By Pepe Escobar
November 24, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- "SCF"
- Spare a thought to the Polish
farmer snapping pics of a missile wreckage –
later indicated to belong to a Ukrainian S-300.
So a Polish farmer, his footfalls echoing in our
collective memory, may have saved the world from
WWIII – unleashed via a tawdry plot concocted by
Anglo-American “intelligence”.
Such tawdriness was compounded by a
ridiculous cover-up: the Ukrainians were firing
on Russian missiles from a direction that they
could not possibly be coming from. That is:
Poland. And then the U.S. Secretary of Defense,
weapons peddler Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin,
sentenced Russia was to blame anyway, because
his Kiev vassals were shooting at Russian
missiles that should not have been in the air
(and they were not).
Call it the Pentagon elevating bald lying
into a rather shabby art.
The Anglo-American purpose of this racket was
to generate a “world crisis” against Russia.
It’s been exposed – this time. That does not
mean the usual suspects won’t try it again.
Soon.
The main reason is panic. Collective West
intel sees how Moscow is finally mobilizing
their army – ready to hit the ground next month
– while knocking out Ukraine’s electricity
infrastructure as a form of Chinese torture.
Those February days of sending only 100,000
troops – and having the DPR and LPR militias
plus Wagner commandos and Kadyrov’s Chechens do
most of the heavy lifting – are long gone.
Overall, Russians and Russophones were facing
hordes of Ukrainian military – perhaps as many
as 1 million. The “miracle” of it all is that
Russians did quite well.
Every military analyst knows the basic rule:
an invasion force should number three times the
defending force. The Russian Army at the start
of the SMO was at a small fraction of that rule.
The Russian Armed Forces arguably have a
standing army of 1.3 million troops. Surely they
could have spared a few tens of thousands more
than the initial 100,000. But they did not. It
was a political decision.
But now SMO is over: this is CTO
(Counter-Terrorist Operation) territory. A
sequence of terrorist attacks – targeting the
Nord Streams, the Crimea Bridge, the Black Sea
Fleet – finally demonstrated the inevitability
of going beyond a mere “military operation”.
And that brings us to Electric War.
Paving the
way to a DMZ
The Electric War is being handled essentially
as a tactic – leading to the eventual imposition
of Russia’s terms in a possible armistice (which
neither Anglo-American intel and vassal NATO
want).
Even if there was an armistice – widely
touted for a few weeks now – that would not end
the war. Because the deeper, tacit Russian terms
– end of NATO expansion and “indivisibility of
security” – were fully spelled out to both
Washington and Brussels last December, and
subsequently dismissed.
As nothing – conceptually – has changed since
then, coupled with the Western weaponization of
Ukraine reaching a frenzy,
the Putin-era Stavka could not but expand
the initial SMO mandate, which remains
denazification and demilitarization. Yet now the
mandate will have to encompass Kiev and Lviv.
And that starts with the current
de-electrification campaign – which goes way
beyond the east of the Dnieper and along the
Black Sea coast towards Odessa.
That brings us to the key issue of reach and
depth of Electric War, in terms of setting up
what would be a DMZ – complete with no man’s
land – west of the Dnieper to protect Russian
areas from NATO artillery, HIMARS and missile
attacks.
How deep? 100 km? Not enough. Rather 300 km –
as Kiev has already requested artillery with
that kind of range.
What’s crucial is that way back in July this
was already being extensively discussed in
Moscow at the highest Stavka levels.
In an
extensive July interview, Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov let the cat – diplomatically – out
of the bag:
“This process continues, consistently and
persistently. It will continue as long as the
West, in its impotent rage, desperate to
aggravate the situation as much as possible,
continues to flood Ukraine with more and more
long-range weapons. Take the HIMARS. Defense
Minister Alexey Reznikov boasts that they have
already received 300-kilometre ammunition. This
means our geographic objectives will move even
further from the current line. We cannot allow
the part of Ukraine that Vladimir Zelensky, or
whoever replaces him, will control to have
weapons that pose a direct threat to our
territory or to the republics that have declared
their independence and want to determine their
own future.”
The implications are clear.
As much as Washington and NATO are even more
“desperate to aggravate the situation as much as
possible” (and that’s Plan A: there’s no Plan
B), geoeconomically the Americans are
intensifying the New Great Game: desperation
here applies to trying to control energy
corridors and setting their price.
Russia remains unfazed – as it continues to
invest in Pipelineistan (towards Asia); solidify
the multimodal International North South
Transportation Corridor (INTSC), with key
partners India and Iran; and is setting the
price of energy via OPEC+.
A paradise
for oligarchic looters
The Straussians/neo-cons and neoliberal-cons
permeating the Anglo-American intel/security
apparatus – de facto weaponized viruses – won’t
relent. They simply cannot afford losing yet
another NATO war – and on top of it against
“existential threat” Russia.
As the news from the Ukraine battlefields
promise to be even grimmer under General Winter,
solace at least may be found in the cultural
sphere. The Green transition racket, seasoned in
a toxic mixed salad with the eugenist Silicon
Valley ethos, continues to be a side dish
offered with the main course: the Davos “Great
Narrative”, former Great Reset, which reared its
ugly head, once again, at the G20 in Bali.
That translates as everything going swell as
far as the Destruction of Europe project is
concerned. De-industrialize and be happy;
rainbow-dance to every woke tune on the market;
and freeze and burn wood while blessing
“renewables” in the altar of European values.
A quick flashback to contextualize where we
are is always helpful.
Ukraine was part of Russia for nearly four
centuries. The very idea of its independence was
invented in Austria during WWI for the purpose
of undermining the Russian Army – and that
certainly happened. The present “independence”
was set up so local Trotskyite oligarchs could
loot the nation as a Russia-aligned government
was about to move against those oligarchs.
The 2014 Kiev coup was essentially set up by
Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski to draw
Russia into a new partisan war – as in
Afghanistan – and was followed by orders to the
Gulf oil haciendas to crash the oil price.
Moscow had to protect Russophones in Crimea and
Donbass – and that led to more Western
sanctions. All of it was a setup.
For 8 years, Moscow refused to send its
armies even to Donbass east of the Dnieper
(historically part of Mother Russia). The
reason: not to be bogged down in another
partisan war. The rest of Ukraine, meanwhile,
was being looted by oligarchs supported by the
West, and plunged into a financial black hole.
The collective West deliberately chose not to
finance the black hole. Most of the IMF
injections were simply stolen by the oligarchs,
and the loot transferred out of the country.
These oligarchic looters were of course
“protected” by the usual suspects.
It’s always crucial to remember that between
1991 and 1999 the equivalent of the present
entire household wealth of Russia was stolen and
transferred overseas, mostly to London. Now the
same usual suspects are trying to ruin Russia
with sanctions, as “new Hitler” Putin stopped
the looting.
The difference is that the plan of using
Ukraine as just a pawn in their game is not
working.
On the ground, what has been going on so far
are mostly skirmishes, and a few real battles.
But with Moscow massing fresh troops for a
winter offensive, the Ukrainian Army may end up
completely routed.
Russia didn’t look so bad – considering the
effectiveness of its mincing machine artillery
strikes against Ukrainian fortified positions,
and recent planned retreats or positional
warfare, keeping casualties down while smashing
Ukrainian withering firepower.
The collective West believes it holds the
Ukraine proxy war card. Russia bets on reality,
where economic cards are food, energy,
resources, resource security and a stable
economy.
Meanwhile, as if the energy-suicide EU did
not have to face a pyramid of ordeals, they can
surely expect to have knocking on their door at
least 15 million desperate Ukrainians escaping
from villages and cities with zero electrical
power.
The railway station in – temporarily occupied
– Kherson is a graphic example: people show up
constantly to warm up and charge their
smartphones. The city has no electricity, no
heat, and no water.
Current Russian tactics are the absolute
opposite of the military theory of concentrated
force developed by Napoleon. That’s why Russia
is accumulating serious advantages while
“disturbing the dust in a bowl of rose-leaves”.
And of course, “we haven’t even started yet.”
Pepe Escobar - Independent geopolitical
analyst, writer and journalist
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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