There’s no American anti-war movement in the Vietnam War, Syrian War or Afghan War sense of the term. That’s because there is a genuine US strategic interest at stake in fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian, and further. No comparable strategic stake existed in the earlier wars.
The stake in the war against Russia is the preservation of the US occupation of Germany and the empire in Europe and the UK, together with the credibility of US weapons which must be sold worldwide at prices to match their reputations in combat. Losing the war on the Ukrainian battlefield and in the sanctions war against Russia means a worldwide defeat for the US, its military power, its commercial and financial dominance, along with its command-and-control systems, subsidiaries, and retainers.
The substitute for an anti-war movement in Washington is faction-fighting over what means, what terms can be devised to get the US out of the Ukraine before the Ukrainian army capitulates, Vladimir Zelensky flees for his life and fortune, and with them the collapse of the US alliance called NATO.
The apprehension of the allies in Europe was revealed a few days ago when Jacques Attali answered a telephone call he thought was from former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, but which came instead from the Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus. Attali, French presidential adviser, US retainer, and ex-head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, said he knew French President Emmanuel Macron well and that Macron was afraid the US would abandon the Ukrainians to save itself. There was the same fear among the Germans and British, Attali added. “The weak point is what happens in Washington.”
“[This is] a nightmare scenario. That would be the US saying, well, enough is enough. We are not going to help Ukraine more. You have to go to negotiations, to the negotiating table. And that’s it. … Neither France, Germany or the UK can do that. But the US could arm-twist your [Poroshenko’s] government and your country [Ukraine] to say we want a ceasefire whatever it costs and stop [the war]. The most important thing is to avoid that.”
“There is no other way than a total win and to get rid of Putin…We have to take all risks for that. No compromise is possible, no compromise.”
This is the European allies’ last stand, their backs to the wall at the Dnieper River. It is the rationale for desperate measures on the battlefield, and at the NATO summit on July 11.
The calls have begun in Moscow, starting among the war blogs and battlefield reporters, for keeping intact Yevgeny Prigozhin’s conglomerate of military budget contractors. The reason argued is that they have established themselves so strategically in the logistics of the military services that they cannot be purged without doing greater damage than Prigozhin himself has caused.
In short, a Russian oligarch who knows too much, with too many mouths to feed, too many pockets to fill, and so too big to fail.
“There may be some reorganizations and a formal change of leadership,” Boris Rozhin, author of the Colonel Cassad media, has announced. “The reason for the preservation is simple. Over many years of work, Prigozhin’s structures have grown so deeply into the state fabric that cutting them out at the same time without serious damage to the state is fraught with serious problems. That is, you can cut it out, but the consequences will be serious.”
The war reporters are not the source of the first estimates from the Defence Ministry indicating the trillion-rouble, multi-billion dollar size of Prigozhin’s empire, and the scale of the personal fortunes he, his close associates, and state officials have been accumulating for at least a decade. No military analyst contacted for comment on the figures, will respond.
In the organized Russian political opposition, only the communist parties think differently and say so in public. Since the beginning of the special military operation they have publicly repudiated the pro-NATO line of the communist parties in Europe.
The non-communist opposition in Moscow, led by Mikhail Delyagin in parliament and Sergei Glazyiev in government, has been vocal in their criticism of the Central Bank governor, Elvira Nabiullina; on Prigozhin they remain silent, refusing to answer questions.
Leading the open challenge to the Kremlin and the Defense Ministry is the Russian Communist Workers Party (RKRP in Russian, CWP in English), a breakaway from the Russian Communist Party (KPRF); with 57 deputies and 20% of the national vote, the KPRF is the leading opposition bloc in the State Duma; the CWP draws about 2% of the vote and has no parliamentary voice. At the start of the special military operation in February of last year, the CWP gave qualified support, but made that conditional on what the goals of the operation would turn out to be.
“In our analysis and conclusions in these specific historical conditions, we rely on the analysis already made in the course of the development of the situation, including at the conference with the communists of Donbass, Ukraine, Russia in November 2019 in Lugansk. Once again, returning to the fact of the recognition of the republics of Donbass, we note that it happened, although late, much later than it should have, but better late than never. The RKRP not only supported this step from the very beginning of the proclamation of these republics, but also demanded that the bourgeois authorities of the Russian Federation take this step as an aid in opposing the People’s republics of Donbass to fascist aggression by the Kiev Nazis.”
“The goal of the strongest US imperialism in the world is to weaken the Russian competitor and expand its influence in the European market space. For this purpose, they purposefully worked to pit against each other not only the authorities, but also the peoples of Russia and Ukraine…We have no doubt that the true goals of the Russian state in this war are quite imperialist — strengthening the positions of imperialist Russia in the global market competition. But, since this struggle today to some extent helps the people of Donbass to fight back against Bandera fascism, the communists do not object to this objective, but allow and support as much as it is being waged against fascism in Donbass and Ukraine… As long as Russia’s armed intervention helps to save people in Donbass from reprisals by the punishers, we will not resist this goal. In particular, we consider it permissible if, due to the circumstances, it becomes necessary to use force against the fascist Kiev regime, insofar as it will be in the interests of the working people…To die and kill for the interests of the masters is stupid, criminal and unacceptable.”
Last week the CWP issued its declaration of “We told you so”. About Prigozhin and the Kremlin, the party told its supporters, “there are no clean and honest people here and there cannot be.”
“These events showed that the bourgeois dictatorship has led the country to the decline, not only of the economy, but also of the army and state administration, which, by the way, was what Prigozhin was talking about and speculating on. It should be said that Prigozhin himself is also an oligarch with a criminal past, who made his billions in a non-transparent way. Now it turns out that Prigozhin was simply competing for a more lucrative place at the feeding trough against other oligarchs. And he himself has understood perfectly well that if he were to find himself in power, he would pursue the same policy. That’s because practically everything in the politics of the bourgeois state is determined only by economic interests, simply put – the interests of profit.”
The KPRF has also issued statements, including a long interview with the Communist Party leader-for-life, Gennady Zyuganov. He doesn’t endorse the line of attack of the CWP.
Follow the arguments presented by the two Russian communist parties as they debate in public the meaning of the Wagner mutiny and the evidence of Prigozhin’s decade-long state capture. Excerpts have been translated into English from the longer Russian statements which can be followed in their original published form.
The partisan jargon varies from country to country, language to language. But nothing comparable exists from the democratic opposition parties of North America or Europe.
Between the US, the UK, and Russia there have been regime-changing games for more than a century now. Thirty years ago Boris Yeltsin was their big hit. They have been bad losers since then. In cricketing terms, the Kremlin regime-changing plan of Alexei Navalny was a googly. The Yevgeny Prigozhin plan was a bouncer. Both have ended as ducks on the scoreboard.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Burns has telephoned Sergei Naryshkin of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) to say Prigozhin wasn’t his batsman. In a public speech to a British foundation of twelfth men, Burns said the CIA doesn’t play cricket. “This is an internal Russian affair, in which the United States has had and will have no part,” he claimed.
If MI6 was planning and paying for these match failures, they need to pull stumps, leave the field.
There are many Russians, however, who believe the Prigozhin affair, the dismantling of his business operations, and the associated clean-up of the Defense Ministry and Army, have upset President Vladimir Putin’s confidence that his campaign for re-election in the presidential election in six months’ time will be unopposed. The Russian sources point out the shock of the events of June 23-24 is visible on the president’s face. A minority of sources believes he will retire from the race after finding a reliable successor.
“Earlier my sense was he was a sure winner if he won the war,” a Moscow source says. “But the victory is not cleancut and not in sight. I’ve believed that escalation on the battlefield would be a prelude to his retirement and that he wanted to leave a legacy of ‘no compromise’ with the Americans. But then he failed on that by keeping the old economic policy-Central Bank team. Third, the war was a perfect opportunity for him to distance himself from the oligarchs and show clean hands. These are three political failures. He is going to be like [former Kazakh president for life, Nursultan] Nazarbayev now.”
In Russian public opinion polling over the past fortnight there is no evidence that voter confidence in Putin has been shaken; nor in the Russian General Staff’s direction of the battlefield. General Patience has been growing in Russian public support.
According to the independent Moscow pollster Levada Centre, “in May, almost half of our respondents (45%) were sure that the conflict in Ukraine would last at least another year – since May 2022, their share has more than doubled. Another quarter see the end of the ‘special operation’ no sooner than in six months. Meanwhile, more than the rhetoric of Russian politicians, it is the course of events that has convinced them of this.”
What has just happened is that confidence in battlefield victory has slipped as a result of the Wagner mutiny. There was public support for the victory in the Battle of Bakhmut, and the role Wagner was advertised to have played in that. Prigozhin destroyed this support by his actions, including the shooting-down of Russian Army aircraft and the killing of its Russian crews.
Levada pollsters were interviewing a nationwide sample from June 22 to 28, and in the results they have been able to track the immediate impact of the armed rebellion as it began, unfolded, collapsed, and resulted in the dismantling of Wagner, and the exposure of Prigozhin as an oligarch-sized crook. “The attitude towards E. Prigozhin during the survey decreased by half: from 58% on Thursday-Friday [June 22-23] to 30% by the beginning of the working week [June 26],” Levada reported on June 29. “In the future, we can expect a further decline in the authority of E. Prigozhin.”
If, in the coming weeks, the Ukrainians commit their reserves, along with NATO weapons in stock, and they are defeated as thoroughly as their offensive in June, Russian public confidence will recover. So will the slip in Levada’s measurement of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s public rating.
The constant is public approval of the president, which is holding above the 80% level of a year ago, and the conviction that the war is the US and NATO’s doing. Defeat on the battlefield in the Ukraine is understood by Russians to be the defeat of the US and the NATO alliance. The first ever.
On Friday, June 30, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was asked if, after the armed mutiny of the week before, he can give guarantees that Russia is stable and will not sink into turmoil?
“We are not obliged to explain anything or make assurances,” Lavrov replied. “We are acting in a transparent manner…Russia has always emerged stronger from its troubles (and this is hardly more than a trouble). The same will happen this time. And, we already feel that this process is underway.”
In Russian history the mention of a time of troubles — or as Lavrov put it, a trouble this time — is a reference to the civil war between 1598 and 1613, when the Rurik dynasty of tsars was replaced by the Romanov dynasty. It was a time of Polish, Swedish and other foreign intervention aimed at installing a tsar pretender, a Russian ruling in the foreign interest. Lavrov minimized his own reference as nothing of the sort.
At the same time former president Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy secretary of the Security Council, broke his week-long silence following the mutiny. As that was collapsing on June 24, Medvedev had said: “Now the most important thing for the victory over the external and internal enemy, hungry to tear apart our Homeland, for the salvation of our state is to rally around the President, the Supreme Commander of the armed forces of the country. Schism and betrayal are the path to the greatest tragedy, a universal catastrophe. We will not allow it. The enemy will be defeated! Victory will be ours!”
On June 30, Medvedev reappeared to say that Russia has been watching the collapse of US rule under “a shuffling old man with acute dementia or a young, overgrown playboy with the habits of a provincial dictator”; followed by the “pandemonium and riots on the streets of France”. Medvedev then quoted the 19th century writer Nikolai Gogol to say “‘there is only one decent person there: the prosecutor; and even that, to tell the truth, is a pig.’ However, if you recall another quote by Nikolai Vasilievich, it becomes quite sad: ‘I don’t see anything. I see some pig snouts instead of faces, but nothing else.’”
Where exactly was Medvedev’s reference to there? Whose were the pig snouts Medvedev was referring to — those of the outside enemies aiming to “tear apart our Homeland”, or the internal enemies, the leaders of the armed rebellion Yevgeny Prigozhin (lead image left) and the Wagner group founder and operations commander Dmitry Utkin (right), and their supporters?
Russian public opinion has been clear, and it has been intensifying over the years of President Vladimir Putin’s term until now, that the snouts they distrust most are those of the oligarchs. Prigozhin, Putin himself announced on June 27, was one of them as he ordered an investigation of the state funding of Prigozhin and the Wagner group. “I hope no one stole anything in the process or, at least, did not steal a lot. It goes without saying that we will look into all of this.”
Why then did Putin spend the next day, on his first visit outside Moscow since the armed rebellion, with the oligarch of Dagestan, Suleiman Kerimov? According to the Kremlin record, Kerimov participated with Putin in a discussion of tourism, and then in a tour of the sights of Derbent, including the Juma mosque. A report of the closeness of Putin and Kerimov during the day appeared with open sarcasm in the Moscow business daily, Kommersant.
Listen to this week’s TNT Radio’s broadcast, “War of the Worlds”, as the Russian files are opened of the multi-billion dollar business Prigozhin created out of the state defence budget and Utkin turned into a private army with his own ideological bent.
When Yevgeny Prigozhin (lead image, right) arrived at Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov, announcing to Lieutenant-General Vladimir Alexeyev that he was on his way Moscow to remove Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff, Alexeyev told him “Go get them.”
Prigozhin didn’t take the road to Moscow. The thin column of Wagner men began to disperse enroute, while those who pressed on were stopped at the Oka River. While Prigozhin was announcing, and western media megaphoning, that he had taken control of Rostov, Prigozhin didn’t know that Shoigu was in Rostov; controlled the city; and with the General Staff decided on the tactics which quickly scattered the Wagner forces, halted Prigozhin’s public relations campaign,and cut off his money supply.
For the General Staff, this was a tactic of giving Prigozhin enough rope to hang himself. He did. The General Staff defeated him handily; the military engagement was concluded almost bloodlessly. Politically, the General Staff won much more.
For President Vladimir Putin it was a replay of October 25, 2003. That was the day, at Novosibirsk Airport Mikhail Khodorkovsky (lead image, left), owner of the Yukos oil group, was arrested, charged with fraud, tax evasion, criminal conspiracy, and other offences. That story, and the reorganisation of Yukos under state control, are well-known. Prigozhin’s story is just beginning.
Putin has declared as much, with the apology that he hadn’t known until now. “I hope no one stole anything in the process or, at least, did not steal a lot. It goes without saying that we will look into all of this.”
His spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, added the qualifier: “Putin has spoken about the quite significant sums that were allocated through the Ministry of Defense. He called out these figures, but the company was also engaged in its own business, which has nothing to do with the state.”
From his exile in London, in a publication sponsored by The Economist, Khodorkovsky declared Prigozhin to be a “thug and war criminal”, but notwithstanding, “truly a revolutionary”. “Only an armed populace can topple this dictatorship”, Khodorkovsky said as he made his appeal for British and NATO support for military intervention across the Russian border, all the way to Moscow on Abrams, Challenger and Leopard tanks. “The West should bet big on Russia’s democratic opposition and grant it agency” – by “agency” Khodorkovsky meant a seat for himself inside the lead tank.
This is the end of MI6 and CIA funded regime-changing tactics of Alexei Navalny, the Khodorkovsky manifesto signals. “Regime change is coming…[but] only an armed populace can topple this dictatorship… we must not only support the toppling of the regime but also be ready to asset our democratic interests through force when it falls.”
This is the familiar 枪杆子里面出政权 – Mao Zedong’s slogan, “political power out of the barrel of a gun”.
To save himself under house arrest in Belarus, Prigozhin has appealed to Putin for release: “we did not aim to overthrow the existing regime and the legitimately elected government.” Prigozhin also wants cash back “so that PMC [private military company] Wagner would continue to work in a legal framework.”
Putin’s answer has been to delegate the political power to the barrel of the gun; that’s the General Staff. The investigation of Prigozhin’s fraud, tax evasion, criminal conspiracy and other offences go now to the security services, the Interior Ministry, and state prosecutors. “I extend my gratitude to you,” Putin told a parade inside the Kremlin of personnel representing the army, National Guard, the Federal Security Service (FSB), Interior Ministry and the Federal Guard Service, “for your service, courage and valour, for your devotion to the people of Russia.” Two hours later he told Defense Ministry officers: “you and your comrades had a special part to play in this. Special words of gratitude go to you…Once again, thank you for what you did for Russia, for the country and for our people.
For more than twenty years – that’s from the beginning of President Vladimir Putin’s term in office – the residents of Chelyabinsk have believed in the romantic story of how truth would triumph over deceit, law over criminality, in their battle to breathe the city air, drink the city water, and eat the produce of the city’s earth – most of it polluted illegally by the oligarch named Igor Zyuzin and the steel, coke and coal conglomerate he owns called Mechel.
In this archive of eighty-three reports, beginning in 2005, the methods have been investigated by which Zyuzin has won the battle, including what Russians call the “administrative measures”, to protect his industrial pollution all these years, and the names of those responsible. The most recent of these reports appeared just two months ago.
Everyone in Chelyabinsk believes this story ends in tears — and from the medical angle, much worse. This is how the story of the deceit was told last week.
In brief statements issued late last week in Moscow – their significance missed in the western press — President Vladimir Putin ordered a reality check of Russia’s war strategy. He then answered himself by declaring the war will be over when no Ukrainian army will be left on the battlefield, nor NATO weapons.
The Foreign Ministry answered by pointing out that Russia does not recognize there is a legal Ukrainian state because the reality is that the mutual recognition treaty between Russia and the Ukraine was cancelled by Presidents Petro Poroshenko and Vladimir Zelensky in 2018 and 2019.
“We can conclude,” Putin said at the Security Council meeting on Thursday morning, “that they can certainly send in additional equipment, but the mobilisation reserve is not unlimited. And Ukraine’s Western allies really seem determined to fight with Russia to the last Ukrainian. At the same time, we must proceed from the fact that the enemy’s offensive potential has not been exhausted; they may have strategic reserves yet unused, and I ask you to keep this in mind when making fighting strategies. You need to proceed from reality.”
Putin was following by a few hours the statement by the Foreign Ministry that Russia does not recognize the legal sovereignty of the regime in Kiev, and that following the cancellation of the treaty between the Ukraine and Russia in 2019, there will be no Ukrainian state left to sign an end-of-war agreement.
At her weekly briefing of reporters, the ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova, was asked “when will Russia initiate a legal procedure to terminate the bilateral treaty with Ukraine on its sovereignty?” Zakharova answered: “The procedure for terminating the bilateral treaty with Ukraine on its sovereignty is hampered by the absence of such a treaty. In Article 1 of the Treaty on the Principles of Relations between the RSFSR and the Ukrainian SSR of November 19, 1990, the two republics recognised each other as ‘sovereign states.’ The 1990 treaty was then replaced by the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between the Russian Federation and Ukraine of May 31, 1997 (Article 39), which was denounced by Ukraine and terminated on April 1, 2019.”
No army, no state. But the war will continue because it is the one between the US and the NATO powers and Russia. That too will have an ending, but longer.
“If [NATO Secretary-General] Mr Stoltenberg again says on behalf of NATO that they are against freezing the conflict in Ukraine,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on June 21, “this means that they want to fight. So let them fight. We are ready for that. We realised NATO’s true goals in Ukraine some time ago as their plans took shape over the years that followed the coup. Today, NATO is attempting to implement them…they are directly involved in the hybrid and hot war declared on Russia.”
I am reminded, Lavrov added, “of a Soviet-era joke noting that the Soviet Union is located too close to US military bases.” The Soviet Union was dismantled, but the war continues against Russia. It will end when the US is pushed to a safe distance. How safe, Putin asked Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to explain in answer to two questions?
Putin’s question: “we know that the enemy is to receive additional Western equipment. What does the Defence Ministry think about threats in this connection?”
Shoigu’s answer: “All arsenals, accumulated by the Soviet Union and countries of the former socialist bloc, have now been virtually depleted. We can say the same about former Ukrainian resources… the amount, due to be delivered throughout 2023, as well as those weapons that have already been delivered, will not seriously affect the course of hostilities. Additionally, most of the armoured vehicles and fighting vehicles belong to the previous generation, or even to an earlier generation. On the one hand, their armour is weak and ineffective, compared to modern equipment. Mr President, we do not see any threats here.”
Question: “Mr Shoigu, what is the percentage of Western equipment out of the equipment that has been destroyed since June 4, which Mr Patrushev has just reported giving generalised data? Approximately.”
Answer: “Of the 246 tanks destroyed, 13 were Western made. At the same time, it should be noted that, if we consider the equipment that was delivered, tanks in particular: 81 Western-made tanks have been delivered. Of the 81 Western tanks, 13 [16%] have been destroyed. Of the armoured fighting vehicles, 59 Western ones have been destroyed. To date, Western countries have supplied Ukraine with an estimated 109 Bradley armoured fighting vehicles. Of the 109 BFVs, 18 [17%] have been destroyed. Overall, 59 Western-made armoured vehicles have been destroyed. As for field artillery and guns, here, of course, I can estimate right away that out of the 48 pieces destroyed, about 30 percent were Western made.”
The “reality”, Putin concluded publicly, not for Shoigu or the General Staff, is that the percentage of NATO weapons destroyed on the battlefield will rise sharply because “the enemy’s offensive potential has not been exhausted; they may have strategic reserves yet unused.” When those reserves are defeated, there will be neither NATO arms nor Ukrainian men left.
Without the public support of any political figure in Russia, military or police unit, regional governor, or the officers of his Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin and his thousand rank-and-filers have agreed to return to their base camps on terms negotiated late on Saturday afternoon between Prigozhin and Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarus President.
The one-armed rebellion has failed with recriminations, immunity from prosecution, and almost no bloodshed. The Kremlin solution has followed the precedent of General Alexander Lebed’s (lead image, centre) rebellion against President Boris Yeltsin in 1996, not the violent end of the rebellion of Yemelyan Pugachev (left) of 1773-75.
Dmitry Rogozin, who was one of the strategists of Lebed’s campaign for the presidency and later became a deputy prime minister under President Vladimir Putin, made the difference clear in a statement he issued early on Saturday, before Putin spoke at 10 o’clock. “I know the situation at the front as well as Prigozhin and I have never hidden my position, but whatever the explanation for an armed rebellion, it is still an armed rebellion in the rear of a belligerent army. In a war, you have to shove your political ambitions up your ass and support the front with all your might. Any attempts to weaken it are nothing but aiding the enemy.”
Another of Lebed’s comrades of 27 years ago, Sergei Glazyev, followed with a repudiation of Prigozhin of his own. None of the well-known critics of Putin on domestic policy, nor the military bloggers who have attacked the tactical management and strategic priorities of the Special Military Operation, supported Prigozhin.
The rebellion, according to sources speaking on Saturday evening, involved advance planning by Prigozhin and several hundred of the lowest ranks of his military group. There was no support among the Wagner officers. After they had moved on Rostov, then took the road to Voronezh and on towards Moscow, the road columns numbered several hundred, with a total across the southwest of no more than four thousand.
A statement issued by Lukashenko’s office in Minsk at 8 in the evening said the rebellion was at an end. “This morning, Russian President Vladimir Putin informed his Belarusian counterpart about the situation in the south of Russia with the private military company Wagner. The heads of State agreed on joint actions. As a follow-up to the agreements, the President of Belarus, having further clarified the situation through his own channels, in coordination with the President of Russia, held talks with the head of the Wagner PMCS [private military companies], Yevgeny Prigozhin.”
“The negotiations lasted throughout the day. As a result, we came to an agreement on the inadmissibility of unleashing a bloody massacre on the territory of Russia. Yevgeny Prigozhin accepted the proposal of the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko to stop the movement of armed persons of the Wagner company on the territory of Russia and further steps to de-escalate tension. At the moment, there is an absolutely profitable and acceptable solution to the situation on the table, with security guarantees for the fighters of the Wagner PMCs.”
A well-informed Moscow source says: “The whole thing was planned for several weeks. Soldiers and unit sergeants might be on board. Officers, obviously not. That makes it a mutiny against commanders. I do not think Prigozhin will go quietly. He will try and romanticize himself as a Pugachev and his assassins as peasants defending Russia from oligarchs. Questions will be asked when and which men were already inside of Rostov Military HQ. Perhaps some advance parties were inside.”
There is no publication yet of Lukashenko’s terms which Prigozhin has accepted for himself. Unconfirmed reports in Moscow indicate he will leave the country for Africa with one of the Wagner units operating there. His media, communications, and internet networks have been blocked.
Since the Ukrainian abrogation of the Istanbul non-aggression and neutrality agreement of March 2022, which President Vladimir Putin displayed to a delegation of African leaders last Saturday, one thing has been clear. The pact to end this war will be drafted and signed by Ukrainian soldiers who have been defeated in the field, not by civilian politicians who are paid and instructed by Washington.
The terms will be dictated by Russian soldiers. They will calculate the distances to be covered by long-range NATO artillery and missile launches on Russian territory, and of Ukrainian terrorist attacks into Russian regions. These are military facts the Russian General Staff have a long history of calculating, plotting them on maps and reinforcing the depth of defence and control lines – as long ago as the Soviet Army war against the US-backed Afghan mujahideen.
Since last November, when this website published first maps of a demilitarized zone for the Ukrainian territory, the depth of the Russian defence lines has been moving steadily westward. As each of the Ukrainian strategic reserves – units newly trained and armed by the US and NATO states – are committed to battle and fail, their retreat leaves all of the remaining Ukrainian territory open to a Russian advance.
What follows is the first detailed discussion in the open in Moscow of how the map of this territory should be drawn when the Ukrainian offensive reaches its end, and the Russian advance begins.
Left out of mention is who in Moscow will be drawing the new map. This is because Putin has announced he is delegating to the General Staff. “Russia’s military leadership,” he said on June 9, “is realistic in its assessments of the situation and will proceed from these realities as it continues to plan up our actions in the short term.”
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had already said the same a year ago. “Now the geography is different,” he concluded an interview in Moscow on July 20, 2022. “Take the HIMARS. [Ukrainian] Defence Minister Alexei Reznikov boasts that they have already received 300-kilometre ammunition. This means our geographic objectives will move even further from the current line. We cannot allow the part of Ukraine that Vladimir Zelensky, or whoever replaces him, will control to have weapons that pose a direct threat to our territory or to the republics that have declared their independence and want to determine their own future.”
“[Question:] How can this be arranged, technically? This is our territory. Then there are the republics that will accede to us. In fact they already have – the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. … Further west, there is the territory controlled by Vladimir Zelensky. They have a common border. So either there should be a 300 kilometre buffer zone or something between them, or we need to march all the way to Lvov inclusive.”
“[Lavrov:] There is a solution to this problem. The military know this.”
“Comrade servicemen,” Lavrov added last week on a visit to the 201st Russian Military Base in Tajikistan, “they are getting ready, in earnest, to supply the F-16 jets. Some say they will make two squadrons available, others say eight. They are gearing up to continue the escalation of the war against us. There’s an ongoing debate about where these planes will take off from. Our armed forces and the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces are well aware of ongoing developments and report to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. We must keep in mind that one version of the F-16 can carry nuclear weapons. If they do not understand this, they are worthless military strategists and planners.”
The General Staff have no reason to speak publicly on this point.
Privately, a source in a position to know says: “the General Staff are not satisfied with the Dnieper [line of defence]. It will run from a small town on the border with Belarus to Transnistria. They will solve that problem as well. But mainly, Belarus has to be protected from the south. And most importantly, that leaves nothing of the Ukraine except the territory which the Poles and Hungarians might not be bold enough to take.”
Jack Teixeira (lead image, left), the US Air Force national guardsman arrested on espionage allegations in April, is scheduled to appear in a Boston federal court for his arraignment on the prosecution’s charges this Wednesday, June 21.
Six counts were listed in the grand jury indictment filed in court on June 15. The 10-page paper reveals new evidence contradicting the case against Teixeira which has been published in the mainstream media based on official government leaks to the Bellingcat propaganda organization and the New York Times, which are working together against Teixeira and against the intelligence disclosures attributed to him.
The new court evidence is now pointing to the likelihood that Teixeira’s access to highly classified documents prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (lead image, right) at the end of February this year had been facilitated for him by senior US Air Force (USAF) officials.
If provable, Teixeira will plead not guilty and his lawyers will prepare the defence case of entrapment. If embarrassing to the Pentagon and the Justice Department, Teixeira may be offered a plea bargain of guilty in exchange for no trial of the evidence and a reduced jail sentence. The section of the Espionage Act which is the basis of Teixeira’s prosecution, 18 United States Code Section 793(e ), provides ten years in prison and a fine of $250,000 for conviction on each count. The 21-year old is facing the equivalent of a life sentence.
It is not yet known whether Teixeira, who has been ordered to remain in prison without possibility of bail release, will appear in person in court or sign a waiver. His lawyers are also not saying what plea Teixeira will enter.
