We posted shortly after news broke of the Ukraine drone attacks on Russian strategic bombers. The losses appear much less severe than initially reported but it appears at least five Tu-95 bombers were seriously damaged and two were destroyed. In comments, readers took issue with a report by Scott Ritter, that these attacks were on Russian nuclear deterrent assets, crossed a Russian red line, and would allow for nuclear retaliation under Russia’s nuclear doctrine, not that the fabulously cool-headed Putin would do such a thing. They also disputed the seriousness of the attack on these aircraft, disputing their status as part of Russia’s nuclear triad.
Larry Wilkerson, without having any apparent knowledge of Scott Ritter’s post, comes down fiercely on his side of the argument. Some readers tried to dismiss Ritter as over his skis in attempting to interpret the Russian doctrine. Whether Ritter is expert or not, Wilkerson was close to incandescent in excoriating the stupidity and sheer reckless of this attack.
Moreover, he has confirmed from his own source that the US was deeply involved in this attack.1
Below is the entire video, which I encourage you to watch in full. [I will transcribe some key part I am a terrible and very slow transcriptionist, so you may initially see only time stamps, I want to sketch out some the implications first and return to providing the backup in written form, although you can find it by listening at the indicated times in the interim]
Recall that Wilkerson has extremely deep experience in US cold war and geopolitics as Colin Powell’s chief of staff and other roles. Some readers attempted to discount Ritter as alarmist about nuclear war risks. That has not been a feature of Wilkerson’s commentary.
At 0:55:
Imagine, if you will, just to sort of set up an analogy, Mexico or Canada or any third party, particularly one that was proximate to our borders, launching missiles that hit Whiteman airforce base and destroyed B-2 bombers, or hit Barstow in Louisiana or Minot in North Dakota and destroyed B-52 bombers., or came in on Groton, Connecticut, where a ballistic missile submarine was being refurbished, and hit it. These are things that during the Cold War, we swore to each other, Washington and Moscow, that we would never do. These are things that are so destabilizing that Putin would be in his every right with regard to all the lessons we have learned, and they are many, to attack and to attack with nuclear weapons, and to say to the rest of the world, “They provoked me,” they surely did, “and I’m not losing my devices for responding should I be really provoked by a first strike.”
And that’s what you are talking about. Never, never hit the assets that your nuclear-armed enemy needs to assess whether or not you are attacking them. That’s a no-no. Always been a no-no. No one disputed that in Moscow or Washington or for that matter in the other capitals of the world. Now we’ve broken that bug-a-boo. Now We’ve said, “Now it’s OK to do this.”
And here’s what we did, Nima. You’re a smart man. We did this under Trump’s tutelage, brain-dead though I am assuming more and more he is, meaning his cabinet and others around him, we did this because we wanted to establish negotiating leverage for the next meeting. Establish negotiating leverage by allowing your proxy to destroy serious nuclear assets of your enemy. This is unbelievable. I can’t believe the Trump Administration has shown repeatedly since the inauguration, confirming much of what it showed in the 2016 forward years. That it is, I won’t say brain-dead, but completely captured by that element of fascistic neoconservative autocratic advisors who are moneyed to the neck, within its realm. That’s what’s running it. It isn’t Donald Trump. Donald Trump didn’t even know, watch his face, that Putin’s assassination was attempted, and that we had probably something to do with the intel that fed that.
I will tell you this right now, I’ve had long conversations with people who know, we were integral, we, the United State intelligence community writ large, we were absolutely necessary for these strikes. My question to Donald Trump is “Did you know that?” And if you didn’t, why is Tulsi Gabbard still in her job?
At 8:30:
Putin is right. He is, in effect, at war with an alliance led by the United States of America. He has every right now, and he has expressed it time and time again, to put a nuclear weapon on a NATO capital.
At 12:30:
These strikes make me think I have lived too long. These strikes make me think that all that I have lived, all that I have learned, all the things that I was taught, that we heard endlessly during the Cold War and afterwards about nuclear weapons have just been set aside, completely set aside. I believe there are people in this country, in the Empire, who think they can win a nuclear war and are not cowed in the least by the fact that Putin has a stockpile that outnumbers our own, has weapons systems that can deliver that stockpile that are better than our own. They want this confrontation to happen, come hell or high water. And they are convinced they are going to win by making him back down.
But I’ve got news for them…
At 34:30
He [Putin] knows damned well we had everything to do with these strikes. Now it seems to him, we’re in the war. 100% in the war. And the next thing he better do is go out and make sure all his nuclear attack early warning systems are working. ‘Cause the next thing he can expect is what Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, and a host of others have argued is said we can win if we go first.
At 42:05:
We’re looking at nuclear war. That’s what we’re looking at. Everyone on this planet is looking at it.
Some commentators have chosen to dismiss the significance of the drone attack in light of the fact that it will not have any impact on Russia’s prosecution of the war. Russia is believed to have at least 50 combat ready Tu-95s and per Simplicius and Alexander Mercouris, needs only 6 at any time for its Ukraine effort. So the loss of 5 or even 10, if Russian sources are understating the total number loss, indeed does not diminish Russia’s war making capability.
Wilkerson argues forcefully that the US participation in the airbase drone strikes means the US has no interest in peace. Worse, it confirms that we are dedicated to the neocon strategy of trying to bleed Russia and thus will never give up on fighting. He contends that we will reach for the nuclear arsenal when other methods have failed. Wilkerson says he knows individuals personally who advocate for nuclear because they think we could “win” it and/or to reduce global overpopulation.
Russia may indeed not change its battlefield tempo but not due to blowing off this attack, but that will be due to digesting its very important and disturbing information content and determining that the current pace of attrition is still the best course of action.
Indeed, one reason for not accelerating the pace much is that Russia is clearly dealing with crazy people, and it’s not prudent to make sudden moves near them. That would argue for playing along with the farce of the peace negotiations, and even eventually indulging Zelensky’s request for a meeting with Putin (although the more likely course still seems to be to impose conditions that make it a non-starter, like asking Ukraine to present a proposed agenda, and then saying most of the items need to be handled by expert staff first before any big dogs meeting can occur).
Another issue is that this confirmation of the US and European determination to keep the war going no matter what, and that means among other things terrorism even after the Ukraine army and state collapse, is that Russia almost certainly to take all of Ukraine, or perhaps save Lvov, particularly if it can deke the Poles into absorbing it. Russia will need to take control of current Ukraine territory so as, among other things, to force everyone in its territory to become Russian citizens, which means getting Russian passports and presumably providing biometric information. Russia has likely been gathering information on members of the SBU and neo-Nazi groups like Right Sector and can better and more aggressively hunt them down than through a friendly but independent state (unless treaties give Russia policing rights inside the new rump Ukraine’s borders limited to hunting down terrorists, which may seem irregular but ipso facto should not be impossible).
Even though Russia will not be able to eliminate the neo-Nazis, its aim is to limit their ability to live in post-war Ukraine and have to operate from outside. Remember that even though the drone attack had the appearance of being implemented from outside Russia, Alexander Mercoursis pointed out it almost certainly relied heavily on networks of agents, and these attacks were costly since many of them would have been burned. Denying the neo-Nazis their old home bases (as in literally their homes) and their communities won’t stop them, but it ought to impede their operations.
We have pointed to but not studied end of World War II arrangements which provided for limited duration occupation (“limited” meaning years) with Germany gradually getting back its national sovereignity. Russia could also use these precedents.
On the flip side of this ledger, we have pointed out that one of the many factor that Putin has had to consider in the pacing of this conflict is keeping the support of his economic allies, particularly China, India, and Turkiye, all of whom took risk in defying the US and continuing to trade with Russia. Putin and Lavrov’s repeated banging on about the history of US duplicity, the measured way in which they have conducted the war (particularly the avoidance of civilian casualties), and the contract with Ukraine terrorism (continued shelling of civilians in Donetsk city, the attack on the Crimea beach, among other examples) have earned the Russian more trust even with leaders like Modi who were initially ambivalent about supporting Russia.
The utter recklessness of this attack, and the fact that it confirms that the West is determined to keep fighting Russia no matter what, should boost the Russian case in the court of international opinion and reduce constraints on that front against more aggressive action and/or more territorial seizure.
One more set of considerations is the debate with Putin’s top team. Even though we regularly stress that, contrary to Western propaganda, Putin is not a dictator and needs to be mindful of public opinion, more subtly, he also needs to not trample important power centers, importantly the General Staff and the military. Even though they all accept his status as supreme commander and would not challenge him, a good manager, and Putin is a superb manager, does not want people in key roles angry and disaffected with his decisions.
John Helmer has been reporting for some time that the General Staff has been unhappy with Putin refusing to prosecute the war more aggressively, particularly electrical grid and production attacks. They may argue that these attacks prove them to be correct (although a heavy US and European hand in them might argue otherwise).
The core problem is a bad rerun of this incident from the Cuban Missile Crisis. We’ve cited this incident occasionally, the first time in 2015. Per Jonathan Glover’s book Humanity:
One lesson some of the Kennedy administration had learnt from The Guns of August was not to allow military drift. Kennedy himself was worried about the use of nuclear weapons by American forces in Turkey and Italy. He ordered that specific orders were to be sent underlining the
need for presidential authorization.The Defence Secretary, Robert McNamara, insisted on controlling the way the navy carried out the blockade. He saw Admiral Anderson the day before the first Soviet ship was due to reach the quarantine line. He asked how the ship was to be stopped, and the Admiral said they would hail it.
McNamara asked whether this would be in English or Russian, and what would happen if they did not understand or did not stop.
He later recounted the Admiral’s response:
‘We’ll send a shot across the bow,’ he said.
‘Then what, if that doesn’t work?’
‘Then we’ll fire into the rudder,’ he replied, by now clearly very annoyed.
‘What kind of ship is it?’ I asked.
‘A tanker, Mr Secretary,’ he said.‘You’re not going to fire a single shot at anything without my express permission, is that clear?’ I said.
That’s when he made his famous remark about how the Navy had been running blockades since the days of John Paul Jones, and if I would leave them alone they would run this one successfully as well.
I rose from my chair and walked out of the room, saying this was not a blockade but a means of communication between Kennedy and Khrushchev; no force would be applied without my permission; and that would not be given without discussion with the President.
‘Was that understood?’ I asked. The tight-lipped response was ‘Yes’
The problem is that Putin has been trying to communicate with the US and NATO since 2008 to de-escalate. Not only is no one listening, but the disarray under Trump means no one seems to be home.
____
1 Both Wilkerson here and Larry Johnson in a different Dialogue Works claim that CNN reported that Hegseth watched the drone attacks in real time. I have not been able to find that story, nor any tweets that link to it. But if this is accurate, not only is the US admitting to intimate participation but also poked Russia in the eye about it.
Please come back or refresh your browser at 7:45 AM EDT for a final version]
Here we see a cautionary side of “Early bird gets the worm”. Patient bird get the final version.
No statement from Trump? He in a bunker somewhere, just in case? Mad dog strategy in action, spectacle for the media. Finnish taxpayer funded media still carries the headers:This is how Ukraine destroyed most of Russian air force. And the 40 planes, too. So the narrative feeder is in full (baloney)delivery mode. Btw, the arms sales growth figures are absolutely amazing!
What they are serving is much less tasty than baloney:
“In FY2024 the total value of transferred defense articles and services and security cooperation activities conducted under the Foreign Military Sales system was $117.9 billion. This represents a 45.7% increase, up from $80.9 billion in FY2023. This is the highest ever annual total of sales and assistance provided to our allies and partners. In FY2024, we oversaw 16,227 FMS cases with an open case value of over $845 billion.”
https://www.state.gov/fiscal-year-2024-u-s-arms-transfers-and-defense-trade/
The baloney should be part of the analysis. If state media in county X, eg BBC in UK, says UA attacking Russian nuclear weapons systems is a good thing, hurrah, as opposed to, omg this is incredibly dangerous/reckless then this tells us and Russia something about the disposition of state X.
Yesterday I noticed BBC was doing lots of hurrahs but US MSM news was relatively quiet.
Indeed Finnish nor e.g. Dutch media think this through. It seems neither of my home countries seem to have analysts of the name.
I am very upset about this because the EU/NATO seem to be willfully leading this to WWIiI, and to what end? We will lose militarily to Russia.
Has Gabbard been completely captured?
If Hegseth knew in advance and DJT didn’t, …. that is not a good look, and DJT cares about “how things look.”
Has Gabbard been completely captured?
Honestly, this was someone who was posting her swimsuit workout videos online about four years back. So probably never a serious person, right?
Is it possible to participate in and support institutional corruption without being corrupt?
The Orange Emperor appears to have lost his marbles, but the court sycophants, including the mass media, cover for it. The little people are not supposed to notice. (Same with the Biden regime)
In one of the recent Dialogue Works videos, Wilkerson states that his sources say no and that she’s going to rein the IC in but hasn’t yet figured out how to do it.
okay I just saw this and no time yet to watch so don’t bomb me but does Wilkerson still have his security clearance?
I just caution to suggest there are many sides and details to these things which none of us know, potentially including all those bloggers who I trust and most here do too.
If anybody were to spill secrets -whether US or RU side – that would be a breach and punished. So the info that reaches us can take us only so far.
I’m not really set up to watch much Youtube here and so don’t follow Wilkerson and some others–just the ones I know more about. But as to
He has every right now, and he has expressed it time and time again, to put a nuclear weapon on a NATO capital.
No he doesn’t and who is being irrational? Here’s suggesting that Putin and company know exactly who and what they are dealing with and are hyper rational–too much so apparently for some factions in Russia. And they are right to be. Nukes would be the end of everything which is why, if the rest of the world could be as rational as Putin, they would be done away with altogether. They are not a useful thing except as a deterrent and Russia still has plenty of them not needing antique bombers.
Meanwhile the chowderheads in the West don’t know who they are dealing with and think the world runs on “credibility” and reputation and that’s what matters instead of competence. Ian
Welsh has an excellent post today on this very subject.
https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-best-short-summary-of-why-china-is-winning-the-west-fading/
Yes he does. Russia has a nuclear doctrine, which is the geopolitical version of “Beware the dog” and we keep poking sticks at the dog. We are the ones crossing red lines, not Putin. The fact that he has demonstrated forbearance does not mean we should assume it will continue.
He had the right to do so when Ukraine with NATO assistance invade Kursk. Russia already regarded the Ukraine war as an existential threat. US think tanks that are in the Dod orbit have not only advocated regime changing Putin but breaking up Russia.
See GM below for more detail.
Wilkerson points out that the US will treat Putin’s restraint as weakness, keep escalating even though Russia is better in nearly all weapons categories and particularly in nuclear capabilities, and when they run out of places to go with conventional weapons, they will resort to nukes. Wilkerson also points out, naming names, that many US think tanks have advocated nuclear war because the US will win if it makes the first strike.
Putin has said that a world without Russia is not a world worth having.
Ritter has repeatedly said every war game of the US v. Russia ends in a nuclear war. The point which Ritter, Wilkerson, Sachs, and perhaps others make is we are now there.
This degree of reckless belligerence makes it entirely rational for Russia to have an itchy trigger finger.
But that trigger finger is a likely pyrrhric victory for Russia. An eventual ‘nuclear winter’ damages the world’s largest land country, as well. Amazing as it may seem, the condition of the planet rests on the responses of Putin to the West’s escalation tactics. Let’s hope Russia can find a way to deploy Oreshnik in a way that ‘gob smacks’ the USA into some form of sanity.
This is not the issue at hand. The issue is whether we have crossed well understood red lines that would put a nuclear retaliation on the menu of responses.
I remember a story in Links about the physics of an Oreshnik missile with a lot of tungsten rods as the payload. As I recall, it had destructive power close to a nuclear weapon and no radiation. It was in a blog analyzing the physics of a strike, in detail. Doing a quick search, there seems to be a lot written about it, some call it “Rods From Gods”.
“Our entire discourse system, our entire media, and our entire elites have zero accountability except for making the rich, richer. “
— Ian Welsh
Many compradors have joined this cult as well.
As of late last year, Ray McGovern mentioned that Wilkerson still did, I think, and that he still regularly participates in war games and such.
Andrey Bezrukov said yesterday on Solovyov on Russia-1 that the only move remaining is preemptive strategic nuclear strike on Europe, followed by occupation of the space all the way to the Atlantic as a safety buffer zone.
Which had been clear to the few “extremists” who dared utter it for a very long time, the fundamental cold hard remorseless logic of the circumstances dictates it, but even I didn’t expect to see it explicitly stated on prime time Russian TV in exactly the same terms.
It’s either that or Russia is done for.
Less extreme measures could have defused the situation in the past — it was absolutely imperative to physically cut Ukraine off Europe, even if it took tactical nukes to do it, and to then finish it off ASAP, no matter the cost.
Putin instead prioritized not ruffling any oligarch feathers, maintaining normalcy, and appearances to the “Global South”. as if the “Global South” ever did anything for Russia to help it save itself from the threat. So here we are now…
Europe as a buffer zone? Only if Europe is reduced to rubble. As per Wilkerson in the video, nobody has the capacity to occupy large swaths of territory, including Russia.
Yes, that is precisely what was meant — strategic bombing for total annihilation.
And yes, I have asked myself the question about how quickly you can secure the territory too. The Netherlands you can fully wipe out with just a few bombs, Germany with all its mountains is a much taller order. Presumably the Russian General Staff has very detailed such plans going back six decades.
That is a dark thought. I do hope we find a way to step back from this cliff edge.
Me too. Bombing Finland, France or Poland is a tall order too but it probably suffices to bomb the big cities and the coastline as well as major river spots. Draw a glowing line where the borders were.
You do realize that the use of nuclear weapons on Europe by Russia would evolve into a general nuclear war? The First and Second World Wars dragged in all the major powers including those trying to avoid conflict. Nobody planned what happened as all the starting plans failed, which is a major reason why no one with nuclear weapons has used them since 1945.
It might,but if in DC they are rational, it wouldn’t.
They would be facing the choice of total annihilation or taking the L.
You take the L eveery time. And the same applies to every other such situation — nobody will retaliate over a nuclear attack on somebody else.
If you are rational.
And if they are not rational, they are planning for a first nuclear strike anyway, so there is nothing to lose by preempting it.
Exactly. Anyone from a semi-casual commenter on a blog such as this to Trump or Putin or any of their lieutenants, who suggests that any kind of strategy or “war-game” involving nuclear arms will not fairly quickly devolve into a civilizational-ending apocalypse, is a blooming idiot who should be immediately shoved into a sound-proofed room, alone. Somewhere, someone close to power is actually considering using nukes to achieve their ends? Dear God, this might actually be it?!
Please remember that during the Cold War European military pundits were continually begging the US not to withdraw nuclear weapons from Europe on the grounds that if they did, the US might be able to leave Europe to be destroyed by nuclear weapons and not retaliate so long as no US target was attacked.
Of course France and Britain have nuclear weapons, but would they use them if they were not themselves attacked?
Indeed, when nuclear weapons are considered, ordinary rationality is seldom at the forefromt.
Yes, as opposed to already being dead.
If your approach was followed it would be as bad as those in the Werst who think a nuclear war can be won…
It can be, and there isn’t much of a choice left.
This is a matter of survival — the West must loot Russia’s resources in order to buy itself a few more decades, and it is desperate enough to go to total war.
If Russia can clear the US out of Eurasia in a first strike while not hitting the continental US, it may all end there without an all-out exchange. If the choice is between losing the empire but staying alive in a diminished status on one hand, and dying on the other, the clear rational decision is to pick the former. For Russia the choice is on one hand, between running the risk of dying in an all-out exchange initiated by it, but quite likely winning it if it hits first, and on the other, dying in an inevitable NATO first strike if it doesn’t hit pre-emptively. It’s a clear choice.
P.S. What happened on Sunday was a first strike. Partial and conventional, but a first strike nonetheles. It didn’t fully succeed, but the intent behinf it was exactly that.
Occupation of all that land after a nuclear strike on Europe. Where would the help come from for this? Even Russia surely would need it after such a thing.
Oh, wait…that’s not going to happen. Their own country and the rest of the world would be too freaked out. Russia’s hands would be full taking care of Russia. In the context of global relations, Europe isn’t a country like Afghanistan.
They are holding it down in Ukraine, but they aren’t like some super-powered “Guardians of the Galaxy”.
See GM, above: “total annihilation”.
Sounds a lot like the Russian version of SIOP-62.
Can anyone get copies of the reports from US ‘think tanks’ that actually published papers advocating that a first strike is winnable? What are the names of the authors? Have these idiots considered that the Nuclear Subs cannot be attacked? Have they not considered that Nuclear winter and global irradiation might be problematic for humanity’s survival?
Concerning Bezrukov, this demonstrates that the ‘Batshit crazies’ are indigenous to all sides of this conflict. There is no ‘winning’ any limited nuclear war, as the loses pile up and the outrage increases, the war will quickly become unlimited.
There is nothing crazy about it. Think about what happened, the ramifications of it, the possible responses and the consequences of not responding.
This was an attempted disarming partial first strike, even if conventional.
If you shrug this off too, the next step is Taurus missiles at ICBM silos in Kozelsk and Tatishchevo and the road mobile TELs around Moscow. And drones at the SSBNs in Murmansk and Kamchatka.
And then you are irreversibly in a death spiral of the Hezbollah kind.
Of course there is winning a limited nuclear war.
Nobody in their right mind will ever retaliate for someone else being nuked.
So if you are Russia, what do you do? Keep taking hits until you are destroyed or do a preemptive limited strike in the hope of physically neutralizing the enemy while avoiding an all-out exchange?
Obviously you go for the latter.
Also, “there is no winning a limited nuclear war” is one of the cliches coming from the same line of thought according to which attacking the other side’s strategic forces was unthinkable.
But the latter just happened.
So perhaps it’s time to rethink conventional wisdom assumptions…
That’s totally preposterous and insane and would end photosynthetic life in the northern hemisphere. Get it together and stop speaking as if a nuclear war is strategically advantageous for anyone. Please.
It is important to include a reminder that this war appeared to begin as a democratic blunder and to now be a continued US military failure by the republicans. Why do we mention Trump’s name or Gabbard’s name. It appears that US foreign policy is being created and run by and a democratic/republican coalition. Who voted for these people. What percentage of US voters are willing to vote against this stupidity or the evil in Gaza. And the war on China begins as the others continue.
What percentage of US voters are willing to vote against this stupidity or the evil in Gaza.
What percentage of US voters are even intelligent or aware enough to vote against these things? And if they did, what difference would an election in a year or three that merely changes figureheads in — as you say — a democratic-republican coalition possibly make to policies enacted now and laid out decades ago to run decades into the future?
Does Joe Citizen’s opinion matter anymore? I’m having my doubts.
No and it hasn’t for a remarkably long time. Partisanizing this particular misadventure and the peril it’s produced is an absurdity. We are beyond domestic politics with the game of brinksmanship being played by our ostensible betters.
The question should not be about voter intelligence or awareness. Rather, we should ask if Americans are humane. I think there is plenty of evidence they are and that is a problem for elites. Thus, the msm does everything in its power to make sure Americans are misinformed.
I think we may differ in definition of humane. All that stuff in old testament about eye for an eye is not what I’d call humane.
I’d call it a flag waving for “you killed some of ours so we’re gonna genocide you”. We hosted US students on Euro trips way back in 1987. We were pretty horrified at their belief in old testament. My family was nominally Roman Catholic which, for all its faults, didn’t take the Bible literally. Meeting people who did was scary. Though not as scary as the “diosecan music conference for the East midlands when I was a church organist”. plying me with scotch (which after one shot I realised what was going on thankfully) and separating me from the adult organists was final proof I needed that they were paedophiles. They’re all dead now thankfully and hope hell is real. One or two even got prosecuted but most did not.
Except for visiting for architectural appreciation etc I will not set foot in a RC church. (The US churches would be of no interest to me since they got rid of all the nice stuff anyway). Am reminded of this gem from Spitting Image during apartheid. Language alert. Interesting to see that it is old but getting recent comments about certain middle east topics we discuss on here. History rhymes.
By humane I mean people who are compassionate, benevolent, sympathetic, etc. The old Testament is irrelevant. A person with a modicum of compassion would never condone a genocide let alone risk a nuclear war.
I remember the Vietnam era well as I was in college.
There is much “loss avoidance” built into the USA’s political leadership, as in continue an apparently bad policy rather than stop something and recognize the loss.
Nixon ran, partially, on a “he will end the war” platform.
But he did a lot more bombing as the war continued.
Continue the effort until the next election and if your party loses, expect the newly elected party will NOT book the loss.
If the new leaders, from the opposing party, support the effort, it serves as an endorsement of the current military effort, and helps remove it from the voters minds as a differentiator.
Trump had a chance to distance himself from Biden, but it would have taken courage.
Maybe if more Trump TACO’S show up on restaurant menues across the USA, he’ll notice the population is not buying his tough guy approach.
I worry that he will escalate as Nixon did in an attempt to “win”.
This reminds me of something I think is important to note. Fascists and wars are often facilitated or instigated by the elites; they get the working class to do the dirty work and the dying. Often, even after the war, the elites survive, and even thrive financially. This has engendered a sense of impunity among them. Perhaps we need a system, where the elites and their sons are the first to enter battle; they might not be so quick to foment it.
What I propose is culture dependant and by no means permanently effective. During the early and middle stage of Rome’s republic, the Roman elites ( the senatorial families), considered bravery among the highest virtues. Hence, a Roman historian recorded that after the Punic wars, approximately 1/3 of the senate had died…
The Presidents change, but the policies remain the same.
The seat holders in the oval office change, but the rulers remain the same.
No one in the least informed about the dangers US is treading would agree with anything done in the past 35 years.
My prayer is Russian regard for life on earth is similar to that the Soviets showed, that is far higher than US’!
Realistically the bombers are useless as both a first strike and a second strike weapon.
As a first strike because you see how the moment they take off the internet knows all about it. And surprise is everything when it comes to a first strike. It will take hours for them to take off and fly to launch points, and if they take off for a first strike, they would fly towards the North Pole, telegraphing the whole thing. Silo-based ICBMs and SSBNs will be firing back before the bombers have even launched their cruise missiles.
A second strike they will never get a chance to carry out because it would take many hours to load the nuclear missiles on them, but the base will have been by then long vaporized by the NATO first strike.
However, that does not diminish the severity of what happened, and the fact that the losses were much less than feared should not distract from it either.
The INTENT is important here. The operation targeted all four strategic bomber bases as well as the A-50/A-100 AWACS plane base in Ivanovo. And there were enough drones in each truck to take out all of the planes. Only blind luck (the truck exploded on the way) saved the Ukrainka base in the far east, in Olenya there weren’t that many planes at that moment, in Ryazan they have been under constant drone attack for months, so they were prepared. But in fact the largest number of planes were in Belya — Russia had been moving them to there for a while now, clearly aniticipating something, and Belya is the safest base in principle, being furthest away from any coasts and enemy borders. There the rest of the planes were saved by heroic effort of locals who jumped on top of the truck, threw stones at the drones, and some shot them down with rifles (hooray for private gun ownership I guess — in Siberia there are a lot of hunters).
But all that was, again, luck. The operation was planned to take out the whole strategic aviation fleet AND the AWACS fleet.
Which is a clear first strike. The AWACS fleet is in fact even more important because a key NATO attack mode would be a mass launch of low flying cruise missiles towards central Russia, and you need the AWACS planes to track those and coordinate air defense efforts because radars won’t be able to see them when they fly so low.
Thus the gravity of what happened cannot be understated.
And this not just allows for a nuclear response, it MANDATES a nuclear response given what the intent of the attack was. And not a nuclear response on Ukraine, but directed at NATO in Europe.
P.S. There is one major caveat in what I said about bombers above — Russia has been working on ultra-long range hypersonic missiles. It is not officially announced, but it is known such things have been in the works, and likely quite advanced. Which can be only air launched, and require the strategic bombers to carry them. And those would be a potential first strike weapon depending on the exact characteristis. Taking the planes out would have thus eliminated it as a threat altogether. Fortunately no Tu-160s were lost, and it is the Tu-160s that are most relevant in this case because of their immense carrying capacity, but all of them would have been lost had the attack succeeded.
This is effectively what I said. What mattered was not the limited damage but the information content of the strike, of violating nuclear asset red lines that we had heretofore regarded as sacrosanct for our own safety.
It wasn’t an information content strike, it was an actual partial disarming conventional first strike.
Which is much much worse.
Again, note that the A-50s were targeted too, which is a critical and overlooked aspect of what happened. The A-50s don’t launch anything, their primary purpose is defense against aerial attacks, especially against incoming low flying jets and missiles.
This wasn’t sending a message, this was the real deal.
No, you misunderstand what I said.
What matters to Russia is not the physical effect of the strike but the information content that RUSSIA infers from incident. The West was not intending to send a message save maybe “Oh we can hurt you so you need to make big concessions in Istanbul.”
The 40 planes they initially said they destroyed were probably the total targeted. Mercouris argued that the bombers have long been the weakest part of Russia’s nuclear triad yet Russia has been ambivalent about investing more in that class of weapon.
I think the clown show around Trump is so cavalier that they don’t really put much weight on the crossing the nuclear protocols red line and hitting nuclear-related assets. Look at how this same crowd is destroying US leadership in science and deliberately driving away foreign “talent” in the name of bizarre nationalist/racist imperatives. They have no interest in bigger considerations or the sort or risk/return considerations that led the Pentagon via Rand to employ top decision science experts like Daniel Ellsberg.
In other words, I think it is hard for you, and most of us, to even dimly comprehend the thought processes at work. It is mainly blind application of ideology.
Wilkerson’s “damaged goods” quip caught my attention. The people in charge here could all do with a tall cold glass of sobriety.
I’m surprised the West hasn’t tried to palm this off as a Russian false-flag.
I can’t find it, but I remember reading that Z did say something to the effect of all the operatives were safely back in Ukraine and if Russia was showing any captures and arrests that it was fake.
Who knows…
Depending on the real situation on the ground, that could be framed as pushing “false flag arrests”. Whatever one knows for sure about what targets were hit, it’s known for certain that a main intent was to chip away at the legitimacy of the Russian government.
“They would say that, now wouldn’t they?”
And it must also raise the question in Putins mind of whether there are more drone filled trucks given locations by the US, of missile silos, sub pens and other nuclear capability, just waiting for a coordinated signal followed by a US first strike. MAD worked despite being, well, mad! Destabilising the guarantee of MAD is dangerous.
Missile silos are invulnerable to small drones.
Missile TELs, on the other hand, might be. As might be SSBNs while in port. Depends on whether there are weak points that can be hit.
But, of course, the drones need not be carrying small charges, but small nukes. And then even the silos might be vulnerable
Yes, I don’t know why this attack used small FPV drones as opposed to bigger ones.
The word I find is contempt for Russian sovereignty and for the safety of the world!
Russia government is unable to define the location of their own borders. The West don’t value sovereignty either. It is a weird idea that isn’t fully recognised by anyone so it is best not to assume anything about it. Sovereignty ended along with the great consort of Europe in 1914. There have been other systems since. Our post ww2, post cold war system has ended and there isn’t one in place at the moment.
“Russia government is unable to define the location of their own borders.”
Said without a shred of evidence.
With the U.S. borders are like the law of the sea….. the biggest CVN/ guns defines them.
US in sunk in the Thucydides trap, with the Melian dialogue as its paradigm
Therefore, look at the phoney war of early 1940 in France and decide who will override their general staff and attack….
More specifically, it is an act of contempt for the sovereignty of the United States and, in particular, President Trump as much as Russia and President Putin simply because it could well have resulted in an immediate Russian nuclear strike against the United States.
It is obviously in the interests of both Presidents to work together to establish which state actors and what concert of intelligence agencies were and are involved. The key will lie in tracing the communications system(s) which were used to synchronise the attacks.
I am assuming that the US and Russia militaries were in contact immediately after the strikes and both Presidents were subsequently in direct contact on military advice. The fact that President Trump has shown great restraint in his media communications gives me hope that the US and Russia will recognise that they have a coincidence of interests in settling not only the Ukraine matter but the more general matter of agreeing a European security architecture which it is in both their interests to jointly police and manage. As my gran used to say, “Even the darkest cloud can have a silver lining”.
Thank you for your comment, GM.
As another point for the analysis, in the recent conflict between Pakistan and India, both countries bombarded each other’s military bases vigorously, but avoided targeting the nuclear infrastructure.
However, when India bombed the base of Noor Khan, disquiet seized the USA — which immediately tried to arrange a ceasefire — because that place, a key hub for the Pakistani airforce, is located just a mile or so from the headquarters for the country’s nuclear arsenal.
This is an argument to assess the Ukrainian attack on the airborne carriers of Russian’s atomic bombs as a reckless action.
Interesting comment this. Going after the bomber fleet was one thing but going after the AWACS fleet was outstandingly reckless. So the question is whether this was an actual Ukrainian objective or whether this was mandated by their “backers.” As this fleet is tasked with looking out for NATO cruise missiles, their destruction would have made the world more dangerous and less nuclear secure. And you just know that idiots like Lindsay graham would have said that as Russia has been partly blinded, now would be a great chance to launch a “limited” nuclear strike on Russia and to render them helpless. I’m not saying that the US wouldn’t get their hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.
I think at this point there’s no room for distinction between Ukrainian objectives and their backers’ objectives. They have been acting as one and the same. Russia is fighting alone against the whole US Empire and its minions.
Not only Putin has to step up, but China would be wise to show some initiative and make NATO more stressed than it currently is. If somehow Russia ends up defeated or partially destroyed, China will become much more vulnerable.
The problem with Wilkerson’s argument is that it’s devoid of any context. If you listen to his opening statement, you wouldn’t even know there was a war on.
He might have said “Imagine, if you will, just to set up an analogy, that the US had invaded Canada in 2022 to support francophone separatists who had voted to join the United States. Since then, around half a million Canadian troops have died, and Canada is desperately press-ganging everyone it can into its disintegrating Army. Most of its equipment has been destroyed, and China, Russia and North Korea cannot provide much more. Sanctions against the US have had no effect. The US continues to launch large missile strikes at targets around Ottawa and Toronto, and much of the Canadian energy system is out of service. US troops are closing on Montreal and expect to take the city soon. At that point, Canadian saboteurs in the US have launched drone attacks against a SAC airfield, and destroyed or damaged about a dozen aircraft. This could not have been done without Russian support, so I would expect a nuclear war with Russia tomorrow.”
There isn’t going to be a nuclear war. As for accusations of western involvement, direction or even just knowledge, we need to be very careful about the epistemological status of what’s being said. “I can’t believe they did it on their own” has no evidential value, and often reflects a common view that the Ukrainians are peasants without agency and can’t do anything unless the West shows them how. Evidence of western-planned operations, such as Kursk, rather suggests the opposite conclusion. “My sources tell me” may mean “other people agree with me,” or it may mean “someone in the system told me that he thinks it’s probable” or “someone told me that someone in the system told him that the US was probably involved,” or “someone in the system was told by a reliable insider that the US was involved,” or “someone who was involved told me the US planned it all.” These things are not equal, and it’s best to remain extremely cautious until there’s some actual genuine evidence. Otherwise we’re on the level of “I can’t believe ivermectin could possibly help to cure Covid.”
As to the operation, I haven’t seen anything yet (and I haven’t seen everything) to suggest that the Ukrainians couldn’t have done this themselves. Elementary operational security suggests that you don’t tell those who don’t need to know, especially the US system that leaks like a sieve. If it’s true that these were short-range attacks, using Russian SIM cards and the Russian telephone network, then I don’t see why foreign engagement is necessary (it might have happened for political reasons, but that’s another issue.) As often it’s best to start from simple explanations first and see if they fit before going on to more complicated ones.
I would think that this attack is at least reliant upon real-time satellite imagery and communication, which the Ukrainians do not possess.
You dismiss Wilkerson’s own contacts, as in multiple ones, that we had a direct hand in this operation? Seriously? That is of ENORMOUS importance. You have no basis for disputing Wilkerson’s multiple inside sources.
Even if we merely knew and didn’t stop it, we are culpable. The US being all over this is consistent with the New York Times account of about three weeks ago, that we were conducing the war and Ukraine was just our arms and legs.
Why are you trying to defend the indefensible?
These were small FPV drones. They can’t do much damage. Wilkerson said Ukraine needed specific targeting information, and not just visual identification, which is what you implied yesterday was all that was necessary. He is vastly closer to this sort of operation than you have ever been in your entire career.
And I am sorry, Wilkerson damned well knows the context and was explicit that he regarded these cases as analogous. You are trying to talk over what he said. He has dealt directly in US Cold War nuclear policy development and practices. I can’t believe you are so cavalier and dismissive of his direct knowledge, which you lack. To be blunt, the UK is a second tier nuclear power and you were not involved Wilkerson’s level on these matters.
Shorter: if we are playing the game of argument from authority, he outranks you.
A British thing, maybe?
I’m not arguing from authority, since I have none, nor trying to defend the indefensible, whatever you think that is. I think personally that this was a stupid and dangerous thing to do. But to present it entirely out of context, as though there were no reason on earth why Ukraine should attack Russia this way, and it might just as well have been Kenya or Iraq, represents a failure of understanding, especially when the argument is about escalation. I apologise for not having had the time to listen to the whole thing, so I might have missed some of his arguments, but for example in NATO war-games in the 1980s, conventional attacks on airfields with nuclear-capable aircraft were expected, as were sabotage operations against nuclear submarine bases. Neither was considered to be the start of a nuclear war, and I would be surprised if any nation today thought differently. As I’ve pointed out many times, nuclear doctrine is declarative, not compulsory. I’d just add that the politics of nuclear use and nuclear strategy is not something the military in any country are expected to be experts on.
I am ready to believe that there was western involvement–though there are many conflicting versions and only one can be right–but as I said “I can’t believe they did it themselves” is not an argument. I can’t remember how many times a nuclear war has been promised since the SMO started, and we’re still here. There is not going to be a nuclear war now either, and in a few weeks time we’ll wonder why people thought there was.
I agree with trying to remain skeptical about some key aspects.
1) Wilkerson does raise 3 important questions:
-Who knew what in the administration?
-What about Tulsi Gabbard in particular (since we put our hopes in her)?
-What about ties between such think tanks as Wilkerson mentioned them – American Enterprise Inst. and Heritage – and Ukraine SBU and other covert operations?
From that arises question #4 already raised by Yves and Michaelmas recently:
-What about rogue elements within Pentagon and CIA (which appears the most likely perpetrator here)?
2) What we witness most likely correponds with what NATO/Gladio had been practicing/planning for decades which RU intelligence is well aware of and prepared for as far as one can. Certainly such secret wars and attacks are part and parcel of RU contingency plans.
Martyanov e.g. pointed out that without major support of Ukrainians in Russia or even Russians none of this would have been possible. So there is a possible domestic component being added to this. The assassination attempt would be another piece of that.
3) How likely would have been a complete success of the attack and how big was its real scale? May be that is the most important question we will never get an answer to.
4) In his broad strokes of geopolitics which are very important, no doubt, Wilkerson does paper over certain issues: One contradiction is, Wilkerson makes abundantly clear that Putin is the only adult here. Yet he then jumps to the worst-case scenario. Why doesn’t he address that RU know very well what primitive provocative intention lies behind these actions. And thus they know that they are intended as a very stupid trap. Along the obvious PR exploitation.
So if Putin is so wise and smart why should Russians regard this as a casus belli for WWIII?
There are so many more options to react. One of which could be blowing up SBU. For instance. But then they know their counterparts well by now. So rather work with the enemy you have.
The Russians see this as a forever war if necessary. That must be understood.
Also the Canada/Mexico comparison isnt´t adequate. After all the US hasn´t been involved in a 3 year war with Canada with 1,2M Canadian soldiers killed. And all the other caveats of such analogies.
5) What I find interesting, so far neither Marat Khairullin, nor Vladimir Trukhan, nor EastCalling Substack have said anything – as far as I know. Andrei Martyanov too cut the topic short. Btw as he did last year with the attacks on early warning.
Same with German-Russian reporter Thomas Röper from ANTI-SPEGEL. He explicitely said that he wanted to wait until more info was out. So for now it is that side talking most about an attack on RU soil that knows least about it and is least affected as of nationality and allegiance.
6) What I personally do not agree with: Elevation of Cold War era US administrations. Suddenly Reaganites are an ideal?
My assertion: The Cold War era administration did not act in this risky manner simply because it was not necessary. The cake they fed on was still big enough. Now the walls are clossing in and the empire starts to lash out. But those gentlemen would be doing the same under current circumstances.
Give me a single US president who in this same situation would have ordered to stand down if this indeed had been in preparation for 18 months. May be it´s not Trump having no interest. May be it´s about keeping up deniability so he can still pose as a dealbreaker. As idiotic as that may seem.
very helpful observations!
Well, Yves does keep raising the point that it’s the Ukrainians who’re saying it’s been in preparation for 18 months. She points to various people (e.g. Helmer) who say that it could have been prepared (at least the actual moving parts) over a few months. I don’t think we can give too much credence to the timeline in question.
For what it’s worth, Russian law enforcement agencies are looking for a 37-year old man from Zytomyr, Ukraine, who apparently owned the trucks used in the operation.
At some point he had moved to Donetsk, then to Irkutsk, Russia. There he got a Russian passport and started a trucking company.
If true, this lends some credibility to the 18 months of preparation.
Chelyabinsk, not Irkutsk
“We” put our hopes in Gabbard? Speak for yourself. That grasping, war-loving, right-wing fraud fits right into the current Administration. If she had any principles, she’d resign, now. It would actually work towards her cynical ends; she could get up and publicly acknowledge what is obvious– that Trump is weak, and not running anything except his mouth. She tried, but the “Deep State” is Really Deep, and if she becomes President (her ultimate goal) she’ll get after them once and for all. Tulsi in 2028, and this will get a lot of her fanboys back on board.
p.s Dmitry Stefanovich had this thread on X. But he too to my knowledge has no security clearance. So we eventually do not learn what is being said behind closed doors:
https://nitter.poast.org/KomissarWhipla/status/1929268643398815777#m
Jun 1
A few thoughts on heavy bombers, sabotage, and nuclear deterrence.
It happens, and it is better to be one step ahead. By the way, it is possible that the scale of the enemy operation could have been much larger.
1/
If our guys have decided to use dual-capable strategic weapons during a regional armed conflict, it is strange to expect immunity for them from enemy retaliation.
2/
The Fundamentals of State Policy of the Russian Federation in the field of nuclear deterrence (as well as, for example, the US Nuclear Posture Review) is not something automatic. Russia doesn’t have to, but Russia can.
What happened is painful. But not fatal.
3/
Long-range aviation has already demonstrated its readiness and ability to adapt to, to put it mildly, non-peaceful times and the necessity of existence and combat use in an environment of very real threats.
4/
The US “mediators” in particular and the N5 in general, especially the Kiev sponsors from London and Paris, should be asked about the assessment of what has happened anyway. Moreover, sabotage against other elements of our nuclear forces cannot be ruled out.
5/
The enemy will want to test the Yars or the 12th Main Directorate convoys. SSBN bases might also come under attack.
In any case, the Bears and the Backfires, at the end of their lifespan, finally got a chance to hit the adversaries for real.
6/
In assessing the economic dimension of what happened, this should be taken into account.
Heavy bombers today remain in the service of the “big three”, and all three have ongoing programs to create new-generation aircraft. It is both a symbol and a tool.
7/
Doing something about the vulnerabilities of big aircraft with big missiles (both on the ground and in the air) is an issue without easy and cheap solutions.
8/
Returning to the RU adventures on the UA front: whether we wanted it or not, our armed forces (and special services, too) have to adapt to the next generation of military conflicts, and have a unique opportunity to do so.
9/
The adversary, with all reservations, is not an existential threat, and the main task is to properly collect, analyze and implement the experience gained. This is a difficult task.
10/
Conclusions will be drawn and measures will be taken. Not very quickly, not publicly enough, but practice shows that not many people enjoy getting hit in the head and even less enjoy dying.
11/11
PS
One more thought: there will be more arguments for proper GLCMs now, and to get rid of any remaining Post-INF self-restraint.
You overestimate the value of clearances. Larry Johnson, ex CIA, said the overwhelming majority of intelligence work is based on open sources. In fact, he was contemptuous of many analysts who failed to adequately mine that.
From our post upon Daniel Ellsberg’s death:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/06/larry-wilkerson-were-looking-at-nuclear-war.html#comment-4224789
Thanks for the link and the excerpt!
I totally agree on the low level quality of intel.
What I was rather suggesting is that actual confirmed statements made by the inside, comments and assessments in secret meetings and thus classified most likely will not be leaked.
In this context it´s not about the actual quality of the intel but the incriminating nature of such statements if it can be proven they were made.
For instance Rutte before he left office 2023 internally asked as we know his lawyers if support of Israeli genocide by his government could get him into any trouble.
We were told this by (former) Dutch employees.
Now I don´t know about any obligation to confidentiality in this particular case by those employees.
But this would be the kind of internal assessment that can hurt someone.
Hurt not due to the nature of the info (it´s genocide) which is not secret. But to:
1)how that info is being handled by authority – that is: Operating illegally knowingly so.
2) Confirming the genocide as such as head of state.
So It´s about form of handling intel not content of it.
If someone with clearance e.g. confirms Trump knew about the attacks that´d be an incriminating statement. While the assumption is mere speculation and beyond faith potentially worthless.
Which is why the lable “paper of record” is so important and harmful.
p.s. THIS IS THE VERY REASON I am so outraged about what is going on e.g. within the secretly convening NSC of Germany vis a vis “Russia aggression”. They lie to us and based on those lies demand war expenditures. And almost NOBODY questions their statements. Although the items that have reached the public are utter utter nonsense. Without knowing what is said in NSC I KNOW it´s BS on the square.
p.p.s. Assange pointed this out e.g. with Cablegate when Wiki published those troves of leaked communication between embassies. Often the intel in those was BS. Because the employees in the embassies knew shit. However still knowing via written real documents that they did say and spread those statements among government bodies made it so important. Again not the quality of the info was often relevant.
p.p.p.s German High Command in WWII had most serious issues of the kind Ellsberg describes above.
They were relying on intelligence about the Red Army which was in fact fabricated and still through countless filters made it up to Gehlen´s “Fremde Heere Ost”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Armies_East
People sensed there was something fishy about the info but everyone in the chain of command profitted of this intel source. In fact it was so pervasive that even the CIA and Stalin tried to find out who those sources were after the war. Although they in reality had never existed.
You know, the thing about “classified” information is a bit like “insider journalism.” The “boys on the bus,” as Hunter Thompson called them, think they know what’s really going on because they are fed information directly from the alleged horses’ mouths. The “conpiracy theorists,” who traffic, essentially, in open (even if rather obscures in many cases) information and conjectures based on them are deemed as uncouth.
But, I mentioned some time ago, that good investigative journalists need to be some sort of conspiracy theorists. “Classified” information is, in the end, same thing as what the “inside journalists” are fed. There’s imprimatur of “officialness,” but how do the officials actually know what they are talking about? AJP Taylor said something about how secrets are generated to serve the interests of the people on the inside (although he meant more on the sense of hiding mistakes, it does fit into the broad theme of self-justification.) If you privilege the excuses made by the “insdiers,” (Which is what secrets ultimately are) then you become their captive.
All the arguments are rational, but that is the problem as wars are often not started rationally or at least calmly.
He has dealt directly in US Cold War nuclear policy development and practices.
The acronym for which was “MAD.” I don’t really know anything about Wilkerson other than that he once worked for Colin Powell but I think the point here is that it’s irrelevant whether some people here knew about it. Also if it was indeed in the planning for eight months then that would make it a Biden operation.
The entire Ukraine war was a provocation that Putin has responded to by exposing the hollow threat behind it with his far more competent war machine. In the reputation battle we lose, and have lost. Doing tit for tat would be giving the West the credibility that they have already lost.
Yes we can still nuke Russia and provoke the end of the world. I doubt this Kamikaze move is in the cards even if Wilkerson disagrees. imo.
Just to add re “already lost”–this is Alastair Crooke’s point in yesterday’s interesting post.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/06/02/one-quiet-early-morning-in-beijing-the-dollars-crown-slipped/
His insiders tell him that privately Trump and Vance realize the fast diminishing international status of the US and that accounts for the panic about China and so much else.
Wilkerson was Powell’s Chief of Staff at State, if you want some background.
“Why are you trying to defend the indefensible?”
I believe it is because the idea of nuclear war is so impossible to entertain. It is pushed away by most of us. Pushed well away to the land of impossible.
Radio War Nerd made the point that Ukraine’s military, intel, and spy capability wasn’t that much in 2014 and has been built up from there to where it is now by and in close continuous cooperation with Nato countries. That Ukraine could have keep the project secret from US spys for 18 months would be quite something.
This is not to say that Trump knew about it. Even if he knew about it, it seems unlikely he would really understand it, i.e. that the Russians may regard it as a first strike in a nuclear war. We are told that Trump delegates security briefings to Vance. And we saw in the leaked Yemen Telegram chat that when Trump delegates a matter of war policy to a subcommittee of yes-men all they do is show-off their theology, ignorance and incompetence.
Putting all this in the context that Aurelien offers doesn’t much change what worries me: that the US and Nato are under de facto command of a political personality cult led by an uninformed, lazy, coward that doesn’t understand what’s going on and likely can’t sit still long enough to have it explained to him. So it seems to me that staffers with their own agendas in its domestic spy, diplomatic, military bureaucracies, in NGOs, and in foreign governments may sometimes have more control over what happens next than Trump and his direct staff because they can create situations that force the next move. Ukraine’s actions on Sunday look like that to me.
How much Trump, Hegseth, or Gabbard knew or approved may not be the top question if the government is that badly out of control and open to manipulation.
The biggest ‘tell’, or at least detail that makes one naturally question if the Ukrainians acted alone, is the great distance between points of attack. If you look at a map of Russia that pinpoints the bases hit they’re extremely far apart. How did the Ukrainians communicate over this vast distance to perfectly coordinate the timing? It would be extremely risky to rely on commercial telecommunications within Russia. Ukraine have no satellites of their own to coordinate such a thing as far as I’m aware, they are at present totally reliant on Starlink, the US or UK at the moment for satellite communications or imagery.
While it isn’t proof positive, it smells terrible. If it wasn’t coordinated with NATO handlers it surely looks as if it could be. For Ukraine, whose only hope is dragging NATO into a wider war, I suspect this is a feature not a bug.
As for ‘there isn’t going to be a nuclear war’…it reminds me too much of the confident assertions leading up to WWI.
Note that Starlink does not really fly much over Murmansk:
https://satellitemap.space/
So it was likely not even Starlink but a dedicated communication satellite used.
Anecdotally about starlink, driving north between NYC and Vermont this past Sunday afternoon I got a message on my Subaru’s computer screen about an “important” vehicle service required. When I pulled off for gas, I tapped the “tap here for more” link and got back “starlink unavailable. Try again later.”
The Subaru “Starlink” system does not to my knowledge use Starlink satellites, but the terrestrial AT&T cellular network (except for the navigation, which uses GPS.)
Lol! Everybody knows AT&T sucks.
I just read a Tmobile ad that they are offering starlink supported text services so maybe other cellcompanies are as well.
Somebody has carried out three recent terrorist attacks on Russia. First they attacked road/rail infrastructure twice, timed for maximum civilian casualties. Then they attacked planes which were sitting ducks due to adherence to nuclear treaties. The third was definitely a technical trojan horse attack, requiring access to people, supply chains, electronics and comms of a high order. Comms including satellites.
The last technical trojan horse attack of note was when Israel weaponised pagers and caused them to explode in the many hands of HizB’Allah staff.
So now we have two recent technical trojan horse attacks, following a pattern of requiring long term planning, electronics and comms. It is reasonable to suspect that the same outfit was behind both, the Mossad/CIA/MI6 cabal. Alastair Crooke has suggested Mossad involvement, and Larry Johnson the CIA.
This is worrying. The Israeli pager attack was the first of a one/two punch on Iran and was successful in that it severed Iran’s operational arms in the Middle East and surrounded it with enemies.
Why now for the drone attack? Most people think it was to derail the Istanbul talks. But to expend two years of work to derail talks that everyone knows are mainly a PR exercise makes no sense from a cost/benefit perspective. Perhaps this has been used as the cover.
It is much more likely that they have a second punch planned for Russia, with the aim of isolating and weakening it. I have no idea what this could be.
Some possibilities include a false flag attack on US territory using either authentic or copied Russian weapons, or a full attack on Iran to draw out Russian support for an ally. The aim being to attack Russian soil under cover of “they did it first” with a limited nuclear response?
The US is mad enough to do this. All we can do is wait and watch.
I hope you are right. However it will only be because it was Russia that was attacked not the US. Continuing to rely on the intelligence and patience of the people your governments ( UK and France in your case) are calling enemies on a daily basis, may be construed as foolhardy.
You don’t know that UK/US intelligence fingers were not all over this and that the Russians will find a smoking gun. I somehow doubt that the average punter in the Moscow omnibus is minded to wait for ‘simple explanations’ as if they were going to be benign ones anyway.
That’s a very bad analogy.
A better one:
New England separates from the US in the aftermath of cataclysmic internal dysfunction in the US, then it decides that it will be a separate nation that speaks a newly concocted language that is a mixture of Celtic and English. With English being banned and vicious Yankee-phobia being the foundation of all state doctrine and practice. New England eventually invites China and Russia to place nukes in CT, RI and MA.
At that point the US invades for obvious reasons. But because the internal dysfunction has still not being cured, it does it half-assed and gets bogged down.
Do you seriously think the SBU and the GUR, which have effectively been a local branch of the CIA since 2014, would do this without telling their masters, given the strategic implications? Nuclear missiles should have been flying already, and would have been if it wasn’t Putin in the Kremlin, but Brezhnev. Or probably even Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
Well, Canada was an example he used, and he was suggesting that with no warning, Canada or Mexico would launch attacks on nuclear forces in the US because reasons. Your counter-example, which I agree is more likely, simply demonstrates that his own example is not a good one.
I don’t have any special personal insight into relations between the CIA and the SBU. Do you? What is known from published sources is that very few intelligence services in the world are actually just the slaves of larger ones. In the Cold War, the Stasi were notoriously independent of the KGB, as memoirs of the time attest. Likewise, the CIA never really knew what the Shah’s SAVAK was up to in Iran, and was thus even more surprised by his fall. US attempts to control the South Vietnamese intelligence community were likewise mostly fruitless, and the same seems to be the case with the ANS in Afghanistan. Indeed, what tends to happen apparently, is that US intelligence organisations, lacking local knowledge and above all language skills, know only what their local interlocutors tell them. Maybe that’s what happened here, maybe not. Time will tell.
I agree, with the possible exception of the BND being a creation of and subsidiary of the CIA (and MI6.)
But there might be links with SBU as well. The history of involvement goes back many years, it might seem likely that the CIA and MI6 have close ties with SBU
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/STUDIES%20IN%20INTELLIGENCE%20NAZI%20-%20RELATED%20ARTICLES_0015.pdf
Also: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/cia-ukraine-russia/
If British intelligence does not control the Ukrainian special services, then this is actually a disaster for London. Ukrainians are dragging the British into such a story that all English smart people’s eyes will pop out. And not from the realization of his failure, but from the high temperature, as in Pompeii. However, there are no volcanoes in England…
Something analogous DID happen–in 19th century. Secession of the Confederacy was followed by the French setting up an “empire” in Mexico under a Habsburg prince, which was resisted by “US-supported rebels” (or, what we’d call them as such if it were today, I guess), led by Benito Juarez. If the French were more cavalier about things (and didn’t have similar things going on in Italy and Germany), one could easily imagine how US Army might have intervened in Mexico after the fall of Confederacy (this WAS threatened by William Seward–and France withdrew from Mexico and basically left the Mexican Empire to its own devices) and France’s puppet empire in Mexico might have used klansmen in former Confederacy to attack US. HIstory would have been rather different if Napoleon III decided to yap about “the LIncoln’s unprovoked full scale war of aggression” like Napoleon IV (Macron) is doing nowadays.
Your analogy is incomplete because you neglected to include the part where the fictional war between the U.S. and Canada started after Canada conspired with Russia and China to build bases on the U.S. border and spent 10 years firing artillery into Detroit killing thousands of civilians, following a Chinese engineered a coup against the legitimate government of Canada.
“10 years firing artillery into Detroit killing thousands of civilians.”
In the USA, we know it would take less than 10 years for people to clear out of Detroit.
True dat!
The plan, Satellite Comms, data links, sources of intell, the drones, C4 explosives , go on and on are far beyond the spunky, geniuses in Kiev.
That said the pentagon who have no input and RF staffs know that one nuke employed in war games has always ended in MAD.
During the Cold War during one or more “situations” Russians military held off a hair trigger response.
A new post on Sonar21 explains why the Ukrainians could not have acted alone:
https://sonar21.com/operation-spiderweb-ukrainian-nato-attack-on-russia-a-new-pearl-harbor-complete-escalation-are-the-lunatics-back-facts-and-analysis/
It is very safe position for you to assert there will not be a nuclear war, as if you are wrong, there will be no one to note. In the real world, where people do stupid shit all the time (e.g., WW1) is even a 1% possibility not worth being highly alarmed?
Aurelian, your argument is devoid of context, particularly geography. There isn’t a gauntlet on the other end of Canada.
With reports out this morning of another attack on the Kerch Bridge in Crimea, the late-game strategy of “the collective West” comes into clear focus. The aim is to strike a significant enough symbolic blow against Russia assets or infrastructure to “force” Russia to “come to the negotiating table”–i.e. to sign off on Kellog’s “peace plan” that in reality is a pretext for the MIC to continue to go balls deep in supplying and funding Ukraine for continued war against Russia over the next 5-10 years.
I am sure these recent events, if they are being communicated to Trump at all, are being communicated to him as “necessary” for getting Russia to compromise on its central requirements: (1) de jure recognition of claimed territories; (2) Ukrainian demilitarization; (3) some kind of enforceable mechanism securing Ukraine’s neutrality and non-Nato membership.
Early in Trump’s administration, it appeared that the Realists preferring a shift to China were winning the internal battles over policy. This has long shifted, and the neocons–Kellog and Rubio–are once again firmly in control of Presidential policy in Ukraine. The aim of these neocons is to overcome Russia’s battlefield supremacy with secret service attacks upon Russian infrastructure, civilians, and military equipment deep inside Russia. It follows that these attacks will continue to proliferate in scope and audacity.
If this is right, then I believe there will now be serious pressure on Putin from his General Staff to authorize non-nuclear decapitating strikes on the Ukrainian government, decisive strikes against the electrical grid, and a much more aggressive bombardment of all Ukrainian industry. The argument will be that the Ukrainian regime must be destroyed before they launch, with the help of the West, a truly devastating guerilla or drone attack on the Russian people.
Because this is where we are now headed.
That bridge is military logistics irrelevant. IOW terror target.
Yves Smith: Many thanks for the transcription. I tend to read words on a page (or what now passes digitally for a page). That is my training as a writer.
Your assessment of the urgency of Wilkerson’s language is on the mark. There is almost (almost) a horrified poetry to it – and poetry is almost (almost) always prophetic. Which has me worried. (I am reminded how grimly poetic the Italian of Curzio Malaparte’s journalistic book Kaputt is.)
This!
“Establish negotiating leverage by allowing your proxy to destroy serious nuclear assets of your enemy. This is unbelievable. I can’t believe the Trump Administration has shown repeatedly since the inauguration, confirming much of what it showed in the 2016 forward years. That it is, I won’t say brain-dead, but completely captured by that element of fascistic neoconservative autocratic advisors who are moneyed to the neck, within its realm.”
Yes, I have written repeatedly in the comments that USonians don’t know how and don’t care to negotiate. I’m not sure when the culture of negotiation fell apart – likely in the 1950s with the domination of the imperial mindset. Let me repeat: USonians don’t know how to negotiate.
And this:
“These strikes make me think I have lived too long. These strikes make me think that all that I have lived, all that I have learned, all the things that I was taught, that we heard endlessly during the Cold War and afterwards about nuclear weapons have just been set aside, completely set aside.”
I am seeing too much nihilism. As if there were a small acceptable dose of nihilism. I consider Hillary Clinton to be the apex of U.S. nihilism, motivated by graft and slimy ambition. But now, I am seeing people like Wilkerson describing necropolitics – the politics of death arising among the sleepwalking elites (think of the two-synapse nihilism of Joe Biden) — and suffering from what seems like the inexorability of necropolitics.
One must be attentive to prophecies. I’m not sure that Delphi truly has shut down: Signs and portents and monsters.
PS: The US of A (with snickerdoodle England) is paying for the war in Ukraine, a proxy genocide. The two countries are paying directly for genocide in Palestine. In case anyone is thinking that these are separate events and “strategies,” I will beg to differ.
If you run the world and have the sneakiest spies in the world and control the western media and have the best military in the world and can bomb anyone you like to oblivion, why would you need diplomacy and negotiation skills?
And so here we are …..
The salami slicing is the issue. A Russian early warning radar was attacked and similar discussions took place: Russia must respond to maintain a nuclear deterrent, nothing short of a strike on a NATO capital will suffice, etc. Yves questioned whether Putin’s restraint was inviting further mischief, Aurelian or someone else argued that everyone was misreading arms control doctrine. Scott Ritter raised alarms. Russia stepped up attacks on Ukrainian power infrastructure. Now this attack. Are we going to keep slicing the salami until we get a nuclear response? Are we trying to provoke a response? Did someone misunderstand the ending to Dr. Strangeglove?
Whether or not the US was directly involved, Ukraine is our proxy, our attack dog. We should visibly tug on their leash.
“Did someone misunderstand the ending to Dr. Strangeglove?”
Kinda tangential, but yesterday’s live podcast by Taibbi and Kirn included an extended discussion of 1984, in which Kirn read long passages from the intro to a new edition of the novel, clearly written by a clueless person without any understanding of the point of the novel who was nevertheless the official resident writer or something at the Orwell foundation (or something like that). Both (and I) found it both hilarious and horrifying. So moderns completely missing the point of Dr. Strangelove seems eminently likely….
Just how does one miss the point of 1984? George Orwell was not a subtle writer; it was easy enough for this high school freshman to understand it. And when I reread it as an adult.
Intentionally.
That’s what Walter Kirn said! (and me, too, but I wasn’t on that podcast.)
Ok, first and foremost, the US unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty – the one limiting ballistic missile defense systems, and quite literally serving as one of the key cornerstones of nuclear deterrence per MAD – in December of 2001, when Powell was Secretary of State, and Wilkerson was right there with him. Granted, I have not read Powell’s memoirs, nor any overview of the discussions taking place in the White House at that time, so who knows – maybe Powell-Wilkerson had argued against it, maybe they were blindsided by it, who knows.
But now, NOW this guy is bemoaning the “neocons” trying to undermine collective nuclear security? THIS guy, of all people?
I know it is a little unfair to Wilkerson, but that was my first honest reaction.
Second, the entire Ukraine issue has been, to a significant extent, about undermining MAD. The whole point of Ukraine-in-NATO would be to place a) US medium range missiles (2 minute flight time to Moscow) into Eastern Ukraine, something that was apparently directly stated by Sullivan to Lavrov in December of 2021, at least according to some sources; and b) US THAAD radar assets into Eastern Ukraine to look through at the Russian missile bases, situated in the south and well away from NATO countries in northern Europe, and according to at least one lecture I watched in 2022 this would increase the time window for US missile interceptors based in Poland to hit Russian missiles in their boost phase by a factor of two. Now, it is possible to argue that in reality, the US was bluffing, feinting that it would do these things, all to get the Russians to have their Vietnam in Ukraine. Fine.
But again, NOW Wilkerson is “incandescent” about the US undermining collective nuclear security?
Three. One interesting part is that for the last two days there has been zero, ZERO Russian TV news or TV propagandist coverage of the airfield strikes. Not even a passing mention. There is textual (!!) mention on sites like Smotrim.ru (VGTRK Channel One news), and various news agencies and newspapers have stories on their websites. But nothing on the telly, nothing on big radio stations like Sputnik, at least from what I can see. Soloviev waited until 1 hour 5 minutes into his Sunday television program to mention it (and this is where Bezrukov piped in, per GM’s comment above, but most of the show focused on completely different things). But Soloviev is not TV news, and he does not run in primetime. No statement by any government official other than the initial MoD confirmation of the attacks.
There is a bunch of discussion in the military blogger community, with some actual reporters (Alexander Kots) joining in. But again, officially, there is a colossal move-along-nothing-to-see-here operation. Which I suppose makes sense if you assume that Moscow is trying to tamp down and de-escalate the situation as much as is humanly possible, i.e. be the sane guy in the room, especially in the eyes of, say, the Chinese. Plus, the telly IS playing up the train disaster in Bryansk, since a bunch of civilians were killed and injured, so there is a distinction between “Kiev regime does terrorism” and “US proxy in Ukraine trying to destabilize nuclear security”.
But one wonders how this public stance sits with the General Staff. Although on the other hand, I suppose you can always throw in their face the, shall we say, lackadaisical operational security arrangements at two of the airbases.
Finally, I think rather than looking at actual losses from the attack, the important question to ask is – what if it had succeeded? In other words, the attack clearly planned to hit and destroy 30, 40, 50 bombers, basically most or all of the Tu-95 fleet. [The Tu-160s, which is the model in actual serial production, slow though it may be, apparently are housed in special hangars, so that’s out.] Russia surely wouldn’t have responded by nuking Ukraine; but even if it had, the precedent of using a proxy to knock out an adversary’s nuclear delivery systems has been established. Again, the US has been trying to, with fits and starts, undermine the concept of nuclear deterrence since the early 2000s, why hello Mr. Wilkerson, and when Ukraine is done, this is not going to stop.
So there is every reason to consider this to be an extremely troubling incident, from the standpoint of – what new red line will we push past in the future (and how this will play in the search for Putin’s replacement, i.e. how much influence will the nationalists in the room have on that score). My money is that in the endgame, the brits or whoever will broach the subject of smuggling a tactical nuke inside Russia, but maybe I am just being too pessimistic.
Another precedent is the use of smuggled cargo containers as Trojan horses to enable attacks deep inside the target country. I wonder which country ranks #1 in how many cargo containers it receives.
This seems on the NATO side as some sick combination of a p-ssing match and a game of chicken. DJG rightly calls it nihilism. It seems rampant among USA and European elites. Have they given up on a future because of what they really believe about where the climate’s headed? Is a fatalistic assessment of the likelihood of Empire collapse a contributing factor? On the one hand, we have these ridiculous “tune the dials and levers a little” garbage about domestic policy put out by Ezra Klein et al., while, in the area of foreign policy, we’re getting End Times games with genocide, nuke sabre rattling and horrific new, extremely disruptive terror methods.
Solovyov said everything on Monday about these attacks on airfields. Look, your eyes will fall from your skull to the floor.
Either:
1) We have a pattern. The US is targeting the T-95’s. Preemptively neutralizing these is intended to degrade Russia’s second-strike and long-range capability ahead of attack. Suggesting US attack is imminent.
2) As part of Ukraine theatre or perhaps an anticipated European theatre, the US is trying to systematically remove a particular Tu-95 delivered asset from Russian capability. Possibly the Kh-101/Kh-55?
3) The Ukrainians can’t hit the side of a barn, so they’re going after much larger, easier and undefended targets. Airports don’t move, their coordinates are static, they’re significantly larger spaces to defend, and for strategic bombers they’re basically airplane parking lots. Also, note that the attackers had to go to Siberia to get at them, where they were probably assumed to be safe and therefore probably also least defended.
All of the above, none of the above, some combination thereof.
The problem is that, from the Russian point of view, there is no way of telling whether 1-2 or 3 are in play; strategically, then, the Russians have to act as if the two worser-case scenarios–1 and 2–are animating these strikes. You don’t want to put a nuclear superpower in this position, which is why *even if* 3 is correct, these strikes never should have been approved, much less aided, by the U.S.
It’s “strategic ambiguity,” like what too-clever-by-half people like Macron likes, except the problem is that there is a good chance that Russians see the worst possible outcome when the realitg is that it’s not quite true and act accordingly. The worst kind of ambiguity–far better ti keep trust by making everything verifiable. The stupid kind of strategic ambiguity gave us WW1.
1). The only bombers which survive first 30 minutes of first strike are those in the air…none of the targeted Russian bombers were on immediate launch alert. They were not second strike assets. During Cold War SAC alert aircraft were primed to be airborne and on nuke missions in minutes.
2). Could be the case but Russia can do those missions with deflated fleet or off other platforms. Like the U.S. the limit is not delivery but numbers of missiles and loading support.
3). Fixed targets are beyond Kiev, there was huge U.S. facilities involved.
I conclude this to be a terror attack with no strategic import.
That is not how it is being viewed by those that matter. They are considered strategic assets due to the fact they were outside in plain view. Knowing how the START treat works is important.
I remember that, during treaty negotiations, whether certain types of bombers (Tu-22M3’s, in fact) were “strategic” assets or not was big deal. In the Russian doctrine, they were tactical weapons. But I think they gave in eventually snd had them subject to the same constraints.
Only goes to prove my point. Even if Russia doesn’t really see them as strategic assets, they know the US does.
The same US that just helped the Ukraine with this attack.
If I’m Russia that makes the US position very clear…
>Wilkerson says he knows individuals personally who advocate for nuclear because they think we could “win” it and/or to reduce global overpopulation.
Of course “they” think we could win, but what is a win when most of the northern hemisphere, if not more is reduced to Mad Max territory? And it’s a hell of a way to reduce overpopulation. I think TPTB are forgetting about the reduction in the US population should things hit the fan.
I’ve often wondered if Russia should just demonstrate a nuclear weapon somewhere in an area that is free from civilian casualties as a reminder to what will happen if this keeps up and mention that they can be loaded into an Oreshnik (maybe), that can’t be defeated. And which city would you like hit first?
But I don’t think it would matter to the sick f**** in charge in this country.
I have not listened to this yet but I infer from the segment title that Sachs is on the same page as Wilkerson:
Jeffrey Sachs: NATO & Russia On the Brink of Nuclear War Glenn Diesen, YouTube
He is. His conversation with Diesen was very even toned but he got to the same place. He hopes that Moscow’s reaction will not be to strike England, Germany, or the US, instead to escalate the conflict in Ukraine and to remove the current regime.
Diesen at one point cited the former Indian ambassador saying that it would be irresponsible of Moscow not to retaliate for this attack.
As a matter of strategy, it makes absolutely no sense for Moscow to escalate in Ukraine–there isn’t much that they can gain there without excessive cost. At minimum, Russia has to obtain some sort of surrender from NATO, and that means having to break its foundation–that it is a meaningful military alliance that provides “strong” protection to its members. So Russia has to break at least one of its core members militarily one way or another, sooner or later. If I were part of Russian leadership, I’d advocate “taking out” UK, France, or Germany as soon as possible, although how exactly that would be done is debatable.
The goal is to demonstrate that, even after a devastating attack on, say, UK–several of its air and naval bases being wiped out, for example–NATO can do little or nothing in response. But it would depend on many factors, obviously–how devastating would those attacks be and what bases/targets are hit, for example.
Satellites would be the ideal target for retaliation- no civilian casualties, high value operational and strategic resources.
According to “Reporter” web site, the Ukrainian Telegram channel “Resident” reported that British intelligence was preparing the attack on Russian air bases. This source says that British agents were brought to Russia. Resident claims to have sources within Z’s regime.
British agents were brought to russia, or they were brought to Ukraine?
Speaking of the bloody Brits, wasn’t it the British SBS who blew up Nordstream?
The attack originated in Russia.
The piece reports (on the basis of an anonymous source) that British operatives controlled the operation from within Russian territory. Most probably infiltrated through Ukraine or another adjoining country.
I think the question of what are the thought processes at work that drive the current military aggressiveness and what that answer suggests is very important in the current situation. I think Trump appears to want to develop a coalition with Russia, and that is probably a good idea whether it means separating Russia from China or including China in the coalition (the latter part is not Trump’s desire). But, the dem/rep coalition that is running USA foreign policy is primarily concerned with losing their dominant and profitable possession. They see Russia and China as an existential threat to their career and they are not concerned to the threat to the USA or the American people. The dem/rep coalition and their supporters believe they will, as the elites, be able to survive. Their goal is to bring on the collapse of Russia and China, or the isolation of the US and its subordinates. In either case they can continue to be the elites. They also believe that the US is a failing base meaning that the requirement to engage in life or death military aggressiveness is presently mandatory. They are not patriots and are not concerned with the fate of Americans, but they are concerned thay they remain elites with a subordinate class to serve them.
I’m still waiting to see what–if anything–RU does in retaliation. Putin is said to be meeting this week with his top security advisors. I continue to believe that UKR desperately wants to provoke RU into doing something drastic that somehow drags NATO into the war, and Putin just won’t bite. So far, anyway. RU patience is not infinite. At some point, Putin’s hand will be forced by events.
I find this whole subject deeply disturbing, so to compensate here are five little anecdata from Moscow (I’m in Tuscany these days, but She Who Must Be Obeyed and our offspring are over there).
1. My wife and offsprings no.1 and no.3 took a road trip last weekend to Kostroma and Ivanovo regions. Driving home on Sunday, all their mobile phones and internet went kaputt…..no more Yandex navigator! So they had to navigate their way home the old-fashioned way, using a paper map and the occasional road sign and dead reckoning (plus stopping to ask for directions, it was an all-female trio). Only when they neared Moscow and the internet switched back on did they realize what had been going on (Ivanovo air base was a target).
2. Two weeks ago, my wife was awakened at oh-dark-hundred by an enormous BANG that shook our house (our dacha is in a gated community about 20 km from the outer ring road, not far from Vnukovo airport). The cats were terrified and raced to her bedroom for protection. Wife went outside, didn’t hear or see or smell anything, went back to sleep. Chatting with neighbors the following day, she learned that there were 3-4 mini-bangs followed by the big one, so it seems that a drone was taken down in our vicinity.
3. RU mobile phone providers have been cracking down recently on cell phones registered to foreigners. This issue popped up because for some long-forgotten reason, my wife’s cell phone number was registered on my passport many years ago. We sorted out the re-registration online; my point being that RU authorities are aware of the security risks associated with foreigners and cell phones.
4. Offspring no.2 follows the UKR situation obsessively on RU social media (not TV), and there is plenty of granular coverage (videos, etc) of Sunday’s events. He reports widespread anger: not only directed at UKR for pulling this stunt, but also at the RU security services for dropping the ball so comprehensively…..and at VVP himself for not being more decisive.
5. Stalin is being rehabilitated, and I don’t think this is a coincidence:
https://apnews.com/article/stalin-statue-russia-ussr-putin-moscow-metro-7a5a425f9b1c6a7120b6345b5d150de3
Keep those seatbelts fastened, because this summer is shaping up to be a memorable one.
Interesting inside anecdotes. Stalin’s rehabilitation?
That reminds me: A few years after the “Maidan” coup in 2014, I spoke to an aunt of my sister-in-law (originally from Ukraine). The woman had lived in the SF Bay Area for only a couple of years and was born and raised in Donetsk, she was in her 70s at that time.. (of course that was in Soviet times)
I asked her some questions regarding her opinions on the conflict in Lugansk/Donetsk and she said “we need another Stalin to come and clean out the Nazis again”. That made the point crystal clear.
Andrei Fursov likes to tell the story about how Stalin used to say that “After I die a lot of dirt will be thrown at my grave, but the winds of history will eventually blow it all away”.
And so it is indeed (whether Stalin actually said it or not)
If the Tu-95s are part of Russia’s nuclear deterrent, they should only be used in the event of a nuclear attack. However, since Russia is using them to attack Ukraine, Ukraine has the right to destroy them.
This is not Wilkerson’s view and he is the expert on US and Russia cold war protocols. Ukraine is our proxy and you are seriously advocating for their right to start a nuclear war?
Sorry, I am not part of your death cult.
Recall the bombers were sitting out in the open and easy targets for the purpose of verification under nuclear agreements.
And you are SERIOUSLY telling me that Russia was lacking in other targets suitable for the flocks of FPV drones?
In fact, the Tu-95s were a poor choice unless the point was to strike part of the nuclear deterrent force. Multiple experts have said only 6 at most are used at one time in offensive operations, so as Alexander Mercouris stressed, this much ballyhooed stunt has zero impact on Russia being able to prosecute the war
Simplicius made the point that Tu-95 were a very poor choice due to the difficulty of little drones doing enough damage, they basically got lucky that enough caught on fire and the blazes could not be extinguished quickly enough:
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/ukraines-unprecedented-operation
Both the START I and START II treaties included a clause requiring that bombers be displayed in the open upon request. However, I cannot find such a clause in the New START Treaty.
In any case, the bombers posed a significant threat to Ukraine, making it reasonable for Ukraine to target them.
No, it is not “reasanable” to violate protocols designed to prevent nuclear war unless you are a psychopath or member of an apocalyptic death cult. You are now in the terrain of bad faith, since you have not acknowledged the point that this was a poor target choice, confirmed by the limited damage done, for itty bitty FPV drones. Alexander Mercouris, as I pointed out earlier, said this caper almost certainly burned agent networks that it took years, even decades, to create. This was a costly and not productive PR stunt that increases nuclear war risks. And yet you keep insisting that this was reasonable? Do you also think Darwin Award stunts are “reasonable”?
What if Israel attacks Palestine with a submarine capable of carrying nuclear missiles, and Hamas or the Houthis destroy it? Would Hamas, the Houthis, or Iran be responsible for nearly sparking a nuclear war?
This is sophistry and a violation of our written site Policies. It has absolutely no bearing on the US crossing a well-set nuclear red line with the world’s biggest nuclear power. Do Hamas and the Houthis have decades of understanding with Israel about leaving its nuclear subs alone?
One might say that it is “reasonable” if Ukraine were a totally “independent” actor. But it is not. Whether it is under Western control or not, it is very well networked with US and other Western military and intel services. Kiev knows the implications all too well. Even if Kiev acted “independently” in this incident, US should not only disavow its actions, but actively punish it severely. (and US has both the right and responsibility to do so as both a sovereign state and as a major nuclear power)
Your explanation made sense to me! Thank you!
“has the right to” Please, let’s not be naive about great power politics and the grand chessboard. If we are going to speak about “rights”, did the US/UK and vassals have the “right” to stage a coup, support neo-Nazis, install a puppet govt. in Ukraine? Did they have a “right” to blow up Nordstream? Did the puppet govt. of Ukraine have a “right” to murder civilians in Luhansk and Donetsk?
No, but the Ukrainian military certainly has the right to destroy enemy weapons. However, they do not have the right to endanger a train carrying hundreds of civilians. It’s unbelievable that people are debating the morality of a successful Ukrainian military operation while ignoring the terrorist attack on the civilian train.
https://www.rt.com/russia/618597-train-sabotage-russia-ukraine-terrorist/
Morality? There is no morality in international relations, only power and the pursuit of interests
Morality? Look at what is happening in Palestine
US caught in a Thucydides trap lives by the Melian dialogue, the strong will, the weak suffer.
Nuclear sabre rattling tantrums are ridiculous under these circumstances. Russia is under zero existential threat at all, they can obviously end the conflict swiftly and peacefully at any moment by the simple expedient of withdrawing the invading forces from their occupied territories and ceasing to attack their neighbour. Which is exactly what they should have been doing all along. This is a war of choice for Russia and a flagrantly illegal one, both in terms of intent and conduct.
Reading comprehension fail. Wilkerson was describing the direction of travel: we keep pushing Putin, who has the probity not to escalate or at most only a little bit. We keep escalating, seeing this as weakness. But Russia is better than us in every significant weapons category and nukes. So at some point, we reach the level on the escalation ladder where we have no where to go and resort to nukes.
The other point you miss is now the US is undeniably in a direct conflict with Russia even though we and Putin keep trying to pretend not. Wilkerson ALSO described how this and recent incidents confirm that the US will never back down, that we will keep trying to bleed Russia.
Scott Ritter has pointed out repeatedly that every war game of the US v. Russia ends in nuclear war.
A small but important point. wargames of this sort, since the Cold War, have been intended to end in a nuclear exchange, so that you can practice all the procedures you might possibly need to exercise in real life, up to nuclear release. They are scripted deliberately (as for example emergency planning exercises are) to include everything that you think may need to be dealt with at some stage. (As I recall dimly, some fairly weird stuff got in.) But it’s very important to understand that such exercises are not predictive: they serve other functions entirely.
This is not what RAND says:
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA1200/RRA1204-1/RAND_RRA1204-1.pdf
And I am allergic to AI, but the hard-to-avoid AI in search summary on the question “Are US wargames against Russia designed to end in nuclear war” also says no and provides examples why not. The details seem to be spread across wonky papers, otherwise I’d feature more examples.
Tom Schilling worked for RAND in 1950’s on game theory subsequently became the questionable (logical and morally) underpinning of US’ triad and MAD as deterrent.
Aurelian presumes incorrectly, the SAC exercises I endured 40 plus years ago (I was logistics we prepared aircraft for mass launch) were operational not theoretical. Those “games” done with RAND help in closed office and no comms to shooters.
Oof, I am old!
It’s Tom Schelling. I take it that was Autocorrect.
Another quibble, too: Schelling described what he did as Bargaining Theory, as distinguished from the maths-focused RAND game theorists, who — like Andy Marshall, forex — had often started out as microeconomists.
I believe Proud Prophet, conducted in 1983, is a counterexample to your point. It gamed a single nuclear strike, deescalation attempts were ineffective and massive strikes eventually followed. It did not assume escalation up front.
The implication from that game is that both sides should avoid actions that would trigger a nuclear strike of any size. That looks to be where we are today, but with one party seeing how far the other can be pushed.
Yup. But one side isn’t very bright.
Maybe try again after you’ve boned up on the last 30+ years of NATO aggressively dismantling small European countries and breaking a multitude of promises made to Russia.
Was it under zero threat in 1941-1943 too?
Because back then the line of contact was roughly the same as it is now. And core historic Russian land was occupied by the same people that have taken over it now. No problem, right?
With the major difference they didn’t have nukes and long-rage missiles. Now they do.
Should “Barstow” be “Barksdale?”
As I said, I am not a very good transcriber. Will listen again.
Listen at 1:09. He did say Barstow but you are right, he must have meant Barksdale.
It’s back to Biden. Who exactly is running the show? The US is a co-belligerant in this war. Russia has to assume that there are other ‘sleeper cells’. One way or the other, the Trump Administration gave the ‘green light’. Russia is now been pit in a position that demands it respond with an escalatory tit for tat or it might as well sue for peace. The obvious conclusion for Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea is that the US is intent on subduing those countries and will use any means to do so. Wilkerson is correct.
Biden has been out of office for over four months, and given what we know about his mental state, he probably wasn’t making any decisions for perhaps several years beforehand.
This is on Trump. I am not saying you’re making this argument, but if anyone is arguing that some sleeper cells in the CIA were lying around waiting for a signal to start the operation post-Biden, Trump should have cleaned house including sending the DoJ in to arrest them on treason charges if they refused to stand down.
Wilkerson argues forcefully that the US participation in the airbase drone strikes means the US has no interest in peace. Worse, it confirms that we are dedicated to the neocon strategy of trying to bleed Russia and thus will never give up on fighting.
Yes, but I would say that it is not just a “neocon” strategy, it is long-term UK and US anti-Russia policy that spans many decades, both before and after the USSR – Long before Leo Strauss followers had any influence in Warshiton. We can go back to Mackinder or even further back
It was a pity that some very informed insiders thought that the DT2 regime would somehow alter the long-term policy. They somehow forgot what happened during the DT1 regime, and apparently forgot about the long-term policy. It is refreshing that Yves and many here did not buy into the wishful thinking. Most of us want peace, but we can’t wish it into existence.
There is a minority faction of international realists, both in academia and in the state department, who desire the U.S. to withdraw from the European theater in order to focus on prepping for a war with China, who really does pose a threat to U.S. hegemony. They had some influence in the Trump administration but have clearly been defeated by the anti-Russia set of liberal Atlanticist maximalists.
Or so it appeared, however there was no policy shift other than superficial rhetoric. Only wishful thinking and hopeful speculation.
Did anybody catch Wilkerson reluctantly mentioning assassinations as an option for Russia? You’d think what passes for European leadership might consider this as well while they’re rattling their sabers. It would probably be a stretch to say the UK populace would welcome Starmer’s demise at the hands of a foreign power, but none of the EU leadership is exactly very popular with their own citizens these days.
Matt Taibbi pointed to this Tweet by Dan Caldwell (the former Pentagon staffer fired by Hegseth for alleged leaks of the Signal messages(I think)).
https://x.com/dandcaldwell/status/1929179204295262515?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
More of the same point as Ritter and Wilkerson (and, well, me). US has to not only disavow this pronto, but do something to show goodwill. Handing over two dozen B-52’s to Russia (minus the sensive parts) would be a good start. (No, I don’t think this will ever happen).
I was actually thinking kind of the same the other day, but a bit different — B-52s handed over to Russia would be useless because they can’t do maintenance plus it is a massive security risk.
But if I am Russia, I come out publicly and demand that the US hands over 18 B-52s and 6 B-1s, i.e. double what was destroyed in this attack because they started it and they need to be punished for doing so, plus strategic balance has to be restored and they already had more planes to begin with.
Those are to be destroyed by Russian representatives, in their bases, with media televising it.
If Trump really wants good relationships with Russia, this would be a good way to establish mutual trust.
And if the US does not agree, I destroy e.g. Barksdale completely, with all the planes and infrastructure and dare them to fire back.
Yves: “I am a terrible and very slow transcriptionist”
Here is an instant transcriber, which would make your life easier (you only have to clean up the results for grammar, typos, meaning):
https://notegpt.io/youtube-transcript-generator
There are probably others (I may have actually heard about this one on NC)
It’s as old as the Trojan horse but nevertheless terrorists around the world have now learned a new method. Drop an innocent looking container somewhere, remotely activate it later or on a timer, perhaps long after most surveillance cameras have deleted their footage of whoever dropped it off. Future Bin Ladins, Incels, Atomwaffen and Jan 6’ers are admiring and taking note.
I expect trucks, containers, dumpsters, garbage bins, trains, Ford F150’s, SUV’s and station wagons, etc., worldwide, will now need to be x-rayed, especially around capitals.
So has the US military, the largest terrorist organization on the planet.
The new hybrid fords that have a built in electric generator could be awesome for smaller attacks. Built in charging capability.
I have a great deal of respect for Wilkerson and I don’t think that he’s being alarmist. As I understand it, he is absolutely correct that the Russian Federation now has every right under existing nuclear doctrine to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike. That doesn’t mean that they’re ready to trigger Armageddon.
It’s clear that the tail is wagging the dog. From what I have read, I believe that the strategy of the little Nazis in “Ukraine” is to provoke such a dangerous situation between the U.S./NATO and Russia that there will be continuing support for their pin-prick acts of terrorism as a “death of a thousand cuts” against Russia. Former president Dmitry Medvedev is making clear that Russia must step-up the level of strikes against “Ukrainian” command and control structures as a response to this attempted escalation.
The wild-card is that the so-called West is led by a bunch of ignorant morons like Trump, Starmer, and Fred Merz who, like that clown Biden who ignited this whole catastrophe, are mired in Hollywood Cold War Russophobia and the blind revanchism of people who are the children of long-ago victims of Stalin. They are mired in First-Strike fantasies and denial of the 70-year reality of Mutually Assured Destruction.
I don’t like the Canadian analogies put forward above but there exists today a swath of counties in the central part of California with Mexican-American majorities, including Monterey, Kings, Fresno, Kern, Riverside, and San Bernardino. Imagine if they were to vote to ban the English language from their public institutions. What would the response of a MAGA federal government be? Can’t we all just get along?
The California analogy might not be fitting either: Spanish-speaking populations of those counties existed before the Anglos arrived and California was taken from Mexico by force.
The long-term “Mexican Americans” say “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”
The best analogy was always Texas, before and during Texas’ war of independence, culminating in the medium term with the Mexican American war a decade later.
The Spanish/Mexican presence in California is about the same tenure as the Russian presence in “Ukraine.”
The first mission in California proper was Mission San Diego, founded in 1769. Sevastopol was founded 14 years later, in 1783. Los Angeles was founded by the Spanish in 1781; Odessa annexed from the Ottoman Empire by Russia in 1792.
The Spanish/Mexican colonial displacement of the indigenous peoples of California had only been ongoing for about 50 years before the “Anglos” joined them.
What’s more, most of the people in California who self identify as “Mexican” are not Californios, but are the descendants of immigrants who came after California was annexed by the U.S. in 1848 (I know because some of them are my relatives). “Mexicans” are no more indigenous to California than the mostly Carinthian Banderites are to “Ukraine.”
So I stand by my analogy…
If one were to be pedantic, it should be noted that Ukrainian persecution (no other way to describe it really) of its Russian speaking citizens (important distinction, as opposed to “Russian”) took place on the Ukrainian side of the border. In your hypothetical scenario, the conflict would be on the US side of the border. Furthermore, the conflict had already gotten quite hot, beyond the language and cultural rights issues: Kiev decided to treat opposition to its policy as insurrection and began to crack down violently: the thugs associated with the regime, rather than its “lawful” agents began doing so first, which really showed off what the regime was about (the Odessa incident being the real turning point) and sent the situation out of control.
In many ways, other than the exact reason for sparking off the conflict, the Texas Rebellion and its aftermath does seem analogous: Texan rebels–basically Americans living in border regions–got into disputes with the government of Mexico. The latter decided to crack down hard (minus the foreign-supported thugs burning people alive part part). Fighting began in earnest. “Yankee invaders” began trickling across the border in to aid the rebels. The fighting never really ended, even with official Texan independence in 1836 (something that never did happen with Donetsk and Lugansk–all they got was Minsk). And voila, we get another war in 1846 and Mexico gets evicerated. (almost got followed by France potentially helping Mexico retake its territory during 1860s, or maybe, the Germans in 1910s. I’m being a bit snarky, but these would have made as much sense as NATO helping Ukraine get “its” territory “back.”)
>Russian speaking citizens (important distinction, as opposed to “Russian”)
What is the difference?
Half of Ukraine has parents, brothers and first cousins in Russia (including much of the current leadership — Yermak, Syrsky, etc.), and 90% of it speaks Russian.
It is a single continuous population, i.e. Ukrainians are Russians
Legally speaking, assuming that Ukraine is a “soverign” state, I think there is differnece. Ukrainian citizens, Russian by background or not, should have rights vis a vis the Ukrainian state as they would be partial owners thereof. If the Ukrainian state deprives them of their rights, then they are persecuting “their own people.” This has been claimed as justification by the West as to why all sorts of countries (Iraq, Yugoslavia, so on) don’t deserve to be “soverign.” Furthermore, to deny that the Russian-speaking Ukrainians are, in fact, not really “Ukrainians” feeds into the narrative by the Ukrainian ultranationalists, that they are somehow “foreign invaders,” undeserving of staying where they are, while, in fact, they are not. (This has been claimed about Serbian minorites in Croatia and Bosnia, for example, and I am pretty sure Banderites have made this claim.)
Incorrect.
The original medieval Russian state was centered on the territory of what is now Ukraine, with Kiev the capital.
Were there any Spanish in California in the 9th century?
If I understand correctly, the Kievan Rus’ is more a legend than a continuous occupation. The Mongols saw to that in 1240. Other than Greeks, Tatars, and Ottoman Turks along the Black Sea coast, the Mongols and the Golden Horde turned what came to be called “Ukraine” into an empty quarter until the modern Russian Empire successfully claimed and repopulated the lands — with Russians.
I suppose that the point that I’m trying to make is that there is a lot of ethno-political propaganda surrounding so-called “ancient” territorial claims, be it California, Québec, “Ukraine,” Kashmir, Myanmar, or Palestine. On a planet infested by 8 billion of us, ethno-nationalism has become the recipe for genocide.
I mean, heck, the region is called “Ukraine” for a reason–it’s borderlands where people from multiple regions came and went over time, of whom many of them settled for good. How can anyone say that it “naturally” belongs to someone for all history and still be called “Ukraine”? (I mentioned how Croats justified basically declaring the Serbs in Krajina non-Croat (ian citizens)s and eventually kicked them out by force–which makes for an odd echo. NB: I thought back then that was a ludicrous injustice and NATO should burn in hell for arranging that, as the Croats were heavily backed by NATO, especially the Germans.)
Actually, it was the Spanish concern for Russian colonies in northern California that made the Viceroyalty of New Spain to populate California. See: Fort Ross.
In the days of Kievan Rus, Novgorod was equally important city, from which the rules often came.
I think I’ve said all I have to say about this except to point out that–unless there’s some General Ripper out there– any use of nuclear weapons will be up to the national leader, not some “nuclear doctrine” whoever may have written or approved it. While Wilkerson may have spent a military career taking orders that doesn’t apply to Trump or to Putin either. Indeed civilian control of our military has always been a key American feature.
And sorry but Trump isn’t going to push the button because why would he? That escalation ladder of what he calls “not my war” doesn’t mean anything to him. And as we now know he’s always willing to change his mind at the drop of a hat.
And Putin isn’t because he’s too smart and knows such a mistake is exactly what Ukraine wants him to do. It doesn’t matter what some pundit on Moscow TV says. Putin is in charge. More speculatively I believe Trump wants to make peace with Russia and go after China (which won’t work either). In the coming months Rubio and the others more militant may well follow Waltz out the door. Trump is on thin ice with his tariff mistake. He does care about public opinion.
Ukraine is not worth a nuclear holocaust–to anyone. And if it was going to happen it already would have.
The real question is, if Russia finds “irrefutible proof” that the British were behind this and sends a few Oresniks against British intel HQ in London, their nuclear submarine base, and the big British base in Cyprus in reprisal, will Trump consider pressing the button?
Our fate hinges on TACO.
“And if it was going to happen it already would have.”
Incorrect and based on nothing but hope. The dust has not even settled yet and it’s clear that elements of the West are not going to stop. Sadly it is true that Russian restraint on this issue will be seen as weakness. So another attack, possibly even more insane, will be made on Russia. At some point, a response will be made.
This is just the beginning of the spiral into hell, baring some amazing development that no one has thought of.
I’m wondering how the chips will fall if Pakistan goes first strike (with a big assist from Modi).
Maybe also it’s not a bilateral relationship. That’s obvious, but it’s also easy for me to think in a binary way about something like this.
These days, there are multiple actors that could be included. There are articles in the links today about the difficulties being caused in the US by lack of access to rare earth magnets.
Maybe a coordinated effort on the bond market- it matters if large parts of the world see the USA as increasingly mercurial and reckless.
Doesn’t have to be bombs these days.
When does Trump figure out that he’s falling into making this “Trump’s War on Russia and China“? That it is affecting tariff negotiations? And everything related to tariff negotiations?
So what will the response from Russia be?
There does not seem to have been much response to the assassination attempt on Putin (perhaps a large strike on kyiv?). In any case, the pattern so far has been that Russia has managed to resist provocation and stick to their plan to slowly and steadily takeover Ukraine.
If there is any other response than continuing the war in Ukraine, I’d guess:
– reach out to allies and make plans
– perhaps taking out the ability to tell what is happening: a coordinated attack on satellite, any awacs, maybe radar stations. This would probably result in a nuclear response however
– then, if the planet still has life on it, demand denuclearization?
The NATO countries are desperate to justify a massive increase in war spending I believe. Trump’s say so is not sufficient. I suspect what we are seeing are attempts to provoke Russia to attack the EU – which would generate support for the continued increase in militarization and perhaps even conscription! It is obviously a wildly dangerous tactic…
I see no evidence that the EU* is concerned about public opinion in its policies (particularly foreign). I think Analena Baerbak stated that German voter opinion was irrelevant to her Ukrainian support. Further, this assumes Europeans have agency (aka sovereignty); however, Operation Gladio shows the US response to vassal disobedience. Thus, no need for a casus belli.
* Years ago, a study showed that US public preference had zero statistical correlation with actual policy, whereas policy had a decent correlation (about 30%) with the monied class preferences. Also expressed as “follow the money.” My SWAG is that in Europe, money talks.
https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba
I think it would be a useful comparison to the possible limited nuclear exchange between USA and Russia with the predicted results if Pakistan and India had done the same after their recent Kashmir flare up. ICAN predicts that a likely sized exchange could kill millions outright and perhaps two billion worldwide from nuclear winter.
Thanks.
We in the B&F Party have been thinking very seriously about this issue for a long time, and are planning a major demonstration soon in front of the U.S. Capitol demanding an immediate nuclear attack against Russia and China. Imagine the impact of a hundred thousand committed people standing on the Mall, chanting “Blood and Feces, End This Species!”
Now, the deeper strategic thinking here is that a sudden, civilization-ending nuclear war, against the forces of international not-niceness, will be so much less embarrassing to the United States than a slightly slower climate catastrophe that will clearly be laid at our door.
Join B&F now, and I’ll see you all at the demo!