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Russia-Ukraine War - News and Developments PART 2


Amazing interview. Watch full interview if you get a chance
Look at it this way...

Let us say that the entire Western alliance, after a few YEARS of supporting Ukraine, decided to end their support and pressured Ukraine into accepting a settlement, and Ukraine had to submit. From that point on, every country in Europe will never look at Russia the same way again. Not for at least one generation. Poutine will die soon as he is already in poor health. Despite the ruble's strength, Russia's economy is in trouble. China cannot support Russia forever, especially after Poutine died. The longer China is busy trying to manage a post-Poutine Russia, the less likely an invasion of Taiwan. Once Ukraine submitted to a settlement, Ukraine will serve as a land buffer for Europe against Russia, whatever version of Russia maybe after Poutine. So in the end, NATO will get stronger anyway, and Ukraine and Russia will get poorer.
 
Look at it this way...

Let us say that the entire Western alliance, after a few YEARS of supporting Ukraine, decided to end their support and pressured Ukraine into accepting a settlement, and Ukraine had to submit. From that point on, every country in Europe will never look at Russia the same way again. Not for at least one generation. Poutine will die soon as he is already in poor health. Despite the ruble's strength, Russia's economy is in trouble. China cannot support Russia forever, especially after Poutine died. The longer China is busy trying to manage a post-Poutine Russia, the less likely an invasion of Taiwan. Once Ukraine submitted to a settlement, Ukraine will serve as a land buffer for Europe against Russia, whatever version of Russia maybe after Poutine. So in the end, NATO will get stronger anyway, and Ukraine and Russia will get poorer.

It's the age old divide and rule method, you learnt it from your English forefathers, and perfected it after WWII to cement you grip on the world, kudos to you.
 
Will be great to see the Panther in action.

Rheinmetall is ready to build a factory in Ukraine.

The tank has a giant 130mm cannon.

German gov has to say ok first though.

Bild: picture alliance/dpa
Der neue „KF51-Panther“-Panzer von Rheinmetall soll ein „Gamechanger für die Gefechtsfelder der Zukunft“ sein.

Rheinmetall will offenbar den „KF51-Panther“-Panzer an die Ukraine liefern. (Screenshot/Archivfoto) © Screenshot/Twitter/@RheinmetallAG

 
sorry to disappoint you but EU is going to manage to avoid a recession with a modest 0.8% growth. Germany being the economic powerhouse is also going to avoid it.

China is Germany's trading partner and with economy in China normalizing, Germany's trade with China's manufacturing industry is mobilizing as well.

I have some beautiful swamp land under a bridge somewhere im selling… im sure you would be greatly interested ….


German economy and competitiveness is absolutely tanking. The german government is literally spending hundreds of billions of dollars in state subsidies to cushion the economy

Even then, with this unsustainable government spending, the german economy is on fragile life support

Gdp growth gone, very lucky to avoid a recession. And uncertain future for massive german industries who require cheap russian gas to remain globally competitive

On top of that, german and eu appointed “leaders” had their hand up in the air, praying for a warm winter to avoid rubbing out of gas/completely collapsing

Germany is on life support, barely trotting along. The government cannot spend hundreds of billions jn subsidies forever. And warm weather good luck will end. Exports will get crushed

Germany is on a rapid path of decoupling from russia and coupling jnto poverty and inflation

Look at it this way...

Let us say that the entire Western alliance, after a few YEARS of supporting Ukraine, decided to end their support and pressured Ukraine into accepting a settlement, and Ukraine had to submit. From that point on, every country in Europe will never look at Russia the same way again. Not for at least one generation. Poutine will die soon as he is already in poor health. Despite the ruble's strength, Russia's economy is in trouble. China cannot support Russia forever, especially after Poutine died. The longer China is busy trying to manage a post-Poutine Russia, the less likely an invasion of Taiwan. Once Ukraine submitted to a settlement, Ukraine will serve as a land buffer for Europe against Russia, whatever version of Russia maybe after Poutine. So in the end, NATO will get stronger anyway, and Ukraine and Russia will get poorer.
He is been barking this BS for about 6 months now. The loser could not even qualify for ambassador to Germany and now he is making random predictions in hope that eventually he may be right just like a broken clock is right 2x a day.

 
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Sanctions have pushed Russia to sell Urals at an average price of $49.48 a barrel last month, a 41 per cent drop year on year and well below of the $70-a-barrel level assumed in Russia’s budget.

Financial Times

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication
digitaledition.ft.com
digitaledition.ft.com

Russian deficit hits $25bn

MAX SEDDON AND ANASTASIA STOGNEI

Moscow’s budget gap has soared as the Kremlin steps up defence spending while western sanctions begin to bite into oil and gas revenues.

Russia’s budget deficit hit Rbs1.76tn ($25bn) in January as the Kremlin stepped up defence spending and western sanctions began to hit the country’s oil and gas revenue.​

The official figures are the latest sign of the damage the invasion of Ukraine continues to wreak on the economy nearly a year into President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Revenue from oil and gas fell 46 per cent year on year to Rbs426bn, the finance ministry said yesterday, blaming the drop on falling prices for Urals, its main crude export blend, and a decline in natural gas exports. Urals has traded at a significant discount to the global benchmark Brent product since the conflict began in late February 2022.
Expenditure ballooned by 59 per cent year on year to Rbs3.12tn in January 2023, amid largely classified plans to ramp up defence spending to Rbs3.5tn this year. Ukrainian officials have warned in recent days they believe Russia is set to launch a big offensive in the coming weeks to mark the first anniversary of the conflict.
Natalia Lavrova, chief economist at BCS Global Markets, the investment banking arm of the brokerage, said the figures marked the first time in its modern history that Russia had increased spending drastically at a time when revenues were falling sharply.
“The only time we saw something similar was in 2015, when spending on national defence increased sharply,” she said. “However, the huge difference between 2015 and 2023 is that, back then, the revenues dynamics was not as disastrous.”
The drop in oil and gas revenue was accompanied by a 28 per cent fall in other revenue to Rbs931bn, the finance ministry said, ascribing it to a decline in value added tax and corporate tax takings. The only similar decline in tax revenues on record was during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Lavrova said, when Russia imposed extensive lockdown measures.
“It is obvious that budgetary risks are increasing: both on the spending and revenue sides,” Lavrova added.
Moscow, which typically derives up to half of its revenues from oil and gas, offset the blow to its economy from western sanctions through increased volumes of discounted energy sales to countries such as China and India amid record energy prices last year.
But Putin’s “economic mobilisation” drive to support the war effort has driven up spending, while the sanctions have pushed Russia to sell Urals at an average price of $49.48 a barrel last month, a 41 per cent drop year on year and well below of the $70-a-barrel level assumed in Russia’s budget.
The ongoing hit to Russia’s coffers has prompted the finance ministry to look for ways to compensate for the widening deficit. Russia sold Rbs38.5bn of Chinese yuan and gold from its rainy-day National Welfare Fund last month and plans to issue Rbs800bn in local bonds in the first quarter of 2023 as part of a move to raise this year’s domestic borrowing to Rbs2.5tn, from a previously planned Rbs1.7tn.
 
European companies might have sold chemicals that could be used for different things including chemical weapons.
That is not the same as selling chemical weapons.

The companies in question knew that the substances they supplied to Iraq were being integrated into chemical weapons, since WMD use by Baghdad had been publicly documented including the types of poison gas fielded.

Moreover, export of those materials requires special government authorization. If there's a realistic possibility let alone evidence that the recipient party is producing banned weapons, then exports become illicit. Although EU regimes were perfectly aware that Saddam was attacking Iran will poison gas on a significant scale, they kept giving their green light. So these supplies were unlawful and constitute a crime.

Secondly, the USA regime provided Iraq with live satellite imagery of Iranian positions even though these were being targeted with chemical weapons to the full knowledge of Washington. Nauseatingly, Washington tried to blame the Halabja massacre on Iran.

Thirdly, the USA prevented the UN Security Council from condemning Iraqi WMD attacks on Iran. Which means the USA intentionally protected Iraq's use of WMD and shielded them from legal repercussions. This makes Washington a direct accomplice to the crime.

No matter how one will look at it, USA and EU regimes were active participants in Iraq's crimes against Iran and are therefore liable to prosecution.

As for sources, they are plentiful and overwhelming.

fp.jpg



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...d-to-violate-human-rights-or-to-protect-them/

un.jpg




at.jpg


pbs.jpg


USA lying on Halabja to whitewash Saddam and falsely accuse Iran, which had in fact been a victim (IRGC forces were at Halabjua to assist the Kurds and were martyred in the process):

hl.jpg


https://www.nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/npr/81ali.pdf

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/longroad/etc/arming.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/dec/18/iraq.germany

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/west-germanys-secret-back-channel-iraq

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/30/world/us-aides-say-iraqis-made-use-of-a-nerve-gas.html


Don't try to rewrite history here. Either way statements like the above quoted one, coupled with bogus accusations against Iran will go a long way exposing the staggering double-standards and unlawful nature of NATO block policies to readers.
 
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As usual, claims without any sources…
go search about UHDE Ltd. and Hoechst AG. and their financing to work in Iraq by UK's Export Credits Guarantee Department

for the record the case went to court and some European convicted .
but as always a certain Swedish person want to deny the sun .
As usual, claims without any sources…





Claims without sources…
European companies might have sold chemicals that could be used for different things including chemical weapons.
That is not the same as selling chemical weapons.
but when you build chemical factory to produce Thuban and mustard I'm not aware of any other use for it or when you approve finance for it . or when you use your veto power to prevent UNSC condemn Saddam use of chemical weapon against civilian
Iraq's 11,000-page report to the UN Security Council lists 150 foreign companies, including some from America, Britain, Germany and France, that supported Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programme, a German newspaper said yesterday.

Berlin's left-wing Die Tageszeitung newspaper said it had seen a copy of the original Iraqi dossier which was vetted for sensitive information by US officials before being handed to the five permanent Security Council members two weeks ago. An edited version was passed to the remaining 10 members of the Security Council last night.


British officials said the list of companies appeared to be accurate. Eighty German firms and 24 US companies are reported to have supplied Iraq with equipment and know-how for its weapons programmes from 1975 onwards and in some cases support for Baghdad's conventional arms programme had continued until last year.
Dutch Melchemie and KBS in particular, are amongst the major suppliers of such chemicals. Furthermore, the by now convicted businessman, Frans van Anraat, had a central part in constructing Iraqi’s arsenal.It is not before 1984, that the Dutch government submits a number of chemicals to export authorisation. A dogged struggle between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Economic Affairs precedes this submission to export regulation. As a result, the number of products ending up on the ‘blacklist’ is far smaller than was proposed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The export of a number of products that indeed can be used to produce chemical weapons thus continues. Minister of Foreign Trade, Frits Bolkestein, who visits Iraq in 1983, is a passionate opponent of a more comprising export scheme.
after 1984 dutch government went to the extend to not mention some precoursor for chemical weapons on manifest to hide their export to iraq and you have the audacity to say European government were not involved and only some individual .
you think you can fool anybody but yourself on the matter
 
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Amazing interview. Watch full interview if you get a chance
Again…this guy has been constantly wrong in his “predictions” for almost a year now.
Its a clown 🤡 .

Take this quote from march 2022.
How ukraine forces would be “annihilated”

Basically every few weeks this clown repeats the same bullshit propaganda how ukraine forces are on the breaking point and will collapse any second, and how certain it is great russia will be victorious.

Only to be proven wrong, wrong, wrong, and again wrong.

He only got “appeal to authority” going for him. Which is a logical fallacy in debate.
And there are thousands of retired colonels. Big whoop the russians found 1 traitor?
 
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, the man who uncovered how the USA military mass-murdered several hundreds of helpless Vietnamese civilians at the village of My Lai, and who went on reporting on the Watergate scandal or the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US occupiers at the Abu Ghraib prison among other topics. Hersh is known for having credible contacts among the USA intelligence community, whom he cites in groundbreaking reports. In a detailed paper last week, he revealed how the CIA on direct orders from the Biden regime planned and executed the attack on the North Stream pipeline connecting Germany to Russia, which NATO has since sought to blame on Moscow.



How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now

Seymour Hersh

Feb 8


The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.

The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.

Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.

Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.

There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.

President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.

The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.

From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.

America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy.

Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of Germany’s annual consumption. Tensions were constantly escalating between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration.

Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as Cruz told Blinken, “halted [the pipeline] in its tracks.” There would be enormous political and economic pressure from the German government, then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online.

Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s views. “I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream 2,” he said. “I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany, not to move forward with it.”

A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had “always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not to criticize the move.

There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz, announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden’s foreign policy nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months, deep into the fall. Politico later depicted Biden’s turnabout on the second Russian pipeline as “the one decision, arguably more than the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, that has imperiled Biden’s agenda.”

The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the crisis in mid-November, when Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval of the second Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged 8% within days, amid growing fears in Germany and Europe that the pipeline suspension and the growing possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine would lead to a very much unwanted cold winter. It was not clear to Washington just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, stood. Months earlier, after the fall of Afghanistan, Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a more autonomous European foreign policy in a speech in Prague—clearly suggesting less reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.

Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of December more than 100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from Belarus and Crimea. Alarm was growing in Washington, including an assessment from Blinken that those troop numbers could be “doubled in short order.”

The administration’s attention once again was focused on Nord Stream. As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.

It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.

All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge.

PLANNING

In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.

It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back and forth chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be reversible—such as another layer of sanctions and currency restrictions—or irreversible—that is, kinetic actions, which could not be undone?

What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.


THE PLAYERS Left to right: Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan.

Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”

At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.

Something like this had been done before. In 1971, the American intelligence community learned from still undisclosed sources that two important units of the Russian Navy were communicating via an undersea cable buried in the Sea of Okhotsk, on Russia’s Far East Coast. The cable linked a regional Navy command to the mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.

A hand-picked team of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency operatives was assembled somewhere in the Washington area, under deep cover, and worked out a plan, using Navy divers, modified submarines and a deep-submarine rescue vehicle, that succeeded, after much trial and error, in locating the Russian cable. The divers planted a sophisticated listening device on the cable that successfully intercepted the Russian traffic and recorded it on a taping system.

The NSA learned that senior Russian navy officers, convinced of the security of their communication link, chatted away with their peers without encryption. The recording device and its tape had to be replaced monthly and the project rolled on merrily for a decade until it was compromised by a forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician named Ronald Pelton who was fluent in Russian. Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defector in 1985 and sentenced to prison. He was paid just $5,000 by the Russians for his revelations about the operation, along with $35,000 for other Russian operational data he provided that was never made public.

That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells, was innovative and risky, and produced invaluable intelligence about the Russian Navy's intentions and planning.

Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right across the border from Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for the mission? “It would be a goat ****,” the Agency was told.

Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”

Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”

What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack.

“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”

Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity. According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”

The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”

The Agency working group members had no direct contact with the White House, and were eager to find out if the President meant what he’d said—that is, if the mission was now a go. The source recalled, “Bill Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”


“The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow water a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island . . .”

 
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Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, the man who uncovered how the USA military mass-murdered several hundreds of helpless Vietnamese civilians at the village of My Lai, and who went on reporting on the Watergate scandal or the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US occupiers at the Abu Ghraib prison among other topics. Hersh is known for having credible contacts among the USA intelligence community, whom he cites in his groundbreaking reports. In a groundbreaking, detailed paper last week, he revealed based how the CIA on direct orders from the Biden regime planned and executed the attack on the North Stream pipeline connecting Germany to Russia, which NATO has since tried to blame on Moscow.



How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now

Seymour Hersh

Feb 8


The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.

The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.

Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.

Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.

There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.

President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.

The direct route, which bypassed any need to transit Ukraine, had been a boon for the German economy, which enjoyed an abundance of cheap Russian natural gas—enough to run its factories and heat its homes while enabling German distributors to sell excess gas, at a profit, throughout Western Europe. Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential.

From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance. The holding company behind it, Nord Stream AG, was incorporated in Switzerland in 2005 in partnership with Gazprom, a publicly traded Russian company producing enormous profits for shareholders which is dominated by oligarchs known to be in the thrall of Putin. Gazprom controlled 51 percent of the company, with four European energy firms—one in France, one in the Netherlands and two in Germany—sharing the remaining 49 percent of stock, and having the right to control downstream sales of the inexpensive natural gas to local distributors in Germany and Western Europe. Gazprom’s profits were shared with the Russian government, and state gas and oil revenues were estimated in some years to amount to as much as 45 percent of Russia’s annual budget.

America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America. In fact, that’s exactly what happened. Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy.

Nord Stream 1 was dangerous enough, in the view of NATO and Washington, but Nord Stream 2, whose construction was completed in September of 2021, would, if approved by German regulators, double the amount of cheap gas that would be available to Germany and Western Europe. The second pipeline also would provide enough gas for more than 50 percent of Germany’s annual consumption. Tensions were constantly escalating between Russia and NATO, backed by the aggressive foreign policy of the Biden Administration.

Opposition to Nord Stream 2 flared on the eve of the Biden inauguration in January 2021, when Senate Republicans, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, repeatedly raised the political threat of cheap Russian natural gas during the confirmation hearing of Blinken as Secretary of State. By then a unified Senate had successfully passed a law that, as Cruz told Blinken, “halted [the pipeline] in its tracks.” There would be enormous political and economic pressure from the German government, then headed by Angela Merkel, to get the second pipeline online.

Would Biden stand up to the Germans? Blinken said yes, but added that he had not discussed the specifics of the incoming President’s views. “I know his strong conviction that this is a bad idea, the Nord Stream 2,” he said. “I know that he would have us use every persuasive tool that we have to convince our friends and partners, including Germany, not to move forward with it.”

A few months later, as the construction of the second pipeline neared completion, Biden blinked. That May, in a stunning turnaround, the administration waived sanctions against Nord Stream AG, with a State Department official conceding that trying to stop the pipeline through sanctions and diplomacy had “always been a long shot.” Behind the scenes, administration officials reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, by then facing a threat of Russian invasion, not to criticize the move.

There were immediate consequences. Senate Republicans, led by Cruz, announced an immediate blockade of all of Biden’s foreign policy nominees and delayed passage of the annual defense bill for months, deep into the fall. Politico later depicted Biden’s turnabout on the second Russian pipeline as “the one decision, arguably more than the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan, that has imperiled Biden’s agenda.”

The administration was floundering, despite getting a reprieve on the crisis in mid-November, when Germany’s energy regulators suspended approval of the second Nord Stream pipeline. Natural gas prices surged 8% within days, amid growing fears in Germany and Europe that the pipeline suspension and the growing possibility of a war between Russia and Ukraine would lead to a very much unwanted cold winter. It was not clear to Washington just where Olaf Scholz, Germany’s newly appointed chancellor, stood. Months earlier, after the fall of Afghanistan, Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a more autonomous European foreign policy in a speech in Prague—clearly suggesting less reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions.

Throughout all of this, Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine, and by the end of December more than 100,000 soldiers were in position to strike from Belarus and Crimea. Alarm was growing in Washington, including an assessment from Blinken that those troop numbers could be “doubled in short order.”

The administration’s attention once again was focused on Nord Stream. As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.

It was at this unsettled moment that Biden authorized Jake Sullivan to bring together an interagency group to come up with a plan.

All options were to be on the table. But only one would emerge.

PLANNING

In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.

It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back and forth chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be reversible—such as another layer of sanctions and currency restrictions—or irreversible—that is, kinetic actions, which could not be undone?

What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.


THE PLAYERS Left to right: Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan.

Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”

At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.

Something like this had been done before. In 1971, the American intelligence community learned from still undisclosed sources that two important units of the Russian Navy were communicating via an undersea cable buried in the Sea of Okhotsk, on Russia’s Far East Coast. The cable linked a regional Navy command to the mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.

A hand-picked team of Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency operatives was assembled somewhere in the Washington area, under deep cover, and worked out a plan, using Navy divers, modified submarines and a deep-submarine rescue vehicle, that succeeded, after much trial and error, in locating the Russian cable. The divers planted a sophisticated listening device on the cable that successfully intercepted the Russian traffic and recorded it on a taping system.

The NSA learned that senior Russian navy officers, convinced of the security of their communication link, chatted away with their peers without encryption. The recording device and its tape had to be replaced monthly and the project rolled on merrily for a decade until it was compromised by a forty-four-year-old civilian NSA technician named Ronald Pelton who was fluent in Russian. Pelton was betrayed by a Russian defector in 1985 and sentenced to prison. He was paid just $5,000 by the Russians for his revelations about the operation, along with $35,000 for other Russian operational data he provided that was never made public.

That underwater success, codenamed Ivy Bells, was innovative and risky, and produced invaluable intelligence about the Russian Navy's intentions and planning.

Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation. Would the divers have to go to Estonia, right across the border from Russia’s natural gas loading docks, to train for the mission? “It would be a goat ****,” the Agency was told.

Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”

Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”

What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack.

“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”

Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity. According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”

The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”

The Agency working group members had no direct contact with the White House, and were eager to find out if the President meant what he’d said—that is, if the mission was now a go. The source recalled, “Bill Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”


“The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow water a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island . . .”

You could write a story like this claiming any country did. It is based on nothing. It is a conspiracy theory.
 
What does Biden's old age have to do with Poutine's health? How do they affect each other?

First:
The vids exposes your propaganda lie "Putin is in bad health condition and will die soon"

Second:
Both are leaders of their country, are at war, so comparing each health condition is essential for the ongoing war. So while comparing it, it turns out that the health condition of Joe Biden is much worse than the health condition of Putin. And this could influence the ongoing war in the next month cause of early dead of Joe Biden.
 
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