Tag: Russia

The Last Stage of the Current Phase

Russian President Vladimir Putin provides an update on the coming end to the Special Military Operation:

Moscow ready for ‘any scenario’ with NATO

Aside from the conflict with Ukraine, this month saw several non-fatal incidents in Syrian skies involving Russian aircraft and US drones, with both sides blaming each other for reckless behavior. Russia would like to avoid a direct armed confrontation with the West, but keeps the worst possible scenarios in mind, Putin said. “If someone wants it – and that’s not us – then we’re ready,” he stressed.

Putin does not directly command operation in Ukraine

According to the Russian leader, as commander-in-chief, he has been receiving regular reports about the situation of the front line and speaks with his top generals several times a day. Putin added that he can reach out to “special units” when needed. However, it would be “wrong” for the president to interfere with the military and start directly commanding the troops, he said.

Kiev running out of conscripts

The Ukrainian army is not only suffering heavy losses on the battlefield, but is struggling with manpower, Putin argued. He said that, while taking prisoners, Russian authorities discovered that Ukraine had “formed military units” made up of aircraft technicians. “What does it tell us? That their mobilization resources are depleting,” the Russian leader said. He previously noted that Kiev’s forces had lost dozens of pieces of Western armor, including German-made Leopard 2 tanks and US-supplied Bradley infantry fighting vehicles.

Putin is clarifying what we’ve already been observing from multiple sources: the Kiev regime is done without direct intervention from NATO. No amount of additional equipment, armor, aircraft, ammunition, or mercenaries is going to change anything for the regime’s operational or strategic position; a meaningless shift of a few kilometers here or there on the tactical front is the most that can potentially be accomplished. Russia has won the war of attrition.

So, NATO now faces a choice. Direct and open war with a Russian military that has completed its initial stage of mobilization and is prepared to engage its forces, the greater part of which are not even present on the European continent right now, or back down, admit that it has lost its proxy war, and attempt to negotiate a surrender to the Russians. Despite his bold words about ending Clown World, Putin has sent clear signals that he will accept the latter. So, the Special Military Operation will soon come to an end, but whether that end will be war or peace is yet to be learned.

Interestingly enough, the most rabid hawks among the neoclowns are pushing for negotiation and peace with Russia. See: Edward Luttwalk. This is because they are anticipating direct war with China, and they do not want to find themselves committed to a two-front war that cannot be won. While this is superficially the correct position, it’s an excessively optimistic one because Russia and China are not going to be divided by factional funding and clever word games; both Xi and Putin are well aware of how the neoclowns have successfully divided and conquered one enemy after another since the end of World War II.

The dumber sort of neoclowns, the sort who believe their own wordspells, are pushing for Poland to enter the war, because they know that Americans won’t support direct war with Russia but they aren’t prepared to give up when Russia is so close to running out of ammunition and Putin is about to be overthrown by a) rebel mercenaries, b) Russian democrats, or c) neurologically-enhanced cyberotters. The disastrous history of Polish democracy suggests this is possible, but given the way Putin has already stated that he’s open to giving Western Ukraine to Poland, I think it’s unlikely unless something gets sparked by Wagner in Belarus on the Polish border. There is a negotiated scenario where Poland, Belarus, and Russia all win, at the expensive of Kiev, and since the only NATO opinion that matters is that of the US neoclowns, I see the “divide-up-Western-Ukraine” as being a more likely outcome than a second NATO war by proxy with Poland playing the role of Ukraine.

However, war, unlike the tango, doesn’t take two. No matter what the immediate outcome of the Special Military Operation turns out to be, any negotiated settlement is even less likely to hold for the intermediate term than the Treaty of Versailles. Once the US-China war begins, Russia is almost certainly going to set itself to completing the task of de-NATOing Europe and excising the neoclown influence from the continent.

So, ironically, it might be better for Americans – though much worse for Europeans – if the neoclowns were to choose war with Russia and be comprehensively defeated even before the anticipated war with China, than opting for a short-term peace that will guarantee war on two fronts with two better-prepared and strategically-superior opponents.

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Putin Warns Poland and NATO

When the NATO leaders are calling the President of Russia “mad” and “crazy”, they are clearly engaged in emotional projection. Compare the difference between the mastery of the historical aspects of the current situation by Putin with the media histrionics and the disjointed ramblings of the unelected US figurehead, Biden. It’s also clear that Putin knows who Russia’s real enemies are.

Both the Europeans and European elites see that support for Ukraine is, in fact, a dead end, an empty, endless waste of money and effort, and in fact, serving someone else’s interests, which are far from European: the interests of the overseas global hegemon, which benefits from the weakening of Europe. The endless prolongation of the Ukrainian conflict is also beneficial to it.

Judging by the actual state of affairs, this is exactly what today’s US ruling elites are doing. Anyways, this is the logic they follow. It is largely questionable whether such a policy is in line with the American people’s true, vital interests; this is a rhetorical question, and it is up to them to decide.

However, massive efforts are being taken to stoke the fire of war – including by exploiting the ambitions of certain East European leaders, who have long turned their hatred for Russia and Russophobia into their key export commodity and a tool of their domestic policy. And now they want to capitalise on the Ukrainian tragedy.

In this regard, I cannot refrain from commenting on what has just been said and on media reports that have come out about plans to establish some sort of the so-called Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian unit. This is not about a group of mercenaries – there are plenty of them there and they are being destroyed – but about a well-organised, equipped regular military unit to be used for operations in Ukraine, including to allegedly ensure the security of today’s Western Ukraine – actually, to call things by their true name, for the subsequent occupation of these territories. The outlook is clear: in the event Polish forces enter, say, Lvov or other Ukrainian territories, they will stay there, and they will stay there for good.

And we will actually see nothing new. Just to remind you, following WWI, after the defeat of Germany and its allies, Polish units occupied Lvov and adjacent territories that had been part of Austria-Hungary.

With its actions incited by the West, Poland took advantage of the tragedy of the Civil War in Russia and annexed certain historical Russian provinces. In dire straits, our country had to sign the Treaty of Riga in 1921 and recognise the annexation of its territories.

Even earlier, back in 1920, Poland captured part of Lithuania – the Vilnius region, a territory surrounding the present-day Vilnius. So they claimed that they fought together with the Lithuanians against so-called Russian imperialism, but then immediately snatched a piece of land from their neighbour as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

As is well known, Poland also took part in the partition of Czechoslovakia following the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler in 1938, by fully occupying Cieszyn Silesia.

In the 1920-1930s, Poland’s Eastern Borderlands (Kresy) – a territory that comprises present-day Western Ukraine, Western Belarus and part of Lithuania – witnessed a tough policy of Polonisation and assimilation of local residents, with efforts to suppress local culture and Orthodoxy.

I would also like to remind you what Poland’s aggressive policy led to. It led to the national tragedy of 1939, when Poland’s Western allies threw it to the German wolf, the German miliary machine. Poland actually lost its independence and statehood, which were only restored thanks in a large measure to the Soviet Union. It was also thanks to the Soviet Union and thanks to Stalin’s position that Poland acquired substantial territory in the west, German territory. It is a fact that Poland’s western lands are a gift from Stalin.

Have our Warsaw friends forgotten this? We will remind them.

Today we see that the regime in Kiev is ready to go to any length to save its treacherous hide and to prolong its existence. They do not care for the people of Ukraine or Ukrainian sovereignty or national interests.

They are ready to sell anything, including people and land, just like their ideological forefathers led by Petlyura, who signed the so-called secret conventions with Poland in 1920 under which they ceded Galicia and Western Volhynia to Poland in return for military support. Traitors like them are ready now to open the gate to their foreign handlers and to sell Ukraine again.

As for the Polish leaders, they probably hope to form a coalition under the NATO umbrella in order to directly intervene in the conflict in Ukraine and to bite off as much as possible, to “regain,” as they see it, their historical territories, that is, modern-day Western Ukraine.

Meeting with permanent members of the Security Council, 21 July 2023

This is one of Putin’s most important speeches since he called out “the Empire of Lies” and when he announced the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. It’s both a warning to the ambitious Polish leadership and an explanation of why the Russian military is increasing its activity; it will not be a surprise to any student of Russian military history if the Russians begin twin offensives once the Ukrainian counteroffensive is definitively over. It’s also a definitive marker of the NATO-Russian war entering a new and more dangerous phase.

Putin has openly called his shots since 2014. He’s given this enemies the opportunity to back down and avoid conflict. He’s also carried through with his threats. And he’s clearly promising the Poles that if they intervene to prop up the Kiev regime – even if their primary interest is to take former Polish land in Western Ukraine – Russia will take Stalin’s gift of the former German territories away from them.

While the Poles hate and fear Russia, one hopes that they will still have enough sense and self-interest to take this warning seriously. What profit it a Pole to gain Lvov for only to lose both it and Danzig?

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The Appetizer Ate Them

I’ve been reading the memoirs of Giorgy Zhukov, the Soviet general who was part of the Supreme Command Staff of the Soviet Union during WWII. I’ll put up more posts in the future about some of the notes and observations I’ve made while reading them, but this article by Big Serge points to something I keep noticing again and again, which is the similarity between the false assumptions of the Nazi command staff and the false assumptions of the NATO command staff.

We must strongly note (for this is of great importance) that in early 1942, much of Wehrmacht leadership still believed that the war with the Soviet Union was a sort of appetizer, which would be won as a preliminary condition for waging a global war with the Anglo-Americans. The land war in the east, in other words, was something that needed to be resolved so that Germany could be freed to wage a full strategic defense of Europe by land, sea, and air – using the resources of the defeated Soviet Union to power this long war effort.

This, of course, demonstrates that Germany was asking the wrong questions and thinking about the wrong problems. They were concerned with bringing a resolution in the east so they could move on to the (as they saw it) bigger problem of contesting Anglo-American global hegemony. They did not yet seem to realize that they were being defeated outright in the east. So eager were they to move on to the main course, they did not see that the appetizer was eating them.

As I have repeatedly stated, WWIII appears to be a remake of WWII, only with the USA playing the part of Germany, Europe playing the part of Italy, the UK and the Commonwealth playing the part of Japan. Russia is the Soviet Union, while China is the USA.

And like the Nazis before them, NATO is asking the wrong questions and thinking about the wrong problems. They’re already trying to pivot to war with China while they are losing the war with Russia.

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Why Your Grocery Bill is Rising

Russia abrogated the Black Sea grain deal and reimposed its naval blockade of Ukraine after the West – shockingly and totally unexpectedly – again failed to live up to its responsibilities under the treaty.

The Russian military issued a new navigational warning for the Black Sea on Wednesday, declaring certain areas in its international waters to be “temporarily unsafe” for vessels. Apart from that, the military advised seafarers against attempting to reach Ukraine’s ports, stating that all vessels heading there will be treated as potential carriers of war goods starting from Thursday.

Therefore, the flag state of a ship attempting to reach the Ukrainian Black Sea ports will be deemed as “taking part in the Ukrainian conflict on the side of the Kiev regime,” the Russian Defense ministry said in a statement.

The military said it also declared certain areas in the international waters of the Black Sea to be “temporarily unsafe” for navigation. The areas are located in the north-west and south-east of the waterway, the military noted, adding that all the necessary navigational warnings have already been published as required under existing procedures.

“With the termination of the Black Sea Initiative and the abolition of the maritime humanitarian corridor, from 00:00 Moscow time on July 20, 2023, all ships en route to Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea will be considered potential carriers of military cargo,” the military insisted.

The new restrictions de-facto re-impose the Russian naval blockade on Ukraine, lifted under the so-called Black Sea grain deal in July 2022. The agreement, signed with mediation by the UN and Türkiye, enabled the safe shipment of Ukrainian grain through Black Sea corridors amid the conflict between Moscow and Kiev. Moscow withdrew from the deal on Monday, citing the West’s failure to keep any of the promises made to Russia under the agreement, including re-enabling exports of grain and fertilizers from the country.

The Russians followed the announcement with a series of missile strikes on Odessa and other Black Sea port facilities, as well as a warning that ships would no longer be allowed to freely transit the Black Sea.

Footage circulating online shows massive explosions in the vicinity of Odessa, including at its Black Sea ports. Ukrainian officials have claimed the strikes also inflicted damage on civilian infrastructure, with the city’s mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, saying the attack was the largest since the beginning of hostilities. He described last night in the city as “terrible.”

The cancellation of the grain deal is expected to contribute to rising food prices, especially in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, according to the IMF, but will likely have a knock-on impact in Europe and North America as well.

As I mentioned on a recent Darkstream, we appear to be entering a new and more dangerous phase of the NATO-Russian war.

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Clown World Won’t Quit

The Ukrainian offensive didn’t just fail, it reportedly failed in a historic manner reminiscent of Napoleon’s epic debacle. But the neoclowns are willing to fight to the last… whoever they can get their hands on.

Colonial MacGregor revealed that American intelligence sources provided information to him and the media showing that during the past two and half weeks alone, Russia suffered 1,500 casualties, of which 200-300 were estimated to be killed, while Ukraine suffered 24,000 to 26,000 combat deaths, with twice that many wounded.

So, naturally, Clown World is determined to send in American soldiers, who despite their military prowess are even less experienced in this sort of modern warfare than the Ukrainians were when it started. And in the meantime, the Ukrainians are recruiting South Americans, particularly Brazilians.

“Ukraine is recruiting in the Global South because it no longer has people to send to the battlefield.” -Brazilian military analyst and reserve officer Robinson Farinazzo

An 83-1 KIA ratio (33-1 casualty ratio) dwarfs some of the most one-sided wars in modern history. The British defeated the Argentines with a 2.9-1 KIA ratio. The notoriously one-sided Israeli-Arab KIA ratio is 4.8 to 1. An 83-1 margin borders on the levels of science fiction or fantasy.

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The Non-Diplomacy Dance

It’s rather amusing to watch Clown World attempting to do diplomacy without actually going through the traditional diplomatic exercises in order to maintain its facade of complete control of the situation.

NATO leaders will “send a clear and positive signal” to Kiev regarding Ukraine’s aspiration to join NATO, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told journalists ahead of a two-day summit in Lithuania. The country will be able to skip one of the normal steps for candidates, he predicted.

The official said he proposed to member states to “remove the requirement for Membership Action Plan (MAP)” for Ukraine. This will change the accession path “from a two-step process to a one step process,” he explained during a conference on Tuesday.

In absolutely-related news, Turkey has unexpectedly dropped its opposition to Sweden’s entry into NATO.

NATO has cleared the way for Sweden to join the Western military alliance by persuading Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to end his opposition to Stockholm’s bid.

Persuading = large cash payments. But hey, whatever works, right?

All of this frantic non-diplomacy diplomacy is meant to “send a message” to Russia, which is completely futile since Russia doesn’t consider NATO or the USA to be “agreement-capable” and the entire world now knows that NATO is ‘victory-incapable”. The idea is to threaten Russia with a full-scale direct confrontation with NATO, and the problem is that the threat is simply not a credible one now that NATO’s ammunition and armor stores have been significantly depleted.

Meanwhile, Russia is growing stronger by the month, as its productive capacity is growing and it is building more tanks and APVs than it is losing. More importantly, the NATO calculation relies upon its own alliance while completely failing to take into account the extent to which Russia’s allies are capable of assisting it, both in terms of supplies and siphoning off NATO resources to other theaters.

I’d always thought that it would be the loss of several aircraft carriers that would signify the end of the US empire. But it increasingly appears that it is the combination of economic and military futility being exposed in Ukraine that will do so instead. And the longer this process continues to play out and methodically weaken the infrastructure of Clown World, the better it will be for the sovereign nations and the American posterity.

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Rangers Lead the Way

KRAMATORSK, Ukraine, June 27 (Reuters) – A Russian missile struck a restaurant in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Tuesday, killing at least eight people and wounding 56, emergency services said, as rescue crews combed the rubble in search of casualties... The building was reduced to a twisted web of metal beams. Police and soldiers emerged with a man in military trousers and boots on a stretcher. He was placed in an ambulance, though it was unclear whether he was still alive.

From Twitter:

Kramatorsk. After an alleged tip off from local informants a hotel with AFU and foreign merc’s was hit. Survivors have being filmed talking with American accents. Perhaps they were on vacation.

A reader at AC’s points out that the tattoo looks very much like a historical Rangers Diamond. Which, in this case, suggests that the 3rd Ranger Battalion is already deployed in eastern Ukraine.

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Of Course They Knew

The US government knew about the Wagner “rebellion” days in advance because the whole thing was most likely orchestrated by the color revolutionaries.

US intelligence officials knew well in advance that Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin was planning to mount an armed rebellion against the Russian military’s top commanders. Congressional leaders were even briefed days prior to Saturday’s events, after US intelligence reportedly observed the mercenary firm mustering forces and amassing weapons in preparation for possibly making a move against the defense ministry.

Any time there is a coup or revolution or color revolution, it’s a certain sign that the neoclowns are waging war by bank transfer again.

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Debacle in Rostov

Warren Balogh also observes a few obvious things about the short-lived threat that a mercenary company would change sides in response to a lucrative offer:

So let me get this straight

1. Prigozhin, the leader of the mutiny, is Jewish.

2. Standing ‘directly behind him.’ according to Russian nationalist Igor Clrkn, is Sergey Kiryenko, Putin’s Deputy Chief of Staff, who also happens to be Jewish and the grandson of a highly decorated Jewish Bolshevik Cheka terrorist

3. This comes just as the big offensive is being launched from Ukraine, under the Jewish junta of Vladimir Zelensky

4. All this is happening against the backdrop of Russa building closer ties to Iran, which threatens Israel.

5. The flag of the Wagner mercenary corps Is being hoisted in Ukraine.

6. Anne Applebaum, the biggest Jewish neocon war hawk against Russa at the Atlantic, is calling this Putin’s Tzar Nicholas moment.

The whole thing smacks of desperation on the part of Clown World. I wouldn’t be even remotely surprised if Prigozhin’s disastrous attempt to switch sides was related to that $6 billion in US funds that was recently reported to have gone missing. But, in retrospect, the attempt was always doomed.

There is no force on this Earth that can survive Jim Cramer’s cheerleading. Not even when he spells the name wrong.

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The Wagner “Coup”

Simplicius reviews a few theories concerning the failed insurrection in Russia by the Wagner mercenary company.

Let’s explore a few possible options for what could actually be going on.

  1. Prigozhin is working with AFU/SBU/CIA to backstab and destroy Russia, coordinating his actions with them.
  2. Prigozhin is secretly working with Putin to remove the stodgily entrenched Russian command. Notice, not in a single one of his rants has Prigozhin accused Putin or so much as even mentioned his name. There’s a possibility that all this is theater to cause a “conciliatory deal” to be made which will result in the ‘stepping aside’ of Shoigu. Putin has previously “laterally promoted” (in actuality demotions) several big name siloviki in the past. For instance, Sergei Ivanov who was deputy prime minister and presidential chief of staff was “moved” to head some ‘ecological’ department. Could we see Shoigu used as a fig leaf to settle the impasse by “laterally” moving him to some other ostensibly ‘important’ (but actually irrelevant) position?
  3. Everything is actually “as is” and whatever we see on the surface of the conflict pretty much represents what’s really happening.

One last thing to mention. There is still the possibility this is all some kind of elaborate psyop. Anything is possible because the situation is simply so ‘out of left field’. The reason it’s out of left field to me in particular is Prigozhin really did not appear to have any substantive justification for any of this. As I said, Russia was crushing the AFU and has recently been in the best position of the entire SMO. Why would something like this happen now, if it were legitimate? It simply defies belief that Prigozhin would be so incensed about all the “failings” of the MOD at the time of the MOD’s singularly greatest glory on the battlefield. The only explanation in that case would be—as I said before—that Prigozhin knew his time was up as the MOD was already planning on canning him, so it was “now or never” for him.

My theory is considerably more simple and is based on “Every Single Time.”

Yevgeny Prigozhin was born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) 1 June 1961. His father and stepfather were of Russian-Jewish descent.

In other words, Prigozhin is a sleeper agent for Clown World who was activated as a desperate reaction to the abject failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.

I can cite precisely zero evidence supporting this theory, but it’s certainly more coherent and consistent with historical events than the “he just went crazy” or “Russian psyop” theories. I don’t think it’s particularly far-fetched to suggest that the man’s true sympathies lie with his co-ethnics presently ruling over the Ukrainian people, especially in light of the Western response to Prigozhin’s announced “coup”.

The US has postponed a fresh round of economic sanctions on the Wagner private military company after its leader, Evgeny Prigozhin, led a march on Moscow in defiance of the Kremlin, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing sources.

UPDATE: Simplicius appears to have come around to my way of thinking.

My other more sinister theory is born: The entire production was in fact an oligarch-funded, perhaps Western-backed coup that was meant to topple Putin. Shoigu and Gerasimov were merely the cover to convince Wagner troops to march on the Kremlin. You see, Shoigu provides a brilliantly convenient target because troops are disgruntled with him. So all Priggy had to do was tell his troops we’re going to take out Shoigu and hand over the reins to Putin and it was easy convincing.

However, this may have always been a performance. You see, once the troops were to have marched to the Kremlin with him, he could position a few thousand of them as a cordon around the Kremlin itself. Then, a much smaller vanguard of his absolute most trustworthy, diehard, and fanatical revolutionaries—Dmitry Utkin surely has these under him—would have walked into the Kremlin with Prigozhin under the guise of “going to arrest Shoigu”.

But the next time the outside Wagner troops would see Prigozhin emerge from the Kremlin would be on the balcony, hailing them with the crown on his head as the new ruler of Russia. Because the idea all along was to use this facade to overthrow Putin and take control for himself.

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