It’s Eve. As John Helmer notes below, many collective Western leaders (if you can call Kaya Kallas a leader), pundits and spokespeople have made all sorts of threats, including sending in their own troops to help Ukraine win. Some NATO leaders have softened a bit as they have spoken out against it. For example, Germany’s Olaf Scholz, who would normally be blackmailed into going along with a US escalation, has softened for a while and just said Germany has no more weapons to send. And yet Ukraine (almost certainly with the help of the little green men) has started dropping drones on very important Russian defense assets, “over the horizon” surveillance systems, designed to provide early warning of ICBMs, i.e. early warning of a possible nuclear attack. The complete lack of any indication of a Russian emergency meeting is consistent with Russian Telegram claims that these drone attacks did very little damage. Still, it’s easy for Russia to treat these attacks as a very big escalation.
John Helmer is the longest-serving foreign correspondent in Russia and the only Western journalist to run his own bureau independent of any particular nation-state or commercial ties. Helmer is also a professor of political science and has served as an advisor to government leaders in Greece, the United States and Asia. He is the first and only member of a U.S. presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to be based in Russia. Originally published at: Dance with Bears
In war, exaggeration is deadly. In the media, exaggeration is a bestseller. In the current war, there is a shortage of military and political analysts who can tell the difference between truth and money.
Instead, the combatant mentality is based on racial superiority and Spetsnaz The result of this bold move is the confidence that with one more brilliant plan and one more superweapon, victory can be snatched from every sign of defeat, because the enemy will be terrorized and persuaded to accept negotiations.
This is the meaning of the Anglo-American propaganda that erupted over the long bank holiday and Memorial Day weekend as summer campaigning got into full swing in the run-up to the July and November elections in Britain and the U.S. In Britain, the incumbent leads by 21 points. behindand the latter incumbent lawmaker has a favorable rating of Minus 16 points.
The New York-based Reuters propaganda arm Assert Four Russians at “senior levels of Russian politics and business” were found chattering about what they know about the Kremlin’s plans to end the war. “[Vladimir]Putin is willing to fight as much as necessary, but also to a ceasefire to freeze the war. … But Putin would be willing to compromise on the land he currently holds and freeze the conflict on the current front, the four sources said. ‘Putin will say we won, NATO attacked us but we maintained our sovereignty, we have a land route to Crimea, and that’s true,'” one of the sources said in their own analysis.
Reuters and four Russian journalists believe Putin would agree to abandon the war if Ukraine applied just one more push, widely reported in Western media this week: drone strikes on a Russian radar station to provide early warning of a nuclear missile attack on Armavir. KrasnodarOrsk, Orenburg.
While Russian military sources claim that these attacks were pinpointed, and that a second was shot out of the air before it exploded, Western media reports that it is now the strategy of the US, UK and Ukraine to provoke Putin into retaliation by crossing the red line of tactical nuclear war – a red line the allies calculate is one that Putin would rather negotiate terms to end the war than cross.
A former Moscow military analyst has sounded the alarm not so much at the exaggeration of the attacks themselves, but at Putin’s overstatement of power to dictate the terms of the war’s end, overriding the objections of the General Staff and the new Defense Ministry. “It’s clear that the Ukrainian military has made a series of successful breakthroughs,” the source acknowledged. “Ships, airfields, refineries, and now this radar facility. We also know that it’s not the Ukrainian military. The target selection, identification, guidance, hardware are all American or European. We don’t know where the command and control of these launch sites is, but it’s most likely not Ukraine.”
“But the Russian response will not be nuclear weapons. That’s not possible. There are thousands of options between doing nothing and using nuclear weapons, and I can assure you that the General Staff is working through all of them. So, there are those who say that this is a provocation for a nuclear attack, and that[Ukrainian President Vladimir]Zelensky is provoking, but, first of all, NATO planners know that Putin and his generals are very rational and sane, so he will not use nuclear weapons. Secondly, it is not President Zelensky who is provoking. So, now the real red line is not a nuclear weapons provocation from the NATO side. It is their fantasy. So, accordingly, I think it is time for Putin to stop making threats and to attack the source of these operations.”
When desperate weakness gives rise to illusions of war, this is called Popski syndrome.
Popsky was the call sign and unit nickname assigned by British Army HQ in Cairo to a small unit of Rear Admiralty Commandos operating against Italian and German forces in the Libyan Desert from late 1941 until September 1943. In September 1943, the war shifted to Italy, where Popsky joined. Popsky’s unit started with 24 men in Libya, but grew to 80 by the end of the war in Italy.
Vladimir Peniakov was born Popsky to a wealthy Russian-Jewish family who fled the revolution and set up an aluminium business and life in Belgium and then Britain. Working with his London publisher Jonathan Cape, Peniakov thought he could turn a small-scale guerrilla war in the deserts of Libya and Tunisia into something approaching a bestseller. The Seven Pillars of WisdomA tale by Ter Lawrence about the war between the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula and Turkey from 1916 to 1918. First published in 1926.
Peniakov’s wisdom turned out to be a combination of cynical racism towards Germany’s Arab allies, love for Germany’s enemies, and an inflated sense of pride in commando and special forces operations, but Peniakov embraced their strategic rationale enthusiastically and without reservation.Popski’s Private Soldier” That’s what it was called back then, but the book says Jacket — manipulating and then outwitting Libyan Arab and Berber tribes, enhancing General Bernard Montgomery’s reputation as a military genius, and eliciting the tender care of New Zealand and Canadian girls in the wounded hospital in the rear where Peniakov lost first a finger and then his left hand.
Left. Vladimir Peniakoff’s book; Right: Peniakoff (front) in action. At first establishment in March 1942 Peniakoff’s Popski’s Private Army (PPA) comprised 24 men, including Peniakoff. Most of the troops were Libyan Arabs. According to Peniakoff, he told a conference of sheikhs of the Obaidi tribe: “My Government wants your help, and they want to help you…I told them that my Government had solemnly undertaken never to let their country come again under Italian rule after the victorious conclusion of the war.” This was a cynical lie. At the Potsdam Conference of the US, UK, and Soviet leaders in July 1945, the British and Americans were so nervous at the rise of the Communist Party in Italy, and of the parallel rise of Arab nationalism in Libya, Tunisia and Algeria, they offered to restore Italy’s colonial administration in Libya until Stalin insisted on a Soviet trusteeship of the territory to prepare the Libyans for independence. This story has been told in The Jackals’ Wedding, American Power, Arab Revolt – Chapter 7. A new history of Libya based on the records of the Obaidi tribe is being prepared. Popski’s betrayal of the Obaidi was the common Anglo-American policy in Libya until Muammar Qaddafi’s revolution of September 1, 1969.
Peniakov’s final lines describe a ride in the jeep of a British cavalry train along a road in the Austrian Alps, crowded with German troops pleading for surrender, only to be caught up by the Russians, who were advancing a few kilometers away. PeniakovPeniakov, who also speaks fluent Russian, Arabic, French, Italian and German, was stopped on the road by “tanks with red Soviet flags flying in front of them.” According to Peniakov, the tank commander “made a speech, and at the end he said: ‘Nothing can destroy our unity.'”
Peniakov does not report what reply he gave to the Russians at the time. Instead, he ends his book with this rumination-threat: “‘The war is over,’ I thought. ‘Now we can do it.'” It was Peniakov’s personal dream to continue the war. But he and his unit, which grew to 80 men in Italy, had no role as lightly armed bombers against the Red Army.
Peniakov did not realize that during his three years of fighting in Arab North Africa and then Italy, he had betrayed not only the Libyan Obaidi people, but also the Italian Communists and Socialists who had fought alongside him under a postwar promise. Having turned his back on them, Peniakov was prepared to go to war with Moscow, but a brain tumor thwarted his plans in 1951, a year after publishing the story.
But the Anglo-American idea of war with Russia is alive and well this week, with Ukrainian forces fleeing from advancing Russian troops.
Popsky’s anti-Russian private army initiative, which Penyakov fought so fervently, is now on the brink of a nuclear attack, first with Ukrainian artillery fire on the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, and then with no subsequent radioactive contamination. explosionDrone attacks on Russian radar stations in Armavir and Orsk, tasked with detecting launches of nuclear-tipped missiles and provoking a Russian nuclear retaliation.
Post-attack pictures of the damage at the Armavir radar station in Krasnodar. Russian military assessment of the drone attack is in marked contrast to the hype of western reporting. "We may be talking about partial shrapnel damage to the high-voltage power lines of the transceiver modules. At the same time, the blocks of transceiver modules themselves (together with amplifiers, phase shifters and cooling circuits) could receive minimal damage, as indicated by the absence of traces of direct hits from drones into active antenna arrays. Considering the modular design of Voronezh-DM (and all stations of this type), we can expect a prompt restoration of the complex and its return to combat duty… The station serves as a means of monitoring ballistic missile launches at a distance of 6 thousand km and also detects high-altitude hypersonic aerodynamic means of aerospace attack. What kind of drone could be used to attack the radar? Initially, it was believed that for the strike on Voronezh-DM, the Main Intelligence Directorate simulated a complex low-altitude flight route for drones of the Lyuty or UJ-26 Beaver type, skirting the radar viewing sectors of the Russian Aerospace Forces anti-aircraft missile systems. However, later information appeared that British-Portuguese Tekever AR3 drones were used for the strike. Interestingly, this drone is designed using VTOL (vertical take-off) technology and could be deployed near the radar, probably several kilometres away. However, launch from the territory of Ukraine is not excluded. To build routes bypassing air defence systems, reconnaissance information from the US Air Force RQ-4 Global Hawk drone could be used. Let us recall that for several months now the focus of attention of the US Air Force RQ-4B data has been shifted specifically to the Krasnodar Territory, as can be seen from the flight route. What conclusion can be drawn? The strike on the Armavir station (and a likely attempt to hit another Voronezh-type radar 25 km from Orsk) may be part of a single operation to inflict painful media attacks. The use of British-Portuguese drones in this case may be the fundamental point since it is the British who are considered the ‘architects’ of many GUR (Ukrainian military intelligence) actions: attempts to land in Crimea and other campaigns in which the planned result was never achieved.”
Veteran US military observers are not optimistic about the rationality of the US and British officers directing the Ukraine operation. They warn that the British, and the CIA, are placing too much faith in game-changing special operations and their own cleverness in coming up with them. According to the source, “What we are seeing, also with Israel, is a spectacular and brutal tantrum that, after years of impunity, has the opposite effect of the original intent. Neither side is incapable of playing nuclear chicken; most would say it would be insane to do so. But they believe that special operations playing nuclear chicken with Russia is smart and potentially effective.”
“So I think there will be a nuclear war. The people who run the Western countries are determined that if they cannot govern themselves, then there is no one to govern. I think we now have to consider whether British and Ukrainian insanity will prevail over American cowardice.”
