Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illuminating an ugly truth: the anti-fracking war on America’s energy security is being waged by well-funded, radical U.S. environmental groups, as well as interests tied directly to Vladimir Putin. For years, the U.S. government has investigated Russian financial ties to environmental groups that push for ending U.S. fossil fuel production and have successfully shut down fracking sites and pipelines, to the detriment of U.S. workers and consumers.
Many Ukrainians applying to come to Canada as Russia’s invasion of their country drags on are doing so as an “insurance policy” and a “backup plan,” the Canadian immigration minister has said.
Canada is boosting its role in NATO deterrence efforts in Latvia amid a major shift by the alliance to a more assertive defensive posture in the wake of Russian atrocities in Ukrainian cities of Bucha and Mariupol.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warned the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that “the next month or two of fighting will be significant,” as President Vladimir Putin deals with a “mismatch between his ambitions” and his “military capabilities.”
“The next few months could see us moving along a more unpredictable and potentially escalatory trajectory,” including “a period of more ad hoc decision making” by Russia, she warned.
It increases the “likelihood that President Putin will turn to more drastic means,” she said, especially “if he perceives Russia is losing in Ukraine.”
Over the past five years, most Americans have become familiar with what leading journalists and academics have termed, the new era of “Great Power Competition”: a reference to the increasingly complex and worrisome armed stand-off between the United States (and its allies), and China and Russia—the two leading authoritarian powers. The alarming genocidal war launched in February 2022 by Russia against Ukraine has awakened us to the reality that our expectations at the end of the Cold War in 1991 were delusional and foolish. It is not apparent that the universal appeal of the democratic idea will not spontaneously enable a benign New World Order to take shape.
It’s not too much to ask that Congress debate and vote on whether to authorize a U.S. march to war that’s now well underway.
This is what sticks in my craw: billions of our taxpayer dollars being sent to fuel a war in which the U.S. has no national security interest. Even Obama said as much in 2016. All that money to buy weapons and pay the salaries and pensions of corrupt Ukrainian government officials. And to fight disinformation? While our own cities are decaying and millions of Americans are out of work? Are you kidding me? All for another proxy war to weaken Russia. And to fill the coffers of the Deep State war machine. And all the while, the Washington bureaucrats and their lapdogs in the media spout their lies and talking points as if they were Gospel. This war should be called “The Great American Propaganda War.”
Russian mercenaries have been accused of summarily executing, torturing and beating civilians in the Central African Republic (CAR).
Witnesses told Human Rights Watch (HRW) that in one incident last July, Russian-speaking fighters shot dead at least 12 unarmed men at a roadblock.
Most victims were put in a shallow hole by the road near Bossangoa, they said.
CAR’s government denies hiring mercenaries from the private Russian Wagner Group to fight rebels.
PayPal has banned the accounts of journalists and media companies that have published stories that contradict some of the West’s reporting of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Among those that have been banned include MintPress News, its journalists Alan MacLeod and Mnar Adley, and independent journalist Caleb Maupin.
A few days ago, MintPress published a report by MacLeod, titled “An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming the New Norm.” The report alleges Silicon Valley and Big Tech have been suppressing anything that contradicts the US and Western governments’ narratives of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Canada’s efforts to help Ukraine are disappointing compared with what our major allies — the United States, United Kingdom, France and even Germany — have undertaken. The recent announcement that Canada had delivered four M777 howitzers to Ukraine was downright embarrassing.
A recent Russian state TV program has stirred outrage and made headlines across the United Kingdom after a television presenter featured a simulated demonstration of how the Russian navy’s nuclear submarines would take out the UK with ease.
Just days after Hillary Clinton emissaries Christopher Steele and Michael Sussmann approached the FBI in September 2016 with dirt that would infuse the Russia collusion probe, the campaign’s opposition research firm sent some of the same information to New York Times journalists.
Hunter Biden’s laptop has revealed a lot, including the depths to which Joe Biden seemed intertwined with his son Hunter’s business, his accounts, and his business partners.
But the laptop has also revealed how they wanted to keep his involvement in the business on the down-low, and Tony Bobulinski has confirmed that. That would suggest that they knew they were doing something wrong and/or doing things they didn’t want people to know about. The emails referred to Joe Biden by various codenames including “Celtic” and “the big guy.”
One of the other things that the email revealed was another alias of Joe Biden’s, even when he contacted his son and others in the emails seen on the laptop. The pseudonym he went by might make one wonder. He used the name “Peter Henderson” — the name of the fictional Soviet KGB spy in the novels of Tom Clancy. The name was connected to his email “67stingray”, which references the Corvette that Biden prizes.
Can we ask why Joe Biden is using the name of a Soviet spy, and what that might portend?
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was largely predictable but it also brought some surprises. It was quite expected that the current U.S. administration would try to draw Russia into the “Ukrainian swamp” in order to weaken and isolate it as much as possible. It was expected that the inexperienced and naive Ukrainian leader would trust the promises of the Biden team and let them to drag his country into a devastating gamble.
It was expected that Russia, seeking to restore its former empire, would use Western provocations to establish its presence in a weak and corrupt Ukraine. It was completely unexpected that instead of a modern, maneuverable, and highly organized Russian army, we saw poorly trained troops erasing entire cities from the face of the earth like nomadic hordes. A terrifying surprise has been the use by the Kremlin against its brothers in blood and faith of the Chechen and Syrian militants. Finally, the biggest surprise was the desperate courage of the Ukrainians themselves and the high combat readiness of their armed forces.
This war will not end in the near future. Most likely, it will lead to the destruction of Ukraine and the extreme weakening of Russia, exhausted by excessive exertion of forces and sanctions.
Space-based threats from China and Russia have grown exponentially in recent years, according to a new report on the issue by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), published April 12.
“Evidence of both nations’ intent to undercut the United States and allied leadership in the space domain can be seen in the growth of combined in-orbit assets of China and Russia, which grew approximately 70% in just two years,” noted Kevin Ryder, DIA senior analyst for space and counterspace. “This recent and continuing expansion follows a more than 200% increase between 2015 and 2018.”
