Tag: Russia

And Here… We… Go

JP Morgan just lost all of the funds it was holding in its bank accounts in Russia:

A Russian court has ordered the seizure of funds in JPMorgan Chase accounts in Russia, court filings showed on Wednesday, in a lawsuit filed by state-owned bank VTB as it seeks to regain funds blocked abroad. JP Morgan Chase last week sued VTB in New York to halt its efforts to recover $439.5 million from an account that was blocked after Russia despatched its army to Ukraine in 2022 and VTB was hit with sanctions.

The Arbitration Court of St Petersburg and the Leningrad Region’s ruling was dated April 22.

The court said it had ordered the seizure of all funds in JP Morgan bank accounts in Russia, including correspondent accounts and those opened in the name of a subsidiary. The court said it had not seized securities and property held by JP Morgan funds, or the jpmorgan.ru domain. In a complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan earlier this month, JPMorgan described VTB’s attempt to recover the money in Russia as a “blatant breach” of its agreement to have disputes addressed in New York.

The largest U.S. bank said U.S. law prohibits it from releasing the $439.5 million, and VTB, Russia’s second-largest bank, will try to seize its assets abroad if it prevails in the Russia lawsuit. It said VTB’s prospects there were good, with Russian courts having granted at least six other Russian banks relief against U.S. and European banks that were required to comply with sanctions laws.

Neither Russia nor China care in the least what U.S. law prohibits anymore. The international system ended the moment sanctions were applied to Russia after the beginning of the special military operation and nothing is going to bring it back.

Pax Americana is over. Plan accordingly.

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What Leverage is That?

Clown World’s strategists appear to be increasingly deluded concerning the arts of the possible with regards to the NATO-Russian war:

The war is not trending toward a stable stalemate, but toward Ukraine’s eventual collapse.  Russia has corrected many of the problems that plagued its forces during the first year of fighting and adopted an attrition strategy that is gradually exhausting Ukraine’s forces, draining American military stocks, and sapping the West’s political resolve. Sanctions have not crippled Russia’s war effort, and the West cannot fix Ukraine’s acute manpower problems absent direct intervention in the war.  Ukraine’s best hope lies in a negotiated settlement that protects its security, minimizes the risks of renewed attacks or escalation, and promotes broader stability in Europe and the world.   

Skeptics counter that Russia has no incentive to make meaningful concessions in a war it is increasingly winning.  But this belief underestimates the gap between what Russia can accomplish through its own military efforts and what it needs to ensure its broader security and economic prosperity over the longer term.  Russia can probably achieve some of its war aims by force, including blocking Ukraine’s membership in NATO and capturing much of the territory it regards as historically and culturally Russian.  But Russia cannot conquer, let alone govern, the majority of Ukraine, nor can Russia secure itself against the ongoing threats of Ukrainian sabotage or potential NATO strikes absent a costly permanent military buildup that would undermine its civilian economy. Reducing the deep dependence on China created by the invasion will also sooner or later require Russia to seek some form of détente with the West.  

As a result, the United States has significant leverage for bringing Russia to the table and forging verifiable agreements to end the fighting.  

As Andrei Martyanov points out, this particular analyst is talking out of both sides of his mouth. If, as he correctly says, Ukraine is on an inevitable path toward collapse, then Russia obviously can conquer, and if it chooses, occupy the entirety of the terrain over which the Kremlin ruled for eight decades. It’s obvious that Putin has no desire to do so, but it’s equally obvious that he will do so if Clown World continues to use the poor Ukrainians as an increasingly battered sword against a resurgent Russia.

And while the Chinese alliance is important to Russia, it is not why Russia has survived the economic attack on it nor have the Chinese provided any substantial material military support to Russia. Russia is serving as China’s proxy on the military front, except that unlike NATO’s Ukrainian proxy, Russia doesn’t need any assistance because when it comes to military technology and expertise, it is the Russians who are the senior partner.

In fact, it is the alliance of Russian military technology and expertise with Chinese economic power and industrial capacity that indicates the high probability of Clown World’s eventual defeat. Throw in the massive quantities of natural resources in Russia and the other BRICS nations, and one would be tempted to declare the conflict as over before it even starts, were it not for the vagaries of history that render any such preliminary verdict foolish.

After all, who foresaw the withdrawal of the Turks from the gates of Vienna, or the sudden retreat of the Mongol hordes from Europe and Russia upon the unexpected death of the Khan? We don’t know if either Putin or Xi have competent successors selected and prepared to step up and complete their national missions, just as we don’t know how much longer the USA and the European nations can withstand the centrifugal demographics that have been inserted into their rapidly degenerating societies.

But it is clear that the current phase is quickly approaching its endgame. Whether that will be via a reasonable surrender and settlement or by a classic Zhukovian Manchurian mega-offensive cannot be known, except that to say that the longer the former is delayed, the more likely the latter becomes. Either way, the war will not end in Ukraine.

We are not approaching the end, only the end of the beginning.

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Air Supremacy in Ukraine

After two years of patiently attriting Ukro-NATO air defenses and keeping its resources in reserve, the Russian Air Force appears to have now achieved air supremacy in Ukraine.

Ukraine now lacking air defense, Russian jets freely fly over the front line as they never have, free to accurately hit Ukrainian positions with guided aerial bombs.

There’s nothing Ukraine can do now but lose positions.

The West needs to understand what this soon means.

What this means is that the Russian forces can now engage in the sort of one-sided risk-free turkey-shoots that convinced the US military and the IDF that their capabilities were considerably greater than they actually are. So the casualty differential, already heavily in Russia’s favor, is about to tilt even more against the beleagured NATO forces.

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Time is Running Out on NATO

Tom Luongo explains why it’s time for the USA to extricate itself from NATO and let it collapse:

NATO cannot and should not survive these stresses if its intended victims, Russia/China/Iran, fight even remotely competently. And they are. They all understand that this is a race against a political and economic clock in the West that is quickly counting down to zero. All Russia has to do is keep grinding out territorial gains in Ukraine, Iran to not over-react to Israel’s provocations, and China to ignore the yapping over tariffs and Taiwan.

And all the Americans who are tired of this have to do is keep the money spigot to NATO and Ukraine closed off as much as is politically possible. The cost/benefit analysis for the US, especially in an election year, just doesn’t add up. And there is zero real leverage Europe can apply to the US other than through their bought and paid-for politicos in D.C. for more money.

The heart simply isn’t willing anymore. Why? For all the reasons I’ve been talking about for six years here, the memories of WWII are fading. The generations of Americans imprinted with the post-WWII Pax Americana lie are dying off (Boomers) or no longer care, if they ever did (Gen X).

The Millennials and ‘Zoomers’ aren’t invested in this mythology. They know their heads are on the chopping block. They can see that none of this is in their best interests.

As we’ve seen in the growing number and intensity of provocations, Clown World is desperate to escalate to direct conflict because it is being systematically defeated by the unrestricted warfare that its opponents are patiently waging against it. Just as Russia is not responding to the terrorist attacks on its civilian population and Iran is not responding to the Israeli attacks on its consulate, China is not going to take the bait on Taiwan.

They have no need to take the risk of engaging in military operations even though they have sound reason to assume that they could comprehensively defeat NATO and the remnants of SEATO; all war involves some degree of risk and there simply isn’t any need to accept any risk when time is quite clearly working in their favor.

Once Ukraine collapses, Clown World will be forced to stop its provocations and focus on retaining as many of its former satrapies and captive allies as it can. And it’s at that point that I expect the diplomatic efforts on the part of the BRICSIA nations to begin in earnest, and we’ll start seeing nations like Hungary, Serbia, Vietnam, and perhaps even Japan and Mexico turning against their current masters.

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The Inevitability of Catastrophic Defeat

Edward Luttwalk doesn’t seem to grasp that NATO will be defeated even faster, and more catastrophically, than its Ukrainian proxies were. Because it won’t be a restrained special military operation limited to the front, but rather full-blown war.

NATO nations can only forestall an inevitable loss to Russian forces in Ukraine by deploying their troops to the former Soviet republic, a former adviser to the US military has claimed.

“The arithmetic of this is inescapable: NATO countries will soon have to send soldiers to Ukraine, or else accept catastrophic defeat,” military strategist Edward Luttwak wrote in an oped published on Thursday by the British online media outlet UnHerd. “The British and French, along with the Nordic countries, are already quietly preparing to send troops – both small elite units and logistics and support personnel – who can remain far from the front.”

The conflict can’t be won without direct troop deployments because regardless of the quantity and quality of weapons sent to Kiev, Ukrainian forces are too outnumbered by the Russians, Luttwak argued.

These older military strategists simply don’t understand the ways in which technology has changed the operational and logistical elements. Any NATO troops entering Ukraine will be very nearly as vulnerable “far from the front” as they are on the front itself, especially since Russia will be free to fully utilize its air superiority, the first consequences of which have only recently begun to make themselves felt.

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Doubling Down Again

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that Ukraine will eventually join NATO as support for the country remains “rock solid” among member states. “Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership,” Blinken told reporters in Brussels.

If Ukraine will become a member of NATO, Russia has no reason to stop the war until Ukraine no longer exists as a sovereign state. Perhaps that’s the goal. Or perhaps this is simply what hubris looks like before nemesis appears.

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Looking for a Way Out

Both the USA and Ukraine are desperately trying to find a way to surrender to Russia in a manner that will be permitted by its Clown World puppeteers. One trial balloon was floated last month in The American Spectator:

How does the Ukraine-Russia war end? In an October surprise. Ukraine, which became independent on 24 August 1991, will be dissolved and a New Ukraine will come into being by virtue of a unilateral declaration by the present Government of Ukraine, with the support of the military high command. The de jure boundaries of New Ukraine will reflect and be co-terminus with the territory currently under the de facto administrative control of the present Government of Ukraine. New Ukraine will be compact; cohesive and well-integrated politically, economically, and socially (i.e., ethnically, linguistically, and culturally); and will have demonstrably defensible borders. Accordingly, New Ukraine will have the strategic autonomy to decouple from Russia’s sphere of influence without joining economic and military blocs such as the EU and NATO.

Simply put, from a realpolitik perspective, Russia has achieved its necessary and sufficient vital national security objectives with respect to its southwestern flank by virtue of the earlier takeover and annexation of Crimea and the strategically vital naval base of Sevastopol in March 2014, and the subsequent annexation (September 2022) and conquest (over the February 2022 – May 2023 period) of portions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk provinces to form a robust cordon sanitaire to protect Crimea. (READ MORE from Samir Tata: Coca-Cola Faces a Challenge in Its China Market)

Moreover, per the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Russian economy grew by 3 percent in 2023 and is expected to grow by 2.6 and 1.1 percent in 2024 and 2025 respectively, which is comparable to U.S. growth rates over the same period and far better than the economic performance of Germany. The challenge for Russia is to safeguard its hard-won national security gains and have the strategic patience to allow the Government of Ukraine to recognize that pursuing the military path is a dead end.

Clearly, what matters from Russia’s perspective is “which Ukraine” would fall outside the penumbra of the sphere of influence of the Russian Federation. As suggested by Vladimir Putin in his seminal speech in 2008 at NATO’s Summit in Bucharest, Ukraine as it was then constituted would break apart if there was a serious attempt to accept the invitation to join the military alliance. As Putin pointed out in the same speech, the core territories of western Ukraine were carved out of Poland and incorporated into an expanded Ukraine in 1939. Eastern Ukraine (Crimea and the strategically vital portions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk provinces) is now under de facto Russian control. A unilateral declaration of a downsized New Ukraine is unlikely to encounter a Russian objection.

An ‘October Surprise’ From ‘New’ Ukraine Is Possible, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, 3 March 2024

This is, of course, absurd. It’s literally the USA’s point of view, which is based on the US military’s need to concentrate on a single front; note that the USA is also attempting to negotiate a surrender to the Yemenese forces that have defeated the US Navy’s attempt to take control of the Red Sea.

The suggestion that the Russians will stop and accept nothing more than what they have already taken by force is obviously only an opening offer; Odessa and its port will obviously be a non-negotiable demand and NATO membership of a militarized “downsized New Ukraine” is an obvious non-starter.

As always, the fundamental flaw can be seen in the false assumptions revealed in the description of the situation. The current war is not just between Russia and Ukraine, or even Russia and NATO, it is between Russia and the masters of Clown World. And those satanic masters apparently believe that if Ukraine falls, they will fall with it. So, they are going to try to fight to the very last European and the very last American in order to save themselves, but neither the Europeans nor the Americans have shown any willingness to fight for Ukraine let alone them.

Furthermore, as Simplicius notes in his April 3rd Sitrep, Ukraine probably doesn’t have until October to make a serious offer of surrender before the Russians are in possession of more than the US trial balloon purports to give them.

Things continue to feel like a calm before the approaching storm. There is not too much overt activity in the battle space, but various rumblings of a large looming escalation continue to trickle through the grape vine. In a recent article I had mentioned how the Western press and elite commentariat for the first time began using the taboo ‘C’ word, i.e. “Collapse”, for Ukraine. Now this has opened up the floodgates, causing more and more worried publications to begin turning off their previous holding-the-line narrative filter and actually start describing the Ukrainian situation with truthful urgency. The U.S. has already emptied almost its entire store of usable surplus mainline weaponry for Ukraine, i.e. tanks, artillery, light armor—not counting things like ammo… even if the $60B were to pass, U.S. has little of actual value to send to Ukraine beyond small arms munitions and things of that nature. There are no more surplus Bradleys left, and none can be built as the factory closed down decades ago.

This highlights the essential danger for a nation accepting foreign rule. Once in control, a foreign elite will unhesitatingly destroy the entire nation over which it rules in order to save itself from the negative consequences of its own actions.

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They Know They Will Lose

Although many of their pet politicians, corporate executives, and talking heads in the media don’t realize it yet, the top globalists already know that they have already lost WWIII, as Col Douglas Macgregor points out:

This war has become financial as well as military. And the globalists understand that they’re going to lose this war. And what will come of this is that the BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, are going to be increased by 81 additional members. And all of these people are going to go to a currency that is backed by gold.

And once they go to that currency backed by gold, whether it is one currency or a basket of currencies, it doesn’t make any difference. Yes, we are in a lot of trouble. The globalists know that, and it is why they are so desperate right now. And the greatest fear that I have is that when the Russians do attack and it becomes abundantly clear that Ukraine is finished, I mean, it’s already obvious to anybody who visits the place for any length of time. It’s in ruins.

But once that occurs, I fear that there will be pressure to commit US forces in Poland and Romania, along with Polish forces and potentially Romanian ones, to western Ukraine. And if that occurs, the gloves will come off, because truthfully, thus far, Putin has exercised tremendous restraint, tremendous patience. He does not want a war with the West. If he wanted that, we’d already have it. But if we intervene in western Ukraine, it’s over. We’ll be in a full-fledged war.

You know, I think we grossly miscalculated. Putin had made several speeches over the last 20 years, repeatedly saying, please do not advance the border to Russia. Do not try to transform Ukraine into a hostile actor, an actor with hostile intentions towards Russia. What happens in Ukraine is of existential strategic interest to us, just as theoretically, what happens in Mexico is of existential strategic interest to us. Although this administration has decided to ignore it. He expected that we would negotiate, that he would demonstrate that this was serious, and that Russia wanted its population in eastern Ukraine, which is really Russian, to have equal rights before the law. He wanted to end the oppression of the Russians that lived there, and he wasn’t going to surrender Crimea.

The reason he went into Crimea is he was afraid it was going to be turned into a US naval base. Biden said. “Our goal is regime change. Our goal is to get rid of Putin, and our goal is ultimately to divide Russia into constituent parts, then exploit it.” All of his supporters, his staffers, everyone in the globalist camp knows this is the truth. The so-called oligarchs Kolomoisky, Soros and others were all part of this. None of this is news.

Finally, he said, enough’s enough. He stopped. They set up a strategic defense. They ran an economy-of-force mission, and now they have a force in place that can go as far as it needs to go, which includes to the Polish border. They have a plan for 31-month war against us if we insist on fighting it and we are in no shape to fight a war.

We can’t even recruit for the United States Army or the Marines. The Marines are running around trying to recruit illegals and are being encouraged to do so by the administration. Is that what you want in the ground force, to fight for this country? Forget it. It’s not going to work.

The difference between the coming war that concerns Col Macgregor and the special military operation of the last two years is that Russia has been keeping most of its primary military forces in reserve from the start. The reason we haven’t been seeing any of the vast and sweeping combined-arms offensives that were utilized in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and Manchuria in the 20th century is because the air force, the navy, and 600,000 army regulars have been preparing for a successful war against NATO that would probably end with the Russian occupation of the entire continent of Europe.

Which, as Macgregor, Martynov, and every competent observer of the last two years very well knows, is something that neither Putin nor any of the Russian generals want. Both the Russians and their Chinese counterparts have witnessed how empire and the foreign occupations it requires destroyed both British and American societies within decades. Even Israel’s micro-empire in Palestine is now causing tremendous rifts in Israeli society due to the current expansionary efforts.

Fortunately, the US is not very unlikely to intervene directly, because its primary concern is now the Southeast Asian front it is desperately trying to shore up in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam. And while it may try to use the Poles, the French, the Finns, and the Germans as a second proxy force in Ukraine, I expect all of the various attempts in this regard to fail as soon as it becomes impossible for the European media to hide the true state of affairs and the complete imbalance of power that currently prevails on the continent from the voters of the European nations. Fear of the Russians might sway the Poles, the Baltics, and the Finns, but the possibility of war won’t increase support for the current governments anywhere else, most of which are already unpopular due to the migrant invasions.

If there is one thing I have learned while living in Europe for nearly 30 years, it is that Europeans are very nearly as clueless about the USA as Americans are about Europe. Much like the US Boomers, even the Millennial Europeans believe that the USA of today is essentially the same as the USA of the 1950s. That’s why the average Finn and the average Swede are genuinely naive enough to believe that the US military can protect them from the Russians when they might as reasonably rely upon Japan or Botswana to do so.

But it’s pretty clear that Putin and his generals have already concluded that only an actual demonstration of sufficient force will serve to impose a more realistic perspective on the delusional leaders of the erstwhile West, which is why I anticipate more unexpected fireworks and major infrastructural collapses this summer.

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Finland Played for Fools

The Finns are giving up their national sovereignty to Clown World because, despite decades of evidence, they actually believe that the US military is going to defend them against Russia:

The DCA gives the American military access to 15 bases in Finland and allows the deployment of military equipment and supplies on Finnish territory, as well as the free movement of US aircraft, ships, and vehicles. Members of the US military and the facilities they use would also get special legal protections.

When the DCA was signed, Finnish Defense Minister Antti Hakkanen said it was “a guarantee from the world’s largest military power that they will defend us.”

First, the USA is no longer the world’s largest military power except in two categories, sea power and space power, neither of which is sufficient to defend against Russia’s advantages with regards to infantry power, artillery power, air power, or nuclear power.

Second, the Finns should have probably asked the Poles what Britain’s guarantee was worth, or the Vietnamese, the Afghans, or the Iraqis what their US guarantees secured them in the end.

History strongly suggests that what best protects a small country is neutrality combined with a population willing to defend against any encroachments on its sovereignty. The single most dangerous position to assume is permitting a cowardly or corrupt elite inclined toward surrender that chooses a side in a battle between two major powers in the erroneous belief that this will either a) secure their own positions or b) protect the country.

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Clown World’s Next Victim?

Two weeks before the Moscow mall attack, the media was publishing the concerns of the US and UK embassies in Moscow that there would be a terrorist attack in a public place in Moscow. Now, for no particular reason at all, the media is suddenly publishing French concerns about the possible assassination of French President Emmanuel Macron:

French President Emmanuel Macron is increasingly concerned about his personal security, Marianne magazine reported on Sunday citing multiple sources within Macron’s detail, the country’s Interior Ministry, and his notorious ex-bodyguard Alexandre Benalla.

Macron has always been concerned with his personal security, Benalla claimed, revealing the president had bolstered the ranks of his guard right after assuming office.

“As soon as we arrived at the Elysee, the staff responsible for the president’s security were immediately doubled compared to those responsible for that of [predecessor] Francois Hollande. There are two reasons for this. First, Macron makes contact, within a slap range. Then, from the beginning, it creates a form of antipathy. It electrifies,” the bodyguard explained.

During his time with Macron’s security team, Benalla became embroiled in multiple scandals, including getting caught beating up demonstrators alongside riot police during the Yellow Vest protests.

The Yellow Vests protests, which have plagued Macron’s presidency throughout his first term and beyond, have left a dent. Macron’s spouse Brigitte has been particularly concerned that her husband would ultimately end up assassinated, Benalla claims.

“She was always very worried about him. At home, there is the fear of ‘Kennedy syndrome,’ that he will end up assassinated,” the insider reportedly claimed.

NATO is desperately casting about for a casus belli capable of justifying its past and present involvement in Ukraine. I would expect there will be multiple false flag events blamed on Russia, right up until Russia either a) declares war or b) provides an unmistakable casus belli and publicly takes credit for it.

If I were Macron, I wouldn’t worry so much about the Russians. I’d worry a lot more about the French citizenry as well as his putative allies in NATO. Sooner or later, everyone who rides with the Black Rider is thrown from his high horse.

The strange thing is they never see it coming…

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