Intellinews, 11/20/24

The Kremlin is ready to start ceasefire talks and is willing to make some “limited” territorial concessions, Reuters’ Moscow bureau chief Guy Faulconbridge reported on November 20, citing five senior current and former Kremlin sources.

Moscow is ready to start talks after Donald Trump is sworn in as the next US president in January, according to the sources cited by Reuters. Russia is also reportedly willing to freeze the conflict along the current front line and cede a limited amount of occupied territory but is demanding in exchange significant Ukrainian concessions.

Russia’s proposed terms for negotiations are based on the failed 2022 Istanbul peace deal. Ukraine’s presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovych, who led the Ukrainian delegation in Istanbul, confirmed that a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine was agreed in principle in March 2022 and said all the points were initialled. He said his team opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy rejected the deal days later. Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who participated in the Istanbul talks, listed the conditions in an interview with Berliner Zeitung on October last year:

-Ukraine would abandon its Nato aspirations;

-The bans on the Russian language in Ukraine would be removed;

-Donbas would remain in Ukraine but as an autonomous region (Schroeder: “Like South Tyrol”);

-The United Nations Security Council plus Germany should offer and supervise the security agreements; and

-The Crimea problem would be addressed, but by future generations.

Top of the list is that Ukraine renounces its aspirations to join Nato and return to its pre-2014 stance of constitutionally enshrined neutrality. The Kremlin has made it explicitly clear since the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued an eight-point list of demands in December 2021 that any and all negotiations start with an “iron-clad legally binding” guarantee that Ukraine will never join Nato.

Moscow has also returned to its demands that Ukraine dramatically reduce the size of its army – a hotly debated point in the Istanbul deal, but one that was eventually agreed to in principle.

Moscow is also insisting that laws constricting the use of the Russian language be dropped and that Russian be made an official language. In Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent Valdai speech outlining his multipolar world view he repeated concerns for the rights of ethnic Russians that were caught in other countries following the fall of the Soviet Union and the issue of language rights has always played an important role in those concerns.

Additionally, Moscow insists on security guarantees for Ukraine that also cover Russia and will avoid future direct conflicts between Russia and the West in the future.

In the run-up to the Istanbul talks, Ukraine already conceded it was willing to give up its Nato aspirations during the initial peace negotiations in Belarus in March 2022, if it received bilateral security guarantees from its Western allies. Those hopes were dashed during the famous meeting between Zelenskiy and former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in April, who told the Ukrainian leader that the West would not provide Ukraine with security deals, and to “fight on.”

Since then Ukraine has signed a series of “security assurances” with European allies, but these all stop short of Western allies coming to Ukraine’s military assistance should it be attacked by Russia again.

These assurances fall short of what Ukraine would like to see and Zelenskiy has been pushing hard for accelerated accession to Nato to provide real security guarantees as part of his victory plan.

More recently, backed into a corner by Trump’s threat to bring the war to an end “in 24 hours” and in anticipation of evaporating military and financial support from Ukraine’s Western backers, Zelenskiy has switched his rhetoric from victory to “resistance”.

Territorial concessions

Putin appears more willing to make concessions to get a deal than most commentators believe, according to the Reuters report, as the officials interviewed suggest that the Kremlin will concede some territory as part of the talks.

While Putin has publicly said that any deal will have to take account of the “territorial realities on the ground” – widely assumed to mean Russia intends to keep the territory it has occupied – Reuters interlocutors suggest that there is actually some wiggle room.

Moscow might relinquish control over small areas of the Kharkiv and Mykolaiv regions. There is also “room for discussion” on the status of four regions it annexed last year – Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – declared part of Russia in 2022. Previously, Putin has said publicly that Kyiv must recognise Russia’s sovereignty over these regions, despite the fact that the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) do not fully control any of them.

However, the Kremlin has made it crystal clear that it is not prepared to discuss returning the Crimea and the officials interviewed by Reuters did not mention the status of the land bridge that connects the Crimea to the Russian border at Rostov-on-Don, which presumably will also remain under Russian control.

Russia ready to stop the war

The very first ceasefire talks began on February 28, 2022, at a time when Russian forces had seized swaths of territory in the south, east and north of Ukraine, where they had advanced close to Kyiv after pouring across the border from Russia and Belarus.

The draft – titled “Treaty on the Resolution of the situation in Ukraine and the Neutrality of Ukraine” – is dated March 7, 2022, a week after Russia launched the invasion.

Putin has been hoping to improve his relations with the West for a long time but has been repeatedly disappointed. There was a brief glimmer of hope after Biden took office in 2021, when he met with Putin in Geneva and rushed through a renewal of the START III missile treaty – the first Cold War arms control treaty to be renewed since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Russian side immediately called for work to be started on renewing the lapsed Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), another Cold War arms control deal, but those talks never began as tensions escalated rapidly.

Russia has had the upper hand in the Ukraine war since the fall of Avdiivka on February 17 and time is on Putin’s side in any negotiations, but the Kremlin is slowly coming under more pressure to halt the war and start repairing the damage to its military and economy.

Heavy military spending has sent inflation skyrocketing, which the CBR has been unable to reign in. Russia’s economy is cooling and set for a sharp slowdown in 2025, according to a pessimistic medium-term macroeconomic outlook issued by the regulator at the start of August. Record-high borrowing costs could spark a wave of bankruptcies in the new year, although others have argued that Russia’s economy is more robust than it first appears.

The Kremlin has been signalling since the summer that it is ready to stop and Ukraine had also been inching towards a ceasefire agreement as it began to run out of men, money and weapons. A preliminary first round of talks on halting Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure had been scheduled to happen in Qatar in August, but that meeting was called off after the Kursk incursion.

Zelenskiy has also said that he wants the war to finish this year as Ukraine’s position becomes increasingly dire, but he has backed himself into a corner with his maximalist demands on a complete Russian withdrawal to the 1991 borders.

While Russia is currently producing more arms than all of the EU combined, it is still digging deeply into its Soviet-era stockpile and needs to start rebuilding its military, making it increasingly vulnerable to a Nato attack. Experts estimate that it will already take decades just to get back to where the military was at the start of 2022.

Security deals

Russia has long called for a new pan-European security deal and a new European security infrastructure that reflects the post-Cold War realities that would move beyond Nato, which was specifically designed to threaten the Soviet Union.

Putin first warned that Russia would “push back” if Nato kept expanding in his famous speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, but was widely ignored by the West.

In his first act as president, Dmitry Medvedev travelled to Brussels in 2008 and offered a Russian draft pan-European security deal, but it was rejected out of hand. Tensions escalated from there and Russian started to modernise its army in 2012 in preparation for WWIII; this was complete by 2021 when Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was ready to throw down the gauntlet with his “new rules of the game” speech. The war in Ukraine started a year later when his challenge went unanswered. Lavrov then lambasted the West in his “Empire of Lies” speech a year later, detailing all of Russia’s complaints with the West.

Military size

Russia has already shown it is willing to make some concessions in Istanbul to bring about peace, although the longer the conflict goes on the less those concessions will be, most experts agree.

During the Istanbul ceasefire talks in March 2022, reports indicated that the Russian side was pushing for Ukraine to significantly reduce the size of its military.

Russian negotiators were reportedly demanding that Ukraine limit its armed forces to around 50,000 to 60,000 troops from the 200,000 active military personnel serving before the war. At the same time, the Russian delegation demanded a cap on the Ukrainian tank force to no more than 100 to 150 tanks from the estimated 800 to 900 tanks Ukraine had before the Russian invasion. Similarly, the Russian side reportedly wanted to limit Ukraine’s air force to a few dozen planes, potentially capping it at 50 aircraft or fewer, vs the approximately 125 combat-capable aircraft in the Ukrainian pre-war air force, and a ban on developing or deploying missiles with a range of over 250 km. Moscow also wanted to be able to prohibit other types of weapons in the future.

However, subsequent reports claim that the Russian side made concessions on the military size issue, but in the end the Ukrainian side agreed to a substantial reduction in its armed forces. Of the various plans being discussed since Trump’s election victory, many of them include substantially beefing up Ukraine’s military, which will be a non-starter for the Kremlin should talks happen.

Reuters, 11/21/24

• Summary

• Putin says Russia fired hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile
• Putin says the Ukraine war taking on global character
• US official says Russia briefed them ahead of time
• Ukraine fired Western weapons into Russia this week
• Tensions rising in 33-month-old war

KYIV, Nov 21 (Reuters) – Russia fired a hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile at the city of Dnipro on Thursday in response to the U.S. and UK allowing Kyiv to strike Russian territory with advanced Western weapons, in a further escalation of the 33-month-old war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a televised address, said Moscow struck a Ukrainian military facility with a new ballistic missile known as “Oreshnik” (the hazel) and warned that more could follow.

“A regional conflict in Ukraine previously provoked by the West has acquired elements of a global character,” Putin said in an address to the nation carried by state television after 8 pm Moscow time (1700 GMT).

A U.S. official said that Washington was pre-notified by Russia shortly before its strike, while another said they had briefed Kyiv and other close allies in recent days to prepare for the possible use of such a weapon.

Earlier on Thursday, Kyiv said that Russia had fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM ), a weapon designed for long-distance nuclear strikes and never before used in war, though U.S. officials said it was an intermediate range ballistic missile that has a smaller range.

Regardless of its classification, the latest strike highlighted rapidly rising tensions in the past several days.

Ukraine fired U.S. and British missiles at targets inside Russia this week despite warnings by Moscow that it would see such action as a major escalation.

“Today there was a new Russian missile. All the characteristics – speed, altitude – are (of an) intercontinental ballistic (missile). An expert (investigation) is currently underway,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video statement.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry urged the international community to react swiftly to the use of what it said was “the use by Russia of a new type of weaponry.”

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Russia likely possesses a handful of the “experimental” intermediate-range ballistic missiles used in Thursday’s strike.

Ukraine’s air force said the missile targeted Dnipro in central-eastern Ukraine and was fired from the Russian region of Astrakhan, more than 700 km (435 miles) away. It did not specify what kind of warhead the missile had or what type of missile it was. There was no suggestion it was nuclear-armed.

Intermediate-range ballistic missiles have a range of 3,000–5,500 km (1,860-3,415 miles)

“Whether it was an ICBM or an IRBM, the range isn’t the important factor,” said Fabian Hoffmann, a doctoral research fellow at Oslo university who specializes in missile technology and nuclear strategy.

“The fact that it carried a MIRVed (Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle) payload is much more significant for signaling purposes and is the reason Russia opted for it. This payload is exclusively associated with nuclear-capable missiles.”

Russia also fired a Kinzhal hypersonic missile and seven Kh-101 cruise missiles, six of which were shot down, the Ukrainian air force said.

The attack targeted enterprises and critical infrastructure in Dnipro, the air force said. Dnipro was a missile-making centre in the Soviet era. Ukraine has expanded its military industry during the war, but keeps its whereabouts secret.

The air force did not say what the missile targeted or whether it had caused any damage, but regional governor Serhiy Lysak said the missile attack damaged an industrial enterprise and set off fires in Dnipro. Two people were hurt.

Ukrainska Pravda, a Kyiv-based media outlet, had cited anonymous sources saying the missile was an RS-26 Rubezh, a solid-fuelled intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 5,800 km, according to the Arms Control Association.

‘TOTALLY UNPRECEDENTED’

A group of glowing projectiles could be seen plummeting to the ground from the night sky in a video published by Come Back Alive, a Ukrainian military charity. It said the video was of Dnipro overnight.

The NATO military alliance did not respond to a request for comment. The U.S. European Command said it had nothing on the reported use of an ICBM and referred questions to the U.S. Department of Defense.

Some military experts said the missile launch, if confirmed, could be seen as an act of deterrence by Moscow following Kyiv’s strikes into Russia with Western weapons this week, after restrictions on such strikes were lifted.

Russian war correspondents on Telegram and an official speaking on condition of anonymity said Kyiv fired British Storm Shadow cruise missiles into Russia’s Kursk region bordering Ukraine on Wednesday.

Russia’s defence ministry, in its daily report of events over the previous 24 hours on Thursday, said air defences had shot down two British Storm Shadow cruise missiles but did not say where. Britain had previously let Ukraine use Storm Shadows only within Ukrainian territory.

Ukraine also fired U.S. ATACMS missiles into Russia on Tuesday after U.S. President Joe Biden gave the all-clear to use such missiles in this way, two months before he leaves office and Donald Trump returns to the White House. Putin on Tuesday lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks.

Trump has said he will end the war, without saying how, and has criticised billions of dollars in aid for Ukraine under Biden. The warring sides believe Trump is likely to push for peace talks – not known to have been held since the war’s earliest months – and are trying to attain strong positions before negotiations.

Moscow has said the use of Western weapons to strike Russian territory far from the border would be a major escalation in the conflict. Kyiv says it needs the capability to defend itself by hitting Russian rear bases used to support Moscow’s February 2022 invasion.

***

Video of Putin’s Comments on the strike:

WATCH FULL: Putin’s address to the nation after long-range Western weapons used against Russia pic.twitter.com/PGxcbXwckn

— RT (@RT_com) November 21, 2024

Twitter link here.

Video footage and report from Hindustan Times:

YouTube video here.

By Paul Sutton, Free Press Backlash, 10/17/24

The much belated public inquiry into Dawn Sturgess’ supposed death from Novichok poisoning is now in progress. It’s claimed she was randomly and inadvertently killed in the Skripal affair. I’d anyway have been interested but I’m in truth fascinated, as I was brought up in Salisbury and my father was director of the nearby Public Health Laboratory Service lab at Porton Down.

This is the Wikipedia account of how Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were supposedly attacked by Russian assassins:

“On Sunday 4th March 2018, Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia, who was visiting from Moscow, were found “slipping in and out of consciousness on a public bench “near a shopping centre in Salisbury by a doctor and nurse who were passing by. While at Salisbury District Hospital, they were put into induced comas to prevent organ damage.

“Following the incident, health authorities checked 21 members of the emergency services and the public for symptoms. Two police officers were treated for possible minor symptoms, said to be itchy eyes and wheezing, while a third, Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, who had been sent to Sergei Skripal’s house, was in a serious condition. By 22nd March 2018, Detective Sergeant Bailey had recovered enough to be discharged from the hospital, and by 15 January 2019, he returned to active duty.

“The police declared a major incident as a number of agencies were involved. On 6th March, it was agreed under the National Counter Terrorism Policing Network that the Counter Terrorism Command based within the Metropolitan Police would take over the investigation from Wiltshire Police. Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, head of Counter Terrorism Policing, appealed for witnesses to the incident following a COBR meeting chaired by Home Secretary Amber Rudd.

“On 12th March 2018, Prime Minister Theresa May identified the nerve agent used in the attack as a Russian-developed nerve agent Novichok and demanded explanation from the Russian government. Two days later, May said that Russia was responsible for the incident and announced the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats in retaliation.

“On 30th June 2018, two British Nationals were hospitalized by chemical poisoning in Amesbury, 8 miles (13 km) from Salisbury where Skripal had been attacked. One victim died in the hospital. Police determined they were poisoned by the same Novichok nerve agent used to attempt to assassinate Sergei and his daughter, and Home Secretary Sajid Javid told the House of Commons that the victims had likely been poisoned by the improperly discarded nerve agent used to attack Sergei.

“On 7th June 2020, The Sunday Times reported that Sergei and his daughter had been settled in New Zealand under new identities. A few weeks later, the New Zealand Herald raised several doubts about the report.”

The story is so absurd as to seem an elaborate joke, designed for some other purpose. The Russian agents supposedly responsible stayed in a grotty east London hotel (where they used hookers and bought drugs) then travelled down to Salisbury on Saturday 3rd March, to survey the scene. A light fall of snow sent them scurrying back to east London, Russians being unused to snow. Obviously they’d stayed in east London to ensure a lengthy and inconvenient repeat trip to Salisbury, with plenty of CCTV to spot them on the way.

Mindful of this, they returned on Sunday 4th and smeared nerve agent on Sergei’s front door handle, then sauntered into Salisbury down the Wilton Road and Fisherton Street, looking in shop windows and ensuring they’d again be spotted. They walked past the station and a London train, to spend time strolling around the city as tourists. Having spare Novichok in a perfume bottle (now miraculously sealed and in a box that was also cellophane wrapped) they dumped it in a charity shop collection bin. Weeks later, it was picked up by junkie Charlie Rowley and given to his unlucky girlfriend Dawn Sturgess as a present. She used it as a spray and tragically died after being hospitalised.

What a crock. I’m not denying the truth somehow involves the Russians ‘tourists’, but wielding Novichok? When the Skripals were taken to Odstock, the initial notes had fentanyl poisoning on them. Interestingly, Skripal senior’s arrival in Salisbury seems to have coincided with a spike in local fentanyl deaths.

I think the Novichok on the door handle theory is too absurd to need much discussion. If this was the intended assassination method, why? The arguments given are that Putin’s regime weren’t worried about killing thousands. Whilst Russia is clearly a rogue state they presumably don’t do things which make no sense. With the 2018 World Cup weeks away, would they really launch an indiscriminate nerve-agent attack rather than just shooting or stabbing the chap?

No sample taken from a patient was ever identified specifically as Novichok. The Chemical Defence Establishment (CDE) at Porton could only state that the substance was ‘of a type developed by Russia’. Samples provided to a Swiss lab by Porton were stated to have ‘almost a complete absence of impurities’. This was used as evidence that the Novichok was military grade and could only have been produced by a state. But it also signalled that the sample was fresh and couldn’t have been on someone’s door handle for days. Maybe it came from Porton’s own material. They must have had some, to identify the supposed sample as Russian in the first place.

No satisfactory answer has been given on how the Skripals were poisoned by their door handle but then fit enough to go to a pub, feed bread to some ducks (none of which were affected) eat a big lunch in Zizzi’s, then both be stricken and disabled at the same moment. They were different ages, genders and weights so that the dose needed wouldn’t be identical. In any case, the agent should have killed them after contact in less than a minute. As it was, the first person to discover the Skripals sitting on a bench was most fortunately the Chief Nurse of the British Army, Colonel A L McCourt, who was ‘just walking past’.

As for the less fortunate Amesbury junkies, Charlie Rowley’s home was urgently searched for Novichok. None was found until 11 days later, when police looked again and allegedly found it in a perfume bottle, sitting in plain sight on the kitchen counter. Meanwhile, there was at least a four month delay in the police searching the crummy east London City Stay hotel; four months in which a cleaner might have fatally stumbled across more Novichok or a guest could have been contaminated. But maybe not, if the stuff was never there.

The BBC’s ‘Diplomatic Editor’ Mark Urban is a regular conduit for the security services. He fronted much of the BBC’s original coverage of the Skripal story. Yet he concealed from the viewers how he’d been in contact with Sergei Skripal for months before the alleged poisoning and had several meetings with him. Urban and Pablo Miller (Sergei’s British MI5 handler) were previously officers together in the Royal Tank Regiment.

Most likely, Rowley and Sturgess were used as a convenient couple of low-level addicts. She suffered a drug death and the security services piggy-backed their bizarre Novichok story onto them, to bolster public opinion which wasn’t buying the Skripal story. Rowley’s account changed but he supposedly settled on finding the perfume on rooting through the charity-shop collection bin. That it was still there more than a month after the Skripal event isn’t credible, since it was emptied regularly. How Rowley didn’t die, or how Sturgess didn’t die immediately, after both touching even a minute quantity is also not believable.

My approach is to focus on the most inexplicable part of the story. And that surely is the Russians travelling to Salisbury on successive days from an inconvenient location, to carry out an assassination. Why would they need any reconnaissance at all, for the door smearing?

But they weren’t there to kill him. The logical explanation is that they went back to London because they’d been told to. I think they’d met Sergei on Saturday but he’d sent them away, so they went back to London for discussion with their bosses about their next move. They’d no worries about CCTV; why would they attract attention? The mission was to get Sergei to work for the Russians again – possibly defect – and probably he already knew them. Perhaps they’d been working on this through his daughter, maybe coercion and threats to her were involved.

The Russians then returned on the Sunday and he agreed to meet them in a Salisbury pub, probably the Bishops Mill, very close to Zizzi’s (where he’d made a prior lunch reservation). This would explain why they wandered around unconcerned, supposedly after smearing his door; they’d done no such thing. Sergei was happier meeting them in a busy pub – was he worried about his British handlers seeing them visit his home or of the Russians getting violent?

Anyway, we’d got wind of the Skripals’ position and we sprayed them on the bench with some opiate, then got the pair up to Odstock. Our spooks were delighted to leave the two Russian agents thwarted, with no choice but returning empty handed and humiliated to Russia. Possibly our motivation was as much about punishing the Skripals as worrying about their defection, since spraying them on the bench would surely not have been our last chance to prevent it.

Or maybe – to be even more George Smiley – we’d always known about the Russian plan because we engineered it, setting a trap. Presumably without Skripal’s awareness but it could also work with him loyal to us and the pair never at any real risk from the spraying. But that’s a big stretch, since they seem to have been genuinely stricken.

Perhaps there were witnesses to them sitting on the bench, despite the prompt attentions of the Army nurse who’d been hovering. Hence the Novichok story from us. Or maybe that was always the intention; our whole purpose was that story, to humiliate Moscow. The policeman Nick Bailey, supposedly poisoned via the Skripal’s door, could have been Special Branch so that was also fake. Crucially, the absurdity of the ‘Novichock attack’ and the resulting world-wide condemnation would enrage the Russians and further isolate them internationally. Realistically, what could they do: admit they’d been trying to get Skripal back and had spectacularly failed?

This explains the half-arsed and embarrassed performance later of the two agents on Russian TV, posing without conviction as innocent tourists who’d visited England just to see Salisbury cathedral then been thwarted on their first visit by a snow shower. Maybe both sides rather enjoyed the stupidity of this story and played along, but the Russians had little choice.

As said, Dawn Sturgess’ was a druggy death – maybe fentanyl – accidental and unrelated to the Skripals, unless they were coincidentally also her suppliers. Whatever, it was used by our side to add veracity and generate public outrage. The nonsense story about the perfume bottle was fed to her boyfriend, who was reliably unreliable but looked after. The more confused he was the better.

And the Skripals? Possibly dead, since the excuse for not even seeing a video recording of them is flimsy. All the Salisbury inquest get are his supposed words, read from a paper copy. How on earth would their safety be compromised by a recording played but not put online? Then again, maybe the Russians do want them dead now, if all along they were working for us and playing them. It all depends on whether they were pawns or players.

I think if my explanation is true then we don’t come out of it too badly, but Salisbury has been treated appallingly. There never was any risk to public health and the publicity was terrible for tourism. Cynically, one could say that in the longer term it’s helped publicise the city.

My last visit was in 2022, for my mother’s funeral. In fact, we ate in Zizzi’s where the Skripals scoffed a hearty meal whilst supposedly poisoned by Novichok. I tried to chat about this with a waitress, who quickly summoned her manager. He was friendly and warned me not to talk about it publicly, but implied they’d not suffered any harm as a business.

By Kit Klarenberg, The Grayzone, 11/16/24

Leaked files show top UK military figures conspired to carry out the Kerch bridge bombing, covertly train “Gladio”-style stay-behind forces in Ukraine, and groom the British public for a drop in living standards caused by the proxy war against Russia.

Emails and internal documents reviewed by The Grayzone reveal details of a cabal of British military and intelligence veterans which plotted to escalate and prolong the Ukraine proxy war “at all costs.” Convened under the direction of the British Ministry of Defense in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the cell referred to itself as Project Alchemy. As British leadership sabotaged peace talks between Kiev and Moscow, the cell put forward an array of plans “to keep Ukraine fighting” by imposing “strategic dilemmas, costs and frictions upon Russia.”

The leaks obtained by The Grayzone expose a hidden hand behind Britain’s policy in Ukraine, showing in unusually granular detail how it aimed to engineer a long, grinding war through covert operations that stretched the bounds of legality.

Project Alchemy’s proposed schemes spanned every conceivable field of warfare, from cyber attacks to “discreet operations” to outright terrorism. The secret cell even put forward a plan to “aggressively pursue” and “dismantle” independent media outlets – including The Grayzone – through an aggressive campaign of legal harassment and online censorship, so they “would be forced to close.” The incendiary blueprints were fed to the highest levels of the British state and national security structure, where they were apparently well-received.

Founded by a senior British Ministry of Defence official, Project Alchemy is composed of veteran military and intelligence operatives united by a desire for all-out war between the West and Russia. Some have trained Ukrainian forces in clandestine sabotage tactics. 

Members of the national security cabal tacitly acknowledged that their proposed operations stretched the bounds of British law. Thus they suggested that London should be “prepared to creatively use the law” to meet its goals, and even be willing to erase “legal restrictions on UK deniable ops” against Russia. 

Some of Project Alchemy’s most extreme recommendations have already been implemented, often with calamitous results. These include the cell’s proposal to strike Crimea’s Kerch Bridge, which prompted a Russian escalation that saw punishing attacks on Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure. Alchemy also envisioned the construction of a secret, Gladio-style army of Ukrainian partisan fighters to carry out assassination, sabotage, and terror missions behind enemy lines. 

It appears the British premier, Keir Starmer, fell under the influence of the Project Alchemy cabal soon after his election in July, when he eagerly embraced the role of “wartime prime minister.” After pledging to support Ukraine “as long as it takes,” however, Starmer is quietly backing away from the maximalist policy. In Kiev, Ukrainians are left to ponder how their “friends” in London got them into this mess, and why they can not, or will not get them out of it.

The British spooks who gathered around Project Alchemy reasoned that the longer the proxy war continued, the more Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “credibility at home and abroad drops, and his ability to fight NATO is degraded.” Today, Project Alchemy’s gambit has clearly backfired, as Putin remains popular within Russia, while a crumbling Ukrainian army loses territory by the day despite constant re-arming by the West. But the war planners in London remain staunchly committed to escalation, refusing to shelve their diabolical proposals.

Britain takes ‘unilateral lead’ on ‘regime change’ in Russia

Project Alchemy was founded on the personal orders of Lt. General Charlie Stickland, who is charged with “planning, executing and integrating UK led joint and multinational overseas military operations” as the head of Britain’s Permanent Joint Headquarters. Stickland boasts in leaked communications that his family “come from a long line of pirates and buccaneers.” In his email signature, the general identifies himself as an “LGBTQ+ Advocate” in rainbow-colored text.

Stickland and his assistant, Maj. Ed Harris, did not answer The Grayzone’s calls to their personal phones, nor did they respond to detailed questions submitted to them through WhatsApp.

Stickland convened the first meeting of Project Alchemy’s on February 26, 2022, just days after Russian troops made their initial foray into Ukraine. According to minutes of the gathering, “an assortment of leading academics, authors, strategists, planners, pollsters, comms, data scientists and tech” was on hand to produce a “grand strategy options paper.” 

The paper consisted of a series of proposals for the British government to “defeat Putin in Ukraine and set the conditions for the reshaping of an open international order of the future.” Throughout the document, the need to “keep Ukraine fighting” was described as London’s “main effort” in the conflict.

In an email to British military apparatchiks dated March 3 2022, Stickland described Alchemy’s paper as the result of “some mischief I’ve been up to” with “a group of ‘sideways thinkers.’” He expressed satisfaction that “this has been seen by all sorts of people,” including senior British government and military officials, “and landed well.”

An Excel document listing potential and confirmed recruits for the effort, authored by project chief Dom Morris, names a number of individuals from the private sector and academia alongside high-ranking army officials. Currently a fellow at King’s College’s “Centre for Grand Strategy,” Morris was listed in the document as a “civilian leader.” The role of “military leader” was to be carried out by Simon Scott, a brigadier in the British army who was appointed O.B.E. in 2013 for his “gallant and distinguished services” in Afghanistan.

Information operations were to be headed by a still-to-be determined member of Britain’s 77th Psychological Operations Brigade. Also listed as a participant in information operations was longtime British psychological warfare operative Amil Khan, founder of the “counter-disinformation” analysis firm Valent Projects.

In 2021, The Grayzone revealed how the then-Prince of Wales, King Charles, enlisted Khan’s Valent Projects to astroturf a pseudo-socialist YouTube influencer to attack skeptics of the government’s ham-fisted response to Covid. Previously, Khan participated in the UK Foreign Office’s program to foment regime change in Syria.

Months after Alchemy put Khan forward as a member of its team, The Grayzone exposed him for plotting with celebrity-left journalist Paul Mason to destroy this publication. One leaked email showed Khan proposing a “full nuclear legal [attack] to squeeze [The Grayzone] financially.” The newly-uncovered documents indicate the decision to assail The Grayzone was met with approval from the highest ranks of the British government.

‘Ukraine’s Next Chapter – Elders Grand Strategy Options Paper’

Within Project Alchemy’s covert war room, the obsession with a long war quickly took hold. Members of the cell took their cues from a policy paper Stickland attributed to “The Elders,” which he described as “a group of Fusion players,” referring to the strata of academics and defense industry figures with strong ties to the British military.

An Alchemy document composed under Stickland’s watch and titled, “Ukraine’s Next Chapter – Elders Grand Strategy Options Paper,” suggests that members of the cabal had convinced themselves a “palace coup” inside the Kremlin was inevitable. So long as Russia struggled inside Ukraine, they believed, British intelligence would be granted “the opportunity to challenge” Moscow’s ever-growing “stature as a competent international actor” on the world stage. 

“A long war against a small state makes [Putin] look a fool,” the Alchemy paper asserted. “He is obsessed by the end of Ghaddafi – he will want to avoid that… Pressure will pile on from oligarchs as a long war drags on – he will not want to give them excuses to threaten his authority.” The group reasoned that “a long war will affect [Putin’s] international credibility,” as “a failure to quickly defeat Ukraine will seriously… reduce his credibility with new rich friends in Belarus, Hungary, China, India, Middle East, Brazil etc.

“Most importantly,” protracted Russian involvement in Ukraine “will embolden NATO,” Alchemy argued. Convinced that Putin would fail in the eastern Donbas region, triggering a collapse of his government, Project Alchemy members openly fantasized about absorbing Russia into the Western-dominated financial order afterwards under the guise of a “Post Putin Marshall Plan.” Of particular interest was London’s “re-engagement” with Moscow “in global energy and commodity markets,” a seeming reference to the West’s desire for cheap Russian gas and wheat. 

“Discreet operations”: reviving ‘Operation Gladio’ terror ops in Ukraine

To accomplish the balkanization of Russia, Project Alchemy’s plotters took inspiration from Operation Gladio, a CIA and NATO-orchestrated covert operation that saw fascist paramilitaries carry out false flag terrorist attacks across Western Europe after World War II in a bid to prevent communism from taking root.

A section detailing potential “discreet operations” in Alchemy’s strategy paper, which stressed the “need to intervene in every way except ‘official,’” explicitly recommended “Stay-behind Gladio handbooks/ Partisan Pamphlets” which would be “updated for Information Age.” 

Another move Alchemy proposed was to deploy Britain’s “strong” private military [PMC] industry “to out Wagner, Wagner.” In other words, the group aimed to establish a British rival to the Russian mercenary force founded by the now-deceased commander Yevgeny Prigozhin. This objective required the formulation of “a new doctrine, operating concept, and legal framework, for effectively integrating the activities of PMCs and other [non-military] actors.” Under these guidelines, British mercenary firms capable of using “sophisticated weaponry like SAMS, cyber, combat air, drones” would be employed to “operate and train and accompany Ukraine formations.” 

These operations were all intended to ultimately be “sponsored and commanded” by the UK government, “using discreet cover” to avoid triggering NATO’s Article 5. 

Following the production of their grand strategy paper, Stickland invited his team of “sideways thinkers” at Project Alchemy to submit further proposals for Gladio-style operations. Among the pitches that arrived was a “mission” to “disable the Kerch Bridge in a way that is audacious, and disrupts road and rail access to Crimea and maritime access to the Sea of Azov.” The blueprints of this highly provocative plot were exposed by The Grayzone in October 2022, in the immediate aftermath of the truck bomb attack that crippled the Kerch Bridge. 

Alchemy’s team also produced a PowerPoint presentation entitled, “Training a Ukrainian Commando Force to restore Maritime Sovereignty – Elders,” outlining plans to construct a 1,000-strong Ukrainian commando force “trained in Britain by military veterans equipped with British equipment” to “degrade the Russian Navy and open another flank in the fight for Kherson and the south of Ukraine.”

Alchemy’s team had been working on the plan for at least three months by the time of the presentation’s submission. “Ukrainians abroad and volunteers inside Ukraine” had already been recruited, in advance of 12 weeks basic training “in the use of all troop weapons including mortars, anti-tank missiles, sniper craft, cliff assault, small craft training, demolitions,” the proposal stated. 

The plan called for formally integrating the commandos into the Ukrainian Navy. Alchemy boasted that the prospective force “will be a force multiplier and highly mobile,” while Russia’s “outdated doctrine will struggle with a highly motivated and well-equipped naval force conducting hit and run operations and targeting Crimea.”

Moreover, “individuals who are fluent Russian speakers and deemed suitable for covert undercover operations,” including “female operators,” would be “inserted into southern occupied Ukraine and Crimea for intelligence gathering and sabotage of key infrastructure targets.” They would be trained by MI6 officers. For this, Alchemy asked the British government for a total of £73.5 million. “The program is at a high state of readiness. We are ready to go,” the presentation forcefully declared. 

The enormous sum was to be paid to Elders Services Ltd that was founded by Alchemy members and registered to an address just 15 miles from Fort Monckton, which was described by former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson as “the SIS’s field operations training centre.” It is unknown how much money, if any, the firm received from the British government for resuscitating Operation Gladio in Ukraine. Elders Services Ltd shuttered in March 2023 after less than a year of operation, without filing financial accounts.

British spies call for ‘action’ against The Grayzone

Behind the Project Alchemy team’s bravado was a sense that Western hegemony was crumbling on the icy borderlands separating Ukraine from Russia. Referring to the rising BRICS alliance, which gathered in Kazan, Russia this October to challenge the US-dominated financial order, Alchemy planners urged British leadership to “prepare for SWIFT II,” as SWIFT was “going to be destroyed” by the West’s anti-Russia sanctions, “slowly, but inevitably.” 

According to Alchemy’s analysts, countries across the globe would naturally “see the need for a non-US alternative” means of safely parking their cash and trading. In a rare show of political sobriety, the British spooks predicted that sanctions on Russia combined with the Ukraine proxy war would impose higher prices on consumer goods and “hit British voters in the pocket.”

This posed “a threat to public support” for the British government’s “hard line” on Ukraine, they warned. “Domestic UK public opinion” would understandably get “fed up” paying more for everyday goods, meaning “pressure grows for a compromise.”

To prepare the British public for the coming storm, Project Alchemy’s plotters proposed what they blandly described as “information operations,” but which could be more accurately described as a blend of domestic state propaganda and malign attacks on disruptive media outlets.

The task they outlined not only included “[dismantling] Russian disinformation infrastructure” by pressuring social media to ban RT and Sputnik, but also targeting critical independent media like The Grayzone.

“A number of actions can be undertaken against these outlets. The most obvious is legal since the content of these media outriders is frequently in contravention of media law in the UK, US and EU,” Alchemy insisted. 

“Aggrieved parties currently tend to ignore libel/defamation by these outlets. Were they to aggressively pursue these outlets, it is likely they would be forced to close.”

The Grayzone, it was claimed, had thus far “managed to obscure” its funding – a suggestion that this outlet is covertly funded by Russia or some other enemy state, which is completely false. The paranoid fantasies of British intelligence may explain why this journalist was quizzed on the subject by British counter-terror police when they detained and interrogated him at Luton International Airport in May 2023.

Alchemy plotters seek to place Britain at lead of war with Russia

In addition to playing a leading role in media manipulation, Alchemy sought to place Britain at the forefront of the International Criminal Court’s agenda to investigate and prosecute the Russian government for alleged war crimes in Ukraine. 

Alchemy suggested London “set international conditions, collection mechanisms and funding for collection of data and evidence” in the proxy conflict, and “provide all possible support, including intelligence” to the ICC “in its efforts to investigate war crimes,” just as British spies did for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). 

Though not named in the document, high-profile British lawyers, including celebrity Amal Clooney, have since emerged at the forefront of efforts to prosecute Russian officials for war crimes, and establish an ICTY analog. As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal reported, Britain played a critical role in the appointment of Amal Clooney’s mentor, Karim Khan, as ICC prosecutor. 

Project Alchemy’s provocative proposals appear to have reached the desk of PM Keir Starmer in some form. At NATO’s 75th anniversary summit, Starmer issued his full-throated endorsement of deep strikes by the Ukrainian military into Russia. Echoing the aggressive language found in Alchemy documents, he pledged to “deliver £3 billion worth of support to Ukraine each year… for as long as it takes.” 

But as the Ukrainian military’s offensive in Russia’s Kursk region falters, the Biden administration has distanced itself from the calls for striking into the Russian heartland. Fortunately for British leaders hellbent on taking the fight to Moscow, Project Alchemy has ensured that a platter of off-the-books options remains handy.

As Alchemy noted in its grand strategy paper, “The UK seeks always to act multilaterally, but is prepared to take a unilateral lead where achieving multilateral consensus might prove time-consuming or difficult.” Among the war’s covert sponsors, who were safely ensconced over 1,000 miles away from the front lines, it was firmly agreed: “we should attempt at all costs to keep Ukraine fighting.”

YouTube link here.

“Arguing that, yes, the U.S. should still police the world is Bret Stephens. Stephens is an opinion columnist for The New York Times and editor in chief of Sapir. As a foreign affairs columnist of The Wall Street Journal, he was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. And he is the author of America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder.

Bret was joined by James Kirchick, contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, writer at large for Air Mail, and contributing writer for Tablet. He is the author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. He is also a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Arguing that no, the U.S. should not still police the world is none other than Matt Taibbi. Taibbi is a journalist, the founder of Racket News, and the author of 10 books, including four New York Times bestsellers.

Matt was joined by Lee Fang. Lee is an independent investigative journalist, primarily writing on Substack at LeeFang.com. From 2015 to 2023, he was a reporter for The Intercept.”