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By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with [2]
Until June 24 the combined air forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) are conducting their largest operation against Russia in the 74-year history of the alliance. The plan has been to disguise F-16 fighter jets as if they are piloted by Ukrainians, and pretend they are launched from Ukrainian territory.
In response, Russian artillery, missile and fighter-bomber forces have been disabling and destroying Ukrainian airfields, and every Ukrainian aircraft being flown from them.
Then on Friday, President Vladimir Putin dismissed the NATO pretence, warning that if an F-16 threatens to attack a Russian target, it would be “burned”, and so would the launch airbase and supporting aircraft – fuel tankers, electronic countermeasures, command-and-control, and decoys – no matter what NATO member-state flag they are flying, and on what territory they are based.
“The F-16 will also burn, there is no doubt,” Putin said [3] in St. Petersburg on June 16. “But if they are located at air bases outside Ukraine, and used in combat operations, we will have to look at how to hit and where to hit those means that are used in combat operations against us. This is a serious danger of NATO’s further involvement in this armed conflict.” When the president and commander-in-chief announces “we will have to look at how to hit”, he means the General Staff have already assembled the operational intelligence and readied plans of attack with three minutes to launch; that is, against targets in Poland, Romania, Moldova, and possibly further west across the Czech and German borders.
In the president’s phrase “those means that are used in combat operations against us”, Putin also intends to identify airborne targets, manned and unmanned, over the Black, Baltic, and Barents Seas.
Never before has NATO’s collective defence proviso Article Five [4] been explicitly challenged by the Kremlin. In practice, by describing the agreement of the NATO members that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”, the NATO wording [4] does no more than require each of the NATO members to take “forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary.” .
What is happening is that by aiming their display of NATO airpower at the Kremlin, US and German commanders in their Ramstein bunkers have provoked Putin to call their bluff: he is now aiming directly at the Poles, Romanians and Germans, telling them to “deem” whether war with Russia is “necessary”.
“Well, the Poles,” added Putin, “okay, they have their own goals, they sleep and see the return of Western Ukraine. And, apparently, they are gradually coming to this.”
In parallel, the US has escalated [5] to nuclear weapons by flying two US Air Force (USAF) B-1B bombers from the UK Fairford airbase, refuelling in Germany, transiting Poland and Romania, to a point in the Black Sea off the Crimean coast and the Sevastopol naval base, where the aircraft transponders were turned off from public view.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Polish President Andrzej Duda have been also been trying to disguise Article Five by negotiating between themselves — they told [6] the press last week — “what sort of security guarantees they would provide [the Ukraine] once the war ends… ‘Our support will last as long as it is needed’, Macron said. ‘We must ensure that Russia will not only not win this unfortunate campaign but also can never repeat it.’”
[7]At the Elysée Palace on June 12 [6], Olaf Scholz, Andrzej Duda, Emannuel Macron.
[8]German Leopard tanks, US Bradley infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) destroyed on the battlefield on June 10; source [9],
The Financial Times was told to report the three officials are discussing how to provide the Ukraine with security guarantees less potent than NATO membership with its application of Article Five, but instead assurances “that are expected to include annual provisions of cutting-edge weaponry, Nato-standard training and intelligence-sharing…‘The question is between guarantees and assurances’ said one European diplomat involved in the talks. ‘We can’t promise them we will go to war for them, but we can give long-term pledges to keep them safe in other ways.’”
On the Ukrainian battlefield, however, the “cutting-edge” German, French and US weaponry has been defeated, and the Ukrainian and foreign men and means to replace them destroyed. The outcome which the Russians have called “de-militarization” of Ukrainian territory at the start of the Special Military Operation last year has now been defined by Putin to mean the accession of the Russian territories east of the Dnieper River, plus a “sanitary zone” from the river westward from Kiev to Lvov which will be deep enough to prevent attacks on the Russian east; [10] and Polish conversion of the Galician region between Lvov and the Polish border.
[11]Source: https://www.bitchute.com/video/JjxHCw5PP2s9/ [12]
For the full speech and question-and-answer session, see: (Russian [12]); the English translation incomplete [13].
“As for demilitarization,” Putin said on Friday, “after all, look, soon Ukraine will stop using its own equipment at all, there is nothing left. Everything they fight on, and everything they use, is brought in from the outside, but you can’t win for so long. And our defense industry is being promoted from day to day. We have increased the output of military products 2.7 times over the past year, and the increase in the most popular samples is tenfold, and further growth is taking place. Enterprises work in two, three shifts, and some day and night. And this tells us that we have a very large margin of safety.”
The implication is that for the Russian war outcome to be checked or defeated before there is no Ukrainian army left on the battlefield, “security guarantees” and “assurances” from NATO will not be enough — Germany, France and Poland must fight Russia directly, activating Article Five thereby. Their bluff called in Friday’s ultimatum over the deployment of the F-16, “the serious danger of NATO’s further involvement in this armed conflict”, as Putin warned, is that Germany, France and Poland will also be defeated on the field, and have no “security guarantee” or “assurance” to rely on for themselves, let alone for the Ukraine.
In his Friday speech Putin warned that Ukrainian military operations are failing up and down the line of contact. “What is going on with this so-called counteroffensive? Not quite so: somewhere Ukrainian units manage to reach the first line, somewhere they fail – that’s not the question. The question is that they use so-called strategic reserves, which consist of several components. The first of them is designed to break through the defense, the second is to use troops to consolidate territories, move through the territory. They didn’t achieve their goals at any of the sites – that’s what’s important.”
“Indeed, their losses are very large, about even more than one in ten compared to the Russian army. This is a fact. On technology: every day there is an increase in the loss of this equipment, somewhere now, to date, 186 tanks have been lost by the Ukrainian army and 418 armored vehicles of various classes. I’m not talking about the personnel right now, it’s necessary for the Ministry of Defense to voice itself. But, I repeat, the most important thing is that there is no success in any of the areas. The enemy had no success, as reported by the military.”
What happens next on the battlefield?
In the broadcast George Eliason introduces the evidence that, in desperation, the Ukrainian military will attempt to trigger a major nuclear explosion at the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), causing radiation contamination of the surrounding area, as the Ukrainian destruction of the Kakhovka dam on June 6 attempted to use flood water to the same effect.
[14]For the story of Ukrainian artillery and commando attacks on the Zaporozhye NPP, read this [15].
[16]For more details on the Kakhovka dam attacks, click [17].
The first segment of the broadcast concludes with breaking news from federal court in Boston, Massachusetts, where the grand jury indictment of Jack Teixeira in the Pentagon Papers case was unsealed and published on June 15. Click to read in full the 10-page document [18].
For the time being, the Bellingcat intelligence unit and the New York Times, which have been collaborating to convict Teixeira of espionage, have failed to see the dramatic shift in the US prosecutors’ case against the young US Air Force (USAF) national guardsman. According to the Times report [19], “the evidence presented in the 10-page indictment represents a distillation of the immense trove of secrets Airman Teixeira is accused of taking from computers at an intelligence unit at the Cape Cod air base — and sharing with online friends he was hoping to impress in chat groups on Discord, a social media platform popular with gamers. But it was not immediately clear how many of the vaguely described incidents that underlie the charges had been previously disclosed and which ones were being made public for the first time.”
In fact, the new court filing confirms the Justice Department has decided to downgrade the originally reported charges against Teixeira from espionage on behalf of a foreign state or organisation to “willful retention and transmission of national defense information”.
[20]Source: https://drive.google.com/ [18]
The government now says that Teixeira had been illegally accessing classified intelligence materials for sixteen months before his arrest. “Beginning no earlier than January 2022 and continuing through in or about April 2023, in the District of Massachusetts and elsewhere, TEIXEIRA improperly retained and transmitted classified National Defense Information on a particular social media platform (“the Social Media Platform”).” The indictment claims this started six months after Teixeira had been vetted by the USAF and qualified for his special clearances to access TOP SECRET and Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) classified documents.
Despite the long duration of this allegedly illegal access, the counts officially filed against Teixeira are limited in time to a two and a half-month period between February 2023 and Teixeira’s arrest on April 13. Although Bellingcat, the New York Times and other US media have been told to report the leaks add up to dozens, if not hundreds of classified documents, the indictment charges Teixeira with leaking just four documents he had photocopied and two handwritten notes he made on classified documents after reading them. The notes, according to the indictment, carry “information regarding the compromise by a foreign adversary of certain accounts belonging to a US company” and “information regarding the provision of equipment to Ukraine, how the equipment would be transferred, and how the equipment would be used upon receipt.”
The new disclosures reveal that the focus of the case against Teixeira is just two documents from the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the deterioration of the Ukrainian military before the proposed counter-offensive, and two other documents, apparently from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA):
[21]Source: https://drive.google.com/ [18]
In the second half-hour Heinrich Buecker returns to the War of the Worlds from Berlin, as the German prosecutors who lost their case against him on April 29 have decided to appeal and take Buecker to a higher court. Buecker has been charged with “publicly approving a crime of aggression in a manner likely to disturb the public peace”; that allegedly was in a speech marking the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 when Buecker also argued against German participation in the new war against Russia.
For details of the Berlin court action, read this [22]. Buecker’s first broadcast appearance can be followed here [23].
Initially in the Berlin district court last January, Buecker was fined €3,000; this was lifted in April, but may be reinstated in higher court action. In parallel, a court in Cologne has convicted a Ukrainian national, Yelena Kolbasnikova, who had been reported in Bild on May 8, 2022, as saying: “Russia is not an aggressor. Russia is helping to end the war in Ukraine.” This, the court ruled [24], was criminal approval of a crime of aggression because “it was undisputed that Russia had violated international law by invading Ukraine”. Kolbasnikova has been fined €900.
[25]Left, Heinrich Buecker at an anti-war protest at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin; Right, Yelena Kolbasnikova outside the Cologne courtroom with a Russian flag emblem she had tried to wear in court until the judge ordered her to remove it. Deutsche Welle, the German state media organ, reported the Kolbasnikova case here [24]. For a brief video clip of the Cologne court proceeding on June 3, click [26].
Buecker discusses the crackdown on public opposition to the war in Germany, and the reaction among Germans to the defeat of the German Leopard tanks and other weapons which the Scholz government has been supplying to Kiev.
In German public opinion, the most recent polls reveal the war against Russia is damaging the government coalition of Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), whose voter support has now been reduced to the level of the Greens, whose leaders, Deputy Chancellor Robert Habeck and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock are the most virulent anti-Russians in the government.
The voter impact is reflecting the loss of Russian gas, trade, and other price and job impacts from Germany’s economic sanctions against Russia, and from the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines. Notwithstanding, the battlefield losses, and the role of the US in directing the war in the Ukraine and the government’s policies in Berlin, including the attack on Nord Stream, have failed so far to diminish German voter confidence in the US first of all, and then in the Ukraine.
In early March Deutsche Welle, the state propaganda organ, has reported [27] a nationwide poll as revealing “Germans are worried about the impact of the war on their own lives. 58% said they fear that Germany could be drawn into the war, while 69% believe that Germany’s economy will deteriorate further…Some 47% of respondents to the latest survey said they believe Germany’s arms deliveries to Ukraine are appropriate — but 53% also say Germany’s efforts to end the war have not gone far enough.”
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[29] The poll reports that Olaf Scholz has been steadily losing public confidence, while Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck have been holding stable; the defense minister Oscar Pistorius, as anti-Russian as the two Green ministers, has been gaining over them all. Source: https://www.dw.com/ [27]
Listen to the broadcast here [30].
[31]Source: https://tntradiolive.podbean.com/ [30]