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.

---

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.

By Sergey Markov

More trouble ahead. Dagestan. Radical Islamism is again raising its head in Russia.

I just returned from the Caucasus. And they told me there that radical Islamists are now holding demonstrations that should show their power.

In the evening, at about 7 p.m., a group of about 5 women in thick hijabs and a couple of people in niqabs come out onto the main street. They walk along the entire street, and on the sidelines they are accompanied by 5 – 10 young bearded men. And this is going on in many cities. This is how the Islamists show that they have an informal “night power” and that everyone should be afraid of them. And they are afraid.

By Yelena Panina and Oleg Pavlov

This article was first published in Russian on Tsargrad.tv

For more than two years, the special military operation has continued in Ukraine. Undoubtedly, this war against Russia was provoked by the “collective West” and globalist circles standing behind it, and is being waged by them through their proxy forces.

The leaders of Western countries and their top ‘think-tanks’ (FA, CSIS) have recently stepped up the rhetoric regarding our country and are obviously set on the military defeat of Russia. NATO participation in combat operations is not only coming into the open but the military escalation is being ramped up by leaps and bounds, i.e. supplies of ever more lethal types of weapons to Ukraine are gaining scale, the US and other countries of the West have decided to shift military activities deeper into the territory of Russia, and active preparations are underway for sending a contingent from NATO and its member states to Ukraine.

Russia has no other alternatives under the circumstances but to either win or die. This is our Patria o Muerte.

The comprehension of what victory is to us should underlie the recognition of this fundamental truth. Making no claims to present a complete clear image of the future victory, we shall try to formulate those major goals without attainment of which the victory is impossible.

First of all, let us ask ourselves how inevitable a special military operation (SMO) was and whether it was possible to somehow come to an agreement with the West.

The scale of the military force deployed against Russia, coordination of actions of almost all countries of the Western bloc, and their political declarations and demarches according to pre-written patterns leave no doubt that an anti-Russia operation had been prepared for many years. By all appearances, it has been financed and administered by Western countries, and primarily the United States, since 2012. In fact, everything that is going on in Ukraine today is the hot phase of the war unleashed by the West against us as far back as 1946 (after Winston Churchill’s Fulton speech). In its first stage, the task was set to destroy the USSR and at the second – to assimilate the Russian Federation and definitively solve the ‘Russian question’.

In practice, immediately after the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the USSR, the West, taking it as its absolute victory, got down to the implementation of the second stage and embarked on the exploration of the geopolitical space left by the Soviet Union, seeing it as a resource to expand and enhance its own hegemony that it had already gained at that time. The goal was to bring about such a model of unipolar globalization that would secure the latter as a form of the domination of the West for many decades, if not centuries ahead.

Despite verbal promises not to expand the NATO bloc to the territories of the countries of the former Warsaw Pact given to Mikhail Gorbachev, the United States used NATO as an instrument of expansion to bring the situation to admitting the Baltic States, and later Sweden and traditionally neutral Finland into the bloc. And before that, NATO began to woo Ukraine and Georgia. At the same time, NATO is far from being a harmless organization, as Mikhail Khodorkovsky recently called it. Only think about the large-scale bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 using depleted uranium ammunition, the 20-year war in Afghanistan under the auspices of NATO, the Iraq war of 2003–2011, which was fought even without a UN mandate on the basis of falsification – the “Powell test tube” – the war in Libya in 2011 or the reprisal against its leadership and the actual destruction of the country. In just 30 years, NATO conducted 23 military operations against other countries with over one million civilians becoming victims, while the toll of ethnic cleansing or environmental and humanitarian disasters after invasions by NATO troops is impossible to calculate. White phosphorus, depleted uranium, cluster bombs against civilians, tortures, photo sessions with the bodies of the dead – all these crimes are on NATO’s conscience.

After signing the treaty that gives the full souvereignty back to Germany the politicians pose for a family picture in Moscow, 12 September 1990. © Global Look Press / Roland Holschneider / dpa

In 2004, when Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia joined the alliance, this monster moved nearer to the borders of the Russian Federation. Could Russia indifferently watch NATO missiles in close proximity, aiming at St. Petersburg, Moscow and our other cities? Most certainly not!

Nevertheless, we still hoped to bring some sense into the presumptuous Western elites. Then followed Putin’s Munich speech. But the United States ignored these signals and, through its own military support, provoked a full-scale invasion of Georgian troops into South Ossetia. One of the goals was to create conditions for Georgia to join NATO. Even Russia’s tough response did not stop the West. Washington organized a coup in Kiev in 2014 and started preparing for Ukraine’s accession to NATO. They perfectly realized the consequences and deliberately went for this aggravation.

All these events also cannot be considered outside the context of the US activities on the complete abolition of the international security system and arms control treaties. Over the past three decades, through the efforts of Washington and other Western countries, the entire supporting frame of this structure was destroyed almost to the ground. International legal nuclear deterrence mechanisms in essence ceased to exist.

A united, nationally strong, sovereign Russia with its special civilizational code did not fit at all into the globalist plans of the United States and it openly moved to implement the Brzezinski formula: “A new world order under the US hegemony is being created against Russia, at the expense of Russia and on the ruins of Russia.” Since the West failed to swallow Russia and finally turn it into its spiritual and resource colony – although it would seem that this was at arm’s length, and Putin set a course for its revival – the Anglo-Saxons decided to implement the old plan. It has existed since the Russian Empire emerged on the world stage as a global power at the beginning of the 18th century. The idea is to dismember and destroy the country, as far as it obviously interferes with hegemonic plans.

That is why this war was inevitable, and it was not us who started it. Another question is whether it was possible to start the SMO, since it was inevitable, in some other way, or to wait as in 1941 for a direct attack from Ukraine against us in order to have an indisputable right to self-defence? The counter question would be: “Are you really sure that if we continued to wait for the end of the development of Ukraine by NATO and its attack on us from territories that are thousands of kilometres closer to Moscow than the USSR border before the start of Hitler’s aggression, then we would be able to withstand this blow with modern missile technologies when the flight time from Kharkov to Moscow would be four to five minutes for hypersonic missiles?”

More than two years of the special military operation have convinced us that Russia’s battle for its security and sovereignty will be long and dramatic. All this time, the stated goals of the SMO have remained the same, i.e. to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine, protect the citizens of Donbass and ensure the security of the Russian Federation.

However, life and the course of combat operations made their own adjustments to the implementation of these goals. By April 2024, Russia took control over parts of Kherson and Zaporozhye Oblasts, which, along with the Donetsk and Lugansk Oblasts, were included in Russia in accordance with its Constitution, and the creation of a safe zone near Belgorod began. As for the achievement of other goals, the parameters of the final settlement that would ultimately ensure the security of the Russian state for the coming decades have not yet been formulated and made public, as well as the way by which this and other goals of the SMO can be accomplished.

Ukrainian soldiers, military in uniform, combat gear, rifles, weapons, on the occasion of celebrations on March 24th, 2023 in Kiev. © Global Look Press / Presidential Office of Ukraine

Some time ago, despite the official belligerent rhetoric, voices started to be heard in the West of those who called for a truce to be declared in Ukraine as soon as possible.

On June 15–16 this year, a ‘peace conference’ took place in Switzerland, where it was proposed to take the ‘Zelensky formula’ as the basis for a peaceful settlement, providing for the return of Ukraine to the 1991 borders. Since Russia had refused to take part in it under any circumstances, and the leading countries of the Global South did not participate in this farce, they tried to reduce the formula to three items. But it does not change the essence. The main idea is to present Russia as a country that does not wish to accept peace talks and then to put forward an ultimatum allegedly on behalf of the ‘international community’.

We also hear soft options: to recognize de facto Russian control over the territories liberated during the SMO and accept the rest of Ukraine into NATO.

It is also clear that the West is actively managing the conflict on the territory of Ukraine. It does not give Kiev the necessary weapons and ammunition and at the same time puts increasing pressure on Russia through strengthening primary and secondary sanctions. Then, by contrast, it ‘throws wood’ onto the fire, as the US Congress did by allocating more than $61 billion to Ukraine.

What is behind all these manipulations, including ‘peace initiatives’? The goal of the West was and is unchanged – the strategic defeat of Russia, final resolution of the ‘Russian question’, and termination of the statehood of the Russian Federation in a much harsher way than it was with the USSR.

Since the ‘Zelensky formula’ is absolutely unacceptable to Russia, they decided to boil the frog slowly: first, to force the parties to agree to an unsatisfactory truce or some kind of a peace, and thereby consolidate preconditions for a new conflict. Here comes all the stuffing about the truce, where the preservation by Russia of the already acquired territories is used as a carrot.

It is easy to predict the way the events will develop in this case. The truce, even without access to the borders of the Donetsk and Lugansk Oblasts, means that Russia will be cut off from the rest of Europe for a long time, for many decades, by the ‘Pilsudski barrier’; the zone of control of the buffer lands by the Western bloc will stretch from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Russia will lose Kaliningrad, and the Baltic will finally take shape as a ‘NATO lake’. Russia will completely lose control over the Western Black Sea region that has existed historically for centuries (since 1711), Moldova will be absorbed by NATO member Romania, and the Transnistrian region by Ukrainian authorities.

At the same time, the Anglo-Saxons, who have conceptual power in the Western world, build on the views of such geo-politicians of the early twentieth century as Sir Halford Mackinder. According to him, the “pivot area, or heartland of Eurasia – much of Russia and Central Asia – is the key to the global balance of power. The state that gains control over this territory will rule the world.”

To master the ‘heartland’ it is necessary to destroy Russia. That is why after the ‘peace treaty’ imposed on it, ‘plan B’ will come into effect, according to which the West will continue to isolate Russia as if “at the will of the international community” and strangle it with increasingly harsh economic sanctions according to the Iranian model. The ‘Anaconda ring’ around our country will begin to shrink even more intensely due to the dragging of limitrophes into its camp. Primarily, Armenia and Kazakhstan, and then other, still Russia-friendly countries. Sabotage will intensify and shatter internal unity, taking advantage of the undermining of interethnic relations. The aim of these medium-term measures is clear, i.e. in 3-5 years (as luck would have it), using ‘salami-slicing tactics’ – numerous small but painful blows – to prepare a lightning disarming military strike against a country weakened by sanctions. It will possibly include the use of nuclear weapons, using both Ukraine’s membership in NATO by that time and the proximity to our borders of new alliance bases, which will be located in the south (Romania) and in the north (Sweden, Norway and Finland). The signs of this have already emerged from the calls of a number of politicians in Eastern European countries. Primarily, from the statements of Poland’s authorities on the placement of nuclear weapons on the territory of their country. Another “intelligence indicator” is a strike on the Russian early warning system, which will provoke Moscow to use tactical nuclear weapons, thus enabling the West to implement the option of a disarming strike.

If you look from a historical depth at the methods that are now being used by the ‘collective West’ and the Anglo-Saxons leading them, then it is quite obvious that London and Washington, with outwardly different tactics, use familiar and historically proven techniques based on the classic thalassocracy principle of ‘divide and rule’. The first one is a method that has been tested more than once, i.e. blockade and massive sanctions. This is exactly the way the United States acted against Iraq in two or three steps. First, in 1991, Baghdad was weakened by military means through Operation Desert Storm, and later by crushing 13-year sanctions, only to be finally finished off afterwards by a lightning military strike.

The second method is the use of a proxy to inflict unacceptable damage and to radically weaken the enemy. This was the way the Ottoman Empire was destroyed. At that time, in 1916, the role of Ukraine was played by the Arabs, who were armed by the Anglo-Saxons, exactly as today, and their military commanders (in that epoch it was, in particular, Thomas Edward Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia) achieved military successes.

Now Russia, since it is a powerful country with nuclear weapons, is being subjected to an unprecedented and multi-aspect hybrid technology of struggle in all areas, where the methods used against the Ottoman Empire and Iraq in different historical periods are being complemented by the ‘Anaconda Strategy’ – surrounding us with unfriendly regimes in parallel preparation for the ‘big war’. This will inevitably be followed by a new, much more destructive and bloody war, but directly with the entire NATO bloc, forcing Russia to surrender and be destroyed.

Vladimir Zelensky (M), President of Ukraine, is greeted by Ursula von der Leyen (R), President of the European Commission, and other attendees at the start of a meeting on January 16 2024, Davos, Switzerland. © Global Look Press / Hannes P Albert / dpa

These will be the consequences of failing to achieve the stated goals of the special military operation. It goes without saying that any country that finds itself in the situation Russia is in now should do everything to avoid dead isolation and set up coalitions that would allow the legal, psychological, informational and other walls erected by the enemy to be destroyed. This problem is being solved so far with greater or lesser success. They failed to drive Moscow into international isolation and they recognize it in Washington. The Global South did not fall for Western hysterics about ‘Russian aggression in Ukraine’ and the massive Israeli bombing of residential areas in the Gaza Strip, which led to colossal casualties, finally buried the West’s ability to manipulate with theses about ‘Moscow’s cruelty’. These arguments lost their validity for the Arab-Islamic world and Africa.

It has also been a surprise for the organizers of Russia’s isolation that Moscow manages, although not immediately and not without effort, to start building ad-hoc coalitions, albeit of different sizes and weights. Beside Great China, which is becoming a strategic rear area for Moscow, it manages to get on well with restive Türkiye, millennia-old Iran, and principled North Korea, i.e. with those who were called the other day (except for Ankara) rogue states as well as with SCO and BRICS countries.

However, this struggle as a whole makes sense only if the main military tasks are fulfilled during the SMO. That is why it is absolutely important to identify them. We can already feel a breeze of slight disappointment today among our well-wishers in the Islamic world and in Africa because the front line has remained practically the same for over two years. It influences many processes, including the efficiency and scale of BRICS expansion, as well as the readiness of our friends to resist secondary sanctions.

First, it is necessary to determine the boundaries of our territorial advance in the south and north, which will protect our country for a long time from any threats from the West. It is obvious that in the south there are no other alternatives but access to Odessa and further to connect with the Transnistrian region, where 220,000 of our compatriots live, right up to the mouth of the Danube and full control of it. But in this case, the Pilsudski-drawn arc ‘from sea to sea’ will be broken and the prospect of restoring relations with Western Europe, primarily with Germany, within the next 10 to 15 years will remain (in fact, the Anglo-Saxons’ fear of an alliance between resource-rich Russia and high-tech Europe under the leadership of Germany was precisely the cause of many events).

The fate of the western lands of the former Ukrainian SSR, and the Polish, Hungarian, and Romanian territories before World War II is not so clear. The fact is that the redistribution of territories between Ukraine and Russia is actually the review of the badly drawn administrative boundaries inside the USSR, which did not take into account (and it was not needed) language or ethnic factors. That is why their revision does not actually affect the fundamentals of the valid Helsinki Act of 1975 on the inviolability of European borders, while changing the borders of Western Ukraine in favor of third countries requires a global revision of the foundations of the European security system.

Second, regarding the demilitarization of Ukraine within the new borders (without the Donbass, Lugansk, Kharkov, Zaporozhye, Nikolaev and Odessa Oblasts and without access to the Black Sea), it is doomed to become a state with a neutral status enshrined in the Constitution. The military industry should be completely abolished; the armed forces should perform only the functions of the police and dealing with emergency situations (natural and man-made disasters).

Third, as for denazification, after the trial of neo-Nazi criminals, Bandera ideology should be completely prohibited and all its followers should be strongly prosecuted. Bilingualism should be introduced in the country with equal use of Russian and Ukrainian languages.

Of course, the outcome of any conflict is a reflection of the balance of power at the time it ends or freezes. At this stage the analysis shows that any truce or ‘freeze’ in Ukraine would be extremely unstable and only benefit the ‘collective West’ without realizing the above components of the picture of victory. They will provide Europe and the United States with the possibility to carry out the rearmament of their armies, preserve the Ukrainian proto-Nazi regime and prepare for a new, large-scale NATO advance on Russia. No change of power in the White House or the hypothetical arrival of Donald Trump to power will alter this scenario.

© Global Look Press / Petrov Sergey / news.ru via globallookpress.com

Summarizing all of the above, we can draw only one conclusion: Russia has no other options but to achieve victory along the described contours. It may seem impossible now, but we don’t want to die, do we?! Therefore, the half-war must be ended. The slogan “Everything for the front! Everything for Victory!” should become the raison d’être of our entire policy, both foreign and domestic. The victory banner should rise in Kiev – the mother of Russian cities and the sacred center of the Russian world.

Without detailing every tectonic shift that Russia is destined to make, we would like to re-emphasize: there is no other historical choice.

via RT

By Igor Istomin, acting head of the Department of Applied Analysis of International Problems at MGIMO University.

The possibility of a trans-European war is closer today than at any time since the mid-20th century. Western analysts discuss various scenarios of a possible conflict, while officials openly speculate about its likelihood and even discuss specific time horizons.

In a recent speech, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that the actions of Western governments had brought the world “to the point of no return.” At the same time, domestic debate in Russia is dominated by the belief that the US and its allies recognize the catastrophic risks of a direct military confrontation with Moscow and will seek to avoid it for reasons of self-preservation.

Such judgments are based on the assumption that the West, despite its aggressiveness and arrogance, is guided in its policies by a rational balance of benefits and costs based on the existing balance of power. Past experience, however, does not convince us that the US-led bloc is capable of pursuing a balanced, calculated course.

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the West repeatedly became involved in military adventures from which it then painfully sought a way out. One need only recall the examples of the interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Of course, in all these cases, the risks were significantly lower than in the case of a hypothetical war with Russia. But the stakes were also significantly lower.

A recent admission by US President Joe Biden is telling: “If we ever let Ukraine fail, mark my words, you will see Poland go, and you will see all these countries along Russia’s actual border negotiate on their own.” Thus, the good old ‘domino theory’ is back in the minds of Western strategists.

The divided consciousness of the West

The growing bitterness of Western countries towards Russia is consistent with the way in which they look at armed conflicts in terms of the logic of preventive war. Rather than linking interstate clashes to aggressive opportunism, this model sees escalation as a product of fears about the future. The belief that their situation will deteriorate over time leads states to take increasingly adventurous steps, up to and including the use of force.

Throughout history, major wars have usually been the product of this preemptive logic – the desire to strike before an expected weakening. For example, the collapse of the continental blockade system led Napoleon to attack Russia. German fears about the prospects for modernization of the Russian army were the trigger for the First World War.

A similar dynamic can be seen today in the policy of the West, which has invested considerable resources in confronting Russia.

The fact that Moscow doesn’t countenance losing in any way, but, on the contrary, is gradually moving towards achieving its goals, can only lead to frustration on the part of the US and its allies. This does not lead to reconciliation, but to the search for more effective means to hinder Russia.

Having failed in its plans to destroy the Russian economy with restrictive measures and to inflict a strategic defeat on Moscow at the hands of Kiev, the West is moving ever closer to the brink of direct military confrontation. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly insensitive to the possible consequences of such a scenario. Like casino players, the US and its allies are raising the stakes with each successive bet.

The growing adventurism is clearly visible in the debate over the deployment of Western troops in Ukraine. Moreover, not only hysterical Western European leaders, but also seemingly more responsible American generals have begun to speak out on the issue. For example, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Brown, has concluded that the deployment of NATO troops to the country is inevitable.

The West’s willingness to take risks is reinforced by its contradictory, if not schizophrenic, view of Russia. Public figures never tire of claiming that Moscow’s potential was greatly overestimated in the past and has been further weakened by the Ukraine operation. At the same time, without being aware of the dissonance, they justify the build-up of their own armed forces on the grounds of an increased Russian threat. An Irish writer once labelled this sort of thinking as “Russophrenia.”

The inconsistency is also evident in the portrayal of Russia as an insatiable expansionist intent on invading its neighbours, combined with a belief in its reverence for Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, which guarantees that NATO members will provide mutual assistance in the event of an attack on one of them.

The portrayal of Russia as a ‘paper tiger’ – an aggressive but weak actor – lays the groundwork for pre-emptive escalations to reverse the trends of confrontation unfavorable to the West. And they can be carried out not only in Ukraine.

The idea of restricting Moscow’s access to the Baltic Sea, which ignores the inevitable response to threats to Kaliningrad, is evidence of this, and is regularly introduced into Western discussions.

Quo Vadis?

So far, the idea of an armed attack on Russia has not been explicitly voiced by Western politicians. At present, they are talking about raising the stakes in the expectation that Moscow will not dare to respond. Moreover, the thesis that NATO and its member states do not want a direct military confrontation continues to be voiced. These assurances do not remove two kinds of danger.

First, the West can play with the reliability of nuclear deterrence and create such a provocation that Moscow will be forced to defend its vital interests with all available means. The aforementioned threats to close the Baltic Sea promise just such a flirtation.

Second, the established trend of increasing adventurism holds out the prospect of further policy shifts from the US and its allies. The logic of confrontation tends to raise the stakes, not least because of the accumulation of costs already incurred. As a result, the means available are beginning to dictate the objectives pursued.

Another factor increasing the risk of confrontation is the collective nature of the West. Domestic debates tend to emphasise the unequal nature of relations in NATO due to Washington’s clear dominance. Meanwhile, it is the vassal status of European states that increases their interest in escalation.

The prospect that Washington, preoccupied with competing with China, will lose interest in them and refocus on Asian affairs is a constant fear of its transatlantic allies. The embodiment of this dread is the figure of Donald Trump, but in European capitals there is a fear that this scenario will come to pass regardless of the personality of any particular leader.

US allies believe that time is working against them. Accordingly, the confrontation with Russia acquires an instrumental function, helping to justify keeping Washington’s attention on the European agenda. The debate in the US Congress over funding for Kiev in early 2024 has already become a wake-up call, demonstrating that the US is immersed in its own affairs.

Guided by the logic of anticipation, European NATO members may conclude that provoking a clash now, while the United States remains engaged in the conflict in Ukraine and containing Russia, is preferable to the prospect of bearing the burden of confronting Moscow alone in the future – a scenario they do not rule out.

Not surprisingly, the most irresponsible and radical proposals – such as sending troops to Ukraine or extending NATO guarantees to territory controlled by Kiev – come from Western European politicians. The internal dynamics within the West encourage competition for the status of the most intransigent fighter against Russia.

From plans to practice

In practice, NATO members are actively preparing for a military confrontation with Moscow. The bloc’s new force model, endorsed at the Madrid Summit in 2022, and the regional plans drawn up on its basis, envisage the deployment of a significant force of 300,000 troops within 30 days, in addition to those already stationed on Russia’s borders.

This is based on the active development and modernization of contingents from Central and Eastern European countries. Poland, which claims the same status as NATO’s main bastion that the Bundeswehr enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century, is particularly noteworthy in this respect. The increase to 300,000 troops is intended to make its armed forces the bloc’s largest land army among European member states.

NATO members are openly practising combat scenarios in potential theatres in Eastern and Northern Europe. Much emphasis is being placed on learning lessons from the armed struggle in Ukraine. To this end, a special center is being set up in Bydgoszcz, Poland, to ensure a regular exchange of experience between Western and Ukrainian military personnel.

The weak link in the Western effort has long been the limited capabilities of its military industry. Nevertheless, NATO members are paying increasing attention to overcoming this problem. It would be foolhardy to expect that they will not be able to increase production over time, including by increasing Western European firms’ links with the US military-industrial complex.

Describing the interim results of Western efforts, experts at the influential Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies concluded in a recent report that NATO is ready for future wars. Such a resounding conclusion was accompanied by the clarification that the bloc still needs to work to prepare for a protracted confrontation that could lead to a clash with Russia.

Such contradictory expert conclusions are clearly dictated by political expediency – the desire to confirm the correctness of the chosen course of deterring Moscow, but at the same time the need to mobilize NATO member states to further increase efforts in the military sphere. They once again raise the stakes.

Finding the ‘golden mean’

In the case of the question posed in the title, analysis shows that the answer is likely to be positive. Russia faces the difficult task of containing escalation in a context of low receptivity to Western signals. Attempts to convey the seriousness of the situation are either dismissed out of hand or interpreted as manifestations of Russian aggressiveness.and NATO are drifting towards a major war

In the face of such indoctrination, there is a danger that we ourselves will slip into a similar exaggeration, trying to force the enemy to abandon its adventurous line with even riskier demonstrations of resolve. So far, the Russian leadership has managed to resist these temptations.

Undoubtedly, Western attempts to raise the stakes must be responded to. At the same time, it makes sense to focus the damage on the NATO member states themselves, not just their proxies (the focus should be on the notorious “decision centers”). Statements about the possible transfer of long-range weapons to US adversaries and the visit of Russian ships to Cuba are logical steps in this direction.

Perhaps the range of responses could also include the shooting down of drones carrying out reconnaissance for Ukraine over the Black Sea. This would also allow for a total ban on their flights in the adjacent waters. Russian deterrence could also be complemented by maneuvers in the Baltic, Mediterranean or North Atlantic with other states that are considered to be Western adversaries.

The expectations from use of deterrence should be weighed against historical experience, which shows that the response to such actions is more often to harden the adversary than to encourage them to make concessions. In particular, this calls into question the validity of sometimes heard suggestions of nuclear strikes for demonstration purposes. Such actions are more likely to have the opposite effect to that envisaged by their authors, i.e. to bring direct military confrontation with NATO closer rather than further away.

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

Prof Jeffrey Sachs Delivers Unfiltered Geopolitical Lesson to Piers Morgan 

PM: “You seem very reliant on accepting Putin’s worldview, rather than perhaps the stark reality of the barbarism with which he’s executed this war?”

JS: “Yeah, maybe because I know too much about the US. Because the first war in Europe after WWII was the US bombing of Belgrade for 78 days to change borders of a European state.

The idea was to break Serbia, to create Kosovo as an enclave, and then to install Bondsteel, which is the largest NATO base in the Balkans, in the southwest Balkans.

So, the US started this under Clinton, that we will break the borders, we will illegally bomb another country. We didn’t have any UN authority.

This was a “NATO mission” to do that.”

via Hal Turner Radio

Yesterday, this website and radio show reported that Russia had suddenly commenced nuclear launch exercises with their naval group off the coast of Florida. What I chose to not report was that at the same time, Russia expanded its ongoing “Tactical nuclear weapons exercises” from the Southern Military District to also include the Leningrad Military District near St. Petersburg.

The unannounced missile drills off the coast of Florida was nerve-racking enough; but the added information about the expansion of tactical nuke drills to the area around St. Petersburg was just emotionally over the top.

TODAY things got exponentially worse.

Overnight, Russia deployed the second generation of its S-500 air defense systems . . . around Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Russia’s strategic nuclear missile silos.

This second generation system – the undisputed pinnacle of air defense systems in the world – was not expected to be ready for deployment for at least another six months.

The fact that Russia deployed them last night, and did so in very significant numbers for which mass-production wasn’t even known to be ready, never mind active, around Moscow, St. Petersburg AND their strategic nuclear missile silos, has now changed the balance of power completely.

There’s no gentle way to say this, so I’m just going to say it: This posture is one that would be expected if Russia was planning a nuclear first-strike upon the West, and was readying to defend itself from the counter-strike.

Looking at the timing of all of this, underscores the harsh reality:

Russia announced Tactical nuclear weapons exercises about three weeks ago, and began them two weeks ago in their Southern Military District.

Russia then sortied eleven nuclear missile submarines into the Atlantic Ocean, about ten days ago.

About three days later, Russia then sortied twenty-seven (27) additional nuclear missile submarines into the Pacific Ocean.

Russia then waited about a week (for the subs to get into position????) and EXPANDED the Tactical nuclear exercises to also include the Leningrad Military District around St. Petersburg. This means the ENTIRE Russian border with the West, is presently seeing the movement of actual, Tactical nuclear weapons, brought to within striking distance of NATO forces and NATO member countries!

Last night, Russia made a surprise deployment of their newest S-500 “Prometheus” air defense system around Moscow, St. Petersburg, and their strategic ICBM silos.

Added together, E V E R Y indication is that Russia is fully prepared now to launch a severe nuclear first-strike, and successfully defend itself from a counter-strike.

The only things the Russians have not yet done are declare a General War Mobilization of the entire population, and begin moving people into Bomb shelters.

Everything else is already done.

by Timofey Bordachev, Program Director of the Valdai Club

Excerpt

[ . . . ] What happened? There seem to be several reasons. The EU’s political systems are mired in crisis. This doesn’t just entail the well-known collapse of traditional parties and movements, or their replacement by populists like Emmanuel Macron’s movement in France or the True Finns in Finland. The whole Western European order, which is designed to convince citizens that the status quo is the most just, is in crisis.

There is no longer enough money for it. Western Europe’s ability to extract neo-colonial rents from the rest of humanity has declined sharply in recent years. The main ‘culprit’ is China, whose power is creating alternative sources of finance for the poor countries of Africa or Latin America to develop and sustain their populations. The other is Russia, whose military and political capabilities have grown, allowing former European colonies to rely on a different kind of power support.

Finally, the whole world is to blame for the Western European tragedy, simply because it is developing and can no longer be controlled by the shrinking powers of the old world. The Americans are less tolerant too; they are even forcing the EU to finance more and more of their own foreign policy adventures, such as supporting Kiev. That is why the ruling classes of the bloc are using every opportunity to drive their own citizens into conditions of mobilization and make them feel like they live in a ‘fortress under siege’.

They gained their first significant experience in this area in the 2010s, when Western Europe was flooded with refugees from the Middle East and Africa. Mobilization technologies were then fully deployed during the coronavirus pandemic. At that time, almost all Western European citizens, with rare exceptions such as Sweden, were locked up and their contact with the outside world drastically reduced. However, Swedes did not need to be particularly restricted as they already had the traditional Scandinavian worldview.

At the same time as strict quarantines were imposed, Western European states were denied the opportunity to choose their own vaccines. The same von der Leyen was put in charge of centralized procurement, giving observers plenty of reason to suspect her of corruption. The experiment was apparently considered a great success. And the armed conflict in Ukraine is already being used by politicians as an excuse to lock their citizens into the ‘bunker’ strategy.

Many ordinary Western Europeans are indeed as anxious and confused about the world around them as their elected or appointed leaders. In the decades since the Cold War, there has been a very interesting change in the minds of many EU citizens – a loss of the ability to make cause-and-effect connections. We can laugh about it all we want, but many people in Western Europe actually believe that they live in a ‘flowering garden surrounded by a jungle’. Those who don’t are seen as crackpots or dangerous ‘pro-Russian’ renegades.

It is difficult to judge whether this is a complete or partial ‘rewiring of the brain’. It is not easy to create in people the psychology of a ‘besieged fortress’ when there are no objective reasons to feel this way. The aforementioned Americans have them – an island position on the world map. Even Hollywood’s productions for children cultivate two feelings: their own omnipotence and, at the same time, being surrounded by dangerous enemies on all sides.

This was not particularly noticeable in Western Europe before. But there was something else – arrogance towards other nations. If in the case of Russia it is a pronounced phobia, i.e. fear mixed with contempt, in all others it is absolutely unadulterated contempt.

After the Cold War, most Western European politicians and thinking citizens realized in principle that they were doing something very wrong by trying to expand their military and political blocs into Russia’s backyard, without seeking to include Moscow itself. The lack of a way to support their own incomes without the predatory treatment of others led them to continue a policy that the best minds in region itself doubted. The realization that such a strategy would lead to a dramatic outcome was always present among those in the EU. It inevitably forced them to prepare for a confrontation caused by their own behavior.

So the Western Europeans were ready to start shutting out the rest of the world. Over the past decade, they have sent patrol boats into the Mediterranean to turn away or sink small boats carrying refugees. Then they kept out those who hadn’t been inoculated with vaccines approved by corrupt EU officials. Now they are massively building bunkers and bomb shelters along their borders with Russia.

The EU is entangled in its own mistakes and sees no way out. Because for decades it has outgrown the ability to seriously doubt the correctness of its actions. And so, for the time being, it is left to walk along a narrow road. Ahead of it is only the construction of new bunkers and other lines of defense in all directions.

Russia and its diplomats are now talking quite sincerely about their willingness to resume dialogue with our EU neighbors. But at the same time, we must be prepared for the fact that the distortions of political and mass consciousness in Western Europe cannot be cured too quickly.

This article was first published by ’Vzglyad’ newspaper and was translated and edited by the RT team.