No news is good news….
For those who wonder why I have not posted any commentary for nearly a week, I have a straightforward explanation. This silence has had nothing to do with the Easter holidays, which have sent many folks on vacation and disrupted work schedules in many European countries. No, it has to do with global news, or the relative absence of it. The war in Gaza grinds on. The war in Ukraine grinds on. But there has been no dramatic turn of events in these conflicts or elsewhere in the world to grab the headlines of our media and require comment from talking heads.
On the other hand, when there is breaking news, I do not hesitate to issue more than one commentary article on a given day.
In recent days, international news in the West has been dominated by the Gaza conflict. We have heard how Biden came close to condemning Israeli atrocities and failed military operations in Gaza. We have heard about the Israeli withdrawal from Southern Gaza, which is interpreted either as a concession to the ‘or else’ threats coming out of Washington or as a prelude to the long announced attack on Rafah, depending on whom you want to believe.
However, in Russia the international and domestic news remains focused on the Ukraine conflict. Day after day, Russian state television provides not only statistics on destroyed Ukrainian planes, tanks, Himars and other rocket artillery units as well as headcounts of the killed and maimed enemy forces, but also relevant video coverage of these successes.
For the layman, it is difficult to see the results of these successes on maps of the line of contact between the opposing sides. The Russian officials are knowingly playing down their daily advance westward, calling it just positional improvements. They do not want to telegraph their punches or to give Western media cause for alarm before they spring the several traps for Ukraine’s army that will come when they break through the Ukrainian defense lines later this spring and summer.
And in parallel with the destruction on the line of contact, the Russians are actively waging what the Moscow-based journalist John Helmer has rightly called an ‘electricity war’ on Ukraine, utterly demolishing an increasing number of power generating plants across the country.
Even the pro-Ukrainian Financial Times two days ago finally published an article describing the attacks on power infrastructure as having taken a new and very dangerous turn for the viability of Ukraine.
Moreover, here and there Western media are reporting on another powerful escalation in the Russian prosecution of the war: the wide and growing use of repurposed Soviet vintage ‘dumb bombs’ that are now maneuverable ‘glide bombs’ carrying between 500 kg and 3 tons of explosives. These cheap weapons have a range of 60 to 90 km and land within 10 meters of target. They are unstoppable and achieve many times the devastation of artillery shells. Indeed they are fully capable of clearing paths through any of the defense lines that the Ukrainians are now constructing posthaste in anticipation of a Russian offensive.
I stress that these various significant developments in the war appear as separate news items in Western media, but without anyone linking the dots. When you do that, it becomes obvious that all the brave talk about the Ukrainians being propped up and reinforced for the sake of a counter-offensive in 2025, all of the brave talk about a 5-year military assistance package for Ukraine amount to empty blather. If the war continues on its present trajectory, there soon enough will not be a Ukraine to prop up.
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Day after day on Russian state television, we also hear about the latest progress of the FSB and other law enforcement agencies in uncovering the financial channels and equipment supply channels linking Ukraine to the terror attack on the Crocus City Hall entertainment complex.
These same news reports also take the lines of responsibility all the way to the USA and the UK. The role of the USA in assisting and promoting the formation of the Islamic State terror groups from the time of the Obama administration is fleshed out. There is no backtracking from the first remarks made by FSB director Bortnikov on the subject of who stood behind the Crocus City attack.
The one non-Ukraine and non-Israeli big news item of last week both in the West and in Russia was the celebration in Brussels of the 75th anniversary of the signing of the agreements that created NATO. Coverage was not particularly exuberant in Western Europe because the NATO countries were unable to reach unanimous accord on the way forward with respect to Ukraine in their discussions just ahead of the cake cutting ceremony.
In Russia, no detail of the NATO celebration was too insignificant to be overlooked. We heard and saw how the caterers of the NATO event failed to provide forks, so that the high and mighty ate their piece of cake with their fingers.
Of considerably greater importance, we saw on last Sunday’s News of the Week program hosted by Dmitry Kiselyov an extensive account of the ‘pre-history’ of the NATO treaty, with a fair dose of conspiracy theories set out that bring to the door of Harry Truman and Winston Churchill responsibility for the start of the Cold War.
Kiselyov emphasized Franklin Roosevelt’s neutral and objective appreciation of the Soviet contribution to the war effort, which ran counter to the views of the anti-Russian Churchill and his newfound fellow thinker U.S. Vice President Truman. Roosevelt’s sudden death from a stroke just days before the Victory in Europe is said to have been possibly a case of poisoning, which Truman and his followers in the Oval Office up to and including John F. Kennedy refused to investigate by barring any exhumation of the body for tests. Moreover, Roosevelt’s quick burial hints at a cover-up, we are told
The net result of FDR’s death was unholy plotting of Truman as his successor, with Churchill’s blessing, to remove the USSR as a Great Power by dropping nuclear bombs on its 20 largest cities. This scheme was not implemented, per Kiselyov, only because the U.S. lacked the bombs and while it worked to manufacture them the Soviet Union developed and tested its own A-bomb, putting an end to America’s nuclear monopoly and restoring a semblance of deterrence.
There is nothing new in what Kiselyov presented, but it is important that he laid out the story now because it is preparing the Russian people for all eventualities in the evolution of the Ukraine war into a Russia-NATO war.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024