via Moon of Alabama

This is a follow on to yesterday’s Ukrainian Tochka-U missile strike on the Kramatorsk railway station. Russia no longer has Tochka missiles (search for Tochka in the pdf) while the Ukraine, Belarus and several other states still use them.

There is now additional evidence that the missile was fired by Ukrainian forces. The facts do not matter in ‘western’ media who stick to whatever story they are told to produce. Still, I do believe that facts matter at least in the long term and that there is a historic value in documenting them.

The Tochka-U is a tactical missile with a maximum range of some 120 kilometer. It is typically fired from a transporter, erector, launcher vehicle (TEL) with little need of preparations.

The TEL vehicle for the Tochka is a six wheeled BAZ 5921 /5922. These are amphibious floating hull chassis. The picture below shows a BAZ TEL in parade mode with a Tochka missile slightly erected. In the normal transport mode the missile lies horizontally under a protective roof.

biggerThere were several claims of such vehicles being seen in Belarus or with Russian forces in Ukraine. But not every six wheeled BAZ vehicle can be said to be a Tochka missile TEL or Tochka transporter. There are various look alike variants of the vehicle with radar or communication equipment or simply used as transporters or ferries for all kind of goods.
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The Tochka missile, below in a firing position, consists of a rocket engine, four fins and grids to direct its course, a solid fuel compartment and a warhead at its front. A complete missile weighs about 2,000 kilogram.

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There are various warhead types available which weigh about 500 kilogram each.

The warhead which was used in Kramatorsk is a fragmentation one with 20 sub-munitions (gray) each with some 7.5 kilogram of explosives enclosed in a metal hull.

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Over the target area these sub-munitions get expelled and explode while still in the air and each one creates some 800 fragments. The warhead thus leaves no hole in the ground but expels a huge number of deadly metal fragments at high speed over a relative large area. The Tochka missiles are not very precise. They have a circular error probability (CEP) of some 150 meters. They are so called area weapons to be used against concentrations of infantry or unarmored vehicles.

After being fired the rocket engine propels the warhead towards is destination. Shortly before the impact the warhead separates from the booster section and continues its path while the rocket engine shuts down. Having lost its thrust and aerodynamic tip the relative heavy booster section will then tumble to the ground. If everything works as designed the booster section always falls short of the warhead section.

Which brings us to the scene in Kramatorsk. Several pictures from the scene show the booster section of the missile.

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The place where it landed was geo-located as being near a parking space some 60 meter west-southwest of the railway station. Here is the Google maps view of the railway station area. The warhead explosions happened on the east side of the station over the departure platform.

The location of the booster debris and where the explosion happened allows one to point out the trajectory from where the missile was fired. I have checked the locations depicted below and found them to be correct.

North is to the top. The station is encircled and the point is where the booster section landed. The arrow shows the trajectory the missile must have taken.

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Oh, the map is annotated in Russian and you don’t trust Russian sources? Well, here is the New York Times posting a similar map.

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Here is map from Liveuamap depicting the current front lines in Ukraine. Kramatorsk is marked in yellow.

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Note that there are no Russian or Russia-aligned forces west-southwest of Kramatorsk within the 120 km maximum range of a Tochka missile. The missile must have been fired by Ukrainian forces.

Unsurprisingly the Russian military has come to the same conclusion:

An analysis of the engagement radius of the warhead, as well as the characteristic position of Tochka-U missile’s tail section, clearly confirm that it was launched from a south-western direction away from Kramatorsk.According to intelligence reports, one of the divisions of the 19th Missile Brigade armed with Tochka-U missile systems at the time of the strike on Kramatorsk was located near Dobropol’e in Donetsk Region, 45 km south-west of Kramatorsk.

This area is still under the full control of the Ukrainian military grouping troops in Donbass.

The publicly available evidence shows that the Ukrainian military must have fired the missile that killed some 50 Ukrainian civilians in Kramatorsk.

The only purpose of the attack I can think of was to create propaganda that, when distributed as ‘Russian attack’ through ‘western’ media, will create more military support for Ukraine.

Everyone who urges to give more arms to the Ukraine or who eggs it on to continue this war is guilty of creating impetus for more incidents like the one seen in Kramatorsk.

via Moon of Alabama

U.S. ‘intelligence’ folks tell their stenographers at NBC News that their obvious lies are obvious lies.

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That announced ‘break with the past’ of faking ‘intelligence’ happened when?

How ‘rock solid’ was the ‘intelligence’ about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction or chemical weapons attacks in Douma, Syria?

U.S. ‘intelligence’, then and now, is pure imagination for the purpose of deceiving the U.S. and ‘western’ publicabout the reality of this or that conflict:

It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine.

President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.

Unlike the U.S. Russia no longer has any ‘banned munitions’:

The OPCW’s inspection teams have verified the destruction at seven chemical weapons destruction facilities in the Russian Federation. On 27 September 2017, the last of these facilities, located in Kizner, officially concluded its operations.With the total elimination of Russia’s declared chemical weapons programme, 96.3 per cent of all chemical weapon stockpiles declared by possessor States have been destroyed under OPCW verification.

That is why the U.S. ‘intelligence’ claim of a potential use of Russian chemical weapons was obvious nonsense from the get go:

It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance. Coordinated by the White House National Security Council, the unprecedented intelligence releases have been so frequent and voluminous, officials said, that intelligence agencies had to devote more staff members to work on the declassification process, scrubbing the information so it wouldn’t betray sources and methods.

Sure, devote more people for the ‘declassification process’ of creating mere fantasies or for the the reproduction of public sources:

Just this week, national security adviser Jake Sullivan stood at the White House podium and read out what officials said was more declassified intelligence, asserting that Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment that signals a significant assault on eastern and southern Ukraine, one that U.S. officials believe could be a protracted and bloody fight.

That ‘declassified intelligence’ Sullivan read out was the copy of a public announcement the Ministry of Defense of Russia had made on March 30:

Planned regrouping of troops in Kiev and Chernigov directions is underway.The first stage of the special military operation conducted by the Russian Armed Forces in Donbas and Ukraine was planned to force the enemy to concentrate its forces, means, resources and military equipment to hold on to high populated areas in these directions, including Kiev. To bring them down on the battlefield and, without storming these cities to avoid civilian casualties, inflict such a defeat on the armed formations of the Kiev regime that it would not be able to use these forces in the main direction of our Armed Forces in Donbass.

All these goals have been met.

At the same time, the Russian army also solved another task, namely – in the absence of an inflow of fresh enemy forces from the western and central regions of Ukraine, through professional military action, using the absolute air dominance it had gained, also using modern high-precision weapons – to create all the necessary conditions for the final stage of the operation to liberate the People’s Republics of Donbass.
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Thus, all the main tasks of the Russian Armed Forces in Kiev and Chernigov directions have been completed.

The objective of the regrouping of the Russian Armed Forces is to intensify action in priority areas and, above all, to complete the operation for the total liberation of Donbass.

To claim that official public announcement by the Russian military are ‘declassified intelligence’ is of course bullshit. But NBC News stenographers won’t tell you that. Instead we get more of this nonsense:

Multiple U.S. officials acknowledged that the U.S. has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect, as with chemical agents, and other times, as an official put it, the U.S. is just “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”

Does anyone believe that Putin gives a f*** about U.S. ‘intelligence’ claims?

No:

Some officials believe, however, that trying to get into Putin’s head is a meaningless exercise, because he will do what he wants regardless.
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The biggest success of the U.S. information offensive may have been delaying the invasion itself by weeks or months, which officials believe they did with accurate predictions that Russia intended to attack, based on definitive intelligence.

Those ‘accurate predictions’ included the false claims that Russia would invade the Ukraine on February 11, February 14 and February 16:

The noise has become deafening.

• US warns war could be ‘imminent’ in Ukraine – Politico, Feb 11, 2022

> The U.S. intelligence briefing included specific reference to next Wednesday, February 16, as a start date for the ground invasion, three officials — based in Washington, London and Ukraine — told POLITICO. <

• Russian invasion could begin at any time, White House says – Reuters, Feb 14, 2022

‘Could’ is doing a lot of work in those headlines.

Can we get it a bit more precise?

• DAWN RAID Russia set to invade Ukraine at 1AM tomorrow with massive missile blitz and 200,000 troops, US intelligence claims – The Sun, Feb 15, 2022
• Russia will order invasion of Ukraine at 3am tomorrow, sources say – Coventry Telegraph, Feb 15, 2022

1am or 3am?

Which is it?

And in what timezone?

In fact, Russia had not decided to invade Ukraine at that time. The decision was most likely made after February 19, after the Ukrainian military had intensified its bombardment of Donbas and after the Ukrainian president Zelinsky had threatened to acquire nuclear weapons:

Starting in mid February the OSCE observers around Donbas noted in their daily reports a strong increase in ceasefire violation and explosions.

biggerMost of the violations came from the Ukrainian site and the explosions of the fired shells and missile happened on Donbas held grounds. On February 19, at the hight of the fire, Zelensky gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference. He prominently mentioned the Budapest Memorandum under which the Ukraine had given up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the USSR:

“.. Ukraine will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt.”

One of the package decisions Ukraine took in 1994 was the entering of Ukraine into the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Russia understood Zelensky’s remark in Munich as a threat by Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons. It already has the expertise, materials and means to do that.

A fascist controlled government with nukes on Russia’s border? This is not about Putin at all. No Russian government of any kind could ever condone that.

I believe that this credible threat, together with the artillery preparations for a new war on Donbas, was what convinced Russia’s government to intervene by force.

The Russian military operation was clearly provoked. It started on February 24, months after U.S. ‘intelligence’ had falsely warned of an ‘imminent’ attack, eight days AFTER Ukrainian artillery preparations to attack Donbas had begun, five days AFTER Zelinsky’s nuclear speech and two days AFTER the U.S. and its allies had implemented unprecedented sanctions against Russia.

NBC News, as well as other western outlets, allow themselves to be abused by presenting U.S. ‘intelligence’ claims they know are outright lies:

Game or not, U.S. intelligence officials say it has been successful. Intelligence is rarely definitive, and Biden officials have calculated in some cases that it’s better to pre-empt something that might not happen, rather than stay silent and watch it unfold.“It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence when we talk about it,” a U.S. official said. “It’s more important to get out ahead of them — Putin specifically — before they do something. It’s preventative. We don’t always want to wait until the intelligence is 100 percent certainty that they are going to do something. We want to get out ahead to stop them.”

Edged on by the ‘intelligence’ community the ‘western’ media ‘get ahead’ and produce one lie after the other.

Here they are, reporting on some scruffy cat in Bucha, a town that had seen five weeks of intense front-line fighting.

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The recently sensationalized mass graves in Bucha were of its Volkssturm ‘civilian defenders’ and of Russian soldiers deceased there. They were dug on March 12 and had nothing to do with the recent pull back of Russian forces. Some carefully filmed bodies in the streets of Bucha have likely been casualties of weeks old Ukrainian artillery strikes. Others bound and killed there, likely by Ukrainian Azov fascists, were wearing white arm bandsidentifying them as neutral to Russian forces.

Only rarely do we get insight from ‘western’ media of what the people on the ground in Ukraine really feel:

8:58 6 Apr – In eastern Ukraine, some don’t blame Putin for the war
Jonathan Beale, BBC News, Donbas

We visited the town of Lysychansk, about a mile from the front line. It’s one of many residential areas to have been hit by Russian artillery over the past few days.
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A Ukrainian soldier led us through the mostly-deserted streets to an underground shelter.Inside in a gloomy room we talked to two old women, who were trying to keep warm in front of an electric fire.

We asked them who they thought was responsible for shelling their town – astonishingly, neither blamed Russia or President Vladimir Putin. They thought their grim situation was as much the fault of Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Whenever such rare reality reports, like the above or this one, come out, they get buried in an overwhelming stream of ‘intelligence’ bullshit and pro-war propaganda:

A video posted online on Monday and verified by The New York Times appears to show a group of Ukrainian soldiers killing captured Russian troops outside a village west of Kyiv.“He’s still alive. Film these marauders. Look, he’s still alive. He’s gasping,” a man says as a Russian soldier with a jacket pulled over his head, apparently wounded, is seen still breathing. A soldier then shoots the man twice. After the man keeps moving, the soldier shoots him again, and he stops.

At least three other apparent Russian soldiers, including one with an obvious head wound who has his hands tied behind his back, can be seen dead near the victim. All are wearing camouflage, and three have white arm bands commonly worn by Russian troops. Equipment is scattered around them and there are blood stains near each man’s head.

For every atrocity Ukrainian troops and militia commit U.S. ‘intelligence’ will create five or more fairy tales of ‘Russian atrocities’ which the media, well knowing that such claims are likely false, will lap up and repeat.

The only advice one can give in such a situation is to always assume that it is the exact opposite of what any ‘intelligence’ claims that is actually happening.

by Finian Cunningham via
Strategic-Culture

Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine takes war to a new level of information warfare. Over the past three weeks, Western mainstream media has unleashed a tsunami of false information and distortion that has swept many people off their feet in disarray.

Appropriately, if not actually intended, on March 15 – the Ides of March no less – we had front pages blaring that Russia’s troops were facing defeat in two weeks. The NATO-backed Kiev regime forces “had Russian troops on the run”, or so we were told.

On the same date – famous for ominous predictions – Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky was reported by Western media as urging Russian soldiers to surrender such was, it was implied, the futile no-win situation for them.

So make a note of that. By the end of this month, as the Western media messaging goes, Russia will be defeated by the NATO-backed Ukrainian rag-tag of NeoNazi brigades. Not only that but as U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham and American social media corporations have intimated Russian President Vladimir Putin may be assassinated.

The concoction of Shakespeare and Julius Caesar as a way to portray the conflict in Ukraine finds a handy cipher in the form of Ukraine’s Zelensky, the man who formerly was a comedy actor before he became president in 2019. Zelensky last week addressed the British House of Parliament by video to standing ovations, with stirring words channeling the famous English Bard and also wartime hero Winston Churchill. It was political theater written by Zelensky’s handlers in the CIA and MI6.

The actor-politician is pretty convincing too. He has played up his purported Jewish ancestry and Holocaust relatives as a way to undermine Russia’s claims of Neo-Nazi paramilitaries over-running Ukraine. Russia’s information on the Azov Battalion and other fascist formations is corroborated and well-documented by independent sources.

Zelensky has been at once a man of many parts. Some Western media remark on his high-profile public appearances rallying Ukrainians to resist, yet at the same time, incongruously, he has also been busy making defiant speeches dressed in military fatigues from what appears to be a secret bunker. That alleged precaution, we are informed (sic), is to prevent the Russian military from discovering his exact location and assassinating him with an airstrike.

A glitch in the drama – seemingly unnoticed by the fawning media – were reports of the prime ministers from Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia flying to Kiev on March 15 to meet with Zelensky and to demonstrate European solidarity.

Really? If Zelensky was hiding in bunkers out of fear for his life from Russian missiles and if Kiev was such a war zone from alleged indiscriminate airstrikes – as the Western media report wall-to-wall – would these European leaders really venture into the Ukrainian capital?

The conflict in Ukraine appears to be like no other in terms of the rampant false information and virtual realities that the Western media are using. It’s reminiscent of the Western hysteria over Syria and the “Siege of Aleppo” in late 2016 which turned out to be liberated by the Syrian army and its Russian allies from Western-backed terrorists. Images of explosions and civilian casualties attributed to Russian forces have been identified as being clipped from other wars, locations and years. Airstrikes in Gaza by Israeli forces have been reported as occurring in Ukrainian cities. Even Hollywood disaster movies have provided images recycled for “reports” of alleged Russian violations.

No doubt the Russian military intervention in Ukraine has caused suffering and displacement. What war has ever not? A Russian news program was disrupted when one of its employees mounted an anti-war protest on air.

But this war could have been avoided if the U.S. and its NATO allies had heeded Russia’s long-time security concerns. The weaponization of Ukraine since the CIA-orchestrated coup in 2014 and the unleashing of Neo-Nazi forces against Russian-speaking people were bound to result in war. The last straw was when Russian efforts at negotiating were met with relentless intransigence by the NATO powers.

Moscow says its military operation launched on February 24 will continue until the Kiev regime agrees to foreswear joining NATO, to eradicate its Neo-Nazi paramilitaries, and recognize Russia’s historic claim to Crimea as well as recognize the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

Zelensky has responded erratically like the puppet on a string he indubitably is. There have been four rounds of negotiations between his representatives and Russia. The Ukrainian CIA-MI6 puppet has at times talked about giving up on NATO membership and acceding to Russia’s territorial claims. Then he flips by giving defiant resistance speeches and calling for Russia’s surrender. The conclusion is that Zelensky and his regime are not serious about negotiating a resolution. Their function is to string out conflict as long as possible in order to undermine Russia and prolong the misery of the Ukrainian population – many of whom are glad to see Russian forces get rid of this corrupt regime.

The Western reporting on the conflict in Ukraine like Zelensky and his regime is something of an elaborate propaganda chimera. We are told the war is due entirely to the mad ravings of an evil Russian tyrant called Vladimir Putin – who, ludicrously, is comparable to Hitler. Western trashy tabloids as well as high-brow people like the US-based Bulletin of Atomic Scientists warn us that “Mad Vlad” is ready to use nuclear weapons or chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. This is from Western media whose governments and military establishments were running biowarfare labs in Ukraine and who are training Neo-Nazi death squads.

Indeed, we may beware the Ides of March. Western propaganda is foretelling the downfall of Russia. The media are making Russia look desperate and depraved ready to use weapons of mass destruction. What for? A seeming self-fulfilling prophesy where they get to play savior of Ukraine? The really desperate side is the side that is really desperate.

via Moon of Alabama

There is significant danger that the Ukraine, the UK or the U.S. will launch a false flag attack in Ukraine.

People have started to take note of the directional fear mongering that is coming from various ‘western’ officials.

The Sirius Report @thesiriusreport – 23:36 UTC · Mar 12, 2022

Setting the scene for a false flag?Polish President:
If Putin uses weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine, NATO will have to think seriously about what to do.
You would have to be sub 100 IQ not to see what is going on.

To which I responded:

Moon of Alabama @MoonofA – 17:56 UTC · Mar 13, 2022

They are indeed doing this on all channels.
IMHO an upcoming false flag attempt to get NATO into the fight.

Historian and Russia expert Gilbert Doctorow points into the same direction:

Warning: it is “highly likely” the United States is now about to carry out a ‘false flag’ operation in Ukraine in which it will accuse the Russians of using chemical weapons.
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The caption which yahoo.com is now carrying reads as follows:USA Today: Russia could be preparing for chemical weapons attack; 35 killed in strike on base near Lviv: Live updates
Now why would Russia stage a chemical weapons attack in Ukraine? The idea defies all reason. Russia has vast possibilities of destroying Ukraine that it has not deployed to date precisely to avoid civilian casualties. These include cyber attack, electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and more intense use of its airpower which has been restrained due to shortage of smart bombs and reluctance to use munitions that might cause greater collateral damage.
Given these manifest signs of Russian caution in staging the war, even at the cost of greater casualties among its own troops and slower progress in a campaign that is very time sensitive, one would have to be utterly mad to consider using universally banned chemical weapons. I rest my case: any so-called chemical attack which may be staged in Ukraine in coming days can only be the dirty work of the United States and its agents.

Having seen how easy it was to deceive the ‘western’ media by staging a fake hospital attack one can easily understand how a fake ‘chemical attack by Russia’ would lead to a public stampede that would push NATO into the Ukraine war.

Meanwhile Patrick Lancaster reports from Donetsk:

Patrick Lancaster @PLnewstoday – 10:47 UTC · Mar 14, 2022#BREAKING Dozens Killed By Ukrainian Cluster Bomb Attack On Center Donetsk. Full report coming soon
video

The U.S. is trying to pressure China to join their anti-Russian campaign. Yesterday ‘anonymous officials’ claimed, without evidence, that Russia had asked China for military and economic aid.

Moon of Alabama @MoonofA – 20:21 UTC · Mar 13, 2022“U.S. officials said ..” equals “Guaranteed to be a lie ..”
Quoted Tweet:

Michael Birnbaum @michaelbirnbaum · 17h
NEW, and BIG -> Russia has turned to China for military equipment and aid in the weeks since it began its invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials said. @nakashimae scoop. https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/..

“Scoop” now means picking up the phone when some official calls you to plant a lie.

Russia is exporting weapons to China, not importing weapons from it. China has now confirmed that there were no such Russian requests:

Beijing blasted Washington’s recent allegations as disinformation that Russia sought military assistance from China to conduct its special operation in Ukraine, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a briefing on Monday.”The allegations on the matter disseminated by the US are false information,” the diplomat specified.

The first story on this also includes this lie:

In recent days, Chinese diplomats, state media organizations and government agencies have used a range of platforms and official social media accounts to amplify a conspiracy theory that says the Pentagon has been financing biological and chemical weapons labs in Ukraine.

That is not a conspiracy theory but, as Tulsi Gabbard points out, a hard fact which even the U.S. government now admits.

The British press took note of it:

Vladimir Putin could unleash biological weapon from seized Ukraine lab, experts fear

The U.S. is delusional in its attempts to deter China from working with Russia:

Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, is scheduled to meet on Monday in Rome with Yang Jiechi, a member of the Chinese Communist Party’s elite Politburo and director of the party’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission.Mr. Sullivan intends to warn Mr. Yang about any future Chinese efforts to bolster Russia in its war or undercut Ukraine, the United States and their partners.
“We are communicating directly, privately to Beijing that there will absolutely be consequences for large-scale sanctions evasion efforts or support to Russia to backfill them,” Mr. Sullivan said on CNN on Sunday.
“We will not allow that to go forward and allow there to be a lifeline to Russia from these economic sanctions from any country, anywhere in the world,” he said.

China will of course continue to have good relations with Russia. It is not for the U.S. ‘to allow’ or disallow China to trade with Russia. The Biden administration has nothing it could do about it. It should stop its campaign and think about how it can dig itself out of the huge hole it has jumped into.

Reviewing the trade shock ‘western’ societies will now experience because of their extensive sanctions campaign against Russia Yves Smith concludes:

Although the complexity of this situation makes it impossible to make any forecasts, consider: a worst case scenario is much much worse than stagflation. Just wrap your mind around the consequences the merely the two outcomes described above: a fair bit of famine and supply shortfalls, even potentially problems with maintaining some critical infrastructure due to chip scarcity. Some of that productive capacity loss could become permanent due to business failures.And let us remind you … so far we are discussing only what the West has done to itself. What happens if Russia goes full Smoot-Hawley and retaliates, or engages in the passive aggressive version, as in no formal pronunciations, just supplies go to friendlies and the West gets chocked down, not 100% but enough to feel like that.
The Democratic Party is in the process of executing a controlled flight into terrain. Too bad that we are along for the ride.

Yesterday and today there seemed to be only minor Russian movement on the battlefield. Presumably Russia is regrouping its forces for the next steps. What those are going to be is for anyone to guess. They will come as soon as the current negotiations between Kiev and Moscow fail. The U.S. will see for that to happen.

via Global Times
Excerpt

Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Tuesday that with both sides of Russia and the West increasing the intensity of sanctions on each other, they are caught in a dangerous trend of pushing a cutoff in the energy trade between the two regions.

According to Lin, using the Russian ruble to settle trade payments is extremely difficult currently, particularly after the exclusion of selected Russian banks from global payment system SWIFT. As a result, Europe will be compelled to make a distinct choice between ending crude imports from Russia and yielding to Russia’s demands.

Lin said that cutting energy trade links with Russia would exert a severe impact on Europe’s economy, as oil and natural gas price will rocket up, adding to already rising inflation and making it more difficult for Europe to recover from the pandemic-triggered economic slowdown.

Russia is the world’s No.3 producer of oil, mostly crude oil, behind the US and Saudi Arabia. It’s also the world’s top exporter of oil to global markets and the No.2 crude oil exporter behind Saudi Arabia, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Roughly 60 percent of Russia’s oil exports go to European members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), per IEA data.”Russia is betting that Europe can’t stand a complete cutoff from Russia’s energy supplies, but actually it’s hard to say if Europe will do such a thing even at the expense of high economic losses,” Lin told the Global Times.

Lin said that an immediate result of the intensifying sanctions is surging crude prices, as he expects that oil prices might break beyond $150 a barrel.

A similar move in the works against Russian natural gas tends to exacerbate the economic fallout on EU countries in particular.

Italy has plans to become independent of gas imports from Russia within 24-30 months, according to Reuters, citing remarks by Italian Energy Transition Minister Roberto Cingolani on Tuesday.

In case of a cutoff of Russian natural gas supplies, Slovakia, Austria and Italy are likely to be among the worst-hit places, an observer of international affairs told the Global Times on condition of anonymity.

German would be the most fragile among major European nations if the worse-case scenario unfolds, according to the observer, speaking of the losses to bear on the part of the EU.

Last year, the EU’s imports of natural gas from Russia accounted for around 45 percent of its total gas imports and close to 40 percent of its entire gas consumption, according to IEA numbers.

Runaway crude oil prices also feed panic through global equity markets, as the resultant higher inflation amplifies concerns over a more aggressive cycle of US Federal Reserve rate hikes.

With the global economic recovery at risk of an energy price spike-inflicted downturn, China might feel greater imported inflationary pressure, experts said.

Local governments should step in with supportive policies, like subsidies, if the prices of energy fluctuate too strongly, especially for natural gas which is used by residents for heating, they suggested.

Last year, China’s reliance on overseas crude oil fell 1.88 percentage points to 71.95 percent, while its reliance on overseas natural gas rose by 2.39 percentage points to 44.3 percent, according to data from China Galaxy Securities.

Over the long term, China should move to reduce reliance on overseas energy imports, he remarked, noting that one thing that China should do is to develop alternative energy by increasing the layout of wind power, electric cars and photovoltaic capacities.

A woman sits on a bus in Irpin, Ukraine, March 5, 2022.Photo:Xinhua

Cards in Kremlin’s hands

It is also noteworthy that Russia has hit back at Western sanctions with countermeasures that are seen to have shown the cards in the Kremlin’s hands, albeit possibly distancing Moscow further from the global system.

In one such move, “Russian citizens and companies, the state itself, its regions and municipalities that have foreign exchange obligations to foreign creditors from the list of unfriendly countries will be able to pay them in rubles,” according to TASS news agency.

“The new temporary procedure applies to payments exceeding 10 million rubles per month (or a similar amount in foreign currency),” the report said, citing the newly unveiled decree.

The latest action is a countermeasure from Russia in response to the West’s financial sanctions, Wu Jinduo, head of fixed income at the research institute of Great Wall Securities, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

Before Western sanctions kicked in, the ruble could be freely converted to the US dollar or the euro, enabling Russia’s domestic debtors to repay their overseas obligations. But freezing Russia’s stockpile of foreign exchange reserves and excluding Russian banks from SWIFT means the ruble cannot be readily used for foreign exchange conversion and overseas payments, Wu said.

Russia could have opted for the yuan or the Singapore dollar in its foreign exchange assets for overseas payments before being converted into the dollar to pay its creditors, Wu continued, noting that the decision to use the ruble is tantamount to a countermove against the West.

With the ruble subject to wild swings, Russia’s overseas creditors would be exposed to huge financial risks if they receive repayments in the ruble that could turn out to be a stack of “waste paper” in case of significant ruble depreciation or the Russian currency becoming non-convertible, the analyst commented.

In another countermeasure, the Russian government has also reportedly revised its rules concerning compensation paid to patent rights holders, with the new regulation stipulating that patent holders from unfriendly countries and regions would be entitled to zero percent of the actual proceeds from the manufacture and sale of goods and the offering of services, if their inventions or industrial design are used without authorization.

While the potential impact of the new regulation on Western technology giants that have moved to stop sales and curb services in the Russia market remains unfathomable, the economic shockwaves per se could be limited, factoring in Russia’s entire expenditure on information and communication technologies that hit roughly $50 billion in 2021, according to market research firm IDC.

What matters more, as experts pointed out, is that the regulation actually facilitates Russian firms to use foreign patents for free, a countermeasure against the West’s technology embargo on Russia.

What’s more, the Russian authorities are purportedly working on the possibility of waiving criminal and administrative liability for the use of pirated software, according to media reports.

Russia’s response seems more likely a countermove against Western high-tech firms, according to Zhang Hong, an associate research fellow at the Institute of Russian, Eastern European & Central Asian Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Tech giants including Google, Apple and Microsoft are among the firms announcing a revamp of their business plans in Russia amid the Russia-Ukraine tensions.

In yet another move that speaks to Kremlin’s ammunition of countermeasures, Russia has imposed a temporary ban on medical products delivered from countries and regions that have joined the sanctions, Interfax reported on Tuesday.

by PATRICK ARMSTRONG via Patrick Armstrong

TACTICS, STRATEGY AND OPERATIONS

So far the Russian military operation in Ukraine has been a reconnaissance in force preceded by the destruction of the supplies and headquarters of the Ukrainian Armed Forces by standoff weapons. The object being to suss out where the Ukrainian forces are, to surround them, to check existing Russian intelligence against reality and, at the same time, destroy known headquarters, air and naval assets, supplies and ammunition depots. And, perhaps, there was the hope that the speed and success (Russian/LDPR forces dominated an area of Ukraine about the size of the United Kingdom in the first week) would force an early end (aka recognition of reality).

At the moment they are readying for the next phase. The long column that so obsessed the “experts” on CNN is the preparation for the next phase. And that is this: “You didn’t get the hint, so now we have to hit you”. The fact that the column has been sitting there indicates that the Russians know they have complete air superiority. Secondly it is a message to the Ukrainian armed forces that it’s over, give up. (And one should never forget that the Russians/Soviets have always been the best at strategic deception, so who knows what’s actually there versus what the images show?)

As far as I can see they’ve created three cauldrons (encirclements). Probably the most important one is the one around Mariupol where the main concentration of Azov, the principal nazi force, is. Another is being established around the main concentration of the Ukrainian Armed Forces facing LDPR. And there appears to be another developing to the east of Kiev. A super cauldron of all three is visible. The nazis will be exterminated; the ordinary Ukrainian soldier will be allowed to go home. The nightmare question is how many ordinary Ukrainians will be free to choose.

The dilemma for the Russians is city fighting. They do not want to have a Raqqa in which every building is destroyed, every person killed and solitudinem is declared to be pax. They know that at the end of the day there will still be Ukrainians and they will want them to be friends: Washington can create solitudes far away, but Moscow cannot create them nearby. This greatly complicates their problem when they try to clear the nazis out of Mariupol knowing that the nazis are using the city’s people as hostages. The same problem exists, to a lesser degree, in the other cities of Novorossiya. My guess is they will surround most cities and hope that Zelinsky & Co come to their senses. But I fear that the Mariupol battle will be horrible.

There are some slight indications, on Day 8, that Ukrainian negotiators are realising that neutrality is something they have to agree to. I also see the realisation creeping up on the American side.

The ultimate Russian aim is not visible. By this I mean the ultimate strategic aim; we know what the grand strategic aim is. Are the Russians planning to create a Novorossiya which will be independent or are they aiming to create a Novorossiya which will be a bargaining chip with rump Ukraine? I think the answer depends on what Zelinsky and Kiev (and the locals) decide. In about a week’s time, an independent Novorossiya will exist and Russia will continue to have the hammer.

I would expect large-scale surrenders of the Ukrainian Armed Forces to begin in the next 24/48 hours (Chechen forces already claim one and have an impressive collection of “trophies” to prove it). A significant proportion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is now surrounded and, as is usual (vide Sun Tsu) the Russians have left them an exit.

GRAND STRATEGY

The impotence of the EU and NATO is clear to everyone (Well, OK, not anyone on CNN, or in the US Congress or in the halls of power in the West. But they are not the whole world). In this respect, I recommend watching Riyadh – Abdul Aziz was very good at seeing how the wind blew and one can assume his descendents are too.

The 97, or whatever they were, fighter planes that were excitedly announced, are obviously not coming. The no fly zone can’t be “declared”. The Chechens have picked up a lot of MANPADs that NATO supplied. All that NATO support will get you is destruction when you fight the war it suckered you into and an extra special Christmas card when you’re defeated and ruined.

We are seeing the collapse of post Cold War triumphalism, “end of history”, “unilateralism” and all the rest of it. Reality is biting, and biting hard. All you have to do is watch CNN’s parade of talking heads and “experts” speculating about how crazy Putin is: they don’t understand, therefore he must be nuts. For the West, as it has been, it’s over. The confusion, the bullshit, the boasting, the hysteria, the bans: the West has nothing left in the locker. Pour Russian vodka down the toilet, fire a singer and director, change the name of a drink or a salad, ban cats or trees, sanction a Russian plutocrat and steal his yacht, wear a blue and yellow t-shirt. Pathetic. And don’t, under any circumstances, allow a Russian outlet to tempt the sheeple with “disinformation”. Just like the USSR but stupider. And who thought stupider was even possible?

Judo is about deception and using the opponent’s strength against him. Putin, the judoka, has judoed the West into suicide. Put your money in our banks, we can confiscate it; put your assets in our territory, we can steal them; use our money and we can cancel it; put your yacht in our harbour, we can pirate it; put your gold in our vault, we can grab it. That is a lesson that will resound around the world. A naked illustration that the “rules-based international order” is simply that we make the rules and order you to obey them. In 2 or 3 weeks everybody in the world who is on the potential Western hit list will have moved his assets out of the reach of the West. Xi will permit himself a small smile.

As to Western sanctions against Russia, I think there’s a very simple answer to that: last week 1000 cubic metres of gas cost $1,000; today it’s over twice that. Next week it certainly won’t be cheaper. Ditto for aluminum, potash, titanium, wheat. Russian airlines lease their planes; now what? Russian rocket motors. What the people in the West do not understand is the ruble is the currency the Russians use inside the country but the price of oil and gas is the Russian currency outside the country. I am astounded at the stupidity: they’re cutting their own throats and destroying their own economies.

Russia sits back and laughs: fly into space on your own broomstick.

The world order has changed. Week Two.

by Pepe Escobar via Strategic-Culture

Only self-sufficiency affords total independence. And the Big Picture has also been keenly understood by the Global South.

One of the key underlying themes of the Russia/Ukraine/NATO matrix is that the Empire of Lies (copyright Putin) has been rattled to the core by the combined ability of Russian hypersonic missiles and a defensive shield capable of blocking incoming nuclear missiles from the West, thereby ending Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.)

This has led the Americans to nearly risk a hot war to be able to place hypersonic missiles that they still don’t have on Ukraine’s western borders, and so be within three minutes of Moscow. For that, of course, they need Ukraine, as well as Poland and Romania in Eastern Europe.

In Ukraine, the Americans are determined to fight to the last European soul – if that’s what it takes. This may be the last roll of the (nuclear) dice. Thus the next-to-last gasp at coercing Russia into submission by using the remaining, workable American weapon of mass destruction: SWIFT.

Yet this weapon can be easily neutralized by rapid adoption of self-sufficiency.

With essential input by the inestimable Michael Hudson I have outlined possibilities for Russia to weather the sanction storm. That didn’t even consider the full extent of Russia’s “black box defense” – and counter-attack – as outlined by John Helmer in his introduction to an essay that heralds no less then The Return of Sergei Glaziev.

Glaziev, predictably detested across Atlanticist circles, was a key economic adviser to President Putin and is now the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). He has always been a fierce critic of the Russian Central Bank and the oligarch gang closely linked to Anglo-American finance.

His latest essay, Sanctions and Sovereignty, originally published by expert.ru and translated by Helmer, deserves serious scrutiny.

This is one of the key takeaways:

“Russian losses of potential GDP, since 2014, amount to about 50 trillion rubles. But only 10% of them can be explained by sanctions, while 80% of them were the result of monetary policy. The United States benefits from anti-Russian sanctions, replacing the export of Russian hydrocarbons to the EU as well as China; replacing the import of European goods by Russia. We could completely offset the negative consequences of financial sanctions if the Bank of Russia fulfilled its constitutional duty to ensure a stable ruble exchange rate, and not the recommendations of Washington financial organizations.”

De-offshore or bust

Glaziev essentially recommends:

– A “real de-offshorization of the economy”.

– “Measures to tighten currency regulation in order to stop the export of capital and expand targeted lending to enterprises in need of financing investments”.

– “Taxation of currency speculation and transactions in dollars and euros on the domestic market”.

– “Serious investment in R&D in order to accelerate the development of our own technological base in the areas affected by sanctions – first of all the defense industry, energy, transport and communications.”

And last but not least, “the de-dollarization of our foreign exchange reserves, replacing the dollar, euro and pound with gold.”

The Russian Central Bank seems to be listening. Most of these measures are already in place. And there are signs that Putin and the government are finally ready to grab the Russian oligarchy by the balls and force them to share risks and losses at an extremely difficult for the nation. Goodbye to stockpiling funds taken out of Russia offshore and in Londongrad.

Glaziev is the real deal. In December 2014 I was at a conference in Rome, and Glaziev joined us on the phone. Reviewing a subsequent column I wrote at the time, between Rome and Beijing, I was stunned: it’s as if Glaziev was saying these things literally today.

Allow me to quote two paragraphs:

“At the symposium, held in a divinely frescoed former 15th century Dominican refectory now part of the Italian parliament’s library, Sergey Glaziev, on the phone from Moscow, gave a stark reading of Cold War 2.0. There’s no real “government” in Kiev; the U.S. ambassador is in charge. An anti-Russia doctrine has been hatched in Washington to foment war in Europe – and European politicians are its collaborators. Washington wants a war in Europe because it is losing the competition with China.”

“Glaziev addressed the sanctions dementia: Russia is trying simultaneously to reorganize the politics of the International Monetary Fund, fight capital flight and minimize the effect of banks closing credit lines for many businessmen. Yet the end result of sanctions, he says, is that Europe will be the ultimate losers economically; bureaucracy in Europe has lost economic focus as American geopoliticians have taken over.”

Gotta pay the “tax on independence”

A consensus seems to be emerging in Moscow that the Russian economy will stabilize quickly, as there will be a shortage of personnel for industry and a lot of extra hands will be required. Hence no unemployment. There may be shortages, but no inflation. Sales of – Western – luxury goods have already been curtailed. Imported products will be placed under price controls. All the necessary rubles will be available though price controls – as happened in the U.S. in WWII.

A wave of nationalization of assets may be ahead. ExxonMobil announced it will withdrawfrom the $4 billion Sakhalin-1 project (they had bailed out on Sakhalin-2, deemed too expensive), producing 200,000 barrels of oil a day, after BP and Norway’s Equinor announced they were withdrawing from projects with Rosneft. BP was actually dreaming of taking all of Rosneft’s participation.

According to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, the Kremlin is now blocking asset sales by foreign investors looking to divest. In parallel, Rosneft, for instance, is bound to raise capital from China and India, who are already minority investors in several projects, and buy them out 100%: an excellent opportunity for Russian business.

What could be construed as the Mother of All Counter-Sanctions has not yet been announced. Deputy Chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev himself hinted all options are on the table.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, channeling the patience of 10,000 Taoist monks, still expecting the current hysteria to fade away, describes the sanctions as “some kind of a tax on independence”,

with countries barring their companies from working in Russia under “huge pressure.”

Lethal counterpunches though are not excluded. Apart from completely de-dollarizing – as Glaviev recommends – Russia may ban the export of titanium, rare earth, nuclear fuel and, already in effect, rocket engines.

Very toxic moves would include seizing all foreign assets of hostile nations; freeze all loan repayments to Western banks and place the funds in a frozen account in a Russian bank; completely ban all hostile foreign media, foreign media ownership, assorted NGOs and CIA fronts; and supply friendly nations with state of the art weapons, intel sharing and joint training and exercises.

What’s certain is that a new architecture of payment systems – as discussed by Michael Hudson and others – uniting the Russian SPFS and the Chinese CHIPS, may soon be offered to scores of nations across Eurasia and the Global South – several among them already under sanctions, such as Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, the DPRK.

Slowly but surely, we are already on the way to the emergence of a sizeable Global South bloc immune to American financial warfare.

The RIC in BRICS – Russia, India and China – are already increasing trade in their own currencies. If we look at the list of nations at the UN that voted against Russia or (sic) but abstained from condemning Operation Z in Ukraine, plus those that did not sanction Russia, we have at least 70% of the whole Global South.

So once again is the West – plus satrapies/colonies such as Japan and Singapore in Asia – against the Rest: Eurasia, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America.

The coming European collapse

Michael Hudson told me, “the U.S. and Western Europe expected a Froelicher Krieg (“happy war”). Germany and other countries haven’t begun to feel the pain of gas and mineral and food deprivation. THAT’S going to be the real game. The aim would be to break Europe away from U.S. control via NATO. This will involve “meddling” by creating a New World Order political movement and party, like Communism was a century ago. You could call it a new Great Awakening.”

A possible Great Awakening certainly will not involve the NATOstan sphere anytime soon. The collective West is rather in serious Great Decoupling mode, its entire economy weaponized with the aim, expressed in the open, of destroying Russia and even – the perennial wet dream – provoking regime change.

Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the SVR, succinctly described it:

“Masks have dropped. The West is not just trying to enclose Russia with a new ‘Iron Curtain’. We are talking about attempts to destroy our state – its ‘abolition’, as it is now customary to say in the ‘tolerant’ liberal-fascist environment. Since the United States and its allies have neither the opportunity nor the spirit to try to do this in an open and honest military-political confrontation, sneaky attempts are being made to establish an economic, informational and humanitarian “blockade”’.

Arguably the apex of Western hysteria is the onset of a 2022 Neo-Nazi Jihad: a 20,000-strong mercenary army being assembled in Poland under CIA supervision. The bulk comes from private military companies such as Blackwater/Academi and DynCorp. Their cover: “return of Ukrainians from the French Foreign Legion.” This Afghan remix comes straight from the only playbook the CIA knows.

Back in reality, facts on the ground will eventually lead entire economies in the West to become roadkill – with chaos in the commodities sphere leading to skyrocketing energy and food costs. As an example, up to 60% of German and 70% of Italian manufacturing industries may be forced to shut down for good – with catastrophic social consequences.

The unelected, uber-Kafkaesque EU machine in Brussels has chosen to commit a triple hara-kiri by grandstanding as abject vassals of the Empire, destroying any remaining French and German sovereignty impulses and imposing alienation from Russia-China.

Meanwhile, Russia will be showing the way: only self-sufficiency affords total independence. And the Big Picture has also been keenly understood by the Global South: one day someone had to stand up and say, “That’s Enough”. With maximum raw power to back it up.