SC Editorial: Kaliningrad Provocation & Ukraine’s EU Candidacy

The cat is out of the bag. The warmongering policies of Western misrulers are being connected and comprehended by the general populace.

The Western propaganda narrative on the conflict in Ukraine is in big trouble. Months of lying by governments and dutiful news media are falling apart as Russia makes major advances to safeguard the Russian-speaking populations in Crimea and Donbass, the formerly eastern Ukrainian region, and to neutralize Nazi military forces under the control of the Kiev regime and backed to the hilt by NATO.

Recall how only a few weeks ago Russia was being pilloried in Western media for making a “strategic blunder” from its military intervention in Ukraine that began on February 24. Western leaders were gung-ho in predicting military defeat for Moscow. After four months of conflict not only are Russian forces decimating NATO-backed Ukrainian flanks, the wider repercussions that the Western powers could have avoided if they had engaged diplomatically with Russia to resolve long-held security concerns are rebounding with devastating economic impact. The U.S.-led NATO and European Union axis is digging a giant hole for itself. If not a grave.

To divert from the NATO-fuelled disaster, the U.S.-led military alliance is recklessly provoking Russia with a blockade on the Russian exclave territory of Kaliningrad. The Russian territory is sandwiched between NATO members Poland and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This week Lithuania moved to block rail and road transport to Kaliningrad. It is clear that the Baltic state is not acting alone. It is enforcing a policy ordained by the NATO and EU leadership. The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell made the absurd excuse that Lithuania was merely applying sanctions against Russian goods. He denied the blatant reality that the move was a hostile economic blockade on sovereign Russian territory and its internal affairs. Laughably, Borrell has the brass neck to accuse Russia of blockading Ukrainian ports.

Moscow has warned that if the blockade of its territory is not lifted it would be seen as aggression to which it will respond. In other words, the NATO and EU axis has decided to gratuitously escalate tensions with Russia to the point of provoking acts of war which a blockade certainly deems.

The insane move by the Western powers has to be seen as nothing other than desperate diversionary tactics to distract from their fiasco of failing propaganda lies over Ukraine. Rather than admitting (even tacitly) that its policies have created a monumental mess in Europe and indeed the wider world, the Western powers are digging an even deeper hole by ratcheting up even more tensions with Russia.

This would also explain the farcical move this week by the European Council to grant official candidate status to Ukraine for joining the 27-member bloc. In practice, it may take decades for Ukraine to gain membership. Turkey has had the same status for 22 years without moving into the European fold. Serbia and other Balkan states have been waiting up to 10 years as candidates for joining the EU club. So, the fanfare of the EU leadership granting Ukraine application is largely empty theater. All the declarations about “solidarity” with Ukraine are typical Brussels bombast.

No wonder other candidate states are exasperated by what they rightly see as the EU playing politics without an iota of principle. The Kiev regime is hailed as “sharing European values” as it bans opposition political parties and outlaws the Russian language, literature, and music. The European Union is impaling itself with its own unscrupulous contradictions by granting candidate status to Ukraine.

But in the futile short term, what it is designed to do is, again, distract from the public embarrassment of the EU and NATO overseeing a total debacle in Ukraine. Billions of dollars and euros bilked from European and American citizens to fuel a Nazi regime have achieved nothing militarily except to prolong the war in Ukraine and escalate the danger of an all-out confrontation with Russia. A war that would in all likelihood lead to a nuclear catastrophe for the planet.

The U.S. and European political establishments have lost all moral authority to govern. At a time of historic collapse in Western capitalist economies, they have decided to make hardship and misery all the more acute for their societies by provoking global energy and inflation crises. Their insane irresponsibility is driven by Western ideological interests, kowtowing to the transatlantic elite and the military-industrial complex as well as by an inveterate mentality of Russophobia. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov pointed out this week that the current climate and dynamics of the EU and NATO are forming a war bloc against Russia, one that has a vile echo of how Nazi Germany and European fascists armed up against the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

The morally bankrupt Western ruling class has always found war to be an expedient escape route from internal calamity. Their lies and misrule can be covered up with the blood of millions, so it is heinously calculated. They did this in the First and Second World Wars. They are willing to do it again with a Third World War.

It is truly shocking that the NATO and EU axis is moving week-by-week towards open war against Russia. The scenario has already moved from a proxy war to a direct one.

The provocation of blockading Kaliningrad is a direct assault on the territory of the Russian Federation.

Likewise, the scandalous flirting with Ukraine over EU membership as well as the delivery of missile systems to the Kiev regime by the United States, Germany, Britain, and others, are all madcap maneuvers to evade accountability and condemnation for their own inherent failure.

It is highly notable that this week saw massive protests on the streets of Brussels in which public anger was explicitly directed at deteriorating economic conditions for citizens in concert with denunciations of NATO warmongering in Ukraine against Russia.

The cat is out of the bag. The warmongering policies of Western misrulers are being connected and comprehended by the general populace. The effete elites know they are being exposed. The emperor has no clothes. And the Western public is getting angrier with millions of workers going on strike and demanding their rights from a callous establishment.

In a wide-ranging speech last week to the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the Western misrulers are facing increasing populist revolt and eventual downfall from their own egregious incompetence and mismanagement.

Such democratic uprisings in the West can’t come soon enough because the grave danger is that its corrupt elite is rushing to provoke war as a diversion. Again.