A commenter wrote:

Requiem is a universal poem that can be written and spoken about all of written human history...when Anna writes of the tyranny of Stalin, of fascism, she writes about thousands of years of repeated tyranny, repeated torture, repeated mass control by not only a political elite, but by the mass themselves. in this poem, she not only writes of Stalinist terror, but crusades, of genocides, inquisitions, holy wars, feudal oppression, and of all the tyranny we see after her time--wars for oil, Vietnam, and all of tyranny of all times. Requiem is the most universal poem of all times. It leaves me with one question, and one question only: when and how will humanity achieve its salvation?

Find out more about her here

March 9, 2025 © Photo: Public domain

There are still some good people in the corridors of power we can appeal to and, if we can leverage them, then maybe, just maybe, the Chinese will finally do the right thing and oppose these ongoing genocides.

Since I last wrote about NATO’s ongoing genocide of the Alawites in mid January, their plight has deteriorated to one of absolute desperation. There are open culls of entire Alawite villages, female students and men in their 90s are being systematically executed, Christians are also being slaughtered and thousands of civilians have fled into Russia’s air force and naval bases in hopes of being spared this latest Holocaust.

Not only must we oppose this, but we must oppose those European fat cats, who rubber stamp genocides like this. Though these include senior British, French and German collaborators like the notorious Annalena Baerbock, who flocked to Damascus to wish their puppet, Jolani, happy hunting, a special shout out goes to Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Najib Mikati, who collaborate with Jolani’s moderate rebels, who previously beheaded Lebanese soldiers they took hostage.

Make no mistake about it. Once NATO’s proxies hack their way through Syria, Lebanon will be next in line literally for the chopping block. The situation in Lebanon is that their economy is totally in the toilet, with the lira trading at 90,000 to the Yankee dollar, down from its long term average of 1500 to the dollar. As in Syria itself, starvation is prevalent and the Lebanese are in no doubt that the worst lies ahead. Though Hezbollah are keeping their heads down as they dig in and make preparations for their own last stand, they can be under no illusion that the same ultimate fate the Alawites are now enduring awaits them.

Khazuk خازوق

To NATO’s Syrian regime, all minorities are fair game. Google words like Khazuk خازوق and these links here and here will show you the horrors of the Ottomans. The Ottomans were such medieval barbarians that the Syrians almost kissed the feet of the French when they replaced the Turks, following the division of spoils at the end of the Great War.

And, though the Druze led the rebellion against the French and were very prominent leaders in the Syrian Arab Army, NATO’s current head hacking proxies have worked hard to prise them away from their motherland, with Israel guaranteeing their security if they surrender to them in the south and NATO’s Jumblatt mob trying to wean them away to the west of Damascus. Add to that that the Kurds and Turks are ethnically cleansing northern Syria as part of their own land grabbing scams and Syria is on the rack.

This process of national dismemberment is made far easier by the dire economic situation of both Syria and Lebanon, with the latter being kept afloat by some $6.7 billion in remittances family members send home to Beirut every year. As these remittances now constitute 30.7 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Lebanon, which represents the third highest in the world, behind Tonga (41 percent of GDP), and Tajikistan (39 percent), NATO and their local Israeli enforcers have Lebanon rightly on the ropes and, Hezbollah perhaps apart, there are few forces on the horizon that will slow their pending apocalypse.

Assad rises from the political ashes

NATO media echo chambers, such as this Irish state media site, have blamed the current Alawite genocide on their victims or, as they put it, the head hackers are trying “to crush a nascent insurgency by fighters from Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect” with Jolani saying.”We will continue to pursue the remnants of the fallen regime… We will bring them to a fair court, and we will continue to restrict weapons to the state, and no loose weapons will remain in Syria.”

Fair court, my royal, proletarian arse. The reality is Alawites, Kurds, Christians and other meddlesome minorities are being lynched and shot out of hand, and helicopters are firing into Alawite homes just for the hell of it. Latakia students Hazar Issa, Nour Issa, Zaina Jadeed, Shinda Kashko and Ahmad Haydar are just some of the many innocent students shot out of hand in the last few days by these jihadist savages. Maronite Tony Boutros and his son, Fadi, are just two of the most recent Christians these liberators dispatched. Sheikh Shaiban Mansour was a 90 year old Alawite they murdered and mutilated and, to give you a feel of the sort of Syrians Baerbock and her equally depraved sort get off on, here is a video of an Alawite winemaker being executed, and his body desecrated by Jolani’s finest, Baerbock’s buddies.

In trying to get at the root of the loathing Baerbock and her buddies have for Alawites and those, like Asma Assad, married to them, we must never leave Western fools and knaves out of our frame. Though we all recall this glowing Vogue review of Asma Assad, here is its author literally swallowing her own words and thereby showing what a contemptible swamp creature she and all journalists like her are. As regards Asma Assad splurging out on clothes, just as well no one told this pretend journalist that Gulf State princesses commute on private jets to Italy to get their feet measured for the custom made shoes these plastic Cindarellas while away their time buying by the truck full.

Then there is [Dr Hafez Assad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez_Bashar_al-Assad#:~:text=Hafez%20Bashar%20al-Assad%20\(Arabic,regime%20on%208%20December%202024.), Asma’s son, who was ridiculed for not winning the various maths competitions he entered when he was a schoolboy. Not only do I know Irish maths geniuses who got nowhere in those competitions because of how the United States and other heavy hitters load the dice but, given that Dr Assad is galaxies ahead of any of his critics in the maths stakes, the old adage that one should only write about what one knows holds true in this case. But hey, if the Assads’ critics wrote about what they know about, they would have nothing at all to write about for the story, if such it was, was not about Hafez’ prowess (or lack thereof) in maths but as a vehicle to have a pop at the Assads and the Alawites and to thereby help the head hackers rid the world of them.

And, as for Bashar al-Assad, what about him? Not only was Jolani’s original war cry to send Alawites to the grave, but the Uyghur shock troops he has pouring into Latakia to finish off the Alawites are screaming about revenge for battles that happened all of 1,500 years ago. Baerbock’s heroes are not mine but then, unlike her, I was never a fan of Nazi Germany’s Einsatzgruppen.

Russia, Mother Russia

Although the immediate Assad family are now residents of the Russian Federation, there is little beyond giving them bed and board that Russia can do. Not only is Russia bogged down resisting another German-backed genocide on its very doorstep, but any serious intervention by Russia outside of using its platform in the United Nations to stop the genocide would not end well. I say that, because Russia’s original intervention in this NATO proxy war caused the United States to change the facts on the ground by levelling Raqqa and its own proxy ISIS forces garrisoned there along with it, so that the heroic Syrian Arab Army, with the Russian Air Force in the van, might not liberate it.

Israel, the United States and their cronies have dark plans not only for the Alawites but for all of Syria and Lebanon and heaven help those, like the Alawites and the Armenians who get in the way. Russia, sadly, cannot be the saviour of the world. That is the job of Jesus.

Qatar and the Palestinians

Qatar’s role was to bankroll the overthrow of the secular Syrian government, not to fund any Syrian economic recovery. Sure, they throw the Syrians the odd plane full of cheap aid but that is it. Best for the Gulf State despots to have the Syrians desperate than to have them making subversive waves.

As for Hamas, who fought against the Syrian Arab Army on behalf of their Qatari paymasters, what is there to say, except if they had brains, they might be dangerous? Their situation is as bad as that of the Alawites and the Jolani regime, which has surrendered most of southern Syria and the Druze areas to Israel without even throwing a cabbage at them, are as much enemies of the Palestinians as are the most fanatical Israelis. There was never any plan, and was never meant to be any plan beyond overthrowing the secular Syrian Arab Republic and that Hamas could not see that shows brains are not their strong suit. That the head hackers of Dera are swarming northwards to massacre Alawites even as the Israelis occupy Dera show what a waste of political space these Uyghur, Jordanian, Turkish, Egyptian and Albanian “new Syrians” are.

And, perhaps the Chinese too. Chinese Uyghur militant Abdulaziz Dawood Khudaberdi, also known as Zahid and the commander of the separatist Turkistan Islamic Party’s (TIP) invasion forces in Syria, is now a brigadier-general in Jolani’s ramshackle army, and Mawlan Tarsoun Abdussamad and Abdulsalam Yasin Ahmad, two other notorious Uyghur head hackers, are colonels. Though China labels TIP a terrorist organisation responsible for plots to attack overseas Chinese targets, there is more hope of the Alawites defeating TIP than there is of the Chinese, who are big on statements but AWOL on actions.

The Turks meanwhile, financed by the Qataris, have sent a further 3,500 of their mercenaries into the Syrian coast, with the objective of seizing its ports, stealing its resources and slaughtering Alawites, Armenians and the various other minority groups that get up their noses.

The end result of all is that Israel will succeed in dividing and conquering Syria and being in a very good position to finish off the Shias of Lebanon, before moving on to Iraq, Yemen and Iran.

Civilisation’s Last Stand

Next month should see me writing an article timed for Thursday 24th April, the 110th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. When I spoke at a function in Damascus University to mark the 100th anniversary of that unspeakable crime, I said that, of all the speakers who had gathered in Yerevan to commemorate it, only Russian President Putin had the right to be there, because, of all Europe’s countries, only Russia had come to the aid of the Armenians.

I had spent that morning in Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp watching the young mothers with their babies wince as Jolani’s mortars landed amongst us and the women in the bread queues nearby. Though Jolani has other targets for the moment I, for one, do not forget the Palestinian children they beheaded in Aleppo, just like I do not forget so many others.

Still, remembrance is not enough. I am still collecting money here for distressed Syrians and I am working with Syrian lawyers and similar people of good will to collate, collect and disseminate information indicting Jolani. Just as with the Armenians, this will be a long and, perhaps, fruitless journey. But, leaving aside that it is better to be a fool on the side of the persecuted Armenians and Alawites than it is to be a bought and bribed genius on the side of Baerbock and her head hacking buddies, there are still some good people in the corridors of power in America and in central Europe we can appeal to and, if we can leverage them, then maybe, just maybe, the Chinese will finally do the right thing and oppose these ongoing genocides. There is, after all, a first time for everything.

Jeffrey Sachs asks the EU Parliament to open their eyes

Few can match Professor Sachs’ bonafides with regard to academic appointments, advisory roles to the most influential bodies of power and breadth of understanding of geopolitics and economics as it pertains to “sustainable development”. He is (very briefly):

• Former Harvard professor of Economics and director of the Harvard Institute for International Development

• A Columbia University Professor and director of its Center for Sustainable Development

• Recipient of numerous awards including being named among Time’s “100 most influential people” twice, recipient of the Padma Bushan, India’s third highest civilian award

• Author and/or co-author of dozens of books on the topics of economics, global inequality, American foreign policy

Beyond that, Sachs has held advisory roles to foreign governments on all major continents as well as UN Secretaries General, the W.H.O. and the World Bank. He is, in other words, extremely well connected and influential academically, politically and socially.

The question is, should you trust him?

The answer is, no. In this environment of misinformation peddled by sources on all sides of topics, trust in anyone cannot be justified, least of all on the basis of stature granted by institutions which in turn cannot be trusted to defend the interests of the 99%. Sachs himself admitted that “we don't speak the truth about almost anything in this world right now”.

Sachs has been an advocate for the disastrous WHO biosecurity agenda which would have secured a commitment from nation signatories to continue with gain-of-function research, the development of countermeasures (i.e. mRNA “vaccines”) and the implementation of tighter liability shields for damage resulting from their use.

As the chair of The Lancet’s Covid-19 Commission, he was a fierce critic of the lab-leak theory, blaming such notions on right-wing ideologues who sought to push the world into conflict using arguments that were not supported by biology and chronology.

He subsequently altered his position after appointing Peter Daszak, the notorious director of EcoHealth Alliance, to head a task force investigating SARS-COV2 origins, only to learn that his Columbia University colleague was not being transparent for obvious conflicts of interest. He has since publicly opined that lab-leak is a viable hypothesis and, in doing so, impugned the integrity of public health officials like Anthony Fauci.

Has he had a reckoning? Is he playing both sides? Who knows? At the very least he has demonstrated the wisdom of being able to change his mind and admit that he was wrong. That certainly counts for something in today’s world.

As long as we do not seek to place trust in an individual, it doesn’t matter. But we can, however, endeavor to get better at trusting our own discernment as we assess what is being offered without having to guess at the hidden motivations of the person who is doing the offering.

Here is my general approach. I ask myself:

• Is the person’s central message worthwhile and helpful? (Is there a good reason to listen closely in the first place)

• Do they present a cohesive and logical argument?

• Are they demanding that you trust them because they are an appointed authority or are they asking you to use your own logic and sensibility?

• What proof do they offer to support their thesis?

I invite you to approach Sachs’s speech to the EU Parliament on March 3 that way. Here is his commentary, in full. A Warning: If you absolutely cannot live without a “I stand with Ukraine” banner in your front yard, DON’T LISTEN TO IT:

To Summarize:

• The war in Ukraine will come to an end and that is a good thing for the Ukrainians and for Europeans

• The fear that Russia’s incursion into Crimea and the Donbass regions of Ukraine is an indication that Putin has his eyes on Brussels next is an absurd idea promulgated by war-mongering propagandists in America and Europe

• Anyone who concludes that Russia’s move to annex these areas was an act of pure aggression and not a desperate attempt to keep NATO off of her borders has no grasp of the historical events that led to this conflict

• Sachs reminds the audience that he knows all the players on all sides of this issue, but rather than demanding we genuflect to his opinion he encourages us to examine the historical record which clearly demonstrates that NATO, under US direction, has a 30 year history of violating agreements in order to provoke an inevitable Russian response.

• The EU should regard Russia as a vital and natural trading partner, not as an existential threat. Antagonizing their giant neighbor to the East serves only American Imperialism and not anyone else.

So by my standards, Jeffrey Sachs hit it out of the park.

Moreover, Sachs was frank and did not limit his critique of American foreign policy to the Russian issue. Sachs reminded the world that the wars in the Middle East were Netanyahu’s wars, not anyone else’s. He cited NATO Commander General Wesley Clark’s surprise when he learned, on September 20, 2001, that the United States had already committed to starting seven wars in the Middle East, years before any kind of 9/11 investigation had been conducted.

Obviously, these plans were hatched years before the events of 9/11 and can be traced to a white paper, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” written in 1996 by American Neo-cons for then (and present) Israeli PM Netanyahu.

He explained America’s foreign policy to the EU parliament like he was speaking to an auditorium of undergraduate students, because, sadly, that is what was necessary. Here are some of his best eye-openers:

• The American political system is a system of image; it's a system of media manipulation every day

• The U.S. has done the most to extinguish peace under President Joe Biden because he was not compos mentis for at least the last two years of his Presidency

• Being an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but being a friend is fatal (attributed to Henry Kissinger)

• Any place without an American military base is an enemy

• Neutrality is the the dirtiest word in the US political lexicon because “at least if you're an enemy we know you're an enemy. If you are neutral you're subversive because then you're really against us because you're not telling us—you're pretending to be neutral”

• With regard to the Middle East: “US completely handed over foreign policy 30 years ago to Netanyahu. The Israel Lobby dominates American politics. Have no doubt about it. I could explain for hours how it works. It's very dangerous”

• Netanyahu is a war criminal, properly indicted by the ICC (International Criminal Court)

• “By the way if anyone would like to discuss how the US blew up Nordstream,

  I'd be happy to talk about that”

Some will complain that all this has been obvious. I would agree. However it hasn’t been obvious to many who sat among Sachs’ influential audience. And Sachs is not a host of a popular podcast speaking to his subscribers. He is a respected voice on the international stage addressing the European political leadership’s failure to formulate any kind of foreign policy. He was politely chastising the leadership of 400 million people to their faces.

I didn’t know who Jeffrey Sachs was four years ago. I was (and still am) unaware of many things. I was, however, aware of NATO’s inexorable march eastward despite the requests, turned demands, turned ultimatums from Russian leadership to relent. This is why I have been flabbergasted by the left leaning intellectuals in this country who paint anyone who asserts that both sides share the blame around the war in Ukraine as “Putin apologists” or spineless cowards for not coming to the defense of the Ukrainian people.

Why has this been lost on the “well-informed”? Who are they listening to?

With regard to the Middle East, Sachs never directly implicates Israel in the events of 9/11 but clearly has no reservations about acknowledging the plain fact that Israeli leadership under Netanyahu had the most to gain by those horrific events. Stating the obvious has sadly never been so dangerous as it is now.

The overwhelming evidence proves that three skyscrapers could not have been leveled in a matter of seconds by two plane collisions. Those events were planned and executed by unknown entities who not only had open access to the guts of those secure buildings but also to highly energetic explosives and, most importantly, the power to steer all major media outlets towards a single explanation. By doing so they got them to undermine their fundamental mission to use skepticism and rigor to hold authority in check.

Though President Trump has responded to the growing demand for a reinvestigation of the events of 9/11, we must ask, why has it taken so long? On what grounds are we to trust what we are now told two decades later? Who would be against transparency? How powerful would they have to be to be able to suppress a movement that has been demanding it for over two decades?

We may never discover who the real perpetrators were, but it is clear that at least one entity, the Israeli messaging platform Odigo, had foreknowledge of the events of that day. Here is the 2001 article from Haaretz which reported that Odigo themselves admitted that someone on their staff notified at least two of its users to stay away from the World Trade Center Complex that morning.

And then there were the group of five young men working for a moving company called Urban Moving Systems. Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Yaron Shimuel and Omar Marmari were spotted in the parking lot of the Doric Apartment Complex in Union City, New Jersey, just after 8am on 9/11 where they were seen taking pictures and filming the attacks while also celebrating the destruction of the towers.

The so-called “Dancing Israelis” were detained, interrogated and eventually sent back to Israel. Very little can be confirmed about these young men. Did they have foreknowledge of the event as well? Did one have $4,700 dollars stuffed in his sock? Did another fail an FBI polygraph test? Did they all appear on Israeli TV months later claiming to be Mossad intelligence agents? We simply cannot confirm any of these things, however one point cannot be contested. They were celebrating. Why?

Could Professor Sachs be the next advocate for a 9/11 Reinvestigation?

It was in the kitsch decor of his Mar-a-Lago residence that Donald Trump convinced allied central bankers and finance ministers that he was going to make them pay the United States’ debts

De-dollarization, that is, using the dollar only at the national level of the United States and no longer in international trade, is the sea serpent of finance. However, following the unilateral coercive measures that the United States imposed on its allies, first against Iran, then against Russia (measures wrongly described as "sanctions" by Atlantic propaganda), Russia created a Financial Message Transfer System (SPFS), China the Interbank Payment System (CIPS) and the European Union the European Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX). As a result, the use of the dollar has declined by about a quarter in international trade.

However, the US public debt has now reached the astronomical sum of 34,000 billion dollars, of which only a third is held by foreign investors, according to Forbes [1]. If some of the US creditors, mainly China and Saudi Arabia, were to ask for repayment, a gigantic economic crisis would occur as in 1929.

Many economists regularly warn of this prospect. However, according to Jon Hartley of the Hoover Institution, central banks have not reduced the share of the dollar in their foreign exchange reserves since the war in Ukraine. However, on February 20, a videoconference by analyst Jim Bianco, taken up by the Bloomberg agency [2], rekindled concerns. According to this analyst, the Trump administration is following a plan, the "Mar-a-Lago Agreement". It intends to radically restructure the US debt burden by reorganizing world trade through tariffs, devaluing the dollar and, ultimately, reducing the cost of borrowing, all with the aim of putting US industry on an equal footing with its competitors in the rest of the world.

The idea of the “Mar-a-Lago Accord” refers to an article by Stephen Miran of the Manhattan Institute [3]; Miran was appointed by President Trump to chair the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) and he himself, Donald Trump, gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 22 that seems to go in this direction.

The expression “Mar-a-Lago Accord” refers to the “Plaza Accord” when, in 1985, the United States implemented a policy of weakening its currency in order to boost its exports. In practice, the financial mechanisms having been poorly controlled, the US economy restarted by causing a very serious recession in Japan.

On January 21 and 22, Donald Trump had gathered the central bankers and finance ministers of the G7 in his Mar-a-Lago residence. He is said to have welcomed them by telling them: "No one will leave this room until we have found an agreement on the dollar." [4]. The agreement in question would therefore have been approved by the allies.

The main idea would be for the US Treasury to issue government bonds that do not pay interest (what are called "zero coupons") and that would not mature for a century (that is, could not be exchanged for cash for 100 years). Washington would therefore have to force its allies to convert their debts into "zero coupons".

If we accept this analysis, we must reinterpret various actions of President Trump, in terms of customs duties or the creation of a sovereign wealth fund. They no longer seem as erratic as the international press describes them, but on the contrary very logical.

We must therefore consider that Donald Trump is trying to manage the possible economic collapse of Joe Biden’s "American empire" as Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev tried to manage that of Leonid Brezhnev’s "Soviet empire".

I am all the more attentive to this hypothesis because, in my opinion, the coup of September 11, 2001 had no other goal than to postpone the foreseeable collapse of the “American empire”. The last two decades have been only a reprieve that, far from solving the problem, have only made it much more complex.

Let us recall: in 1989, the Russian Mikhail Gorbachev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, decided to reduce state spending. He abruptly stopped aid to the USSR’s allies and gave everyone their freedom. Simultaneously, the East Germans toppled the Berlin Wall, while the Poles elected members of Solidarity to the Diet and the Senate. This is the end of the imperialism of the Ukrainian Leonid Brezhnev who, in 1968, had imposed on all the allies of the USSR to adopt, defend and preserve the economic model of Moscow.

This is probably what we are witnessing today: Donald Trump, President of the United States, is dissolving the “American empire” as he had tried to undo it in 2017 [5]. On July 28, 2017, he had reorganized the National Security Council by liquidating the permanent seats of the director of the CIA and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This was followed by three weeks of war in Washington and, ultimately, the resignation of the National Security Advisor, General Michael T. Flynn. The latter, who has disappeared from the radar, is in fact still active today and organizes meetings at Mar-a-Lago for opponents of the allied countries.

This time, cautiously, President Trump is lulling his public opinion to sleep by evoking the annexation of the entire North American continental shelf, from Greenland to the Panama Canal, while liquidating the war in Ukraine and the European Union.

If my hypothesis is correct, we must not believe a word of the threats of annexation of new territories, such as Canada, and not imagine that the United States is withdrawing militarily from Europe to confront China, but admit that it is militarily abandoning its European allies. We see that it is abandoning Germany and relying on Poland to organize Central Europe, even if it means letting Warsaw annex Eastern Galicia (currently Ukrainian). Similarly, we must prepare to see the United States abandon its Middle Eastern allies, with the exception of Israel. Indeed, it has just resumed arms deliveries to Tel Aviv and begun secret talks with Iran via Moscow. They let Saudi Arabia and Turkey divide up the Arab world.

The competition between Paris and London to take the lead in European defense should therefore not be understood as opposition to peace in Ukraine. Neither the French nor the British armies have the possibility of replacing Washington’s military support. It is rather a question of determining the role that the two capitals will subsequently play on the continent. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, hopes to develop his defense concept around the French strike force, while Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, intends to take advantage of the situation. The former is aware that the European Union, around Germany, is disintegrating and that President Trump prefers the "Three Seas Initiative", around Poland. He could therefore reawaken the Weimar Triangle (Germany/France/Poland) to maintain some room for maneuver. While, from the same analysis and taking into account the disappearance of NATO, the second will ensure that Germany is kept as far away from Russia as possible, thus continuing his country’s foreign policy for a century and a half. Note that if the European allies, the Chinese and the Saudis should consider it a scam to exchange their debts for “zero coupons”, Russia should on the contrary support the United States in this maneuver. Indeed, during the dismantling of the Soviet Union, Russia went through a decade of recession and unrest, but today it needs the United States to avoid finding itself face to face with China.

Thierry Meyssan

[1] «Why Trump’s ‘Mar-A-Lago Accord’ Would Financially Matter To You», Erik Sherman, Forbes, February 23, 2025.

[2] «"Mar-a-Lago Accord" chatter is geting Wall Street attention» and «Jim Bianco on What a "Mar-a-Lago Accord" could mean for the economy», Tracy Alloway & Joe Wiesenthal,Bloomberg, February 20 and 25, 2025.

[3] «A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System», Stephen Miran, Hudson Bay Capital, November 2025.

[4] «Et Donald Trump fit entrer Mar-a-Lago dans la légende du dollar», Nessim Aït-Kacimi, Les Échos, 25 février 2025.

[5] « Donald Trump dissout l’organisation de l’impérialisme états-unien », par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 30 janvier 2017.

There is a bedrock of Russian public opinion on how the war in the Ukraine should end. 

There is also a bedrock of American public opinion on whether President Donald Trump is to be believed when he speaks of ending the war under the new American “Golden Dome” of peace with Russia. 

Between this rock and this hard place, there are the politics and the business of enlarging power and making money. According to Trump in his March 4 speech to Congress, he aims at “building the most powerful military of the future. As a first step, I am asking Congress to fund a state-of-the-art golden dome missile defence shield to protect our homeland — all made in the U.S.A.”  

For “most powerful military of the future”, Trump means new hypersonic weapons for a first strike against Russian and Chinese nuclear forces. For his “golden dome”, Trump means first-strike capacity without fear of retaliation — without mutually assured destruction by the Russians and Chinese.  The word for this isn’t peace – it’s a new US arms race.

In the recent statement by Howard Lutnick, Trump’s long time business friend and now US Commerce Secretary, Trump’s strategy for ending the current war on the Ukrainian battlefield means a cash dividend payable on a ceasefire at the frozen line of contact; this peace with Russia means business with Russia. “The President,” said Lutnick, “is going to figure out what are the tools he can use on Russia, and what are the tools he can use on Ukraine.  Like any great mediator, he’s going to beat both sides down, to get them to the table…We’ve given three hundred billion dollars to the Ukraine. Is it difficult to see what side we’re on?  Gimme a break…Let’s go force Russia into a reasonable peace deal…Enough already.”  

Between the rock, the hard place, and the Golden Dome, there is plenty of hopeful, wishful thinking. This is understandable, especially at this time of Lent. It’s also religious faith. The Roman Catholic bishops of Europe have just issued their Lenten proclamation that “as Christians prepare to embark on the journey of Lent, a time of repentance and conversion leading to Easter, the feast of hope and new life, we continue to entrust Ukraine and Europe to our Lord Jesus Christ, through the intercession of Mary, the Queen of Peace.”

Because the bishops are as unconfident of Mary’s mediation and Christ’s intervention, as they are of Trump’s,  they say they are still for holy war against “Russia the aggressor”, and for British and French guns to enforce it. “Amid deepening geopolitical complexities and the unpredictability of actions taken by some members of the international community,” the bishops say, meaning the US and Trump, “we call on the European Union and its Member States to remain united in their commitment to supporting Ukraine and its people. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a blatant violation of international law… A comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine can only be achieved through negotiations. Any credible and sincere dialogue effort should be supported by continued strong transatlantic and global solidarity and it must involve the victim of the aggression: Ukraine. We firmly reject any attempts to distort the reality of this aggression. In order to be sustainable and just, a future peace accord must fully respect international law and be underpinned by effective security guarantees to prevent the conflict from re-erupting.”

Under their mitres, when the bishops are saying complexity, unpredictability, and distortion of reality, they are thinking Trump.

Reviving the crusade against the Russian infidels is also what the regimes of the UK and Europe want. But the public belief in this crusade is waning, especially in the UK, creating another rock-and-hard- place squeeze for Prime Minister Keir Starmer; his military, intelligence and other Deep State institutions; the City business lobby; and the British media. 

The Russian response is as sceptical of Trump as it is of the combination of Europe’s rulers and their bishops. 

In nationwide polling in the second half of January, the Levada Centre of Moscow reported the high level of support for President Vladimir Putin, is qualified by the conviction of the  majority of voters that the end of the war terms must not (repeat not) concede the return of the four new regions – Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhye. “Although there is talk of Russia’s interest in rare metals and other resources in the depths these provinces, in some industrial enterprises, etc., [public opinion is] not about the material side. Russian society is showing what Lenin called the’ national pride of the Great Russians’. The level of solidarity is very high…What would the majority want? They are for peace, but their peace plan is that it stops at the point when they can feel victory.”  

Listen to the new podcast here.

By the end of February, Trump’s first month in office, Russian public support for the Army has reached the 80% peak expressed at the beginning of the Special Military Operation (SVO) in March 2022. Public confidence that the SVO is progressing successfully has now hit a peak of 72%.   

At the same time, Russian support for end-of-war negotiations between Russia and the US is high. According to Levada’s poll of February 20-26, “the most preferred conditions for concluding a peace agreement for respondents are: the exchange of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of war – 92%;  ensuring the rights of Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine – 83%; protecting the status of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine – 79%;  establishing a friendly Russian government in Ukraine – 73%;  lifting Western sanctions against Russia – 71%; demilitarization of Ukraine and , reducing its army – 70%; an immediate ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine – 69%.”  

Wariness towards Trump and the Americans is the watchword of Russian policymakers. Dmitry Rogozin, the senator for Zaporozhye and commander of a combat unit at the front, is urging  scepticism towards press announcements that the US is halting deliveries of new weapons to the Ukraine, and stopping intelligence-sharing with the Ukrainian General Staff.

Source: https://t.me/rogozin_do/6804   
Rogozin’s scepticism has been corroborated by the Central Intelligence Agency Director, John Ratcliffe: “"I think on the military front and the intelligence front, the pause I think will go away. I think we'll work shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine as we have to push back on the aggression that's there, but to put the world in a better place for these peace negotiations to move forward.”

In today’s hour-long podcast with Nima Alkhorshid, we discuss the Special Inspector General’s (SIG) recent report to Congress, revealing that the total spent and sent by the US for military, other security and infrastructure assistance to the Ukraine is only $83.4 billion; that’s just a quarter fraction of the $350 billion figure Trump, Lutnick and other US officials have been publicizing. Most of this money, the SIG report also reveals, is for replenishment of weapons stocks taken out of the Army and other Pentagon stocks and sent to the battlefield; and for equipping and operating US military forces in eastern Europe, outside the Ukraine.

Read the accounting details here.

Source: https://johnhelmer.net/

Finally, as discussed in the podcast, here is the evidence from dozens of US opinion polls that Trump’s claims about American voter support are false. In his speech to Congress, the President said “for the first time in modern history, more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction. In fact, it’s an astonishing record: 27-point swing, the most ever.”   

The week before, the White House Press Office published the headline claim of “massive support for President Trump and his agenda”. In point of fact, the poll revealed that on the question of whether the country is moving in the right direction or not, despite the improvement on the positive side since the end of the Biden Administration, the majority of Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction, 48% to 42%.  Black Americans were significantly more pessimistic; 59% said the wrong direction.

Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/

Source: https://harvardharrispoll.com/

A closer look at the February 19-20 panel interview poll cited by the White House also reveals strong voters majorities opposed to Trump’s line on negotiating peace with Russia. One of the reasons, the poll identifies, is that most Americans still believe Russia is expansionist and will move into other countries unless restrained by US forces.   

Source: https://harvardharrispoll.com/

Compilations of this and 36 other national polls by Realclearpolitics.com, reporting as recently as March 2, reveal that since the Inauguration, public disapproval of Trump’s performance has been growing, and approval shrinking until this week there is just 1.3% between them. The Harvard Harris poll cited by the White House was the second most favourable to Trump of all 37 polls reporting.

Source: https://www.realclearpolling.com/

When the direction of the country, right or wrong, was questioned by the pollsters, the average of the poll results as of March 2 was a negative spread of 9%; that’s to say, 51.4% believe the country under Trump is going in the wrong direction, while 41.4% believe it is going in the right direction.

Source: https://www.realclearpolling.com/

Trump’s negative job approval rating after his first month in office contrasts with Biden’s positive job approval for his first seven months. President Barack Obama’s job approval remained positive for the first 18 months of his term. “We’ve done more in two weeks than Obama and Biden!” Trump said in February.  The majority of US voters don’t believe him.

Click to listen to the discussion.  

Trump and his team have been busy dismantling – and exposing to public view – the mechanism to the all-encompassing narrative control machine which has been shown to be both authoritarian and industrial in its global scope.

The Musk investigations have begun to peer into the USAID complex. They reveal

The big picture however is not that USAID has been a sub-silo for CIA; that is not revelatory. What is revealing, however, is the evidence that USAID was so heavily involved in domestic influence operations. This latter aspect serves to highlight USAID’s relationship with the CIA and the fact that CIA, FBI, Dept. of Homeland Security and USAID were one big Intelligence Community structure, held together (in flimsy legal terms) by the Office of Director of National Intelligence (the role that Tulsi Gabbard will fill now she has been confirmed in post).

Trump’s insistence on Gabbard for the post reflects his absolute need for Intelligence ‘truth’; but it is also likely that the DNI will become the locus for unscrambling and revealing the shadow ‘Intelligence Control Machine’ that is twin to the narrative manipulation complex.

Likely more revelations will follow, as part to a carefully managed release of further exposés – adding to the atmosphere of a breathless hurtling towards a new era. And keeping the opposition off-balance.

The Spectator magazine correctly observes that the head-spinning acceleration towards a new era is not confined to America, Canada, Greenland and Panama: “There is a wind of change blowing through the West. It emanates from Washington DC”, Gavin Mortimer writes.

A number of EU leaders congregated last weekend at a ‘Patriots for Europe’ (PfE) summit in Madrid. Geert Wilders declared:

“We are living in an historic age, and my message to all the old leaders from Macron to Scholz, to your own Pedro Sánchez?: It’s time. It’s over now. They are history”.

Viktor Orbán said:

“The Trump tornado has changed the world in just a few weeks … Yesterday we were heretics, today we’re mainstream”.

Marine Le Pen claimed that the West is “facing a truly global turning point … Meanwhile, the European Union seems to be in a state of shock … [in the consensus Brussels view however], Trump isn’t an inspiring figure – but an antagonizing one”.

Nonetheless, in the U.S., the first CBS-YouGov snapshot poll; n) shows what public sentiment thinks of Trump: 69% see him as tough; 63% as energetic; 60 % as focussed, and 58% as effective. His overall job rating stands at 53%. Just how Trump would like his image to be, we imagine.

Trump’s ‘showman’ image and ‘shock psycho-therapy’ clearly works for domestic America. In the world beyond, it is another story. There they have only Trump’s ‘reported’ rhetoric by which to judge. They do not get to see the full theatrical ‘global leadership show’, so his conjuring is understood more literally. And the rest of the world is only too aware of America’s history of broken-words (and withdrawals from agreements).

Overseas, Trump sticks with this same strategy of presenting shock interventions, or rather, an image (Gaza, for example) of an aspirational outcome that is intended to be novel, and to evoke surprise and evenshock. The purpose seems to be to toss a psychological grenade into congealed and stultified political paradigms, hoping to find movement and intending perhaps, to trigger changed conversations.

There can be validity to such an approach, providing it does not just stick a wrench into complex geo-politics. And for Trump, this is a real danger: Advancing extreme and unrealistic notions that can simply confuse and undermine confidence that his outcome could be realistic.

The inescapable fact is that the three key foreign policy issues which Trump faces however, are not ‘conversations’ – they relate to existential wars; to death and destruction. And wars are not so susceptible to off-hand grenade tossing. Worse, ‘careless words’ fired from the hip, have real import and may produce unintended and distinctly adverse consequences.

The cease-fire between Israel and Hamas remains close to the brink of collapse, as [“the magician” [Netanyahu] continues working to sabotage it](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-02-12/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-works-to-derail-gaza-cease-fire-but-trumps-agenda-could-override-his/00000194-f9d8-df1c-ad94-fbfe38a00000 "https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-02-12/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-works-to-derail-gaza-cease-fire-but-trumps-agenda-could-override-his/00000194-f9d8-df1c-ad94-fbfe38a00000"evertheless Hamas’ pressure in recent days worked, and the ceasefire (for now) continues.

Trump may have believed that by unilaterally raising the stakes (demanding publicly the release of “all” Israeli hostages this Saturday) – thereby collapsing a complex process down to just one single release – he would be able to bring more hostages home quicker. However, in so threatening, he risked the complete collapse of the deal, since the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, and the withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza in Phase Two, form the absolute bedrock to Hamas’ continued participation in the negotiations.

Any resulting resumption of the Israeli destruction of Gaza would also constitute a black stain on Trump’s aspiration to end wars – for he would then ‘own’ the consequences to a renewal of war in the Middle East.

Netanyahu’s principal concern primordially lies with not completing the deal, but with the continued survival of his government. This was the meaning to his statement in reaction to Trump’s ‘threats’ (hell let loose) that Israel would halt negotiations on Phase Two of the Gaza deal, and in Netanyahu’s echoing of Trump’s demand that Hamas release “all” the hostages on Saturday – or else. The Israeli government however, duly has backtracked under pressure from Hamas – Israel, officials report, has conveyed the message to Hamas that the ceasefire will continue, should the three hostages be released this Saturday.

Whilst it is now obvious from the Trump Team’s discourse that the U.S. is intent to present a new face to the coming multipolar world – “with multi-great powers in different parts of the planet”, as Marco Rubio outlined in a recent interview – it is also true, however, that this change came about (was driven, in fact) by a seismic shift in how the world views America. Rubio effectively admits to this ‘truth’ when he adds that “the postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us”.

Some members of the Trump Team, however, persist with threats (‘inflicting maximum pain’, ‘bombing to extinction’) that hark back to the old era of U.S. imperium. That is to say, some of Trump’s Team repeat Rubio’s rubric well enough, but without showing any indication that they have been affected or transformed by the new understanding. The ‘seismic shift’ is two-way.

The World is in a new era too. It has had enough of western unlateral impositions. It is this that triggered their shift. Their swivel of ‘the face that the U.S. presents to the world’ – the one outlined by Rubio. Understanding that both Hegemon and its vassals have transformed demands new approaches by all sides.

When Trump signed a Presidential Order for maximum pressure on Iran, the Supreme Leader simply said “No” to all talks with the U.S. Trump was just too unpredictable and untrustworthy, Khamenei said. Kellogg’s exaggerated claim that Iran ‘is scared’ and effectively defenceless, didn’t bring the expected response of talks. It brought defiance.

The West’s insensibility to what is going on in the world – and why the world is what it is – has been made possible because it was partially disguised through the ability of the U.S. – in the past era – to be able to impose itself on crises, and control the way that those problems were presented across the global narrative machine.

Trump’s Ukraine Envoy Kellogg said recently that Russia’s current sanctions ‘pain level’ is at about 3 out of 10, and that Trump has much more room to raise that ‘pain level’ by putting sanctions pressure on Russian oil and gas:

“You have to put economic pressure; you have to put diplomatic pressure, some type of military pressures and levers that you’re going to use underneath those to make sure [this goes] where we want it to go”.

The arrogance and misreading of the Russian position in Kellogg’s statement is so complete that it brought Russian Deputy FM Sergei Ryabkov to warn that Moscow-Washington relations are “teetering at the brink of complete rupture”; the ‘antagonistic content’ of Russian-U.S. relations has become ‘very critical’ today, Ryabkov cautioned:

“Washington’s attempts to give Moscow demands or to demonstrate the alleged doing of ‘a great favour’ in exchange for unacceptable U.S. demands are bound to end with failure in the dialogue with Russia”.

This ominous signal was stated by Ryabkov, despite Russia actively wanting a strategic, big-picture, written security deal with the U.S. – albeit one achieved on equal terms.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has cataloged the deep-seated Russian experience (and resentment) for the West’s history of duplicity. It runs deep, and begs a question whose answer is yet to be seen: ‘The elephant in the room’. Drafting a paper of understandings on Ukraine is one thing. But Russians remain sceptical as to whether it can achieve a process that is written, binding and trustworthy.

Behind this lies a second question: Russia can see Trump searching for leverage over Moscow. But time (what Yves Smith calls “military time”) runs to a different tempo to that of “political time”. Trump wants to end the conflict, AND be seen to have ended it. The point here is that Russia’s slower military time may end with Trump falling into what Steve Bannon warned could be a deadly trap: ‘Too long, and you (Trump) will end by owning it’ (as Nixon ended up ‘owning’ Vietnam).

Trump Team members may, at one level, ‘understand’ the new balance of power. Yet culturally and unconsciously, they adhere to the notion that the West (and Israel) remain exceptional, and that all other actors only change behaviour through pain and overwhelming leverage.

What did emerge from the transcript of Trump’s long call with Putin was that it touched on big issues and did not at all stay captive to the Ukraine issue.

Yves Smith puts the ‘elephant in the room’ issue this way:

“It took a full 17 years from Putin’s 2008 Munich Security Conference speech, where he called for a multipolar world order, for the U.S. to officially acknowledge, via Mark Rubio, that the U.S. unipolar period was unnatural and had ended”.

Let us hope it will not take as long for Russia to achieve a new European security architecture. As The Telegraph avers: “This is Putin and Trump’s world now”.

Video Link

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation by permission of author or representative)

Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin (photo from 2018).

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have officially begun negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Whatever the territorial solutions, they will not resolve the entire dispute. It will probably persist beyond peace.

Three problems overlap:

1) NATO’s expansion to the East and the Brzeziński Doctrine

When the East Germans themselves tore down the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989), the West, taken by surprise, negotiated the end of the two Germanys. Throughout 1990 the question arose whether German reunification would mean that East Germany, by joining West Germany, would enter NATO or not.

When the Atlantic Alliance Treaty was signed in 1949, it did not protect certain territories of certain signatories. For example, the French territories in the Pacific (Réunion, Mayotte, Wallis and Futuna, Polynesia and New Caledonia) were not covered. It would therefore have been possible that, in a unified Germany, NATO would not have been allowed to deploy in East Germany.

This issue is very important for the Central and Eastern European states that were attacked by Germany during the Second World War. In the eyes of their populations, seeing sophisticated weapons being installed on their borders was worrying. Even more so for Russia, whose immense borders (6,600 kilometres) are indefensible.

At the Malta Summit (2-3 December 1989) between the US and Russian Presidents, George Bush (the father) and Mikhail Gorbachev, the US argued that it had not intervened to bring down the Berlin Wall and that it had no intention of intervening against the USSR at that time [1].

West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher stated that "the changes in Eastern Europe and the process of German unification must not lead to an ’attack on Soviet security interests’". Consequently, NATO should rule out an ’expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. a rapprochement with the Soviet borders’"

The three occupying powers of Germany, the United States, France and the United Kingdom, therefore made repeated commitments not to expand NATO towards the East. The Moscow Treaty (12 September 1990) assumed that a reunified Germany would not claim territory from Poland (Oder-Neisse line), and that no NATO bases would be present in East Germany [2].

At a joint press conference in 1995 at the White House, President Boris Yeltsin described the meeting they had just had as "disastrous", provoking laughter from President Bill Clinton. It is indeed better to laugh than to cry.

However, the Russians were informed that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke was touring the capitals to prepare the NATO membership of former Warsaw Pact states. President Boris Yeltsin therefore harangued his counterpart, Bill Clinton, at the Budapest summit (5 December 1994) of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). He declared: "Our attitude towards NATO’s enlargement plans, and in particular the possibility of infrastructure progress to the East, remains and will remain invariably negative. Arguments such as: enlargement is not directed against any state and is a step towards the creation of a unified Europe, do not stand up to criticism. This is a decision whose consequences will determine the European configuration for years to come. It may lead to a slide towards the deterioration of trust between Russia and the Western countries. […] NATO was created at the time of the Cold War. Today, not without difficulty, it is seeking its place in the new Europe. It is important that this approach does not create two zones of demarcation, but on the contrary, that it consolidates European unity. This objective, for us, is contradictory to NATO’s expansion plans. Why sow the seeds of distrust? After all, we are no longer enemies; we are all partners now. The year 1995 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Half a century later, we are increasingly aware of the true significance of the Great Victory and the need for historic reconciliation in Europe. There must no longer be adversaries, winners and losers. For the first time in its history, our continent has a real chance of finding unity. To miss it is to forget the lessons of the past and to call into question the future itself. Bill Clinton replied: "NATO will not automatically exclude any nation from membership. […] At the same time, no external country will be allowed to veto expansion.” [3].

At this summit, three memoranda were signed, including one with independent Ukraine. In exchange for its denuclearization, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States committed to refraining from resorting to the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.

However, during the Yugoslav wars, Germany intervened, as a member of NATO. It trained Kosovar fighters on the basis of the Incirlik Alliance (Türkiye), then deployed its men there.

However, at the NATO summit in Madrid (8 and 9 July 1997), the heads of state and government of the Alliance announced that they were preparing for the accession of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. In addition, they are also considering that of Slovenia and Romania.

Aware that it cannot prevent sovereign states from entering into alliances, but worried about the consequences for its own security of what is being prepared, Russia intervened in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) at the Istanbul summit (18 and 19 November 1999). It had a declaration adopted establishing the principle of free membership of any sovereign state in the alliance of its choice and that of not taking measures for its security to the detriment of that of its neighbours.

However, in 2014, the United States organised a colour revolution in Ukraine, overthrowing the democratically elected president (who wanted to keep his country halfway between the United States and Russia) and installing a neo-Nazi regime that was publicly aggressive against Russia.

In 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined NATO. In 2009, it was Albania and Croatia. In 2017, Montenegro. In 2020, North Macedonia. In 2023, Finland, and in 2024, Sweden. All promises have been broken.

To understand how we got to this point, we also need to know what the United States was thinking.

In 1997, former security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, the Polish-American Zbigniew Brzeziński, published The Grand Chessboard. In it, he discusses “geopolitics” in the original sense, that is, not the influence of geographical data on international politics, but a plan for world domination.

According to him, the United States can remain the world’s leading power by allying itself with the Europeans and isolating Russia. Now retired, this democrat offers the Straussians a strategy to keep Russia in check, without however proving them right. Indeed, he supports cooperation with the European Union, while the Straussians wish on the contrary to slow its development (Wolfowitz doctrine). In any case, Brzeziński would become an advisor to President Barack Obama.

Monument in Lviv to the glory of the criminal against Humanity Stepan Bandera

2) Nazification of Ukraine

At the beginning of the special operation of the Russian army in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin declared that his first goal was to denazify the country. The West then pretended to ignore the problem. They accused Russia of exaggerating some marginal facts although they had been observed on a large scale for a decade.

This is because the two rival US geopoliticians, Paul Wolfowitz and Zbigniew Brzeziński, had formed an alliance with the “integral nationalists” (i.e. with the disciples of the philosopher Dmytro Dontsov and the militia leader Stepan Bandera) [4], at a conference organized by the latter in Washington in 2000. It was on this alliance that the Department of Defense had bet, in 2001, when it outsourced its research into biological warfare to Ukraine, under the authority of Antony Fauci, then Health Advisor to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It was also on this alliance that the State Department had bet, in 2014, with the Euromaidan color revolution.

The two Ukrainian Jewish presidents, Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky, allowed memorials to be built throughout their country paying tribute to Nazi collaborators, particularly in Galicia. They allowed Dmytro Dontsov’s ideology to become the historical reference. For example, today, the Ukrainian population attributes the great famine of 1932-1933, which caused between 2.5 and 5 million deaths, to an imaginary desire of Russia to exterminate the Ukrainians; a founding myth that does not stand up to historical analysis [5], in fact, this famine affected many other regions of the Soviet Union. Moreover, it is on the basis of this lie that Kyiv managed to make its population believe that the Russian army wanted to invade Ukraine. Today, several dozen countries, including France [6] and Germany [7], have adopted, by overwhelming majorities, laws or resolutions to validate this propaganda.

Nazification is more complex than we think: with NATO’s involvement in this proxy war, the Centuria Order, that is to say the secret society of Ukrainian integral nationalists, has penetrated the Alliance forces. In France, it is already present in the Gendarmerie (which, by the way, has never made public its report on the Boutcha massacre).

The contemporary West wrongly perceives the Nazis as criminals who primarily massacred Jews. This is absolutely false. Their main enemies were the Slavs. During the Second World War, the Nazis murdered many people, first by shooting and then, from 1942, in camps. The Slavic civilian victims of Nazi racial ideology were more numerous than the Jewish victims (about 6 million if we add the people killed by shooting and those killed in the camps). Moreover, since some victims were both Slavic and Jewish, they are included in both assessments. After the massacres of 1940 and 1941, approximately 18 million people from all backgrounds were interned in concentration camps, of whom 11 million in total were murdered (1,100,000 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp alone) [8]..

The Soviet Union, which was torn apart during the Bolshevik revolution, did not reunite until 1941 when Joseph Stalin formed an alliance with the Orthodox Church and put an end to the massacres and political internments (the "gulags") to fight against the Nazi invasion. The victory against racial ideology founded today’s Russia. The Russian people see themselves as the slayers of racism.

3) Russia’s rejection from Europe

The third bone of contention between the West and Russia arose not before, but during the Ukrainian war. The West adopted various measures against what symbolized Russia. Of course, unilateral coercive measures (abusively called “sanctions”) were taken at the government level, but discriminatory measures were also taken at the citizen level. Many restaurants were banned for Russians in the United States or Russian shows were canceled in Europe.

Symbolically, we accepted the idea that Russia is not European, but Asian (which it also partially is). We rethought the Cold War dichotomy, opposing the free world (capitalist and believer) to the totalitarian specter (socialist and atheist), into an opposition between Western values (individualist) and those of Asia (communitarian).

Behind this shift, racial ideologies are resurfacing. I noted three years ago that the New York Times’ 1619 Project and President Joe Biden’s woke rhetoric were in reality, perhaps unwittingly, a reverse reformulation of racism [9]. I note that today President Donald Trump shares the same analysis as me and has systematically revoked all of his predecessor’s woke innovations. But the damage is done: last month, Westerners reacted to the appearance of the Chinese DeepSeek by denying that Asians could have invented, and not copied, such software. Some government agencies have even banned it from their employees in what is nothing other than a denunciation of the “yellow peril.”

Should Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), the author of "War and Peace", be censored as Ukraine does, where his books are burned because he was Russian?

4) Conclusion

Current negotiations focus on what is directly palpable by public opinion: borders. However, the most important thing is elsewhere. To live together, we need not to threaten the security of others and to recognize them as our equals. This is much more difficult and does not only involve our governments.

From a Russian point of view, the intellectual origin of the three problems examined above lies in the Anglo-Saxon refusal of international law [10]. Indeed, during the Second World War, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed at the Atlantic Summit that after their common victory, they would impose their law on the rest of the world. It was only under pressure from the USSR and France that they accepted the UN statutes, but they continued to flout them, forcing Russia to boycott the organization when they refused the People’s Republic of China the right to sit on it. The glaring example of Western duplicity is given by the State of Israel, which tramples on a hundred resolutions of the Security Council, the General Assembly and opinions of the International Court of Justice. This is why, on December 17, 2021, when the war in Ukraine was looming, Moscow proposed to Washington [11] to prevent it by signing a bilateral treaty providing guarantees for peace [12]. The idea of this text was, nothing more, nothing less, that the United States renounce the "rules-based world" and fall in line with international law. This right, imagined by the Russians and the French just before the First World War, consists solely of keeping one’s word in the eyes of public opinion.

“Poets are often held in high repute in Russia and often feared by government not because of the power of poetry to move and shape souls, but because, in Russia only great poets dare speak the truth.”
Eric Hoffer

I know that many musicians and other creative spirits feel as if they have little significance or impact in our society. The prevailing metrics of success—money, power, whatever—relegate their work to the fringes and sub-fringes.

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, they don’t even get the respect given, in an earlier era, to a counterculture.

In the past, you might not get rich as a member of the counterculture—but at least you had a voice that was heard by the mainstream, and occasionally received some tokens of appreciation. Mainstream elites were not so isolated and antagonistic as today, and felt they needed a reality check from outside—but not anymore.

Conformity is the safest path now. Sometimes it feels like the only path.

Why is this the case?

There are many reasons, but I would focus especially on the technocratic tone in today’s culture in which prominence and relevance is determined by metrics imposed by huge corporations.

Sometimes they won’t even tell you their metrics—who knows how Netflix evaluates its shows? Who knows how things go viral on Instagram?

But when we do learn what moves the wheels of digital media, it’s usually clicks, links, dollars, profits, and other extrinsic hierarchies.

If you look at art that way, you will avoid anything that deviates from mainstream entertainment. Or even just mindless distraction.

That’s why it’s useful to remind ourselves of other times and places when the free creative impulse of artists, even those of genius, genuinely seemed on the verge of eradication.

Yes, there were situations far more dire than our own.

So let me share a story that gives me comfort. It’s almost a parable of the creative life and its hidden power. This particular tale testifies to my belief that artists of vision and courage can even rise above the most brutal dictator.

Alas, this victory of art over tyranny only happens over the long run. But it does happen.

And when it finally occurs, the turnaround takes place so dramatically and resoundingly that we need to reconsider our conventional definitions of power and influence.

I’m referring to the case of Anna Akhmatova.

15-year-old Anna Akhmatova in 1904

Akhmatova, was a promising poet in the days before the Soviet Revolution, but her physical presence was just as compelling as her writing. Modigliani made at least twenty paintings of Akhmatova, and she had an affair with the famous poet Osip Mandelstam. Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak proposed marriage to her on multiple occasions.

Even far away at Oxford, philosopher and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin—whom I considered the most brilliant person in the entire University when I was a student there—allegedly pined away with romantic longings based on his brief encounter with Akhmatova 35 years before.

I don’t think it’s going too far to claim that she could have been a movie actress, given her beauty and allure.

Nathan Altman’s Portrait of Anna Akhmatova, 1915

But Akhmatova was crushed under Soviet rule.

Not only was her poetry sharply criticized and censored, but the secret police bugged her apartment, and kept her under surveillance.

She was silenced so completely, that many people simply assumed she was dead.

One by one, the people closest to her were arrested, prosecuted, and often executed. Her ex-husband Nikolay Gumilev, falsely accused of participating in a monarchist conspiracy, was shot. Her common-law husband Nikolai Punin, an art scholar, got arrested and sent to the Gulag, where he died. (His offense was allegedly mentioning that the proliferation of portraits of Lenin throughout the country was in poor taste.)

But the most painful loss was her son, Lev Gumliev. After the execution of his father, when their child was just nine, Lev got sent to a Soviet labor camps. When he was finally released from captivity, authorities insisted that he fight in the Red Army. Then he was sent off to the prison camps again in 1949.

Akhmatova was desperate to save the life of her son. But what can a poet—even a poet of genius—do in such situations?

“I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad,” she later recalled. She traveled to Kresty Prison every day to hold a futile vigil. She tried constantly to get some word about her son’s status.

Or give him a parcel. Or find someone to beg for his release.

But to no avail.

Here each day she waited with so many other women, often in bitter cold weather—bundled in heavy clothes in front of the closed gates. One day someone in the crowd recognized the poet, who had once been so esteemed and beautiful. She asked Akhmatova whether her poetic gifts were capable of describing this scene of tragedy.

What could be more futile than a poem in the face of Stalinist purges and executions? But Akhmatova told her inquirer: “I can.” And in that horrible and desolate place, “something like a smile” appeared on the other woman’s face.

Akhmatova began working on what would be her greatest work, the long poem called Requiem. But this was a dangerous endeavor.

Publishing a poem of this sort, even overseas, was out of the question. Just putting the words down on paper could lead to her execution—the secret police might search her apartment at any time.

So she burnt the pages she used for rough drafts. The polished version was retained in her memory.

For seventeen months I’ve called you
To come home, I’ve pleaded
—Oh my son, my terror!—groveled
At the hangman’s feet.
So much I can’t say who’s
Man, who’s beast any more, nor even
How long till execution.
(From the translation of Requiem by D.M. Thomas)

This is one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. But the lines that inspire me the most come on the final page, where Anna Akhmatova makes that extraordinary prediction of the destiny for her and this forbidden work.

And if ever in this country they should want
To build me a monument
I consent to that honor,
But only on condition that they
Erect it not on the sea-shore where I was born:
My last links there were broken long ago,
Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens,
Where an inconsolable young shade is seeking me,
But here, where I stood for three hundred hours
And where they never, never opened the doors for me.

She is literally taunting Stalin and the Soviet secret police here, but with an authority of her own—one only the creative artist possesses. Yet, in some miracle, she triumphed over the dictatorship.

No, Akhmatova herself didn’t live long enough to see it happen. But she did survive Stalin, and her son was released from incarceration. He eventually witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Akhmatova got shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, and finally—the year before her death in 1966—was allowed to travel to Oxford to receive an honorary degree. Her global renown as a voice of courage and integrity was so powerful that even the Soviet authorities were now afraid of the consequences of cracking down on her.

So they did nothing when Requiem was finally published in Germany in 1963. And the long poem even got issued in the USSR in 1987, at a time when the regime was now the pathetic vulnerable party.

But the most remarkable moment of vindication came when they erected a statue of Anna Akhmatova in her native land.

It happened on the 40th anniversary of her death in 2006. By then, even the name of the city had changed—it was no longer Leningrad, but St. Petersburg once more. And Akhmatova was now returning to the scene of her greatest suffering and tragedy, but in towering bronze form atop a granite pillar.

Anna Akhmatova, larger than life, stares down Kresty Prison

Meeting her poetic demands, they placed her statue facing Kresty Holding Prison, where she had once waited before the closed gates, day after day.

Her visage is strong and defiant, and the inscription reads:

That’s why I pray not for myself
But for all of you who stood there with me
Through fiercest cold and scorching July heat
Under a towering, completely blind red wall.

This is more than the triumph of one woman.

Art is more powerful than pundits or politicians, or even the most brutal dictator. It survives the longest. It has an authority that comes from a higher source.

We do well to remember that—especially in times when the creative impulse seems so weak and ineffective.

That weakness is an illusion. Art triumphs in the end. The very hollowness of its opponents ensures that eventual victory. It’s really just a matter of time.

I would like a bit of a break from the military covid op. I am sick of it, I hate it, I despise those who are responsible and those who blindly obeyed, as well as those who keep obeying and keep staying willfully blind. I hate writing about it. I want to write about people I admire and not about the ones I hate.

I previously wrote about Nikolai Kozyrev, a Russian physicist who proposed a revolutionary theory of Time as the source of energy in the stars and all bodies in our World:

This Energy of Time - Part 1

This is Part 2 of the story, largely focusing on Kozyrev’s biography.

Kozyrev’s Selected Works is a book in Russian available in scanned image format at Ana’s Archive. It contains his most important papers on astrophysics and his own theory of causal mechanics, including experimental work and detailed astronomical, geological and atmospheric observations. The book was published by the Leningrad University Press in 1991.

I tried and failed to find an English translation, and I don’t think a full version of this book is available in English. However, I found Kozyrev’s biography translated into English, abridged included in a science journal article. The English translation is very awkward and some IMO very important information about the history of the repressions against scientists in the 30’s by Stalin’s regime is omitted. For most of this post I made my own translations from the chapter on Kozyrev’s biography by his one-time colleague Dadaev published in this book.

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Kozyrev’s life story is both tragic and astonishing.

Nikolai Kozyrev was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) on September 2 (20), 1908 in the family of Alexander Kozyrev, a geologist who worked at the Ministry of Agriculture. Kozyrev senior came from a family of Russian peasants from the city of Bugulma, Samara province, but ultimately attained an administrative rank in the Russian imperial government giving him the rights of nobility. Note: my non-Russian, Tatar part of the family are also from Bugulma. Kozyrev’s mother, Yulia Nikolaevna was from the family of a merchant, Shihobalov.

Kozyrev graduated from the secondary school in 1924 and initially entered the pedagogical institute, but, with urging from his professors, transferred to studying astrophysics at the Leningrad University, where he completed his studies in 1928. He then began working at the Pulkovo Observatory (later became part of the USSR Academy of Sciences) as a postgraduate student. At Pulkovo he became friends with two other postgraduate students - V.A. Ambartsumian and D.I. Eropkin.

“The Trio” became memorable at Pulkovo due to their outstanding abilities, original early scientific publications, but also due to their rebellion against the bureaucratic administration which was being unrolled throughout Soviet academia during the 1920’s-30’s. The new regime’s objective was to eliminate any traces of self-governance in academia, such as replacement of the leadership previously elected by scientific peers with the Communist Party-appointed administrators. These changes were not in favor of any independent thinkers.

Kozyrev’s early publications included articles on spectrometry-based measurements of the temperature of solar flares and solar spots. He demonstrated that there should be a radial equilibrium within the solar spots, and that the spots are located deeper in the solar atmosphere than had been previously thought. In 1934, Kozyrev published a paper on radial equilibrium and extended photosphere of the stars in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (London). In the same issue of Notices, albeit with data published six months later than Kozyrev’s, S. Chandrasekhar proposed a more generalized theory. The theory became known as Kozyrev-Chandrasekhar.

Note that today it is hard to find a mention of Kozyrev’s work in the archives of Chandrasekhar (on the University of Chicago’s page dedicated to Chandrasekhar’s work, Kozyrev’s name is only mentioned in the photo collection).

Kozyrev maintained scientific collaboration with his friend Eropkin who was focused on the areas of geophysics. They jointly undertook several expeditions to perform spectrographic measurements of the polar lights. However, their work repeatedly ran into administrative obstacles, staffing intrigues and conflicts. In 1936 they were falsely accused of misusing funds for the expeditions. The false accusations were used to dismiss the scientists from Pulkovo and start a court case against them. The case was dismissed in 1936 with the court even issuing a reprimand to the administration of Pulkovo for “poor staff relations”. Kozyrev and Eropkin had to file a countersuit to get reinstated as employees at Pulkovo, and administrative court struggles continued for almost a year.

In the meantime, in October, 1936, in Leningrad, arrests of scientists had begun. One of the first to be arrested was the corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Boris V. Numerov (1891–1941), the director of the Astronomical Institute, an outstanding scientist in the field of astronomy and geodesy. He was accused of being the organizer of a terrorist anti-Soviet group amongst intellectuals. The wave of arrests reached Pulkovo. Kozyrev was arrested on the evening of the 19th anniversary of October revolution. On the night of December 5th (Day of the Stalin’s Constitution, the “most democratic in the world”) his friend Eropkin was arrested in Leningrad.

The wave of arrests and execution of scientists based on undisclosed accusations continued without any apparent logic - a new head of department would be arrested weeks after the previous head of the department was sent to political prison and/or executed. The full set of charges against 100+ scientists arrested in 1936-1937 in Leningrad alone was disclosed only decades later, in the late 1980’s. They were accused of being connected to a “fascist Trotsky-Zinoviev terrorist organization”, allegedly set up by the German intelligence forces in 1932 with an objective of overthrowing the Soviet regime. This formulation of the charges became available from declassified KGB documentation in 1989.

The Pulkovo astronomers, arrested between November and the following February, were tried in Leningrad on May 25, 1937. Most were sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, removal of civil rights for 5 additional years, and confiscation of all assets. The “trial” for each political prisoner lasted several minutes, without disclosure of charges, without defense representation, and only accepting “confessions of the accused” - confessions obtained by torture. Executions by firing squad for many followed later in the day of the trial.

According to the Soviet legal codes at the time, the 10 year imprisonment term was the maximum, beyond which was only execution. However, almost all political prisoners died or were executed before the expiry of their sentences.

Of all arrested and condemned Pulkovo scientists, only Kozyrev survived. Kozyrev’s friend Eropkin was executed along with many others. Many executions were performed in prisons by “special tribunals” without even nominal court sanctions. It is not possible to know the fate of many people who perished in the repressions. Death certificates, issued in 1956 to the families of the rehabilitated can hardly be considered reliable. As an example, one listed cause of death as “diabetes” for the same person listed as executed at the prison camp in the declassified KGB documentation.

While it was at some time proposed that Kozyrev was targeted in 1936-37 due to his prior conflicts with academic administrators, this was unlikely. The scope of the repressions was a much broader, and a largely indiscriminate operation. The repressions in the late 1930’s by Stalin’s regime implemented by the NKVD (predecessor to KGB) was designed to suppress any possible political opposition and especially target the “intellectual class”. Later disclosures, including by the Khrushev’s government, revealed that the repressions had been pre-planned in advance, with pre-manufactured scenarios of “terrorist plots”, accusations and plans of imprisonment/execution.

Note: if you think this totalitarian horror is only possible under a communist regime, this approach is very similar to the arrests of the J6 “insurrectionists” on made-up terrorism charges, or intense prosecution and lawfare against doctors who are trying to treat their patients during the DOD-faked “covid pandemic”, or scientists who do not want to participate in fraud - the standard approach of fabricating plots by the national security-intelligence apparatus for political aims. Apparently, every aspiring totalitarian deep state shares the same playbook:

Parents Catch FBI In Plot To Force Mentally Ill Son To Be A Right Wing Terrorist.

If you think the NKVD invented this, they didn’t. The tactic to set up “terrorist plots and sleeper cells of radicals” and then “foil their evil plans” to “protect” the public with ever increasing totalitarian control measures and the upward extraction of wealth was used by the tsarist Russia, and by many governments prior to that.

Specifically, the Leningrad bureau of NKVD dreamed up “terrorist cells” of “organized intellectuals” conspiring to overthrow the Soviet government and fabricated dossiers for the closed-door prosecution. Decades later, the farfetchedness of those materials was plainly obvious. But back then the atmosphere of the top-down terror incentivized snitching and witch hunts.

The imaginary rosters of the subversive organizations were created by the NKVD by going through the university HR records and identifying plausible targets to paint as a conspiracist - typically because the target came from a middle or upper class (deemed hostile to the proletariat by default), although that wasn’t strictly necessary. Any pretext to assign membership in the fictional counter-revolutionary organization was utilized. Another widely used pretext was an accusation of international espionage, which was quite easy because all Pulkovo scientists routinely corresponded with their academic colleagues in other countries. Thus the fictional “terrorist organization” was fabricated. Subsequently its “discovery and elimination” was implemented by beating out false confessions and false witness statements from the accused in order to provide convictions and further credence to the entire repression scheme.

Kozyrev was lucky to survive. Later in life he was reluctant to discuss his time in prison and in labor camps, although some parts of his memories were included in Solzhenytsyn’s GULAG Archipelago, and several works by other authors.

Some episodes of the prison and camp life of Kozyrev are very important to understanding of his subsequent scientific work. One episode concerns the textbook Course of Astrophysics and Stellar Astronomy (published by Pulkovo Observatory, 1934-36). While being held in prison, Kozyrev continued thinking about his scientific research in theoretical physics, specifically about the question of the source of stellar energy. He was stumped because he needed data about certain types of stars - data that he knew were contained in the 2nd volume of the Course of Astrophysics. Kozyrev’s cellmate was sent to the solitary confinement for five days and upon return was so mentally and physically damaged that he died shortly afterwards. Kozyrev was then left alone in his cell, clinging to shreds of sanity himself by intensely thinking about cosmos. And one day, mysteriously, the exact book that he desperately needed, the 2nd volume of the Course of Astrophysics was pushed through the observation port of his cell door by an unknown person.

By different accounts, Kozyrev used the book between one and three days, scanning through it and memorizing the data. Then the book was noticed by a prison guard and taken away. Until the end of his life Kozyrev thought that the book was from the prison library, but the way it appeared in his cell was “it fell from heavens”. However it is very unlikely that the exact volume of a highly specialized, small-circulation science textbook would have been found in a prison library. It is more likely that someone delivered it. It is also possible that under conditions of physical and mental deprivation, Kozyrev drew the necessary data from his memory, and may have had a dream/delirium about the book appearing in the cell.

Another known episode describes that once consumed by his thoughts, Kozyrev began to pace his prison cell. This was forbidden: during the day the prisoners were required to sit on a stool, and at night lie on the bunk. For this infringement he was sent to the solitary confinement for five days, during February. The temperature in the confinement cell was about zero degrees Celsius, and the prisoners were left barefooted, in underwear only. The daily meal contained a piece of bread and a mug of hot water. With the mug it was possible to briefly warm one’s freezing hands but not the body. Kozyrev began to pray to God. He recalled that after some time of intense prayer he began to feel internal warmth, and thus was able to survive the 5 or even 6 days of the freezing hell.

Later in life Kozyrev tried to figure out how the internal heat could have been generated, and noted in his theoretical works that people have an ability to survive for long periods of time without food, “sustained by the Holy Spirit”. What is the Holy Spirit? If He is the source of energy then energy can appear through Him in any natural body, whether a man, or a star, or a planet. What universal source can generate the energy? Twenty years later Kozyrev advanced these ideas in his theory of Time as the source of energy in our World.

Until May 1939, Kozyrev was in prison, then afterwards he was sent into the Norilsk labor camps. Being sent to labor camps might have saved Kozyrev’s life, as due to the war and shortage of qualified engineers, he became a needed specialist in mining and geology. In 1940 he was sent to the Dudinsky Permafrost Station as a geodesist. He was allowed to work unguarded as there was no possibility of escape anyway: he was surrounded by hundreds of miles of the frozen tundra.

On October 25, 1941, “for engaging in hostile counter-revolutionary propaganda amongst the prisoners” he was again arrested, and sentenced to death.

What kind of “counter-revolutionary propaganda” was considered grave enough to warrant the death penalty? Kozyrev recalled several official charges: 1) that he thought the theory of expanding universe was valid; 2) he thought that Esenin was a good poet and that Dunaevsky was a bad music composer; 3) during a fight in the barracks he declared that social being does not determine the consciousness (i.e. disagreed with Karl Marx); 4) he also disagreed with Friedrich Engels calling Isaac Newton “an inductive ass”. Regarding the last point, the accused was argumentative and said “I have not read Engels, but I believe Newton is one of the greatest scientists of all time”.

Therefore, the Supreme Court of the Soviet Russia reconsidered Kozyrev’s previous sentence as too liberal and replaced it with the death penalty. However, the warden of the Noril-Lag (part of the GULAG) tore up the order of execution in front of Kozyrev, saying that the regional center didn’t have any firing squads. In reality, Kozyrev was needed, as an expert, for the building of a copper-nickel mining facility, as the only other nickel mine near the Finnish border was then located behind the WWII front line. He worked as the superintendent for geology and prospecting expeditions until March of 1945.

In August 1944, a petition asking specifically for liberation of Kozyrev was sent to the Minister of Internal Affairs, signed by three members of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Vavilov, Shayn, and Mihailov. What can explain this? In 1943, the Soviet intelligence agencies received the information about the creation of nuclear weapons by the USA and realized they needed to enter the nuclear race. Many Soviet physicists were in custody at the time. Many were already dead. It became a matter of urgency to return those who were still alive in prison camps, however, the question remains as to how the 3 academicians who supposedly signed the petition knew that Kozyrev was still alive? In addition, the judicial revision was almost inconceivable back then. The decisions of the Military Board of the Supreme Court of the USSR had never been reconsidered.

The process of reconsidering his sentence took 18 months, and a key role was played by inspector N. A. Bogomolov (Note: interestingly, the name means “praying to God”) who was brave enough to conclude that there had been no basis to charge Kozyrev with a crime of treason in the first place. This was a dangerous position to take, as this opened the door to revise the convictions of all other scientists swept up in Stalin’s repressions. According to Kozyrev himself, the deciding factor at the end of the investigation was the question posed by the inspector “Do you believe in God?”, to which Kozyrev replied “yes”. Afterwards he found out that the inspector took this as the verification of his honesty answering all other questions of the investigation. This is indeed shocking, considering that professing religious beliefs and taking them as evidence of honesty at the time would have been the reason for another imprisonment or a death sentence for both Kozyrev and Bogomolov.

Kozyrev was liberated “conditionally ahead of schedule” by a special meeting of the KGB on December 14, 1946. This meant that with the slightest pretext he could be behind bars again. He was finally cleared of all charges only by February 21, 1958.

Kozyrev was invited by academician Shayn to work at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, then under construction. He accepted, but first he went to Leningrad to complete his yet unfinished doctoral thesis, the defense of which took place at the Leningrad University on March 10th, 1947, i.e. only about 3 months after his return from labor camps. Many colleagues were surprised: when did he write the dissertation? Apparently, he had composed the dissertation during his ten years in prison. By some accounts he carried it all in his head, although by other accounts, including that of his son, there was a rough draft in a notebook that he carried sewn into his clothes. Some pages from it were seen photographed and presented upside-down at an exhibit dedicated to his work shortly after his death (in order to not attract too much attention to the still prohibited topic of discussion), but the whereabouts of the notebook today are unknown. Still, it is a long way from a rough draft to a finished dissertation. In addition, how would one keep abreast of the scientific literature published during a decade of imprisonment?

His colleague Dadaev, who was present at the defense of the dissertation, and many years later researched and wrote up his biography, explained that Kozyrev had an incredible ability to review scientific literature. The library at Pulkovo was producing a biweekly exhibit of all newly arrived scientific literature, typically containing 100+ papers and books. He would review all of it in a couple of hours, zeroing in on precisely what he needed and without making any notes, as if he knew upfront who would produce anything worthwhile. Another reason noted by Dadaev as an explanation to how the dissertation was accomplished - Kozyrev’s work was so fundamental and so original that not much in science had changed to influence it one way or another during his decade in prison. In fact, this last point remains the same and perhaps even more true today. What 10 years? The major works of art as all original thinking are timeless: they transcend centuries as if they are but brief moments.

Dadaev wrote:

Defense of the dissertation occurred at the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Leningrad University: the dissertation was titled “Sources of Stellar Energy and the Theory of the Internal Structure of Stars”. […]I was permitted to be present at this defense. Discussion was rather animated, because […] Kozyrev put forward a new idea as to the source of the stellar energy, subverting the already widespread conviction that thermonuclear reactions are the source of energy in the entrails of stars.

The Academic Council of the University awarded Kozyrev the degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. Kozyrev’s dissertation was published in two parts, in the Proceedings of the Crimean Astrophysics Observatory in 1948 (part I), and in 1951 (part II).

Kozyrev’s dissertation proposed a radically different view on the internal processes of the stars, arguing that the stars are not nuclear reactors but rather machines that convert yet unknown energy - the energy of time - into radiation. The stellar “machines” are extremely efficient as they barely consume any of their own material for production of massive amounts of energy, contradicting the conventionally accepted theory of nuclear fusion as the source of the stellar energy. Later on confirmations of his theory came from, e.g., the failure to detect neutrino streams from the Sun and additionally from detection of the solar 160 min pulses or oscillations, measured by academician A.B. Severny and several other independent scientists, including by Stanford Observatory in the 70’s. Subsequently, similar oscillations were found for the Earth magnetosphere and ionosphere and for some stars and star clusters. Yet, today the internet search engines will proclaim that this finding is controversial and “unconfirmed” because it threatens the mainstream failed dogma of stars as nuclear furnaces and the fake Climate Change models that use these assumptions.

Kozyrev planned to write the third part of his dissertation, investigating further the source of the solar energy, however it was never completed. He produced an enormous research output making major discoveries about the geological and atmospheric properties of Venus, Mars and the Moon. In august 1958, the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union gathered in Moscow. Kozyrev’s “Causal Mechanics” paper was published for this event, describing the principles of his theory of time as the source of non-nuclear stellar energy. This work provided a fundamentally different view of the universal forces of nature, of life itself, acting simultaneously everywhere, defying the thermal death and giving us the World that, quoting Kozyrev “sparkles afresh, renewed each day”.

Also in 1958 Kozyrev was able to observe and capture a volcanic plume on the Moon and published a short letter in The Astronomical Circular (No. 197, 1958) as well as an article containing the description of his methods, with a reproduction of the unique spectrogram, in Sky and Telescope (vol. 18, No. 4, 1959). In response to this article the famous astronomer and planetologist, Gerard Kuiper, sent a letter to the Director of Pulkovo Observatory in which he declared that Kozyrev’s spectrogram was a fake. This resulted in years of ruffled feathers in international science circles, as the dogma of the Moon as a “geologically dead body” was “settled science” back then. To give credit to Kuiper, when presented with more information, he withdrew his claims of forgery. Ultimately, in 1969 Kozyrev’s discovery of Lunar volcanism was awarded the gold medal from the International Academy of Astronautics. The discovery that the Moon is not a “dead body” but has evidence of ongoing tectonics has been confirmed by independent observations. It is also claimed that Apollo missions brought back volcanic soil samples, and this forced the change of minds in the international science circles.

I am almost certain that NASA’s Moon landings were faked, so the question is - why did they decide to “confirm” Kozyrev’s discovery and even give him the prestigious medal? My guess is that there was too much other data pointing to the same thing - ongoing tectonic activity on the Moon. The Moon is the closest celestial body, and as the imaging technologies were becoming more powerful. Denying the tectonics would not be a smart idea for NASA in the long run. Tectonic activity on the Moon is consistent with Kozyrev’s theory that celestial bodies, just as everything else present in nature, are alive, continuously drawing the energy from the flow of time.

In December 1969, the State Committee for Affairs of Discovery and Inventions of the USSR awarded Kozyrev the diploma for discovery for “tectonic activity of the Moon”. Despite the conferring of the medal and the diploma, the question of a non-nuclear stellar energy source was not acknowledged. While nominally respected, Kozyrev’s work was systematically sidelined and ignored. After some positive popular press appeared discussing Kozyrev’s theory of time by highly respected science writers, an academic committee was called to review and debate his discoveries. All were systematically shot down as “unconfirmed theories”. I am not a physicist or mathematician, but I do have extensive experience commercializing modern academic intellectual property. From what I have seen of Kozyrev’s papers - the experiments, observational work and theoretical reasoning are exceptionally thorough, lightyears ahead of the nonsense that gets Nobel Prizes today. Kozyrev did not get any official support, even for making the equipment necessary for his experiments. He was forced to work alone, and the only help in mechanical engineering he received was from a volunteer, engineer Nasonov, who one day showed up in Kozyrev’s lab and continued working for him, making lab tools. Nasonov worked evenings and weekends after his primary job at a manufacturing plant, without any pay, and took his own vacation time to accompany Kozyrev to the Crimean Observatory.

The two developed some successful experimental equipment, such as gyroscopic scales to study irreversible natural processes - melting of the snow, heating and cooling of copper wire, evaporation of liquids and fading of the plants.

Kozyrev repeatedly tried to get the attention of the academia to his research and discoveries, some truly unprecedented. For example, he was able to detect the effects of the solar and lunar eclipses on Earth without leaving his lab, simply using his experimental mirrors, the equipment that allowed him to shield and focus the flow of time and detect the disruptions introduced by the eclipses. He documented geological effects of the eclipses and the position of the Moon on the seismic activity on Earth. All of these discoveries fell on deaf ears. The establishment academia remained uninterested and continued treating him generally as a nuisance and a heretic. Ultimately, by 1979 he was forced into retirement that he did not want but had no choice as he would be left without any income otherwise. He died in 1983, aged almost 75.

Kozyrev was not able to complete his theory of causal mechanics, to which he dedicated nearly 40 years of his life. During his life, American probes Voyager-1 and -2 (1979) registered 8 active volcanos on Jupiter’s satellite Io, confirming Kozyrev’s position on wide spread active tectonic activity in the universe, even in the smaller bodies that were deemed too small to have it under prevailing physical theories. He was not recognized for this and other discoveries that he predicted. Nobody seemed to be interested in researching the nature of the “inconvenient” volcanism of smaller celestial bodies then or now - and no wonder! Observations like these defy the prevailing geological theories that are now being used to concoct the Climate Change narratives.

He worked most of his life, alone, with little support. His theory of time remains unfinished because he simply ran out of it.

The Genocide of the Palestinian people began 76 years ago. What may be drawing to a close is merely a particularly intense phase in the Genocide.

Gaza is destroyed. 92% of its housing has gone. Its water treatment and sanitation, electricity generation, food processing, farming, and fishing are all now incapable of sustaining much life. Its hospitals, health centres, universities, colleges, and schools are all now destroyed, as are its municipal buildings, waste disposal, road surfaces, drainage channels, theatres, cultural centres, cinemas, cafés.

What is left is 1.8 million cold and starving people, malnourished, soaked, ill-clothed, living in tents and defecating in trenches. Tens of thousands will die in these conditions however fast aid comes – and you can be 100% certain Israeli obstructionism will prevent it from coming fast.

But even if they can be physically saved, the culture and fabric of society are damaged beyond repair. The psychological damage is immense. The institutions of normality that might permit recovery are non-existent.

Nobody really knows the true number killed so far in the genocide. The Palestinian health authorities, run by the elected Hamas representatives, have been scrupulous in giving out numbers only of those officially certified dead following the recovery and identification of their bodies.

Given the almost total destruction of Gaza’s buildings and the unavailability of rescue equipment and the lack of ceasefire for body recovery, I suspect the 46,707 official death toll as of last night (and the Israelis already killed over 80 again today) may prove to be way short of the truth, which could be double or more from unaccounted bodies.

That is without the Lancet study suggesting that 50% again may have died subsequently from wounds. A similar number to the dead are permanently maimed.

The worst effects may not in the long term even be in Palestine at all. The Western world has, in the support of its rulers for Israel as it commits Genocide, abandoned any pretence to wish to maintain the system of international law that had been extended and developed post World War 2. Untold horrors of war may be unleashed as a result in the next decade.

In both the USA and the UK, governments ignored their own senior officials and legal advisers to break the human rights constraints which those nations had imposed upon their foreign policy, particularly with regard to the supply of weapons.

In Poland, France and several other NATO countries, the governments have openly repudiated their duty to enforce warrants of the International Criminal Court.

In the UK, Germany, USA, France and throughout the Western world, there has been a massive rolling back of long-cherished and hard-won rights of freedom of expression and assembly, explicitly to prevent criticism of Israel and support for Palestine.

There has been concerted social media suppression to the same end on all major online platforms, and a seizure of Tik Tok in the USA avowedly because of its failure to repress speech critical of Israel.

The unanimity of mainstream media support for Israel, and the tiny or no space for any dissenting view, has become so established a part of the political landscape it can go unnoticed. But it needs to be highlighted.

In his closing address, the one useful thing Biden said was the correct observation about the USA becoming an oligarchy. The whole world is becoming intensely oligarchic, with an astronomical expansion of the wealth gap between rulers and ruled these past twenty years.

The impunity of Israel, and the decline of international law, is a direct consequence of this. There is a particular truth that encompasses almost every Western country and, interestingly, unites both the Arab and the Western worlds.

That truth is this. The wealthy oligarchic elites who control media and politics are extremely pro-Israel. The people are not.

The gap between the support for Israel among the super wealthy and powerful, and the view of the majority of normal people, really deserves serious study to explain it. Not the least interesting is the fact that not even the almost 100% mainstream media pro-Israeli propaganda has been enough to convince the peoples of the world to support the Genocide, outwith the special cases of Germany and the US religious Zionists.

So, what happens now? Well, I was in Beirut when it was carpet bombed in the hours immediately before the ceasefire here took effect, and I expect Israel to massively bomb Gaza’s tent cities in the next three days.

I have also seen Israel break the ceasefire in Lebanon every single day, and I expect them to do that in Gaza too.

Israel daily breaches the ‘ceasefire’ in Lebanon both inside and outside the demilitarised zone. Three days ago they killed 5 civilians. pic.twitter.com/MiAQpZ4AZI

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) January 15, 2025

So long as the USA and Israel designate Hamas as a terrorist organisation, they will claim the right to bomb and kill at any time as a “counter-terrorism operation”, irrespective of any ceasefire agreement. That is their formal position, just as it is their formal position with regard to Hezbollah and the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon.

The Israelis did not start killing Palestinians on 8 October 2023 and they will not stop killing them now.

I expect the ceasefire agreement to go ahead as projected, with occasional Israeli “anti-terrorist” attacks continuing in Gaza. The prisoner exchanges will happen. The Israelis will continually delay and renege on the provisions on aid access and on withdrawal of troops. Palestinians in Gaza will die in large numbers of disease, hunger and poor sanitation.

Just as the ceasefire in Lebanon led to Israel immediately invading Southern Syria, Israel will now increase its activity in the West Bank, suppressing resistance together with its proxy “Palestinian Authority” forces and continually seizing land from Palestinians.

I do not doubt that it is true that the Gaza ceasefire is due to Trump telling Netanyahu to stop. As I continually said, Biden’s attempts to restrain Netanyahu were a complete subterfuge and Biden was absolutely committed to the Genocide.

Trump is very difficult to read. When he was elected in 2016, I believed he was less hawkish in foreign policy than Hillary Clinton. Had Clinton been elected, for example, I am sure that she would have immediately laid waste to Syria, which would have been destroyed like Libya – eventually achieved by Biden.

Trump II had seemed an altogether more aggressive persona than Trump I, particularly as regards the Middle East. Yet Trump II has told Netanyahu to stop the Genocide – confirming incidentally that Biden could have done so had he wished.

Biden wanted Genocide.

The myth of Western support for international law and human rights died in Gaza, along with the myth of Western support for the “two-state solution”. There never was a viable two-state solution and it was those states who were loudest in pretending to support it, who vehemently refused to recognise the Palestinian state.

The “two-state solution” was only ever a cover for Zionism. With Gaza now utterly smashed and its population ruined, and the West Bank almost totally expropriated, the pretence of a “two-state solution” has to be finally killed off.

Israel has lost any moral authority for its continued existence. It has proven itself to be a genocidal entity driven by ethno-supremacism. (A people who believe themselves to be a superior or divinely favoured race are ethno-supremacists, regardless of whether their claim of ethnic homogeneity is founded or not.)

Within 48 hours of the Hamas breakout on 7 October I wrote my first piece about it. Often in retrospect reactions to a major incident are too influenced by the emotion of the moment, but actually I am as proud of this as of anything I ever wrote.

Asymmetric warfare tends to be vile. Oppressed and colonised peoples don’t have the luxury of lining up soldiers in neatly pressed uniforms and polished boots, to face off against the opposing army in an equality of arms.

A colonised and oppressed people tends, given the chance, to mirror the atrocities perpetrated on them by their oppressor.

This of course feeds in, always, to the propaganda of the Imperialist. A paroxysm of resistance by the oppressed always ends up portrayed by the Imperialist as evidence of the bestiality of the colonised people and in itself justifying the “civilising mission” of the coloniser.

Which is not to say I relish violence, quite the opposite. I am in fact pleased that Israeli prisoners as well as Palestinian prisoners will be returned as part of a ceasefire deal.

While the Palestinian resistance are fully entitled to take as many IDF members and reserves prisoner as they can, I cannot approve of the illegal practice of taking children and other complete non-combatants prisoner – and yes I know the Israelis do it on a much larger scale.

Behaving better than the Israelis should be a permanent guide in life.

Unfortunately, it is not the case that colonial settler, racist states cannot triumph. The white settlers in the USA, Canada and Australia did manage to permanently subjugate and almost extinguish the local populations. I have spoken to some wonderful Arab intellectuals these last few weeks who all tend to take the view that Israel’s ultimate defeat is inevitable because the colonial settler state will never be accepted by the Arab populations. I wish I were so confident.

Where I agree with them totally is that the abolition of the terrorist state of Israel must be the goal, not an accommodation with it.

Israel’s pariah status is now assured for a generation, it is deeply split internally and it is dependent on a parent state, the USA, which is losing its relative power and hegemony. Yet for now Israel is expanding. It occupies significantly more territory than it did two years ago and in Syria and Lebanon it has seized control of vital regional water sources. Israel currently has full military control of over 30% of Syria’s fresh water.

Trump probably supports Israeli annexation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and more. But that does not of necessity mean he supports either the expulsion of their populations or an apartheid state. He may see such heavy state interventions as an interference in the freedom of business to make money, and even undesirable per se.

It is impossible to be certain about what Trump sees as the end goal. From this first indication, it is fair to say his influence is, to this point, more benign than feared.

It is all a house of cards. As of today, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon all have leadership which is, broadly speaking, pro-USA and pro-Israel. Will that still be the case in a decade? Because it is the fact on which Israel depends for its existence.

The other point on which Israel relies is the support of Western governments. But throughout the Western world, the electoral and party systems which maintain the neo-liberal consensus and give voters no real choice at elections across issues ranging from economic policy to support for Israel, are fracturing.

This requires an article in itself, but in the UK, France, Germany and countless other states there is a tectonic shift happening with voters demanding a shift away from the tiny window of orthodox policy.

To date, the populist right has been quickest to take advantage of this shift, and of course benefited from mainstream media cooperation. But the fluidity indicates an impending seismic shift in western domestic political alignment.

That coincides with the disillusionment of Eastern Europe with the EU and NATO and the consequent desperate attempts of the NATO powers to subvert democracy in Georgia, Romania and Moldova.

At some stage China will take a more active interest in the Middle East. Once the Ukraine war has concluded, Russia will undoubtedly turn more attention to the Mediterranean again.

The situation is dynamic. I would not know whether to be more surprised if Trump initiated US attacks on Iran or initiated rebooted nuclear talks and the lifting of sanctions. I suspect the latter surprise to be the more likely.

Today there is at least a moment of hope that the horrible deaths and mutilations in Gaza may be slowed. Let us take that for a moment of respite, and feel the sun upon our faces. Then we continue the fight against evil.

———————–

To be blunt, our two months in Lebanon before Christmas made a slight financial loss. I was delighted with the output of four mini-documentaries and numerous short video reports and articles, some of which individually had millions of viewers. But to date the model of reader-sponsored real overseas journalism is not proven nor stable.

If you have not yet contributed financially, I should be grateful if you could do so. If you have contributed, perhaps you could help further by encouraging others to do so. I would as always stress I do not want anybody to contribute if it causes them the slightest financial hardship.

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a GoFundMe appeal and a Patreon account.

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There’s an old saying, “Fool around and find out.” On November 19, Ukraine fired six US-made missiles at a target located on Russian soil. On November 20, Ukraine fired up to a dozen British-made Storm Shadow cruise missiles against a target on Russian soil. On November 21, Russia fired a new intermediate-range missile against a target of Ukrainian soil.

Ukraine and its American and British allies fooled around.

And now they have found out: if you attack Mother Russia, you will pay a heavy price.

In the early morning hours of November 21, Russia launched a missile which struck the Yuzmash factory in the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk. Hours after this missile, which was fired from the Russian missile test range in Kapustin Yar, struck its target, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared on Russian television, where he announced that the missile fired by Russia, which both the media and western intelligence had classified as an experimental modification of the RS-26 missile, which had been mothballed by Russia in 2017, was, in fact, a completely new weapon known as the “Oreshnik,” which in Russian means “hazelnut.” Putin noted that the missile was still in its testing phase, and that the combat launch against Ukraine was part of the test, which was, in his words, “successful.”

Russian President Putin announces the launching of the Oreshnik missile in a live television address

Putin declared that the missile, which flew to its target at more than ten times the speed of sound, was invincible. “Modern air defense systems that exist in the world, and anti-missile defenses created by the Americans in Europe, can’t intercept such missiles,” Putin said.

Putin said the Oreshnik was developed in response to the planned deployment by the United States of the Dark Eagle hypersonic missile, itself an intermediate-range missile. The Oreshnik was designed to “mirror” US and NATO capabilities.

The next day, November 22, Putin met with the Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Missile Forces, Sergey Karakayev, where it was announced that the Oreshnik missile would immediately enter serial production. According to General Karakayev, the Oreshnik, when deployed, could strike any target in Europe without fear of being intercepted. According to Karakayev, the Oreshnik missile system expanded the combat capabilities of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces to destroy various types of targets in accordance with their assigned tasks, both in non-nuclear and nuclear warheads. The high operational readiness of the system, Karakayev said, allows for retargeting and destroying any designated target in the shortest possible time.

Scott will discuss this article and answer audience questions on Ep. 215 of _Ask The Inspector

“Missiles will speak for themselves”

The circumstances which led Russia to fire, what can only be described as a strategic weapons system against Ukraine, unfolded over the course of the past three months. On September 6, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin traveled to Ramstein, Germany, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who pressed upon Lloyd the importance of the US granting Ukraine permission to use the US-made Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) missile on targets located inside the pre-2014 borders of Russia (these weapons had been previously used by Ukraine against territory claimed by Russia, but which is considered under dispute—Crimea, Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Lugansk). Zelensky also made the case for US concurrence regarding similar permissions to be granted regarding the British-made Storm Shadow cruise missile.

Ukraine was in possession of these weapons and had made use of them against the Russian territories in dispute. Other than garnering a few headlines, these weapons had virtually zero discernable impact on the battlefield, where Russian forces were prevailing in battle against stubborn Ukrainian defenders.

Secretary Austin listened while Zelensky made his case for the greenlight to use ATACMS and Storm Shadow against Russian targets. “We need to have this long-range capability, not only on the divided territory of Ukraine but also on Russian territory so that Russia is motivated to seek peace,” Zelensky argued, adding that, “We need to make Russian cities and even Russian soldiers think about what they need: peace or Putin.”

Austin rejected the Ukrainian President’s request, noting that no single military weapon would be decisive in the ongoing fighting between Ukraine and Russia, emphasizing that the use of US and British weapons to attack targets inside Russia would only increase the chances for escalating the conflict, bringing a nuclear-armed Russia into direct combat against NATO forces.

On September 11, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, accompanied by British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, traveled to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, where Zelensky once again pressured both men regarding permission to use ATACMS and Storm Shadow on targets inside Russia. Both men demurred, leaving the matter for a meeting scheduled between US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Kier Starmer, on Friday, September 13.

The next day, September 12, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to the press in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where he addressed the question of the potential use by Ukraine of US- and British-made weapons. “This will mean that NATO countries – the United States and European countries – are at war with Russia,” Putin said. “And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”

President Biden took heed of the Russian President’s words, and despite being pressured by Prime Minister Starmer to greenlight the use of ATACMS and Storm Shadow by Ukraine, opted to continue the US policy of prohibiting such actions.

And there things stood, until November 18, when President Biden, responding to reports that North Korea had dispatched thousands of troops to Russia to join in the fighting against Ukrainian forces, reversed course, allowing US-provided intelligence to be converted into data used to guide both the ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles to their targets. These targets had been provided by Zelensky to the US back in September, when the Ukrainian President visited Biden at the White House. Zelensky had made striking these targets with ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles a key part of his so-called “victory plan.”

After the approval had been given by the US, Zelensky spoke to the press. “Today, there is a lot of talk in the media about us receiving a permit for respective actions,” he said. “Hits are not made with words. Such things don’t need announcements. Missiles will speak for themselves.”

The next day, November 19, Ukraine fired six ATACMS against targets near the Russian city of Bryansk. The day after—November 20—Ukraine fired Storm Shadow missiles against a Russian command post in the Kursk province of Russia.

The Ukrainian missiles had spoken.

The Russian response

Shortly after the Storm Shadow attacks on Kursk occurred, Ukrainian social media accounts began reporting that Ukrainian intelligence had determined that the Russians were preparing an RS-26 Rubezh missile for launch against Ukrain[

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Trident D5 missile launch from an Ohio-class submarine
e. These reports suggested that the intelligence came from US-provided warnings, including imagery, as well as intercepted radio communications from the Kapustin Yar missile test facility, located east of the Russian city of Astrakhan.

Test launch of an RS-26 missile

The RS-26 was a missile that, depending on its payload configuration, could either be classified as an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM, meaning it could reach ranges of over 5,500 kilometers) or an intermediate-range missile (IRBM, meaning it could fly between 1,000 and 3,000 kilometers). Given that the missile was developed and tested from 2012-2016, this meant the RS-26 would either be declared as an ICBM and be counted as part of the New Start Treaty, or as an IRBM, and as such be prohibited by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The INF Treaty had been in force since July 1988 and had successfully mandated the elimination of an entire category of nuclear-armed weapons deemed to be among the most destabilizing in the world.

In 2017, the Russian government decided to halt the further development of the RS-26 given the complexities brought on by the competing arms control restrictions.

In 2019, then-President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the INF Treaty. The US immediately began testing intermediate-range cruise missiles and announced its intention to develop a new family of hypersonic intermediate range missiles known as Dark Eagle.

Despite this provocation, the Russian government announced a unilateral moratorium of producing and deploying IRBMs, declaring that this moratorium would remain in place until the US or NATO deployed an IRBM on European soil.

In September 2023, the US deployed a new containerized missile launch system capable of firing the Tomahawk cruise missile to Denmark as part of a NATO training exercise. The US withdrew the launcher from Denmark upon conclusion of the training.

In late June 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would resume production of intermediate-range missiles, citing the US deployment of intermediate-range missiles to Denmark. “We need to start production of these strike systems and then, based on the actual situation, make decisions about where — if necessary to ensure our safety — to place them,” Putin said.

At that time the western media speculated about the mothballed RS-26 being brought back into production.

When Ukraine announced that it had detected an RS-26 being prepared for launch on November 20, many observers (including me) accepted this possibility, given the June announcement by President Putin and the associated speculation. As such, when on the night on November 21, the Ukrainians announced that an RS-26 missile had been launched from Kapustin Yar against a missile production facility in the city of Dnipropetrovsk, these reports were taken at face value.

As it turned out, we were all wrong.

Ukrainian intelligence, after examining missile debris from the attack, seems to support this assertion. Whereas the RS-26 was a derivative of the SS-27M ICBM, making use of its first and second stages, the Orezhnik, according to the Ukrainians, made use of the first and second stages of the new “Kedr” (Cedar) ICBM, which is in the early stages of development. Moreover, the weapons delivery system appears to be taken from the newly developed Yars-M, which uses independent post-boost vehicles, or IPBVs, known in Russian as blok individualnogo razvedeniya (BIR), instead of traditional multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles, or MIRVs.

In the classic weapons configuration for a modern Russian missile, the final stage of the missile, also known as the post-boost vehicle (PBV or bus), contains all the MIRVs. Once the missile exits the earth’s atmosphere, the PBV detaches from the missile body, and then independently maneuvers, releasing each warhead at the required point for it to reach its intended target. Since the MIRVs are all attached to the same PBV, the warheads are released over targets that are on a relatively linear path, limiting the area that can be targeted.

A missile using an IPBV configuration, however, can release each reentry vehicle at the same time, allowing each warhead to follow an independent trajectory to its target. This allows for greater flexibility and accuracy.

The Oreshnik was designed to carry between four and six IPBVs. The one used against Dnipropetrovsk was a six IPBV-capable system. Each war head in turn contained six separate submunitions, consisting of metal slugs forged from exotic alloys that enabled them to maintain their form during the extreme heat generated by hypersonic re-entry speeds. These slugs are not explosive; rather they use the combined effects of the kinetic impact at high speed and the extreme heat absorbed by the exotic alloy to destroy their intended target on impact.

Oreshnik missile impact on the Dnipropetrovsk military industrial complex

The military industrial target struck by the Oreshnik was hit by six independent warheads, each containing six submunitions. In all, the Dnipropetrovsk facility was struck be 36 separate munitions, inflicting devastating damage, including to underground production facilities used by Ukraine and its NATO allies to produce short- and intermediate-range missiles.

These facilities were destroyed.

The Russians had spoken as well.

Back to the future

If history is the judge, the Oreshnik will likely mirror in terms of operational concept a Soviet-era missile, the Skorost, which was developed beginning in 1982 to counter the planned deployment by the United States of the Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missile to West Germany. The Skorost was, like the Oreshnik, an amalgam of technologies from missiles under development at the time, including an advanced version of the SS-20 IRBM, the yet-to-be deployed SS-25 ICBM, and the still under development SS-27. The result was a road-mobile two-stage missile which could carry either a conventional or nuclear payload that used a six-axle transporter-erector-launcher, or TEL (both the RS-26 and the Oreshnik likewise use a six-axle TEL).

In 1984, as the Skorost neared completion, the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces conducted exercises where SS-20 units practiced the tactics that would be used by the Skorost equipped forces. A total of three regiments of Skorost missiles were planned to be formed, comprising a total of 36 launchers and over 100 missiles. Bases for these units were constructed in 1985.

The Skorost missile and launcher

The Skorost was never deployed; production stopped in March 1987 as the Soviet Union prepared for the realities of the INF Treaty, which would have banned the Skorost system.

The history of the Skorost is important because the operational requirements for the system—to mirror the Pershing II missiles and quickly strike them in time of war—is the same mission given to the Oreshnik missile, with the Dark Eagle replacing the Pershing II.

But the Oreshnik can also strike other targets, including logistic facilities, command and control facilities, air defense facilities (indeed, the Russians just put the new Mk. 41 Aegis Ashore anti-ballistic missile defense facility that was activated on Polish soil on the Oreshnik’s target list).

In short, the Oreshnik is a game-changer in every way. In his November 21 remarks, Putin chided the United States, noting that the decision by President Trump in 2019 to withdraw from the INF Treaty was foolish, made even more so by the looming deployment of the Oreshnik missile, which would have been banned under the treaty.

On November 22, Putin announced that the Oreshnik was to enter serial production. He also noted that the Russians already had a significant stockpile of Oreshnik missiles that would enable Russia to respond to any new provocations by Ukraine and its western allies, thereby dismissing the assessments of western intelligence which held that, as an experimental system, the Russians did not have the ability to repeat attacks such as the one that took place on November 21.

As a conventionally armed weapon, the Oreshnik provides Russia with the means to strike strategic targets without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons. This means that if Russia were to decide to strike NATO targets because of any future Ukrainian provocation (or a direct provocation by NATO), it can do so without resorting to nuclear weapons.

Ready for a nuclear exchange

Complicating an already complicated situation is the fact that while the US and NATO try to wrestle with the re-emergence of a Russian intermediate-range missile threat that mirrors that of the SS-20, the appearance of which in the 1970’s threw the Americans and their European allies into a state of panic, Russia has, in response to the very actions which prompted the reemergence of INF weapons in Europe, issued a new nuclear doctrine which lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons by Russia.

The original nuclear deterrence doctrine was published by Russia in 2020. In September 2024, responding to the debate taking place within the US and NATO about authorizing Ukraine to use US- and British-made missiles to attack targets on Russian soil, President Putin instructed his national security council to propose revisions to the 2020 doctrine based upon new realities.

The revamped document was signed into law by Putin on November 19, the same day that Ukraine fired six US-made ATACMS missiles against targets on Russian soil.

After announcing the adoption of the new nuclear doctrine, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov was asked by reporters if a Ukrainian attack on Russia using ATACMS missiles could potentially trigger a nuclear response. Peskov noted that the doctrine’s provision allows the use of nuclear weapons in response to a conventional strike that raises critical threats for Russia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Peskov also noted that the doctrine’s new language holds that an attack by any country supported by a nuclear power would constitute a joint aggression against Russia that triggers the use of nuclear weapons by Russia in response.

Shortly after the new Russian doctrine was made public, Ukraine attacked the territory of Russia using ATACMS missiles.

The next day Ukraine attacked the territory of Russia using Storm Shadow missiles.

Under Russia’s new nuclear doctrine, these attacks could trigger a Russian nuclear response.

The new Russian nuclear doctrine emphasizes that nuclear weapons are “a means of deterrence,” and that their use by Russia would only be as an “extreme and compelled measure.” Russia, the doctrine states, “takes all necessary efforts to reduce the nuclear threat and prevent aggravation of interstate relations that could trigger military conflicts, including nuclear ones.”

Nuclear deterrence, the doctrine declares, is aimed at safeguarding the “sovereignty and territorial integrity of the state,” deterring a potential aggressor, or “in case of a military conflict, preventing an escalation of hostilities and stopping them on conditions acceptable for the Russian Federation.”

Russia has decided not to invoke its nuclear doctrine at this juncture, opting instead to inject the operational use of the new Oreshnik missile as an intermediate non-nuclear deterrence measure.

The issue at this juncture is whether the United States and its allies are cognizant of the danger their precipitous actions in authorizing Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil have caused.

The answer, unfortunately, appears to be “probably not.”

Rear Admiral Thomas Buchanan

Exhibit A in this regard are comments made by Rear Admiral Thomas Buchanan, the Director of Plans and Policy at the J5 (Strategy, Plans and Policy) for US Strategic Command, the unified combatant command responsible for deterring strategic attack (i.e., nuclear war) through a safe, secure, effective, and credible global combat capability and, when directed, to be ready to prevail in conflict. On November 20, Admiral Buchanan was the keynote speaker at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Project on Nuclear Issues conference in Washington, DC, where he drew upon his experience as the person responsible for turning presidential guidance into preparing and executing the nuclear war plans of the United States.

The host of the event drew upon Admiral Buchanan’s résumé when introducing him to the crowd, a tact which, on the surface, projected a sense of confidence in the nuclear warfighting establishment of the United States. The host also noted that it was fortuitous that Admiral Thomas would be speaking a day after Russia announced its new nuclear doctrine.

But when Admiral Buchanan began talking, such perceptions were quickly swept away by the reality that those responsible for the planning and implementation of America’s nuclear war doctrine were utterly clueless about what it is they are being called upon to do.

When speaking about America’s plans for nuclear war, Admiral Buchanan stated that “our plans are sufficient in terms of the actions they seek to hold the adversary to, and we are in a study of sufficiency,” noting that “the current program of record is sufficient today but may not be sufficient for the future.” He went on to articulate that this study “is underway now and will work well into the next administration, and we look forward to continuing that work and articulating how the future program could help provide the President additional options should he need them.”

In short, America’s nuclear war plans are nonsensical, which is apt, given the nonsensical reality of nuclear war.

Admiral Buchanan’s remarks are shaped by his world view which, in the case of Russia, is influenced by a NATO-centric interpretation of Russian actions and intent that is divorced from reality. “President Putin,” Admiral Buchanan declared, “has demonstrated a growing willingness to employ nuclear rhetoric to coerce the United States and our NATO allies to accept his attempt to change borders and rewrite history. This week, notwithstanding, was another one of those efforts.”

Putin, Buchanan continued, “has validated and updated his doctrine such that Russia has revised it to include the provision that nuclear retaliation against non-nuclear states would be considered if the state that supported it was supported by a nuclear state. This has serious implications for Ukraine and our NATO allies.”

Left unsaid was the fact that the current crisis over Ukraine is linked to a NATO strategy that sought to expand NATO’s boundaries up to the border of Russia despite assurances having been made that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” Likewise, Buchanan was mute on the stated objective of the administration of President Biden to use the conflict in Ukraine as a proxy war designed to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia.

Seen in this light, Russia’s nuclear doctrine goes from being a tool of intimidation, as articulated by Admiral Buchanan, to a tool of deterrence—mirroring the stated intent of America’s nuclear posture, but with much more clarity and purpose.

Admiral Buchanan did couch his comments by declaring from the start that, when it comes to nuclear war, “there is no winning here. Nobody wins. You know, the US is signed up to that language. Nuclear war cannot be won, must never be fought, et cetera.”

When asked about the concept of “winning” a nuclear war, Buchanan replied that “it’s certainly complex, because we go down a lot of different avenues to talk about what is the condition of the United States in a post-nuclear exchange environment. And that is a place that’s a place we’d like to avoid, right? And so when we talk about non-nuclear and nuclear capabilities, we certainly don’t want to have an exchange, right?”

Right.

It would have been best if he had just stopped here. But Admiral Buchanan continued.

“I think everybody would agree if we have to have an exchange, then we want to do it in terms that are most acceptable to the United States. So it’s terms that are most acceptable to the United States that puts us in a position to continue to lead the world, right? So we're largely viewed as the world leader. And do we lead the world in an area where we’ve considered loss? The answer is no, right? And so it would be to a point where we would maintain sufficient – we’d have to have sufficient capability. We’d have to have reserve capacity. You wouldn’t expend all of your resources to gain winning, right? Because then you have nothing to deter from at that point.”

Two things emerge from this statement. First is the notion that the United States believes it can fight and win a nuclear “exchange” with Russia.

Second is the idea that the United States can win a nuclear war with Russia while retaining enough strategic nuclear capacity to deter the rest of the world from engaging in a nuclear war after the nuclear war with Russia is done.

To “win” a nuclear war with Russia implies the United States has a war-winning plan.

Admiral Buchanan is the person in charge of preparing these plans. He has stated that these plans “are sufficient in terms of the actions they seek to hold the adversary to,” but this clearly is not the case—the United States has failed to deter Russia from issuing a new nuclear war doctrine and from employing in combat for the first time in history a strategic nuclear capable ballistic missile.

His plans have failed.

And he admits that “the current program of record is sufficient today but may not be sufficient for the future.”

Meaning we have no adequate plan for the future.

But we do have a plan.

One that is intended to produce a “victory” in a nuclear war Buchanan admits cannot be won and should never be fought.

One that will allow the United States to retain sufficient nuclear weapons in its arsenal to continue to “be a world leader” by sustaining its doctrine of nuclear deterrence.

A doctrine which, if the United States ever does engage in a “nuclear exchange” with Russia, would have failed.

There is only one scenario in which the United States could imagine a nuclear “exchange” with Russia which allows it to retain a meaningful nuclear weapons arsenal capable of continued deterrence.

And that scenario involves a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Russia’s strategic nuclear forces designed to eliminate most of Russia’s nuclear weapons.

Such an attack can only be carried out by the Trident missiles carried aboard the Ohio-class submarines of the United States Navy.

Hold that thought.

Russia is on record as saying that the use of ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles by Ukraine on targets inside Russia is enough to trigger the use of nuclear weapons in retaliation under its new nuclear doctrine.

At the time of this writing, the United States and Great Britain are in discussions with Ukraine about the possibility of authorizing new attacks on Russia using the ATACMS and Storm Shadow.

France just authorized Ukraine to use the French-made SCALP missile (a cousin to the Storm Shadow) against targets inside Russia.

And there are reports that the United States Navy has just announced that it is increasing the operational readiness status of its deployed Ohio-class submarines.

It is high time for everyone, from every walk of life, to understand the path we are currently on. Left unchecked, events are propelling us down a highway to hell that leads to only one destination—a nuclear Armageddon that everyone agrees can’t be won, and yet the United States is, at this very moment, preparing to “win.”

A nuclear “exchange” with Russia, even if the United States were able to execute a surprise preemptive nuclear strike, would result in the destruction of dozens of American cities and the deaths of more than a hundred million Americans.

And this is if we “win.”

And we know that we can’t “win” a nuclear war.

And yet we are actively preparing to fight one.

This insanity must stop.

Now.

The United States just held an election where the winning candidate, President-elect Donald Trump, campaigned on a platform which sought to end the war in Ukraine and avoid a nuclear war with Russia.

And yet the administration of President Joe Biden has embarked on a policy direction which seeks to expand the conflict in Ukraine and is bringing the United States to the very brink of a nuclear war with Russia.

This is a direct affront to the notion of American democracy.

By ignoring the stated will of the people of the United States as manifested through their votes in an election where the very issue of war and peace were front and center in the campaign, is an affront to democracy.

We the people of the United States must not allow this insane rush to war to continue.

We must put the Biden administration on notice that we are opposed to any expansion of the conflict in Ukraine which brings with it the possibility of escalation that leads to a nuclear war with Russia.

And we must implore the incoming Trump administration to speak out in opposition to this mad rush toward nuclear annihilation by restating publicly its position of the war in Ukraine and nuclear war with Russia—that the war must end now, and that there can be no nuclear war with Russia triggered by the war in Ukraine.

We need to say “no” to nuclear war.

I am working with other like-minded people to hold a rally in Washington, DC on the weekend of December 7-8 to say no to nuclear war.

I am encouraging American[

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Trident D5 missile launch from an Ohio-class submarine
s from all walks of life, all political persuasions, all social classes, to join and lend their voices to this cause.

Watch this space for more information about this rally.

All our lives depend on it.

What if there simply is no alternative to America's permanent war party?

[The firing of an Iskander ballistic missile. Photo Credit: By Mil.ru, CC]

What if politics in America plays out not so much via presidential elections, but through a constant, if often obscured, struggle between the permanent war party (the hawks) and, well, everyone else?   If this is the case, then it is not going to be enough to just hold our breath and wait for a more peace-loving Trump to assume office on January 20, at which time, supposedly, the threat of WWIII will be called off.  Instead, a strategy must be devised that hard-headedly accepts that the permanent war party is not going anywhere, even after January 20, and therefore a strategy must be devised which accepts this tragic circumstance, while still giving us a chance to survive.  Such is the conceptual framework which political historian Victor Taki uses as his starting point for discovering a response to the Ukraine war. -The Editors

In the old Soviet anecdote, Radio Armenia is asked about the likelihood that a Third World War will take place. Upon reflection, Radio Armenia declares that a Third World War is unlikely, but it expects such a ferocious fight for peace that not a single stone will be left standing. This joke about Soviet-American relations at the time of the (first) Cold War acquires an uncanny relevance today, now that President Biden’s permission to Ukraine to use American missiles for strikes inside Russia has shifted the discussion from possible scenarios for building a stable peace to ways of avoiding WWIII.

Paradoxically, an ostensible willingness on the part of the nascent Trump administration to end the war in Ukraine has helped the globalist hawks to secure Biden’s consent to take this highly provocative measure. Its limited potential impact on the purely military aspect of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation has long been emphasized by this policy’s opponents. After all, the Russians have already placed their bombers out of range of those few ATACMS missiles and launchers that Ukraine currently has. However, any analyst who attempts to describe the actions of the Ukrainian leadership and its Western backers in terms of purely military rationality will necessarily miss the intended political and psychological effects of those actions.

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For almost a year the theme of “permitting” Ukraine to use the ATACMS and Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles for strikes into Russia’s interior has served as clickbait to offset Ukraine’s steady loss of ground. It has helped create the impression that it is Russia’s and not Ukraine’s fate that hangs in the balance, and that the articulate representatives of smaller or bigger (East) European nations can decide this fate by convincing the American president to call Putin’s bluff. After the clearly disappointing results of the US presidential elections from the perspective of Zelensky and his American and European backers, this “permission” becomes the last trump card to be thrown on the table in a reckless attempt to thwart Trump’s announced pacification of Ukraine.

The move is Machiavellian enough. In view of Putin’s September announcement that “authorization” of such strikes would be tantamount to NATO’s entry into the conflict, it will indeed be difficult for the Russian leader not to retaliate without losing face once these strikes actually take place. Russia’s retaliatory measures will in turn make it difficult for Trump to continue presenting Ukraine as “Biden’s war.” Apart from the danger of nuclear escalation that this scenario harbors, it will surely bury the prospect of a stable peace in Ukraine, however much the returning American president and his unchanging Russian counterpart would like to see it happen. 

The desire of some to stop the war turns out to be what gives others the opportunity to continue it. Given this circumstance, the doves might have to focus on ways of keeping the conflict within acceptable limits and forsake for the time being the different peace formulas meant to bring the war to a rapid end. Even if some variant of the “Vance Plan” (i. e. Ukraine’s neutral and demilitarized status plus the [existing] frontline as the new de factor Russian-Ukrainian border) could ultimately be accepted by Moscow, last Sunday’s news demonstrates that the global war party will not step back and simply let such an outcome materialize. 

Conclusion 

When an escalating provocation becomes the only way for the sidelined hawks not to lose badly from a prospective peace, the doves might need to reappraise their attitude towards the conflict itself. Continued within certain limits, the conflict represents the lowest common denominator between the otherwise incompatible interests and stakes of the different parties involved. At the same time, once the conflict becomes routine, the logic of de-escalation is likely to eventually prevail, if only because of the implacable law of universal entropy.  

Taking this into consideration, the doves’ strategy should be the opposite of the strategy of the Sicilian aristocracy at the time of Risorgimento, which was famously expressed in Giuseppe Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard (1958). Lampedusa’s characters repeatedly state that “[i]f [they] want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” By contrast, today’s doves should realize that if they want things to change, things will have to stay as they are. This minimalist approach to conflict resolution in Ukraine might strike some as cynical in light of the daily losses of hundreds of soldiers on both sides of the frontline. However, a straighter road to peace contains the even deadlier traps that have been set by those who would rather flip over the grand Eurasian chessboard than admit their defeat.

A guest post by

Victor Taki

I am a historian interested in imperial Russia’s Balkan entanglements and the intellectual history of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. My latest book Russia’s Turkish Wars was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2024.

I’ve written a number of times now about the unreality with which the West habitually approaches the continuing crisis in and around Ukraine, and the almost clinical dissociation from the real world that it displays in its words and its actions. Yet as the situation deteriorates and Russian forces move forward everywhere, there is no real sign that the West is becoming more reality-based in its understanding, and every probability that it will learn nothing, and continue to live in its constructed alternative reality until it is dragged out forcibly.

True, some daring leading-edge thinkers in the West are starting to wonder about the need for negotiations, even if they are on the West’s terms. They have begun to accept that perhaps some of Ukraine’s 1991 territory will have to be considered lost, if only in the short term. Perhaps, they muse, there will be a Korean-style DMZ in place, guaranteed by neutral troops, until such time as Ukraine can be rebuilt to take the offensive again. And then they look at the map of Russian advances, and they look at the size and power of the two armies, and they look at the size and readiness of NATO forces and they fall into despair.

But actually, no: scrub that last sentence. They don’t look, and if they did, they wouldn’t really be able to understand what they were seeing anyway. The “debate” (if you can call it that) in the West largely excludes real life factors. It takes place at a high normative level, where certain facts and truths are simply assumed. Why that is so, and what its consequences are, is the subject of first part of this essay, and then because these subjects are inherently complex, I go on to set out how to understand them as straightforwardly as possible.

We’ll start with some practical considerations of political sociology and psychology. The first is that politics is the classic example of the Sunk Costs phenomenon in action. The longer you continue with a course of action, no matter how stupid, the less willing you are to change it. Changing it will be interpreted as acknowledging error, and acknowledging error is the first stage in losing power. In this case the old defence (“personally I always had doubts…”) is just not going to wash, give the gratuitously psychopathic terms in which western leaders have expressed themselves about Russia.

The second is the absence of any articulated alternative. (“So, Prime Minister, what do you think we should do instead then?) The very fact of not understanding the dynamics of a crisis means that you are helpless to propose a sensible solution to it. It’s better to stay with a sinking ship in the hope of rescue than to jump blindly into the water. Maybe a miracle will happen.

The third is to do with group dynamics, in this case the dynamics of nations. In a situation of fear and uncertainty like the present, solidarity comes to be seen as an end in itself, and nobody wants to be accused of “weakening the West” or “strengthening Russia.” If you have to be wrong, best be wrong in the company of as many others as possible. There are enormous disincentives to being the first to suggest that maybe things are looking pretty bleak, and in any event what are you going to propose instead? The chances of thirty-odd nations being able to agree on a different approach to the present one are effectively zero, not helped by the fact that the United States, which might otherwise give a lead, is politically paralysed until perhaps the spring of next year.

The fourth is to do with isolation and groupthink. Everybody in your own government, everybody you speak to in other governments, every journalist and pundit that you come across says the same thing: Putin can’t win, Russia is taking massive casualties, we must rebuild Ukraine, Putin is scared of NATO blah blah. Everywhere you turn, you get the same messages, and your staff write the same messages for you to deliver to others. How could you not wind up assuming all this is true?

These are what we might call Permanently Operating Factors in politics, common to any crisis. But there are also a number of special factors operating in this particular crisis which seem obvious to me, but which I haven’t seen much discussion of. So let’s look at a few.

To begin with, the current generation of western politicians is especially incapable of understanding and managing high-level crises of any kind. The modern western political class—the Party as I call it—resembles more and more the ruling party in a one-party state. That is to say, the skills that lead to success are those of advancement in the Party apparatus itself: climbing the greasy pole and backstabbing rivals. Even managing a purely national crisis—as we saw during Brexit, or as we are seeing now in France and Germany—is actually beyond their abilities, except perhaps the ability to turn a crisis to their own personal political advantage. The result is that they are utterly overwhelmed by the Ukraine crisis, which is of a scale and a type that occurs perhaps once every couple of generations. The fact that it’s also a multilateral crisis means that it ideally requires advanced skills of political management just to ensure that things don’t fall apart, and they don’t even have those. In turn, the ever-increasing reliance on “advisers” linked to the personal fortunes of the politician concerned means both that professional advice is increasingly excluded, and also that professional advisers are often selected and promoted because they are willing to give the advice that politicians want.

So far, so generic. But we are also confronted here with a security crisis, and our political classes and their parasites are completely ignorant of how to deal with such crises, or even how to understand them. During the Cold War, governments were forced to confront security issues regularly: often, they were also domestic political issues. Security issues were also objectively important, as East and West glared at each other across a militarised border, with the possibility of nuclear annihilation never very far away. None of that is true now. NATO summits still happen of course, but until recently they have been concerned with peacekeeping deployments, counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and the endless succession of new members and partnership initiatives. No fundamental security decisions of any kind have been needed in the political lifetime of any current head of a NATO (or EU) country, until now.

This is the more unfortunate because a security crisis is a highly complex thing, and involves a whole series of levels from the political down to the military/tactical. And a security crisis is just about impossible to manage multilaterally: the only remotely comparable example I can think off is the 1999 Kosovo crisis, when a much smaller NATO effectively stopped working after the first week, and came quite close to breaking down completely.

I’ve pointed out before that NATO has no strategy for Ukraine, and no real operational plan. It just has a series of ad hoc initiatives, glued together by vague aspirations unrelated to real life, and by the hope that something will turn up. In turn, this is because no individual NATO nation is in a better state: our current western political leadership has never had to develop these skills. But it’s actually worse than that: not having developed these skills, not having advisers who have developed these skills, they cannot actually understand what the Russians are doing and how and why they are doing it. Western leaders are like spectators who do not know the rules of Chess or Go trying to work out who is winning.

Now, western leaders are not themselves expected to be military experts. It’s common to sneer at Defence Ministers with no military background, but this is to misunderstand how defence works in a democracy, and for that matter how a democracy itself works. Let me put on my lecturer’s hat for a moment, and explain that.

Governments have policies at different levels. One of those policies will be a national security policy, which in turn is the basis for more detailed policies in subordinate areas: in this case, defence. Conventionally, these policies are managed by Ministries, headed by political figures or appointees, who have advisers, and in most cases operational organisations to turn policy into actual activity on the ground. In the case of the Education Ministry, the operational units are schools and universities. In the case of the Defence Ministry, they are the armed forces and the specialist defence establishments. You would no more expect a defence minister to be a former soldier than you would an education minister to be a former teacher or, for that matter, a transport minister to be a former train driver. The responsibility of a Minister is to make and apply policy within the larger government strategic framework, and to manage the budget and programme of their area.

So it’s the responsibility of the political leadership—normally including the head of state or government—to say what the strategic purpose of any military operation actually is, and to set out  a situation (the “end-state”) where this purpose will have been realised. If this is not done, military planning and operations are pointless, no matter how good your forces and how destructive your weaponry is, because you won’t actually know what you are trying to do, and so you won’t’ be able to tell whether you’ve done it. This, not lack of military knowledge, is the fundamental problem of western political leaderships today. Indeed, it would be better to call them “managerships,” because they have no aspiration to lead. They are just MBA-trained fiddlers and bodgers, for who the concept of a strategic goal in the true sense of the term is basically meaningless. Instead of actual strategic objectives, they have slogans and fantasy outcomes. It is, after all, obvious that the strategic objectives government sets have to be actually realisable, or there is no point in pursuing them. They must also be clear enough that they can be passed to the military for the military to make an operational plan to deliver the “end-state.” And in addition, the political leadership has to set out constraints and requirements within which the military have to work. Because western leaders and their advisers do not know how to do this, they cannot understand what the Russians are doing, either.

After that, of course, you need a politico-military layer that is capable of doing operational planning, and so answering a series of questions like: what military outcomes will deliver the political end-state? how do we get there? what forces will we need? how should they be structured and equipped? how do we cope with political imperatives and limitations? Whilst these questions are generic, and it can be argued that they apply even to peacekeeping operations, they obviously apply with more and more force as operations become larger and more demanding.

And this is the essential problem. The war in Ukraine involves forces which are an order of magnitude larger than those sent on operations by any western nation since 1945. Indeed, it can be argued that the only time that forces of comparable size have been deployed in Europe is between 1915 and 1918, and again in 1944-45. European armies certainly studied these campaigns at one time, but with the passing of time they became historical examples, not things to learn applicable lessons from. And the planning from about 1950 to 1990 was for a short, defensive war which would probably go nuclear. It’s questionable whether there is actually anything at all in recent western military history that would help today’s commanders really understand what they are seeing.

Nor do they have the recent professional experience. It’s become fashionable also to sneer at western military commanders, but in many ways that’s unfair. In peacetime, the role of senior military leaders is only partially to prepare for war. There are also a thousand other issues to do with budgets, programmes, personnel questions, contracts, the future size and shape of the military, and many others. Senior military figures need of be capable of understanding all these issues and dealing with political leaders, diplomats, civil servants and their opposite numbers in other governments, as well as with parliament and the media. It is obvious that in peacetime you are not going to select a Chief of the Army just for putative war-fighting skills, if that person is an abrasive individual who is always arguing with the Minister.

This is why it is almost universally the case that military commanders are replaced wholesale at the start of a war. Some commanders may turn out to be natural war-fighters and others will not. Widespread personnel changes are therefore common because the task is very different: we have seen this with the Russian Army since 2022. Likewise, a peacetime army as a whole takes time to adjust to being a war-fighting one. The problem western experts have is that they are watching this process from a distance, without going through it themselves. Armies that still only know peacetime modes of operation are trying to understand the activities of armies that have completely transitioned to war-fighting.

Finally, western military specialists are limited by their own experiences. Imagine you are the Chief of Operations in a medium-sized western country. You joined the military in the 1990s, when the last senior officers who had known the Cold War were retiring. Your actual experience has been on peacekeeping operations and a couple of deployments in Afghanistan. The largest unit you have ever commanded on operations is a Battalion (say 5-600 personnel) and the last time you actually came under fire, you were a Company commander. How can you be reasonably expected to grasp the mechanics and complexities of manoeuvring armies hundreds of thousands strong, along lines of contact hundreds of kilometres long, and understand what the commanders involved are doing, and how they think? You will unconsciously focus on the things you can understand, at the scale that you can understand them. You will inevitably concentrate on the detail—some tanks destroyed here, a new variant of artillery deployed there—rather than the big picture.

All this seems to me to explain several things, including the curiously episodic nature of Ukrainian initiatives. Some of these were clearly suggested by the West, others by a political class in Ukraine which is highly westernised and thinks in western terms. (Ironically, the Army is probably more realistic and more able to grasp the wider picture.) But there has been very little sense of any long-term strategy, or even thinking. Take the attacks on the bridge to Crimea, for example. What were they supposed to achieve exactly? Now replies like “sending a message to Putin” or “complicating Russian logistics” or “improving morale at home” are not allowed. What I would want to know is, what is expected to follow, in concrete terms?  What are the tangible results of this “message” supposed to be? Can you guarantee that it will be understood? Have you gamed out possible Russian reactions and what will you do then? Supposing, again, that you complicate Russian logistics? What will be the direct result, and how easy will it be for the Russians to get round the problem. (Answer, fairly.)

Western political and military leaders have no answer to these questions, because they have no strategy, and do not really understand what a strategy is. What they have is a consistent habit of coming up with clever, publicity-generating ideas that are disconnected from each other, but all sound good at the time. Broadly, they reflect the following “logic.”

• do something that humiliates Russia.

• miracle happens.

• change of government in Moscow and end of war.

And I’m not exaggerating. This is all the “strategic planning” that the West is capable of, and all it ever has been capable of. I’ve stressed before the necessity of separating aspirations from strategy. For a good twenty years, important constituent parts of western governments have had the aspiration of removing Putin from power, and somehow creating a “pro-western” government in Moscow. From time to time they have come up with disconnected initiatives—sanctions, for example—which they believed might move events in that direction. But mostly it’s just hope, manured with the belief that no “anti-western” leader can ever be representative of his or her people, and so will not last very long anyway. But this approach ignores the most fundamental issues of strategy: what is the clearly-defined end-state you are seeking, how precisely will you achieve it and is it, in fact, achievable? Because if you can’t answer those questions, then any amount of “strategic” planning is pointless. As regards the last question, any military expert will tell you that although the military can create the conditions for political developments to take place, they can’t make them happen. The actual relationship between the two is very complex. Recall that in 1918, the German Army, badly hurt by the Allies’ attrition strategy, was in full retreat but still on Allied soil, and that the Allied armies advancing from the Balkans were still well outside German territory. What ended the War earlier than expected was a nervous breakdown in the German High Command.

And the West cannot answer those questions. The end-state is vaguely defined as “Putin gone,” the mechanism is “pressure” of an ill-defined nature, and the idea that a “pro-western” government will emerge is just an article of faith. So even if a “strategy” could somehow be constructed from these fragments, it would stand no chance of working. Thus the essentially reactive nature of western actions. I’ve talked before about the Boyd Cycle, of Observation, Orientation, Decision and Action. Whoever can go round this circle faster, and “get inside” the Boyd Cycle of the enemy, controls the development of the battle, or the crisis. This is essentially what the Russians (who understand such things) have been doing since the start of the crisis, well before 2022.

Conversely, the West, confusing vague aspirations with an actual strategy, has not understood what the Russians are trying to do, and has treated every Russian setback, or presumed setback, as a step on the road to victory without looking at the bigger picture. Take one simple example. From the beginning of the war, the Russian strategy was to bring about specified political changes in Ukraine by degrading and destroying Ukrainian forces, and so removing Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian political demands. Once the West became involved, this strategy, whilst the same overall, was nuanced to include the destruction of western-supplied equipment and, to a degree, western-trained units. (Though the latter without the former were not so much of a threat.) Two things followed from this.

The first was that the reduction of Ukrainian fighting capability on terms favourable to the Russians was independent of the larger ebb and flow of battle. Destroying stored equipment was if anything better than destroying that equipment in combat. Destroying stored ammunition was better than destroying it once it was deployed in units. Now generally, defenders in a military conflict have fewer casualties than attackers. If your objective is to destroy your enemy’s fighting power, especially if you know that it will be difficult and expensive for them to replace it, then it makes more sense to let the enemy attack you, where they will lose more resources than you. If you have a functioning defence industry and ample reserves of manpower and equipment, this is unarguably the best strategy, and was practised by the Russians in 2022-23. But the West seems incapable of understanding this, and massively over-interpreted Russian strategic withdrawals as crushing defeats which would soon “bring Putin down.”

The second is that, to the extent that Russia has territorial objectives, it is better to degrade Ukrainian forces to the point where they cannot defend territory and have to withdraw either preemptively or after a cursory defence, than it is to stage deliberate attacks to seize territory. The Russians have a whole series of technologies which enable them to attrit Ukrainian forcers from a position a long way behind the contact line. They can thus progressively destroy the Ukrainian ability to hold ground without needing to risk their own troops and equipment in direct attacks. Over the last few months, we have seen that this stage has effectively been reached, and that the Russians are advancing quite quickly in certain key areas. But the West, which is obsessed with the control of terrain as an index of success, cannot understand this, having forgotten how the War in the West ended in 1918, when Allied territorial gains were still quite modest.

To be fair (assuming that one wants to be fair), these issues are very complex: not more complex, perhaps, than neurosurgery or the taxation of multinational companies, but not any less complex either. They require years of study and experience, and a willingness to master strange and sometimes counter-intuitive concepts. The western Liberal mind has never wanted to do this: its ideology of radical individualism is incompatible with discipline and organisation, and its search for instant gratification is incompatible with any long-term planning and careful implementation. In retaliation, it likes to dismiss the military as stupid and war-mongering. When Liberalism was constrained by other religious or political forces all this was less obvious, but with the emancipation of Liberalism from all controls over the last generation, and its dominance of political and intellectual life, western societies have now pretty much lost the ability to understand conflict and the military. It is striking, indeed, that most western military personnel are still recruited from the more conservative and traditional elements of society where Liberalism has made less of an impact, and not from Liberal urban elites.

Since the nineteenth century, and especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, the Liberal mind has oscillated between dislike and disdain for the military in normal times, and panicked demands for their use in periods of crisis, or when Liberal norms need to be enforced somewhere. The spread of the Liberal mindset to countries like France, which has historically been proud of its military, has produced a European political and media class largely unable to understand military issues. American Liberals, so far as I can see, themselves oscillate between fear of the military and endless citation of the warnings by Eisenhower’s speechwriter about the Military-Industrial Complex, and demands for the use of the military to enforce their norms. (Eisenhower’s remarks were, of course, a cliché of the time: there was nothing original in them.)

The result is a decision-taking and influencing class that has no real idea about strategy and conflict at all, and just repeats words and phrases it has heard somewhere, as magical incantations. One minute “F16s” (whatever they are precisely) will save the day, the next, “deep strikes” are going to bring Putin down.

So for example, it is impossible for a society brought up on just-in-time delivery and impulse purchases on Amazon to understand the importance of logistics and the nature of the attrition war the Russians are fighting. If you look at a map and try to understand it (I know!) you can see the the Ukrainian forces are fighting at the end of very long supply lines, especially for western equipment and ammunition, whereas the Russians are only a few hundred kilometres, at most, from their borders. The fuel consumption of heavy armoured vehicles is measured in gallons per mile, and even if they can be delivered to the area of operations by train or transporter (which has its own problems) they consume frightening amounts of fuel, all of which has to be brought, dangerously and expensively, into the operational area. They also break down, require new tracks and new engines and an endless supply of ammunition, all of which has to be brought forward. So Leopard tanks are not just teleported into the battle area, and when they are damaged they have to be sent back to Poland for repairs. And just about every aspect of military operations requires electrical power: yes, even drone operations.

The Russians of course know this, and have been targeting power generation and distribution systems, bridges and railway junctions, ammunition and logistic storage sites and troop concentrations and training areas. But they are not capturing large amounts of territory with daring armoured thrusts, so the Ukrainians must be winning, mustn’t they? Yet tanks without fuel or ammunition, or whose engines have broken down, are useless, and once Ukrainian forces are operationally isolated from their supply lines it’s only a question of time before they lose their combat capability and have to surrender or make a run for it. This is what appears to be happening now around Kursk. And if you are fighting an attrition war, and your stocks and replenishment capabilities are greater than your enemy’s, you want your enemy to use up those stocks as quickly as possible. So why not send, for example, large numbers of cheap drones that can be replaced, to soak up large numbers of defensive missiles that can’t? But this is too much for most alleged western experts to wrap their neurones around.

Of course the logic applies both ways. It defies belief that anyone with a functioning brain-cell would ever have thought that the Russians planned to “occupy Ukraine,” let alone in a matter of days. Insofar as the idea had anything real behind it at all, it was a folk memory of the rapid advance of US forces to Baghdad in 2003, against no opposition and with complete air supremacy. A simple practical example: a NATO Mechanised Division (in the days when NATO had them), advancing against no opposition, would take up some 200km of road, and take several days just to organise, leave, arrive and deploy into combat formations. And that’s just one Division. The idea of doing this against a battle-hardened Army two to three times the size of the attacking force, and beating them in a few days at that, is beyond ridiculous. Again, look at the map. And while you are at it, think about the current hysterical cries that “Putin wants to invade NATO.” Everything I’ve said about the difficulty of NATO going Eastward applies to the Russians going Westwards, should they be insane enough to consider the idea.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Russians chose Kursk as a jumping-off point, then it’s about 2000 kilometres to Berlin, which is the first remotely plausible objective I can think of. (Oh, they would have to go to Poland to get there.) Just to give you an idea, in the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s Group of Forces in Germany was about 350,000 strong, supplemented by recalled reservists in an emergency. They would have attacked NATO forces in Germany, but they were only the first echelon, and were expected to be wiped out. Two more echelons would therefore follow them. The total distance needing to be travelled was a couple of hundred kilometres. As far as we know, subduing and occupying Western Europe alone would have required perhaps a million men in combat units, never mind the western flanks and countries like Turkey. This was in the context of an existential struggle, probably involving nuclear weapons, which a victorious Russia would take a generation to recover from. We are a little way from that at the moment.

I think that what we are seeing, as well as culpable deliberate ignorance, is the beginning of a gnawing realisation that NATO is not strong but weak, that NATO equipment is mediocre, that talk of “escalation” is meaningless in the absence of something to escalate with, and that if the Russians felt so inclined they could do a lot of damage to the West. But even there, western pundits are stuck in narratives of armoured warfare and territorial conquest. The Russians don’t need to do that, of course. With their missile technology, which the West has consistently ignored and downplayed, they can make a mess of any city in the western world, and no western state is in a position to respond. Of course the Russians, who understand these things, realise that they don’t need to actually use these missiles: the psychological leverage they have from just possessing them will do quite nicely. Ironically, I think the Ukrainians do understand these things, better than their supposed NATO mentors. Their Soviet heritage and the large Army they retained gave them an awareness of how large-scale operations are conducted at the political and strategic levels even if, since then, they have been got at by NATO

The French historian and Resistance martyr Marc Bloch, who fought in the Battle of France in 1940, wrote a book about it, only published posthumously, after the war, called L’Étrange défaite, or The Strange Defeat, in which he tried to explain what had happened. His central conclusion was that the failure was intellectual, organisational and political: the Germans employed a more modern style of war that the French were not expecting and could not cope with. Time has nuanced that conclusion: the German tactics were certainly innovative, involving fast-moving, deep penetration armoured units and close cooperation with aircraft, but they were also extremely risky and required a lot of luck to pull off successfully. But Bloch was right that the Germans had developed a style of warfare, dictated by the need to avoid long wars, to which there was no counter at the time, and which posed unexpected and, for a period insoluble, problems for the defender.

There’s something about the dazed incomprehension of the French political and military class and the people themselves, in the summer of 1940 that seems very relevant today. The defeat of the West—not yet even recognised as such—is at once intellectual, organisational and political. The ruling classes of the West seem to have no idea at all what has happened to them and why, nor what is likely to follow.

Huge hubbub surrounds Trump’s rapid-fire picks for key Cabinet positions over the last few days. A great division has ensued, between the two opposing sides, one screaming “betrayal!” at the slew of establishment Neocon Zionists chosen, while the other exults in triumph at the boldly unexpected picks.

Let’s examine what we have first—the longer list so far:

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SO FAR:

•Vice President: JD Vance
•Secretary of State: Marco Rubio
•Attorney General: Matt Gaetz
•Defense Secretary: Pete Hegseth
•Secretary of Homeland Security: Kristi Noem
•Director of National Intelligence: Tulsi Gabbard
•National Security Advisor: Mike Waltz
•CIA Director: John Ratcliffe
•White House Chief of Staff: Susie Wiles
•EPA Administrator: Lee Zeldin
•Ambassador to the United Nations: Elise Stefanik
•White House Counsel: Bill McGinley
•Deputy Chief of Staff: Stephen Miller
•Border Czar: Tom Homan
•Ambassador to Israel: Mike Huckabee
•Government Efficiency Advisors: Elon Musk & Vivek Ramaswamy
•Middle East Envoy: Steve Witkoff Dan Scavino, James Blair and Taylor Budowich will also take senior staff roles in the White House. Just the start.

Now, here is an elucidating post only and specifically from the perspective of the Ukraine situation:

Who the US President-elect has chosen for his administration. Trump's nominees

▪️For the post of US Secretary of State – Marco Rubio

He is an opponent of military aid to Ukraine, known for his anti-Castro and anti-Russian statements. Rubio has repeatedly advocated for launching peace talks and abandoning attempts to return Ukraine's lost territories .

▪️For the post of national security adviser – Mike Waltz

He advocated lifting restrictions on Kiev's strikes with Western long-range weapons on Russian territory, the Washington Post wrote. Waltz also suggests using economic pressure on Moscow to resolve the Ukrainian conflict .

▪️For the post of Minister of Defense – Pete Hagseth

He criticized sending money to Kiev amid domestic economic problems. He believes that in the Ukrainian conflict, Russia is getting its [way] .

▪️John Ratcliffe for the post of CIA Director

He has repeatedly spoken about the dangers of the partnership between Russia and China, and in 2020 he accused Russia and Iran of attempting to interfere in the US elections. However, it was Ratcliffe who dispelled the fake about the Russian trace in Trump's election campaign in 2016.

▪️For the post of Director of National Intelligence – Tulsi Gabbard

Gabbard was in the Democrats' camp, at the beginning of the SVO she even supported Ukraine, then she switched to Trump's side and began to criticize Zelensky, accused Biden of dragging the United States into a nuclear war, and admitted that the United States, under the leadership of the Democrats, is waging a proxy war with Russia.

▪️Elise Stefanik for the post of US Permanent Representative to the UN

In 2022, she advocated for Kiev to be accepted into NATO, but now she thinks differently and opposes financial support for Ukraine and Kiev’s entry into the Alliance .

▪️For the post of Secretary of Homeland Security – Kristi Noem

She is known for her criticism of American aid to Ukraine. In the spring of 2023, she said that military support for Ukraine was a “costly strategic mistake” that only served to strengthen the alliance between Russia and China.

▪️For the post of Attorney General and Head of the Department of Justice – Matt Gaetz

He stated that Ukraine’s goal of “separating Crimea from Russia” is unachievable. Gaetz has repeatedly spoken out in favor of a peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian crisis, and also noted that the United States “has sent enough money to Ukraine.” He also called it a “historically corrupt country.” (ed: he also prefers to bring Russia into NATO over Ukraine.)

▪️Susan Wiles for White House Chief of Staff

Known as the Republican Party's leading strategist, she is known as the "ice maiden." She is said to have been the chief architect of Trump's victorious campaign. She is a private person.

▪️For the post of deputy chief of staff for political affairs – Stephen Miller

He is known as the main ideologist of tough measures in the field of migration policy. His policies are characterized as far-right and anti-immigration.

▪️ Tom Homan has been nominated to serve as the "Border Czar" or "Border Czar"

He advocates for the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, which will likely be Homan's first task in his new White House position, which involves overseeing all immigration and border security issues.

▪️For the position of co-directors of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) - Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy

Both support Trump's policies, including the Ukrainian conflict. Ramaswamy withdrew his candidacy in favor of Trump. He said that the US should promise Russia that Ukraine will not join NATO .

A few things first: some believe that a few of Trump’s picks are either deliberate troll jobs or merely favors for support to people he knows cannot possibly be actually confirmed by the Senate. For instance Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, even RFK Jr.

On the other hand, Trump has tricks at his disposal, such as the infamous ‘recess appointment’ which would controversially allow him to put in his nominees while the Senate is at recess. Some have complained, yet when Obama put in various recess appointments in 2012, it seems no one batted an eye. Also, isn’t it interesting how there was no outcry when Obama considered RFK Jr. for his own Cabinet once long ago?

Now, Thomas Massie has gloatingly confirmed Trump reserves this right:

“You think he’ll (Matt Gaetz) will be confirmed by the Senate?”

“Doesn’t need to. Recess.”

GOP Massie says “recess appointments” when asked if GAETZ can get confirmed by the Senate “He’s the Attorney General. Suck it up!”

Though some thought the nomination of Gaetz was a kind of gag, Gaetz immediately resigned from his House seat, burning the ship behind him as token of his confidence. Even if something were to happen, Florida Governor DeSantis reserves the right to install Gaetz into Marco Rubio’s now-vacant Florida Senator seat, which I believe would last until 2026.

Now some of Trump’s more controversial picks have fired up the Deep State operatives in ways that are extremely elucidating in regard to how the Deep State works and keeps power amongst its own pre-vetted in-house people. John Bolton, for instance, has called Matt Gaetz’ nomination to Attorney General as the most shocking and ‘worst’ Cabinet nomination in the country’s history—how’s that for hyperbole?

Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic Senator from Connecticut, stated earlier today that 10 Republican Senators have already said they will not Approve the Nomination of Matt Gaetz to Attorney General; which if True, makes it very likely that his Appointment would be Rejected.

And this, of course, needs no introduction or explanation:

But the most telling reaction has been for Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination for the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Some of the most entrenched establishment figures crawled out the woodwork to waylay Tulsi for being an ‘outsider’ who would be ‘dangerously’ privileged with the most sensitive need-to-know information in the country.

But most revealing was what ex-CIA agent and House rep Abigail Spanberger said about why Tulsi absolutely cannot be allowed to become the DNI—listen closely:

She mentions how it’s the DNI’s job to control the information flow to the president. This is precisely how the Deep State wags the dog by easily misinforming US presidents into officiating any policy they so need. They don’t even have to lie: the main weapon in the DNI’s arsenal is careful curation of facts by omission. The things omitted from the president’s Cabinet meetings are even more powerful than the things said.

In short: this is a Deep State panic and revolt about the reality that they are about to lose their ability to totally puppeteer the US president into doing the bidding of foreign intelligence services, which are effectively who control the US agencies beneath the DNI.

By the way, Avril Haines—the current DNI—is a quite nefarious spook from the Obama days, and Tulsi would be leagues better than her. How about ex-CIA and NSA head General Michael Hayden replying to histrionic Spanberger from the video above, with the suggestive “what can we do” in keeping Tulsi out:

GenMHayden George W. Bush's CIA and NSA chief (who failed to detect 9/11) joins CIA operative RepSpanberger's panic over Tulsi's nomination. He was one of the 51 intel agents who signed the false Hunter Biden letter. These are the people who need to feel threatened and upset by Tulsi’s nomination.

Can you see how the entire Deep State neocon cabal of the Bush-Obama-Clinton dynasty days are in revolt against an ‘outsider’ cleaning house and installing actual patriots in key positions to insulate Trump?

Most people don’t know this, but since the days of Rockefeller, Kissinger, and co., the chief and only role of the presidential Cabinet is as bulwark against a ‘rogue’ president. The Cabinet is entirely selected by donors, financial interests, and foreign intel agencies and its members are essentially “minders” or ‘grey controllers’ whose job is to enforce a series of ‘off limits’ guardrails for the president. How can they enforce this? The 25th Amendment, which specifically gives the Cabinet the power to vote the president out of office due to “incapacity”. In short: if the president goes off-script, the Cabinet can vote to immediately remove him.

Recall that Obama’s entire Cabinet was famously chosen by Citigroup Bank:

“One month before the presidential election of 2008, the giant Wall Street bank Citigroup submitted to the Obama campaign a list of its preferred candidates for cabinet positions in an Obama administration. This list corresponds almost exactly to the eventual composition of Barrack Obama’s cabinet.”

So, Trump got his great Cabinet—everything should be peachy now, right?

Well, not exactly—I’ll leave the arch-Zionist of Twitter to explain:

Virtually every pick is not just pro-Israel, but is of a particularly virulent pro-Zionist stripe in the most cult-like and messianic way possible: Pete Hegseth, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Mike Waltz, and last but not least, Kristi Noem, who betrayed freedom of speech by literally signing the ‘strongest hate crime bill in America’ to combat “antisemitism”—a bill which vastly expands definitions of ‘antisemitism’ as guidance to law enforcement agencies in helping them prosecute the nebulous specter of ‘hate crimes’:

So, yes: we know Trump’s Cabinet is basically full of Israel-firsters, that’s no real shock. But the one aspect surrounding discussions that’s missing is the following: Everyone is busy making blanket generalizations because mentally differentiating the nuances is tiresome and time-consuming for most.

But we can clarify Trump’s picks as follows: They are pretty good domestically, and bad for foreign policy.

Obviously, for Americans the domestic issues take precedence, and it’s better to have a bunch of Zionists who will clean out the country, than a rotten lot that will be great for ending foreign wars and such, but completely totalitarian at home—or something to this effect. People must accept the fact that we will never solve all issues at once, and we must take our blessings where we can get them. That means if the next four years can be used to clean up the domestic in large part, there will always be time afterwards to worry about the other huge issues—like the US’ total enslavement to Israel.

The fact is, many of Trump’s picks will do wonders for cleaning up the domestic bureaucracy that has hollowed out the country and turned it into a dystopian techno-fascist panopticon. RFK Jr. can really go to town on Health agencies; hell, just look how Big Pharma tanked on his announcement:

Gaetz replacing the monstrous Deep State traitor Merrick Garland as AG will have incalculable trickle down effects on the Justice Department and every other facet of government. Of course, Ramaswamy and Musk will do a clean sweep on extraneous agencies and begin balancing the US’ check books for once—though it will likely end up being a drop in the bucket.

My colleague at MoA agrees that we should give Trump some iota of a chance and have an open mind for the time being. I think huge strides can be made on the domestic front with his picks, while the foreign stands as always to be 50-50, and has the chance to be usurped by the same old neocon policies of war against Iran, aggression and escalation against Russia, economic terror against China, and the like. But as I said, we have to start somewhere, and cleaning up the domestic bureaucracy could be a springboard for more eventual housecleaning of the foreign-policy neocon remnants.

Case in point: Pete Hegseth is a giant Zionist, but he’s about to patently take the scythe to the triple-headed Hydra of DEI, CRT, and ESG in the US military:

Then look at Trump’s new border czar Tom Homan—the guy is serious about mass deportations which could roll back much of the damage done by the globalist clique of the past couple decades—or even the ‘60s if you want to go as far back as the Hart-Celler Act of ‘65.

And there are other potentially disruptive appointments still coming up:

Don’t you think it’s at least a start? Rome wasn’t built in one day, and the US has been slowly encrusted in bloodsucking foreign limpets since about the early to mid-1900s. They have to be scraped off slowly and carefully, so as not to roust the roost and spark a full-on mutiny. Considering what we’ve gotten for the past several administrations, these appointments on paper appear revolutionary in nature; but as always: that doesn’t mean we must be naive and credulous, expecting them all to work out without a hitch—I myself remain skeptical as always, but cautiously optimistic.

After all, Trump has effected a perfect syzygy of Republican power that can give him a once-in-generations ability to carry out virtually any policy his team desires:

There’s still grave danger that Trump may fall short of accomplishing much of the above, though, particularly since the Deep State is regrouping and re-strategizing as we speak. For instance, here’s Democrat Rep Wiley Nickel openly calling for a ‘Shadow Cabinet’ to be formed in undermining Trump’s new administration and counteracting each of his ‘dangerous’ Cabinet picks:

Apparently committing treason is now “protecting democracy”:

https://x.com/RepWileyNickel/status/1857141802660229224

Like I said, Trump’s picks are strong on domestic and dangerous on foreign relations. Here’s an example—National Security Advisor nominee Mike Waltz describes how he believes Trump can or will end the Ukraine conflict, which is another way of saying how Mike Waltz will advise and militate for Trump to carry out the negotiations; and it’s not very promising or assuring:

Namely: Enforce the energy sanctions on Russia, which is nothing more than a ‘gas station with nukes’, then threaten Russia with allowing Zelensky’s long range strikes—typical hubristic neocon escalation.

As a last note, many astute observers have brought up just how oddly surreal it is that the person on the right is able to simper and dawdle with the person on the left, who he had just recently characterized as a grave ‘threat to the nation’, the new Hitler, et cetera. It beggars belief that one could smugly shake the hand of a man one believes to embody evil itself—it’s what made yesterday’s first post-election White House meeting between the two such a classic study:

The occasion calls for a larger-than-life splash page, as books could be written on the symbolism of this one photo alone:

The hieratic tableau is pregnant with meaning.

The only question is, which initiate level did he confer?

Jests aside: I personally believe Trump more liable to have made a threatening “gun gesture” with his hand at Biden, or perhaps even for cameras as a sort of “gotcha back” or “I know it was you” moment, referencing the hit attempts—made particularly poignant with Biden’s subtle choice of pinstripe gangster suit:

We all know the changing of the guard is just one mafia clique shoving off the other, but just like in the case of the Godfather, where Pacino’s character Michael had a generational plan to clean things up during his tenure so that the future of his family could go totally legit, Trump and his flawed team, too, can initiate some semblance of a move toward the light for the country.

There’s still a hell of a fight left, and we shouldn’t take for granted that Trump will even be allowed to take office. But given the abrogation of true neocon vermin like Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo in exchange for flawed characters with at least an inkling of some promising virtues, we’ve for once got an innings chance for improvement. For now, that makes the outlook considerably better than it’s been for quite some time.

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  [@bears_with](https://twitter.com/bears_with)

In politics — the Kremlin is no exception — politicians don’t mean what they say.  In gardening, the plants always mean what they say. Gardeners, obliged to record what that is, are more likely than politicians to tell the truth.

In the records of Russian politicians since the Bolshevik Revolution, only one leading figure stands out as having the eye, ear, and nose for what plants have to tell. Not the present nor the founding one. The only gardener among them was, and remains, Joseph Stalin.

Nothing has been found that he wrote himself on his gardening except perhaps for marginal comments in books he read.  There is no mention of books on gardens or gardening in the classification system Stalin’s personal library adopted from 1925. He kept no garden diary. Without a diary recording the cycle of time and seasons, the planting map, colour scheme, productivity of bloom and fruit, infestation,  life and death, he must have committed his observations – “he possessed unbelievably acute powers of observation” (US Ambassador George Kennan) – to memory,  as peasants do.  

Unlike the tsars who employed English, Scots, and French architects and plantsmen to create gardens in St. Petersburg and Moscow in the royal fashions of Europe, defying the Russian winter to display their power and affluence without shovelling for themselves, Stalin dug his gardens himself in the warm weather of his dacha at Gagra, on the Black Sea. There he was photographed with his spade tending parallel, raised beds of lemon trees (lead image, top).  There is no sign of him wielding trowel and fork in the garden at Kuntsevo, his dacha near Moscow, where the photographs show him strolling in a semi-wild young forest or seated on a terrace in front of a hedge of viburnum. No record of Stalin digging at Kuntsevo has been found.

There is just one reminiscence of Stalin speaking to a visitor about his gardening. “Stalin is very fond of fruit trees. We came to a lemon bush. Joseph Vissarionovich carefully adjusted the bamboo stick to make it easier for the branches to hold large yellow fruits. ‘But many people thought that lemons would not grow here!’ [He said]  Stalin planted the first bushes himself, took care of them himself. And now he has convinced many gardeners by his example. He talks about it in an enthusiastic voice and often makes fun of would-be gardeners. We came to a large tree. I don’t know it at all. ‘What is the name of this tree?’ I asked Stalin. ‘Oh, this is a wonderful plant! It’s called eucalyptus,’ Joseph Vissarionovich said, plucking leaves from the tree. He rubs the leaves on his hand and gives everyone a sniff. ‘Do you feel how strong the smell is? This is the smell that the malaria mosquito does not tolerate.’ Joseph Vissarionovich tells how, with the help of eucalyptus, the Americans got rid of the mosquito during the construction of the Panama Canal, how the same eucalyptus helped with the work in swampy Australia. I felt very embarrassed that I did not know this wonderful tree.”   

Stalin read a great deal of philosophy, Roman and Russian history, art, and agronomy, and so he is bound to have reflected on the way in which the ideas of the classics he read took physical form in the gardens of the time. Especially so on the ancient idea of the paradise garden. It is this transference between thinking and digging, between the idea of paradise and the cultivation of it, which a new book, just published in London, explores in a radical way.

Olivia Laing, author of The Garden Against Time, In Search of a Common Paradise, knows nothing whatever about Russia or its gardens or its politics – except for propaganda on the Ukraine war she has absorbed unquestioningly and briefly repeats from the London newspapers. That’s a personal fault; it’s not a dissuasion from the book of reflections she has written out from her garden diary to an end which Russians understand to aim at, not less than the English.

In this wartime it’s necessary to keep reflecting on this end, on the aesthetic and philosophical purpose of the paradise garden. Laing begins her book and her garden with John Milton’s lament for gardening in wartime – in his case, the English Civil War of 1642-46 and the counter-revolution of 1660. “More safe I Sing with mortal voice, unchang’d”, Milton observed at the beginning of Book 7 of his Paradise Lost, “to hoarce or mute, though fall’n on evil dayes/ On evil dayes though fall’n, and evil tongues;/in darkness and with dangers compast round,/And solitude.”  

At the same time, Laing records for herself and Stalin certainly knew, “what I loved, aside from the work of making [the paradise garden], was the self-forgetfulness of the labour, the immersion in a kind of trance of attention that was as unlike daily thinking as dream logic is to waking.”

Source: [https://www.rulit.me/](https://www.rulit.me/books/vstrechi-s-tovarishchem-stalinym-read-60539-2.html)

Through the near eighty years of my life, I’ve made gardens in each of the houses I’ve lived in, four of them are in Russia. The first was on the bank of the Osetr (“sturgeon”) River, in the only brick cottage of the dying village of Ivanchikovo (“Little John”).

In a semi-circle around the front of the old house and its timbered verandah (Russian has also adopted the Hindi word, веранда), I excavated a trench in which I planned a tall hedge of roses, with underplanting of blue and white scilla siberica for the early spring, iris siberica for late spring, and mauve colchicums for late summer and autumn.

They were the evil days of Boris Yeltsin, however. Ivanchikovo’s collective farm had collapsed, and there was almost nothing, certainly no seed, no bulbs, not even flowers in the local shop or nearby market. What I should plant, I decided, was what I could fossick from the wild of the untended sovkhoz fields, the verge of the river stretching up to Kukovo (“Baker”) and down to Tregubovo (“Three Lips”), and the forest nearby. I started with wild roses. 

I also asked for the advice of the other villagers, my neighbours. They were unused to speaking with foreigners: the last of them they told me were German soldiers in retreat fifty years before. The only gardener in the village was a Soviet Army officer who had been made redundant at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and pensioned off with a pittance. In his cottage garden he had planted an orchard of apple trees. By patient experiment and skilful grafting, he explained, it was his ambition to revive as many of the old varieties of Russian apples as he could find. His paradise garden was filled with apples. Ground flowers he had excluded,  he told me.

In the rear garden of my cottage the hedgerows were composed of raspberry and blueberry bushes. A tree of Bolshevik vintage cast ample shade on to the narrow sward. Shade meant more specialized plantings for which there was no obvious source but the forest. For the time being, my priority was the front garden.

After a week of hiking, searching and excavating I had enough wild rose bushes to fill the trench and promise a luxuriant screen of flowers, blooming twice in the summer, I hoped. To cheer the poverty-stricken husband and wife on the left who had taken my fence palings for their oven fire, and to deter the wealthy transplant from Moscow who was erecting a double-storey house to the right, I engaged the local priest to conduct a ceremony of exorcising the evil spirits inside and around the house and to bless the garden for fertility and beauty.

But money and force defeated the plan. Without a preliminary word, the neighbours from Moscow — formerly high-ranking officials of the now defunct Communist Party — arranged for  construction trucks to make their deliveries of bricks, cement, timber, and workers by driving  across my garden. Dozens of tyre tracks destroyed the roses.

This was a violation of my private property rights, as the Yeltsin regime had announced them. But like everything else he did, this was false, and for me there was no recourse. My little paradise garden, blessed by the Church, hadn’t been nipped in the bud. It had been annihilated before it had a chance to bud.

My second Russian garden was planned and planted at the same time in Moscow. It was in the square in front of my apartment house at Kolobovsky pereulog (“Bun Lane”), in the Tverskaya  district of the old city. The building dated from the time of reconstruction after Napoleon had left. The square had been intended for the residents, my new neighbours. Its four corners had been planted with shade trees which had survived the Revolution and the Germans. But the space underneath had long ago been covered by refuse, then cars in various states of disrepair, poisoned by patches of oil, suffocated by weeds.

As the only non-Russian to own an apartment in the building, I was the only one to think of spending personal cash on the public space in front, for the benefit of our collective, so to speak. My neighbours gave their consent to my tossing my money on to the garden.

To remove the cars first of all, I installed a waist-high fence around the square in the wrought-iron style of the century before. The next task was to clear the surface rubbish; dig up the impoverished sandy soil, adding black top soil and worms; prune the dead boughs of the trees and fertilize the roots; lay down out diagonal paths from corner to corner; and plan plantings of spring and autumn bulbs in the quadrants formed by the paths, as well as an annual display in a raised circle in the centre.

Restored public benches on Strastnoy Boulevard.

Four old wrought-iron park benches, salvaged from elsewhere in the city, were placed in the quadrants, bolted to concrete foundations sunk into the soil, repainted. The babushki of the house were invited to take their morning and afternoon sittings there. They would become the guardians of the budding paradise. They shouted off drivers attempting to repair and oil their engines. They stopped dog defecation. They prevented anyone cutting the spring display of snowdrops and daffodils. In thus defending the Kolobovsky Pereulog garden, these women were, unlike my neighbour at Ivanchikovo, true communists.

Both gardens were ruined by theft.  To steal is a venal sin but in Russia not a mortal one. It was common in Russia, not only during Yeltsin’s time in the Kremlin, but after. It continues for me. Venal sins can be repented, reversed, compensated. But to ruin a garden is a mortal sin. No  punishment fits that crime.

This is because the paradise garden is a morality play on the soil —  as Laing has discovered, without her forgetting the deadly simple mechanics of how the land is owned, the labour paid for, the neighbours fenced off.  The English garden is not such a thing, Laing concludes in a revolutionary fashion.  Rather, it’s a “confidence trick. To reshape the land in your own image,  to reorder it so that you inhabit  the centre and own the view. To fake nature so insidiously that even now those landscapes  and the power relations they embody are mistaken for being just the way things are, natural, eternal, blandly reassuring…”

In trying to understand the idea of the paradise garden and to make it for herself, Laing writes of the English precursors of communism – the Levellers  and the Diggers of the Civil War period. About them, she notes, they are remembered for “declaring the earth to be a ‘common treasury’, given by God equally to all men and never intended to be bought or sold.” Laing has studied Karl Marx and the English socialists, some of whom gardened seriously  – William Cobbett, William Morris, George Orwell, E.P. Thompson. With their point of view, Laing goes on the attack against the English style in gardens – the fashion which was aped by Catherine the Great and her tsarist successors  in those palatial gardens which remain on show in St. Petersburg.

One of the “English views” in Catherine the Great’s garden at Tsarskoye Selo, nationalized in 1917.

This month it is the 93rd anniversary of Stalin’s idea, implemented by the Central Committee on [November 3, 1931](https://johnhelmer.net/russian-gardens-and-the-war-against-the-anglo-american-grass-sward/), to design, build, and pay for public parks and gardens as national policy. The pleasure garden of the rich and powerful for the preceding three thousand years had been revolutionized and democratized for the first time. “The parks of culture and rest,” the Central Committee declared, “represent a new kind of institution that has numerous political and didactic obligations to fulfil, all of which are for the wellbeing of millions of workers”.  The creation of Moscow’s Gorky Park had been an idea of Stalin’s inside the new layout he conceived for Moscow from Red Square to Sparrow Hills (called Lenin Hills between 1935 and 1999).  

For Laing, the privatisation of peasant farmland, the enclosures by Act of Parliament, the replacement of the village common with the aristocratic lawn and the ha-ha  to view it, the creations of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton – all are to be understood now to be “status symbols and adornments, a way for money  to announce its presence in a more comely or displaced form.”

“But where does the money come from?” Laing asks. Her answer is unique in the modern English gardening literature. In probing for the origins of the great English gardens, Laing goes from the corrupt Elizabethan trade and privateering concessions of the 16th century to the sugar and tobacco plantations of the US and Caribbean worked by slavery and the East India Company slaughter of India during the 18th and 19th centuries.  “There are gardens that have come at far too high a price, and I am glad that Crowfield is now obliterated, and that the historians at Middleton Place have tried to recover and foreground the stories of the enslaved people who build and paid for its garden, with its rare camellias and azaleas.”

Laing is confident enough of her own values to record her debts for gardening imagination and skill to the English garden writers Monty Don, Beth Chatto, Rosemary Verey,  Christopher Lloyd, and to several garden custodians at the university colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. She leaves out the best known of them, Robin Lane Fox, the classics don at New College where he has been the Garden Master.  Lane Fox is also the longest continuing garden  columnist for the Financial Times, platform for the display of what very large sums of money can buy. Laing calls that money laundering – “us[ing] gardens to cleanse and frame their reputation …to rise above the degraded and exploitative sources of their wealth.”

Source: [https://johnhelmer.net/](https://johnhelmer.net/cabbages-and-rothschilds-%e2%80%93-the-special-horticulture-of-spreading-manure-grafting-and-forcing-for-the-enrichment-of-everybody-%e2%80%93-well-almost-everybody-%e2%80%93-well-somebody-with-ta/)

For the land, the peasants are bound to fight the aristos, the communists against the oligarchs, the garden writers against each other – for the idea of the land and the idea of the paradise garden are collectively and personally a moral geography that’s worth fighting for.  

Laing correctly identifies this idea with John Clare (right), the 19th century farm labourer poet who ended up locked in an asylum. “His knowledge,” Laing writes, “was another way of saying his familiar ground , the place he knew… that knowledge  is itself a function of place, in which one’s capacity  to make sense of things, to generate understanding , is a product of being in some way rooted  and at home, and that, even more strikingly, this sense of home  is reciprocal: that one doesn’t  just know, but is known.”

In the story of this book, Laing succeeds in keeping the garden she makes. Milton wasn’t so fortunate. He went blind and was pursued by the counter-revolutionaries empowered by King Charles II. They are the “evil tongues”, the “dangers compast round”, and the “evil dayes” against which Milton wrote his Paradise Lost, “propelled” — Laing retells the story — “by an almost intolerable need to understand what it means to have failed and what one ought to do once failure has occurred, both by imagining a process of future reparations and by re-envisaging  the nature of an intact , untarnished world.”

Laing’s has got the question right, but not quite the answer. “A garden dies with its owner”, her book concludes.

I believe the opposite, and Laing is honest enough to allow it — the owner may die, the garden may remain in place. I am obliged to conclude so because my third garden in Moscow is being stolen from me as I write, but not quite yet.

The fourth, in the village of Kurlek, by the Tom River in the Tomsk region of Siberia, is the garden of Tatiana Vasilievna Turitsyna, my dead wife.   

By the acts of oligarch Oleg Deripaska and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, this garden too is being stolen from me, but not quite yet.

Yet is a long time, mind you.

For how long, Old Blind John claimed optimism at the very end of his Paradise Lost, “Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;/The World was all before them, where to choose/Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide.” In the Russian politics I know, as Stalin knew, there is no place of rest and no Providence.

by Editor - Sunday, November 17th, 2024

During the period of the Wagner Group insurrection in the spring of 2023, the biography of the mercenary group’s founder and principal owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was spread far and wide. The fact that he had once served meals to Vladimir Putin prompted sniggering among our mainstream commentators. Just imagine that such a person could rise to the power, influence and wealth of Prigozhin! This was proof positive of the endemic corruption and distorted values of the ‘Putin regime,’ they opined.

However, my point in writing today’s installment is to demonstrate that upward mobility of those with great talent and imagination has long been and remains a competitive advantage of Russia. That was so under Peter the Great in the first quarter of the 18th century, it was certainly true in much of the Soviet period until the 1980s. And it revived very nicely in the ‘Roaring 90s’ when the hero of this piece, Sergei Gutzeit, restaurateur, vineyard owner, restorer of landmark buildings at his own expense, founder and chief benefactor of a lyҫėe for aspiring talents from the lower classes began his steep rise up the success ladder in the circle of another rising star, Vladimir Putin.

All of these issues came to mind this afternoon when my wife and I took lunch in Gutzeit’s first and still best earning restaurant Podvorye located in the Petersburg suburb of Pavlovsk where he has kept his primary residence and focus of his charitable works for decades.

Pavlovsk is named for the Emperor Pavel (Paul I), son of Catherine the Great and father of Emperor Alexander I, best known as the conqueror of Napoleon. Paul’s elegant and modestly sized palace is a ‘must see’ tourist destination for both foreign and domestic visitors to Northwest Russia, alongside the much larger and more demanding Summer Palace of Catherine in the town of Pushkin (formerly Tsarskoye Selo), 5 km away.

However, the success of Gutzeit’s restaurant opposite the palace park had little to do with location, location, location. Gutzeit opened the Podvorye in 1994 on an unpromising plot of land that the grudging city authorities offered him. It is wedged between the train tracks on one side and a busy local highway on the other. It was his unique architectural solution and his talents in hospitality services that won him a loyal clientele from among the top business and political circles of Petersburg after a very few years.

As for architecture, the Podvorye restaurant and the ensemble of outbuildings adjacent to it are made from immense stripped logs in a style that resembles the stage settings for 17th century or still earlier Russia as shown in Rimsky Korsakov operas in the Mariinsky Theater. The basic menu was built entirely around traditional hearty Russian cuisine that is very well turned out, in copious portions and priced very fairly. And on weekends it was the rule to regale diners with rounds of Russian folk songs by musicians who invited the children especially to join in.

Gutzeit’s fortune was assured in October 2000 when Vladimir Putin decided to celebrate his first birthday as president in…the Podvorye. The specially prepared meal for the presidential party remains on page one of the printed menu and is currently priced at 55 euros in ruble equivalency. In typical Russian fashion, the meal opens with a shock and awe array of eight different meat, fish, salted vegetable, marinated forest mushroom and other appetizers which invite rounds of vodka shot glasses, then moves on to a fish or meat soup followed by the mains of fried fish or meat. Fasting for a day ahead of such a meal is a good idea.

On the other hand, for normal dining, the out of pocket cost is much lower. By way of example, I mention that our favorite dish is half a roast duck served with stewed cabbage and a baked pear with lingonberry filling. One portion is more than sufficient to serve two and today costs the equivalent of 12 euros. Back in the 1990s, when Russian farming was reeling from the shock therapy administered at the advice of Western advisers, Gutzeit had to import his ducks frozen from France to be satisfied with quality and uniform portions. Then when relations with France soured, he shifted to frozen ducks from Hungary. Now chef assures me that they arrive fresh from farms in Rostov (Russia) and I assure you that the quality is superb.

But, to resume my story of Gutzeit’s rise: once word of the President’s visit got around, the Podvorye was filled daily to capacity. Back in the 1990s and early in the new century, the diners were predominantly foreigners whose reservations were made for them by the premiere hotels in St Petersburg where they were lodged. I recall how in about 2004 my wife and I spotted former British prime minister John Major at another table.

Those were the glory days when Gutzeit made a fortune that he immediately invested in other commercial ventures and also in charitable works, the first of which, was a free of charge soup kitchen for the poor run daily from a large, specially built canteen adjacent to the restaurant.

Nowadays the clientele is almost exclusively middle class Russians from near and far. They arrive as couples, as families with kids, and as groups of friends.

Aside from opening other restaurants in the region, Gutzeit created the ‘Russian Village’ in Upper Mandrogi, a Russian equivalent to America’s Williamsburg on a riverbank site jointly agreed with tour operators of cruises in the rivers and canals running north from Lake Ladoga that are very popular in the summer season. This venture provided work opportunities to artisans in traditional decorative handicrafts.

With the proceeds of his businesses, with his own money Gutzeit undertook the restoration of dilapidated buildings from the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries in the Pavlovsk area. In one of these complexes he opened what I would call his most ambitious and far-sighted project which was inspired by the lyҫėe within the Catherine Palace which Alexander I created initially with a view to educate his younger brothers together with a small group of talented students from outside the royal entourage. Today it is best known as the school where the young Pushkin studied. Gutzeit’s vision was to help create a new patriotic but broadly educated and widely traveled elite to help guide the country’s future.

The school was named for Russia’s revered Foreign Minister in the second half of the 19th century, A.M. Gorchakov. Gutzeit directly oversaw the selection of the 18 candidates for the first class and following classes from among children of low income intelligentsia families. He oversaw the program of travel abroad in the West and domestically around Russia that the students were given gratis. The school is still going strong and I expect to hear more about its graduates when I meet with Gutzeit at the start of next week.

In reviving the tradition of what was called in Pushkin’s time the Tsarskoye Selo lyҫėe, Gutzeit was a good 20 years ahead of the Putin government. It is only now that a project to revive that school in the original Catherine Palace complex is being realized.

Meanwhile, Gutzeit never abandoned the love for fresh produce that directed him to cooking and restaurant ownership. Originally born and educated in Odessa (Ukraine), Gutzeit got his start in business in the food markets of the north where he traded in vegetables. The latter partly explains his decision early in the new millennium to buy a farming estate in the Crimea. His main crop there is grapes for wine, and he began well before it became popular for Russian arbiters of taste like Dmitry Kiselyov, director of all Russian state television news, to become a vineyard owner in Crimea. Gutzeit indulges in his gentleman farmer avocation in the south from late spring to autumn.

His most recent acquisition, agricultural land near the regional center Gatchina, brings together various interests. The location has its own logic: Paul 1 had his earliest palace in precisely Gatchina. On this farm, Gutzeit is now growing most of the fresh vegetables, herbs, fowl and dairy products that will be featured in Podvorye. With this latest accent on cooking mainly what you get from your surroundings and can personally control, Gutzeit’s restaurant is sure to vie for a star in the Michelin guide if and when sanctions are lifted.

That, in a nutshell, is my Exhibit Number 1 of a successful and wealthy benefactor of his society with outstanding vision who began, like Prigozhin, as ‘a waiter to Putin.’ When you care to scratch the surface, this country has a great many surprises that help you to better understand why it is now the fourth biggest economy in the world as measured by Purchasing Power Equivalency and likely has the number one army in the world.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. He chose this third career of 'public intellectual' after finishing up a 25 year career as corporate executive and outside consultant to multinational corporations doing business in Russia and Eastern Europe which culminated in the position of Managing Director, Russia during the years 1995-2000. He has publishied his memoirs of his 25 years of doing business in and around the Soviet Union/Russia, 1975 - 2000. Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume I: From the Ground Up was published on 10 November 2020. Volume II: Russia in the Roaring 1990s was released in February 2021. A Russian language edition in a single 780 page volume was published by Liki Rossii in St Petersburg in November 2021: Россия в бурные 1990е: Дневники, воспоминания, документы. View all posts by gilbertdoctorow

In one hour our conversation with host Nima Alkhorshid covered the waterfront of current international issues. We opened with discussion of the results of last week’s BRICS Summit in Kazan and then moved on to war in Ukraine and in particular to the latest stunning Russian successes in Donbas. The presence of North Korean troops in Russia, possibly in Kursk to assist in the mopping up operation there, was a further issue. We concluded with consideration of what a Trump win next week will mean both for shutting down the war in Ukraine and for possibly advancing towards war with China, an eventuality that I see as most improbable.

As I say out the outset of this video, the lighting is less than optimal and the possible intrusion of the sound of the refrigerator’s compressor is what you get when recording from the best lit room in a Petersburg apartment, the kitchen. Accordingly I ask viewers for their indulgence and hope that you will find that the content of this discussion justifies your time.

Nima R. Alkhorshid: 0:05
Today is Friday, November 1st. Gilbert is here with us. Welcome back.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Thanks. Good to be with you.

Alkhorshid:
You are in Russia right now.

Doctorow:
I’m in my apartment in St. Petersburg right now. So the lighting is not ideal. The sound is a little bit distorted when you’re talking in a kitchen and you have a refrigerator compressor behind you, but this is the way it is.

Alkhorshid:
Yeah. Let’s start with BRICS summit in Russia. You believe that there are a lot of misinterpretation of what has happened in BRIC Summit. What’s your take on what has happened?

Doctorow: 0:48
First, the overriding observation that I have is not very different from what my peers are saying. That is to say, I believe as well as they do that this is a world-changing event. But how it changes the world, what time frame it changes the world, here we have differences. I take as my basis for interpretation, not the declaration of the BRICS summit, not papers, but words, words by the most influential person at the event, the host, Vladimir Putin, in particular in a couple of speeches that he made. One is on the second day, the so-called outreach day, when more than 30 heads of government and foreign ministers from various states, both BRICS members, BRICS designate partner countries, and just those who are onlookers. His speech there, and then still more importantly, his press conference at the conclusion of the summit, were useful to see the dynamics, not a static statement of what our values are, but a dynamic statement of where the organization is headed and what are its priorities.

2:15
And there I find myself in a slightly different position from what others are saying, other Russia followers are saying. And what I have to say I think is quite important to anyone who follows markets, because the number one issue is, is BRICS about de-dollarization, or is BRICS about something much bigger? And a lot of focus has been placed on de-dollarization as if this were the whole objective of BRICS. It isn’t. The objective of BRICS is to create parallel structures for an emerging multipolar world.

2:58
That is the objective of BRICS. And breaking the American domination of finance is a part of the process, but you do this with a sledgehammer or do this with more subtle means that are not off-putting, that do not alienate prospective future members and partners of BRICS. And I would like to call out the real sophistication and the realism as opposed to the wishfulness of the organizers of this summit. And I direct my attention first and foremost to the Russians, to Mr. Putin, to the Chinese, Mr. Xi, and of course to Mr. Modi of India. They are the moving forces in what we saw last week. And above all, for, I think it’s Mr. Putin, not just because of his intellectual leadership, but because of the team that he has managed, that successfully organized a very delicate operation.

4:09
These are all, all the guests are being told that they are equal and that BRICS organization does not put one country above the other. And these principles had to be realized, they had to be put into action when the heads of government were assembled. You can’t have Mr. Xi having a ten-room suite and the president of Bolivia having a two-room or a studio. This is, they have to be matched.

4:45
And that is not an easy thing to do, particularly in a place like Kazan, which is of course an important center, an organizational center, but is not Moscow. I think it was very important for the whole purpose of BRICS and for the whole message of BRICS, that it was held precisely not in Moscow, but in a provincial center, a very wealthy provincial center, because Kazan is the capital of Tatarstan, is the main city in an oil-producing part of Russia. But nonetheless, it is not a normal center for receiving 30 heads of government and the like. So to have pulled this off, to have organized it in a way that left smiles on the faces of all the participants, as we saw from the television coverage, that was quite a feat.

5:40
Now, what did they agree on? As I said, they did not agree on dollarization as their prime objective. They agreed, it appears, to significantly raise the capital, the number of projects, the outreach of the New Development Bank, which is intended as an instrument to be built in parallel to the World Bank and the IMF. These are leading institutions of the American-dominated financial order in the world. And they are very cruel structures to emerging nations.

6:18
To anyone who is in financial trouble, they come to your aid, but they virtually decapitate your country. They take control of your budget and they impose this austerity, which of course is very cruel to the lower and middle classes of the country involved, and has political consequences. Well, the New Development Bank doesn’t do that. It doesn’t impose conditions of a political nature, and it is a very interesting point of attraction that BRICS has and will further grow in making itself a place, a safe harbor for emerging countries or for the global south. So that is one vector.

7:08
Another obvious point which has as the necessary consequence de-dollarization is who has been invited as the last round of 2023 and who as core members. I have in mind the United Arab Emirates and Iran. This is United Arab Emirates are a main repository of reserves from the oil-producing countries in the Middle East, and Iran, which is itself a major producer of oil and a lesser producer of gas. Now, in this round, in which no new core members are added, but 13 candidates have been named for partnership, we find two major producers of oil, and that is Nigeria– and gas– Nigeria and Algeria. The point that I’m making is that at its center, the core is growing, the BRICS is growing its control over global supplies of hydrocarbons. And that all bears on the dollar, because the dollar’s dominance and place as a reserve currency is bolstered by its position as the currency of exchange of the single biggest-traded commodity in the world, which is oil.

8:49
If BRICS has in it so many producers and so much, such control essentially, of the trade in hydrocarbons, it is working to de-dollarize the petroleum exchange. And that means that the petrodollar is in peril. And the petrodollar, as I said, is a major bolster, support, for American financial dominance. Mr. Putin announced also at the BRICS summit the planned creation of a bourse and a commodity exchange, global commodity exchange for grain trading.

9:33
The argument that was given is that this will take grain trading out of the hands of the speculators in Chicago and put it into safe hands of an exchange that seeks to reduce speculation and to assure the emerging countries of the world of food security. That is the humanitarian explanation for it. I can give you another explanation for it. It is another move against the dollar. Grain, wheat, corn, they are traded in dollars.

If the BRICS has an exchange, you can be sure they will not be dollar based. The same is true of the metal exchange. Putin announced that the BRICS is going to create a gold and silver exchange. That will not be denominated in dollars. These are all kicking the supports out from under the dollar. So there you have it, a very subtle but powerful move on the dollar.

10:46
But that is the sidelines of BRICS, not the central focus of BRICS. And why is there no effort to create a parallel to SWIFT, that is the global Brussels-based American-dominated messaging system between all banks of the world, except those that have been sanctioned by the United States, like Russia and Iran. The world trades, does its banking through SWIFT. It would be off-putting to perspective new members of BRICS if they had to forego the use of this existing functional system, if they had to self-isolate and turn themselves by their own efforts into sanctioned countries. So by their realism and maturity, the guiding hands of BRICS are saying to the world, “Look, this is a system we are working to change global management, financial management, and political management, but it doesn’t happen in one day. And there will be a period of coexistence. And as two systems exist in tandem, the one that we know till now and the one that is being created under the aegis of BRICS.”

12:19
“We do not require that you put all eggs in one basket, that you turn your back on the West and come running to us. No, no, you can keep one foot there. We don’t mind that. It’s just a matter of practicality that you do that.” So aside from the very serious technical issues of creating an alternative to SWIFT, there is a more important political consideration not to pressure prospective new adherents to BRICS by imposing conditions that they can object to.

So countries can have a foot in both camps. Turkey is an outstanding case, member of NATO. How could they possibly let it into BRICS? Well, into the core of BRICS, they’re not letting it. But as a partner, yes, all our partners will have, will be allowed to sit on the fence, sort of have, as I said, a foot in both camps.

13:16
That is a sign of real maturity and of self-confidence, that they don’t have to destroy the existing things to create a new system. They can tolerate a period of coexistence when they emerge and become more influential and more powerful than the G7 and all the other mechanisms. So these are the, I think what I saw as the main achievements and main directions for further development of BRICS, which none of us, and I put myself in that group as well, none of us foresaw. That was quite remarkable.

Alkhorshid: 13:58
What have we learned from what has happened between China and India in terms of their border problems?

Doctorow:
Well, I understand that in preparation for BRICS, the two sides had an agreement that they would take measures to reduce the tensions and to find a practical solution to the border dispute. It was kept quiet. It was announced just as BRICS was about to assemble. And at the very start of BRICS, the body language of Modi and Xi made it clear that they have reached an accommodation and they intend to proceed as good working partners in BRICS, notwithstanding the past differences they have and notwithstanding the fact that, let’s face it, they are serious competitors for global manufacturing. The United States has been playing India off against China in that way as a way of reducing the reliance of global supply chains on China. Nonetheless, the leaders of these two countries, I say, are quite mature and realistic, and they’re looking for accommodation and a way forward as leaders within BRICS. So that is all to the good. I don’t say that BRICS made this happen, but BRICS helped this to occur.

Alkhorshid: 14:58
And you mentioned Turkiye. On the other hand, we had Saudi Arabia being part of BRICS, and nobody knows what’s the situation in Saudi Arabia. Do they have any sort of solid understanding of what’s going on with Saudi Arabia?

Doctorow:
Certainly nothing in the public domain. The fact is that Saudi Arabia was at the summit one year ago; they were on the list of invitees. There should have been ten members of BRICS, or more actually, but Argentina dropped out and Saudi Arabia held off giving an answer. Still, the relationship of Saudi Arabia with BRICS members is much closer than appears to the naked eye. After all, the OPEC-plus is managed jointly by Russia and Saudi Arabia.

16:41
This is of key importance to the economic welfare of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, that they have this ongoing, long-lasting partnership, very close cooperation with Russia. So, Saudi Arabia may not be in BRICS proper, but it’s on the fringes of BRICS because of its very close working relationship with Russia, including the question– and I should say China as well– including the question of de-dollarization. The Saudis did not renew their obligations under written agreements with the United States over the petrodollar. The Saudi Arabians have been playing with selling to China and Iran. Therefore, in the general principle, Saudi Arabia is presenting itself as a major prospective contributor to de-dollarization.

17:48
At the same time, Saudi Arabia is in a defense alliance with the United States, and it cannot just hop from one side to the other without taking very great risks. We saw that when the Houthis forced Saudi Arabia to desist from its support to their opponents in Yemeni civil war by bombing Saudi, by missile attack, Saudi oil installations, it was clear that Saudi Arabia is vulnerable militarily and has to be very careful. And part of that caution is not to competely alienate the United States. So I don’t think that we have to be too concerned that Saudi has not signed up. They haven’t said no, they haven’t said yes. They’re standing and watching, for obvious reasons. I think that everyone is watching how the Ukraine war is evolving.

19:00
And as I’ve said on other occasions, the mood of heads of state, heads of government, is very much the same psychology that applies to ordinary mortals. They want to be on the side of winners and not on the side of losers. And for the last year, and particularly for the last several months, it has been perfectly clear to every objective observer that Russia is winning, not just against Ukraine, but against the whole of NATO, plus another dozen or more countries that have signed up to provide support to Ukraine at the behest of the United States. But Russia is clearly winning. And so you had the, despite all of the efforts by Washington to sabotage the BRICS gathering and to remind the world that Vladimir Putin has been condemned by the International Criminal Court and all the rest of this propaganda, nobody paid heed to it.

20:07
They came, they enjoyed being guests of Vladimir Putin. They took their selfies with him when they had an opportunity. And so it is a way of saying that the 30 or more countries that were there, representing 45 percent of the world’s population, do not believe anything coming out of Washington.

Alkhorshid: 20:33
And the situation with Venezuela, you know, that the country is important for Russia in South America. On the other hand, we’ve seen that it seems that Brazil, Lula, without the possibility of Venezuela being part of BRICS, how, what are they talking about in Russia about this? It was all about Brasil blocking Venezuela

Doctorow:
The Russians aren’t talking about this They know very well what you just said. But there are a lot of things they don’t talk about. They don’t want to endanger relations with Brazil. Brazil takes over next year, the presidency of BRICS. They would be very foolish to antagonize Lula over the issue of Venezuela.

21:32
At the same time, I’d like to point out just the human side of this. I don’t know what you saw. I was very impressed by Maduro. He must have lost 20 kilograms. He looks very gentlemanly and very much a world leader. I think it’s a question of time before he’s admitted over– this will pass. The position of Lula will change over time. He has to show that he has some power, and he had every right to do that. It is the governing rule of BRICS that all decisions are made by consensus. Therefore, it would be, Russians would be bad sports if they denied the Brazilians the right to their own voice and to veto something. I don’t think this should be blown out of proportion.

22:34
On the other hand, it is notable that Bolivia was added. Bolivia is one of the 13 designated partners which will come on board in 2025. And the Russians gave some attention to Bolivia and to the president in advance of Greece. And they pointed out to their audience that he is a real intellectual leader. He is a major actor on the world stage.

Mr. Maduro is embedded in Venezuela, okay. And he stands for certain politics which are liked or not liked by his neighbors. Bolivia is not in that situation, and Bolivia’s led by a man who enjoys very big international respect. Therefore, for the sake of Latin America, I think it probably was better that Bolivia is the new flag carrier for their region of BRICS rather than Venezuela.

23:37
Then of course you have compensation. In compensation to the left, you have Cuba designated as a prospective partner. So– and then a few days later, as we know, just a couple of days ago, you had 187 countries in the United Nations General Assembly voting against American sanctions. You had– on Cuba, trade sanctions, the embargo, And you’ve had only two countries, the United States and Israel, who voted for continuation of that embargo. So I wouldn’t worry about which way the world is going. The American foreign policy of, as they used to say, me-me-I, that is pure unadulterated egoism at the expense of the rest of the world, has been shown up.

24:30
And remarkably, all of America’s allies had enough of this. And you would think that, all right, the EU abstained. The great British poodle would abstain. No, they all voted against the United States on this. So the times are changing.

Alkhorshid: 24:55
It’s out of our discussion, but do you understand the behavior of United States toward Cuba? Because they have been under the sanctions for more than, if I’m not mistaken, 68 years. It’s unbelievable what they’re doing to Cuba.

Doctorow:
The United States is a very vengeful country. I’m not speaking about individuals. Individuals have very short memories. But the deep state has a long memory and is vindictive. You speak about the sanctions against, the embargo on Cuba, the vitriolic language used to describe the Cuban leadership. What about Iran?

The conflict with Iran didn’t start last week. It didn’t start ten years ago. It goes back to 1979, the hostage taking of the American embassy in Tehran, which is never forgotten by the American political class. So this vengefulness towards Cuba is not an isolated case.

Alkhorshid: 26:08
Yeah. And talking about what’s going on right now in Ukraine, do you think that Russia is shifting its focus from the Kursk region to other regions?

Doctorow:
Well, I can’t say that it’s shifted its focus, but it’s shifted, well, it’s focused in the sense of what are they talking about? What is the news telling the Russian public? They’re talking only about the front lines in Donetsk and Donbass, because they’re scoring enormous victories, and the mood has changed entirely in Russian news coverage of the war. And they admit that, they say that themselves, that they have not seen anything like the present advances, not of inches, meters, but of kilometers every day.

And we talk about the collapse of the Ukrainian army. No, it’s not collapsing. And a different word is used, both in Russia and in Ukraine. They speak about sipitsa. They say the front is crumbling.

27:26
Now, crumbling is not the same thing as running away. But it means that there are weak points that are being revealed and taken advantage of every day along the front by the Russian troops. And they are proceeding with greater confidence, with more daring, I would say, because they are less fearful of a counterattack. But that being said, the Ukrainians still have very effective drone operations. And even on today’s news, one of the Russian war correspondents was counting his blessings that he was not blown to bits in his car, because a Ukrainian drone did hit his car earlier in the day. So the notion that its a steamroller, the Russians are just mowing down everything, is not inaccurate.

28:34
There is resistance. The Ukrainians, by pure perversity and I’d say cruelty of their senior command, are standing the ground, fighting and dying like men. That is praiseworthy, maybe, if you write patriotic poetry. But for the sake of the Ukrainian nation, of course, it’s a disaster that their men are being killed because they’re ordered to stand and hold the ground, which is untenable, which cannot be defended, and they don’t have sufficient fortifications to withstand the onslaught of the glider bombs and heavy artillery and so forth, and also the jet fighters that the Russians are throwing at them. For this reason, we see the front moving, evening out.

29:38
And we hear words said that we haven’t heard in two years, that they are moving not just on Bakrovsk, which is an immediate objective, but they’re now planning their moves on Kramatorsk and Slavyansk. Now these are towns which had great iconic values, like speaking of the Alamo in Texas, because that’s where the Russian Spring of 2014, the rising in Donbas against the coup-d’etat government in Kiev, this is where their valiant local troops held out for 85 days against the vastly superior Ukrainian army. But those towns in the middle of Donetsk oblast are now in the sights of the Russian army. So a lot of attention is being given there, and it’s as though Kursk doesn’t exist. Of course there’s fighting going on in Kursk, the mopping-up operation.

30:51
Somehow– I mean, it is a 160-kilometer-long border, And there obviously are some porous parts of that border in which some additional troops from Ukraine are getting into Kursk and giving some relief to the remaining several thousand out of what must have been close to 30,000 troops overall that were introduced by Ukraine into the Kursk oblast. But these are still rather small units that are spread out over large territory and that is highly forested. And so it’s difficult to flush them all out very quickly and at least cost in lives to yourself. So the Russians are doing a methodical– and they’re doing this at their own leisure, one can say, while all of the dynamism in the Russian war effort is taking place in Donbas and primarily in Donetsk. What we have to remember is that going back to 2014, when the line of confrontation was frozen, these two main oblasts or regions of Donbas, Donetsk and Lugansk, they were held substantially by Ukraine, not by Russia.

32:23
This was true particularly of Donetsk. Lugansk, going back to the start of the special military operation, was mostly liberated by the Russian forces. Donetsk was not. And Donetsk, when you look at the map, the capital of the Donetsk oblast was just a dozen kilometers or so away from the line of confrontation. And therefore for more than a year, maybe 18 months, the capital of Donetsk was subject to daily artillery strikes and short-range rocket attacks coming from the Ukrainian forces just over the border, so to speak.

33:17
Well, they have been pushed back. The only strikes that hit Donetsk now are long-range missiles, not artillery, because they’re out of artillery range. And the pushback that has been slow, very slow, by the Russians in Donetsk, was made slow because of the eight, nine years of fortification building and digging in that the Ukrainians had done in the period between 2014 and the start of the special military operation in 2022. So it looks like nothing happened, nothing changed, but on the ground, around the Donetsk, a lot changed, particularly from a year ago. And now it’s dramatic changes that we see in the last few weeks.

Alkhorshid: 34:11
Do you think that– because we’ve learned recently that Ukraine is preparing to conscript 160,000 soldiers, new forces coming out, coming into the army of Ukraine– do you think that they’re preparing, they’re getting some sort of information from the United States that in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, they’re going to get some sort of aid to improve their army, maybe put Ukraine in a better position — if, at the end of the day, they decide to go after negotiations?

Doctorow: 34:48
Well, you can project big numbers of mobilization. Implementing that in the present situation of a very demoralized population, which is what’s happened to Ukraine, when they’re entering a winter period with 80 percent of their power generation knocked out, when they’re going to face, the home front will be facing freezing temperatures in their residences, lack of water, lack of everything that electricity provides, that will further demoralize not just the general population, but the fighting population. And I believe the presently observed deserters level and presently observed flight and hiding of potential draftees will be exacerbated. So it’s inconceivable that numbers like this will actually find themselves in military uniforms. That being said, you come to the question of the disposition of forces. A large part of what the Russians are doing now is preparing for spring offensive.

36:15
Their offensive, not a Ukrainian offensive. And they’re doing that by occupying the heights. Now, there are no mountains in Ukraine, and heights means 250 meters above sea level. But if you are 250 meters above sea level, and the enemy is at sea level, then you have a very big military advantage. And that is what the Russians are doing. They’re taking all of the desirable locations to support a crushing blow if this war continues into the spring.

Alkhorshid: 36:56
How do you find right now in the mainstream media in the West, all over you find they’re talking about North Korean soldiers being in Russia, helping them against Ukrainians. How is that– in your opinion, what is the main reason of this type of rhetoric on the part of the West?

Doctorow:
Well, there’s several reasons, not just one. One of them is to cry foul and say the Russians are escalating and therefore we are entitled to an escalatory path. So they’re setting the public opinion to be prepared for the West to do something still more irresponsible in this war. That’s one aspect of it. It’s a diversion. It’s being used to suggest that the Russians are weaker than they seem. It is to detract from the military success in Donetsk, that their own newspapers and television reporters are putting out to the public every day, that Russians are steamrolling Ukraine, or perhaps I say that’s an exaggerated statement, but that’s how it’s being described, even in Western media today.

38:19
And if you say, oh, the Russians need to have those North Koreans to clear out Kursk, then it makes it seem as though the Russians really aren’t so formidable as you thought a moment ago. So it’s a demeaning disparagement of Russians and preparing your way for some kind of utterly stupid escalation from the side of the West. As for example actually setting off South Korean pilots and F-16s from Romania to defend Ukrainian airspace. That harebrained scheme is possibly what the dying days of the Biden administration might be plotting to enact. I don’t think it will happen. I imagine the South Koreans are not quite that stupid.

Alkhorshid: 39:15
We are approaching the day that the United States would decide who’s going to be the next president of the United States. So far it seems both candidates have a good chance of winning 2024. But in the case of Donald Trump, if he wins, do you think that … is he able to accept what Russia would put on the table to negotiate on? Because that would be so important that if he has the support from those people behind the scene to negotiate with Russia.

Doctorow: 39:53
There will be a difficult situation for Trump. The Russians have already put their cards on the table. That they have absolutely no trust in him or in his judgment, and they do not accept the notion that he can knock heads together and bring them to the table, the Ukrainians and the Russians to the table and end the war. I think that Trump, he and his advisors look closely at the situation will back away from this proposal of being honest brokers to end the war, because it will only involve them in making, approving actions that will be criticized by the opposition in the United States, by howls of anger over the American betrayal of this ally and future NATO member. So I think prudence will dictate that Trump solve the question in a manner that is least painful for his reputation, that takes the least political coinage from his side.

41:20
And that’s very simple. Stop, stop sending money, stop sending arms. That in itself will have the consequence of the Ukrainian capitulation, for which the United States can just wash its hands. “Well, guys, you couldn’t do it. Too bad.” But if he gets involved in negotiations, I think it will cost him a lot of political capital for no political gain.

Alkhorshid: 41:49
How about the situation with China? Do you think that as we have these two conflicts in Ukraine and in the Middle East, do you think that recently, I don’t know if you saw the interview of JD Vance talking about Iran and Israel, he said, “We are not interested in going to war with Iran because it doesn’t matter how much Israelis are pushing for a war with Iran. It’s not in our interest right now. We are not prepared for that.”

It seems that he wants to focus on China and what’s going on with China. And at the end of the day, we see that the case of Ukraine and even in the Middle East, somehow fading away. And the case of China is getting much more important in the eyes of the United States. Do you think … is that possible if Trump wins? We’re going to have at the same time, I don’t because I’m not, I don’t see that Trump would be able to put an end to any of these two conflict in Ukraine, in the Middle East. But do you think, are we going to have a new conflict? It doesn’t matter who wins, Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. And are we going to have a new front on Taiwan, a new conflict, which would, these two countries, Iran and Russia, would be part of this conflict again, against the United States.

Doctorow: 43:24
Look, Donald Trump is not a towering intellect, nor is he a man to make long-term commitments to anybody. He is a showman. He is a rather skilled political actor. And he knows the value of pre-election promises, which is nil. He is saying a lot of irresponsible things, which I think, should power come into his hands, he will not hesitate for a moment to discard.

Then is the timing issue. The Ukraine war is with us right now. The Iran-Israeli conflict is with us right now. It is very good politics to say, “Oh, we have to go slow on these things because the bigger issue is the coming fight with China”, which is not right now, which is by American military estimates three, five years away. In five years, Donald Trump will be out of power. Donald Trump today is not the Donald Trump of 2016, when he had virtually no control of who would be serving him.

44:49
He was stymied by inability to get anyone through the Senate for approval, except those who were actually going to implement the opposite of what he wanted. And so he had people from Tillerson to Pompeo, not to mention his national security advisor, who were undermining entirely his intentions for foreign policy. That was the Donald Trump then. Donald Trump today has at his side formidable thinkers and actors. He has the world’s richest man at his side, Elon Musk.

Musk, I don’t think for a second, could entertain the idea of a real conflict with China. Much of his fortune is invested in China. It’s unthinkable that he would encourage Trump to head into a war with China. The other members around, other people around Trump, RFK Jr. is one, and there are others, people of a lot of maturity and not an infantile wish to show who’s boss to China.

46:10
So I don’t take, I take it with a grain of salt, all of the pre-election discussion in the Trump camp about a coming showdown with China. Showdown in the future is one thing, showdown in the present is something very different. And for that reason, I’m not at all worried about relations with China leading us to a world war.

Alkhorshid: 46:35
You have to consider that Donald Trump is amazing when it comes to firing people as well.

Doctorow:
Look, I have one enormous debt to Donald Trump and so do all of my peers, only I admit it and they don’t. If it weren’t for Donald Trump, this show would not exist and none of the other shows would exist, and we all would be silenced. He by his impudent, irresponsible language, as viewed by the deep state, he has given us all a voice. Whatever else you can say about Trump and many things negatives, for me that’s a saving grace. I hope it’s also understood by all of your viewers. They wouldn’t be listening to you.

Alkhorshid:
Yeah. Thank you so much, Gilbert, for being with us today. Great pleasure as always. And have a good trip.

Doctorow: 47:35
Thanks so much.

Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. He chose this third career of 'public intellectual' after finishing up a 25 year career as corporate executive and outside consultant to multinational corporations doing business in Russia and Eastern Europe which culminated in the position of Managing Director, Russia during the years 1995-2000. He has publishied his memoirs of his 25 years of doing business in and around the Soviet Union/Russia, 1975 - 2000. Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume I: From the Ground Up was published on 10 November 2020. Volume II: Russia in the Roaring 1990s was released in February 2021. A Russian language edition in a single 780 page volume was published by Liki Rossii in St Petersburg in November 2021: Россия в бурные 1990е: Дневники, воспоминания, документы. View all posts by gilbertdoctorow

Published November 2, 2024

Suzuki Muneo.

Suzuki Muneo is straight-talking, a man’s man. He has spent his career in the Diet in Tokyo and has rubbed elbows with–and rubbed the wrong way–just about every powerful person in Japanese politics over the past forty years. The two descriptions are mutually reinforcing. Suzuki uses power; he doesn’t worship it. He remains as much an outsider now–a Hokkaido patriot in the political maze of Nagatacho–as when he entered the political road in 1983.

Suzuki is unpopular now, as ever, because he refuses to follow the political herd on, above all, the question of Russia. Suzuki, whose home island is Russia’s backyard neighbor, maintains close ties with Russia. This brings benefits to Suzuki’s constituents, but it also wins him few friends in the Japanese political world, or in the media.

In this, our second long interview with Suzuki (first interview here), we ask him about his most recent visit to Russia, and about the future of Japan. Suzuki sees many possibilities for Japan with Russia, but laments that there is no one in power now who can turn those possibilities into reality.

Interview and text by Jason Morgan and Kenji Yoshida.

Kenji Yoshida and Jason Morgan (K&J): How was your visit to Russia?

Suzuki Muneo (SM): It’s been ten months since my last visit to Russia in October of 2023. Moscow is peaceful and orderly. The people of Moscow are out until late at night, strolling through the city. Restaurants are filled with customers. Department stores and other shops are fully stocked with goods. There is plenty of fruit for sale. Plenty of fish and meat.

Not far from this unhurried Moscow scene a war is unfolding, but one would never know it from inside the city. In this, I felt the strength and stability of Russia.

K&J: The West repeatedly imposes sanctions on other countries. In the case of Russia, the West imposed sanctions in response to Russia’s incursion into Ukraine and tried to destroy the ruble. Those sanctions, though, appear to have had the opposite effect.

SM: Russia initiated its special military operation in February of 2022. In May of that year, President Biden imposed sanctions on Russia. Biden said that sanctions would lead Russia to give up within two months. Was President Biden correct in this pronouncement?

It’s been nearly two and a half years since then. In 2023, Russia’s economy exhibited a growth rate of 3.6%. The growth rate for this year is forecast to be 5%. Russia is the world’s biggest energy superpower. It was underestimated by the West, but it has proven to be a strong country. The West, including the G7 countries, made a mistaken assessment of Russia in this regard. Responsibility for this misreading falls heavily also on NATO.

The special military operation started February 24, 2022. In March [of 2022], Ukraine came forward with a peace proposal. On April 15, 2022, Russia was prepared to sign Ukraine’s peace proposal. However, it was Ukraine that then withdrew the proposal. The backdrop to this, we are told, is that then-UK prime minister Boris Johnson interjected himself into the proceedings and pressured Ukraine not to sign any peace deal with Russia.

I think this was a terrible mistake. The United States was apparently also involved. In the Ukraine situation, too, the tendency of the Anglo-Saxons to use force to get their way proved to be a mistake. The war could have been over. An armistice was within reach. But England and America sent everything in the opposite direction.

K&J: For more than a hundred years, the Anglo-Saxons have been using force of arms to impose their will on the world. They seem to believe that they are qualified to rule in this way. It’s arrogant.

SM: In the Ukraine war, Russia seems to have understood the nature of Anglo-Saxon power and decided to have a showdown with the UK-American way of rule. Looking at Russia’s recent alliance with North Korea and also its collaboration with China, India, and other countries, it seems as though Russia is trying, not just to deal with the Anglo-Saxons, but to end their rule. Russia seems to be not passively accepting the Anglo-Saxons’ way but trying to put an end to it.

I am thinking back to the Crimea incident ten years ago. At that time, the president was Barack Obama. Obama was saying that America was no longer the world’s policeman and no longer the world’s financial backer. He took a step back from the world’s affairs.

I think he was correct in his assessment. America had been the world’s leader in everything, but Obama was saying that the United States would no longer be involved militarily in every part of the world, and would no longer be throwing money around everywhere in the globe. Obama was forthright and upfront about this.

And yet, Biden has urged Ukraine to fight on, promising to send weapons and cash. Why?

It has been ten years since Obama said that America was no longer the world’s sole superpower. Biden seems to be operating under the impression that the United States remains the world’s champion nation. Biden has dropped out of the presidential race. But for three years now, I have been thinking that his mental faculties are off. Hence, the mistaken approach to Ukraine.

K&J: Is it only Biden? Biden is surrounded by neocons, and Washington itself has the same outlook as Biden.

SM: Yes, it’s true.

America and England are one thing, but France and Germany have their own reasons separate from the former two countries. And yet, France and Germany were pulled into the present war. I think this way of doing things is behind the times. I have some doubts whether France and Germany can see what is ahead.

The Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall came down. Germany was reunited. The Soviet Union collapsed and we now have Russia. History changed completely.

President George H.W. Bush told the world that NATO would expand no further east than the reunited Germany. Then-Secretary of State James A. Baker wrote as much in his book. Chancellor Helmut Kohl told Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO’s eastward expansion ended with the reunified Germany. Baker went so far as to say that he would not allow NATO to expand by a single inch. Gorbachev believed these statements and dismantled the Warsaw Pact arrangement.

NATO repeatedly said, year after year, that it would cut its presence. But the opposite happened. NATO expanded. It was Russia that took history as fact and faced the facts squarely. The West relied on sidestepping and deception. The West spoke of liberalism, solidarity. But behind the scenes it was plotting to weaken Russia. I don’t think this was fair.

K&J: Could it be that Obama laid a trap by appearing to retreat from the world’s stage?

SM: I think Obama made an honest and accurate assessment of America’s economic position at the time. America commanded a quarter of the world’s economic might. Today, that figure has gone down to less than ten percent.

I think Japan is making a mistake on this point. Japan is one of the G7 countries. When the G7 got underway, those seven countries accounted for some eighty percent of the global economy. Now, unfortunately, it’s forty percent.

K&J: BRICS has overtaken the G7 it seems.

SM: Yes. When you expand the G7 to take in the G20, the latter includes Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, Indonesia, Kazakhstan [occasional guest at G20 summits], Argentina, Turkiye, and so forth. Now, the G20 accounts for eighty percent of the global economy.

The BRICS countries are in control of eighty percent of the world’s energy. Russia, Iran as of last year, Saudi Arabia, UAE–the world is moving to be carbon neutral by 2050 as part of the response to climate change, but for the next twenty-six years we will have no choice but to remain reliant on fossil fuels. Of the fossil fuels, natural gas is particularly important. The most abundant source of natural gas, and oil must also be included here, is Russia. It is essential to look at these facts dispassionately.

Russia is a superior country and is recognized as such worldwide. It is the world’s most important country in terms of energy resources, and also has a formidable might apart from this as well. Russia’s supremacy in energy resources is unwavering in the face of Western sanctions. I find it baffling in the extreme why the G7 and NATO countries do not comprehend this.

K&J: It seems there are many possibilities for Japan in a relationship with Russia. You have just visited Russia and seen for yourself. Are other Japanese politicians unaware of the possibilities that could be realized in dealing with Russia? Japan remains attached at the hip with the United States. Is this a sustainable arrangement?

SM: If America were as powerful today as it was thirty or forty years ago, then it would be understandable for Japan to be pulled this way and that by the United States. But now, even America is saying that America cannot remain the world’s sole superpower, that we have to take the rest of the world into account.

Ten years ago, Obama told then-prime minister Abe Shinzo that the United States would impose sanctions on Russia over Crimea. Obama asked Japan to cooperate. But Abe told Obama, clearly, “No.”

I heard this from Prime Minister Abe directly. He told Obama, “Japan and Russia are neighbors. There are issues between Japan and Russia that must be resolved. A peace treaty must be signed. The Northern Territories. Japan cannot survive if it takes the same position and adopts the same values as the United States. So, I will make an independent decision, for Japan.”

Abe said this straight out. He was correct in what he said. Obama, I am told, hung up on him.

The Foreign Ministry bureaucrats in Japan told Abe that President Obama would not attend the Ise Shima Summit that was being planned for the next year, 2015. The bureaucrats said that Obama also wouldn’t attend the Hiroshima peace memorial event to which he had been invited. The bureaucrats took a pessimistic view. But Obama came to the Ise Shima Summit.

[He also came to Hiroshima in 2016.]

This was proof that, at that time, a national leader with resolution and patriotism, and who had the mind of the people at heart, could expect to be understood. So I cannot understand, at all, why Prime Minister Kishida Fumio cannot do the same with President Biden. [As of September 27, 2024, Ishiba Shigeru is the new prime minister of Japan].

K&J: Russia’s relationship with North Korea has strengthened considerably as of late. The Japanese government has long entrusted to Washington the resolution of the abductions issue, wherein North Korean agents abducted Japanese civilians. But Russia’s influence over North Korea is, presumably, now considerable. What is the possibility that, if Japan were to ask Russia to intervene with Kim Jong Un and ask him concretely what his demands would be in exchange for allowing the abduction victims to return home, Russia would respond favorably?

SM: North Korea is a neighboring country, and is also a member of the United Nations. In light of these facts, it is highly unusual that Japan and North Korea have no diplomatic relations. Japan and North Korea ought to normalize relations immediately. Talks [between North Korea and Japan] must start with this.

Japan must not impose conditions before entering into talks, such as by insisting that North Korea acknowledge that it abducted Japanese citizens, or by declaring that the resolution of the abduction issue will take priority. The abduction issue is one to discuss after a summit meeting has been achieved and trust has been built.

No summit meeting is scheduled yet. Before we even get to that point, Japan’s imposing conditions will serve only to antagonize the other party. Japan will obtain nothing by doing so.

When Koizumi Junichiro was prime minister, he visited North Korea. The leader of North Korea at that time was Kim Jong Il, who admitted, before the world, to the abduction of Japanese citizens and apologized.

I think that this was an opportunity to make a fresh start. But Japan squandered this opportunity because the government, swayed by public opinion, advanced an intractable position. The Stockholm Agreement [of May 2014, in which North Korea promised to conduct investigations into the abductions issue] is one thing, but when Koizumi and Kim sat down together [in Pyongyang in 2002], they spoke with one another without any expectations. I think this was extremely important in building a relationship of mutual trust.

The six-party talks [started in 2003 and addressing security concerns in Northeast Asia, especially regarding North Korea] were underway around the time [North Korea and Japan were discussing the abduction issue]. The first chair country of the talks was Russia. The head of the Russian delegation was Alexander Losyukov [then Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs]. Losyukov was a diplomat I knew very well. I thought it would have been a good idea to ask Losyukov [to help broker talks over the abduction issue]. Russia and North Korea have, historically, a close relationship. Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of Kim Jong Un, used to be a soldier in the Soviet Red Army. Because of these good connections, I still think it would be good to have Russia help [with the abduction issue]. It would have been good at the time, too.

But then the Americans got involved, then South Korea, and then China. There were too many parties involved, and the talks broke down.

Still, though, the only one that can broker and advise on this is Russia. Former prime minister Abe understood my views on this and accepted them. Abe was strongly determined to resolve [the abduction issue] without asking [the United States], but now it’s become such that Japan can do nothing without asking the United States. Therefore, there is no progress made at all.

K&J: Was that not the point of the six-party talks from Washington’s perspective? Far from wanting to resolve the abduction issue, it seems, even now, that Washington’s objective is to draw the problem out for political advantage.

SM: I think that the abduction issue, at the most fundamental level, can be resolved only bilaterally, only between Japan and North Korea. And how to bring about that bilateral engagement is to ask Russia to help [open channels of communication]. That is the only way. But the talks were put at the mercy of the United States in many ways, and things went awry.

Next year will mark eighty years since the end of the Second World War. I think this should mark a turning point on a number of issues, such as for example, concluding a peace treaty with Russia. I think we’re also approaching the last opportunity to resolve the abduction issue.

One often hears in Japan that it was the Soviet Union that unilaterally reneged on the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact [in 1945]. But it was the Americans who incited the Soviets to do this at the Yalta Conference. President Franklin Roosevelt told Soviet leader Josef Stalin that Germany would surrender in May, and that the Soviet Union should attack Japan two or three months later. Stalin took very serious stock of the situation and made his move after the American atomic bombings of Japan.

Taking an objective view of history, I came to the conclusion that when Japan follows the United States Japan’s legs are swept out from under her.

K&J: I find it very difficult to understand why Nagatacho should still trust a Washington which has thus proven itself devious time and again.

SM: The current American ambassador to Japan is Rahm Emanuel. He is butting into the moral values and historical sensibilities of the Japanese people. This is unprecedented. I am worried to see that some people are being led along by him and can see nothing but the United States.

The bill always comes due. And it’s surely going to be a big bill.

K&J: The United States has recently set up a joint-command structure in Japan. The new joint force headquarters is under the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, but is based in Japan. I see this as Washington’s preparing to involve Japan in a major war, possibly over Taiwan.

SM: Japan is, in part, being used for America’s global strategy. Seventy-three percent of America’s military presence in Japan is concentrated in Okinawa. This is not a normal situation.

Russia is a major nation. If there were a Japan-Russia relationship on par with the US-Japan alliance, then Japan could expect to play the role of counterweight between Russia and America. I want there to be a leader in Japan able to make the decision to do this. As things are now, it’s all one-sided for America.

Abe worked well with Trump. He worked well with President Putin. I think that if Japan’s leader was smart about it, then Japan could [work with both sides]. Japan must be firm in its dealings with other countries. We are not nearly firm enough now.

Look at India. India is very strong, but it also balances Russia against the United States very well.

K&J: Is there anyone in the Liberal Democratic Party today that can be that strong leader?

SM: No. There is no one. And it worries me.

Introduction

The following is an overview of the recent events and present state of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. We observe movement towards the end of the conflict in its present configuration and in two new directions simultaneously—a race to the final resolution of the NATO-Russia question. One direction consists of movement towards peace negotiations. The other is toward escalation into a open, direct NATO-Russia war likely to expand beyond the borders of Ukraine and far western regions of Russia. The race to resolution is on and it remains anyone’s guess whether peace or greater war will win the day.

Russia Proposes Diplomacy…Again

On June 14 Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed a roadmap for ending the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War during a speech at Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He called the “Ukrainian crisis” “a tragedy for us all” and the result not of a Russo-Ukrainian conflict per se but “of the aggressive, cavalier, and absolutely adventurous policy that the West has pursued and is pursuing.” He proposed what he called “a real peace proposal” for establishing a permanent end to the Ukrainian conflict and war rather than a ceasefire. Putin based his proposal on principles he has reiterated numerous times, most of which were agreed upon by Kiev and Moscow in Istanbul in March-April 2022; a process scuttled by Washington, London, and Brussels (https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1746596120971673766.html; see also https://x.com/i_katchanovski/status/1750362694949966291?s=51&t=n5DkcqsvQXNd3DfCRCwexQ). In particular, he has now offered “simple” conditions for the “beginning of discussions.” They include: the full withdrawal of all Ukrainian troops from Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhia oblasts as they existed as of 1991—that is, Russia would receive all the oblasts’ territories not just those now controlled by Russian troops. Immediately upon agreeing to this condition and a second requiring Kiev’s rejection of any NATO membership (Ukraine’s “neutral, non-bloc, non-nuclear status”), from the Russian side “immediately, literally the same minute there will follow an order to cease fire and begin negotiations” and Moscow “will guarantee the unhindered and safe withdrawal” of Ukrainian units. However, he expressed “huge doubts” that the West would allow Kiev to agree to this. If his offer is rejected, Putin emphasized that all future blood-letting in Ukraine would be the West’s and Kiev’s “political and moral responsibility” and that Kiev’s negotiating position would only deteriorate as its troops’ position at the front (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/74285).

To be sure, Putin’s offer was not made under the illusion that it would be taken up within the next few months and was certainly another effort to lay blame for the conflict at Washington’s, Brussels and, less so perhaps, Kiev’s doors. Nevertheless, Putin’s public offering before Russia’s Foreign Ministry personnel is a most authoritative and official statement of a specific proposal from Russia; one that included paths to both a ceasefire and permanent peace, if Washington and/or Kiev choose to take them as Ukraine continues to crumble at the front, in the political sphere, and economically throughout this year. The pressure from the Western and Ukrainian publics to negotiate with Moscow will continue to mount through the U.S. presidential elections, as Ukraine deteriorates and the risk of direct, open, full-scale NATO-Russia war grows. It is possible that if US intelligence concludes and reports to the White House that the Ukrainian front and/or army and/or regime will collapse before the November elections, then the Biden administration may be moved to open talks or force the Ukrainians to do so. 

Putin’s territorial demands are not likely to be static, as the territorial configuration changes rapidly on the ground. Russia seizes more territories beyond the four oblasts and Crimea, and the negotiating algorithm changes. Thus, the seizure of areas in Sumy and Kharkiv may not just be an attempt to begin establishing a broad ‘buffer zone’ to move more Ukrainian artillery and drones out of range. The Sumy, Kharkiv, and areas near, say, areas of Nikolaev and Odessa in the south can serve as trading cards to entice acquiescence to talks, as long as Russia makes no claims on those territories. In other words, the Ukrainians could have inferred and were perhaps supposed to infer that they could demand a request for the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces from Sumy and Kharkiv simultaneously with Kiev’s withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the four Novorossiyan regions. The incursions into Sumy and Kharkiv in May might reflect preparation then already for Putin’s official reiteration of the peace proposal in June. Putin’s call for Ukrainian withdrawal from the four noted ‘Novorossiya’ regions implies the ‘return’ of any and all other areas occupied by Russian troops. Continued refusal to talk with Moscow and any further Russian gains give Putin flexibility in enticing or threatening Washington, Brussels, and/or Kiev to the negotiating table. Refuse talks and lose non-Novorossiyan lands; accept talks and Kiev gets them back.        

Also, both subjectively (with Putin’s intent) and objectively (without Putyin’s intent) the proposal undermined Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s ‘disnamed’ ‘peace summit’ in Switzerland which was nothing other than an exercise in rallying support among supporters for the beleaguered Maidan regime. Tied to this issue is the Russian president’s assertions in the speech both Zelenskiy and the Maidan regime are illegitimate. Putin got mired down in some self-contradictions here. His assertion that the Maidan regime is illegitimate, since it came to power by an illegal “armed putch” – an absolutely correct one – contradicts his other claim that only Ukraine’s parliament or Supreme Rada is now a legitimate authority and representative of the Ukrainian people. According to Putin, Zelenskiy is not Ukraine’s legitimate authority according to the Ukrainian constitution and thus the Rada is, because Zelenskiy’s first five-year term expired without his being re-elected, but this is a plausible but debatable conclusion regarding a now extremely complicated legal issue. The key point here is that if the Maidan regime that arrived in power in February 2014 by way of an illegal coup is illegitimate, then the organs of power elected under it are equally as illegitimate, putting aside the issue of creeping legitimization by time (still too early) and international recognition. Indeed, it was a decision of the Rada on 21 February 2014 ostensibly impeaching the already overthrown (for all intents and purposes) President Viktor Yanukovych, without a quorum moreover, that gave a quasi-legal veneer of legitimacy to the Maidan coup, as Putin himself notes in his June speech (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/74285).

However, it should be noted that Putin’s raising of this issue is probably less driven by legalities than politics. Putin may be trying to drive a wedge between parliament and the Office of the President in order to strengthen any coup d’etat being planned in the wings by those such as former president Petro Poroshenko and former Chief of the General Staff Valeriy Zaluzhniy. In Putin’s interpretation of Ukraine’s “unique juridicial situation” as well as that of some Ukrainians, Poroshenko’s or Zaluzhniy’s legitimacy to rule is no less and indeed greater than that of Zelenskiy’s own.

It appears that Zelenskiy’s increasingly weak position at home, which I have discussed numerous times elsewhere, declining support for Ukraine abroad and most importantly in the U.S., Ukrainian forces’ dire situation all along the front and in the rear (lack of men and weapons to fight), the threat of a Russian summer offensive (see below), and Putin’s June proposals had their effect. As Zelenskiy arrived in Brussels on the eve of the NATO summit in Washington DC, a series of events confirmed the likelihood that Putin’s speech reflected developments in secret US-Russian talks, and Zelenskiy suddenly moved to suggest Kiev prepare (https://ctrana.news/news/467522-zelenskij-nameren-ustroit-perehovory-ob-okonchanii-vojny-chto-eto-znachit.html). In the days prior, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin telephoned Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov and supposedly discussed measures to prevent a US-Russian clash that could lead to war likely motivated by the ATACMs attack on Crimea that killed some ten beach-goers, including children, and wounded some 40. It seems almost certain that there was some discussion of negotiations on war and peace. This was followed by rumors that a Russian plane had departed to Washington DC on June 25th. Now, just days later, Zelenskiy said in Brussels that Kiev “must put a settlement plan on the table within a few months.” This followed a statement weeks earlier by Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba and Office of the President Andriy Yermak that the next Ukrainian peace summit following the failure of early June’s session should lead to a peace agreement and include Russia directly or indirectly for the first time and lead to a peace agreement (https://ctrana.news/news/466816-kuleba-dopustil-prekrashchenie-vojny-v-ukraine-posle-sammita-s-uchastiem-rossii.html; see also https://ctrana.news/news/467121-v-kakom-formate-mohut-sostojatsja-perehovory-s-rossiej-na-novom-sammite-mira.html). This confirms my sense that the Ukrainian war will end one way or the other this year unless NATO intervenes directly with troops on the ground.

Moscow’s Military Plans: Reject Talks and War You Shall Have

Moscow’s military plans for the remainder of the year can be summed up as continuity in Ukraine and preparations for war beyond Ukraine against the West. Thus, in Ukraine Russia will continue its more offensive strategy of ‘attrit and advance’ upgraded from, an intensification of what Alexander Mercouris calls ‘aggressive attrition’ (https://gordonhahn.com/2024/02/02/russian-strategic-transformation-in-ukraine-from-aggressive-attrition-to-attrit-and-advance/). Under attrit and advance, Russian forces still emphasize destruction of Ukraine’s armed forces over the taking and holding of new territory. The attrition of massive, combined air, artillery, missile, and drone war supersedes the advances on the ground by armor and infantry in this strategy. Thus, territorial advance is slow, but personnel losses are fewer. The Russians do not have their eyes on Kharkiv and may not even be attempting to create a border buffer zone. The main military strategic goal of the Kharkiv, now Kharkiv-Sumy offensive likely is to stretch the frontlines and thus resources of the Ukrainian armed forces. Building a buffer zone is secondary and concomitant with the military-political strategy of attrit, advance, and induce Kiev to talk. Look south in summer or autumn for offensives or very heightened activity in Kherson and/or, perhaps, Zaporozhia. The goal of this will be to stretch out the length of the entire war front beyond that which is being accomplished by the attacks on Kharkiv and Sumy oblasts. The Russian strategy at this higher level is to stretch and thin out the Ukrainian forces’ already exhausted personnel, weapons, and equipment resources in the hope that a whole can be punched deep into Ukrtainian lines and the rear at some overstretched point, allowing a major, perhaps even ‘big arrow’ breakthrough aimed at some key Ukrainian stronghold or an encirclement of a large number of Ukrainian troops.

Despite the calls of some Russian hawks, Putin will never acquiesce to bomb Ukraine, no less Kiev ‘into a parking lot’ or ‘the stone age.’ For Russians, Ukrainians are a fraternal eastern Slavic people, with long-standing ties to Russia. Most Russian families have relatives or friends from or in Ukraine. Kiev is ‘the mother of all Russian cities’, and despite Russia’s possession of precise smart weapons, the risk of destroying Orthodox holy sites and other historical monuments in Kiev is too high. Russia’s overwhelming strength in weapons and manpower, despite Western inputs into Ukraine’s armed forces, could allow Russian attrit and advance to persist for many years—more than will be necessary to force negotiations or seize much of Ukraine.

Boiling the Russian Frog – Escalation by Any Other Name

There has been much talk about the US repeartedly stepping over Russian red lines. The most recent is Washington’s and Brussels’ (NATO’s) grant of permission to Kiev to target the territory of Russia proper (1991 territory) with Western-made weapons. The West itself has drawn many red lines that it said could spark direct war with Russia and, therefore, should not be crossed: offensive weapons, artillery, tanks, aircraft, various types of missiles, cluster munitions, etc., etc. Most recently, Washington crossed two red lines in rapid succession by approving Kiev use of U.S missiles, such as ATACMs to target Russian territory across the border in Kharkov and, presumably Sumy, where Russian forces have made a new incursion in order to develop a buffer zone so that Ukraine cannot target civilians as it has been doing in cities in Belgorod, send Ukrainian and Russian-manned pro-Ukrainian units across the border into Russia, and otherwise target Russian territory from northeastern Ukraine. It then expanded approval of the use of such missiles against any Russian territories from which attacks in Ukraine are being supported  (www.politico.com/news/2024/06/20/us-says-ukraine-can-hit-inside-russia-anywhere-00164261). Days later Ukraine fired 5 ATACMs (4 were intercepted) at Sevastopol which hit beach-goers far from any military target, wounding 46 and killing 3, including 2 children. The potential escalation of the overall war resulting from this Ukrainian target was compounded when on the same day jihadi terrorists attacked the ancient Muslim city of Derbent in Dagestan, long a hotbed of global jihadi terrorism in Russia. The terrorists, likely from Central Asia or Afghanistan’s ISIS-affiliated Islamic State of Khorosan, attacked an Orthodox church and a Jewish synagogue, killed several civiulians, 15 policeman, and cut the throat of an Orthodox priest. This attack will likely be conflated with the Sevastopol attack. Recall the jihadin attack on Moscow’s concert venue, Crocus City Hall, which Russian authorities immediately suspected to be one involvomng Ukrainians.

Russian President Vladimir Putin himself has drawn few if any clear red lines, but several have been implied. Cautious and cagey Putin has never explicitly promised a particular response to any particlar crossing of a red line. Instead, he has invoked Russia’s great military potential, including nuclear, as sufficient reason for rational leaders to cease and desist. The assumption – both Putin’s and observers’ – is that this is a spontaneous, gradual escalation, driven by panic over Kiev’s deteriorating military, political, and economic situation as Russia marches forward, expanding the war front. The likelihood is that this is not a spontaneous response to conditions at the battlefront but rather a calculated policy of ‘boiling the frog’, and the ‘frog’ is as much Western publics as it is Russian political and military planners. After all, it matters less to Russian military planners at least why NATO is escalating the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War than the fact that NATO is escalating, crossing red lines. For Western publics, however, the approach of war needs to go unnoticed until it is too late. Whether by hook or crook, a false flag operation or a provoked Russian overreaction, Western NATO leaders seem intent on expanding the war beyond Ukraine’s borders and that will require Western public support and thus a vaccum of public discussion of NATO actions and national interests. Even if the constant escalation is ‘simply’ a game of chicken, upping the ante to see if Putin blinks or if the war can be dragged out past the November U.S. elections, there are many in U.S. intelligence and other departments, who are itching for a war against Russia who may escalate or enable Kiev to do so, intentionally or not, such that one is provoked. Unintentionality comes in, as Kiev has been anxious to force NATO or at least NATO member-states into direct involvement in the war. Ukraine has achieved some success in this, but so far such Western involvement has been limited, intially, to secret injections of Western troops and mercenaries, and then to open advisory roles. The summer and fall of 2024 will be a dangerous window in which a spark can detonate the larger war that such mad men and women are playing with.

To the extent that the West remains intent on continuing the escalation of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, Moscow will engage in asymmetrical escalation targeting Western forces outside of Europe and prepare for possible full-scale war with NATO or NATO members in and beyond Ukraine. Putin recently noted that asymmetrical escalation would be Moscow’s choice should the Werst continue escalating against Russian in Ukraine. Many commentators have noted what such options might be: arming the Houthis with missiles or air defense, supporting Hezbollah and/or Hamas against Israel, arming terrorist groups in the Middle East to attack U.S. bases, say, in Syria, Iraq, or elsewhere. Given the thousands of U.S bases around the world, American and other Western forces are eminently vulnerable. Moscow only needs the will and networks for deploying its ample means in the necessary directions. Moscow has the will. It is building networks.

Towards a Eurasian Security Pact: Getting Ready for Direct War with NATO

With war with NATO now firmly in the cards, a distinct possibility, the Kremlin is intensely set on military and military-political preparations. The rejection of Putin’s next peace proposal was likely the last straw that will set in motion the next phase in Russia’s diplomatic offensive in tendem with China aimed it rallying the Rest against the West. This new phase will focus on developing military partnerships and alliances. This was signalled most notably in the same June 14th speech in which Putin made his peace offering, evidencing the connection between it, the West-Ukraine rejection, and Russia’s first diplomatic move in this security direction. 

For years, particularly after the Maidan coup, Putin has been conducting Russian diplomacy with the goal of creating a Great Eurasian and global alternative to the West’s ‘rules-based world order’, seeking to base a new, alternative international system of political, economic, financial, and monetary institutions on different rules written by all the great powers – the ‘Rest’ – rather than just the West. This ‘democratization’ or a certain ‘de-hierarchization’ or ‘levelling’ of the international system is to be organized on the principle of multipolarity and diversity for the world’s major civilizations. Putin’s model has come to mirror the ideas of the late Russian neo-Eurasianist Aleksandr Panarin in many ways. It has taken years for Putin to arrive firmly at the idea of an interconnected Greater Eurasia as the core of a global community of civilizations, preferably ‘traditional’ (i.e. non-postmodernist Western ones) as a kind of ‘Russian idea.’

However, in his February 29th annual address to both houses of the Russian Federal Assembly, Putin introduced the idea of creating a Eurasian security system. He reiterated his idea of “democratizing the entire system of international relations,” by which he means dismantling Western hegemony or ‘rules-based world order.’ However, he also proposed replacing it with a “system of unidivided security,” under which “the security of some cannot be secured at the expense of the security of others,” and gave marching orders to Russia’s diplomatic corps and other departments to what in effect would culminate in a Greater Eurasian security ‘architecture’ or pact (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/73585).

On June 14th, Putin declared the death, the “collapse of the system of Euro-Atlantic security,” and repeated his call for the international security architecture to be “created anew.” He instructed the government and foreign ministry to work out “jointly with partners, with all interested countries…their version of guaaranteeing security in Eurasia, proposing them then for a wide international discussion.” He revealed that during his May visit to China he discussed this with PRC Chairman Xi Jinping, and they “noted that the Russian proposal does not contradict, but, to the contrary, compliments and is fully in agreement with the basic principles of the Chinese initiative in the sphere of global security.” Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy responded to the summit by criticizing China for being Putin’s tool, contributing further to the anti-diplomatic dynamic and isolation of the West from the Rest (https://breakingdefense.com/2024/06/in-surprise-singapore-visit-zelenksyy-asks-for-asian-support-in-peace-talks-accuses-china-of-disruption/). China responded by declaring its geopolitical military solidarity with Russia. Nevertheless, in his June speech Putin stated that Russia “future architecture of security is open to all Eurasian countries,” including “European and NATO countries.” This Greater Eurasia security pact is thus also a mechanism for splitting NATO, particularly Europe from the U.S. This is to be achieved by networking and lobbying all the international organizations in Eurasia that Russia has been building for decades now: the Russia-Belarus Union, BRICS+, SCO, EES, CSTO, and the CIS—all specifically mentioned by Putin in his speech behind such a project—as well as “influential international organizations of Southeast Asia and the Middle East.” According to Putin, the “states and regional structures of Eurtasia should determine concrete sphers of cooperation in the area of joint security. Proceeding from this: that they themselves should build a system of working institutions, mechanisms, and agreements that would really serve the attainment of the common goals of stability and development.” In this regard, he supported the Belarus’s proposal “to work out a programmatic document: a charter of multipolarity and diversity in the 21st century” (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/74285). The Belarusian proposal was made by Minsk’s Foreign Minister in 23 October 2023 speech and envisaged what Putin discussed on June 14 but included the OSCE as a potential participant (https://ont.by/news/belarus-predlagaet-miru-razrabotat-hartiyu-mnogoobraziya-dlya-xxi-veka).

It is likely no coincidence that Putin openly supported Belarus’s idea of such a charter ten days before Belarus, with Russian sponsorship, was set to become a member of SCO on June 25th. Belarus’s membership in the largely Asian based organization founded by Moscow and Beijing places SCO’s flag farter west than ever before. This comes days after Putin’s visit to North Korea and the agreement to establish a de facto Russo-North Korean alliance. Thus, the gorwing network of theb Sino-Russian-organized networks of international networks based in Eurasia but extending globally through BRICS+5 to every continent is growing apace and now includes a robust security component.

         Putin suggested in his June 14th speech that building an “undivided system of Eurasian security” and in fact global security architecture would be a post-Ukrainian war focus, again implying possible inclusion of the West or elements thereof, in any such architecture. But the train of the Rest’s rejection of the Western worldview has left the station, and, with the danger of escalation in Ukraine, Israel, and elsewhere afoot, it seems more likely that the new Eurasian-South bloc will be an alternative to, possibly a foe of the West’s ‘rules-based world order’ rather than a partner (http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/74285). 

Conclusion

         Again, the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War – the current war with militay combat confined largely to Ukrainian and far western Russian territory — will end this year or very early next year. However, a new broader war can take its place, if the peace fails or is never agreed upon. Such a broader war could be confined to the present war’s territorial parameters in Ukraine, while expanding to a worldwide proxy war led by Russia and its direct or indirect allies against Western foreigbn bases and/or spreading to western Ukraine as a result of a NATO military intervention across the Dniepr’s Right Bank. A NATO fighter jets, such as F-16s, based outside Ukraine, could make Romanian or Polish air bases or other facilities targets for Russian missiles and drones. A NATO or Russian no fly zone of one kind or another could lead to NATO-Russian air combat. A Russian shootdown of the U.S. intelligence drone Global Hawk could be the spark for such tensions in the air.

         The hope is that cooler heads will prevail, but the U.S. is in the midst of a deep and potentially explosive political crisis in which bureaucratic politics can become highly cryptic, conspiratorial, chaotic, and irrational, provoking new more dangerous conflict. Similarly, in Kiev a meltdown of the Maidan regime could be imminent and will likely come as a shot in the dark, unexpected by all. That could lead to the same kind of breakdown of bureaucratic, state discipline, and the rule of law – something far weaker in Ukraine than in the `U.S. – and lead to clandestine adventures of desparation, such as a false flag on a nuclear plat in Ukraine’s Energodar or elsewhere or ‘Hail Mary’ operation targeting a Russian nuclear or other strategic object, sparking a Russian overreaction and a full-scale NATO-Russian war. Worse still, state organizational (as opposed to territorial) breakdown in Ukraine could bring a complete political, economic, social, and state breakdown, with opposing Ukrainian partisan armies, warlords, and ultranationalist/neofascist formations fighting between themselves and carrying out guerilla and terrorist warfare against Russian and even Western occupiers. That Zelenskiy is now broaching peace talks with Putin is a reflection of the opportunity and dangers that are in the offing.  

NEW BOOK

EUROPE BOOKS, 2022

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About the Author – 

Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu

Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media. 

Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.