By Andrew Cockburn, Substack, 9/12/24

Though they may be happy to ignore Palestinian-American voters’ pleas for a halt to U.S. support for Israeli butchery in Gaza, the Harris-Walz campaign is only too happy to go full cold war for the sake of Polish-American and Ukrainian-American votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Politico National Security reports that a Democratic dark money operation, America’s Future Majority Fund super PAC,  is about to blanket the Keystone State with a full-throated ad campaign invoking Reagan’s and Kennedy’s stand against “communist dictators” and pledging that Harris “will stand up to Putin, protect our allies and keep us safe.”  There’s even a brief shot of Joseph Stalin to remind us how wicked the Russians are. Trump, naturally, features as Putin’s ally…

Andrew Cockburn’s Substack page is here.

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 9/22/24

I havent seen anything very substantial since my morning post on “Ukrainian” attacks on Russian ammunition depots, other than Dima’s midday report (California time of Sunday, September 22). There may now have been four such attacks in recent days. While the sites were big, and the damage apparently extensive, there are thousands of ammunition depots throughout Russia.

Dima continues to confirm that these attacks have involved cruise missiles which, if true, of course implicates NATO, providing evidence of direct NATO involvement. Since there has been no official Washington permission for this, it is hardly surprising that Washington is not saying anything, and I suspect that Russia at this time is too embarrassed or uncertain as to how it wants to proceed to make any formal pronouncement either. Dima implies that Russia is waiting for Washington to “officially” give the green light for the use of such weapons before Russia responds, but I think this is absurd unless Russia simply wants an excuse not to have to respond to this escalation right away.

Of course it is still theoretically possible that Ukraine has all of a sudden come up with some miracle drone that does as much damage as a cruise missile, just at the very same moment as Washington has appeared to go quiet on the subject of allowing the use of Western long-range missiles on targets deep in Russia.

Perhaps things will be clearer once Zelenskiy arrives in New York, which I believe he will have done by tomorrow, September 23.

Of course, attacks on Russian ammo depots is not a new phenemonon in this war. They have been ongoing. What is surprising right now is the size of the depots involved, their long distance from the front lines, and the scale of the damage that they have inflicted. Up until now attacks on ammo depots have seemed of relatively slighmt significance, and it was not unreasonable to attribute the damage that was caused to drones, except for some attacks by cruise missiles on depots in Crimea. Up until now use of Western long-range missiles on targets in Crimea has been considered “permissible,” given that for the West and for Ukraine, Crimea has been considered Ukrainian territory illegally seized by Russia in 2014 but which Russia says asked to join the Russian Federation for protection against the illegal, anti-Russian Kiev regime that came to power following the US-instigated, violent and unrepresentative coup that year in Kiev.

Dima also appears to be the only source I have seen today who is reporting the failure of a Russian test of its R5-28 “Sarmat” nuclear-capable missile, following the recent Russian confirmation that it was re-initiating such tests. The rocket exploded in or before take-off from a mine, destroying the test site, leaving a huge crater. The most recent comparable test took place on April 20, 2022. There have been four failed tests of the Sarmat to date, at least, according to Dima, and one success.

The Sarmat is nuclear capable, but can also carry Avantgard warheads. These are not nuclear but their explosive force is equivalent to 18 tons of TNT. By comparison, the hypersonic Kinzhal missile, when it is not fitted with a nuclear warhead, can carry a non-nuclear warhead with the impact equivalent to just one ton of TNT. That, at least, is as much as I could understand of Dima’s report today.

Dima suggests that Russia’s response to Western use of long-range missiles on Russian targets will take the form of the use of Avantgards but he does not explain how Russia intends to do this if Avantgards can only be deployed from Sarmat launchers that have only a one in five success rate. Once again, I shall be looking out for more reliable data on this matter.

In Kursk, which is of considerable importance to Western and Ukrainian narratives of the war’s progress, Russia continues to push back on previous Ukrainian successes south east of Snagost, and some of the fiercest clashes are in the forested areas close to Lyubimovka (recently recovered by Russia, according to some reports) and Tolstyi Lug. Further to the east, there are still fierce clashes in the highly contested area of Martynovka. Ukraine’s cross-border raid on Veseloye, well to the west, appears to have been repelled, but there are continuing clashes to the north near Glushkovo.

Otherwise, Dima’s most recent reports are of Russian advances in Zapporizhzhia in the territory north of the Russian-held settlements of Preschystivka and Pavlivka, from which Russian forces have been establishing a semi-encirclement of Vuhledar, while to the east Russian forces are moving from their recent acquisition of Vodiane towards Bohoiavlenka to the northwest, completing another part of the circle around Vuhledar. Bohoiavlenka would be the natural destination, otherwise, of Ukrainian forces abandoning Vuhledar.

Further north, west of Marinka and Krasnohorivka – both now under Russian control – Russian forces are moving from Hostre towards Ostrivske and the Kurakhove reservoir. They will soon likely take Maksymilianivka on this route. Moving up towards Pokrovsk, Russia is recovering positions in the south and southeast of Selydove, and appear to have taken the coalmine and Ukrainian stronghold in that area. Russia has control over most of Novohrodivka, as well as over Mykolaivka and Krasnyi Yar to the north. Further north still, Russian forces are moving from Niu-York, which they have recently taken, towards Leonidivka, and they control 70% of the Toretsk agglomeration.

Russia continues to consolidate control over all territory east of the Kanal, north and south of Chasiv Yar. Otherwise, the main recent developments have been in Kupyansk where Russian forces gradually edge towards to the Oskil river in a number of different locations, with a view to dividing up the oblast into three sections.

Russia Matters, 9/23/24

1. The editorial boards of several Western publications, including BG, WP and The Economist, have called on Joe Biden to allow the Ukrainian armed forces to use longer-range Western-supplied missiles, such as Storm Shadows, for strikes inside Russia’s officially recognized borders. The calls were published ahead of Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to the U.S., which began on Sept. 23. Later this week, Zelenskyy intends to hold separate meetings with Biden, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump to promote his “victory plan,” in which the approval of long-range missile use is a key part, according to the Ukrainian leader.Zelenskyy has refused to disclose the plan in its entirety so far; however, the Ukrainian leader did share that “most of the decisions on the plan depend” on Biden, and that these decisions need to be made in October to December, according to Ukrainska Pravda.
2. Should strikes into Russia by Storm Shadows and ATACMs take place, Moscow’s potential response is likely be directed in the first instance against Great Britain, not America, but it would not involve the use of nuclear weapons, according to Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute. One response would be to shoot down British military aircraft operating close to Russian airspace; another would be to destroy British intelligence satellites; yet another one would be to provide Hezbollah and the Houthis with both missiles and the satellite technology to launch much more effective strikes on Israel and Western shipping, Lieven wrote in Unherd.

By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 9/20/24

On March 7, 2022, two weeks after Moscow entered the civil war in Ukraine, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CBS News from Moldova that the U.S. would give NATO-member Poland a “green light” to send Mig-29 fighter jets to Ukraine to enforce a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft. 

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer then also backed the no-fly zone. But within days the Pentagon shot down the idea as it engaged in a consequential battle with the State Department and members of Congress to prevent a direct NATO military confrontation with Russia that could unleash history’s most unimaginable horrors.

A no-fly zone “could result in significant Russian reaction that might increase the prospects of a military escalation with NATO,” according to then Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. 

President Joe Biden was caught in the middle of the fray. Pressure on the White House from some members of Congress and the press corps was unrelenting to recklessly bring NATO directly into the war.

Biden ultimately sided with the Defense Department, and he couldn’t be more explicit why. He opposed a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine fighting Russian aircraft, he said, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin  backed him up:

“President Biden’s been clear that U.S. troops won’t fight Russia in Ukraine, and if you establish a no-fly zone, certainly in order to enforce that no-fly zone, you’ll have to engage Russian aircraft. And again, that would put us at war with Russia.”

(The administration plan was, and apparently still is, to bring down the Russian government through a proxy counteroffensive and an economic and information war, not a direct military one.)

Blinken, who stepped out of line to speak above the heads of the president and the Pentagon, lost that round. It’s surprising he kept his job. But he survived and now he’s come back for more. 

Relentless 

Blinken’s recklessness emerged yet again last week when he peddled a story — eagerly picked up by The Guardian and The New York Times — that Biden would approve a British request to fire its Storm Shadow missiles deep into Russia.

The Guardian story on Sept. 11 said: 

“The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, gave his strongest hint yet that the White House is about to lift its restrictions on Ukraine using long-range weapons supplied by the west on key military targets inside Russia, with a decision understood to have already been made in private.

Speaking in Kyiv alongside the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, Blinken said the US had ‘from day one’ been willing to adapt its policy as the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine changed. ‘We will continue to do this,’ he emphasised.”

To fire British Storm Shadows, Ukraine would have to depend on British technical soldiers on the ground in Ukraine to actually launch them and on U.S. geolocation technology. German Chancellor Olaf Shulz revealed those British soldiers are already in Ukraine.

In other words, it would be a NATO attack on Russia, dressed up as a Ukrainian one. It would mean the U.S. and Britain were at war with Moscow, something Blinken seems to want and said was going to happen. 

The next day Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that launching such missiles into Russia “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”

Nevertheless, The New York Times ran a story on the same day with the headline: “Biden Poised to Approve Ukraine’s Use of Long-Range Western Weapons in Russia.” 

The Guardian added:

“British government sources indicated that a decision had already been made to allow Ukraine to use Storm Shadow cruise missiles on targets inside Russia, although it is not expected to be publicly announced on Friday when Starmer meets Biden in Washington DC.”

Blinken’s words evidently raised British Prime Minister Keir Starmer‘s hopes that he would satisfy his desire to strike Russia with his nation’s arsenal of long-range missiles, despite Putin saying that meant direct war with NATO.

Blinken and the British are trying to lead us to the brink. 

Sanity in Arlington

Except that the Pentagon, the purveyor of the most monstrous violence in world history, has pulled the world back from it. 

For at least the second time — publicly known — the Department of War secured peace from neocon recklessness fronted by Blinken. 

Starmer was sent back on his chartered British Airways flight from the White House meeting licking his wounds. He’d evidently been led by Blinken to believe that it was a done deal: the U.S. would let Britain attack Russia with its long-range missiles using U.S. technology — even if the U.S. wouldn’t allow its own long-range ATACMS to be used. 

The Times of London reported that Biden withholding approval “surprised British officials who had listened closely to hints from Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, that America was edging towards authorising Storm Shadow, an Anglo-French weapon which relies on American GPS guidance systems.”

Starmer’s mania to strike Russia illustrates the British elite’s continuing pathological hatred of Russia, extending back centuries, compared to a perhaps more tempered, though determined, American geostrategic rivalry with Moscow. 

Biden’s Limits With the Neocons 

Biden has proven himself a supreme warmonger, his advocacy for the illegal invasion of Iraq and his complicity in the genocide in Gaza as the most egregious examples. 

Like the two presidents before him, Biden allowed neocons to worm themselves into positions of power in his administration. But the extent to which Biden himself is a neocon, as opposed to a traditional warmonger, is subject to question.

As a creature of Washington of more than half a century, he seems to respect the military’s judgement about military matters and, on his good days, understands that even America has limits. 

Barack Obama let Hillary Clinton, the “Queen of Warmongers,” bring Neocon Queen Victoria Nuland into his administration. Donald Trump let neocons John Bolton and Mike Pompeo into his.  And Biden has Blinken (and for a time Nuland too.)

Instead of banishing these people, they are allowed to linger and drag the U.S. into evermore perilous failures: Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and Ukraine, leaving behind a mountain of squandered dollars and an ocean of blood.

As a careerist, Blinken said what he had to say to get to where he is. Obama in 2015 wisely decided against arming Ukraine after the Nuland and Biden-led 2014 coup because he did not want to antagonize Russia, for whom he said Ukraine was a vital interest, while it was not for the U.S. Obama also feared U.S. arms would fall into the hands of “thugs” — meaning neo-Nazi Azov types, whom Obama was well aware of.

Blinken at the time was Obama’s deputy secretary of state.  To support the president’s position, he told a conference in Berlin:

“If you’re playing on the military terrain in Ukraine, you’re playing to Russia’s strength, because Russia is right next door. It has a huge amount of military equipment and military force right on the border. Anything we did as countries in terms of military support for Ukraine is likely to be matched and then doubled and tripled and quadrupled by Russia.”

But once he was freed of the restraints of Obama, he joined Biden’s aggressive Ukraine policy at the top of the State Department. From that position, and with a power vacuum in the White House because of Biden’s dementia, Blinken has been openly pushing the neocon agenda, laid out plainly in the 2000 report of the Project for a New American Century. 

And what is that agenda? In another age, before it became a dirty word, it would have been proudly proclaimed as imperialism. It contains all of the hubris and sense of invincibility and impunity of any empire in history.

PNAC plainly promulgates that no power or alliance of powers will be allowed to rise up to stand in the way of the neocons’ mad quest to harness American power to achieve world domination. An alliance of powers such as that of China, Russia and the BRICS countries, which has only accelerated in opposition to unhinged, neoconservative adventurism.

No matter the many disasters piling up, notably Iraq, Palestine and now Ukraine, the neocons are undeterred and unrestrained. It’s about power and murder but it is made palatable to themselves with flowery language about America saving the world for democracy.

Their belief in their own supremacy, cloaked in an American flag, remains fanatic, no matter the death and destruction they cause. They do not understand that American power has limits and to test that, they risk everything.

In 2019, Blinken teamed up with arch-neoconservative Robert Kagan to write a Washington Post op-ed arguing for more aggressive use of U.S. power abroad and against U.S. domestic trends towards non-interventionism.

With Kagan’s wife Nuland out of the Biden Administration and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan crucially siding with the realists, Blinken has emerged as the undisputed leader of who George H.W. Bush called the “crazies in the basement.”

That was 30 years ago. The neocons are in the penthouse now and only the restraint of the Pentagon and Sullivan’s persuasion brought Biden back from the brink.

This time.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.

Apparently Mr. Karaganov just isn’t going to let this insanity about nuclear options go. He’s still at it. – Natylie

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 9/12/24

The respected Russian intellectual Sergey Karaganov, who serves as the honorary chairman of Russia’s influential Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and is also an academic supervisor at the Higher School of Economics’ School of International Economics and Foreign Affairs, is once again talking about nukes. He made global headlines last year after he proposed a nuclear first strike against Europe, which was responded to here, and just gave an interview to Kommersant about updating Russia’s nuclear doctrine.

Although the preceding hyperlinked response supported this proposal at the time, upon further reflection, it’s clear that it won’t deter the West for the reasons that’ll now be explained. The current doctrine enumerates four scenarios in which nukes can be used, which include threats to the existence of the state and large-scale conventional aggression. Karaganov believes that they should be used “in the event of any encroachment on our territory and our citizens” in a nod to Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk.

While he’s sure to have his share of supporters among the hawks at home and Russia’s most passionate supporters abroad, they’re all overlooking a few “inconvenient facts”. First, any encroachment of Russian territory can be framed as threatening the existence of the state if the Commander-in-Chief truly wants to use nukes in response, but the current one won’t resort to radical measures as explained here. Basically, Putin has worked hard to avoid World War III by miscalculation, and he won’t get careless now.

The second point is that the aforementioned calculations are already in force for a reason regardless of however anyone feels about this since dropping nukes in response to what the government officially considers to be an act of terrorism in Kursk is grossly disproportionate. Not only that, but it would suggest that Russia can’t conventionally respond to territorial incursions due to presumed weakness, which isn’t the case seeing as how it just launched a counteroffensive to expel Ukraine from that region.  

Third, even if the doctrine was changed according to Karaganov’s vision, it’s unlikely to specify the targets and scale of Russia’s nuclear response since the exact circumstances can’t be known in advance. If decisionmakers were legally compelled by a revised doctrine to use nukes no matter what, then they might opt to drop them on their own territory or just across the border in order to avoid escalating. This observation segues into the fourth point about why their hands shouldn’t be tied in the first place.

Mandating a nuclear response to any cross-border encroachment whatsoever can lead to Russia’s adversaries manipulating it into using such weapons exactly as Lukashenko warned last month that Ukraine sought to do through its invasion of Kursk. It was explained here that “China and India would be under immense pressure to distance themselves from Russia, not just by the West, but also for appearance’s sake since they wouldn’t want to legitimize the use of nuclear weapons by their rivals.”

And finally, Russia can already employ discreet channels to convey its intent to use nuclear weapons in circumstances other than its publicly stated ones (or per a novel interpretation thereof as was touched upon in the first point), so updating its nuclear doctrine is pretty much only a soft power exercise. All that it would do is send a strong message of intent, albeit one which ties decisionmakers’ hands in arguably counterproductive ways and which could be easily manipulated as explained.

***

September 11, 2024

Enemies must realize Russia could go nuclear – ex-Kremlin adviser

The existing doctrine is outdated and does not serve as a deterrent, Sergey Karaganov has said

https://www.rt.com/russia/603875-russia-ready-use-nuclear-weapons

[See also: “Political scientist Sergei Karaganov on the change in Russia’s policy on the use of nuclear weapons”: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/7059257]

Russia’s nuclear doctrine urgently needs to be revised to allow a nuclear response to any major military aggression against the country, former Kremlin adviser Sergey Karaganov stated on Wednesday.

The former foreign policy adviser to the deputy head of the Russian presidential administration told the Kommersant daily that the existing document is “woefully outdated” and no longer serves as an effective deterrent.

Adopted in 2020, Russia’s nuclear doctrine does not provide for pre-emptive nuclear strikes and envisages the use of nuclear weapons only in “exceptional cases” in the face of a “threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of the country. According to Karaganov, this approach has rendered it nearly useless and has effectively “excluded” the nuclear deterrence factor from Russia’s military and foreign policy arsenal.

“We have allowed the situation to deteriorate to a point when our adversaries believe we will not use nuclear weapons under any circumstances,” the political scientist said. “Having nuclear weapons without being able to convince your enemies that you are ready to use them is suicide.”

A failure to have an effective nuclear deterrent policy “would plunge the world into a series of wars that would inevitably turn nuclear and end up with the World War III,” Karaganov believes, adding that this could happen “within the span of several years.”

“The main goal of a doctrine should be in convincing all current and future enemies that Russia is ready to use nuclear weapons.”

His words came amid the continued Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region and Kiev’s attempts to receive permission for the use of Western long-range missiles to strike deep inside the country.

“It’s high time we stated that any massive strikes against our territory give us a right to respond with a nuclear strike,” Karaganov insists. He also called on Moscow to clearly define the “nuclear escalation” steps in the next doctrine to leave Russia’s adversaries no room for doubt about whether it is ready to use its nuclear arsenal and when.

President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly demonstrated a more reserved position on the issue. Talking to Karaganov at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June, the president said that Russia was “not brandishing” nuclear weapons and expressed hope that “it will never come” to a nuclear exchange between Moscow and the West.

Moscow “has no reasons to even think about” using nuclear weapons, he said at the time, calling on Russian officials to not even “touch upon” the subject of nuclear weapons unless absolutely necessary.

Later in June, Putin also said that Russia did not “need a preventive strike yet, because the enemy is guaranteed to be destroyed in a retaliatory strike.” He did not rule out changes to the doctrine, though.