Winner, innit like …

 

Well, what a surprise: there’s no shooting war, there’s no invasion. Our MSM had to make do with acres of pixels reporting Biden’s ‘warning’ about not believing Putin. Missing are reports on Trudeau and the truckers, reports on Covid and reports on the rise in cost-of-living. And to no-one’s surprise there’s nothing about gas supplies either, even though there’s been a development – more on that below.

And so to Putin, Russia, the Ukraine and our ‘fearless leaders’, especially Messrs Biden and Johnson. The US president bleated that they cannot verify the withdrawal of Russian troops and so everybody must remain alert and distrustful because Putin could still invade, after all (link, paywalled link, link paywalled, link).

It’s strange, isn’t it, that the wonderful US intelligence services which briefed the international MSM at the weekend about the precise invasion plans of Russia are now incapable of ‘verifying’ these withdrawals. Still, their agents on the ground, Ukrainian ‘assets’, I assume, are still mistrustful. This quote, published by the mighty BBC, shows how this works:

“Ukraine’s foreign minister has given the purported evidence [of withdrawal] short shrift. “We in Ukraine have a rule: we don’t believe what we hear, we believe what we see,” Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Twitter. “If a real withdrawal follows these statements, we will believe in the beginning of a real de-escalation.” (link)

Yes, dear readers: a tweet by an Ukrainian politician is a proper reason to doubt what Russia does! It must be a huge ego-boost to yon minister, driving US and NATO policies with a tweet. Let me also mention that someone hasn’t received their proper marching orders because yesterday afternoon there were reports about ‘a cyber attack’ on the Ukrainian defence ministry’s site and two banks (link).

Weren’t cyber attacks meant to be the start of the Russian invasion, as ‘predicted’ at the weekend by US Intelligence? Tough innit that Putin didn’t play: this attack seems to have happened just as some of his troops were already withdrawing. 

As Biden is telling the world that Putin cannot be trusted there are news demonstrating that NATO cannot be trusted either. Instead of dialling down their own belligerence, NATO is now planning to send another 4,000 troops into Romania and Bulgaria, i.e. to the southern flank of Russia (link). It’s ‘only’ a plan so far, as the Times reports (my emphasis):

“Nato is drawing up long-term plans to reinforce the alliance’s southeastern flank against Russian aggression with up to four new battlegroups, starting with a deployment to Romania. Defence ministers will discuss the plan in Brussels today in what would be Nato’s biggest escalation of “force posture” against Russia in six years. Military planners are examining the deployment of four multinational battle groups of 1,000 troops each to Romania and Bulgaria, possibly followed by Slovakia and Hungary. There are fears in the latter two countries that the new deployments would enrage Moscow.” (link, paywalled)

Never mind ‘enraging Putin’ – it’s all his fault! He simply ‘made NATO do it’:

“Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary-general, described the latest proposals, on top of recent reinforcements in the region, as a consequence of the “lasting impact of the security situation in Europe” of Russian aggression against Ukraine.” (link, paywalled)

Let’s better not ask where those battalions are going to come from, especially not when our own forces are being reduced and military expenditure is being cut back. Let’s also not ask how we and other NATO countries will be able to scrape up enough funds to pay for this. “We” have to show strength, don’t we, and never mind that this is just another instance reinforcing Putin’s claim that NATO is encircling Russia.

In an intriguing parallel of timing there are two essays, published today, one in the DT, the other in the Times. One points out that Russia’s Armed Forces are now ‘more capable’ than ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, having modernised them since 2008 (link, paywalled). Meanwhile Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in the DT:

“Russia has amassed foreign exchange reserves of $635bn, the fifth highest in the world and rising. It has a national debt of 18pc of GDP, the sixth lowest in the world, and falling. The country has cleaned up the banking system and has a well-run floating currency that lets the economy roll with the punches. It has a budget surplus and does not rely on foreign investors to cover government spending. It has slashed its dependency on oil state revenues. The fiscal break-even cost of a barrel of oil fell to $52 last year, down from $115 before the invasion of Crimea in 2014.” (paywalled link)

If newspaper correspondents know all this, is it unreasonable to ask if this can be utter news to our Whitehall civil serpents ‘advising’ the Johnson cabinet? I hope they did know, but then again, this begs the question why they allowed the PM to poodle after Biden’s belligerent announcements. AEP’s most important observation is this:

“The Kremlin could sever all gas flows to Europe – 41pc of the EU’s supply – for two years or more without running into serious financial buffers.” (paywalled link)

So why were Biden and Johnson so insistent on stopping NordStream2 in order to ‘punish’ Putin by cutting of Russia’s income on gas sold to Germany and the EU? I’ve said already that the point about not permitting NordStream2 to go ahead was the hidden reason for this game of brinkmanship as Biden seems desperate to sell his liquid gas. 

Nordstream2 is not the only gas pipeline Biden wants to disrupt. Yesterday, the Gatestone Institute reported that Biden just now, in another perfect timing, withdrew his support for the gas pipeline through which gas from Israel was going to be sent to Greece and the European markets:

“In reaching its decision, which effectively kills EastMed, the White House appears to have caved to pressure from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has vociferously opposed the underwater pipeline because it would bypass Turkey. Biden’s decision — reportedly coordinated with Turkey but reached without consulting Israel, Greece or Cyprus, the main countries involved in the project — undercuts three of the strongest American allies in the Mediterranean region.” (link)

Do read the whole report! This ‘decision’ begs the question why a gas pipeline was ‘killed’ which would help European countries to abandon the Russian gas imports. If, as the report points out, this was about ‘not angering Turkey’, then we can ask why that is so important.

Turkey is a NATO state, just across the Black Sea from Russia. Is NATO, with the help of Biden, hoping to beef up that country militarily, a country which is on the verge of economic collapse? Why? And didn’t Turkey ‘grab’ parts of northern Syria which doesn’t seem to have bothered anyone, unlike the ‘Crimea grab’?

Since there’s now no war the warmongers in Western governments and MSM have shedloads of egg on their faces. Their ‘communications’ cannot be trusted. We can however ask what these ‘powers’ wanted to hide – covid, covid measures, the destruction of Canada as democracy?

Perhaps they’re hiding a more sinister ‘green’ conspiracy, aimed at impoverishing us all. Did they hope that ‘a little war far away’ would make us accept the ever rising costs of living because they’d rise for a ‘good cause’, that ‘cause’ being a combination of greenery and ‘standing against Putin’? Was the economic damage caused by the two covid years not sufficient, did they think we needed a bit more economic destruction in order to ‘build back better’? 

They’ve got one ‘result’ though. Across the western world the governing elites, the swamp in Washington and Whitehall and their sock puppets, from Presidents and PM down to the MSM, have now squandered all the trust many used to have in them. Trust once lost cannot easily be won back.

Why indeed would any of us now believe a word they say about anything?

 

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