A predominantly one-topic blog: how is it that the most imminent and lethal implication for humankind - the fact that the doctrine of "Mutually Assured Destruction" will not work with Iran - is not being discussed in our media? Until it is recognized that MAD is dead, the Iranian threat will be treated as a threat only to Israel and not as the global threat which it in fact is.
A blog by Mladen Andrijasevic
Yuri Fedorov on The Breakfast Show said
that he thinks that the Ukrainians with their attack yesterday were testing the
Ukrainian defenses and the main idea was to split the Russian troops on the
right bank of the Dnieper along the Inhulets river since the bridge at Darivka
has also been destroyed. The Ukrainians have imposed a media silence, in order
not to reveal their plans, and that more information will be revealedwithin
24-36 hours. Yuri Fedorov believes that there is also a possibility that this attack might be a diversion and that the main Ukrainian
attack would come near Kharkov.
This quick translation
from Russian is mine. (2:33 to 8:05)
“Putin has been
preparing for this war for a long time. About the doctrine developed by Putin
and Patrushev I wrote already since 2009. It is based the idea that while being
inferior to the West economically, in civilizational terms, in the level of
conventional military forces, they could still manage to win over the West through
blackmail, impudent blackmail by threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons.
Their scenario
with Ukraine and the West as a whole and NATO had been repeatedly stated at
different levels but most vividly it had been expressed by Putin himself when
he was at the peak of euphoric victorious state on February 5 at the press
conference after having met Macron. He said, yes, in conventional arms we are
inferior to NATO but on the nuclear level we are superior, and we can win.
Putin has
no Wunderwaffen. Perhaps he believed in this, deceived by scoundrels who spent
billions of dollars in the development of new redundant and unnecessary strategic
nuclear arms with which he threatened the world. The world has been living
under the MAD doctrine for a while and therefore nobody had been planning for a
nuclear war because it would bring nuclear destruction unacceptable to all
participants.
Putin and
Patrushev decided to threaten with tactical nuclear weapons. During the
confrontation with NATO when NATO superiority manifests itself (which apparently
as it turned out, they understood), they threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons
and were convinced that the West would get scared, capitulate and back off.
This was his
plan when he faced the collapse of his Blitzkrieg during the first days of the
war in Ukraine. You can well remember that they sable rattled almost daily with
nuclear weapons threatening to hit the convoys destined for Ukraine through NATO
countries Poland, Romania etc.
He was met
with a very harsh resistance. The first to react to Putin’s threat to use nuclear
weapons and of Putin’s fate in case of use, was Ukraine’s Friend #1, the leader
of the Free World in support of Ukraine, Boris Johnson. When Putin threatened
the possible use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Johnson without waiting for the
US reaction, and NATO’s as a whole, reminded him that the UK was a nuclear
power in its own right and would not leave without punishment Putin’s use of
nuclear weapons. Later similar warnings were given at the military level, by Secretary
of Defense Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to
Gerasimov, that Patrushev and Putin’s calculation that the West would capitulate
was flawed and a response would be given, a devastating response to Russia and
a response which would involve Putin himself. Translated into the language he would
understand, i.e. into St. Petersburg street gang language, he was told that in case of use of nuclear weapons he would be
killed.
And you
know, he understands this language. The last two-three weeks there have been in succession official statements by Russian responsible figures, both Putin and Shoigu,
to that effect. Putin in his letter to the
UN conference on nuclear disarmament stated that they understood that nuclear
war was impossible since there would be no winner. That is, he repeated the
basic truths that have been for decades shared by all responsible world leaders
since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Shoigu
recently stated that our nuclear weapons exist only to prevent a possible nuclear
attack by other nuclear countries. That is, the threat to Putin’s life works,
he is not a shahid who is willing to die for his great idea, when he said: ‘we as martyrs, will go
to heaven’. To no paradise does he intend to go.“
***
My comment:
I do hope Piontkovsky
is right. We already have Iran.
But
Zelensky resisted calls to relocate his government and was adamant that he not
panic the public. Down that path, he thought, lay defeat.
“You
can’t simply say to me, ‘Listen, you should start to prepare people now and
tell them they need to put away money, they need to store up food,’ ” Zelensky
recalled. “If we had communicated that — and that is what some people wanted,
who I will not name — then I would have been losing $7 billion a month since
last October, and at the moment when the Russians did attack, they would have
taken us in three days. ... Generally, our inner sense was right: If we sow
chaos among people before the invasion, the Russians will devour us. Because
during chaos, people flee the country.”
For
Zelensky, the decision to keep people in the country, where they could fight to
defend their homes, was the key to repelling any invasion.
Alexei Arestovich, an advisor to Zelensky, gives a
detailed explanation why Zelenskydid not call the reserves in
December. ( 13 min into the video)
Yonah
Jeremy Bob writes in “How significant is
the latest Russia-Iran satellite launch?” (August 4): “the Russian leader
rarely admits actions his country takes.” Now that is an understatement! Russia
for weeks denied that it was about to invade Ukraine and when it did, it denied
that it ever invaded.
Russian
propaganda has reached unprecedented levels, as Predrag Petrović, the
researcher at the Belgrade Center for Security Policy observes
following the events in Kosovo: “Somewhere around half past seven on July 31,
when sirens were activated in Kosovska Mitrovica and other places in the North
where Serbs live, and then barricades were erected, the information was still
fresh and scarce, and militant Russian and pro-Russian Telegram channels
actively entered the game, and for hours they are filled with a mixture of
information, semi-information and complete disinformation and distortions.”
So, on the
one hand, we have a desperate Putin who is losing the war in Ukraine,
transferring troops from the Donbas to the Kherson area to prevent a Ukrainian
counterattack; and on the other, we have an undeterrable Iran approaching the
bomb and Russia launching an Iranian satellite.
Surely the
answer to Bob’s question is a no-brainer? If this time, in contrast to 1938,
the West is trying to prevent Putin from occupying Europe, they better stop
Iran from destroying not only Europe but everyone. Have they learned anything
from February 24?
