Russia today

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 27, 2024 4:09 pm

Ben Aris: Russia’s economy is tougher than it looks, no chance of a crisis in the next 3-5 years – CASE
November 26, 2024
By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 11/14/24

Russia’s economy has been battered by sanctions and high inflation, but there is no chance of a major economic crisis occurring anytime in the next three to five years, says a new authoritative report from CASE. [https://case-center.org/wp-content/uplo ... ressed.pdf]

The authors of the report are amongst the keenest observers of Russian economics. Sergey Aleksashenko is a renowned Russian economist who served as Deputy Finance Minister of Russia from 1993 to 1995. Dmitry Nekrasov held various positions in Russia’s Federal Tax Service and Presidential Administration during Dmitry Medvedev’s years in the Kremlin. And Vladislav Inozemtsev is a famous Russian economist in exile who is the founder and director of the Center for Post-Industrial Studies and former professor at the prestigious Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

Inozemtsev has been well ahead of the curve, being the first to predict how the Russian economy is cooling as the military Keynesian effects start to wear off in August. The theme of Russia’s growing economic problems has been take up by many of Russia’s opponents and culminated in a recent article from opposition publication Meduza predicting that Russia faces a wave of bankruptcies in 2025 thanks to the soaring cost of borrowing.

But in his latest paper, Inozemtsev takes some of the wind out of the sails of this pessimistic outlook. The reports general conclusion is that “Russia has been able to withstand the blow caused by the Western sanctions due to a combination of factors, including its well-developed market economy, its indispensable position as a supplier of primary commodities to the global market, highly professional responses by its government officials, and the West’s inability to isolate Russia on the international stage.”

“An unbiased assessment of Russia’s economic capabilities presented in the report excludes almost any chances of a serious crisis caused by internal factors in at least three-to-five-years perspective,” the report concludes, running counter to the predictions that Russia’s economy will run into a brick wall in 2025.

Growth without development

Russia’s economy was expected to collapse after the extreme sanctions were imposed in 2022. And indeed, the first few months were a shock. But during the summer it unexpectedly boomed and in 2024 it has been the European economies that have fallen into recession as the boomerang effect of the sanctions begins to bite. The West underestimated how fast and how successfully Putin could reorient his trade to the Global South and how deeply integrated Russia is into European economies.

Since mid-2023, the Russian economy has undergone important structural changes: military spending has increased, the geography of foreign trade has changed and the citizens’ real disposable incomes have grown as wages are driven up by a chronic labour shortage. Together, all this has provided the Russian economy with strength and stability and made it capable of meeting the needs of Kremlin’s military machine in the years to come while providing the necessary financial resources for funding welfare programmes on a scale preventing an increase in protest sentiments, the authors say. The flourishing oil trade means Russia has plenty of money, but the war has killed off meaningful progress.

“The current stance can be described as a “growth without development”, being characterised by a quantitative increase in the volume of production of long-mastered products, an expansion of the service sector, and limited modernisation of infrastructure without significant technological progress.

Indeed, in many respects Russia’s economy has gone backwards. CBR Governor Elvira Nabiullina warned companies at the start of the war they might need to go back “two generations of technology” to keep their factories running.

And even more worrying for the global economy, sanctions have created a new class of Bandit Counties that champion massive violations of intellectual property rights, illicit foreign trades and the use of non-traditional forms of international settlements.

“The Kremlin sees opportunities for institutionalising this model and is laying it down as the basis for its geopolitical claims, trying to establish itself as a leader of a “non-Western” community of nations.

Getting it wrong

The authors point out that analyst keep getting Russia wrong, overestimating the power of sanctions, underestimating the quality of the country’s economic leadership and its ability to remake its markets in the face of sanctions.

In April 2022 the World Bank predicted Russia’s GDP would decline by 11.2% by the end of the year, but the final estimate came to only minus 2.1%. In 2023, the Russian economy grew by 3.6% against the January IMF forecast of 0.3%; and in 2024 its growth could achieve 3.8-4.0%, while at the start of the year international experts gave a figure of just 1.3%. These are not small mistakes. They belie a deep misunderstanding of what is happening in Russia, the authors argue, and lead to very poor policy recommendations.

“We believe this disconnect is largely subjective, reflecting essential features of three main groups of analysts.

“The first group consists of long-time Russia specialists who view current events through a Soviet-era lens, interpreting Putin’s dictatorship as an attempt to restore the Soviet system.

“The second group includes analysts who work for Western governments or NGOs, and feel compelled to propose sanctions and restrictions, projecting confidence in their effectiveness.

“The third group is made up of experts with Russian backgrounds, including those former politicians who despise Putin and are convinced of his regime’s imminent collapse.

“The deep biases of these groups hinder objective assessments of the Russian economy’s current state and prospects,” the authors opine.

Sanctions don’t work because the “international community” is in reality only the handful of counties that make up the Global North, and even in Europe, within the EU itself, the willingness to impose sanctions is weakly followed or enforced. Turkey’s propensity to continue to act as a way-station for trade with Russia, Austria and Hungary’s continued imports of Russian gas and Germany’s luxury carmakers that continue to export top of the range cars to Moscow via Minsk are only a few of the manifold examples of how sanctions are being undermined. The West’s failure to get China and India on board and refusal to join the regime by the real “international community” of the Global South, which makes up 90% of the world’s population, blows a major hole in the sanctions regime.

Another miscalculation is to put all the growth at the feet of the military-industrial sector. The civilian sector has also flourished. Several things have gone into this growth but among the most important was Russian businesses reacted to sanctions by investing heavily into retooling factories to replace hard-to-obtain Western technology, and booming consumption fuelled by the rapid rise in real disposable incomes.

In 2023, the largest increase in gross value added was recorded in the hotels and catering enterprises (by 10%), in the information and communications sector (10%), in financial and insurance activities (8.6%), in wholesale and retail trade (7.3%) and in construction (7.0%), which reflects an increase on the share of final consumption expenditures in GDP to 68.7% from 64.9% in 2022, including the share of household expenditure to 49.8% from 47.4%.

“It seems that the development of the Russian economy in the last two years, as well as the real effect of sanctions, should have led to a re-evaluation of the quality of the expertise used by policymakers – but this has not happened yet,” the authors say.

Russia’s robust growth

The introduction of the twin oil price cap sanctions at the end of 2022 and start of 2023 were also misunderstood. When the budget figures were released in March 2023 and showed a massive deficit for 2022 and collapsing tax revenues in January 2023, the oil sanctions were hailed as huge success. However, the numbers were misleading.

“Bureaucratic factors became more important: the excessive strengthening of the ruble exchange rate under the influence of paramount currency restrictions and the Ministry of Finance’s sluggishness in changing the methodology of determining the price of oil for tax purposes [which used to be based on the price of the sanctioned Urals blend, but was changed to a Brent benchmark],” the authors explain.

“When these factors ceased to have an effect, budget revenues stabilised and soon began to increase rapidly, outpacing economic growth – the Ministry of Finance began to collect an “inflation tax” of additional revenues from VAT, profit tax and personal income tax, caused by a significant excess of the inflation rate over what was anticipated in the draft budget,” which bne IntelliNews reported on at the time and also discussed in an oil podcast, but was not well understood by most commentators.

In 2023 the Ministry of Finance had to dip into the National Welfare Fund (NWF) for RUB3.46 trillion to cover a 17% of the budget shortfall. In 2024, the budget spending to date is fully funded by revenues – although it may not stay that way, as typically 20% of all spending usually happens in December. Currently, the official forecast for the deficit is 1.7% of GDP of around RUB3 trillion, increased from 0.8% earlier in the year. For 2026, the Ministry of Finance is expecting the budget deficit to be flat.

“One should add that the Russian government’s debt is insignificant by modern standards,” say the authors. Debt is expected to reach 18.1% of GDP by the end of 2024, which leaves a huge space for domestic borrowing. The Ministry of Finance is planning to issue RUB4 trillion of domestic debt in 2024 (nearly double pre-war levels), tapping the estimated RUB19 trillion of liquidity in the domestic banking sector. That is enough money to continue Putin’s war in Ukraine for years.

The growth of real disposable incomes during the war was an even bigger boon, as it came after the longest period of their fall in Russian history – from 2014 to 2021 – ironically caused by the chronic labour shortage as men were bled away from the labour pool to fight on the frontlines. In three years since the start of the aggression against Ukraine, this figure will grow by at least 17.5% (4.0% in 2022, 6.9% in 2023 and, according to the government forecast, about 7% in 2024).

Domestic consumption has become a bigger growth driver than the booming raw material exports. It has created a new War Middle Class and is fuelling activity in the civilian segment of industry. At least until mid-2024, the rate of income growth accelerated (the maximum figure of 8.1% was recorded in the first half of this year) with ever higher pay going to soldiers, who earn three times the average salary.

The growth of incomes is part of the reversal of Putinomics that war has brought with it. Pre-war the Kremlin effectively ran an austerity budget, starting in about 2012 when Putin launched a drive to modernise the military. The CBR hoarded cash, building up a huge $600bn reserve, debt was paid down and investment into non-strategic sector was muted. Since the war started, the Kremlin has opened the spending spigot and money has poured into wages and investment, as much as is needed to get the job done. From mid-2023 to mid-2024, the Kremlin paid RUB3 trillion in military salaries, equivalent to the entire budget deficit.

While many commentators have pointed to the huge military salary bill as a weakness, the Kremlin doesn’t appear to think so. The current 2025-2027 budget proposal keeps military spending at 6% of GDP and this is not seen to be excessively high, but the current budgetary structure looks sustainable over a three-year horizon, maintaining the massive military spending. What is spent on salaries can be offset to a large extent by what is earned on taxing consumption and growth. Already the non-oil part of the budget revenues is easily outstripping those from oil.

A dramatic U-turn in strategy, the reversal of Putinomics has unleashed years of pent-up growth. Another side-effect of the spending is to undo some of Russia’s legendary income inequality, as the poorest regions have been the biggest winners of the Kremlin’s largesse, as that is where most of the military factories are located as a legacy of the Cold War. Putin stressed the importance of balanced investment into both civilian and military parts of the economy in his guns and butter speech in May and more generally, the Kremlin continues to push its National Projects 2.1 agenda aimed at improving the lives of the average family.

“With the outbreak of the war, a trend in the transformation of social policy became especially noticeable: the efforts of the authorities and budget funds are directed at those Russians who either belong to less well-off social strata,” say the authors, “or do not show a tendency to emigrate.”

“It should be noted that in Russia a significant part of both individuals and businesses does not experience profound economic discomfort either from Putin’s aggression against Ukraine or from the Western nations’ reaction to it,” the authors add. “The main effect of sanctions has so far been felt by the upper middle class, which has historically taken the most critical stance vis-à-vis Vladimir Putin and his policies.”

And the upper middle class are actually making money from the strain the economy is under. Sky-high interest rates are threatening SMEs, but they have also become a cash cow for the middle class, which are depositing their cash in banks for the interest income that can be earned. Over the first nine months of 2024 retail deposit soared by 53.8% year on year and companies are also placing so much of their cash in deposit accounts the CBR is currently planning to impose special restrictions on corporate deposits in order to keep this cash in circulation.

Sale of the century

“The first and most important circumstance is the free market character of the Russian economy, which has been underestimated by analysts,” the authors argue.

Most of Russia’s detractors have tried to paint Putin as reverting to Soviet control. The famous Yale University report that predicted Russia’s economy was headed into oblivion, mentioned the word “Soviet” 19-times, although few modern economic commentators make any reference to the Soviet Union today. The report was debunked by bne IntelliNews at the time, and by Russia’s performance since.

As Putin established control over Russia’s largest corporations, the idea of the “étatisation” of the Russian economy, and consequently about its growing similarity to the old Soviet system, spread amongst the Western expert community. It was argued that the state controls 100% of the railway and pipeline infrastructure, and that by 2018 the share of state-owned companies in overall corporate revenue had reached 63% in the oil and gas industry, 79% in the machine-building sector and 92% in banking. The observers therefore arrived at the conclusion that Russia’s economy could collapse just as easily as the Soviet one once did.

But this ignores the fact that half of Russia’s economy is privately owned and that even the leading state-owned enterprises operate in highly competitive environments. As part of Putin’s hybrid ZAO Kremlin model, the state purposely sets up two big state-owned companies to directly compete against each other and also encourages privately owned business to also keep their feet to the coals. It has been a successful model that ensures both state control over key sectors but also efficiency and competitiveness in the leading state-owned enterprises.

“Many large state-controlled corporations (one may just look on the banks) operate in a highly competitive environment, acting as if they were owned by private capital,” the authors conclude.

The Kremlin’s changes to the regulations after sanctions were imposed – most importantly the legalisation of “parallel imports” that undid a decade of intellectual property rights rules – that opened up a plethora of new opportunities to sell famous brands royalty-free.

Likewise, the departure of scores of foreign brands, many of which simply sold their Russian businesses to their Russian managers, was probably the largest transfer of property in Russia’s modern history. What was in effect the appropriation of decades of FDI has also opened huge opportunities for entrepreneurs as they took over businesses worth billions of dollars at knock-down prices.

In just the car sector – by far the worst hit of all the sectors by sanctions – all the Western brands have left but Russian carmakers and the leading distributors have taken over their businesses. The Renault-Nissan sold the largest car concern in Russia Avtovaz for just one ruble, while the sector as a whole has completely recovered after production came to a complete standstill in 2022. The team that took over the McDonald franchise claim its replacement Vkusno i Tochka (Tasty. Period) is now more profitable and its predecessor. There are similar stories in nearly every sector of the economy.

The Yale report claimed the departing international companies had revenue that was equivalent to 40% of GDP, but this revenue didn’t leave the country; it was simply taken over by Russian businessmen.

“No less important is the fact that property became the main reason for non-resistance to the authorities, since fears of losing it perfectly disciplined the Russian entrepreneurs. In other words, the private and market nature of the Russian economy made it much more resilient than the Western policymakers had expected,” the authors wrote.

The commodities backstop

Russia’s economy has always been strong thanks to the bedrock of the commodities subsidy. Even during the chaotic 90s, Russia has suffered from multiple crises, but the economy has always bounced back relatively quickly and each crisis did progressively less damage than the last one.

“Despite a probable slowdown in economic growth in the second half of 2024, Russia looks safe from the collapse of the existing economic model in the near future: the budget remains balanced, and real disposable incomes are expected to grow further. Of course, the increased military spending provokes growing inflation, but for now it is kept within single-digit numbers,” the authors argue.

This resilience is thanks to the subsidy the country earns from the export of things like oil and metal. The best way to understand this is from the so-called non-oil deficit. For all of Putin’s reign until the war in Ukraine the headline budget has been in surplus, but if you magically remove the oil and gas revenues then the non-oil budget has been around -4% of GDP in the non-crisis years. In other words, the Kremlin has used the oil and gas income to subsidise the rest of the economy. In times of crisis the non-oil deficit can blow out to -13% at its most extreme in the past, as the Kremlin taps its cushion of cash to ease the pain.

[Table mot here]

As the table shows, the government continues to rely on its raw materials subsidy to cushion the cost of the war by running a non-oil budget deficit of around 8% of GDP. This is a high number, but not the most extreme non-oil deficit Russia has ever run. For comparison, in 2020 during the pandemic the government ran a 9.8% of GDP non-oil deficit, equivalent to RUB10.4 trillion.

Put in other terms, the war in Ukraine is now stressing the government’s finances less than coronavirus global pandemic did.

Russia’s oil and gas revenues occupies the most attention, but Russia exports a cornucopia of raw materials and commodities. Another miscalculation the Western sanctions has made is how deeply these inputs are integrated with the global economy.

As of 2021, in addition to the export of more than 7.8mn barrels of crude and refined oil per day, it also sold 240bn cubic metres of natural and liquefied gas, 227mn tonnes of coal, 43.5mn tonnes of steel, 37.6mn tonnes of mineral fertilisers, 49mn tonnes of grain, as well as large volumes of timber, aluminium, nickel, uranium and many other commodities, which collectively accounted for 78% of all exports and were worth a whopping $385bn in 2021. This made Russia the world’s largest supplier of crude and primarily processed raw materials.

As bne IntelliNews has reported, the vast majority of the sanctions on Russia have failed to make much of a dent in the export business. Russia has either found new markets in Asia for things like oil, or it has offered discounts to win over new customers. At the same time, the West has turned a blind eye to the daisy chain of transhipments of Russian commodities or the more obvious transubstantiation of say Russian crude oil into Indian petrol that allows Russia to continue to trade.

Despite all the introduced restrictive measures, Russian exports decreased from $491.6bn in 2021 to $425.1bn in 2023, or by a mere 13.5%.

“Overall, this creates a trend that is alarming for the West and highly significant for Russia: Russia is not simply “falling into China’s embrace” the authors wrote. “Rather, Moscow is transforming into a centre of an “alternative model of globalisation,” operating outside the frameworks of Western-controlled institutions and established rules. This trend could prove far more dangerous than the much-discussed “export of corruption” to Western countries… As recent years have shown, the use of unconventional payment systems, the export of pirated products, and the smuggling of goods from Western companies – all of these practices are much easier to implement than previously assumed.”

“Viewing all of this as merely a way to circumvent sanctions is extremely short-sighted, as the Kremlin has set its sights on fundamentally undermining the existing system and has reasonable grounds for hoping to succeed,” the authors conclude.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/11/ben ... ears-case/

*******

LORD HUGHES IS EITHER THE MOST CORRUPT JUDGE IN ENGLAND, OR THE STUPIDEST

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by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

The story the British government began telling in March 2018 on the road to the war, which the British and their allies are now losing in the Ukraine, is that Russian assassins, on a mission approved by President Vladimir Putin, tried to kill Sergei and Yulia Skripal with a poison weapon they left behind.

As story-telling goes, this one has been extraordinarily successful. Much more successful than the Anglo-American war against Russia. Most British people, all United Kingdom media reporters, and about one-quarter of the black cab drivers of London believe the story.

This large group of people are being persuaded by a retired Court of Appeal judge named Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley) not to notice that between the allegation of an unwitnessed attempt at murder by poison sprayed on a door handle on March 4, 2018, and the allegation of a death by poison sprayed from a perfume bottle on June 30, 2018, there is a gap of more than four months in time, and of almost fifteen kilometres in space.

The question for the judge is an obvious one: how did the murder weapon get from the one crime scene to the other without the murderer’s movement, presence or action; without leaving a single circumstantial clue; and without causing collateral damage, let alone poisonous contamination of anyone over such a long interval.

In testimony to answer this question this week in a London meeting hall made up like a court, Hughes listened to the chief investigator of the crimes at the Metropolitan Police repeatedly admit he didn’t know how to explain the gap.

In ten accompanying evidence exhibits, Hughes also accepted that the only way the sole witness called to explain the gap could do so was to coach him through ten separate police interviews, eight of them in just three weeks following the death of Dawn Sturgess, his girlfriend. The witness Charles Rowley, according to his police record, is a criminal with multiple heroin possession convictions, a suspect in dealing Class A drugs, and a drug addict on methadone prescription. Para 31. Rowley was also on the press record as hustler for a million-pound payout.

Rowley, the judge was told by the police, was classified by the MET as a Section 18 witness. That is to say, according to the exhibit of the police “Witness Interview Strategy – Charlie Rowley”, dated July 12, 2018, he was a witness “whose quality of evidence is likely to be diminished by reason of fear or distress”.

Hughes made a record of accepting as admissible Rowley’s changing and contradictory explanations of how he came by the poison weapon. The judge also accepted as admissible the MET’s acknowledgement that they don’t know with confidence how the poison weapon had gone from one place to the other. Their confidence was so low, the chief MET investigator told the judge, “we have not managed to secure sufficient evidence yet to present to the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service], sir, that allows them to charge with any offences linked to Dawn and Charlie’s poisoning,” — Page 6.

Hughes’s counsel replied: “Yes, thank you. Moving on just a little bit.” .

The policeman, Commander Dominic Murphy, also said: “I don’t think we will ever actually know and the reality is there are of course several hypotheses for where the Novichok could have been and where Charlie could have found it”; “I think it’s worth acknowledging, sir, that there are of course many possibilities still for where the Novichok would have been and how Charlie found it”; “I don’t think we can discount the box being anywhere during those periods, no. We cannot evidence where the box was from 4 March right through to the point at which it was in Muggleton Road [Dawn Sturgess’s home]”; “I should say as the SIO [Senior Investigating Officer] for Operation Caterva I have seen no information or evidence to suggest that this is the case, but yes, of course it absolutely remains a possibility.”

“Thank you,” Hughes said.

Hughes tried telling the policeman how to say what he wasn’t sure he saw. “He [Rowley] is coming from the direction of the bins. What is he carrying, do you think? A [Murphy]. I would imagine items he has recovered during the process. LORD HUGHES: Well, don’t imagine, Mr Murphy, come on. What does it look like?” The judge was so angry with the police officer, he stripped him of his commander rank.

In the Anglo-American jurisprudence of murder trials, when the judge coaches the witness in front of the jury, the defence lawyer rises and objects. He then asks for the jury to be excused while he demands the judge retract, recuse himself, or dismiss the charges because the prosecution has failed to present a case to answer. Hughes, however, is following the orders of the British Government, not English law. The orders are to fabricate the appearance of the case which the prosecution cannot make, in order to “identify, so far as consistent with section 2 of the Inquiries Act 2005, where responsibility for the death lies.”

Russian weapon, Russian crime, Russian culprits, Russian responsibility – those are the Hughes orders.

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Left, Metropolitan Police Commander Dominic Murphy under questioning from Lord Hughes, right, at the hearing of November 20, 2024. Note both the witness and the judge fidget nervously with pens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp7_dbHHJPg -- Minute 17.

Charles Rowley, the only direct witness of the poison weapon in a perfume bottle which allegedly killed Dawn Sturgess, had been scheduled to give his own sworn testimony to the Hughes proceeding in its first week. However, the BBC reported “Mr Rowley had been expected to give evidence to the inquiry this week, but was unable to because of his poor health.”

Hughes’s counsel, Andrew O’Connor KC, said something different in the hearing of October 16. “At one stage we [Hughes] had planned for Mr Rowley to give evidence this week and, of course, had he done so he would have been able to cover those matters in sequence.” O’Connor did not claim that Rowley was ill. “For various reasons,” O’Connor told Hughes, “he isn’t now giving evidence this week and is timetabled to appear to give evidence in London, in fact towards the end of the hearings in November.”

“There are two important factual issues that his evidence covers. The first one, which we have mentioned more than once, is the question of how he came into possession of the perfume bottle; how, when, where. The second, as I have just mentioned, is that of the events of Saturday, 30 June…We will leave that other issue, the question of how Mr Rowley came into possession of the bottle, when, where and so on, until that section of the evidence at the end of the hearings where we hope Mr Rowley will be present to give evidence about that himself.

LORD HUGHES: Right.” — page 50-51.
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Source: https://www.mirror.co.uk/

Read what Rowley told police interviewing him for the third day in a row at his bed in the Intensive Care Unit of Salisbury District Hospital on July 15, 2018.

When O’Connor said Rowley was “timetabled to appear”, he was lying. In the outcome, Rowley was not scheduled, and he did not appear to testify “at the end of the November hearings.”

Hughes has not asked for the reason; his lawyers have announced none. The British press reporting the hearings have failed to notice that Rowley is missing.

As chairman of the Inquiry and as judge, Hughes has explained that he has disallowed Sergei and Yulia Skripal from testifying in order to protect their security. He has failed to explain his reason for preventing Rowley from testifying, and for substituting MET Commander Murphy in his place.

There is precedent. In the history of the English courts, the Star Chamber had a record of accepting witnesses who had been tortured by state agents. That was abolished in 1640, and the statute of habeas corpus introduced to require those accused and direct witnesses to be brought physically before the court. In Hughes’s Inquiry, the Skripals and Rowley have been denied the right of habeas corpus; their lawyers have not objected; the state agents have presented witness evidence in their place. Rowley’s spokesman was Commander Murphy.

His task, directed by Hughes and his lawyers, was to explain how and where the alleged Russian assassins abandoned their alleged weapon on March 4 so that Rowley might find it on the same day; keep it to himself without trying to sell, open, or give it away for sixteen weeks; then present it out of its box to his girlfriend on the morning of June 30, so that she would spray herself fatally within minutes, and contaminate Rowley himself whose symptoms did not materialize for eight hours, after he had consumed methadone and other drugs.

Rowley had told the police in ten of his interviews that he could not remember, did not know, or was guessing what he had found at a charity bin in the Salisbury town centre in the evening of March 4. He had also recorded his change of mind on how and when he came by the perfume bottle on his kitchen table, and on how he had suspected a man friend, not his girlfriend, of poisoning him with something else.

Two police photographs of the perfume bottle on the kitchen table were presented by O’Connor for Hughes, and Murphy was then asked questions.

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Source: https://dsiweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazon ... 6_1-10.pdf

“Q. I’m asking you rather than telling you, Mr Murphy, but it seems likely that it was either this photograph or one very similar to it that Charlie was shown?

A. Yes, it does seem so, yes.

Q. I don’t want to labour it — the bread bin on the right-hand side, the soap on the left.

A. Yes, of course.

Q. The perfume bottle in the middle there. I think we have already explained, but just for the record that black mark is a redaction to the photograph that has been made for the purposes of our processes.

A. Yes.

Q. Because the level of liquid in the bottle at that time is something that’s covered by a restriction order the Chair [Hughes] has made.” — page 40.

Revealed here for the first time in public was that the level of the liquid in the perfume bottle, and also the colour of the liquid, were direct evidence of whether that bottle had been used to spray the Skripal front-door handle with Novichok. If that had been the truth, and if the bottle had caused Strugess’s collapse, the colour of the liquid should have been Novichok yellow, not perfume pink, according to evidence presented to the Inquiry by the British police from the bottle manufacturer. — Para 146( c).

Also, the liquid level would have been measurably lower inside the bottle from having been sprayed multiple times, an independent British expert on organophosphates has added.

Judge Hughes and his lawyer O’Connor were manipulating the evidence and covering up. Commander Murphy was going along with the deception.

Hughes interrupted the questioning: “Q [O’Connor]. Just to be clear, would it have had that [black redaction] mark on it when Charlie was shown it?

A. No, unlikely, sir.

Q. We can take that down, thank you.

LORD HUGHES: I’m so sorry, it’s gone, but it doesn’t matter. Your analysis is that that question which we’re looking at was about the fairly large white pot –

A. Yes.

LORD HUGHES: — on the left of the picture as to which, if that’s what he was talking about, he said that’s soap.” — page 41.

This was soft soap Hughes was expressing. The propaganda technique.

According to Murphy, this was Rowley’s evidence on how the alleged weapon got to where the police claim to have found it on July 11, eleven days after Sturgess had collapsed and died:

“In those early stages Charlie’s recall was quite vague and unclear and so our learning from our interviews with the Skripals post their contamination, sir, was that over time their recall does get better after treatment, so one of the reasons to persist in those early stages with Charlie was because we were hoping that recall would improve as his condition improved in hospital. Q. [O’Connor] On the other hand, Commander Murphy, many of those same factors we have just discussed, his caution involving the police, his vulnerable status and so on – A. Yes. Q.– might be factors that would make him quite suggestible? A. Well, absolutely quite possibly, yes, given all the circumstances around him, yes.” — page 20.
“I think the first thing to say, and it’s really important, sir, is that I don’t think we’re ever actually going to know where Charlie found the Novichok. We certainly don’t know explicitly where Petrov and Boshirov discarded the Novichok, sir, but I think it’s unlikely Charlie found it, unless circumstances as yet undiscovered, that found that particular perfume box that late in June in those bins at the back of the charity shops, given that they had been emptied several times in that process and several times a month, if not more regularly than that. It may be that Charlie is remembering some detail from those bins, but just the timing is not correct, but, as you have heard, my assessment is on the basis of Petrov and Boshirov being out on the Sunday afternoon, sir, and Charlie being out on that Sunday afternoon, that’s probably the significant point at which Charlie and Petrov and Boshirov come the closest to each other.” – page 157.
“Q [O’Connor]. Of course Brown Street carpark is over towards the top on the right there. Going back to the first of those two questions or issues that I identified right at the beginning, is there any more you wanted to say about where Petrov and Boshirov in the consideration that was given to this in Operation Caterva, where they might have left the bottle? A [Murphy]. Yes, thank you. So the 33 minutes [of missing CCTV coverage] were clearly the most significant period of time during their short period of time in Salisbury where we were concerned that they would have had the opportunity to discard the bottle, sir. You have heard that there are many hypotheses for where they may have been, but I think important to remember that during the time period of the investigation that I was considering this area, actually we still were not sighted on what the Novichok might be, what container it was in, or had any further information in relation to that whatsoever. But on it being found by Charlie and subsequently then recovered from Muggleton Road it has allowed us to try and pull those two things together and try and understand with greater detail where perhaps Petrov and Boshirov were and that Charlie was out that day and, as you have heard, my assessment being that he was out searching through some bins that day.” — page 140.
In an exchange between Hughes, O’Connor, and Murphy, published here as a screenshot of the transcript of pages 140-41, the judge and lawyer lead the witness to confirming what he had repeatedly said he could not verify from the evidence of CCTV, from physical witnesses like Rowley, or from the box and bottle themselves. The judge is here telling the witness what was “off camera”.

Image
https://dsiweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazon ... -2024-.pdf

This is the Star Chamber practice of four hundred years ago. It is state corruption.

https://johnhelmer.net/lord-hughes-is-e ... more-90714

******

Assessing The Feasibility Of A Russian Gas Pipeline To China Through Kazakhstan

Andrew Korybko
Nov 27, 2024

Image

The only reason why Kazakhstan is being considered either as a complement or an alternative to Mongolia as a transit state to China is for political reasons.

Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak confirmed in mid-November that “We are now potentially considering with our Chinese friends a new route through Kazakhstan, which could also amount to around 35 billion cubic meters of gas.” This builds upon what the Kazakh Ambassador to Russia disclosed in May and would almost equal the maximum capacity of the Power of Siberia I pipeline at 38 billion cubic meters of gas per year, but would be less than the proposed Power of Siberia II’s 50 billion.

About the last-mentioned pipeline, this analysis here covered the reported Chinese-Russian pricing dispute that appears in hindsight to have been why Putin didn’t sign an agreement on this megaproject during his last trip to Beijing in May. It was then followed up a few months later with this one here about how Russia might instead redirect its pipeline plans towards Iran and India. In brief, China wants basement-bargain prices while Russia wants something better, hence why no deal has been reached.

This dilemma hasn’t yet been resolved, thus raising questions about the feasibility of a Russia gas pipeline to China through Kazakhstan. After all, the problem isn’t the Power of Siberia II’s capacity, which could always be reduced upon an agreement on pricing. The persistent problem has precisely been that they can’t resolve their pricing dispute. The only reason why Kazakhstan is being considered either as a complement or an alternative to Mongolia as a transit state to China is for political reasons.

To explain, even though Kazakhstan was just invited to partner with BRICS, this analysis here from mid-October right before that happened enumerated three analyses over the past 15 months highlighting Russia’s concerns about that country’s reliability in the face of Western pressure since February 2022. There’s accordingly a chance that Russia might agree to China’s reportedly requested basement-bargain gas prices if this is deemed required to keep Kazakhstan from drifting further into its rivals’ camp.

Of course, Russia would still prefer to receive better terms, but a much smaller profit margin might be considered an acceptable cost to pay for the aforesaid political dividend. If concerns over Kazakhstan’s reliability are alleviated in the coming year, such as if a ceasefire enters into effect in Ukraine and the West consequently reduces some of its pressure upon that Central Asian country, then Russia might be less interested in this sort of financial-political compromise.

Instead, it might be emboldened to continue refusing China’s reported terms, with the expectation being that the US’ accelerated “Pivot (back) to Asia” under Trump in that scenario could place more stress on China’s energy supply chains and thus coerce it into agreeing to more of Moscow’s terms. This could in turn possibly lead to an eventual breakthrough on the Power of Siberia II pipeline talks, in which case Russia might even be able to get a higher price than it initially bargained for if the circumstances change.

With all this insight in mind, it can therefore be concluded that the latest talk about a Russian gas pipeline to China through Kazakhstan is the Kremlin’s backup plan in case the Ukrainian Conflict continues into the indefinite future in parallel with more Western pressure on that transit country. This could thus help keep Kazakhstan from drifting further into its rivals’ camp while also resulting in more budgetary revenue for Russia from China. For now, however, it’s just a proposal and not a serious plan.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/assessin ... -a-russian
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Thu Nov 28, 2024 3:02 pm

A touching tribute to a noble martyr

Stephen Karganovic

November 27, 2024

Admiration for Darya Dugina and desire to honour her memory continue undiminished in the hearts and minds of normal people.

Whether Darya Dugina was a martyr in the religious meaning of the expression is not for us to decide. But in secular terms, the gruesome circumstances that claimed the life of this remarkable young woman, who was also a beautiful human being, undoubtedly do elevate her to the rank of martyr.

Etymologically, the martyr is a witness who boldly and at grave peril proclaims a transcendent truth or exalted reality. As an engaged intellectual of the first order in her own right, and a public figure recognisable independently of her father, Darya Dugina indeed bore witness to the truth in a perverse world that detests it and at every turn persecutes it intensely.

In her witness, she chose the right side to be on.

She was a committed Orthodox Christian, of course, which defined her vision of life and understanding of her duties.

Darya Dugina’s beastly murder, in August 2022, by means of a surreptitiously placed car bomb was plotted by operatives of Ukrainian intelligence and executed by a depraved female agent they selected for this gruesome task. It is a matter of conjecture whether she or her father, philosopher Alexander Dugin, was the intended target because on the fatal night they were attending together a cultural event and at the last moment switched cars unexpectedly. It is certain however that either or both would have been considered high value targets by the killers.

Darya’s tragic death was initially minimised and cruelly mocked (The Guardian’s dismissive comment is typical) and then completely black-holed by the public opinion masters of the collective West. That was natural conduct from people whose moral rages are always cheap and selective, who are destitute of conscience, and whose actions are governed by loathsome hypocrisy. The reasons for their discretion concerning the crimes of their protégés in Kiev are neatly encapsulated in the Russian saying: Ворон ворону глаз не выклюет (crows do not pick crow’s eyes).

It is comforting, however, that admiration for this brave young woman and desire to honour her memory continue undiminished in the hearts and minds of normal people. On 6 and 7 December of this year an homage to Darya Dugina is scheduled to take place in Belgrade, Serbia, as part of a scholarly gathering under the title “The theory of Europe: Darya Dugina’s multipolar vision.”

Multidisciplinary participants in the conference will include Darya’s father, Russian philosopher, sociologist, and geopolitical thinker Dr. Alexander Dugin, and distinguished lecturers from France, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Serbia.

The moral and symbolic significance of this tribute cannot be overstated. It is a resounding declaration on the part of the Serbian organisers of where their sympathies lie in the current geopolitical confrontation. All indicators of the public mood in Serbia, without exception, confirm that this position is shared by the overwhelming majority of the Serbian people.

That leads us to the obvious question: why did hundreds of thousands of men on both sides die and sustain horrible injuries in the conflict that for almost three years has been going on in Ukraine? Darya Dugina’s answers would be, amongst other things, to stop the Ukrainian Nazi regime’s armed forces’ shelling and killing of Russian civilians in the Donbas, to ensure full respect for the cultural identity of the majority ethnic Russian population throughout Ukraine, to finally eradicate all traces of Nazism in Ukraine almost eighty years after it was crushed in Germany, and to put an end to NATO’s aggressive expansion which threatens not just Russia but also world peace.

We have an essentially different answer to the same question that must urgently be publicised. Its author, a few days ago, was Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. That answer actually is not at all false from the standpoint of Graham and the like-minded cabal for which he speaks. In its crude sincerity and unspeakable vulgarity it ought to shock the conscience of every decent person. For the cabal in question, according to Sen. Graham, the colossal conflict which has so far destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced millions, and which, unless its escalatory trajectory is curtailed, could provoke a global catastrophe by sparking World War III, was all about – money.

For incredulous doubters, let Sen. Graham speak for himself, in his own words:

“This war is about money. People don’t talk much about it. But you know, the richest country in all of Europe for rare earth minerals is Ukraine. Two to seven trillion dollars’ worth of minerals that are rare earth minerals, very relevant to the 21st century … Ukraine’s ready to do a deal with us, not the Russians. So it’s in our interest to make sure that Russia doesn’t take over the place.”

Lindsay Graham is a complete and utter idiot in all matters pertaining to history, geography, international relations, and fundamental precepts of morality. But money is a topic that he and his good ole boys understand well. He should not therefore simply be dismissed for being the disgusting vulgarian that he is. He deserves credit, and even a measure of gratitude, for being – in his coarse style – a clownish, but in the core message he emits an unfailingly honest articulator of the true motives of the criminal political class that he represents. Whenever he is given a platform to speak, he does an enormous public service by letting the cat out of the bag.

To conclude, we have juxtaposed two contrasting cultural archetypes, personified by Darya Dugina and Lindsey Graham. Their respective responses to the unfathomable human tragedy of the conflict in Ukraine are the raw data for a far-reaching comparative socio-cultural and anthropological study.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... le-martyr/

******

Transcript of ‘Judging Freedom’ edition of 27 November 2024
Transcript submitted by a reader

Napolitano: 0:32
Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for “Judging Freedom”. Today is Wednesday, November 27th, 2024, Thanksgiving week here in the United States. Professor Gilbert Doctorow joins us now. Professor Doctorow, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for joining us. We have been talking almost nonstop with your colleagues on this show about the significance militarily and geopolitically, and I know your field is geopolitics, not military, of the Russian Oreshnik missile. How big a deal is this?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 1:11
It is a big deal for itself and also for what it tells us about us. The most important features of the Oreshnik were already on view in 2018 in the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, which had in its nose cone, 12 Avangard hypersonic missiles.

The same principle as we see in Oreshnik. Oreshnik has six hypersonic blocks, they call them, which are individually targeted and which coast down to their target at 10 Mach, 10 times the speed of sound. The 2018 ICBM had 20 Mach Avangard missiles aboard. The real technical challenge as far as I understand was to fly in those hypersonic blocks or the MIRV missiles that are part of the delivery package at these enormous speeds and to control them for precise targeting. This was the enormous achievement of Russian physicists and engineers for 2018. It was overlooked completely by us in the West.

2:40
It was explained to the public on the March 1st, 2018 speech to the nation, the state of the nation address, as we like to call it, that Putin delivered then, which was about a month before the presidential elections. And it was made light of by our press and by our experts who spoke about it as a bluff, as a pre-electural empty speech by a man who was very keen to be reelected, Vladimir Putin. But the fact that the Russians could have, as Putin later explained, done something that they had not achieved in 70 years of the Soviet Union, pulled ahead of the United States technologically in arms. We know that they pulled ahead of the United States in Sputnik when it was launched, but not in the arms race.

3:35
There, the United States was always years ahead, going back to who had the first nuclear weapons. Here, in this case, Russia pulled a whole generation ahead of the United States, and maybe as much as 10 years ahead. Ten years in politics is forever. What’s important about the Oreshnik and very few of my peers have discussed, is the timing issue. The Oreshnik has been introduced to the world as an intermediate-range, but it’s the top of intermediate-range missiles.

5,000 kilometers is the top, and that’s where it stands. It has been introduced two years ahead of the American Tomahawks that were promised to or were threatened to Mr. Scholz as being based in Germany in readiness for what could be a preemptive attack on Russia. Two years ahead. So this is an amazing feat, that this weapon has been brought out.

Napolitano: 4:38
Was Western intel, particularly CIA and MI6, caught off guard by this? Or stated differently, did the Pentagon, Whitehall, 10 Downing Street, the White House even have a hint that this was coming?

Doctorow:
Well, they had more than a hint. As I said, the basic technology was already shown to have been developed and to be introduced into serial production in 2018. So there’s no excuse for this. But I think that they, like the general public and even, or particularly, like Russians who left the Soviet Union and who thought they know Russia, were saying about Mr. Putin’s announcement in 2018, that it was an absolute bluff, and there’s no way the Russians could achieve a technological advantage with a budget for military purposes, 10 times smaller than the United States. And there are reasons, I don’t want to be too unkind to those who would have discounted Russia’s technical abilities to achieve what they have achieved.

5:54
I was reminded of this when I was on my last visit to Petersburg just two weeks ago, and I got into a taxi. It was, most of the taxis I got into were crossovers from China, which were wonderful to ride in. But this happened to be a Lada, a new Lada. And the taxi driver–

Napolitano:
What is a Lada? A Russian–

Doctorow:
It’s a Russian car. It’s the car that was built in the, in the Tolyatti, in the original Fiat joint venture with the Russian automobile industry. It is a modern-looking car, modest, but modern looking. It’s not as, this is not an ancient-looking car, it’s modern-looking. But the technical achievements of the automobile engineers are not much to persuade us that Russians are capable of engineering. The driver was complaining, and he’s not just complaining, he demonstrated. When he tried to start the car, it would not start, because the Russians had just gone over from the key ignition to the push button ignition.

Napolitano:
Right.

Doctorow:
And they never quite made it. So the only good thing about the car is it didn’t have an American or Western feature of the engine cutting out when you were at a light. Otherwise, this poor fellow in his taxi wouldn’t just have been stuck at the curb as he was with me, but he would have been stuck in the middle of traffic.

7:20
But my point is that in many consumer goods, Russians never were in the forefront. Their capable engineers in consumer goods went to California, and they started Google and things like that. That does not mean the Russians don’t have capable engineers. They have loads of them, but they tend to be patriotic, and they’re working for the government to make missiles to shoot at us.

Napolitano: 7:52
Okay. How do you think the Kremlin in general, President Putin in particular, regards the continued US, UK, and Ukraine attacks on Russian land using ATACMSs, American, and Storm Shadow, British? He reacted with the Oreshnik after the first attack. And then there was another one, as if the West is taunting him.

Doctorow: 8:29
It’s a very pertinent question. And I’ll bring you up to date with the latest news on Russian state television, which I take as significant for understanding President Putin’s state of mind. The people whom I listen to, well, they reason like you and me and other others on your show. They are sentient beings. They understand reality and they’re not caught in ideologies. And when I listened to to Vyacheslav Nikonov last night, the presenter of “The Great Game”, it was the first time that I’ve seen him ashen-faced. He has in recent weeks been confident, not smug, but confident that the Russians were well on their way to achieving the goals that Putin set out in February 2022.

9:29
Last night he was ashen-faced. And why? He said, “I have to tell you that the Ministry of Defense has just announced that there were in the past several days two strikes of ATACMSs within Kursk region.” And in both cases, there were multiple missiles fired at the Russian targets, of which most were shot down, I think five out of six, something like this. But in each case, at least one, either wholly or in part after being intercepted, did reach target and cause some damage, unquantified, to the equipment, which was a radar installation, I believe.

10:18
In any case, it was technical equipment that was manned, and caused injuries to several Russian soldiers who were manning this equipment. “And that our ministry is preparing a formidable retaliation.” I put that together with the remark by one of the panelists, expert panelists on the show, who said that “When we were in military training, and we were using” I don’t know what, whether it was automatic weapons or some kind of weapon, “we were told this is what you do: you prepare yourself to fire, and then you do this and that. And then if there is no response from those whom you are threatening, you fire over their heads. And if there’s no response to that, you fire at their heads.”

11:16
“And that’s where we are today. Our firing of the
Oreshnik into Dnipropetrovsk and destroying that military complex was shooting over your heads. Our next firing will not be over your heads.” So this is why he was ashen-faced.

Napolitano: 11:36
Will that firing be at the suppliers of these weapons? Stated differently, will they attack the brand-new American air base in Poland? Will they attack British troops or British technicians amassing in Poland in preparation for their execution of the Storm Shadow? Or are they going to continue to attack Ukraine military targets?

Doctorow: 12:04
It’s anyone’s guess. That it will be a severe attack is perfectly clear. That it will be much more damaging and costly in lives, most likely, than what happened a week ago is almost certain. But I would say that we ought to look at a hierarchy of targets from the, in terms of desirability, if the Russians had a wish list. I think the first point in a wish list would be to strike the United Kingdom.

12:35
The Brits have battened down various airfields they have in anticipation that there could be a strike within Britain. However, Britain falls from the top place, because the Brits have nuclear-armed missiles on their submarines, and Mr. Starmer is sufficiently irrational to possibly use them against Russia at this early stage. So the Russians are unlikely to do that. The second, as you say, is Poland, precisely because of the recently opened base for this dual-purpose, supposedly dual-purpose, but actually single-purpose, attack on Russia for a decapitating strike.

13:22
These are two bases that took about seven years to install. This is the Aegis onshore in Poland, another one in Romania. So that is a second choice. Poland cannot respond but of course it would invoke Article 5 and so it’s a bit risky, unpredictable how rational the Americans will be. I say the third down the list is to strike Moldova, which is not a NATO, which is a major point of marshalling and onward delivery as a logistic center for American military deliveries to Ukraine.

14:03
It’s not in NATO, and so it’s fair game. And the fourth would be another strike in Ukraine, and I would name Kiev itself with something like Oreshnik, because Kiev is a holy city to Russians. It’s the mother of all cities. They have been reluctant to strike Kiev for that reason. But with the Oreshnik, there is almost no damage, no collateral damage to a specific bunker or hardened site that protects American generals who are running the war in Ukraine or protects Mr. Zelensky.

Napolitano: 14:46
Our friend and colleague Larry Johnson reports this morning that the Russians have showered portions of Kiev with warnings in writing for the civilians to depart. Subterfuge or a legitimate warning of an area to be attacked?

Doctorow;
I think he’s right. I think it is not a subterfuge. The Russians at this point are not playing games. And that’s, I think, the major message they want to get through to Washington, London and Berlin, that game playing is ended. They’re playing for keeps and Kiev would be a very good target. But as I said, if they use the Oreshnik, there will be very little damage to the city at large.

Napolitano: 15:42
What do you think, with your finger on the pulse of Kremlin thinking, President Putin thinks President Biden is up to. His administration was just roundly overwhelmingly repudiated by the electorate. His successor is very much the opposite from him in many respects, though we’re seeing Neocon people appointed by, or indicated he will appoint, by Donald Trump. He has two months left in office and he’s accelerating a war that his proxy is losing. So scratching my head, how does Putin analyze that?

Doctorow: 16:30
They’re watching the same things that you and I are watching. They were watching Admiral Bauer and they were in shock over what he said. They’re also watching what Donald Trump does not say, and they’re in shock over his silence. So their emotions, I’d say, are not far removed from those irrational people in the United States. And you draw the conclusions from that. If you are alarmed, then, and you have reason to be, I think Putin is alarmed.

Napolitano: 17:04
There are rumors that Joe Biden is going to supply nuclear warheads for use on American missiles in Ukraine. Is this taken seriously by Russia?

Doctorow:
No, because they understand that they would then be obliged to destroy the United States. That is beyond the pale of discussion.

Napolitano: 17:33
One of President-elect Donald Trump’s senior foreign policy advisors– actually designated right now, I don’t know if this is going to change, nobody’s actually been nominated and as you know can be nominated until Trump is sworn in– to be number two on the National Security Council is Sebastian Gorka. You may be familiar with Dr. Gorka. I want to show you a particularly antagonistic and bellicose comment he made just the other day, and I’m going to ask you what your reaction is and what you think President Putin’s reaction would be if he saw this and gave any credibility to it. Chris, cut number 10.

Gorka:
I’ll give one tip away that the president has mentioned. He will say to that murderous former KGB colonel, that thug who runs the Russian Federation, you will negotiate now or the aid that we have given to Ukraine thus far will look like peanuts. That’s how he will force those gentlemen to come to an arrangement that stops the bloodshed.

Napolitano:
Who in their right mind would think that that’s a way to negotiate with Vladimir Putin?

Doctorow: 18:50
Well, this comes back to the fundamental question. Will Mr. Putin show forbearance as he did in 2016 after Trump won then and the administration outgoing did what it could to spoil the relations with Russia? And Russia showed forbearance, which I think it later regretted. They will not do that now. Their operating assumption is that whoever is in charge in the United States is actually a front man for the deep state and is not in control of foreign policy or military policy.

Napolitano:
Even if that human being is someone as self-confident and headstrong as Donald Trump.

Doctorow: 19:40
Well, they have seen him for four years, and they were not pleased with what they saw. because relations between the two countries tumbled steadily downward during that whole period. Therefore, they do not give this new Trump the benefit of doubt. And his absolute silence to present on this whole question of the ATACMSs’ use, or as you said, the handover of nuclear weapons to Ukraine. His silence on these issues does not give them confidence that he is worth waiting for.

Napolitano: 20:20
Does the Kremlin think that Joe Biden and his friends who are elites in Western Europe either want to start World War III or want to extend substantially the Ukrainian conflict so that a catastrophe is dropped into the lap of Donald Trump? Does the Kremlin believe that?

Doctorow:
I think they do. And they have good reason to believe it. Just even yesterday’s reporting by the Brussels Bureau Chief of Russian state television news, Anastasia Popova. She was outside the European institutions where there was a discussion, or rather outside of NATO buildings, where there is discussion of what comes next, the meeting of the senior diplomats from the NATO countries on what to do next over Ukraine.

And all of the– there were no direct briefings to the press, but there were whispers coming out, and none of it was encouraging to the Russians. So the Europeans, with the exception of Slovakia and Hungary, are remaining steadfast with the absurd policies that they held to before Trump’s victory.

Napolitano: 21:54
Do the Russians, does the Kremlin analyze the thinking of Donald Trump’s likely national security team? And if they do, do they see them as just a Republican version of neocons?

Doctorow:
They don’t speak of it in those terms. What they speak about it is the question of realism versus ideology-driven. Of course, the ideology in question is neocon, but what bothers them most is the absence of realism or a an ability to absorb what the real world is doing around them. That is what alarms the Russian elites who are part of the entourage of Putin.

Napolitano: 22:46
Here’s President Putin himself shortly before the Oreshnik, no, no, after the Oreshnik was fired, arguing that “we are entitled to strike back anybody that strikes at us or finances it”. Cut number two.

Putin: (voice over)
We consider ourselves entitled to use our weapons against military facilities of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities. I recommend that the ruling elites of those countries that are hatching plans to use their military contingents against Russia seriously think about this.

Napolitano: 23:23
Does the West take him seriously? I mean surely they should, Professor.

Doctorow:
I don’t think they do. There’s still this under- appreciation of Russian might. There is still this residual thinking about Russia as it was on its knees or on its back during the 1990s. They cannot fathom that the country could have reconstituted itself. They cannot begin to imagine that this “thug” could have saved his country and is really a national hero. It’s beyond their comprehension, which is terribly sad. But the Russians take that all in.

Napolitano: 24:05
Does the Russian– forgive me if this is naive– does the Russian government have a deep state? Does it have a part of the government that has unseen powers, is not accountable, doesn’t change, gets its way, or does Vladimir Putin control everything?

Doctorow:
Well, he doesn’t control everything. And there was a misunderstanding. He’s spoken of as a dictator, which is utter nonsense, not because they have elections. Yes, they have elections, but because there are other forces in, as there should be and would be in a country of 145 million with many competing, conflicting economic and political interests. Of course he is a politician. He has to juggle competing claims on resources and on direction of the country.

25:01
So this man is a remarkable juggler of competing interests. He never wiped out the liberals from the people whom he inherited when he took over from Boris Yeltsin. They are finally establishing a new vision of what the state’s purpose is. That is a kind of a market economy that is driven by certain social requirements. It is a dirigism in the directed economy in the French style. This creation of the national sense, the national purpose has taken 30 years to achieve. The war has hastened it.

Napolitano: 25:52
Professor Doctorow, thank you very much, my dear friend. I know you’re in Europe, but happy Thanksgiving from one American to another, from my family to yours. Thank you very much for accommodating our time schedule in this shortened week. And thank you for the privilege of allowing me to pick your brain as you do every week. I hope you’ll join us again next week as well.

Doctorow: 26:16
Well thanks, and happy Thanksgiving to you and to the viewers of this program.

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/11/27/ ... mber-2024/

Well, it seems the liberals wiped themselves out. And while there's no denying the dominance of capitalism given the presence of powerful oligarchs it seems that war like imminent death has a tendency to focus one's mind and priorities come to the fore. I might despise Putin for betraying the USSR but there is no denying that he is a Russian patriot.

*******

Invested in Cyprus
November 28, 13:55

Image

There is sadness in the camp of those who like to "invest in Cyprus" today.

The Cypriot authorities have deprived 77 foreigners of citizenship, who received passports under the republic's investment program. Their list of names was published by the Cypriot newspaper Politis.

In particular, the founder of Rusal Oleg Deripaska, shareholder of Alfa Group Alexey Kuzmichev, founder of the Safmar Group Mikhail Gutseriev, as well as the former owner of Probusinessbank Alexander Zheleznyak were deprived of Cypriot citizenship. The list includes seven Russian businessmen who were included in the Forbes billionaire rating for 2024.

They invested in Cyprus, but should have invested in Russia. Now we are in the very stage of swallowing dust.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9522313.html

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 29, 2024 4:17 pm

Russian Defense Minister Visits North Korea

Image
Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov (R) arrives in North Korea, Nov. 29, 2024. X/ @Newsweek

November 29, 2024 Hour: 7:43 am

On Nov, 9, President Putin ratified the comprehensive strategic partnership agreement signed with Pyongyang.

On Friday, Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov arrived in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, on an official visit.

North Korean Defense Minister Gen. No Kwang-chol welcomed Belousov at Sunan Airport, near Pyongyang.

During this visit, Belousov will meet with North Korean military and political leaders, following Russia’s recent signing of a mutual defense treaty with North Korea.

On November 9, Russian President Vladimir Putin ratified the comprehensive strategic partnership agreement signed between Moscow and Pyongyang in June of this year, which includes a clause for mutual military assistance in the event of aggression.

JUST IN: 🇷🇺🇰🇵 Russian President Putin finalizes a strategic partnership treaty with North Korea, establishing a mutual defense pact. pic.twitter.com/OWhRBdq7f3

— BRICS News (@BRICSinfo) November 9, 2024


In recent months, Ukraine has claimed that about 11,000 North Korean troops are present in Russian territory and that North Korea has sent military equipment to Russia.

Some of these North Korean troops are supposedly fighting against the Ukrainian army in Russia’s Kursk region, which has been partially occupied by Kyiv’s forces since August.

Russia, which has so far neither confirmed nor denied the presence of North Korean troops on its territory, asserts that the treaty with North Korea is defensive and is not directed against the security of third countries.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/russian- ... rth-korea/

******

Attempt of Maidan in Georgia
November 29, 11:01

Image

Last night in Georgia there was a kind of attempt at a Maidan.

1. The protests began in the evening. They were also attended by a French granny, who is currently the president of the Georgians and who declared herself the only legitimate authority in the country.
2. The statements of the Georgian leadership about freezing Georgia's accession to the EU and the refusal of grants (!) were used as a pretext for starting a street attack.
3. The police acted decisively, using water cannons, batons and gas canisters. The attackers tried to build barricades and set fire to garbage on the pavement. They also tried to shine laser pointers in the eyes of the security forces.
4. Several dozen people were detained. 18 police officers were injured. As a result, the crowd was pushed back from the government buildings and control over the city center was maintained.
5. A continuation is planned for today. The West will not give up so easily and will stir up a Maidan in Tbilisi in order to overthrow the current government. If they fail, then Georgia will essentially go free-floating for the next few years.

Which is ironic. In fact, the police in Tbilisi are fighting for a free Georgia and its right to choose its own path. And the street crowd is fighting for Georgia's slavery under the Western boot. This is what a "fight for freedom" is.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9523986.html

Voting for the new 1000-ruble banknote
November 29, 14:56

Image

Voting has opened on the Central Bank website regarding the image for the updated 1,000 ruble banknote. The banknote will be dedicated to the Volga Federal District. It is proposed to choose from a large number of local attractions. You can choose only one of the options.

You can vote here https://cbr.ru/cash_circulation/simvoly ... knot/1000/

I voted for the monument from Samara.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9524573.html

Google Translator

******

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service Warned About A 100k-Strong NATO Intervention In Ukraine

Andrew Korybko
Nov 29, 2024

Image

NATO might be willing to test Putin’s patience by crossing yet another of Russia’s perceived red lines in spite of its updated nuclear doctrine and new Oreshniks.

The NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine might be on the brink of an unprecedented escalation that could easily spiral out of control if Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) is correct in claiming that NATO is planning a 100,000-strong military intervention in Ukraine under the guise of peacekeepers. The purpose is to freeze the conflict, presumably by having these troops function as tripwires for deterring a Russian attack that could spark World War III, and then rebuild Ukraine’s military-industrial complex (MIC).

SVR revealed that Poland will have control over Western Ukraine (like it did during the interwar period); Romania will be responsible for the Black Sea coast (which it seized during World War II via and ruled as the “Transnistria Governorate”); the UK will lord over Kiev and the north; while Germany will deploy its forces to the center and east of the country. The latter’s Rhinemetall will lead the efforts to rebuild Ukraine’s MIC by investing heavily, dispatching specialists, and providing high-performance equipment.

Another important detail is that “NATO is already deploying training centers in Ukraine, through which it is planned to drag at least a million mobilized Ukrainians”, while police functions will be carried out via Ukrainian nationalists that SVR likens to World War II-era Sonderkommandos. The last part is intriguing since it raises the question of why 100,000 NATO troops/peacekeepers would be required. Only a fraction of that is needed for tripwire and training purposes so perhaps those numbers are inaccurate.

In any case, this latest move isn’t surprising, and readers can review the following analyses to learn why:

* 1 November: “Trump 2.0 would be no easy ride for Vladimir Putin”

* 7 November: “Here’s What Trump’s Peace Plan Might Look Like & Why Russia Might Agree To It”

* 8 November: “View from Moscow: Russia tepidly welcomes Trump’s return”

* 9 November: “The Clock Is Ticking For Russia To Achieve Its Maximum Goals In The Ukrainian Conflict”

* 10 November: “10 Obstacles To Trump’s Reported Plan For Western/NATO Peacekeepers In Ukraine”

* 11 November: “Five Reasons Why Trump Should Revive The Draft Russian-Ukrainian Peace Treaty”

* 15 November: “Trump Probably Really Does Appreciate Two Points From Zelensky’s ‘Victory Plan’”

* 18 November: “The Moment Of Truth: How Will Russia Respond To Ukraine’s Use Of Western Long-Range Missiles?”

* 20 November: “Russia’s Updated Nuke Doctrine Aims To Deter Unacceptable Provocations From NATO”

* 22 November: “Putin Is Finally Climbing The Escalation Ladder”

The last analysis also includes a map at the end depicting the most realistic best-case scenario for Russia.

To summarize, Biden is beating Trump to the punch by “escalating to de-escalate” on better terms for the US, which Russia’s updated nuclear doctrine and the historic first use of the MIRV-capable Oreshnik hypersonic medium-range missile in combat are meant to deter. The 10 obstacles described above still stand, however, so it’s unclear exactly how viable NATO’s reportedly planned conventional intervention in Ukraine (regardless of the numbers involved and the pretext relied upon for justifying it) actually is.

Nevertheless, the fact that SVR warned the world about it suggests that it’s no longer the far-fetched scenario that it was thought to be, though the clock is also now ticking for NATO too since the possible rise to power of a populist conservative-nationalist in Romania next month could spoil these plans. NATO might therefore intervene before 21 December when that figure will take office if he wins. If he loses, then they might bide their time to prepare better, possibly placing this responsibility on Trump’s lap.

At any rate, SVR’s claim that NATO is setting up training centers in Ukraine shows that the bloc is still expanding there. If Russia doesn’t target these facilities, which could spark World War III, then it might have to accept as a fait accompli what SVR just warned about. In that event, as proposed in the “escalation ladder” analysis above, Russia might then reach a deal allowing NATO to safely enter Ukraine up to the Dnieper if Ukraine first demilitarizes everything east of it and north of Russia’s new regions.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/russias- ... ce-service

NATO in Ukraine would render all the loss of life and destruction in vain. Is that what little Andy wants?

A Top Russian Thinker Described His Country’s Differences With India On Eurasian Security

Andrew Korybko
Nov 29, 2024

Image

Russia and China see eye-to-eye on more nowadays than Russia and India do, yet both pairs of strategic partnerships are equally important for Russia, thus making the second’s continued strength more impressive than the first’s.

Russia and India are close strategic partners who’ve jointly accelerated multipolar processes since the global systemic transition began to unprecedentedly speed up in 2022. No serious disagreements exist between them, but they still don’t see eye-to-eye on everything, which is normal for any pair of partners. One issue on which they have divergent views is collective security in Eurasia, which former Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council Andrey Kortunov recently elaborated on.

In his article titled “Collective Security in (Eur)Asia: Views from Moscow and from New Delhi”, he identifies several differences between them. The first is that Russia believes that the core security challenge on the supercontinent comes from overseas powers, previously the UK and now the US, while India believes that they’re integral to preventing “unipolarity in Asia”. They also therefore have naturally different approaches to the US and China, with Russia seeking to balance the former and India the latter.

Kortunov predicts that “These challenges are likely to have a lasting impact on Russia’s and India’s foreign policy agendas and might also affect their bilateral relations.” Then there’s their differences over the Indo-Pacific concept. Russia considers this to be a means for containing China and subordinating the broader region as American vassals while India reminds Russia that it was a jointly proposed Indo-Japanese initiative. It’s not anti-Russian, and India can serve as Russia’s “entrance ticket to the club”.

Collective security is the third difference between Russia and India. The first believes that it should embrace the entire supercontinent and be institutionalized while the second believes that it should be regionally focused without formal commitments. Building upon this, the fourth difference is what Kortunov described as Russia’s deductive paradigm versus India’s inductive one, or forming specific conclusions from general premises as opposed to general theories from specific observations.

He doesn’t mention it, but a relevant example is Russia assuming that the US always tries to advance its hegemony so the Quad is therefore supposedly a hegemonic platform, while India contests that characterization due to it remaining strategically autonomous in spite of being a Quad member. Likewise, Russia assumes that China can’t be hegemonic since it’s being contained by the hegemonic US, while India also contests that characterization since it considers China’s border behavior to be hegemonic.

The fifth difference is that Russia and India take different approaches to the seemingly interconnected concepts of security and development. Russia believes that they go hand in hand, while India showed that close security ties with India don’t automatically translate into close economic cooperation, just like tensions with China didn’t lead to a reduction in trade between them. And finally, Kortunov concluded that India and Russia embody an International Relations paradox about rising and established powers.

As a rising power, India would ordinarily be expected to support revisionist objectives, but it actually favors the status quo with only gradual reforms. By contrast, Russia is an established power that would ordinarily be expected to favor the status quo, but instead if supports revisionist objectives. He doesn’t elaborate on the significance of this observation but it’s definitely worthy of deeper contemplation and research by interested experts since it suggests serious shortcomings in International Relations theory.

Reviewing Kortunov’s insight, what stands out is that the six primary differences between Russia and India on the subject of Eurasian security haven’t harmed their bilateral cooperation, which continues to expand and reshape the world at this pivotal moment in the systemic transition. These divergencies are due to their different political histories in recent centuries, different roles within the international system at present, and different strategic cultures that consequently formed as a result.

Nevertheless, these differences have had no adverse effect on their ties since the geographic distance between them prevents such from materializing due to the absence of areas where their divergencies could lead to diametrically opposed and fiercely competing interests, unlike China and India. In fact, their differences might have even helped expand their ties since each recognizes the other as an important Eurasian stakeholder, thus they need to cooperate even more closely to advance shared interests.

Accordingly, while Alt-Media pundits describe Russian-Chinese ties as the best example of pragmatic ties in today’s world, the argument can therefore be made that Russian-Indian ties are an even better example of this due to them remaining strong in spite of their differences. Russia and China see eye-to-eye on more nowadays than Russia and India do, yet both pairs of strategic partnerships are equally important for Russia, thus making the second’s continued strength more impressive than the first’s.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/a-top-ru ... cribed-his

That final paragraph is idiotic, Can little Andy not read a map or trade statistics?

'ABC': Anything But China, eh Andy?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Sun Dec 01, 2024 6:24 pm

DPRK invited to military parade on May 9
November 30, 13:25

Image

A parade box of North Korean soldiers may march at the May 9 parade.
An official invitation has already been sent to Comrade Kim Jong-un.
So next year, North Koreans may march on Red Square.
In fact, the Red Army helped the Koreans gain freedom and independence from Japanese occupation in 1945.

It would be logical to hold a military parade next year at the events marking the 80th anniversary of the victory over imperialist Japan and invite Koreans and Chinese to attend.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9525911.html

******

Seymour Hersh on Biden White House Decision to Approve Long Range Missile Strikes on Russia (Excerpt)
November 30, 2024
By Seymour Hersh, Substack, 11/26/24

…I have been told that the strategic implications of the president’s escalation—both Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin have nuclear bombs at their fingertips—had not been fully analyzed inside the Pentagon, and that some important offices, sure to have different views about escalation, were never asked for their input….

…Trump’s casualty numbers [on the Ukraine war that he cited in his debate with Kamala Harris] might have been off, but his consistency, especially when pressed, adds to the credibility of what I have been learning in recent weeks: that an understanding about the mechanisms for ending the war has been debated and discussed and even tentatively outlined between informal advisors to Trump and Putin and their teams. I was told by one American that “the lines are open” between those representing the two men, with some vague “assurances sent and received.”

I have also been told by experts here in Washington who are knowledgeable about Russian political affairs that Putin does not want to make a settlement with Zelensky “until he is good and ready”—meaning that he is going to wait until the currently very successful Russian surge targeted at Donetsk and Kursk plays out. There is said to be concern in Moscow about extensive “stay-behind” intelligence and operational activity in Ukraine that is believed to be organized by American and British agencies.

What is going on now, one American expert told me, is an attempt to change the long-standing American support for containment, exemplified by the Biden administration’s instinctive disdain for the governments of Russia and China, which marred the initial meetings with each in 2021…

…This is not a brief for Putin, a former Soviet intelligence agent who is brutal to his political opponents and runs a government that is quick to put foreign journalists in jail. He is also considered by many in the American intelligence community to be a competent and informed leader.

Trump’s agenda, I was told, was to find a way once in office not to be haunted by worries about contacts with those who dissent from America’s foreign policy. Hence the idea of working more with military-to-military negotiations as a start. One American told me that “reality over politics and history over headlines” would be a fresh way to close out the murderous war between Russia and Ukraine…

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/11/sey ... a-excerpt/

Russia Matters: US Officials Predict Ukraine Could Be Pushed Into Talks ‘Within a Few Months’
November 30, 2024
Russia Matters, 11/27/24

Many U.S. officials now privately concede that within a few months, Ukraine could be pushed into negotiations with Russia to end the war and that it could be forced to give up territory, WP reported on Nov. 26. Speaking publicly on that day, Anthony Blinken acknowledged that Ukraine might end up entering into talks with Russia sometime soon, according to NYT. A statement, which Blinken and his G-7 colleagues adopted after their meeting on Nov. 26, contained no explicit calls for peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. Meanwhile, a Pew poll released one day before the G-7 event shows that Americans are split on whether the U.S. has a responsibility to help Ukraine defend itself from Russia’s invasion. Half of Americans say the U.S. is responsible, while 47% say it is not, according to Pew’s Nov. 12–17 poll.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/11/rus ... ew-months/

******

Is the ruble worth anything? Why is there no panic in Russia over its 7% depreciation against the dollar in the past week?

In his press conference at the end of his two-day state visit to Kazakhstan, President Putin was asked about the sharp devaluation of the ruble against the dollar and euro that was occurring during the week. By my estimation the ruble exchange rate worsened by about 7% in just a few days’ time.

The question was no doubt anticipated by Putin, but nonetheless he did not give a definitive answer. Instead, he mentioned various determinants of the exchange rate at any given moment, including the latest price of the price of a barrel of oil on export markets (which has fallen below the critical $70 mark), the actual and anticipated rate of domestic inflation (now at 8% and presumed to be falling), and the seasonality of tax payments by industrialists.

Meanwhile, Western observers have been hoping that the exchange rate deterioration reflects some serious hidden weakness in the Russian economy and/or the effectiveness of the latest US financial sanctions which once again cut off Gazprombank, Russia’s leading bank for settlement of hydrocarbon exports from the international banking system, making it difficult to realize proceeds from sales abroad.

While the causes for the worsening exchange rate cannot be identified today with certainty, political observers in the West speculate on some hoped-for revolt of the oligarchs and broader population against the loss in value of the ruble, the main currency of their savings.

I say ‘main currency’ because Russian citizens at all levels of society enjoy the possibility of opening bank accounts in Chinese Yuan and other fairly stable currencies. They also can open accounts denominated in precious metals including gold, silver, platinum and palladium. And they can buy and receive in their hands bars of pure gold, the smallest ingots weighing as little as a quarter of an ounce.

Of course, for the general population in Russia there is not much experience with Yuan or with precious metals, just as there is not much experience with the stock market, whether in mutual funds, Exchange Traded Shares on the Moscow bourse or similar financial instruments which the Russian retail banks are now heavily promoting to their clients.

But what they can do is take advantage of the eye watering interest being paid by Russia’s leading banks on both time deposits and on special interest-bearing savings accounts that have no limitations on deposits or withdrawals and compound interest on the daily balances. The time deposits looked like a very good deal when they locked in 10% annual interest on 12 month accounts some six months ago. However, as of today, the special unrestricted savings accounts have flown past that level to the present-day 22% being offered. These rates rise and fall month by the month.

How can the banks offer these incredible interest rates on current accounts? Keep in mind that the prime lending rate of the Bank of Russia is now 21%. I assume that banks get a still better return on consumer credit that they extend to holders of their Mir cards or their automobile loans.

The stated reason for the Bank of Russia’s sky-high prime rate is to tame inflation and bring it down from 8% to half that number. Indeed, it is a tribute to the Central Bank that it has kept domestic inflation at ‘just’ 8% given the tight labor market in Russia which has already doubled the salaries of ordinary working people in the past 12 months. The labor market is tight because of the vastly increased production levels of the military industrial complex, which is now running on three daily shifts and which has revived manufacturing in the many one-factory towns in Central Russia that were moribund since the crash of the 1990s. Then we must consider as well the removal from the work force of many volunteers to serve in the Special Military Operation under contracts that begin with a 10,000 euro payment upon signing the contract.

There are many economically savvy commentators within Russia who decry the high prime rate for strangling the economy and putting in jeopardy the 4% growth in GDP that the Putin government has targeted. But the loss of affordable bank loans to industry and commerce under present conditions of the prime rate is at least partially offset by government subventions to the military industry and to favored sectors of the consumer economy.

In fact, I see the sense of the sky-high prime in that it has led to sky high interest rates being offered to the Russian public on their bank deposits. This surely has the effect of pulling cash out of the consumption column and putting it into the savings column, thereby reducing the inflationary pressures in the economy very substantially.

To be sure, the interest paid on bank deposits can only have an impact on the family budgets of those who have money left over at the end of each month to invest in savings accounts. That is a minority of the population, given that many Russian families live from month to month on their salaries.

The majority of the population may not profit from eye-watering interest payments on savings, but do profit from inflation being kept under control. These same people at the bottom of the financial ladder, especially pensioners and young families, receive many support payments that are regularly inflation-adjusted upwards. For none of these people does the exchange rate to the dollar or euro have any practical relevance. Whereas for those wealthier strata of the population who would be anxious about the loss in value of their rubles when they travel abroad or purchase big ticket items like imported cars, the interest on their bank accounts or the growth in value of their gold bars in safe deposit boxes should provide solace.

*****

I close today’s ‘diary entry’ with a remark on the much-discussed Russian attack on Dnepropetrovsk with its new hypersonic missile Oreshnik that has set tongues wagging in both Western mainstream and alternative media this past week.

One name has been missing in all accounts of the Russian ‘shock and awe’ action: that of the Russian political scientist Sergei Karaganov, who in July 2023 touched off a domestic and international controversy when he called upon Vladimir Putin to authorize a ‘demonstration’ attack on one or another West European country using tactical nuclear arms to bring the Collective West to its senses and put an end to the hubristic confidence that Russia was a paper tiger than can be pushed around.

At that time, some Russia-cheerleaders in the West believed that Karaganov had a good point, that Putin’s forbearance, his turning the other cheek after each escalatory move by the West was leading only to more dangerous conflict ahead, including full-blown nuclear war when Russia’s back was to the wall.

We now see that Vladimir Putin knew better what was in the Russian pipeline of weapons systems that could achieve the objective of ‘shock and awe’ without opening the Pandora’s box of nuclear weapons: it was precisely the high precision and vastly destructive Oreshkin, for which, as he has pointedly said, the West has no defense for years to come.

My conclusion is that there is some space between despair that Putin is encouraging escalation by holding back and despair that the Russians have also gone mad and are leading the way to Armageddon.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/12/01/ ... past-week/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Sun Dec 01, 2024 6:25 pm

DPRK invited to military parade on May 9
November 30, 13:25

Image

A parade box of North Korean soldiers may march at the May 9 parade.
An official invitation has already been sent to Comrade Kim Jong-un.
So next year, North Koreans may march on Red Square.
In fact, the Red Army helped the Koreans gain freedom and independence from Japanese occupation in 1945.

It would be logical to hold a military parade next year at the events marking the 80th anniversary of the victory over imperialist Japan and invite Koreans and Chinese to attend.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9525911.html

******

Seymour Hersh on Biden White House Decision to Approve Long Range Missile Strikes on Russia (Excerpt)
November 30, 2024
By Seymour Hersh, Substack, 11/26/24

…I have been told that the strategic implications of the president’s escalation—both Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin have nuclear bombs at their fingertips—had not been fully analyzed inside the Pentagon, and that some important offices, sure to have different views about escalation, were never asked for their input….

…Trump’s casualty numbers [on the Ukraine war that he cited in his debate with Kamala Harris] might have been off, but his consistency, especially when pressed, adds to the credibility of what I have been learning in recent weeks: that an understanding about the mechanisms for ending the war has been debated and discussed and even tentatively outlined between informal advisors to Trump and Putin and their teams. I was told by one American that “the lines are open” between those representing the two men, with some vague “assurances sent and received.”

I have also been told by experts here in Washington who are knowledgeable about Russian political affairs that Putin does not want to make a settlement with Zelensky “until he is good and ready”—meaning that he is going to wait until the currently very successful Russian surge targeted at Donetsk and Kursk plays out. There is said to be concern in Moscow about extensive “stay-behind” intelligence and operational activity in Ukraine that is believed to be organized by American and British agencies.

What is going on now, one American expert told me, is an attempt to change the long-standing American support for containment, exemplified by the Biden administration’s instinctive disdain for the governments of Russia and China, which marred the initial meetings with each in 2021…

…This is not a brief for Putin, a former Soviet intelligence agent who is brutal to his political opponents and runs a government that is quick to put foreign journalists in jail. He is also considered by many in the American intelligence community to be a competent and informed leader.

Trump’s agenda, I was told, was to find a way once in office not to be haunted by worries about contacts with those who dissent from America’s foreign policy. Hence the idea of working more with military-to-military negotiations as a start. One American told me that “reality over politics and history over headlines” would be a fresh way to close out the murderous war between Russia and Ukraine…

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/11/sey ... a-excerpt/

Russia Matters: US Officials Predict Ukraine Could Be Pushed Into Talks ‘Within a Few Months’
November 30, 2024
Russia Matters, 11/27/24

Many U.S. officials now privately concede that within a few months, Ukraine could be pushed into negotiations with Russia to end the war and that it could be forced to give up territory, WP reported on Nov. 26. Speaking publicly on that day, Anthony Blinken acknowledged that Ukraine might end up entering into talks with Russia sometime soon, according to NYT. A statement, which Blinken and his G-7 colleagues adopted after their meeting on Nov. 26, contained no explicit calls for peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. Meanwhile, a Pew poll released one day before the G-7 event shows that Americans are split on whether the U.S. has a responsibility to help Ukraine defend itself from Russia’s invasion. Half of Americans say the U.S. is responsible, while 47% say it is not, according to Pew’s Nov. 12–17 poll.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/11/rus ... ew-months/

******

Is the ruble worth anything? Why is there no panic in Russia over its 7% depreciation against the dollar in the past week?

In his press conference at the end of his two-day state visit to Kazakhstan, President Putin was asked about the sharp devaluation of the ruble against the dollar and euro that was occurring during the week. By my estimation the ruble exchange rate worsened by about 7% in just a few days’ time.

The question was no doubt anticipated by Putin, but nonetheless he did not give a definitive answer. Instead, he mentioned various determinants of the exchange rate at any given moment, including the latest price of the price of a barrel of oil on export markets (which has fallen below the critical $70 mark), the actual and anticipated rate of domestic inflation (now at 8% and presumed to be falling), and the seasonality of tax payments by industrialists.

Meanwhile, Western observers have been hoping that the exchange rate deterioration reflects some serious hidden weakness in the Russian economy and/or the effectiveness of the latest US financial sanctions which once again cut off Gazprombank, Russia’s leading bank for settlement of hydrocarbon exports from the international banking system, making it difficult to realize proceeds from sales abroad.

While the causes for the worsening exchange rate cannot be identified today with certainty, political observers in the West speculate on some hoped-for revolt of the oligarchs and broader population against the loss in value of the ruble, the main currency of their savings.

I say ‘main currency’ because Russian citizens at all levels of society enjoy the possibility of opening bank accounts in Chinese Yuan and other fairly stable currencies. They also can open accounts denominated in precious metals including gold, silver, platinum and palladium. And they can buy and receive in their hands bars of pure gold, the smallest ingots weighing as little as a quarter of an ounce.

Of course, for the general population in Russia there is not much experience with Yuan or with precious metals, just as there is not much experience with the stock market, whether in mutual funds, Exchange Traded Shares on the Moscow bourse or similar financial instruments which the Russian retail banks are now heavily promoting to their clients.

But what they can do is take advantage of the eye watering interest being paid by Russia’s leading banks on both time deposits and on special interest-bearing savings accounts that have no limitations on deposits or withdrawals and compound interest on the daily balances. The time deposits looked like a very good deal when they locked in 10% annual interest on 12 month accounts some six months ago. However, as of today, the special unrestricted savings accounts have flown past that level to the present-day 22% being offered. These rates rise and fall month by the month.

How can the banks offer these incredible interest rates on current accounts? Keep in mind that the prime lending rate of the Bank of Russia is now 21%. I assume that banks get a still better return on consumer credit that they extend to holders of their Mir cards or their automobile loans.

The stated reason for the Bank of Russia’s sky-high prime rate is to tame inflation and bring it down from 8% to half that number. Indeed, it is a tribute to the Central Bank that it has kept domestic inflation at ‘just’ 8% given the tight labor market in Russia which has already doubled the salaries of ordinary working people in the past 12 months. The labor market is tight because of the vastly increased production levels of the military industrial complex, which is now running on three daily shifts and which has revived manufacturing in the many one-factory towns in Central Russia that were moribund since the crash of the 1990s. Then we must consider as well the removal from the work force of many volunteers to serve in the Special Military Operation under contracts that begin with a 10,000 euro payment upon signing the contract.

There are many economically savvy commentators within Russia who decry the high prime rate for strangling the economy and putting in jeopardy the 4% growth in GDP that the Putin government has targeted. But the loss of affordable bank loans to industry and commerce under present conditions of the prime rate is at least partially offset by government subventions to the military industry and to favored sectors of the consumer economy.

In fact, I see the sense of the sky-high prime in that it has led to sky high interest rates being offered to the Russian public on their bank deposits. This surely has the effect of pulling cash out of the consumption column and putting it into the savings column, thereby reducing the inflationary pressures in the economy very substantially.

To be sure, the interest paid on bank deposits can only have an impact on the family budgets of those who have money left over at the end of each month to invest in savings accounts. That is a minority of the population, given that many Russian families live from month to month on their salaries.

The majority of the population may not profit from eye-watering interest payments on savings, but do profit from inflation being kept under control. These same people at the bottom of the financial ladder, especially pensioners and young families, receive many support payments that are regularly inflation-adjusted upwards. For none of these people does the exchange rate to the dollar or euro have any practical relevance. Whereas for those wealthier strata of the population who would be anxious about the loss in value of their rubles when they travel abroad or purchase big ticket items like imported cars, the interest on their bank accounts or the growth in value of their gold bars in safe deposit boxes should provide solace.

*****

I close today’s ‘diary entry’ with a remark on the much-discussed Russian attack on Dnepropetrovsk with its new hypersonic missile Oreshnik that has set tongues wagging in both Western mainstream and alternative media this past week.

One name has been missing in all accounts of the Russian ‘shock and awe’ action: that of the Russian political scientist Sergei Karaganov, who in July 2023 touched off a domestic and international controversy when he called upon Vladimir Putin to authorize a ‘demonstration’ attack on one or another West European country using tactical nuclear arms to bring the Collective West to its senses and put an end to the hubristic confidence that Russia was a paper tiger than can be pushed around.

At that time, some Russia-cheerleaders in the West believed that Karaganov had a good point, that Putin’s forbearance, his turning the other cheek after each escalatory move by the West was leading only to more dangerous conflict ahead, including full-blown nuclear war when Russia’s back was to the wall.

We now see that Vladimir Putin knew better what was in the Russian pipeline of weapons systems that could achieve the objective of ‘shock and awe’ without opening the Pandora’s box of nuclear weapons: it was precisely the high precision and vastly destructive Oreshkin, for which, as he has pointedly said, the West has no defense for years to come.

My conclusion is that there is some space between despair that Putin is encouraging escalation by holding back and despair that the Russians have also gone mad and are leading the way to Armageddon.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/12/01/ ... past-week/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Mon Dec 02, 2024 4:17 pm

THE STURGESS INQUIRY ENDS IN FOREIGN OFFICE WHIMPER, BANG OF NOVICHOK LIES

Image

by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

The Novichok show trial ended its public hearings last week in London with the revelation that it will not name the chemical constituents of the poison used in the attempted killing of Sergei and Yulia Skripal on March 4, 2018, and in the cause of death of Dawn Sturgess on June 30, 2018.

By doing this, by keeping the chemical formula combination of the poison a state secret, independent British toxicologists say there is no evidence that a Russian-made Novichok was used; and that, instead, a British or US-made Novichok was readily available in 2018, and this was as likely to have been the killer weapon.

Revealed earlier in the hearings by a doctor at Yulia Skripal’s bedside four days after the attack, Skripal believed she and her father had been hit by a poison spray as they ate lunch at a restaurant just before they collapsed outside. Skripal’s evidence pointed to a British operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal before he escaped back to Moscow, and then cover up by planting fabricated Russian clues at the crime scenes, and in the blood test reports of the victims.

Weapon, crime scene, victim pathology, killer identification, motive – all faked.

The toxicology experts point out that in 2018 scientists working on this type of organophosphate poison had revealed synthesis, production, testing and stocking of A232 and A234 Novichok in the US Army’s chemical warfare centre, known by its location as the Edgewood Arsenal; and at its British counterpart and partner, the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), known as Porton Down. The Iranian military establishment had also done the same by 2016. After the Skripal case in 2018, military chemists in South Korea and the Czech Republic revealed how they had produced and tested their own formulas for Novichok.

By openly publishing their Novichok chemistry, the Americans, Iranians, South Koreans, and Czechs have proved that making, detecting and naming Novichok is a transparent process, not difficult to verify forensically in a criminal investigation or court. This, British scientists now say, means that the refusal of government officials and the Sturgess Inquiry judge, Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley, lead image, right), to name the Novichok alleged to have been the Russian murder weapon, is evidence of a scheme of British fabrication and coverup.

Mark Allen (lead image, left) of the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) was the last witness to testify before Hughes at the Inquiry’s public hearings. As head of defence and intelligence, he was also the official in charge of coordinating the intelligence and military units involved in the attack on the Skripals; and then in the police and media coverup employed to pin the crime on the Russian military intelligence agency GRU, and on President Vladimir Putin.

Allen’s testimony on November 28 identified as his direct superior Sir Mark Sedwill, the national security advisor reporting to then-Prime Minister Theresa May and then-Foreign Minister Boris Johnson.

“As SRO [Senior Responsible Owner] for Russia,” Allen said, “when we’re dealing with Russia strategy, the Government strategy towards Russia, I bring together all government departments, including representatives of the agencies as well, to ensure that we’re all essentially using all of our levers, all of our information, all of our understanding is pointing in the same direction and we’re being coherent. Then where there are situations where something unexpected arises, what you might call a crisis of some sort, then I will also chair that sort of grouping to work out what our collective response should be.”

“I act, not as the Foreign Office’s DG [director-general], but as the government’s senior official. Page 17 Asked to substantiate public statements at the time by May, Johnson and Sedwill that only Russia could have made and used the Novichok weapon, Allen was unable.

“… it is safe to say that any modern chemical laboratory is capable of synthesising Novichok. In contrast to what you have said about it being a state — really only something that can be done at the state level. Is there anything that you can add to this debate, Mr Allen? A. I don’t think that is a view that is shared in the scientific community, or in the OPCW.” Page 41.

This was a lie; Hughes let it go unchallenged.

“LORD HUGHES: As far as you know, is it something which has been asserted either by Mr Mirzayanov or by the other publications of American, Czech, Italian, et cetera, researchers?

“A [Allen]: I haven’t read those in detail, sir, so I couldn’t say.

“LORD HUGHES: All right, thank you.” Page 41.

“What’s in a name like Novichok? Why the coverup?” responds an independent British chemist and expert on organophosphates. “If the full molecular readout was exposed publicly from the blood sampling of the Skripals and Sturgess — also later of [Alexei] Navalny — then it would be obvious that some constituents are missing. And because they are missing from the name or the reported chemical formula, then identification of Novichok cannot be made. All we are left with is an assumption covered up and concealed in secret. The scientific name for that is a lie.”

Allen had presented a written statement ahead of last week’s appearance. The government, he said, “places particular weight on the fact that the weapon used in the attack on Mr Skripal was a fourth generation liquid nerve agent of the class known as Novichoks. This class of nerve agent is known to have been developed by the Soviet Union, with the Russian Federation inheriting and developing that programme…The nerve agent used in Salisbury was identified by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), and later independently confirmed by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)…Both DSTL and OPCW separately concluded that this same nerve agent caused the death of Ms Sturgess…”

This chain of Allen’s evidence confirms only that out of a class of chemicals tagged Novichok, one chemical tagged Novichok by Porton Down was found in blood testing of the Skripals and of Sturgess, and then matched with an unnamed chemical by the OPCW in The Hague, and by the Swiss laboratory, Labor Spiez, which OPCW contracted to do the testing (Allen concealed this). Allen’s say-so does not prove that the samples were either matching, or Russian in origin, or even the chemical formula chemists know to be Novichok.

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Source: https://johnhelmer.net/

Allen’s written statement and hearing testimony confirmed that to substantiate his claims, the DSTL Porton Down, OPCW and other evidence is being kept secret. “To the extent issues cannot be articulated fully in public, they will be addressed fully before the inquiry through its CLOSED processes.”

Counsel for Hughes in the inquiry, Andrew O’Connor KC, then told the hearing that Allen and Sedwill had revealed all their evidence, but responsibility for keeping it secret rested on Hughes. “Q. Are you saying there that there is some detail about these matters that cannot be addressed in a public forum? A. Yes, I am. Q. Can you confirm to us that all relevant detail has been provided to the Inquiry, but that as a result of restriction orders made by the Chair, the consequence of those is that some detail will have to be dealt with in closed session rather than open session? A. Yes, I understand that’s the case, yes.” Page 21.

O’Connor told Allen that although the OPCW report had not in fact identified Novichok, the organisation had relied on Porton Down for the match. “We have heard about this being the public report,” O’Connor said, referring to the OPCW. “They don’t actually name the chemical, but we know that the UK had identified Novichok and had told the visitors [OPCW] that that was the chemical they believed was involved. Then also of some significance the analysis of the chemical being of high purity. We have heard the evidence of the significance of that too. So that’s part of the context for the Sedwill letter.”

“A [Allen]. Yes, indeed.” .

This exchange erased the independence of OPCW . British officials had “told the visitors” to find Russian Novichok, and so that’s what the OPCW did.

Sedwill then told the NATO Secretary-General that “the OPCW’s. analysis matches [sic] the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory’s own, confirming [sic] once again the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity [sic] of the toxic chemical of high purity that was used in Salisbury.”

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The two principals in the Skripal attack and coverup operation – Mark Sedwill and Boris Johnson.

In fact, a British expert on organophosphorus chemicals points out, there has been no evidence of a match between the test result reports of Porton Down and the OPCW’s laboratory because there has been no reliable identification of the chemical formulas in the original victim blood samples or in the subsequent manipulation to which they were exposed at Porton Down and then by OPCW.

“This is the A234 formula and name as described in Wikipedia,” the expert source says:

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-234_(nerve_agent)

“The IUPAC is the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, and it issues strict rules on how molecules should be named in chemical formulas. This is to prevent mistakes or ambiguous identifications, so all scientists follow the same rules. What is interesting is that A234 now has a CAS [Chemical Abstracts Service] name; this means that someone or some organisation has added it to the Chemical Registry.” .

“In 2018 A234 did not have a CAS number because it was a state secret in the UK and US. Technically, no number had been assigned. But A234 is a molecule, and now this has its formal IUPAC name. This diagram shows how the atoms are bonded to each other to form the molecule.”

A234 NOVICHOK MOLECULAR STRUCTURE

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KEY= O=oxygen, P=phosphorus, N=nitrogen, F=fluorine. If the fluorine atom is not detected, or something else is in its place, then the compound is not A234 Novichok.

“One key element of the Czech research of 2021 is that for the first time perhaps, a paper has openly described the testing of A234 on mammals. In secret and unpublished, this has been going on for years, especially at Porton Down which has been awarded US Department of Defense for animal experiments which are illegal in the US, especially on primates.”

“The Czechs reported that ‘a broad spectrum of muscarinic (salivation, lacrimation, and others) and nicotinic (tonic–clonic convulsions) symptoms was observed in all poisoned rats within a few minutes after administering A234, regardless of the antidote.’ Bear in mind, the rats in question were administered potential organophosphate poisoning antidotes before they were exposed to Novichok A234. All succumbed to symptoms within a few minutes. To extrapolate, these data suggest that the British government’s narrative that the Skripals collapsed within seconds of each other would be impossible if they were dosed some 150 minutes earlier.”

“In this branch of chemistry,” the source adds, “not all rats lie — only the British Government.”

The naming issue, and the secrecy imposed by Hughes and his lawyers on key Novichok evidence, remain to be explained, the expert acknowledges. “Why the A234 molecule has not been named as the nerve agent, the Novichok — that is a question I have been asking ever since 2018. Not to identify by name the chemical formula and molecule structure is sloppy science, poor toxicology, and it undermines the foundation of the British Government’s case. It’s up to them to explain publicly, but they refuse.”

“I believe the reason is that DSTL claims to have found the parent Novichok in its unreactive, free state before it has reacted at the molecular level with the environment, human tissues, blood. When testing is done of environmental surfaces – the Skripal front door-handle, for example – or of human skin, hair and blood samples, chemical reactions have already taken place. The nerve agent loses part of its structure in binding to the protein peptide. An atom has fallen off the molecule of the original nerve agent in forming the compound of nonapeptide and nerve agent found in the sampling and testing. So a chemist using the mass spectral data to elucidate the structure of the original, unbound nerve agent, could not do so. This is why DSTL are claiming that the unbound, free, unreacted nerve agent was also detected and measured in the samples but keeping secret the formulas, so no expert can verify what they have done.”

“You can’t guess at or assume what the specific chemical structure was in the unbound, unreacted, free Novichok. The laboratory will have samples of that because it has made the agent itself. But it cannot find that in blood samples. It’s a political conclusion, not an organic chemical one, to assume what cannot be identified. This is why there is no naming of the chemical formula in the samples taken from the Skripals and from Sturgess.”

“Explaining to the layman what happens when part of the A234 molecule is lost in the process of binding on to proteins is difficult. It’s enough to say that when this process happens – as it must when Novichok is allegedly sprayed on a target – we can guess which part of the molecule, which atom has been lost. Probably the fluorine atom is lost, maybe not.”

“Guessing is not what the OPCW can report. This is why the OPCW labs are not confirming the specific structure. It’s a Catch 22 situation for the OPCW. If they knew fluorine was there in the first place, they would have had to have reference samples of A234 in order to know that fluorine was there. But in 2018 they could not admit to having such reference samples because the British Government’s line was that only Russia could make Novichok. To keep up the pretence, this is why the generic, unspecific description is still being used six years later. This is so generic and non-specific it has no place in science, and certainly not in a murder investigation.”

EXCERPTS OF OPCW REPORT ON SKRIPAL INCIDENT SAMPLE TESTING

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Source: https://www.opcw.org
Press leaks of the Austrian copy of this OPCW report indicated that the classified data of chemical name and structure did not confirm Russian origin.

Allen testified that, two years later, a parallel process of misidentification was used by the German Government, OPCW and a Swedish state laboratory to identify Novichok in blood samples taken from Alexei Navalny when he was in a Berlin hospital in September 2020. Navalny and his supporters, including the UK and other NATO governments, claimed in unison that he had been poisoned on Putin’s orders with Novichok. “In further support of the conclusion that Russia was responsible for the use of Novichok on British soil in an attempt to murder Mr Skripal,” Allen declared, “HMG [His Majesty’s Government] notes that the Russian state was also responsible for the attempted murder of Alexei Navalny…Again, the use of Novichok to poison Mr Navalny was confirmed by independent testing conducted by the OPCW and other states [Sweden].” Paragraph 38.

This was politics, not chemical science nor clinical pathology.

The Berlin hospital test records identified a potentially lethal combination of other drugs which Navalny had consumed before his collapse, but there was no Novichok. Testing by a German military laboratory in Munich was kept secret, its Novichok result announced by a government press spokesman in Berlin. To create the appearance of independent confirmation, the OPCW and the Swedish military organisation, the Defence Research Agency (FOI), were given Navalny blood samples and told what to look for, what to find. Both the OPCW and FOI did so, but kept secret the chemical names and molecular structures which their testing had identified.

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Source: https://johnhelmer.net/

For more details of the German Novichok operation, including Swedish documents forced into the open by a Stockholm court order, click on this and this.

When the Russian Government issued detailed denials of the British Novichok narrative, Allen said this was evidence of Russian deception and propaganda. “Is it your opinion,” Allen was asked by a lawyer for the Sturgess family, “that that disinformation campaign further demonstrates the Russian State’s culpability? A. Yes.” Page 102

When Russian intelligence agents attempted to open the OPCW and the Spiez laboratory files to find out how the testing had been done; what chemical formulas had been identified, and what secret evidence was reported, Allen testified this was further evidence of Russian culpability in the Novichok attack in England. “The Dutch, if I may say, caught them red-handed with the equipment in the back of a car. They were able to get information from telephone devices that were in the possession of the individuals. They found documentary evidence as well, including in one case one of the individuals had a taxi receipt from outside GRU headquarters to Moscow airport on the day their group had left to go to the Netherlands, and so putting all that together we were able quite quickly to identify this as a GRU group. I think again the reason it’s significant is that they were seeking to hack into the OPCW, I would say, because at that time the OPCW was testing the blood and testing for Novichok and they clearly wanted to know what people were finding and to find out if there was any information, I would suggest that we had given them.” Page 47-48

Allen did not reveal nor did Hughes and his lawyers query the reason British officials and the OPCW were refusing to disclose to the Russians the chemical data of the Novichok they alleged the Russians had used in the attack on Skripal, and thus already knew for themselves.

The details of the GRU hacking of OPCW and Spiez were not released publicly by the Dutch until October 13, six months after Dutch police had arrested four Russians outside OPCW headquarters at The Hague. Their espionage had been intercepted by the Dutch on April 3 but was kept secret at the time.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov then disclosed in public on April 14 that the hacking operation had been successful before the Dutch caught up. The concentration of the nerve agent reported from the blood test results, Lavrov revealed, had been too high and too pure to be credible in blood samples. He implied the A234 Novichok was added after the original samples had been drawn. He also charged that the testing revealed evidence that the Skripals had been hit with another nerve agent, BZ.

Allen, Hughes and his lawyers agreed that the Dutch incidents proved the Russians were guilty. The evidence for their innocence which the Russians announced at the time was ignored.

https://johnhelmer.net/the-sturgess-inq ... more-90750

******

Hands up! Black humor predominates on the latest ‘Sunday Evening with Vladimir Solovyov’

Times are grim in international relations as every reader of these pages knows well. But allow me to assure you that Russia’s chattering classes are NOT wrapping themselves in bedsheets and slowly walking to the cemetery in advance of some hypothetical preemptive nuclear strike on their country. i.e. they are not preparing for eternity any time soon. No, they are likely ensconced in armchairs with mugs of beer in their hands while they enjoy the black humor delivered to them by the country’s most widely watched talk show host, Vladimir Solovyov.

Like every news program on Russian state television yesterday, the Solovyov show gave ample coverage to Vladimir Putin’s s speech in Astana, Kazakhstan before fellow heads of state of what were once Soviet republics and are now members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the sense of which the BBC almost gets right when it calls the CSTO Russia’s NATO. Putin spoke about Russia’s military might and about what he can do using the Oreshnik hypersonic intermediate range ballistic missile to utterly destroy the Kiev regime should they continue to launch French, British and American rockets into Russian territory. His listeners smiled politely, though, surely, he was scaring the living daylights out of them all. For the home audience in Moscow, on the other hand, his very tough speech was music to the ears of his countrymen. At last, they were witnessing ‘Putin Unbound.’ Both Solovyov and his panelists used the moment to let off steam and to enjoy a good laugh in what has to be described as black humor.

Political commentator Sergei Mikheev, a regular on the show, set the tone when he said how pleased he was that Putin was moving away from the Soviet style diplomatic language which had proven to be so unproductive in dealing with the leaders of today’s Collective West. He was now speaking in the only manner that those folks understand: frontal assault. What Russia should be saying to the West now that its superiority in weapons had been demonstrated for all to see via the Oreshnik attack on Dnepropetrovsk is simply: ‘Hands Up!’

Others joined in with similar contributions, including:

“Our opening lines to Berlin should be: ‘you have three hours to evacuate the city before we demolish it!’”

and

“To the Brits, who seem to be suffering extraordinarily from their loss of empire: ‘We’ll put you out of your misery!’”

*****

Jokes aside, the feeling of the panelists on this show and the mood of the weekly news wrap-up hosted by Dmitry Kiselyov a couple of hours earlier was that there is no need for negotiations with anyone to end the war in and about Ukraine. Russia is smashing its way to total victory, the enemy lines will collapse under the overwhelming pressure of the ongoing offensive, and Russia will get what it wants in the act of capitulation that whoever is left to speak for Ukraine signs.

In this scenario, a role for Donald Trump in ending the war and the American notion of the outcome as a ‘frozen conflict’ in which Zelensky cedes land in exchange for NATO membership – all of this is trashed by the Russian side.

You will note that the Russian programming yesterday was wholly focused on the war on the front lines of Donbas and in the Kursk region. To my knowledge, there was no coverage of the feats of Russian arms that appeared on the Times of India’s youtube channel yesterday, namely the destruction of a trainload of freshly arrived ATACMS and Storm Shadows in the Odessa region, or of the similarly reported Russian assassination of the main leader of rebel forces occupying Aleppo in Syria. None of this has yet been announced by the Russian Ministry of Defense. Indeed, the entire issue of threat to the survival of the Bashar Assad regime in Syria was not covered yesterday by Russia’s main news channels. In short, there was nothing to spoil the fun over ‘Putin Unbound’.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/12/02/ ... -solovyov/

*****

The West Is Ramping Up Its Regime Change Campaign In Georgia

Andrew Korybko
Dec 02, 2024

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The immense political pressure being placed upon the ruling party by the West is punishment for its pragmatic domestic and foreign policies.

The Georgian capital of Tbilisi has been beset by increasingly violent unrest as the foreign-backed opposition desperately seeks to overturn the outcome of fall’s parliamentary elections. They were won by the ruling Georgian Dream party, which is comprised of conservative-nationalists who won’t sacrifice their country’s objective national interests by sanctioning Russia or allowing Western “NGOs” to meddle in their affairs. It then froze EU accession talks till 2028 after the EU refused to recognize the results.

No self-respecting government like Georgia’s would continue trying to join an organization that denies the democratic mandate that it just received. The intention is to wait until the EU undergoes domestic political transformation, ideally by 2028, through the expected rise of more conservative-nationalist forces in the future who’d then recognize the aforesaid results. If they’re not recognized by that time, then this policy might be extended unless a regime change happens beforehand.

The situation is worsening as a result of the renascent Color Revolution and the French-born president refusing to leave office after her term expires later this month, both provocations of which are aided by the EU threatening sanctions and the US suspending its strategic partnership with Georgia. The immense political pressure being placed upon the ruling party is punishment for its pragmatic domestic and foreign policies. Here are six background briefings to bring unaware readers up to speed:

* 8 March 2023: “Georgia Is Targeted For Regime Change Over Its Refusal To Open A ‘Second Front’ Against Russia”

* 11 March 2023: “Russia Called The US Out For Double Standards Towards Georgia-Moldova & Bosnia-Serbia”

* 4 October 2023: “Armenia’s Impending Defection From The CSTO Places Georgia Back In The US’ Crosshairs”

* 2 May 2024: “The West Simply Shrugged As Rioters Tried Storming The Georgian Parliament In A J6 Redux”

* 30 September 2024: “Ukraine’s Disastrous Policy Towards Donbass Taught Georgia The Importance Of Reconciliation”

* 30 October 2024: “Duda Claimed That Georgia’s Pro-Western President Has No Evidence Of Russian Meddling”

To summarize, Georgian Dream refused to open a “second front” against Russia in summer 2023 to assist Ukraine’s doomed counteroffensive, which was unforgiveable from the West’s perspective. Georgia’s geostrategic importance also spiked after the West “poached” Armenia from Russia’s “sphere of influence” since it then became indispensable for furthering their plans there. Georgian Dream is too patriotic to become their puppet, however, and that’s why they now consider it to be their enemy.

Western intelligence’s success in organizing the defection of several Georgian ambassadors is aimed at creating a “government-in-waiting” to replace Georgian Dream if the Color Revolution topples them, while convincing its French-born president to illegally remain in office is meant to turn her into a martyr. Potentially forthcoming sanctions could worsen the socio-economic situation there, thus making more people desperate enough to accept foreign funding to take part in the ongoing regime change campaign.

Although the Prime Minister said that “The Maidan scenario cannot be realized in Georgia”, that’s precisely the scenario that the West is orchestrating. As the security services intervene to restore order, decontextualized footage of their “Democratic Security” operations in defense of their country’s national form of democracy will likely circulate to discredit the state and radicalize the rioters. Everything will therefore likely get a lot worse before it gets better, and Georgia might even slip into a full-fledged crisis.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/the-west ... its-regime
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Mon Dec 02, 2024 4:18 pm

THE STURGESS INQUIRY ENDS IN FOREIGN OFFICE WHIMPER, BANG OF NOVICHOK LIES

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by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

The Novichok show trial ended its public hearings last week in London with the revelation that it will not name the chemical constituents of the poison used in the attempted killing of Sergei and Yulia Skripal on March 4, 2018, and in the cause of death of Dawn Sturgess on June 30, 2018.

By doing this, by keeping the chemical formula combination of the poison a state secret, independent British toxicologists say there is no evidence that a Russian-made Novichok was used; and that, instead, a British or US-made Novichok was readily available in 2018, and this was as likely to have been the killer weapon.

Revealed earlier in the hearings by a doctor at Yulia Skripal’s bedside four days after the attack, Skripal believed she and her father had been hit by a poison spray as they ate lunch at a restaurant just before they collapsed outside. Skripal’s evidence pointed to a British operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal before he escaped back to Moscow, and then cover up by planting fabricated Russian clues at the crime scenes, and in the blood test reports of the victims.

Weapon, crime scene, victim pathology, killer identification, motive – all faked.

The toxicology experts point out that in 2018 scientists working on this type of organophosphate poison had revealed synthesis, production, testing and stocking of A232 and A234 Novichok in the US Army’s chemical warfare centre, known by its location as the Edgewood Arsenal; and at its British counterpart and partner, the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), known as Porton Down. The Iranian military establishment had also done the same by 2016. After the Skripal case in 2018, military chemists in South Korea and the Czech Republic revealed how they had produced and tested their own formulas for Novichok.

By openly publishing their Novichok chemistry, the Americans, Iranians, South Koreans, and Czechs have proved that making, detecting and naming Novichok is a transparent process, not difficult to verify forensically in a criminal investigation or court. This, British scientists now say, means that the refusal of government officials and the Sturgess Inquiry judge, Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley, lead image, right), to name the Novichok alleged to have been the Russian murder weapon, is evidence of a scheme of British fabrication and coverup.

Mark Allen (lead image, left) of the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) was the last witness to testify before Hughes at the Inquiry’s public hearings. As head of defence and intelligence, he was also the official in charge of coordinating the intelligence and military units involved in the attack on the Skripals; and then in the police and media coverup employed to pin the crime on the Russian military intelligence agency GRU, and on President Vladimir Putin.

Allen’s testimony on November 28 identified as his direct superior Sir Mark Sedwill, the national security advisor reporting to then-Prime Minister Theresa May and then-Foreign Minister Boris Johnson.

“As SRO [Senior Responsible Owner] for Russia,” Allen said, “when we’re dealing with Russia strategy, the Government strategy towards Russia, I bring together all government departments, including representatives of the agencies as well, to ensure that we’re all essentially using all of our levers, all of our information, all of our understanding is pointing in the same direction and we’re being coherent. Then where there are situations where something unexpected arises, what you might call a crisis of some sort, then I will also chair that sort of grouping to work out what our collective response should be.”

“I act, not as the Foreign Office’s DG [director-general], but as the government’s senior official. Page 17 Asked to substantiate public statements at the time by May, Johnson and Sedwill that only Russia could have made and used the Novichok weapon, Allen was unable.

“… it is safe to say that any modern chemical laboratory is capable of synthesising Novichok. In contrast to what you have said about it being a state — really only something that can be done at the state level. Is there anything that you can add to this debate, Mr Allen? A. I don’t think that is a view that is shared in the scientific community, or in the OPCW.” Page 41.

This was a lie; Hughes let it go unchallenged.

“LORD HUGHES: As far as you know, is it something which has been asserted either by Mr Mirzayanov or by the other publications of American, Czech, Italian, et cetera, researchers?

“A [Allen]: I haven’t read those in detail, sir, so I couldn’t say.

“LORD HUGHES: All right, thank you.” Page 41.

“What’s in a name like Novichok? Why the coverup?” responds an independent British chemist and expert on organophosphates. “If the full molecular readout was exposed publicly from the blood sampling of the Skripals and Sturgess — also later of [Alexei] Navalny — then it would be obvious that some constituents are missing. And because they are missing from the name or the reported chemical formula, then identification of Novichok cannot be made. All we are left with is an assumption covered up and concealed in secret. The scientific name for that is a lie.”

Allen had presented a written statement ahead of last week’s appearance. The government, he said, “places particular weight on the fact that the weapon used in the attack on Mr Skripal was a fourth generation liquid nerve agent of the class known as Novichoks. This class of nerve agent is known to have been developed by the Soviet Union, with the Russian Federation inheriting and developing that programme…The nerve agent used in Salisbury was identified by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), and later independently confirmed by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)…Both DSTL and OPCW separately concluded that this same nerve agent caused the death of Ms Sturgess…”

This chain of Allen’s evidence confirms only that out of a class of chemicals tagged Novichok, one chemical tagged Novichok by Porton Down was found in blood testing of the Skripals and of Sturgess, and then matched with an unnamed chemical by the OPCW in The Hague, and by the Swiss laboratory, Labor Spiez, which OPCW contracted to do the testing (Allen concealed this). Allen’s say-so does not prove that the samples were either matching, or Russian in origin, or even the chemical formula chemists know to be Novichok.

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Source: https://johnhelmer.net/

Allen’s written statement and hearing testimony confirmed that to substantiate his claims, the DSTL Porton Down, OPCW and other evidence is being kept secret. “To the extent issues cannot be articulated fully in public, they will be addressed fully before the inquiry through its CLOSED processes.”

Counsel for Hughes in the inquiry, Andrew O’Connor KC, then told the hearing that Allen and Sedwill had revealed all their evidence, but responsibility for keeping it secret rested on Hughes. “Q. Are you saying there that there is some detail about these matters that cannot be addressed in a public forum? A. Yes, I am. Q. Can you confirm to us that all relevant detail has been provided to the Inquiry, but that as a result of restriction orders made by the Chair, the consequence of those is that some detail will have to be dealt with in closed session rather than open session? A. Yes, I understand that’s the case, yes.” Page 21.

O’Connor told Allen that although the OPCW report had not in fact identified Novichok, the organisation had relied on Porton Down for the match. “We have heard about this being the public report,” O’Connor said, referring to the OPCW. “They don’t actually name the chemical, but we know that the UK had identified Novichok and had told the visitors [OPCW] that that was the chemical they believed was involved. Then also of some significance the analysis of the chemical being of high purity. We have heard the evidence of the significance of that too. So that’s part of the context for the Sedwill letter.”

“A [Allen]. Yes, indeed.” .

This exchange erased the independence of OPCW . British officials had “told the visitors” to find Russian Novichok, and so that’s what the OPCW did.

Sedwill then told the NATO Secretary-General that “the OPCW’s. analysis matches [sic] the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory’s own, confirming [sic] once again the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity [sic] of the toxic chemical of high purity that was used in Salisbury.”

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The two principals in the Skripal attack and coverup operation – Mark Sedwill and Boris Johnson.

In fact, a British expert on organophosphorus chemicals points out, there has been no evidence of a match between the test result reports of Porton Down and the OPCW’s laboratory because there has been no reliable identification of the chemical formulas in the original victim blood samples or in the subsequent manipulation to which they were exposed at Porton Down and then by OPCW.

“This is the A234 formula and name as described in Wikipedia,” the expert source says:

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-234_(nerve_agent)

“The IUPAC is the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, and it issues strict rules on how molecules should be named in chemical formulas. This is to prevent mistakes or ambiguous identifications, so all scientists follow the same rules. What is interesting is that A234 now has a CAS [Chemical Abstracts Service] name; this means that someone or some organisation has added it to the Chemical Registry.” .

“In 2018 A234 did not have a CAS number because it was a state secret in the UK and US. Technically, no number had been assigned. But A234 is a molecule, and now this has its formal IUPAC name. This diagram shows how the atoms are bonded to each other to form the molecule.”

A234 NOVICHOK MOLECULAR STRUCTURE

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KEY= O=oxygen, P=phosphorus, N=nitrogen, F=fluorine. If the fluorine atom is not detected, or something else is in its place, then the compound is not A234 Novichok.

“One key element of the Czech research of 2021 is that for the first time perhaps, a paper has openly described the testing of A234 on mammals. In secret and unpublished, this has been going on for years, especially at Porton Down which has been awarded US Department of Defense for animal experiments which are illegal in the US, especially on primates.”

“The Czechs reported that ‘a broad spectrum of muscarinic (salivation, lacrimation, and others) and nicotinic (tonic–clonic convulsions) symptoms was observed in all poisoned rats within a few minutes after administering A234, regardless of the antidote.’ Bear in mind, the rats in question were administered potential organophosphate poisoning antidotes before they were exposed to Novichok A234. All succumbed to symptoms within a few minutes. To extrapolate, these data suggest that the British government’s narrative that the Skripals collapsed within seconds of each other would be impossible if they were dosed some 150 minutes earlier.”

“In this branch of chemistry,” the source adds, “not all rats lie — only the British Government.”

The naming issue, and the secrecy imposed by Hughes and his lawyers on key Novichok evidence, remain to be explained, the expert acknowledges. “Why the A234 molecule has not been named as the nerve agent, the Novichok — that is a question I have been asking ever since 2018. Not to identify by name the chemical formula and molecule structure is sloppy science, poor toxicology, and it undermines the foundation of the British Government’s case. It’s up to them to explain publicly, but they refuse.”

“I believe the reason is that DSTL claims to have found the parent Novichok in its unreactive, free state before it has reacted at the molecular level with the environment, human tissues, blood. When testing is done of environmental surfaces – the Skripal front door-handle, for example – or of human skin, hair and blood samples, chemical reactions have already taken place. The nerve agent loses part of its structure in binding to the protein peptide. An atom has fallen off the molecule of the original nerve agent in forming the compound of nonapeptide and nerve agent found in the sampling and testing. So a chemist using the mass spectral data to elucidate the structure of the original, unbound nerve agent, could not do so. This is why DSTL are claiming that the unbound, free, unreacted nerve agent was also detected and measured in the samples but keeping secret the formulas, so no expert can verify what they have done.”

“You can’t guess at or assume what the specific chemical structure was in the unbound, unreacted, free Novichok. The laboratory will have samples of that because it has made the agent itself. But it cannot find that in blood samples. It’s a political conclusion, not an organic chemical one, to assume what cannot be identified. This is why there is no naming of the chemical formula in the samples taken from the Skripals and from Sturgess.”

“Explaining to the layman what happens when part of the A234 molecule is lost in the process of binding on to proteins is difficult. It’s enough to say that when this process happens – as it must when Novichok is allegedly sprayed on a target – we can guess which part of the molecule, which atom has been lost. Probably the fluorine atom is lost, maybe not.”

“Guessing is not what the OPCW can report. This is why the OPCW labs are not confirming the specific structure. It’s a Catch 22 situation for the OPCW. If they knew fluorine was there in the first place, they would have had to have reference samples of A234 in order to know that fluorine was there. But in 2018 they could not admit to having such reference samples because the British Government’s line was that only Russia could make Novichok. To keep up the pretence, this is why the generic, unspecific description is still being used six years later. This is so generic and non-specific it has no place in science, and certainly not in a murder investigation.”

EXCERPTS OF OPCW REPORT ON SKRIPAL INCIDENT SAMPLE TESTING

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Source: https://www.opcw.org
Press leaks of the Austrian copy of this OPCW report indicated that the classified data of chemical name and structure did not confirm Russian origin.

Allen testified that, two years later, a parallel process of misidentification was used by the German Government, OPCW and a Swedish state laboratory to identify Novichok in blood samples taken from Alexei Navalny when he was in a Berlin hospital in September 2020. Navalny and his supporters, including the UK and other NATO governments, claimed in unison that he had been poisoned on Putin’s orders with Novichok. “In further support of the conclusion that Russia was responsible for the use of Novichok on British soil in an attempt to murder Mr Skripal,” Allen declared, “HMG [His Majesty’s Government] notes that the Russian state was also responsible for the attempted murder of Alexei Navalny…Again, the use of Novichok to poison Mr Navalny was confirmed by independent testing conducted by the OPCW and other states [Sweden].” Paragraph 38.

This was politics, not chemical science nor clinical pathology.

The Berlin hospital test records identified a potentially lethal combination of other drugs which Navalny had consumed before his collapse, but there was no Novichok. Testing by a German military laboratory in Munich was kept secret, its Novichok result announced by a government press spokesman in Berlin. To create the appearance of independent confirmation, the OPCW and the Swedish military organisation, the Defence Research Agency (FOI), were given Navalny blood samples and told what to look for, what to find. Both the OPCW and FOI did so, but kept secret the chemical names and molecular structures which their testing had identified.

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Source: https://johnhelmer.net/

For more details of the German Novichok operation, including Swedish documents forced into the open by a Stockholm court order, click on this and this.

When the Russian Government issued detailed denials of the British Novichok narrative, Allen said this was evidence of Russian deception and propaganda. “Is it your opinion,” Allen was asked by a lawyer for the Sturgess family, “that that disinformation campaign further demonstrates the Russian State’s culpability? A. Yes.” Page 102

When Russian intelligence agents attempted to open the OPCW and the Spiez laboratory files to find out how the testing had been done; what chemical formulas had been identified, and what secret evidence was reported, Allen testified this was further evidence of Russian culpability in the Novichok attack in England. “The Dutch, if I may say, caught them red-handed with the equipment in the back of a car. They were able to get information from telephone devices that were in the possession of the individuals. They found documentary evidence as well, including in one case one of the individuals had a taxi receipt from outside GRU headquarters to Moscow airport on the day their group had left to go to the Netherlands, and so putting all that together we were able quite quickly to identify this as a GRU group. I think again the reason it’s significant is that they were seeking to hack into the OPCW, I would say, because at that time the OPCW was testing the blood and testing for Novichok and they clearly wanted to know what people were finding and to find out if there was any information, I would suggest that we had given them.” Page 47-48

Allen did not reveal nor did Hughes and his lawyers query the reason British officials and the OPCW were refusing to disclose to the Russians the chemical data of the Novichok they alleged the Russians had used in the attack on Skripal, and thus already knew for themselves.

The details of the GRU hacking of OPCW and Spiez were not released publicly by the Dutch until October 13, six months after Dutch police had arrested four Russians outside OPCW headquarters at The Hague. Their espionage had been intercepted by the Dutch on April 3 but was kept secret at the time.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov then disclosed in public on April 14 that the hacking operation had been successful before the Dutch caught up. The concentration of the nerve agent reported from the blood test results, Lavrov revealed, had been too high and too pure to be credible in blood samples. He implied the A234 Novichok was added after the original samples had been drawn. He also charged that the testing revealed evidence that the Skripals had been hit with another nerve agent, BZ.

Allen, Hughes and his lawyers agreed that the Dutch incidents proved the Russians were guilty. The evidence for their innocence which the Russians announced at the time was ignored.

https://johnhelmer.net/the-sturgess-inq ... more-90750

******

Hands up! Black humor predominates on the latest ‘Sunday Evening with Vladimir Solovyov’

Times are grim in international relations as every reader of these pages knows well. But allow me to assure you that Russia’s chattering classes are NOT wrapping themselves in bedsheets and slowly walking to the cemetery in advance of some hypothetical preemptive nuclear strike on their country. i.e. they are not preparing for eternity any time soon. No, they are likely ensconced in armchairs with mugs of beer in their hands while they enjoy the black humor delivered to them by the country’s most widely watched talk show host, Vladimir Solovyov.

Like every news program on Russian state television yesterday, the Solovyov show gave ample coverage to Vladimir Putin’s s speech in Astana, Kazakhstan before fellow heads of state of what were once Soviet republics and are now members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the sense of which the BBC almost gets right when it calls the CSTO Russia’s NATO. Putin spoke about Russia’s military might and about what he can do using the Oreshnik hypersonic intermediate range ballistic missile to utterly destroy the Kiev regime should they continue to launch French, British and American rockets into Russian territory. His listeners smiled politely, though, surely, he was scaring the living daylights out of them all. For the home audience in Moscow, on the other hand, his very tough speech was music to the ears of his countrymen. At last, they were witnessing ‘Putin Unbound.’ Both Solovyov and his panelists used the moment to let off steam and to enjoy a good laugh in what has to be described as black humor.

Political commentator Sergei Mikheev, a regular on the show, set the tone when he said how pleased he was that Putin was moving away from the Soviet style diplomatic language which had proven to be so unproductive in dealing with the leaders of today’s Collective West. He was now speaking in the only manner that those folks understand: frontal assault. What Russia should be saying to the West now that its superiority in weapons had been demonstrated for all to see via the Oreshnik attack on Dnepropetrovsk is simply: ‘Hands Up!’

Others joined in with similar contributions, including:

“Our opening lines to Berlin should be: ‘you have three hours to evacuate the city before we demolish it!’”

and

“To the Brits, who seem to be suffering extraordinarily from their loss of empire: ‘We’ll put you out of your misery!’”

*****

Jokes aside, the feeling of the panelists on this show and the mood of the weekly news wrap-up hosted by Dmitry Kiselyov a couple of hours earlier was that there is no need for negotiations with anyone to end the war in and about Ukraine. Russia is smashing its way to total victory, the enemy lines will collapse under the overwhelming pressure of the ongoing offensive, and Russia will get what it wants in the act of capitulation that whoever is left to speak for Ukraine signs.

In this scenario, a role for Donald Trump in ending the war and the American notion of the outcome as a ‘frozen conflict’ in which Zelensky cedes land in exchange for NATO membership – all of this is trashed by the Russian side.

You will note that the Russian programming yesterday was wholly focused on the war on the front lines of Donbas and in the Kursk region. To my knowledge, there was no coverage of the feats of Russian arms that appeared on the Times of India’s youtube channel yesterday, namely the destruction of a trainload of freshly arrived ATACMS and Storm Shadows in the Odessa region, or of the similarly reported Russian assassination of the main leader of rebel forces occupying Aleppo in Syria. None of this has yet been announced by the Russian Ministry of Defense. Indeed, the entire issue of threat to the survival of the Bashar Assad regime in Syria was not covered yesterday by Russia’s main news channels. In short, there was nothing to spoil the fun over ‘Putin Unbound’.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/12/02/ ... -solovyov/

*****

The West Is Ramping Up Its Regime Change Campaign In Georgia

Andrew Korybko
Dec 02, 2024

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The immense political pressure being placed upon the ruling party by the West is punishment for its pragmatic domestic and foreign policies.

The Georgian capital of Tbilisi has been beset by increasingly violent unrest as the foreign-backed opposition desperately seeks to overturn the outcome of fall’s parliamentary elections. They were won by the ruling Georgian Dream party, which is comprised of conservative-nationalists who won’t sacrifice their country’s objective national interests by sanctioning Russia or allowing Western “NGOs” to meddle in their affairs. It then froze EU accession talks till 2028 after the EU refused to recognize the results.

No self-respecting government like Georgia’s would continue trying to join an organization that denies the democratic mandate that it just received. The intention is to wait until the EU undergoes domestic political transformation, ideally by 2028, through the expected rise of more conservative-nationalist forces in the future who’d then recognize the aforesaid results. If they’re not recognized by that time, then this policy might be extended unless a regime change happens beforehand.

The situation is worsening as a result of the renascent Color Revolution and the French-born president refusing to leave office after her term expires later this month, both provocations of which are aided by the EU threatening sanctions and the US suspending its strategic partnership with Georgia. The immense political pressure being placed upon the ruling party is punishment for its pragmatic domestic and foreign policies. Here are six background briefings to bring unaware readers up to speed:

* 8 March 2023: “Georgia Is Targeted For Regime Change Over Its Refusal To Open A ‘Second Front’ Against Russia”

* 11 March 2023: “Russia Called The US Out For Double Standards Towards Georgia-Moldova & Bosnia-Serbia”

* 4 October 2023: “Armenia’s Impending Defection From The CSTO Places Georgia Back In The US’ Crosshairs”

* 2 May 2024: “The West Simply Shrugged As Rioters Tried Storming The Georgian Parliament In A J6 Redux”

* 30 September 2024: “Ukraine’s Disastrous Policy Towards Donbass Taught Georgia The Importance Of Reconciliation”

* 30 October 2024: “Duda Claimed That Georgia’s Pro-Western President Has No Evidence Of Russian Meddling”

To summarize, Georgian Dream refused to open a “second front” against Russia in summer 2023 to assist Ukraine’s doomed counteroffensive, which was unforgiveable from the West’s perspective. Georgia’s geostrategic importance also spiked after the West “poached” Armenia from Russia’s “sphere of influence” since it then became indispensable for furthering their plans there. Georgian Dream is too patriotic to become their puppet, however, and that’s why they now consider it to be their enemy.

Western intelligence’s success in organizing the defection of several Georgian ambassadors is aimed at creating a “government-in-waiting” to replace Georgian Dream if the Color Revolution topples them, while convincing its French-born president to illegally remain in office is meant to turn her into a martyr. Potentially forthcoming sanctions could worsen the socio-economic situation there, thus making more people desperate enough to accept foreign funding to take part in the ongoing regime change campaign.

Although the Prime Minister said that “The Maidan scenario cannot be realized in Georgia”, that’s precisely the scenario that the West is orchestrating. As the security services intervene to restore order, decontextualized footage of their “Democratic Security” operations in defense of their country’s national form of democracy will likely circulate to discredit the state and radicalize the rioters. Everything will therefore likely get a lot worse before it gets better, and Georgia might even slip into a full-fledged crisis.

https://korybko.substack.com/p/the-west ... its-regime
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 03, 2024 4:12 pm

Wintering complex "Vostok"
December 3, 17:12

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The new wintering complex "Vostok" in Antarctica. Now it is the most modern Russian Antarctic station.

(Video at link.)

Resources have been allocated for this complex to conduct scientific research in a number of areas for the next 18 years.
In general, it is good that scientific research in Antarctica is not abandoned + the infrastructure of the stations is being updated.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9532082.html

Damage from the activities of the VKS amounted to more than 19 billion rubles
December 3, 15:05

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The amount of claims of the Ministry of Defense against the Military Construction Company has reached ₽19.2 billion

. This figure has “dripped” over 11 months of this year. This is 45 times more than for the whole of 2023. The Ministry of Defense demands payment of penalties for state contracts and debt collection. Let us recall that the work of VSK in the new regions was supervised by the notorious former deputy head of the Ministry of Defense Timur Ivanov. ( https://readovka.biz/the-disastrous-end ... eal-career ) And in July of this year, the former head of the company was sent to jail in a case of abuse of authority in the implementation of a state defense order.

https://t.me/suverenka/12317 - zinc

So the initial statements about tens and hundreds of millions in damage from Ivanov's activities are just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, we are talking about tens of billions in direct and indirect damage to the state. Some of this damage was done after the start of the SVO. It will be interesting to see the final amounts of the sums presented to Ivanov in court.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9531722.html

Google Translator

The difference here between the US and Russia is that we have legalized corruption that favors the oligarchy but the little fish will be persecuted. This guy would be raking in the same dough sitting on the board at Boeing.

******

Oliver Boyd-Barrett: Maximum Pressure on Russia Before Trump Inauguration
December 2, 2024
By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 12/1/24

The Economy
Russia’s new military budget for 2025-2027 commits 13.5 trillion rubles (32.5 of the total budget; equivalent to $145 billion) per year to the war.

This will doubtless run the risk of overheating the economy, especially given manpower shortages for the defense industries, and adding further pressure on interest rates that now exceed 21%, and on inflation which is around 8%. This is in the context of a troubling fall in the international value of the ruble (7% depreciation in the past seven days, now on a par with its value in the opening phase of the SMO in 2022), in part connected to a fall in the price of Russian oil and gas. This is likely the result of a recent US imposition of sanctions on Gazprom Bank. That the US delayed so long targeting the Gazprom Bank is indicative of the importance to the West of continuing Russian trade in oil and gas. But at this time, it would appear, the US needs more than anything else to inflict pain on Russia, regardless of the accompanying pain to the West.

All this, it should be emphasized, is occurring in a context of (1) a healthy GNP that until the Central Bank’s recent measures to apply the brakes, was increasing at an annual rate of almost 4%; (2) generously increasing wages and benefits to military personnel and their families; (3) a doubling over the past year in the rate of increase of the real value of household wealth; (4) a reinvestment into the Russian economy of flows of money that had previously been exported and of the profits of former Western corporations that were formerly siphoned off to the West; (5) rapidly expanding markets for Russian energy and other goods in China, India and other countries of the Global South.

Further, none of the problems outlined above should be regarded as insuperable. Many are natural to the ebb and flow of all economic cycles. Russian industry and agriculture overall are very strong. Many if not most of the weaknesses that resulted from Western sanctions and the departure of Western corporations have been overcome in whole or in part, as just mentioned, by the enhancement of Russian trade with China and India and other countries of the Global South and by sophisticated work-arounds to avoid Western sanctions.

Further still, the West is divided by an economically crippled Europe, ever more impoverished by the transfer of its wealth in weapons, money and, soon, human lives, to Ukraine, and ever more economically dependent on the US for markets and supplies and for its fanatical continuation of the war. The US grows stronger as a result of this imbalance but not so much that the upward trajectory of its approximately $35.5 trillion debt load is significantly off-set any time in the forseeable future, helping to explain why, somewhat pathetically, Trump now threatens the BRICS (representing the Global South or, better still, the Global Majority) with sanctions if they try to topple the dollar as hegemonic currency.

Extending but Not Breaking Russia
Russia’s increased military budget will be sufficient, in conditions in which it has proven superiority over the West in both nuclear and non-nuclear (but nuclear-comparable, as in the case of the Oreshnik) weapons, to (1) continue its advances on Ukrainian territory (even as Ukraine prepares a new offensive in Zapporizhzhia, and possibly on Belgorod and Bryansk); (2) head off Western attempts to stage a “Maidan” style coup d’etat (or the “Ukrainization of a Causcasian State”) against the recently elected government of pro-Russian prime minister Irakli Kobakhidze in Georgia, where street protests in Tbilisi constitute the latest Western-financed splurge of “pro-democratic” violence and coercion); (3) halt the progress of a Turkish-Israeli-Western backed jihadist offensive from Idlib on Aleppo and Hama in Syria; (4) head off anticipated Western provocations against the government of Belarus in Minsk during the lead-up to presidential elections that are scheduled for 26 January 2025; and (5) counter Ukrainian designs on pro-Russian Transnistria in an attempt to seize its Russian military assets and to support Moldavan aspirations to EU and NATO membership.

<snip>

Russian Advances in Ukraine
In Ukraine, Russia’s current advances are freshest:

(1) In the Vremivka/Velyka Novosilka area in Donetsk, where Russian forces have moved westwards from Novodonetske and north from Staromaiorske and Urozhaine, up through Makarivka in the direction of Storozheve, Vremivka, and Velyka Novosilka. Only one supply road now connects Velyka Novosilka to Ukrainian sources in Uspenivka to the west, a road that is vulnerable to being cut off by Russian forces moving north from Rivnopil to Novosilka;

(2) To the southeast of the Ukrainian stronghold of Uspenivka, Russian forces have established control over Illynka, and are advancing towards the adjacent settlements of Velyzavetivka and Romanivka in the direction of Vesely Hai;

(3) Around the Kurakhove reservoir, Russian forces now control some 50% of the town of Kurakhove on the southern bank, and are advancing in the direction of Dachne to the west while, north of the reservoir, Russian forces control Berestky and much of the territory to its north, and Stan Terny at the western end;

(4) Russian maneuvers are forcing the flight of Ukrainian forces westwards towards Shevchneko, very close to the major city of Pokrovsk. West of Sedove, Russian forces have taken or are moving on Pushkine, Petrivka, Zhovte, Novotroitske and Novopustaynka. They will aim to divide the city of Pokrovsk itself from adjoining Myronhohad. Elsewhere,

(5) Russian forces continue to bomb settlements north of Russian-held Mykoaivka towards Siversk, or westwards from Vyimka; establish footholds west of Oskil river in northern Kupyansk with a view to outflanking the city of Kupyansk from behind and, possibly, moving north to bring reinforcements to the city of Vovchansk, whose northern territory Russia now controls. Meanwhile the area controlled by Ukrainian forces on the Russian territory of Kursk continues to contract, its area of control (north of Ukrainian-held Suzhda), centers on Kryglenkoye, between Novoivanovka to the west and Malaya Loknye to the east.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/12/oli ... uguration/

Russian quality of life and confidence in the future reaches new all-time highs in November – Levada
December 2, 2024
Intellinews, 11/18/24

Perceptions of the quality of life and confidence in the future have reached new all-time highs, according to a poll by the independent pollster, the Levada Centre.

Public sentiment in Russia regarding quality of life has rebounded to near-record levels after a slight decline last year, with over half of respondents expressing satisfaction with their lives, according to a recent survey by Levada-Center, a Russian research organisation designated as a “foreign agent.”

Quality of life

As of November, 54% of respondents reported being satisfied with their lives – a figure approaching the peak of 55% recorded in April 2023. Meanwhile, dissatisfaction has reached a historic low, with only 12% indicating discontent, a stark contrast to June 1992, when two-thirds of Russians reported dissatisfaction.

The survey highlights a demographic split. Younger respondents under 24 years old reported the highest levels of satisfaction (75%), followed by those who can afford durable goods (63%) and those supportive of President Vladimir Putin’s administration (59%). Conversely, satisfaction levels were lower among those aged 55 and above (48%), individuals struggling to afford food (34%), and those critical of the country’s direction (27%) or opposed to Putin (21%).

Confidence in the future

Confidence in the future also surged, with 66% of Russians expressing optimism, a return to the near-maximum levels observed in May 2022 (67%). However, 31% remain uncertain about the future, a figure consistent with spring 2022 lows.

Young people were the most confident, with 87% expressing optimism. Other confident groups included those with disposable income (75%) and Putin supporters (72%). In contrast, uncertainty was most pronounced among those over 55 (34%), those struggling financially (52%), and Putin’s critics (78%).

Adapting to change

A growing proportion of Russians (38%) reported that their lives have remained stable over the past seven years, an 18 percentage-point increase. Meanwhile, 16% of respondents stated they had capitalised on new opportunities to improve their lives, an increase of eight points.

Fewer respondents reported struggling to maintain their previous lifestyle (15%, down 13 points) or resorting to any available means to earn money (23%, down six points). However, 6% of respondents still report being unable to adapt, a figure unchanged over the last six years.

The findings underline the significant influence of socio-economic and political factors on public sentiment. Those in financial stability or alignment with the government are more likely to express satisfaction and confidence, while older and economically disadvantaged groups, along with opposition supporters, report greater dissatisfaction and uncertainty, Levada concluded.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/12/rus ... er-levada/

******

SERGEI AND YULIA SKRIPAL ARE AS GOOD AS DEAD – ANTHONY HUGHES HAS BURIED THEM

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by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

After Yulia Skripal has testified through her doctor that she was attacked with a poison spray in a restaurant minutes before she and her father, Sergei Skripal, collapsed on March 4, 2018, the British Government hearings on what happened have attempted to suppress her evidence.

Yesterday, December 2, the hearings ended with a statement by Jack Holborn, a lawyer paid by the Home Office to say he represents the Skripals, and to claim they agree to the suppression of their own evidence. “Sergei and Yulia Skripal are grateful to this Inquiry for its work,” Holborn said. “Thank you.” Page 158

The retired judge who has directed the hearings, Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley – lead image), let slip in his closing statement that he understands the Skripals are dead or incommunicado in prison because he omitted to thank them for their participation. “I am grateful,” Hughes said, “to all the Core Participants and chiefly, of course, to those most closely connected to the events, namely Dawn Sturgess’ family, who have coped, if I may say so, admirably with what must have been at times extremely difficult evidence to listen to.”

Only the Skripals were closer to the events than the Sturgess family or the ambulance crews, police, intelligence agents, doctors, and government officials who have been called to testify on their oaths. But Hughes ruled on September 23 that the Skripals were not allowed to testify either in the open hearing room, behind closed doors, or by remote internet link.

Hughes’s expression of his gratitude to everyone associated with the Novichok narrative except for the Skripals means he is burying them.

Holborn has been seconding Andrew Deakin KC, a lawyer also paid by the Home Office to represent the Skripals. Neither of them has asked questions of any witness nor made submissions throughout the eight weeks of the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry hearings. Deakin’s opening statement on October 14 lasted 88 seconds. “Both Sergei and Yulia Skripal,” Deakin said, “would like to express their sorrow at the death of Dawn Sturgess and to offer their deepest sympathies to her family and loved ones. Sergei and Yulia Skripal also express their sympathy to those who were injured in the course of this incident. Finally, Sergei and Yulia would like to express their profound gratitude to the emergency workers, police and hospital staff who risked their lives to help them. Sergei and Yulia keenly await the outcome of this Inquiry. They look forward to better understanding the circumstances of the Salisbury attack, to considering the Inquiry’s conclusions as to who was responsible for that attack and to being able to move on with their lives.” Page 156-57

Deakin did not appear again.

In open testimony at the Inquiry it has been revealed that Yulia Skripal’s doctor at the Salisbury District Hospital, Stephen Cockroft, discovered she had recovered consciousness on March 8, four days after the attack. The police evidence to the Inquiry is that Skripal then communicated by eye signals to Cockroft that she remembered being sprayed, not at home but at Zizzi’s Restaurant where she and her father had been lunching just before they collapsed.

The senior police source for this evidence was Keith Asman; he is the chief of forensics for the Counter Terrorism Policing (CTPSE) group which in the investigation of the Novichok affair has combined the Metropolitan and regional police forces with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Security Service (MI5). In his witness statement, Asman repeated what another police officer, code-named VN104, had recorded from Dr Cockroft. The evidence of Detective Inspector (DI) VN104, identified as the deputy head of the Metropolitan Police investigating Novichok, was not called into open or closed testimony by Hughes.

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Source: https://dsiweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazon ... ession.pdf

Asman’s record of this signalling sequence was cut short before Yulia responded to Cockroft to indicate if she had recognized the nationality or the name of the attacker. Whether she knew the person who had sprayed her or not, her response has been excised from the record on Hughes’s orders.

Asman knows what Yulia signalled, and so does Cockroft. But they aren’t saying because Hughes has forbidden them to do so.

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Left: the exterior and interior of Zizzi’s Restaurant in the Salisbury city centre were sealed off by police from March 5, 2018; CCTV video footage confiscated and kept secret or destroyed. Right: for more details of the suppression by Hughes of the Skripal blink-of-an-eye evidence, click to read.

Asman continued in his witness statement: “78. At this point Yulia Skripal was described as being emotional and fell unconscious. I made notes of my conversation with DI VN104 in one of my notebooks, and in addition this information was confirmed to me in writing the next morning. 79. The information she provided about being sprayed at the restaurant was seemingly inconsistent with the presence of novichok at the Mill public house and 47 Christie Miller Road. On hearing this, I personally wondered whether Yulia Skripal knew more about it than she had alluded to and therefore whilst being fully cognisant of the SIO’s [Senior Investigating Officer] hypothesis and the need to be open-minded I continued to prioritise her property.”

During his appearance at the hearing on November 14, Hughes stopped Asman and the Inquiry lawyer from probing any further into Yulia Skripal’s evidence. Asman added: “I wasn’t sure whether Yulia had wittingly or unwittingly been involved and at the point I think for the final question where she cries when asked who did it, I did wonder to myself if she was crying because she felt maybe she had been identified, so it didn’t change my initial thought process about whether she may or may not have been involved in it and apart from that, nothing else at all. Q. You were still following the forensics as that – A. Absolutely. It was information to have but not necessarily going to change my approach on anything.”

Hughes interjected. “Well, you see she didn’t. If the record that you were given there is right, someone [sic] suggested to her ‘Had you been sprayed’. She didn’t come up with it herself.”

None of the records of police questioning of Yulia or Sergei Skripal — revealed during the hearings in unsigned, unwitnessed, excerpted, and redacted form – reports questioning of what they had meant by the evidence in the blink of an eye. If Yulia Skripal had recognized the restaurant attacker as British, not Russian, she would have understood that, although they had survived the poison, both she and her father were doomed.

Craig Murray has recently broadcast his belief that at lunch with the Skripals at Zizzi’s Restaurant on March 4, 2018, there was the MI6 agent Pablo Miller whom the Skripals had known well over many years – Sergei since 1996, Yulia since 2010. No other source corroborates Miller’s presence at the fateful lunch; there has been no reporting of Miller’s presence in the mainstream or alt-media since 2018. Murray has been asked to substantiate his belief; he has not replied.

Miller had been one of the MI6 group which had initially recruited Sergei Skripal in 1996 to become a double agent for British intelligence; Miller’s cover name at the time was Richard Bagnall. Over the next eight years Skripal delivered an estimated eighteen batches of Russian material to MI6; he received a little less than $100,000 in cash payments and the promise of a safe-haven house in England.

In Moscow in December 2004, Skripal was arrested, interrogated for two years, and then sent to trial in 2006. He was convicted and sentenced to prison for thirteen years. In July 2010 he was released to go to the UK in a spy swap.

Although the British Government has issued a D-Notice to the media not to publish Miller’s names and role in the Skripal case, this was voluntary — only the BBC, the Guardian and other British media supporting the official narrative of a Russian Novichok attack complied. Read the book for the full Miller-Bagnall story and the break Skripal appears to have made with MI6 in the summer of 2017.

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Left: Dr Stephen Cockroft, the witness of Yulia Skripal’s evidence from her hospital bed on March 8, 2018, that the attack against her and her father had taken place in Zizzi’s Restaurant, which led within minutes to her collapse, alongside her father, on a bench outside the restaurant. Centre: Hughes, the presiding judge who barred direct Skripal testimony and then silenced the Skripal evidence from Keith Asman; Asman’s face was concealed during his appearance at the hearing of November 14, 2024; watch Hughes stop the evidence from Minute 2:01. Published in February 2020, Skripal in Prison is the only book to document the fabrications of the Novichok story and the propaganda on the UK’s road to war against Russia. Compared to other western journalism, the Skripal case has had a far wider, deeper, and longer-lasting impact than Julian Assange’s Wikileaks. Unlike Assange, the Skripals have not survived their incarceration.

On March 19, 2018, ten days after Cockroft’s exchange with Yulia Skripal, Cockroft changed his evidence under duress of threats from the Salisbury hospital management, the police and security services. He said: “I felt that if she could remember if something had happened and given the nature of her father’s background, she may be laying there thinking that we don’t have a clue what has actually happened to her. I wanted to make a point of telling her that we knew she had be poisoned, that we knew what it was and that she was getting the right treatment to get her better. I did not get much of a response from Yulia to this, she may well have drifted off. I would have asked the general questions first and I then went on and asked her if she remembered anything about the incident on Sunday, I got the impression she nodded or shook her head, but 1 cannot say which for sure. I asked her did someone attack you, I did not get a response to that, I asked did someone spray something in your face, did someone throw something at you? Something along those lines. I didn’t get a response to that either.”

The witness to Cockroft’s signature on this statement was code-named VN314. The police who interviewed Cockroft, including the detective inspector VN104, who relayed what he had said earlier to Asman, have been concealed.

In the interval between what Cockroft had witnessed with Yulia and what he told the police, the doctor had been removed from Skripal’s case and threatened that unless he kept silent, there would be further professional and financial sanctions by the hospital acting on government orders. The doctor went silent. Yulia Skripal was silenced by an induced coma and a tracheostomy.

Cockroft signed a new witness statement for the Hughes proceeding on July 18, 2024. “I tried to reassure Yulia that she was safe, as was her father,” he now claimed. “I had absolutely no idea what they had both experienced on that fateful Sunday 4 March 2018 and had no idea if they had been attacked or would have had any knowledge or insight into the events that had led to their hospital admission. During those few minutes I asked Yulia if she had any recollection of her and her father being assaulted in some way. Fortunately, after some five minutes, she was safely sedated and support of her breathing could be re-established.”

The crucial “five minutes” are now missing, concealed from Cockroft’s evidence. Read more of the details here.

During Asman’s and Cockroft’s testimony, Skripal’s lawyers Deakin and Holborn failed to respond to any of this evidence, and its powerful conclusion that it had been British assassins, not Russians, who had been responsible for the alleged Novichok attack. The two lawyers have prevented their purported client from explaining what her eyes had been blinking when she remembered the attack, and why her eyes were crying.

In his concluding statement on December 2, Holborn stood up for 45 seconds, half the time Deakin had used on October 14, and repeated many of Deakin’s words. According to Holborn, “both Sergei and Yulia Skripal would like to express again their sorrow at the death of Dawn Sturgess and offer their deepest sympathies to her family and friends. The Skripals also express their sympathies to those who were injured in the course of the incidents. They would like to express their profound gratitude to the emergency workers, police and hospital staff who risked their lives to help them. Sergei and Yulia Skripal are grateful to this Inquiry for its work. Thank you.”

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Jack Holborn, the state-appointed representative of the Skripals, rises and falls at the final public hearing on December 2.Watch the video here. Minute 1:44 et seq.

Holborn was so nervous in saying how grateful the Skripals were for the Inquiry’s “work”, he failed to memorize the words. Instead, he read them from a prepared script.

https://johnhelmer.net/sergei-and-yulia ... more-90763

******

“Dialogue Works,” 3 December 2024: Russia’s Solid Response Coming!

This 57-minute discussion with host Nima Alkhorshid is the longest session we have had and, from my perspective, one of the most challenging.

The opening segments deal with the latest international crises – the ‘rebel’ takeover of Aleppo and threat to the Assad regime in Syria and the political struggle for power being fought out in the streets of Tbilisi, Georgia. My efforts were to present the Russian view of these crises, which differs very much from what you will hear and read today in both Western mainstream and in alternative media.

From there we moved on to a variety of currently hot issues including the likely Russian reaction to the Trump-Kellogg plan for peace in Ukraine and the risks of Russia’s using its new hypersonic ballistic missile Oreshnik against NATO countries leading to further escalation towards a nuclear exchange.

My overarching observation is that the Kremlin has written off any possible contribution by Donald Trump to ending the war in Ukraine and are relying solely on their own efforts to subdue Kiev in the coming weeks and ending the war on their own terms.

I am hopeful that viewers will find the discussion of the foregoing to be worth their time. However, I am particularly pleased with the final 10 minutes in the interview in which I was given the opportunity to explain my position calling for the deconstruction of the European Union and the return to an economic alliance such as the European Economic Community before the creation of the Union in 1992. I see this as feasible, while retaining many of the benefits of the EU, such as the common currency, if the Euro is changed from a Fiat valuta to a gold-backed currency. In any case, the pitiful collective EU leadership consisting of nonentities is the direct result of the abandonment of sovereignty in the 1992 constitution which leaves the 27 “leaders” with no powers and no responsibilities to deal with the crises at Europe’s doorstep and beyond that we see today.

Comments will be most welcome.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhSwiA-coPE

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/12/03/ ... se-coming/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Wed Dec 04, 2024 4:03 pm

THE INCITATUS PRECEDENT IN US STRATEGY, THE CALIGULA CURE IN RUSSIAN STRATEGY

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by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with

There has never been a transition between US presidential administrations which has been so replete with new Washington-directed violence across the world. That’s to say, the escalation of wars already under way and the instigation of new ones to the furthest limits of the US empire’s reach.

As the Pentagon war-gaming of the Reagan Administration proved in secret, neither escalation of conventional war nor escalation to nuclear war can be controlled when Americans are running the game. That’s because Americans always think they have firepower superiority (aka shock and awe).

That this superiority has been defeated since 2022 with the destruction of every US weapon and operation plan on the Ukrainian battlefield has spurred the projection of Washington’s denial – that’s Freudian denial — to every other untested battlefield.

Across the Pacific this US escalation now extends from the martial law attempt in South Korea to coup attempts in Bolivia and Venezuela, the threat of trade war against Mexico, and forcing Canada to submit, as Donald Trump has just told Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to “becom[ing] the 51st state and Trudeau could become its governor.” .

Australia, the rich rear base of the US, is under orders to spend more on US arms and bases for US and Japanese forces to fight land, sea, air, and space war against China; for less low-cost raw materials to China, for more tributary payment to the US.

In the Caucasus the US is aiming at escalation to war with Russia in Armenia and Georgia; in the Balkans against Serbia; on the Black Sea and Danube region, Moldova and Romania. Nuclear war stocking has begun in Greece, Germany, Spain, and Poland. In the Middle East, the escalation has already reached genocide for the Palestinians and the demolition of Lebanon. The partition of Syria has resumed. Escalation against Iran is now closer to nuclear exchange than ever before.

This campaign of politics by means of war and war by political means is now existential for both the outgoing and incoming US presidents, and for each of the countries which are their targets. Submission, and the readiness to pay the US demand for billions of dollars in economic and military costs, have become a display of ambition and fear on Roman imperial scale – of the example of the Roman senators ready to kowtow to Incitatus (“Full Speed”), Caligula’s race horse. The Swiss-Serbian geopolitician Slobodan Despot has recently explained this:

“If [European Commission President] Ursula von der Leyen appointed her pony as the European Union’s Foreign Minister, do you think anyone would object? And that the brave animal would be less competent in this position than Mr. Borrell [EU Foreign Minister] or Ms. Kallas [EU Vice President]?… What if by chance Caligula had really appointed his equine senator? Without blinking, the senators would have treated him with all the respect due to his rank. These people were probably no dumber than the satraps of today, but they were not driven by their own reason, or even by their well-understood interests. They were spurred on by fear and by its proactive counterpart, sickly ambition.”

Like the Roman senators and the legion commanders of Caligula’s time (37-41 AD), the fear today is of US-directed political, economic, and physical elimination, as has been tested in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Teheran, and in Slovakia on Prime Minister Robert Fico.

For resistance to Caligula’s horse in Washington, President Vladimir Putin has demonstrated signal success. He has also introduced several innovations in counterforce weaponry against the US and its allies from which they have no effective protection, With Kinzhal, Oreshnik and other weapons named but not yet launched by the Russian side, US escalation without counterforce protection or defence of city grids and civilian populations is irrational. The Incitatus Precedent can work only when the emperor is mad and his subjects are in abject fear or mad ambition or both at once.

The outcome of that in first-century Rome was the Caligula Cure – elimination by force.

In the Third Rome these days, there remains a group of high, very high officials who have reason to be afraid of the Incitatus Precedent and the Caligula Cure. They and their oligarch allies have also believed, and for more than twenty years invested in their safe-haven stable beyond the emperor’s reach.

Their names aren’t important to identify; they are well-known. What is important to know for now is what they believe, and especially what they hope the incoming Trump Administration can be persuaded and bribed to do, at least toward themselves.

Vzglyad, the government-financed internet publication in Moscow, is their mouth organ. Yesterday, there appeared in Vzglyad an essay explaining what they are thinking. Their idea, according to the publication, is composed of three options for Russian strategy.

In translating this verbatim into English, illustrations, map inserts, captions, and URL references have been added to assist the reader. As translator I express no opinion, neither strategic, military, Freudian, nor veterinary.

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Vzglyad essay published here on December 3. The writer is Gevorg Mirzayan, an associate professor at the University of Finance and research fellow of the US-Canada Studies Institute in Moscow. To date, Mirzayan has not found fault with the translations he has read here.

What will be the finale of Cold War 2.0?
December 3, 2024
By Gevorg Mirzayan


Thirty-five years have passed since the statement of the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States that the cold war between the two superpowers is over. However, Moscow and Washington understood the reasons for the end of the mutual confrontation in different ways – and how it is now necessary to build international relations. On the one hand, the resulting Cold War 2.0 must be ended; on the iother hand, in a completely different way.

Exactly 35 years ago – on December 3, 1989 – Soviet Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President George H.W. Bush met in Malta. And there they officially declared the end of the almost 40-year period of the cold war. They declared the advent of an era of “lasting peace” where ideological differences would no longer matter.

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Left: President Bush on board the USS Belknap off Malta for the summit meeting in December 1989. Behind and to his right was the Soviet missile cruiser, Slava, carrying Soviet Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev. Right: The launch carrying Bush approaches the Soviet cruise liner Maxim Gorky. Because of storm weather, the site of the December 2-3 summit between Bush and Gorbachev was moved from the two warships to the Gorky at its shore berth.

Today it becomes clear that the parties understood the essence of the agreement in completely different ways. As well as the conditions for the end of the war – the definition of who won it, who lost it, and what should be the further structure of this “lasting peace”.

“Initially, Moscow and Washington had diametrically opposed approaches to this issue. The United States unilaterally declared its unconditional victory – ‘with God’s grace,’ as George H.W. Bush said in 1992 – in the Cold War. And this victory, from the point of view of the United States, should have marked the beginning of an infinite era of American global dominance. A unipolar world, the universal spread of American values – and the end of history, which Francis Fukuyama proclaimed,” Dmitry Suslov, Deputy Director of the Higher School of Economics Centre for Integrated European and International Studies, explains to Vzglyad.

In this case, the end of history does not mean some kind of global apocalypse, but the end of the global competition of ideas (which, in fact, was the story). That, according to the United States, ended with the total and eternal victory of the liberal democratic model, which (after first the defeat of fascism, and then of the Soviet project) no longer had competitors. And the era was coming, not just of American domination, but of the complete reconstruction of the world in line with American values, views and interests.

The United States has been acting on this principle since the 1990s. The wars in Yugoslavia, interference in the internal affairs of all countries (including Russia), attempts to force recognition of US hegemony and its right alone to decide the fate of the “conquered” world.

The principle of Brennus, leader of the Gauls, voiced by him to the Romans and adopted by them, worked for the United States: Vae Victis, “Woe to the vanquished”. The winner takes all.

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After Brennus had defeated the Romans in battle and the city was surrendering, the Romans tried to ransom themselves from military destruction with an offer of tribute. They then argued over the scales for measuring their compliance, so Brennus used his sword to tip the scale in his favour. A late 19th century French illustration for the sale of a meat extract illustrates what happened.

Russia did not agree with this approach even in the 1990s, during the Yeltsin era. First of all, with the large-scale expansion of NATO to the East. In the decade of 2000-2010, US interference in the affairs of the post–Soviet space was added to this, including a series of colour revolutions. At the same time, Moscow tried to resolve the matter peacefully – that is, to agree on the rules of the game. For example, the proposal for a new collective security system from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

“From Moscow’s point of view, the Cold War ended with the voluntary agreement of the great powers to end the confrontation. And the cold war should be replaced by a multipolar world in which Russia, the United States and other centres of power on an equal basis had to form a new world order, exercise global governance, maintain international security and so on,” says Suslov.

However, in the United States, Moscow’s position was interpreted differently. “Russian disagreement with American hegemonic policy in the United States was perceived as a relapse of revisionism and Russia’s attempt to rewrite the history of the end of the Cold War. To review its results, including through the use of military force,” Suslov adds.

And this eventually led to the resumption of the Cold War – or as some experts say, Cold War 2.0. But now this looks much more dangerous than the previous one.

As before, the United States is trying to inflict strategic defeat on Russia. As then, sanctions and other methods of pressure are used. But now the conflict zone is not on the periphery – that is, in the countries of the third world, but instead in the space of one of the rival powers. In this case Russia, whose sovereign territory is occupied by Ukraine, which, in turn, is armed, financed and directed by the United States.

“In the last cold war, the confrontation in the central sector was considered fraught with a global war, so, in practical outcome, the confrontation was channeled to the periphery. But now it is taking place both on the periphery (for example, the terrorist offensive in Syria) and in the central direction – that is, in Ukraine,” says Suslov.

RUSSIAN MILITARY BLOGGER SITUATION REPORTS ON THE WAR IN SYRIA

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Mikhail Zvinchuk’s Rybar situation report for the Idlib and Aleppo fighting as of December 23, 22:00. It is made clear in the Russian milblog reporting that the adversaries are the US, Turkey, Israel and their proxies, and that theirs is not a “terrorist offensive”; source -- https://t.me/rybar/65997 There is a ban on Russian mainstream media discussion of the restrictions placed on the Russian command in Syria so that they may not defend against the Turks, Americans or Israelis.

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Boris Rozhin’s Colonel Cassad reports an offensive by US trained, armed and directed proxy forces at Syrian Army positions in the Deir ez-Zor region in eastern Syria. Rozhin does not identify the operation as a “terrorist” one. Source: https://t.me/boris_rozhin/146564 .

In addition, the quality of American statesmen has plummeted. Brought up in the 1990s era of American supremacy, the current elites of the United States are not just unready to make some kind of compromise (that is, to recognize Russia’s right to its national interests); but also they do not even fully understand all the risks of the absence of compromise. First of all, there is the risk of nuclear combat.

There are only three possible options for ending the Cold War 2.0. The first, the most terrible and unnecessary for anyone in the world, is its spillover into hot war, and then into the thermonuclear phase.

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Just published on December 2-3, 2024, this report of the top-secret 1983 Pentagon war game, Proud Prophet, concludes that the American military and civilian officials who participated on the US and the Soviet sides escalated to nuclear war because “nuclear war cannot be controlled”. The report failed to note this was a conclusion about American warfighters, not Russian ones who were not invited to play their part in the game. Although the report identifies the Harvard economist Thomas Schelling as the game designer, Schelling had already come privately to the conclusion that the evidence of the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War and USAF plans for nuclear targeting of the Soviet Union were escalatory for ideological and psychopathological reasons on the US side. Privately, Schelling told me in 1971 he was persuaded that the only option for an adversary was to inflict strategic defeat, as happened in the Vietnam War.

The second option is the infliction of strategic defeat on the United States through the strategy of a thousand injections (regional wars in the post–Soviet space, the Middle East, and East Asia, which will morph into a split in American society and result in internal destabilization). This outcome is also not needed by the responsible Great Powers. At the very least, this is because it will lead to a global economic crisis since the United States is the second largest economy on the planet.

The best ending to Cold War 2.0 can – and should – be the third option. This is the one which Russia originally had in mind in the guise of the USSR back in time, thirty-five years ago.

This finale can be formalized through a new agreement between Russia and the United States (as well as China, Iran and other Great Powers). As part of such an agreement, the parties will announce the end of the new cold war, but this time with a common understanding of the terms of their agreement. This will also be perceived in the United States as a defeat – but in fact it will be a universal victory.


The United States must abandon its claims to global hegemony and become a normal Great Power. One of the poles in a multipolar world. And in this multipolar system, the parties will combine both rivalry and cooperation in their relations with each other. And in this outcome, along with the second cold war the first one will be completely over.
https://johnhelmer.net/the-incitatus-pr ... more-90774

******

Russia Conducts Military Drills in The Mediterranean Sea

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Zircon hypersonic missile launched from the Mediterranean, Dec. 3, 2024. @Darwin_f1978


December 4, 2024 Hour: 8:03 am

This exercise involves over 1,000 military personnel, 10 ships, and 24 aircraft, including MiG-31I fighters.

On Tuesday, the Russian Navy and Aerospace Forces launched high-precision sea- and air-based missiles in the eastern Mediterranean Sea as part of ongoing military drills.

The Russian Navy Forces fired hypersonic Zircon missiles and a Kalibr cruise missile at a target position at sea, the Defense Ministry said, adding that an Oniks cruise missile was also launched from the Mediterranean coast.

Some of the combat exercises are carried out “with the complex use of high-precision weapons” recently adopted by the Russian Navy and Aerospace Forces.

The exercise involves over 1,000 military personnel, 10 ships and support vessels, and 24 aircraft, including MiG-31I fighters with Kinzhal hypersonic missiles from the Russian Aerospace Forces and the Bastion coastal missile system.

This morning, the Russian Coastal Defense Forces in Tartus launched a number of hypersonic missiles towards presumed targets deep in the Mediterranean Sea.

Weapons used included Bastion batteries and Zircon hypersonic missiles. pic.twitter.com/416DDV8rKU

— MARIA (@its_maria012) December 3, 2024
On Wednesday, the Defense Ministry reported that Russian air defenses shot down 35 drones, some of which attacked a military airfield in the Ryazan region and a training center in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya.

Twelve drones were shot down in Rostov; six in Bryansk; four in Belgorod and two in Kursk, all regions bordering Ukraine. In addition, five enemy aircraft attacked Krasnodar; four in Ryazan; and one each in Kaluga and Astrakhan, regions on the Caspian Sea.

Ukrainian drones attempted to attack Diaghilevo airfield, which hosts Tu-22MC bombers and Il-76 tankers. The Ukrainian army also attacked one of Russia’s largest microelectronics factories in the city of Bryansk, causing minor damage to the building’s roof and the fence around the compound.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/russia-c ... anean-sea/

Protests in Georgia Have Lasted for Six Days

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Man uses bazooka-type device to launch fireworks in Georgia, Dec. 2024. X/ @Ad_Couly

December 4, 2024 Hour: 9:02 am

The Interior Ministry accused protesters of throwing blunt objects, pyrotechnic devices, and flammable items.
On Tuesday, the police used water cannons and tear gas to control pro-European protesters demonstrating for the sixth consecutive night in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.

Last week, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze postponed negotiations regarding Georgia’s accession to the European Union until 2030. This decision immediately sparked public protests.

Kobakhidze, whom critics accuse of having pro-Russian tendencies, blamed his political opponents and NGOs for “orchestrating the violence” in these demonstrations, which he claimed were “funded from abroad.”

On Tuesday night, thousands of people gathered in Tbilisi to protest, launching fireworks at Parliament and the police. The Interior Ministry accused protesters of throwing “blunt objects, pyrotechnic devices, and flammable items.”


President Salome Zurabishvili, who supports her country’s integration into the European Union and backs the protests, condemned the police for their disproportionate use of force, including mass arrests and mistreatment.

Levan Yoseliani, the National Human Rights Commissioner, accused the police of “acts of torture” against the protesters after visiting detained citizens, many of whom had “severe injuries” to their heads or eyes.

On Tuesday, the Constitutional Court rejected a petition from President Zurabishvili and chose to uphold the enforcement of the October legislative elections.

The government accuses the West of attempting to draw Georgia into a conflict with Moscow, warning of scenarios similar to Ukraine’s Maidan events in 2013.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/protests ... -six-days/

Letting these hoodlums wear themselves out without going medieval has worked in Venezuela and Nicaragua. It did not work in Kiev, the difference being the deep direct involvement of the US and minions. And Nazis...

The device in the photo is more properly called a mortar. Instructions for the making and use of such devices have been provided by US intelligence.

******

Another short excursion into the history of Russia
December 4, 8:30

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Tucker Carlson has come to Russia again and this time interviewed Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
We are waiting for new short excursions into Russian history.
He promises to post them soon. The burning of butts is guaranteed.
Carlson probably came not only for the interview and will convey something from Donald's agent.

P.S. Carlson also said that he wanted to interview Zelensky in Kiev, but the US Embassy in Ukraine forbade him to give an interview.
Everything you need to know about Ukraine's "independence".

P.S. 2. Peskov said yesterday that there are currently no prerequisites for negotiations with Ukraine.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9533018.html

Dunno why anyone credits this cheap-jack opportunist, no more a real journalist than his spiritual father, Bill O'Reilly.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Russia today

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 05, 2024 6:15 pm

(A better than average report from Upper Middle Class Land. Salt required...)

Transcript of ‘Dialogue Works’ edition of 3 December 2024
Transcript submitted by a reader

Nima R. Alkhorshid: 0:06
Hi everybody, today is Tuesday, December 3rd and Dr. Gilbert Doctorow is here with us. Welcome back, Gilbert.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Good to be with you.

Alkhorshid:
Let’s get started with what’s going on in Georgia and in Syria. What are the repercussions of these two major events that are happening right now in the Russian media, and how do they feel about it in terms of what’s going on in Ukraine?

Doctorow: 0:33
Well, I’m glad that you asked me to direct attention to the Russian media, because their take on these developments is rather different from what we hear in major media here in the West, or in the alternative media. I’ve heard some very interesting and well-informed statements by people like Scott Ritter, with regard to Syria, who knows vastly more than I do about it. But that is reflecting his insider’s knowledge of politics on the ground in that part of the world. And the Russian, what I’m bringing to this discussion is what the Russians are saying about it.

1:09
Because the Russians are a big player in one of these two crises. They’re a big player in Syria. They were when they came in and saved Assad’s regime or government, as you wish to call it, in 2015, 2017, by very well conducted air strikes coordinated with Iranian forces on the ground to knock out what the extremist terrorists, which the Americans like to call moderate terrorists and which now the Americans are calling rebels. Rebels, my foot. These are terrorists, and they have been financed by the United States.

1:54
However, let’s come back to the difference in interpretation. From the Russian perspective, what is happening in Syria is an American operation. Some of my peers, like I said, Scott Ritter, have good reason to put the finger on Israel as the driving force. And of course, Israel is a beneficiary of chaos in Syria, because it interrupts supply lines from Iran, which is a source of munitions, missiles, and all sorts of good things, to Hezbollah. It all crosses Syrian territory. This is the reason why there have been these Israeli strikes over the last several years, air strikes on arms caches in various places of Syria.

2:38
It was all about that movement of arms across Iraq and Syria into Lebanon. So then the beneficiaries of chaos that interrupts that neat logistical solution, keeping Hizballah armed. The Russian perspective on this is that it’s driven by the United States. For the United States, it is a concept that they have two areas of conflict in which Russia is a participant or can be named as a participant, and which can distract public attention away from the disastrous situation for America’s Kievan allies. The war is being won on the ground day by day with a thousand Ukrainian soldiers here and there killed every day with 30 or 40 Americans killed manning various weapons systems on Ukrainian territory with French soldiers being killed.

3:47
All of this bad news crawls into the front page even of the “New York Times”. It was yesterday they had an article on the front page, on the online edition, about the real military setbacks. And they spoke about these two towns or cities, which are now under contention, that is in the middle of the Donetsk region. The the important logistical hub Pokrovsk, which is now being renamed by the Russians to its original name before the Ukrainians got hold of it. It is Krasnoarmiisk, and that’s the name under which it will appear in Russian military bulletins; and Kharkovka, which is mostly captured already by the Russians. Both towns will fall completely in the next week or two.

4:40
The Russians claim to have about 50% or 60% of Kharkovka and a substantial portion of Pokrovsk. These are enormous blows to the supply of arms to the Ukrainian front. The loss of these towns opens the way for a Russian offensive straight across to the Dnieper. The next major cities would be the ones that were most famous in the period of 2014, so- called Russia Spring, when the rebellious Donetsk militias held on to Slaviansk was the name of the town, which is yet to be reached by the Russian offensive. They held on to it for 85 days in a kind of saga that for them is like the Americans talking about the Alamo. It’s holding on to a fortified area against the overwhelming enemy forces.

5:45
So the Russians are moving very nicely; and the Americans, the Brits, would particularly like to get this off the front page of the news. And it’s so much more convenient to have what’s going on in Syria, which as the “Financial Times” very nicely put it, “Well, the Assad forces are doing badly because the Russians and Iranians are so weak.” They love to say the Russians are weak.

It takes your mind off the fact that the Ukrainians are being crushed, ground down. And that the Russians have demonstrated their military might 10 days ago or whatever by their blow using the hypersonic, a Oreshnik ballistic missile to destroy a multi-story fortified concrete multi-story factory making– it’s an old factory that was always involved in production of missiles and other military gear. So they demonstrated their military might and the “Financial Times” would rather have us forget it.

6:49
The second area that is in the news, that for the purposes of American propaganda is another front, another point where the Russians are losing is Georgia. The Russians are losing what they don’t have. The Russians were, after the 2008 war, the Russians have had very poor relations with Georgia.

For a brief time, they had restored air transport between Russia and Moscow and Tbilisi, but that was taken down. There was a lot of protests in Georgia over that. And in point of fact, they have no diplomatic relations. Russian leverage on Georgia today is zero. But that doesn’t stop our media, our mass media, from saying what Washington would like them to say, that at least the election in September of the new parliament and prime minister in Georgia was Russia-influenced, Russia- controlled, and is trying to put Georgia back in the Russian sphere of influence.

7:58
And it does, we have now a revolt, something like the start of a civil war going on in the streets of Tbilisi, very much according to the Ukrainian Maidan scenario, down to little details like handing out cakes to the street demonstrators, handing out 40 euros equivalent to everybody who appears on the streets to try to overthrow the government. The only thing they haven’t had yet, which would be in line with the whole Maidan scenario dash catastrophe is the use of snipers to pretend to present the government as being murderous. When in fact, the snipers in the case of Maidan were … Georgian, by the way, snipers who were brought in precisely to facilitate the overthrow of the government, since the murder of people on the streets of Maidan would be laid at the door of the president Yanukovych. This is coming, because there are Georgian fighters in Ukraine who are now heading back to Tbilisi. So they can fulfill the rest of the scenario and try to kill people on the streets and blame it on the government.

9:33
The point is that in our newspapers, this whole saga, the whole adventure in Georgia is presented as pro-Russian, anti-Russian. It’s nothing of the sort. As I said, the Russians have no boots on the ground, they have no presence, they have no diplomatic mission, which could be coordinating the efforts of the young prime minister to hold on to power and to kick out the president, whose term expires within this month, but who’s refusing to leave her office, claiming that the elections that put in place the parliament were fraudulent. Well, these are two trouble spots, and the Russians have their view, which I’ve just expressed, on who is behind it. And who’s behind it is a country that has an abbreviated three letters starting with U, the USA. That is the present situation.

Alkhorshid: 10:44
I think the main question right now is: what would be the policy of the United States under Donald Trump in Georgia? And to what extent Europe would be involved when Donald Trump comes to power in Georgia, in order to facilitate some sort of color revolution in your opinion?

Doctorow:
Well, the color revolution is underway. The question is, there’s a very big difference between 2013 and 2024. The difference is who’s the top of the government. Yanukovych was a very weak man. If he had shown the courage and the determination that Lukashenko showed three years ago when his rule was threatened, or two years ago, when his rule was threatened by a pretender, a false king, or the queen, who was backed by the Lithuanians and by the Poles. And he showed his teeth and he came out with his son, both of them armed with Kalashnikovs, saying, “You’re going to have to take me.”

11:52
Well, Yanukovych was not such a fighter. He was a very weak man. And he did not do what common sense would have dictated, which is to beat to hell those violent street demonstrators. He didn’t do it. I think this government in Georgia is prepared to do it as a young, vigorous and very smart Prime Minister, they’re very lucky to have him in this Georgia dream team.

12:18
So that scenario won’t go. But to answer your question about the United States, I think the United States doesn’t have to do very much, because the work for the color revolution is being led by the French on behalf of the United States. And why do I say that? It’s quite extraordinary that in at least two countries, the head of state of democratic sovereign states is a person who’s a dual national, which should be a no-no. You should not have a dual national as your head of state. It’s a contradiction in terms.

12:53
And she, the sitting president, is a French national. And as I said on Russian television last night, she’s not only a French national, but she’s working and has been working for a long time with French intelligence. Therefore, she would not take the position that she has taken, which is directly challenging the elected parliament and the elected prime minister, by refusing to step down and calling them illegitimate. She would not dare to do that if she didn’t have the full power of France behind her. And I assume that’s via the French diplomatic mission and whatever.

13:44
So the Americans don’t have to do very much. Trump can just rest easy and find something else to busy himself with. Mr. Macron’s people have got the rebel cause, the traitorous cause in Georgia well in hand. I think they’re going to lose.

Alkhorshid: 14:02
How do they talk about, in Russia they’re talking about– because we know in 2020 there was an agreement between Iran, Russia and Turkiye considering Idlib and Aleppo being a demilitarized zone. What do they talk about the situation right now between these three countries? I’m talking about Turkiye, as you’ve mentioned, being totally in the hand of the United States, playing on their part in Syria.

Doctorow: 14:32
Yeah. Well, the Russians are deeply disappointed by the behavior of Erdogan. And I think his chances of getting into BRICS even as a partner have been reduced to close to zero. I think the Chinese are also furious at him. So with these two core members of BRICS on the committee deciding who’s going to enter the association, I think Mr. Erdogan is no longer on the list.

But the Russians explained that this is a very– the first day, the day when Aleppo was seized, Russian news said nothing about it. You would have no idea that there was a crisis going on there. Yesterday, Russian news and Russian talk shows, the two most serious analytic programs that I watch– both “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov”, and the earlier in the day program, “The Great Game” with Vyacheslav Nikonov– they both had segments of their program devoted to the crisis in Syria.

15:41
And what I heard was, this is from, of course they’re not just people from the street. They’re not just talking heads. These are leading scholars from Moscow University and from other very authoritative research institutes who are specialized in the Middle East. What they had to say is that first of all, they believe that Mr. Bashar Assad is largely responsible for this catastrophic loss of Aleppo.

16:21
He was not doing the job properly. He was not taking into account that you snuff out rebellions as they did between 2015 and 2017, 2018, with Russian and Iranian help. And it dies down, but then it flares up again at some point in the future. And he was totally unprepared for a flare-up, which he had no right to be. So the Russians are quite unhappy with Bashar Assad. They’re trying to put heads together with the Iranians, who were the people on the ground today and people in this axis of resistance as the cat’s paws of Iran, they were the people on the ground mostly who saved the Assad regime in that period, critical period, starting with 2015 when the vast majority of the territory was in the hands of various rebels.

17:27
So the situation today is bad but not terrible. The loss of Aleppo is very important. It is the second- largest city in Syria. And it was before 2011, I think it was the largest city in Syria. Also the sortie, the advance that these rebels made, oh I’m calling them rebels, I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.

In fact, in the past we would have called them Islamic extremists, Sunni extremists and terrorists. All these people moved south from Idlib into Hama. It’s another province which has apparently some important military infrastructure that they are in the process of seizing. They said they seized weapons caches there.

18:24
So there’s a threat. They’ve been turned back, or at least the line has been held in this province, South Lidlib, Hamas. But the Russians are at a disadvantage. Their logistical supplies between the center of the country and their airfield and naval base on the coast are in jeopardy. So the Russians are looking in an anxious way in trying to save the situation with the forces they have on hand there, which are primarily air force. They are making attacks in the first day of action– again, this is very sketchy news that came out on Russian television– that killed 350 of these insurgents or terrorists by their bombing campaign.

19:16
There will be a lot more of them. They have their airplanes there and they also have some ground forces, but marginal. The expectation of the United States is that this, from the Russian perspective, is that the whole Syrian crisis would be an important distraction for the Russians and would take the pressure off the front in Donetsk, giving some relief to Mr. Zelensky. That is a false hope. I think the Russians are quite prepared to see Syria collapse if at the same time they finish off Ukraine.

Alkhorshid: 19:55
It seems that there was a phone call between Putin and the President of Iran Pezeshkian. They are talking about they are going to meet soon in the near future, personally. But do you see that these two countries are trying to manage the situation with Turkiye, or they’re just, they don’t know what to do with Turkiye right now.

Doctorow:
Well, I think Pezeshkian has a better feel for Turkey right now than Putin does because Putin refused to take a phone call yesterday from Erdogan. That’s the state of their present relations, whereas Iran had sent their foreign minister into both Damascus to meet with Bashar Assad and to meet with Erdogan in Ankara, I believe.

20:52
So the initiative for finding a great-power or regional-power solution to the crisis in Syria is really with the Iranians. At the same time, the Russians point to something that you will not find mentioned anywhere in our major media, which [is] the situation is not as bad for Assad as it was in 2015. He has gotten the support of Saudi Arabia, of Egypt and of the United Arab Emirates in this present fight against the Sunni terrorists. Back in 2015 he was public enemy number one among the Arab countries. So in this sense, the situation is considerably more favorable, at least the regional situation, is more favorable to Assad than it was back then.

Alkhorshid: 21:53
In your opinion, right now in Russia, if you remember, Keith Kellogg is talking about the Biden administration preparing everything for Donald Trump to put him in a better position. Is what’s going on in Georgia, in Syria, and Jake Sullivan talking about sending more weapons by mid-January to Ukraine. Is part of that grand plan on the part of the deep state in the United States?

Doctorow:
Well, the Russian position of Mr. Trump has become very clear in the last week or two. And out of this, there are a number of things I want to share with viewers to give them some comfort that the world is not going to hell and that a nuclear war is most improbable given what the Russians have learned and how they intend to continue their their activities against the Ukrainian and NATO forces. What they learned is that Mr. Trump is worthless, from their standpoint. They have discounted him completely as a factor in the end game of the Ukraine war.

23:15
If they pretend– well, Mr. Putin is never an insulting person, he never would show his disdain, except if you happen to be Angela Merkel and he knows that you are afraid of dogs. In that case, he might show his disdain for you in a way that people will know. But as regards Donald Trump, of course, he will be given all respect. Mr. Kellogg, General Kellogg will be given all respect if and when he makes a visit to Moscow.

But the outcome of those talks will be zero. From the Russian perspective– they discussed precisely Kellogg’s outline back in June, published, on what the solution to the war could look like. And this was presumably what he was feeding to Donald Trump back then. And it’s presumably what Trump had in mind when he spoke, said that he could solve the war at once. From the Russian perspective, what is coming to the public domain, the public news about the Kellogg Plan back from June, dates from June and has no relevance to November, December 2024.

24:31
The battle has moved on. The Russians have achieved sweeping victories and conquered additional territory, more territory in the last month than the preceding 12 months. They have shown on their television for the first time in a way that you can make sense out of it, they showed exactly how the battle, the line of confrontation, the battle lines in Donetsk have moved in the last month. It’s dramatic.

And they’re comfortable that they have a winning hand and that time is on their side. And they have something else. And that is their present reading of the meaning of Oresznik and what to do with it. Many of our commentators, both in mainstream and in alternative media, have considered that Mr. Putin will use this weapon to strike against a NATO country.

25:39
I myself put Poland at the top of the list of potential targets for a Russian strike if they were further subjected to ATACMS, SCALP and Storm Shadow firings from Ukraine into their territory. However, I think on the basis of their dismissing Trump’s possible contribution to a solution, considering the desperation and the recklessness of the Biden administration, considering the utter recklessness and stupidity of the British Prime Minister Starmer, and how he is conducting himself in British policy…

I think the Russians have stepped back and said, “Why are we going to play into the hands of these people who are hoping to incite us to do something that will raise the escalatory level? And why would we wait a minute for the arrival of Mr. Trump when he showed himself by appointing these hopeless loud mouths and Waltz and Gortcan who are insulting us, why would we wait for Trump to come to power? No reason at all.”

27:07
So, in this context, what is the leverage that they enjoy from the power of the Oreshnik? Well, in Ukraine, it’s not Mr. Trump who’s sitting in a bunker 200 meters below the earth. It’s Mr. Zelensky, who now realizes he’s totally vulnerable. And all the American and NATO generals who are in similar bunkers around, either around Xxxx or within the Kiev area, they all can be killed in a moment’s notice by the Russians. So the real pressure, the point of leverage, is not in Washington where you’ve got dummies with Yale degrees on their office walls, who don’t get it and who are only making these sounds for the sake of getting a better university position on January 21st.

28:10
No, leave them alone. Let them talk to themselves. Let them talk to their journalists. The Russians are applying pressure where it can move things on the Ukrainians. It’s the Ukrainians who are now about to lose five million refugees to Europe because all heating and electricity is being reduced to close to nil. And they are, and Mr. Zelensky is rattled, as he should be, by the strength of Russia’s new arms.

Alkhorshid: 28:46
In your opinion right now, with what we’ve seen considering Oreshnik and the power it has in terms of any sort of escalation between the West and Russia, do you think that– we have two conflicts in the West Asia, in Georgia, and with escalation in Ukraine– do you think what would be the next step on the part of the policymakers in the United States? Because they want to escalate the situation, in my opinion. They don’t give up on escalation, that any possibility, they can take any possibility to escalate the situation. But at the end of the day, we have the fear of having a nuclear interaction between the West and Russia. Russia doesn’t need to go nuclear because they have a new, as you’ve mentioned, hypersonic missile that is so capable of hitting any target in the West. But the West doesn’t have it. This is the problem that you’re facing right now.

Doctorow: 29:53
Well, as I’ve written a couple of days ago, when this situation was discussed on the Sunday “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov” show, one of the regular political-scientist commentators said that they were delighted with Mr. Putin’s speeches in Astana on Wednesday and Thursday, both sitting at the session of their treaty organization of defense.

And he was talking tough. He was talking very tough. They were very happy finally that their president had moved from what they called Soviet- era diplomatic language to the kind of very straightforward in-your-face language that he was using in Astana. And to sum it up, what’s the best way to for Russia to conduct itself in front of the West now? it’s just to say, “Hands up! Time for you to surrender, because we got you covered.” And let’s just say something about the Oreshnik, which again, is not much discussed.

31:10
Yes, it’s an intermediate range ballistic, but it’s at the top end of intermediate and the bottom end of intercontinental. It is intercontinental, it depends where you fire it from. If you fire it from Kamchatka, from the Russian far east, it can reach Montana and maybe farther down the US West Coast. So of course it is intercontinental in that sense. It’s where you position it.

It also can wipe out any or all of American military assets in the Middle East. You fire it from Astrakhan and that’s it. You’ve got the whole US military establishment in West Asia covered and ripe for destruction. Now, I think the only limitation in this is first of all, how many of these Oreshniks do they have? And it’s clear that when they say they’re going into serial production, they mean three-shift production.

32:06
They have a few of them, clearly, but they decided not to waste them on a further attack on Ukraine until and unless Mr. Zelensky fires another one or two or more ATACMS or Storm Shadows into Russian territory. Then they will start spending some of their stock of this missile, their hypersonic missile. In the meantime, they’re doing quite well, thank you, destroyed the energy infrastructure and various arms caches and concentrations of foreign mercenaries using simpler, much less expensive short-range missiles. The Iskandar in particular, which has a 500-kilometer range, quite sufficient to wreak havoc across Ukraine, which is what they are doing.

Alkhorshid: 33:04
We’ve seen, if you remember in the Trump’s presidency, his first term, he wanted to withdraw the US troops from Syria and later on he said, we’re there, I didn’t do it because we have a lot of oil there and we have to take care of that. Don’t you think that would be the case in Ukraine in the future? That would bring some sort of– because Lindsey Graham was talking about the resources in Ukraine, and they may go in that direction. That would be problematic for Russia. Don’t you think that would be the case?

Doctorow: 33:44
Look, Ukraine was an important country for population. It had 45 million. It’s down now to 28 million and soon it’ll be down to 22 million or less across all the refugees who headed either to Russia or to Europe. It was important because of the skills of the population and the manufacturing infrastructure in Donbass, which was among the most advanced and important contributors to the Soviet economy.

34:13
The wealth that Russia has received in terms of population and manufacturing capabilities in the Donbass, which it now possesses, I think more than offsets the $350 billion in frozen assets and so forth. So that aspect, manufacturing in both the equipment and the skills, the manufacturing skills and the mining skills of population in Donbass, were an important contributor. The agricultural component also was very important. Oil and gas, much less important. There was discussion of fracking and how that would open up all kinds of possibilities for energy sufficiency or as you’re suggesting for energy exports from Ukraine but that was never really exploited.

35:13
There was considerable resistance within Ukraine to fracking. I said nothing much came of it But they have their metal, they have a lot of things. Mr. Zelensky has opened up shop to sell off his country as if he has a right to sell it. He has no legitimacy. And I think any contracts he makes will be overturned in international lawsuits because he has no legitimacy. I don’t think that the United States is motivated in its policy towards Ukraine by this kind of mercantilism and resource capture. That is no doubt an additional bonus, but it’s not what’s driving American policy there. It’s all geopolitics. It’s trying to deprive Russia of its rightful place in the world by having it under continual pressure by an existential enemy that they are supplying.

Alkhorshid: 36:21
What were the repercussions of Donald Trump’s comment on the countries who are not willing to use dollar any more? Because he’s just trying to intimidate them by putting more sanctions on these countries. How do they talk about it in the Russian media?

Doctorow: 36:41
They laugh at it. I think he’s making a fool of himself, because he’s carrying to a still further extreme all of the self-destructive practices of the Biden administration in its sanctions policy. It is utterly impossible for the United States to sanction the BRICS countries. That is more than half of the world’s population, a very substantial part of global GDP. Whom are they going to sell to, after all? Whom are they going to buy from? It is showing utter ignorance of the real economic power of the United States today in the present configuration of nations. It’s assuming that the United States has the preeminent place in the global economic pecking order that it had in 1947. It doesn’t.

37:42
The only thing that he can achieve is self-isolation of the United States and harm to the American economy. So the Russians take this as showing rank stupidity. They don’t say that openly, but they laugh. They laugh.

I think that it also misses the point. I think Trump was very badly advised. He was following all of the promotional hype about what BRICS would do and not following what they actually said and concluded in their declaration of the BRICS summit, which is not attacking the dollar. They made it plain that their efforts will be of a constructive rather than a destructive nature, constructive in that they’re building parallel institutions for global governance that they expect will take over eventually from the existing institutions but for some time will be parallel. And they did not, they pointedly did not make de-dollarization an objective or the creation of a BRICS currency the objective, knowing that this will alienate many prospective new members of BRICS who do not want to risk their ongoing, their substantial commercial relations with the United States for the sake of an unproven new currency.

39:33
So the whole BRICS exercise is assuming a gradual replacement of the dollar with bilateral currency exchanges or by trading in national currencies. The biggest factor in de-dollarization is not what Trump was talking about. “Ah, who’s going to stand against it?” No, The biggest factor is what the Saudis are doing. And he doesn’t dare touch that.

The fact that the Saudis did not renew the petrodollar agreements with the United States, that they are now doing substantial sales to China in Yuan and not in dollars, that’s the single biggest threat to the American financial hegemony, not any declarations coming out of BRICS.

Alkhorshid: 40:30
Do you think in Donald Trump’s view right now, is he saying these conflicts are helping him or just solidifying the relationship between Iran, China, Russia and other countries within BRICS?

Doctorow:
Well, the Russians view Trump’s plans for foreign policy as having the notion that he can make some kind of a pragmatic solution to relations with the Russians and then can try to split off the Russians from the Chinese.

41:05
The people around Trump have been rightfully alarmed that the Biden administration did so much to solidify a Russian-Chinese high-level alliance, practically speaking, an alliance. And they would like to take one or the other country aside to break this up. Well, they can’t take China aside, because they’ve already declared China as enemy number one and the biggest threat to Americans global position. So what’s left is to take the “junior” partner, as they like to see it. The concept of junior partners is also nonsense. It shows ignorance of the real strength of the Russian negotiating position within their relation with China. But that’s a separate issue, for a separate discussion.

42:03
Gilbert, what’s so interesting right now is the United States, Washington, right now is talking about that the next battlefield between the United States on one side and Russia and China and BRICS on the other side wouldn’t be in Africa. It means that it would be in Africa because it seems– do you see the war expanding under Donald Trump, in a new front in Africa?

42:37
I’m not aware of his policy plans. I am aware of what Mr. Biden is doing at the very end of his four-year term. He’s finally made it over to Africa, one last hurrah. And as the BBC is describing it today, his trip there is a step towards addressing the concerns in Africa, that America is not interested in their continent, whereas the Chinese have invested so very much.

43:05
And the suggestion is the Americans will invest in Africa. That’s an assumption that doesn’t have much foundation under it. As for the Russians, they’re busy in Africa, but doing different things, not so much commerce of supplying security and arms sales, not, I said, not commerce, not civilian commerce, not consumer-goods type of commerce, but services they’re selling, namely security, military assistance and military supplies. So that is the Russian presence in Africa is rather small footprint. The Chinese have an enormous footprint, because they’re so dependent on raw material supplies, minerals and other things for their industry as a global manufacturer and exporter that Africa to them has, like Latin America, has very great meaning and importance and is worth investing in.

44:11
For the United States, it’s hard to see that, because the United States is no longer the world’s factory. It’s a consumer, not a producer of manufactured goods. Therefore, I find it hard to imagine that the American investment in Africa can become a serious rival to China’s.

Alkhorshid: 44:35
We had all of Sholz within Kiev. And is this one of the final attempts on the part of the Biden administration to keep things calm in Kiev. And what do we know about what’s going on in Ukraine politically between these political parties, between these different factions?

Doctorow: 45:03
Well, on the latter, I cannot claim an expertise to add to this discussion. I don’t follow the political factions within Ukraine. But as to Mr. Scholz’s visit, that was shown on Russian television. They again had a good laugh of his stepping out of the train and holding onto an aluminum suitcase. And they were asking, what have they got in there? Is it loaded with banknotes? Is it loaded with gold ingots? Well, gold ingots, because you know, that would, Scholz may do his exercises in the morning, but he’s not going to carry a suitcase like that full of ingots. So it was something rather that he didn’t want anyone else to have a chance to see. His visit there was– I don’t think provided a great deal of comfort to Zelensky.

45:55
The Russians call it “political tourism”. They don’t take this seriously. He didn’t give Zelensky what he wanted most, which is permission to use a Taurus missile. He specifically denied that this was something that Germany will accept for the reasons that we’ve heard in the past, because it would have to be German personnel manning and guiding those missiles. Instead, he offered various types of military aid and kept on beating the drum how Germany is the largest supplier of military goods to Ukraine after the United States.

46:40
Mr. Zelensky looks uncomfortable, And as well he might, because really his days are numbered, and if he’s not careful, his days on earth are numbered.

Alkhorshid: 46:54
How about Europe, the European countries right now? Is the conflict in Ukraine, or would this conflict in Ukraine be a dividing issue for the Western European countries or they were still united in their policies?

Doctorow:
Well, I have something, kind of challenge, to the audience to think about on this very question, something that’s crossed my mind. Why is it that we have 27 leaders of whom 25 are just licking the boots of the United States and are not doing anything to look after the interests of their own people and are submitting to the American dictates on how to conduct a war against Russia by way of Ukraine? Why is that the case? And as you say, is it split? Yes, it’s split, but not dramatically split in any way. You have Mr. Orban all there by himself as the one brain in the whole operation, and the rest of them presenting themselves as dummies.

47:58
Now why is that true? Are these people genuinely dummies, or is there something else going on? I believe there’s something else going on, which no one is talking about. And that is: all of the states, the 27 states, they have sacrificed, going back to 1992, when the European Economic space, the Community, became the European Union, when what was an economic grouping became a supranational state, they all gave up their sovereignty, large amounts of their sovereignty, to the point where a head of state or head of government has the power of a city mayor and not of a traditional head of state.

48:48
They gave up foreign policy. Even Germany, pretend to do policy. You’ve got that complete idiot, Baerbock, who was busy getting herself censored by the Chinese for making insulting remarks about Xi. They pretend to do something like diplomacy, even if they have such very poor, very poorly educated personalities speaking on behalf of their diplomacy. But this is an accident, because there is nothing there. The diplomatic function is concentrated in Brussels.

49:29
And so all of these countries are not countries any more in the traditional sense of understanding. And this is precisely what Putin has revolted against. That type of denial of sovereignty is unacceptable to the Chinese, to the Russians, to the Iranians, and to a few other countries who stand out. Europeans– and why did they do this? Why did they give up their sovereignty?

50:00
Because they believed, falsely, wrongly, that national sovereignty is the basis for wars. Countries are aggressive. If they have full sovereignty, they make wars on one another. And since the European Union is supposed to be a peace project, we do away with sovereignty. Well, this other factor: they wanted to integrate for the sake of freedom of travel within the borders of the EU, which ultimately took the form of the Schengen, and to simplify economic life, financial life within this whole space by creating a common currency, the euro.

50:50
And you can’t, if you are not willing to tie the currency to gold, then you have a fiat currency. And a fiat currency requires that all members using that currency have a coordinated tax system, budgetary system, deficit agreements, and all the rest of it. And that’s what they’ve done. They have a fiat currency which works fine, but the result of that fiat currency is that European leaders are nobodies. And we can afford to have complete idiots bearing the title of prime minister or head of state. That’s what we have.

51:25
No, I don’t mean to say everyone’s an idiot, of course not. But they have been stripped, they have stripped themselves of the responsibilities and the powers that would give them a voice in the present conflict over Ukraine. They don’t have a voice. And into this void– it was a void before she took power five years ago, she being Von der Leyen– you had a drunkard who was the head of the Commission, the drunkard prime minister, former prime minister of Luxembourg, who didn’t do very much. And she came around and she understood, “My goodness, I can seize all this.”

52:23
And she did. And nobody said no. Nobody said that the European Union constitution doesn’t give you these powers. So they’ve all been silenced, and she has seized the power. She’s very ambitious, she’s not stupid, she’s vicious and she has concentrated all the power in her own hands. So you ask her, is Europe divided? Who cares if it’s divided? So long as Von der Leyen has all of the cards in her hand, it doesn’t make any difference.

Alkhorshid: 52:58
What’s tragic, Gilbert, about what’s going on in the European countries is those people who are largely corrupted are getting to the power. This is the tragedy of what’s going on in Europe. And they’re having everything in their hands to change the future of Europe. And it doesn’t seem that they’re representing the people who are, as we’ve seen so far, the people in Europe want some sort of change. But do you see that coming to Europe, even under Donald Trump?

Doctorow: 53:31
He may be the disruptive force. He doesn’t have any respect for the European leaders for all the reasons I just outlined above. And I’m sure he may not think of it conceptually as I’ve just outlined it, but the net result of these people are nobodies: he’s right. So why should he respect them? Why should he care what they think of him? What they think of the ambassador who’s delivered to France, the convicted felon who’s a jailbird, and he’s now, because of his relationship with the Trump family, is now going to be the ambassador to France.

54:11
It fits in with his estimate of what France counts for, which is to say close to nothing. And ultimately in foreign affairs, he’s right, it counts for nothing. What will change this? I’m afraid nothing short of breaking up the European Union and turning it back to where it was before 1992 as an economic community.

And it can have a common currency. Why not? Only it would be tied to the gold. It can be done if somebody realizes what you sacrificed to achieve a common currency that is based on fiat, you will realize that it’s time to undo some of these crazy things that were done by very smart, very progressive intellectuals in 1992 with the best interests. There were no villains in the piece, but what we see now [is] a Europe that’s descended to lower depths and has people who are an embarrassment. And they’ve had a whole succession– looking at foreign policies, a whole succession of embarrassments in what preceded Mr. Borrell.

55:26
Borrell is an embarrassment. He’ll never live down “This Europe as a garden, and outside our gates is a jungle”, said two years ago. It’s an embarrassment for anyone with any self-worth to consider this. And before him, what did they start with? Lady Ashton, this British Dame. I mean by title, not by sex, from Britain. She was the first nitwit to head European foreign policy. She didn’t know her ass from her elbow. And then she was followed by this Italian, name escapes me right now, who was a mental case.

56:10
She couldn’t bear the pressure of the office. And you saw the anguish in her face every time she appeared in public. And she was speaking for the European Union. There is something seriously wrong, just as it’s utterly unacceptable that this buffoon, insulting buffoon, Baerbock, is sent on missions abroad to represent Germany and to deal with complex issues like separating China from Russia.

So I know that the party, the bloc in the parliament that was created and is headed by Viktor Orban, is to reform the European Union and not to deconstruct it. But I dare say he’s going to have to rethink this, because I don’t see a way that you can reform the European Union under conditions when the constituent member states are not states, they’re not nation states. They are, they’ve been deprived of powers of diplomacy and of powers to think for themselves, which is a disaster for an entity that represents 500 million people.

Alkhorshid:
Thank you so much, Gilbert, for being with us today. Great pleasure as always.

Doctorow:
Yeah. Thank you for having me.

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/12/04/ ... mber-2024/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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