Dear Readers:
If you have been keeping up with the news, then you are probably aware of the Ukrainian military raids that took place yesterday (Tuesday). When “Ukrainian” (probably also mercenary/NATO, etc.) sabotage/reconnaissance troops attacked several Russian border areas in the regions of Belgorod and Kursk. The attacks were synchronized, showed some signs of an overall organizational plan, and included preparatory bombardments and support from tanks and armored vehicles. The Russian Ministry of Defense claims that it repelled all attacks before the enemy troops were even able to cross the border, while inflicting massive losses on the attackers and their equipment
I don’t know if that last bit is true, but even people without any particular military knowledge or training, can see clearly that such attacks serve no strategic purpose for the Ukrainian side. Even the most deluded Ukrainian cannot possibly believe that he can seize, hold, and administer actual Russian cities and territories. Therefore, the question arises: Why bother to try?
Today I saw this piece, in which President Putin was asked that exact question, in an interview with prominent Russian TV journalist Dmitry Kiselev. Putin theorized that he could see 3 main reasons why the Ukrainians would make such a mad attempt.
Putin: On the front lines of the Special Military Operation, the initiative has gone over completely to the side of the Russian Armed Forces. “Everybody knows this, everybody admits this.”
Reason 1: To interfere with the upcoming Russian Presidential elections (to be held March 15-17). Putin is running for re-election against 3 other candidates: Nikolai Kharitonov from the Communist Party; Leonid Slutsky from LDPR; and Vladislav Davankov from “New People”. Putin is expected to win, and none of the other candidates are pro-Ukrainian, so I am not sure why Putin believes this is even a factor; yet he names it as the “main reason” for the Ukrainian attack, in his opinion. It’s true that many Russians will be upset by the attack and may even blame Putin or the government for not protecting them against Ukrainian bombs and drones, but I still don’t see how this would have any impact on the election.
Anyhow, Reason 2, according to Putin, and this one sounds more logical to me, is just for PR reasons: “They need to show that they are doing something and attract some attention to themselves somehow in the informational arena.”
Reason 3: The Ukrainian leaders may actually be deluded enough to think they can grab some Russian territory and then use it as a bargaining chip once the time arrives for the inevitable negotiations. Putin: “As in, well, we’ll return what we took, and you’ll return what you took. I already said that it is actually easier to deal with people like this, people who are guided by the principle I am well sated, drunk, and have my nose dipped in … well, you know the rest… The reason it’s easier to deal with them, is because you know exactly what they are going to do. And they will continue to make these kinds of attempts, in other sectors. But we are keeping our eye on them.” In case Kiselev didn’t get the reference, Putin went on to explain his joke: He was quoting from old Russian proverb or saying describing the perfectly happy life: “Сыт, пьян и нос в табаке” (“Well sated, drunk, and nose dipped in tobacco”). “But we’re actually talking about cocaine, no?” Putin went on to fully explain his joke to the probably stunned Kiselev.
“Never mind,” Putin concluded. “It’s not important. Like I said, it’s actually easier to deal with people like that. With smart people, it’s harder, they are more dangerous, because they can influence public opinion, even among our own people. They can present their entire wish-list to us, like dangling a carrot under our noses.”
Whom Putin was referring to in that last sally, I am not sure. But I suspect he is alluding to a section of Russian society, that part of the bourgeois ruling class, which still believes they can cut some kind of deal with NATO.
Awful Avalanche 
Putin has several times surprised me with tougher rhetoric during the last 3 months. It all started after a series of high level Kremlin meetings before Christmas last year. My guess is that they decided on how to proceed with the next stage then. Here’s more from the interview:
The president stated that over the past few centuries, the so-called “golden billion” has grown accustomed to being able to “fill their bellies with human flesh and their pockets with money” as they have been “parasitizing” other peoples in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. ”But they must understand that the vampire ball is ending,” Putin said.
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World War 3 started on 10 February 2007 at the Munich Security Conference, when Putin declared that the West would have to share. He was already persona non grata due to chasing the Western-backed oligarchs (mostly) out of Russian politics and breaking Yukos in particular.
Putin was supposed to be another, less-drunk lapdog taking his cut while the Russian people toothlessly faced demographic genocide and every bit of wealth was plundered into London banks. The Hegemon was furious. HOW DARE HE?!
There was a window, in 2007, in which some concocted excuse for a massive nuclear first-strike on Russia would have probably done the job at “acceptable cost”. But arguably the US military establishment wasn’t ready for that–it wasn’t pliable enough for decisive if contrived action. And so instead we got a ramp-up in the Caucuses through Saakashvili and an attempt to re-ignite the CIA-funded Chechnya conflict (staked if not dead following Karyrov’s election Feb 2 2007–note the timing RE: Munich). That backfired and arguably between Chechnya and Georgia the groundwork was laid for the restoration of Russian military pride.
The 2008 Financial Crisis, which came to a head only a month after the Georgia adventure, occupied the Hegemon for a bit and illustrated that the West desperately needed a global reset to clear the books–that, is a major war. The next, primary thrust would be through Ukraine, which as we (and Putin) has increasingly understood is about playing for all the marbles and it’s personal.
The Western elite who feel themselves cheated of their rightful plunder by Putin want him gone, even if his successor is more likely to play hard(er)ball. They get the global hot war that resets derivative accounts, while settling accounts with the man, Putin, who dared say they should not be gods.
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Good summary of the main points of the last couple of decades.
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I saw that “golden billion” remark, I think in RT. It’s all part of the same interview which was supposed to be translated in full today.
It’s a pleasant surprise that Putin has started to talk more like Lenin, and less like Yeltsin, obviously events have driven him to the Left, into the bosom of the Global South and the socialist countries.
Another point I will give Putin: For some reason this man has the talent to talk like Lenin and excoriate Western Imperialism while still attracting the love of the Right, the Far Right, and even neo-Nazis. Case in point: under the RT article I saw commenters of the “I hate Jews and Bolsheviks” variety expressing their adoration of Putin with comments such as “I like the way Putin trashes the Anglo-elite Jews and Zionists…” Putin does no such thing. He never even said one bad word against Zionists, let alone Jews. But clearly the Unzie types like to project all their emotions and beliefs onto this one man. He must have some magical power, like a chameleon!
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Putin is affected by the “enemy of my enemy is exactly like me!” fallacy. In that lazy black-and-white analysis simply assumes that if you don’t like the Hegemon, and Globalists support the Hegemon, and Zionists support the Globalists, then if Putin is fighting the Hegemon he automatically inherits the same feelings toward the Globalists and Zionists.
This is… incredibly sloppy, and incredibly common, levels of reasoning. It does everyone a disservice and makes, for example Russia “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” to dispense with much like the Gordian Knot. At the diplomatic levels Russia operates by the same types of realpolitik thinking that typified 19th-Century relations or enabled Byzantium to manage a tableau of tribal pressures for a thousand years.
But modern humans are taught that all issues are moral issues, making good and evil discretely assignable characteristics to other humans, and thus automatically characterizing all other speech and action.
Its a mental model that assures very, very stupid conflicts.
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eesh, how true that is. And how stupid some people are! Instead of realizing there are thousands of different variables, they assume everything is binary!
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There are others axes (plural of “axis”, not the sharp thing that Vikings swing) along which to analyse peoples’ perspectives. Not just Nazi vs. not-zi. The desire for authoritarianism is one. Lots of Unzie-types emotionally crave a strongman, a Big Daddy who will punish the people they hate. And they hate so many! But they’re too weak — not just physically, but in their position in the world — to hurt those hate-objects. So they imagine a leader who will do that for them. Even if he’s not actually acting against their targets, as you point out about Putin. Imaginary leaders make people feel better, the way that pretend leftists fantasise about Obama being a kind-hearted champion of the little people. (Narrator: Obama was a tool of rich bankers) If people paid attention to the reality of what their idols do, instead of deluding themselves with “if only the Tsar knew!” then they’d either have to start burning stuff down and fucking shit up, or kill themselves. Fantasyland is safer.
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Excellent points. Freud might say that these authoritarian-minded people have a Daddy issue. They need to read more Sylvia Plath, that might cure them.
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None of what has happened in Ukrainia since 2014 makes any sense if you are an ordinary citizen or…a nationalist in Ukrainia. It only makes sense within the context of Galicians seeking revenge for their Führer’s humiliating loss to the Russian untermenschen in 1944-45. Likewise, none of what has happened in Ukrainia since 2014 makes any sense if you are an ordinary citizen in the US, Britain or, most dramatically, in the EU.
Likewise, none of what has happened in Ukrainia since 2014 makes any sense if you learned anything during your military leadership training. Would somebody please pull these English-schoolboys & their wannabes American cousins aside and let them know they are knocking on Russia’s doorstep and BTW, this isn’t 1853!
Does the word “logistics” ring a bell with these know-it-all schoolboys? If the US Army was good/best at anything in 1944-45 it was L-O-G-I-S-T-I-C-S, to fight a high intensity war overseas requires at a MINIMUM, a mastery of logistics. The Russians would face a similar dilemma were they to try and create and support an uprising in northern Mexico…Sonora/Bahia would become a slaughterhouse for Russian soldiers and that remains true…even if Andrei is right about the US lagging Russia in SAMs and offensive hypersonics..that’s how big of a roll L-O-G-I-S-T-I-C-S plays.
So what to make of these terrorist-tactics so blatantly employed by the 3LAs in this Crimean War 2.0 ? It would be easy to say that terrorist-tactics are being employed to delay and cover-up another of Langley’s legendary losing streak, after all, as we speak, their cockroaches are busy burrowing in the woodwork. And as any Captain Obvious would observe, the US-National-Security-State [3LAs] hope to be in a position to saddle the Trump Admin with this war and by so doing, paralyze representative government…meanwhile the National-Security-State [3LAs] will continue to operate without any checks or balances. If that vain outcome requires the sacrifice of 300,000 more Ukraini souls upon Ares altar..well..that’s a small price to pay for the depraved ghouls of DC & London.
But I think there is more to it since DC/London’s 3LAs have been employing terrorist-tactics from the start of this Crimean War 2.0 ? More likely it is because the “special-ops” guys have been in charge of this war from the very start and while they are very, very, very good at backstabbing-office-politics, murdering civilians and mass executions of hastily assembled civilian militias…their skill in commanding large armies is poor…if it exists at all.
The Crimean War 2.0 project is a clarion call to return “special-ops” solely to the USMC and to dump Dulles’s “plausible-deniability” bullshit. If we have to do something nasty for the purposes of national survival, fine, own it. If such action is untenable politically and counter to the US Constitution then let it’s perpetrators be thrown from office and/or jailed. And if a man/woman is willing to martyr themselves because they saw something that the others did not, then surely time will tell the tale and their freedom secured through US Constitution’s Presidential pardon. But if one wants the glory and the perks that come with such adoration..without the requisite risk, you belong in the battalion of the banal, not in the sacred pantheon of heroes who have graced this great land with their lives.
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Daresay it’s a clarion call to return the power of expeditionary war to the deliberative body of Congress, and not the black halls of the shadow bureaucracy.
What is that saying? Something about how amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics? The US ended WW2 with perhaps the foremost heavy lift capacity the world has ever seen. It was reduced, frittered away and then to my true horror effectively ended in the mid-00s. There is no merchant marine. There is no transport build capacity. There’s the airforce transports (which is overshadowed by FedEx), a few amphibious assault carriers, and a dozen aircraft carriers. If you actually want to move real materials around you’re going to have to use tankers and container cargo.
Practically speaking that means the ability of the US is limited to whatever its bases can reach, plus a few blown-up buildings from air power. And air power has never won a war, just made it easier on the men who march in to do the hard work.
Terrorism and backstabbery and fruitless gestures are all the Hegemon can bring to bear, and THAT is the emperor-no-clothes moment that terrifies the elite. They bet big on “soft power” and sanctions and the idea somehow, unlike all the previous times, the elites of their opponents would just throw in the towel if they go their local baristo blown up or couldn’t buy Levis. They bet big on soft power and sanctions because real capabilities didn’t line their pockets and DID create centers of challenge internally.
So while the elites of the Hegemon are terrified of the rest of the world, they are more terrified of their own people. Every move is best understood as directed not at the supposed target of terror, but at their own. How does it put into place a new constraint against rebellion of thought or deed?
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In my view, what happened to the U.S. after WWII was its accelerated descent into a true oligarchy. A true oligarchy is the worst form of government. In Russia there was an oligarchy under Yeltsin, and Putin had to try to curb it. Ukraine has been a wild oligarchy since 1991.
In the U.S. I think this process began soon after WWII but really came to fruition around the time (I don’t recall the exact year) when the Supreme Court declared that “Corporations are people”, in order to allow unlimited political funding. Once any kind of cap was removed from campaign funding, then the oligarchs were secured their tight control over government. Any vestiges of representational democracy have been removed, and it’s just the raw power of the oligarchs ruling over the masses with a fig leaf of a government.
As the Ukrainian experience shows, oligarchic states are typically wasteful, inefficient, brutal, and violent, even sadistic in nature. They can’t build anything. They have no redeeming qualities. In Putin’s words, they are “vampire” states which feed off of human flesh and misery.
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I think the irreversible decline began when the coda “corporations owed loyalty ONLY to Wall Street [and of course…corporate officers]” became widely accepted during the late 1970’s. The message was proselytized and popularized by Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago* in a 10 episode series, each episode was 1 hour long, the series was endlessly looped year after year on USG-taxpayer funded TV. Talk about Welfare for the Wealthy. The series was loosely based on Milton Friedman’s previously published book “Freedom to Lose”. It was called a documentary but, that claim is false, just like Milton Friedman’s claim of a “Nobel Prize in Economics”. There is no such thing as a “Nobel Prize in Economics”. For decades economists, the stepchildren of university philosophy departments, had beseeched the Nobel committee to no avail, finally, they gave themselves a “Nobel” prize they called it:
“Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
Award…in memory of Alfred Nobel” established in 1968 by Sveriges Riksbank. Economics being to science what astrology is to astronomy. But I digress…
Basically, according to Milton Friedman all other stakeholders, suppliers, employees, community, nation, world et al, were NOT due ANY consideration in corporate governance. According to Milton Friedman, loyalty was only owed only to shareholders and Wall Street perceptions; if a shareholder held the stock for hours or, even for minutes, that stockholders whims were supreme to those who had put in the effort to grow the enterprise and ensure it’s continued success.
Jimmy Carter was the first US President to embrace this doctrine, though Democrats and people ignorant of history falsely claim that Ronald Reagan holds that honor.
*Founded by John D. Rockefeller
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Yes, the big acceleration in the existing decline into oligarchy definitely began under Carter. Reagan just continued the irreversible process that was already falling, like a boulder down a hill…
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All correct-ish, the consideration being that oligarchy in the US is a condition that keeps moving backwards in time the closer you look at it.
Probably you’d want to consider it as formed in its governance-deforming state by the late 1800s, as the robber-barons of capital found purchase and linkages to Old World money and influence. However it’s not hard to trace US oligarchy even further back through to the original founders, which makes the Civil War a struggle between oligarchs, the War of 1812 a fight over debt settlement (which it was) and the Revolutionary war a matter of who makes the rules constraining the oligarchs.
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That’s a good point. There is such a fuzzy grey line between “normal” capitalism and oligarchic capitalism. Probably more like a quantitative than qualitative thing. But I see the unlimited money campaign contribution thing as some kind of tipping point.
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Putin scoffs about the futility of those Ukronazis going on a rampage to affect an election. But it won’t seem so scoffulous when they stage an armed incursion into the United States later this year to tip the balance in favour of War President FJB. The most MASSIVE October Surprise since Jimmuh Carter and Operation Eagle Claw. (Well, that was a surprise which went the wrong way…) Democracy can’t be entrusted to the hands of Cheeseburger-Eating Surrender Trumpy. It’s going to be like Belgorod with balls, Krynky without the kinks.
I don’t know whether the Ukramarines will invade at some seaside spot full of important people like the Martha’s Vineyard or Miami Beach. Consider the hostage potential, especially if they capture the Obamas’ New England mansion while the Peace Prize winner is there. Imagine the hostage value, as all of America cries out “Do whatever you need to free our beloved ex-president! Seal Team 6 must immediately grab Trump and use him as an ‘exchange fund’ in a prisoner swap.”
Or a Ukrokommando mob might storm the U.S. Capitol to seize the seat of power when Congrifts is in session. There’s precedent for that, eh? It would be SO easy to sneak an armoured division into D.C. from where Ukiearmy #4 is being trained at the Quantico for the Great Spring 2025 Counteroffensive. You’ll know that plan is ON like Khokholkong when Germyknee, Brutain, Polockland and those other trainazing grounds announce this (Northern Hemisphere) summer that they no longer want to teach kidnapped conscripts how to use expensive weapons when they’re just going to be killed within 48 hours of arriving on the front line.
That announcement will be part of a cunning double-reverse deception by Gen. (for genius) ratBudanov, who’s done so well with bringing the battle to Russian border towns, dams, bridges and undersea methane pipelines. Is there anything he CAN’T succeed at? Especially because Budanov will actually be acting on behalf of the U.S. Deep State, in order to protect America from potentially making a mistake by selecting a dangerous president. It will LOOK like a foreign invasion but it will REALLY be a conspiracoup. For freedom! What could possibly go wrong?
Also too, in the Russian folk saying that Putin mentioned — would it be a nose dipped in snuff, not mere tobacco? Did you lose some subtle meaning in translation? I see the spelling in your caption, and even with my barely-existent ability to decipher Cyrillic, it looks like “tobacco.” But what KIND? Not cigarettes. Nobody, even proverb-producing snowserfs, would fill their noses with that. As an American, I would expect you to understand those fine distinctions in terbacky. Including chaw! Do you dip or spit?
Aussies don’t know spit about such things. I was chatting to one of the building supers last week when he was in the alley outside the bike shed, killing his lungs with vaping. “I’m on smoko!” is the second most popular saying amongst these antipodean bludgers, after “No worries, mate.” I had seen a news story the day before about the latest smokeless scourge that’s tornado-ing across Oz — snuff pouches. “Snüs” to Swedes, pronounced “snoose” in northwoods Michigan where I first saw the stuff. Like tiny teabags full of flavoured nicotine powder. Less messy than a plug of Red Man. Burns like hell when you tuck one between your teeth and gums, but it’ll soon set your head to spinning. The super didn’t know about that stuff — it was snews to him.
As an American, I am privy to all sorts of info about exotically decadent mind-bending substances like bath salts, kronic and cough syrup mixed with gin. They’re essential parts of U.S. national culture which I must explain to these ignorant innocents. They still can’t believe me when I describe tranq. “Why would Yanks mix antipsychotic sedatives with fentanyl and whack it up their arms?!? Doesn’t that kill them straight away?” These naive children of sunshine just don’t grok the soul pain that comes with being Amerikan and the desire to make it go away…
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I think you make a good point about the snuff. That’s probably what they mean, because nobody would dip their nose in cigarette tobacco. To my shame, I did not know the word “snuff” nor the Russian equivalent, but I just goggled it, it’s нюхательный табак, “n’ukhatel’nyi tabak”, or “sniffing tobacco”.
But would the kind of low-lifes in the illustration be able to afford snuff? I thought it was something that only aristocrats could afford.
As to your Budanov scenario of invading America, it sounds like a pretty good plan. They shouldn’t march directly on the Capitol though. After those recent events, I think the Capitol police might have put up some barbed wire or dragon’s teeth, or something like that, to protect the Sacred Chamber. But an underwater operation involving the Potomac River, I think Budie is up to that kind of derring-do.
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