Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 85
June 10, 2024
Scott McConnell: George Kennan’s Internal Exile
By Scott McConnell, Modern Age, 7/17/23
For baby boomers, a first encounter with George Kennan likely came in a college history assignment to read American Diplomacy, the published lectures Kennan gave at the University of Chicago in 1951. Or perhaps with Kennan’s “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the historic essay, written under the pseudonym “X,” published in 1947 in Foreign Affairs. There Kennan distilled the message of the “Long Telegram” he had dictated from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow the previous year, crystallizing Washington’s thinking about how to deal with the Soviet Union in the new postwar era.
A first-time reader might have sensed the beauty of Kennan’s prose, unusual for those writing about foreign policy. Then might have followed a realization that the arguments he made seemed like no one else’s.
Foreign-policy debates during the Vietnam era fell almost invariably into two ideological camps. Some writers scorned the United States, finding fault with nearly every aspect of the country’s conduct because it was imperialist or bellicose or insufficiently humanitarian—the Marxist and liberal positions often overlapped.
Others—most government officials and Cold War liberals and conservatives—presented American policies as an outgrowth of good or reasonable intentions, directed against genuine threats, or as efforts to right genuine injustices. If those policies were sometimes flawed or ineffectual, the purposes behind them were moral and sound.
And here was Kennan, very much a part of the American establishment, yet highly critical of American policies. All too often they were, he argued, manipulated populist impulses disrespectful of the realities of power and arts of diplomacy. He lamented an American proclivity for legalism and moral posturing in foreign affairs, decried his country’s tendency to present America’s opponents as embodiments of evil, worried over America’s hubris and lack of humility. He concluded (in 1951) that we were a far less secure country than we had been in the nineteenth century.
While several excellent biographies of George Kennan have been published, it’s not obvious that any of them give a better sense of the man or more reading pleasure than his own voluminous published writings. One of his biographers, the noted historian (and Kennan’s close personal friend) John Lukacs, says in George Kennan: A Study of Character that Kennan “was, and remains, the best and finest American writer about [interwar] Europe at that time: better and finer than hundreds of others, including Hemingway.”
That judgment is based simply on Kennan’s verbal sketches and diary entries written as a young Foreign Service officer, stationed in interwar Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltics, well before he was famous. Fame did ensue after the Long Telegram and the X article, which led to a few years of genuine influence in government, followed by a lengthy post-government career at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. There Kennan became a prize-winning diplomatic historian, producing after the age of fifty a body of scholarship which would exceed that of most Ivy League professors.
In addition, he wrote two volumes of widely read and touted memoirs, some remarkable polemical sallies (most notably against the 1960s student left), and a best-selling work of political philosophy that was published when he was approaching ninety.
Yet in Kennan’s diaries and memoirs there runs a skein of almost constant complaint about his own lack of influence over the direction of his country, regular expressions of woe that, while he was treated with a kind of respect, he was never (apart from the interlude of the late 1940s) taken seriously.
June 9, 2024
An interview with Annie Jacobsen, author of ‘Nuclear War: A Scenario’
By Michael Mechanic, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists/Mother Jones, 4/1/24
This article was originally published by Mother Jones .
Nuclear war is a topic few care to think about. We sometimes call it unthinkable. But we need to think carefully, and to talk—particularly with high-ranking foreign officials whose motives we may have reason to distrust, just as they distrust ours—about how we can collectively avoid launching a weapon that would end our civilization.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen’s timely new book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, is a lightning-fast read intended to put the nuclear threat squarely back on everyone’s radar. Her narrative thread, as the title suggests, is a fact-based (though thankfully fictional) scenario that shows how a nuclear launch can escalate into World War III at dizzying speed.
Jacobsen tees up her cinematic approach with chapters describing how we got here, including a discussion of America’s Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) for General Nuclear War—which was devised in the 1960s and, as Jacobsen details in this book excerpt published today by Mother Jones, was more or less a recipe for the end of the world.
Because that’s nuclear war: One bad assumption, one shot, one retaliation, and it’s unstoppable.
Your book is frightful. What made you want to write in such detail how a nuclear war could unfold?
As a national security reporter, I have written six previous books on military and intelligence programs—CIA, Pentagon, DARPA—all designed to prevent nuclear World War III. During the Trump administration, amid the “fire and fury” rhetoric, I was watching STRATCOM commanders and deputy commanders speak freely on C-SPAN about the dangers therein. I began to wonder, My god, what would happen if deterrence failed? I began to interview people during COVID, when people had more time on their hands for someone like me—and that began the terrifying process of learning that nuclear war is, in essence, a sequence of events, and that once it starts it almost certainly will not stop.
The US public hasn’t thought a whole lot about nuclear weapons since the Cold War. We have more nuclear nations today, but far fewer weapons in the global arsenal. Are we safer now?
Well, as I show in the book, it doesn’t take but one weapon to set off a chain reaction to unleash the current arsenal, which is forward deployed in launch-on-warning positions and could be fired in as little as a minute—15 minutes for the submarines. There are enough weapons in those positions right now to bring on a nuclear winter that would kill an estimated 5 billion people.
Are there too many? Absolutely. Have we made progress? The all-time high in 1986 was 70,481 nuclear weapons. Now, there are approximately 12,500. But to your point, there are nine nuclear-armed nations, not just two or three superpowers. And that presents a lot of unknowns that create serious unease and room for catastrophe.
So we may be less safe because we don’t really know how certain nations might behave—notably North Korea.
Absolutely. Reporting and writing this book was one surprise after another. For example, I did not know until I had it confirmed with US nuclear experts that North Korea does not announce any of its missile tests, whereas the other countries do. North Korea has launched 100 missiles since January 2022. After you read my book, you realize what happens to the US nuclear command and control apparatus in the seconds and minutes after a launch is seen by the advanced super satellite system we have. You can now imagine what goes on in those command centers.
A total frenzy.
Imagine!
One thing that really struck me is the unbelievable speed at which nuclear war is waged.
Gen. Robert Kehler, the former commander of STRATCOM, said to me that the world could end in the next couple of hours. It took me a minute to ask my next question, because coming from someone in that position of authority—the most significant role in the entire nuclear apparatus—that really blew my mind.
Ditto goes for an interview I did with President Barack Obama’s FEMA chief, Craig Fugate. Of course, FEMA is the agency in charge of what’s called population protection planning for American citizens in the event of hurricanes, floods, earthquakes. Fugate told me that after a nuclear war, there wouldn’t be any population protection planning because everyone would be dead.
Help is not coming .
I said, “Well, what should people do?” He more or less said, “Self-survive, and don’t forget your morals, and I hope you stocked Pedialyte”—because radiation poisoning makes you vomit and have diarrhea and away go all of your electrolytes, which leads to secondary problems.
I learned from your book that FEMA plays a unique role in the event of a nuclear attack, and it’s not what one might expect.
That’s right. In the ’50s and ’60s, the US position was that a nuclear war could be fought and won. That is no longer the official position. But plans were put in place for the continuity of government programs—the idea that the government must continue functioning no matter what. That is also a fantasy.
To hear from former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry about the madness and mayhem and anarchy that would follow, in his mind, in the event of a nuclear war, you really get the sense that civilization will fail. I believe one of the reasons so many of these sources went on the record for me is because they know that this is the truth. And they know it is up to the people to change the trajectory of where we’re headed. I mean, my god, look at the saber-rattling going on as we do this interview.
Potential nuclear nightmares range from an accidental detonation to a massive “decapitation” strike to someone using a small nuke on the battlefield. You picked the madman scenario: North Korea inexplicably launches a long-range missile at Washington, DC. Why that one?
I did a series of interviews with [physicist] Richard Garwin, who is now 95. He is arguably the most knowledgeable person about nuclear weapons on the planet, and he probably knows more about policy over the long lens of history because he was 23 or 24 years old when he designed the first thermonuclear bomb.
In the “Ivy Mike” test, it exploded with 10.4 megatons of power—about 1,000 Hiroshimas. Garwin said to me that his biggest fear was now, and always had been, the madman theory you referred to. He used the French phrase Après moi, le déluge—after me, the flood—referring to this idea that a maniacal, egotistical, narcissistic madman leader could launch a nuclear weapon for reasons no one would ever know.
And to counterattack North Korea, as in your scenario, the US would need to send missiles over Russia, which has a very unreliable early warning system.
That’s right. Learning about the technological limitations of some of the Russian systems was just as terrifying as any part of reporting this book.
It’s almost like you’d want to reach out to the Russians and say, look, just take our technology so you won’t launch on a false alarm—but the US would never do that.
There have been many opportunities to have a dialogue with the Russians—Putin inquired about joining NATO back during the Clinton administration. One really has to lean upon one’s leaders to think about communicating rather than saber-rattling, because I hope that my book demonstrates in appalling detail how horrific nuclear war would be. And we know from the Proud Prophet war games that no matter how it begins, it ends in nuclear apocalypse.
For context, Proud Prophet was a classified series of war games President Ronald Reagan ordered in 1983. Civilian and military planners convened for two weeks to run through scenarios that could spark a nuclear war and see how they played out.
That Proud Prophet was declassified is interesting. Nuclear war games are among the government’s most jealously guarded secrets. I printed a copy of what a couple pages of the declassified war game look like—95 percent is redacted. It’s literally a couple of headers and a few numbers.
But when something like that gets declassified, it becomes very valuable to the people. An individual like Paul Bracken—a civilian professor at Yale who participated in Proud Prophet—can now speak about it in general terms. He wrote in his own book that everyone left very depressed, because no matter how the nuclear scenario begins—if NATO is involved or not involved, China is involved or not—it always ends the same way, the most terrible way, because America has a “launch on warning” policy.
We do not wait to absorb a nuclear blow. Once a missile is on the way and there is secondary confirmation from ground radar, the president is asked to launch a counterstrike. In the book—I have the president asking this because it came up in my discussions with sources—he says, “How do we know it’s a nuclear weapon?”
And we don’t.
That is a fact. The answer is, Well, it could be a biological weapon. Another answer I was told is that no one launches a ballistic missile at the United States unless they’re expecting a counterattack. So now you are looping into the Orwellian world of: This is deterrence. Deterrence will hold. Don’t you dare launch at us or else! Which becomes part and parcel for why the counterattack is required, per the deterrence doctrine. There is no room for saying, well, maybe we’ll wait and see.
Once you break deterrence, everything else goes out the window.
Correct. One of the most haunting quotes in the book is from the deputy commander of STRATCOM, Lt. Gen. Tom Bussiere. I located an unclassified discussion he had with insiders, and the quote is along the lines of, When deterrence fails, it all unravels. In seconds and minutes and hours—not days and weeks and months.
Twelve thousand years of civilization extinguished in a few hours.
General Kehler was not speaking hyperbolically when he said that.
Say more about “launch on warning.” You cite Paul Nitze , a former defense secretary and later presidential adviser, calling the policy “inexcusably dangerous.” Presidents Bush, Obama, and Biden wanted it scrapped. So why is it still in place?
I’d like to shout out William Burr, who runs the National Security Archive at George Washington University, because many of those quotes and documents come from that organization, which made them accessible to journalists like me. Nitze was one of the biggest hawks across the Cold War. To have a guy like that go on the record and say this is inexcusably dangerous says a lot.
Multiple presidents have campaigned on the promise that they will change this dangerous policy, but then they become president and you never hear of it again. That speaks to the kind of secret-keeping that is dangerous and can be changed. I wrote Nuclear War: A Scenario for the layperson to be able to rip through it in a night, no matter how terrifying. I do not bog the reader down with polemics or jargon, because this is an issue everybody should know about. Because only in knowing about it is change possible. We can look to The Day After battle, what’s known in inner circles as the Reagan Reversal policy of 1983.
Wait, what’s that?
So in 1983—I’m dating myself here—I was a high school student. And I watched the ABC movie The Day After.
I was the same age, and watching it too.
It’s a fictional account of a nuclear war between America and Soviet Russia, and half the country watched it. Interestingly, behind the scenes, ABC got a lot of pressure not to air it. Well, one very important American watched it: Reagan had a private screening at Camp David. His chief of staff tried to suggest that he shouldn’t watch it, but he did. And he wrote in his diary that he became “greatly depressed,” and he picked up the phone and called [then–Soviet President Mikhail] Gorbachev, and the two leaders communicated—which is really the only solution for any of this.
Because of those communications and because of their conference and because of the treaty, the insane nuclear arsenal has been reduced to the approximately 12,500 we have now, which is a considerable reduction. The president’s position prior to seeing The Day After was a much harder, more saber-rattling approach. He changed his position and became much more dovish.
“Launch on warning” puts extraordinary pressure on a president. The one in your scenario is pretty clueless. He hasn’t ever rehearsed. Nobody told him he’d have just six minutes to choose from a Denny’s breakfast menu of existential options in response to what may or may not be an incoming nuke. It’s hard to believe the Pentagon doesn’t put every new president through a series of war games.
I was just as surprised as you are. But that’s coming from multiple secretaries of defense and national security advisers—people in a position to advise the president on a nuclear counterattack. The best summation came from Leon Panetta, who explained that as White House chief of staff he was witness to the fact that the president is primarily concerned with domestic issues—like his popularity. I asked Panetta how clued in he was when he was the CIA director, and he said almost not at all, because the CIA is about intelligence, not nuclear operations.
Only when he became secretary of defense did it really hit home, the weight of all of this. He spoke about visiting missile silos, submarine bases, and nuclear command bunkers—once you go to places like that, your entire perspective changes. And that is why I believe he was willing to go on the record. You really get the sense that things are precarious once they begin, and decisions follow that are out of everyone’s control.
Right. And our continued existence depends not only on our internal communications and processes, but those of our adversaries, about which we know little.
Absolutely.
Your book busts some common myths, for instance the belief that the US could shoot down an incoming nuclear missile. We really can’t defend against nuclear weapons, can we?
We can’t. That is pure fantasy. During the final fact-checking incantations, I had the book read by a lieutenant general who ran these scenarios for NORAD. I was almost hoping someone would say, Annie, you should take this part out of the book, because we have a secret Iron Dome that you can’t report on. No. The truth is that the United States relies upon 44 interceptor missiles to stop any incoming missiles. Russia alone has 1,674 nuclear warheads in “ready to launch” position. Adding to that, according to congressional reports, the interceptors are only approximately 50 percent effective.
Under the best of circumstances.
Absolutely, like when you’re doing a test and you know precisely where the missile is going to be. It’s a curated test. So people have this idea that we have an Iron Dome–type shield. And we don’t.
The Reagan Reversal bit reminds me of a moment from your scenario. Your secretary of defense is sworn in as president because the president and others in the line of succession are dead or AWOL, and he has this moment of humanity. Russia has launched all its ICBMs at us, so we know we’re goners. And the new guy asks: Why respond now if all it will do is kill millions more people? The STRATCOM commander is like, Nope, we’re doing this. Humanity is already doomed, yet Russia and the United States keep launching their weapons until practically none are left. It’s nonsensical. But is it realistic ?
It is if you talk to the sources I spoke to. A lot of the decision-tree situations involving the defense secretary came from my multiple discussions with former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, who has thought a lot about this—and what an individual’s thought process would be. The point of including that question was to demonstrate how the madness of MAD—mutual assured destruction—takes over.
I asked [retired weapons engineer] Glen McDuff—the curator of the classified museum at the Los Alamos National Laboratory—the question you’re kind of asking me: What did he think, as an insider, about the notion that people would not follow orders? He basically said: Annie, I would suggest betting on Powerball, because you’d have a better chance of winning than betting on a high-ranking individual in the nuclear command and control system not following orders.
Right. It seems like folks in the nuclear command and control structure have rehearsed these scenarios over and over. They’re on autopilot to a degree. Which gets at the notion of “apes on a treadmill” that you write about late in the book: We’ve made this plan, and we’re going to follow it—even if it’s completely bonkers.
Apes on the treadmill was just such a brilliant concept. It goes back to the Cold War when it was used as a metaphor for people slavishly following away in this nuclear arms race.
But even more interesting was the present-day anecdote I found. It was a scientific experiment having nothing to do with the original metaphor but was literally apes on a treadmill. The researchers were studying bipedalism: They put humans on the treadmill and they put apes on the treadmill. Anecdotally, one of the scientists said, and I’m paraphrasing, that some of the apes got fed up with walking to nowhere and got off the treadmill.
I thought, my god, the apes are smarter than the humans when it comes to mutual assured destruction.
June 8, 2024
Russia’s leading scholar of nuclear arms Alexey Arbatov has crossed swords with one of the most renowned pro-Kremlin experts on geopolitics, Dmitri Trenin, on whether and how nuclear arms control can be revived
Russia Matters, 6/3/24
Russia’s leading scholar of nuclear arms Alexey Arbatov has crossed swords with one of the most renowned pro-Kremlin experts on geopolitics, Dmitri Trenin, on whether and how nuclear arms control can be revived, while also debating whether the tenets of Russia’s nuclear deterrence should evolve. In a commentary for Interfax, Arbatov describes Russia’s current approach as defensive deterrence, but also acknowledges the calls for a transition to offensive deterrence made by what he has described, tongue-in-cheek, perhaps, as “independent strategists,” and which would be employed to support the country’s military offensives. In his commentary, Arbatov also calls for “restoring arms control, renovating the negotiation process and expanding them from bilateral to various multilateral formats and new weapons systems.” In his turn, Trenin writes in his commentary for Interfax that “arms control is dead and will not be revived.” Moreover, Trenin calls for “an active strategy of nuclear deterrence that would lower the threshold for use of nuclear weapons that is too high today.” Instead of authorizing use of nuclear weapons over “a threat to the very existence of the state,” Russian strategic documents should authorize such use over “a threat to the vital interests of the country,” according to Trenin. Implementing Trenin’s suggestion would require revising not only the language on the use of nuclear weapons in the 2014 Military Doctrine and 2020 Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence, but also the language on national interests in, for instance, Russia’s 2021 National Security Strategy, which describes national interests such as “maintaining… harmony” and in “conservation of natural resources.”*
Dmitry Trenin: A massive transformation is taking place in Russia, and the West is blind to it
by Dmitry Trenin, RT, 5/13/24
Two and a half years into its war against the West in Ukraine, Russia certainly finds itself on a course toward a new sense of itself.
This trend actually predated the military operation but has been powerfully intensified as a result. Since February 2022, Russians have lived in a wholly new reality. For the first time since 1945, the country is really at war, with bitter fighting ongoing along a 2,000-kilometer front line, and not too far from Moscow. Belgorod, a provincial center near the Ukrainian border, is continuously subjected to deadly missile and drone attacks from Kiev’s forces.
Occasionally, Ukrainian drones reach far deeper inland. Yet, Moscow and other big cities continue as if there were no war, and (almost) no Western sanctions either. Streets are full of people and shopping malls and supermarkets offer the usual abundance of goods and food items. One could conclude that Moscow and Belgorod are a tale of two countries, that Russians have managed to live simultaneously both in wartime and peacetime.
This would be a wrong conclusion. Even the part of the country that ostensibly lives ‘in peace’ is markedly different from what it was before the Ukraine conflict began. The central focus of post-Soviet Russia – money – has not been eliminated, of course, but has certainly lost its unquestionable dominance. When many people – not only soldiers but civilians, too – are getting killed, other, non-material values are coming back. Patriotism, reviled and derided in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, is re-emerging in force. In the absence of fresh mobilization, hundreds of thousands of those who sign contracts with the military are motivated by a desire to help the country. Not just by what they can get from it.
Russian popular culture is shedding – slowly, perhaps, but steadily – the habit of imitating what’s hot in the West. Instead, the traditions of Russian literature, including poetry, film, music are being revived and developed. A spike in domestic tourism has opened to ordinary Russians the treasures of their own country – until recently neglected, as a thirst for travel abroad was quenched. (Foreign travel is still available, but difficult logistics make reaching other parts of Europe far less easy than before).
Politically, there is no opposition to speak of against the current system. Almost all of its former figureheads are abroad, and Alexey Navalny has died in prison. A lot of former cultural icons who, after February 2022, decided to emigrate to Israel, Western Europe, or elsewhere, are fast becoming yesterday’s celebrities, as the country moves on. Those Russian journalists and activists who criticize Russia from afar are increasingly losing touch with their previous audiences, and are saddled with accusations of serving the interests of countries fighting Russia in the proxy war in Ukraine. By contrast, nearly two-thirds of young men who left Russia in 2022 for fear of being mobilized have returned, some of them quite embittered by their experience abroad.
Putin’s statement about the need for a new national elite, and his promotion of war veterans as the core of that elite, is more of an intention than a real plan at this stage, but the Russian elite is definitely going through a massive turnover. Many liberal tycoons essentially no longer belong to Russia; their desire to keep their assets in the West has ended up separating them from their native country.
Those who stayed in Russia know that yachts in the Med, villas on the Cote d’Azur, and mansions in London are no longer available to them, or at least no longer safe to keep. Within Russia, a new model of a mid-level businessperson is emerging: one who combines money with social engagement (not the ESG model), and who builds his/her future inside the country.
Russian political culture is returning to its fundamentals. Unlike that of the West, but somewhat similar to the East – it is based on the model of a family. There is order, and there is a hierarchy; rights are balanced by responsibilities; the state is not a necessary evil but the principal public good and the top societal value. Politics, in the Western sense of a constant, often no-holds-barred competition, is viewed as self-serving and destructive; instead, those who are entrusted with being at the helm of the state are expected to arbitrate, to ensure harmony of various interests, etc. Of course, this is an ideal rather than reality. In reality things are more complex and complicated, but the traditional political culture, at its core, is alive and well, and the last 30 to 40 years, while hugely instructive and impactful, have not overturned it.
Russian attitudes to the West are also complex. There is appreciation of Western classical and modern (but not so much post-modern) culture, the arts and technology, and of living standards to an extent. Recently, the previously unadulterated positive image of the West as a society has been spoiled by the aggressive promotion of LGBTQ values, of cancel culture, and the like. What has also changed is the view of Western policies, politics and especially politicians, which have lost the respect most Russians once had for them. The view of the West as Russia’s hereditary adversary has again gained prominence – not primarily because of Kremlin propaganda, but as a function of the West’s own policies, from providing Ukraine with weapons that kill Russian soldiers and civilians, to sanctions which in many ways are indiscriminate, to attempts to cancel Russian culture or to bar Russians from world sports. This hasn’t resulted in Russians viewing individual Westerners as enemies, but the political/media West is widely seen here as a house of adversaries.
There is a clear need for a set of guiding ideas about “who we are,” “where we are in this world” and “where we are going.” However, the word ‘ideology’ is too closely linked in many people’s mind with the rigidity of Soviet Marxism-Leninism. Whatever finally emerges will probably be built on the values-led foundation of traditional religions, starting with Russian Orthodoxy, and will include elements from our past, including the pre-Petrine, imperial, and Soviet periods. The current confrontation with the West makes it imperative that some kind of a new ideological concept finally emerges, in which sovereignty and patriotism, law and justice take a central role. Western propaganda pejoratively refers to it as “Putinism” but, for most Russians, it may be simply described as “Russia’s way.”
Of course, there are people unhappy with policies that have deprived them of certain opportunities. Particularly if those people’s interests are largely in money and individual wealth. Those in this group who have not gone abroad are sitting quietly, harbor misgivings and privately hope that somehow, at whatever cost to others, the “good old days” come back. They are likely to be disappointed. As for the changes within the elite, Putin is aiming to infuse fresh blood and vigor into the system.
It doesn’t look like some sort of ‘purge’ is coming. The changes, nonetheless, will be substantial, given the age factor. Most of the current incumbents in the top places are in their early 70s. Within the next six to ten years these positions will go to younger people. Ensuring that Putin’s legacy lives on is a major task for the Kremlin. Succession is not merely an issue of who eventually emerges in the top position, but what kind of ‘ruling generation’ comes in.
June 7, 2024
John Varoli: Russia Won’t Take Biden’s Bait to Start WWIII
A more positive take from Varoli. I hope he’s right. – Natylie
By John Varoli, Substack, 6/3/24
Last week, the White House stirred up a media frenzy about allowing Kiev to use U.S. weapons to attack sites “inside Russia”, though ostensibly only regarding the HIMARS short-range missile launcher system to hit targets in the Belgorod Region.
What’s behind this decision? Strategically it changes little. So, most likely it’s part of a media campaign to boost Biden’s dismal ratings, to deflect from NATO’s battlefield defeats and to galvanize public opinion in an election year amid the White House’s failed crusade against Russia.
On May 30, the New York Times wrote: “President Biden, in a major shift pressed by his advisers and key allies, has authorized Ukraine to conduct limited strikes inside Russia with American-made weapons, opening what could well be a new chapter in the war for Ukraine. Mr. Biden’s decision appears to mark the first time that an American president has allowed limited military responses on artillery, missile bases and command centers inside the borders of a nuclear-armed adversary.”
No, there won’t be any “new chapter in the war for Ukraine”. As often, the NYT dutifully labors on behalf of the White House to create the illusion that NATO/ Kiev will be able to turn the tide against Russia and then ethnically cleanse the Donbass and Crimea regions of its Russian-speaking population.
The stark reality is that over the past 12 months, the U.S., UK, France and several other NATO states have been helping Kiev to bomb Russian cities, military bases and industrial infrastructure. For example, in summer 2023 the UK began to supply Kiev with Storm Shadow missiles as part of efforts to terrorize south Russian cities.
On May 30, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg admitted that several NATO states “never imposed any” restrictions on the use of their weapons, by which he meant the UK, France and Czech Republic. The latter’s “Vampire” multiple rocket launcher has often been used in Kiev’s terrorist attacks against Russia’s Belgorod Region that have killed many people at family events and city markets.
Meanwhile, for the past 18 months the U.S. Army’s HIMARS system has been used by Kiev to commit numerous war crimes throughout Donbass, especially in the city of Donetsk, where public markets and other civilian areas are often targeted, leaving many dozens dead and injured.
Kiev’s missile and drone attacks over the past year were only possible thanks to U.S. support, primarily real-time battlefield intelligence from Pentagon satellites and Reaper drones operating over the Black Sea. Also, earlier this year the NYT revealed that the CIA plays a direct role in attacks against Russia, which is why the U.S. is now widely considered to be a leading sponsor of terrorism.
Many American experts have erroneously described the recent White House decision to attack “inside Russia” as a watershed that could lead to World War 3. I disagree. Russia won’t take the bait because it’s already winning the war. Time is on Russia’s side. Zelensky’s unpopular regime is collapsing, and there’s also the possibility that all of NATO will go down with him.
Moscow’s reaction to the May 30th announcement to strike “inside Russia” has been relatively mild. Why? First, Russia’s powerful air defenses have been able to deal successfully with most U.S./ NATO missiles and drones; and in general there have been many reports of NATO missiles’ overall poor technical performance, especially when faced with Russian jamming.
Second, Moscow realizes that the White House has a wider plan to ignite the world on fire and kill as many people as possible. Thus, President Putin will continue to exercise the restraint he has shown over the ten years of the Donbass conflict. Moscow only responds by punishing NATO’s offensive capabilities inside Ukraine, never hitting infrastructure and command centers inside NATO, even though international law gives Moscow that right.
Putin’s response last week sounded menacing but don’t expect any threat to be carried out: “Officials from NATO countries, especially the smaller European countries, should be fully aware of what is at stake. Before talking about ‘striking deep into Russian territory,’ they should remember that their countries are small and densely populated. This unending escalation can lead to serious consequences.”
NATO certainly won’t heed that message. In February 2022, Putin warned the West to stay out of Ukraine, but that was quickly ignored. Then in September 2022 Russia’s Foreign Ministry said that if the U.S. supplied Kiev with longer-range missiles, it would cross a “red line” and become “a party to the conflict”. Again, NATO crossed the red line with impunity.
Then, in October 2023, Putin labeled U.S. supplies to Kiev of long-range tactical ballistic missiles (ATACMs) “another mistake by the U.S.” But no punishment was ever carried out, further giving the West reason to believe that Russia is weak. Moscow truly has a credibility problem.
The White House is goading Russia, hoping Moscow will make a rash step — such as a direct attack on a NATO country — in order to justify the start of World War 3. Such a war would play into the hands of the failed Biden presidency, which eagerly seeks a substantial reason to call off the presidential election in November and to decree martial law at home. World War 3 would certainly be that reason.
The U.S. and its Kiev proxy will continue to try to escalate the conflict, sending tens of thousands of forcefully conscripted young men to die in Zelensky’s meat grinder. As someone who worked with Ukraine for nearly 15 years, I’m speechless at how that nation has been brainwashed to die for a blatant fraud and con artist as Zelensky.
The war in Ukraine and all major events of the past five years (such as Covid 19) leads one to conclude that modern western liberalism is a death cult — developing deadly biological weapons, inciting wars across the globe, and subjugating freedom-loving nations that won’t bow to its ‘progressive’ gods. This destructive ideology has brought the world to the edge of a nuclear war in its obsession for global domination to forge its Orwellian “rules-based order”.
History, however, is clear — totalitarian ideologies that seek global domination eventually fail and collapse through internal and external pressures. Internally, the U.S. is plunging into chaos as a feeble and demented president tries in vain to stamp out the last flames of American freedom; internationally the Global South looks to Russia, China and India in a bid to stop the manic ambitions of the West.
We are witnessing one of the most epic confrontations in human history. Truly a glorious time to be alive.
RT: Zelensky’s illegitimacy, NATO ‘bulls**t’ & Russia’s ‘asymmetric’ response: Key takeaways from Putin’s foreign press briefing
RT, 6/6/24
Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered an overview of how he sees the Ukraine conflict’s roots and where the crisis may be headed, as well as the prospects of peace and speculation about a full-fledged war with NATO, as he spent over three hours answering a wide range of questions from representatives of international news agencies on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) on Wednesday.
1. Zelensky’s questionable legitimacy
Putin argued that the crisis stems from a US-backed coup that overthrew Kiev’s elected government in 2014. “Everyone believes that Russia started the war in Ukraine. But no one – I want to emphasize this – no one in the West, in Europe, wants to remember how this tragedy began. It began with a coup in Ukraine – an unconstitutional coup d’etat.”
Zelensky ‘seized power’ in Ukraine – PutinREAD MORE: Zelensky ‘seized power’ in Ukraine – Putin
Now Vladimir Zelensky’s legitimacy has also come under question, as according to Ukrainian laws his powers were supposed to be transferred to the country’s parliament after his term as president ended last month, Putin argued. He suggested that Western backers may “tolerate” and keep Zelensky around long enough to force through more unpopular policies – like lowering the conscription age all the way down to 18 – then oust him, possibly as early as next spring. “They have several candidates to replace him.”
2. ‘Bulls**t’ NATO claims
Asked about NATO’s preparations to defend against a possible Russian “invasion,” Putin suggested that Western governments are spreading absurd and false fears to help maintain their global hegemony.
“Look, someone has imagined that Russia wants to attack NATO,” he said. “Have you gone completely insane? Are you as thick as this table? Who came up with this nonsense, this bulls**t?”
3. ‘Asymmetric’ measures loom
Putin called out the US and other NATO members for supplying long-range missiles targeting deep into Russian territory. He warned that such escalations could backfire for the West as Moscow weighs its options.
“If someone deems it possible to supply such weapons to the war zone, to strike our territory…, why shouldn’t we supply similar weapons to those regions of the world where they will be used against sensitive sites of these countries?” Putin asked. “We can respond asymmetrically. We will give it a thought.”
4. How the conflict could end
The administration of US President Joe Biden could quickly stop the fighting in Ukraine by halting the flow of weapons to Kiev, Putin said. He told journalists that he had received a letter from Biden regarding the crisis, and he replied by arguing that the bloodshed would stop within two to three months if munitions shipments are cut off.
Russian leaders have repeatedly claimed that Ukraine’s Western military backers are merely prolonging the conflict without changing its outcome.
5. US election offers little hope
Putin said Russia has no expectation of serious policy changes resulting from this year’s US presidential election. Even if Biden loses to Republican challenger Donald Trump, relations with Moscow will likely remain antagonistic. “Basically, we don’t care (who wins),” the Russian leader said.
Biden’s administration is tearing down the US political system by using the courts to prosecute Trump, Putin added. “They are burning themselves from the inside.” In any case, he said, the new US administration would have to abandon Washington’s focus on “global liberalism” and hegemony – instead prioritizing the interests of the American people – to enable a major shift in foreign policy.
“No one is interested in Ukraine in the United States,” Putin said. “They are interested in the greatness of the United States. They are not fighting for Ukraine; they are fighting for their leadership in the world. They do not want Russia to be successful, to prevail, because they think it will be damaging for the leadership of the United States.”
6. Germany lost sovereignty
Putin also painted a bleak picture of Moscow’s relationship with Germany. Berlin’s supplying of tanks and missiles to Kiev has destroyed Russo-German relations, he said, and providing long-range weapons for strikes on Russian territory could lead to “very serious problems.”
Germany has allowed the US to devastate its economy by blowing up the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines and imposing failed sanctions against Russia, Putin claimed. The US also controls the flow of information in Germany, he added. “No one is trying to protect German interests. Germany is not sovereign, but there are Germans, and someone has to think of their interests.”
June 6, 2024
Guy Mettan: “Report from Donbas.”
by Guy Mettan, The Floutist, 5/11/24
When I first read Guy Mettan’s report from Donbas I felt as if he had transported me to an antipodean universe of some kind. You can take this, as I do, as a measure of how prevalently, as in wall-to-wall, Western media have systematically misrepresented the Donbas region—when they represent it at all, this is to say. I was at once astonished and voraciously curious to read Mettan’s account of his travels to the two republics of the formerly Ukrainian region, which voted in referenda in September 2022 to join the Russian Federation.
Mettan is based in Geneva and travels often, a little in the way of what the French call le grand rapporteur—the accomplished correspondent who has established his authority in the course of a long career. When I met Mettan at a Geneva café the other day to discuss publication of his Donbas report I asked, “What did you expect to find?” It seemed an important question. Mettan immediately smiled. “Nothing,” he said. “I had no expectations whatsoever.”
Good, I recall thinking. A blank slate. A project so counter to the orthodoxy as this would not otherwise work.
This is a very rare account, rare for its objectivity, a look at a place and a people we are not supposed to see from a journalist of long experience. We at The Floutist are pleased to welcome Guy Mettan into our pages.
This is the first of a two-part series. The second part of Mettan’s report will appear shortly.
—P.atrick Lawrence, May 11
Guy Mettan
Guy Mettan is an independent journalist based in Geneva and a member of the Grand Council of the Canton of Geneva, over which he presided in 2010. He has previously worked at the Journal de Genève, Le Temps stratégique, Bilan, and Le Nouveau Quotidien. He subsequently served as director and editor-in-chief of Tribune de Genève. In 1996, Mettan founded Le Club suisse de la presse, of which he was president and later director from 1998 to 2019.
DONESTK—How could they do this to us? Why does Kiev want to destroy us?
These are the questions that the people of Donbas have been asking themselves for the past 10 years. Considered from Switzerland or France, they may seem incongruous, as we are so used to believing that only Ukrainians are suffering from the war with Russia. We don’t want to know that the battle has been going on for a decade and has primarily affected the civilian population of Donbas.
For a week in April, I was able to criss-cross the two provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk, visiting towns that had been destroyed and those that were being rebuilt, meeting refugees, and talking to people. This is my report.
I have no doubt that this piece will offend many people who are used to seeing the world in black and white. To them I would say what John Steinbeck and Robert Capa said to their detractors when they visited Stalin’s Russia in 1947, at the beginning of the Cold War: I am simply bearing witness, reporting what I saw and heard on the other side of the front. Then it’s up to everyone to form an opinion.
Mine is that Russia and the people of Donbas will never stop fighting until they have won.
This project began in a very Russian way, through an unlikely chain of circumstances. Nine years ago, in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, I met a Tajik entrepreneur from Moscow who was marrying off his daughter. He didn’t speak English and, without paying any attention to my miserable Russian, he invited the delegation I chaired, comprised of Swiss business people, to the wedding. I made a short speech in honour of the bride and her parents.
Since then, Umar Ikromovitch has become a close friend, one that neither distance nor the linguistic barrier could separate. Once or twice a year, on important holidays, he sends me a message via Telegram. In February, I was surprised when he invited me to join him to tour his work in Donbas, a region he had never visited before. Umar is an entrepreneurial builder—of roads, playgrounds, sports fields, and the like. His company employs several hundred workers in the Moscow region and a few dozen in the reconstruction of Donbas.
So, at 3 a.m. on 3 April, he and Nikita, one of his friends from the Russian Ministry of Defence, were waiting for me outside Vnukovo airport to begin our drive to Donbas. Nikita (and it is best I do not give his surname) had prepared the programme and provided the necessary permits, as well as an experienced driver, Volodia. For 10 hours, with a short coffee break at a newly opened petrol station, we drove at breakneck speed down the 1,060 kilometres of the “Prigozhin motorway,” as I nickname it, between Moscow and Rostov-on-Don—the same motorway on which the late leader of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had set out upon with his tanks last July.
Nothing could be simpler than a Russian motorway. They are always straight. There’s not a single bend along the Prigozhin motorway until you reach Rostov. And as the motorway is clear, apart from 50 kilometres of roadworks shortly before Rostov, the journey was quick and effortless, allowing us to travel from the last snows of Moscow to the soft spring of the Sea of Azov in less than half a day. We saw a steady stream of lorries and a few military convoys, although not many of the latter.
In Rostov, the bustling port and congested capital of southern Russia, we barely had a chance to put down our luggage and take three steps before setting off on our first visit. This was to an enormous pumping and turbine station, located at the mouth of the River Don some 20 kilometres from the city.
Workers are still finishing the external work. Two gigantic tubes, dozens of 20,000 m3 tanks, and eight pumping stations, each with 11 turbines, now transport fresh water to Donetsk, 200 kilometres away, which is deprived of drinking water because of the embargo Ukraine has imposed. Everything is automated. The 3,700 workers started as soon as the republics were reintegrated into the mother country, in November 2022, and finished the huge worksite and the construction of the high-voltage line powering the turbines six months later, in April 2023.
My first conclusion is that, after such rapid and colossal investments, Russia’s will to fight until its final victory seems unshakeable. And I don’t think Russia will ever again agree to separate itself from the Donbas. This territory is now Russian, full stop.
As night fell, we seated ourselves at a table in one of Rostov’s most popular brasseries, facing the peaceful River Don. It was to be a quiet night, and we slept soundly. The following night, with 40 Ukrainian missiles fired at the nearby Morozov’s air base, would prove more animated.
The next morning we set off for Mariupol, 180 kilometres and three hours away. After Taganrog, a small port near the river’s mouth, the road runs alongside the Sea of Azov and is jammed with convoys of lorries coming and going from Donbas. The road is currently being widened. Military vehicles are clearly marked with a “V” or a “Z”—Roman letters, not Cyrillic, adopted at the start of Russia’s intervention to signify victory.
Checkpoints and various controls succeed one another on either side of the Russian border with the Republic of Donetsk. On the side of the road, long convoys wait to be searched. Thanks to our passes, we are soon on ex–Ukrainian territory. Yevgeny, a Russian from Vladivostok who has volunteered for the Donetsk Republic, takes over. He will be our guide and interpreter throughout our stay.
Shortly before noon we reach the outskirts of Mariupol and enter the zone of Azovstal, the vast steel complex that was totally devastated early in the war. The factory now is nothing but rusting chimneys, tangles of burst pipes, and twisted ironwork. A vision of apocalypse that immediately evokes the Stalingrad tractor factory of Vasily Grossman, the Red Army war correspondent, and Steinbeck and Capa’s Journey to Russia. None of the surrounding houses and apartment blocks survived.
The city centre, however, has survived the war much better: At first glance, half of it was destroyed, half survived. Mariupol is currently undergoing a major renovation. In the central square, the reconstruction of the famous theatre—bombed or blown up, we’re not sure—is due to be completed by the end of the year. Umar is happy: The children and young mothers have already taken over the park and playground that his company has just completed. The bus routes, with buses donated by the city of St Petersburg, have been re-established. The café terraces have reopened.
Then we head back to the west of the city, which offers a very different landscape. Everything here is new. The old districts have already been renovated; new districts, clusters of buildings, a school, a nursery, and a hospital have all been built in less than a year. A lady walking with her dog tells us that she just moved into her brand new flat a fortnight ago, after living for months in a slum without running water.
Supervised by the Russian Ministry of Defence’s Military Construction Company, with the help of Russian towns and provinces, work goes on day and night. Ten thousand residents have already been rehoused and the town has regained two-thirds of its prewar population of 300,000. In the afternoon, we will visit a second 60–bed hospital, completely new and demountable – designed to be taken apart and moved if the need arises. They are very well equipped and run by volunteer doctors from all over Russia.
The most spectacular buildings, however, are the schools.
On the seafront, a new naval academy will welcome its first class of cadets at the start of the new academic year in September. Classrooms, dormitories, sports halls, and training facilities: Four gleaming glass-and-steel buildings have been completed in 10 months. Designed to accommodate 560 uniformed pupils aged 11 to 17, I am told they will take in mainly orphans from the two wars in Donbas, 2014–2022 and 2022–2024. With six days of instruction per week, eight to 10 hours a day, there’s hardly time to get bored. At the end of the course, students can either continue their training in the navy or enter a civilian university.
A second school is more traditional but even more spectacular. It’s an experimental school, the like of which has never been seen before in Russia (or in Switzerland, to my knowledge). The design is very sophisticated. The classrooms are equipped with the latest technology, including computers, robots, cyber– and nanotechnologies, and artificial intelligence. More traditional are the rooms for drawing, sewing, cooking, painting, languages, ballet, drama, chemistry, physics, biology, anatomy, and mathematics. There is even a room equipped with compartments for learning to drive and fly.
Begun at the end of 2022 and completed in September 2023, this school welcomed its first intake of 500 students last year and expects 500 more at the start of the new school year in September. The pedagogy is in keeping with the building, but without any pedagogical flourishes: Classes last 12 hours a day—8 a.m. to 8 p.m., with six hours of “hard” subjects in the morning—grammar, mathematics, history—and six hours of more recreational or complementary subjects in the afternoon—sport, ballet, music, drawing. The canteen provides three meals a day. The only difficulty, says the headmistress, is finding teachers willing to move to Mariupol. But she doesn’t seem to be one to shy away from the task.
In the late afternoon, we set off on the brand-new motorway linking Mariupol to Donetsk, 120 kilometres away, making a short stop in the small town of Volnovakha, whose Palace of Culture was hit by HIMARS rockets last November. The roof has collapsed, and scaffolding clutters what remains of the stage and auditorium. Fortunately, no one was killed or injured in the blast, as the show scheduled for that day was moved at the last minute.
As far as the locals were concerned, there is no doubt that the Ukrainians were trying to kill as many civilians as possible. My guide explained that they always fired HIMARS rockets in groups of three—the first rocket to pierce the roof and structures, the second to kill the occupants, and, 20 to 25 minutes later, a third strike to kill as many firefighters, rescue workers, relatives, policemen, friends, and neighbours who had come to help the victims as possible. I heard this kind of story several times.
Donetsk is a city of one million inhabitants—very spread out, very busy, with heavy traffic. Few buildings or façades have been destroyed. On the other hand, the city is alive with the sound of cannon fire.
I didn’t pay much attention to it when I arrived, because of my fatigue, and the intense emotions provoked by all I was seeing. But when I woke up at 3 a.m., I was suddenly struck by the sound of the cannon. Every two or three minutes, a shot goes off, rattling the windows and lighting up the sky with an orange glow: It’s Russian artillery firing on Ukrainian positions a few kilometres from the town centre. The Ukrainians retaliate with missiles, drones, or HIMARS rockets, which trigger Russian counter-battery fire, at a rate of one or two an hour, I believe.
The next morning, I was taught to distinguish one from the other. The HIMARS rockets are silent until the final explosion, the French SCALP and British Storm Shadow missiles make an airplane-like hum, as do the Russian anti-missile batteries, while the ordinary shells fall with a whistling sound. In any case, I have nothing to worry about, my new friends assure me. They have put me up in the only hotel in the city still in American hands, and the Ukrainians would never dare fire on an American target.
Nevertheless, Ukrainian fire continues to cause injuries and an average of one death a week. All civilians, because there are absolutely no soldiers, military vehicles, or military installations in the town. In four days, I haven’t come across a single uniform.
We start the day with a visit to the “Alley of Angels,” which stands in the middle of a beautiful city park. This is the name given to the funerary monument erected in memory of the children killed by Ukrainian bombing since 2014. A hundred sixty names have already been inscribed on the marble. But the list of casualties now runs to more than 200. Dozens of bunches of flowers, toys, and photos of children pile up under the wrought-iron arch. It’s overwhelming.
On the way back, we pay a visit to our professional colleagues from OPLOT television and radio, the Donetsk state broadcaster, on the edge of the central square. Their building is regularly targeted by HIMARS. The last studios to be hit have not yet been repaired, but the refurbishing is swift, and the five TV and radio channels are broadcasting without interruption. The management and staff are 90 percent female; the few men on staff are assigned to cover the front line, 10 kilometres away. A small kindergarten—a large crèche would attract the attention of the Ukrainian HIMARS—takes care of the employees’ children. It’s the same all over the city, as public crèches have had to close to avoid the strikes.
Initially, in 2014, it was difficult to recruit journalists because of the risk of attack, but that is no longer the case, says editor-in-chief Nina Anatoleva. The Russian intervention in 2022 greatly increased security. But they have lost viewers. Their channels, which used to broadcast widely in the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine, have been cut off—the Ukrainians have blocked the satellite signals—and can now be seen only on the internet or the local network.
As soon as you leave Donetsk, you feel the proximity of the front.
In the afternoon, we travel to the village of Yasynuvata, close to Avdiivka and therefore very close to the front line. The village, which is very exposed to Ukrainian shelling, is home to a school that has been converted into a reception centre for refugees from recently liberated villages. The road is torn up by shellfire and littered with the debris of collapsed bridges. On our left, two Ka–50 Alligator attack helicopters and an MI–8 helicopter are flying low over the ground as they return from the front. To our right, trenches and three rows of dragoons’ teeth, the equivalent of the Swiss Army’s Toblerone armoured barriers, so named after the Swiss chocolate because of their shape, form one of the lines of Russian defence. Military vehicles regularly drive along it.
Our vehicle is entirely anonymous. No convoy, no press badges, no bullet-proof waistcoats or helmets to attract the attention of Ukrainian surveillance drones. The GPS on our mobile phones has long since been deactivated. It’s all about being as ordinary as possible. The road is getting worse and worse, and traffic is now almost non-existent. The driver, the guide, and Umar are perfectly impassive.
The headmistress of the school, a former maths teacher who is now the head of the reception centre, welcomes us. The liberation of Avdiivka and its neighbouring villages at the end of February brought the surviving inhabitants out of the cellars. They are housed here, in the classrooms, while waiting to return to their homes or find new ones. Some of the 160 people housed here have already been able to return to Avdiivka.
Today, it is the turn of Nina Timofeevna, 85 years old and full of verve, to return to her home. She lived in her cellar for two years, making fires on the street. “The Ukrainian soldiers didn’t help us at all,” she assures us, while the Russian army repaired her roof and the windows of her house so that she can return, flanked by two soldiers from the military police who carry her gear. “It’s not a war,” she says. “It’s a massacre of civilians. They want to destroy us.”
In the corridors, volunteers from the Orthodox Church are unpacking boxes of clothes, bottles of water, and food. In the other rooms, a couple with a beautiful blue-eyed cat, old people. A family with a four-year-old boy: They had their flat blown away by a rocket while trying to find food outside. The father was a factory worker and the mother an accountant at the Avdiivka coking plant. They miraculously escaped death and still can’t believe they survived.
On the way back to Donetsk, the discussion turns to life during the war, and Yevgeny, our volunteer guide from Vladivostok, tells me that, in Mariupol in 2014, the neo–Nazi Azov Battalion opened a secret prison in a building at the airport, called the Bibliotheka, the Library, because the victims there were referred to as “books,” like the Nazis who called their victims “Stücke,” “pieces.”
According to eyewitness accounts, dozens of people were tortured and killed there during the eight years when the battalion’s nationalists, tattooed with Nazi symbols, ruled Mariupol while the local police looked the other way. Investigations are under way to identify the victims, and visits to the premises have been suspended. The Russian press reported on these incidents, but Western media remained silent for fear of undermining the narrative of the good Ukrainians and the bad Russians.
My second conclusion now. At the beginning of April, Donbas celebrated the 10th anniversary of its uprising against the Kiev regime, which, in the spring of 2014, had declared a terrorizing war against it. Thousands of people—civilians, children, and fighters—have been killed. Donetsk has taken on the nickname of “City of Heroes.” After so many sacrifices, the three million inhabitants of the oblast, the province, will fight to the bitter end to defend their republic, whatever the cost and whatever people in the West may think of them.
June 5, 2024
Gordon Hahn: On the Brink: The NATO-Russia Ukrainian War Comes to Europe
By Gordon Hahn, Russian & Eurasian Policy, 6/2/24
The NATO-Russia Ukrainian for, the war for and against NATO expansion, is on the brink of expanding to the NATO countries that provoked Russia to invade Ukraine on 24 February 2024 and have supported its continuation ever since, save one—the United States of America—ironically, the real force behind the war’s genesis. Sixteen years ago today’s CIA Director, at the time US Ambassador to Moscow, William Burns was ignored when he informed Washington:
“Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face. ….“Russia’s opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia is both emotional and based on perceived strategic concerns about the impact on Russia’s interests in the region. It is also politically popular to paint the U.S. and NATO as Russia’s adversaries and to use NATO’s outreach to Ukraine and Georgia as a means of generating support from Russian nationalists. While Russian opposition to the first round of NATO enlargement in the mid-1990’s was strong, Russia now feels itself able to respond more forcefully to what it perceives as actions contrary to its national interests” (https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html).
Rather than heed Burns’s warning and that of numerous objective experts, the US and NATO tried to remake Ukraine, funding anti-Russian forces and backing what became a violent, terrorist coup led by neofascists in February 2013, confounding an agreement worked out by regime, opposition, Europe, and Russia that would have resolved the crisis.
The post-coup NATO involvement in Ukraine was discussed in unusual pieces. One had purposes beyond the present discussion, The New York Times (NYT), acknowledged that the CIA was involved in Maidan Ukraine no later than immediately after the coup (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/cia-ukraine-intelligence-russia-war.html). In one rare objective opinion published in NYT on the subject, it was noted: “Over the next decade, the US and its allies built a powerful Ukrainian army while sabotaging the Minsk agreement and later (after the Russian invasion) also sabotaged the Istanbul negotiations. Weapon systems poured in, Ukrainian ports were modernised to fit American warships, and Ukraine was becoming a de facto NATO member. Top Ukrainian officials like Arestovich argued openly they were preparing for a war with Russia. A top adviser to former president Nicolas Sarkozy, warned that the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership of November 2021 convinced Russia that it must attack or be attacked’” (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/opinion/us-ukraine-putin-war.html).
The decision to supply nuclear capable F-16 fighter jets to Kiev and the recent French and presumably other Western countries’ coming declarations making official their previous and future deployments of ‘instructors’ and ‘advisors’ to the Ukrainian front is dangerously escalatory enough. Moscow is required to respond with an answering escalation to save face internally before the Russian people and externally before the world. Now NATO, in the person of its GenSec, has opened up the Overton window by way of convening discussions with member-states on the introduction of troops and the use of Western-supplied mid-range rockets to hit deep inside Russian territory. Poland is on the verge of deploying its missile defense systems to protect Ukraine from Russia attacks. Moreover, a claim is being circulated to the effect that decision of 12 NATO countries (UK, France, Netherlands, Denmark, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania so far) to allow Kiev to use Western missiles to strike deep into Russia — as far as Moscow and Russia’s ‘second capitol’ of St. Petersburg. Germany, not included in the list, has apparently changed its position and now supports attacks on Russia using Western weapons, as Chancellor Olaf Shultz stated standing next to French President Emmanuel Macron last week. Berlin also is still considering sending long-range Taurus missiles to Kiev. For its part, the US is considering giving permission to Kiev to use US weapons, such as ATACM missiles (180-mile range), against military targets deep inside Russia (https://www.wsj.com/world/blinken-signals-u-s-may-allow-ukraine-to-strike-inside-russia-with-u-s-weapons-61fedb10). The US has announced that it will allow the use of weapons it has supplied to Ukraine for attacks on Russian proper in the battle in the Kharkov (Kharkiv) border region now the focus of a Russian counteroffensive. Otherwise, for the moment Washington will continue to pretend it is opposed to Ukraine’s use of American weapons against Russia proper, using official statements and media plants to this tune: “a U.S. official said Washington had expressed concerns to Kyiv over Ukraine’s strikes — using its own weapons — on Russian radar stations that provide conventional air defense and early warning of nuclear launches by the West.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/05/30/ukraine-us-strategy-disagreement-corruption/). Ukraine’s armed forces could not have made this attack without US assistance. The US also will soon conclude a US-Ukraine Security Pact likely intended to institutionalize US weapons, training, intelligence, operational, and financial support to Kiev for the ‘long war.’ Fifteen European states have already concluded such long-term security agreements with Kiev over the last few months (https://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2024/05/31/7458547/).
All this —added to the Western weapons, intelligence, training, operational planning, and undercover military personnel contributed to Kiev — makes Ukraine de facto a full-fledged NATO member-state. In other words, NATO countries — and thus de facto NATO itself — are preparing to do officially what they have been doing clandestinely since February 2022: fight Russia in Ukraine for the right to expand NATO when and where Washington and Brussels want. Before all this, Western countries — all the leading members of NATO — were de facto and de jure co-belligerents with Ukraine against Russia. Suffice it to note that Ukraine does not have space based reconnaissance data for targeting but is receiving such from French, German, US and other NATO militaries.
It appears that the recent Western escalations are driven in part by the need to prevent a Russian victory at all costs in order to save face for the US and NATO and, perhaps no less importantly, to salvage US President Joe Biden’s career in the coming presidential elections—a career that has been so disastrous for his family, Americans in general, and now the world. The authoritarianizing Democrat Party-state Biden administration has no limits in what it will do to achieve foreign and domestic hegemony; regarding the latter, witness the weaponization of the judicial system against both rank-and-file American citizens and former US President Donald Trump. To achieve its ends, Washington and other Western countries are willing to mount an over-escalation that very possibly will provoke Russian to target Western sites, perhaps ‘decision-making centres’ as some Russians have proposed. It is more likely that Moscow will target any objects located in NATO countries used for air sorties for attacks on Russia: airfields in Poland and Romania, operational and intelligence centers, air defense installations in Poland, and the like. In the event, a Europe-wide war conflagration threatens to break out. Such Russian retaliation will cause NATO to invoke Chapter 5 requiring a decision on whether to undertake military measures against Moscow directly. Russian officials and media are already preparing the Russian public for the likelihood of a broader war sparked by the West.
Two weeks ago, Ukraine attacked and damaged or destroyed 2 of Russia’s 10 early ballistic missile warning systems designed to pick up nuclear missile attacks on Russia coming from the south. The Austrian Armed Forces published analysis suggesting that the attacks could have been sanctioned by the US and were meant as a warning to Moscow, because there targets were of no military value for Kiev. If this is how Austrian military elements see this attack, one can imagine how the Russian GRU, SVR, and other security-interested elements see this attack at least in symbolic terms or future potentialities, since the radar systems were not aimed at discovering missiles coming from the west.
These attacks were clearly intended by Ukrainian leader Volodomyr Zelensky to intensify tensions between Russia and the West and provoke Moscow into an overreaction in order to bring NATO closer to direct military intervention in the war. Zelensky has attempted this numerous times, from attacking Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet with Western rockets, using American intelligence for targeting, to claiming Russian plots to explode nuclear power plants and the like. He will now have a much easier job pushing the West and thus Russia over red lines. Expanding the war is the only way to save himself, the Maidan regime, and a Ukraine — if a rump one — with a viable opportunity to join NATO and the EU.
Although these intensifications of the war crisis may not occur immediately, once Russian forces’ offensive seem destined to reach the Dniepr River and/or political instability breaks out in Kiev, Washington will be forced to return to the issue and likely ‘pull the trigger’ allowing Kiev to use Western missiles and operations to hit targets deep inside Russia. This may come in autumn. This dangerous approach would be consistent with the West’s possible strategy of upping the length and costs of the war so that it lasts until Putin’s health falters and/or war costs damage the Russian economy’s health, prompting his political demise. This ‘long war strategy is reflected in the noted security pacts between Ukraine and 15 European states, with Washington soon to follow.
Worse still, the European NATO war risks expanding into a world war, if, for example, in addition to Belarus, other CSTO states were to send equipment or even troops to support Moscow in Ukraine, or if China were to intervene on Moscow’s behalf more aggressively in these or other ways. Western criticism of Chinese trade and technology transfers with military applicability and more recent Western claims that China is already supplying weapons to Moscow demonstrate just how this vector in expansion of the NATO-Russia Ukraine War already is kinetic rather than theoretical. China cannot allow Moscow to lose its ‘special military operation’ that likely would deprive it of its most powerful ally at a time when Washington is gearing up for a twilight struggle against Beijing. Moreover, once the war spreads beyond Ukraine, the temptation on both sides to machinate asymmetrical escalations elsewhere grow. The West might target Georgia, Kazakhstan, or, again Belarus, Syria, and Iran. Moldova and Armenia could become Russian foci of asymmetrical escalation. In a grave pinch, China and Russia might be able to entice North Korea to attack South Korea. The US and China can provoke each other on Taiwan or in the South China Sea. The US’s hundreds of military and intelligence installations abroad could become targets, transformed from assets into liabilities. A kind of perfect storm is coming. This autumn there likely will be: the collapse of the Ukrainian front and/or army and/or regime; the Russian army’s approach to the Dniepr and perhaps encirclement of Zaporozhe, Kharkiv, even Kiev; and an American political crisis (given the guilty verdict against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump). The possibilities are almost endless, and some rather dire ones are becoming increasingly more probable.
