This article is a follow-up to :
 1. "Russia wants to force the US to respect the UN Charter," January 4, 2022.
 2. "Washington pursues RAND plan in Kazakhstan, then Transnistria," January 11, 2022.
 3. "Washington refuses to hear Russia and China," January 18, 2022.
 4. "Washington and London, deafened", February 1, 2022.
 5. "Washington and London try to preserve their domination over Europe", February 8, 2022.
 6. “Two interpretations of the Ukrainian affair”, 16 February 2022.

In the forefront, the United States, which still refuses to respect international law and especially the United Nations Charter, has given dilatory answers to the Russian proposal for a treaty guaranteeing peace and is escalating tensions in Ukraine. They have raised the tension by accusing Russia of preparing for war. Behind the scenes, Washington is preparing new theaters of confrontation in Transnistria and the Middle East.

Russia has denied the US statements. As a response, it tested its military superiority.

Meeting of the Moldovan-Transnistrian Commission in the OSCE offices in Tiraspol.

Transnistria

The United States is pursuing the Rand Corporation’s plan and trying to organize a conflict in Transnistria. The blockade of this small, independent but unrecognized republic is not working. Despite the Ukrainian border guards put in place by the European Union’s High Representative, Josep Borell, the Moldovan border remains open. President Maia Sandu, who is campaigning for her country’s entry into the European Union, does not want a war in Transnistria. She intends to replace the Russian contingent in Tiraspol with an OSCE civilian force and is not giving up on recovering Transnistria.

On Saturday, February 12, the Transnistrian authorities asked the U.S. chargé d’affaires to ensure that the shipment of U.S. weapons by third states to Moldova is stopped. They stressed that such transfers threaten peace and contradict the spirit of international agreements.

On Wednesday, February 16, a Transnistrian delegation went to Moscow to seek help. It argued that the opening of the Moldovan border would not hold for much longer: the Moldovan army, supervised by Pentagon and European Union officers, is deploying in the neutral zone, in violation of international commitments.

On Friday, February 18. a Moldovan-Transnistrian meeting ("1+1") was held in Tiraspol in the offices of the OSCE. The negotiations were only about details. It is no longer possible to drive a vehicle out of Transnistria: its license plate bears symbols of secession. Each driver must therefore change his plate at the border. Similarly, it is no longer possible to enter Transnistria with medicines, even emergency medicines, without any explanation. All medicines are seized by Moldovan customs in the presence of EU officials.

Sergei Shoigu in Damascus.

Syria and Lebanon

It is especially in Syria and Lebanon that tensions are rising. Since late October, the United States and Turkey have been recruiting jihadists again from among those who have settled in their custody in Idleb. Some have been sent to Ukraine, but most have been hired for renewed service against Syria and against Lebanese Hezbollah. However, most of them are known to be bad fighters except for those who remain affiliated with al-Qaeda or Daesh.

To structure these soldiers, the CIA organized an attack on a prison in Hassake in which Kurdish mercenaries were holding 3,500 Daesh members. The Kurds lent themselves to the staging, using the opportunity to declare that they needed more weapons and US support to hold their prisoners. Most of the jihadists ran away and joined the CIA. Then, the US army, this time, transferred the few Daesh leaders that the Kurds had recovered to another prison, in an unknown location, where... the CIA was waiting for them. So appearances are safe, but the reality is that the US is reorganizing Daesh.

The two faces of Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the highly visible leader of al-Qaeda in Syria.

The reorganization of al-Qaeda has become more visible. Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the leader of al-Qaeda in Syria and later emir of Tahrir al-Sham, has given himself a makeover. The British have taught him to wear a Western suit and to speak without threatening to cut off the heads of those who resist him. But he is still the leader of al-Qaeda in Syria.

It is in this context that the Russian Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, visited Damascus on February 15 and that his counterpart of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, is expected there on Monday February 21.

Already Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah, confirmed to Al-Alam TV that his network of resistance has acquired anti-aircraft means to protect Lebanon from the Israeli air force that violates its airspace every day. In addition, Hezbollah revealed that it had sent a drone for a long time over Israel without being shot down by its army. Shortly before, the Syrian and Russian air forces had begun patrols over the Syrian Golan Heights illegally occupied by Israel, without Tel Aviv reacting.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken at the UN Security Council.

Ukraine

To fully understand what is happening in Ukraine, we need to go back a few days. On February 11, President Joe Biden summoned his key allies to a video meeting. He told them of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine. Bloomberg reported that the intelligence community was predicting it on the night of the 15th to the 16th. Then President Biden addressed his fellow citizens on television. He told them that if Russia attacked, it would cost them, and that the United States and its allies were ready.

Even before he spoke, Russia had announced that it was withdrawing its troops from Belarus and the Ukrainian border, and that its military exercises were over, but Washington had not had time to check. Moscow claimed that NATO elements were preparing a provocation, which the Pentagon had accused Russia of a few weeks earlier. In any case, it became difficult for the Allies to accuse Moscow of invading Ukraine.

On February 15, the Federal Duma adopted a resolution introduced by the Communist Party (i.e., the nationalists) asking President Putin to recognize the independence of the two People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. In other words, if Ukraine were to take advantage of the Russian military withdrawal to attack Donbass, Russia would recognize its independence and be forced to intervene because its constitution states that its president is responsible for the lives of his fellow citizens. However, the majority of the inhabitants of Donbass have a triple nationality: Ukrainian, independence and Russian.

The same day, President Putin received the German Chancellor, Olaf Schlotz. As with French President Emmanuel Macron, the meeting was particularly long. It seems that the Russian detailed to his visitor the arrival of the Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland in the Kremlin. Interloqued by what he learned, the chancellor, like the French president, refrained from making any anti-Russian statements on his return to Berlin. The same scenario was repeated on February 19 with the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro.

On the night of 15-16, the Russian army did not invade any state. The US press asked National Security Advisor Jake Sulivan to explain why he had put forward such a date, but he backed down and said he had never given a date.

Unexpectedly, Secretary of State Antony Blinken went to the UN Security Council on February 17. He accused Russia of "persistent violations" of the Minsk agreements, even though it is Kiev that rejects them. He said he was intervening to defend "the international order based on rules that preserve stability in the world", i.e. not international law, but the law of the West. He then revealed the Kremlin’s hidden plan: "Russia is planning to fabricate a pretext for its attack. It could be a violent event that Russia will blame on Ukraine, or an aberrant accusation that Russia will make against the Ukrainian government. We don’t know exactly what form that will take. It could be a so-called "terrorist" bombing inside Russia, the alleged discovery of a mass grave, a staged drone strike against civilians, or a fake - or even real - chemical weapons attack. It is possible that Russia will call this event ethnic cleansing or genocide, and disregard a concept that we do not take lightly in this forum, and that I do not take lightly because of my family’s past."

The philosopher Leo Strauss taught his closest students to create a world dictatorship to protect themselves from a new Shoah. He trained the main leaders of the Project for a New American Century.

By this incidence, Antony Blinken was referring to his stepfather, Samuel Pisar, who raised him in Paris. The latter was a survivor of the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question. But he did conceive hatred from this, only an acute awareness of evil. He became an advisor to President Kennedy, then an international lawyer for the largest corporations. He was revolted by the words of Professor Leo Strauss, who said that it was essential for the Jewish people to establish a world dictatorship in order to avoid a "new Shoah". Surely Samuel Pisar would be appalled at the evolution of his son-in-law and the group he has formed with his deputy Victoria Nuland and National Security Advisor Jacob Sullivan.

The OSCE confirms that fighting has resumed in Donbass. Elements of the Ukrainian army under US supervision, probably the Azov battalion and another group, are shelling the separatists. The presidents of the two independent republics of Donetsk and Lugansk have called on their citizens to mobilize, if they are men between 18 and 55 years old, or to seek refuge abroad, for women, children and the elderly living near the military contact line. Russia has declared its willingness to accept all of them. Each region of the Federation has announced that it will create structures to receive them one after the other. The federal government is offering them a small sum of money for their temporary settlement.

For the State Department, which has ordered its nationals to leave Ukraine, this population displacement is proof that Moscow is going on the offensive... Both parties interpret each piece of information in a contradictory manner.

Refusing to take sides in this conflict, Israel has given up installing an "Iron Dome" (anti-rocket defense) on behalf of Kiev against the Donbass.

Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland (wife of Project for a New American Century founder Robert Kagan) is traveling the world to warn against Russia. This week she was in Colombia.

On February 18, President Biden spoke to U.S. congressmen and his vice-president who were representing their country at the Munich Security Conference. He then called his main transatlantic allies together again via videoconference. He congratulated himself on delaying the Russian attack and accused Moscow of persisting in its plans. He said that all the Allies were ready and that Russia, if it took action, would see what it would see.

President Putin responded by ordering a demonstration of the Federation’s nuclear forces. Several missiles of different ranges were fired from the ground, a submarine, surface ships and aircraft. They were conventionally loaded and all hit their targets in the presence of foreign observers, including a US officer.

The United States is escalating the tension with words, Russia with deeds. In this regard, let us repeat once again that the US armies are not capable of waging a high-intensity war. If they manage to destroy Third World countries without any problem after having placed them under embargo for at least a decade, they are not at all prepared to confront a modern army. Its main allies (the United Kingdom, France and Turkey) are in the same state. As an example, on February 16, a report was presented in Paris to the Commission de la défense nationale et des forces armées on the decay of the French army. The deputies noted that given the state of its equipment, the French Air Force could not withstand the Russian forces for more than five days. It is therefore clear to all the protagonists that Nato is in no position to wage war against Russia and China.

To everyone’s surprise, the United States did not manage to impose a martial atmosphere in Munich. The Europeans were rather irritated by the very strong pressure from the White House. When he spoke, Chancellor Scholtz spoke in a monotone voice, taking care not to say anything compromising. Everyone in the room knew that an investigation into a sordid affair in which he had been involved during his tenure as mayor of Hamburg had been strangely revived. Many imagined that he was being blackmailed. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, whom the White House had tried to dissuade from coming, was the object of all attention. He kept calling for help, not so much from Moscow as from Washington.

Jake Sullivan, former advisor to Vice President Biden, then National Security Advisor to the same Joe Biden once he became President.

Tentative conclusion

A confrontation is always possible in Ukraine, or tomorrow in Transnistria or the Middle East. But it does not answer the initial question, posed by the Kremlin on December 17, 2021: how can the United States comply with international law and respect its word?

For the first time, two major German media, Der Spiegel [1] and Die Welt [2], have shown that Russia is right about the ban on Nato’s expansion beyond East Germany. Quoting a well-known expert on the issue, Assistant Professor Joshua Shifrinson of Boston University, the media revealed the existence of a document dated March 6, 1991, which had just come out of the secret archives of the UK. In it, the German representative states, "We cannot propose to Poland and other countries to join NATO," and the U.S. representative stresses that the Alliance should not expand eastward, either "formally or informally. As if that were not enough, the former German Secretary of State for Defense and former vice-president of the OSCE, Willy Wimmer, gave an interview to Russia Today, which was immediately translated into English and broadcast in the USA before being broadcast in Germany [3]. In the interview, he testified that he had participated in the negotiations on German reunification and that he himself had drafted the Additional Protocol prohibiting Nato forces from being stationed on the territory of the former East Germany after reunification had taken place.

The question arises: why is the Bien administration, which is not supported by its allies, continuing and amplifying its accusations against Russia at the risk of provoking an explosion? Perhaps the ongoing investigation in the United States by Special Prosecutor John Durnham into the White House wiretapping affair is precipitating matters. According to Fox News [4], the prosecutor suspects that Hillary Clinton spied on President Donald Trump at the White House and at his home by intercepting all of his Internet browsing data. This operation would have been organized by her foreign policy advisor, "Jake" Sullivan, current National Security Advisor. It is on the basis of these illegally intercepted and manipulated data that Congress opened an impeachment procedure, RussiaGate.

Translation
Roger Lagassé

[1«NATO’s Eastward Expansion: Is Vladimir Putin Right?», Der Spiegel International, Klaus Wiegrefe, February 15, 2022.

[4«Durham Probe», Fox News.