Degrees of Complicity

Matt Kennard

In the UK there is a formal machinery of censorship through what used to be called the D Notice Committee, a system that shocks most US journalists when they learn of it, but which explains routine silences by the British media of so many stories of potential embarrassment to the UK Establishment (such as British media inability to refer to last week’s BRICS summit in Kazan as a BRICS event as opposed to what British media simply referred to as an international meeting convened by Russia).

US support for Israel is no less illegal in terms of international and its own laws: it should not be supplying military aid to a country that has developed a secret nuclear weapons capability that has not signed up to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty; it should not be providing military aid to a country that is demonstrably guilty of massive and flagrant war crimes.

On Ukraine, Dima of the Military Summary Channel reported this morning of October 31st (California time) that there have been negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, mediated by Qatar, to explore the possibility that the two sides might cease hitting one another’s energy facilities.

It does not look as though the negotiations are going well for Ukraine (which is on the brink of another harsh winter). Russia has not been striking energy facilities for some months, but if it resumes doing so it may well cripple Ukraine and bring an end to the conflict very quickly, an outcome in which it is invested, argued Dima, because a very long war is not something that Russia wants. Russia is not only moving closer to the cities of Dnipro and Zapporizhzhia but it has stepped up strikes in Kharkiv to the north and Odessa (and commercial ships entering the port of Odessa).

This suggests to me not only Russian intent to take the whole of Zapporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts but also that of Kharkiv, and the city of Odessa and the southeast Black Sea coast. Quite likely Kiev too, since an unsuppressed Kiev would be too great an instability for the new extended Russian Federation.

In the meantime, Ukraine has appealed to Poland to seek a US green light for Poland to strike at Russian missiles over Ukraine. This brings Poland back in to the picture after a period of silence with respect to speculations earlier in the war that in the event of Russia reaching the Dnieper - an eventuality to which we get closer by the day, now that the Ukraine presence in Kursk has all but been extinguished and the cities of Selydove and Kurakhove are falling, and those of Pokrovsk, Siversk and Kupyansk likely soon to fall - Poland and Ukraine together may activate an escalation of Polish forces in western Ukraine and, possibly, an eventual reversion of western Ukraine to Polish control, something that would guarantee a major hostile presence on Russia’s new border with Ukraine, and probably not an acceptable outcome from a Russian perspective.

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