Eurasia note #46 - Mariupol Lair Could Be Azov's Tomb
Kyiv denies leave to surrender; Western war of agitprop faces new dilemma
Putin calls off plan to storm Mariupol refuge; opts for blockade instead.
Orders Azovstal steel plant to be sealed “so even a fly can’t get in or out.”
Radio intercepts suggest Zelenskiy’s handlers are blocking surrender on pain of death.
G7 finance ministers pledge aid to Ukraine exceeding $24 billion for 2022.
West pays more to have Ukraine at war, than it is willing to pay for Ukraine at peace.
(1,400 words or six minutes’ read.)
Tbilisi Apr 21, 2022
As they try to dislodge up to 2,000 Azov soldiers in the southern port city of Mariupol, Russian tactics have switched from deadline to siege. President Vladimir Putin paused an imminent Russian assault on Friday morning.
President Volodomyr Zelenskiy, his Azov/SBU minders and the NATO-Atlanticists speaking into his ear, have so far refused to countenance surrender.
The troops (who claim to have civilian hostages with them) have no way out of the Azovstal steel plant bunkers, built as a nuclear fallout shelter for 40,000 workers.
A further reason why Russian forces cannot smoke or bomb them out is the reports that senior NATO officials are on site. The reporter Pepe Escobar was expelled from Twitter after describing another biolab on the site, along with Western military.
One reason Elon Musk is being blocked from gaining influence over Twitter is not the Woke Twitterati but military intel who are embedded throughout, as well as the five alumni of the World Economic Forum on its board.
Le Figaro senior correspondent Georges Malbrunot said Americans were directly “in charge” of the war on the ground. Citing a French intelligence source, Malbrunot also said British SAS and U.S. Army Delta Force “have been present in Ukraine since the beginning of the war.”
Mid-week an Azov commander demanded to be rescued by a third country, providing safe passage out of their last resort. Major Serhiy Volyna of the 36th Separate Marine Brigade posted the appeal on Facebook.
Russian forces claim that radio intercepts show top military or security commanders have forbidden surrender on pain of death.
The obstacle to surrender, however, is not military but political. There are two wars being fought in Ukraine: one on the ground, the other online.
The media is focused on, and curates, an online war. The danger is that Western politicians are consuming their own propaganda. As Patrick Henningsen discussed with Joaquin Flores on Friday, even the Azov soliders have been sold the line that the Western peoples will go to the barricades with them. [1]
As we wrote in Moneycircus, Jun 2021 — Journalists! What is to be Done?
Former German defence minister Andreas von Bülow said that 80-90 per cent of intelligence is gathered from public sources, yet those are increasingly under the control or influence of defense and intelligence agencies. This is creating a feedback loop.
Through influence activities, state ministries and agencies fill newspapers and social media with information to prod the public towards certain perceptions, behaviours and outcomes. At the same time, social media vacuums up that information on behalf of corporations and state, crunching data and feeding it into algorithims and policy decisions, schooling and policing, and the whole cycle begins again.
Henningsen says postmodern reality-bending has overtaken the political strategists.
Thus when Moscow offers safe passage for evacuuees they won't trust it because reality has been shaped by their own propaganda about Bucha, the maternity hospital the Mariupol children's theatre — all of which existed more as headlines than events on the ground.
The result is that Ukraine’s forces, infiltrated by Azov Batallion and manipulated by Western governments and military, are strung out on their own propaganda washing line. There are two wars, one real, the other invented — and they conflate the two.
As we wrote in Moneycircus, Apr 17, 2022, Eurasia note #44 - Azov's Last Stand In Mariupol, the sinking of the Russian Black Sea flagship, the cruiser Moskva, on Apr 14, may have been timed by Ukraine forces with NATO’s help to distract from a climbdown in Mariupol.
The timing fits but it didn’t work. Why not? Because Zelenskiy, Azov, the SBU and their Western handlers lost the chance to withdraw their troops from Mariupol and thus save face, and the reason they weren’t ready is they believe their own propaganda.
Azov and Zelenskiy think the West will come to their aid with a dramatic gesture; the West believes that gestures will satisfy the Western public and buy time until “something comes up” to deliver the Ukrainian victory that has already been won, at least morally, on the pages of the press.
Such propaganda works, at least with Western audiences who have been programmed, as Dr Jessica Rose says in the context of Covid mRNA shot.
Groupthink and hive mind
There is a psyop going on — psychological absconsion, says Dr Rose — clearly people have been programmed. How do you get programmed? By watching programming, the legacy media is dangerous, malfeasant. [2]
Just as illness is becoming normalized by the choir of televised voices in unison — as the children and athletes in their early 20s drop with heart attacks — so Ukraine’s soldiers are winning the war, even as they drop to the ground or take shelter below it.
This is the postmodern propaganda in which we don't try to shape reality; we don't relate to reality at all.
As in Ukraine, the shadowy origin of the plague-war, the vagueness of the threat, and effectiveness of the response doesn’t matter — if the long-term outcome is left unspoken.
Meanwhile in the real world, the West is using Ukrainians as cannon fodder in a proxy war against Russia, “down to the very last Ukrainian,” as Russia’s First Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Dmitry Polyansky said on Apr 19.
Sanctions latest
When Ukraine asked the European Union nine years ago to help it move out of Russia’s influence, the EU turned down its request for €20bn ($21bn) in aid — said it was too expensive. Germany this week said it would give Ukraine up to €2 billion for weapons and military training. Now the finance ministers of the Group of Seven leading industrial countries have pledged aid to Ukraine exceeding $24 billion for 2022. [3]
The West will pay more to have Ukraine at war, than it is willing to pay to have Ukraine at peace.
The adage says “follow the money.” It tells us that some in the West wanted war with Russia, long before the 2014 coup in Ukraine.
That’s not the only cost. German inflation, as measured by the prices that producers pay, rose 30.9 per cent in March. That's its highest level since the agency began collecting data 73 years ago. Mockingbird media like CNN insists that energy prices jumped as lockdown ended, made worse by war in Ukraine. They don’t even mention the Green policies — that Germany’s last three nuclear power stations are due to close by the end of 2022.
What could be worth such disruption, especially to so valuable a commodity as hydrocarbons?
Germany’s much-touted liquefied natural gas terminals in Brunsbuttel and Wilhelmshaven in northern Germany could take from four years to build. If German corporations and citizens can stand the pain, Gulf producers and even the USA will benefit.
Qatar and Iran, who share the Persian fields, could sell their gas more competitively if they could lay pipelines across Syria and, via Turkey or the Mediterranean Sea, reach Europe.
Some of the same powers are fighting over Yemen in a Western-instigated battle for its oil and gas — the key competitors: UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Israel is reported to have secretly signed a deal with Syria in Jan 2022 to pipe gas to Lebanon via an existing pipeline. [4]
Two fields, the Leviathan and the Tamar, hold the vast majority of Israel’s gas reserves. The latter was signed into a deal in 2021 with United Arab Emirates’ Mubadala Petroleum, which bought a 22 per cent deal worth at the time $1.1 bn.
It’s not just a question of who owns what. Israel has struggled to attract the investment it needs to develop its fields. If constraints on Russia increase the attractiveness of Israel’s gas, that will help drive investment.
In recent years the only investors showing interest were American Nobel and, more recently, Chevron — our friends from the 19th century Caspian borders of southern Russia: Alfred Nobel’s brothers in alliance with Rothschild, on the one hand, and Rockefeller on the other.
Plus ça change; plus c'est la même chose.
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[1] Telegram: Xoaquin FIores - New Resistance
[1] 21st Century Wire: Patrick Henningsen
[2] Geopolitics & Empire, Apr 20, 2022 — Dr Jessica Rose
[3] Kyiv Post, Apr 21, 2022 — G7 finance ministers pledge more than $24B in aid to Ukraine
[4] Times of Israel, Jan 2015, 2022 — Israel said to secretly ink unprecedented deal to supply gas to Lebanon, via Jordan
Shoutout to Pepe Escobar. His and your reporting on this have been great, much appreciated.
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