Andrew Roth – The Guardian Dec 12, 2021
A Russian-made Buk air defence system.
A flatbed rail wagon speeding through south-west Russia last week carried an ill omen for negotiations to avert a larger war with Ukraine.
On board was a Buk-M1, the kind of medium-range surface-to-air missile system that became notorious in 2014 after a missile fired from territory controlled by Russian proxies in eastern Ukraine shot down a Malaysian airliner, killing all 298 people aboard.
If Russia goes to war in Ukraine, it still needs to take a number of steps: establishing fuel supply lines, opening field hospitals and deploying air-defence systems such as the Buk that would protect its heavy weaponry and troops near the front.
Even as Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin were sitting down to talks meant to end the crisis, Russia was inching closer to being ready to launch a full-scale ground invasion of its neighbour.
“These data allow us to conclude that despite the negotiations between Biden and Putin, the concentration of Russian troops in the areas bordering the territory controlled by the Ukrainian authorities continues,” wrote the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) – an online research group that has used social media, railway schedules and other data to reveal details of Russia’s military buildup on the border.
Putin may still decide not to launch an invasion, as he leaves troops near the front as leverage for negotiations. But Russian and western analysts are predicting that this military buildup – the second one this year – portends a series of future crises over Ukraine as Putin seeks to reverse its trajectory towards the west.
“Even if Putin gets something from the west, serious talks or discussions about guarantees – will that be enough for Putin?” said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the political analysis firm R.Politik. “We are witnessing the dawn of a new geopolitical adventurism from Russia.”
Despite the Putin-Biden talks, the crisis is growing deeper.
On Thursday, Russia’s FSB said it had intercepted a Ukrainian ship in the Sea of Azov near Crimea for failing to obey orders. A day later, Russia closed nearly 70% of the Sea of Azov, a shared body of water also used by Ukraine, for firing drills. Then there is the escalating rhetoric.
Deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov has said Russia and the US may be hurtling towards a repeat of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. And Putin said that the situation in eastern Ukraine “looked like genocide” in a recent meeting, raising fears he could seek a pretext to send his troops into the country.
With its military threat on the table, Russia’s foreign ministry released its list of demands for how to end the crisis on Friday. Chief among them was for Nato to “officially disavow the decision of the 2008 Bucharest Nato summit that ‘Ukraine and Georgia will become Nato members’”.
Putin has spent the last two decades trying to fight Nato expansion, but the possible accession of Ukraine into the military alliance has always touched deeper emotions, and in part motivated him to order the annexation of Crimea and provoke a war in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 14,000 people.
“I told them: please don’t touch Ukraine or there’s going to be a problem,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, an influential Russian foreign policy analyst, of his discussions with western colleagues about Nato’s enlargement in the 2000s. “There is a real red line. Right or wrong … this kind of engagement with Ukraine on security and military affairs – that is seen here as absolutely unacceptable.”
Lukyanov said Putin saw it as his “duty as president” not to leave the “Ukrainian problem” – meaning its trajectory towards the west – for the next Russian leader.
The US has sought to persuade Russia that Ukraine would not join the alliance any time soon, but on Friday Moscow demanded a more formal declaration. That was a non-starter, Nato head Jens Stoltenberg said within hours of the demand being made public. “Nato’s relationship with Ukraine is going to be decided by the 30 Nato allies and Ukraine – no one else,” he said during a press conference with Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz.
In Ukraine, support for joining Nato has jumped considerably in recent years as the country has sought protection from an increasingly aggressive Russia. And for the nations on Nato’s eastern flank, allowing Russia to dictate the alliance’s policy on Ukraine is seen as the first step down a slippery slope towards recognising a Russian sphere of influence.
“History shows that pledges of neutrality by Ukraine or any other country in the region do nothing to abate Putin’s appetite; rather, they feed it,” wrote Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, in an article published by Foreign Affairs on Friday. “The best way to respond to such ultimatums is to ignore them altogether.”
There are doubts whether Russia really wants to strike any deal at all. Analysts noted that despite Moscow building up its forces for months, Russian diplomats had not prepared any formal documents or even formulated the country’s demands until last week. And the idea of mustering nearly 100,000 troops within striking distance of the Ukrainian border (the US has said that Russia could increase that number to 175,000 by the end of January) just to hold talks with Biden has struck western observers as overkill.
That brings us back to the Buk, which, as CIT noted, had its numbers crudely painted over in an effort to prevent identification. Russia employed similar tactics during its clandestine invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
The clock is ticking. Putin could pull back, but it would be embarrassing to do so without a solid win in hand. And Russia’s demands look impossible to fulfil for the west: “Putin thinks that if Biden wants, he can move mountains, he can convince allies and convince Kyiv [to make concessions],” said Stanovaya. “This problem could lead Putin to demand the impossible and push the stakes so high that everything ends in war.”
To think twenty years ago I used to buy The Guardian. I learned a lot about the markets reading their money pages. Now I wouldn’t line a dog’s toilet with it. It ain’t right, doing that to dog sh!t.
The future round here is Russian, since the Russians are not being replaced by tramps, cretins and insane criminals like we are.
If war breaks out, the only reason is the destruction of the white race. It would be the 3rd time that Jews have set peoples against each other in Europe (WWI, II and III).
This article is pure garbage. I suspect Roth is a Satanic JEW. And, nothing published in a UK newspaper is worth anything.
the US wants to start WW3 in Europe, by putting a powder-keg in the Ukraine. It has now supplied 3 billion dollars of ‘lethal aid’ Remember that America benefitted greatly from WW1 and WW2. A war fought in Europe could be quite convenient for it, to destroy its main competitors..
it is still not established who shot the
Malaysian air down the russian proxis,
ukraine jet or CIA/MOSSAD/IDF jet !
answer knows only JHWH .
Useless disinformant, that Malaysian airliner, supposed to be MH-17.. wasn’t intercepted by a Buk M-1, the Ukrainian airforces shot it out of the sky. The crash “investigation” is the longest running in the history of aviation.
The rest of the article I did not read.
These are lies and propaganda typical of the western press to demonize Russia and trying to provoke a war. There is genocidal campaign against Russian Ukrainians. This is not even hidden in pronouncements by neo nazi militants and extremist politicos. Militant actions and killing of these people occurred in 2014 and continues to this day. Russia sees that the only way now to stop this genocide is military since diplomacy and negotiations did not work. Mintz agreement etc. The West has never lived up to any agreements with Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. They were only used to take advantage by lies and deception. Putin has said no more to Kiev proxies and no more to Nato/U.S. war mongers coming to Russia borders to commit genocide on the Russians themselves. They would rather die fighting for freedom than capitulate and live a little longer as slaves of the New World Order. This in fact the decision we all have to make. Hopefully we dont need to die but there is a red line on which we need to make a stand if we want to be a free people.
Last Iheard was that the Russian troops were at least 100 miles from the border with ukraine. another blatant piece of false facts? if Russia were to invade, be assured they will both ensure the southern ukraine is cut off from the sea and possibly annex it together with Donbas following a plebescite for the locals. guess what, the local will seek to join Russia rather than be nder the yoke of a government controlled by the usa..
As usually, the problem seem to be, the Turcies Drones, they are dangeres, but not for Russia, they stop them still as death in the air, and they can to this with ships, airplains ! so why old Buk rockets !
The people who are at the center of the behemoth world order are specialists at concentrating and centralizing wealth and power into their hands through stealth by creating mass fear, uncertainly, insecurity, and mistrust. However, truthers aware of such things as the 9/11 and Syrian gas attack false flags, and the Covid Plandemic have only scratched the surface of how the common people are constantly being manipulated by the central powers.
Once you realize the necessity of having an enemy of some sort threatening people’s basic interests, you can better detect the real threats from those which have been manufactured. Sure, if you have the Barbarian hordes or Genghis Khan at your door you are going to have to centralize authority to unify an effective opposition for your protection. However, most monarchs and despots over the centuries know the value of an enemy as the prime justification to concentrate and consolidate more and more wealth and power into their own clutches, often making deals with neighboring rulers.
The 20th century which to date was the most violent century in his history was also the most evil. The first part of that century dealt with the crushing of the rival to the British empire on the global stage with the emergence of an united and powerful Germany wanting a place in the sun like the other colonial powers. It took two world wars to crush them. Then we had the strange phenomena of a the cold war which enabled the vast growth of the MIC and enormous profits being made in weaponizing the world.
Without the boogeyman of the USSR which was financially supported and economically sustained by Western bankster funds before, during, and after WWII, not only would there have been no basis for the arms race, the huge annual US military expenses, but without the threat of a spreading communism there would have been no basis or pretext for the expansion of the huge mainly US and UK bankster dominated empire by the debt-rigging and take over of so many third-world nations and their resources. The communist threat was the vehicle not only of the vast concentration and consolidation of more and more wealth and power out of the hands of third-old nations into the those of the Western establishment and particularly those who made huge profits from both of the world wars, but nuclear threat was the very pretext used scare us into even more increased centralized controls.
As many of us can now clearly see how 9/11 was used as a pretext for a number of stakeholder interests, and especially for the pre-ordained US DHS, in a similar vein it now should be more easily seen how the communist threat of the USSR as used especially by the largest banking dynasty in the world and all of their puppet national leaders and corporations in the West, was in fact used to centralize and consolidate more and more wealth and power into their hands. Yet at the same time one being a communist and belonging to a communist party was entirely legal in the West, and Marxism was openly and freely taught in our universities. So, how exactly was the USSR which could not even produce a reliable automobile a real military threat to us?
It was only through the fake mass media and fear mongering that the vast military expenditures, that the entire cold war was sustained, making it possible to export of the fake threat of communism as a pretext to take over more and more nations. More importantly the nuclear threat and the suspension of the truth was used to justify in inner circles the continued use of mass deception, hypnosis, propaganda, fake news, fake history, fake science, and brainwashing, as well as a host of fear-mongering threats to control the people. After all it all worked so splendidly in WWII, so why not continue to develop and use those very same methods on the people for a centralized one-world order under their control? First Germany then die Welt. Covid is just the cherry on the cake.
The Ukrainian government is an American puppet. It will propel the country into war with Russia. The Russians understand that unless the Kiev regime is overthrown, war is inevitable.
The Pentagon – populated by dinosaurs who still think it’s 1950 – think that they are going to turn the Ukraine into a Russian Vietnam. But they are wrong, very wrong.
When Ukraine is destroyed, the next question is what Britain – the Americans favourite puppet state – will do. Will Britain be ordered to launch a nuclear attack on Russia (and be sacrificed in turn)?
Thankfully I saw TWO screaming Red Flags – “Roth” and “The Guardian” – in the headline, so mercifully spared myself from having to read what was sure to be nothing but the unadulterated garbage in the actual article.
WINNING!!!!
Two possibilities come to mind,,, a diversion for a monetary/economic collapse or a diversion to get the lemmings to forget the covid tyranny,,, or all the above. That’s three…. Oh well…