Moscow has decided to drag the United States out into the open from the cheap proxy war it has waged against Russia on Ukrainian soil for the past quarter century. President Putin’s speech on Wednesday underscored that this is an existential struggle and that the Kremlin is determined to defend the motherland at all costs. He explicitly warned Washington, London and Brussels that Moscow “will certainly use all weapons systems at our disposal” in the coming period.
The obfuscations in the Western narrative – it’s about aggression, national sovereignty, the UN Charter, democracy versus authoritarianism, etc. – are no longer sustainable. Reduced to the bone, a titanic power struggle looms on the horizon. Both sides are preparing to fight tooth and claw, the outcome of which will phenomenally affect world politics and fundamentally change the world order. For Russia, the struggle is nothing less than its survival as a civilizational state, while for the United States, it comes down to the preservation of its global hegemony – the “rules-based order”. .
The fact is that Washington never accepted Russia’s resurgence in the post-Cold War era. Its program remained consistent through the Chechen insurgency in the Caucasus in the 1990s, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, NATO’s eastward expansion since 1999, and the color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, culminating in the 2014 coup in Kyiv orchestrated by the Obama administration whose point person was then-Vice President Joe Biden. This program is to encircle Russia with hostile states under the NATO banner.
NATO deployments against Russia speak for themselves – 40,000 troops on the eastern axis of the alliance, excluding around 100,000 US troops deployed under bilateral agreements across Europe, the highest level since 2005. The United States also has about 100 B-61 nuclear gravity bombs that are forward deployed to NATO bases. With the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO, the length of the direct land border between NATO and Russia doubles to approximately 2,500 km.
Russia has no choice but to strengthen its military assets at significant economic cost and to strengthen its surveillance posture for territorial security. Russia’s access to its enclave of Kaliningrad is becoming more difficult and the activities of its navy are severely restricted. NATO air security is diversifying, which also has a significant impact on the operations of the Russian Air Force in the Baltic Sea. In addition, Russia’s hybrid warfare capabilities in the new operational domains of space, cyberspace and cognitive domains will be greatly affected. Imagine a similar menacing deployment taking place in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Washington will become ballistic!
Flashpoint occurs in Ukraine as NATO powers now openly encourage Kyiv to mount attacks on Crimea and other Russian regions, even as the alliance provides Ukraine with timely intelligence real on the southern regions of Russia and that its personnel participate in the fighting. Western rhetoric threatens Russia with the admissibility of using WMD against it. Putin indicated in his speech on Wednesday that the United States and the United Kingdom had undermined the agreement reached during the Turkish-mediated Istanbul talks in April between Russia and Ukraine. Clearly, NATO wants this conflict to continue so that Russian military capability will be depleted.
The proxy war is a politically safe bet for President Biden since no body bag returns to Arlington Cemetery. The supply of arms is governed by a lend-lease agreement under which Ukraine is supposed to repay the debt in cash or in kind. (Zelenskyy overturned Ukraine’s 2001 land moratorium that allows GMO cartel companies to own Ukraine’s rich farmland and control its grain trade. These companies reportedly already control 16.7 million hectares of prime Ukrainian agricultural land.)
Wars are known to generate lucrative business for the military-industrial complex in America. Interest groups manipulate corrupt politicians. Wall Street, too, is a compelling reality. This Gordian knot is hard to cut, as shown by the strong “bipartisan” support in Congress for such a massive arms flow to Ukraine. Therefore, no third party is today capable of acting as an intermediary between Russia and the United States. As for French President Emmanuel Macron, despite being part of the Normandy Four and working with Russia on a constitutional solution in the Donbass, France acted diabolically to silently incite Kyiv to bury the Minsk agreement! Moreover, the Europeans are confined to a subordinate role and strategic autonomy is difficult for powers in decline.
Notably, the announcement of Putin’s mobilization came immediately after the return of Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council, from China where he held a strategic consultation on security on September 19 with Yang Jiechi, member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and director of the Bureau. of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission. The Chinese reading mentioned that the parties “exchanged in-depth views” on Ukraine, among other topics. China’s foreign ministry has since maintained its consistent stance when asked about the Russian mobilization, signaling its neutrality.
Putin’s speech signals that a negotiated settlement is unlikely now. The mobilization of three lakh reservists suggests that Moscow has no hope of dialogue – at least not as long as the Kyiv regime remains under US thumb. We can therefore expect a much larger Russian deployment on the battlefield in a concerted effort to stem the tide of the conflict and create a fait accompli for NATO. The September 23-27 referendum in the Donbass, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions on joining the Russian Federation is an indicator of how things will turn out.
Russia has blunted kyiv’s so-called “counter-offensive”. With the autumn showers, the ground becomes soft and muddy in the steppes criss-crossed by rivers, and tracked vehicles become useless. The advantage goes to Russia once the unforgiving winter hits this part of the world. Indeed, Putin had alluded on Wednesday to the fate of Hitler and Napoleon.
The writer is a former diplomat
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