European households into freezing conditions and ramp up consumer inflation.

But don’t worry about that grim hardship. Boris’ noble defense of Poland and Ukraine against alleged Russian hybrid warfare and aggression will likely start a hot war that in turn will spiral into a thermonuclear conflagration engulfing the continent of Europe. That’s one way of “solving” freezing conditions, we may suppose.

Johnson’s advice to Europe is like listening to a clown smoking a reefer near a gasoline spigot.

His rosy British war history paints Poland and Ukraine as victims of aggression. The current scenario is contrived to evoke memories of Britain declaring war on Nazi Germany after the Third Reich invaded Poland in September 1939. Never mind that Britain and Poland’s fawning over the Fuhrer in the run-up to the Second World War was a major precipitating factor in eventually igniting that war.

Johnson’s cartoon-history speech at the City of London banquet implies that Russia is the contemporary incarnation of Nazi aggression. Those horrible Ruskies are supplying Europe with up to half of its natural gas fuel which is keeping European homes warm. How utterly fiendish of the Ruskies! So, in Boris’ logic, we must cut off this nefarious gas “weapon” used by the Russians to stop Europe from freezing.

While we’re on the subject of freezing, it is the Polish military with the help of British troops who are drenching hapless refugees in the middle of winter with water cannons to prevent them from entering the European Union from neighboring Belarus. The predominantly Middle Eastern refugees are in Belarus largely as a result of criminal wars waged by the United States, Britain, Poland and other NATO members over the past two decades.

Britain and its NATO partners have weaponized Poland and the Baltic states to antagonize Belarus, as well as Russia. While the Polish military erects razor-wire fences against freezing, huddled women and children, it is barbarous acts like this that evoke the heinous memory of fascism and aggression in Europe. Poland, the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and Ukraine are steeped in complicity with past Nazi crimes, despite their obdurate denials. The cruelty being meted out to refugees today is shockingly consistent, although dimwits like Britain’s Johnson arrogantly pronounce on history with an upside-down distortion.

It’s not just Johnson though. European Union leaders are decrying Russia for “masterminding hybrid warfare” with Poland, the Baltics and Ukraine. When it is the EU that is funding the rolling out of barbed wire concertinas and militarization of borders across Europe. This effete cowardice and duplicity of Europe’s political class have echoes of the past too in the face of fascism.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron this week reportedly warned Russian leader Vladimir Putin that NATO will defend Ukraine if the latter is invaded by Russia. Such hypothetical hyping is insulting.

Russia has no intention of invading Ukraine or any other European country. Where’s the evidence? Where’s the reasoning? This shrill scenario is entirely dreamt up by NATO propaganda and Russophobia.

The Ukraine has been a NATO spearhead for aggression towards Russia ever since the U.S.-led military bloc backed a coup d’état in Kiev in 2014. The Kiev Neo-Nazi regime is waging a low-intensity war against the ethnic Russian population of Southeast Ukraine. NATO is arming the regime to the teeth, the latest weaponry including attack drones from Turkey.

The U.S. and other NATO members are also increasingly conducting war drills in the Black Sea on Russia’s border. The tensions with Russia are compounded by the militarization of the refugee crisis between Belarus and Poland and the Baltic states.

If an analogy is to be made between the Second World War and the present it is that Russia is once again being subjected to aggression. Instead of the Nazi Wehrmacht over-running Poland, the Baltics and Ukraine it is the U.S.-led NATO axis.

Clowns like Britain’s Boris Johnson and France’s Emmanuel Macron are fanning aggression and the danger of war with fatuous speeches about “defending” Europe.

As the saying attributed to Karl Marx goes: history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce. Another axiom cited by Boris’s hero Winston Churchill is: those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Lamentably, we are living in such a time.

As much as with “brain dead” NATO (copyright Emmanuel Macron) no one ever lost precious assets betting on the incompetence, narrow-mindedness and cowardice of political “leaders” across the Atlanticist EU.

There are two main reasons for the latest German legalese gambit of suspending the certification of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

1. Retaliation, directly against Belarus and Russia, “guilty” of the disgraceful refugee drama at the Poland-Belarus border.
2. Politicking by the German Greens.

A high-ranking European energy executive told me, “this a game where Germany does not hold a winning hand. Gazprom is very professional. But imagine if Gazprom decided to deliberately slow down their deliveries of natural gas. It could go up tenfold, collapsing the entire EU. Russia has China. But Germany does not have a workable contingency plan.”

This ties up with a proposal that is sitting at a crucial desk in Moscow for approval for two years now, as I reported at the time: an offer by a reputable Western energy firm of $700 billion for Russia to divert their oil and gas exports to China and other Asian customers, away from the EU.

This proposal was actually the key reason for Berlin to resolutely counteract the U.S. drive to stop Nord Stream 2. Yet the torture never stops. Russia now faces an additional hurdle: a carbon tax on exports to the EU which include steel, cement and electricity. That may well be extended to oil and natural gas.

Every sentient being across the EU knows that Nord Stream 2 is the easiest path to lower natural gas prices across Europe, and not the EU’s blind neoliberal bet of buying short term in the spot market.

“They are going to freeze”

Seems like the Bundesnetzagentur, the German energy regulator, woke up from a deep slumber just to find out that the Swiss-based company Nord Stream 2 AG did not meet the conditions to be an “independent transmissions operator” and could be certified only if it was “organized in a legal form under German law.”

The fact that neither the Germans nor the Swiss company were aware of it during the long, previous, always turbulent stages is very hard to believe. So now it looks like Nord Stream 2 AG will have to establish a subsidiary under German law only for the German section of the gas pipeline.

As it stands, the company is not “in a position” to comment on details and especially “the timing of the start of the pipeline operations.”

Nord Stream 2 AG will have to transfer capital and personnel to this new subsidiary, which will then have to present a full set of documentation for certification all over again.

Translation: gas from Nord Stream 2 will be absent during the coming winter in Europe and the pipeline, at best, might start running only by mid-2022.

And that certainly ties in with the politicking angle, as the German regulators are de facto waiting for the new German ruling coalition to emerge, including the neoliberal Greens who are viscerally anti-Nord Stream and anti-Russia.

The European energy executive did not mince his words on a quite possible scenario: “If Germany does not obtain their oil and natural gas by land now they cannot fashion a fall back position, as there is not sufficient LNG capacity or oil for that matter to supply the EU this winter. They are going to freeze. Much of their economy will be forced to shut down. Unemployment will soar. It would take four years to build up LNG capacity for natural gas but who will build it for them?”

Germany has zero margin of maneuver to dictate conditions to Gazprom and Russia. The gas that Gazprom won’t sell to northern Europe will be sold to eastern and southern Europe via Turk Stream, and most of all to Asian clients, which do not engage in blackmail and pay much better than the Europeans.

What is also clear is that if by a misguided political decision Nord Stream 2 gas is eventually blocked, the fines to be collected by Gazprom from the European consortium that begged for the construction of the pipeline may exceed 200 billion euros. The consortium is made up of Engie, Shell, Uniper, Wintershall Dea and OMV.

It’s against this background that the offer on the table in Moscow becomes even more than a game-changer. The bold recommendation to the Kremlin – with financing already in place – is that Russia’s natural resources including oil and natural gas should be redirected to China, as part of the Russia-China strategic partnership.

The proposal argues that Russia needs no trade with the EU, as China is way ahead of them in most advanced technologies. That certainly provides Moscow with the upper hand in any negotiations with any German government. As I mentioned it to the European energy executive, his terse comment was, “I doubt they will desire to commit suicide.”

It’s all Putin’s fault

It would be too much to expect from German and EU politicians the clear-sightedness of the government of Serbia, which is considering importing 3 billion cubic meters of Russian natural gas annually for 10 years. Gazprom has been on the record for years demonstrating the practical, reliable and cost-conscious aspects of long-term contracts.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, commenting on the migrant crisis at the Poland-Belarus border, noted how “Poland behaves outrageously, while the leadership in Brussels applies double standards that are so apparent and naked that they can’t fail to understand that they are embarrassing themselves.”

The case of Nord Stream 2 adds extra layers to EU self- embarrassment as it concerns the wellbeing of populations already living inside Fortress Europe. Let them freeze, indeed – or pay virtual fortunes for natural gas that should be readily available.

As we all know, Germany, Nord Stream 2, Ukraine, Belarus, it’s all interlinked. And according to a Ukrainian lunatic profiting from an Atlanticist platform, it’s all Putin’s fault – guilty of conducting hybrid war against the EU.

It will be up to the “resolve of Poland and Lithuania” to “counter the Kremlin threat”. The ideal framework in this case should be the Lublin Triangle – which unites Poland and Lithuania with Ukraine. These are the lineaments of the new Iron Curtain, erected by the Atlanticists, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, to “isolate” Russia. Predictably, German Atlanticists are a crucial part of the package.

Of course, to be successful, these actors should “also seek greater U.S. and UK engagement”, with every movement complementing “the role of NATO as the ultimate guarantor of peace in the region”.

So behold, EU mortals: a “perfect storm of Russian aggression during the coming winter months” is all but inevitable. Watch it on your screens while you properly freeze.