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.”

YouTube link here.

Ukraine fired long range missiles into Russia proper earlier today. Read BBC report here:

Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, accused Washington of trying to escalate the conflict.

“That Atacms was used repeatedly overnight against Bryansk Region is of course a signal that they [the US] want escalation,” he said.

“And without the Americans, use of these high-tech missiles, as [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has said many times, is impossible.”

He said Russia would “proceed from the understanding” that the missiles were operated by “American military experts”.

“We will be taking this as a renewed face of the Western war against Russia and we will react accordingly,” he told a press conference at the G20 in Rio de Janeiro.

***

Putin lowers the threshold for using his nuclear arsenal after Biden’s arms decision for Ukraine

From AP:

President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday formally lowered the threshold for Russia’s use of its nuclear weapons, a move that follows U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to let Ukraine strike targets inside Russian territory with American-supplied longer-range missiles.

The new doctrine allows for a potential nuclear response by Moscow even to a conventional attack on Russia by any nation that is supported by a nuclear power.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said Ukraine fired six U.S.-made ATACMS missiles early Tuesday at a military facility in Russia’s Bryansk region that borders Ukraine, adding that air defenses shot down five of them and damaged one more. Ukraine’s military claimed the strike hit a Russian ammunition depot.

While the doctrine envisions a possible nuclear response by Russia to such a conventional strike, it is formulated broadly to avoid a firm commitment to use nuclear weapons and keep Putin’s options open.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov emphasized that the Ukrainian strike in Bryansk marked an escalation and urged the U.S. and other Western allies to study the modernized nuclear doctrine.

The Bell, 11/18/24

Russia’s reaction to the prospect of ATACMS strikes

The news that the United States will allow Ukraine to use its missiles to hit targets inside Russian territory was an unpleasant surprise for Russia’s leaders on Sunday evening. It is by no means certain that it will hand Ukrainian forces a significant advantage on the battlefield, but Vladimir Putin has previously said that he would regard such a move as equivalent to the US directly entering the war. According to The Bell’s sources, that is not just rhetoric — the Kremlin leader genuinely does see it that way. Now that it has become a reality, Moscow is searching for a response.

• The US decision to permit Ukraine to strike at Russia’s internationally recognized territory with long-range ATACMS missiles has not yet been announced publicly by any administration official. However, on Sunday evening several US media outlets reported simultaneously, citing administration insiders, that the green light had been given — and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky also referenced it cryptically in his evening address. The Kremlin did not respond right away, but on Monday, Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that the US decision injected a “significant new round of tension” into the conflict. Hours later, the foreign ministry said the decision radically changes the nature of the conflict and said Moscow would respond “appropriately and palpably”. Both directly referred to Putin’s speech of Sep. 12, when he spoke at length about the potential consequences of such a decision.
• At that time, Putin’s statement came in response to a New York Times report (which on that occasion turned out to be premature) that Biden might allow Ukraine to use ATACMS to strike deep into Russia. Putin said such a move “would mean that NATO countries — the US, European countries — were at war with Russia.” He added that Ukraine is not capable of carrying out such strikes by itself and that NATO personnel would have to enter the flight assignments and targets for the missiles. His words were indirectly backed up today by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who explained Germany’s refusal to supply Ukraine with its own long-range Taurus rockets was because Germany would have to take part in setting up the strike parameters — helping with targeting — something that was unacceptable to Scholz.
• Judging by TV broadcasts, Russian propaganda appears to be in a holding pattern — awaiting further instructions on how to respond. So far they have adopted something like “moderate nuclear threat” mode. Leading state TV host Dmitry Kiselyov, whose main weekly show was prepared ahead of the news, inserted a quick segment about a possible Russian response into a section about Joe Biden’s talks with European leaders at this week’s G20 in Brazil. “It could be anything, it’s not for nothing that we revised our nuclear doctrine,” Kiselyov said. The on-duty hawks, such as lawmaker Andrey Gurulyov, warned there “might be nothing left of America.” However, such threats have long been standard on Russian TV. 
• A source familiar with the Russian leadership’s thinking told The Bell that within the Kremlin the mood behind closed doors is very much that “NATO has gone to war with us” and they are proceeding from that basis. At the very least, Russia will step up its strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure, as well as on government agencies. But there could be more radical options, The Bell’s source suggested.
• Russia was already escalating its aerial attacks even before news came from Washington. Through Saturday night and into Sunday morning, Russian forces launched one of their largest mass missile and drone assaults since last winter, targeting Ukraine’s electricity grid with 120 missiles and 90 drones. But that was not the end. Hours later a missile hit an apartment block in the city of Sumy, killing 12 people, and then on Monday, Russia launched a missile strike on a residential quarter of Odesa, killing another 10. Russia’s logic is clear — it’s trying to hit Ukraine as hard as possible to force it into negotiations that it hopes Donald Trump will broker.

Why the world should care

The two months before Trump’s inauguration will be tough for Ukraine and anxious for the rest of the world. Russia will seek to raise the stakes as much as possible ahead of any talks in order to sap Kyiv’s morale and advance its own hardline demands. It’s hard to say at this stage how serious the latest Russian threats about a response are.