RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”