Rand | This week marks one year since Russia's full-scale invasion of
Ukraine began, igniting the largest armed conflict in Europe since World
War II.
RAND researchers have been analyzing the war from countless angles, providing insights on Russian and Ukrainian capabilities, the potential for diplomacy, refugee assistance, and much more.
What have we learned? And what might lie ahead?
We asked nearly 30 RAND experts to reflect on this
grim anniversary by highlighting notable takeaways from the first year
of Russia's all-out war—and sharing what they're watching as the
conflict in Ukraine grinds on. Here's what they said.
“Russia seems poised to resume limited offensives. Ukraine also seeks
another successful counteroffensive. Yet both sides' capabilities are
being worn down. Ukraine will need continued and predictable support as
Russia digs deep into its reserves.”
What stood out in Year One
“The trajectory of Russia-Ukraine negotiations seems odd in retrospect. The sides came closest to outlining the contours of a settlement in the first six weeks of the conflict. What was nearly agreed to then would be inconceivable now.”
What to watch in Year Two
“I will be watching closely to see if Russia is learning from its mistakes or just perpetuating them.”
What stood out in Year One
“Of the war's many takeaways, perhaps the most fundamental is that
large, conventional wars are not just confined to history books. It's a
lesson that many only half-believed until February 24, and one that the
world must never forget going forward.”
What to watch in Year Two
“The big strategic question is whether the front lines will stagnate
and eventually turn the war into a frozen conflict. The answer will
ultimately come down to whether Western military aid or the ongoing
Russian mobilization gains the upper hand.”
What stood out in Year One
“The strategic failure of the Russian leadership and the incompetence of the Russian military.”
What to watch in Year Two
“The evolving views of the Russian elite and the Russian populace toward Putin and the war.”
kremlin |President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good
afternoon,
Members of the Federation Assembly – senators, State Duma deputies,
Citizens of Russia,
This
Presidential Address comes, as we all know, at a difficult, watershed
period for our country. This is a time of radical, irreversible change
in the entire world, of crucial historical events that will determine
the future of our country and our people, a time when every one of us
bears a colossal
responsibility.
One
year ago, to protect the people in our historical lands, to ensure
the security of our country and to eliminate the threat coming from
the neo-Nazi regime that had taken hold in Ukraine after the 2014 coup,
it was
decided to begin the special military operation. Step by step, carefully
and consistently
we will deal with the tasks we have at hand.
Since
2014, Donbass has been fighting for the right to live in their
land and to speak their native tongue. It fought and never gave up amid
the blockade, constant shelling and the Kiev regime’s overt hatred. It
hoped and waited that Russia would come to help.
In the meantime, as you know well, we were doing everything in our power
to solve this problem by peaceful means, and patiently conducted talks on a peaceful solution to this devastating conflict.
This appalling method of deception has been tried and tested many times
before. They behaved just as shamelessly and duplicitously when destroying
Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. They will never be able to wash off this
shame. The concepts of honour, trust, and decency are not for them.
Over the long centuries of colonialism, diktat and hegemony, they got
used to being allowed everything, got used to spitting on the whole world. It
turned out that they treat people living in their own countries with the same
disdain, like a master. After all, they cynically deceived them too, tricked
them with tall stories about the search for peace, about adherence to the UN
Security Council resolutions on Donbass. Indeed, the Western elites have become
a symbol of total, unprincipled lies.
We firmly defend our interests as well as our belief that in today’s
world there should be no division into so-called civilised countries and all
the rest and that there is a need for an honest partnership that rejects any
exclusivity, especially an aggressive one.
We
were open and sincerely ready for a constructive dialogue with
the West; we said and insisted that both Europe and the whole world
needed an indivisible security system equal for all countries,
and for many years we
suggested that our partners discuss this idea together and work on its
implementation. But in response, we received either an indistinct
or hypocritical
reaction, as far as words were concerned. But there were also actions:
NATO’s expansion
to our borders, the creation of new deployment areas for missile defence
in Europe and Asia – they decided to take cover from us under
an ‘umbrella’ –
deployment of military contingents, and not just near Russia’s borders.
I would
like to stress –in fact, this is well-known – that no other country
has so many military bases abroad as the United States. There are
hundreds of them – I want to emphasise this – hundreds of bases all over
the world; the planet is covered with them, and one look at the map is
enough to see this.
The whole
world witnessed how they withdrew from fundamental agreements
on weapons, including the treaty on intermediate and shorter-range
missiles,
unilaterally tearing up the fundamental agreements that maintain world
peace.
For some reason, they did it. They do not do anything without a reason,
as we
know.
Finally,
in December 2021, we officially submitted draft agreements on security
guarantees to the USA and NATO. In essence, all key, fundamental points
were rejected.
After that it finally became clear that the go-ahead
for the implementation of aggressive plans had been given and they were
not going to stop.
The threat was growing by the day.
Judging by the information we received, there was no doubt that everything
would be in place by February 2022 for launching yet another bloody punitive
operation in Donbass. Let me remind you that back in 2014, the Kiev regime sent
its artillery, tanks and warplanes to fight in Donbass.
21stcenturywire | There is a small but highly influential and powerful faction
embedded throughout Washington’s top political institutions and policy
think tanks, who’s primary objective is the promotion of region and
global military conflicts.
They will not rest unless the world is on fire, and the share prices of ‘defense’ corporations like General Electric, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Blackstone Group, and Carlyle Group
– are hitting record highs. To do this they must also keep Israel
relevant, if not the center of attention, regarding US foreign policy.
They want war, and they want it often and they will do anything to see it happen…
From US-Russia.org
– Here‘s what Robert Parry, the American investigative journalist who
broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated
Press and Newsweek, has to tell us about the Robert
Kagan-Victoria-Nuland couple and their hold on Obama, whose foreign
policy seems to be outsourced to these two Washington
ideologue-opportunists.
According to Parry, the couple’s latest project is to sink Minsk-2
and lay the ground for further U.S. military-industrial-complex
profiteering at the expense of the EU, of the U.S. national security
itself, and of peace in Europe.
The Background
Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of
State Victoria Nuland, run a remarkable family business: she has
sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia –
and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so
America can meet these new security threats. [….]
Not only does the broader community of neoconservatives stand to
benefit but so do other members of the Kagan clan, including Robert’s
brother Frederick at the American Enterprise Institute and his wife
Kimberly, who runs her own shop called the Institute for the Study of
War.
Yet it weren’t for Nuland’s efforts as Assistant Secretary of State
for European Affairs, the Ukraine crisis might not exist. A neocon
holdover who advised Vice President Dick Cheney, Nuland gained
promotions under former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and received
backing, too, from current Secretary of State John Kerry.
Confirmed to her present job in September 2013, Nuland soon undertook an extraordinary effort to promote “regime change”
in Ukraine. She personally urged on business leaders and political
activists to challenge elected President Viktor Yanukovych. She reminded
corporate executives that the United States had invested $5 billion in
their “European aspirations,” and she literally passed out cookies to
anti-government protesters in Kiev’s Maidan square.
Working with other key neocons, including National Endowment for
Democracy President Carl Gershman and Sen. John McCain, Nuland made
clear that the United States would back a “regime change” against
Yanukovych, which grew more likely as neo-Nazi and other right-wing
militias poured into Kiev from western Ukraine.
In early February 2014, Nuland discussed U.S.-desired changes with
U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt (himself a veteran of a
“regime change” operation at the International Atomic Energy Agency,
helping to install U.S. yes man Yukiya Amano as the director-general in
2009).
Nuland treated her proposed new line-up of Ukrainian officials as if
she were trading baseball cards, casting aside some while valuing
others. “Yats is the guy,” she said of her favorite Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
Disparaging the less aggressive European Union, she uttered “Fuck the
EU” – and brainstormed how she would “glue this thing” as Pyatt
pondered how to “mid-wife this thing.” Their unsecure phone call was intercepted and leaked.[….]
Though there was no evidence that Putin had instigated the Ukraine
crisis – and indeed all the evidence indicated the opposite – the State
Department peddled a propaganda theme to the credulous mainstream U.S.
news media about Putin having somehow orchestrated the situation in
Ukraine so he could begin invading Europe. Former Secretary of State
Clinton compared Putin to Adolf Hitler. [….]
Amid the barrage of “information warfare” aimed at both the U.S. and
world publics, a new Cold War took shape. Prominent neocons, including
Nuland’s husband Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New
American Century which masterminded the Iraq War, hammered home the
domestic theme that Obama had shown himself to be “weak,” thus inviting
Putin’s “aggression.”
In May 2014, Kagan published a lengthy essay in The New Republic
entitled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” in which Kagan castigated
Obama for failing to sustain American dominance in the world and
demanding a more muscular U.S. posture toward adversaries.
According to a New York Times article about how the essay
took shape and its aftermath, writer Jason Horowitz reported that Kagan
and Nuland shared a common world view as well as professional ambitions,
with Nuland editing Kagan’s articles, including the one tearing down
her ostensible boss.
Though Nuland wouldn’t comment specifically on her husband’s attack
on Obama, she indicated that she held similar views. “But suffice to
say,” Nuland said, “that nothing goes out of the house that I don’t
think is worthy of his talents. Let’s put it that way.”
Horowitz reported that Obama was so concerned about Kagan’s assault
that the President revised his commencement speech at West Point to
deflect some of the criticism and invited Kagan to lunch at the White
House, where one source told me that it was like “a meeting of equals.”
[See “Obama’s True Foreign Policy ‘Weakness.’”]
How to sink Minsk-2
And, whenever peace threatens to break out in Ukraine, Nuland jumps in to make sure that the interests of war are protected.
Last month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President
Francois Hollande hammered out a plan for a cease-fire and a political
settlement, known as Minsk-2, prompting Nuland to engage in more
behind-the-scenes maneuvering to sabotage the deal.
In another overheard conversation — in Munich, Germany — Nuland mocked the peace agreement as “Merkel’s Moscow thing,” according to the German newspaper Bild,
citing unnamed sources, likely from the German government which may
have bugged the conference room in the luxurious Bayerischer Hof hotel
and then leaked the details.
Picking up on Nuland’s contempt for Merkel, another U.S. official called the Minsk-2 deal the Europeans’ “Moscow bullshit.”
Nuland suggested that Merkel and Hollande cared only about the
practical impact of the Ukraine war on Europe: “They’re afraid of damage
to their economy, counter-sanctions from Russia.” According to the Bild
story, Nuland also laid out a strategy for countering Merkel’s
diplomacy by using strident language to frame the Ukraine crisis.
“We can fight against the Europeans, we can fight with rhetoric against them,” Nuland reportedly said.
NATO Commander Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove was quoted as saying
that sending more weapons to the Ukrainian government would “raise the
battlefield cost for Putin.” Nuland interjected to the U.S. politicians
present that “I’d strongly urge you to use the phrase ‘defensive
systems’ that we would deliver to oppose Putin’s ‘offensive systems.’”
Nuland sounded determined to sink the Merkel-Hollande peace
initiative even though it was arranged by two major U.S. allies and was
blessed by President Obama. And, this week, the deal seems indeed to
have been blown apart by Nuland’s hand-picked Prime Minister Yatsenyuk,
who inserted a poison pill into the legislation to implement the Minsk-2
political settlement.
The Ukrainian parliament in Kiev added a clause that, in effect,
requires the rebels to first surrender and let the Ukrainian government
organize elections before a federalized structure is determined. Minsk-2
had called for dialogue with the representatives of these rebellious
eastern territories en route to elections and establishment of broad
autonomy for the region.
Instead, reflecting Nuland’s hard-line position, Kiev refused to
talks with rebel leaders and insisted on establishing control over these
territories before the process can move forward. If the legislation
stands, the result will almost surely be a resumption of war between
military forces backed by nuclear-armed Russia and the United States, a
very dangerous development for the world. [See “Ukraine’s Poison Pill for Peace Talks.” ]
aurelian |These problems are coming together, to some extent, with the
widespread diffusion of automatic weapons, and the spread of ethnic
organised crime groups in the suburbs of major European cities. Together
with the increasing hold of organised Islamic fundamentalism on the
local communities, this has created a series of areas where governments
no longer wish to send the security forces, because of the fear of
violent confrontation, and where these groups exert an effective
monopoly of violence themselves. Again, it’s not clear what current
military or paramilitary capabilities would be of any real use in
dealing with such situations, and there is the risk of other, non-state,
actors intervening instead. (It’s worth adding that we are not talking about “civil war” here, which is a quite different issue)
So
the existing force-structures of western states are going to have
problems coping with the likely domestic security threats of the near
future. Most western militaries are simply too small, too highly
specialised and too technological to deal with situations where the
basic tool of military force is required: large numbers of trained and
disciplined personnel, able to provide and maintain a secure
environment, and enforce the monopoly of legitimate violence.
Paramilitary forces can only help to a certain extent. The potential
political consequences of that failure could be enormous. The most basic
political question, after all, is not Carl Schmitt’s infamous “who is
my enemy?” but rather “who will protect me?” If modern states,
themselves lacking capability, but also with security forces that are
too small and poorly adapted, cannot protect the population, what then?
Experience elsewhere suggests that, if the only people who can protect
you are Islamic extremists and drug traffickers, you are pretty much
obliged to give your loyalty to them, or if not, to some equally strong
non-state force that opposes them.
In a perverse kind of
way, the same issues of respect and capability also arise at the
international level. I’ve already written several times about the parlous state of
conventional western forces today, and the impossibility of restoring
them to something like Cold War levels. Here, I just want to finish by
talking about some of the less obvious political consequences of that
weakness.
At its simplest, relative military effectiveness
influences how you view your neighbours and how they view you. This can
involve threats and fear, but it doesn’t have to. It means, for example,
that the perception of what regional security problems are, and how to
deal with them, is going to be disproportionately influenced by the
concerns of more capable states. (Thus the influential position enjoyed
by Nigeria in West Africa, for example). This isn’t necessarily from a
crude measure of size of forces either: in the old NATO, the Netherlands
probably had more influence than Turkey, though its forces were much
smaller. Within international groupings—formal alliances or not—some
states tend to lead and others to follow, depending on perceptions of
experience and capability.
Internationally—in the UN for
example—countries like Britain and France, together with Sweden, Canada,
Australia, India, and a few others, were influential because they had
capable militaries, effective government systems and, most importantly,
experience of conducting operations away from home. So if you were the
Secretary-General of the UN, and you were putting together a small group
to look at the possibilities for a peace mission in Myanmar, who would
you invite? The Argentinians? The Congolese? The Algerians? The
Mexicans? You would invite some nations from the region, certainly, but
you would mainly focus on capable nations with a proven track record.
But in quite complex and subtle ways, patterns of influence, both at the
practical and conceptual level, are changing. The current vision even
of what security is, and how it should be pursued, is currently
western-dominated. That will be much less the case in the future.
This
decline in influence will also apply to the United States. Its most
powerful and expensive weapons—nuclear missiles, nuclear submarines,
carrier battle groups, high performance air-superiority fighters — are
either not usable, or simply not relevant, to most of the security
problems of today. We do not know the precise numbers and effectiveness
of Chinese land-based anti-shipping missiles for example, but it’s clear
that sending US surface ships anywhere within their range is going to
be too great a risk for any US government to take. And since the Chinese
know this, the subtle nuances of power relations between the two
countries are altered. Again, the US has found itself unable to actually
influence the outcome of a major war in Europe, because it does not
have the forces to intervene directly, and the weapons it has been able
to send are too few and in many cases of the wrong kind. The Russians
are obviously aware of this, but it is the kind of thing that other
states notice as well, and then has consequences.
Finally,
there is the question of the future relationship between weak European
states in a continent where the US has ceased to be an important player.
As I’ve pointed out before,
NATO has continued as long as it has because it has all sorts of
unacknowledged practical advantages for different nations, even if some
of these advantages are actually mutually exclusive. But it’s not
obvious that such a state of affairs will continue. No European nation,
nor any reasonable coalition of them, is going to have the military
power to match that of Russia, and the US has long been incapable of
making up the difference. On the other hand, this is not the Cold War,
where Soviet troops were stationed a few hundred kilometres from major
western capitals. There will actually be nothing really to fight about,
and no obvious place to do the fighting. What there will be is a
relationship of dominance and inferiority such as Europe has never
really known before, and the end of such shaky consensus as remains on
what the military, and security forces in general, are actually for.
I suspect, but it’s no more than that, that we are going to see a
turning inward, as states try to deal with problems within their borders
and on them. Ironically, the greatest protection against major
conflicts may be the inability of most European states, these days, to
conduct them. Weakness can also have its virtues.
TAC | Given that American politicians
are always more preoccupied by domestic affairs than foreign policy,
members of Congress are quick to adopt the “true faith.” This faith
explains why for the last eight years members thought a future war with
Russia was a low-risk affair. Ukrainians would provide the cannon fodder
and Washington would provide the expensive weaponry and munitions.
Predictably, Washington’s governing strategic principles are
unchanged from previous U.S. interventions around the world. Muddle
through: masses of soldiers—in this case Ukrainians advised by U.S. and
allied officers—and huge infusions of cash, equipment, and technology
can and will permanently alter strategic reality in America’s favor.
The stupefying air of self-righteousness the Biden administration assumes when it attacks erstwhile strategic partners such as Saudi Arabia
or delivers moralizing lectures to Beijing’s leadership, or when its
media surrogates express contempt for the Russian state, is downright
dangerous. Political figures in Washington are ready to indulge any
transgression if it is committed in the name of destroying Russia.
They do not view U.S. foreign policy in the context of a larger
strategy, nor do they comprehend Russia’s capacity to hurt the United
States, a bizarre judgment of Russia’s actual military and economic
potential.
The result is a toxic climate of ideological hatred making it hard to
imagine a contemporary U.S. secretary of State ever signing an
international agreement renouncing war
as an instrument of U.S. national policy, as Secretary of State Frank
Kellogg did in 1928. But as one of Shakespeare’s characters in the Merchant of Venice warned, “The truth will out.”
The ongoing buildup of 700,000 Russian forces
with modern equipment in Western Russia, Eastern Ukraine and Belorussia
is a direct consequence of Moscow’s decision to adopt an elastic,
strategic defense of the territories it seized in the opening months of
the war. It was a wise, though politically unpopular choice
in Russia. Yet, the strategy has succeeded. Ukrainian losses have been
catastrophic and by November, Russian Forces will be in a position to
strike a knockout blow.
Today, there are rumors in the media that Kiev may be under pressure
to launch more counterattacks against Russian defenses in Kherson
(Southern Ukraine) before the midterm elections in November. At this
point, expending what little remains of Ukraine’s life blood
to expel Russian forces from Ukraine is hardly synonymous with the
preservation of the Ukrainian state. It’s also doubtful that further
sacrifices by Ukrainians will assist the Biden administration in the
midterm elections.
The truth is Moscow’s redline concerning Ukrainian entry into NATO
was always real. Eastern Ukraine and Crimea were always predominantly
Russian in language, culture, history, and political orientation.
Europe’s descent into economic oblivion this winter is also real, as is
support for Russia’s cause in China and India and Moscow's rising
military strength.
In retrospect, it is easy to see how Congress was beguiled by the
denizens of think tanks, lobbyists, and retired generals, who are, with
few exceptions, people with a cocktail level of familiarity with
high-end conventional warfare. Members of the House and Senate were
urged to support dubious strategies for the use of American military
assistance, including reckless scenarios for limited nuclear war with
Russia or China. For some reason, U.S. politicians have lost sight of
the reality that any use of nuclear weapons would overwhelm the ends of all national policy.
moonofalabama | The Americans are now crying ‘uncle’ about Russia’s hypersonic
weapons. After the most recent flight test of the scramjet-powered
Zircon cruise missile, the Washington Post on July 11 carried a Nato statement of complaint:
"Russia’s new hypersonic missiles are highly destabilizing
and pose significant risks to security and stability across the
Euro-Atlantic area," the statement said.
At the same time, talks have begun on the ‘strategic dialog’
between the US and Russia, as agreed at the June 16 Geneva Summit of
the two presidents. The two sides had already agreed to extend the START
treaty on strategic weapons that has been in effect for a decade, but,
notably, it was the US side that initiated the summit—perhaps spurred by
the deployment of the hypersonic, intercontinental-range Avangard
missile back in 2019, when US weapons inspectors were present, as per
START, to inspect the Avangard as it was lowered into its missile silos.
But what exactly is a hypersonic missile—and why is it suddenly such a big deal?
We all remember when Vladimir Putin announced these wonder weapons
in his March 2018 address to his nation [and the world]. The response
from the US media was loud guffaws about ‘CGI’ cartoons and Russian
‘wishcasting.’ Well, neither Nato nor the Biden team are guffawing now.
Like the five stages of grief, the initial denial phase has slowly given
way to acceptance of reality—as Russia continues deploying already
operational missiles, like the Avangard and the air-launched Kinzhal,
now in Syria, as well as finishing up successful state trials of the
Zircon, which is to be operationally deployed aboard surface ships and
submarines, starting in early 2022. And in fact, there are a whole slew
of new Russian hypersonic missiles in the pipeline, some of them much
smaller and able to be carried by ordinary fighter jets, like the Gremlin aka GZUR.
The word hypersonic itself means a flight regime above the speed of Mach 5. That is simple enough, but it is not only about speed.
More important is the ability to MANEUVER at those high speeds, in
order to avoid being shot down by the opponent’s air defenses. A
ballistic missile can go much faster—an ICBM flies at about 6 to 7
km/s, which is about 15,000 mph, about M 25 high in the atmosphere.
[Mach number varies with temperature, so it is not an absolute
measure of speed. The same 15,000 mph would only equal M 20 at sea
level, where the temperature is higher and the speed of sound is also
higher.]
But a ballistic missile flies on a straightforward
trajectory, just like a bullet fired from a barrel of a gun—it cannot
change direction at all, hence the word ballistic.
This means that ballistic missiles can, in theory, be
tracked by radar and shot down with an interceptor missile. It should be
noted here that even this is a very tough task, despite the
straight-line ballistic trajectory. Such an interception has never been
demonstrated in combat, not even with intermediate-range ballistic
missiles [IRBMs], of the kind that the DPRK fired off numerous times,
sailing above the heads of the US Pacific Fleet in the Sea of Japan,
consisting of over a dozen Aegis-class Ballistic Missile Defense ships, designed specifically for the very purpose of shooting down IRBMs.
Such an interception would have been a historic demonstration
of military technology—on the level of the shock and awe of Hiroshima!
But no interception was ever attempted by those ‘ballistic missile
defense’ ships, spectating as they were, right under the flight paths of
the North Korean rockets!
The bottom line is that hitting even a straight-line ballistic
missile has never been successfully demonstrated in actual practice. It
is a very hard thing to do.
But let’s lower our sights a little from ICBMs and IRBMs [and even
subsonic cruise missiles] to a quite ancient missile technology, the
Soviet-era Scud, first introduced into service in 1957! A recent case
with a Houthi Scud missile fired at Saudi Arabia in December 2017 shows
just how difficult missile interception really is:
At around 9 p.m…a loud bang shook the domestic terminal at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport.
‘There was an explosion at the airport,’ a man said in a video taken
moments after the bang. He and others rushed to the windows as emergency
vehicles streamed onto the runway.
Another video, taken from the tarmac, shows the emergency vehicles at
the end of the runway. Just beyond them is a plume of smoke, confirming the blast and indicating a likely point of impact.
The Houthi missile, identified as an Iranian-made Burqan-2 [a copy of
a North Korean Scud, itself a copy of a Chinese copy of the original
Russian Scud from the 1960s], flew over 600 miles before hitting the Riyadh international airport. The US-made Patriot missile defense system fired FIVE interceptor shots at the missile—all of them missed!
Laura Grego, a missile expert at the Union of Concerned
Scientists, expressed alarm that Saudi defense batteries had fired five
times at the incoming missile.
‘You shoot five times at this missile and they all miss?
That's shocking,’ she said. ‘That's shocking because this system is
supposed to work.’
Ms Grego knows what she’s talking about—she holds a physics doctorate
from Caltech and has worked in missile technology for many years. Not
surprisingly, American officials first claimed the Patriot missiles had
done their job and shot the Scud down. This was convincingly debunked in
the extensive expert analysis that ran in the NYT: Did American Missile Defense Fail in Saudi Arabia?
This was not the first time that Patriot ‘missile defense’ against this supposedly obsolete missile failed spectacularly:
On February 25, 1991, an Iraqi Scud hit the barracks in
Dharan, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers from the U.S. Army's 14’th
Quartermaster Detachment.
A government investigation revealed that the failed intercept at
Dhahran had been caused by a software error in the system's handling of
timestamps. The Patriot missile battery at Dhahran had been in operation
for 100 hours, by which time the system's internal clock had drifted by
one-third of a second. Due to the missile's speed this was equivalent
to a miss distance of 600 meters.
Whether this explanation is factual or not, the Americans’ initial
claims of wild success in downing nearly all of the 80 Iraqi Scuds
launched, was debunked by MIT physicist Theodore Postol, who concluded that no missiles were in fact intercepted!
americanaffairsjournal | The book really comes into its own in the long sections on the
American economy. These chapters seem especially prescient after Western
sanctions against Russia failed to stop the invasion or decisively
cripple the Russian economy, while causing increasing strains in the
West. In a word, Martyanov views American prosperity as largely fake, a
shiny wrapping distracting from an increasingly hollow interior.
Martyanov then moves on to other consumer goods. He recalls the
so-called kitchen debate in 1959 when Vice President Richard Nixon
showed Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev a modern American kitchen.
During this debate, Nixon explained to Khrushchev that the house they
were in, with all its modern luxuries, could be bought by “any steel
worker.” Nixon explained that the average American steel worker earned
about $3 an hour—or $480 per month—and
that the house could be obtained on a thirty-year mortgage for the cost
of $100 a month. Martyanov points out that this is impossible in the
contemporary American economy. As vital goods have become less and less
affordable for the average American, debt of all types has exploded. He
notes that the flip side of this growing debt has been a decline in
domestic industrial production, which has been stagnant in nominal
terms and falling as a percent of U.S. GDP since 2008. “The scale of
this catastrophe is not understood,” he writes, “until one considers the
fact that a single manufacturing job on average generates 3.4 employees
elsewhere in non-manufacturing sectors.”
Needless to say, Martyanov does not believe that America has the most
powerful economy on earth. Deploying his old school materialist
toolkit, he surveys core heavy industries—including the automotive industry, the commercial shipbuilding industry, and later the aerospace industry—and
finds U.S. capacity wanting. He points out that in steel production
“China outproduces the United States by a factor of 11, while Russia,
which has a population less than half the size of that of the United
States, produces around 81% of US steel output.”
Martyanov is particularly critical of GDP metrics as a basis for
determining the wealth of a country or the power of its economy, because
they assign spending on services the same weight as spending on primary
products and manufactured goods. He believes that the postindustrial
economy is a “figment of the imagination of Wall Street financial
strategists” and that GDP metrics merely provide America with a fig leaf
to cover its economic weaknesses. In a separate podcast
that Martyanov posted to his YouTube channel, he explains why these
metrics are particularly misleading from the point of view of military
production. He compares the U.S. Navy’s Virginia-class fast-attack
submarine and the Russian Yasen-class equivalent. He argues that these
are comparable in terms of their platform capabilities, but that the
Yasen-class has superior armaments. Crucially, however, he notes that
the cost of a Virginia-class submarine is around $3.2 billion while the
cost of the Yasen-class submarine is only around $1 billion. Since GDP
measures quantify economic output (including military output) in dollar
terms, it would appear that, when it comes to submarine output, Russia
is producing less than a third of what it is actually producing. Using a
purchasing-power-parity-adjusted measure might help somewhat here, but
it would still not capture the extra bang for their buck that the
Russians are getting.
A few years ago, it would have been fashionable to dismiss this sort
of materialist analysis as old fashioned. Pundits argued that the
growing weight of the service sector in the American economy was a good
thing, not a bad thing, a sign of progress, not decline. But today, with
supply chains collapsing and inflation raging, these fashionable
arguments look more and more like self-serving bromides every day.
Next, Martyanov looks at energy. While many American pundits believed
that the emergence of fracking technology would make Russian oil and
gas less and less important, Martyanov views the shale oil boom as “a
story of technology winning over common economic sense.” He believes
that America’s shale boom was a speculative mania driven by vague
promises and cheap credit. He quotes the financial analyst David
Deckelbaum, who noted that “This is an industry that for every dollar
that they brought in, they would spend two.” Ultimately, Martyanov
argues, the U.S. shale industry is a paper tiger whose viability is
heavily dependent on high oil prices.
Martyanov is even more critical of “green energy,” which he views as a
self-destructive set of policies that will destroy the energy
independence of all countries that pursue them. He also points out that
China, Russia, and most non-Western nations know this and, despite lip
service to fashionable green causes, avoid these policies.
Finally, Martyanov returns to the collapse of America’s ability to
make things. He recites the now familiar numbers about falling
manufacturing output and an increased reliance on imports from abroad.
But he also points to the collapse in manufacturing expertise. Martyanov
cites statistics showing that, on a per capita basis, Russia produces
twice as many STEM graduates as America. He attributes this to a change
in elite attitudes. STEM subjects are difficult and require serious
intellectual exertion. They often yield jobs on factory floors that are
not particularly glamorous. “In contemporary American culture dominated
by poor taste and low quality ideological, agenda-driven art and
entertainment, being a fashion designer or a disc jockey or a
psychologist is by far a more attractive career goal,” he writes,
“especially for America’s urban and college population, than foreseeing
oneself on the manufacturing floor working as a CNC operator or mechanic
on the assembly line.”
Rotting from the Head Down
Martyanov’s economic analysis may reflect his Soviet materialist
education, but ultimately, he views America’s core problem as being a
crisis of leadership. He traces this problem back to the election of
Bill Clinton in 1993. Martyanov argues that Clinton represented a new
type of American leader: an extreme meritocrat. These new meritocrats
believed their personal capacities gave them the ability to do anything
imaginable. This megalomaniacal tendency, Martyanov observes, has been
latent in the American project since the founding. “Everything
American,” he writes, “must be the largest, the fastest, the most
efficient or, in general, simply the best.” Yet this character trait has
not dominated the personality of either the American people or their
leaders, he says. Rather, the American people remain today “very nice
folks” that “are generally patriotic and have common sense and a good
sense of humour.” Yet in recent times, he argues, something has happened
in American elite circles that has let the more grandiose and
delusional side of the American psyche run amok, and this has happened
at the very time when America is most in need of good leadership.
Martyanov believes that America’s extreme meritocrats vastly
overestimate their capabilities. This is because, rather than focusing
on the strengths and weaknesses of the country they rule, they have been
taught since birth to focus on themselves. They believe that they just
need to maximize their own personal accomplishments and the good of the
country will emerge as if by magic. This has led inevitably to the rise
of what Martyanov characterizes as a classic oligarchy. Such an
oligarchy, he argues, purports to be meritocratic but is actually the
opposite. A proper meritocracy allows the best and the brightest to
climb up its ranks. But an oligarchy with a meritocratic veneer simply
allows those who best play the game to rise. Thus, the meritocratic
claims become circular: you climb the ladder because you play the game;
the game is meritocratic because those who play it are by definition the
best and the brightest. Effectively, for Martyanov, the American elite
does not select for intelligence and wisdom, but rather for
self-assuredness and self-interestedness.
newyorker | When
we first spoke, in early September, Goemans predicted a protracted
conflict. None of the three main variables of war-termination
theory—information, credible commitment, and domestic politics—had been
resolved. Both sides still believed that they could win, and their
distrust for each other was deepening by the day. As for domestic
politics, Putin was exactly the sort of leader that Goemans had warned
about. Despite his significant repressive apparatus, he did not have
total control of the country. He kept calling the war a “special
military operation” and delaying a mass mobilization, so as not to have
to face domestic unrest. If he started losing, Goemans predicted, he
would simply escalate.
And then, in the weeks
after Goemans and I first spoke, events accelerated rapidly. Ukraine
launched a remarkably successful counter-offensive, retaking large
swaths of territory in the Kharkiv region and threatening to retake the
occupied city of Kherson. Putin, as predicted, struck back, declaring a
“partial mobilization” of troops and staging hasty “referendums” on
joining the Russian Federation in the occupied territories. The partial mobilization
was carried out in a chaotic fashion, and, as at the beginning of the
war, caused tens of thousands of people to flee Russia. There were
sporadic protests across the nation, and these threatened to grow in
size. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces continued to advance in the east of
their country.
In a terrifying blog post,
Goemans’s former student Branislav Slantchev laid out a few potential
scenarios. He believes that the Russian front in the Donbas is still in
danger of imminent collapse. If this were to happen, Putin would need to
escalate even further. This could take the form of more attacks on
Ukrainian infrastructure, but, if the goal is to stop Ukrainian
advances, a likelier option would be a small tactical nuclear strike.
Slantchev suggests that it would be under one kiloton—that is, about
fifteen times smaller than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
It would nonetheless be devastating, and would almost certainly lead to
an intense reaction from the West. Slantchev does not think that NATO
would respond with nuclear strikes of its own, but it could, for
example, destroy the Russian Black Sea Fleet. This could lead to yet
another round of escalation. In such a situation, the West may be
tempted, finally, to retreat. Slantchev urged them not to. “This is it
now,” he wrote. “This is for all the marbles.”
“Branislav
is very worried,” Goemans told me, “and he is not a scaredy-cat.”
Goemans was also worried, though his hypothetical time line was more
extended. He believes that the new Russian reinforcements, however
ill-trained and ill-equipped, and the onset of an early winter will
pause the Ukrainian campaign and save the Russians, for the moment.
“People think it’s going to be over quickly, but, unfortunately, war
doesn’t work like that,” he said. But he also believes that Ukraine will
resume its offensive in the spring, at which point the same dynamic and
the same dangers will be back in play. “For a war to end,” Goemans
said, “the minimum demands of at least one of the sides must change.”
This is the first rule of war termination. And we have not yet reached a
point where war aims have changed enough for a peace deal to be
possible.
The theorists’ predictions for what
would happen next depended, in part, on how they evaluated the
variables. Would the Russian front in the Donbas really collapse, and,
if so, how soon? If it did collapse, how much of the information about
it would the Kremlin be able to control? These things were
unpredictable, but one had to make predictions. Dan Reiter, for example,
was slightly more sanguine than Goemans about Putin’s ability to sell a
partial victory to the Russian people, because of his mastery of the Russian media. To Reiter, Putin was enough of a dictator that he would be able to back off.
Despite
being the preëminent theorist of credible commitment, Reiter believes
that the war could end short of an absolute outcome, such as the
destruction of the Russian Federation. “You really don’t like to leave
in place a country that is going to offer some kind of lingering
threat,” he said. “However, sometimes that’s just the world you have to
live in, because it’s just too costly to actually remove the threat
completely.” He saw a future in which Ukraine agreed to a ceasefire and
then gradually turned itself into a “military hedgehog,” a prickly
country that no one would want to invade. “Medium-sized states can
protect themselves even from very dangerous adversaries,” Reiter said.
“Ukraine can make itself more defensible into the future, but it will
look a lot different as a country and as a society than it did before
the invasion.” It would look more like Israel, with high taxes, military
spending, and lengthy mandatory military service. “But Ukraine is
defensible,” Reiter said. “They’ve proven that.”
Goemans
was feeling more worried. Once again, his thoughts took him to the
First World War. In 1917, Germany, faced with no hope of victory,
decided to gamble for resurrection. It unleashed its secret weapon, the
U-boat, to conduct unlimited operations on the high seas. The risk of
the strategy was that it would bring the United States into the war; the
hope was that it would choke off Great Britain and lead to victory.
This was a “high variance” strategy, in Goemans’s words, meaning that it
could lead to a great reward or a great calamity. In the event, it did
lead to the U.S. entering the war, and the defeat of Germany, and the
Kaiser’s removal from power.
In this situation,
the secret weapon is nuclear. And its use carries with it the risk,
again, of even greater involvement in the war by the U.S. But it could
also, at least temporarily, halt the advance of the Ukrainian Army. If
used effectively, it could even bring about a victory. “People get very
excited about the front collapsing,” Goemans said. “But for me it’s,
like, ‘Ah-h-h!’ ” At that point, Putin would really be trapped.
For
the moment, Goemans still believes that the nuclear option is unlikely.
And he believes that Ukraine will win the war. But that will also take a
long time, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
johnhelmer | The military operation on Monday night which fired munitions to blow
holes in the Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II pipelines on the Baltic
Sea floor, near Bornholm Island, was executed by the Polish Navy and
special forces.
It was aided by the Danish and Swedish military; planned and
coordinated with US intelligence and technical support; and approved by
the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.
The operation is a repeat of the Bornholm Bash operation of April
2021, which attempted to sabotage Russian vessels laying the gas pipes,
but ended in ignominious retreat by the Polish forces. That was a direct
attack on Russia. This time the attack is targeting the Germans,
especially the business and union lobby and the East German voters, with
a scheme to blame Moscow for the troubles they already have — and their
troubles to come with winter.
Morawiecki is bluffing. “It is a very strange coincidence,” he has announced, “that on the same day that the Baltic Gas Pipeline
opens, someone is most likely committing an act of sabotage. This
shows what means the Russians can resort to in order to destabilize
Europe. They are to blame for the very high gas prices”. The truth
bubbling up from the seabed at Bornholm is the opposite of what
Morawiecki says.
But the political value to Morawiecki, already running for the Polish
election in eleven months’ time, is his government’s claim to have
solved all of Poland’s needs for gas and electricity through the winter —
when he knows that won’t come true.
Inaugurating the 21-year old Baltic Pipe project from the Norwegian
and Danish gas networks, Morawiecki announced: “This gas pipeline is the
end of the era of dependence on Russian gas. It is also a gas pipeline
of security, sovereignty and freedom not only for Polish, but in the
future, also for others…[Opposition Civic Platform leader Donald] Tusk’s
government preferred Russian gas. They wanted to conclude a deal with
the Russians even by 2045…thanks to the Baltic Pipe, extraction from
Polish deposits, LNG supply from the USA and Qatar, as well as
interconnection with its neighbours, Poland is now secured in terms of
gas supplies.”
Civic Platform’s former defence and foreign minister Radek Sikorski also celebrated the Bornholm Blow-up. “As we say in Polish, a small thing, but so much joy”. “Thank you USA,” Sikorski added, diverting the credit for the operation, away from domestic rival Morawiecki to President Joseph Biden; he had publicly threatened to sabotage the line in February. Biden’s ambassador in Warsaw is also backing Sikorski’s Civic Platform party to replace Morawiecki next year.
The attack not only escalates the Polish election campaign. It also
continues the Morawiecki government’s plan to attack Germany, first by
reviving the reparations claim for the invasion and occupation of
1939-45; and second, by targeting alleged German complicity,
corruption, and appeasement in the Russian scheme to rule Europe at
Poland’s expense. .
“The appeasement policy towards Putin”, announced
PISM, the official government think tank in Warsaw in June, “is part
of an American attempt to free itself from its obligations of
maintaining peace in Europe. The bargain is that Americans will allow
Putin to finish building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in exchange for
Putin’s commitment not use it to blackmail Eastern Europe. Sounds
convincing? Sounds like something you heard before? It’s not without
reason that Winston Churchill commented on the American decision-making
process: ‘Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once
all other possibilities have been exhausted.’ However, by pursuing such a
policy now, the Biden administration takes even more responsibility for
the security of Europe, including Ukraine, which is the stake for
subsequent American mistakes.”
“Where does this place Poland? Almost 18 years ago the Federal
Republic of Germany, our European ally, decided to prioritize its own
business interests with Putin’s Russia over solidarity and cooperation
with allies in Central Europe. It was a wrong decision to make and all
Polish governments – regardless of political differences – communicated
this clearly and forcefully to Berlin. But since Putin succeeded in
corrupting the German elite and already decided to pay the price of
infamy, ignoring the Polish objections was the only strategy Germany was
left with.”
The explosions at Bornholm are the new Polish strike for war in
Europe against Chancellor Olaf Scholz. So far the Chancellery in Berlin
is silent, tellingly.
What worries American diplomats is that Germany, other NATO
nations and countries along the Belt and Road route understand the gains
that can be made by opening up peaceful trade and investment. If there
is no Russian or Chinese plan to invade or bomb them, what is the need
for NATO? And if there is no inherently adversarial relationship, why do
foreign countries need to sacrifice their own trade and financial
interests by relying exclusively on U.S. exporters and investors?
These are the concerns that have prompted French President Macron to
call forth the ghost of Charles de Gaulle and urge Europe to turn away
from what he calls NATO’s “brain-dead” Cold War and beak with the
pro-U.S. trade arrangements that are imposing rising costs on Europe
while denying it potential gains from trade with Eurasia. Even Germany
is balking at demands that it freeze by this coming March by going
without Russian gas.
Instead of a real military threat from Russia and China, the problem for American strategists is the absence of such a threat.
What the U.S. needed was to provoke Russia, and later China, into
reacting to U.S. arranged threats in a way that would oblige its
'allies' to follow its sanction policies.
The rather dimwitted European leadership fell for the trick.
Pres. Biden: "If Russia invades...then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it."
Reporter: "But how will you do that, exactly, since...the project is in Germany's control?"
The U.S. arranged for a Ukrainian attack on the rebel held Donbas
region. This started on February 17 with intense artillery preparations
against Donbas positions as recorded by the OSCE observers
at that border. Russia had to react or see the ethnic Russians in those
areas getting maimed and killed by Nazi devoting Ukrainians.
There was no way to prevent that but by other than military means. On
February 22 Russia recognized the Donbas republics as independent
states and signed defense agreements with them.
The same day the German chancellor Olaf Scholz canceled the launch of
the undersea Nord Stream II pipeline which was to transport Russian gas
to Germany's industries and consumers.
The Europeans launched a sequence of extremely harsh economic
sanctions against Russia which, prodded by the U.S., had been prepared
months in advance.
Russia's Special Military Operation, under Article 51 of the UN Charter, commenced on February 24.
A follow-up piece by Michael Hudson on February 28 stated that Germany had been defeated for a third time in a century:
The active military force since 1991 has been the United
States. Rejecting mutual disarmament of the Warsaw Pact countries and
NATO, there was no “peace dividend.” Instead, the U.S. policy by the
Clinton administration to wage a new military expansion via NATO has
paid a 30-year dividend in the form of shifting the foreign policy of
Western Europe and other American allies out of their domestic political
sphere into their own “national security” blob (the word for special
rentier interests that must not be named). NATO has become Europe’s
foreign-policy-making body, even to the point of dominating domestic
economic interests.
The recent prodding of Russia by expanding Ukrainian anti-Russian
ethnic violence by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi post-2014 Maiden regime aims at
forcing a showdown. It comes in response to the fear by U.S.
interests that they are losing their economic and political hold on
their NATO allies and other Dollar Area satellites as these countries
have seen their major opportunities for gain to lie in increasing trade
and investment with China and Russia. ... As President
Biden explained, the current military escalation (“Prodding the Bear”)
is not really about Ukraine. Biden promised at the outset that no U.S.
troops would be involved. But he has been demanding for over a year that
Germany prevent the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from supplying its industry
and housing with low-priced gas and turn to the much higher-priced U.S.
suppliers. ... So the most pressing U.S. strategic aim of
NATO confrontation with Russia is soaring oil and gas prices. In
addition to creating profits and stock-market gains for U.S. companies,
higher energy prices will take much of the steam out of the German
economy.
(Some people currently peddle a 'Secret RAND study from January
2022'. It is obviously faked. It is simply a write up of Hudson's
analysis.)
Nord Stream II was created to make Germany independent from pipelines
running through Poland and the Ukraine. Blocking it was the most stupid
thing for Germany to do and thus chancellor Scholz did it.
In the following months Poland blocked the Yamal pipeline which also
brought Russian gas to Germany. Ukraine followed up with cutting off two
Russian pipelines. The main compressor stations of the Nord Stream I
pipeline, which the German company Siemens had build and has the
maintenance contract, failed one after the other. Sanction are
prohibiting Siemens from repairing them.
It is not Russia that has blocked its gas and oil from European
markets. It were the German, Polish and Ukrainian governments that did
it.
Russia would in fact be happy to sell more. Putin has recently again offered to push as much Russian gas as possible through Nord Stream II to Germany:
After all, if they need it urgently, if things are so bad,
just go ahead and lift sanctions against Nord Stream 2, with its 55
billion cubic metres per year – all they have to do is press the button
and they will get it going. But they chose to shut it off themselves;
they cannot repair one pipeline and imposed sanctions against the new
Nord Stream 2 and will not open it. Are we to blame for this?
It is the German government that is to blame for rejecting that offer.
The economic war against Russia that the sanctions against were meant
to win has failed to move Russia. The Rubel is stronger than ever.
Russia is making record profits even while selling fewer gas and oil
than before the war. Russia may have a small recession this year but its
standard of living is not in decline.
As was easy predictable and, as Michael Hudson explained, the
economic consequences of the anti-Russian sanctions within Europe have
in contrast huge catastrophic consequences for the Europe's industries,
its societies and its political standing in the world.
Governments and the media had so far refrained from noting the
gigantic problems that are coming up and which industry leaders had
pointed out early on. Only over the last two weeks or so have they
picked up the urgent warnings.
The first German companies have begun throwing in the towel
and consumption is collapsing in response to the fallout from exploding
energy prices. The economy is sliding almost uncontrolled into a crisis that could permanently weaken the country.
The piece discusses the five stages along which the catastrophe will happen.
Act One: Freezing Production - It is becoming prohibitively expensive to produce in Germany. Act Two: The Price Trap - No one buys at the high prices German products now cost. Act Three: The Consumer Crisis - Needing to pay high energy prices German consumers buy less of everything else. Act Four: The Wave of Bankruptcies. Act Five: The Final Act on the Labor Market.
When Germany will have some 6 to 10 million unemployed people, and
the government less tax income as only a few companies will be
profitable, the social system will break down.
Volkswagen, Europe’s biggest carmaker, warned last week
that it could reallocate production out of Germany and eastern Europe if
energy prices don’t come down.
Europe is paying seven times as much for gas as the US, underscoring a
dramatic erosion of the continent’s industrial competitiveness that
threatens to cause lasting damage to its economy. With Russian President
Vladimir Putin redoubling his war efforts in Ukraine, there’s little
sign that gas flows - and substantially lower prices - would be restored
to Europe in the near term.
All eyes may be on the Italian election results this
morning, but Europe’s got much bigger problems on its hands than the
prospect of a Right-wing government. Winter is coming, and the
catastrophic consequences of Europe’s self-imposed energy crisis are already being felt across the continent.
As politicians continue to devise unrealistic plans for
energy rationing, the reality is that soaring energy prices and falling
demand have already caused dozens of plants across a diverse range of
energy-intensive industries — glass, steel, aluminium, zinc,
fertilisers, chemicals — to cut back production or shut down, causing thousands of workers to be laid off. Even the pro-war New York Times was recently forced to acknowledge
the “crippling” impact that Brussels’s sanctions are having on industry
and the working class in Europe. “High energy prices are lashing
European industry, forcing factories to cut production quickly and put
tens of thousands of employees on furlough,” it reported. ... It’s
truly a sign of the feebleness of Europe’s politicians that despite the
fast-approaching cliff, no one can bring themselves to state the
obvious: that the sanctions need to end. There’s simply no
moral justification for destroying the livelihoods of millions of
Europeans simply to school Putin, even if the sanctions were helping to
achieve that aim, which they clearly aren’t.
The U.S., while also going into a recession, will profit, as it had planned, from the European catastrophe.
The Handelsblatt, a business daily, reports that Germany companies are moving production to North America.
Washington is attracting German companies with cheap energy and low taxes.
herson.tsargrad |Question: Do you concede that not only in the territory of the
border regions of Russia – that’s to say, the Kursk, Belgorod, Voronezh,
Rostov regions, and Crimea — but martial law may be declared
throughout the country?
YP: Very had to believe, but I cannot rule out this
possibility. This is because, in my opinion, the question of creating
the State Defense Committee is already overdue and even overready. We
now live under the laws of peacetime. Accordingly, we can influence
certain structures, including state power and elected power, only
through the laws of peacetime. Holding referendums raises the stakes and
already implies a war to the bitter end, because neither Kiev nor the
West will agree to the outcomes of the referendums. Therefore,
everything will depend on the military, there will be no negotiations.
The essence of the special operation must change – this is inevitable.
Question: Does this mean that the Special Military Operation itself will change in its essence?
YP: I really hope for it. I think it’s inevitable.
Because it makes no sense to announce even partial mobilization within
the framework of the Special Military Operation [SMO] – and this cannot
solve the problem of a referendum. It is clear that the status of the
SMO should be changed; this has been under discussion for a long time.
If, nevertheless, martial law is declared on the territory of Russia,
then we can expect the termination of the transit of natural gas through
the territory of Ukraine and many other negative economic consequences.
Right now I believe that strikes against the critical infrastructure of
Ukraine should simply be unavoidable. And this will quickly put Kiev in
an uncomfortable position. Military operations must now proceed
differently.
Question: But do I understand correctly that there will be an escalation?
YP: Of course, this is the next stage of escalation,
and at the highest level. The next stage is the direct and open
declaration of war. Although the war has in fact already been under way.
You can call this a special military operation as much as you like, but
the essence of it will now change.
Question: How do you think the situation will develop? You have
already said that this is an escalation, that these are quite tough
measures. I have a certain suspicion that Russian society for the most
part is not ready for such a development of the situation. How to convey
to people that this is important? That this is necessary — partial
mobilization and the introduction of martial law?
YP: We woke up on February 24 in a completely
different country. It’s just that people still try not to notice it. But
this is to be expected, really. After all, both at the beginning of the
First World War and at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, people
also did not fully understand the essence of the events that took place
at the beginning. And even the leadership of the Soviet Union finally
designated the Great Patriotic War as the Great Patriotic War only on
August 10–11, 1941, and not on June 22 at all. It’s the same with us
now. The war is already underway, and we have had another country since
February 24. In gradual steps our society should mature to
understanding. And yet we are not going anywhere else. The country will
be different. The world will be different. And we, accordingly, must
win our place under the sun in the new world for our country. There are
no other options. If we do not do this, then we will be in the dustbin
of history.
Question: What will this mean from the practical point of view of our compatriots, ordinary Russians?
YP: In fact, for the ordinary person, nothing
fundamentally will change, not yet. But the rules of the game in the
country will change. That is, many things that could still be done – to
criticize the special military operation, to criticize the army, to
express, as some say, ‘their personal opinion’ about these events which
harm Russian society — all this will gradually be curtailed. It is clear
that you cannot conduct military operations when a powerful fifth
column is fighting against you in the rear. This, first of all, the
ordinary Russian will have to understand.
There is one more problem. Many officials are waiting for everything
to come back to where it was in the expectation that the Russian army
will lose in Ukraine. I feel and see it when I communicate with people.
And I really hope that after Vladimir Putin’s address, all this will
stay in the past. Each official will be subject to completely different
requirements. They will either have to support what is happening, or
they will be removed from their places.
Question: So you are convinced that the behaviour and thinking of the so-called elite will change?
YP: Not right away. But things will change very
quickly. However, the mobilization will affect a very small number of
people. It will be no more than a few hundred thousand people.
Question: I understand what the transition to the mobilization
model of the economy means. However, I have very significant doubts,
taking into account the structure of the domestic economy, taking into
account those owners who control the assets. I am skeptical that this
entire group will begin to change. What do you think the mobilization
economy means?
YP: The mobilization economy can be different –
full, partial, and so on. I do not think that the same emphasis will
be placed on this now as it was in the Soviet Union in 1941. That is,
everything for victory, and nothing else for anything. However, the
production of weapons will be increased; we will see some changes in
priorities. We urgently need to make ourselves independent now,
including in the information space, in the computer business. And if
earlier we tried persuading the asset owners to do this, now we must
compel them by state order.
Begrudgingly Acknowledged Country Bangers
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When someone says they hate country music, they’re typically referring,
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A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
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eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...