"The truth is that Americans will end up being hated by everyone. Even by their most staunch allies. All the tricks the Americans imagine are belied by events."
Charles de Gaulle November 6, 1963 Quoted by Alain Peyrefitte "C'était de Gaulle, Tome 2"
Chronicle of the consensual destruction of Europe. - For thirty years, the United States has had only one obsession on our continent: to prevent the emergence of this "European Europe", which General de Gaulle called for, based on a security that was to extend "from the Atlantic to the Urals". The war in Ukraine is both the peak of the American capacity for division and the moment of a potential reversal. We are witnessing not only a Russian military revolution (thanks to hypersonic weapons) but also the emergence of a multipolar world whose center of gravity will be in Eurasia, at the heart of the triangle constituted by Russia, India and China.
France has an enormous advantage - it is both European and present on all the world's oceans. France have every reason to play a major role in the new balance of power. But before that, we must first analyze and understand what is happening before our eyes: the inevitable decline of American power due to the de-dollarization of the world; the self-destruction of the European Union, which is pushing sanctions against Russia in a "more American than American" mode; the decline of German power, which has forgotten the old sagesse of Bismarck, Willy Brandt and Gerhard Schröder - Europe goes wrong when Germany and Russia don't get along ; but also the political awakening of India, which is keeping the Anglo-Saxon world at bay; the revival, despite COVID-19, whether we like it or not, of neo-Leninist China; and, of course, Russia's resistance to sanctions. It is on the condition that we understand the world that is coming that France will be able to find its place in it.
The front
+ Soldiers of the Ukrainian regular army continue to surrender in Mariupol.
According to estimates, there are still 3000 fighters. Neo-Nazi militiamen intend to resist to the end. Unverifiable reports of a large number of fighters, instructors or foreign agents are multiplying.
Ukrainian Army units and Azov fighters are divided into three groups, which are besieged in the Azovstal, the Ilich factory and the port area.
Donetsk troops and the Russian army continue to advance a few hundred meters per day. The assault on the plant began from the northern direction, under close artillery fire and air strikes, but the advance is met with fierce resistance from Azov fighters.
According to the government of the secessionist Republic of Donetsk, the besieged nationalists burned a number of commercial ships in the port. The Donbass command ship of the Ukrainian Navy had been targeted by a Russian strike.
+ On the other fronts in Donbass, heavy fighting continues. Russian troops and the army of the Lugansk Republic are advancing a few kilometers a day towards Barvenkovo and Slaviansk.
West of the city of Donetsk, the village of Sladkoe came under their control on April 7. The village of Novomikhailovka is besieged by Russian and Donetsk Republic troops. The same is true for the small town of Ugledar.
+Meanwhile, the Russian army has continued its missile strikes on military targets in different parts of Ukraine. On 6 and 7 April, air and sea-launched missiles destroyed four fuel storage bases near Nikolaev, Zaporozhie, Kharkov and Chuguev from which Ukrainian forces were supplied with fuel.
A strike with air-launched missiles also hit a group of Ukrainian military equipment at the Novograd-Volinski railway station in the Jtomir region. Equipment prepared for deployment in the Donbass was destroyed.
+ According to the latest briefing of the Russian Ministry of Defense, 125 Ukrainian warplanes, 95 helicopters, 416 drones, 227 anti-aircraft missile systems, 2,003 tanks and other armored fighting vehicles, 220 multi-launch rocket systems, 869 field artillery pieces and mortars, as well as 1,902 units of special military vehicles have been destroyed since the beginning of the Russian special military operation.
The Russian army and the forces of the self-proclaimed republics are unlikely to expand their offensive on the other fronts of the Donbass until Mariupol is fully under Russian control.
Kramatorsk
+ On April 8, in Kramatorsk, did Ukraine launch, after Bucha, a second "coup" aimed at the West to draw the US and EU into additional sanctions or even war? A missile killed 30 people and wounded 100 at the city's train station.
"As a result of the rocket attack on the Kramatorsk railway station, according to preliminary data, more than 30 people were killed and more than 100 injured.The Ukrainian side immediately announced the shelling of the station by Iskanders from the Russian side, but photos of the tail of the rocket fell to the ground appeared on the network, taken by local residents. According to the pictures, it is a 9M79-1 OTR-21 Tochka ballistic missile. Russia does not use this type of weapon.
The flight path of the rocket is also characteristic. Rybar's team established that the missile was fired from the territory controlled by the armed forces of Ukraine.
+
Communiqué of the Russian Ministry of Defense: "According to intelligence reports, one of the divisions of the 19th missile brigade armed with Tochka-U missile systems at the time of the strike on Kramatorsk was located near Dobropol'e in the Donetsk region, 45 km southwest of Kramatorsk. This area is still under the full control of the Ukrainian army, which is regrouping troops in the Donbass."
The unbearable lightness of Ursula von der Leyen
+Will the European Union's leaders one day regret having allowed the European Commission to develop its action far beyond the prerogatives given to it by the treaties?
The visit of Mrs. von der Leyen to Bucha and Kiev is in itself eminently dangerous. It has no basis in the EU treaties. (One could at least imagine that the EU had sent the only high representative, Josep Borrell for foreign policy - next to the Commission President in the photo above). It consists in throwing oil on the fire when de-escalation should be practiced. In the past, we used to say
"Europe is peace". Should we now say
"The EU is war"?
In any case, we have arrived at the more than dangerous situation where Russia considers NATO and the EU to be actors of war. Our rulers will be judged very severely by history.... if there is still a history. Because the risk of an escalation to nuclear war is real with the behavior of an Ursula von der Leyen.
+ Slovakia
announced that it was delivering S300 missiles to Ukraine the day after it announced that it agreed to pay for Russian gas according to the new technical terms imposed by Moscow (opening an account in a Russian bank). It is basically shameful that powers such as France and Germany force Slovakia into such contortions.
+ When you look closely, even at the UN the front of countries that vote against Russia is crumbling: The 140 countries that condemned the Russian intervention in Ukraine were not included in the vote to exclude Russia from the Commission on Human Rights: 93 countries voted for, 24 voted against. The others abstained. And this despite the accusations against Russia after Bucha!
+ The polls follow one another and confirm that at least
three quarters of Russians support the war led by Vladimir Putin. And
62% of Americans consider Putin a stronger leader than Joseph Biden.
+ An interesting parallel is drawn in this photo montage between the way the US treated and isolated Japan before the 1930s; and the way it has targeted Russia since 1990:
The parallel is drawn between (1) the construction of military bases; (2) the rupture of the commercial treaty with Japan in 1911 and the Maïdan coup in 2013; (3) the sanctions, intended to subdue the power deemed dangerous by the USA but which in fact produce the opposite: the exacerbation of tensions.
+ We remember how, a few days ago, Poland targeted Hungary, accusing it of being too Russophile. Now it's President Macron's turn to attack Poland, accusing it of being "racist, anti-Semitic and anti-LGBT" and of supporting the candidate Marine Le Pen.
+ The Finns finally let the Hermitage Museum's paintings, brought from Italy, back into the country after they had been blocked by their customs without any reason.
The ruble consolidates
+ The Russian currency strengthened to just under 72 rubles to the U.S. dollar and 77 against the euro in trading on the Moscow Stock Exchange Friday.
The ruble has now reached its strongest level against the dollar since last November and against the euro since June 2020.
+ Exciting article by Ellen Brown. Some excerpts (Part 1):
"In 1971, President Richard Nixon ended the dollar's international convertibility to gold (known as the "closing of the gold window") in order to avoid emptying the U.S. gold reserves. The value of the dollar then collapsed against other currencies on world markets. To support it, Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made an agreement with Saudi Arabia and the OPEC countries that OPEC would sell oil only in dollars, and that the dollars would be deposited in banks on Wall Street and in the City of London. In return, the United States would militarily defend the OPEC countries. Economic researcher William Engdahl also presents evidence of a promise that the price of oil would quadruple. An oil crisis triggered by a brief war in the Middle East did quadruple the price of oil, and the OPEC agreement was finalized in 1974.
The agreement held until 2000, when Saddam Hussein broke it by selling Iraqi oil in euros. Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi did the same. Both presidents were assassinated, and their countries were decimated by war with the United States. Canadian researcher Matthew Ehret
observes:
"Let us not forget that the Sudan-Libya-Egypt alliance, under the combined leadership of Mubarak, Gaddafi and Bashir, set out to establish a new gold-backed financial system, outside the IMF and World Bank, to finance large-scale development in Africa. Had this program not been undermined by the NATO-led destruction of Libya, the carving up of Sudan and regime change in Egypt, the world would have seen the emergence of a major regional bloc of African states shaping their own destiny for the first time in history outside the rigged game of Anglo-American controlled finance. (...)
Within a month of the start of the conflict in Ukraine, the United States and its European allies imposed heavy financial sanctions on Russia in response to the illegal military invasion. Western measures included freezing nearly half of the Russian central bank's US$640 billion in financial reserves, expelling several of Russia's largest banks from the SWIFT global payment system, imposing export controls to limit Russia's access to advanced technologies, closing their airspace and ports to Russian planes and ships, and instituting personal sanctions against high-profile Russian officials and tycoons. (...)
Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a March 16 speech that the U.S. and the European Union had failed in their obligations and that the freezing of Russia's reserves marked the end of the reliability of so-called first-class assets. On March 23, Putin announced that Russian natural gas would be sold to "unfriendly countries" only in Russian rubles, rather than in euros or dollars, as is currently the case. Forty-eight nations are considered "unfriendly" by Russia, including the United States, Britain, Ukraine, Switzerland, South Korea, Singapore, Norway, Canada and Japan.
Putin noted that more than half the world's population remains "friendly" to Russia. Countries that did not vote for sanctions include two major powers - China and India - as well as major oil producer Venezuela, Turkey and other countries in the South. The "friendly" countries, Putin said, can now buy from Russia in different currencies. (...)
(...)
The energy ministers of the G7 countries rejected Putin's request, saying it violated the terms of gas contracts that require a sale in euros or dollars. But on March 28, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia was "not engaged in charity" and would not supply gas to Europe for free (which it would do if sales were in euros or dollars, which it cannot currently use in trade). The sanctions themselves are a violation of the agreement to honor currencies on world markets.(...)
Russia's economy is much smaller than that of the United States and the European Union, but Russia is a major global supplier of essential commodities - not only oil, natural gas and grain, but also wood, fertilizer, nickel, titanium, palladium, coal, nitrogen and rare earth metals used in the production of computer chips, electric vehicles and aircraft.
On April 2, Russian gas giant Gazprom officially halted all deliveries to Europe via the Yamal-Europe pipeline, a critical artery for European energy supplies. (...)
Richard Werner, a professor of economics in the United Kingdom, calls the Russian manoeuvre clever - a repeat of what the United States did in the 1970s. To obtain Russian goods, "unfriendly" countries will have to buy rubles, which will drive up the value of the ruble on world markets, just as the need for petrodollars supported the U.S. dollar after 1974. Indeed, by March 30, the ruble had already reached the level it was at a month earlier.
Russia follows the United States not only in tying its national currency to sales of a key commodity, but also in following an earlier protocol - what nineteenth-century American leaders called the "American system" of sovereign money and credit. Its three pillars were (a) federal subsidies for internal improvements and to support the nation's infant industries, (b) tariffs to protect those industries, and (c) easy credit issued by a national bank.
Michael Hudson, professor of economics and author of "Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of the U.S. Empire," among many other books, notes that sanctions are forcing Russia to do what it has been reluctant to do itself: reduce its dependence on imports and develop its own industries and infrastructure. The effect, he says, is equivalent to that of protective tariffs. In an article titled "The U.S. Empire Is Self-Destructing," Hudson writes of the Russian sanctions (which actually date back to 2014):
"Russia had remained too captivated by free-market ideology to take steps to protect its own agriculture or industry. The U.S. provided the necessary assistance by imposing domestic self-governance on Russia (via sanctions). When the Baltic States lost the Russian market for cheese and other agricultural products, Russia quickly created its own cheese and dairy sector - while becoming the world's largest exporter of grain. ...
Russia is discovering (or is about to discover) that it does not need U.S. dollars to guarantee the ruble's exchange rate. Its central bank can create the rubles needed to pay domestic wages and finance capital formation. So the U.S. confiscations may finally lead Russia to end the neoliberal monetary philosophy, as Sergey Glaziev has long advocated in favor of MMT [Modern Monetary Theory]. ...
What foreign countries have not done on their own - replacing the IMF, the World Bank, and other arms of U.S. diplomacy - U.S. politicians are forcing them to do (...)"
Statue in Odessa of the Duke of Richelieu, governor of New Russia between 1804 and 1814
