Monday Grab Bag: Jacques Baud And Tom Luongo On Ukraine; The Duran On Trump And The GOP

A number of things are becoming apparent regarding the conflict in Ukraine. There are at least three active fronts. In the Zaporozhye region in the south as well as in the eastern area around Bakhmut the Russian forces are content to maintain an attritional defensive posture—although in what could be called the geographic link between these two fronts Russian forces are maintaining consistent offensive pressure. On the other hand, in the north in the Kharkov direction Russian forces are aggressively seeking to exploit breakthroughs in the Ukrainian defenses. Time will tell if this will develop further.

In the Odessa direction, it is now clear that the end of the “grain deal” and the institution of a total sea blockade of Ukraine is intended to cut off the smuggling of weapons and munitions under cover of the grain trade. In addition, however, the pattern of missile attacks indicate that Russia is also aggressively seeking to stop the flow of war materiel to Ukraine from Romania, along the Black Sea coast.

These developments should all be viewed in the context of President Putin’s recent remarks directed at Ukraine and Poland. In the aftermath of Putin’s remarks—in which he warned Poland in very direct terms against meddling in Belarus, and in more oblique terms against meddling in Western Ukraine—I maintained that Putin was speaking over the heads of the Ukrainian and Polish governments and directing his remarks to the Ukrainian and Polish peoples. I still see that as true, but there may also have been an even more significant target audience—the Ukrainian military. John Helmer and Jacques Baud—a former Swiss Army colonel who has good sources in the French military—believe that Putin is seeking to plant the idea of the Ukrainian military ending Ukraine’s agony by seizing control from the Zelensky regime and doing a deal with Russia. Putin’s remarks regarding Ukraine clearly portrayed the Zelensky regime as betraying the interests of the Ukrainian nation, so this interpretation makes sense to me. Putin’s remarks can be seen as suggesting to the Ukrainian military that it’s time for them to take on the role of savior of the nation.

In their podcast together—Colonel Jacques Baud on War of the Worlds - 22 July 2023—Helmer and Baud make a number of important points. I’ll summarize those points very briefly.

First, Baud believes that Putin is still intent on keeping Russia’s casualties as low as possible—although by this time they are not inconsiderable, even if Ukraine’s casualties have been much higher. Therefore, says Baud, Putin will probably not want to get involved in urban warfare in cities like Odessa and Kharkov, where the populations may be relatively favorable to a return to union with Russia.

Secondly, following from the first point, Putin will seek to exert maximum pressure on the Ukrainian military with the intent of stimulating of pressuring them to seek a resolution. At current rates there will be 100K additional Ukrainian casualties by Christmas, and the word out of Vilnius is that Zelensky was told: Win by Christmas—or else. Putin’s aim will surely be to pressure the Ukrainian military into reading the writing that is now on the wall, and cutting their losses—and the tragic losses of the young men of the Ukrainian nation.

Here are a few additional points gleaned from the podcast:

Talk of Russia attacking westward, which we hear especially from Poland and the Baltics, is simply nonsense.

The Ukraine conflict has highlighted the weakness of NATO in conventional warfare. The professional military know this, even if the politicians find themselves trapped within the the Neocon narrative of a plucky Ukraine on the verge of victory.

The Ka-52 “Alligator” attack helicopter has proven to be extremely effective against NATO tanks and armored vehicles. The Ka-52 has taken out most of the Leopard 2 tanks that have been lost. In Russian doctrine these helicopters stay above their own lines, striking at relatively long range, so any military that wants to counter them will need either extremely powerful air defense or fixed wing fighters that can attack them. Ukraine has neither, rendering their armored vehicles sitting ducks. That's exactly why the Ukrainians wanted F-16s. Therefore, telling Ukraine they can get F-16s only after their offensive succeeds actually places Ukraine in a Catch 22 situation. Military professionals understand this, and it explains why Zelensky was so angry at Vilnius.

Next up is our next transcript installment of Tom Luongo’s interview with Dimitri Simes, Jr. In this installment there’s not too much that readers won’t already understand, but it places the military situation—described above—within a financial context

What does European crisis mean for NATO war plans?

DS: I had to ask about the geopolitical implications of this, because what we've discussed is that the European Union is moving towards a banking crisis which will likely have global ramifications including for the United States. But, at the same time, we're seeing that European leaders--NATO leaders--are openly talking about the fact that, due to the proxy war in Ukraine, they're facing an ammunition shortage and they need to dramatically ramp up military production to keep the conflict going. How can they square these two things? On the one hand, mass economic mobilization does place quite a strain on industry, but at the same time--as you've described--the banking industry in the West as a whole is not exactly in the most robust shape. How can they Square these two things?

TL: I think Christine Lagarde thinks she's going to do it by getting rid of the original Euro and introducing the digital Euro, and then-- Remember, George Soros was talking about a lot of things and one of those things is perpetual bonds. You take the existing capital stock of Europe, take all the various individual country sovereign debt--Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Greek--and roll it all up into the ECB, who pays all those off and issues perpetual bonds and makes the ECB, basically, the central bank. Now I'm sure that that's still the plan, and I also believe that they want to introduce a digital Euro to be the currency that backs this new regime. By doing that they would then have a clean balance sheet. All that debt would be on the ECB's balance sheet, and the rest of the countries would be free from having those debts on their balance sheets, and then they can go out and lever up and start building new industries. I firmly believe that that is their plan.

I don't know that that's going to work. I just don't buy that any of that's going to work. I just don't buy that anybody in Europe is going to vote for it. I also kind of buy the argument that they'll allow a crisis to eventually occur on their time schedule. Well, if they really wanted this to occur, they would have already allowed it to occur, because you can't make the switch in three months. You can't do all this in three months. It's three months from October. You can't do it. Yeah, they may have set all the preparatory work up for it, so I don't think they are going to industrialize and mobilize for a greater war effort against Russia.

Luongo is referencing the late fall as the time by which this needs to get done because that appears to be the deadline that NATO gave to Zelensky at Vilnius.

What I think we saw at Vilnius was an admission that, 'Oh well, this project didn't work; we're gonna have to give this one up now and retrench. We'll leave the Ukrainians out to hang and they've got until December to beat the Russians. If they don't beat the Russians by December then we'll just shut this project down.' And we all know that that means, effectively, 'in December' really means the next two months before the weather in Ukraine precludes any major offensives or anything along those lines. So, we're doing this interview on the morning that Ukraine bombed the Kerch Strait Bridge a second time, so it's not like the Ukrainians are going to give up here. Certainly not. But Europe is not going to militarize and mobilize. They've already made abundantly clear that they can't or they won't. There's too many countries that won't do it.

Now, will France and Germany use the militarization of their industrial base to kind of rebuild at some point later this decade? Yes, because what happened at Vilnius last week was a stark admission that NATO doesn't work. What we have is a NATO that's capable of adding more countries to it but is only becoming more dysfunctional the more countries they add to it. I don't see the circle getting squared. What I see is a whole lot of bluff and bluster, a whole lot of, 'Hey, we were able to get Finland and Sweden into NATO, that's putting pressure on Russia and we're controlling the Arctic.' But at the same time, as my partner Dexter White said to me yesterday on the phone, NATO can't even decide on what airplane they want to fly, much less whether they're all going to go to war with the Russians. At the end of the day, if the Poles and the Americans don't want to fight this war, this war ain't gonna get fought. It's just that simple. Because Poland's where it would would be fought, and it would be fought with American and Polish troops. Everything else is just you know frankly virtue signaling from a bunch of out of touch bureaucrats.

DS: Returning to the financial side of things, I understand all the arguments you bring up for why this would be difficult for Europe to do, but I also hear what Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, what national security adviser Jake Sullivan, are saying. And they're saying the United States and its allies will support Europe as long as it takes. Maybe given this sort of political willpower Janet Yellen, Jerome Powell, Christine Lagarde can somehow sit down and make the math work in order to keep the military support for Ukraine up at its current levels. Is that possible? Could they work some sort of financial Wizardry to keep this machine going?

TL: Not unless you have the industrial capacity to do so. Now, the United States has been sandbagging about how many 155 millimeter shells they can produce every month. I mean, the first casualty of war is the truth. We're producing a lot more 155 millimeter shells than has been reported, and we're finally starting to let this stuff slip out. But I want you to understand something.

Look at what happened in the wake of Vilnius. UK defense secretary Ben Wallace's political career is over. He was tagged to become the next General Secretary of NATO. It was blocked by Biden of all people and now Wallace is stepping down and his political career is over. He's not even going to run for re-election as an MP in the UK. Victoria Nuland. After Wendy Sherman, the Assistant Secretary of State and no less a neocon than all the rest of them, announced about a month or a month and a half ago that she was retiring? That's a rat leaving the sinking ship as far as I'm concerned--or was she being pressured out by Victoria Nuland who was number three at the State department. We all know who Victoria Nuland is, and now all of a sudden Nuland is not going to get the number two job. Everybody expected her to move into Wendy Sherman's position but she's not going to get that job. So the ultra hawks in the U.S and UK establishment are being chastised.

It's not about the money at this point. At some point all the money in the world doesn't buy you production--if you don't have skilled labor and you don't have infrastructure and you don't have access to credit. If you don't have the things you need, if the copper and the steel and the lead are too expensive to make the bullets, then you don't make the bullets. It's that simple. So we're spending far too much money surveilling our domestic populations both in Europe and the US to ever fight a full mobilization war. We could, but we're not going to, and I think Jerome Powell is committed in every way to making sure that if we are going to fight this war it's going to be as expensive as possible—and it's going to bankrupt the United States in the process. At some point a whole bunch of very powerful people within the US went, 'You know what? That's not a good idea, that's not a good look for us.' The MIC still wants the gravy train, NATO still wants their paychecks and their fat vacations.

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Shifting to the domestic front and the war on Trump, we’ll keep this brief. Bernard at MoA does a nice job of presenting where the American Republic stands right now—on the brink. Here’s how he begins:

The Failed State Effort Of Indicting Trump

The effort Biden's Justice Department puts into preventing the leader of its opposition from gaining another presidency has reached an insane level.

As Inquiries Compound, Justice System Pours Resources Into Scrutinizing Trump - NY Times - Jul 23, 2023

Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing criminal investigations into former President Donald J. Trump, employs 40 to 60 career prosecutors, paralegals and support staff, augmented by a rotating cast of F.B.I. agents and technical specialists, according to people familiar with the situation.

In his first four months on the job, starting in November, Mr. Smith’s investigation incurred expenses of $9.2 million. That included $1.9 million to pay the U.S. Marshals Service to protect Mr. Smith, his family and other investigators who have faced threats after the former president and his allies singled them out on social media.

At this rate, the special counsel is on track to spend about $25 million a year.

With that budget and the brainpower of such a large staff one could find fault with anyone and indict any person for whatever without much problems.

If this would happen in a foreign democracy that is not friendly with the U.S. the State Department and various think tanks would be outraged about such anti-democratic behavior. It would be explained as a sign that the state in question is falling apart.

The guys at The Duran have a similar view, which they express in a 17 minutes video. Alexander Mercouris, a savvy observer, is obviously dumbfounded—not say appalled—at what he sees going on in America. At around the 7 minute mark he calls on all GOP midgets to give up their absurd campaigns and unite behind Trump. Now, he says, is not the time to think of one’s career—the fate of the republic is at stake. If, he adds, this outrage on constitutional order and rule of law is allowed to succeed the outcome for the American Republic will be “catastrophic”. It will be the end. Mercouris is clearly at his wits end trying to make sense of the state of American politics. Toward the end he even likens the state of the American judiciary and Dept. of Justice to the courts under Henry VIII.