UPDATE
I no longer have a source with access to Putin’s inner circle. I did not pretend to understand the astonishing episode of the Wagner march on Moscow at the time, and plainly it was impossible, if the Russian and Belarussian official narrative were remotely true, that Prigozhin could be allowed to carry on living.
Well, at least I got that right. But I still am no closer to understanding the entire dynamic. Unless Prigozhin has been effectively a prisoner these last few months, it seems incomprehensible that he did not flee.
To move from something I do not understand to something I do.
In comments below the line here, and even more so in replies to the post of this article on twitter, I am intensely irritated by the sheer stupidity of the lines trotted out by the Putin cult.
Ukraine has not lost 400,000 dead. That is half of British Empire casualties in World War 1 – in one year? It is 80% of the size of the Ukrainian armed forces in 2021. To try to give a meaningful comparison, those units of the Iraqi Republican Guard destroyed in the initial 2003 onslaught by vastly superior forces using massive firepower, lost about 20% dead in the most extreme cases. They had broken long before that many were killed in flight.
There would be evidence of fields piled up with thousands of bodies if 400,000 were dead. In all the drone and headcam footage we have seen, there is nothing remotely like that. It is simply a quite extraordinary example of the Big Lie technique. Ukrainian casualties have been serious, but nothing like on that scale.
I wrote below in the original article that ludicrous casualty figures have been claimed by both sides. I really do not need idiots doing so here.
The “Putin is perfect” narrative claims that Russia has failed to entirely subdue Ukraine because a) it never intended to b) Ukraine had an immensely powerful army at the start of the conflict.
Both claims are utter nonsense. Russia sent a column of its finest troops and armour to Kiev from the North at the start of this stage of invasion. It also sent special forces ahead into Kiev with the object of decapitating the Ukrainian command structure. The ground had been prepared by very large sums of money paid to key Ukrainian officials and generals.
The aim was regime change.
The whole was based on very faulty intelligence that there would be little resistance and the Ukrainian people would welcome regime change. Much of the money to have been laid out in bribes had in fact been stolen within the Russian FSB (something, I would add from personal experience, MI6 is not immune from either).
The initial Russian assault on Kiev was a costly failure, with many of Russia’s best forces very badly damaged. The attempt to deny this is pathetic. We all saw it.
Elsewhere the Russian advance meant much better. This is largely because:
It is nonsense to state that Ukraine had very powerful armed forces. In 2021 the Ukrainian army was equipped almost entirely with largely outdated ex-Soviet hardware. There were huge problems in supply chains caused by quite astonishing levels of Ukrainian corruption (though this was true of both sides). A Ukrainian command structure riddled by co-option of large, supply favoured, units of Nazis, which ran on bragadaccio, was hardly efficient either.
The Russian invasion of its far smaller, weaker and corruption-riddled neighbour has been a demonstration of Russian weakness.
Of course Russia will ultimately win – Russia is a lot bigger and it is taking on a smaller, underdeveloped and scarcely functional mafia state.
But that this is all an example of Putin’s genius, and casualty rates favour Russia by ten to one, are claims so divorced from reality they can only come from those who are utterly delusional – or paid to put them out.
END OF UPDATE
For well over a decade, we were used to nightly shots on our television news of British and US forces, in heavy combat gear, storming across desert landscapes in cloud of dust or firing heavy machine guns over the top of mud walls.
These shots were provided by “embedded journalists” with the UK and US forces, swaggering around in the same kind of body armour and helmets as the troops, often distinguishable only by a blue bib with “press” written on it.
Thankfully, we see almost no such screen footage of the proxy war NATO is fighting against Russia in Ukraine. War porn has almost disappeared from our screens. We saw a lot of it when the failed Russian column to Kiev was destroyed in the early part of the war, but since then, very little.
The answer is of course not hard to find. The ratio of Iraqi dead to American dead in the second Iraq war was about 200 to 1, and in the “triumphant” early advance was still higher than that. The embedded journalists travelling as part of US or UK armed forces in their armoured vehicles were posing as heroes, but in little real danger at that stage.
The US forces were a real danger to non-embedded journalists. 16 journalists and 6 other media workers were acknowledged as killed by US forces in Iraq, while scores of other Iraqi journalists disappeared with no certainty as to who killed them. By contrast 2 “embedded” journalists were killed.
The “embedded journalists” were of course not real journalists at all, they were simply functioning as actors, presenting images of the exhilarating triumph of colonial massacre of a technologically inferior people, to a home audience that lapped it up.
By contrast, being in the front line with Ukrainian troops now would be very dangerous indeed. The very tiny number of journalists who have done it are indeed worthy of the name. Streaming along as a passenger in a glamourised turkey shoot in Iraq is much more congenial than being embedded with troops in Ukraine who are fighting where the kill ratio is somewhere close to even.
(There are utterly ludicrous enemy casualty claims by both Ukraine and Russia, which should be treated with equal contempt).
The territorial gain in the vaunted Ukrainian counter-offensive is of the same order as that in the notoriously futile Battle of the Somme. It doesn’t make for glorious television.
You may have noted a repeated Western propaganda meme, that very often when a Russian missile strikes hundreds of miles from the frontline, it is frequently said to have landed close to a hotel, bar or cafe used by western journalists.
I am not sure this is the propaganda win they think this is.
The Ukraine war is going extremely well for those who are making billions from the arms sales and increases to western defence budgets that have resulted. It is going extremely badly for ordinary people all over the world, who have suffered the inflationary and other consequences of the disruption of trade and production and the population flows.
Our rulers would love it to go on like this for years – in fact a quick Ukrainian victory would be a disaster for the profiteers.
This war is going nowhere on the ground. I do not expect a Russian winter offensive will be significantly more successful than the Ukrainian spring offensive. It would be impossible to display frontline coverage that did not demonstrate both abject horror and utter futility. Which is why there is almost none.
I am grateful we are seeing so little war porn on our screens. But I know why.
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The 10:1 is of course a strawman –whether sourced or authentic– so I’ll ignore it, along with a few other of same nature.
But can you please give me your source on the ratio being “close to even”.
Thank you.
bj
There is no source. having followed the conflict closely from the start and the development of casualty figures of both sides issued over time (and it is evident both sides are wildly lying) one thing is very obvious. The Russians took very heavy losses in the attempt to take Kiev at the start of the campaign (and if there is one thing that makes me absolutely furious, it is the nutters and trolls who pretend that did not happen because they cannot accept Putin makes mistakes, and that the situation on the ground now was not his masterplan all along). They also lost heavily in their original southern advance and later attempts to break out of central Donbass. The Ukrainians are taking very heavy losses in their counter-offensive.
As we know since time immemorial, each side is taking its heaviest losses when attacking.
Illegal cluster weapons have increased Russian losses recently.
The only good news is that I think both sides having wildly exaggerated the number of the “enemy” they have killed, there are possibly less dead in total than feared. If you forced me to make an estimate at this moment, I would say Russian 80,000 dead 220,000 wounded, Ukrainian 70,000 dead 200,000 wounded.
Russia has of course lost a far lower percentage of its available personnel. In that sense it is “winning”.
Appreciate the nature of guesstimating, but the fact that Ukraine started with a reported 600K troops – at the time the largest standing army in Europe – and has been in several rounds of call ups, added to the endless graveyard videos, the fact that increasingly older and younger Ukrainians have been called up, the massive artillery advantage that both sides agree the Russians have, this would generally lead me to believe that Ukraine has indeed the greater casualties by several factors. They are also drawing it from an smaller population. Of course, all moot, we probably won’t know for some time definite figures. I’m not sure the weight of probability supports your admittedly cautious conjecture.
Also not sure about the “attempt to take Kiev”. It was woefully understaffed and equipped, certainly not enough to occupy the city. Many other narratives have suggested that this stage of the SMO was either to say “we are serious, get to negotiating” or a feint to get Ukrainian troops heading out of the Donbass, where they were concentrated at the time.
Everyone is wise after the event, however.
Also not sure about the “attempt to take Kiev”.
I don’t think there was any serious attempt to take Kiev. The airborne assault looks like a risky gamble to grab Zelensky and anybody else handy . Russia did not have the troops to capture the city. I originally thought that the intention was an encirclement and siege à la Paris in 1870 but with an escape corridor for civilians. Clearly I was wrong.
I think the Russian Government did not make any serious military mistakes early on in the SMO but miscalculated badly politically in that they did not anticipate the pathological (and I mean that seriously) desire of the US & Britain to weaken or destroy the Russian Federation. They anticipated and dealt with the economic sanctions though I wonder if they expected the sanctions on Gucci handbags and British racehorses.
Up to the negotiations in Istanbul, it looked like Russia had called the game correctly. It seems that it was during those negotiations and with Boris Johnson’s visit that the Ukrainian position hardened. Give that at least one Ukrainian negotiator was assassinated after the earlier negotiations in Belarus one wonders if President Zelensky and his team felt that their personal survival rested on continuing the conflict.
since Iraq&Baghad were mentioned in some posts:
US/UK forces flew about a 1000 sorties every day bombing Iraq during the first stage of their invasion.
Including “carpet bombing” (goodness who invented that word?).
Then before 40.000 US/UK troops entered Baghdad they increased to 1500 sorties directed against the city area, among those over 500 cruise missiles fired into the city.
None of that happened in UKR.
I do not state to know what the RU High Command intended.
But comparistic approaches and available sources do not suggest a serious attempt to take over the city.
As someone here pointed out: it took the US 40.000 to take Baghdad. How many to hold it?
Remember the Greenzone?
p.s. yes, there is the issue of false intelligence allegedly causing major “mishaps”. (Who reported those? MI-6? SBU? FSB? Mossad? CIA?)
Still, it always struck me as odd that the RUs did not know what was going on in UKR and vice versa considering how close those countries have been for ages. But may be I am naive.
Key to taking Kyiv was capturing its two airports so that supplies and reinforcements could be flown in and Russia sent its elite troops, airborne units, to do it. That alone proves it wasn’t a feint. You don’t use your best troops as decoys. They succeeded after some heavy fighting only to discover that the Ukrainian sabotage had rendered both airports unusable and the Russians were so sure of success that they didn’t have a Plan B to fall back on.
The intention was clearly to surround Kyiv and shell and starve it into submission as happened in Mariupol and Aleppo. That’s the Russian way of doing war.
The obsession with body counts is an echo of the Vietnam war. With no ground being gained or lost the only thing the US military had to offer the American public were regular body counts and the perception that as long as they were killing more of the enemy than the enemy were killing Americans, they were winning. Final tally was about 800,000 Vietnamese military dead (plus about an equal number of civilians) to 58,000 Americans. The Soviet Union’s losses in Afghanistan were about half those of the defenders and a half to two million civilians died with a further 5 million displaced.
As opposed to the American way of war, Shock and Awe – eliminating “ high value targets” at wedding parties, snatch and snuff missions, drone strikes, a global torture complex, millions of civilians killed etc, etc, ad nauseum. They like it so much they even invade the wrong country. British soldiers in the first Gulf War were more afraid of the American military then the Iraqi military. Don’t forget Hiroshima or Nagasaki either. The “Collateral Murder” vid above exemplifies the American method.
Got any sources for those highly specific death figures? I think you are in error.
War is war – nationality alters the premise but don’t get hung up on it Mr Morgaine.
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning – it smells like victory”
Colonel Kilgore in the movie Apocalypse Now.
Mr Murray “guess” regarding casualties is eccentric to say the least, but given he’s mentioned a wish to see Russia “decolonised” (despite the fact the country is 80% or more ethnic Russian and the minorities might not feel the same), So I think there may be a bias there. Plus the long standing stereotype that Russia wears out its opponents by burying them beneath bodies
However an application of material facts, can debunk the notion that the casualty rate is 1-to-1 let alone favours Ukraine.
First the RF has a functional airforce, long-range strike capability, more professional cadres, more artillery, plus support from local auxiliaries forces.
Then consider that Ukraine’s healthcare system & hospitals, are in a much more dire state than Russia’s. Thus affecting the survival rate of wounded men. Plus the fact the AFU has been profligately using semi-trained territorials to bolster their ranks.
The ratio of POW’s also substantially favours Russia, that’s quite indicative of the state of the combatant armies.
And like you posted there’s been more circumstancal evidence leaking out of Ukraine suggesting serious losses. Then the fact that Ukraine has had a few mobilizations, and their defense minister just ripped off Goebbels “total-war” speech.
I wonder if some people here subscribe to in an inverse “stopped clock rule”. That the MSN tells the gospel about Russian casualties & one other subject.
“There is no source. having followed the conflict closely from the start and the development of casualty figures of both sides issued over time …..one thing is very obvious. The Russians took very heavy losses in the attempt to take Kiev at the start of the campaign”
If there is no reliable source for casualty figures, how can it be obvious that there were heavy casualties? If there is neither documentary nor video evidence of heavy casualties, then the statement that there were cannot be more than speculation at best.
This war should be known as the Popcorn War because of the way that the soldiers doing the actual fighting are so outnumbered by the armchair warriors in the rest of the world watching them. Never in the history of human conflict has so much been speculated by so many on so few facts.
As The Jam sang, That’s Entertainment. Are you not entertained Bayard?
Eval woman Tatyana is taking notes of Mr. Murray’s control buttons.
Lever #4: “Putin is perfect and never makes mistakes”. Can infuriate Mr Murray into full Karen mode, making him to be rude to his readers, thus losing support.
—
Do you know there’s a … a joke / common knowledge / stereotype – known here in Russia. It describes a person, whose attitude to his interlocutors is as follows: “Hey you bastards, where’s your today’s support. Fuck you.”
So Tatyana, what are your pronouns?
In any case, I love your jokes, you’re the best.
If all Americans could have such a sense of humor, this would be a perfect world.
And now that the Wagner Group has been devastated by this tragic incident, do you think they should continue their praiseworthy work in Ukraine and Africa under a new name?
Prokofiev should be considered: Brilliant composer, born in the-part-of-Russia-that-Nazis-stole-with-NATO ?
Also, in Prokofiev, to a foreign ear, the ending sounds just like KIEV !!!
Have a beer buddy
Hi, Melrose 🙂
I thought that I maybe was too toxic again, giving my opinion on Mr. Murray’s reactions, so I returned to give more explanation, before he gets too angry with me and throw me away forever from here 🙂 I promise I’ll return in about 36-48 hours to answer you, Melrose, because now I’m on highway, driving home.
So, Mr. Murray, you know I’m not an enemy of yours. But you may be not aware how emotional I myself am 🙂 There are lots of things that enfuriate me. Like trucks, for example. Do you imagine how much annoying the trucks on the highway can be?
I mean, as a housewife I have little opportunities to check why is my car’s speedometer has 240 km/h mark on it. And the trucks, they ARE slow!
When cheking if my speedometer a good one, I simply cannot stand them trucks! They should stay in their low-speed lane, damn snails and turtles. When seeing the trucks going in columns ahead of me I invent colorful descriptions, and prey that they don’t suddenly start their shitty pas de deux pulling their dirty toad paws into my lane. If only they knew the names I give them, Mr. Murray, if you were sitting in the passenger place, I bet your ears would shrink!
So, I see your modest ‘nutters and trolls’ with a mild smile.
What is different is that I’m alone in my car, the trucks go their way unaware of my opinion. And, I know that in the end, we all will reach our destinations. Also, I guess them the truck drivers must have some good explanation for their behaviour. Also, insulting people never does anything good.
Well, my personal feature is to find smth positive in negative situations. In my case I am f*cking happy to be a linguist, because when I run out of obscene Russian vocabulary then I switch to foreign one 🙂 Isn’t it great? Yes, it is.
Ah, and the degree of enfuriation I’m able to feel amounts to “I see red”
https://youtu.be/LhRtAdrn0Rg
One great song for me. I can feel it, and I know this emotion, and I can recognise it in me. So, when I get angry I recall the song and think to myself “hey, Tanya, it’s not an adultery this time, so these people don’t deserve a gun at their head. Highly likely. Not this time, perhaps.”
This gives me time to cool down and think about what I prefer: to behave like a decent person, or to let my emotions out. The latter is tempting, because sometimes people become famous because of that 🙂
https://youtu.be/o8hYrNsRoTs
—
Any Russians here? Please advise if ‘забрало упало’ is a good equivalent for ‘i see red’?
Do Russians even use pronouns? I know they don’t have articles, and seem to get along fine without. Often I see some autotranslated Russian and the main issue is that wrong pronouns are often attributed to verbs. Such as “I ran away”, when it should be “they ran away”.
An admirably concise language IMHO.
[ MOD: Caught in spam-filter ]
___
Master Tom, wherever you hail from, you’re clearly totally unaware of what I meant by asking about ‘pronouns’. No big deal. You’ll find out…
Tatyana, I appreciate your YT clips from US shows, but obviously that’s not an answer to my question. If instead of of a web blog, we were exchanging emails, I would possibly end the message with :
Это электронное письмо и любое вложение являются конфиденциальными и могут быть юридически привилегированными. Если вы не являетесь предполагаемым получателем, имейте в виду, что любое раскрытие, воспроизведение, распространение или другое распространение или использование строго запрещено. Пожалуйста, уничтожьте сообщения и немедленно сообщите об этом отправителю. Содержание этого электронного письма не является юридически обязательным, если оно не подтверждено письмом.
Melrose, I hope you may return to this comments thread, as I promised to answer upon my return home. I’m back and happy to be here 🙂
I think you hardly need clarification on my preferred pronouns, quite obvious to everyone I guess, but thanks for asking anyway 🙂 It’s she/her for me, and have been since my birth, I’m proudly a woman and have no intention to change it, and quite happy with it.
Wagner group – I really dislike an idea that some rich people may get tanks, hire folks, and have their private army, killing people in the name of my country. I prefer an Army that is controlled. All must be clear and transparent – the funding, the spending, conditions for deployment etc. So, if they the Wagner group acted as volunteer organization, or whatever else they could invent as a legal ground, I do not like it when they march inside my country shooting at my Army’s helicopters, for the sake of some strange goal, which is still incomprehensible.
I prefer things be done in a simple way – I vote for my government, my government spends on the Army, the Army does what the government entitles them to do.
On Prokofiev I don’t know what to say, in Russian it is ponounced like ‘Pre – koh – fjef’ with much reduction in the end, so little resamblance to ‘Kee – jev’. The sign ‘j’ in trascription denotes a sound that is initial in ‘Yota’ or ‘Yoga’
In Ukrainian they say Kyiv, and I sometimes wonder how one reads it? Kai – aiv? Kaee – aee – vee?
That is hard to transcript, English has no Ы sound. The most close is ‘Kee – ieev’. As you see, poor guy Prokofiev actually would be very much surprised to know his name is any semblance to Kiev 🙂
was the Wagner group devastated? I’ve read they are still in existence. the cook is gone, true, but they could be folded into the Russian military forces.
re: propaganda
I wouldn´t discount the possibility that the RUs have mostly given up on trying to influence the West, because even if they told the truth nobody here would be listening. In that sense, may be they are closer to real numbers than the West because it simply doesn´t matter what they are saying. So they can as well tell the truth.
After all UKR propaganda concerning the Western youth (I see it in Germany every day) is outstanding, if one falls easily for well designed webpages and simplistic but emotional fairy-tales. So it makes no sense to counter that. Russian viewpoints are not part of our system any more.
Just think of the “grain deal” and how it was (not) covered by media.
And as a reader what am I supposed to do? There is a limited number of sources I would like to believe, like Swiss Jacques Baud.
You don´t have to agree with him, nor like him but he is honest and he is not a moron and does have his credentials as frm UN/NATO/Swiss Intell. working in Eastern Ukraine and Ruanda among others.
Are the frm US operatives from the McGovern lot making up their numbers? Why should McGovern do that?
(I met frm Pentagon physicist Ted Postol who is cooperating with McGovern as well as with Hersh as we know and he would not engage with a liar.)
So I am trying to connect the dots. One has to start somewhere.
p.s. I have lost contact to my friends in Kiev and the Russians/Ukrainians in Germany have withdrawn completely. We don´t talk. I would want to hear their side at the present. I know they were much wiser regarding the geopolitical stakes for RU than most Germans.
Someone said to me the other day “ This war is warping us all, both those who are on the battlefield and those who are not.” I realised they were right the more I thought about it.
Your last paragraph is a sad testament to the widespread effect of this warping
“I don’t believe in anything, I don’t believe in belief.”
Norman Lewis.
You might have read “Naples44” by Norman Lewis but if you haven’t… it is a diary kept by the author whilst serving as a military police officer during the allied landing and occupation of Naples in WW2, it is very frank and made me think about the hardships war inflicts on civilians. I found it a good story, well told by a morally decent persona, the diary format is consistent and convincing, suggesting it is a real diary with maybe some editing for publication. He had a long and successful career as a writer publishing fiction and non-fiction. Naples is the first book of his I’ve read but it won’t be the last.
thx for the recommendation. Sounds good. Any such literary document is increasingly valuable, the more certain aspects of WWII are being lost in the memory holes. Especially the contradictory ones.
The only stuff from Naples 43/44 that I know is by Malaparte. But that´s different of course.
…still available in Germany in book shops…
The Guardian in 2011:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/28/naples-44-norman-lewis-rereading
I got the feeling that Lewis was asking himself “who to believe?” as you were above.
So possibly he found a route/method through the propaganda jungle which allowed him to live a life of “human flourishing” I will read some more of his stuff and let you know if I find anything more solid concerning “human flourishing” and “ who to believe?”
btw commanding general Marc Clarke was known to the troops as “Marcus Aurelius Clark’s”
Marcus Aurelius Clark’s
what soldier today would know Roman history?
(unless of course they are West Point officer graduates, I guess)
AG I got the impression the nickname was based on Marc Clarke’s perceived arrogance, ie that of a Roman emperor.
Craig, are you willing to bet on your judgement?
What do we know about the war in the Ukraine?
The Ukrainian regime is using press gang methods to kidnap Ukrainian men between the ages of 16-65 to send to the front because they have suffered catastrophic losses. Evidence for this can be found on the vast increase of newly expanded graveyards and freshly dug graves all over the Ukraine.
In addition, the Russians destroyed the vast majority of the Ukrainian airforce plus its navy. Ukrainian does not posses vast numbers of ballistic missiles, as the R.F does, nor the vast superiority in tanks, self propelled artillery or towed artillery pieces.
Furthermore, it has scant industrial capacity to manufacture these weapons, since the R.F destroyed most of it, so it is almost totally reliant on the West.
Since even the Ukrainian regime admits the RF has a superiority in artillery and NATO admits its a war of attrition, how can the Ukrainian KIA plus WIA be comparable with the RF ?
https://kyivindependent.com/why-ukraine-struggles-to-combat-russias-artillery-superiority/
excellent question.
The problem with Craig’s analyses is that they focus too much on the battlefield in Ukraine. The real war is in the politco/economic field, and the US and its vassel states in NATO and elsewhere are losing it.
I should also correct some peoples’ misconception that this is a Ukrainian Russian war. It is not. It is a US/UK/EU Russian war. Craig seems not to see the forest for the trees, so to speak. To that end, try to listen to former British diplomat Alastair Crooke on Judge Napolitano’s show “Judging Freedom”. Try to get the full 27 minute view, rather than the short excerpt:
Ukraine’s Dire Situation w/Alastair Crooke fmr Brit ambassador
https://www.judgenap.com/
Of course it is a proxy war. But it is the Ukrainians who are dying.
Alastair Crooke is not a former Ambassador, he is ex-MI6. His expertise is the Middle East. But he is a very sensible person.
Often enough, people are both. Diplomats and agents of Intelligence agencies.
Obviously the case here. And clearly, it’s not always required to be ‘sensible’ to work as a diplomat, but if you’re MI6 and NOT sensible, your days are numbered…
The extreme case, of course, is the USA. To be a US diplomat all you need is to be very rich (otherwise you won’t even be considered as a candidate) and to be able to threaten and bluster.
They don’t do diplomacy as we know it, Jim.
The “war porn” is pretty much freely available on telegram. It doesn’t confirm the western narrative. I’m not sure anyone can talk with any accuracy on casualty figures until perhaps well after the event, but there are many, many videos of endless Ukrainian graveyards, but I’ve seen none from Russian graveyards. Maybe that’s just selective, but given the freelance nature of the content on telegram if they were there they would have been picked up by MSM to prove the Russia is losing narrative. Equally there’s no videos of Russian press-gangs capturing young and old men and sending to them to the front, plenty from the Ukraine side.
Indeed, there are a couple of nasty Telegram pro-ukrainians channels dedicated to show russian corpses in humilated ways with perverse and psychopatic comments below them.
I have seen nothing of the same sickness on the russian side making fun of killed ukrainians.
And as you say, plenty of videos of zelensky forces running around trying to arrest and send ukrainians to the front, I have seen no such on the russian side. Still the ukrainian behavior is denied any airtime on western msm.
If westerners only knew what is going on in Ukraine, they would drop their support instantly…
Yeah case in point regarding arresting poor ukrainians for the war:
Video of van Der Leyen:
Warm congratulations from the EU on the occasion of Ukraine’s Independence Day and an illustration of the remarkable results in the realization of democracy in the country.
https://t.me/s/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses
When I see her talk about Russia, Adolf Hitler often pops up in my head for some reason….. I bet she would fit just fine in a brown power suit, it would go along with her blonde aryan hairdo.
EU, Fourth Reich, say no more, nudge, nudge.
Nuland, Freeland, van der Leyen, …
… suggestive apparatchik…
Stevie Boy, I heard that Downing Street has a nudge, nudge unit.
I also heard that a nod is as good as a wink to a blind bat but a nudge is better. However if one touches a bat (blind or otherwise), there is a chance of infection and one can’t be to careful these days. We got the “war on drugs” and we got the “war on terror”, time for a war on bats (blind or otherwise)?
Von der Leyen knows Ukraine is neither independent nor democratic in any meaningful sense. But then she also knows she herself is a comically antidemocratic figure, presiding over another vassal entity of the United States. If Ursula is remembered at all it will be as a craven coward who demanded silence when the Americans brazenly degraded the West European economy and standard of living.
“The “war porn” is pretty much freely available on telegram. It doesn’t confirm the western narrative.”
What I find bizarre is how many of the videos of Ukranian soldiers being blown up seem to be filmed by the Ukranians themselves. Perhaps they are more interested in showing it how it is than conforming to the official narrative that everything is going swimmingly. I would not be surprised if the Ukranian soldiers view their politicians in the same light as the British soldiers did theirs in WWI, i.e. the lowest form of life.
Some of them seem to have most impressive victim complexes. They don’t mind how much they (or preferably others) suffer, as long as it shows the sympathetic West how awfully they are treated by the horrid Russians. (Who, ironically, have suffered badly through too much use of kid gloves).
craig Post author
August 26, 2023 at 09:09
BabsP
A draft treaty was not agreed and initialled in Turkey. Proximity talks were however underway to end the war. They were torpedoed by the USA. I was there.
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Why the delay in reporting this info? The time for this revelation was when Russia first made the claim to numerous heads of state.
If negotiations to end the war were underway, why were they derailed, why was Johnson used? I can guess the reasons, but you are claiming you don’t need to guess because you where there and have the answer.
Are you obliged to serve the British government because of your diplomatic career, or do you still claim to be a journalist acting as an agent on the citizens behalf? You can’t serve two masters.
If it endangered you to be the first source, fine, I can understand your silence, but you know a whole world of sources who could have released such crucial information. Or have you lost the addresses of John Pilger, Consortium News, Seymour Hersh etc… ?
I feel it appropriate to ask if you are our agent, or theirs…_
Judge Napolitano talks to LarryJohnson, Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern.
They continue to make sense to me, I guess they will continue to make sense until they don’t make sense, or this butchers yard shuts down…_
https://sonar21.com/judge-napolitanos-round-table-and-the-continued-delusions-of-david-petraeus/
Truly brilliant. Not a single word that one could disagree with. If only people like those four could be heard and given some influence. In Judge Napolitano’s words, a “power panel”. And he himself is a shrewd and realistic chairman.
As Larry Johnston says, reports by professional intelligence analysts are arriving at the White House and being ignored. Men like Ray McGovern have been discarded while their political bosses told the top men whatever they wanted to hear. The leaders make up their own stories as Karl Rove explained 19 years ago.
Then they project all their own lies and failings onto the Russians and the Chinese.
Tom, if you had told me I would be paying attention to such people as these, at any time in my life before now, I would have smacked you in the gob.
World turned upside down….again! All I wanted to do at this time of my life, was work the garden, chop firewood, play with the grandkids, walk the dog, collect the horse poo and cruise my arse off.
I ask you, what’s a girl to do for some peace and quiet these days…_
Sorry but even agreeing to certain extent with them would be crazy for me and we are where we are listening and trying to make sense and ignoring blatant propaganda.
If I had so many pleasures like you I would ignore the shit show .
Personally pls pretty pls stay around!
Pigeon, “If I had so many pleasures like you I would ignore the shit show”….. ok, I’ll leave the poo picking to Mrs. D and the grandkids…_ ? ?? ??
Digger UK
I am confused!!!
I assumed that you were a man and you asked IMO rhetorical question ” what’s a girl to do …,” and I assumed you are a woman.
Yes Mrs D and kids and neighbours etc. should pick up dog poo while we change the world ?. OT we can teach dogs to so many skills but not where and when to shit (unbelievable).
Pigeon English shit is information.
I went for a walk in some forest with a soil scientist working at a university somewhere. They kept on picking up various bits of shit from several different species eg badger,fox,rabbit etc and and by the end of the walk they were able to offer remarkably persuasive conjectures of the relationships between the various species and the health of each individual population. It was a very powerful experience, leaving an abiding memory. The criteria were, what was and wasn’t in the shit and the location where it was found.
I have come across the phrase “A users information belongs to the user or should belong to the user and they should be able to dispose as they see fit.”.Maybe dogs feel the same way?
Recently came across an academic study that found that dogs took the direction of true magnetic north into consideration when choosing a location in which to defecate or urinate!
“OT we can teach dogs to so many skills but not where and when to shit (unbelievable).”
Housetraining?
Bayard, house training does not involve a time element, at least not in my house, yours may be different. I saw a Canadian film called “Leolo”, where a patriarch timed his offspring performing their daily rituals and then weighed it all. Low budget film from Quebec, hilarious and sickening, yet with a great deal of pathos The dad is such a prick, Leolo imagines his own creation story because he can’t believe it is really his dad.
“Bayard, house training does not involve a time element, at least not in my house, yours may be different. ”
My experience is that animals quickly become creatures of habit and expect to be fed and allowed out at the same time of day.
You can have peace or you can have freedom. Never count on having both.
Got as far as Scott Ritter saying Putin doesn’t murder his opponents and fell off my chair laughing. I suppose he thinks Pavel Antov and all the others really did die accidentally falling out of high windows. He’s either a propaganda stooge or a gullible fool.
And the Skripals were honest victims of Putin’s evil, I suppose? You have a very black-and-white view, it seems.
“Got as far as Scott Ritter saying Putin doesn’t murder his opponents and fell off my chair laughing. I suppose he thinks Pavel Antov and all the others really did die accidentally falling out of high windows. He’s either a propaganda stooge or a gullible fool.”
Conspiracy theorist.
Yes he could be a conspiracy theorist I suppose.
“I suppose he thinks Pavel Antov and all the others really did die accidentally falling out of high windows.”
OK, probability says they were pushed, but not that Putin or one of his agents did the pushing. That’s just you putting the spin you want to hear on it.
I’m an even worse offender than Ritter; I don’t believe that any Russians ever tried to kill anyone in the UK with a deadly nerve agent called Novichok. I don’t believe the Russians or the Donbass people had anything to do with the destruction of Flight MH17.
what did you think about the Skripals? did you fall for the UK propaganda that Russia did it? where are the Skripals?
I have been told the Skripals are just outside Kitchener, Ontario, living adjacent to but not as part of a Mennonite community. They are very much not free to leave as they wish or communicate with the outside world.
Thanks for clearing that up, sounds eminently plausible.
I’m just wondering what would’ve happened if Russia hadn’t invaded the Donbass last year, would the Ukrainian forces have slaughtered those in the region of the Donbass and would that have allowed US nukes to be positioned right on Russia’s doorstep.
On the above would the USA or for that matter the UK have accepted nukes from Russia placed on their doorsteps or would they have done something about it.
Another point would Ukraine have eventually been fully equipped with modern styled weapons, (Merkel’s comments appear to suggest stalling tactics) and would that have led to some sort of uneasy situation with Russia, and was the plan all along to use the people of Ukraine to draw Russian forces in to a conflict, or was Putin eventually planning on invading Ukraine anyway.
What would happen if Putin withdrew his forces from the Donbass region, would the Ukrainian government and Nato allow Luhansk and Dontesk to remain independent or would they resume attacking the people within, I like to think the former would happen, but the latter seem more likely to me.
All we can hope for right now is that the conflict doesn’t escalate, in my opinion Russia doesn’t have the forces to fully subdue Ukraine and Ukraine doesn’t have the forces to repel Russia, it appears to be a bit of a stalemate, maybe its time to call a truce and get around a table to negotiate so sort of peace deal. I’d say the Western MIC doesn’t want that, and Putin can’t be seen to lose face to his people either. The people of Russia might get tired of the war if it drags out for years, and Putin could find himself it a bit of trouble, I suppose the same could be said of Zelensky, apart from the war casualties who are paying the ultimate price, we in the West are paying for this war through the nose, so its in our best interests as well for this conflict to end sooner than later.
This conflict has opened up a mutlipolar world, which will dilute US power, which inturn will see US foreign policy become more and more belligerent, the USA will itself become a casualty (economic one) of this conflict further down the line.
Reublicofscotland
If Russia hadn’t invaded, the Donbas area would have been a blood bath, and then emboldened by their success the USA would have encouraged (forced) them to complete the job and re-take Crimea.
Does anybody think Russia would give up its Black Sea bases and allow Nato warships in Sevastopol?
Oh, somehow Azov forces were in Mariupol doing engineering course in Azovstal ?.
Luhansk and Dontesk are not independent. They’re part of Russia and ruled from Moscow which I don’t believe is what the inhabitants wanted.
If Russia hadn’t invaded the stalemate in the area would probably have continued with Russia continuing to support the rebels. There was your real ‘proxy war’.
Well, a majority of them certainly voted for it.
So far there is no “proof” that the RU government did support the provinces during the Donbas conflict. Any good historian I read pointed out the lack of evidence that would leave this undisputed.
So even if the West takes this as a fact, it is not. So far what we do know, the RUs did not hinder volunteers to cross the border.
The Donbas provinces during that time period had various views. Many wanted to become part of RU, many wanted a neutral status. What none of them wanted was to be subject of the “ATO” by the Kiev government any longer. They did not want their water supply cut off, being shelled and so on.
Eventually the regional government criticized Putin harshly for not helping them. They were the ones calling for support from Russia. Which Mr. Putin was very reluctant to give.
Why? At least Richard Sakwa says Putin is/was considered too cautious, wary of swift and decisive decisions. He was considered not a “master” but a “mediator” between power factions in RU. If Putin´s biography does matter FSB planning out every detail and not making mistakes was his first rule.
Crimea was a dangerous situation since it would cut RU off. And don’t forget the nuclear arsenals stationed there. And the RU government did have a popular position in Crimea.
It´s not that Kiev played its cards well.
They had very good starting positions with Yanukovych playing RU and EU against each other so he would eventually receive a RU loan of 15 bn.
Regarding the EU offer Yanukovych´s options were limited. After the EU presented their economic demands the Ukrainian industrials and social organizations rebelled because it would have instigated a neo-liberal restructuring program which eventually could have cost him the coming elections. Not to speak of the financial hardship. Not my intention to white-wash him. But it was infinitely better than what the country got afterwards.
Quote from Petro´s book:
“Yanukovych’s strategy was to play Russia and the EU against each other. He delayed signing the EU Association Agreement at the Vilnius summit in November, and asked for a loan of 27 billion dollars. When the EU offered him the paltry sum of 833 million dollars, Yanukovych turned to Russia to try to obtain a deal that would put more pressure on the EU negotiators. A month later, Ukraine received a 15 billion dollar multiyear loan from Moscow, and the EU then countered with a comparable offer. Yanukovych had actually achieved what many other Ukrainian politicians had only dreamed of: getting Russia and the West to compete with each other for Ukraine’s favor.
But for this negotiating strategy to bear fruit, it needed domestic political support, which Yanukovych’s opponents were determined not to give him. In a telling sign of how frayed social discourse had become, Yanukovych’s refusal to sign with the EU and get an even more advantageous deal with Moscow was interpreted as a betrayal of Ukraine’s only proper “civilizational choice.”
Re: participants of Euromaidan:
“Some research has suggested that actual residents of Kiev made up only 12 percent of protestors; 55 per cent came from western, predominantly rural regions, 24 percent from the center, and another 12 percent from southern and eastern Ukraine.”
* * *
me again:
If all this makes no sense look into how Kiev mishandled the Covid crisis. It is a perfect example for how racist, anti-rational views threatened the population. Foreign Secretary Kuleba made clear on Dec. 24th 2020:
“As Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba put it, even if it were proven to be effective, Sputnik V would never be used in Ukraine because “Russia is not interested in the health of Ukrainians, but in imposing its propaganda and its ideology.”
They declined the RU offer after visiting the US embassy in Kiev who told them not to cooperate with RU on this issue. Remember how the West mocked any vaccine coming from other places but their own labs.
Then Kiev turned to the Brits who demanded stellar sums then went back to the Chinese who by then had too many patients of their own and declined. They ended up with India. And so on.
The entire history of this single example gives you the core racism and idiocy of this government. It´s just not being reported in our realms at all.
If they have proven one thing, it´s complete incompetence in taking care of their own population.
Here’s some news, Craig, of a Sancho Panza to your Don Quixote, or vice versa ……. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/road-totalitarianism-part-3-cj-hopkins-trial-sentencing-thoughtcrimes …… and the powers that be that would be thinking they have everything under their command and control, but in live actuality and an unfolding virtual reality, are totally unaware of the catastrophic damage and exploitable vulnerabilities they are unable to prevent or fight against, as the world as they know it, and worlds that they haven’t yet a clue about, and ITs rabid dogs of war, concentrate their crazy attentions and manic vengeful retributions on them and on the future fare they would be intending with the cuckolded help of mainstream media moguls and channels to deliver and mentor/reign over and monitor like latter day Caesars or wannabe Hitlers.
Hard to believe maybe, but honestly true nevertheless, for it is around everywhere and completely surrounds them in their exalted lair prisons from which there be no clear safe and secure avenues of escape.
It is hard to believe (I never learnt how to use Pun intended or pun not intended).
With no disrespect at all the “guy from a cellar” writing literally satire!
Is his writing about charges, satire or real?
It might be real or warning.
Things are absurd!!
To make it clear I mostly enjoy CJ Hopkins writing.
I didn’t enjoy, at the time as militant pro vaxxer his satire but now I am more sceptical.
Furthermore I would never portray him as à Nazi from my leftist perspective or would I class him as lefty or any other label. Guy is funny!
interesting how narratives shift and nobody notices
In Germany Ukraine for almost 30 years was synonymous with corruption / whores / mafia.
If you wanted a failed state perfect example, you chose Ukraine. Naturally.
That this was racist, nobody gave a damn.
Now? Over night virtually its a textbook democracy.
p.s. anyone knows why one hears so little of the Polish secret sevices?
During the 20th century they were called the best secret service on the continent.
AG
“p.s. anyone knows why one hears so little of the Polish secret sevices?
During the 20th century they were called the best secret service on the continent.”
It goes back at least as far as the decoding of the German enigma machines in the 1930s.
Few, lets face it virtually nobody, in the UK or USA will have heard of Marian Rejewski or Gwido Langer.
However Polish cryptographers cracked the German enigma machine codes then and created machines to
help them do the decoding.
They decoded German messages throughout the rise of the Nazi regime and passed them on to the
Western allies. Weeks before the invasion of Poland they handed their latest decryption machines and
techniques over to British intelligence.
After the War began both Rejewski’s and Langer’s groups continued to operate on the Continent, in France
and elsewhere continuing to decode German messages, obviously undertaken at great personal risk.
Rejewski’s group got out by the skin of their teeth by crossing into Spain in 1943.
Langer’s group were not so lucky. They were captured at the Spanish Border and spent over a
year undergoing interrogation from the Germans until liberated after D-Day.
In Langer’s case, there is, an admittedly somewhat tenuous Scottish connection.
After liberation he chose to relocate to Perth in Scotland for the remainder of the War and indeed until he died there a few years later. Perth Airport, as now is, Scone Aerodrome as then was, was a wartime base for
the Polish Air Squadron which played such an important part in the Battle of Britain. There are hundreds
of Polish war graves in a section of Perth Cemetary, mostly pilots. Langer was seconded to a Signals unit
based in Kinross.
When he died he was buried in the Polish War Graves section of Perth Cemetary where his body remained
for many decades. Then in circa 2010 the Polish Government, in line with his descendants wishes, re-interred his body to Poland with full military honours. His gravestone is inscribedwith with his role in decodng the German Enigma machine
Of course, all we ever hear about is Bletchley Park, Turing. I don’t wish to downplay the importance of Bletchely Park.
The speed they developed in breaking the coded messages was an immense achievement. Indeed many think the Colossus machine developed there was a true precursor of modern computers. However, that machine was
the brainchild of a man called Tommy Flowers who you will also probably not have heard of either.
Not in this case because he was Polish, but rather because he was a lowly Post Office engineer and in Britain class matters.
thx!
I knew the Enigma connection but the personal stuff is quite intruiging.
The Polish squadroon around here, Germany, was known mainly for the Guy Hamilton evergreen “Battle of Britain” and Lubitsch´s comedy “To be or not to be” from 1942 which involves a Polish pilot stationed in Britain.
Flowers I totally forgot about after I might have read of him, once?
Thx for bringing him back.
p.s. its funny that with Flowers the postal services were involved in war research. For some time the German Post Ministry was part of developing the nuclear bomb, supporting Manfred von Ardenne´s research financially.
The postal service ran the telephone network and pre-war Flowers built some of the earliest electronic telephone exchanges using over 1,000 valves. A lot of scientists thought such machines would never run reliably but Flowers knew that the trick was to never switch them off and keep them at a constant temperature.
nice
I guess the entire history of technological progress has a “para” version of what really happened.
In this “true” history” a lot of individuals with practical minds and excellent understanding of the craft solved the real issues.
Small pox vaccines were produced long before members of the educated elite made themselves rich and famous on the back of “discovering” and marketing them. Power gathers all “good things” unto itself. Revealed religious experience becomes the Church, small pox vaccines become “Big Pharma” and a manatee became Marcus Aurelius Clarkus’ dinner in the book “Naples44”
The only thing true in history is “parahistory”
Rereading my post a possible mislead, Scone Aerodrome was a training base for the Polish Air Force not operational, or at least very little operational.
“However, that machine was the brainchild of a man called Tommy Flowers who you will also probably not have heard of either.
Not in this case because he was Polish, but rather because he was a lowly Post Office engineer and in Britain class matters.”
as can be seen by his being remembered as “Tommy”, rather than Thomas.
“Over night virtually its a textbook democracy”.
So? We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Tom Welsh, if your comment had not been processed, actioned and stored wherever GCHQ keeps it’s data, I would have to grass you. Everybody knows (or should) that we always been at war with Eurasia not Eastasia. What would happen if people were allowed to believe themselves not our kind and wise masters? You can’t have culture breaking out all over the place, especially without supervision. I mean, have you ever seen a colony of mould. It wouldn’t be profitable and potentially, messy and uncomfortable. Now you have been alerted to your deficiencies, a sincere attempt to correct them is expected.
DO NOT DISSAPPOINT.
“Everybody knows (or should) that we always been at war with Eurasia not Eastasia”.
But that was yesterday, citizen. Do you need a spell of re-education?
Tom Welsh, joking aside, I wasn’t telling you, I was warning you. I am already in a “re-education facility” and believe me, it ain’t pretty. It is only a matter of time before the hammer comes down and
As secret official messages, later leaked, are concerned: When Wiki leaked the “cable leaks” there was a lesson there, I am grateful to Noam Chomsky, who welcomed the leaks, but stressed to not take their content at face value, since messages from internal embassy memos e.g. first of all only documented the embassies beliefs, which were not necessarily realistic or in accordance with realities on the ground, outside the embassy building.
Which means, they were creating fiction in part.
Of course every case had to be checked individually. But these things are complicated.
One good example was the completely wrong assessment from the US embassy in Israel on the situation in Palestine. Since no member of the US embassy would ever go there, everything they wrote about Palestine was total nonsense. But it fit the picture they wanted to sell.
A bit like the UKR war effort in the public now. First fiction then after 18 months of death, some scrutiny.
I think one of the main reasons the Washington people got so angry about those leaks was that the whole world learned what American government employees really think of their foreign “allies” and other collocutors.
Of course, if you don’t want to risk being embarrassed that way, don’t speak ill of others. Not even in what you think is a secret cable.
I remember rather vividly some advice I saw – and have followed – back in the 1990s when I began to use the Internet very day.
Anything you post anywhere on the Internet might as well be on a huge public bulletin board that can be read by everyone in the world. And it will never expire or go away – it will be there until you die, and after. You might think that some Internet locations are secret, but I wouldn’t count on it. Nor phone calls, as we see every day.
Incredible as it might seem to some, I always bear that in mind when posting.
I try to make this my last post today:
Good entry on Moon of Alabama on the latest Russiagate stunt, with CNN and NYT publishing new CIA stuff on how RU is brainwashing innocent Western citizens:
“Newly declassified US intel claims Russia is laundering propaganda through unwitting Westerners”
MoA is quoting Caitlin Johnstone´s critique:
“One of the craziest things happening in our world today is how westerners are being trained to overlook the massive amounts of western propaganda they’re inundated with day in and day out and focus instead on “Russian propaganda”, which has no meaningful existence in the west. In 2017 before RT was shut down in the UK, it accounted for 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. A New York University study published earlier this year found that the supposed Russian Twitter influence campaign ahead of the 2016 election which dominated headlines for years had had “no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior”. An earlier study found that suspected Russian accounts showing up in Facebook’s news feed during that time amounted to “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content.” A study by Adelaide University found that despite headline after headline warning us about a massive wave of Russian bots manipulating online discourse after the invasion of Ukraine began last year, the overwhelming majority of fake accounts they examined (more than 90 percent) were pro-Ukraine accounts.
Contrast this microscopic smattering of influence with the fact that westerners are continually getting their news reporting from western propaganda outlets which openly publish CIA press releases disguised as news on a regular basis. These people are absolutely telling us the truth when they say we’re under constant bombardment by propaganda and influence operations — they’re just lying about who’s really doing it to us.”
MoA here:
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/08/information-designed-to-show-.html#more
“Russia is laundering propaganda through unwitting Westerners”.
Translation: Russia is telling the truth, and some Westerners are paying attention to what it says – having noticed that their own governments, corporations, and media aren’t.
Well, we’ll find out in due course who has been telling the truth and who hasn’t. (Although some people, like the amazing Mr Pompeo, have been kind enough to announce publicly that they are accustomed to cheat, lie, and steal. One assumes that many of their colleagues have similar ethical standards).
As Warren Buffett remarked, when the tide goes out you see who’s been swimming naked.
As for Mr Putin, whom I assess to be truthful almost to a fault (if that is possible), he reminds me of Alexander Pope’s famous criterion:
“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him”.
“(Although some people, like the amazing Mr Pompeo, have been kind enough to announce publicly that they are accustomed to cheat, lie, and steal. One assumes that many of their colleagues have similar ethical standards)”
He also said that they did whole courses in lying etc. so the ethical standards must be part of their terms of employment.
Why bother to insinuate that Putin callously murdered Prigozhin after he had turned the tide of this war in Russia’s favour?
The Empire 2 Atlantacists are on the Nato Nazi Great Game bandwagon of colonising Russia. That is evil intent indeed, and has brought Europe to war, and near to Armaggeddon.
Last week a recruitment agency refused to pay me unless I scanned my passport into Yoti’s KGB Facial Recognition app.. or sold my I.D. . Tory corruption is approaching Ukrainian levels.
How come Putin daring to defy this Right-wing swerve into the ditch of WW3 is somehow suspicious or malign? While Tories of red and blue glorify Nazism and war and KGB levels of state control and espionage.
How far have we got in our campaigns against the blood suckers of Thatcherite Imperalism over last 45 years? Precisely nowhere.
A little more respect for Putin’s progress in challenging US imperialism + poodles would be more appropriate than accusing him of murder imho.
It is ridiculous, western media is so outdated and such a has-been, on top if it all it is so conspiracy-theory laden.
One day western MSM claim that Wagner is Putin’s evil mercenaries
Next day Wagner leaders are killed off on the alleged order on….Putin
It’s like, every thing, every negative thing that happen inside of Russia, a nation of 150 million people is somehow the works of Putin personally. Not to mention every bad thing in the west, of course also malign machinations stemming from this bad person named Putin.
Still the stupid populace of the west in great numbers believe every kind of bs about him.
Jack, do you remember “Putin’s brain” – Dugin. Why don’t they call him Putin’s advisor, if that is what he is?
The image that is promoted is that Putin is Hobbes’ Leviathan made flesh. I think Hobbes thought of Leviathan as the abstract “ultimate monster”, take away the abstract and you have the “ultimate monster”.
Having a fairly wide ranging conversation over quite a lot of drink yesterday with a couple of professionals, highly educated, wealthy people who can hold forth across a range of topics. Conversation turned to my opinion of Vladimir Putin. I said I thought he was understandable as mainly a Russian nationalist, i.e. in the interests of Russia and the Russian people (which may or may not be a correct opinion, I am not well informed on Russian domestic politics)… but because I didn’t agree he was pure evil they stormed off and that ended the evening. As I said, quite a lot of drink was involved. But wtf.
I expect the people with whom you were talking can hold forth convincingly on topics which they understand. Presumably, like most Westerners, they know virtually no facts at all about Mr Putin.
But then, what can you expect if you read, listen to, or otherwise “consume” Western MSM? (I actually wish it would be consumed – by fire).
alexey
Haha yes we have all been there for simply telling the truth, last time the exact thing happend to me: the people I talked to became uneasy and furious when I simply said that Putin have great support amongst Russians – it was not easy for me since I have a bit of a conflict-phobia in real life, but I stood my ground and afterwards it felt great since one grow from standing up for the truth.
Regarding the highly-educated: Chomsky had a great quote on this that I cannot find right now but it was something along the line that highly-educated people are the most prone to believe propaganda and to uncritically believe everything western MSM tell them.
“Midwits”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byb3ffrBYgU
I was responding directly to Jack’s comment, specifically the final paragraph:
“Regarding the highly-educated: Chomsky had a great quote on this that I cannot find right now but it was something along the line that highly-educated people are the most prone to believe propaganda and to uncritically believe everything western MSM tell them”.
The link I posted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byb3ffrBYgU is to a short video on Edward Dutton’s “Jolly Heretic” channel. It explains the concept of the “midwit”, a postulated type of person who has above average intelligence and education, but nevertheless sees fit to behave in an apparently unintelligent fashion. Dutton’s explanation is that the midwit, clever but not very creative, seeks above all to fit in to society and be respected. He is more interested in acceptance and safety than in truth.
” highly-educated people are the most prone to believe propaganda ”
Highly educated people usually aspire to be members of highly educated social groups. The MSM tells them what they have to believe if they want to join their aspirational group.
Jack Conspiranoid
Well put, they (the highly educated) feel abnormally uneasy going outside of conventional wisdoms they read in the MSM and since they, in their back in their mind, know they are highly educated they think they cannot be wrong in judging the world. That in turn causing them cocksure, smug.
Ironically if you compare the highly educated guy vs the low-educated guy about lets say Ukraine/Russia, I would bet, in general, that the low-educated guy knew way more than the highly educated. The highly-educated know the situation very well from MSM headlines, the low-educated guy know the subject from googling it from different sources outside of the MSM.
As actor Denzel Washington put it, not reading the news = you are uninformed. if you are reading the news = you are disinformed. Thus the highbrow get misinformed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwnNrr9RO2Y
This is also good btw:
Denzel Washington on fake news and information overload – BBC News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKhUa9Nj5kw
We were asked to believe that Putin killed Skripal, after he had held him in a Russian prison and then released him. Now we are to believe that Putin killed Prigozhin after capturing and releasing him. And so with Litvinenko.
The common thread apart from ‘Russia bad, evil Putin’ appears to be MI6 and their MSM.
And, in our wonderful free democracy I’m now informed I can only vote with state approved photo ID, how much we’ve progressed in my lifetime, such a wonder to behold. From land of hope and glory to you’ll own nothing and be happy.
The same patterns can be discerned in propaganda from century to century. Among the principal ones are:
1. All evil emanates from one person (or a small group) – like the Devil and his demons.
2. That person is wholly and utterly evil, and can be happy only through acts of unspeakable cruelty.
3. He is incredibly ingenious and powerful.
4. He is utterly incompetent.
Come to think of it, maybe I have just described the top levels of the CIA! 😎 “Gestapo meets the Keystone Cops”.
That’s also the propaganda of psychopathology.
TW
As taught to kids – Dick Dasterdly from The Whackey Races
“4. He is utterly incompetent.”
I think that should be,
4. He is utterly incompetent and a moron.
Well neither of the Skripals died but Sergei was swapped for a Russian in a British jail so at that point may have been more useful alive.
We can’t be 100% sure at this stage that Putin killed Prigozhin but having him drop dead whilst in Putin’s care might’ve looked a bit obvious and Vlad does have ‘previous’ here.
I thought the fate of the Skripals was unknown.
There are certain people who are cursed with omniscience.
“Prigozhin but having him drop dead whilst in Putin’s care might’ve looked a bit obvious and Vlad does have ‘previous’ here.”
Whilst having his plane blow up not far from Moscow isn’t? He’d just been in Africa, why not bump him off there?
Also Vlad’s “previous” is 100% wishful thinking from the likes of you.
@Stevie Boy Britain has never been a democracy (it is a republic though).
Wake up and smell the coffee …. and realise that to not do so, and see how easily you are used and abused, has you serially treated as a conveniently ignorant, undereducated idiot with no mind of your own planning remedial activity for others to be worried about satisfying or ignoring, both of which they presently do with arrogant aplomb.
‘Ukrainian casualties have been serious’
Not serious enough for the organ grinder, who is now whining that Ukraine is casualty averse.
‘The “Putin is perfect” narrative claims that Russia has failed to entirely subdue Ukraine because a) it never intended to’
Hold on. You think Russia intended to entirely subdue Ukraine with a force of 100,000 men? A vast country full of febrile Russophobic fascists, armed to the teeth by the USA? Germany took fifteen times that many soldiers into Poland in 1939. Are we meant to view Russian military analysts as simpletons, with less understanding of war and the country of Ukraine than online amateur generals from Berkshire to Nebraska?
I think that you put that rather well.
Indeed, quick strike into Kiev, replace the President with little resistance and widespread popular support. Based on disastrous intelligence. A quick and limited military operation. That was the original Russian expectation.
I find it hilarious the way the “Putin is perfect” fools believe that Putin’s objective all along was whatever the status quo is on any given day.
They expected popular support for a takeover – in Kiev? That makes no sense to me. You could have told them from Scotland that there would be no support for a Russian takeover in that part of Ukraine. So again it’s suggesting Russian intelligence are just bewildered goons who know Ukraine and Ukrainians far less well than you or I do living on the opposite side of the continent. How likely is that?
“with little resistance and widespread popular support.” “That was the original Russian expectation.”
How do we know this?
indeed, apparently the same way we “know” casualties are even.
Craig, you are allowing your dislike or perhaps even hate of Russia to get in the way of your analysis. Plus you are simply wrong about the facts. For example the strength of the Ukrainian army at the start of the conflict. Or that since 2014 Russia being subjected to most severe media and financial beating and still standing. Strong sense of nationhood I’d guess, willing to sacrifice blood and treasure in order to follow its own chosen path, and not the one made for it in Washington. You could start Scotland Russia friendship society. The Scottish people may learn a thing or two about independence from Russia. Howzat?
I love Russia, enjoyed living there enormously and am a great fan of the culture.
Not sure re: the sudden attacks on Craig, he is simply saying: be aware of both side/parties argumentation. Question, question, question!
We all get caught up in our own biases especially during war-time – myself included, encountering and admitting such fallacies makes one stronger, not weaker.
Having said that, I would say that the clientèle that comments here have way way less bias than the pro-ukrainian MSM and their crowd, but still.
You just question. Others attack.
Considering the numerous planning documents by NATO or by RAND before 2022 the US would have attempted to force RUs hand on another occasion if it hadn´t happened now. So from that perspective we were bound for war. In how far diplomacy would have been able to counter that I don´t know.
To increase economic pressure as the Chinese appear to try (instead of waging war) takes a lot of time (re: dedollarization etc.).
So may be the RU decision only accelerated the process intended by the West.
Considering the constant attacks on Russian minorities in UKR since 2014 it appears not unlikely the Kiev government would have found ways to elevate a conflict there again. So regardless if those “secret plans” of the AFU to launch an offensive were forged or not, something would have happened.
You can observe it with Nordstream. If Berlin is not capable of protecting its very own infrastructure how should then Berlin be able to counter US push for integrating UKR into NATO?
That was the bottom-line argument: France/Germany were against it. So no need for fear by RU. But Germany/France are against it, until they aren´t. After that what happens?
None of this would have been an unsolvable problem had the Ukrainians and Europeans not sold out to the US.
Quite agree, It seemed to me that once the Corp-0-rat media and state broadcasters turned on Putin a couple of decades ago, the Russians began preparing for this confrontation and from 2008 began to prepare urgently.
Squeeth, agree but would go further, both sides have been preparing for this since early 2000’s.
Colonel Douglas McGregor has repeatedly endorsed that 400,000 figure in his interviews, and he’s no idiot.
There are some differences between Word War I and the current Urkaine war, one being the reconnaissance & artillery systems the Russians have, which allow them to pound the Ukrainians repeatedly and with a precision unimaginable in WWI day after day after day, which has been going on now for actually one year and 6 months.
If the 400,000 figure represents 80% of the initial Ukrainian army, Urkaine has been bringing or hauling new troops to the front to replace the casualties,presumably almost since the war started, so the actual proportion of the total men (and women) killed would be far less than that, because the total number of Ukrainians who have seen combat since the start of the war is far more than the initial number of soldiers of the Ukrainian army.
I would assume that the reports of new AFU soldiers arriving at the front and being killed at their first mission are not all invented.
Several US mercenaries left UKR and returned to the US. They said they were shocked by what was going on there after initially intending to fight for UKR. No without cause their reports were kind of surpressed / not circulated.
The fact that RUs – Tatyana might know more – are less likely to speak out, is, apart from the law enforcement problem, the simple fact that most RU soldiers are from fringe regions far off the classic metropoles and professional long-time contractors. Just like in the US (and Germany btw), it is poor men who go to war.
Which makes documenting RUs domestic situation in the war even more difficult, since not many witnesses among those privileged groups closer to the media.
Most bloody events around Bakhmut eventually were fought out by Wagner. Which was different to the average Russian soldier.
The RU bourgeoisie has simply not yet been touched by the war in a significant way (Vietnam became a problem when middle-class parents started to loose their sons.)
The government will go to some lenghts to keep it that way. Which means trying to keep casualty numbers limited – in the long run.
‘’Just like in the US (and Germany btw), it is poor men who go to war.
Vietnam became a problem when middle-class parents started to lose their sons.’’
That’s why governments are reluctant to conscript, even in time of war. The Tommy Atkins who signs on for a stint in the army is a much better professional soldier and much easier to manage than the Johnny Atkins who is dragooned into compulsory service at the nearest army barracks. The fact that Ukraine has been forced into conscription in order to keep fighting is a clear acknowledgment that their casualty figures have been high.
An estimated 10 million Ukrainians have already left the country since the conflict intensified in 2022 which further depletes the number of potential soldiers and military support personnel. The western media suggested these refugees were all women and children but even if that were true, which it is not, it ignores the role of women on the home front in a country under occupation. Soviet history has a pantheon of heroic female fighters from what Russians call the Great Patriotic war and some of them were Ukrainian.
Russia has mobilised an extra 300,000 soldiers but it assumed here in Moscow that these are to deal with any attempt by NATO forces to put boots on the ground in Ukraine to shore up the deteriorating situation. A Coalition of the Willing might offer some respite for Ukraine but would most likely find itself in the same situation as the Ukraine military is in at present. Despite the bellicose noises coming from Poland and the Baltic states, I cannot believe there is much appetite amongst their soldiers to become involved in front line fighting in Ukraine.
” Despite the bellicose noises coming from Poland and the Baltic states, I cannot believe there is much appetite amongst their soldiers to become involved in front line fighting in Ukraine.”
I hope you´re right.
As much as I am aghast at what is going on publicly and how little has changed since 1914 (which DID surprise me) I hope average people do know enough about war by now to not fall into any traps with unimaginable consequences.
In Germany the Greens and 68ers used to say “Imagine it´s war but nobody goes there”.
Col. Macgregor
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Macgregor
may not be an idiot but he is most certainly not an impartial source.
He predicted the immediate destruction of the UAF in February 2022 and has been either a useful idiot or a cheerleader for the Putin regime ever since.
I’d be interested to see a source for that 400,000 UA casualty figure.
“I’d be interested to see a source for that 400,000 UA casualty figure.”
Why are so many people arguing about the casualty figures, when no official figures are available? Even if the figures were the same for both sides, as Craig maintains, the Russians are going to be able to keep up the war much longer than the Ukrainians. The only thing that matters is which way the front line is going.
“He predicted the immediate destruction of the UAF in February 2022 ”
He got that wrong then.
Doug McGregor has had to explain that multiple times.
He (like many others, myself included) expected that at the onset of the war the Russians would go all NATO on ukraine and blow the crap out of the place irrespective of damage and civilian casualties.
Basically turn it into European Fallujah v2.
But they didn’t. Instead they were amazingly careful and almost even dainty. It was just weird to watch. No real commentator understood what was going on because no one had ever seen anything like it before.
e.g. Kiev still has water and communications! If it was US, we’d destroy those. First thing is they go. Dual use critical infrastructure is dead. We’d smash the lot to rubble. Not the russians apparently. Ukraine is still free to go to parties and twitter. It’s surreal.
I think I saw an article, that purportedly, was reporting on the rave/hardcore scene in Kiev. The strap line claimed it was more dynamic and exciting than pre-war times, because of the war. Surreal you say? I concur – tales from an alien realm
as far as I have read we have not commented about the antiwar groups in RU and especially in UKR.
In Germany conscientious objectors from RU have no right for asylum any more.
UKRs have major difficulties.
I don´t know about RU but anyone in UKR against the war effort gets death threats.
The presence of Nazi columns within the Ukrainian military administration will most likely have a tremendous psychological effect. Pure intimidation. (including the imprisonment of oppositional figures.)
Already in spring 2022 there were a few comments by Ukrainians against supporting UKRs war effort in small German left papers under pen names. Out of fear.
Whereas this would be most important to support.
If those inividuales who are supposed to carry the war are the ones who refuse to fight.
It´s the only position that makes sense. But in the oh so enlightened Western press they receive almost zero coverage. Or are being denounced.
AG once there are two sides, the dynamics of human behaviour change in well studied ways, psychologically speaking. There is less room for individuals to express themselves. WW2 has often been called “the good war” (Brokaw – the greatest generation etc) yet if one removes this statement from the history of that conflict, a lot of what is left becomes harder to understand and the moral ambiguities of that war are seen in greater relief
The last British combatant in WW1 was a man called Harry Patch, he died sometime around 2008. He was extremely anti-war in a very simple, non-ideological fashion. The media made a big deal about him, fawning on his every word. I saw a clear change in the depiction of war once he was dead. Triumphalism and the one-sided lauding of “righteous” state violence grew from the moment of his death in Britain. I imagine it was planned and the same process took place in the other western countries.
I watched him in an interview and allowed his words to become my words, I believed his “propaganda”, pretty much in its entirety. I was radicalised by his anti-war views He spoke with complete moral authority, incontestable and indivisible. I considered him a respected elder and though not of my “clan”, I just knew I had to listen to him, in order to drink from the font of true wisdom that he possessed. That true wisdom lives no more in our western world and no one has the moral authority to condemn war and the MIC with sufficient gravity to effect a change. This man, Harry Patch, is the only hero I have ever had.
You’re right I saw it all too. Dannat desecrated his funeral by claiming that he would have supported Airstrip One’s lackey wars.
Squeeth the first Remembrance Day without Harry Patch my heart sank. Dannat is wrong, in the interview I saw Patch specifically outlined his thoughts on interstate conflict, they didn’t include any type of colonial or neo-colonial conflict or wars of appropriation.
From German (true) left newspaper “Junge Welt” (the only paper 100% against war, the smallest of all non-regional dailies but reliable texts):
Today, 28th:
“Overcrowded military hospitals – (…) Sanitation chief complains about too many wounded”
https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/457744.konflikt-in-osteuropa-%C3%BCberf%C3%BCllte-lazarette.html
“Russia speaks of 43,000 Ukrainians killed or wounded since the start of the summer offensive alone; U.S. media cite about 7,000. New York Times estimates that Kiev has killed 70,000 since the war began.(…) Defense Minister Anna Maljar (…) said (…) casualty figures are military secret. Ukrainian bloggers, citing satellite images, report that cemeteries are being massively expanded throughout the country.
On Saturday, the head of the military medical service, Tetjana Ostashchenko, was a guest on Rada TV, the Ukrainian parliament’s television station. She complained that the country’s hospitals were hopelessly overwhelmed by the large number of wounded. She said that the “legislative basis” and “organizational preparation” were lacking for treating so many wounded. “Legislative basis”? This is a recognizable attempt to find objective causes for personal failure: Three weeks ago, Ostashchenko was at the center of accusations that the army had not procured enough bandage packs and straps for tying – that is, it had underestimated the possible losses. Ostashchenko had used the excuse that the army did not have an overview of its stocks, especially since a lot of medical supplies were sent directly to the front as donations. In essence, this confirmed the accusations.
Meanwhile, there have been new arrests in military substitutes. Officials were arrested in Kiev, Kharkiv, and Odessa for issuing false unfitness certificates in exchange for bribes of up to $13,500 per person. At the same time, Ukraine announced a new wave of mobilization, and all previous exemptions are to be reviewed again. (…)”
I guess this won´t be reported anywhere else. More likely in US papers than German large ones.
AG
May I ask you, perhaps you’ve got access to the Bild?
https://www.bild.de/politik/inland/politik-inland/ukraine-krieg-was-scholz-nach-seinem-putin-telefonat-besonders-quaelte-85191144.bild.html
The source I’ve linked is on our today’s news. Russian article retells the passages from the Bild, about Scholz / Macron / Putin talks.
“Something worries me more than the negotiations: he (Putin. — Approx. ed.) does not complain about the sanctions at all. I don’t know if he did this in a conversation with you. But he didn’t even mention them,” the publication quotes the words of Scholz, said in a conversation with his French colleague.
In addition, the German politician complained that Putin was only interested in reaching a compromise on the Ukrainian issue, in particular, the demilitarization and denazification of the country.
Macron, in turn, admitted that he also did not receive complaints from the President of Russia about the restrictive measures introduced.
As Putin emphasized, Moscow does not seek to spin the flywheel of the Ukrainian conflict, but to end it. At the same time, Western countries are constantly talking about the need to continue hostilities, increasing the supply of weapons and training fighters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on their territories. Russia has repeatedly stated that foreign military assistance does not bode well for Ukraine and only prolongs the crisis.”
Russian source is here
https://ria.ru/20230828/putin-1892667799.html
I wonder if they inform us properly and trustworthy of the what is there in the Bild article?
I will send the translation a little later today. If thats okay.
How does one open a new discussion thread? I think Niger could use one until CM is posting on that issue.
To start a new discussion thread: go to the Discussion Forum index page, scroll past the list of recent discussions to the heading Create New Topic in “Discussion Forum”, and use the textboxes provided.
TATYANA on BILD:
first a few remarks:
I don´t read BILD. With BILD you never know whether they are reporting truthfully or not. It can happen, but since its a right-wing tabloid á la The Sun, I guess, reliability is not their first job. They are the best sold paper in the country for a reason. They did report when criticism of the Ukrainian war effort was not prohibited any more. But they as well reported on the NORDSTREAM fiction involving that tiny yacht if you remember. And so on. (Above all Russia is a vicious dictatorship. Everything is black or white.)
Second question is the book BILD is quoting which forms the body of the article.
A German TV journalist I only know by name, Stephan Lamby, has written an “eye-witness” account about the very difficult work the current German cabinet has to accomplish “during this worst crisis since WWII“.
Lamby seems to be an established senior figure in the German TV landscape of state TV. With all kinds of respected and thus meaningless awards.
Then: Is the book truthful and is BILD truthfully quoting the book? And so on.
See the book publisher´s link with info on book, video with Lamby & Baerbock on her fucking plane, interview transcript with Lamby:
https://www.chbeck.de/buehnen/stephan-lamby-ernstfall/
The book was published by C.H. BECK publisher. They are a conservative pretty established publishing house.
Owned by two brothers publishing popular political and science literature like this book.
Second branch is publishing academic scholarship especially law.
I once visited the villa of one of the two BECK brothers in Munich, South Germany.
They used to offer free rooms to students for whatever reason. Some of those living there I then knew. I however never met the proprietors.
The BECK villa itself is a “Neo-Classic” building but inside state-of-the-art kitchen, salon etc. with garden and beautiful romantic fountain and was allegedly serving as a shooting location for Italian director Roberto Rosselini´s Ingrid Bergman film “Fear“ in 1954, I was told then. Could never verify that.
Just because, whenever I hear BECK I have to think of these stories.
* * *
Reading the entire BILD piece I have decided to translate everything. Because that does matter a little and with deepl.com this is quick:
„(…)
New details from behind the scenes of the highly dramatic days at the beginning of the Ukraine war!
The Kremlin dictator shocked the whole world in February 2022 when he attacked Ukraine and threatened to wipe the neighboring country off the map. Leaders of the Western world tried to talk down the warmonger – including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (65, SPD).
Now filmmaker and journalist Stephan Lamby, 63, has gotten glimpses of the conversations – emerging from a conversation between Scholz and Macron on March 4, 2022 – Day 9 of the Ukraine war – in the aftermath of their respective phone calls with Putin.
Lamby describes this conversation in his new book, “Ernstfall – Regieren in Zeiten des Krieges.”
What Scholz reported about Putin to Macron:
Because Scholz can’t get through immediately, Macron jokes with his advisers: If that doesn’t work, it’s probably not good with the “German sea change” and the rearmament of the Bundeswehr either …
Then the chancellor answered: “Ah, hello Olaf, how are you? How was your discussion this morning?”
It’s “not getting any better,” Scholz recounts. “Something bothers me more than anything else when we talked: he (Putin) doesn’t complain at all about the sanctions. I don’t know if he did that in the conversation with you. But he didn’t bring up the sanctions at all.”
Macron replied, “Neither with me.”
Scholz complained that Putin again only gave speeches about his view of Ukraine: “He told me about all his ideas on how to find a compromise. He talked about demilitarization, denazification.”
“And,” Scholz further reported to Macron, “he asked me that Crimea be recognized as part of Russia. And the independence of these republics.” Concluded the Chancellor, “Nothing new, then, to put it bluntly.”
Scholz, however, had sought a summit meeting. “When I asked him whether there should possibly be a meeting on Ukraine, sooner or later, with you, me, Selenskyj and with him, Putin, he did not completely refuse. But he mentioned two conditions. First, it must not be an occasion for a cease-fire. Then he spoke only of the three of us, you, me and him. Without Selenskyj.”
Putin also expressed conspiracy-theory ideas, Scholz also recounted: “Then he said that the Ukrainian delegation left for Poland because they want to talk to the presidents of the United States to get their instructions …” Scholz then laughed and summed up, “More or less. That’s it.”
Macron had replied, “Thank you, that was very similar to the conversation I had with him yesterday. I think he is now quite determined to go all the way. The narrative and the brutality of his message that was televised, as well as all the initiatives that he undertook in the last hours in talks with civil organizations in Russia, are very disturbing. To be clear.”
It was clear to both, he said, that Putin had become highly radicalized and unpredictable.
Scholz had so far revealed little about these telephone calls with the Kremlin leader:
They were “always polite”, he was with Putin per Sie („Sir“). In February 2023, the chancellor denied to BILD am SONNTAG that Putin had threatened Scholz with a missile strike. Previously, Britain’s ex-prime minister Boris Johnson had claimed this.
In December 2022, after another hour-long Putin phone call, Scholz said he would continue to reach for the chancellor’s phone when the Kremlin chief called. He said that despite all differences, it was necessary to keep talking to the dictator, and Scholz also wanted to check whether there were any changes on Putin’s part regarding Ukraine.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron was different: He was on first-name terms with Putin and had also published transcripts from his telephone conversations with him in June 2022.
As a result, a little more had leaked out about Macron’s telephone conversations with Putin. Shortly before the war began, he had told the Russian president, “I’d like you to tell me first how you assess the situation, and perhaps in a fairly direct way, as we both do, tell me your intentions.”
Macron had primarily wanted to persuade Putin to talk again with U.S. President Joe Biden. Putin had apparently agreed in principle to such a conversation – but it did not come to that.
Putin had then brushed Macron off, saying he was just going to the ice rink to play ice hockey. When Macron said he was also about to go to sports, namely boxing practice, Putin reportedly said, “Think of Selenskyj when you punch the punching bag.”
Putin also reportedly talked about the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and told Macron what lesson he drew from it: You don’t have to “attack the big cities at all to win,” he said.
(…)”
* * *
Clearly the book is the worst piece of disinformation for average readers with no time at their hand since they are fed fake expert knowledge which gives itself the appearance of real understanding, deep expertise and journalistic care without offering the bigger picture. Probably the worst of it all, author Lamby most likely will believe all these things.
p.s. it is telling that on the top of the publisher´s site there is a VIP reader´s comment to sell the book as awesome by Carlo Masala, a known typical TV military expert, teaching at the army university, of the usual clone mentality who constantly has been calling for arms and more war. The target group for the book is thus clear.
Thank you very much, AG, especially for the background you gave. This is valuable as it gives an idea of the sources of information.
I noticed that in the West, the practice of writing books by ex-employees of various government departments is common. I thought it was probably a legal way to earn extra income in retirement. And also I believe that books are not official certified documents, I mean, not the verified results of an authorized investigation. So, books should be considered more like fiction or memoirs, as they probably use a large proportion of literary devices to keep readers’ attention and increase sales (that makes sense from a business standpoint). But there must also be a basis, some facts of reality, so that the book has the right to be sold as ‘based on real events’.
—
The telephone talk of Putin and Scholz is covered in the official Kremlin website. English translation is made by their Kremlin’s translators, so I belive they know how to put it in English better than me or deepl 🙂
the source
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67907
in case you’re interested to read, but don’t want let your Internet provider know you’ve visited there 🙂 here is the text:
“The parties continued to discuss the developments in Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin laid out Russia’s principled approaches in the context of the special military operation to protect the residents of Donbass, explaining in detail its objectives that will be achieved without fail.
Olaf Scholtz expressed concern over the active hostilities and reports of the sides’ civilian and military casualties. Vladimir Putin recalled that for eight years, the Western partners shut their eyes to the genocide of people of the Donbass republics perpetrated by the Kiev regime. About 14,000 people, including thousands of children, died as a result. During the special operation, the Russian military are doing all they can to protect civilian lives. Reports of shelling in Kiev and other big cities are crudely fabricated propaganda.
It was emphasised that the main threat is posed by neo-Nazi military units that are committing numerous war crimes. They are using terrorist methods by deploying strike weapons in residential areas and cynically using civilians as cover. The Kiev authorities continue to break their promise to stop the barbarity – the number of such cases has been on the rise in the past few days.
We are increasingly documenting the appearance of mercenaries from third countries, including Albania and Croatia, militants from Kosovo and even jihadists with experience in combat in Syria.
In addition, over 6,000 foreign citizens, mostly students, have essentially been taken hostage and are being used by radicals as the human shield. Attempts to leave the districts controlled by Ukrainian forces are stopped at gunpoint. One recent case that cannot be ignored is the shelling of a foreign student dormitory by the neo-Nazis in the city of Sumy. Some students were wounded.
The collective West prefers to ignore such violations of international humanitarian law, and so the President of Russia urged Olaf Scholz to compel the Kiev authorities to release foreign citizens as soon as possible and organise their safe evacuation.
Vladimir Putin reaffirmed that Russia is open to dialogue with Ukraine as well as all those in Ukraine who want peace, but on the condition that all Russian demands are met. These include a neutral and nuclear-free status for Ukraine, mandatory demilitarisation and denazification of the Ukrainian state, recognition of Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea and the sovereignty of the DPR and the LPR within the borders of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.
The hope was expressed that representatives of Kiev will take a reasonable and constructive position at the planned third round of talks.
The President of Russia and the Chancellor of Germany will continue their contacts.”
—
Rather different, eh?
well, Macron’s attempts to get through to Putin became the occasion for rather funny memes in which the Frenchman posed as an abandoned lover in anguish dialing the phone number again and again, extremely jealous of the news that Putin had telephone conversations with other people while ignoring Macron’s calls .
thx!
and I don´t care what my internet provider thinks. For that it´s way too late.
(Actually that´s more complex than any human relationship. In case, you can´t just walk away.)
re: Putin/Scholz, of course the Kremlin is presenting its side of the matter. I remember however that those things were reported in the German press (Putin talking about Donbas) – and disregarded as Putin´s paranoia. So the book is repetition and just chatter I assume.
There was one documented case where the contradicting views of one and the same thing came apparent:
On the grain deal in Nov. 2022 a senior advisor from the German Wuppertal Institute wrote a harsh critique of the German chancellory, which had published about the telephone conversations between Scholz and Putin on the deal, but concealing decisive facts about the deal and the phone call by reporting only certain statements.
So the lie was documented by an “expert” on the field of economics in the respected DER FREITAG paper (they still have their long-term cooperation with THE GUARDIAN since the early days when Assange was a global hero because he made them tons of money), but without any consequences for the media. The history of the grain deal, like with everything else, is now written into the book of fictions.
This article in DER FREITAG was one of the very very few of this kind.
And you could probably go through every single reported event in this war, thousands of them I guess, and make an assessment of what happened and what was reported and what not.
T
this naked capitalism link on sanctions not working and hurting mainly Germany starts out with the BILD quotations.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/09/europe-and-the-law-of-holes.html
I am a bit surprised since the telephone conversation had been talked about before. As well as sanctions not working.
But the press apparently needs some repeated “nudging”.
Better this way. At least its being talked about in extensio now.
2 corrections re: above machine translation:
“that Kiev has SUFFERED 70,000 KILLED since the war began”
and in the final part:
“new arrests in CONSCRIPTION OFFICES” (in case: “military substitutes” makes less sense to native speakers)
Tucker Carlson want to interview Putin
Tucker Carlson wants to interview Putin – RT chief editor
The popular US anchor has been “strongly” asking for a meeting with the Russian leader, Margarita Simonyan said
https://swentr.site/russia/581934-tucker-vladimir-putin-interview/
He should interview Lavrov too which might be a bit easier not only to set up but also becuse Lavrov speaks english (there is always a bit of a hassle to watch translated interviews).
Craig wrote: “The initial Russian assault on Kiev was a costly failure, with many of Russia’s best forces very badly damaged. The attempt to deny this is pathetic. We all saw it.”
No, we didn’t. I and several other posters here recall seeing and reading about a Russian invading column that stopped short of Kiev, hung around for a while, then withdrew.
Of course, I don’t watch every TV channel so it’s very possible I missed what you saw.
Where did you see it?
I have no idea what the Kiev incursion was about and while I have no military knowledge but even so somone like me recognize that the Kiev incursion was a folly not only how Russia got there but also how they quickly drew back its forces without any real benefit from it.
Basically, how it started:
Huge Russian Convoy Nears Kyiv, Ukraine Braces For Assault
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHA6maU4E40
How it ended:
Russian tanks, armored vehicles ambushed outside Kyiv l WNT
https://youtu.be/1ABvYVaNS0w?t=84
You simply do not move in a big caravan of vehicles unless you have cleared tthe threats right in front of you. All these vehicles, let alone humans, became sitting ducks.
Sure it is easy to say this with hindsight but it was obvious even watching this in real time back then.
According to Russia they withdrew from Kiev since Ukraine cried uncle and agreed to have peace-talks with Russia, talks which in turn lead to nowhere.
it does puzzle me, while Craig argues one way, how is it that other knowledgeable people in their own way have written very long articles suggesting that it was not always incompetence and that there might have also been a bigger plan in parts by the RUs. I will have to get back to those analyses. Maybe write a few emails which might get answered.
if they quickly withdrew their forces would that not be evidence they were not badly damaged by it? moreover, if they were stuck as you suggest how did they quickly withdraw their forces?
pretzelattack
Why did Russia withdrew then? If they were powerful enough to hold Kiev, why did they leave it? What was even the point, Kiev has close to 3 million population. What did Russia expect targeting such a big city with such a small and unprotected force?
“Why did Russia withdrew then?”
If it was a feint, to draw troops from the south, where the real attack was, then of course they would withdraw as soon as the southern attacks had achieved their immediate aims. There is absolutely no evidence that the Russians intended to take, let alone hold Kiev. However the possibility that they might was something that Ukraine couldn’t ignore.
Bayard
That does not make sense to me, why use so much hardware and humans for such matter? Russia should be able to take out any threats whatever it is locate without binding up the use of tanks/vehicles and humans, they should be able to send middle to long distance missiles wherever they want in Ukraine.
Also there was a clear optic win to push out the russians from Kiev, that boosted the morale for Ukraine and west tremendously.
If you what you say is true, a feint-move, why then do not Russia keep using such tactics? Russia have lost many areas to Ukraine and most recently they seems to have lost Robotyne to Ukraine now.
JACK I understand your frustrations.
BUT talking about Robotinye and 12 of other letteraly williges with about anything from 20 to 200/300 houses is silly.
People are dying every day for no progress on either side.
TBH I expected after the fall of Bahmut RF to destroy Chasiv Yar and the rest of
the area full of soldiers.
My point is that this war is very different if not peculiar.
Obviously many things have changed.
All kinds of drones destroying tanks etc.
and being better than satellites.
In opinion we are using pen and paper assisted by a computer while people are dying like in Ww 1 in trench combat.
Unbelievable and horrible!
Some reports at the time suggested that the column near Kiev was badly equipped with unreliable vehicles. Maybe that was just propaganda but, considering how Russian forces seem to be doing now, if it was true then it was more like the dregs than the best. There were reports of it being harried by Ukrainian forces as you’d expect but nothing about air attacks which would have been devastating.
true don’t remember “devastation”. i also don’t remember any commenters here saying “putin is perfect”. did anybody ever say that?
perhaps something from my comments where I tried to practice wit, but not being a native speaker failed to convey irony / sarcasm?
To be honest, sometimes I feel too bored and I can just write for fun something like “Sorry, XXX, for not responding. Today I was too absorbed in my volunteer tasks to raise money for a new church of St. Putin in my city district. Sorry again, but this is a priority mission for me, because people around me are so silly that most of them don’t notice the infallibility of our Great Leader, and don’t recognize his True Greatness, and strangely refuse to pray five times a day in his honor”
Normally I add a smiley symbol to things like that. Just in case.
I don’t remember the famous battle of Kiev either.
I do remember that some/ many or few wehicles were destroyed. Again propaganda! Allegedly the column was 60 km long which IMO means about 5000- 6000 wehicles.
Let’s say 100 (I doubt that many)were distroyed. Is that few some many or obliterated or as CM calls heavy loss.
if someone is interested, a German language text about how the owners of old German tanks are now making a fortune selling them back:
https://overton-magazin.de/top-story/schrott-leopard-panzer-fuer-die-ukraine/ – translation
The Belgian Army e.g. now has to buy back old gear for millions after they had dissolved their tank units.
In 2019 an old German 1A5 Leopard was sold for 500 Euros. It now costs a fortune.
Many of these are also sold to Ukraine and other places.
Why would some countries even have tanks
Portugal bordering Spain
UK fucking Island
Denmark peninsula bordering Germany
Does Island have tanks? Asking for a friend.
End so on
Why is Germany spending 4 bn. Euros on an ABM system called Arrow-3 which doesn´t work?
Because the purpose of NATO is to provide a market for such things.
you are not allowed to say that so please try to find another explanation.
Quite right PE.
Ideally only the armies of the Russkiy Mir should be permitted to possess tanks.
The army of the Russkiy Mir still believes that Nazism at any stage of its development is dangerous, unacceptable and must be stopped. Unlike the armies of other ‘Mirs’, which at first take a long time to ask if Nazism is dangerous, or can still be tolerated. And then even longer they evaluate whether it’s worth fighting Nazism or better they may benefit of the war first. And only when the fall of Nazism is inevitable do they finally join the anti-Nazi coalition, not because this idea finally reaches their conscience, but because they see another benefit in being among the Winners and taking full advantage of such a position.
You should look into the history books and find out why the modern structure of the highest international bodies is what it is now, and also learn what is the UN Security Council is, who are permanent members with veto power, and why this is so.
Everyone is permitted to have tanks.
Does it make sense Denmark having about
40 tanks and likewise Portugal. Is 40 Danish or Portuguese tanks going to stop Germany or Spain invading?
I didn’t say that Poland or Baltic etc. countries shouldn’t have tanks.
After thinking it through England needs tanks to send them on Scotland and Ni. Thanks for opening my eyes
The best one is that Australia bought Himars from the US.
No idea what for. They can’t hit ships. Where’s the land threat?
China is building a land bridge to Australia to invade and cut off the Pacific. Didn´t you hear?
new entry on Moon of Alabama on the madness behind the to be expected forever war
“Ukraine SitRep – U.S. To Prolong Its Proxy War”
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/08/ukraine-sitrep-us-to-prolong-its-proxy-war.html#more
The photograph in the end shows Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan.
Which is funny because he received the most important literary award for peace in Germany last year.
An event so peaceful that anyone critical of the decision was ostracized.
That´s like Ben Wallace posing in front of a neo-nazi flag together with Britain´s most popular poet (if there is such a thing right now in GB)
War is peace. So war-mongers deserve peace prizes.
Or you give them (Obama) peace price to start a war in the name of peace!. I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t read Orwell but I have a jist?
and old but excellent piece by Andrew Cockburn in HARPERS in 2015 on the joyful post-2014 relationship between UKR and the US, with Kolomoisky and corruption and much love to Moscow:
“Undelivered Goods – How $1.8 billion in aid to Ukraine was funneled to the outposts of the international finance galaxy”
https://harpers.org/2015/08/undelivered-goods/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
excerpt:
“Toria” Nuland, as I reported in the January 2015 issue of Harper’s Magazine, has enjoyed a remarkable career, occupying a succession of powerful positions through changing administrations, despite her close neocon associations over the years both marital—her husband being leading neocon ideologue Robert Kagan—and political, notably as a national-security adviser to former vice president Dick Cheney. In the buildup to the 2008 Russo-Georgia war, for example, Nuland, at the time ambassador to NATO, urged George Bush to accept both Georgia and Ukraine as NATO members. Since Georgia’s then president and neocon favorite, Mikheil Saakashvili, had high hopes of drawing the United States in on his side in the coming conflict, this was a dangerous initiative. Fortunately, Bush, by that time leery of neocon advice, stood firm against her pleas.”
p.s. since Harper features following Assange piece in the end of above from 2015 as well:
“[Letter from Washington] – Alternative Facts”
by Andrew Cockburn
How the media failed Julian Assange
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/03/alternative-facts-how-the-media-failed-julian-assange/
who to believe UKR or RU:
In yesterday´s program of The Duran, Mercouris, starts by comparing the lacking reliability of official statements from UKR Deputy SoD Hanna Maliar with RU bloggers who have constant contact to RU soldiers at the front.
Mercouris argues that in hindsight Maliar has not proven to be an always reliable source (since there are often completely contradicting opinions about the state of affairs at the front.)
Sometimes it can as well happen, that RU soldiers are reluctant to admit truths if the situation has been dragging on, naturally.
Starting with this issue right away till min. 6
https://theduran.com/rus-claims-ukr-capture-rabotino-fails-110k-rus-buildup-kupiansk-zelensky-interview-ukr-losing-hope/
p.s. Mercouris is following the war every single day.
Even Geoffrey Roberts regards him as a good source.
And Mercouris admits mistakes.
‘Dying by the dozens every day’ – Ukraine losses climb
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66581217
Dozens ain’t enough ! God damn those chickensh*t cowards !!
https://scheerpost.com/2023/08/21/us-fears-ukraine-is-too-casualty-averse/
Dozens in one spot multiplied by 20 or 100 (frontline about 1000 Km). Make sense. Every fing day.
this is kind of funny:
EU governments try all kinds of tricks to fulfill the 2% NATO budgetary rule for their state budgets.
from German HANDELSBLATT:
“France, for example, has declared the expenditure for the budget of the Paris fire department as a NATO contribution, Spain its fire-fighting aircraft of the professional fire departments, Germany (is using) pension payments for former Wehrmacht and NVA (GDR) soldiers.”
(sounds like using dead people as fake electorates in the US)
I’d rather pay for fire-fighting aircraft than aircraft carriers.
Yes a ship in the Med having 100 fire fighting ✈️.
oh dear Craig, you are so wrong on this one.I suggest you take a closer look.
I thought was War Porn was slobbering over pics/video of military stuff. Once these media contain death I couldn’t call it that.
What about War Snuff, as in “Did you you see that War Snuff of the attack on Robytine? I reckon that was the best War Snuff I have ever seen.”
As opposed to “I prefer aircraft carrier War Porn.”. That is images of carriers, planes taking off and landing etc but no one being hurt or killed.
Peskov a city bordering Estonia struck with drones:
Swarm of drones attack airport in Russian city near NATO state – governor
Multiple unmanned aircraft have targeted Pskov airport, close to the Estonian border
https://swentr.site/russia/582061-pskov-gunfire-explosions-reports/
This is a region that is not even bordering Russia, Russia cannot keep making these mistakes repeatedly.
On top of that multiple other regions were targeted by ukrainian drones
Russian air defenses repel coordinated drone raids – MoD
Ukrainian UAVs were downed over Russia’s Bryansk, Orel, Kaluga, Ryazan and Moscow regions
https://swentr.site/russia/582062-bryansk-oryol-drone-raids/
In fact Ukraine warned that something big would happen just days before:
Ukraine threatens more attacks on Crimea
Something will happen “in the next few days,” military intelligence chief Budanov has said
https://swentr.site/russia/581673-budanov-ukraine-crimea-attacks/
And why should not Ukraine do this? They see that Russia is either unable or unwilling to respond in kind. Of course the behavior by Ukraine is going to escalate. 101 obvious military psychology here! Hello Russia where are you?
Allegedly multiple russian military-airplane destroyed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFgnILSmQpU
Why on earth are Russia keeping those military airbases unprotected? I remember last year when Ukraine managed to strike an airport in Crimea, taking out a dozen top fighter jets and I was quite surprised that happend ….and it just keeps on happening.
Another case back last summer involved ukrainian sabotage units basically walking into a russian military airport and destroyed a couple of fighter jets because there was no one guarding the place!
Ukraine can keep doing this low-cost warfare for a long time, it is high time Russia recognize that fact.