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:

www.urmedium.com/c/presstv/102893

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

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.

https://english.pravda.ru/news/world/150057-russian_submarine/

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.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

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.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/biden%E2%80%99s-opportunity-peace-eurasia-199344

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.

https://latvia.on-24.com/world/109351.html

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, 2022

The Russia-US-NATO-OSCE meetings this week have come and gone.  The Russian verdict was succinctly delivered by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Ryabkov, who explained even before the OSCE session was over that the talks have come to “a dead end” and it was unlikely the Russians will participate in any follow-on talks.

This opens the question to what comes next. 

Official Washington feels certain that what comes next is a Russian invasion of Ukraine, which could come in the next few weeks and thereby fall within the timetable for such an operation suggested by State Department officials when they met with NATO allies ahead of Biden’s December 7 virtual summit with Putin. The logic put out then was that January-February would be very suitable for a land invasion given that the frozen ground would well support tank movements.  One might add to that argument on timing, one further argument that was not adduced:  in midwinter it is questionable how long the Russians would want to keep 100,000 soldiers camped in field conditions near the border; such stasis in these severe conditions is not conducive to maintaining morale.

In what I would call a rare show of failing confidence in the predictive powers of the Biden Administration, U.S. media admit to uncertainty over Russia’s next moves. However, they cleverly present this by pointing to the uncertainty of the analysts and commentators on the Russian side.

A featured article in The New York Times a couple of days ago by their Moscow correspondent Anton Troianovsky says it all in the title: Putin’s Next Move on Ukraine Is a Mystery. Just the Way He Likes It”

Indeed, all the best known Russian experts appear to be stymied, none more so than the ubiquitous Fyodor Lukyanov, host of the weekly television show “International Overview” and long time research director of the Valdai Discussion Club, where his peers in the front ranks of American international affairs specialists have gotten to know him.  Lukyanov has in recent days humbly admitted he hasn’t a clue to what comes next.  Another leading figure in the Russian foreign affairs think tank community, Andrei Kortunov, director of the Russian International Affairs Council, has shown in recent interviews that he is no better informed about what is going on in the Kremlin and what comes next.

Western experts are also shown by our media to be clueless. Today’s Financial Times article “Russia writes off security talks…” ends with a quote from Andrew Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace: “Nobody knows Putin’s next move. And we’ll all find out at the same time.”

By definition, ‘experts’ cannot declare they know nothing and be taken seriously. This reminds me of the saying of my boss for five years at ITT Europe in the 1980s, Georges Tsygalnitzky. Each time we sat down to prepare the annual Business Plan he told us that if we calculated the sales forecasts badly, we could be up to 100% off, but if we failed to deliver a Plan we would be “infinitely wrong.” The same rules apply to government defense planning.

No right-thinking person likes the idea of a major war coming to the middle of Europe, as the Ukrainians consider themselves to be.  The United States has still more reason to worry about a looming war between Russia and Ukraine, because the outcome of total rout for the Kiev military forces equates to a bloody nose for Washington: its acknowledged 2.5 billion dollar investment in arming and training the Ukrainian military will have been in vain, and the loss would rival the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan in terms of American global prestige. The Biden administration would enter the midterm electoral period reeling from its losses in international relations.

Without wishing the Biden administration ill, I believe their scenario of a Russian invasion is wrong-headed and unimaginative. It fails to come to terms with the Russians’ imperatives on altering the security architecture in Europe as drivers of their current policies, not settling scores with Ukraine, or bringing them back to a common homeland, as Blinken & Company repeat ad nauseam.

So what comes next?  In successive articles on this website, I have set out several scenarios, or algorithms. My most recent prognosis in yesterday’s piece was that Putin’s Plan B would likely be purely “military-technical” in the sense of roll-out of medium range nuclear capable missiles in Kaliningrad and Belarus, to place all of Europe under threat of attack with ultra-short warning times, such as Moscow finds unacceptable coming from U.S.-NATO encirclement of its territory.

At the same time, Moscow might announce the stationing off of the American East and West Coasts of its submarines and frigates carrying hypersonic missiles and the Poseidon deep sea nuclear capable drone, all to the same purpose, namely putting a pistol to the head of the U.S. leadership. And now there is even talk of Russia building military installations in Venezuela, likely to host Russian strategic bombers capable of swift attack on the Continental United States without having to fly half the world. And a Cuban delegation is reportedly in Moscow, no doubt talking about posssible installation of missiles there. This is all very reminiscent of the goings-on in 1962.

One reader of this essay has written in, saying that news of Russian submarines posted off the coast of New York and Los Angeles could sink the S&P. Yes, indeed, and this financial damage is an aspect of policy that the Russians have taken into account. The sensitivity of Wall Street to bad news was mentioned specifically by Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov earlier in the week in Q&A. The American middle classes may be indifferent to foreign affairs generally but they are very attentive and politically active when the value of their 401k pension fund is hit. It is not for nothing that wealth fund managers in the City of London, board members of leading U.S. banks and insurance companies are readers of my essays as reposted on my LinkedIn account.

I imagine that Russia’s Plan B could begin implementation in the next couple of weeks and would be given three or four weeks to take effect on Western public consciousness.  If the United States and NATO still resisted coming to terms over changes to the Alliance that satisfy Russian demands, then I envision a Plan C which would indeed be kinetic warfare, but quite different from the invasion that figures in U.S. public statements and approaches to its allies.

Without putting a single soldier on the ground in Ukraine or contemplating direct overthrow of its regime and occupation, Russia could by “military-technical means,” such as missile and air attacks destroy the Ukraine’s command and control structure as well as “neutralize” the most radical nationalist militias and other hostile units now threatening Donbas. The destruction of Ukraine’s military infrastructure would by itself put an end to Washington’s plans for extensive war games there later in the year.  We may assume that Russian forces will remain massed at the border till such operations are completed.

The clean-up of Ukraine, ending its potential to threaten Russian national security, would be a very strong signal to all of Europe to back off in practice even if no formal treaties are signed with Russia at present.

In an exchange with a close colleague in Washington this morning, we agreed a bet on whether my prediction holds. And in this casino of international politics, I invite readers to place their own bets on what comes next.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

With administrative assistance provided by an RT television crew who had invited me to the Russian Embassy, Brussels to give an interview on the results of yesterday’s NATO-Russia meetings, I had the opportunity to witness most of the press conference given there by Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko, who co-led the Russian delegation earlier in the day.  

In the spirit of my writings on this website generally, I provide here an account of the press conference that reflects the facts but also my personal impressions of the event and of its main actor, Mr. Grushko. I conclude this report with the link to my 15 minute interview with RT.                                                                         

                                                                                   *****

I know Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Grushko from face to face meetings we had in Brussels back in the time when he served as Russian ambassador to NATO. He had to leave that post in 2018 after savage cuts imposed on the Russian staff as part of the global US-led move to cut ties with Russia, to denigrate its leadership and move the country to pariah status internationally. Once back in Moscow, Grushko further climbed the hierarchical ladder to assume deputy minister status.

From our talks in 2018 and before, I found Grushko to be a sincere and dedicated public servant, as idealistic in orientation as one can reasonably be in any large organization, whether governmental or private. His statements and answers to questions at the press conference yesterday proved that these personal qualities remain with him. Even The New York Times account of the press conference noted Grushko’s remark about the nature of the talks earlier in the day at NATO headquarters: “This was a heart-to-heart discussion,” he said.  Frank, constructive, professional – these are the commonplace, diplomatic wooden language terms both Russian and American officials used to describe the meetings.  But “heart-to-heart”? – this was very much the man of the day speaking his mind.

He spoke favorably of the four hours of talks at NATO headquarters, although what the Russians call their three “imperatives,” beginning with exclusion of Ukraine forever, were rejected by the NATO member states unanimously.  Grushko said it was important that the Russian delegation could set out directly to all 30 NATO member states what its security concerns are and what motivates any further action their country will take to get satisfaction. Thus, the message was received by each member directly and not by way of summary from the hands of the U.S. State Department.

Grushko also used his time at the microphone to share with the press some of his personal regrets at the change in NATO policy from the time of the creation of the NATO-Russia Council in 1997. In these remarks he drew upon his own experience of the functioning of the Council during his six years as the envoy of his country to NATO.

To his understanding, the overriding principle behind creation of the Council had been to go beyond clearing away the wreckage of the Cold War relations and to establish a positive joint agenda for the future. He saw this in the joint activities of NATO and Russia to combat terrorism globally, which included notably activities to stabilize Afghanistan, to root out the narcotics traffic emanating from that country, to combat piracy at sea, to coordinate measures to thwart would-be hijackers of commercial aircraft and the like. Now none of these cooperative activities remains and the sides have been cut off from one another for more than two years. Instead, Russia has been used by the United States and its NATO allies as their common Enemy Number One, with whom no cooperation is possible or desirable.

But Grushko’s concerns go much further. He condemned the U.S. led efforts to drag Russia back into a Cold War, when all the efforts and budgets of humankind should be addressing our real common threats, including Global Warming, food security, Covid and similar threats that are outside of geopolitical pigeonholing.

Of course, none of these personal appraisals of Mr. Grushko was picked up by our major Western media covering the press conference. They would sound too human, too progressive to be attributed to our sworn enemies. Instead, our newspapers and television news bulletins disseminated NATO Director General Jens Stoltenberg’s insistence on the same day that the Russian demands for closing NATO’s open door to new members was unacceptable, but that progress in diplomatic channels was still possible on other issues including limitations on war exercises in Europe, measures to reduce the risks of accidental conflict, arms control. if the Russians were genuinely interested in continuing the talks.

However, I detect some progress made by our media in exposing to their audiences the logic of the Russian security concerns, which previously had been untouchable. They are being looked at for themselves apart from the present confrontation over Ukraine, and that is real progress.

Meanwhile, The Financial Times in today’s issue carries an Opinion article written by Samuel Charap of the Rand Corporation entitled “Nato honesty on Ukraine could avert conflict with Russia.” This extraordinary piece argues for NATO to abandon its stiff-necked response to Russian demands and to openly acknowledge what we all know for a fact, that NATO is not reviewing Ukraine’s bid to join the alliance.

Western media repeat uncritically the position taken by U.S. Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman that if the Russians choose to break off negotiations it will show they were never serious about finding a diplomatic solution.  All are confused over what Mr. Putin’s military options are and which he will exercise if the talks fail.  Like today’s New York Times, they repeat the Russian President’s warning of an “unspecified ‘military-technical’ response.” They obviously do not understand the term, though a good Russian dictionary could point the way and tell us that the Russians’ Plan B is not to invade Ukraine or bomb Estonia but to position their latest tactical and strategic weaponry in places that present to the United States and NATO the same existential threat and ultra-short warning times of attack that the U.S.-led encirclement of Russia presents to Moscow today.  Of course, if that does not work, no doubt the Russian Plan C will involve some kind of kinetic or cyber warfare that demonstrates Russia’s negotiating “from a position of strength,” as the Americans like to say.

                                                                       *****

I was asked a couple of days ago by an old schoolmate in the States whether I have to cut and trim what I say in public not to lose the privileged access I have to Russian media.  Behind this question lies the ubiquitous opinion in the West that Russian media are strictly controlled by the Kremlin, that everything is censored for the thought control you expect in an “autocratic” or “authoritarian” regime.

I repeat here the observation I made back in 2016 when I was a frequent panelist on political talk shows hosted both by Russian state television and commercial channels.  Yes, the programming and selection of panelists is tendentious, but part of the tendency is to give the microphone to representatives of views at odds with official Russian policies and to let the panelists have a go at one another in the confidence that the superiority of the reasoning preferred by the state will be shown. I also noted back then that when given the microphone I was never censored, said what I thought and saw that the later releases of the respective videos onto youtube.com were complete and without cuts. And, at times, I have made statements that directly contradicted the preferred positions of United Russia, as for example with respect to the amended constitution which granted to Mr. Putin the right to stand for reelection in 2024.

Now, as regards complicity with my interviewer yesterday:  in the ten minutes or so that I, the camera man and the interviewer stood waiting for the press conference in the background to end so that noise interference would be removed, my interviewer read out to me the questions she intended to ask me. In turn, and exceptionally, I told her what key point I wanted to make on air. I did this to avoid assuming the commonplace but not very polite routine of interviewee who hears a question, ignores it and makes his own prepared communication to the audience.  I was pleased a few minutes later to see that what I wanted asked of me was duly worked into the sequence of questions so that I had no need to abuse my right to the microphone.

In the end, I was satisfied with the interview. I leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

I am pleased to share with readers of my articles a just posted full review of the Russian language edition of my diaries and memoirs Россия в бурные 1990е: Дневники, воспоминания, документы as published in November 2021 by Liki Rossii, St Petersburg.

https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d5add3a46f4ff00ad8a4a08/burnye-1990e-amerikanskogo-menedjera-61dbd8b4f443461eefed4f4d

This 780 page hard bound book represents the full text of Volume II of the original English edition published in the USA, integrated with the narrative and selected diary entries from the English language Volume I.  It has a photo-montage insert illustrating key moments in the narrative. A selection of these photos has been included in the book review.  The Russian edition also has a very useful Index of Names, which facilitates navigation for browsers.

To a large degree my memoirs-diaries were prepared for publication with an eye to the potential audience in Russia, where most any educated person over the age of 50 will know very well the personalities in political, business and cultural life who populate my text. The book reviewer is one such person. As for the English-language edition, that has already attracted readers in the academic community of historians of Russia, though hopefully, the value to students of business management in developing markets will eventually also be appreciated.

My latest essay, “How Far Can Diplomacy Go?” dated 7 January, has taken on a life of its own.  Shortly after it was re-posted on http://www.antiwar.com in the early hours of 8 January it was immediately translated into Russian by politros.com, a St Petersburg based news portal. This was then picked up and re-posted by a half a dozen other Russian news websites including www.yandex.ru, the country’s equivalent of google.com, as well as fbm.ru, discover24.ru and rznonline.ru. It also was placed on the youtube channel 24NEWS plus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA7IVHljLH4, where the translated text of my article is read by a female voice, while the video shows Russian submarines and synthesized views of their cutting edge technology nuclear deap sea drone, Poseidon. The youtube broadcaster plays the theme song of state television Rossiya 24, but otherwise it is not clear what their relationship may be.

I emphasize that my articles are very rarely spotted and translated by Russian media. Their website specializing in such translations, inosmi.ru has done this only a few times over the past five years. Other Russian sites have occasionally re-posted me in Russian, but these appeared to be machine translations, unlike what politros produced, and took several days to appear.

I also point out that the translation which the Russian portals have now disseminated is a partial translation, amounting to about two-thirds of my original text.  They left out my comments on the “crackpot” whom I identified as a source of the “window of opportunity” argument which no doubt is driving the present Russian ultimatum to the West to revise the security architecture in Europe in its favor. They left out my remark on how revising this architecture must take place before Vladimir Putin’s current mandate in office expires in 2024 so that he may retire in peace and let the country move on to normal democracy.

More importantly, the Russian reposting of my article leaves out my mention of “surgical strikes” as the way for Russia to prove to our skeptical foreign and military policy establishment in the United States and Europe that their demands are not a bluff, but are backed up by superior strategic and tactical military force.  Instead, the reposting focuses on placing Russian strategic arms just off the American shores, and in particular on stationing there submarines carrying the Poseidon, Russia’s new state of the art nuclear armed deep sea drone which is capable of setting off tsunamis that destroy coastal cities and installations.

The advantage of the offshore stationing of such weapons of mass destruction is that they pose an existential threat without need to actually destroy anything or kill anyone as would happen with the other show of force I had mentioned, “surgical strikes” on the Ukrainian Black Sea coast naval bases now being outfitted and manned by US-UK teams.  A secondary advantage is that the pressure is piled on against one country, the United States, the moving force of the Alliance. The negotiations which follow would then be strictly bilateral talks, without the cacophany of the other 29 NATO members delaying or preventing achievement of results.

The threat of Poseidon by itself would be very unlikely to elicit a kinetic response from the United States and NATO.  But will such a threat alone be sufficient to win for Russia the capitulation it is now demanding from NATO?  Perhaps, but only perhaps. There are simply a great many stubborn and proud global hegemonists in Washington who will not be persuaded by a purely peaceful display of might. 

Time will tell

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

As the day of the US-Russian talks in Geneva over revising the security architecture in Europe approaches, analysts on both continents are publishing their prognoses of the outcome. Among them are great optimists that the ongoing acute confrontation can be scaled back, and also pessimists who see a clash of arms as inevitable with the risk of its becoming an end in itself.

I would categorize my position as optimistic, though predicated upon actual military action occurring in the weeks ahead. That and only that can be the lever to force a diplomatic settlement which is unattainable through talk alone. 

I also remark up front that it is totally unclear at present which scenario will be realized and which will fall by the wayside.

Notwithstanding my calling a “crackpot” the Russian author of the “window of opportunity” argument for muscular behavior in my last essay, his argument on this narrow issue is very strong and no doubt is guiding present Russian foreign and military policy.  Moreover, as I said in passing, his time line for resolution of the critical security issues before Russia falls within Putin’s remaining time in office on this mandate.  So there is also the personal timeline of Vladimir Vladimirovich in play. If Russia’s military security is assured to the same degree as its economic security has been secured on his watch, then Putin can retire in 2024 and Russia can proceed on its way to normal democracy, because the system will no longer depend on one strong man in power to protect it from a hostile world led by a hubristic America.

By making their theses so public, nailing them to the door of the Wittenberg cathedral, so to speak, the Russians have not left themselves wiggle room to settle for something as limited as some of my peers are suggesting, to wit a formal American pledge not to install attack missiles in Ukraine on what will be nominally ABM bases, such as have been built in Romania and Poland.

The Russians will not tolerate de facto US and NATO control of Ukrainian territory, which presently includes the holding of massive war games directed against Russia in Ukraine during this year. They will not tolerate further US and NATO delivery of advanced arms to Ukraine enabling Kiev to retake the Donbas and possibly even Crimea by force. They want a formal renunciation of plans for Ukraine’s accession to NATO now and forever. 

They also want agreements that prevent the United States and NATO from redirecting their attention to Finland and Sweden, turning them into advance posts for attacking Russia from close proximity to its borders, and to prevent the considerable upgrading of airbases in Estonia, which are less than 20 minutes flying time to Petersburg in a conventional jet fighter, not to mention a hypersonic cruise missile. In short, the Russians want a global solution with the United States amounting to a real backdown or capitulation from its encroachments and threatening positions of the past 30 years.

But there is no way that Joe Biden can yield to the Russian demands if there is no Russian demonstration of strength, not just jawboning. 

One has to understand that the American and European foreign policy establishments, not to mention the broad public, still do not believe the Russians were capable of recovering from their degraded state in the 1990s to match or overtake the United States in military technology and physical deployment in 2022 on a budget that is ten times less.  There are snide remarks from our pampered expert community which have to be smashed by proofs that the Kremlin is not bluffing.  So some kind of military action is needed.

I continue to believe it will be surgical strikes, probably against NATO installations being built on the Ukrainian coast.  There is also the possibility that the Russians will announce the positioning on patrol just outside US territorial waters of their latest hypersonic cruise missiles and Poseidon deep sea nuclear drone, presenting an existential threat we have not seen since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Such actions would demonstrate that the Russians really and truly have strategic arms which reinstate MAD and also have enormously powerful and precise conventional arms which go toe-to-toe with America’s.  And what does the latter mean?  It means that the Russians are ready for a full scale war in Europe that they may just win without resorting to tactical nuclear arms, which would open the Pandora’s box of end of the world scenarios.

Does the US really want to have Russian missiles with a 5 minute flight time to the nation’s capital permanently positioned off its coast?  Does the United States want to fight a full scale conventional war in Europe?  I doubt it.  And that hesitancy would give Biden the political strength to tame Congress and cut a deal with the Russians giving them extensive revision of the European security architecture.

Now what I have just written is only one of many possible scenarios.  None of us knows what actually lies ahead.  

We have some optimism over the final outcome given Biden’s responding positively to the Russian initiative. He did not dismiss the two draft treaties out of hand as NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg did at once.  But how far can Biden go on his own, without the Schumers and Pelosis of this world on board, supporting his capitulation? And the Republicans on The Hill have to be similarly scared. 

As for the Europeans, they will bark while the caravan of US-Russian negotiations proceeds and reaches solutions the Europeans will have to accept absent alternatives.

As any market observer knows, man is driven alternately by fear and greed.  The United States has had 30 years of greed. The day of fear is about to arrive.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

PS: This article, as re-posted on http://www.antiwar.com in the early hours of 8 January was immediately translated into Russian and has been posted on half a dozen Russian news websites including yandex.ru, fbm.ru, discover24.ru, rznonline.ru. It also was placed on the youtube channel 24NEWS plus : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA7IVHljLH4

Curiously, the Russian newscasters have chosen to put the spotlight on their nuclear deep sea drone as the threat likeliest to force a capitulation to Russian demands from NATO.

My inbox is filled each day with many articles bearing on my interests in international affairs that I receive from a couple of high level online digests for professionals that also republish most of my own essays. One of them is Johnson’s Russia List based in George Washington University and serving primarily subscribers from among the American academic community. The other, also based in Washington, D.C., has subscribers drawn from among the diplomatic community in the nation’s capital.  It was the latter which on Monday brought in a catch worthy of two thumbs up.

I will now direct attention to some important information contained in one of the articles, entitled “What does the Russian ultimatum to the West mean?” written by the French Sovietologist and historian of contemporary Russia Françoise Thom. https://en.desk-russie.eu/2021/12/30/what-does-the-russian-ultimatum.html

Thom is an old-school political scientist. She is 71 years old and did her doctoral dissertation on “Soviet Wooden Language” at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales under the internationally known Alain Besançon. Unlike so many of today’s professors of Russian studies in American universities who give courses and chair conferences on LGBT issues in Modern Russia and other frilly topics that may catch the fancy of students and land them a job in some NGO after graduation, unlike our mainstream media journalists who have long ceased to practice journalism and are mere conduits for Pentagon and State Department press releases, Thom’s work is intended to have direct practical application in formulation of government policy.

In recommending her article to my readers, I point out that Thom and I are on opposite sides of the barricades politically. She is a fierce defender of Western global hegemony. Nonetheless, what she has turned up about the sources of the latest Russian foreign policy initiative I see in no other publications at this moment. Of course, it may well be that similar knowledge is common currency within the Rand Corporation or, here in Brussels, among some faculty attached to the Royal Egmont Institute funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But none of that knowledge behind closed doors does any good to promote open public discussion of the most important foreign policy challenge facing the United States and other Western nations at this moment. As The Washington Post wisely observes (but does not facilitate in practice), “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

My debt to Thom for treading where few dare or are capable of treading is qualified by another consideration besides her political partisanship:  she ignores a fundamental rule of historical and political sciences, which is not merely to find and present what you believe to be influencers of state policy whether in Russia or elsewhere but also to explain who they are, on behalf of which economic and other interests they speak.  Thom has not done this although a simple visit to google.ru search would have been sufficient for the purpose. In what follows I will do precisely that, because the results of such search are very relevant to our understanding what makes Russia tick today.

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In the subtitled section of her essay “What is at stake,” Thom sets out in detail the full scope of Russian demands contained in the two draft treaties submitted to Washington on 17 December. The consequence of accepting the Russian terms is clear: “In a word, Russia is demanding that NATO commit suicide, and that the United States be reduced to the role of a regional power.”  So far, so good. I would not disagree with that observation.

 Where Thom goes off the rails is her follow-on conclusion: “By negotiating as an equal with the president of the United States Putin demonstrates at the same time to the Russians that his position as the boss is recognized by the cursed Westerners. The feeling of debasement the Russians experience in their hearts by submitting to despotism vanishes when they see the humiliation of the West: foreigners too are bowing down to Putin. The regime’s propaganda knows how to play these sensitive chords.” 

Regrettably, the Russian public that Thom knows about goes no farther than listeners to the fiercely anti-Putin radio Ekho Moskvy, meaning the two or three percent of the population who are dyed in the wool Liberals. These folks are not so much a Fifth Column as simply Russian self-haters, such as always existed in certain numbers through Russian history going back centuries. I think Thom is spending too much time inside the Sorbonne and too little time out and about in Russia, where she could see for herself what nonsense it is to apply the word “despotism” to the country and its form of governance today.

Another section, subtitled “An orchestrated blackmail,” puts in repugnant terms what other people might simply call Realpolitik. Yes, historically speaking, might has almost always made right. The USA has gotten away with this for decades, so why should the Russians, as another Great Power, not also feel entitled?  The question is can you impress your greater strategic and tactical capabilities upon your adversaries by firing a cluster of hypersonic missiles, as the Russians apparently did on 24 December to show off to the world their ability to sink American aircraft carriers if and when necessary by the flick of a switch, or do you have to kill a few hundred thousand people to make clear your might, as the United States has done from time to time in ‘shock and awe’ events.

The segment of Thom’s article under the subtitle “Why this Russian ultimatum?” is the most valuable contribution by the author. She has identified one, perhaps the source of the thinking that I heard repeated and broadcast to the nation on the 28 December edition of the talk show “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov.” It is a think tank called Russtrat (Institute of International Political and Economic Strategies) and its publication on 21 November 2021 was a paper entitled “Russia has focused its mind: the country and the world on the eve of great changes,” by a certain Igor Kazenas.    https://russtrat.ru/reports/21-noyabrya-2021-0010-7259

We see spelled out in this article the notion of a window of opportunity for Russia to solve here and now its international security issues with the West, both military and economic. This window of opportunity, by the way, falls conveniently within the present, likely final, mandate of Vladimir Putin as president.

Thom quotes extensively from the Russtrat source paper [translation hers]:

“In the next year and a half, Russia will considerably change the balance of global power.[…]Russia’s current historical situation is unique. The state has prepared itself for the major challenges that may arise under critical pressure. Huge reserves have been accumulated, including gold. National financial and information infrastructure plans have been created and launched.. Digitization has begun to encompass the entire economy, bringing it to a new level of competitiveness. The expansion of our own industrial base, including in highly sensitive high-tech areas, is proceeding in leaps and bounds, the ‘technology gap’ is closing. We have overcome critical dependence in the area of food security. […]For the past five years, the army has been the world’s leader. In this area, the ‘technological gap’ is in our favor and is only widening…Moreover, the explosion of planetary inflation is causing an energy crisis, which makes the Europeans for the most part, much more accommodating and rules out a blockade of our energy supplies, WHATEVER WE DO.”  

Thom notes the author’s emphasis on playing the China card, to coordinate actions against Ukraine and Taiwan, with the effect of freeing Russia’s hands even more. And she quotes the Russtat conclusion which surely bears on the delivery of Russia’s ultimatum to the West of 17 December: “Russia has restored its weight in the international arena to the point that it is able to dictate its own terms in the shaping of international security.”

Thom sees weakness and errors of the Biden administration as having brought on this new belligerence from Moscow.  In particular, the debacle of the summer evacuation from Afghanistan and the succession of envoys sent by Washington to deal with the Russians, none more damaging than William Burns, of whom she says, “Burns’ visit was interpreted in Moscow as an indication that the policy of appeasement has prevailed in Washington and thus an encouragement to raise the stakes and ‘seize the strategic initiative.’”

The least impressive section of Thom’s essay is “What to do?”  Her recommendation comes down to this: “do nothing, say nothing and stand your ground.” So, no dialogue, instead wage a new Cold War. I think even those with her on the other side of the barricades will find this “solution” unconvincing in the face of what she calls Russian blackmail backed up by strategic superiority.  Strategic inferiority was the hand of the Kremlin when the original Cold War was launched and remained the fact till the very end. On 1 March 2018 Vladimir Putin pointed out in his State of the Nation address that for the first time in modern history Russia had pulled well ahead of the West in development and deployment of cutting edge strategic weapons systems.

                                                                           ****

As I indicated in the opening, there are serious methodological failings in Thom’s analytical essay.

She tells us nothing at all about the various Russian media and think tank source that she presents, although that knowledge is an essential context for our considering the political dynamics in Russia and the contribution of each writer/institution to setting state policy. Without such background we are unable to choose between cause and effect or identify which economic interests the authors of the articles cited represent.

First, with regard to the Russtrat essay:  we see here not a collectively prepared or anonymously written text as is customary in think tanks but instead a single author, Igor Kazenas, whose past and present is readily available using google.ru search. A biographical sketch of Kazenas posted on the REX Information Agency (https://iarex.ru) makes it clear that he is a certifiable crackpot. He is an economist by training. In that regard he fits the description of the Russtrat think tank, as I will discuss in a minute. But we are told that “Besides business, he has engaged in studies along the lines of the psychedelic guru Timothy Leary and with various gurus of India….As a result, he managed to develop a new philosophical-metahistorical toolbox allowing him to survey the prospects of any society, country, the world.”

Indeed, a substantial part of the text of his 21 November essay in Russtrat is devoted to spiritual issues and mystical-philosophical musings. Russia will show the world a new spiritual foundation for its unification. He calls out the triangle of Russia, China and India, which will lead humanity to the Kingdom of Light. Russian “conservatism” is said to be an ideology of planetary significance! “This is the creation of an agenda and one of the foundation stones of future world leadership.”

We need not be surprised that Thom has not quoted any of this philosophical claptrap, since it would detract from her story.

Meanwhile, Kazenas’s language, meaning his choice of words throughout his essay includes a lot of rough, bully boy words from the street. He is excessively boastful about Russia and excessively contemptuous about the United States and the Collective West. This is not what you would expect to see in the product of a ‘think tank’ and it is surprising that Thom, whose first academic achievements were as wordsmith and analyst of ‘wooden language’ does not convey these obvious facts to her readers.

It bears mention here that Russia experts have for years been looking for modern day Rasputins, crackpot advisers to the throne in Russia.  Several years ago they settled upon a certain Alexander Dugin, professor of philosophy at Moscow State University who was said to be feeding Neo-Eurasianist thinking to Vladimir Putin that allegedly underlay the Russian president’s foreign policy.  Eventually Dugin was ousted from his university post and disappeared without a trace into history’s dust bin.  The same fate may await Mr.Kazenas, though, it would seem that his argumentation about this being the time to strike and rewrite European security provisions has now become mainstream thinking among certain Russian elites.

We learn which elites by doing a bit of background search into the think tank that published Kazenas. The Russtrat website tells us very little about the institution other than that it was founded in April 2020 and holds a registration number with the Russian Ministry of Justice. Then there is their Mission Statement: “…to ensure the national-state interests of Russia in the foreign policy sphere by the forces of a team of highly professional experts in various fields of human knowledge – politics, economics, the humanitarian sphere, ecology and so forth. We ensure professional and objective decisions based on profound knowledge of the subject of research.”

We learn considerably more about Russtrat by looking at the biography of its director, Yelena Vladimirovna Panina whose career is summed up on the think tank’s “About Us” page:  “a well-known politician, chairman of the Moscow Confederation of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, doctor of economics, professor.”

Indeed, Panina is a very serious personality, with decades of service at all levels of the Soviet, then Russian government, both appointive and elective.  Aged 73, she has served successive terms as deputy in the State Duma, where she was in the fraction of the ruling United Russia Party.  Back in the 1990s she was the author of the law on self-government in the Russian Federation that was in effect until 2009. She crafted this law with a backward look at the functioning of the zemstvos, the institution of local rule established in the 1860s by the Tsar Liberator Alexander II.  But it is clearly Panina’s role as a founder and officer of the Confederation of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs that is most relevant to our understanding of who chose Kasenas’ essay to be featured by Russtrat and why.

This conclusion about the economic interests behind the new muscular and assertive foreign policy of Russia is further substantiated by looking at the affiliation of another author whom Thom chooses to highlight in her essay without providing context. I have in mind Irina Alksnis, who is identified as writing for the news agency RIA Novosti. But Alksnis is also published in Vzglyad, still another media source that Thom quotes from.  It is essential to understand that Vzglyad is a business daily.  There Alksnis is a pundit, a commentator, nothing more. But the paper has a business audience, which is highly relevant to our case.

In this regard, it is worth noting that the argument for a muscular foreign policy rests not only on military strategic considerations but on economic-commercial considerations. Essentially they are saying that Russia is now sanction-proof, and they believe that the coming economic crises in the world, in particular high inflation, will favor inflows of industrial development money to Russia, where, due to low energy costs, prices will be much more stable.

From all of the foregoing, one wonders what are the concrete steps that Kasenas recommends for Russia to take the initiative and solve its security issues.  I find that he is headed off into a number of different directions, none of which matches the clearly defined answer – ‘surgical strikes’ against NATO targets – that Vladimir Solovyov spoke about in his 28 December television program.

Instead Kazenas talks about finishing up the war in Syria by liquidating the Idlib area of resistance. Of course, the Ukraine figures prominently in his plans. He expects that country’s forces will be annihilated with likely loss of Russian soldiers limited to 100-150 if the fight comes soon, larger numbers if the fight comes later and the United States succeeds in planting ever more advanced equipment on Ukrainian soil.  In his analysis, Belarus will draw ever closer to Russia, leading inevitably to their being a single state. The author concentrates on economic-commercial issues: winning the gas war and further consolidating its position in Europe, taking over market niches and whole segments thanks to its competitive pricing based on low energy costs. Kazenas foresees ever more localization of production in Russia.

What is missing entirely in the Kazenas plan for the way forward is any mention of ‘surgical strikes’ and very limited operations in Ukraine to achieve maximal political results in changing relations with the USA and its allies, which Solovyov promoted in his program.  Nor is there discussion of how Russia’s present advantages over the Collective West arising from its advanced strategic weapons systems will be lost if the country fails to act decisively in the coming 18 months.

Put another way, the Russtrat article and the other articles cited by Thom are pieces of a game plan, while the integrated game plan was created at some other level, likely within the Presidential administration acting in consultations with the Russian General Staff. We may consider the authors of the various recommendations to be speech-writers of sorts, not principals. The only issue of substance, which is not identified by Thom, is that Russian business may be running well ahead of the Putin government in its aggressiveness towards the West. To those of us with an historical perspective, this is reminiscent of the situation in Russia in the several years just before the outbreak of WWI. Of course, Vladimir Vladimirovich is no Nicholas II, and surely he can keep his own society under better control and not  be pushed to overplay his hand.

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The second article which drew my close attention on Monday was “The non-West ‘stands up’. We witness history” by Patrick Lawrence, published on 3 January in The Scrum: https://thescrum.substack.com/p/the-nonwest-stands-up?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozNDA2NjM5LCJwb3N0X2lkIjo0NjQ5NDg5NywiXyI6InJTYlYyIiwiaWF0IjoxNjQxMTY4MTEzLCJleHAiOjE2NDExNzE3MTMsImlzcyI6InB1Yi0xMTIxNjQiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.XPFuWFugZKKxqMYNv_rdziv3Y5mwzFMDSk0ReIVte2Y  

In this review of the year gone by from the perspective of the changing correlation of powers between those on the rise (Russia, China) and those in decline (USA and Collective West), the author identifies inflection points.

The inflection point of greatest interest to us is the first in his list, in March 2021 when Secretary of State Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the President’s national security adviser hosted their Chinese counterparts in an Anchorage hotel. The event was in Lawrence’s words ‘an unmitigated debacle’:

“Blinken and Sullivan….determined to lecture the Chinese on all the old stand-bys – human rights, democracy, a free press, persecution of Muslims, and so on. Instantly, the occasion blew up in their faces. In a manner I will risk terming unprecedented, FM Wang Yi and top diplomat Yang Jiechi dumped the whole shopping cart of condemnations back across the mahogany table: Who in hell are you to talk to us about human rights and press freedoms? Who are you to tell anyone else about how democracies ought to be governed? How dare you affect concern about the treatment of Muslim populations?…

“If Anchorage and its aftermath were disasters for the Americans, it was something else for the Chinese. They faced the U.S. in a way they rarely had until then. They said, We are done with humoring you people. We are done trying to work with you in a cooperative spirit so long as you insist on speaking to us as other than equals. It was not hard to detect that China had assumed a new posture toward America, the non-West as it faced the West.”

However, for our purposes what is most relevant is Lawrence’s following remark: “Immediately after the Anchorage encounter, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s very able FM, flew to Beijing to confer with Wang.”

There is no need to reproduce Lawrence’s narrative on other turning points in East-West interaction during 2021.  He has set out a dimension that was missing in our examination above of the factors within Russia that led ultimately to the muscular, forceful presentation of its security demands to the United States and NATO in December. This dimension is the China factor.

Russia may have the weapons, but China enjoys the economic might to challenge the United States and the West in the most determined way.  The growing alliance between the two countries and their ability to coordinate actions simultaneously in the two global hotspots that have the full attention of Washington, Ukraine and Taiwan, present important additional support for the concept of a window of opportunity that the Kremlin found so attractive and underpin the present defense and diplomatic playbook.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Information provided to the press by both American and Russian sides following the 50 minute telephone conversation between presidents Putin and Biden is very meager.  That has not prevented major Western media like the New York Times and Financial Times from putting out this morning normal sized articles filled mostly with background information for those readers who have been asleep for the past few weeks. The few statements about the meeting from official sources on both sides have just been repeated at face value in their articles, without any attempt at interpretation.

In what follows, I will provide precisely that:  a Kremlinologist’s deciphering of what we used to call ‘the wooden language’ of diplomacy and of officialdom.

Let us begin with the remark in the FT that “the telephone call between the leaders…was arranged at Moscow’s request.” They take it no further, but it certainly bears mention that until now all contacts –phone calls and in-person or virtual summits between the two leaders – have been called at the request of the American side, which was unnerved by the build-up of 100,000 or more Russian soldiers at the Ukrainian border and assumed that an invasion was being prepared.  So, I ask why did Russia take the initiative this time? And why a conversation now, just days before the official delegations from both countries meet in Geneva.  I will hazard guesses.

First, from their own perspective, as revealed in statements by panelists on the 28 December “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov” talk show that I published earlier today, the Russians say they are  now taking the strategic initiative in relations from the Americans and setting the agenda as they see fit. I believe that Putin wanted the call to discuss Ukraine one-on-one with Biden well before the planned date of the meeting in Geneva by their negotiating teams. Knowing that the Americans intend to divert discussion from the Russian agenda of NATO retreat, that the Americans have flagged Ukraine and arms control as their preferred subjects for negotiation, Putin decided to remove at least one of these issues here and now.

Indeed, the United States media and government have for more than six weeks been beating the drum over an expected Russian invasion of Ukraine, for which the build-up of Russian forces at the border was alleged to be the preparation. The FT duly reported in this manner today in the headline of their article on the phone call yesterday: “US will respond ‘decisively’ if Russia invades Ukraine, Joe Biden warns Vladimir Putin.” But all this claptrap about “consequences” for expected Russian boots on the ground in Ukraine is only domestic PR in the USA to make Biden appear to be standing tall, to show him as a determined defender of freedom who will put Putin in his place, and to help us all forget the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan this past summer which gave Biden the image of incompetence and cowardice in foreign affairs.

What about Putin’s response to the threat of a ‘decisive’ U.S. response to an invasion.  We read in the FT article the following:  “Putin told Biden that sweeping sanctions would cause a ‘complete rupture’ in relations between the two countries,…adding that it would be a ‘colossal mistake that could lead to the most serious consequences.’”  This same line was used by the NYT at the start of its morning report “A call between Biden and Putin.”

Neither the FT nor the NYT hazards a guess as to what those consequences of Russian counter action might be, nor do they venture to say how a ‘complete rupture’ in relations might play out.  Let’s work on that now.

I believe that Putin’s counter threat of a complete rupture in relations is directed not at the USA as such but at Europe, and is intended to strip Biden of much of the impact of his proposed ‘sanctions from hell,’ as Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland called them. 

Cutting off all relations with the United States does not have much importance by itself under present conditions of minimal diplomatic and other communications channels between them following waves of U.S. sanctions and expulsions of Russian diplomats, seizure of Russian diplomatic property over the past five years. As for trade, it was never very consequential between the two countries simply due to the structure of their economies.  What little the U.S. has imported from Russia is chiefly in certain grades of crude oil that Gulf of Mexico refineries in the United States cannot get elsewhere since a ban on Venezuelan oil was imposed some time ago.

The threat of total cut-off of relations would be an entirely different matter for the European Union, which would surely face the same issue if it dared to impose draconian sanctions on Russia in concerted action with the United States. And Biden’s threat holds water only if the EU acts in harmony with America. 

The European Union cannot possibly risk a total cutoff of relations with Russia because 30% of all gas it consumes comes from Russia, not to mention the other very extensive trade relations which make the EU Russia’s largest trading partner, and make Russia a major partner for Germany and several other key EU member states.

I would say that metaphorically speaking, Putin sank Biden’s ships with this one warning.

Now I direct attention to another tantalizing sentence in the FT article which takes us all the way back to last week, when “Putin …refused to rule out a military solution [in Ukraine] and has previously warned that he has ‘all kinds’ of options if his demands are not met.”

What could those ‘all kinds of options be’? If the FT staff in Moscow had bothered to listen to the December 28 edition of the talk show ‘Evening with Vladimir Solovyov’ they would know what readers of my transcription of the show published earlier today now know:  Russia is considering making surgical strikes against NATO military infrastructure that it deems threatening to its national security, and the targets are not necessarily in Ukraine.  No invasion, no overthrow of the fascist-rabid nationalist influenced government in Kiev, just surgical strikes, such as Israel and Turkey and the United States itself have carried out in places like Syria and Iraq in the past few years with total impunity.

When I heard this voiced by Vladimir Solovyov, this was the first time such an ingenious solution came up. I had been looking elsewhere when trying to make sense of Putin’s talk of ‘military technical’ means to achieve its political objective of removing existential threats posed by NATO installations. I had assumed he meant stationing submarines and frigates armed with hypersonic missiles just off American shores or planting still more missiles in Kaliningrad and in Belarus to threaten European capitals.  But how could the reality of Russian strategic superiority represented by these new weapon systems be driven home without an exercise similar to the US bombing of Hiroshima, which took place in the context of all-out war?  If instead Russia uses its new precision strike weapons against, say, what is nominally an ABM base in Romania, but which the Russians consider to be in fact an offensive missile base directed at themselves, who will raise a finger?  Is Romania better loved in the world, and even within the EU, than Syria or Iraq? Not really. Would that be an act of war?  Hardly. But to avoid any risk, the Russians might instead begin their political military case by bombing NATO formations in Ukraine.  When they bombed NATO units in Syria that were supporting terrorists, it was hushed up by NATO member states even though lives were lost.  The same would likely happen in any Russian attacks in Ukraine that had collateral loss of life.

These are surely the arguments that Russia will bring to the table in its own good time to get Uncle Sam’s signature on the treaties of security that they presented to Washington on December 17^th.  And at that point the American political establishment will bless Biden, the peacemaker and drop all pretence at resistance.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021