Western officials say Russia is asking China for military help — denied by Beijing — in what is clearly an effort to build a case to include China in its economic war against Moscow, writes Joe Lauria.
The settlement of the Ukraine war or its escalation to a NATO-Russia conflict with all that entails comes down to how far Ukraine will go to get the Western alliance involved in its war, writes Joe Lauria.
There’s been no intelligence revealed at State Dept. briefings, to the U.N., to European allies or Ukraine, but the U.S. wants everyone to believe they’re telling the truth about an imminent Russian invasion and its “kill lists,” writes Joe Lauria.
Rather than produce fake evidence to the U.N. Security Council, as Colin Powell had, Antony Blinken just produced nothing at all, though the U.S. has intelligence it can show, writes Scott Ritter.
The moral: nothing is as dangerous as a dim leader convinced of his cleverness by schemers selling nostrums that promise to etch his name in the history books forever, writes Michael Brenner.
With a Kiev regime offensive against the breakaway provinces apparently beginning, Russia has begun to prepare for an influx of refugees from Donbass across the border into Russia.
Blinken’s certainty about an “invasion” is suspicious. He may know more than he’s saying: such as the date of the Kiev offensive, perhaps designed to provoke the invasion he is so sure will happen, writes Joe Lauria.
Russia called a U.N. Security Council meeting on the anniversary of the council’s endorsement of the Minsk 2 accord. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russia’s deputy foreign minister addressed the meeting. Watch it here.
It’s not something it can come out and directly say, because admitting it sees itself as the rulers of the world would make it look tyrannical and megalomaniacal, writes Caitlin Johnstone.
The Republican senator cited Russian “threats,” but said going to war with Moscow over Ukraine was not in the interests of the U.S., which should go after China instead, Joe Lauria reports.