Russian philosopher, naturalist, and economist Nikolai Danilevsky. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

November 28 marks the 200th birthday of Russian thinker Nikolai Danilevsky. Relatively unknown in the West, Danilevsky is extraordinarily influential in modern Russia, and understanding his ideas is essential to grasping the essence of the current political conflict between Russia and the West.

In the early 1990s, two theories of humanity’s future competed for the attention of those interested in international affairs. The first was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, which predicted that every country in the world was destined eventually to adopt the same social-economic and political system, namely Western-style liberalism. The second was Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which stated that rather than converging, the countries of the world were separating into distinct civilizational blocs.

To Russians, none of this was remotely new. For the Fukuyama-Huntington debate did little more than echo a long-standing argument that has been raging among Russian intellectuals since the infamous debate between the Westernizers and Slavophiles in the 1840s.

The Westernizers were Fukuyama-ists before Fukuyama. They had what academics like to call a “teleological” view of the world, considering that the iron laws of history dictated that all societies eventually converged on a common end (telos in Greek). For them, this end was synonymous with the West. As the mid-19th century liberal Russian thinker Konstantin Kavelin put it, “The difference [between the West and Russia] lies solely in the preceding historical facts; the aim, the task, the aspirations, the way forward are one and the same.”

The Slavophiles countered this argument by contending that Western civilization had peaked. Russia, by contrast, still had much to offer the world through its own unique, Orthodox, culture. Only by developing this uniqueness and avoiding assimilation into the West could Russia contribute to universal civilization.

Interestingly, this argument still viewed Russia and the West as connected. Russia, by protecting its Orthodox heritage, was seen as being able in due course to export it to the West and so save the latter from itself. Slavophilism did not reject the idea of a common future.

It is here that Danilevsky stepped in, making the decisive break with teleological thinking. A biologist by profession, he adopted an organic view of the world. Human civilizations, he maintained, were organic beings that were born, matured, and died. None could be said to constitute the “End of History.”

In his most famous work, entitled Russia and Europe, he outlined a theory that Russia and Western Europe were entirely distinct “cultural historical types.” Different cultural historical types, he said, developed in their own separate ways. In opposition to theories of cultural convergence, he compared the world to a town square from which different roads (i.e. different civilizations) moved out in different directions. Each cultural historical type was inherently distinct, and consequently it made no sense to try to force it to develop along the path of another.

Other Russians built on Danilevsky’s theory. Late nineteenth century philosopher Konstantin Leontyev, for instance, postulated that civilizational life cycles had three stages: primary simplicity, flowering complexity, and secondary simplicity (the period of decay). Flowering complexity represented the peak of development. On an international scale, this meant that one should avoid the alleged homogenization that would come with everybody adopting Western-style liberalism, and instead celebrate a multiplicity of different civilizational types. The “End of History” would quite literally be the end of human development, and was thus to be avoided.

Later, Eurasianist thinkers used geology, botany, linguistics, and other fields of study to try to provide a scientific basis for the idea that the space of the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union constituted a coherent entity distinct from those around it. Originally devised by Russian émigrés in the 1920s, Eurasianism crept into the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era, influencing among others the ethnographer Lev Gumilyov. Gumilyov argued that ethnic groups (etnoi) were a natural phenomenon and that what suited one group did not suit another, although those with certain complementarities could form a superetnos. The superetnos that was the Soviet people was entirely different from the superetnos of the West and as such should develop entirely in its own separate way.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, civilizational thinking has become de rigueur in Russia. A study by San Francisco State University professor Andrei Tsygankov showed that the most cited Russian authors in Russian academic articles on topics of international relations were Danilevsky and Leontyev. The idea that civilizational differences are real and can be objectively determined is now widely accepted outside the very narrow circle of Russia’s few remaining liberals.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was rather late in coming round to this point of view. In the early 2000s he was a traditional Westernizer, speaking of Russia’s eventual integration into Europe. More recently, however, his tone has changed. Speaking to the Valdai Club at the end of October, he used the words “civilization,” “civilizations,” and “civilizational” some 20 times, and commented that “real democracy in a multipolar world is primarily about the ability of any nation—I emphasize—any society or civilization to follow its own path.”

To rub in the point, Putin mentioned Danilevsky and cited his statement that progress lies in “walking the field that represents humanity’s historical activity, walking in all directions,” adding that “no civilization can take pride in being the height of development.” Putin followed this by calling for a “free development of countries and peoples,” in which “primitive simplification and prohibition can be replaced with the flourishing complexity of culture and tradition.” Though Putin didn’t say it, the language was pure Leontyev.

Some commentators argue that the “New Cold War” between Russia and the West differs from the original in that lacks an ideological component similar to the conflict between communism and capitalism. Others maintain that there is such a component and that it consists of the struggle between democracy and autocracy. Putin’s speech shows that both points of view are wrong.

For the speech reveals a very coherent philosophy well founded in a specific Russian intellectual tradition with origins in Danilevsky. However, this philosophy has nothing to do with autocracy and democracy. In fact, the very essence of civilizational theory is that no system is inherently the best. Putin is not making any claims about how states should organize their internal affairs, let alone promoting autocracy versus democracy. He is, however, making a claim about how the world as a whole should operate, and contrasting the vision of a world converging around Western values and institutions with that of a world consisting of distinct civilizations each advancing towards their own unique destinations. The New Cold War does, therefore, have an ideological component but it’s very different from what most people in the West imagine it to be.

Only time will tell which vision of the world turns out to be accurate. But for now, the terms of the intellectual debate have been set. Two hundred years on, it is very much Danilevsky’s moment.

Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.

John Mearsheimer, the eminent political scientist who has warned for years that NATO’s Ukraine policy would lead to disaster, joins Aaron Maté to assess the state of the Ukraine proxy war and the dangers ahead.

Guest: John Mearsheimer. R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.

Read “The Darkness Ahead: Where The Ukraine War Is Headed” by John Mearsheimer

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TRANSCRIPT

AARON MATÉ: Welcome to Pushback. I’m Aaron Maté. Joining me is John Mearsheimer. He is R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, now writing on Substack. Professor Mearsheimer, thanks so much for joining me.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s my pleasure to be here, Aaron.

AARON MATÉ: I want to get your response to this from The Wall Street Journal. This just came out, and it says this about the state of Ukraine’s wildly hyped counteroffensive and the Western efforts to encourage it. It says this, quote, “When Ukraine launched its big counteroffensive this spring, Western military officials knew Kiev didn’t have all the training or weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge Russian forces. But they hoped Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness would carry the day. They haven’t.” Unquote.

So, that’s from The Wall Street Journal, basically admitting that the West pushed Ukraine into this counteroffensive, knowing that Ukraine did not have what it needed to come anywhere close to success. I’m just wondering, having long predicted that this US effort to drive Ukraine into NATO, turn Ukraine into a NATO proxy, would lead to Ukraine’s decimation. Your response to this candid admission in this establishment news outlet.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, it seems to me that anybody who knows anything about military tactics and strategy had to understand that there was hardly any chance that the Ukrainian counteroffensive would succeed. I mean, there were just so many factors that were arrayed against the Ukrainians that it was almost impossible for them to make any significant progress. Nevertheless, the West encouraged them, pushed them hard to launch this offensive. In fact, we wanted them to launch the offensive in the spring, and you sort of say to yourself, ‘What’s going on here?’ This is like encouraging them to launch a suicidal offensive which is completely counterproductive. Wouldn’t it make much more sense for them to remain on the defensive, at least for the time being? But I think what was going on here was that the West is very fearful that time is running out, that if the Ukrainians don’t show some significant success on the battlefield in the year 2023, public support for the war will dry up and the Ukrainians will lose—and the West will lose. So, I think what happened here is that we pushed very hard for this offensive, knowing that there was a slim chance at best that it would succeed.

AARON MATÉ: In that same vein, we also integrated Ukraine as a de facto proxy of NATO without formally promising it—or without formally giving it—NATO membership, and that was a major factor in this, in Russia’s invasion to begin with.

But then you have this recent NATO Summit in Lithuania, and I’m wondering your take on this. At the end of the summit, the pledge that was given to Ukraine, it seems to me that it actually made future NATO membership for Ukraine even more distant than it was when it was first promised back in 2008. Because this time the final communique—and this was apparently done at the behest of the US—said that we will admit Ukraine when allies agree and when conditions are met, but it didn’t specify what those conditions are. And so accordingly, it seems to me that Ukraine is even further away from NATO than it was back when it was first promised back in 2008. I’m wondering if you agree with that assessment, and what you make of this very vague pledge from NATO.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I agree with what you said, but I’d take it a step further. The Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, made it very clear that Ukraine would not be admitted into NATO until it had prevailed in the conflict. In other words, Ukraine has to win the war before it can be brought into the alliance. Well, Ukraine is not going to win the war, and therefore, Ukraine is not going to be brought into the alliance.

This war is going to go on for a long time. Even if you get a cold peace, it will linger right below the surface and there will be an ever-present danger that a hot war will break out. And in those circumstances, I find it hard to imagine the United States or any West European country agreeing to bring Ukraine into NATO. And the simple reason is that if you bring Ukraine into NATO in the midst of a conflict, you are in effect committing NATO to defending with military force Ukraine on the battlefield. And that’s a situation we don’t want. We do not want NATO boots on the ground, or to be more specific, we don’t want American boots on the ground. So, it makes perfect sense for Stoltenberg to say that Ukraine has to win. In fact, Ukraine has to win a decisive victory over the Russians within the borders of Ukraine. That is not going to happen, in my opinion, and therefore, as you were saying, Ukraine is not going to become part of NATO.

AARON MATÉ: So, given that, I mean, do you think it’s fair to speculate that the US policy in Ukraine was even more cynical than it appeared? Because basically this war was largely fought because the US refused to agree to neutrality for Ukraine, saying that, ‘Well, we have an open door for NATO; we don’t take people’s membership off of the table.’ But yet, when given the opportunity, the US won’t commit to granting Ukraine a road map to joining NATO, which leads me to conclude that, possibly, what if the aim was never to actually admit Ukraine into NATO but just use the future pledge of NATO membership to de facto turn Ukraine into a NATO proxy, without the obligation, the part of the US and its allies, to actually defend it?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s possible that’s true. It’s hard to say without a lot more evidence.

I have a slightly different view. I don’t think it was so much cynicism. I think it was stupidity. I think you can’t underestimate just how foolish the West is when it comes to the whole question of Ukraine—and all sorts of other issues as well. But I think that the West believed—and here we’re talking mainly about the United States—that if a war did break out between Ukraine and Russia, that the West plus Ukraine would prevail, that the Russians would be defeated. I believe we thought that was the case.

If you look at the run-up to the war in early 2022, what’s really striking to me is that it was quite clear that war was at least a serious possibility, yet the United States and the West more generally did virtually nothing to prevent the war. If anything, we egged the Russians on. And I find this hard to imagine. What was going on here? And I think that we believed that if a war broke out, we had trained up the Ukrainians and armed the Ukrainians up enough that they would hold their own on the battlefield. Number one. And number two, I think, we felt the magic weapon was sanctions, that we’d finished the Russians off with sanctions, and the Ukrainians would end up defeating the Russians, and they would then be in a position where we could admit them into NATO. That is what I think is going on. I don’t think it’s really a case of cynicism as you portray it. It may be. Again, this is an empirical question. We just need a heck of a lot more evidence to see whether your interpretation is correct or mine is. But my sense is, this is worse than a crime. This is a blunder, to put it in [French diplomat] Talleyrand’s famous rhetoric.> Visit source: grayzone.com

AARON MATÉ: On the issue of the sanctions, it was recently reported that Russia had a milestone in selling its oil above the price cap that the US and its allies tried to impose on the price of Russian oil. Why do you think the US sanctions policy has not worked, and did that surprise you? Did you expect Russia to take more of a hit than it has?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I thought it would take more of a hit than it has. I think the Russians themselves thought that. That’s my sense from sort of keeping abreast of this conflict. I think the Russians have done better than they even expected, and certainly better than I expected. But my view, Aaron, is that even if we had been more successful with the sanctions, we would not have brought the Russians to their knees. We would not have ended up inflicting a significant defeat on them. And the reason is very simple.

The Russians believe that they’re facing an existential threat in Ukraine, and when you’re facing an existential threat, or you think you’re facing an existential threat, you’re willing to absorb huge amounts of pain to make sure that you’re not defeated on the battlefield. So, I think the sanctions were doomed from the beginning. I think when you look carefully at what has happened since then, it’s quite clear that the Russians were in an excellent position to beat the sanctions, by and large. And it shouldn’t have been surprising to anyone who spent a lot of time studying how sanctions work, that it was not going to do much against a country like Russia, which was so rich in natural resources and had all sorts of potential trading partners that could replace the ones that it lost in the West. I certainly don’t fit in that category as an expert on sanctions, but I would imagine that people who study this issue carefully understood that it was going to be of limited utility against the Russians. And it certainly has been.

This, by the way, was a major miscalculation, I believe, on the West’s part. In the literature in the West on the war, if you read the mainstream media carefully, people like to dwell on Putin’s miscalculations, and they completely ignore the West’s miscalculations. But I think if you look at our behavior in the run-up to the war and what has subsequently been happening in the conflict, it’s quite clear that we miscalculated in a big way.

AARON MATÉ: On the point, let me ask you to respond to what Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently said on CNN. He’s talking about what he says are Putin’s objectives in Ukraine, and he says Putin has already lost.

Anthony Blinken: In terms of what Russia sought to achieve, what Putin sought to achieve, they’ve already failed, they’ve already lost. The objective was to erase Ukraine from the map, to eliminate its independence, its sovereignty, to subsume it into Russia. That failed a long time ago.

AARON MATÉ: That’s Anthony Blinken, Professor Mearsheimer. Do you think those were Putin’s objectives in Ukraine?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No. I mean, it’s the conventional wisdom in the West, for sure, that these were Putin’s aims. But as I have said on countless occasions, there is no evidence. Let me emphasize here: zero evidence to support the claim that Putin was bent on conquering all of Ukraine and incorporating it into a Greater Russia. You can say that a million times, but it’s simply not true. Because there is no evidence that Putin had any interest in conquering all of Ukraine and that he believed when he invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, that that is what he was going to try to do.

But that just takes care of his intentions. You also have to look at his capabilities. The idea that that small force, that small Russian force that went into Ukraine in February 2022 could conquer all of the country is a laughable argument. To conquer all of Ukraine, the Russians would have needed an army that had a couple million men in it. This is a huge piece of real estate. When the Germans went into Poland in 1939—and remember when the Germans went into Poland in 1939, the Soviets went in a few weeks later, so, the two countries, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were a tag team against Poland. Nevertheless, the Poles… I mean the Germans invaded Poland with roughly 1.5 million men.

The Russians had at most 190,000 men when they invaded Ukraine in February 2022. No way they had the capability to conquer the country. And they didn’t try to conquer the country. And again, as I said, Putin’s intentions were manifestly clear before the war that he had no interest in conquering Ukraine. He fully understood that conquering that whole country would be like swallowing a porcupine.

AARON MATÉ: And if you compare the Russian invasion of Ukraine to how the US went into Baghdad 2003, the first thing they do is attack the capital. They try to knock out the head of government, Saddam Hussein.

Russia obviously didn’t do that. There were no missile strikes on the presidential office in Kiev, no missile strikes on basic infrastructure, and the railroads even left intact, even though those railroads supply military equipment. But what Putin did get, though, in those early stages was negotiations, which apparently went somewhere to the point of a tentative deal reached between Ukraine and Russia, in which Russia would have withdrawn to its pre-invasion lines and Ukraine would have basically pledged neutrality.

We know from various reports that the West stood in the way. Boris Johnson reportedly came over, told Zelensky that, ‘If you sign a deal with Russia, we’re not going to back you up with security guarantees.’ Putin recently produced a document when he was speaking before some African leaders that he said was signed by Ukraine, and he also accused the West of sabotaging this deal. Based on the evidence you’ve seen, do you think that’s a fair rendering of events, that there was a serious deal reached but the West stood in the way?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Couple of points. I think there was a potential deal. Whether it could have been worked out had the West not interfered remains to be seen. There’re some very complicated issues that had to be resolved here, and they weren’t fully resolved in the negotiations at Istanbul. So, I would say it was a potential deal; it had real promise, for sure.

I do think that the West moved in, the British and the Americans, to sabotage the negotiations, because as I said earlier, Aaron, I think that we felt we could defeat the Russians. When those negotiations were taking place in March, at that juncture it looked like the Ukrainians were holding their own on the battlefield, and that simple fact coupled with our belief in sanctions made us think we had the Russians right where we wanted them, and the last thing we wanted was a deal. This was time to inflict a significant defeat on Russia, so I think that’s what was going on.

Now, just to go back to what you said about Putin’s goals going into Ukraine, I think you’re exactly right, that he was not interested in conquering Ukraine, as I said. What he wanted to do was coerce the Ukrainians into coming to the negotiating table and working out a deal. That’s what he wanted. He did not even want to incorporate the Donbass into a Greater Russia. He understood that would be a giant headache. He preferred to leave the Donbass inside of Ukraine. But what happened here is that the West moved in when it looked like a possible deal was there to be had, and the West made sure that the Ukrainians walked away from the negotiations and that the war went on. And here we are today.

AARON MATÉ: A major goal of Russia is, it seems to me, on top of getting Ukraine to commit to neutrality, to not joining NATO, was to get Ukraine to implement the Minsk Accords—the deal that it had signed back in 2015 to end the war in the Donbass. And I’m wondering what you make of the admissions that have come out since Russia invaded, from NATO leaders like Angela Merkel of Germany and François Hollande of France, who helped broker the Minsk Accords, where they said—and this mirrors what Ukrainian leaders like [Petro] Poroshenko said, too—that Minsk wasn’t intended to actually make peace; it was intended to buy time for Ukraine to build up its military to fight the Russian-backed rebels in the east of Ukraine and Russia itself. Do you buy that from Merkel and Hollande, or do you think they’re maybe just trying to save face and reject criticism from hawks who believe that their efforts to try to broker peace and end the war on the Donbass somehow enabled Russia and Putin?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s really hard to know what to think, for sure. I mean, the fact is that Hollande, Poroshenko, and Angela Merkel have all said very clearly that they were not serious at the time about negotiating some sort of settlement in accordance with the Minsk II guidelines. If they say that, it would seem to me to be true. Is it really the case that they’re all lying now to cover up their past behavior so that they don’t damage their reputations in the West? I guess that’s possible. I don’t know how you would prove one way or the other where the truth lies. But my tendency in these situations is to believe what people say, and if Angela Merkel tells me that she was just pretending in the Minsk negotiations because she wanted to help arm up the Ukrainians, I tend to believe her. But maybe she’s not telling the truth. Who knows for sure?

AARON MATÉ: And going back to what you said earlier, about how the US did nothing to prevent this war and in some ways may have even egged it on before February 2022, given that the Biden Administration refused to address Russia’s core concerns of NATO expansion and the NATO military infrastructure surrounding Russia, which Russia and its draft treaties that it had submitted in December 2021 proposed, that NATO basically roll back its NATO military infrastructure around Russia to pre-1997 lines. Given that, the Biden Administration pretty much refused to discuss any of that with maybe some minor exceptions, from a realist perspective, is there any room now for the Biden Administration to go back on that and to actually discuss the issues that it wouldn’t discuss prior to the invasion? And if they won’t discuss those issues, then what kind of future are we looking at?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, let me make a quick point. I think your description of the American position in December 2021 and in the run-up to the war in February 2022 is correct. But it’s also important to emphasize—and people in the West don’t want to hear it, but it is true—that the Russians were desperate to avoid a conflict. The idea that Putin was chomping at the bit to invade Ukraine so he could make it part of Greater Russia, it’s just not a serious argument. The Russians did not want a war, and they did, I believe, everything possible to avoid a war. They just couldn’t get the Americans to play ball with them. The Americans were unwilling to negotiate in a serious way. Period. End of story.

Now, what can we do today? In effect you’re asking whether we can go back to where we were before the war broke out, or maybe even where we were in March 2022, shortly after the war broke out, when the negotiations in Istanbul were ongoing. I think we are well past the point where we can work out any kind of meaningful deal. I think that first of all, both sides are so deeply committed to winning at this point in time that it’s hard to imagine them negotiating any kind of meaningful peace agreement. Both sides can win and both sides are committed to winning, so negotiating the deal now at the general level is, I think, not possible.

But when you get into the details, the Russians are bent on keeping the territory that they have now conquered, and I believe the Russians are intent on conquering more country, more of Ukraine. The Russians want to make sure that Ukraine ends up as a dysfunctional rump state and cannot become a viable member of NATO at any time in the future. So, I think that what the Russians will end up doing is cleaving off a huge chunk of Ukrainian territory, and then going to great lengths to keep Ukraine in a terrible—both economic and political—situation. They’ll do everything they can to continue strangling the Ukrainian economy, because they do not want Ukraine to be in a position where it becomes a viable member of the Western alliance. So, the idea that the Russians would now agree to give up the territory that they’ve conquered and pull back to the borders that existed in February of 2022, I think is almost unthinkable.

Now, you may say they would do this if Ukraine became a neutral state, it gave up its aspirations to become a part of NATO. First of all, I don’t think that Ukraine is anytime soon going to agree to become a neutral state. It’s going to want some sort of security guarantee, and the only group of countries that can provide that security guarantee are NATO countries. So, it’s hard to see that bond between Ukraine and NATO being completely severed.

Furthermore, the Russians are going to worry about the fact that Ukraine will one day say, ‘We’re neutral,’ and then the next day they’ll change their mind and form some sort of alliance with the West, and the end result is the Russians will have given up all that territory and Ukraine will no longer be neutral. So, I think from a Russian point of view what makes sense is just to conquer a lot of territory in Ukraine and make sure you turn Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state. I hate to say this because it portrays such a dark future for Ukraine and also for international relations more generally, but I think the mess that we have created here, the disaster we have created here, cannot be underestimated in terms of its scope.

AARON MATÉ: There was a recent acknowledgment in The New York Times from NATO officials that pretty much said the same thing, that their policy, they acknowledge, incentivizes Russia to continue the war and take more territory. I’ll read you the passage.

They’re talking about the US policy of rejecting any territorial deal with Russia inside Ukraine, and also this policy of leaving an open door for Ukraine to join NATO. This is what The New York Times says, quote, “…as several American and European officials acknowledged during the Vilnius summit,”—the NATO Summit in Lithuania—”such commitments make it all the more difficult to begin any real cease-fire or armistice negotiations. And promises of Ukraine’s eventual accession to NATO—after the war is over—create a strong incentive for Moscow to hang onto any Ukrainian territory it can and to keep the conflict alive.”

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: That’s exactly right. But that raises the question, why don’t Western leaders change the policy regarding bringing Ukraine into the alliance?

I mean, they’re exactly right, and if you go back to what caused this war, the principal cause of this war, as the evidence makes perfectly clear, is the idea that we were going to bring Ukraine into NATO. And if we had abandoned that policy before February 2022, we probably wouldn’t have a war today. Then once the war starts, we keep doubling down on bringing Ukraine into NATO. We’ve refused to give up on that. But the end result is, that just incentivizes the Russians more and more to make sure that that never happens, or if it happens, Ukraine is a dysfunctional rump state.

So, we are playing—we, meaning the West—are playing a key role here in incentivizing the Russians to destroy Ukraine. It makes absolutely no sense to me from a strategic point of view or from a moral point of view. You think of the death and destruction that’s being wrought in Ukraine, and you think that this could have easily been avoided. It makes you sick to your stomach just to contemplate it all.

AARON MATÉ: What do you make of US policy so far when it comes to weaponry? There’s been so many times where the Biden Administration says publicly that certain weapons are not going to Ukraine, but then later on they relent and send those weapons, and now it looks like F-16s will be the latest on that list. And by contrast, recently John Kirchhofer, who is with the US Defense Intelligence Agency, said that unlike what Biden and Blinken are saying, he said the war is at a stalemate. And he also said that none of these heavy weapons are going to make a difference to allow Ukraine to break through.

John Kirchhofer: Certainly, we are at a bit of a stalemate. We do see incremental gains by Ukraine as they commit to this counteroffensive over the summer, but we haven’t seen anything to really help them break through, for example, to drive to the Crimea. It’s interesting to me, we tend to focus on some of the munitions that we, the West, provides to Ukraine as they fight this out, and we look at some of them as holy grails as they play out. So, if you think of HIMARS, certainly that led to some sensational tactical events. And then you see the Storm Shadow missile doing the same thing, and now we’re talking about dual purpose improved conventional munitions or cluster bombs. None of these, unfortunately, are the holy grail that Ukraine is looking forward to, that I think will allow them in the near term to break through.

AARON MATÉ: So, you have that being acknowledged by somebody with the Defense Intelligence Agency. But that doesn’t seem to have entered the thinking of the White House, which keeps sort of slowly drip-feeding these heavy weapons systems that had previously been taken off of the table.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I think there’s no question that we’re desperate here. You used the word ‘stalemate.’ In a way it’s a stalemate. If you focus on how much territory each side has conquered, it looks like a stalemate. But I don’t look at territory conquered as the key indicator of what’s going on in this war.

In a war of attrition like this, the key indicator is the casualty exchange rate. That’s what you want to pay attention to. You want to focus on how many people each side has available to draft, to put in the military, and then you want to focus on the casualty exchange rate. And, in my opinion, the casualty exchange rate decisively favors the Russians who also happen to have many more people than the Ukrainians do. This is a disastrous situation for Ukraine. It makes it almost impossible for Ukraine to win this war, and it makes it likely that the Russians will prevail.

So, the question is, if you’re the West, how do you rectify this situation? What do you do to keep the Ukrainians in the fight? And you want to remember here that the Russians have a formidable industrial base, and they have lots of military equipment—lots of heavy equipment, lots of artillery, lots of tanks. They have assembly lines that are churning out lots of equipment. The Ukrainians have hardly any assembly lines at all; they’re completely dependent on the West for weaponry.

So, the question then becomes, what can we give them? And there’re real limits to what we have, right? We don’t have that much more artillery to give them. So, it’s no surprise that therefore we’re giving them cluster munitions. It’s no surprise that in recent months we’ve emphasized giving them tanks when what they really needed was artillery. So, you see, we’re in a pickle here, in that we’ve picked a fight with a country that has a huge industrial base that can produce lots of weaponry, and our ally—the country that’s doing the fighting for us, the dirty work on the battlefield—does not have weaponry of its own, so we have to supply it. And again, we have real limits to what we can give them.

So, what’s going on is that we give them HIMAR missiles, and everybody says this is the magic weapon, it’s going to rectify the casualty exchange ratio, it’s going to help the Ukrainians prevail on the battlefield. That proves not to be the case, right? And then we start talking about giving them sophisticated tanks. We give them sophisticated tanks, be they Leopard 2s, Challengers, or what have you, and they’re supposed to be the magic weapons. And that doesn’t work out. Then we talk about training nine brigades and creating a Panzer Forest that can punch through the Russian defenses, to do to the Russians what the Germans did to the French in 1940. And, of course, on June 4th of this year the Ukrainians launched their counteroffensive, and they used a lot of those NATO-trained and -armed troops—and it didn’t work. They didn’t even get to the first defensive lines of the Russian forces. They ended up fighting in the gray zone and suffering huge casualties.

So, what’s the solution? Well, we’ve got to give them F-16s and we’ve got to give them ATACMS [Army Tactical Missile Systems, long-range guided missiles], and if we give them that, that will reverse the balance of power between these combatants, reverse the casualty exchange ratio, and the Ukrainians will end up prevailing on the battlefield.

This is a pipe dream. It’s hard to believe that people in the Pentagon who study war for a living believe that F-16s or ATACMS are going to change the balance of power on the battlefield. They are doing this in large part because we have to do something, and this is really all we can do. So, we can’t quit, we got to stay in the fight, we got to continue to arm the Ukrainians. This is the only game in town. So, what we’re doing here, giving them weapons that we can publicly say and then the media can repeat it, that these are war-winning weapons, and once the Ukrainians get these weapons and learn how to use them, once they learn how to fly F-16s, the balance of power will be rectified, and we’ll live happily ever after.

Again, this is not going to happen. The Ukrainians are in deep trouble. We have led them down the primrose path, and there is nothing we can do at this point in time to rectify that situation.

AARON MATÉ: Well, speaking of which, that was your famous warning back in 2015, that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path and, according to you, the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.

John Mearsheimer: What’s going on here is that the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked. And I believe that the policy that I’m advocating, which is neutralizing Ukraine and then building it up economically and getting it out of the competition between Russia on one side and NATO on the other side, is the best thing that could happen to the Ukrainians.

AARON MATÉ: This was your warning back in 2015. Why were you so confident of this? What made you so sure that this was the inevitable path?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I thought it was very clear when the crisis first broke out in February 2014. Remember the crisis breaks out on February 22, 2014, and at that point in time it’s clear that the Russians view Ukraine in NATO as an existential threat. They make no bones about that. And furthermore, it’s clear that if we persist to try to bring Ukraine into NATO, if we persist to try to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s borders, that the Russians will destroy Ukraine, they’ll wreck Ukraine. They make that clear at the time.

So, that’s in 2014, and then if you look at what happens from 2014 up till 2022, when the war breaks out, when it goes from being a crisis to a war, if you look at what happens then, the Russians make it clear, at point after point, that Ukraine in NATO is an existential threat, but what do we do? We double down at every turn. We continue to commit ourselves more forcefully each year to bringing Ukraine into NATO. And my view in the very beginning was that this was going to lead to disaster.

Now, a lot of people like to portray my views as anomalous. I’m one of a handful of people, folks like me, Jeffrey Sachs, Steve Cohen [Stephen F. Cohen], who make these kinds of arguments. But if you think about it, back in the 1990s, when the subject of NATO expansion was being debated, there were a large number of very prominent members of the foreign policy establishment who said that NATO expansion would end up in disaster. This included people like George Kennan, William Perry—who at the time was the Secretary of Defense.

AARON MATÉ: He almost resigned, he says.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Pardon?

AARON MATÉ: He almost resigned, he says, over the issue of NATO expansion. When Clinton expanded NATO, he said he considered resigning, I believe.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes, that’s exactly right. And, by the way, there was widespread opposition to NATO expansion inside the Pentagon at that point in time. And all this is to say that those people were right.

And one of my favorite examples is Angela Merkel. When the decision was made in April 2008 at the Bucharest Summit—the Bucharest NATO Summit—to bring Ukraine into NATO, Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy, who was then the French leader, both of them were adamantly opposed to bringing Ukraine into NATO. This is when the trouble started, April 2008. Angela Merkel was bitterly opposed, and she subsequently said that the reason that she was opposed was that she understood that Putin would interpret it as a declaration of war. Just think about that. Angela Merkel said that in 2008, when she opposed the idea of bringing Ukraine—and Georgia, by the way—into NATO, she opposed it. She opposed it because she understood that Putin would interpret it as a declaration of war. So, there are a lot of people besides Jeff Sachs, Steve Cohen, and John Mearsheimer who understood that this whole crusade to expand NATO eastward was going to end up in disaster.

AARON MATÉ: Let me ask you a personal question. You were friends with Steve Cohen, who I knew very well. He was a hero of mine and a friend. I’m wondering, it seems to me that since his passing [in 2020] and since the Ukraine War escalated with Russia’s invasion, you should have taken his place as Enemy Number One in the US academy in terms of someone willing to speak out and counter the establishment point of view. I’m just wondering whether you agree with that, and whether it’s given you any more empathy for Stephen, and what that’s been like for you, and what you make of the space for debate and how it compares to previous controversial issues that you’ve spoken out on. You’re very critical of the Israel Lobby. You spoke out against the Iraq War, how all that compares to the climate we’re in today.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, just to talk about Steve Cohen for a minute, I think Steve was out front on this issue before I was. He was out front on the issue before 2014, when the crisis broke out. That’s when I first got involved. I wrote a well-known piece in Foreign Affairs in 2014 that said the crisis which broke out in February that year was the West’s fault, but Steve had been making the argument before I came into the game. And then he and I were involved in a number of different events where we were on the same side, making the same argument. And then, of course, Steve passed, and his presence in this debate is greatly missed, for sure. I think you could say that people like me and people like Jeff Sachs are in effect replacing Steve, where we’re making the arguments that he made for a long time. So, I think there is a lot of truth in that.

Now, with regard to your question about how receptive people are today to hearing the argument that I have to make or that Jeff Sachs has to make, where the argument that Steve was making when he was alive, I think there’s no question that it is more difficult to be heard today than it was when the Iraq War, for example, took place in 2003. I was deeply opposed to the Iraq War in a very public way, in late 2002 and up until March 2003, when the war started. And it was tough to make a case against the war in public in those days. It was tough to be heard, but it is much tougher to be heard today. The climate is much more Orwellian.

And I would note, by the way, Aaron, that Steve, who I talked to obviously about these issues a lot when he was still alive, told me on more than one occasion that during the Cold War, when he would sometimes make arguments that one might categorize as pro-Soviet or sympathetic to the Soviet position, it was much easier then to be heard in the mainstream media, in places like The New York Times, for example, than it was in 2014 or 2016 in The New York Times. The cone of silence here is really quite remarkable. The extent to which people like Steve, people like Jeff Sachs, and people like me have sort of [been] kept out of the mainstream media is really quite remarkable. We have a conventional wisdom here, and the mainstream media is committed to policing the marketplace to make sure that people who disagree with that conventional wisdom are not heard, or if they are heard their arguments are perverted or countered immediately. It’s a terrible situation. It’s not the way life is supposed to work in a liberal democracy. You have to have some semblance of a marketplace of ideas if you want to have smart policies, because the fact is that governments often times do stupid things, or they pursue policies that look like they’re correct at the time but prove to be disastrous, and you want to have lots of people who disagree with those policies having an opportunity to voice their opinions before the policy is launched and after the policy is launched. But in this day and age, that’s very difficult to do, and that’s very depressing and distressing.

AARON MATÉ: Turning back to the battlefield today, are you at all concerned about a new front opening up? There’s recently been some heated rhetoric between Russia and Poland, Putin warning Poland not to attack Belarus, Belarus now hosting Wagner fighters and some of them talking about going back into Ukraine, or maybe opening up a new front with Poland. What do you make of all that talk, and does it possibly threaten a new front opening up, or is that overblown?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, that’s just one possible front. Another front is the Black Sea. It’s quite clear that the Russians are now moving towards blockading Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea, and the potential for conflict there is real. Then there’s the whole question of Moldova, and there’s all sorts of talk about a possible conflict there. Then there is the Baltic Sea. The Russians care greatly about the Baltic Sea because it’s the only way they can get to Kaliningrad. And if you look at all of the countries besides Russia that surround the Baltic Sea, they are now all NATO members now that Sweden and Finland have been brought into the alliance. If you look at the Arctic, looking down the road, the Arctic makes me very nervous. There are eight countries that are physically located in the Arctic. One is Russia, of course. The other seven are all NATO members now that Finland and Sweden are in the alliance. And with the ice melting and all sorts of questions about control of water and territory coming into play up there, the potential for conflict is very real. And the Russians and NATO are bumping into each other.

So, you have the Arctic, the Baltic Sea, Moldova, the Black Sea, and then the issue that you raised, which, at this point in time appears to be the one of most concern, and that is Poland coming into the war mainly in Belarusia. There’s also the question of what happens if Polish troops enter into western Ukraine. [Alexander] Lukashenko, who, of course, is the leader of Belarus, has made the argument that this is basically unacceptable to the Belarusians, so one can imagine a situation where Poland comes into western Ukraine and the Belarusians end up in a fight, and the Russians end up in a fight with the Poles in western Ukraine. I’m not saying that’s likely, but it’s possible.

And then if you look at the Polish-Belarusian border, as you pointed out, there are Wagner forces very close to that border, and not surprisingly the Poles have moved up their own forces to make sure that the Wagner forces don’t do anything against Poland. So, you have Wagner forces and Polish forces eyeball-to-eyeball on the Belarusian-Polish border. This is not a good situation. Who knows what the chain of command looks like with [Yevgeny]Prigozhin, who’s in charge of those Wagner forces, as best we can tell. So, there’s just all sorts of potential for trouble here.

And the general point I like to make is that we’re not going to get a meaningful peace agreement between Ukraine and the West on one side and the Russians on the other side. The best we can hope for is a cold peace, and a cold peace where the Russians are constantly looking for opportunities to improve their position, and the Ukrainians and the West are constantly looking for opportunities to improve their position. In both cases this means taking advantage of the other side. When you get into a cold peace, where both sides are operating that way, the potential for escalation and returning to a hot war is great. And you want to think about that in the context of the different possible fronts where war could break out that we were just discussing. There’s just a lot of potential for escalation in this area of the world. So, I think the situation between Russia on one side and the West on the other side, and of course Ukraine, is going to be very dangerous for a long time to come.

AARON MATÉ: Finally, Russia has already annexed four Ukrainian oblasts during its invasion, on top of Crimea in 2014. You mentioned earlier that you think Russia wants to take more territory. Where do you think Russia would be satisfied stopping its incursions? Where do you think its territorial ambitions end?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, on a very general level, Aaron, I think it’s important to understand that the Russians will want to take territory if they can do it militarily, and that remains to be seen. If they can do it militarily, they’ll want to take territory that has lots of Russian speakers and ethnic Russians in them. This is why I think they’ll take Odessa if they can, and Kharkiv if they can, and two other oblasts as well. But I think they will stay away from the oblasts or the areas of Ukraine that have lots of ethnic Ukrainians, because the resistance to a Russian occupation will be enormous. So, I think the demography of Ukraine limits how much territory the Russians can take.

Furthermore, I think military capability limits how much of Ukraine that they can take—that they don’t have the military capability to take all of it. And I think they’ll have to actually increase the size of the existing Russian army if they’re going to take the four oblasts. This includes Kharkiv and Odessa that are to the west of the four oblasts that they now control. But I think that they will try to take those eight oblasts, plus Crimea. Those eight oblasts, they already control four and they’ve taken Crimea; that represents about 23 percent of Ukrainian territory, before 2014. If they take the additional four oblasts to the west of the four they now have annexed, that will represent about 43 percent of Ukrainian territory that will have fallen into the hands of the Russians. And that I think will leave the Russians in a position where they are dealing with a Ukraine that is a truly dysfunctional state.

I hate to say that this is the likely outcome because it’s a such a terrible outcome from Ukraine’s point of view, but I think in all honesty that that is where this war is headed. I think the Russians are now playing hardball, where, as I said to you before, well past the situation that existed in March of 2022, or certainly in the period before the war broke out in February of 2022, where it’s possible to imagine a situation where the Russians pulled out of Ukraine in return for Ukrainian neutrality. Those days are gone, and a Russia that’s playing hardball is a Russia that’s going to conquer more territory if it can and do everything it can to wreck Ukraine.

AARON MATÉ: One more question, because we haven’t discussed this issue yet and it’s existential, and that’s the nuclear threat. There was a recent article by a Russian namedSergei Karaganov, who was an academic with the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. He’s said to be close to Putin. And I don’t know if you caught this essay, but he basically said that Russia needs to adopt a more bellicose nuclear posture, needs to embrace the use of First Use, and even threaten to use it in Ukraine in order to sufficiently scare the West. I don’t know if you caught that essay, but if you did, what did you make of it? And overall, is the nuclear threat, the threat of nuclear war something that you think is still a possibility when it comes to this war itself?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, I think that nuclear war is most likely if the Russians are losing. If the Russians are losing, if the Ukrainian military is rolling up Russian forces in eastern and southern Ukraine, and the sanctions are working and the Russians are on the verge of being knocked out of the ranks of the great powers, in that situation I think it’s likely that the Russians would turn to nuclear weapons, and they would use those nuclear weapons in Ukraine. They would not dare use them against NATO, but they would turn to nuclear weapons. I think, given the fact that the Russians are not losing and, if anything, are winning, therefore the likelihood of nuclear war is greatly reduced. I don’t want to say it’s been taken off the table for one second, but I think as long as the Russians are on the upside of the battle, not on the downside, the likelihood of nuclear use is very low.

Now, with regard to the Karaganov article, I read that to say that the Russians are likely to prevail, but to use rhetoric I’ve used, it’s going to be an ugly victory. I think he understands that the Russians are not going to win a decisive victory. They’re not going to end up with a neutral Ukraine, and they’re not going to end up in a situation where the West backs off. I think that Karaganov understands that even if the Russians capture more territory, and even if they turn Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state, that you’re going to get at best a cold peace that’s going to be very dangerous. I referred to this in my Substack article as an ugly victory. And I think what he is basically saying is that it’s not clear that’s acceptable to the Russians over the long term. It’s not clear that Russia can afford to live in such circumstances over the long term. And if Russia were to use nuclear weapons, it might be a way of sending a wake-up message to the West. It might be a way of telling the West that they have to back off.

In other words, what’s going on here is Karaganov is talking about using nuclear weapons for coercive purposes. He’s interested in limited nuclear use for the purpose of getting the West to back off, getting the West to change its behavior and put an end to this ugly victory, and allow the Russians to have some sort of meaningful victory and to help create some sort of meaningful peace agreement. I think that he is right. The Russians at best can win an ugly victory. I think it’s just important to understand that. He senses, I think, quite correctly, the Russians are not going to win a decisive defeat. There’s no real happy ending to this story, that’s what he’s saying. And he’s saying that’s probably not acceptable, and we’ve got to figure out a way to move beyond a cold peace, and nuclear coercion may be a way to do that.

Now, is that an argument that’s likely to sell? I think it’s impossible to say, because we don’t know exactly what an ugly victory will look like, number one. Number two, we don’t know who will be in control in Russia in the future, who will have his or her finger on the trigger in Moscow when this ugly victory is becoming almost intolerable, and we certainly don’t know whether that person would be bold enough to countenance using nuclear weapons.

Is that possible, that someone might countenance using nuclear weapons, because Russia is in an intolerable situation? Yes, it’s one, but it’s an ugly victory, and that’s not acceptable. It is possible. I think there’s a non-trivial chance that there’ll be someone like Sergei Karaganov in power and who will think about using nuclear weapons. I bet that that will not happen, but who knows for sure? As you well know, it’s incredibly difficult to predict the future, especially when you’re talking about scenarios like that. But I think that’s what’s going on here—and again this just highlights how much trouble we’re in, no matter how this war turns out. As I said before, if the Russians are losing, I mean, they’re seriously losing the war, that’s where nuclear use is likely. And what Karaganov is saying is, even if we win it’s going to be an ugly victory and we may have to use nuclear weapons anyway. You want to think about where that leaves us.

And then there’s the whole question of, if Ukraine is really losing, let’s assume that the Ukrainian military cracks, let’s assume that the beating that it’s taking leads to a situation like the one that faced the French army in the spring of 1917—this is when the French army cracked, it’s when the French army mutinied—let’s assume that that happens, and the Ukrainians are on the run. Again, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, but it is a possibility. What is NATO going to do? Are we going to accept the situation where Ukraine is being defeated on the battlefield in a serious way by the Russians? I’m not so sure. And it may be possible in those circumstances that NATO will come into the fight. It may be possible that the Poles decide that they alone have to come into the fight, and once the Poles come into the fight in a very important way, that may bring us into the fight, and then you have a great power war involving the United States on one side and the Russians on the other. Again, I’m not saying this is likely, but it is a possibility. What we are doing here is, we’re spinning out plausible scenarios as to how this war can play out over time. And almost all the scenarios that one comes up with have an unhappy ending. Again, this just shows what a huge mistake we made not trying to settle this conflict before February 24, 2022.

AARON MATÉ: Well, based on this answer alone, I can see why you called one of your most recent pieces “The Darkness Ahead: Where the Ukraine War is Headed.” Very apt. John Mearsheimer, thank you so much for joining me.

John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, now writing on Substack.

Professor Mearsheimer, thanks so much.

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me, Aaron.

On this day, 12 August, in 1939, British-French-Soviet military talks began in Leningrad. The British delegation was headed by an obscure admiral and the French by an obscure general; they had taken five days to get there by boat. The Soviet delegation was headed by the Defence Minister and the Chief of the General Staff. At the first meeting the Soviet side said it was there to negotiate a real agreement to combine against Hitler; what were they authorised to do? To talk said the Frenchman, let me get back to London said the Brit. A couple of days later London said he was there to talk. Not an auspicious beginning.

About a year after Hitler took power, Moscow realised Hitler was coming for it and everybody else. At Stalin’s direction, the Foreign Minister, Maksim Litvinov, starting pushing “collective security”: everybody who was threatened by Hitler should get together to resist him. Obviously, the three principal powers, Britain, France and the USSR, would be the leaders, but Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia were all on Hitler’s hitlist. Alone they would be eaten one by one, only united could they stop Hitler.

Litvinov didn’t have much success: he did get a treaty with France in 1935 but it turned out to have little content in practice. Meanwhile Poland, vitally important to any anti-Hitler scheme because it lay between the USSR and Germany, signed the very first non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1934 and collaborated in the carve-up of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Washington rejected overtures in 1934. The UK signed a naval agreement with Germany in 1935. Litvinov kept trying, and people like Winston Churchill agreed, but the Munich agreement of September 1938 pretty well killed it off. Without Britain, France or Poland, it couldn’t be done.

The fuse was burning: in March 1939 Berlin tore up the Munich agreement and dismembered the rest of Czechoslovakia; in April it denounced the Polish pact. Litvinov got Stalin’s agreement for one last try. Even though Stalin replaced Litvinov with Vyacheslav Molotov, he was still hopeful enough to send his two top military people to meet the Anglo-French delegation when it finally got there. But what hope was there for a collective anti-Hitler alliance if the only result from years of trying was a low-level delegation with no negotiation powers and lethargic time appreciation? Evidently nothing would be coming from London or Paris or Warsaw. A low-level Anglo-French mission in, say, 1935 would have been a base to build on but in late summer 1939 it was absurd.

If you were Stalin, what would you do when your Plan A is dead? You know war is coming, you believe Hitler when he says his aim is to seize lebensraum to the east. Your potential allies don’t get it. What would you do?

While London and Paris dither and Warsaw dreams dreams (what dreams? Hitler just tore up the non-aggression pact you were counting on: you’re next) Hitler strikes. How about a non-aggression pact? Stalin seizes the chance, the agreement is immediately signed. Stalin knows perfectly well that Hitler is going to attack the USSR and so he starts to grab as much territory to the west as he can and put off the day as long as possible.

In a couple of weeks you will see a whole bunch of op-eds saying that those two evil BFFs got together to do the dirty on Poland and start the war. You won’t see any mention of the failed Soviet collective security attempt. Why not? Well, the authors probably haven’t heard about it (lots of things have gone down the memory hole) and, if they had, it would spoil the propaganda value of their rant about wicked Russia.

FURTHER READING. I knew this happened because AJP Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War was a set text in my university days and he mentions it. But the man who’s really done the big work on it today is the Canadian historian Michael Jabara Carley. Here’s an interview with him that covers the bigger picture and his trilogy about to be published, an essay on what I call Stalin’s Plan A, and a book 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II. Every now and again the corporate media forgets to forget it: “Stalin ‘planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact'”.

(By the way, while the West has pretty much forgotten this, you can be sure that Moscow hasn’t.)

All of the worst atrocities in human history have been perpetrated by people convinced they were in the right. People act according to the mores of their era and group. There is nothing more dangerous that the inability to see that it is reasonable for others to have a different view or interest.

The Guardian has been publishing calls for NATO to declare war on Russia. Twitter is awash with fanatic “liberals” arguing there can be no negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine, and the war must only end with Ukraine recovering all territory including Crimea.

The most crazed sometimes go further and suggest the war may only end with regime change in Russia.

It does not require any special degree of intelligence to see the dangers of insisting on the unconditional surrender, and the personal incarceration or death, of those with their finger on the big red button, in a war against a nuclear power.

The 20th century saw two terrible “world wars”. The first was the result of Imperial rivalries and dynastic power, and it is difficult to discern any morality in it at all (though the propaganda fabrications about Germans bayonetting Belgian babies are a template that has been, with slight variations, repeated by western media in every war right up until today).

The Second World War, however, was as close to a justified war as can ever be found. Fascism and Nazism were truly evil doctrines, while the Western forces that opposed them were on the brink of a golden but short-lived era of social democracy and meaningful working class empowerment.

The problem is that this has become the template for thinking about war in the West – that we are always the “goodies” and the opponents are truly evil, and that total war must be fought leading to unconditional surrender, with even the most horrendous atrocities (Dresden, Hiroshima) justified within the overarching moral imperative.

We have seen straightforward imperial wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, each of which the media has tried to manipulate to fit that thought pattern. It also drives the continual propaganda that the war in Ukraine comes from an invasion by an evil Russian regime and was “illegal and unprovoked”.

Now as you know, I hold that Russian incursion or invasion was illegal, both in 2014 and 2022. But unprovoked it most certainly was not.

It is interesting to return to the World War II precedent here, because it has never been understood to detract from acceptance of the evil of Nazism, to attempt to understand how it happened.

Every schoolchild of my age was taught the “Causes of World War II”, and the first cause was always the extremely punitive Treaty of Versailles.

The insistence on unconditional surrender in World War I, the entirely unfounded claim the whole conflict of World War I was Germany’s fault, the annexations, cruel financial reparations and blow to national pride of military suppression, were all universally acknowledged by historians as mistakes that were of great help to Hitler.

Interestingly, today’s history school curricula in the UK spend much more time on World War II than we used to, and are much less nuanced. The causes of the war feature much less if at all, and heroic Britnat tales of a brave struggling people (which are not of course untrue) feature much more.

With Ukraine, we are not allowed to acknowledge any of the factors that provoked Russia. Not NATO expansion and forward positioning of missiles, not glorification of Nazism, not suppression of Russian language and political parties, not shelling of Russian civilian areas.

In fact it is apparently traitorous to mention any of these things: a crime against the overarching goal of total victory.

This establishment and media narrative is countered on social media by others who take an opposite and equally uncompromising view. They believe Russia must fight to a total victory in Ukraine, depose Zelensky, and humiliate and weaken NATO, thus dealing a blow to US Imperialism.

While a much smaller group, the pro-Russian extremists can be every bit as bloodthirsty as the NATO hawks.

The problem is that all these people on both sides, fuelled by the righteousness of their own belief, are blind to the immense human suffering of the war. They don’t seem to care that many times the amount of suffering so far would be required in order for either side to achieve total victory.

Whereas in the real world both sides are bogged down in a barely moving battle of attrition. The idea of “total victory” is impractical nonsense.

As for those actually making the decisions, for Western politicians a continuing war is a win-win. It drains Russia, their designated enemy. More importantly, it provides the massive opportunities for concentrated political power and super-profits from the public purse that only war can bring.

So far the UK has provided £4.1 billion of weaponry to Ukraine, without a mainstream political dissenting voice. If total victory is the aim, that is just an appetiser.

Yet we have the pretend opposition Labour Party stating that £1.2 billion a year cannot possibly be found to lift the two-child benefit cap and relieve child poverty.

That is one reason wars are so good for the wealthy who control us. Weapons expenditure is beyond control or criticism. To date £5 billion has been spent on the Ajax light armoured vehicle project without a single vehicle ready to enter service having been produced.

There is no telling how much Trident is eventually going to cost, though at least 125 billion. The war in Ukraine provides yet more evidence that our nuclear deterrent does not actually deter anything.

Though I suppose the Ukraine war does radically improve the chances that at least we might get our money’s worth from Trident by blowing the whole world to pieces.

I can see no logical refutation to my constantly repeated argument that the war in Ukraine has shown that Russia cannot speedily defeat a much smaller, weaker and extremely corrupt neighbouring state, so the incredibly high expenditure on “defence” by NATO is not really needed.

The idea that Russia, which is taking a long while to defeat Ukraine, could be a serious threat to the entire NATO alliance is plainly utter nonsense.

But Russia can of course eventually defeat it’s much weaker and smaller neighbour. Ultimately Ukraine cannot win this war, and somehow the West has to come to terms with that. Ukraine is quite simply going to run out of people able and willing to fight.

Ukraine’s use of US cluster weapons was perhaps the first major dent in the blue and yellow public opinion so carefully manufactured in the West. As the horrible war continues on with no real Ukrainian victories to cheer, the “who started it” question will fade in the public mind.

I still think it was unwise of Putin to start this war, as well as illegal. If his goals are limited, then this is a good time to move to cash in his gains.

You may be surprised to know that I have a certain degree of admiration for Bismarck. Apart from a genuine claim to have invented the foundations of a welfare state, Bismarck’s use of war was brilliant.

Bismarck stuck to defined and limited objectives, and did not allow spectacular military success to lead him to expand those objectives.

The purpose of his two wars against Austria and France was to unify Germany, and he succeeded in very quick wars, immediately ended. Humiliating or punishing France or Austria played no significant part in his thinking. Bismarck had limited goals, achieved them and stopped the fighting immediately.

This horrible war will end with Russia retaining Crimea. There is no point in arguing about it. Whether the Donbass remains theoretically part of Ukraine remains to be seen, but de facto Russian autonomy there will be established. I suspect that more important to Putin than the Donbass would be territory further south which secures the approaches to Crimea.

There has to be a territorial settlement. That is what diplomacy is for. The total war options are in themselves terrible and bring massive nuclear risk.

The idea of either side fighting through to total victory is, quite simply, madness. Sanity must be imposed on those who seek to profit from continuing war, or seek to engulf the world in the flames of ideology and righteousness.

Ask this one question of those who insist on total victory for one side or the other. “How many dead people is that worth?”. Insist on an actual number. For total victory either way, anything less than 1 million is utterly unrealistic. It could be much, much worse. Do you really want that?

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Not Putin! Zelensky. https://t.co/VKqfvB8zRx" / Twitter

Hubris consists in believing that a contrived narrative can, in and of itself, bring victory. It is a fantasy that has swept through the West – most emphatically since the 17th century. Recently, the Daily Telegraph published a ridiculous nine minute video purporting to show that ‘narratives win wars’, and that set-backs in the battlespace are incidentals: What matters is to have a thread of unitary narrative articulated, both vertically and horizontally, throughout the spectrum – from the special forces’ soldier in the field through to the pinnacle of the political apex.

The gist of it is that ‘we’ (the West) have compelling a narrative, whilst Russia’s is ‘clunky’ – ‘Us winning therefore, is inevitable’.

It is easy to scoff, but nonetheless we can recognise in it a certain substance (even if that substance is an invention). Narrative is now how western élites imagine the world. Whether it is the pandemic emergency, the climate or Ukraine ‘emergencies’ – all are re-defined as ‘wars’. All are ‘wars’ that are to be fought with a unitary imposed narrative of ‘winning’, against which all contrarian opinion is forbidden.

The obvious flaw to this hubris is that it requires you to be at war with reality. At first, the public are confused, but as the lies proliferate, and lie is layered upon lie, the narrative separates further and further from touched reality, even as mists of dishonesty continue to swathe themselves loosely around it. Public scepticism sets in. Narratives about the ‘why’ of inflation; whether the economy be healthy or not; or why we must go to war with Russia, begin to fray.

Western élites have ‘bet their shirts’ on maximum control of ‘media platforms’, absolute messaging conformity and ruthless repression of protest as their blueprint for a continued hold in power.

Yet, against the odds, the MSM is losing its hold over the U.S. audience. Polls show growing distrust of the U.S. MSM. When Tucker Carlson’s first ‘anti-message’ Twitter show appeared, the noise of tectonic plates grinding against each other was unmissable, as more than 100 million (one in three) Americans listened to iconoclasm.

The weakness to this new ‘liberal’ authoritarianism is that its key narrative myths can get busted. One just has; slowly, people begin to speak reality.

Ukraine: How do you win an unwinnable war? Well, the élite answer has been through narrative. By insisting against reality that Ukraine is winning, and Russia is ‘cracking’. But such hubris eventually is busted by facts on the ground. Even the western ruling classes can see their demand for a successful Ukrainian offensive has flopped. At the end, military facts are more powerful than political waffle: One side is destroyed, its many dead become the tragic ‘agency’ to upending dogma.

“We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met … [however] unless Ukraine wins this war, there’s no membership issue to be discussed at all” – Jens Stoltenberg’s statement at Vilnius. Thus, after urging Kiev to throw more (hundreds of thousands) of its men into the jaws of death to justify NATO membership, the latter turns its back on its protégé. It was, after all, an unwinnable war from the beginning.

The hubris, at one level, lay in NATO’s pitting of its alleged ‘superior’ military doctrine and weapons versus that of a deprecated, Soviet-style, hide-bound, Russian military rigidity – and ‘incompetence’.

But military facts on the ground have exposed the western doctrine as hubris – with Ukrainian forces decimated, and its NATO weaponry lying in smoking ruins. It was NATO that insisted on re-enacting the Battle of 73 Easting (from the Iraqi desert, but now translated into Ukraine).

In Iraq, the ‘armoured fist’ punched easily into Iraqi tank formations: It was indeed a thrusting ‘fist’ that knocked the Iraqi opposition ‘for six’. But, as the U.S. commander at that tank battle (Colonel Macgregor), frankly admits, its outcome against a de-motivated opposition largely was fortuitous.

Nonetheless ‘73 Easting’ is a NATO myth, turned into the general doctrine for the Ukrainian forces – a doctrine structured around Iraq’s unique circumstance.

The hubris – in line with the Daily Telegraph video – however, ascends vertically to impose the unitary narrative of a coming western ‘win’ onto the Russian political sphere too. It is an old, old story that Russia is military weak, politically fragile, and prone to fissure. Conor Gallagher has shown with ample quotes that it was exactly the same story in World War 2, reflecting a similar western underestimation of Russia – combined with a gross overestimation of their own capabilities.

The fundamental problem with ‘delusion’ is that the exit from it (if it occurs at all) moves at a much slower pace than events. The mismatch can define future outcomes.

It may be in the Team Biden interest now to oversee an orderly NATO withdrawal from Ukraine – such that it avoids becoming another Kabul debacle.

For that to happen, Team Biden needs Russia to accept a ceasefire. And here lies the (the largely overlooked) flaw to that strategy: It simply is not in the Russian interest to ‘freeze’ the situation. Again, the assumption that Putin would ‘jump’ at the western offer of a ceasefire is hubristic thinking: The two adversaries are not frozen in the basic meaning of the term – as in a conflict in which neither side has been able to prevail over the other, and are stuck.

Put simply, whereas Ukraine structurally hovers at the brink of implosion, Russia, by contrast, is fully plenipotent: It has large, fresh forces; it dominates the airspace; and has near domination of the electromagnetic airspace. But the more fundamental objection to a ceasefire is that Moscow wants the present Kiev collective gone, and NATO’s weapons off the battle field.

So, here is the rub: Biden has an election, and so it would suit the Democratic campaign needs to have an ‘orderly wind-down’. The Ukraine war has exposed too many wider American logistic deficiencies. But Russia has its’ interests, too.

Europe is the party most trapped by ‘delusion’ – starting from the point at which they threw themselves unreservedly into the Biden ‘camp’. The Ukraine narrative broke at Vilnius. But the amour propre of certain EU leaders puts them at war with reality. They want to continue to feed Ukraine into the grinder – to persist in the fantasy of ‘total win’: “There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin … We have to take all risks for that. No compromise is possible, no compromise”.

The EU Political Class have made so many disastrous decisions in deference to U.S. strategy – decisions that go directly against Europeans’ own economic and security interests – that they are very afraid.

If the reaction of some of these leaders seems disproportionate and unrealistic (“There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin”) – it is because this ‘war’ touches on a deeper motivations. It reflects existential fears of an unravelling of the western meta-narrative that will take down both its hegemony, and the western financial structure with it.

The western meta-narrative “from Plato to NATO, is one of superior ideas and practices whose origins lie in ancient Greece, and have since been refined, extended, and transmitted down the ages (through the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and other supposedly uniquely western developments), so that we in the west today are the lucky inheritors of a superior cultural DNA”.

This is what the narrators of the Daily Telegraph video probably had at the back of their minds when they insist that ‘Our narrative wins wars’. Their hubris resides in the implicit presumption: that the West somehow always wins – is destined to prevail – because it is the recipient of this privileged genealogy.

Of course, outside of general understanding, it is accepted that notions of ‘a coherent West’ has been invented, repurposed and put to use in different times and places. In her new book, The West, classical archaeologist Naoíse Mac Sweeney takes issue with the ‘master myth’ by pointing out that it was only “with the expansion of European overseas imperialism over the seventeenth century, that a more coherent idea of the West began to emerge – one being deployed as a conceptual tool to draw the distinction between the type of people who could legitimately be colonised, and those who could legitimately be colonizers”.

With the invention of the West came the invention of Western history – an elevated and exclusive lineage that provided an historical justification for the Western domination. According to the English jurist and philosopher Francis Bacon, there were only three periods of learning and civilization in human history: “one among the Greeks, the second among the Romans, and the last among us, that is to say, the nations of Western Europe”.

The deeper fear of western political leaders therefore – complicit in the knowledge that the ‘Narrative’ is a fiction that we tell ourselves, despite knowing that it is factually false – is that our era has been made increasingly and dangerously contingent on this meta-myth.

They quake, not just at a ‘Russia empowered’, but rather at the prospect the new multi-polar order led by Putin and Xi that is sweeping the globe will tear down the myth of Western Civilisation.

By John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

“He was not a nihilist for nothing!”

This is one of the funniest, and at the same time one of the saddest lines written by Ivan Turgenev in Fathers and Sons, the novel of his which preserves its contemporaneity through the Russian revolutions better than any other classic of Russian literature.

Appearing to come out of the stream of consciousness of one of story’s characters, the line is also an irony of Turgenev’s — and if you understand that he meant nihilist as a synonym of Russian, it is a warning of great philosophical force for right now. Right now is a synonym for June 22, 1941, when Hitler invaded to destroy the Russians; and for June 24, 1812, when Napoleon tried the same. Those two names can’t be synonyms for Biden because the German and the Frenchman weren’t demented or led by psychopaths.

Turgenev’s line is comic because in thinking the opposite of what the character had said aloud, he was also making fun of himself.

It is sad because nihilism as an idea or an ideology turns out to be pose, a man’s vanity, a will o’ the wisp, in short nothing at all. And it is exposed, dismantled, destroyed by the woman of the story, Anna Sergeyevna Odintsova, who causes the nihilist to fall in love with her, and then in getting him to admit it to her she annihilates – that’s the precise word – every conviction the nihilist said he stood for.   

In the plot of the book, this destruction takes place at the midpoint of the story. The man remains alive, as does Odintsova, his destroyer, and both of them spend the rest of the novel compensating for what has happened. But the lines Turgenev wrote as if in Odintsova’s stream of consciousness are terrible. Read them again — she was forced “to look behind her – and there she had seen not even an abyss but only a void… chaos without shape”. This is destruction, not of a man or a woman, but of meaning.

Today this is a warning for Russians facing the attack of enemies determined, after seventy years of planning to destroy them, to finish the job once and for all.  In Turgenev’s telling, what had just happened was the destruction of all meaning of what had already happened, interpreted retrospectively. What follows in the tale, and for its readers, is survival after hindsight of the void.

A lot of guff has been written for a hundred and fifty years about what is called the central character of the story, Yevgeny Vasilievich Bazarov the nihilist. This is a mistake. The central character is the woman, Odintsova. It is she who reduces the pretensions, and also all the qualities of the man, to next to nothing. She does so without malice, but with a clarity that ruins Bazarov. This woman Odintsova  is in Turgenev’s description a force, almost not a physical body at all.  

Turgenev himself was unusually tall – 1.9 metres, or 6 feet 2 inches¹. At that height it’s impossible not to notice the height of a woman to whom one is attracted – believe me, I too am 1.9 metres, 6 feet 2 inches.  And indeed, although most of the tall things in Turgenev’s story are either men or trees, the first glimpse of Odintsova entering a ballroom registers that she is “a tall woman in a black gown”. Bazarov then remarks: “What a face! No one in the room has anything like it.” But that’s the only physical particular he is reported by Turgenev to have acknowledged.   

Left: the English translations quoted come from the 1965 Penguin Classics edition, in which the translator was Rosemary Edmonds;   Right:  the digital text used here to analyse what Turgenev didn’t intend to be understood by readers about his methodical mind, as distinct from his professional intention, was first published just eight years ago -- by the Gutenberg Project in 2015. The English translation used is the 1921 edition by by C.J. Hogarth. Click to open.

Otherwise, Odintsova is described hardly at all – no arms, hands, lips, not even her eyes. These are “brilliant”, then “clear”, and finally “beautiful”, but Turgenev gives them no colour, shape, or size. Fancy a face described without features — impossible you might say. But not in this story.

Turgenev dissembles with Odintsova’s nose and skin in order to demean her: “Her nose – like most Russian noses² – was a trifle thick and her complexion was not translucently clear”.  Surrounding Odintsova, Turgenev draws much more distinctive noses, including the nose of the pet Borzoi dog, and on occasion arranges to blow them with special effect. Odintsova is reported to pay special attention to an ancient Greek statue acquired by her late husband – of the Goddess of Silence – whose missing nose Odintsova refuses to replace, and because of that stores out of sight.  

Bazarov is revealed to have erotic desire for Odintsova by a passing reference to “her pair of shoulders” – as if she were an unsaddled  pony. Much more is revealed in Turgenev’s multiple references to the rustling sound of Odintsova’s silk dresses, explaining that “Bazarov followed [her] with his eyes fixed upon the floor, and his ears open to no sound but the faint rustling of a silk dress.”  Odintsova’s silks are black – she was a widow – and Turgenev mentions this colour 19 times.    The colour white, on the other hand, appears 31 times;  but when Bazarov flirts with another woman, kissing her twice on her parted lips, he does so by reaching across her to select from her bouquet a red rose instead of a white one.

Odintsova and Bazarov try to find complementarity, not in art which Bazarov says he despises, but in botany. Accordingly, Turgenev sets a spray of fuchsias in her hair at a ball. However, the other flowers he writes into the story —  which is set in late spring, early summer when there is abundant blossom – are acacia, lilac and roses – these Turgenev fixes to other, lesser characters.

The contemporaneity of Fathers and Sons , along with the originality of Turgenev’s insight, comes at the midpoint climax when Odintsova destroys Bazarov. Thereafter, the tale turns into a conventional 19th century romance in which there is a happy love ending, consummated in  marriage for everybody except Bazarov. He dies a painful, possibly self-inflicted death from typhus after doing better at a pistol duel than he had expected. Before Bazarov breathes his last he is visited, and kissed on the forehead,  by Odintsova; subsequently she too  marries. Presenting that union in his dénouement, Turgenev makes a political statement which  readers of today can hardly miss.   

“My father will tell you what a loss I shall be to Russia”, Bazarov whispers to Odintsova on his deathbed. “That’s bosh, but don’t disillusion the old man.” Bazarov’s extraordinary self-conviction and ambition for himself are thereby exposed to be the very antithesis of his nihilism.  By contrast, Odintsova, according to Turgenev’s epilogue for the surviving characters, “has recently married again, not for love but out of conviction (that it was the reasonable thing to do) a man who promises to be one of the future leaders of Russia.” Turgenev then itemizes what he projects to be the characteristics of the future leaders of Russia — “a very able lawyer possessed of vigorous practical sense, a strong will and remarkable gifts of eloquence. He is quite young still, kind-hearted and as cold as ice.”

It cannot escape readers that in the 162 years since Turgenev wrote that, there has been only one leader of the Russian state to have fitted this bill.

Once met, any man with a heart would want to love Odintsova, and much more importantly, to be loved by her. Bazarov failed and got his dressing-down and his comeuppance. If you are fortunate, you may be loved by a Russian woman of Odintsova’s quality.  If that happens to you, you can forget what you’ve been told since this war began about your brothers and sisters, the Ukrainians.

But was the object of the man’s love in this tale the woman at all? Was what we love with passion, what we must defend and fight to save if we are to keep our honour, a woman —  or is it something else? War shortens the time for such speculation, disallows the risk of such choice.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner Group, in Rostov, June 24, 2023

The dust has settled following last weekend’s abortive insurrection by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the private military company known as the Wagner Group, and some 8,000 fighters he employed, against Russian President Vladimir Putin. A clearer picture has since emerged about what exactly transpired during this coup, and why these events unfolded as they did. It also has allowed time to shine a light on Wagner Group, revealing it as something more than the invincible band of heroic Russian patriots celebrated by Russian society at large. Instead, a less complimentary image of Wagner emerges, one which portrays it as a business venture run by a corrupt narcissist who used Russian state funds to build a cult of personality that hypnotized an unwitting Russian populace into believing that Wagner was the sole source of salvation for Russia from the threat posed by the war with Ukraine.

As a military analyst with no small amount of experience in covering armed conflict, I don’t believe that I am susceptible to being star-struck in the presence of men who have earned, through experience, reputations as warriors of formidable stature. I was myself a US Marine, a member of a fraternity of sea-going warriors proud of both their martial history and military abilities, which are held to be second to none. I have served in harm’s way with special operators from America’s most elite military units and have worked closely with similarly skilled professionals from other nations. I think I have a good judge of what constitutes military competence and am not hesitant to give credit to where it is due.

Scott Ritter will discuss this article and answer audience questions on Ep. 78 of Ask the Inspector .

As someone who follows events in the Middle East closely, I had been tracking the activities of the Wagner Group in Syria since their initial deployment in 2015. Their reputation as skilled fighters was earned in the blood of dozens of their comrades who lost their lives fighting terrorists affiliated with the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. As such, when in 2022 rumors started to circulate about the presence of Wagner Group fighters operating alongside the Russian Army in the region of the Donbas, I took notice. It was difficult to find credible sources of information, and the Wagner Group was reticent about anyone giving out information about its activities. But eventually I was able to piece together an understanding of the role played by Wagner in the Donbas, along with the impact Wagner had on the war. My analysis, both spoken and written, reflected the high regard I had for the Wagner Group as a combat formation, and the heroism and skill of the soldiers it employed.

Prior to my recent visit to Russia, my host informed me that the Wagner forces engaged in the fierce fighting around Bakhmut spoke highly of my analysis and could be counted among my biggest fans. Indeed, during my visit, I was introduced to several Wagner veterans, and a few serving Wagner employees, all of whom wanted to shake my hand, and many of whom presented me with gifts signifying the depth of their appreciation for my work. Whether it was a combat knife, a chrome-plated sledgehammer (an unofficial symbol of the Wagner Group), or various Wagner combat patches (including one embroidered with my name), I was taken aback by the level of genuine and heartfelt affection these Wagner men—noted for their toughness under fire—showed for me.

When the events of June 23-24 unfolded before me, I was taken aback. An organization that I held in the highest esteem was engaged in an act of self-destruction before my very eyes, engaged in conduct—an armed insurrection against a constitutionally-mandated government—that any military professional imbued with a respect for the chain of command and the nation he or she served would find reprehensible. Like many others, I was compelled to reexamine my understanding of the Wagner Group, the people it employed, and its history in the service of Russia.

Relatively little is known about the formation of the Wagner Group. What little information is available comes from Yevgeny Prigozhin himself and, as such, must be seen in the context of his tendency for self-promotion. Prigozhin long denied any involvement with Wagner Group, and indeed initiated legal action against journalists (including Bellingcat) who reported on his involvement. This changed in September 2022, when Prigozhin openly discussed his role with Wagner Group in a post published on his Telegram page.

Wagner’s origins date back to February 2014, following the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s constitutionally-elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, by Ukrainian nationalists backed by the United States and European Union. At that time, Crimea was part of Ukraine. Shortly after the Maidan revolution ousted Yanukovych, right-wing Ukrainian nationalists attempted to take control of Crimea, which had a majority ethnic-Russian population whose loyalties leaned decisively toward Moscow. The nationalists were confronted by so-called “self defense units” drawn from the local pro-Russian citizenry.

But there were other actors on the ground as well. Concerned that the Ukrainian government would call out the Ukrainian army to intervene, the Russian government mobilized a force of several hundred “little green men,” consisting of elite Russian special forces who, because of constitutional limitations regarding the deployment of regular Russian army forces on the soil of a foreign nation, were “sheep dipped” (a US term made popular during the CIA’s covert war in Laos in the 1960’s and 70’s, where active duty US Air Force officers would be transferred to the CIA’s “Air America” proprietary company for operations inside Laos.)

The man put in charge of these “sheep dipped” special operators was Dmitry Utkin, a recently-retired Lieutenant Colonel who had previously commanded a Russian special forces (Spetznaz) unit affiliated with Russian Military Intelligence (GRU). Utkin and his “little green men” played a leading role in the Russian takeover of Crimea on February 26, 2014, four days after Yanukovych fled Ukraine. Following the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014, Utkin’s “little green men” were dispatched to Lugansk, where they were tasked with providing training and assistance to the pro-Russian fighters that had taken up arms against the Ukrainian nationalists who had seized power in Kiev.

As the fighting expanded, so, too, did the role of the “little green men,” and by April it became clear that the Russian government would need to create a more formal organization which would serve as the conduit for military assistance to the pro-Russian militias fighting in the Donbas. On May 1, 2014, a new entity, known as the “Wagner Group” (named after the call sign—“Wagner”—used by Utkin) was created and given a contract with the Ministry of Defense to serve in this role. While Utkin served as the military commander of this new organization, “Wagner Group” itself was managed by a group of civilian businessmen headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who by that time had established himself as a successful restaurateur whose clients included Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Wagner was heavily involved in the fighting that raged in the Donbas from May 2014 through February 2015, when a ceasefire came into effect after the signing of the Minsk 2 accords. With the fighting in Ukraine winding down, Prigozhin and Utkin sought to exploit Utkin’s own past experience as a mercenary in Syria. The ability to deploy a professional military unit capable of operating on foreign soil where regular Russian forces were prohibited was attractive to the Russian Ministry of Defense, who contracted with Wagner to provide military assistance to the embattled Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad. Wagner’s success in Syria led to additional “support contracts” being executed for operations in several African countries. In addition to being paid by the Russia government, Wagner Group was able to arrange its own economic relationships with its African clients, which led to several profitable ventures designed to enrich its owners, including Prigozhin.

On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian military to commence what was being called a “Special Military Operation” (SMO) against Ukraine. The Russian military began deploying onto the soil of the Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republics (which were both recognized by Russia as independent states days prior to the SMO being kicked off), where they fought alongside local militias. Wagner Group continued to operate on the territory of the Donbas in a reduced capacity from 2015 until the SMO’s initiation.

After the collapse of the April 1, 2022, peace negotiation between Russia and Ukraine scheduled to take place in Istanbul, Turkey, the Russian military was instructed to begin large-scale offensive operations intended to liberate the territory of the Donbas still occupied by Ukraine. On May 1, 2023, a new contract was signed between the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Wagner Group for some 86 billion rubles, or $940 million, to expand the scope and scale of its Ukrainian operation from advisory and assistance to that of a combat unit of roughly division-size capable of largescale fighting against regular Ukrainian forces. To sweeten the deal, the Russian Ministry of Defense signed a separate 80-billion-ruble deal (some $900 million) for the provision of food to the Russian Army using Prigozhin’s catering company.

War, it seems, had become very profitable business for Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Wagner played a major role in many of the battles waged in the spring and summer of 2022 which, collectively, became known as the Battle of the Donbas. Wagner was initially organized as a battalion-sized unit of several hundred highly-trained military veterans. As the fighting dragged on, the Wagner forces began to expand in size and capabilities, soon acquiring their own armor and artillery forces, as well as dedicated fighter aircraft. By the time the Lugansk city of Sievierodonetsk fell to Russian forces, on June 25, 2022, the Wagner Group was a division-sized unit which had developed a reputation for expertise in urban warfare, taking the lead in clearing Ukrainian troops who were dug in among the ruins of that city. By the fall of the neighboring city of Lysychansk, on July 3, 2022, the Wagner Group had become synonymous with operational excellence.

The fighting in Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, however successful it was for the Russians and Wagner, had proven to be extremely costly from the standpoint of casualties. It became apparent to both the military command structure of Wagner, built around a cadre of experienced military veterans known as the “commanders council,” and Wagner’s corporate owners, headed by Prigozhin, that Wagner would suffer both in terms of military efficiency and profitability if it had to recruit and train seasoned veterans to replace those who had fallen in battle. During the house-to-house fighting that defined the Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk battles, Wagner’s small unit commanders had developed tactics which combined firepower (indirect artillery and direct fire support from tanks) with aggressive infantry assaults which could overwhelm Ukrainian defenders.

Rather than waste experienced fighters in this style of fighting, Prigozhin began recruiting new fighters from Russian prisons, promising them expungement of their criminal record in exchange for a six-month contract to fight on the frontlines. The Wagner commanders would train these inmate recruits over the course of a 21-day program that focused on the rudimentary combat skills needed to execute the Wagner urban warfare tactics, before organizing them into “shock” units which would be fed into the fighting. These units, while ultimately effective, suffered up to 60% casualties. Between 30-50,000 convicts were eventually recruited by Wagner, of whom 10-15,000 are believed to have been killed in the subsequent fighting for the cities of Soledar and Bakhmut.

The battles for the twin cities of Soledar and Bakhmut began on August 1, 2022. Wagner Group and its inmate “shock” units played a central role in the intense combat that followed. By this time, the world was starting to take notice of the fighters of this private military company. Labeled as mercenaries by the Western media and governments, and patriotic heroes by the pro-Russian citizens of the Donbas whose homes, villages, towns, and cities were being liberated, Wagner began emerging from the shadows. Whereas previously the Russian government and media were reticent to even acknowledge its existence, by the end of September 2022 Prigozhin, who had famously sued journalists who (accurately) reported that he was the owner of Wagner Group, wrote a posting on his Telegram channel admitting that he was, indeed, the owner.

While many observers took Prigozhin’s unexpected step into the spotlight as a sign of Wagner’s increasing public profile, the reality behind Prigozhin’s decision was simple business. From September 25-27, 2022, the citizens of the Donbas undertook a referendum on whether they wanted to be incorporated as part of the Russian Federation. By the end of the first day, it was clear that the result would be an overwhelming “yes.”

Prigozhin went public with his role as the owner of Wagner Group on September 26, 2022. This was the first salvo of what would become a massive public relations campaign designed to create the impression that Wagner was an essential part of the Russian war effort, whose fighters were singularly capable of defeating the Ukrainians. Prigozhin’s public relations campaign was further enhanced by the fact that the Russian public had been shocked by the retreat of the Russian army during the Ukrainian Kharkov Offensive, which began on September 6, 2022. While the regular army was in retreat, the forces of Wagner continued to advance along the Soledar-Bakhmut front, providing the Russian people with the only example of battlefield success during these dark times.

For Prigozhin, it became essential that he separate Wagner from the Russian Army in the eyes of the Russian people. The reason why was simple—with the Donbas now part of the Russian Federation, Wagner Group was in technical violation of Russian laws which prohibited the operation of private military contractors on Russian soil. Already there was talk about the need to change the contractual status of Wagner’s relationship with the Russian Ministry of Defense as soon as Wagner’s contract expired on May 1, 2023.

But Prigozhin had a money-making system in place, especially when it came to the use of convicts. Prigozhin could pay them less than a regular Wagner recruit, and the cost of their training was miniscule compared to that given more specialized fighters. The money saved by this process was estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars, all of which flowed back into the pockets of Prigozhin and his fellow owners and investors. Desperate to keep this enterprise intact, Prigozhin went on the offensive, publicly condemning senior Russian generals and officials, including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

In November Wagner unveiled a shiny new center in Saint Petersburg designed to propel the company into the psyche of the Russian public as a major player in Russian national security affairs. All the while, the fighters of Wagner pressed forward their attacks on Soledar and Bakhmut, driven by Prigozhin’s desire to be seen as the only effective fighting force fighting the Ukrainians. And, increasingly, the fighters leading the charge were units composed on former Russian inmates.

But Prigozhin was running into a problem. He was forced to stop recruiting from prisons for the simple fact that he lacked a contract vehicle to pay the inmates after May 1,2023, meaning the last inmate recruit was processed by Wagner by December 1, 2022. Prisoners were still allowed to volunteer as frontline fighters, but they would have to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense going forward. Since the prisoner contracts were linked to specific periods of service that had to be fulfilled before their records could be expunged, Wagner could not commit inmates to anything less than a full-six-month term of enlistment. Wagner could still recruit non-inmate persons, since there would be no legal headaches created if Wagner did not renew its contract with the Ministry of Defense.

While Prigozhin’s PR campaign was a tremendous success (Wagner even released a feature-length film, Best in Hell, in February 2023 that brought the horrors of urban warfare—and the individual heroism of the Wagner fighters—to the screen), he was failing to win over the Minster of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, and the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces and First Deputy Minister of Defense, Valery Gerasimov. Prigozhin turned what should have been a professional disagreement about legalities into a personal matter filled with allegations of corruption and incompetence. Prigozhin also began accusing the Russian Ministry of Defense of deliberately holding back on the provision of ammunition to Wagner forces, a phenomenon he described as “shell hunger,” which resulted in Wagner forces suffering disproportionally high casualties.

Prigozhin began to behave erratically. It was becoming increasingly clear that the Wagner contract was not going to be renewed, meaning that Wagner forces would have to be incorporated into the very Russian Ministry of Defense Prigozhin was publicly denigrating, a move widely rejected by the rank and file of Wagner as well as its leadership. It also was becoming clear that Prigozhin’s lucrative food contract with the Ministry of Defense was likewise not going to be renewed, an action most probably related to Prigozhin’s attacks on the Defense Ministry’s two most senior officials, Shoigu and Gerasimov.

It was around this time that Prigozhin first discussed the issue of what would become of Wagner’s 50,000-strong force if the Russian Ministry of Defense continued to insist on their formal incorporation. In an interview in February 2023 with Semyon Pegov (“War Gonzo”), a pro-Russian combat correspondent and blogger, the topic of a potential Wagner attack on Moscow was raised in the context of why the Ministry of Defense was restricting ammunition. While Prigozhin noted that the idea did not originate with him, he indicated that it was interesting—not something one wants to hear from who owns a large, combat-hardened, well-equipped private army.

It was also in February 2023 that, according to US intelligence, Prigozhin and the Ukrainian intelligence service began communicating directly. Perhaps picking up on Prigozhin’s frustration and paranoia, the Ukrainian intelligence service notified the Wagner owner of a plot involving former Wagner personnel to orchestrate a coup in Moldova. Prigozhin and Wagner had, by this time, been conducting secret talks with Ukrainian intelligence. Concerned that Russian intelligence had gotten wind of these discussions, Ukraine raised the possibility of Prigozhin’s arrest and subsequent labeling as a traitor.

The impact of Prigozhin losing nearly $2 billion in contacts, combined with an increasing level of paranoia on his part that he was caught up in a life-or-death struggle with Shoigu and Gerasimov, led the Wagner owner to double down on his vitriolic attacks on Russia’s military leadership, and thereby create the impression that he and Wagner alone could guarantee military victory for Russia over Ukraine. These attacks reached their culmination in the final fights for Bakhmut, which concluded on May 20, 2023, when Prigozhin announced that his fighters had captured the city. Prigozhin spoke of the “meatgrinder” aspect of this battle, and how Wagner—at great sacrifice—“broke the back” of the Ukrainian army, killing between 55-70,000 Ukrainian soldiers for a loss of between 20-30,000 of its fighters.

As Russia celebrated the accomplishments of Wagner in Bakhmut—elevating even further the near-mythological status Wagner and its fighters enjoyed in the eyes of an adoring Russian public—Prigozhin had more pressing matters to deal with. His contract with the Ministry of Defense had expired. He had been given a two-month extension—through July 1, 2023—given the fact that Wagner was heavily engaged in the fighting in Bakhmut. After that time, however, the Wagner forces operating in the Donbas would have to enter a contractual relationship with the Ministry of Defense or else be disbanded. Prigozhin withdrew his fighters from Bakhmut to camps in eastern Lugansk, where he lobbied his combat-hardened commanders to reject the terms of the Ministry of Defense, and instead join him to create a common front of opposition to the leadership of the Russian military.

Prigozhin’s opposition to Shoigu and Gerasimov, and his plotting to supplant them, did not escape the attention of either the Russian government or Russia’s enemies in Ukraine, the US, and Great Britain. Vladimir Putin, in a speech delivered to Russian security officials on June 27, indicated that Russian officials were in constant contact with the commanders of Wagner to warn them not to help Prigozhin use Wagner for his own personal ambition. Days before Prigozhin sent Wagner forces to Rostov and Moscow, the CIA briefed US Congress and President Biden on the existence of Prigozhin’s plot. The British MI-6 did the same, briefing the British Prime Minister as well as Ukrainian President Zelensky.

According to Ukrainian sources, the British also lobbied the Ukrainians to pause offensive operations during the window of time Prigozhin was expected to move on Moscow in the hopes that a civil war would break out that would cause Russia to withdraw combat troops from the frontline, providing the Ukrainian army with increased opportunities for success. MI-6 also used its connectivity with the Ukrainian intelligence services, in coordination with MI-6-controlled Russian oligarchs operating out of London, to reinforce Prigozhin’s belief that he had the support of the Russian military, politicians, and business elite, all of whom Prigozhin was led to believe would rally to his side once Wagner began marching on Moscow.

The failure of Prigozhin’s gambit has already become cemented in history. However, there remains an element of Russian society which, having been swayed by Prigozhin’s intensive PR campaign, continue to believe that Prigozhin’s complaints against Shoigu and Gerasimov were legitimate and, as such, so too was his march of Moscow. The facts speak otherwise. At the time of Prigozhin’s precipitous move on Moscow, Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov were overseeing a Russian military campaign that was eviscerating Ukraine’s NATO-trained army, inflicting casualties at a 10-to-1 ration. During the first three weeks of the current Ukrainian counteroffensive, more than 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed, along with hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles—many of which were just recently supplied to Ukraine—destroyed. The Russian military was well-equipped, well-trained, and well-led. Morale was high. Any notion that Shoigu and Gerasimov were professionally incompetent was belied by the facts.

Prigozhin has bragged about the superiority of the Wagner forces when compared to those of the Russian Army. But the real reason the Wagner forces halted their march on Moscow and returned to their barracks was the fact that they had encountered the Russian military outside Serpukhov, south of Moscow. There, some 2,500 Russian special forces backed by Russian air power were waiting. At the same time, some 10,000 Chechen “Akhmat” special forces had closed in on Rostov-on-Don, where Prigozhin had taken up headquarters, and were preparing to assault the city with the intent to destroy the Wagner forces deployed there, along with their leader. Wagner’s combat experience could not make up for the fact that they were not prepared to carry out sustained ground combat against Russian ground and air forces.

Prigozhin was not only confronted with the reality of his imminent demise and of the men who had accompanied him, but, contrary to the expectations created by the British and Ukrainian intelligence services before the Wagner mutiny, the fact that not a single military unit or officer, not a single politician, and not a single businessman—no one—rallied to Prigozhin’s cause; Russia had sided with its President, Vladimir Putin. While Prigozhin’s extensive PR campaign had succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of Russian people, it had failed to convince people that they should betray their president.

In the interest of avoiding Russian-on-Russian bloodshed, Prigozhin accepted a compromise, brokered by Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, that had he, Dmitry Utkin (the only senior Wagner commander to join him) and the 8,000 Wagner fighters who participated in the failed coup return to their camps in eastern Lugansk. There they would disarm, turning over their heavy weapons to the Russian military, before being sent off into exile in Belarus. For those Wagner fighters—some 17,000—who refused to participate in Prigozhin’s act of treachery, they, along with their commanders, were given the option to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense or go home. Prigozhin’s contracts were cancelled, and Wagner disbanded. Moreover, there would be no changes in the Russian Ministry of Defense—Shoigu and Gerasimov would remain in their respective positions.

Even had Prigozhin not betrayed Russia, the Wagner Group would have ceased to exist as Prigozhin’s private army. However, the Wagner Group’s honor would have remained intact. Prigozhin’s treachery guaranteed that Wagner will be forever tainted by the greed and naked ambition of its owner, a man who sought to exploit the goodwill of the Russian public that the fighters of Wagner had earned with their blood and sacrifice on battlefields in the Donbas, Syria, and Africa, all in a misguided effort to usurp a constitutionally-mandated government the people had themselves put in power.

Farewell, Wagner—I hardly knew ye.

I have frequently noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not the Stalin or Hitler of today. He is not an irrational, radical, bloodthirsty dictator or imperialist. Nor is he a liberal, democratic republican. Rather, Putin is a moderate authoritarian leader, who will democratize or authoritarianize dependent on what is beneficial for social and political stability, state integrity, and preservation of his and his allies’ hold on power. He is a balancer, who weighs and counterbalances various political forces rather than crushing them. The latter choice is made only when there is no other way to protect the cardinal goals mentioned above. This is true for Putin’s conduct of both domestic and foreign affairs. Putin always tries to find the golden mean, a fair compromise in any dispute between Russia and other states, between himself and other forces comprising the Russian elite clans, and between competing groups. These orientations were on display in the way Putin dealt with Wagner chief Yevgenii Prigozhin’s armed revolt against the top military brass, in particular Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Valerii Gerasimov.

Rather than crushing the rebellion immediately, which would have been relatively easy for the Russian army to accomplish, Putin hoped and sought to avoid ‘major bloodshed’ in a way similar to the way Mikhail Gorbachev rejected the January 1991 Baltic coups attempted by Soviet Party-state loyalists against the secessionist Baltic republics. This was one of the final straws that drove the Party-state to direct a coup against Gorbachev himself seven months later in Moscow—a coup Putin played no small in helping to quell in St. Petersburg. Putin’s political career in a reunifying Germany, a collapsing Soviet state, and the disorderly Yeltsin years of organized crime violence and the Chechen war familiarized Putin with the dangers of rebellion—a lesson he had long ago drawn from his reading of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the treasonous role played by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks during World War I.

Now Putin was facing a far more ticklish situation than that of January 1991 but not as global yet as that of the August coup, no less 1917. The situation can be described as the following. A long-time acquaintance and political ally had betrayed his direct subordinates in the military chain of command – the two top military officials in the Russian state, Shoigu and Gerasimov – and two key pillars of both Putin’s political power and the most important operation in Putin’s political lifetime. There was the risk that had Prigozhin’s march proceeded much longer or actual large-scale conflict exploded inside Russia that morale at the front would have plummeted, risking the success of the special military operation. Moreover, the ‘special military operation’ (SVO) or war in Ukraine provoked by NATO expansion will determine whether the new Russian state – one Putin has spent nearly three decades rebuilding – will survive in its present form and how Putin will go down in history.

In this high-tension situation laced with the sense of personal and political betrayal how did Putin respond? He did not panic, he did not overreact, he methodically employed a sound strategy to keep the crisis from escalating into massive domestic military battle with some, not great, but some potential to spread and even devolve into civil war, depending on his and others’ next steps after a major battle around Serpukhov. He deployed the stick and the carrot, he posed a threat and took the way out. He positioned forces both in Serpukhov and along the other main artery leading to Moscow from the south where some 5,000 Wagner forces were moving on the capitol. He then issued a televised address in which he designated Prigozhin a traitor threatening the Russian state’s stability in a time of war. In other words, Prigozhin could make no mistake in concluding that should he continue the rebellion, he (and his forces) would face certain death or lifetime imprisonment (there is no death penalty in Russia) and go down in history as a modern day Mazepa or Tsarevich Aleksei, both of whom betrayed Russia under Peter the Great by going over to the side of the Swedes and Hapsburgs, respectively. In this situation Prigozhin had little choice but to accept the exit Putin agreed to—his exile to Belarus rather than arrest, trial, and prison for he and his Wagner forces.

Putting aside the risks involved in allowing Prigozhin and Wagner to remain free and intact, albeit trapped abroad, we are told that Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenka phoned Putin and proposed this way out from the crisis. However, it cannot be excluded that it was Putin who phoned Lukashenka, who Putin knows is a friend of Prigozhin of even greater duration and who might be willing to help his friend Prigozhin out of the bind he got himself into. Remember Putin needed an off ramp as desperately as Prigozhin. If it was Lukashenka who phoned Putin and proposed the way out, Putin theoretically could have rejected it. Certainly, a less discerning and balanced leader might have. But Putin is not that leader, and this was not theory. The moderate, careful, and methodical Putin who seeks to avoid extremes in solutions and outcomes was the Russian leader in a very real situation.

Despite Putin’s balanced leadership in this crisis, there can be no doubt that in certain, mostly ultra-nationalist, hardline circles, he has lost some of his authority. Prigozhin was popular among them, and Putin did not allow him to reveal an even uglier side that surely would have come out if the crisis would have ever devolved into a wider rebellion or civil war and Prigozhin came to believe he should and could succeed in seizing power. For these radical circles and perhaps even among others, Prigozhin remains a hero. His survival and potential revival in Belarus, which has shown some ability to destabilize, remains something Putin (and Lukashenka) will have to keep an eye on, as his most recent statements are not repentant (https://t.me/Prigozhin_hat/3815). For the present, Putin emerges from the crisis somewhat tainted politically. Hardliners and less discerning Russians will ask why he did not crush Prigozhin or address Prigozhin’s complaints. Others will rightly say that Prigozhin and his revolt are a consequence of Putin’s ill-advised patronage and tolerance of Prigozhin.

Indeed, Putin tried yesterday and today to shore up solidarity between state and society and inside the state, convening and addressing an assembly of security forces as a show of unity and loyalty to him, the state, and the law. First, last night he gave a short address thanking the people and soldiers under arms for unity and support for the state and its president in the face of the potential instability posed by Prigozhin’s march (www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71528). That the people’s support is his central concern at this point and more generally is reflected by the fact that this address remained first on the official Kremlin site of the Russian president even after subsequent address were made today (see below), breaking the usual chronological order of videos and news on the site (www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71528). Should Putin’s popularity fall below 50 percent and with his aging, there might be some in his inner circle who would be willing to send him into retirement should such crises or debacles at the front become routine. Thus, Putin also checked in with the leaders of the seven main ‘siloviki’ (organs of coercion and law enforcement) departments the same day in a mostly closed meeting devote, according to Putin, to addressing issues related to the recent days’ events, including likely domestic political stability and implications for foreign affairs and the war (www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71530). Present was Defense Minister Shoigu, who might be a little concerned reasonably about the recategorization of the criminal case opened against Prigozhin as an “intraelite conflict,” investigation of such a case could determine or be arranged to put forth a conclusion that Shoigu was perhaps in some way also responsible for the conflict, leading to his dismissal a few months down the road.

This morning Putin addressed briefly an assembly of units of the military, National Guard, FSB, MVD, and FSO troops and officers praising their unity and support of the state and social order during the revolt, “standing in the way of troubles (smuta) that inevitably would have led to chaos” and having “ defended the constitutional order, the life, security and freedom of our citizens, saved our homeland from disturbances, and actually stopped a civil war. After a minute of silence for the some 20 pilots killed in fighting the advancing Wagner rebels, he emphasized: “Your determination and courage, as well as the consolidation of the entire Russian society, played a huge, decisive role in stabilizing the situation.” (www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71533). A few hours later he addressed a select group of what appeared to be young unit commanders, seemingly pilots, to thank them for their service. In the process, he underscored the state’s financing of both Wagner and Prigozhin’s catering company ‘Concord’, while implying that Prigozhin, whom he identified as “the owner” of Wagner and Concord, may have stolen some of those funds, which he said would now be investigated (www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71535). Analysts and Russian citizens might ask themselves what Putin and other members of his government knew about Prigozhin’s misuse of funds earlier and when did they know it.

Despite the bad residue and stain on Putin’s authority left by the Wagner revolt, any objective analysis of his handling of it has to conclude that Putin managed the crisis capably, calmly, carefully, and conservatively. He made no rash moves, demonstrating a desire to save lives rather than exact revenge and found a moderate, peaceful solution to a conflict fraught with potential for great bloodshed. If only NATO had been as judicious and balanced from 1995-2023, then we might have seen the great bloodshed that has resulted in Ukraine since 2014.

A documentary of pianist Glenn Gould's 1957 tour of Soviet Russia. Several sections are muted, apparently because of copyright issues. Just perservere - the sound will resume.

I found myself responding to this with a lot of emotion. Gould seems to resonate with the Russian spirit. Something comes across that can't be expressed with words.

Before coming to Kiev, President Joe Biden sought assurances from Russia that it would not bomb his special train.

The first anniversary of the East-West military confrontation in Ukraine was an opportunity for the West to convince its people that they were "on the right side of history" and that their victory was "inevitable."

None of this is surprising. It is normal for governments to communicate about their activities. Except that here the information is lies by omission and the comments are propaganda. This is such a reversal of reality that one wonders whether the defeated of the Second World War have not come to power in Kiev today.

Russia’s illegal, unjustifiable and unprovoked war

All Western interventions claim that we condemn the "illegal, unjustifiable and unprovoked war of Russia" [1]. This is factually wrong.

Let’s leave aside the qualification of "unjustifiable". It refers to an indecent moral position. No war is just. Every war is the acknowledgement, not of a fault, but of a failure. Let us examine the qualifier "unprovoked".

According to Russian diplomacy, the problem began with the 2014 US-Canadian operation and the overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, in violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and thus the UN Charter. There is no denying that Washington was instrumental in this so-called "revolution of dignity": the then Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, Victoria Nuland, posted herself at the head of the coup plotters.

According to Chinese diplomacy, which has just published two documents on the subject, one should not stop at this operation, but go back to the "Orange Revolution" of 2004, also organized by the United States, to see the first violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and the United Nations Charter. Obviously, if Russia does not mention it, it is because it also played a role in it, which it did not do in 2014.

The Western public is so shocked by the ease with which the United States manipulates mobs and overthrows governments that it is no longer aware of the seriousness of these events. From the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 to the overthrow of Serge Sarkissian in Armenia in 2018, it has become accustomed to forced regime changes. Whether the deposed leaders were good or bad should not matter. What is unbearable and inadmissible is that a foreign state organized their overthrow by masking its action behind a few national opponents. These are acts of war, without military intervention.

Facts are stubborn. The war in Ukraine was caused by the violations of Ukrainian sovereignty in 2004 and 2014. These violations were followed by an eight-year civil war.

Nor is war illegal under international law. The UN Charter does not prohibit the use of war. The Security Council even has the possibility of declaring war (articles 39 to 51). This time the particularity is that it opposes permanent members of the Council.

Russia co-signed the Minsk Agreements to end the civil war. However, not having been born yesterday, it understood from the start that the West did not want peace, but war. So she had the Minsk Agreements endorsed by Security Council Resolution 2202, five days after their conclusion, and then forced the Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev to withdraw his men from the Ukrainian Donbass. It attached to the resolution a statement by the presidents of France, Ukraine and Russia, as well as the German chancellor, guaranteeing the implementation of these texts. These four signatories committed their countries.

– Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko declared in the following days that there was no question of giving anything up, but rather of punishing the inhabitants of Donbass.
– Former Chancellor Angela Merkel told Die Zeit [[2](#nb2 ""Hatten Sie gedacht, ich komme mit Pferdeschwanz?", Tina Hildebrandt und (...)")] that she only wanted to buy time so that NATO could arm the authorities in Kiev. She unknowingly clarified her statement in a discussion with a provocateur she believed to be former President Poroshenko.
– Former President Francois Hollande confirmed in Kyiv Independent the words of Mrs. Merkel [3].
– That left Russia, which implemented a special military operation on February 24, 2022 under its "responsibility to protect". To say that its intervention is illegal is to say, for example, that France’s intervention during the genocide in Rwanda was also illegal and that the massacre should have been allowed to continue.

Emails from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special adviser Vladislav Surkov, which have just been revealed by the Ukrainian side, only confirm this process. In the years that followed, Russia helped the Ukrainian republics of Donbass prepare intellectually for independence. This interference was illegal. It was in response to the equally illegal interference of the United States, which armed not Ukraine but the Ukrainian "integral nationalists. The war had already begun, but Ukrainians exclusively conducted it. It resulted in 20,000 deaths in 8 years. The West and Russia intervened only indirectly.

It is important to understand that by pretending to negotiate peace, Angela Merkel and François Hollande have committed the worst of crimes. Indeed, according to the Nuremberg Tribunal, "crimes against peace" are even more serious than those "against humanity". They are not the cause of this or that massacre, but of the war itself. This is why the chairman of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, has called for the convening of a new Nuremberg Tribunal to try Angela Merkel and François Hollande [4]. The Western press has not relayed this call, which shows us the gulf between the two perceptions of the conflict.

The order of the International Court of Justice of March 16, 2022 stated, as a precautionary measure, that "the Russian Federation must immediately suspend the military operations which it began on February 24, 2022 on the territory of Ukraine" (ref: A/77/4, paragraphs 189 to 197). Moscow did not comply, considering that the Court had been asked about the requirement of genocide perpetrated by Kiev against its own population and not about the military operation to protect the Ukrainian population.

For its part, the United Nations General Assembly has adopted several resolutions, the latest of which is A/ES-11/L.7, of February 23, 2023. The text "Reiterates its demand that the Russian Federation immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all its military forces from Ukrainian territory within the internationally recognized borders of the country, and calls for a cessation of hostilities.

Neither of these texts declares the Russian intervention "illegal. They order or demand that the Russian army withdraw. 141 of 193 states consider that Russia should stop its intervention. Some of them think it is illegal, but most of them think it is "no longer necessary" and is causing unnecessary suffering. This is not the same thing at all.

States have a different point of view than jurists. International law can only sanction what exists. States must protect their citizens from the conflicts that are brewing, before it is too late to respond. That is why the Kremlin did not comply with the UN General Assembly. It did not withdraw from the battlefield. Indeed, it has watched for eight years as NATO has armed Ukraine and prepared for this war. It knows that the Pentagon is preparing a second round in Transnistria [5] and must protect its population from this second operation. Just as it chose the date of its intervention in Ukraine on the basis of information indicating an imminent attack by Kiev on the Donbass, which was only confirmed later [6], so ot is deciding today to liberate the whole of Novorossia, including Odessa. This is legally unacceptable as long as the proof of the Western shenanigans is not provided, but it is already necessary from the point of view of its responsibility.

Clearly, these two ways of thinking have not escaped the notice of observers. Judging that Russian intervention is no longer necessary must be distinguished from supporting the West. That is why only 39 out of 191 states participate in Western sanctions and send weapons to Ukraine.

Ukraine is a "democracy"

The second message from Western leaders is that Ukraine is a "democracy". Apart from the fact that this word has no meaning at a time when the middle classes are disappearing and income disparities have become greater than at any other time in human history, moving away from the egalitarian ideal, Ukraine is anything but a "democracy.

Its constitution is the only racist one in the world. It states in Article 16 that "Preserving the genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people is the responsibility of the state", a passage written by Slava Stetsko, the widow of the Ukrainian Nazi prime minister.

This is the subject that makes people angry. At least since 1994, "full nationalists" (not to be confused with "nationalists"), i.e., people who claim to follow the ideology of Dmytro Dontsov and the work of Stepan Bandera, have held high positions in the Ukrainian state [7]. In fact, this ideology has become more radical over time. It did not have the same meaning during the First World War as during the Second. Nevertheless, Dmytro Dontsov was, from 1942 on, one of the designers of the "final solution of the Jewish and Gypsy questions". He was the administrator of the organ of the Third Reich in charge of murdering millions of people because of their ethnic origin, the Reinhard Heydrich Institute in Prague. Stepan Bandera was the military leader of the Ukrainian Nazis. He commanded numerous pogroms and massacres. Contrary to what his successors claim, he was never interned in a concentration camp, but under house arrest in the suburbs of Berlin, at the headquarters of the concentration camp administration. He ended the war leading the Ukrainian troops under the direct orders of the Führer Adolf Hitler.

One year after the beginning of the Russian military intervention, full nationalist and Nazi symbols are visible everywhere in Ukraine. Forward journalist Lev Golinkin, who has started an inventory of all monuments to criminals involved in Nazi crimes all over the world, has compiled an amazing list of such monuments in Ukraine [8]. According to him, almost all of them are after the 2014 coup. Therefore, it must be admitted that the coup authorities do claim to be "integral nationalism", not simply "nationalism". And for those who doubt that the Jewish President Zelensky celebrates the Nazis, two weeks ago he awarded the "Edelweiss title of honor" to the 10th separate mountain assault brigade in reference to the Nazi 1st mountain division that "liberated" (sic) Kiev, Stalino, the Dnieper crossings and Kharkov [9].

Few Western personalities have agreed with the words of President Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on this subject [10]. However, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and his Defense Minister, General Benny Gantz, have repeatedly stated that Ukraine must comply with Moscow’s injunctions at least on this point: Kiev must destroy all Nazi symbols it displays. It is because Kiev refuses to do so that Israel does not deliver weapons to it: no Israeli weapons will be handed over to the successors of the mass murderers of Jews. This position may of course change with the coalition government of Benjamin Netanyahu, himself an heir to Vladimir Jabotinsky’s "revisionist Zionists" who formed an alliance with the "integral nationalists" against the Soviets.

The current policy of the government of Volodymyr Zelensky is incomprehensible. On the one hand, the democratic institutions are functioning, on the other hand, not only are the integral nationalists being celebrated everywhere, but the opposition political parties and the Orthodox Church under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate have been banned; millions of books have been destroyed because they were written or printed in Russia; 6 million Ukrainians have been declared "collaborators of the Russian invader" and the personalities who support them are being assassinated.

Introduction

Recently, there is a lot of talk about where the escalating spiral will end. Will it conclude in World War III? Will there be a nuclear war? What are the determining factors? And what would indicate World War III is imminent? I'll go through these questions in detail from a strategic perspective.

But, before I do, I'd like to write another short dedication to an author and analyst, that I value very much. I'm talking about Andrei Raevsky, better known under his pseudonym “The Vineyard Saker”. I've read his blog regularly since 2015, and before that for years occasionally. I learned in this time a lot from him with regards to strategic and comprehensive thinking. This is what he does wonderfully. Unfortunately, but understandably, he decided to stop maintaining and writing his blog. Thank you, Andrei, for everything, for recommending my blog and for all the analysis I/we have been able to read for years and even decades. All the best for you and your family, going forwards.

So, will there be a third world war? I would say yes, with absolute certainty. But there are a few questions left that need to be clarified before we start to panic. I personally, currently, see no need for panic. Yet. But about which questions do I speak? About the following:

• When will WW3 break out?

• Under which circumstances?

• Which alliances will participate?

• Where will the main battlefield be?

• Ultimately: Will the big three powers directly clash on a large scale against each other?

I don't have answers to these questions. But you can see that these are strategic questions, not operational questions, such as those we are currently considering in Ukraine. I don't think that the operational questions, whether 100 tanks will be supplied to Ukraine, or even 200 fighter jets, will decide anything about the likelihood of World War III.

What I hope to do here is to help readers develop their strategic thinking so that they can see past the short-sighted operational questions I mentioned before.

Preconditions

We at BMA developed a strategic and operational picture that is still valid. In fact, we can say that from my last operational update, there is nothing to add. I can go even further. I see now, step by step, all the major and well-known podcast analysts jumping on my train. All are now talking instead of big arrows, of methodical grinding on several theatres, to put as much pressure as needed on the Ukrainians so they can collapse. That's perfectly fine for me.

For people, that haven't read my analysis yet, I strongly recommend reading the following articles in this sequence:

1. Analysis of Phase 3 of the war

2. Roles of Artemovsk (Bakhmut), Belarus, Poland and Odessa

3. BMA prediction about the Russian offensive

4. Some backgrounds, why we don't expect “Big Arrow” offensives

Further weapon shipments

Let's start with weapon shipments. We will see later in this article, that I assume, that the war has escalated far more than both sides would have ever thought. From my personal standpoint, I assume, and it could have been observed in my former articles, that Russia planned with escalations up to the destruction of the third iteration of the “Ukrainian” army.

• First iteration:

  Destruction of the initial Ukrainian army. (Until April 2022)

• Second iteration:

  Destruction of the Ukrainian army, equipped with Western light equipment, designed to buffer off Russia, until the “third iteration” has been trained and equipped abroad. The second iteration had been defeated until the end of July 2022.

• Third iteration:

  Soldiers trained abroad and equipped with all the weapons, that countries with old Soviet stockpiles could have spared.

  Destroyed at the day, General Gerasimov took over command of the SMO. 11th of January 2023.

• Fourth iteration:

  This army is currently in the making and is already partially fed into the battle to prevent the frontlines from collapsing. Which exactly is their purpose. To keep the battle (Scorched Earth) up as long as physically possible.

  This army consists of two components, which should make sure, that this goal will be achieved.

  1. Professional army:

  People that are mobilised since a few months and trained abroad, will make the professional part of this army. These are mainly “ideologically confused, highly motivated” people. There is also one single word for this.

  They will be trained on new western weapons and equipment. There is a high probability, that the initial plan, a few months ago, has been, to use them for another offensive, to produce another “defeat” for the Russians before the total collapse of Ukraine. But as it looks, the events have been faster.

  There certainly is no room any longer for any kind of offensives. This units will most likely be used for operational mobile defence. In other words, they will be used, where it hurts the most, to slow down the collapse. See BMA's five theatres. The big question is, will this army be used wisely on the West side of the Dnieper in a mobile way, to inflict the most possible damage to the Russians, or will it simply be fed into the Donbass meatgrinder and be buried along with the Ukrainian state?

  2. Forced conscript army:

  As far as I can remotely judge it, I have the feeling that all “ideologically confused highly motivated Ukrainians” are “depleted” or in the process of being depleted within the fourth iteration fire brigade. See above.

  One of the reasons of course is, that the government's propaganda, that the Ukrainian army had almost no losses, has fallen apart. It is now very well known within Ukraine that everyone who is drafted will either die, be seriously wounded or, in the best case, become a Russian POW.

  There won't be anything else left, because one of the goals of the Russians is the full physical annihilation of the Ukrainian army. Which will be achieved until summer 2023. Until then everyone will be dead, wounded or captured. There may be some hardcore “ideologically confused and highly motivated” people that continue fighting, but they will only act on their own, not as part of an organized military.

  Having said that, we can come back to the conscripts. Since no one wants to die for a lost cause (they know now that it is over and only the dying is left to be done), Ukrainian men are now hiding or otherwise trying to evade the draft. There are now mobile “conscription” teams scouring every city to catch men under any circumstances. The goal of depleting every able-bodied male Ukrainian is still active.

  Well, these unmotivated people, to put it mildly, will be thrown into trenches to buy time. They have no other prospects than to either be killed or, if they are lucky, captured by the Russians.

This is the fourth iteration of the Ukrainian army. The last stand, so to say. One component should buy time by trading blood, the other component should inflict damage on Russia.

This is the last iteration. There are no more human resources left, after this “Volkssturm” mobilisation, to carry on the fight. As I pointed out several times, Ukraine will experience this collapse by summer 2023.

What does it have to do with further weapon deliveries?

Well, the war can only be continued if these last Ukrainians have armoured vehicles. The “confused” Ukrainians are still believing in a victory with Western equipment. They wouldn't continue the fight or charge Russian positions on their bare feet, without armoured assistance.

The following circumstances apply:

• The whole Soviet stock of NATO and Ukraine is depleted.

• The biggest part of the Ukrainian manpower is depleted.

So, a new “Frankenstein” army is being built with all kinds of NATO stuff, to keep the Ukrainians motivated to die for the West. Frankenstein, because it is an incompatible mix of everything, that has no battle value without combined arms ability.

Considering the current state of the Ukrainian army, nothing can help. In fact, it doesn't matter anymore what the West is delivering. It has zero impact on the outcome of the war. It is only a motivator and enabler for the Ukrainians to keep up the fight, until the last “mobilizable” men are killed or captured. It will fully achieve its goal.

Moreover, it will mean far more dead Russians, since the prolongation of the war means far more dead Russians. Which is NOT good.

Red lines

What about red lines? There are red lines indeed. But I don't think that Russia is measuring them by the amount and quality of tanks or planes, that are being sent by the West.

I'm personally convinced that the red lines were agreed by Sergei Naryshkin and William Burns in Ankara on November 14, 2022. And these red lines, from my point of view, concern the control and security of territory after the war.

In fact, I assume that all kinds of weapon deliveries would be “tolerated”, but not with pleasure, by the Russians, as long as there is no risk of lost territory. And Ukraine as a whole, except for places that could be negotiated away to other countries, is being considered as Russian territory.

Why is it accepted? The Ukrainian army is mostly defeated. Russia is fighting against the fourth and last iteration. The best people are already dead or have fled. And there is another major reason. I will cover it in the chapter “Wounded animal”.

The last point, I want to cover in this chapter is Germany. Germany of course is being forced to send its tanks to Ukraine. It will have no military consequences, but the calculation is, that Russia would escalate and break up relations with Germany for all times, because of history. The United States desperately wants to destroy the relations between Germany and Russia forever. So, Germany would depend on America and wouldn't benefit from the new BRICS/SCO-oriented multipolar world order.

Here are some personal thoughts and assumptions:

• Germany wants Ukraine to collapse ASAP, so they come out of the hellish situation, on which they are forced in, by America.

• Russia knows this and keeps backchannel doors open to Germany to manage the transition away from the American grip. I assume the tank deliveries won't change much if there are no further escalations. However, if NATO troops are part of the escalations, we are in WW3.

The West

The West is currently in sharp decline. Economically, militarily and politically.

Nevertheless, we mustn't forget, that the West has been the dominant power for decades. So, of course, it accumulated a lot of wealth and a large military. And now we come to the problem. Russia, more or less, openly worked on implementing the new multipolar world order around BRICS and the SCO. The Americans were aware of this. At the same time, the American empire, carrying on the work of other empires before it, has been working for the destruction of Russia. Therefore, the strategy to turn all former allies and Soviet States around Russia against them and then trigger the internal collapse in Russia.

Well, both Russia and America activated their corresponding plans in 2022. Everyone wants something, but only one side will prevail. Who wins in Ukraine will achieve its geopolitical goals. At least, that's what the parties believe. As of now, it should be clear to the politicians and secret services of all Western states, that it is over. Ukraine will soon fall, and with it, the single-polar American-centric world order.

Russia won't be destroyed.

Goals

What now? Well, the Americans know very well about their fate since their plan in Ukraine failed. Which doesn't need to be the end of the USA. They can become normal and powerful members of the future multipolar world order. Sitting at the table with the other great powers. I think, there are two possible outcomes.

1. Exactly this scenario. America becomes a “normal” multipolar power at the table with others. A single new world system emerges, which is controlled by an organisation and not by states. Either a new kind of UN/League of Nations, or a fundamental reconstruction of the UN and purge of “Western” “influence” and “Influencer”. Hence, the “De-Westernification” of the world.

2. America could decide, to stay an “opposite-pole”, against the multipolar world order. Then we would have two systems at the same time, competing against each other. The rest of the West and the BRICS/SCO states, competing and struggling for the contested bloc-free markets, until there is no bloc-free nation left.

Unfortunately, I assume, that option two will prevail. Which is the worse option for the world and humankind.

What are the goals of such an America (The West)?

• Completely draining power from all its colonies and making them completely dependent on themselves. To secure markets and territory, for the future struggle against the powers of the Heartland. At the same time weakening the Heartland, since Europe is an integral part of it, with a huge potential, if managed correctly.

• The depletion of the weapon stocks of Europe has the positive side effect that all these weapons will need to be replenished. Since the industrial production costs rose sky-high, for example, because of the blowing up of the gas pipelines (what a coincidence) and many other self-defeating reasons, Europe will struggle to reproduce these stocks themselves. The rationale is, that they will come to America and beg for “cheap” weapons.

In fact, America is raping Europe and is forcing them to come back to them and beg for more. Perversion. Or how does Scott Ritter say? Odious!

Wounded animal

Most likely the West didn't expect that the war would develop as it did. I wrote several times about it. First, they expected that Ukraine would fall within days and then they would organize a guerrilla war. Then, after they saw that Russia was not waging a strategic doctrinal offensive but a SMO, they thought, the West will win.

But none of it is true. Neither did Russia win within days, nor will it lose. In fact, it is defeating the West, its armies and economies in Ukraine. Who would have thought that?

America knows very well what its new role will be, so they are preparing for it by making Europe totally dependent on them, deindustrializing it and draining it for the next decade. Not only Europe, but all other colonies as well, including Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, etc.

Here is the problem. Since America is well aware of its impending downfall from a superpower to a normal but powerful nation, it struggles with a certain syndrome. When everything is well, all are happy and are competing to claim the success for themselves. When things go south, then the opposite applies. Everyone tries to blame the other. Which is currently the case in America. I will write a separate article about America. So, I'll go here quickly over it.

There is not one single power that is determining the course of the United States. The ruling oligarchy (the politicians are only “sponsored executioners” of the oligarchy) doesn't know exactly which way to go. There are powers that want to choose option 1, away from the empire and towards multipolarity and there are also powers who don't want to go down without a fight. Unfortunately, the majority of the establishment or oligarchy are supporters of the second option. And here we are. America is acting exactly as a wounded wild animal. It is biting, fighting and scratching everyone around it. Which is extremely dangerous for humankind. One mistake, and everyone dies.

This is what we see in Ukraine. Now, everything short of nuclear weapons will be delivered, what could be handled by the few capable Ukrainians left. And it would be idiotic by Russia to make a big deal out of it. It will be managed. Escalation management. Yes, a few thousand Russians more will die. Or if you count the Ukrainians as Russians, a few tens or hundreds of thousands more. But still, the world will survive.

It is up to Russia and the other civilized people to handle the rage of this wounded animal and contain it, so we won't need to use nuclear weapons or kick-off WW3. That's why Russia is taking many hard punches, without responding.

Challenge

The challenge is for Russia to win the war in Ukraine without escalating too much, to not trigger any reactions from the West, that could still trigger WW3, over Ukraine.

Currently there is no potential for such an escalation if we consider only the Ukrainian and the Russian army. The Ukrainian Army is soon (by the end of the summer 2023) gone. But the Americans could decide to sacrifice the European armies against Russia as another proxy force. Without American involvement.

It is not impossible, even though I think that the probability is very low.

Think of Polish and other European countries sending own troops to defend Western Ukraine, Odessa or Kiev.

People don't want it? There is not such a mood? There are no weapons? Who cares?

Create enough false flag operations within the EU and NATO, activate a large media campaign and you will have fanatical Europeans cheering for war and volunteering to march on Moscow.

Such a scenario needs to be avoided. It is called “escalation management”.

Why did I write that Americans would use the Europeans as a proxy force? Well, Europe is no longer interesting for America. They are pivoting to the new hot spot for trade, Asia. Europe is done. It can be used like a used condom, to further weaken Russia. Throwing old stuff and human waves against the Russians is creating losses for Russia. Both, in people and economically. Learn about opportunity costs. These are costs or revenues, that you did not achieve since you chose to do something less favourable. Hence, Russia could prosper by developing trade and relationships with the “New World”. But instead, it would need to fully mobilize and put a huge part of its resources, money and welfare into the military and war. While other market actors are exploiting the absence of Russia on the world markets.

Horror scenario? Yes, but I don't believe that it will materialize.

Indicators

But we need to discuss it. We are talking about a wounded wild animal. Its actions are totally unpredictable. And it is always doubling down. So, nothing can be excluded. We should be aware of it. And that's why I decided to write down some important indicators, which would indicate, that a threshold has been crossed, where there is no return.

• Overt or covert mobilisation efforts within the big European countries.

• Overt or covert transition to a wartime economy/production within the big European countries.

• If the number of mobilized troops of Russia exceeds more than one and a half million men. I'm talking only about the mobilized. Not about the already standing conscript and professional peacetime army.

• Calmness of Vladimir Putin is gone for a longer time. In fact, he would be visually very angry and his rhetoric would reach levels, never seen before. See his behaviour from November 2021 until February 2022, for a small version of what we would see.

• Active and official participation of NATO troops in hostilities against Russia.

• Officially breaking off relations between Russia and major NATO countries. Withdrawing of diplomatic missions and personnel, etc.

• Total severing of all economic relations.

• Russia withdrawing from many not-crucial markets without visible reasons.

• Russia withdrawing from Syria.

• Overt or covert full mobilisation in Russia.

• Withdrawal of the Americans from important and major regions without a clear reason. Say, a sudden withdrawal of the Americans from the Middle East, including its navy. The Americans would try to bring as much equipment and as many troops as possible out of harm's way before the Russian barrages start to hit American bases worldwide.

Important factors

As I said. I want to be honest, I think, and this is only my assumption\ߪ It is too late for triggering WW3:

• The Ukrainian human potential is almost gone. And soon it WILL BE GONE.

• The Europeans have been demilitarized. And they will be demilitarized further until this is over. There is not much which could be used to actually fight the Russians.

• The Americans would withdraw its equipment to America or Asia. This is an important region. Europe lost its significance, and with it, the obligation to NATO.

• Article 5 says that the allies should consult on whether and how to support the member under attack. The decision of the single member states could be to send medical equipment or simply to do nothing. This applies to America as well. America wouldn't do much for Eastern European states. And it certainly would NOT fight Russia over them. I'm not yet sure, about central and west Europe, since America will need them, for reindustrializing over their resources and industries.

• Until this war is over, NATO will only be four letters on a piece of paper. To be honest, I didn't expect it that way. I will point out my assumption, how NATO could be dismembered, in the “strategic outlook” chapter. But as it turns out, the NATO military branch will soon be done and gone. Left will be a club of people, that are meeting regularly to issue some threats out of a parallel universe in the direction of Russia. As I said, I'll go deeper into this later.

I want you all to keep in mind, what the ultimate goal of Russia is. Russia's ultimate goal is to secure its strategic security in the western direction, by forcing the West to accept the new draft treaty for European security. Either voluntarily or by force. Force can be military, economic or revolutionary. Don't forget that part. In case of failure, we all are simply going to die. \&#D83D;\&#DE0A; I pointed out the process and the reasons in detail in my analysis of Phase 3.

As I pointed out in the quoted article, who is cheering for Russia to lose, is cheering for his own death.

The lynchpin \ߝ Odessa

The strategic lynchpin, whether there will be a Ukraine, going forward, or not, is Odessa. With Odessa, Ukraine could sustain some kind of economy, by accessing the Black Sea. Probably it would be enough, to continue an existence as a classic American failed state, like Libya and some others that I won't name so as to not insult the people living there.

If Russia takes Odessa, or defeats the Ukrainian army somewhere else, so that Odessa could no longer be defended, then the war is over. Odessa is more important to Ukraine than Kiev itself.

Odessa is also one of the strategic goals, named by President Vladimir Putin, before he started the SMO. One of these goals is to bring justice to what happened in Odessa in 2014, when some fifty Russians were burned to death by Ukrainian nationalists. It is a personal goal of Vladimir Putin to take the city and seek justice for these deaths. Here are more reasons:

• It is a strategic city. Without it, there could never be something like “Ukraine” again. It wouldn't be economically sustainable.

• It would give Russia the control of a big part of the Black Sea. In fact, Russia's dominance in the Black Sea couldn't be contested anymore. Not only not from the Sea, but also not from the land or air.

• Russia would have a deep outpost within the east flank of NATO, which is crucial. Think of radars, air bases, air defences, missile bases, fleet bases, marshalling grounds, etc.

• Odessa is a Russian city. Not just any Russian city. It is a highly important Russian city. It was built by a very popular Russian emperor, Katherine the Great. Moreover, it is a hero city. (See WW2 hero cities).

• Ukraine and the West will never accept peace with Russia as long as Russia holds territory that the West claims as well, such as Kherson, Crimea, etc. If the Russians would leave Odessa to Ukraine, under some kind of treaty, there would always be the danger that Ukraine rearms and uses Odessa and its access to the Black Sea to harm Russia. As we all know, and Russia knows even more, the West breaks ALL treaties that it signs.

• Odessa is the last step before Russia can reunify with Transnistria. This is a problem which certainly needs to be solved. And it needs to be solved now. And it will be solved now.

In fact, you can take these arguments and flipside them, then you have the reasons, why NATO (America) has a strategic interest to take Odessa. The arguments are essentially similar to these, why the West desperately wants to have Crimea. To be straightforward. Crimea and Odessa are by far more important to the West than Kiev or any other region of Ukraine. That's why we always hear the talk about an offensive against Crimea. The question is, will the West have a strategic advantage against Russia or will Russia have a strategic advantage against NATO. The answer is obvious.

Considering all this, there is no chance in the world that Russia won't take Odessa. No matter what agreements would be proposed, or what treaties, or whatever. Maybe there was a moment where it would have been possible. In Phase 1. MAYBE still in Phase 2. But since August 2022, all this is gone. There has been too much sacrifice to not go all the way through. In fact, it would be a huge insult in the face of all people, that died on the Russian side, both civilian and military.

Nevertheless, there will be an Odessa moment. The moment, when it is clear to everyone, that Odessa can't be defended. I'll give you here an incomplete list of cases, that could be considered as an “Odessa moment”:

• Siege of Odessa.

• Collapse of Ukrainian armed forces.

• Collapse of the Ukrainian state.

• Complete destruction of the Ukrainian army.

• Complete surrender of the Ukrainian army.

• Cutting Odessa off, further north. E.g., Transnistria.

• An approach to Odessa by the Russian army with no troops left to defend it from the South.

This will be the most dangerous moment in the war. It is the moment where the West will need to decide whether it will surrender Ukraine or double down and intervene with Western troops. This is essentially the question over whether WW3 will happen or not.

Whatever decision the West might take, it is insignificant for Russia, for the aforementioned reasons. Russia would take it, no matter what the escalation threat of the West would be. Even if it would mean the end of the human race. There is no scenario where Russia would not take Odessa and the world would not go up in flames. None whatsoever.

Chickens in Odessa

And here we come to the problem. I described this scenario already in one of my operational updates. See here.

The Americans have the habit to go into a place and claim it forever, only through their presence. The rationale is, that if they are there, no-one would ever dare to contest that. For example, to avoid WW3.

This is essentially true, and it works well, all over the world. See Serbia (our province, Kosovo) and East-Syria. Of course, there are many more examples. I call it the “Chicken game”.

Now, why has the 101st airborne division of the US Army been deployed to Eastern Europe? To Romania? My personal assumption is that they stay idle for the Odessa moment. If the Odessa moment happens, the US government (better, the US oligarchy) will have the opportunity, to move the 101st into Odessa.

Why would they do that? The 101st is unable to fend off a Russian attack. It potentially could buy time until the US is able to mobilize a large force in Romania to relieve them. The truth is that such a force doesn't exist and couldn't relieve anything. Nowadays, Russia has conventional deep strike abilities with hypersonic missiles that are unstoppable. The whole European rear is not defendable. The Americans are not idiots, and their military planners know this.

So why the 101st? Well, they can be quickly deployed with helicopters and create facts on the ground. In fact, create a big “chicken game” right in Odessa. This would create two problems for the Russians:

1. If now the Russians attack Odessa and the American troops, then they would have triggered WW3 from the Western perspective. This is mainly for the civilian audience worldwide to measure how a world war has started and how it could have been avoided. No one will ask why the Americans have moved in after the first missiles start flying. They might ask who shot first, but it doesn't matter. All would die anyway in nuclear fire.

2. As I pointed out already above, Odessa is a crucial and wonderful historical city for Russia. In fact, Russia doesn't want to fight in such cities, to preserve them. If the Americans would move in, Russia would be forced to destroy Odessa, to get them out of there. Again, it doesn't matter anymore at such a point.

Will this “Chicken Plan” be activated by the Americans? I really don't know. If they assume that Russia would back down if they move in, then it could happen. But such information would be wrong and the escalation would start. I personally don't believe yet, judging by the political climate, that it would be triggered. But this assessment could change anytime. For now, I don't want to issue any warnings.

Provided that such a “Chicken Plan” would be triggered by the Americans, there is still the question, which strategy the Russians would choose to get them out of there. Here are some possibilities:

• There could be a very short timeframe for a diplomatic solution, but none that would leave Odessa in Western hands. More likely, some kind of geopolitical trade somewhere else to preserve humanity. By short, I mean no longer than 48 hours. The Russian army can't wait for American armoured brigades/divisions to marshal in Romania to feed them into Ukraine to relieve the paratroopers (101st) in Odessa.

• A direct attack on Odessa by simply levelling it to the ground with everything inside, to not give the Americans time to catch up to their paratroopers. A painful solution.

• Increasing the pain dial for America all over the world to force them to voluntarily withdraw. Hence, sinking the US Navy (which could be triggered anytime by Russia with her long-range hypersonic missiles), bombing all the poorly protected US bases worldwide, with a focus on manpower and equipment and the destruction of the whole NATO infrastructure in Europe with standoff weapons.

There is nothing that could be done against it, since there is currently no technology that can shoot down hypersonic missiles. This strategy is only limited by the number of available missiles. I'm not sure how many of these have been produced to date.

You see, it would be much preferable if the West simply accepts the return of a Russian city to Russia. I want to be straightforward. I don't want to see either an Odessa moment or a Russian attempt to expel the chickens.

One more remark. Scott Ritter also is referring frequently to the “Odessa moment”. I only want to highlight that we have here a similar concept, but it is not the same. As you surely have figured out on your own.

Strategic outlook

Basics

In this chapter I want to present a few strategic considerations.

Poland and its options

I think first there were considerations to intervene directly in Western Ukraine through Poland. Not to fight the Russians, but to secure territory. And I also think that President Putin made it crystal clear in one of his early speeches during the war, that such actions would trigger lightning responses. Most likely he was talking about a hypersonic rain over Poland. These intentions died down afterwards. Nevertheless, it seems that Poland is still eager to seize some parts of Ukraine that Poland considers former Polish territories.

This, of course, is an interesting fact.

Why?

Well, Russia wants to force the West to implement the new draft treaty for European security. Hence, to push back NATO influence and military infrastructure in Eastern Europe. In former articles, I presented the economic axes which could trigger a European political collapse. Here, I'm going to present some strategies on a geopolitical scale.

Poland is openly talking about taking former Polish territories. Russia is highlighting this fact in the media. Even Dimitry Medvedev often highlights it on his Telegram channel. But apart from highlighting it, there don't seem to be many objections. In fact, I believe, that it would have some advantages for Russia, if Poland would indeed take the Lvov oblast. First, see the map.

Russia could indeed allow Poland to take the Lviv oblast marked above. It is an oblast that is highly committed to and associated with Stepan Bandera ideology. They are deeply anti-Russian and one would struggle to call them Russians or former Russians. In fact, taking, appeasing, and governing it would be a burden to Russia. It will be a burden for Poland as well, but they want it. \&#D83D;\&#DE0A;

The big advantage is not about governing or appeasing it. No, the big advantage is that it would trigger major tensions within the EU and NATO, especially between Poland and the other major EU countries, Germany, France, and Italy. I remember a comment from the German chancellor Olaf Scholz in 2022. Reportedly, he privately said to the Poles that if they insist on reparation payments from Germany, that Germany could remember about former German territories that are currently part of Poland. If Poland takes Lviv, then this dispute would escalate.

Tensions in the EU and NATO absolutely contribute to the implementation of the new draft treaty for European security. Not voluntarily, but by diplomatic force. \&#D83D;\&#DE0A; So, I truly could imagine that such a move could take place if the Polish really want it, but in agreement with Russia, not against Russia's will.

Here we come to two major constraints:

1. The oblasts north of Lvov mustn't be touched by Poland. These are buffer and security zones for Belarus.

2. The oblasts to the south of Lvov also mustn't be touched by Poland. These are the geopolitical gates to the Eastern European states. So, to say, land bridges through states, that are not controlled by the West. West Ukraine (to be done), Hungary (will break free as soon as the land bridge is established) and Serbia (the same).

If Poland were to claim these territories, there would be a lightning response by President Putin. I think the message was clear to Poland.

I explained it already in my analysis of Phase 3. It is possible that West Ukraine (minus Lvov) won't join Russia. Who knows? But it certainly will be taken, demilitarized and denazified. Afterwards, it could be released in some kind of pseudo-independence, with Russian military bases on its territory, to secure this state. But this “pseudo-independent country” would be crucial because it would be Russia's gate to Eastern Europe. Its landbridge.

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Hungary, Serbia and the end of NATO

And here we come straight to these landbridges and trade routes.

Before I begin, I just want to remind you about my articles “Economics and Empires 1” and “Economics and Empires 2”.  Essentially, Serbia and Hungary currently are being held hostage by the West. Since they are landlocked countries that are also hostages to America, but more submissive hostages than other European nations, Serbia and Hungary can't develop independent foreign politics or foreign trade. If they don't do what they are told, many things can happen to them apart from military action:

• Blackmailing

• Intimidation

• Blockade of trade routes

• Denial of critical supplies

• Closure of air space

And all this without openly admitting it, but by inventing reasons. The West loves to use Croatia for trade restrictions against Serbia into the European direction. Croatia then invents some reasons why Serbian lorries aren't allowed to drive through Croatia. And similar stuff.

That's the reason why Serbia has been forced these many years to say that it wants to join the EU, even though the people don't. Such fealty is required by the West, to not press Serbia down again.

And here comes the war in Ukraine and “West-Ukraine” into play. If Russia manages to secure the landbridge to Hungary in Western Ukraine, then the whole house of cards built on blackmailing Eastern Ukraine falls apart. Russia would have through Hungary, which faces problems like Serbia's even though Hungary is part of the EU and NATO, direct access to Serbia.

It would allow Serbia and Hungary to freely choose with whom they want to trade and have relations. Hence, the whole heartland would be open to these countries. And with it the SCO and BRICS states. The West couldn't threaten these countries any longer with blocking them from trade and supplies, and if military threats are employed, Russia could deploy troops or provide unlimited military assistance through the corridor.

However, I could imagine troops only in Serbia because it is a brother state. This would be a huge part of the solution for the Kosovo problem, which is a Western-occupied province of Serbia. Today, NATO can threaten Serbia with bombing in the case that Serbia is protecting its citizens in Kosovo. If Serbia would have direct land and air access to Russia, things would be completely different. Apart from that, Russia left the imperial path with the Soviet Union, which is good! Russia won't spend blood and money to maintain a remote empire anymore.

Exactly this would be the death of both the EU and NATO. Why? Look at my second map.

• The black lines are the new main trade routes with the initial “breakaway” countries, Serbia and Hungary. They in fact are waiting for these routes to be opened. As long as they aren't open, both countries need to endure massive intimidation by the West.

• The red lines represent potential new trade routes between Russia (BRICS/SCO) and single Eastern European countries. When these nations see how Serbia and Hungary can develop independent policy and trade, ever more European countries would join this model and break free from the Western influence/blackmailing/colonialism. As soon this begins to unravel, it would be the end of NATO and the EU. Combine this with the economic pressure, due to the self-sanctions and to Poland's possible seizure of Lvov, and NATO and the EU is finished. Of course, no one should imagine that such a centrifugal process would be finished overnight. We are talking about a few years.

You see no lines to Romania? Well, Romania is by far the most submissive colony without a single bit of an own will. I don't know how much it could free itself, even with land access to Russia.

You might want to argue that some of these countries (Croatia, Greece etc.) already have access to the sea. Yes, but they have no land access to Russia. In theory, they could do independent trade. But in case of military escalation, they would be on their own without the landbridge to Russia.

Russia's steamroller

There is something we mustn't forget. Russia is not yet mobilized in any reasonable sense. I'm not talking about full mobilization. Russia isn't even partially mobilized yet. But remember one thing: if the West would force Russia to switch its economy to a full war economy, her society also goes into full war mood and if her losses mount over a reasonable number, then the West will get what it got after Napoleon and Hitler. A Russian society, army and war machine that can't be simply “switched off” after it reconquers Ukraine. If you have a million or even two-million-man army standing on the Polish border, then this army will do what their ancestors did. They will march to Berlin or even beyond and put an end to the new threat to Russian statehood.

We haven't reached this point yet. And if there won't be an escalation which would include western troops IN Ukraine, we won't ever reach this point. Nevertheless, if the West would escalate with Western troops in Ukraine, this point could be reached easily.

As NATO is currently demilitarising itself on a large scale and soon will only exist as four letters on a piece of paper, you can imagine what will stop the Russian army on its way to Berlin. Nothing.

Is Russia powerful enough to do that? This question is totally insignificant. Remember what happens if Russia loses militarily. Given the state of NATO, there is not much they could do against such an event if Russia fights doctrinally. In Ukraine, there is a civil war between Russians. President Putin said repeatedly that he still considerers the Ukrainians as brothers and Russians. That's the reason he takes care that the civilians suffer as least as possible within such a war environment. You should not even try to think about it what weapons and strategies would be applied against a hostile nation like Poland or (fill in the blank). Certainly not a slow grinding to only destroy the enemy army.

Nor does it matter how loudly people would scream “ARTICLE 5”. This is not a magic spell, that would make the Russian army vanish. You think there would be a nuclear retaliation by the United States? Nope! Europe is a used condom for the Americans. The new cool guys are in Asia. America will never ever put itself at risk for a used condom. Pardon, for Europe.

Again, I don't see such a scenario happening. But nothing is certain.

Now we are coming closer to my conclusion.

China

Initially I said that there will be a WW3. And yes, I think there will be a WW3. But I doubt, at least for now, that it will be triggered in Europe. And I also doubt that its main battlefield will be in Europe. Although there will be a battle in Europe.

The big battle of our time will be in Asia and in the pacific. And not today but in 2030. The battle will be about throwing the United States out of a region where it doesn't belong. China is preparing two strategies.

1. The best-case scenario for the world would be if BRICS and the SCO bring the American imperial economy down, in such a way, that it couldn't sustain its empire and network of military bases any longer. Thereby it would withdraw under an economic and social collapse from its bases abroad. Don't get me wrong. I do not wish the American people their downfall. Absolutely not! I like Americans (the people, not the imperial parasite) as much as I do anyone else. I wish for the American people, that your country comes out stronger through the hard times that are ahead. That you manage to become a normal nation among others and that every single American becomes prosperous. This with normal trade relations with other nations, without the need to bomb them to get good trade conditions.

2. Option two is war. Therefore, China is currently building the biggest military the world has ever seen. But it is not ready yet in terms of quantity or professionalism/experience. But it certainly will be, within the next few years, 2030 at the latest. Russia, currently pinning down the empire in Europe and depleting it, is the biggest gift China can get. That's why China will do what it can to sustain this status. Therefore, China is helping Russia to circumvent most of the sanctions.

   And Russia is more than returning the favour. She is buying time for China with her blood as a side effect of her existential struggle against NATO.

   Well, I will stop here, since I'm planning to write a separate article about the struggle in the Pacific region. But please keep the following in mind. I can make more or less accurate predictions for the timeframe of one year (operational). I can explain the shape, probabilities and boundaries of a strategy, which covers up to three years. The actual implementation could look completely different. And everything one writes, including myself, that would make predictions for a time after three years (vision), simply writes fairy tales.

   Nevertheless, I'll try to write such a fairy tale about the Pacific region in another article. But I'll mark it as an assumption and also as one possible scenario between infinite possible scenarios. Hence, you'll need to consider it to learn backgrounds but apart from that you should take it with a grain of salt.

Conclusion

Okay, we reached the end of the article. I'll try to sum it up and make a conclusion.

The question that this article seeks to answer is about the prospect of a World War developing from the Ukraine crisis. I see a probability of 90% that the Ukraine war will not evolve into a World War. Unfortunately, 90% is still far from certain! There is still a possibility that the West will try to push proxy forces (Poland, Romania, Germany?) into Ukraine to create a bigger “local”/continental conflict, while the Americans focus on Asia. Here we are at 5%. And above that, there is a probability of 5% that the United States will directly intervene (See Odessa moment, etc.), which certainly would evolve into an instant World War.

• Peace after Ukrainian army is defeated (90%)

• Developing war between Russia and European proxies within Ukraine/Europe (5%)

• American intervention &emdassh; World War 3 (5%).

That is, of course, still too high. We are talking about the human race.

Indeed, there are two major determining factors which will decide whether there will be an escalation or not:

The “Odessa moment” and the “Western Ukraine” moment.

• Odessa moment:

  The West will try to do what it can to avoid giving Odessa to the Russians. This is for strategic military considerations. If the Russians have it, they will have a strategic advantage and leverage over NATO. If NATO has it, the same applies to NATO against Russia.

• “Western Ukraine” moment:

  Here we are talking about Russia's land access to Hungary and thereby to Serbia. Essentially, if Russia gets it, NATO and the EU is done. History. Not instantly, but within a reasonable number of years.

I can only leave you here and say that when one of these moments are imminent, start praying to whomever you are praying to.

Nevertheless, I want to end this article on a positive note. Since I AM positive. Everything depends on the decisions of the oligarchs in the United States. Are they willing to let Ukraine go or not when they are threatened with global annihilation? These guys are not idiots. Sure, they want to possess power over others, but in the event of a nuclear war, they and their children will possess nothing. Exactly as everyone else.

Even though they seem to have no reverse gear and always doubling down, in this particular case I assume that they would do the right thing and vacate Ukraine. Why is there still a possibility of 10% of escalation? Well, Russia (BRICS) is engaged in escalation management, to provide a safe way for the Americans to transition into a normal state.

And here we come to the fact that not even the Americans and their oligarchs can control everything. It is possible that a crazy group of people, either within America or within Europe, could suddenly do something extremely stupid when they feel that the end is near. Think of Poles or the Baltic statelets or some extremely crazy American neoconservatives. The good thing is that I don't give more than a 10% chance to such an idiotic chain of events.

While we react with fear to the resurgence of fascist, Nazi or Japanese imperial groups, we fail to see that it was not these ideologies that provoked World War, but the alliance of rulers ready for the worst. The same configuration is about to be repeated with other groups. In a few months, if we do not react now, a Third World War may be possible.

The Second World War can serve as a lesson to us. It did not appear in a serene sky. It was not a battle of the Good guys against the Bad guys. It was just triggered by an unforeseen gathering of forces capable of destroying everything.

After the economic crisis of 1929, the whole world was convinced, and rightly so, that the capitalism of that time was over. The Soviet Union alone offered an alternative, Bolshevism. Soon the United States came up with a second alternative, the structural reforms of the New Deal, and then Italy promoted a third alternative, fascism. The great Anglo-Saxon capitalists chose to support a new regime, close to fascism, Nazism. They thought that Germany would attack the USSR, thus preserving their interests threatened by both Bolshevik collectivisations and US economic reforms. However, nothing worked out as planned, since Italy, Germany and Japan formed the Axis with their own logic and the war was not started against the Soviets, but against the great fortunes that prepared it.

In the collective imagination, we do not hold responsible the great Anglo-Saxon capitalists who supported Nazism at its beginning. On the contrary, we remember the British and American people as having participated in the victory.

From this experience we must learn that the most skilful plans can escape their promoters. Peace was threatened by the alliance of three very different regimes, Fascism, Nazism and Hakkō ichiu. None of the international relations scholars and other geopoliticians of the time foresaw this union. All of them, without exception, were wrong.

What these three ideologies had in common was that they wanted to change the world order without regard to the human consequences of their actions. This does not mean that their opponents were democratic and peaceful, far from it, but only that they refrained from exterminating entire peoples.

Let’s not mistake the adversary. We must be very vigilant, not to a particular type of political regime, but to the fact that states governed by men capable of the worst ever unite. The current danger is neither fascism, nor Nazism, nor Hakkō ichiu, three ideologies marked by their time and which do not correspond to anything today. What we must protect ourselves from, above all, is a global alliance between ideologies capable of the worst.

This is exactly what is about to happen: the current leaders of the US State Department, the government in Kiev and the next government in Tel Aviv have no limits. The union of the "Straussians", the Ukrainian "integral" nationalists and the Israeli "revisionist Zionists" can, without any qualms, plunge the world into a Third World War. Fortunately, the CIA does not share their ideas, the government in Kiev is constrained by Russian military intervention, and the Israeli Prime Minister’s coalition has not yet formed its government.

Professor Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Although he wrote extensively on natural law and Jewish philosophy, he left nothing about his political conceptions, which he reserved for certain of his students. Numerous testimonies have made his "oral" thought known to us.

The U.S. "Straussians”

This small group of about a hundred people controls the foreign policy of the United States, including the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, his deputy, Victoria Nuland, and the National Security Advisor, Jacob Sullivan.

It is in line with the thinking of the Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss "Russia declares war on the Straussians” for whom democracies showed their weaknesses during the 1930s. The only way to ensure that the next anti-Semitic regime does not massacre them is for the Jews to set up their own dictatorship; to be on the side of the hammer and not of the nail.

The "Straussians" have already shown what they are capable of by organizing the 9/11 attacks and by launching various wars to destroy the "wider Middle East".

It is amazing that, despite the controversies that tore the US ruling class apart during the Bush Jr. administration, most of today’s politicians are unaware of who the Straussians are.

The poet Dmytro Dontsov (1883-1973). He created a mythology that inspired millions of Ukrainians to fight the Russians. A secret agent of the Second and Third German Reichs, he participated in the supervision of the extermination of Jews and Gypsies in Europe as administrator of the Reinhard Heydrich Institute, before being whitewashed by the Anglo-Saxon secret services.

The Ukrainian "integral nationalists”

This is a group comprising hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions. It originated in the First World War, but solidified during the interwar period, the Second World War and the Cold War “Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists ?”.

They identify with the poet and criminal against humanity Dmytro Dontsov. They see themselves as Vikings ready to fight the last battle against evil, that is, according to them, against Russian civilization.

The term "integral nationalist" should not be misleading. Dontsov chose it in reference to the thought of the Frenchman Charles Maurras. Dontsov was never a patriot, nor a nationalist in the classical sense. He never defended either the Ukrainian people or the Ukrainian land. On the contrary.

The Ukrainian "integral nationalists" have, since 1919, shown what they are capable of. They have murdered more than 4 million of their fellow citizens, including 1.6 million Jews. Since 2014, they have waged a civil war that has cost the lives of about 20,000 of their fellow citizens. They also, in 1921, amputated their land from Galicia and Volhynia to pay in advance the Polish army against the USSR.

They made an alliance with the Straussians, in 2000, during a big congress in Washington, where the Straussian Paul Wolfowitz was the guest of honor.
It is very dangerous to claim, as NATO does, that the "integral nationalists" are marginal in Ukraine. Certainly, in the spirit of this organization, it is only a question of discrediting Russia’s discourse and mobilizing for Ukraine. But these people are now murdering, without trial, those of their fellow citizens who find themselves in Russian culture.

It is particularly dangerous to participate in the delirium of the "integral nationalists" as the Bundestag has just done by adopting a resolution on the "Holodomor", i.e. the "genocide by hunger". The famine of 1932-33 was by no means caused by the Soviets in general, nor by Joseph Stalin in particular. It affected many other regions of the USSR than Ukraine. It is a climatic catastrophe. Moreover, in Ukraine itself, it did not affect the cities, but only the countryside because the Soviets decided to manage this shortage by feeding the workers rather than the peasants. To give credence to the myth of a planned genocide is to encourage anti-Russian hatred as the Nazis once encouraged anti-Jewish hatred.

Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), founder of the Jewish Legion, then of the Irgun. He called for Israel to extend over the entire British Mandate territory, i.e. over the current State of Israel, the Palestinian Territories and the Kingdom of Jordan.

Israeli "revisionist Zionists”

The "revisionist Zionists" represent about 2 million Israelis. They have managed to form a parliamentary majority by uniting several political parties behind Benjamin Netanyahu.
They claim to be inspired by the Ukrainian Vladimir Jabotinsky, the man who claimed that Palestine is "a land without a people, for a people without a land". In other words, Palestinian Arabs do not exist. They have no rights and must be expelled from their homes.

In September 1921, Jabotinsky formed a secret alliance with the Ukrainian "integral nationalist" anti-Semites, the first link in the developing Axis. This union aroused the indignation of the entire Jewish diaspora and Jabotinsky was expelled from the World Zionist Organization. In October 1937, Jabotinsky formed a new alliance with the anti-Semites of Marshal Rydz-Smigly, number 2 in Poland behind Józef Piłsudski. He was again rejected by the Jewish diaspora.

At the very beginning of World War II, Jabotinsky chose Bension Netanyahu, Benjamin’s father, as his private secretary.

It is appalling that, 75 years after the establishment of the State of Israel, most people continue to lump together different, and often opposing, views solely on the basis of the religion of those who profess them.

Revisionist Zionism" is the opposite of the Zionism of Nahum Goldman and the World Jewish Congress. It has no concern for the Jewish people and has therefore not hesitated to form alliances with anti-Semitic armed forces.

The "revisionist Zionists", including Menahem Beguin and Ariel Sharon, have shown what they are capable of with the Nakba; the forced expulsion of the majority of the Arab population of Palestine in 1948. It is this crime, whose memory haunts both Arabs and Israelis, that makes peace in Palestine impossible to this day.

Benjamin Netanyahu formed an alliance with the Straussians in 2003 at a large closed-door congress in Jerusalem «Sommet historique pour sceller l’Alliance des guerriers de Dieu». Since the election of Volodymyr Zelensky, of whom he has become a personal friend, Netanyahu has also renewed Jabotinsky’s alliance with the "integral nationalists".

The Axis is constituted.

The common ideology of the new Axis

Just as Italian Fascism, German Nazism, and Japanese Hakkō ichiu had little to do with each other, so did the Straussians, the "integral nationalists," and the "revisionist Zionists" think differently and pursue distinct goals. Only the Nazis were so anti-Semitic as to seek to kill an entire people. The fascists despised the Jews, but did not seek to exterminate them. The Japanese never engaged in this hatred and even protected the Jews in their own country and in the territories they occupied. In the same way, today if the "integral nationalists" are obsessively against Russian culture and wish to kill all Russians, men, women and children, the Straussians despise them without wishing to exterminate them, and the "revisionist Zionists" pursue other objectives.

Each of these three isolated groups represents a danger to specific populations, but all three together threaten all of humanity. They share a cult of violence and power. They have shown that they can engage in wars of extermination. All three consider that their time has come. However, not only do they have to overcome their internal oppositions, but their axis is still uncertain. For example, the Straussians have just warned the "revisionist Zionists" about the possible expansion of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories.

After the Second World War, modern international law was established with the idea of countering "war propaganda" United Nations General Assembly Resolution 110 of November 3, 1947 and Resolution 381 of November 17, 1950 “Condemnation of propaganda against peace”. International legislators, i.e. sovereign states, soon agreed that war could only be fought against by ensuring the "free flow of ideas" resolution 819 of 11 December 1954 “Strengthening of peace through the removal of barriers to free exchange of ideas".

In recent years, however, we have witnessed an extraordinary backsliding that deprives us of the thoughts of others, exposes us to war propaganda, and ultimately leads us to a global conflict.
This phenomenon began with the private censorship on social networks of the incumbent president of the United States, and continued with the public censorship of Russian media in the West. Now the thoughts of others are no longer seen as a tool to prevent wars, but as a poison that threatens us.

Western states are setting up bodies to "rectify" information that they consider falsified (Fake News)“The West renounces freedom of expression”, by Thierry Meyssan. NATO is considering the creation of a unit, called Information Ramstein, which will be responsible for censoring not Russian information sources, but Russian ideas within the 30 member states of the Atlantic Alliance "A ’Ministry of Truth’ soon to be created within NATO".

This is a complete reversal of the values of the Atlantic Alliance, which was founded in the wake of the Atlantic Charter, which incorporated President Franklin Roosevelt’s "four freedoms". The first of these freedoms was the freedom of expression.

However, before the invention of the Internet, when the United States and the Soviet Union had just guaranteed the "free circulation of ideas" with the Helsinki Agreements, the United Nations and more particularly its agency in this field, UNESCO, were worried about "information imperialism". The technical superiority of the West allowed them to impose their view of the facts on developing countries.

In 1976, during the Nairobi conference, the UN raised the question of the functioning of the media with regard to "the strengthening of peace and international understanding, the promotion of human rights and the fight against racism, apartheid and incitement to war.

Former Irish Foreign Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Seán MacBride formed a 16-member commission at Unesco. It included the Frenchman Hubert Beuve-Mery (founder of Le Monde), the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez (Nobel Prize for Literature) and the Canadian Marshall McLuhan (communication theorist). The United States was represented by Elie Abel, then dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, and Russia by the director of the Tass agency, Sergei Losev. Only the fifth and final part of the report (Communication Tomorrow) was the subject of a general debate. The MacBride commission discussed the draft of the other parts, but could not question their final wording. In any event, its report, issued in 1978, seemed to be a consensus.

In fact, by pointing out that the same facts can be perceived differently and by opening up the question of the means of the media of the North and those of the South, he was opening a Pandora’s box. At the same time, Unesco was confronted with the propaganda of the South African apartheid regime and the propaganda of Israel, which denies Muslim and Christian cultures. In the end, the United States and the United Kingdom ended the debate by withdrawing from Unesco. We know today that the British Empire had ensured its intellectual domination by creating news agencies. Whitehall closed the Information Research Department (IRD) just before the MacBride report was published "Britain’s secret propaganda war, Paul Lashmar & James Oliver, Sutton". But the war against Syria has shown that the whole system has been reconstituted in another form “The fabrication of the myth of the "Syrian revolution" by the United States. Westerners continue to falsify information at its source.

In forty years, the media landscape has been transformed: the emergence of international television news channels, websites and social networks. At the same time, there has been a huge concentration of media in the hands of a few owners. However, none of the problems listed in 1978 have changed. On the contrary, with the unipolar world, they have become worse.

The journalistic profession today consists of either writing agency reports or contextualizing the news for the media. News agencies are factual and unsourced, while the media offer commentary and analysis by referring to news agencies. Contextualization requires a great deal of historical, economic and other knowledge, which today’s journalists are largely lacking. The immediacy of radio and television does not give them the time to read books and even less to consult archives, except during in-depth investigations. Commentary and analysis have thus become considerably impoverished.

The dominant ideology in the West, which tends to become "global", has become a religion without God. There are now only two camps: that of the Good and that of the apostates. Truth is determined by a consensus among the elites, while the people reject it. Any criticism is considered blasphemous. There is no more room for debate and therefore for democracy.

The alternative press has become just as poor because it relies on the same data as the international media: news agency reports. It is indeed enough to control AFP, AP and Reuters to impose a vision of the facts on us. You can season it according to this or that tendency, Republican or Democrat, conservative or progressive, etc., but it will always be the same dish.

Since the September 11 attacks, those who challenge the official version of events have been called "conspiracy theorists ». Since the election of Donald Trump, those who contest the data of press agencies are accused of distorting reality and imagining Fake News. Journalists, after refraining from relaying the thoughts of "conspiracists", i.e. dissidents, try to correct Fake News with Checked News.

Yet, at the same time, belief in the versions of the mainstream media has collapsed. In the United States, the Gallup Institute has been measuring trust in the print media since 1973 and in the broadcast media since 1993. Trust in newspapers has fallen from 51 percent to 16 percent, and trust in radio and television has fallen from 46 percent to 11 percent.
The only solution is to increase the number of news agencies, i.e. the sources of information. Not to make them numerous, but diverse. Only then will we realize that the way an event is reported determines the way we think about it.

For example, today the three news agencies mentioned above present the conflict in Ukraine as a "Russian invasion". They claim that Moscow has not been able to take Kiev and overthrow President Zelenky, but commits war crimes every day. This is one way of looking at it. We don’t have the means to publish dispatches all the time, but we publish a weekly identical bulletin. Our criterion is different. We refer to "International Law" and not to Western "rules". Therefore, we describe the same conflict as the application of the Security Council resolution 2202 and the "responsibility to protect" the oppressed populations since 2014. The events are the same, but for some the way they tell them leads to think that the Russians are wrong, while ours leads to think that the Russian position is legal. To tell the truth, there is another difference: we interpret the facts over time. For us and for the Security Council, there has been a civil war in Ukraine for eight years with 20,000 deaths, the three major agencies pretend to ignore it. For us, the "integral nationalists" have a long criminal history, having cost the lives of 4 million of their fellow citizens, the Western agencies also pretend to ignore it “Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists?”.

This difference can be applied to all subjects. For example, the major news agencies tell us that the West has imposed sanctions to punish Russia for invading Ukraine. We do not read events in this way. Once again, referring to "International Law" and not to Western "rules", we note that the decisions of the Anglo-Saxons and the European Union violate the UN Charter. These are not "sanctions", since there has been no judgment, but economic weapons to wage war against Russia, just as castles were besieged in the past to starve those who had taken refuge there.

Each difference in the interpretation of events provokes another. For example, when we point out that the Western pseudo-sanctions have not been endorsed by the Security Council, we are told that this is quite normal since Russia has a veto right in the Council. This is to forget why the UN was organized the way it was. Its purpose is not to say what is right, but to prevent wars. This is precisely what allowed the Council to adopt resolution 2202 to resolve the civil war in Ukraine. However, the West, despite the commitment of Germany and France, did not apply it, forcing Russia to intervene.

We could go on endlessly with this double reading. The important thing to remember is that the presentation of the facts radically changes the way they are perceived. To conclude, I invite you to found news agencies that describe the facts in their own way and not in the way of our leaders. It is in this way and not by glossing over biased information that we will regain our lucidity.

The Ukrainian president addressing the G20.

I was talking to an open-minded leader of the European Parliament in Brussels ten days ago, and I listened to him tell me that the Ukrainian conflict was certainly complex, but that the most obvious thing was that Russia had invaded that country. I replied by observing that international law obliged Germany, France and Russia to implement resolution 2202, which Moscow alone had done. I continued by reminding him of the responsibility to protect the populations in case of failure of their own government. He cut me off and asked me: "If my government complains about the fate of its citizens in Russia and attacks that country, will you find that normal? Yes," I said, "if you have a Security Council resolution. Do you have one? » Disconcerted, he changed the subject. Three times I asked him if we could talk about the Ukrainian "integral nationalists". Three times he refused. We parted courteously.

The question of the responsibility to protect should have been nuanced. This principle does not allow for a war, but for a police operation, conducted with military means. That is why the Kremlin is careful not to refer to this conflict as a "war", but as a "special military operation". Both terms refer to the same facts, but "special military operation" limits the conflict. As soon as his troops entered Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin made it clear that he did not intend to annex this territory, but only to liberate the people persecuted by the Ukrainian "Nazis". In a previous long article, I pointed out that, if the expression "Nazis" is correct in the historical sense, it does not correspond to the way these people call themselves. They use the expression: "integral nationalists". Let’s remember that Ukraine is the only state in the world with an explicitly racist constitution.

The fact that international law gives Russia the upper hand does not mean that it has a blank check. Everyone must criticize the way it applies the law. Westerners still find Russia "Asian", "savage" and "brutal", even though they themselves have been far more destructive on many occasions.

Reversal of the situation

Now that the Russian and Western points of view have been clarified, it is clear that several events have prompted a Western shift.

• We are entering winter, a harsh season in Central Europe. The Russian population is aware, since the Napoleonic invasion, that it cannot defend such a large country. Therefore, they learned to use the vastness of their territory and the seasons to defeat their attackers. With winter, the front is frozen for several months. Everyone can see that, contrary to the discourse that the Russians are defeated, the Russian army has liberated the Donbass and part of Novorussia.

• Before winter fell, the Kremlin withdrew the liberated population living north of the Dnieper, and then withdrew its army, abandoning the part of Kershon located on the north bank of the Dnieper. For the first time, a natural border, the Dnieper River, marks a border between the territories controlled by Kiev and those controlled by Moscow. However, during the interwar period, it was the absence of natural borders that brought down all successive powers in Ukraine. Now Russia is in a position to hold on.

• Since the beginning of the conflict, Ukraine has been able to count on unlimited aid from the United States and its allies. However, the mid-term elections in the USA have removed the majority of the Biden administration in the House of Representatives. From now on, Washington’s support will be limited. Similarly, the European Union is also finding its limits. Its populations do not understand the rising cost of energy, the closure of certain factories and the impossibility of heating normally.

• Finally, in some circles of power, after admiring the talents of the actor Volodymyr Zelensky as a communicator, they begin to wonder about the rumors about his sudden fortune. In eight months of war, he became a billionaire. The imputation is unverifiable, but the scandal of the Pandora Papers (2021), makes it credible. Is it necessary to bleed to the four veins not to see the donations arrive in Ukraine, but disappear in offshore companies?

The Anglo-Saxons (i.e. London and Washington) wanted to turn the G20 in Bali into an anti-Russian summit. They had first lobbied for Moscow to be excluded from the Group, as they had succeeded in doing at the G8. But if Russia had been absent, China, by far the world’s largest exporter, would not have come. So it was Frenchman Emmanuel Macron who was responsible for convincing the other guests to sign a bloody declaration against Russia. For two days, Western news agencies assured that the matter was in the bag. But in the end, the final statement, while summarizing the Western point of view, closed the debate with these words: "There were other points of view and different assessments of the situation and the sanctions. Recognizing that the G20 is not the forum to resolve security issues, we know that security issues can have significant consequences for the global economy. » In other words, for the first time, the West has failed to impose its worldview on the rest of the planet.

The trap

Worse: the West imposed a video intervention by Volodymyr Zelensky as they had done on August 24 and September 27 at the United Nations Security Council. However, while Russia had tried in vain to oppose it in September in New York, it accepted it in November in Bali. At the Security Council, France, which held the presidency, violated the rules of procedure to give the floor to a head of state by video. On the contrary, at the G20, Indonesia held an absolutely neutral position and was not likely to accept giving him the floor without Russian authorization. This was obviously a trap. President Zelensky, who does not know how these bodies work, fell into it.

After having caricatured Moscow’s action, he called for its exclusion from the... "G19". G19 ". In other words, the little Ukrainian gave an order on behalf of the Anglo-Saxons to the heads of state, prime ministers and foreign ministers of the 20 largest world powers and was not heard. In reality, the dispute between these leaders was not about Ukraine, but about whether or not to submit to the American world order. All the Latin American, African and four Asian participants said that this domination was over; that the world is now multipolar.

The Westerners must have felt the ground shake under their feet. They were not the only ones. Volodymyr Zelensky saw, for the first time, that his sponsors, until now absolute masters of the world, were letting him down without hesitation in order to maintain their position for a while longer.
It is likely that Washington was in league with Moscow. The United States realizes that things are turning against it on a global scale. It will have no hesitation in blaming the Ukrainian regime. William Burns, director of the CIA, has already met Sergei Narychkin, the director of the SVR, in Turkey. These meetings follow those of Jake Sullivan, the US National Security Advisor, with several Russian officials. However, Washington has nothing to negotiate in Ukraine. Two months before the conflict in Ukraine, I explained that the core of the problem had nothing to do with this country, nor with NATO. It is essentially about the end of the unipolar world.

So it is not surprising that a few days after the G20 slap in the face, Volodymyr Zelensky contradicted his American sponsors for the first time in public. He accused Russia of having launched a missile at Poland and maintained his words when the Pentagon indicated that he was wrong, it was a Ukrainian counter-missile. The idea, for him. was to continue to act in line with the Treaty of Warsaw, concluded on April 22, 1920, by Symon Petlioura’s integral nationalists with the regime of Piłsudski; to push Poland to go to war against Russia. This was the second time Washington rang a bell in his ears. He did not hear it.

Probably, these contradictions will no longer manifest themselves in public. Western positions will soften. Ukraine has been warned: in the coming months it will have to negotiate with Russia. President Zelensky can plan his escape now, because his bruised compatriots will not forgive him for deceiving them.

The only way Ukrainians will see anything approximating a holiday season is if a ceasefire can be arranged by New Year’s Day, and it just might happen, regardless of President Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s repeated assertions that there will be no negotiations with Russia until it withdraws all its troops from all occupied territories, including Crimea. There are several reasons for the possible ceasefire.

First, the Russian hammer is about to fall on Ukraine. The gloves are coming off; electric energy stations, bridges, and even ‘decision centers’ such as central Kiev’s government buildings are being targeted. Russia is one or two more massive bombing attacks on Ukraine’s energy and transport infrastructure from permanently disabling Ukraine’s electricity, water, and railroad systems. With ‘only’ 50 percent of Ukrainian electricity infrastructure knocked out by the first three widespread bombings of electricity grid components, demonstrations are already breaking out in Odessa and other places over the deteriorating humanitarian situation, with Zelenskiy sending the Ukrainian KGB, the SBU, in to break up the protests and banning coverage in media. The Office of the President was reportedly recently informed by technicians that the electricity system has entered the stage of ‘arbitrary and uncontrolled imbalance,” and one official has urged Ukrainians to be prepared to leave the country in winter. What will the sociopolitical situation be like when these critical infrastructures are in complete collapse and temperatures are 20 degrees colder? Russia will be moving closer to the strategy of ‘shock and awe’, fully destroying all infrastructure – military or otherwise – as the US did in Serbia and Iraq and will likely take less care now to avoid civilian casualties.

After the infrastructures are completely destroyed or incapacitated, Russia’s reinforcements of 380,000 regular and newly mobilized troops will have been fully added into Russia’s forces across southeastern Ukraine. Even without these reinforcements, Russian forces continue to make small gains in Donbass around Ugledar, Bakhmut (Artemevsk), as withdrawals from and stabilization of the fronts in Kharkiv and Kherson have led to a redeployment and thus concentration of forces in Zaporozhe, Donetsk, and Luhansk. A winter offensive by some half a million troops will make substantial gains on those three fronts and multiply Ukrainian losses in personnel and materiel`, which are already high. This could lead easily to a collapse of Ukrainian forces on one or more front. On the backs of such a success Russian President Putin might also make another attempt to threaten Kiev by moving a much larger force in from Belarus than the small 30-40,000 force that advanced and then withdrew from Kiev’s surrounding districts in the first months of the war.  

Second, the West is suffering from Ukraine fatigue. NATO countries’ arms supplies have been depleted beyond what is tolerable, and social cohesion is collapsing in the face of double-digit inflation and economic recession. All this makes Russia the winner on the strategic level and is forcing Washington and Brussels to seek at least a breathing spell by way of a ceasefire. This is evidenced by the plethora of Western leaders calling on Zelenskiy to resume talks with Putin and the emergence of the ‘Sullivan plan’. Most recently, rumors have it that new British PM Rishi Sunak used a package of military and financial aide he announced during his recent trip to Kiev to cover up his message to Zelenskiy that London could no longer bear the burden of leading the European support for Kiev and that Kiev should reengage wirh Moscow. There has been a several day delay in the fourth round of rocket sorties against Ukrainian infrastructure, suggesting Putin is waiting to to see if Zelenskiy will cave and offer talks before unleashing the major assaults on Ukrainian infrastructure and the Russian winter offensive.

Third, Ukraine’s greatest political asset – Zelenskiy himself – just got devalued, putting at even greater risk Ukraine’s political stability. The Ukrainian air defense strike on Poland (accidental or intentional) and the Ukrainian president’s insistence that it was a Russian air strike, despite the evidence and nearly unanimous opposing opinion among his Western backers, has hit Zelenskiy’s credulity hard. Zelenskiy’s insistence on the Russian origins of the missile and technical aspects of Ukrainian air defense suggests that the event may have been an intentional Ukrainian false flag strike on Polish/NATO territory designed to provoke NATO or Poland into entering the war. Some in the West are beginning to wake up to the dangers of Ukrainian ultranationalism and neofascism, not to mention the growing megalomania of Zelenskiy, who has appeared on ore than one occasion to be willing to risk the advent of a global nuclear winter in order to avoid sitting at the negotiating table across from Putin. Some may now come to understand that claims that Putin wants to seize all Ukraine and restore the USSR if not conquer Europe are yarns spun by Kiev to attract military and financial assistance and ultimately draw NATO forces into the war. There remains a danger that Kiev’s dream of a NATO intervention might come to fruition is the following temptation. NATO has declared that a defeat of Ukraine in the war is a defeat for NATO, and NATO cannot be allowed to lose a war to a Russia because that would accelerate the coming of the end to U.S. hegemony. It cannot be excluded and may even be likely that should Kiev appear to be losing the war that Polish forces, NATO or some ‘coalition of the willing’ will move military forces into western Ukraine up to the Dnepr but do so without attacking Russian forces. This would force Russia to cease much of its military activity or risk attacking NATO forces and a larger European-wide war. This or something like it is probably already being considered in Washington.

For now, in order to keep the West on board, Zelenskiy is rumored to be pushing Ukrainian armed forces commander Viktor Zalyuzhniy to start a last pre-winter offensive in northern Donetsk (Svatovo and Severodonetsk) or Zaporozhe in order to put a stop to the West’s ceasefire murmurs and reboost support. At the same time there is talk of continuing Zelenskiy-Zalyuzhniy tensions over the latter’s good press and star status in the West. Tensions first emerged over disagreements of previous offensives and Zalyuzhniy’s earlier entry on the Western media stage. On the background of the deteriorating battlefield and international strategic situation, such civil-military tensions are fraught with the potential for a coup. Much of Zelenskiy’s strategy and tactics is driven more by political than by military considerations. Not least among the former is Zelenskiy’s political survival, which any ceasefire or peace talks requiring Kiev to acquiesce in the loss of more territory certainly will doom. Neofascist, military, and much of public opinion will not brook the sacrifices made in blood and treasure bringing only additional ones in Ukrainian territory. Others will ask why was not all of this averted by way of agreeing to Ukrainian neutrality and fulfilling Minsk 2 could have avoided it all.

We may be reaching the watershed moment in the Ukrainian war. No electricity, no army, no society. But here, as with any Russian occupation of central or western Ukrainian lands (not planned but perhaps a necessity at some point down the road for Putin), a quagmire awaits the Kremlin. Russia can not allow complete societal breakdown and chaos to reign in Ukraine anymore than it could tolerate a NATO-member Ukraine with a large neofascist component next door. All of the above and the approaching presidential elections scheduled in Moscow, Kiev and Washington the year after next make this winter pivotal for all the war's main parties.

Ukraine is turning into a significantly more homogeneous and far less culturally diverse country

In recent years, Ukraine has become the battleground for a 'war of monuments' waged among various political forces. In 2014, the process reached a peak during the mass demolition of statues of Vladimir Lenin and other Soviet politicians. These events fundamentally changed the symbolism and policy of the country's historical memory, paving the way to a reality in which any public speech must now be accompanied by the words 'Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!'

This was the slogan of Stepan Bandera's World War Two nationalist movement, which collaborated with Adolf Hitler's Nazis and took part in the Holocaust.

Although Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky's team initially tried to 'reset' the historical memory policy, radical nationalism got the upper hand in this symbolic battle. Following the start of Russia's military operation, this year, the so-called 'decommunization' policy became openly known as 'de-Russification' - even with over half of the population officially recognized as Russian-speaking.

Memory wars

After Russian troops entered Ukraine in February, many locals projected their hatred of Moscow onto objects of cultural and historical heritage that were in any way linked to the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, politicians actively supported such sentiment, using it as a cheap way to boost their personal ratings.

Over the past months, the number of initiatives aimed at the cultural and historical 'de-Russification' of Ukraine have ballooned. Examples abound. The Kiev City Council recently renamed 11 streets having any reference to Russia (Lomonosov, Magnitogorsk, and Belomorskaya streets, among others). It also completely excluded the Russian language from the curricula of the capital's kindergartens and schools. The decision was supported by 64 out of 120 deputies. Vadim Vasilchuk, head of the Standing Committee on Education, Science, Family, Youth and Sports of the body, commented that teaching Russian in the current situation is "inappropriate." In fact, Kiev's educational institutions stopped teaching the language in any shape or form (including as electives) at the beginning of the academic year.

Meanwhile, other Ukrainian cities saw a wave of 'de-Pushkinization' sweep through. In November, monuments to the great Russian poet were toppled in Kharkov and Zhitomir, while the monument in Odessa was painted over with the inscription 'Get out!' In Kiev, one of the oldest monuments to the bard had been taken down a few weeks earlier.

The demolition of monuments to Russian and Soviet statesmen has continued as well. The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture's expert council on 'overcoming the consequences of Russification and totalitarianism' decided to demolish monuments to Soviet military commanders Nikolay Vatutin and Nikolay Shchors (even though Leonid Kravchuk - a student at the time and later the first president of Ukraine - posed for the Shchors monument).

A memorial to Soviet soldiers erected on May 8, 1970 on the 25th anniversary of victory in WWII was demolished in Uzhgorod in November. The decision dates back to October 13. In its place, Kiev proposed a memorial to the soldiers of the 128th separate mountain assault brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine - a military unit that took an active part in the Donbass war unleashed by Kiev in 2014.

The story of one monument

Perhaps the most dramatic case of 'de-Russification' unfolded in the port city of Odessa. The city's history dates back to the end of the 18th century, when the Russian Empire colonized the northern Black Sea region. In November, Odessa's mayor, Gennady Trukhanov, announced the impending demolition of one of the historical city symbols - a monument to its founders that shows Catherine the Great and her associates, thanks to whom the city became the southern capital of the Russian Empire by the end of the 19th century.

Just a few months back, the same official had opposed the initiative. Trukhanov wrote:

"I'm not in favor of taking down statues. We may remove the monuments, but history will not change. I know that a petition has been signed by 25,000 people, but I'm going to wait. After all, should I also remove the monument to [Alexander] Pushkin or [Yuri] Gagarin? It doesn't make sense."

However, activists soon sent a petition to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, who instructed the police to investigate the mayor's activities.

Ukraine's Ministry of Culture supported the idea of taking down the monument to Catherine the Great, but according to the ministry's head, Aleksandr Tkachenko, the decision was to be made by local deputies, the official said. Finally, following numerous vandalism attacks on the monument (it was doused with paint, covered with inscriptions, and a red 'executioner's' hat was placed on Catherine the Great's head), the Odessa City Council decided to conduct an electronic survey to decide on its fate.

Trukhanov hastened to change his mind and said he would vote to transfer the monument to a "park of the imperial and Soviet past" that he proposed to create. Meanwhile, the deputy mayor of Odessa, Oleg Bryndak, offered to immediately install a fountain on the site.

An online vote was held in the shortest possible time. As a result, out of Odessa's population of about a million people, 2,900 residents voted for the demolition and 2,251 opposed it. The rest (i.e., over 990,000 people) abstained from the vote. Despite this, the public vote was recognized as legitimate. The city council is yet to make a final decision, but the outcome is not hard to predict. According to an announcement affixed to the wooden protective case now enclosing the bronze monument, preparations for its dismantling and transfer are already underway.

History repeats itself

Ironically, Catherine Square in central Odessa perfectly illustrates the shifts in historical heritage policies during critical periods for Ukraine. When the square was initially built, a public garden was laid out in its center. In 1873, the city's central water supply began functioning and the authorities installed a fountain on the spot. In 1891, the Odessa City Duma decided to build a monument honoring the centenary of the city's foundation. On the eve of the anniversary, a competition was held to decide on the best design project and finally in August 1894, construction officially began. The opening of the monument took place on May 6, 1900 and was timed to coincide with the centenary of the death of one of the city fathers, commander Alexander Suvorov. At an architectural conference one year later, Catherine Square with its monument to the city founders was recognized as the best integral architectural complex in Europe.

The monument was unveiled twice - first on May 6, 1900, and then on October 27, 2007. During the Russian Revolution, when the city was constantly changing hands, the authorities covered the monument and intended to take it down. Nobe**l Prize-winning author Ivan Bunin, who was in Odessa in 1919, wrote in _'The Cursed Days'_ [his diaries of the Revolution]:**

"Visited Catherine Square before dusk. Everything is gloomy and wet. The monument to Catherine the Great is wrapped from head to toe, bandaged with dirty, wet rags, entwined with ropes and plastered with red wooden stars. Opposite the monument is the Emergency Commission [the Provincial Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-revolution, Speculation, Sabotage, and Crimes of Office, known as the Odessa CHEKA - RT]. Red flags droop from the rain, their reflections flowing like blood in the wet asphalt."

Speculation on whether to keep the monument or not had given the authorities no peace since the 1917 Revolution, and as a result it was transferred to the Petrograd Art Commission. In May 1920, when Soviet power was established in Odessa, the monument was finally dismantled, leaving a bare round column and pedestal. The figures of Catherine the Great and her associates eventually ended up in the courtyard of the Museum of Local Lore thanks to the intercession of the writer Maksim Gorky.

In the 1920s, Catherine Square and street were renamed after Karl Marx. For the next two decades, the pedestal housed a sculpture of the famed 'Das Kapital' author. At one point, the authorities replaced the bust with a new, life-size monument. However, the statue fell during a sudden storm, supposedly due to the poor quality of the materials used in its construction (or so reads the official version). In 1931, a sculptural composition with the symbols of the proletariat - a hammer and sickle - was temporarily installed on the spot.

During the occupation of Odessa by Romanian troops during World War II, Romanian Prime Minister Ion Antonescu hastened to rename the square and street after Adolf Hitler, though this time without any monument. In the 1950s, the pedestal was removed from the square and once again replaced with a public garden. In 1965, on the day marking the 60th anniversary of the uprising on the battleship Potemkin, a bronze monument to the sailors was unveiled on the square. This monument stood for 42 years. Finally, in 2007, as part of a project to recreate the historical appearance of Odessa's city center, the 'Monument to the Founders of Odessa', an exact replica of the original, was returned to Catherine Square. And now the square is in for new changes as the political winds have shifted again.

A political pendulum

The fact that nationalism comprises the essence of cultural memory in many Eastern European countries and, as a result, the nation becomes its own victim, is once again confirmed by the changes across Ukraine's cultural and historical landscape. Moreover, Russia, which is being cast as a threat to independence and territorial integrity, is thus becoming a key element in the mechanism of collective memory and identity. In other words, the model of a suffering nation and the motif of an existential threat have prevailed, and it is the image of Russia's past and present that will be used in forming Ukrainian identity.

How has this become possible? When Ukraine gained independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union, its political (electoral) geography acquired stable borders and became integrated into the self-consciousness of the country's two parts. In fact, several population groups with powerful national identities emerged at the time: Ukrainian-speaking (mostly living in the western and central regions, and professing a purely ethnic narrative), Russian-speaking (mostly living in the center, south and east, for whom Russians were not 'strangers' or 'enemies'), and actual Russians.

These groups, particularly the Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers, long had their own heritage, language, and political representation. Recall the Orange Revolution of 2004 or the Euromaidan of 2014, during which the 'pro-Ukrainian' part of society opposed the 'pro-Russian' leader Viktor Yanukovych. Who, in reality, had spent years negotiating with the EU about eventual Ukrainian membership.

Despite certain similarities between the groups, their differences were so strong that even prior to Ukraine's independence, the authorities viewed any federalization attempts as ruinous for the nation at large.

For many years, Ukraine had existed thanks to a political pendulum between its south, east and west. A sense of unity depended on two conditions: the internal and external. The internal condition was that the political elite coming to power from any part of the country would express the interests of the entire population. The external condition was to keep the country balanced between the main centers of power. Both conditions turned out to be fragile. The former depended on how Ukraine's domestic political projects were pursued, while the latter reflected the country's ability to pursue a multi-vector policy in relations with Russia and the European Union.

2014 saw the collapse of both conditions. Prior to Euromaidan, the reunification of Crimea with Russia, and the outbreak of the armed conflict in Donbass, the disagreements about the historical narrative had been moderate. This delicate balance was upset by a policy in favor of actively building a nation state. The pendulum swung violently and suddenly the whole system lost balance.

Local elites reacted in different ways. Some emigrated fearing persecution (such as former deputy of the Odessa City Council Aleksandr Vasiliev), and others became part of a nationally-minded elite (as the aforementioned mayor of Odessa, Trukhanov, who in late 2013 to early 2014 repeatedly spoke at pro-Russian rallies).

At the same time, the main battle unfolded for the loyalty of Ukraine's so-called 'moderate' residents - i.e., the Russian-speaking Ukrainians (or Russian Ukrainians, as the renowned political scientist and Kiev resident Mikhail Pogrebinsky calls himself). This group has always been the middle ground. Having much in common with the two groups, it stood apart from both. And following the start of the conflict in 2014, the attitude of this cohort towards Russia and its culture became a key point of Ukrainian politics.

A Russian east?

Most Russian-speaking Ukrainians did not consider themselves of 'different nationality' and did not propose alternative national projects (for example, a unique regional identity associated with Ukraine's southern and eastern regions as a former part of the historical cultural region of Novorossiya). Such 'denationalization' was a result of Russia's limited foreign policy in the 1990s to early 2000s and the overall socio-economic situation.

In those years, there had been no interethnic or intercultural conflicts in Ukraine because it wasn't divided between 'Russians' and 'Ukrainians'. The eventual split occurred between those who took on Ukrainian national identity and those who didn't. In other words, following the status quo change in 2014, the southern and eastern regions became a conglomerate of territories insufficiently involved in the construction of the Ukrainian nation. While the region questioned its Ukrainian identity, it also couldn't follow the example of Donbass, which proclaimed the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and the Lugansk People's Republic (LPR) - a unique model that couldn't be applied to the rest of the south and east.

Following the start of Moscow's military operation, dissociation from Russian culture and language became inevitable. At the same time, the national identity of Russian-speaking Ukrainians has also undergone major changes. What used to be a compromise that encouraged a multiethnic and multicultural model of national development became a transitional model towards acquiring a totally Ukrainian identity - both language- and culture-wise.

A few years ago, residents of Ukraine's south and east spoke Russian while recognizing themselves as Ukrainians. Now, the Russian language and its cultural and historical symbols are undergoing irreversible changes and becoming a marker of political affiliation - namely, of being pro-Russian.

Conscious of this, the authorities are striving to gain control over historical heritage and memory policies and expect to win this battle for public opinion. The current southern and eastern regions are turning into a testing ground for experimental nation-building. Their political self-determination fully depends on the historical memory and language policies. Meanwhile, nationalism offers all the necessary tools for constructing a cohesive socio-political community. That is why such a striking 'de-Russification' initiative as the demolition of the monument to Catherine the Great in Odessa will not be the last.

For many years, the main political and cultural debate in Ukrainian society has revolved around the question of preserving or eradicating its Russian and Soviet cultural heritage. In the present situation of armed conflict, supporters of the latter skillfully use public outrage to achieve their aims. Should the process continue (and there's little reason to think it won't), in a few years Ukraine will turn into a significantly more homogeneous and far less culturally diverse country - one that has willingly renounced a major part of its heritage.

About the Author:
Alexander Nepogodin is an Odessa-born political journalist, an expert on Russia and the former Soviet Union.

More bad news:  the newly created U.S. coordination center in Stuttgart for Ukraine operations as a landmark on the way to WWIII

Earlier today I received an email from my good friend Professor of Law at the University of Illinois Francis A. Boyle regarding the creation in Stuttgart of a new U.S. coordination center for war operations in Ukraine headed by a 3-star general. The news item seems to have been sidelined this past week by Western mainstream coverage of the Russian withdrawal from Kherson and entry of Ukrainian forces into that city.  However, judging by Boyle’s interpretation, there is every reason to put a spotlight on this issue and to seek the broadest possible discussion in Alternative News electronic and print media.

I offer the following quote from Boyle’s email with his permission:

The story below is a pure cover story by the Pentagon. You do not need a 3 Star General and a Staff of 300 to keep tabs on U.S. Weapons in Ukraine. This is a War Command to wage war against Russia. The last time I dealt personally with a 3 Star General was  when I lectured at West Point on “Nuclear Deterrence” in their Senior Conference on that subject in front of, among others, the 3 Star General in Charge of War Operations at the Pentagon. The Pentagon puts a 3 Stars  General in Charge of War Operations—not Inventory. And you do not need a Headquarters Staff of 300 to do an Audit. It’s a War Headquarters Staff. We are going to war against Russia unless the American People can figure out some way to stop it!

Francis A. Boyle

Professor of Law

STUTTGART, Germany — A three-star general will lead a new Army headquarters in Germany that will include about 300 U.S. service members responsible for coordinating security assistance for Ukraine, a senior U.S. military official said this week.

Unquote

I refer those unfamiliar with Francis Boyle to his brief biography in the University of Illinois website:

https://law.illinois.edu/faculty-research/faculty-profiles/francis-boyle/   To that I can add, that his ‘political science’ studies for the Masters and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard were primarily in Russian/Soviet affairs, and that in his time at Harvard he worked under many of the same professors as did I.  In this sense, Boyle is a well qualified Russia expert, even if his primary listing at Illinois is as defender of human rights.  He is also particularly noteworthy this year for his efforts to promote among several key Congressmen the articles of impeachment against President Biden that he has drafted; the charges – waging undeclared war on Russia in violation of the Constitution. So far that has gained little traction, but when the new Congress with Republican majority takes its seats in 2023 the prospects of finding sponsors may be significantly improved.

Notwithstanding the worrisome or alarming news above, I close this essay with a glimmer of hope that the world has not yet gone completely mad.  From my volunteer translator in Germany, I have learned about the start of what should be a nationwide “Ami Go Home” movement in the Federal Republic. It will begin with mass demonstrations in the East German city of Leipzig on 26 November. The protests are inspired by the thinking of Oskar Lafonteine, a German politician who held leading positions in the SPD and later in Die Linke: namely the notion that it is high time for the United States occupation forces to leave Germany so that the country may recover its sovereignty. Those new to German politics may more easily identify Lafonteine as the husband of the eloquent Opposition member of the Bundestag Sahra Wagenknecht. It behooves me to add that per the advice of my translator when he forwarded to me news about the ‘Ami Go Home’ demonstration that the actual organizers are not on the German Left but, on the contrary, on the Hard Right. This interpretation has been reconfirmed by a well informed reader living in Berlin. Call this yet another ‘impersonation’ or imposter phenomenon if you will. We are living through interesting times.

Recently, I argued that Russia was provoked into beginning the ‘special military operation’ (SMO) by a series of events stretching from initial NATO claims of its goal to expand to Ukraine, NATO-Ukrainian cooperation, the Western-cultivated and ex post facto fully supported Maidan revolt (despite the neofascist Ukrainian element’s false flag snipers terrorist attack) to which Putin responded by annexing Crimea, Western support for Kiev’s attack on Donbass (including civilians), deeper Western and NATO involvement in Ukraine, Kiev’s failure to implement its obligations under the Minsk Donbass peace accords, and much else [see Gordon M. Hahn, Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West and the ‘New Cold War’ (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Books, 2018); https://gordonhahn.com/2022/02/24/coercive-diplomacy-phase-2-war-and-iron-curtain-descended/; https://gordonhahn.com/2016/01/21/report-the-russian-american-reset-nato-expansion-and-the-making-of-the-ukrainian-crisis/; https://gordonhahn.com/2016/03/09/the-real-snipers-massacre-ukraine-february-2014-updatedrevised-working-paper/; and https://www.academia.edu/37784742/Shooting_of_Maidan_Protesters_from_Maidan_Controlled_Locations_Video_Appendix_C_2018_?email_work_card=title%5D. As far as I am concerned, the ‘West/NATO expansion provoked the Ukrainian crisis and war’ is an incontrovertible fact.

More recently, I also argued, Putin decided to call off coercive diplomacy begun in spring 2021 and escalated in autumn through January 2021 by massing tropps at the Ukrainian border, when the West rejected Moscow’s appeals to end NATO expansion and sign a draft treaty on security agreements for Kiev and a European security architecture (https://gordonhahn.com/2022/01/31/putins-coercive-diplomacy/). The West’s rejection was accompanied by a major escalation in the Ukrainian military attacks along the Donbass line of contact and a threat by Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy to abandon the Budapest Memorandum, implying an attempt to acquire nuclear weapons (https://gordonhahn.com/2022/02/24/coercive-diplomacy-phase-2-war-and-iron-curtain-descended/). Zelensky said at the annual meeting of the Munich Security Conference on February 19, 2022: “I, as president, will do it for the first time. But Ukraine and I are doing it for the last time. I am launching consultations within the framework of the Budapest Memorandum. The Minister of Foreign Affairs has been asked to convene them. If they do not happen again or if their results do not guarantee the security of our country, Ukraine will have the right to think that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and that all the comprehensive decisions of 1994 are being questioned” (“Speech by Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the 58th Munich Security Conference”, by Volodymyr Zelensky, Voltaire Network, 19 February 2022). The Munich conference is attended by all the leaders of the NATO alliance and other parties interested in European security issues, and yet not one Western leader questioned the appropriateness of what would be a violation not just of the Budapest Memorandum but of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. That these immediate provocations were a direct cause of Putin’s decision to begin the SMO is not possible to prove, but the thesis is highly plausible if not likely a fact. Putin responded to Zelenskiy’s nuclear demache, saying that the only thing Ukraine needs is a uranium enrichment system, but this technical issue “is not an insoluble problem” for Ukraine, especially given the support Kiev enjoys from some nuclear powers (www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/putin-says-minsk-agreement-on-ukraine-exists-no-more/2510573). Incidentally, this is not only pertinent to Putin’s February decision but also provides some context for the struggle surrounding the Zaporozhe Nuclear Power Plant.

Now new evidence suggests that perhaps, perhaps, the West and Kiev intentionally or not engaged in additional provocations that prompted Putin’s SMO on 24 February 2022. For example, former President Petro Poroshenko has suggested that Kiev never intended to follow through on the Minsk accords and sought only to buy time for Ukraine to strengthen its military through training and weapons supplied by the West for an offensive to take back Donbass and Crimea. In a June interview to Radio Free Europe’s Ukrainian language service and the German Deutsche Welle, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said the Minsk accords were intended to “delay the war” and “create powerful armed forces”: “Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war – to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces” (www.bignewsnetwork.com/news/272589263/minsk-deal-was-used-to-buy-time-ukraines-poroshenko). Then in an August 2022 interview advisor to Zelenskiy and his Office of the President of Ukraine, Aleksei Arestovich revealed that in December 2021 the Ukrainian armed forces deployed additional troops to the Donbass contact line under the cover of a training exercise “despite the damage (the deployment) did to the economy” (https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses/8504). Perhaps this is what led Zelenskiy to tell the Ukrainian tntelligence services a month before Putin’s SMO began the following: “”We have learned to deter and counter external aggression quite effectively. I am convinced that the time has come to move to offensive actions to defend our national interests” (www.president.gov.ua/en/news/zovnishnya-rozvidka-vidigraye-vazhlivu-rol-u-protidiyi-zagro-72517). Then throw into the mix the aforementioned exponential increase in firing across the contact line undertaken by Ukrainian forces first and Zelenskiy’s threat to pursue nuclear capability.

I am saying ‘provoked Putin intentionally or not’ because we do not know what Moscow knew about these new deployments. Moscow did claim that Ukraine was preparing an attack on Donbass, especially after the SMO began, even claiming that it discovered documents proving Kiev was planning an attack. But it remains unclear whether these Russian claims pertain to the newly revealed secret depoloyment. Certainly, Moscow would had Donbass and Ukraine crawling with intelligence operatives and well-covered with electronic and satellite data collection and would likely have observed the ‘secret’ deployment. Then the issue might be whether Kiev and/or the West wanted Moscow to uncover the deployment, so as to provoke Putin into attacking. Or perhaps they did not want this, but Russian intelligence nevertheless did discover it, which along with other immediate challenges noted above prompted Putin’s decision to begin the SMO.

If the provocation theory is correct than it would also be correct that the West wanted Putin to invade, and if that is so then it would be logical that the West would want the war to continue. We now know that the West directly intervened with Zelenskiy to prevent Russia and Ukraine from finalizing a tentative agreement that would have ended the war in April. A recent article in the establishment flafship foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs written by two rusologists with deep ties to the ruling Democrat Party-state revealed this: “According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries” (https://archive.ph/kxfbG and https://raheemkassam.substack.com/p/russia-and-ukraine-came-to-peace?fbclid=IwAR0n03z7v-tJOjIOFC4_eXZCjvzyJbwzcgjycFbFigo9a9LV_FOA439_o74). This is one piece of evidence that the West wants the war to continue. NATO expansion and weakening Russia trump international security and Ukrainians’ well-being. The West’s massive supply of weapons, intelligence, military expertise, training, strategic planning, and financial support and Washington’s and Brussels’s lack of any effort in the diplomatic sphere to encourage negotiations further demonstrate that the West wants the war to continue.

At the same time, there is reason to believe that Zelenskiy himself may have been manipulated by the West, there is a new video circulating that shows French President Emmanuel Macron in discussion over the phone with Zelenskiy as the Russian invasion began on February 24th. Zelenskiy can be heard pleading with Macron to organize US President Joe Bden and European leaders to make a phone call to Putin and urge him to stop the military action, claiming that if this is done, then Putin “will stop” (https://t.me/stranaua/62507). On the other hand, Zelenskiy’s suspicions regarding Biden’s and other US officials’ claims of an imminent invasion and reports that Russia engaged in a massive bribery and recruiting campaign among Ukrainians before the war, which would have almost certainly led to some reporting the effort to the authorities and tipping off the possibility of a Russian invasion suggest that the Ukrainian leadership should have been well aware of the likelihood of an attack. Yet Zelenskiy showed no desire to negotiate with Putin on the key issues Moscow sought to have addressed: NATO expansion, direct talks between Kiev and the Donbass, the incomplete Minsk peace process, and so on.

In sum, there is some reason to believe that the escalation of the Donbass war ordered by Putin in February has a more interesting pre-history and causal chain than might be assumed even those who understand that Putin did not wake up one morning and decide to seize Ukraine in some master plan to ‘reestablish the Soviet Union’ and other such delusions. At any rate, the new war’s start needs more investigation and its origins are likely only to be revealed many years from now.

About the Author

Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, http://www.canalyt.com and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, www.cetisresearch.org. 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, and the Hoover Institution.

Last week on October 19 the US Navy announced that “General Michael ‘Erik’ Kurilla [lead image, lower right] , commander of CENTCOM, conducted a visit aboard the USS West Virginia [top], a U.S. Navy Ohio-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine at an undisclosed location at sea in international waters in the Arabian Sea. Kurilla was joined on the USS West Virginia by Vice Admiral Brad Cooper [lower left], commander of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet and NAVCENT.”   

The Fifth Fleet and the Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT) are headquartered at Bahrain on the Persian Gulf.  From Bahrain down the Gulf to the Masirah Island airbase, off Oman, is a flight distance of 1,047 kilometres. From Masirah to the West Virginia and its escort was within helicopter flight range.

Two days later,  the Pentagon reported that “on October 21, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III spoke by phone with Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoygu. Secretary Austin emphasized the importance of maintaining lines of communication amid the ongoing war against Ukraine.”  They spoke again on October 23, according to Austin’s spokesman, because Shoigu had “requested a follow up call.”  

Less than 24 hours elapsed before Austin telephoned his Kiev counterpart, Alexei Reznikov,  to “reiterate[d] that the United States rejects the public and false allegations by Russia about Ukraine and any attempt to use them as a pretext for further Russian escalation of its unlawful and unjustified war against Ukraine.”  

The same day, in the Moscow evening,  the US Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a communiqué confirming that “Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley spoke with Chief of Russian General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov today by phone. The military leaders discussed several security-related issues of concern and agreed to keep the lines of communication open. In accordance with past practice, the specific details of their conversation will be kept private.” RIA, the Russian state news agency,  reported that in their conversation the generals “discussed the possibility raised by Moscow that Ukraine might use a ‘dirty bomb’.”  

“The call took place shortly after a similar conversation between Gerasimov and his British counterpart.”

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the British chief of staff, announced that Gerasimov had requested their conversation. According to Radakin,  he had “rejected Russia’s allegations that Ukraine is planning actions to escalate the conflict, and he restated the UK’s enduring support for Ukraine. The military leaders both agreed on the importance of maintaining open channels of communication between the UK and Russia to manage the risk of miscalculation and to facilitate de-escalation. The conversation followed the Defence Secretary’s call with his Russian counterpart yesterday and a call between the Foreign Ministers of France, the UK, and the USA last night.”  

That preceding call of foreign ministers, involving Secretary of State Antony Blinken for the US, produced a joint statement of “committ[ment]  to continue supporting Ukraine’s efforts to defend its territory for as long as it takes. Earlier today, the defense ministers of each of our countries spoke to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu at his request. Our countries made clear that we all reject Russia’s transparently false allegations that Ukraine is preparing to use a dirty bomb on its own territory. The world would see through any attempt to use this allegation as a pretext for escalation. We further reject any pretext for escalation by Russia.”   

Blinken then telephoned his Kiev counterpart, Dmitry Kuleba, to repeat both parts of the message – that the Ukraine should not escalate to using a nuclear weapon, and that Russia should do likewise.  

In case there was hardness of hearing or weakness of command and control in Kiev, or ambiguity between what Reznikov and Kuleba thought they were hearing from Washington and London, British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace had met Austin at the Pentagon on October 18.  They then telephoned to talk again on Sunday, when they “reaffirm[ed] the U.S.-UK defense relationship and the importance of transatlantic cooperation. Their conversation today was a continuation of their discussion at the Pentagon last week, which covered a wide range of shared defense and security priorities, including Ukraine.”  

Austin telephoned Kiev again yesterday to repeat to Reznikov that he should make sure the allegation of a Ukrainian nuclear weapon escalation was “false”;  and that the allies had given Moscow this assurance in exchange for Moscow’s undertaking against “further escalation” – read Russian nuclear response.    

At the same time yesterday, Vzglyad, the Moscow security publication, published its assessment of the escalating nuclear threat to Russia from the US, as the Kremlin, Defence Ministry, General Staff and the Stavka see it now.  A translation into English follows.

Left to right: General Valery Gerasimov; General Mark Milley; Admiral Sir Tony Radakin; General Lloyd Austin. 

Source: [https://vz.ru/](https://vz.ru/world/2022/10/24/1183495.html)

The US has shown its readiness to launch a nuclear strike on Russia.  
October 24, 2022
Text: Alexander Timokhin 

Does the United States have the ability to instantly, within a few minutes, launch a disarming and unreciprocated nuclear strike on Russia? For decades, it was assumed that no, any US attack would cause an immediate similar response from the Russian armed forces. But now there is reason to believe that Washington has come to a different conclusion – and brazenly demonstrates it.

On Thursday, October 20, an exceptional event took place in the Arabian Sea. It was publicly announced that Michael Kurilla, commander of the US Central Command, paid a visit to the Ohio-class West Virginia SSBN (submarine with ballistic nuclear missiles), which specially surfaced in the Arabian Sea. This submarine, like all its ‘sister ships’, is armed with 24 Trident II ballistic missiles, each of which can carry 10 warheads at a maximum,  which in total gives the vessel an ammunition supply of 240 strategic nuclear warheads.

But the fact is that the purpose of such vessels is always to be secretive and never to reveal the location of their patrol. The fact that now the location of this SSB [ballistic missile submarine] is expressly highlighted, it is impossible to understand otherwise than a special signal. It is difficult to remember when earlier in this way any American military commander so clearly and openly visited a boat at sea on combat duty. All this is directly related to the nuclear deterrence system that exists between Russia and the United States.

Nuclear deterrence and nuclear attack

Nuclear war, the preparation for it and its conduct, is not as simple as the average person thinks. Let’s briefly list the key concepts.

When two sides – in this case, Russia and the United States – both have nuclear weapons, and the means of their delivery to enemy territory, a missile attack warning system, and the technical capability to launch ballistic missiles after this system detects the launch of enemy missiles, then a simple missile attack becomes suicide for the attacker. If the United States or Russia launches their ballistic missiles at the enemy, the enemy will be able to launch their missiles before the attacking side’s missiles reach their target.

Such a strike, when a counterattack is carried out before the enemy’s missiles have reached target, is called a ‘counter-counter’ [ответно-встречным]. It is applied with the help of intercontinental ballistic missiles based in deep underground silos and ready to launch immediately.

The problem is that the interval from launch command to the counter-strike takes time. And besides, it is necessary that someone from among the leaders who have the authority to order such a strike would be physically able to do it — that is, would be alive, conscious, and so on.

This vulnerability can be exploited by delivering a so–called обезглавливающий удар (for Americans, the term is decapitation strike). A strike aimed at destroying the leadership. There are various ways to prevent or to balance the consequences of such a strike — we will not list them, nor the methods of their application (not only by missile strike).

In addition to the decapitating blow, there is such a thing as a disarming blow (удар обезоруживающий — counterforce strike). Its goal is to attack the nuclear arsenal of the victim country in such a way that the enemy, even with a workable leadership, simply does not have time to launch its missiles in response. To do this, the time for which the blow is struck should be less than the enemy needs to make a decision and pass the order to the launchers.

Therefore, in addition to providing a retaliatory nuclear strike, the country’s nuclear forces have been invested with the means of ensuring the guaranteed possibility of a retaliatory strike. Which will be produced even if the enemy struck first, and all his missiles hit their targets before at least something was launched in response. The most common way to ensure a retaliatory strike is  strategic submarines. As a result, the enemy’s attack in any case causes a counter-counter or retaliatory strike. Nuclear war turns out to be a dead end;  it cannot be won;  and even the initiator who has attacked successfully also dies.

This principle is called “mutually assured destruction”. It was this, and not anything else, that guaranteed the absence of major wars on our planet since 1945.

However, today the situation is somewhat different. The number of nuclear warheads has become such that the exchange of nuclear strikes cannot lead to the guaranteed death of all living things. The number of carriers of nuclear weapons has fallen to such numbers that even after a massive, all-out strike, wildlife, untouched cities and towns, and people will remain in the Northern Hemisphere. A nuclear war without the death of all participants has become possible.

The second problem is the combat stability of the Russian nuclear forces in their current configuration. Russia was able to revive the Missile Attack Warning System (SPRN). The missiles that are supposed to retaliate and counter-strike are regularly updated.

But now our fleet has fewer ships than Japan. There is no possibility to intercept or block all dangerous waters with the operations of Russia’s anti-submarine forces. And this means that, as in the case of the Arabian Sea, the Americans and the British who can hold the area, will be free to manoeuvre there in order to strike from locations where the missiles can reach us too quickly. For example, in the Northern, Norwegian, Barents, Mediterranean and Arabian Seas.

Russian strategic submarines are few in number today compared to the Soviet times. Together with the qualitative superiority of the US Navy, this creates an environment where the Americans can destroy our submarines immediately before the attack begins. This, alas, is a fact known to specialists. At the same time, 44% of all strategic nuclear warheads in Russia are placed on submarines. And almost all of them are in two (!) fleet bases vulnerable to the first strike. The Russian strategic aviation has never learned to fight like the American one, and it is not a means of guaranteed retaliation.

The combination of these factors creates a technical opportunity for the United States to launch a successful disarming nuclear strike against Russia without receiving a significant blow in response. At the same time, the intensity of anti-Russian propaganda is such that the western man in the street will not have to justify anything — from that  perspective everything is already prepared. And right now there is the hint of the possibility of such a strike when the West Virginia surfaced in the Arabian Sea.

Chinese factor, flight time and impact mechanics

Some experts believe that the American SSB was carrying out tasks to put pressure on China during the CPC [Chinese Communist Party] Congress. On the one hand, it is indeed easy to attack China from the Arabian Sea ‘from the rear’ – the approach of missiles to its populated areas will be from its deserts in the west of the country.

But there is no logic in such pressure. The Americans don’t know exactly where the Chinese have missiles. In addition, China does not have its own full-fledged SPRN [missile attack warning system]. The Americans can organize a sudden strike on this country with Pacific submarines from other directions. They simply do not need to threaten China from the Indian Ocean, and without this, they have a full array of threats.

In contrast to China, the coordinates of Russian underground launchers and the corridors along which mobile installations moved until recently are known to the Americans extremely accurately. We gave them all the information ourselves during mutual inspections of each other’s missile positions. Thus, the strategic missile submarine in the Arabian Sea is a hint not to China, but to Russia. At the very least we should not rule it out.

In order for the strike on our country to be successful, it must be delivered faster than we will have an alarm, an assessment of the situation for the command to launch. To do this, the distance from which the strike is carried out must be about 3,000 kilometres, otherwise the flight time of the missiles will be too long. So now let’s look at the map.

When the SSB is deployed in the northern part of the Arabian Sea, it just happens to be at about such a distance from the installations of the 31st Missile Army of the RVSN [Russian Strategic Rocket Forces, HQ Orenburg] and some parts of the 33rd Guards Army of the RVSN [Russian Strategic Rocket Forces, HQ Omsk], which allows the submarine to deliver the same disarming blow in the minimum flight time.

It is clear that such a task cannot be solved by one submarine. And it is clear that such a task cannot be solved solely from the Arabian Sea. But no one is talking about ‘one’ and ‘only’. The deployment of SSBMS in this sea area is not a preparation for a strike against Russia. But this is a demonstration that technically the United States can strike such a blow if it sees fit. And they’re not bluffing.

There is one technical aspect that is little-known to the layman. A ballistic missile can fly not only along the normal trajectory for itself, when the payload is lifted into the upper point of the trajectory and drops down from there. In addition to ballistic trajectories, missiles can also fly along the so-called flat (depressed in English terminology). The meaning of the flat trajectory is that the rocket goes very low, not even rising to 300 kilometres.  With such a trajectory, ranges and accuracy suffer greatly, the dispersion of combat warheads increases, but this turns out to give a serious gain in flight speed to the target and a very small flight time.

If during a strike from the Arabian Sea, for example on the 13th missile division [13th Orenburg Red Banner Rocket Division] in the Orenburg region, employing a conventional trajectory, the flight time of the missiles is comparable to the time required for making a decision and passing the command for a counter-strike. However, when striking from there by a flat trajectory, the picture changes dramatically, and not in our favour.

At the same time, there are ways to compensate for the dispersion of interceptors.  Firstly, these are the new fuses in the W76-2 combat warheads, which allow for time-synchronized detonation of the warheads, preventing them from flying past the target. Secondly, there is the mutual overlap of the affected areas when working on a target from several submarines. Thirdly, the US has made progress in hypersonic gliding attack warheads.

A clear sign of the ambition of the United States to deliver such disarming strikes sometime in the future would be evidence that they are firing missiles along flat trajectories, and there is such evidence. Since 2015, three videos of such tests have been filmed by random eyewitnesses – and have become publicly available.

The Americans are clearly working on launching missile strikes using such schemes. And now they are showing us their readiness to bring a strategic submarine to the point of a salvo ‘at point-blank range’. Across Russia.

Of course, it’s easier said than done. One still needs to deploy a sufficient number of submarines to strike. It is necessary not to frighten the enemy and not to cause an emergency exit to the sea of all its strategic missile carriers, not to cause the dispersal of strategic bombers, tankers and cruise missiles with nuclear warheads. What is necessary is that that the mobile ground-based missile systems do not have time to ‘run away’ too far for the inconspicuous B-2 and B–21 bombers, which will go in the second wave to mop up those remnants of the strategic missile forces that would have survived the missile strike – unless the [US] launch team still did not pass through the [Russian] system known as Perimeter [western name, Dead Hand]  or otherwise.

It’s all very complicated, and the risks of loss of surprise are very high. But their chances of success are not zero. With the visit of West Virginia to our ‘soft underbelly’, the Americans clearly show how far they are willing to go if they deem it necessary. The Americans are sending an extremely clear signal – for them, nuclear war is no longer unthinkable, and not impossible.