The websites of Ukraine's government, foreign ministry and state security service were down on Wednesday in what the government said was the start of another massive denial of service (DDoS) attack that began at around 4 p.m. (1400 GMT).

Ukrainian authorities said this week they had seen online warnings that hackers were preparing to launch major attacks on government agencies, banks and the defence sector.

Ukraine has suffered a string of cyberattacks that Kyiv has blamed on Russia. Moscow, which is caught up in a mounting confrontation with the West over Ukraine, has denied any involvement.

"At about 4 pm, another mass DDoS attack on our state began. We have relevant data from a number of banks," said Mykhailo Fedorov, Minister of Digital Transformation, adding that the parliament website was also hit. He did not mention which banks were affected and the central bank could not immediately be reached for comment.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed the accusation that he is plotting to restore his country to the borders of the Russian Empire, insisting that Moscow recognizes the independence of post-Soviet states.

In an exchange held with his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev on Tuesday, Putin assured that, while he had anticipated Western backlash over his decision to formally recognize the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, the return of the Russian Empire was not on the cards.

"I want to say right away: we see and foresaw speculation on this topic that Russia is going to restore the empire within the same imperial borders. This is absolutely not true," the Russian president explained to Aliyev.

One of the most challenging obstacles working against ordinary citizens in the West is the self-satisfying presumption that Western institutions and philosophies are inherently immune from the rise of totalitarianism. This is an understandable blind spot. Their identities have been forged, to various degrees, in the great traditions of Enlightenment notions of liberty, free speech, and natural rights. Surely the victors over communism, fascism, and Nazism cannot then fall victim to the madness of those same philosophies collapsing their systems from within. This "Us/Them" self-delusion has kept the citizenry from recognizing tyranny inside its gates.

It is good for people to take pride in the achievements and histories of their nation-states. It is natural for the inhabitants of countries founded in fights for freedom to assume that the costs of obtaining that freedom are behind them and not ahead. It is easy to self-define the victors of WWII as cultures standing firmly opposed to authoritarianism, to believe that nations not bound by the Iron Curtain would never choose to build their own and to assume that millions of graves and monuments attesting to the great human sacrifices over the last century in the defense of freedom are sufficient safeguards against future generations ever detouring from the blessings of human liberty. But all of these good and natural and easy mental prisms become mental prisons when they keep us from seeing what is happening in our own backyards.

The growing tyranny in the West has not happened overnight. It did not suddenly arrive at our doorsteps with the Chinese Flu. It has been a nightmare decades in the making. The difference today is that previously slumbering citizens once sublimely content in the normal humdrum of their lives are waking up to realize that the enemies from our past have returned with a vengeance. Free speech is treated as dangerous. Western governments, corporations, and social media platforms engage in rampant censorship. Race and sexual identity are used as the defining attributes of a person to the exclusion of talent, character, and achievement. Teachers' unions openly demand the right to indoctrinate children according to the interests of the State. Parents are threatened for believing that their children belong to them. The criminal justice system is used as a place to punish political opponents and to protect political friends. Religious expression is outlawed. Leftists' "secularized religion" is imposed. Freedom is disparaged as "right-wing." Coercion has replaced consent. Victimhood has replaced virtue. Conformity has replaced individuality. "Correct" thinking has replaced freethinking. "Social justice" has replaced real justice. And the protection of government has become more important than the protection of human rights.

For the newly awakened, there is a tendency to see all this carnage for the first time with fresh eyes and become overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the rot. The corruption, criminality, and chaos have infiltrated everything once held dear, and the future seems hopelessly lost. That hopelessness, however, is not based in reality but rather the "Us/Them" self-delusion that tyranny could not happen here. It's not easy to accept that the great sacrifices of the past made in the struggle for human freedom have once again been squandered by a new generation of despots. It is a necessary first step, though, before the righteous can throw themselves into the fight and get back to work. And once people come to terms with the fact that tyranny not only could happen here but that it is happening here, then they will realize that the struggle has only really begun in earnest.

The US used to produce experts on Soviet and Russian affairs like Jack Matlock. Today we get the likes of Michael McFaul. The decline of popular interest in Russian-area studies, combined with intellectual laziness on the part of the average US citizen, is to blame.

On February 21, Russia's President Vladmir Putin gave what will most likely go down in history as one of the most important speeches in modern history. It was a brutally honest example of how current events are shaped by the forces of history. What is important about this speech isn't so much the content-that is now part of the historical record-but rather how it was absorbed and interpreted by those who watched it.

As an American imbued with more than a little first-hand insight into Russian affairs, I have been struck by the inability of the American people to comprehend the historical foundation of Putin's speech. It is not my place to either attack or defend the details put forward by the Russian president. I would hope, however, that my fellow citizens would be able to engage in an informed, intelligent, and rational discussion about the speech, given the immense geopolitical ramifications attached to it.

Speaking with the UN special envoy for Syria on Wednesday, Russia's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, has lamented what he described as the UN secretary-general bowing to Western pressure over the situation in Ukraine. Antonio Guterres has accused Russia of "perverting the concept of peacekeeping," after President Vladimir Putin recognized the two breakaway Donbass republics as sovereign states.

Lavrov told Geir Pedersen, that, much to Moscow's regret, it has turned out that the UN secretary-general "has yielded to Western pressure, and, in recent days, made several remarks regarding the situation in eastern Ukraine that are unbecoming to his status and fall outside his remit under the UN charter."

Lavrov went on to say that Moscow had analyzed statements made by Guterres and his predecessors and never before had a UN secretary-general made such remarks about any other previous armed conflict. Russia has notified the UN secretary-general of its assessment.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday for condemning Vladimir Putin and saying he stands against authoritarianism while he commits human rights violations on peaceful protesters in his own country.

"Just a day after declaring himself King of Canada, Justin Trudeau announced that he is going to sanction Russia in the name of 'protecting democracy' in Ukraine, which is not a democracy," Tucker Carlson said. "Joe Biden has also announced sanctions to save democracy."

"What is going on here?" Carlson asked. "Can anyone speak in an honest declarative sentence?"

As all eyes were trained on the aggressive police sweep of the Ottawa trucker convoy this week, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau's administration was quietly moving to implement a sweeping expansion of surveillance power at the federal level.

The Trudeau government's financial war against the truckers has been covered at length. But one underreported aspect of this broader assault on Canadian civil liberties is the effort to bring crowdfunding and payment service providers — two of the most prominent routes for financial transactions on the Internet — under the permanent control of a centralized government authority.

In a February 14 news conference, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said that the government was using the Emergencies Act to broaden "the scope of Canada's anti-money-laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use." That broadened power requires all forms of digital transactions, including cryptocurrencies, to be reported to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada. (I.e., "Fintrac"). "As of today, all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with Fintrac, and they must report large and suspicious transactions to Fintrac," Freeland said. She justified the move as a way to "mitigate the risk" of "illicit funds" and "increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by Fintrac and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement." Trudeau, standing behind Freeland at the press conference, nodded his head in agreement.

Freeland said the trucker convoy, which had assembled to protest coronavirus restrictions, had "highlighted the fact" that digital assets and funding mechanisms "weren't captured" by the Canadian government's pre-existing surveillance powers. As a result, she said, "the government will also bring forward legislation to provide these authorities to FinTrac on a permanent basis."

It seems like Russia has entered a new era of its foreign policy - a 'constructive destruction', let's call it, of the previous model of relations with the West. Parts of this new way of thinking have been seen over the last 15 years - starting with Vladimir Putin's famous Munich speech in 2007 - but much is only just becoming clear now. At the same time, lackluster efforts to integrate into the western system, while maintaining a doggedly defensive attitude, has remained the general trend in Russia's politics and rhetoric.

Constructive destruction is not aggressive. Russia maintains it isn't going to attack anyone or blow them up. It simply doesn't need to. The outside world provides Russia with more and more geopolitical opportunities for medium-term development as it is. With one big exception. NATO's expansion and formal or informal inclusion of Ukraine poses a risk to the country's security that Moscow simply won't accept.

For now, the West is on course to a slow but inevitable decay, both in terms of internal and external affairs and even the economy. And this is precisely why it has started this new Cold War after almost five hundred years of domination in world politics, the economy, and culture. Especially after its decisive victory in the 1990s to mid-2000s. I believe [1] it will most likely lose, stepping down as the global leader and becoming a more reasonable partner. And not a moment too soon: Russia will need to balance relations with a friendly, but increasingly more powerful China.

Russia's continued request for Kiev to finally implement the Minsk Accords might be the last chance that the rest of Ukraine has to remain unified, albeit not as a 'unitary' state since it seems almost inevitable that only a 'confederal solution' can keep this communist zombie construct from further collapsing, and that's only if the Donbass Republics agree to this implied proposal (which can't be taken for granted) and similar such rights are afforded to Ukraine's other indigenous minorities like the Hungarians, Poles, Romanians, and the rest of the Russians living on its territory.

Empires have existed for millennia but they've almost always been "natural" ones in the sense of one people conquering (and hopefully subsequently assimilating, integrating, and treating fairly) another. For right or for wrong, for better or for worse, this is how International Relations have developed up until only comparatively recently. That's not to imply any blanket judgement on such systems but simply to remind everyone that they exist. This is crucial to keep in mind when analyzing President Putin's decision to recognize the independence of Ukraine's breakaway Donbass Republics. His nearly hour-long speech can be heard in full in English here and read on the official Kremlin website here, though the latter hasn't yet released the entire text at the time of this article's publication.

History will register that the birth of the baby twins - Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics - only a few hours before 2/22/22, was simultaneous to the birth of the real, 21st century multipolar world.

As my columns have stressed for a few years now, Vladimir Putin has been carefully nurturing his inner Sun Tzu. And now it's all in the open: "Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt."

The thunderbolt was months in the process of being meticulously polished. To paraphrase Lenin, who "created Ukraine" (copyright Putin), we did live many decades in only these past few days. It all started with the detailed demands of security guarantees sent to the Americans, which Moscow knew would be rejected. Then there was the Russia-China joint statement at the start of the Winter Olympics - which codifies not only the strategic partnership but also the key tenets of the multipolar world.

The culmination was a stunning, nearly one hour-long address to the nation by Putin shortly after the Russian Security Council live session deliberating on the request for independence by the DPR and the LPR (here is a condensed version.)

A few hours later, at an emergency UN Security Council meeting, Russian Permanent Representative Vasily Nebenzya precisely outlined why the recognition of the baby twins does not bury the Minsk agreements.

The baby twins actually declared their independence in May 2014. In 2015 they signed the Minsk agreements as one of the interested parties. Theoretically they could even be back within Ukraine if Kiev would ever decide to respect the agreements, which will never happen because the U.S. has vetoed it since 2015. Moreover, the people of Donbass do not want to be subjected to a regime harboring neo-Nazis.

As Nebenzya outlined, "I would like to remind you that at the time of the conclusion of the Minsk agreements, the LPR and DPR had already declared independence. The fact that Russia today recognized it does not change the composition of the parties to the Minsk agreements, since Russia is not one (...) Another thing is that the Minsk agreements have long been openly sabotaged by Ukraine under the auspices of our Western colleagues. Now we see that many colleagues want to sign that the Minsk agreements are dead. But this is not the case (...) We are still open to diplomacy, but we do not intend to allow a new bloody massacre in the Donbass."

And here's the clincher, directly addressing imperial support for the killing of ethnic Russians in Donbass: "The main task of our decision [on recognizing independence] was to preserve and protect these lives. This is more important than all your threats."

There you go: Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a concept invented by the Americans to launch wars, used by Russia for preventing one.

That certified nullity, German chancellor Scholz, deriding Putin's characterization of a genocide in Donbass as "laughable", was a decisive factor in the birth of the baby wins. Putin, in his address to the nation, especially took time to detail the Odessa massacre: "We cannot but shudder when we remember about the situation in Odessa, when people were burned alive (...) And those criminals who did this, they are not punished (...) But we know their names, and we will do everything to punish them (...) and to bring them to justice."