Tag: Russia

China Puts Troops on the Ground

China appears to be warning NATO not to attack Belarus. Global Times reports Chinese troops have arrived in Belarus, on the border of Ukraine:

According to a press release from the Belarusian Defense Ministry on Saturday, military personnel from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have arrived in Belarus to participate in the joint anti-terrorism exercise scheduled from July 8 to 19.

The joint exercise will allow for the exchange of experience, the coordination of Belarusian and Chinese units, and the establishment of a foundation for further development of Belarusian-Chinese relations in the field of joint military training, said the Belarusian press release.

Photos released by the Belarusian Defense Ministry show the PLA troops arriving in Belarus on a Y-20 strategic transport aircraft of the PLA Air Force.

The joint drill was announced after Belarus officially jointed the SCO on Thursday, becoming its 10th member state, the Xinhua News Agency reported on the day.

This move is obviously being made in response to the buildup of NATO forces near the borders of Belarus. It’s apparent that Clown World is finding it difficult to accept the reality of its defeat in Ukraine, and is threatening to double down on its losing bet by openly sending in NATO forces.

By clarifying its pro-Russian position, China is calling what any sane observer would assume to be a bluff, although it is entirely possible that the Clown Worlders are desperate enough, and insane enough, to launch an attack on Belarus while claiming that it is not an attack on Russia.

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The USA Already Lost WWIII

As I’ve been banging repeatedly on since 2004, warfare since 1940 has primarily concerned industrial capacity. Of course, the Clown World establishment doesn’t listen to me, so they’re genuinely confused and afraid now that it’s clear that both China and North Korea are formally allied with Russia, giving the sovereign nations a 100x advantage over the post-industrial financialized economies of Clown World.

Remember when the narrative was that it was Russia totally reliant on Western-supplied parts in its weaponry? Here an American general literally admits the entire U.S. military structure would collapse in a day if China issued an embargo against them:

‘If we were in a war with China and it stopped providing parts, we wouldn’t be able to build the planes and weapons we needed,’ he said.

A startling report released earlier this year revealed Chinese firms have a stranglehold across 12 critical technologies that are vital to US national security, including nuclear modernization, hypersonic and space technologies.

The study, which was carried out by defense software firm Govini, delivered a damning indictment on the American armaments industry.

‘U.S. domestic production capacity is a shriveled shadow of its former self,’ the report said. ‘Crucial categories of industry for U.S. national defense are no longer built in any of the 50 states.’

Remember when it was Russia using Western chips in all of its missiles?

Perhaps most worryingly, Govini found that more than 40 per cent of the semiconductors that sustain Department of Defense (DoD) weapons systems are now sourced from China.

How the tides have turned.

It seems the West is slowly coming to its awakening moment: it stands no chance in a long term conflict against the manufacturing powerhouse of the Russia-China-North Korea-Iran bloc.

The central problem is that the strategic geniuses of Clown World are neocons like the Kagan clan, who understand nothing of military history. Their expertise is in subjective rhetoric and subversion, not objective logic and reality. They’re like the bad guys in a Hollywood horror flick, where all that is necessary to defeat them is to refuse to believe in them and proceed as if they don’t even exist.

The astonishing thing is that the corpocracy is still exporting manufacturing capacity abroad. Just yesterday, John Deere announced that it was moving its factories to Mexico. So US manufacturing capacity is actually shrinking, just as European energy production is shrinking, while Russia, China, and North Korea are all ramping up their production of everything from ammunition to tanks.

Clown World should surrender now. But they won’t, because they don’t deal in objective reality. They never have.

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The Russian Historiography of WII

This looks like a book worth reading once I’m finished with Jack Vance’s Treasury.

The Postil (TP): You have written a trilogy on the Great Patriotic War, that is the Second World War as experienced by Soviet Union. The first part of this magisterial study will be published soon. What is your overall aim?

Michael Jabara Carley (MJC): My trilogy, as I call it, deals with the origins and early conduct of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War (Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina). The VOV is the name given to the war in Soviet and Russian history arising from the German invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941. My work runs from January 1930 to December 1941. My project was first entitled “A Near-run Thing: The Improbable Grand Alliance of World War II,” supported by an “Insight” research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. My initial objective was to write a narrative history of how the USSR, Britain, and the United States, powers hostile to each other during the interwar years, became allies against Nazi Germany and the Axis. The work evolved from an envisioned single volume into three dealing with Soviet relations with the great and lesser European powers and the United States.

TP: Is there a difference between a Western historiography of WWII and a Russian one?

MJC: Oh yes, the difference is enormous. During the war, it was clear to all who had eyes to see that the Red Army played the key role in smashing the Nazi Wehrmacht and winning the war in Europe. The United States and Britain played supporting roles. After 1945 the war became an important object of propaganda in the Cold War. The new narrative was that the United States or Churchill single-handedly won the war in which the USSR was practically invisible. In the western media, histories, iconography, Hollywood films, comic books, more recently video games, the Red Army is invisible. The key moment in the war was operation Overlord, the Normandy landings, when in fact, they were an anticlimax, grand to be sure, in a war whose outcome had already been determined by the Red Army. In the context of the Cold War, it was normal that the United States would seek in various ways to rub out the memories of the Soviet role in the war, for otherwise how could you portray the USSR as a menacing communist enemy.

I’ll report back on it once I’ve finished it. It should be interesting to see if he supports or contradicts the Icebreaker theory of Operation Barbarossa.

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Slowly, Then Suddenly

I concur with the Armchair Warlord’s take on how the Russian strategy is likely to switch to a much more aggressive mode of offense when the time is deemed right.

The Stavka has placed a heavy emphasis on efficiency in this war. Many Russian decisions at the operational-strategic level can be explained simply by their seeking the most efficient means to inflict mass casualties on the AFU with the lowest risk to themselves. Thus, any decision to transition to high-speed, mobile warfare from low-speed, positional war can be expected to follow that rubric. In other words, the Russians will launch an offensive to rout the AFU after its back is broken in positional war, rather than attack seeking to “change the game” and defeat the Ukrainians in mobile war. The “game” heavily favors the Russians and they’re not in a rush to change it!

The difference between these scenarios can be seen quite easily by comparing two very successful offensives: Operation Bagration in 1944 and the 1975 Ho Chi Minh Offensive. Bagration routed the once-mighty Army Group Center – at the cost of 180,000 killed in action, three times the total Russian death toll of this war. I’m sure the Russians would much prefer the 8,000-strong butcher’s bill of North Vietnam’s war-ending 1975 operation – and they have the strategic insight to see that modern Ukraine, as a corrupt and deeply dysfunctional garrison state propped up by endless foreign aid, is far more akin to South Vietnam than Nazi Germany.

So what does this look like in practice? The Russians are going to keep poking and prodding in their usual methodical way until part of the line collapses “in depth,” and then all hell is going to break loose.

It seems most observers have forgotten that the Russians have already shown great flexibility in their approach to the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. The initial gambit was a high-risk, low-cost decapitation strike at Kiev combined with support for very rapid advancement into the Donbass by the separatist militias backed by Russian air and artillery support. Only when the limits of that approach were reached did they switch to using Chechen and mercenary light infantry to storm fortified locations like Bahkmut, after which they switched again to the brutal, but low-risk attrition warfare we’ve been seeing over the last year.

Therefore, it is correct to anticipate another change in grand tactics, (the more proper term in this context as the strategic objectives remain unchanged) which will primarily depend upon whether a) the Ukrainian Armed Forces break under the relentless attritional pressure or b) if NATO ground forces are sent in to prevent the UFA from breaking. Remember, the Russian strategists will comprehensively plan for all possible situations, not merely the particular scenarios that the enemy media deems most likely.

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Why Putin Waits

Simplicius explains why the Russians are in no hurry to finish off the Ukrainian resistance:

Everyone understands the dry points of Putin’s demands, which he has articulated over the course of months, about deNazification, keeping to current battlefield gains and ‘realities’, etc. But the single most important point which has flown completely under the radar, and which I believe is actually the very heart of Putin’s proposal, is hinted at in the earlier video where he says that mere ‘ceasefires’ are inadequate, and that he is seeking a permanent solution of some kind.

He didn’t specify there, but he has before—multiple times. What Putin alludes to is that in order to end the Ukrainian war for good, Russia will take no less than a re-working of the entire European security framework. This is why he harps on Zelensky’s illegitimacy, it’s because Putin wants to build up to the fact that there must be a far larger, overriding framework of guarantors which is immutable and inviolable, rather than flimsy and ephemeral like Zelensky.

What Putin is seeking is revolutionary: he wants to re-establish a whole new, modern Westphalian Peace. He wants the Ukrainian war to be the linchpin of a new global security system that plays into all the recent BRICS declarations of ‘reworking the UN’ and every other major global institution. Putin wants to reshape how the entire international system functions vis-a-vis their security relationships; in essence, it would be the first new concrete paradigm of the post-Cold War and ‘Iron Curtain’ era.

So for all those people who are asking: what is the ultimate price Putin is willing to pay to give up Russia’s maximalist aims in Ukraine—would he do it for the basic terms of demilitarization, no joining NATO, and all that? Not likely: because there is no way to guarantee Ukraine’s adherence to any such agreements. The only way to end the war would be a reworking of the entire system in such a way as to give Russia credible confidence in the new system holding indefinitely. It would take, as I said, a new Westphalian framework that institutionalizes new, much broader realities of what countries can and cannot do in overreaching via provocative actions against one another. If you really listen to Putin’s speeches and statements on this issue, this is the secret he’s intimating—though not very loudly or aggressively, for now. The reason for that is likely because he knows it’s too ambitious of an opening ‘ask’, and he would prefer to first lure the parties in via basic conditions before escalating it to the logical conclusion when it comes to the issue of: how do we realistically guarantee such conditions between parties?

This is why Putin is likely in no great rush to end the war: in order to effect such an ambitious world-reshaping plan, he knows the current political class has to first be waited out.

As I’ve been pointing out from the beginning, Putin knows he’s not at war with Ukraine. He’s not even at war with the USA or the West. He’s at war with Clown World, and there are safer, easier ways to defeat his enemies than to wade through literal continents of armies to do so. He understands, as does Xi, that time is on his side.

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Believing Their Own Word-Magic

Morgoth observes that the insane retardery of Clown World has now gone from redefining invaders as refugees and Pakistani rapists as English grooming gangs to a very dangerous redefinition of war as not-war:

It is stated quite clearly by a left-leaning, neoliberal outlet that there should be no brakes whatsoever on action taken against Russia because they’re all talk and no punch. Yet, the entire reason we’re in this mess is precisely because Russia invaded Ukraine in the teeth of Western opposition and condemnation. The reality of what is being proposed here is bombing campaigns inside Russia, including Russian cities, using weapons and aircraft supplied directly by Western powers, including personnel.

However, if we just play fast and loose with the definitions and framing, it will lose its bite; we can spin it a bit so the Western public can consume it more handily. It is hardly novel to highlight the degree to which Western journalists and politicians exist within their own bubble; now, they’re convincing themselves, entombing themselves within a narrative, that they can treat Russia however they like.

Niland certainly isn’t a lone voice. Establishment figures such as Boris Johnson have angrily demanded the West give Ukraine everything it needs to stay in the fight; the block was always that Russia is a nuclear power and allied with China. The evolving narrative is that Putin just talks a lot, and he won’t retaliate whatever we do. It is the logic of the drunk driver convincing himself he’s good for another four pints because he had a hearty dinner — it’s convenient bullshit rather than a reflection of reality.

I’m by no means a Putin fanboy; the camp I’m sitting in is the “anti-dying slowly in a cloud of nuclear fallout camp”. Putin is no stranger to weaving bullshit narratives himself. After all, he never even “invaded” Ukraine; he conducted a “special military operation”. The more we in the West convince ourselves, or are told by our betters, that Russia can be attacked with impunity, the more it will be. The more Russia is attacked, the greater the chance of retaliation because the Russian people will demand it.

Yet, astonishingly, Western establishment politicians and journalists are unable to see and understand basic logic in the same way they managed to convince themselves or compartmentalise foreign rape gangs or that a piece of paper doesn’t make a Somalian Irish.

Once you start believing lies in the face of the observable truth, you have no control over when to stop because you no longer have the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, or reality from your own wishful thinking.

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Why Russia Took So Long

Scott Ritter asks a question that any halfway-decent military analyst could answer:

Why did it take so long for Moscow to wake up to the need to bring the Donbass into the fold of the Russian nation?

This is the eternal question, one that Russia today struggles to find an adequate answer for.

Russia’s path of redemption ends in Donbass. Here, the sins, errors, and evil which combined to create the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict are manifest. Questions have been asked to which there may be no adequate answer. Today, the situation on the ground increasingly points to a Russian victory over both Ukraine and its supporters in the collective West. But this victory has come at a huge physical and psychological cost. While the dead may be buried and honored, the living will always have to struggle to come to grips over the sacrifices that have been made in support of the cause they were fighting for.

And, in the end, if they believe that the cause was a just one – and it is my firm position that they do, in fact, believe this to be the case – then the answer to the question as to why it took Russia so long to intervene on behalf of Donbass will hang there, unanswerable, if for no other reason than that the pain any honest answer will generate may be too much to bear for those who had been fighting for the liberation of Donbass these past ten years.

It’s a dumb question with an obvious answer. The Russians took so long to intervene because they were afraid to confront the full might of Clown World, both militarily in the form of NATO and economically, on their own. That’s why they’ve pursued such a cautious military strategy and steered well clear of declaring total war on the USA and NATO, while simultaneously securing their economic and military alliances with China and the rest of the BRICSIA countries.

The fact that Russia is now winning so comprehensively on the economic, military, and diplomacy fronts is testimony to the wisdom of the Russian approach, even though it was very hard on the people of the Donbass. And they have the benefit of knowing that their sacrifice was not in vain.

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Russia 1, Pride 0

No wonder Clown World is raging about its ongoing defeat at the hands of Christian Russia:

The US-based company behind the popular language-learning application Duolingo has agreed to remove content potentially violating Russian “LGBT propaganda” laws, the country’s media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, has announced. The watchdog said on Tuesday it had received a letter from the company on the matter, confirming its compliance with the nation’s legislation.

“The Duolingo company sent a response letter to Roskomnadzor, in which it confirmed that it had removed materials promoting non-traditional sexual relationships from its educational application,” the watchdog told TASS in a statement.

Roskomnadzor handed Duolingo a notice in April about its potential violation of Russian legislation and warning it “about a ban on publication of any materials promoting non-traditional sexual relations.” Failure to comply with such demands results in hefty fines for companies operating in Russia, and further non-compliance could potentially lead to their online services being blocked by the watchdog.

That’s how easy it will be to rein in the satanists in the post-WWIII world, now that the falseness of the “free speech” rhetoric has finally been fully revealed. There is no such thing as free speech, the only disputable element is who defines what speech is permissible and what is not.

Free speech is the inversion of a factual observation by Martin Luther, who said that a man’s thoughts are free precisely because they remain unspoken, unheard, and therefore unknown to anyone but God.

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Russia is Playing Black

But I’m not entirely sure that Clown World is even playing chess. It looks a lot more like checkers to me.

In the conversation between Russia and the United States, a certain readable language has emerged that can be read and understood. The sequence of steps and actions is this language: everything has a clear meaning. This makes it possible to understand what both sides are trying to achieve and to state that such a language of gestures is still readable and that the situation has not collapsed into chaos.

Thus, we see a clear desire on the part of the West to drive Russia into an escalation algorithm favorable to NATO. This is a protracted war of attrition against our country, waged exclusively with conventional weapons, for which NATO has the potential for quantitative and/or qualitative advantage. Even in those weapons where Russia has a predominance, NATO is trying to compensate for the situation with the combined use of other means of attack.

Russia is signaling that it sees this scenario and is conducting TNW deployment exercises, albeit without loading warheads. This is a warning that there is a counter-scenario and that the West will not be able to impose its war plan.

The West immediately responds with strikes on Russian missile warning system (MWS) radar stations near Armavir and Orenburg, with a simultaneous attack on an antenna in Crimea, also used for this purpose. So far, this is only a demonstration. But the West has outlined the trajectories of future strikes and made it clear that it is capable of attacking Russia’s SPRN in a combined and serial manner, if Russia develops the topic of TNWs, rather than continuing the war according to the NATO plan by conventional means, where the West expects to realize its resource advantage.

At the same time, Russia is being given to understand that the West sees the problem of manning the AFU and is preparing to introduce contingents of NATO countries into Ukraine. NATO intends to block Russian intentions to block this build-up with TNWs by denoting its ability to blind our Strategic Nuclear Forces. This, according to the West, should force Russia to give up its strong trump card and accept an ultimatum in the fall, the text of which will be approved in Switzerland in June.

At the same time, the West is conducting exercises to launch nuclear attacks near our borders. The pressure on the Russian leadership is exerted on all fronts, in combination. Preparedness for nuclear attacks, counting on internal instability, demonstrating readiness to expand escalation without restrictions – this is the language the West is now using with Russia. The goal is to convince the Russian leadership that it is impossible to inflict unacceptable damage on the West and surrender.

Before us is a chess game where Russia is playing Black. Her strategy is built in relation to White’s strategy. The opening is over, the exchange phase (middlegame) has begun. White shows that he is ready to throw pieces off the board and move to a fight. Black shows that it will cost White a lot.

The strategy of the West is a penned hunt, the strategy of Russia is a hunt for the hunter. These strategies are 200 years old, they are constant and are now being repeated. The West understands only real answers, it will not stop until it has tried everything. Russia will have to respond in kind. It’s about where Ukraine’s borders will be drawn and how the new balance of power in Europe will be formed.

What I find so astonishingly bizarre about the mainstream coverage of the Ukraine situation is the way in which it is always discussed in complete isolation from everything else going on in WWIII. Yes, it’s true that Russia might well struggle if forced to face the combined might of Clown World alone – which is the USA, the UK, the EU, and Japan – but Russia is not alone! Russia is very far from alone, being more closely allied to China than Japan or any of the European satrapies are to the USA.

Defense Minister Minoru Kihara conveyed Tokyo’s “serious concern” about Beijing’s increased military activity near Japan during talks with his Chinese counterpart Dong Jun on Saturday, while both agreed to maintain bilateral dialogue, according to the Japanese Defense Ministry. In their first meeting held on the sidelines of the annual Asia Security Summit in Singapore, known as the Shangri-La Dialogue, Kihara said there are “many security concerns” for the two Asian nations, such as a territorial row in the East China Sea and increased joint military activities by Beijing and Russia around Japan.

Only the UK is tied to the USA by more than threats and political corruption, and both the combined demographics and industrial capacity of the BRICSIA alliance far surpasses that of Clown World. Indeed, I think that the event the Chinese are waiting for prior to their next major move, whatever that may be, is either a) a NATO attack on Russia or b) a massive Russian offensive aimed at knocking Kiev out of the war.

Remember, for all its careful harboring of its resources in the current Special Military Operation, the 20th Century Russians specialized in the Zhukovian art of unexpectedly delivering overwhelming force on a scale larger than anything the West has ever known.

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Will NATO Go All In?

Ukraine has been defeated. And NATO has been defeated in Ukraine. The proxy war is essentially over. The question now is if Clown World will accept defeat and all the consequences it entails, or whether it will provoke a direct war with Russia:

Ukraine is at a crossroads and a potential breaking point. The political situation has hit rock bottom, with Zelensky’s authority and legitimacy quickly unspooling; the manpower issue is reportedly very bad and is not being addressed by the newly announced mobilization; and on top of all that, Russia appears on the brink of opening up another in a series of new fronts that could bring the AFU to the brink by stretching the lines like never before.

Here’s where the ominous signs begin.

There are increasing signals that the covert plan from the globalist controllers is to get Ukraine to leave Russia with no choice but to escalate drastically and bring NATO in some form, whether limited or not, into the fight. Ex-British MP Andrew Bridgen stated that this is the real reason why Rishi Sunak has called an early election—he refuses to be a ‘war time president’.

My perception is that cooler heads will ultimately prevail, simply because both the Middle East front and the Asian front are more important to Clown World if it prioritizes its survival rather than its continued global rule. But there is no guarantee that the longer-sighted parties will make the decisions, and indeed, there is a case to be made by the nationalist side that a conclusive global war might be preferable to putting things off until World War IV.

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