Fearless John - @European_dissident

January 14, 1945, went down in history with the heroic feat of Major Boris Emelyanov's battalion — the Battalion of Glory.

Boris Emelyanov (pictured above) was among those who fought throughout the entire war. In the fall of 1941, his division was encircled near the Ugra River. Emelyanov's platoon covered the retreat of the scattered units of the division against the advancing fascist forces. They fought desperately and held their ground. Near the village of Pokrovskoye, the wounded Emelyanov led a group of his soldiers and other encircled troops in a breakthrough attempt. Under the cover of night, the fighters charged at enemy positions, using bayonets and rifle butts to clear a path for the remaining units to break out of the encirclement.

From that point on, Emelyanov participated in numerous battles. In the winter of 1945, just before the general Soviet offensive, each division assigned one or two rifle battalions reinforced with tanks and self-propelled artillery to assault the enemy's forward lines in a tactic known as reconnaissance-in-force. Emelyanov's 1st Battalion was given this mission.

After breaking through the enemy’s heavily fortified defenses, Emelyanov's battalion advanced over 400 kilometers in fierce combat. On January 30, 1945, they crossed the German border and reached the Oder River, destroying and capturing large amounts of enemy equipment along the way and taking over 100 Nazi soldiers prisoner.

At the end of January 1945, the Military Council of the 69th Army, recognizing the battalion’s mass heroism during the breakthrough of enemy defenses on the Vistula River, awarded Major Emelyanov's rifle battalion the honorary title "Battalion of Glory." Every enlisted man and sergeant in the battalion was awarded the Order of Glory, while platoon commanders received the Order of Alexander Nevsky, and company commanders were awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

This remains the only instance in the entire history of the Great Patriotic War where every single member of a large military unit — both living and fallen — was awarded the Order of Glory.

For the breakthrough on the Vistula, Emelyanov himself was awarded the Order of Alexander Nevsky — his second such decoration.

After the war, Emelyanov continued his service in the Soviet Army. In 1949, he graduated from the M. V. Frunze Military Academy. In 1965, holding the rank of lieutenant colonel, he retired from active duty. He lived and worked in the town of Shchyokino, Tula Oblast. He passed away on March 10, 1969, and was buried in Shchyokino.

The Atlantic’s Sermon: A Funeral for Working-Class America

Jonathan Chait’s latest Atlantic piece, “Maybe It Was Never About the Factory Jobs,” is less an analysis and more a eulogy for a system that has bled American workers dry. Framing Biden’s presidency as a “meaningful economic success” yet a political failure, Chait unwittingly confirms the core critique of populists: neoliberalism’s architects despise the very people they claim to serve.

Chait’s defense of Biden’s post-neoliberal turn is riddled with contradictions. Biden’s much-touted economic agenda, from the Inflation Reduction Act to green energy subsidies, was meant to bring prosperity to forgotten Rust Belt towns. Yet, as Chait admits, Lordstown swung six points toward Trump in 2024, becoming the second-highest pro-Trump shift in Ohio. Even with billions funneled into union-friendly battery factories, working-class voters weren’t fooled. “Transformational” policies failed to transform anything except the DNC’s delusions.

Chait spends much of the piece trying to absolve the Biden admin of its failures. Inflation? Just bad timing. Rust Belt voters? Too impatient to recognize the “fruits” of Biden’s labor. Harris? Dragged down by Biden’s toxic record. But these excuses ring hollow. As Chait himself notes, “None of these actions has shown any sign of helping Biden politically.” The electorate, the working class, saw through the performative populism, rejecting it in droves.

And let’s talk inflation. The same “post-neoliberal” architects who claimed inflation wouldn’t matter politically were proven disastrously wrong. Chait’s own article reveals the arrogance: “The 40-year damage of neoliberalism…was so profound that three years of modest improvement was far from FDR-style transformation.” Translation? Biden’s advisors underestimated the pain of rising prices on everyday Americans, doubling down on an ideology that prioritized ESG-friendly subsidies over immediate economic relief.

This Atlantic piece is riddled with euphemisms, calling Biden’s record “historic” while ignoring its catastrophic unpopularity. Chait even cites unionized breakthroughs at Starbucks and Amazon as victories, conveniently glossing over the fact that union members themselves abandoned Biden. As Chait confesses, Biden’s pro-union policies “did not yield more support among union members.” Instead of self-reflection, the author shields the Democratic establishment by arguing they just didn’t shout their “anti-neoliberal” achievements loudly enough.

Nowhere does Chait acknowledge the systemic betrayal. Since the 1990s, both parties sold out the working class on the altar of globalization. Jobs shipped to China, towns hollowed out, and wages suppressed, all to enrich the same corporate elite that bankrolls the Atlantic. As Chait finally concedes, “Delivering concrete benefits” failed to generate political support. But he stops short of asking the real question: Why?

American workers aren’t stupid. They know when they’re being pandered to. Billion-dollar battery plants don’t erase decades of economic dislocation or pay the bills when groceries are 20% more expensive. Biden’s “post-neoliberal” advisors promised a New Deal but delivered breadcrumbs wrapped in greenwashing rhetoric. And voters weren’t buying it.

Chait’s neoliberal sermon is an indictment of the entire globalist elite. The same forces that hollowed out the industrial heartland now seek to distract with “green revolutions” that enrich Wall Street while leaving workers in the dust. The Biden presidency was a classic bait-and-switch, a rebranding of neoliberalism as “populism.”

The empire’s managerial class hates the American worker as much as it despises the Global South.

Lordstown, Ohio, is treated no differently than a sweatshop in Bangladesh, a resource to be extracted and discarded. Until America frees itself from the grip of neoliberalism and the globalist machine, the factory floor will remain a ghost town, and articles like Chait’s will serve as epitaphs for a dying empire.

- Gerry Nolan

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🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸 Younger brother of the murdered Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed, has taken over Hamas – WSJ

Sinwar Jr. is about 50 years old. Like Yahya, he joined Hamas in his youth. The publication writes that, unlike his brother, Mohammed Sinwar did not spend “significant time” in an Israeli prison, so the Israeli intelligence services do not understand him as well.

He received the nickname “Shadow” because he preferred to act “behind the scenes” and managed to hide from the Israeli intelligence services for a long time.

Младший брат убитого Яхьи Синвара Мухаммед возглавил ХАМАС – WSJ

Синвару-младшему около 50 лет. Так же, как и Яхья, он присоединился к ХАМАС в молодости. Издание пишет, что в отличие от брата, Мухаммед Синвар не провел «значительное время» в израильской тюрьме, поэтому спецслужбы Израиля его не так хорошо понимают.

Прозвище «Тень» он получил за то, что тот предпочитал действовать «за кулисами» и ему долгое время удавалось скрываться от израильских спецслужб.

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Another "Maidan of widows": relatives search for missing storm troopers of the 95th Airborne Brigade of the AFU

In Ukraine, relatives and friends of missing storm troopers of the 95th Airborne Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces have once again protested, demanding that the command find their fathers, brothers and sons.

Especially for our Ukrainian audience, and it is quite extensive, judging by the appeals to the bot, we duplicate the information: paratroopers from the 95th Brigade are currently in the vicinity of the village of Pogrebki, Kursk region, where they still have the opportunity to save their lives and surrender. Otherwise they will be annihilated and will be included in the endlessly long lists of "missing in action".

It is interesting that the "Maidan of widows" for the first time has achieved a certain result - in addition to the failure to carry out the offensive order, Kombrig Maryshev is now accused of destabilizing the situation in the country.

The paradox of the situation is that the retreats and losses of the AFU in other directions are absolutely calmly perceived by Syrsky and his entourage, while any negativity around the "Kursk adventure" is considered a personal insult by the Ukrainian commander-in-chief. Before this protest, Syrsky was actively interested in the fate of his protégé Maryshev, but since recently the commander-in-chief has placed his full trust in his deputy, former commander of the 95th Odshbr Apostol, who is to determine the fate of his replacement.

North Wind

@Slavyangrad

What will Turkey do with Syria’s Kurdish population?”

Neville Teller’s recent op-ed in The Jerusalem Post attempts to paint a picture of justice and inclusion for Syria’s Kurds in the aftermath of Bashar al-Assad’s ouster. However, it conveniently whitewashes the geopolitical theater of betrayal that has defined their plight, reducing a complex and brutal reality to sanitized platitudes. The Kurds, the largest stateless people on earth, have long been treated as expendable pawns on an imperial chessboard, sacrificed to protect the king, whether that king is Erdogan, Netanyahu, or the US.

Teller’s suggestion that “an autonomous Kurdish region” might emerge under a new Syrian constitution is either painfully naive or willfully deceptive. The reality is that any such “autonomy” will be contingent on Turkish approval, an approval Erdogan has repeatedly denied through years of military incursions and violent repression. Turkey’s “safe zones” in northern Syria are a façade for annexation, complete with Turkish infrastructure, governance, and a forced demographic engineering project that has displaced countless Kurds. Erdogan’s rhetoric of inclusivity is as hollow as the promises made by Western powers to the Kurds after World War I (Treaty of Sèvres).

And then there’s Israel, which Teller avoids scrutinizing altogether. Israel’s relationship with the Kurds is emblematic of its transactional approach to regional alliances: exploitative and disposable. While Kurdish forces have at times cooperated with Mossad, as Teller correctly notes, Israel consistently discards the Kurds once they outlive their usefulness. The Kurds’ tenuous autonomy in Iraq was shaped as much by Israeli intelligence interests as by the Kurds’ aspirations for freedom, and the silence from Tel Aviv on Erdogan’s campaigns speaks volumes about where Kurdish lives rank in the Zionist calculus.

The United States, Israel’s perennial vassal, fares no better. Washington’s betrayal of the Kurds in 2019; abandoning them to Erdogan’s Operation Peace Spring after years of anti-ISIS collaboration, cemented the Kurds’ role as cannon fodder in America’s endless Middle Eastern quagmire. Even the supposed Kurdish victories against ISIS came at the cost of untold casualties and a fleeting, fragile autonomy. It was the U.S., after all, that once declared Syria’s Kurds allies in the fight against extremism, only to pave the way for their abandonment when Turkey raised its hand.

Teller’s piece also lionizes Abu Mohammed al-Julani, leader of HTS, as some kind of moderate Islamist poised to broker Kurdish inclusion. This is farcical. Julani’s “inclusive” Syria is nothing more than an Islamist dystopia, underwritten by Turkey and, indirectly, by Israel and the U.S. The same HTS that terrorizes Syrian Christians and Yazidis has no interest in Kurdish rights, only in their submission. That the Kurds would find justice under Julani’s rule is as laughable as Erdogan’s promise of a “safe zone.”

The tragedy of the Kurds is a reflection of imperial hypocrisy at its finest. Erdogan and Netanyahu might play at antagonism in public, but behind the scenes, they share energy deals, mutual animosity toward Assad, and a vested interest in controlling Syria’s fractured landscape. The Kurds, caught in this web of duplicity, are left with no allies, no guarantees, and no homeland.

Until the imperialists, be they Western, Zionist, or wannabe Ottoman, leave the region, the Kurds will remain perpetual pawns, enduring false promises and endless betrayal. In this game of empires, there are no saviors, only predators.

- Gerry Nolan

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The best words describing the way of the West, Israel, the US, and NATO today can be found in Tolstoy:

"I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means, except for getting off his back.”

Good night Comrades 🇷🇺☦️

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