Balance of Power or Balance of Terror?
I would like to share some perspectives on the Russia-US-Ukraine War, that may be helpful, or at least of interest. They may not be popular and they could be construed as merely “pro-Russian;” however I simply report my perspectives and experience, and leave some of the implications to the reader’s judgement. I have lived and worked throughout the FSU (Former Soviet Union) for a large multinational technology company, and on some occasions with the U.S. State Department and other US, European and Russian agencies in technical assistance programs. I speak Russian, have a degree in Russian Language and Literature, and have written on Soviet science and technology, including in defense applications. I have a graduate degree in business and have been a science and technology chief executive. I have also worked in global aerospace and defense for the largest US defense management consultant.
I worked mostly in Moscow (Russia), Minsk (Belarus) and Kiev (Ukraine) beginning in 1990 right after the Berlin Wall episode, and during former Soviet leader Gorbachev’s “Perestroika” (“Rebuilding”) and “Glasnost” (“Openness”) programs. I met Gorbachev personally. I also had first-hand experience with the so-called US-designed “Shock Therapy” policy that was thought of then as a way of transitioning the former Soviet Union from a state-centered and planned economy into a market-based one. It was modelled after programs previously used in Chile’s privatization programs, and championed by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, and then later in Russia, it was orchestrated and overseen especially by Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs. I will return to the Shock Therapy question in a moment, as it provides very important context in the current Ukrainian conflict. First, may I share some opinions on what is happening in the contentious conflict in Ukraine? I’m not the first to broadcast some of these perspectives, but some aspects of my views and experiences, may provide some ways of seeing more of the linkages between Russian and U.S. behavior in foreign policy dimensions.
Certain foreign policy and international relations observers and researchers, including University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer (author of “The Israel Lobby”), remain in a small minority, largely ignored or sidelined by major media, but who clearly lay out the historical missteps and provocations made by the US, toward Russia. His view is that the U.S. all but guaranteed a Russian invasion into Ukraine. Other observers including long-time Soviet media journalist Vladimir Posner made a coherent description of events, at a talk at Yale University. Others including consultant Samo Burja have spoken at length on Russia, as has former White House advisor Col. Douglas Macgregor who in my view stands apart from most of the “talking Generals” who sit on defense contractor Boards.
These alternative, in some cases, expert views, generally coalesce around three themes: one, that NATO expansion threatened (and threatens) Russia; two, that Russia has legitimate, current strategic interests in Ukraine including warm-water sea access; and three, that the US and EU are using Ukraine as a staging base, or proxy, for an unrelenting ideological war against Russia, including harboring the belief that the West can “defeat” Russia once and for all, and destroy is industrial base. All three factors are correct. But there is much more.
In my view it is no coincidence that Ukrainian-born US Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was at the center of the Trump impeachment operation, and alleged a legitimate impeachment cause of action, after he was listening in on a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Zelenskyy. Some have not unreasonably asserted that Vindman may be a “double agent” which drew immediate defensive posturing and reputational “whitewashing” from various quarters of the Washington, DC, establishment. I think this is essentially a correct characterization, but he is more than a “double agent.” He is part of an explicit cooperative operation between the US State Department (in part by Victoria Nuland) and Ukraine special interests, with Zelenskyy as their front spokesman, to pursue a mixed but ultimately mutually reinforcing policy of war profiteering, financial fraud, and US “Green New Deal” extremism that can be arranged under a war footing (oil and gas disruption, and demographic management by food shortages). The war also provides a “blank check” for US pretextual and “false flag” operations, including cyber-attacks. The assertion of a nuclear accident, exchange or other detonation, can also set the stage for the US administration’s shift into its next phase of public control and suppression—in part due to election engineering objectives—by declaring various states of emergency, including martial law.
Concerning the prior US policy of “Shock Therapy” that was orchestrated by Western economic advisors in the early 1990s as a way to turn Russia into a western-style commercial market economy, it not only failed—Russia had no history over a 500-year period, of any formal democracy, nor any critical legal, banking or management infrastructure whatsoever—but it turned Russia upside down in a cynical if cruel effort to exploit the country. Putin witnessed it all. I was in Moscow at the time. It was demoralizing to see the extent of suffering, confusion, and mass dislocation. Princeton historian Stephen Cohen, with whom I have corresponded at length, and who recently passed, had been one of the few sane voices warning the West about such mendacious foreign policy.
In closing, I would like to underscore the utility of understanding Russian philosopher and government advisor (called by some, “Putin’s Brain”) Alexander Dugin, who presents an argument of Russian geopolitical, and other motivations that few in the West care to confront, although he has received significant media coverage. Some, such as Canadian scholar Michael Millerman, give a balanced context, with his paper, “Alexander Dugin on Eurasianism, the Geopolitics of Land and Sea, and a Russian Theory of Multipolarity” (Interview.)
As for Jewish Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he is running a “war within a war” by attacking—militarily, psychologically, and economically—his own people (reported here by Canadian award-winning journalist Eva Bartlett in her asserted eyewitness testimony), and forcing mass panic, suffering and migration, largely in order to put on a “financial road show” by bilking the UK and US out of billions of dollars in cash, technical assistance and military hardware, much of which may end up going to NGOs favored by U.S. politicians. He may be a war criminal of the highest order, and the current incompetence of US leadership at nearly all levels, combined with special interests orchestrating the fraud within the US, makes for easy pickings, and one of the “heists of the century.” Zelenskyy also recently passed an order banning opposition political parties.
Ms. Bartlett describes from her location in the Donbas, that Ukraine has for many years consistently terrorized Russian regions of Ukraine with shelling. She reports of mid-day Ukrainian rocket attacks on civilian shopping areas, while also visiting areas of current Ukrainian-alleged Russian “war crimes” such as Bucha’s mass grave sites, where such evidence appears inconclusive or strangely arranged. She is an experienced independent war correspondent, including in Syria and Palestine, and although she discloses some occasional journalism work for RT News, she appears largely outside mainstream media bias, and her work by them, ignored or suppressed. Her very interesting WordPress website is here, where she reports on these issues, among others.
As for “winning” a war against Russia, the West, including the EU and NATO, do not realize that Russia may have effectively “won” the Eurasian land conquest, in part by its reserves of kinetic and other weaponry still held in abeyance, and by its alignment with China, India and Iran. Putin may also be right that sanctions are hurting the U.S. more than Russia: For the US, in fact, the concept of “winning” isn’t actually the objective, as current US domestic policy wins by losing: losing the US, that is, by seeking to destabilize its industrial infrastructure and economy, in part as a tactic to cloak current government extremism, while carrying out its radical “re-set” ideology centered in Green extremism.
How about stickers for gas pumps that picture Zelensky pointing at the price and saying I DID THAT ! It would be more accurate than the Biden one. When it ends Zelensky has his golden bridge to his 35 million dollar mansion in Florida. I’m sure Hollywood would even give him his own tv show.
John, you must have forgotten the TV footage covering Biden’s first day in office.
Desk piled high with leather binders, each containing an Executive Order, to be signed. The cancellation of the main oil pipeline, almost finished, was one such Order, slipped in by his diaper changing Sanhedrin.
The deliberate gaslighting obfuscation, on the part of the B administration, is based on the differences between owning oil land, licensing drilling, changing Regulations, environmental restrictions and simple bureaucratic chicaneries.
Not conducive to regaining self sufficiency, nor for necessarily patient investors.
You are correct about Biden the puppet. We can’t ignore the fact that Biden and his neocon puppeteers by supporting Zelensky and a proxy war with Russia coupled with sanctions has exacerbated the situation which will be even more painful for us in June. If you can do it, it would be wise to put aside what you need for Thanksgiving and the Yuletide season now, it will only cost more in Nov. and Dec if it’s available.
I tend to agree with the gist of this analysis. But the elephant in the room that has disappeared from public attention and discussion is the obvious ecocide that our way of life was inflicting on our planet long before the pandemic or the Ukrainian War reared their ugly heads. I no longer have to stop on a road trip to scrape bugs off the windshield, and that, to cite only one example, scares the hell out of me. Surely we have long recognized the pressing necessity of a great economic/environmental reset, albeit one not designed and implemented by our elite overlords.
Thought about it the other day, when I heard a debate between two environmentalists. One of them a local farmer, the other a lawyer from WWF. The lawyer talked from a globalist perspective, used all the buzzwords (“sustainability”, “energy efficiency”, “carbon footprint” etc.), kept everything general and sweeping, but in a over-sentimental way. A bit like a priest giving a sermon.
The farmer talked from a local perspective (“Why import meat and grain from other continents when we can grow it here?”) and kept to specifics and common sense solutions (isolate the houses better, ban “seedless seeds” and pesticides from Monsanto, strengthen local markets).
Like you say, the environmental organisations has been hijacked by the globalists. It’s they who cause the environmental problems – the materialist throwaway society, the headless depletion of natural resorces, the unessessary shipping of plastic garbage from Asian sweatshops, the nature-killing pesticides, the GMO manipulation. And the “solutions” they recommend, or dictate, is all about protecting global trade and global exploitation.
What started as a genuine concern about pollution and destruction of nature, has now become a giant greenwashing propaganda campaign, where the worst culprits paint themselves as saviors and moral do-gooders.
Sound familiar? Usurers claiming to be philantropists, pornographers claiming to be free speech protectors, exploitative merchants claiming to spread wealth to the third world, neo cons dropping burning phosphor on infants claiming to spread democracy and human rights, communists burying millions in massgraves while claiming to create equality, liberty and brotherhood…
And behind it all, if you scratch just a little on the surface, you always find the same Jewish lunatics, feverishly chasing money and power, and the realization of a clinically insane prophesy about “uniting the world”.
Regardless of whether there is or isn’t some kind of environmental crisis, you wouldn’t/won’t be able to do anything about it until after the current crop of globalist elites have been removed from power. One thing at a time.
Where are these road trips? Arizona? The mojave? The Yukon in winter? The front of our car is so encased in dead bugs after summer trips to MN/MI that only a high-pressure hose at a car hand car wash followed by a generous scrubbing with bug and tar remover will get rid of them. The frogs may be turning gay, but the bugs are doing just fine.
“The Kremlin invited Dugin to speak at its Anti-Orange Rally in Moscow in February 2012. There, Dugin addressed tens of thousands with..”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin
This Alexandr Dugin I find very troubling. In fact this entire quote by him is extremely troubling. The last sentence “Russia is everything! All else is nothing!” though is odd***
*** “All else is nothing?” ***
Seems to me such a sentiment simply replaces one with the other.
Far more serious however, is surely his spirituality being a mix of Orthodoxy and paganism? Rodnovery if any cared to read St. Paul would understand and rightly so that there can be no fellowship between Christianity and Paganism period.
Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? 15 What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? 16 What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said:
“I will live with them
and walk among them,
and I will be their God,
and they will be my people.”
17 Therefore,
“Come out from them
and be separate,
says the Lord.
Touch no unclean thing,
and I will receive you.”
18 And,
“I will be a Father to you,
and you will be my sons and daughters,
says the Lord Almighty.” 2 Corinthians 6:15-18
God isn’t nature and He certainly isn’t man! Dugin is under a deception by the foe of humankind which again St. Paul clearly warned of:
The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. 1 Timothy 4:1
Politics— O good grief it’s just a war against Christianity that’s all it ever is period!!!
I would love to know what Dugin would think and say if he heard one say these words – That the single greatest political statement ever made by anyone at any time in any period in the whole history of mankind is this!
Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us,
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom and the power, and the glory,
forever and ever. Amen.
PERIOD!
And Putin can’t be so deceived can he? Everything I’m seeing and reading says no but who really knows? Hopefully his Pastor does and corrected him accordingly!!!
Maybe if America fails Satan’s desire for total world control and returns to its Christian roots, waiting in the wings will be this Dugin as the leader for America’s replacement?
Study Demonology and one should learn what Dostoevsky knew about the temptation of Christ and how today’s world of technology is bringing to fruition the control of ones conscience and your bread! Rev. 13: 16-17
The USA (I assume ‘Gerry’ is from there) must be unique in all modern states in having an incredibly high percentage of gullible, redneck types, who think they’re ‘spiritual’ and sing and chant. I suppose Jews in the USSR removed vast numbers of the same type. I’m surprised TOO doesn’t allow witches and flat earthers to contribute long articles.
@ Raeto West
“Gullible”
“But test all things carefully [so you can recognize what is good]. Hold firmly to that which is good.”
1 Thess. 5:21
and no I’m not American. I also do not chant. But ah, singing:
https://thesaker.is/clash-of-christianities-why-europe-cannot-understand-russia/#comment-1083175
All of the problems with Ukraine that Putin has expressed as justification for this war could have been resolved simply by having Kolomoisky, Zelensky, etc assassinated. It is not as if Putin hasn’t successfully had people in foreign countries assassinated before. For Putin this was a war of choice, not necessity. Conquering Ukraine, annexing it, was always Putin’s motivation. It is only because Russia’s military has proven so inept, and Ukraine’s resistance so fierce, that Putin has had to downsize his goal. The goal now is securing a pissant land bridge to Crimea. And here is the most cruel irony, Russia already had build a man-made bridge to Crimea!
Putin the Slavic Superman? More like Putin the Slavic Schmuck.
@ Captainchaos
assassinate? you might or will I suppose find this entertaining:
Amazing how prescient Pepe is:
August 4, 2020 Conversation between Pepe, Alistair Crooke and Mohammed Marandi
“Everybody is absolutely lost into this wilderness. Nobody talks about what the Joe Biden campaign actually proposes. They don’t seem to have a national or international program. In fact, their international foreign policy is very well organized like in the Obama years. The guy who’s running the people around Biden foreign policy is TONY BLINKEN. TONY BLINKEN is an extremely dangerous character. He was the guy behind Obama’s silent wars. Including those famous meetings every week to decide “okay who’s going to be decided this week in the kill list, so o he’s going to have a Hellfire missile on his back.”Just to give all of you watching this how dangerous this is in terms of if we have a “Dem” as President, WE’RE GOING TO HAVE A HOT WAR IN 2021. THIS IS PRACTICALLY CERTAIN. WE DON’T KNOW AGAINST WHO.”
Minute 31:3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSVKNS8xsbUhttps://thesaker.is/exclusive-russian-geo-economics-tzar-sergey-glazyev-introduces-the-new-global-financial-system/#comment-1073251
Kolomoisky and all Ukrainian oligarchs have financial and power interests that transcend their deaths. Their successors will do exactly the same as they have been doing, and no assassination has ever been successfully tied to Putin. Speculation is truth only to George Soros, Victoria Nuland and Geoff Pyatt, and woke mass media. You must be a bot.
Very lucidly stated; and I agree that understanding Dugin’s presentation of Russia’s geopolitical interests and the history of its unique Orthodox Christian culture is critically important for Americans. Our elite networks rely on Americans’ basic ignorance of their own history and of Russia’s, to carry down through the generations a plan to balkanize the Russian Federation, which is more a spiritual war than anything else. Ultimately Russian Orthodoxy cannot be integrated into Klaus Schwab’s world.
‘Orthodox Christianity’ is just another Jewish assemblage. But after a hundred years of Jewish looting of its land and assets, destruction of churches, and butchery of any serious leaders, why should you imagine Dugin or anyone else looks at its remains in any favourable way?
@ Christopher Caudill
Ultimately Russian Orthodoxy cannot be integrated into Klaus Schwab’s world.
Martin Armstrong on his blog had a pick of Schwabii in his office and circled on the picture was a bust of Lenin on a desk behind him!
Lenin this and Lenin that, the great hero that ever lived? what did he write on religion?
“Religion is the opium of the people. Religion is a kind of spiritual gin, in which the slaves of capitalism drown their human shape and their claim to any decent human life.”
What a shame he didn’t read and understand what Christ said when Peter cut off the servants ear in the garden. :
“Put away your sword. Do you not think that I can call to my Father and He can put at my disposal an entire legion of angels.”
What a truly shocking thing this is? To have resident within oneself the kind of power to end the entire Roman world with a mere sentence and you do what? Submit to what you created and be killed in the most gruesome of ways.
That guy who rolled away the stone there are tens of thousands of them and Lenin and Dugin could care less to pay attention to Him? Wow?
There is one name that didn’t come up in Solovyev essay though which is covered quite extensively here https://thesaker.is/?s=glazyev
Thanks for the Glazyev reference – The Saker has great info all the time. Dugin definitely has some “quirky” ideas, but he’s good on geopolitics. Marx was essentially a satanist, filled with hatred and a lust for destruction. From Francis Bacon putting Mother Nature on the rack to extract her secrets through torture, to Marx and his rejection of any spiritual consciousness in man, to Schwab and Co. planning on culling and controlling the goyim as they construct their AI hellscape – we are facing the same enemy in different guises.
@ Christopher Caudill
I was speechless when I read that Glazyev mentioned what the power brokers of the world, the International Bankers desire above all is in his words “Electronic Concentration Camp.”
that follows what Catherine Austin Fitts says; “Livestock Management.”
Dr. Mary Stweart Relfe is another who taught about the strange appearance of the 666 in the UPC codes.
https://leagueofprayer.com/shop.asp?action=details&inventoryID=57015&catId=10620
she was a close personal friend of Dr. Cantelon.
Well, if that didn’t stop me in my tracks because for me this is Biblically Prophetic and it came from a Russian this time! Woe, wow!!!!!!!!!
It is just more proof for me of what I learned to many years ago now about the 666 of Revelation 13 and how the last world economic system will be one where we are all the serfs to a coming king who will rule by holding our conscience and bread in his hand as foretold by Dostoevsky. Where no one will be able to buy or sell without a mark in ones forehead or hand. When i see the QR Code and crypto currency I’m mumbling too myself could this be what St. John saw 2000 years ago on the Island of Patmos? I am dead serious about this!!! I only wish Dr. Cantelon was around to see what is occurring. He way back in 1973 was talking about this to the laughter of some. More significantly though is Dostoevsky O how he could have written an exceptional book on the subject given his foresight with the famous quote:
“Why hast thou come to hinder us? …We are working not with Thee but with him {Satan}…We took from him what thou didst reject with scorn, that last gift he offered thee, showing you all the kingdoms of the earth. We took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar, and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth…We shall triumph and shall be Caesars, and then we shall plan the universal happiness of man…Hadst thou accepted that last counsel of the mighty spirit {Satan}, thou wouldst have accomplished all that man seeks on earth-that is, someone to worship…who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and bread in their hands?
Hoorayyyyy for Dostoevsky!!!!!! We instead got what in the west? Hagee and his ilk?
Here is the mind that has wisdom!!!! Says Revelation in two places meaning hey guys this is where you need to be looking and studying. More significantly, are Christs own words about what to be on the lookout for the Abomination of Desolation. And guess who works almost feverishly to bring this to fruition? Anglo-Zionsts!!!!! Wow or Woe rather yes?
Add to this the surveillance society of China with its Social Credit System and viola if we aren’t on the cusp of it all and welcome to a coming Dystopian future and a war against Christ quite literally to I might add!
there are others like Stalin who shake their fists at heaven among us!
@ Christopher Caudill
AI hellscape?
If interested just picked up a great comment by a Ted https://thesaker.is/quantitative-diseasing/#comment-1096970
He sums it up quite succinctly!!! and what a sentence to begin with:
“And the US model was killed between 1860-1865.”
This is the best brief scenario of the situation that I have read in the English language. They can be no doubt the author has the tools and the experience to hit the nail on the head. He should be riding for UNZ and other publications using a pseudonym. I’ll send this to approximately 200 individuals. I sincerely hope that we have more columns and commentary by this individual.
I have always indicated that the US has the strongest military of earth. Even with figure heads like King Bushy II, Obama and ‘Honest’ Uncle Joe Biden, the US spends as much on military hardware than just about the entire world combined (if you take China out of the equation). Now it seems the Biden regime with be assisting the Zielinskyy hierarchy with high tech to control the Black Sea… If we look into the crystal ball the cloudy images seem to show that eventually Beijing will overtake Washington and the weapon race will be something beyond imagination.
It’s more than probable that if the present trends continue, mankind will liquidate himself. The topic of liquidation. Ah, the verba of liquidation. I’ve been reading books on how the American Indians fought amongst themselves as the pilgrims were landing. On the Euro home front, Mother Europe had her religious wars, when hundreds of thousands fled to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Then, to further enhance infighting, there was an attempt to advance infighting when Christian nations engaged in eradicating themselves via Eurocide I and II. Try envisioning the next war. Russia doesn’t have the roads or RR systems that Amdom has. Her only card is nuclear. Even if that is archaic it only takes a few to do the job…
A final few words should indicate that what the Biden regime is doing is a travesty. It’s immoral, destructive to the US and a danger to the world.
Their nuclear card is anything but archaic.
They have unmanned mini subs, undetectable at low noise low speeds, with enormous range: armed with nuclear missiles. Constructed with materials capable of avoiding radar detection.
How many are presently lingering off the North American coasts, as during WW II ?
Already during WW I, they had the largest Navy, after GB, France and Spain: including submarines made in the St. Petersburg area.
The only weapon they need to resurrect, is a new Ilya Ehrenburg with a broader list of those who deserve to be annihilated in the most beastly fashion.
“…US policy of “Shock Therapy” that was orchestrated by Western economic advisors in the early 1990s as a way to turn Russia into a western-style commercial market economy,..”
It was orchestrated by some economic advisors belonging to the tribe whose name must not be spoken. The late Jude Wanniski and former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts, the drivers of supply side economics advised against it for several of the reasons listed. Both saw the need for gradual transition so that people could see the benefits of a capitalist economy. Wanniski had been to the USSR on a number of occasions, pre and post collapse. . http://www.wanniski.net/ssu/ssu-980605.htm
I’m not pushing the supply side theory, because at the end of the day it promotes globalism.
The big picture is about jewish world control, which they now effetively have.
A. Restore Khazaria for Ashkenazi. Kill native Ukranians. Kill Russians
B. Give China the lead role as world prison warden as the Europe, US and Russia self immolate.
C. Settle score with US Republic and bleed it dry and leave open to Chinese invasion.
D. Set stage for genocide of European whites as well as US whites.
E. Install belt and road domination of Asia and Africa with Israel as controlling hub.
What needs to be done here to save ourselves will have to be horrifically ruthless I fear.
@Captainchaos
The policy of coups, regime change in Ukraine by Russia (which seems to be what you see as possible) had been tried and failed. The reason it failed is because of the kind of motivations from the USA that the essayist enumerates in his well informed meanderings.