As I have indicated en passant in prior articles devoted to the unfolding crisis in and around Ukraine, a substantial part of the added value I seek to bring to reporting and analysis is derived from my following the Russian-language electronic and print media closely, whereas the vast majority of commentators who populate Western television news and op-ed pages only offer up synthetic, rearranged factoids and unsubstantiated claims from the reports and analysis of their peers. Investigative reporting does not exist among mainstream. Reprinting handouts from anonymous sources in high places of the Pentagon and State Department is the closest they come to daily fresh “news.”
Last evening’s Vladimir Solovyov talk show on Russian state Channel One provided yet another justification for paying close attention to what they are saying in Moscow. The program was dedicated to the Donbas and included several politicians and political scientists from both Kiev and the Donetsk-Lugansk republics. The most interesting remarks were made by a Russian speaking former Rada member, Spiridon Kilinkarov, who noted that Western mainstream is every day publishing maps showing the positioning of Russian forces at the several common borders of Russia/Belarus and Ukraine. They also carry maps showing the likely routes to be used by the Russian invaders. But Western media are never showing the positions of Ukrainian troops, which one might expect are there to counter Russian threats. The speaker went on to say that now two-thirds of the Ukrainian military or about 150,000 troops are all concentrated on the line of demarcation with Donbas. That is to say, there are almost no Ukrainian forces in the northeast around Kharkiv facing Russian military or to the north of Kiev to face the combined Russian-Belarus military. If this is true, then Mr. Zelensky’s insistence that he does not expect a Russian invasion is justified by Ukrainian boots on the ground. If Russia is holding a pistol to the head of Ukraine, as Boris Johnson stated earlier this week, then Kiev is holding a pistol to the head of the rebel provinces.
Solovyov’s guests further explained that after eight years of facing down one another across about 200 meters of no-man’s land at the line of demarcation, the situation between Ukrainian armed forces and Donbas forces is very tense and volatile, so that it would be very easy for a provocation staged by British or American special forces, who are known to be in the area, to touch off a major conflagration. This is surely the accident threatening to upset the ongoing negotiations between the United States and NATO on one side and Russia on the other side.
The guests further assert that in effect the Ukrainian forces at the line of demarcation are not under the control of President Zelensky, whose power is very circumscribed by other political actors, oligarchs and militia chiefs in Kiev, not to mention by U.S. and U.K. forces on the ground in his country.
Many of these general observations cannot be verified from here. But the map of Ukrainian military positions can be verified against images from U.S. spy satellites. I challenge The New York Times, the Financial Times and others to post such maps on their pages now.
As for the host, Vladimir Solovyov, he continues pressing a hard line Russian response of action, not words to U.S. provocations such as yesterday’s announcement by White House Press Secretary Psaki of the fake video Russia is supposedly preparing to justify an invasion. He used the show to urge imposition by Russia of a ‘total economic blockade’ of Ukraine, putting an end to the dozens of daily flights from the West carrying many tons of armaments. Given that Russia views the present security crisis around Ukraine as a replay of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, such a blockade would be entirely in keeping with historical precedent. It would mean, of course, establishing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which Russia has the military capability to declare and enforce.
The leak yesterday onto the pages of the Spanish daily El Pais of the contents of the U.S. written response to the Russian ultimatum on a roll-back of NATO and reorganized security architecture in Europe has prompted colleagues in the peace movement to raise higher the prospects for a negotiated settlement between Russia and the Collective West without recourse to a potentially devastating war.
In an essay published today on www.antiwar.com, Ray McGovern points to the American offer allowing Russian inspectors onto the missile sites in Romania and Poland that have been a major concern of the Russians going back more than six years. On-site inspections were a major confidence-building element in the disarmament treaties reached with Russia in the Reagan years (доверяй но проверяй – trust but verify!). It would be very helpful to see them reinstated, not only for purposes of efficacy of treaty enforcement but for a generalized relaxation of tensions that they confer through regular face-to-face meetings of expert personnel from both sides. The measure would reinstate communications channels that the United States cut starting in the Obama years with intent to isolate Russia and present it as a pariah nation to the world. That has proven to be a very misguided policy which finally may be abandoned as negotiations go forward.
Independently from the latest leaks, on the Russian side Alexei Gromyko, a recognized foreign affairs expert in his country who happens to be the grandson of the Soviet Foreign Minister about whom I wrote yesterday, has just published a thorough analysis of possibilities for the United States and Russia to agree on compromise solutions to the present confrontation that satisfy the main concerns and principles of both sides as regards reduction of security threats coming from each. On the side of the West these might include imposing neutral, demilitarized status on Ukraine and parallel concessions by the Russians as regards Belarus and Kaliningrad. I heartily recommend his paper to all readers.
It bears reminding that none of these possible compromises would have seen the light of day had it not been for Russia’s currently ‘holding a gun to the head of Ukraine,’ to use Boris Johnson’s graphic image. Only application of maximum pressure on the West focused minds in Washington and Brussels to complaints over the evolving security arrangements in Europe that Russia had been making for more than fifteen years. And this application of maximum pressure by Moscow was made possible only by its new self-confidence in its strategic parity with if not superiority over the United States and the Collective West thanks to its modernized armed forces and state of the art new strategic weapons systems that already have been partly integrated into its field units. Even the Russophobe Financial Times yesterday featured an article detailing how the Russian armed forces have been transformed in recent years. The New York Times has done similarly. We see respect replace ridicule on their pages even as regards conventional arms and without discussion of the awe inspiring new strategic weapons systems.
For those who wonder how Biden will be able to sell any compromise with the Russians to Congress, America’s current plumage display over ‘sanctions from hell’ that may be imposed on Russia for any incursions into Ukraine, the breast beating and saber rattling, including dispatch of an additional several thousand American troops will provide some cover. Moreover, it is almost certain that Biden will be able to claim at the end of the day that the United States did not betray its principles (ideology above all in American political discourse!) so that the door at NATO would remain open notwithstanding Russian objections. And likely, behind closed doors, the Pentagon will explain that Russia is armed to the teeth and possibly has first strike capability in its grasp. Then, of course, there is the China Factor, about which we will learn more tomorrow at the press conference given in Beijing by Presidents Xi and Putin following their face-to-face meeting. We are told they will roll out a joint statement on what ‘the new world order will look like.’
I have used the term ‘window of opportunity’ to explain the sudden aggressiveness of the Kremlin in pursuing a revision of the European security architecture. This concerns Russia’s present superiority in arms which may be reduced if not erased by developments on the U.S. side two or three years hence. Moreover, the defenselessness of Ukraine may also be corrected through Western technical and materiel assistance in two or three years. It concerns the electoral calendar in Russia, where Vladimir Putin’s present mandate expires in 2024. If he is to have any chance to retire, he must solve the country’s vulnerability to further NATO encroachment in the coming year or two. For his part, Alexei Gromyko very ably discusses the window of opportunity on the American side given the prospects in the November mid-term elections and the remaining time before the 2024 U.S. presidential elections get into full swing.
None of the foregoing negotiated settlement is more than a sketch of the possible and is no more certain to be realized than the war path we have discussed till now. A mishap along the way, a stumbling into armed conflict is always possible, though with each passing day that becomes less likely as all sides size one another up and appraise the consequences of their actions.
As the Cold War-2 unfolds, shades of the past return to haunt those of us old enough to recollect and not merely to have read about them. One such recollection was brought to life on Monday at the session of the United Nations Security Council convened at U.S. demand to consider the ongoing threat of war at the Russian-Ukrainian border.
In his career as Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union from 1957 to 1985, a period of such length that the present incumbent Sergei Lavrov’s 18 years would seem to render him still a boy in short trousers, Andrei Andreevich Gromyko was the dour face of the world’s second superpower at the UN and at all other international gatherings. He held his own in the give and take of debate, and did not mince his words. Yet, by his intelligence, sophistication and steadfast pursuit of national interest he won the respect of adversaries as well as allies.
It is too early to speak of respect that Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya, appointed only in 2017, may or may not have earned with adversaries. But his severe mien and in-your-face denunciation of American and Western claims that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is imminent at Monday’s session certainly drew the rapt attention of all. Surely Gromyko would be proud.
Let us not coddle the Russians. “Strategic empathy” is for fools. Clown though he may be, Boris Johnson was entirely accurate when he said in Kiev yesterday that “Russia is holding a gun to the head of Ukraine, by intimidating Ukraine, to get us to change the way we look at (European security)” [Reuters].
What we are witnessing today on the international stage is more than a re-run of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 with the roles of the United States and Russia reversed. It is an intentional reversal of roles and language up and down the line on Russia’s part. Nebenzya’s brazen denial that his country is intimidating Ukraine by moving its armed forces around on its own territory was intentionally serving up to the USA and NATO the tripe that has been served up to Russia these past 25 years: that NATO is a purely defensive alliance which does not threaten Russia in any way when it holds massive war exercises at Russia’s borders or stages a mock recapture of the Kaliningrad enclave.
I have been in a friendly discussion with peers in the antiwar movement over Vladimir Putin’s end goal: will he settle for ‘half a loaf’ or is he truly going va banque as the French and Russians say, meaning ‘going for broke’ in vernacular English. I believe in the latter interpretation: Putin would never have delivered what is in effect an ultimatum to the United States to return to the status quo ante in Europe of 1997 if he were not persuaded that he can win most if not all of his objectives. Moreover, the United States would not now be engaged in diplomatic discourse, however dissembling it may be on their part, were the Pentagon not aware of the facts it does not yet disclose to Congress, not to mention to the broad American public: that Russia is in a ‘gotcha’ position if things go to extremis, that it probably has a first strike capability, meaning it could so destroy the United States war-making capabilities on a first strike as to preclude an effective riposte. This is the so-called ‘window of opportunity’ that Russia has created for itself by developing and deploying hypersonic missiles and other cutting edge strategic weapons over the past twenty years while the United States poured its military budget into bloody wars on the ground in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Will there in fact be a war now in Ukraine? No one can say. The Russians have declared and should be believed when they say a war, if it comes, will not be of their choosing, but will be imposed on them by the United States using Ukraine as a tool, so as to enforce a cruel new round of sanctions from Europe.
How would that war end? No one is in doubt of absolute Russian victory, achieving any particular outcome they seek, but very likely ‘ending Ukrainian statehood.’ This is what Vladimir Putin warned more than a year ago if Ukraine failed to implement the Minsk Accords, which is manifestly the case now that Kiev said publicly a couple of days ago that implementation is off the table.
Would such a war trigger a broader conflagration at the global level? Again, no one can say for sure, though from the foregoing it would appear to be very unlikely. This is so not only because of Russian strategic strength but also because of backing from the Chinese who can at any moment turn up the pressure on Taiwan and force the USA to confront a potential two-front war.
And so, We, the People can sleep soundly on our pillows even if the world order we have known for the past twenty-five years is about to come crashing down.
You need a sense of irony, an open mind and sang froid to see what the Russians are doing in stoking the confrontation with the Collective West, which is what they are plainly doing all the while denying it. In what follows, I will try to apply these very approaches to answer the highly topical question of what comes next now that the United States formally rejected the essential Russian demand that NATO expansion to the East be halted in its tracks and that the Alliance backtrack to the status quo ante of the spring 1997.
Over the past couple of weeks, every few days I have given lengthy interviews or participated in half hour televised panel discussions of the East-West confrontation being played out at the Russian-Ukrainian border. My hosts included RT (Russia Today) in a chat at the Russian embassy, Brussels following the Russia-NATO Council talks of 12 December; TRT World, a Turkish public service global television channel broadcasting in English; Belarus television’s interview at my home this past Friday examining the implications for Minsk of its close military collaboration with Russia at the Ukraine border; PressTV of Iran; and anti-war radio of Scott Horton, a hero in the American peace movement.
As a consequence of all these interviews, I developed a 30 minute long talk on why the Russians are unlikely to stage a full invasion of Ukraine or even a brief incursion unless provoked by some military move on Donbas by the Kiev regime. I fleshed out this talk with retrospective analysis of how Vladimir Putin’s denunciation of the US-led unipolar world at the Munich Security Conference meeting of February 2007 led in a straight line to the delivery of the Russian ultimatum to the USA and NATO on 15 December last year in the form of its two draft treaties rearranging the security architecture of Europe in Russia’s favor.
Today I propose to take another tack, to move back a bit from what I and others have said about the stand-off at the Ukrainian border and to examine what the Russians will likely do next in their gambit to put the West back in its box by acting on their current position of strength and strategic advantage in armaments, as well as on their new strong alliance with the world’s number two economy, China.
In one of my recent essays, I invoked the term ‘Russian roulette’ as describing the game the Kremlin is playing but not in the sense of its usual understanding as testing one’s luck with the partly loaded, partly empty bullet chambers of a revolver pointed at one’s temple. That would hardly be in character for the ever-cautious, ever prudent Mr. Putin. I spoke of roulette in the usual casino terms, meaning a game of chance loaded only in favor of the house and indifferent to the interests of separate players. However, the game played by the Kremlin today on the world stage and before the klieg lights is a card game of skill more than one dependent on arbitrary distribution of winnings by Lady Luck. And while Washington lawyers turned statesmen like former Secretary of State Baker were surely skilled at poker as we saw from his handling of Gorbachev in oral agreements ending the Cold War, there was more than a whiff of outright card cheat in their behavior. Putin is playing a mean game with the same degree of deception or imposed confusion being exploited to the hilt even if nearly all of my peers among political analysts are missing this point.
Russia has gotten the rapt attention not only of European capitals but of global media. Day after day, coverage of the latest Russian deliveries to the Ukrainian border dominates the news on television and the print press, jostling for number one position with the fading threat of Covid. This, of course, has a certain collateral effect which the Russians surely do not mind: the economic harm war fever has on the Ukrainian economy and on Western investment there now that the U.S. and others are withdrawing their diplomatic missions. It may well be that the strongest voice for Western concessions on security will ultimately be Kiev, to stem its losses.
Sergei Lavrov and other spokesmen for the Kremlin insist that their country has no intentions to invade while every few days Russia is adding additional forces, equipment and capability to their positions near the Ukrainian border. Now that border covers 3 sides with the addition of the Belarusian front and the growing capability of staging landings on the Black Sea coast with the assistance of newly arriving specialized vessels from the Pacific fleet. It is throwing back at the US and NATO the in-your-face NATO line that it poses no threat to Russia and is just a defensive alliance while NATO stages highly provocative war games to retake Kaliningrad or to energize Ukraine’s hostile ambitions by a series of ten games planned for this year.
Meanwhile, among our most celebrated pundits and strategists, the notion that diplomacy can prevail and prevent war is rolled out in our media. The latest is an opinion article penned by Henry Kissinger’s intellectual heir, director of Kissinger Associates, Tom Graham. With all due respect, Mr. Graham is touting nonsense when he says diplomacy can finesse differences as stark as those separating Moscow and Washington today, thereby extinguishing the flames of war. One side has to capitulate in substance if not in appearances given the divide separating the principals. The capitulation can be masked for consumption by Capitol Hill through deft diplomacy, but its reality will nonetheless be seen in the concrete actions of the sides which follow. Talk is cheap, always was and will be. Only lightweights can say otherwise.
I wager that the next step in Mr. Putin’s game will be in the Americas. This is not because establishing a military presence in the Caribbean basin is militarily more important than Russia’s other options like peek-a-boo surfacing of otherwise undetected Russian nuclear submarines off the East and West coasts of the USA to make the point of sudden death and 5 minute warnings which are insufficient for the American president to board Air Force One and make a getaway that preserves the decision-making hierarchy. No, it is because establishing formally Russian air and port facilities in the Americas calls out the Big Lie embedded in Washington’s refusal to accept buffer states or a Russian sphere of influence at its borders and the neutering of countries like Ukraine and the Baltic States: the US reserves to itself the sole right to a sphere of influence that takes in the entire Western Hemisphere and is known as the Monroe Doctrine.
Moreover, for the Russians to use a present, fully realized threat to America’s existence for purposes of negotiations like those aforementioned hypersonic missile carrying submarines could have the opposite effect from forcing capitulation, just as the notion of imposing ‘preventive’ sanctions on Russia as proposed by Kiev was dismissed as likely to be counterproductive by Washington. Better to roll out for threat a project that is only partially realized so far, a project that involves not creation of Russian bases but use of existing local facilities to host Russian strategic bombers and surface or submarine vessels. Such arrangements would in the not too distant future enable Russia to maintain a permanent presence in the Caribbean Sea that is as threatening to the Continental USA as the stepped up presence of US navy and air force in the Black and Baltic Seas is to Russia. The time prior to realization would give breathing space to the negotiations for capitulation to end in a finessed public explanation.
P.S. – One reader of this essay on my LinkedIn account remarked that the Russians might make their first move together with Venezuela, where the air base on the island of Orchila was mentioned in 2018 by a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences speaking to the Nezavisimaya Gazeta as possible host to supersonic Tupolev TU-160 strategic bombers. That was in the context of Trump’s abandoning nuclear disarmament treaties. The same reader went on to say that another possible Russian move could be to stage joint patrols in the Caribbean with the Chinese navy. This would put flesh on the Russian-Chinese de facto alliance by both acting in parallel in response to the provocative sailing of British and US aircraft carriers and other attack vessels off their respective Black Sea and South China Sea coasts. All such measures would be entirely legal under international law but would bring howls of indignation from the American political classes and might provide the quid for an American quo on a pull back of NATO in Europe.
Open Letter signed by 40 top former diplomats, military officers and political scientists condemning U.S. belligerence and drumbeats of war
Many of us were surprised and impressed by the bold statements on behalf of common sense dealings with Vladimir Putin to de-escalate the conflict over Ukraine made by the German navy chief Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schoenbach during his visit to New Delhi on 21 January. Moreover, when his remarks were disseminated on social media and elicited a storm of protest from the German mainstream, not to mention from the Kiev regime, Schoenbach very honorably tendered his resignation. In our day and age of moral and intellectual Lilliputians in high office most everywhere on the Continent, it was inspiring to see that there is at least one resister to political correctness in high office and that an old fashioned sense of honor can even direct the actions of generals and admirals.
To those who believe Vice Admiral Schoenbach’s actions were strictly idiosyncratic and have no broader significance, another development in German political life yesterday proves them wrong and provides us all with a glimmer of hope in this time of high anxiety over the ongoing confrontation between Russia and the US-led Collective West.
In what follows, I first set out the main theses of an Open Letter by leading German political scientists, retired ambassadors and high military officers that was published yesterday in mainstream German and Russian media, with further reposting on French and other portals. I then offer a brief retrospective, taking the thinking in this Open Letter back to the chancellorship of Willy Brandt and to the pen of his assistant Egon Bahr. That period established a pro-peace wing within Germany’s socialist party (SPD) and also among non-partisan Germans of good will. The last public demarche of that movement was in the autumn of 2016 and found supporters in the United States at the time. I know, I was there at its launch in Berlin.
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The more than forty signatories of the Open Letter published yesterday are all the more important given that they are connected with the international politics institute or think tank WeltTrends, which publishes its journal on the Potsdamer Wissenschaftsverlag. The most widely known names of signatories include former ambassadors Arne Seifert, Wolfgang Grabowski and Otto Pfeiffer; former Bundestag deputy Dr. Norman Paech; and retired colonel Wilfried Schreiber. Among them also is Dr. Alexander Rahr, who has long been a business adviser to Russian-German industrial projects including Gazprom-Wintershall, and is Research Director of the German-Russian Forum.
The Open Letter, which has the title “For a German security policy that serves Peace” was prompted by the publication on 14 January in the online news portal www.zeit.de of a very different kind of Open Letter by self proclaimed experts in Eastern Europe and security policy which in the view of the WeltTrends group “would promote an Ice Age, a new Cold War” and “would add to economic extortion a strongly confrontational policy of Germany towards Russia, heating up the Ukraine conflict and extending NATO right up to Russia’s borders. That letter on Zeit denounced peaceful settlement of conflicts and building trust…” The new Open Letter of the WeltTrends group intends to address the falsehoods, half-truths of their opponents, delivering a response based on building peace and friendly coexistence.
Indeed, the text of this Open Letter is remarkable in its boldness and clarity. We read the following:
“It is possible to lessen the severity of the conflict between NATO and Russia, at the center of which at present is the Ukrainian conflict, only by issuing guaranties of security for all involved states and building trust between NATO and its partners, Ukraine and Russia and with all the remaining European states. At the same time, it is essential to revive or create anew both international formats of negotiations and agreements, as well as measures for creating trust.”
“We stand before a choice: to ignite conflict or to extinguish the flames.”
The authors of the Open Letter blame the United States for taking the initiative to exert pressure on the Russian Federation, and the United States for imposing its will on its allies. The text emphasizes that the Western policy of confrontation with Russia does not correspond to the German and European interests; rather it panders to the U.S. desire to keep Western Europe under its control: “The demand that Germany strengthen its pressure on Russia still further subordinates German foreign policy to American policy. The so-called conflict between the West/Europe and Russia was always a conflict between the USA and Russia.”
The Open Letter continues:
‘’Russia preparing to straighten all this out. This is only possible with the withdrawal of the United States from Russia’s borders (or with the placement of missiles on Washington’s doorstep). The United States (President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken) seem to have understood this fully – otherwise they would not have reopened the negotiating formats that Russia did not close. Direct talks between Russia and the United States remain the key to solving the problem.”
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The reference in the Open Letter to the Eastern Policy of the socialist chancellor Willy Brandt (1969-74) is highly significant even if the thinking of the authors of this Letter marks a radical departure from the underlying motif of the détente of Brandt and Bahr, their Entspannungspolitik, which was to recover relations with the Soviet Union after the harsh reality of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The logic of Brandt was to moderate Soviet policy by exercising a force of attraction instead of the brinksmanship and negotiations from a position of strength that underlay American policy then (and now.)
The Open Letter sets out a brief overview of how following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the USA took advantage of the moment to continue unabated its containment policy, to leave its forces and nuclear weapons in Germany/Europe, to integrate a number of East European states into its advance organization and to bring its attack forces to the Russian borders. In this perspective, the conflict between Russia and NATO/West Europe over Ukraine is not a separate conflict but is at the heart of the conflict with the USA.
The Open Letter then cites the updated thinking of Egon Bahr in the 1990s:
“The whole of Europe is larger than the European Union can ever become, so stability for this great Europe requires “the inclusion of Russia and the republics that used to be part of the Soviet Union, as far as they want it. Not without or against Russia, not without or against America, is pan-European stability to be achieved.
“Bahr pointed to a fundamental difference in the interests of Germany and the United States: ‘Perhaps America believes that it can gain advantages from the continuing internal and external weakening of Russia, as long as chaos is avoided and the nuclear factor remains controllable. For Germany and the EU, on the other hand, ‘a Russia that consolidates is preferable.’ Western confrontation policy against Russia is thus more in the interest of the U.S. and the desire to keep Western Europe under U.S. control than in the German and European interest.
The concluding paragraph of the Open Letter is dramatic and impressive:
“We therefore call on the new German government to return to the cornerstones of the peace policy of Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr. Security for Germany and the EU is only possible together with Russia. This requires equality and equal rights, as laid down in the Charter of the United Nations, the Helsinki Final Act, the Charter of Paris and the NATO-Russia Founding Act. On these bases, it is indeed necessary to assume more responsibility for peace and security.”
It must be said that the authors of the Open Letter have in common expertise in international affairs. They are not speaking as members of any political party. In this sense the pro-peace policy invented by Brandt has left a legacy bigger than the party he led.
Nonetheless, it would be wrong to deny détente a home base in the SPD. Indeed, it was precisely a socialist chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder (1999-2005) who stood up to America and its war of aggression in Iraq, joining France and Russia in rejection of the American call for United Nations cover, and compelling Washington to resort to an ad hoc and patently illegitimate “coalition of the willing.”
It was also Gerhardt Schroeder who promoted the Nord Stream I gas pipeline over American opposition. And after leaving office following his brave decision to impose austerity on Germany as the bitter medicine to cure economic woes resulting from post-unification overspend, at foreseeable political costs in popularity, Schroeder accepted an offer to join the board of the pipeline’s operating company.
The conservative CDU dominated government which took the reins of power had no such commitment to strategic partnership with Russia, notwithstanding the oft-repeated characterization of Mutti Merkel in the American and European press as a Russian speaker who had a rapport with the Russian president. Her background as an Ossie made Merkel more a condescending superior than an equal partner of the Russians. When then President Dmitry Medvedev presented his draft treaty revising the security architecture of Europe, Merkel was among the first to dismiss the Russian initiative out of hand, saying that “we already have a security architecture – NATO – and have no intention of replacing it.”
When US and European relations took a sharp turn for the worse after the fateful coup d’etat in Kiev in February 2014 that placed a viscerally anti-Russian government in power, triggering the independence of Crimea and its annexation by Russia, then the rebellion against Kiev of the Donbas oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk with Russian backing, Merkel applied the brakes to American sanctions, but then quickly sought to maintain prestige by becoming the sanctions’ enforcer within the EU.
Against this background of rising tensions, in November 2016 the intellectual heirs of Egon Bahr, who died in 2015, came out of the shadows and issued a call for Détente Now! (Neue Entspannungspolitik Jetzt!). I was present in Berlin at the public launch of this initiative which had at its core one of Egon Bahr’s assistants, Wolfgang Biermann, former secretary general of the World Council of Churches Konrad Raiser, chairman of the German Trade Unions Federation Reiner Hoffmann, and Member of the German Bundestag, SPD, member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and Deputy Chairperson of the Subcommittee on Arms Control and Disarmament in the Bundestag Ute Finckh-Kraemer.
In the United States, the declaration of this group won the support of the Association of International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War, Veteran Intelligence Officials for Sanity, Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky, among other notables. The appeal for a new détente was carried by the progressive American journal The Nation.
However, in 2016 the SPD was a minority party with steadily diminishing electoral support and this initiative led to nothing. Today, of course, the stakes of war and peace are that much higher than back then and the standing of the SPD is now that of majority party in the new governing German federal coalition. Within that coalition, there are signs that the Chancellor Olaf Scholz has a good memory for his party’s traditional commitment to détente. If he can overcome the hawkish, anti-Russian coalition partners in the German Greens, perhaps the latest Open Letter will do some good.
To my regret, I am very much in demand these days from various international broadcasters. Were it not for the ongoing crisis in relations between Russia and the Collective West over Ukraine, over Russian demands to radically revise the security architecture of Europe with the associated risk of an outbreak of war in Europe that could go horribly wrong, I would be left in peace to mind my wine collection in Brussels and to prepare our vegetable garden in our dacha plot south of Petersburg.
However, present day reality steals time from such pastimes and I am being asked to provide insights into the degree of risk to global peace day by day. Today I was invited by TRT Turkish international English language television to join their panel discussing the latest state of play in the unfolding crisis over Ukraine. My fellow panelists were an expert on deterrence and a researcher on Russian policy-making at the federal level. The high level of the panelists was matched by the very capable presenter and by the station’s technical staff.
It is my pleasure to offer the link to this half hour program:
Your comments will be most welcome.
Today was also a day when my latest observations on the U.S.-Russian negotiations in Geneva were picked up and disseminated in an analytical article published by a Belgian scholarly news portal. True, my name does not appear in the text, but an embedded link in the first paragraph of this lengthy article takes you straight to my latest piece entitled “Blinken and Lavrov Meeting.”
For those of you who are not comfortable with Dutch, the text is readily machine translatable by insertion into www.linguee.fr or via Google translate. I believe you will find this small effort is worthwhile.
I take particular satisfaction in this publication because of the company I keep there: a widely published American think tank expert, Anatol Lieven, and a director of the prestigious Royal Egmont Institute, Sven Biscop.
In the academic world, as in the business world, institutional affiliations count for a great deal. They are easier to rank than quality of output of any given researcher – writer, so that this bias for institutional names is understandable. I am able to break that rule for the simple reason of the added value I bring on my own, without prestigious affiliation. While my peers, including the two experts just named, are watching one another or are piled up on the scrimmage line of the day’s latest news from Western news providers, I am daily paying close attention to the Russian side of the equation. This entails close monitoring of Russian media as an indicator of the predisposition of Russian political, business and social elites. Those elites, of course, do not set policy in Russia, but they do set constraints on what policy makers above them can do, and occasionally provide a narrative to explain or justify decisions taken above on other grounds, for example Realpolitik, which is never popular in pure form. Moreover, as an occasional insider, as for example by participating in Russian domestic political talk shows, I know better than most academics who is who on the Russian side, and especially who may be acting as an unofficial spokesperson for the Kremlin to send us signals that should not be missed.
Contrary to my expectations, the 90 minute meeting of Blinken and Lavrov in Geneva yesterday appears to have had some justification and ended with a slightly improved prognosis for resolution of the crises, both those at the borders of Ukraine and those in bilateral US-Russian relations over satisfaction of Russian demands that the security architecture of Europe be redrawn.
Very subtly, the second issue is moving into the center of attention, which is, all by itself, an undeniable achievement of Vladimir Putin’s stated policy of maintaining and intensifying pressure on the West to be heard about its security concerns.
In his press briefing, Blinken repeated his by now ritualistic statement that there will be severe economic punishment if Russia invades Ukraine. However, he also said that the United States will submit to Russia a written response to its draft treaties of 15 December within the coming week. To this he added that the sides will meet again at the ministerial level after that submission, and, most significantly, that the U.S. President is ready to hold another summit meeting with President Putin if the sides believe that will be useful.
From the foregoing, one can extract the message that there will be some substantive counter offer from the United States to the Russian text that will be sufficiently interesting for the talks to continue and even to be bumped up to the presidential level.
Sergei Lavrov’s separate press briefing was broadcast live by both CNN and the BBC, something we have not seen in years.
Lavrov declined to characterize the talks as proceeding well or otherwise and insisted that will be clear only after the American submission is received. He explained to journalists that the substance of the meeting had been to provide the Americans with clarifications of several points in the draft treaties. We may assume that one such clarification was over the meaning of the Russian demand that NATO return to the 1997 status quo before the accession of former Warsaw Pact member countries. We now were told that in the case of Bulgaria and Romania, for example, all NATO troops and installations would have to be removed.
On the sidelines of the talks, one interesting and relevant piece of news which the Russian state television reported but I have not seen in Western media. Deputy Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Ryabkov said to a journalist who met him in the cloakroom as he was on his way to the meeting: “We are not afraid of anyone, including the United States!”
That is a statement which only a handful of nations in the world can make. It reflects the newfound self-confidence that is propelling the Russians forward in their present quest for treatment as equals by the Collective West and for changed security arrangements in Europe.
This brings us to the other side of the equation – the step back. Both Russia on the one side and the United States with NATO member countries on the other are proceeding apace with saber rattling.
The U.S. embassy in Kiev announced yesterday the arrival by plane of substantial new “lethal arms” to Ukraine, apparently ammunition. Meanwhile, the day before, the United Kingdom had made numerous flights to Kiev to bring in weapons and elite trainers/military advisers.
For its part, Russia announced yesterday the immediate start of a worldwide exercise of naval power that includes the move of landing assault vessels into the Black Sea. Russia also has in the past few days added another 6,000 soldiers to its 100,000 strong forces at the Ukraine borders and has brought in Iskander missile launchers capable of making precise and highly destructive strikes on Kiev. Furthermore, Russia has brought into the theater its S-400 air defense missiles, which would enable it to enforce a ‘no fly zone’ over Ukraine at any time of its choosing, thereby denying access to the United States and other allied planes for delivery of further weapons or for performance of aerial reconnaissance.
All of the foregoing Russian measures fit nicely into the description of ‘military technical measures’ that Vladimir Putin had said Russia will apply should the talks with the United States over its security demands reach a dead end.
So far not a single shot has been fired. There is heightened tension but no war. It is safe to assume that this line of psychological warfare is precisely the favored strategy of the Russian President to reach his objective of revising the European security architecture.
Already the fissures within Europe over how to respond to the Russian demands are deepening. In a lengthy address to the European Parliament meeting in Strasbourg, French President Emanuel Macron has spoken of the need for a Europeans-only approach to Russia on this question, showing more than a measure of skepticism if not contempt for the Biden administration. And German chancellor Scholz has tamed his inexperienced, loudmouth Greens Party foreign minister Annalena Baerbock and has himself taken the lead in parting company with the United States and fellow NATO members over how to deal with Moscow. Even the BBC reporting yesterday on the flights of British planes carrying military supplies to Ukraine showed the large arc by which they skirted German airspace, traveling instead to the north through Denmark to avoid conflict with the German government’s policy against sending arms to Ukraine under present conditions.
Similarly, The Financial Times and other mainstream Western press are now giving considerably more attention to the Russian security demands which were previously buried in coverage of the stand-off at the Ukraine-Russia border.
The task before Vladimir Putin is to convert what the Russian leadership believes to be their present “window of opportunity,” when they have strategic and tactical military advantage over the United States and NATO, into political gain. They are demanding changes to the security architecture that normally come only after one side has won a war. It is devilishly difficult to achieve without ‘breaking some china’ though that is the constraint that the ever cautious Putin is working under.
As I have mentioned in prior articles, one element in the ongoing Psy-ops is to release every few days information about additional options available to the Kremlin to get its way without invading Ukraine. One such option that emerged a couple of days ago was the announcement that a bill has been introduced in the State Duma calling upon President Putin to recognize the Donbas republics of Lugansk and Donetsk as independent, sovereign countries,, preparing the way for possible Russian annexation. Yesterday, Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov addressed this issue, saying it must be approached “with caution.” It has further come out that the initiators of the bill in question were the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, not the ultra-nationalist LDPR of Zhirinovsky or the ruling party United Russia. Russian politics are definitely more complex and ‘normal’ than our Western media and governments tend to understand.
Apart from ideologically blinded fools in the United States, among them well known former diplomats like Ivo Daalder (ambassador to NATO 2009-2013) who published his view on how to constrain Putin in The Financial Times two days ago, the realistically minded politicians and statesmen in the United States, of whom there always were quite a few, are now sitting up straight and paying attention to Putin. We have not heard the words ‘thug’ or ‘killer’ applied to his name for some time. The worst we hear from people like Daalder is that he is a ’dictator’ and so by definition is our adversary in the global struggle between freedom loving democratic countries and dictatorships. But such Neocon ideological nonsense always was a veneer for popular consumption over the bitter pill of American military dominance. Now confidence in that dominance is being put to the acid test by the Russians.
All of which brings me to the final point today, to what extent is the Russian confidence in its negotiating position assisted by the country’s growing alliance with China.
In the United States, in the past several years when China was identified by U.S. President Trump as the prospective Public Enemy Number One that had to be contained at all costs, there has been the beating of drums in the American press telling us that the PRC is busy developing what will soon be the world’s most powerful armed forces.
In August 2021, when the Chinese conducted their first tests of their own hypersonic missiles, Western newspapers all quoted one Pentagon official who claimed this was a new ‘Sputnik moment,’ meaning that the Chinese had moved ahead technologically with an awesome new weapon system. They all ignored the fact that the Russians had done the same three years earlier and now had hypersonic glide missiles ready for serial production.
In short, Western media and, presumably, most Western politicians were deceived by their own prevailing propaganda about Russia being a power in decline with ability only to act as ‘spoiler,’ and ignored the reality which the Russians are saying loudly and clearly today: that they have the world’s most modern armed forces and are second in strength globally only to the United States.
What this means is that the Chinese factor in Russian strategic actions exists only in the economic domain, where cooperation with China in the event of drastic U.S. and European sanctions such as cut-off from SWIFT will be very important for stability of the Russian economy and military potential. However, in all other respects, the China factor is useful to Russia only as a scarecrow, to raise U.S. fears of a simultaneous Chinese strike on Taiwan when the Russians invade Ukraine. Neither event is likely to happen, but the possibility is another feature of Russia’s ongoing psychological warfare to achieve its security objectives.
Post Script,23.01.22: In the past 24 hours several additional noteworthy facts about the Blinken-Lavrov meeting have been released by one or the other side. First, Blinken told Lavrov that when the U.S. response to the Russian draft treaties is handed over, they do not want the contents released to the press. As political commentator and talk show host Vladimir Solovyov has remarked today on his daytime television show, this suggests that the White House does not want the Western press to jump on Biden’s proposals at once and frustrate his will to do a deal with the Russians that averts a war. This would line up very well with the supposed gaffe of Biden a day ago when he said the United States would only react to a major Russian incursion in Ukraine, which the State Department immediately swooped in to retract. It would appear that the 79 year old Biden is the weak link in the bipartisan Democrat-Republican line-up of hawks in the capital. This may be the old man’s saving grace. For these reasons yet another Biden-Putin summit may yet achieve a breakthrough, though how Biden will sell the deal to Congress is the great puzzle.
Another fact relating to the meeting in Geneva on Friday is that for 15 minutes the two ministers of foreign affairs met one on one, without their advisors or translators. Russian commentators have mentioned the Iran nuclear deal talks as one of the subjects they discussed. This would be entirely logical given that Vladimir Putin and the visiting Iranian president had held talks in Moscow a few days earlier. And it would suggest a degree of collegiality in dealing with a common problem that one might not expect from the very frosty U.S.-Russian relations at this moment. There is also the remark by Russian observers that they talked about restoring normal functionality to their respective diplomatic missions in one another’s country.
Finally, it bears mention that in his Sunday evening broadcast News of the Week, presenter Dmitry Kiselyov opened the segment devoted to the state of play with Blinken and the American negotiators by saying that should the talks fail Russia will start releasing details of its agreements with the presidents of Nicaragua and Venezuela about “strategic cooperation.” This was said to underline that the Russian security demands in Europe are separate from and far exceed the question of finding solutions in Ukraine. By consciously reconstructing the issues underlying the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kremlin would be targeting directly the hypocrisy of U.S. insistence that Russia may not enjoy a sphere of influence at its borders. The Monroe Doctrine would unravel and Russia’s prestige in Latin America would likely soar. Here again, the Putin strategy would be psychological warfare and not aggression by kinetic warfare.
The American Secretary of State is adding air miles to his account this week by visiting Kiev, Berlin and tomorrow Geneva for meetings with President Zelensky, Chancellor Scholz and RF Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov respectively. However, whether abroad or at home he is a captive of the U.S. foreign affairs community echo chamber, utterly indifferent to external stimuli and incapable of responding appropriately to the changing environment. Everywhere he repeats the mantra that Russia is about to stage a classical invasion of Ukraine, just as everywhere President Biden repeats daily that the Russians will face consequences for their actions, very grave damage to their economy as a result of American led sanctions.
Meanwhile reality develops on its own, paying no heed to the script written in stone in Washington, D.C.
The Russians have a very flexible and constantly changing set of responses to threats and opportunities. This is what makes it so difficult for us commentators to foresee the actual path to denouement. But it is also what makes it almost certain the Russians will get what they want and change the European security architecture to their advantage in the face of American obtuseness.
A couple of days ago, several Russian news portals carried the story of a new generation Russian nuclear submarine packed with missiles capable of laying waste to half of America surfacing just outside U.S. territorial waters in a ‘peek-a-boo’ exercise to show they operate undetected by the Pentagon in permanent watch off of U.S. shores. This may have been fake news, but if so it was seeded as a taste of what is to come shortly in real news as the Russians say ‘gotcha, the game is up’ to Washington and unsheathe their hypersonic missiles and deep sea nuclear drone on board real submarines off U.S. east and west coasts. The message: ‘Please sign here on our treaties of mutual security in Europe.’
Yesterday, another route to resolving the Ukraine confrontation in their own favor was set out for the world to see: several legislators advanced a bill in Russia’s State Duma calling upon President Putin to recognize the rebellious Donbas republics of Lugansk and Donetsk as independent countries. This means applying to the Donbas the scenario which played out so successfully in Crimea in 2014: they become independent, then they hold a referendum to which international observers are invited calling for unification with the Russian Federation, followed in short order by their annexation.
In such a scenario, would a shot be fired? No! Would there be an invasion or even an attack by Russia on Ukraine to justify application of any new sanctions? No! Are these possibilities being entertained by Blinken & Company as the Secretary of State travels the globe to align allies? Obviously not, and this is why his diplomatic mission is a waste of everyone’s time.
I am surprised that Foreign Minister Lavrov is going the extra mile and proceeding to meet Blinken in Geneva tomorrow. From the Russian standpoint, such a meeting would have one purpose only: to collect the written response of the American side to the draft treaties they received on 17 December. In his press conference in Kiev yesterday, Blinken said he is not carrying the written response. Consequently, the meeting can be no more than a photo opportunity for the vacuous Mr. Blinken.
In mentioning the possible annexation of Donbas above, I do not mean to suggest that that alone will satisfy the Russians that their security concerns have been met. So long as the United States, the U.K. and other NATO member countries supply weapons and training to the Ukrainian military, Russia cannot rest easy. And just yesterday, in a move that makes as much sense as the Ukrainian idea of applying sanctions on Russia before they break any china, the United States announced it has approved sending another $200 million in military aid to Kiev. That is to say, it continues to prioritize pouring oil on the flames rather than finding solutions with Russia.
What move the Russians might make after an annexation of Donbas will also likely depend on the overall political context, including changes of position within Europe and consultations with China at the start of February when Vladimir Putin travels to Beijing.
Resolution of the Ukraine problem for Russia absent agreement with the U.S and NATO on the country being declared neutral would be possible only by destruction of Kiev’s military infrastructure, for example by aerial bombardment and missile strikes. That would put an end to NATO deliveries of materiel, training and war games at Russia’s front porch.
Meanwhile, there are growing signs of European disillusionment with leadership on Russia relations coming from Washington. Yesterday, in his five hour address and discussion with the European Parliament meeting in Strasbourg, President Macron called for Europe to reach its own settlement with Russia as Europeans to Europeans, without U.S. participation. Of course, Macron was grandstanding as usual and he is a lightweight in European decision-making compared to his counterpart in Berlin, the German Chancellor. However, Scholz also has been making sounds showing disagreement with the stiff-necked and utterly unrealistic sanctions policy coming from Washington. The influential business newspaper Handelsblatt had a day before indicated that the most severe sanction proposed by the U.S. administration, cutting Russia off from SWIFT, would be a grave mistake, since the Russians could in short order achieve the same functionality in international settlements via a system they will jointly operate with the Chinese, and the only loser would be Europe. This is not to mention Scholz’s defense of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline as very important to the German economy, whatever the Americans may wish.
As I say, the geopolitical landscape is changing daily. The only ones too stubbornly proud and intellectually limited to appreciate this are the top officials in the Biden Administration, including the president himself. Yes, there will be a price to pay…
In closing, I mention that Iran’s PressTV has been closely following developments between Russia and the West, with all the more reason to do so provided by the state visit of their President to Moscow. I had the pleasure of participating in an interview with them yesterday evening and now share the link:
Post Script: 31.01.2022 In line with the argument of this article, yesterday’s News of the Week broadcast on Russian state television hosted by Dmitry Kiselyov, who may be seen as an unofficial spokesman for the Kremlin, devoted 20 minutes to the degraded state of American and European political leaders in the new millennium. NATO General Director Jens Stoltenberg and his predecessor Anders Fogh Rasmussen were singled out for being utterly out of touch with reality. But none were spared exposure of their ignorance of history and utter lack of judgment, including not ony the fools in high office like ‘Donald Trump but those seen as exceptionally brilliant in the USA like Barack Obama. The moral degeneracy of Hilary Clinton was illustrated by the widely circulated video of her rapturous smile upon learning of the brutal murder of Gaddafi. Summing up, Kiselyov complained that Moscow has no worthy interlocutor with whom to negotiate in the USA.
My last report on Russia’s premier political talk show, “Sunday with Vladimir Solovyov” was in advance of the scheduled Russia-US, Russia-NATO, Russia-OSCE talks that took place in the week of 10 January. Now I will present some findings from after these meetings, namely the show of Sunday, 16 January.
I will not take readers’ time with the remarks of all the panelists, only the remarks of the talk show host and his politically most important three guests: Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Duma member, leader of the nationalist party LDPR; Andrei Sidorov, dean of the department of world politics at Moscow State University; and Yakov Kedmi, retired officer of Israeli intelligence, former Soviet citizen, ‘refuse-nik’ refugee and present-day super patriot of the homeland he left behind. I preface their remarks only with some background information on who they are. My own comments on what they have said will be saved for the end of this essay.
The show is worthy of our attention because of the shift in focus from negotiations with the West to war, in one form or another.
Before summarizing or selectively quoting from the speakers on the program, I call attention to one point on which they all agreed: the embarrassingly low intellectual level of the American representatives to the talks in Geneva, Brussels and Vienna. But the scathing criticism reaches higher into the whole Biden administration where they find there is almost no one worth talking to on the American side. Blinken is a fool, who likely believes in the empty propaganda he endlessly spouts. Sullivan is disappointing. Victoria Nuland is beyond the pale as an outrageous liar and propagandist. Curiously the one American official who gets a thumbs up for advising Biden to engage with the Russians rather than walk away from their brazen demands is….Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Perhaps it is because he alone knows very well what “military technical” arguments the Russians have to back up their demands.
Lest readers draw the false conclusion that the Americans come in for exceptional scorn, the European statesmen do not score any better in the collective view of the Russian panelists. EU foreign and defense affairs commissar Borrell is seen to be a pitiful buffoon, groveling now for a place at the table in the negotiations. And Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg is singled out for special mention. He is seen as likely believing in the nonsense he delivers from the podium, and he is deemed to be mentally defective generally. As one panelist said about him: “Stoltenberg is the ideal person to lead NATO in this period of political schizophrenia.”
Additional scorn, of course, was heaped on the Ukrainian leadership. However, these moments of levity stand out in a session that dealt with the gravest issues of war and peace.
*****
Out of the six panelists on the program, two were outstanding for their assertive nationalism and calls for war. One was Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the bad boy of Russian politics ever since he first ran for the Duma against the ruling Communists in the early 1990s. His party surged in popularity in the 1996 elections and seemingly was on the cusp of displacing, along with the Communists, the pro-American parties on which Boris Yeltsin relied to control the national agenda. In the last Duma elections, his party won a little more than 12% of the vote and did especially well in Siberia and the Far East, where they control local politics in several cities.
Zhirinovsky has often played the clown, making knowingly outrageous statements that drew to his side public attention while keeping him safe from attack by the ruling party precisely because he posed no threat among right-thinking citizens. But behind the façade of extravagance and excess was always a first class and broadly educated mind. Zhirinovsky has over the years been consistently contemptuous of the Soviet Union’s waste of Russian resources to maintain an empire of scroungers.
After Vladimir Putin unveiled Russia’s new offensive weapons systems in March 2018 and Liberal candidates asked how the country could hope to compete militarily with the USA, with its very strong economy and military budget ten times the size of Russia’s, Zhirinovsky’s response on air was tough and persuasive. He showed his contempt for the United States over its costly global ring of military bases around the world which meant, in his words, that the $700 billion in defense budget was going to pay for toilet paper in all those latrines rather than in development of new weapons systems, such as Russia was doing very effectively in the new millennium.
Zhirinovsky has for years been given priority access to the microphone on Solovyov’s program and Sunday night, 16 January was no exception. He speaks at length. Exceptionally for a Russian talk show, Zhirinovksy is never interrupted because of his venomous tongue that lashes at others who dare to cross him. So it was on Sunday.
Zhirinovsky’s opening words set the tone for the entire evening: “The year 2021 was the last year of peace in the new millennium. We have nothing to talk about with the United States. Foreign troops are at our borders along with their weapons. We can hold talks. They took place. Maybe there will be some more, and talking is better than pushing the button on both sides. But the solution can only come by force.” This, he emphasized, was his personal opinion and not the official opinion of Russia.
“The end may be that part of Europe doesn’t exist any more. Take out London! Leave Ireland alone. Don’t touch Wales. London is the heart of the anti-Russian forces. And London is dancing its last days. Look at the photo of Boris Johnson [projected onto the screen].”
“Ahead is a great tragedy for Europe, for humanity. War is inevitable! It will spell the end of Europe, the end of the USA.”
“We now demand a return to the NATO configuration of 1997. I would demand removal of all nuclear weapons from Europe, including denuclearization of France and the UK.”
“I would demand that all sanctions be cancelled at once. If they don’t say yes to this, then I have just one sanction for them: we force them to fulfill our demands. Our armed forces are in full battle readiness and they await an order from their commander in chief.”
Following these inflammatory words by Zhirinovsky, moderator Solovyov intervened, not to calm down the discussion but to heighten the emotion. Indeed, Solovyov’s opening speech of the evening had been a lengthy denunciation of the United States for its never ending lies to Russia, about Russia going back to the 1990s and continuing to this very day in the official statements from the Biden Administration.
Now he denounced NATO and the false self-image it projects as nonthreatening to Russia, just a peacemaker. Instead he pointed to the alliance’s bloody wars as from the bombing of Belgrade in the late 1990s, then the murder of two to three million Iraqis in George W. Bush’s attack of 2003. This was followed by the assault on Libya. And most recently the installation of a fascist dominated regime in Ukraine, about which Europe does nothing.
Solovyov ended his fiery speech with talk about the Germans, and their acknowledgement of guilt before the Jews over the Holocaust but their absolute indifference to what they committed as a nation by their Operation Barbarossa, namely the murder of 27 million Soviet citizens. Instead, the Germans come before us as moralists, castigating Russians for their supposed aggression.
The intensity of the remarks from Zhirinovsky and Solovyov were then allowed to cool down when the microphone was passed to Andrei Sidorov, dean at Moscow State University. Sidorov had smiled knowingly through the tirades, but used his opening words to respond to Zhirinovsky’s implicit criticism of the Russian diplomatic corps earlier on, which had implied that by recruitment of graduates from the elite MGIMO higher school, then by postings to cushy positions in London, Paris and New York, the Ministry had been preparing cadres which are unable, unwilling to strongly defend Russian interests abroad against the West. Without remarking on past educational programs, Sidorov said that a lot has changed, and very pointedly noted that since March 2020 the president of the department of international relations at Moscow State is none other than Leonid Slutsky, member of the State Duma from Zhirinovsky’s own party, chair of the Duma committee on foreign relations and holder of a doctorate in economics. Let all those who wonder about the patriotic cast of Russia’s present-day preparers of their foreign policy community take notice.
Sidorov observed with pleasure that Russia has begun responding to the West, where there is still the illusion that after Putin Russia may return to its pliable state in the 1990s. He said it is good that Russia is dealing now directly with the United States. The USA tries to dilute the discussion by bringing in NATO. Meanwhile, the Baltics, Poland say Russia is the source of all the problems today – this is because conflict is essential to justify their own existence.
Yes, the United States can create problems for us – sanctions. Or by their special operations to foment unrest, as, for example, in Kazakhstan and in Belarus. We have to secure our rear. Here at the level of the USA, Sidorov does not see military solutions. But with respect to Ukraine: it has to be resolved, by war if necessary.
When the microphone was passed to Yakov Kedmi, the emotional temperature in the room rose once again.
Kedmi has appeared on the Solovyov program by remote from his home in Israel, as well as by coming to the Moscow studio, which he did on Sunday.
In the past, Kedmi has made statements on the Solovyov show that were so stridently pro-Russian, so admiring of Russian military forces and so intent that they be unsheathed that I have wondered if he wasn’t an agent provocateur. However, for purposes of this essay, let us assume that his remarks are all bona fide and based on his knowledge as a professional in military intelligence.
On Sunday evening he came forward more as a practitioner of political intelligence, a traditional Kremlinologist. He devoted most attention to recent statements from Kremlin officials and tweaked out hidden messages that others have missed. He directed special attention to the answer given a couple of days earlier by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov to a question whether Russia would be invading Ukraine. Peskov chose his words carefully : “I can neither confirm nor deny that we will use offensive weapons in Ukraine.” Per Kedmi, that is a clear signal from the man closest to Vladimir Vladimirovich from among all his assistants that Russia will attack Ukraine, and not with tank columns and boots on the ground but ‘the American way,’ with high level bombing and missile strikes against the military infrastructure. And, per Kedmi, the casus belli will be not some Ukrainian attack on Donbas but Kiev’s overall disregard for fulfillment of the Minsk Accords.
Kedmi insists that the Russian war plans are developing along entirely different lines from those anticipated by NATO, where Stoltenberg continues to talk about a traditional invasion.
According to Kedmi, Russia has not only delivered an ultimatum to the United States and NATO; it has delivered an ultimatum to itself. Russia cannot afford to fail in the coming confrontation. To fail would, in his words, put the government and the state in peril. It would show that Russia is weak, irresolute and incompetent. Therefore it is vitally important for Russia to win this fight, while for other countries, like the EU, it is just a matter of lost prestige.
Russia awaits concrete written answers on every point in the draft treaties within a week. If the demands are not agreed to, then Russia must move on to “military-technical means” to achieve its objectives.
NATO must be kept out of not just Ukraine and Eastern Europe; it must be kept out of the entire post-Soviet space.
At this point Solovyov jumped in to remind the audience that on 3-4 February Putin will be in Beijing for the Winter Olympics and meeting with Chairman Xi. It is clear that the meeting will be used to agree a coordinated plan of action going forward. Like Russia, the Chinese have important material levers to bring the West to its knees without deploying military force: by cutting all exports of rare earth.
Kedmi closed out this section of the session with the observation that in case of full nuclear war between the United States and China, Russia might suffer ‘heavy losses’ but the United States would be obliterated, wiped off the face of the earth and its territory would remain radioactive for a thousand years. The same would be done to the nuclear powers of Europe, meaning the U.K. and France.
Again Solovyov jumped in to thicken the plot, saying that implementation by Europe of the US-drafted sanctions on Russia would bring about economic collapse globally, and that it would first hit European and American shares, given that a large part of the hydrocarbon assets on the books of Western oil companies are in fact assets in Russia.
His closing remarks posed the rhetorical question whether a Russian attack on the Ukraine infrastructure would be a “war” or something less. He reminded the audience that rational behavior on the part of the Americans in the days ahead is hard to predict, that Americans still believe that their F-35s can destroy anything and allow them to act with impunity on the world stage. The flaw there, per Solovyov, is “there are too few of them.” And, at the end of the day, the Americans don’t have the will to fight, as we see from the diminishing world status of the present administration. They have lost their hegemonic status and they are now rallying to what remains of their status as “world leader.”
****
I refrain from comments on anything said by the panelists save one: the remark by Kedmi that in case of full nuclear war Russia may incur serious damage but the USA would be obliterated. This bears uncanny resemblance to an unforgettable dialogue in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove: when the flighty, gum chewing senior Army officer in the War Room reports to the U.S. President, that “in case of war I won’t say we will not take a haircut, maybe ten or twenty million, but the Russians will be totally destroyed.”
I close this essay with several observations on the little signals the Kremlin is now giving regarding its intentions if and when it pulls out of further talks with the United States in the two or three weeks to come.
First, there is the stunning late breaking news of the surfacing of a fully armed Russian nuclear submarine just off the East Coast of the United States.
This story is carried by a dozen or more news portals in Russia, none of particular repute and may well be fake news. According to the portal of Russia’s Federal News Agency, the submarine was either from the recent super-quiet Akula or Borei class vessels. It would be carrying up to sixteen ballistic missiles, each with multiple entry warheads, enabling it to destroy a large swathe of the USA. The captain of the ship said they had entered his service zone off the American coast undetected by the Pentagon. His vessel was performing its permanent watch.
True or not, this particular report is an unsubtle hint from sources close to the Kremlin about what surprises may be in store in the coming weeks as real as opposed to fake news. In any case sightings like the one which is alleged to have taken place on 14 January have been made from time to time going back to 2012, when CNN disseminated such a report. We are dealing here with traditional Psy-ops, which is a proper arm of state warfare.
Lastly, I note the latest change in the tune of leading Western media about the applicability of Nuland’s ‘sanctions from hell’ to Russia. Today The Financial Times published a lengthy article by its Moscow correspondent Max Seddon explaining how Russia has amassed wealth, reduced its foreign exposure to purchases of its state bonds and to foreign investment flows generally, so that it can withstand whatever Washington is planning to send its way should it take action in Ukraine. The same article explains Western Europe’s energy dependence on Russia as barring imposition of sanctions that leave no channel of payment open. There is nothing new in the report, so its timing for publication now reflects only one factor: the growing recognition in Western financial media that Russia is bullet-proof and that it will do what it wants to secure its vital security interests whatever Washington and Brussels may think.
In the meantime, I can recommend to all a short film clip from The Wizard of Oz that one reader of my last essay kindly forwarded. Let us hope that the denouement of the present crisis follows the script.
It is one month since the Russians presented first to American diplomats and then to the world community their brazen demands to roll back NATO to its configuration status quo ante in May 1997 before the accession of former Warsaw Pact countries.
Those demands were taken up with seeming seriousness by the U.S. Government, then by NATO, whose Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, initially dismissed them out of hand as unacceptable. In short order dates were sketched in for a meeting of U.S. and Russian delegations in Geneva on 10 January. Then at U.S. insistence further meetings were scheduled with NATO in Brussels on 12 January and with the OSCE in Vienna on 13 January.
Western media were invited by their ‘high level but anonymous’ information sources in Washington to see these astonishing developments as required to de-escalate tensions at the Russian-Ukrainian border, where the Russians had amassed over 100,000 troops. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and his minions said repeatedly the troop concentration was in preparation for a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Such an invasion would spell a blitzkrieg victory for the Russians and would undo the 2.5 billion dollar U.S. investment made under two U.S. presidents to turn Ukraine from one more “catch” by the American team, as described by Gideon Rose, then editor in chief of Foreign Affairs magazine when it happened in February 2014, into a major military asset in the policy of threatening and containing the Russian Federation. Instead, this looked to become the second U.S. foreign policy debacle in less than a year after the shameful chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan last August.
It is astounding that none of the major Western media picked up the fact in front of their noses: that on the pretext of an invasion they had no intention of staging, the Russians had succeeded in lining up high level meetings with the United States and its NATO allies to discuss total revisions to the security architecture in Europe, something which was the laugh of the town when first proposed by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in 2008-2009 and led to nothing back then.
I would call this the first Psy-ops success scored by Moscow. The second success was the admission by the United States, the United Kingdom and France in the run-up to the meetings in Geneva and Brussels that they would not send a single soldier to help defend the Ukrainians if they were invaded! This was the loudest possible signal to Kiev to sober up its rabid nationalist militias and forget entirely using their shiny new U.S. military gear to stage the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that remain in open rebellion against the central authorities. Was this foreseeable on the part of Joe Biden, who in 2008 had been inciting the Georgian president Saakashvili to similar folly of recovering rebel provinces by force of arms in the face of Russian opposition? No, it resulted directly from some folks on Capitol Hill knowing what’s what with respect to comparative U.S. and Russian military strength, capabilities and will in Russia’s Near Abroad today. Victory two for Psy-ops!
Now today I am delighted to share with readers an article just published by The National Interest in Washington urging what would be, in effect, total capitulation to Russian demands for NATO’s downsizing. I am especially delighted that the author’s lever for his argumentation is precisely the definition of “military technical means” that I have provided to an otherwise clueless community of Russia experts in the U.S. and Western Europe. It is all set out on page one of his essay.
That this was dynamite is confirmed by its immediately being reposted by a news portal in Latvia, which would be one of the countries whose anti-Russian, pro-American government would be finished, kaput should the recommendations in this article be implemented.
I hasten to add that the publishers of this article are just one step away from U.S. mainstream in terms of respectability. The officers of the parent organization, the Center for the National Interest, formerly known as The Nixon Center, include not only dual citizenship former Soviets, whose patriotism might be put in question by political foes, but also some high serving former U.S. government folks who made the right sounds of patriotism when given a microphone in the past. Not entirely unimpeachable, but pretty solid. And now we read this call for capitulation in their journal!
It is entirely logical that the author has used my little linguistic exploration as the starting point for his argumentation. Because language is key to what is before us: the American foreign policy community is largely lacking all competence in Russian thanks to policies that go back more than a decade. I recall my semester on Columbia campus in 2010-11 when I refreshed my knowledge of The Harriman Institute and discovered they had dropped all language requirements for their master’s degree in regional studies relating to Russia and Eurasia. Instead, they required students to concentrate on numerical skills, which presumably would be more useful for their obtaining jobs after graduation in banks and international organizations. And Columbia was not at all alone in its downgrading of language skills.
The net result is that journalists who report today on crises like the ongoing crisis between the United States and Russia are heavily reliant on handouts from the State Department and Pentagon, i.e. on state propaganda which they are unable to interpret critically and just pass through to their readers without comment.
But there is a bigger issue that cannot be resolved just by starting up language courses: it is the unwillingness of institutions of higher education presently to listen to our adversaries and try to understand the logic underlying their behavior. In the case of Russia, anyone presenting the Russian side of things has been instantly labeled a ‘stooge of Putin’ over the past decade. I know very well, because all of my efforts as a public intellectual during this time have been precisely to present the thinking of the other side to my readers. Not to be an advocate or modern day “Tokyo Rose,” just to let the facts fall where they may.
Now that the Russians are saying “move or we will move you,” which they can back up with superior tactical and strategic military hardware, it is obvious there is a price to pay for ignorance.
Gilbert Doctorow 