PM SUNAK HAS LOST NO TIME in announcing a series of fresh sanctions against Russia that include a ban on imports of aluminium, diamonds, copper and nickel.
The UK has also sanctioned 86 individuals and companies working for Russia’s military, energy, metals and shipping industries.
The announcement came ahead of the Friday ‘war council’ summit of the Group of Seven ‘developed countries’, in the Japanese city of Hiroshima, a city destroyed by a US-nuclear attack in 1945 that was supported by the UK.
Sunak, with President Biden scuttling back to the USA in fear of a complete banking collapse, flew into Hiroshima for the three-day gathering of world leaders demanding that India show greater support for Ukraine.
Sunak said: ‘One of my three things is talking to countries around the world and making sure they realise what is going on, the war crimes Russia is committing inside Ukraine and why everyone should support bringing about a peaceful resolution to the conflict.’
The G7 summit is expected to introduce upwards of ‘300 new sanctions against individuals, entities, vessels and aircraft’, a senior US administration official said.
British workers are now being told that they are suffering from a massive inflation brought about by the imperialist support for the Ukraine and that they should be proud to starve for Ukraine for way ahead into the future.
The UK ruling class is with the Ukraine fascists to the end because they know that a defeat for them in the Ukraine will be taken all the way from Paris, London, Berlin to New York and Washington, as proof that capitalism is finished.
In fact, this imperialist intervention is being made out of sheer desperation that capitalism has had its day, a fact that has been brought out by a letter on Ukraine published on Tuesday in the New York Times.
The letter’s 14 signatories consist mostly of former US military officers and other national security officials, including Jack Matlock, Washington’s former ambassador to the Soviet Union; Ann Wright, a retired US Army colonel and former diplomat; Matthew Hoh, a former Marine Corps officer and State Department official; and Ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff.
The letter calls the war an ‘unmitigated disaster’ and cautions that ‘future devastation could be exponentially greater as nuclear powers creep ever closer toward open war’.
While condemning Putin’s ‘criminal invasion and occupation,’ the letter notes that the serial invasions of Russia by foreign adversaries, encourages readers to understand the war ‘through Russia’s eyes’. It adds: ‘In diplomacy, one must attempt to see with strategic empathy, seeking to understand one’s adversaries,’ according to the letter. ‘This is not weakness: it is wisdom.’
It continues: ‘Since 2007, Russia has repeatedly warned that NATO’s armed forces on Russian borders were intolerable – just as Russian forces in Mexico or Canada would be intolerable to the US now, or as Soviet missiles in Cuba were in 1962,’ the letter reads. It adds:‘Russia further singled out NATO expansion into Ukraine as especially provocative.’
The letter lays out the history of warnings by key U.S. national security officials, politicians, and others about the dangers of NATO expansion in the late 1990s, and again in 2008 when the then-U.S. Ambassador to Russia and current CIA director, William Burns, cautioned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice against pushing for NATO membership for Ukraine.
The letter continues: ‘NATO expansion, in sum, is a key feature of a militarised US foreign policy characterised by unilateralism featuring regime change and preemptive wars,’ which suggests that Washington’s ‘failed wars’ in Iraq and Afghanistan have been two of the results.
President Joe Biden has vowed that Washington will continue to aid Kiev ‘as long as it takes’. The letter’s signers fear that this is a recipe for escalation that could result in catastrophe for the USA and the UK.
‘As Dan Ellsberg has warned courageously and unceasingly, we – the world – are at the nuclear brink again, perhaps closer to the edge than ever before. It only requires one step to go over and then our steps end forever.’ To date, the United States has sent $37 billion worth of military aid to Kiev. High-level discussions with officials in Moscow have been rare, and a number of other entities, including China, Brazil, and the Pope, have taken on the mantle of pushing for a diplomatic solution.
The letter, entitled ‘The US Should Be a Force for Peace in the World’, urges the Biden administration to pivot towards pursuing a negotiated solution to end the war speedily.
Biden will not listen for sure. There is only one solution to this crisis and that is for the working class of the world to take action to smash US and UK imperialism and consigns the capitalist system to where it belongs: ‘The dustbin of history!’
