RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.ft.com/content/0b1a1f5d-147d-4300-8f56-41e16e3dfa2e?segmentId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9

Russian forces have launched a heavy bombardment of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, an assault that overshadowed the first direct talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials since President Vladimir Putin began his invasion five days ago. Residents of the city said they had come under intense artillery and rocket fire from Russian positions. Video footage shared on social media showed high-rise apartment blocks in Kharkiv being hit by heavy shelling that shrouded the sky with plumes of dark smoke. “Dozens of civilians are dying,” said regional governor Oleh Sinegubov. “It’s happening during the day when people go to pharmacies, for food, for drinking water. This is a crime.” Russia’s military operation, unleashed five days ago, has failed to unseat Ukraine’s government or capture any major cities, but has uprooted hundreds of thousands of civilians who have fled to neighbouring countries in search of safety. The war has cranked east-west tensions to new heights, with Putin putting the country’s nuclear deterrent on high alert and the west imposing swingeing sanctions on Moscow that sent the rouble into a tailspin and prompted Russia’s central bank to impose capital controls.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/putin-places-russias-nuclear-forces-high-alert-joseph-klein/

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday placed his military’s nuclear forces on high alert – as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine entered its fourth day.

“Western countries aren’t only taking unfriendly actions against our country in the economic sphere, but top officials from leading NATO members made aggressive statements regarding our country,” the Russian president said in a televised broadcast as he explained his rationale for the nuclear alert order.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden remained at his private residence in Delaware during the weekend. The U.S. president did not comment directly on Putin’s nuclear forces high alert order as of Sunday afternoon. He left it to White House press secretary Jen Psaki and other senior administration officials to respond. Psaki said that Putin was “manufacturing threats that don’t exist in order to justify further aggression — and the global community and the American people should look at it through that prism.”

Russia’s military has stepped up its air bombardments across Ukraine this past weekend. The attacks included missile strikes against a burial point of radioactive waste, an oil depot, and a residential complex. Putin has also reportedly deployed at least two-thirds of the estimated 150,000 Russian troops, who had been assembled near the Ukrainian border, to invade Ukraine from multiple directions. In order to take control of Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, Russia is massing more troops to lay siege to the city in preparation for a major assault inside Kyiv. Russia has also reportedly reinforced its military offensive capabilities with heavy weaponry capable of inflicting enormous casualties, including to civilians.

As of Sunday evening, Russia had not yet achieved complete control over Ukraine’s air space. The Ukrainians have continued to repel Russia’s persistent attempts to take over Kyiv, while bracing for a more massive attack, and have managed to hold on to other key cities as well. The longer it takes the Russian military to achieve Putin’s objectives, the more strain is being placed on Russia’s logistics supply lines.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tony-abbott-putin-west-weak-ukraine-russia-invasion-military-fossil-fuels-nuclear-germany-lng-woke-covid-regulations-china-11645977566?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Mr. Abbott served as prime minister of Australia, 2013-15.

‘The bullying of small nations by big ones, the trampling of justice and decency in the pursuit of national aggrandizement, and reckless indifference to human life, should have no place in our world.”

Those were my words to the Australian Parliament on the morning of July 17, 2014, when a Russian missile battery had shot down flight MH17, killing 38 Australians among the 298 on board, as Russian proxies seized the Donbas. If it wasn’t yet obvious in 2008, when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia, it should certainly have been six years later, when he annexed the Crimea, that Mr. Putin was bent on the restoration of greater Russia—and to hell with the freedom and independence of the countries that were once part of the Soviet Union.

Yet since then, Western democracies have culpably failed to boost their military capability while indulging acts of economic and cultural self-harm.

Take the U.K., the West’s second-strongest military power. The total number of British defense personnel dropped from about 600,000 in the 1950s to 300,000 in the 1960s and about 150,000 now. British forces in Europe declined from 80,000 in the 1950s to 50,000 in the 1960s to 25,000 in 1994 (still including one tank division), before dwindling to zero in Germany by 2020 and 1,000 in Estonia (placed there after 2015 in reaction to Russia’s renewed threat). In response to Russia’s blitzkrieg on Ukraine, the U.K. government has just announced that this force will be boosted to an armored brigade of fewer than 3,000. Given that the U.K. has provided by far the strongest response to the current crisis, it’s little wonder Mr. Putin thinks the West is weak and easily distracted.

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/02/how-to-make-russia-pay-over-ukraine-deploy-every-financial-weapon-possible/

How to Make Russia Pay – When asked, after his speech on Thursday, why the United States and its allies weren’t then kicking Russia completely out of SWIFT, the global banking communications system, over its invasion of Ukraine, President Biden said, “[It] is always an option. But right now, that’s not the position that the rest of Europe wishes to take.”

Removing Russia from SWIFT – the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication – is considered a “financial nuclear weapon,” the most severe sanction that the West could take. Since SWIFT is the “cans and the strings by which banks communicate to settle trades and transfers,” in the words of Marshall Billingslea, a former assistant Treasury secretary for terrorist financing,” removing Russia would cut off its banks from more than 11,000 banks in more than 200 countries.

By late Saturday, the West had partly triggered the SWIFT option; the United States, European Union, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Canada announced that they would remove “selected” Russian banks from the global system.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/putin-attacks-cold-war-order/

The post-Cold War order, which began in 1989, ended in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine and said it had no right to exist as an independent nation. Faced with the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II, the biggest questions are

How much will this new world order resemble the Cold War?
How effective will the Russian war effort be in Ukraine?
Can Russia decapitate the Zelensky government and establish a puppet regime? Can they hold hostile territory in the long term against armed guerrillas, fighting for their homeland? Will a lingering conflict, and the endless funerals it brings, undermine Putin’s rule?
Can we avoid a direct, deadly, and unpredictable engagement between nuclear powers?
Will the costs the West imposes on Russia be high enough to deter China from taking Taiwan?

The historical setting of this crisis

Russia’s invasion is not just an effort to retake Ukraine, which was once part of the Soviet Union. It is an effort to use military force to overturn the post-Cold War settlement, reached in the early 1990s. In fact, the invasion cannot be understood without first understanding what that settlement looked like and why Russia wants to overturn it, despite the high costs.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/north-korea-launches-another-missile-world-focuses-ukraine-crisis

We know that North Korea’s Hwasong-15 is a two-stage liquid-fueled missile believed to have a range of almost 8,000 miles and the capability of carrying multiple warheads. (Note:  North Korea is 5,626 miles from the California coast and 4,550 miles from Hawaii. – Janet Levy

North Korea resumed missile testing on Sunday following a pause during the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games. The latest is a suspected mid-range ballistic rocket, according to Bloomberg.

Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi told reporters in Tokyo the suspected ballistic missile reached a maximum altitude of around 385 miles and flew 186 miles before splashing down in the waters outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

South Korea’s military said the ballistic missile launch occurred at 0752 local time near Pyongyang’s main airport on the waters off its east coast.

Weapon experts told Bloomberg the missile’s flight path was unusual and indicated the likely test of a medium-to-intermediate range ballistic missile.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/zelensky-announces-talks-with-russia-as-putin-ups-nuclear-saber-rattling/

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that a Ukrainian delegation would participate in talks with a Russian delegation on the Ukrainian–Belarusian border “without preconditions.”

Zelensky announced the talks on his official Telegram channel following a phone call with President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus on Sunday, according to several news outlets.

Lukashenko has “taken responsibility for ensuring that all planes, helicopters and missile stationed on Belarusian territory remain on the ground during the Ukrainian delegation’s travel, talks and return,” the Ukrainian president said.

Zelensky had previously declined an earlier request for talks in Belarus, saying it was not neutral territory.

News of the talks came as Russian president Vladimir Putin said Sunday that he had placed Russia’s nuclear-deterrent forces on high alert in response to recent sanctions and “aggressive statements” from NATO countries.

Putin said in a televised statement that he had ordered the nuclear deterrent forces in a “special regime of combat duty.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18270/migrants-desecrate-churches-greece

“As a deeply religious society, these attacks on churches are shocking to the Greek people and calls to question whether these illegal immigrants seeking a new life in Europe are willing to integrate and conform to the norms and values of their new countries.” — Greek City Times, May 16, 2020.

While the report most likely has the 1453 sack of Constantinople (today Istanbul) in mind — when countless Greek churches, including Hagia Sophia, were desecrated, destroyed, or turned into mosques — that pattern is a century older.

Before Christmas, in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, where more than a million Muslim migrants reside, some 50 public statues of Jesus and other Christian figures were beheaded and crucifixes broken.

According to a new report published by Greece’s Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs, there were 2,339 incidents of church desecrations in the country between 2015 and 2020, when tiny Greece, seen as Europe’s eastern gateway, was flooded with migrants from the Islamic world. Greek City Times wrote regarding the report:

“There appears to be a correlation between the increase in illegal migration and the incidents of attacks on Greek Orthodox religious churches and religious spaces during the five year period which occurred during the peak of the migration crisis.”

In the most recent year recorded, 2020, there were 385 incidents against Christian churches and buildings, including “vandalism, burglary, theft, sacrilege, necromancy, robbery, placement of explosive devices and other desecrations.”

Over the years, a few of these desecrations made it to English-language media.

In April 2021, Muslim migrants entered into and utterly desecrated a small church. Proud of their handiwork, they videotaped portions of the incident and uploaded it on TikTok. It shows a topless migrant dancing to rap music as he walks towards and inside the church. The next clip shows the aftermath: devastation inside the church, with smashed icons and the altar overthrown.