Ukrainian commandos trained by Britain are planning a "series of terrorist attacks" in the Donbass to use as cover for a false flag operation, an official from the unrecognised, so-called, Donetsk People's Republic has alleged.
Local militia spokesman Eduard Basurin said on Wednesday that Kiev will stage a provocation to accuse Russia of invading the country. He added that he believed neo-Nazi 'Right Sector' militants were also operating in the area. However, he provided no evidence to back up the allegations.
Basurin, however, insisted that he had "reliable information" suggesting six groups of saboteurs from the 8th Special Purpose Regiment of Ukrainian Armed Forces (VSU) had been trained by specialists from the UK and deployed near the line of contact. Their targets would allegedly include gas and water supply as well as power stations.
The purpose of their supposed provocation is to accuse Russia of 'false flag' attacks to prepare "aggression" against Ukraine, and to create panic among the local residents, he added.
Moreover, members of the 'Right Sector' were also spotted in the vicinity of Mariupol, a city close to the contact line, according to Basurin. The group was accompanied by a psychological operations detachment and a crew from a Ukrainian TV channel, and is operating in the village of Pavlopol, controlled by the 36th Brigade of the Ukrainian army, he alleged.
Much of the Donbass region has been outside Kiev's control since the Western-backed 2014 Maidan saw the democratically-elected Ukrainian government overthrown. Fighters loyal to the self-declared 'People's Republics' in Donetsk and Lugansk have been clashing with Kiev's forces in an effort to hold the territory since then.
In December, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu alleged that American private military companies had begun shipping "unidentified chemical components" to towns in the Donbass as a potential precursor to an attack. Shoigu provided no further details or evidence of the purported plot.
Last week, Washington accused Russia of planning a 'false flag' attack in the separatist-controlled territory as a pretext for invading Ukraine. The allegation echoed claims of the Ukrainian government and came after CIA Director William Burns visited Kiev. Russia has rejected it as baseless, and called US insinuations of a planned invasion "fake news."
"Russia is not going to attack anyone," the Russian embassy in Washington said on Tuesday evening, commenting on statements coming from the State Department and the Pentagon that an invasion could "come at any moment" and even from Belarus. The embassy said:
"We urge you to stop the hysterics and not to put tension around the problem of Donbass. And the main thing is not to push the 'hot heads' in Kiev to new provocations."If the US actually wanted to solve the internal Ukrainian conflict, it would stop sending weapons to Kiev and urge the government there honor the Minsk Agreements, designed to stem the fighting.
Reader Comments
Yeah just a little tid bit for you to swallow, taken right off the table and given to Sott readers LOL.....
Their man on the inside sure is well informed.
Strategic private planning available in realtime without an App....
Can you dig it!?
The attempts by D.C. barbarians to push us into war over Ukraine has been met with grass roots condemnation. See The Ukraine Crisis is More Fake than Saddam Hussein's WMD.
Their antics, much like their medical Faucism and mandates, are now facing new degrees of resistance and activation from the population. People have had enough, from either party. Just look at the support for the trucker convoys! It's only going to grow.
Now is the time to end the uniparty of neo-cons and neo-libs, and run the barbarians out of power. Now is the time to restore the American system and reclaim our sovereignty. As Lincoln would have said, first the barbarians, and then the British.
Think it's impossible? If you did, you won't anymore.
Call your Senators & Representatives (202-224-3121) and tell them that you don't want to go to war for Hunter Biden's and Hillary Clinton's Neo-Nazis!
The President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, while at the Verkhovna Rada, signed a decree "On strengthening the defense capacity of the state and the attractiveness of military service", which includes, among other things, an increase in the number of forces Ukrainian armies of 100,000 people.
This was announced by Zelensky from the Rada tribune at the opening of the seventh session, underlining that this decree is not related to the "coming war", but is the beginning of the country's transition to a professional army.
“This decree is not because the war is coming soon. This I tell everyone. This decree is so that soon and in the future there will be peace, peace in Ukraine ”, said the head of the square.
After that, he publicly signed the decree.
"This decree provides for an increase in the monetary support of the military to a level of not less than three minimum wages, the transition of Ukraine to the principles of a professional army, an increase in the duration of contracts, the development of a concept for providing housing for military personnel, veterans, their families, a career development system for officers, as well as an increase in the next three years, the strength of the Ukrainian Armed Forces per 100,000 people of the professional army, the creation of 20 additional brigades of the Ukrainian Armed Forces ", Zelensky listed the main points of the document.
In his speech to parliamentarians, he also stated that Ukraine can only count on its own strength: apart from the Ukrainians themselves, no one will defend it.
“In everything, you should always rely only on your own strength. Our country has many friends. And we are still grateful to him. But friends have their homeland. Do not forget. So no one will build Ukraine in our place, will not protect Ukraine, will not preserve, will not uplift Ukraine. We have to rely only on ourselves, "Zelensky told deputies.
Furthermore, anticipating the meetings with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who will arrive in Ukraine today, the Ukrainian president announced "a new format of cooperation with Poland and the United Kingdom".
As reported by Russkaya Vesna, it was previously known of the plans of the British authorities to create a "tripartite alliance".
It is noteworthy that at the end of his speech to the Rada, Zelensky briefly touched on the topic of the Minsk agreements, suggesting that there are great disagreements with the West about them. In this regard, he said that "you cannot please everyone" and the Ukrainian authorities "should think about what our descendants will say about us" .
My answer?
100,000 ??? Knowing that people are running away from such a GULAG, of course, the "descendants" will think they were just a mass of neo-Nazi Zombies .
DONETSK, February 1 - RIA Novosti. Ukrainian security forces bombed the territory of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic 61 times in January, a spokesman for the DPR at the joint center for monitoring and coordination of the ceasefire regime told reporters Tuesday.Previously, the department reported that in December 2021, security forces violated the ceasefire 25 times. One civilian was killed and another was injured.
"From January 1 to January 31, 61 cases of violation of the ceasefire regime by the armed formations of Ukraine were recorded. One civilian was injured. Two infrastructures and four residential buildings were damaged," said the representative. of the department.
In the summer of 2020, further ceasefire measures came into effect in Donbass. They imply a complete ban on firing, placing weapons in and near populated areas, offensive operations and reconnaissance and sabotage. In addition, they provide for disciplinary responsibility for violating the ceasefire regime. Ceasefire orders, containing measures to maintain it, must remain in effect until the conflict is fully resolved.In April 2014, the Ukrainian authorities launched a military operation against the self-proclaimed DPR and LPR, which declared independence after a coup in Kiev in February 2014.
According to the latest UN figures, some 13,000 people are victims of the conflict.
The question of the solution of the situation in Donbass is discussed, inter alia, at the meetings of the contact group. However, even after the ceasefire agreements, the skirmishes continue, in the DPR they announced the bombing of residential areas by Ukrainian heavy artillery. Moscow has repeatedly asserted that Kiev does not respect the Minsk agreements and drag on negotiations to resolve the conflict.The Russian Foreign Ministry noted that Kiev has sent half of the entire Ukrainian Armed Forces personnel to the Donbass. Moscow has expressed concern over the transfer of military equipment from NATO countries to Russian borders and the increase in the number of Western instructors in the Donbass. Western countries continue to provide military support to Ukraine, including by supplying weapons used in the Donbas.
[Link]
In addition to Russia, there are other countries that are ready to provide Donbass with military-technical assistance , said Eduard Basurin, deputy head of the people's militia department of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic.
Earlier it was reported that the Ukrainian general staff had completed the development of a plan for an offensive operation in the Donbass. The People's Militia Department of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic noted that it reserves the right to seek military assistance, including from the Russian Federation, in case of further arms supplies to Ukraine.
"Today I have already declared that we will be forced to turn to our friends who will help us in a military and technical-military way to stop the aggression of Ukraine against the inhabitants of Donbass ... I think the first thing is what there is to say is that (help) it will be. Nothing specific, but the very fact that our friends will declare, it is not only the Russian Federation ... I would like to emphasize that there are other countries that are ready to provide us with military-technical assistance " , Basurin told the TV channel "Russia 1".
At the same time, Basurin did not directly name countries that could provide military-technical assistance to the Donbass, noting that there are many unrecognized states that "have a positive attitude towards when people fight for their independence".
According to him, provocations are being prepared in the Donbass at the expense of the United States and Great Britain. He noted that Kiev already has a targeted plan to invade Donbass territory. "In life, a great war is brewing against the inhabitants of the Donbass," added Basurin.The Russian Foreign Ministry noted that Kiev has sent half of the entire Ukrainian Armed Forces personnel to the Donbass. Moscow has expressed concern over the transfer of military equipment from NATO countries to Russian borders and the increase in the number of Western instructors in the Donbass. Western countries continue to provide military support to Ukraine, including by supplying weapons used in the Donbass.
[Link]
An event in the energy sector of truly historic proportions took place in Ukraine.
Energoatom of the National Nuclear Energy Generating Company (NAEK) reported that after scheduled preventive maintenance and nuclear refueling, the fourth power unit of the Rovno nuclear power plant was restarted. Thus, for the first time in our neighbor's history, all fifteen nuclear power plants operate simultaneously in four stations.Of course, this event within the confines of the Ukrainian media camp is presented in exceptionally bold and victorious tones. It is reported that Energoatom now generates more than half of all electricity in the country and in the current autumn-winter period, its share could grow to a staggering seventy percent. The ordinary Ukrainian secular, ignorant of the details and stunned by such figures, is persistently convinced that the atomic record will finally help to get rid of dependence on the Belarusian and Russian electricity supply, which is why scandals regularly occur in the Verkhovna Rada, turning into fighting and searches for Kremlin agents.
But first, to make the alignment on the Ukrainian nuclear table more understandable, let's clarify the main facts. As practice shows, the general reader does not know much about this sector of the Ukrainian energy sector, and in everyday life they often use not facts, but conjectures.Our neighbor inherited four nuclear power plants from the Soviet Union: Zaporozhye, Rivne, South Ukraine and Khmelnitsky. It is their composition that includes a dozen and a half electric units, in which Soviet technical solutions are used as a power plant. It should be made clear here that Ukraine's reactor fleet, when compared with other former socialist bloc countries, is quite new. Energoatom has only two VVER-440 reactors in its budget, which were launched in the early 80s of the last century at the Rovno nuclear power plant, after which all Ukrainian specialized facilities were technically armed only with reliable and much more modern VVER-1000.We make a reservation that the first Ukrainian nuclear power plant was Chernobyl, where in the late 1970s uranium-graphite water cooled channel reactors (RBMK-1000) were launched, but after the accident in the spring of 1986, the their construction was reduced. Another, more recent, RBMK-1500 was later used at the Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania, but in 2009 Vilnius voluntarily decided to shut down the station, which was shut down. Now in the nuclear power plants of Kursk and Smolensk, reactors of the type RBMK-1000, similar to that of Chernobyl, are used. But due to accidents that occurred over the years of operation and design features, the further deployment of reactors of this type is extremely doubtful.
The installed capacity of nuclear power plants is 13 gigawatts. The country's energy profile for the past year reports that nuclear generation accounts for 27 percent of the energy balance. Attentive readers will immediately notice a discrepancy with Energoatom's claims about the current production quotaS.
Separately, it is necessary to dwell on the issue of nuclear fuel supplies, because the greatest confusion is observed here.Until 2011, the Russian company TVEL was the sole supplier of fuel assemblies (FA) for Ukrainian nuclear power plants. However, already in 2008, during the reign of Viktor Yushchenko, who came to power following the first Maidan, Ukraine started the so-called diversification of nuclear fuel supplies by signing an agreement with the American Westinghouse. In 2011, the first American fuel assemblies were installed in one of the reactors of the nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine, but only a year later, due to failures, their operation was stopped. Ukrainian energy engineers, crushed under a rapidly spreading policy in the West, cried, injected themselves, but continued to look for ways to refuse Russian supplies.And they found something that not even Westinghouse's failure could prevent. The latter granted Kiev a license for the production of nuclear fuel and, although production in Ukraine was never established, the share of American fuel has risen to 46%. At the moment, the fuel groups produced in Sweden are installed in six Ukrainian reactors. At this point, US nuclear expansion stalled and Ukraine in 2020, without too much publicity, extended its contract with Russian TVEL until 2025.Recently, there have been reports of Kiev's desire to purchase two abandoned reactors from the Americans, left over from one of the previous projects, and that Ukraine is counting on the construction of five new electrical units by Westinghouse itself. But considering that each reactor will cost the Ukrainian budget five billion dollars, that is, 25 billion dollars in total, which represents a quarter of Ukraine's external debt, such projects can only be considered speculative.And now that we understand the basic numbers, we'll go back to our neighbor's energy profile again.
He reports that the installed capacity of the entire Ukrainian energy sector is 55 gigawatts, of which 52 per cent are thermal power plants running on fossil fuels, followed by the aforementioned atom, and closes the first three thermal power plants running on natural gas with a share very modest by just eight percent.
In 2020, the entire Ukrainian energy sector produced 149 terawatt hours of electricity, while if we look at the statistics of energy consumption per capita, we will see the most natural collapse. If in 1990 60 thousand kilowatt hours a year were spent on the complete supply of the needs of every resident of Ukraine (household needs, cooking, heating and transport), in 2019 this figure - only 21 thousand. You need to understand that here we are talking about the activities of the entire state energy complex, working for the benefit of each resident, and not personal expenses. That is, in thirty years, industrial and domestic energy consumption has decreased by a factor of three, which indicates, firstly, the closure of energy-intensive industries as the main consumers and, secondly, a sharp decline in population. That is, in Ukraine, 42 million people currently do not live, as official statistics say.
This is also demonstrated by the data relating to the production of electricity. In 1990, the energy sector of the Ukrainian SSR independently generated 297 and in 2019 only 142 terawatt hours. At the same time, Ukraine has not shown a sharp increase in, for example, exports of electricity abroad in recent years, that is, we have before us precisely the capacities that have fallen out of uselessness.To understand how in all this mathematics the nuclear sector has suddenly occupied half of the production, it is enough to look at the share of thermal power plants and remember the autumn of last year, which in Ukraine has become a continuous series of scandals. In September, it was clear that the country had extremely low coal reserves and Ukraine entered the heating season without its main resource: coal-fired power and heat plants. The Kiev official tried to buy coal in Kazakhstan, accused Moscow of cutting off supplies, urgently imported coal by sea, but this still did not save the situation. In many large cities, January was characterized by many hours of continuous blackouts, such as, for example, in Odessa.
The Ukrainian government maintains a stubborn silence, but the simplest logic suggests that if nuclear production in the budget structure has doubled dramatically, it means that thermal energy has collapsed in exactly the same proportion. That is, this is not growth, this is a manipulation with numbers tied to a deliberately low base.The issue of heat production remains completely uncovered: the production of heat for heating residential buildings and industrial plants. Given the lack of coal-based heat production and the growing share of the atom, one can speak of a massive forced transfer of the Ukrainian population to electric heating. Winters in conditional Chernigov, of course, are not as severe as in Krasnoyarsk, but given the lack of an alternative choice of electricity as a source of heating and runaway energy prices, bills are guaranteed to surprise the citizens of Nezalezhnaya.At the end of our conversation, we will reassure everyone who is concerned that a second Chernobyl will happen in our neighborhood in connection with the events described.The supervision of all Ukrainian nuclear power plants is carried out by the IAEA, whose representatives are extremely difficult to accuse of political bias and neglect of safety issues for temporary economic reasons. If Ukrainian nuclear scientists don't come up with some completely insane tricks (which, let's be objective, they have never seen before), then nothing serious can happen.But we advise Ukrainian citizens not to rejoice in the records, but to stock up on candles. The local nuclear power plants are, in fact, the only trump card to save the Kiev authorities, and are thrown into battle at the limit of their capabilities not for a technological breakthrough, but for lack of hope. Considering that nuclear power plants are the last frontier of Ukrainian energy defense, in the event of a serious failure, for example of a transformer in one of the stations, the surrounding areas will experience a prolonged and cool winter twilight. Light bulbs and electric heaters without power in the socket do not work.