By John Helmer, Website, 8/26/24
Remember the old adage — sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never harm me.
In the war by the US and its Anglo-European allies to destroy Russia since 1945, the propaganda war has been lost by the Russians many times over. That war is still being lost [3].
But for the first time since 1945, the battlefield war is being won by the Russian General Staff.
The uncertainty which remains is whether President Vladimir Putin will continue to restrict the General Staff’s war plans in order that Putin can go to negotiations with the Americans on terms which will forego the demilitarization and denazification of the Ukrainian territory between Kiev and the Polish border, and concede to the Kiev regime unhindered control of the cities to the east — Kharkov, Odessa, Dniepropetrovsk.
Call those terms Istanbul-II. As with the draft terms initialled in Istanbul at the end of March 2022 [4], Istanbul-II amounts to an exchange of dominant Russian military power for US and Ukrainian signatures on paper with false intention and temporary duration.
The US administration says it believes Putin will concede. It also believes that by staging its war of pinpricks — that’s the drone, artillery and missile barrages fired by the Ukrainian military, directed by the US and UK – in the Black Sea and Russia’s western border regions, Putin’s red lines and threats of retaliation are exposed [5] as empty bluff. The same interpretation of Putin, and confidence that he will accept US terms, are the foundation of the Ukraine “peace plan” of Donald Trump’s advisors [6]. The Trump plan’s offer of “some limited sanctions relief” reflects the conviction in Washington that Putin’s oligarch constituency can be bribed to push Putin into the same “frozen war” concessions as Roman Abramovich got Putin to accept at Istanbul-I – until the General Staff stopped them both.
Putin’s restrictions on the General Staff’s proposals for neutralizing the US and British air surveillance and electronic warfare operations; and his orders to stand by while the Ukrainians have assembled several thousand forces, first to cross into Kursk, and then into Bryansk and Belgorod, are now as visible in Moscow as they have been in Washington.
Moscow sources believe it was the Kremlin which was taken by surprise by the Kursk attack on August 6, but not the General Staff and the military intelligence agency GRU. They understood the battlefield intelligence as it was coming in and requested Putin’s agreement to respond. In retrospect, they say “we told you so”; they imply their hands were tied by the Kremlin orders.
“My understanding for now,” says one of the sources, “is that these are pinpricks that feel painful but they are not life threatening. Russia will not take any land, for now, other than the four regions. It should be the eight regions but it’s obvious Putin doesn’t have the will and the military does not have the capacity to hold. So we will see Ukrainians inside Kursk for a while. But it should be downplayed because it should not be allowed to be a bargain chip in negotiations the other side is aiming at.”
Putin said this himself, the source points out at his meeting on August 12 [7] with the Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, and others. “These [Kursk] actions clearly aim to achieve a primary military objective: to halt the advance of our forces in their effort to fully liberate the territories of the Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics, the Novorossiya region.” Putin also said: “It is now becoming increasingly clear why the Kiev regime rejected our proposals for a peaceful settlement, as well as those from interested and neutral mediators…. It seems the opponent is aiming to strengthen their negotiating position for the future. However, what kind of negotiations can we have with those who indiscriminately attack civilians and civilian infrastructure, or pose threats to nuclear power facilities? What is there to discuss with such parties?”
“It’s obvious at this point,” comments a military source, “that the Americans and Ukrainians have decided that Putin will come to terms if they snatch enough Russian territory and keep up their strikes behind the Russian lines…The Ukrainians are going for broke in the north while the centre collapses. But they know, no matter how expensive it is, the longer they remain on the attack, the worse it looks for the Russian leadership. They also have the measure of Putin who gives orders for half measures.”
This is also obvious in the Security Council in Moscow. The Council’s deputy secretary, ex-president Dmitri Medvedev, made the point explicitly in his Telegram account declaration on August 21 [8], implying that until he had said it, no one else dared: “In my opinion, recently, even theoretically, there has been one danger – the negotiation trap, into which our country could fall under certain circumstances; for example. Namely, the early unnecessary peace talks proposed by the international community and imposed on the Kiev regime with unclear prospects and consequences.” Medvedev was referring to Istanbul-I. “After the neo-Nazis committed an act of terrorism in the Kursk region, everything has fallen into place. The idle chatter of unauthorized intermediaries on the topic of the beautiful world has been stopped. Now everyone understands everything, even if they don’t say it out loud. They understand that there will BE NO MORE NEGOTIATIONS UNTIL THE COMPLETE DEFEAT OF THE ENEMY! [Medvedev’s caps]”
Medvedev’s reference to the “idle chatter of unauthorized intermediaries” is to the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, whom Putin endorsed at the Kremlin on July 5 for the ill-concealed purpose of sending a message to presidential candidate Trump with whom Orban talked on July 10. For that story, click [9].
Days before his meeting with Orban, Putin had announced [10] his abandonment of the demilitarization, denazification objectives of the Special Military Operation in exchange for “the complete withdrawal of all Ukrainian troops from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and from the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions.”
This change of objective has not yet been acknowledged by the Kremlin media; it is opposed [11] by the Russian military and by the majority of Russian voters. “War is war — either we go to war or surrender” – is a popular slogan on Russian social media for Putin to stop restricting the General Staff.
“The problem for the Russians,” comments a military source, “is that they, especially the Kremlin, the Defense Ministry, and the Foreign Ministry have lost the propaganda war. This puts them in a bad spot as they need more than stopping, then pushing the Ukrainians back in Kursk, or a Donbass victory, in order to recover. They need to knock the Ukrainians out of the war. But on that Putin says one thing — he does another.”
The Ukrainian border crossing began between 5 and 5:30 in the morning of August 6.
The first reports from the Defense Ministry in Moscow were false. On the afternoon of August 7, Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, in a public briefing of the president and other officials, claimed [12]: “At 5.30 am on August 6, units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine numbering up to 1,000 people went on the offensive with the aim of capturing a section of the territory of the Sudzha District in the Kursk Region. The joint actions by the state border covering units together with border guards and reinforcement units, air strikes, missile forces, and artillery fire stopped the enemy’s advance into the territory in the Kursk direction…We will complete the operation by defeating the enemy and reaching the state border.”
This Ukraine force count was much too low; their advance was not stopped; the restoration of the state border has not been achieved after three weeks of fighting. Either Gerasimov knew much better and was lying to Putin for public propaganda; or else he didn’t know what the true situation was.
The General Staff’s misdirections were repeated by the only independent Russian media sources not directly under state control – the military bloggers, the best of whom are Boris Rozhin (Colonel Cassad) and Mikhail Zvinchuk (Rybar). Rozhin tried to downplay the attack through the first day, relying on Defense Ministry and region official releases. Rozhin’s first report appeared at 10:12 on the morning of August 6: [14] “The governor of the Kursk region reported an attempt by the enemy forces to break through on the territory of the region. The attack was carried out by limited forces and was repulsed. The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and the FSB did not allow the breakthrough of the enemy’s forces”. This was false.
Gerasimov’s report to Putin exposed himself, the General Staff, and the Defense Ministry to a round of allegations of incompetence and negligence which were published a week later by media under Kremlin control. These allegations [15] include a failure by Russian intelligence to detect the concentration of Ukrainian forces in advance of the border crossing, and a personal failure by Gerasimov to “ignore several warnings about a Ukrainian buildup near the Kursk border. ” An anonymously sourced report by a non-Russian reporter with a record of plagiarism and fabrication claims to be based on “hawks in the siloviki apparatus [who] don’t make it a secret that Gerasimov should be fired” and replaced, the reporter claimed, by a combination of the discredited General Sergei Surovikin and the head of the Federal Security Service, Alexander Bortnikov.
The campaign against Gerasimov also appears to be a defence of Putin’s advance knowledge and his operational orders to Gerasimov before August 6 [15]: “President Putin’s reaction to the Kursk invasion was visible in his body language. He was furious for the flagrant military/intel failure; for the obvious loss of face; and for the fact that this buries any possibility of rational dialogue about ending the war.”
Moscow sources explain these are Kremlin claims aimed at whitewashing Putin’s refusal to allow the General Staff to extend their operations into the Ukrainian Sumy region to break up the attack concentration in advance; and at concealing Putin’s purpose in preparing for the Istanbul-II negotiations. The sources also point out that the National Guard, the well-armed and highly mobile presidential force, has failed to appear in any role in the Kursk region, not even in defence of the predictable target of the Kurchatov nuclear power plant. The Guard commander, Victor Zolotov, Putin’s former bodyguard, did not appear in the Kremlin meetings on the Kursk operation until August 12, when he was at the bottom of the table on Putin’s right, sitting opposite Gerasimov; in the Kremlin record [7] Zolotov had nothing to say….
As the Russian analysts struggle to explain what has happened at Kursk, they have largely ignored the history illustrated in this chart and this map. In order to blame the regional administrations and scapegoat the governors, as the Kremlin has encouraged, the record of repeated requests to put the regions on a war footing in advance – not an anti-terrorism operation after the event – has been censored, along with the record of Putin’s temporizing, procrastination, and refusal. For Putin’s comparable form in responding to high-casualty coalmine accidents in Kemerovo region and to coke and steel plant pollution in Chelyabinsk, both of them caused by oligarch supporters of the president, click to read this [40] and this [41].
Because Martyanov is based in the US, he has used his military reports to imply political blame at the level of the civilian regional administrations. “The best equipped Ukrainian (practically all of it fresh NATO hardware) and motivated troops, and NATO generals who planned this catastrophe for them, covered part (about 11-12 kilometers) of what is called the security zone, which was not prepared (why, we will know in a due time–administration of Kursk Oblast has a lot to answer for)…”
The national politician closest to the war front has carefully reversed the scapegoating down the command line, and at the same time held the Kremlin to account for its insistence on the war as an anti-terrorist operation. This is Dmitri Rogozin [42] – at one time the civilian minister in charge of the military-industrial complex, a potential presidential successor, and currently senator for Zaporozhye . According to Rogozin as early as August 7 [43], “the transfer of responsibility for restoring order and legality in these territories to the National Anti-Terrorist Committee, which is headed by the FSB and which includes or involves all those who are necessary for the case, including the Ministry of Defense, is also a recognition of the fact that in the person of the Kiev regime we are dealing with terrorists, and not with the state. With all the consequences…”
By that last phrase Rogozin (right) meant that since the Kursk attack was a terrorist operation directed by terrorists in Kiev, the Russian anti- terrorist operation should extend to Kiev, Putin’s restrictive orders to the General Staff should be lifted, and the “terrorist regime” should be destroyed throughout the territory to the Polish, Romanian and Hungarian borders. “The situation in the world and in our country has changed radically, and these decisions are urgently needed.” Rogozin was addressing [43] Putin as the decision-maker.
“[Alexander] Syrsky is not a Ukrainian,” Rogozin said on August 11, referring to the Russian- born Ukrainian general staff chief. “He’s one of our traitors. Zelensky is also not a Ukrainian. He’s one of the Jewish traitors. They don’t feel sorry for Ukrainians. They’ll definitely throw them at us… Zelensky is threatening us with a series of terrorist attacks across the country, including the Urals, Siberia and the Far East. That’s how you should understand his words. If his threats are not military, but terrorist in nature, he positions himself as the leader of a state terrorist organization and is subject to liquidation. I hope that my logic is clear and obvious to those who should immediately make a decision to start planning an operation to eliminate Zelensky.”
This is as close as a national politician has come so far to reverse the logic of Putin’s proposals for Istanbul-II, and instead to empty the territory of its “terrorists” and their weapons to the full limits of the demilitarization and denazification goals of February 2022.
“Whoever is to blame on the Russian side for the invasion of Kursk,” comments [45]a military source, “this is officially now a tar baby for the Ukrainians. They can’t afford to stay but they can’t afford to leave either. They should thank their lucky stars for Putin. It not for him, they’d have no place to leave for or return to.”
Reversing the operational logic of the anti-terrorism operation has a domestic political corollary which Rozhin admitted ruefully on August 24. [46] “Many people are already talking about the need to use useful organizational solutions of the Stalinist period, especially in terms of mobilizing the country and society in war conditions, starting with the former de-stalinizer [Dmitri] Medvedev, who now scares the directors of defense factories with Stalin’s letters from the Second World War. The reason for this is simple — referring to the previous historical experience, in the 20th century, in terms of decisions in a difficult period for the country, there is no one to turn to except Stalin. Well, not to Gorbachev nor to Nicholas II.”
For “organizational solutions of the Stalinist period”, read the end of the Russian oligarchy.
An oligarch source in Moscow denies this. “The oligarchs are having the best time in the last two decades inside Russia,” the source says. “None of them wants to leave for the west and no one is asking Putin to make any compromise with the US. Everyone understands the money is not coming back; they have written off their London, their Sardinia properties. Their children are fine in the US and UK with their new nationalities, but they were not going to return anyway. So no, there is no real pressure from oligarchs on Putin for a war settlement. But everyone wants some sanctions softened.”
John Helmer discusses these issues with the hosts of The Duran here.