The polarization of opinions on Russian President Vladimir Putin couldn't be more extreme. To the 'official' West, he is an authoritarian dictator, the next Hitler, a greedy power-mad ex-intelligence menace to all the values the Western world holds dear. To everyone else, he's nothing of the sort. After all, what are Western 'values', really? As I wrote in my last article for SOTT (Where's my cookie?! Anti-government protests in Ukraine ignored by US and EU), they're pretty obvious: "crippling, suicidal debt, no economic or foreign policy to speak of, the torture and murder of civilians, brazen lies, insane rhetoric, and brutal psychopathy." Freedom and democracy are meaningless words, or at least, their true meanings are totally opposite to what most people think.

By his words and his actions, Putin has shown that he not only sees through the democratic doublespeak; he's also doing things in such a way as to avoid the worst aspects of Western freedom and democracy. You know, by supporting things like diplomacy over aggression, international law over unilateral invasions and blatant interference in the affairs of other nations, dialogue and cooperation over threats, demands, and subjugation. This is unacceptable to the rulers of the West, who amount to little more than an entrenched, hereditary, oligarchic ruling class that has thought it has the right to rule the world by virtue of the size of its military and the size of its checkbook.

So it's understandable that anyone who hasn't made a habit of imbibing the sweet sickness of the mainstream media, and the honeyed words of two-faced politicians in the West, sees Putin in a totally different light, putting their hopes in him to do what the whole world wants. For example, here's what people on the streets of Italy expressed during Putin's recent visit:

The US is obstructing international efforts to eradicate biological weapons, seeking to involve other nations covertly in research on weaponized diseases, Moscow charged. America's record of handling bioweapons is poor.

The accusations of mishandling biological weapons voiced by the Russian Foreign Ministry refer to a recent report that the US military shipped live anthrax by mistake. Last week, the Pentagon admitted sending samples of the highly dangerous disease to at least 51 labs in 17 US states and three foreign countries.

The delivery "posed a high risk of outbreak that threatened not only the US population, but also other countries, including Canada and Australia.Of great concern is the shipment of bacteria to a US military facility in a third country, the Osan Air Base in South Korea," the Russian ministry said in a statement.

It added that an anthrax outbreak incident occurred in 2001, which also involved a US military lab.

What's the connection between the G7 summit in Germany, President Putin's visit to Italy, the Bilderberg club meeting in Austria, and the TTIP - the US-EU free trade deal - negotiations in Washington?

We start at the G7 in the Bavarian Alps - rather G1 with an added bunch of "junior partners" - as US President Barack Obama gloated about his neo-con induced feat; regiment the EU to soon extend sanctions on Russia even as the austerity-ravaged EU is arguably hurting even more than Russia.

Predictably, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande caved in - even after being forced by realpolitik to talk to Russia and jointly carve the Minsk-2 agreement.

The hypocrisy-meter in the Bavarian Alps had already exploded with a bang right at the pre-dinner speech by EU Council President Donald Tusk, former Prime Minister of Poland and certified Russophobe/warmonger: "All of us would have preferred to have Russia round the G7 table. But our group is not only a group (that shares) political or economic interests, but first of all this is a community of values. And that is why Russia is not among us."

So this was all about civilized "values" against "Russian aggression."

G7 Joint Communique - yet another exercise in make-believe

I won't divulge into the full text (which you can read @ https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/06/08/g-7-leaders-declaration), but here is the "foreign policy" segment, dealing with the Ukraine: (stress added)

Finding a Solution to the Conflict in Ukraine

We reiterate our condemnation of the illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula by the Russian Federation and reaffirm our policy of its non-recognition.

We reiterate our full support for the efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict in eastern Ukraine, particularly in the framework of the Normandy format and the Trilateral Contact Group. We welcome the OSCE's key role in finding a peaceful solution. We call on all sides to fully implement the Minsk agreements including the Package of Measures for their implementation signed on 12 February 2015 in Minsk, through the established Trilateral Contact Group and the four working groups. We are concerned by the recent increase in fighting along the line of contact; we renew our call to all sides to fully respect and implement the ceasefire and withdraw heavy weapons. We recall that the duration of sanctions should be clearly linked to Russia's complete implementation of the Minsk agreements and respect for Ukraine's sovereignty. They can be rolled back when Russia meets these commitments. However, we also stand ready to take further restrictive measures in order to increase cost on Russia should its actions so require. We expect Russia to stop trans-border support of separatist forces and to use its considerable influence over the separatists to meet their Minsk commitments in full.

We commend and support the steps the Ukrainian government is taking to implement comprehensive structural reforms and urge the Ukrainian leadership to decisively continue the necessary fundamental transformation in line with IMF and EU commitments. We reaffirm our commitment to working together with the international financial institutions and other partners to provide financial and technical support as Ukraine moves forward with its transformation. We ask the G7 Ambassadors in Kiev to establish a Ukraine support group. Its task will be to advance Ukraine´s economic reform process through coordinated advice and assistance.

Seven Ukrainian servicemen were killed as their car ran into their own anti-tank mine in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region on Monday. The accident occurred at about 14:00, local time, near the settlement of Krasnogorovka. Ukrainian servicemen reaped the fruits of their own actions - total mining of the territory.

Four fuel tanks caught on fire at an oil depot in the Kiev region, five people were injured, Ukraine's Emergencies Ministry reports. The oil depot is located in the village of Kryachky, about 40 kilometers southwest of Ukraine's capital, Kiev last night. Homes located around the depot were engulfed in flames, also. A local humanitarian catastrophe has been arisen in the region.

It might have been the most influential single sentence of that era: "In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies." And it originated in an 8,000 word telegram - yes, in those days, unbelievably enough, there was no email, no Internet, no Snapchat, no Facebook - sent back to Washington in February 1946 by George F. Kennan, the U.S. chargé d'affaires in Moscow, at a moment when the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was just gaining traction.

The next year, a reworked version of Kennan's "Long Telegram" with that sentence would be published as "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in the prestigious magazine Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym "Mr. X" (though it was common knowledge in Washington who had written it). From that moment on, "containment" of what, until the Sino-Soviet split, was called the Soviet bloc, would be Washington's signature foreign and military policy of the era. The idea was to ring the Soviet Union and China with bases and then militarily, economically, and diplomatically hem in a gaggle of communist states from Hungary and Czechoslovakia in Eastern Europe to North Korea on the Pacific and from Siberia south to the Central Asian SSRs of the Soviet Union. In other words, much of the Eurasian land mass.

And then, when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed and disappeared from the face of the Earth in 1991, that was that. Along with the former Communist world, containment as policy was dispatched to the dustbin of history - or was it? Strangely enough, as historian and TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy points out today, if you look at Washington's military bases (which, if anything, were expanded in the post-Soviet era), its conflicts, and the focus of its foreign policy, American attempts to "contain" the heartlands of Eurasia, especially Russia and China, have never ended. Given the passage of almost a quarter of a century since the Cold War era, the map of those garrisons and the conflicts that go with them still looks eerily familiar.

And here's an even stranger thing, as McCoy again makes clear: the U.S. was not the first imperial power to put its energy into "containing" Eurasia. In 1945, when World War II ended with Great Britain and its empire hollowed out and in a state of exhaustion, the U.S. inherited a no-name version of "containment" policy from the British before Kennan even thought to use the term. It's odd to realize that "containment" as imperial policy has a history that is now, in a sense, more than two centuries old. It's strange enough, in fact, that McCoy turns his attention to the subject to help make sense of the edgy U.S.-China relationship for the rest of this century. ~ Tom

Eight or nine EU countries speak against the anti-Russia sanctions and their prolongation, a senior Russian lawmaker said.

Around a third of European countries oppose expanding and prolonging anti-Russia sanctions imposed by the West over the Ukrainian crisis, Alexei Pushkov, head of the foreign affairs committee in the lower house of Russia's parliament, told reporters Thursday.

"We know that around a third, 8 or 9 European states, speak against the expansion of sanctions against Russia, and also against their prolongation," Pushkov said, highlighting Austria, Hungary, Italy, Greece and Slovakia.

NATO wanted to annex Russia's Kaliningrad on Thursday morning! According to a message posted on the Lithuanian armed forces website in what was described by Lithuanian officials as a hacker attack. An investigation has been launched.

The information on the army's page alleges that 'Sword-Stroke' - the NATO military drills going on in Poland and the Baltic - are actually a preparation for the annexation of Kaliningrad, Russia's westernmost city, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania, which separates it from mainland Russia.

Lithuanian defense ministry spokesman, Victoria Cemenite, confirmed to the Delfi news agency that a hack has in fact occurred, and that the false information has since been removed from the website.

Two topics we've deemed critically important to a thorough understanding of both global finance and the shifting geopolitical landscape are the death of the petrodollar and the idea of yuan hegemony.

Last November, in "How The Petrodollar Quietly Died And No One Noticed," we said the following about the slow motion demise of the system that has served to perpetuate decades of dollar dominance:

Two years ago, in hushed tones at first, then ever louder, the financial world began discussing that which shall never be discussed in polite company - the end of the system that according to many has framed and facilitated the US Dollar's reserve currency status: the Petrodollar, or the world in which oil export countries would recycle the dollars they received in exchange for their oil exports, by purchasing more USD-denominated assets, boosting the financial strength of the reserve currency, leading to even higher asset prices and even more USD-denominated purchases, and so forth, in a virtuous (especially if one held US-denominated assets and printed US currency) loop.

The main thrust for this shift away from the USD, if primarily in the non-mainstream media, was that with Russia and China, as well as the rest of the BRIC nations, increasingly seeking to distance themselves from the US-led, "developed world" status quo spearheaded by the IMF, global trade would increasingly take place through bilateral arrangements which bypass the (Petro)dollar entirely.

And sure enough, this has certainly been taking place, as first Russia and China, together with Iran, and ever more developing nations, have transacted among each other, bypassing the USD entirely, instead engaging in bilateral trade arrangements.

China on Wednesday launched a cargo train service connecting its far western Xinjiang region with Moscow, Chinese media reported.

The railway authorities in Xinjiang said the additional cargo train service linking the region's capital Urumqi with Moscow would contribute to the economic development of the autonomous region, which is seen as a "core area" of the Silk Road economic belt, Xinhua news agency reported.

Since March 2014, Xinjiang has opened cargo train service to Kazakhstan, Georgia, Iran, Turkey and also Chelyabinsk in Russia.

By the second half of the year, more than three cargo trains will run between Xinjiang and the destinations in Russia and also central and western Asia per week.

The trains will be able to transport $8.1 billion of cargo a year, local officials said.

The first freight train service linking a Chinese province to neighboring Russia was launched when a cargo train from the northeast Heilongjiang Province set off on its maiden journey to central Russia on March 1, 2015.