As S states, "Airliners should simply not be anywhere near active combat zones."
Of course no commercial airliners have flown over the declared battlefield, which includes all of Ukraine, since the SMO commenced. It's why dignitaries who visit Kiev take the 7-hour train from the Polish border and arrange the elaborate permissions w/ Moscow, deconflicting as it were, while the dignitaries visit.
But when the combat zone shifts, terroristically & unpredictably, to unannounced quadrants, regions far from the line of contact, it's another matter entirely.
Sporadic whack-a-mole terrorism is possible now anywhere in Russia. Crafty Ukrainian drone operators can set up their rogue ops in Georgia, for instance, and fire on Chechnya while hoping to create a confused & chaotic incident involving commercial airliners. Crafty Ukrainian drone operators can set up rogue ops in Estonia or in Finland, treating themselves to a front row seat for aerial provocations in Saint Petersburg.
Especially when you consider the *accepted* explanation for how the NordStream sabotage happened—drunken Ukrainians under Zaluzhny’s direction sailing the Andromeda yacht from a Polish port, etc—you see the possibility for nefarious terrorism wherever Russia’s borders intersect near Western ones: we saw last summer an out-of-the-way drone attack on a Murmansk airfield which must surely have originated in Finland [drunken Ukrainians again.]
With a Starlink mini attached to the drone, the operator doesn't even have to be in the same *country* as the drone. All that's needed is a drone smuggled in (not even that , if you can buy one locally, just smuggle in the dish and the warhead) battery plugged in by an operative and you're good to go...
Also, Western MSM has had the odd press release throughout the year from Western MIC drone makers, about their drones being popular with Western Special Forces.. which raises the question of *where* they're being used, and the choices pretty much ALL boil down to "against Russia".
NiggleS: I wasn't aware of these capabilities until I read your post. Seems like "terrorism anywhere, anytime" will be here to stay. Not a comforting thought.
"During a White House meeting with Israeli officials in 2009, Samantha Power pulled out a photo of her infant son. Her son, she said, is a descendant, from his father’s side, of the Vilna Gaon, Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman Kremer, the 18th-century Jewish sage who is considered the greatest talmudic scholar of his time. This impressive lineage — a product of Power’s marriage to prominent law professor Cass Sunstein — offers some insight into Power’s personal sense of connection to Jews." Sure. The greatest ever numbers of pediatric amputees in Gaza (in the context of the still-opened whining and shameless Holo museums) is the greatest evidence of talmudic values. Pediatric amputees! -- And ALL major jewish organization in North America continue "standing with Israel."
Considering the accepted fact of the US congress being an "aipac-occupied territory," and US State Dept. being heavily zionized, who has been really making the decisions about doing "terrorism anywhere, anytime?" Banderites have been financed and armed by US. ISIS/Al Qaeda have been financed and armed by US. ... The jewish idiots think that the living by Kol Nidre rule and destroying the formerly plump host-country augurs well for "ersatz yizrael" - No. Jews were never able to create their distinct civilization but they were always adept at destroying other peoples civilizations. See the jewish Bolshevik revolution in Russia (which was financed by jewish bankers in Germany, UK, and US, and brought immense sufferings and deaths to Russian people); Judea War on Germany (declared in 1933); the destruction of Iraq and the beautiful formerly flourishing Libya, and the ruination of the multi-denominational Syria.
The US and European vassals will be next. There are always local compradors helping to destroy their countries, from the psychopaths Cheney and Erik Schmidt to the amoral Ursula, mad Salome, miserable Macron, and hapless slave Sandu.
You have to bear in mind that according to many leading rabbis and Talmudic scholars, Gentiles are not fully human - they lack proper souls. To Jews of that persuasion, all Gentiles without exception are lower and have less dignity than white slave owners accorded to their black slaves.
Incidentally, in general the learned books explaining why black people were inferior to whites appeared only after black slavery increased. It seems that slave holders had some residual conscience, which they assuaged by persuading themselves that black people were not fully human.
Very similar indeed to the Zionist beliefs. If you want to enslave people, or steal their land, just explain that they aren't really human so they have no rights (and perhaps "do not feel pain as we do").
"the choices pretty much ALL boil down to "against Russia..."
Well....two or three or four can play THAT game. What's good for the goose...
Parties sympathetic to Russia can take down Euro-aircraft(military or civvy) with
an easy "counter punch".
Want to end the baseball or NFL season in the U$? A couple of drones dumping anarchy on an NFL playoff game (Big 10 Saturday event?) can ratchet that dynamic. All those shoulder launched nasties, sold by Ukes on the black market can show up anywhere/anytime. Take down a couple of western airliners and watch the economies crater. No more tourism or biz trips via air. Plus...the west has vulnerable sea trade too. FAFO...Just sayin'.
The government seeking the death penalty for Luigi but not for mass murder school shooters shows what they fear. Instead of attacking a football game try taking out the top 3 guys at Lockheed and half the Board one night in their own beds. A week later repeat with the corporation that builds submarines. Now the chaos is off the charts but only for the rich and powerful. At the peons level who cares if rich corporation heads get killed - heck, let's throw a party. BUT FOR THEM, it is all of a sudden, no longer fun to make money in weapons manufacturing. I know we all think those big wigs are overpaid but they do have certain valuable skills and are not easily replaceable. Especially if you keep killing them.
Let's not encourage the killing of powerless Joe's and Jane's who had no say. Instead target the movers and shakers and get better results while taking the moral high ground.
Dear Federal agents: Nothing here encouraging or supporting attacks on Americans. Instead, this is a discussion of vulnerabilities and moral precepts as applied in warfare.
Which would be the reason for the Trump team calling out the assassination of General Kirilov as a bad move.
Imagine: Buy a few Carl Gustav (M4) from the Mexican Cartels (shipping included), cash buy large agricultural drones in the US, buy some Starlink terminals from Craigslist. Marry them up and pay a visit to your favourite warhawk senator or government official...
An all (or mostly) U.S. manufactured/sourced weapon system. Very hard to blame Russia for that...
And very few ordinary Americans would care about the victims enough to get onboard with any such propaganda anyway...
Killing nobodies is easier and with the amount of planning that went into the CEO kill the culprit would stay forever hidden if not for the fact that TPTB were in rage that the killing visited them too. I am not advocating anything - just pointing out that the dynamic of any uprising is titled towards killing the weak.
Just imagine the amount of work and money that went into killing the top of Hamas. No grassroots organisation would manage to do such level of mayhem - they would be caught before even having their plans ready. OTOH you do not need to to take out 3 top guys at once - TPTB would get pissed off with the first one. If one manages the second the (miserable remains of the) civil rights are suspended forever.
But you are right of course - this is where it hurts. The problem here is that the deep state is like hydra. But it would be a good start and if they do not stop then we are lost anyway.
Very poor choice of target, the ordinary American citizen is who you *don't* want to rile up.
The ideal target would be power lines/ substations in Washington DC. Imagine rolling blackouts, with Government being cut back to "essential only" yet somehow society keeps rolling on...
The LAST thing DC inhabitants want is for people to *see* how irrelevant DC is.
Who is going to do that? Russia is not going to do that, terrorism is favourite tool of the West. So, who? I am completely sceptic on that's going to happen
Ex: U.S. Navy is buying drones that never spend a day on a naval base or ship. They go straight to an Air Force base and then get put on a plane to an undisclosed foreign location.
Doesn’t take a genius to guess where they’re going.
As Russia has demonstrated with the SMO, if they are pushed too far they will act. So when they do act all the cries of legality, morality, moralizing and condemnation won't matter as actions have consequences and every action may have equal and even more severe reactions.
Seeker: Good comment. The current situation, which is already at a very dangerous level, may conceivably escalate further and reach a point of no return - a point when the unthinkable happens. After WWII, many declared that "this must never happen again", and yet, 85 years later, here we are... This recurring madness has to stop.
85 years ago the western elites did not expect that the pile of gold they acquired (almost 80% of world reserves) would run out so fast. They need a new victim to loot
Agree. The US has enormous resources but bankers and mega-corporations prefer an easy rout of looting other peoples' resources by using the obedient NATO. The dishonorable US brass and the dishonorable European vassals are a property of Looters -- the banking cabal and fascist supranational corporations.
Thanks to the shale oil boom, the US is now sitting on more oil reserves than Russia, which estimates as having 256 billion barrels of untapped oil. The next-richest countries in terms of oil after that are: Saud Arabia (212 billion), Canada (167 billion), Iran (143 billion) and Brazil (120 billion).
Unfortunately the West with its delusional sense of superior morality will always take the moral high ground, just take that obnoxious Josep Borrell comparing the West to a "garden" and the rest of the world to a "jungle".
I would agree that Russia doesn't want the war. How exactly do you know Russia's objectives to draw the conclusion Russia is not acting exactly how they desire to act? Unless you know and understand Russia's goals you are just speculating.
No matter how well events are planned there will always be unforseen events. Who in the world would believe those that promote themselves to be the most moral would resort to terrorism? If just to save a crumbling empire they would be so immoral What would they do if they are truly threatened? What response are you expecting? Did you consider the consequences of that response?
I don't know, it doesn't take a Nostradamus to figure out that humans are hypocrites, and that they respect strength and hold weakness in contempt, to address your examples.
So what's Russia's answer to that? Answer with tit-for-tat terrorism? Get real, Russia is not Izrael. I am oblivious how people can be so short sighted
The West has figured out that,.as long as Russia fears escalation, there isn't much Russia can do, so the West will only continue to abuse Russia with total impunity.
cheetosSpring: I agree with your comments.👍 Your second to last line hit home: "Pop up terrorism" - damn what a cynical phrase, but sadly, it does describe today's reality. Peace to all of you out there.
Interestingly the West i.e. the US and its vassal states do not see anything wrong when they do it. The terrorism and the terrorists are only evil when they are not authorized by the deep state/cabal/PTPB/cabal/whatever other name we give this complex that controls the resources of the Western states.
The US (and West generally) used to crow about its superior morality because it had scruples; it would not commit heinous acts to reach its lofty goals (even if it was a lie).
OTOH, they would point to the Commies as being Evil because they would do "ANYTHING" because, to the Commies, the Ends Justifies The Means.
Now the West labels its goal as Peaceful AntiAuthoritarian and makes war, spews misinformation and propaganda, penalizes dissent and unbiased views, subverts democracy and International Law, even threatening Judges, to counter those who will not obey.... as their Means.
Ironically the West has become the Evil Commies by its own definition.
I am afraid Jeannie, that in the old days, it was easier to think the US and West were moral, peaceful and well-meaning, at least partially because of the relative information isolation of the pre-internet days.. and lies in domestic history books. Americans still think they "won" the War of 1812 (they didn't in Canadian history books), even though Washington DC was burned. Americans and Canadians still do not realize that, at the end of WW2, Ukrainian Nazis and their families were imported into North America to allow the men to be sent back on terrorism mission against the Soviets. Those enclaves still exist in North America and they celebrate Bandera.
And most Americans believe it was Soviet aggression that led to the USSR sending offensive missiles into Cuba, when it was just a tit for tat reply to the US sending nukes into Turkey to threaten the Soviets. One of the parts of the deal between JFK and Khrushchev was that the US would remove the missiles in Turkey, but that it would be kept secret, so it looked like the USSR backed down, and the US, as usual, was without blame. The reality was different.
Back when US Mainstream Media included some truth-tellers (where are you Walter Cronkite when the world needs you?), in the mid- to late Vietnam War era, there were enough real facts revealed about lying Generals and Presidents for intelligent people to realize that almost everything the Govt. has to say is either a lie, or has been spun to make themselves look better. Many of those who learned that lesson are dead, but their grandchildren are finally starting to figure it out.
Where were the US MSM commentators telling everyone, at least once a week over 20 years that the war in Afghanistan was NOT being won, even though the Military said it was?
Once people focus on what they did not tell everyone, much less the lies they did tell, one sees that a truly well meaning moral government was an oxymoron back when most people thought it was a truism.
And that was true, no matter the Party in charge. Only the extent and details change, when the reality is the Oligarchs and Deep State are the ultimate "checks and balances" should a Legislature or POTUS develop a real conscience and morals.
This not going to change. Russia is stroke without striking back, which gives the empire a feeling of impunity. After the fall of Hassad, the levels of Hubris in the Pentagon, CIA, NATO, MI6, Mossad, et al, must be stratospheric. This is going to strenghten the allout-war party. The empire controls countries and corporations. It is rare that someone like Orban or Fico move from the empire's guidelines. On the contrary, Russia does not have solid allies. Iran's real intentions are more and more suspicious, China is irritatingly inactive, Turkey is genetically treacherous, Brasil? India? The BRICs have shown to be an empty shell. Only North Korea and Belarus are going all the way with Russia. But it is not enough. A taker boxer, even if tough and powerful, cannot stop a puncher forever. They are punching Russia in every possible way without consequences. Why would they stop?
The history is best predictor. Last time Russia submitted was Tatar yoke. And it wasn't even Russia, it was all decentralized amalgamation of principalities. And they won in the end. Even if it took 300 years. After that, after Ivan the IV creating an Empire? Never happened. You can burn Moscow (Poles, Napoleon), you can kill 27 mil (of which 17 mil is civilians, which historians always forget when comparing USSR/Nazies losses) but you lose in the end.
Why? Because history goes into folklore, it goes into DNA. You can't beat that. That's why US, which is very young state, without ever going into existential struggle (civil war is a joke compared) is no contestant. Not even close. US politicians love to associate themselves with Rome, but US is no Rome. US is Carthage.
The media all collaborated in mentioning right in the heading that "Putin STOPS SHORT OF taking responsibility," or similar formulations. But they NEVER said anything about Ukraine not taking responsibility for killing two Polish farmers with an old Soviet anti-air missile.
Instead, they kept writing about the killing as "RUSSIAN-MADE missile kills two farmers in Poland." If you search for "Russian-made missile" you can still see it today. It is the greatest example of lying by omission I have ever seen.
I include couple of examples of how uniform the media were in reporting about the crashed plane. Also note how they never, ever said anything about Ukraine not taking responsibility for killing two Polish farmers with an old Soviet anti-air missile.
The NYT:
Putin Apologizes but STOPS SHORT OF Taking Responsibility for Kazakhstan Crash
The WSJ:
Putin Apologizes to Azerbaijan’s Leader Over ‘Tragic Incident’
Russian leader’s phone call STOPPED SHORT OF acknowledging responsibility for crash of Azerbaijan Airlines plane
WaPo:
Putin apologized for the “tragic incident” in Russian airspace, but the Kremlin DID NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for downing the Azerbaijan Airlines flight.
Canadian Toronto Star:
Putin apologizes for ‘tragic incident’ but STOPS SHORT OF saying Azerbaijani plane was shot down
British The Guardian:
Putin apologises for Azerbaijan plane crash WITHOUT ADMITTING Russia at fault
Spanish ABC:
Putin apologizes for the flight accident on Russian soil, but AVOIDS ANY RESPONSIBILITY
However, French newspapers that I checked didn't use the same U.S.-invented formulations. Nor the German ones. But of course, some have their own propaganda:
German Bild:
Kremlin DESPOT Vladimir Putin (72) indirectly admits that the Azerbaijan Airlines plane was hit by Russian air defense
We know that the journalists have invite-only forums where they collaborate. Some have revealed this. And it's the same in other countries.
Note also that the day after Trump's acceptance speech at the RNC in 2016, the media all included "dark" in their headlines. "Trump's dark speech" "Trump's dark vision for America," etc. Like "stops short of," an example of how they collaborate.
And after two Islamists stabbed people on a bridge in London, the media uniformly wrote that "some of the rescue personnel were Muslims!" Such a coincidence that they all came up with the same thing!
There are multiple back-ups to enable the craft to survive such a strike, all sorts of ways of bringing down the under-carriage etc unless the undercarriage itself was taken out, which would not happen with a bird strike. There is still the issue of why the pilot did not deploy the various mechanisms for slowing the aircraft on a belly skid. It went full blast into that wall. That is what tragically did for the passengers.
Now the dust has settled we have to wonder whether Boeing did not retrofit some new safety mech that overrode all manual attempts to land safely and then attempted to force a take off from the belly touch down. That is what it looked like watching the plane fully stabilised, actually accelerating nose raised, into the wall.
All of which requires both knowledge and practice on behalf of the pilot in charge, which then brings in the question of culture.
There's been more than one "Air Crash Investigation" episode (involving Asian based Airlines) where the root cause is the pilot who is *officially* in charge has flown the plane into the ground, because his junior *cannot* override his authority, even though the junior knows what to do... The senior is *always* right..
Ok the engine might have taken a bird hit, although they are certified for such an event, but was the gear even down in the video and the landing gear are inboard of where the puff of smoke came.
Regardless the landing gear are Robust. It can take the weight of the aircraft but a bird took it out? Betting nah!
Perhaps the regulators are captured in the aviation industry as well? Used to be conform to specifications, now we have pay off the inspectors.
Vaguely remember thrust reversal issues with early 737s. Maybe the engine not reversing due to a bird hit is possible. Changed fan blades on Bae-146 that ate seagulls on landing. Boy did that stink.
Once again plane certified to land with only one engine lit, but maybe it surprised them when they went to reverse thrust.
"The need was obvious even in 2022." Ah, no, not at all. It's stupid to waste resources on building concrete shelters that are not at all necessary. Russia doesn't waste resources like that.
They weren't necessary in 2022 because it is far simpler, cheaper, and quicker to base air assets outside the striking range of an adversary's weapons.
The difference between 2022 and 2024 is that Russia has dramatically increased the number of sorties and the amount of munitions unloaded onto the nazis. As nazi air defenses have been degraded manned aircraft can strike deeper into Ukraine as well. Commuting to the strike zones from farther away is now eating into the number of sorties they'd like to do, so Russia would like to base aircraft closer.
At the same time even though the numbers of long range missiles are not great, the US has achieved a greater ability to strike into Russia, so shelters have become necessary not just relatively near the combat zone but also farther away. Russia has also achieved a dramatic increase in logistics capability for support operations, such as military construction.
Finally, Russia is gearing up for general war with the US and NATO. That means hardening facilities relatively far from its borders to defend against what could be widespread attacks.
All the above boils down to building concrete shelters becoming a priority in 2024 and 2025 when doing that wasn't a priority in 2022.
"Russia is gearing up for general war with the US and NATO."
Actually, that concern was announced by VVP at Munich 2007, and many times afterwards. The strategic grievances announced in 2021, prior to the SMO, addressed the need to remove the NATO missile bases in Poland and Romania. VVP consistently considered the adversary to be NATO and not the USA proxy Ukraine. Aircraft shelters were one of many details below Presidential level and Shoigu underperformed, at best.
That Russia complained to the US about US moves leading to war with a peace time Russia is not the same as actually going to war with Russia or Russia switching to a war footing. The US/NATO weren't in a hot war with Russia in 2021. US military personnel were not firing long range missiles into Russia in 2021. Shelters were not a priority then. But they are now, as the proxy war in Ukraine has shifted into a hot, direct war between the US/NATO and Russia, and it's foreseeably getting hotter to the point where it is now time to start building shelters, with one reason for doing so being the very initial stages of a US war on Russia that might, just might, stop before general nuclear war.
Shoigu for sure underperformed. But starting to build shelters in 2022 that weren't factors then in a possible war with the US and are not big factors now in a more possible such war is the least of it. They're not big factors now in a war with the US since the time span during which shelters might matter at all in a general war between the US and Russia is so very short.
It's hard to see how if there are so many US missile attacks on Russia where shelters make any tactical difference that it would be more than a matter of hours before nukes go to work on both sides. And then the time for shelters will have passed.
Concrete shelters and revetments are mostly helpful in the event of a first strike against a surprised foe. I don't think this applies so much to Russia at this point, except inasmuch as there are facilities away from Ukraine that might be targeted. I mean with Uke missile/drone attacks, some provision for protection is warranted, I suppose, but i'd not go nuts with it. Places like say, Iceland, Germany or Korea generally have such things for the obvious reasons.
Honestly i'd expect NATO strikes against economic targets and strategic assets rather than SEAD and an attempt to assert air superiority over Russia. That sounds like a losing game to me. The ranges and balance of forces are not favorable for that kind of campaign. In fact, i'd expect the military types to advise against _any_ kind of such attack. They are not as bereft of sanity as the neocons.
the Ukrainian banderites are American Nazi by all metrics. They are creatures of deep state /cia. The jewish lobby (and Knesset) have been celebrating the self-proclaimed Nazi regiments Azov, Aidar, and Dnipro 1&2 as “freedom fighters against Russia..”
The regiments were founded and financed by the president of the jewish community of Ukraine, Mr. Kolomojsky, to protect his properties in Donbas. Not a peep from Holo museums. See the profitable memes “nazi&hitler” and “gas chambers&ovens” and the idiotic “6 min.” Global Jewry had dispensed with decency a long time ago.
great article - I think you're right about that passenger jet...but you didn' elaborate on the part about - WTF was an passenger jet doing, flying in a war zone. And I'm glad Putin is going the slow steady way and not nuking anyone.
Until this incident, I doubt many people would have considered the Caspian Sea anywhere near a war zone. In 2023, I flew into Sochi (on the Black Sea) airport twice, once from Tblisi and once from Yerevan, both flight routes much closer to Ukraine than the Azerbaijani airline's flight route. Sochi is a major tourist destination inside Russia and no one then considered it to be close to a war zone. Clearly, Ukraine is trying to expand the war zone.
It's was not a warzone, technically, it's Caucuses. While it has proximity to Ukraine, it's still far away to be launched from Ukraine. Again, Ukraine smuggles drones into deeper Russia and launches these at something. It could have happened in Murmansk of all places. We already had drone incidents in far north.
Putin is playing for time until Trump gets into office, so I don't see any major changes to Russia's order of battle until then...But these acts of terrorism by Ukrainian and British intelligence operatives must be grating on his nerves....
He'll use the acts of terrorism when he bargains with Trump. Trump will sympathize with what he's been through, and the need to fight back if they aren't stopped, because Trump has personally been through something exactly like this.
Thanks for the insight that the various terrorist attacks against Russia are indeed bargaining chips for them.
So this would put the situation when the great dealmaker and master negotiator Trump gets into office as follows:
1. Trump goes into the negotiations with his usual bluster, thinking he's holding all the cards with potential military and economic escalation.
2. The Russian side just needs to point out to him that, no, they have a pile of incitements that they never responded to that must be repaid. They have waited patiently for a potential change in US Empire leadership, and if he doesn't end the US's war against Russia promptly on Russian terms, this bill comes due, rather than being torn up.
The bill should be directed to “deciders:” the City/FedRrserve, big wig at MIC and fascist corporations blackrock & vanguard, and the aipac-owned dishonorable congress. The criminal warmongers of the Kagans clan deserve a special delivery.
These hapless Brit’s deserve to be hunted on one by one. There is nothing honorable about British brass and prominent war profiteers Arbuthnots and Blairs the degenerate.
>I have long wondered when Ukraine would begin exporting its naval drones to hound Russian fleets across the world, rather than just in the Black Sea. We’ve seen that these drones have massive ranges, able to go from Odessa to the Kerch Bridge in a circular path that takes them far outside of Crimea, which can be nearly 1000km in total distance. This means Russian ships in the Mediterranean and elsewhere can be easy prey, given that the Starlinks powering these drones are able to navigate them anywhere.
Please.
They would have had to go through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, navigate around the Greek islands, make it past Sicily, then hit the ship somewhere between Algeria and Spain. That is nearly 3000 km. They don't have that kind of range.
It was launched either from the Spanish coast or from the British base in Gibraltar, i.e. it was a direct NATO attack.
This sort of thing is supposed to result in a war being declared, but in the Kremlin they are so cucked out, that they will never dare.
BTW, the oil spill in the Kerch strait is mighty suspicious too, because there was another ship in distress there the next day, and it is all happening around the same time as the Ursa Major sinking, the situation with the plane, and the tanker seized by Finland. Too many coincidences.
>This naturally energizes the ‘turbo patriot’, doomer, and concern-troll crowd into heaping invectives on Putin for being ‘weak’ and not nuking London, Washington, Kiev, etc., as a “message” to stop these provocations. Realistically speaking, there’s not much Russia can do to directly halt these escalations.
Oh, yes, there is a lot that Russia could do, and yes, it does involve nukes. Wipe out the UK. It is the easiest of the NATO nuclear powers to take out -- you need to sink the one SSBN on patrol, the rest are in port due to poor maintenance, nuke them with hypersonics from ships or subs lurking nearby, then UK has no means to fight back, so you finish it off with strategic strikes, and do it Rome against Carthage style, i.e. complete total annihilation so that it can never be resurrected again.
Let's see see if anyone dares attack Russia again after that.
But even a nuclear strike on some of the non-nuclear NATO members will do the job -- NATO will automatically fall apart if Poland and/or Romania are reduced to zero (which will also block Ukraine's NATO logistics), because then the NATO nuclear powers will be faced with the choice of nuking Russia and thus ensuring their own annihilation in the process, or having the fiction of Article 5 be exposed. The latter will result in the alliance dissolving, because why would anyone in their right mind volunteer to be a strike platform for the US to attack Russia from if that will bring Russian nukes on their heads with no protection from the US, but it is the rational choice, because better that than being dead.
How many Russians have to die before the Kremlin finally starts defending the country? Because I don't see any such defense being played right now.
The whole NATO aggression is based on the calculation that at the end of the day Russian elites feel more affinity for their counterparts in the Western oligarchy than for the Russian people so they will never seriously fight back (which is natural given that most Russian oligarchs are Zionist Jews, to a much greater degree in fact than the US oligarchs, where you have a bit more diversity, and that is only on the ethnic level, while the affinity extends on a class level too). So far it has been a very sound bet.
>Oreshniks on Dnieper Bridges, anyone?
Kinzhals and Zirkons could have done the job on Day 1 of the SMO or any moment since. It is not the military-technical capabilities that are blocking it, but the Kremlin's split loyalties.
>Next year, Ukraine will have even less systems to strike Russia with
They are talking about having 30,000 long-range drones, which is perfectly doable, these things have a production complexity somewhere between a scooter and a small car. That is on average a hundred a day, and much more difficult to shoot down than what they are flying now.
And in general the trajectory has been for a constant and accelerating increase in their capabilities, not a reduction.
Re.: "This sort of thing is supposed to result in a war being declared, but in the Kremlin they are so cucked out, that they will never dare."
At the back of Putin's mind is always thinking about keeping China, India and even South Africa on board with his campaign in Ukraine. I reckon Putin is playing his cards just about spot on.
There is no such a thing like friends between countries. The interests of the ruling class in cooperating - that does exist. Sometimes these interests have a lot in common with the interests of the people but not always - see Ukraine leadership cooperates with the West against the interests of its people. The same can be said about German government or current Polish one and the future Romanian.
China etc cooperate with Russia probably for these two reasons: they assess Russia has a chance of surviving the war as it is big enough and they see it as the way to build secondary power centers which are only possible if they all together do business - they would not destroy the hegemonial power (military and financial) in this way or even come close but independent Russia and failed plan Ukraine would mean the hegemon could stop expanding.
That would be stupid because it's about Russian national security, not theirs. And these allies are in for gaining from the situation, not for suffering alongside Russia for the greater cause. It's not like they're coming to save Russia from any of the attacks.
I think it's more about keeping the West from escalating faster than they already are, since time is on Russia's side. Which is exactly why Russia's enemies are trying to force Russia to act, in order to escalate things past the point Trump could back away.
Cornishman in Basel: I agree, Russia cannot afford to act alone. Besides battling it out in Ukraine (in what Russia views as an existential conflict), and not wanting to escalate the current critical situation, Russia will also want to retain it's credibility within BRICS, and other "global south" countries.
It's a difficult and treacherous sea for the Kremlin to navigate, to say the very least.
However, if the conflict does drag on, even the BRICS members may reach a point where they wish for quicker resolution, and allow Russia to push hard and end the conflict decisively.
But for now, the Kremlin might first want to wait and see what the Trump administration is going to do, and then decide what further action to take.
Yes but is the war simply a battleground thing or not? Like are there 'powers behind the throne' ? Is it all fueled by Washington and Kiev oligarchs, ' mafia', etc ?
I think so.
The battlefield is a public drama, theatre, orchestrated, with rules and conditions, constraints.
The real war we don't see. I trust Putin is fighting it.
just look at the question of alliances. you see what happened in syria. double cross and backstabbing etc. that's the sort of thing he's fighting behind the scenes. you see the pipeline crossing ukraine and feeding his friends in hungary and slovakia. that's the kind of issue he has to balance. you see china and the supply of microchips to usa or not. that's the kind of thing he has to play with along with them. you see the north korean munitions being received. he had to tee that up. you see the presence of blackrock and vast investments in kiev ukraine - that's an indication of the relevance of those players and his need to 'play' with that 'ball'. you see turkey and know what it is like and see how strategically important it is. he has to deal with that and somehow get a win out of it. If putin were to disappear tomorrow I reckon he's done so much and played his cards so well they ought to erect a monument to him in every country in the world. bomb the place into submission and assume that has no collateral effects in the wider world: what has it as effects right there? a hostile country you have to occupy and police, subdue, while they do everything they can, 30 million of them, to destroy you from within.
Putin is a grown up, not a petulant child. So are those who manipulate america. They use the tactics of schoolyard bullies, petulant children, destroy who/what they don't like. Blunt crude aggression just like children. But that's not who/what they are. No way. They are sophisticated amoral grown ups, just twisted evil with it, too. And while the theatre plays out its bloody sham they devise ever new ways of destroying Putin and Russia. They make plans today for destroying russia after Putin has reached old age and gone. They are implacable and wholly inimical to life.
Putin deals with them and their doings and he knows better than to think the immolation of a hundred thousand Kiev Ukrainian people is the cure for all ills.
>If putin were to disappear tomorrow I reckon he's done so much and played his cards so well
Played his cards so well that his country, the former untouchable superpower and still in possession of the largest nuclear arsenal, has been reduced to the status of Libya and Syria, i.e. places anybody can bomb whenever they feel like, with total impunity, safe in the knowledge they will not be touched in response?
You also don't seem to understand the internal situation in Russia and what role Putin plays. Forget about the man himself, though he is to blame for a lot, and think about the overall power structure. There is a large and powerful segment of the Russian elites who want to surrender and go back to being a pure resource appendage of the West with no independent development whatsoever. The jury is still out on whether Putin the person in his mind set it as his task to wrestle control over the country from those people, but it is very clear that even if wanted to do it and tried to do it, he did not succeed, and they are still determining policy to a large extent.
The only way to make sense of what has happened in the last three years that does not invoke magical hypotheticals not in the public domain (i.e. the West having revealed some technological trump card behind the scenes that has the Russians effectively defeated and they are stalling for time because of it) is to interpret it as a consequence of that failure to clean up the elites in Moscow after the catastrophe of the 1990s.
well there you go - you try to put Putin down at the same time as pointing to one of the intractable problems he has internally.
And it is completely invalid to refer to his country as formerly an untouchable superpower. Completely invalid. The USSR might have been that but the Russia that Putin inherited was a meal for the dogs and they were chowing down.
It is totally to his credit what he did, the complete reverse of what you try to say.
I'm in your camp GM. A step forward would be the destruction of star link satellites. Every single long range air/sea drone has a terminal attached to it. Next, knock out one or more commercial satellites providing real time intel info to The Ukraine. That's not any attack on NATO right?
If that is not enough to stir the pot use an EMP over Kiev. Do this all before Trump and Musk are sworn in. I really don't want to have to comment on terrorism against Russia for the next decade do I? Cuz to me Russia seems terrified of Article 5. I mean imagine how pissed as a Russian solider you would be knowing buddies died because they can stop star link but don't because of some commercial contract or future earnings?
I used to think Russia needs to make a show of force to stop these kinds of attacks but I am more settling on the idea Russia will do nothing. I guess I have to wait for post-Putin for my fireworks show.
Russian soldiers are in fact indeed pissed about the whole situation. And Starlink is just one thing out of a very long list.
There have been videos of soldiers in the trenches outright cussing out Putin for refusing to disable logistics and to do decapitation on the Kiev regime.
And airing that sort of thing in public is obviously seriously frowned upon, so you can imagine how widespread that sentiment actually is on the ground.
The mid-high-ranking officers are the most important group here, as they would be key for an eventual pro-patriotic military coup.
How many of those in the BSF died because Putin refused to lift a finger to stop the attacks while explicitly preventing them from defending themselves? Notice how the Global Hawk drones have not flown ever since one was actively "disturbed" immediately after the ATACMS strike on the Sevastopol beach. That is all it took and the drones were gone. And no BSF ships have been sunk since then, because that is hard to do without real-time targeting. Which naturally and immediately raises the question why the ships had to be sitting ducks for more than a year, with half a dozen of them sunk and who knows how many crew members drowning, before these simple measures, that everyone was screaming for, were taken? I can't imagine Putin is very popular in the BSF after that. But it isn't just the BSF -- there were a lot of losses in the ground forces and air defense officer ranks due to the refusal to do anything to stop the weapons influx and Western GMLRS systems having a free reign for so long.
What is always forgotten here is that the Russian army never planned for fighting a war against NATO under such self-crippling rules of engagement.
The assumption was always that if they were ever attacked, they would be allowed to immediately disable NATO ISR, and fight on equal (in Russia's favor even) terms.
Obviously nobody planned for a war in which the Kremlin forbids preventively striking the enemy and disabling logistics and ISR, and you have to just rely on being able to dodge the hits and praying that SHORAD saves you once again. Because who in their right mind would fight like that?
So again, I can't imagine Putin is very popular currently within the military. What the threshold for a coup is in reality is the big question. Because the risks are very high. The last time that was tried -- i.e. political leadership was clearly acting in treasonous way and had to go if the country was to be saved so the military tried to take matters in its own hands -- it was not planned properly, and the coup not only failed but it ended up being the final trigger for the dissolution of the USSR. I imagine that story has not been forgotten, even more so given that e.g. someone like Surovikin was a part of it as a junior officer and then spent time in prison because of his actions.
Starlink, at this point, comprises over 7000 satellites, so NO, they can't *stop* Starlink in any way that's meaningful across the whole SMO.
Russia *has* demonstrated the ability to use EW over a *limited* area sufficient to degrade Starlink signals. But they do that for GPS as well, so the limits to the area covered are the same, and the reasons for doing so are the same. Troops bitch about what they don't have all the time, in the grand scheme of things, this one is meaningless.
Russia is NOT afraid of Article 5, they have comprehensively destroyed everything NATO has sent into Ukraine, to the point where the bottom of the NATO barrel has been scraped clean. It is in fact NATO *itself* that is afraid of Article 5 being enabled, because NO-ONE in Europe wants to be the first to feed its troops into the Russian meat grinder... They all want the USA to do it.
The only NATO force that is of any concern to Russia is the combined air forces, but only because they can send *one* big Hail Mary attack that would cause huge (but very survivable) damage to the Russian war machine, resulting in a doctrinal nuclear exchange.
Once Oreshnik is available in operational numbers, even that threat goes away, so NATO has a very small "window of opportunity" to use its air superiority for that one time punch. For that reason, the first few months of Trump 2 are going to be very interesting.
It may just be that removal of the bad apples from the stash is just not feasible. We see how Trump will deal with his own deep state and the oligarchs. I dont suppose much better than Putin.
Your observation about the unhinged behaviour of Ukrainians and quite some NATO countries is correct. You let them do it then they do more. There is only one thing that can put the jinni back into the bottle - violence. The West is not interested in diplomacy because our elites never have to pay the price. Maximum what can happen to them is to be dismissed, enjoy private assignments from the cronies they helped and give interviews to the eager media - see Boris Johnson for an example. In war the people are not interested and simply cannot oppose the government. It does not work in any country at war, does it?
Do you just make things up as you go or is there a bigger retard writing your talking points? You clearly know less than nothing about the realities inside Russia. It is not 1994.
Very sensible comment. The world we live in is complex and Russia has to navigate a veritable minefield both figuratively and literally. It's not just Ukraine and not just the West. He also has to kepp the main BRICS+ countries together.
Some day, the whole truth will be told. The full 9 yeards of it. Our friend GM will not be impressed, of course, but the rest of us kind of prefer to live another day before WWIII is upon us.
Let's start from comparing 2001 Russia to 2024 Russia. If you don't see a difference, you are a blind fool. And before you start stupid "I am talking about XX-YY period" he straight went into 2001 when CIA were funding ISIS precursors in Chechnya. So action from the day one.
The difference between me and you is that you look at the superficial level and I look at the underlying structures.
Putin's main job when installed in power was to make sure the communists never returned to power and the oligarchic model established in the 1990s was cemented in place. In order to achieve that, he had to stabilize the country. Which was done.
So what do we have as a structural changes here? Nothing -- the oligarchic model firmly and irreversibly remained in place during Putin's quarter century in power. Supposedly with some restraints on the oligarchs individually, which was necessary to rein in the centrifugal forces that were threatening to tear the country apart, but as a class they retained and cemented their place in society.
Again, don't look at the superficiality of such and such individual oligarch getting in trouble with the Kremlin. Forget about the shiny skyscrapers and relatively clean streets (in some places), look at the more general systemic factors -- who owns things and who makes the decisions.
The whole Ukrainian fiasco stretching back to the 1990s and continuing now cannot be understood without firmly grasping that reality.
And it increasingly looks like the West has done its analysis very carefully and concluded quite accurately that the internal oligarchic structure in Russia will prevent any serious fighting back against NATO from happening, because that would be contrary to the interests of that oligarchy, so they are safe to escalate as much as they want, until the Russian oligarchy surrenders. If you are watching events in Russia carefully, that is exactly what has been happening.
Thus if Putin was to actually save the country, it was an absolute must to end the oligarchic economic model. But how could he do that if he was installed to make sure it is cemented in place? See the problem?
You may theorize all you want. I lived under communists, under Yeltsin and under Putin. So I have firsthand experience. Everything changed in past 25 years. Like, literally. It's absolutely, utterly unrecognizable country atm. Laws, commons, dos and don'ts.
If "everything changed" why has the most fundamental thing not changed?
Which is that Russia is still a resource appendage to the West, and continues to export natural resources to the enemy even as the enemy sends them back in the form of drones, missiles and shells killing Russian soldiers and civilians daily?
If Putin "saved the country" because he cared about, why is it that he then turned it into a large-scale Syria/Libya, i.e. a place anyone can bomb whenever they feel like without any fear of retaliation? Because that is exactly what is happening right now. Daily.
Why is all of that happening when Putin can literally end it in a day?
The cost of that is the permanent separation of Russia from the "West". Which would be a very good thing for the average Russian -- Russia gets to keep its precious non-renewable resources for itself and to invest them into local development instead of sending them to West for pennies on the dollar of their real worth. But a bad thing for the Russian oligarchy.
So we have otherwise inexplicable actions and inactions -- total failure, in fact a firm refusal on the part of the Kremlin to defend the country -- that only benefit the oligarchy while hurting the country as a whole and especially the regular people. These can only be explained by what I tried to get across to you (that nothing has fundamentally changed since the 1990s, only the superficial appearances).
There have been a number of news articles on how there are understandings between the CIA and Russia. Some drama has happened because not everyone in the West is on board with the CIA calling the shots, including other parts of the US government.
Yes, I know. About there being articles. Some few I have seen, others I have seen referenced. It is clear there are levels and areas of this conflict far beyond what we know.
And what's sad is not that our msm ignores them but that our alt-media, our clerisy, ignore them, too. More and more i see it: the manipulating monsters at the top, the crucified manipulated at the bottom: asleep, comatose. And no one in between. No help from clerisy, from educators, from activists, from the political. None.
So the people are just going to have to wake up and take an interest and do things or they will finish up like the sacrificial beings that are the kiev ukrainians, the syrians, the gazans and so on..... we think it cannot happen to us... in the west.... I've got news for them... it can happen anywhere, any time...
Yep. We need to wake up. That is a fact. It is the number one major need. It's funny our guides and mentors rarely mention it, promote it, agitate for it, suggest any steps that might facilitate it.
Well not so funny, really, of course.
More an indication that they need to wake up, too.
Generally they pride themselves on being awake - for after all, don't they read and contribute to arcane alt media columns...
Think about the insanity of what you just said. Which, for the record, does seem to be true.
But what does it mean? The Russian government agreed on having a daily casualty tally measured in the triple digits on killed and maimed soldiers and in the double digits on killed and maimed civilians. Daily. And at least one industrial object blown up every day somewhere in the vicinity of Ukraine.
Read that again.
The Russian government **agreed** on that becoming the norm with no end in sight.
What should happen to a government that does that, by the hands of its own citizens?
That's not what the agreements were about. The agreements were more along the lines of Russia doesn't bomb outside Ukraine and the West doesn't give Ukraine the tools to bomb inside Russia. A far quid pro quo.
The problem is that many in the West want escalation, and so went against some of those handshake agreements by providing Ukraine long range missiles.
I don't know what your argument is. Or are you still trying to push some nonsense about how Russians need to kill Putin, on an anglophone website? Russians aren't reading this, so I don't know who your intended audience is supposed to be for your propaganda.
Russia is forced to deal with mad and unscrupulous creatures which hate Humanity. What is US debt- $37 trillion? The US is the most corrupt and rotten entity on the planet; the triumph of Thieves and mass murderers & talmudized traitors and liars.
It’s not Russia’ business to restore the denuded and degraded US. It is the Russian business to protect humanity from the amoral perverts which have already devoured the western civilization.
I believe that shadow/real war is financial, yes it is seen but the real impact, size and methods are not all visible.
To glimpse it, look at the BlackRock investments in Ukraine, the Master role BlackRock supposedly will have in a post war Ukraine.
If Russia allows BlackRock to have ANY role in Ukraine 2.0 he can be viewed as a WEF pawn, I don't believe he is and I believe he sees the very real danger of a BlackRock anywhere near his nation.
Could be, although I am inclined to think that they're more satanic than zionist and/or fascist, could be wrong.
But stories of a world satanic cult that demands novices murder to prove fealty, novices who are then given powerful positions in govt, media seems more and more plausible.
"you need to sink the one SSBN on patrol," Oh, is that all? Why that's just as easy as believing in unicorns. Click your ruby slippers together three times while wishing hard and there's no need to be constrained by reality.
Out here in the real world solving real world problems by ignoring them and betting on fantasy doesn't work. The reason SSBNs became and remain an iron-clad deterrent is that it is virtually impossible to find them when they are on patrol. Each SSBN also has such intense firepower that nobody who cares about the future of his country will take the risk that an attempted attack on an SSBN will fail.
If Russia attempted an all-in nuclear strike on the UK and failed to nail the SSBN on patrol, over 50 million Russians would die. People who give a shit about their countries will do pretty much anything else to achieve their goals rather than roll the dice on such a risky act. They will only attempt such a strike on the UK if they have absolutely no other options, and people who are smart enough to run a country like Russia will have options if general nuclear war has not erupted.
Paradoxically, some of those options you've named. A nuclear strike on a non-nuclear power, like Poland or the Netherlands, is a very different deal, especially if it was limited to nuclear strikes on US nuclear weapons depots or on the US's Aegis Ashore offensive nuclear missile installations. But even there you have a risk that deeply delusional fools in the UK, France, or the US may launch city-killing nuclear strikes against Russia.
One of the risks arises exactly from the SSBNs that Russia, the US, the UK, and France have on patrol. Commanders of the western SSBNs have agency, the ability to launch without needing authorization codes from their national command. They also have standing directives to launch under attack, the presumption being that an attack on an SSBN is part of a nuclear war which communications links have not been able to convey to the SSBN. They practice very rapid ripple fire for just such a purpose, to launch under attack, to be able to get off at least some missiles even within the time it takes for a torpedo fired from a stand-off distance, whole minutes, to get to the SSBN. The West has made such launch under attack standing orders known precisely to discourage any attacks on their SSBNs.
We don't know if Russian SSBN commanders have the same launch on attack standing orders, but it is at least a significant possibility they do. If so, that's a pathway for relatively low level commanders in the West to start a nuclear war: attack a Russian SSBN to push it into launching under attack. If Russia nukes a non-nuclear NATO power like the Netherlands or Poland, there will be lots of desire for revenge out there even if the US, UK and France decide they don't want their countries erased forever by attacking Russia.
>The reason SSBNs became and remain an iron-clad deterrent is that it is virtually impossible to find them when they are on patrol
Actually if it is just one SSBN you need to go after, it can be tailed quite reliably after it leaves port. The real problem is dealing with the whole of NATO. The USSR had the numbers to do that, Russia does not and is vastly outnumbered (2:1 in SSBNs, 5:1 in strike subs). But one SSBN can be done.
>If Russia attempted an all-in nuclear strike on the UK and failed to nail the SSBN on patrol, over 50 million Russians would die
Obviously you would only launch the countervalue strike upon confirmation of the SSBN kill, not before.
>We don't know if Russian SSBN commanders have the same launch on attack standing orders
We have a hint -- some time ago there were leaked documents regarding the internal Russian thresholds for launching the nukes, and one of them was the loss of two SSBNs. Which, if you think about how that could happen, implies no such orders. This assumes those leaks were accurate, of course.
>Paradoxically, some of those options you've named. A nuclear strike on a non-nuclear power, like Poland or the Netherlands, is a very different deal, especially if it was limited to nuclear strikes on US nuclear weapons depots or on the US's Aegis Ashore offensive nuclear missile installations.
That is correct in terms of how it would play out. But those places do not deserve it as much as the UK. And you will have to do countervalue towards reduction to zero, not mere counterforce against Aegis Ashore and other military objects. The reason is that if you nuke the bases in Poland, the mere fact that anything on its territory has been nuked (and you can't really take out something like the base in Rzeszow without taking out several sizable villages around it, i.e. quite a bit of civilian casualties) will ensure that then Poland will cry to high heaven until the end of times for retaliation, and that will put the US in a tough spot, especially with a strong internal Polish lobby in the Midwest, etc. The way to preempt that is to make sure there is no Poland left to cry for retaliation. The logic is cold and callous, but remorseless.
"Actually if it is just one SSBN you need to go after, it can be tailed quite reliably after it leaves port. [...] But one SSBN can be done."
Not so. Breaking contact from the adversary's trackers on leaving port is one of the most elementary and basic elements of SSBN operations. Countries don't spend trillions on such hardware and life or death strategies without taking advantage of the many simple and straightforward methods for dealing with such utterly obvious issues.
"Obviously you would only launch the countervalue strike upon confirmation of the SSBN kill, not before."
In that case you'd be too late, because your target would have already launched their airborne assets and emptied their silos at you.
The only way to pull off a sneak attack on the UK is if you get *all* of their nukes with your first strike, and you accomplish that first strike fast enough to ensure that *none* of their nukes get launched. At the present time there's no way for Russia, or any other nuclear power, to pull that off.
The key factor that discourages first strikes is the phenomenal lethality of even a single modern nuke. If you don't get them all in your first hit you'll lose ten million or more in the case of Russia (a strike on Moscow).
In the case of the classic nuclear powers, you can't even assume that they don't have nukes pre-positioned in Moscow. Israel, for example, is widely believed to have stashed one or more nukes in Moscow to set off in case of need. Who's to say the UK hasn't done that as well? Use a design with no boosting in the primary and you don't even have to refresh tritium bottles every so often. They could sit in a basement for many decades, waiting for the day they explode.
"This assumes those leaks were accurate, of course."
A false assumption. Russian internal nuclear doctrine has never leaked, although there is no end of faked "secret documents" out there.
"But those places do not deserve it as much as the UK." Russia makes its decisions on the base of military advantage or disadvantage. They're not emotional about it in terms of who "deserves" it more.
"then Poland will cry to high heaven until the end of times for retaliation, and that will put the US in a tough spot" Yes, it will put the US in the spot of either ignoring the Poles or having 300 million Americans killed.
There's no way a Russian tactical nuclear strike on NATO and US assets in Poland would end with everybody in the West just saying, "Gosh, we're awed. OK, we'll back down." There will, for sure, at least be conventional war after that. But if Poland doesn't like what Russia does, Russia won't give a shit. If Poland acts up Russia will strike them again. That's what war is about.
What the US faces is a terrible asymmetry: the US has many military assets that Russia can hit, including with nuclear weapons, which are not in the US. Russia can wipe out US foreign military assets all day long without touching any US cities or even a square meter of US territory. But the US can't do that to Russia. It may strike the two Russian bases in Syria, but besides those Russia has what? Maybe two other small bases outside of Russia? If any US nukes explode on Russian territory, Russian nukes will explode on US territory.
You can never be sure with any of this, given the insanity, incompetence, and delusion that rule the US, but if past US actions are any guide the US will cheerfully throw any ally under the bus just to make sure nothing bad happens within the US. Look at what they did to Germany's economy, for example. The US actually *attacked* Germany, blowing up Nordstream, which was as much a German property as it was a Russian property.
Also it takes away the fact that the issue is those at the top with too much power and influence, nuking countries only guarantees the death of innocents, while also probably allowing the elite to some extent to survive, therefore the issue never gets solved.
It also continues the vicious cycle with some fury.
There will be no quick solution to any of this, its a giant balancing act ironically for both sides. Plus there's the risk nuking a country or even asset may generate the opposite response, and a small chance it doesn't even work properly and the world then laughs at you, putting you in a very awkward position.
Go after those who do and will, not those who don't and won't.
>Also it takes away the fact that the issue is those at the top with too much power and influence, nuking countries only guarantees the death of innocents, while also probably allowing the elite to some extent to survive, therefore the issue never gets solved.
For the record, my preferred solution is surgical strikes on the Western oligarchy. Not nukes on cities.
But there are problems with that.
The first problem is that you need too many missiles for that, and it has to be done in a way that will ensure what has not been taken out during the first salvo is not going to launch the nukes.
I don't think Russia has the number of missiles and launchers to do it, although Oreshnik is a big step forward.
Although, of course, all of that is a moot point if Putin continues to see Western oligarchs as more dear to the Russian elite's hearts than Russian civilians, as has been the case so far.
The second problem is that the US is actively working on containerizing medium-range missile launchers, which can then be concealed anywhere -- ports, trucks, trains, anywhere in cities, etc. So some areas of Europe may have to be just vaporized totally with lots of megatons just to ensure no strike on European Russia is launched.
It didn't have to be that way, if red lines had been enforced on time, and if proper preparations for total war had been carried out.
Unfortunately it seems like bloodlust is the only way - that will do most to deter future attacks. It's like what happened in villages under German occupation on the Eastern Front. Very quickly did Partisan's lose support - as the death of one German soldier would result in the deaths of 10 villagers.
Same thing here - for one Russian downed plane/boat/etc you raze a village?
How do you disable the launchers? Surgical strikes won't do, you don't know where the launchers are, as they are indistinguishable from standard shipping containers in ports, on truck beds, in cargo trains, etc.
The only way is very large nukes wiping out large areas with everything there.
At some point the populations there deserve it. Some of them actively wanted to be a launch platform for US nukes, those that didn't actively want it clearly did not find the issue important enough to rise up and block the deployment.
I am from the Netherlands, please choose Poland. We do store nuclear warheads though. I would also suggest Brussel, Belgium as an alternative where we have both EU and NATO HQ. That’s were most of the war retoric originates from.
I could well see a direct hit with a zircon or Kinzhal on MI6 HQ in London, completely destroying that massive structure. That might well be a severe lesson for the UK and shut them up, knowing that it could be easily done again on any other structure of importance.
Article 5 then? Not on your life. No NATO country (esp including the USA) would risk escalation after such a hit. Indeed, the US hopes for a Russian-European land war, solving two problems with one war.
From what I have read the Russians are at least a decade ahead in SSBN’s. Remember last summer offthe coast of Georgia the navy knew a Russian submarine there but could not locate it. What if they can locate ours?
This new conventional missile seem to be designed to penetrate precisely into hardened targets and expode deep underground so if they were launched from subs off the Coast they could destroy all land based nuclear weapons
Doesn't matter how ahead you are technologically if you don't have the numbers.
The SSBNs are widely dispersed, so unless the Poseidon is actually a tool to tail them and sink them, not so much an Armageddon coast destroying weapon, then there is a serious numbers problem.
Russia has as many nuclear attack subs as NATO has SSBNs, and NATO has five times as many nuclear attack subs as Russia has. That's a problem.
For comparison, in Soviet times it was 1.2 to 1 in USSR's favor across the board.
I wouldn't suggest they are launched from Ukraine into the Mediterranean. Recall the SBU now works with HTS, they can easily be launched from Syria or elsewhere in the region amenable to Ukraine (British Cyprus? etc.)
Exactly. people need to look at the whole geography of it.
Also, don't forget who else has it in for Russia, if not overt;y and obviously. Yes, the name starts with 'I' and ends with 'l'. Now who could that be?
GM is right in general based on what we know, but there are other layers to the situation, which make the available choices to be not so simple, and finding that British SSBN on patrol is also not a simple thing.
There is a reason why NATO is trying to provoke Russia into a response and they don't mind to commit actual acts of war in order to get Russia to respond, and it's also clear that they don't mind WW3 as result of that, so the logical question here is WHY? And Putin, which knows more than us about those "other layers of the situation" is not giving it to them. I have some ideas as to why NATO wants to provoke a war and also about other military elements that can change the military balance of power, where it would make a lot of sense for Putin to be extra cautious.
Drones over the US, UK, etc anybody? Including those orbs that seem to have an anti gravity drive, otherwise how do they stay in place levitating, and never mind the crazy speeds, etc that they can do. There is a whole other level of weapons tech derivative of crashed UFOs that the US, the UK, etc have and that may be one reason for Putin to be cautious.
Also, those that understand more about the deeper levels and goals of the deep state cabal know that they want a civilization level collapse, aka "deep reset" WEF style, and Putin certainly knows about that and he won't give it to them so easily. People may want to read about the "Anglo Saxon Mission" and their plans.
Anyway, my point is that there are other layers to the situation that most people don't have a clue about, but Putin surely does, and yes, it's very frustrating to see them hit Russia over and over and no retaliation. More will be revealed...........
Lovely bit in WRSA about the English sub force scandal that involves officers with target lists of enlisted men and rape gangs. I forgot that is just 2 subs, thanks. Anyway, I bet those lads are all top notch fellows in their prime, physically and mentally. Ready to defend their officers, er - England to the end.
There are plenty of Ukrainians in Spain. You might recall, a Russian helicopter pilot who defected by flying his Mi-8, along with unsuspecting (later killed) crew members, to Ukraine, and ended up in Spain, where he ended up murdered. I doubt Spain got great security, so if someone wants to use Spain for launching drones, they might have a sleeper cell/whatever there.
I think that such terror acts in the EU would increase the closer the war to its "end." Ukrainians will eventually realize how cynically they're screwed and disposed by the West and unleash terror on the EU, at least. Ukrainians known for running terror operations in Western Ukraine after WW2, where they were gutting the entire villages way into mid-1950s, when they were finally captured, and sent to Gulag, until Khrushchev, who grew up in Ukraine, granted them amnesty as "political prisoners" in 1960s.
Spain is also one of the friendly places many young Ukrainian families fled to (and applied for citizenship) in the first months of the war, seeing what was coming.
Don't know there's anything Spain can do about Gibraltar and UK though. These bastards sure do plan way ahead.
Dear God, make these righteous Ukrainian men and women find Ursula(and progeny), Baerbock (and progeny), Nuland-Kagan (and progeny), and the whole Kagans clan, along with Blinken & Shapiro.
Another aspect could be that when they bomb oil tankers, (western) countries will suffer from oil pollution on their beaches.
But who cares about the environment these days? Everything accepted for the destruction of Russia. Not that I lost hope, cause hope is already at zero level
You got called out by a lot of people but for the record I think you are totally right on Russian MOD not fighting this war seriously at all, not now, not in the beginning and not a year from now either.
Comparing the Russian conduct to this war to America's in three seperate wars is eye opening
1. In world war 2, America bombed Japan to ashes, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and burning their infastructure to the bedrock. Many of these targets had no specific military value beyond providing GDP for the overall war machine. At the time it was considered totally justified and even now a hundred years later criticizing the US torching of Japan is taboo for politicians. It was one of the most appalling crimes in human history and that isn't even talking about the NUKES.
2. In Vietnam, America killed like a million Vietnamese, again a huge number of them civilians and poisoned rain forests with toxic gas and napalmed children. Remember that famous photo of a burning girl? She came and spoke at my school - showed us her burns - horrible! America lost that war why - because 50000 casualties was too much for us, we only cared about ourselves - imagine if Russia had the same regard for its troops and disregard for their enemy as we did in Vietnam.
3. In Israel, which is functionally the same as the United States, they have recently leveled an entire civilization. Two million people reduced to the level of roaches, with the greatest proportion of women and children killed in any conflict in modern history. The Israelis were called out on it sure, but so what? Their enemies are dead and they are dancing on the recently conquered Mt. Hermon. Do you think they give a rat's ass about optics?
Before someone accuses me of being a turbo patriot hyper doomer - it doesn't need to be as extreme as Putin nuking poland or Britain or whatever. But there's no good reason that kievs water treatment plants and main water pumps weren't bombed to atoms in the first hours of the war, or at least once it became clear that operation "Parade Uniforms in Kiev" wasn't going according to plan. Unlike, say, Israel, blowing up Kievs water network wouldn't have tormented the population, it simply would have disabled Kievs economic and logistical worth - without water you now have several million civies to evacuate into Poland or Lviv or wherever, that means all the roads are tied up, all the soldiers are tied up evacuating people, Zelensky can't dance on Tik Tok because he's digging latrines alongside his senior staff.
If that didn't work, you could airburst an EMP over Kiev or Odessa or both, again, few if anyone dies, but the city is disabled as a "war engine."
I know there's downsides to this strategy but Russia's strategy of grinding up its own people and economy against Ukraine's is a "race to the bottom" that doesn't make sense to me at all. Anyone talking about optics or diplomacy at this point in the war really is coping, Israel mashed up babies under tank treads and laughed about it - but forcing Zelensky to shit in an outhouse is too extreme??? - give me a break!!!
It is very possible that Russia does not want to "win" in Ukraine. Would you??
Why win a psycho hydra nation when you can just bleed said hydra and its allies of men, cash, weapons.
Russia already has the most valuable regions no need to bother with the remaining rump state. And it is now creating a military buffer zone as it waits for Ukraine to either collapse completely or for Trump to show up with the deal of the century.
>But there's no good reason that kievs water treatment plants and main water pumps weren't bombed to atoms in the first hours of the war, or at least once it became clear that operation "Parade Uniforms in Kiev" wasn't going according to plan.
There is a very good reason, several of them in fact, and this is where you reveal yourself to not understand the nature of the conflict. But that does not make the Kremlin's conduct any better.
Kiev is a Russian city inhabited mostly by ethnic Russians, and so is everything in Ukraine east of Zhytomyr. Furthermore, Kiev is literally called "the mother of all Russian cities".
Why would anyone in their right mind level it or force the population to go without water?
Because it is not even necessary. What was necessary was to disable logistics, to exterminate the leadership and the oligarchy in Ukraine, and, if necessary, to hit NATO in such a way that it backs off. War is over, quickly, without hundreds of thousands and millions of dead, who are, again, mostly ethnic Russians on both sides. The tools to do that without destroying cities existed on Day 1, and have only become more abundant and refined since then.
But it has not been done.
Understand that the West is perfectly happy to supply Ukraine with weapons as long as there is no real threat to itself, and to have what is essentially a Russian civil war go on indefinitely, with Soviet, i.e. Russian-built infrastructure being destroyed by Russian weapons. Not even NATO's. Win-win-win-win.
The energy grid campaign will go down in history as the most insane waste of precious military resources ever. It is not even about degrading Ukrainian air defense any more -- the Soviet legacy systems are largely gone and an equilibrium has been reached where the West, as long as that continues to be allowed by the Kremlin, will continue to send a sufficient trickle of replacements to make direct overhead flights an impossibility. So you are punishing and angering the civilian population (which is, again, mostly your own people), but without even achieving a shutdown of the grid for substantial periods of time, because you have imposed limits on yourself regarding things like 750-kV substations, wasting thousands of missiles in the process, for what gain?
Some interesting points, thank you. I believe you are overlooking the fact that NATO is run by the insane.
They believe that THEY will survive, the fact that they would then rule over the ashes of their civilizations is not a big issue for them, for their be all and end all is to rule.
"It was launched either from the Spanish coast or from the British base in Gibraltar..."
Why is it that just about every other time some serruptitious offense against Russia occurs, the Nasty Island's name comes up as having some possible involvement?
The position of the attack suggests Gibraltar to me. I don't see Spain doing anything so committal, and a drone coming from Gibraltar would reach the oncoming ship faster by virtue of the ship's own speed. Unless drones could be launched from a nearby ship.
No need to engage in nuclear war. Such provocations should be met with greater provocations. This is the only language they understand.
Example - Arson within Russia is met with arson of a NYC metro during rush hour. Or a sudden wave of increased BLM violence/protests all over America. Sinking of Russian shipping? Sink a British/American cruise liner. This will serve to minimize further escalations as Western nations are taught to understand that they will be made to look bad and that escalations depend on their own actions.
The rest I largely agree with - even Prigozhin said that given 200k men he could sweep the entire territory to the Dnieper but he was being blocked. And it is precisely due to Kremlin's compradore elites that cause this.
All of the things you suggest harm largely innocent people in the West
If you are going to go that route, target the people responsible directly. Why arson in the NYC metro when you can set on fire the Blackrock HQ instead?
A grandiose marvelous plan but thank god Putin is in charge, not you. Russians have conscience, whereas brits are empty vessels led by soulless Friends of Israel in the UK.
Has Gaza slaughter taught you anything? Their whining Holo museums are still opened for brainwashing. Voltaire predicted that jews will be a danger for Humanity at large. More recently, great Smedley Butter wrote “All wars are bankers’ wars”. It’s the system than must be demolished to he ground.
You can count on good ol Simplicius to set the record straight. For the plane to get caught in the crossfire of a drone attack is the most sensible explanation by far.
If only women had been in charge of societies from the beginning of time, there would have only been 1 war in all of human history. It would have started in the stone age, would still be going on today, and no one would remember what it was about.
We can criticize and judge Putin and his decisions from afar, but like the old saying, don’t judge me until you walked a mile in my moccasins. I’m sure that anyone who would trades places with Putin and see it from his perspective, they would come to the conclusion that he is doing the right thing. And I feel Putin is doing his best to protect his country from becoming another Palestine. And stopping the world from entering a nuclear winter.
There's a difference between evil actions, where the sole purpose is power acønd destruction, and good actions where the debate is about the most efficient actions rather than good or evil.
The West’s hybrid war on Russia has spilled beyond the bounds of the Ukrainian landmass to include anyplace on earth, at sea or in the sky where Russian assets operate—commercial or cargo, non-military, civilian. In critical ways this newly minted facet of the West’s hybrid war extends the ephemeral financial assault on Russia—the stolen bank deposits & the economic sanctions—into tangible & physical targets : any ship at sea, potentially any plane in the sky, any place where Russians are, the International Space Station conceivably.
Predictably logical guardrails attendant to warfare don’t exist any longer. Indeed, OTAN, which has *not* declared war on Russia, is nonetheless actively escalating its war on Russia while still coyly claiming *not* to be at war with Russia. This absurdity is a feature of the non compos mentis mind-set which overtook the West as it normalized an American president in a steep cognitive nosedive.
OTAN, a weak & incapable military hodgepodge, can’t declare a battlefield war against Russia, so it engages in terroristic acts with an eye toward strangling Russia, corralling Russia inside an open-air prison that spans 11 time zones.
The West has *tolerated* Bibi’s genocide in Gaza for so long that it has become inured to unbridled, no-limits extermination. It wants a world without Russia. Willing to engage collectively in acts of increasing mendacity, the West does so knowing that none of its allies or vassals [lookin’ at you, Seychelles] will utter a peep, no matter how vicious or off-the-rails.
Those living well beyond their means are the most dangerous. Countries, too. They behave extremely reckless and desperate like they have everything to lose and they do not even care about their "noble" image any more
The real Holocaust in Palestine will eventually lead to shutting down the shameless and whining Holo museums. All major jewish organizations in North America support the zionist state's policies, including the creation of the largest ever numbers of pediatric amputees. Global jewry turned out to be the most amoral, sadistic, and dishonorable entity. Don't forget that the shoah-business scheme was established during the acts of ethnic cleansing (rapes, theft, destruction of property, mass murders) in Palestine by jewish thugs.
Very balanced article Simplicius but I missed the emerging threat of closing Baltic Sea for Russian ships&trading. It will be the next thing after some Tonkin Gulf hoax they orchestrate in a harbour of Lettland. As you noted, it is dangerous times for Russia, and I think they will regret that they didnt decapitate the Ukrainian leadership long before.
Also like: ”The only way to stop them is to win the war as quickly and decisively as possible.” There you have it!
But like you I sincerely hopes Putin/Kremlins restraint and patience will pay off.
Attempting that will lead to Russian strikes on the military resources attempting to close the Baltic Sea. Decapitating the Ukrainian leadership has nothing to do with that.
Oh dear, writing of two topics can be confusing to others…
1. All these hybrid warfare from Russia in the Baltic Sea (as West desribes it) will inevitably lead to ”demands” from western leaders to ”secure” the infrastructure. Finnish troops boarded the Eagle and they have no proof presented for their accusations. From Russia…no reaction at all. Ursa Major…reactions but no actions! I
It was an impudent act of War. I know you live in Russia and as such must be loyal but do you really think Russia has the guts to sink the NATO-ships blocking the Denmark Strait (if NATO are dumb enough to do such an act)?
2. Putin has informed West about him regretting not to help Donbass 2014-2021, he has admitted that securing Crimea was a spontaneous operation (dont think so) and that even the SMO developed in a spontaneous operation. He has said that Russia should have been better prepared.
Your resistance to decapitate Ukraine leadership is honourable but I firmly believe Putin will regret that he left Zelensky&Yermak&Budanov untouched. One ”problem” West have right now is to back out of the mess they have created. Behind them is Zelensky effectively blocking their retreat. If gone, the question about Ukraine, would be an open affair.
"Oh dear, writing of two topics can be confusing to others…" Yes, especially when you confuse facts and geography in a highly inaccurate way.
"Finnish troops boarded the Eagle and they have no proof presented for their accusations. From Russia…no reaction at all."
Why should there be? The Eagle S is not a Russian flagged vessel, but is registered in the Cook Islands. Russia's stance towards shipping that's not registered in Russia is "you're on your own" and always has been. If it had been a Russian vessel there would have been a reaction, and action as well.
"Ursa Major…reactions but no actions!" The Ursa Major sank at sea, far from the Baltic. When Russia determines why this Russia flagged vessel sank it will take appropriate actions. Russians aren't cretins, nor are they Americans. They don't go bombing at random based on wild-eyed speculation by uninformed people on Internet.
"It was an impudent act of War." What was? No one knows why the Ursa Major sank, nor, if it was a deliberate act, who committed that act. Russia doesn't go into exploding head syndrome. It first develops all available information and then it acts.
As for the Eagle S, you can do whatever you want to a third party ship and that's not an act of war against Russia. For that matter, if the ship did indeed damage the undersea power cable Finland was well within its rights to arrest the vessel. It's routine for large vessels to damage undersea infrastructure, for example, by accidentally dragging their anchors.
"do you really think Russia has the guts to sink the NATO-ships blocking the Denmark Strait (if NATO are dumb enough to do such an act)?"
There are no NATO ships "blocking the Denmark Strait." The Strait is wide open to Russian shipping. Yes, if NATO attempted to block Russian passage through the strait there's no doubt in my mind Russia would blow those ships out of the sea. Anybody who thinks otherwise doesn't know Russia. By the way, being in contact with reality is not about loyalty. It's about basic sanity.
I don't get what you intend to say with your point 2. Crimea was, indeed, and very obviously so, a spontaneous operation. It really was prompted by Crimean decisions to push an exit from a disintegrated Ukraine followed by accession to Russia. The SMO likewise also developed as a highly spontaneous operation. Russia simply didn't have the military assets in the region given the peacetime nature of Russia's army at the time. Putin is exactly right to say Russia should have been better prepared. They're not going to make that mistake twice.
I don't have any resistance to decapitating Ukrainian leadership nor have I indicated such resistance. I just pointed out the obvious, that whether or not Russia chooses to decapitate the Ukrainian leadership has absolutely no effect on dealing with a possible blockade of the Baltic Sea to Russian shipping.
I get the impression that you, like many Westerners, for some reason still don't get it that Russia is fed up. Russia would prefer to end this without general war with the US, but if the US or its vassals screw with Russia directly, like trying to blockade Russian shipping, they're going to discover what it feels like to loose a violent war with Russia, after experiencing first hand the ferocity of Russian arms.
Oh dear. Deliberate misunderstandings is not my cup of tea. No meaning of discussions of the topics then? All is settled and done with. Not being able to identfy friend and foe is a sign of ignorance. So is slap in the face.
I found 'Denmark Strait' ambiguous. Was the Kattegat and Skagerrak being discussed, or the actual Denmark Strait in the North Atlantic? I presumed the former.
Agree on all points. No blockades are in the future.
No. All can be maskirovka and willful deception of their own people. All he has said for more than 20 years could all be lies and disinformation. Nothing can be trusted from a Russians mouth. We have just to wait for the Masterplan to evolve in the coming months…(so is the tune in the West…)
I have followed Putin from his year as PM and the following 24 years. I have followed everything on the International scene. Putin is powerful and a difficult adversary because he uses frankness and honesty as weapons. He declares what is wrong or what he wants to be done. I would describe him as a man with willpower.
Cat among pigeons? Why didnt he eat them all then? The pigeons in the West has claws and teeth behind their red eyes.
Putin's reign is a master class in the Art of War. He is very adept at the strategy of appear weak when you are strong, as well as it's flip side, appear strong when you are weak.
His, "Mercy me, we dashed into Crimea with no thought in our pretty heads", and his "Gosh, whatever were we to do??" on the SMO implementation are equally specious. His military have war gamed out every imaginable play the West might run.
And action plans for an attack on Crimea (you are aware the US put out public bids for US infrastructure to be in Crimea prior to the coup?) as well as a Ukraine attack with a 250,000 man army created, trained and armed by NATO would have been high on their to do lists.
My pigeons reference was an echo Putin's comment that negotiating with the West is like playing chess with pigeons for when they realize they are losing they shit all over the board, overturn it, and declare themselves the victor. See Ukraine for details.
"Putin is powerful and a difficult adversary because he uses frankness and honesty as weapons."
So which is it? In reality, Russians don't bluff. In geopolitics they lay out what they want, what they're willing to do, and how they'll react. That's because they think being duplicitous is something weaklings and dishonest people do, and also because they have the grown up common sense to know that once you lie in life or death matters - and a "bluff" is indeed a lie - no serious person will ever trust you again. And trust is an extremely powerful factor in resolving life and death disputes.
The obvious historical record is that since 1991 onwards Russia has built a stellar record of saying what they mean, while the West, led in their race to the bottom by the US, has lied in virtually everything it has said and done in geopolitics, especially to Russia. At every step the West has lacked the backbone to come right out and say what they really intended and instead has tried to get what it wants through trickery and lies. The lies about "not one inch eastward" for NATO and about Minsk are classic examples.
You dont understand irony? ALL I hear in the West is that you cant trust the Russians.
What I see for myself is completely different and what I wrote then (and you reiterated above). Not at all confusing whenever you realize and finally perceive that we are on the same side.
The entire Ukrainian leadership is composed of puppets. What's the point of decapitating puppets, when they will be instantly replaced with more puppets?
Don't be misled by these people who talk about puppets and proxies. There is and was an inherent force in Ukrainian society that suited the American imperialist and Russophobic agenda. So they have done everything to incite and exploit these Ukrainian forces coupled with the population's misguided desire to become EU citizens and EU.contributions served on a silver platter.
Zelensky&Co is a cunning and ruthless opponent who understands how to exploit the playing field and his benefactors to the maximum. The real puppets sits in Brussel and European capitolcities.
The resistance to uprooting the Ukrainian leadership may cost Russia the victory.
Homoerotic dancer in heels? “Penist” proclaimed to be Churchill? ( not a great compliment though). Ze had said all the proper words about peace with Russia when kolomojsky’s money funded his election campaign. Better look at the largest in Europe synagogue that still disfigures the city line of Dnipro and reminds whom the Ukrainian Nazi have been serving to and dying for in this bankers’ war in Ukraine.
Yes, strings attached but ”they” cut Igor Kolomoisky away and stripped him and other tribesmen of citizenships. They propably stole to much money from the State of Ukraine…
I am very disappointed with Russia's taking a beat approach. Hoping for what? No saine military is operating on assumption. The latest report on the deployment of the new S-500 brigade may be a clue, that Russia wants to be more prepared, before the big showdown. The war will not tolerate those who are unprepared. Turning out that NATO itself is way under prepared. We don't see all the cards. Russia knows one thing for sure, once it starts, there will be no let up until win or lose.
Im sure the brits sank that ship, probably from from Gibraltar.
As to the plane, If a misile intercepts a drone,thats a lot of crap up in the air, it does have to come down somewhere. In the fog would your 1st though be i hit a bird or some bits of wreckage hit me? And they were almost 600 miles from the actual war zone
I woulld think that if there were, they would have been taken out by now. Often for such things, I believe Russia will depend on local partisans providing location data.
There have been many reports of partisan activity, esp in traditionally Russian sections of the country. Partisans were noted for identifying the positions of ammo storage sites, command and control centres and developing groups of Ukie formations. They are an important part of Russian ISR.
Nothing that is currently happening can stop Russia winning the war on the ground. The only question is how far into western Ukraine it will go? Everything else is noise.
As for provoking Russia into an escalation- that is not the game at all. The west is still trying to bully Russia to the negotiating table to do a western favour able deal- to break Putin's nerve. (Some hope!). It is also going for lurid headlining to boost the morale of troops on the ground in danger of imminently throwing in the towel.
Russia will go as far as they have to in order to fulfil their mission objectives. If that means conquering the whole of Ukraine, so be it. They will, however, never leave a portion of Ukraine that contains the potential of re-building itself into another anti-Russian force on behalf of NATO.
You might be correct about the escalation, but maybe not - there is a significant portion of the Western powers-that-be who truly want a war with Russia, but they want the excuse that Russia started it. Insane? Yes. But we are not dealing with rational beings here, nor are we dealing with people who have any sympathy for the rest of mankind.
The western nutters who want to escalate are the likes of Estonia. And they have made it clear on numerous occasions that will not go it alone! They want NATO as in US cover. 'That ain't never gonna happen'- as Trump would say.
I think some of this escalation from the illegitimate Biden regime is a stupid effort to prevent Trump from taking office. We still have about 23 days of the regime doing something really stupid like a nuclear black swan event.
Very possible, or they if they can't get a WW3, may want to get Putin to do something they can label as rash so they can do an all new, all improved, Russia, Russia stunt.
As S states, "Airliners should simply not be anywhere near active combat zones."
Of course no commercial airliners have flown over the declared battlefield, which includes all of Ukraine, since the SMO commenced. It's why dignitaries who visit Kiev take the 7-hour train from the Polish border and arrange the elaborate permissions w/ Moscow, deconflicting as it were, while the dignitaries visit.
But when the combat zone shifts, terroristically & unpredictably, to unannounced quadrants, regions far from the line of contact, it's another matter entirely.
Sporadic whack-a-mole terrorism is possible now anywhere in Russia. Crafty Ukrainian drone operators can set up their rogue ops in Georgia, for instance, and fire on Chechnya while hoping to create a confused & chaotic incident involving commercial airliners. Crafty Ukrainian drone operators can set up rogue ops in Estonia or in Finland, treating themselves to a front row seat for aerial provocations in Saint Petersburg.
Especially when you consider the *accepted* explanation for how the NordStream sabotage happened—drunken Ukrainians under Zaluzhny’s direction sailing the Andromeda yacht from a Polish port, etc—you see the possibility for nefarious terrorism wherever Russia’s borders intersect near Western ones: we saw last summer an out-of-the-way drone attack on a Murmansk airfield which must surely have originated in Finland [drunken Ukrainians again.]
This is pop-up terrorism.
And all of Russia wears a bullseye.
Yes. That 7 hour train from the Polish border. It needs destroying. Kiev needs isolating.
Not you again. GO AWAY!
With a Starlink mini attached to the drone, the operator doesn't even have to be in the same *country* as the drone. All that's needed is a drone smuggled in (not even that , if you can buy one locally, just smuggle in the dish and the warhead) battery plugged in by an operative and you're good to go...
Also, Western MSM has had the odd press release throughout the year from Western MIC drone makers, about their drones being popular with Western Special Forces.. which raises the question of *where* they're being used, and the choices pretty much ALL boil down to "against Russia".
An example of this is the startup company White Stork financed by former
Google CEO Eric Schmid.
The goal was the development of AI powered drones - these have allegedly been
sold to the Ukraine.
Eric Schmid has stated that he envions the future of warfare to consist of
swarms of AI powered drones.
wet dream.
Multiple wet dreams, if i may add.
CN owns the resources and the supply chains.
The US has banned CN drones for its emergency responders.
However the US military still has a dispensation.
How is all of that working for the former Eric Schmid?
NiggleS: I wasn't aware of these capabilities until I read your post. Seems like "terrorism anywhere, anytime" will be here to stay. Not a comforting thought.
"terrorism anywhere, anytime" aka rules-based order, Samatha Power's style.
"During a White House meeting with Israeli officials in 2009, Samantha Power pulled out a photo of her infant son. Her son, she said, is a descendant, from his father’s side, of the Vilna Gaon, Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman Kremer, the 18th-century Jewish sage who is considered the greatest talmudic scholar of his time. This impressive lineage — a product of Power’s marriage to prominent law professor Cass Sunstein — offers some insight into Power’s personal sense of connection to Jews." Sure. The greatest ever numbers of pediatric amputees in Gaza (in the context of the still-opened whining and shameless Holo museums) is the greatest evidence of talmudic values. Pediatric amputees! -- And ALL major jewish organization in North America continue "standing with Israel."
Considering the accepted fact of the US congress being an "aipac-occupied territory," and US State Dept. being heavily zionized, who has been really making the decisions about doing "terrorism anywhere, anytime?" Banderites have been financed and armed by US. ISIS/Al Qaeda have been financed and armed by US. ... The jewish idiots think that the living by Kol Nidre rule and destroying the formerly plump host-country augurs well for "ersatz yizrael" - No. Jews were never able to create their distinct civilization but they were always adept at destroying other peoples civilizations. See the jewish Bolshevik revolution in Russia (which was financed by jewish bankers in Germany, UK, and US, and brought immense sufferings and deaths to Russian people); Judea War on Germany (declared in 1933); the destruction of Iraq and the beautiful formerly flourishing Libya, and the ruination of the multi-denominational Syria.
The US and European vassals will be next. There are always local compradors helping to destroy their countries, from the psychopaths Cheney and Erik Schmidt to the amoral Ursula, mad Salome, miserable Macron, and hapless slave Sandu.
look at the Straussian doctrine, google wolfowitz, kristol et al.
khazarian psychopaths.
You have to bear in mind that according to many leading rabbis and Talmudic scholars, Gentiles are not fully human - they lack proper souls. To Jews of that persuasion, all Gentiles without exception are lower and have less dignity than white slave owners accorded to their black slaves.
Incidentally, in general the learned books explaining why black people were inferior to whites appeared only after black slavery increased. It seems that slave holders had some residual conscience, which they assuaged by persuading themselves that black people were not fully human.
Very similar indeed to the Zionist beliefs. If you want to enslave people, or steal their land, just explain that they aren't really human so they have no rights (and perhaps "do not feel pain as we do").
Correct. Dehuminize first....then genocide.
Excellent comment, right on the button.
"the choices pretty much ALL boil down to "against Russia..."
Well....two or three or four can play THAT game. What's good for the goose...
Parties sympathetic to Russia can take down Euro-aircraft(military or civvy) with
an easy "counter punch".
Want to end the baseball or NFL season in the U$? A couple of drones dumping anarchy on an NFL playoff game (Big 10 Saturday event?) can ratchet that dynamic. All those shoulder launched nasties, sold by Ukes on the black market can show up anywhere/anytime. Take down a couple of western airliners and watch the economies crater. No more tourism or biz trips via air. Plus...the west has vulnerable sea trade too. FAFO...Just sayin'.
The government seeking the death penalty for Luigi but not for mass murder school shooters shows what they fear. Instead of attacking a football game try taking out the top 3 guys at Lockheed and half the Board one night in their own beds. A week later repeat with the corporation that builds submarines. Now the chaos is off the charts but only for the rich and powerful. At the peons level who cares if rich corporation heads get killed - heck, let's throw a party. BUT FOR THEM, it is all of a sudden, no longer fun to make money in weapons manufacturing. I know we all think those big wigs are overpaid but they do have certain valuable skills and are not easily replaceable. Especially if you keep killing them.
Let's not encourage the killing of powerless Joe's and Jane's who had no say. Instead target the movers and shakers and get better results while taking the moral high ground.
Dear Federal agents: Nothing here encouraging or supporting attacks on Americans. Instead, this is a discussion of vulnerabilities and moral precepts as applied in warfare.
Let the Ukrainian mothers meet nuland-kagan and blinken.
the hedgehog hegemon is on track to destroying itself.
after 01.20.25 it will do it a lot quicker.
Which would be the reason for the Trump team calling out the assassination of General Kirilov as a bad move.
Imagine: Buy a few Carl Gustav (M4) from the Mexican Cartels (shipping included), cash buy large agricultural drones in the US, buy some Starlink terminals from Craigslist. Marry them up and pay a visit to your favourite warhawk senator or government official...
An all (or mostly) U.S. manufactured/sourced weapon system. Very hard to blame Russia for that...
And very few ordinary Americans would care about the victims enough to get onboard with any such propaganda anyway...
Excellent points-Thanks.
Killing nobodies is easier and with the amount of planning that went into the CEO kill the culprit would stay forever hidden if not for the fact that TPTB were in rage that the killing visited them too. I am not advocating anything - just pointing out that the dynamic of any uprising is titled towards killing the weak.
Just imagine the amount of work and money that went into killing the top of Hamas. No grassroots organisation would manage to do such level of mayhem - they would be caught before even having their plans ready. OTOH you do not need to to take out 3 top guys at once - TPTB would get pissed off with the first one. If one manages the second the (miserable remains of the) civil rights are suspended forever.
But you are right of course - this is where it hurts. The problem here is that the deep state is like hydra. But it would be a good start and if they do not stop then we are lost anyway.
Spot on! Once we realize the fact that these MFKRS are at war with us, everything makes sense.The pushback must be made very painful and costly.
Very poor choice of target, the ordinary American citizen is who you *don't* want to rile up.
The ideal target would be power lines/ substations in Washington DC. Imagine rolling blackouts, with Government being cut back to "essential only" yet somehow society keeps rolling on...
The LAST thing DC inhabitants want is for people to *see* how irrelevant DC is.
There are very few "parties sympathetic to Russia" in the West, and they all are thoroughly infiltrated and unable even to agree with themselves.
Who is going to do that? Russia is not going to do that, terrorism is favourite tool of the West. So, who? I am completely sceptic on that's going to happen
Ex: U.S. Navy is buying drones that never spend a day on a naval base or ship. They go straight to an Air Force base and then get put on a plane to an undisclosed foreign location.
Doesn’t take a genius to guess where they’re going.
That sounds like the sort of tactic that could easily boomerang...
As Russia has demonstrated with the SMO, if they are pushed too far they will act. So when they do act all the cries of legality, morality, moralizing and condemnation won't matter as actions have consequences and every action may have equal and even more severe reactions.
Seeker: Good comment. The current situation, which is already at a very dangerous level, may conceivably escalate further and reach a point of no return - a point when the unthinkable happens. After WWII, many declared that "this must never happen again", and yet, 85 years later, here we are... This recurring madness has to stop.
85 years ago the western elites did not expect that the pile of gold they acquired (almost 80% of world reserves) would run out so fast. They need a new victim to loot
Agree. The US has enormous resources but bankers and mega-corporations prefer an easy rout of looting other peoples' resources by using the obedient NATO. The dishonorable US brass and the dishonorable European vassals are a property of Looters -- the banking cabal and fascist supranational corporations.
what resources are you refering to?
Its the common myth the the US has a huge amount of natural resources waiting to be easily exploited.
The reality is most everything that could be easily exploited already has been.
Thanks to the shale oil boom, the US is now sitting on more oil reserves than Russia, which estimates as having 256 billion barrels of untapped oil. The next-richest countries in terms of oil after that are: Saud Arabia (212 billion), Canada (167 billion), Iran (143 billion) and Brazil (120 billion).
Unfortunately the West with its delusional sense of superior morality will always take the moral high ground, just take that obnoxious Josep Borrell comparing the West to a "garden" and the rest of the world to a "jungle".
The problem is that Russia does not want this war, and thus fails to act decisively.
I would agree that Russia doesn't want the war. How exactly do you know Russia's objectives to draw the conclusion Russia is not acting exactly how they desire to act? Unless you know and understand Russia's goals you are just speculating.
So acts of terror committed with total impunity, rockets falling on Russia are all Just Part Of A Great Big Plan? Go on, pull the other one.
No matter how well events are planned there will always be unforseen events. Who in the world would believe those that promote themselves to be the most moral would resort to terrorism? If just to save a crumbling empire they would be so immoral What would they do if they are truly threatened? What response are you expecting? Did you consider the consequences of that response?
I don't know, it doesn't take a Nostradamus to figure out that humans are hypocrites, and that they respect strength and hold weakness in contempt, to address your examples.
So what's Russia's answer to that? Answer with tit-for-tat terrorism? Get real, Russia is not Izrael. I am oblivious how people can be so short sighted
The West has figured out that,.as long as Russia fears escalation, there isn't much Russia can do, so the West will only continue to abuse Russia with total impunity.
cheetosSpring: I agree with your comments.👍 Your second to last line hit home: "Pop up terrorism" - damn what a cynical phrase, but sadly, it does describe today's reality. Peace to all of you out there.
Interestingly the West i.e. the US and its vassal states do not see anything wrong when they do it. The terrorism and the terrorists are only evil when they are not authorized by the deep state/cabal/PTPB/cabal/whatever other name we give this complex that controls the resources of the Western states.
The US (and West generally) used to crow about its superior morality because it had scruples; it would not commit heinous acts to reach its lofty goals (even if it was a lie).
OTOH, they would point to the Commies as being Evil because they would do "ANYTHING" because, to the Commies, the Ends Justifies The Means.
Now the West labels its goal as Peaceful AntiAuthoritarian and makes war, spews misinformation and propaganda, penalizes dissent and unbiased views, subverts democracy and International Law, even threatening Judges, to counter those who will not obey.... as their Means.
Ironically the West has become the Evil Commies by its own definition.
Russia has become what we used to be, a moral, religious, and patriotic country.
We have become what Russia used to be, a corrupt, censoring, despised country.
I am struggling to find a time when western elites were moral. It was just not that obvious to those in the West
amen to that.
case in point is FR being dismantled in Africa.
Exactly
They never were, but we didn't realize that at the time. We have lots more information now.
I am afraid Jeannie, that in the old days, it was easier to think the US and West were moral, peaceful and well-meaning, at least partially because of the relative information isolation of the pre-internet days.. and lies in domestic history books. Americans still think they "won" the War of 1812 (they didn't in Canadian history books), even though Washington DC was burned. Americans and Canadians still do not realize that, at the end of WW2, Ukrainian Nazis and their families were imported into North America to allow the men to be sent back on terrorism mission against the Soviets. Those enclaves still exist in North America and they celebrate Bandera.
And most Americans believe it was Soviet aggression that led to the USSR sending offensive missiles into Cuba, when it was just a tit for tat reply to the US sending nukes into Turkey to threaten the Soviets. One of the parts of the deal between JFK and Khrushchev was that the US would remove the missiles in Turkey, but that it would be kept secret, so it looked like the USSR backed down, and the US, as usual, was without blame. The reality was different.
Back when US Mainstream Media included some truth-tellers (where are you Walter Cronkite when the world needs you?), in the mid- to late Vietnam War era, there were enough real facts revealed about lying Generals and Presidents for intelligent people to realize that almost everything the Govt. has to say is either a lie, or has been spun to make themselves look better. Many of those who learned that lesson are dead, but their grandchildren are finally starting to figure it out.
Where were the US MSM commentators telling everyone, at least once a week over 20 years that the war in Afghanistan was NOT being won, even though the Military said it was?
Once people focus on what they did not tell everyone, much less the lies they did tell, one sees that a truly well meaning moral government was an oxymoron back when most people thought it was a truism.
And that was true, no matter the Party in charge. Only the extent and details change, when the reality is the Oligarchs and Deep State are the ultimate "checks and balances" should a Legislature or POTUS develop a real conscience and morals.
and don't forget "operation paperclip."
Yes, we know all that now. We always believed we were the good guys, but thanks to modern technology, we have much more information today.
My point is that the culture was moral, religious, and patriotic. That's not America's culture anymore, it's Russia's.
the point is that RU does not talk about its operations.
only the losers do.
This not going to change. Russia is stroke without striking back, which gives the empire a feeling of impunity. After the fall of Hassad, the levels of Hubris in the Pentagon, CIA, NATO, MI6, Mossad, et al, must be stratospheric. This is going to strenghten the allout-war party. The empire controls countries and corporations. It is rare that someone like Orban or Fico move from the empire's guidelines. On the contrary, Russia does not have solid allies. Iran's real intentions are more and more suspicious, China is irritatingly inactive, Turkey is genetically treacherous, Brasil? India? The BRICs have shown to be an empty shell. Only North Korea and Belarus are going all the way with Russia. But it is not enough. A taker boxer, even if tough and powerful, cannot stop a puncher forever. They are punching Russia in every possible way without consequences. Why would they stop?
The history is best predictor. Last time Russia submitted was Tatar yoke. And it wasn't even Russia, it was all decentralized amalgamation of principalities. And they won in the end. Even if it took 300 years. After that, after Ivan the IV creating an Empire? Never happened. You can burn Moscow (Poles, Napoleon), you can kill 27 mil (of which 17 mil is civilians, which historians always forget when comparing USSR/Nazies losses) but you lose in the end.
Why? Because history goes into folklore, it goes into DNA. You can't beat that. That's why US, which is very young state, without ever going into existential struggle (civil war is a joke compared) is no contestant. Not even close. US politicians love to associate themselves with Rome, but US is no Rome. US is Carthage.
The media all collaborated in mentioning right in the heading that "Putin STOPS SHORT OF taking responsibility," or similar formulations. But they NEVER said anything about Ukraine not taking responsibility for killing two Polish farmers with an old Soviet anti-air missile.
Instead, they kept writing about the killing as "RUSSIAN-MADE missile kills two farmers in Poland." If you search for "Russian-made missile" you can still see it today. It is the greatest example of lying by omission I have ever seen.
I include couple of examples of how uniform the media were in reporting about the crashed plane. Also note how they never, ever said anything about Ukraine not taking responsibility for killing two Polish farmers with an old Soviet anti-air missile.
The NYT:
Putin Apologizes but STOPS SHORT OF Taking Responsibility for Kazakhstan Crash
The WSJ:
Putin Apologizes to Azerbaijan’s Leader Over ‘Tragic Incident’
Russian leader’s phone call STOPPED SHORT OF acknowledging responsibility for crash of Azerbaijan Airlines plane
WaPo:
Putin apologized for the “tragic incident” in Russian airspace, but the Kremlin DID NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for downing the Azerbaijan Airlines flight.
Canadian Toronto Star:
Putin apologizes for ‘tragic incident’ but STOPS SHORT OF saying Azerbaijani plane was shot down
British The Guardian:
Putin apologises for Azerbaijan plane crash WITHOUT ADMITTING Russia at fault
Spanish ABC:
Putin apologizes for the flight accident on Russian soil, but AVOIDS ANY RESPONSIBILITY
However, French newspapers that I checked didn't use the same U.S.-invented formulations. Nor the German ones. But of course, some have their own propaganda:
German Bild:
Kremlin DESPOT Vladimir Putin (72) indirectly admits that the Azerbaijan Airlines plane was hit by Russian air defense
We know that the journalists have invite-only forums where they collaborate. Some have revealed this. And it's the same in other countries.
Note also that the day after Trump's acceptance speech at the RNC in 2016, the media all included "dark" in their headlines. "Trump's dark speech" "Trump's dark vision for America," etc. Like "stops short of," an example of how they collaborate.
And after two Islamists stabbed people on a bridge in London, the media uniformly wrote that "some of the rescue personnel were Muslims!" Such a coincidence that they all came up with the same thing!
Do you think the Korean plane was really brought down by bird strike as well? Birds seemed to be aiming for the landing gear ....
It wasn't brought down so much as failed to land on its wheels or then brake. It looks like pilot suicide.
Don't know for certain if this footage is real yet, but: https://x.com/Global_Mil_Info/status/1873181671375421703
There are multiple back-ups to enable the craft to survive such a strike, all sorts of ways of bringing down the under-carriage etc unless the undercarriage itself was taken out, which would not happen with a bird strike. There is still the issue of why the pilot did not deploy the various mechanisms for slowing the aircraft on a belly skid. It went full blast into that wall. That is what tragically did for the passengers.
Reminiscent of Germanwings Flight 9525 back in 2015
Now the dust has settled we have to wonder whether Boeing did not retrofit some new safety mech that overrode all manual attempts to land safely and then attempted to force a take off from the belly touch down. That is what it looked like watching the plane fully stabilised, actually accelerating nose raised, into the wall.
All of which requires both knowledge and practice on behalf of the pilot in charge, which then brings in the question of culture.
There's been more than one "Air Crash Investigation" episode (involving Asian based Airlines) where the root cause is the pilot who is *officially* in charge has flown the plane into the ground, because his junior *cannot* override his authority, even though the junior knows what to do... The senior is *always* right..
It appears the plane lost elevator control. any use of the flaps would cause a nose down effect and also prevent attempts to lose airspeed.
DEI?
Ok the engine might have taken a bird hit, although they are certified for such an event, but was the gear even down in the video and the landing gear are inboard of where the puff of smoke came.
Regardless the landing gear are Robust. It can take the weight of the aircraft but a bird took it out? Betting nah!
Perhaps the regulators are captured in the aviation industry as well? Used to be conform to specifications, now we have pay off the inspectors.
Vaguely remember thrust reversal issues with early 737s. Maybe the engine not reversing due to a bird hit is possible. Changed fan blades on Bae-146 that ate seagulls on landing. Boy did that stink.
Once again plane certified to land with only one engine lit, but maybe it surprised them when they went to reverse thrust.
except on the boing boing 737's
the birds aim at the sensors.
It was a Boeing, start there.
It's amazing that it took a new Defense Minister to get concrete aircraft shelters under construction. The need was obvious even in 2022.
"The need was obvious even in 2022." Ah, no, not at all. It's stupid to waste resources on building concrete shelters that are not at all necessary. Russia doesn't waste resources like that.
They weren't necessary in 2022 because it is far simpler, cheaper, and quicker to base air assets outside the striking range of an adversary's weapons.
The difference between 2022 and 2024 is that Russia has dramatically increased the number of sorties and the amount of munitions unloaded onto the nazis. As nazi air defenses have been degraded manned aircraft can strike deeper into Ukraine as well. Commuting to the strike zones from farther away is now eating into the number of sorties they'd like to do, so Russia would like to base aircraft closer.
At the same time even though the numbers of long range missiles are not great, the US has achieved a greater ability to strike into Russia, so shelters have become necessary not just relatively near the combat zone but also farther away. Russia has also achieved a dramatic increase in logistics capability for support operations, such as military construction.
Finally, Russia is gearing up for general war with the US and NATO. That means hardening facilities relatively far from its borders to defend against what could be widespread attacks.
All the above boils down to building concrete shelters becoming a priority in 2024 and 2025 when doing that wasn't a priority in 2022.
"Russia is gearing up for general war with the US and NATO."
Actually, that concern was announced by VVP at Munich 2007, and many times afterwards. The strategic grievances announced in 2021, prior to the SMO, addressed the need to remove the NATO missile bases in Poland and Romania. VVP consistently considered the adversary to be NATO and not the USA proxy Ukraine. Aircraft shelters were one of many details below Presidential level and Shoigu underperformed, at best.
That Russia complained to the US about US moves leading to war with a peace time Russia is not the same as actually going to war with Russia or Russia switching to a war footing. The US/NATO weren't in a hot war with Russia in 2021. US military personnel were not firing long range missiles into Russia in 2021. Shelters were not a priority then. But they are now, as the proxy war in Ukraine has shifted into a hot, direct war between the US/NATO and Russia, and it's foreseeably getting hotter to the point where it is now time to start building shelters, with one reason for doing so being the very initial stages of a US war on Russia that might, just might, stop before general nuclear war.
Shoigu for sure underperformed. But starting to build shelters in 2022 that weren't factors then in a possible war with the US and are not big factors now in a more possible such war is the least of it. They're not big factors now in a war with the US since the time span during which shelters might matter at all in a general war between the US and Russia is so very short.
It's hard to see how if there are so many US missile attacks on Russia where shelters make any tactical difference that it would be more than a matter of hours before nukes go to work on both sides. And then the time for shelters will have passed.
Concrete shelters and revetments are mostly helpful in the event of a first strike against a surprised foe. I don't think this applies so much to Russia at this point, except inasmuch as there are facilities away from Ukraine that might be targeted. I mean with Uke missile/drone attacks, some provision for protection is warranted, I suppose, but i'd not go nuts with it. Places like say, Iceland, Germany or Korea generally have such things for the obvious reasons.
Honestly i'd expect NATO strikes against economic targets and strategic assets rather than SEAD and an attempt to assert air superiority over Russia. That sounds like a losing game to me. The ranges and balance of forces are not favorable for that kind of campaign. In fact, i'd expect the military types to advise against _any_ kind of such attack. They are not as bereft of sanity as the neocons.
the Ukrainian banderites are American Nazi by all metrics. They are creatures of deep state /cia. The jewish lobby (and Knesset) have been celebrating the self-proclaimed Nazi regiments Azov, Aidar, and Dnipro 1&2 as “freedom fighters against Russia..”
The regiments were founded and financed by the president of the jewish community of Ukraine, Mr. Kolomojsky, to protect his properties in Donbas. Not a peep from Holo museums. See the profitable memes “nazi&hitler” and “gas chambers&ovens” and the idiotic “6 min.” Global Jewry had dispensed with decency a long time ago.
Before you judge someone, walk a mile in their shoes.
So you do not judge Biden, for instance? Blinken? Sullivan?
Then your a mile away and you got the suckers shoes
great article - I think you're right about that passenger jet...but you didn' elaborate on the part about - WTF was an passenger jet doing, flying in a war zone. And I'm glad Putin is going the slow steady way and not nuking anyone.
Until this incident, I doubt many people would have considered the Caspian Sea anywhere near a war zone. In 2023, I flew into Sochi (on the Black Sea) airport twice, once from Tblisi and once from Yerevan, both flight routes much closer to Ukraine than the Azerbaijani airline's flight route. Sochi is a major tourist destination inside Russia and no one then considered it to be close to a war zone. Clearly, Ukraine is trying to expand the war zone.
right. So awful
The disunited bankers-owned US are trying to expand the war zone.
It's was not a warzone, technically, it's Caucuses. While it has proximity to Ukraine, it's still far away to be launched from Ukraine. Again, Ukraine smuggles drones into deeper Russia and launches these at something. It could have happened in Murmansk of all places. We already had drone incidents in far north.
yes, I see...its already faded from the news.
Ukraine only needs to hold out till mid 2025 as Pootin will be assssinated and Merde will surrender to avoid being the next dead guy.
I did not know you could upvote yourself troll.
the commisars are coming for you
quickly hide under your mommie's skirts.
They spent hundreds of millions on troll farms and yet you're the outcome? LMMFAO!!
Putin is playing for time until Trump gets into office, so I don't see any major changes to Russia's order of battle until then...But these acts of terrorism by Ukrainian and British intelligence operatives must be grating on his nerves....
He'll use the acts of terrorism when he bargains with Trump. Trump will sympathize with what he's been through, and the need to fight back if they aren't stopped, because Trump has personally been through something exactly like this.
Thanks for the insight that the various terrorist attacks against Russia are indeed bargaining chips for them.
So this would put the situation when the great dealmaker and master negotiator Trump gets into office as follows:
1. Trump goes into the negotiations with his usual bluster, thinking he's holding all the cards with potential military and economic escalation.
2. The Russian side just needs to point out to him that, no, they have a pile of incitements that they never responded to that must be repaid. They have waited patiently for a potential change in US Empire leadership, and if he doesn't end the US's war against Russia promptly on Russian terms, this bill comes due, rather than being torn up.
Exactly.
The bill should be directed to “deciders:” the City/FedRrserve, big wig at MIC and fascist corporations blackrock & vanguard, and the aipac-owned dishonorable congress. The criminal warmongers of the Kagans clan deserve a special delivery.
And Trump will say "So what? What are you going to do to make th eUS repay these supposed debts?"
Very possible, let's hope so!
These hapless Brit’s deserve to be hunted on one by one. There is nothing honorable about British brass and prominent war profiteers Arbuthnots and Blairs the degenerate.
>I have long wondered when Ukraine would begin exporting its naval drones to hound Russian fleets across the world, rather than just in the Black Sea. We’ve seen that these drones have massive ranges, able to go from Odessa to the Kerch Bridge in a circular path that takes them far outside of Crimea, which can be nearly 1000km in total distance. This means Russian ships in the Mediterranean and elsewhere can be easy prey, given that the Starlinks powering these drones are able to navigate them anywhere.
Please.
They would have had to go through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, navigate around the Greek islands, make it past Sicily, then hit the ship somewhere between Algeria and Spain. That is nearly 3000 km. They don't have that kind of range.
It was launched either from the Spanish coast or from the British base in Gibraltar, i.e. it was a direct NATO attack.
This sort of thing is supposed to result in a war being declared, but in the Kremlin they are so cucked out, that they will never dare.
BTW, the oil spill in the Kerch strait is mighty suspicious too, because there was another ship in distress there the next day, and it is all happening around the same time as the Ursa Major sinking, the situation with the plane, and the tanker seized by Finland. Too many coincidences.
>This naturally energizes the ‘turbo patriot’, doomer, and concern-troll crowd into heaping invectives on Putin for being ‘weak’ and not nuking London, Washington, Kiev, etc., as a “message” to stop these provocations. Realistically speaking, there’s not much Russia can do to directly halt these escalations.
Oh, yes, there is a lot that Russia could do, and yes, it does involve nukes. Wipe out the UK. It is the easiest of the NATO nuclear powers to take out -- you need to sink the one SSBN on patrol, the rest are in port due to poor maintenance, nuke them with hypersonics from ships or subs lurking nearby, then UK has no means to fight back, so you finish it off with strategic strikes, and do it Rome against Carthage style, i.e. complete total annihilation so that it can never be resurrected again.
Let's see see if anyone dares attack Russia again after that.
But even a nuclear strike on some of the non-nuclear NATO members will do the job -- NATO will automatically fall apart if Poland and/or Romania are reduced to zero (which will also block Ukraine's NATO logistics), because then the NATO nuclear powers will be faced with the choice of nuking Russia and thus ensuring their own annihilation in the process, or having the fiction of Article 5 be exposed. The latter will result in the alliance dissolving, because why would anyone in their right mind volunteer to be a strike platform for the US to attack Russia from if that will bring Russian nukes on their heads with no protection from the US, but it is the rational choice, because better that than being dead.
How many Russians have to die before the Kremlin finally starts defending the country? Because I don't see any such defense being played right now.
The whole NATO aggression is based on the calculation that at the end of the day Russian elites feel more affinity for their counterparts in the Western oligarchy than for the Russian people so they will never seriously fight back (which is natural given that most Russian oligarchs are Zionist Jews, to a much greater degree in fact than the US oligarchs, where you have a bit more diversity, and that is only on the ethnic level, while the affinity extends on a class level too). So far it has been a very sound bet.
>Oreshniks on Dnieper Bridges, anyone?
Kinzhals and Zirkons could have done the job on Day 1 of the SMO or any moment since. It is not the military-technical capabilities that are blocking it, but the Kremlin's split loyalties.
>Next year, Ukraine will have even less systems to strike Russia with
They are talking about having 30,000 long-range drones, which is perfectly doable, these things have a production complexity somewhere between a scooter and a small car. That is on average a hundred a day, and much more difficult to shoot down than what they are flying now.
And in general the trajectory has been for a constant and accelerating increase in their capabilities, not a reduction.
Ah, yes, let ourselves be bombed without fighting back then. That will sure end well.
LOL! you are so naive
well said
Yeah, they were launched from Gibralter. All the naval drones are run by the british anyway
Could Malta be a possibility ? It would certainly avoid upsetting Spanish sensibilities.
Re.: "This sort of thing is supposed to result in a war being declared, but in the Kremlin they are so cucked out, that they will never dare."
At the back of Putin's mind is always thinking about keeping China, India and even South Africa on board with his campaign in Ukraine. I reckon Putin is playing his cards just about spot on.
If China, India and South Africa are forcing Putin to let Russian people be slaughtered, those are not friends of Russia, plain and simple
You seem to know everything. How did this omniscience come about? Please share your secret.
It's generally referred to as delusions of grandeur. They have a pill to help with that now Mr Moron, you should get a bottle soon.
Typical Western mindset - I'm surprised you haven't brought up the Munich appeasement meme.
There is no such a thing like friends between countries. The interests of the ruling class in cooperating - that does exist. Sometimes these interests have a lot in common with the interests of the people but not always - see Ukraine leadership cooperates with the West against the interests of its people. The same can be said about German government or current Polish one and the future Romanian.
China etc cooperate with Russia probably for these two reasons: they assess Russia has a chance of surviving the war as it is big enough and they see it as the way to build secondary power centers which are only possible if they all together do business - they would not destroy the hegemonial power (military and financial) in this way or even come close but independent Russia and failed plan Ukraine would mean the hegemon could stop expanding.
That would be stupid because it's about Russian national security, not theirs. And these allies are in for gaining from the situation, not for suffering alongside Russia for the greater cause. It's not like they're coming to save Russia from any of the attacks.
I think it's more about keeping the West from escalating faster than they already are, since time is on Russia's side. Which is exactly why Russia's enemies are trying to force Russia to act, in order to escalate things past the point Trump could back away.
I agree
Cornishman in Basel: I agree, Russia cannot afford to act alone. Besides battling it out in Ukraine (in what Russia views as an existential conflict), and not wanting to escalate the current critical situation, Russia will also want to retain it's credibility within BRICS, and other "global south" countries.
It's a difficult and treacherous sea for the Kremlin to navigate, to say the very least.
However, if the conflict does drag on, even the BRICS members may reach a point where they wish for quicker resolution, and allow Russia to push hard and end the conflict decisively.
But for now, the Kremlin might first want to wait and see what the Trump administration is going to do, and then decide what further action to take.
Yes but is the war simply a battleground thing or not? Like are there 'powers behind the throne' ? Is it all fueled by Washington and Kiev oligarchs, ' mafia', etc ?
I think so.
The battlefield is a public drama, theatre, orchestrated, with rules and conditions, constraints.
The real war we don't see. I trust Putin is fighting it.
>I trust Putin is fighting it
I don't given the long history of his actions and inaction
just look at the question of alliances. you see what happened in syria. double cross and backstabbing etc. that's the sort of thing he's fighting behind the scenes. you see the pipeline crossing ukraine and feeding his friends in hungary and slovakia. that's the kind of issue he has to balance. you see china and the supply of microchips to usa or not. that's the kind of thing he has to play with along with them. you see the north korean munitions being received. he had to tee that up. you see the presence of blackrock and vast investments in kiev ukraine - that's an indication of the relevance of those players and his need to 'play' with that 'ball'. you see turkey and know what it is like and see how strategically important it is. he has to deal with that and somehow get a win out of it. If putin were to disappear tomorrow I reckon he's done so much and played his cards so well they ought to erect a monument to him in every country in the world. bomb the place into submission and assume that has no collateral effects in the wider world: what has it as effects right there? a hostile country you have to occupy and police, subdue, while they do everything they can, 30 million of them, to destroy you from within.
Putin is a grown up, not a petulant child. So are those who manipulate america. They use the tactics of schoolyard bullies, petulant children, destroy who/what they don't like. Blunt crude aggression just like children. But that's not who/what they are. No way. They are sophisticated amoral grown ups, just twisted evil with it, too. And while the theatre plays out its bloody sham they devise ever new ways of destroying Putin and Russia. They make plans today for destroying russia after Putin has reached old age and gone. They are implacable and wholly inimical to life.
Putin deals with them and their doings and he knows better than to think the immolation of a hundred thousand Kiev Ukrainian people is the cure for all ills.
>If putin were to disappear tomorrow I reckon he's done so much and played his cards so well
Played his cards so well that his country, the former untouchable superpower and still in possession of the largest nuclear arsenal, has been reduced to the status of Libya and Syria, i.e. places anybody can bomb whenever they feel like, with total impunity, safe in the knowledge they will not be touched in response?
You also don't seem to understand the internal situation in Russia and what role Putin plays. Forget about the man himself, though he is to blame for a lot, and think about the overall power structure. There is a large and powerful segment of the Russian elites who want to surrender and go back to being a pure resource appendage of the West with no independent development whatsoever. The jury is still out on whether Putin the person in his mind set it as his task to wrestle control over the country from those people, but it is very clear that even if wanted to do it and tried to do it, he did not succeed, and they are still determining policy to a large extent.
The only way to make sense of what has happened in the last three years that does not invoke magical hypotheticals not in the public domain (i.e. the West having revealed some technological trump card behind the scenes that has the Russians effectively defeated and they are stalling for time because of it) is to interpret it as a consequence of that failure to clean up the elites in Moscow after the catastrophe of the 1990s.
well there you go - you try to put Putin down at the same time as pointing to one of the intractable problems he has internally.
And it is completely invalid to refer to his country as formerly an untouchable superpower. Completely invalid. The USSR might have been that but the Russia that Putin inherited was a meal for the dogs and they were chowing down.
It is totally to his credit what he did, the complete reverse of what you try to say.
I'm in your camp GM. A step forward would be the destruction of star link satellites. Every single long range air/sea drone has a terminal attached to it. Next, knock out one or more commercial satellites providing real time intel info to The Ukraine. That's not any attack on NATO right?
If that is not enough to stir the pot use an EMP over Kiev. Do this all before Trump and Musk are sworn in. I really don't want to have to comment on terrorism against Russia for the next decade do I? Cuz to me Russia seems terrified of Article 5. I mean imagine how pissed as a Russian solider you would be knowing buddies died because they can stop star link but don't because of some commercial contract or future earnings?
I used to think Russia needs to make a show of force to stop these kinds of attacks but I am more settling on the idea Russia will do nothing. I guess I have to wait for post-Putin for my fireworks show.
Russian soldiers are in fact indeed pissed about the whole situation. And Starlink is just one thing out of a very long list.
There have been videos of soldiers in the trenches outright cussing out Putin for refusing to disable logistics and to do decapitation on the Kiev regime.
And airing that sort of thing in public is obviously seriously frowned upon, so you can imagine how widespread that sentiment actually is on the ground.
The mid-high-ranking officers are the most important group here, as they would be key for an eventual pro-patriotic military coup.
How many of those in the BSF died because Putin refused to lift a finger to stop the attacks while explicitly preventing them from defending themselves? Notice how the Global Hawk drones have not flown ever since one was actively "disturbed" immediately after the ATACMS strike on the Sevastopol beach. That is all it took and the drones were gone. And no BSF ships have been sunk since then, because that is hard to do without real-time targeting. Which naturally and immediately raises the question why the ships had to be sitting ducks for more than a year, with half a dozen of them sunk and who knows how many crew members drowning, before these simple measures, that everyone was screaming for, were taken? I can't imagine Putin is very popular in the BSF after that. But it isn't just the BSF -- there were a lot of losses in the ground forces and air defense officer ranks due to the refusal to do anything to stop the weapons influx and Western GMLRS systems having a free reign for so long.
What is always forgotten here is that the Russian army never planned for fighting a war against NATO under such self-crippling rules of engagement.
The assumption was always that if they were ever attacked, they would be allowed to immediately disable NATO ISR, and fight on equal (in Russia's favor even) terms.
Obviously nobody planned for a war in which the Kremlin forbids preventively striking the enemy and disabling logistics and ISR, and you have to just rely on being able to dodge the hits and praying that SHORAD saves you once again. Because who in their right mind would fight like that?
So again, I can't imagine Putin is very popular currently within the military. What the threshold for a coup is in reality is the big question. Because the risks are very high. The last time that was tried -- i.e. political leadership was clearly acting in treasonous way and had to go if the country was to be saved so the military tried to take matters in its own hands -- it was not planned properly, and the coup not only failed but it ended up being the final trigger for the dissolution of the USSR. I imagine that story has not been forgotten, even more so given that e.g. someone like Surovikin was a part of it as a junior officer and then spent time in prison because of his actions.
So it's your turn to be the morons wingman while trolling?
Starlink, at this point, comprises over 7000 satellites, so NO, they can't *stop* Starlink in any way that's meaningful across the whole SMO.
Russia *has* demonstrated the ability to use EW over a *limited* area sufficient to degrade Starlink signals. But they do that for GPS as well, so the limits to the area covered are the same, and the reasons for doing so are the same. Troops bitch about what they don't have all the time, in the grand scheme of things, this one is meaningless.
Russia is NOT afraid of Article 5, they have comprehensively destroyed everything NATO has sent into Ukraine, to the point where the bottom of the NATO barrel has been scraped clean. It is in fact NATO *itself* that is afraid of Article 5 being enabled, because NO-ONE in Europe wants to be the first to feed its troops into the Russian meat grinder... They all want the USA to do it.
The only NATO force that is of any concern to Russia is the combined air forces, but only because they can send *one* big Hail Mary attack that would cause huge (but very survivable) damage to the Russian war machine, resulting in a doctrinal nuclear exchange.
Once Oreshnik is available in operational numbers, even that threat goes away, so NATO has a very small "window of opportunity" to use its air superiority for that one time punch. For that reason, the first few months of Trump 2 are going to be very interesting.
It may just be that removal of the bad apples from the stash is just not feasible. We see how Trump will deal with his own deep state and the oligarchs. I dont suppose much better than Putin.
Your observation about the unhinged behaviour of Ukrainians and quite some NATO countries is correct. You let them do it then they do more. There is only one thing that can put the jinni back into the bottle - violence. The West is not interested in diplomacy because our elites never have to pay the price. Maximum what can happen to them is to be dismissed, enjoy private assignments from the cronies they helped and give interviews to the eager media - see Boris Johnson for an example. In war the people are not interested and simply cannot oppose the government. It does not work in any country at war, does it?
Do you just make things up as you go or is there a bigger retard writing your talking points? You clearly know less than nothing about the realities inside Russia. It is not 1994.
It is not 1994 indeed. It is 2024. Things were supposed to have changed...
Very sensible comment. The world we live in is complex and Russia has to navigate a veritable minefield both figuratively and literally. It's not just Ukraine and not just the West. He also has to kepp the main BRICS+ countries together.
Some day, the whole truth will be told. The full 9 yeards of it. Our friend GM will not be impressed, of course, but the rest of us kind of prefer to live another day before WWIII is upon us.
WWIII has been made much more likely by Putin's "strategic wisdom", not less likely.
Very linear childish assertion
Now I remember why I stopped coming to Simplicius comment section- you, the keyboard warrior in moms basement.
Your posts bring to mind madam Salome Z and her plans for “instant democracy” in Georgia. Someone called her “Salmonella/Shalom”
A lot of them are just petulant children. Don’t give them too much credit.
Attrition should work on you the same way as it has been working on banderites, these loyal servants to the zionized empire of lies.
Let's start from comparing 2001 Russia to 2024 Russia. If you don't see a difference, you are a blind fool. And before you start stupid "I am talking about XX-YY period" he straight went into 2001 when CIA were funding ISIS precursors in Chechnya. So action from the day one.
The difference between me and you is that you look at the superficial level and I look at the underlying structures.
Putin's main job when installed in power was to make sure the communists never returned to power and the oligarchic model established in the 1990s was cemented in place. In order to achieve that, he had to stabilize the country. Which was done.
So what do we have as a structural changes here? Nothing -- the oligarchic model firmly and irreversibly remained in place during Putin's quarter century in power. Supposedly with some restraints on the oligarchs individually, which was necessary to rein in the centrifugal forces that were threatening to tear the country apart, but as a class they retained and cemented their place in society.
Again, don't look at the superficiality of such and such individual oligarch getting in trouble with the Kremlin. Forget about the shiny skyscrapers and relatively clean streets (in some places), look at the more general systemic factors -- who owns things and who makes the decisions.
The whole Ukrainian fiasco stretching back to the 1990s and continuing now cannot be understood without firmly grasping that reality.
And it increasingly looks like the West has done its analysis very carefully and concluded quite accurately that the internal oligarchic structure in Russia will prevent any serious fighting back against NATO from happening, because that would be contrary to the interests of that oligarchy, so they are safe to escalate as much as they want, until the Russian oligarchy surrenders. If you are watching events in Russia carefully, that is exactly what has been happening.
Thus if Putin was to actually save the country, it was an absolute must to end the oligarchic economic model. But how could he do that if he was installed to make sure it is cemented in place? See the problem?
You may theorize all you want. I lived under communists, under Yeltsin and under Putin. So I have firsthand experience. Everything changed in past 25 years. Like, literally. It's absolutely, utterly unrecognizable country atm. Laws, commons, dos and don'ts.
You have no clue.
If "everything changed" why has the most fundamental thing not changed?
Which is that Russia is still a resource appendage to the West, and continues to export natural resources to the enemy even as the enemy sends them back in the form of drones, missiles and shells killing Russian soldiers and civilians daily?
If Putin "saved the country" because he cared about, why is it that he then turned it into a large-scale Syria/Libya, i.e. a place anyone can bomb whenever they feel like without any fear of retaliation? Because that is exactly what is happening right now. Daily.
Why is all of that happening when Putin can literally end it in a day?
The cost of that is the permanent separation of Russia from the "West". Which would be a very good thing for the average Russian -- Russia gets to keep its precious non-renewable resources for itself and to invest them into local development instead of sending them to West for pennies on the dollar of their real worth. But a bad thing for the Russian oligarchy.
So we have otherwise inexplicable actions and inactions -- total failure, in fact a firm refusal on the part of the Kremlin to defend the country -- that only benefit the oligarchy while hurting the country as a whole and especially the regular people. These can only be explained by what I tried to get across to you (that nothing has fundamentally changed since the 1990s, only the superficial appearances).
There have been a number of news articles on how there are understandings between the CIA and Russia. Some drama has happened because not everyone in the West is on board with the CIA calling the shots, including other parts of the US government.
Yes, I know. About there being articles. Some few I have seen, others I have seen referenced. It is clear there are levels and areas of this conflict far beyond what we know.
And what's sad is not that our msm ignores them but that our alt-media, our clerisy, ignore them, too. More and more i see it: the manipulating monsters at the top, the crucified manipulated at the bottom: asleep, comatose. And no one in between. No help from clerisy, from educators, from activists, from the political. None.
So the people are just going to have to wake up and take an interest and do things or they will finish up like the sacrificial beings that are the kiev ukrainians, the syrians, the gazans and so on..... we think it cannot happen to us... in the west.... I've got news for them... it can happen anywhere, any time...
Westerners need to wake up and take care of the rapacious parasites which infected all critical nodes of governance.
Yep. We need to wake up. That is a fact. It is the number one major need. It's funny our guides and mentors rarely mention it, promote it, agitate for it, suggest any steps that might facilitate it.
Well not so funny, really, of course.
More an indication that they need to wake up, too.
Generally they pride themselves on being awake - for after all, don't they read and contribute to arcane alt media columns...
Think about the insanity of what you just said. Which, for the record, does seem to be true.
But what does it mean? The Russian government agreed on having a daily casualty tally measured in the triple digits on killed and maimed soldiers and in the double digits on killed and maimed civilians. Daily. And at least one industrial object blown up every day somewhere in the vicinity of Ukraine.
Read that again.
The Russian government **agreed** on that becoming the norm with no end in sight.
What should happen to a government that does that, by the hands of its own citizens?
That's not what the agreements were about. The agreements were more along the lines of Russia doesn't bomb outside Ukraine and the West doesn't give Ukraine the tools to bomb inside Russia. A far quid pro quo.
The problem is that many in the West want escalation, and so went against some of those handshake agreements by providing Ukraine long range missiles.
And in response Russia did not start bombing outside Ukraine, i.e. Russia agreed to the rules changing.
I don't know what your argument is. Or are you still trying to push some nonsense about how Russians need to kill Putin, on an anglophone website? Russians aren't reading this, so I don't know who your intended audience is supposed to be for your propaganda.
Russia is forced to deal with mad and unscrupulous creatures which hate Humanity. What is US debt- $37 trillion? The US is the most corrupt and rotten entity on the planet; the triumph of Thieves and mass murderers & talmudized traitors and liars.
It’s not Russia’ business to restore the denuded and degraded US. It is the Russian business to protect humanity from the amoral perverts which have already devoured the western civilization.
I believe that shadow/real war is financial, yes it is seen but the real impact, size and methods are not all visible.
To glimpse it, look at the BlackRock investments in Ukraine, the Master role BlackRock supposedly will have in a post war Ukraine.
If Russia allows BlackRock to have ANY role in Ukraine 2.0 he can be viewed as a WEF pawn, I don't believe he is and I believe he sees the very real danger of a BlackRock anywhere near his nation.
BlackRock is a zionist fascist corporation acting by dishonorable talmudic rules.
Could be, although I am inclined to think that they're more satanic than zionist and/or fascist, could be wrong.
But stories of a world satanic cult that demands novices murder to prove fealty, novices who are then given powerful positions in govt, media seems more and more plausible.
"you need to sink the one SSBN on patrol," Oh, is that all? Why that's just as easy as believing in unicorns. Click your ruby slippers together three times while wishing hard and there's no need to be constrained by reality.
Out here in the real world solving real world problems by ignoring them and betting on fantasy doesn't work. The reason SSBNs became and remain an iron-clad deterrent is that it is virtually impossible to find them when they are on patrol. Each SSBN also has such intense firepower that nobody who cares about the future of his country will take the risk that an attempted attack on an SSBN will fail.
If Russia attempted an all-in nuclear strike on the UK and failed to nail the SSBN on patrol, over 50 million Russians would die. People who give a shit about their countries will do pretty much anything else to achieve their goals rather than roll the dice on such a risky act. They will only attempt such a strike on the UK if they have absolutely no other options, and people who are smart enough to run a country like Russia will have options if general nuclear war has not erupted.
Paradoxically, some of those options you've named. A nuclear strike on a non-nuclear power, like Poland or the Netherlands, is a very different deal, especially if it was limited to nuclear strikes on US nuclear weapons depots or on the US's Aegis Ashore offensive nuclear missile installations. But even there you have a risk that deeply delusional fools in the UK, France, or the US may launch city-killing nuclear strikes against Russia.
One of the risks arises exactly from the SSBNs that Russia, the US, the UK, and France have on patrol. Commanders of the western SSBNs have agency, the ability to launch without needing authorization codes from their national command. They also have standing directives to launch under attack, the presumption being that an attack on an SSBN is part of a nuclear war which communications links have not been able to convey to the SSBN. They practice very rapid ripple fire for just such a purpose, to launch under attack, to be able to get off at least some missiles even within the time it takes for a torpedo fired from a stand-off distance, whole minutes, to get to the SSBN. The West has made such launch under attack standing orders known precisely to discourage any attacks on their SSBNs.
We don't know if Russian SSBN commanders have the same launch on attack standing orders, but it is at least a significant possibility they do. If so, that's a pathway for relatively low level commanders in the West to start a nuclear war: attack a Russian SSBN to push it into launching under attack. If Russia nukes a non-nuclear NATO power like the Netherlands or Poland, there will be lots of desire for revenge out there even if the US, UK and France decide they don't want their countries erased forever by attacking Russia.
>The reason SSBNs became and remain an iron-clad deterrent is that it is virtually impossible to find them when they are on patrol
Actually if it is just one SSBN you need to go after, it can be tailed quite reliably after it leaves port. The real problem is dealing with the whole of NATO. The USSR had the numbers to do that, Russia does not and is vastly outnumbered (2:1 in SSBNs, 5:1 in strike subs). But one SSBN can be done.
>If Russia attempted an all-in nuclear strike on the UK and failed to nail the SSBN on patrol, over 50 million Russians would die
Obviously you would only launch the countervalue strike upon confirmation of the SSBN kill, not before.
>We don't know if Russian SSBN commanders have the same launch on attack standing orders
We have a hint -- some time ago there were leaked documents regarding the internal Russian thresholds for launching the nukes, and one of them was the loss of two SSBNs. Which, if you think about how that could happen, implies no such orders. This assumes those leaks were accurate, of course.
>Paradoxically, some of those options you've named. A nuclear strike on a non-nuclear power, like Poland or the Netherlands, is a very different deal, especially if it was limited to nuclear strikes on US nuclear weapons depots or on the US's Aegis Ashore offensive nuclear missile installations.
That is correct in terms of how it would play out. But those places do not deserve it as much as the UK. And you will have to do countervalue towards reduction to zero, not mere counterforce against Aegis Ashore and other military objects. The reason is that if you nuke the bases in Poland, the mere fact that anything on its territory has been nuked (and you can't really take out something like the base in Rzeszow without taking out several sizable villages around it, i.e. quite a bit of civilian casualties) will ensure that then Poland will cry to high heaven until the end of times for retaliation, and that will put the US in a tough spot, especially with a strong internal Polish lobby in the Midwest, etc. The way to preempt that is to make sure there is no Poland left to cry for retaliation. The logic is cold and callous, but remorseless.
"Actually if it is just one SSBN you need to go after, it can be tailed quite reliably after it leaves port. [...] But one SSBN can be done."
Not so. Breaking contact from the adversary's trackers on leaving port is one of the most elementary and basic elements of SSBN operations. Countries don't spend trillions on such hardware and life or death strategies without taking advantage of the many simple and straightforward methods for dealing with such utterly obvious issues.
"Obviously you would only launch the countervalue strike upon confirmation of the SSBN kill, not before."
In that case you'd be too late, because your target would have already launched their airborne assets and emptied their silos at you.
The only way to pull off a sneak attack on the UK is if you get *all* of their nukes with your first strike, and you accomplish that first strike fast enough to ensure that *none* of their nukes get launched. At the present time there's no way for Russia, or any other nuclear power, to pull that off.
The key factor that discourages first strikes is the phenomenal lethality of even a single modern nuke. If you don't get them all in your first hit you'll lose ten million or more in the case of Russia (a strike on Moscow).
In the case of the classic nuclear powers, you can't even assume that they don't have nukes pre-positioned in Moscow. Israel, for example, is widely believed to have stashed one or more nukes in Moscow to set off in case of need. Who's to say the UK hasn't done that as well? Use a design with no boosting in the primary and you don't even have to refresh tritium bottles every so often. They could sit in a basement for many decades, waiting for the day they explode.
"This assumes those leaks were accurate, of course."
A false assumption. Russian internal nuclear doctrine has never leaked, although there is no end of faked "secret documents" out there.
"But those places do not deserve it as much as the UK." Russia makes its decisions on the base of military advantage or disadvantage. They're not emotional about it in terms of who "deserves" it more.
"then Poland will cry to high heaven until the end of times for retaliation, and that will put the US in a tough spot" Yes, it will put the US in the spot of either ignoring the Poles or having 300 million Americans killed.
There's no way a Russian tactical nuclear strike on NATO and US assets in Poland would end with everybody in the West just saying, "Gosh, we're awed. OK, we'll back down." There will, for sure, at least be conventional war after that. But if Poland doesn't like what Russia does, Russia won't give a shit. If Poland acts up Russia will strike them again. That's what war is about.
What the US faces is a terrible asymmetry: the US has many military assets that Russia can hit, including with nuclear weapons, which are not in the US. Russia can wipe out US foreign military assets all day long without touching any US cities or even a square meter of US territory. But the US can't do that to Russia. It may strike the two Russian bases in Syria, but besides those Russia has what? Maybe two other small bases outside of Russia? If any US nukes explode on Russian territory, Russian nukes will explode on US territory.
You can never be sure with any of this, given the insanity, incompetence, and delusion that rule the US, but if past US actions are any guide the US will cheerfully throw any ally under the bus just to make sure nothing bad happens within the US. Look at what they did to Germany's economy, for example. The US actually *attacked* Germany, blowing up Nordstream, which was as much a German property as it was a Russian property.
TY. The blood lust of the armchair generals is as bad as any of our megalomaniac leaders. Just nuke em is just stupid.
Also it takes away the fact that the issue is those at the top with too much power and influence, nuking countries only guarantees the death of innocents, while also probably allowing the elite to some extent to survive, therefore the issue never gets solved.
It also continues the vicious cycle with some fury.
There will be no quick solution to any of this, its a giant balancing act ironically for both sides. Plus there's the risk nuking a country or even asset may generate the opposite response, and a small chance it doesn't even work properly and the world then laughs at you, putting you in a very awkward position.
Go after those who do and will, not those who don't and won't.
>Also it takes away the fact that the issue is those at the top with too much power and influence, nuking countries only guarantees the death of innocents, while also probably allowing the elite to some extent to survive, therefore the issue never gets solved.
For the record, my preferred solution is surgical strikes on the Western oligarchy. Not nukes on cities.
But there are problems with that.
The first problem is that you need too many missiles for that, and it has to be done in a way that will ensure what has not been taken out during the first salvo is not going to launch the nukes.
I don't think Russia has the number of missiles and launchers to do it, although Oreshnik is a big step forward.
Although, of course, all of that is a moot point if Putin continues to see Western oligarchs as more dear to the Russian elite's hearts than Russian civilians, as has been the case so far.
The second problem is that the US is actively working on containerizing medium-range missile launchers, which can then be concealed anywhere -- ports, trucks, trains, anywhere in cities, etc. So some areas of Europe may have to be just vaporized totally with lots of megatons just to ensure no strike on European Russia is launched.
It didn't have to be that way, if red lines had been enforced on time, and if proper preparations for total war had been carried out.
Unfortunately it seems like bloodlust is the only way - that will do most to deter future attacks. It's like what happened in villages under German occupation on the Eastern Front. Very quickly did Partisan's lose support - as the death of one German soldier would result in the deaths of 10 villagers.
Same thing here - for one Russian downed plane/boat/etc you raze a village?
Look up the Typhon missile launcher.
It is a shipping container.
How do you disable the launchers? Surgical strikes won't do, you don't know where the launchers are, as they are indistinguishable from standard shipping containers in ports, on truck beds, in cargo trains, etc.
The only way is very large nukes wiping out large areas with everything there.
At some point the populations there deserve it. Some of them actively wanted to be a launch platform for US nukes, those that didn't actively want it clearly did not find the issue important enough to rise up and block the deployment.
I am from the Netherlands, please choose Poland. We do store nuclear warheads though. I would also suggest Brussel, Belgium as an alternative where we have both EU and NATO HQ. That’s were most of the war retoric originates from.
Or you think it is non negotiable 😀
I could well see a direct hit with a zircon or Kinzhal on MI6 HQ in London, completely destroying that massive structure. That might well be a severe lesson for the UK and shut them up, knowing that it could be easily done again on any other structure of importance.
Article 5 then? Not on your life. No NATO country (esp including the USA) would risk escalation after such a hit. Indeed, the US hopes for a Russian-European land war, solving two problems with one war.
You know what goes through everyone's mind when they meet at Davos....
Excellent.
From what I have read the Russians are at least a decade ahead in SSBN’s. Remember last summer offthe coast of Georgia the navy knew a Russian submarine there but could not locate it. What if they can locate ours?
This new conventional missile seem to be designed to penetrate precisely into hardened targets and expode deep underground so if they were launched from subs off the Coast they could destroy all land based nuclear weapons
Doesn't matter how ahead you are technologically if you don't have the numbers.
The SSBNs are widely dispersed, so unless the Poseidon is actually a tool to tail them and sink them, not so much an Armageddon coast destroying weapon, then there is a serious numbers problem.
Russia has as many nuclear attack subs as NATO has SSBNs, and NATO has five times as many nuclear attack subs as Russia has. That's a problem.
For comparison, in Soviet times it was 1.2 to 1 in USSR's favor across the board.
You have no idea how many subs or what kinds Russia actually has. You are just making stuff up again.
Yes, we do know how many they have. It takes years to build these things and they are not concealable.
I wouldn't suggest they are launched from Ukraine into the Mediterranean. Recall the SBU now works with HTS, they can easily be launched from Syria or elsewhere in the region amenable to Ukraine (British Cyprus? etc.)
Cyprus is also nearly 3,000 km away, and if it was Cyprus, what difference does that make?
The point is that this is a direct NATO attack on Russian shipping.
Exactly. people need to look at the whole geography of it.
Also, don't forget who else has it in for Russia, if not overt;y and obviously. Yes, the name starts with 'I' and ends with 'l'. Now who could that be?
India is a strong ally of Russia and a BRICS partner. Russia and India need each other to balance China.
Israel
GM is right in general based on what we know, but there are other layers to the situation, which make the available choices to be not so simple, and finding that British SSBN on patrol is also not a simple thing.
There is a reason why NATO is trying to provoke Russia into a response and they don't mind to commit actual acts of war in order to get Russia to respond, and it's also clear that they don't mind WW3 as result of that, so the logical question here is WHY? And Putin, which knows more than us about those "other layers of the situation" is not giving it to them. I have some ideas as to why NATO wants to provoke a war and also about other military elements that can change the military balance of power, where it would make a lot of sense for Putin to be extra cautious.
Drones over the US, UK, etc anybody? Including those orbs that seem to have an anti gravity drive, otherwise how do they stay in place levitating, and never mind the crazy speeds, etc that they can do. There is a whole other level of weapons tech derivative of crashed UFOs that the US, the UK, etc have and that may be one reason for Putin to be cautious.
Also, those that understand more about the deeper levels and goals of the deep state cabal know that they want a civilization level collapse, aka "deep reset" WEF style, and Putin certainly knows about that and he won't give it to them so easily. People may want to read about the "Anglo Saxon Mission" and their plans.
Anyway, my point is that there are other layers to the situation that most people don't have a clue about, but Putin surely does, and yes, it's very frustrating to see them hit Russia over and over and no retaliation. More will be revealed...........
Lovely bit in WRSA about the English sub force scandal that involves officers with target lists of enlisted men and rape gangs. I forgot that is just 2 subs, thanks. Anyway, I bet those lads are all top notch fellows in their prime, physically and mentally. Ready to defend their officers, er - England to the end.
If NATO wanted WWIII, they wouldn't need to provoke Russia into anything. They'd just start it.
Otherwise, this is just more wishful thinking.
There are plenty of Ukrainians in Spain. You might recall, a Russian helicopter pilot who defected by flying his Mi-8, along with unsuspecting (later killed) crew members, to Ukraine, and ended up in Spain, where he ended up murdered. I doubt Spain got great security, so if someone wants to use Spain for launching drones, they might have a sleeper cell/whatever there.
I think that such terror acts in the EU would increase the closer the war to its "end." Ukrainians will eventually realize how cynically they're screwed and disposed by the West and unleash terror on the EU, at least. Ukrainians known for running terror operations in Western Ukraine after WW2, where they were gutting the entire villages way into mid-1950s, when they were finally captured, and sent to Gulag, until Khrushchev, who grew up in Ukraine, granted them amnesty as "political prisoners" in 1960s.
Spain recently blocked US arms shipments docking in Spain (as being against international law):
https://theintercept.com/2024/12/17/israel-weapons-spain-embargo-shipping/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter.
Spain is also one of the friendly places many young Ukrainian families fled to (and applied for citizenship) in the first months of the war, seeing what was coming.
Don't know there's anything Spain can do about Gibraltar and UK though. These bastards sure do plan way ahead.
Dear God, make these righteous Ukrainian men and women find Ursula(and progeny), Baerbock (and progeny), Nuland-Kagan (and progeny), and the whole Kagans clan, along with Blinken & Shapiro.
Another aspect could be that when they bomb oil tankers, (western) countries will suffer from oil pollution on their beaches.
But who cares about the environment these days? Everything accepted for the destruction of Russia. Not that I lost hope, cause hope is already at zero level
Russian beaches are covered by oil now, after a very suspicious disaster with Russian tankers.
You got called out by a lot of people but for the record I think you are totally right on Russian MOD not fighting this war seriously at all, not now, not in the beginning and not a year from now either.
Comparing the Russian conduct to this war to America's in three seperate wars is eye opening
1. In world war 2, America bombed Japan to ashes, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and burning their infastructure to the bedrock. Many of these targets had no specific military value beyond providing GDP for the overall war machine. At the time it was considered totally justified and even now a hundred years later criticizing the US torching of Japan is taboo for politicians. It was one of the most appalling crimes in human history and that isn't even talking about the NUKES.
2. In Vietnam, America killed like a million Vietnamese, again a huge number of them civilians and poisoned rain forests with toxic gas and napalmed children. Remember that famous photo of a burning girl? She came and spoke at my school - showed us her burns - horrible! America lost that war why - because 50000 casualties was too much for us, we only cared about ourselves - imagine if Russia had the same regard for its troops and disregard for their enemy as we did in Vietnam.
3. In Israel, which is functionally the same as the United States, they have recently leveled an entire civilization. Two million people reduced to the level of roaches, with the greatest proportion of women and children killed in any conflict in modern history. The Israelis were called out on it sure, but so what? Their enemies are dead and they are dancing on the recently conquered Mt. Hermon. Do you think they give a rat's ass about optics?
Before someone accuses me of being a turbo patriot hyper doomer - it doesn't need to be as extreme as Putin nuking poland or Britain or whatever. But there's no good reason that kievs water treatment plants and main water pumps weren't bombed to atoms in the first hours of the war, or at least once it became clear that operation "Parade Uniforms in Kiev" wasn't going according to plan. Unlike, say, Israel, blowing up Kievs water network wouldn't have tormented the population, it simply would have disabled Kievs economic and logistical worth - without water you now have several million civies to evacuate into Poland or Lviv or wherever, that means all the roads are tied up, all the soldiers are tied up evacuating people, Zelensky can't dance on Tik Tok because he's digging latrines alongside his senior staff.
If that didn't work, you could airburst an EMP over Kiev or Odessa or both, again, few if anyone dies, but the city is disabled as a "war engine."
I know there's downsides to this strategy but Russia's strategy of grinding up its own people and economy against Ukraine's is a "race to the bottom" that doesn't make sense to me at all. Anyone talking about optics or diplomacy at this point in the war really is coping, Israel mashed up babies under tank treads and laughed about it - but forcing Zelensky to shit in an outhouse is too extreme??? - give me a break!!!
It is very possible that Russia does not want to "win" in Ukraine. Would you??
Why win a psycho hydra nation when you can just bleed said hydra and its allies of men, cash, weapons.
Russia already has the most valuable regions no need to bother with the remaining rump state. And it is now creating a military buffer zone as it waits for Ukraine to either collapse completely or for Trump to show up with the deal of the century.
>But there's no good reason that kievs water treatment plants and main water pumps weren't bombed to atoms in the first hours of the war, or at least once it became clear that operation "Parade Uniforms in Kiev" wasn't going according to plan.
There is a very good reason, several of them in fact, and this is where you reveal yourself to not understand the nature of the conflict. But that does not make the Kremlin's conduct any better.
Kiev is a Russian city inhabited mostly by ethnic Russians, and so is everything in Ukraine east of Zhytomyr. Furthermore, Kiev is literally called "the mother of all Russian cities".
Why would anyone in their right mind level it or force the population to go without water?
Because it is not even necessary. What was necessary was to disable logistics, to exterminate the leadership and the oligarchy in Ukraine, and, if necessary, to hit NATO in such a way that it backs off. War is over, quickly, without hundreds of thousands and millions of dead, who are, again, mostly ethnic Russians on both sides. The tools to do that without destroying cities existed on Day 1, and have only become more abundant and refined since then.
But it has not been done.
Understand that the West is perfectly happy to supply Ukraine with weapons as long as there is no real threat to itself, and to have what is essentially a Russian civil war go on indefinitely, with Soviet, i.e. Russian-built infrastructure being destroyed by Russian weapons. Not even NATO's. Win-win-win-win.
The energy grid campaign will go down in history as the most insane waste of precious military resources ever. It is not even about degrading Ukrainian air defense any more -- the Soviet legacy systems are largely gone and an equilibrium has been reached where the West, as long as that continues to be allowed by the Kremlin, will continue to send a sufficient trickle of replacements to make direct overhead flights an impossibility. So you are punishing and angering the civilian population (which is, again, mostly your own people), but without even achieving a shutdown of the grid for substantial periods of time, because you have imposed limits on yourself regarding things like 750-kV substations, wasting thousands of missiles in the process, for what gain?
"The energy grid campaign will go down in history as the most insane waste of precious military resources ever."
I've been saying that for long time now.
You do not want to give the enemy what it wants, and declaring a war on NATO IS what it wants.
If NATO wants a war, it will start a war. It doesn't need an excuse.
Some interesting points, thank you. I believe you are overlooking the fact that NATO is run by the insane.
They believe that THEY will survive, the fact that they would then rule over the ashes of their civilizations is not a big issue for them, for their be all and end all is to rule.
NATO is run by the zionized US. The beacon on the hill turned into a sewer of zombies in a swamp.
"It was launched either from the Spanish coast or from the British base in Gibraltar..."
Why is it that just about every other time some serruptitious offense against Russia occurs, the Nasty Island's name comes up as having some possible involvement?
Degradation? The brits behavior has become consistently dishonorable.
The position of the attack suggests Gibraltar to me. I don't see Spain doing anything so committal, and a drone coming from Gibraltar would reach the oncoming ship faster by virtue of the ship's own speed. Unless drones could be launched from a nearby ship.
No need to engage in nuclear war. Such provocations should be met with greater provocations. This is the only language they understand.
Example - Arson within Russia is met with arson of a NYC metro during rush hour. Or a sudden wave of increased BLM violence/protests all over America. Sinking of Russian shipping? Sink a British/American cruise liner. This will serve to minimize further escalations as Western nations are taught to understand that they will be made to look bad and that escalations depend on their own actions.
The rest I largely agree with - even Prigozhin said that given 200k men he could sweep the entire territory to the Dnieper but he was being blocked. And it is precisely due to Kremlin's compradore elites that cause this.
All of the things you suggest harm largely innocent people in the West
If you are going to go that route, target the people responsible directly. Why arson in the NYC metro when you can set on fire the Blackrock HQ instead?
A grandiose marvelous plan but thank god Putin is in charge, not you. Russians have conscience, whereas brits are empty vessels led by soulless Friends of Israel in the UK.
Has Gaza slaughter taught you anything? Their whining Holo museums are still opened for brainwashing. Voltaire predicted that jews will be a danger for Humanity at large. More recently, great Smedley Butter wrote “All wars are bankers’ wars”. It’s the system than must be demolished to he ground.
You can count on good ol Simplicius to set the record straight. For the plane to get caught in the crossfire of a drone attack is the most sensible explanation by far.
That's exactly what I think happened too. It really does make the most sense.
Ukraine deliberately steering their drones to civilian airliners
Fyi - UK did not accept Russia apology to Azerbaijan. Amazing - from that little shit hole island
Did you expect them to? And I doubt that either Russia or Azerbaijan care what the UK accepts or doesn't.
The point is the sheer arrogance that little UK rejected the apology…
Why would they, where is the fun in that for them??
I understand much of this report. However, they are all nuts in DC. I'm glad that Russia is restrained in it's responses.
US media is s constant attack on Putin, Russia and China. It's disgusting.
War is an ugly business.
Women need more input. Our children are dying while these jerks keep fighting. It all needs to stop.
I used to think that the effect of women in politics might ease things a bit, but then when that happened, I saw how wrong I was.
I needed to say ethical women. Ethical men also applies. ☺️
You are assuming the "women" (eg Merkel shudder) represent female qualities and are not just men in pant suits
See my 2nd comment. Good leadership requires ethical people. We clearly do not have that.
I assumed nothing. I just DID not add the ethical part. It's a given if we think clearly.
Plus, I worked with a friend clearing out a storage unit all day. Maybe staying off the internet when exhausted is a good idea. 💡
If only women had been in charge of societies from the beginning of time, there would have only been 1 war in all of human history. It would have started in the stone age, would still be going on today, and no one would remember what it was about.
it was provoked by the mythical apple, but instead of war Adam and Eve had a go at it and here we all are. still not able to take care of paradise.
One must believe that story to find this credible. I don't believe it. It's a myth to control and blame women. Note the 2 misogynistic comments above.
so.... they didn't have a go at it?
And as stories go it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Wife one was dumped by God because she found the missionary position to limiting.
Would a God who made such a lame decision, dump Adam when Wife two fed him a line about some fruit?? I doubt it.
maybe (spoken as a woman)
Ethics is a must.
I couldn't agree more!
Good luck with that! Look at history how much have womens input been sought or listened to?
Greatly in some matriarchal cultures that respect women.
Are there any that have managed to progress beyond a Neolithic level of technological development?
No, not since male domination took hold. Do you mean power and control of societies?
We can criticize and judge Putin and his decisions from afar, but like the old saying, don’t judge me until you walked a mile in my moccasins. I’m sure that anyone who would trades places with Putin and see it from his perspective, they would come to the conclusion that he is doing the right thing. And I feel Putin is doing his best to protect his country from becoming another Palestine. And stopping the world from entering a nuclear winter.
You are right. I don’t know how the man sleeps at night.
So, do you judge Biden or Boris Johnson? Have you walked in their moccasins?
Basically, people are trying to protect their heroes, when it is obvious that their heroes are far from infallible.
There's a difference between evil actions, where the sole purpose is power acønd destruction, and good actions where the debate is about the most efficient actions rather than good or evil.
So, what's your point?
The West’s hybrid war on Russia has spilled beyond the bounds of the Ukrainian landmass to include anyplace on earth, at sea or in the sky where Russian assets operate—commercial or cargo, non-military, civilian. In critical ways this newly minted facet of the West’s hybrid war extends the ephemeral financial assault on Russia—the stolen bank deposits & the economic sanctions—into tangible & physical targets : any ship at sea, potentially any plane in the sky, any place where Russians are, the International Space Station conceivably.
Predictably logical guardrails attendant to warfare don’t exist any longer. Indeed, OTAN, which has *not* declared war on Russia, is nonetheless actively escalating its war on Russia while still coyly claiming *not* to be at war with Russia. This absurdity is a feature of the non compos mentis mind-set which overtook the West as it normalized an American president in a steep cognitive nosedive.
OTAN, a weak & incapable military hodgepodge, can’t declare a battlefield war against Russia, so it engages in terroristic acts with an eye toward strangling Russia, corralling Russia inside an open-air prison that spans 11 time zones.
The West has *tolerated* Bibi’s genocide in Gaza for so long that it has become inured to unbridled, no-limits extermination. It wants a world without Russia. Willing to engage collectively in acts of increasing mendacity, the West does so knowing that none of its allies or vassals [lookin’ at you, Seychelles] will utter a peep, no matter how vicious or off-the-rails.
They don't "tolerate" it: they "promote" it.
These men of NO honor never declare war. They use proxies, lies, and "strategic ambiguity".
Referring to allies and vassals taking a beating without a peep, Germany is in the top spot for now.
So, since when was honor necessary to win a war?
Those living well beyond their means are the most dangerous. Countries, too. They behave extremely reckless and desperate like they have everything to lose and they do not even care about their "noble" image any more
The real Holocaust in Palestine will eventually lead to shutting down the shameless and whining Holo museums. All major jewish organizations in North America support the zionist state's policies, including the creation of the largest ever numbers of pediatric amputees. Global jewry turned out to be the most amoral, sadistic, and dishonorable entity. Don't forget that the shoah-business scheme was established during the acts of ethnic cleansing (rapes, theft, destruction of property, mass murders) in Palestine by jewish thugs.
So what does Russia propose to do about it?
Very balanced article Simplicius but I missed the emerging threat of closing Baltic Sea for Russian ships&trading. It will be the next thing after some Tonkin Gulf hoax they orchestrate in a harbour of Lettland. As you noted, it is dangerous times for Russia, and I think they will regret that they didnt decapitate the Ukrainian leadership long before.
Also like: ”The only way to stop them is to win the war as quickly and decisively as possible.” There you have it!
But like you I sincerely hopes Putin/Kremlins restraint and patience will pay off.
"closing Baltic Sea for Russian ships&trading."
Attempting that will lead to Russian strikes on the military resources attempting to close the Baltic Sea. Decapitating the Ukrainian leadership has nothing to do with that.
Oh dear, writing of two topics can be confusing to others…
1. All these hybrid warfare from Russia in the Baltic Sea (as West desribes it) will inevitably lead to ”demands” from western leaders to ”secure” the infrastructure. Finnish troops boarded the Eagle and they have no proof presented for their accusations. From Russia…no reaction at all. Ursa Major…reactions but no actions! I
It was an impudent act of War. I know you live in Russia and as such must be loyal but do you really think Russia has the guts to sink the NATO-ships blocking the Denmark Strait (if NATO are dumb enough to do such an act)?
2. Putin has informed West about him regretting not to help Donbass 2014-2021, he has admitted that securing Crimea was a spontaneous operation (dont think so) and that even the SMO developed in a spontaneous operation. He has said that Russia should have been better prepared.
Your resistance to decapitate Ukraine leadership is honourable but I firmly believe Putin will regret that he left Zelensky&Yermak&Budanov untouched. One ”problem” West have right now is to back out of the mess they have created. Behind them is Zelensky effectively blocking their retreat. If gone, the question about Ukraine, would be an open affair.
"Oh dear, writing of two topics can be confusing to others…" Yes, especially when you confuse facts and geography in a highly inaccurate way.
"Finnish troops boarded the Eagle and they have no proof presented for their accusations. From Russia…no reaction at all."
Why should there be? The Eagle S is not a Russian flagged vessel, but is registered in the Cook Islands. Russia's stance towards shipping that's not registered in Russia is "you're on your own" and always has been. If it had been a Russian vessel there would have been a reaction, and action as well.
"Ursa Major…reactions but no actions!" The Ursa Major sank at sea, far from the Baltic. When Russia determines why this Russia flagged vessel sank it will take appropriate actions. Russians aren't cretins, nor are they Americans. They don't go bombing at random based on wild-eyed speculation by uninformed people on Internet.
"It was an impudent act of War." What was? No one knows why the Ursa Major sank, nor, if it was a deliberate act, who committed that act. Russia doesn't go into exploding head syndrome. It first develops all available information and then it acts.
As for the Eagle S, you can do whatever you want to a third party ship and that's not an act of war against Russia. For that matter, if the ship did indeed damage the undersea power cable Finland was well within its rights to arrest the vessel. It's routine for large vessels to damage undersea infrastructure, for example, by accidentally dragging their anchors.
"do you really think Russia has the guts to sink the NATO-ships blocking the Denmark Strait (if NATO are dumb enough to do such an act)?"
There are no NATO ships "blocking the Denmark Strait." The Strait is wide open to Russian shipping. Yes, if NATO attempted to block Russian passage through the strait there's no doubt in my mind Russia would blow those ships out of the sea. Anybody who thinks otherwise doesn't know Russia. By the way, being in contact with reality is not about loyalty. It's about basic sanity.
I don't get what you intend to say with your point 2. Crimea was, indeed, and very obviously so, a spontaneous operation. It really was prompted by Crimean decisions to push an exit from a disintegrated Ukraine followed by accession to Russia. The SMO likewise also developed as a highly spontaneous operation. Russia simply didn't have the military assets in the region given the peacetime nature of Russia's army at the time. Putin is exactly right to say Russia should have been better prepared. They're not going to make that mistake twice.
I don't have any resistance to decapitating Ukrainian leadership nor have I indicated such resistance. I just pointed out the obvious, that whether or not Russia chooses to decapitate the Ukrainian leadership has absolutely no effect on dealing with a possible blockade of the Baltic Sea to Russian shipping.
I get the impression that you, like many Westerners, for some reason still don't get it that Russia is fed up. Russia would prefer to end this without general war with the US, but if the US or its vassals screw with Russia directly, like trying to blockade Russian shipping, they're going to discover what it feels like to loose a violent war with Russia, after experiencing first hand the ferocity of Russian arms.
Oh dear. Deliberate misunderstandings is not my cup of tea. No meaning of discussions of the topics then? All is settled and done with. Not being able to identfy friend and foe is a sign of ignorance. So is slap in the face.
I just read a great piece with a S. Lavrov interview. He is one smart person. I've always respected him.
I found 'Denmark Strait' ambiguous. Was the Kattegat and Skagerrak being discussed, or the actual Denmark Strait in the North Atlantic? I presumed the former.
Agree on all points. No blockades are in the future.
Except maybe by Trump. He really wants Greenland. :-)
They should just sell it to him. The US already has unlimited military access anyway. Let Trump deal with the native Inuit concerns.
Thank you!
On item 2; Russia's Putin is a cat among the pigeons, he would never disclose how he reasons to these NATO/EU pigeons.
Do you really imagine an attorney/PhD/KGB grad with over 20 years on the world stage would ever really allow himself to be in a "who knew" situation?
No. All can be maskirovka and willful deception of their own people. All he has said for more than 20 years could all be lies and disinformation. Nothing can be trusted from a Russians mouth. We have just to wait for the Masterplan to evolve in the coming months…(so is the tune in the West…)
I have followed Putin from his year as PM and the following 24 years. I have followed everything on the International scene. Putin is powerful and a difficult adversary because he uses frankness and honesty as weapons. He declares what is wrong or what he wants to be done. I would describe him as a man with willpower.
Cat among pigeons? Why didnt he eat them all then? The pigeons in the West has claws and teeth behind their red eyes.
Putin's reign is a master class in the Art of War. He is very adept at the strategy of appear weak when you are strong, as well as it's flip side, appear strong when you are weak.
His, "Mercy me, we dashed into Crimea with no thought in our pretty heads", and his "Gosh, whatever were we to do??" on the SMO implementation are equally specious. His military have war gamed out every imaginable play the West might run.
And action plans for an attack on Crimea (you are aware the US put out public bids for US infrastructure to be in Crimea prior to the coup?) as well as a Ukraine attack with a 250,000 man army created, trained and armed by NATO would have been high on their to do lists.
My pigeons reference was an echo Putin's comment that negotiating with the West is like playing chess with pigeons for when they realize they are losing they shit all over the board, overturn it, and declare themselves the victor. See Ukraine for details.
You're getting really confused:
"Nothing can be trusted from a Russians mouth. "
but
"Putin is powerful and a difficult adversary because he uses frankness and honesty as weapons."
So which is it? In reality, Russians don't bluff. In geopolitics they lay out what they want, what they're willing to do, and how they'll react. That's because they think being duplicitous is something weaklings and dishonest people do, and also because they have the grown up common sense to know that once you lie in life or death matters - and a "bluff" is indeed a lie - no serious person will ever trust you again. And trust is an extremely powerful factor in resolving life and death disputes.
The obvious historical record is that since 1991 onwards Russia has built a stellar record of saying what they mean, while the West, led in their race to the bottom by the US, has lied in virtually everything it has said and done in geopolitics, especially to Russia. At every step the West has lacked the backbone to come right out and say what they really intended and instead has tried to get what it wants through trickery and lies. The lies about "not one inch eastward" for NATO and about Minsk are classic examples.
You dont understand irony? ALL I hear in the West is that you cant trust the Russians.
What I see for myself is completely different and what I wrote then (and you reiterated above). Not at all confusing whenever you realize and finally perceive that we are on the same side.
The entire Ukrainian leadership is composed of puppets. What's the point of decapitating puppets, when they will be instantly replaced with more puppets?
Don't be misled by these people who talk about puppets and proxies. There is and was an inherent force in Ukrainian society that suited the American imperialist and Russophobic agenda. So they have done everything to incite and exploit these Ukrainian forces coupled with the population's misguided desire to become EU citizens and EU.contributions served on a silver platter.
Zelensky&Co is a cunning and ruthless opponent who understands how to exploit the playing field and his benefactors to the maximum. The real puppets sits in Brussel and European capitolcities.
The resistance to uprooting the Ukrainian leadership may cost Russia the victory.
Homoerotic dancer in heels? “Penist” proclaimed to be Churchill? ( not a great compliment though). Ze had said all the proper words about peace with Russia when kolomojsky’s money funded his election campaign. Better look at the largest in Europe synagogue that still disfigures the city line of Dnipro and reminds whom the Ukrainian Nazi have been serving to and dying for in this bankers’ war in Ukraine.
Yes, strings attached but ”they” cut Igor Kolomoisky away and stripped him and other tribesmen of citizenships. They propably stole to much money from the State of Ukraine…
I am very disappointed with Russia's taking a beat approach. Hoping for what? No saine military is operating on assumption. The latest report on the deployment of the new S-500 brigade may be a clue, that Russia wants to be more prepared, before the big showdown. The war will not tolerate those who are unprepared. Turning out that NATO itself is way under prepared. We don't see all the cards. Russia knows one thing for sure, once it starts, there will be no let up until win or lose.
Im sure the brits sank that ship, probably from from Gibraltar.
As to the plane, If a misile intercepts a drone,thats a lot of crap up in the air, it does have to come down somewhere. In the fog would your 1st though be i hit a bird or some bits of wreckage hit me? And they were almost 600 miles from the actual war zone
Excellent - measured and balanced.
FYI recently there was a brief video of Ukro-Nazi underground drone operation surveillance and targeting center. It had about 7 large screens…
Is there any way to locate such drone operating centers?
I woulld think that if there were, they would have been taken out by now. Often for such things, I believe Russia will depend on local partisans providing location data.
Do we have any indication of local partisans? That would be great if true!!
There have been many reports of partisan activity, esp in traditionally Russian sections of the country. Partisans were noted for identifying the positions of ammo storage sites, command and control centres and developing groups of Ukie formations. They are an important part of Russian ISR.
Nothing that is currently happening can stop Russia winning the war on the ground. The only question is how far into western Ukraine it will go? Everything else is noise.
As for provoking Russia into an escalation- that is not the game at all. The west is still trying to bully Russia to the negotiating table to do a western favour able deal- to break Putin's nerve. (Some hope!). It is also going for lurid headlining to boost the morale of troops on the ground in danger of imminently throwing in the towel.
Russia will go as far as they have to in order to fulfil their mission objectives. If that means conquering the whole of Ukraine, so be it. They will, however, never leave a portion of Ukraine that contains the potential of re-building itself into another anti-Russian force on behalf of NATO.
You might be correct about the escalation, but maybe not - there is a significant portion of the Western powers-that-be who truly want a war with Russia, but they want the excuse that Russia started it. Insane? Yes. But we are not dealing with rational beings here, nor are we dealing with people who have any sympathy for the rest of mankind.
The western nutters who want to escalate are the likes of Estonia. And they have made it clear on numerous occasions that will not go it alone! They want NATO as in US cover. 'That ain't never gonna happen'- as Trump would say.
"...the likes of Estonia" and Blinken, Sullivan, Lindsey, Pompeo...the list is long.
Estonia “wants” nothing unless prompted to “want” some idiocy by the EU compradors.
I think some of this escalation from the illegitimate Biden regime is a stupid effort to prevent Trump from taking office. We still have about 23 days of the regime doing something really stupid like a nuclear black swan event.
Very possible, or they if they can't get a WW3, may want to get Putin to do something they can label as rash so they can do an all new, all improved, Russia, Russia stunt.