Tuesday, February 07, 2023

Ukraine End Game: As Bakhmut Falls Real Reporting Vies With Propaganda In Western Media

 

 by Arthur Foxake, 7 February 2023

Ever since Russia crossed the Ukrainian border and launched its 'Special Military Operation' almost a year ago now, everyday in western news media we have watched, heard and read that Ukraine was winning the war - Russia was losing ten soldiers for every Ukrainian casualty, Russian troops were incompetent brutes, Russian military hardware did not work and the Russians were running out of missiles, bullets and everything else. 

And yet the Russian war effort kept grinding on, advancing a little then consolidating then advancing again, occasionally retreating a little in order to regroup but all the time maintaining the bombardment. While the media reported every little Ukrainian win as a major victory and every minor setback for Russia as a game changing defeat, while Bellendskyyyyy preened and posed and played piano with his penis, enjoying a level of fame he had never known in his first career as a comedian, while western leaders demonised Russia and poured money and hardware into Ukraine and encouraged the regime to keep escalating the war, the Russians, unrelentingly, often brutally, just got on with the job.

This week, however, there has been a significant shift in the tone of reporting; in Britain most news organisations repoted that Bellendskyyyyy had acknowledged the battle for the strategically important town of Bakhmut was going badly and the town plus control of road links throughout the easdtern area was likely to be lost. On top of this the New York Times, a newspaper which has beeen streadfast in its support for Ukraine and faithful in sticking to the US/NATO narrative throughout the war, reported that the current situation is catastrophic for Ukraine. Under this headline:

Outnumbered and Worn Out, Ukrainians in East Brace for Russian Assault

the NYT reporter embedded with the Ukrainian forces wrote:

Exhausted Ukrainian troops complain they are already outnumbered and outgunned, even before Russia has committed the bulk of its roughly 200,000 newly mobilized soldiers. And doctors at hospitals speak of mounting losses as they struggle to care for fighters with gruesome injuries.
...
The first stages of the Russian offensive have already begun. Ukrainian troops say that Bakhmut, an eastern Ukrainian city that Russian forces have been trying to seize since the summer, is likely to fall soon. Elsewhere, Russian forces are advancing in small groups and probing the front lines looking for Ukrainian weaknesses.

The efforts are already straining Ukraine’s military, which is worn out by nearly 12 months of heavy fighting.
...
Losses among Ukrainian forces have been severe. Troops in a volunteer contingent called the Carpathian Sich, positioned near Nevske, said that some 30 fighters from their group had died in recent weeks, and soldiers said, only partly in jest, that just about everyone has a concussion.

“It’s winter and the positions are open; there’s nowhere to hide,” said a soldier from the unit with the call sign Rusin.

At one frontline hospital in the Donbas, the morgue was packed with the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers in white plastic bags. In another hospital, stretchers with wounded troops covered in gold foil thermal blankets crowded the corridors, and a steady stream of ambulances arrived from the front nearly all day long.


So what is going on with the media. For eleven and a half months they tried to convince us first that Russia would fold at the first sigh of resistance, citing 'western military intelligence' as the only reliable source of information on the war.


Unfortunately western Intelligence has been wrong about the Soviet Union and Russia for decades: the problem is wishful thinking and ideological blindness. One aspect of that blindness is the conviction that all is well 'at home' and that Russians long to live as well as the English or the Americans, by which they mean themselves. The members of the Intelligence community, the armed forces and the political class live in a social bubble, another planet from the one in which the people they rule live.

As to negotiations, there is nothing to negotiate about. The NATO strategy, laid down in Washington, is to build an iron curtain across eastern Europe thus preventing the development of China's One Belt One Road, and then to squeeze the Eurasian alliance through the agency of Central Asia's former Soviet Republics.When Russia was willing to talk and the Ukrainian regime, realising they were outnumbered and outgunned were ready to listen, then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was dispatched to Kiev to tell the regime there could be no negotiations until US / NATO conditions were met (i.e. total surrender by Russia,) and to pledge support and high tech weaponry to the neo - Nazi nutters in Kiev so long as they kept fighting.

The war was never about Ukraine, they were just the unfortunate people whose land was chosen as the site for the main event in a proxy war the USA / NATO has been waging since the Soviet Union fell apart  in the early 1990s. It is not about democracy, freedom or the guys in white hats beating the guys in black hats. It is not about protecting 'little Ukraine' from the imperialistic ambitions of Russia's leader, it is and was always about about money, preserving the imperial dominance of the USA by protecting the status of the Petrodollar as the global currency and about control of Russia's vast reserves of natural resources, oil, gas, minerals and fertile agricultual land.

 Which leads us back to the dollar, which is what the imperialists seem to have forgotten about when their sanctions made it impossible for the rest of the world not to wake up to the reality that the dollar is not a currency for trade and investment, a store of wealth or reliable medium of payment but an instrument conquest in the incompetent hands of the idiots running the US Economic Empire, to be weaponised against any nation that stood in the way of Washington's geopolitical ambitions. Unfortunately sanctions failed, China, India and Iran led the resistance and the weapon became a dud.

To put the situation into perspective it is useful to recognise that the Imperial system in question dates back two thousand years to the Punic Wars when Rome crushed its main rival Carthage to become the dominant power in the known world. 

Since then, though Empires have come and gone the imperial system has never been challenged, though it has survived several changes of ownership and successive unsuccessful takeover bids from Genghis Khan, the Islamic Caliphate, Sweden, Austria, France, Germany and the Axis powers, most recently. Its essential nature, long distance maritime trade facilitated by naval dominance and hinged on the exploitation of the natural resources of undeveloped regions, has been unchanged.

The Eurasian uprising, born of the movement for decolonisation, patronised by the Soviet Union and its allies, represents the first real challenge to the Empire, the first revolution, in the sense of the world being turned upside down, since Zheng He was ordered to dock his fleets by the Ming emperor, and the way was open for Europeans. 

Which is why Russia has to be effectively expelled from Europe driven back into a smaller area than it has occupied in almost six hundred years, and the Russian - Chinese alliance broken.Due to the aforementioned incompetence of the Empire's leaders it looks as if the emerging economies are gathering around Russia and China, and The Empire is losing the economic war as well as the shooting war. I pity the people of Ukraine who may have to suffer more years of conflict before this exercise in idiocy can be ended.

 

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Dozens of giant turbines at Scots windfarms powered by diesel generators

 Source: Scottish Daily Record

Scottish Power admitted 71 of its windmills were hooked up to the fossil fuel supply after a fault developed with their power supply.

The Glen App windfarm in South Ayrshire
The Glen App windfarm in South Ayrshire
Dozens of giant turbines on Scotland’s windfarms have been powered by diesel generators, the Sunday Mail can reveal. Scottish Power admitted 71 of its windmills were hooked up to the fossil fuel supply after a fault developed on the grid

The firm said it was forced to act in order to keep the turbines warm during very cold weather in December. But a whistleblower has told the Sunday Mail the incident is among a number of environmental and health and safety failings.

The worker, who asked to remain anonymous, said: “The Scottish Government wants to make our country attractive to foreign investors as 40 per cent of the wind that blows across Europe blows across Scotland. However, that should not mean we put up with our waterways and nature being polluted with carbon from diesel generators and hydraulic oil.

“People should be aware that, while their energy costs continue to rise, our windfarms are not operating as efficiently as they could be due to corporate greed.”

Labour’s South Scotland MSP Colin Smyth said: “The SNP and Greens have proven time and time again they cannot be trusted on environmental issues. They laud Scotland’s potential for renewables, yet don’t appear to ensure those already in existence are properly run. This isn’t the first problem raised about this site and there is concern at a lack of openness when problems arise.

"Whatever the reasons, having to use diesel generators to de-ice faulty turbines is environmental madness. This level of dishonesty cuts to the very core of the SNP and Green Government where their rhetoric on net zero is very different from the reality."

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon with Ignacio Galan, CEO of Scottish Power
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon with Ignacio Galan, CEO of Scottish Power

Sixty turbines at Arecleoch Wind farm and 11 at Glenn App near Cairnrayn in South Ayrshire were affacted and connected to six huge diesel generators. The windfarms are operated by Scottish Power Renewables, a subsidiary of Spanish-based Iberdrola, which operates 1183 onshore turbines which can produce enough electricity to power two million homes.

But the whistleblower revealed how they had to bring in generators after the issue was discovered.

The worker said: “During December 60 turbines at Arecleoch and 11 at Glenn App were de-energised due to a cabling fault originating at Mark Hill wind farm. In order to get these turbines re-energised diesel generators were running for upwards of six hours a day.”

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