Playing with Nuclear Fire

Guest Post by Lew Rockwell

I didn’t think it was possible for brain dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers to do anything in foreign policy that was crazier than what they have already done. But I have to give them credit. They have managed to do it. They are sending tanks and weapons to the Ukraine, even though doing this risks a nuclear war that could destroy mankind.

Although the US over the past year has supplied the Zelensky dictatorship with weapons, this wasn’t unlimited. Now, it looks like it is well on the way to becoming so.

Here is a statement from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken about the new aid: “The United States is announcing a significant new security assistance package to help Ukraine continue to defend itself against Russia’s brutal war. Pursuant to a delegation of authority from the President, I am authorizing our 30 th drawdown of U.S. arms and equipment for Ukraine since August 2021. This assistance package will provide Ukraine with hundreds of additional armored vehicles, including Stryker armored personnel carriers, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, and High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled vehicles. The package also includes critical additional air defense support for Ukraine, including more Avenger air defense systems, and surface to air missiles, as well as additional munitions for NASAMS that the United States has previously provided. The package also contains night vision devices, small arms ammunition, and other items to support Ukraine as it bravely defends its people, its sovereignty, and its territorial integrity.

This package, which totals $2.5 billion, will bring total U.S. military assistance for Ukraine to an unprecedented approximately $27.5 billion since the beginning of the Administration.

The United States also continues to rally the world to support Ukraine. We have seen incredible solidarity from our allies and partners, including at today’s Ukraine Defense Contact Group, and we applaud the more than 50 countries who have come together to make significant contributions to support Ukraine.”

The Russians aren’t taking this lying down. “The speaker of Russia’s parliament warned Sunday that countries supplying Ukraine with more powerful weapons risked their own destruction, a message that followed new pledges of armored vehicles, air defense systems and other equipment but not the battle tanks Kyiv requested.

‘Supplies of offensive weapons to the Kyiv regime would lead to a global catastrophe,’ State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin said. ‘If Washington and NATO supply weapons that would be used for striking peaceful cities and making attempts to seize our territory as they threaten to do, it would trigger a retaliation with more powerful weapons.’

Ukraine’s supporters pledged billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine on Friday, though the new commitments were overshadowed by defense leaders failing at an international meeting in Ramstein, Germany, to agree on Ukraine’s urgent request for German-made Leopard 2 battle tanks.

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of the Russian Security Council, said the meeting in Ramstein ‘left no doubt that our enemies will try to exhaust or better destroy us,’ adding that “they have enough weapons’ to achieve the purpose.

Medvedev, a former Russian president, warned on his messaging app channel that Russia could seek to form a military alliance with foes of the United States. He didn’t name the nations he had in mind, but Russia has defense cooperation with Iran and Venezuela, an existing military alliance with Belarus and strong ties with North Korea.. Since invading Ukraine, Russia also has increased both the scope and the number of its joint military drills with China.

‘In case of a protracted conflict, a new military alliance will emerge that will include the nations that are fed up with the Americans and a pack of their castrated dogs,’ Medvedev said.”

As Tyler Durden has pointed out, the new policy constitutes a large-scale war against Russia by the US and its European allies. The German Foreign Minister acknowledged this. “German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock bluntly stated in fresh remarks that Western allies are fighting a war against Russia. The remarks came during a debate at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on Tuesday amid discussions over sending Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine.

While Baerbock’s words were largely ignored in mainstream media, a number of pundits on social media noted with alarm that the German foreign minister just essentially declared war on Russia.

Ironically other German officials have long sought to emphasize their country is not a party to the conflict, fearing uncontrollable escalation.

Contradicting this official stance, Baerbock said the quiet part out loud, and introduced the comments with: ‘And therefore I’ve said already in the last days – yes, we have to do more to defend Ukraine. Yes, we have to do more also on tanks.’

And that’s when she asserted: ‘But the most important and the crucial part is that we do it together and that we do not do the blame game in Europe, because we are fighting a war against Russia and not against each other.’

Interestingly, both Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his former defense minister who recently resigned, Christine Lambrecht, have been seen as weak on arming Ukraine – repeatedly declaring an unwillingness to get pulled deeper into the proxy war aspect to the conflict. But now it seems the more hawkish Baerbock is willing to at this point be much more open with the reality of what’s happening.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova seized on the comments, saying this is yet more proof that the Western allies were planning a war on Russia all along…

‘If we add this to Merkel’s revelations that they were strengthening Ukraine and did not count on the Minsk agreements, then we are talking about a war against Russia that was planned in advance. Don’t say later that we didn’t warn you,’ Zakharova said.

One thing is for sure, things are moving fast…” See this.

It’s clear that the Russians aren’t bluffing. A hostile Ukraine is an existential threat to them but it isn’t to America. What goes on in that region of the world is not a security threat to us. As Benjamin Abelow, the author of the excellent short book How the West Brought War to Ukraine, notes: “Even from a blinkered American perspective, the whole Western plan was a dangerous game of bluff, enacted for reasons that are hard to fathom. Ukraine is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a vital security interest of the United States. In fact, Ukraine hardly matters at all…. In contrast, for Russia—with its 1,200-mile shared border and its history of three major land-route invasions from the West, the most recent of which, during World War II, caused the death of roughly 13 percent of the entire Russian population—Ukraine is the most vital of national interests. (pp. 60–61, emphasis removed)”

Some people, though I’m sure not LRC readers, will say, “Don’t we have to defend the brave democrat Zelensky against the brutal Russian invasion? In fact, Zelensky is a cruel dictator engaged in religious persecution. Here is account of what he is doing to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church: “On January 2, an Orthodox church in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, was covered in blood. In the morning, a man burst into the church and turned the crucifix over, broke several icons, threw banners on the floor, and finally cut the priest’s throat with a razor. A few days earlier, in the city of Chornomorsk, parishioners of an Orthodox church only at the last moment disarmed a man who was about to stab the priest with a knife. In the village of Chechelnyk, a man in camouflage brutally beat a priest right on the street, breaking his nose and shouting curses.

There is a backstory to the above. Stand-up comedians at Kvartal 95, the film studio co-founded by now President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, recently released a video where they obscenely insulted Orthodox priests and publicly wished them death. The video is a news parody in the style of The Daily Show that mocks the church and refers to its clergy as ‘Russian agents.’ Many experts see a direct connection between the appeals of the actors and the recent violence.

The target of all these attacks is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which used to be in unity with the Moscow Patriarchate but has had an independent and autonomous status for more than 30 years.

The religious situation in modern Ukraine is complicated. The country has been considered Orthodox since 988, when the bishops of Constantinople baptized this land, which was then ruled by the Kievan Rus. The Russian Orthodox Church originates from Kyiv. The first metropolitans of this church had their sees there, and only centuries later were they transferred to Moscow. It was not until 1686 that the Greek patriarch entrusted the Kyiv Metropolis, which was then subordinate to the church of Constantinople, to the Russian church.

Under the USSR, the Orthodox Church in Kyiv was almost destroyed, but it was resurrected after the fall of the Soviet regime. In 1990, the Russian church granted full administrative independence to its Ukrainian bishops under the name of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Although many call it the ‘Moscow Patriarchate’ by inertia, it is a completely independent structure in terms of governance. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church elects its primate and bishops on its own with no regard for Moscow. There is no ‘Moscow Patriarchate’ in its official name.

For the first six months of the war, Zelenskyy and Ukrainian officials emphasized that the UOC is a Ukrainian denomination that completely took the side of its people. That took a U-turn at the end of 2022. The central authorities brought down repressions on the UOC; in comparison, Poroshenko’s methods seemed like child’s play.

Cathedrals and monasteries were searched by Ukrainian SBU officers, who reported that they allegedly found evidence of collaboration between bishops and priests of the UOC and the enemy. These findings were often ridiculous. Security officials exhibited photos of children’s bibles, prayer books, old liturgical books, archival collections of newspapers and magazines featuring the words ‘Russian,’ and Christmas or Easter sermons of the Russian Church patriarch. In cases where there was nothing to find, the special services planted compromising evidence themselves.

For instance, in the church of Hlynsk village, near Rivne, the security services planted ‘enemy’ leaflets while the pastor was busy purchasing cars for the Ukrainian army with money raised by his community. ‘I received a call from the headman, who said that he was not allowed into the temple. People from the SBU examined the church themselves, then called the headman and led him to the closet, where they took out two packs of leaflets, which they had put there on their own because there could not be postcards of such content in our church,’ rector priest Vasyl Nachev told us.

The true details of these searches are practically unknown to Ukrainians. Instead, it is widely reported in all media that the special services find much evidence of collaboration with the enemy in UOC churches. Thus the UOC is cast as an enemy in Ukrainian society, the consequences of which we described above.

Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson assessed the situation accurately: ‘Zelenskyy’s secret police have raided monasteries across Ukraine, and even a convent full of nuns, and arrested dozens of priests for no justifiable reasons whatsoever and in clear violation of the Ukrainian Constitution, which no longer matters. And in the face of this, the Biden’s administration has said nothing. Not one word. Instead, they continue to push to send Zelenskyy more tax dollars.’

Carlson is absolutely right. The president, in violation of Ukrainian laws, imposed sanctions against Ukrainian bishops and then revoked the Ukrainian citizenship of some other bishops, despite the fact that this clearly contradicts the constitution.

The situation is even more absurd because the UOC is doing everything to help its people in this unjust war. According to official data, the church renders great assistance to the army, internally displaced persons, and the needy. The assistance to the army has reached nearly a million dollars, and 180 tons of humanitarian aid have been delivered for the Armed Forces of Ukraine—impressive given that people in Ukraine are not at all rich and their donations to temples are very scarce. In addition, at the UOC’s main council in May 2022, it adopted a number of decisions to break off canonical spiritual ties with the ROC.

However, it seems that Zelenskyy is set to completely outlaw and destroy the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. On January 20, a bill on the de facto ban of the UOC was submitted to parliament. The initiator of the law was no ordinary parliamentarian but the prime minister, Denys Shmyhal. It marks a return to a shameful era when a state in the center of Europe intends to crack down on the religion of its own people.”

We must do everything we can to reverse military aid to the Ukraine. Let’s save the world from nuclear war!

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