Russian Update

What Will The Future Bring? The Zhou Regime's Debacle.

Today was a significant snow day for me, so posting will be briefer.

There have been some developments in the tug of war between Russian and the Zhou regime. Without digging down too deeply, there are several points of importance.

First, a key demand by Putin was that the US/NATO should respond in writing. Ray McGovern in Will Putin Accept Half a Loaf? provides a key statement by Putin that explains this stance:

Here is President Putin speaking to his top military officers:

"In particular, the growth of the US and NATO military forces in direct proximity to the Russian border and major military drills, including unscheduled ones, are a cause for concern.

"It is extremely alarming that … Mk 41 launchers, which are located in Romania and are to be deployed in Poland, are adapted for launching Tomahawk strike missiles. If this infrastructure continues to move forward, and if US and NATO missile systems are deployed in Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow will be only 7–10 minutes, or even five minutes for hypersonic systems.

"This is a huge challenge for us, for our security. In this context, as you are aware, I invited the US President to start talks on the drafting of concrete agreements. … We need long-term legally binding guarantees. Well, we know very well that even legal guarantees cannot be completely fail-safe, because the United States easily pulls out of any international treaty that has ceased to be interesting to it for some reason, sometimes offering explanations and sometimes not, as was the case with the ABM and the Open Skies treaties – nothing at all.

"However, we need at least something, at least a legally binding agreement rather than just verbal assurances."

Gorbachev Should Have Said ‘Put It in Writing’

At this point in his speech, Putin asserts that verbal assurances from the US can be worthless, and recalls that Moscow was repeatedly told that Russian concerns about NATO expansion were without merit.

"Take the recent past, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when we were told that our concerns about NATO’s potential expansion eastwards were absolutely groundless."

Whatever your views may be on Russian geopolitical ambitions, Putin’s views cannot simply be dismissed as unreasonable. This is the background to Russia’s presentation of written demands and its demand for written responses.

What’s significant at this point is that Russia got the written responses it was demanding. Score one for Russia.

The question then moves to the nature of those responses. Russia expressed strong disappointment at those responses. However, against the background of Putin’s core concerns for Russian security—if we are to take his words to the Russia officer corps at face value—it’s important to note that what Putin explicitly references is not so much NATO membership as NATO missile deployments. In other words, Russia’s current demands are likely in the nature of bargaining points and are expressed in maximalist fashion.

The Zhou regime has chosen to frame the whole affair as being about Ukrainian membership in NATO, but Putin knows as well as anyone in the West that NATO is highly unlikely to unanimously approve (as required) membership of a basket case nation like Ukraine any time in the foreseeable future. What’s going on? The Zhou regime gets to save a bit of face—for public consumption. They have rejected Putin’s demand about Ukraine. But …

Both sides now agree that there is room for negotiation and dialogue on “secondary” issues. So, about those missile launchers in Poland and Romania—technically ABM launchers but readily adaptable to offensive weapons? That appears to be open for discussion, and so Russia’s strongly expressed disappointment may mask the fact that the negotiations have moved in the direction of Russia’s key security concerns—not such a “secondary” matter, after all. On balance, I’d say, score another one for Russia. For purposes of documentation, we turn to NATO Response To Russia's Proposals 'Embarrassing': Lavrov:

"Compared to the paper that was sent to us from NATO, the American answer is almost a model of diplomatic decency," the Russian foreign minister said Friday of NATO written feedback in particular. "The response from NATO is so ideological, it has such a sense of exceptionalism of the North Atlantic Alliance, its special mission, its special purpose, that I even felt a little embarrassed for those who wrote it."

...

"I can’t say that the negotiations are over," Lavrov said. "The Americans and NATO, as you know, have been studying our extremely simple proposals for more than a month… but there are grains of rationality there."

Over in Washington earlier this week, the State Department said that dialogue and diplomacy remain open. Spokesman Ned Price, however, still called Russia's core demands "absolutely non-starters" - affirming with Blinken that NATO's door would remain open. 

"But there are other areas that – where dialogue and diplomacy could help improve our collective security, transatlantic security," Price had said in an earlier briefing. "The key point in that is that any steps that we would take would not be concessions. They would need to be on a reciprocal basis, meaning that the Russians would also have to do something that would help improve our security – our security posture."

If that sounds like a plea to Russia to help the Zhou regime find a face saving way out of this embroglio it’s because it probably is exactly that. Note too that the US side is complimented by Lavrov for maintaining diplomatic niceties. In other words, the US is showing Putin and Russia the respect that the (now former) German naval chief was referring to.

But that won’t be easy—not for the discerning observer.

A third matter—Russia has brought divisions between the US and European countries out in the open. And by “European countries” I mean Germany. Germany is, for realistic purposes, the EU. Germany is almost totally dependent on Russia for its energy needs—a situation that has been enabled by the Zhou regime. US posturing and rhetoric is largely meaningless without a strongly united NATO, and knowledgeable observers will understand this.

Fourth, and just about as bad, Ukraine has basically dissed the hapless Zhou, several times telling the US to tone down its rhetoric, denying that there is any imminent military conflict—in sharp contrast to Zhou’s reported statements. It doesn’t matter so much why Ukraine is doing this—whether they’re feeling Russian pressure, whether it’s about economic concerns that US panic talk may provoke. The important thing is that Ukraine is publicly calling Zhou’s judgment into question. There have been a variety of reports on this, and here’s a recent one:

Zelensky Slams Biden: ‘I Think I Know the Details Deeper Than Any Other President’

but this pair of tweets sums it up:

Release The Poso @JackPosobiec

BREAKING: President Zelensky slams Biden after Botched Call “I am the President of Ukraine. I am based here. I think I know the details better.”

Release The Poso @JackPosobiec

BREAKING: President Zelensky slams Western media coverage of Ukraine Says they are giving the image there are tanks on the street and people fleeing, creating panic

Again, the question isn’t so much how the US finds itself in this position—is Ukraine to blame, is the US? The point is simply that Russia has maneuvered Zhou out on a limb by himself. Score another for Russia—how many allies will think multiple times before falling in line with this hapless regime?

Sundance offers some pointed commentary on this issue, focusing on the dilemma that Zelensky and Ukraine find themselves in. They have to realize that the Hillary foreign policy establishment—as Sundance correctly notes—is in charge of all this, and they certainly don’t have Ukraine’s best interests at heart. Consider what this says about the way US foreign policy has been conducted since Bill Clinton:

Given the nature of how corrupt the U.S. administration is on a globalist scale; and considering that Biden Inc, which is really the Hillary Clinton foreign policy establishment, would give Zelensky the full Gaddafi treatment if it helped them gain wealth, power and influence; it really would be in Ukraine’s best interest for Zelensky to open a dialogue with Vladimir Putin.

Ukraine is not the only country having second thoughts about the US as an “ally”. Count on that.

So far the Zhou regime and it’s Hillary sycophants who are supposedly in charge of foreign policy have been thoroughly out-maneuvered.

Let me conclude with this. Back in 2016 I told a well known writer—whose writings you’ve all read—that central to Trump’s MAGA agenda was the conviction that Germany was Carthage to America’s Rome. Trump, I said, was convinced that Germany must be destroyed. Destroyed as a claimant to world empire. Apparently the Deep State found that to be a dangerously subversive idea and Trump had to go.

OK, this is a complicated topic—too complicated to delve into for now—but consider two quotes from an important article—The German Question:

Marx, you will recall going all the way back to at least 1845, was trying to win elections while laying the foundations of communism with Germany, front and center. Germany remained a locus of problems during World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Versailles Peace Treaty, the rise of Hitler, World War II, the Holocaust death camps, the division of Germany thereafter, the Cold War, Germany’s reunification, the elevation of a German EU, and now with the eventual breakup of NATO. What is it about Deutschland and the Germans themselves?

and:

The EU is either a European Germany or a German Europe. Take your pick. Yes, Europe always seems to revolve around the so-called German Question, i.e., assertiveness and dominance by the former Prussians.

and:

The Germans won’t defend Ukraine, send armaments or support, and have banned other countries (members of the same alliance) from using their airspace or ground transport to do so. Germany has broken with NATO and insisted on a pro-Russia approach and said it will not go along with some of the proposed Biden sanctions. Most important among those is the SWIFT financial payments system. Banning Russia from using it would be a crippling sanction with some teeth. Germany says no.

The new socialist government in Germany is further left of center than ever before and closer to Russia. Many of its primary cabinet members are Ossie’s—from East Germany, the former Soviet colony and coincidentally the place where Vladimir Putin was stationed when the Berlin Wall fell.

The real reason Germany is acting against NATO is selfish interest. Germany has expanded its empire eastward and to Russia in trade and investment over the last three decades. It sees this as their economic zone, exclusively.

Germany is convinced that it can manage its energy dependence on Russia. They see a break with NATO as their final victory for mastery of Europe.

I don’t insist on everything Theodore Roosevelt Malloch says—but do consider it carefully and seriously. He doesn’t spare our Establishment, and certainly not the Intel Community. There’s much more going on here than meets the casual observer’s eye. What we’re seeing is the Deep State’s exposure as incompetent strategists.