Feb. 28—UPDATE: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Feb. 28 called, through an advisor according to Axios, for the United States and “the West” to establish a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft over significant parts of Ukraine. White House press spokesperson Jen Psaki had to scramble, not jets, but a fast rejection. Psaki said, “Here’s what’s important for everybody to know about a no-fly zone: What that would require is implementation by the U.S. military. It would essentially mean the U.S. military would be shooting down Russian planes.” In short, World War III—with Russia’s strategic nuclear missile force already placed on heightened alert Sunday, Feb. 27. Will this break the illusion so many Europeans and Americans have developed from non-stop war propaganda, that NATO is involved in a painless and heroic defense of heroic Ukraine against evil Russia?

Feb. 28: At first view all the economic austerity and suffering from the financial and economic “extreme sanctions” on Russia imposed this weekend, seems to devastate only Russia. Its central bank had to raise its repo rate drastically Monday morning, Feb. 28, from 9.25% to 20% to stop an ongoing 50% collapse of the ruble. That interest rate will contract and do great damage to the Russian economy. The head of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Adam Posen, characterized the economic attacks on Russia on Sunday: “You are essentially directing a financial and economic crisis in another country.” Bank runs which were occurring with perhaps 1 trillion rubles withdrawn by Russians over the weekend. The Bank of Russia central bank barred foreign residents from selling out investments in Russia (capital controls) and required export firms to convert 80% of their sales revenues to rubles as received. The European divisions of major Russian banks are going under.

EIR has informed you, with the quotes from senior U.S. officials to document it, that crushing the Russian economy was the objective of NATO’s daring Russia into a war over Ukraine or some other Eastern European nation on the Russian border with potential nuclear missile launchers, like Poland or Romania. China is the other, even bigger obstacle to the trans-Atlantic nations’ as they face a financial crash worse than that of 2008. They cannot drag their dominant City of London- and Wall Street-centered banks through the crisis without imposing the drastic austerity of “the Great Reset” on their people and businesses. They have to eliminate the economic alternative for nations all over the world, represented by the China-Russia partnership.

The outcomes now triggered by an economic takedown of Russia will be serious, highly inflationary, and deadly for the world economy and the developing nations in particular. A UN representative of Brazil was right to say on Feb. 27, in the UN Security Council discussion of calling an emergency General Assembly session to condemn Russia, that the effect of these economic attacks on one of the world’s leading fertilizer-producing nations would be famines—fertilizer is already hyperinflating out of the reach of farmers around the world. But also in the NATO nations’ their leaders, suddenly self-righteous warriors for at least the sixth time since they bombed Serbia in 1999, are going to impose serious economic austerity on their people, with bigger and bigger war spending, rapidly rising inflation, shortages of vital products including enough heat, electricity and food.

Unless a nuclear war intervenes—and it may. We are in a form of Cuban Missile Crisis “in reverse” right now.

The one way out of that is the Schiller Institute’s proposed “strategic architecture” based on the economic development principles of Lyndon LaRouche’s “four economic laws” prescribed in 2014. This petition, calls for an immediate international conference to get nations to cooperate on those principles. Signing it, and discussing it with other people, is the best action you can take to get mankind off the downward slope toward world war, which it is now on.