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

Ukraine and its American and British allies fooled around.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Missiles will speak for themselves”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ukrainian missiles had spoken.

The Russian response

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

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

Test launch of an RS-26 missile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As it turned out, we were all wrong.

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

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

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

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

Oreshnik missile impact on the Dnipropetrovsk military industrial complex

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

These facilities were destroyed.

The Russians had spoken as well.

Back to the future

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

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

The Skorost missile and launcher

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ready for a nuclear exchange

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rear Admiral Thomas Buchanan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

His plans have failed.

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

Meaning we have no adequate plan for the future.

But we do have a plan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hold that thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this is if we “win.”

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

And yet we are actively preparing to fight one.

This insanity must stop.

Now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need to say “no” to nuclear war.

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

I am encouraging American[

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

Watch this space for more information about this rally.

All our lives depend on it.

Point to point navigation describes the long-lost art of celestial navigation, the ability to use the stars to chart a course across the open seas in the age before compasses. The key to successfully executing point to point navigation lay in fixing one’s position vis-à-vis the North Star. Failure to do so meant risking sailing aimlessly about a sea with no fixed reference points, an act that leads to death or, perhaps worse, becoming a castaway on some unchartered point on earth.

After a storm, a ship’s captain and his navigator would scan the skies for the North Star, from which they could establish not only what direction true north was, but also where they were in reference to the position of the North Star in the sky, so that they might navigate to safety.

When special operations forces are compromised behind enemy lines, they conduct what they call “escape and evasion,” the act of avoiding detection and probable death or capture, while making their way to a pre-designated haven from which they can regroup or be extracted. The CIA trains its operations officers in similar skill sets. Both colloquially refer to such actions as “finding their true north.”

The perpetrators of the horrific attack on the Crocus City Hall and Concert Center in Krasnogorsk, a metropolitan community located to the northwest of Moscow, were no different than any other terrorist/militant before them; after their act of mass murder, they sought out their “true north” to make good their escape.

Western governments, analysts, and pundits have loudly proclaimed that the men who carried out the attack on the Crocus City Hall had nothing whatsoever to do with Ukraine, and instead have collectively embraced a narrative that paints the men as members of the Islamic State-Khorasan (ISIS-K). ISIS is an off-shoot of Al-Qaeda-Iraq (AQI) which emerged in 2013 when core AQI members relocated to Syria. In 2014 ISIS declared itself to be a caliphate and began a series of operations which saw it take control on a third of Syria and a quarter of Iraq before being driven back and ultimately defeated by a coalition which included Iraq, the United States and Iran.

In 2014 Central Asian fighters affiliated with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan formed a branch of ISIS in Afghanistan known as ISIS-K, where they stood for Khorasan (ISIS-K). Khorasan is an ancient term for the territory encompassed by modern day Iran, Turkmenistan, and Afghanistan. ISIS-K continues to operate today in Afghanistan and Iran, as well as inside the former Soviet Central Asian republics, including Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Terrorists attacking the Crocus City Hall

According to US officials, the United States collected intelligence that ISIS-K was planning an attack on Moscow in early March. This intelligence was behind a public warning issued by the US embassy in Russia on March 7 that “extremists” were planning an imminent attack on large gatherings in Moscow. “US citizens should be advised to avoid large gatherings over the next 48 hours,” the warning, published on the embassy website, stated. American citizens were warned to avoid crowds, including concerts. These US officials likewise claimed (and Russia has acknowledged) that Russia had been informed about the intelligence behind the March 7 warning. This information was shared based upon the “duty to warn” principle where US intelligence about potential terrorist attacks must be shared with the suspected targets. However, rather than passing this information through formal channels, it was done unofficially, through informal channels, significantly diluting the impact of the information.

The attackers posted a photograph of them reciting the Shahada, or Islamic oath and creed ("I bear witness that there is no deity but God, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God") which, if made sincerely, is all that is required to be identified as a Muslim in the eyes of God. While Islamic scholars note that it is only necessary to recite the words, for jihadists reciting Shahada accompanied by a raised right index finger, has become de riguere—Osama Bin Laden delivered it in this fashion, as did Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of the Islamic State.

Shahada is a ritual, and those who make Shahada must understand its importance for it to have any meaning. As such, if one incorporates the raising of the right index finger as part of the Shahada ritual, it must be done piously. The use of the right hand is critical—in the Muslim faith, the right hand symbolizes all that is good, and the left is reserved for unclean acts: “No one among you should eat with his left hand or drink with it, for the shaytaan (devil) eats with his left hand and drinks with it.”

The four attackers delivered this oath by raising their left hands.

They also published this photograph with their faces blurred—they were shielding their identity.

There can be no subterfuge when reciting Shahada—it is an oath made before God and in the eyes of men.

Moreover, the blurring of their faces indicated that the attackers intended to survive their mission.

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The Crocus City Hall attackers making Shahada

For most militants affiliated with ISIS-K, true north is the path to martyrdom, a one-way ticket to paradise. Their goal is to inflict as much harm as possible before being dispatched from this mortal earth, an act that is usually made certain using a suicide vest detonated at a time when more death and destruction can be wrought.

The perpetrators of the Crocus City Hall attack, however, did not wear suicide vests. Indeed, they had no intention of losing their lives, but rather to live and be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor, a purported $5,500 payment for services rendered.

These weren’t Islamist militants.

These were mercenaries who disguised themselves as Islamic militants.

The Crocus City Hall attackers in their getaway car

And when they finished their murderous rampage, the purported ISIS-K fighters jumped into their car and headed toward their “true north.”

Ukraine.

Ukraine. The source of their money.

Ukraine. The source of their motivation.

The Russian investigation into the terror attack is still in its early stages. There are many facts left to be uncovered.

But there is a plethora of data which allows one to populate the puzzle with enough pieces to begin to see a discernable shape take form.

Russian authorities went out of their way to make sure that all four perpetrators were captured alive.

The perpetrators are in the process of being interrogated. Many of the techniques being used by Russia would not be permitted in the United States as they could readily be classified as torture. And many intelligence professionals—me included—discount the value of any confession made under severe duress.

But the Russian interrogations are aided by the fact that the Russian investigators are not engaged in a fishing expedition, but rather are guided by specific facts derived from the forensic examination of the cell phones of the four terrorists, which are currently in the possession of Russian authorities. One of these phones was recovered at the crime scene, and the data contained on this phone was used by Russian security officials to track the terrorists as they drove out of Moscow, toward Ukraine. Telephone numbers contained on the recovered phone allowed the Russians to zero in on the remaining phones, and monitor phone calls made by the terrorists in real time—including numerous calls to persons inside Ukraine who were working to create a gap in the Russian-Ukrainian border that the terrorists could escape through.

The Russians have been able to identify the core structure of a support network in Moscow which provided the four terrorists with transportation and housing.

Eleven arrests have been made in this regard.

The Russians have identified a network operating in Turkey who were affiliated with the recruitment, training and logistical preparation and support of the terrorist operation in Moscow.

Forty arrests have been made as a result.

But more importantly, Russia has gathered enough information to issue a warrant for the head of the Ukrainian security service, Vasyl Malyuk, on charges of public incitement of terrorism. Likewise, the head of the Russian security service, Alexander Boritnikov, has stated that when it comes to delivering justice to Ukrainians who may have been involved in the attack on the Crocus concert venue, “Everything is ahead of us.”

Russia, it seems, is navigating point to point.

Not toward a safe haven, but rather on a path of retribution.

And its “true north” is the same as that of the terrorists.

Ukraine.

Vasyl Malyuk, the head of the Ukrainian SBU

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.

Russia’s goal is not to destroy Ukraine—this could be accomplished at any time. Rather, the goal of Russia is to destroy NATO by exposing its impotence, writes Scott Ritter.

High-water monument at Gettysburg National Military Park. (Veggies /Wikimedia Commons)

By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News

In the quiet fields outside the sleepy college town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, sits a bronze monument, in the form of an open book. Known as the “High-Water Mark of the Rebellion” monument, it contains the identities of the various military formations that, in the afternoon of July 3, 1863, fought a life and death struggle on and around the soil where the monument is set.

Here, some 12,500 men under the command of Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet, formed into three divisions, and launched a frontal assault on some 10,000 entrenched Union troops commanded by Major General Winfield Scott Hancock.

While around 1,500 confederates managed to pierce the Union line, they were quickly surrounded and compelled to either surrender or die. It is at this point on the battlefield that the “High-Water” monument is located, commemorating what has become to be known as “Pickett’s Charge,” named after one of the division commanders who participated in the battle.

The Confederate Army was able to withdraw from the Gettysburg battlefield in good order to continue to fight for nearly two more years, before surrendering. But it never recovered from the disaster that was Pickett’s Charge. It was truly the High-Water Mark of the Rebellion.

A Messy History

Students of history might be experiencing what Yogi Berra once famously called “Déjà vu all over again” when examining the frenetic activities undertaken by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) today, as it responds to what it alleges is a provocative Russian military buildup along the Russian-Ukrainian border.

The Trans-Atlantic alliance is a strange amalgam of political, economic, and military belief systems cloaking a mass of 30 nations who manage the day-to-day activities of their organization through a consensus-based, collective decision-making process that is as unwieldy as it is inefficient.

Originally formed as a collective of 12 nations united by the desire, as the first secretary-general of NATO, Lord Ismay, once quipped, “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”, the Trans-Atlantic alliance was, first and foremost, a club comprised of nations which had two things in common—a shared belief in the primacy of democratic governance, and a desire to be protected under the umbrella of American military power.

Signing of Washington Treaty that established NATO, April 1949. (NATO)

Early on the alliance witnessed a period of expansion, as it grew to 16 nations following the admittance of Turkey, Greece, Spain, and Portugal. These 16 nations served as the foundation of NATO throughout the Cold War, united in their determination to stand up to any potential Soviet aggression targeting the territory of western Europe.

NATO was always, from a political standpoint, a mess. Strong pro-communist movements in France and Italy led to the unseemly situation where the intelligence services of an allied nation, the United States, were engaged in manipulating the domestic political affairs of two ostensible allies to keep the communists out of power.

West Germany carried out its own unilateral Ostpolitik, seeking better relations with Soviet-occupied East Germany, much to the consternation of the United States. France, offended by what it (rightly) believed to be the dominance of the United States in the military command structure of the alliance, withdrew its military from NATO command authority. And Turkey and Greece were engaged in their own regional Cold War which, in 1974, went hot over the island of Cyprus.

The glue that held the alliance together was the collective defense provisions of Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which provides that if a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked.

For much of the Cold War, the NATO alliance was configured militarily so that there was little doubt as to what actions would be taken, with a standing NATO army deployed in West Germany in constant combat readiness, prepared to repel any attack by the Soviet Army and its Warsaw Pact allies. Likewise, NATO maintained significant air and naval forces deployed in the Mediterranean Sea ready to confront any Soviet aggression there. These forces were anchored by a massive standing U.S. military presence comprising hundreds of thousands of troops, tens of thousands of armored vehicles, thousands of combat aircraft, and hundreds of naval vessels.

This full-time presence of concentrated combat-ready military power, prepared as it was to fight at the drop of a hat, gave the Article 5 obligation far more gravitas than it perhaps deserved. The reality of Article 5 is such that, upon its invocation, Allies can provide any form of assistance they deem necessary to respond to a situation based upon the circumstances.

While this assistance is taken forward in concert with other Allies, it is not necessarily military in nature and depends on the material resources of each country. In short, Article 5 leaves to the judgement of each individual member country to determine how and what it would contribute in the case of its invocation.

With the end of the Cold War in 1990-91 came the dismantlement of this full-time combat-ready military force. The unified nature of the NATO military component that existed in the 1980’s ceased to exist barely ten years later, with each member state carrying out its own demobilization and restructuring based upon domestic political requirements, and not the requirements of the alliance.

NATO Goes on Offense

The former military headquarters in Belgrade, bombed intensively by Nato 10 years ago. (Dennis Jarvis/Wikimedia)

During this time NATO also watched its long-held mantra of being a purely defensive alliance fall to the side as it engaged in offensive military operations on the soil of the former Republic of Yugoslavia, and non-member, and a offensive bombing campaign against Serbia, despite Serbia not having attacked any NATO member.

This deconstruction of NATO’s military capabilities and status as an exclusively defensive organization took place hand in glove with a decision by NATO to expand its membership to include the former members of the Warsaw Pact, beginning with the accession of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999. The enlargement of NATO was seen as achieving two objectives—from the NATO perspective, it brought most of Europe together into a single collective of allied parties who, because of their membership, would contribute to the overall stability of Europe.

But there was another perspective at play, that being that of the U.S.. While NATO responded to the U.S. invoking of Article 5 after the 9/11 attacks, providing airborne surveillance aircraft for North American patrols and naval forces in the Mediterranean Sea, several core members, led by Germany and France, balked at becoming involved in the post-9/11 military misadventures of the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This prompted then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to make a quip denigrating “Old Europe” at the expense of “New Europe.” The continued expansion of NATO eastwards, absorbing all of the former nations of the Warsaw Pact along with three former Soviet Republics in the Baltics not only pushed NATO’s geopolitical center of gravity further east, but also put NATO on a collision course with Russia, whose opinion most NATO members had conditioned themselves to ignore.

NATO went on to provide military and police training support to Iraq in 2004, following that nation’s defeat at the hands of a military coalition which included the U.S., U.K., and Poland providing combat troops, and Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands providing political support.

Likewise, NATO contributed significant military forces to reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. These troops operated under Article 4 authorities after the U.S. brought the Afghan situation post-9/11 to the attention of the general membership, which voted to authorize member states to deploy to Afghanistan in support of U.S. reconstruction and nation-building operations.

In 2011, NATO engaged in offensive military operations in Libya, part of a larger political campaign to remove the Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi, from power.

A US Adjunct

(Creative Commons/Wikipedia)

By 2008 NATO had become a bloated edifice largely unrecognizable from the organization that had been created at its founding, in 1949. Its appetite for expansion knew no bounds, with membership offers being dangled before two former Soviet Republics, Georgia and Ukraine, and military engagements being initiated in North Africa and the Persian Gulf.

While the bloated organizational structure of NATO looked impressive on paper, there were two realities that no amount of puffing and posturing could obviate. First and foremost was the absolute dearth of real military power on the part of the non-U.S. NATO components. To support and sustain their respective military commitments to Afghanistan, the major NATO nations involved—Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy—were forced to cannibalize their overall military capability to surge their respective military components forward. Even then, none of these nations could accomplish their Afghan mission without the logistical support provided by the United States.

This over-reliance upon U.S. military capacity only underscored the inconvenient reality that NATO had become little more than an adjunct of U.S. foreign and national security policy. The U.S. had always played an oversized role in NATO. If this was singularly focused on preserving European security, the non-U.S. members of NATO could deceive themselves into believing that they were co-equal partners in a defensive-oriented Trans-Atlantic arrangement.

Once NATO began expanding, both in terms of membership composition and scope and scale of its non-European military commitments, it was obvious to any observer exercising a modicum of intellectual curiosity that NATO existed for the sole benefit of the United States.

Nothing drove this point home more than the humiliation NATO suffered at the hands of the U.S. when it came to the abandonment of the Afghan reconstruction mission. The decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was made unilaterally by the United States, without consultation. NATO, faced with a fait accompli, had no choice but to do as ordered, and leave Afghanistan with its tail between its legs.

The ultimate humiliation was yet to come. Nothing takes place in a vacuum, and the expansion of NATO, combined with its offensive re-orientation, drew the ire of Russia, which took extreme umbrage over the encroachment of a military alliance no longer bound by the constraints of collective self-defense, but rather imbued with a post-Cold War posture built around the notion of containing and constraining a Russia which was recovering from its post-Soviet collapse malaise and, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, was actively restoring it position as a regional and global power.

NATO Fissures

U.S.-backed, violent coup in Ukraine, 2014. (Wikipedia)

Russia had, since 2001, been sounding a claxon call about NATO expansion and the threat it posed to Russian security interests. These calls were ignored by NATO and its U.S. masters, largely because they believed Russia to be too weak both militarily and economically.

While NATO chased post-9/11 ghosts in the Middle East and Afghanistan at the behest of its American overseer, Russia worked to reform its economy and military. In 2008 Russia defeated Georgia in a short but violent war precipitated by a Georgian military assault on the breakaway territory of South Ossetia. In 2014, Russia responded to the U.S.-orchestrated Maidan coup that ousted the democratically-elected president of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovich, by annexing Crimea and throwing its support behind pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region of Ukraine.

The important thing to note about the current crisis in Ukraine is that while the underlying issues are solely the byproduct of NATO overreach, the timing of the crisis is based upon a Russian timetable defined by purely Russian goals and objectives. The goal of Russia is not to destroy Ukraine—this could be accomplished at any time. Rather, the goal of Russia is to destroy NATO.

This will not be accomplished through the direct use of military force, but rather the indirect threat of military action which forces NATO to react in a way which exposes the impotence of an organization which long ago lost its raison d-etre, collective defense, and instead flounders under the weight of a mission—the containment of Russia—it cannot achieve, and which its membership is not united in pursuing.

Here are a few statements of fact—the Russian military would defeat any force NATO can assemble in a stand-up conventional fight. The entire notion of collective self-defense is predicated on the ability to deter any potential adversary from considering military action against a NATO member because the outcome—the total defeat of the attacking party—was never in dispute.

While a truly defensive alliance would have the moral authority to call out the build-up of Russian military power around Ukraine as un-duly provocative, NATO has long since lost the ability to apply that label to itself with any degree of seriousness. From the standpoint of Russia, when the same “defensive” alliance which bombed its ally Belgrade and worked to overthrow the leader of Libya puts its sights on acquiring Ukraine and Georgia as members, such actions can only be viewed as aggressive, offensively oriented-measures that function as part of a broader anti-Russian campaign.

Exposing NATO

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and others representatives of NATO countries in a group photo at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, March 23, 2021. (State Department, Ron Przysucha)

By militarizing the Ukraine crisis, Russia has exposed the absolute military impotence of NATO. First and foremost, after dangling the bait of NATO membership before Ukraine for the past fourteen years, NATO was compelled to confess that it would not be able to come to the defense of Ukraine in case of any Russian military invasion because Article 5 only allowed collective defense to be invoked for NATO members, which Ukraine is not.

Moreover, the “massive” economic sanctions that NATO has promised to unleash in lieu of a military response have turned out to be as impotent as NATO’s military power. Despite what the political leadership of NATO and the United States may say to the contrary, there is no unity of purpose when it comes to imposing sanctions on Russia in the event of a military incursion into Ukraine.

In short, any sanction package that targets Russian energy and/or access to banking institutions will hurt Europe far more than Russia. While the United States continues to push for Europe, and in particular Germany, to wean itself off Russian energy supplies, the fact is there is no viable alternative to Russian energy and, moreover, Europe is increasingly recognizing that the U.S. position has less to do with European security and more to do with a play by the U.S. to grab the European market for itself.

Under normal conditions, the U.S. cannot compete with Russia in terms of price and volume when it comes to natural gas deliveries. If, through sanctions, the U.S. can cut off Europe from Russia, then the U.S. will be able to impose its own energy products on Europe at prices that otherwise would be uncompetitive.

NATO’s Realization

The individual members of NATO are beginning to awaken to the reality that their organization is little more than an impotent tool of American global hegemony. Hungary has cut its own gas deal with Russia, in defiance of U.S. directives to pull back. Croatia and Bulgaria have made it clear that they will not be deploying troops in support of NATO posturing on Ukraine.

Turkey has stated that it views the Ukraine crisis as little more than a thinly disguised effort by NATO and the U.S. to weaken Turkey by forcing it to fight Russia in the Black Sea. But perhaps the most telling moments came when the two European powerhouses of NATO, Germany, and France, were compelled to come face to face with the reality of their subservient role vis-à-vis the U.S..

When French President Emmanual Macron flew to Russia to try and negotiate a settlement to the Ukraine crisis, he was confronted with the reality that Russia won’t negotiate with France without the U.S. first expressing support for the positions being put forward by the French President. The U.S. matters; France does not.

Likewise, the German chancellor was forced to stand mutely during his visit to the White House while U.S. President Joe Biden “promised” that he would unilaterally shut down the NordStream 2 pipeline project, even though the U.S. had no role to play in the construction and administration of the pipeline. Germany, Biden was saying, is little more than a colony of the United States.

Chinese President Xi Jinping with Russian President Vladimir Putin during visit to Moscow in 2019. (Kremlin)

The final nail in the NATO coffin came on Feb. 4, when the Russian president met with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing. The two leaders issued a 5,000-plus word joint statement in which China threw its weight behind Russia’s objection to NATO expansion into Ukraine.

The Sino-Russian joint statement was a de facto declaration that neither Russia nor China would allow the U.S.-led “rules based international order” being promulgated by the Biden administration to go forward unchallenged. Instead, the two nations announced that they will be pursuing a “law based international order” which draws on the United Nations Charter for its authority, in contrast to unilateral rules which only serve the interests of the U.S. and small blocs of allied nations.

A Different World

The world has fundamentally changed. NATO literally has no relevance. Its last gesture of defiance lays in the deployment of forces into eastern Europe to bolster the defensive capabilities of that region in accordance with Article 5. The forces deployed—a few thousand American paratroopers, and a smattering of other contingents from other NATO nations—not only cannot defeat a Russian adversary, but doesn’t even provide a modicum of deterrence value should Russia be inclined to shift its sights away from Ukraine toward Poland and the Baltics.

What NATO doesn’t realize is that Russia has no intention of invading either Ukraine or eastern Europe. All Russia has done is demonstrate the empty shell that NATO has become by underscoring just how empty the Article 5 promise of collective defense truly is.

In this regard, one should view NATO’s current round of muscle flexing as the modern-day equivalent of Picket’s Charge, the high-water mark of the Trans-Atlantic alliance. In the weeks and months to come, NATO will be faced with the reality that Russia is not invading anyone, and that the muscle flexing it is currently engaged in is not only not needed, but worse, unsustainable.

The fractures exposed in NATO’s membership when it comes to Ukraine will only grow larger over time. It may take years for NATO to go away, but let no one be fooled by what is happening—NATO is finished as an alliance.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

Scorpion King: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump is a history of America’s corrosive affair with nuclear weapons, and the failed efforts to curb this radioactive ardor through arms control. The book’s title refers to the allusion by Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the American atomic bomb, to dueling scorpions when discussing the deadly nuclear rivalry between the US and Soviet Union, and signals the dangers inherent in the resumption of the perilous US drive for nuclear supremacy.

Providing a vivid and gripping A-Z history of America’s deceptive use of arms control as a means of actually furthering its quest for nuclear dominance, Ritter sheds light on a contradictory US agenda little understood by the lay reader, while providing sufficient detail and context to engage the specialist.

The Trump administration has pulled out of one landmark arms control treaty, the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty, and is threatening to let another, the 2010 New START treaty, expire. The terrifying Cuban missile crisis of 1962 demonstrated the apocalyptic folly of nuclear arsenals operating without limitation, and led to reciprocal constraints that moderated the nuclear ambitions of both the US and Soviet Union Those constraints, for the most part, no longer exist. The next missile crisis could prove terminal for humanity.

“A comprehensive and illuminating account of America’s paralyzing infatuation with nuclear weapons. This expanded edition of Scott Ritter’s 2010 book drives home the point made in the original: The ominous threat of Doomsday persists, with U.S. policymakers unable to extricate themselves from the reckless pact with the devil made by their predecessors more than a half-century ago.”

—**ANDREW BACEVICH, President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft**

“Scott Ritter’s Scorpion King is an important and necessary wake-up call. Nuclear weapons, in the quantities that now exist, are a threat to our very existence. They have no rational military use, yet we still cling to them, “modernize” them, and undermine the international agreements designed to keep them under control. This book should be required reading for political leaders, media pundits, and citizens who want to leave a future to our children and grandchildren.”—**JACK J. MATLOCK, JR, author of Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray**

The assassination by the United States of Qassem Suleimani, a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general and commander of the Quds Force, an Iranian paramilitary force specializing in covert operations on foreign soil, has sent shock waves through the Middle East and around the globe.

The Trump administration has justified its action, citing unspecified intelligence that indicated Suleimani was in the process of finalizing plans for attacks on U.S. personnel and interests in the region, claiming that Suleimani’s death “saved American lives.” This narrative has been challenged by Lebanese officials familiar with Suleimani’s itinerary, noting that the Iranian general had been in Beirut on diplomatic business, and had travelled to Baghdad via a commercial air flight, where he had been diplomatically cleared to enter. These officials claim Suleimani was killed while riding in a convoy on his way from Baghdad International Airport into the city of Baghdad.

In any event, Suleimani’s death resonates in a region already on edge because of existing tensions between the U.S. and Iran. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, has announced three days of mourning for Suleimani, an indication of his status as national hero. Khamenei also vowed revenge on those who perpetrated the attack. Concern over imminent Iranian retaliation has prompted the State Department to order all American citizens to leave Iraq, and for U.S. forces in the region to be placed on the highest level of alert. Hundreds of American soldiers have been flown into the region as reinforcements, with thousands more standing by if needed.

For many analysts and observers, Iran and the U.S. are on the cusp of a major confrontation. While such an outcome is possible, the reality is that the Iranian policy of asymmetrical response to American aggression that had been put in place by Qassem Suleimani when he was alive is still in place today. While emotions run high in the streets of Iranian cities, with angry crowds demanding action, the Iranian leadership, of which Suleimani was a trusted insider, recognizes that any precipitous action on its part only plays into the hands of the United States. In seeking revenge for the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, Iran will most likely play the long game, putting into action the old maxim that revenge is a dish best served cold.

In many ways, the United States has already written the script regarding major aspects of an Iranian response. The diplomatic missions Suleimani may have been undertaking at the time of his death centered on gaining regional support for pressuring the United States to withdraw from both Syria and Iraq. Of the two, Iraq was, and is, the highest priority, if for no other reason that there can be no sustained U.S. military presence in Syria without the existence of a major U.S. military presence in Iraq. Suleimani had been working with sympathetic members of the Iraqi Parliament to gain support for legislation that would end Iraq’s support for U.S. military forces operating on Iraqi soil. Such legislation was viewed by the United States as a direct threat to its interests in both Iraq and the region.

The U.S. had been engaged in a diplomatic tug of war with Iran to sway Iraqi politicians regarding such a vote. However, this effort was dealt a major blow when Washington conducted a bombing attack Sunday which targeted Khaitab Hezbollah along the border with Syria, killing scores of Iraqis. The justification for these attacks was retaliation for a series of rocket attacks on an American military base that had killed one civilian contractor and wounded several American soldiers. The U.S. blamed Iranian-backed Khaitab Hezbollah (no relation to the Lebanese Hezbollah group), for the attacks.

There are several problems with this narrative, first and foremost being that the bases bombed were reportedly more than 500 kilometers removed from the military base where the civilian contractor had been killed. The Iraqi units housed at the bombed facilities, including Khaitab Hezbollah, were engaged, reportedly, in active combat operations against ISIS remnants operating in both Iraq and Syria. This calls into question whether they would be involved in an attack against an American target. In fact, given the recent resurgence of ISIS, it is entirely possible that ISIS was responsible for the attack on the U.S. base, creating a scenario where the U.S. served as the de facto air force for ISIS by striking Iraqi forces engaged in anti-ISIS combat operations.

ISIS has emerged as a major feature in the Iranian thinking regarding how best to strike back at the US for Suleimani’s death. The Iranian government has gone out of its way to announce that, in the wake of Suleimani’s assassination, that Washington would be held fully responsible for any resurgence of ISIS in the region. Given the reality that Iran has been at the forefront of the war against ISIS, and that Iranian-backed Iraqi militias such as Khaitab Hezbollah have played a critical role in defeating ISIS on the ground, there is no doubt that Iran has the ability to take its foot off of the neck of a prostrate ISIS and facilitate their resurgence in areas under U.S. control.

Such an outcome would serve two purposes. First, U.S. forces would more than likely suffer casualties in the renewed fighting, especially since their primary proxy force, the Syrian Kurds, have been diminished in the aftermath of Turkey’s incursion late last year in northern Syria. More importantly, however, is the political cost that will be paid by President Trump, forced to explain away a resurgent ISIS during an election year after going on record that ISIS had been completely defeated.

But the real blow to American prestige would be for the Iraqi government to sever relations with the American military. The U.S. bombing of the Iraqi bases severely stressed U.S.-Iraqi relations, with the Iraqi government protesting the attacks as a violation of their sovereignty. One of the ways the Iraqi government gave voice to its displeasure was by facilitating access by protestors affiliated with Khaitab Hezbollah to gain access to the highly secure Green Zone in downtown Baghdad where the U.S. Embassy is situated, where they set fire to some buildings and destroyed property before eventually dispersing. While commentators and politicians have described the actions targeting the US Embassy as an “attack,” it was a carefully choreographed bit of theater designed to ease passions that had built up as a result of the U.S. attack.

Getting the Iraqi Parliament to formally reject the U.S. military presence on Iraqi soil has long been a strategic objective of Iran. As such, Iran would be best served by avoiding direct conflict with the US, and letting events take their expected course.

If Iraq votes to expel American forces, the Trump administration will be tied up trying to cope with how to manage that new reality. Add to that the problems that will come in confronting a resurgent ISIS, and it becomes clear that by simply doing nothing, Iran will have already gained the strategic upper hand in a post-Suleimani world. The Trump administration will find it hard to sustain the deployment of thousands of troops in the Middle East if there is no Iranian provocation to respond to. Over time, the American presence will lessen. Security will lapse. And, when the time is right, Iran will strike, most probably by proxy, but in a manner designed to inflict as much pain as possible.

Trump started this fight by recklessly ordering the assassination of a senior Iranian government official. The Trump administration now seeks to shape events in the region to best support a direct confrontation with Iran. Such an outcome is not in Iran’s best interests. Instead, they will erode Trump’s political base by embarrassing him in Iraq and with ISIS. Iran will respond, that much can be assured. But the time and place will be of their choosing, when the U.S. expects it least.

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of several books, most recently, Deal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West’s Road to War (2018).

The ceasefire agreement brokered by Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday accomplishes very little outside of putting window dressing on a foregone conclusion. Simply put, the Turks will be able to achieve their objectives of clearing a safe zone of Kurdish forces south of the Turkish border, albeit under a U.S. sanctioned agreement. In return, the U.S. agrees not to impose economic sanctions on Turkey.

So basically it doesn’t change anything that’s already been set into motion by the Turkish invasion of northern Syria. But it does signal the end of the American experiment in Syrian regime change, with the United States supplanted by Russia as the shot caller in Middle Eastern affairs.

To understand how we got to this point, we need to navigate the four A’s that underpin America’s failed policy vis-à-vis Syria—Afghanistan, Astana, Adana, and Ankara.

The first, Afghanistan, represents the epitome of covert American meddling in regional affairs—Operation Cyclone, the successful CIA-run effort to arm and equip anti-communist rebels in Afghanistan to confront the Soviet Army from 1979 to 1989. The success of the Afghanistan experience helped shape an overly optimistic assessment by the administration of President Barack Obama that a similarly successful effort could be had in Syria by covertly training and equipping anti-Assad rebels.

The second, Astana, is the capital city of Kazakhstan, recently renamed Nur Sultan in March 2019. Since 2017, Astana has played host to a series of summits that have become known as “the Astana Process,” a Russian-directed diplomatic effort ostensibly designed to facilitate a peaceful ending to the Syrian crisis, but in reality part of a larger Russian-run effort to sideline American regime change efforts in Syria.

The Astana Process was sold as a complementary effort to the U.S.-backed, UN-brokered Geneva Talks, which were initially convened in 2012 to bring an end to the Syrian conflict. The adoption by the U.S. of an “Assad must go” posture doomed the Geneva Talks from the outset. The Astana Process was the logical outcome of this American failure.

The third “A”—Adana—is a major city located in southern Turkey, some 35 kilometers inland from the Mediterranean Sea. It’s home to the Incirlik Air Base, which hosts significant U.S. Air Force assets, including some 50 B-61 nuclear bombs. It also hosted a meeting between Turkish and Syrian officials in October 1998 for the purpose of crafting a diplomatic solution to the problem presented by forces belonging to the Kurdish People’s Party, or PKK, who were carrying out attacks inside Turkey from camps located within Syria.

The resulting agreement, known as the Adana Agreement, helped prevent a potential war between Turkey and Syria by formally recognizing the respective sovereignty and inviolability of their common border. In 2010, the two nations expanded the 1998 deal into a formal treaty governing cooperation and joint action, inclusive of intelligence sharing on designated terrorist organizations (i.e., the PKK). The Adana Agreement/Treaty was all but forgotten in the aftermath of the 2011 Syrian crisis, as Turkey embraced regime change regarding the Assad government, only to be resuscitated by Russian President Vladimir Putin during talks with Erdogan in Moscow in January 2019. The re-introduction of the moribund agreement into the Syrian-Turkish political dynamic successfully created a diplomatic bridge between the two countries, paving the way for a formal resolution of their considerable differences.

The final “A”—Ankara—is perhaps the most crucial when it comes to understanding the demise of the American position in Syria. Ankara is the Turkish capital, situated in the central Anatolian plateau. In September 2019, Ankara played host to a summit between Erdogan, Putin, and Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani. While the ostensible focus of the summit was to negotiate a ceasefire in the rebel-held Syrian province of Idlib, where Turkish-backed militants were under incessant attack by the combined forces of Russia and Syria, the real purpose was to facilitate an endgame to the Syrian crisis.

Russia’s rejection of the Turkish demands for a ceasefire were interpreted by the Western media as a sign of the summit’s failure. But the opposite was true—Russia backed Turkey’s demand for a security corridor along the Turkish-Syrian border, and accepted Ankara’s characterization of the American-backed Syrian Defense Forces (SDF) as “terrorists.” This agreement, combined with Turkey’s willingness to recognize the outcome of Syrian presidential elections projected to take place in 2021, paved the way for the political reconciliation between Turkey and Syria. It also hammered the last nail in the coffin of America’s regime change policy regarding Bashar al-Assad.

There is little mention of the four A’s in American politics and the mainstream media. Instead there’s only a skewed version of reality, which portrays the American military presence in Syria as part and parcel of a noble alliance between the U.S. and the Kurdish SDF to confront the ISIS scourge. This ignores the reality that the U.S. has been committed to regime change in Syria since 2011, and that the fight against ISIS was merely a sideshow to this larger policy objective.

“Assad must go.” Those three words have defined American policy on Syria since they were first alluded to by President Obama in an official White House statement released in August 2011. The initial U.S. strategy did not involve an Afghanistan-like arming of rebel forces, but rather a political solution under the auspices of policies and entities created under the administration of President George W. Bush. In 2006, the State Department created the Iran-Syrian Operations Group, or ISOG, which oversaw interdepartmental coordination of regime change options in both Iran and Syria.

Though ISOG was disbanded in 2008, its mission was continued by other American agencies. One of the byproducts of the work initiated by ISOG was the creation of Syrian political opposition groups that were later morphed by the Obama administration into an entity known as the Syrian National Council, or SNC. When Obama demanded that Assad must step aside in August 2011, he envisioned that the Syrian president would be replaced by the SNC. This was the objective of the Geneva Talks brokered by the United Nations and the Arab League in 2011-2012. One of the defining features of those talks was the insistence on the part of the U.S., UK, and SNC that the Assad government not be allowed to participate in any discussion about the political future of Syria. This condition was rejected by Russia, and the talks ultimately failed. Efforts to revive the Geneva Process likewise floundered on this point.

Faced with this diplomatic failure, Obama turned to the CIA to undertake an Afghanistan-like arming of Syrian rebels to accomplish on the ground what could not be around a table in Geneva.

The CIA took advantage of Turkish animosity toward Syria in the aftermath of suppression of anti-Syrian government demonstrations in 2011 to funnel massive quantities of military equipment, weapons, and ammunition from Libya to Turkey, where they were used to arm a number of anti-Assad rebels operating under the umbrella of the so-called “Free Syrian Army,” or FSA. In 2013, the CIA took direct control of the arm and equip program, sending teams to Turkey and Jordan to train the FSA. This effort, known as Operation Timber Sycamore, was later supplemented with a Department of Defense program to provide anti-tank weapons to the Syrian opposition.

American efforts to create a viable armed opposition ultimately failed, with many of the weapons and equipment eventually falling into the hands of radical jihadist groups aligned with al-Qaeda and, later, ISIS. The emergence of ISIS as a regional threat in 2014 led to the U.S. building ties with Syrian Kurds as an alternative vector for implementation of its Syrian policy objectives.

While the fight against ISIS was real, it was done in the context of the American occupation of fully one third of Syria’s territory, including oil fields and agricultural resources. As recently as January 2019, the U.S. was justifying the continued presence of forces in Syria as a means of containing the Iranian presence there; the relationship with the SDF and Syrian Kurds was little more than a front to facilitate this policy.

Turkish incursion into Syria is the direct manifestation of the four A’s that define the failure of American policy in Syria—Afghanistan, Astana, Adana and Ankara. It represents the victory of Russian diplomacy over American force of arms. This is a hard pill for most Americans to swallow, which is why many are busy crafting a revisionist history that both glorifies and justifies failed American policy by wrapping it in the flag of our erstwhile Kurdish allies.

But the American misadventure in Syria was never going to end well—bad policy never does. For the American troops caught up in the collapse of the decades-long effort of the United States to overthrow the Assad government, the retreat from Syria was every bit as ignominious as the retreats of all defeated military forces before them. But at least our forces left Syria alive, and not inside body bags—which was an all too real alternative had they remained in place to face the overwhelming forces of geopolitical reality in transition.

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of several books, most recently, Deal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West’s Road to War (2018).

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced the commencement of “Operation Peace Spring,” a military incursion by the Turkish armed forces into northern Syria. The target of the offensive, according to Erdogan, are “terrorists” from the Kurdish Workers’ Party, or PKK, which is comprised of Turkish Kurds fighting for independence from Turkey, and Syrian Kurds from the YPG, or People’s Protection Units. Erdogan is also pledging to combat residual ISIS elements.

The Turkish move comes with an ostensible green light from President Trump, who cleared the way for the Turkish action by precipitously ordering the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the area.

Trump’s actions have been widely condemned as a betrayal of the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, an American-trained and -equipped force of Syrian Kurds who played a lead role in the fight against ISIS in Syria, suffering thousands of casualties in the process. That Turkey, an American NATO ally, is waging war against the SDF (which the Turks label as YPG/PKK—more on that later), while at the same time targeting ISIS, the archenemy of the all these Kurdish groups, underscores the complexity of the regional politics at play in northern Syria today. Deciphering this alphabet soup goes a long way towards explaining why the Turkish actions are justified and why President Trump will ultimately be vindicated for pulling the troops out.
Truly understanding the complex history of the Kurds in the Middle East would require several Ph.D.’s worth of research, and even then questions would remain. My own opinions are, in large part, shaped by personal experience.

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The complexity of inter-Kurdish politics was driven home when, in 1992, I led a team of UN weapons inspectors to inspect the area around the Bekhme Dam, located some 40 miles northeast of the city of Irbil, considered to be the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. At that time, Iraqi Kurdistan had freed itself from Iraqi governmental control, and Irbil was controlled by a faction of Iraqi Kurds known as the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK. The territory around Irbil was contested between the PUK and another Kurdish faction, the Kurdish Democratic Party, or KDP. These two factions did not get along.

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Trump’s decision to withdraw American forces from the Syrian border zone makes perfect sense: it avoids a damaging conflict with Turkey, a strategic NATO ally, and sidesteps a potential major power confrontation with Russia. This was always in the cards, since the United States was never a guarantor of the Syrian Kurds’ objective of autonomy. But the precipitous way that the American redeployment was announced, and the fact that it was done void of any coordination with either the Kurds or other U.S. regional allies, sets the stage for more geopolitical chaos in a region already wracked by conflict.

The United States has long been engaged in a secret shadow war with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), dating back to the American invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.

This conflict took the lives of hundreds of American troops and hundreds more IRGC members. The Iranian opposition to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and the inability of the U.S. to militarily defeat Iranian forces inside Iraq, was just one reason that the Obama administration decided to withdraw American troops in 2011.

Since that time, a tenuous truce has existed between the U.S. military in the region and the IRGC. Even when American troops were re-deployed to Iraq in 2014 to help defeat the Islamic State (ISIS), they did so in concert with IRGC who were fighting alongside Iraqi Shiite militias. American forces inside Syria likewise avoided direct conflict with the IRGC, which was aiding the Syrian military.

But now, the Trump administration has made the decision to designate the IRGC a terrorist organization. This little reported move will have large consequences, shredding the prior truce and putting the lives of thousands of U.S. service members at risk.

“Today, I am formally announcing my Administration’s plan to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including its Qods Force, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act,” the president announced on April 8. The designation will take effect on April 15.

“This designation will be the first time that the United States has ever named a part of another government as an FTO,” adding, “This action sends a clear message to Tehran that its support for terrorism has serious consequences. We will continue to increase financial pressure and raise the costs on the Iranian regime for its support of terrorist activity until it abandons its malign and outlaw behavior.”

The Quds Force, a unit within the IRGC that specializes in operations outside Iran, has long been viewed as a terrorist organization by the United States. The IRGC as an entity, however, operates as an integral part of the Iranian government. As such, the U.S. has deliberately avoided classifying it as a terrorist organization out of concerns that doing so would hobble diplomatic efforts with Iran and even destabilize the greater Middle East.

Given the fact Washington is currently engaged in a global “war” on terrorism, this designation—which places the IRGC on the same footing as ISIS and al-Qaeda—means that the U.S. is in effect at war with Iran.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif responded to the designation on Monday. He recommended in a letter to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani that—given the ongoing overt and covert support of U.S. military forces in the region for groups that have been involved in terrorist acts against Iran—the Supreme National Security Council should designate U.S. Central Command as terrorists.

The Iranians have long assessed that U.S. intelligence services and Special Operations forces have used militant Iranian opposition organizations as proxies in a bloody, undeclared war to undermine the legitimacy of the Iranian government and harm the IRGC. For example, last February, a Baluch separatist group, Jaish al-Adl, claimed credit for the bombing of a bus carrying IRGC soldiers, which killed nearly 30 people. The IRGC claims that the group received its instructions, training, and equipment from U.S. personnel operating out of Afghanistan.

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Zarif’s recommendation to designate Central Command as terrorists was echoed by Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, the head of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee. The IRGC also made its position clear regarding the FTO designation.

“If the Americans take such a stubborn measure and endanger our national security we will put in place counter-measures in line with the police of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, the IRGC’s commander-in-chief, declared.

He further noted that if this happened, U.S. forces would no longer be safe in the region. The impetus behind Trump’s decision is clear—he wants to support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu himself acknowledged as much in a tweet:

“Thank you, my dear friend President Donald Trump, for deciding to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization. Thank you for answering another one of my important requests, which serves the interests of our country and the countries of the region.”

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The timing of the announcement is seen as an attempt to influence the outcome of elections in Israel, where Netanyahu is struggling in a bid for reelection.

But another reason might be lingering resentment within certain American circles over the role played by the IRGC in fomenting resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

“In Iraq, I can announce today, based on declassified U.S. military reports, that Iran is responsible for the deaths of at least 608 American service members. This accounts for 17 percent of all deaths of U.S. personnel in Iraq from 2003 to 2011,” declared Brian Hook, the U.S. Representative for Iran, in a briefing this week.

Left unsaid was that during that same time, the U.S., through the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), was engaged in its own undeclared war with Iran on Iraqi soil. Far from being the fallout of unilateral Iranian acts of terrorism, the U.S. combat deaths referred to by Hook were part and parcel of a conflict waged in the shadows that only ended with the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq in 2011.

Given this direct link between American and Iranian aggression in Iraq, there can be no doubt that the Trump administration understands that by designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization, it has placed the lives of thousands of American personnel still serving in the Middle East at risk. There are currently between 1,000 and 1,500 U.S. troops inside Syria, and they are surrounded by IRGC-affiliated forces and militias. And more than 5,000 U.S. troops are stationed inside Iraq, where the IRGC controls powerful Shiite militias as well as significant portions of the Iraqi military.

There can be no doubt that if the U.S. acts kinetically against the IRGC, Americans will die. That this policy has been implemented in support of the re-election campaign of an Israeli prime minister, in furtherance of an effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear deal that was likewise implemented at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu, means these brave men and women will not have died in the service of their country. They will have perished as pawns of a policy conceived in Tel Aviv that places the political fortunes of a foreign politician above the lives of our heroes.

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Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of Dealbreaker: Donald Trump and the Unmaking of the Iran Nuclear Deal (2018) by Clarity Press.

The search for truth is as old as civilization. Philosophers throughout the ages have struggled with the difficulties of rationalizing the beginning of existence, and the relationships between the one and the many. Aristotle approached this challenge through what he called the development of potentiality to actuality, which examined truth in terms of the causes that act on things. This approach is as relevant today as it was two millennia prior, and its application to the problem of ascertaining fact from fiction regarding Khan Sheikhun goes far in helping unpack the White House statements regarding Syrian chemical preparations and the Hersh-Higgins debate.

On the night of June 26, the White House Press Secretary released a statement, via Twitter, that, “the United States has identified potential preparations for another chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime that would likely result in the mass murder of civilians, including innocent children.” The tweet went on to declare that, “the activities are similar to preparations the regime made before its April 4 chemical weapons attack,” before warning that if “Mr. Assad conducts another mass murder attack using chemical weapons, he and his military will pay a heavy price.”

A Pentagon spokesman backed up the White House tweet, stating that U.S. intelligence had observed “activity” at a Syrian air base that indicated “active preparation for chemical weapons use” was underway. The air base in question, Shayrat, had been implicated by the United States as the origin of aircraft and munitions used in an alleged chemical weapons attack on the village of Khan Sheikhun on April 4. The observed activity was at an aircraft hangar that had been struck by cruise missiles fired by U.S. Navy destroyers during a retaliatory strike on April 6.

The White House statement comes on the heels of the publication of an article by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in a German publication, Die Welt, which questions, among many things, the validity of the intelligence underpinning the allegations leveled at Syria regarding the events of April 4 in and around Khan Sheikhun. (In the interests of full disclosure, I had assisted Mr. Hersh in fact-checking certain aspects of his article; I was not a source of any information used in his piece.) Not surprisingly, Mr. Hersh’s article has come under attack from many circles, the most vociferous of these being a UK-based citizen activist named Eliot Higgins who, through his Bellingcat blog, has been widely cited by media outlets in the U.S. and UK as a source of information implicating the Syrian government in that alleged April chemical attack on Khan Sheikhun.

Neither Hersh nor Higgins possesses definitive proof to bolster their respective positions; the latter draws upon assertions made by supposed eyewitnesses backed up with forensic testing of materials alleged to be sourced to the scene of the attack that indicate the presence of Sarin, a deadly nerve agent, while the former relies upon anonymous sources within the U.S. military and intelligence establishments who provide a counter narrative to the official U.S. government position. What is clear, however, is that both cannot be right—either the Syrian government conducted a chemical weapons attack on Khan Sheikhun, or it didn’t. There is no middle ground.

The search for truth is as old as civilization. Philosophers throughout the ages have struggled with the difficulties of rationalizing the beginning of existence, and the relationships between the one and the many. Aristotle approached this challenge through what he called the development of potentiality to actuality, which examined truth in terms of the causes that act on things. This approach is as relevant today as it was two millennia prior, and its application to the problem of ascertaining fact from fiction regarding Khan Sheikhun goes far in helping unpack the White House statements regarding Syrian chemical preparations and the Hersh-Higgins debate.

According to Aristotle, there were four causes that needed to be examined in the search for truth — material, efficient, formal and final. The material cause represents the element out of which an object is created. In terms of the present discussion, one could speak of the material cause in terms of the actual chemical weapon alleged to have been used at Khan Sheikhun. The odd thing about both the Khan Sheikhun attack and the current White House statements, however, is that no one has produced any physical evidence of there actually having been a chemical weapon, let alone what kind of weapon was allegedly employed. Like a prosecutor trying a murder case without producing the actual murder weapon, Syria’s accusers have assembled a case that is purely circumstantial — plenty of dead and dying victims, but nothing that links these victims to an actual physical object.

Human Rights Watch (HRW), drawing upon analysis of images brought to them by the volunteer rescue organization White Helmets, of fragments allegedly recovered from the scene of the attack, has claimed that the material cause of the Khan Sheikhun event is a Soviet-made KhAB-250 chemical bomb, purpose-built to deliver Sarin nerve agent. There are several issues with the HRW assessment. First and foremost, there is no independent verification that the objects in question are what HRW claims, or that they were even physically present at Khan Sheikhun, let alone deposited there as a result of an air attack by the Syrian government. Moreover, the KhAB-250 bomb was never exported by either the Soviet or Russian governments, thereby making the provenance of any such ordinance in the Syrian inventory highly suspect.

Sarin is a non-persistent chemical agent whose military function is to inflict casualties through direct exposure. Any ordnance intended to deliver Sarin would, like the KhAB-250, be designed to disseminate the agent in aerosol form, fine droplets that would be breathed in by the victim, or coat the victim’s skin. In combat, the aircraft delivering Sarin munitions would be expected to minimize its exposure to hostile fire, flying low to the target at high speed. In order to have any semblance of military utility, weapons delivered in this fashion would require an inherent braking mechanism, such as deployable fins or a parachute, which would retard the speed of the weapon, allowing for a more concentrated application of the nerve agent on the intended target.

Chemical ordnance is not intended for precise strikes against point targets, but rather delivery of the agent to an area. For this reason, they are not dropped singly, but rather in large numbers. (The ab-250, for instance was designed to be delivered by a TU-22 bomber dropping 24 weapons on the same target.) The weapon itself is not complex—a steel bomb casing with a small high explosive tube—the burster charge—running down its middle, equipped with a nose fuse designed to detonate on contact with the ground or at a pre-determined altitude. Once detonated, the burster charge causes the casing to break apart, disseminating fine droplets of agent over the target. The resulting explosion is very low order, a pop more than a bang—virtually none of the actual weapon would be destroyed as a result, and its component parts, readily identifiable as such, would be deposited in the immediate environs. In short, if a KhAB-250, or any other air delivered chemical bomb, had been used at Khan Sheikhun, there would be significant physical evidence of that fact, including the totality of the bomb casing, the burster tube, the tail fin assembly, and parachute. The fact that none of this exists belies the notion that an air-delivered chemical bomb was employed by the Syrian government against Khan Sheikhun.

Continuing along the lines of Aristotle’s exploration of the relationship between the potential and actual, the efficient cause represents the means by which the object is created. In the context of Khan Shiekhun, the issue (i.e., object) isn’t the physical weapon itself, but rather its manifestation on the ground in terms of cause and effect. Nothing symbolized this more than the disturbing images that emerged in the aftermath of the alleged chemical attack of civilian victims, many of them women and children. (It was these images that spurred President Trump into ordering the cruise missile attack on Shayrat air base.) These images were produced by the White Helmet organization as a byproduct of the emergency response that transpired in and around Khan Sheikhun on April 4. It is this response, therefore, than can be said to constitute the efficient cause in any examination of potential to actuality regarding the allegations of the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government there.

The White Helmets came into existence in the aftermath of the unrest that erupted in Syria after the Arab Spring in 2012. They say they are neutral, but they have used their now-global platform as a humanitarian rescue unit to promote anti-regime themes and to encourage outside intervention to remove the regime of Bashar al-Assad. By White Helmet’s own admission, it is well-resourced, trained and funded by western NGOs and governments, including USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development), which funded the group $23 million as of 2016.

A UK-based company with strong links to the British Foreign Office, May Day Rescue, has largely managed the actual rescue aspects of the White Helmet’s work. Drawing on a budget of tens of millions of dollars donated by foreign governments, including the U.S. and UK, May Day Rescue oversees a comprehensive training program designed to bring graduates to the lowest standard—”light,” or Level One—for Urban Search and Rescue (USAR). Personnel and units trained to the “light” standard are able to conduct surface search and rescue operations—they are neither trained nor equipped to rescue entrapped victims. Teams trained to this standard are not qualified to perform operations in a hazardous environment (such as would exist in the presence of a nerve agent like Sarin).

The White Helmets have made their reputation through the dissemination of self-made videos ostensibly showing them in action inside Syria, rescuing civilians from bombed out structures, and providing life-saving emergency medical care. (It should be noted that the eponymously named Oscar-nominated documentary showing the White Helmets in action was filmed entirely by the White Helmets themselves, which raises a genuine question of journalistic ethics.) To the untrained eye, these videos are a dramatic representation of heroism in action. To the trained professional (I can offer my own experience as a Hazardous Materials Specialist with New York Task Force 2 USAR team), these videos represent de facto evidence of dangerous incompetence or, worse, fraud.

The bread and butter of the White Helmet’s self-made reputation is the rescue of a victim—usually a small child—from beneath a pile of rubble, usually heavy reinforced concrete. First and foremost, as a “light” USAR team, the White Helmets are not trained or equipped to conduct rescues of entrapped victims. And yet the White helmet videos depict their rescue workers using excavation equipment and tools, such as pneumatic drills, to gain access to victims supposedly pinned under the weight of a collapsed building. The techniques used by the White Helmets are not only technically wrong, but dangerous to anyone who might actually be trapped—the introduction of excavators to move debris, or the haphazard drilling and hammering into concrete in the immediate vicinity of a trapped victim, would invariably lead to a shifting if the rubble pile, crushing the trapped victim to death. In my opinion, the videos are pure theater, either staged to impress an unwitting audience, or actually conducted with total disregard for the wellbeing of any real victims.

Likewise, the rescue of victims from a hazardous materials incident, especially one as dangerous as one involving a nerve agent as lethal as Sarin, is solely the purview of personnel and teams specifically equipped and trained for the task. “Light” USAR teams receive no hazardous materials training as part of their certification, and there is no evidence or even claim on the part of the White Helmets that they have undergone the kind of specialist training needed to effect a rescue in the case of an actual chemical weapons attack.

This reality comes through on the images provided by the White Helmets of their actions in and around Khan Sheikhun on April 4. From the haphazard use of personal protective equipment (either non-existent or employed in a manner that negates protection from potential exposure) to the handling of victims and so-called decontamination efforts, everything the White Helmets did was operationally wrong and would expose themselves and the victims they were ostensibly treating to even greater harm. As was the case with their “rescues” of victims in collapsed structures, I believe the rescue efforts of the White Helmets at Khan Sheikhun were a theatrical performance designed to impress the ignorant and ill-informed.

I’m not saying that nothing happened at Khan Sheikhun—obviously something did. But the White Helmets exploited whatever occurred, over-dramatizing “rescues” and “decontamination” in staged theatrics that were captured on film and rapidly disseminated using social media in a manner designed to influence public opinion in the West. We don’t see the actual rescue at the scene of the event—bodies pulled from their homes, lying in the streets. What we get is grand theater as bodies arrive at the field hospital, with lots of running to and fro and meaningless activity that would actually worsen the condition of the victims and contaminate the rescuers.

Through their actions, however, the White Helmets were able to breathe life into the overall narrative of a chemical weapons attack, distracting from the fact that no actual weapon existed and thus furthering the efficient cause by which the object—the non-existent chemical weapon—was created.

Having defined the creation of the object (the non-existent chemical weapon) and the means by which it was created (the flawed theatrics of the White Helmets), we move on to the third, or formal cause, which constitutes the expression of what the object is. In the case of Khan Sheikhun, this is best expressed by the results of forensic testing of samples allegedly taken from victims of the chemical attack, and from the scene of the attack itself. The organization responsible for overseeing this forensic testing was the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW. Through its work, the OPCW has determined that the nerve agent Sarin, or a “Sarin-like substance,” was used at Khan Sheikhun, a result that would seemingly compensate for both the lack of a bomb and the amateurish theatrics of the rescuers.

The problem, however, is that the OPCW is in no position to make the claim it did. One of the essential aspects of the kind of forensic investigation carried out by organizations such as the OPCW—namely the application of scientific methods and techniques to the investigation of a crime—is the concept of “chain of custody” of any samples that are being evaluated. This requires a seamless transition from the collection of the samples in question, the process of which must be recorded and witnessed, the sealing of the samples, the documentation of the samples, the escorted transportation of the samples to the laboratory, the confirmation and breaking of the seals under supervision, and the subsequent processing of the samples, all under supervision of the OPCW. Anything less than this means the integrity of the sample has been compromised—in short, there is no sample.

The OPCW acknowledges that its personnel did not gain access to Khan Sheikhun at any time. However, the investigating team states that it used connections with “parties with knowledge of and connections to the area in question,” to gain access to samples that were collected by “non governmental organizations (NGOs)” which also provided representatives to be interviewed, and videos and images for the investigating team to review. The NGO used by the OPCW was none other than the White Helmets.

The process of taking samples from a contaminated area takes into consideration a number of factors designed to help create as broad and accurate a picture of the scene of the incident itself as well as protect the safety of the person taking the sample as well as the integrity of the crime scene itself (i.e., reduce contamination). There is no evidence that the White Helmets have received this kind of specialized training required for the taking of such samples. Moreover, the White Helmets are not an extension of the OPCW—under no circumstances could any samples taken by White Helmet personnel and subsequently turned over to the OPCW be considered viable in terms of chain of custody. This likewise holds true for any biomedical samples evaluated by the OPCW—all such samples were either taken from victims who had been transported to Turkish hospitals, or provided by non-OPCW personnel in violation of chain of custody.

Lastly, there is Aristotle’s final cause, which represents the end for which the object _is—_namely, what was the ultimate purpose of the chemical weapons attack on Khan Sheikhun. To answer this question, one must remain consistent with the framework of examination of potential to actuality applied herein. In this, we find a commonality between the four causes whose linkage cannot be ignored when assessing the truth of what happened at Khan Sheikhun, namely the presence of a single entity—the White Helmets.

There are two distinct narratives at play when it comes to what happened in Khan Sheikhun. One, put forward by the governments of the United States, Great Britain, France, and supported by the likes of Bellingcat and the White Helmets, is that the Syrian government conducted a chemical weapons attack using a single air-delivered bomb on a civilian target. The other, put forward by the governments of Russia and Syria, and sustained by the reporting of Seymour Hersh, is that the Syrian air force used conventional bombs to strike a military target, inadvertently releasing a toxic cloud from substances stored at that facility and killing or injuring civilians in Khan Sheikhun. There can be no doubt that the very survival of the White Helmets as an organization, and the cause they support (i.e., regime change in Syria), has been furthered by the narrative they have helped craft and sell about the events of April 4 in and around Khan Sheikhun. This is the living manifestation of Aristotle’s final cause, the end for which this entire lie has been constructed.

The lack of any meaningful fact-based information to back up the claims of the White Helmets and those who sustain them, like the U.S. government and Bellingcat, raises serious questions about the viability of the White House’s latest pronouncements on Syria and allegations that it was preparing for a second round of chemical attacks. If America has learned anything from its painful history with Iraq and the false allegations of continued possession of weapons of mass destruction on the part of the regime of Saddam Hussein, it is that to rush into military conflict in the Middle East based upon the unsustained allegations of an interested regional party (i.e., Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress) is a fool’s errand.

It is up to the discerning public to determine which narrative about the events in Syria today they will seek to embrace—one supported by a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist who has made a career out of exposing inconvenient truths, from My Lai to Abu Ghraib and beyond, or one that collapses under Aristotle’s development of potentiality to actuality analysis, as the manufactured story line promoted by the White Helmets demonstratively does.

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of “Deal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West’s Road to War” (Clarity Press, 2017).