JCS CHIEF GENERAL CHARLES BROWN JUST PROVED THAT NOTHING SHORT OF UKRAINE’S SURRENDER IS NEGOTIABLE WITH THE US — THAT’S CAPITULATION, NOT NEGOTIATION
by John Helmer, Moscow 12/5/24
@bears_with
The head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), General Charles Brown (lead image, right), has just revealed by press leak that he and the chief of the Russian General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, had talked by telephone last week, on November 27, and agreed not to disclose the contents of their call. If that was the point of agreement the two generals reached, Gerasimov has honoured it. Brown has just now decided to break his word.
“At the request of General Gerasimov, General Brown agreed to not proactively announce the call,” the New York Times has reported Brown’s spokesman saying “after he was approached by a reporter about the call”. The newspaper omitted to say that Brown had leaked information about the call in advance, in order to prepare reporters to publish the exchange.
As an exchange of positions between the two generals, the Russian assessment is that once again the American side proves that nothing it says in private, agrees to in public, or signs on paper can be trusted. Sources say in Moscow that Gerasimov and the General Staff will dictate the terms for the end of the Ukraine war “proactively”; that is, when the battlefield is ready, and there is nothing left for Brown to fight or leak.
Officially, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) have not announced their “read-out” of the telephone conversation of November 27. The last of Brown’s calls was identified by the JCS three days earlier.
The Russian Defense Ministry has made no disclosure. Boris Rozhin, who reports through the Colonel Cassad military blog, has not mentioned the telephone exchange. Neither has Yevgeny Krutikov, whose Mudraya Ptitsa blog and essays in Vzglyadreport GRU-level intelligence. The Foreign Ministry briefer was not asked about the call at her press briefing in Moscow on December 4, and she appeared to be unaware of it. The only publication in Russian to report the call was Meduza, an anti-Kremlin website in Latvia.
In the New York Times version of Brown’s leak, it is claimed that Gerasimov said “the Oreshnik ballistic missile launch had been planned long before the Biden administration agreed to allow Ukraine to use American ATACMS to strike deeper into Russia.” This is spin, Moscow sources claim, to reinforce the Biden Administration’s line that development of the Oreshnik dates back to the violations of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty which the Trump Administration claimed as its justification for withdrawing from the treaty in 2019.
The Moscow sources also believe the General Staff was certain from its intelligence of Ukrainian battlefield preparations that the US had been planning to use ATACMS against Russian territorial targets long before the Biden Administration announced its go-ahead. On November 27, Gerasimov told Brown that because the JSC had ignored the Oreshnik strike on the Yuzhmash plant on November 21 and used ATACMS on November 23 and November 25, there would be fresh Russian retaliation.
That followed on the day after the Gerasimov-Brown telephone call. Massed Russian missile and drone strikes across the Ukraine on November 28 also targeted and killed US personnel operating ATACMS launchers in the Sumy region. Since then no new ATACMS launch across the border has been reported by the Defense Ministry in Moscow or by Russian military bloggers.
“Brown spilled the beans as part of a warfighting exercise to show light between Gerasimov and Putin,” a NATO military veteran comments. “It was underhanded, but typical.” A source close to Moscow speculates that Putin and Gerasimov had agreed they would try to sound out Brown, just as they have been sounding out President-elect Donald Trump.
On December 4 it was reported by CNN that Gerasimov had “cautioned the top US general about a large-scale Russian military exercise in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, according to a US official”. CNN added that “Gerasimov did not explicitly mention the launch of hypersonic missiles in the call, according to the US official.” On December 5, ABC News, referring to an unnamed US official as its source, reported that Gerasimov had warned “that Russia was going to carry out test launches of hypersonic missiles in the eastern Mediterranean Sea and that U.S. Navy ships should steer clear of the target area for safety reasons.”
Source: https://abcnews.go.com/
From his base in Seattle, Andrei Martyanov reported on the firing of Zircon, Kalibr and Onyx missiles during the exercise. Zircon is hypersonic (Mach 9); Onyx and Kalibr are supersonic. Martyanov’s report, dated December 3, displays Defense Ministry footage of the fleet at sea and missile firing. He was not aware of the Gerasimov-Brown call.
The Russian naval operation in the eastern Mediterranean was not picked up by Moscow reporters or by western specialists covering the area — the Italian monitoring site Itamilradar, and the Belgian report on Russian naval operations in the Mediterranean. The operation at sea followed just after the launch of Turkish and US-armed and directed forces in northern Syria; the Gerasimov-Brown telephone call came just before.
The Pentagon source of the CNN report said that the “US and Russia maintain deconfliction lines in certain combat zones to avoid unintentional encounters when the two militaries operate near each other. That line has been used recently in the Middle East to prevent any friction between US and Russian forces operating in Syria.” A US Navy publication claimed the Russian vessels participating in the missile-fire exercise “may be evacuating its naval vessels [from] the Russian Navy base at Tartus in Syria [because it] appears under imminent threat as the civil war turns against the Assad regime.”
What early-warning intelligence the Russian General Staff had of preparations for the attack on Syria now under way is a sensitive question currently in discussion behind closed doors in Moscow.
From the telephone call of the two generals and Brown’s leak, what interpretation do Russian sources give of the terms for the Ukraine war which the General Staff and the Kremlin were considering when the call was initiated, and what do they think now in the aftermath of the call and of the escalation in Syria?
The consensus of the Russian military bloggers is in favour of no negotiation with the US until after the Russian military objectives have been achieved.
Officially, the Russian Foreign Ministry continues to stress that the only basis for negotiation on Ukraine is President Vladimir Putin’s speech to the Ministry of June 14. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is expected to reiterate the point when his interview with Tucker Carlson is broadcast shortly.
In the meantime, according to Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, “if the Kiev regime’s handlers, its puppeteers, recognize that there is no alternative to the solution outlined by President Putin at the meeting with the Foreign Ministry leadership on 14 June, adjusted for the developments on the ground that have taken place since then, if they see that there is no alternative, then, of course, a negotiated solution is possible. The choice before them is quite simple, binary—either accept what Putin has proposed or stay where they are now, with the prospect of further deterioration of the situation for them.”
The positions Putin outlined on June 14 were dynamic politically and militarily; in consequence, they were ambiguous. That meant the President and the General Staff were undecided at the time, and still.
PUTIN’S END-OF-WAR TERMS OF JUNE 14, 2024
Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/
There have been and will continue to be many US attempts to simplify and modify these specific terms and the framework Putin also proposed for compliance beyond the reach of the US to violate. For example.
Looking now at the June 14 speech as a formulation of Putin’s terms with six months of retrospection, a knowledgeable Moscow source responds: “Moscow will talk – always – sometimes politely, sometimes not so politely, and tell Trump to take a walk.” The source believes “the talks will work differently. The Russians will come to the table with the December 2021 draft treaty. Everyone has forgotten that.”
But not Putin in his June 14 speech. “Let us recall the idea of a European security treaty, which we proposed in 2008. In December 2021, a memorandum from the Russian Foreign Ministry was submitted to the United States and NATO, addressing the same issues. However, all our repeated attempts (it is impossible to list them all) to convince our partners, as well as our explanations, appeals, warnings and requests, met with no response. Western countries, confident not so much in the righteousness of their cause as in their power and ability to impose whatever they wish on the rest of the world, simply disregarded other perspectives. At best, they proposed discussions on less significant matters (that did little to resolve the actual problems), or matters that only benefitted the West.”
What the source means — also what Putin meant on June 14; what Ryabkov has announced again; and what Gerasimov intended to test when he telephoned Brown — remains the fundamental Russian position: the Americans, they believe, represent nothing but deceit: the US cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith or honour its undertakings. Accordingly, on the battlefield its resources, arms and proxies must be defeated, the source emphasizes. Only then can there be negotiations on end-of-war terms for the Ukrainian territory remaining after military capitulation. For there to be any hope of an agreement which the Americans will not aim to subvert, the US must be subordinated to an international framework of Europe-wide security. This is what the draft treaties spell out in comprehensive detail. Read the draft treaties for the US and for NATO of December 17, 2021, here, along with a line by line analysis.
On end of war terms in the Ukraine, the Moscow source says “there is a sequence which the westerners haven’t mentioned yet. It will start with [Vladimir] Zelensky’s resignation and an election for a government in Kiev. Russians will give a sigh of relief if Trump ensures a new election. This process could last six months. Everything else follows from there. For Russia’s economic security there must be the restoration of Nord Stream and the lifting of sanctions on Swift and on restoring Russian airline connectivity. There’s no point if we achieve the goals of the SVO [Special Military Operation] militarily and do not require the dismantlement of sanctions. We aren’t winning this war against the Americans on the Ukraine front in order to let them defeat us on the other fronts they have chosen to fight us.”
by Editor - Thursday, December 5th, 2024