Putin Prepares For A Showdown With Trump As 50,000 Russian Troops Move Into Position

by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:

Now that Donald Trump has won the election, he is going to have to deal with Vladimir Putin and Russia, and that isn’t going to be easy. The Russians have no incentive to end the conflict because they are steadily gobbling up territory in eastern Ukraine. As long as the Russians are making progress toward achieving their goals, why would they want to stop? On the other side, the Ukrainians will never agree to any peace agreement that allows the Russians to keep all of the territories that they have already taken, but the Ukrainians are losing even more ground with each passing day. Of course most members of Congress and our NATO allies want to keep fighting until Russia is defeated, but escalating the war even more is likely to bring us to the brink of nuclear conflict.

TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

So where do we go from here?

As we wait to see what Trump will do once he takes office, the Russians have gathered a force of 50,000 troops to push the Ukrainians completely out of the Kursk region…

The war between Russia and Ukraine is escalating.

The neighbors this weekend launched their largest drone attacks against each other since the start of the war nearly three years ago. Russia last week began a fresh effort to oust Ukrainian forces from its Kursk region after amassing more than 50,000 troops, including some 10,000 soldiers from North Korea. And Russian troops, while advancing steadily in Ukraine’s east, are incurring record numbers of dead and injured, according to the British military’s top commander.

The fact that North Korean troops are now involved has gotten a tremendous amount of attention.

Apparently these North Korean troops are actually “wearing Russian uniforms”…

US and Ukrainian officials say 10,000 of the 50,000 massed troops are North Koreans.

Those soldiers are said to be wearing Russian uniforms and have been equipped by Moscow, but will fight in their own units.

Putin’s army has also been training the North Koreans in infantry tactics, artillery fire, and trench clearing.

NATO officials are absolutely furious that North Korean troops are being introduced into this conflict, and they want to take things to the next level.

They will undoubtedly be putting pressure on Trump to take action, and we shall see what Trump decides to do.

Over the past few days, the corporate media has been telling us that there was a phone call between Trump and Putin…

President-elect Trump spoke with Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Thursday and warned him not to escalate the fighting in Ukraine, according to a source briefed on the call.

It was being reported that Trump specifically warned Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine…

The source said Trump’s message to Putin was roughly: “Don’t escalate because I have weapons, too.”

But now the Russians are denying that such a call ever took place…

But the Kremlin is denying that any of this happened. It is saying the call didn’t even take place. Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov blasted the Post report as “pure fiction” and said that currently there are no plans for the Russian president to speak to Trump.

“This is completely untrue. This is pure fiction, it’s just false information. There was no conversation,” Peskov told reporters in a briefing.

“This is the most obvious example of the quality of the information that is being published now, sometimes even in fairly reputable publications,” Peskov added.

What in the world is going on here?

Obviously, someone is lying to us.

A call either happened or it didn’t.

Hopefully Trump will come forward and clarify things for us.

Meanwhile, the Russians continue to march forward in eastern Ukraine…

On the front lines, particularly in Ukraine’s east, Russia is advancing slowly but steadily. Russian troops seized almost 200 square miles of Ukrainian territory last month, according to a Ukrainian war-monitoring group, DeepState, which said it was the largest monthly gain this year.

At this moment, a fierce battle is happening for the key logistical hub of Kurakhovo…

Russian troops are engaged in urban combat with the Ukrainian army in the city of Kurakhovo in the Donetsk People’s Republic. As TASS was told by security agencies, the Ukrainian troop group is being “taken in pincers” from the northern, southern and western suburbs.

The agency’s source reported that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are currently trying to transfer small groups to the city.

The city of Kurakhovo is located 46 km from Donetsk and 30 km from Pokrovsk. The settlement acted as a logistics hub through which supplies were supplied to the Ukrainian garrison in Ugledar. On November 2, the Ministry of Defense also reported the capture of the village of Kurakhovka, located on the approaches to Kurakhovo.

The Russians are going to try to take as much territory as they can before winter officially begins.

Once snow starts piling up everywhere, it will become much more difficult to maneuver.

Elsewhere, our relations with China also continue to go downhill. In fact, the Biden administration just ordered TSMC to stop sending advanced AI chips to China…

The U.S. ordered Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co to halt shipments of advanced chips to Chinese customers that are often used in artificial intelligence applications starting Monday, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The Department of Commerce sent a letter to TSMC imposing export restrictions on certain sophisticated chips, of 7 nanometer or more advanced designs, destined for China that power AI accelerator and graphics processing units (GPU), the person said.

Needless to say, this is going to make the Chinese even angrier with us.

And we are being told that the EU and China are also “on a path that leads straight to a dangerous trade war”…

China and the European Union are on a path that leads straight to a dangerous trade war. After European duties on imports of electric vehicles, the Asian giant announces its first retaliation: from Friday, Nov. 15, Beijing will impose “temporary anti-dumping measures” on brandy imported from EU countries, despite “progress” announced by both sides over the weekend on negotiations to remove duties on battery-powered cars.

Beijing threatened to tax the distillate a month ago, trying to dissuade EU governments from imposing duties and sit at the negotiating table with Brussels from a position of less weakness. In a note, China’s Ministry of Commerce explained that “the authorities have decided to implement temporary anti-dumping measures in the form of cash deposit or letter of guarantee” against European brandies. A decision taken in response to the risk of “substantial damage to the domestic industry.”

Every time we push China further away, the result is that they just get even closer to the Russians.

This should deeply alarm all of us, and I have been specifically warning about this particular alliance of superpowers for a very long time.

Originally Posted at https://www.sgtreport.com

zerohedge
Economics , News , Politics , Science
December 7, 2024
2 views

The Miserable Cost Of An Open Border

Authored by Seth Barron via RealClearPolitics,

The Biden-Harris experiment in dissolving the U.S. border has wrought massive changes to American society, most of which will not be understood for years, if not decades. Since 2021, U.S. border officials have had at least 10 million “encounters” with migrants, many of whom were allowed to enter the country. There is no telling how many more aliens entered the country without encountering enforcement agents. The population of the United States may have increased by as much as 15 million people in just a few years.

This massive flow of humanity crosses multiple national borders, involves every mode of transportation, accounts for billions of dollars paid in fees to smugglers, and describes a fantastically complex economy of suffering and hope. In an effort to get a handle on this human tide, noted muckraker James O’Keefe – known for his hidden camera “gotcha” interviews with abortionists, media executives, progressive nonprofit executives, and other degenerate types – traces the migrant onrush from its source, and seeks to trace the machinery of profit and influence that is conducting it from great removes.

“Line In The Sand,” the resulting documentary, is a remarkable and humane exposition, revealing perspectives and images American audiences have mostly been prevented from seeing. O’Keefe and his intrepid team begin on the U.S. side of the Mexican border, where we witness migrants crossing the border through holes that their guides have cut in a fence that serves as a target as much as a barrier. Infrared cameras show dozens of illegal aliens streaming toward “pick-up” vehicles on the U.S. side while smugglers – presumably cartel members – a few feet away taunt O’Keefe and his group. “What if I were to run up to them right now, what would happen?” O’Keefe asks his guide. “I would highly advise you against that,” he is told, in a classic understatement.

The fact that coyotes and other human traffickers are paid to assist northbound migrants with their passage is no scandal; we all know what their motivations are and why they are doing what they do. But O’Keefe documents multiple examples of U.S. Border Patrol agents standing idly by while illegal aliens cross, virtually under their noses. “Why aren’t you doing anything?” he asks. “Have a good day, guys,” a border agent desultorily responds before driving off in the general direction of the episode. Later, a migrant stands in front of a Border Patrol truck, clearly trying to alert the agents of his intention to surrender, but is studiously ignored until O’Keefe and his team call their attention to him.

There is a kind of sad comedy in the operations of U.S. border security, and O’Keefe is not unsympathetic to the absurd position that border agents have been put in. Trained to defend the national border and to serve as the first line of defense of American soil, these agents have been recommissioned as a perverse Welcome Wagon for illegal aliens, charged with making their undocumented and uninvited entrance to the United States as commodious as possible.

Looking to get deeper into the heart of this migratory avalanche, O’Keefe went deep into Mexico, to the city of Irapuato, about 150 miles northwest of Mexico City. Irapuato is a popular railway junction where thousands of migrants climb aboard “La Bestia,” or “The Beast,” a cargo train that chugs northward toward the United States. In the film’s most remarkable footage, O’Keefe and his team join with migrants, mostly from South and Central America, to ride The Beast, also known as “el Tren del Muerto,” or the Train of Death. O’Keefe talks to the migrants without condescension, asking them their destinations and what they plan to do when they get there, and their concerns about the perilous nature of the journey. We see the film crew race to jump on a moving train and clamber on top to sit in a pile of coal; O’Keefe is shocked at how truly dangerous this small element of the trip is and sympathizes with the migrants’ difficult choices. These scenes are among the film’s most affecting, along with the crew’s random encounter with a little girl who had just crossed the border after journeying from Guatemala by herself. There is a human dimension to illegal immigration, and O’Keefe does not ignore it.

However, there is also an impersonal dimension to this massive population transfer, and O’Keefe determinedly aims to uncover it – to put a face to the institutions and administrators that benefit from the rough injection of millions of people into American society. From government agents to bus companies to nonprofit resettlement groups to private contractors running huge, walled compounds housing thousands of children, O’Keefe doggedly tries to penetrate the mechanics of a system that resolutely hides itself behind a screen of silence, usually in the name of “safety” and “privacy.”

Some of the film’s more comical moments pertain to these segments, such as when the team follows some just-arrived Chinese migrants in San Diego to an employment agency, where other Chinese aliens, already in the country for several months, complain that it’s much harder to live in the United States than they had imagined. O’Keefe tries to sniff out a connection between the owner of the agency and more powerful actors, but it emerges that there really isn’t much going on; in fact, the owner asks O’Keefe if he knows of a way to apply for government grants.

Elsewhere, O’Keefe tries to get information about the operations of several huge residential centers for unaccompanied minors and tries to spin their refusal to give him access to the centers or submit to interviews as evidence of the existence of vast, government-funded child sex trafficking networks. But it seems more likely, though no less troubling, that the open borders policy of the last four years has created a tremendous humanitarian crisis of alien children roaming the continent by themselves, and the government is probably trying to keep them from becoming prey to sex traffickers while they sort out where to send them. Though O’Keefe does not uncover a salacious network of child predators, his vigorous pursuit of the truth does reveal the existence of a large, shadowy, government-funded, and lucrative system of child “welfare.”

So, “Line In The Sand” is correct in the larger sense that billions of dollars are being spent managing this human flow, and many people are getting rich off of it. The last thing these parasitical administrators of the nonprofit industrial complex want is for the border to close. O’Keefe does a great job of capturing in real time the corruption of a local New York City nonprofit called La Jornada, whose leader, Pedro Rodriguez, evidently perpetrates fraud, demanding fees for services that the city provides for free. O’Keefe also sends a Spanish-speaking reporter undercover into the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City’s main processing center for newly-arrived migrants, which offers him free housing, medical care, and even airplane tickets, even though the reporter explains that he has no identification of any sort. How, O’Keefe asks, in our post 9/11 security-obsessed era, are we to make sense of a system that admits millions of unvetted foreigners into the country, and then offers to fly them anywhere they care to go?

“Line In The Sand” is rough in parts, but intentionally so. Its subject is so sprawling and tangled that a neat and clean representation would be a lie. Even with a nine-figure budget – which this film assuredly did not have – a documentary about the border and the 30 million-footed human swarm that has crossed it would be messy and incomplete. But James O’Keefe and his small team have done something remarkable. They have taken on the decade’s biggest story, given it form, and preserved the humanity of its subjects. It is worth watching.

Seth Barron is a writer in New York and author of the forthcoming “Weaponized from Humanix.”

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/07/2024 – 17:30