Dennis Small

From the moment last Friday that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken announced that they had met and agreed that the U.S. would provide a written response to Russia’s urgent security concerns, the British have been working overtime to make sure that nothing of the sort ever happens—or at least that whatever written response Blinken provides will be a further anti-Russian provocation.First, there are the stepped-up direct military deployments: another American planeload of sophisticated weapons for the pro-Nazi Kiev government; the transfer of Ukrainian rocket launchers and other heavy weapons to the conflict zone with Donbas; and the Pentagon confirming that President Biden had instructed them to put 8,500 U.S.-based troops on heightened alert for potential deployment to Europe, based on a briefing on “military options” presented to him by Defense Secretary Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff head Gen. Milley. Those options included sending up to 50,000 U.S. troops to Eastern Europe—steps which the Russians will read as a direct military threat. Then there are the British psy-ops: British intelligence reached a fact-less finding that Russia intended to topple the Kiev government and put in their own puppet (denied by the Russian government); an anonymous diplomat in Beijing reported that Chinese President Xi Jinping had asked Putin to hold off on invading Ukraine until after the Winter Olympics (denied by the Chinese and Russian governments); and yet another round of anti-Russian bravado by Blinken (there will be “massive consequences” for Russia if a “single additional Russian force” enters Ukraine) and by Karen Pierce, the British ambassador to the United States (“you’ll always find the U.K. at the forward end of the spectrum” in going after Russia). “What is clear,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche reported today, “is that we are in an extremely dangerous situation and, given the number of lunatics in leading positions and also the absolute certainty of miscalculation based on wrong epistemological approaches, I think the only conclusion we can have out of this present situation is that we have to go into an all-out anti-war mobilization, waking up especially the American public, because that is the main force which is uninformed about what the danger of the situation is.” Russia expects an answer this week, she continued, and that answer cannot fail to address their existential security concerns by putting in writing guarantees that NATO will cease its eastward expansion up to Russia’s borders. But at this point, everything indicates that the U.S. will do nothing of the kind. If that is the case, Zepp-LaRouche warned, then we are in a showdown for a countdown to Russia’s activation of “military technical measures” of their own—which could include the deployment of hypersonic Zircon missiles on submarines within five-minutes flight time of both American coasts. For an anti-war mobilization to be successful, however, it must not simply issue pronouncements against war, but it must address two key policy points: 1) identify who is behind the war drive, and why (the collapsing trans-Atlantic financial empire); and 2) present a program to build a durable peace—based on the policies of global economic reconstruction encapsulated in LaRouche’s Four Laws. As then-presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche summarized the matter nearly 40 years ago, in the opening sentence of a March 30, 1984 “Draft Memorandum of Agreement between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.”: “Article 1: General conditions for peace. The political foundation for durable peace must be: a) The unconditional sovereignty of each and all nation-states, and b) Cooperation among sovereign nation-states to the effect of promoting unlimited opportunities to participate in the benefits of technological progress, to the mutual benefit of each and all.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken began three days of critical meetings in Europe on Wednesday, Jan. 19 to discuss the Ukraine crisis and Russia’s adamant insistence that, if security talks with the U.S. are to continue, Russia must receive written responses to each of the points raised in the two draft treaty proposals they presented to the world on Dec. 17. Those proposed treaties, one with the United States and the other with NATO, state that Russia’s national security is gravely endangered by the threatened deployment of NATO advanced weapon systems on their very border, and by the proposed admission of Ukraine to the NATO alliance; and that therefore Russia must be given written guarantees that neither will occur—or else they will have to take “retaliatory military-technical measures” of their own.On Wednesday, Blinken travelled to Kiev, Ukraine to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. On Thursday, Jan. 20, he will go to Berlin to caucus with the foreign ministers of Germany, France and war-drive ring-leader United Kingdom. And on Friday, Jan. 21 he will go to Geneva to sit down with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Blinken’s trip is not just another round of diplomacy: war or peace between the U.S. and Russia hangs in the balance. Putin has warned repeatedly that Russia is being driven to adopt “appropriate retaliatory military-technical measures” of its own, which Gilbert Doctorow, a Brussels-based political analyst, believes would include deploying nuclear-armed SS-26 Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles to Belarus and Kaliningrad to threaten NATO’s frontline states and eastern Germany, as well as possibly placing nuclear-armed Zircon sea-launched hypersonic cruise missiles off the coast of Washington, D.C., which, Doctorow further points out, “Russia has previously stated could be utilized to destroy the U.S. capital before the President could escape on Air Force One.” In his talks with Zelenskyy, Blinken set the tone for his Jan. 21 talk with Lavrov by yet again aggressively blaming Russia alone for the crisis, and demanding that they “de-escalate” by stopping the deployment of troops on their own territory, near the Ukraine border, or be prepared to be hit with scorched-earth economic warfare by the West. Lavrov, for his part, restated the Russian position after talks on Jan. 18 with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock: “We are now awaiting answers to these proposals (the two draft treaties), as promised, in order to continue the talks.” “The war danger is greater than ever, and we are on the verge of World War III,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche warned today. “We are now down to the wire and things will have to break one way or the other in the days ahead.” Although there is a growing chorus of voices calling for sanity in the U.S. and Europe, the control of U.S. policy by the British and their American war party confederates has not been broken. Furthermore, Zepp-LaRouche stated, the descent into war is being driven by the systemic breakdown of the trans-Atlantic financial system, which is now going out of control, as Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly explained. But there is a second dynamic underway in the world, which is the emerging realignment of nations of all continents around China and Russia, and the Belt and Road Initiative as an alternative to the policy of Malthusian depopulation being promoted by the dying trans-Atlantic system. One indication of this is the visit of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi to Moscow, where a 20-year package of development deals is under discussion. Another is the upcoming visit to Moscow and then Beijing by Argentine President Alberto Fernàndez, where he plans to sign a memorandum of understanding on the Belt and Road Initiative. If the United States remains hostile to this policy alternative, and continues to defend the City of London and Wall Street’s bankrupt system, then the world will in all likelihood careen toward thermonuclear war. If the U.S. joins with the Belt and Road, as Lyndon LaRouche advocated from the outset, then the prospects for peace and development are excellent. We join with Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s call to make 2022 the Year of Lyndon LaRouche, and of the adoption of his policies.

Between Monday and Wednesday of this week, the world has moved dramatically closer to the brink of thermonuclear war.The United States and NATO dug in their heels in their respective Jan. 10 and Jan. 12 high-level security talks with Russia, and proclaimed their intent to continue expanding NATO eastward up to Russia’s very border, and to deploy threatening nuclear attack systems also on that border, five minutes flight-time from Moscow. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko emerged from today’s Russia-NATO Council meeting to report that not only was there no unifying positive agenda between Russia and NATO, but that the U.S. and NATO have reverted to the full Cold War strategy of “containment” towards Russia, including “full spectrum dominance.” Russia is being left with no option but to respond in kind to the policy of containment, deterrence and intimidation, he stated. The Monday U.S.-Russia discussions ended on a similar note. These results are not surprising, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche commented today. Other than any possible back-channel or private communications between Presidents Biden and Putin that may be underway and which offer a more rational approach, there could well be a quick counter-action on the part of Russia. As Putin and many top Russian leaders have warned repeatedly over recent weeks, Russia cannot back down to the threats being posed to its very sovereignty and existence. Russia is faced with a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis, only this time with a far shorter hair-trigger to war. Recall the words of JFK sixty years ago: “Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island (Cuba).” To do this, he reminded the world, “in an area well-known to have a special and historical relationship to the U.S., is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country.” Zepp-LaRouche warned that, if the bellicose statements and confrontation continue, then the world is most likely in for a sudden showdown—which could escalate to the thermonuclear threshold nearly instantly. A broad mobilization of forces worldwide is urgently required to stop this descent into hell, and quickly develop new options that will guarantee security and wellbeing for all parties. • A new, global security architecture is needed to immediately replace the NATO organization and policy, which has brought the world to the brink of war. The driving force that is impelling the world towards thermonuclear war is the breakdown crisis of the entire trans-Atlantic financial system. For their system to survive, the predatory speculators of the City of London and Wall Street must impose fascist levels of economic looting, and bring Russia and China to heel to ensure that there is no real opposition to that policy. • The trans-Atlantic system must be put through bankruptcy reorganization along the lines specified by Lyndon LaRouche in his 2014 Four Laws. Put that system out of its misery, and you remove the danger of World War III. Throughout his life, Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly explained this intimate connection between the collapsing financial system and the drive to war. One of his clearest expositions was in a Dec. 23, 2011 statement, “To Stop Thermonuclear War, Bring on the World Economic Recovery,” which we have previously quoted in this space, and excerpts of which are the editorial appearing in the January 7, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. As that editorial notes, LaRouche’s remarks from 2011 “confirm the prescience of this genius, and demonstrates why Helga Zepp-LaRouche has called for the year 2022—the 100th anniversary of his birth—to be known as ‘The Year of Lyndon LaRouche.’” LaRouche warned in his 2011 presentation: "We are now on the verge of what must be called World War III: This will be thermonuclear World War III—not pre-nuclear war, not nuclear war, but thermonuclear war. The targets, principally, are Russia and China. These are the two principal targets…. “The issue is as follows: The present world system, the economic system, is in the process of disintegrating. Exactly how that will occur is uncertain, but it is happening. The intention is to eliminate two nations—Russia and China—and this means nuclear weapons; it means thermonuclear weapons. That part is engaged…. “Now, at this point, the United States, nations of Europe, Russia, China, and other countries, are poised for exactly this war. “The background of the war is the fact that the entire world is going bankrupt, especially the trans-Atlantic region, especially Europe, and also the United States, and the nations of South America and elsewhere, as well… “The bankruptcy from the United States’ standpoint, was set into motion back in 2007, when the beginning of the bailout process was set into motion. Since that time, the entirety of the trans-Atlantic region, particularly the United States and Europe, have been trapped into a bailout crisis, a hyperinflationary bailout crisis. At this point, the debt which has been accumulated since 2007, under this program, is such that every part of Europe at this time, under the present rules and the present arrangements, is hopelessly bankrupt! They could never recover as living nations, under the present degree of indebtedness they have. The same thing is true of the United States; Europe is a little more acute. That’s what’s happened…. The author of this thing is the British…. “Now, what we have to do—there are solutions for this bankruptcy. First of all, we have to put the world through bankruptcy—that is, a legitimate bankruptcy operation. We can do that, by, first of all, in the United States, for example—and other nations can copy this measure in cooperation with the United States—we go with a Glass-Steagall law, a U.S. Glass-Steagall law. And there are nations of Europe who are thinking of adopting the same Glass-Steagall law. “Under a Glass-Steagall law, the greater part of the debt of European nations, and the United States and others, will be wiped out, in effect, because under Glass-Steagall, the gambling debts, which are the major part of the indebtedness of the United States, will be simply put into a special category where somebody’s going to try to figure out how to get these debts paid—and they will never be paid! They will simply be wiped off the books; there’s no other solution. “Wiping that debt off the books, canceling the bailout debt, will mean that the United States, and Europe if they join, will be in a position to reorganize their finances, to create a credit system, and actually going into a new kind of Hamiltonian kind of credit system, a banking system which will enable the United States, and also Europe and other nations if they join, to organize a financial recovery. “In other words, what would happen, immediately: Remember, most of this bailout debt, the Wall Street debt, the London debt, the other bailout debt, is absolutely worthless! It can never be repaid! It never could be repaid: And the only solution, of course, for this thing, was to have this war. And if the British Empire came out as the victor in such a war, with the support of the United States, then they would cancel their debts, and they would go about their business. But, the population of the world would be reduced, greatly, through hunger, starvation, and so forth, which is about to occur anyway.”

With but a few days to go before the scheduled Jan. 10 talks between high level Russian and American diplomats on Russia’s demand for “immediate” written security guarantees from the U.S. and NATO, powerful circles in London and Washington who oppose moving back from the brink of thermonuclear war, have launched yet another provocation against Russia: the violent destabilization of Kazakhstan. Tony Blair, George Soros, and endless numbers of international NGOs are all over the operation.A “color revolution” in Kazakhstan has clear security implications for Russia. Kazakhstan has the longest border with Russia. It is the location of Russia’s principal space launch facility, the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a city that Russia today rents from Kazakhstan. It would appear that powerful circles in London and Washington are intent on provoking the Russian bear to respond with repressive violence in Kazakhstan, or to do the same in Eastern Ukraine, to then turn around and use this as a pre-packaged excuse to launch withering economic warfare against Russia. In a word, if they can get Russia to go for the “bear trap,” they will then give Russia the “Afghanistan treatment”—economic sanctions and warfare so severe as to starve the country into submission… or try to. In that sense, the impending Afghan genocide of more than 20 million people is also a precursor to World War III. Helga Zepp-LaRouche drew out the strategic significance of these developments, in her weekly webcast: “If you would have asked me a week ago, do you expect some effort to disturb the diplomatic offensive coming mainly from Russia and China to defuse what was building up, clearly, as a double ‘Cuban crisis’ with the development around Ukraine and Taiwan, I would have said, one should absolutely expect a provocation to disrupt these meetings, and here we are… “Now, let me first state the positive aspect: There was a certain breakthrough just a few days ago, on Monday, that for the first time the P5 UN nations, that is, the permanent five nuclear weapons states agreed on reaffirming the very important statement which was negotiated between Gorbachev and President Reagan in Reykjavik in October 1986, that a nuclear war can never be won and therefore must never be fought.” That is positive, Zepp-LaRouche said, but now "the words must be followed by deeds. And that statement as such, while it is extremely important, does not yet defuse the crisis around Ukraine, nor the crisis around Taiwan, but, as I said, it’s a very important first step…. “But we need a hundred percent turnaround, because this confrontation against Russia and China is suicidal…I think we need a complete reversal in priorities, and the population has to wake up, that their indifference, your indifference—some of you—against Afghanistan is what allows these rotten policies to go on in our own countries. And we have to have a mobilization for a new paradigm, both within our own countries and also in relations among nations, because these are expressions of the same problem in the system.”

Every year for the last five years, the Schiller Institute has led a solemn memorial ceremony to mark the tragic death on Dec. 25, 2016, of Russia’s fabled Alexandrov Ensemble, along with humanitarian workers and others, in a plane crash near Sochi, Russia. Over the years, the ceremony has been held at the Tear of Grief monument in Bayonne, N.J.—a monument gifted to the people of the United States by the government of Russia in honor of the fallen victims of 9/11—and each time it has been moderated by a representative of the City of Bayonne Fire Department, and it has heard from an official Russian representative at the United Nations. Every year, the enduring friendship of the Russian and American people has been its message and song.This year was no different, in those regards. And yet the ceremony held today carried with it a special urgency for action, given the extraordinary danger of thermonuclear war now facing the planet in the form of a kind of “reverse Cuban Missile Crisis” between the United States and Russia, as Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche put it in her remarks read to the event. Can such a threat be defused, and its causes degraded? Perhaps. Yesterday the State Department announced that the dates have now been set for three meetings to address the Russian government’s demand for written security guarantees to stop the relentless eastward drive of NATO up to its very borders, and the positioning of defensive and offensive strategic weapons in those countries. High-level Russian officials will meet with their U.S. counterparts on Jan. 10—preceded by another direct conversation between Presidents Biden and Putin on Dec. 30. On Jan. 12 there will then be a Russia-NATO meeting to also address these security matters. And on Jan. 13, Russia will meet with the OSCE. Substantive progress must come from these talks, including the signing of the two draft treaties that Russia has already proposed to the United States and NATO. Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s remarks read to today’s Alexandrov Ensemble memorial, sends the requisite message: “In the name of the Schiller Institute, I send you my thoughts on the anniversary of the tragic loss of the members of the Alexandrov Ensemble and a number of other Russians on their way to Syria five years ago. In the artistic work of that choir was and is expressed that quality which makes us human. “Unfortunately, our species finds itself right now in an incredible danger, in which the world is faced with a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis, to which the President of your country has reacted in an unmistakable fashion: He insists, rightfully, that the promises given to Russia around the time of the German Unification, that NATO would not move eastward, closer to the borders of Russia, and which were broken repeatedly, now belatedly be restated in a written and legally binding form—at least as it concerns Ukraine and Georgia. Indeed the history of the last 32 years is a history of an unbelievable series of lies and deceits to create a narrative to justify the vilification of Russia—to what end? “The Schiller Institute fully endorses the demand by Russia that these treaties must be signed, and that the world must be pulled back from the brink of the abyss. We must shift all efforts to solve the great catastrophes of a pandemic out of control; a famine of biblical dimensions; the greatest humanitarian crisis on the planet, in Afghanistan; and to eradicate poverty for billions of people. We must reach a new paradigm of our civilization, or we may not exist. “Let us revive the spirit of the cultural contribution of the Alexandrov Ensemble to mobilize the strength in ourselves to create a more human civilization!” Watch the video of the event here.

Vladimir Putin’s statement during his marathon press conference of Dec. 23 that “the first thing to do here is to unfreeze Afghanistan’s assets, the money it had in foreign, primarily American, banks, in order to provide the required assistance to the Afghan people. Otherwise, the country could plunge into famine; there will be grave consequences that will affect the neighboring states as well,” should be read as not necessarily identical to, but congruent with, Russia’s proposals concerning stopping the extension of NATO farther eastward. Putin’s statements represent a summary rejection of the Malthusian military outlook characteristic of both trans-Atlantic policies, each of which is based on population reduction in a different way. That same outlook was fought at the COP 26 Halloween Summit, and must now be fought in the worldwide war against pandemics. The Schiller Institute proposal, the pro-life, pro-development “Operation Ibn Sina,” to provide food, water, and medical treatment and supplies, now, is the proper springboard for immediate action and follow-up in Afghanistan, once funds were indeed released.This is the season of Hope. We don’t know, but have been told, and pass on for corroboration to any who can help verify the rumor, that signs have begun to appear in offices in and around Washington, including at the State Department, Pentagon, the House of Representatives and Senate, among other locations—even the CIA and FBI. They read, “WARNING: Marijuana and other drugs can severely compromise your ability to operate government machinery.” Perhaps with the assistance of the newly-launched James Webb telescope, signs of intelligent life can once again be spotted somewhere near the Washington Beltway. The return to sanity, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, in deliberative exchanges with nations such as China and Russia, might be the greatest present that the world could expect to receive from the United States at the beginning of the New Year. The appearance yesterday in the New York Post of an article entitled “Top Russian official likens Ukraine standoff to Cuban Missile Crisis” has broken the near-blackout in American media on the reality of the ongoing strategic confrontation between Russia and China on the one hand, and the United States on the other, which is most advanced at the moment in Ukraine. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, no stranger to the United States (he served in the Russian consulate to Washington from 2002-2006 and is fluent in English), “has compared Moscow’s standoff with the West over a possible invasion of Ukraine to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the tense 1962 confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union that led the world to the brink of nuclear war.” More of Ryabkov’s remarks, as well as those of Sergei Lavrov and President Putin appear below. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, a co-founder of the Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS,) has asked why the United States agreed so quickly, as reported by Ryabkov yesterday, to meet with Russia on Monday, January 10, the first day after the end of Russia’s Christmas season. McGovern called attention to an address given to the Russian military by Putin two weeks after his December 7 phone discussion with Biden, in which Putin reported: “Incidentally, during our conversation he [Biden] actually proposed appointing senior officials to oversee [Russian concerns over U.S. missile deployments in Romania, Poland, and possibly Ukraine]…. It was in response to his proposal that we drafted our proposals on precluding the further eastward expansion of NATO and the deployment of offensive strike systems in the countries bordering on Russia." The Russian proposal was drafted as a response to an initiative proposed by the United States President. It is no”ultimatum." The chronology is significant. The Washington Post printed the story, “Russia planning massive military offensive against Ukraine involving 175,000 troops, U.S. intelligence warns” on Dec. 3, with the New York Times following suit on Dec. 5. Russia’s head of foreign intelligence, Sergei Naryshkin, had already responded a week earlier, on Sat., Nov. 27, to assertions made the day before by Karen Donfried, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, about a planned attack on Ukraine. At that time, according to Reuters, “U.S. President Joe Biden said he was concerned about the situation in Ukraine…and added that he will ‘in all probability’ speak with his Ukrainian and Russian counterparts Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Vladimir Putin.” The Putin-Biden conversation then occurred on Dec. 7, followed by the release of the Russian proposal, and its being reported in the New York Times on Dec. 17: “Russia Lays Out Demands for a Sweeping New Security Deal With NATO.” The Post further reported, “Asked if he was exaggerating by comparing the Ukraine situation to the stalemate over the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba, Sergei Ryabkov said, ‘No, not too much,’ Russian media reported Monday…. ‘We are not bluffing. These are our real proposals. The West’s awareness of this needs to be facilitated and we are going to make every effort to achieve it,’ Ryabkov, who is known for his over-the-top rhetoric, said in an interview with a Russian foreign affairs magazine….” LaRouche Organization forces know that since the 1970s, on several occasions, the impending danger of thermonuclear war precipitated dialogues involving "“East” and “West” in which this organization played a decisive, if marginal role. Lyndon LaRouche’s personal backchannel negotiations with the then-Soviet Union over the course of the Fall of 1981 through early 1983 resulted in the “miracle” of the Strategic Defense initiative (SDI) policy being adopted by President Ronald Reagan over the fierce opposition of the globalist forces against which FDR, LaRouche, and in this instance Reagan had campaigned for decades. Now, in the face of one of the greatest threats in humanity’s history—the inaction in response to the emergence of increasingly treatment-resistant bacteria and viruses worldwide, something to which LaRouche called attention as a threat five decades ago—Helga Zepp-LaRouche proposed a World Health Platform, as an international strategic intervention, to be organized by a “Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites.” She also indicated how a tactical-strategic instance of the application of this “Coincidence of Opposites” principle, as in Afghanistan’s “Operation Ibn Sina,” would provide the means to supersede war, famine, and disease. At the ongoing 30th anniversary meeting of the heads of state of the nine nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS,) Putin, addressing the coronavirus pandemic as the number one issue on the agenda, introduced Russia’s Chief Sanitary Physician, Anna Popova, to brief people on the current worldwide situation. “Considering the proximity of our states, the commonality of epidemic threats and the level of integration, one of our key tasks is to build a unified system for epidemic response and relief,” she said. Putin himself spoke about “joint scientific activities, the development of medications and preventive drugs, as well as exchanges of test kits and means of overcoming this disease.” Lyndon LaRouche’s Fall, 2001, “National Defense Against Germ Warfare,” in the section subtitled “National Defense As Sanitation,” identified something with which Putin is familiar, and that any sane head of state should quickly learn: "The most important principles of national defense against bacteriological and related forms of warfare, were consolidated as knowledge in the experience of World War II and the war in Korea. Those lessons were featured in the adoption and implementation of the Hill-Burton legislation adopted shortly after the close of World War II…. “We must situate the role of the medical profession, both in care for the sick and in other ways, as an essential, subsumed feature of public sanitation….” Once again, by returning to the outlook of the United States of Franklin Roosevelt, the true self-interest of a United States facing tens, if not hundreds of millions of cases of infectious disease in the short term, can be re-established by organizing the worldwide symposium proposed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche and Dr. Jocelyn Elders, and extending that to the world as a whole as rapidly as possible. That way lies hope, and humanity’s immediate way forward.

The following is the introductory section of a Schiller Institute memorandum issued Dec. 24, “Are We Sleepwalking Into Thermonuclear World War III,” which is available in full on the Schiller Institute website.You are being lied to. Russia is not planning to invade Ukraine. Putin is not a “bad actor” out to recreate the Soviet Empire. Ukraine is not a fledgling democracy just minding its own business. As a summary review of the documented record shows, Ukraine is being used by geopolitical forces in the West that answer to the bankrupt speculative financial system, as the flashpoint to trigger a strategic showdown with Russia, a showdown which is already more dangerous than the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and which could easily end up in a thermonuclear war that no one will win, and none would survive.Consider the facts as we present them in the abbreviated timeline below. Russia, like China, has been increasingly subjected to the threat of being destroyed by two distinct kinds of “nuclear war” by the bellicose and bankrupt U.K.-U.S. financial Establishment: 1) “first-use nuclear action,” as stated most explicitly by the demented Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS); and 2) the “nuclear option” in financial warfare, measures so extreme that they would be tantamount to laying financial siege to Russia to try to starve the nation into submission, as is being done against Afghanistan. Russia has now announced, for the whole world to hear, that its red line is about to be crossed, after which Russia will be forced to respond with “retaliatory military-technical measures.” That red line, it has made clear, is the further advance of U.S. and NATO military forces up to the very border with Russia, including the positioning of defensive and offensive nuclear-capable missile systems a scarce 5-minutes flight time from Moscow. Russia has presented two draft international treaties—one with the United States, the other with NATO—which would provide legal guarantees that NATO’s eastward march will stop, that Ukraine and Georgia in particular would not be invited to join NATO, and that advanced weapons systems will not be placed at Russia’s doorstep. These are neither more nor less than the verbal guarantees given to the Soviet Union in 1990 by the duplicitous Bush and Thatcher governments, guarantees that have been systematically violated ever since. They are neither more nor less than what President John F. Kennedy demanded of Khrushchev during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which was successfully defused by the deft back-channel negotiations of JFK’s personal envoy, his brother Bobby Kennedy, out of sight of the pro-war military-industrial complex. It is urgently necessary that the United States and NATO promptly sign those proposed treaties with Russia—and step back from the edge of thermonuclear extinction. What we chronicle below has been happening, step by step, while most people around the world were asleep at the switch. It is time to wake up, before we sleepwalk into thermonuclear World War III. The Military Component The past 30 years of strategic relations between the U.S. and NATO on the one side and Russia on the other is littered with broken promises, beginning immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989. Already in February of 1990, then-Secretary of State James Baker was in Moscow promising Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze that in the wake of German reunification, which was to come about later that year, that if U.S. troops remained in Germany, there would be no expansion of NATO “one inch to the east.” But it wouldn’t take long before the Department of Defense would be plotting exactly that, with the process getting fully underway during the administration of President Bill Clinton. The first round of post-German unification expansion of NATO came in 1999 with the admission of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, followed in 2004 by all three Baltic states, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Four more Balkan countries joined in the years following, bringing NATO’s membership up to 30 countries. In the middle of that process, during the George W. Bush Administration, the U.S. also began to dismantle the system of strategic arms control assembled during the Cold War, beginning with the U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 ABM Treaty. The Trump Administration accelerated the process by withdrawing the U.S. from the INF Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty, leaving only the New START treaty, which was extended by President Joe Biden shortly after he took office, as the only nuclear arms control treaty remaining between the U.S. and Russia. The turning point in the current war danger came in 2014. The ongoing efforts to pull Ukraine into the EU common market through the Ukrainian-European Association Agreement, were rejected as untenable by Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych government in late 2013, when it became clear that it would de facto associate Ukraine with NATO and grant European goods unlimited access to the Russian market. Yanukovych’s turn against the EU led to the “Euromaidan” protests by proponents of aligning Ukraine with the European Union, which in January 2014 escalated into deadly clashes as these demonstrations were taken over by pro-Nazi elements, including those associated with the figure of Stepan Bandera, the notorious Ukrainian Nazi who worked closely with Hitler during World War II. In February, the violence escalated, and Yanukovych was driven from office, and the new government began to adopt strong measures against the Russian-speaking minority in Ukraine, especially in Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine. All of this was done with full backing from London and Washington, with U.S. State Department official Victoria Nuland playing a prominent role. EIR published a detailed fact sheet and several in depth reports in its February 7, 2014, issue. The fact sheet is available at this link. On March 16, 2014, a referendum was held in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the local government of Sevastopol, asking the populations whether they wanted to join the Russian Federation or retain Crimea’s status as a part of Ukraine. In Crimea, 97% voted for integration into the Russian Federation with an 83% voter turnout; in Sevastopol there was also a 97% vote for reintegration into the Russian Federation with an 89% voter turnout. There was no “Russian military invasion of Ukraine,” nor forcible changing of any borders. All throughout this time period, Moscow protested NATO’s eastward march, but to no avail. “Despite our numerous protests and pleas, the American machine has been set into motion, the conveyor belt is moving forward,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his dramatic March 1, 2018 Address to the Federal Assembly, in which he publicly announced the new generation of strategic weapons that Russia had under development, at least two of which, the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle for ICBMs and the Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, have since been introduced into service.

The Russian government is shouting from every rooftop that their strategic red lines are about to be crossed, and that they will respond unless the U.S. and NATO start negotiating seriously. Yesterday’s expanded meeting of the Defense Ministry Board served as the forum for extensive comments about this by both President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Putin also spoke by phone on Dec. 21 with India’s Narendra Modi, Germany’s Olaf Scholz, and France’s Emmanuel Macron, and hammered on the same point with each of them. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also had blunt comments on the matter.These developments are being widely covered by live Russian TV broadcasts, while they are by and large blacked out in the West, whose population continues to live in the Valley of the Clueless as the world careens towards another Cuban Missile Crisis. TASS reported that, after listening to Shoigu’s report to the Defense Ministry Board, Putin stated: “They [the U.S.] simply do what they want [in other parts of the world]. But what they are doing on the territory of Ukraine now, or trying to do and going to do — this is not thousands of kilometers away from our national border. This is at the doorstep of our home. They must understand that we simply have nowhere to retreat further.” Putin went on: “The United States does not possess hypersonic weapons yet, but we know when they will have them…. They will put hypersonic weapons in Ukraine, and then, under their cover—that does not mean that they will start using them tomorrow, because we already have Zircon [hypersonic missiles] and they do not—they will arm and push extremists from the neighboring state against Russia, including into certain regions of the Russian Federation, for example, Crimea, when they think circumstances are favorable…. Do they think we don’t see these threats? Or do they think that we are so weak-willed to simply look blankly at the threats posed to Russia? That is the problem: we simply have nowhere to move further, that’s the question,” Putin said. Sputnik further quoted Putin: “As I have already noted, in the event of the continuation of the obviously aggressive line of our Western colleagues, we will take adequate retaliatory military-technical measures, and react toughly to unfriendly steps. And, I want to emphasize, we have every right to do so, we have every right to take actions designed to ensure the security and sovereignty of Russia…. We are extremely concerned about the deployment of elements of the U.S. global missile defense system near Russia.” Putin then carefully explained: "We already see that some of our detractors are interpreting them [Russia’s draft treaty documents] as Russia’s ultimatum. Is it an ultimatum or not? Of course not…. Armed conflicts and bloodshed are absolutely not our choice. We do not want to see events go that way. We want to use political and diplomatic means to resolve problems but we want to at least have clearly formulated legal guarantees. This is what our proposals are all about. We set them down on paper and sent them to Brussels and Washington, and we hope to receive a clear and comprehensive response to these proposals. “There are certain signals that our partners appear to be willing to work on that. However, there is also a danger that they will attempt to drown our proposals in words, or in a swamp, in order to take advantage of this pause and do whatever they want to do.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping held what amounted to an emergency summit meeting today by video conference. Announced only two days ago, the summit directly addressed two distinct kinds of “nuclear war” being threatened against the two countries by the bellicose and bankrupt U.K.-U.S. financial Establishment: The Dec. 7 call by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) to consider “first-use nuclear action” military strikes against Russia, using the Ukraine crisis as justification. Wicker is the second ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Despite the storm of protests from the left and the right that his remarks unleashed, the Senator has yet to retract his demented provocation. Moreover, the NATO drive eastward, along with the arming of Ukraine and other nations on Russia’s very border, is continuing relentlessly—a drive which Russia continues to warn is crossing a red-line and will lead to a Russian response. The repeated call to carry out the “nuclear option” in financial warfare against Russia—expelling them from the SWIFT global financial payments system. This would be tantamount to laying financial siege to Russia, to try to starve them into submission, as is being done against Afghanistan. This “nuclear option” was called for just last week by U.S. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the architect of the 2014 Nazi coup d’état in Ukraine, and it was publicly threatened by Secretary of State Tony Blinken right after the Dec. 7 summit talks between Biden and Putin. Similar threats were voiced by President Biden himself immediately before his June 2021 meeting with Putin. What did Putin and Xi discuss today when the cameras for the press were turned off? They clearly reviewed the danger of war, and their commitment to help strengthen each other’s security in the face of threats surrounding both Ukraine and Taiwan. Otherwise, the public account provided by Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov provides further insight: “Particular attention was paid by the two leaders to the need to intensify efforts to form an independent financial infrastructure to service trade operations between Russia and China,” Ushakov reported. “We mean creating an infrastructure that cannot be influenced by third countries.” Does this mean that Russia and China are about to announce that they are breaking with the dollar system, and decoupling their economies from the West? Probably not. Does it mean that they have put in place defensive measures to deal with a financial “nuclear option” launched against them? Probably so. Helga Zepp-LaRouche commented today that if Russia and China are driven to adopt full-scale countermeasures against the SWIFT system, this could well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back of the entire bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system. Fortunately, the potential of China’s Belt and Road Initiative is available to take its place, and to replace today’s Malthusian policy of deindustrialization and depopulation with a new system focused on high-technology physical economic growth. Take a step back and consider Putin’s recent diplomacy—the same Putin whom Lyndon LaRouche frequently described as a “strategic genius” who should not be underestimated. Putin made sure to flank his critical Dec. 7 summit with President Biden: before, with a Dec. 6 summit meeting in New Delhi with India’s Prime Minister Modi; and after, with today’s emergency summit with President Xi. Another topic raised between Putin and Xi, according to Ushakov, was the intention of holding a three-way summit of Russia-India-China in the immediate future. And the United States? President Biden, along with circles that might be described as “realists” in Washington, seems inclined to seek a negotiated solution to the crisis surrounding Russia and Ukraine. But his policy palace guard—Blinken, Sullivan, Nuland et al.—is not, and for now they are dominant in Washington. Nor are the owners of the Western speculative financial system in a mood to negotiate—they can’t. Their system is in a breakdown collapse, and their only hope is to force through a transition to a fascist, Malthusian order. America, to survive and prosper, will have to adopt the pathway long-recommended by Lyndon LaRouche, of establishing a four-power alliance with the power to usher in a New Paradigm of global development—an alliance among the U.S., Russia, China and India, acting on behalf of all humanity.

Ten years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 20, 2011 murder of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, Lyndon LaRouche wrote an article on Oct. 28, 2011 titled: “Threat of World War III: Qaddafi’s Death” In it. LaRouche stated:“In the opinion of certain relevant, higher placed circles in the trans-Atlantic region, the extraordinary mass-execution of the former Libyan principal Muammar al-Qaddafi and his companions, in their attempted flight from Libya, signals a potential for an early outbreak of more general warfare within Europe, the Mediterranean region, and beyond: potentially a new general state of warfare throughout much of this planet. This were probably the included outcome, unless a radical correction in trans-Atlantic financial and related policies were made more or less immediately. The object is to prevent that general warfare from occurring…. “The manner in which British-directed interests, acting in concert with the British puppet known as U.S. President Barack Obama, have created and manipulated the recent warfare within Libya, has now created a serious, more or less immediate threat-potential of a ‘Third World War.’ This is a threat potential which is coincident with the immediately threatened, general breakdown-crisis of the already hyper-bankrupt, trans-Atlantic monetarist system…. It is the accumulated potential triggered by the Libya affair, which has now cocked the potential for a sudden eruption of a pattern of active general warfare. “Long nurtured potentials for the greatest of wars, explode into great wars which have been prepared, in fact, over long periods when the victims were sleeping.” Three months later, in a Jan. 18, 2012 webcast, LaRouche elaborated on the British Establishment’s intention of launching war against Russia and China. “Now, the purpose of doing this was not to conduct a war against Syria and Iran—that was not the purpose. That was the sideshow. What you had, if you looked at the map, and looked at the Eastern Mediterranean and the bay around Iran, you saw the greatest concentration of thermonuclear-warfare capabilities on this planet, represented by the forces of the United States, Britain, and other powers. Why would they have to have the thermonuclear capabilities of major powers and others combined, against two small nations—a relatively very small nation, Syria, and a medium-size small nation, shall we say, Iran: Why? “Because their target wasn’t Syria, their target wasn’t Iran. Their target was—as we know now, from the diplomatic scandals that have broken out in Washington and Europe—the target was Russia and China. What does that mean? Why should Britain and the United States, and other nations, wish to launch thermonuclear war, against two great thermonuclear powers, Russia and China? And you have a nuclear power, Pakistan; and India’s also a thermonuclear power…. “So therefore, what’s the point? The British now say, what’s the purpose of this? They told you: The purpose is, as the Queen of England and others have insisted, their intention is to reduce the population of the planet, from 7 billion people to 1 or less! Their argument is the Green policy! And therefore, if you want to have a Green policy, and what that connotes, you can not tolerate Russia’s existence; you can not tolerate 1.4 billion people in China; you can not tolerate 1.1 billion people in India, and other nations. Therefore, this is a British operation, run under the Green policy of Her Majesty the Queen and her cohorts to change the character of the planet, in this way. In other words, these guys make Hitler look like a piker!”