Our Friday News Analysis | In Search of a Nation's Soul (Part 28)

FILE PHOTO: John Bolton speaks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC, September 30, 2019 © AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais

The former national security advisor
believes the charge
makes talks on resolving the Ukraine conflict less likely.

The Hague, 31 March 2023 | If you know of any story that is decisive, tell the world. We're still searching.

Former US national security advisor John Bolton has come out against the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) decision to indict Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling the court “fundamentally illegitimate.”

               “I believe and have for many years [that] the International Criminal Court is fundamentally illegitimate,” Bolton told Sky News on Monday, adding that its arrest warrant for Putin is “not something that the United States should cooperate with.”

               “It’s a very dangerous institution,” he continued.

               “It is an exercise of governmental power in a vacuum without any constitutional framework to restrain it.”

The Court's pre-trial Chamber issued a warrant on Friday for the arrest of Putin and Russian Children's Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for the “unlawful deportation” of children from “occupied areas of Ukraine.”

               The charges refer to Russia’s efforts to evacuate civilians away from areas – mostly in the predominantly Russian-speaking region of Donbass – shelled by the Ukrainian military.

Read more: Asian leader warns Putin warrant could spark nuclear war

Neither the US nor Russia recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction. Speaking to reporters on Friday, US President Joe Biden said that he believed the arrest warrant was “justified,” but admitted that the court was “not recognized by us either.”

In addition to sanctioning a number of top International Criminal Court officials in 2020, the US maintains the ‘Hague Invasion Act’, giving its military permission to invade the Netherlands were any US citizens detained at the court.

As George W. Bush’s undersecretary of state, Bolton signed the official letter withdrawing the US from its jurisdiction in 2002. As Donald Trump’s national security advisor, he threatened sanctions against anyone cooperating with its investigations into alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan.

While Bolton has maintained for two decades that the ICC is a “direct assault on the concept of national sovereignty,” he argued on Monday that its indictment of Putin could hinder eventual peace talks in Ukraine.

               “If you want negotiations to take place, do you think an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin makes it more likely or less likely he will negotiate?” he asked Sky’s Kay Burley.

Instead, he suggested that either Ukraine or a hypothetical pro-Western government in Moscow should try the Russian president.

Read More: Putin arrest warrant shows international law is collapsing – Medvedev

Bolton is a lifelong advocate for using US hard power against other nations, and throughout his political career has called for regime change or military action in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, North Korea, Venezuela, and Russia. Last summer, he admitted to CNN that he had “helped plan coups d’etat” around the world.

The Kremlin is “unfazed” by the charges against Putin, spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday. Peskov has previously called the indictment “null and void from a legal standpoint.”

What is the Side of the Story that is Not Yet Decisive? Edited by Abraham A. van Kempen

Read more: ‘US threatens to arrest ICC judges,’ DW Made for Minds, 09 October 2018.

US National Security Adviser John Bolton on Monday threatened to sanction and prosecute International Criminal Court (ICC) judges if the tribunal attempts to charge US service members and intelligence agents with war crimes.

               "The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court," Bolton said in a speech delivered to the conservative Federalist Society in Washington.

               "We will not cooperate with the ICC. We will provide no assistance to the ICC. We will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us."

The ICC responded on Tuesday to Bolton's threats, stating that its work would not be influenced by Washington in any way.

               "The ICC, as a court of law, will continue to do its work undeterred, in accordance with those principles and the overarching idea of the rule of law," the body said in a statement.

We are not at the 1-year anniversary of the war,
as the Western governments and media claim.
This is the 9-year anniversary of the war.
And that makes a big difference.

The ninth anniversary of the Ukraine war

By Jeffrey Sachs
Mar 3, 2023

The war began with the violent overthrow of Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, a coup that was overtly and covertly backed by the United States government (see also here). From 2008 onward, the United States pushed NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia. The 2014 coup of Yanukovych was in the service of NATO expansion.

We must keep this relentless drive towards NATO expansion in context. The US and Germany explicitly and repeatedly promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge “one inch eastward” after Gorbachev disbanded the Soviet military alliance known as the Warsaw Pact. The entire premise of NATO enlargement was a violation of agreements reached with Soviet Union, and therefore with the continuation state of Russia.

The neocons have pushed NATO enlargement because they seek to surround Russia in the Black Sea region, akin to the aims of Britain and France in the Crimean War (1853-56). US strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski described Ukraine as the “geographical pivot” of Eurasia. If the US could surround Russia in the Black Sea region, and incorporate Ukraine into the US military alliance, Russia’s ability to project power in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and globally would disappear, or so goes the theory.

Of course, Russia saw this not only as a general threat, but as a specific threat of putting advanced armaments right up to Russia’s border. This was especially ominous after the US unilaterally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, which according to Russia posed a direct threat to Russian national security.

During his presidency (2010-2014), Yanukovych sought military neutrality, precisely to avoid a civil war or proxy war in Ukraine. This was a very wise and prudent choice for Ukraine, but it stood in the way of the U.S. neoconservative obsession with NATO enlargement. When protests broke out against Yanukovych at the end of 2013 upon the delay of the signing of an accession roadmap with the EU, the United States took the opportunity to escalate the protests into a coup, which culminated in Yanukovych’s overthrow in February 2014.

The US meddled relentlessly and covertly in the protests, urging them onward even as right-wing Ukrainian nationalist paramilitaries entered the scene. US NGO spent vast sums to finance the protests and the eventual overthrow. This NGO financing has never come to light.
Three people intimately involved in the US effort to overthrow Yanukovych were Victoria Nuland, then the Assistant Secretary of State, now Under-Secretary of State; Jake Sullivan, then the security advisor to VP Joe Biden, and now the US National Security Advisor to President Biden; and VP Biden, now President. Nuland was famously caught on the phone with the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, planning the next government in Ukraine, and without allowing any second thoughts by the Europeans (“F*ck the EU,” in Nuland’s crude phrase caught on tape).

The intercepted conversation reveals the depth of the Biden-Nuland-Sullivan planning. Nuland says, “So on that piece Geoff, when I wrote the note Sullivan’s come back to me VFR [direct to me], saying you need Biden and I said probably tomorrow for an atta-boy and to get the deets [details] to stick. So, Biden’s willing.”

US Film director Oliver Stone helps us to understand the US involvement in the coup in his 2016 documentary movie, Ukraine on Fire. I urge all people to watch it, and to learn what a US-regime change operation looks like. I also urge all people to read the powerful academic studies by Prof. Ivan Katchanovski of the University of Ottawa (for example, here and here), who has laboriously reviewed all of the evidence of the Maidan and found that most of the violence and killing originated not from Yanukovych’s security detail, as alleged, but from the coup leaders themselves, who fired into the crowds, killing both policemen and demonstrators.

These truths remain obscured by US secrecy and European obsequiousness to US power. A US-orchestrated coup occurred in the heart of Europe, and no European leader dared to speak the truth. Brutal consequences have followed, but still no European leader honestly tells the facts.
The coup was the start of the war nine years ago. An extra-constitutional, right-wing, anti-Russian and ultra-nationalist government came to power in Kiev. After the coup, Russia quickly retook Crimea following a quick referendum, and war broke out in the Donbass as Russians in the Ukraine army switched sides to opposed the post-coup government in Kiev.

NATO almost immediately began to pour in billions of dollars of weaponry to Ukraine. And the war escalated. The Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 peace agreements, in which France and Germany were to be co-guarantors, did not function, first, because the nationalist Ukrainian government in Kiev refused to implement them, and second, because Germany and France did not press for their implementation, as recently admitted by former Chancellor Angela Merkel.

At the end of 2021, President Putin made very clear that the three red lines for Russia were: (1) NATO enlargement to Ukraine as unacceptable; (2) Russia would maintain control of Crimea; and (3) the war in the Donbass needed to be settled by implementation of Minsk-2. The Biden White House refused to negotiate on the issue of NATO enlargement.

The Russian invasion tragically and wrongly took place in February 2022, eight years after the Yanukovych coup. The United States has poured in tens of billions of dollars of armaments and budget support since then, doubling down on the US attempt to expand its military alliance into Ukraine and Georgia. The deaths and destruction in this escalating battlefield are horrific.

In March 2022, Ukraine said that it would negotiate on the basis of neutrality. The war indeed seemed close to an end. Positive statements were made by both Ukrainian and Russian officials, as well as the Turkish mediators. We now know from former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett that the United States blocked those negotiations, instead favouring an escalation of war to “weaken Russia.”

In September 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. The overwhelming evidence at this date is that the United States led that destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. Seymour Hersh’s account is highly credible and has not been refuted on a single major point (though it has been heatedly denied by the US Government). It points to the Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team as leading the Nord Stream destruction.

We are on a path of dire escalation and lies or silence in much of the mainstream US and European media. The entire narrative that this is the first anniversary of war is a falsehood that hides the reasons of this war and the way to end it. This is a war that began because of the reckless US neoconservative push for NATO enlargement, followed by the US neoconservative participation in the 2014 regime-change operation. Since then, there has been massive escalation of armaments, death, and destruction.

This is a war that needs to stop before it engulfs all of us in nuclear Armageddon. I praise the peace movement for its valiant efforts, especially in the face of brazen lies and propaganda by the US Government and craven silence by the European governments, which act as wholly subservient to the US neoconservatives.

We must speak truth. Both sides have lied and cheated and committed violence. Both sides need to back off. NATO must stop the attempt to enlarge to Ukraine and to Georgia. Russia must withdraw from Ukraine. We must listen to the red lines of both sides so that the world will survive.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as Special Adviser to three UN Secretaries-General. His books include The End of Poverty, Common Wealth, The Age of Sustainable Development, Building the New American Economy, and most recently, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism.

Read more: THE COVER-UP – The Biden Administration continues to conceal its responsibility for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, by Seymour Hersh, 22 March 2023

THE COVER-UP

The Biden Administration continues to conceal its responsibility for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines

               It’s been six weeks since I published a report, based on anonymous sourcing, naming President Joe Biden as the official who ordered the mysterious destruction last September of Nord Stream 2, a new $11-billion pipeline that was scheduled to double the volume of natural gas delivered from Russia to Germany. The story gained traction in Germany and Western Europe, but was subject to a near media blackout in the US.

               Sarah Miller—an energy expert and an editor at Energy Intelligence, which publishes leading trade journals—explained to me in an interview why the pipeline story has been big news in Germany and Western Europe. “The destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in September led to a further surge of natural gas prices that were already six or more times pre-crisis levels,” she said. “Nord Stream was blown up in late September. German gas imports peaked a month later, in October, at 10 times pre-crisis levels. Electricity prices across Europe were pulled up, and governments spent as much as 800 billion euros, by some estimates, shielding households and businesses from the impact. (Miller writes a blog on Medium.)

               I was told by someone with access to diplomatic intelligence that there was a discussion of the pipeline exposé and, as a result, certain elements in the Central Intelligence Agency were asked to prepare a cover story in collaboration with German intelligence that would provide the American and German press with an alternative version for the destruction of Nord Stream 2. In the words of the intelligence community, the agency was “to pulse the system” in an effort to discount the claim that Biden had ordered the pipelines’ destruction.

Read more: Peace Requires Betrayal, by Shlomo Ben-Ami, Project Syndicate (A George Soros Publication), 20 March 2023

Over the past year, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has become an unlikely war hero. But now he faces an excruciating dilemma, because ending the war will most likely require an imperfect and almost certainly unpopular negotiated settlement with Russia.

Read more: ‘Why the War Will Continue,’ by Richard Haass, President Council on Foreign Relations, Published by Project Syndicate (A George Soros Publication), 23 February 2023.

               So, what does this augur for the future? Wars end one of two ways: when one side defeats the other and is able to impose its peace terms, or when the two sides conclude that compromise is preferable to continuing a war neither is strong enough to win.

               Neither of these conditions applies to this war as of now. To be sure, it is far from clear that Ukraine can eject Russia from its territory, even if Western governments shed their inhibitions and supply Ukraine with more advanced arms.

               Russian forces are dug in and will be difficult to dislodge. And there is the possibility, or even likelihood, that China would provide copious economic and military assistance to Russia, rather than see its strategic partner defeated by a US-led coalition.

_________________________

Editor's Note |

Will this nightmare ever end? For some, NEVER!

Please consider joining the Building the Bridge Foundation, The Hague,
in urging the United States and the European Union to stop abusing the people of Ukraine
to serve as cannon fodder and human shields.

The more firepower, the more bloodshed.

Is there any other alternative than Peace?

The clowns in Brussels and their stooges in Washington, DC, have only one choice.

_______________________

Related Articles Recently Posted on www.buildingthebridgefoundation.com:

Our Friday News Analysis | 'In Search of a Nation's Soul (Part 27),' 24 March 2023.

Our Wednesday News Analysis | 'Netanyahu's visit is a reminder that Israel's hard-right regime has much in common with our own,' so what?,' 29 March 2023.

The Evangelical Pope| 'Peace Is for EVERYONE or for NONE,' 27 March 2023.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of the Building the Bridge Foundation, The Hague.