This week saw widespread air strikes on the Russian Federation involving mass aerial drone attacks. Six regions were attacked including the capital, Moscow. Among the targets was the Kursk region where a nuclear plant is located. Several international airports across Russia were temporarily shut down. This is an incredible situation in which Russian territory is being targeted by a military assault not seen since the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany.
The U.S. media could barely contain its glee at the surge in air strikes on Russia. The New York Times hailed them as a “morale booster” for Ukraine, while CNN noted cryptically that the Kiev regime was “emboldened” to hit strategic targets inside Russia. The telling question of course not asked by CNN is: emboldened by whom?
Most of the incoming drones were shot down or disabled by Russian air defenses. But that is beside the point that Russian territory is now being targeted by mass attacks. And there can be no doubt that this “emboldened” military campaign is being enabled and directed by the United States and its NATO allies who are arming the Nazi regime in Kiev to the teeth.
The air strike, this week at Pskov airport is particularly revealing. Several Russian military cargo planes were reportedly destroyed. The location is only some 30 kilometers from Russia’s northwestern border with Estonia and over 600 km from Ukraine. It is almost certain that NATO members Estonia and possibly Latvia enabled that attack on Pskov. Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has openly accused NATO of participating in the air assaults on Russian territory. The British publication, The Economist, also reported that NATO hardware, satellite and navigational logistics were vital for the drone campaign.
Dmitry Medvedev, the Deputy Chairman of Russia’s National Security Council, this week stated that Russia now has legal justification for going to war with NATO members directly. He warned that the world is on the brink of a nuclear conflagration.
We need to step back here and see the process of the proverbial boiling-frog scenario. This describes an insidious creeping situation which would otherwise not be tolerated. A frog apparently will jump back from a pot of boiling water but if the frog is placed in the pot of water which is then slowly brought to the boil it will succumb passively to its ill fate.
The process seems apt as a metaphor for the conflict in Ukraine between the U.S.-led NATO bloc and Russia. The Kiev regime was installed in 2014 through a CIA-backed coup against a democratically elected president; it was armed and trained by NATO, despite its vile Nazi battalions, to attack ethnic Russians in Ukraine; when Russia intervened militarily in February 2022 after diplomatic offers were rejected by the U.S. and NATO, the conflict has steadily escalated over the past 18 months to the point where pre-war Russian territory is now coming under mass air strikes.
This mass assault on Russian territory by NATO forces would have been unthinkable only a few months ago. And yet here we are at that astounding point.
There seems little doubt that the air strikes on Russia are a sort of Plan B to compensate for the abject failure of the NATO-backed regime on the battlefields in Ukraine. The much-vaunted “counteroffensive” that started in June has become a debacle for the NATO sponsors. The turn towards drone strikes on Russia appears to be a change in tactic as a way of terrorizing the Russian population and destabilizing the authority of Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as distracting from NATO’s military incompetence.
Russia’s defense doctrine mandates the use of nuclear weapons if the state’s existential security is threatened. So far, the NATO-backed drone attacks on Russia have not reached that threshold. But the incremental process is dangerously heading in that dreadful direction.
If we were to turn the tables on the situation, the audacity would become even more apparent. Can anyone imagine for a second how the United States would react if a foreign adversary was enabling the launch of air strikes on Washington DC and other strategic centers, whereby airports were shut down and military infrastructure was being destroyed?
Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, said this week that he believed the United States was heading towards a catastrophic hot war with Russia over the coming year. He pointed out that the Biden administration and most of the politicians in Washington are incapable of avoiding such an outcome because of their arrogance, ignorance and irrational Russophobia. The U.S. lackeys in the European Union are also equally pathetic in their acquiescence to such a doomsday scenario.
Russia’s forbearance has been remarkable given the relentless outrageous provocations from the U.S. and NATO. It has reached the stage where Russia has the legal right to defend itself by striking directly at NATO members. World War Three and the end of the planet are all but imminent and only checked because of the immense moral and military fortitude of Russia.
The United States’ incumbent leaders and those of the European Union (with a few honorable exceptions like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán) are showing themselves to the world as the reckless criminals that they are. They are willing to risk the deaths of millions of people and quite possibly planetary extinction.
Russia overcame the existential assault by Nazi Germany. It will do so again against the despicable NATO axis. The formidable strength of the Russian people and its military defenses will ensure that.
However, the ultimate fate of the corrupt Western states is one of definitive, historic failure. The longer this geopolitical conflict in Ukraine persists the deeper will be the fatal damage to Western presumptions of moral authority, governance and its war-driven capitalist economies. The boiling frogs are not in Russia. They are in the endemically corrupt Western regimes.
For rolling days, just turn off CNN, Fox, BBC, New York Times, Guardian, Times, and so on.
Western media are conditioning the public for a false-flag attack on the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant (ZNPP) to blame Russia. That would then provide the United States and NATO a pretext to directly intervene in their proxy war to support the Kiev regime.
The Kiev regime’s month-old counteroffensive is failing miserably to push back Russian defense lines. Indeed, if anything, it seems that Russian forces are turning the tables to gain more territory in eastern Ukraine. The military situation is becoming a fiasco for the NATO-backed regime in Kiev.
Months of much-hyped counteroffensive are delivering nothing but defeat for the Ukrainian forces despite massive supplies of weapons from the U.S. and its NATO allies. Western governments and media can barely hide the reality that NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is turning into a historic debacle. How long can the charade continue before the American and European public demand answers and accountability?
With a major NATO summit due to take place next week in Latvia on July 11-12, the battlefield disaster for the alliance’s Kiev proxy will be potentially an acute embarrassment. There will be severe political repercussions for Washington and the European Union which has funneled close to $200 billion in military support to the Kiev regime since the conflict erupted in February last year.
Blowing up the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant is one way of dramatically shifting the narrative – albeit an act of criminal desperation. The power station is Europe’s largest civilian nuclear installation. The radioactive fallout from a fatal missile strike on the ZNPP would engulf large swathes of Europe, including Russia, with potentially deadly contamination.
Russian forces took over the ZNPP last March, days after launching their special military operation in Ukraine on February 24. Since then, the power station has been routinely fired on by the Kiev regime using U.S. and NATO-supplied rockets. Moscow has presented categorical evidence of NATO missile fragments recovered from air strikes on the plant’s cooling ponds. The UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has visited the ZNPP multiple times and will surely know from where the missiles are being fired, yet the IAEA is conspicuously reluctant to publicly identify the perpetrators. It confines itself to making vague statements expressing concern about security and public safety.
The Western media have shamelessly spun the Kiev regime’s narrative claiming that the ZNPP is being shelled by Russian forces despite the absurdity of such claims given that the Russian military controls the nuclear plant.
The situation is a repeat of the sabotage on the Kakhovka Hydro-electric Power Plant. The dam was blown up last month by the Kiev regime using U.S.-supplied HIMARS rockets. Yet the Western media immediately blamed and continue to blame Russia for that sabotage even though Moscow had been warning the United Nations Security Council for months that the Kiev regime was planning to strike the dam. And even though Russian forces were in control of the dam.
Incredibly, given that obvious precedent, a false-flag attack on the Zaporozhye nuclear plant is now being intensively prepped. The Kiev regime has stepped up public warnings that Russian forces have mined the ZNPP and are going to blow it up. Of concern is that Western media are amplifying these claims regardless of the fact that the IAEA inspectors have said they see no evidence that Russia has mined the nuclear station.
The British Times newspaper this week claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is facing a “perilous moment” of internal dissent within Russia due to alleged war losses in Ukraine and the thwarted mutiny by private military boss Yevgeny Prigozhin. The Times is sowing the notion that “Putin might blow up the ZNPP to bolster his frayed authority”.
In that event, the Times urges, NATO should intervene directly with troops on the ground in Ukraine. “That would be the quickest way to end the cruel war and neutralize Putin’s corrupt regime,” intoned the newspaper with hypocritical reasoning.
The Western media propaganda machine is once again turning reality on its head. The Prigozhin mutiny on June 24 was an abject failure because the Russian armed forces and the Russian public resolutely spurned the half-baked plot, remaining loyal to President Putin’s leadership. There is strong evidence that the plot was a Western-intelligence-backed coup attempt orchestrated by Britain’s MI6, as Scott Ritter has comprehensively analyzed.
Having failed to destabilize Russia and overthrow Putin’s government, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 through their reliable Western media outlets are resorting to a consolation narrative that Putin’s authority is now facing a “perilous moment”. This is fabricating a prelude to blowing up the ZNPP.
But it won’t be Russia bombing a nuclear plant where its forces are stationed. It will be the Kiev regime using NATO munitions and U.S. and British targeting intelligence – as was the case in the sabotage of the Kakhovka dam on June 6.
The Kiev regime is ordering civilians to evacuate from areas near the ZNPP, while its intelligence and military chiefs are outlining “contingency plans” on how to deal with the fallout from an alleged Russian strike. All this is a tad too theatric, indicating orchestration.
The Western media have continually covered up or not reported on the Kiev regime’s habitual air strikes on the ZNPP over the past year. Instead, the media have audaciously twisted the narrative to implicate Russia. Now the Western media are prepping the coming false flag by trying to convince the public that Russia is losing the war in Ukraine and that Putin is losing authority among ordinary Russians.
Gaslighting the public is what the Western media do best, not “reporting”. That’s been the way for decades but never has the media function been so blatant than during the U.S.-led proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.
The shockingly corrupt Neo-Nazi Kiev regime is desperate to keep the war racket going at all costs as is the Western weapons industry and its bought-and-paid-for politicians. (Whether Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, they are all War Party.)
The NATO ideologues are desperate to hide their debacle, which is in effect funded by impoverishing the Western public. Putin isn’t the one who is desperate. It’s the United States and its European satraps who are like the rats in a corner.
If these desperados blow up the Zaporozhye nuclear plant that’s tantamount to NATO dropping a dirty bomb on Russia.
And all the gaslighting by the Western media is unleashing thermonuclear catastrophe.
Here’s a proposal, just one among other possibilities: an antiwar campaign might consider the Western public avowedly and en masse turning off their TVs and toxic media channels. For rolling days, just turn off CNN, Fox, BBC, New York Times, Guardian, Times, and so on. In a concerted, synchronized protest. Turn it off! Before these crazies turn off the entire planet.
Sometimes you wake up from a dream to realize it is telling you to pay close attention to the depth of its message, especially when it is linked to what you have been thinking about for days. I have just come up from a dream in which I went down to the cellar of the house I grew up in because the basement light was on and the back cellar door had been opened by a mysterious man who stood outside.
I will spare you additional details or an interpretation, except to say that my daytime thoughts concerned the media spectacle surrounding the Titan submersible that imploded two miles down in the ocean’s cellar while trying to give its passengers a view of the wreck of the Titanic, the “unsinkable” ship nicknamed “the Millionaire’s Special.” The ship that no one could sink except an ice cube in the drink that swallowed it.
Cellar dreams are well-known as the place where we as individuals and societies can face the flickering shadows that we refuse to face in conscious life. Carl Jung called it “the shadow.” Such shadows, when unacknowledged and repressed, have a tendency to autonomously surface and erupt, not only leading to personal self-destruction but that of whole societies. History is replete with examples. My dream’s mysterious stranger had lit my way through some dark thoughts and opened the door to a possible escape. He got me thinking about what all of us tend to want to deny or avoid because its implications are so monstrous.
The obsession with the alleged marvels of technology together with naming them after ancient Greek and Roman gods are fixations of elite technologues who have lost what Spengler called “living inner religiousness” but wish to show they know the classical names even though they miss the meaning of these myths. Such myths tell the stories of things that never happened but always are. Appropriating the ancient names without irony – such as naming a boat Titanic or a submersible Titan – unveils the hubristic ignorance of people who have never descended to the underworld to learn its lessons. Relinquishing their sense of god-like power doesn’t occur to them, nor does the shadow side of their Faustian dreams.
They will never name some machine Nemesis, for that would expose the fact that they have exceeded the eternal limits with their maniacal technological extremism, and, to paraphrase Camus, dark Furies will swoop down to destroy them.
Nietzsche termed the result nihilism. Once people have killed God, machines are a handy replacement in societies that worship the illusion of technique and are scared to death of death and the machines that they invented to administer it.
The latter is not a matter fit to print since it must remain in the dark basement of the public’s consciousness. If it were publicized, the game of nihilistic death-dealing would be exposed. Because power, money, and technology are the ruling deities today, the mass media revolve around publicizing their marvels in spectacular fashion, and when “accidents” occur, they never point out the myth of the machines, or what Lewis Mumford called “The Pentagon of Power.” Tragedies occur, they tell us, but they are minor by-products of the marvels of technology.
But if these media would take us down to see the truth beneath the oceans’ surfaces, we would see not false monsters such as the Titanic or Moby Dick or cartoon fictions such as Disney’s Monstro the whale, but the handiwork of thousands of mad Captain Ahabs who have attached the technologues “greatest” invention – nuclear weapons – to nuclear-powered ballistic submarines.
Trident submarines. First strike submarines, such as the USS Ohio.
These Trident subs live and breathe in the cellars of our minds where few dare descend. They are controlled by jackals in Washington and the Pentagon with polished faces in well-appointed offices with coffee machines and tasty snacks. Madmen. They hum through the deep waters ready to strike and destroy the world. Few hear them, almost none see them, most prefer not to know of them.
But wait, what’s the buzz, tell me what’s happening: the Titan and the Titanic, wealthy voyeurs intent on getting a glance into the sepulchre of those long dead, while six hundred or so desperate migrants drown in the Mediterranean sea from which the ancient gods were born. These are the priorities of a society that worships the wealthy; a society of the spectacle that entertains and distracts while the end of the world cruises below consciousness.
The United States alone has fourteen such submarines armed with Trident missiles constantly prowling the ocean depths, while the British have four. Named for the three-pronged weapon of the Greek and Roman sea gods, Poseidon and Neptune respectively, these submarine-launched ballistic missiles, manufactured by Lockheed Martin (“We deliver innovative solutions to the world’s toughest challenges”), can destroy the world in a flash. Destroy it many times over. A final solution.
While the United States has abrogated all treaties that offered some protection from their use and has declared their right of first use, it has consistently pushed toward a nuclear confrontation with Russia and China. Today – 2023 June – we stand on the precipice of nuclear annihilation as never before.
A single Trident submarine has 20 Trident missiles, each carrying 12 independently targeted warheads for a total of 240 warheads, with each warhead approximately 40 times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb. Fourteen submarines times 240 equals 3,360 nuclear warheads times 40 equals 134,400 Hiroshimas. Such are the lessons of mathematics in absurd times.
James W. Douglass, the author of the renown JFK and the Unspeakable and a longtime activist against the Tridents at Ground Zero Center for Non-Violent Action outside the Bangor Submarine Base in Washington state, put it this way in 2015 when asked about Robert Aldridge, the heroic Lockheed Trident missile designer who resigned his position in an act of conscience and became an inspirational force for the campaign against the Tridents and nuclear weapons:
Question: “What did the Nuremberg attorneys say about war crimes that had such a deep impact on Robert Aldridge?”
Douglass: “They said that first-strike weapons and weapons that directly target a civilian population were war crimes in violation of the Nuremberg principles. Those Nuremberg principles, which are the foundations of international law, are violated by both by electronic warfare – which is why we poured blood on the files for electronic warfare [at the base] – and also by the Trident missile system, which is what Robert Aldridge was building.”
Robert Aldridge saw his shadow side. He went to the cellar of his darkest dreams. He refused to turn away. He became an inspiration for James and Shelley Douglass and so many others. He was a man in and of the system, who saw the truth of his complicity in radical evil and underwent a metanoia. It is possible.
If those missiles are ever launched from the monsters that carry them through the hidden recesses of the world’s oceans, there will never be another Nuremberg Trial to judge the guilty, for the innocent and the guilty will all be dead.
We will have failed to shed light on our darkest shadows.
Writing in another context that pertains to today’s high-flying nuclear madmen whose mythic Greek forbear Icarus would not listen, the poet W. H. Auden put it this way in “Musée des Beaux Arts”:
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Though no one outside of NATO’s legions of Dr Strangeloves will admit to working towards a nuclear High Noon at the OK Corral, all of NATO’s saber-rating has consequences.
Though Martin Jay’s recent Nord Stream article in praise of Seymour Hersh’ forensic investigation of the 26 September 2022 Nord Stream terrorist attack should need no further comment that, sadly, is not the case not because of any fault in the work of either Hersh or Jay but because NATO has never and can never tell the truth about anything.
Here is Emil Cosman, a Romanian youtube commentator, citing an experienced Danish military diver giving more expert testimony that the USA and their Norwegian Quislings were the culprits. As someone who has scuba dived quite a lot, including with Thailand’s Special Forces and with those who implemented the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue, all of this makes eminent sense to me. Operations, such as the Nord Stream attack, are light years past my capabilities and anyone else who is not a member of the Special Forces or Ukraine’s fictional James Bonds.
NATO will have none of that baby logic. Facebook has labeled Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour “My Lai” Hersh as an unreliable source and a spreader of disinformation. To justify its ludicrous claim, Facebook cites a Ukrainian Centre of Disinformation (I jest not), some obscure Norwegian rag and the fact that Hersh must self-publish, rather than publish in one of NATO’s own disinformation outlets, which have all long ago blackballed truth tellers like Hersh.
Thus, according to Facebook, unless the work of Hersh, Jay and other long-established journalists gets the imprimatur from one or more of NATO’s Pinocchio groups, it can be dismissed out of hand because Hersh, Jay and, for what it is worth, Assange, are not Team NATO players.
When we link Jay’s article with that of Finian Cunningham’s, who wrote of how NATO were using the trumped-up fear of Russian fishing trawlers in the Eastern Atlantic as a pretext to ramp up its stranglehold over the Continental Shelf, the situation is graver still.
From those two articles, we must surmise that, firstly, NATO is turning the Baltic into its own private lake, from which the forces of Russia and allied countries will be excluded. Secondly, we must surmise that NATO intends to fully control the Eastern Atlantic, just as the British did prior to World War One, where they engaged in a Dreadnought naval arms race with Germany that was one of the main causes of the Great War, whose awful consequences we are still dealing with in Ukraine’s killing fields.
But NATO, no more than Vichy Ireland, does not have level-headed fishermen as ambassadors, politicians or journalists. NATO does not want accommodation. NATO wants war. And the job of NATO’s media is to prime its people for war. But never against the real enemy.
As the Russian Embassy in Dublin was under siege over Russian vessels the guts of a thousand miles away, my good friend Diarmaid Ó Cadhla was boarding a British warship moored at Cork harbour and telling its armed NATO occupants to fuck off out of our waters. Although Ó Cadhla won that battle, shortly afterwards, Belgian and Dutch warships dropped anchor in Cork Harbour to let independent-minded folk like Ó Cadhla know that Ireland too will sign up to Team NATO. Gunboat diplomacy, NATO style.
If we now move on to a recent SCF editorial, we see that NATO is serving the same poisoned chalice it is ramming down Ireland’s throat to minor Asian countries like Papua New Guinea and, as previously discussed, the Philippines, whose people need these fights with China like they need a hole in their collective heads.
All of that is bad news not only for them, but for French dictator Macron as well, who has seen his British and American partners (ha ha) steal France’s contract to supply submarines to Australia and whose lucrative deal supplying attack helicopters to Japan has likewise gone the way of the dodo. As France’s other main exports to Japan are wine, water and luxury products, her American partner (ha ha) might do a repeat of the freedom fries fiasco if France does not fully sign up to war against China, on Uncle Sam’s non-negotiable terms.
That is how I deduce the bigger picture from those and related articles, all of which NATO would, like “My Lai” Hersh, dismiss as misinformation, Chinese/Russian bots, Assad apologists and so on. The kindergarten charge of Russian disinformation, in fact, seems to be almost as old as NATO’s wars of aggression. Here, for example, is Daniela Peled, from NATO’s Orwellian named Institute for War and Peace Reporting, on a site seemingly run by the UN Refugee Agency complaining in 2015 about Russian disinformation over the Donbass.
If you follow through on those and other links on Peled, all you get is a NATO apologist, who remains in steady and lucrative employment spinning NATO’s lies and excusing NATO’s crimes. Nothing about Hersh’s My Lai, Assange’s Collateral Murder, Obama’s Abu Ghraib, Joe Biden’s Nord Stream, Hunter Biden’s bio labs or the gang rape of Iraqi child Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and the mass murder of her family by America’s finest for that hussy. No! All is Putin’s Russian propaganda, even when CIA spooks are repeatedly on record as saying such bare-faced lies are part and parcel of NATO’s play book.
NATO’s self-serving flunkeys notwithstanding, it is just an absolutely irrefutable fact that there are Nazis in Ukraine, so many of them in positions of authority that Nazi thuggery is the rump Reich’s prevailing ideology and policy. Ukraine is an open air prison where men must wait their turn to be shanghaied to the front whilst getting strapped, along with their women and children, to a pole for dubious reasons Peled and her fellow truth tellers (ha ha) don’t seem to care about. Though churches in Zelensky’s Reich deliberately make a mockery of all religions, the Pope and all other senior Western clerics keep shtum because they lack the courage of Graham Greene’s feckless whiskey priest.
The United States and its flunkeys believe their armadas can contain China, Iran, Russia and all others who rock their boat. Maybe they can. But it is the duty of the political, diplomatic and military leaders of those and allied countries to defend their core interests, their sovereign integrity and the peace and well-being of their peoples. That is why China, Iran and Russia have invested in and developed a range of symmetric and asymmetric weapons that will give NATO a run for its money, even if NATO’s jackals resort to thermonuclear war as a last throw of the dice.
Though no one outside of NATO’s legions of Dr Strangeloves will admit to working towards a nuclear High Noon at the OK Corral, all of NATO’s saber-rating has consequences. It is one thing for NATO to be the school yard bully but it is another thing for NATO and its propagandists and arms lobbyists to push Russia, China and Iran into a corner where the only option left to them is to hit London, Berlin, Helsinki, Oslo, New York, Washington, Copenhagen and Chicago infinitely harder than Hiroshima, Tokyo and Nagasaki were hit in August 1945.
Because all things must end, so too must NATO’s perpetual war-mongering and, as the nuclear arsenals of China and Russia make clear, NATO can end in only two ways. As things currently stand, The Little Mermaid, Big Ben and the Statue of Liberty must, along with selfie queen Ursula von der Leyen and a million other NATO parasites, be prepared to be incinerated by the heat of a million suns or Creepy Joe Biden and his grubby runts, the hollowed, stuffed and spiritually dead men TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men eviscerates, can holster their guns, sail their war ships back to port and put them on the scrap heap where they and all who profit from them belong.
On Tuesday, February 21st President Putin gave a speech that was expected to be very significant. After it was delivered, however, most pundits said he didn’t say anything we didn’t already know. Most of them focused on his announcement of the withdrawal from the START II treaty. However, he said something far more significant.
An Existential Threat
What Mr. Putin said, when read through the lens of international law, should be chilling to the West.
We would do well to remember that Mr. Putin majored in international law. His speech made a legal case against NATO.
First he listed, by my count, 30 different ways in which the Western nations have attacked Russia. These included the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, support of terrorists in Russia, economic war, terrorist sabotage of the Nordstream Pipeline, financing of the coup and war in Ukraine, directly assisting Ukraine to attack targets in Russia including Russia’s nuclear bombers, and plotting to destroy and partition Russia into pieces.
Nestled in the middle of these was an important statement.
“This means they plan to finish us once and for all. In other words, they plan to grow a local conflict into a global confrontation. This is how we understand it and we will respond accordingly, because this represents an existential threat to our country.”
Putin’s choice of words is extremely significant in light of Russian nuclear doctrine, which states that nuclear weapons could be used by Russia “in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it or its allies, and also in case of aggression against Russia with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is threatened.”
Among the 30 points of evidence of the American war on Russia, Mr. Putin listed several cases of American use of conventional weapons against Russian territory through Ukraine as the thinly veiled proxy, and stated that this represents an “existential threat to [the Russian State].”
What Mr. Putin has just told us is that the Kremlin now considers nuclear use condition #2 to be true, today.
This statement was accompanied by two related actions. The day before the speech Russia tested a Sarmat II ICBM. And at the end of the speech, Mr. Putin announced that Russia shall immediately withdraw from the START II treaty, which limits the number and range of their nuclear missiles.
These three statements and events together should tell the collective West that Russia has just said “Get off my porch!”, and cocked the forty-five.
This doesn’t mean that Russia is going to strike the USA tomorrow morning. But, we are definitely now teetering on the cliff’s edge of nuclear war.
Nuclear Offense and Defense
Mr. Putin has previously said that nobody can win a nuclear war, and it is a war that should never be fought. However, behind the scenes Russia had been furiously preparing to survive just such a war, which they hope to avoid.
Russia has developed and deployed the S-500 and S-550 air defenses which are primarily designed to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles in space before they can release their multiple warheads upon re-entry. Each S-500 battery is capable of simultaneously tracking and destroying 10 ICBMs in the early to mid flight stages.
The S-300 and S-400 batteries armed with the new 77N6-N and 77N6-N1 anti-ballistic missiles are also capable of shooting down ICBM warheads after re-entry at shorter ranges than the S-500.
These systems create an onion of defensive rings around key Russian cities and military bases. In the event of a nuclear exchange the S-500 would target the incoming ICBMs while still in space at a range of 600 kilometers, and outside the borders of Russia; and the S-400 and S-300 batteries would target any deployed warheads that managed to get through. Obviously, preventing as many enemy missiles as possible from being launched would improve the chances of successful defense.
The S-500 was deployed in 2021 to protect Moscow and went into mass production in 2022. So it is very possible that Russia has quietly installed a comprehensive missile defense shield. However, we don’t have enough information to know whether it could be perfectly effective against hundreds of ICBMs at once. Given the maximum launch of 640 ICBMs by NATO, a total of sixty-four S-500 batteries would be required in order to intercept them all.
Due to missile reduction treaties since 1990, NATO’s nuclear triad consists of about 400 Minuteman III ICBMs, 240 submarine-launched Trident II ICBM’s, plus a few hundred B61 nuclear bombs carried by the sixty B1 and B2 heavy bombers in NATO’s air force.
If Russia’s ICBM defenses could take out 90% of 640 incoming missiles, it could survive a nuclear exchange at the cost of absorbing hits from about 50 warheads that got through. Given the smaller modern warheads in NATO’s missile forces, it would do terrible but localized damage. Moscow would probably experience massive damage, but the rest of Russian territory would be fine.
NATO’s nuclear offense forces rely on aging Trident II and Minuteman III ICBMs. The majority of these systems are over thirty years old. This means they will probably have a significant failure rate just to launch. Russia’s modern air defenses and ECM have been designed to defeat these old technologies.
In balance to the effort to perfect defenses against ICBMs, Mr. Putin announced that Russia’s nuclear forces have been 91% modernized. That means that the ICBMs that Russia would fire all have maneuverable hypersonic warheads. US air defenses are currently unable to defend against these.
The spacing of American Minuteman silos was designed for the majority to survive a first strike and launch retaliation. However, Russian maneuverable hypersonic multiple re-entry vehicles nullify this defense if the targeting data is accurate. Russia has to accurately hit 400 ground targets in the first strike to nullify a response.
Thus, if Russia strikes first, it may be able to eliminate the majority of incoming missiles by destroying them on the ground. The 240 submarine launched Trident missiles would be the primary threat to defend against. Thus a first strike could reduce the number of expected retaliation missiles by 62%.
NATO’s aging heavy bomber fleet is unlikely to be able to penetrate Russian air defenses. While these bombers were constantly kept in the air at the peak of the cold war, that is no longer the case.
A first strike would make it unlikely that the bombers and refuelers could get off the ground in time to effectively respond.
Russia currently has a window of superiority in both nuclear offense and defense that NATO is rapidly trying to close. It is not in Russia’s interest to allow NATO to close the technology gap in air defense and ICBM offense.
The world is now on the threshold of nuclear war. Russia keeps warning the West. The West keeps ignoring the warnings and doubling down. The immovable object is meeting the unstoppable force.
Three important things have changed since the Cold War which have changed the probability of a nuclear exchange.
Nuclear proliferation means that MAD can be bypassed if the identity of the first attacker is uncertain to the target. A missile that appears from an unexpected direction may not have been launched by the most obvious suspect.
MAD depends on both parties being rational actors. The West ceased to be rational when they destroyed Nordstream.
Russia may now have an effective missile defense shield, while NATO does not.
The Russian Method Projected Forward
Just as in December 2021 when Russia asked NATO for security guarantees, Russia follows the letter of the law and procedure. They gave NATO the opportunity to back down or negotiate. When they were rebuffed, Russia intervened militarily in Ukraine, about 70 days after the initial demand for negotiation with NATO.
Following the same method, in 2023, Russia has just made the legal case that the USA and NATO are at war with Russia and pose an existential threat to Russia’s existence.
It seems likely to me that in the coming weeks Russia’s ally, China, will offer a peace deal which freezes the Ukraine conflict within the current lines of contact, i.e. Ukraine conceding lost territory to Russia.
If the West rejects the offered peace, which seems fairly likely, then all of the conditions for a nuclear war will be in place. All it will take is a new provocation by NATO to trigger a first strike by Russia. Or worse, if both parties realize this is the case, both will have the incentive to strike first.
In the next 360 days we are in greater danger of a nuclear exchange between Russia and NATO than we have ever before seen. There is a 60 to 90 day window remaining for this outcome to be avoided. Let us pray that God will turn the hearts of the Western leaders away from the suicidal folly they have embraced.
On February 22, the day after Russia recognized the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, I said a situation had now been created in which the second most likely reaction by the US/NATO would be to “Launch a military effort to take back LPR, DPR, and Crimea—using Ukrainians as cannon fodder, or, if they dare, bringing in US/NATO troops directly,” and that would result in a “loss for US/NATO, before or after a devastating, probably nuclear, world war.”
Ten days later, on March 3rd, right after the Russian army entered Ukraine, I wrote: “WWIII is not a remote possibility. We are already in it. The only question is: How much worse will it get?
At that time, I would have put the chances of nuclear war at more than 0 but less than 30%.
By mid-April, I noted that it was now clear that Ukraine was an entirely dependent ward of the US/NATO, which is the principal in this fight, and whose weapons, as well as military and intelligence officers—in Washington, Brussels, and personally in Kiev—are effectively waging this war. I also insisted that the notion that some shrewd, mutually face-saving compromise can be negotiated to end this conflict is wishful thinking, and that the decisive question in this battle between Russia and the US/NATO is not “What compromise can they negotiate?” but “Who is going to accept defeat?”
Since then, things have gotten much worse. It is now clear that US/NATO personnel are heavily involved in every aspect of the fighting in Ukraine. The Intercept reports of “a broad program” of:
clandestine American operations inside Ukraine are now far more extensive than they were early in the war…There is a much larger presence of both CIA and U.S. special operations personnel and resources in Ukraine than there were at the time of the Russian invasion in February….Secret U.S. operations inside Ukraine are being conducted under a presidential covert action finding…[T]he president has quietly notified certain congressional leaders.
This program is part of an “international partnership with the special operations forces of a multitude of different countries” These international—i.e., NATO—forces are there to help remedy Ukraine’s “most acute” problem: the fact that it “is losing its most battle-hardened and well-trained forces.”
The New York Times also reports on reports on the “secretive operation involving U.S. Special Operations forces hints at the scale of the effort to assist Ukraine’s still outgunned military,” including “commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania…working inside Ukraine.”
All of which is confirmed by Ukrainian POWs, like the guy below, who said “at least 100 foreign fighters, including from the USA, Poland and Great Britain, helped the Ukrainian military in Kharkiv: ‘If the foreigners had not helped us we would have disintegrated immediately.’"
This is not a matter of a few random "volunteers." These are US/NATO personnel, directing and participating in combat, being paid directly or indirectly by their governments and seconded to the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU). If they are not presently on active duty, they were allowed/recruited to “retire” into more lucrative “private” legions, contracted and paid for by their governments. They are actively fighting in coordination with and under the direction of those governments, moving US/NATO participation beyond the supply of weapons and real-time targeting and intelligence.
In April, Bruce Fein, constitutional and international law specialist and former deputy attorney general, said that the “systematic and massive assistance to [Ukraine’s] military forces to defeat Russia” constitute “systematic or substantial violations of a neutral’s duties of impartiality and non-participation in the conflict,” and means that “the United States and several NATO members have become co-belligerents with Ukraine against Russia.” It’s gone way beyond that now. As Scott Ritter said in September: “Russia is no longer fighting a Ukrainian army equipped by NATO, but a NATO army manned by Ukrainians.”
The countries Russia is fighting
Indeed, a couple of weeks ago, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, echoing the “in it to win it” stance of the U.S. leadership, made it explicit that the Kiev regime is a proxy for the US/NATO: "Russia's victory in the war against Ukraine will be a defeat of NATO. This cannot be allowed."
As existential an imperative as it gets. So, as far as US/NATO leadership is concerned—and they are correct—this is a war between the US/NATO and Russia, the very existence of NATO is at stake, and a Russian victory over the Kiev regime cannot be allowed.
Except if nuclear weapons are needed to prevent it No, I don’t hear that in there either.
On the other side, from the beginning, Russia’s offensive in Ukraine was precisely a reaction to actions it cannot accept—the threat of de facto NATO expansion into Ukraine and the fascist-dominated Kiev regime’s ongoing attacks against the Donbass republics. Russia’s determination to end that unacceptable state of affairs has only been strengthened by the costs and achievements of its combat, and by the reactions of its Kiev/US/NATO adversary. Having seized a large swath of territory, and—after Washington and London quashed negotiations that could have limited Kiev’s loss to Donetsk, Lugansk, and Crimea—and having annexed those regions plus Kherson and Zaporizhzhia via referenda, Russia now considers that it is fighting to protect the territory of the homeland. Having seen the US/NATO pour weapons, real-time intelligence, combat and control personnel into the fight, carry out and sanction assassination and sabotage attacks on undisputed Russian territory and Crimea (Kerch bridge) as well as on the civic infrastructure of its own members (Nord Stream), Russia is well aware of who its adversary is and how difficult and imperative the fight will be. Every day Russia does not attack Kiev’s co-belligerents is a day of Russian restraint. That will not last forever, especially if the level of direct combat participation by US/NATO increases, which it will have to in order to have any chance of defeating Russia.
The goal of that part of the West is to weaken, divide and ultimately destroy our country. … Today our armed forces…[are]fighting not only against neo-Nazi units but actually the entire military machine of the collective West…. Washington, London and Brussels are openly encouraging Kiev to move the hostilities to our territory. They openly say that Russia must be defeated on the battlefield by any means, and subsequently deprived of political, economic, cultural and any other sovereignty and ransacked.
He, too, is saying that the victory of that adversary would be an existential defeat that cannot be allowed.
Except if nuclear weapons are needed to prevent it?
It is true, as Scott Ritter and Moon of Alabama have pointed out, that—contrary to the characterizations of Western politicians and pundits—in his extraordinary September 21st speech, Vladimir Putin did notthreaten the first use of nuclear weapons. In fact, he spoke in response to what he perceives—not without reason—as “nuclear blackmail” by his Kiev/US/NATO adversary:
They have even resorted to the nuclear blackmail. I am referring not only to the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which poses a threat of a nuclear disaster, but also to the statements made by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia.
I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.
The citizens of Russia can rest assured that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be defended – I repeat – by all the systems available to us. Those who are using nuclear blackmail against us should know that the wind rose can turn around. [my emphases]
So, while it’s true that Putin here is not initiating, but responding to, a threat of nuclear weapons use—and suggesting a response with “different types of weapons” to boot—it’s also true that he explicitly and emphatically (“This is not a bluff”) warns that all, including nuclear, weapons systems will be used to defend the “our people” and the territory of “our Motherland”—which now includes Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. In that speech, Putin was neither threatening nor abjuring the use of nuclear weapons.
It is certainly true that Russia’s explicit military doctrine puts much stricter limits on nuclear weapons use than does that of the United States. Russian doctrine only allows the use of nuclear weapons in two circumstances: 1) “[I]n response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies,” or 2) “in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy.”
The U.S., on the other hand, is all about keeping its nuclear options open. In the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), cited by Ritter—which Biden promised to revise but didn’t—the U.S. maintains a “range of flexible nuclear capabilities needed to ensure that nuclear or non-nuclear aggression against the United States, allies, and partners will fail to achieve its objectives.” This echoes the 2001 NPR: “U.S nuclear forces will continue to provide assurance to security partners, particularly in the presence of known or suspected threats of nuclear, biological, or chemical attacks or in the event of surprising military developments.” For the U. S. military, “desirable qualities for nuclear weapons in flexible, adaptable strike plans include options for variable and reduced yields” [my emphasis]. Thus, since the George W. Bush administration, the U.S. has developed dial-a-yield nuclear weapons whose “variable and reduced yields” provide a wide range of use options.
It’s important to know these doctrinal differences. They demonstrate what the current media narrative deliberately hides: that it’s not Russia, but the U.S.—which has been planning a nuclear attack on Russia since before WWII ended—that is explicitly planning and willing to use nuclear weapons to overcome battlefield “surprises.” As Mark Sleboda put it: “The Pentagon has been openly and proudly developing and deploying what they call ‘more useable’ battlefield nuclear weapons, specifically for use against Russia and China” [my emphasis].
Still, in the current context in Ukraine, given that Russia considers the battle of existential importance, and the terrain of actual combat its “homeland” territory, Russia’s use of a nuclear weapon is possible even within its more restrictive explicit policy. This is a very dangerous situation, and no “doctrine” here guarantees against the use of nuclear weapons.
Nor, I regret to inform you, does any explicit “doctrine” anywhere. The actual policy for nuclear weapons use of any state that has them, and the danger to the entire world as long as any nation does, is: We will use them when we judge that it's absolutely necessary to do so. And we will determine what “absolutely necessary” means.
The question in this dangerous situation is: Which party is more likely to find it absolutely necessary to use nuclear weapons to stave off what it considers an existential defeat? The insistent Western political and media narrative has raised the specter of nuclear weapons use upon the assumption that it is Russia who will have to use nuclear weapons to stave off the defeat it is already suffering. Because they know no one would believe the party that’s winning would use nuclear weapons, they must get you to believe Russia is losing—so you’ll know who must be to blame in case a nuclear “surprise” happens.
With all due caution about the unpredictability of warfare, the unexpected tenacity of Ukrainian soldiers, the willingness of western leaders to pour money, weapons, personnel, and other resources into the conflict, the setbacks that Russian forces have experienced, et. al., the idea that Russia is on the verge of defeat in Ukraine is ridiculous. And they—the US/NATO/Ukrainian managers of this war—know it. If you’ve come to believe Russia is losing, it’s because they’ve lied to you, and got you to believe a narrative they know is not true. They toldyou they are lying about this conflict, and they are still confident you’ll believe them.
The analysis of the current situation I find persuasive is that Russia quickly captured and still holds a large swath of territory (~116,000 sq. km). Ukraine recaptured a small portion (5-8%) of that territory (~9000 sq. km. according to CNN, ~6000 sq. km., according to BBC) by throwing its best troops and equipment into two major offensives that “relied heavily on U.S. intelligence and high-tech weaponry,” as well as larger numbers of foreign forces (without whom “we would have disintegrated immediately”). The Russians, outnumbered by 4-5 to 1, made an orderly retreat to more defensible lines, preserving their own forces while at the same time decimating the cream of the Ukrainian army—"its most battle-hardened and well-trained forces.” Ukraine’s attempts to extend their gains around Kherson and Kharkov have been repulsed.
In parallel attacks, the US/NATO/Ukraine “side” undertook the assassination of a Russian intellectual in Russia, the sabotage of the Crimea bridge and the Nord Stream pipeline, and various attacks on Russian cities close to Ukraine. In response, Russia—the largest country in the world, whose strategic depth (size and materiel of armed forces, fighting-age population, industrial capacity, etc.) dwarves that of Ukraine—has mobilized 300,000 more men, began the campaign of destroying Ukrainian electrical and other dual-use infrastructure that it had previously abjured (to the surprise of shock-and-awe American warmakers who blow all that stuff up first thing), and amassed troops and planes at multiple border sites. Russia has also set up a special council to coordinate industrial resources and military needs on a wartime scale. Russia has only just begun.
There is a major Russian air and land offensive coming and it is very unlikely that what’s left of the AFU will be able to repulse it. To have any chance for that would require the direct, massive, and quick intervention of US/NATO forces. And even that may not be enough. In this theater, it would be very difficult for anyone—and certainly for Kiev itself—to win a conventional-arms war against Russia.
While nothing is inevitable, it is not Russia but the US/NATO/Kiev that is more likely to have to use nuclear weapons to stave off defeat. For Russia to be faced with the need to use nuclear weapons to stave off an existential defeat that threatens “the very existence of the Russian state,” it would require that the Armed Forces of Ukraine push Russia out of all the territory it has gained, and be posing an imminent threat to Crimea and other Russian territory. The possibility of that happening is on another planetmany orders of magnitude less than the possibility that Russian forces will rout the AFU and put the US/NATO/Kiev regime in a position where it would have to use nuclear weapons to prevent its existential defeat and demise.
And they know it. It is exactly for that kind of possibility in that kind of theater that the U.S. developed its “flexible” nuclear weapons policy, “deploying…‘more useable’ battlefield nuclear weapons, specifically for use against Russia and China.”
Russia is not losing this war, and is in no position where it has to consider using nuclear weapons. Zelensky isn't begging every week for more weapons and more money, and for preventative strikes on Russia, because Russia is losing. The US is not sending the 101st Airborne into Romania a few miles from the Ukraine border because Russia is losing. It is because they know that Kiev is in existential danger that they need to get you thinking that Russia is.
The idea that Russia is about to use nuclear weapons, which would only be harmful to its own forces and territory, is another fantasy scenario, along with Russia shelling its own nuclear power plant, bombing its own POW camp, sabotaging its own pipeline, or blowing up its own dam. In fact, it’s a projection of US/NATO/Kiev’s fears and plans.
The tell on that is the suggestion that Russia might explode a “demonstration” nuke in the Black Sea or somewhere, as a gesture of intimidation. Russia doesn’t do gestures. It acts. If it needs to use nuclear weapons, it will use them, without bluff, intimidation, or “demonstration.” That’s the American game, and specifically with nuclear weapons. The only nuclear weapons use in the world was by the United States, precisely as a demonstration—blowing up militarily meaningless civilian targets (cities!) in order to intimidate its present (Japan) and future (USSR) enemies, to show them what we could do. The U.S. is projecting its own nuclear strategy on Russia, revealing what it does and is thinking about.
Ditto, Russia staging a “false flag” nuclear explosion. It’s interesting that the notion of “false flag” operations is suddenly not dismissed as unthinkable “conspiracy theory,” but presented as a possibility that everyone should seriously consider. False-flag allegations are at once important to take seriously and intrinsically difficult to untangle. Anyone might do a false flag, but, again, that’s typically America’s, not Russia’s, game. You want false flags? Remember the Maine, and the Maddox (Tonkin Gulf), and Operation Northwoods, and Syrian chemical weapons attacks, and Saddam’s WMDs, etc. Sleboda again: “False flags and/or WMDs are after all the indisputable standard US MO and playbook for pretexts for military action from the Spanish American War, to Vietnam, to Iraq, to Syria.” More projection.
In this case, Western media managers are confident they can convince you that Russia is more likely than Kiev to false-flag blow up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and the Kakhovka dam, both of which Russia controls and Kiev has been attacking; they are confident they can persuade you that Russia is more likely to false-flag explode a nuclear weapon than is Kiev—although the White House and Pentagon say there is “there is no evidence” and “no indication” for such a senseless action on Russia’s part; and they are certainly confident they can get to dismiss the possibility of a Ukrainian “dirty bomb” false-flag, although Ukraine has the materiel, means, motive, and absolutely no doctrine of restraint, and Shoigu and Lavrov claim to have “specific information” they are willing to present to the UN. Because Western media managers are confident they can make you believe anything. And so often—just about every time it was crucial to them—they have. Really, if they can get people to believe this was a Russian false flag:
(Courtesy Matt Orfalea)
The US/NATO/Kiev punditocracy and media apparatus is positing for us a situation in which nuclear weapons use has kinda-sorta, you-can-bet-on-it, already been decided upon, by Russia, because it is losing. They hope, if you believe that, you will accept direct, overt, massive US/NATO military intervention. They know American and European publics will not accept such dangerous intervention unless they’re convinced that it’s not about some prior plan to destroy Russia and preserve U.S. hegemony, but about saving the world from the nuclear threat Russia has unleashed (as well as saving the brave Ukrainian regime which would have defeated Russia fair and square if Russia hadn’t cheated with those nukes). They will produce the evidence for that, if it’s absolutely necessary. It won’t be any harder than getting people to believe that Russia blew up Nord Stream.
Of course, overt US/NATO intervention will include the “flexible” use of nuclear weapons, if battlefield surprises make it absolutely necessary—i.e., if they are losing. Which is very likely.
Any way you cut it, the way this war is going, it is reasonable—if not optimistic—to posit a 50-50 chance of nuclear weapons use.
Here are the three scenarios, in order of likelihood:
Scenario one: Without overt, direct US/NATO intervention, with just the current level of borderline co-belligerency from NATO states, the Kiev proxy regime drives Russia back to the February 21st lines. That means Kiev is on a roll, and there is nothing in the militant, fascist, Russian-hating ideology driving that regime that will stop them from continuing on at least to Crimea. At that point, if not sometime shortly before, Russia will conclude that “the very existence of the state is in jeopardy.” Russia will not accept that existential defeat. At least a 50-50 chance Russia will use nukes to prevent it.
Fortunately, we are nowhere near this scenario. It is extremely unlikely. The chance of it occurring is less than 10%.
Scenario two: In a renewed offensive, Russian forces rout the AFU, and the US/NATO decline to intervene with countervailing military force. Combat ends without the use of nukes. Whoever’s left in Kiev capitulates on Russian terms. US/NATO try to preserve a rump regime in Kiev that can support an eventual revanchist insurgency. Because this would be exactly the clear defeat for US/NATO that Stoltenberg said cannot be allowed, I do not think they’ll just let it happen. This non-interventionist scenario can only occur if Russia routs the AFU very quickly. I put the chances at less than 50-50.
Scenario three: Under whatever pretext, US/NATO forces enter the battle as overt co-belligerents. Any way this occurs—from no-fly zone to the 101st Airborne and US-European infantry and tank brigades—it will result in US and European casualties and US and European ships, bases, and cities being destroyed. Russian targets, too, of course, but Russia will not allow this fight to be contained in its territory or neighborhood. This will be the inescapable, worldwide, fight to the finish of either NATO or Russia. For either side, defeat cannot be allowed.
At least a 50-50 chance that the losing side will use nuclear weapons to stave it off.
Please understand that this scenario—“a large scale war with Russia and joining NATO as a result of the defeat of Russia”—is what Kiev desired and planned for (“The coolest thing”), as Zelensky adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, said in 2019, giving the date it would occur and details of how it would unfold:
Oct 25, 2022
Zelensky advisor Arestovitch talks about the need for large-scale war with Russia to bring in NATO. Describes in detail and gives date.
“A large scale war with Russia and joining NATO as a result of the defeat of Russia. The coolest thing”
The chance of this scenario occurring is increasingly likely. I would say 50-50 and getting worse. The dynamic will only reverse if there is political upheaval in Europe that causes the internal fracture of NATO. I wouldn’t have thought this scenario so likely in March or April, but the US/NATO leadership has committed itself in every way, and talked itself into a tight box. (They have already sent the 101st Airborne and are talking up nukes!)
This scenario is made more possible by the fact that the West—especially the US—has no idea what kind of danger they face in getting into it. Americans think they can bluff, intimidate, and escalation-dominate any adversary. They do not think it’s possible that they will suffer a nuclear attack, because they think their nuclear weapons are the thing that has protected and always will protect them from that, when it’s actually been the admirable caution of Soviet submarine and early warning officers who prevented their annihilation. This time, there will be no bluff.
What will not happen, Scenario Null, is some Solomonic negotiation that stops the fighting before it gets out of hand. There will be no Minsk/Musk 3. Been there, done that. Gone, baby, gone. The military conflict that’s happening now is because those negotiations failed. The negotiations that were taking place after this military conflict started, which could have resulted in a Minsk/Musk 3, with Ukraine only losing Donetsk and Lugansk and Crimea, were nixed by the UK, under the orders of the US, with the acceptance of the EU—because they will not (permit Kiev to) give up an inch of territory, unless forced to do so by military defeat—which cannot be allowed.
The only negotiation will be over terms of surrender once things are settled on the battlefield. The result will be that one side or the other suffers a decisive, unallowable defeat. If Russia returns to its February 21st position, it is defeated. Donetsk and Lugansk will be overrun by Kiev fascists, Crimea will be under threat, and the dismemberment of Russia will begin in earnest. A rainbow of color revolutions! If US/NATO/Kiev does not irreversibly recapture Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and maybe even Crimea, it is defeated. The Zelensky government will collapse amidst a fascist melee, Ukraine will become a neutered rump state, and NATO will be a laughingstock, on the road to dissolution.
Both sides know this. The principals on both sides have eliminated any possibility of mutually acceptable compromise and are fully invested in fighting to win a definitive victory. There's no outside force—no international organization or group of domestic anti-war politicians (who do not exist in the US., anyway)—that is going to impose a peace. All the powers that could do so are the principal protagonists in this conflict, too heavily invested in it to accept anything less than decisive victory, and too rightfully afraid to accept the unacceptable defeat that is the only alternative.
As I said previously, (”Many more loose variables, and many more profoundly stupid actors”), we are at a greater risk of nuclear war than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Today, the two major nuclear powers are in ongoing combat. Today, the president is Joe Biden.
The only element that could bring an abbreviated end to fighting would be a political and social uprising of people in particular nations that would force their political leadership to withdraw prematurely and accept defeat. That would of course be in a country whose side in Ukraine is losing. If you want to think that means Russia, have at. We’ll see. In my understanding, the greatest possibility for that is in European countries, whose populations are being hammered by suicide sanctions, who will be the first to be devastated by the expansion of combat, and who are not fully brainwashed by the neocon/neoliberal US media apparatus. It’s only a slight chance, because it will require real street battles against a determined political leadership that knows its capitulation would bring that unallowable defeat to the side it is aligned with in Ukraine.
So, there’s at least a fifty-percent chance that a military situation will arise in which one of the parties in this conflict faces an imminent existential defeat that it cannot allow. (I think that’s most likely to be the US/NATO/Kiev. We shall see.) And there’s at least a fifty-percent chance that the party threatened with such a defeat will use every weapon in its arsenal to stave it off. Therefore, there’s a fifty-percent chance of nuclear war. If you want to argue otherwise, in this war between the US/NATO/Kiev vs. Russia, please tell me: Who will accept defeat?
We all know that such an outcome is irrational. It will not be confined to the Ukraine theater, will devastate humanity, and render any “victory” pointless. Unfortunately, war is not a rational enterprise.
Nobody will accept defeat, so everybody will lose.
