RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/02/the-failure-of-bidens-friends-and-allies-strategy/

For two years, from the campaign trail through to the White House, all of Joe Biden’s foreign policy pronouncements have been punctuated with one phrase: the pledge to “work with friends and allies”. It’s a mantra that everyone associated with his administration has clearly been instructed to repeat, ad nauseum. Biden and his minions have pledged to “work with friends and allies” to solve the border crisis, to protect Taiwan, to renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal, to contain the Taliban, to promote democracy, to prevent global warming—you name it, and you can Google it.

But not with Russia. In response to the Russian attack on Ukraine, the Biden administration updated its catchphrase to allies and partners. Boris Johnson apparently missed the memo, sticking with friends and allies. So did the Ukrainian ambassador in Washington, Oksana Markarova. So the friends are out, and the partners are in. Maybe that’s because the friends failed to deliver.

Biden claims to have imposed “profound sanctions” on Russia that “exceed anything that’s ever been done” before. These include a prohibition on Russia raising dollar-denominated debt, penalties on Russia’s leading banks, personal restrictions on the travel of influential Russians, and a re-suspension of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline connecting Russia directly to Germany under the Baltic Sea, bypassing Ukraine (a Trump suspension that Biden lifted last May at the behest of erstwhile friend and ally Angela Merkel). Unspecified further sanctions await the cooperation of allies and partners.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18274/first-round-to-putin

Initially, aware that he [Russian President Vladimir Putin] must cast himself as victim in order to win sympathy in Western public opinion that warms up to figures like Saddam Hussein or George Floyd, he presented Russia as a victim of NATO “expansion” and his saber rattling as an act of self-defense.

Never mind that NATO is a defensive pact and not allowed to attack anyone unless one of its own members is first attacked. Even then, Article V under which military action is allowed is not automatically applicable and hasn’t been applied since the alliance was created. In contrast, led by the now defunct Soviet Union, the rival Warsaw Pact was used for military interventions in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia to crush popular uprisings against Russian domination.

[U]nder NATO rules, a country that has unsettled irredentist disputes with its neighbors cannot be admitted as a member. That rule applies to both Ukraine and Georgia, another country invaded by Putin, both of which are barred from NATO membership because of their territorial disputes caused by Russian aggression.

Thus, Putin was making a song and dance about something that couldn’t happen under NATO’s own rules.

[Putin] can no longer play wolf disguised as sheep. Even his apologists, not to say mercenaries among Western politicians and journalists, are able to defend his latest move let alone presenting him as a victim of “Imperialism”.

Putin would be wrong to think that with the passage of time the rest of the world will endorse his “conquest”, just as no one ever recognized the annexation of the Baltic republics by Stalin.

The spectacle of ancient Russian tanks and armored vehicles creeping into Donbass showed how antiquarian Putin’s arsenal is.

At first glance, the latest twists and turns in the Ukraine poker game might present Russian President Vladimir Putin as the winner.

After all, he is reaping what he sowed eight years ago, when he incited ethnic Russian secessionists to set up breakaway “people’s republics” in parts of Ukrainian territory, in Donetsk and Lugansk. By stationing troops in the two enclaves, Putin makes official an occupation that he had indirectly exercised through Wagner mercenaries and local militias. Imposing two “cooperation treaties” on the breakaway “republics,” he also shows their annexation in all but name by Russia.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/02/26/the_growing_threat_of_a_world_run_by_dictators_147250.html

Early Thursday, an authoritarian ruler deployed troops into an embattled democracy in clear defiance not only of that country’s sovereignty, but of condemnation and threats from the rest of the democratic world. The Putin regime’s incursion into Ukraine is just the latest symptom of a much larger pattern of antidemocratic aggression.

In 2021, for the 16th consecutive year, Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report found that respect for political rights and civil liberties declined globally. Military coups proliferated, and authoritarian regimes staged utterly uncompetitive elections in Hong Kong, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, and elsewhere. An astonishing 8 out of 10 people in the world now live in countries rated by Freedom House as Not Free or Partly Free.

Fueling the spread of authoritarian practices has been a new kind of mutual aid society for dictators – less formalized than the Communist International (Comintern) of the Cold War era, but perhaps more effective. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the global dominance of democratic states meant that all nations needed to move or – appear to move – toward democratic standards of governance in order to gain credibility, access international trade and financing, and receive development or military aid. Over the last decade and a half, however, wealthy and powerful authoritarian regimes in China, Russia, and the Middle East have made it possible for an increasing number of despots to openly pursue antidemocratic systems, safe in the knowledge that any repercussions from the world’s democracies will be offset by assistance from their autocratic friends.

Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad have long been propped up by other authoritarian regimes: Havana, Moscow, and Beijing in the former case and Tehran and Moscow in the latter. More recently the practice has benefited Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus and the leaders of military coups in Myanmar and Sudan.

When tens of thousands of Belarusian citizens turned out to protest the fraudulent presidential election of August 2020, Russia’s Vladimir Putin came to Lukashenka’s aid – not only with words of support, but also with a $1.5 billion loan. The Kremlin sent propagandists to “report” on the election when real journalists in Belarus went on strike, provided security forces to backstop the regime’s brutal crackdown, and dispatched election observers to validate the farcical results.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/putin-sizes-biden-invades-ukraine-robert-spencer/

Russian troops are advancing briskly into Ukraine. Vladimir Putin has brushed off Old Joe Biden’s sanctions and made it abundantly clear that he is not afraid of Biden, as Democrat operatives and their propaganda arm, the establishment media, have long insisted.

This is what happens when America has a feeble president, an obvious figurehead, and our military is compromised by Leftist ideologues. Clearly Putin is taking advantage of Biden’s obvious weakness and the decimation of our Armed Forces by wokeness and Covid hysteria. He knows that there is little likelihood that Biden will touch off World War III by committing American troops to the defense of Ukraine. Putin also likely considers that even if the American military does end up confronting Russian forces, that the U.S. military’s concentration on pushing Critical Race Theory and other Leftist agendas on the troops, as well as the culling that took place due to vaccine mandates, have left our military in such a weakened, distracted, and confused state that it will not pose any significant threat anyway.

Meanwhile, Putin emphasized in his remarks announcing the beginning of the operation against Ukraine that “in December 2021 we once again made an attempt to agree with the United States and its allies on the principles of ensuring security in Europe and on the non-expansion of NATO. Everything was in vain. The US position did not change. They did not consider it necessary to negotiate with Russia on this important issue for us, continuing to pursue their own goals and disregarding our interests.”

If this is an accurate summation of what happened, and there is no reason to believe that it isn’t, then the fecklessness of the Biden administration’s foreign policy is as much to blame for this conflict as Putin is. The questions must be asked: was it really necessary to begin maneuvering to incorporate Ukraine into NATO, and to ignore all Russian entreaties that may have led to the formulation of an agreement that was mutually acceptable to both parties? Were State Department officials too preoccupied with implementing the woke agenda to bother to negotiate with Putin over NATO?

https://www.city-journal.org/understanding-putins-ukraine-gambit

Is Russian president Vladimir Putin mad? While it’s natural for people waking up to a war having broken out on the European continent to ask themselves this question, it is the wrong question to ask.

It’s wrong because it leads to strategic mirroring. In the run-up to today’s outbreak of hostilities, the Biden administration admirably focused much of its energies on keeping allies on the same page. It aggressively shared detailed information about plans behind the scenes across European capitals, and by earlier this week had managed to cobble together a united front against Putin’s increasingly threatening posture.

But in seeking to deter Putin, the Biden team made several mistakes. It kept waving the threat of sanctions, sure that the thought of economic pain would make the Russian leader flinch. After all, to a modern, liberal-minded leader, the looming threat of material privations feels like a heavy cost to bear. Putin himself punctured that fantasy in his speech on Monday, saying that he fully anticipated heavy sanctions to be applied no matter what. The whole tone of his speech, dripping with hateful grievance, indicated that material privation was a small sacrifice to right what he insists are historical wrongs. Now that sanctions are set to roll out, we will see if Putin misjudged how much stress the Russian state can bear. As a means of deterrence, however, sanctions failed miserably.