RT News - June 22nd 2024 Late

The death toll from southern China floods reaches 47 and more bad weather is expected in other parts of the country. The search for survivors continues. At least 55,000 people have been affected by the flooding. The flood is the worst in recorded history.
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Israel/Gaza The International Committee of the Red Cross says ‘heavy-calibre projectiles’ landed metres from its office in the designated safe zone in the south. The IDF carried out and assault on a tent camp in al-Mawasi in the south killed at least 25 people. (via Al Jazeera : On Saturday, 42 Palestinians were killed by Israeli attacks on the Shati refugee camp and the Tuffah neighbourhood in Gaza City.)

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The US admits it's reasonable to conclude that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza. Saad Nimr gives comments.

On the Day of Memory and Sorrow, President of Russia Vladimir Putin per a long-standing tradition laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Memoriam of the 26.6 million lives of Soviet people lost. The ceremony was attended by combat veterans, servicemen and graduates of military universities. Flowers to the Eternal Flame were also laid by Defence Minister Andrei Belousov. (via MFA Russia)
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Short take: The Russian Defense Ministry reports advances on the frontlines in Ukraine and striking the country’s energy infrastructure. That’s after Kiev’s forces hit an electrical substation close to the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant. Kiev is said to be prioritizing the return of captured neo-Nazi fighters from its Azov Brigade over regular military personnel, some of whom have been waiting to go home for nearly two years. Tensions ratchet up between India and Canada after New Delhi accuses Ottawa of allowing a controversial separatist movement to operate with impunity, on its territory.

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Ukraine ‘wants peace as soon as possible’ – Zelensky aide 22 Jun, 2024 13:19

Kiev seeks to end the conflict but not on Russia’s terms, Igor Zhovkva has said

Ukraine intends to hold a second ‘peace summit’ later this year, the deputy head of Vladimir Zelensky’s office, Igor Zhovkva has said. However, the official stressed that Kiev cannot accept Russia’s demand that it withdraw troops from four regions.

In an interview with the Interfax-Ukraine news agency on Friday, Zhovkva said his country wanted a follow-up to last week’s peace conference in Switzerland. The event focused on three points of Zelensky’s “peace formula,” including prisoner exchanges, food and nuclear security. Moscow was not invited to the gathering, and has rejected Zelensky’s plan, which calls for Russia to withdraw from all territories Kiev claims as its own.

”We want to hold the second peace summit before the end of the year. The process should not be delayed. Ukraine, like no one else, wants peace as soon as possible,” Zhovkva said, adding that Kiev “definitely does not want peace to be based on the so-called Russian recognition of reality.”

Prior to the Swiss-hosted conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow was ready to immediately start peace talks with Kiev if it withdraws from Russia’s Donbass and the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, with the ultimate deal including Ukraine’s neutrality and the lifting of Western sanctions. Both Kiev and the West have dismissed the offer.

Asked where a possible follow-up meeting could take place, Zhovkva suggested that it could be hosted by a country of the Global South, but refused to name any specific nations, claiming that Russia could then attempt to prevent the gathering from taking place.

Officials in Kiev previously left open the possibility of inviting Russia to the next conference, with Swiss officials saying it would not be held in Europe or the West, and hinting that Saudi Arabia could be considered as an option.

Putin previously called the Swiss-hosted event a Western trick to create the illusion of a global anti-Russian coalition and distract attention from the roots of the conflict.

However, Aleksey Chepa, deputy head of the Russian State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee, has suggested that Moscow could take part in the next meeting provided that Russia’s conditions for ending the conflict are addressed at the gathering.

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Kiev in talks with EU on extraditing Ukrainian citizens – minister 21 Jun, 2024 19:19

Border guards detain dozens of men seeking to flee to the EU every day, Interior Minister Igor Klimenko said

Kiev is negotiating with Brussels for the extradition of any Ukrainians who have illegally crossed into the bloc, Interior Minister Igor Klimenko told the US state-funded broadcaster RFE/RL.

Ukraine’s border guards are struggling to stem the flow of men fleeing the country to evade military service amid concerted mobilization efforts.

“We are consulting with our colleagues from the European Union,” Klimenko said when asked if Kiev would like the EU to extradite those who have crossed illegally. “These negotiations will continue regarding the possible return of our citizens,” he added.

Ukraine announced a general mobilization in February 2022, and barred most men aged between 18 and 60 from leaving the country. Kiev’s draft campaign has been marred by widespread corruption; thousands have attempted to depart illegally by either forging documents or attempting to bypass border controls.

Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly said they want individuals of military age to be returned from abroad. In October last year, Klimenko revealed that authorities were seeking ways to “justly” penalize citizens who had fled abroad to avoid conscription.

Multiple EU states, including Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, have refused to consider such extraditions, arguing that Ukrainians must be treated as refugees in the bloc. Some German politicians have since floated other “incentives” to entice Ukrainians to return home, including stripping them of welfare payments.

In the interview published on Friday, Klimenko admitted that the EU was “mostly” unanimous in its rejection of extradition. He also confirmed that border guards are detaining “dozens of people every day” who seek to cross the border illegally, either by swimming across rivers, traversing forests and mountains or using fake documents at checkpoints.

In early June, the Ukrainian State Border Guard Service said that at least 45 men had died of drowning and other causes in attempts to depart.

Klimenko also admitted it is “difficult” to man the nation’s western border because of a lack of personnel. “The border with Romania, with Slovakia, Poland, Moldova, Hungary is minimally protected on our side” he said.

The minister refused to reveal the total number of border detentions since the start of the conflict between Kiev and Moscow, but said “tens of thousands” was an exaggeration.

Some 12,700 men have illegally crossed from Ukraine into Romania alone since the start of the conflict, RFE/RL has reported, citing border police.

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US warns Ukraine about corruption – Washington Post 21 Jun, 2024 12:13

Washington says Kiev is not doing enough to fight the issue and claims it could imperil future military and economic aid.

Ukraine’s Western backers have accused Kiev of not making enough progress on eliminating corruption, and have warned that it could cost the country military and economic support in the future, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

The outlet noted that while Ukrainian officials have admitted that corruption remains an issue in the country, they have insisted that they are battling it “as fiercely as their troops are fighting Russia,” suggesting that the West was not giving Kiev sufficient credit for its efforts.

While new corruption cases against high-ranking government officials are being opened almost every month, the head of the dedicated unit within Ukraine’s Prosecutor’s Office, Alexander Klimenko, stressed that the fact that “the number of cases has doubled doesn’t mean that there is twice as much corruption.”

“On the contrary: it means that we’re twice as effective as before,” Klimenko claimed, according to the Washington Post.

However, US officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have reportedly been dissatisfied with the results of Kiev’s war on corruption. A meeting between Vladimir Zelensky and Blinken in Kiev last month was “tense,” the Washington Post reported, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter. While the Ukrainian leader expressed his appreciation for US military aid, he was also reportedly frustrated with Blinken’s focus on corruption.

“Winning on the battlefield will prevent Ukraine from becoming part of Russia,” Blinken said following the meeting. “Winning the war against corruption will keep Ukraine from becoming like Russia,” he added.

But many in Zelensky’s team, as per the Washington Post, privately argue that although corruption remains a challenge for the country, efforts to fight it could distract them from the primary goal of defeating Russia. Some senior Ukrainian officials have also been complaining that Kiev’s Western backers were using the “stereotype of Ukraine as corrupt” as an excuse to delay additional aid.

On Monday, the European Commission also appeared to express doubt in Kiev’s ability to properly manage foreign aid, and announced the creation of a special watchdog to prevent “fraud, corruption and conflicts of interest,” as well as the possible embezzlement of billions of dollars allocated to Kiev as part of the EU’s plan to finance Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Moscow has repeatedly condemned continued Western military and financial aid to Ukraine, arguing that it only serves to prolong hostilities and cause more bloodshed without affecting the inevitable outcome of the conflict.
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Three civilians killed in Ukrainian strikes on Russian city – regional head 22 Jun, 2024 14:33

The Donetsk People’s Republic was targeted by US-made, cluster warhead-equipped M26 rockets, Denis Pushilin has said.

Three people were killed and four others wounded in the latest Ukrainian bombardment of Donetsk and Gorlovka, the head of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Denis Pushilin, has said.

Kiev’s forces began “large-scale strikes” on the region at 4am local time, Pushilin wrote on Telegram.

The timing was not without significance. On Saturday, Russia marks the Day of Remembrance and Sorrow, commemorating the estimated 27 million victims of the Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union during World War Two. Adolf Hitler’s forces attacked the USSR at 4am on June 22, 1941.

It was Ukraine’s first deployment of US-made M26 rockets with cluster warheads against Donetsk, the regional head claimed. He reminded that those munitions are fired from HIMARS multiple rocket launchers, provided to Kiev by Washington, with each carrying 644 M-77 submunitions. The attack against Budennovsky district in the southeast of the city killed three men who were working for a local construction firm, Pushilin said.

In the northwest of Donetsk, an elderly man suffered moderate injuries after tripping on an anti-personnel ‘Lepestok’ (Petal) land mine, he said.

Six residential buildings and four civilian infrastructure facilities were also damaged in the strikes on the DPR’s capital, the regional head added.

A Ukrainian drone also struck a moving passenger bus outside the town of Gorlovka northeast of Donetsk. Three people were wounded in the attack, including one who suffered serious injuries, Pushilin wrote.

According to Pushilin, as of midday on Saturday, Kiev’s troops had shelled the republic’s territory 16 times, firing 40 munitions of various types such as HIMARS rockets, 155mm artillery shells and kamikaze drones.

The frequency of Ukrainian strikes on Donetsk, which has been targeted on a regular basis throughout the conflict, has decreased since Russian forces captured the strategic settlement of Avdeevka in February and made other territorial gains in the DPR. However, Ukrainian attacks on the city of some 900,000 people still happen with the use of more sophisticated, longer-range weapons.
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White Christians being replaced in Europe – Orban 22 Jun, 2024 14:44

German politician Manfered Weber is the “Beelzebub” behind this population replacement, the Hungarian prime minister has claimed

A “militant” faction of pro-migration politicians is overseeing the “replacement” of white European Christians with Muslim immigrants, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has declared.

“In Europe there is an exchange of populations, the number of white, Christian, traditional – let’s say European – people is decreasing, the number of migrants being imported and the number of people belonging to the Muslim community born here is radically increasing,” Orban told Kossuth Radio on Friday.

German politician Manfred Weber, who leads the centrist European People’s Party (EPP) in the European Parliament, is the “beelzebub” responsible for this alleged scheme, Orban continued, adding that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is Weber’s “little servant girl” responsible for its implementation.

The EPP remained the largest faction in the European Parliament after last month’s elections. However, the decline of the Greens and a surge in support for right-wing parties has left the EPP with fewer allies with whom to pass legislation.

Hours after he spoke to Kossuth Radio, Orban flew to Berlin to meet with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz ahead of Hungary assuming the EU Council’s rotating presidency next month. The Hungarian PM claimed that Germany has suffered greatly as a result of immigration, and “no longer looks like it did ten years ago.”

“This Germany is no longer the Germany that our parents and grandparents held up to us as an example,” he said, adding that the country is now a “colorful, changed multicultural world” in which migrants are “no longer guests.”

Hungary’s stance on immigration has placed the country at odds with Brussels in recent years. Earlier this month, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ordered Budapest to pay €200 million ($216 million) for failing to comply with EU asylum law, and imposed a fine of €1 million per day until Hungary fully implements the legislation. According to the court, Budapest has limited migrants’ access to asylum procedures since 2020, making the process of filing applications “virtually impossible.”

“It seems that illegal migrants are more important to the Brussels bureaucrats than their own European citizens,” Orban responded, vowing to “figure out a way, so [the ruling] hurts Brussels more than it hurts us.”

Orban was criticized in the German media for his comments on Friday, with Munich’s Merkur newspaper accusing him of spreading “conspiracy myths” about immigration.

The idea of a so-called ‘Great Replacement’ is often written off by liberals as a racist conspiracy theory. However, the population share of white Europeans has been decreasing across the continent since the mid-20th century, and European leaders sometimes admit that they intend to use non-European immigration to replace the aging native workforce.

Speaking in Athens earlier this year, European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson stated that “legal migration should grow by more or less 1 million per year” to achieve this goal.
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The evil clown returns: Boris Johnson is not done haunting world politics 21 Jun, 2024 16:29

OPINION : Britain’s most scandalous PM, who turned 60 this week, left a dark footprint on the UK and the world… and he may yet return By Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian https://tarikcyrilamar.substack.com/

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, aka Boris Johnson, aka BoJo – former British prime minister, foreign secretary, mayor of London, leader of the Conservative Party (Tories), and, last but not least, member of Parliament – is hawking his forthcoming memoir. Under the title “Unleashed,” the publisher promises it will be like no other prime minister’s reminiscences before. That, for once, is something we could almost believe, even if it’s Johnson who says it.

Indeed, BoJo’s career in politics – which, unfortunately, we have no reason to consider over yet – has left the imprint of something badly “unleashed,” something, that is to say, in the worst style of a monster movie: Think “Godzilla Comes to London,” but without the charm of make-believe.

Where to even begin? Why not at the end: At this point, Johnson, the arch-Tory, is conspicuously absent from the ongoing British elections, although they are in full swing. Full swing, let’s not forget, toward a disaster for BoJo’s fellow Conservatives: Polling by The Economist predicts that the Tories will lose 179 seats of the 371 that they won in 2019; that is a reduction by almost half. Labour, on the other side, seems on track to win 381 seats or more. In other words, a historic landslide is looming, and it will bury the Tories.

And yet, with a desperate battle for political survival afoot and despite half-hearted denials, Johnson is mostly silent, AWOL from the campaign trail. Certainly, one reason is his outsized, even by politicians’ standards, egotism. Johnson has never been one to take one for the team. Most likely still plotting a comeback, he is sitting this one out. And then, he also happens to hate Rishi Sunak, the current, extremely unpopular Tory prime minister. Watching from the sidelines as Sunak gets clobbered is an added bonus.

Some observers believe he is simply too busy making money with speeches and soon his memoirs, which are certain to offer plenty of lucrative indiscretions and sensationalism. And then, there was his recent 60th birthday as well, an occasion his long-suffering wife Carrie – fidelity has never been BoJo’s forte, not even in private life – marked by gifting him three wooden elephant sculptures. In some cultures, that animal stands for a memory that never lets go.

One reason that is not holding BoJo back, rest assured, is the fact that he is the single most scandal-ridden politician in Britain – and, within a British political establishment that is toxic with snobbishness, backstabbing, and corruption, that is quite an achievement.

The key reason why Johnson had to relinquish – at long last and after indecently obstinate resistance – first his premiership, in 2022, and then even his seat in the House of Commons, in 2023, is that he was caught out lying unbearably often. He was forced from his office as prime minister and, later out of Parliament, because of the scandal known as “Partygate”: During the Covid-19 pandemic, he had held illegal, boozy parties in his residence at Downing Street 10, while ordinary Britons were subjected to harsh restrictions; and then he kept denying the facts, blatantly and repeatedly lying not “only” to the British public but to the House of Commons as well. An especially appointed committee found that BoJo was in contempt of parliament.

Apart from egotism, contempt is perhaps Johnson’s most important character trait. Rules – whether legal or moral – are for others, and others only count as far as they can be used to feed Johnson’s insatiable cravings for fame, power, and, really, any form of gratification you can think of – and some you ought not to.

A gifted populist with a knack for appealing to ordinary people, he is, in reality, almost a caricature of a spoiled, self-absorbed “toff,” a typical representative of the worst the British, or specifically English upper classes have to offer. He was born to and raised in privilege. After attending Eton he went to Oxford’s Balliol College. While an excellent college for the many who go there to actually study, that was not Johnson’s case. He was there for the exclusive Bullingdon Club, networking, and early-career politicking. Where another former British prime minister – tactlessly and misleadingly – ascribed “effortless superiority” to Balliol’s graduates, Johnson was of the “superior effortlessness” kind.

BoJo has a carefully cultivated clownish side: the trademark, phony wild hair; the jocular guffaws; the well-rehearsed artificial upper-class stutter, so overdone it’s always slightly comical, if in a mirthless way. But this is an evil clown. Apart from his specific scandals, outsized as they have been, there are his policies that have done – it is true, often in complicity with others – immense harm both inside and outside Britain.

Not the only but the single most obvious example of his taking a wrecking ball to his own country, of which he claims to be a patriot, is his demagogic promotion of Brexit in 2016. He helped heap false promise on false promise. Anyone remember those hundreds of millions of pounds that would flow to Britain’s NHS after Brexit? Those “sunlit uplands” to follow? The UK’s future as “Buccaneering Britain,” a nimble, perky world trade power, unshackled from all that bad EU red tape to cash in wherever opportunity beckons? In 2019, when he led the Conservatives to a massive victory (enhanced, however, by the Starmerite wing of Labour sabotaging their own candidate Jeremy Corbyn), he made the one promise he kept, namely to “get Brexit done.”

Yet once it was done, its real consequences – four years after formal Brexit completion in January 2020 – have turned into a great disappointment. The EU, let’s be clear, is as rotten as can be now: A submissive appendix to Washington’s declining yet scrappy NATO+ empire, undemocratic to the bone, wedded to elitist austerity policies, and stuck in a geopolitical and economic morass due to obediently following the US on its great Eurasian crusade against Russia. But that does not mean that leaving the Brussels monster was a good idea for Britain.

In terms of geopolitics, Brexit has been useless because London is, if anything, even more belligerent toward Moscow than Washington, as its trailblazer role in permitting Ukraine to strike inside Russia with Western weapons has shown again only recently. So, no upside there.

Regarding the economy, a key if not the central issue for “leave” voters, Brexit has been worse than useless: By January 2023, studies summarized in The Economist found that Brexit had shaved 6% off British GDP and 11% off investments, as compared with models simulating a world without Brexit and that average food prices increased by around 3% annually in 2020 and 2021.

One can, of course, argue about the methods and data of these and similar studies. Moreover, assessing the real-world economic impact of Brexit is complicated by the fact that some British problems predated it – for instance, with productivity and investment – and that other factors have also intervened, foremost the Covid-19 pandemic and then the war in and over Ukraine and the West’s self-defeating response to it.

Yet two things are beyond doubt: Brexit has definitely not been the quick and almost utopian success that the Brexiteers, with Johnson among the most vocal, kept selling. And, second, this clear discrepancy between what was promised and what has happened, has made many Britons change their mind. In 2016, 52% voted for leaving the EU and 48% for staying inside. By now, a poll shows that over 60% think that the UK “was wrong” to quit, while less than 40% believe Brexit was the right decision. At least one British polling expert, John Curtice, considers the economy (and not anxieties about immigration) the main cause of this shift.

If his contribution to Brexit has been the worst single blow Boris Johnson has inflicted on his fellow citizens, his meddling in the Ukraine conflict still stands as his most bloody fiasco. Brexit has blighted Britain, but the failure to avoid or end the war quickly has utterly devastated Ukraine. The long-term damage done by Brexit can, perhaps, be repaired in the future, either by Britain rejoining the EU (or, maybe, parts of it, for instance, Scotland) or by other creative maneuvers. And then, the EU itself is in so much trouble that its future is not entirely clear either. But the damage done in Ukraine is largely irreversible: the dead won’t come alive again, many of those displaced abroad won’t return, and the country is very likely to lose substantial territories forever.

Yet, even while the conflict had already escalated to a larger scale, most of this could still have been avoided as of spring 2022. Then, between February and April, Russia and Ukraine almost reached a viable peace deal. By the time, these negotiations peaked in Istanbul, “a very real compromise,” was on the table, according to Aleksandr Chalyi: “We were very close in the middle of April, in the end of April, to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement.” But then, things fell apart, quickly and – at least until now – irreversibly: A peace agreement that could have been remembered as exemplarily rapid and effective was discarded. A war that could have entered history as bad and unnecessary but, ultimately, short and, comparatively, small was left to grow into the worst conflagration in Europe since World War II (yes, worse by far, already, then the Wars of Yugoslav Secession of the 1990s).

BoJo played a role in this dreadful failure. He was not powerful enough, to be fair, to cause it on his own. In essence, he served – with enthusiasm – as a messenger boy for the US and its collective West. But that does not change the fact that he took it upon himself, of his own free will, to use his considerable skills of charm and flattery (A little more Churchill bombast, Sir?) to help persuade Vladimir Zelensky, the hapless president of Ukraine, to abandon the negotiations with the nearly finished deal and, instead, keep fighting. This has long and realistically been claimed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and by now been confirmed by David Arakhamia, a key member of the Ukrainian negotiating team (as well as a top Zelensky aide). Even a recent Foreign Affairs article on these negotiations, while trying hard to spin away from these embarrassing facts, could not help but confirm them.

The Foreign Affairs authors, Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko, are right, though, about the fact that the Ukrainian side did not have to listen to Johnson or the West in general. Zelensky, in particular, had what we now call “agency.” He could and should have put his country first, especially once he had seen two things: that Russia was not bluffing and that, at the same time, it was also ready for a reasonable compromise. In that sense, peace failed in the spring of 2022 because two histrionic egomaniacs met in the wrong situation and at the wrong time. One of them is about to publish his self-serving memoirs; the other is still busy avoiding picking up again where he left things hanging in Istanbul.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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US forces Russia to close visa centers – ambassador 22 Jun, 2024 08:13

The Americans are also trying to make Russia’s diplomats “hide behind embassy walls,” but this won’t happen, Anatoly Antonov has said.

US authorities are closing both Russian visa center offices in the country and will deprive Russia’s diplomats of tax exemption, Moscow’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, has revealed.

The Russia Visa Application Center operates in Washington and New York, assisting those looking to get permits to travel to Russia with preparing the necessary papers and submitting them to the Russian consular offices.

"The Americans notified us that the visa center is closing,” Antonov told the journalists on Saturday. The move by Washington creates a “serious extra burden for us given the fact that our consulate general offices in Houston and New York are drained of blood” due to expulsions of Russian diplomats from the US, he stressed.

The decision to revoke tax exemption status from Russian embassy workers is another “petty, nasty attack” by Washington, the ambassador said. The cards are common practice and handed out to diplomats in all countries, he explained.

US officials didn’t provide any reasoning for their actions, Antonov noted. As for a possible response by Moscow, he said that “there is no need to make any rash moves. We need to consider what the specific consequences of what we will have to do.”

According to the ambassador, the Americans “are trying to break [Russia], trying to change [its] foreign policy, trying to force our diplomats to hide behind the walls of the embassy, to stop communicating and working,” he said.

"This will not happen. Until the last diplomat, while we remain here, we will keep performing our duties,” the ambassador assured.

Relations between Moscow and Washington have steadily deteriorated over the past decade, with the administration of former US President Barack Obama shutting down several Russian consulates after accusing Moscow of “interference” in the 2016 presidential election. The diplomatic row has only escalated since Moscow launched its military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, prompting a wave of Western sanctions and several tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats by both countries.

Last month, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov warned that Moscow may well downgrade its diplomatic ties with Washington if the West “continues on the path of escalation” in terms of supporting Ukraine or making hostile economic moves.

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