Russia and China
Election Day in the United States turned out to be a probable inflection point in domestic and world politics. We will not know for sure for another year, that is, with the results of the 2026 "mid-term" Congressional Election. The results depend heavily on whether or not the White House continues, accelerates, or cuts back on its campaign of immigration terrorism, economic chaos, and rampant law breaking across the nation. In any case, Trump and Vance and Miller and Noam and Bondi are weakened now. That does not mean they will act that way!
MAGA lost badly, and in this world everyone realized that Trump and his administration may lose even more resoundingly next year. The implications spread out like the ripples in a pond of a thrown stone. Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin in Moscow now has to gauge his precarious situation against the possible loss of Trump as the (seemingly off-and-on) witless ally and hapless diplomat, the soft, forgiving buffoon posing as a mediator. Putin has lost globally in his encounter with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and has stirred up the misgivings within NATO. NATO can take heart from the election and could stiffen even more its resistance to Putin.
Russia is teetering on the brink of an economic collapse according to some sources that sound sort of propagandistic to me. The BBC is taking a more cautious stand on the issue, and I think they have erred in the other direction. The Ukraine Project, which Putin thought on February 24, 2022 he could win in a week, is now 1,350+ days downstream and effectively stalemated by many estimates. Stalemates are not wins.
Part One of the War Against Ukraine began in February-March 2014 as Russia invaded Crimea with a disguised army, annexed Crimea, and then in April paramilitary forces seized several towns in the Donbas and Lukhansk regions. Pokrovsk, a town now deserted, formerly 60,000 in population, was on the edge of that takeover and now, today, is still contested nearly twelve years later here in the 2022-25 Part-Two of Putin's war.
So the question posed is: whether if Ukraine were to lose the empty town of Pokrovsk would that significantly change the odds on the war as a whole? The question may have emerged from the press that covers Ukraine's military. Or, the question may have been raised in Kyiv or in Moscow as a provocation, propaganda, a secret message to NATO and Washington, or most likely just an open plea to stimulate support enhancements for the Ukrainians. Remember, they are fighting Russia for all of us!
Ukraine may have to give up Donbas and Lukhansk, each as now ungovernable from Kyiv. They should never give up Crimea or the isthmus connecting it to Ukraine territory, that is, the territory from Mariupol to Kherson. They can give back the territory around Kursk east of Kharkiv and the territory to the east of it, depending on the amount of reparations Russia can be required to pay for destroying Mariupol and much else. Billions of Russian assets are held in the west, sequestered, which will be used as reparations.
Ukraine is war weary. It is no surprise, and they are admitting it publicly but deliberately amid news of their surprising tech and reimagining of war with the likes of Russia with drones deep into Russian territory and their continued outsmarting of Russian ground forces. Russia is war weary, too, and has lost well over a million men to the Ukrainian asymmetric warfare they further perfect daily. There could be a political comeuppance for Putin for that huge loss of personnel and the loss of literally billions in tanks, aircraft, artillery, and defense technology which has the Russian economy stretched to the breaking point in places for lack of workers and national income.
Covering this war has been an impossibility for US media. MSNBC/MSNOW does not have the resources or has the resources, but would rather spend them covering domestic politics, which is a hard call, but in the end obvious. I am quite certain that Ali Velshi, who was over there two years ago for them, has no great desire to return. I appreciate that former Ambassador Michael McFall's periodic comments on their shows are honest, but the whole truth cannot be forthcoming because it is not known, and when known, much of it needs to be kept confidential for security reasons. The three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC did a lot better with the American War in Vietnam. FoxNews and CNN are not to be trusted.
I think about Ukraine all the time. One of the scenarios I think about is what would happen if a contingent of the Russian military overthrew Putin and summarily backed out of the war? What would NATO nations ask of the successor regime and who would it be, given that it begins in the undemocratic, conservative, slavophilic ranks of the Russian military? One certain thing is that the west cannot leave Russia to figure it all out for themselves like they did beginning in 1991.
The other thing I think about is that the historical relationship between Ukraine and Russia has been misrepresented consistently by the press, largely due to the fact that Russia is huge and since Peter the Great a player in the world and Ukraine has not been, except for battles in WWII. Below is the world's shortest history of that relationship up to the time, roughly of Ivan III, "the Great," Grand Prince of Moskva and All the Russias from 1462 to 1505. (The image is of The Great Gate of Kiev by Hartman.)
Russia is the result of three centuries (late 9th-early 13th) of expansion of Kievan Rus before the devastating Mongol invasion. What Russia became is because of what the Varangians and Slavs of Kievan Rus made it. What the progeny of the expansion did during that time and through to 1480, the end of Mongol domination, they did first as colonists, then as "old stock," as Kievan as Britain's 150 years of colonists in America, if you will. Kievan Rus had become Christianized in 988 by Byzantine monks, including Cyril and Methodius. It was organized by the Varangian Swedes as a grand-princedom, but owing to the fact that successive generations of leading boyars (next in rank to a prince) settled further and further to the northeast their defensive resources were drawn thin and so Kievan Rus was weakened by its geography. The new territories then declared their own princely status in fortress-city places named Vladimir, Suzdal, Tver, Ryazan, Moskva. The Mongols came in the year 1240 and crushed Kiev on their way to the very gates of Vienna, and they made vassals of these new Kievan-born places, one of which each year collected the tribute from the others to be paid to the Mongol Golden Horde. One of them, Moskva, obtained the tribute collection job—the yarlik— and cheated the Mongols of some of the tribute thereby enriching and making itself more powerful. That was the beginning of Moskva as capital of eponymous Muscovy, thanks to Prince Ivan I "Kalita" (Moneybags). With Kiev no longer ruling, the Church moved to Moskva, which soon enough declared itself to be the Third Rome! The Russian Orthodox Church has had a significant role in controling what Russia thinks of itself, including its own "racial identity," the Slavs, who are deliberately not Western, fallen from the grace of God, as the destruction of Rome and Byzantium would clearly indicate.
Ostorozhno! Dveri otkryvayutsa!
Russia & China
28 May 2025
With Tulsi Gabbard as DNI and Pam Bondi Attorney General and Kristi Noam as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, all four of whom have dramatically shown complete fealty to Trump, but none of whom are experts at their jobs, we do not know for sure whether we could survive five minutes of the WWIII Putin's guy, former President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev, threatened against Trump a couple days ago.
In surprised exasperation with Putin's escalation of the war against Ukraine instead of coming to peace talks, Trump said that Putin is "playing with fire" and "What Vladimir Putin doesn't realize is that if it weren't for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia," describing the Russian leader as "absolutely CRAZY."
Medvedev responded for Putin—leaving that much room for reinterpretations—"I only know of one REALLY BAD thing — WWIII. I hope Trump understands this!" Russians like to talk big threats because they are capable of them, but there really is no worse, more dangerous threat than WWIII! Interestly, something short of WWIII, but unlikely to be nuclear, is hidden in Medvedev's words!
Professor of History at Yale Timothy Snyder, discussing this and the failure of Trump to understand Putin, said that since the failed talks in Turkey weeks ago, Putin has taken the posture of using underlings to talk to Trump publicly, since Trump is now beginning to see that Putin has no intention of beginning peace talks until his requirements are met in advance, which of course is not a negotiation at all.
Those requirements seem to be that Russia will appropriate Crimea and the Donbas territories and southwestward to connect to Crimea at a minimum, with no concessions about war crimes or reparations of any kind, no NATO for Ukraine, and basically no promises about the rump Ukraine's security.
One wonders if Trump will finally give up his dream of a Trump Tower in Moscow, and will completely withdraw his support of Putin's aims? Only the most fanatic of his domestic support team believe he should not! The four key cabinet members are obviously of no consequence in this decision, except if he fumbles the situation as badly as he has fumbled the tariff regime he has been dreaming about for forty years, those four will not be able to credibly defend us, much less put an end to Putinism in Russia. Moreover, the one hope some of the more gullible in the Senate had, now seems completely unlikely. Marco Rubio as Secretary of State obviously believes that Trump's policies should be his own, and so of the top five of the cabinet he is the single one most disappointing and just as unlikely to rise above fealty to save any situation Trump stumbles into.
Having said that, Vlad Putin is in way up past the top of his boots in a declining economy, battered military, and accordingly a slowly growing more vocal opposition. The one he must worry about most is internal to the military. Of those, there is a Russophile contingent quite willing to continue the Russian Resurgence.
I am quite sure the civilian power elite, those in Moscow and the oligarchs across Eurasian Russia, have already taken steps to make sure they are not taken by surprise by anything Putin does, especially an ill-timed, poorly thought-out comment or acceleration in Russian resurgence policy. On the other hand, the Russian military brass at this point believe they cannot survive further embarrassment. They are correct.
But, Putin now has them stacked up along the borders of Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland. The air over the eastern Baltic and Gulf of Finland is hotly contested and missiles will fly from one or the other if it does not cool soon. Will Putin test NATO to see if it still includes the United States? Is Hegseth in any position to say yes? What if Trump says no?
Russia & China
Alexander Gabuev's October 3, 2024, article in Carnegie Politika, "How Serious a Threat Is Russia's New Nuclear Doctrine?" is an eye-opening description of the geopolitical corner Vladimir Putin has backed ... or been backed ... into as the Ukraine War continues. Russia's nuclear deterrent has failed to protect Russia's war against Ukraine from NATO nations' support of Ukraine, despite early and recent sabre rattling.
The new policy has not yet been formally published, but Putin made public comments at the meeting of the UN Security Council on September 25, which sounded like he was lowering the threshold for use of his nuclear weapons. This is the gist of the comments as Gabuev reports:
... The first proposal is that aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, but "with the participation or support" of a nuclear one, should be considered a joint attack. The second defines the conditions for the possible use of nuclear weapons: Moscow will be prepared to use them "upon receipt of reliable information of a massive launch of air and space attack weapons and their crossing of the state border," including strategic and tactical aircraft, cruise missiles, drones, and hypersonic aircraft.
Finally, nuclear weapons may be used in response to an attack on Russia and Belarus using conventional weapons if that attack poses a "critical threat to sovereignty." ....
The support the US and other NATO countries are providing to Ukraine has incrementally pushed Putin into an effort to define with more specificity what he thinks crosses that fabled "red line" for him. The recent use in the Crimea of British NATO missiles, which nominally would have been useful for Ukraine only if NATO personnel were involved, is a classic example of how he has been pushed back without any plausible recourse to his nukes or useful time for rattling them. That is the essense of the situation in which "... NATO is successfully deterring Russia, Russia is not so successful at deterring NATO."
It should occur to us that Putin is bringing this up to weaponize the Trump campaign with scary ideas intended to weaken the resolve of some voters who might otherwise easily vote for the successful policy of Biden and Harris. When the policy is formal we can assume Russia will retaliate by doubling down on its sabotage and targeted assassinations in NATO countries.
Russia & China
7 Sept 2024
With the very recent Ukrainian expedition into, the capture of, and occupation of Russian territory in the region of Kursk, which was the site of the famous WWII Battle of Kursk, the single largest battle in the history of warfare, Russia and Putin particularly have been humbled and embarrassed, and the oligarchs seem to be fed up.
"Putin warlords and oligarchs threaten coup."s Please check this video out first. Diane Francis is a Canadian journalist, one with considerable experience in recent Russian history, especially its war on Ukraine. She has filtered out of the daily chaos an opinion worthy of consideration.
Perhaps the key point is that what happens or fails to happen is fundamentally something that must begin in Russia. The players are the Russian oligarchs, the Russian Army generals, the Ministry of Defence, the Minister of Defence, Andrei Belousov, the Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, President Xi Jinping of China, President Modi of India, and of course President Vladimir Putin. Putin could resign, be resigned, be ousted with prejudice, be assassinated, or he could strike first and kill off enough of his detractors to bring the others to heel. I do not know anyone who knows for sure what the Russian intelligence agencies will do. They are
the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, FSB RF, the Foreign Intelligence Service, (FIS RF, but romanized to:) SVR RF, and the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, GRU.
Remember that Putin grew up in and probably not completely out of the KGB when it was reorganized as the new agencies. If I were Putin I would have a hard core group komanda tyulenei to assassinate Russian political enemies ready at all times. The prospect of sudden assassination has a way of moderating rebelliousness. However, a Russian assassination group might be ineffective against a large group of peers from the among all of the above mentioned. Some might die, but the rest would prevail.
If a coup takes more than a day or two, leaders like Xi and Modi and Biden and Harris might have a chance of directing the play. I am not sure our military is or ever has been ready for the possible impending situation. Russia is huge and very much unlike anything in the west save Depression Era-Prohibition Era criminal empires.
All of the foregoing obscures the fact that the Russian invasion of Ukraine seems now to be predicated on the strategy of "a seized territory stalemate" which favors Russia — occupying ~20% of Ukraine — and the stalemate supplemented by various and frequent military terror events.
Ukraine's capture of a chunk of Russia is impressive and super-embarrassing to Putin and those committed to the war. If nothing else it will have or already has peeled away some from the war party. The point then is how Time affects Ukraine's daring. Can it hold? If it holds, how long will the embarrassed and astounded Russians remain loyal and forgiving to Putin. Diane Francis thinks they are a good and necessary way down the road to coup d'etat already.
I think the US political calendar and prospects do not now favor Putin's position. I am confident, however, that the US is no better prepared for a demise of the regime in Russia than it was in 1991, when western capitalistic adventurers hoped that introducing a consumer economy into Russia would automatically convert it to a responsible western nation, the which could be quietly exploited for decades, perhaps centuries. And, of course, one of Russia's options post coup would be to get nastier.
Russia & China
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