Heading towards World War III?

Zelensky wants to exchange Ukrainian soldiers for fertilizer

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky will allow Russia to resume sending ammonia exports through his country, thus easing a global fertilizer shortage, only if Moscow releases Ukrainian prisoners of war, he told Reuters on Friday.

“I am against supplying ammonia from the Russian Federation through our territory. I would only do it in exchange for our prisoners,” Zelensky told the outlet. “This is what I offered the UN.”

The Kremlin quickly dismissed the offer. “Are people and ammonia the same thing?” spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded, as reported by the news agency TASS.

While Zelensky has claimed Ukraine took hundreds of Russian troops as prisoners during its recent counter-offensive in Kharkov, he has acknowledged Russia holds more Ukrainian POWs.

The UN had suggested Russian fertilizer producer Uralchem pump ammonia gas by pipeline to the Ukrainian border, where it could be purchased by Trammo, a US-based commodities trader.

The pipeline can pump as many as 2.5 million tons of ammonia per year from the Volga region to the port of Yuzhny on the Black Sea. However, the port has been closed since the start of Russia’s military offensive in February.

Ammonia is a vital ingredient in nitrate fertilizer, and a shortage in supply threatens to compound the global food crisis, itself already exacerbated by the conflict as much of the world’s wheat comes from Ukraine and Russia.

As many as 70% of European ammonia plants have reduced or halted production in recent months due to record-high energy prices, according to the Russian fertilizer industry.

Russia, Ukraine and Turkey signed a UN-brokered deal in July to resume grain exports from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports to alleviate the shortage. However, Russia’s representative to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, recently blamed Western sanctions for holding up shipments of both grain and fertilizer.

He accused EU officials of hypocrisy for blocking Russian shipments to Africa, Asia and Latin America while allowing the critical resources to reach the bloc’s own shores. Of the 136 ships that have left Ukrainian ports carrying grain, just six went to the poorest countries suffering food crises.

www.rt.com/russia/562973-zelensky-ammonia-pows-fertilizer-shortage

Ukraine once again endangering nuclear plant

Ukraine has again shelled the area around the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant in an effort to undermine the facility’s safety, Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed on Saturday.

The ministry said that “the Kiev regime has resumed provocations to create the threat of a man-made disaster” at the plant. Within the last 24 hours, the Russian military registered two Ukrainian artillery strikes, one on a suburban settlement and the other on a thermal substation in the vicinity of the facility, which has been under Russian control since March.

“In total, 15 artillery shells were fired from the Nikopol area of the Dnepropetrovsk region. The artillery units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were suppressed by retaliatory fire,” the statement read. According to the Defense Ministry, the radiation situation at the plant remains normal.

Moscow has repeatedly accused Ukrainian forces of shelling the grounds of the plant, warning that the attacks could trigger a disaster that would eclipse the Chernobyl incident. Earlier this week, the head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolay Patrushev, accused Washington of supplying Kiev with crucial intelligence to designate targets for shelling around the facility.

“The consequences of these provocations could be very catastrophic not only for the majority of the population of Ukraine and Russia but also for Europe, and in terms of their scale they could surpass the tragedies that occurred at the nuclear power plants in Chernobyl and Fukushima,” he said at the time.

Ukraine has blamed Russia for the incidents, alleging that Moscow has been carrying out the strikes to frame Ukraine, even though its military eventually admitted to targeting the area.

Following the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) mission that visited the Zaporozhye plant in early September, the UN’s nuclear watchdog adopted a resolution demanding that Russia “immediately cease all actions against and at” the plant. Russian officials, however, criticized the document, saying that it failed to mention Ukraine’s attacks on the station. Blasting the resolution as “anti-Russian,” Moscow also accused Western nations of “supporting and shielding” Kiev in “every possible way.”

www.rt.com/russia/563001-ukraine-shelling-zaporozhye-nuclear

Putin reiterated the goals of Russia’s military operation and blasted the Western elite’s attitude

Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to the media on Friday following the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Earlier, he met with the leaders of China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Mongolia.

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Destroying Russia and “disintegrating” it into a number of petty states has always been a top priority for the collective West, the Russian president said. Ukraine, in its modern state, has been selected to become an “anti-Russian enclave” and the main tool to achieve such goals, Putin believes.
“The fact that they’ve always strived for the disintegration of our country is certain. It is only regrettable that at some point they decided to use Ukraine to achieve such goals,” Putin said. “In order to prevent such developments, we have launched the special military operation.”

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“The special military operation is not a warning of some sort, but a special military operation. We’re witnessing attempts to stage terror attacks, attempts to damage our civilian infrastructure. We respond to this with restraint, but only for the time being,” Putin stated, warning that the approach may change in the future.
“Quite recently, the Russian armed forces delivered a couple of sensitive strikes, let’s say they were a warning. If the situation continues to develop in such fashion, the response will be more serious,” he added.

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“The main goal is the liberation of the entire territory of Donbass. This work continues, despite the attempted counterattacks by the Ukrainian army,” Putin said, adding that it was too early to draw any conclusions from the ongoing counteroffensive by Kiev’s forces, and one should wait to see “how it ends.”

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Russia was ready to agree to the security guarantees for Ukraine proposed during the Istanbul talks back in March, the Russian president explained. However, the negotiations were scuppered by Kiev.
“The troops were withdrawn from Kiev in order to create conditions for the reaching of this deal. Instead of inking it, the Kiev authorities immediately abandoned all agreements. They announced that they would not seek any deals with Russia, but would seek victory on the battlefield. Well, let them,” Putin said.
The prospects of further negotiations or personal talks between him and his Ukrainian counterpart Vladimir Zelensky remain uncertain, Putin admitted. “First of all, they should agree [to hold the talks]. But they refuse. Zelensky declared that… he was not ready and not willing to talk with Russia. Well, if he’s not ready – there’s no need [for that],” Putin said.

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The collective West still remains trapped in the colonial-era mindset, the Russian president said, suggesting that Western countries simply cannot give up their habit of living at the expense of someone else.
“These are former colonial powers, but they still live in the paradigm of colonial philosophy. They are accustomed to living at the expense of others. And they still cannot get rid of this paradigm in their practical daily politics,” Putin stated.

www.rt.com/russia/562965-ukraine-conflict-energy-crisis

Leaked documents expose Ukrainian attempts to destabilize Russia and draw NATO into a full-scale war with Moscow

And as Ukrainian documents now at the disposal of the media show, Moscow apparently had something to defend itself from when it launched its offensive in Ukraine. Over the past eight years, Kiev’s military and special services have been preparing numerous operations aimed at undermining Russia’s international ties, and internal peace itself.

In June, a hacker Telegram channel dubbed ‘Beregini’ published the action plan of the Information and Psychological Operations Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces (SSO). According to official information, the tasks of this unit include working with the population of foreign countries, creating agent networks, and infiltrating special services and military organizations to conduct espionage and destroy people who pose a threat to the Ukrainian government (including in other countries), as well as preparing coups and the overthrow of regimes.

The SSO plan was prepared back in 2017, and this is just one of many similar secret documents created by Ukrainian spooks. It was just one that became public. But the presence of these plans and the real political and military steps taken by Ukraine, which coincide with SSO programs to a surprising extent, indicate that KI’ve has been actively carrying out anti-Russian activities since at least 2014, when a Western-backed coup took place in the country.

www.rt.com/russia/562803-best-defense-is-good-offence

telegra.ph/Funduk-Zaslon-Bolotnaya-ploshchad-06-09

A staged PR event?

The Ukrainian forces that attacked Kharkiv were in effect a NATO army with the full support of Western intelligence and tactics. Because Kharkiv was held by police-type forces rather than the Russian army, it was clearly done for a PR event to raise morale and to get the West to send more money under the theory that Putin is on the run.

www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/politics/putin-october

A quick interview that explains why Zelensky has no incentive to seek peace:

disk.yandex.com/i/idyU7IzSTwAZOA

Ukraine fumes over ‘unnatural borders’ claim

The Ukrainian Embassy in Romania has accused the EU country's former foreign minister, Andrei Marga, of undermining the “basic principles of international law,” after he claimed that the borders of modern Ukraine are “unnatural,” and suggested that Kiev should cede parts of its territory to neighboring states.

The embassy voiced its “regret” that a former top official of a “democratic European state” would make a statement that is not just “unacceptable under any circumstances,” but also represents a “particularly blatant deviation at a time when Ukraine heroically defends its independence and the security of Europe.”

The former Romanian diplomat made the controversial remark earlier on Saturday at the Alba Transylvania book fair, where he presented his new book ‘The Fate of Democracy’ and suggested that leading world powers should come together and agree on a new “security structure” in Europe and worldwide.

“We are in a very special situation here, and I take this with all responsibility, Ukraine exists in unnatural borders. It should cede Transcarpathia to Hungary, Galicia to Poland, Bukovina to Romania, Donbass and Crimea to Russia. These are the territories of other countries,” he said, listing the regions that were incorporated into then-Soviet Ukraine by the Communists, but which he thinks should be relinquished.

Ukraine’s ‘unnatural’ borders should be redrawn – EU country’s ex-foreign ministerREAD MORE: Ukraine’s ‘unnatural’ borders should be redrawn – EU country’s ex-foreign minister
Over the course of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Kiev has repeatedly vowed to regain all territories it held following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

After the 2014 Maidan coup, Ukraine lost Crimea, which ended up re-unifying with Russia after a referendum. In February 2022, the Kremlin recognized two Donbass republics as independent states, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions special status within the Ukrainian state.

Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked, even as Former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko had admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.” Moscow has since demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc.

www.rt.com/russia/563024-ukraine-romania-unnatural-borders