No more shadow play. It’s now in the open. No holds barred.
Exhibit 1: Friday, March 22, 2024. It’s War. The Kremlin, via Peskov, finally admits it, on the record.
The money quote:
“Russia cannot allow the existence on its borders of a state that has a documented intention to use any methods to take Crimea away from it, not to mention the territory of new regions.”
Translation: the Hegemon-constructed Kiev mongrel is doomed, one way or another. The Kremlin signal: “We haven’t even started” starts now.
Exhibit 2: Friday afternoon, a few hours after Peskov. Confirmed by a serious European – not Russian – source. The first counter-signal.
Regular troops from France, Germany and Poland have arrived, by rail and air, to Cherkassy, south of Kiev. A substantial force. No numbers leaked. They are being housed in schools. For all practical purposes, this is a NATO force.
That signals, “Let the games begin”. From a Russian point of view, Mr. Khinzal’s business cards are set to be in great demand.
Exhibit 3: Friday evening. Terror attack on Crocus City, a music venue northwest of Moscow. A heavily trained commando shoots people on sight, point blank, in cold blood, then sets a concert hall on fire. The definitive counter-signal: with the battlefield collapsing, all that’s left is terrorism in Moscow.
And just as terror was striking Moscow, the US and the UK, in southwest Asia, was bombing Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, with at least five strikes.
Some nifty coordination. Yemen has just clinched a strategic deal in Oman with Russia-China for no-hassle navigation in the Red Sea, and is among the top candidates for BRICS+ expansion at the summit in Kazan next October.
Not only the Houthis are spectacularly defeating thalassocracy, they have the Russia-China strategic partnership on their side. Assuring China and Russia that their ships can sail through the Bab-al-Mandeb, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden with no problems is exchanged with total political support from Beijing and Moscow.
The sponsors remain the same
Deep in the night in Moscow, before dawn on Saturday 23. Virtually no one is sleeping. Rumors dance like dervishes on countless screens. Of course nothing has been confirmed – yet. Only the FSB will have answers. A massive investigation is in progress.
The timing of the Crocus massacre is quite intriguing. On a Friday during Ramadan. Real Muslims would not even think about perpetrating a mass murder of unarmed civilians under such a holy occasion. Compare it with the ISIS card being frantically branded by the usual suspects.
Let’s go pop. To quote Talking Heads: “This ain’t no party/ this ain’t no disco/ this ain’t no fooling around”. Oh no; it’s more like an all-American psy op. ISIS are cartoonish mercenaries/goons. Not real Muslims. And everyone knows who finances and weaponizes them.
That leads to the most possible scenario, before the FSB weighs in: ISIS goons imported from the Syria battleground – as it stands, probably Tajiks – trained by CIA and MI6, working on behalf of the Ukrainian SBU. Several witnesses at Crocus referred to “Wahhabis” – as in the commando killers did not look like Slavs.
It was up to Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic to cut to the chase. He directly connected the “warnings” in early March from American and British embassies directed at their citizens not to visit public places in Moscow with CIA/MI6 intel having inside info about possible terrorism, and not disclosing it to Moscow.
The plot thickens when it is established that Crocus is owned by the Agalarovs: an Azeri-Russian billionaire family, very close friends of…
… Donald Trump.
Talk about a Deep State-pinpointed target.
ISIS spin-off or banderistas – the sponsors remain the same. The clownish secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Oleksiy Danilov, was dumb enough to virtually, indirectly confirm they did it, saying on Ukrainian TV, “we will give them [Russians] this kind of fun more often.”
But it was up to Sergei Goncharov, a veteran of the elite Russia Alpha anti-terrorism unit, to get closer to unwrapping the enigma: he told Sputnik the most feasible mastermind is Kyrylo Budanov – the chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
The “spy chief” who happens to be the top CIA asset in Kiev.
It’s got to go till the last Ukrainian
The three exhibits above complement what the head of NATO’s
military committee, Rob Bauer, previously told a security forum in Kiev: “You need more than just grenades – you need people to replace the dead and wounded. And this means mobilization.”
Translation: NATO spelling out this is a war until the last Ukrainian.
And the “leadership” in Kiev still does not get it. Former Minister of Infrastructure Omelyan: “If we win, we will pay back with Russian oil, gas, diamonds and fur. If we lose, there will be no talk of money – the West will think about how to survive.”
In parallel, puny “garden-and jungle” Borrell admitted that it would be “difficult” for the EU to find an extra 50 billion euros for Kiev if Washington pulls the plug. The cocaine-fueled sweaty sweatshirt leadership actually believes that Washington is not “helping” in the form of loans, but in the form of free gifts. And the same applies for the EU.
The Theater of the Absurd is unmatchable. The German Liver Sausage Chancellor actually believes that proceeds from stolen Russian assets “do not belong to anyone”, so they can be used to finance extra Kiev weaponizing.
Everyone with a brain knows that using interest from “frozen”, actually stolen Russian assets to weaponize Ukraine is a dead end – unless they steal all of Russia’s assets, roughly $200 billion, mostly parked in Belgium and Switzerland: that would tank the Euro for good, and the whole EU economy for that matter.
Eurocrats better listen to Russian Central Bank major “disrupter” (American terminology) Elvira Nabiullina: The Bank of Russia will take “appropriate measures” if the EU does anything on the “frozen”/stolen Russian assets.
It goes without saying that the three exhibits above completely nullify the “La Cage aux Folles” circus promoted by the puny Petit Roi, now known across his French domains as Macronapoleon.
Virtually the whole planet, including the English-speaking Global North, had already been mocking the “exploits” of his Can Can Moulin Rouge Army.
So French, German and Polish soldiers, as part of NATO, are already in the south of Kiev. The most possible scenario is that they will stay far, far away from the frontlines – although traceable by Mr. Khinzal’s business activities.
Even before this new NATO batch arriving in the south of Kiev, Poland – which happens to serve as prime transit corridor for Kiev’s troops – had confirmed that Western troops are already on the ground.
So this is not about mercenaries anymore. France, by the way, is only 7th in terms of mercenaries on the ground, largely trailing Poland, the US and Georgia, for instance. The Russian Ministry of Defense has all the precise records.
In a nutshell: now war has morphed from Donetsk, Avdeyevka and Belgorod to Moscow. Further on down the road, it may not just stop in Kiev. It may only stop in Lviv. Mr. 87%, enjoying massive national near-unanimity, now has the mandate to go all the way. Especially after Crocus.
There’s every possibility the terror tactics by Kiev goons will finally drive Russia to return Ukraine to its original 17th century landlocked borders: Black Sea-deprived, and with Poland, Romania, and Hungary reclaiming their former territories.
Remaining Ukrainians will start to ask serious questions about what led them to fight – literally to their death – on behalf of the US Deep State, the military complex and BlackRock.
As it stands, the Highway to Hell meat grinder is bound to reach maximum velocity.
Hersh also notes there is no interest in peace talks Ukraine’s claims of incremental progress in the offensive constitute of “all lies”.
Citing a US official familiar with current intelligence, US journalist Seymour Hersh said that the US intelligence believes that the Ukrainian forces have become demoralized and have no chance of winning, adding that there currently exists no discussion in Kiev or the White House regarding a ceasefire.
In a new post on his Substack account, Hersh said, “There are significant elements in the American intelligence community, relying on field reports and technical intelligence, who believe that the demoralized Ukraine army has given up on the possibility of overcoming the heavily mined three-tier Russian defense lines and taking the war to Crimea and the four oblasts seized and annexed by Russia. The reality is that Volodymyr Zelensky’s battered army no longer has any chance of a victory”.
Hersh also noted there is no interest in peace talks. Quoting the official, Hersh continued that Ukraine’s claims of incremental progress in the offensive constitute of “all lies”.
The renowned investigative journalist reported last month that the CIA informed US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the Ukrainian counteroffensive would not likely yield results.
This information, said Hersh, came from a US intelligence official, who stated more specifically, that “the word was getting to him [Blinken] through the Agency [CIA] that the Ukrainian offense was not going to work. It was a show by Zelensky and there were some in the administration who believed his bullshit.”
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has been calling on his Western allies for months to provide his military with long-range missiles, arguing that this could drastically improve the outcome of the counteroffensive. But before that, it was the anti-air missiles, the advanced offense tanks, heavily armored troop carriers, and the HIMARS system.
Ukraine is depleting resources at an unsustainable rate, firing 90,000 artillery rounds per month when the Pentagon is only capable of producing a third of that number, while also losing around 20 percent of NATO-provided weapons – that were either destroyed or damaged – within the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, which saw very limited ground gains since it was launched almost three months ago.
As the Draconian Western-led sanctions on Russia exacerbate the economic crisis worldwide, and as Russian troops gain more ground despite the influx of military aid into Ukraine, exposing US direct involvement in bio-labs spread across Eastern Europe and the insurgence of neo-Nazi groups… How will things unfold?
This information, said Hersh, came from a US intelligence official, who stated more specifically, that “the word was getting to him [Blinken] through the Agency [CIA] that the Ukrainian offense was not going to work. It was a show by Zelensky and there were some in the administration who believed his bullshit.”
Following in the footsteps of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger when he ended the Vietnam War through a peace deal in Paris in 1973, Blinken, according to Hersh’s source, has sought to broker a Russia-Ukraine peace agreement, however, “it was going to be a big lose.”
The Russian Defense Ministry announced earlier that as of August 4, the Ukrainian forces lost more than 43,000 troops and 4,900 units of military equipment.
‘Jeddah peace’; a Blinken story
In his piece, Hersh also cited the US official as saying that the Jeddah Peace Summit, which was scheduled earlier this month, failed after Russia was not invited.
“Jeddah was [Biden National Security Advisor Jake] Sullivan’s baby,” Hersh cited the official as saying, reaffirming that Sullivan had “planned it to be Biden’s equivalent” of the World War I peace treaty known as Woodrow Wilson’s Versailles Treaty moment.
“The grand alliance of the free world meeting in a victory celebration after the humiliating defeat of the hated foe to determine the shape of nations for the next generation. Fame and Glory. Promotion and re-election. The jewel in the crown was to be Zelensky’s achievement of Putin’s unconditional surrender after the lightning spring offensive,” the official said before adding that “they were even planning a Nuremberg-type trial at the world court, with Jake as our representative. Just one more f***-up, but who is counting?”
Significantly, the official concluded by stating that in Jeddah, what happened was that “forty nations showed up, all but six looking for free food after the Odessa shutdown.”
Ukraine counteroffensive
Last month, Hersh reported, also citing a US official, that the US and Ukrainian military have refrained from making forecasts about future victories in the counteroffensive because Russia has a clear upper hand on the ground.
“The American and Ukrainian military are no longer making any predictions,” the US official was quoted by Hersh as saying. “The Ukrainian army has not gotten past the first of three Russian defense lines. Every mine the Ukrainians dig up is replenished at night by the Russians.”
The fact of things “is that the balance of power in the war is settled. Putin has what he wants,” the official noted. Ukraine is not in the capacity to retake Crimea, Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk, and Zaporozhye.
The Ukrainian President has “no plan, except to hang on,” he added.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh confirmed that Washington enabled both Ukrainian attacks on the Kerch Bridge on Thursday. “The Biden administration’s role in both attacks was vital,” he declared on his Substack.
“Of course, it was our technology,” an American official told Hersh, referring to the drone that damaged the bridge on July 17. “The drone was remotely guided and half submerged–like a torpedo.”
Hersh did not identify his source, but his latest post was described as a look at recent events in Ukraine “from the point of view of those in the American intelligence community who don’t feel they have the ear of President Joe Biden but should.”
Asked if the US intelligence community considered the possibility of Russian retaliation for the bridge attack, Hersh’s source replied, “we don’t think that far.”
“Our national strategy is that [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky can do whatever he wants to do. There’s no adult supervision,” he added.
A truck bomb exploded on the Crimean Bridge in early October 2022, killing three civilians. The bridge was seriously damaged and required months of repairs. The July drone attack killed two people and orphaned a 14-year-old girl, who barely survived.
Kiev celebrated both attacks, but officially denied any responsibility. US intelligence quickly attributed the October truck bombing to Ukrainian intelligence, however. The head of Ukraine’s main intelligence agency, the SBU, finally took credit for the blast earlier this week.
Though Crimea is no stranger to bloodshed, all battles fought there seem to have been akin to those of Stalingrad on a bad day. When the Reds overran Crimea’s Whites in the Russian Civil War, they had a five to one advantage and they attacked from over the shallow marshes dividing Crimea from the rest of Russia, an option Zelensky’s lemmings do not have.
When Hitler’s Army Group South captured Crimea, they had the help of the Italian navy and Dora, the giant Schwerer Gustav railway gun. Although the Crimean peninsula witnessed some of the heaviest fighting of the entire Eastern Front during the eight months it took the Soviets to boot out Hitler’s Army Group South, that ferocious fighting and huge loss of life should still be a factor for Zelensky’s doomed Army Group South to ponder, even though they march not to Hitler’s drum, but to that of Zelensky’s own candy man.
Although this excellent article summarises that and other Crimean battles, its main contribution is it tells us that this pending Crimean battle is, like all Crimean battles before it, not about the integrity of Zelensky’s artificial Ukrainian rump Reich but about controlling the Crimean peninsula so as to control the Black Sea and entry to the Bosporus Straits.
When looked at through that more sober strategic vista, Zelensky is just a coked-up NATO bit player. Whether it is plagiarising Churchill or King Henry V for the British Parliament, or aping Stalin’s Order 227 ordering his rump Reich’s lemmings to fight to the last man, Zelensky’s role is to parrot the lines his candy men give him and nothing more. Though this former porno actor is not a serious player, his collaboration with the Banderites has caused the death of hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians and, for that, he and his wife should pay, just as Mussolini and his mistress paid. That said, they are but well-paid bit players in this Russo-Ukrainian tragedy and are of no major strategic consequence.
In the unlikely event Zelensky’s Army Group South were to capture Sevastopol, then Russia’s Black Sea fleet would be permanently neutralised and the Russian Navy would effectively only be left with Vladivostok, Murmansk and the Baltic. As NATO’s Army Group North is upping the ante to a nuclear showdown around the Kola peninsula and, as Army Group Centre, spear-headed by Warsaw’s day dreamers, wants to restore the former glories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Eastern Europe, Murmansk and the Baltic included, are in for a very bumpy ride.
And all for what? Certainly not for Ukraine, whose people are already sick of their coke-addled puppet President. The goal is to box Russia in from Crimea in the South up to Kola in the Arctic and to thereby reduce Russia to a giant quarry for Uncle Sam and his fellow-pirates to pillage.
It would be a simple, daring and, perhaps, even perfect plan if it did not have one central flaw. Russians have proved themselves, time and again, masters at defensive warfare and nowhere more so than in Crimea, which is the penultimate goal of Army Group South.
Should Zelensky’s lemmings move on Crimea, Russian naval and land artillery will turn the Perekop Isthmus into a lake of Ukrainian blood, an unrelenting fire-zone where everything that moves dies. Ukrainian troops attacking over the Syvash during low tide will find themselves isolated when the tide comes back in with the non-stop incoming Russian artillery and rocket fire they’ll have to contend with making Lord Raglan’s Light Brigade Charge look like a master class in military genius.
As an amphibious or airborne assault are both logistically impossible without major NATO input along the lines of D Day, the Perekop Isthmus and the Syvash are Crimea’s only two vulnerable points, if indeed they are really vulnerable.
Though NATO’s goal is to control the Black Sea, just as its previous goals included taking control of the Yalu River, the Ho Chi Minh trail and Helmand Province, the really tangible goal is again just to milk the Western tax-payer by gathering funding, material & manpower to slaughter Russian children, Korean children, Vietnamese children, Afghan children or whomever else it is who happens to be in the way of these serial mass murderers.
Though Zelensky and his wife have serious fraud and other cases to answer for, neither they nor the putative leaders of Army Group South are the main culprits in all of this. That honour belongs to Joe Biden, the Big Guy and the arms and Big Pharma companies he and his whole stinking family are in hock to. Consider this recent report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI), showing that Europe’s military expenditure saw its sharpest year-on-year increase in at least 30 years and that total global military expenditure has reached a new, unprecedented height of $2.24 trillion, with the Yanks taking up the lion’s share of that colossal amount. What this means in plain English is that not only Zelensky but Crooked Joe Biden and the other gangsters of the British and American regimes are coining it, just as they did in all their other previous money-making wars.
Whether we are talking about Crimea, Murmansk, the Black Sea or the Straits of Taiwan, NATO’s goal remains the same one of controlling the world’s choke points and sea lanes to extract rents that are not their due.
Although the High Commands of Russia, China and NATO are undoubtedly aware of all this, the real question is what can be done about it. As the war mongering Economist magazine has kindly informed us that Russia exchanged 60 Su-35 aircraft with Iran for several thousand kamikaze drones, the Iranians are certainly making their own considerable contribution to bringing peace to Europe.
But what of China, The Economist and ourselves? Could China not sail a peace-seeking flotilla of its modern war ships into the Black Sea on the same pretext that little Germany uses to send its spy ships to the Chinese coast because Josep Borell (a Barcelona waiter who plays a double act with Forest Gump doppelganger Ursula von der Leyen), asked them to? And what of The Economist and NATO’s other media outlets, who continue to cleanse themselves of all dissenting voices? NATO’s recent media scalps have included Tucker Carlson, today’s right-wing equivalent of Phil Donahue, whom NATO filleted for opposing their Iraqi genocide. And, though they are big fish, the little fish have not been forgotten either. The CIA have arrested members of obscure African-American groups for being Putin agents (Assad apologists are last year’s fashion) and the Germans have, as previously discussed, put a bounty out on citizen journalist Alina Lipp and her family. Stopping Russian journalists accompanying Lavrov to the United Nations is, of course, par for the course as all one can expect from these CIA pigs is an ignorant grunt.
Although Army Group South has not got a hope in hell of over-running Crimea, it will, together with Army Group North and Army Group Centre, achieve a number of key NATO objectives. They will keep Russia under pressure, they will further emasculate Central and Western Europe, they will make a ton of money for Joe Mr Big Guy Biden and his ilk and Hollywood and the media will have a great and lucrative time spinning all of this and promising more of the same star-spangled hypocrisy to their tens of millions of gullible customers.
Perhaps things were much the same when the Tauri, the Scythians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Byzantines all, so long ago, jostled over this part of Russia. Who, bar the ancient historians, is to know? And who is to care as a gang of American draft dodgers are set to bring more misery on Europe not only through this revamped Army Group South, but through Army Group North and Army Group Centre as well.? Although the hope of the civilised world has to be that the forces of Belarus and Russia will prevail, as long as these Anglo-American war profiteers continue to enjoy their safe havens in Western Europe and the United States, we will never see an end to their crimes, not in Crimea, not in the Black Sea nor anywhere else under our common canopy.
The US summons the Russian ambassador to Washington to protest the crash of a US MQ-9 drone into the Black Sea.
A US MQ-9 Reaper drone in Afghanistan, March 2016 (Reuters)
The Russian Defense Ministry denied US allegations and said its fighter jets did not come into contact with the US MQ-9 drone that crashed into the Black Sea earlier, pointing out that the drone crashed due to “sharp maneuvering”.
Earlier, the US European Command claimed that a Russian fighter jet dumped fuel on an American drone over the Black Sea and then collided with it, causing the drone to crash. The White House called the crash a result of “reckless” behavior by Russia.
“The Russian fighters did not use their onboard weapons, did not come into contact with the UAV and returned safely to their home airfield,” the Ministry confirmed.
The Russian Defense Ministry indicated that the US drone fell into the Black Sea on Tuesday morning due to its own sharp maneuvering, confirming that Russian fighters did not come into contact with it and did not use weapons.
“As a result of sharp maneuvering around 09:30 Moscow time [06:30 GMT], unmanned aerial vehicle MQ-9 went into an uncontrolled flight with a loss of altitude and collided with the water surface,” the Ministry said.
The Ministry clarified that on Tuesday morning, the airspace control of the Russian Aerospace Forces had recorded the flight of the US unmanned aerial vehicle MQ-9 over the Black Sea in the region of the Crimean peninsula in the direction of the Russian state border.
The flight of the drone “was carried out with transponders turned off, violating the boundaries of the area of the temporary regime for the use of airspace, established for the purpose of conducting a special military operation, communicated to all users of international airspace and published in accordance with international standards,” the statement read.
It added that Russian fighters from the air defense forces on duty were scrambled in order to identify the intruder.
US summons Russia ambassador over drone crash
Following the incident, the US summoned Russia’s Ambassador to protest the crash, the State Department confirmed.
“We are engaging directly with the Russians, again at senior levels, to convey our strong objections to this unsafe, unprofessional intercept, which caused the downing of the unmanned US aircraft,” State Department Spokesperson Ned Price told reporters.
Price said the Russian Ambassador in Washington has been convened at the State Department Tuesday afternoon and the American ambassador in Moscow registered a “strong objection” to the incident.
The spokesperson said the incident marked a clear violation of international law.
US had to crash drone in Black Sea after damage: Pentagon
On the other hand, the Pentagon claimed that the US military was forced to essentially crash its MQ-9 Reaper surveillance drone because of the damage caused when it was allegedly struck by a Russian jet.
“Because of the damage, we were in a position to have to essentially crash into the Black Sea,” Brigadier General Pat Ryder told reporters, adding that the drone was basically unflyable after the damage.
Ryder said Russia had not recovered the crashed drone at this point.
The Pentagon spokesperson declined to disclose whether the Reaper drone was armed, saying he is not “going to get into the specific profile of this particular aircraft. As you know the MQ-9 does have the ability to be armed.”
Austin not in contact with Shoigu over drone crash
Elsewhere, Ryder said that US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has not talked to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu after the recent incident.
“In terms of Secretary Austin talking to his counterpart, not at this time,” Ryder said. “To my knowledge, DOD [Defense Department] officials have not spoken specifically to Russian authorities on this particular incident.”
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Amid incessant NATO aggression and escalation of hostilities within Russia, now also including US-backed Kiev regime terrorists targeting schoolchildren, Moscow has started revamping the doctrinal approach to the use of its strategic arsenal. Rather curiously, the new document, published by the “Military Thought” magazine run by the Russian Ministry of Defense, attracted little attention in Western media. It should be noted that such changes are made only once in several decades or even longer. The strategic posturing of countries, particularly superpowers, is usually “set in stone”, meaning that changes are prompted only by major events of historical proportions.
It was only a week ago that Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Russia is suspending its participation in the New START arms control treaty. Putin cited continuous, blatant US and NATO violations of the agreement as the primary reason for the decision. With the treaty becoming a mere formality, Russia is not bound to honor it anymore, as this would undermine its own strategic security. With that in mind, the Russian Strategic Missile Forces (RVSN) started implementing new ways to deter any possible direct US/NATO attacks on Russia, particularly as the belligerent thalassocracy has repeatedly floated the idea of “decapitation strikes” on Moscow in the last several months.
The authors of the document are Deputy Commander of the RVSN Igor Fazletdinov and retired Colonel Vladimir Lumpov. They argue that the US is on a collision course with Russia, as Washington DC and its vassals are becoming increasingly aggressive due to their political elites’ frustration with the loss of the “sole superpower” status.
With America seeing Moscow as the main culprit for this, it plans on defeating Russia in a “single blow”, thus eliminating the main obstacle to total US global dominance. Fazletdinov and Lumpov argue that Washington DC plans to defeat Russia in a “strategic (global) multi-sphere operation”, the primary goal of which will be the elimination of its strategic arsenal.
“[The US believes] this goal is only achievable in the event of an instantaneous nuclear strike against the RVSN or at least with the deployment of ABM [anti-ballistic missile] systems around Russia. The US plan is to destroy at least 65-70% of Russian strategic nuclear forces as part of its Prompt Global Strike concept, with the rest eliminated by American ABM systems. The US would then launch an all-out nuclear attack on the Russian Federation in order to destroy it,” authors warn, further adding: “We aim to repel a potential [US] nuclear strike, preserve our own nuclear capabilities, suppress the deployed US missile defense systems and cause unacceptable damage in case of [US/NATO] aggression.”
Russia certainly has the capability to almost instantly change its strategic doctrine.
Unlike its NATO rivals (including the US itself), Moscow leads the world in several key military technologies, which also include at least a dozen operational hypersonic weapons deployed over the last 5-10 years.
And indeed, in early December President Putin stated Russia could adopt a US-style concept of preemptive strikes. The program mentioned by Russian military experts, called PGS (Prompt Global Strike), is a US attempt to develop a capability that enables it to attack enemy strategic targets with precision-guided weapons anywhere in the world within just one hour. Still, the US is yet to deploy a weapon that can achieve that.
On the other hand, with the Mach 12-capable “Kinzhal” air-launched hypersonic missile carried by modified MiG-31K/I interceptors and Tu-22M3 long-range bombers, the Mach 28-capable “Avangard” HGV (hypersonic glide vehicle) deployed on various ICBMs and the Mach 9-capable scramjet-powered “Zircon” hypersonic cruise missile deployed on naval (both submarines and surface ships) and (soon) on land platforms, Russia is the only country on the planet with the capability to immediately implement such a program. And yet, Moscow still refrains from going ahead with such plans, although its justification for this would hold much better than that of the US.
The authors further emphasize “the need to make sure the US was perfectly aware of the impossibility of the complete destruction of our strategic capabilities and the inevitability of a crushing retaliatory nuclear strike”.
American policymakers take advice from former high-ranking generals and officers who somehow managed to lose a war against outnumbered and outgunned AK-wielding insurgents in sandals while wasting trillions of dollars and deploying hundreds of thousands of troops during the two decades of continuous NATO aggression in Afghanistan. This is without taking into account the technological disparity which was so overwhelmingly on the side of the aggressors that it can quite literally be measured in centuries rather than decades. Still, delusions and living in parallel reality seem to be a given for the warmongers at the Pentagon.
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South Africa’s former Minister for Intelligence Services Ronnie Kasrils. (Photo: via Kasrils FB profile)
– Ronnie Kasrils, veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, and South Africa’s former Minister for Intelligence Services, activist and author. He contributed this piece to The Palestine Chronicle
The recent hatchet job by Greg Mills and Ray Hartley in the Daily Maverick shows they believe it is their hallowed duty to strike down any voice daring to question the Western crusade against the evil Russian Empire.
Debate should always be encouraged, but the search for historic truth and a credible understanding of the facts is ill-served by a descent into a childlike morality tale of good versus evil.
In fact, Mills and Hartley, along with the rest of the increasingly shrill and at times hysterical pro-Western lobby in our media, should learn something from the much more sophisticated contributions that have been developed in the West in response to the USA-NATO belligerence, the crossing of bright red lines regarding Russia and China’s security, and the possibility of dire consequences. Learned American academics such as John Mearsheimer, Edward Curtin, John Bellamy Foster, and military intelligence specialists such as Scott Ritter and Jacques Baud, to name just a few prominent Western thinkers, have produced excellent analyses.
Contrary to what Mills and Hartley infer by twisting my words, I am by no means an uncritical fan of Putin or capitalist Russia. Of course, it is true that a strong legacy exists concerning the support the ANC and other fraternal liberation movements received from the former Soviet Union, but it is far more than that which inclines much of the Global South, to understand Russia’s security needs, and sustains its anathema for USA-NATO imperialist domination.
Indeed, the South African position on the conflict is hardly an outlier in the Global South. Brazil’s Luis Inazio Lula da Silva, for instance, has taken a similar position.
My article in News24 focused on the historical connection between the liberation struggle in South Africa and the Soviet Union because the publication specifically asked me to comment from my perspective as an Umkhonto weSizwe cadre who underwent military training there in 1964 – and in Odessa no less. I learned about Russia and the Soviet Union’s immense sacrifice during World War 2, and the people’s opposition to fascism in all its forms, including the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, and the Soviet people’s deeply-rooted commitment to world peace.
I also referred to the bellicose emergence of neo-Nazis in present Ukraine. Mills and Hartley have the temerity to cynically spin this factual observation and declare themselves “sickened” by my alleged inference that present-day Ukraine is “somehow a Nazi state”. I said no such thing. I wrote: “Little wonder that President Putin has stated that part of Russia’s objective is the de-Nazification of the Ukraine.”
The emergence of neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine became globally visible during the Maidan Square protests in Kyiv, which turned into a violent rampage in 2014. At the time, mainstream Western media highlighted the role of those Nazi gangs.
Since then, the notorious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and their ilk have become embedded within the Ukrainian armed forces, adorned with Nazi symbolism, and involved in atrocities. Now the Western media has turned a blind eye.
It is a moral duty to point to the rising peril of neo-Nazism in the streets of Europe, the USA and elsewhere, and the broader populist appeal to white supremacism. I will not be quietened in pointing out how emboldened the neo-Nazis have become in Ukraine.
It is important for readers to be aware that the Brenthurst Foundation is hardly a neutral institution when it comes to an ideological worldview. It is funded by white mining capital and, as a casual look at its board and associates shows, deeply enmeshed in the Western military establishment – apart from a handful of Africans.
There is so much that is factually incorrect, dangerous and superficial in the Mills and Hartley piece. Particularly revealing is what they studiously avoid, because it does not suit their case.
I turn only to some of their more obvious howlers and deliberate omissions.
The Kyiv regime, which they laud as an example of freedom and democracy, has banned the communist and socialist parties, several left-wing organizations, and the For Life parliamentary opposition platform.
The “democrat” Zelensky, has closed down all opposition television and media outlets and instituted crippling legislation against Ukraine’s trade union movement and civil liberties. No word of this from the Brenthurst duo.
They claim that Crimea voted in a referendum to leave the Russian Federation and join Ukraine. But they don’t specify which referendum and when. There was a referendum among Crimea’s people in 2014, which voted for inclusion in the Russian Federation. What other referendums have occurred other than at the dissolution of the Soviet Union? Those related to the independence of the former constituent republics.
At that time, in December 1991, the three Slavic republics – Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine – proclaimed the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). That was not a referendum specifically concerning Crimea.
As to the sanctity of referenda or elections, there is no sound from the Brenthurst pair concerning the Maidan coup of 2014 which overthrew the democratically elected government of President Yanukovych, and the “color revolution” investment of the USA, Germany, Poland and others.
They state that in Africa a very limited number of countries were against supporting Ukraine. There were seventeen, including South Africa, that abstained from the UN General Assembly vote. As for African countries voting against Russia, President Ramaphosa has referred to South Africa being blackmailed and threatened to toe the US-NATO line.
I am accused of ranting about the “morality of US foreign policy, CIA-sponsored coups, punitive sanctions and blockades, military aggression and intervention globally”. Russia, they state appears exempt from my criticism “when it does the same — and far worse — in Africa under the brutal rule of Wagner military interventions that secure mineral wealth for oligarchs.”
The facts are that whatever the sins of Wagner, the most active and destructive mercenary groups that have plundered Africa and the Middle East are American, British and French. Their boots on the ground are numbered in the tens of thousands.
Wagner personnel are 6,000.
By Wikipedia’s broadest definition of military intervention, the US has engaged in nearly 200 since 1950 with over 25% occurring since 1991.
That explains why so many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America refuse to kowtow to the US-NATO-EU axis. When they do it is either because of fear of the consequences or they are infamous dictators installed by the CIA such as Mobuto Sese Seko, Pinochet, Bolsonaro or Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, loyal to their master’s orders.
As for elephants in the room which Mills and Hartley are silent about, any university undergraduates serious about historical events can point to:
NATO expansion east to Russia’s doorstep since the collapse of the Soviet Union when it should have been wound up along with the Warsaw Pact;
Numerous countries added to NATO’s eastern expansion despite promises to Russia to the contrary;
15,000 mostly Russian-speaking people in the Donbas killed by Ukrainian forces between 2014 and February 2022;
42 massacred at the Odessa trade union building in July 2014;
Atrocities committed by the Ukrainian forces and Neo-Nazis;
US rejecting calls from Russia to respect its borders;
US surrounding Russia with military bases;
George W. Bush withdrawing the US from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty;
Trump withdrawing the US from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty;
The US asserting its right to a nuclear first strike;
The US waging an economic war on Russia via sanctions for years.
Mills and Hartley venture into the realm of wild conspiracy theories and cheap insults in hallucinating state capture of our democracy by China and Russia “in politics, unions and business” and, following a now debunked US conspiracy theory, warn of Russia “disrupting elections” as a natural next step.
Whilst our government affirms the need for peaceful negotiations, the pro-NATO position of the Brenthurst duo follows the most dangerous hawks in the West by advocating escalation of the war and more lethal weapons for Ukraine at the risk of a nuclear conflagration.
It seems that Greg Mills has forgotten about Afghanistan. In his years in Kabul serving as ‘special advisor’ to a NATO commander, did he ever conceive of an ignominious reversal?
(This article was originally published in the Daily Maverick)
– Ronnie Kasrils, veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, and South Africa’s former Minister for Intelligence Services, activist and author. He contributed this piece to The Palestine Chronicle
Note: reading these moronic questions+statements only confirms to me my conviction that Europe is sub-pathetic and deserves what will come its way. This is sad, of course, but indisputable. As for Roger Waters, his willingness to reconsider his views only inspires even more admiration in me. Andrei
Against the backdrop of the outrageous and despicable smear campaign by the ISRAELI LOBBY to denounce me as an ANTI-SEMITE, WHICH I AM NOT, NEVER HAVE BEEN and NEVER WILL BE. Against he backdrop of them trying to silence me because I lend my voice to the seventy five year old fight for equal human rights for all my brothers and sisters in Palestine/Israel, irrespective of their ethnicity, religion or nationality. Against the backdrop, of the ISRAELI LOBBY trying to cancel my 85% SOLD OUT series of concerts in Germany, the National Newspaper BERLINER ZEITUNG, has today, courageously, published an in depth interview with me in their Saturday Magazine. Thank you so much gentlemen.
And to MY FANS who have purchased tickets for my forthcoming shows in Europe,
FEAR NOT! I AM DEFINITELY COMING.
WILD HORSES COULDN’T KEEP ME AWAY
AND NEITHER CAN THIS APARTHEID RABBLE
THE TRUTH WILL SET US FREE.
LOVE
R.
Interview translated into English from German:
Roger Waters can rightly claim to be the mastermind behind Pink Floyd. He came up with the concept of and wrote all the lyrics for the masterpiece “The Dark Side of the Moon”. He wrote the albums “Animals”, “The Wall” and “The Final Cut” single-handedly. On his current tour “This Is Not A Drill”, which comes to Germany in May, he therefore wants to express that legacy to a large extent and play songs from Pink Floyd’s classic phase. The problem: Because of controversial statements he has made about the war in Ukraine and the politics of the state of Israel, one of his concerts in Poland has already been cancelled, and in Germany Jewish and Christian organizations are demanding the same. Time to talk to the 79-year-old musician: What does he mean by all this? Is he simply misunderstood – should his concerts be cancelled? Is it justifiable to exclude him from the conversation? Or does society have a problem banning dissenters like Waters from the conversation?
The musician receives his visitors in his residence in southern England, friendly, open, unpretentious, but determined – that’s how he will remain throughout the conversation. First, however, he wants to demonstrate something special: In the studio of his house, he plays three tracks from a brand new re-recording of “The Dark Side of the Moon”, which celebrates its 50th birthday in March. “The new concept is meant to reflect on the meaning of the work, to bring out the heart and soul of the album,” he says, “musically and spiritually. I’m the only one singing my songs on these new recordings, and there are no rock and roll guitar solos.”
The spoken words, superimposed on instrumental pieces like “On The Run” or “The Great Gig in the Sky” and over “Speak To Me”, “Brain Damage” “Any Colour You Like and Money” are meant to clarify his “mantra”, the message he considers central to all his work: “It’s about the voice of reason. And it says: what is important is not the power of our kings and leaders or their so-called connection with God. What is really important is the connection between us as human beings, the whole human community. We, human beings, are scattered all over the globe – but we are all related because we all come from Africa. We are all brothers and sisters, or at the very least distant cousins, but the way we treat each other is destroying our home, planet earth – faster than we can imagine.” For instance, right now, suddenly here we are in 2023 involved in a year old proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Why? Ok, a bit of history, in 2004 Russian President Vladimir Putin extended his hand to the West in an attempt to build an architecture of peace in Europe. It’s all there in the record. He explained that western plans to invite the post Maidan coup Ukraine into NATO posed a completely unacceptable existential threat to The Russian Federation and would cross a final red line that could end in war, so could we all get round the table and negotiate a peaceful future. His advances were brushed off by the US and its NATO allies. From then on he consistently maintained his position and NATO consistently maintained theirs: “F… you”. And here we are.
Mr Waters, you speak of the voice of reason, of the deep connection of all people. But when it comes to the war in Ukraine, you talk a lot about the mistakes of the US and the West, not about Russia’s war and the Russian aggression. Why don’t you protest against the acts committed by Russia? I know that you supported Pussy Riot and other human rights organizations in Russia. Why don’t you attack Putin?
First of all, if you read my letter to Putin and my writings around the start of the war in February….
…you called him a “gangster”…
…exactly, I did. But I may have changed my mind a little bit in the last year. There is a podcast from Cyprus called “The Duran”. The hosts speak Russian and can read Putin’s speeches in the original. Their comments on it make sense to me. The most important reason for supplying arms to Ukraine is surely profit for the arms industry. And I wonder: is Putin a bigger gangster than Joe Biden and all those in charge of American politics since World War II? I am not so sure. Putin didn’t invade Vietnam or Iraq? Did he?
The most important reason for arms deliveries is the following: It is to support Ukraine, to win the war and to stop Russia’s aggression. You seem to see it differently.
Yes. Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I am now more open to listen what Putin actually says. According to independent voices I listen to he governs carefully, making decisions on the grounds of a consensus in the Russian Federation government. There are also critical intellectuals in Russia, who have been arguing against American imperialism since the 1950s. And a central phrase has always been: Ukraine is a red line. It must remain a neutral buffer state. If it doesn’t remain so, we don’t know where it will lead. We still don’t know, but it could end in a Third World War.
In February last year, it was Putin who decided to attack.
He launched what he still calls a “special military operation”. He launched it on the basis of reasons that if I have understood them well are: 1. We want to stop the potential genocide of the Russian-speaking population of the Donbas. 2. We want to fight Nazism in Ukraine. There is a teenage Ukrainian girl, Alina, with whom I exchanged long letters: “I hear you. I understand your pain.” She answered me, thanked me, but stressed, I‘m sure you’re wrong about one thing though, “I am 200% certain there are no Nazis in Ukraine.” I replied again, “I’m sorry Alina, but you are wrong about that. How can you live in Ukraine and not know?”
There is no evidence that there has been genocide in Ukraine. At the same time, Putin has repeatedly emphasised that he wants to bring Ukraine back into his empire. Putin told former German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the saddest day in his life was in 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Isn’t the word origin of “Ukraine” the Russian word for “Borderland”? It was part of Russia and the Soviet Union for a long time. It’s a difficult history. During the Second World War, I believe there was a large part of the population of western Ukraine that decided to collaborate with the Nazis. They killed Jews, Roma, communists, and anyone else the Third Reich wanted dead. To this day there is the conflict between Western Ukraine (With or without Nazis Alina) and Eastern The Donbas) and Southern (Crimea) Ukraine and there are many Russian speaking Ukrainians because it was part of Russia for hundreds of years. How can you solve such a problem? It can’t be done by either the Kiev government or the Russians winning. Putin has always stressed that he has no interest in taking over western Ukraine – or invading Poland or any other country across the border. What he is saying is: he wants to protect the Russian-speaking populations in those parts of Ukraine where the Russian speaking populations feel under threat from the far right influenced post Maidan Coup Governments in Kiev. A coup that is widely accepted as having been orchestrated by the US.
We have spoken to many Ukrainians who can prove otherwise. The US may have helped support the 2014 protests. But overall, reputable sources and eyewitness accounts suggest that the protests arose from within – through the will of the Ukrainian people.
I wonder which Ukrainians you have spoken to? I can imagine that some claim that. On the other side of the coin a huge majority of Ukrainians in the Crimea and the Donbass have voted in referenda to rejoin The Russian Federation.
In February, you were surprised that Putin attacked Ukraine. How can you be so sure that he will not go further? Your trust in Russia does not seem to have been shattered, despite the bloody Russian war of aggression.
How can I be sure that the US will not risk starting a nuclear war with China? They are already provoking The Chinese by interfering in Taiwan. They would love to destroy Russia first. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature understands that, when they read the news, and the Americans admit it.
You irritate a lot of people because it always sounds like you are defending Putin.
Compared to Biden, I am. The US/NATO provocations before February 2022 were extreme and very damaging to the interests of all the ordinary people of Europe.
You would not boycott Russia?
I think it is counterproductive. You live in Europe: How much does the US charge for gas deliveries? Five times as much as its own citizens pay. In England, people are now saying “eat or heat” – because the poorer sections of the population can hardly afford to heat their homes. Western governments should realize that we are all brothers and sisters. In the Second World War they saw what happens when they try to wage war against Russia. They will unite and fight to the last ruble and the last square meter of ground to defend their motherland. Just like anyone would. I think if the US can convince its own citizens and you and many other people, that Russia is the real enemy, and that Putin is the new Hitler they will have an easier time stealing from the poor to give to the rich and also starting and promoting more wars, like this proxy war in Ukraine. Maybe that seems like an extreme political stance to you, but maybe the history I read and the news I garner is just different from you. You can’t believe everything you see on TV or read in the papers. All I am trying to achieve with my new recordings, my statements and performances is that our brothers and sisters in power stop the war – and that people understand that our brothers and sisters in Russia do not live under a repressive dictatorship, any more than you do in Germany or I do in the US. I mean would we choose to continue to slaughter young Ukrainians and Russians if we had the power to stop it?
We can do this interview, in Russia this would not be so easy… But back to Ukraine: What would be your political counter-proposal for a meaningful Ukraine policy of the West?
We need to get all our leaders around the table and force them to say: “No more war!”. That would be the point where dialogue can start.
Could you imagine living in Russia?
Yes, of course, why not? It would be the same as with my neighbours here in the south of England. We could go to the pub and talk openly – as long as they don’t go to war and kill Americans or Ukrainians. All right? As long as we can trade with each other, sell each other gas, make sure we’re warm in the winter, we’re fine. Russians are no different from you and me: there are good people and there are idiots – like everywhere else.
Then why don’t you play shows in Russia?
Not for ideological reasons. It is simply not possible at the moment. I’m not boycotting Russia, that would be ridiculous. I play 38 shows in the USA. If I were to boycott any country for political reasons, it would be the US. They are the main aggressor.
If one looks at the conflict neutrally, one can see Putin as the aggressor. Do you think we are all brainwashed?
Yes, I do indeed, definitely. Brainwashed, you said it.
Because we consume western media?
Exactly. What everyone in the West is being told is the “unprovoked invasion” narrative. Huh? Anyone with half a brain can see that the conflict in Ukraine was provoked beyond all measure. It is probably the most provoked invasion ever.
When concerts in Poland were cancelled because of your statements on the war in Ukraine, did you just feel misunderstood?
Yes. This is a big step backwards. It is an expression of Russophobia. People in Poland are obviously just as susceptible to Western propaganda. I would want to say to them: You are brothers and sisters, get your leaders to stop the war so that we can stop for a moment and think: “What is this war about?”. It is about making the rich in the Western countries even richer and the poor everywhere even poorer. The opposite of Robin Hood. Jeff Bezos has a fortune of around 200 billion dollars, while thousands of people in Washington D.C. alone live in cardboard boxes on the street.
Ukrainians are standing up to defend their country. Most people in Germany see it that way, which is why your statements cause consternation, even anger. Your perspectives on Israel meet with similar criticism here. That is also why there is now a discussion about whether your concerts in Germany should be cancelled. How do you react to that?
Oh, you know, it’s Israeli Lobby activists like Malca Goldstein-Wolf who demand that. That’s idiotic. They already tried to cancel my concert in Cologne in 2017 and even got the local radio stations to join in.
Isn’t it a bit easy to label these people as idiots?
Of course, they are not all idiots. But they probably read the Bible and probably believe that anyone who speaks out against Israeli fascism in the Holy Land is an anti-Semite. That’s really not a smart position to take, because to do so you have to deny that people lived in Palestine before the Israelis settled there. You have to follow the legend that says, “A land without a people for a people without a land.” What nonsense. The history here is quite clear. To this day, the indigenous, Jewish population is a minority. The Jewish Israelis all immigrated from Eastern Europe or the United States.
You once compared the state of Israel to Nazi Germany. Do you still stand by this comparison?
Yes, of course. The Israelis are committing genocide. Just like Great Britain did during our colonial period, by the way. The British committed genocide against the indigenous people of North America, for example. So did the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese even the Germans in their colonies. All were part of the injustice of the colonial era. And we, the British also murdered and pillaged in India, Southeast Asia, China…. We believed ourselves to be inherently superior to the indigenous people, just as the Israelis do in Palestine. Well, we weren’t and neither are the Israeli Jews.
As an English man, you have a very different perspective on the history of the State of Israel than we Germans do. In Germany, criticism of Israel is handled with caution for good reasons; Germany has a historical debt that the country must live up to.
I understand that very well and I have been trying to deal with it for 20 years. But for me, your debt, as you put it, your national sense of guilt for what the Nazis did between 1933 and 1945, shouldn’t require your whole society to walk around with blinkers on about Israel. Would it not be better if it rather spurred you to throw away all the blinkers and support equal human rights for all your brothers and sisters all over the world irrespective of ethnicity religion or nationality?
Are you questioning Israel’s right to exist?
In my opinion, Israel has a right to exist as long as it is a true democracy, as long as no group, religious or ethnic, enjoys more human rights than any other. But unfortunately that is exactly what is happening in Israel and Palestine. The government says that only Jewish people should enjoy certain rights. So it can’t be described as democratic. They are very open about it, it’s enshrined in Israeli law. There are now many people in Germany, and of course many Jewish people in Israel, who are open to a different narrative about Israel. Twenty years ago, we could not have had a conversation about the State of Israel in which the terms genocide and apartheid were mentioned. Now I would say you can’t have that conversation without using those terms, because they accurately describe the reality in the occupied territory. I see that more and more clearly since I’ve been part of the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, ed.).
Do you think they would agree with you here in England?
I can’t say for sure because I’ve hardly lived here for the last 20 years. I would have to go down to the pub and talk to people. But I suspect more and more would agree with me every day. I have many Jewish friends – by the way – who whole heartedly agree with me, which is one reason why it’s so crazy to try to discredit me as a Jew-hater. I have one close friend in New York, who happens to be Jewish, who said to me the other day, “A few years ago, I thought you were crazy, I thought you had completely lost it. Now I see you were right in your position on the policies of the state of Israel – and we, the Jewish community in the US, were wrong.” My friend in NY was clearly distressed making this remark, he is a good man.
BDS positions are sanctioned by the German Bundestag. A success of the BDS movement could ultimately mean an end to the state of Israel. Do you see it differently?
Yes, Israel could change its laws. They could say: We have changed our mind, people are allowed to have rights even if they are not Jewish. That would be it, then we wouldn’t need BDS any more.
Have you lost friends because you are active for BDS?
It’s interesting that you ask that. I don’t know exactly, but I very much doubt it. A friendship is a powerful thing. I would say I’ve had about ten real friends in my life. I couldn’t lose a friend because of my political views, because friends love each other – and friendship begets talk, and talk begets understanding. If a friend were to say, “Roger, I saw you flew an inflatable pig with a Star of David on it during your Wall concerts!”, I explain to them the context and that there was nothing anti-Semitic either intended or expressed.
What is the context then?
That was during the song “Goodbye Blue Sky” in “The Wall” show. And to explain the context, you see B-52 bombers, on a circular screen behind the band, but they don’t drop bombs, they drop symbols: Dollar signs, Crucifixes, Hammer and Sickles, Star and Crescents, the McDonalds sign – and Star of Davids. This is theatrical satire, an expression of my belief that unleashing these ideologies, or products onto the people on the ground, is an act of aggression, the opposite of humane, the opposite of creating love and peace among us brothers and sisters. I’m saying in the wrong hands all the ideologies these symbols represent can be evil.
What is your ideology? Are you an anarchist – against any kind of power that people exercise over each other?
I call myself a humanist, a citizen of the world. And my loyalty and respect belong to all people, regardless of their origin, nationality or religion.
Would you still perform in Israel today if they let you?
No, of course not. That would be crossing the picket line. I have for years written letters to colleagues in the music industry to try to convince them not to perform in Israel. Sometimes they disagree, they say, “But this is a way to make peace, we should go there and try to convince them to make peace” Well we are all entitled to our opinion, but in 2005 the whole of Palestinian Civil Society asked me to observe a cultural boycott, and who am I to tell a whole society living under a brutal occupation that I know better than they.
It is very provocative to say that you would play in Moscow but not in Israel.
Interesting that you say that given that Moscow does not run an apartheid state based on the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants.
In Russia, ethnic minorities are heavily discriminated against. Among other things, more ethnic non-Russians are sent to war than ethnic Russians.
You seem to be asking me to see Russia from the current Russo phobic perspective. I choose to see it differently, though as I have said I don’t speak Russian or live in Russia so I’m on foreign ground.
How do you like the fact that Pink Floyd have recorded a new piece for the first time in 30 years – with the Ukrainian musician Andrij Chlywnjuk?
I have seen the video and I am not surprised, but I find it really, really sad. It’s so alien to me, this action is so lacking in humanity. It encourages the continuation of the war. Pink Floyd is a name I used to be associated with. That was a huge time in my life, a very big deal. To associate that name now with something like this… proxy war makes me sad. I mean, they haven’t made the point of demanding, “Stop the war, stop the slaughter, bring our leaders together to talk!” It’s just this content-less waving of the blue and yellow flag. I wrote in one of my letters to the Ukrainian teenager Alina: I will not raise a flag in this conflict, not a Ukrainian flag, not a Russian flag, not a US flag.
After the fall of the Wall, you performed “The Wall” in reunified Berlin, certainly with optimistic expectations for the future. Did you think you could also contribute to this future with your own art, make a difference?
Of course, I believe that to this day. If you have political principles and are an artist, then the two areas are inextricably intertwined. That’s one reason why I left Pink Floyd, by the way: I had those principles, the others either did not or had different ones.
Do you now see yourself as equal parts musician and political activist?
Yes, sometimes I lean towards one, sometimes the other.
Will your current tour really be your last tour?
(Chuckles) I have no idea. The tour is subtitled “The First Farewell Tour” and that’s an obvious joke because old rock stars routinely use Farewell Tour as a selling tool. Then they sometimes retire and sometimes go on another Final Farewell Tour, it’s all good.
You want to keep sending something out to the world, make a difference?
I love good music, I love good literature – especially English and Russian, also German. That’s why I like the idea of people noticing and understanding what I do.
Then why don’t you hold back with political statements?
Because I am who I am. If I wasn’t this person who has strong political convictions, I wouldn’t have written “The Dark Side of the Moon”, “The Wall”, “Wish You Were Here”, “Amused to Death” and all the other stuff.
Thank you very much for the interview.
***
This is what Dave Gilmour, speaking through his wife (!), had to say:
Needless to say, I now see Gilmour as a (very talented) sad piece of shit. Andrei
Does US Secretary of State Antony Blinken think a Washington Post op-ed will move Russian Armed Forces Chief Valery Gerasimov to postpone his planned military offensive on Ukraine?
Realizing NATO’s war with Russia will likely end unfavorably, the US is test-driving an exit offer. But why should Moscow take indirect proposals seriously, especially on the eve of its new military advance and while it is in the winning seat?
Those behind the Throne are never more dangerous than when they have their backs against the wall.
Their power is slipping away, fast: Militarily, via NATO’s progressive humiliation in Ukraine; Financially, sooner rather than later, most of the Global South will want nothing to do with the currency of a bankrupt rogue giant; Politically, the global majority is taking decisive steps to stop obeying a rapacious, discredited, de facto minority.
So now those behind the Throne are plotting to at least try to stall the incoming disaster on the military front.
As confirmed by a high-level US establishment source, a new directive on NATO vs. Russia in Ukraine was relayed to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Blinken, in terms of actual power, is nothing but a messenger boy for the Straussian neocons and neoliberals who actually run US foreign policy.
The secretary of state was instructed to relay the new directive – a sort of message to the Kremlin – via mainstream print media, which was promptly published by the Washington Post.
In the elite US mainstream media division of labor, the New York Times is very close to the State Department. and the Washington Post to the CIA. In this case though the directive was too important, and needed to be relayed by the paper of record in the imperial capital. It was published as an Op-Ed (behind paywall).
The novelty here is that for the first time since the start of Russia’s February 2022 Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine, the Americans are actually proposing a variation of the “offer you can’t refuse” classic, including some concessions which may satisfy Russia’s security imperatives.
Crucially, the US offer totally bypasses Kiev, once again certifying that this is a war against Russia conducted by Empire and its NATO minions – with the Ukrainians as mere expandable proxies.
‘Please don’t go on the offensive’
The Washington Post’s old school Moscow-based correspondent John Helmer has provided an important service, offering the full text of Blinken’s offer, of course extensively edited to include fantasist notions such as “US weapons help pulverize Putin’s invasion force” and a cringe-worthy explanation: “In other words, Russia should not be ready to rest, regroup and attack.”
The message from Washington may, at first glance, give the impression that the US would admit Russian control over Crimea, Donbass, Zaporozhye, and Kherson – “the land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia” – as a fait accompli.
Ukraine would have a demilitarized status, and the deployment of HIMARS missiles and Leopard and Abrams tanks would be confined to western Ukraine, kept as a “deterrent against further Russian attacks.”
What may have been offered, in quite hazy terms, is in fact a partition of Ukraine, demilitarized zone included, in exchange for the Russian General Staff cancelling its yet-unknown 2023 offensive, which may be as devastating as cutting off Kiev’s access to the Black Sea and/or cutting off the supply of NATO weapons across the Polish border.
The US offer defines itself as the path towards a “just and durable peace that upholds Ukraine’s territorial integrity.” Well, not really. It just won’t be a rump Ukraine, and Kiev might even retain those western lands that Poland is dying to gobble up.
The possibility of a direct Washington-Moscow deal on “an eventual postwar military balance” is also evoked, including no Ukraine membership of NATO. As for Ukraine itself, the Americans seem to believe it will be a “strong, non-corrupt economy with membership in the European Union.”
Whatever remains of value in Ukraine has already been swallowed not only by its monumentally corrupt oligarchy, but most of all, investors and speculators of the BlackRock variety. Assorted corporate vultures simply cannot afford to lose Ukraine’s grain export ports, as well as the trade deal terms agreed with the EU before the war. And they’re terrified that the Russian offensive may capture Odessa, the major seaport and transportation hub on the Black Sea – which would leave Ukraine landlocked.
There’s no evidence whatsoever that Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the entire Russian Security Council – including its Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev – have reason to believe anything coming from the US establishment, especially via mere minions such as Blinken and the Washington Post. After all the stavka – a moniker for the high command of the Russian armed forces – regard the Americans as “non-agreement capable,” even when an offer is in writing.
This walks and talks like a desperate US gambit to stall and present some carrots to Moscow in the hope of delaying or even cancelling the planned offensive of the next few months.
Even old school, dissident Washington operatives – not beholden to the Straussian neocon galaxy – bet that the gambit will be a nothing burger: in classic “strategic ambiguity” mode, the Russians will continue on their stated drive of demilitarization, denazification and de-electrification, and will “stop” anytime and anywhere they see fit east of the Dnieper. Or beyond.
What the Deep State really wants
Washington’s ambitions in this essentially NATO vs. Russia war go well beyond Ukraine. And we’re not even talking about preventing a Russia-China-Germany Eurasian union or a peer competitor nightmare; let’s stick with prosaic issues on the Ukrainian battleground.
The key “recommendations” – military, economic, political, diplomatic – were detailed in an Atlantic Council strategy paper late last year.
And in another one, under “War scenario 1: The war continues in its current tempo,” we find the Straussian neocon policy fully spelled out.
It’s all here: from “marshaling support and military-assistance transfers to Kyiv sufficient to enable it to win” to “increase the lethality of military assistance transferred to include fighter aircraft that would enable Ukraine to control its airspace and attack Russian forces therein; and missile technology with range sufficient to reach into Russian territory.”
From training the Ukrainian military “to use Western weapons, electronic warfare, and offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, and to seamlessly integrate new recruits in the service” to buttressing “defenses on the front lines, near the Donbass region,” including “combat training focusing on irregular warfare.”
Added to “imposing secondary sanctions on all entities doing business with the Kremlin,” we reach of course the Mother of All Plunders: “Confiscate the $300 billion that the Russian state holds in overseas accounts in the United States and EU and use seized monies to fund reconstruction.”
The reorganization of the SMO, with Putin, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, and General Armageddon in their new, enhanced roles is derailing all these elaborate plans.
The Straussians are now in deep panic. Even Blinken’s number two, Russophobic warmonger Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland, has admitted to the US Senate there will be no Abrams tanks on the battlefield before Spring (realistically, only in 2024). She also promised to “ease sanctions” if Moscow “returns to negotiations.” Those negotiations were scotched by the Americans themselves in Istanbul in the Spring of 2022.
Nuland also called the Russians to “withdraw their troops.” Well, that at least offers some comic relief compared with the panic oozing from Blinken’s “offer you can’t refuse.” Stay tuned for Russia’s non-response response.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
The United States and its imperial surrogates think they are putting a gun to Russia’s head. But non other than the NATO powers are the ones who are playing Russian Roulette.
NATO is at war against Russia. There can be no more pretense or illusions about NATO “not being a party to the conflict” in Ukraine, as Western leaders have been absurdly asserting for the past year. NATO missiles, drones and logistics have already been used to strike Russia. And by Russia, we don’t just mean the disputed territories of Crimea and Donbass, but the pre-war territory of the Russian Federation.
This week saw the NATO mania for war against Russia reach a fever pitch. NATO military leaders met in a series of well-publicized meetings in Europe that can only be described as war summits to plan the further escalation of conflict with Russia. The culmination was the gathering at the US Air Force Base in Ramstein, Germany, on Friday, at which pressure is mounting on Berlin to give the go-ahead for the supply of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. The meeting was opened by Ukrainian leaders alongside American military commanders demanding tanks and more heavy weaponry.
Laughably, the Americans are prevaricating about sending their M1 Abrams tanks, preferring instead for Germany, Britain, France, Poland, Finland and others to send theirs. The farcical wrangling encapsulates the U.S. colonialist attitude towards European allies who are too supine or stupid to complain. “Go ahead punks, make my day,” as Clint Eastwood’s character Dirty Harry might say.
The U.S. is quite content for Europe to be turned into ashes and rebuild the continental wreck for the purpose of reviving redundant American capitalism, as in the aftermath of previous world wars.
Earlier in the week, the U.S. top military commander General Mark Milley met with Ukrainian counterpart Valery Zaluzhny to oversee the setting up of new training grounds for troops in Poland and Germany. Zaluzhny is an acolyte of the Ukrainian World War Two Nazi collaborator and mass murderer Stepan Bandera. The pairing between Milley and Zaluzhny can hardly be a better illustration of the nefarious nature of the U.S.-led axis pushing war against Russia. Western media don’t report this because its function is to hoodwink the Western public into cheerleading for war.
The relentless mobilization of the NATO bloc under U.S. leadership has finally reached a historic war footing against Russia. We can trace this ideology all the way back to the beginning of the Cold War following the defeat of Nazi Germany, but it certainly has accelerated since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, followed by 9/11 and the U.S. imperial notion of full-spectrum dominance, and especially after the ignominious withdrawal of the NATO war machine from Afghanistan in August 2021.
All members of the 30-nation bloc are rushing weapons to the conflict in Ukraine. It is even reported that the United States is drawing down military stockpiles held in Israel and South Korea to augment firepower against Russia. Furthermore, Washington is now considering supporting strikes on Crimea which Moscow warned would be an extremely dangerous escalation towards all-out general war. Virtually all taboos have been shelved it seems, as the New York Times remarked this week.
The Western states appear to be driven by madmen who are willfully pushing the world to the brink of catastrophe. There are now open calls for the defeat of Russia and illogical demands for more weapons to Ukraine as a way of achieving peace. “Weapons are the way to peace,” declared Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s titular leader during the World Economic Forum for assorted global elites in Davos this week. “We have to prevent a stalemate,” intoned Washington’s top diplomat Antony Blinken and his British counterpart James Cleverly (how misnamed is the latter!).
Meanwhile, American, European and NATO leaders are calling for war crimes prosecutions against Russia.
There seems to be no room for any diplomacy or rationality. The NATO powers are doubling down on reckless demands that Russia is expelled from Crimea and the Donbass. What the NATO powers are really seeking is the defeat and conquest of Russia.
Russia was forced to intervene in Ukraine last February after all diplomatic efforts by Moscow were rejected. The NATO-backed covert war on the Russian people within the artificially created areas of Ukraine – a war that had been raging for eight years following the NATO-orchestrated coup in Kiev in 2014 – had to be put to an end by force. Hence Russia’s military intervention on February 24, 2022.
There is no way that Russia is going to cede the territories that have now become part of the Russian Federation following legally constituted referenda. But the war has been dragged out by NATO’s demonic weaponization and callous exploitation of Ukraine as a bridgehead against Russia. NATO leaders talk about “preventing a stalemate” by sending more weapons to prop up the NeoNazi Kiev regime. It is the United States and European states along with other allies who have striven to create a bloody quagmire in Ukraine in which lives are callously being destroyed.
The stakes are being made incredibly high by the United States and its imperialist minions. Make no mistake. Washington and its NATO stooges have embarked on a war of choice. Russia has every right to take military action against NATO members. Train tracks in Poland delivering Leopard tanks to Ukraine to kill Russian soldiers are legitimate targets. As are British servicemen maintaining Challenger tanks or British ships transporting them. Up to now, NATO has aggressed Russia with impunity. It is time to end the impunity and give Western warmongers pause for thought about their criminal conduct as one of our commentators noted this week.
Russian President Vladimir Putin this week said that Russia will eventually win the war in Ukraine to vanquish the NATO-backed NeoNazi regime. He was speaking, appropriately, on the 80th anniversary of the breaking of the Nazi siege on Leningrad (St Petersburg).
Other independent international military analysts, including Colonel Douglas Macgregor and Scott Ritter, agree that Russia will prevail in its objectives to render Ukraine demilitarized and remove the NATO-NeoNazi surrogate posing as a national security threat to Russia. The Western media in lockstep with imperialist ideologues have created a propaganda illusion that the Kiev regime can win if only it is supplied with more tanks and missiles. This is fomenting a disaster for Ukraine and potentially for world peace. Russia will not be defeated but the madcap warmongers are raising the stakes to the level of an existential crisis by demanding that Ukraine be made into a “defense line for freedom”.
Moscow again this week warned that if the Western powers insist on pursuing a general war with Russia, then the world is being pushed to the brink of nuclear destruction. This is not a threat. It is simply a statement of fact. Western leaders have become so deranged in their imperial arrogance, self-righteousness and Russophobia, they are beyond heeding sensible warnings. When they declare that war is being waged for the sake of peace and freedom and when diplomacy is vilified as a weakness then there is little hope for an imminent political solution.
The United States and its imperial surrogates have made war all but inevitable from their intransigence. They think they are putting a gun to Russia’s head.
Moscow needs to end this war in Ukraine decisively by eliminating the NATO-Kiev regime. The NATO powers are the ones who are playing Russian Roulette.
It has been said often over the past year, most recently by Emmanuel Todd, that the conflict in Ukraine is “existential” for Russia.
Certainly, the Great Bear cannot abide a NATO ballistic missile launchpad just 300 miles from Moscow in a country run my rabidly-Russophobic Nazis — not neo-Nazi skinhead cosplayers but the literal descendants of the real deal.
But others have argued that the Special Military Operation (SMO) is also a make-or-break roll of the dice for NATO and the US which dominates it. How else can we explain the latest mania for arming the regime in Kiev just as its ‘Siegfried Line’ in the Donbass starts to crumble?
How else can one explain cry-bully US National Security Spokesman John Kirby’s response to news that Russian Wagner ‘private military company’ had liberated the town of Soledar, a keystone of the Ukrainian defences? He simultaneously tried to cast doubt on the facts while claiming the town’s capture was strategically insignificant.
“We don’t know his it’s gonna go, so I’m not going to predict failure or success here,” Kirby said as Wagner were mopping up stranded Ukrainian conscripts. “But even if both Bakhmut and Soledar fall to the Russians, it’s not going to have a strategic impact on the war itself, and it certainly isn’t going to stop the Ukrainians or slow them down in terms of their efforts to regain their territory.”
To the contrary, reports indicate that several Ukrainian brigades being concentrated for a southward push on Melitopol, near the narrow isthmus to the Crimea, were redeployed to Donbass in a vain attempt to hold Soledar and Bakhmut, where they suffered huge casualties. Taking Bakhmut could allow the Russian forces to ‘roll up’ the Ukrainian line to the north and south and advance on Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last two major cities Ukraine holds in Donetsk.
Moscow has repeatedly said there can be no peace while the West keeps pumping arms into Ukraine. The most obvious interpretation of those statements is that NATO is only prolonging the suffering of the Ukrainian and Donbass peoples with its cornucopia of death. But another is, as blogger Andrei Martyanov said recently, that the ultimate end of the SMO is not just to de-militarise (and de-Nazify) the Ukraine, but all of NATO too.
Indeed, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in a January 6 TV interview that his country was already a “de facto” member of NATO, and that he had been thanked by unnamed Western politicians for fighting Russia on their behalf to defend their imperialist idea of exclusive “civilisation”.
Western aid to the Ukraine since the start of the SMO — arms supplies and payments for fighting the war on NATO’s behalf — has long since exceeded Russia’s 2022 defence budget of around $75 billion, and even its projected 2023 spend of $84 billion. It’s widely recognised that the Russian arms industry gives you more ‘bang for your buck’, but the disparity has become stark.
On December 22, 2022, Russian Chief of the General Staff, Army General Valery Gerasimov said: “Since the beginning of the special military operation, the West has delivered to Kiev a total of four aircraft, more than 30 helicopters, over 350 tanks, about 1,000 armoured combat vehicles, at least 800 armoured vehicles, up to 700 artillery systems, 100 MLRS [multiple-launch rocket systems], 130,000 anti-tank weapons, more than 5,300 MANPADs, and at least 5,000 UAVs for various purposes.”
Russia’s initial estimate of Ukrainian military strength included 2,416 armoured fighting vehicles — probably about 800 main battle tanks (MBTs) along with 1,600 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) and armoured personnel carriers (APCs) — 152 fixed-wing combat aircraft and 149 helicopters, 180 medium- and long-rang surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems, 1,509 artillery guns and 535 MLRS.
Various Western ‘military analysis’ sources say Ukraine had a lot more tanks and artillery to begin with, although those figures includes mothballed vehicles and guns that would have to be overhauled — while Russia continues to hit repair workshops with its long-range missiles.
In mid-June 2022, Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Denys Sharapov admitted that his army had lost around half its heavy equipment: 400 tanks, 1,300 IFVs and 700 artillery.
At the end of August, the Ukrainian army launched its counter-offensive in the Kherson region. Just three weeks in, on September 21, Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu said his forces on that front had destroyed “208 tanks and 245 infantry fighting vehicles, 186 other armoured vehicles, 15 aircraft and 4 helicopters.” Those losses continued to mount until Russia pulled back across the Dnieper river from the city of Kherson in November 2022. The final tally was around 1,200 armoured vehicles of all types, 40 artillery pieces, 38 aeroplanes and a dozen helicopters.
As of January 14 2023, the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) claims to have destroyed more than 7,500 armoured fighting vehicles of all types, 372 planes and 200 helicopters, 400 SAM systems, 982 MLRS, more than 3,800 self-propelled and towed artillery and 8,000 soft-skinned military vehicles, which include civilian-model trucks and cars.
More specifically, Russia says it has hit at least 31 of the 38 M142 HIMARS MLRS launchers pledged by the US, plus six of the 13 M270 tracked MLRS, of the same nine-inch calibre, donated by the UK, Norway, Germany and France. Also on the clobber list are 122 of the 152 US-made M777 howitzers supplied — 80 per cent of them.
The MoD claims may be exaggerated. But, as The Saker blog points out, even if you halve those numbers then the Ukrainian armed forces are still on the verge of being completely ‘de-militarised’.
The arsenals of NATO’s eastern and southern European members have been scoured for Soviet-made arms and vehicles that the Ukrainian forces already operate and for which they have ammunition and spare parts.
As it turns out, Poland has one of the biggest armies in Europe. It has already supplied, among other things, at least 230 MBTs to Kiev, all variants of the T-72. Warsaw has also sent about 40 IFVs, 72 self-propelled 155mm howitzers, 20 122mm SP howitzers and 20 MLRS.
If, as some suspect, the defence ministry in Warsaw actively encouraged the thousands of serving soldiers to have gone to fight in the Ukrainian ‘Foreign Legion’, Poland has lent its very flesh and blood to the Kiev government.
But the cherry on the cake, announced by Polish President Andrzej Duda on a visit to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky in Lvov, the western Ukrainian city Warsaw still covets, was “a company of Leopard tanks” — 10 to 14 in layman’s terms — which he hoped would be just the start of a new wave of largesse from the “international coalition.”
British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace confirmed on Monday January 16 that the UK was adding a squadron (company) of 14 Challenger 2 MBTs, 24 AS90 155mm SP guns plus an unspecified number of Bulldog APCs and “proected” (i.e. not really armoured) vehicles to the pile of chips on the Ukraine-shaped card table. Rumours of four AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships to follow had been swiftly denied over the weekend.
These tanks have been out of production since 2002 and the British army has just 227 of them. 148 of those are earmarked to be upgraded to the proposed ‘Challenger 3’ standard, although Wallace said that number could be increased — with the implication that there would be fewer to spare. The UK only had 117 AS90s in service as of 2015 and its replacement is still in development, so that pledge represents a fifth of the army’s tracked artillery.
In a leaked internal memo, British Chief of General Staff Sir Patrick Sanders admitted that “giving away these capabilities will leave us temporarily weaker as an army, there is no denying it.”
France has volunteered an unclear number (reportedly 30) of its AMX 10 RC wheeled, turreted vehicles. These have been variously described as “light tanks”, “tank destroyers” or “armoured recce vehicles”, he last reflecting how the French army actually use them. They’re certainly no match for a real MBT.
Marder, She Wrote
The Polish, British and French pledges of token numbers of tanks are explicitly a political move to pressure other countries, especially Germany, to hand over some — or many — of their own. US President Joe Biden already managed to twist German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ arm in the first week of January to give up 40 Marder IFVs by pledging 50 US M2 Bradley IFVs as well.
The ultimate humiliation for Berlin was that the White House announced the move before the German government did. Meanwhile, the new Puma IFV (named after a WWII Nazi armoured car) that is meant to replace the Marder has turned out to be a complete disaster that constantly breaks down. The German defence minister Christine Lambrecht resigned on January 16 — ostensibly for failing to fix the equipment shortage, but also, paradoxically, amid criticism that she has not handed over enough arms to Kiev.
Germany is the biggest European importer of Russian gas and has been reticent to antagonise Moscow too much. It is not lost on the Germans that the last time their tanks were in Ukraine was when the Wehrmacht was perpetrating the genocide of 21 million Soviets.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki was in Berlin on Monday in a bid to unlock that Pandora’s box, arguing NATO should not let tanks “rust away in the warehouses.” Of course, Russia’s approach since WWII of stockpiling old equipment, rather than scrapping or selling it, has been key to its ability to sustain high-intensity combat operations this long.
London also pressed Berlin to grant other countries permission to re-export the tanks it has sold them in the past.
“It is hoped that the example set by the French and us will allow those countries holding Leopard tanks to donate as well. I would urge my German colleagues to do that,” Wallace said, then claimed: “These tanks are not offensive when they are used for defensive methods.”
The Leopard 2 also massively out-sells the much-vaunted US M1 Abrams and the Challenger 2 on the export market. 21 countries have bought the German tank, compared to just eight for the Abrams and only one, Oman, for the Challenger 2. Social media videos of burnt-out and turret-less Leopards strewn across the Ukrainian steppes will really mess up German heavy industry’s bottom line. After the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and the US ‘Inflation Reduction Act’, this would be the third time Berlin has been screwed by its so-called allies.
German tank-maker Rheinmetall’s CEO Armin Papperger tried to head off that outcome on Sunday. He told reporters that Germany could only spare 22 Leopard 2s for Ukraine, and no earlier than 2024. “The vehicles must be completely dismantled and rebuilt,” Papperger stated. The fighting could very well be over by the time they’re fixed.
Scholtz tried to put the ball back in Washington’s court on January 17. “We are never going alone, because this is necessary in a very difficult situation like this,” he said, reiterating that he was anxious to avoid “escalating” the conflict to “a war between Russia and NATO.” Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck more explicit, telling a journalist at the World Economic Forum in Davos the same day: “If America will decide that they will bring battle tanks to Ukraine, that will make it easier for Germany.”
The Pentagon’s excuse for not giving some of its stock of more than 6,000 M1 tanks (compared to Germany’s 300-odd Leopards) to the Ukraine is that they are high-maintenance, voracious gas-guzzlers, even by tank standards, and are fitted with technology that they can’t afford to let fall into Russian hands. But the US has previously exported ‘Nerfed’ versions of the Abrams to several Middle-Eastern countries without the depleted uranium armour inserts and other top-tier systems. The problem is that they turned out to be quite vulnerable.
Many announcements of arms deliveries to the Kiev regime so far have been short on specific numbers. One might speculate that is either because they are embarrassingly small, or because they mean disarming the donor country. Both can be true at once.
For example, Italy’s latest mooted donation is a SAMP-T surface-to-air missile (SAM) battery. Given that the Ukraine started the conflict with 250 long-range S-300 SAMs systems and hundreds of other types, one more is not going to make any difference to the outcome — nor the two Patriot SAM batteries prmised by the US and Germany. But the Italian army only has five SAMP-T systems, and two of those have already been deployed abroad in Kuwait and Slovakia.
Sweden and Finland are not even in NATO yet, and may never be while they both continue to harbour hundreds of Kurdish separatist terrorists wanted in Turkey, which as an existing member has a veto on their entry. But Stockholm may send up to 12 of its 48 Archer self-propelled howitzers to the Ukraine, while Helsinki has already supplied ‘classified’ numbers of APCs, heavy mortars and anti-aircraft guns.
Little Slovakia made headlines last summer when promised Kiev 11 MiG-29 fighters, its entire combat jet fleet. It turns out they still haven’t been delivered, however, and in the meantime Russia has claimed far more aircraft shot down leaving the Ukrainian Air Force at a net loss.
Slovakia’s neighbour the Czech Republic has supplied up to 40 T-72 tanks, 60 IFVs, 50 to 70 SP guns, 20 to 30 MLRS and at least 10 Mi-24 attack helicopters — which have been replaced by either gifts or sales of old AH-1 Cobra choppers from the US.
Latvia donated four helicopters — half its fleet — and six M109 155mm tracked howitzers, which was one in nine of its stocks. Lithuania sent 52 M113 APCs, which is a quarter of its armoured infantry transports, and 10 of its 32 120mm self-propelled mortars based in the same vehicle. Estonia gave nine of its 42 122mm howitzers and what appears to be all seven of its Alvis Mamba light armoured cars. It is these three Baltic micro-states, along with their neighbour Poland, who shout the loudest about the threat of ‘Russian aggression’, yet they are disarming themselves for the sake of the lost cause in the Ukraine.
Logistics? Fiddlesticks!
Mark F. Cancian of the Centre for Strategic and international Studies (a Washington think-tank) has been warning those who will listen about the US military’s logistics problems almost since the start of the SMO.
His latest article, published on January 9, contains a helpful infographic of how many years it will take to replace the arms sent to Ukraine.
Even at the “surge rate” of accelerated production, it will take five years for the US to replenish its stocks of 155mm artillery shells after sending more than 1 million to the Maidan regime. Replacing the 38 HIMARS MLRS launchers sent will take two-and-a-half to three years, while for the Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger shoulder-launched SAMs the time frame could be as long as eight and 18 years respectively.
US Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro appears to agree. Asked this week if the US Navy had reached the point of having to choose between arming itself and Ukraine, he said it was not their yet, but “if the conflict does go on for another six months, for another year, it certainly continues to stress the supply chain in ways that are challenging.”
This betrays a criminally-negligent lack of planning by NATO military staff. Why did the collective west start a fight it couldn’t finish? Did they really think they could bluff Russia into backing down with a few M777s and HIMARS launchers?
Too Little, Too Late
Retired German brigadier general Erich Vad warned last week that the latest round of arms was a “military escalation” even if the 40-plus-year-old Marders were “not a silver bullet.”
“We’re going down a slide. This could develop a momentum of its own that we can no longer control,” Vad said, questioning whether the NATO had a strategy at all. “Do you want to achieve a willingness to negotiate with the deliveries of the tanks? Do you want to reconquer Donbass or Crimea? Or do you want to defeat Russia completely? There is no realistic end state definition. And without an overall political and strategic concept, arms deliveries are pure militarism.”
Brian Berletic of The New Atlas has broken down the latest headline-grabbing pledges of heavy armour to Ukraine. He has explained cogently that nothing is indestructible, and most of the immensely-heavy Western MBTs have proven vulnerable in recent years by man-portable weapons.
Islamic State/DAESH wiped out about 10 Turkish army Leopard 2s when Ankara sent troops into northern Syrian four years ago, and destroyed or captured around Iraqi army 100 M1 Abrams during its sudden seizure of northern Iraq in 2014.
The US Bradley and German Marder IFVs are far more vulnerable. Both are about a third taller and half as heavy again as the Russian equivalent BMP series of vehicles, making them fat targets with the bonus of huge propaganda value when they are destroyed. Armour-wise, the Bradley is only fully protected against Russian 14.5mm heavy machine guns and the Marder against 20mm and 25 mm automatic cannon. The Russian BMPs and the newer wheeled BTRs carry a 30mm cannon, but more importantly anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs), both quite capable of destroying any other IFV in service.
Berletic also puts the numbers to be supplied in context. Along with the 90 refurbished Czech T-72 tanks paid for by the US and Netherlands in the autumn, the new deliveries will only be enough to equip one armoured brigade with its attached mechanised infantry battalions.
Ukraine is now claiming that it will form up three whole new army corps of troops this year, each numbering 75,000 men, for a total of 225,000. That’s as large as the standing army Kiev commanded on February 24 last year. What will they be armed with and transported on, slingshots and bicycles?
Martyanov simply points to the commonly-used algebraic equations for force requirements and battle outcomes as proof that the latest ‘packages’ will make no difference.
General Lord Richard Dannatt agrees with Martyanov and Berletic that a dozen or so tanks is not going to be enough. While still claiming the Challenger is a wonder-weapon, he wrote for the Daily Mail that 50 would be needed to make a difference.
Kiev’s ambassador to the UK, Vadym Prystaiko, combines NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s killer android stare with Zelensky’s shameless passive-aggressive panhandling.
He took the whole argument to its logical conclusion by demanding “hundreds” of tanks in an interview with LBC radio, then upped the stakes to “thousands” when he went on Sky News — in the process admitting that Russia was able to field that many itself despite Western claims it is running out of everything.
Prystaiko probably realises that he is talking about the entire arsenals of the European NATO members, and probably a large part of US military stocks.
Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said simply: “These tanks will burn like the rest. The goals of the special operation will be achieved.”
The whole world has been on tenterhooks for almost a year now, wondering whether the conflict between NATO’s proxy Ukraine and Russia will escalate into full-blown World War Three or just end up as World War Two-and-a-Half: the sequel only the psycho fans wanted.
But instead of weakening Russia militarily and economically, as US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has stated is Washington’s goal, the conflict is destroying NATO’s ability to fight and only making Russia richer and stronger. Moscow may in no hurry to finish it.
In the mean time, let’s hope the West doesn’t throw a tantrum when Russia breaks its best war toys and drop the big one.
لا يمرّ يوم منذ حرب الأطلسي على روسيا وبدء العملية العسكرية الروسية في أوكرانيا، إلا ونقرأ تقارير غربية ـ «إسرائيلية»، تشي بتحوّل معادلات الصراع التقليدية بين الغرب والشرق، وتحديداً من البوابة الإيرانية.
دخول مُسيّرات شاهد ١٣٦، وحرثها الأرض تحت أقدام الناتو، ومن ثم دخول صواريخ باليستية إيرانية الى الميدان هناك، وتموضع مستشارين إيرانيين في شبه جزيرة القرم، كلها تقارير متداولة، في الصحافة البريطانية والأميركية كانت مع الزمن تضاعف مزيداً من القلق لدى الدوائر الغربية بشكل عام، والصهيونية بشكل أخصّ.
لم تتمكن مصادر مستقلة حتى الآن على تأكيد كلّ ما سبق ذكره آنفاً، لكن القدر المتيقن والصحيح باعتراف الإيرانيين والروس حتى الآن، هو أمرين:
أولا ـ تزايد التقارب الاستراتيجي الروسي الإيراني بشكل واضح وملحوظ.
ثانيا ـ تزايد التعاون التسليحي بين موسكو وطهران بشكل استراتيجي ومكثف. المفاجأة الآن هو رواية وصول طائرات سوخوي ٣٥ الروسية المتطورة جداً الى يد الإيرانيين ـ والتي يمكن أن تحدث خللاً كبيراً في موازين القوى في الإقليم ـ كما يرد في التقرير الأميركي التالي: حيث نشر موقع صحيفة «ذي ناشيونال انتريست» الأميركي في 6/1/2023، على موقعه تحليلاً مفصلاً لأبعاد حصول إيران على صفقة طائرات: سوخوي ٣٥ الروسية المتطورة جداً. ولأهمية الموضوع فإننا نورد لكم هنا أهمّ ما جاء في المقال نصاً كما يلي:
اولا ـ انّ الموضوع أخطر بكثير مما يتصوّر المرء، إذ انّ اقتناء إيران لهذا النوع من الطائرات، المتقدّمة جداً والمتعدّدة المهمات (يمكنها القيام بعمليات القصف الجوي أو عمليات الاعتراض والاشتباك الجوي مع الطائرات والأهداف المعادية الأخرى وتقديم الدعم الناري للقوات البرية في ميادين المعارك. أما مصدر الخطورة، حسب الموقع فيتمثل في أنّ ذلك (اقتناء إيران لها) سوف يحدث خللاً في موازين القوى الجوية في الخليج، حيث سيعطي إيران مجالاً أكبر بكثير للسيطرة على أجواء الخليج.
ثانيا ـ والأخطر من ذلك أنّ عملية التبادل التجاري، بين روسيا وإيران، على قاعدة مُسيّرات وصواريخ باليستية إيرانية مقابل مقاتلات روسية، انّ مثل هذه العملية تشكل تطوّراً جيوسياسياً مهماً، إذ آنذاك يشي بقيام تحالف هجومي (بين إيران وروسيا) معادٍ للولايات المتحدة.
ثالثا ـ أما ما يزيد من خطورة هذه المقاتلة فهو: سرعتها العالية جداً، والتي تصل الى الفين وخمسمئة كيلو متر في الساعة، وقدرتها العالية جداً على المناورة، خاصة في المعارك الجوية. بالإضافة الى تجهيزها بأنظمة رادار متقدمة جداً، يصل مداها الى أربعمئة كيلو متر (باستطاعتها اكتشاف الطائرات المعادية على بعد أربعمئة كيلو متر، ما يمكنها من الاستعداد للانقضاض على العدو). كما أنّ تسلّحها بصواريخ: R 73، المخصصة للاشتباك الجوي، القادرة على ضرب الطائرات المعادية على بعد أربعين كيلو متراً، يزيد الى حد بعيد من خطورة هذه المقاتلة، المؤهلة لتأمين السيطرة الجوية، وهي القادرة على إطلاق صواريخها بعكس اتجاه طيرانها، معتمدة على تقنيات متطورة، سواءً في حجرة القيادة او تجهيزات الطيار نفسه (مجهز بأجهزة رؤية تسمح له بمشاهدة محيط الطائره على مدار ٣٦٠ درجة).
رابعا ـ وما يزيد من خطورة هذه المقاتلة هو تسلّحها بصواريخ جو/ جو، :، التي تحلق بسرعة تبلغ خمسة أضعاف سرعة الصوت وتحمل رأساً متفجراً يزن اثنين وعشرين كيلوغراماً ونصف الكيلوغرام وقادر على إصابة وتدمير ايّ هدف معادٍ (طائرة) على بعد ثمانين كيلو متراً. وهو الأمر الذي يعزز، الى حدّ بعيد، قدرة الردع الجوي الإيراني
وعلى الرغم من انّ هذا التطور (حصول إيران على مقاتلات سوخوي ٣٥) لن يقلب موازين القوى رأساً على عقب (في الخليج)، إلا انّ ذلك سيجعل العمل في الأجواء الإيرانية محفوفاً بالمخاطر.
كما انّ الأمر يفضي الى خلل في موازين القوى الجوية، بين إيران ودول الخليج، كما أنه يؤثر على احتمالات اي عملية استباقية اسرائيلية (في الأجواء الإيرانية). علماً انّ الموقع يقول بأنّ وسائل إعلام رسمية إيرانية قد أعلنت عن هذا الموضوع (الحصول على المقاتلات الروسية مقابل مُسيّرات وصواريخ إيرانية) بتاريخ ٢٨/١٢/٢٠٢٢، وقالت انّ الطيارين الإيرانيين يتدرّبون على قيادة هذه الطائرات منذ شهر ٥/٢٠٢٢.
الأمر إذن أخطر بكثير من مجرد صفقة طائرات وتعاون تسليحي بين قوتين إحداهما قوة عالمية عظمى تحارب مجموع دول الأطلسي انطلاقاً من أوكرانيا، والثانية قوة إقليمية عظمى تواجه القوة الرئيسية في التحالف الأطلسي منذ أكثر من أربعة عقود، دون هوادة، ولا يزيدها زمن المواجهة إلا إصراراً وقوةً واقتداراً.
لا بل أصبحت على رأس محور متجانس يتمثل في نحو ستة جيوش مركبة بين عمليات نظامية تقليدية وأخرى حرب غوار، استطاعت أن تهزم أميركا على بوابات عواصمها في دمشق وبغداد وصنعاء وبيروت والقدس وطهران.
ما سيثير الفزع الأكبر لدى محور الشر الأطلسي المقابل هو ما قاله قائد أحد الجيوش الأكثر اقتداراً بعد إيران وهو السيد حسن نصر الله قبل أيام: « على واشنطن كبح جماح حكومة الفاسدين والمجانين الجدد في تل أبيب، إذا ما أرادت أن تتجنّب، حرباً جديدة من طراز الحرب الأوكرانية».
هل اقتربت حرب يوم القيامة والصعود الى الجليل بشكل جماعي من قبل حلف المقاومة!؟
كلمة السر عند السيد والراسخين في علوم جغرافيا آخر الزمان.
There is no doubt that NATO is trying hard to escalate the war in the Ukraine. Just before the end of the year there were two drones strikes against a major Aerospace Forces base in Engels. The attacks were not very successful, but Russians did die when shrapnel hit a fuel truck which exploded. The importance of that attack was that Engels is located deep inside Russia.
Then there were assorted small attacks against various Russian border posts and towns near the Russian border.
What is left of Russian barracks in Makeevka following a HIMARS strike
Let’s first deal with the second headline. The first thing we need to say is that this was clearly a legal target under the laws of war: NATO hit Russian military personnel, and that is a fully legal target. However, if we look just a tad deeper, we realize that the HIMARS attack was clearly conducted by western “volunteers/advisors”, that is to say NATO personnel who took off their uniform and are under cover. Still, this is still yet another direct NATO attack on Russian soldiers.
[Sidebar: this is the type of attack HIMARS are very good at: precision strikes against fragile targets. HIMARS has very good range and precision, but their warheads are too small to successfully take out harder targets, such as bridges or bunkers. HIMARS, especially backed by the full US/NATO C4ISR capabilities, do represent a major threat to any “soft” targets like, in this case, wooden barracks]
I would note that only a clueless civilian could expect NATO to never do anything, offer no resistance, take no counter-measures, never succeed or hit Russians were in hurts. The truth in warfare is that the enemy will shoot back (at least in a real war, not a counter-insurgency operation against a vastly inferior adversary).
But what about the rest of these strikes, especially those aimed at Russian territory (as it was before the liberation of Ukrainian regions)?
So we need to ask a basic question: what is the goal of these strikes?
Let’s begin with some truisms:
First, none of these strikes will make ANY difference on the actual course of this war. Just like the Israeli strikes against Lebanon or Syria (latest one today, killed two Syrians and damaged the facilities). However, while the Israeli strikes on Syria are for “psychotherapeutic reasons” (I have explained that MANY times in the past), this is not the case with NATO strikes, including the “non-claimed” ones against Engels.
Second, after each of these strikes many people will wonder what Russia will do about it. The precedent is the attack on the Crimean bridge which gave Russia a pretext to switch off the lights in Banderastan. And yes, it was clearly only a pretext, as such massive strikes campaign cannot be quickly planned and executed in a few hours/days. The self-evident truth is that the Russians were quite ready to unleash their strikes long BEFORE the Crimean Bridge attack, but that they were more than happy to have that attack as a pretext (as opposed to a *reason*) to strike.
And, if you wonder, Russia is still conducting such strikes on a daily basis, including strikes involving hundreds of missiles! These follow on strikes are almost not reported in the western media because 1) “Ze” banned any images/videos of the results of these strikes and 2) reporting their true magnitude would undermine the official narrative (including the one about Russia running out of ammo).
Still, NATO does not act just to show that it can act. There is a real, military, purpose behind these strikes. And it is not “just” to provoke Russia into some kind of response (not with tens and even hundreds of Russian missile strikes every day already taking place).
The war is already going on, the Russians are already fighting along a very long frontline, the Russian Aerospace Forces are already striking targets over the entire Ukraine, so what is there more to provoke/trigger?
I submit that there is only one thing which the Russians have not done yet, and that is the fullscale combined arms operation the Russian General Staff is obviously preparing. And since this major offensive is almost certain to happen, the only thing which such NATO strikes could affect is the timing of the attack. And since there is no way that these NATO (pinprick) strikes could delay the Russian offensive, their only possibly goal would be to make it happen sooner.
Why would NATO want the Russian offensive sooner rather than later? In all its other actions, the AngloZionists have tried to draw out this war for as long as possible, so why would they want to make the Russians attack sooner rather than later?
Because the Russian General Staff is waiting for all the “ducks to be lined” up before attacking. Thus by trying to force the Russians into a premature attack date, NATO is, very logically, trying to prevent all the said “ducks” to be “lined up”. In other words, NATO is trying to force the hand of the Russian General Staff by increasing the pressure on the Kremlin to “finally take action”.
Trying to force your enemy into a premature attack makes perfect military sense (as would any effort to seize the initiative and impose your tempo on your enemy).
These efforts are greatly aided by the following categories:
Civilians who don’t understand warfare
Infantiles who get outraged every time NATO successfully strikes Russian targets
Western (fake) “friends of Russia” who mantrically repeat that “Putin is weak/indicisive/naive/fill_the_blank“
Western PSYOPS who want to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubts) in the Russian general public
These four groups form a rather loud crowd who act EXACTLY as the AngloZionist want them to.
So how effective are these NATO efforts?
Here we need to mention a deep cultural difference between the Russian society and the western one: most Russians have a much better understanding of war than the folks in the West. This is true for civilians all the way through the generals. There are many reasons for that, but just to name a few:
Many Russians have military training (basic or more advanced)
Almost every Russian has lost family members during WWII and, therefore, know how ugly war is.
Russian culture, from books to movies, is chock full of war stories, and not of the Tom Clancy type, but the real thing.
Wars in Chechnia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Georgia, Syria, Armenia and many more conflicts have “educated” the Russian society about the painful realities of war.
Unlike the hallucinations of the (fake) “friends of Russia” in the West, the “Strelkovites” and other assorted “allislosters” in Russia have very little traction or credibility with the Russian general public. Simply put – Russians trust Surovikin (and Putin!) much, much, more than these hysterical FUDers because they instinctively feel that what is needed is not anger, but focus.
Conclusion:
NATO is trying really hard to force the Russians into a “NATO schedule” and out of their planned schedule. An added beneficial side-effect from such “for optics only” strikes is to give the morons in Congress a rationale to put even more money into the US MIC.
As for forcing Russia to attack in suboptimal conditions, that won’t happen. Neither Putin, nor Shoigu, nor Gerasimov nor Surovikin are the types who will respond to hysterics with “for optics only” actions (just look at their faces, I mean it!). And this also goes for the entire General Staff.
I fully concur with those who, like Macgregor, have been announcing a major combined arms offensive this Spring, but it will happen when Putin decides it, not when NATO wants it. Right now, the Russian meat grinder is inflicting such losses on the Ukraine that it really makes no sense for the Russians to stop it. But, sooner or later, even this will eventually yield diminishing marginal returns and, by then, the Russian forces (there are three of them around the Ukraine) will be fully ready, trained, equipped and poised to attack.
The big unknown (to us, the Russians probably already know) is what NATO will do when this offensive happens. You can be sure that the “best” minds (relatively speaking) in the US are working on the following task: how to trigger a continental war without directly and officially involving the United States?
I don’t have an answer to this, your guess is as good as mine 🙂
Seems like a simple question, but in reality it is immensely complex. I will try to outline a few of the issues, assumptions and implications this question involves.
Well, for starters, we might want to ask “what is a Ukrainian?” After all, no such nation or country can be found in history books. But we should not stop here, and we also need to ask “what is a Russian?”. Yes, there was a Russian nation and a Russian country recorded in history books, but does that really help us?
French history books used to begin with the sentence “our ancestors the Gauls” which even kids on the French colonies had to learn. Some ridiculed the fact that sub-Saharan Africans or the children of Guadeloupe had to learn that and that was self-evidently ridiculous.
But what about metropolis French, those who lived in France proper?
Where their ancestors really Gauls and, if so, how much continuity, if any, is there between Vercingetorix and Macron or the people from ancient Gallic tribes to the modern French?
What we often overlook is that nationality is a very modern concept born out of the post 1789 ideology of nationalism. In the more distant past, people built their identity around 1) their place of birth/residence 2) their religion and 3) their ruler. Keeping all that in mind, let’s begin by asking the question “what is a Russian?”. But before we go there, I need to mention another pesky issue: the English word “Russian” can mean one of two things: a member of the Russian ethnic/cultural group, in which case the Russian term is русский (roosskii) or a citizen of the Russian Federation, in which case the Russian term would be россиянин (rossiianin).
[Sidebar: before 1917 you could be a “Russian Chechen” or “Russian German” because the distinction between rossiianin and roosskii did not exist then or, should we say, it was less common and used differently. Russia being the cultural, political and spiritial heir to the East Roman Empire, it had multi-ethnicity built into her from the moment Russia appeared]
For the time being, let’s ignore the second meaning and focus on the ethnic/cultural русский (roosskii). What is a русский (roosskii)?
To try to find a good definition, let’s being by spelling out what a Russian is not.
This is not somebody who speaks Russian. There are plenty of folks out there who speak Russian and who are not Russian.
This is not somebody born in Russia, because there are plenty of non-Russians born in Russia.
How about somebody born from Russian parents?
Here we run into a logical problem: if we define as Russian somebody born of Russian parents without defining what Russian means in the first place, this is a completely circular definition.
Also, is Shoigu Russian? This father is an ethnic Tuvan. So 50% Russian max?
How about Czar Nicholas II? His ancestry was mostly German and Danish.
How about Lenin? He had only 1/4 “Russian” blood (whatever that means)
Here we need to keep three crucial elements in mind:
Russia was always multi ethnic, even in the 10th century!
Russia has no natural borders
Russia was invaded by innumerable ethnic and religions groups and many of these groups acculturated into the Russian society adding their heritage to the common Russian one
Thus the “ethnic definition” does not work at all.
For countries like Japan or native people like the Mapuche ethnic categories might make sense, but for a country with a history and geography like Russia it is utterly meaningless (hence the reason why patriotism is a very positive force in Russia and nationalism a very toxic one).
But it only get even more complicated.
Just like, say, France or Italy, Russia went through very different moments in history and the Russia or, say, the 15th century and the Russia or the 19th century had very little in common.
Now this is highly subjective, but I would submit that at the very least, we can roughly break up the historical Russia into the following periods:
Russia before Peter I
Russia between Peter I and 1917
Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1991
US colonized Russia between 1991 and 2000
Putin’s Russia 2000-2021
Russia after 2022
And even this is a much simplified categorization, each period should also be further subdivided, but that would take too much space here.
Next I would also argue that how Russians defined themselves over these periods also changed, and this why pre-1917 Dostoevsky thought that one cannot be Russian unless one is Orthodox first (which might have make sense before 1917, but sure makes no sense at all in 2022). My point here is not to discuss the best possible definition of “who/what is a Russian” but to show that this apparently simple question is also very complex and, at best, a moving target!
Now in the case of the Ukraine, it gets even more complex than that.
When I wrote above that there was no “Ukrainian nation” or “Ukrainian state” in history I did not mean to say that BECAUSE there were no such phenomena in history there is no such thing as a Ukrainian today.
To be clear, I do NOT believe that in order to consider yourself as belonging to an ethnic or cultural group you MUST have a historical basis for your claim. Nations can be created, in fact, I would argue that all of them are created at some point in time. Ethnogenesis is something we can observe on all continents, nations and ethnic groups: this is the emergence of a NEW and DISTINCT identity, usually followed by the creation of “founding myths” which might or might not have any real basis in history.
In the case of the Ukraine (I mean this term geographically here, the southwestern frontier/border lands of Russia), it is simply undeniable that these lands lived under Polish/Latin yoke for many centuries and that this occupation had two direct results:
The people of the Ukraine had experiences with the rest of the Russian nation did not (such as being under Latin occupation or having Orthodox communities submitted the Greek and not the Russian Orthodox Church)
The people of the Ukraine did not experience some of the most crucial events in Russian history (such as the Old Rite vs New Rite crisis which deeply shattered Russian society in the 17th century and after).
Such differences in experience left deep marks on the identity of the people it affected. It would be foolish to deny this and it would be dangerous to deliberately ignore it!
So, to sum up what I have tried to show so far we could say that:
History is not a useful tool to measure some supposed “legitimacy” of any one group’s claim of identity.
Ethnic/cultural identities can arise both spontaneously and even artificially.
In the case of the Ukraine, it is a mix of both. Primarily, the “Ukraine” is a creation of the Latin Papacy (see here for a discussion). But, like it or not, the Latins did eventually trigger a Ukrainian ethnogenesis, albeit with varying degrees of success (roughly the further West, the longer the Polish yoke, the stronger that Ukrainian identity).
But even if none of that had happened, it would make no difference.
Even if we assume that there was absolutely NOTHING on our planet which could be called “Ukraine” or “Ukrainian”, and even if the people of the post-1991 Ukraine had ZERO historical basis for their claims, it is still a fundamental human right to choose your identity (or, more accurately, identities, plural).
If tomorrow the people of Japan decide that from now on their identity will not be Japanese but, say, Martian, we could laugh all we want, but we could not deny them that right or force them to give up their newly adopted “Martian” identity.
Furthermore, is it not silly to tell a person who absolutely hates Russia and all things Russian and who sincerely believes that he is from a totally different ethnic and cultural group, that this person has no right to his opinion that this person must accept that he is Russian?
That would create a “Russian russophobe”.
Actually, there are PLENTY of Russians russophobes out there. Even if by any imaginable definition you are Russian (or any other nationality), you still have the free will to reject that heritage and choose another one (even a fictional one).
There is even a special term for these folks: вырусь (vyroos‘). In my experience, most (but not all!) folks who voluntarily emigrated from Russia fall into this category.
This is why my first thesis here is this: those Ukrainians who chose to identify as Ukrainians and who reject any Russian heritage (whatever we may mean by that) have the moral right to do so and nobody has the moral right to deny them this choice. And while historical arguments can be used to debunk the founding myths of the Ukronazi ideology, they still cannot be used to deny anybody what is a deeply personal choice.
[Sidebar: it is my personal belief that identities can be cumulative and that they don’t have to exclude each other. While I personally consider myself culturally a “pre-1917 Russian”, I am 50% Dutch by DNA, I was born in German speaking Switzerland and lived most of my life in French speaking Geneva, and I also feel even more cultural identities inside me, including an Argentinian one. I speak 5 languages well (albeit with many typos when I write, as you all know!) and another 2 reasonably. I currently live in the USA (click here for an explanation why) And just to add yet another element, I am a member of a Greek Orthodox Church, not a Russian one. I also think of myself as a Jazz guitarist and freediver. So even my hobbies form part of my identity. Why should I have to limit myself to only one, “pure”, identity when I am so clearly a mongrel? In fact, I embrace and enjoy all this diversity of influences which all have contributed to shape the person I am today. And if I claim that right to cumulative identities, how could I deny it to anybody else?]
And then there is this undeniable fact: while about 80% of россиянин (rossiianin) are русский (roosskii), 20% are not. In fact there are 193 ethnic groups in Russia and 35 languages which are considered official languages in various regions of Russia, along with Russian, plus are over 100 minority languages. And while Chechens are not русский (roosskii) they are most definitely россиянин (rossiianin), that is to say that while Chechens are a distinct ethnic group, they are also part of what I call the “Russian civilizational realm”. One could reasonably argue that the Chechens of 2022 are the most patriotic of all Russians!
This makes a lot more sense to me that to dig into past clades, tribes or local native groups and seek some “biological identity”.
This is, by the way, one of the most striking and profound differences between the Russian and Ukronazi cultural models: Russians want and enjoy the immense diversity of their nations. Ukronazi want a racially pure, russenrein, Ukraine (hence their constant talk about “subhumans”, “cockroaches” and “biomass”).
Let’s leave the idiotic concept of “pure race” to the Nazis, Zionists and their likes.
The first thing which I would immediately point out if that historically the lands which we now call the Ukraine were very much exposed to, or even part of, the Russian civilizational realm. But that is absolutely NOT true of the current, Ukronazi/Banderista cultural identity which, in fact, was created as an anti-Orthodoxy and which nowadays sees itself as an anti-Russia. I personally know that identity very, very well: not only have I met plenty of Ukronazis in my life, I also monitored the Ukronazi propaganda on VOA and RFE/RL for years and I know that Ukronazi nationalism has no positive content whatsoever, it is only a pure and total negation of everything Russian with a few truly ridiculous (and comical) claims about some “Ukrainian antiquity”.
In other words, even if you live in Odessa or Kharkov and you are (let’s simply assume that) from 100% pure ethnic Russian stock (no such thing, but bear with me), you STILL get to reject that identity and adopt any identity you want, including the Ukronazi/Banderistsa one.
At this point, I want to list all the criteria which are plainly not helpful to discuss identities:
Genetic makeup
Place of birth
Mother-tongue (or languages)
Religion
History in general and historical borders (which constantly shifted) specifically
Whether we personally approve of an ideology or cultural claim or not
Political ideologies
Identities embraced in the past
The difference between a language and a dialect
Similarities and differences with other identities
And yet, every time I hear people discuss whether the Russian are liberators or occupiers of the Ukraine, I see these criteria used, and by both sides!
This makes absolutely no sense to me.
In fact, I strongly believe that the choice of being Ukrainian, Russian or both (yes, that is a choice!) depends on each individual person. Period.
But here I want to add something crucial: having to make such a personal choice is not specific or unique to the Ukrainians, all Russians also face the same question too!
I submit that, objectively, the “Russian” 5th column and the Atlantic Integrationists are, de facto, not Russians. Why do I say that? Because 1) they serve foreign masters and 2) they seek to harm Russia. And I don’t care how their actions are packaged (heck, Navalnyi tried really hard to impersonate a nationalist!).
Thus, to “be Russian” means, in my opinion, that you have made a deliberate choice by identify with, and become part of, the Russian civilizational realm.
Put simply: you cannot be Russia and hate Russia.
How many people in what is left of the Ukraine today consider themselves Russian?
I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody else knows either.
But I think that it is fair to say that most people in Russia were shocked by the number of Ukrainians who chose to not only adopt a Ukrainian identity, but even fight and die for it! Many did, sincerely, think of Ukrainians are “brothers”.
Today this “brotherhood” looks increasingly like the “brotherhood” of Cain…
Even more amazingly, most of these Ukronazis don’t even speak Ukrainian properly and mostly speak to each other in Russian. Some even consider themselves as Orthodox Christians. Yup, these Russian speakers, many from the central and eastern Ukraine still sing “Батько наш — Бандера, Україна — мати, ми за Україну будем воювати!” (Our Father is Bandera, our mother the Ukraine, we are ready to wage war for the Ukraine).
I would note with some glee that if Bandera is their father, then the Ukraine was born no earlier than the mid-1920s (since Bandera was born in 1909!). And I won’t even go into the Ukie hallucinations about being “pure Aryans” (as opposed to the Moskals whom they see as Finno-Ugric-Mongols), which is an ideology developed even later 🙂
So, 2163 words later, did we even being to answer the question of whether the Ukrainians are Russians?
No, not really. And here is why:
Taken by themselves, the terms “Ukrainian” and “Russian” are highly ambiguous.
We know that in the past, many of those whom we call “Ukrainians” today had ancestors who lived and were part of the Russian civilizational realm. But that does not AT ALL mean that modern Ukrainians want (or even could!) join the Russian civilizational realm, especially since what this realm was, is and will become is also highly complex and even controversial.
Furthermore, I think that we need to pay special attention to what is happening in Russia today: the SMO has had a HUGE impact on the Russian society and that society is quickly and profoundly changing.
That by itself begs the question of what kind of civilizational realm Russia is offering to the peoples of the Ukraine today?
One thing is certain, the Russia of, say 2023-2025 will be profoundly different from the Russia of 2000-2022. First, the Russian ultimatum to the West of 2021 then the 2022 SMO have truly revolutionized (in a literal sense) Russia: 5th columnists and assorted liberals have fled by the thousands (mostly to Poland, Israel and the three Baltic statelets), the Atlantic Integrationist have either given up or are keeping a very low profile. Foreign agents (folks paid by foreign interest) must now register, are listed as such, and can be fined or even imprisoned for breaking Russian laws (finally!).
Russia has also completely and categorically rejected the entire Woke ideology promoted by the Hegemony worldwide.
Most importantly, the reality of a AngloZionist Empire which wants to subjugate, colonize, enslave and break-up Russia has now become pretty hard to ignore. In fact, this war (against the collective West, not just a few Ukronazis!) is as much an existential war for Russia as WWII, so those Russians who complain about the lack of Spanish jamon serrano in Russia stores need to wake up and compare their current “hardships” with what their parents and grandparents suffered during WWII (besides, you can still find Spanish jamon serrano in Russia, just at a higher price than before; there are also superb local substitutes!).
Here I want to express my deepest thanks to the US Neocons, EU lemmings, NATO Nazis, the Latin Papists and all the other Russia-haters who have generated one of the biggest hate-wave in human history and who have now FORCED all Russians into a basic, yet vital, choice: resist or perish.
Unlike the folks in the West (until recently) and unlike the folks in the Ukraine (again, until recently), many Russian people have gradually switched their mode thinking from “peacetime” to “wartime”. In fact, I would even argue that the so-called “Russian defeats” in Bucha, Kharkov or Kherson have only poured more fuel onto the raging fire of Russian anger: in February of this year very few Russians would have supported to switch off the lights in the entire Ukraine. But by late summer, they were DEMANDING it!
So, the next time you hear about “Russian defeats” consider the following:
the massive wake-up effect these “defeats” have had on a (rather spoiled) Russian society
the comparatively minuscule price paid by Russia for these tactical retreats (economy of force maneuvers really) and
the huge costs of these “victories” for the NATO side
and decide for yourself if Putin is weak and indecisive or very smart and cunning 🙂
Nobody really knows what Russia will look like in 2023-2024-2025 etc. So nobody really know what kind of “Russian civilizational realm” the SMO is “offering” to the people of the Ukraine. It is therefore impossible to ascertain whether Ukrainians (which Ukrainians anyway, they are still a diverse group!) will ever become Russians again or not. Some probably will. Many will probably won’t.
One thing for me is axiomatic: Russia should not occupy even a single square meter of “Ukrainian” land if that land is mostly populated by Ukronazis. In fact, I see no need to “go to the Polish border” or any other such grand plans. Yes, NATO might well not give Russia any choice (just as NATO forced the SMO upon Russia!), but then I hope for a swift “in and out”. Russia should only free those who want to be freed. Period. The rest she can either ignore (if they leave Russia alone), or kill (if they threaten Russia).
Does Russia want/need millions of Ukronazis inside her borders? Nope!
Can Russia afford to pay for the destruction of country 404? Nope!
Do Russian authorities really want to be in charge of not only pensions and social programs, but also law and order in a land populated by (armed!) people who hate Russia with a passion? Nope!
But I do agree, fully, that Banderastan needs to be fully demilitarized and denazified.
The former can be achieved without having to put forces on every square meter of the Ukraine while the latter will happen as a natural consequence of the former: if all you got if police and SWAT forces, what is the point of playing Nazi or talking about “liberating Crimea next year”? And if some residual Ukronazis want to read Mein Kampf, and can stay awake while reading it, then let them. Who cares?
And then there are population movements. MILLIONS have left for the EU and MILLIONS have left for Russia. MILLIONS have also “left” when Crimea and the LDNR joined Russia. And now that the lights are out, MILLIONS more are leaving (and only 20% plan to return according to Ukrainian estimates). Add to this the 100’000 KIA of Ursula von der Lugen, multiply it by a safe factor 2 and we probably already have 200’000 KIA and, therefore, about 300’000-400’000 wounded in action. True, “Ze” & Co. can continue to mobilize wave after wave after wave of civilians, and NATO can even get most of them through some sort of basic training (including advanced training for some), but that is not a sustainable strategy: Russia has many more artillery shells than bodies the Ukrainians, Poles, Brits and all the other crazies can throw into the Russian meat grinder.
[Sidebar: you might wonder what the current US Neocon plan is. Simple: to get as many Ukrainians killed as possible and then accused Russia of genocide and to ruin the EU economies to remove a competitor. BTW – Plan A was to attack the LDNR, trigger an overthrow of Putin, place a puppet in power and dismember Russia. That plan failed. So what we see today is the USA’s Plan B, executed by NATO and a few megalomaniacal idiots with imperial phantom pains (UK+PL not to mention them).]
One more point: this all also applies to Belarus, Kazakhstan and all the other Russian limitrophes. So far, not single one of them has shown the capability of being a viable, stable state. ALL of them have chosen what some call “multi-vectorness”, that is: you beg Russia for protection and the USA for money.
Does Russia needs such “friends” or “allies”?
Are Iran, China or even Algeria not infinitely better friends and allies by any measure?
I say that they all these limitrophes get their act together and make a basic choice because if there is one thing which the Euromaidan has proven beyond reasonable doubt that is that the West will never allow any country to be a good neighbor or partner to both the West and Russia.
Now, especially following the wave of total hatred against all things Russian in the West, this obligation to chose one side or another has become a fact of life for at least as long as the (already dead) AngloZionist Empire maintains its (still very real) momentum and its ability to suborn the comprador elites ruling over countries with no sovereignty or agency (the entire EU for starters). This is why both Russia and China seek a multi-polar world in which all countries are truly sovereign and the relations between these countries determined by the rule of international law.
Conclusion:
This is not about the Ukraine and Russia. This is about a full reorganization of our entire planet, including the international trade and finance, political alliances and cultural/spiritual values.
The following two images sum it all up nicely I think.
Right now, both Russia and the Ukraine are moving targets undergoing tremendous changes. And I am not saying that Russians and Ukrainians cannot be brothers or even be one nation again. All I am saying is that making such an assumptions would be extremely dangerous and costly.
Somewhere, further down the road, there could be a Ukraine and a Russia living in a not too comfy relationship like, say, Pakistan and India today, but with a fully demilitarized Ukraine (nevermind one threatening Russia with nukes, which both Pakistan and India have, so that parallel only goes so far). I am pretty sure that the Poles will bite off a chunk of the rump-Banderastan, and maybe the Hungarians too. Finally, I consider it very likely that by one way or another, Russia will liberate the Ukrainian coast and lift the current blockade of the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (PMR) were about half a million Russian citizens live. So you can pretty much visualize what the Ukraine will look like when then Russian decide to stop.
But, when all is said and done, it will be for the people of the Ukraine to decide which civilizational realm they want to embrace. Russia should not liberate those who embrace their slavery.
Are you happy with the way the war in the former Ukraine is going? Most people aren’t—for one reason or another. Some people hate the fact that there is a war there at all, while others love it but hate the fact that it hasn’t been won yet, by one side or the other. Bounteous quantities of both of these kinds of haters are found on both sides of the new Iron Curtain that is hastily being built across Eurasia between the collective West and the collective East. This seems reasonable; after all, hating war is standard procedure for most people (war is hell, don’t you know!) and by extension a small war is better than a big one and a short war is better than a long one. And also such reasoning is banal, trite, platitudinous, vapid, predictable, unimaginative and… bromidic (according to the English Thesaurus).
Seldom is to be found a war-watcher who is happy with the progress and the duration of the war. Luckily, Russian state television shows a very significant one these almost daily. It is Russia’s president, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Having paid attention to him for over twenty years now, I can confidently state that never has he been so imbued with calm, self-assured serenity leavened with droll humor. This is not the demeanor of someone who feels at any risk of losing a war. The brass at the Ministry of Defense appear dour and glum on camera—a demeanor befitting men who send other men to fight and possibly to be wounded or to die; but off-camera they flash each other quick Mona Lisa smiles. (Russian men don’t give stupid American-style fish-eyed toothy grins, rarely show their teeth when smiling, and never in the presence of wolves or bears).
Given that Putin’s approval rating stands firm at around 80% (a number beyond reach of any Western politician), it is reasonable to assume that he is just the visible tip of a gigantic, 100-million-strong iceberg of Russians who calmly await the successful conclusion of the special military operation to demilitarize and denazify the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (so please don’t even call it a war). These 100 million Russians are seldom heard from, and when they do make noise, it is to protest against bureaucratic dawdling and foot-dragging or to raise private funds with which to remedy a shortage of some specialty equipment requested by the troops: night vision goggles, quadrocopters, optical sights, and all sorts of fancy tactical gear.
A great deal more noise is being made by the one or two percent whose entire business plan has been wrecked by the sudden appearance of the New Iron Curtain. The silliest of these thought that fleeing west, or south (to Turkey, Kazakhstan or Georgia) would somehow magically fix their problem; it hasn’t, and it won’t. The people we would expect to scream the loudest are the LGBTQ+ activists, who thought that they were going to use Western grant money to build East Sodom and East Gomorrah. They’ve been hobbled and muzzled by new Russian laws that label them as foreign agents and prohibit their sort of propaganda. In fact, the very term LGBTQ+ is now illegal, and so, I suppose, they will have to use PPPPP+ instead (“P” is for “pídor”, which is the generic Russian term for any sort of sexual pervert, degenerate or deviant). But I digress.
It can be observed rather readily that those who are the least happy with the course of the Russian campaign are also the least likely to be Russian. Least happy of all are the good folks at the Center for Informational and Political Operations of the Ukrainian Security Service who are charged with creating and maintaining the Phantom of Ukrainian Victory. These are followed by people in and around Washington, who are quite infuriated by Russian dawdling and foot-dragging. They have also been hard-pressed to show that the Ukrainians are winning while the Russians are losing; to this end, they have portrayed every Russian tactical repositioning or tactical withdrawal as a huge, humiliating defeat personally for Putin and every relentless, suicidal Ukrainian attack on Russian positions as a great heroic victory. But this PR tactic has lost effectiveness over time and now the Ukraine has become a toxic topic in the US that most American politicians would prefer to forget about, or at least keep out of the news.
To be fair, the Russian tactical cat-and-mouse games in this conflict has been nothing short of infuriating. The Russians spent some time rolling around Kiev to draw Ukrainian troops away from the Donbass and prevent a Ukrainian attack on it; once that was done, they withdrew. Great Ukrainian victory! They also spent some time tooling around the Black Sea coastline near Odessa, threatening a sea invasion, to draw off Ukrainian forces in that direction, but never invaded. Another Ukrainian victory! The Russians occupied a large chunk of Kharkov region that the Ukrainians left largely undefended, then, when the Ukrainians finally paid attention to it, partially withdrew behind a river to conserve resources. Yet another Ukrainian victory! The Russians occupied/liberated the regional capital of Kherson, evacuated all the people who wanted to be evacuated, then withdrew to a defensible position behind a river. Victory again! With all these Ukrainian victories, it is truly a wonder that the Russians have managed to gain around 100km2 of the former Ukraine’s most valuable real estate, over 6 million in population, secured a land route to Crimea and opened up a vital canal that supplies irrigation water to it and which the Ukrainians had blocked some years ago. That doesn’t seem like s defeat at all; that looks like an excellent result from a single, limited summer campaign.
Russia has achieved several of its strategic objectives already; the rest can wait. How long should they wait? To answer this question, we need to look outside the limited scope of Russia’s special operation in the Ukraine. Russia has bigger fish to fry, and frying fish takes time because eating undercooked fish can give you nasty parasites such as tapeworm and liver fluke. And so, I would like to invite you to Mother Russia’s secret kitchen, to see what’s on the cutting board and to estimate how much thermal processing will be required to turn it all into a safe and nutritious meal.
Mixing our food metaphors, allow me to introduce Goldilocks with her three bears and her porridge not to hot and not too cold. What Russia seems to be doing is keeping their special military operation moving along at a steady pace—not to fast and not too slow. Going too fast would not allow enough time to cook the various fish; going too fast would also increase the cost of the campaign in casualties and resources. Going too slow would give the Ukrainians and NATO time to regroup and rearm and prevent the proper thermal processing of the various fish.
In an effort to find the optimal pace for the conflict, Russia initially committed only a tenth of its professional active-duty soldiers, then worked hard to minimize the casualty rate. It opted to start turning off the lights all over the former Ukraine only after the Kiev regime tried to blow up the Kerch Strait bridge that linked Crimea with the Russian mainland. Finally, it called up just 1% of reservists to relieve the pressure from the frontline troops and potentially prepare for the next stage, which is a winter campaign—for which the Russians are famous.
With this background information laid out, we can now enumerate and describe the various ancillary objectives which Russia plans to achieve over the course of this Goldilocks War. The first and perhaps most important set of problems that Russia has to solve in the course of the Goldilocks War is internal. The goal is to rearrange Russian society, economy and financial system so as to prepare it for a de-Westernized future. Since the collapse of the USSR, various Western agents, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the US State Department, various Soros-owned foundations and a wide assortment of Western grants and exchange programs have made serious inroads into Russia. The overall goal was to weaken and eventually dismember and destroy Russia, turning it into a compliant servant of Western governments and transnational corporations that would supply them with cheap labor and raw materials. To help this process along, these Western organizations did whatever they could to drive the Russian people toward eventual biological extinction and replace them with a more docile and less adventurous race.
Starting well over 30 years ago, Western NGOs set to corrupting the minds of Russia’s young. No effort was spared to denigrate the value of Russian culture, to falsify Russian history and to replace them both with Western pop culture and propaganda narratives. These initiatives achieved limited success, and the USSR, and Soviet-era culture, has remained ever-popular even among those who were too young to have experienced life in the USSR firsthand. Where the damage has been most severe is in education. Excellent Soviet-era textbooks that taught students how to think independently were destroyed and replaced with imports. These were at best useful for training experts in narrowly defined fields who can follow previously defined procedures and recipes but can’t explain how these procedures and recipes were arrived at or to create new ones. Russian teachers, who saw their job not just in educating but in bringing up their students to be good Russians who love and cherish their country, were replaced by Western-trained educationalists who saw their mission as providing a competitive, market-based service in bringing up qualified, competent… consumers! Who are these people? Well, luckily, the Internet remembers everything, and there are plenty of other jobs for these people such as shoveling snow and stoking furnaces. But identifying and replacing them takes time, as does finding, updating and reproducing the older, excellent textbooks.
But what of the young people left behind by this wave of destruction? Luckily, not all is lost. The special military operation is providing them with some very valuable lessons that their ignorant educationalists left out: that Russia—a unique, miraculous agglomeration of many different nations, languages and religions—has been preserved and expanded over the centuries through the efforts of heroes whose names are not just remembered but venerated. What’s more, some of them are alive today, fighting and working in the Donbass. It is one thing to visit museums, read old books and hear stories about the great deeds of one’s grandfathers and great-grandfathers during the Great Patriotic War; it is quite another to watch history unfold through the eyes of your own father or brother. Give it another year or two, and Russia’s young people will learn to look with disdain on the products of Russia’s Western-oriented culture-mongers. Their elders do already: opinion polls show that a large majority of Russians see Western cultural influence as a negative.
And what of these Russian culture-mongers who have been worshiping all things Western for as long as they can remember? Here, a most curious thing happened. When the special military operation was first announced, they spoke out against it and in favor of the Ukrainian Nazis—a stupid thing to do, but they thought it good and proper to keep their political opinions harmonized with those of their Western patrons and idols so as to stay in their good graces. Some of them protested against the war (ignoring the fact that it had been going on for eight long years already). And then quite a few of them fled the country in unseemly haste.
Keep in mind that these are neither brain surgeons nor rocket scientists: these are people who prance around on stage while making noises with their hands and mouths; or they are people who sit there while makeup artists do things to their faces and hair, then endlessly repeat lines written for them by someone else. These are not people who have the capacity to analyze a tricky political situation and make the right choice. In an earlier, saner age their opinions would be steadfastly ignored, but such is the effect of the Internet, social media and all the rest, that any hysterical nincompoop can shoot a little video and millions of people, having nothing better to do with their time, will watch it on their phones and make comments.
The fact that these people are voluntarily cleansing the Russian media space of their presence is a positive development, but it takes time. If the special military operation were to end tomorrow, there is no doubt that they would attempt to come back and pretend that none of this ever happened. And then Russian popular culture would remain a Western-styled cesspool full of vacuous personae who seek to glorify every single deadly sin for the sake of personal notoriety and gain. Russia has plenty of talented people eager to take their place—if only they would keep out long enough for everyone to forget about them!
Particularly damaging to Russia’s future has been the emergence and preeminence of pro-Western economic and financial elites. Ever since the haphazard and in many cases criminal privatization of state resources in the 1990s, there was brought up an entire cohort of powerful economic agents who does not have Russia’s interests in mind. Instead, these are purely selfish economic actors who until quite recently thought that their ill-gotten gains would allow them to enter into posh Western society. These people usually have more than one passport, they try to keep their families in some wealthy enclave outside of Russia, they send their children to schools and universities in the West, and their only use for Russia is as a territory they can exploit in creating their wealth extraction schemes.
When in response to the start of Russia’s special military operation the West mounted a speculative attack on the ruble, forcing Russia’s central bank to impose strict currency controls, these members of the Russian elite were forced to start thinking about making a momentous choice. They could stay in Russia, but then they would have to cut their ties to the West; or they could move to the West and live off their savings, but then they would be cut off from the source of their wealth. Their choice was made easier by Western governments which worked hard to confiscate the property of rich Russian nationals, freeze their bank accounts and subject them to various other indignities and inconveniences.
Still, it’s a hard choice for them to make—realizing that, in spite of their sometimes fabulous wealth, for the collective West they are just some Russians that can be robbed. Many of them are mentally unprepared to throw in their lot with their own people, whom they have been taught to despise and to exploit for personal gain. A quick victory in Russia’s special military operation would allow them to think that their troubles were temporary in nature. Given enough time some of them will run away for good while others will decide to stay and work for the common good in Russia.
Next in line are various members of the Russian government who, having been schooled in Western economics, are incapable of understanding the economic transformation that is occurring in Russia, never mind helping it along. Most of what passes for economic thought in the West is just an elaborate smokescreen over this fundamental dictum: “The rich must be allowed to get richer, the poor must be kept poor and the government shouldn’t try to help them (much).” This worked while the West had colonies to exploit, be it through good old-fashioned imperial conquest, plunder and rapine, or through financial neocolonialism of Perkins’s “economic hit men,” or, as has recently been grudgingly admitted by several top EU officials, by taking advantage of cheap Russian energy.
That doesn’t work any more—not in the West, not in Russia or any place else, and mindsets have to adjust. There is a great deal of inertia in appointments to government positions, where there are many vested interests vying for power and influence. It takes time for such basic ideas to percolate through the system as the fact that the US Federal Reserve no longer has a planet-wide monopoly on printing money. Therefore, it is no longer necessary for Russia’s central bank to have dollars in reserve to cover their ruble emissions to defend it against speculative attack since it is no longer necessary for Russia’s central bank to allow foreign currency speculators to run rampant and stage speculative attacks.
But some results have already been achieved, and they are nothing short of spectacular: over the past few months, just a few well-chosen departures from Western economic orthodoxy have made the ruble the world’s strongest currency, have allowed Russia to earn more export revenue by exporting less oil, gas and coal, and have allowed it to drive inflation down to almost zero. Since the start of the special military operation, Russia has been able to reduce its national debt by a large amount and increase government revenues. A swift end to Russia’s special military operation may spell the end of such miracles and a most unwelcome return to the untenable status quo ante.
Beyond the intangible world of finance, equally significant changes have been occurring throughout the physical Russian economy. Previously, many economic sectors, including car sales, construction and home improvement, software development and many others, were foreign-owned and the profits from these activities left the country. And then a decision was made to block the expatriation of dividends. In response, foreign companies sold off their Russian assets, taking a huge loss and depriving themselves of access to the Russian market. The change has been quite stunning. For example, at the beginning of 2022, Western car companies owned a large share of the Russian auto market. Many of the cars that were sold had been assembled within Russia at foreign-owned plants and the profits from these sales were expatriated. Now, less than a year later, European and American automakers are pretty much gone from Russia, replaced by a swiftly reborn domestic auto industry. Chinese automakers have immediately grabbed a large market share for themselves, while South Korea continued to trade with Russia and has held on to its market share.
Equally stunning have been changes in the aircraft industry. Previously, Russian airlines were flying Airbuses and Boeings, most of them leased. After the start of the special operation Western politicians demanded that these leases be rescinded and the aircraft returned to their owners, neglecting to take into account the fact that this would be ruinous financially (glutting the market for used aircraft for years to come and destroying demand for new aircraft) and, furthermore, physically impossible, given that there was no way to effect the transfer of the aircraft. In response, the Russian airlines nationalized the aircraft registry, stopped flying to hostile destinations where their aircraft might be arrested, and started making lease payments in rubles to special accounts at the Russian central bank.
Then came the news that Aeroflot is panning to buy over 300 new passenger jets, all Russian МС-21s, SSJ-100s and Tu-214s, all before 2030, with the first deliveries slated for 2023. There has been a scramble to replace almost all Western-sourced components, such as composites for the carbon fiber wing of the MC-21 and jet engines, avionics and much else for all of the above. Over this period many of the previously leased Boeings and Airbuses will be phased out, but these companies’ market share in the largest country on Earth will be gone forever. Damage to Western aircraft manufacturers will be matched by the damage to Western airlines. At the outset of hostilities, the collective West closed its airspace to Russia, and Russia reciprocated. The problem is that Europe is small and easy to fly around while Russia is huge and flying around it takes a whole day. European airlines suddenly found that theу can’t compete on routes to Japan, China or Korea.
Following the closing of the airspace came other sanctions, from both the European Union and from the United States, all of them illegal, since the UN Security Council is the only body empowered to impose sanctions. Right now the European Union is working on the ninth packet of sanctions, all of which have been dubbed “sanctions from hell”. Speaking of hell, Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno” there are nine circles of hell, so perhaps the sanctions juggernaut is about to run its course.
These sanctions were supposed to have swiftly destroyed the Russian economy and have caused so much social upheaval and suffering that the people would gather on Red Square and overthrow the dread dictator Putin (or so thought Western foreign policy experts). Clearly, nothing of the sort has happened and Putin’s approval rating is as high as ever. On the other hand, the good people of the European Union are indeed starting to suffer. They can no longer afford to heat their homes or to take regular hot showers, food has become outrageously expensive for them, and so much else is going wrong that huge crowds of protestors have been gathering all across Europe and demanding, among other things, an end to anti-Russian sanctions, normalization of relations with Russia and a return to business as usual. Their demands are unlikely to be met, since this would mean a major loss of face for the European leaders.
But there is a more important reason why the sanctions will stay: a return to business as usual would mean that Russia would once again provide energy and raw materials to Europe cheaply while allowing European companies to profit from the labor of Russians. This is quite unappealing and is therefore unlikely to happen. Russia is using the sanctions as an opportunity to rebuild its domestic industry and reorient its trade away from hostile nations and toward friendly nations that are fair and sympathetic in their dealings with Russia. It is also working hard to phase out the use of currencies that Dmitry Medvedev called “toxic”; namely, the US dollar and the euro.
Add to this list a wonderful new Russian innovation called “parallel import.” If some company, in complying with anti-Russian sanctions, refuses to sell its products to Russia or to service or upgrade its products in Russia, then Russia will buy these products and upgrades from a third or fourth or fifth party without permission from the US, the EU or the manufacturer. If a certain brand-name product becomes unavailable, the Russians simply rename the brand and make the same product themselves, or have the Chinese or another trade partner do it for them. And if the West refuses to license its intellectual property to Russia, then that intellectual property becomes free in Russia.
This works particularly well with software: free copies of brand-name software are just as good as the paid-for copies, and if tech support, training or other associated services become unavailable from the West, the Russians simply organize their own. Intellectual property of various sorts makes up a large portion Western notional wealth, and Western sanctions are having the effect of letting Russia make use of it free of charge. Thanks to modern digital technology, it works rather well with hardware too. Instead of painstakingly reverse-engineering products, now the same effect can be achieved by buying the 3D models on a thumb drive and 3D-printing them or automatically generating the mill and drill paths to create them on an NC mill. Putin likes to use the expression “tsap-tsarap” to describe this process. It is hard to translate directly but pertains to the act of a cat snatching its prey with its claws. The short of it is, what Russia previously had to pay for is now, thanks to sanctions, free to it.
Since the Goldilocks War is, after all, a sort of war, we need to briefly discuss its military aspects. Here, too, a steady-as-she-goes approach seems to be the most copacetic. The stated goal is to demilitarize and denazify the former Ukraine, and to some extent this has already been achieved: most of the armor and artillery that the Ukraine had inherited from the USSR has already been destroyed; most of the diehard Nazi battalions are either dead or a shadow of their former selves. Gone too are most of the volunteers that once fought on the Ukrainian side. After over 100000 Ukrainian soldiers “have been killed” since February 2022 (as forthrightly stated, then sheepishly denied, by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen), and after perhaps as many as half a million casualties, scores of service-age men bribing their way out of the country and several rounds of the draft, it is slim pickings. With well over a hundred Ukrainian casualties a day the pickings are bound to get even slimmer over time. Foreign mercenaries have been used to fill the gap—Anglos, Poles, Romanians—but there is a major problem with them: as Julius Caesar pointed out, lots of people are willing to kill for money but nobody wants to die for money—except an idiot, I would add. And on NATO’s Russian front an idiot and his life are soon parted. Up-to-date information on Russian casualties is a state secret and the only number divulged by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in late September 2022 was 5937 killed since the start of the campaign. Casualty rates are said to have been significantly lower since then.
At present, there is still no shortage of idiots on the Ukrainian side—yet—and neither is there a shortage of donated Western weaponry. First came used Soviet-era tanks and other weapons systems donated from all over Eastern Europe; then came actual Western weapons systems. And now throughout NATO one hears plaintive cries that they have nothing left that they can give to the Ukrainians: the cupboard is empty. Nor can they manufacture more weapons in a hurry. To start churning out weapons at the same rate as Russia is doing, these NATO members would first need to reindustrialize, and there are neither the human resources, nor the money to do so. And so the Russian army grinds away, demilitarizing the Ukraine, and the rest of NATO with it. In the process, it is perfecting the art of fighting a land war against NATO—not that a single NATO country would even entertain such an idea.
Perhaps this is mission creep, or perhaps this has been the plan all along, but what Russia is doing at this point is destroying NATO. You may recall that a year ago Russia demanded that the US honor certain security guarantees it made as a condition for allowing the peaceful reunification of Germany; namely, that NATO would not expand eastward. “Not an inch to the east” was how the official record of the meeting reads. Gorbachev and Shevardnadze failed to get this deal on paper and signed, but a verbal deal is a deal. A year ago Russia’s offer was quite moderate: that NATO withdraw to its pre-1997 borders, when it expanded to Eastern Europe.
But, as usually happens when negotiating with the Russians, their initial offer is usually the best. For all we know, based on how things are going in the Ukraine, Russia’s best and final offer may require NATO to disband altogether. After all, the Warsaw Pact disbanded 31 years ago but NATO is still around and bigger than ever; what for? To fight Russia? Well, then, what are they waiting for? Come and get it! This may not even take the form of a negotiation. For example, Russia could say, take a quick whack at Latvia (it richly deserves a whack or two for abusing its large native Russian population Nazi-style) and then stand back and say, “Come on, NATO, come and die heroically on our doorstep for poor little Latvia!” At this, NATO officials will stand united but very quiet, thoughtfully examining their own and each others’ shoes. Once it becomes clear that there will be no offers to launch World War III to avenge Latvia, NATO will quietly dry up and blow away.
Finally, we come to what is perhaps the least important reason for the Goldilocks War: the former Ukraine itself. In view of Russia’s other strategic goals, it seems more of the nature of a sacrificial piece in a chess gambit. Given what Russia has already achieved over the past nine months—four new Russian regions, six million new Russian citizens, a land bridge to Crimea, irrigation water supply to Crimea—there isn’t much left for Russia to achieve militarily before its military campaign reaches the stage of diminishing returns. The addition of Nikolaev and Odessa regions and full control of the Black Sea coastline would, of course, be most valuable; control of Kharkov and Kiev somewhat less so. Control of the entire Dniepr hydroelectric cascade is a definite nice-to-have. As for the rest, it could be left to languish for ages as a deindustrialized, depopulated wasteland, labeled “Mostly harmless.”
Let me divulge a personal detail or two. Two of my grandparents were from Zhitomir, my father was born in Kiev, my first romantic interest was a girl from Odessa, and over the years I’ve had as many friends from Odessa, Kharkov, Lvov, Kiev, Donetsk, Vinnitsa and elsewhere as anywhere else in Russia. Russia? You read that right: there is no way to convince me that so-called “Ukrainian territory” somehow isn’t Russia or that the people who live there somehow aren’t Russian—regardless of what some of them have been recently brainwashed to think. What’s more, none of these people I have known over the years ever thought of themselves as the least bit Ukrainian and they would probably view the very idea of a Ukrainian nationalist identity as symptomatic of a mental condition. The label “Ukrainian” was to them some Bolshevik nonse; since then, Ukrainianness has been turned into a Western method for exploiting minor ethnic variations in order to make one group of Russians fight another group of Russians.
In case you are doubtful, let’s apply the good old duck test: Do the people there walk, quack and look like Russians? All of that territory, with one minor exception in the far west, was part of Russia for anywhere between ten and three centuries; most of the people there, and virtually the entire urban population, speaks Russian as their native language; their religion is predominantly Russian Orthodox; they are genetically indistinguishable from the rest of the Russian population. So, what happened to them?
Unfortunately, a small piece of this Russian land spent three centuries in captivity to the Austro-Hungarian Empire or as part of Greater Poland, and this poisoned their minds with foreign ideas such as Catholicism and ethnic nationalism. Unlike Russia, which is a multinational, multi-ethnic, religiously diverse monolith, the West is a mosaic of ethnic nationalisms, and where there are nationalists there may be Nazis, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
As one drop of poison infects the whole tun of wine, these Western Ukrainians, with lots of help and funds from the German Nazis, then the Americans and the Canadians, managed to infect a large part of the formerly Ukrainian territory with a fake nationalism based on a forged history and a haphazardly concocted culture. Official bans on the teaching and, eventually, the use of Russian have brought up a generation of young people who are essentially illiterate in their native Russian. They are taught in Ukrainian, but Ukrainian literacy is close to an oxymoron, since nothing of any great consequence has ever been written or published in that language and the vast majority of Ukrainian literary works are, you guessed it, in Russian.
The Russian special military operation that’s been ongoing since February 2022 has polarized the entire population. Those who had decided to be with Russia back in 2014 were, obviously, overjoyed to finally get some help from Russia. The now Russian regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson gladly voted to join Russia. But as far as the rest of the former Ukrainian territory, the polarization is mostly in the opposite direction. Those who wanted to be with Russia mostly voted with their feet and are now living somewhere in Russia.
This is something that time alone can fix. Eventually the population of the former Ukraine will be forced to make a choice: they can be Russian, or they can be refugees somewhere in Europe, or they can die fighting Russians at the front. Note that even Donetsk and Lugansk didn’t make this choice right away, the way Crimea did. At that time, only some 70% of their population was in favor of leaving the Ukraine and rejoining Russia. It took eight years of relentless Ukrainian bombing to convince them to make this choice.
Over these intervening years, the diehard “Ukrainians” filtered out, leaving behind a population that was close to 100% pro-Russian. It was only then that the Kremlin granted them official recognition, sent in troops to defend them from imminent invasion and, soon after, accepted them into the Russian Federation. And now the same sort of sorting operation has to take place throughout the rest of the former Ukraine. How long will it take? Only time will tell, but it is already clear that, as far as Russia is concerned, there is no compelling reason to rush.
Note from Michael Rossi Poli Sci who subtitled that video:
Dear Patreon Supporters,
First off, thank you once again for your pledged support and votes of confidence on my work.
Unfortunately, YouTube decided to remove the latest video I uploaded today (Sunday November 27) of Sergey Lavrov giving an interview on political extremism in Europe AS “hate speech”. How they came to that conclusion is beyond me, but I suppose it had to do with the video title having the word “extremism” in it, and “nazism” in the description.
Either way, YouTube removed the video and I have received my first Community Guideline strike, preventing me from upload, commenting, or interacting in any way on my channel for a week. I have appealed the strike, but I don’t know when I will hear back.
In the meantime, I have uploaded the video here and made it publicly accessible. Please feel free to share with those whom you think would benefit from it. For the next week, you’re my “ambassadors” of sorts 🙂
I hope to get this straightened out ASAP, because YouTube offers no prior warning or review of content before something gets flagged, and videos with direct “hate speech” get published all the time.
I may start moving more of the translated videos over here and making it Patrons Only.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 