Until June 24 the combined air forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) are conducting their largest operation against Russia in the 74-year history of the alliance. The plan has been to disguise F-16 fighter jets as if they are piloted by Ukrainians, and pretend they are launched from Ukrainian territory.
In response, Russian artillery, missile and fighter-bomber forces have been disabling and destroying Ukrainian airfields, and every Ukrainian aircraft being flown from them.
Then on Friday, President Vladimir Putin dismissed the NATO pretence, warning that if an F-16 threatens to attack a Russian target, it would be “burned”, and so would the launch airbase and supporting aircraft – fuel tankers, electronic countermeasures, command-and-control, and decoys – no matter what NATO member-state flag they are flying, and on what territory they are based.
“The F-16 will also burn, there is no doubt,” Putin said in St. Petersburg on June 16. “But if they are located at air bases outside Ukraine, and used in combat operations, we will have to look at how to hit and where to hit those means that are used in combat operations against us. This is a serious danger of NATO’s further involvement in this armed conflict.” When the president and commander-in-chief announces “we will have to look at how to hit”, he means the General Staff have already assembled the operational intelligence and readied plans of attack with three minutes to launch; that is, against targets in Poland, Romania, Moldova, and possibly further west across the Czech and German borders.
In the president’s phrase “those means that are used in combat operations against us”, Putin also intends to identify airborne targets, manned and unmanned, over the Black, Baltic, and Barents Seas.
Never before has NATO’s collective defence proviso Article Five been explicitly challenged by the Kremlin. In practice, by describing the agreement of the NATO members that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”, the NATO wording does no more than require each of the NATO members to take “forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary.” .
What is happening is that by aiming their display of NATO airpower at the Kremlin, US and German commanders in their Ramstein bunkers have provoked Putin to call their bluff: he is now aiming directly at the Poles, Romanians and Germans, telling them to “deem” whether war with Russia is “necessary”.
“Well, the Poles,” added Putin, “okay, they have their own goals, they sleep and see the return of Western Ukraine. And, apparently, they are gradually coming to this.”
In parallel, the US has escalated to nuclear weapons by flying two US Air Force (USAF) B-1B bombers from the UK Fairford airbase, refuelling in Germany, transiting Poland and Romania, to a point in the Black Sea off the Crimean coast and the Sevastopol naval base, where the aircraft transponders were turned off from public view.
It’s religious to believe that a slight young man with a slingshot can defeat a heavily armed giant with a single stone.
No general, head of government, or national electorate can rationally calculate risking their fortunes and fates on such a disadvantageous ratio of force; on a lucky shot; and on an article of faith. Icons can motivate soldiers to ignore the odds of survival in a battle; they don’t win wars of attrition.
In the two hundred years since Greece freed itself of Turkish rule with Russian and British support, it’s to be expected that the Greeks would be obliged to count and counter the strengths of their enemies with the resources of their friends. Over the years this Greek calculation has required them to conceal, lie, cheat, fabricate, and steal from them all when their survival was at stake.
In retrospect of the 20th century, that has happened more often to the Greeks than to most other Europeans. In the outcome for them of the Balkan Wars, 1912-1913; World War I; the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22; the Italian and German invasions of World War II; the Civil War of 1945-49; the military dictatorship of 1967-74, the Turkish invasion and occupation of Cypus from 1974; and the European bailout terms of 2015, the Greeks have suffered incomparable losses. Measuring by the European standard of destructiveness in war — civil war and invasion — only one country exceeds Russia (and possibly Serbia) in the frequency of violence, in the percentage losses of Gross Domestic Product, and in casualties per head of population: this is Greece. In the anti-Russian European alliance of today, no country has been as damaged by the violence and depredations of its own allies — the Turks, Italians, Germans, British, and Americans — as Greece.
That is, until the US and NATO allies decided on war with Russia to be fought to the last Ukrainian and to the end of the Ukrainian state. For the time being, though, the money which the US, the UK and NATO allies, and the International Monetary Fund have paid into the Kiev regime dwarfs the sums of reparations, compensation and aid paid to Greece.
Notwithstanding, in the current war none of these allies has concealed its role in the battlefield fight against Russia more clumsily than the Mayor of Athens, Kostas Bakoyannis (lead image, left) and his uncle, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis (right). No communist party in Europe has been as outspoken as the Greek Communist Party (KKE) in its verbal attacks on Russia. No domestic oligarchs have put their capital to the aid of Russia as much as the Greek tanker fleet owners. No rocket forces commander has exchanged one anti-aircraft and missile defence system which works for another which does not as the Greek exchange of the Russian S-300 for the US Patriot.
These aren’t individual Greek faults or follies. They are contradictions which have political and economic reasons. But there is a standard of deceit below which not even the Greeks in their historic and current predicament should fall. This is when the Greeks deceive and cheat each other for self-enrichment, and for the benefit of the country’s enemies. The first of these is corruption; the second is treason. When the two are combined in the running of the state – election votes, parliamentary majority, formation of government, allocation of budget, military pacts, security service operations – and when all of this is camouflaged by the courts and the media, then the country is committing suicide.
Is this the present fate of Greece? Listen to the discussion between Slobodan Despot, Alexander Mercouris, and John Helmer.
The Black Sea is a small body of water by international sea standards.
It is so small that when the navies of the shore states go to war, the battles tend to be brief, hit-and-run affairs, like the skirmishes between the Romanians, Germans and Soviets in 1941-42, and between the Georgians and the Russians in August 2008. The Russians, with the bigger, better equipped navies, tend to win. When they win, as they did over the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Sinope in 1853, the outside powers try to equalize by taking the anti-Russian side: it was the French and British in 1853; the Americans and the NATO allies now.
In the recent history of their direct encounters with the Russian vessels and their air support, the Americans and British have come off with what is known in maritime history as their tails between their legs.
The surface area of the Black Sea is 436,400 square kilometres. By comparison, the Mediterranean, into which the Black Sea drains, is 2.5 million square kms, and there are several much larger seas than that. .
The Black Sea is also not the biggest of the seas on which Russia has a shore line and frontier. The Caspian Sea is 371,000 square kms; the Baltic Sea is 377,000 square kms; the Chukchi Sea, 595,000 square kms; the Barents Sea, 1.4 million square kms; the Sea of Okhotsk, 1.6 million square kms; and the Bering Sea, 2.4 square million kms. For the time being, the Black Sea is the only one of these seas in which one of the littoral territories, the Ukraine, has declared war on one of the littoral states, Russia.
In the year since the Special Military Operation began on February 24, 2022, Turkish figures count 52 ship losses altogether; most of the Russian losses are Ukrainian claims which have not been verified. All of the Ukrainian losses on the Turkish list have occurred in port harbours or at a limit of 12 nautical miles (23 kms) offshore. The principal causes have been mines, shore-based artillery, missile, aircraft, and drone strikes.
In the past three weeks, the Kiev regime has declared war in the international waters of the Black Sea by launching drone boats to attack two Russian naval vessels operating to guard the gas pipelines which run on the seabed between Russia and Turkey. The pipelines are known as Blue Stream, operational in 2003, and Turkstream from 2020. On May 24, the Russian Navy’s Ivan Khurs (lead image, left) was attacked by three Ukrainian surface drones; at the time the location was 140 kms northeast of the Bosphorus Strait, outside Turkish territorial waters, inside Turkey’s exclusive economic zone, but in international waters.
The Russian Defense Ministry reported the destruction of the attacking vessels without their reaching the Ivan Khurs, and the return of the vessel undamaged to its homeport of Sevastopol. Its mission, the ministry said, had been “to ensure safe operation of the Turkstream and Blue Stream gas pipelines in the exclusive economic zone of the Republic of Turkey and also [it] monitored the surface situation in the southwest part of the Black Sea to ensure the safety of navigation under the ‘grain deal.’”
On June 11, six Ukrainian surface drones attacked the Russian Navy’s Priazovye (“Azov Sea”, lead image, right). All six were destroyed before they could strike. The reported location was about 300 kms southeast of Sevastopol; that is the northern limit of the Turkish exclusive economic zone, but still in international waters.
The Ukrainian military have made no claim of responsibility.
The official Russian reporting of the incidents has treated them as Ukrainian terrorism. The method of the operations, and the vessels from which the drone boats were launched, have not yet been disclosed, although the positional data appear to have been recorded by the overhead US Air Force FORTE11 operation, and by overhead Russian surveillance aircraft, drones, and satellites, and by naval radars. The probability is also that real-time course targeting coordinates for the drones in their runs at the IvanKhurs and the Priazovye were transmitted to the Ukrainians by the US Air Force (USAF).
The likelihood also is that the Ukrainian attackers used the shipping channel designated for the security of grain transportation under the Black Sea Grain Initiative agreements of July 2022. Compliance with these agreements is the responsibility of the United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres. Ukrainian terrorism in violation of the agreements indicates the complicity of that UN official as the war has been extended by the Ukrainians and the USAF into international waters.
There’s an old Russian adage about swallowing too much and trying to talk at the same time – if you don’t want to die of gastroenteritis, keep your mouth shut. This isn’t an option for understanding the past week of the war, and preparing for the next.
Bear in mind that, in the middle of the Ukrainian ground offensive and hours before the start of the largest NATO air operation since the alliance was created in April 1949, the war in the Ukraine is having almost no impact on President Biden’s (lead image) job approval polls and thus on his re-election chances in November 2024.
By contrast, President Putin, who goes to election between January and March of 2024, has declared his new approach to what will happen between now and then.
The longest lasting of the false-flag operations conducted against Russia since the Special Military Operation started in February 2022 has been flying the flag of the United Nations (UN).
The chief flag-bearer has been the Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, a Portuguese (lead image, left); he has manipulated, plotted, and lied his way through the Ukrainian hostage-taking at Azovstal, during the Battle of Mariupol; the Ukrainian attacks on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant; and Ukrainian attempts to break the ports blockade with what the UN has been calling its “Black Sea Grain Initiative”.
Reinforcing Guterres in these schemes of deceit have been his spokesman, American and Frenchman Stéphane Dujarric (Rothschild), Argentine Rafael Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); and the negotiator of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, British lawyer Martin Griffiths (lead image, right) and https://twitter.com/. Griffiths came to his UN job from a Geneva organization funded by the anti-Russian governments of Norway, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Denmark, the UK, Australia, Ireland, and Switzerland. It calls itself “The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue”.
Guterres’s bluff was called a year ago, on April 26, at the long-table incident in Moscow when President Vladimir Putin told Guterres he was wrong on the facts, biased in his public statements, and acting in violation of his UN authority.
“You can call it whatever name you like and have whatever bias in favour of those who did it, “ Putin told Guterres after getting him to confirm that the earphone to his interpreter was working. “But this was really an anti-constitutional coup. Unfortunately, our colleagues in the West preferred to ignore all this. After we recognised the independence of these states [Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics], they asked us to render them military aid because they were subjected to military actions, an armed aggression. In accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter, Chapter VII, we were forced to do this by launching a special military operation…[About the Battle of Mariupol and the Azovstal hostages] Mr Secretary-General, you have been misled…The simplest thing for military personnel or members of the nationalist battalions is to release the civilians. It is a crime to keep civilians, if there are any there, as human shields.”
Putin did not shake hands to greet Guterres; he placed him further away than any head of state had ever been seated in conversation at the Kremlin before; Guterres squirmed. To CNN a day later in Kiev, Guterres lied about what had been said at the meeting. Later, when asked in New York to say what and when he knew of the foreign combatants at Azovstal, and the use of civilian hostage shields in the battle, Guterres refused to answer.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has been more explicit in its condemnation of Guterres than of any UN secretary-general before him. “Contrary to the requirements in the UN Charter,” the Foreign Ministry spokesman declared last July, “the [Guterres’ staff] Secretariat is not taking an equidistant position, as one would expect from a Secretariat of the most authoritative international organisation that is designed, among other things, to promote the settlement of disputes.”
“I would like to remind our esteemed colleagues from the UN Secretariat”, according to Maria Zakharova at the ministry, “that their job is not to take sides in situations of dispute, but to help maintain peace and stability. This is what they are paid for and this is their mandate.”
On September 29, the Foreign Ministry announced: “The relevant functions do not give the Managing Director [Guterres] of the UN Secretariat the right to make biased political statements on behalf of the entire [UN] Organization. Nor is such a person authorized to interpret the norms of the Charter and documents of the General Assembly, including the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation between States in Accordance with the UN Charter… Obviously, A[ntonio] Guterres has not only exceeded his authority, but actually taken sides with the collective West, again resorting to a selective approach in the interpretation of the unfolding events.”
“We consider unacceptable the fact that the UN Secretary-General has become an instrument of propaganda and pressure on Member States at a time when he should be guided by the UN Charter in its entirety.”
The defeat of the Ukrainian and NATO forces on the battlefield has gradually diminished the value to the US and NATO of the role of the UN Security Council and of Secretary-General Guterres. This has left Grossi exposed as playing the role of spokesman for Kiev when war operations caused the biggest radiation release so far into the atmosphere on May 13 as Ukrainian army stocks of depleted uranium shells were blown up at Khmelnitsky.
In the war over food stocks – the attempt to stop Russia exporting grain and crop fertilizers, and to use Ukrainian grain exports to recover Black Sea ports and to conceal attacks on Russian targets – the role of Griffiths as the UN go-between has failed comprehensively, and for the same reason that Guterres and Grossi have failed. Griffiths told the UN on May 23 that the Ukraine is the victim of Russian attacks based on Kiev press releases. “The biggest challenge remains the impediments to reaching all areas in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia currently under the military control of the Russian Federation.”
Griffiths also claimed that “in recent weeks, we have engaged in intensive discussions with the parties to the Black Sea Initiative, to secure agreement on its extension and the improvements needed for it to operate effectively and predictably. This will continue over the coming days.”
In fact, Griffiths and UN officials cannot “engage” with the Russian side because they are no longer trusted. Griffiths’ claim that he and his staff have “continued to deliver a wide range of support with concrete results under the Memorandum of Understanding on the facilitation of Russian food and fertilizer exports” is false.
The Russian response is that Grossi and Griffiths have been following “illegal instructions to his subordinates” from Guterres.
In a month it will be three hundred and fourteen years precisely since the Swedes lost their king, their generals, their soldiers, and their empire when Tsar Peter the Great and the Russian army defeated them at the Battle of Poltava (lead image) . That battle of July 8, 1709, is the greatest disaster in Swedish military history; it is the bitterest grudge they hold against Russia, still.
The Swedes were obliged to accept their inferiority and become a minor power in Europe. Their strategic calculation ever since has been to conserve their resources by keeping to the winning side in Europe, while hoping to revenge themselves on the Kremlin. At Poltava, in eastern Ukraine, they still hope if, with Swedish money, arms, and men, the regime in Kiev can manage it.
Over the past week the Swedish Air Force has taken its Saab-made JAS39 Gripen fighter-bombers to the air, alongside other NATO forces and the USS Gerald Ford in what they are calling Operation Arctic Challenge 23. At the same time, the Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonsson, has admitted that he is discussing with Kiev supplying the Gripen for attacking Russian forces over the Ukrainian battlefield. “Yesterday [February 14], I had the opportunity to discuss this with the Minister of Defense of Ukraine, Reznikov….We are significantly increasing our support for Ukraine”. “President Zelensky also asked for it.”
Jonsson didn’t admit that the Swedes are discussing with the US, NATO, and the Czech Republic a form of disguising the battlefield deployment of the Gripen through third countries and through NATO’s Air Defender 23 exercise, which begins on June 12.
The last time the Norwegians whipped themselves into a frenzy of warmaking race hatred, their minister president was Vidkun Quisling (lead image, left).
An exceptionally intelligent young military officer, he became the Norwegian General Staff’s expert on Russia at the time of the Russian Revolution. He then was posted to the Norwegian Embassy in St Petersburg early in 1918, returning to Oslo when the embassy was suspended after the revolution. He returned to Kharkov in 1922 where he married a Russian, and then the following year, he married another local woman, an ethnic Ukrainian. He was in Moscow for three years, 1926-28, first engaged in trading timber and buying Russian antiques, then representing the British Embassy which had been closed after the revolution and British troops invaded.
When he launched his political career at home, Quisling had become a fascist and racist, and his book of 1930,Russland og vi (“Russia and Ourselves”) a manifesto of Norwegian identity in combat against Bolshevism, revolution, and the Russian race. He met Adolf Hitler (right) many times, starting in mid-1939. “An unspeakable enemy is threatening our civilization”, Quisling’s book began. “This enemy is Bolshevism, the master of Russia and the champion of the World Revolution.” At the time, Norway’s military and economic survival, Quisling believed, depended on the British Empire, as he called it. “The Russian question is an issue between Bolshevism and the Teutonic nations, especially Great Britain, the natural upholder of all that is in opposition to and threatened by Bolshevism.” Breaking up the old Russian Empire’s states and the Soviet Union, especially the Ukraine, Quisling wrote, “might prove a useful means for attaining certain ends, but it might also lead to a reaction which would be destructive to those who had planned it. Charles XII and Germany had that experience in the Ukraine, though this does not necessarily prove much as regards the present and the future. For the rest, it must be remembered that the Ukraine is a country of the same size as Germany, with a population of over 30 millions, possessing great natural wealth, and every qualification for becoming an independent State.”
Quisling’s policy and his party, Nasjonal Samling (NS, “National Gathering”), were political failures until the German Army invaded and occupied Norway in 1940. Quisling and his NS party ministers were installed in power in Oslo alongside a German reichskommissar reporting to Berlin, in February 1942. They held office until the Germans left early in 1945. Quisling was arrested in May of that year; put on trial for embezzlement, murder, and treason; convicted in September; and executed in October.
The first time Quisling’s name was used in English to mean treachery, betrayal, and treason was in an editorial of The Times of London in April 1940. “Quislings everywhere” ran the headline. In New York, Time magazine followed by turning the name into the verb quisle, and the noun quislers. Quisling has stuck.
“I want to let history reach its own verdict,” Quisling said from prison after his arrest. “Believe me, in ten years’ time I will have become another Saint Olav.”
More than ninety years have elapsed since Quisling wrote this: “The most effective remedy for Bolshevism and Bolshevist-Russian plots and intrigues will be found in a closer cultural, economic and political co-operation between those peoples which are the main supporters of Western civilization, and which can be described as Nordic in the widest sense of the term. Where are these peoples? They are in the Scandinavian countries, in Holland and Flanders, the British Empire, Germany, the United States of America, to a considerable extent in France, and largely intermingled with the people of other countries where the Nordic race, however, does not prevail to the same extent. A Northern Coalition of these nations, beginning with Scandinavia and Great Britain—and with the inclusion of Finland and Holland—which might attract Germany next, and possibly the British Dominions and America later on would render innocuous any Bolshevist combination, and would within a measurable distance of time ensure European peace and civilization.”
A firing squad put Quisling into the grave on October 24, 1945. With the new Norwegian doctrine of Teutonic-Nordic war, that is to say, NATO war against Russia, Quisling has jumped out of his grave, and his doctrine has become Norwegian state policy.
Observers record that hatred of Russians and Russian culture is more intensely expressed and pervasive in Oslo than in any other west European capital. Once again, it is righteous in Norway to wage war against Russia for the advancement of the Teutonic-Nordic race and western civilization. To quisle, in short.
Existentially speaking — which means whether to live and let live, to do or die — how far from a mortal enemy is far enough? In between the one and the other outcome, is there anything but a no man’s land?
Carthago delenda est – “Carthage must be destroyed” – was a Roman strategic aim 2,200 years ago. It was regularly repeated in his public speeches by Marcus Porcius Cato in his advocacy of putting an end to the Punic Wars by destroying the Carthaginian adversary entirely, not just militarily, so that it could never rise again to challenge Roman power. The opposition slogan was Carthago servanda est – “Carthage must be saved”. Its author, Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Corculum, meant don’t rule by force if it can be avoided; instead conserve lives, resources, power.
Cato was a politician; Corculum was a soldier. The political strategy of doing what you can because you can, and as a warning to everyone else, won out; Cato is remembered even now; Corculum is forgotten. This is not because imperial history repeats itself, but because the history is always written by people aiming to stay on the winning side: they don’t know any better until the empire has been lost and their retainers with it.
In the evolution of the Russian war aims, former president Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy head of the Security Council, stood up for the Cato line last week. “Ukraine will disappear”, he declared. “Now it’s time to say how Ukraine will disappear, and also what will then be the risk of a resumption of the war in Europe and in the rest of the world.” Medvedev also left open the Corculum option after the Cato option in his last line. “We may be temporarily satisfied with the second option, but we need a third one.”
Because Russia is the only functioning democracy on the two sides of this war, where military tactics and war aims are openly argued in parliament and the media, the debate between the Cato delenda war aim, and the Corculum servanda war aim is an active one. Sworn to destroy President Vladimir Putin, the Russian army and economy, the US, European and western allies misinterpret this debate to be vacillation and vulnerability. Dialectically speaking, this encourages the Cato line faction in Moscow at the expense of the Corculum line faction. In this way the US and NATO axis provokes its own defeat.
This process has taken the war well beyond the 300-kilometre range of some of the US, French or British weapons which have been deployed and fired to date. The debate over the 300-km westward defence line was winding up in Russia, not beginning, when winter started last year.
Medvedev made this official last week, following the intensification of artillery, rocket, and drone attacks on Russian cities, including Moscow. This week the governor of Belgorod, Vyacheslav Gladkov, went further. Then yesterday President Putin (lead image, left) tried to pull Gladkov and Medvedev back in line — that’s the Corculum line, not the Cato line.
The man in the frame is General Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
There are no insignia on his jacket, zipped tight to his chin. His torso and legs are concealed beneath the desk which also accommodates a computer screen without keyboard or mouse; and a pen held between the general’s right thumb and index finger, upside down and useless. Patriotic slogans have been pasted to the wall. A wall socket accommodates a thick communications cable routed along the base of the wall, but not visibly connected to the two telephones. There are ten unopened water bottles on display, six plastic cups. A single piece of paper on the desk reveals no date. The general is able to say a dozen scripted words and raise his left hand.
He is not dead from the Russian missile attack which had caused his disappearance until this video clip was published on Thursday evening to dispel what the Ukrainian introducer called the mystery and the Russian propaganda of Zaluzhny’s death. The clip proves the opposite of this intention. The general is visibly unwell and is no longer capable of commanding the Ukrainian forces.
This is one of the funniest, and at the same time one of the saddest lines, written by Ivan Turgenev in Fathers and Sons, the novel of his which preserves its contemporaneity through the Russian revolutions better than any other classic of Russian literature.
Appearing to come out of the stream of consciousness of one of story’s characters, the line is also an irony of Turgenev’s — and if you understand that he meant nihilist as a synonym of Russian, it is a warning of great philosophical force for right now. Right now is a synonym for June 22, 1941, when Hitler invaded to destroy the Russians; and for June 24, 1812, when Napoleon tried the same. Those two names can’t be synonyms for Biden because the German and the Frenchman weren’t demented or led by psychopaths.
