All Things Russia & Ukraine

[old salt]

Potential sources of F-16's for Ukraine.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/u ... -countries

https://www.politico.eu/article/f-16-je ... -training/

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/22/europe/f ... index.html

[DocBarrister]

The incursion into Belgorod is stunning and very odd. It was reportedly significant enough to compel the Russian military to move some of their nuclear weapons stored in the region.

An incursion into Russia itself. Wow.

Russia moved to clear out a nuclear weapons storage facility in Belgorod as fighting in the region continued into a second day Tuesday, with Russian forces cracking down on armed revolutionary groups that attempted to seize control of local towns.

Russian troops have taken back control of the towns of Kozinka and Grayvoron, according to media accounts, but Moscow’s forces are still searching for armed militants across the region.

https://thehill.com/homenews/4016951-uk ... d-day/amp/

Is this the beginning of Ukraine’s much anticipated counteroffensive?

DocBarrister

[youthathletics]

Putin putting it out there: https://twitter.com/WarClandestine/stat ... 60218?s=20

[DocBarrister]

Great surprise from President Zelenskyy at the Johns Hopkins commencement ceremony at Homewood.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a guest appearance at Johns Hopkins University as he delivered a surprise address to the class of 2023 at their commencement ceremony Thursday morning.

Zelenskyy spoke in a live video stream from Ukraine that was shown at Homewood Field on the university's Baltimore campus, where he was also presented with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree by Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels.

In his 10-minute speech, Zelenskyy centered his remarks on the importance of time, in addition to indispensable ideals of freedom, self-determination and democracy.

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/25/11781997 ... ad-speaker



DocBarrister

[old salt]

This month's free read from Foreign Affairs.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian- ... -%20112017

The Plot Against Russia
How Putin Revived Stalinist Anti-Americanism to Justify a Botched War
By Andrei Kolesnikov, May 25, 2023

...As Moscow’s “special military operation” in Ukraine turns into a long and difficult war, the old ideology of Russian messianism, which had already become the Kremlin’s preferred tool for manipulating public opinion, has been stirred into a sort of defining rationale for the regime.
...According to the new framing, Russia’s real fight is against the mighty United States, which wants to destroy it, while Ukraine—just like the European Union and NATO—is merely an obedient U.S. satellite. For the Kremlin, a sinister U.S. plot offers a convenient explanation for why the war has dragged on for so long and why Putin has proved to be not such a great military strategist after all. It also helps explain to average Russians why the war was started in the first place.

Seen in this context, the “special operation” has evolved from an effort to recover lost imperial lands into a civilizational battle between the forces of good, embodied by Russia, and the forces of evil, sometimes called “satanic,” personified by the United States and its allies.

...By fixating on the United States, Putin is tapping into the late Stalinist doctrines that made up the ideological foundations of the Cold War: the United States rules the world and has always wanted to weaken, if not destroy, us. Of course, many ordinary Russians—at least when they are not being told otherwise by the Russian state—have tended to be indifferent or even partial to the United States. But as Stalin knew and Putin has discovered, those attitudes can be shifted by effective propaganda.

By conjuring a nefarious, all-powerful adversary, the Putin regime can create a new justification for a hugely costly war that has already lasted well over a year and seems unlikely to end anytime soon. The presence of such a strong external enemy, of course, also justifies intensified repression of internal enemies...The late Stalinist regime operated under the same logic. In April 1951, George Kennan wrote in Foreign Affairs: “No ruling group likes to admit that it can govern its people only by regarding and treating them as criminals. For this reason there is always a tendency to justify internal oppression by pointing to the menacing iniquity of the outside world.”

DAMN YANKEES
The United States was not the original focus of Russian xenophobia. During World War I, Germany was considered the main enemy, and patriotic hysteria was fueled by anti-German sentiment. Then, in the early Soviet years, France and the United Kingdom were considered the main adversaries—whereas the United States was a distant, well-developed but soulless capitalist society from which to borrow technology and industrial specialists. Turning the United States into the main enemy was more of a postwar phenomenon: even then, Stalin was initially more preoccupied with, as he put it in 1946, “the replacement of Hitler’s domination by Churchill's domination,” and in his growing Anglophobia, he overlooked the transformation of America into a leading power. But he quickly made up for it in both propaganda and repression when “Anglo-American spies” came on the scene.

Yet during World War II, things were absolutely different: Soviet soldiers and the Soviet population had a strong affinity for their Anglo-American allies. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the Red Army’s song and dance ensemble performed two of the Allies’ most popular melodies: the British marching song “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, and the Anglo-American folk tune “There’s a Tavern in the Town,” known in its Russian version as “Kabachok.” Subsequently recorded for gramophone, these Russian versions were wildly popular in the Soviet Union along with other American hits, such as “Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer,” a World War II song about an Allied bombing raid that was sung in Russian as “Song of the Bombers.” Another popular song, known in Russian as “And in Trouble and in Battle,” which was performed even before the war by Alexander Varlamov’s jazz orchestra, turned out to be a Russian version of the 1934 American hit “Roll Along, Covered Wagon, Roll Along.”

It wasn’t just the music of the United Kingdom and the United States that were stratospherically popular by the end of the war. So were the Allies themselves. On the morning of May 9, after the 3 AM radio announcement of Germany’s surrender, enormous jubilant crowds poured onto the streets of Moscow. My father, who had just turned 17, was woken by a classmate at four in the morning, and they rushed toward Red Square, which was already full of people celebrating. Throughout the day, people also flocked to the nearby square where the U.S. embassy was located, as captured in photographs by Yakov Khalip and Anatoly Garanin.

In Stalin’s late years, anti-Americanism became the cornerstone of Soviet propaganda.
“We were naturally moved and pleased by this manifestation of public feeling, but were at a loss to know how to respond to it,” recalled Kennan, then chargé d’affaires at the embassy, who had not yet become famous for his “long telegram’’ on Soviet conduct. Rapturous Muscovites were hoisting up anyone in military uniform and were prepared to do the same to staff from the embassy of a friendly power. Kennan, who spoke Russian, risked climbing out onto the parapet over the embassy’s entrance to shout: “Congratulations on the day of victory! All honor to the Soviet allies!”

Although it was unnoticed by the Soviet people at the time, however, Kennan could already sense the emerging tensions of the Cold War. According to the historian John Gaddis, even in the wake of their triumph over Hitler, the members of the Big Three alliance were already at war with one another, at least ideologically and geopolitically. In the later years of the Stalin regime, anti-Americanism would serve an important strategic purpose, countering the West’s new threat to Soviet spheres of influence. Anti-Americanism became the cornerstone of foreign policy, propaganda, and counterpropaganda for the entire Cold War. Not surprisingly, a comparable confrontation with the West today has brought the old genie out of the bottle—there are no more effective means.

“THERE WILL BE BOMBS”
In 2022, the derogatory term Anglosaksy—“Anglo-Saxons”—suddenly came into frequent use in Kremlin discussions and even entered the vocabulary of ordinary Russians. But the term, which refers to scheming Americans who lead obedient European satellites, is by no means an invention of the Putin regime. It comes directly from the Soviet lexicon of power of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when it was deployed to refer to the Soviet Union’s most important adversaries. In its current ideology and propaganda, Moscow has intuitively or consciously regurgitated classic Russian conspiracy theories, which have always been—in both Soviet and post-Soviet history—a simple, universal way to explain Russia’s problems or the expansionist actions of its rulers.

During the Cold War, for example, the KGB actively promoted the idea of a secret U.S. plot against the Soviet Union. Consider the widely circulated 1979 book CIA Target: The USSR, by Nikolai Yakovlev, a Russian historian recruited by the KGB. Among other things, Yakovlev expounded a theory then popular in the Russian security agencies and in Russian nationalist circles that there was an American “Dulles Plan”—after C.I.A. director Allen Dulles— to destroy the Soviet Union. As the Russian historian Viktor Shnirelman has shown, this idea was likely inspired by an intentional misreading of a 1948 U.S. National Security Council directive that may have become known to Soviet intelligence. (The directive was in fact exclusively defensive and contained not a single word about the “destruction of the Russian people.”) The myth about the existence of the “plan” even found its way into some Russian history books.

The KGB promoted the idea that there was a secret U.S. plot to destroy the Soviet Union.
Although the Soviet government moved much closer to the United States during the Mikhail Gorbachev era, the strain of extreme anti-Americanism continued to thrive in some corners of the Soviet and post-Soviet state. In the 1990s, for example, Filip Bobkov, a former senior KGB officer, claimed that the collapse of the Soviet Union had been engineered by the United States with the help of the “Yakovlev group”—this time the Yakovlev in question was Alexander, an architect of perestroika and Gorbachev’s right-hand man. These conspiracy theories had lived on, unaltered, on Russia’s nationalist fringe, including in the work of the Russian émigré philosopher Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), whose concept of a global “world behind the scenes,” or illuminati, became fashionable in the Kremlin. (The influence of such philosophers on Putin, though, should not be exaggerated: he has quoted Ilyin on perhaps two occasions; and he has referred once to the classic Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, although he probably knows no more about him than Brezhnev did about Marx. In essence, he was simply showing the that the historical idea of a Russianness shaped in opposition to the West has endured.)

All of the Kremlin’s theses about the dangerous West and Russia’s opposition to it, which Putin repeats nonstop, were formulated long ago in the late Stalin era, sometimes even in verse. In 1951, Pravda published “On the Soviet Atom,” a poem by the children’s poet Sergei Mikhalkov, who also wrote the words to the Soviet and then Russian national anthems. Roughly translated, it went something like: “There will be bombs! / There are bombs! / You should take that into account! / But it’s not in our plans / To conquer other countries.” Those lines could be lifted straight from one of Putin’s speeches.

Then there is the practice of portraying Russia’s American enemies as stupid. In effect, the message is, “Our opponents may be cunning, but we can see right through them.” In the late Stalin years, the Communist leadership propagated the cliché of Americans’ roaming Moscow with cameras and bribing children with candy to look sad to show the despondency of life in the Soviet Union. “Look, Alik is crying / They’ll film him for America!” joked the children’s poet Agniya Barto in the 1950s. Similarly, Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and deputy chairman of the Security Council, now have a habit of naming and shaming Western enemies in their speeches as “morons” and “half-wits.” Accompanying this is Putin’s growing obsession with LGBTQ topics and obscene jokes about Westerners.

AMERICA FIRST, RUSSIA SECOND
As much as official Russia has often been anti-American, it has also long been obsessed with U.S. economic power and even U.S. goods and food. One of the main slogans from the 1960s Khrushchev era focused on matching and then overtaking the United States in terms of per capita meat, milk, and butter production. When Putin came to power, the idea of catch-up development was hardly less present. In some sense, “America first” is effectively one of Putin’s slogans: everything is viewed through the prism of the United States and the West. To be different means not looking like Western people and not living like them. More precisely, it means achieving similar successes while relying on one’s own strength, upholding sovereignty and “originality,” and practicing import substitution. In other words, both the Russian state and society continue to measure themselves against the yardstick of the United States and its European allies.

The pattern goes back to the earliest Soviet years. American “bourgeois specialists” appeared in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s industrialization drive in the 1920s and 1930s. The Soviet writer Valentin Kataev depicted them somewhat ironically, but the truth is that without U.S. technology, it’s unlikely that an industrial breakthrough would have been possible. When the United States presented the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959—an event that attracted more than two million members of the Soviet public, who tasted Pepsi and got their first look at American washing machines—Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon had their famous “kitchen debate” at the fair site, in which they discussed the relative merits of capitalism and socialism. At the time, the Soviet leadership clearly felt its backwardness in the consumer sphere. This was also why the Soviet Union had to lead the way in the space race: to break free of the catch-up matrix.

Amerika, a Russian-language magazine about American life published by the U.S. State Department, was a coveted item, although less so than jeans, chewing gum, and soft drinks. Characteristically, the magazine was banned in 1948, when Stalinist anti-Americanism was in full force, and was released again during Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinist thaw in the 1950s. At the beginning of 1970s, Leonid Brezhnev gladly accepted prototypes from the U.S. car industry as a gift from the Americans, adding to the atmosphere of détente. And when the Soyuz and Apollo missions jointly docked in space in July 1975, it was commemorated in Moscow with the appearance of “real Virginian tobacco” in cigarettes named after the historic event: not the choking fumes of the motherland, but the fragrant aroma of another world. By the twilight years of the Soviet Union, Soviet industry was so dependent on Western supplies and technologies that the sanctions imposed on Moscow for the invasion of Afghanistan put entire industries, such as chemical engineering, in jeopardy.

For Putin, everything is viewed through the prism of the United States and the West.
Even in the post-Soviet era, the Russian fixation with U.S. models and Putin’s talk of a U.S.-imposed unipolar world created a sense of unavoidable dependence on “them.” Respondents in Russian focus groups would sometimes say that Russia’s 1993 constitution was written in Washington and that Putin’s amendments to it were required to make the country truly sovereign. At the same time, however, people understand that the United States has been an economic powerhouse from which Russia could learn a lot in order to achieve the same standard of living. Once again, a combination of Russian superiority and Russian inferiority has been simultaneously expressed in Moscow’s contradictory attitude toward its American rival.

Still, until Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 and Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Russians’ complexes about the United States were not so noticeable. In the initial years of his rule, beginning in 2000, Putin was still adjusting to the West and wary of squandering the legacy of Boris Yeltsin, his predecessor. He did not see Russia as a trend-setter in the Western-led world order. The open hostility to the West expressed in Putin’s speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, however, marked the start of deteriorating relations with the United States—delayed only slightly by an attempted “reset” during Medvedev’s four-year presidency. By 2014, Moscow’s new emphasis on Russian pride and reawakened great-power aspirations brought back all the old hang-ups about the United States, stirring up a quasi-patriotic hysteria. But the strongest manifestation has surfaced since the “special operation” began last year.

Since then, Russian attitudes toward the United States have worsened drastically. In February 2022, 31 percent of Russians had a positive attitude about the United States. A year later, according to the Levada Center, the independent Russian opinion research organization, just 14 percent of respondents had a positive view of the United States, and 73 percent had a negative attitude. The decline in positive attitudes toward Europe is not far behind: just 18 percent of Russians polled had a positive opinion of EU countries in February 2023, compared with 69 percent who did not. When combined with conspiracy theories and Putin’s own growing isolation, Russian fixations with America have become a potent recipe for militarism.

THE SOURCES OF RUSSIAN CONDUCT
Putin’s embrace of conspiratorial anti-Americanism is especially dangerous because of his regime’s growing disregard for the old red lines. During the Cold War, at least, both sides agreed that the consequences of inflicting damage on each other would be unacceptable. Putin’s problem—in fact, the whole world’s problem right now—is that the Russian government lacks the one instinctthat since the late 1960s has consistently led to détente with the West: the willingness to negotiate. Instead, Putin has suspended cooperation on nuclear nonproliferation, discussed the possibility of a nuclear strike with infantile levity, expressed teenage grievances, and shown an unwillingness to maintain even a minimal level of dialogue. All of these actions unfavorably distinguish Putin’s anti-Americanism from that of his late Soviet predecessors.

“The political personality of Soviet power as we know it today,” Kennan wrote in 1950, “is the product of ideology and circumstances.” If one looks at the sources of Russian conduct today, the circumstances are a dictator obsessed with his mission. As for the ideology, Russia’s new foreign policy concept refers to the country’s “special position as an original state-civilization, a vast Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power”—a noteworthy new term. This concept further cites Russia’s role in consolidating “the Russian people and other peoples that make up the cultural and civilizational community of the Russian world”—a geographic space whose borders are not specified.

The eclectic essence of this ideology, which has re-emerged at various stages of Russia’s historical development, was described astutely in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Conversation Piece, 1945,” a short story in which a former White Army colonel who emigrated to the United States declares, “The great Russian people has waked up and my country is again a great country.” He continues: “We [have] had three great leaders. We had Ivan, whom his enemies called Terrible, then we had Peter the Great, and now we have Joseph Stalin. … Today, in every word that comes out of Russia, I feel the power, I feel the splendor of old Mother Russia. She is again a country of soldiers, religion, and true Slavs.”

In his Victory Day speech on May 9, Putin said that Russia’s enemies were notable for their ideology of superiority. It is interesting that he uses almost everything that can be said about him—“exorbitant ambition, arrogance and permissiveness” as he put it in his speech—and lays it at the door of his opponents. Herein lies the deeper purpose of Russian anti-Americanism: to attribute everything that you yourself are plotting, all those immoral plans you are hatching, to the United States.

But this resurrected ideology also reflects the disappearance of the bipolar Cold War order and the loss of Russian greatness and power that have come with it. Thus, when Putin and members of his team talk about a new multipolar world, they are simply trying to reassert Moscow’s lost superpower status and portray themselves as a guiding light for the former Soviet republics and the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. All of this is a consequence of the psychological trauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which the elite who came to power in 2000 carried with them. Twenty-two years later, that trauma has resulted in a global catastrophe.

[runrussellrun]

Pretty missile videos, the negative space is wonderful in the still images too. All over the news. (watched some "private" drone footage, pretty cool listening to the dying, screaming in pain and anguish, in bombed out buildings )

just sure hope Putin uses neutron type bombs, but think they would only be deployed, if the US enters their terroritory.

what is the carbon footprint of Smedley Butlers, war IS a racquet, stuff.

Take MY guns, please. Ukraine needs them.

time to dust off the old boots and join up with some old buddies in private security employment. Heard they let you smoke mary jane, while all the others fellas are sipping free budlite.

Peace proposal IS horshit, says our pretend peace loving liberals.

carry on.....we have people to kill.

[a fan]

Best of luck getting the Ukrainian people to surrender to Putin, or cede their land.......

At least two people died and dozens more were left injured after Russian forces struck a medical facility in the city of Dnipro on Friday morning, after intense shelling rained over central Ukraine overnight.

A 69-year-old man was killed while “just passing by when the rocket struck the city,” and the body of another man “was pulled out of the rubble,” said Serhii Lysak, head of the regional military administration.





https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/26/europe/d ... index.html

[old salt]

Victoria Nuland & George Soros need to hurry up with regime change in Belarus.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/28/europe/l ... index.html

Lukashenko offers nuclear weapons to nations willing ‘to join the Union State of Russia and Belarus’

By Mariya Knight, Uliana Pavlova and Helen Regan, CNN, May 28, 2023

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has claimed that nations who are willing “to join the Union State of Russia and Belarus” will be given nuclear weapons, days after confirming the transfer of some tactical nuclear weapons from Moscow to Minsk had begun.

Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, made the comments in an on-camera interview released Sunday on the state-run Russia 1 channel.
During the interview, Lukashenko said, “no one minds Kazakhstan and other countries having the same close relations that we have with the Russian Federation.”
“It’s very simple,” he added. “Join the Union State of Belarus and Russia. That’s all: there will be nuclear weapons for everyone.”

Signed in 1999, the Agreement on Establishment of the Union State of Belarus and Russia Treaty set up a legal basis for a wide-ranging alliance that spanned economic, information, technology, agriculture, and border security among other things between the two countries, according to the Belarus government website.

It was not clear how wide Lukashenko’s invitation to join the Union State extended, and he offered no other specifics.
But his comments on handing out nuclear weapons to like-minded allies are likely to heighten concerns at a time of growing global proliferation and as Moscow threatens the world with its own atomic arsenal as its war against Ukraine falters.

On Thursday the Belarusian autocrat said the transfer of some tactical nuclear weapons from Russia to Belarus had begun, following an agreement signed by Moscow and Minsk.
“It was necessary to prepare storage sites, and so on. We did all this. Therefore, the movement of nuclear weapons began,” Lukashenko said, according to state news agency Belta.
He also promised the safety of those weapons, saying: “This is not even up for discussion. Don’t worry about nuclear weapons. We are responsible for this. These are serious issues. Everything will be alright here.”

Putin has said that Russia would retain control over any tactical nuclear weapons stationed in Belarus and likened the move to Washington’s practice of stationing nuclear weapons in Europe to keep host countries, like Germany, from breaking their commitments as non-nuclear powers.

Belarus has had no nuclear weapons on its territory since the early 1990s. Shortly after gaining independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it agreed to transfer all Soviet-era weapons of mass destruction stationed there to Russia.

Since invading Ukraine more than a year ago, Putin has used escalating rhetoric on a number of occasions, warning of the “increasing” threat of nuclear war and suggesting Moscow may abandon its “no first use” policy.

In March, Putin said Moscow will complete the construction of a special storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus by the beginning of July, and said Russia had already made the transfer to Belarus of an Iskander short-range missile system, which can be fitted with nuclear or conventional warheads.

Tactical nuclear weapons are smaller than strategic nuclear weapons – which can decimate entire cities – and are designed for use in a limited battlefield. However, their explosive yields are still enough to cause major destruction as well as radiation contamination.

Strong condemnations
The United States and the European Union, as well as opposition leaders in Belarus, have denounced the move to deploy Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.

“It’s the latest example of irresponsible behavior that we have seen from Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine over a year ago,” said US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on Thursday.

Miller added that despite the report of the transfer, the US sees “no reason to adjust our strategic nuclear posture” and said there are no “indications that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon.”

The EU called the agreement between Moscow and Minsk “a step which will lead to further extremely dangerous escalation.”

And Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted on Sunday that Lukashenko’s words “directly indicate that the Russian Federation is deliberately ‘killing’ the concept of global nuclear deterrence and ‘burying’ the key Global Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.”

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko attends a news conference with Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi (not pictured) in Tehran, Iran, March 13, 2023. Iran's President Website/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS PICTURE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY
Lukashenko says Putin could deploy more powerful Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus
“This fundamentally undermines the principles of global security,” Podolyak said. “There can only be one solution: a tough stance of nuclear states; relevant UN/IAEA resolutions; extensive sanctions against (Russian state nuclear energy firm) Rosatom; systemic financial sanctions against Belarus and ultimately against Russia.”

Members of the Belarusian opposition also slammed the agreement, with exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya saying in a post on Twitter “we must do everything to prevent Putin’s plan to deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus.”

“It directly violates our constitutional non-nuclear status and would secure Russia’s control over Belarus for years ahead. And it would further threaten the security of Ukraine and all of Europe,” she said.

Analysts say there are still a lot of unknowns with the transfer.

“We don’t know if it’s actually physically started yet, though Lukashenko says it has. We don’t know if any weapons have actually left Russia yet, we don’t know when they are going to be deployed, we don’t know what kind of weapons will be deployed,” national security expert Joe Cirincione told CNN on Friday.

Cirincione, former president of the Ploughshares Fund which is focused on reducing the threat of nuclear weapons, said if it goes ahead it would be “an historic milestone.”

“We can’t remember another incident where, during a crisis, a nuclear armed state has flushed its weapons from garrison and put them into the field, which is effectively what Putin is doing here,” he said.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Victoria Nuland & George Soros need to hurry up with regime change in Belarus.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/28/europe/l ... index.html

Lukashenko offers nuclear weapons to nations willing ‘to join the Union State of Russia and Belarus’

By Mariya Knight, Uliana Pavlova and Helen Regan, CNN, May 28, 2023

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has claimed that nations who are willing “to join the Union State of Russia and Belarus” will be given nuclear weapons, days after confirming the transfer of some tactical nuclear weapons from Moscow to Minsk had begun.

Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, made the comments in an on-camera interview released Sunday on the state-run Russia 1 channel.
During the interview, Lukashenko said, “no one minds Kazakhstan and other countries having the same close relations that we have with the Russian Federation.”
“It’s very simple,” he added. “Join the Union State of Belarus and Russia. That’s all: there will be nuclear weapons for everyone.”

Signed in 1999, the Agreement on Establishment of the Union State of Belarus and Russia Treaty set up a legal basis for a wide-ranging alliance that spanned economic, information, technology, agriculture, and border security among other things between the two countries, according to the Belarus government website.

It was not clear how wide Lukashenko’s invitation to join the Union State extended, and he offered no other specifics.
But his comments on handing out nuclear weapons to like-minded allies are likely to heighten concerns at a time of growing global proliferation and as Moscow threatens the world with its own atomic arsenal as its war against Ukraine falters.

On Thursday the Belarusian autocrat said the transfer of some tactical nuclear weapons from Russia to Belarus had begun, following an agreement signed by Moscow and Minsk.
“It was necessary to prepare storage sites, and so on. We did all this. Therefore, the movement of nuclear weapons began,” Lukashenko said, according to state news agency Belta.
He also promised the safety of those weapons, saying: “This is not even up for discussion. Don’t worry about nuclear weapons. We are responsible for this. These are serious issues. Everything will be alright here.”

Putin has said that Russia would retain control over any tactical nuclear weapons stationed in Belarus and likened the move to Washington’s practice of stationing nuclear weapons in Europe to keep host countries, like Germany, from breaking their commitments as non-nuclear powers.

Belarus has had no nuclear weapons on its territory since the early 1990s. Shortly after gaining independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it agreed to transfer all Soviet-era weapons of mass destruction stationed there to Russia.

Since invading Ukraine more than a year ago, Putin has used escalating rhetoric on a number of occasions, warning of the “increasing” threat of nuclear war and suggesting Moscow may abandon its “no first use” policy.

In March, Putin said Moscow will complete the construction of a special storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus by the beginning of July, and said Russia had already made the transfer to Belarus of an Iskander short-range missile system, which can be fitted with nuclear or conventional warheads.

Tactical nuclear weapons are smaller than strategic nuclear weapons – which can decimate entire cities – and are designed for use in a limited battlefield. However, their explosive yields are still enough to cause major destruction as well as radiation contamination.

Strong condemnations
The United States and the European Union, as well as opposition leaders in Belarus, have denounced the move to deploy Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.

“It’s the latest example of irresponsible behavior that we have seen from Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine over a year ago,” said US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on Thursday.

Miller added that despite the report of the transfer, the US sees “no reason to adjust our strategic nuclear posture” and said there are no “indications that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon.”

The EU called the agreement between Moscow and Minsk “a step which will lead to further extremely dangerous escalation.”

And Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted on Sunday that Lukashenko’s words “directly indicate that the Russian Federation is deliberately ‘killing’ the concept of global nuclear deterrence and ‘burying’ the key Global Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.”

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko attends a news conference with Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi (not pictured) in Tehran, Iran, March 13, 2023. Iran's President Website/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS PICTURE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY
Lukashenko says Putin could deploy more powerful Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus
“This fundamentally undermines the principles of global security,” Podolyak said. “There can only be one solution: a tough stance of nuclear states; relevant UN/IAEA resolutions; extensive sanctions against (Russian state nuclear energy firm) Rosatom; systemic financial sanctions against Belarus and ultimately against Russia.”

Members of the Belarusian opposition also slammed the agreement, with exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya saying in a post on Twitter “we must do everything to prevent Putin’s plan to deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus.”

“It directly violates our constitutional non-nuclear status and would secure Russia’s control over Belarus for years ahead. And it would further threaten the security of Ukraine and all of Europe,” she said.

Analysts say there are still a lot of unknowns with the transfer.

“We don’t know if it’s actually physically started yet, though Lukashenko says it has. We don’t know if any weapons have actually left Russia yet, we don’t know when they are going to be deployed, we don’t know what kind of weapons will be deployed,” national security expert Joe Cirincione told CNN on Friday.

Cirincione, former president of the Ploughshares Fund which is focused on reducing the threat of nuclear weapons, said if it goes ahead it would be “an historic milestone.”

“We can’t remember another incident where, during a crisis, a nuclear armed state has flushed its weapons from garrison and put them into the field, which is effectively what Putin is doing here,” he said.

Two Jews.

[Farfromgeneva]

Victoria Nuland & George Soros need to hurry up with regime change in Belarus.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/28/europe/l ... index.html

Lukashenko offers nuclear weapons to nations willing ‘to join the Union State of Russia and Belarus’

By Mariya Knight, Uliana Pavlova and Helen Regan, CNN, May 28, 2023

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has claimed that nations who are willing “to join the Union State of Russia and Belarus” will be given nuclear weapons, days after confirming the transfer of some tactical nuclear weapons from Moscow to Minsk had begun.

Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, made the comments in an on-camera interview released Sunday on the state-run Russia 1 channel.
During the interview, Lukashenko said, “no one minds Kazakhstan and other countries having the same close relations that we have with the Russian Federation.”
“It’s very simple,” he added. “Join the Union State of Belarus and Russia. That’s all: there will be nuclear weapons for everyone.”

Signed in 1999, the Agreement on Establishment of the Union State of Belarus and Russia Treaty set up a legal basis for a wide-ranging alliance that spanned economic, information, technology, agriculture, and border security among other things between the two countries, according to the Belarus government website.

It was not clear how wide Lukashenko’s invitation to join the Union State extended, and he offered no other specifics.
But his comments on handing out nuclear weapons to like-minded allies are likely to heighten concerns at a time of growing global proliferation and as Moscow threatens the world with its own atomic arsenal as its war against Ukraine falters.

On Thursday the Belarusian autocrat said the transfer of some tactical nuclear weapons from Russia to Belarus had begun, following an agreement signed by Moscow and Minsk.
“It was necessary to prepare storage sites, and so on. We did all this. Therefore, the movement of nuclear weapons began,” Lukashenko said, according to state news agency Belta.
He also promised the safety of those weapons, saying: “This is not even up for discussion. Don’t worry about nuclear weapons. We are responsible for this. These are serious issues. Everything will be alright here.”

Putin has said that Russia would retain control over any tactical nuclear weapons stationed in Belarus and likened the move to Washington’s practice of stationing nuclear weapons in Europe to keep host countries, like Germany, from breaking their commitments as non-nuclear powers.

Belarus has had no nuclear weapons on its territory since the early 1990s. Shortly after gaining independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it agreed to transfer all Soviet-era weapons of mass destruction stationed there to Russia.

Since invading Ukraine more than a year ago, Putin has used escalating rhetoric on a number of occasions, warning of the “increasing” threat of nuclear war and suggesting Moscow may abandon its “no first use” policy.

In March, Putin said Moscow will complete the construction of a special storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus by the beginning of July, and said Russia had already made the transfer to Belarus of an Iskander short-range missile system, which can be fitted with nuclear or conventional warheads.

Tactical nuclear weapons are smaller than strategic nuclear weapons – which can decimate entire cities – and are designed for use in a limited battlefield. However, their explosive yields are still enough to cause major destruction as well as radiation contamination.

Strong condemnations
The United States and the European Union, as well as opposition leaders in Belarus, have denounced the move to deploy Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.

“It’s the latest example of irresponsible behavior that we have seen from Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine over a year ago,” said US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on Thursday.

Miller added that despite the report of the transfer, the US sees “no reason to adjust our strategic nuclear posture” and said there are no “indications that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon.”

The EU called the agreement between Moscow and Minsk “a step which will lead to further extremely dangerous escalation.”

And Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted on Sunday that Lukashenko’s words “directly indicate that the Russian Federation is deliberately ‘killing’ the concept of global nuclear deterrence and ‘burying’ the key Global Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.”

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko attends a news conference with Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi (not pictured) in Tehran, Iran, March 13, 2023. Iran's President Website/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS PICTURE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY
Lukashenko says Putin could deploy more powerful Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus
“This fundamentally undermines the principles of global security,” Podolyak said. “There can only be one solution: a tough stance of nuclear states; relevant UN/IAEA resolutions; extensive sanctions against (Russian state nuclear energy firm) Rosatom; systemic financial sanctions against Belarus and ultimately against Russia.”

Members of the Belarusian opposition also slammed the agreement, with exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya saying in a post on Twitter “we must do everything to prevent Putin’s plan to deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus.”

“It directly violates our constitutional non-nuclear status and would secure Russia’s control over Belarus for years ahead. And it would further threaten the security of Ukraine and all of Europe,” she said.

Analysts say there are still a lot of unknowns with the transfer.

“We don’t know if it’s actually physically started yet, though Lukashenko says it has. We don’t know if any weapons have actually left Russia yet, we don’t know when they are going to be deployed, we don’t know what kind of weapons will be deployed,” national security expert Joe Cirincione told CNN on Friday.

Cirincione, former president of the Ploughshares Fund which is focused on reducing the threat of nuclear weapons, said if it goes ahead it would be “an historic milestone.”

“We can’t remember another incident where, during a crisis, a nuclear armed state has flushed its weapons from garrison and put them into the field, which is effectively what Putin is doing here,” he said.

Two Jews.

As presented by fanLax’s cartman

https://youtu.be/AQYJbTAkBN4

[a fan]

Members of the Belarusian opposition also slammed the agreement, with exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya saying in a post on Twitter “we must do everything to prevent Putin’s plan to deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus.”

“It directly violates our constitutional non-nuclear status and would secure Russia’s control over Belarus for years ahead. And it would further threaten the security of Ukraine and all of Europe,” she said.

Doesn't make any sense to me. Why would he give nukes to a country that could easily turn on Russia, ala Ukraine. Now he's got to blow more money to keep Belarus from turning on Russia. Tactical nukes are the WORST thing he could give them. Because now if Belarus turns its back on Russia.....Russia can't invade.

How is this a smart long term move?

[old salt]

The same arrangement we have with the tac nucs bombs we provide our NATO allies.
We provide the codes for them to use them.

[old salt]

Victoria Nuland & George Soros need to hurry up with regime change in Belarus.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/28/europe/l ... index.html

Two Jews.

As presented by fanLax’s cartman
https://youtu.be/AQYJbTAkBN4/

Their religion is irrelevant.

[old salt]

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog ... nland-bids

16 Feb 2023 - 18:54

Soros says Russian defeat in Ukraine would trigger dissolution of ‘Russian empire’

Billionaire financier George Soros has said that if Russia was defeated in the Ukraine war it would result in the dissolution of what he called the “Russian empire”, something he said would be greeted by former Soviet republics.

“The countries of the former Soviet Union can hardly wait to see the Russians defeated in Ukraine because they want to assert their independence,” Soros told the Munich Security Conference, according a text of his speech released by his office.

“This means that a Ukrainian victory would result in the dissolution of the Russian empire. Russia would no longer pose a threat to Europe and the world,” he said. “That would be a big change for the better.”

https://mronline.org/2021/10/14/u-s-wri ... ge-script/

U.S. writes Belarus into its familiar regime-change script
By Alan MacLeod (Posted Oct 14, 2021)

Quietly, the U.S. national security state is turning up the heat on Belarus, hoping that the ex-Soviet country of 9 million will be the next casualty of its regime-change agenda. This sentiment was made clear in President Joe Biden’s recent speech at the United Nations General Assembly. Biden announced that the U.S. would pursue “relentless diplomacy” finding “new ways of lifting people up around the world, of renewing and defending democracy.” The 46th president was explicit in whom he meant by this: “The democratic world is everywhere. It lives in the anti-corruption activists, the human rights defenders, the journalists, the peace protestors on the frontlines of this struggle in Belarus, Burma, Syria, Cuba [and] Venezuela,” he said, putting Belarus first on the list of states in desperate need of a change in government.

This builds on the back of previous statements the administration has released. In June, a joint announcement by the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom and the European Union essentially pronounced the death penalty on the Lukashenko government, in power since 1994. “We are committed to support the long-suppressed democratic aspirations of the people of Belarus and we stand together to impose costs on the regime for its blatant disregard of international commitments,” they wrote, as they announced new sanctions.

A “modest but significant contribution”
Covertly, Washington is taking far more wide-ranging action. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is spending millions of dollars yearly on Belarus and has 40 active projects inside the state, all with the same goal of overthrowing Alexander Lukashenko and replacing him with a more U.S.-friendly president. Although not a single individual or organization is named, it is clear from the scant public information it reveals that Washington is focusing on three areas: training activists and civil-society organizations in non-violent regime-change tactics; funding anti-government media; and bankrolling election-monitoring groups.

The NED was set up by the Reagan administration as a front group for the CIA, to continue the agency’s work in destabilizing other countries. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA,” Gershman said, explaining its creation. Another NED founder, Allen Weinstein, was perhaps even more blunt: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” he told The Washington Post.

Belarusians are largely ignorant that this is going on beneath the surface. A poll taken by the NED’s sister organization USAID found that around two-thirds of the public were unaware of the actions of any NGOs inside their country, let alone where their funding came from.

The chosen one
The U.S. and Europe have not only decided Lukashenko must go, but have even agreed on his replacement. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a 39-year-old former schoolteacher and wife of anti-government activist Sergei Tikhanovsky, is the D.C. establishment’s clear candidate of choice. Described almost universally in corporate media as a pro-democracy activist, Tsikhanouskaya emerged from obscurity last year after her husband was barred from standing in the 2020 elections. Sergei is currently on trial for his role in organizing the nationwide demonstrations last year, an event the government sees as a coup attempt.

The government reportedly detained tens of thousands of people, and it was this heavy-handed response that added fuel to the flames of protests, turning them into a demonstration against political repression.

If convicted, Tikhanovsky faces up to 15 years in prison. Sviatlana ran in his stead, officially winning 10% of the national vote (although she maintains that she actually won an overwhelming victory and that the contest was rigged). In recent months, she has been doing the rounds in the West, meeting with foreign leaders in an attempt to convince them to support her. In July, she traveled to Washington for a meeting with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who conveyed the U.S.’ “respect for the courage and determination of the opposition” in Belarus.

Later that month, Tsikhanouskaya received what she was looking for: an endorsement from the president of the United States. After an in-depth meeting with Joe Biden, he promoted her as the true leader of her country. “The United States stands with the people of Belarus in their quest for democracy and universal human rights,” he said in a statement. She also received NATO’s blessing, meeting with senior figures from its think tank, the Atlantic Council, on several occasions.

At a recent event with the Council on Foreign Relations, Tsikhanouskaya made it clear that she was dependent on foreign support to continue her campaign. “We don’t have a lot of space inside the country. That’s why we are so [grateful for a large] amount of help from outside,” she said, telling the audience of business figures, state officials and media personalities that she and they “shar[ed] common values.” Perhaps the clearest indication that she had won the favor of the Western establishment were the rumors of a Nobel Peace Prize. At the time of its awarding, she was equal third with the bookmarkers, but ultimately lost out to journalists Dmitry Muratov and Maria Ressa.

Despite the official endorsements, there are strong indications that Tsikhanouskaya enjoys little public support in Belarus and that her position is largely buoyed by foreign backing. A study conducted by Chatham House and the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) found that only 10% of Belarusians believed she would be a good president (as opposed to 25% for Lukashenko). Both Chatham House and RUSI are directly funded by NATO and its member states like the U.S., and both have previously advocated for regime change in Belarus.

More worryingly, Tsikhanouskaya appears to be among the least trusted and most disliked people in the entire country, the poll finding that even among people who supported the 2020 protests her trustworthiness score is negative.

Furthermore, the poll was carried out by an organization that makes blatantly clear throughout the report that it wants Lukashenko overthrown, and was conducted largely online, among tech-savvy, younger Belarusians in large cities–all groups that trend heavily towards being pro-protest and anti-Lukashenko. As such, the survey could barely have been designed any more favorably for Tsikhanouskaya. That even under these circumstances her popularity is so low is telling. Moreover, the polling was carried out before she began touring the West, asking for more crippling economic sanctions on her own country.

Washington’s woman
Why, then, has the West decided to champion her, and not other opposition leaders, many of whom have a far greater support base according to the poll? One explanation is that the Lukashenko administration has already imprisoned them. Viktar Babaryka, for example, was sentenced to 14 years in a penal colony for a host of financial crimes. Amnesty and other Western organizations have described the ruling as “politically motivated.” Other opposition figures, such as Maksim Znak and Maria Kalesnikava have also been jailed.

Another reason could be Tsikhanouskaya’s seeming total willingness to be a representative of the U.S. government in Belarus. Her senior advisor, Franak Viačorka, for example, is a consultant for the U.S. Agency for Global Media; the creative director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, an organization described by The New York Times as a “worldwide propaganda network built by the CIA.” He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council, a NATO-linked organization that boasts no fewer than seven former CIA directors on its board. At an Atlantic Council event in July, Tsikhanouskaya called on the West to do more to overthrow her opponent, saying “I think it’s high time for democratic countries to unite and show their teeth.” According to the NED’s Gershman, the U.S. continues to work “very, very closely” with her.

Tsikhanouskaya’s ascension from obscurity to political stardom mirrors that of Venezuelan politician Juan Guaidó, whom the U.S. contends is the country’s rightful president. According to Cuban intellectual Raul Capote, whom the CIA recruited to become president of the country after what it hoped would be a successful regime-change attempt, the U.S. prefers to work with unknown figures because of their lack of political baggage and Washington’s ability to shape them in a manner it sees fit. Tsikhanouskaya apparently sees herself in the same mold as Guaidó, describing him as “inspiring.” Meanwhile, Venezuelan anti-government demonstrators can be seen flying the flag of the Belarusian opposition at rallies.

While in the United States, Tsikhanouskaya made sure to publicly meet with Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland. To those in the know, this was another clear message. Nuland was the brains behind the U.S.-backed Maidan Insurrection in Ukraine that overthrew the government of Viktor Yanukovych, bringing in a far-right, pro-Western administration. Nuland flew to Kiev to personally participate in the demonstrations herself, even handing out cookies in Independence Square in the city center.

At the Council on Foreign Relations, Tsikhanouskaya said she saw “a lot of parallels” between her situation and the Maidan, adding that “the Belarusian people will fight till our victory.”

[MDlaxfan76]

The same arrangement we have with the tac nucs bombs we provide our NATO allies.
We provide the codes for them to use them.

Which do we provide them to?

Re Nuland and Soros...are they the only prominent people who have supported Ukraine and other former Soviet holdings turning away from authoritarianism and Russian domination towards democracy and the West?

Nope. But they're the ones the hard right wing "Nationalists" chooses to emphasize.
Christian Nationalists propaganda.

[Typical Lax Dad]

The same arrangement we have with the tac nucs bombs we provide our NATO allies.
We provide the codes for them to use them.

Which do we provide them to?

Re Nuland and Soros...are they the only prominent people who have supported Ukraine and other former Soviet holdings turning away from authoritarianism and Russian domination towards democracy and the West?

Nope. But they're the ones the hard right wing chooses to emphasize.

The two Jewish people.

[MDlaxfan76]

The same arrangement we have with the tac nucs bombs we provide our NATO allies.
We provide the codes for them to use them.

Which do we provide them to?

Re Nuland and Soros...are they the only prominent people who have supported Ukraine and other former Soviet holdings turning away from authoritarianism and Russian domination towards democracy and the West?

Nope. But they're the ones the hard right wing chooses to emphasize.

The two Jewish people.

They're the ones the hard right wing "Nationalists" choose to emphasize.
Christian Nationalists propaganda.

[old salt]

Re Nuland and Soros...are they the only prominent people who have supported Ukraine and other former Soviet holdings turning away from authoritarianism and Russian domination towards democracy and the West?

Nope. But they're the ones the hard right wing chooses to emphasize.

The two Jewish people.

They're the ones the hard right wing "Nationalists" choose to emphasize.
Christian Nationalists propaganda.

Other than Biden (w/Blinken) & John McCain, they are the 2 most influential figures in the promotion of regime change & dismemberment of Russia, dating back to Maidan in 2014.

VP Biden (w/ his staff advisor Blinken) was the Obama admin point man on Ukraine & delivered the ultimatum that prompted the elected Ukrainian President to step down in 2014. Senators John McCain & Chris Murphy were on the stage in Maidan, in front of Nuland.

Not all Neo-Con hawks are Jewish. That's just a diversionary smear used to deflect any critique of the policies they advocate.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/neoconser ... nservative

There are plenty of gentiles in positions of power propelling us down this road to confrontation with Russia, with the ultimate goal of weakening Russia via regime change & the further dismemberment of the historic Russian nation. Nuland & Soros are 2 of the most impactful over the long run.

[old salt]

The same arrangement we have with the tac nucs bombs we provide our NATO allies.
We provide the codes for them to use them.

Which do we provide them to?

https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep28847.10

It's a major factor in which model fighter aircraft participating NATO members choose to procure.
Not all options are certified by the US for delivery of the nuclear weapon provided.

Here's a lengthy WP explainer on the B-61 bomb. I''ll post the text, if anyone is interested.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyl ... 61-russia/

[MDlaxfan76]

Re Nuland and Soros...are they the only prominent people who have supported Ukraine and other former Soviet holdings turning away from authoritarianism and Russian domination towards democracy and the West?

Nope. But they're the ones the hard right wing chooses to emphasize.

The two Jewish people.

They're the ones the hard right wing "Nationalists" choose to emphasize.
Christian Nationalists propaganda.

Other than Biden (w/Blinken) & John McCain, they are the 2 most influential figures in the promotion of regime change & dismemberment of Russia, dating back to Maidan in 2014.

VP Biden (w/ his staff advisor Blinken) was the Obama admin point man on Ukraine & delivered the ultimatum that prompted the elected Ukrainian President to step down in 2014. Senators John McCain & Chris Murphy were on the stage in Maidan, in front of Nuland.

Not all Neo-Con hawks are Jewish. That's just a diversionary smear used to deflect any critique of the policies they advocate.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/neoconser ... nservative

There are plenty of gentiles in positions of power propelling us down this road to confrontation with Russia, with the ultimate goal of weakening Russia via regime change & the further dismemberment of the historic Russian nation. Nuland & Soros are 2 of the most impactful over the long run.

Yup, there are indeed plenty of gentiles who have supported democratic movements throwing off the yoke of Soviet and Russian domination.

But right wing Christian Nationalists always mention Soros and Nuland, usually by themselves, and it ain't by accident.

I'm not saying you are anti-Semitic, but pretending to be oblivious (and I have to assume it's pretending at this point in our back and forth) is willfully repeating the anti-Semitic propaganda that is rampant in right wing media and right wing pseudo intellectual circles.

If you're opposed to democracy movements in those areas because of geo-political risks, we can have that conversation, but resorting to trolling anti-Semitic tropes is unhelpful. And I have to assume you know that by now, right?