Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 80

Gilbert Doctorow: Travel Notes, St Petersburg, April-May 2024: fourth and final installment

By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 5/11/24

We come to Russia, to Petersburg for a lot more than the pleasures of High Culture. A bigger incentive is people, our good and long time friends here. I already mentioned in passing in my first installment that we met up with friends Masha and Ivan (names changed to protect their privacy) from Moscow who came here expressly for a get-together with us and with still another two-some who live here in the city center of Petersburg, Irina and Alexei.

 Whether partly or fully retired from their lifelong professional positions, these people, through their own networks, are upstanding members of the intelligentsia in Russia’s two capitals. Ivan may no longer be president of the Moscow branch of the Union of Journalists, but he remains on the editorial board of their magazine and has administrative responsibilities in the university department of journalism. Irina may publish fewer articles today than in the past, but she performs public relations tasks on behalf of one of the clubs of Petersburg’s international friends headed by Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky. Then there are the publishers of the Russian editions of our books with whom we did not share a meal, but with whom we spent three very pleasant hours in their office talking about the state of the book trade and about a lot more.

The overarching conclusion from spending time with these friends, who could all in the past have been described as pro-Western in orientation, is that what Alexander Dugin and Dmitry Simes were saying in the interview on The Great Game that I described a couple of days ago is borne out: these friends now have very positive feelings about the direction the country is taking.

This is not to say that there is complete unanimity among us about what is going on in public life. On the one side, I heard the remark that ever tighter censorship is being imposed on journalism. On the other side, our publishers say that there is absolutely no censorship in the book trade. Of course, we put to one side the ban on sales of the author of the detective stories Boris Akunin and on the one-time Russian Booker Prize winner Ludmila Ulitskaya. Akunin has publicly stated that he donates royalties from his book sales to the Ukrainians and Ulitskaya has made damning remarks on the ‘Putin regime’ and on the country as a whole. In wartime, their removal from bookstores is something you could expect even in nominally free and open countries.

The impact of the war on the lives of our friends is clearest as regards the Petersburg pair. For the past twenty years they travel each summer to Crimea, where they own a patch of land and a tiny house on a hillside overlooking the port town of Feodosiya on the eastern shores of the peninsula. Last year there were Ukrainian drone and missile attacks on the town and they witnessed the midair destruction of these aircraft. One girl who was spending the night on a hillside to watch the dawn was killed by falling debris. As the countdown begins for their train journey to Crimea at the end of this month, they cannot avoid thinking about a possible Ukrainian missile strike on the Kerch bridge on which their train will be traveling for 20 minutes to reach the peninsula. Then there is the uncertainty about how intense the missile and drone attacks on Feodosiya will be this summer. The risks are low but they do not make for calm nerves, which is what you really want from a summer get-away. Some friends of theirs who are also owners of dachas on the hills above Feodosia have cancelled their travel plans, though others are proceeding to the Crimea as in the past.

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I have in previous installments spoken about goods. Now I will turn to services. The one we use daily is taxis and I direct attention to that.

We take taxis around town in Pushkin. But mostly we use them to drive into and from the Petersburg city center.

Back in the bad old days of generalized pauperdom in the 1990s, every jalopy Lada traveling down the street could be hailed and would take you wherever you were going for next to nothing. Forget seat belts! Forget suspension! Forget the rules of the road! The drivers, mostly coming from Central Asia, were free spirits.

Those days are long gone. Nobody today will stop to pick you up if you raise your hand curbside. Unoccupied taxis will not let you in, because they are all radio dispatched, waiting for their next order. And the business has really consolidated in the past couple of years, with many smaller taxi companies having been bought out and with Yandex, the Russian equivalent to Google, having taken a dominant if not monopolistic position in the Petersburg market. I assume Yandex is similarly placed across the country.

One result of Yandex scooping up all the cars and drivers is that when you place your order by phone you have no idea what will be the quality of the car and driver who arrives to pick you up. It may be a proper Yandex branded car in full livery, or it may be just an ordinary passenger car, often quite worn out, operated by a Yandex ‘partner.’ Placing your order via their App is a safer bet, because you see on your telephone what the car and driver look like and have veto power.

Measured in dollars or euros, the taxis operating in Petersburg are cheap. The cars must take in 8 – 10 euros per hour if they are fully engaged. Fares for a given trip are revised up or down depending on the computer projected time of the journey taking into account density of traffic. How much of the gross revenue is passed along to the driver depends on his relationship to the company: his contract may be for rental of the vehicle from the taxi company, or it may be that he provides the vehicle. Our Pushkin based taxi service competes with others when it posts a new passenger call, since any one driver may be under contract with several firms.

In the past, going back a dozen years, when there were only local taxi companies, you could do side deals with drivers to order their services directly, not going through the dispatcher. Back then and until quite recently, I found the drivers to be very chatty and a good source of all kinds of information about local politics, local gripes and so forth. The ride into Petersburg takes between 45 minutes and an hour and a half depending on the weekday and the time of travel, so there was plenty of time to ‘chew the fat,’ as we say.

 With the recent professionalization or corporatization of taxis under the Yandex banner, drivers seem less approachable and I rarely strike up conversations with them. However, two days ago, in the last 5 minutes of our late evening drive from Petersburg center to our apartment in Pushkin, I asked the driver what he thought about the fancy and impressive top of the line Geely car we were in. It was as if he had been just waiting for the opportunity to share his concerns as he weighs the possibility of actually buying a Geely, not renting it from Yandex to raise his share of the fares.

The Geely, for those of you who are not familiar with Chinese brands, is one of the biggest Chinese manufacturers, with extensive operations outside China. Inter alia, they happen to be the owners of Sweden’s Volvo cars.

The ride in his Crossover was very comfortable, as you would expect in a car of this type. It was very easy to get into and to get out of. And the interior was up to date, with large a informational screen on the dashboard. However, the driver’s interests lay elsewhere, namely in service life, in resistance to rust (poor) and the robustness of the electronics (poor). Then there is the question of availability of spare parts, which, per his information can take up to two months to procure, and that is a real negative.

You see quite a few Geely cars on Petersburg streets these days, but still more Haval cars produced by China’s Great Wall Motors, Chery from the manufacturer of the same name, and Exeed.

Last night we traveled home from the city in a Yandex liveried Exeed, which also was noteworthy for passenger space and comfort, for good suspension and tight steering. Once again I decided to talk cars with the driver and he was delighted to oblige. By his face seen in profile, it was clear he himself came from one of the Chinese sphere of influence countries. But his Russian was perfect, and he clearly aims to make his future here.

He is satisfied with his Exeed, though he acknowledges there are potential problems with spare parts. We may assume that this will be resolved once the newly arrived Chinese brands build their dealerships and local inventory.

The experience of last night’s driver with his Exeed only goes back a couple of months. Before that he drove a Chery, also in the luxury car category. Its best and endearing feature was safety. He and the car parted company when someone crashed into him at a crossroads and the car was destroyed. However, the air bags worked perfectly and he walked away from the wreck without a scratch.

From this chap I picked up the observation that the Chinese entered the Russian market a couple of years ago with very cheap prices. However, when the South Korean manufacturers left Russia some months ago, the Chinese immediately steeply raised their prices. Chinese cars may still be priced below comparable West European brands like Mercedes, but that is only because Russian consumers pay a premium to import their Mercedes, etc. from third countries in parallel trade.

 We may assume that Chinese manufacturers have found their new Russian market to be a boon. Here they can dispose of their internal combustion cars for which there is falling demand in their domestic market now that the Chinese public is turning to Electrical Vehicles in big numbers. In Russia there is virtually no demand for EVs, because there is virtually no charging infrastructure for private cars.

Finally, on the subject of cars and drivers, I say with conviction that the more expensive and comfortable the car, the better the taxi driver follows the rules of the road and shows courtesy to pedestrians. None is ‘racing a traffic light.’ None is flying over speed bumps. None is weaving between lanes. All of these bad habits that raise safety risks were common in the driving public before.

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Victory in Europe Day, 9th May, was celebrated this year like last, with only military parades that people watched at home on television. There were no Immortal Regiment parades that brought the broad public out onto the streets in the years leading up to the Special Military Operation. The risk of terror attacks put an abrupt end to the Immortal Regiment and that is sad.

On the positive side, this year it was common for strangers to congratulate one another with good wishes for the holiday. So it was with our taxi driver who took us to the late lunch/early dinner we shared with friends in the city center. This year you could see cars flying the red flag of Victory day with the same patriotic gusto that Americans show on the 4th of July when they drive around their towns.

Finally, I close out these Travel Notes with a remark on the big Russian attack on the Kharkov region that began yesterday and is still underway, said to be the biggest of its kind since the Special Military Operation began.

There is considerable speculation in the West on what this means. Some say the Russians will try to take the city in the coming days. Others say it is just a feint, to draw Ukrainian troops away from other sectors of the front, in particular, from the Donetsk region, where the Russians will stage their real offensive, seeking to capture the strategic town of Chasiv Yar that has been contested for months and open the way to the full liberation of the Donbas.

Following as I do the Russian state news, I emphasize that the Russians are presently not tipping their hand. They only report the names of the villages in the Kharkov region lying between the city and the border with Russia that they have taken in the past 24 hours. Consequently all that we can say at this point is that the Russian forces have de facto created a ‘sanitary zone’ from which the Ukrainians can no longer fire artillery , drones and short range missiles into the residential neighborhoods of the Belgorod region on the other side of the border, killing civilians and creating havoc as they have been doing for months.

RAY McGOVERN: Will Putin Attack Poland & the Baltics?

By Ray McGovern, Consortium News, 7/1/24

At Thursday’s debate with Donald Trump, President Joe Biden, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal,” claimed that he “wants all of Ukraine. … Do you think he’ll stop? … What do you think happens to Poland and other places?”

Spoiler Alert: Official Ukrainian sources confirm that Putin did stop in March 2022, after Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky agreed to forswear membership in NATO. This was the key provision in the Ukraine-Russia deal initialed by Davyd Arakhamia, who at the time was Zelensky’s chief negotiator (and his party’s faction leader in the Rada) at the talks in Istanbul at the end of March, hardly a month into the war.

The Russians lifted their objection to Ukraine joining the EU, as the Ukrainians agreed to neutrality. Security guarantees sought by Kyiv (short of NATO membership) would be worked out. The fighting would stop. Agreement on the status of Crimea would be put off to the future.

Putin and Zelensky reportedly were micromanaging the March 2022 negotiations, and at that early stage the Russians expressed readiness for the two to meet. 

At the same time that Biden and other Western leaders raise the alarm that Putin will attack other parts of Europe when he’s through with Ukraine, they claim Russia can’t even take the Ukrainian province of Kharkiv, has lost more than 500,000 men to just 30,000 Ukrainians and its economy is faltering (none of which is true.)  But Cold War Western power was based on an exaggerated Soviet threat and the same is true today. 

Ukrainian Negotiator Spills the Beans

Arakhamia in Ukraine’s Parliament in 2021. (Vadim Chuprina, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

In a November 2023 Kyiv Post report titled “Russia Offered to End War in 2022 If Ukraine Scrapped NATO Ambitions – Zelensky Party Chief,”  Arakhamia confirmed that in the March 2022 negotiations Russia proposed ending the war on the condition that Ukraine abandon its NATO aspirations and adopt a neutral stance.

Arakhamia continued:

“Neutrality was the biggest thing for them, they were ready to end the war if we took — as Finland once did — neutrality and made commitments that we would not join NATO. This was the key point. 

While negotiations continued in Istanbul, former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson unexpectedly arrived in Kyiv on April 9 and said that Ukraine shouldn’t sign anything with them at all – and ‘let’s just fight.’ ”

Arakhamia’s candor was refreshing. But it came as no surprise to those of us following Ukraine in early 2022. On May 5, 2022 — a year and a half before Arakhamia spilled the beans to the Kyiv Post — Ukrainska Pravda ran a report under the title “Possibility of talks between Zelensky and Putin came to a halt after Johnson’s visit”:

“According to sources close to Zelenskyy, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, who appeared in the capital almost without warning, brought two simple messages.

The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they [the West] are not. The collective West felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to press him.”

Three days after Johnson left Kyiv, Putin publicly stated that talks with Ukraine had “turned into a dead end.” Putin expressed confidence that Russia would ultimately prevail and added that it would “rhythmically and calmly” continue conducting the operation in Ukraine.

Putin Provides Detail

Putin addressing the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in early June.  (Ivan Sekretarev, RIA Novosti, Kremlin)

In his major speech to the Russian Foreign Ministry on June 14, Putin said the Russian troops approaching Kyiv in February-March 2022 were there “to push the Ukrainian side to negotiations.” 

From Feb. 24 on, the Russians had expressed readiness for diplomacy. Interestingly, Zelensky appointed Arakhamia chief negotiator on Feb. 28.

Putin continued:

“Surprisingly, as a result, agreements that satisfied both Moscow and Kyiv were indeed reached and initialed in Istanbul. … The document was titled ‘Agreement on Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees for Ukraine’. It was a compromise but  resolved the problems that were stated as major ones even at the start of the special military operation.

But the path to peace was rejected again. … The former UK prime minister said directly during his visit to Kyiv – no agreements. Russia must be defeated on the battlefield. … Thus they began to intensively pump Ukraine up with weapons and started talking about the need to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.”

Johnson and Zelensky walking around the center of Kiev on April 9, 2022. (President of Ukraine)

Biden & Pseudo-Experts on Russia

Who has been telling Biden that Putin “will not stop at Ukraine?” Exhibit A would be Fiona Hill, disciple of arch-Russophobe historian Richard Pipes, and national intelligence officer for Russia (2006-09). 

Her insights appeared in The New York Times exactly a month before Russia invaded Ukraine.

On Jan. 24, 2022, the Times featured a guest essay by Hill titled “Putin has the U.S. Right Where He Wants It”:

“This time, Mr. Putin’s aim is bigger than closing NATO’s ‘open door’ to Ukraine and taking more territory — he wants to evict the United States from Europe. As he might put it: ‘Goodbye, America. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.’”  [Emphasis added.]

Fiona Hill’s NYT essay about Putin driving the U.S. out of Europe had a short (two-month) shelf life, as Putin’s negotiators in Istanbul extracted a Ukrainian commitment not to seek NATO membership and a stop in hostilities. Hill admitted as much in a September/October 2022 Foreign Affairs article which included, briefly, the substance of the Istanbul agreement.

This may be damning with faint praise but, in this respect, Fiona Hill showed far more integrity than the Times, which continues to deny its readers the facts about the Istanbul accord and how it showed that in March-April 2022 Putin did stop once Ukrainian negotiators agreed to forswear membership in NATO.

With Putin having provided, in his June 14 speech, chapter and verse on the (aborted by Boris Johnson) “Agreement on Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees for Ukraine,” the Times wasted no time distorting the terms of the Istanbul accord, mostly by omission and turgid obfuscation, in publishing two highly deceptive articles on June 15. 

Neither article mentions  Johnson’s wrecking-ball role in scuttling the Istanbul accord. And even the subsequent admissions of Ukrainian negotiators are mangled.

Thus, New York Times readers, and the thousands of media outlets that take their lead from the Times, are once again misled on a crucial issue — one for which there is ample official Ukrainian testimony that the Times chooses to omit or fudge. And many Americans will be inclined to believe Biden’s evidence-free claims about Putin’s ultimate objectives, and to acquiesce in the dangerously growing tension with Russia — malnourished as they are on accurate information.

For many it will come down to: Between Biden and Putin, Americans “know” whom to believe!

Putin’s Take

Speaking to Western journalists on June 5, Putin cautioned: 

“You should not make Russia out to be the enemy. You’re only hurting yourself with this … They thought that Russia wanted to attack NATO. Have you gone completely crazy? … Who came up with this? It is just complete nonsense, you know? Total rubbish.”

Sadly, it is the kind of nonsense that could mislead Americans, conditioned to believe the worst of Russia, into supporting some kind of risky escalatory move by an administration determined to show how tough it is, as the November election inches closer and closer. Strap on your seatbelts.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27 years as a C.I.A. analyst included leading the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and conducting the morning briefings of the President’s Daily Brief. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of  Consortium News.

Jeff Childers: Terminate This

By Jeffrey Childers, Substack, 6/6/24

Jeff Childers is an attorney and conservative commentator based in Florida.

Until very recently — so recently you will be forgiven lack of notice of the change — it was fashionable among elites to wring their hands over letting robots decide whether to kill people. Countless conferences were devoted to the subject, new UN departments were designed, and new job descriptions were drafted, spawning battalions of specialized military bioethicists.

Zing! What was that? That was bioethics flying out the window. Sorry, chaps, pack it in. All those new ethics experts and professors and opinion influencers just became redundant. They are moot.

Pre-pandemic, so-called autonomous killing machines were de facto no bueno, the stuff of war crimes. Everyone agreed they were bad. Even if a robot lines up the shot and delivers the killing blow, an accountable human, not an unaccountable machine, must make the ultimate decision to take another human life.

The risks could not possibly be more well-known. Hollywood has thoroughly explored the subject to the point of cliché in countless silver screen series, from The Terminator and its innumerable sequels, spinoffs, and television adaptions, to Netflix’s Black Mirror, whose bleak, terrifying, and unforgettable 2017 episode “Metalhead” conclusively settled the argument in 41 minutes of runtime.

On June 4th, 2024 — mark the date — the Washington Post quietly ran an unobtrusive “good news” op-ed headlined, “The Pentagon is learning how to change at the speed of war.” To call it “just an op-ed” would do violence to its malevolent significance. First of all, the author, spy novelist and columnist David Ignatius, is one of WaPo’s most senior writers, and it’s a poorly hidden secret he is inextricably intertwined with the deep security state.

In other words, David and the CIA are besties. He knows what he’s talking about, and probably much more.

David’s op-ed began gently chiding the U.S. military for, with the very best of intentions, its antiquated ‘addiction’ to overly complicated, finicky, insanely expensive, super high-tech, human-directed weapons systems, rather than cheap, practical, reliable, and effective alternatives like the Russians are using to beat the Dickens out of Ukraine.

Ignatius ripped off the band-aid, rebelliously breaking from all conventional wisdom, and authoritatively accused the U.S.’s powerful and influential military-industrial complex of being systematically broken.

David Ignatius — the military-industrial complex’s best friend in media — openly scoffed at U.S. generals’ multi-billion dollar high-tech toys, which he predicted were so vulnerable they would only survive the first few minutes in a war with China:

David described an existential crisis. And you know Obama’s first rule: Never let a good crisis go to waste. The country thus breathlessly awaits an intervention, a Hegelian solution to the problem the MIC created, a savior. What could it be?

Most folks now agree the Russians’ pragmatic, entrepreneurial approach in Ukraine has decisively proven its battlefield superiority over our fancy, high-tech, acronymized weapons that took decades to develop: our top-tier M1 Abrams tanks, our PATRIOT air defense systems, our HIMARS and ATACMS missiles, our JDAMS flying bombs, and our networked cluster munitions.

They all literally or figuratively bogged down in the Ukrainian rasputitsa. In other words, stuck in the mud.

Desert tanks struggle in Eastern European mud

But the bigger problem is that all our defense systems, from the most modest mobile artillery unit to the sky-scraping F35 intelligent fighter jet, are all e-something, or i-something. They are all linked together, connected to the internet, in a networked global battlefield information system (GBIS). They were designed to be centrally controllable from the confines of an op center safely concealed under two hundred feet of granite below the Pentagon in Washington, DC.

Unfortunately, the Russians — those ‘incompetent,’ slipshod, gas-station-with-nukes ice jockeys — somehow overtook us in electronic jamming technology. And then kept going, without looking back. The Russians are jamming all our toys!

Our Borg-like, electronically interconnected technology is dead in the water, or in the mud, if it can’t talk to the other parts of itself. Worse, Russian jamming cuts it all off from its handlers thousands of miles away in America. In other words, it’s damned useless, which is why Ignatius predicted it wouldn’t last five minutes against China.

Ignatius’ description of this perfectly foreseeable development understated the terror and panic on the part of U.S. generals. It all worked so well against Saddam Hussein’s disorganized army! But the generals are slowly and reluctantly coming to terms with the fact our entire arsenal is close to useless against near-peer adversaries like Russia and China.

In desperation, and because Ukraine uber alles, all those ethical concerns over autonomous weapons systems instantly became as obsolete as our trillion-dollar aircraft carriers. The ban on machines that kill on automatic has been swept aside.

It’s an emergency, dummy.

Then, Ignatius described the easy fix to the problem. The simple correction is truly autonomous weapons, weapons that can’t be jammed, weapons that don’t have to talk to each other, weapons that push the pesky humans right out of the picture. In the same way the military is now quietly moving aside the humans, David also glided right over the pesky ethical issues, which earned not a single syllable in his column.

Ignatius said the only answer is machines that can think for themselves:

The military is way ahead of us. It’s almost too late to even hold a debate over whether saving Ukraine is worth a Metalhead future. Two years ago, the Deep State’s influential Council for Foreign Relations openly argued to cut off debate, in its article “Stop the “Stop the Killer Robot” Debate: Why We Need Artificial Intelligence in Future Battlefields.”

Coming soon to a pet store near you

Read it for yourself. The CFR waved off arguments about risks the robots will run amok and kill civilians. Humans make mistakes too! Soldiers kill civilians all the time! Robots might be even more accurate deciders of who to kill, and when. Who knows?

But the CFR never grappled with the accountability problem. Who’s responsible when the robot goes rogue and wipes out a village, or a wedding, or a whole city? Who’s tried for the war crimes?

Nobody, that’s who. You can’t expect technology to be perfect, dummy.

You can’t put a robot on trial. Come on, be serious.

The government knows full well that public outcry will only slow down the killer robot train. The military is now moving with mind-blowing, demonic, uncharacteristic speed toward building its dystopian, robot-armed future. The first fully autonomous killing machines have already been designed, built, and delivered to Ukraine.

To our chagrin, we learned during the pandemic that government can move unimaginably fast when it wants to. Ignatious heard it directly from Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks:

Autonomous killer drones are nothing more than autonomous killer robot dogs with wings.

Ignatius also assured us that the Air Force is, right now, building robotic fighter jets labeled with the grim euphemism “uncrewed.” The robots can keep on fighting, long after the human crews are gone.

Similarly, last month, the Navy formed a new squadron of hundreds of fully autonomous, uncrewed boats, a water swarm with the unwieldy name, “Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft.” GARC doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but maybe it echoes the last thing dying sailors say.

Instead of applying that awkward acronym, the Navy has nicknamed its new robot squadron the “Hell Hounds.” Coincidentally, Hell Hound also aptly describes the shiny robot dogs prowling Metalhead’s bleak, apocalyptic landscape, where they will forever be roaming in metallic packs, slowly herding the shrinking remnants of the human race into extinction.

Cute, isn’t it?

It’s easy to blame Congress for failing to pull the plug, slow things down, or at least hold a public debate. But remember: attractive, well-spoken military analysts constantly deliver confidential, top-secret briefings to Congressmen, direly warning them China will win in five minutes unless we do something.

What can I say? It’s 2024. Here come the terminators, and nothing can stop it. We all knew this day was coming; we just didn’t think it would come from us.

Somebody track down that scrappy Sarah Connor and tell her it’s time to report for duty.

Lock and load

US Military Raises Alert Level at Europe Bases Amid Russia Tensions

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 7/1/24

The US military has raised its alert level at bases in Europe amid soaring tensions with Russia that are the result of the US increasing its support for Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory.

US and Western officials told The New York Times that the alert levels were raised in response to “vague threats” from Russian officials. Russia warned last week that it would retaliate against the US in response to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea using a cluster bomb variant of US-provided ATACM missiles that killed five civilians, including two children, on the beach near Sevastopol.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned in May that there would be “major consequences” for any NATO country that allows Ukraine to use its weapons to strike targets inside the Russian mainland. Putin made the warning before President Biden gave Ukraine the green light to use US-provided missiles on targets across the border.

US military bases are currently at the alert level “Charlie,” which is the second-highest level. According to the Times, it’s the highest level that could be sustained over a long period of time.

US officials said there was no specific intelligence about a potential Russian attack on US bases in Europe. They also accused Russian intelligence of being behind sabotage attacks in Europe, including a fire at an IKEA furniture store, but offered no evidence to back up the claim.

US bases in Europe support the proxy war in Ukraine by training Ukrainian troops, providing intelligence, and serving as hubs for weapons shipments. The US and NATO’s increasing support for Ukrainian strikes in Russia and other escalations risk provoking a Russian response since Moscow has made clear it views the Western nations as direct participants in the war.

After the Ukrainian strike on the beach in Crimea, the Russian Defense Ministry said, “The responsibility for the deliberate missile strike against civilians in Sevastopol lies primarily in Washington, which supplied these weapons to Ukraine.”

Eva Bartlett Interviews Donbass War Correspondent & Journalist, Dmitry Astrakhan on 10 Years of Ukraine’s Brutal Terrorism & Slaughter of Donbass Civilians

Odysee link to video here.

“In Donetsk’s Kievsky district on May 27, I interviewed Dmitry Astrakhan, a war correspondent and journalist who has covered Ukraine’s brutal war on the civilians of the Donbass since its inception one decade ago.

He details Ukraine’s war crimes, attacking Donbass civilians since 2014, along with the complicity of the OSCE in enabling these atrocities. He covered the liberation of Mariupol, and countless other Donbass regions, and saw Ukrainian forces using civilians as human shields, a well-established fact by now, keeping civilians on one or two floors, and putting Ukrainian forces above them who then fired on Russian forces.

“You could see white flags on one level, and machine gun firing from another.”

He took testimonies regarding Ukrainian snipers shooting at civilians, Ukrainian forces exploding buildings knowing there were civilians inside, in Artyomovsk (Bakhmut).

Dmitry spoke of too many Ukrainian war crimes to detail here. Instead, listen to the first-hand experiences of this courageous Donbass journalist.” – Eva Bartlett

Follow Dmitry at:

https://t.me/astrahandm

Andrew Korybko: Russia’s Response To Ukraine’s US-Backed Bombing Of Beachgoers Wasn’t What Many Expected

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 6/26/24

President Putin proved once again that he’s mature enough of a leader to make tough decisions that disregard public opinion following his government’s tepid response to Ukraine’s US-backed bombing of beachgoers in Sevastopol over the weekend. It was predicted that “Russia Probably Won’t Impose A No-Fly Zone Over The Black Sea After The Sevastopol Attack”, which explained why it was unlikely to capitulate to the public’s demand due to worries about accidentally sparking World War III.

Instead of shooting down or otherwise neutralizing American reconnaissance drones over international waters in the Black Sea, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reaffirmed that President Putin’s ceasefire proposal still stands. Shortly afterwards, Peskov also expressed Russia’s continued openness to talks with France after Emmanuel Macron publicly said that he’s interested in them the other day while also walking back his earlier rhetoric about wanting to conventionally intervene in Ukraine.

These two developments were then followed by new Defense Minister Andrey Belousov talking to his American counterpart in a call where “they exchanged views about the situation around Ukraine”. He also warned him about “the dangers of further escalation in terms of the continuing deliveries of American weapons to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.” Taken together, it’s clearly the case that Russia’s response was once again conciliatory and not escalatory, exactly as the earlier cited analysis predicted.

Interestingly, these developments were interspersed with the viral fake news claim that Russia had already supposedly downed an American drone over the Black Sea in revenge, which was introduced into the information ecosystem here but was then quickly walked back by its originator here. Nevertheless, this claim wildly proliferated across social media because it conformed to many wishful thinking observers’ expectations, most of whom never came across the follow-up post walking it back.

The reason why it’s so important to clarify exactly what Russia’s response to last weekend’s provocation was, namely to continue its conciliatory approach for de-escalation purposes as opposed to risking World War III by miscalculation if it reacted as the public demanded, is to prevent false expectations. Those who get their hopes unrealistically high will inevitably experience deep disappointment, after which some might become susceptible to hostile narratives that Russia “sold out” or whatever.

Whether one agrees with the merits of its saintly restraint or not, the fact of the matter is that this is indeed the policy that President Putin has decided to promulgate for the reasons that were explained. While it’s possible that he might order a symbolic show of force by authorizing the shooting down or neutralization of an American drone in the coming future, his tepid response thus far suggests that he’s disinclined to do so, or that it would solely be a one-off in the unlikely event that it happens.

President Putin isn’t a “madman”, “monster”, or “mastermind” like many imagine that he is, but is a consummate pragmatist at least as how he sees himself and is therefore unlikely to ever do anything that could be spun as emotional or radical. He always takes a long time before making major decisions, with the proof being how long it took for him to commence Russia’s aerial intervention in Syria and the ongoing special operation, usually waiting till the last possible moment.

Likewise, if Russia does indeed decide to seriously escalate against the West, then the track record suggests that it would be a seemingly abrupt game-changer but preceded by clear statements of intent that could be seen in hindsight as “ultimatums” (despite being described differently by its diplomats). Some might interpret a few of its recent signals as hinting at that scenario, but the substance of its response thus far as was explained dispels that notion and suggests that the current policy will continue.

Matthew Blackburn, Glenn Diesen, Geoffrey Roberts: The Dangerous Interregnum: Can the Slide to War be Halted?

YouTube link here.

CNN: Biden administration moves toward allowing American military contractors to deploy to Ukraine

Natasha Bertrand doesn’t have a great record for reliability as a journalist, but… – Natylie

By Natasha Bertrand & Oren Liebermann, CNN, 6/26/24

The Biden administration is moving toward lifting a de facto ban on American military contractors deploying to Ukraine, four US officials familiar with the matter told CNN, to help the country’s military maintain and repair US-provided weapons systems.

The change would mark another significant shift in the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy, as the US looks for ways to give Ukraine’s military an upper hand against Russia.

The policy is still being worked on by administration officials and has not received final sign-off yet from President Joe Biden, officials said.

“We have not made any decisions and any discussion of this is premature,” said one administration official. “The president is absolutely firm that he will not be sending US troops to Ukraine.”

Once approved, the change would likely be enacted this year, officials said, and would allow the Pentagon to provide contracts to American companies for work inside Ukraine for the first time since Russia invaded in 2022. Officials said they hope it will speed up the maintenance and repairs of weapons systems being used by the Ukrainian military.

Over the last two years, Biden has insisted that all Americans, and particularly US troops, stay far away from the Ukrainian frontlines. The White House has been determined to limit both the danger to Americans and the perception, particularly by Russia, that the US military is engaged in combat there. The State Department has explicitly warned Americans against traveling to Ukraine since 2022.

As a result, US-provided military equipment that has sustained significant damage in combat has had to be transported out of the country to Poland, Romania, or other NATO countries for repairs, a process which takes time. US troops are also available to help the Ukrainians with more routine maintenance and logistics, but only from afar via video chat or secure phone—an arrangement that has come with inherent limitations, since US troops and contractors are not able to work directly on the systems.

Administration officials began to seriously reconsider those restrictions over the last several months, officials said, as Russia continued to make gains on the battlefield and US funding for Ukraine stalled in Congress. Allowing experienced, US government-funded American contractors to maintain a presence in Ukraine means they will be able to help fix damaged, high-value equipment much faster, officials said. One advanced system that officials say will likely require regular maintenance is the F-16 fighter jet, which Ukraine is set to receive later this year.

Companies bidding for the contracts would be required to develop robust risk mitigation plans to mitigate threats to their employees, an official said.

The discussions follow a series of decisions the US has made in recent months to try to help Ukraine beat back the Russians. In late-May, Biden gave Ukraine permission to strike targets inside Russia, near the border with the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, with US weapons—a request the US had repeatedly denied in the past. Last week, that policy appeared to expand once again, when National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said Ukraine could counterstrike anywhere along the Ukraine-Russia border using US weapons.

Current and former officials familiar with the discussions about deploying contractors to Ukraine emphasized that the policy change will not result in the kind of overwhelming American contractor presence there that existed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, it would likely result in anywhere from a few dozen to a couple hundred contractors working in Ukraine at a time.

“This would be a much more focused and thoughtful effort to support Ukraine in country,” said retired Army officer Alex Vindman, who served as the director for European Affairs on former President Donald Trump’s National Security Council.

Vindman has been pushing the administration to lift the restrictions for nearly two years and said the administration has been working on a plan to ease the restrictions since earlier this year.

“Ukraine is an ally,” Vindman told CNN. “The US has keen, critical national security interests in supporting Ukraine, and there are plenty of risk mitigation measures.”

Guy Mettan: Report from Donbas, Part 2. (Excerpt)

By Guy Mettan, The Floutist, 6/3/24

To destroy the shared past of a people is to go some way toward destroying a people—the coherence and solidity of their identity, their ability to think and act collectively, their collective confidence in themselves, altogether their place in the world. It is among the most vicious methods known to aggressor armies, imperial powers, and dictators—psychologically vicious, vicious because effective—of attacking the psyches and souls of others in the course of violent campaigns to dominate them.

Pierre Nora, the honored French scholar of history and identity, termed the places where people preserve their pasts lieux de mémoire, sites of memory. It is these that are attacked, sooner or later, when one or another kind of power seeks to destroy or conquer other people. You saw this during the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards defaced as many monuments to China’s past as they could. You have long seen this in the Israelis’ aggressions against Palestinians. And you have seen it this past decade as the Kiev regime continues its war against the people of Donbas.

This war on memory, as Guy Mettan terms it, is in our view a pernicious, quite significant dimension of ethnic cleansing. In Part 2 of his “Report from Donbas,” Mettan takes us to some of the places where this war is waged to show us how the people of Donetsk and Lugansk, once again Russian by choice, defend their sites of memory as a matter of defending themselves.

The Floutist published the first part of this exceptional series 11 May. We are pleased to welcome Mettan, the distinguished Swiss journalist, back into our pages. Part 1 of his Report can be found here:

https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/report-from-donbas

—The Editors.

Guy Mettan

It is now two years and several months since the Russian military began its intervention in Ukraine. And between Russia and the West, between the Ukrainians in Kiev and the former Ukrainians who have become Russians again, the battle is not just a military struggle. It is also a struggle in defence of memory against those who would obliterate it.

In the West, the 80th anniversary of the D–Day landings on 6 June will be commemorated without the Russians. This is an official if symbolic denial that the victory over Nazi Germany was first and foremost a Soviet victory and that Operation Overlord could not have succeeded without the Red Army’s Operation Bagration in the east, to hold off German tank divisions.

Attempts to erase the past in this manner are not at all new. One finds cases of it throughout history. But in the lands to Europe’s east and the Russian Federation’s west it has greatly intensified since 2014, a decade back, when, some months after the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kiev, the Western powers marked the 70th anniversary of the D–Day landings and refused to invite Russians to the ceremonies held on the Normandy beaches—this while inviting representatives of the former enemy, among them German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Across Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, and in Ukraine in particular, history is being turned upside down. Historical statues and war memorials honouring those who defeated the Reich in the Second World War are being demolished to erect steles, inscribed stone pillars, that commemorate not the Soviet’s hard-won victory but the victims of the Soviets. These monuments are also intended to mark the glory of the nationalists who fought alongside the Nazis and massacred Jews, such as Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko, and Roman Shukhevich.

Every day, monuments are taken down and others erected in their place—on the sly, in the silence of the Western media. We seem to forget, to take but one example of many, that the Treblinka death camp was run by a group of some 20 German SS troops and that the exterminations were carried out by a hundred Ukrainian and Lithuanian guards.

This rewriting of history amounts to a war on the past of a people. And if it is waged not on battlefields but at sites of memory, the outcome of this struggle is comparably important. To destroy the collective memories of a people is to destroy their common identity. In this way it also destroys their understanding of their place in the world and their ability to act effectively—and so their ability to go forward. If you have no past you have no future, it has been said: This is the ultimate objective of those who attack the shared memories of others.

None of this has gone unnoticed by the people of Donbas. And, true to their motto, “Never forget, never forgive,” they are in response redoubling their commemorative faith and monuments to fallen heroes.

A typical example of this struggle are the annual commemorations of the Holodomor, held each fourth Sunday of November, as the European Parliament mandated in 2008. The Holodomor is the Ukrainians’ name for the famine unleashed by Stalin against the peasantry in 1932. These events occurred mainly in 1932–1933 and were the result of Stalin’s desire to advance the collectivization of the economy. In this cause he confiscated the peasants’ incomes to finance the Soviet Union’s industrialization following the financial boycott of the Western capitalist countries.

But as a memorial the Holodomor commemoratives are incomplete. They attribute this massacre by famine solely to the Russians. Ukrainians are depicted as its sole victims, even though the famine also affected southern Russia and Kazakhstan and was orchestrated by a Georgian, Stalin, and executed by a Pole, Stanisław Kossior, who ruled Ukraine at the time. The present Ukrainian authorities have never acknowledged the collaboration of local and regional Communists. In the Ukrainian narrative of the tragedy, all responsibility for it has been and continues to be projected onto Russia and Russians, even though ethnic Russians played a minor role in that tragedy.

During the two last days of my trip in Donbas, we visited a dozen of the memorials established to commemorate the victims of the slaughters, massacres, and wars that have occurred on the territory over the last century. These are countless. You can find them in cities, in the countryside, and in small villages. This is why, during two full days, we travelled here and there, on small roads and large, throughout the two republics, Donetsk and Lugansk, to visit these testimonials of past dramas.

■

Perhaps the most disturbing of these memorials is located near the shaft of Mine No. 4/4–bis in Donetsk. The site was once a coal mine and lies not far from the centre of the city. Mines are everywhere here. The entrance, very sober, appears to be to the side of an ordinary street road of an ordinary suburb. There are no large advertisements for it.

I’d never previously heard of Mine No. 4/4–bis, and I suspect you haven’t either. It doesn’t appear in any of our history books and can’t be found in Wikipedia. This why it is maybe the most disturbing place of death that I visited. In Auschwitz or Babi Yar, in Kyiv, you know what you are facing, and you expect to be moved. But here, you have to add the element of surprise.

Where the Nazis once massacreed many. Mine No. 4/4–bis, Donestsk. (Guy Mettan.)

It is estimated that 75,000 to 102,000 people were massacred at 4/4–bis from the end of 1941 to September 1943, two or three times as many as at the better documented massacre in 1941 at the ravine in Kiev known as Babi Yar. The entire Jewish community of Donetsk (called Stalino at the time) was thrown into the pit, along with tens of thousands of others.

The Kiev government ignored the 4/4–bis memorial after 1991, when Ukraine declared its independence, because it disrupted official narratives and concerned only Russian-speaking people in the east of the country. But for the past year the site has been brought to life again. The restoration work, not quite finished, is still under way. The site is, accordingly, not yet open to the public. But the visible parts are quite impressive: There are prominent sculptures, a wall honouring those killed, landscaped gardens and trees.

A visit to No. 4/4–bis is all it takes to understand why the people of Donbas rose up against Kiev in April 2014, when the regime that emerged from the U.S.–backed Maidan coup wanted officially to ban their language while sending the heirs of their forebears’ executioners to suppress them. This region has a strong tradition of resistance to any kind of invaders, from German Nazis to west–Ukrainian ultranationalists in Nazi–style uniforms. If No. 4/4–bis is about remembering, it is also about determination.

You can destroy monuments, but not memories.

■

Seventy kilometres northeast of Donetsk, in the direction of Bakhmut, in the province of Horlivka, the monumental Savur–Mohila cenotaph is another testimony to the battles of the last century. It is erected at the top of the highest hill in the Donbas, on the site of one of the great clashes of the Second World War. That took place in July–August 1943, at the same time as the famous tank battle of Kursk, which was to break the Wehrmacht.

A broad stairway up the hill with a huge spire at the top was built here in 1963. Seven decades later—in August 2014, six months after the coup in Kiev—the hill was the scene of a bitter battle between separatists and units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The monument was hit hard during the battle. When the separatists retook the hill, led by Alexander Zakhartchenko, their prestigious leader, it was a definitive victory for the Donetsk republicans.

But the fighting had devastated the Savur–Mohila site. And after the Russian military operation began in February 2022, President Putin ordered it rebuilt to commemorate two wars—the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 and the Donbas Liberation War of 2014–2022. On either side of a walkway that leads to the spire on top of the hill, large sculpted steles celebrate the heroes who died for the freedom of Donbas from 1941 to 2022. In this important way, the present is anchored in the past.

This battle to preserve memory against its destruction is probably most intense in Lugansk. I’m welcomed there by Anna Soroka, a historian who has been fighting in the republic’s regiments since 2014.

The first monument she shows me commemorates the 67 children killed by Ukrainian militias from the Kraken and Aïdar battalions, both of them neo–Nazi, who tried to take the city in 2014, failed, and then proceeded to shell it until the Russian intervention in 2022. It was built in the middle of a park that serves today as a kindergarten. Several kids were killed there by targeted Ukrainian shelling—targeted, surely, as the surrounding buildings were not hit.

Children are the objects of an unrelenting information war on both sides. The Ukrainians have filed war crimes charges against the Russians, and the International Criminal Court has indicted Vladimir Putin and the head of Russia’s children’s affairs agency, Maria Lvova–Belova, for allegedly kidnapping Ukrainian children. Western propaganda repeats these accusations over and over, in media and in the cinema: A full-length documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol, directed by Mstyslav Chernov, Michelle Mizner, and Raney Aronson–Rath, featured these allegations and has just won this year’s Oscar for best documentary.

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Western media reports naturally fail to pass on the point of view of the inhabitants of the Donbas—who say it is the Ukrainians who are taking children hostage. There is, in fact, a volunteer organization in Ukraine called the White Angels, modelled on the infamous Syrian White Helmets, who, as you will recall, were far from the neutral rescue workers they posed as and, in fact, were covertly funded by Western intelligence and acted in behalf of jihadist groups.

These White Angel detachments were formed in February 2022 by a certain Rustam Lukomsky. The Western (or Western-backed) press has mentioned them on several occasions. The Kyiv Independent (24 March 2024), Le Monde (7 February 2023), the BBC (30 January 2024) are among the media that have reported on this group. “Amid the thud of explosions and rattle of gunfire,” a typical report reads, “a special police unit called the White Angels goes door-to-door helping evacuate the town’s remaining civilians.” Lukomsky, whose background remains unclear, is portrayed invariably as a hero of these operations.

For those in Donbas, the White Angels are something very different. The group’s aim, residents here say, is to force parents in front-line areas to separate from their children under the pretext of protecting them. The children are thus isolated and “taken to safety” in the rear, where they are used as a means of blackmail against their families.

These families are in this way torn between two equally unbearable choices: Either they abandon their homes to join their children, or they remain near the front and are forced to collaborate with the Ukrainian army, which invites them to denounce or sabotage the movements of the Russian army.

One can only imagine the distress of parents faced with such perverse coercion. Testimonies, such as those of Olga V. Zubtsova, from Bakhmut, and Igor Litvinov, from Avdiivka, confirm this version of events. “In Avdiivka,” Igor says, “the ‘White Angels operated completely unhindered and, in the guise of good intentions, offered to evacuate families with children on the Ukrainian side. When the parents refused, they threatened to take the children away.” There are countless rumours circulating on social networks, it bears mentioning, accusing these so-called White Angels of fuelling paedophilic crime networks and child trafficking. But this remains to be proven….

Tarik Cyril Amar: Russia’s Long Game of Ambition and Restraint

By Tarik Cyril Amar, Website, 6/24/24

On 21 June, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin gave an important speech, which, as so often, has been badly under-reported in Western media. That is especially regrettable for two reasons: First, because what Putin had to say concerned two issues that observers and leaders in the West should care about, namely, the ongoing confrontation with what he – plausibly – calls “the collective West” and the way in which Russia’s leaders (and many other Russians as well) see their country’s place in the world. [http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/74363]

Second, as it happens, Putin’s statements were soon followed by two violent events that will inevitably lead to Russian responses, namely, on 23 June, the Ukrainian attack with American cluster munition-carrying ATACMS missiles (and, of course, vital American assistance) on Sevastopol in Crimea that ended with at least 4 dead and over 150 injured civilians on a beach and, on the same day, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in the region of Dagestan.

While these are different events, major Russian politicians see them as linked. The speaker of Russia’s parliament (the Duma), Viacheslav Volodin, for instance, has spoken of them in the same breath, calling both “inhuman crimes” and stating that their “master minds” may turn out to be the same.” It takes no guessing at all to understand that Volodin is referring to the West and its intelligence agencies, in particular to the USA, and perhaps the UK as well.

Whether you agree or disagree with this suggestion, what matters at this moment is that we can be certain that it is shared by the Russian leadership – and, again, many Russians outside it as well – more generally: Moscow sees a pattern connecting the attacks on Crimea and in the Caucasus, and, worryingly, it also sees the West as involved in both.

Formally, Putin’s speech on 21 June was an address to the best graduates (those obtaining either a gold medal or a distinction) of various military academies as well as institutions that train police and security forces, including, for instance, the National Guard, the FSB, and the penal and prison service. According to tradition, as Putin stressed, these elite graduates – the future cadre backbone of the Russian state’s international and domestic hard power – are received in the Georgievsky Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace. In that sense, it was, if you wish, a routine event. Yet Putin used the occasion to go beyond its official purpose. (That, by the way, is an ordinary technique among political leaders. Think, for instance, of Churchill delivering his now famous “Iron Curtain” speech on the occasion of receiving an honorary degree at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.)

Putin began by reminding his listeners of a historical fact, but not – as could have been expected the anniversary of the German 1941 attack on the Soviet Union (22 June) but that of the start of Operation Bagration, a massive Soviet summer offensive of 1944 that, in essence, shattered what was left of the German armies, extending the Soviet reach over most of what was to become Cold War Eastern Europe, and prepared the final phase of the war that culminated in the Soviet capture of Berlin in the spring of 1945.

Bagration – “this bold, large-scale” enterprise, in Putin’s word – was, of course, named after a Russian commander (of Georgian descent) in the 1812 war against Napoleon, as the president also underlined, highlighting the traditions of both the first Fatherland War (against the French and their many European auxiliaries) and the second one (the “Great Fatherland War”) against the Germans and also their many European auxiliaries: talk about a decisive summer offensive and two wars won against, taken together, Paris and Berlin plus various other Europeans…

You cannot say, Putin scrimped on symbolical layers or contemporary allusions there. For one thing, it sounded almost as if he wanted to remind his listeners in the Georgievsky Hall, at home more broadly understood, and abroad (for instance, in Kiev) that, while Russia has done well with its current strategy of aggressive attrition and slow gains, there is another side to its military tradition, namely, sweeping “big-arrow” operations, when the time is ripe.

Putin’s direct statements about the present were no less intriguing Unsurprisingly, he singled out “perseverance” as one of the key virtues of the Russian military (a clear hint to those, in the West, who still hope to see Russia tire of the war in Ukraine before they do – or Trump wins in the US). He also stressed the cohesion of front and rear and national unity in general (a way of telling the West to finally let go of another favorite piece of wishful thinking, namely that – somehow – it can pressure and disintegrate Russian society into regime change). He made it very clear that he considers “Donbass” and “Novorossiia” (yes, that term was back as well) Russian by praising the current Russian military for defending their citizens and emphasizing that for the domestic security forces as well the newly “liberated,” that is, annexed territories are a “priority.”

Putin also offered several remarks on the world beyond Russia and Ukraine, insisting that his country “consistently pursues the strengthening of stability on the planet, for a just and democratic multipolar world order,” with a particular emphasis on creating a stable security structure for Eurasia. In this context, Putin reiterated Russia’s readiness to cooperate even with EU and NATO countries – “once,” he said, “they are ready for it.”

Especially in the context of his recent visit to Asia (he had virtually just returned from there, when delivering the Georgievsky Hall address), the message to the West was clear: Russia – and its partners – will build this new Eurasian structure one way or the other; the question for NATO/EU-Europe is if it wants to be part of it or be excluded. As for the USA, the whole concept is about reducing, marginalizing, and, finally, removing its influence: Make the US dispensable again, so to speak.

Meanwhile, as long as the West shows no signs of being ready to talk on Russian terms, Putin went into remarkable detail – for a short speech – on measures that will be taken to arm Russia more and more effectively, in the conventional and nuclear domains. He stressed cutting-edge technology as well as “effective economic and financial solutions” (a clear hint, again, that Moscow does not have the slightest intention to let the West exhaust its mobilization of reserves through a greatly expanded military-industrial complex, even if there are signs that it makes the national economy overheat). Putin’s new Minister of Defense, Andrei Belousov, who was in attendance and also delivered a speech (more uncompromising than Putin’s, if anything), is, of course, the skilled, incorruptible, and strict technocrat who is tasked with seeing to those “solutions:” Putin’s Witte, so to speak, except that Putin is much better at making good use of talent than Nicolas II. Putin also noted the experience that the Russian military has gained from the war in Ukraine.

Where does all of that leave us with regard to the Ukrainian – really US-Ukrainian, as Russia rightly claims – ATACMS attack on Sevastopol?

A perhaps counter-intuitive aspect of the immediate Russian reaction to the attack has been noted far too little: Russian authorities were quick to publish a short but precise sketch of what had happened: Of 5 incoming ATACMS missiles, Russian air defense had neutralized 4, but the fifth had hit the beach. Very importantly, the Russian authorities added that the fifth missile had also been hit by air defense fire, which made a difference to its trajectory or, perhaps, led to an explosion so close to the ground that it affected the beach.

Yet that does not mean that Russian media and officials have not been crystal clear about their condemnation of the assault and who they are holding responsible for it: On Russia’s most important news show, the Sunday edition of Vesti (which airs at primetime for two hours every week), one of the country’s most prominent media figures, Dmitry Kiseliov, dedicated several segments to the attack, condemning it, unsurprisingly, in harsh terms and stating that a Russian response was inevitable, but would be “asymmetrical,” to be delivered at the frontline of the war in Ukraine as well as via strikes at Kiev’s energy infrastructure and “decision-making centers.”

One day later, the spokesman of the Russian president, Dmitry Peskov confirmed that the “direct involvement of the USA in combat activities, as a result of which Russian civilians die, cannot not have consequences.” Despite the careful double negative, the message is clear: Moscow will not let Washington off the hook. There will be some price to pay for going too far with its attacks on Russia, even while they are shoddily camouflaged as “merely” coming from Ukraine. By now, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has publicly characterized the attack as a “terrorist crime” and presented the American ambassador in Moscow with its official assessment that the US is as responsible as Ukraine for “the missile strike on civilians.”

Hence, it is already clear that Moscow will not choose to “overlook” or even downplay American responsibility and that it is classifying the attack as terrorism. But we also know that Russian authorities have chosen to be explicit about the fact that the course of the fifth missile, the one that hit the beach, was influenced by air defense intervention. That says nothing about the original target of that or the other four missiles: it may still have been criminal in the sense of being entirely civilian or so close to civilians that the attack was disproportionate. Anyone who has any awareness of the real (no, not the Kiev-NATO information war version) record of a decade of Ukrainian targeting, especially in the Donbass area, cannot simply assume that the Ukrainian intent was to strike a legitimate military target.

At the same time, we know that Russia has signaled at least the possibility that the beach that was actually hit was not the original target. Likewise, Peskov has also stated that Putin’s peace proposals, as formulated just before his trip to Asia, remain in force, another significant signal that points to Moscow’s intention to control and limit any escalation that may emerge from this event.

And thank God for that: As some commentators have correctly pointed out – including on social media – if the shoe were on the other foot, that is, if Russia had provided arms and essential operating assistance for a bloody missile strike on, say, a Florida beach, we’d be on the brink or in the middle of World War Three already.

But fortunately, the Russian leadership is very different from that of the US. Hence, the question of how Russia will respond remains complicated: What Kiseliov has announced on Vesti – military strikes against Ukrainian targets – will certainly happen. Indeed, it is possible that a large-scale Russian attack on Odessa one day after Ukraine’s Sevastopol strike was already part of that kind of retaliation.

Yet it is hard to tell because this type of retribution will not be principally different from attacks carried out by Russia before. At the same time, Russian investigators and prosecutors will treat the Sevastopol attack as a crime and seek to identify culprits and build cases. Just two days before, in his Georgievsky Hall address, Putin that part of the “priority” tasks of the security forces in the annexed territories continues of “the investigation of the crimes of the Neo-Nazis [yes, the war aim of “de-Nazification” is also in full force] and persecutors, who must answer for their evil deeds, for crimes against civilians, for the shelling of our towns and villages.” Will they do so for non-Ukrainians, too? In any case, these cases will remain on paper, at least for now and perhaps forever.

Yet what will the practical – as it were palpable – response to US involvement look like? Here we should remember Putin’s already famous comment made in Hanoi just before his return to Russia: that the “strategic defeat” that the West wants to inflict on Russia would amount to the “ending of Russia’s statehood”; and, in that case, as Putin put it, “why not go to the end?” Since an existential threat to that statehood is, according to Russia’s current nuclear doctrine, one explicit reason for the use of nuclear weapons, many observers – this author included – have interpreted this statement as a reference to potential nuclear war. Peskov, subsequently, clarified that his president had really meant fighting the war in Ukraine to the end. Kiseliov, however, who also hardly says things that run counter to what the Kremlin wishes to have said, referred to the Hanoi statement in the context of the Sevastopol attack and qualified Putin’s declaration as “mnogoznachitelno,” that is, ambiguous in multiple ways.

Make of that what you will, but, on balance, what Putin conveyed in the Georgievsky Hall address seems more important, even if it may be counterintuitive: It is true that the speech did not give an inch. One plausible way of reading it, is as a condensed list of all the reasons why Russia will not make concessions to the West in general and to the USA in particular. But there was a larger point hidden in some deceptively simple phrases: Russia has a well-developed strategy aiming at the eventual expulsion of US influence from Eurasia, and, if that should prove impossible, its literal marginalization in a weak EU-NATO Europe facing everyone else.

It is that fact that gives weight to the signals of Russian restraint on the Sevastopol issue. Impatient natures may interpret this restraint as a lack of follow-through or even resolve. But arguably, the opposite is true: It bespeaks the fact that Moscow now intends to win a much larger game and will not be distracted or baited to over-escalate where such an escalation would disrupt its own plans. If this is true, and if it is this long game that keeps us all from tumbling into World War III, then, once again, thank God some people still have the brains to play chess.