What are the Russians saying today?
What you will not read in today’s New York Times but need to know before heading for a bomb shelter
Yesterday I had the pleasure of chatting for some 20 minutes with Natali Morris, who hosts an interview program called “Redacted” that is widely viewed on youtube.com. The starting point for our virtual meeting was her recent discovery of my 2015 book Does Russia Have a Future?, which surprised her for the prescience of some of the essays in the book warning about a U.S.-NATO confrontation with Russia such as is now playing out before our eyes.
I explained to Natali, and now to you, that I never sought to take the mantle of Cassandra, that over the past eight years I have not been walking the streets wearing a sign-board declaring that “the end of the world is nigh.” However, at moments that I have considered critical, I have periodically sounded the alarm. We are in the midst of such a critical moment, as you know.
When the interview is posted, I will add a link to the bottom of this essay.
*****
Russian state television does not broadcast news worth repeating on this platform every day. And for that reason I do not take the time of readers until and unless there is something they should know. Today is such a day. What I am about to share is news and analysis that I harvested on the morning edition of Sixty Minutes (there is also an early evening edition) and on the 14.00 o’clock Vesti program.
One featured item was the latest news from the front lines about the status of the Ukrainian counter-offensive, which has become very active in recent days and is likely to further increase in intensity in the course of the week remaining before the start of the NATO gathering in Vilnius on the 12th. Kiev’s receiving further substantial military and financial aid from its Western sponsors depends directly on the regime’s ability to demonstrate that the investment made so far has paid off handsomely and that it can push the Russians out of the territory they occupy if given sufficient resources.
As reported today, the Ukrainian forces continue to gain no ground and to lose enormous numbers of personnel and military hardware. They are now going well beyond exploratory moves of small number of troops such as characterized the first two weeks of their counter-offensive and are fielding at least on one location of the front in the south of Donbas a force numbering 6,000.
The Russian fighters interviewed by state television war correspondents and backed up by video footage explain that they are able to repel all Ukrainian efforts to achieve a breakthrough on their lines thanks to heavy support from artillery and now from fighter jets. We were shown clips of these jets hugging the terrain at a height of 25 meters off the ground while flying at 1,000 km per hour, delivering lethal strikes against armored personnel carriers, tanks and trenches occupied by Ukrainian infantry. The results of their work are recorded by reconnaissance drones. In sum, the Russians maintain that the loss ratio for Ukraine is an order of magnitude higher, meaning 10 times higher on the Ukrainian side in the present fighting.
They claim to have destroyed all of the Leopard-2 tanks delivered in recent weeks to Ukraine by Portugal and Finland. And, the Russian journalists comment that replacement tanks from Germany, announced yesterday by Minister of Defense Pistorius, will be of a still older and less capable generation, the Leopard 1. They will fall easy prey to Russian artillery and tanks in the field.
This being the case , the Russians see no possibility that the Ukrainians can win anything remotely described as military gains on the battlefield to show off in Vilnius next week or in the weeks that follow. And this is precisely why things could soon get out of hand, as Kiev tries to achieve by terrorism what it cannot achieve by conventional warfare.
Even today Ukrainian “terrorism” was denounced by Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. Five drones were shot down or disoriented by electronic means in the greater Moscow metropolitan area today. Vnukovo airport was clearly their assigned target area and the airport’s operations this morning had to be suspended for security considerations. I am not surprised: it was just a question of time before the Ukrainians would start targeting such infrastructure and putting air passengers in danger. Vnukovo is the air base used by a number of foreign carriers, including Turkish Airlines and Egypt Air. An attack on the airport can thus easily become an international scandal and/or catastrophe.
But, of course, the greater threat remains a Ukrainian missile strike on the Zaporozhie nuclear power plant, which Kiev would claim to have been perpetrated by the Russians. The logic of such a strike would be to create a threat of nuclear contamination reaching into Western Europe and justifying NATO intervention in the war.
The Russians have publicly and loudly denounced such a pending false flag operation, but in this hour of near desperation the Kiev authorities cannot be trusted to play by normal rules or normal logic.
If this or something similarly dastardly is perpetrated by the Zelensky regime in the coming days before the NATO summit, then indeed you should look for a bomb shelter. The Russian response to risk of imminent NATO attack “in retaliation” for the false flag tragedy may be an escalation that will shock us all.
*****
Happily, today’s harvest of news on Russian television was not entirely grim. The other featured news item was today’s summit meeting of member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). This periodic event was coordinated from New Delhi and was held in virtual format.
Indian Prime Minister Indira Modi appeared to be in top form and clearly enjoyed his privileged position as “host.” Watching his performance and his proposal that the SCO be further strengthened to combat terrorism we may conclude that the hope of US Secretary of State Blinken to wrest India away from its close relations with SCO founding member Russia is purely delusional.
Vladimir Putin used his time before the camera primarily to persuade fellow member states that Russia is rock solid, that its society has consolidated behind the constitutional order and that the threat posed by the armed rebellion of the Wagner Group has been entirely neutralized.
President Xi of China had some topics of broader interest to put on the table. He suggested that the SCO members should cooperate in support of a world order based on international law, that they should oppose imposition of unilateral sanctions against any member states and that they should trade in national currencies. If I may be permitted to decode these points by the Chinese leader, they all are directed against the United States and its bullying foreign policy which seeks to enforce a ‘rules based order’ that it alone dictates.
This SCO summit was notable for the first time presence of Iran as a fully qualified member. Meanwhile we are told that Egypt has put its hat in the ring as a potential future member, which would mark the first expansion of the SCO beyond the Eurasian land mass, where its members now account for more than two-thirds of the territory and for one half of the world’s total population. Another 14 countries are said to have put their names on the list as candidates for future admission to the club.
On the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, Russian state television tells us that Russian-Chinese trade is now being conducted in yuan and rubles at the level of 85%.
Russia’s senior delegate to the SCO, appearing on Sixty Minutes, said that pending its expansion the Organization is in need of reforms to its charter. These might include raising the powers and the visibility of its general director so that he can interact more effectively with other institutions of global governance and also creating a permanent body to coordinate the fight against narcotics trafficking.
One hour ago, I had an opportunity to discuss the aforementioned aspects of the SCO summit during a brief interview on India’s WION television channel. When the link becomes available, I will post it below as s postscript.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023