The Party of Chaos Blows Its Cover - Ukraine Conflict Updates

Putin has the truth as a weapon.

The western group must pretend they didn’t carry out a color revolution in Ukraine. The western group must also pretend they didn’t install Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The western group must also pretend there was not a civil war happening inside Ukraine for a decade, and the western group must pretend they didn’t try to provoke Vladimir Putin with expansions of NATO and an intentional breaking of the Minsk accords. There are other pretenses that must be maintained, but those are the top ones...

One way President Trump could gain back the power of not pretending is to: (1) request an immediate ceasefire; then (2) tell the CIA (Ratcliffe) to immediately withdraw all CIA operatives from Ukraine; then (3) tell Secretary Marco Rubio to pull all USAID operatives out of Ukraine; then (4) tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy he must hold a national election within 60 days...

Under the terms of Russia’s newly redefined nuclear weapons policy, Russia is now at war with the United States, with no indication that President Biden has any intention of sending to Congress a resolution declaring that the United States is at war with Russia...

Congress need not stand by idly, watching without recourse, as a lame-duck president (whose mental competence must be considered questionable) authorizes Ukraine to fire USA-manufactured missiles into Russia—a policy that has as its only rational purpose to induce Russia to use a tactical nuclear bomb in retaliation...

Under the authority of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, Congress can pass rescission legislation that, according to the Congressional Institute, “is considered under expedited procedures, making it easier for a simple majority of each Chamber of Congress to revisit spending decisions.”...

the very fact of originating the legislation in Congress will send clear messages to Presidents Biden, Putin, and Trump. That message will be that Congress does not approve the funding of a reckless executive decision made by a lame-duck president (with questionable mental acuity) that could lead to a World War III thermonuclear confrontation before it was over...

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) has become the first member of the Washington establishment to say the quiet part out loud regarding the U.S. funding of the war between Ukraine and Russia, which is really a war between the U.S./NATO and Russia. Ukraine is just NATO's proxy.

Speaking in an interview with CBS News Face the Nation on Sunday, Senator Graham said Washington "cannot afford" to allow Russia to achieve victory in its war with Ukraine as this would mean losing direct access to vast mineral wealth...

"... If we help Ukraine now, they can become the best business partner we ever dreamed of, that $10 to $12 trillion of critical mineral assets could be used by Ukraine and the West, not given to Putin and China," Graham stated...

The U.S./NATO wants to control not only the vast natural resources in Ukraine but in Russia as well. Russia's natural resources dwarf those of Ukraine. It has huge amounts of natural gas, oil, gold and rare-earth mineral. That's why they've openly called for a regime change in Russia, to replace Putin with a Western puppet more favorable to the financial interests of Western-based transnational corporations...

If we accept the fundamental truth that Ukraine is nothing more than a proxy battleground between Russia and the west, then you might say WWIII has already begun. The powers-that-be have been content to keep the situation contained primarily to Ukraine so far, but a recent event suggests things are about to change. There's something very strange happening on the nuclear front between NATO and Russia and I believe it might be time to consider the possibility that a false flag threat is in the works...

I have no doubt that WWIII is the intended outcome of the confrontation between NATO and Russia in Ukraine. The question is, how do they plan to arrange that outcome while convincing the American and European public to join the war effort? They need a serious false flag.

... US intelligence has not only been instrumental in Ukraine wartime decision-making, but has established and financed high tech command-and-control spy centers, and was doing so long prior to the Feb. 24 Russian invasion of two years ago...

These intelligence bases, from which Russian commanders' communications can be swept up and Russian spy satellites monitored, are being used launch and track cross-border drone and missile attacks on Russian territory...

This means that with the disclosure of the longtime "closely guarded secret" the world just got a big step closer to WW3, given it means the CIA is largely responsible for the effectiveness of the recent spate of attacks which have included direct drone hits on key oil refineries and energy infrastructure...

the revelations contained in the NY Times report also confirm what President Putin has precisely accused Washington of all along...

Among the most interesting and curious moments of the NYT report is a description of the CIA program's expanse under the Trump administration. The report suggests that the true scope may have even been hidden from Trump...

The matter at hand is the war in Ukraine, what we've heard or been told, and what may be a totally different truth. Our government's embellishments about COVID, the obfuscation, deliberate lying, and the major media commitment to selling those lies and others give this conversation a good deal of merit. Tucker Carlson is speaking with retired U.S. Army colonel Douglas Macgregor. He is an author, consultant, and commentator. He shares a very different version of the events in Ukraine, the competence of the Diplomatic core, the state of the US Military, and the Russian Army. He says our intervention (boots on the ground) seems inevitable, that we are ill-prepared, and that Russia is not just ready but able to put America in a corner the extraction from which will result in either nuclear war or surrender in Ukraine, under terms unfavorable to the West and its Allies. Put simply, we should not be there, and we need to get out now, or the cost will be much greater than the human rights disaster we've helped precipitate to date.

So there is room in the Kremlin’s thinking for coexistence with the West. However, it will always be coexistence at the expense of the “small nations” located between Russia and Germany... contrary to the claims often made, this is not a clash between the liberal West and the conservative East. The front line runs almost in reverse. This war is between the idea of the nation-state that is allowed to choose its own path of development, and the concept of an empire claiming the right to impose its pattern of progress on others, cynically using slogans about the fight against “fascism.” Russia is aiming to build a world ruled by empires rather than nations.

Ukraine is in uproar now simply because geniuses in the US State Department thought it would be a good way to annoy and antagonize Russia. The project was insane from inception. The main result is that Europe will no longer have the natural gas it needs at a rational price to continue being an industrial society.

One must conclude that NATO is looking for a way out of this. But there is no way out except to declare by word or deed, directly or otherwise, that NATO has outlived the reason for its existence. Any sane analysis by Europeans would arrive at the unnerving realization that the USA has become the enemy of NATO, not Russia. If all that is so, then a seismic shift is underway that will leave America hung out to dry on the Ukraine project. Germany will have to make a deal with Russia to rebuild the Nord Streams. What could the US do about that? Impose sanctions on Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the rest of the bunch? Where does that leave Western Civ?...

On February 16, 2022, a full week before Putin sent combat troops into Ukraine, the Ukrainian Army began the heavy bombardment of the area (in east Ukraine) occupied by mainly ethnic Russians... the Ukrainian Army was, in fact, shelling civilian areas along the Line of Contact that were occupied by other Ukrainians.... The killing of civilians in the Donbas was a clear provocation, a provocation that was aimed at goading Russia into a war....

Before Putin sent his tanks across the border into Ukraine, he invoked United Nations Article 51 which provides a legal justification for military intervention.... "...the uncomfortable truth is that, of all the claims made regarding the legality of pre-emption under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, Russia's justification for invading Ukraine is on solid legal ground."

The plan to engage Russia militarily is a tacit admission that the United States can no longer maintain its global dominance through economic or political means alone. After exhaustive analysis and debate, western elites have settled on a course of action aimed at dividing the world into warring blocs in order to prosecute a war on Russia and China. The ultimate strategic objective of the current policy, is to tighten the grip of western elites on the levers of global power and to prevent the dissolution of the “rules-based international order.” But after 11 months of nonstop warfare in Ukraine, the US-backed western coalition finds itself in a worse position than when it began...

The stage is now set for a conventional ground war the likes of which no one in Washington ever anticipated. We expect that the outcome of this conflict will reshape Europe’s outdated security architecture and force a realignment that will mark the end of the unipolar era.

In what still may be the most remarkable statement of the war, [State Department spokesman Ned] Price responded, "this is a war that is in many ways bigger than Russia, it's bigger than Ukraine." ... The war in Ukraine has always been about larger US goals. It has always been about the American ambition to maintain a unipolar world in which they were the sole polar power at the center and top of the world....

But when, in 2014, the US set up and supported a coup in Ukraine that was intended to pull Ukraine closer into the NATO and European security sphere Russia responded by annexing Crimea, Russia broke out of its post Cold War policy of compliance and pushed back against US hegemony....

The "Russia Problem" has always been that it is impossible to confront China if China has Russia: it is not desirable to fight both superpowers at once. So, if the long-term goal is to prevent a challenge to the US led unipolar world from China, Russia first needs to be weakened....

The western media is also being used as a weapon against Russia. For example, Russia has been universally blamed for starting the war, but Russia did not start the war and everyone on the Security Council knows it. Ukraine started the war, and the Observer Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has collected evidence to prove it....

You can see that by the time Putin invaded Ukraine, the war had already begun. The shelling of ethnic Russians had already intensified by many orders of magnitude. People were being slaughtered in droves, and tens of thousands of refugees were fleeing across the border into Russia. And, all of this had been going on since the 16th of February, a full week before Russia crossed the border....

Finally, it should be clear by now, that the war in Ukraine was planned long before the Russian invasion. At every turn, Washington has orchestrated the provocations that were designed to lure Russia into Ukraine, drain its resources and, thus, remove a major obstacle to US strategic objectives in Central Asia....

Washington knows that it will not be able to encircle and control China’s explosive growth, unless it crushes Russia first. That is why it has embarked on such a reckless strategy that could end in an unprecedented catastrophe. Our miscreant leaders believe that preserving their grip on global power is worth the risk of nuclear annihilation.

... What is clear to any serious observer of EU politics is that they are not interested in what their people have to say or want.... The bigger Davos plan of destroying the old global order to Build it Back Better, where they own everything and you will own nothing and like it or else, is the script....

... First, some Russians see this as a war against Communism, plain and simple: the Communism of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s republics and their foreign antifa fighters. They associate Communism with terror, death, and rule by scum. They don’t wish to submit to that....

When Russian ethnonationalists complain about being displaced by Muslim immigrants from the post-Soviet “Stans,” the elites feel threatened. Like Western elites, Russia’s rulers feel more secure if they can dilute the Russian majority with outsiders....

Russia’s military is just as wedded to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” propaganda as the Western military....

The Ukraine war is a conflict between Russia, a multiracial empire with an aggressive multicultural ideology, and Ukraine, the homeland of the Ukrainian people. This conflict, in one form or another, has existed since the seventeenth century....

Russia has also vowed to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, which means destroying its national self-consciousness — basically anything that would prevent the Ukrainians who survive from being assimilated by Russia and disappearing from the pages of history. This is simply cultural genocide.

The U.S. got its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia's economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia, all part of an attempt to bring down its government....

It was the second time that Biden confirmed that the purpose of the draconian U.S. sanctions on Russia was never to prevent the invasion of Ukraine, which the U.S. desperately needed to activate its plans, but to punish Russia and get its people to rise up against Putin and ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow....

... Ukraine’s ability to launch significant military operations had been eliminated.... The scale and scope of the Russian attack is remarkable. They captured territory in three weeks that is larger than the land mass of the United Kingdom....

Why is the media trying to convince the Ukrainian people that they can prevail in their war against Russia?... Rather than do real reporting, the vast majority of the media (print and electronic) as well as Big Tech are supporting a massive propaganda campaign....

NATO and Washington, believed they could continue to creep east on Russia’s borders without provoking a reaction...

And this attempt to coerce Russia with sanctions has now made it very likely that the U.S. dollar’s role as the international reserve currency will show up in the dustbin of history....

I think Putin’s demands are quite reasonable. The problem is that 99% of Americans have no idea of the kind of military provocation that NATO and the U.S. have carried out over the last 7 years. The public was always told the military exercises were "defensive." That simply is not true. Now we have news that DTRA was funding biolabs in Ukraine. I guess Putin could agree to allow U.S. nuclear missile systems in Poland and Romania if Biden agrees to allow comparable Russian systems to be deployed in Cuba, Venezuela and Mexico. When we look at it in those terms we can begin to understand that Putin's demands are not crazy nor unreasonable....

Putin has sent a very clear message—NATO forces in Ukraine will be viewed and treated as combatants. Period....

... Ukraine does not have the right to do whatever it wants on its own territory. Ukraine and more than 50 other countries signed treaties ("at the OSCE summits in Istanbul in 1999 and in Astana in 2010") agreeing that they would not strengthen their own security at the expense of other’s security....

Russia's sole objective is to end the existential crisis that was created by Washington. It was Washington that encouraged NATO to pump Ukraine full of lethal weapons. It was Washington that provided arms for the far-right extremists that were threatening ethnic Russians in east Ukraine. It was Washington that coaxed Ukrainian President Zelensky to jettison Minsk and to publicly support the development of nuclear weapons. It was Washington that launched the coup in 2014 that deposed the democratically-elected president and replaced him with a US-puppet. And, it was Washington that has done everything in its power to isolate and demonize Russia following provocations that were entirely of its own making....

It shows that Uncle Sam is trying to destroy Russia so he can project power into Central Asia and maintain Washington's grip on global power. Who is going control the most populous and prosperous region of the next century, Asia? That's the question that guides Washington’s actions in Ukraine....

Perhaps the greatest danger lies in the difference of motives between parties, which is also the fundamental cause of this war: Russia seeks security, while the U.S. and its NATO allies have been using Ukraine to deny that security — to "break Russia," in Henry Kissinger’s 2015 phrase . The U.S. does not want peace, unless it be the peace of a conquered Russia. That is why there is no obvious end to the escalations and counter-escalations. The U.S. and NATO see opportunity in the war they have been trying so hard to provoke.

The tragedy is that few people seem to understand that at the root of the Ukraine crisis is a specific strategy known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine... "Our first objective," stated the document, "is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival [to the United States],"... The Wolfowitz Doctrine triggered the post-Cold War use of NATO as an instrument of bloody aggression against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya...

An end to the invasion and war in Ukraine can only be guaranteed if Russia’s security is itself guaranteed. Security is largely indivisible. Security for one state requires security for others. This is a core principle of European security which Russia rightly insists upon. The U.S. should honor that. The fundamental cause of the current conflict is the desire of the U.S. to weaken or "break" Russia.
Human rights, including the right of political self-determination, are pillars of Western values and institutions. The government of Ukraine has denied human rights and political self-determination to the peoples of the Donbass...

What the Study Group Wants

1. We want a negotiated peace at the earliest possible time...

2. Weapons should not be provided to civilian individuals, gangs, criminals, children, and "stay-behind," guerrilla, or Volkssturmgroups...

4. All economic sanctions – which hurt ordinary citizens more than elites – should be lifted...

5. We want measured, just, de jure de-nazification of the Ukrainian government and laws.

6. The independence of the Donbass region within pre-conflict administrative boundaries should be accepted by all peace organizations and states...

10. Ukraine should not be allowed to join NATO...

11. NATO should disband...

12. The U.S. and the five states that host U.S. nuclear weapons should, jointly or individually, end nuclear hosting arrangements, as well as end the training of non-U.S. pilots in nuclear weapons use and the prospective use of non-U.S. dual-capable aircraft for nuclear missions...

It seems that Putin has three fundamental options (with a host of variance in between):

- Option 1, stay on the current path with a methodical, extended war against Ukraine.

- Option 2, escalate with the use of a low-yield battlefield tactical nuclear weapons and chemical attacks on urban resistance.

- Option 3, at some point offer a seize fire with the following conditions; regime change in Ukraine to include a friendly coalition government, demilitarization of Ukraine or at least two thirds of it and cessation of sanctions in return for returning his forces to Russian territory...

One of the key underlying themes of the Russia/Ukraine/NATO matrix is that the Empire of Lies (copyright Putin) has been rattled to the core by the combined ability of Russian hypersonic missiles and a defensive shield capable of blocking incoming nuclear missiles from the West, thereby ending Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.)

This has led the Americans to nearly risk a hot war to be able to place hypersonic missiles that they still don’t have on Ukraine’s western borders, and so be within three minutes of Moscow. For that, of course, they need Ukraine, as well as Poland and Romania in Eastern Europe.

In Ukraine, the Americans are determined to fight to the last European soul – if that’s what it takes. This may be the last roll of the (nuclear) dice. Thus the next-to-last gasp at coercing Russia into submission by using the remaining, workable American weapon of mass destruction: SWIFT.

Yet this weapon can be easily neutralized by rapid adoption of self-sufficiency....

"The choice that we faced in Ukraine — and I'm using the past tense there intentionally — was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield," said George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney. "And we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that the military operation would fail."...

Mearsheimer also warned that... Ukraine's pseudo-membership status was going to bait Moscow and result in catastrophe. 'The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is Ukraine is going to get wrecked,' he said in a lecture. [See above videos.]

Russia has grown concerned again about Ukraine for a number of reasons. Analysts like [Anatol] Lieven [senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of 'Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry,'] and [George] Beebe [former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney] point out that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has taken a number of sharp measures to eradicate Russian influence in Ukraine recently by doing things like banning the use of Russian language in schools and state institutions, shutting down Kremlin-linked television stations and arresting some of the most prominent Russo-sympathetic leaders in the country - all while cooperating on the ground with NATO. Russia read this as a sign that Kyiv was throwing its lot in with the U.S. and the prospect of an agreement ensuring autonomy for the separatist-held Donbas region, crucial to Russia's plan to thwart Ukraine's NATO entry, might be dead....

The U.S. may want to be the only great power in the world, free to expand its hegemony with impunity, but it is not. Refusing to see this is dangerous for us all....

... In the larger context though, Ukraine has become an unwitting victim and proxy in the resurgent U.S. Cold War against Russia and China, in which the United States has surrounded both countries with military forces and offensive weapons, withdrawn from a whole series of arms control treaties, and refused to negotiate resolutions to rational security concerns raised by Russia.

In December 2021, after a summit between Presidents Biden and Putin, Russia submitted a draft proposal for a new mutual security treaty between Russia and NATO, with 9 articles to be negotiated. They represented a reasonable basis for a serious exchange. The most pertinent to the crisis in Ukraine was simply to agree that NATO would not accept Ukraine as a new member... But the Biden administration brushed off Russia's entire proposal as a nonstarter, not even a basis for negotiations....

At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact, NATO's Eastern European counterpart, was dissolved, and NATO should have been as well, since it had achieved the purpose it was built to serve. Instead, NATO has lived on as a dangerous, out-of-control military alliance dedicated mainly to expanding its sphere of operations and justifying its own existence. It has expanded from 16 countries in 1991 to a total of 30 countries today, incorporating most of Eastern Europe, at the same time as it has committed aggression, bombings of civilians and other war crimes.

In 1999, NATO launched an illegal war to militarily carve out an independent Kosovo from the remnants of Yugoslavia...

Far from the North Atlantic, NATO joined the United States in its 20-year war in Afghanistan, and then attacked and destroyed Libya in 2011, leaving behind a failed state, a continuing refugee crisis and violence and chaos across the region.

In 1991, as part of a Soviet agreement to accept the reunification of East and West Germany, Western leaders assured their Soviet counterparts that they would not expand NATO any closer to Russia than the border of a united Germany....

U.S. nuclear weapons are now based in five NATO countries in Europe: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey, while France and the U.K. already have their own nuclear arsenals. U.S. "missile defense" systems, which could be converted to fire offensive nuclear missiles, are based in Poland and Romania, including at a base in Poland only 100 miles from the Russian border....

Lastly, as Americans condemn Russia's aggression, it would be the epitome of hypocrisy to forget or ignore the many recent wars in which the United States and its allies have been the aggressors: in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti,Somalia, Palestine, Pakistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen....

Less than a day after Russia wiped out both Ukraine's military power and political architecture, President Sundowner confirmed that all the West's threats were as empty as the heads of the Millennials running the propaganda desk at the State Dept....

Cutting Russia out of SWIFT would mean the end of the EU as anyone has known it or wishes it could be in the future. It would mean the end of the petrodollar system.

Russia is too systemically important to the global commodity trade that goes far beyond energy. It supplies not only the marginal barrel of oil and BTU of natural gas, but pound of nickel, palladium, titanium, enriched uranium and tungsten. It's a major supplier of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, potash, and urea.

Do this and Europe not only freezes to death with their three days of gas reserves but starves once the global food supply is disrupted. Do this and Biden enters the mid-terms with $8/gallon gas, and 20% real inflation....

The game has changed because the rules have changed. It's no longer a game of rhetorical chicken and virtue signaling....

We now have to come to terms with this new game. It's a game where the rules will be far more equitable because the unthinkable alternatives are no longer theoretical, they are real....

... Biden has been the best thing to happen to Europe. Much as Obama demonstrated to American allies in the Middle East that they were on their own against Iran, Biden did the same to Europe. In response, Germany may actually properly fund national defense and other European nations are starting to take national defense seriously....

We have done our part. And it should not be our job to police nationalist conflicts that are regional, not global, in scope....

The Kremlin's increasingly assertive foreign policy, including its illegal occupation of Crimea in 2014 and its intervention in Syria in 2015, came unexpectedly to many in the West. These events were nonetheless mere extensions of the worldview held by Russian President Vladimir Putin. This worldview was built on more than two decades of compounded dissatisfaction with the West as well as Putin's cumulative experiences in his ongoing global campaigns to achieve his core objectives: the preservation of his regime, the end of American hegemony, and the reinstatement of Russia as a global power. Some of these ambitions were tamed, and others expedited, by external events, yet their core has remained the same and often at odds with the West. The U.S. believed that a brief period of non-assertive foreign policy from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s had become the new norm for Russia. This period was not the norm but an anomaly. Putin's foreign policy has always been assertive, similar to Russia's historic foreign policy. The U.S. may thus find itself once again surprised by Putin.

A buffer state had staked its future on a distant power that had simply seen it as an instrument to annoy its powerful neighbor with no attachment to any larger strategic concept that it was willing to support.

It is fair to say that the "Joe Biden" government dearly wanted a Russian invasion of Ukraine in order to divert attention from the "Joe Biden" government's war on its own people in the United States.... And the situation was aggravated by the deliberate negotiation-unworthiness (Russian term) of "Joe Biden" and Company, who refused to discuss the chief issue between the US and Russia, namely, the dishonest effort, in violation of written agreements dating from 1990, to enlist Ukraine in NATO, and thereby to place missiles on Russia's border. The US disallowed something very similar in 1962, when the old USSR tried to put missiles in Cuba.

You are also seeing payback for the Maidan color revolution of 2014, engineered by John Kerry's State Department and John Brennan's CIA. We have been managing Ukraine backstage since then and, alas for that poor country, quite deceitfully....

... first let's be clear about what "Joe Biden" & Co. seek to divert public attention from: the complete implosion of all the narratives that support the "Joe Biden" regime — and the campaign against Western Civ more generally by the sinister likes of Klaus Schwab and his global gang of Great Re-setters, including Bill Gates, George Soros, and many actors in America's own Deep State.

The Covid-19 story is blowing up, and in a very ugly way for the American people. The news is finally wriggling free of our combined news media / social media censorship machine and that news is as follows: Covid-19 was a trip laid on the world to get rid of the irascible Mr. Trump and usher-in a system of digital social controls. The mRNA "vaccines" were all patented and ready to go before the virus even took off. The mRNA "vaccines" turned out to be ineffective and arguably more damaging than the Covid-19 virus...

The blow-up of the Covid-19 story will come to horrify even those Americans hypnotically locked into mass formation...

Then there is the 2020 election narrative: that it was the fairest and most error-free contest in our history. The evidence that the opposite is true waits in several states...

Russia's ultimate interest in this matter is to stabilize its border.

We in the USA perhaps can't appreciate that because our current government shows no interest in stabilizing our own border. (We will in the future, when the Party of Chaos is swept out of power.)...

In hints, in pleas, in public speeches and private approaches, Russia has begged us for years to show it the most basic respect.

Our response has been to react with mistrust and abuse, and with blatant attempts to worsen the situation in Ukraine and Georgia, two incredibly dangerous flashpoints where real war might all too easily begin.

Having been there when everything was possible, on that Moscow summer's day in 1991, I cannot forgive or forget this great missed opportunity to bring Russia into the free and lawful world.

And I think the peoples of the West should think very carefully before they follow the path to a new and bitter division of Europe.

It is wholly avoidable. It gains us nothing. And it might lose us everything.