Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov speaks to UN Security Council, July 16, 2024

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG7b0Kq85Zw — with UN-dubbed English and English subtitles

From the Ministry of Foreign MInistry of the Russian Federation

Statement by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during the UN Security Council meeting on multilateral cooperation in the interest of a more just, democratic and sustainable world order, New York, July 16, 2024

16 July 2024

I would like to extend a warm welcome to distinguished dignitaries present in the Security Council Chamber. Their participation in today’s meeting confirms the importance of the subject under review. In accordance with Rule 37 of the Council’s provisional rules of procedure, I invite the representatives of Australia, Bangladesh, Belarus, the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Brazil, Cambodia, Chile, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Maldives, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Africa, Syrian Arab Republic, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Türkiye, the UAE, Uganda, Vietnam, and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to take part in the session.

In accordance with Rule 39 of the Council’s provisional rules of procedure, I invite His Excellency Stavros Lambrinidis, Head of the European Union Delegation to the United Nations, to participate in this meeting.

The Security Council will now begin its consideration of agenda item 2. I would like to draw the attention of the Council members to document S/2024/537, a cover letter dated July 9, 2024 from the Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations addressed to Secretary-General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres for a policy brief on the item under review.

Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,

Your Excellency,

Today, the very foundations of the international legal order – strategic stability and the UN-centric system of international politics – are put to the test. We won’t be able to resolve the mounting conflicts unless we understand their root causes and restore faith in our ability to join forces for the common good and justice for all.

Let’s face it: not all countries represented in this chamber recognise the key principle of the UN Charter which is the sovereign equality of all states. Speaking through its presidents, the United States has long declared its exceptionalism. This applies to Washington’s attitude towards its allies, whom it demands to be unquestioningly obedient even to the detriment of their national interests.

Rule, America! This is the thrust of the notorious “rules-based order” which presents a direct threat to multilateralism and international peace.

The most important components of international law – the UN Charter and the resolutions of our Council – are interpreted by the collective West in a perverse and selective manner, depending on the instructions coming from the White House. Numerous Security Council resolutions have been ignored altogether, among them Resolution 2202, which approved the Minsk agreements on Ukraine, and Resolution 1031, which approved the Dayton Agreement on peace in BiH on the basis of the principle of equal rights of the three constituent peoples and two entities. We can discuss endlessly the sabotage of the resolutions on the Middle East. Just think back to what Antony Blinken had to say in an interview with CNN in February 2021 taking a question about what he thinks about the decision of the previous US administration to recognise the Syrian Golan Heights as part of Israel. In case someone is not sure what his answer was, I will refresh your memory. The Secretary of State said, “Leaving aside the legalities of that question, as a practical matter, the Golan is very important to Israel’s security.” This is despite the fact that UN Security Council Resolution 497 of 1981, which you and I are well aware of and which no one has cancelled, qualifies annexation of the Golan Heights by Israel as illegal. However, according to those very “rules,” to quote Mr Blinken, “legal questions are something else.” And, of course, everyone remembers the statement by the US Ambassador to the UN that Resolution 2728 adopted on March 25 demanding an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip “is not legally binding,” meaning that the American “rules” supersede Article 25 of the UN Charter.

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Finland gives U.S. control over 15 military bases, on Russia’s doorstep

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From Global Research
July 4, 2024
by Drago Bosnic

For nearly half a century, Scandinavia’s neutrality (with the obvious exception of Norway) was an important segment of keeping various buffer zones between the Soviet Union and NATO. And interestingly, despite the fact that the USSR was much more powerful than Russia nowadays, while also being virtually unopposed in the Baltic Sea, for some reason, neither Sweden nor Finland felt the need to become part of NATO.

What’s more, if there ever was a danger of a mythical Soviet invasion of either country, it was gone in 1991. Up to that point, Moscow’s access to the Baltic Sea stretched from Finland to Denmark (nearly, that is). Nowadays, Saint Petersburg and Kaliningrad are Russia’s only access points.

Thus, if the Kremlin hadn’t invaded Sweden and Finland during the (First) Cold War, it surely wouldn’t be doing it now. However, as rabid Russophobia is an extremely damaging degenerative disease, it clouds people’s judgment, leading them to make all sorts of rash and inexplicable decisions. On the other hand, it’s impossible to explain NATO expansionism in Scandinavia without seeing it as part of a wider offensive build-up that aims to surround Russia with hostile states and other entities (including terrorist ones). In one of the latest such moves, Helsinki just gave the United States the legal permission to station troops in the country. The vote in the Finnish Parliament was unanimous.

Thus, starting from July 1, Washington DC has access to at least 15 Finnish military bases, with the possibility of deploying heavy weapons. It wasn’t specified what sort of arms and equipment that refers to, but it’s not that difficult to imagine.

The US is already trying to surround both Russia and China with the previously banned medium and intermediate-range missiles, which is precisely why it’s setting up new military bases all across Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. The latest agreement with Finland, aptly termed the “Defense” Cooperation Agreement (DCA), “will allow the United States to bring defense equipment, supplies, materials, and soldiers to Finland”, according to local sources (https://yle%5Bdot%5Dfi/a/74-20097310.)

Worse yet, the DCA gives America legal grounds to create military exclusion zones, areas that will be accessible to US personnel only. What this really means is that Finland effectively relinquished its sovereignty so it could become a legitimate target for Russian missiles.

Congratulations, Helsinki! You just exposed 5.5 million Finns to virtually immediate thermonuclear annihilation in case of (an increasingly possible) military conflict between NATO and Russia. Considering the fact that the US has similar “exclusive access” facilities all over the world and that the Pentagon usually uses them for illegal programs and experiments, including with deadly biological materials, Russia will respond.

In fact, the Kremlin certainly anticipated such moves, which is why it started deploying new missile brigades in northwestern Russia, including those armed with ballistic and hypersonic weapons. Moscow’s second-to-none missiles such as those used by the “Iskander-M” platform or the MiG-31K strike fighters with 9-A-7660 “Kinzhal” systems (carrying the 9-S-7760 air-launched hypersonic missiles) put the entire Scandinavia in range. In addition, the sheer speed of these unrivaled weapons gives the Kremlin the ability of a virtually instantaneous retaliation in case anyone gets any ideas. Unfortunately, none of this seems to have deterred the (obviously suicidal) ruling elite in Helsinki.

The Finnish Parliament’s rather senseless decision to antagonize its much larger nuclear-armed neighbor cannot possibly be justified by any excuses of “defense” or any similar reasoning. The simple fact that Finland is allowing the presence of American offensive capabilities on the border with Russia will be enough for the latter to deploy weapons that the former simply has no means of defending against. As the DCA creates a legal framework for a permanent American military presence in Finland, this also means that the Kremlin will surely respond in kind, making Helsinki far less safe than was the case before it joined NATO, thus defeating the very purpose of its membership in this racketeering cartel.

However, according to Finnish sources, there might even be some opposition to this in the country, as MP Anna Kontula submitted a proposal calling on other MPs to reject the DCA, although her motion received no backing. Therefore, the Finnish Parliament “did not vote on the agreement, but approved it unanimously”, local sources report (https://yle%5Bdot%5Dfi/a/74-20097360). This alone puts the legality of the agreement in serious question, although we’re extremely unlikely to see any major opposition to it. Last month, Helsinki’s Constitutional Law Committee concluded that the “[DCA] would have to be approved by a two-thirds majority in Parliament, as it affects several aspects of the Finnish constitution” (i.e. it’s unconstitutional).

In other words, Finland is going out of its way to please the US and NATO, just like it did with Nazi Germany (their geopolitical predecessor) over 80 years ago. This was in the making for quite some time, even predating the special military operation (SMO), as Helsinki wanted to acquire the troubled F-35 fighter jets back in 2021 (https://www.treasuryfinland%5Bdot%5Dfi/news/state-treasury-has-completed-currency-hedging-in-the-purchase-of-finlands-f-35-fighter-jets/#:~:text=In its plenary session in,%2C software%2C supplies and services.). Having such aircraft in one’s arsenal also means that a country is relinquishing its sovereignty. Namely, the US has control over the F-35’s systems, as the jet keeps sending data back to Lockheed Martin and the US military, meaning that even if the then “neutral” Finland didn’t join NATO, the Pentagon would effectively control a crucial branch of the country’s armed forces, forcing Russia to respond either way.

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Ukraine’s Minerals: What the West is Fighting For

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From Sputnik News
June 26, 2024

Ukraine is rich in mineral resources, with diverse deposits of fossil fuels, metals and industrial minerals. The country is a major producer of iron ore, coal, natural gas and oil, among others.

Washington “cannot afford” to allow Russia to achieve victory in the Ukraine conflict as this would mean losing direct access to vast mineral assets. That was the view of US Senator Lindsey Graham* in an interview with ‘Face the Nation’ on CBS News in June.

“They’re sitting on 10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals in Ukraine. They could be the richest country in all of Europe,” Graham said. “If we help Ukraine now, they can become the best business partner we ever dreamed of, that $10 to $12 trillion of critical mineral assets could be used by Ukraine and the West,” he added.

Graham is treating Ukraine as a future colony of the US with his comments on the ownership of the country’s natural resources, said Vladimir Dzhabarov, official of the Russian Federation Council.

While “promising Ukrainians mountains of gold, Graham in fact considers it as a future American colony,” Dzhabarov said.

“The fate of the colonies is always the same: the Americans will scoop up all the natural resources of Ukraine in exchange for ‘the great honor of being a friend of the United States’,” he warned. “Well, they will feed the corrupt top of the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev at the same time.”

*Lindsey Graham is included on the list of terrorists and extremists in Russia.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240626/ukraines-minerals-what-the-west-is-fighting-for-1119119104.html

Anti-NATO events in Washington DC

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From Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space
by Bruce Gagnon
July 9, 2024

Bruce Gagnon and Rick Staggenborg in the march on Sunday

Four of us from Maine (MB Sullivan, Lisa Savage, Mark Roman and I) made the 10-hour drive to Washington DC last Friday to join the anti-NATO events planned to protest NATO’s ’75th anniversary celebration’ which begins on July 10. We were joined by former Mainers Melody Shank and Ken Jones now living in North Carolina.

Things began with a conference on Saturday morning at a local church attended by about 150 people and organized by a coalition led by World Beyond War. Disappointingly (but not surprising) several of the speakers once again blamed Russia for the war in Ukraine with words like ‘illegal, immoral, provocative’ Russian invasion. Sadly there are still some in the ‘peace movement’ who continue to be reluctant to pin the blame for the proxy war on US-NATO which was particularly uncalled for at an anti-NATO summit. Those that do at some point admit that US-NATO did in fact instigate the ‘tensions’ always seem to say that Russia should not have responded to protect the Donbass. That option was of course unacceptable to Moscow which I fully agree with.

This of course has been going on ever since the 2014 US-NATO orchestrated coup d’etat in Kiev which was led by the Obama-Biden administration under the direction of Victoria Nuland, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden [and John Kerry]. Soon thereafter the US-NATO regime in Kiev (infused with Nazis from Western Ukraine) began attacking the Donbass region of Ukraine where Russian-ethnics predominate and killed more than 15,000 and wounded around 35,000.

Moscow made repeated attempts to create mechanisms to end the siege on the Donbass including the Minsk 1 & 2 agreements that leaders of Ukraine, France and Germany later admitted they never intended to honor – they just used the agreements to buy time to build up Ukraine’s US-NATO funded, trained, armed and directed army for a final charge against their own citizens whose only crime was they spoke Russian.

By early 2022 Russia knew that the western controlled Ukrainian military would soon launch a full scale attack on the Donbass so Moscow decided to preempt that move and began the slow and deliberate effort to push the Nazi-led forces away from the Donbass which sits on Russia’s border.

Later Saturday around 5:00 pm a larger conference began at another church in Washington. Oh, what a difference it was. This event was led by anti-imperialist organizations that have no doubt the US-NATO were in fact responsible for the war in Ukraine – to be used in a now failed strategy to force ‘regime change’ in Moscow in order for western resource extraction corporations to grab Russia’s vast resource base (among other reasons).

More than 300 (mostly young activists) gathered at this event with powerful speakers talking about a myriad of regions of the world where the US-NATO war machine is trying to regain their settler colonial domination. Good luck with that one.

This multi-ethnic coalition was a stark difference from the smaller event we had attended earlier that day.

I learned years ago about the US anti-imperialist movement led by Mark Twain during Washington’s war on the Philippines. At this event an impressive video was shown about the long US occupation of the Philippines that continues today as the Biden administration now floods that island nation with new missiles, warships, war planes and troops aimed at China. All part of NATO’s ‘pivot’ into the Asia-Pacific.

We also heard from young activists speaking about Palestine, Puerto Rico, black liberation movements across the US and much more. The Nicaraguan ambassador to the US also spoke and was roundly received.

Fascism is growing worldwide in order to protect corporate interests and to suppress the resulting people’s movements for liberation. US-NATO wars in the Middle East have cost 4.5 million lives in the last 25 years. Israel is a ‘partner’ of NATO and takes part in its war games. NATO also trains Middle Eastern reactionary regimes that have served as western puppets for many years – Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, Jordan and more.

On Sunday we joined a march led by the anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist coalition to the White House. A rally was set up in Lafayette Park next to the White House led by the World Beyond War coalition. When we arrived very few people were at the rally site. Thanks to the 400 in the anti-imperialist march the rally began to look more respectable though I didn’t see any of the anti-imperialist leaders invited to the stage to speak to the largely younger crowd.

Despite the long drive from Maine to DC we all agreed that it was well worth the trip – especially to be with emerging activists. We often hear elder ‘peace movement’ folks wonder where are the ‘young people’? Actually they are out there leading the protests against zionist genocide in Palestine and doing great anti-NATO work against the empire’s ever expanding war machine. Some might call them radicals – but I stand by the definition of radical as those getting to the root of the problems that we face.

The half-stepping reformist peace groups (sometimes linked to the Democratic party and their foundation funders) have a long way to go if they hope to more fully integrate with the next generation of activism.

https://space4peace.blogspot.com/2024/07/anti-nato-events-in-washington-dc.html