>Communist Bloc Military Updates: Moscow- Beijing Axis plans war games for 2009-2010 following Tajikistan exercise; Moldova drops NATO drill

>Breaking News: NATO Expels Two Russian Diplomats in Connection with Estonian Spy Scandal, One Diplomat Son of Russian Ambassador to European Union

Pictured here: Kazakh soldiers, taken from Kazakhstan Ministry of Defense website.

Eradicating the US nuclear arsenal remains a top priority for the Soviet strategists, while concurrently pursuing peaceful East-West convergence, with the threat of nuclear blackmail in the background.

The first round of US-Soviet consultations on a new strategic arms reduction treaty begins in Rome this Friday. First inked in 1991, at the “end” of the Cold War, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START 1) requires that each country reduce its nuclear warheads to 3,000 and its delivery vehicles to 1,600. START 1 expires on December 5, 2009. US Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller and Anatoly Antonov, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department for Security and Disarmament, are leading the negotiations on May 1. Igor Neverov, director of the Foreign Ministry’s North American Department, told Novosti on April 23 that the discussions will resume on May 7 in Washington, at a meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

During an official visit to Helsinki during the week of April 19, Russian “President” Dmitry Medvedev insisted that the new deal to replace START 1 must also cover delivery systems. The 2002 Moscow Treaty envisioned cuts of between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads by each country by December 2012. Medvedev and US President Barack Hussein Obama, a possible Soviet mole, agreed during their meeting at the Group of 20 summit earlier this month on an immediate start to talks on a new treaty.

Incidentally, veteran political operative Clinton lost the Democratic Party nomination last year to then US Senator Obama, but apparently secured a promise from her victorious rival to enter his cabinet. Not so coincidentally, too, Clinton’s hubby “Slick Willie,” the former US president and Arkansas governor, is a suspected KGB asset. There is therefore no good reason to believe that leftist-globalist Secretary of State Clinton has America’s sovereignty and national security at heart in negotiating a disarmament treaty with the Soviets.

It is surely no accident, moreover, that Rome was chosen as the venue for negotiations leading to a new strategic arms reduction framework. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, although a center-rightist by profession, is buddy buddies with Russia’s KGB-communist dictator, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Berlusconi also recently welcomed to Rome Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’ unabashed communist dictator, with the purpose of pushing the “former” Soviet republic into the European Union. Like Putin, Lukashenko is committed to restoring the Soviet Union. Russia and Belarus are united in a common political-military-economic entity called the Union State, founded in 1996. The Communist Party of Belarus, which is closely linked to the (secretly ruling) Communist Party of the Russian Federation, openly supports Lukashenko in the national parliament.

The Moscow-Beijing Axis, embodied in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), serves as one of several communist counterweights to NATO and was amazingly predicted by KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn in his first book, New Lies for Old, 25 years ago. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China feigned hostility in order to disguise their united devotion to world communism’s long-range plan for global domination, formally promulgated at the Eighty-One Party Congress in Moscow in 1960. Open military coordination between the Soviets and the Red Chinese during the Cold War would have no doubt aroused NATO’s alarm and possibly provoked an undesirable military response from the West.

Since the fake demise of communism in Eastern Europe, however, military coordination between Moscow and Beijing, facilitated by a new telephone hotline between the two general staffs, has proceeded steadily since a treaty of friendship and cooperation was signed in 2001. Thus far, Russia and China have held at least three joint war games: Peace Mission 2005, Peace Mission 2007, and Norak-Antiterror 2009. The first two were held in both Russia and China, while the third was carried out in mid-April of this year in Tajikistan. Two more combined military exercises are planned: Peace Mission 2009, to be held this summer in northeast China, and Peace Mission 2010, to be held obviously next year, this time in Kazakhstan.

After Wednesday’s session of SCO defense ministers in Moscow, Russia’s Anatoly Serdyukov announced: “Specific anti-terror activities will be practiced at drills in Kazakhstan. All previous and upcoming military exercises involving SCO countries are of a counterterrorism nature. The decision to hold the exercises entitled Peace Mission 2010 was made last May [2008] in Dushanbe at a similar meeting.” As we regularly note and as Serdyukov reiterates in the previous quote, military coordination within the Communist Bloc is frequently carried out under the pretense of combating “terrorism.” However, the USA and its allies are the real targets of communist hatred.

Kremlin mouthpieces stridently deny that the SCO is a military alliance, along the lines of NATO or the “post”-Soviet Collective Security Treaty Organization. However Novosti honestly describes the SCO as a “regional security group” comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. Russia assumed the SCO presidency last August. Disturbingly, Iran, India, Mongolia, and Pakistan hold observer status. Iran, of course, is run by a bunch of Islamo-Nazi nutjobs bent on destroying Israel, India boasts a socialist government that was supported by the communists until July 2008, Mongolia labors under an 87-year-old communist regime feigning social democracy, while Pakistan’s socialist government risks capitulation before the Taliban insurgency.

Personal relations between the Soviet and Red Chinese leadership are warm and fuzzy. On April 27, after conversing with the Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi in Moscow, Medvedev enthused about the pending visit of Chinese President/Tyrant Hu Jintao to Russia: “This year we’ve met with Chairman Hu Jintao during the G-20 summit in London. We have an intensive agenda this year, including the visit to the Russian Federation by the Chinese chairman, as well as other events with our and your participation. We’re pleased with good friends should have regular consultations, moreover in the period when it is necessary for economic and political reasons.” Russian Prime Minister Putin, Medvedev’s master, is also slated to visit Beijing, reports Itar-Tass.

In addition to promoting military integration, the Moscow-Beijing Axis is committed to energy integration within the Communist Bloc. On April 21 Russia and China inked an agreement by which a new branch from the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean (ESPO) oil pipeline will be built between the two countries. The new pipeline will extend from the Skovorodino refinery in Russia’s Far East to Mohe County in China’s Heilongjiang province and must be completed by the end of 2010. After signing the deal, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, who chairs the state oil company Rosneft, gushed: “The agreement creates a new foundation for developing our energy cooperation. This is a unique agreement of a long-term nature, which is accompanied by financial agreements, and to implement it we have already begun building a branch from the main pipeline toward China.”

The Skovorodino-Mohe pipeline will pass under the Amur River and will pump 15 million metric tons of petroleum per year. The pipeline is part of Russian efforts to diversify export routes from Siberia. Under the intergovernmental deal, China will provide US$25 billion in loans to Rosneft and pipeline operator Transneft. Deputy PM Sechin, a “former” GRU resident who armed Latin American insurgents during the 1980s, is also heavily involved in revitalizing relations between Moscow and the Western Hemisphere’s predominantly leftist regimes, including Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. He visited these countries several times in 2007 and 2008.

While Russia has established firm political-military-economic links with both Iran and Venezuela, the regimes in Tehran and Caracas are also promoting ties between themselves. State-run IRNA news agency reported yesterday that Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammed Najjar recently met with Venezuelan Vice President Ramon Carrizalez, who is also acting defense minister, in the Venezuelan capital. The purpose of the meeting was to “strengthen” military cooperation. Like Iran, the communist regime of President Hugo Chavez is staunchly pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel, a fact highlighted by comments made by the dictator during Israel’s military incursion into the Gaza Strip in December and January.

The Soviet strategists are not only consolidating military linkages among Communist Bloc countries, but regularly denouncing NATO exercises in “former” Soviet republics and “former” Soviet Bloc states, such as Georgia. In a not very surprising move, Moldova has followed Kazakhstan in withdrawing from the Western Alliance’s Cooperative Longbow/Lancer drills, to begin shortly near Tbilisi. A number of “post”-communists countries were slated to join this exercises under NATO’s Partnership for Peace program. In early April Moldova’s ruling communist party won a third consecutive election, provoking violent anti-communist, pro-Romanian riots and prompting a swift statement of support from Moscow for the regime of President Vladimir Voronin, a former Soviet Interior Ministry general.

End Times File: Israel’s Isolation: Russian-Arab-Iranian Invasion, Destruction of Damascus Loom as Turkey Holds First-Ever Military Drill with Syria

Meanwhile, the Soviet strategists continue to woo NATO members like Greece and Turkey into a closer embrace that has already undermined the West’s military alliance against the Communist Bloc. Moscow will exhibit over 120 types of weaponry at the IDEF 2009 arms show in Istanbul between April 27 and 30. “Turkey is mostly interested in buying short- and medium-range air defense systems and combat helicopters,” stated Anatoly Aksenov, senior adviser at the Kremlin’s arms export monopoly, Rosoboronexport. Aksenov, who leads the Russian delegation at the IDEF 2009 exhibition, revealed that several military-technical cooperation contracts could be signed between the two countries after the show.

Last year, Turkish media reported that Ankara was planning to buy 32 used Mi-28 Havoc helicopters from Russia in a deal totaling US$1 billion. In February, states Novosti at the link above, the Russian and Turkish defense ministers agreed to boost bilateral military-technical ties “despite the fact that Turkey is a NATO member.” Since the mid-1990s Turkey has implemented a large-scale program to modernize its armed forces, to be completed by 2020. The Kremlin has embarked on a similar program under first Putin and then Medvedev, as we have copiously documented here.

Like Iran and Venezuela, the Justice and Development regime in Ankara is also unashamedly pro-Islamist and stridently anti-Israel, two facts exposed during the Israeli Defense Forces’ Operation Cast Lead. This week’s war game between Turkey and Syria, an avowed enemy of Israel, is yet more proof that Turkey is no longer committed to the North Atlantic Alliance and has effectively moved into orbit around the Communist Bloc and its Islamo-Marxist proxies in the Middle East.

From the vantage of Bible prophecy, we see the end-times anti-Israel military confederacy described by the prophet Ezekiel coalescing before our eyes. This development foreshadows the rapture of the church and then the first events of the early tribulation period: 1) Antichrist’s seven-year covenant with Israel, establishing a brief but false peace in the Middle East (Daniel 9:27), 2) a short war between Israel and Syria leading to Damascus’ destruction, probably by Israel exercising the so-called Samson Option (Isaiah 17:1), and 3) the Russian-led invasion of the Holy Land, only to be supernaturally defeated by God (Ezekiel 38-39). Current events prove that the international isolation of Israel, with US complicity, has begun.

The AP news agency reports today of Turkey’s dismissive reaction to Israel’s response to the Turko-Syrian maneuver: “Turkey’s military chief is not concerned about Israel’s reaction to a joint drill involving Turkish and Syrian soldiers. Defense Minister Ehud Barak called this week’s exercise a “disturbing development.” [Turkish] Gen. Ilker Basbug told reporters Wednesday he was ‘not concerned by Israel’s reaction,’ and Turkey wasn’t seeking any other country’s consent.” The first-ever drill between Ankara and Damascus also represents the first-ever drill between a NATO member and an Arab nation. According to the Turkish military, “The aim of the exercise is to boost friendship, cooperation and confidence between the two countries’ land forces, and to increase the ability of border troops to train and work together.” Turkey’s involvement in the drill is putatively linked to the government’s efforts to suppress the Marxist guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, in the southeast part of the country. The stateless Kurdish separatists are also based in northern Iraq and northwest Iran.

The cooperation between Turkey and Syria follows discreet talks between the Obama Team and the regimes in Damascus and Tehran, apparently well before the US president’s inauguration. On January 31 the AFP news agency reported that “a group of experts under the auspices of the think tank, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), announced Thursday that they met for more than two hours in Damascus with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The experts included Ellen Laipson, a former White House adviser under president Bill Clinton and a member of the Obama transition team.” Last Friday, while visiting Washington, Jordan’s King Abdullah warned: “Israel must choose between integrating into the region or remaining isolated. Delaying a two-state solution would be disastrous for Israelis and Palestinians.”

Soviet Deception in the Balkans: Kosovo Views Serbia’s Staunch Ally Russia as “Friendly State,” Calls for Recognition

Finally, in the Balkans, the disingenuous nature of Kosovo’s secession from Serbia, a staunch ally of Russia, was exposed this week when Pristina, the capital of a country that is only partly recognized worldwide, urged Moscow to accept Kosovar independence. “Russia can do two things: Exert pressure on Belgrade and persuade it not to use force, and recognize the independence of Kosovo,” declared Hajredin Kuci, Kosovo’s deputy prime minister, at a Pristina news conference attended by Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Moldovan reporters. Significantly, Kuci stated: “Kosovo views Russia as a friendly state.”

The regime in Pristina is controlled by former members of the Marxist Kosovo Liberation Army, while members of Slobodan Milosevic’s “ex”-communist Socialist Party of Serbia hold key posts in the Belgrade regime. In 1999 Russian troops rushed to take control of Pristina ahead of NATO forces during the latter’s bombing campaign of Yugoslavia. Yugoslav President Milosevic’s showdown with the West eventually led to his ouster in 2000 and controversial demise in a Hague jail cell six years later. Moscow withdrew its forces from Kosovo/Serbia in 2003.

>Latin America/USA Files: Chavez to Obama in Trinidad: “I want to be your friend”; US president defends handshake with country’s avowed enemy

>- Mexico’s Faux Rightist President Calderon Urges USA to End Economic Blockade of Cuba

- Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) Meeting Denounces Summit of the Americas as “Imperialist” for Excluding Cuba

Pictured above: “The Eight Amigos”: Leaders from ALBA countries and others aspiring to membership in the bloc of socialist states converge at “anti-Summit of the Americas summit.” From left to right: Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Bolivian President Evo Morales, Cuban President Raul Castro (in army uniform), Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (also in army uniform), Prime Minister Roosevelt Skeritt of Dominica, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, and Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa.

Between April 17 and 19 the USA’s new socialist (Kenyan-born?) president Barack Hussein Obama attended the Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, a tropical archipelago near the coast of Communist Venezuela. The fifth summit of the 34-nation Organization of American States, reports the Voice of America, is “being hailed by most participants as a new beginning for relations in the region.” President Obama was praised by his peers for “setting a new tone of openness,” especially with respect to his comments about defrosting Washington’s relations with Havana and his congenial handshaking session with Venezuela’s virulently anti-USA dictator Hugo Chavez.

Some Republican lawmakers in the USA, including Senator John Ensign, denounced Obama’s friendliness toward Chavez. “You have to be careful who you are seen joking around with,” grumbled Ensign, adding: “And I think it was irresponsible for the president to be seen kind of laughing and joking with Hugo Chavez.” We agree. Obama insists that he has “great differences” with Chavez, but he also defended his actions. “It’s unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the strategic interest of the United States,” the US president protested.

Venezuela’s communist dictator, a close ally of Moscow, Beijing, and Havana, once called former President George W. Bush the “Devil” and last year expelled the US Ambassador from Caracas, a move that prompted the White House to expel Venezuela’s counterpart. At the summit in Port of Spain, Chavez offered to kiss and make up by dispatching a new envoy to Washington.

Michael Shifter, an analyst on US-Latin American relations at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington believes, rightly to our way of thinking, that Chavez, rather than Obama, was the one launching a charm offensive: “He’s a politician and he understands that Obama is enormously popular throughout Latin America, in the United States today and in Venezuela. And I think it was smart politics for Chavez to associate himself to Obama, to be nice to Obama, to open up to Obama and have these kind of gracious, warm moments with Obama because he knows it plays well with his constituency.”

During their first encounter in Port of Spain, Chavez crooned to Obama: “I want to be your friend.” Chavez, who is also a big fan of US academic Noam Chomsky, pushed a copy of the book, The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of Pillage of a Continent, on the US president. Written by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, the book is about alleged US and European exploitation of the region.

Back in Caracas, Chavez crowed: “I am coming back from Trinidad and Tobago, from the Americas Summit where, without a doubt, the position that Venezuela and its government has always defended, especially starting 10 years ago, of resistance, dignity, sovereignty and independence has obtained in Port of Spain, one of the biggest victories of our history.” Apparently alluding to Obama’s election and the Democratic Party’s control over both houses of the US Congress, he added: “It would seem that the changes that started in Venezuela in the last decade of the 20th century have begun to reach North America.” Communists like Chavez are masters of false friendship. Chavez’s good buddy Vladimir Putin, Russia’s KGB-communist dictator, used the same tactics on former President Bush after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

The day before the Summit of the Americas kick off, reports Voice of America at the link above, Cuban President Raul Castro delivered a speech in which he stated that Cuba is willing to discuss any issue with the USA, including human rights, press freedom and political prisoners. Despite the peace overture, President Obama cautioned that he does not expect relations between the two adversaries to “thaw overnight.”

Nicaragua’s Past/Present Marxist Dictator Ortega Scurries to Havana Second Time in Three Weeks, Wife and Chief Ideologist Rosario at His Side

This past Tuesday, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega touched down in Havana en route to Managua from Port of Spain to brief his revolutionary mentor Fidel Castro on last weekend’s Fifth Summit of the Americas, a gathering upon which the former Cuban president heaped contempt in an essay. Obama, reports the AP news agency at the previous link, told the summit that US policy toward Cuba must be “revised” but insisted that the economic embargo against the island will not be lifted until the communist regime demonstrates progress on human rights issues. Cuba state television offered no details about the meeting between Daniel and Fidel, two long-time friends and ideological allies who ultimately dance to the tune of the KGB. Ortega also met with Fidel before the Organization of American States (OAS) shindig, which Cuba has never been invited to attend.

The Cuban media reported that Ortega’s address in Port of Spain was broadcast on Cubavision and Cubavision Internacional on Wednesday. Over Cuban airwaves the Nicaraguan dictator condemned the “second class” treatment shown to Latin America’s heads of state and government on their arrival at the Port of Spain airport due to the earlier arrival of “the emperor of the hemisphere,” meaning the US president. Ortega also accused the US delegation of “censoring” the agendas of its Latin American counterparts, although he rejoiced in the fact that the issue of Cuba’s pariah status was broached during the summit.

While in Havana Ortega also met Cuban President Raul Castro, Fidel’s younger brother, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez and, significantly, the boss of the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of the ruling Communist Party of Cuba, Rolando Alfonso. Accompanying Ortega was his wife and communications director, Rosario Murillo. Former guerrilla girl Rosario also oversees the Sandinista-dominated Councils of Citizens’ Power, the Nicaraguan counterpart of Cuba’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, resurrected in 2007 when Ortega re-assumed the presidency after a 17-year absence.

In the context of the vigorous power networking taking place among Western Hemisphere communist leaders over the last two years, Ortega’s presence in Havana this week is worrisome for at least two reasons. First, as noted above, the Sandinista leader enjoys a decades-old friendship with the Castro Bros. and, second Daniel and Rosario previously visited Cuba only three weeks ago.

This week, reports Novosti, Nicaragua joined a wider trend throughout Central and South America of scrapping visa requirements for Russian citizens travelling to that country. Managua’s decision to facilitate the admission of Russian “tourists” will no doubt provide cover for agents of Moscow’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and military intelligence (GRU). In view of the Kremlin’s little-publicized plan to renovate the Soviet-built, never-used military runway at Punta Huete and dredge a deep-water port at Monkey Point, on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, this is not an insignificant diplomatic development.

Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru, and Venezuela have removed similar restrictions on Russian citizens visiting their countries. A visa-free regime between Argentina and Russia will take effect in the near future, while Russian and Chilean presidents, Dmitry Medvedev and Michelle Bachelet, have stated their intention to work towards a visa-free arrangement during a meeting in April. With the exception of Colombia, every one of these Latin American countries has a communist or center-left government.

During a joint press conference with Obama after the Summit of the Americas, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, one of the USA’s few center-right allies in the Western Hemisphere, urged Washington to terminate its five-decade blockade against Cuba. “The US blockade began when neither Obama nor I had been born and it has not succeeded,” commented Calderon. He then praised the White House’s decision to lift travel restrictions against Cuban-Americans wishing to visit the island communist state. Calderon enthused: “My country is friends with Cuba and the United States and it is ready to cooperate in the resolution of problems between both nations. It is now time to look ahead for the good of hemispheric relations.”

Students of the international communist conspiracy should expect Obama to incrementally defrost relations between Washington and Havana, as reported above. When a visa-free regime is finally implemented between the two countries, expect the Communist Party of Cuba to flood the Continental USA with agents of the state Intelligence Directorate.

The Summit of the Americas was preceded by the 7th Presidential Summit of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), held in Cumana, capital of Venezuela’s Sucre state. Founded in 2004 as a counterweight to the US-led OAS and Free Trade Area of the Americas, ALBA is a bloc of socialist nations under the leadership of Chavez and the Castro Bros. and specifically consists of Cuba, Bolivia, Dominica, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Ecuador and St. Vincent and the Grenadines are considering membership. Ominously, even Russia has expressed an interest in joining the anti-Washington bloc in America’s backyard.

This particular ALBA get-together wound up its meetings with a pointed resolution rejecting the policies of the Washington- dominated Summit of the Americas. Venezuelan President Chavez, who later attended the OAS meeting as noted above, read a 15-point statement, blaming capitalism for creating the current global economic crisis and criticizing U.S. “imperialist policy” on Latin America, especially with respect to Washington’s blockade of Cuba. “We contend there’s no consensus for adopting that draft statement and we propose an exhaustive debate,” Chavez ranted. Alluding to Puerto Rico’s independence movement, Nicaraguan President Ortega chimed in: “You can not call that summit ‘of the Americas’ because Cuba and Puerto Rico are missing.” On Thursday Bolivian President Morales warned that he and his leftist colleagues will “prepare for our battle at the Summit of the Americas for the United States to change its policies.” He added: “Obama has a moral and ethical obligation to repair the damage caused by his country’s former presidents.”

The Obama White House dismissed the ALBA veto to the declaration of the Fifth Summit of the Americas as “irresponsible and misplaced.” While accompanying Obama in Mexico City on April 16, adviser Jeffrey Davidow defended the OAS declaration:

The declaration of the summit is a document, a fairly lengthy document that’s been negotiated for the last nine months by all 34 countries, including Venezuela. It’s been a laborious process of negotiation. Many of Venezuela’s points were accepted, as were the points of the United States and other countries. This decision to not sign the document is something that just came up in the last day or so, and is inconsistent with the negotiations that have been going on for almost a year.

Bolivian President Morales Scores Political Victory with Hunger Strike, Fends off Assassination Attempt by Mercenaries with Eastern European Links

Earlier this month, reported BBC News, on April 18, Bolivia’s communist president Evo Morales, an important player in Latin America’s Red Axis, was the target of a failed assassination attempt carried out, intriguingly, by a five-member hit squad with a strong Eastern European connection. On April 16 Bolivian police tracked the mercenaries to a hotel in the eastern city of Santa Cruz, a hotbed of regional secessionism. After confronting the hit squad, police engaged the group in a gunbattle. Three gunmen were killed and two arrested.

The gunmen who were killed included Romanian national Arpad Magyarosi, Irish national Michael Martin Dwyer, and the group’s Bolivian-Hungarian ringleader Eduardo Rosa Flores. The last fought in the war for Croatian independence in the 1990s, at which time he commanded a paramilitary organization. The two men arrested were Mario Francisco Tasik Astorga, another veteran of the Croatian war, and Elot Toaso, a Hungarian computer expert. While Irish national Dwyer has no obvious Eastern European link, it is possible that he was a militant in Ireland’s dormant Marxist republican insurgency.

In addition to President Morales, the hit squad reportedly intended to kill Bolivian Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linera, a former guerrilla like El Salvador’s new vice president Salvador Ceren, and Santa Cruz Governor Ruben Costas, a bitter opponent of Morales and his ruling Movement toward Socialism (MAS) party. Secessionist Governor Costas doubts the national government’s information, accusing Morales of “mounting a show” aimed at discrediting the opposition. Bolivian authorities suspect the hit squad of orchestrating a dynamite attack on the home of a Catholic cardinal early during the week of April 12.

Morales revealed the existence of the alleged plot as he travelled first to Venezuela and then Trinidad and Tobago for the ALBA summit and Summit of the Americas, respectively. “There has been no immediate explanation,” ponders BBC, “of why the alleged plotters would target government and opposition targets alike.” Indeed. Perhaps someone in the Kremlin or Lubyanka has the answer, although we would expect Morales, who dutifully trouped to Russia in February, is Moscow’s man in La Paz.

In a related story, Morales ended a five-day hunger strike on April 14 when Bolivian legislators approved a new election law that will permit the president to run for a second term in the next election, scheduled for December. During his politically motivated fast, Morales urged his supporters to seize a major part of the seats in the 27-seat senate, which is controlled by the rightist opposition. The ruling MAS party had enough votes to approve the election law, but opposition lawmakers blocked the bill for nearly a week by refusing to attend a special bicameral session, thereby preventing a quorum. Bolivians approved a new constitution by referendum in January.

Morales’ successful hunger strike represents another wider trend among Latin America’s predominantly leftist leaders of seeking to remove term limits and advance constitutional reform in the direction of socialism. In February Chavez was essentially made “President for Life” by referendum, while Ortega likewise seeks to abolish presidential term limits in Nicaragua. Eucadorean President Rafael Correa, Chavez’s “mini me,” is poised for another four-year term as a result of tomorrow’s presidential election.

>Communist Bloc Military Updates: Kremlin to increase number of warplanes at Kyrgyzstan base after US departure, Russian aircraft to join Kyrgyz drill

>Kremlin Sacks GRU Chief General Korabelnikov in Military Reform Shakeup

This past Monday, reports the AFP news agency, a Russian general announced that Moscow will increase the number of warplanes stationed at the Kant Air Base in Kyrgyzstan after the US and allied armed forces vacate the Manas Air Base in August. Manas is the last such US military installation in Central Asia and has been used since December 2001 to support Operation Enduring Freedom in neighboring Afghanistan.

“The Russian leadership plans to increase the number of individual warplanes at Kant,” Nikolai Bordyuzha informed the Kyrgyz parliament on April 20. He downplayed the departure of NATO militaries from the Central Asian country: “I don’t think that the US airbase at Manas fundamentally influenced the security situation in the region.” In February the “post”-communist regime in Bishkek was swayed by a US$2 billion loan from Moscow to evict coalition forces from Manas. Bordyuzha is secretary-general of the Moscow-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organization and a career Chekist. In a post earlier this week we noted his disapproval of NATO’s Cooperative Lancer/Longbow military drill in Georgia.

Russia has long maintained a small contingent of combat aircraft at Kant (pictured above), which is not far from both Bishkek and Manas. The base currently houses about 400 troops, including 250 officers and NCOs and 150 conscripts, and deploys several Su-25 Frogfoot close air support aircraft and Su-27 Flanker fighters, two Mi-8 combat transport helicopters, and four L-39 combat trainers.

In a related story Russian Su-25s will join Kyrgyzstan’s armed forces to carry out the active phase of the latter’s Security-2009 tactical exercise in the southern part of the country on April 25. Kyrgyzstan will contribute over 500 servicemen, armored vehicles, self-propelled artillery, and aircraft. The exercise involves live-firing drills aimed at suppressing “terrorists.” The Kyrgyz Defense Ministry disclosed: “A flight of Su-25 attack aircraft from the Kant airbase and Kyrgyz Air Force Mi-24 helicopters will provide aerial fire support during the drills.”

Last weekend troops from Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan and the other Central Asian members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization completed the Norak-Antiterror 2009 drill in Tajikistan.

In another story related to Russia’s ongoing testing of its nuclear arsenal, the Russian Strategic Missile Forces successfully test-fired a Topol ICBM on April 10. The purpose of such tests is to extend this category of missile’s service life for an additional 22 years.

Finally, in a directive that no doubt reflects the Kremlin’s intention to once again place Russia’s military and military intelligence under the ideological control of the (secretly ruling) Communist Party of the Soviet Union, GRU chief General Valentin Korabelnikov was sacked on Friday. The 63-year-old Korabelnikov held the position since 1997 and is replaced by his deputy Lieutenant General Alexander Shlyakturov. Moscow gave no explanation for Korabelnikov’s dismissal. However, the general was bumped over into an advisory capacity in the General Staff.

Independent military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer notes that Korabelnikov clashed with Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov over plans to slice up the GRU and remove special units under its control. “This is the beginning of a major reform of Russia’s military intelligence,” Felgenhauer explained. Another analyst, Alexander Golts, stated “The Kremlin is eager to shun generals with a clear Soviet mentality.” This is either a naive or disengenuous statement. We would rather say just the opposite. Serdyukov’s father in law is Viktor Zubkov, former prime minister, current Gazprom chairman, and “ex”-CPSU cadre.

>WW4 File: Tajikistan hosts SCO war game; Russia massing troops in Georgia’s breakaway regions; Moldovan vote recount “confirms” communist victory

>- Russia Deploys Entire Black Sea Fleet for Maneuvers in Third Week of April

- Four Large Amphibious Landing Craft Left Sevastopol in Second Week of April, Two Used to Insert Russian Marines into Abkhazia during August 2008 Invasion

- CSTO General Secretary, Career Chekist Bordyuzha Brands Cooperative Lancer/Longbow Exercise “Provocation,” Russia’s NATO Envoy Rogozin Denounces War Game as “Insanity”

- Russian FSB/KGB Arrests Georgian “Spy” Plotting against Sochi Olympics, Moscow-Backed Separatists Accuse OSCE Observers of Provocations

It [South Ossetia] will be Russia. And Georgia used to be Russian, too.
– Russian Ground Forces Lieutenant “Sergei,” statement made to AP news agency at South Ossetia-Georgia (proper) border checkpoint, April 21, 2009

Pictured above: On April 13 Russian soldiers stand at a checkpoint to the entrance of the Georgian village of Akhmaji, on the boundary with Russian-controlled South Ossetia. Georgian police maintain their own checkpoint about 100 yards away.

Established in 2001, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) kicked off its first joint military exercise in 2005, followed by a second in 2007. Both war games were held in Russian and Chinese territory. The SCO actually represents the culmination of many decades of collusion between Moscow and Beijing, typified by the deceptive “Sino-Soviet split” that led to several (fabricated) border skirmishes in 1969. Although a third “Peace Mission” drill is slated for the summer of 2009, the SCO actually carried out its third war game, Norak-Antiterror 2009, on April 17 and 18 at the Fakhrobod training ground in Tajikistan’s Khatlon province, about 50 kilometers south of the national capital Dushanbe. Tajikistan, of course, was until 1991 known as the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic.

According to Faridoun Mahmadaliyev, spokesentity for the Tajik Ministry of Defense, Norak-Antiterror 2009 was conducted as part of a common plan formulated at the SCO anti-terror center. “The exercise that was conducted in two stages involved operational groups and special units of the armed forces of Tajikistan, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia,” Mahmadaliyev intoned, adding:

The purpose of the exercise was to rehearse coordination and interaction in antiterrorist missions. The exercise that involved military personnel along with armored vehicles, artillery and aircraft closed on April 18 featuring life-fire missions with combat helicopters.

Representatives of defense and civilian institutions structures from the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] and other countries observed the exercise.

We have documented many times before that the neo-Soviet leadership prepares for war against NATO and its allies and positions military assets for specific operations under the guise of “anti-terror” drills. This was the case with Caucasus Frontier 2008, which the Soviets began three weeks prior to their Georgian incursion. At the same time US and Georgian forces were holding the Immediate Response 2008 drill near Tbilisi. A similar situation is once again forming in the Caucasus region as the SCO completes Norak-Antiterror 2009 only weeks before NATO carries out the Cooperative Lancer/Longbow 2009 military exercise, like Immediate Response to be held on Georgian soil, from May 6 to June 1. The “terrorists” in Norak-Antiterror 2009 were apparently armed for “Soviet bear,” requiring suppression by armored vehicles, artillery, and combat aircraft.

Sino-Soviet collaboration in the military sphere is also seen in the presence of the missile cruiser Varyag, the flagship of Russia’s Pacific Fleet, in a parade of 21 foreign warships that will commemorate the 60th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army Navy. The Chinese Navy launched the maritime ceremony on Monday, off the coast of the eastern city of Qingdao, in Shandong province. The fleet review will feature Chinese nuclear-powered submarines. “It is not a secret that China has nuclear submarines, which are key to safeguarding our country’s national security,” Xinhua quoted PLA Navy Vice Admiral Ding Yiping as saying.

Elsewhere in the “post”-Soviet space the Soviets are positioning their military assets closer to the “renegade” Georgian capital of Tbilisi. Following last August’s re-invasion and re-occupation of Georgia’s two separatist regions, the Russians established permanent military bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, boosting their troop presence in each to 7,000. Although Moscow denies any designs of annexing the two territories, the latest Russian military activity near Akhmaji, a checkpoint between South Ossetia and Georgia proper, suggests otherwise:

At a military checkpoint between Georgia and its breakaway region of South Ossetia, the word “Russia” is hand-painted in pink on a concrete security barrier. “It will be Russia,” said a Russian army lieutenant as the Ossetian soldiers under his command nodded. “And Georgia used to be Russian, too,” said the young freckle-faced lieutenant, who would give only his first name, Sergei. Three armored personnel carriers and a tank were dug in around the checkpoint.

Russia has troops just 25 miles (40 kilometers) from the Georgian capital, in violation of the European Union-brokered cease-fire that ended last year’s brief war. And in recent weeks, it has put even more soldiers and armored vehicles within striking distance of the city ahead of street protests against Georgia’s president.

The AP article linked above elaborates on the augmentation and movement of Russian troops in Georgia’s breakaway regions, as well as a “freshly dug anti-tank trench” along the highway to Tbilisi:

Russia’s Foreign Ministry confirmed the Kremlin has sent reinforcements to the boundary lines. It was responding to fears the Georgian government would provoke clashes to distract from the opposition protests, ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko said.

Georgia’s Interior Ministry said Russia has 15,000 soldiers in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which would be far more than in past months. Since the beginning of April, Russia has moved 130 armored vehicles toward the boundary line from elsewhere in South Ossetia and 70 more have entered South Ossetia from Russia, ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said.

Russia’s Defense Ministry refused to comment on the composition of its forces, and Georgia’s claims could not be independently verified. European monitors who patrol the boundary lines are not allowed into South Ossetia or Abkhazia, and journalists also are stopped at Russian checkpoints.

Peter Semneby, the EU special representative for the South Caucasus, said the Russian military presence is clearly “significantly larger” than it was.

From a Georgian police checkpoint just 100 yards (meters) from a Russian roadblock controlling access to the village of Akhmaji, a half dozen Russian tanks and other armored vehicles can be seen in the valley.

Local police chief Timur Burduli said the vehicles appeared during the first week of April and are the Russian forces closest to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. “A tank needs only 40 minutes,” he said.

Along the highway to Tbilisi, a freshly dug anti-tank trench stretches across a long field. Steve Bird, spokesman for the EU monitors, said the Georgians have been building such defenses in recent weeks.

In addition to stridently objecting to NATO’s Cooperative Lancer/Longbow 2009, the Kremlin is not pleased that several oil and gas pipelines supplying the West traverse Georgia, from the Caspian Sea and Central Asia to Turkey and beyond. These energy conduits, which the Russian Air Force attempted to bomb during the Caucasian War, are beyond Moscow’s overt control. “Russia wants to be the monopoly supplier,” observes Georgian political analyst Shalva Pichkhadze at the link above.

We have previously blogged about the protests demanding the resignation of President Mikhail Saakashvili, whom we suspect is a KGB agent playing along with Moscow’s long-range deception plan. One Georgian media source contends that Saakashvili’s uncle, Temur Alasania, is allegedly in the employ of the Russian internal security apparatus.

In a related story, Novosti reports that the first six Mi-28N Night Hunter attack helicopters have been delivered to the Russian Ground Forces’ North Caucasus Military District, a military source revealed on Tuesday. This military district is adjacent to the “former” Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic and was the site of the Caucasus Frontier 2008 drill, mentioned above, just prior to the re-invasion of Georgia. The Mi-28N, manufactured by the Rostvertol plant in southern Russia, is designed to carry out hunter-killer missions against main battle tanks, helicopters, ground forces, and armor in all weather conditions. The Russian Defense Ministry plans to procure between 45 and 67 Mi-28Ns over the next few years, fully replacing the 1970s-era Mi-24 Hind combat/troop transport helicopter by 2015.

Not only is the Russian army creeping closer to Tbilisi, but also the Kremlin’s navy appears to be preparing for some sort of action against Georgia’s only maritime coast on the Black Sea. On April 16 Information Dissemination blog reported that the Russian Navy has deployed all 22 vessels in its Black Sea Fleet for drills: “Earlier this week, as per the agreement between Russia and the Ukraine, Russian officials notified the Ukraine that 22 of its Black Sea Fleet vessels will leave Sevastopol for military maneuvers. Those ships were expected to depart earlier this week, but it was noteworthy when all of the amphibious ships deployed first rather than all of the ships at once.” On the same day the Eurasia Daily Monitor reported:

It is important that the Russian military acknowledges its mobilization and forward deployment of troops and ships. At present, it is impossible to know precisely how many additional army units have been moved within striking distance of Georgian territory.

However, the composition of the naval force that disembarked from Sevastopol is not secret, since the Ukrainian authorities must be informed. It seems to be larger than the force that was deployed against Georgia last August. Four large amphibious landing craft left Sevastopol last week, while in August 2008 only two were reportedly deployed to insert a regiment of marines into Abkhazia in the small port of Ochamchira, close to the border with Georgia (Vlast, August 18). The marines were later deployed in the invasion of Western Georgia.

On April 17 President Dmitry Medvedev, KGB-communist dictator Vladimir Putin’s lapdog, warned that “Russia will be closely watching the drills and will if necessary, make appropriate decisions.” He added: “Such decisions are disappointing and do nothing to help restore full-level contacts between the Russian Federation and NATO.”

The anti-NATO comments emanating from the Kremlin were echoed by Russia’s NATO envoy Dmitry Rogozin on April 18: “On Monday I addressed NATO [incoming] Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen with a letter asking [him] to cancel the drills in Georgia, due to start in early May. I believe this is absurdity and insanity. It is provocational to rattle the saber near our borders until Russia-NATO military contacts are restored and until trust is restored between our sides.” On April 20 Rogozin announced that in protest Russia will withdraw from a scheduled meeting with senior NATO military officials. Formal high-level contacts between Russia and NATO only resumed recently after being frozen by NATO in the wake of last summer’s Caucasian War.

A few days later, while visiting Kyrgyzstan, CSTO Secretary General Nikolai Bordyuzha, a career Chekist, branded NATO maneuvers in Georgia as a provocation: “I absolutely agree that carrying out of the exercises in the territory of Georgia especially after last year’s conflict is nothing else but demonstration of support of those aggressive actions undertaken during Michael Saakashvili’s regime concerning the citizens of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.”

Sergei Bagapsh, de facto “president” of Abkhazia, retorted that his separatist regime will hold a counter-exercise in response to Cooperative Lancer/Longbow 2009: “The planned NATO exercises in Georgia do not lead to the stabilization of the situation in the Caucasus. We observe the situation in Georgia and we will conduct our own drills in response.”

The NATO drills are putatively designed to improve interoperability between the armed forces of NATO and partner countries, within the framework of the Partnership for Peace, Mediterranean Dialogue, and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative programs. The exercise will involve 1,300 troops, but will not include light or heavy weaponry. A total of 19 countries will participate in the exercises. These countries include NATO members Britain, Canada, Greece, Spain, Turkey, and the United States of America, NATO ally United Arab Emirates, as well as a number of “post”-communist countries, including Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Hungary, Serbia, and Macedonia.

Kazakhstan, which belongs to the Moscow-controlled CSTO, has decided to pull out of the NATO drill. Explaining Astana’s decision, Kazakh government spokesentity Danial Akhmetov huffed: “We are too busy for this.” Communist Moldova, which received Moscow’s backing after the April 7 “Twitter Revolution,” is also scheduled to participate in Cooperative Lancer/Longbow. It remains to be seen whether Moldovan President Vladmir Voronin, a former Soviet Interior Ministry general, develops second thoughts about his country’s involvement.

Meanwhile, in what reeks of a Kremlin-contrived provocation, the intrepid defenders of the fatherland at the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB/KGB) declared on Tuesday that they have apprehended a Georgian spying on preparations for the Olympic Games in Sochi, the Black Sea resort city near Georgia, and plotting “subversive activities.” An FSB spokesentity intoned to Interfax and Novosti:

The Russian FSB uncovered and halted an agent of the Georgian security services… illegally trespassing on Russian territory with the aim of carrying out reconnaissance and subversive activities. He was directed to gather information on the socio-political situation in the region, and on the preparation for the Olympic Games. We have identified the spy as Mamuka Maisuradze. He will be banned from entering Russia as a threat to Russian security.

Maisuradze has been operating in the region since 2000. He has been arming bandits in the North Caucasus with explosives to incite anti-Russian actions.

The secretary of Georgia’s National Security Council, Eka Tkeshelashvili, denied that the man identified by the FSB/KGB was a Georgian agent. “Such a person is not a staff member of the Georgian intelligence services,” Tkeshelashvili informed AFP, adding: “I see a clear connection between this arrest and the recent capture of a Nashi activist by the Georgian authorities.” Georgian authorities allege that Russian citizen Alexander Kuznetsov, who was detained last week, had been planning an armed provocation against Georgia, but Moscow insisted that Kuznetsov’s confession was coerced.

For their part South Ossetian authorities briefly detained on Tuesday two observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Separatist officials accused the observers of illegally crossing into South Ossetian territory. “The situation is now over and they are returning to base,” Martha Freeman, spokeswoman for the OSCE mission in Tbilisi, told AFP. However, Eduard Kokoity, de facto “president” of South Ossetia, accused the observers of instigating “provocative” actions: “The OSCE observers unlawfully crossed the border of South Ossetia in the Tskhinvali district by car and were detained by South Ossetian border guards. The actions of the OSCE observers have a provocative character.” The mandate of the OSCE’s 24-member mission in Georgia expires on June 30. Moscow opposes any extension of that mandate. A European Union mission of 225 unarmed observers is also monitoring the ceasefire between Russia and Georgia.

Pictured here: Moldovan communists worship at the shrine of their messiah in Chisinau, on April 22, Vladimir Lenin’s birthday.

Moldovan State Prosecutor Remands Businessman in Custody, Accused of Bankrolling “Twitter Revolution”; Ukrainian Communists Back Voronin

In another Not-So-Former Soviet republic, Moldova, a parliamentary vote recount has confirmed the communist party’s electoral victory on April 5. According to the initial poll results, the Communist Party of the Republic of Moldova attracted around half of the votes, resulting in violent anti-communist, pro-Romanian riots in the capital Chisinau. The country’s Constitutional Court made the decision to hold a recount at the request of President Vladimir Voronin, who chairs the ruling communist party. The communists hold 60 out of 101 parliamentary seats, which means they are only one seat away from being able to unilaterally elect the president. Two-term president Voronin must step down on May 7, presumably in favor of a party colleague. Moldova’s prime minister Zinaida Greceanii, a close Voronin ally, is his presumed successor.

On April 17, reports Novosti, Moldova’s Prosecutor General’s Office remanded Moldovan businessman Gabriel Stati in custody on suspicion of inciting mass riots and an attempted coup. Stati and his bodyguard will remain in custody for 30 days in Chisinau while the state prosecutor investigates the case. If found guilty, Stati could face up to 15 years for inciting mass riots in the country and an additional 25 years for the attempted coup. That Moldova’s communists would identify an oil and construction industry magnate as the source of the “Twitter Revolution” should surprise no one. Stati was living in Ukraine until Chisinau submitted an extradition request to Kiev.

For its part, the Communist Party of Ukraine sympathizes with the Voronin regime: “The presidium of the central committee of the Ukrainian Communist party notes that the government overthrow attempt in the Republic of Moldova cannot be viewed separately from the events which began with the establishment of the Saakashvili dictatorship in Georgia in 2003-2004 and the ‘orange putsch in Ukraine.'”

Incidentally, there is widespread belief in Georgia, states the Information Dissemination blog quoted above, that “Russia helped finance the [anti-Saakashvili] demonstrations that began April 9th, but it is noteworthy those demonstrations have become smaller and smaller each day.” Along that theme, Moldovan billionaire Stati’s links to the KGB-controlled Red Mafiya are worth exploring.

In an April 12 interview broadcast on Russia’s NTV channel, “President” Medvedev referred to the Moldovan unrest as “monstrous” and singled out Romanian irredentists for denunciation: “Such civil activity should be held within the legal framework and not in the way of the so-called color revolutions, which bring nothing but poverty and problems with human rights. What happened in our close neighbor, in Moldova, is unfortunately an example of how events can develop in an absolutely unconstitutional way. The footage we saw looked monstrous, when there were attempts to hang flags of another country on the main state buildings, the symbols of a state.” Along the same theme, Voronin has identified the Romanian intelligence service as the culprit behind the “Twitter Revolution.”

>Latin America/Asia Files: Thailand’s exiled left-populist PM materializes in Managua, rubs elbows with Ortega, claims Nicaraguan passport, new job

>- Anti-Thaksin Leader Sondhi Limthongkul Seriously Injured by Gunmen in Early Friday Morning Attack, Condition Stable Following Surgery

- First Contingent of Nicaraguan Cadets Heads to Russia for Military Training, Russian Delegation to Arrive in Managua to Discuss Upgrades for Country’s Soviet-Built Army

In January, Nicaraguan authorities revealed to the AFP news agency this week, Thailand’s exiled left-populist prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra materialized in Managua, rubbed elbows with past/present Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega, claimed a Nicaraguan passport, and acquired a new job. “President Ortega,” an official statement from Managua disclosed, “asked the foreign ministry to accredit him [Thaksin] as an ambassador of Nicaragua on a special mission, in order to facilitate his efforts to bring investments to our country.”

Nicaragua, which is once again under the overt control of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), issued the statement on Wednesday, only hours after authorities in Bangkok revoked Thaksin’s Thai passport in light of the banished politician’s alleged incitement of recent deadly anti-government protests. During the unrest in the streets of Bangkok, pro-Thaksin forces, known as “Red Shirts” due to their high-visibility Hugo Chavez-style T-shirts, clashed with police and pro-government supporters, including royalists and pro-business groups. Pro-Thaksin forces are formally organized as the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship.

Thailand, a Buddhist country with a constitutional monarchy, has never endured a full-blown communist regime, unlike the rest of Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Thailand’s communist guerrillas terminated their armed warfare against the government in the early 1980s. However, we have documented how Thaksin’s two previous political parties, both of which have been banned by Thailand’s Constitutional Court, are infiltrated at the highest levels by former cadres of the otherwise defunct Communist Party of Thailand. Thaksin’s current political vehicle is the For Thais Party.

“We have diplomatic relations with Nicaragua but no extradition agreement,” foreign ministry spokesman Tharit Charungvat informed AFP. Tharit admitted that Thailand has not yet issued a formal protest to Nicaragua for harboring and employing Thaksin. On Wednesday Thai authorities explained that they cancelled Thaksin’s passport after the billionaire tycoon called for a “revolution” against the pro-monarchist government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. Apparently in response to Thaksin’s call to arms, last Saturday Red Shirts stormed a Thai beach resort, where an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit was meeting. “The ministry can cancel or recall a passport if it can prove that a person has caused damage to the country,” stated government spokesman Panitan Wattanayagorn.

Thaksin lives in exile to avoid a two-year jail term for corruption. In an interview filmed in the United Arab Emirates before the announcement of the passport cancellation, Thaksin predictably denied that he had incited the Red Shirts’ violence.

At dawn on Friday, BBC News reports, Sondhi Limthongkul, head of the anti-Thaksin forces, the People’s Alliance for Democracy, was seriously injured in an assassination attempt. Sondhi’s so-called “Yellow Shirts” helped to oust Thaksin from power in 2006 and brought down a pro-Thaksin government last year. “At least two attackers followed Sondhi’s car, overtook it and sprayed it with about 100 rounds of gunfire from AK-47 and M-16s,” related local police commander Colonel King Kwaengwisatchaicharn. Sondhi was en route to his television station to record a program.

Thailand is one of several non-communist Asian countries with which neo-Sandinista Nicaragua maintains relations. The Republic of China is another. Instead of predictably snuggling up to Beijing, as it did during the 1980s, Nicaragua’s second communist regime recognizes Taipei, a linkage established by Managua’s liberal-conservative governments during the 1990s. This may be for the purpose of subverting Taiwan and Thailand into the Communist Bloc, but more likely for the purpose of attracting business investments, as admitted above by Managua itself. In light of Ortega’s cozy relationship with Thaksin, one is inclined to wonder if the Sandinistas are supporting a slow-motion crypto-communist coup in Thailand.

Meanwhile, in a sign that the revitalized Moscow-Managua Axis is moving ahead, Brigadier General Adolph Zepeda, public relations chief for the Nicaraguan Army, announced today that his country has dispatched its first contingent of 19 cadets to Russia for military, academic, and language training. Zepeda also revealed that a Russian military delegation will be arriving in Nicaragua over the next few days to continue discussions on the subject of technology transfers and re-equipping the Nicaraguan military, which uses mostly Soviet-vintage weapons. “The technicians of this [Russian] military mission will support us in the maintenance and correct operation of aircraft, armored vehicles, and armament,” explained Zepeda to La Voz del Sandinismo, the official mouthpiece of the FSLN.

The Cold War has returned to Central America and communism is once again oozing throughout the region, having claimed its latest victim, El Salvador, by the ballot box last month. But is anyone in the shopping mall regime paying attention?

>Final Phase Backgrounder: Soviet strategists accomplish major objective: Germany’s vice chancellor urges Obama to remove US nuclear warheads

>- KGB Defector Anatoliy Golitsyn Predicts Restoration of Moscow-Berlin Axis, the Soviet Strategists’ “Key to Progress toward a Neutral, Socialist Europe”

- Right Wing of Social Democratic Leadership Blocks Kurt Beck’s Bid to Push Party Leftward, Endorses Foreign Minister for Chancellor; Frank-Walter Steinmeier Already Committed to Angela Merkel’s Strategic Partnership with Russia

- SPD Mulls National Coalition with “Former” East German Communists as September 2009 Bundestag Election Approaches; Putin Ally and Former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder Calls Potential Alliance “Thoroughly Realistic”

- Federal Republic of Germany’s Domestic Intelligence Agency: 31,000 “Extremists” in Left Party and other Far-Left Formations, 6,000 Prepared to Overthrow Government by Force

- German Communist Party Cadre, Former Left Party Member in Lower Saxony State Parliament Lauds Stasi, Praises Berlin Wall

Pictured above: Russian “President” Dmitry Medvedev and German Vice Chancellor/Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier at the 45th Munich Security Conference in February.

It has been many months since we filed a report under “Final Phase Backgrounder.” However, the fulfillment of KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn’s detailed 25-year-old warnings about the Soviet strategic deception are becoming more and more apparent with the passage of time. Specific developments that validate Golitsyn’s thesis that communism in Eastern Europe transformed itself, rather than “died,” include:

1. The federalization of the European Economic Community into the European Union (EU) in 1993, per Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1989 prescription for a “common European home” from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains
2. The absorption into the EU of “post”-communist countries where leftist parties are still under covert Soviet control via the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties, the International Communist Movement, the Socialist International, the Party of European Socialists, European United Left–Nordic Green Left, and other inter-party organizations
3. The transformation of Europe into a “neutral, socialist” bloc of nations subservient to the Kremlin’s energy imperialism, via projects such as the Nord Stream and South Stream natural gas pipelines
4. The undermining of European conservative parties by figuratively placing an “Open for Business” sign over Russia and temporarily hiding the expansionistic threat of Soviet communism
5. The rise of the Moscow-Beijing Axis, as embodied in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, founded in 2001
6. The restoration of the Moscow-Berlin Axis, as embodied by a series of bilateral agreements, beginning in 1990, and a new strategic partnership contrived in 2006
7. The election of socialist and possible Soviet mole Barack Hussein Obama to the US presidency in 2008
8. The withdrawal of the US atomic arsenal from Europe, increasing the vulnerability of NATO to a nuclear blitzkrieg from Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces

In his first book New Lies for Old (1984), Golitsyn sketches the predictive framework for these “post”-Cold War realities. Please note your resident blogger’s comments in brackets.

The communist strategists have achieved their purpose thus far by misleading the West on developments in the communist world with three main aims in view: to relieve Western pressure on the communist regimes while they are “building socialism” and laying the groundwork for an eventual worldwide federation of communist states [including the European Union, African Union, Union of South American Nations, Commonwealth of Independent States, etc.]; to provoke the Western responses they desire to their activist diplomacy and international communist strategy [such as unrest in Moldova and Georgia in April 2009]; and to prepare the ground for a major shift in communist tactics in the final phase of policy [beginning] in the 1980s [and continuing into the early 21^st century] (page 322).

There are increasing signs of preparation for a communist initiative on Germany, the key to progress toward a neutral, socialist Europe [our emphasis]. Among these were the meeting between [Soviet dictator Leonid] Brezhnev and the East German leader, [Erich] Honecker, in the Crimea in 1980 at which a European conference on disarmament was discussed. Similar discussions took place between the Soviet and West German peace committees in February 1980 (page 335).

Pressure could well grow for a solution to the German problem in which some form of confederation between East and West Germany [realized in 1990] would be combined with neutralization of the whole and a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union [also realized in 1990 and greatly expanded since then] (page 341).

NATO could hardly survive this process [our emphasis] (page 341).

The disappearance of the Warsaw Pact [replaced by the Collective Security Treaty Organization and Shanghai Cooperation Organization] would have little effect on the coordination of the communist bloc, but the dissolution of NATO could well mean the departure of American forces from the European continent and a close European alignment with a “liberalized” Soviet bloc (page 341).

The EEC [European Economic Community, now European Union] on present lines, even if enlarged, would not be a barrier to the neutralization of Europe and the withdrawal of American troops. It might even accelerate the process (page 341).

“’Liberalization’ in Eastern Europe on the scale suggested could have a social and political impact on the United States itself, especially if it coincided with a severe economic depression,” suggests Golitsyn in the last chapter of New Lies for Old, “The Final Phase” (page 342). In view of the serious global recession that began in 2008 and Presidents George W. Bush and Obama’s application of “financial socialism” to America’s economic woes–a phrase used by Russian “President” Dmitry Medvedev–the former KGB major’s admonitions are once again worth pondering.

In a September-November 1990 memorandum to the US Central Intelligence Agency, Golitsyn expounds on the implications of German reunification for the advancement of the Soviet strategy to conquer Europe. The establishment of bilateral relations and binding obligations between Moscow and Bonn/Berlin began under the chancellorship of center-rightist Helmut Kohl. The linkages in the Moscow-Berlin Axis have only grown tighter over the last 20 years, under both Christian Democratic (CDU) and Social Democratic (SPD) governments, forcing reunified Germany into a subservient position before the Moscow Leninists. Golitsyn’s memo, published in The Perestroika Deception (1995, 1998), refers to Kohl, but his analysis is also applicable to Kohl’s Christian Democratic successor, the current German chancellor, Angela Merkel. Please note our comments in brackets.

Since West Germany was considered by the Soviets as politically the most vulnerable country in Western Europe, the main weight of the Soviet assault was directed against that country [our emphasis]. To ensure success, the Soviets made use of skilled diplomacy, agents of influence, pressure and significant concessions to the Germans on reunification. The result was a breakthrough for the Soviets [our emphasis].

The Germans responded with enthusiasm, providing massive financial, economic and technological aid to the Soviets—developing into their principal partners in the execution of their economic strategy. Ironically, Germany is moving towards partnership with the USSR under a conservative chancellor, Kohl. The problem with Kohl [and Merkel] is not that he is using the situation to gain his re-election but that he is recklessly disregarding the lessons of the history of Germany’s past dealings with the Soviets [our emphasis]. He overlooks the fact that it was the German General Staff [under Kaiser Wilhelm II] who financed [revolutionary Vladimir] Lenin and brought him to the Finland Station [in 1917].

No sooner had Lenin succeeded with his October Revolution than he attempted to re-export it to Germany [via the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic and the Spartacist insurrection]. Although Kohl dismisses the idea, the comparison between Lenin’s negotiation and exploitation of the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo with the Germans and the present Soviet strategy with regard to economic collaboration offered by Kohl and his Foreign Minister, Genscher, is close and compelling.

What Kohl [and Merkel] fails to realize is that the Soviet strategists aim to use Germany’s economic and technological might to convert the USSR into the dominant power in a united Europe. Chancellor Kohl [and Merkel] had his eyes on the next election. But Gorbachev and the strategists are thinking further ahead. It was no accident that Gorbachev referred to reunited Germany’s right not only to participate in NATO but to join whatever alliance Germany preferred. What he had in mind was the possibility that a future Germany under a Social Democratic Government [such as Gerhard Schröder’s (1998-2005) or possibly a future one under current Vice Chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeier] would switch to political alliance with the USSR. Domination of a united Europe by a Soviet-German political and economic partnership would be a significant achievement for the second round of the October World Socialist Revolution (page 125).

As noted in passing above, a Moscow-Berlin Axis first existed after the secret Treaty of Rapallo (1922-1933), signed between the Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union, and then again briefly after the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (1939-1941). Contrary to the Treaty of Versailles, Rapallo allowed German military units to train on Soviet territory in exchange for technology transfers from Berlin to Moscow. Germany’s National Socialist dictator Adolf Hitler terminated the Moscow-Berlin Axis when he hurled his armies against the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa.

Since Kohl’s retirement from German politics in 1998, there has been one Social Democratic government in Berlin, under former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a close personal ally of Russia’s KGB-communist dictator Vladimir Putin who advanced still further the Moscow-Berlin Axis. In fact, last year the Kremlin awarded “Comrade” Schröder with a post in the foreign relations section of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Schröder also chairs the shareholders’ committee of Nord Stream, a joint enterprise of Kremlin entity Gazprom, BASF/Wintershall, E.ON Ruhrgas, and N.V. Nederlandse Gasunie.

The current German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is also Merkel’s vice chancellor, is an SPD member who intends to lead his party to victory again in the September 27, 2009 Bundestag election. Steinmeier was formally nominated as the Social Democrats’ chancellor-candidate at a convention on October 18, 2008. The SPD also chose Transport, Building and Urban Affairs Minister Franz Müntefering to replace party leader Kurt Beck. Steinmeier is totally committed to ending all vestiges of the Cold War and expanding Merkel’s new strategic partnership with Russia. After Medvedev’s election in March 2008, Steinmeier gushed:

Russia is and remains an indispensable strategic partner if we want to secure peace in Europe. But it’s not only us who needs Russia — Russia also needs us. Let us take the president [Medvedev] at his word. Let us accept his partnership proposition. Russia’s transformation — it’s as much in his interest as it is in ours. The European Union must develop closer ties with countries in central Asia and the Caucasus as well as the Ukraine and Belarus — providing the latter agrees to work on its human rights record. We should enshrine a new charter with Russia, focused on democracy and peace. The Cold War is today definitively consigned to history.

One year later, on April 14, 2009, the UPI news agency reported that Steinmeier intends to ask Washington to remove its nuclear warheads stationed in Germany. “These weapons are militarily obsolete,” Steinmeier informed German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. Seizing upon Obama’s communist-inspired vision of a nuclear-free world, articulated over a week ago in Prague, Steinmeier insisted that Washington should first withdraw its nuclear weapons from Germany. He added that any disarmament conference that the USA attends with Russia should include scrapping “weapons in this category.” Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the US military has downsized its nuclear arsenal in fellow NATO states but, at present, it maintains approximately 100 nuclear warheads in Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Turkey. Another SPD government in Germany, especially under Steinmeier’s leadership, will effectively gut NATO’s ability to resist neo-Soviet aggression.

Chancellor Merkel has in the past argued that having nukes in Germany elevated the country’s security profile within NATO, but Steinmeier rejects that idea. Since Steinmeier and Merkel will face off in September’s parliamentary election, they have begun to adopt different positions on several issues. In any case, Merkel’s commitment to NATO as a bulwark against neo-Soviet aggression is dubious. Merkel was not only raised in East Germany but also joined the ruling communist party’s youth section as a girl.

Current public opinion polls reveal that popular support for the German Left and Right is evenly matched. For example, the CDU and its long-time ally in the state of Bavaria, the Christian Social Union (CSU), enjoy the support of 34 percent of voters, while the SPD enjoys only 27 percent. While the CSU/CSU could form a stable coalition with the liberal Free Democratic Party, as it did during the Cold War, thereby commanding support from a total of 48 percent of the electorate, the SPD could similarly enter a grand coalition with the Green and Left parties, thereby also commanding support from about 48 percent of the electorate.

The Left Party was founded in 2007 through the merger of the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor organization to the German Democratic Republic’s ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED), and Labour and Social Justice Electoral Alternative, a party founded in 2005 by disgruntled SPD members based in western Germany. Since then, the Left Party, not to mention the Green Party, has drained support away from the SPD. East Germany’s “former” communists have in fact cleared the five percent threshold to enter into the state parliaments of eastern Germany. In recent regional elections in western Germany, the Left Party also entered for the first time the state parliaments of Bremen, Hamburg, Hesse, and Lower Saxony. Left Party leader Oskar Lafantaine is an ex-SPD boss, who is notorious for branding former US President George W. Bush as a “terrorist” and praising Venezuela’s communist dictator Hugo Chavez for nationalizing power companies.

Since the formation of the Left Party, the SPD leadership has been divided over the possibility of inviting their far-left colleagues into a future coalition government. In October 2007 former chancellor Schröder was quoted as saying that an alliance between the SPD and the Left Party after 2009 was “thoroughly realistic.” Some political analysts attribute former SPD leader Kurt Beck’s departure from that office to his suggestion, made last year, of collaborating with the Left Party at the state and federal levels. In particular, the SPD’s right wing slammed Beck for “giving a green light” to the state party leader in Hesse to form a minority government with the Left Party. That particular venture failed.

Nevertheless, Müntefering sharply criticized Beck for cozying up to Germany’s far left, foreseeing a still further decline in the SPD’s fortunes. At the same time, the left wing of the SPD, including deputy party leader Andrea Nahles, expressed cautious support for Beck’s proposal. “The Left Party has become a political reality, also in western Germany,” Nahles told Der Spiegel adding: “Everyone in the SPD should accept this reality. Kurt Beck’s course is the correct one. However, the SPD should continue to refuse working together with the Left Party at the national level. No coalition, no tolerance or any kind of cooperation with this party.”

Beck’s attempt to shift the party leftward and so return to the SPD’s “socialist roots” represented a broader strategy aimed at dumping former chancellor Schröder’s Agenda 2010 reforms, modeled on ex-British prime minister Tony Blair’s “New Labour” policies. Instead, he sought to reinvigorate the party’s support base within western Germany’s working class and among advocates of “social justice.” The attempt obviously failed with Beck’s resignation last September. In the end, therefore, if Germany’s Social Democrats join forces with the Left Party, then it will be under Steinmeier’s leadership. Granted, Steinmeier’s candidacy for the chancellorship was backed by the SPD’s right wing, including Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück, Brandenburg Governor Matthias Platzeck, and Müntefering. However, it is evident from the quote above, that Steinmeier is already committed to consolidating the Moscow-Berlin Axis, with or without the domestic involvement of East Germany’s “former” communists.

It is not too surprising that many leaders in the SPD are nervous about snuggling up to the hard-core leftists in Germany’s Left Party. In February 2008 Christel Wegner, a cadre of the German Communist Party who ran on the Left Party ticket, made the audacious statement, in her capacity as deputy in Lower Saxony’s state parliament, that East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, and the Berlin Wall were “useful” in protecting the country from “reactionary forces” (that is, fascists and capitalists). “I think that when one builds a new societal form,” Wegner reflected, “then one needs such an organ because one has to protect oneself from other forces, reactionary forces, that look for opportunities to weaken a state from the inside.” She added: “The construction of the Wall was, in any case, a measure taken to prevent West Germans from continuing to come into East Germany.” Wegner was promptly expelled from the Left Party. Some offended CDU politicians in Lower Saxony demanded that Wegner also be expelled from the state parliament. Wegner is a paying member of Greenpeace.

In a related development, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, warns that the Left Party has been “infiltrated by far-left extremists and former communists.” One of the responsibilities of this agency is to monitor political extremism, both on the Left and Right. Der Spiegel reports that the Left Party contains several influential factions committed to advancing violent communist revolution in Germany:

The most powerful individual faction within the party is the Communist Platform (KPF) with 840 members, according to the report. It struggles openly for the “overthrow of capitalism” and is making massive attempts to influence the party’s new political platform, the agency writes.

The agency also mentions a faction with around 60 members called the Marxist Forum (MF), “an association of orthodox communist-oriented members and sympathizers,” including former members of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), the communist party which ruled the former East Germany.

The KPF and MF participate in a movement within the Left Party known as the Geraer Dialogue/Socialist Dialogue. This group, which has 120 members, is a “receptacle for extremist forces,” according to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Its political platform expressly includes “the extra-parliamentary struggle for social change.”

Other left-wing extremist movements within the Left Party include the Socialist Left with 550 members, as well as a pro-Cuban faction, the Cuba Si Working Group, with 420 members.

According to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution’s 2006 annual report there are about 31,000 extremists in the Left Party and other far-left formations, of whom around 6,000 are prepared to overthrow the government by force.

>USSR2 File: Moldovan opposition to boycott vote recount, Voronin: Romanian agents behind “Twitter Revolution”; Saakashvili faces "Necktie Revolution"

>In Russia, business and the mafia are one and the same — business, mafia, and the KGB. Large Russian businesses are run by the mafia and the KGB. An order goes out telling Georgian businessmen who live in Moscow to finance various political parties here in Georgia. Moscow would rather see Georgia destabilized than leaning toward the West.
– Vakhtang Rcheulishvili, former deputy speaker of Georgian parliament; quoted by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, March 27, 2009

Pictured above: While addressing his country’s parliament today, Romanian President Traian Basescu condemned Moldova’s treatment of ethnic Romanians and offered to fast-track one million applications for citizenship piling up in Romania’s embassy in Chisinau.

Although European monitors endorsed the results of Moldova’s April 5 parliamentary election, a poll that granted a third consecutive victory to the ruling communist party, domestic unrest two days later prompted the government of President Vladimir Voronin to restore the public’s trust by submitting to a vote recount tomorrow.

After serving two terms, Voronin must step down from his office. Moldova’s president is elected by parliament. Moldovan media consider Zinaida Greceanii, the country’s female prime minister and a Voronin croney, to be the most likely candidate for president. Moldova is covered by the European Union’s Neighborhood Policy and the new president is expected to attend the May 7 launch of the EU’s Eastern Partnership at a summit in Prague. The Czech Republic currently holds the rotating EU presidency. Incidentally, as we blogged before, the new caretaker prime minister in Prague, Jan Fischer, is an “ex”-cadre of the old Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Moldova and Cyprus, moreover, are the only European countries with democratically elected, openly communist governments.

Notwithstanding his concessions to Moldova’s liberal opposition, Voronin, a former Soviet Interior Ministry general who collects a Kremlin pension, continues to lash out against Romania. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Voronin ranted:

Citizens of Serbia and Romania masterminded pogroms in Chisinau. The arrival of nine persons from Serbia, as well as agents of the Romanian secret services had been registered in Chisinau. They wished to use the moment to stage an operation like a ‘colour revolution’. The events in Belgrade, Tbilisi, Bishkek and Kiev took place according to such a scenario. The events have been filmed, so we can identify the offenders who attacked policemen. We are going to arrest and prosecute them.

“We have proof on video of the participation of citizens from the neighboring state in the protests,” confirmed Grigory Petrenko, chairman of Moldova’s parliamentary foreign relations committee. He added:

It is not an accident that during the protests in front of the parliament and presidential administration they yelled slogans calling for unification with Romania. It is not an accident that the Romanian flag was raised on top of the presidential administration building, along with a map of a so-called Greater Romania, and it is not an accident that there was a large number of Romanians participating in the protest.

Voronin’s mention of Belgrade, Tbilisi, Bishkek, and Kiev refers to Serbia’s 2000 Bulldozer Revolution that ousted communist dictator Slobodan Milosevich, who died while on trial at The Hague in 2006; Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution that ousted communist dictator Eduard Schevardnadze, an ally of former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev who remains Moscow’s man in Tbilisi to this day; Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution that blocked an electoral victory for communist dictator Leonid Kuchma’s hand-picked successor Viktor Yanukovich; and Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 Tulip Revolution, which not-so-ironically replaced one “ex”-Soviet apparatchik with another one.

These fake anti-communist coups were named after the November 1989 Velvet Revolution that supposedly topped Czechoslovakia’s red regime. Soviet Bloc defector and dissident testimony proves that the Prague operation was masterminded by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and its Czechoslovakian counterpart. The KGB, the “sword and shield” of the CPSU, and Czechoslovakia’s State Security (StB) then carried out Moscow’s plan of false “democratization” through bogus political organizations like Charter 77.

Along the theme of Eastern Europe’s “color revolutions,” the Western MSM has portrayed last Tuesday’s anti-communist riots in the Moldovan capital as the “Twitter Revolution.” Twitter is a social networking forum on the Internet, where many protesters plotted their demonstration in Piata Marii Adunari Nationale, the main square in downtown Chisinau. “Digital tools like Twitter, Facebook and SMS text messaging played a key role in the massive youth protests that rocked the Communist government in the former Soviet republic of Moldova this week,” relates the AFP news agency. The same source continues:

The flow of Twitter comments could be searched with the tag #pman which stood for the name of Moldova’s central square, Piata Marii Adunari Nationale. Meanwhile a group set up on the social networking site Facebook called ‘Down With Communists!’ boasted over 500 members on Wednesday along with a logo of a stick-figure man dumping a Communist hammer and sickle in a trash can.

Unimpressed by the stamp of approval placed on the poll results by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Council of Europe, Moldova’s opposition alleges that the ruling communists rigged the election in their favor. Foreign witnesses also allege that last Tuesday’ riots were staged by “provocateurs” who commandeered an otherwise peaceful protest march. In an April 8 interview with EurActiv, Julien Danero, a Belgian researcher who witnessed the unrest, asserted: “Yes, I think that those who did the rampage were provocateurs. Even the opposition parties could not control the developments in any way. They were making speeches nearby, and all the speakers, politicians and young people were making appeals for calm, saying that the EU would recognize the protests only if they were peaceful.”

The leaders of the three main opposition parties–Our Moldova, the Liberal Party, and the Liberal Democratic Party—announced today that they intend to boycott the scheduled recount, denouncing the move as a ruse to cover up election violations and to ensure the continuation of communist rule.

The war of words between Chisinau and Bucharest is heating up as a result of the Twitter Revolution. Today Romania’s “ex”-communist President Traian Basescu warned: “We cannot tolerate Romanian citizens be threatened with guns by political leaders in the Republic of Moldova, as such actions cannot be in no way tolerable, while speaking of human lives. We drew attention that using weapons against the civil population, among which there were Romanian citizens too, is a crime.” The Romanian president also requested legislators to simplify the procedure by which one million ethnic Romanians in Moldova can obtain citizenship from Bucharest. EurActiv reports that this decision will “raise eyebrows in EU capitals, which would end up with another emigration wave of ‘millions of hungry, new EU citizens.'” Romanian-speaking Moldova has a total of four million people. As the country faces the possibility of becoming a failed state, Chisinau’s backers in Moscow will no doubt edge closer to war with NATO.

Indeed, following the April 7 riots, Russia’s neo-Soviet leadership strongly endorsed Moldova’s communist government and, alluding to Romanian irredentism, condemned external meddling in the small country’s affairs. It is not clear to what extent the Putinist and Voronin regimes were involved in fomenting fake anti-communist/pro-Romanian provocations in Chisinau. However, between April 3 and 8 Russian “President” Dmitry Medvedev held telephone conversations with Voronin and other leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The topics of discussion reportedly included the results of the April 2 Group of 20 summit in London, and upcoming meetings of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, the Collective Security Treaty Organization’s Collective Security Council, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s Council of Heads of State. Moldova’s unrest, of course, began on April 7. Thus, it is possible that just prior to Moldova’s election Moscow communicated its intention to Chisinau to provoke communist-controlled NATO member state Romania.

“Necktie Revolution” Brewing in Georgia as Kremlin Condemns NATO-Georgian Military Exercise

Pictured here: After six days of protest in Tbilisi, Georgians continue to demand the resignation of the country’s president.

Elsewhere in the “post”-Soviet space, Georgia’s opposition continues to besiege the country’s deceptively pro-USA/NATO president Mikhail Saakashvili, a social democrat who is an alleged KGB agent and known protégé of Schevardnadze. Last Thursday and Friday tens of thousands of Georgians, as part of a campaign of civil disobedience, took to the streets of Tbilisi to block roads near the president’s official residence and the state broadcaster’s headquarters.

The chief opposition leader is Levan Gachechiladze, a liberal-conservative businessman who founded Georgia’s United Opposition and ran in the January 2008 presidential poll that re-elected Saakashvili. “We will turn Tbilisi into a city of tents and cells,” vowed Gachechiladze, who has participated in six days of protest outside the presidential residence. A Conservative Party of Georgia activist, Lasha Chkhartishvili, urged residents gathering in front of the residence to bring neckties and hang them on a fence. Last August, explains Novosti, Saakashvili became the object of mockery in both Georgia and Russia when he was caught on camera nervously chewing his necktie while discussing the Russian invasion by telephone with a top Western official.

Political analysts, according to Reuters, insist, however, that Saakashvili’s ruling United National Movement retains wide support, even though the president has reshuffled his cabinet in the face of some high-level political defections. Saakashvili has accused the opposition of receiving “Russian money” and the Kremlin of building up its military presence in Georgia’s breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. At the same time, in what appears to be a provocation designed to lure NATO into a war with Russia, the Georgian president declared: “Although the concentration of Russian forces in Georgia and beyond it exceeds what was there in August last year, I don’t think there is a possibility that Russia will resume a large-scale military adventure. As regards our relations with Russia, Russians keep saying that they want good relations with Georgia, but only after a change in government.”

This week South Ossetian “President” Eduard Kokoity, a Soviet Komsomol graduate, rumbled: “The Georgian army cannot resist to the Russian and South Ossetian military forces stationed in Tskhinvali Region. Russian and Ossetian border guards will protect the borders of the republic together soon.” He was quick to add: “The joint control of borders does not mean that South Ossetia is not an independent republic.” Only Russia and neo-Sandinista Nicaragua have recognized the “independence” of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Russian President Medvedev, his master KGB-communist dictator Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Foreign Ministry have not disguised their desire for “regime change” in Tbilisi. Georgian political scientist Ghia Nodia provides a brief overview of Kremlin intrigue in its “former” satellite in the Caucasus Mountains:

Russia is attempting to satisfy this demand for a change of government by supplying political alternatives. Russia has been trying to create some kind of a fifth column in Georgia, be it by strengthening [Igor] Giorgadze’s Justice Party or through the creation of some NGOs. They probably thought that since Saakashvili was brought in by the West, they could similarly change the government in Georgia.

So far, such efforts, including the backing of former [Georgian] Security Minister Igor Giorgadze’s Justice Party in 2005-06, have been unsuccessful.

Russia hasn’t given up the plan. It still hopes that by continuing to push this agenda they will bring about political instability.

Interpol fugitive Igor Giorgadze, who is reportedly hiding out in Russia, is the son of retired Soviet Army general Panteleimon Giorgadze, boss of the United Communist Party of Georgia. The latter is allied with Gennady Zyuganov’s (secretly ruling) Communist Party of the Russian Federation. The several communist parties that operate in Georgia do not command much popular support but, as can be seen, their leaders are important fifth columnists for Moscow.

At the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty link above, even Georgia’s former border guard commander Badri Bitsadze, husband of former parliament speaker and opposition leader Nino Burjanadze, has shady links with the Kremlin via the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB/KGB) and the Russian and Georgian mafias. “In Russia, business and the mafia are one and the same — business, mafia, and the KGB,” explains Vakhtang Rcheulishvili, former deputy speaker of the Georgian parliament. “Large Russian businesses are run by the mafia and the KGB. An order goes out telling Georgian businessmen who live in Moscow to finance various political parties here in Georgia.” Rcheulishvili, who does not hesitate to call Russia’s internal repression apparatus by its old name (that is, KGB), adds: “Moscow would rather see Georgia destabilized than leaning toward the West.”

Meanwhile, Russia’s fiery NATO envoy Dmitry Rogozin has articulated the Kremlin’s displeasure with another planned joint NATO-Georgia military exercise to be held at Georgia’s Vaziani military base from May 3 to June 3. NATO troops and Georgia’s armed forces wrapped up a previous combined drill, Immediate Response 2008, one week before Russia’s re-invasion and re-occupation of the “former” Soviet republic on August 5, 2008. “NATO is trying to interfere in Georgia’s affairs in this way,” Rogozin complained to Novosti on Tuesday. The Cooperative Longbow/Lancer-2009 drills will include 900 service personnel from 23 NATO member states, to be held under NATO’s Partnership for Peace Program, of which Russia is also a member. The exercises will improve interoperability between NATO and Georgian troops. Specifically, Cooperative Longbow will train staff, while Cooperative Lancer will consist of field drills.

Rogozin huffed: “The exercises are an expression of support for Saakashvili, and a challenge to the newly independent South Ossetia and Abkhazia.” He added ominously: “Russia will be forced to react.” Rogozin concluded: “The Saakashvili regime shows gross disregard towards those people sacrificed on the altar of his Napoleonic ambitions.” In other words, the Kremlin views Saakashvili as a “fascist.”

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which embodies the Moscow-Beijing Axis, plans to carry out joint military drills in Tajikistan between April 17 and 19, as well as in northeast China in the summer. These will constitute the third and fourth Sino-Soviet war games since 2005.

>USA File: Intel officials, cybersecurity experts: Russian, Chinese hackers mapping electrical grid, deploying “attack software” for future disruptions

>A number of nations, including Russia and China, can disrupt elements of the US information infrastructure.
– Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence, recent statement to US lawmakers

If we go to war with them [Russia or China], they will try to turn them [malware] on.
– Senior US intelligence official

At Once Upon a Time in the West we regularly monitor attempts by the Communist Bloc to disrupt or bring down the Internet, as well as penetrate and interfere with civilian and military computer systems in NATO countries. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal, citing various US intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts, reported that hackers from Russia and China have been caught red-handed (pun intended) mapping the US electrical grid and deploying malware to activate at a later date.

“Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials,” begins the WSJ, continuing: “The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven’t sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.”

“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid. So have the Russians,” a senior US intelligence official is quoted as saying, adding: “If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on.”

“The espionage appears pervasive across the U.S. and doesn’t target a particular company or region,” observes a former Department of Homeland Security official. “There are intrusions [in electrical systems], and they are growing. There were a lot last year.” The US electrical grid consists of five separate networks covering the eastern states, the western states, Texas, Alaska, and Hawaii.

Experts at the US Cyber Consequences Unit think tank explained that “attack programs” search for openings in a computer network through which the software and its human controllers overseas can acquire the same access and powers as a systems administrator.

Intelligence officials admit that many of the intrusions were not detected by the companies in charge of the infrastructure but, rather, by US government agencies. The WSJ relates that the newspaper’s sources in the intelligence community “worry about cyber attackers taking control of electrical facilities, a nuclear power plant or financial networks via the Internet.”

“Over the past several years, we have seen cyberattacks against critical infrastructures abroad, and many of our own infrastructures are as vulnerable as their foreign counterparts,” Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence, recently told lawmakers. “A number of nations, including Russia and China, can disrupt elements of the U.S. information infrastructure.”

Last year, a senior Central Intelligence Agency official, Tom Donahue, informed a meeting of utility company representatives in New Orleans that a cyberattack brought down power equipment in multiple regions around the world. The outage was followed by extortion demands.

Intelligence officials, the WSJ concludes, “cautioned that the motivation of the cyberspies wasn’t well understood, and they don’t see an immediate danger.” It is not known whether these breaches in cybersecurity are government sponsored, but Russian and Chinese officialdom is quick to deny culpability. “These are pure speculations,” spluttered Yevgeniy Khorishko, a spokesentity at the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC, adding: “Russia has nothing to do with the cyberattacks on the U.S. infrastructure, or on any infrastructure in any other country in the world.”

Wang Baodong, Khorishko’s counterpart at the Chinese Embassy, piously intoned: “The Chinese government resolutely oppose[s] any crime, including hacking, that destroys the Internet or computer network. We have laws barring the practice. China is ready to cooperate with other countries to counter such attacks. Some people overseas with Cold War mentality are indulged in fabricating the sheer lies of the so-called cyberspies in China.” Sure, Comrade Khorishko, Comrade Wang, we believe you.

For anyone who holds to the Golitsynian thesis, though, the motivation of Russian and Chinese cyberspies should be evident. The Communist Bloc is preparing to cripple civilian and military computer systems in the West immediately prior to a hot war.

In January 2008 the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved new industry protection measures that will improve computer server security and counter cyberattacks. Last week, Senate Democrats introduced a proposal that will require all private companies managing critical infrastructure to comply with new cybersecurity standards. More ominously, the Senate bill will grant President Barack Hussein Obama emergency powers to control the electrical grid and other critical infrastructure, which could be good or bad, depending on whether Obama is a Soviet mole, as we suspect. Under the Bush administration, Congress approved US$17 billion in secret funds to protect government networks. The Obama administration is considering the possibility of expanding the program. A senior Pentagon official stated on Tuesday that the Department of Defense has over the last six months allocated US$100 million to repair cyber damage.

>USSR2/EU Files: Moldova’s communist president severs relations with Bucharest following pro-Romanian riots, Moscow backs Voronin

>Is another manufactured crisis brewing in the “post”-Soviet space, this time in Moldova? Last year the Soviet strategists goaded Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, an alleged KGB agent, into attacking South Ossetia’s separatist regime, where most residents hold Russian passports. Clashes between Georgian and South Ossetian forces resulted in Russia’s re-invasion of Georgia over a five-day period, the establishment of Soviet military bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and a new state of chilly relations between Russia and NATO. Previously, Russian forces withdrew from their Soviet-era garrison in Georgia in November 2006.

Pictured above: On April 8 anti-government activists gathered for a second day of protests near Moldova’s parliament building in Chisinau. Riot police regained control of the president’s office and parliament early Wednesday after they were ransacked by the protesters.

Now, in the wake of Moldova’s disputed Sunday parliamentary election–in which the ruling communist party won a third consecutive victory, sparking violent protests by anti-communists and Romanian irredentists–President Vladimir Voronin has accused Bucharest of destabilizing Moldova, expelled Romania’s ambassador, and announced visa restrictions on Romanian citizens.

“We made the decision to impose visa restrictions with Romania,” Voronin blustered, adding: “Moreover, the Romanian ambassador to Moldova has been declared persona non grata. Romania’s influence in the riots is very serious and that the government knew who was behind the events, though some of them had escaped. Romania is involved in everything that has happened. Patience also has its limits.”

Turning on Moldova’s liberal opposition, Voronin rumbled: “They should concede defeat with decency.” Alluding to his role as Soviet Interior Ministry general in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, Voronin added that authorities will use force if “mass disorder” resumes: “I tried to prevent bloodshed in 1989 and 1991, when I was interior minister. Yesterday I was almost ready to take such a decision. Corresponding measures could be taken in the future if this happens again. The authorities have the grounds to take such steps, in line with the law.” As a result of his faithful activities in the old Soviet regime, Voronin reportedly draws a pension (compliance money?) from the Kremlin to this day. He has served two presidential terms since 2001 and must cede the office to another member of the communist party.

On Wednesday Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov rushed to the defense of Voronin by dismissing the Moldovan opposition’s demand for a second election, noting that international monitors determined that the original poll was free and fair. “We are deeply concerned by what happened in Moldova yesterday, I hope the situation will be taken under control,” Lavrov intoned in Moscow, “Demands for fresh elections and the revision of the vote results are absolutely groundless, as all international monitors agreed that the election complied with democratic and legal norms.”

The Russian Foreign Ministry also took a dim view of Romania’s alleged involvement behind the Tuesday riots: “Judging by the slogans shouted in the squares, plenty of Romanian flags in the hands of organizers of these outrages, their aim is to discredit the achievements in strengthening the sovereignty of Moldova. The Russian foreign ministry hopes that common sense will prevail, public and constitutional order will be restored in the next few days and the choice of the Moldovan citizens will be confirmed by all politically responsible forces.”

Representatives of Moldova’s two main opposition parties, Our Moldova and the Liberal Democratic Party, denied responsibility for the riots. “What happened yesterday had nothing to do with the Liberal Democratic Party. We are not planning to call for anyone to hit the streets today,” Alexander Tenase complained. This was not the stance of Liberal Democratic leader Vladimir Filat yesterday, who reportedly threatened to use force to instigate a vote recount.

Ironically, or perhaps not, Romania’s government is stacked with “ex”-communists, like the rest of Eastern Europe. This fact suggests that the nationalist saber rattling between Chisinau and Bucharest is part of the Soviet deception strategy and, thus, designed to confuse Western analysts and flush out domestic anti-communists. Formerly part of the Warsaw Pact, Romania is now a NATO member state. However, the two major political parties in Bucharest trace their origin to the communist-controlled National Salvation Front that replaced dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989. The KGB–using their agent Ion Iliescu, Romania’s first “post”-communist president–scripted the execution of Ceausescu when it became apparent that the latter was unwilling to comply with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s disingenuous plan for “democratizing” Moscow’s Eastern European satellites.

Meanwhile, during Tuesday’s riots in Chisinau Ukraine placed its border control police units along the 1,222-kilometer border with Moldova on alert. Itar-Tass quoted Kiev’s border service chief, Sergei Astakhov, as saying: “Border protection was strengthened over aggravation of the situation in the neighbouring country.”

Additional provocations can be expected in Moldova and Transnistria, Moldova’s ethnically Russian breakaway region, in which the Kremlin portrays NATO member state Romania as an aggressor and creates a pretext to establish a military presence in Moldova, thereby also outflanking “pro”-NATO Ukraine.

>USSR2/EU Files: Kremlin accuses USA of militarizing space, using Kyrgyzstan base to spy on Russia, China; Medvedev lauds Obama as “My new comrade"

>- Poking the Soviet Bear in His Den: NATO Countries Carry Out Baltic Air Sovereignty Training Event II over Estonia and Lithuania

- “Ex”-Communist (Surprise!) Chosen as Czech Republic’s Caretaker Prime Minister; Social Democratic-Communist Coalition Promises to Scrap US Radar Base Deal after October Election (Surprise!)

- US President/“Comrade” Obama Regales Adoring Audience in Prague with Vision of “Peace in Our Time,” Urges America to Enter Total Disarmament Regime with the Soviet Strategists

- Moldovan Reds Win Election (Surprise!), Form Third Government; Anti-communists, Romanian Irredentists Riot, Threaten to Force Vote Recount

This past Friday, in an interview with Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), the newspaper of the Russian Defense Ministry, Lieutenant General Yevgeny Buzhinsky, deputy head of the department for international military cooperation, accused Washington of militarizing outer space. Buzhinsky pointed to the US National Space Policy, signed by former President George W. Bush on August 31, 2008, as proof:

The new doctrine adds a tougher and more unilateral nature to these actions. Russian military experts see in this doctrine a disguised bid of the USA to weaponization of outer space.

As you know, space is already used for military purposes. Many countries have deployed and continue deploying in it satellites of reconnaissance, communications, navigation and other systems designed to perform tasks for ensuring their defence potential and security.

Anti-satellite weapons make an integral part of the U.S. missile defence system. The efficiency of the anti-satellite weapons was shown graphically in 2008, when the U.S. antimissile Standard-3M downed the U.S. spy satellite US-193.

Despite the statements of some U.S. officials that the satellite destruction had to be performed just once only to minimize risks for life and health of people, many analysts are of another opinion. They believe that the U.S. tested a new type of weapons capable of destroying spacecraft.

By accusing Washington of militarizing space, of course, Moscow thereby creates a pretext to do the same. This was the entire thrust behind the Kremlin-directed propaganda that followed the apparently accidental collision of a US comsat and Russian milsat in February.

Along the same theme, on Sunday Rossiya TV accused Washington of using its air base in Manas, Kyrgyzstan, slated to be closed in August, to spy on Russia and China. The “documentary” on Rossiya TV asserted:

In one of the buildings … there is a multi-channel, multi-functional system of radio-electronic surveillance.

This station can eavesdrop the whole world — every fax, every e-mailed letter. Every call from a mobile or landline phone is being recorded and processed. Billions of messages are being intercepted.

At Manas, the U.S. built a station which controls entire Central Asia, parts of China and Siberia. For Americans, the existence of the intelligence complex at the base is more important than the runway. It was done in a treacherous way, without being endorsed by the Kyrgyz authorities.

Rossiya TV is widely perceived as a propaganda arm of the Kremlin, while the US$2 billion loan that Moscow extended to Bishkek earlier this year is viewed at this blog as a thinly disguised attempt to oust the Americans from their last Central Asian base.

Russia does not hesitate to denounce NATO “expansionism” in the old Soviet Bloc, even though we believe that this is part of the long-range Soviet strategy to provide a pretext for preemptive military strikes against the West. NATO’s BAST-E II drill provides such a pretext.

Today, according to the Estonian Defense Ministry, NATO fighter jets will carry out air defense exercises over the capitals of Estonia and Lithuania, Tallinn and Riga. During the Baltic Air Sovereignty Training Event II, the same source stated, “The populations of the Estonian and Lithuanian Capitals may well see NATO fighter aircraft overfly their cities. Onlookers in the vicinity of Riga International Airport will also see NATO fighter aircraft enacting a practice Air Policing exercise.” The one-day drill will focus on improving interoperability among NATO air forces.

BAST-E II is a continuation of drills held in October 2008. NATO’s commitment to protect the airspace over Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia expires in 2011. Since all three countries are wary of neo-Soviet aggression, most recently displayed last August in Georgia, they are urging an extension of the agreement until 2018.

Even as Moscow beats the war drum against Washington, the neo-Soviet leadership feigns friendship with the USA by granting permission to NATO to transit non-military cargoes over Russian territory to Afghanistan. “I do not believe that the transit of toilet rolls via rail through Russia for NATO’s use in Afghanistan constitutes a betrayal of the motherland,” Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s fiery envoy to NATO, joked on Monday. Rogozin also hinted that military cooperation between Russia and NATO, which was severed after the invasion of Georgia, could be re-established after ministerial meetings of the NATO-Russia Council, to be held between May 18 and June 6.

The USA’s planned National Missile Defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as Russia’s refusal to comply with the Cold War-era Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty are two more sources of tension between Russia and NATO. The only reason that Moscow is “playing nice” with Brussels at this time is to be in the best possible position to plunge the dagger into the North Atlantic Alliance at a later date.

Yesterday the UPI news agency reported that the Czech Republic’s outgoing government and opposition leaders have agreed that 58-year-old economist Jan Fischer will organize a caretaker cabinet by May 9 and lead the country until the October 9-10 general election. Fischer will replace outgoing Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, whose government resigned in mid-March. Topolanek belongs to the center-right Civic Democratic Party, although he began his career in the youth section of the ruling Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. For his part, Fischer is not currently affiliated with any party, but between 1980 and 1990 was also a cadre of the ruling communist party. Fischer has directed the republic’s statistical office since 2003. In another article, the same source confidently predicts the outcome of the next Czech poll: “The Social Democrats and Communists, two parties that strongly oppose letting the United States build the radar base, will form the next government.”

The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) is the Czech Republic’s main communist party and chief successor to the old Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In the 2006 Chamber of Deputies election the KSCM picked up 26 seats, thereby also making the party the country’s third largest.

This past Sunday US President Barack Hussein Obama addressed adoring crowds in Prague and urged a “nuclear-free world” (pictured above in Hradcany Square). Translated from commiespeak, this means that America must scrap its nuclear deterrent while the Kremlin gangsters secretly modernize and expand their own battery of nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles. First, notwithstanding North Korea’s in-your-face provocations, “Obamessiah” offered Czechs a history lesson in the Cold War and then painted a grim picture of nuclear war:

The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War. No nuclear war was fought between the United States and the Soviet Union, but generations lived with the knowledge that their world could be erased in a single flash of light. Cities like Prague that had existed for centuries would have ceased to exist.

Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black markets trade in nuclear secrets and materials. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one. Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered in a global nonproliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point when the center cannot hold.

Obama then proposed the negotiation of new treaties with Russia, implementing strategic arms reduction and a comprehensive test ban, as well as ending the production of fissile materials. Obama then mentioned that he and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev instigated this process during the Group of 20 summit in London last week.

First, the United States will take concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons.

To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy and urge others to do the same. Make no mistake: as long as these weapons exist, we will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies — including the Czech Republic. But we will begin the work of reducing our arsenal.

To reduce our warheads and stockpiles, we will negotiate a new strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia this year. President Medvedev and I began this process in London, and will seek a new agreement by the end of this year that is legally binding, and sufficiently bold. This will set the stage for further cuts, and we will seek to include all nuclear weapons states in this endeavor.

To achieve a global ban on nuclear testing, my administration will immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. After more than five decades of talks, it is time for the testing of nuclear weapons to finally be banned.

And to cut off the building blocks needed for a bomb, the United States will seek a new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons. If we are serious about stopping the spread of these weapons, then we should put an end to the dedicated production of weapons grade materials that create them.

Second, together, we will strengthen the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a basis for cooperation.

The basic bargain is sound: countries with nuclear weapons will move toward disarmament, countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them; and all countries can access peaceful nuclear energy. To strengthen the treaty, we should embrace several principles. We need more resources and authority to strengthen international inspections. We need real and immediate consequences for countries caught breaking the rules or trying to leave the treaty without cause.

Although Obama was directly addressing the Czechs, he was no doubt also appealing to a global audience that includes patriotic US citizens who did not vote for him and who reject his policy of disarming America, as well as sending reassuring signals to the Soviet strategists and their friends in the Council on Foreign Relations.

Obama’s peace rhetoric sounds nice to the ideologically challenged sound bite generation, but we strongly suspect that America’s new president is a smooth-talking Soviet mole who is more committed to submerging the USA into Moscow’s Red World Order than even former president Bill Clinton, another suspected KGB asset. Last November, after Obama’s election, former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev enjoined Obama to implement “perestroika” (socialist restructuring) in the USA. Later, on March 20, Obama, along with US Vice President Joe Biden, secretly met with Gorbachev at the White House. Spokesmen in Washington and Moscow refused to divulge details of this under-reported meeting, but it appears that America’s days as a free nation are numbered.

Following Obama’s first encounter with Medvedev at the G20 summit, the Russian head of state tellingly referred to the US president as “comrade.” In connection with NATO’s expansion into the old Soviet Bloc, Medvedev, a Soviet Komsomol graduate, told reporters: “Yesterday I spoke about this with my new comrade, President Barack Obama.” He then added: “I believe that we managed to establish contact. . . . I cannot say that we made much progress on the most serious issues. Let’s wait and see. I liked the talks. It is easy to talk to him. He can listen. The start of this relationship is good. Today it’s a totally different situation [compared to former President George W. Bush]. This suits me quite well.” Incidentally, when Nicaragua’s past/present Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega made his first “post”-Cold War trek to Moscow last December, Medvedev also referred to El Comandante as “comrade.”

The shopping mall regime long since swallowed communist deception–hook, line, and sinker–but Eastern Europe’s citizen-slaves have learned some hard lessons. This past Sunday the ruling Communist Party of the Republic of Moldova, formerly the Moldavian section of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, won its third consecutive parliamentary election. The results afford the communists at least 62 seats in the new legislative session, with 61 votes in the 101-member chamber required to elect a new president. Since President Vladimir Voronin, a former Soviet Interior Ministry general and thus Moscow’s man in Chisinau, has already served two terms, the Moldovan parliament must elect another communist for the chief executive office. The Central Election Commission stated that 59.49% of the more than 2.6 million eligible voters cast ballots under the watchful presence of some 5,500 local and international observers.

Anti-communists and Romanian irredentists were not pleased by Sunday’s red victory. On Tuesday 5,000 protestors stormed the presidential palace in Chisinau, only to be dispersed by police with water cannon. Some protesters demanded reunification with Romania, waved Romanian flags, and chanted “We are Romanians!” Rioters then broke into the parliament building, scribbled anti-communist slogans on walls, threw a smoke-bomb from an upper storey, and burned furniture in the streets. “The situation is under police control, and will remain under their control,” insisted Interior Ministry spokesentity Alla Meleka in an interview with Novosti. The protests, which began peacefully, were initially led by Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Filat, who warned that the opposition would go as far as using force to implement a vote recount.

Since 1992 Moscow has used the threat of Russian military intervention in Moldova’s ethnically Russian breakaway region of Transnistria to keep Chisinau under its thumb. Moldova and Cyprus are the only two European countries with democratically elected communist governments although, of course, “ex”-communists still dominate the leadership of most Not-So-Former Soviet Bloc states.

>Latin America File: Ortega heads for Havana, Salvadoran President-Elect Funes meets Lula in Brazil; South American, Arab leaders converge in Qatar

>- Panama’s Drug Czar: Colombian and Mexican Cartels Have Transformed Country into Relay Station for Northbound Drug Shipments

- Chavez Denounces Capitalism, G20 Summit, Ex-President George W. Bush; Huddles with Qadaffi, Assad in Doha, Invites Sudan’s Genocidal Dictator to Visit Venezuela; Rubs Elbows with Ahmadinejad in Tehran

- Ecuador’s Socialist President Correa Anticipates Uneventful April 26 Re-Election, Defense Minister Leads Military Delegation to Moscow in March

- Soviet Communist Leader Zyuganov Urges President Obama to Release “Cuban Five” Espionage Agents, Terminate Economic Blockade against Havana

Pictured above: Seems like old times: Dan and Raul chillin’ in Havana.

No doubt laughing at reports of communism’s exaggerated demise, Communist Bloc leaders are busy power networking around the world in 2009. On Thursday Nicaragua’s past/present dictator Daniel Ortega travelled to Cuba where he has cultivated a long and ideologically fruitful relationship with the Castro Bros. Like Fidel, now in self-contemplative retirement, and Raul, who guides the ship of state in his brother’s stead, Daniel is a decades-old KGB asset. The Cuban state media reports that Ortega travelled to Havana upon the communist leadership’s invitation:

According to Granma news daily, the meeting reaffirmed the excellent state of relations between the Caribbean archipelago and the Central American nation while both leaders expressed their intention to continue strengthening the bilateral ties. Raul and Ortega exchanged opinions on different topics such as the challenges that Cuba and Nicaragua face amidst the complex international situation and discussed other topics of regional and multilateral interest. Also present at the meeting were Cuban First Vice President Jose Ramon Machado Ventura, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla and Rosario Murillo, President of the Council of the Citizen’s Power of Nicaragua.

Accompanying Ortega was his wife Rosario, who presides over the Councils of Citizen’s Power, the Sandinista counterpart to Cuba’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. On April 1 Nicaragua broke off trade talks with the European Union. “We cannot negotiate with a gun to the head,” Ortega complained in a speech posted on El Comandante’s website. “They want to put us in a free trade agreement where the shark swallows the sardine,” he pouted. What’s wrong with free trade, Dan? Karl Marx bestowed his imprimatur on free trade back in the 1840s. Real capitalists, as far as we’re concerned, are not opposed to some protectionism to safeguard national interests.

In another example of Nicaragua’s reintegration into the Communist Bloc, on March 24 Managua inked an accord with state-owned firm PetroVietnam for the exploration of offshore oil and natural gas reserves. The signing ceremony was attended by Petroleos de Nicaragua CEO Francisco López and PetroVietnam President Dinh La Thang, with Ortega participating as witness of honor (loosely defined). López explained that the accords with PetroVietnam cover viability studies on both coasts. PetroVietnam also pledged to provide technical assistance with the construction of the El Supremo Sueño de Bolivar refinery, to be located in Nagarote, 90 kilometers west of Managua. El Supremo will cost US$3.9 billion to build and will refine 150,000 barrels of crude oil per day, transforming energy-starved Nicaragua into an exporter of petroleum derivatives. The project is being constructed with financial assistance from close ally Venezuela. López announced that: “A PetroVietnam executive mission will be arriving in Nicaragua within four weeks to explore the distinct possibility that there are large reserves of petroleum and natural gas in our country.”

In addition to Vietnam, Venezuela, and Iran, Russia, as we have previously documented, has also promised to beef up Nicaragua’s energy infrastructure. In the 1980s El Comandante revealed a penchant for designer sunglasses now, like Mikhail (“I’ll Always Be a Communist”) Gorbachev, he’s an aging communist windbag. As long as Ortega enjoys Moscow’s backing, though, the neo-Sandinista regime in Managua is potentially dangerous.

Since his election two weeks ago, Salvadoran President-Elect Mauricio Funes, the moderate-left figurehead for the soon-to-be-ruling Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), has responded to accusations that he is Hugo Chavez’s man in San Salvador by retorting: “Chavez will not meddle in El Salvador.” The formerly ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) has played up alleged relations between the FMLN and Venezuela’s red dictator. However, Funes also pledged that El Salvador will have “superb” relations with the USA, on the one hand, and Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, on the other hand. Since US President Barack Hussein Obama is a socialist, while the other three countries sport communist dictatorships, warming relations between the USA and Latin America’s Red Axis are possible as long as Chavez stops beating the anti-Washington war drum. Tellingly, Chavez was the first Latin American Red Axis leader to congratulate Funes and expressed his desire to “deepen the links of brotherhood between our people and governments.”

President-Elect Funes has also pledged to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba, severed nearly 50 years ago, after the Castro Bros. seized power. On March 19 Funes told a news conference: “We would be, at present, the only country in Latin America that doesn’t have diplomatic relations with Cuba. The date on which relations with Cuba will be re-established remains up to my discretion.” During the civil war that wracked the country between 1980 and early 1992 the Soviet Union and Cuba funneled arms to the FMLN guerrillas. Vice President-Elect Salvador Sanchez Ceren was the FMLN’s battlefield commander between 1984 and 1992, which means he’s a hard-core revolutionary which, in turn, proves that Funes is little more than a façade for the party’s unreconstructed Marxist leadership.

The AFP news agency reported, at the link above, that on March 19 President-Elect Funes made a private trip to Brazil, where he met fellow moderate leftist head of state, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Funes’ wife, Dr. Vanda Pignato, is a Brazilian national who was involved in the formation of Lula’s ruling Workers’ Party in 1980. Lula, along with retired red thug Fidel Castro, founded the narco-communist-terrorist Sao Paul Forum ten years later. Thus, we see that El Salvador’s new president is also well plugged into the Western Hemisphere’s Communist Bloc leadership network.

One of outgoing President Tony Saca’s last official functions was to represent El Salvador at the Central American Integration System (SICA) meeting in Managua on March 25. He excused Funes’ absence, noting that his successor was visiting Brazil. Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Samuel Santos welcomed the delegations at the Augusto C. Sandino International Airport. Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom did not attend due to the worsening situation created by organized crime in his country, a situation not unrelated to the narco-anarchy in neighboring Mexico. Instead Colom was represented by his foreign minister. Saca was the only rightist present at the SICA meeting, which is now a tool for Latin America’s ascendant Red Axis.

Summit host Ortega persuaded participants to hold a regional “summit in defense of employment” in Managua on May 19-20. The summit will invite government and business leaders from throughout Central America and the Caribbean Basin to develop a common strategy, the outcome to be determined in advance, of course, by the region’s political left.

Elsewhere in Central America, the Latin American Herald Tribune, citing Panama’s drug czar Rafael Guerrero, has revealed that the Colombian and Mexican drug cartels are increasingly using Panama as a staging area for northbound shipments of cocaine. This recreational drug is produced in large part under the auspices of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, hence terrorism expert Joseph Douglass’ 20-year-old term “red cocaine.” “Panama has become the main logistical point for meetings between those who commit this crime, mainly members of [Mexico’s] Sinaloa, Gulf and Tijuana cartels,” explained Guerrero.

On March 16 the Naval Aviation Service of Panama acknowledged the arrest the previous week of 17 people, including both Colombian and Panamanian citizens, from whom about 1.2 tons of cocaine and three speedboats were confiscated along the country’s Pacific coast, near the Colombian border. Panamanian authorities do not rule out the possibility that Colombian narcos have infiltrated the country’s southern province Darien in order to set up a cocaine processing laboratory in the area.

The totalitarian nature of Venezuela’s red dictatorship is evident in the fugitive career of opposition leader Manuel Rosales, who is evading arrest by Chavez’s cronies. Last year Chavez vowed to jail Rosales on corruption charges. Omar Barboza, an official spokesman for Rosales’ party, revealed that the opposition leader had moved to a “safe place” to avoid capture. “It is not possible for Manuel Rosales to exercise his right to defend himself in Venezuela,” Barboza explained. “I don’t think it does any favors to the country when people don’t face justice,” Venezuela’s Communications Minister Jesse Chacon retorted. Rosales unsuccessfully ran for president in 2006. The Chavezista regime, like the neo-Sandinista regime in Managua, has utilized the legal system to neutralize opposition leaders. Last year Venezuelan officials blocked the candidacy of Leopoldo Lopez, who was favored to win election in Caracas and seen as a possible future presidential candidate.

Speaking from Tehran, where he materialized after attending the Second Summit of Heads of State of South America and Arab Countries (ASPA) in Doha, Qatar, Chavez denounced the Group of 20 meeting in London and demanded the end of capitalism. Rant on: “It’s impossible that capitalism can regulate the monster that is the world financial system, it’s impossible. Capitalism needs to go down. It has to end. And we must take a transitional road to a new model that we call socialism.” Rant off. On Friday Chavez and his buddy President Mahmoud (“Iwannajihad”) Ahmadinejad launched a joint commercial bank designed to expedite trade and industrial projects between Venezuela and Iran, two OPEC states facing declining crude prices.

At his previous engagement in Qatar, Chavez informed journalists that he considered the ASPA meeting “a good opportunity to give shape to the idea of the pluripolar world, what he called the new architecture of the post-US imperial world.” In an interview with Prensa Latina, Chavez described the “ASPA integration goal” in glowing, revolutionary terms: “Those are our inspiring roots and, more than inspiring, they are like the energy that drives us. [Jose] Marti, [Simon] Bolivar, [Francisco de] Miranda, Fidel [Castro], they are all with us and their flag of struggle. Now is the time, as Karl Marx proposed, for all that theory to come true. Our challenge is to turn it into something practical and able to work as a machine.” For their part, statesmen from the 22-member Arab League expressed appreciation for South America’s solid support for the Palestinian Arabs. Veteran anti-Semite Chavez, conveniently forgetting the fact that in 1947 the United Nations offered both Jews and Arabs separate states, used the occasion to blast Israel’s policy in West Bank and Gaza Strip. Incidentally, the Palestinian Arabs responded to the first offer of statehood by saying: “No thanks, we’ll kill all of the Jews instead.” Six decades later the world is still seeking to impose a two-state solution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

While in Doha, Chavez opened his big month one more time to reveal his support for Islamic terrorism by opposing the international arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against genocidal Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, who was also in attendance. “I spoke with al-Bashir and asked him about the risks he is facing when he visits a foreign country. I invited him to visit Caracas, and I told him, ‘I hope you do not have any problem there.’” During his opening address at the ASPA summit, Chavez asked the applauding audience: “Why do they not order the arrest of [former US president George W.] Bush, who is a genocidal murderer, who ruled the United States for eight years, and ordered bombing Iraq?” Venezuela endorsed the ICC in 1998, shortly before Chavez assumed the presidency of that country. On the summit sidelines, Chavez huddled with veteran Libyan strongman and African Union chairman Muammar al-Qaddafi (“Duck”), Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and Lebanon’s pro-Hezbollah president Michel Suleiman.

In a related story, on March 23 Caracas hosted seven South American finance ministers at a meeting of the new Bank of the South, which will provide member states with an alternative source of financing apart from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The act creating Banco del Sur was signed in late 2007 by Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela. “We are committed to creating the Bank of the South. There is a great force against it, but we keep moving on,” commented Chavez.

In tiny Ecuador Chavez’s “mini me,” President Rafael Correa, an economist who trained at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, looks forward to an uneventful re-election on April 26. According to Santiago Perez pollster Correa is currently supported by 52 percent of voters. The Institutional Renewal Party of National Action candidate, multimillionaire and banana magnate Alvaro Noboa, can count on receiving 11 percent of the votes, while former President Lucio Gutierrez, another leftist, can count on 12 percent. The constituent assembly that governs Ecuador is dominated by Correa’s socialist Proud and Sovereign Fatherland Alliance and other socialist and communist groupings.

In spite of his youthful good looks, Correa is a dangerous socialist who has not only snuggled up to Caracas and Havana, but also Moscow. In March Ecuadorean Defense Minister Javier Ponce traveled to Russia to continue negotiations on a bilateral technical-military cooperation pact. Ponce, who was slated to meet with representatives of the Russian Defense and Development and Trade Ministries, was accompanied by brass from the Ecuadorean air force and navy. Ponce’s Moscow trip is a follow-up to the cooperation accords that the two countries signed in Quito last November, when Nikolai Patrushev, current secretary of the Russian Security Council and former chief of the Federal Security Service (FSB/KGB), touched down in the South American country. The neo-Soviet leadership, as we have copiously documented at this blog, is anxious to re-project its Cold War-era power throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Last but not least, the Soviet strategists continue to closely monitor the “Red Spread” in Latin America as well as encourage their client state in Havana. On March 23 the Cuban media reported that Gennady Zyuganov, chairman of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, urged the US Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of the notorious Cuban Five. In 1998 Antonio Guerrero, Rene Gonzalez, Gerardo Hernandez, Ramon Labañino, and Fernando Gonzalez, three of whom are known agents of Cuba’s Intelligence Directorate, were jailed for infiltrating Miami-based anti-Castro groups. Chairman Zyuganov threw his weight behind an international amicus curiae signed by former presidents, legislators, and 10 Nobel Prize winners, stating that the document is an effective legal tool that could be used to launch an appeal. He also urged US President Barack Hussein Obama, whom we suspect maybe a Soviet mole, to lift the 50-year-old economic blockade against Cuba.

>Communist Bloc Military Updates: 3rd Sino- Soviet war game slated for April 17-19 in Tajikistan; DPRK to launch Rodong, deploys nukes to missile sites

>The Soviets and the Communist Chinese will hold their third joint war game in Tajikistan between April 17 and 19. This is not the “Peace Mission 2009″ drill slated for northeast China in the summer. Both war games, however, will occur under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). This month’s exercise will not only include military personnel from Russia and China, but also Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and the host country. “Military planes and helicopters, heavy armor and soldiers will be used in the exercises,” the Tajik Defense Ministry explained in a statement, adding: “The war games are aimed at improving cooperation in counter-terrorist operations as well as readiness in opposing international terrorism, political extremism and separatism.”

Pictured above: Chinese paratroopers jump from their transport during the final stage of Peace Mission 2007 in Chelyabinsk, in Russia’s Ural Mountains region, on August 17, 2007.

The AFP news agency observes that the SCO is a “regional group dominated by Moscow and Beijing that has raised concern in the West about becoming a possible counterweight to NATO.” The MSM finally gets it: The SCO and the related Collective Security Treaty Organization, also controlled by Moscow, are most definitely counterweights to NATO. It is worth noting that Tajikistan borders Afghanistan, where NATO forces are struggling to crush a lingering Taliban insurgency and eliminate Al Qaeda hideouts. By flexing its military muscle in Central Asia, the Communist Bloc is clearly sending a message to the North Atlantic Alliance that Western influence is not appreciated in the Soviet Empire’s old vassal state in Kabul. In short, the Moscow-Beijing Axis is preparing for war against the West under the guise of “counter-terrorist operations.”

Meanwhile, the Stalinist hellhole known as the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, reported the British media on March 31, has deployed nuclear warheads to at least two underground missile-launching facilities. “I received the information from the national intelligence agency of a certain country that they believe North Korea has deployed nuclear warheads at two underground facilities for Rodong missiles,” Daniel Pinkston, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, told The Telegraph from Seoul. “We estimate that North Korea has as many as 320 Rodong missiles, which can be launched from mobile transporters anywhere in the country, and we are assessing the threat these pose,” Pinkston added. Rodong missiles have an estimated range of 1,300 kilometers, placing Japan within range of the two missile bases that have been identified in North Korea.

North Korea’s reported deployment of nuclear weapons will exacerbate tensions in the region, already strained due to Pyongyang’s determination to launch an experimental satellite. Lift off is scheduled to take place between April 4 and 8. Satellite surveillance images reveal a three-stage Rodong rocket at the Musudan-ri launch pad, near the east coast of North Korea. Experts estimate that technicians could attach a nuclear warhead to the missile with 48 hours. The Japanese government has threatened to shoot down the rocket, provoking a stream of “anti-imperialist” invective from Crazy Kim’s communist nuthouse. The intelligence reports suggest that the warheads are made from plutonium extracted at the Yongbyon nuclear complex, which North Korea sporadically promises to dismantle in return for fuel assistance, but never does.

>Red Terror File: Former Chechen chief of Russia’s Vostok Battalion gunned down in Dubai on Saturday, or maybe not; suspects with Slavic names arrested

>Personal sickness prevented your resident blogger from posting this past week. With our health restored we continue our information war against the Communist Bloc . . .

This past Saturday in Dubai unknown gunmen killed Sulim Yamadayev, former commander of the Vostok Battalion, a Russian Ground Forces’ group comprised mainly of pro-Moscow Chechens. Organized in 2003, the Vostok (East) and related Zapad (West) Battalions are affiliated with the 42nd Motorized Rifle Division, which is permanently stationed in Chechnya. These two battalions were also directly subordinate to Russian military intelligence (GRU).

“Unfortunately, he is dead and has been buried in Dubai,” mourned Ziad Spassibi, who represents Chechnya in Russia’s Federation Council, the rubberstamp parliament’s upper house. Spassibi then provided some details about Sulim’s burial: “He was buried on Monday in the al-Kuz cemetery in Dubai at 3:00 pm local time (1100 GMT) on Monday.”

This is just another open-and-shut case of Moscow-orchestrated red terror in which an untrustworthy Chechen asset is eliminated, right? Nyet. It turns out that “Hero of Russia” Sulim may not be dead after all. Sulim is pictured above at Hankala airport, a military base outside Grozny, on September 16, 2007.

Contrary to official reports from United Arab Emirates police, where Spassibi probably derived his information, Sulim’s younger brother insists that the former Chechen separatist is not dead. Instead, Sulim was seriously wounded in a brief gun battle that took place outside Jumeirah Beach Residence luxury hotel. “He feels fine,” Isa revealed in a telephone interview from Dubai, adding: “The doctors do not let us talk with him for a long time. They also said nothing threatens his life. Everything will be fine.”

Meanwhile UAE police chief Major General Dahi Khalfan Tamim contends that “The murder was organized by a criminal group that has foreign links. Four or five people have been detained on suspicion of the murder. One of them is a Russian national.” On April 1 Russia’s consulate general told Novosti that “At least seven people have been detained in connection with the murder, all of whom had Slavic surnames.”

Yamadayev was discharged from his post as battalion commander last August over an alleged involvement in the abduction and murder of a Chechen businessman 10 years before. In the early part of August 2008 Sulim reportedly fought alongside Russian forces during the invasion of Georgia. Yamadayev’s brother Ruslan, a former member of the Russian State Duma, was gunned down in Moscow last September. Ruslan was a prominent rival of Chechnya’s pro-Moscow President Ramzan Kadyrov who, naturally, denied any involvement in the killing.

Pictured here: Don’t worry, everything is under control in Russia. Neo-Soviet dictator Vladimir Putin surfs the web and visits his official site.

In a story that may cast some light on the present case, in 2004, in the nearby Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a court convicted two GRU agents of using a car bomb to murder Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the former president in exile of Chechnya. Qatari authorities asserted that Russia’s agents received their orders directly from then Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov.

So, we must ask the inevitable questions. First, are reports of Sulim’s death greatly exaggerated? Second, did someone in the Kadyrov puppet regime, Russian Defense Ministry or GRU order the assassination (or attempted assassination)? Finally, is it possible that someone wants Sulim to appear dead? Answer those questions as you please, but one thing is sure: the Kremlin is too busy monitoring Internet usage among Russia’s citizen-slaves to tell the truth about anything.

>Communist Bloc Military Updates: Smirnov offers to host Russian military base in Transnistria; Kremlin to organize “Arctic Group of Forces"

>On March 24 Igor Smirnov, the “ex”-communist president of the unrecognized Pridnestrovian Moldovan Republic, or simply Transnistria, invited Russia to establish a full-blown military base in the diminutive country wedged between Moldova and Ukraine. “If Russia needs military bases here, we have legislation on Russian troops,” Smirnov informed journalists. Possibly in response to Smirnov’s saber rattling, Novosti reports, Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin pulled out of a meeting with Smirnov, scheduled to take place the next day.

One week prior to Voronin’s snub, the leaders of Russia, Moldova, and Transnistria agreed to continue talks on the issue of Transnistria’s status at a meeting in Moscow. They reiterated their commitment to the “five-plus-two formula,” which includes Russia, Ukraine, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the European Union, and the USA, as well as the two “disputing” parties, Moldova and Transnistria. Smirnov has also expressed interest in either joining Russia outright or possibly the Union State of Russia and Belarus.

Pictured above: Voronin and Smirnov attend “kiss and make up” meeting at Tiraspol, on December 24, 2008.

Relations between Moldova and its ethnically Russian separatist region have been tense since March 1992, when Moldova declared independence from the Soviet Union, and Transnistria in turn proclaimed itself an independent republic. Russia has maintained a small garrison of peacekeepers in Transnistria since July 1992, but the negotiation process for troop withdrawal was suspended in February 2006. Under the Joint Control Commission, Russia is permitted to field a maximum of 385 peacekeepers on Transnistrian (Moldovan) soil.

In view of the fact that the governments in Moscow and Tiraspol are both connected to the old Soviet regime, while the government in Chisinau is openly communist, one should be forgiven for concluding that the whole dispute between Moldova and Transnistria is part of the long-range Soviet deception. The primary purpose of the dispute would probably consist of confusing Western analysts into believing that the former communist regimes of Eastern Europe are disunited.

A military base, per Smirnov’s invitation, would institutionalize and no doubt enhance the Russian presence in the unrecognized state. A fully equipped air base in Transnistria, moreover, could conceivably serve as a stopover for the Kremlin’s strategic bombers en route to Southern Europe, the Balkan Peninsula, or the Middle East. Russia is illegally building military bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia’s separatist regions that are recognized only by Russia and neo-Sandinista Nicaragua. Moscow has also threatened to construct a naval base on Abkhazia’s Black Sea coast and is presently building a naval base in the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiisk.

The Russian Navy views Novorossiisk as an alternative to the Black Sea Fleet’s headquarters in Sevastopol should the Ukrainian government, which is also deceptively connected to the old Soviet regime, finalize plans to evict the Russians in 2017. “The infrastructure is being built under the federal program for the construction of a naval base in Novorossiisk until 2020,” Vice Admiral Oleg Burtsev, deputy head of the navy’s general staff, told Novosti. The Black Sea Fleet, Burtsev continued, must deploy eight to 10 submarines as soon as possible to bolster the overall strength of the armed forces in southern European Russia. The fleet currently deploys one Project 877 Kilo-class diesel-electric submarine, while an outdated Project 641 Foxtrot-class sub is being overhauled. Almost two weeks ago we blogged that at least 10 Russian nuclear-armed attack submarines, commissioned with the Northern and Pacific Fleets, are presently patrolling the world’s oceans.

On March 27 the Russian Security Council, which is chaired by former chief of the Federal Security Service, Nikolai Patrushev, announced that the FSB will organize an Arctic Group of Forces to protect Kremlin interests in the polar region. “However, it does not mean that we are planning to militarize the Arctic. We are focusing on the creation of an effective system of coastal security, the development of arctic border infrastructure, and the presence of military units of an adequate strength,” a Kremlin spokesentity soothed. The Arctic Group of Forces will utilize assets of the navy’s Northern and Pacific Fleets and military districts that border the Arctic Ocean.

The security council published its designs for the North Pole at its website under the document “The Fundamentals of Russian State Policy in the Arctic Up to 2020 and Beyond.” In the last four years Russia has carried out two Arctic expeditions, the first to the Mendeleyev underwater island chain in 2005 and the second to the Lomonosov Ridge in 2007, to lend credence to its territorial claims in the region. Moscow intends to submit documentary support to the United Nations on the external boundaries of Russia’s territorial shelf by 2010.

Canada, the USA’s closest ally and the other half of NORAD, has not taken kindly to neo-Soviet expansionism in the polar region. Even as Moscow broadcast its plan to form an Arctic military force, a spokesperson for Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon huffed: “Canada is an Arctic power. The government is engaged in protecting the security of Canada and in exercising its sovereignty in the North, including Canadian waters.” Catherine Loubier explained: “Canada plans to have more Arctic patrol vessels, construct a deep water port and eavesdropping network in the region, hold annual military exercises, and boost the number of Inuit Arctic rangers keeping an eye on goings-on along our northern frontier.”

While Canada has every right to exercise sovereignty in its Arctic region, it is unlikely that the Kremlin gangsters will be frightened by these trivial assertions of power. Ultimately, Canadians depend on Washington’s goodwill and nuclear arsenal to keep the Soviets out of North America.

Pictured here: A previous summit of the SCO in Astana, Kazakhstan, held on October 30, 2008.

Moscow Moves in the Middle East and Southwest Asia

Elsewhere, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which embodies the Moscow-Beijing Axis, continues to extend its influence throughout Asia by wooing observer states like Iran and Pakistan into full membership with an organization that has become unashamedly militaristic in its objectives, to wit a third Sino-Soviet war game to take place this year. Novosti reports that declared nuclear power Pakistan, like incipient nuclear power Iran, is also seeking complete absorption into this new Eurasian Communist Bloc.

“I hope that one day we will be invited to join this organization,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi announced last Friday, as he attended the SCO shindig in Moscow. “We are currently reviewing the situation in Afghanistan and its influence on neighboring states” Qureshi explained, ominously adding, “Russia and China could play a key role in improving the situation in the impoverished state.”

Like the CSTO, with which it shares a memorandum of understanding, the SCO serves as the Moscow-Beijing Axis’ counterweight to NATO. The organization embraces Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. Iran, India, Mongolia and Pakistan have observer status. Russia assumed the SCO presidency last August.

The present SCO get-together in Moscow is a veritable super-summit of communist, “post”-communist, semi-communist, and pro-communist states, with predictable endorsements from the United Nations and the Obama Administration. Foreign ministers from SCO member and observer states are not the only delegates in attendance. Afghanistan, Turkey, and the USA also sent representatives. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the heads of CSTO, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, of which is Russia is an observer state, are also taking part in the event.

Russia, not surprisingly, is not content to meddle in its old stomping grounds in Afghanistan, but has decided to extend its influence into post-Baathist Iraq, by supplying military equipment to the US-backed government there. On March 31 Novosti reported that Moscow will ship 22 Mi-171 Hip transport helicopters to Baghdad. According to a spokesman for Helicopters of Russia, Iraq’s Airfreight Aviation Ltd. signed a contract at an unstated time with the Ulan Ude helicopter plant for an undisclosed sum. The Ulan Ude factory, which is based in East Siberia, manufactures Mi-171 transport and Mi-171Sh combat/transport helicopters. Russia’s chummy, new-found relationship with Iraq, former US President George W. Bush’s showcase for “Middle East democracy,” represents the tip of the iceberg with respect to the Kremlin’s geopolitical designs in the region.

Putatively committed to settling regional conflict through its membership in the Middle East Diplomatic Quartet, Russia does not hesitate to arm Israel’s most embittered enemies, the Palestinian Arabs. Novosti reports that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that Moscow will soon ship 50 armored personnel vehicles (APCs) to the Palestinian Authority. “All of these 50 armored vehicles will be taken from the Defense Ministry’s available resources–that is to say, from depots where mothballed vehicles are stored,” a source in the Russian Defense Ministry revealed. The same source explained that on-board weapons would be removed from the APCs prior to delivery. The Soviets first offered armored vehicles to the Palestinian Authority in 2005 to help the Fatah terrorist regime in Ramallah “maintain order” (meaning, suppress the populace and attack Jewish settlers). Fearing the vehicles could fall into the hands of Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since 2007, Israel first opposed the idea but the spineless government of then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon subsequently agreed to the shipment of “weapon-less” military vehicles.

Pictured here: G20 summiteers at the ExCel Centre, in east London, on April 2, 2009. The US and Russian presidents are standing in the middle row, left and center, respectively.

Financial Crisis Forces Resignation of Hungarian and Czech Prime Ministers, United Nations Joins Russia and China in Urging Global Currency

The global financial crisis has brought down two more Not-So-Former Soviet Bloc governments, those of Hungary and the Czech Republic, in addition to Latvia’s in February.

On March 21 Hungary’s unpopular prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany resigned, effectively acknowledging the inability of the minority ruling Hungarian Socialist Party to counter the regional effects of the world recession. In the 1980s, when Hungary was an open communist dictatorship, Gyurcsany led the youth section of the party’s previous incarnation, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party. Not so coincidentally, outgoing PM Gyurcsany visited Russia barely two weeks ago before his resignation. At the time he conferred with both “President” Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Russia’s KGB-communist dictator. Was Gyurcsany’s departure from Hungarian politics the subject of discussion with his Moscow masters? We can only speculate, but it seems likely.

György Surányi, economist and former “dissident,” is being touted as the next head of government. In 1986 Surányi, then a technocrat in the Finance Ministry’s Financial Research Institute, co-authored a study on political and economic reform that prompted Hungary’s communist rulers to dissolve the institute. In other words, Surányi bears all the hallmarks of a communist-controlled dissident. The former president of the “post”-communist Hungarian National Bank and current chairman of CIB Bank presently enjoys the backing of both the Hungarian Socialist Party and the small Free Democratic Party. This means, of course, that Surányi has Moscow’s imprimatur.

Last week the Czech Republic’s prime minister Mirek Topolanek also resigned, citing the country’s economic woes as pretext. The collapse of Topolanek’s center-right government, reports The Telegraph, threatens to destabilize Prague’s six-month presidency of the European Union, leaving the federation “rudderless” ahead of a crucial Group of 20 summit in London underway today. Topolanek offered the following explanation for his resignation and refusal to institute a caretaker government until his country’s EU presidency expires on June 30: “I believe it can complicate our negotiating power. Partners in Europe have grown used to us negotiating hard. In this sense it can happen that our position will be weakened. Political instability will only deepen uncertainty and concerns, and will hurt the chances of successfully overcoming the consequences of the economic crisis.”

Like Gyurcsany, in the early part of his political career Topolanek belonged to the youth section of Czechoslovakia’s ruling communist party. The no-confidence vote that brought down Topolanek’s cabinet will most likely delay Czech ratification of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty until the autumn, after elections that the communist-infiltrated Social Democratic Party hopes to win.

Last, but definitely not least, the United Nations, an embryonic world government jointly founded by the Soviets and Council on Foreign Relations in 1945, joined Russia and China in blessing the concept of a global currency reserve system to replace the dollar-based system. The UN panel pontificated on the importance of “reforming” (socializing) the world’s financial system:

A new Global Reserve System — what may be viewed as a greatly expanded SDR (Special Drawing Rights), with regular or cyclically adjusted emissions calibrated to the size of reserve accumulations, could contribute to global stability, economic strength and global equity.

Recovery would require all developed countries, in the short term, to take strong, coordinated and effective actions [meaning socialism] to stimulate their economies.

This would lay the basis for the long-run [socialist] reforms that will be necessary if we are to have a more stable and more prosperous global economy and avoid future global crises.

The panel is chaired by Joseph Stiglitz, the US economist who has lauded the nationalization (communization) programs of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Taking up the slogan “Cough up some more dough, Mack,” the Stiglitz panel proposed that developed countries bail out developing ones with anti-crisis packages (which would thrill Nicaragua’s panhandling Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega), impose more market regulation everywhere, and create yet another UN agency, to be called the Economic Council. Last Wednesday International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn conceded that discussions on a new global reserve currency to replace the US dollar were “legitimate” and will take place “in the coming months.” That’s nice. Where would you like that mark, sir? On your forehead or right hand?