IGOR STRELKOV (letter fragment):
Regarding the question of assessments/analysis of the situation — I still receive too little information for reliable “tactical” forecasts. “Strategically” “everything is bad” — if the “bet on Trump” (in my opinion — initially a failure, but I do not insist on 100% reliability of my opinion) “does not work out”, — then the next year (or even the end of the current one) will become a very serious test for our state.

I have repeatedly voiced the reasons for this even before my arrest (and long before it):

— the “imitation” style of leadership and state administration led to the fact that “on paper” the Russian Federation looked extremely impressive in all respects (including in terms of military power). In reality, a significant part of our power (in some places — very significant) turned out to be “inflated”. And now the needs of the war far exceed the capabilities of our military-industrial complex, and the war has long ago “eaten up” or is “eating up” all the reserves of new weapons.

The same applies to trained human resources, which for 2.5 years were spent (and are still being spent) as if they were endless and inexhaustible. While the main “ready” (and relatively painlessly torn away from the economy) war has already “eaten up” without a trace.

— the wretchedness (to the point of complete absence) of strategic planning and the lowest quality of tactical planning have already led us to a complete impasse (both in strategy and tactics), loss of initiative to the state of “amoebic reaction to irritants” — i.e. The military and industrial machines react to problems that have arisen only at the moment when these problems have already become critically dangerous.

— There was no talk of making any long-term forecasts 2.5 years ago, and there is none now (which is not surprising, given the “amazing preservation of old reliable personnel” in all the main VIP positions, except, perhaps, (and even then, only partially) the Ministry of Defense. There is either no search for a way out of the impasse at all (which is logical, since the level of necessary intelligence and competence significantly exceeds that available to the said VIP officials), or we are simply unable to discern it (due to the lack of visible results, even preliminary ones.

— The time to correct the grossest mistakes (which our enemies in the West and the so-called “Ukraine” kindly provided us with due to their own incompetence and degradation) was not even “wasted” — it was simply “missed.” And now it is practically gone. The general systemic military-political crisis will very soon turn into a military-economic one. Perhaps — following the example of 1917, and on it will be “superimposed” by the growing fatigue from the senseless and unclear (in terms of goals) war on the part of the population. And without real strategic (and not tactical – carried out according to the principle of “Trishkin’s caftan”, as now) changes and measures – we will face extremely unpleasant consequences, the quantity and quality of which will constantly increase (in terms of negative consequences for the state and the country as a whole).

This is all I want/can write for now.

With respect, I am waiting for letters and reports,

I. V. Girkin
09/28/2024, Kirovo-Chepetsk

by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with

The last time an obscure official of junior rank named Vladimir Medinsky (lead image) was recorded officially as having words with President Vladimir Putin was on November 20, 2019.

At the time Medinsky was the Minister of Culture, and he was briefing Putin on one of his portfolio activities, the St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum. “Over 15,000 people attended the forum in St Petersburg,” Medinsky counted. “It lasted almost five days: it started earlier and ended later than scheduled… it was attended by 96 countries and saw the signing of over 90 international contracts for museum exhibitions, guest performances and exchanges…for the first time, and this is a very good trend, the forum was not just a club for cultural figures but also a place that attracted a lot of attention from the younger generation. Tens of thousands of St Petersburg students went to the forum.”

Putin said next to nothing: “Yes…Why?..Good…Very good…A very good festival, we need to cooperate with them…Good. Thank you.”

Eight weeks later on January 24, 2020, the Kremlin announced that Putin had removed Medinsky from the culture ministry, and instead appointed him an assistant to the President. There were no other details in the official announcement; nothing leaked then or later to the press on whether this was a demotion or promotion. What is certain is that Medinsky’s talk of cultural events was camouflage. Putin had told Medinsky he was changing his role for one of the most personal foreign policy operations on Putin’s agenda.

This didn’t materialize in public until Medinsky appeared as the leader of the Russian delegation to negotiate end-of-war terms with the Ukrainian government in Istanbul between March 29 and April 1, 2022.

Medinsky was sharply criticized by the General Staff, State Duma, and press for the terms he initialled in the draft agreement. After these domestic attacks combined to reverse Putin’s support for the pact and the Kiev regime appeared to withdraw under Anglo-American orders, Medinsky disappeared from view. But he has retained the role of Putin’s negotiator in the preparation of a sequel agreement, Istanbul-II.

He reappeared publicly at the Kremlin on July 5, 2024, when Medinsky was listed by the Kremlin in negotiation of end-of-war terms between Putin and Hungarian prime minister Victor Orban, and through Orban, US presidential candidate Donald Trump. In the Kremlin communiqué of the Orban talks, Medinsky was ranked ahead of foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yury Ushakov. The Kremlin has not explained what the former expert on Russian culture and history was doing there. Despite evidence made public by Orban himself, the Kremlin has denied the discussion in which Medinsky participated was about terms for an end of the Ukraine war with the US, after the presidential election on November 5.

A Moscow source confirms Medinsky was identified to Orban as Putin’s personal messenger. “He remains the chief negotiator but he has not been seen with the Chinese or with the Indians. This means that Putin is only serious about Orban – of course not about Orban, but Trump whom Orban went on to meet in Miami on July 11.”

Then last week, on September 20, Medinsky reappeared again in public, this time – and for his first time – at a weekly session of the Security Council.

According to the Kremlin communiqué, Putin began by announcing “we all know that in recent years, history has often been used as a means of achieving political goals with regard to our country. This is often done in an opportunistic and unscrupulous manner. As such, this can be viewed as a current policy issue, and our country, its official authorities need to define their attitude to it. Therefore, I propose that we discuss this today. We have two speakers, Mr Medinsky and Mr Lavrov.”

What Medinsky had to say about Russian history remains top secret. His Security Council speech has not been quoted on the Kremlin website; the Kremlin’s Telegram platform has ignored it. Asked for a copy or a summary of Medinsky’s remarks, the Kremlin press office replied: “If we get it, we’ll add it. Follow the website”. So far as Moscow political observers can remember, this is the first time that an official statement on Russian history has been classified.

Russian sources believe the reason is the same as Medinsky’s November 2019 meeting with Putin. It is camouflage. Only this time, the sources add, Putin’s purpose is to expose the camouflage himself, confirming he is ready for Istanbul-II, and is employing Medinsky in the president’s effort to override opposition to the end-of-war negotiations from the General Staff and from the Deputy Secretary of the Security Council, former president Dmitry Medvedev.

“Whatever Medinsky says is Putin’s thoughts exactly, more powerfully than Medvedev,” a Moscow source explains. “Putin wants the Americans to understand this.”

By making public Medinsky’s presence with Orban on July 5, and now at the Security Council on September 20, Putin is sending a signal to Trump, and also to the Biden Administration, that they should reciprocate with a negotiating signal of their own and stop the Kiev regime’s plans to escalate on the battlefield, with F-16 operations, and with long-range missile attacks on Russian territory.

Medinsky, 54, is Ukrainian. He was born at Smila, a small town 170 kilometres south of Kiev on the west bank of the Dnieper River. His father, Rostislav Ignatievich Medinsky (right), is a retired Soviet Army colonel who was a specialist in the automobile forces delivering ammunition and fuel, evacuating
and repairing combat vehicles. He served in the Prague intervention of 1968, the Afghanistan war, and in the military rescue operations associated with the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident (Ukraine) in 1986 and the Spitak earthquake of 1988 (Armenia). After he retired, he set up the Ya corporation in which his son Vladimir worked for a time.

His mother, Alla Viktorovna Medinskaya, is a general medical practitioner. Both parents appear to be ethnically Russian. They moved from garrison to garrison during the father’s army service, but then settled in Moscow where Vladimir went to high school.

He went on to study journalism and political science at universities in Moscow and then, at an unusually young age, he was posted to the Soviet (then Russian) Embassy in Washington in 1991-92. His arrival at the press department of the Embassy was registered by US counterintelligence as likely to indicate KGB cover. A Russian source comments: “Medinsky was definitely a KGB officer but low-level. Still, these guys have very high opinion of themselves just as Putin has of himself in Germany.”

Medinsky went on to a career in a variety of political party and government posts ever since. Between 2015 and 2017, however, he was the target of serious allegations that he had faked his expertise in Russian history and plagiarized large parts of his doctoral thesis, “Problems of objectivity in covering Russian history of the second half of the XV–XVII centuries.” Details of the case presented against Medinsky by several senior academicians and the scientific director of the Russian Military Historical Society were widely published.

The investigation became highly politicized at several universities, academic councils and the Ministry of Education, where by a split vote Medinsky retained his degree. By the end of the process, Medinsky’s survival in his job and his reputation for Russian history were attributed to intervention in his favour by Putin. A purge of Medinsky’s academic critics reportedly followed.

Since 2012 Medinsky was recorded as meeting Putin annually to brief him as Minister of Culture. In the same capacity, he arranged for the president to visit new Russian plays, films and theatres, and preside at ground breakings and unveilings of public monuments.

After he had left the ministry to join Putin’s personal staff, Medinsky was assigned the role of head of all government policymaking in education and culture, responsible for “strengthening the spiritual and moral foundations of society, preserving traditional values and state policy in the field of historical education.” He took charge of the rewriting of Russian history textbooks for the country’s schools.

In October 2020, Medinsky was reported by the Kremlin to have told a forum of the Russian Military Historical Society, the Russian Culture Foundation and the Victory Museum, that “it is “important to study the past “via one’s own answers to questions: how and why this happened and why our ancestors acted in this way.” He was followed at the same forum by Sergei Naryshkin, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, who said there are “similarities between historians and intelligence officers, because their professional duty is to take a look at the full picture and obtain unbiased and truthful information by analysing sources and gathering facts.”

For analysis of the terms Medinsky agreed to, on Putin’s instructions, during the Istanbul negotiations of March-April 2022, and why they were overruled in Moscow, read this.

In Istanbul on March 29, 2022, Medinsky, right, at the head of the Russian delegation, and extreme left, the head of the Ukrainian delegation, Davyd Arakhamia (aka Braun).

Medinsky, left, with Deputy Defence Minister Alexander Fomin in Istanbul on March 29: Fomin was reading the announcement: “The Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation has taken the decision to radically reduce combat operations in the Kiev and Chernigov areas in order to boost mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations and for the signing of the aforementioned agreement.”

By late in 2023, Medinsky began again to promote his role as Ukrainian peacemaker. “My personal deep conviction is that Ukraine and I have a common historical past, we are one people, and we have an inevitable common historical future.”

Source: https://rtvi.com/

In Medinsky’s interpretation of the Special Military Operation and of the purpose of Istanbul-I, the strategic objective was limited to the Crimea and the two Donbass regions, Lugansk and Donetsk. “Among the unconditional demands on our part was recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea, recognition of the independence of the republics of Donbass, then there was a large number of humanitarian demands, but we proceeded from the protection of the Russian—speaking population of Donbass… Russia’s peace with Ukraine will be possible with the full fulfillment of its tasks and goals.”

At the end of February this year, Medinsky told the press he is ready to resume his end-of-war negotiations with the Kiev regime in Istanbul. “If they give us the assignment,” he is quoted as saying, “we’ll go.” In another press report of the same remarks, Medinsky responded to announcement of a new mediation effort by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by saying: “They will give the instructions – let’s go.”

In his version of Istanbul-II, Medinsky has implied — just as he has insisted on his interpretation of Istanbul-I — that Russia is not at war with the US and NATO, dismissing the range of demilitarization of Ukrainian territory required by the General Staff and the Security Council, and ignoring the terms of regional security proposed by the Russian Foreign Ministry in the draft treaties presented to the US and NATO in December 2021.

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has confirmed Medinsky’s status in preparing for Istanbul-II. Medinsky “has conducted negotiations, so, of course, the entire array of developments is supervised by him,” Peskov said. He added: “the negotiating group has not yet been formed, since Moscow does not yet see prospects for the emergence of a peace process in Ukraine.”

Source: https://life.ru/p/1670471

Medinsky’s version of the end-of-war terms is flatly opposed by the General Staff. In the Security Council their case is argued by Deputy Chairman Medvedev. Medinsky’s appearance at the Security Council last week is a sign, Moscow sources believe, of the intensification of the debate between the Army and the President.

In an unusual disclosure of military command thinking, the former Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral Sergei Avakyants, has written earlier this month that “despite its external logic and attractiveness”, the Medinsky terms for ending the Special Military Operation “lead to a catastrophe that threatens to become the last and most tragic in the history of the Russian people. In Russia, it is dangerous for the current government to lose wars, especially when for a long time this government held parades and convinced the people of the invincibility of their native army. Defeat will cause disappointment and loss of faith, but not in the army, rather in the political leadership.”

Avakyants was warning Putin publicly. In private, Putin had ordered Avakyants’s dismissal in April. No Russian military blogger has reported the circumstances of the clash between Avakyants and the Kremlin.

Left: Admiral Sergei Avakyants; right, Avakyants’s unprecedented attack on Kremlin end-of-war negotiating strategy published on September 13, 2024.

According to Avakyants’s declaration of military independence from the Kremlin, “the pressure on Russia from its historical opponents will only increase, and the escalation process will enter an irreversible phase. The enormous resources currently invested in the indirect hot war of the collective West against our country will be redirected to finance all destructive and anti-state forces (regional separatism, ‘the fight against the rotten corrupt regime’, ‘the promotion of universal freedoms and values’, etc.). Various states ‘historically offended’ by our country will begin to make territorial claims against Russia from all sides.”

“The sanctions will not be lifted, but they may take even harsher and more painful forms for our economy. Part of the elite — weakened but still strong compradors, the remaining part of the ‘fifth column’ in the country – will painlessly adapt to the conditions of the collapse of the state. The country’s leadership, elite groups directly integrated into state structures, will be destroyed (politically, economically, and some even physically). No one will be forgiven, and no one will be forgotten.”

“It is very important for the West to once again demonstrate to the entire world what awaits the ‘rebels’ who have encroached on its model of world order. There is no hope for support from allies due to the absence of any (except Belarus). It will be necessary to answer a very difficult question that is already forming in the public consciousness: ‘For what were so many sacrifices made if the goals of the SVO were not achieved, and is not peace concluded at the expense of fundamental concessions to enemies a defeat for Russia?’ The people, having once again lost their ‘Faith’ and ‘Tsar’, will remain silent, watching the collapse of their ‘Fatherland’. All this will not happen overnight, but by historical standards very quickly – in five to seven years.”

“To avoid all this, Russia must choose the second option. It can be briefly described in two words – ‘Fight and Victory’. This option is unattractive and uncomfortable. It requires the leadership to assume the heaviest burden of responsibility, implement unpopular decisions, change the usual, established way of life for millions of people, introduce a different system of values and life priorities for the ruling elite. ‘Option No. 2’will require (for some time) exerting all efforts, attracting new personnel selected on the basis of professionalism, patriotism and the prevalence of the interests of society and the state over personal ones. It will be necessary to carry out a significant reorganization and restructuring of various government structures and a significant part of the entire state mechanism.”

In Avakyants’s outline of end-of-war terms, he proposes negotiations after military victory. “The victory must be unconditional – neither enemies, nor partners, nor our own people should have even the slightest doubt that this is Russia’s Victory. The goals declared by the President must be achieved without fail: access to the 2014 administrative borders of the DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions; denazification – a change of the ruling regime in Ukraine, a change in the Constitution of Ukraine and current legislation (permission for the UOC [Ukrainian Orthodox Church], official bilingualism, a ban on Nazi-Bandera ideology, etc.); demilitarization – constitutionally activated neutral status of Ukraine, prohibition of deployment on its territory of foreign military bases and military contingents (including advisers and instructors), heavy weapons, types of weapons capable of threatening the territory of Russia; after the invasion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces into the Kursk region, Ukrainian statehood in its current form should not exist or, in extreme cases, can be preserved, but weakened as much as possible.”

For the time being, no Russian mainstream media nor alternative press have reported Medinsky’s reemergence as Putin’s personal negotiator of end-of-war terms. The military bloggers Boris Rozhin (Colonal Cassad) and Mikhail Zvinchuk (Rybar) refused to respond to questions about Medinsky’s role. Dmitry Rogozin, currently the senator representing Zaporozhye and a future presidential succession candidate, has not commented publicly on Medinsky as Putin’s spokesman for negotiations.

The Communist Party, which fiercely attacked Medinsky’s performance in Istanbul-I, has warned against the prospects for Istanbul-II but party leaders and the party spokesman refuse to answer questions on Medinsky’s current role.

by Germán Gorraiz López- Political analyst

The globalist establishment would outline for the next five years a plan that would involve the recovery of the US role as a global gendarme through an extraordinary increase in US military interventions abroad to recover the Unipolarity on the global geopolitical board, following the Wolfowitz Doctrine, which outlined “a policy of unilateralism” and “preventive military action to suppress possible threats from other nations and prevent dictatorships from rising to the status of a superpower”, which implies a simultaneous lightning-fast nuclear attack by the United States against China, Russia and North Korea.

Biden and the “Nuclear Employment Guide”

According to the New York Times, President Joe Biden approved a highly classified nuclear strategic plan in March called the “Nuclear Employment Guide”. The plan ” aims, for the first time, to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges by China, Russia and North Korea and for the first time redirects the US deterrence strategy to focus on the rapid expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal” and according to the American newspaper, “this change occurs when the Pentagon estimates that China’s reserves will rival in size and diversity with those of the US and Russia over the next decade”.

China’s nuclear expansion would have raised alarm bells in the Pentagon as it would move faster than expected by US intelligence officials due to the change implemented by President Xi Jinping after abandoning the old strategy of maintaining a “minimum deterrent” and adopt the Nuclear Triad Doctrine of “matching or exceeding the size of the Russian and US nuclear arsenals by 2035”.Since the presidency of Harry Truman, this strategy has focused mainly on the Kremlin’s arsenal but for the first time, China appears in Biden’s new guidelines before the evidence of a change in the world nuclear cartography, as the new strategy emphasizes “the need to simultaneously deter Russia, the People’s Republic of China and North Korea”. Thus, according to estimates by the Pentagon, China’s nuclear strength would increase to 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030 and to 1,500 by 2035; so that the Chinese nuclear arsenal would equal the number of nuclear warheads currently owned by both the US and Russia and would sign up to part of the new nuclear Triad, with which the US nuclear arsenal would be in direct inferiority against the Russian-Chinese axis in case of nuclear conflagration.

Are the US convinced that we can win a nuclear war?
In an article published at the Quincy Institute entitled ” Reflection on Nuclear War, “Biden’s new nuclear strategy and the super-fuse that activates it,” MIT Dr. Theodore Postol states that “It is now possible, at least according to nuclear war fighting strategies, that the US will attack the more than 300 silo-based ICBMs that China has been building since about 2020 with the copious number of 100 kt Trident II W-76 warheads available. The rapid expansion of the W-76’s 100 kt hard-target killing capability also makes it possible for the United States to simultaneously attack the approximately 300 Russian ICBM based in silos”.So,” the superwarheads now being loaded into US missiles would be specifically designed for a simultaneous, first-strike, lightning nuclear attack on Russia, China and North Korea, to eliminate its capacity for retaliation and thus win a Third World War and then take control of the entire world”, to proceed then to the implementation of the New World Order following the doctrine of Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his book «Between two ages: The role of the United States in the techno-tronic era» (1.971), indicates that «the era of rebalancing global power has come, and this power must be handed over to a new global political order based on a trilateral economic link between Japan, Europe and the US». Such a doctrine would imply the submission of Russia and China and would include the possibility of a lightning-fast, no-warning nuclear attack by the US using Trident II missiles against vital Russian and Chinese targets, The European Union is a world leader in the field of education and training.

Real risk of nuclear winter

However, such an attack could not be definitive and could lead to a global conflagration with unforeseeable consequences for the human species and the future of the planet because according to a study published in the journal Nature, “a nuclear conflict between the United States and Russia would cause more than 5 billion deaths in the two years following the impact, and most of the casualties would be caused by the subsequent nuclear winter”.
The nuclear winter theory emerged from a study by Paul J. Crutzen and John Birks published in 1982 which states that ” nuclear explosions and subsequent fires would release into the atmosphere vast quantities of soot, dust and ash, causing a severe global cooling known as nuclear winter, which would last for at least two decades”.

Putin said that Russia’s nuclear doctrine has been changed. Key points.
1. The threshold for using nuclear weapons has been lowered. Now it will be easier for Russia to use nuclear weapons.
2. The main thing is that nuclear weapons can now be used against a non-nuclear state if it commits aggression against Russia with the support of a nuclear state.
3. Russia can also use nuclear weapons to defend not only itself, but also its allies. Specifically, Belarus.
4. Generally speaking, this means that Russia, according to the new doctrine, can now use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. There is Ukrainian aggression in the Kursk region. There is support from the nuclear USA, Britain, and France. This means that it is already possible to strike Kiev with nuclear weapons.
5. But Russia will not strike Kiev with Tactical Nuclear Weapons. This creates a contradiction – reminiscent of the story with the Red Lines. 6. But Russia is clearly threatening with nuclear weapons.
7. The reason for changing the nuclear doctrine is the threat of a complete escalation of the war against Russia by the West. The West is confident that Russia will not use TNW first. But Russia says it is ready.

S. M.

The discussion about Ukraine at the UN unexpectedly turned out to be largely about nuclear power plants.

1. China called for leaving the nuclear power plants alone and not involving them in the conflict.
2. Zelensky said that Russia is preparing strikes on three nuclear power plants.

3. Zelensky said that according to intelligence, Russia is using photos of nuclear power plants in Ukraine from Chinese satellites to prepare strikes on nuclear power plants in Ukraine.

4. It is known that Russia does not strike nuclear power plants, and Ukraine regularly strikes the periphery of the Zaporizhzhya NPP and the Kursk NPP.

5. In Russia, at the expert level, the need to strike at electrical substations that transmit electricity from nuclear power plants to the economy of Ukraine is being discussed. Since Ukraine receives most of its electricity from nuclear power plants, the only way to damage the Ukrainian power grid is to disconnect these networks from the nuclear power plant.

6. But for two years now, Russia has not even tried to disconnect the Ukrainian power grid from the nuclear power plant.

On the other hand, Zelensky’s message is all about escalation.

Zelensky’s speech at the UN Security Council was surprisingly not focused on peace initiatives. It was assumed that Zelensky would try to win the sympathy of the countries of the Global South and would lie that Ukraine was in favor of peace.

But it turned out that Zelensky did not say anything pleasant for the countries of the Global South. And he continued to speak like a war maniac. He spoke only about the need to force Russia to peace under the terms of Zelensky’s formula, that is, about the need to defeat Russia on the battlefield and then force Russia to semi-capitulate.

It is not very clear why Zelensky did not use this opportunity to win the sympathy of the countries of the Global South?

Options:

1. Zelensky knows that Washington is very close to making tough decisions about significantly greater NATO involvement in the war against Russia. And that is why he focused his speech not on the Global South, but on the West. And that is why he was so belligerent.

2. Zelensky has personally psychologically turned into a war maniac and cannot even talk about peace for tactical purposes.

Sergey Markov

by Gilbert Doctorow

For well over a year, we have known that Germany’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock is a disgrace to the government she serves. The lady is not smart enough to flip hamburgers at McDonalds let alone sit in the federal cabinet and make pronouncements bearing on war and peace. She will never live down her remark that Vladimir Putin must change his course by 360 degrees.

However, I had always thought of Chancellor Olaf Scholz as a wily fox. Of course, I believed that he is an out and out coward, a sell-out to American interests at the expense of his own nation. His silence on the sabotage of the Nord Stream I pipeline was proof positive. But stupid?

What he and his Defense Minister Boris Pistorius were saying these past two days on the sidelines of the Ramstein gathering of donors to the Ukrainian war effort leave little doubt that he is also a damned fool.

I have in mind Scholz’s announcement that Germany will now budget for new procurement of air defense capabilities for itself and will join other European countries in their plans to build what might be called an iron dome, if we may borrow from the Israeli lexicon, to describe an impenetrable screen against incoming airborne attack.

If such an announcement might have appeared to be patriotic and an investment in the security of his nation, say, a week ago, the events of the past week have trashed all such thoughts. Following the successful Russian missile attacks on Poltava, on Lviv, on Krivoy Rog and on several other towns in Ukraine where there were large concentrations of NATO officers, high level advisers and instructors, the notion that there is any defense whatsoever against Russian hypersonic missiles was disproved beyond any doubt.

The Russians say that their attack on the communications institute in Poltava, which may have killed 200 and sent to hospital with grievous wounds another 500, was executed with a variant of the Iskander missile, which has a maximum speed of Mach 6.

If we concede that Poltava may not have enjoyed very good protection from anti-missile defense, the situation was precisely the opposite in Lviv, which was protected by an American Patriot system plus additional systems manufactured in Germany, Italy and elsewhere within NATO. For this hardened target, the Russians used their Kinzhal missile which travels at Mach 10. If this were not enough, they also have the Avangard family of missiles which reach Mach 20. There is absolutely no known air defense which can protect against these missiles now in the Russian arsenal, and we may well assume that by the time the Germans will actually acquire and set up what they now are thinking of buying, the Russians will have still more advanced attack missiles that remain invincible.

As for the long range nuclear armed missiles that the United States is planning to deliver to Germany in 2026 with the consent of Mr. Scholz, that only has the effect of painting a very big bulls-eye on his country. Moreover, it is a provocation that could prompt a preemptive strike from Russia.

Would it not make more sense for the German leadership to face up to the facts: namely that Russia’s ability to destroy their country is for the foreseeable future beyond their own ability to protect themselves, with or without American help. That admission should lead them to do the obvious: sit down with the Russians and come to terms over a new security architecture for Europe that everyone, EVERYONE can live with.

I close with a couple of further observations about what the Russians were doing this week. In Lviv, they not only killed numerous NATO personnel but destroyed a newly arrived train from Poland carrying a large amount of advanced weaponry for Ukraine. By choosing as targets installations in various cities where NATO officers are living, the Kremlin was delivering an unmistakable message to the Alliance, to its main decision maker, the United States, that it has the will and the wherewithal to take on NATO directly wherever and whenever it believes that its ‘red lines’ are being crossed. It may well be that even in Washington this message was received …and understood. To my knowledge, Zelensky’s bleating at Ramstein for permission to use long-range NATO supplied missiles to attack the Russian heartland fell on deaf ears.

by Paul Schwennesen via Reason

Dr. Paul Schwennesen is a military affairs analyst and environmental historian.

A front-line report from the Kursk offensive reveals that in the battle for hearts and minds, Ukraine’s resolve outpaces Russia’s crumbling morale, signaling an inevitable conclusion.

Wars end long before armistices are signed. A war’s end, after all, is a matter of will, of spirit—and popular will is only haltingly, grudgingly reflected in the political machinery of peace talks.

Though it may seem astonishingly premature to say so, my impression after returning from the Russian front is that the war in Ukraine is over and that the powers that be haven’t realized it yet. In the Kursk salient, at least, I can personally attest to the eerie, almost surreal inversion of spirits between the people of Ukraine and Russia. The moral scales have now firmly settled on the side of the Ukrainian defenders, and it is far likelier that Russia itself splinters into its constituent republics than that Ukraine falls to its erstwhile invaders.

I was in Irpin and Bucha nearly three years ago, while they were still smoldering from Russian occupation. The mood then, as we pulled burned bodies with bound hands from the tree lines, was a tragedy-enforced grim determination. Evidence of Ukrainian resistance was everywhere: crates of Molotov cocktails on street corners, invective-laced messages scrawled on storefronts, spent shell casings piled behind makeshift barriers against the intruders—all of it unequivocally pointing to a deep-seated resolve.

In Russia today, it is entirely different—it is a moral vacuum. Its citizens in Kursk fled the Ukrainian advance like smoke in the wind, leaving homes and possessions without so much as a whimper. I saw exactly one makeshift roadblock, consisting of a few chairs and a rake. Russian civil resistance is (or was) desultory at best. The comparison is stark: Despite Russia’s enormous advantages in mass and material, the will to fight is fundamentally absent.

Ukrainian morale, meanwhile, is topping the charts—bordering on euphoria even. A fervent passion for taking the fight to their enemies has infected the front and operations are conducted amid a general scrum of units desperate to be part of the action. A sense of Wild West–like possibility draws a cast of aggressive fighters, many eagerly engaging in their own semiprivate pirate operations in the free-for-all. This does not necessarily imply a lack of Ukrainian command and control, only that a willingness to take the fight into Russia is pervasive—the Ukrainian armed forces are like a spirited charger, barely reined in. The ambiance is almost party-like—battle-hardened and battle-hungry troops alike joke and banter at the last gas station before the Russian border, glad and relieved to be free of the grinding stalemate of the last months as they race toward the expanding front.

In Russia meanwhile, there is silence. Of the tiny handful of remaining civilians in the Kursk area, some eagerly interact with the occupiers while the rest furtively attend to their habitual routines. One woman we spoke to turned down an offer of Ukrainian cash (a gift from my daughter), asking bitterly, “And where would I spend that?” Dogs and cats wander the streets forlornly, while herds of sheep move in from the countryside to gorge on the town’s unharvested fruit trees.

Those Russians left behind engage in petty low-grade looting of their former neighbors’ homes. The overriding sense is one of poverty—physical as well as moral—a kind of community-wide bankruptcy. A faded plaque on a home proclaimed a “Veteran of the Great Patriotic War” once lived there, and my Ukrainian comrade noted how sadly decrepit his home was. “Russians are known for brutalizing their neighbors,” he said, “but it is the Russians themselves who are the most brutalized of all because they do it to themselves.”

Ukrainian occupiers, for their part, are too busy dashing into and through these small Russian towns to bother much with the spoils of war. Moreover, the comparatively wealthy Ukrainian forces laugh at the grimy and obsolete possessions of their neighbors—continually surprised at the degree of pervasive shortage. Ukrainian soldiers instead feed the abandoned dogs, then move quickly onward to press their advantage at the far fringes of the active front line.

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The action in Kursk is a reminder to Westerners that the Russian behemoth is far from a monolithic, integrated federation. It is instead a tentative, demoralized, loosely adhered tissue of a nation, held together primarily through fear and learned dependence on the state. Separatist sentiment, never fully extinguished, is rising rapidly in regions like Chechnya and Karelia and across some 85 other autonomous regions spanning 11 time zones, most of which have long traditions of independence.

Leo Tolstoy famously wrote of the Russian army: “This horde is not an army because it possesses neither any real loyalty to faith, tsar and fatherland—words that have been so much misused!—nor valour, nor military dignity. All it possesses are, on the one hand, passive patience and repressed discontent, and on the other, cruelty, servitude and corruption.” Things have not appreciably improved since.

Russia’s incursion into Ukraine has simply run out of moral impetus. It has the resources, of course, to engage in a substantial amount of lingering mayhem. No doubt it will. But the Ukrainians I’ve met simply cannot envisage a scenario in which they lose. They are prepared to fight in the streets to the last man, and their commitment to freedom is overwhelming. In contrast to the current Russian mood, which seems largely to be one of confused apathy, Ukrainians have the decided advantage.

Wars are won in the heart of a people, not through the rational calculations of military planners. While there is momentum left in the Russian war machine, it is only a matter of time before reality sinks in that the Russian heart is not in this fight. Whether the war ends in the shattering of its fragile federation or in some half-hearted armistice measures to mitigate its appalling losses, Russia simply cannot go on. The Kursk offensive, for all its complexities and contradictions, has, if nothing else, opened a clear window into the popular wills of each side.

What are the plans of the war party in the West? Compare this view to that of Gilbert Doctorow, also reading the tea leaves from Boris Johnson:

1. The West believes that the Russian economy produces few new weapons systems. And the main thing that the Russian army is fighting with is repaired and slightly modernized Soviet tanks, artillery and rocket launchers. And the supply of such weapons is gradually ending due to the large losses of the Russian army. — According to their calculations, the Russian army will run out of these Soviet weapons by the spring or summer of 2025.

2. A wave of mobilization in Ukraine and new supplies of weapons to Ukraine will make the Armed Forces of Ukraine much stronger by the spring of 2025.

3. Therefore, in the summer of 2025 there will be a turning point at the front in favor of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

4. This will require a new mobilization from the Kremlin in the summer of 2025.

5. Mobilization will lead to mass protests and regime change in Russia.

6. They are now imposing this plan on Trump. They say, we will defeat the Russians in 2025. And then we will make peace with them. In the meantime, we need to sharply increase the supply of weapons to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

7. It was this plan that Boris Johnson gave to Trump and this plan that Johnson described in the media.

Serghey Markov

by Chris Wright via https://original.antiwar.com/Chris_Wright/2024/07/11/natos-endgame-appears-to-be-nuclear-war/

The world is at its most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Back then, however, the fear of total destruction consumed the public; today, few people seem even to be aware of this possibility.

It is easily imaginable that nuclear war could break out between Russia (and perhaps China) and the West, yet politicians continue to escalate tensions, place hundreds of thousands of troops at “high readiness,” and attack military targets inside Russia, even while ordinary citizens blithely go on with their lives.

The situation is without parallel in history.

Consider the following facts. A hostile military alliance, now including even Sweden and Finland, is at the very borders of Russia. How are Russian leaders – whose country was almost destroyed by Western invasion twice in the 20th century – supposed to react to this? How would Washington react if Mexico or Canada belonged to an enormous, expansionist, and highly belligerent anti-U.S. military alliance?

As if expanding NATO to include Eastern Europe wasn’t provocative enough, Washington began to send billions of dollars’ worth of military aid to Ukraine in 2014, to “improve interoperability with NATO,” in the words of the Defense Department. Why this Western involvement in Ukraine, which, as Barack Obama said while president, is “a core Russian interest but not an American one”? One reason was given by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in a recent moment of startling televised candor: Ukraine is “sitting on $10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals… I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China.”

As The Washington Post has reported: “Ukraine harbors some of the world’s largest reserves of titanium and iron ore, fields of untapped lithium, and massive deposits of coal. Collectively, they are worth tens of trillions of dollars.” Ukraine also has colossal reserves of natural gas and oil, in addition to neon, nickel, beryllium, and other critical rare earth metals. For NATO’s leadership, Russia and, in particular, China can’t be permitted access to these resources. The war in Ukraine must, therefore, continue indefinitely, and negotiations with Russia mustn’t be pursued.

Meanwhile, as Ukraine was being de facto integrated into NATO in the years before 2022, the United States put into operation an anti-ballistic-missile site in Romania in 2016. As Benjamin Abelow notes in How the West Brought War to Ukraine, the missile launchers that the ABM system uses can accommodate nuclear-tipped offensive weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missile. “Tomahawks,” he points out, “have a range of 1,500 miles, can strike Moscow and other targets deep inside Russia, and can carry hydrogen bomb warheads with selectable yields up to 150 kilotons, roughly 10 times that of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.” Poland now boasts a similar ABM site.

American assurances that these anti-missile bases are defensive in nature, to protect against an (incredibly unlikely) attack from Iran, can hardly reassure Russia, given the missile launchers’ capability to launch offensive weapons.

In another bellicose move, the Trump administration in 2019 unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. Russia responded by proposing that the U.S. declare a moratorium on the deployment of short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, saying it wouldn’t deploy such missiles as long as NATO members didn’t. Washington dismissed these proposals, which upset some European leaders. “Has the absence of dialogue with Russia,” French President Emmanuel Macron said, “made the European continent any safer? I don’t think so.”

The situation is especially dangerous given what experts call “warhead ambiguity.” As senior Russian military officers have said, “There will be no way to determine if an incoming ballistic missile is fitted with a nuclear or a conventional warhead, and so the military will see it as a nuclear attack” that warrants a nuclear retaliation. A possible misunderstanding could thus plunge the world into nuclear war.

So now we’re more than two years into a proxy war with Russia that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and has seen Ukraine even more closely integrated into the structures of NATO than it was before. And the West continues to inch ever closer to the nuclear precipice. Ukraine has begun using U.S. missiles to strike Russian territory, including defensive (not only offensive) missile systems.

This summer, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium will begin sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, and Denmark and the Netherlands have said there will be no restrictions on the use of these planes to strike targets in Russia. F-16s are able to deliver nuclear weapons, and Russia has said the planes will be considered a nuclear threat.

Bringing the world even closer to terminal crisis, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg states that 500,000 troops are at “high readiness,” and in the next five years, NATO allies will “acquire thousands of air defense and artillery systems, 850 modern aircraft – mostly fifth-generation F-35s – and also a lot of other high-end capabilities.” Macron has morphed into one of Europe’s most hawkish leaders, with plans to send military instructors to Ukraine very soon. At the same time, NATO is holding talks about taking more nuclear weapons out of storage and placing them on standby.

Where all this is heading is unclear, but what’s obvious is that Western leaders are acting with reckless disregard for the future of humanity. Their bet is that Russian President Vladimir Putin will never deploy nuclear weapons, despite his many threats to do so and recent Russian military drills to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. Given that Russian use of nuclear warheads might well precipitate a nuclear response by the West, the fate of humanity hangs on the restraint and rationality of one man, Putin – a figure who is constantly portrayed by Western media and politicians as an irrational, bloodthirsty monster. So the human species is supposed to place its hope for survival in someone we’re told is a madman, who leads a state that feels besieged by the most powerful military coalition in history, apparently committed to its demise.

Maybe the madmen aren’t in the Russian government but rather in NATO governments?

It is downright puzzling that millions of people aren’t protesting in the streets every day to deescalate the crisis and pull civilization back from the brink. Evidently the mass media have successfully fulfilled their function of manufacturing consent. But unless the Western public wakes up, the current crisis might not end as benignly as did the one in 1962.

by Andrey Sushentsov, program director at the Valdai Club.

The desire of the US to dominate and its refusal to see other countries as equals, willing and able to assume equal responsibility for peace and stability, is the short answer to the question of why Moscow-Washington relations cannot get out of the current state of crisis. This attitude also leads the US to the same difficulties in its relations with China, India and even some of its own allies, such as Turkey.

The Russian and Chinese position is buttressed by the principle that peace is the result of compromise between the major centers of power, and that without their mutual agreement – without equality, mutual respect, a willingness to recognize each other’s interests, and adherence to the principle of non-interference in internal affairs – a stable order is impossible. The US believes, however, that peace is a deterministic given, and that no special effort is needed to maintain it. This leads to paradoxical solutions: the more weapons, the more peace. The West is not yet ready to become just one of the Atlanteans holding up the sky. It still believes it should be in charge.

Are changes in relations between Moscow and Washington possible with a change of administration in the United States? I expect that this will not have a significant impact on the American line towards Russia. It is useful to look at American politics as an independent factor in our planning – we need to assume we cannot rely on the US elites. Washington will in most cases act with hostility towards Russia, in some cases opportunistically, engaging Moscow at time when it suits its own interests.

There is still a paradigm gap between Russians and Americans in their understanding of the world in the 21st century. US experts believe that Russia is part of the West and will inevitably end up in the Western camp at the end of this crisis, with China as its opponent. This set of paradoxical ideas has been present in the American narrative since the early 1990s.

The Americans believe that ultimately Russia has no alternative, and will therefore accept any offer from Washington. With the dollar sure to remain as the dominant currency for the medium term, the US will be an important country. And much depends on its turbulent domestic political life.

When it comes to Ukraine, the Americans think in investment banking terms and say straight out that Ukraine is a fairly cheap instrument that serves two purposes: to weaken Russia and to stifle any voices in Europe calling for strategic autonomy from the US.

Over the past two years, Washington has found this method of mobilisation quite cheap. Indeed, Russia-EU relations have been disrupted, the main gas pipeline linking the Russian and Western European energy systems has been destroyed, Eastern Europe has been militarised, the US military-industrial complex has been strengthened, and economic activity has flowed from Europe to the US. The American economy has gained from this crisis, while the Western European economy has suffered badly.

What are the US objectives in the Ukraine crisis? It wants a weakened Russia, which has lost control of key advantages in the Eurasian space, such as in transport, economics, production and energy. The US wants to knock Russia out of the top five world powers and make it strategically secondary.

However, the US is beginning to realize that Ukraine as an instrument of deterrence against Moscow is no longer a cheap resource. Kiev’s own military, material and human resources are close to exhaustion, and maintaining the viability of the Ukrainian state is becoming increasingly expensive for the US and the EU.

The US has been looking at Russia as a declining strategic player for some time. They were waiting for the moment when the country would leave the top-five leading countries in order to deal with China. Why did the US abandon negotiations with Moscow at the end of 2021, push Ukraine towards a military solution to the crisis, and then forbid it to negotiate with Russia? They believed that a quick victory over Russia was achievable, that the 52 countries the US had gathered in a coalition around Ukraine – their economies, resources, military arsenals, intelligence, satellite constellations, arms supplies, political intelligence and other support – would be enough to defeat our country. The West had not properly assessed Russia’s potential and that of their own coalition, and the short-term goals they set themselves have proved unattainable. They believe that a country whose economy apparently accounts for 3% of the world’s nominal GDP cannot fight the entire grand coalition on its own. But when Western countries have 65-80% of their GDP in the service sector, rather than in heavy industry and weapons-related areas, a situation arises in which Russia alone produces more artillery shells than all the Western states. This is a paradox that the US has not taken into account.

The US-Russian standoff should be seen as a long-term confrontation. It will continue even after Washington realizes that Ukraine has lost its importance as a tool. As a result, the US will shift the center of anti-Russian activity to another country that, like Ukraine, is willing to sacrifice itself and be at the forefront of the fight against Moscow. The US will not cease to be a strategic rival, and therefore we cannot afford to ignore it in our planning. We must regard the Americans as a constant threat, and prepare for a long confrontation.

This article was first published by Valdai Discussion Club, translated and edited by the RT team.