Tag: Russia

The Offensive Begins Next Week

All of the signs are pointing to the Russian military transforming the Special Military Operation into a full-blown invasion of Ukraine next week. Simplicius goes into considerable detail about the mobilization and positioning of Russian forces and concludes that the invasion will be conducted on very different principles and will begin on the anniversary of the original operation.

Putin is now officially scheduled to give a big State of the Nation address on February 21st, which falls precisely on the anniversary of his pivotal Feb. 21, 2022 speech where he first announced the recognition of LPR/DPR’s independence, leading the way to the big Feb. 24 speech which announced the actual full military launch of the SMO invasion.

Conversely, Biden is said to fly into Poland on Feb. 20 to meet Zelensky, and Biden & Zelensky reportedly will give a joint address on Feb. 21. The timing is very climactic and intriguing. And the fact that Biden will be literally right next door on the potential day/eve of a massive offensive launch (which could include huge airstrikes only a few kilometers away from him) seems almost pre-calculated for escalation.

There are now even rumors (though the ‘source’ is uncertain) that the subject/talking points of Putin’s address will revolve around NATO’s escalations, treachery, Nord Stream attacks (Russian UN reps have just put forth a resolution regarding it to coincide), and American biolabs revelations. Some of the wilder speculation/rumors revolve around a recognition of Transnistria (and even Ossetia) as Russian territory, or an announcement for a new mobilization, but these are most likely more on the wild and improbable conjecture side.

And on top of that, the Russian federal council and Duma will convene an ‘extraordinary session’ on February 22, which could be designed to ratify new initiatives announced in Putin’s address.

With that said, if the rumors are true that the 1 hour long planned speech will touch on the various transgressions of NATO, then it does point to the likely announcement of some major Russian escalation. Whether that means using this as rhetoric simply to justify the coming offensive announcement OR a possible unforeseen doctrinal escalation, such as the announcement of new ‘red lines’ for NATO weapons deliveries/satellite ISR with a more formal warning that Russia will begin shooting them down or hitting certain facilities, etc.

The speech presumably would also make an effort to outline Russia’s new/updated goals of the SMO to give the people an idea of what this is all really about, and a possible notion of how/when people can expect the war to end.

While plans can always be called off or cancelled, I see no reason to doubt his conclusions. I don’t think there is any real question about whether the Russian offensive will begin soon or if it will be successful. Nor do I think there is much reason to fear an escalation to the nuclear level. For me, the real question is whether China is going to open the second front in harmony with the Russian actions, or whether Xi Xinping will continue to be patient in the hopes of a violence-free unification with China’s renegade island.

Regardless, you would do well to remember that the Russians historically prefer to launch offensives that are bigger and much more overwhelming than their enemies anticipate or even believe possible. And they have been preparing for this one for a long, long time. So, I suggest being prepared for the possibility that the media, as well as one’s friends and family, will start shrieking about World War III in a complete state of panic.

Here’s an outside-the-box idea: what if the timing of the joint Biden-Zelensky speech is designed to a) clear the path for Bardiem-Harris while b) stoking public support for the war against Russia in the USA? “They killed the two presidents” would certainly make for an epic false flag, and wouldn’t be too hard to execute or cover up amidst a barrage of Russian missiles.

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Inversion in War

I don’t think word magic works quite as well in military matters as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs apparently believes it does.

Russia has already ‘lost’ the war in Ukraine as the one-year anniversary of its brutal invasion approaches, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley said in Brussels Tuesday.

Milley spoke amid warnings of a renewed Russian offensive, with allies seeking to rush modern weapons and ammunition to Ukrainian forces – who have been battling Russian forces who have been slowly gaining ground around Bakhmut in the eastern Donbas region.

‘Russia is now a global pariah and the world remains inspired by Ukrainian bravery and resilience. In short, Russia has lost — they’ve lost strategically, operationally, and tactically,’ said Milley. ‘Ukraine remains free, they remain independent. NATO and this coalition has never been stronger,’ he said.

This should be sufficient to get Milley institutionalized. I mean, it’s approaching Hitler in the bunker degrees of lunacy. NATO is out of ammo, Ukraine is nearly out of men, and the European economies are out of energy. It’s NATO that has not only lost the war, but lost the plot.

There are 1430 comments on a mainstream UK media site, and virtually no one even pretends to believe this.

Russia’s New Red Lines

Russia is sending a very clear warning to the neoclowns. Not because they expect the evil morons to heed them, but to give the people of the West one last chance to stop following the wicked satanists down the pathway to Hell.

As usual, Yevgeny Popov, State Duma member and host of “Sixty Minutes,” put a lot of video segments from Western television up on the screen, including a lengthy statement by Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, former commander of all U.S. forces in Europe from 2014 to 2017, on how the Ukrainians must be given long range precision missiles for them to attack Russian Crimea and also further into the Russian heartland. The interview from which this declaration was made does not yet appear in Google search, but from interviews posted in 2022 it is clear that Hodges is no madman, and his statements must, as Popov said, be taken with utmost seriousness.

The context, of course, for the radical escalation now being discussed in the United States is the expectation of a massive Russian offensive to begin shortly as the anniversary of the Special Military Operation approaches. The imminent defeat of Ukrainian forces has focused minds in Washington.

One of the regular panelists on “Sixty Minutes” then faced the cameras directly and said that Russia’s nuclear doctrine is under revision in light of these aggressive plans being aired in the United States, so that Russia is headed towards a policy of ‘preventive’ tactical nuclear strikes, similar to what the United States has. Moreover, if Ukraine targets Crimea and heartland Russia, then Russia will respond according to plans now being laid down. These plans foresee counter strikes against U.S military installations in Europe and in the Continental United States using hypersonic missiles. The panelist calls for this threat of counter strikes in Europe and the US to be made public and explicit, so that no one is in doubt about what to expect from the Kremlin.

So here we are. The Russians are stripping away the fiction of a proxy war and revealing the co-belligerent status of the US and its NATO allies in preparation for a kinetic war with NATO.

Meanwhile, the slaves of Clown World are still playing their magic word games and pretending that they are relevant in a military context. Colonel Markus Reisner, the military strategist of the Austrian Ministry of Defence, takes on the difficult task of explaining why NATO soldiers fighting in Ukraine under NATO command-and-control with NATO weapons against Russian forces do not mean that NATO is at war with Russia.

If the military from Austria or NATO countries retired from service and became mercenaries, then they could no longer be considered representatives of the armies of their states. He explained that the serviceman takes off his uniform, signs a contract and goes to Ukraine – now he is not a soldier, for example, of the Austrian armed forces, but a contract mercenary. In his opinion, there are a large number of mercenaries on the territory of Ukraine and not soldiers of the alliance.

Wanna bet? I’m pretty sure the Russians are perfectly capable of considering these newly-minted “mercenaries” to be not only representatives of the armies of their states, but representatives of Clown World as well. The idea that the various European states, led by the USA, are merely providing weapons and money for Ukraine to pay for and supply these retired US and European soldiers, who are now “mercenaries”, is the application of talmudism to military grand strategy.

I expect it is going to be demonstrated, very soon, what a fundamental category error that will turn out to be.

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The USA Attacked Germany

Seymour Hersh delivers the damning evidence: the USA not only destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines, but it was a premeditated attack that was planned even before the beginning of the Russian Special Military Operation in the Donbas.

Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.

Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.

There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022…

In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin’s impending invasion.

It would be the first of a series of top-secret meetings, in a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). There was the usual back and forth chatter that eventually led to a crucial preliminary question: Would the recommendation forwarded by the group to the President be reversible—such as another layer of sanctions and currency restrictions—or irreversible—that is, kinetic actions, which could not be undone?

What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President.

Over the next several meetings, the participants debated options for an attack. The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”

At the time, the CIA was directed by William Burns, a mild-mannered former ambassador to Russia who had served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama Administration. Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.

If you’ve still got any vestige of belief that the USA are the good guys, this proof of the neocons in Washington ordering the US military to attack its own allies should suffice to destroy it. This isn’t even remotely a surprise; I assumed the US military was responsible for the destruction of the pipelines from the start. But even I am a little taken aback at how brazen and premeditated it was.

It’s 100-percent certain that the pipelines were destroyed on the orders of the US government, and most likely, by US military forces.

Vox Day, 29 September 2022

It will be interesting to see how the European slave-governments attempt to spin away the fact that it is the USA, not Russia, that is quite literally engaging in acts of war against the European nations.

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Intelligence of Intent

Ukrainian sources are buzzing with what they believe to be the incipient winter offensive by Russia starting within the next ten days.

The Financial Times writes that Kyiv has obtained “very solid intelligence of intent” by Russia to launch a new attack. The Russian offensive will likely aim to capture the entire Donbas region and may begin in the west of Luhansk Oblast, near the cities of Kreminna and Lyman, where Russia has been assembling forces for several weeks.

The Financial Times also notes that Russia is building up its troops in the south of Donetsk Oblast, with additional forces being deployed to villages around occupied Mariupol. According to the Financial Times, Russia’s goal is to launch the offensive before Ukraine receives Western tanks and weapons.

The anonymous Ukrainian military adviser said a renewed Russian attack would probably be spearheaded by elite units.

It appears the “Russia is out of weapons and totally losing” crowd is about to get an object lesson in what the actual Russian army looks like. If the Turkish earthquakes were the unnatural results of a geophysic strike, one assumes that any last Russian doubts about the wisdom of bringing the war in Ukraine to a rapid end have been settled.

Or perhaps this is just more fog of war being spread about by one of Clown World’s leading media organs. We’ll find out soon enough.

UPDATE: The media preparations for the Narrative shift are underway.

Vladimir Putin is about to make shock gains

With Russia back on the offensive after significant Ukrainian combat successes around Kharkiv and Kherson in the second half of 2022, the past few weeks have been the bloodiest so far of an already bloody war, with both sides taking extraordinarily heavy casualties. Expect it to get worse.

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Surrender Means Success

The neocons are still practicing their insane word magic as they try to convince Russia to let them surrender Ukraine without openly admitting that they lost their proxy war on Russia.

David Ignatius has been a career-long mouthpiece for the US State Department. He has just been called in by the current Secretary of State Antony Blinken to convey an urgent new message to President Vladimir Putin, the Security Council, and the General Staff in Moscow.

For the first time since the special military operation began last year, the war party in Washington is offering terms of concession to Russia’s security objectives explicitly and directly, without the Ukrainians in the way.

The terms Blinken has told Ignatius to print appeared in the January 25 edition of the Washington Post.

The territorial concessions Blinken is tabling include Crimea, the Donbass, and the Zaporozhye, Kherson “land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia”. West of the Dnieper River, north around Kharkov, and south around Odessa and Nikolaev, Blinken has tabled for the first time US acceptance of “a demilitarized status” for the Ukraine. Also, US agreement to restrict the deployment of HIMARS, US and NATO infantry fighting vehicles, and the Abrams and Leopard tanks to a point in western Ukraine from which they can “manoeuvre…as a deterrent against future Russian attacks.”

This is an offer for a tradeoff – partition through a demilitarized zone (DMZ) in the east of the Ukraine in exchange for a halt to the planned Russian offensive destroying the fortifications, rail hubs, troop cantonments, and airfields in the west, between the Polish and Romanian borders, Kiev and Lvov, and an outcome Blinken proposes for both sides to call “a just and durable peace that upholds Ukraine’s territorial integrity”.

Also in the proposed Blinken deal there is the offer of a direct US-Russian agreement on “an eventual postwar military balance”; “no World War III”; and no Ukrainian membership of NATO with “security guarantees similar to NATO’s Article 5.”

Blinken has also told the Washington Post to announce the US will respect “Putin’s tripwire for nuclear escalation”, and accept the Russian “reserve force includ[ing] strategic bombers, certain precision-guided weapons and, of course, tactical and strategic nuclear weapons.”

Russia isn’t going to accept this offer or even use it as a point to begin negotiations, because they already tried negotiating with the West with the Minsk Accords of 2014 and 2015. But, as Angela Merkel and other Western leaders have publicly admitted, the agreements were a sham from the start, and were only intended to buy Ukraine more time to prepare its defenses.

Various Russian leaders have stated that both the USA and Ukraine are “non-agreement capable” and they are absolutely correct to have reached that conclusion, as Clown World’s leading neocons are still making plans to win a war that was not only unwinnable from the start, but has already been lost.

Because what they really need to prepare for is success, you see!

Success. That’s the potential outcome that the United States, Ukraine, allied and partner governments, and private-sector actors must now prepare to confront. Ukraine’s counteroffensives, backed by expanded and accelerated US and allied support, continue to push Russian forces out of Ukrainian territory, although at a reduced rate. These hard-won successes, however, bring with them possible challenges that also must be addressed.

In the short term, there are fresh threats from Moscow—attacks on electricity, water, and heat as winter approaches, sham annexations of occupied territories, mobilizations of new troops, reduced but persistent nuclear risk, and Russian prisoners to manage. Areas that Ukraine has liberated from Russian forces need immediate governance, cleanup, humanitarian assistance, and economic revival. Over the longer term, Ukraine will have to rebuild destroyed infrastructure; institute the economic and political reforms required for European Union (EU) membership; and be capable of ensuring its security.

How exactly to meet these looming challenges while exploiting present and future opportunities?

It is, of course, up to the Ukrainians to determine their priorities and their supporters to assist as much as possible, which is also consistent with US interests. But what’s urgently needed is a four-front, long-haul strategy for helping Ukraine win the war against Russia and the peace that follows—one built to withstand the dramatic developments that are sure to play out over the coming years, not just over the next weeks and months of this rapidly evolving conflict.

Preparing for victory: A long-haul strategy to help Ukraine win the war against Russia—and secure the peace, Atlantic Council, November 30, 2022

This isn’t quite Hitler in the bunker giving orders to nonexistent divisions levels of delusion, but they’re observably on their way. And, of course, the word magic failed. No deals. I find it particularly interesting that they went out of the way to mention Nuland’s name. I think they’re making it clear they know perfectly well who is calling the shots in Washington.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has dismissed proposals issued this week in Washington by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Under Secretary, Victoria Nuland. Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova has confirmed that Russia’s military plan for the Ukraine will not be interrupted or delayed.

Clown World’s desperation is observably increasing, as both China and Russia have gone largely silent. This leads me to suspect that both nations will make their next major moves in concert with each other. Exactly what those will be, we can only offer our best surmises, but it would not be surprising if both Ukraine and Taiwan are entirely lost to Clown World by the end of this year.

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The Saker Closes Shop

It’s a pity, but it’s understandable that the Saker is ending his very valuable blog given that Andrei understands the difficult position he’s likely to be in once WWIII goes hot much better than most. Anyone who followed the site had a much better idea of what was happening in Ukraine, and why it was happening, than everyone getting their news from the various organs of the mainstream media.

  • First, I will shut down the blog no later than at the end of February.
  • Second, for a host of reasons, I cannot transfer the blog to any one person or group of trusted people. This sounds like a great idea until you look at tons of details and it becomes an impossible one.
  • Third, yes, I would like to keep the entire archive of the blog available somewhere on the Internet.
  • Everything I posted on the blog was licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 International license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0). Which means that ANYBODY can copy and post and even modify ANYTHING I have ever posted. There is no need to ask for permission or get my approval or anything like that.
  • In practical terms this means this: if you can grab it all (or parts) and reposted it elsewhere, anywhere, you will have my eternal gratitude.
  • Furthermore, I personally would prefer that the archive be available on as many sites as possible (for obvious redundancy reasons). I would therefore not agree to grant anybody “exclusive rights” or anything like that.
  • Please notice that while I never monetized the blog, you are not under any obligation to follow my example, but only as long as you don’t claim any exclusive copywrong “rights” or object on anybody else doing the same thing (or not).

I very much appreciate the landmark work that Andrei has done in effectively chronicling the start of World War III since its inception in 2014, and I suspect future historians will find it extremely useful and informative as well. I wish him well in his future endeavors.

And I would encourage the autists and archivists who read this site to download, archive, and publish mirrors of the Saker’s site for future reference. Regardless of whether the future unfolds in the general direction that we envisage or not, they will be an important record of recent historical events.

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When the Plan Fails

A Rand report published in April 2019 laid out US strategy vis-a-vis Russia, which as you can see in hindsight, was followed fairly closely to the letter. Note that “extending” Russia is shorthand for “causing the Russians to overextend and unbalance themselves”.

This report examines a range of possible means to extend Russia. As the 2018 National Defense Strategy recognized, the United States is currently locked in a great-power competition with Russia. This report seeks to define areas where the United States can compete to its own advantage. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from Western and Russian sources, this report examines Russia’s economic, political, and military vulnerabilities and anxieties. It then analyzes potential policy options to exploit them — ideologically, economically, geopolitically, and militarily (including air and space, maritime, land, and multidomain options). After describing each measure, this report assesses the associated benefits, costs, and risks, as well as the likelihood that measure could be successfully implemented and actually extend Russia. Most of the steps covered in this report are in some sense escalatory, and most would likely prompt some Russian counter-escalation. Some of these policies, however, also might prompt adverse reactions from other U.S. adversaries — most notably, China — that could, in turn, stress the United States. Ultimately, this report concludes that the most attractive U.S. policy options to extend Russia — with the greatest benefits, highest likelihood of success, and least risk — are in the economic domain, featuring a combination of boosting U.S. energy production and sanctions, providing the latter are multilateral. In contrast, geopolitical measures to bait Russia into overextending itself and ideological measures to undermine the regime’s stability carry significant risks. Finally, many military options — including force posture changes and development of new capabilities — could enhance U.S. deterrence and reassure U.S. allies, but only a few are likely to extend Russia, as Moscow is not seeking parity with the United States in most domains.

Key Findings

Russia’s weaknesses lie in the economic domains

  • Russia’s greatest vulnerability, in any competition with the United States, is its economy, which is comparatively small and highly dependent on energy exports.
  • The Russian leadership’s greatest anxiety stems from the stability and durability of the regime.

The most promising measures to stress Russia are in the realms of energy production and international pressure

  • Continuing to expand U.S. energy production in all forms, including renewables, and encouraging other countries to do the same would maximize pressure on Russia’s export receipts and thus on its national and defense budgets. Alone among the many measures looked at in this report, this one comes with the least cost or risk.
  • Sanctions can also limit Russia’s economic potential. To be effective, however, these need to be multilateral, involving (at a minimum) the European Union, which is Russia’s largest customer and greatest source of technology and capital, larger in all these respects than the United States.

Geopolitical measures to bait Russia into overextending itself are likely impractical, or they risk second-order consequences

  • Many geopolitical measures would force the United States to operate in areas that are closer to Russia and where it is thus cheaper and easier for Russia than the United States to exert influence.

Ideological measures to undermine the regime’s stability carry significant risks of counter escalation

  • Many military options — including force posture changes and development of new capabilities — could enhance U.S. deterrence and reassure U.S. allies, but only a few are likely to extend Russia, as Moscow is not seeking parity with the United States in most domains.
Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground, RAND, 24 April 2019

This was followed up by a report five months later, which provided specific actions intended to achieve the objectives identified in the initial report, entitled Overextending and Unbalancing Russia: Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options.

Insert deep movie trailer voice: They did not correctly assess the impact of the cost-imposed options.

What’s fascinating is that now RAND is rapidly backtracking on the idea of extending Russia, because the US attempts to extend Russia have turned out to extend the USA, its NATO proxies, the other European states, and Clown World itself. Remember what I said in the previous post about NATO needing to win fast? That’s why Rand wants to pull a Vietnam/Afghanistan, call it a win, and get the US military out of Eastern Europe as quickly as possible.

The Andrew Anglin committee has correctly assessed the situation.

Here’s the deal: everyone understands that Russia is only a power capable of competing with the US because it is backed by a much larger and much wealthier country called “China.” Russia needs their economy to survive. India wouldn’t be standing up to the US, nor would Saudi or any of the other former allies pushing back, if they weren’t getting cover from China.

The think tanks were all pushing for China to be the target of the next US war.

However, Pentagon people said Russia is much weaker, so they went with that. Now it’s a boondoggle. The West is destroying its economy, they are alienating the whole world, and they’re accomplishing what exactly? Russia can keep fighting indefinitely. It’s not costing them anything…

The US can’t possibly open up the China front while the Ukraine is ongoing, and time is on China’s side over there.

This is why RAND is mad.

However, wars do not take place in a vacuum and they have a way of creating a new reality that is unforeseen even by the architects of the best-laid warplans. There is no reason for Russia to let NATO and the US military off the hook just because it suits RAND, and there is absolutely zero chance that Xi Xinping and the extremely astute Chinese warplanners are going to be blind to the advantages of making sure that the first front stays active until the second one is opened by one of the two parties concerned.

Remember, the failure of a plan doesn’t mean it never existed, it simply means it didn’t work.

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NATO Calls the Shots

The Chairman of NATO’s Military Committee pulls the curtain away and reveals that the “alliance” is in fact the military bureaucracy of the US empire.

NATO is prepared to fight Russia if a direct conflict erupts between the two, Rob Bauer, the chairman of the alliance’s Military Committee, said on Saturday. In an interview with Portuguese RTP TV, when asked whether the US-led military block is ready for a direct confrontation with Russia, Bauer unequivocally stated, “We are.”

The official noted that when the hostilities broke out in Ukraine in February 2022, NATO already had a number of battle groups along its eastern flank. During a summit in Madrid which took place in June 2022, the alliance’s leaders decided to create four more battle groups in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, Bauer said.

Bauer went on to say that for decades, many NATO nations thought they were the ones who decide when and where to deploy their forces, but the Ukraine conflict was a gamechanger.

If a nation isn’t able to decide when and where to deploy its own military forces, it isn’t a sovereign nation anymore. This is why signing up for all of these supranational organizations was always short-sighted and foolish, as they intrinsically necessitate giving up sovereignty and democracy.

The Russian generals get more of a vote where the NATO generals establish their forces than the elected leaders or the people of any of the NATO nations.

As for whether NATO is ready for direct war with the Russian military, well, its proxies haven’t fared very well against the Russian proxies. I suppose they’re about as ready as they’re ever going to be, I just don’t think “readiness” should be confused with “having a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning”.

Remember, we’re talking about a military that can’t even defend its own borders.

UPDATE: The US empire is apparently not ready to fight China, however.

A four-star US air force general predicted that the US and China will be at war in two years, most likely over the Taiwan region, and called on troops under his command to pursue battle readiness in a recently disclosed memo, a move Chinese experts on Saturday decried as a reckless and provocative hyping of “China threats,” which would inflame tensions and deepen strategic mistrust between the US and China when ties are already at a low ebb.

It cannot be ruled out that the move may serve as a way of putting pressure on China to gain more leverage ahead of a potential China trip by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, analysts said.

In the memo, first obtained by NBC News on Friday but dated February 1, General Michael Minihan, head of Air Mobility Command (AMC), said that “my gut tells me will fight in 2025,” as both US and Taiwan regional authorities will have elections in 2024, and the US will be “distracted,” which gives the Chinese mainland an opportunity.

Minihan listed his goals of military preparation for a “fight with China” to his soldiers in the AMC, including building “a fortified, ready, integrated, and agile Joint Force Maneuver Team ready to fight and win inside the first island chain,” according to an NBC report.

Better beat those Russians fast…

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No Part of It

Croatia very sensibly wants no part of NATO’s war on Russia:

Commenting on the German foreign minister’s declaration that Europe is “fighting a war against Russia,” Croatian President Zoran Milanovic said on Thursday that this was news to him, and wished Berlin better luck than in WWII. Croatia “should in no way help” Ukraine militarily, Milanovic said…

“Now the German foreign minister says we must be united, because I quote, we are at war with Russia. I didn’t know that. Maybe Germany is at war with Russia, but then, good luck, maybe this time it turns out better than 70-odd years ago.”

Neither, apparently, does France.

Decisions by the US, Germany and several other countries to supply main battle tanks to Ukraine do not mean NATO is at war with Moscow, the French Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday. The comments from Quai d’Orsay come after a controversial speech by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in the European Parliament earlier this week. “We are not at war with Russia and none of our partners are,” ministry spokeswoman Anne-Claire Legendre said on Thursday, according to AFP. “The delivery of military equipment… does not constitute co-belligerence.”

But while it takes two to tango, it only takes one to war. And Russia is now “at war with NATO and the West” thanks to the neocons’ successful escalation of the conflict in Ukraine.

Russia is now at ‘war against NATO and the West’ and has taken the invasion of Ukraine to a ‘different stage’, a senior EU official has admitted, raising the terrifying spectre of a global conflict.

The Asian and Arab nations have already taken Russia’s side. The African nations don’t really matter, but they will do so as well. I expect that more than a few European nations will follow suit once it becomes abundantly clear to even the most casual observer that NATO has zero chance of winning the war. And when I say zero, I mean ZERO. None whatsoever.

Based on a comparison of the technological and industrial capacities, the United States and the UK have about the same chance of defeating the Sino-Russian alliance as Japan had of defeating the US/UK alliance in WWII. Which is just one reason why no American or European should lift a finger, let alone risk his life, for Clown World and its wicked disorder.

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