In a recent article for Layout, the Russian journalist Ilya Zhegulev investigates how Putin “came up with the idea of a war in Ukraine”. Zhegulev is a respected dissident who’s currently affiliated to the Wilson Center in Washington (he’s not pro-Putin, in other words).
While there’ve been hundreds of articles discussing why Putin launched the invasion, this one happens to be based on “conversations with former and current officials in the Russian and Ukrainian authorities”. So it’s more worth your time than most – even if you don’t agree with all the author’s interpretations.
Some themes are familiar, of course. Putin increasingly viewed independent Ukraine as an “artificial phenomenon”. He was deeply suspicious of U.S. influence, believing that Americans “make all decisions regarding Ukraine”. And he’d sought to keep Ukraine within Russia’s sphere of influence via the Minsk agreements, which were “a great relief”.
When Zelensky came to power, Putin “hoped it would be possible to negotiate”, assuming “he would beat the inexperienced politician and finally launch the implementation of the Minsk agreements”. However, Zelesnky proved to be “an even more difficult negotiator than his predecessor”. After the 2019 Paris Summit failed to yield a satisfactory outcome, relations rapidly deteriorated.
The “last straw” was Zelensky’s decision to ban three pro-Russian TV channels linked to Putin-ally Viktor Medvedchuk. According to Zhegulev, this was an attempt to “neutralise” Medvedchuk – whose party had recently beaten Zelensky’s in six regional elections.
Three sources “close to the Russian president” all confirmed the significance of Zelensky’s decision, which Putin took as a “personal attack”. Zhegulev notes that “the existence of Medvedchuk and his channels” had been “like a bridge and a hope to somehow resolve the situation by political means”.
What Zhegulev doesn’t mention is how Oleksandr Danylyuk, Zelensky’s former national security adviser, characterised the decision in an interview with Time magazine last year. Specifically, he said that it was “calculated to fit in with the U.S. agenda”.
It’s not entirely clear what Danylyuk meant by this. The author of the Time article writes that banning the TV channels was “conceived as a welcome gift to the Biden Administration, which had made the fight against international corruption a pillar of its foreign policy”. So perhaps all Danylyuk meant is that Zelensky knew the U.S. would approve of him putting a stop to something that they considered corruption.
However, it’s certainly noteworthy that a decision representing the “last straw” for Putin was also “calculated to fit in with the U.S. agenda”.
There are two possibilities. One is that U.S. officials were well-intentioned but had such poor knowledge of the situation they never considered Putin would react to his ally’s TV channels being banned. The other is that U.S. officials actually wanted Putin to react.
Neither possibility inspires confidence.
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This is the new “War on Terror”.
It’s worse than that, it’s war on the British Population and their way of life.
The War on Terror was. It was responsible for some of the most illiberal and insidious legislation ever passed. It also similarly involved lies and meddling to justify actions both here and abroad where previously there had been no justification. Made a lot of money too, for some.
The War on Terror paved the way for exactly this kind of Just War.
Both suspiciously involved Tony Bliar in bucket loads.
Strange how the muzzi terrorists have been so quite for the last 15 months has the Rona got them all?
a bit hard to blow up / drive through some crowds when there’s no crowds to blow up / drive through.
Most of the effort is being funelled into this, not sponsoring and “reporting on” the”rebels” in the Middle East.
They’ve been disorientated by the ubiquity of face coverings.
Not quiet in France.
This stinks.
It was only a matter of time. The British people have been gaslit all over again. MSM has spent the last 10 days exulting in how lockdown is easing, indeed that the pace of the roadmap should increase and that all restrictions should be lifted well before 21 June. And just when people were beginning to think it was all over they do it all over again and pronounce that we need to be terrified of the Indian scariant.
oooh gaslit… serves people right for thinking they were getting out of this that easy
If they don’t keep lockdown they have to raise interest rates…
These tactics are the tools of hostage takers, terrorists and torturers. They are playing us, and trying to break us. If we’re back in lockdown again within weeks I wonder if the vaccinated normies who laughed when I said this isn’t the end of lockdowns, will start to see possibly, just possibly, something isn’t adding up here!
How can we have a third wave, where there hasn’t been a first or second?
It is indeed a fucking script…
I did predict this last year. The government are so easy to see through.
I have told people at work that we’ll be back in lockdown later this year and I was laughed at. People are so dumb, how can they not see what is going on. Like someone said below, it like being held hostage. Just how much more evidence does the public need that it is being lied to on an industrial scale?
A month ago Bunter was saying the third wave in mainland Europe would inevitably land here. The message has changed from Monday. I wonder why.
There was no third wave in Western Europe. France has quietly been easing its restrictions.
Eastern Europe has had a first wave, meanwhile. They don’t seem to bothered about reporting that. It’s almost as if their reporting has an agenda.
Don’t you f’ing dare Boris, I genuinly don’t know how much more of this I can take.
This exactly what these globalist types are aiming for. This is why they keep “gaslighting” … raising hopes then dashing them again. I think they’ve been hoping for riots all along so they can bring in martial law and that kind of thing. But the British people are just too reasonable and well behaved and the more they act like reasonable human beings the more cornered and pressurised Boris (and his ilk) look. I wonder who is going to snap first ?
WAR OF NERVES.
Well, I hope the British people do stay calm and focused. They are pushing for unrest and for people to riot, so they can bring in a total surveillance state, where they don’t need police or physical enforcements. We’ve got to be clever, much clever than they are and beat them at their game. Mass peaceful, civil disobedience, and non compliance in everything by everyone is how we win.
Probably the middle class
Well this could all end tomorrow more people just need to say no I am not doing it any more. They are completely relying on people rolling over yet again.
And I’m afraid they will.
They can do one.
So sick of this now, of course it will re-emerge in Autumn it’s now an endemic seasonal respiratory virus, like flu.
All those terrified and vulnerable have had the poison injected into them.
The fat controller and his buddies can Just effing do one.
This should hardly come as a surprise to anyone. Johnson and Co. are entirely dishonest and untrustworthy, and for this man, it’s black one day and white the next, and always contradictory. Notwithstanding his manifold and glaringly-obvious deficiencies, the thing which interests me are the questions of whether he is really off his rocker, a cunning and guileful operator, or a puppet whose strings are pulled by a puppetmaster (who?). Probably it’s a combination of all three.
If the pressure on the NHS is to be at its highest this autumn, perhaps he could forsake his green agenda and all the other trashy stuff, and pull his finger out to make sure that it’s not going to be “overwhelmed”. Implicit in this is, of course, a restatement of his vote of no-confidence in the vaccines that were the salvation just a few weeks ago.
The Ceausescu Solution looks ever more attractive.
Perhaps the JFK solution would be better.
Only “perhaps”?
I was in Roumania the day after. Apparently the ‘head of the snake’ action worked well. The problem we have is we are dealing with a Hydra. One head at a time won’t work.
Pressure on the NHS? Overwhelmed? They shut the bloody doors and hid under a desk for a twelvemonth. There’s 1, 400,000 of the feckers in that organisation, 1 in 48 of the population of these isles. 20 nhs staff for every 1000 people. WTF do they do all day, is a question I often ask myself. Push out presentations on coercion, tinker with computers….. But look after sick people? Ooh, no, nasty, sick people are messy and clutter up the wards when we could be doing something clean with a ‘puter. The whole thing is becoming a sick joke of ineptitude at all levels. Where’ s bloody batman when you need him?
Ye gods and little fishes, I’m off to the barn to sharpen a pitch fork or two.
Halbard
Who? .. Gates.
Obviously our economy hasn’t been trashed enough yet.
Anyone who believes the PM has good intentions needs to explain this to me
These people are just evil.
google is the new normal
1) C19 is airborne endemic virus in the UK, it can’t be stopped. We will all catch it at some point and 99.8% of those that are un-vaccinated (99.9996% if under 20) will survive it (and more to the point develop long term effective immunity, unlike that being provided by the vaccines).
2) Vaccine deaths are outstripping C19 deaths by a considerable margin, even if under-reporting is not taken into account. The only ‘spike’ occurring at the moment is in hospital admissions of those suffering vaccine side effects.
3) If Johnson is prepared to shut down the country because of handful of deaths from C19 variants, why doesn’t he immediately stop the vaxx roll out where deaths are being reported at around 9 per day; while applying the government’s own estimate of 90% under reporting this suggests 90 per day.
4) Are these variants now a consequence of the vaccinations turning individual recipients into viral factories, and if so how is it then possible for any lockdown to work other than as an incubator? If not, and these variants are naturally mutated viruses, occurring globally, how can lockdown stop an airborne virus permanently?
5) The efficacy of lockdowns has never been proven, in fact the results suggest at best they have no impact at all – other than a negative one on the economy, culture and other health issues.
Yet Johnson is the same old tired one trick pony led by one trick SAGE asses, and is now prepared to risk the fragile recovery (largely occurring via invisible mass insurrection and quiet civil disobedience while being driven by an over-heating black economy) on yet ever more ludicrous and desperate Imperial College models. Or is he worried that as soon as he lets the country recover naturally there will be some very serious questions asked of (and hopefully stiff punishments meted out to) those responsible for this disaster?
When you see the backhanders he feels entitled to – £200k refurb and a nanny at anyone’s expense but his, I wonder what other funds have been made available to him
Indeed, and the far greater funds and influence that will be made available in the future after he finishes his dutiful stint as puppet PM. Look forward to the ‘BoJo International Green Economic Foundation’ or some such quasi-legitimate tax dodging front organisation, along with overstuffed envelopes masquerading as payments for obligatory lecture tours on ‘How I Single Handedly Defeated Covid 19 and Kick Started an Economic Miracle’ at half a million a pop.
Unfortunately, with Carrie still in tow, it will still take more than that to get him out of perpetual debt.
The injections are a weapon not a therapy
Sorry to be picky, but it’s not airborne. It’s carried in water droplets which we exhale.
The difference being it can’t travel as far as it would if airborne. Water is heavier than air and quite quickly drops or evaporates. The virus dies quickly once in just air or on a surface.
This is why I had a dislike of masks from the start, giving it somewhere damp to settle seemed absolutely counter intuitive. Fresh air is the answer, and despite it seeming daft in mid winter ventilation is one of the few bits of government advice that made any sense.
Lots of scientific debate saying it IS airborne. There was a big article about it on here last week. Also “Revising it’s guidelines on Covid-19 The CDC has modified the listed modes of SARS-CoV-2 transmission to comprise the probability of the virus being airborne.”
Ok, I must have missed that.
Still I imagine like most respiritory ailments it’s very much predominently passed on with coughs and sneezes. If it were truely airbourne we’d have seen a much bigger incidence of health staff in covid wards becoming ill.
On this point I 100% concur, and have been banging on about sunshine and fresh air for months. The sight of earnest folks out walking in the bright September sunshine but blocking out the fresh air with damp incubating masks was enough to drive one to drink.
Yet despite the belated government advice, it and the MSM deliberately demonised (and the police heavy handedly arrested) anyone seeking to be outdoors in the warmth last summer topping up their natural immunity and vitamin D levels.
Maybe the new virus that’s being designed to kill the vaccinated isn’t ready yet…. stalling tactics?
There’s a reason for the Indian variants spreading.
Something to do with the fact we had tens of flights a day, thousands of people coming in for weeks and weeks and an even bigger last minute rush importing it.
With as reported average 5% positive on those flights (or more, Hong Kong had one flight with 48 positives) chances are we’ve had more seed cases from that than the Italian ski resorts caused last year.
Who is responbible for it? Boris Johnson.
Well viruses do spread. Short of more less stopping anyone living, the last year of madness has shown there’s not much that can be done about it.
It’s not ‘the Indian variant’. It’s a strain of the virus that has been identified in India. It’s now been identified identified in the UK. There is no evidence that it was ‘brought here from India’. Indeed such evidence would be impossible to establish. Virus mutate. Some mutations are statistically more probable than others to occur. It is likely if not certain that these occur naturally in more than one country.
They may be moremor less infectious, but there is no evidence they can slide a healthy natural human immune system. However the science is not yet available to assess their impact on an immune system compromised by unlicensed Gene therapy.
I can’t edit this and my iPad keyboard is playing up.
Moremor = more or less.
Slide = beat
Absolute rubbish.
We have full genetic family trees of where the 617 lineage evolved and that is the Indian sub continent.
Yes mutations happen but you can quite happily map each and every one of them to produce a family tree. They dont happen all at once.
We’re not talking of one mutation here. We’re talking of 20 or so which in turn differ from another 20 or so in their parent.
617 .1, .2 and .3 have sub mutations off it.
We also as a matter of routine sequence almost every single travel arrival case and yet again shows that link.
And as is clear on Nextstrain and elsewhere you can see where it came from.
https://cov-lineages.org/lineages/lineage_B.1.617.html
https://covariants.org/variants/20A.S.478K
Genetic Phylogeny is a well established field.
Im assuming you didn’t attend any science lessons in school over primary level?
So theres overwhelming evidence for where it came from, its scientifically simply to obtain such evidence (and has been done).
Then you go tinfoil had and go on about gene therapy which shows (i) you dont know what gene therapy is and (ii) dont know how any of the vaccines work.
Do tell!
We’re hanging on your every word……..
We are told that a ”variant” is usually about 0.3 per cent different from the original, and recognisable to the immune system (as I understand it). This is just another weapon in the scaremongers’ armoury.
I’m tired of hearing South Africans, Brazilians and now Indians blamed. Fact is viruses mutate all the time and the more sucessful you are at eradicating one strain (vaccination?) then another pops up. I think it’s called evolution.
Still it appeals to the numb nuts voter to be able to blame a foreigner.
So you’re in favour of travel bans?
Indian variant? ..bollox wake up you dozy prat..
I think you’ve been suckered by Mr Toad.
Please can you share the source for the 5% positive and 47 cases on HK flight?
Can you also explain how such a high potential numbers of cases could escape the testing regimes required to board an aircraft?
Risk of transmission very low on flights (https://www.iata.org/en/youandiata/travelers/health/low-risk-transmission/) and subsequent tests/quarantine on arrival. Very different scenario from the Italy ‘seeding’.
Doesn’t matter. There was hardly a problem with piles of bodies in the streets,was there? Just a lot of obsessive and unnecessary testing of healthy people to inflate the numbers.
I do hope everyone made the most of their life while they had one. I feel for the young who have had a taste and now face a future of mere existence. Johnson should be bracketed with history’s other examples of totalitarian evil.
I don’t think he’s actually intelligent enough to understand or care.
This is why I’m an anarcho-capitalist. Evil.
I said the same to a neighbour a short while ago – she told me I must be reading ‘the wrong stuff’. She also told me she was going to have the jab to respect all the hundreds of thousands of people who had died.
Darwin.
Pay her respects in person, probably.
I am no Scientist but never in my life have I ever heard of virus waves… I thought coronaviruses were seasonal and you simply move onto the next season’s, year after year. How do we know that this so called “surge” in the Autumn (and sounds like the date has actually been planned already!) isn’t just seasonal colds, flu and penumonia etc which kill many thousands every year who are vulnerable. All normal. I say the latter especially because I heard an NHS hospital nurse interview yesterday (former nurse now I guess) who has worked through the last year and she said they have not for the last year been testing anyone for influenza when normally they would do so regularly and routinely with respiratory illnesses coming in. Orders from above… Speaks volumes doesn’t it. They want this to continue no matter what which is why every illness under the sun is being called Covid- guess the (not so hidden) agendas are not quite complete yet.
What the nurse said about not testing for flu is correct in the hospital my partner works at. They are not allowed to test for flu as all resources are “needed” to test for covid.
It would be have been interesting to test all the covid positive patients for flu as well, we will never know what the outcome would have been.
Well there’s a surprise. Who could have possibly anticipated that they would be planning for another round of house imprisonment in the autumn…
And people wondered why there was a massive anti-lockdown march in London a few weeks ago..
There’s another on 29 May. Even more massive.
Yes – and it was the reason for all these bodies in the streets, overwhelmed hospitals, queues at cemeteries, tiktok nurses at their wits’ end, etc etc. Will it be EVEN WORSE after these next marches?
Me too. My feelings exactly.
Cases in India have peaked and are now falling.
Anyone remember the South African variant?
Did they bring back Ivermectin and HCQ?
Of course there will be a new surge. A new surge of stupidity if the fu****g plebs actually go along with it. I’ve had it, I am getting to the end of my tether. Why are we fighting so hard to help them, educate them, save them? Answers on a fu****g postcard!!!
I think we’re just trying to hold on to our own sanity. The rest of them seem to be a lost cause.
Last week. The Conservatives /
SNP / Welsh Labour should have been kicked into kingdom come. Nope.
Now look at the firming up of language and the return of threat. Never should these people have been trusted in the first place, to do it twice is insane.
This goes to “3rd wave” and more restrictions it will be longer lasting and more destructive than Spanish Flu, which actually killed so many more people. It’s a nonsense.
Fat Wanker say “Be scared slaves, get back in your cells”
Obvious what a shit Summer is ahead of us, followed by more Lockdown BS and hysteria. If ADE does kick off as some are predicting then the UK is toast.
Well, large parts of the world will be toast as well, so at least we won’t be alone.
Lockdown 4.0 will end bloodily, thats for sure.
I’m determined to be on the March in London on the 29th crutches at the ready. Is there a rough start time and location please?
Can someone please shut this clueless cunt up. Permanently if possible .
I’m actually now looking forward to a massive surge in the autumn. Bring it on . What will these bastards do then? People will turn against them and anarchy will rule! Fuck them
Or they’ll turn against the unclean and unvaccinated…
Either way it’s war. This is why Johnson looks so worried. The narrative the government have taken is backing them into a corner and he knows it. What can they do now? Tell everyone to stop obsessing over covid and move on? That won’t work. Hence the vaccinating of children as a desperate measure to secure zero covid. Utterly evil. Welcome to the new world order folks!
You’re right.
And he does look like death warmed up these days. He’s aged a decade in a year.
The Covidians will not give up their new found piety so easily
Quelle surprise.
So – how about another headline, Boris?
“PM admits that government measures have been a total failure.”
This is terrible news for Fon re going to the pub.
I am worried for him.
Splatt I think will cope, but Fon maybe not.
I can’t find the words, someone needs to get through to Boris and help him grow his bollocks back.
What?? He’s just a useful idiot. You don’t actually believe he has any say in all this, do you?
“the fast vaccine rollout” – Hurrah! It’s not “the success of”, for once.
I expect a lot of younger people will be affected in the Autumn, much,much younger. The new mutants, will be so much more serious and cause numerous blood problems and strokes.
(Sarcasm)
I suspect that the flu will be permanently rebranded as covid, whether that’s covid19 or covid21 or any other version of their choosing. That way, they can carry on with this shitshow indefinitely.
I know quite a few people now who are getting excited for 21st June. I think I’ll just allow them their joy, because it seems likely to be cut short pdq from what I’ve seen. The sheeple will baah bahh contentedly and bend their heads down to the grass, comforted by another round of heavy restrictions, oblivious to the fact that the country has gone to hell in a handcart. Judging by the sizes of the recent protests, there are gonna be an awful lot of angry people if the muppets pull another variant-excuse.
Someone below said well the people carried on voting for more of the same last week, so more of the same is what they’re going to get. Pressure-cooker lid must blow sometime. I’ve had it with sheeple.
Damn clever, these Dominion machines. I’m sure they’ve come in very handy in so many ways.
HAs he not looked out his window? The weather so far this year has been anything but Spring weather.
I sense another “NUDGE”!
More Guff coming out of whitehall.
When will people wake up…Im starting to think never
Catching even a glimpse of this scruffy, pompous, sententious, patronising oik strutting about on the world stage is enough to make anyone vomit.