NATO’s most westerly European member, Portugal, has under its territory the mid-Atlantic Azores archipelago, home since the 1950s to a geographically strategic U.S. airbase. Portugal’s mainstream newspaper, O Expresso, recently reported that the Dutch NATO General Secretary, Mark Rutte, had paid a visit to Lisbon to notify the country it needed to spend more on the war he had declared on Russia – unless the Portuguese wanted to start learning Russian for when they would be invaded.
The article explained that an increase in Portugal’s defence spending to the three per cent of GDP demanded would amount to an extra 3.44bn Euros, or 604 Euros for every Portuguese, every year. O Expresso went on to inform the public that Portugal’s prime minister, Luis Montenegro, met the customary Dutch arrogance with equilibrium and – in diplomatic language – told Rutte to take a running jump.
More significant, however, is an article published in Estátua de Sal (Statue of Salt) by Portuguese former military attaché to the UN special representative on Kosovo, Major General Raul Luis Cunha, on how MI6-CIA operatives carried out NATO’s dirty work in Ukraine to provoke the proxy war against Russia. Under the title Provoked Invasion, the Major General writes that, despite all the loud noise to the contrary, ill-intended politicians, academics, commentators and journalists continue to propagate, falsify and distort the facts. He says this has resulted in the majority of people still accepting a war narrative fabricated to support the propaganda for NATO enlargement.
He explains that the spinners of the war narrative disingenuously point to February 2022 as the starting point of the conflict, knowing full well that it began with the coup d’état fomented by NATO in Kiev in 2014. In the interests of long-term peace, the Major General believes it is now vital to acknowledge that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was provoked by the west’s machinations. He explains that immediately after the coup in 2014, the U.S. installed a new government with a new head of communications whose very first move was to enrol the CIA and MI6 to start a secret war with Russia.
This was before Russia’s annexation of Crimea or the conflict in the Donbas. CIA bases were set up to spy, steal confidential technology and even make incursions into Russian territory. The Ukrainian population was then subjected to cultural suppression of Russian customs and traditions, in the form of being denied linguistic and religious rights. More than sixty per cent of the population communicated daily in Russian and practised the orthodox religion, while all political opposition parties and almost all the press and media were purged.
As for the Minsk accords of 2014 and 2015, truces brokered by Russia to put an end to the slaughter of Russians in East Ukraine by the Azov Battalion, the right-wing of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), western politicians and Ukrainians alike have admitted they never had any intention of implementing the accords. Their aim was to play for time to build a huge Ukrainian army. The main NATO powers modernised the AFU, supplying them with vast quantities of weaponry, particularly artillery, aerial and anti-tank defence. They intensified military exercises and simulated and prepared for war against Russia. Cunha emphasises that the efforts made by President Putin to negotiate a better security architecture for Europe and to get the Minsk accords honoured.
But the west, and Ukraine under its influence, was never in good faith, and Putin’s efforts were met with evasion and downright refusal. This, coupled with the Ukrainian president’s declarations that he wanted Ukraine to be admitted to NATO and have nuclear arms, led to a sharp rise in local tensions. Then the Ukrainian military exponentially increased its violence in the Donbas and began intense artillery fire, characteristic of preparing to attack – as witnessed and registered by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
Finally, all of the above convinced Russia that it had to attack Ukraine to prevent the slaughter by the AFU of the populations of Donbas and Crimea, and even to prevent attacks on its own territory. Since then, lies have been endlessly repeated by our parliamentarians and media alike – that Russia made an ‘unprovoked’ attack on a ‘sovereign’, ‘democratic’ Ukraine that sparked the war. This raises the question: are they so ill informed, have such short-term memories, and are unable to see what has taken place? Or do they just believe that we, the people, are wholly gullible?
eturn to Bomb Alley 1982 – The Falklands Deception, by Paul Cardin
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