The OSCE has revealed the 12-point roadmap behind the September 5 truce signed in Minsk. It says that Ukraine must adopt a new law, allowing for a special status for Lugansk and Donetsk regions, and hold early elections there.

The document, titled 'Protocol on the results of consultations of the Trilateral Contact Group' and signed in Minsk on September 5, outlines what needs to be done for the ceasefire to stay in place.

"To decentralize power, including through the adoption by Ukraine of law 'on provisional procedure for local government in parts of Donetsk and Lugansk regions (law on special status),'" states one of the provisions in the document.

Another point emphasizes that "early local elections" are to be held in light of the special status of both regions. The early elections must be held in accordance with the same proposed law, it says.

There are so many rumors and opinions about the latest ceasefire for Novorussia agreed between the Novorussian leaders and the Junta reps that I have decided to make a small survey of the issues in the format of a Q&A/FAQ. I will write up a real analysis next week. I also will use this opportunity to explain a few thing about what my own personal position is. So here goes:

Q: Do you support or oppose the latest peaceplan?

A: Neither. First, I still have not seen the 14 points actually agreed upon and, most importantly, I don't believe that this plan will hold.

Q: Why not?

A: Because it is opposed by all the following groups: the USA, NATO, the Ukie Nazis, most of the Novorussian field commanders and a large segment of the Russian nationalist ideologues in Russia. Furthermore, Poroshenko is so weak that he probably cannot impose his will on others. Finally, the Ukies and their western supporters have so reneged on every agreement they signed/

Q: So you think that this agreement is irrelevent?

A: No, not at all. For one thing, it's perfect timing took a lot of wind out of the sails of the anti-Russian crowd at the NATO summit which, after all, did not result in anything more than hot air and empty threats.

Q: Are you saying that this is a victory for Russia?

A: Hardly, but it has been an effective way to temporarily defuse a potentially dangerous situation. Also, the very fact that neither the EU or NATO or the US were even present in Minsk is a very powerful symbol of the fact that the "indispensable nation" and it instruments of colonial domination are not indispensable after all.

Q: But will this ceasefire not allow the Junta Repression Force (JRF) to regroup?
A: Yes, but that is not that relevant because of the size of its strategic depth the Junta can to reorganize and regroup anyway. Most the JRF units close to the front are so beat up that "regrouping" will not help very much. At best ("best" for the JRF of course), this ceasefire will turn a hasty retreat into a more or less organized withdrawal followed by a much needed break. But the key thing to always remember is this: wars are won by willpower, by moral strength, by a fighting spirit. Unlike the Russians, the Ukies have had their fighting spirit completely broken by the NAF. Check out the picture circulating on the RuNet which I have posted above. It shows a wounded Russian solider (from the 08.08.08 iirc) war against Georgia and a Ukrainian solider captured in Novorussia (who had been made famous by his militaristic and neo-Nazis videos posted on the Ukie social media). This montage shows something crucial: just compare the determined and undefeated expression of the severely wounded Russia private with the totally broken and terrified expression of the Ukrainian "paratrooper". The difference here is not "Russian" vs "Ukrainian" in an ethnic sense (there is no such thing as an "ethnic Russian" or an "ethnic Ukrainian" - they are all ethnically mixed), but the difference in the fighting spirit of the Russian solider and the Ukrainian one. And no amount of US/NATO aid can change this: unlike the Ukie, the Russian knows what he is fighting for and he is determined.

Official statements from the Russian government indicate that the president and foreign minister continue to rely on the good will of "our Western partners" to work out a reasonable diplomatic solution to the trouble in Ukraine caused by Washington. Not only is there no evidence of this good will in Western capitals, the hostile measures against Russia are increasing. Moreover, hostile measures are on the rise even though their main effect is to disadvantage Europe.

For example, the socialist president of France has followed Washington's orders and refused to deliver a ship that it owes to Russia under contract. The news reports are so incompetent that they do not say whether Russia has paid for the ship or whether payment was awaiting completion. If Russia has not already paid, then the failure to deliver will harm whoever financed the construction of the ship. If Russia has paid, then the idiot French president has placed France in violation of a contract and under international law France is subject to heavy financial penalties.

It is not clear how this hurts Russia. It is Russia's strategic nuclear force that the West has to fear, not a helicopter carrier. What Hollande has taught Russia is not to do business with France or any country in NATO.

Russia should promptly take the contract violation to court. Either France will be sanctioned with penalties that could exceed the value of the contract or the West will prove that in its hands international law is meaningless. If I were Russia, I would give up a helicopter ship in order to establish this point.

The Justice Department released two decade-old memos Friday night, offering the fullest public airing to date of the Bush administration's legal justification for the warrantless wiretapping of Americans' phone calls and e-mails - a program that began in secret after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The broad outlines of the argument - that the president has inherent constitutional power to monitor Americans' communications without a warrant in a time of war - were known, but the sweep of the reasoning becomes even clearer in the memos written by then-Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, who was head of President George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel.

"We conclude only that when the nation has been thrust into an armed conflict by a foreign attack on the United States and the president determines in his role as commander in chief . . . that it is essential for defense against a further foreign attack to use the [wiretapping] capabilities of the [National Security Agency] within the United States, he has inherent constitutional authority" to order warrantless wiretapping - "an authority that Congress cannot curtail," Goldsmith wrote in a redacted 108-page memo dated May 6, 2004.

The labor force participation rate has declined from 66.5% in 2007 prior to the last downturn to 62.7% today. This decline in the participation rate is difficult to reconcile with the alleged economic recovery that began in June 2009 and supposedly continues today. Normally a recovery from recession results in a rise in the labor force participation rate.

The Obama regime, economists, and the financial presstitutes have explained this decline in the participation rate as the result of retirements by the baby boomers, those 55 and older. In this five to six minute video, John Titus shows that in actual fact the government's own employment data show that baby boomers have been entering the work force at record rates and are responsible for raising the labor force participation rate above where it would otherwise be. http://www.tubechop.com/watch/3544087

It is not retirees who are pushing down the participation rate, but those in the 16-19 age group whose participation rate has fallen by 10.4%, those in the 22-14 age group whose participation rate has fallen by 5.4%, and those in the 24-54 age group whose participation rate is down 2.5%.

As the NATO Summit wraps up in Wales, the Alliance has adopted its "Readiness Action Plan", which is aimed at responding to the "risks and threats at NATO's borders and further afield", including "the challenges posed by Russia and their strategic implications".


An independent expert in international law Alexander Mercouris however explains that "it is absolutely ridiculous to say that Russia poses any kind of military threat to the NATO alliance at all".

"If we just look at the actual level of military spending, the various NATO countries between them spend around 57 % of the total defense spend that is spent around the world on matters and military matters," he told Radio VR. "Russia spends 5%. And Russia has already made it clear many times that it has no aggressive intentions against any state in NATO and no capability to pose such a threat".

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin's decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia's orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU's expansion eastward and the West's backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine -- beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 -- were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's democratically elected and pro-Russian president -- which he rightly labeled a "coup" -- was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.


Putin's pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia's backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.


But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant -- and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia's border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.

Denmark's decision to join NATO's anti-missile defense system in Europe will not improve the Danish-Russian relations, but is likely to have a reverse effect, Danish retired Major General Karsten Jakob Moeller said in an ITAR-TASS interview on Friday.

On August 21, the Danish parliament passed a decision allowing Denmark to join NATO's anti-missile defense system in Europe. Denmark will contribute one or several frigates equipped with modern radars. Many Danish politicians believe that Denmark's decision was prompted by the Ukraine crisis.


Moeller, who is one of Denmark's leading experts on Russia, said it had been wrong to force Ukraine to decide in favor or against the association agreement with the European Union. "Ukraine was a deeply split country already at that time. The inability by Brussels to understand Ukraine's history had catastrophic consequences," Moeller said, adding the decision to exclude Russia from EU-Ukraine negotiations had almost the same effect.

"Any well-informed person knows about close trade and economic ties, let alone cultural relations between the two countries. Russia has lawful interests in Ukraine that should be seriously taken into account," the Danish expert said.

He hopes a peaceful solution to the crisis will be found soon. He has written many times that Russia is not a problem but part of a solution to the Ukraine crisis.

The cease-fire in Eastern Ukraine is no done deal. The last truce lasted just 10 days and became "unilateral" because pro-Russian rebels never abided by it. But assuming this one does hold, it will give Kiev, Moscow, pro-Russian separatist representatives and OSCE mediators some space to negotiate a peace.


Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's representatives came to the talks in Minsk with a proverbial knife to their throats. Poroshenko just witnessed the defeat of his armed forces and militias, outgunned and beaten back this past week as pro-Russian rebels - reinforced by Russian heavy weapons and commandos - took key towns and opened a new front. Today, separatists claim to have entered Mariupol, Ukraine's strategic sea port. And after more than five months of exhaustive fighting - in which at least 2,600 people have died, according to UN figures - a real cease-fire may be prize enough for the battered Ukrainian leadership to offer up a compromise.


The rebels, on the other hand, would he holding their fire at a time when they effectively control the major cities of Donetsk and Lugansk, as well as much of a land corridor to the Azov Sea. In order words, their "New Russia," as they now call it, is already a viable, breakaway entity. A fact on the ground.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, can well proclaim his seven-point peace plan is proof of his good intentions in Ukraine. He knows he's already attained his immediate military goal: "to let Poroshenko know that the war is unwinnable for him," as prominent Russian analyst Fyodor Lukyanov recently told NBC News.

Russia will 'certainly' react to new European Union's sanctions, if they are implemented, Russia's Foreign Ministry said Saturday.

"Concerning the new list of sanctions on behalf of the EU, if they are implemented, the reaction will certainly follow on our side," the ministry said in a statement.

The EU is expected to impose a new round of sectoral sanctions against Russia on Monday, a number of European politicians told RIA Novosti late Friday. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso also said a week ago that the EU was ready to expand the list of limitations imposed on Russia over the Ukrainian crisis.


The EU's announcement of additional sanctions signals its direct support of Kiev's 'War Party," which is dissatisfied with the result of Friday's Minsk meeting of the Contact Group on Ukraine, the Russian ministry said.

"Basically, the announcement of the upcoming expansion of the anti-Russian sanctions became the EU's first reaction to the meeting of the Contact Group on the resolution of the situation Ukraine that took place in Minsk the previous day and all the agreement that had been reached there, which allow to set the lives of all Ukrainians on a peaceful path," the ministry said in a statement.

"The European Union has demonstrated that its authorities are still lost in a political fantasy, and is practically sending the signal of direct support of the 'War Party' in Kiev, which is not satisfied with the outcomes of the Minsk meeting," the ministry said.