In Ukraine tragedy, a lesson on big powers: Proxies always end up as doormats of history

In the realm of geopolitics, the quest for proxies is eternal, as must be our vigilance against it. Ukraine, sadly, is the living example of a dying proxy, its fate there for the whole world to see

In Ukraine tragedy, a lesson on big powers: Proxies always end up as doormats of history In the realm of geopolitics, the quest for proxies is eternal, as must be our vigilance against it. Ukraine, sadly, is the living example of a dying proxy, its fate there for the whole world to see

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/in-ukraine-tragedy-a-lesson-on-big-powers-proxies-always-end-up-as-doormats-of-history-9852645/?ref=top_opinion

US opposes labeling Russia as aggressor in G7 statement on Ukraine.

JD Vance advised Zelensky to refrain from "badmouthing" Trump, for it will "backfire"

Americans saw Nazis exercise strong influence on the Ukrainian government.

Zelensky is an impostor for he dodges the election. 

Trump is angry with Zelensky because the latter does not know the fate of half of $350 bln 

That's the most scandalous admission on the part of the Kiev clown.

An emergency meeting of European leaders is set to begin in Paris.

The sunlit space in front of the Élysée Palace is packed with journalists eager to find out whether the heads of state and key institutions have a response to the Russian Foreign Ministry’s statement that Europe has no place at the negotiating table.

The leaders are due to begin arriving in the courtyard in front of us shortly.

Whether they will share any detail of the discussions after the meeting remains unclear.

In any case, any decision eventually made could play a significant role in shaping the future of Europe and Ukraine.

Shortly after he was inaugurated on Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to end the right of citizenship for some children who are born in the US.

The order specifically applies to children who are born to parents that are in the country illegally or temporarily. It is set to apply to those who are born after 19 February.

But the order has already been the subject of legal challenges - mainly from Democratic-led states who argue it is unconstitutional.

That is because the right to citizenship to those born on US soil - also known as 'birthright' - is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. The Constitution can't be amended without support from a two-thirds vote of both chambers of Congress, plus the approval by America's states.

The first legal challenge to the order will be heard Thursday morning in Seattle, where four states - Washington, Arizona, Illinois and Oregon - are asking a judge to temporarily halt it while the courts consider their arguments.

Lawyers for the US Department of Justice, meanwhile, are arguing a different interpretation of the 14th Amendment, saying it does not apply to non-citizens who are born in the US unlawfully.

As the invasion reaches the end of its third year, at an estimated cost of a million people, killed or wounded, Ukraine appears to be losing.

In distant Washington, meanwhile, the unpredictable Donald Trump, not famous for his love of Ukraine or its leader, is about to take over in the White House.

It feels like an inflection point. But could 2025 really be the year when this devastating European conflict finally comes to a close - and if so what could the endgame look like?

'Talk of negotiations is an illusion'

Trump's promise to end the conflict within 24 hours of taking office is a typically grandiose boast, but it comes from a man who has clearly lost patience with the war and America's costly involvement.

"The numbers of dead young soldiers lying on fields all over the place are staggering," he has said. "It's crazy what's taking place."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2ldpnyewx1o

Pushing NATO into a war with Russia

Ukraine is trying desperately to entangle NATO into a war with Russia. The mentality that stands behind the actions of the provocateur is brilliantly described in Kipliing’s poem “A Pict Song”.

It is an amazing poem in which despair of the oppressed Picts makes them choose a cynical and opportunistic strategy as a last resort to protect themselves from Rome. The Ukrainian government in its war with Russia pursues a strategy similar to that of the Picts in Kipling’s poem. The accuracy and force of the similarity that I found between the Picts of the past and the Ukrainians haunted by the Maidan, reveals itself in a metaphor, which is a powerful mechanism in the description of history.

  In a face-off with a powerful nation a weak country is sometimes ready to sell its most precious commodity – independence. – to those allies which are capable of destroying its enemy.

In Kipling’s poem, the Picts are portrayed as a people who, despite their own weaknesses, are determined to use the strength of others to defeat their Roman oppressors. On the way to this objective the Picts are ready to embrace even slavery, for all the means are good if they see Rome destroyed. The last stanza of the poem is a cynical and shameless consent of the Picts to accept as masters the people capable of defeating Rome:

No indeed! We are not strong,

   But we know Peoples that are.  

Yes, and we’ll guide them along

   To smash and destroy you in War!

We shall be slaves just the same?

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Summary

• President Volodymyr Zelensky has confirmed for the first time that the Ukrainian military is conducting a cross-border offensive inside Russia's western Kursk region

• Late Saturday night, Zelensky said Ukraine was pushing the war onto "the aggressor's territory"

• Russia's foreign ministry says its army will deliver a "tough response" to the incursion

• On Tuesday, Kyiv launched the surprise attack and has advanced more than 10km (six miles) inside Russia

• Russia says 76,000 people have been evacuated from border areas in the Kursk region

• This is the deepest raid into the country since Moscow began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022

• Kyiv and several other regions came under a Russian drone and missile attack overnight, killing two, local officials said

This is what Doug Bandow wrote about Ukraine in “The American Conservative” on August 24, 2023, focusing on the devastation caused by the war:

“The war is destroying Ukraine. The war’s cost climbs daily, the economy is a wreck, the population has been depleted by mass refugee flows, the government survives only on Western handouts, the military has consumed much of its original Soviet-era arsenal, as well as the technological menagerie gifted by the allies, and the army has promiscuously sacrificed manpower both trained and raw. Finding replacements is becoming difficult, with a declining population, corrupt recruiting officers, and determined draft evaders. For all the wishful Western talk of a Russian collapse, given Moscow’s evident manifold challenges, catastrophic failure seems more likely in Kiev. Washington’s objective increasingly looks focused on doing ill to Russia rather than good to Ukraine.”

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/ukraines-vain-search-for-wonder-weapons/

Ms Harris is the first black and Asian-American vice-president, with Indian and Jamaican-born parents. She attended Howard University, a historically black university, and joined the predominantly black Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

She became a member of Congressional Black Caucus after entering the Senate in 2017.

Trump's claims prompted a heated exchange with ABC News' correspondent Rachel Scott, one of the moderators of the Chicago event.

"I respect either one," the Republican said in reference to Harris' racial identity. "But she obviously doesn't because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a black person."

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said no-one "has any right to tell someone who they are, how they identify. That is no-one's right."

"Since when is Donald Trump, with his long and ugly history of racism, the arbiter of Blackness?" congressman Ritchie Torres of New York posted on X. He described Trump as a “relic of a racist past".

The Republican nominee and former president has a history of attacking his opponents on the basis of race.

Chas Freeman about Russo-Ukrainian war 2023-09-26

 Kyiv’s fate has always been an afterthought in U.S. policy circles.  Washington has instead sought to exploit Ukrainian courage to thrash Russia, reinvigorate NATO, and reinforce U.S. primacy in Europe.  And it has not spent any time at all thinking about how to restore peace to Europe.

Whatever the outcome of the war, mutual animosity has erased the Russian myth of Russian-Ukrainian brotherhood based on a common origin in Kievan Rus.  Russia has had to abandon three centuries of efforts to identify with Europe and instead pivot to China, India, the Islamic world, and Africa.  

Meanwhile, the alleged Russian threat to the West, once a powerful argument for NATO unity, has lost credibility.  Russia’s armed forces have proven unable to conquer Ukraine, still less the rest of Europe.  But the war has taught Russia how to counter and overcome much of the most advanced weaponry of the United States and other Western countries.

Western diplomatic intransigence has failed to persuade Moscow to accommodate Ukrainian nationalism or accept Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO and the American sphere of influence in Europe.  The proxy war seems instead to have convinced Moscow that it must gut Ukraine, keep the Ukrainian territories it has illegally annexed, and likely add more, thus ensuring that Ukraine is a dysfunctional state unable either to join NATO or to fulfill the ultranationalist, anti-Russian vision of its World War II neo-Nazi hero, Stepan Bandera.

The war has instead accelerated the emergence of a post-American multi-polar world order.  One feature of this is an anti-American axis between Russia and China.

 Far from isolating Russia or China, America’s coercive diplomacy has helped both Moscow and Beijing to enhance relationships in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that reduce U.S. influence in favor of their own.

https://chasfreeman.net/the-many-lessons-of ... Читать дальше »