According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, attempts to accuse Russia of escalating tensions in the bilateral affairs to justify such inadequate actions do not stand up to criticism.
MOSCOW, January 22. /TASS/. The Russian Foreign Ministry is outraged at Washington’s decision to withdraw the accreditation of the Russian honorary consuls in the United States, the ministry said in a statement. “We are outraged at Washington’s decision to withdraw the accreditation of five of six honorary consuls of Russia in the United States — in California, Utah, Minnesota, Florida and Puerto Rico,” the ministry said. “Moreover, they are even threatened with prosecution.” “Attempts to accuse us of escalating tensions in the bilateral affairs to justify such inadequate actions do not stand up to criticism,” the ministry said. “It is common knowledge that it was the United States that unleashed the sanctions aggression against Russia and is carrying out large-scale Russophobic propaganda all over the world trying to shirk responsibility for supporting the armed coup in Ukraine and the bloody war in Donbass. The American intelligence services do not stop provocations against employees of the Russian diplomatic missions, not only in the in the United States.” “By taking a decision on the honorary consuls the Administration of Barack Obama continues the line of curtailing the ties with our country,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said. “The US authorities have once again demonstrated their true attitude towards developing contacts between people, which are established by the honorary consuls who also render assistance to Russians visiting the United States,” the ministry said. “All this was not to Washington’s liking. It’s worth to recall that back in 2013 the United States blocked Americans’ familiarization trips to Russia through Rossotrudnichestro [the Russian Federal Agency for CIS Affairs, Compatriots Living Abroad and International Humanitarian Cooperation] launching a campaign of slander in the media and intimidating potential participants with interrogations by the FBI.” “For our part, we express sincere gratitude to the U.S. citizens who for many years fulfilled the functions of the Russian honorary consuls properly, for their big contribution to the development of multi-faceted cooperation between Russia and the United States,” the statement said. “It is neither their fault nor ours that this cooperation has now been derailed. We hope that sooner or later common sense will prevail in Washington, and the honorary consuls will be able to resume their useful and popular activities.”
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Washington’s version: http://www.rferl.org/content/us-cancels-accreditation-of-russian-consuls/27505614.html
What do we expect? Our partners to be paramours? A partner like the US has but one part to play and that is to break Russia’s heart.
Russia’s heart is her banking system. She better change her diet soon or she’ll have a heart attack, unless the cancer of western fast foods of thought eat her away first.
Military might is a sedative red herring, a weapon of mass distraction from the arsenic laced main dish.
This latest of Dear John letters is a symptom for a mortal disease. We fool ourselves by saying: “oh, it’s nothing to worry about.”
US is not a partner, not to Europe nor Russia. US is the worst of enemies. I understand why Putin is using such a rhetoric, but don’t be confused by that and call the things as they rally are.
An important detail missing from this report is that these closings are in response to Russian closure of the American center in Moscow. See Fort Russ for details: http://fortruss.blogspot.ca/2016/01/us-closes-5-russian-consuls-in.html
So the closure of “one” non-governmental center in Moscow is responded to by the closure of “five” governmental consulates in the US. Two can play that game. And Russia should respond by closing all but one in Russia. The same number the US left open.
The governmental consulates are still open.
Russia should close every Western NGO, and all Western ‘diplomatic’ posts but the Embassies, and restrict the movements of the subversives quaintly known as ‘diplomats’. Western ‘Embassies’ are everywhere and always nests of vipers.
Dead right, Mulga. There are enough silly jokes masquerading as “countries” where these scum would be more than welcome. The less remaining in Russia, the better.
Nussiminen, these arrogant Western busybodies (I do enjoy telling ‘Amnesty’ and, now, since Syria, ‘MSF’, panhandlers where to go. They generally have no idea what their sainted groups are really up to and who really controls them)have a lifetime’s work just awaiting their delicate attention right in their own, rapidly crumbling, homelands. The sheer bloody arrogance of Western supremacists who think that they have some sort of moral and cultural right to lecture others on how they MUST run their countries is simply nauseating. And, more and more, they steer clear of really nasty states that are in Mordor’s camp.
The cartoon put a huge smile on my dial.
Can’t see the artists’ name… the ability to distill a topic to a few succinct pen lines is worthy of applause. Many thanks.
Likely just another escalation in response to this 6 weeks ago, among other things.
FW Engdahl wrote a longish piece on this about that time.
Russia to launch own crude benchmark in 2016
He added that it’s important to set a more relevant mechanism for determining a fair price for Russian crude.
Initially the Russian futures market could use the US dollar in its operations, but it could possibly switch to trading in Russian rubles and other currencies, according to Kvartalnov.
He explains that around 70 percent of the world’s oil contracts are currently based on the Brent benchmark.
At the same time, he said, “the volume of Urals and ESPO Russian oil blends on the international market is twice the total volume of oil supplied from BFOE, Oman and Dubai.”
“The price of Russian oil should stop being determined by Brent or Dubai,” said Kvartalnov.
https://www.rt.com/business/325577-russia-oil-new-benchmark/
And yet it’s a nice thing to examine this response by Russia. I wouldn’t worry about the surface actions, but instead look how the language has evolved in the last year or two. Calling out the US for the coup, for the Donbass incursions and for the sanctions as a part of that aggression.
I don’t recall that the language was this blatant back in the day, when we all worried that Russia was losing the information war and just didn’t have it together.
Since then we’ve watched the remarkable precision of its operations across all fronts, including with language, using a rigorous diplomacy that almost could be physics, for all its mathematical exactitude.
Russia forgets nothing and records everything. And as it judges the time, so it measures its language for that day. I will take the wording of this response as a measure of how far Russia senses that the world has come in its understanding of who is the good guy and who the bad.
This is a huge leap, and yet all its progress happened by imperceptible degrees, like gently boiling water.
Just reminding that usa will investigate any political parties or groups that are questiong usa actions etc especially if they have the slightest rus connections, eg questiong nato- quoted was a bank loan by rus bank to fr. National Front- and will persue sanctions against them.
The war increases,…
Nothing could make clearer that 9/11 was US set up false flag. Nothing constrains US willful and criminal misuse of normal leadership powers into whims. Trivialising the most serious of Governmental functions. These actions could be considered pre-9/11 as clear acts of war.True of each sanction against Russia too.
911 stands out as the only thing the Bush administration did exactly right. Sanctioning the attacks on selfsame administration’s ardent, flag-waving underlings would indeed be ironically appropriate. You get what you vote for in a Western Democracy, mind you.
The one thing the Bush administration did right(Bush 11?) was 9/11? Bush did not know anything about the governments plans for 9/11. The cabal in his government had as one of it’s leaders, the Vice President, Cheney, who also flew to Colorado the night before 9/11 to stop all surveillance planes from operating over Manhattan and the Pentagon. Hundreds knew. Wall Street knew and made special trades on the aftermath.As the to the buildings, I watched them be built with Thermite built into every WTC building.Thermite is an explosive that grows so hot, as it explodes, it melts steel. The loud explosive booms at each floor as building1 comes down in 10 minutes are the steel braces at each level exploding, shattered. Those building were built to implode if need be! Simple.Did right! You are insane! That was way beyond criminal. Over three thousand dead were just considered by the plotters as collateral damage. Do read “Hotel Rwanda”..Mrs Clinton knew
Suzzane, you’re right. Dubya is too stupid to ever have been included in so important of a plot. Nussiminen makes a lot of good comments here, but he regularly comes out with something similar, when the subject of 911 comes up. For shock effect or something. Several people have reacted as you have and it has not deterred him one iota, so far.
Rather than admit that some Americans are on the right side of this fight and encourage others to join it, he’d rather write them all off, with sarcastic contempt, and gloat over 911. Not a very smart approach, IMHO.
That has to be the most stupid and sick comment I have yet read here. 911 led to the illegal Iraq invasion with how many hundreds of thousands DEAD, and millions more suffering, and part of PNAC, which also resulted in the coup in Ukraine, with thousands dead, and yet more suffering, and destruction.
You can be quite sure, that on another site, I would have ripped you to shreds verbally.
Well, lighten up Ralph and others! Let it be known that my Schadenfreude would actually be at least as nasty if the same thing happened to my own “dear compatriots” proudly serving in the financial/military wing of Western imperialism.
Topics such as 911 and the street brawl in Cologne on New Year’s Eve show that this site reeks a little of a Pity Party at times.
Shadenfreude is a frequently occurring, understandable human emotion, that like pity, should be passed over relatively quickly when we feel it coming on. Its baseness should never be wallowed in for years.
Either shadenfreude or pity are the ONLY two options? An absurd and counter-productive proposition that no one, including yourself should buy.
How about getting out of both extremes of emotional muck, and thinking more responsibly and productively, instead of remaining stuck in emotional self-indulgence of either extreme?
Rejecting your prolonged orgy of 911 shadenfreude is not mental or emotional weakness, contrary to what you seem to be implying to “Ralph and others” with the false Shadaenfeude/Pity Party dichotomy.
I detect a very pronounced nasty tone turn the past 3 days in the field of political public pontification.
Remember there’s that US airfield being put into an old cropduster airstrip northern Syria near Turkey.
Fadel says the rats are on the run on all fronts.
JAN 24
http://syrianperspective.com/2016/01/al-rubayah-liberated-chechen-rats-trapped-with-nowhere-to-hide-army-advancing-everywhere.html
The Pentagon is “clearly frustrated by the lack of support from its Western coalition,” with the US government threatening to resolve the Syrian crisis militarily, German newspaper Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (DWN) wrote.
Earlier, US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called for a stronger involvement of the members of the international coalition against Daesh terrorists, German newspaper Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (DWN) reported, referring to Carter’s interview with CNBC.
http://sputniknews.com/us/20160124/1033640114/last-resort-us-coalition-syria.html
I figure we’ll see something big break out by Groundhog Day, maybe not even on the Syria front.
This sounds like a typical zionazi/nazi move. Neocons are essentially the mutants in society who never mature past adolescence. Childishness, like what the pindo quislings did here, is a sure sign of decay. I mean essentially that when one puts kids in charge of policy making, final collapse can’t be too far off.
There seems to be a growing Russian political confidence that globally, support is inclining to Russia and that Russia’s leadership isincreasingly seen as a bulwark against the moral rot of the West.
This is reflected in a general ‘enough already’ mood from Moscow. And a much more candid style of communication.
S. Lavrov openly snubs neo-con appartchik Nuland. This is significant from a world-class diplomat who is otherwise a stickler for protocol. It is effectively dispensing with US defined notions of legitimacy, and substituting them with Russian-backed return to international law. The neo-cons are low-rent criminals, no more, no less. That was the message.
He has also said there will be no ‘business as usual’ with the EU and US. This is a major signal of disdain, and again, draws the veil back to reveal Russian-determined – not US – reset. (And s**w you Hillary Clinton. We know what you did to Libya.)
Possibly related, is Ban Ki Moon’s condemnation of Israeli occupation of Palestine. The UN SG has rarely shown any signs of going against Washington consensus. Why this unusually robust criticism now?
The German FM is also making conciliatory noises. And major German media – hitherto towing the Washington line – are treating VVP with a new-found respect. The migrant crisis is the direct consequence of US-NATO led destruction of the M.E. :German elites can no longer hide the fact from their electorate.
Do they now ‘realise what they have done’?
Meanwhile UK Establishment and media is engaging in a renewed frenzy of Putin-bashing. But it’s so crude and obvious it is having a counter-productive effect. The Litvinenko inquiry was farce, and everyone knows it.
Now we have the US reaction, and Carter attempting to drum up enthusiasm for direct invasion of Syria.
Interesting times indeed.