By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The sudden change of US warfighting plans in defence of Israel, disclosed on Saturday by General Lloyd Austin, the US Defense Secretary, reveals the trap which Russia, China, and Iran have opened, and the desperate measures the US has taken as it falls in.

Austin announced  that he has “redirected the movement of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group to the Central Command area of responsibility. This carrier strike group is in addition to the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, which is currently operating in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. It will further increase our force posture and strengthen our capabilities and ability to respond to a range of contingencies.”

“I have also activated the deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery as well as additional Patriot battalions to locations throughout the region to increase force protection for U.S. forces.”

The Eisenhower’s new destination has not been announced. US military media are claiming it will be the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea, or both.

The Central Command (CENTCOM) area of responsibility (AOR) is officially the Arab and Iranian territories east of the Mediterranean shoreline, focusing on the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, and targeting Iran, Russia, and China.  

 “In a small change that could have major meaning,” Pentagon officials are telling their press,    “the U.S. is changing its plans for the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group. The change could place the strike group in waters where Chinese warships have been active in recent months. Last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the Eisenhower strike group would head to the eastern Mediterranean instead of Europe as had been planned. Sailing in the eastern Mediterranean would have put the strike group to the west of Israel. But that plan changed after a week in which U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq came under fire from Iran-backed militias, and a U.S. Navy ship in the Red Sea downed missiles launched from Yemen…On Saturday, Austin said in a statement the strike group will now go to the ‘Central Command area of responsibility.’ Central Command covers a vast amount of Middle East territory, including the Persian Gulf and Red Sea.”

The purpose of “these steps,” Austin said, is to “bolster regional deterrence efforts, increase force protection for U.S. forces in the region, and assist in the defense of Israel.” The priority order is a switch. Israel comes last – Iran, Russia and China come first.

For the first time too,  the US command has acknowledged what President Vladimir Putin meant when he said in Beijing last Wednesday, October 18,  that he has deployed  MiG-31s armed with Kinzhal missiles within range of the Eisenhower.

Austin added for Sunday television viewers in the US:    “If any group or any country is looking to widen this conflict and take advantage of this very unfortunate situation that we see, our advice is: don’t. We maintain the right to defend ourselves, and we won’t hesitate to take the appropriate action.”

The US doctrine of self-defence while attacking states like Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran,  Yemen, and Somalia isn’t new. In September 1969, when Libyan Army Captain Muammar Qaddafi took control of his country, he carefully skirted the US Air Force (USAF) base at Wheelus (Mellaha), which was stocking nuclear weapons at the time; Qaddafi then squeezed the US forces out of Wheelus over twelve months, but the USAF evacuated its nuclear weapons swiftly.   

Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon don’t have time; the Israelis even less.

But Austin’s rush to change the sailing orders for the Eisenhower and fly THAADs and Patriots to US bases in the Arab territories reveals he’s short of time too. This is because the entire portfolio of US air defence systems is being defeated. The Russian Kinzhal has defeated the US Patriot batteries around Kiev; the Hamas swarms of drones and rockets defeated Israel’s Iron Dome on October 7. THAAD has been tested in combat once, against a Houthi missile, rocket and drone attack against Abu Dhabi targets in January 2022. “Several were intercepted, a few of them [weren’t].”

The USS Carney’s firing against Houthi missiles and drones in the Red Sea has exposed how vulnerable that southern line of attack against Israel would be if the Houthis try swarming instead of testing their ordnance, as they did against the Carney. Originally, in the Pentagon  version of Friday, October 19,   three Houthi missiles and several drones were intercepted on their way to Israel. A day later, CNN revised the story by reporting “a US official familiar with the situation” to say there had been a “nine-hour duel” and four cruise missiles and fifteen drones came down.  

Tongue-biting and stammering are clinical symptoms of the mind which knows what to say but has difficulty getting it out; this usually causes loss of self-esteem.  When General Austin is speaking like this, it signals the mind doesn’t know what to say, and is desperate for self-esteem.

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by Editor - Monday, October 23rd, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Preamble
1.  Since 1943 the US and its European allies, including Germany (Olaf Scholz’s government, not Adolf Hitler’s), have aimed to liquidate the secular nationalist Arab leadership capable of co-existence with the West and a state for the Jewish people.

2.  In Palestine Hamas has studied seventy-five years of lessons on the impossibility of coordinating Arab state war in the defence of the Palestine part of the two-state solution.

3. For more than a year, therefore, Hamas has prepared in well-kept secret an offensive against Israel to achieve five objectives – the first to demonstrate how inferior the Israeli military is, how vulnerable, how incompetent their intelligence on the Arab world. This has been achieved by the initial attack of October 7.

4. The second Hamas objective has been to demonstrate the Israeli plan of ethnic cleansing of Gaza,  genocide against the Arabs, and incorporation of all Israeli-occupied territories in a single theocratic Zionist state —  Quod erat demonstrandum. The third objective is to hold out against the expected Israeli counterattack for long enough to activate the Hezbollah forces on the northern Lebanon front;  Syrian and Iranian forces on the eastern Golan front; and the West Bank Palestinians, including the Jordanian Palestinians; the latter’s targets will be US air and armoured land force bases in Jordan. So far, so good.

5. The final Hamas objectives are to compel the vacillating sheikhdoms to resist US pressure; limit oil and gas supplies to the enemy markets; prevent regional land base and air transit rights being activated in support of Israel — so far, so good. And lastly, the fifth objective, to engage the friendly nuclear powers – Russia, China – to deter, and if necessary combat US forces in the region and Israel’s threat to fire its nuclear weapons.

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by Editor - Saturday, October 21st, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It comes to this now, again.  

Call it a repeat of the SS ultimatum to the Warsaw Ghetto of April 1943 — evacuate and we’ll give you a small chance of surviving, or stay and we’ll kill you for certain.   

Following the embrace of President Joseph Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the  US has endorsed the Israeli plan to force the evacuation of the Palestinians from Gaza City to designated camps in the south. There Israeli forces will allow convoys of humanitarian aid to enter from Egypt and unload after Israeli forces have inspected the cargoes. The new southern zone will be cordoned off by an Israeli ring of fire, and everything north of the line, including Gaza City will be destroyed, hospitals included.  

This formula has been pressed on Egypt, the other Arab states, China, and Russia to accept by the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, a Portuguese government retiree, and his deputy for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, a British government retiree. They have emphasized there is no alternative to the destruction of Gaza, and its full absorption into the state of Israel. Reinforcing them, the US has cast its veto of all resolutions proposed in the UN Security Council (UNSC) by Russia, China and the Arab states to create humanitarian corridors under a ceasefire.

China is preparing a new UNSC resolution to face the US veto shortly, according to a statement by Zhang Jun during Wednesday’s UNSC debate in New York.  

In Beijing, President Vladimir Putin and President Xi Jinping discussed between themselves  what they plan to do jointly and publicly. “Over a cup of tea”, Putin told Russian reporters on Wednesday evening, “we talked for another hour and a half, maybe two hours, and discussed some very confidential issues face to face. It was a very productive and informative part of our meeting.”  “Informative” in Russian means they were unable to agree to make a public declaration of a Sino-Russian action plan.

Instead, Putin announced he is deploying supersonic Kinzhal missiles within range of the US naval and air forces positioned in the eastern Mediterranean and in Jordan. “They have upped and dragged two carrier task forces to the Mediterranean. I want to say – what I am going to say and inform you about is not a threat – that I have instructed the Russian Aerospace Forces to start patrolling the neutral zone over the Black Sea on the permanent basis. Our MiG-31 aircraft carry the Kinzhal systems that, as is common knowledge, have a range of over 1,000 kilometres and can reach speeds of up to Mach 9.”

Putin repeated: “This is not a threat. But we will perform visual control, and weapons-based control over what is happening in the Mediterranean Sea.” In Russian, “this is not a threat” means this is exactly what it is.

Said twice, Putin was telling the US, Israel, Guterres, and Griffiths to consult the map of Russian missile strike ranges; and also to remember that the last US Navy aircraft carrier to be sunk by hostile fire was the USS Bismarck Sea which in February 1945 could not defend against waves of Japanese kamikaze aircraft.  

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by Editor - Thursday, October 19th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The first Moscow newspaper analysis has appeared of Russia’s current position towards Israel and Palestine. It supports President Vladimir Putin’s public endorsement of the two-state solution between the Israelis and Palestinians.  

Entitled “Why Russia remains neutral in the conflict in the Middle East”, Vzglyad, the Moscow security strategy publication, posted the piece late on Friday evening, October 13.   It added an opinion poll for its readers with a single question, “should Russia recognise Hamas as a terrorist organisation?”

The new analysis and conclusion are in contrast to Vzglyad’s call six months ago for Russia to reorient its position towards the Arab side.  This is also a marked change of editorial line in the prevailing silence in Moscow: there has been no Security Council meeting since October 3;  no State Duma debate; no national opinion polling of public attitudes.   

The Arab-Israeli conflict is the one in which Israel is destroying the remnants of the Palestine state territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, and replaces that two-state solution with a single state; that is the Israeli one in which about 7 million Jews restrict about 2 million Arabs in bantustans administered according to an apartheid regime.   

The rules of this Jewish-based order have been fixed in Israel’s constitutional amendment enacted in 2018 as the “Basic Law: Israel – the Nation State of the Jewish People”,    and ratified by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2021.   This adopts the single- state solution expanding territorially by resettlement of the Palestinian territories “as a national value”; and in parallel, combating international opposition to the process by Israeli state operations to “preserve the cultural, historical and religious heritage of the Jewish People among Jews in the Diaspora.”  

By equating Jewish ethnicity and religious faith with nationality of the Israeli state, this constitution eliminates Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim rights with the formula, “the exercise of the right to national self-determination  in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People.” The corollary is that any Palestinian exercise of the right to self-determination on the expanding Jewish national territory is illegal, anti-Semitic, and terrorist. Internationally, it is the policy of Israel and its allies to make support for or discussion of Palestinian right to self-determination a thought and speech crime.

In Russian politics, this is the one international conflict on which President Vladimir Putin has said so much since the start of his term, and done so little – this has been to advocate the two-state solution in public while in private to impose a do-nothing,  say-catchword line on diplomats and military officials, and the state media.   

The gap between the Kremlin and the General Staff and Defense Ministry became visible in September 2018 after the Israel Air Force caused the shoot-down in Syria of a Russian Ilyushin-20M electronic reconnaissance aircraft, and the killing of all fifteen crewmen on board.  At that time the Russian military expressed a loss of confidence which had not been seen in public since President Boris Yeltsin countermanded orders for Russian military support of Serbia under NATO bombing between March and June 1999, and dismissed Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov on the US demand.   

In the present fighting between Palestinian, Arab and Israeli forces, the options for Russian action are numerous;  the public debate over what the options should be has been nugatory. There have been no national opinion polls;  no State Duma debate; no meeting of the Security Council since October 3.  

An initial statement by Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church was carefully balanced between Palestine and Israel, referring to the “military conflict” between the two sides, not a unilateral act of terrorism. “Peaceful coexistence” between the religious communities, Kirill said, has a “religious dimension” and requires a “just peace”.   In context, this was a tilt against Israel. The Church’s Department for External Church Relations issued the statement on October 7; there has been nothing since.

As a bellwether of Russian security analysts, Vzglyad’s decision to publish a report of expert assessments on “the advantages of Russia’s neutrality in the conflict in the Middle East” is unusual. Vzglyad’s publishing record shows what the new report is not. Strategically, Russia is being obliged by the US and NATO alliance to fight an all-forces war in Europe, and commit small forces in separate conflicts in Syria; Transdnistria and Moldova; Azerbaijan and Armenia; with the possibility of engagement in the Kosovo fight against Serbia.  There is no discussion in the Vzglyad outline of Russian capacities to conduct military operations on all battlefields simultaneously.

No military or intelligence source, to which Vzglyad has frequent and unique access, has been quoted. Privately, some of these sources suspect bargaining with the US in the Quartet format of the American “monopoly” of Israel for Russia’s “monopoly” of the Ukraine.  

Vzglyad’s writers and editors decline to answer questions.

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by Editor - Sunday, October 15th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The leading Russian opinion pollsters said today they are “not planning” to survey nationwide opinion towards the Palestinians, the Israelis, and the current fighting “in the near future”.

The blackout on public opinion comes as President Vladimir Putin gave his first direct interview on the conflict to the Arab press.  “The issue is complex, very sensitive,” Putin told the Jordan-based al-Ghad television channel. “But at the moment, of course, it is necessary to refrain from harsh statements and, no matter what, it is not necessary to offend the feelings of people who are involved in this conflict”, the Kremlin website recorded.  

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by Editor - Thursday, October 12th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In a time as testing for national liberation movements, and the ethics of armed struggle against race war, it is rare for the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature to publish a book as pretentious, wrong-headed, and silly as J.M. Coetzee’s The Pole.  But that’s exactly what the South African — one of just two from that country to have won the literature prize — has gone and done.

According to the Financial Times, it was the best book of the week which ended last Saturday, October 7. 

That was the day when the Palestinians achieved what the Arabs have been unable to do since the US and United Kingdom created the state of Israel on their way to annihilating every trace of secular nationalist leadership in Palestine and throughout the Arab world.

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by Editor - Thursday, October 12th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Until now Russia has never been so silent in the middle of a Middle Eastern war.

Russian opinion pollsters are reluctant to reveal how far the country’s public opinion is moving away from Israel towards the Palestinians and the anti-American Arab and Iranian side.

The silence from the Kremlin reveals how thoroughly the Israelis have burned their bridges to President Vladimir Putin, and how far, if silently, the Russian President has moved to the side of the General Staff in their assessment of Israel as hostile – on the enemy front with the Ukraine, the US and NATO. Putin’s pro-semitism, on display in his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for several years,   is now impossible in public, also in private.  

The Russian money which has  moved easily between Moscow and Tel Aviv and exercised its influence on Putin’s dealings with the Israelis,  is now fleeing back to Moscow with the oligarch, Mikhail Fridman.  About Fridman’s flight to safe haven in Russia, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has said: “Fridman is a citizen of the Russian Federation. He can come back, live here, leave here, just like any other citizen of the Russian Federation. There is nothing unusual.”  

About that, the Speaker of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, said something more unusual. “Anyone who left the country and engaged in reprehensible acts, celebrating gunfire on Russian territory and wishing victory to the Nazi Kiev regime, should realize they are not only unwelcome here, but if they do return, Magadan [the gulag] is waiting for them.”  

From a policy of equivalence and equivocation between Israel and the Arabs,  Russia has reached the policy of engagement on the Arab side. The driver has been the US war to defeat and destroy Russia through the Ukraine. The longer the new Palestinian war lasts, the more clearly Russian military and political strategy in the Middle East will pursue a new anti-American line. The consequences are as great as the defeat of the US and NATO which Russia is now inflicting in Europe, and of the western sanctions war in the global commodity markets and the trading lanes at sea.  

“We are witnessing a sharp deterioration of the situation in the Middle East,” Putin said in his public welcome for Iraq’s prime minister, Muhammed Shia al-Sudani, at the Kremlin on Tuesday morning. “I think that many will agree with me that this is a clear example of the United States’ failed policy in the Middle East, which tried to monopolise the settlement process, but, unfortunately, was not concerned with finding compromises acceptable to both sides, but, on the contrary, put forward its own ideas about how this should be done and put pressure on both sides, truly both — first on one, then on the other. But each time without considering the fundamental interests of the Palestinian people, bearing in mind, first of all, the need to implement the decision of the UN Security Council on the creation of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state.”

The Foreign Ministry followed Putin later in the afternoon, when the regular weekly briefing by Maria Zakharova was advanced several days early in order to report there have been direct negotiations with the leaders of Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, the Arab League, Iran, and Turkey – not with Israel.”*

“The US bet on the ‘freezing’ of the status quo and the promotion of ‘economic peace’, as well as the use of collective formats tailored for crisis response, has not justified itself,” Zakharova said. “Everyone sees the result…The statements of American politicians and public figures calling for ethnic cleansing in the region look monstrous. They openly call for one group of people [to be] near-doomed to complete destruction. Once again, aggression, violation of the rule of law, and the caveman’s hatred have emerged on the surface of the American declarations of good looks and human rights dogmas.”

In the first direct Russian warning to the  US Navy force in the Eastern Mediterranean,  Zakharova added: “So far we see that the situation is developing along the path of escalation. There is a great risk of involving third forces in this conflict. And this is fraught with long-term consequences for the region and for the world.”

Putin followed in the evening on the telephone with the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “The need for an immediate ceasefire by both sides and the resumption of the negotiation process was emphasised,” according to the Kremlin’s communiqué. “Mutual readiness to actively contribute to this was expressed…Separate issues of Russian-Turkish cooperation in various fields were also touched upon.”  

Erdogan’s press release was more revealing. He and Putin had “touched upon what initiatives can be taken to meet humanitarian needs in the region, as the Turkish president told Putin that targeting civilian settlements is worrying and Türkiye does not welcome such move.”   Erdogan’s twitter announcement adds: “President Erdoğan and President Putin of Russia also exchanged views on potential initiatives to meet humanitarian needs in the region.”  

This is a hint that Erdogan and Putin are contemplating a Turkish ship convoy of aid to Gaza, protected from Israeli attack by the Russian Navy from its Tartous base on the Syrian coast, and by the Russian Air Force from Hmeimim. This humanitarian operation by sea would aim at breaking the blockade of the coast by the Israelis, and running the gauntlet of the USS Gerald Ford and its squadron further offshore.  If this operation, a reminder of the Gaza Flotilla of 2010,   is in planning now – the open signals are warning Washington and the US Navy to expect it – then the confrontation, and the risk to the US and Israel of strategic defeat at sea, are unprecedented.

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by Editor - Wednesday, October 11th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

A US Sixth Fleet squadron (lead image, top left) is now steaming towards the eastern shore of the Mediterraean, following the unusual mission last Thursday by a US Navy P-8 aircraft monitoring the state of operational alert of the Russian naval fleet at Tartous, Syria (top right).*

Between August 18 and September 1, the Soviet aircraft carrier Moskva passed through the Turkish Straits and into the Mediterranean, accompanied by two guided-missile destroyers. Over the next seven days the Soviet Navy gathered almost seventy surface ships – with uncounted submarines – and deployed between the Greek island of Crete and the point on the Libyan coastline where the Libyan and Egyptian border ran into the sea. That was fifty-four years ago in 1969 (lead image, bottom).

Ostensibly, the Soviet operation was to screen an amphibious troop landing exercise of Soviet, Egyptian and Syrian troops. In fact, the naval screen protected Libyan Army Captain Muammar Qaddafi and a dozen junior officer associates when, on September 1, 1969,  they successfully toppled the regime of Libyan King Idris and ended US occupation and control of Libya through the Wheelus Air Force Base.

Can the Palestinian operation, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, which Hamas forces commenced on Saturday morning, continue for long enough to engage the Arab state militaries, the Iranian, US and Russian forces, to turn into a new war of the worlds, as the US and NATO war against Russia is on the Ukrainian battlefield? Will the US force, including the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford and its five cruiser and destroyer escorts,   screen Israel as it orders emergency resupply of US arms and ammunition? Will it attempt to blockade the Arab coast – Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Egypt – to prevent resupply convoys from Turkey or Iran aiding the Palestinians?

“This is the day of the greatest battle to end the last occupation and the last apartheid regime of earth,” the Hamas military commander, Mohammed Deif, has declared.    

Is this the final Israeli war of “mighty vengeance”, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared, forcing all Palestinians in Gaza “to leave now”, and in the phrase of the spokesman of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), “end the Gaza enclave”?

Is this the final Jewish solution to remove the Arabs from the territory according to the Basic Law, ratified by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2021,   which legalizes the takeover of Palestinian territory as a “natural” Jewish right. “The State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People,” the constitution enacted in 2018  by the Knesset declares, “in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.  The exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People”; and  “the State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and strengthening.”  

Is this race war — is it now the war of the worlds?

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by Editor - Sunday, October 8th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

The Polish government is dragging its feet, closing its eyes, and covering its mouth over prosecution of Ukrainian war crimes against Poles, Jews, and Russians during the German war of 1939 to 1945.  

Officials reveal they are reluctant to pursue the Canadian Ukrainian Yaroslav Hunka (lead image, right) for war crimes against Poles and Jews between 1943 and 1945, when Hunka was a volunteer in the German-led SS unit, the SS Waffen Grenadier Galician Division. After it was routed by the Red Army at the Battle of Brody in July 1944, Hunka and the survivors fled southwest where the German SS command re-formed them in a new unit called the SS 14^th Grenadier Division; later the 1^st Ukrainian Division,  which in May 1945 surrendered to the British Army.  But not before the Ukrainians had operated against the anti-German partisans of Slovakia, Yugoslavia, and Austria, where  investigations have identified more of their war crimes.*   

There is also more to the Polish government’s reluctance. It is a combination of misinformation, deliberate inaction, and camouflage to pacify Jewish communities in the US, Israel and Canada;  satisfy the Ukrainian diaspora of Canada led by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland (lead image, left); and mislead Polish voters who go to the polls in ten days’ time.

The four Polish officials responsible for this deceit are the former prime minister Beata Szydlo; the current minister of education Przemysław Czarnek; the chief archivist and spokesman for the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) Rafał Leśkiewicz, who is also an adviser to Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki; and Poland’s ambassador to Canada in Ottawa, Witold Dzielski.

Despite their public statements about the Hunka case, they are Russia haters, proponents of the war against Russia, and defenders of the Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky.

To obscure the contradiction between what the four have said publicly after Hunka was saluted by Zelensky and the Canadian parliament on September 22, and what they have done behind the scenes with senior officials in Warsaw, they are now covering up what Polish, British, Yugoslav, and Russian records already expose of Hunka’s wartime actions, along with those of the Galician units in which he participated.  

Cynically, the four Poles are proposing to request information and assistance from the two sources certain not to provide it,  the Canadian and Ukrainian governments; and make promises to the Polish media certain that journalists will ask no further questions.

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by Editor - Thursday, October 5th, 2023
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Canada’s parliament, the Canadian Armed Forces and Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) demonstrate what the other NATO allies keep trying to hide. They aim to reverse the outcome of World War II and resume Adolf Hitler’s operation to destroy Russia.

However, the fate of soldier Yaroslav Hunka of the SS Waffen Galician division,  whom the MPs, the chief of the Defence Staff, and the RCMP commissioner, saluted a few days ago for his exploits killing Jews and Poles in the Ternopil region of western Ukraine between 1943 and 1945,  now rests with two dossiers. One is in the archive of the Polish war crime prosecuting authority, the Institute of National Remembrance, in Warsaw. The second is the Soviet Army intelligence and KGB archives on the operations of Hunka’s unit before it fled a thousand kilometres southwest to Austria in order to surrender to the British Army.

“Beasts in human form with a red star on their foreheads,” Hunka has called the Russians whom he was afraid to fight.

His Jewish schoolmates in the Berezhany Gymnasium – 32 of them refugees from Poland – caused him to “wonder why they ran away in front of such a civilized Western people as the Germans.” They were all murdered by June 1943 when the town was declared Judenfrei.  Hunka remembered that time as “the happiest years of my life [dreaming] of the company of charming girls.”  

A year later, the Red Army launched its offensive against Lvov and in four weeks Hunka’s division was destroyed at Brody, 70 kilometres north of Hunka’s home.   Of 11,000 of the Galicians with Hunka in the battle of the Brody pocket, less than a third survived. He fled with the retreating Wehrmacht towards Graz, Austria. “It was now every man for himself”, a recent history of the Battle of Brody (lead image, July 14, 1944) has described the outcome for the Galicians.   

What Hunka had already done to the “charming” Jewish girls of Berezhany, and what he did when facing the Russians has been described by the Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons, in a script drafted by the Canadian Foreign Ministry, applauded by General Wayne Eyre, chief of the Defence Staff, as “heroic”.

With Hunka as their inspiration, the Canadian military wants to repeat this battle against “the beasts with a red star on their foreheads” — this time with the Canadian Jewish community for allies, one of them the Leader of the House of Commons, Karina Gould. But she and her fellow government ministers must now decide whether to block Polish and Russian requests for assistance in documenting Hunka’s war record from Canadian, British and US military intelligence files. If they refuse, they will be protecting Hunka from prosecution for the war crimes in the Ukraine they declare they know nothing about, in order to improve themselves on Hunka’s performance at Brody seventy-nine years ago.  

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by Editor - Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023
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