“Ukraine – Russia”

The old world broke this week. It was blown up cynically by someone who thought this would advance their agenda the most.

The act of vandalizing a major piece of physical infrastructure, targeting civilian populations, isn’t unprecedented in history, but it does signal that everything we thought we knew about the rules of the current game was wrong.

Well, for most people anyway.

When I spoke in June at the Ron Paul Institute Conference on Foreign Policy I described the game of geopolitics as a seven-player game of the ancient Chinese game, Go.

Serious Rabbit Hole reading. But I admit that blowing up the pipelines leaves us more questions than answers. Do you trust the Biden government? The EU? The WEF? Russia?

A blood-stained mattress lay in the dank basement of a bombed-out hotel where Russian troops were based until Ukraine’s soldiers forced them out last month. Abandoned army rations and sleeping bags indicated a rapid departure.

Not long ago, Sviati Hory [Holy Mountains] National Park was a popular tourist spot. The war has transformed this once tranquil area in the north of Donetsk region, centred on a 17th monastery, into an apocalyptic landscape littered with the grim detritus of Russia’s failing invasion.

Sensors are everywhere on the battlefield in #Ukraine: including those of the Bayraktar TB-2 UCAV, seen using the Wescam MX-15D sensor turret to observe what appears to be this recent shootdown. https://t.co/wZCgXgAoJo pic.twitter.com/5NRlcNq0by

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) October 2, 2022

IZIUM, Ukraine (AP) — The first time the Russian soldiers caught him, they tossed him bound and blindfolded into a trench covered with wooden boards for days on end.

Then they beat him, over and over: Legs, arms, a hammer to the knees, all accompanied by furious diatribes against Ukraine. Before they let him go, they took away his passport and Ukrainian military ID — all he had to prove his existence — and made sure he knew exactly how worthless his life was.

“No one needs you,” the commander taunted. “We can shoot you any time, bury you a half-meter underground and that’s it.”

The Calgary branch of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress is calling on the federal government to take a harsher stance against Russia as the situation abroad continues to worsen.

The organization wants to see Ottawa declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, expel Russian diplomats from Canada and suspend the issuance of Canadian travel visas to Russian Federation citizens.

Vladimir Putin’s disastrous military adventure in Ukraine has raised the prospect that his 22-year rule could be nearing its end. But will he go, or will he have to be pushed?

Seven months into the Russian president’s war of aggression, his troops have suffered massive losses of men and equipment and are in headlong retreat in eastern Ukraine. Putin’s order last week to mobilize hundreds of thousands of men has descended into chaos, drawing rebukes even from his own propagandists and political allies.

The 69-year-old autocrat rose to power in 2000, succeeding an ailing Boris Yeltsin after championing Russia’s second war in Chechnya. The chances of his leaving anytime soon are still remote, but it’s clear that the escalating fallout from his military gamble is already loosening his viselike grip on power.

DARIALI, Georgia — They are bus drivers, programmers, photographers, bankers. They have driven for hours, bribed their way through many police checkpoints — spending a month’s wages in some cases — and then waited at the border, most of them for days, in a traffic jam that stretched for miles.

Many grabbed their passports, abandoned their cars and crossed the frontier on foot, fearing that Russia would slam shut one of the last, precious routes to leave the country. The Kremlin dispatched teams to border crossings to weed out draft-eligible men and hand them conscription notices, and rumors spread on social media that it would seal the border.

Most of those who left had no idea when they would return home, if ever.

Russia has withdrawn its troops from the strategic Ukrainian town of Lyman, in a move seen as a significant setback for its campaign in the east.

The retreat came amid fears thousands of soldiers would be encircled in the town, Russia’s defence ministry said.

Recapturing Lyman is of strategic significance for Ukraine.

The town had been used as a logistics hub by Russia, and could give Ukrainian troops access to more territory in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

OTTAWA—Russia’s war on Ukraine escalated sharply Friday after President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed four eastern Ukraine territories, prompting Kyiv to apply for fast-track membership in NATO and the U.S. and Canada to promise more support.

In Moscow, Putin renewed threats to use tactical nuclear weapons and blamed the West for sabotaging Russia-built undersea gas pipelines to Germany — an accusation the White House flatly rejected.

In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly condemned Putin’s latest moves, including “sham” votes this week that were “political theatre” to justify Friday’s “illegitimate” annexations.

WASHINGTON, Sept 30 (Reuters) – Russia’s mobilization has exposed the mounting pressure the Kremlin is under as its armed forces show signs of “increased weakness and frailty” in the war in Ukraine, Britain’s Chief of Defense Staff Admiral Sir Tony Radakin said on Friday.

“There are pressure points. There is some brittleness to the Russian armed forces,” Radakin told a small group of reporters in Washington.

But Radakin cautioned that the conflict was slow-moving, with Ukraine poised to take further, incremental advantage of Russian “pressure points.” He did not predict any sudden Russian battlefield collapse.

#Ukraine: A Russian T-72B3 tank was taken out by an ATGM fired by the Ukrainian 95th Brigade in the vicinity of Olhivka, #Kharkiv Oblast. pic.twitter.com/tHmbWtkXsP

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) September 30, 2022

THE 2021 film Operation Mincemeat begins with the narrator saying: ‘In war, truth is protected by a bodyguard of lies’. The same is true of the war in Ukraine. While we know the truth about the gangster state that is Russia and its malevolent dictator who has ordered the murder of more than a dozen people on British soil, supervises state terror and torture at home and initiated an illegal and bloody war, we are not being told the whole truth about Ukraine. It is not the freedom-loving democracy its propagandists claim.

As Russia’s recent partial mobilization has shown, he is desperate

As the world wonders what happened to the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, many suspect that Russian President Vladimir Putin is behind the sabotage. At first glance, it appears strange that Russia would damage pipelines that its own companies run. But Putin has several possible reasons for carrying out the attack.

One reason could be that Gazprom (the Russian state-owned gas giant) wants to avoid paying penalties for failing to fulfill its contractual obligations. Since August 31, Russia has halted gas exports via both Nord Stream pipelines, which follows a similar move in July where the Kremlin cited erroneous maintenance issues as the cause of the short shutdown that month. Despite the ceasing of operations, Gazprom is still contracted to provide gas to European nations, and it has become clear that the cessation is a political stunt. But after the explosions disabled the pipelines, Gazprom can claim force majeure, and avoid paying for its failure to deliver gas. Claiming force majeure would not be novel either, as Gazprom already tried to do so earlier this year under similarly suspicious circumstances.