By Natylie Baldwin, Consortium News, 7/21/23

Geoffrey Roberts is an historian, biographer and political commentator. A renowned specialist in Russian and Soviet foreign and military policy and an expert on Stalin and the Second World War, his books have been translated into numerous languages. He is emeritus professor of history at University College Cork and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Natylie Baldwin: How did you become interested in the Soviet Union and Russia?

Geoffrey Roberts: Mainly, it was a political interest in the Soviet socialist system. As a teenager I was enthused by the Prague Spring and [Alexander] Dubcek’s vision of socialism with a human face. Together with others, I studied the Soviet system for lessons — positive and negative — that could inform the achievement and building of socialism in my own country and elsewhere in the world.

I studied international relations as an undergraduate and that led to specialization in Soviet foreign policy but I have always been interested in all aspects of Soviet history. People assume I’m a Russophile, which I’m not (though I do have many Russian friends) — only in recent years have I become more interested in pre-revolutionary Russian history.

Baldwin:  A big part of your specialty is Joseph Stalin as well as World War II. What made you focus on Stalin and what is the most interesting thing you learned about him?

Roberts: When I started studying Soviet history I wasn’t much interested in Stalin as an individual. I thought his Marxism was mechanistic, crude and dogmatic. I agreed with Nikita Khrushchev’s critique of his dictatorial rule at the 20^th Party Congress.

What interested me was not Stalin but “Stalinism” — the political, ideological and economic functioning of the Soviet system. In that regard, I was unconvinced by Khrushchev’s explanation of Stalinism as a function of the cult of Stalin’s personality. It seemed to me that the mass repressions of the 1930s and 1940s and the ongoing authoritarianism of the Soviet system — softer though it was after Stalin’s death — were the result of the collective failings and defects of the party and its ideology.

Nikita Khrushchev addressing the 20th CPSU Congress in the Kremlin, 1956. (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

When I started to research Soviet foreign relations, I focused on policy, and on personalities other than Stalin, such as his foreign commissar, Maxim Litvinov. Only when I began working in the Russian archives in the mid-1990s did my attention switch to Stalin. What those archives revealed to me was how pervasive, detailed and dominant was Stalin’s leadership and decision-making. Given the dictatorial nature of Stalin’s regime, that was not so surprising, but now I could follow its day-to-day operation. Above all, the archives showed that Stalin was a formidable administrator who was able to absorb and process huge amounts of information. His decision-making was often inefficient but invariably effective in achieving his key goals.

The Soviet system was created by Stalin and it endured for many decades after his death. It had many defects but, after a fashion, it worked, not least during the crucible of total war with Nazi Germany.

Baldwin:  One of your books is Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War.  After making profound errors of judgment in the runup to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which led to horrible losses in the first weeks, you detail how Stalin worked hard to learn from his mistakes and ultimately became — you argue — the most important military strategist of the war in terms of defeating the Germans. Can you discuss this aspect of Stalin as well as how the war affected the Soviet Union in general and why it still has resonance for Russia?

Roberts: Stalin remains a hugely popular historical figure in post-Soviet Russia and in many other parts of the former U.S.S.R., such as his native Georgia. His popularity rests on his perceived role in winning the Second World War.  In my book I argued that Stalin was indispensable to the Soviet war effort — it was his system and could only function effectively if he performed well — that without his warlord-ship Hitler and the Nazis might well have won. Somewhat provocatively, I claimed it was Stalin who saved the world for democracy, albeit at the expense of half of Europe being subordinated to his authoritarian rule.

When the war ended in 1945, Stalin was almost universally hailed as the key architect of the allied victory over Nazi Germany. Not until Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin in 1956 was that positive verdict seriously questioned. Central to Khrushchev’s critique of the dictator was the poor quality of Stalin’s military leadership. While some of Khrushchev’s criticisms were valid, others obscured the extent to which the mistakes of the early war years were a collective failure, including on the part of Khrushchev himself.

With access to Russian archives, I was able to re-evaluate Khrushchev’s critique and demonstrate that Stalin was a highly effective war leader — a leader who learnt from and corrected his mistakes.

World War II was the central event in Soviet history. At stake in the conflict was not only the survival of Soviet socialism but the continued existence of the multinational state the Bolsheviks had inherited from the Tsars.  Had Hitler won, European Russia would have become a German colony and what was left of the Soviet Union a fragmented, disintegrating state. That historical spectre has particular resonance at the present time when many Russians see their country as once again involved in an existential struggle for survival.

Baldwin: In a recent interview with Glenn Diesen and Alexander Mercouris, you said that Stalin committed the crimes he did largely due to his being such a true believer in his communist ideology and was very convinced of the rightness of his actions to further this ideology.  This fits in with an observation I’ve made over the years (and I’m sure I’m not the only one) that the most dangerous people are those who are the most self-righteous, whether it’s on behalf of a religion or political philosophy, because they can justify the use of any means or methods in pursuit of their righteous ends.  What do you think?  Do you think policymakers in Washington suffer from a similarly dangerous sense of self-righteousness regarding their exceptionalism?

Roberts: The most important thing to understand about Stalin is that he was an intellectual, driven by his Marxist ideas, a true believer in his communist ideology. And he didn’t just believe it, he felt it. Socialism was an emotional thing for Stalin.  His often-monstrous actions stemmed from his politics and ideology, not his personality.

Josef Stalin, 1949. (Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

But the mass violence and repression of the Stalin era is not the whole of the Soviet story. Soviet society embodied many laudable ideas and aspirations — egalitarianism, multiculturalism, internationalism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, above all the valorization of peace and peaceful co-existence between different peoples, systems and values. The U.S.S.R. inspired a great deal of idealism and popular support throughout its existence, notwithstanding the millions of innocent people who fell victim to Stalin’s fanatical determination to defend the Soviet system against its enemies.

I agree with you about the dangerous self-righteousness of Western policymakers. But what really worries me is that they lack Stalin’s sense of realism and pragmatism and his ability to grasp the reality beyond his own ideological preferences. Thankfully, the same is not true of President Vladimir Putin, himself a product of the Soviet system, and an inheritor of its tradition of adapting political ideology to the contingencies and exigencies of the real situation.

Baldwin:   Given your work in analyzing and attempting to understand Stalin as a political leader, military strategist and as an intellectual, I wouldn’t be surprised if you get accused of being a Stalin apologist.  If so, what is your response?

Roberts: No one who reads my work with any degree of care would give any credence to such an accusation.

As a historian my primary task is to understand and explain Stalin, not to condemn or justify him. I do that by striving to see the world through his eyes, which, admittedly, requires a high degree of empathy, but which is not to be confused with sympathy. As a colleague of mine, Mark Harrison, once said, there is no moral hazard in trying to understand Stalin and having gained greater understanding, you can condemn him even more if you want to. But let’s get the history right before rushing to judgement.

One or two reviewers of my latest book — Stalin’s Library — complained that by presenting him as an avid reader and as a serious intellectual, I whitewashed his dictatorship. All I can say is that they must not have noticed the book’s sub-title — A Dictator and His Books — or its first sentence — “this book explores the intellectual life and biography of one of history’s bloodiest dictators” — or the title of Chapter One — “Bloody Tyrant and Bookworm” — or, indeed, a whole section devoted to “Stalin’s Terror” — a topic on which I published yet another article about just recently.

Baldwin: I want to shift gears to current events.  You’ve done a remarkable job documenting exactly how events must have looked to Putin in the leadup to February of 2022, including Putin’s numerous public comments about the growing dangers of NATO expansion, de facto NATO membership for Ukraine, and the possible stationing of offensive missiles in Ukraine.

One of the things I really wanted to hash out with you regards an indirect sort of debate you had recently with Ray McGovern over whether Putin had other options he could have pursued instead of invading Ukraine in February 2022.  McGovern tends to agree with John Mearsheimer that Putin did not have any other realistic options to defend Russian security interests.  You wrote in response that you think this was a war of choice and not necessity by Putin. 

At the time Putin invaded, I believed Putin did have other options such as those outlined by Russia expert Patrick Armstrong in his article of December 2021. Those options included positioning nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad and Belarus to show resolve in defending Russia against NATO-aligned mischief, and/or economic measures that would punish NATO-aligned nations, among other things. 

In retrospect, I don’t think any of these alternative measures would have worked. We’ve seen how the U.S. and virtually all of Europe has gone along with policies that have hurt their own interests both economically and in terms of security, particularly Europe.  We’ve also seen how the West is willing to escalate this conflict. I hate this war as much as anyone, but I also have to be honest at this point — it now seems implausible that Putin stopping gas deliveries to Europe or stationing nukes in Belarus or trying to appeal more to Europe would have deterred Washington/NATO in any meaningful way. 

Also, [former Ukraine President Petro] Poroshenko, [former German Chancellor Angela] Merkel and [former French President Francois] Hollande have all since admitted that they had essentially taken Russia for a ride with the Minsk Agreements which they used as a cover to build up Ukraine’s military. 

[Related: SCOTT RITTER: Merkel Reveals West’s Duplicity and PATRICK LAWRENCE: Germany & the Lies of Empire]

It seems like some in the West wanted this conflict or at the very least they didn’t have a problem once it started given their rejection of several attempts at negotiating an end to it.  Can you give some concrete options that Putin had that were realistic at all, given what he was dealing with from the West?  And please feel free to respond to any part of what I just laid out.

October 2015 in Paris; seated at table from left: Germany’s Angela Merkel, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Ukraine’s Petro Poroshenko and France’s Francois Holland during Normandy format talks to resolve the conflict in eastern Ukraine. (Kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

Roberts: My agreement with Ray McGovern and John Mearsheimer is far greater than any particular differences of interpretation.

The most important point about the Russia-Ukraine war is that it was the most avoidable war in history. It could have been avoided by Ukraine implementing the Minsk agreements. It could have been avoided by NATO halting its build-up of Ukraine’s armed forces. It could have been avoided by a positive U.S. response to Putin’s common security proposals of December 2021. Putin pulled the trigger but it was Ukraine and the West that loaded the gun.

[Related: The War in Ukraine Was Provoked and John Pilger: War in Europe & the Rise of Raw Propaganda and Ukraine Crisis Should Have Been Avoided]

When the West stonewalled his security proposals, Putin had a choice — continue with what I call his militarised diplomacy, or take military action to force acceptance of his demands. He chose war because diplomacy didn’t seem to be working and because he thought it was better to fight now rather than later — hence my characterisation of the invasion decision as a choice for preventative war.

I disagreed with his decision for three reasons: (1) notwithstanding Ukraine’s progressive military build-up, a dire existential threat to Russia was emergent rather than imminent; (2) the chance of diplomacy succeeding was slim but not non-existent; and (3) going to war was an enormously dangerous and destructive step to take, not just for Russia and Ukraine but for Europe and the rest of the world.

In retrospect, it seems clear that Putin’s decision for war was also based on a series of miscalculations. He over-estimated the power and efficacy of his armed forces, under-estimated Ukraine’s fighting ability, and, crucially, did not anticipate the determination and recklessness of the Western proxy war on Russia.

Had the Istanbul peace negotiations succeeded and war come to an end in spring 2022, those who argue Putin’s decision for war was right at the time he took it, would have a much stronger case to argue. But the prolonged nature of the war, the extent of its death and devastation, the real and continuing threat of nuclear catastrophe, and the prospect of an endless conflict, leave me unconvinced that it was the right thing to do.

It is highly likely Russia will in due course secure a decisive military advantage that will enable Putin to credibly claim victory. But it remains to be seen whether or not what Russia gains will have been worth the cost it will have paid.

Baldwin: Why do you think European leaders refuse to stand up to Washington’s reckless actions in terms of scuttling negotiations to end this war much earlier and continuing to escalate the conflict using a frog-in-boiling-water approach?  European leaders must know that if this conflict continues to escalate, they will be potential targets.

Roberts: It’s mind-boggling! Presumably, they feel the Russian threat is so great and their dependence on U.S. protection so deep, that these are risks worth taking. But I hope the scales will fall from their eyes and they will see that the Ukrainians are fighting a losing war of attrition that may end in complete catastrophe for their country.

To be fair, there are realist and pragmatic politicians in all European countries who desire a ceasefire and are prepared to negotiate a compromise peace with Russia. I’m sure their voices will become louder and more persistent in the coming months.

Baldwin:  In a similar vein, a recent survey of European opinion revealed that, though they currently view Russia as a rival, once the war ends most European citizens want to reconcile and partner with Russia.  It seems that regular Europeans realize that you can’t change geography and that Russia is a European neighbor and a modus vivendi must somehow be reached.  When do you think the leaders of Europe might catch up to this realization?

Roberts: The commonsense of the European public is right. There can be no peace and prosperity in Europe without a partnership with Russia. None of the world’s most pressing problems can be resolved without Russian participation.

The sooner this war ends the better it will be for Europe, for Russia and, above all, for Ukraine.

Natylie Baldwin is the author of The View from Moscow: Understanding Russia and U.S.-Russia Relations. Her writing has appeared in various publications including The Grayzone, Antiwar.com, Covert Action Magazine, RT, OpEd News, The Globe Post, The New York Journal of Books and Dissident Voice.

Views expressed in this interview may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

By Jonathan Cook, Middle East Eye, 7/14/23

Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net

The Nato summit in Lithuania [last] week served only to underscore the utter hypocrisy of western leaders in pursuing their proxy war in Ukraine to “weaken” Russia and oust its president, Vladimir Putin.

Both the US and Germany had made clear before the summit that they would block Ukraine’s admission to Nato while it was in the midst of a war with Russia. That message was formally announced by Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Tuesday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky fumed that Nato had reached an “absurd” decision and was demonstrating “weakness”. British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace lost no time in rebuking him for a lack of “gratitude”.

The concern is that, if Kyiv joins the military alliance at this stage, Nato members will be required to leap to Ukraine’s defence and fight Russia directly. Most western states balk at the notion of a face-to-face confrontation with a nuclear-armed Russia – rather than the current proxy one, paid for exclusively in Ukrainian blood. 

But there is a more duplicitous subtext being obscured: the fact that Nato is responsible for sustaining the war it now cites as grounds for disqualifying Ukraine from joining the military alliance. Nato got Kyiv into its current, bloody mess – but isn’t ready to help it find a way out.

It was Nato, after all, that chose to flirt openly with Ukraine from 2008 onwards, promising it eventual membership – with the undisguised hope that one day, the alliance would be able to flex its military muscles menacingly on Russia’s doorstep.

It was the UK that intervened weeks after Russia’s invasion in February 2022, and presumably on Washington’s orders, to scupper negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow – talks that could have ended the war at an early stage, before Russia began seizing territories in eastern Ukraine.

The message Nato has sent Moscow is that Russia made exactly the right decision to invade

A deal then would have been much simpler than one now. Most likely, it would have required Kyiv to commit to neutrality, rather than pursuing covert integration into Nato. Moscow would have demanded, too, an end to the Ukrainian government’s political, legal and military attacks on its Russian-speaking populations in the east.

Now the chief sticking point to an agreement will be persuading the Kremlin to trust the West and reverse its annexation of eastern Ukraine, assuming Nato ever allows Kyiv to re-engage in talks with Russia.

And finally, it is Nato members, especially the US, that have been shipping out vast quantities of military hardware to prolong the fighting in Ukraine – keeping the death toll mounting on both sides.

Damp squib

In short, Nato is now using the very war it has done everything to fuel as a pretext to stop Ukraine from joining the alliance.

Seen another way, the message Nato has sent Moscow is that Russia made exactly the right decision to invade – if the goal, as Putin has always maintained, is to ensure Kyiv remains neutral.

It is the war that has prevented Ukraine from being completely enfolded in the western military alliance. It is the war that has stopped Ukraine’s transformation into a Nato forward base, one where the West could station nuclear-tipped missiles minutes from Moscow.

Had Russia not invaded, Kyiv would have been free to accelerate what it was already doing secretly: integrating into Nato. So what is Zelensky supposed to conclude from his exclusion from Nato, after he committed his country to an ongoing war rather than negotiations and neutrality?

So far, Ukraine’s much-vaunted “spring counter-offensive” has turned into a damp squib, despite western media spin about “slow progress”. Moscow is holding on to the Ukrainian territories it annexed.

So long as Kyiv can’t “win the war” – and it seems it can’t, unless Nato is willing to fight Russia directly and risk a nuclear confrontation – it will be precluded from the military alliance. Catch-22.

Do not expect this conundrum to be highlighted by a western establishment media that seems incapable of doing anything other than regurgitating Nato press releases and cheering on bigger profits for the West’s war industries.

War crimes

Another such conundrum is the Biden administration’s decision last week to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions – small bomblets that, when they fail to explode, lie concealed like mini-landmines, killing and maiming civilians for decades. In some cases, as many as a third are “duds”, detonating weeks, months or years later.

Washington’s move follows Britain recently supplying Ukraine with depleted uranium shells, which contaminate surrounding areas with a radioactive dust during and after fighting. Evidence from areas such as Iraq, where the US and Britain fired large numbers of these shells, suggests the fallout can include a decades-long spike in cancer and birth defects.

The White House was all too ready to denounce the use of cluster bombs as a war crime last year – when it was Russia that stood accused of using them. Now it is Washington enabling Kyiv to commit those very same war crimes.

More than 110 states – not including the US, of course – have ratified a 2008 international convention outlawing cluster munitions. Many are in Nato.

Given the high “dud” rate of US cluster bombs, President Joe Biden appears to be breaking US law in shipping stocks to Ukraine. The White House can invoke an exemption only if exporting such weapons satisfies a “vital US national security interest”. Apparently, Biden believes “weakening” Russia – and turning parts of Ukraine into a death zone for civilians for decades to come – qualifies as just such a vital interest.

Desperate stop gap

While the official story is that this latest escalatory move by the US will help Kyiv “win the war”, the truth is rather different. Biden has not shied away from admitting that Ukraine – and Nato – are running out of conventional arms to fight Russia. This is a desperate stop-gap measure.

While most Nato members might be signatories to the convention on banning cluster munitions, they appear more than willing to turn a blind eye to Washington’s decision. Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who signed the convention in his earlier role as foreign minister, said this week that Berlin should not block the US shipment because to do so “would be the end of Ukraine”.

Every day such talks are delayed, Ukraine loses more of its fighting men, and potentially more of its territory

In other words, the resort to cluster munitions is an admission that it is Kyiv and its Nato partners – not Moscow – that have been weakened militarily by the war.

Once again, a supposedly “humanitarian war” by the West – remember Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria – is becoming the opposite. Like every previous weapon delivered to Ukraine, the cluster bombs are being supplied to postpone the inevitable: the need for Kyiv to engage in talks with Moscow to end the fighting.

And every day such talks are delayed, Ukraine loses more of its fighting men, and potentially more of its territory.

Horrors of cluster bombs

It is not as though Washington or the rest of Nato are unaware of the effects of using cluster bombs. The US is estimated to have dropped 270 million of them on Laos during its “secret war” on that country more than half a century ago. Up to 80 million of them did not detonate.

Since the bombing ended in 1973, at least 25,000 people – 40 percent of them children – are reported to have been killed or injured by these small landmines littered across Laos’s territory.

More recently, the US used cluster munitions in its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Hun Sen, the prime minister of Cambodia, which was bombed alongside Laos by the US during the Vietnam War, reminded the world this week of the horrors in store. He noted that, half a century on, Cambodia had still not found a way to destroy all the explosives: “The real victims will be Ukrainians,” he said.

But that warning is likely to fall on deaf ears in Ukraine. Zelensky, a leader who has been all but beatified by the western media, is no stranger to the use of cluster bombs. Though journalists prefer to mention their use by Russia only, human rights groups have documented Kyiv’s firing of cluster munitions on its own population in eastern Ukraine since 2014.

The need to protect Russian-speaking communities in eastern Ukraine from their own government – and from Ukrainian ultra-nationalists in the Ukrainian military – was one of the main reasons given by Moscow for launching its invasion. The New York Times reported Kyiv using cluster bombs last year on a small Ukrainian village in the country’s east.

According to an investigation by Human Rights Watch, Ukrainian forces also fired cluster munitions on the Ukrainian town of Izium last year, killing at least eight civilians and wounding 15 others.

Given this history, Washington would be foolish to take at face value reassurances from the Zelensky government that US supplies of cluster bombs will be fired only on Russian troops. All the evidence indicates that they will likely be used on civilian areas in eastern Ukraine too.

Double standard

Publicly, European leaders are trying to salve their consciences by implying that there are exceptional justifications for providing cluster munitions to Kyiv. The bomblets are supposedly essential if Ukraine is to defend its territory against Russian aggression and occupation.

But if that is really Nato’s yardstick, then there is another exceptional, oppressed state in no less need of such munitions: Palestine.

Like Ukraine, the Palestinians have had their territory seized by an implacable foe. And like Ukraine, the Palestinians face continuous military attacks by an occupying army.

Occupation forces always end up committing war crimes, as Russia’s have. The United Nations accuses the Russian army of rapes, killings and torture, and attacks on civilian infrastructure.

The commission of war crimes is inherent in the task of invading another people’s sovereign territory and subduing the local population, as the US and UK proved in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Undoubtedly, both Israel and Russia’s actions are causing untold suffering. But where there are differences, they reflect worse on Israel than Russia.

Is anyone in Nato considering supplying cluster munitions to the Palestinians to defend themselves?

Israel’s occupation has lasted many decades longer than Russia’s, and it has throughout those years continued to commit war crimes, including creating hundreds of illegal, armed settlements exclusively for Jews on Palestinian land.

Further, there was an existing civil war in Ukraine that had killed more than 14,000 Ukrainians before Russia invaded. At least a proportion of Ukrainians – largely its ethnic Russian population in the east – welcomed Moscow’s intervention, at least initially. It would be hard to find a Palestinian who wants Israel or its settlers occupying their land.

Is anyone in Nato considering supplying cluster munitions to the Palestinians to defend themselves? Would Nato endorse Palestinians firing cluster bombs at Israeli military bases or at militarised settlements in the occupied West Bank?

And would Nato accept Palestinian reassurances that such munitions would not be fired into Israel, just as it has accepted Ukrainian assurances that they won’t be fired into Russia?

These questions answer themselves. In the case of the Palestinians, western states don’t just apply a double standard. They even echo Israel in condemning Palestinian conventional attacks on Israeli forces.

Dangerous delusions

But the hypocrisies do not end there. Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s hawkish foreign minister, wrote in the Guardian last week that her country had made a mistake in pursuing a policy of what she called “chequebook diplomacy”.

Berlin, she added, had naively believed that political and economic interaction with the West would “sway the Russian regime toward democracy”. Instead, she concluded that “Putin’s Russia will remain a threat to peace and security on our continent and that we have to organise our security against Putin’s Russia, not with it.”

Europe’s path forward, Baerbock suggests, is limited to either a forever war against Russia or imposing regime change on the Kremlin. All of this is dangerous nonsense. The fact that self-serving, delusional analysis of this kind is echoed so uncritically by western media should be a stain on its reputation.

Baerbock implies that it was Moscow that rebuffed “our efforts to construct a European security architecture with Russia”. But Russia was never offered a meaningful place within Europe’s security umbrella after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That contrasts strongly with West Germany’s treatment after the Second World War. With the Nazi regime barely gone, Germany received massive US aid via the Marshall Plan to rebuild its economy and infrastructure, and it was soon embraced by Nato as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was handled very differently. It was not viewed as an opportunity to bring Russia into the fold.

Instead, the US and its western allies denied Russia both a proper aid plan and the cancellation of Soviet-era debts. The West preferred to prop up a weak president, Boris Yeltsin, insisting he commit to “shock therapy” privatisation that left the Russian economy open to asset-stripping by a new class of oligarchs.

Nefarious ambitions

While Russia was being hollowed out economically, Washington hurried to isolate its historic rival militarily and bring former Soviet states into the US “sphere of influence” via Nato. Successive US administrations developed and zealously pursued a hubristic foreign policy known as “full-spectrum global dominance” against its main great-power rivals, Russia and China.

Putin’s popularity among Russians grew the more he posed – often only rhetorically – as the strongman who would stop Nato’s expansion to Russia’s borders.

Contrary to Baerbock’s suggestions, Moscow wasn’t wooed by a Nato “chequebook”. It was gradually and systematically cornered. It was turned, bit by bit, into a pariah.

This isn’t the assessment simply of “Putin apologists”. Nato’s strategy was understood and warned against in real time by some of the biggest figures in US foreign policy-making – from George Kennan, the father of US Cold War policy, to William Burns, the current CIA director. 

In 2007, as US ambassador to Moscow, Burns wrote a diplomatic cable – later revealed by Wikileaks – arguing that “Nato enlargement and U.S. missile defense deployments in Europe play to the classic Russian fear of encirclement”. Months later, Burns warned that offering Ukraine Nato membership would place Moscow in an “unthinkable” predicament.

Washington simply ignored these endless warnings from its own officials, because maintaining peace and stability in Europe was not its goal. Permanently isolating and “weakening” Russia was.

The Biden administration understands it is playing with fire. Last year, in a remark most likely unscripted, the president himself invoked the danger of Russia, faced with a defeat in Ukraine it viewed in existential terms, unleashing a nuclear “Armageddon”.

Tragically, Nato’s malevolence, deceit and betrayal means that the only alternative to Armageddon may be Ukraine’s downfall – and with it, the crushing of Washington’s nefarious ambitions to advance full-spectrum global dominance.

By Riley Waggaman, Substack, 7/13/23

Is the Russian government downplaying the socioeconomic hardships of its proles?

This is the incendiary claim put forward by State Duma Deputy Sergei Mironov, the leader of the sometimes surprisingly uppity (but mostly pro-Uniparty) political faction A Just Russia For Truth. According to Mr. Mironov, Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) has employed creative methods to “fix” the number of impoverished Russians at 9 million people—apparently forever.

Mironov wrote on his Telegram channel on Tuesday:

A huge number of people live in debt from paycheck to paycheck, take loans for the most necessary things. And then they save on the most necessary things, so that they can pay their debts on time—only so collectors do not come to torment them. But according to the reports, the bankers and financiers from the Government are performing well—the number of poor people is stable at 9 million, and the incomes of citizens are allegedly growing! This is a typical fraud and manipulation of statistics.

Harsh, bro.

Before I type another word I want to make it very clear that as an American I fully understand that the United States of Hamburgers is a cesspool of unconscionable poverty, and this blog post is in no way an attempt to portray Russia’s socioeconomic ailments as uniquely upsetting. That being said, Russia’s socioeconomic maladies are quite bad, and I would argue that just like in the United States, it’s very difficult to understand why poverty should exist at all in Russia—a country that, objectively, should be the wealthiest place on planet Earth. Well, there are many wealthy people with Russian passports, but for some weird reason their vast wealth never “trickles down” to the proles….

Your humble Moravia correspondent grew up in Santa Monica, California, which at least in his youth was the homeless capital of the United States, while also being a hub for very rich people with extremely fancy wives and condos and automobiles.

On my list of constructive criticisms of the United States of America, the country’s truly appalling wealth inequality, and its demonic mistreatment of those suffering from severe mental distress and/or substance abuse (anyone who falls through the cracks is treated like a 9th columnist rat), would have to be near the top.

I remember as a young Hobbit, full of piss and vinegar, waltzing down Montana Avenue as I tried to understand why Santa Monica’s fetishized beachside streets were peppered with homeless people in clear anguish. My mother once told me that many of these hurting souls were veterans with severe PTSD who were kicked to the curb after famous California governor-turned-Nicaraguan-cocaine-trafficker Ronald Reagan shuttered the state’s psychiatric wards. I don’t know if this is true, but it’s what I tell people when they ask me about Santa Monica, so let’s say it’s true.

A bit of a detour but I thought it was important to explain my feelings on this subject.

Back to Mironov. The Russian lawmaker warned the government in his Telegram rant that “the poverty of the population directly leads to its extinction,” and described the fight against poverty as “the second urgent task after the victory in the special military operation [in Ukraine].” Yikes.

Using Rosstat’s statistics, the number of poor Russians in the first quarter of 2023 decreased by 1.3 million, to 19.6 million people, compared to the first quarter of 2022. The poverty line is currently defined as households that bring in less than 14,000 rubles per month ($155 USD).

Mironov has been expressing his displeasure with these official statistics for a very long time. As Nakaunue reported on June 9 (“Mironov does not believe in poverty reduction according to Rosstat”):

Mironov is confident that another “victory” over poverty has been won exclusively on the “fronts of statistics.” Since 2021, Rosstat has been applying a new methodology for calculating poverty, as a result of which it is seasonal. In addition, it is estimated according to an obviously underestimated indicator—the “poverty line”.

“For the whole of last year, [the poverty line] was 13,545 rubles, in the first quarter of this year—14,026 rubles. If a person earns 14,027 rubles, he is no longer considered poor, which distorts the picture of poverty in the country. And the Government can use the data of the subordinate Rosstat for positive reports,” Mironov wrote.

According to the calculations of his faction, at the end of 2019 the real size of the consumer basket exceeded 31 thousand. This is the real poverty line, but the Government does not need such statistics.

Mironov’s displeasure with the “official” poverty statistics is nothing new, actually. He was making similar comments exactly one year ago:

“It turns out that people’s incomes are constantly falling, while the number of the poor is declining. What kind of miracles are these?! This socioeconomic phenomenon can only be explained by the ardent desire of Rosstat to show pleasant numbers, and the achievements of the agency’s bosses from the Ministry of Economy,” Mironov wrote.

According to the Rosstat report, in the third quarter of 2022, the poverty line was 13,688 rubles.

“Try to live on less than 14,000 rubles! It’s not even poverty anymore, swindlers, but real poverty, in which more than 15 million of our fellow citizens live!” Mironov said. […]

When determining the poverty level, Rosstat uses the “poverty line” parameter introduced by Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation No. 2049 dated November 26, 2021. It corresponds to the value of the consumer basket in the fourth quarter of 2020, taking into account inflation.

Mironov is sure that its composition is “long and hopelessly outdated,” but Rosstat is interested in such a beggarly consumer basket, because the smaller it is, the fewer the poor.

Look: I’m not going to act as if everything Mironov is saying is 100% true, but he’s clearly tapping into deep populist sentiment, which is almost certainly based on some kind of Truth. And as far as I can tell, many Russians are not convinced that “everything is going according to plan” with the economy (however, it’s important to acknowledge that after 10,000+ sanctions, things could be a lot worse).

I am basing this analysis on anecdotal evidence—including “off-the-record” conversations with some Russians I know in the Regions.

But, for example, here is a recent thread on popular internet forum Yaplakal, celebrating the Russian economy’s various positive indicators:

The top comment:

Again, I can’t confirm or deny that the Russian government is fudging its poverty statistics. All I can say is that Moscow has a long, proud tradition of manipulating numbers for its benefit.

My favorite recent example of this compulsive habit is when Putin issued his famous “May Decrees” in 2012. One of these orders stated that by 2018, Russia should record a significant reduction in mortality from diseases of the circulatory system, the country’s top killer.

Here’s what actually happened:

Regretfully, the initiative’s overwhelming success was soon besmirched by the federally-funded Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). The institute released a report in February 2018 which stated that it was “necessary to analyze the correctness of statistical information coming from the regions and conduct a detailed analysis of mortality rates.” The document also called for greater accountability for officials who provide “false reports on the causes of death.”

Eventually, the obviousness of the scam became undeniable. In December 2018, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova ordered regional governors to provide “a full justification” after it was determined that mortality from certain causes of death had been “underestimated.” 

The health ministry, which had readily rubber-stamped the problematic figures, absolved itself of wrongdoing and said any issues with the data should be taken up with Rosstat, Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service. Despite its denials, Skvortsova’s ministry allegedly played an active role in the odious scheme, and even retroactively changed its mortality targets to better fit the fraudulent statistics to predetermined benchmarks. 

The official acknowledgment of the scam created a sticky situation for the Russian government: who was to blame for all this nasty data manipulation? On October 14, 2019, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev publicly accused the country’s regional governors of cooking their books.

“This is a lie in the truest sense of the word,” Medvedev said in October 2019, referring to Russia’s phony mortality rates. 

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/hrfjAsOe9ZE?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

So basically nothing has changed.

Just to be very clear: I think it’s very disingenuous of the Collective West to wet its diapers with crocodile tears about the sufferings of the Russian people, when Western sanctions do very little to inconvenience Russia’s Western-linked kleptocratic ruling elite, while making things needlessly annoying for proles who did absolutely nothing wrong.

But Moscow is almost certainly cooking its poverty books.

The End.

This video was recorded on July 18, 2023. Link here.

By Seymour Hersh, Substack, 7/13/23

This article is behind a paywall, but it covers several issues as relayed to Hersh through his intelligence and government contacts. With respect to Turkey’s Erdogan lifting his opposition to NATO membership for Sweden, it was not mainly the promise of F-16’s from the US military, but according to Hersh:

I have been told a different, secret story about Erdogan’s turnabout: Biden promised that a much-needed $11-13 billion line of credit would be extended to Turkey by the International Monetary Fund. “Biden had to have a victory and Turkey is in acute financial stress,” an official with direct knowledge of the transaction told me. Turkey lost 100,000 people in the earthquake last February, and has four million buildings to rebuild. “What could be better than Erdogan”—under Biden’s tutelage, the official asked, “finally having seen the light and realizing he is better off with NATO and Western Europe?” Reporters were told, according to the New York Times, that Biden called Erdogan while flying to Europe on Sunday. Biden’s coup, the Times reported, would enable him to say that Putin got “exactly what he did not want: an expanded, more direct NATO alliance.” There was no mention of bribery.

A June analysis by Brad W. Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations, “Turkey’s Increasing Balance Sheet Risks,” said it all in the first two sentences—Erdogan won re-election and “now has to find a way to avoid what appears to be an imminent financial crisis.” The critical fact, Setser writes, is that Turkey “is on the edge of truly running out of usable foreign exchange reserves—and facing a choice between selling its gold, an avoidable default, or swallowing the bitter pill of a complete policy reversal and possibly an IMF program.” 

Another key element of the complicated economic issues facing Turkey is that Turkey’s banks have lent so much money to the nation’s central bank that “they cannot honor their domestic dollar deposits, should Turks ever ask for the funds back.” The irony for Russia, and a reason for much anger in the Kremlin, Setser notes, is the rumor that Putin has been providing Russian gas to Erdogan on credit, and not demanding that the state gas importer pay up. Putin’s largesse has been flowing as Ergodan has been selling drones to Ukraine for use in its war against Russia. Turkey has also permitted Ukraine to ship its crops through the Black Sea.

One of Hersh’s sources with access to relevant intelligence has told him that, despite what the Washington Post and NYT have been reporting, there is no evidence that the Prigozhin debacle of a few weeks ago has weakened Putin but just the opposite: “Putin emerged stronger than ever after the Prigozhin implosion, which led to the absorption of many of his mercenaries into the Russian army.”

With respect to the sending of the controversial cluster munitions to Ukraine, an administration official admitted that these are only now being sent because “that’s all we got left in the cupboard.” Interestingly, this official also told Hersh that claims being made that Russia has used them already during this war is a false attempt to cover up a morally questionable move by the US that will have no effect on the direction of the war: “the administration claims that the Russians have used them first in the war, which is just a lie.”

Finally, there are insider statements to Hersh that Victoria Nuland will not be Wendy Sherman’s replacement as Deputy Secretary of State and CIA director William Burns is seen among his colleagues in the government as an opportunist rather than a principled diplomat or intelligence agent.

Full article available to subscribers here.