Russia will not negotiate a peace treaty with Japan
January 31, 15:22
The Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed that Russia's decision to withdraw from negotiations on a peace treaty with Japan is still in force. This is already an official response to the Japanese Prime Minister, who yesterday said something about the desire to negotiate peace with Russia, subject to receiving the Kuril Islands and maintaining sanctions. So to speak, they supplemented yesterday’s encyclical by Medvedev about the disregard for “Japanese feelings”.
I believe that this year we will see symbolic steps related to the Kuril Islands (with visits from officials) + further updating of the celebration of Victory over Japan Day, which has finally returned to the official list of holiday dates (next year will be the 80th anniversary of Victory over Japan).
Regarding the issues of investment and development of the Kuril Islands, in the current realities, the Chinese and North Koreans can be invited to joint projects (within reason), and the Japanese with their feelings and claims can be dismissed.
PS. For Japanese wishing to enter the Kuril Islands, it would be possible to establish a mandatory rule when entering the Far East to sign a statement stating that they do not support the policy of sanctions against Russia and recognize the Kuril Islands as part of the Russian Federation. Those who do not recognize them will not be allowed into the Kuril Islands.
Ceremonial events
February 1, 14:42
Celebrations were held at the Yeltsin Center in honor of Yeltsin’s birthday.
The training program for specialists in information and hybrid warfare has been resumed
January 31, 18:59
After the scandalous closure of the program for training specialists in information and hybrid warfare (in fact, an official audit is ongoing through the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation),
the program resumed for now on the basis of the Academy of Political Sciences.
We are opening our own enrollment for our educational program
Despite everything that is happening around the unique master’s program “Information and Hybrid Wars,” the program’s teachers understand the need for personnel training. Therefore, they decided to open their own program at the Academy of Political Sciences.
We are waiting for everyone who wants to protect our national interests in the information space
Duration of training: 6 months.
Form of study: full-time, evening/full-time.
Tuition fee: 370,000 rubles for the entire course.
Limited number of seats.
Group maximum 35 people.
The educational document you will receive: a state-issued diploma of professional retraining from the Academy of Political Sciences.
Course start date: February 19, 2024.
Location of classes: Moscow, st. Nikoloyamskaya 16/2 p. 7
Program coordinator: Yulia Volkova
Phone: +7-926-2634258
So far, this is the only program of this kind in Russia.
In the next academic year, perhaps 1-2 more programs will appear (but there is still no clarity about the content and place of study).
In the West, all this is done more systematically. For now, the development of this direction is encountering internal sabotage.
... or a fool or why I stopped cooperating with RT, which is a tribune for Valdai boys with pedigrees like this:
Andrey Sushentsov
Russian Federation
Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club; Dean of the School of International Relations at MGIMO University. Mr. Sushentsov specializes in the US foreign policy in international conflicts, as well as in South Caucasus, Ukraine, and the Middle East. He has substantial experience of analytical work. He took part in applied researches on the United States’ foreign policy, conflict resolution in South Caucasus, Ukraine, and the Middle East. In his studies, he examines the spheres of conflicting interests of Russia and the United States in Europe, the Middle East and the post-Soviet space. He was a Visiting Professor and Research Fellow at Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, Guido Carli Free University of International Studies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Harvard University and Middlebury Institute for International Studies in Monterey. He is a member of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and of the Working Group on the Future of Russian-American Relations.
In other words, Sushetsov is a product of degree mills in the US and is shaped as "professional" by the environment which produced a staggering number of diplomatic and governing failures. So, it is no wonder that he writes the piece with the title which even commenters on RT board laughed at.
Andrey Sushentsov: Here’s why the US can’t get along with the other major global powers. American elites believe in democracy at home and dictatorship abroad; that’s why the world is so dangerous right now.
I wonder what stone did he sleep under for the last 24 years? Yes, I am talking about well coordinated assault on the American Constitution and Bill of Rights, starting from Patriot Act and final subversion of Capitol Hill by Israel. Boy, those Valdai boys are slow. But if that hasn't been enough, Sushentsov goes to prove Arthur Clark's Third Law that:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Modern military technology as well as its tactical and operational use, as well as formulation of military doctrine and strategy are extremely complex and require people with serious military and engineering background. This whole thing is in the foundation of global balance of power. But for Mr. Sushentsov who has a "soft degree" in essentially nothing, formation of the global power balance is indistinguishable from magic, because none of the Valdai boys have cognitive tools to grasp it. Because of that Sushentsov invents things trying to explain what he doesn't understand and views as magic.
Ukraine is a convenient, rather cheap tool for the US to weaken and contain Russia, and to force its European allies to keep their discipline and obey. This is all part of an international struggle for a new form of hierarchy. Of course, it’s just a temporary phenomenon until a new balance of power, recognized by all, is established.
I have news for Sushentsov--recognition is always achieved through coercion and deterrence. In other words, this recognition and, hence, power balance are formed by those who know how to fight a war and win it. The whole structure of the international relations in XX and XXI centuries rests on warfare and industrial might. It will continue to be such until the United States is completely stripped off its grossly exaggerated military might, both through defeat in Ukraine and continuous unstoppable de-industrialization, and a complete loss of remnants of the US mythology as "the finest fighting force in history". This whole thing is in progress and it is Russia, and China, who already dictate conditions, with Russia leading the way because she did what China still cannot do--she accepted NATO's military challenge and brought about the implosion of the West as we know it. You see, magic.
In other news, for those who still view Metternich (or Kissinger) as some kind of great diplomatic minds, as Stalin once responded to attempts to convince him on importance of Pope: "and how many divisions does the Pope have?" Until these guys understand that no diplomacy matters until one has Mr. Kinzhal and Mr. Borei-A behind diplomacy and international relations--they will continue to write this nonsense about the United States, its oligarchy selling "democracy" gospel to stupid, and power balance. Difficult to figure it out in XXI century without serving a day in armed forces and studying Theory of Operations, physics and systems integration. The might was always right in human history and it always was about the nature of this might.
Look at it--it is magic of the Project 955A Borei--it is a foundation of Russian diplomacy. I would love to quote Mr. Ostap Bender from the conclusion of the 12 Chairs immortal classics, but I only can quote Hofstadter:
… the complexity of modern life has steadily whittled away the functions the ordinary citizen can intelligently and comprehendingly perform for himself. In the original American populistic dream, the omnicompetence of the common man was fundamental and indispensable. It was believed that he could, without much special preparation, pursue the professions and run the government. Today he knows that he cannot even make his breakfast without using devices, more or less mysterious to him, which expertise has put at his disposal; and when he sits down to breakfast and looks at his morning newspaper, he reads about a whole range of vital and intricate issues and acknowledges, if he is candid with himself, that he has not acquired competence to judge most of them(c)
BEN ARIS: RUSSIA PREPARES TO TAKE THE WEST TO COURT IF IT TRIES TO SEIZE THE CBR’S FROZEN MONEY
FEBRUARY 1, 2024 NATYLIESB
Photo by Rūdolfs Klintsons on Pexels.com
By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 1/14/24
Russia is preparing for a potential massive legal battle with the West to thwart any attempt by the US or Europe to seize the Central Bank of Russia’s (CBR) frozen $300bn of frozen assets and give them to Ukraine, Bloomberg reported on January 12.
Officials in Moscow have been analysing the prospects of asset seizures, after the White House started pressuring its European partners in December to start the process of seizing the assets as a way of continuing to fund Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
Western financial and military aid has become snarled in internal wrangling and some $110bn of funding for Ukraine has been tied up as a result at a time when Ukraine is running out of money and ammunition.
On January 11, the US said it had sent its last military aid package and its funds for Ukraine are now exhausted. At the same time, several bills have been presented to give the US government the legal authority to seize the CBR’s money. However, the US only has some $5bn in frozen Russian assets whereas the bulk, some $210bn, is in Europe.
Western governments have the ability to freeze the money, but thanks to Western property rights technically the money remains the property of the Russian government. The only way Western can seize the money under current rules is if the West declares war on Russia.
The Bank of Russia is preparing to take the West to court should any of its assets be seized. The CBR is on the verge of finalising agreements with international law firms to safeguard the country’s interests in the event of a court confrontation, Bloomberg reported.
The Russian authorities have sought expert opinions on relevant foreign legislation and examined precedents in other countries like Iran and North Korea to bolster their position. Central Bank reserves have never been seized before and are generally regarded as sacrosanct; however, the international agreements governing their status are vague and incomplete.
The White House seems increasingly keen on seizing the assets as it has to contend with a mushrooming number of military clashes. It has been trying to coordinate this move with its G7 allies, but Europe remains reluctant, afraid of the damage it could do to Europe’s financial system and the euro.
When questioned about potential Western actions, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasised that Russia would challenge such measures in court and warned of possible retaliation. Peskov said: “This will entail very serious judicial and legal costs for those who make such decisions,” highlighting the Kremlin’s readiness to contest any seizure in a court case that could go on for decades.
The legal route has long been considered by top Russian officials, with central bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina expressing preparedness to challenge the freeze in July. In a December interview, she criticised it as a violation of basic reserve security principles.
Officials engaged in discussions believe that pursuing the case in courts would thwart any transfer of funds to Ukraine, even if Russia doesn’t regain control of the money. They argue that the West faces slim chances in court and lacks legitimate grounds for seizure based on post-freeze legislation.
Russia’s state-backed Roscongress Foundation recently released a report on the prospects of taking up the case in court, which suggested that the “real risks” of seizing Russian central bank reserves remain low. It found that attempts to seize the assets would rely on the domestic laws of states imposing sanctions on Russia, providing grounds for legal challenges that could go on for decades.
One question that would need to be resolved is which court could hear such a case, as there is no pre-eminent global court of appeal in a case like this. And if fought at sovereign level, the existence of mutual investment guarantee treaties will also play a crucial role.
Russia’s potential legal avenues include appealing to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York and the EU’s Court of Justice in Luxembourg, according to Sergey Glandin, a Moscow-based partner specialising in compliance and sanctions law, Bloomberg reports.
... on the day The Stalingrad Battle ended on February 2, 1943. By then, Soviet people knew that they will win the war.
More than 2 million casualties, more than a million KIAs, a complete destruction of Wehrmacht's 6th and elements of 4th Armies, annihilation of Italian, Hungarian and Romanian armies. Compare this with victory over 50,000 Germans at Alamein. Just numbers and scales.
“BATTING IN THE DARK” — LORD HUGHES ORDERS THE NOVICHOK PUBLIC INQUIRY TO TURN INTO A SECRET FARCE BEFORE THE PUBLIC HEARINGS BEGIN
by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
In a London courtroom on Friday, Lord Anthony Hughes (lead image), the retired judge whom the British government has appointed to run a public inquiry into the alleged Novichok poisonings of March and June 2018, collapsed into a farce of state secrecy.
Not even the open hearings which are now scheduled to start later this year, on October 14, will in fact be open, Hughes told lawyers for the Home Office and for the family of Dawn Sturgess. This is because the police and the security services have told the judge they want a livestream default or broadcasting delay of at least fifteen minutes, possibly longer when “the police will decide if any disclosure at all will be made”, a government lawyer told the judge.
Hughes announced: “I absolutely accept how difficult it is when you are batting in the dark…but it is a situation which has simply got to be coped with.”
Follow the archive on the official investigation of the cause of Dawn Sturgess’s death in June 2018, allegedly from a Novichok poison which Russian assassins left behind after they had attacked Sergei and Yulia Skripal the previous March.
Left to right: Dawn Sturgess, died between June 30 and July 8, 2018; Sergei Skripal, died in British custody at an unknown date after his last telephone call to Russia on June 19, 2019; Adam Chapman, the London lawyer appointed by the British government on March 25, 2022 -- without evidence of Skripal consent.
The Skripals have been assigned a lawyer, Adam Chapman, to represent them in the Hughes proceeding, but he wasn’t present in court on Friday. To date, Chapman hasn’t asked a question, made a written submission, or reported what the Skripals want to say about the Novichok affair. Chapman’s silence confirms that if the Skripals are still alive, they are being held by the British government incommunicado. Hughes has yet to rule on whether they will be called to testify as witnesses, and if so, whether their testimony will be given in open or secret session.
Read the book of the Skripal case here.
Hughes ran Friday’s hearing to just under 90 minutes. A switch of stream engineering companies and a failure by Paul Dunlay, the judge’s technician in charge of live-streaming, excluded reporters who had registered to hear the proceeding from their offices. Hughes’s spokesman apologized for the “confusion”. Dunlay said “we are not responsible for your IT systems security which may have blocked this auto response.”
“My starting point,” Hughes claimed, “has always been that this is a public hearing and everything is in public unless there is a necessity for it not to be. But given the circumstances of this Inquiry – involving as it does the use of a chemical weapon on British soil – it will be of no surprise that there will inevitably be some material that will be CLOSED. Indeed that was the reason for the conversion of the original Inquest to a public Inquiry.”
Just how little will be open — and just how large “the necessity for it not to be” — were revealed in Friday’s hearing.
Closed circuit television (CCTV) tapes from Salisbury and Amesbury which the police seized after the Skripal attack and the Sturgess death, and which have not been released to date, are to be allowed in evidence in the open hearing, but only, Judge Hughes has conceded, in the form of a “compilation”. What has been withheld will remain a state secret.
A police report combining the Skripal incident in Salisbury of March 4, 2018, and the Sturgess incident in Amesbury four months later, on June 30, 2018, has been partially released to the Sturgess family’s lawyers, led by Michael Mansfield KC. But on Friday he told Hughes the evidential value of the report has already been compromised.
“There are 17 pages of redactions,” Mansfield said, “not all of them total pages, although the further you go into the report, starting at page, for example — it should be the same on yours, so that is page 53 onwards. There is nothing visible there, or the 20 succeeding pages. Altogether 17 pages in which, again, if we can just say, there must be questions arising there and in relation to the open and closed divide, it would be of great help if we did have a gist.”
Mansfield went on to refer to a section he has read in the police report entitled “Target”. “I hope I am not exaggerating it, there are some pretty astonishing observations in this section alone and if what is said in this section alone about the target, there is and must be very much more material, or absence of material.”
Mansfield was intimating in public that the police report he has seen is missing the key elements of how the alleged Russian-made Novichok got into Dawn Sturgess’s hands and killed her, as well as the police account of how their searches of Sturgess’s house failed to detect the Novichok in a perfume bottle standing on the kitchen table until July 11, 2018 – eleven days after Sturgess had collapsed and been taken to Salisbury District Hospital, and after police reported their search of the house for suspected narcotics.
“The issues that the family may want to raise,” Mansfield said, “preventability [of Novichok entering the UK] being one of them, but there are many others and obviously I will exemplify what some of the others may be, to do with Novichok, movements, other parties and so on, the list is quite extensive already in terms of issues.” Mansfield was implying that the police report he has seen doesn’t reveal how the Novichok reached the Skripals in Salisbury, and then later Sturgess and her boyfriend, at their home in Amesbury. The lawyer is also hinting that the police report isn’t clear on the evidence that “other parties” – the alleged Russian assassins – attacked the Skripals, then abandoned a leftover bottle of the poison for Sturgess’s boyfriend to find and present as a gift to her.
“In terms of tying those issues in with material,” Mansfield told Hughes, “we cannot do much more than look at the police report as it stands and hopefully there will be other documents being disclosed after April 19, which will assist. However, the point I am coming to is this, that the analysis of the material we get after the 19th is going to be fundamental.”
“The internal question –” Mansfield continued, “can I raise one question, and that is the location of Novichok in Salisbury itself and the police report — I am not going to read it out — has in fact pinpointed some dimensions that were not known before. That is just on the preliminary police report. So the actual locations and deployment of Novichok, the nature of Novichok, the link between Salisbury and Amesbury, is again a separate topic.”
“Separate topic” is Mansfield’s euphemism for what has not been revealed by the British police and security services after almost six years of investigation – that is to say, evidence about Novichok either still missing or concealed in the redacted pages of the police report.
Hughes allowed a guarded mention of the foreign intelligence he has been reading in the evidence presented by the security services, but which is likely to be kept secret from the public. The Home Office lawyer told Hughes that foreign intelligence is to be called by the euphemism — “information derived from international partners. According to the terms under which such information is shared, Op Verbasco [police] must obtain permission for their international partners before such material is disclosed. Permission remains outstanding in respect of some of the material.” This means that US signals and other intelligence has yet to be permitted for disclosure by the British police; for testing by cross-examination in court; and definitely not for the public if Washington vetoes disclosure.
For the time being, this intelligence is being held by Hughes’s assistants “in a secure location”. “I understand,” Hughes agreed, “that it may have to be handled in a particular way.”
The witnesses to testify at the open inquiry have also been tampered with. At present, Hughes was told, the list of these witnesses remains secret, and even the list of ciphers by which secret witness testimony will be identified. On Friday the judge agreed to postpone to another preliminary hearing — behind closed doors — a review of the witness names and ciphers.
Mansfield for the Sturgess family told Hughes the outcome is likely to be ludicrous. “Just trying to approach it practically speaking, one doesn’t want a situation in which in the middle of a witness you ask a question to discover it cannot be answered, and many of these witnesses overlap Amesbury and Salisbury, so again, it cannot be compartmentalised. So the issue about what can be heard publicly and what cannot be heard, that also has to be at least canvassed in a round table forum…”
Hughes acknowledged that the requirements to keep secret and close the open hearing have become so complicated and time-consuming, much more money will be needed from the Home Office budget. In its last financial report, the Inquiry revealed that Hughes has so far received salary and expenses of just under of £22,000. The big beneficiaries have been the lawyers assisting the judge – they have earned £946,340, with another half-million pounds on “staffing costs”.
The problems of vetting the evidence to keep it secret has become so protracted and “complicated”, Hughes announced that the government will have to give him and his lawyers more cash. “I will just say this, you and Ms McGahey [Home Office lawyer] have been very tactfully making what I will call the resources submission to me over the course of the last two years now. If in the end this comes down to resources, we have reached the point at which additional ones are going to have to be provided.”
As soon as money was mentioned in the courtroom, Mansfield stood up to say he wants more of it too. “Given what is being said about resources and all the rest, may we say on that topic, we have earmarked that at a much earlier stage, suggesting that the government in fact provides sufficient resources.” Hughes replied: “No, you need not worry about resources, Mr Mansfield. What you said in the past has been noted and understood but there are — it is much more complicated…than simply numbers.”
Complicated — that’s Hughes’s innuendo for the objective of the Sturgess family, through Mansfield, to obtain a multi-million pound payoff from the government in compensation for what Mansfield alleges was the negligence of the security services to stop the Novichok and the Russians from getting into the UK in the first place. This, the so-called preventability issue, is the reason the Home Office is paying Hughes and his staff to conclude at the end of the inquiry that there was no fault, no negligence.
The next preliminary hearing has been scheduled for March 15.
Deputy Director of the Yeltsin Center recognized as a foreign agent
February 3, 23:25
Deputy Executive Director of the Yeltsin Center* Nikita Sokolov was recognized as a foreign agent.
Sokolov opposed the special operation and spread fake news, the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation reports.
Previously, Sokolov tried to rehabilitate the accomplices of Hitler’s Nazis - the “Vlasovites”.
We are waiting for them to mature into the director and the Yeltsin Center itself.
The head of the Russian segment of Wikipedia turned out to be a foreign agent.
The head of the Russian segment of Wikipedia, Kozlovsky*, has finally received the status of a foreign agent, and the encyclopedia of fakes about the Russian army continues to exist. The
replenished list of foreign agents has finally included ( https://t.me/readovkanews/73452 ) the head of the NGO "Wikimedia RU" Stanislav Kozlovsky - a person , responsible for publishing fakes on the Russian Wikipedia in recent years. The miraculous “seal” began to work a little earlier - back in mid-December, Kozlovsky received information that he would soon become a foreign agent, and the entire “party” of the media encyclopedia split: the project was prepared to be closed, Kozlovsky resigned from Moscow State University, and the editors left the public space “ for security". The publicly accessible encyclopedia entered our everyday life and painstakingly recreated the image of the “honest” one, and only the SVO revealed its true essence.
With the help of the management team, Wiki became a weapon of information warfare in the hands of a collective enemy. It was thanks to Kozlovsky, as the director of an NGO, that any citizen of Russia, wanting to know something in more detail about the events in the special operation zone, habitually went to the electronic encyclopedia and read outright enemy propaganda. The titles of the articles speak for themselves: “Russian invasion of Ukraine” or “genocide in Bucha.” So is the status of a foreign agent enough for a person who has ingratiated himself and deceived hundreds, or even thousands of our citizens?
RILEY WAGGAMAN: NEWS FROM RUSSIA
FEBRUARY 5, 2024 2 COMMENTS
By Riley Waggaman, Substack, 2/4/24
Welcome to Edward Slavsquat’s weekly Russian media news roundup and open thread-thing.
The quote of the week:
The real physical assets are with us, these are mines, pipelines, factories—it’s all here [in Russia]. And abroad there is a mirror image of this property in the form of financial documents. That is, the guys in the West are running the Russian economy from offshore companies. Locally they are controlled by very obedient oligarchs who prefer to look into the mouths of the owners of the money. And Russia for them is just a territory where they can earn money on a rotational basis.
— Economist Valentin Katasonov, as quoted by Free Press in a February 3 op-ed about Russian capital flowing west.
And now for some news.
Society
Moscow will celebrate Chinese New Year for the first time in 2024. In honor of the holiday, the streets of Moscow will be decorated in a “traditional Chinese style”, and several festival sites will be set up in the city center. [fontanka.ru]
Russian President Vladimir Putin earned around 67.5 million rubles (approximately 740,000 USD) from 2017 to 2022, according to information about his income and property published on the website of the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation. [Interfax]
Russia is planning to launch a group visa-free tourist exchange with India in 2024. [regnum.ru]
Moscow airports will begin to collect personal biometric data of foreigners arriving in the country, as part of a pilot program outlined in Rusisa’s migration policy for 2024-2025. [pnp.ru]
Speaking about Boris Yeltsin on his birthday, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the first president of the Russian Federation was “an integral part of the history of our country, and, of course, we preserve the memory of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin”. [RIA Novosti]
43% of Russians believe that their vote in elections has no affect on anything, according to a new survey released by sociological group Russian Field. [nakanune.ru]
American journalist Tucker Carlson was spotted in Moscow. A photo of Carlson at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow went viral on social media. The purpose of the American journalist’s unannounced visit to Russia remains unknown. [regnum.ru]
The Ministry of Education of Belgorod Oblast wants to create “social maps” of all children and adolescents in the region in order to “comprehensively analyze and evaluate their personalities” based on an analysis of the introduced social risk map. This map will take into account the entire life activity of the child and his family, including personality, education, employment, peers, ideology, health, and criminal record. [katyusha.org]
Approximately 18 million Russians have connected their biometric data to the government’s State Services (Gosuslugi) portal, according to the head of the Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation, Maksut Shadayev. In addition, 19 million citizens have digital copies of personal documents instead of paper ones, “which in the future can replace traditional identification, not only in digital, but also in offline interactions”. In total, 110 million Russians have a profile on Gosuslugi. [ixbt.com]
The exhibition-forum “Russia”, which opened at Moscow’s VDNKh on November 4 and will last until April 12, has been visited by 6 million people in three months. [bmf.ru]
MTS became the first mobile operator in Russia with state accreditation for working with biometric data. [RIA Novosti]
“Public Health”
Russia hopes to create a “universal vaccine” against flu and Covid-19, the composition of which does not need to be changed annually, Gamaleya Center Director Alexander Gintsburg said while speaking at the Russia International Exhibition and Forum on February 2. [Interfax]
More than 130 domestic drugs for the treatment of cancer were registered in 2023, and today more than 100 more drugs are undergoing clinical trials, according to Health Minister Mikhail Murashko. [bmf.ru]
Russia “has significantly relaxed its requirements for compulsory vaccination against Covid-19”, according to RT. “Under the new rules, [if an epidemiological threat is declared], only those that have never been vaccinated against Covid-19 or contracted the disease itself—as well as those suffering from chronic lung or heart diseases, HIV, or tuberculosis—and the elderly will have to take a mandatory shot.” [RT.com]
Russia’s Health Ministry will expand the country’s vaccination calendar in an effort to fulfill directives in President Vladimir Putin’s decree on supporting large families, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko told RIA Novosti on Saturday. [RIA Novosti]
Professional communication between Russian doctors and colleagues from other countries continue despite efforts by “politicized associations” to exclude Russian health authorities from global cooperation, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said. Murashko added that Russia is actively cooperating with China on health issues, and that Chinese counterparts are actively monitoring what is happening in Russian healthcare. [spbdnevnik.ru]
Ukraine
The Ukrainian Armed Forces are attacking civilians and shooting at ambulances, effectively making them a “terrorist organization”, Russian President Vladimir Putin said during the “Everything for Victory!” forum on February 2. [Izvestia]
72-year-old Evgenia Mayboroda was sentenced to five years and six months in prison for posting fakes about the Russian military, after sharing “information about the number of dead Russian military personnel” and an “emotional video.” Mayboroda admitted guilt but said she posted the material in an emotional state after her brother, who lived in Ukraine, was buried under the rubble of a building that collapsed as a result of shelling. However, a Rostov region court concluded she acted out of political hatred. [Kommersant]
Gazprom continues to supply gas to Europe via Ukraine in the amount of 42.4 million cubic meters per day, a Gazprom representative announced on February 3. [TASS]
Hungary will not veto an increase in the so-called European Peace Fund, which finances arms supplies to Ukraine, but will not itself take part in its work, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjártó said on February 4. [regnum.ru]
A bill on raising the conscription age for those who have received Russian citizenship will be reintroduced after “comprehensive discussions” on the legislation’s language is finalized, according to one of the bill’s sponsors, State Duma deputy Mikhail Sheremet (United Russia). Last week, a bill was introduced to the State Duma proposing an increase in the conscription age to 50 years for men who have received Russian citizenship. However, the bill was quickly withdrawn. [Kommersant]
The Ukrainian army lost more than 23,000 people killed and wounded in January of this year, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed during a conference call with Russia’s military leadership. [Interfax]
The shelling of DPR territory will stop if the Ukrainian army is pushed back 150 km, the head of the republic, Denis Pushilin, said during a recent media appearance. [regnum.ru]
Igor Strelkov’s lawyer said that if his appeal fails, the former defense minister of the DPR may request to be sent to fight in Ukraine, instead of serving his 4-year prison sentence. [ura.ru]
Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said that 70 billion rubles will be allocated for the rehabilitation of those wounded during the special military operation. [vademec.ru]
Customs officers in Transbaikal discovered eight containers on a freight train containing uniforms for Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers. The cargo, which came from China, was in transit to Poland. [life.ru]
Economy
Over the next 12 months, Russia plans to install 1,437 fast (50 or more kilowatts) electric charging stations for electric vehicles. [Vedomosti]
The share of borrowers in Russia with five or more existing loans reached 8.6% at the end of 2013. The figure has almost doubled over the past two years (at the end of 2021 it was 4.7%). [nakanune.ru]
In November, Russia became the main exporter of uranium to the United States for the first time since May, RIA Novosti calculated based on open data. [RIA Novosti]
Russia took 15th place in the ranking of European countries in terms of gasoline availability at the beginning of 2024. Residents of Luxembourg can purchase the largest amount of fuel with their average monthly salaries, while residents of Moldova can purchase the least, according to a RIA Novosti study. [RIA Novosti]
Dmitry Mezentsev, State Secretary of the Union State of the Russian Federation and Belarus, said the possibility of a single currency space within the framework of a supranational entity is not currently being discussed. [finobzor.ru]
Since the beginning of 2024, the wealth of Russia’s richest businessmen has grown by $7.953 billion, according to data from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. This is approximately 717 billion rubles at the current exchange rate. [nakanune.ru]
Unlike other economies, the Russian economy is growing and has become the largest in Europe and fifth in the world, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the “Everything for Victory” forum on February 2. [RIA Novosti]
Akunin and Arestovich were arrested in absentia in Russia
February 6, 11:23
The court arrested Akunin and Arestovich in absentia in Russia.
For the first defendant, all that remains is to deprive him of the opportunity to earn even a penny in Russia + under the new law, opportunities are open related to the confiscation of Akunin’s property under the article for disseminating fakes about the RF Armed Forces.
In the case of Arestovich, the possibility of him appearing on Russian TV to replace Kiva is closed.
They couldn’t wait until Friday, because repressions in Russia usually take place on Fridays.
All’s fair in love and war – this is a 500-year old English proverb but it isn’t in the Geneva conventions on war crimes and genocide, much as the US and US-backed Israel claim it is.
In the war of US, NATO and their Asian allies against Russia, it is turning out that almost all the major companies on the enemy side love Russia too much to leave.
They also think Russia has won the war, so they are convinced — the executive managers, boards of directors, control shareholders, and bankers — that there is no point in leaving. So they continue to do business in the Russian market profitably, while they wait for the military defeat of the Ukraine and their own governments to register, and the terms of capitulation allow them to tell their shareholders, “we told you so.”
That notice will be delivered with a dividend paid out of the profits the companies continue to earn from their Russian businesses. The shareholders will be satisfied with both; they will vote their confidence, with a bonus, for the chief executive and board at the next Annual General Meeting.
Two studies on the enemy side, one by the Kiev School of Economy’s (KSE) “Leave Russia” and “SelfSanctions” projects, and a follow-up by the Russian-language publication Novaya Gazeta Europa have reported results of their surveys of 110 international firms working in Russia. This is fresh evidence of the defeat of the enemy in the economic war — from the foxhole of the enemy.
The survey results demonstrate that after two years of intense pressure and threat campaigns by the US, NATO and the Ukraine for the companies to wind up their Russian businesses and leave Russia, the outcome is defeat.
KSE claims this work has been done by “a team of Ukrainian IT volunteers;” the Yale University’s School of Management collaborated with data on the companies. Volunteer doesn’t mean what it seems in Ukrainian. The funding for the operation has come through KSE’s money suppliers, which include several Ukrainian ministries, whose funding comes in turn from the International Monetary Fund, the US, and the European Union (EU). “KSE Institute’s clients”, the institution’s website says of its paymasters, “also include the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine, the European Business Association, and a number of large law and development companies. Among the international partner organizations are USAID, UK aid, DFID, the embassies of the United States, Canada and the Netherlands, the EBRD, the World Bank, the EU Commission, IFC, WHO, UNDP, GIZ, UNICEF, Yale School of Management and others.”
KSE’s “SelfSanctions” project is paid for by another group of “partners” including George Soros, government-backed organizations in Germany, Norway, Taiwan, and Poland, and a Ukrainian entity called “Squeezing Putin”. This takes US and other intelligence material, feeds it to the Anglo-American media, and then identifies the media reports as corroboration of the process for sanctioning companies which remain in Russia and are attacked in the press as an “international sponsor of war”.
KS adds a note of self-importance: “Kyiv School of Economics holds the first place among the most powerful economic analytical institutions of Ukraine according to the RePEc rating.”
The importance, the breaking news, is that, according to the newly published evidence, 82.7% of the international companies surveyed have dismissed KSE, its foreign state financiers, and its economic warfare projects as a failure – and their shareholders concur.
This is how the Maidan cookie crumbles.
The Russian report by Novaya Gazeta Europa, officially identified by the Russian government media monitor as a foreign agent, was published on February 6. It appears on the Russian website of the publication; not on its English website. The publication attaches this notice: “Military censorship has been introduced in Russia. Independent journalism is banned. We continue to work because we know that our readers remain free people. Novaya Gazeta Europa reports only to you and depends only on you. Help us to remain the antidote to dictatorship – support us with money.”
Unlike the international companies it is reporting on, Novaya Gazeta Europa has left Russia, and is based in Riga, Latvia.
A summary report of the same material appeared on the same day in The Bell. This is also a foreign agent publication; since 2019 it is reportedly financed by the oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov; follow his business practices here. Prokhorov has become an Israeli citizen and lives in that country.
The Russian text has been translated verbatim; illustrations have been added for clarification.
“If you work quietly, no one will come for you” — we have studied the cases of 110 foreign companies doing business in Russia despite the war. That’s why they never left.
By Denis Morozhin
The Russian authorities like to talk about how foreign companies only pretend to leave Russia, and if they do leave, they will certainly return. As the Novaya-Europa study shows, foreign business gives the Kremlin reasons for such statements. Of the 110 largest foreign companies which continue to operate in Russia, 51 were not even going to leave, and another 40 changed their minds or were unable to sell their assets at a bargain price. We tell you about the five main strategies that allow them to stay in the country during the war.
Shortly after February 24, four global tobacco giants that divided the Russian market among themselves — Japan Tobacco, Philip Morris, British American Tobacco and Imperial Brands — made the most radical statements about working in Russia: ‘We will leave the country, we will sell the business.’ Back in 2022, the sources of Novaya Europa assessed these plans extremely skeptically. “At least the largest tobacco companies will definitely not leave, why would they do that? Do you think that if Philip Morris does not close the factory near St. Petersburg, people in Indonesia or Brazil will stop buying Marlboros to take revenge on those who sold themselves to Putin and pay taxes for the war?” one of the insiders of this market said at the time.
Almost two years after the outbreak of a full-scale war, it turned out that this forecast has largely come true. Not only tobacco companies (of which only British American Tobacco and Imperial Brands have left), but also many other major companies continue to work in Russia despite all their promises and even despite the title of ‘sponsors of war’ assigned to them in Ukraine. It was the market leader, Japan Tobacco, who explained the continuation of work at the end of 2023 as follows: we do not want to “deprive consumers of the product they are used to.” At the same time, according to Novaya-Europa, back in the summer of 2022, this manufacturer was negotiating a sale, and its corporate statements confirmed this.
By the beginning of 2024, it became clear: some do not leave, because they know that if they anger the Russian authorities even a little bit, they will lose key assets and a lot of money. The second is just fine in Russia, they have no reason to lose a profitable business, and now they have even stopped hiding it — although they promised to leave the market. Still others, whose example is certain warning for others, did not want to come out on the Kremlin’s terms, went into conflict with the authorities — and lost everything. The fourth, looking at the first three groups, just remain silent and work quietly all these two years.
Novaya Gazeta Europa studied the cases of 110 foreign companies which either worked in Russia in 2023 or left the market no later than the second half of 2023. We took the 50 largest foreign companies according to the Forbes 2023 rating and added to them firms from the Novaya Europa rating compiled last year of the top 100 foreign companies by net profit in Russia in 2022 (minus those who completed their exit from the country before July 2023).
It has turned out that these companies can be divided into five categories depending on their operating strategies in Russia.
We have called the largest group, which included 51 companies, “Wait it out in silence.” At best, they have expressed concern about the outbreak of a full-scale war, or they have simply remained silent. Some of them have explicitly said that they would continue to work. Among those who still adhere to this model of behaviour are Auchan, Metro, Calzedonia, Ecco, Benetton, Ehrmann, TotalEnergies, Rockwool, Mitsui, and major pharmaceutical companies.
According to our calculations, in 2022 – the reports for 2023 have not yet been published — they have received a total net profit of 448 billion rubles.
The second largest group, in which we included 40 firms, are those which promised to sell their business, leave the market, reduce investments and abandon development plans in Russia – this is the “Promise and not leave” strategy. As a result, they retained a variety of assets in the country: production, retail chains, brands, service or supplies. Examples include BP, JTI, PMI, Pepsico, Mars, Nestle, Raiffeisen, UniCredit, Intesa, ABB, Bacardi, Campari. This group is smaller in number, but larger in total profit — 669.6 billion rubles. We have identified three companies in a separate group (Leroy Merlin, Decathlon, Adidas) which have retained their brands in Russia on one condition or another — in fact, they “left without leaving.” All of these companies did not disclose profits for 2022.
Two small groups, in each of which we have included 8 companies, have adopted the strategies of “Sitting until the last” and “Losing everything”. Those who stayed (with a total profit of 43 billion rubles) promised to leave the market, but sold the business only in the second half of 2023, usually at a discount and on unfavourable terms. These are Hyundai, Kia, Volvo, Ingka Group (shopping centre investor), AB InBev, Veon.
The same number also went into confiscation or external management because they quarrelled with the Russian authorities or became, according to the Kremlin, a “compensation fund” – held for potential offset if the West fails to compensate for its seizure of Russian assets abroad — Danone, Carlsberg, Fortum and others with a total net profit of 48.8 billion rubles.
According to the calculations of Novaya-Europa, the leaders in choosing the first two strategies, which involve maintaining business in Russia, are companies from the United States, a total of 20 of them. Germany is in second place with 14 firms (12 of them are “silently waiting it out”), Italy is in third place with 11.
The strategy of “sitting it out and keeping business” shows that foreign companies have verbally condemned the war. In fact, however, it is more important for them to preserve the opportunity to earn in a large and growing market. These earnings probably outweigh the potential problems in Western consumer markets for them. It is in order to create such difficulties for companies that the Ukrainian authorities have created a register of “International Sponsors of War”, which at the end of January includes 48 companies (31 of them from countries that the Russian authorities call “unfriendly”).
Since mid-2023, some companies on this list have begun to face corporate boycotts in the West. However, this has turned out to be very localized and has so far mainly manifested itself in the Scandinavian countries. For example, Swedish SAS has decided to stop feeding passengers with Mondelez and Nestle products, as well as drinking Pepsico soda and Bacardi alcohol.
Other consumers in Sweden and Norway, in particular, the railway company, the ferry carrier Tallink and others, began to refuse Mondelez chocolate. “At the same time, Mondelez is holding up for now,” a Russian lawyer who specializes in international trade said in a conversation with Novaya—Europa. In Finland, the VR rail carrier and Finnair airline have said they may reject Nestle and Unilever products.
Ukraine has included all these companies in the list of sponsors of the war, but it is still difficult to judge the economic consequences of the boycotts, because they began very recently. None of the companies has yet claimed damage from these measures.
Hostages and “calculating men”
Many companies found themselves in the position of hostages of the Kremlin, and these are both those who promised to leave Russia, but did not do so, and those who remained silent for two years, say the sources of Novaya Europa. “They are forced to work in Russia and have become an offset fund which the Russian authorities need to exchange for Russian assets blocked abroad,” an expert from one of the major analytical companies believes.
He explains the status of “hostages” by the mass of restrictions imposed on foreign firms, which deprive them of the chance to exit without serious losses for the business. In particular, bankruptcy is prohibited, and if there are signs of premeditated bankruptcy, then managers face criminal liability.
Assets can be sold at a discount of 50% of their current estimated value, which is now very low. And most importantly, you need to get a sale transaction permit through a special commission, which reviews and agrees to an average of one or two transactions per month, the expert notes.
Among the global giants who tried, but could not sell their factories in Russia on favourable terms, but did not want to lose everything, the experts identify Mitsubishi Motors, ABB, General Electric — all of them have stopped production in Russia.
But there is also a directly opposite group — the “calculating ones” who understand perfectly well that their position in the market is such that they can safely continue working in Russia. If the Kremlin takes their assets to bargain with the West, it will cause problems for the economy.
Despite the fact that the state, after the outbreak of a full-scale war, has learned to take away private business from owners, the authorities simply cannot nationalize some companies, otherwise that will be a “shot in the foot,” our sources say. Tobacco concerns are an example of this, according to our industry sources. Of the four largest cigarette manufacturers represented in Russia, Russian assets have been sold to British American Tobacco and Imperial Brands, while Japan Tobacco and Philip Morris are in no hurry.
“Let’s imagine that Putin took Russian factories from Japan Tobacco and Philip Morris, just as he confiscated the assets of Carlsberg and Danone. And then it is possible that factories in Russia will have serious problems with the supply of raw materials. Tobacco plantations, of course, do not belong to cigarette manufacturers. But global concerns still know how to interact with plantation owners who can meet the global giants halfway and arrange problems with the supply of tobacco raw materials to Russia,” says a source of Novaya-Europa, who knows this industry well.
At the same time, he adds, tobacco raw materials are produced, among other countries, in China: “But there is another tobacco, though it is not very suitable for our factories. And China, even though it is our friend, will also not want to quarrel with the West. And what happens when cigarettes run out in the stores, Putin and his friends should remember perfectly well, because in 1990 and 1991, because of such a shortage, people blocked Nevsky Prospekt in the president’s hometown”. Anatoly Chubais recalled such a riot – there was similar unrest in Moscow and other cities.
The Russian market for worldwide global tobacco manufacturers is at least number two in global size, so it cannot be lost, says another source in the industry. “They want to sit here until the last moment and earn money”, he thinks. For example, Japan Tobacco earned a fifth of its $3 billion in net profit for 2022 — or $645 million — in Russia (43.5 billion rubles, recalculated at the average ruble exchange rate of 67.46 to the dollar). At the same time, its ruble profit in Russia in 2022 increased by one and a half times compared to 2021.
At the same time, Philip Morris earned $787 million (53.1 billion rubles) in Russia in 2022 — about 5.4% of its total net profit of $9.05 billion in the same year. Its Russian net profit increased by a third in the first year of the war.
Stand with a drink replacing Coca-Cola at a grocery store in Moscow, June 10, 2022. After Coca-Cola announced the termination of its business in Russia, the new product has already appeared on the shelves of Moscow supermarkets. Bela Cola, produced in Belarus, was previously available only in some regions of Russia. It is reported that since February 2022, imports of carbonated beverages to Russia have increased by 50 percent. Photo by Vlad Karkov / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty Images
Promising does not mean leaving
Among those who spoke about their intentions to leave the market, but have remained while only partially reducing their presence, there are many global producers of what you can eat and drink. These include both of the world’s main suppliers of non-alcoholic soda, as well as both of the largest alcohol sellers, Bacardi and Campari Group.
It is noteworthy that all these companies (as well as Mars, Nestle, Procter& Gamble, Mondelez and others) have behaved in approximately the same way. In the early days of the war, they issued fairly similar statements about the suspension of some operations in Russia (Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Campari).
Left: one of the LeRoy Merlin stores in Russia; right, Gérard Mulliez, patriarch of the family owning LeRoy Merlin, Auchan, Decathlon and other retail chains operating in Russia.
In December 2023, the data of the Unified State Register of Legal Entities showed that the owner of Leroy Merlin had changed: it became the company Scenari Holding LP from the United Arab Emirates. The market does not believe this. One of our industry sources, who asked not to be named, believes that in fact the French owners could have retained control of the network. He explains this by saying that Leroy Merlin, with 112 hypermarkets in Russia, which tops the Russian Forbes ranking of foreign companies by revenue, is too large an asset to be sold to an unknown company. The source recalls that until 2022, Leroy Merlin had more than a quarter of its revenue generated in Russia; losing that would mean dealing a severe blow to the business.
Two more examples of “changing signage” are Decathlon and Adidas. The first one sold its chain to the Russian company ARM (previously it specialized in the restaurant business), which opened stores under the name Desport. They sell products of the same brands as in the “old” Decathlon — the Desport online catalogue confirms this.
Adidas exited very cleverly. It subleased some of its stores to Lamoda, retaining its legal entity in Russia, and now sells its products through an official Russian distributor.
The illusion of return for energy production
The Kremlin has managed to show foreign companies that those who insist on their rights will lose everything. In particular, Shell, an oil and gas producer, and Carlsberg, a brewer, have faced this. The result is that only the one who knows how to negotiate retains assets or is allowed to leave Russia with money. Other companies from the same industries, oil and gas and beer, have succeeded: BP, TotalEnergies and Heineken.
Shell has been producing and liquefying gas on Sakhalin for 15 years and selling liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Asian markets, mainly to neighbouring Japan. Then a full-scale war broke out – and the concern, which had been friends with the Kremlin for decades, was one of the first to announce that it would withdraw from all enterprises in Russia. Moreover, it did this without equivocation, issuing a harsh statement on the fourth day of the invasion of Ukraine, on February 28, 2022.
Perhaps that is why Vladimir Putin by his decree dated June 30, 2022, effectively took away 27.5% of the LNG plant on Sakhalin from Shell. Formally speaking, according to this decree, the Kremlin took the plant from all its shareholders, including Gazprom (50%), Japanese Mitsui (12.5%) and Mitsubishi (10%) – the latter are representatives of the “sit and wait” strategy — and transferred the enterprise to a specially created Russian company, Sakhalin Energy. Of course, the Japanese and Gazprom agreed to become its shareholders. Shell refused this honour.
The refusal of the Anglo-Dutch company meant that, according to the same presidential decree, Shell’s share had to be sold, and the money blocked inside Russia in a Type C account. In the spring of 2023, the Russian government allowed Novatek to buy this block of shares. Novatek is the second gas producer in Russia after Gazprom and the Kremlin’s great hope for conquering the global LNG market. Its export is critically important for the budget of Russia, which is under an oil embargo due to the war.
In the spring of 2023, Kommersant reported that Novatek co-owner Leonid Mikhelson asked Putin to allow Shell to withdraw $1.16 billion from Russia for the sale of the stake in the Sakhalin plant – and Putin, according to the newspaper, gave such consent. The deal is still in limbo and probably not completed, two sources in the oil and gas market told Novaya-Europa: they say they do not know whether Novatek will receive the share and Shell will receive the money. “In fact, [Shell] hasn’t left”, one of the sources said. One of the proofs of this, he believes, is that the stock quotes of Novatek “have not yet gained value on the entry into Sakhalin-2 in any way.” In the database of Spark legal entities, information about the shareholders of Sakhalin Energy is classified.
When asked by Novaya-Europa whether the company received money for the asset, Shell’s press office noted that they have nothing to add to what is written about this in the “Frequently Asked Questions” section on the company’s website. This says: “We reserve all our legal rights in relation to our share of 27.5% (minus one share) in the Sakhalin Energy Investment Company.” That is to say, the share in the very company from which Putin took the plant last year.
One of our sources in the oil and gas market believes that this statement of the company can be interpreted as follows: Shell considers the nationalization illegal and may well sue the Kremlin to protect its rights to the asset. At the same time, in December 2023, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak did not confirm that the Shell and Novatek deal had been completed.
But Shell’s competitors, British BP and French TotalEnergies, did not issue loud statements and did not promise to protect their shareholder rights. And as a result, they have retained their assets in Russia. TotalEnergies’ strategy is to continue making money from LNG production together with Novatek, in which it owns a 19.4% stake. In addition, the French concern owns stakes in Arctic gas projects jointly with Novatek.
Total’s map of its joint Arctic gas projects with Novatek, 2018
BP has carefully assured the public that “we continue to consider options for completing our exit.” At the same time, the company is well aware that it cannot sell 19.75% of its Rosneft shares due to the restrictions imposed in Russia. “It does not count on the imminent end of the war and normalization of relations, and therefore it does not think to sit it out”, a former manager of the oil company familiar with the situation told Novaya-Europa; he asked not to be named. In this situation, all BP could do has been to limit itself to “honest deconsolidation – it does not show this asset in the financial reports, displaying the subtraction from the point of view of the market. This is why its production, reserves, cash flows all fell,” he added. BP did not respond to a request for comment.
“Our business was stolen in Russia”
In the beer industry, there are also both nonconformists and skilful diplomats. The second obviously includes Heineken, which, according to our source in this market, “came to the authorities and said that the company was ready to leave on your terms, but with some money, bring your buyer, they say — the main point was that he was neutral and not under sanctions.” As a result, it was bought by the Russian concern Arnest, which in September 2022 bought three Russian factories for the production of aluminum cans from the American Ball Corporation.
Carlsberg, our source claims, was not ready to accept such conditions, and wanted to choose a buyer itself, and “from the point of view of the government behaved unconstructively.” As a result, Heineken earned at least a little on leaving: Arnest repaid the debt of its Russian subsidiary for €100 million. However, Baltika, owned by Carlsberg, came under the external control of the state. In response, the Danish concern stated that “our business was stolen in Russia.”
“Now, if this situation can be resolved, it is only at the level of heads of state and interstate negotiations. And since they are impossible now, it seems that Carlsberg will have to forget about the Russian asset,” says our source in the industry. At the same time, according to his information, Arnest was ready to buy the Russian business of both brewing companies (and Carlsberg in June 2023 even managed, without specifying the buyer, to announce that it had already signed an agreement on the sale of the business), but did not receive the Kremlin’s consent to Baltika.
Denmark’s share of total Russian assets frozen or seized in the EU as of April 2022 was very small. The data tabulation was reported by the Irish Times from a leaked internal EU document and appeared on April 21, 2022.
We are waiting until the last bell
The list of Novaya Europa includes eight companies which announced the sale of their Russian assets only at the end of the second year of a full-scale war. Almost all of them, except for the Belgian brewing company AB InBev, managed to come to an agreement with the Russian authorities and received consent to the deal.
Turkish Anadolu Efes, the owner of half of one of Russia’s largest brewing companies AB InBev Efes, has announced the purchase of the second half from its partner, the world’s largest beer producer AB InBev. The deal announcement emphasizes that the completion of the transaction can be discussed only after its approval by the regulatory authorities. Nothing has been reported that the Russian authorities have given such consent.
AB InBev announced its intention to sell its stake a long time ago — two months after the start of the war. The deal could not be completed for so long, not because the Belgians could not come to an agreement with the Russian authorities, but because “it is a matter of dividing the business at the international level between AB InBev and Anadolu Efes,” says our source in the beer market. And besides, the departure of the Belgian company turned out to be very conditional: AB InBev managed to leave without leaving, because it owns 24% of the shares of Anadolu Efes. This means that the European brewer will continue to earn money on the Russian beer market, but will retain its reputation.
Among the automakers, Hyundai, Kia and Volvo were late at the exit. Their competitors have already sold factories — but these three concerns were in no hurry to get to the end. At the end of the year Hyundai and its subsidiary Kia, which owned 70% and 30% of the automobile plant in St. Petersburg, received consent to sell their enterprise to the Russian company Art Finance LLC. The Russian authorities said Hyundai would have a two-year option to buy back. And in the third quarter of 2023, Volvo reported it had received permission to sell its truck manufacturing plant in Kaluga, which has since managed to change several owners.
Next to exit
The lawyers interviewed by Novaya-Europa, who are familiar with the plans of the global companies in Russia, do not have a consensus view on how this process will develop further. Some believe that under pressure from public opinion, companies will continue to try to leave. Others believe that everyone who wanted to has left already; the rest have adapted to the new conditions and learned how to earn money in them.
“They will try to get rid of the assets, as the pressure on them is strong,” says one of the lawyers working in Russia, who asked not to be named. And they will do this not because of money, because “there is little economic sense in selling assets, money can’t be withdrawn from Russia anyway,” but “it’s more about social responsibility, reputation, and so on.” At the same time, he believes, “there are those who hope to return to the market which is large and attractive. Bridges are not being burned – they are maintained, and will be preserved. But these are not the same bridges, of course. It won’t be the same as before.”
But not everyone will be able to return: “In the case of someone who has already quarrelled, they will not return here,” the lawyer said, and cited the example of Siemens, which completely withdrew from the energy, engineering and financial business in Russia in 2022, selling assets and stopping supplies and service.
Yegor Noskov, managing partner of the lawfirm, Duvernois Legal, has a different point of view. Those who decided in the spring of 2022 that their image losses from continuing to work in Russia exceeded their possible profits have left. “Other companies have found that the profits generated from the Russian market are too significant for their business and exceed image losses, and remain on the market, making record profits”, says the lawyer, and cites Raiffeisen as an example.
This configuration will continue in 2024, Noskov believes: “I think those who left will not return until the end of the military operations, and perhaps not for a long while after.” And those who remain will not sell their business, but will adapt to the situation using either other brands or all kinds of schemes allowing them to maintain a presence in the market, but avoid direct affiliation of the Russian assets with the parent companies abroad, Noskov says.
State veterinary inspectors have begun an investigation into the appearance of an unauthorized dump of discarded eggs in the Oktyabrsky district of Omsk.
Citizens spoke about an unusual dump of hundreds of packages of chicken eggs on social networks. Inspectors from the Office of Rosselkhoznadzor for the Omsk Region and specialists from the Main Veterinary Directorate of the region went to the indicated location.
“The inspection revealed that the eggs, presumably chicken, were in a frozen state, the eggs and corrugated containers with traces of decay were mixed with snow and glass,” the regional department of Rosselkhoznadzor told RG.
Inspectors collected samples and sent them for laboratory testing. The producer of the eggs has not yet been identified. Law enforcement agencies are searching for him. If the culprit cannot be found, the owner of the land plot will have to liquidate the unauthorized dump.
Apparently someone decided to speculate on eggs during rising prices, but not calculated the expiration date.
But there were probably many who profited from the hype by holding their eggs during the price surge.
Lieutenant General of the Federal Customs Service Zavgorodniy was dismissed for drunken rowdy in Kaliningrad
February 7, 17:18
Lieutenant General of the Federal Customs Service (FCS) Oleg Zavgorodniy was dismissed for drunken brawling in Kaliningrad.
While relaxing in the most expensive room of a local hotel with colleagues, he drank himself into a state of insanity, got into a fight with the hotel security, was detained by the Russian Guard, and insulted the employees of the Russian Guard while on duty. The case might have been hushed up, but one of the employees leaked a wonderful video of the deranged general online and he became a “YouTube star,” after which his fate was sealed.
He reset his career in much the same way as the former governor of Sevastopol Ovsyannikov, who ended his career as a federal official after a drunken brawl in Izhevsk.
PS. Blue is evil.
PS2. Don't be rude to the employee with the phone.
The Ministry of Justice has added the Japanese “Union for the Return of the Northern Territories” to the list of undesirable organizations.
Ultimately, it is necessary to ensure that individuals and organizations advocating the separation of the Kuril Islands from Russia cannot enter Russian territory.
Japan missed the opportunity to receive two islands from Russia and is now obvious that it will not receive anything.
Finland Is Opening Up NATO’s Arctic Containment Front Against Russia
ANDREW KORYBKO
FEB 8, 2024
Finland closed its border with Russia on the false pretext of responding to a suspiciously timed illegal immigrant “crisis” that objectively paled in comparison to the US’ own, after which it swiftly allowed its new military patron access to 15 bases on its territory. This was followed by the “Baltic Defense Line’s” announcement and partial progress being made on implementing the “military Schengen”, both projects of which Finland is expected to participate in.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told RIA Novosti on Wednesday that Finland was avoiding dialogue with Russia on their border issues, which involve Helsinki’s allegations that Moscow is waging “hybrid warfare” against it. These claims stem from the fact that 900 illegal immigrants entered their country from Russia in November instead of the usual one a day or less. Finland then closed its border with Russia and agreed to give the US access to 15 bases a month later.
Objectively speaking, Finland’s illegal immigrant “crisis” at the time paled in comparison to the US’ ongoing one, where a record 300,000 flooded into the country last December. That Nordic nation’s overreaction to 300 times less than that number suggested ulterior motives behind its moves and lent credence to suspicions that Western-linked but Russian-based human traffickers might have been responsible. The purpose behind this provocation was to manufacture the pretext for all that followed.
It was assessed in late November that “Finland Is Hellbent On Positioning Itself As A Frontline NATO State Against Russia”, with subsequent events confirming the veracity of that analysis. Right before the New Year, it became obvious that “CNN Is Lying About Who’s Responsible For Opening The Arctic Front Of The New Cold War” by manipulating perceptions of Finno-Russo tensions to justify the latest US base deal. By mid-January, Russia regained control of the domestic dynamics and began deporting some migrants.
The situation at the border has since improved, yet Finland is still avoiding dialogue with Russia, which discredits its initial claims that closing their crossings and partially fencing the frontier with “temporary structures” was just an ad hoc solution to a supposedly unexpected “crisis”. It’s for this reason why Russian Ambassador to Finland Pavel Kuznetsov told Sputnik on the same day as Zakharova’s statement that Moscow considers the avoidance of dialogue as “aimed at a complete severance of relations”.
The larger context in which their latest troubles have emerged concerns NATO’s ongoing “Steadfast Defender 2024” drills all across Europe till June, which coincided with the Baltic States’ Foreign Ministers announcing their plans to build a so-called “Baltic Defense Line” in late January. The preceding hyperlinked analysis forecast that Finland might informally join this initiative by turning its “temporary structures” along their frontier into permanent ones and joining the “military Schengen”.
The first of these moves amounts to the creation of a new “Iron Curtain” in the New Cold War while the second facilitates the free movement of troops and equipment throughout the bloc. Scaremongering about war with Russia like Poland just did or hyping up a faux border crisis like Finland is doing serve to justify these interconnected developments, which collectively create a single NATO-Russian front that ominously resembles the Nazi-Soviet one on the eve of the Great Patriot War.
The Arctic dimension is especially important to pay attention to since it’s a comparatively new arena of competition given Finland’s recent abandonment of its decades-long policy of military neutrality. Its opening also comes as the Ukrainian Conflict finally begins to wind down, thus enabling NATO to continue kindling tensions with Russia and distracting from its failure to inflict a strategic defeat on that Great Power via its neighboring former Soviet Republic.
Putting it all together, Finland closed its border with Russia on the false pretext of responding to a suspiciously timed illegal immigrant “crisis” that objectively paled in comparison to the US’ own, after which it swiftly allowed its new military patron access to 15 bases on its territory. This was followed by the “Baltic Defense Line’s” announcement and partial progress being made on implementing the “military Schengen”, both projects of which Finland is expected to participate in.
Upon doing so regardless of whether this is official or informal, Finland will have fulfilled late November’s forecast about how it was poised to position itself as a NATO frontline state against Russia, all with the intent of creating a new “Iron Curtain” from the Arctic to Central Europe via the Baltics. As the Ukrainian Conflict winds down, New Cold War tensions in the Arctic will heat up, which will maintain the EU’s image of Russia as an enemy and thus consolidate the US’ reassertion of hegemony there.
(And here's the real reason for Finland joining NATO: Overweening lust for the riches of the North to be gotten at Russia's expense.)
******
Why Medvedev Is Free to Go Full ‘Born to Be Wild’
Pepe Escobar
February 8, 2024
Washington is actively splitting the EU in favor of a rabidly Russophobic Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis.
Yeah, darlin’ gonna make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once
And explode into space
Steppenwolf, Born to be Wild, 1967
The world has got to be thankful to the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council Dimitri Medvedev. Paraphrasing that iconic Cold War era string of ads about a beer that refreshes the parts other beers cannot each, Medvedev refreshes those – sensitive – parts the Kremlin and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for diplomatic reasons, cannot reach.
As astonishing tectonic shifts keep turning geopolitics and geoeconomics upside down, and the Angel of History looks East while the United States, corroded from the inside, desperately clings to scraps of its dwindling Full Spectrum Dominance, Medvedev makes no bones about how much he enjoys “smoke and lighting”, not to mention “heavy metal thunder”.
Exhibit One is something for the ages. It deserves a full quote – complete with colorful English translation:
“Western politicians who have shat their pants and their mediocre generals in NATO have once again decided to scare us. They launched the largest military exercises since the Cold War.
These involve 90,000 soldiers from 31 countries of the Alliance and ‘almost block’ Sweden, about 50 warships, 80 aircraft, 1,100 ground combat vehicles, including 133 tanks.
Some stages are expected to take place in the most blatantly Russophobic and most disgusting countries to us, such as Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, that is, in close proximity to Russia’s borders.
The NATO blabbers were afraid to directly say who these exercises are aimed against, and limited themselves to empty chatter about ‘practicing defense plans and deterring potential aggression from the nearest opponents’.
But it is quite obvious that this convulsion of flabby Western muscles is a warning to our country. It’s like they’re saying, shouldn’t we properly threaten Russia and show the Russian hedgehog a fat transgender European ass.
It turned out not scary, but very significant.
After all, if the Alliance itself decided to conduct exercises of this level, it means they are really afraid of something.
And even more so, they do not believe not only in victory but in any military successes of the rotten neo-Nazi regime in Kiev. Plus, of course, they are working out the anti-Russian agenda for domestic political purposes, consolidating their dissatisfied electorate.
Overall this is a very dangerous play with fire.
Significant forces have been assembled. And exercises of this scale have not been conducted since the last century. So they are a well-forgotten old thing.
We are not going to attack any country in this bloc. All reasonable people in the West understand this. But if they play too hard and encroach on the integrity of our country, they will instantly receive an adequate response.
This will mean only one thing – a big war, from which NATO will no longer turn away.
The same thing will happen if any NATO country begins to provide its airfields to Bandera’s supporters or quarters its troops with neo-Nazis. They will certainly become a legitimate target for our Armed Forces and will be mercilessly destroyed as enemies.
All those wearing helmets with NATO symbols, who today swaggeringly rattle their weapons not far from our borders should remember this”.
Humiliating defeat or Totalen Krieg
Heavy metal thunder Medvedev is complemented by a superb analysis by Rostislav Ishchenko, who I had the pleasure to meet in Moscow years ago.
These are two key takeaways:
“Today, the readiness of the armies of European NATO members for a real war is lower than that of the Russian army in the most difficult time ‘of the 90s’”.
Ishchenko neatly draws the West’s choice, “between recognition of a shameful defeat, with a defeat on the battlefield of NATO units proper, and the beginning with Russia of a full-fledged war, which the European armies cannot wage, and the Americans have no strength for, for they are going to engage in China.”
The inevitable conclusion: the whole U.S. architecture of “Russian containment” is “crumbling”.
Ishchenko correctly notes that “the West is not able to wage a proxy war against Russia beyond 2024” (Defense Minister Shoigu, on the record, already said last year that the SMO will end in 2025).
Ishchenko adds, “Even if they manage to hold out not only until the fall, but until December 2024 (which is very doubtful), the end of Ukraine is still near, and to replace them, the West was not able to prepare yet another one who wanted to die for the United States in a proxy war with Russia.”
Well, they are trying. Hard. For instance by regimenting a bunch of hyenas for the Three Seas scam. And by giving the CIA’s darling Budanov in Kiev free reign to stage serial terror attacks inside the Russian Federation.
Meanwhile, a confidential memo designed at the London School of Economics suggests close cooperation between the German government, USAID and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation to build a sort of “new Singapore in Kiev”: that is, a “reconstruction” profiting corporate Germany out of a low-wage hellhole.
Well, no one knows what sort of “Kiev” will survive, and in what form. So there won’t be any remixed “Singapore”.
There will be no compromise
German analyst Patrik Baab has offered a meticulous breakdown of the key facts underlying Medvedev’s outburst.
Of course he needs to quote NATO’s Stoltenberg, who has already elliptically confirmed, on the record, that this is not an “unprovoked” war of aggression – NATO in fact provoked it; moreover it’s a proxy war, essentially about NATO’s eastward expansion.
Baab also correctly acknowledges that after the peace negotiations in Istanbul in March/April 2022, imploded by U.S. and UK, there is zero trust in the Kremlin – and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – of collective West politicos.
Baab also refers to one of Sy Hersh’s Deep State sources:
“The war is over. Russia has won.”
Still, the key point – which does not escape Medvedev’s attention – is that “no concessions are to be expected in Washington. The military confrontation continues. The war has become a battle of attrition.” That ties in with Medvedev already making it explicit that Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkov, Mykolaev and Kiev are “Russian cities.”
Hence, “a compromise is therefore de facto ruled out.”
Russia’s Security Council clearly understands how the strategic concept adopted by NATO at the 2022 summit in Madrid totally militarizes Europe. Baab: “It proposes multi domain warfighting against a nuclear-armed peer-competitor. In other words, nuclear war. It says: ‘NATO enlargement has been a historic success.’”
That’s the rhetoric parroted non-stop by Stoltenberg straight out of NATO’s think tank, the Atlantic Council.
Feeling the pulse in Moscow, in a series of in-depth exchanges, it becomes clear that the Kremlin is prepared for a nasty war of attrition that could last years – beyond the current Raging Twenties. As it stands, the song remains the same in Ukraine: a crossover of snail technique and the ineluctable meat grinder.
The endgame, as Baab clearly understands, is that “Putin is seeking a fundamental security agreement with the West.” Even as we all know it’s not gonna happen with Straussian neocons dictating policies in the Beltway, the facts on the – geoeconomic – ground are unmistakable: sanctioned-to-death Russia already surpassed Germany and the UK and is now the strongest economy in Europe.
It’s refreshing to see a German analyst quoting historian Emmanuel Todd (“WW III has already begun”) and crack Swiss military analyst Jacques Baud, who explained how there has been “a sophisticated philosophy of war in Russia since Soviet times”, including economic and political considerations.
Baab also refers to the inimitable Security Council’s Scientific Council stalwart Sergei Karaganov in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta: “Russia has completed its European journey… The European and especially the German elites are in a state of historical failure. The foundation of their 500-year dominance – the military superiority on which the West’s economic, political, and cultural dominance was built – has been stripped away from them (…) The European Union is moving… slowly but surely towards disintegration. For this reason, European elites have shown a hostile attitude towards Russia for about 15 years. They need an external enemy.”
When in doubt, read Shelley
It’s now crystal clear how Washington is actively splitting the EU in favor of a rabidly Russophobic Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis.
Meanwhile, the “no compromise” in Ukraine is deeply determined by geoeconomics: the EU desperately needs access to Ukraine’s lithium for the “decarbonization” scam; the vast mineral wealth; the rich black-earth soil (now mostly property of BackRock, Monsanto and co.); the sea routes (assuming Odessa does not revert to its status of “Russian city”); and most of all, the ultra-cheap workforce.
Whatever happens next, Baab’s diagnosis for the EU and Germany is gloomy: “The European Union has lost its central function”, and “historically, it has failed as a peace project.” After all now it’s the Washington-Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis that “sets the tone.”
And it gets worse: “We are becoming not only the backyard of the United States, but also the backyard of Russia. The energy flows and container traffic, the economic centers are moving eastwards, forming along the Budapest-Moscow-Astana-Beijing axis.”
So as we crisscross Medvedev, Ishchenko and Baab, the inevitable conclusion is that the proxy war on country 404 will keep going on and on and on – in myriad levels. “Peace” negotiations are absolutely out of the question – certainly not before the November elections in the U.S..
Ishchenko understands how “this is a civilizational catastrophe” – perhaps not “the first since the fall of the Roman Empire”: after all, several civilizations collapsed across Eurasia since the 4th century. What is blatantly clear is that the collective West as we know it is fast flirting with a one-way ticket to the dustbin of History.
And that brings us to the genius of Shelley encapsulated in one of the most devastating sonnets in the history of literature, Ozymandias, published in 1818:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
As we keep searching for light in the darkness of insanity – complete with a genocide running 24/7 – we may visualize the pedestal standing in the middle of a vast desert, painted by Shelley with a couple of sublime alliterations, “boundless and bare” and “lone and level.”
This is all about a vast empty space mirroring a political black void: the only thing that matters is the blind obsession for Total Power, the “sneer of cold command” asserting the perpetuity of a hazy “rules-based international order”.
Oh yes, this a heavy metal thunder sonnet that outlasts Empires – including the “colossal wreck” vanishing in front of our eyes.
One of the creators of "Loaf" has died
February 8, 12:06
One of the creators of "Loaf" has died
Veteran of the Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant Egor Varchenko, who participated in the creation of a whole family of domestic trucks, died on February 7. He was 96 years old. The tragic departure of the developer was reported by the press service of the car plant.
During the Great Patriotic War, Yegor Varchenko miraculously survived in a concentration camp. Returning to his homeland, he completed a driver's course, worked in a motor club and studied at the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute. Afterwards he was sent to the Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant.
Egor Varchenko devoted 47 years to the leading domestic enterprise. All this time he was engaged in the construction of all-terrain vehicles, called “loaf”. For the development of UAZ-450 vehicles and their modifications, Varchenko received large silver and small bronze medals from the USSR Exhibition of Economic Achievements and many other awards.
Based on the results of Carlson’s interview with Putin
February 9, 5:05
In general, based on the results of the interview.
1. For the Russian Federation, this was a good opportunity to convey its position through the wall of the Western mainstream. The interview will probably be seen by tens of millions of people in the West. The interest in him in the West is obviously enormous, which is clearly visible today on American social networks.
2. For Carlson, this became a mega-hype interview, which will increase the capitalization of his personal media brand. Shutting him down like Alex Jones won't be easy.
3. This is certainly a blow for mainstream neoliberal propaganda, so in the next 24 hours we will see intensive “damage control” activities.
4. The interview was aimed at a Western audience; for Russian residents there was little that was new. I would focus only on the direct statement that the collapse of the USSR was initiated by the Russian leadership. In this regard, the Yeltsin Center looks even uglier, as one of the symbols of the destruction of one’s own country for the sake of friendship with the West.
In contrast to this interview was Biden, who came out to a press conference almost immediately after the end of Putin’s interview and tried to prove to reporters that he is adequate and not an old man with memory problems, as the US Attorney’s Office calls him. After which he named El-Sisi the president of Mexico.
From comments on Twitter.
Putin just spent over 28 minutes going through 1,000 years of Eastern European history without a single note in his hand, Biden has no idea what he had for lunch. This is terrifying.
(I will post a transcript as I can get one but I ain't paying Carlson.)
******
Putin Subverted The Mainstream & Alternative Media’s Expectations In His Interview With Tucker
ANDREW KORYBKO
FEB 9, 2024
He isn’t the monster or madman that the Mainstream Media portrays him as, though he also isn’t the anti-Western revolutionary mastermind that the Alt-Media Community claims either. President Putin is simply an apolitical pragmatist that solely wants to preserve his country’s conservative-nationalist society, robustly develop its economy, and ensure its objective national security interests, all while cooperating with others in pursuit of mutual benefit.
Tucker’s interview with President Putin was preceded by the Mainstream Media (MSM) and the Alt-Media Community (AMC) alike hyping up their audiences with unrealistic expectations. Both predicted that the Russian leader would spew a bunch of talking points, which the former described as propaganda while the latter speculated that they’d crush the West’s reputation, but both were proven wrong. Instead of a simple talk show, President Putin clarified from the start that this would be a serious conversation.
He didn’t waste any time proving his intent either, immediately jumping into a detailed historical review of what can be described as the ‘Ukrainian Question’ between Russia and Poland over the centuries, after which he segued into how this subject was addressed during the Soviet period. The purpose in doing so was to comprehensively inform his audience of the context leading up to the special operation, taking care to explain each side’s motives and nuances in order for them to fully understand everything.
As he approached the end of the Old Cold War, President Putin then reaffirmed Russia’s sincere interests in cultivating a new era of relations with the West, pointing out that that he even once asked Clinton if his country could join NATO and explored joint anti-missile cooperation with Bush Jr. Both initiatives ultimately failed for reasons that he attributed to the American elite’s obsession with dominance, hinting throughout the interview that the CIA is the one that’s really calling the shots on foreign policy.
Instead of mutually beneficial cooperation, the US-led West continued pushing their subjectively defined zero-sum interests at the expense of Russia’s objective national ones, which took the form of expanding NATO eastward in violation of their word and trying to Balkanize Russia in the Northern Caucasus. Even so, President Putin kept pressing on with the vision that he admitted several months ago was naïve in hindsight, which manifested itself through Russia’s actions during “EuroMaidan” and afterwards.
He revealed that former Ukrainian President Yanukovich was told by him to stand down and not use serious force against the armed opposition at the time, being advised to go along with what he himself admitted was a coup through peaceful means via an impromptu round of anti-constitutional elections. In response to his naivete, the CIA completed its armed coup plans despite Germany, France, and Poland acting as guarantors of the aforementioned agreement just the day prior.
That violent regime change prompted Crimea to democratically reunify with its historical homeland after the putschists vowed to oppress Russians, around which time Donbass rebelled and the Ukrainian Civil War broke out after Kiev bombed that region and invaded it. Once again, President Putin preferred peace and pragmatism to war and ultimatums, opting for the Minsk Accords over all else even though the German and French leaders later admitted that they never intended to honor them.
This sequence of events as described by none other than President Putin himself contradicted the MSM and AMC’s expectations of him as a “monster, madman, or mastermind”, revealing him to actually be an apolitical pragmatist with no bloodlust, psychological instability, or ideological motivations whatsoever. The only reason why he commenced the special operation was to ensure the integrity of his country’s national security red lines in Ukraine after NATO clandestinely crossed them and refused to retreat.
There was never any ulterior agenda since he remains committed to the view put forth in his summer 2021 magnum opus that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people that only diverged in superficial ways as a result of external meddling throughout the centuries. That’s why he sought to swiftly end the latest phase of the long-running conflict that his special operation was meant to end shortly after it began via the Istanbul peace process, only to once again be hoodwinked, with all due respect to him.
After President Putin ordered his troops to pull back from Kiev as a goodwill gesture for clinching the agreement that the Ukrainian delegation had already initialed, former British premier Johnson convinced them to scrap that detailed political-military pact in favor of continuing the fight. Nevertheless, the Russian leader still said that he envisages a political end to the conflict, but reminded everyone that Ukraine must first repeal its legislation banning talks with Moscow in order for this to happen.
The world will never be the same whenever this proxy war ends, however, since he believes that it dealt a powerful blow to America’s prior dominance. In fact, a large degree of this was self-inflicted after its elite convinced decisionmakers to attempt to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia, which was always a political fantasy. To that end, they even weaponized the dollar, though this backfired by accelerating de-dollarization processes (including among American allies) that in turn undermine the basis of US power.
The emerging Multipolar World Order that’s taking shape should focus on collective security instead of separating into blocs, he said, and he hopes that international law as enshrined in the UN Charter will once again be respected by all with time. AI and genetics should be regulated just like nuclear weapons, though there has to be mutual trust for that to happen, which is obviously lacking. In the interim, pragmatic agreements are possible on other issues like spy swaps, but not much else is expected.
Everything that President Putin spoke about in his interview with Tucker, from the historical background of the ‘Ukrainian Question’ to details about the evolution of Russian policy as well as his interactions with American leaders, subverted the MSM and AMC’s expectations because it wasn’t simple talking points. Quite the opposite, this was a series of master classes on those complex subjects that likely went over the heads of most, but it was still important to discuss for the sake of those who are interested.
The first takeaway for average viewers/readers is that American foreign policy is actually controlled by elite members of its permanent bureaucracy (‘deep state’) such as those in the CIA, not the President, since Clinton and Bush’s initial interests in cooperating with Russia were scuttled by that agency. The second point is that foreign meddling in Ukraine turned the question of its people’s identity into a geopolitical weapon for weakening Russia, which wants to live in peace and prosperity with that country.
Third, President Putin only commenced his country’s special operation after feeling that the failure to do so would lead to irreversible security challenges that risked culminating with time in Russia’s Balkanization, which he explicitly claimed that the West is pursuing as a means of containing China. The fourth point is that it’s this obsession with dominance among its policymaking elite (i.e. CIA) that’s responsible for destabilizing the world, with the final point being that he wants peace via diplomacy.
As was pointed out earlier, he isn’t the monster or madman that the MSM portrays him as, though he also isn’t the anti-Western revolutionary mastermind that the AMC claims either. President Putin is simply an apolitical pragmatist that solely wants to preserve his country’s conservative-nationalist society, robustly develop its economy, and ensure its objective national security interests, all while cooperating with others in pursuit of mutual benefit. He’s neither a villain nor a hero, but just himself.
Well and good, Putin is the 'lesser evil' compared to rampant 'neoliberalism', but let's not forget that he betrayed the Soviet Union and his "conservative-nationalist society" is a step backwards for the material and social well-being of those formerly Soviet people.
******
Tucker Carlson Interview of Vladimir Putin
Posted on February 8, 2024 by Yves Smith
Get a cup of coffee. The Putin interview is over 2 hours, although 1.25X is a fine listening speed.
I just started it myself and will add comments. There is a transcript but you have to subscribe to Tucker’s venture to access it, so it’s not proper to hoist it, but I expect to post some snippets.
As Tucker points out at the top, Putin starts with a long history of the Russia and the Ukraine region. If you’ve read his speeches, even ones before the Maidan coup, you’ll see he likes this framing. Like Tucker, I find this an odd choice, particularly the length of the recap.
Update: As I am partway through this talk, stylistically it seems very similar to Putin’s domestic press briefings, where he likes reciting details for the sake of completeness but also to demonstrate his command of the subject matter. But “press briefing” is not the same as a conventional Western one-on-one interview, even though Putin takes and even seems to enjoy tough questions from Russian and foreign reporters. Note this talk differs markedly from the Oliver Stone 4 hour interview series, broadcast in 2017. Even though many of Putin’s responses then were lengthy, the talk felt like more of an exchange. Did Putin have more confidence in Stone’s understanding of the background than he did with Tucker?
Further update: This talk was flabby and Tucker blew this opportunity. Given that Putin often does 3-4 hour press sessions, and Tucker said there was no time limit, Tucker ran out of gas due to his difficulty in engaging effectively with Putin, as contrasted with the Stone interviews. Putin shut it down and Tucker didn’t offer any reason to continue: “Shall we end here, or is there anything else?”
I don’t think Tucker was knowledgeable enough nor did he compensate with preparation. He appeared ignorant of many key issues germane to Putin’s decisions to invade, such at the US refusing to give written responses to Russian proposals in 2021, Zelensky asking for nukes in the February 2022 Munich Security Conference, and Ukraine increasing shelling of Donbass then as it was also massing troops. He might have been able to banter with Putin during his discussion of NATO expansion, for instance, but Tucker exhibited almost no independent point of view or meaningful preparation.
Further thoughts: Tucker’s translator was nowhere near as good as the one in the Oliver Stone series. The translations often had stilted sentence structures and awkward pacing, which may accurately replicate Russian grammar but is not English-friendly. The translator in the Stone interviews was a young man who sat next to Putin….as in provided by the Russian government, and Stone did the voice-over much later (Stone noted that one way the Western press set out to diminish Putin was via ugly-voiced translators).
While there was some interesting tidbits, like a meeting Putin had with Condi Rice, Bill Gates and Bill Burns back in the day, the only thing new to me was a Putin claim about the failed Istanbul negotiations. Recall Russia had troops near Kiev, which most experts saw as a pinning operation. They were clearly too few to take Kiev, but sufficient to force Ukraine to keep meaningful forces there. Russia pulled them out in early April, depicting it as a good will gesture based on negotiation progress. Military experts claimed the Russian forces were being harassed enough that they needed to be reinforced and/or rotated, and the “good will” was an excuse.
Per Putin:
We haven’t achieved our aims yet because one of them is de-nazification. This means the prohibition of all kinds of neo-Nazi movements. This is one of the problems that we discussed during the negotiation process, which ended in Istanbul early this year. And it was not our initiative because we were told by the Europeans in particular that it was necessary to create conditions for the final signing of the documents. My counterparts in France, in Germany said, How can you imagine them signing a treaty with a gun to their heads? The troops should be pulled back from Kiev. I said, all right. We withdrew the troops from Kiev. As soon as we pulled back our troops from Kiev, our Ukrainian negotiators immediately threw all our agreements reached in Istanbul into the bin and got prepared for a long standing armed confrontation with the help of the United States and its satellites in Europe. That is how the situation has developed, and that is how it looks now.
If this is the operative truth (there are many levels of truth, something can be true but not the most germane truth), then Russia was snookered. Or has Putin elevated the importance of the European prodding in light of what he learned later about the bad faith dealings with the Minsk Accords?
Ep. 73 The Vladimir Putin Interview pic.twitter.com/67YuZRkfLL
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 8, 2024
Note that Putin showing his stamina and famed memory comes the same day as the Special Counsel on the Biden “classified documents next to his Corvette” scandal concluded with the Special Counsel deciding not to prosecute despite finding Biden did willfully mishandle classified material, basically because Biden is too doddering to hold up to cross examination. From NBC:
Special counsel Robert Hur’s portrait of a man who couldn’t remember when he served as Barack Obama’s vice president, or the year when his beloved son Beau died, dealt a blow to Biden’s argument that he is still sharp and fit enough to serve another four-year term.
In deciding not to charge Biden with any crimes, the special counsel wrote that in a potential trial, “Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”….
“This is beyond devastating,” said another Democratic operative, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk candidly about Biden’s shortcomings. “It confirms every doubt and concern that voters have. If the only reason they didn’t charge him is because he’s too old to be charged, then how can he be president of the United States?”
Scott Ritter: Tucker Madness Is Good for America
February 8, 2024
Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin tonight will deliver an antidote to dangerous Russophobia in the U.S. while unleashing an insane reaction from Western elites.
By Scott Ritter
Scott Ritter Extra
The former Fox News talk show host-turned independent media phenomenon, Tucker Carlson, is in Moscow, where he has committed the mortal sin of interviewing Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The interview is scheduled to air at 6 pm eastern time tonight, Thursday, Feb. 8. Let there be no doubt — Tucker Carlson has pulled off one of the most memorable journalistic accomplishments in modern history, and when the interview does air, it will — literally and figuratively — break the internet.
As someone who has travelled to Russia twice in the past year to engage in “people’s diplomacy” designed to advocate for better US-Russian relations, I applaud Tucker Carlson’s decision to go to Moscow and get this interview.
The American people have been infected with a virulent case of Russophobia transmitted to them via a political and economic elite who have built a model of American relevance predicated on the need for an enemy capable of sustaining a military industrial and congressional complex by justifying an expansive budget that leaves America weaker and shareholders wealthier.
Rampant Russophobia threatens American security by creating a false sense of danger around which policies that could lead to a military confrontation with Russia—and nuclear war—are formulated and implemented. If the American people are to have any hope of surviving the next decade, then an antidote to the disease of Russophobia must be administered.
This antidote is not difficult to acquire — it consists of fact-based truth grounded in a realistic understanding of the world we live in, inclusive of a sovereign Russia. The real issue is administering this antidote because the traditional vectors for the dissemination of information in America — the so-called mainstream media — have long since been corrupted by the very political and economic elites who are promoting Russophobia to begin with.
Love him or hate Tucker Carlson (I am guilty of having done both; I currently count Tucker as one of the “good guys”), he represents a massive media presence that operates outside the span of control of the informational elite in America, a social media-based presence which, given its association with Elon Musk’s “free speech” platform, X (the former Twitter), cannot be shut down or silenced.
Quantifying the “Tucker Carlson factor” is a challenge. Back in August 2023, Tucker interviewed former President Donald Trump; the interview was streamed at the same time as a prime-time Republican Party presidential debate that Trump had boycotted. Fox News, which broadcast the debate, attracted some 12.8 million viewers during the two-hour broadcast.
Donald Trump later posted on X that the interview had received 236 million views a day after it was streamed. But that number reflects what X calls “impressions,” not actual views—that number was just shy of 15 million (not as impressive, but still beating out the Fox debate.)
Let’s be clear — major networks would kill to have 15 million viewers (the final episode of the HBO hit series “Game of Thrones” brought in 13.8 million viewers, the most in that network’s history.) There are outliers — the 1983 final episode of MASH attracted 136 million viewers, and the 2023 Super Bowl drew over 115 million.
But for Tucker Carlson to bring in 15 million viewers for an independent social media event was unprecedented. And while “impressions” aren’t “views,” per se, they cannot be discounted — 236 million “impressions” means Tucker was moving the needle somewhere.
And, when it comes to delivering an antidote to Russophobia, these “impressions” matter as much as the actual views. Let there be no doubt — the Tucker Carlson interview tonight with Vladimir Putin will attract huge numbers of viewers — most likely shattering records for a streaming event on X.
But we are at the stage where the actual content of the interview doesn’t matter — the mere fact that this interview has taken place has set the information world on fire. The amount of support Tucker Carlson has received is impressive — a clear indication of the power of alternative media.
Unhinged, Un-American Reactions
But the real tell is in the extreme vitriol the idea of this interview has produced among the ranks of the political and media elite in the United States and Europe.
It seems that every major personality in the mainstream media has weighed in on the issue, universally condemning Tucker for daring to operate outside his “lane.” No, it seems, the right to interview Vladimir Putin apparently resides only with the chosen few, those self-anointed gatekeepers through which all information suitable for public consumption must pass.
Tucker has also been vilified by a class of political elites who have, together with their like-minded accomplices in the mainstream media, been responsible for infecting the minds of average Americans with Russophobia-laced nonsense.
For Tucker’s sin, these elites have called for his excommunication — his passport seized, travel bans, and even criminal prosecution.
These American elites have gone insane.
Their arrogance in assuming that they represent some sort of moral and ethical police force imbued with extra-constitutional powers designed to punish free speech when the content is no longer convenient to the official narrative is matched only by their collective ignorance of the Constitution when it comes to free speech.
Their actions are the living embodiment of un-American activities, an irony that seems to escape them as they attack Tucker Carlson’s patriotism for having the audacity to give a platform to perhaps the most important voice about the most critical issue of our time.
Moreover, the stupidity of these elites is mind-bending.
If they truly believe Tucker Carlson’s platforming of Vladimir Putin is a bad idea, then the appropriate response is to turn to the U.S. Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court. In this, we have the example of Justice Louis Brandeis, who opined on the issue of free speech and its relationship to American values while hearing arguments in the 1927 case, Whitney v. California. He argued:
“If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency, can justify repression.”
The question before us, then, is whether Tucker Carlson’s interview of Vladimir Putin constitutes an emergency warranting repression. Brandeis provides guidance in answering this question by referring to the founding fathers of the United States of America. He wrote:
“They [the founding fathers] believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth: that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people. Believing in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they eschewed silence coerced by law—the argument of force in its worst form.”
Tucker Carlson’s detractors do not seek to engage him in a battle of ideas—the kind of discussion based upon the power of reason embraced by the founding fathers. If they chose this path, they would be engaging in activities that represented the quintessential value of American free speech.
As Brandeis noted, “we have nothing to fear from the demoralizing reasonings of some, if others are left to demonstrate their errors and especially when the law stands ready to punish the first criminal act produced by the false reasonings; these are safer corrections than the conscience of the judge.”
Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 1, 1923. Brandeis is third from the right. (National Photo Company Collection/Wikimedia Commons)
Fantasy-Laced Fiction
Tucker Carlson has not committed any criminal act. If people disagree with his actions, once the interview with the Russian President becomes public (his words or the words of President Putin), then they are free to demonstrate the errors of Tucker, Putin, or both.
The problem, however, is that the proponents of Russophobia operate in a fact-free environment, where ideological hatred has replaced informed judgment, where actual knowledge about Russia has been supplanted with fantasy-laced fiction.
They fear Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin because, through this interview, ideas, narratives, and facts that have been ignored or suppressed by the political and media elites will be set forth in unfiltered fashion for the American public to consider free of the influence of those who seek to manipulate the population through narrative manipulation.
One such “gatekeeper” is Fred Hoffman, a retired U.S. Army Colonel who served as a Foreign Area Officer and who has converted this service into a teaching sinecure at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania. “The main problem I have with Tucker Carlson interviewing Vladimir Putin,” Hoffman noted in a recent posting on X, “is that Carlson is being used as a tool, a ‘Useful Idiot,’ in the Kremlin’s strategic disinformation campaign against the West.”
Not one to let an opportunity for defending free speech to pass me by, I authored a reply:
One would hope that self-proclaimed “national security experts” like Hoffman would welcome the opportunity to dissemble the illogic and fallacies they believe will be present in the product of Tucker Carlson’s interview with President Putin. I, for one, would relish this kind of intellectual combat, an opportunity to demonstrate to the public the strength of my ideas and the flaws of those of my opponent.
But Hoffman and his ilk do not relish such a challenge, in large part because of the deficit of fact and logic inherent in their position. Putin and Russia, in their minds, have been reduced into a simplified black and white, good-versus-evil caricature which exists only to mock and criticize.
Any action which provides the target of this debasement with an opportunity to defend itself, to put forward alternative facts, to challenge the status quo narrative, must be avoided at all costs, for the simple fact that Hoffman and his colleagues are ill-equipped to engage in such activity.
Tucker Carlson’s interview with President Putin represents the greatest threat to the proponents of Russophobia in recent history.
I say this with more than a little bitterness, for myself and others have been at the forefront of the struggle against Russophobia for years, with minimal impact.
Watching Tucker Carlson swoop into Moscow and accomplish in days what I have been struggling to do over the course of a lifetime is, to be frank, a hard pill to swallow, especially when I had myself submitted a request back in September 2023 for an interview with the Russian president.
Would I have loved to have the opportunity that has been given to Tucker Carlson?
Hell, yes.
Am I upset that he got this interview, and I did not?
To be honest, I was — more than a little.
But that’s because I’m only human, and jealousy is very much a human trait that resides inside me as much as anyone else.
But I’m over it.
Let’s be honest — I’m an expert, a historian.
I’m not your classic journalist.
My ideal interview with Vladimir Putin would be in the form of a conversation where I could learn about the challenges he faced in the early years of his presidency, overcoming the inherited legacy of the catastrophe of the 1990’s.
Of how he and Akhmad Kadyrov brought an end to the Chechen conflict.
About what prompted his address to the Munich Security Conference in 2007.
How he overcame the dominance of the oligarch class and create an economy that enriches Russia, and not Russian billionaires.
I’d want to know how he felt about the betrayal of the Minsk Accords.
The betrayal of the United States when it came to arms control.
About his connection with the Russian people.
My interview would have had no “gotcha” moments.
It would lack the drama of the hunt, where the wily interviewer seeks to find the chink in the logic of the interviewed.
In short, my interview would have bored the living hell out of an American audience. And it would not have moved the needle in any appreciative manner when it comes to overcoming Russophobia in America today.
Tucker Carlson is an accomplished journalist. He knows how the game is played. There is no doubt that he will package the interview with President Putin in a manner which is both informative and entertaining.
He will elicit responses designed to create controversy in the United States and Europe, to challenge the official narrative, and to inject a new point of view into the American public.
In short, Tucker’s interview will be everything that any interview I might have conducted would not have been. It will be a game-changing moment, a historical event.
It will shake Russophobia in America to its core and, in doing so, hopefully set in motion the grounds for a broader discussion of US-Russian relations that could set America on a trajectory away from conflict, helping eliminate the possibility of a nuclear war.
Such a result would be a good thing. And it is my duty to be prepared to use whatever resources I can muster to help facilitate such a national dialogue.
I applaud Tucker Carlson for having the courage to make this trip to Russia, and to pursue this interview.
As I know from personal experience, the cost one pays for undertaking such a journey is high.
But I also know that the benefits of such a journey, from the perspective of what is good for America, outweigh these costs.
I am convinced that Tucker Carlson is doing what he believes is best for America.
My hope is that most Americans will come to share this belief and that, because of this interview, America will find itself on a path where peaceful coexistence with Russia is the preferred outcome.
Tucker Carlson Committed ‘Treason’ to Interview Russian President Vladimir Putin… and the World Loved It!
February 9, 2024
The powerful effect of Carlson’s interview is that he succeeded in bringing an important perspective to a wider American and Western audience who regrettably have been up to now badly misinformed by Western media.
The volume of vitriol poured on American journalist Tucker Carlson by Western media and politicians was something to behold.
Carlson traveled to Moscow to conduct an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The interview consisted of a full uncut exchange involving dozens of questions that lasted for more than two hours. It was aired on Carlson’s website and other social media platforms.
In the hours leading up to the interview, the former Fox News host was pummeled by the political and media establishment in the United States and Europe. Their reaction was nasty and hysterical. Carlson was denounced as a “traitor” and a “useful idiot”. There were calls for him to be arrested on returning to the U.S. and also to be banned from traveling to the European Union.
A telling reaction, too, was that after the interview was published, the Western media and politicians tended to ignore the event as if it did not happen.
Ironically, though, despite the concerted effort to suppress it, the interview has exploded with eager public viewing around the world. Within hours of airing, the interview had been seen by an estimated 100 million people. It will continue to gather millions of more viewers over the coming weeks.
An amusing aside is the scale of viewer figures far eclipses those of the Western media outlets that were vilifying Carlson over his encounter with Putin. Yet these marginal media outlets (one can hardly call them “mainstream” any longer due to their diminishing audience ratings) presume to deem what the majority of people should or should not watch. They include the likes of CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, the Guardian, and so on. Presstitutes all, as American writer Gerald Celente inimitably labeled them.
There are several conclusions to draw. One is the insidious malign control – or at least attempted control – of communication, views, and narrative by Western states and their media.
It should be a journalistic duty to engage with different parties and perspectives. Carlson did that with Putin and as a result, the Western establishment unleashed a torrent of scorn on him, vigorously trying to discredit the interview before people even had a chance to view it and make up their own minds. That speaks volumes about the real lack of free speech and independent journalism that the West pretends to uphold.
Secondly, the huge worldwide interest among ordinary people in what President Putin had to say shows that there is a keen appreciation for hearing a different perspective from the one that the Western governments and media have been monopolizing. This is especially true regarding the war in Ukraine.
The fact that Carlson’s interview attracted so much interest despite the knee-jerk attempts to denigrate it in advance only demonstrates how much popular contempt there is for the Western official media and its self-importance.
Another lesson to draw is the desperation of the Western establishment to prevent any understanding among the public about the conflict in Ukraine: the historical background, the causes of the war, the true nature of the Kiev regime and its NeoNazi composition, the bigger geopolitical agenda of the United States and its European vassals trying to project Western hegemonic ambitions on the world, and more.
All these complex issues require a deep and lengthy discussion based on historical facts. Western media and politicians are incapable of providing such communication contrary to their conceited pretensions. They serve power and propaganda, not the public interest.
Washington, its European clients, and their servile media have distorted the conflict in Ukraine as a facile bogeyman story about alleged Russian aggression. Putin has been smeared as a dictator and “new Hitler” figure (how disgraceful and absurd!). Of course, such fabulation plays well for the Western militarism that drives American capitalism. It is also grist for the mill of Western politicians who are ideologically blinded by Russophobia. And yet the Western media dare to disparage Russia’s “twisted arguments”.
In his interview with Carlson, Putin presented at length a cogent historical account of how notions of Ukrainian nationalism have been cynically fabricated by Western powers for destabilizing Russia.
The war that the West claims began in February 2022 with a “Russian invasion” was started at least as far back as 2014 with the CIA-backed coup in Kiev that installed a NeoNazi regime.
The Western politicians and media are in total denial of this background as well as the treachery of NATO expansion towards Russia’s borders. How can such media even pretend to provide any informative perspective on the current conflict? The cognitive dissonance with reality is astounding.
Many people around the world including in the United States will agree with Putin’s view or find it paused for further thought. On hearing the proper historical context of the conflict in Ukraine, more people will understand the reality of a proxy war instigated by the United States and its NATO allies, not for the ostensible defense of Ukrainian democracy (that doesn’t exist) but for the strategic defeat of Russia. That bigger imperialist agenda has been extant for decades, albeit tacitly so, stemming from the Cold War following World War Two and for the past 33 years since the supposed end of the Cold War in 1991.
The Western states and their media can deprecate Russia’s perspective as much as they like but there is such a thing as historical truth. Most people around the world, including informed American scholars like John Mearsheimer, diplomats like Jack Matlock, and commentators like Jeffrey Sachs, know that the conflict in Ukraine has a much greater dimension than the Western propagandistic media would try to purvey.
There is such a thing as the ring of truth. Most people, even those who have been formerly benighted by misinformation, generally appreciate a version of history that accords with the facts and rational analysis.
Western politicians and media cannot deliver such an edifying account because they have systematically lied about and distorted the causes of conflict in Ukraine and more generally on the relations between the West and Russia.
Putin went a long way towards setting the record straight in his interview with Tucker Carlson this week. It was by no means the first time that the Russian leader had done so. For those who follow the Ukraine conflict outside of the confines of Western media propaganda, what Putin said would have been quite familiar.
The powerful effect of Carlson’s interview is that he succeeded in bringing an important perspective to a wider American and Western audience who regrettably have been up to now badly misinformed by Western media.
Already, growing numbers of American and European citizens have become wary and critical of the futile war in Ukraine and the relentless allocation of public money to prop up a corrupt regime in Kiev.
Carlson deserves immense credit for having the courage and integrity to seek out a perspective that sheds light not just on why there is a bloody conflict in Ukraine but also on the corruption that is endemic in the Western states: the illusions of independent journalism, free speech, and promoting democracy.
Sooner or later, people will realize that the United States and its European vassals are nothing but rogue states whose imperialist crimes know no bounds. The Western media corporate machine plays a vital part in the cover-up of imperial crimes, not just in Ukraine, but also currently in Syria, Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, and beyond. Any lifting of the veil on this naked Western despotism must be shut down immediately. Hence the furious reaction to Carlson’s interview.
But it’s too late. The truth is out. The escaping truth will have inevitable political and historical consequences.
In regard just to Ukraine, the U.S.-led NATO proxy war is no longer tenable. Elitist Western regimes must be – and will be – held to account for the fueling of this war and the vast squandering and theft of public money to pursue their secretive imperialist interests.
Tucker Carlson interview with Putin: what went wrong?
In the week or so before Carlson published his interview with Vladimir Putin, the talking heads on Russian state television spoke glowingly of what could be expected. Their logic was that Tucker Carlson is the most influential journalist in the English-speaking world with a vast audience of viewers and that he would make available to the world the complete, uncensored recording of his conversation with Putin.
What has been withheld from the American public would now reach them directly. The Ukraine war financed and armed by the Biden administration has proceeded amidst a blackout on Russian news sources that are systematically condemned as ‘disinformation’ or propaganda. With the help of Carlson, the eyes of Americans and others in the Collective West would be opened to reality, opened to the logic of Putin’s thinking and to the Russian view of the way out of the ongoing crisis.
As soon as it was confirmed from Moscow that the interview actually took place and would be made available on Carlson’s internet platform, major Western broadcasters raised a hullabaloo. The loudest voice of condemnation came from CNN, where a television presenter denounced Carlson as a fraud, a non-journalist, citing accusations against him dating from the lawsuits that ultimately cost Carlson his job at Fox News. Carlson’s claim in his address from Red Square issued on the day before the interview’s release that he had done what no one else in Western media had dared to do was called a lie: CNN and others said they had been banging on the Kremlin’s door to do an interview with Putin but had received only refusals.
Meanwhile Russian state television maintained that Carlson had been granted this extraordinary favor because he alone, as opposed to mainstream media, would guaranty that the final product aired had no cuts.
I have several remarks to make on the Carlson interview after going through all two hours of it. The first and most damaging remark is that its being uncut, or unedited if you will, is precisely its biggest fault. What we have here is an undisciplined, self-indulgent work of journalism that has all the negative aspects of self-publication. There is a reason why editors existed as a profession, and it is a tough trade-off to accept unlimited transparency at the price of zero quality control. It is a mistake to believe that editing has to serve only hostile intentions.
I say this in full knowledge that I and my fellow commentators who publish essays on their own websites or who publish books on Amazon subsidiaries face this very problem daily.
But back to Carlson and Putin:
For at least ten years, I have been following Vladimir Putin’s speeches and his performance during televised Q&A sessions that can last hours. He was always very impressive for tightly argued points that drew on his encyclopedic memory. Here the very ground rules stating that the discussion would go on without any time limitation worked against Putin’s strengths: he became prolix, did not answer a given question but repeatedly went back to further develop his answer to a previous question, and so on. Worst of all, he decided to open his ‘serious discussion’ with Carlson by delivering a 15 minute history lecture on Russia and Ukraine going back to the 9th century and taking his sweet time bringing us up to the period just before WWI. I can easily imagine that the audience for this video will have contracted by half or more at that point.
The interview became interesting only after the 50 minute point. Putin then spoke about the draft agreement to end the war initialed by the Ukrainian side at negotiations in Istanbul in March 2022. He discussed denazification, what it means and how it had been dealt with in the draft 2022 treaty. Still more serious material comes up as from one hour seven minutes when Putin talks about how Russia’s threat to the West is an invention to scare their publics and pass financing for the war. His explanation for Russia’s putting blame for the Nord Stream bombing on Washington was good, as were his remarks on Germany’s silence on the subject. At one hour 18 minutes, Putin speaks well about multipolarity in global affairs, from which he goes on to a solid description of how the United States is doing serious damage to the dollar as the currency of international trade by its wrong-minded sanctions policies.
I think that those who stay with the interview this far will also appreciate what Putin has to say about his relationship with American Presidents and how the decision makers on foreign policy are really the elites, whose minds are stuck in the pre-1991 prejudices.
At times, Carlson posed questions that do him no credit. Asking Putin how an observant Christian like him can kill people in a war he unleashes may be a question coming from the religious community of Trump backers, but sounds very naïve, not to say stupid when addressed to a head of state.
Perhaps the least professional part of the interview was the last 10 minutes when Carlson seemed to forget who he is and who is Putin, asking in the spirit of ‘just between us guys’ whether Putin would not be magnanimous and release that poor kid (age 32) journalist Evan Gershkovich who could not really have been doing espionage.
This morning’s BBC news program offered viewers about 1 minute from the interview in which Putin said Russia had no interest whatsoever in invading, in occupying the Baltic States, Poland or other NATO countries and that he could envisage a war with Poland only if Poland attacked Russia first. That was better than the total silence about the interview on Euronews and CNN, but it was very meager coverage of what should have been the number one media event of the day.
Curiously, the Financial Times this morning offered a three page article on the interview which reporters Max Seddon and Felicia Schwartz probably won from reluctant editors by taking as their lead those final minutes devoted to release of the imprisoned journalist Gershkovich. From there, at the two thirds mark they turned to other subjects from the interview relating to the start of the Ukraine war and the way Russia is being used by the US and its western allies “to intimidate their own population with an imaginary Russian threat,” a direct quote from Putin. At the same time the FT was not far from the mark in describing Putin’s performance as “a grab bag.”
In closing, I wish to share my impression of one dimension of the interview that surely few others will comment on: body language. Carlson was true to form, posing with a blank, puzzled face the whole time. However, there were flashes of Putin that we normally do not see, and they were not at all flattering. Perhaps it was barely contained annoyance with this pushy American, but Putin allowed himself to display arrogance that contradicted the modest composure we most commonly see. That will not win many friends for Russia.
Did Putin Really Compare Himself To Hitler & Justify The Nazis’ Invasion Of Poland?
ANDREW KORYBKO
FEB 10, 2024
Poland knew that Hitler announced his expansionist plans against the Slavic East in his 1925 infamous manifesto so it was a mistake to participate in chipping apart Czechoslovakia and refusing the Soviets’ overtures for an anti-Nazi alliance thinking that’ll save it. This was the point that President Putin meant to convey in his interview with Tucker, though he wasn’t as clear as he probably thought that he was at the time while speaking impromptu without any notes.
President Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson, which subverted popular media expectations and also spent considerable time on Poland, included a part where the Russian leader briefly summarized the lead-up to World War II. This section also focused on Poland and subverted plenty of expectations too due to the way in which he related these events. Here’s what he said according to the official Kremlin transcript, which will then be analyzed to clarify his intentions:
“In 1939, after Poland cooperated with Hitler — it did collaborate with Hitler, you know —Hitler offered Poland peace and a treaty of friendship and alliance (we have all the relevant documents in the archives), demanding in return that Poland give back to Germany the so-called Danzig Corridor, which connected the bulk of Germany with East Prussia and Konigsberg.
After World War I this territory was transferred to Poland, and instead of Danzig, a city of Gdansk emerged. Hitler asked them to give it amicably, but they refused. Still they collaborated with Hitler and engaged together in the partitioning of Czechoslovakia.
…
So before World War II, Poland collaborated with Hitler and although it did not yield to Hitler’s demands, it still participated in the partitioning of Czechoslovakia together with Hitler. As the Poles had not given the Danzig Corridor to Germany, and went too far, pushing Hitler to start World War II by attacking them. Why was it Poland against whom the war started on 1 September 1939? Poland turned out to be uncompromising, and Hitler had nothing to do but start implementing his plans with Poland.
By the way, the USSR — I have read some archive documents — behaved very honestly. It asked Poland’s permission to transit its troops through the Polish territory to help Czechoslovakia. But the then Polish foreign minister said that if the Soviet planes flew over Poland, they would be downed over the territory of Poland.
But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the war began, and Poland fell prey to the policies it had pursued against Czechoslovakia, as under the well-known Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, part of that territory, including western Ukraine, was to be given to Russia. Thus Russia, which was then named the USSR, regained its historical lands.”
The Russian leaders’ words prompted a flurry of condemnations among those who interpreted them as comparing himself to Hitler and justifying the Nazis’ invasion of Poland, though he arguably no such intent as will be explained in this piece. For starters, readers should familiarize themselves with his magnum opus on this subject from summer 2020 titled “75th Anniversary of the Great Victory: Shared Responsibility to History and our Future”, which comprehensively explains his point of view.
In fact, the insight that he shared in his latest interview was largely a rehash of what he wrote about nearly four years ago with respect to Poland’s controversial interwar diplomacy, particularly its participation in Czechoslovakia’s eventual dissolution. Warsaw had at the time assessed the USSR to be a greater threat than the Nazis, which shared their fears of communist expansion, hence why it refused the Red Army transit rights to save that erstwhile state that Poland itself played a role in chipping apart.
Their partition of modern-day Belarus and Ukraine after the Polish-Soviet War also led to rampant distrust that spoiled any possibility of Warsaw ever agreeing to grant Moscow the rights that it requested to save Czechoslovakia even if Poland hadn’t participated in its eventual dissolution. The aforementioned statements of verifiable historical facts aren’t being shared to excuse Poland’s policies at the time, but simply to explain the paradigm through which they were formulated.
Hitler’s infamous manifesto had already been published over a decade prior and it was thus well known that he harbored explicitly stated expansionist plans against the Slavs, specifically the Soviet Union, whose Ukrainian breadbasket couldn’t be invaded for “Lebensraum” without passing through Poland. He envisaged subordinating it into a vassal by annexing the Danzig Corridor and then exploiting that country as an anti-Soviet launching pad at a later time, but his plans were pushed forward by events.
Poland had the right to refuse the Nazis’ demands, but such might never have been made had Poland not participated in chipping apart Czechoslovakia a year earlier and had instead granted the Red Army transit rights to respond or at least agreed to form a broader anti-Nazi alliance with it and the West. Moscow had been trying to assemble exactly that, but to no avail, as President Putin explained in detail in his previously cited magnum opus from summer 2020.
After having been appeased at Munich, around which time Poland also played a role in Czechoslovakia’s eventual dissolution, he set his sights on Lithuania’s Klaipeda/Memel Region, after which he then sought to annex the Danzig Corridor from Poland. When Warsaw refused, due to part to it being hyped up with security guarantees from the Anglo-Franco Alliance, Hitler launched the Nazis’ first blitzkrieg that he’d been preparing for since 1933. He’d have preferred more appeasement but finally acted in its absence.
This sequence of events was foreseeable since Poland knew that Hitler announced his expansionist plans against the Slavic East in his 1925 infamous manifesto so it was a mistake to participate in chipping apart Czechoslovakia and refusing the Soviets’ overtures for an anti-Nazi alliance thinking that’ll save it. This was the point that President Putin meant to convey in his interview with Tucker, though he wasn’t as clear as he probably thought that he was at the time while speaking impromptu without any notes.
Hitler’s long-held and explicitly stated plans for invading the Soviet Union and particularly its Ukrainian breadbasket that he was obsessed with for “Lebensraum”, as were his predecessors during World War I, were therefore pushed forward by Poland’s uncompromising attitude. He expected that it would also appease him after its role in Czechoslovakia, especially due to it sharing his assessment of communism as Europe’s greatest threat, and that’s why he was so surprised by its Western-emboldened refusal.
To reiterate an earlier point, Poland had the right to refuse the Nazis’ demands and that was the morally correct policy, but President Putin’s point is that events might never have even gotten that far had Hitler not been appeased at Munich a year earlier, nor had Poland chipped apart Czechoslovakia too. That threw a wrench in Hitler’s plans to peacefully subordinate Poland as a vassal and then exploit it as an anti-Soviet launching pad at a later time, ergo why President Putin said he felt compelled to militarily act.
Hitler could have backed down, but he wasn’t one to take no for an answer, plus he was obsessed with reincorporating Imperial Germany’s lost regions prior to expanding into the Slavic East for “Lebensraum”. That’s why he decided to push his plans forward instead of risking the scenario of them becoming unattainable if the incipient (but at that time illusory) anti-Nazi alliance strengthened. This is a valid point that doesn’t equate to President Putin comparing himself to Hitler or justifying the latter’s invasion.
Only ill-intentioned propagandists would draw a parallel between the events leading up to the Nazis’ invasion of Poland in 1939 and those that preceded Russia’s special operation in 2022. These are two completely different conflicts that can’t be compared by any honest observers. President Putin brought up the first-mentioned simply to correct the historical record after Poland led the EU in laying equal blame on the Soviets for World War II in 2019 and to add further context to the ‘Ukrainian Question’.
As a history buff who rarely gives interviews to Western journalists, the Russian leader probably didn’t realize at the time how his impromptu summary of events leading up to that conflict would be spun, but he obviously didn’t intend to compare himself to Hitler to justify the Nazis’ invasion of Poland. Those who’d like to learn more about his perspective on World War II should reference his earlier cited magnum opus from summer 2020, which explains everything more clearly and in much greater detail.
It's funny. how simultaneously liberals here and in the West rushed to accuse Putin of accusing Poland of provoking Hitler’s attack.
In fact, this was officially voiced by the British military theorist and historian Basil Liddle-Hart in his fundamental work “The Second World War” ( http://militera.lib.ru/h/liddel-hart/01.html ).
I open the book and read:
However, within a few days, Chamberlain completely changed his course. It was so unexpected and fraught with consequences that it surprised the whole world. Chamberlain suddenly decided to block any further advance by Hitler and on March 29 sent Poland an offer to support it against “any action that threatens the independence of Poland and the resistance of which the Polish government considers vitally necessary.”
It is now impossible to find out what exactly had the predominant influence on this decision: public indignation or his own indignation; anger at being deceived by Hitler, or humiliation at being seen as a fool in the eyes of his own people.
The unheard-of terms of the guarantees placed England in such a position that her fate was in the hands of the Polish rulers, who had very dubious and fickle judgments. Moreover, England could fulfill its guarantees only with the help of Russia, but so far not even preliminary steps have been taken to find out whether Russia can provide, and Poland can accept, such assistance.
The Cabinet was asked to approve the guarantees without even familiarizing them with the reports of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, which proved the practical impossibility of effective assistance to Poland. True, it is doubtful that this changed anything in the prevailing mood at that time.
When discussed in parliament, the guarantees received general support. Only Lloyd George thought it possible to warn Parliament that taking on such fraught obligations without securing Russian support was recklessness, like suicide. Guarantees to Poland were the surest way to speed up the explosion and the outbreak of world war. They combined maximum temptation with open provocation and incited Hitler to prove the futility of such guarantees in relation to a country beyond the reach of the West. At the same time, the guarantees received made the die-hard Polish leaders even less inclined to agree to any concessions to Hitler, and he now found himself in a position that did not allow him to retreat without damaging his prestige.
Why did the Polish rulers accept such a fatal proposal? This was partly because they had an absurdly exaggerated view of the power of their outdated military (they boasted of a "cavalry raid on Berlin"). Another reason was due to the purely personal desire of Beck, who, in his own words, decided to accept England’s offer “without having time to shake the ash off his cigarette twice.” Beck further explained: when he met Hitler in January, he found it very difficult to “swallow” Hitler’s remark about the return of Danzig, and therefore, when the English proposal was conveyed to him, he seized on it as an opportunity to slap Hitler in the face. In such ways the fate of nations is often decided.[/b]
The only way to avoid war was to enlist the support of Russia, the only power that could provide direct assistance to Poland, and thus contain Hitler. However, despite the severity of the situation, the actions of the English government were sluggish and insincere. Chamberlain had a feeling of deep hostility towards Soviet Russia, and Halifax had a religious antipathy. In addition, they both equally underestimated the power of Russia and overestimated the strength of Poland.
Churchill writes:
“...When all these advantages and all this help were lost and discarded, England, leading France, came forward with a guarantee of the integrity of Poland, the same Poland that just six months ago, with the greed of a hyena, took part in the robbery and destruction It made sense to fight for Czechoslovakia in 1938, when Germany could barely field half a dozen trained divisions on the Western Front, and the French, with 60-70 divisions, could undoubtedly break through to the Rhine or the Ruhr Basin
. was considered unwise, careless, unworthy of modern views and morals. And yet now two Western democracies have finally declared themselves willing to put their lives on the line for the territorial integrity of Poland. In a history that is said to be largely a litany of crimes , the follies and misfortunes of mankind, after the most careful search we are unlikely to find anything like such a sudden and complete abandonment of the policy of complacent appeasement pursued for five or six years and an expression of readiness to go to a clearly inevitable war under much worse conditions and on the largest scale. At last a decision had been made - at the worst possible moment and on the worst possible basis - a decision which would undoubtedly lead to the extermination of tens of millions of people...”
This is a rather harsh indictment of Chamberlain's recklessness, but it is made imprudently, since Churchill was in the midst of events, he himself supported Chamberlain's insistent proposal for English guarantees to Poland.
All this was written back in the 50s of the 20th century. Even then, British historiography directly pointed to the role of the Polish leadership (as well as Chamberlain's government) in unleashing the Second World War. Some make miraculous discoveries in 2024. Read books, study history and you will be happy.
PATRICK LAWRENCE: RUSSIA’S TURN FROM THE WEST
FEBRUARY 8, 2024 NATYLIESB
By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News, 1/22/24
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s steady, able, intellectually quick foreign minister, last week held one of those wide-ranging press conferences he and his boss favor. Lavrov’s remarks are subtly delivered but of a significance we must not miss.
Tass published a useful summary of them on Jan. 18.
Here are a few of Lavrov’s pithier remarks. The first of these appeared under the subhead, “On friends of Russia.” I take the liberty of minorly cleaning up the English translation:
“Relations between Russia and China currently experience the best period of their centuries-long history.
Their relations are firmer, more reliable, and more advanced than a military union as we understood these in the previous Cold War-era.
In all cases, the interests of Russia and China reach a common denominator after negotiation, and this is an example for resolution of any issues by any other participants in global communication.
Relations of particularly privileged cooperation with India develop gradually. Russia also takes relations with African states to a truly strategic level. It develops relations with the Latin American continent. Russia’s close circle also includes Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Qatar.”
Here is Lavrov on the BRICS–Plus group, which expanded last year from its original members, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa:
“About 30 states are interested in rapprochement with BRICS. This association has a great future. Being a superregional global structure, BRICS symbolizes the diversity of a multipolar world.”
At one point Lavrov turned, inevitably, to the conflict in Ukraine:
“It is not up to Ukraine to decide when to stop and when to talk seriously about realistic preconditions for the end of this conflict. It is necessary to talk with the West about it.
The West wants no constructive resolution that would take Russia’s legitimate concerns into account. This is indicated by incitement and coercion of Kiev for increasingly aggressive use of long-range weapons to strike Crimea, in order to make it unsuitable for life, as well as deep into Russian territory, and not only incitement, but the handover of corresponding weapons as well.”
Three practical questions as Russia’s top diplomat interpreted them in a review of “Russia’s diplomatic work in 2023,” as TASS put it. This is fine as it is, but Lavrov’s comments are a case of the subtext being vastly larger than the text. Russia’s objective in 2024 — this is TASS again — is “to remove any dependence on the West.”
I am sure you know the old adage, derived from an 18th century Christian hymn, “God moves in mysterious ways.” So does history. Let us, then, consider this history in brief. Lavrov’s press conference brims with implied references to it.
Notions of Progress
Red Square, Moscow, 2015. (Misha Sokolnikov, Flickr,CC BY-ND 2.0)
Russia is considered among the scholars what is called “a late developer.” Such nations are so named because they were a century or more behind the West as it entered the age of scientific and industrial advances and then — regrettably enough, I would say — on to the Age of Materialism. Railroads, telegraph lines, steamships, photography, Bessemer steel, and all the rest: Late developers, lagging in these technologies, looked Westward with envy well-mixed with a felt inferiority.
The premier case of late development is Japan. Among Russians as among the Japanese, the condition of being “behind” produced profound confusion as to identity and their place in the modern world. This confusion is still easily detected. At its core lie two very consequential misunderstandings.
One, there is the fraudulent Western notion of “progress” as this became an orthodoxy from the mid–19th century onward. I say “fraudulent” because history does not advance in anything like a straight line, and progress is measured in the West strictly according to material advances. In matters of ethos, humaneness, equality, environmental stewardship, the settling of conflicts — of the human spirit altogether — the West remains more primitive than many “primitive” societies.
Two, and the larger point here, from the 19th century onward, there was only one way to modernize. All colonized people who chose the capitalist road understood the imperative this way: modernization = Westernization. All of a sudden, to advance, to make a future in the modern world, meant to repudiate who one was and imitate being someone else.
How hard is it to imagine the deep disturbances and distortions — at bottom psychological but also political, social, economic, and cultural — that arose in consequence of this misapprehension? I count the equation of modernizing with Westernizing, as measured by the extravagant damage it did, among the gravest errors of the late 19th century and all through the 20th to our time.
Russia has spent nearly three centuries in this state of turmoil and — maybe not too strong a term — disorientation. Periods of orthodox conservatism have been followed by cycles of Westward-looking liberalization, this followed by a return to previously abandoned traditions, which have included over many years a return to reaction and a new valorization of one or another kind of nativism and nationalism.
A New Course
U.A.E. welcoming ceremony for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Abu Dhabi, Dec. 6, 2023. (President of Russia)
There is another factor to consider. From the 1830s onward to NATO’s post–Cold War expansions, the horrific U.S.–led program to turn the Russian Federation into a capitalist greedfest after the Soviet Union’s collapse, and now the conflict in Ukraine, Russia’s struggle to understand itself has been accompanied by more or less incessant Western efforts decisively to reshape Russia in the West’s image.
We cannot understand Lavrov’s press conference, or many, many of the things Vladimir Putin has said these past few years, without this historical context. In so many words, all of them well-chosen, the foreign minister and the president have announced that Russia will no longer look Westward as it advances into the 21st century. Modernization will no longer mean Westernization.
It would be altogether impossible to overstate the historical magnitude of what Russia has set as its new course. We live in the most interesting times, to put this point another way — even if most of us, mesmerized by the propaganda of eternal Western superiority, cannot see five feet in front of us as the most significant events of our time unfold.
Many things will now fall into place. Lavrov, in enumerating the members of Russia’s “close circle,” describes, a couple of years on, the “new world order” the Chinese frequently reference.
The 5,000–word charter Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping made public two years ago next month, “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development,” can be understood now as what your columnist called it at the time: the most important political document to be issued so far in the 21st century.
Gordon Hahn, the accomplished scholar of Russia and Eurasia, last week offered a superb history of Russia’s relations with the West during an appearance last week on The Duran, the daily web program produced by Alexander Mercouris and (in this case) Glenn Diesen. In the course of this long, rich interview Hahn notes, “Putin, as he has stated over and over again now recently, the [Russian] elites routinely demonstrate that they do not trust anyone in the West anymore.” He elaborates:
“For Russia, it looks now, the West is no longer its ‘Other.’… Russia has always identified itself, motivated itself, driven itself in relation to Europe. Now Putin is turning away from that. He said that we are no longer to define ourselves, look at ourselves, through the European prism. For now, we will put all our eggs in one basket, and that is Eurasia…. This close bilateral relationship, of Europe as Russia’s Other, is ending, and therefore the cycle [from conservatism to Westernization and back] is probably ending.”
This moment has been a long time coming. A shallow peruse of the past brings us back to 1990–91, when Michail Gorbachev accepted Washington’s assurance — without a signed document, imprudently — that NATO would not expand eastward from the reunified Germany.
As is well-known, 30 years of betrayals and diplomatic dishonesty followed as Moscow sought a new security architecture that would provide the Russian Federation a place in that “common European home” for which Gorbachev longed.
“I am extremely pessimistic,” Hahn says of the outlook for U.S.–Russian relations. “I can’t see that, even with an agreement between Russia and Ukraine, the West will cease trying to expand NATO. They will try to repeat the same scenario unless something changes in the West itself, in Washington.”
The world turns, even as the West declines or is incapable of turning with it. The teaser on The Duran’s segment with Gordon Hahn reads, “Russia ends 300 years of west-centric foreign policy.” This is big. It rarely gets bigger. History’s mysterious ways lie before us.
Responding to the call for ‘de-centering Russian Studies’: the field was ‘de-centered’ from its earliest days
February 8, 2024
A day ago I was invited by the editor of a daily digest on Russian affairs to comment on the President’s Speech to the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) that was delivered on 3 December 2023 at the Association’s annual conference. See
As Political Science professor Juliet Johnson of McGill University remarks in her text, at the conference of the ASEEES during the preceding year there were 175 sessions that explicitly addressed the theme of ‘Decolonization’ of Russian studies in some way, accounting for more than 30% of the sessions overall. Either with intent to blaze new trails or just to employ a less emotive term, Johnson has renamed the subject at hand ‘decentering.’ The intent and the content remain the same.
The speaker further notes that one scholar at the year earlier conference said the following from the podium: “The conference program for ASEEES23 may have more occurrences of the word ‘decolonization’ than any other I have read. Take that, Putin!’’ Regrettably that puerile final point brings to mind the blather of German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock when in the early months of the Russia-Ukraine war she admonished Germans to give up showers in favor of washing the three strategic body parts, saying ‘Take that, Putin!’ Baerbock is widely acknowledged to be a fool’s fool. The academic cited by Johnson is no better, nor are the recommendations set out by Johnson herself to achieve decolonization or decentering.
But my intent in this brief essay is not to take readers’ time with those pointless recommendations which only would direct research funding and teaching positions to peoples of the Former Soviet Union and of Eastern Europe who carry no weight in the world, never did and so hold little interest for normal people wherever they live. As we say, only their mothers could love them.
Instead I take issue with the speaker’s fundamental notion that Russian studies were ever carried on by academics in the USA or elsewhere who had the slightest empathy for Russia and whose disregard for everyone else in that part of the world was due to some inexplicable Russia-centrism. At their best and most relevant, these studies were conducted by people who were paid to inform U.S. military and diplomatic officials of the real challenges posed by the USSR and then by its successor, the Russian Federation. Period. Everthing else, like studying Russian literature, arts, economy, etc. just came along for the ride.
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My first point to develop is that Russian studies for most of the 20th century were the domain of everybody except Russians. Going back to when I was a graduate student in the 1970s and 80s, the field was almost exclusively taught by immigrants from the MINORITY, borderland peoples of the Russian Empire all of whom had an anti-Russian axe to grind.
Curiously, when new ethnic and nationalities studies were added to university programs in the 1970s and later, it was argued by those who had a vested interest in securing appointments that only blacks could properly teach Black History, or only Ukrainians deserved posts in the newly founded Ukrainian Studies Centers. No one ever bothered to extend that logic to who was recruited for Russian Studies, perhaps because the field was not expected to generate positive feelings about the nation under the magnifying glass.
Who were the big names when I was at university? I point to my undergrad thesis adviser Richard Pipes at Harvard, a Polish Jew. He would comment on his weekend trips down to Washington to provide advice to Senator Jackson, best known to the broader public as the sponsor of the Jackson-Vanik amendment which aimed to knee-cap the Soviet economy over its emigration policy for Jews. Pipes later served for a little more than a year in Reagan’s National Security Council, where he fought tooth and nail against détente and against arms limitation agreements. Still later he was a key member of the Neocon dominated Committee on the Present Danger.
A few years later, when I was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Russian Research Center, now the Davis Center, its director was the Polish Pole Adam Ulam who was no less a Russophobe than his colleague Pipes.
During my years at Columbia doing my doctorate, the lead professors were Leopold Haimson and Marc Raeff, on the one side, which perhaps we may call the ‘side of the angels,’ notwithstanding their religious and ethnic affiliation, but they were outdone by the Russia-hating Polish Pole Zbigniew Brzezinski on the other side. I do not have to explain who he was because since the start of the Ukrainian troubles back in 2014 even the broad public knows about his textbook for reducing Russia to a small box in the European region, Grand Chessboard. What they would not necessarily know is that Brzezinski advocated and even helped to implement the ‘pipeline wars’ against Russia’s hydrocarbon exports that logically and ultimately led to the destruction of Nord Stream I at the orders of Joe Biden. And let us remember that Madeleine Albright, the champion of NATO expansion which has brought us to the present day near-war with Russia was a student and protégé of Brzezinski.
I do not present these few professors as constituting the majority of specialists in Soviet – Russian affairs. But they were the most important academics of the age. Perhaps a larger percentage of instructors was drawn from native-born WASP and other non-Slavic extraction candidates, but when the study programs at Harvard and Columbia were formed just after WWII, they drew heavily on ex-US intelligence officers whose views of Russia were certain to be less than empathetic.
I have little doubt that that the demographics of Russian studies changed somewhat in the 1990s when American universities generally closed down foreign language programs, including Russian. Consequently Russian speaking immigrants from the Russian Federation were suddenly very welcome. But they brought with them, whatever their personal ethnic or religious label, a loathing for the country they left behind which was very suitable for teaching the courses they were expected to give.
My second point is that the problem with Russian studies goes back to Russia itself, where the most influential historian of the last quarter of the 19th century, Vasily Kliuchevsky, set out views that suited very well the Anglophile Russian self-haters whom we know as Liberals. It was he who emphasized Russian expansionism and wars under the tsars which gave us the notion that when it stopped expanding Russia would implode. This view of Russia, the autocratic and aggressive, was carried forward and abroad by Kizevetter and then Milyukov, and their continuator at Harvard Mikhail Karpovich. It was then was picked up by our very first native born American historian of Russia Geroid Robinson, founder of the Russian Institute at Columbia to which he recruited alumni of the OSS (wartime US intelligence).
The consequence of the foregoing two points is that Russian studies were ever financed in the United States for reasons of the strategic challenges this particular country and people posed. That fact has not changed. And if a policy of ‘decolonization’ or ‘decentering’ is pursued by the association which is the professional torchbearer, they will only marginalize their field and condemn themselves to irrelevancy and unemployment.
Dissident, participant and founder of many political clubs during Perestroika, Vyacheslav Igrunov, recalled with what “ideological core” the young reformers began building a “new Russia” in the 1990s:
“In 1989, a large group of young reformers went to Chile to learn from Pinochet’s experience; there were Naishul, Chubais, Lvin, Vasiliev, Boldyrev and many others. Everyone returned in complete delight. In the fall of 1989, we had very difficult discussions on this topic. After the trip, they thought this way: to make the population poor in order to depreciate the value of labor, and our not very good goods would become competitive due to their cheapness. Concentrate resources in the hands of a few so that those few can compete in the international market.
I told them: these methods will lead to strikes and the collapse of the country. They replied that they understand this, because the main task is to first destroy the trade unions. I objected that it is possible to negotiate with trade unions, but without them there will be radicals and “wild” protests. Their response to my remark was stunned: “What, we don’t have machine guns?”
People from Gaidar’s team generally talked about the destruction of the state: “The more we destroy, the harder it will be to restore what was before.” When I heard this, I realized that we were not on the same path. Their idea of strong power is not the idea of a state, but of a dictator who breaks the people over his knees and carries out reforms. The phrase “break through the knee” appeared quite early in this environment”
Chubais later confirmed this approach to the destruction of the country. We are still dealing with the consequences. And we will be unraveling for a long time.
(Illustrative of why the 'Breakthrough' crowd finds the current regime, while oligarchic still preferable to the liberals/neoliberals/libertarians/whatever...)(I can't tell them apart)
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NATO and the CIA Are Waging a Secret War in Russia
Sonja van den Ende
February 11, 2024
The Special Military Operation is still going on, but in addition there is another real war being waged by the West, a “war in the dark.”
In a recent article reprinted by Strategic Culture Foundation, Jack Murphy writes that there is a campaign by the CIA and NATO states to sabotage Russia from within.
Jack Murphy is a former U.S. Green Beret and army ranger turned journalist. Furthermore, the CIA itself claims to have a dozen “mission centers,” issue-specific groups that bring together officials from the agency’s various directorates.
Murphy claims that two days before February 24, 2022, the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in the Donbass, the allied spy service through which the CIA is running the sabotage campaign used a covert communications system to activate its sleeper cells across Russia, according to a former military official and a person who has been briefed on the campaign.
Allegedly, a sort of “spy” program has been functioning since 2014, starting from the Maidan coup d’état in Kiev, which is very plausible.
In this author’s assessment, the Dutch Bellingcat so-called investigative media bureau and the UK-founded Statecraft Institute were also involved.
The Statecraft Institute has been involved in making and breaking “wars and sabotage” plans for Syria, Ukraine, and Russia since 2009. Now its website is closed due to the so-called theft of documents (hack). This happened after research and publication by various journalists, including myself. But for sure it is still operating under another name or secret cover in the UK or the Netherlands.
A visit by five Ukrainian officials to the UK, dated July 11, 2016, is an example of the “work” of the Statecraft Institute. In interviews conducted in the summer of 2016, the Ukrainian personnel of special units described their operations behind hostile lines in the separatist-controlled Donbass region, including targeted killings and destruction of infrastructure.
Jack Murphy is no doubt right that European countries are coordinating the attacks via orders from the CIA, consistent with their subordinate role in serving U.S. imperialist power. One of the smaller countries of the EU and NATO is the Netherlands, small in area but large, the largest after the UK, in terms of spying for the U.S. The Netherlands hosts the most so-called international organizations on its territory after Austria.
In addition, the Netherlands hosts a European spy center (calling itself a journalistic agency), Bellingcat, established directly after the downing of the MH17, and of course the International Criminal Court (ICC) which recently issued an arrest warrant against President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
Considering “agents” of NATO states, one must first investigate the media of these NATO states. Bellingcat has many so-called journalists operating around Russia, for example in Kyrgyzstan. The whole team can be labeled as agents of NATO.
The journalists residing in Russia and working for the so-called mainstream Western media and, in particular, for the Dutch state broadcaster NOS, the English BBC, and the German ZDF, can be considered to be NATO agents. Recently, they organized a so-called uprising of the wives and mothers of Russian soldiers at the front, following the example of The “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” in Argentina. These journalists tried to spark a revolution on behalf of the NATO states, which fortunately failed. In my opinion, these journalists should leave Russia immediately: they can activate “sleeper cells” in Russia.
The CIA is now trying to recruit agents through an (online) video to spy for the U.S. and NATO states. Perhaps there are people in Russia itself, who have signed up (seduced by money) and have carried out various sabotages. Russia’s state security service, the FSB, has arrested people caught spying for the U.S./NATO or preparing sabotage such as recently in Crimea, the plot to eliminate a high-ranking government employee.
The Special Military Operation in Ukraine is proceeding apace, but the U.S. and its NATO allies are pursuing a “covert war” inside Russia, especially in the field of espionage and sabotage. This is because the NATO army cannot yet defeat Russia on the military battlefield.
That is why gloomy “war rhetoric” is now being spouted in all kinds of Western mainstream media, and Western politicians are warning of war with Russia, in a desperate attempt to get more recruits for the newly formed European army. There are calls to recruit asylum seekers to fight against Russia and receive a passport if they survive. The American army cannot of course openly send battalions to Ukraine itself, then the U.S. is directly at war with Russia, which is why they use the Ukrainian army as proxies, and the population is recruited as saboteurs.
This “dark” war is no longer a secret. After all, in the Western media, we can read every day how “bad” the Russian government is. Everything is taken out of context and almost everything we read or see is a lie. The mainstream media themselves boast about drones that will be used against Russia, with the Netherlands explaining that Dutch Reaper drones are being used for the first time in a mission abroad “on NATO’s eastern border.”
But that’s not all. The Netherlands will have a new drone control center, following in the example of Ramstein in Germany, the largest U.S. base in Europe. From Ramstein, the U.S. and NATO carried out attacks on Afghanistan. Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan, with these MQ-9 Reaper drones, so there is a possibility that these recent drone attacks on oil depots, etc. in Russia are coordinated from Ramstein. The new drone base in the Netherlands is located at Leeuwarden.
The murder of Darya Dugina and other Russian journalists was carried out internally by Ukrainians or, as with Vladven Tartasky, by an indoctrinated Russian youth. Still, the order always came from the SBU in Ukraine, which is again coordinated by the CIA and Western security agencies such as MI6, or perhaps its European equivalent Bellingcat.
The drone attacks on the Kremlin were also carried out internally in Russia. In the future, even near future, we can expect drones from Leeuwarden or Ramstein into Russia. Perhaps this is what the NATO countries are betting on, a drone war, for which you need relatively few army personnel.
Other indirect sabotage comes from the so-called NGOs, most of which have already left Russia as this video shows.
Washington’s agenda is now being actively pushed by American foundations inside Russia. The aim is that Russia should be divided into several weakened, nominally independent states. Like what happened with former Yugoslavia, a process of dismemberment called Balkanization. Russia is already alert to the plot, hence Moscow’s order to many U.S. and NATO NGOs to leave the country.
Another threat is posed by the embassies of various Western countries, especially NATO countries, which try to recruit young people by organizing all kinds of programs under benign-sounding projects such as “pro-democracy” and “civic responsibility”. Universities are a common target for these NATO programs, where participating groups receive training, and generous funding for travel, computers and other communication devices.
The latest example was NATO’s attempt at a coup d’etat in Belarus, where the Netherlands played a major role by offering certain programs to young people and students through their embassy and also financing them.
NATO’s secret war in Russia is becoming more overt, it seems, through its various networks. However, the Russian people are well aware of the manipulation effort from abroad despite the Western media’s “reporting” (propaganda) about unrest within Russian society.
The Latest Israeli Bombing Of Syria Proves That Russia Won’t Risk A Wider War To Stop Tel Aviv
ANDREW KORYBKO
FEB 11, 2024
The present piece critiques the Alt-Media Community’s counterfactual reading of Russian-Israeli relations that misled them into having false expectations about this.
Many among the Alt-Media Community (AMC) continue holding out hope that Russia will directly intervene to stop Israel’s bombing of Iranian targets in Syria, especially after it commenced aerial patrols along the so-called Bravo Line separating those two countries in the Golan Heights late last month. Those false hopes, which were based upon a counterfactual reading of Russian-Israeli relations that were clarified here late last year, were just shattered by Israel’s latest bombing of Syria via the Golan Heights.
The same Russian military official who announced the aforementioned patrols confirmed over the weekend that “The strike came from the southern portion of the Golan Heights, and the aircraft did not enter Syrian airspace.” The importance of this detail rests in the fact that Israel was neither deterred by those patrols nor did Russia attempt to intercept the incoming missiles. This sequence of events was predictable and explicitly forecast late last month here.
The present piece won’t redundantly rehash the points contained in the two cited analyses but will instead critique the AMC’s counterfactual reading of Russian-Israeli relations that misled them into thinking that Moscow would stop Tel Aviv. A lot of folks can’t accept that President Putin has excellent ties with Isarel as documented here from 2000-2018 per the official Kremlin website and that his country aims to balance regional affairs as opposed to support one side over the other in any given dispute.
In their minds, President Putin is a “mastermind” who’s obsessed with undermining the West and its allies, the notion of which was debunked here last spring and reaffirmed here after his interview with Tucker. While remaining committed to accelerating the global systemic transition to complex multipolarity (“multiplexity”), he’s nevertheless unwilling to take major risks that could lead to a wider war. This disappoints many in the AMC who imagined that he hates Israel as much as they do.
Far from being an ideologically driven anti-Western revolutionary, he’s always just been an apolitical pragmatist who if anything has consistently sought to cultivate mutually beneficial and respectful ties with the West as proven by what he revealed to Tucker, not undermine it like they want. Back in summer 2022, “Putin Cautioned Russian Strategic Forecasters Against Indulging In Wishful Thinking” while addressing his foreign intelligence service, the advice of which the AMC would do well to apply.
Whenever he doe or doesn’t do something that contradicts their “wishful thinking” expectations of him being obsessed with undermining the West, they chalk it up to “5D chess master plan” conspiracy theories instead of maturely acknowledging that they got it wrong and need to change their paradigm. The reason for this reaction is because they’ve begun to behave in a cultish way by treating him as a god of sorts who’s infallible and supposedly so smart that mere mortals can’t understand his moves.
That’s why every perceived setback or contradiction of their false paradigm is instead spun as part of a “5D chess master plan”, which when taken together with the rest that they’ve concocted for “political convenience” whenever this happens, makes them ever further divorced from objective reality. When top AMC influencers peddle this narrative, it misleads countless others and leads to the cultivation of false expectations that inevitably end in disappointment.
The end result is that the AMC’s “Non-Russian Pro-Russians” (NRPRs) might in turn be swayed by hostile narratives falsely alleging that he and his country “sold out” to the West, “Zionists”, the World Economic Forum, etc., thus leading to “defections” from Russia’s ranks to its adversaries. It’s arguably due to this strategic risk that the authorities decided to crack down on “doom-and-gloom” conspiracy theorist Igor Girkin, whose narratives represented the natural evolution of “5D chess master plan” conspiracies.
Circling back to Israel, one can be as anti-Zionist and opposed to Israel as they want while still supporting Russia’s grand strategic goal of accelerating multipolar processes but soberly acknowledging that it doesn’t share their views about Tel Aviv, though that requires maturity, willpower, and control over ego. Few can muster all three, and many AMC influencers manipulate this to peddle “5D chess master plans” in order to generate clout, push an ideology, and/or solicit donations from their naïve followers.
At this point and especially after Israel’s latest bombing of Syria that was done via the Golan Heights in spite of Russia’s new aerial patrols, there shouldn’t be any more doubt among anyone that Russia will not risk a wider war just to stop those attacks. Those members of the AMC who are still redeemable will finally recognize this reality and recalibrate their paradigms accordingly, while the presumably irredeemable majority of them will continue spewing “5D chess master plan” theories ad infinitum.
While I agree that there has been a lot of undo speculation on this topic I would still add 'yet' to that headline. Just as the intervention in Syria was to some degree prompted by the necessity of maintaining 'face', no small thing in international relations. Russia is restrained for now, for the good reasons above. But should the Demented Dem go medieval necessity may demand elsewise.
Young Andrew has a hard time disguising his pro-Zionist tendencies, for which the Great Patriotic War and significant Russian emigration to Occupied Palestine were big factors. Circumstances have become starkly clear and those reasons are not good enough to justify what is most certainly ethnic cleansing and mass murder and will likely be judged genocide, at least attempted, after the fact.
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Follow up to Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin
I watched with interest evaluations of the Putin interview last night aired on Russian state television’s Vesti program, read assorted articles on this subject published in yesterday’s Johnson’s Russia List and the comments which readers posted on my website or sent to me directly via email.
I think the issues are worthy of further discussion and that is the objective of today’s essay.
It should come as no surprise that yesterday’s Vesti only sang the praises of the interview and of Putin’s performance in particular. In that context they put on air the very complimentary remarks of two Americans from the intelligence community who in recent months have become the darlings of Russian television: Scott Ritter and Larry Johnson. I will only say that both showed poor judgment in giving unqualified thumbs-up. Why? I hope that will become clear from what I have to say today to amplify and dig down deeper into the critique that I sketched yesterday.
By its nature, a website like mine attracts a goodly number of Russia-cheerleaders who don’t want to hear any sour notes. Many of these folks know little or nothing about Russia and rely on guesswork that ignores highly relevant facts available to Russia speakers.
The question of who was the target audience for the Tucker Carlson-Putin interview is critical. Was it the United States? the Collective West? the Russian domestic public? China, India and the Global South?
As I said yesterday, the Kremlin elites hoped that the interview would get around U.S. censorship and bring the Russian perspective directly to the ears and eyes of the broad American public, which also, of course, includes American elites. It is highly likely that Tucker Carlson was on the same wave length, since Americans are the folks he hopes to entice to become paying subscribers to his Network and also because he likely believes he can influence the course of history by waking up his compatriots. Each time Carlson brings in 40 million viewers he puts to shame the likes of CNN whose viewer numbers are ten times less, if I may be generous to them.
With this objective in mind, I continue to believe that Putin’s decision to deliver a 30 minute opening history lecture by way of answer to Carlson’s question of why Russia invaded was a bad decision. It was bad for several reasons. One is that it was boring for the general public. Yes, the interview attracted 140 million ‘hits’ on Carlson’s website, but we are not told how long those viewers stayed tuned. Secondly, Putin is not a professional historian and anything he said would be pulled to pieces by academics in the States, not just by the usual journalistic commentators. Thirdly, the history going back to the 9th century had nothing to do with the decision to invade Ukraine, which was prompted and justified internally in the Kremlin by reasons of Realpolitik, not by what is called Romantic Nationalism.
As I have said in the past, Realpolitik does not go down well with the general public in Russia as in many other countries whereas Romantic Nationalism does. Mothers don’t willingly send their sons to die for Realpolitik. Hence, the story of how Russians and Ukrainians are just brothers and similar platitudes in many of Putin’s speeches to his domestic audience. But if you have any marketing sense, and I tell you frankly that the people advising Putin seem at times to have zero marketing sense, then you prepare your speech around who is the intended audience, in this case the USA.
Putin’s explanation of why he chose to invade should have started with the year 2008, when the U.S. insisted that NATO offer membership to Ukraine. After all, the trigger for the war in February 2022 was the refusal of the United States to negotiate on Russia’s demand that Ukraine remain neutral and that NATO pull back to its 1996 borders. Note that after one hour of the interview Purin himself says this, but I believe it is too late and many who came to Tucker’s platform will not have stayed with it long enough to hear this.
In the same vein, Putin never answered Tucker Carlson’s reasonable question as to why, knowing as he did that modern Ukraine is an ‘artificial state’ concocted by Lenin and his associates in 1922 to satisfy their own needs to consolidate power throughout what had been the Russian Empire, knowing as he did that the Russian speakers in the Donbas were being persecuted before 2014 and were being bombed and shelled after 2014, why did he wait so long to move against the regime in Kiev. Fair question, I might add, as I poke back at some readers who insisted that Carlson is just an ignorant clown.
The answer is available and well known among Russia’s foreign policy professionals: Putin could not dare act until Russia’s armed forces were sufficiently modernized and strengthened, until the Russian economy was made similarly robust to survive any threats coming from the West should Russia forcefully push for regime change in Kiev. That moment arrived in 2018 when Putin announced to the world the serial production of strategic arms including hypersonic missiles that put Russia years ahead of the USA and presented a window of opportunity to act. Meanwhile conventional weapons of superior quality were being delivered to the armed forces and the economy was being readied for the most severe sanctions, beginning with the ‘import substitution’ programs launched in 2014. I do not see why setting out these real motivations on air to the American public was not done.
A couple of readers noted that Tucker introduced his Sinophobe thinking into the interview with Putin, asking pointedly whether Russians are happy to be rushing into the arms of China, whether they understand that Xi is using BRICS to dominate its partners just as Washington has been doing with its allies. Putin responded in line with what he has been saying at many forums, namely that Russia and China have an exceptionally strong cooperation in many spheres that is mutually beneficial. However, he added something that I have rarely heard him say: “Russia and China have thousands of kilometers of common borders. You don’t choose your neighbors, just as you don’t choose your relatives.” Here is precisely the Realpolitik mentality that I have alluded to above. The game is not about kissy-kissy. It is about the necessities of life and playing with the hand you are dealt.
If I may expand on the China issue, I believe Russia had no particular interest in how many Chinese or Indians tuned in to watch the interview. The Chinese as a people may or may not have particularly warm feelings for Russians. I can assure you that the man in the street Russian has mixed feelings about China, of which the most evident are fear and envy. The Chinese loggers who rape the forests of Eastern Siberia are denounced in Russian media, as are the many Chinese farmer settlers in the Far East who find Russian wives and move in permanently, changing the fragile demography. But none of this can or should influence policy in Moscow, which is focused on the big picture of Russian interests.
China is without question one of the most supportive countries in the world in Russia’s hour of need. And Xi’s actions are similarly based on realism. As the hero of The Queen of Spades Hermann sings in his last aria, Сегодня ты, завтра я! – Today it is you, tomorrow it will be me!
I take exception to Doctorow's characterization of the creation of the Ukrainian SSR as aggrandizement on the part of the new Soviet authorities. Rather it was a recognition of and solution to the 'National; Question' which had necessarily engaged the Bolsheviks. That and a rationalization of administrative issues on a geographic basis.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Putin Debunks Tucker Carlson’s Warmongering Anti-China Propaganda, Mocks His CIA Ties
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on FEBRUARY 10, 2024
Ben Norton
The U.S. TV host Tucker Carlson set off a political scandal by traveling to Moscow this February to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This provoked a debate in the media, which – as is so often the case in partisan U.S. politics – completely missed the forest for the trees.
Liberal war hawks like Hillary Clinton portrayed Tucker Carlson as a traitor and “useful idiot” of Putin.
Democrats have been blinded by their obsessive hatred of Russia and are utterly incapable of seeing what is happening geopolitically.
In reality, Carlson and other Donald Trump allies in the Republican Party have tried for years to drive a wedge between Russia and China while maniacally pushing for war on Beijing.
Trump’s former top advisor Steve Bannon, who ran the far-right leader’s 2016 presidential campaign, stated openly in 2018: “We’re at war with China.”
Bannon called to “unite the West against the rise of a totalitarian China.” And he considers Russia to be part of the “West.”
This strategy was also adopted by France’s far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, who stated in 2022 that she wanted to improve relations with Russia in order to prevent it from allying with China.
The Trumpist Republicans and their far-right counterparts in Europe see Russia as white, European, Christian, and capitalist, and a potential ally against China, which they demonize as a non-white, Asiatic, atheistic, and communist threat to so-called “Judeo-Christian Western civilization.”
Carlson has played a key role in this warmongering campaign against China.
When he had his prime-time show on Fox News, Carlson declared, “Russia is not America’s main enemy. Obviously, no sane person thinks it is. Our main enemy, of course, is China. And the United States ought to be in a relationship with Russia, aligned against China”.
Anyone claiming Tucker Carlson is “anti-war” is a useful idiot. He’s just a neocon 2.0
The only reason he criticizes NATO’s war on Russia is because he wants war on China instead
Tucker lamented, “If Russia ever joined forces with China, American global hegemony would end” pic.twitter.com/P42zHVIS3A
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 24, 2023
The narrative that Carlson is “anti-war” is totally false. The reason that he opposes the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is simply because he wants all resources focused on war with China.
Carlson insisted on his Fox program, “The biggest threat to this country is not Vladimir Putin; that’s ludicrous. The biggest threat, obviously, is China”.
The far-right TV host is afraid that a China-Russia alliance would end U.S. hegemony over the planet, which the close Trump ally wants to preserve.
“If Russia ever joins forces with China, American global hegemony, its power, would end instantly”, Carlson lamented. “If Russia and China ever got together, it would be a brand new world, and the United States would be greatly diminished. Most Americans agree that would be bad”.
Another clip of warmonger Tucker Carlson: “The biggest threat to this country is not Vladimir Putin; that’s ludicrous. The biggest threat obviously is China”
He fearmongers about Chinese spying and its “growing military”, blames it for fentanyl deaths, brings on a neocon guest pic.twitter.com/B7XpqpdymY
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 26, 2023
Since he was fired from Fox News in 2023, Carlson has continued pushing this same warmongering narrative: that the U.S. should ally with Russia against China.
In his February interview with Putin, however, the Russian leader could clearly see that Carlson is a political operative acting on behalf of the Republican Party and Trump, and that they hope to encourage division between Moscow and its most important ally.
Putin pushed back against Carlson’s hysterical anti-China narratives, which he referred to as mere “boogeyman stories”.
The Russian president emphasized that China wants peaceful cooperation, and that “China’s foreign policy philosophy is not aggressive”.
The following is a transcript of the February 6 exchange:
TUCKER CARLSON: The question is what comes next? And maybe you trade one colonial power for another, much less sentimental and forgiving colonial power. I mean, is the BRICS, for example, in danger of being completely dominated by the Chinese, the Chinese economy, in a way that’s not good for their sovereignty? Do you worry about that?
VLADIMIR PUTIN: We have heard those boogeyman stories before. It is a boogeyman story.
We’re neighbors with China. You cannot choose neighbors, just as you cannot choose close relatives. We share a border of a thousand kilometers with them. This is number one.
Second, we have a centuries long history of coexistence. We’re used to it.
Third, China’s foreign policy philosophy is not aggressive. Its idea is to always look for a compromise. And we can see that.
The next point is as follows. We’re always told the same boogeyman story, and here it goes again, through a euphemistic form, but it is still the same boogeyman story.
The cooperation with China keeps increasing. The pace at which China’s cooperation with Europe is growing. It’s higher and greater than that of the growth of Chinese-Russian cooperation.
Ask Europeans. Are they afraid? They might be. I don’t know. But they are still trying to access China’s market at all costs. Especially now that they are facing economic problems.
Chinese businesses are also exploring the European market.
Do Chinese businesses have small presence in the United States? Yes.
The political decisions are such that they are trying to limit the cooperation with China.
It is to your own detriment, Mr. Tucker, that you are limiting cooperation with China. You are hurting yourself.
As Putin made clear, the Republicans have failed to isolate China from Russia and divide BRICS.
The irony is that the Democratic Party’s hysteria over the Russiagate conspiracy, combined with the war in Ukraine, prevented the Trumpist elements from realizing this strategy.
(Washington’s failure to divide Russia from China has only further incentivized the United States to focus heavily on allying with India’s far-right government, seeking to provoke conflict between New Delhi and Beijing. Both Trump and Joe Biden have sought to woo India.)
Carlson’s bellicose anti-China rhetoric was not mere red meat for his typical Fox News conservative audience. Since he was fired, Carlson has continued churning out this cartoonish propaganda as an independent broadcaster.
On February 2, just four days before he interviewed Putin, Carlson published a video claiming that China is “fueling the invasion of America”. The implication was that war would on Beijing would be justified in response to a supposed Chinese communist-backed “invasion”.
In November 2023, Carlson released an interview with Trump, in which both fearmongered about Beijing.
“Why is China allowed to conduct imperialism in our hemisphere?” Carlson asked.
Trump replied, “Yeah, and it’s far beyond Cuba; it’s all over South America”. The former U.S. president then claimed, without a shred of evidence, that “China is building military installations in Cuba”.
Carlson is a personal friend of Trump, and acts as a propagandist for the former president and his faction of the Republican Party.
But their relationship goes deeper than friendship. In fact, Trump has publicly said that he has considered Carlson to run with him to be vice president of the United States.
This is especially relevant considering that Trump may very well win this year’s presidential election. Most polls show that he is leading over Biden, including in critical swing states.
As he campaigns for president, Trump has pledged to implement extremely aggressive anti-China policies. The Washington Post reported, citing his advisors, that “Trump is preparing for a massive new trade war with China”, and wants to impose 60% tariffs on all imports of Chinese goods into the U.S..
When asked about this on Fox News, Trump floated tariffs even higher than 60%, stating, “I would say maybe it’s going to be more than that.”
Historically, economic wars of this magnitude often lead to military conflict. So, Trump’s hawkish anti-China policies could escalate into a conventional war.
In addition to being a close ally of Trump, Carlson has used his large post-Fox personal media platform to promote the Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Together, they have China and fearmongered about war over Taiwan.
Ramaswamy has campaigned on a Trumpist and Carlsonian foreign policy platform, arguing that the U.S. should ally with Russia in order to try to isolate China.
Ironically, this strategy advocated by Trump, Bannon, Ramaswamy, and Carlson was also previously promoted by Henry Kissinger.
Back in the Richard Nixon administration in the 1970s, Kissinger used “triangular diplomacy” to play China against the Soviet Union. Washington’s alliance then with Beijing was a significant factor that led to the destabilization and, eventually, overthrow of the USSR.
In 2018, Kissinger called for returning to this triangular diplomacy, but in the opposite direction. The Daily Beast reported, “Henry Kissinger suggested to President Donald Trump that the United States should work with Russia to contain a rising China”.
Putin mocks Tucker Carlson for applying to join the CIA
With the rise of Donald Trump and his far-right movement, Tucker Carlson tried to rebrand himself as a so-called populist.
But Carlson was always blue-blooded media royalty. His middle name is Swanson, and his stepmother was the heiress of the eponymous food corporation.
The scion of a powerful, wealthy, politically connected family, Carlson started his media career as a neoconservative hawk, churning out diehard pro-war articles for the notorious neocon bible the Weekly Standard.
Carlson was soon kicked upstairs, in the 2000s, to host shows at CNN and MSNBC, before later moving to Fox News.
In the Trump era, Carlson has marketed himself as a paleoconservative, condemning neoconservatives to try to score points with “populists”. But back during the George W. Bush administration, Carlson was a card-carrying neocon.
Carlson eagerly supported the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq, using crude, neocolonial, racist talking points.
As The Daily Beast wrote (emphasis added):
Tucker Carlson described Iraqis as “semiliterate primitive monkeys” in past comments made on the Bubba The Love Sponge radio show, according to new audio recordings uncovered by Media Matters. The Fox News host also claimed Iraqis don’t “behave like human beings” and said he had “zero sympathy” for Iraqis or their culture during a May 2006 discussion of the Iraq War on the popular radio show. “A culture where people just don’t use toilet paper or forks,” Carlson said—adding that Iraqis should “ just shut the fuck up and obey” the U.S. because “they can’t govern themselves.” In a Sept. 2009 episode, Carlson also proclaimed that Afghanistan would never be a “civilized country because the people aren’t civilized.”
In fact, Carlson was such a dedicated Reaganite and cold warrior that, back when he was in college, he applied to join the CIA.
Journalist Alan Macleod showed how, in the 1980s, Carlson traveled to Nicaragua to support the CIA’s far-right death squads, the Contras, in their terror war against the revolutionary Sandinista government.
Tucker’s father, Richard “Dick” Carlson, was the director of Voice of America, a U.S. government propaganda outlet that is closely linked to the CIA and other spy agencies.
Russian intelligence clearly knew about Carlson’s CIA ties. So when he interviewed Putin in February, the Russian leader mocked Carlson for having applied to join the notorious U.S. spy agency, which Putin emphasized had organized many coups d’etat and meddled in the internal affairs of countless foreign countries.
The following is a transcript of the exchange:
TUCKER CARLSON: With the backing of whom?
VLADIMIR PUTIN: With the backing of CIA, of course. The organization you wanted to join back in the day, as I understand.
We should thank God they didn’t let you in. Although it is a serious organization, I understand.
My former vis-à-vis, in the sense that I served in the first main directorate, the Soviet Union’s intelligence service.
They have always been our opponents. A job is a job.
Tucker Carlson’s neocolonial views on Latin America
Although he criticizes neocons today, Carlson’s foreign policy regarding Latin America is decidedly neoconservative, and neocolonial.
Carlson routinely treats Latin America like the U.S. “backyard”, and frequently complains that China is supposedly trying to “take over” and even colonize “our hemisphere”.
In 2022, when he was still at Fox News, Carlson traveled to Brazil to produce a propaganda documentary for far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, who was staunchly pro-U.S. and anti-China.
In effect, Carlson was meddling in Brazil’s election, seeking to prevent the return to power of leftist Lula da Silva (who went on to win the 2022 election).
In the promotional video that Carlson made for Bolsonaro, he invoked the 200-year-old, explicitly colonial Monroe Doctrine, in order to fearmonger about China’s bilateral, consensual relations with Latin American nations – and to justify increasingly aggressive U.S. interventionism in the region.
The Fox News host declared (emphasis added):
In 1823, President James Monroe announced a policy that has been the center of American foreign policy for the last 200 years. Called the Monroe Doctrine, it has a very simple thesis: Great powers would not be allowed to control nations in the Western hemisphere. That would be a direct threat to the interests of the United States. And for 200 years, we haven’t allowed it.
Under the Biden administration, the Monroe Doctrine is no longer enforced.
Constrained by its ideological concerns, consumed with petty political grievances and above all, distracted by a faraway war in Eastern Europe [ie, against Russia in Ukraine], the Biden administration has abdicated its responsibility.
And into the void left by the United States moves a new superpower.
We’ve come to Brazil to see for ourselves the rise of China, and how the government of China is replacing the United States as the dominant power in our hemisphere.
Washington’s bipartisan imperialism
This anti-China, pro-colonial diatribe was a stark reminder that Carlson is, in fact, an ardent advocate for U.S. imperialism.
Carlson is not opposed to war on principle. He only criticizes the U.S. proxy war against Russia because he wants to focus the entire attention of the U.S. empire for war on China.
Carlson is co-opting many well-intentioned people who don’t want war on Russia, and brainwashing them to want war on China.
However, U.S. liberals’ hysteria over the Russiagate conspiracy has blinded them to this reality.
Of course, in Washington there is bipartisan opposition to China. But the Democrats are more fixated on Russia now, in the short time, while referring to China as a “long-term threat.”.
Republicans, led by Trump and Carlson, want to put aside differences with Russia and dedicate all of the U.S. empire’s resources into containing, weakening, and ultimately overthrowing the Communist Party of China.
Both dominant U.S. political parties are thoroughly imperialist. Their fight is not about whether the U.S. should be an empire; rather, their debate is about what is the best strategy to preserve the U.S. empire.
Carlson and Trump share much in common politically with neocons and liberal-interventionist hawks, whom they sometimes criticize for “populist” credit.
What unites them all is their desire to strengthen the U.S. empire and maintain Washington’s unipolar hegemony over the planet.
This is precisely why Tucker Carlson warned with terror, back on his Fox News show, “If Russia ever joins forces with China, American global hegemony, its power, would end instantly.”
The history of Russian sex after the fall of Communist Party rule in 1991 hasn’t been told yet. And it won’t be.
This is because sex between Russians during the Soviet period was a public taboo – its history has been written down as a party and police problem, and buried as a relic of the past. Then in the period of shock therapy which followed during the US-backed Yeltsin administration, Russian sex became a commercial commodity, like everything else. Russian women became prostitutes selling sex, and Russian men who lacked the cash to pay for their time missed out. This is known as one of the liberal reforms.
When the heart is excluded from sex, there’s nothing of value to record for posterity, at least nothing of Russian particularity.
It was also during this period that on account of the money value of access to their sexual parts, Russian women began to say, quite clearly, that for their lovers (or clients) they preferred American Jews because, they said, Russian men were reluctant to pay and violent when asked, whereas American Jews were neither — or so the women said. But the women were just catching up. Russian men, starting from Mikhail Gorbachev and descending downwards, had long displayed their desire to be loved by Americans, and to be paid in return, handsomely. Wanting to be loved by Americans (and Israelis) is a continuing reflex of Russian men; the posture of bending over to receive the love can’t be reported in the history books by the term handsome, unless it’s accompanied by gender reversal. About that, Russians of both sexes are emphatically hostile.
The Russian women’s idea of Jews as non-violent, or at least less violent than Russian men, has been turned on its head — wrong organ — by Russian politicians who have celebrated their Israeli counterparts for their lack of inhibition in using violence, not only against the Arabs, but against their women.
The history of sex in Russia started famously with jealousy and violence, male as well as female.
Alexander Pushkin (lead image, left), who lost his life in a duel prompted by public gossip of his wife, Natalia Goncharova’s infidelity, warned her in a letter of 1833: “You like it when the dogs trail after you like a bitch in heat,” Pushkin wrote. “All you have to do is make sure everyone knows, ‘I love it’. That’s the whole secret of flirting. As long as there’s a trough, the swine will find it.”
Pushkin was talking about the come-on. There’s no record of what Goncharova told Pushkin in reply; it’s still uncertain what she did. Four years later, the story ended violently when Pushkin was fatally wounded in a duel with the man he believed to have been boasting publicly of being Goncharova’s lover, if not the genuine McCoy.
After 1991, in the history of liberal reform sex the Gonacharovas vastly outnumbered the Pushkins. Defending a man’s honour by duelling was chancy, and so satisfaction by pistol was usually obtained by ambush with a shot in the back, as happened between Paul Klebnikov and his Chechen rivals.
An equally notorious case was the fate of the woman known as Nastya Rybka who sold stories of her sex life with the Russian aluminium oligarch, Oleg Deripaska. The sex wasn’t her selling point but the political and commercial intelligence she thought she overheard before, during, and after the amours. Prurience and vulgarity of that sort had already been turned into an MI6 plot when Pussy Riot, a sex performance band, were coached by the BBC into staging a sacrilege on the altar of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow.
Before that, at the climax of Boris Yeltsin’s potency, two American reporters, Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, had turned prurience and vulgarity into a fortnightly comedy they published called The Exile. Their publication was distributed free of charge; its costs were financed by advertisements for prostitution and pick-up joints.
Left to right: Paul Klebnikov; Anastasia Vashukevich (Nastya Rybka); Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of the Pussy Riot band; Mark Ames.
The website archive on Russian sex as a line of business or politics has been small because, by comparison with oligarch contests and war with the US and NATO, sex is low value. About smallness as a sexual psychopathology, there has been only one analysis of the Russian evidence in thirty years. Click to read.
Lead image of report of April 26, 2013 – left, Vladimir Mamyshev-Monroe, right, Alexander Venediktov. Also analyzed were the pathological cases of Peter Pomerantsev and Masha Gessen. Their predecessors in Russian history appear in Yury Olesha’s novel, Envy, first published in 1927.
As for sexual violence in politics, there was the well-known episode in October 2006, when President Vladimir Putin was hosting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Moscow and failed to notice a hot mike.
In the Kremlin record of October 18, 2006, Putin appeared to take Israel’s side in the war Olmert had launched against Lebanon between July 12 and August 14, purportedly to rescue Israeli soldiers captured and held hostage by Hamas and Hezbollah. “The only way to break out of the vicious circle of violence”, Putin said, “is to end mutual accusations, free the hostages and resume peaceful negotiations. It is extremely important to protect the civilian population of Israel and its neighbours from terror.” Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/
The recorded press statements were anodyne. However, the open microphone reproduced Putin telling Olmert to relay a personal greeting to Israel’s President, Moshe Katsav; at the time he was facing a criminal investigation for multiple rape offences on evidence from ten women stretching back over several years. After several more years of court manoeuvring, Katsav was tried, convicted, and sent to prison for seven years, five of which he served; his early release was backed by the prime minister at the time and Olmert’s successor, Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to the press reports, Putin told Olmert: “Say hello to your president. He really surprised us.” The microphones were then cut off, but a member of the Israeli delegation told Associated Press that Putin went on to say of Katsav: “I met him. He didn’t look like a guy who could be with ten women.” The Israeli ambassador reportedly quipped, “it seems like he’s envious of him,” and Olmert told his host: “I wouldn’t envy him.” The Moscow business newspaper Kommersant reported Putin’s remarks through its Kremlin pool journalist Andrei Kolesnikov: “He turned out to be quite a powerful man. He raped ten women. I never expected it from him. He surprised all of us. We all envy him.”
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, responded to the reports by announcing that Putin’s remark “should not be considered approval of raping women.”
Anti-Putin publication Meduza repeated the story in a report twelve years later in 2018, adding a joke about homosexual rape told in front of Putin by the steel oligarch, Vladimir Lisin. This is the story of the tractor driver and the milkmaid.
Male violence against women in Russia, and the debate on how to deal with it between the Church, the State Duma, police, and prosecutors, can be followed here. The Russian argument over how to curb the promotion of transgender sexuality has been analyzed here.
Such arguments and debates are ancient – this is natural. Long before there was a Russian state or an Israeli one – 600 years before the Rus, 1,800 years before Israel – a book was written in Sanskrit on the arts, ethics, and morals of sex. The audience for the book were the Indian ruling courts and wealthy commercial elites of what is today called the Bitar region of north India, then the rising Gupta empire.
The book’s author was Mallanaga Vatsyayana about whom almost nothing is known now except his name and his book. Its title is Kama Sutra, sometimes written together as Kamasutra. Kama means desire, love, pleasure or sex, usually all of them combined. Sutra means a treatise or manual.
Thus, the Kama Sutra is probably the oldest sex manual we have today. For its first translator and publisher into English, Richard Burton in 1883, it was a money-spinner, priced for the equivalent of $400 today. Burton and his successors in the British imperial administration of India regarded it as a guide to using women by outsmarting or overpowering them, whichever was required – a kind of Machiavellian Prince for exploiting women’s sex and whatever power or money they also controlled.
That was the interpretation in the East India Company, the British Indian Army, and in the gentlemen’s clubs of London for several hundred years.
That’s a monumental mistake, Wendy Doniger, a Sanskrit scholar at the University of Chicago, has written recently. “There is nothing remotely like [the Kama Sutra] even now. For its time it was astonishingly sophisticated; it was already well-known in India at a time when the Europeans were still swinging in the trees, culturally (and sexually) speaking.” Doniger has retranslated the book and corrected Burton’s mistakes and misrepresentations.
In Doniger’s interpretation, the quality and originality of Vatsyayana’s book have been progressively diminished, then destroyed over the intervening 1,800 years by what has followed in Indian history – Buddhist renunciation; Muslim demolition; British repression. Mistaking the book for its manual on positions and techniques to enhance sexual excitement, modern Indians have opted instead for western-style pornography. The rise of political Hinduism in these days has also adopted some of the violence towards women which Vatsyayana went to lengths to point out is the antithesis of kama, ruling it out of his book and out of civilized, moral sex life as of 250 AD.
Kama is the fundamental moral value of the book, and indeed the purpose of its male and female anatomy, psychology, and neurology in sex. This makes it the antithesis of violence, and of the abuse of power by men against women, or vice versa. On Doniger’s evidence, the book was written for women no less than for men, and also for both genders whose preference was for homosexuality.
If there’s Russian particularity in the history of sex, then how have the themes of the Kama Sutra been interpreted in Russia?
The extraordinary answer is a blank.
Russian soldiers and spies had plenty of military and political reasons during the 19th century “great game” for control of India to monitor what the British and the Indians were doing when their pants were down. But there is no sign that Russian scholars of Sanskrit produced a Russian translation of the Kama Sutra before Burton’s English edition of 1883 or the French translation which followed in 1891. The francophone court of Tsar Nicholas II didn’t have much time to pore over the pictures until they and their court were removed in 1917.
During the Soviet period the Russians who got hold of either the English or French translations, or the pictures, misread Vatsyayana as an advocate of sex as a commodity in the pre-capitalist empire stage or the same thing in the capitalist stage. Either way, the book was condemned as exploiting women and immoral.
A search of the Russian history of the book reveals no translation into Russian until Alexander Syrkin published his version in 1990; subsequent editions of Syrkin’s version appeared in 1993 and 2023. Syrkin was a Sanskrit expert in Moscow but in 1978 he moved to Jerusalem and became a university professor there. His Kama Sutra thus arrived in Russia via Israel, and at a time when Gorbachev was demolishing as much of Communist Party rule as he could. The Russian Kama Sutra was the offspring of Gorbachev’s glasnost. But within a few months it was overtaken by the same market forces as have overtaken the book in India itself. As for the pictures, they couldn’t compete with video pornography.
The Russian editions of the Kama Sutra -- all three translated by Alexander Yakovlevich Syrkin (right), a well-known indologist. In the 1960s he began his research career at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences. Since 1978 he has been a professor at the University of Jerusalem.His translations from Sanskrit also introduced the Russian reader to other works of ancient Indian literature such as the Upanishads. Follow Syrkin in podcasts from June 2019 here.
In July of 2011 Interfax announced the Kama Sutra “with a national flavour — the ancient Indian treatise on love will be published in the Udmurt language for the first time.” According to the Volga region publisher, the translation “for Udmurts, especially for young people, will be a real sensation.” The translator, Pyotr Zakharov, had been working on it for a decade. He had also been translating ancient Hebrew texts such as King Solomon’s Song of Songs. The work was difficult, he told Interfax, “because in Udmurt there is very little sexual vocabulary. I was obliged not only to select allegorical expressions to denote sexual subtleties, of which, by the way, there are many in the original, but also to come up with completely new words.”
Zakharov acknowledged that 19th century prudery and state censorship have “obscured the book’s value as a literary masterpiece. The first translator of the Kama Sutra is partly to blame for the distorted perception of the book. American historians [Doniger] have discovered that Burton’s English translation, which served as a model for subsequent translations into other languages, contains a lot of inaccuracies. The first Russian translation from Sanskrit was made by the famous indologist Alexander Syrkin…His was the first translation into Russian, accompanied by a detailed scientific commentary by the translator, giving an idea of the high culture of sensory perception in ancient India. Another interesting fact is that initially the Kama Sutra was not illustrated, and most of the poses are described in it very briefly or given only a name tag. Most often, the so-called illustrations to the Kama Sutra are erotic miniatures of Mongolian painting and Indian schools and styles which emerged [much later], between the 16th and the 19th centuries…The Kama Sutra is often perceived in society as a book exclusively about sex, but if you read it carefully, you can see that this is a book about the lifestyle and relationships of people. In my translation I tried, on the one hand, to keep as close as possible to the original, and on the other, to use a modern language that reflects modern realities and problems.”
More than a decade has now elapsed without a sign of either academic or popular Russian interest in the book and its message. Academic focus has almost petered out. In March 2021, Anton Zakharov, a leading researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow, published his study of the way in which Vatsyayana had understood male sperm, and the differences he had observed between men and women at the climax of the sex act. Zakharov concluded that in the Kama Sutra there is a far more positive attitude towards the emission of semen at orgasm than prevailed in other Sanskrit books of the time or in the centuries which have followed.
Zakharov also remarked on the fact that Russians have so failed to notice anything of value in the Kama Sutra – except the pictures invented centuries after the book was published. He noticed that Vatsyayana’s understanding of male and female orgasm were so different, the Kama Sutra has provided training, as well as moral instruction on how to achieve them in combination and in reciprocation (aka love).
Read Doniger’s appreciation of the revolution in values still to be learned from Vatsyayana’s book. In my new book, read how modern neurology, concentrating on repair of spinal cord damage from war wounds and car accidents, has provided physiological confirmation of Vatsyayana’s ancient close-encounter observation. There is more than that in his book; mine likewise.
Foreign agents will tell the whole truth about Stalinism
February 12, 18:46
Foreign agents will tell the whole truth about Stalinism
Interesting information recently came across on the Internet. That the sixteenth international scientific conference from the series “History of Stalinism” will be held on June 20 – 23, 2024 in Yekaterinburg, at the Yeltsin Center. Conference theme: “Soviet regions: politics, economics, everyday life. 1930–1950s."
Why interesting? I open the newsletter. The organizers of the conference are the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, the Presidential Center B.N. Yeltsin, State Museum of the History of the Gulag, Publishing House "Political Encyclopedia" (ROSSPEN). That is, everything is on a serious level. And in the list of the conference organizing committee, in addition to “sovereign people”, for example, Yan Rachinsky is indicated, a member of the board of the Russian historical, educational and human rights society “Memorial” *.
Excuse me, but this organization was recognized as a foreign agent and was even liquidated by a court decision! Just in case, I have to stipulate this in the text.
And last year, a criminal case was even initiated under Art. 354.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“on the rehabilitation of Nazism”) against unidentified Memorial employees*. (This is my text about - About searches at Memorial and fake lists of those repressed).
But as we see, the head of Memorial* calmly participates in an event organized by government agencies.
Also among the organizers is Roman Romanov, the director of the State Museum of Gulag History, known for receiving more than 260 thousand rubles a month for his fight against “Stalinism.” This is open information, long ago posted on the Internet:
The information letter states that “the selection of reports is carried out by the Conference Organizing Committee” and “The Organizing Committee: reserves the right not to explain the reasons for refusal.” Wonderful rules! Freedom of speech or strangers will not be allowed in there! But on a pleasant note: “Accommodation in Yekaterinburg and travel expenses for non-resident participants are provided by the organizing committee.”
It’s funny, but recently the Yabloko party made another hysterical statement about “the campaign unfolding in Russia to justify the Great Terror and its inspirer, Joseph Stalin.”
Calm down, gentlemen, don't scare each other. As you can see, specialists in “Stalinism” and lovers of the slogan “pay and repent” feel as comfortable in Russia as before. Conferences with government support, grants, payment for meals, a mandatory buffet and everything else, as they like...
* The Memorial Society was recognized as a foreign agent in 2014, and was liquidated in 2021 by a decision of the Moscow City Court.
How wonderful it is that during the war, representatives of the fifth column can have a place where they can all get together and in a pleasant atmosphere, at state expense, talk about the horrors of Stalinism.
