U.S. Army General Curtis Scaparrotti, the top military commander for the U.S. in Europe and an officer of NATO, told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week that Washington was considering sending another batch of lethal aid to the Kiev government in the near future, citing the need to deter Russia.

According to U.S. News and World Report, Scaparotti was responding to Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) who pressed him about why Washington wasn’t taking bigger advantage of congressional authorization to provide such weaponry. The delivery of anti-tank Javelin missiles wasn’t enough apparently to placate the hawkish committee member:

Scaparrotti…said the U.S. is considering bolstering the Ukrainian military’s sniper capabilities. But he added of any potential aid shipments, “it has to go through the policy deliberations.” He also expressed concern to the committee about Russia’s modernization of its navy.

“I’m not comfortable yet with the deterrent posture we have in Europe,” Scaparrotti said, when asked about U.S. forces and resources to deter Russia. He later said specifically of Ukraine,

“We need to study their maritime component, their navy.”

Scaparrotti also took the opportunity to reiterate that western powers would continue to flaunt their naval wares in the area, referring to the U.S.S. Donald Cook’s maneuvers in the Black Sea:

“They, frankly, don’t like us in the Black Sea. It’s international waters — and we should sail and fly there.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg has reported that during the Munich Security Conference last month, Washington attempted to pressure Germany to also send warships to the Kerch Strait to prove a point to Putin about western access in the narrow waterway between mainland Russia and Crimea. Merkel refused but offered a more modest action:

Merkel had indicated she was willing, in coordination with the French, to send a convoy through the waterway as a one-time maneuver but Poroshenko said that wasn’t enough to solve his problem — he wants to ensure the strait is open permanently, the people said. France also refused to take part, judging the idea as an unnecessary provocation, according to another official who declined to be identified.

Fortunately, it appears that western European leaders are keeping cooler heads for now. Let’s hope they continue to do so.

Another excerpt from my forthcoming book, this one from the chapter covering the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Narodnaya Volya (from a previous post) would play another pivotal role in the fate of Russia and its revolutionary future.  A young student named Alexander Ulyanov soon fell under the group’s sway and in 1887 was arrested for involvement in a plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander III.  Refusing to ask for clemency, Alexander was hanged (Salisbury 1977; Krausz 2015).

Alexander Ulyanov was the older brother of Vladimir Ulyanov – later known as Vladimir Lenin.  Vladimir and the rest of the family did not know of Alexander’s revolutionary activities until his arrest.  The death of Alexander deeply affected Vladimir who up to that point had shown little interest in politics, much less revolution.  As one chronicler of Lenin’s path as a revolutionary stated:

Some critics have tried to find cruelty, single-mindedness, egocentricity, or ultraism in the record of Vladimir’s early years.  It does not stand up in the objective evidence of those who knew him.  This was no rebel, no iconoclast, no youthful messiah.  Vladimir was by all accounts as normal and pleasant a youngster as any parents could have desired (Salisbury 1977). 

In fact, those who knew him later in life said that Lenin was not motivated by power but by genuine conviction. Combined with his boundless energy and “iron will,” this gave him tremendous charisma.  Compared to Trotsky and Stalin, he was considered to have the least dictatorial personality, taking the time to try to educate and persuade (Krausz 2015).   

The Ulyanov boys had grown up in a middle class rural environment.  Their father was educated in math and physics and enjoyed a career as a local school inspector.  He was a liberal reformer who had supported Alexander II.  He and his wife provided an intellectually stimulating environment for their children, encouraging reading and games, and instilling reformist values (Salisbury 1977). 

By all objective measures, the boys enjoyed a relatively stable and happy home life.  Vladimir was known as a smart, rambunctious and playful youngster who liked music and chess.  His brother, on the other hand, was solemn, studious and compassionate but Vladimir idolized him, often seeking to emulate him.

Alexander eventually left home to go to university in St. Petersburg.  His journey to radicalization was not uncommon for idealistic youths of the time.  Having grown up rather insulated in the provinces, upon arriving in the big city, Alexander witnessed the deplorable conditions of workers as well as brutal crackdowns by the police on demonstrations.  In fact, he had participated in a demonstration just weeks before his arrest that had been handled particularly violently by the authorities (Salisbury 1977). 

Vladimir was devastated by his brother’s death and the sudden shunning of the family by others in their community (Krausz 2015).  Witnesses describe a young man having trouble expressing his grief:  “It was notable that in all the accounts no member of Vladimir’s family, none of his friends, offers any remark or expression made by Vladimir in those days in Simbirsk.  Change there was.  Everyone noticed that.  The gay, laughing boy, full of tease and jokes and high spirits, overnight became serious, thoughtful, gloomy.” (Salisbury 1977)

The effects were still visible four years later in 1891 when Vladimir went to St. Petersburg to take his law exams.  While there, he looked up one of his brother’s close friends, S.F. Oldenburg: 

[Vladimir] asked many questions about his brother, especially his scientific work.  Oldenburg remembered Vladimir as ‘gloomy and silent,’ and said he obviously suffered deeply over his brother’s death.  (Salisbury 1977).

The lingering effects of Alexander’s demise would be seen in Vladimir’s now single-minded focus on revolutionary politics.  By 1893, after practicing law successfully for around 18 months, he began immersing himself in revolutionary studies.  He was already under surveillance and barred from government employment (Krausz 2015; Salisbury 1977). His mother disapproved and wanted him to become a farmer, but she would help to support him financially throughout his career, including during his stints of exile and emigration (Krausz 2015). 

As part of his revolutionary education, he repeatedly read What is to Be Done? (Salisbury 1977) and later acknowledged Chernyshevsky to be second only to Marx in influence (Szamuely 1974). 

Lenin, however, rejected the use of terrorism and instead advocated a strong centrally controlled movement of dedicated and professional revolutionaries who acted as secret conspirators.

To be continued.

References:

1. Salisbury, Harrison E.  Black Night, White Snow:  Russia’s Revolutions 1905 – 1917.  De Capo Press. New York, NY. 1977;
2. Krausz, Tamas. Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography. Monthly Review Press. New York, NY. 2015;
3. Szamuely, Tibor. The Russian Tradition. Fontana Press. 1974.

Geopolitical analyst Gilbert Doctorow has done an important write-up on Putin’s February 20th speech to the Federal Assembly in which the Russian president provided more details on Russia’s military posture in response to Washington’s abrogation of the INF Treaty and implementation of missile shields in Eastern Europe. An excerpt and link to the complete article are below – Natylie

To the vast majority of Americans, including the foreign policy establishment, the question posed in the title may seem something of a joke. After all, absolute military superiority over Russia and other potential rivals for global influence has been the objective of US military policy for the last twenty-five years or more, at vast budgetary expense. One instrument for its achievement has been the roll-out of a system known as the global missile defense, which in effect encircles Russia and China, posing the threat of massive simultaneous missile strikes that could overwhelm any defenses. To intelligence specialists at the Pentagon, who likely have been watching, as I have done, what the Kremlin disseminated earlier today in Russian only versions so far, the question of Moscow turning the tables is entirely serious and shocking.

When Vladimir Putin first publicly described Russia’s latest state-of-the-art weapons systems in development and deployment one year ago, during his 1 March 2018 Address to the bicameral legislature, he said these systems would ensure the re-establishment of full strategic parity with the United States. Western media sniggered. US politicians, with a very few exceptions, chose to ignore what they considered to be just domestic electioneering during a presidential campaign that Putin was expected to win handily. It was all a bluff, they said.

In his annual Address [on] Wednesday, 20 February, President Putin expanded on those developments in armaments, reported which systems were now entering active service. He made it clear one of them is the planned Russian response to a likely consequence of US withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty: the stationing by the U.S. of nuclear armed cruise missiles like the Tomahawk on land and directed against Russia, all of which would reduce the warning time of incoming attack in Moscow to just 10–12 minutes and constitute an existential risk.

Putin, being Putin, did not spell out the threats implicit in the prospective deployment of the new Russian weapons systems. He remained always polite and open to discussion in his speech. But as we saw earlier today, he entrusted the task of dotting i’s to a member of his close entourage, Dmitry Kiselyov who is the chief administrator of all news programs on Russian state television while also serving as the anchor of the widely watched News of the Week, a summary newscast shown on two federal channels on Sunday evenings. To expand the circulation still more, the segment dealing with Putin’s Address and the new arms systems was released as a separate 10 minute video on YouTube.com early in the afternoon.

Continue reading Doctorow’s article here

Read Putin’s full speech to the Federal Assembly here