CAZmaj

He is too tall and too good looking

https://cepa.org/article/expelling-russia-from-the-un-security-council-a-how-to-guide/ Expelling Russia from the UN Security Council — a How-to Guide September 26, 2022 Written By: Thomas D. Grant Russia’s permanent membership of the world’s most powerful international forum has been a cause for despair, but there is a way to unseat Putin’s diplomats. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, over the objections of Russia and a small gaggle of its allies, last week addressed the United Nations (UN) General Assembly and asked a long overdue question: why does Russia still hold a veto-wielding seat on the UN Security Council? Twice in the past, the United Nations has taken improvised steps to modify or restrict the participation of a member state when the organization judged such steps necessary. Similar improvision, adapted to the circumstances, can work again. A General Assembly vote in 1971 gave China’s UN seat to the government in Beijing, effectively removing Taiwan from the UN. Three years later, the General Assembly declared that South Africa’s government no longer had a right to address the Assembly or to cast votes there. In neither case did the Assembly follow any script provided by the UN Charter. It relied instead on creative use of the UN’s credentials procedures — the seemingly arcane procedures that determine who represents a given member state. What would justify putting Russia’s Security Council credentials to a vote? How would such a vote take place? And why would credentialling a representative from Ukraine be the right solution to fill the seat Russia vacates? Under UN Charter Article 23(1), the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council are “[t]he Republic of China, France, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom . . . and the United States of America.” The USSR seat, since December 1991, has been filled by representatives of the Russian Federation. The text of Article 23(1) has not changed since that time. International lawyers often describe this state of affairs as having arisen automatically. However, it did not. A Russian representative filling the USSR seat resulted from an agreement. The agreement, both tacit and express, was part of the overall peaceful transition to a new political order in Russia and to Russia’s largely seamless inheritance of a vast array of Soviet rights, privileges, and assets. Other outcomes were possible. As of December 1991, although nobody pursued the possibility at the time: two UN Members besides Russia were also, in principle, suitable to fill the USSR Security Council seat. Ukraine and Belarus had both been Union Republics of the USSR — and both were also “original Members” of the UN, i.e., founding member states. No other UN member had or has those characteristics as negotiated at Yalta and accepted at San Francisco in 1945 — both had Union Republic status in the former USSR and original membership in the UN. But one of the two, Belarus, has since February 2022 aided and assisted Russia in aggression against Ukraine, thus disqualifying itself by any reasonable measure. That leaves Ukraine as the sole original member of the UN that has remained faithful to the organization’s principles and was also a constituent of the USSR. It, therefore, has a credible claim to the USSR’s seat. How to make good on that claim? The first step would be for Ukraine to issue credentials to one of its diplomats to fill the USSR seat. No doubt Russia’s representative would insist that he, not a Ukrainian, keep the seat. Other Council Members, however, would be free to object to the Russian’s presence. An objection would give rise to a matter requiring settlement. Here, the Security Council’s seldom-noted credentials rules would come into play. Under Rule 17 of the Security Council’s Provisional Rules of Procedure:  [a]ny representative on the Security Council, to whose credentials objection has been made within the Security Council, shall continue to sit with the same rights as other representatives until the Security Council has decided the matter (emphasis added).  So Russia’s representative would “continue to sit” on the Council until a decision was made. Deciding the matter — i.e., deciding an objection to the credentials of a Security Council representative — falls under the rules on procedural matters. These are decided by a nine-member majority on the 15-member council. Under UN Charter Article 27(2), such matters cannot be vetoed. Russia would be powerless. Is there any justification for this? As it happens, there is. The Council would be asked to recall the agreement under which Russia initially filled the USSR seat, and by drawing attention to Russia’s subsequent violation of that agreement. In December 1991, Russia agreed to respect the UN Charter, including, specifically, the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its neighbors. Russia expressed the same intention in numerous other forums and instruments, including in the Alma Ata Protocols and Budapest Memorandum. In return, Russia obtained numerous significant benefits, ranging from the USSR’s strategic nuclear assets and the former Soviet space infrastructure, to the privilege of representing the USSR under Article 23(1) of the Security Council. This settlement of questions of state continuity and state succession in the 1990s, which was very much to Russia’s liking, took place through highly bespoke transactions, not through the automatic application of general international law. Of indispensable importance in the settlement was Russia’s pledge to accept as final the sovereign frontiers of its neighbors and never to use force or threat against them. Russia, through its aggression against Ukraine, has egregiously violated that pledge and, thus, its presence on the Security Council has lost its legal basis. The Council has the procedural tools to respond to Russia’s violation and to recognize Ukraine’s fealty to the UN Charter. If it wishes to affirm its own vitality and that of the UN as a whole, then the Council should use those tools without delay. Dr. Thomas D. Grant is a Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge and writes on geopolitics and international law. (See Aggression Against Ukraine: Territory, Responsibility, and International Law (2015) and International Law in the Post-Soviet Space, volumes I and II (2019)).

Russian submarine carrying ‘doomsday weapon’ disappears from harbor: Reports https://americanmilitarynews.com/2022/10/russian-submarine-carrying-doomsday-weapon-disappears-from-harbor-reports/

Chechen volunteer explains to people why there are no massive uprisings in Russian occupied territories not only in Ukraine but in the Caucasus

Putin: "The End of Western Hegemony is INEVITABLE"The quiet part out loud.Konstantin KisinThis is a reproduction of my live Twitter summary/translation of Vladimir Putin's speech:I wish every single person in the West would listen to Putin's speech. Obviously, that won't happen so let me summarize as a professional translator for 10+ years. He states, as he has done from the outset, what his intentions and complaints are in the plainest terms possible.Setting aside his brief comments on the recent "referendums", he spends most of his speech discussing the West. His primary complaint isn't NATO expansion, which gets only a cursory mention. The West is greedy and seeks to enslave and colonize other nations, like Russia.The West uses the power of finance and technology to enforce its will on other nations. To collect what he calls the "hegemon's tax". To this end the West destabilizes countries, creates terrorist enclaves and most of all seeks to deprive other countries of sovereignty.It is this "avarice" and desire to preserve its power that is the reason for the "hybrid war" the collective West is "waging on Russia". They want us to be a "colony". They do not want us to be free, they want Russians to be a mob of soulless slaves - direct quote.The rules-based order the West goes on about is "nonsense". Who made these rules? Who agreed to them? Russia is an ancient country and civilization and we will not play by these "rigged" rules. The West has no moral authority to challenge the referendums because it has violated the borders of other countries. Western elites are "totalitarian, despotic and apartheidist" - direct quote. They are racist against Russia and other countries and nations. "Russophobia is racism". They discriminate by calling themselves the "civilized world".They colonized, started the global slave trade, genocide native Americans, pillaged India and Africa, forced China to buy opium through war. We, on the other hand, are proud that we "led" the anti-colonial movement that helped countries develop to reduce poverty and inequality.They are Russophobe (they hate us) because we didn't allow our country to be pillaged by creating a strong CENTRALISED (emphasis his) state based on Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. They have been trying to destabilize our country since the 17thcentury in the Times of Trouble.Eventually, they managed to "get their hands on our riches" at the end of the 20th century. They called us friends and partners while pumping out trillions of dollars (his ironic game is strong today).We remember this. We didn't forget. The West claims to bring freedom and democracy to other countries but it's the exact opposite of the truth. The unipolar world is anti-democratic by its very nature. It is a lie. They used nuclear weapons, creating a precedent. They flattened German cities without "any military need to do so". There was no need for this except to scare us and the rest of the world. Korea, Vietnam. To this day they "occupy" Japan, South Korea and Germany and other countries while cynically calling them "allies".The West has surveillance over the leaders of these nations who "swallow these insults like the slaves they are".He then talks about bioweapon research (haven't heard about them for a while) and human experiments "including in Ukraine".The US rules the world by the power of the fi st. Any country which seeks to challenge Western hegemony becomes an enemy. Their neocolonialism is cloaked in lies like "containment" of Russia, China and Iran. The concept of truth has been destroyed with fakes and extreme propaganda (irony game still strong).You cannot feed your people with printed dollars and social media. You need food and energy. But Western elites have no desire to find a solution to the food and energy crises*they* (emphasis his) created.They solved the problems at the start of 20c with WW1 and the US established dominance of the world via the dollar as a result of WW2. In the 80s they had another crisis they solved by "plundering our country". Now they want to solve their problems by "breaking Russia".Russia "understands its responsibility to the international community" and will "do everything to cool the heads of these neocolonialism who are destined to fail".They're crazy. I want to speak to all Russian citizens; do we want to replace mum and dad with parent 1 and 2?They invented genders and claim you can "transition". Do we want this for our children?We have a different vision.They have abandoned religion and embraced Satanism - direct quote.The world is going through a revolutionary transformation. A multipolar world offers nations freedom to develop as they wish and they make up the majority of the world.We have many like-minded friends in Western countries. We see and appreciate their support. They are forming liberation, anti-colonial movements as we speak - direct quote. These will only grow.We are fighting for a fair world for our country. The idea of exceptionalism is criminal and we must turn this shameful page. The breaking of the West's hegemony is INEVITABLE (emphasis his).There is no going back. We are fighting for our "great (as in big), historic Russia". Our values are (irony game crescendo): love of our fellow man, compassion and mercy.Truth is with us; Russia is with us.(That's the end of the speech)As I said from day 1, the purpose of what Putin is doing in Ukraine is to throw the West off its pedestal. This isn't about NATO or Ukraine; this is the big play to replace the current world order.P.S.Reaction from one of the attendees:"We'll beat them all, we'll kill them all, we'll plunder all their stuff. It's going to be what we love to do!”

Canadian nationalism? And what is that?

That is "паляниця" (palyanytsia) which is a type of hearth-baked wheat bread.

I was just referred to this tweet by Madi Kapparov. Based on my studies of history and years of residing and working in Moscow, St. Peterburg, Budapest, Belgrade, Prague, Warsaw, and Podgorica, and traveled extensively in that region of Central and Eastern Europe, but also in Russian Federation Far East (Tomsk) and Kazakhstan, I would agree with most of Madi’s points in his tweet: Nazism is mainstream in Russia. What is Nazism? Abstract away from the distractions of economics and markets. Nazism is a form of fascism founded on the delusional belief of one group of people, generally based on ethnicity, being superior to another group of people. 1/ So too the Russians, who have been absorbed by the culture of their ethnic exceptionalism and historic revisionism promoting their ethnic superiority in all aspects, think that they are more privileged than any other ethnicity or nation. 2/ The Russians think that no rules apply to them. They think that they can do whatever they please because they are exceptional. When the USSR collapsed the new Russian government fought very hard to become a successor state to the Soviet Union. 3/ Much like the USSR became a successor state to the original Russian empire, the Russian federation had to become a successor state to the USSR. Ideologically it was critical to them to preserve imperial continuity of exceptionalism and cultural and historical superiority. 4/ Without the succession, Russia would have had become equal to the former colonies, such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc. That was simply unacceptable to the Russians. They also maintained their centuries-long militarism, as it all feeds into their Russian exceptionalism worldview. 5/ In the 1990s Russia was in dire economic straights and it was completely irrational to maintain a huge military and a large nuclear arsenal. But it was culturally and ideologically of an absolute necessity to the Russians. Why? It is part of their exceptionalism beliefs. 6/ Long before Putin, the war in Transnistria happened. The Russians then had no doubt in the necessity to protect ethnic Russian "separatists" in Moldova, whom the empire moved there over the years. However, just a few years later they went to war with Chechen separatists. 7/ Transnistria was acceptable, while Chechen separatism, a liberation movement, was unacceptable to the Russians. The Russians apply no rules to themselves. You see, they think they are special, exceptional, and superior to the rest of the world. 8/ Chechen independence was absolutely repugnant to the Russians. Negotiations with the Chechens were absolutely unacceptable for an average Russian, until major military defeats and economic strains in 1996. The Russians returned in 1999 to put the "savages" in their place. 9/ Any suggestions for Chechen independence from abroad faced an aggressive push back from the Russians. It is all driven by Russian exceptionalism deeply rooted in their culture. 10/ For the Russians, the protectionism of their empire and their imperial ambitions come naturally. They are an organic part of their individual and national psyche. 11/ Over the years, I have witnessed countless times how aggressively the Russians react to any attempts at an independent foreign policy by the former colonies. Typically, such attempts are called "ungrateful." 12/ The Russians expect their former colonies to be grateful. Grateful for what? In their perverted and revised historical view, they did "so much" for the former colonies, they "civilized" them. 13/ When the former colonies do something independently from Russia, the Russians feel betrayed. “How could they? We did so much for them.” Such Russian behavior is axiomatic. They will hold a grudge and retaliate when an opportunity presents itself. 14/ The reality is that the Russians demand the former colonies to be grateful for the misery, death, destruction, starvation, and sometimes assimilation. Such is the Russian way to “civilize” the “savages.” 15/ The Russians also demand the rest of the world to be grateful to them for the victory over Nazi Germany. In their worldview it is the ethnic Russians *alone* who defeated German Nazism in 1945. “The Great Patriotic War” became one of the pillars of Russian exceptionalism. 16/ Anyone who questions the victory in WW2 the ethnic Russians appropriated will face self-righteous anger and a flurry of insults from them. However, it is unclear why the world should be grateful to them: the USSR was allied to Germany till the very first day of Barbarossa. 17/ Should I even mention the brutal Russian occupation of Eastern Europe following the end of WW2? The Russians expect gratitude for that too. The Russians demand gratitude from the world and from the former colonies, they are special, they are exceptional. 18/ 2014 was a point of no return. That year centuries long Russian chauvinism regressed into Russian Nazism. I will ignore Crimea. Russia manufactured oppression of Russian speakers in the Donbas and invaded with “separatists.” That is just a few years after the Chechen Wars. 19/ Again, Russian “separatism” is acceptable, Chechen separatism is unacceptable, because rules do not apply to the Russians. They are exceptional. They allow themselves to do what is unimaginable to them if others do it. That is the essence of Russian Nazism. 20/ I think there are no “good” or “bad” Russians. The distinction is meaningless. There are however sheepishly obedient Russians and zealous z-supporters, averaging out into a regular Russian Nazi. 21/ Germany was zombified by Nazi propaganda for 12 years. The Russians were on their path to Nazism for decades if not centuries. There are no easy fixes. There will be no protests. Changes in the Russian government would solve nothing. The road ahead will be long and difficult. 22/ However Nazi Germany was defeated. So too will be the current version of the Russian empire. Their Nazi worldviews will have to be shattered. The sooner the world realizes it is everyone’s problem, the better. Ukraine will win as they have no other choice. 23/23 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1574051110654189569.html

Agreed. Just a small issue - Balkan was never Russian/Soviet.

That's right. And if the same Russian youth emigrated to the Western Europe, then they attack and beat-up Ukranian women and girls.

Explanation: I see a bunch of soldiers riding on the top of APC. Hayduk stated there used to be 10 APC per Company and since 2016 there are only 4 thus, I wondered if in addition to a squad of soldiers riding on the top of APC there is another squad sitting inside the same APC?

Are there soldiers INSIDE the APC?

The differences now: - no more Politburo - Putin has billions $ to pay for loyalty and protection

Mark Galeotti How will Putin respond to his latest defeat? 11 September 2022, 9:20am Russia is retreating at speed along the Kharkiv front, leaving behind burnt-out tanks and, even more tellingly, undamaged ones, too. There are television images of locals welcoming Ukrainian forces and accounts from eyewitnesses on the spot – but none of that has made it into Russian state media. As the Kremlin struggles to find some way of spinning the unspinnable, this will affect not just its public credibility but also elite unity. The Russian defence ministry is talking about a 'regrouping' of its units. State TV is extolling the 'exploits' of its gallant soldiers. Government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta, recounting an alleged victory, trips itself up by placing the action deep into formerly Russian-held territory. The tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda’s war correspondent – sorry, ‘special military operation’ correspondent – files gung-ho tales from the front describing not a rout, but an orderly retreat under assault by 'foreign mercenaries' and 'Nato-trained troops.' The official media is either trying to ignore the collapse of the Russian lines or looking for some ways of excusing or sugar-coating it, but either way the effect is incoherent and unconvincing. In the process, this is demonstrating the key problem of a state-controlled propaganda machine: it all depends on a line coming from above. Instead, the Kremlin seems to be in disarray at best, crisis at worst. Caught by surprise, unsure how to respond, it is not giving the media a steer, and in a system like this, no one dares show initiative lest they get it wrong. This is, after all, the same Soviet-style defensive thinking that is bedevilling the military, and it’s proving every bit as counter-productive. The Kremlin has two immediate problems. The first is how to manufacture any kind of positive narrative without resorting to the most egregious of lies. This was the same dilemma it encountered in both Chechen wars and during the Soviet war in Afghanistan: how to lie enough, but not too much. There is, after all, a strange kind of moral balancing act that obtains in totalitarian regimes. It is not so much that most Russians necessarily believe the official line – though many do – so much as that they are unwilling to put the effort into disbelieving it. It’s too dangerous, both morally and ethically. Back in the late 1980s, I remember one parent of a Soviet Afghan war veteran telling me 'I didn't want to believe what people were saying about the war, because if I did, then I would either have to act or be a part of it.' Likewise, today, many Russians would rather leave the box closed and not know whether Schrödinger’s cat is dead or alive. However, the greater the gap between propaganda and reality, the harder it is to avoid the truth. The Kremlin’s second challenge is how to manage the elite, those who have most to lose but also the best knowledge of what is going on. A sign of the times is that Ramzan Kadyrov, warlord of Chechnya, has taken to social media openly to complain that 'it’s a hell of a situation' and warning that 'if today or tomorrow there are no changes in the strategy for conducting the special military operation, I will have to go to the leadership of the Ministry of Defence and the country to explain the situation to them.' One cannot take his posturing at face value, as he has a track record of empty rhetorical threats and flourishes. (Just as Russian troops have become exasperated that the Chechen forces seem more interested in posting videos of themselves on TikTok than fighting.) However, when Kadyrov is admitting that things are going badly, and trying to distance himself from the conduct of the invasion, it is a sign of deeper, tectonic pressures. The technocrats have long been unhappy with the war, but unable to do anything about it. As hawks and opportunists also begin to be willing publicly to signal their dismay, it signals a growing isolation of the president. Putin is not seriously under threat, at least not yet. But if he feels he may be, then that arguably takes us into even more dangerous territory. It may be that he will find ways to reframe the narrative and try and make peace while calling it a victory. But it may also be that he feels he has no alternative but to find some way of escalating, lest defeat abroad lead to defenestration at home. WRITTEN BY Mark Galeotti Professor Mark Galeotti is the author of 24 books about Russia. The latest is ‘A Short History of Russia’ (2021).

Owen Matthews More mad than Vlad: Russia’s ultra-nationalist threat From magazine issue: 17 September 2022 ‘Russia without Putin!’ was the cry of Muscovites who turned out to protest against Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency for a third term in December 2011. Crowds 100,000 strong chanted their opposition on Moscow’s Academician Sakharov Prospect – as symbolically named a venue as you could wish for – as riot police stood calmly by. There was anger in the crowd. But there was hope, too, not least because the massive protest was officially sanctioned. One after another, prominent opposition politicians such as Ilya Yashin, Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny denounced Putin from a stage provided by the city authorities. Today the memory of those protests seems to belong to a different age of Russia. Yashin and Navalny are in jail. Nemtsov was shot dead. Since the beginning of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, street protests by a single person, let alone 100,000, have become illegal. Since 24 February, some 16,000 people have been arrested for protesting – including one woman near Red Square who was detained for holding up a piece of paper reading ‘Two Words’ (implying Net Voine – No War), and another for brandishing a paper that was completely blank. Russia’s liberal opposition has been completely crushed. But in the country’s new wartime reality the liberals’ main slogan has also come to raise more questions than answers. What would ‘Russia without Putin’ actually look like? If not Putin, then who? The grim reality is that Putin’s most dangerous potential opposition today comes not from the pro-western liberals but from the nationalist right. Before the annexation of Crimea in 2014, ultra-nationalist ideologues such as Alexander Dugin (whose daughter Dasha was killed by a car bomb in Moscow last month), Christian-fundamentalist TV station-owning billionaire Konstantin Malofeev and paramilitary imperialist and former FSB officer Igor Strelkov were on the fringes of Russian politics. After Crimea, Putin not only brought these orthodox ultra-nationalists inside the Kremlin’s ideological big tent but actively began to model its own propaganda message on their toxic brand of imperial nostalgia. But there was one problem with riding the ultra-nationalist tiger. While the spin doctors who ran the Kremlin’s ideology and media empire had an essentially cynical, post-modern and consumerist attitude to ideology, the people they had recruited actually believed the message. More, many of these Christian ultra-nationalists were unafraid to bite the hand that fed them and denounce their masters for unpatriotic corruption. ‘Putin and his circle have recently taken steps which I believe will almost inevitably lead to the collapse of the system,’ Strelkov, who had served as the minister of defense of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, told the Guardian as far back as 2016: ‘We don’t know yet how, and we don’t know when, but we are certain it will collapse, and more likely sooner than later.’ Strelkov – who openly boasted about executing his own soldiers for looting – had been instrumental in toppling Ukrainian authority in a series of towns across the Donbas in 2014. And he openly boasted, too, about doing the same in Russia. ‘We do not plan to launch a revolution to depose Vladimir Putin,’ he warned darkly. ‘Having taken part in five wars, I know very well what it is like when authority and social infrastructure collapse in big cities. Nobody wants that, including me. But unfortunately, it could be inevitable.’ Even Navalny, often described in the western media as Russia’s leading opposition figure, clearly recognized that the Kremlin was far more afraid of ultra-nationalists than they were of him. ‘The Kremlin is very scared of nationalists, because they use the same imperial rhetoric as Putin does, but they can do it much better than him,’ he said before his 2020 poisoning. During the build-up to the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin turned to the ultra-nationalist paramilitary organizations to boost its forces. Chief among them was the Wagner private military company. Its founder, GRU special forces lieutenant colonel Dmitry Utkin, earned the call sign ‘Wagner’ because of his passion for the Third Reich. Photographs published last year showed him sporting a Waffen-SS collar tab and Reichs-adler eagle tattoos on his neck and chest. According to a report in May by Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, leaked by Der Spiegel, numerous other Russian right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis are fighting in Ukraine too. Among them are the Wagner Group contingent Rusich, whose co-founder Alexei Milchakov is infamous for social media videos of himself chopping the head off a puppy. ‘I’m not going to go deep and say I’m a nationalist, a patriot, an imperialist and so forth,’ Milchakov said in a December 2020 video. ‘I’ll say it outright: I’m a Nazi.’ Another is the Russian Imperial Movement, a white supremacist group that was designated a ‘global terrorist organization’ by the United States two years ago. In July the Wagner Group was authorized to recruit prisoners from Russian jails, offering reprieves in exchange for military service. Such groups may be small and marginal but they have been armed by the Russian military and ideologically empowered by near-hysterical levels of state propaganda. ‘Orthodox warriors – do your work!’ was Kremlin propagandist-in-chief Vladimir Solovyov’s reaction to news of the Bucha massacre in April. Since news broke last week of Ukrainian forces storming through Russian defences in Kharkiv province and retaking 6,000 square kilometres of territory, the levels of hysteria have only grown. ‘There is still civilian infrastructure left in Ukraine?’ RT head Margarita Simonyan asked sarcastically after Russian rockets battered power stations in retaliation for the Kharkiv breakthrough. With hatred for Ukraine whipped to such levels, the reaction to every defeat by Kyiv’s forces both on the extreme right and in the Kremlin media has been the same: an aggressive search for traitors. ‘I directly accuse [defence minister] Sergei Shoigu of, at minimum, criminal negligence,’ Strelkov posted on his Telegram channel in May. ‘I have no grounds to accuse him of treason, but I would suspect it.’ Russian commanders had been ‘shamefully indecisive’, railed Alexander Sladkov, a military correspondent for state TV. Even Solovyov has vented furiously over the ‘shameful’ time it took for weapon supplies to reach the Russian military in Ukraine. For the Kremlin, the search for scapegoats and traitors should be a deeply worrying warning sign of the future. As long as the Russian army steamroller was grinding on through Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, and Kremlin officials were busy making preparations for referendums in the occupied territories in June and July, Putin could have plausibly declared victory. But last week, with the collapse of the Kharkiv front, the war turned a corner. ‘The vector has changed,’ said the daughter of one of Putin’s close associates, who herself is a senior media executive. ‘The people are still oblivious; they gobble up the propaganda. But everyone who is paying attention feels it. Putin is not a winner any more.’ Putin is not about to lose the war any minute now: Ukrainians have so far taken back less than 6 per cent of the territory they have lost since 2014. Nor is he about to become the scapegoat for anything. His image as Russia’s good tsar, built up over 20 years of relentless propaganda, means that he will be the last to be blamed by his people. But the question now arises of how he will lose it eventually. Will it be in the form of a slow, attritional stalemate that ends in a truce allowing Putin to stay in power – or a fast and humiliating collapse that could shake his regime to its core? In part, the outcome is in the hands of the West, with whose arms the Ukrainians are almost exclusively fighting. But many in the West are not so sure that Russia without Putin is a good idea. Keeping an odious regime in power for fear of something even more unstable and dangerous has a long history in western diplomacy. The US strongly desired to preserve the Soviet Union – as evidenced by George H.W. Bush’s notorious ‘Chicken Kiev’ speech in 1991 – for fear of a patchwork of failed nuclear-armed states that might replace it. And France’s Emmanuel Macron has a ‘strong fear of a Weimar [Republic]-like situation’ if Putin were to fall as a result of the Ukraine war, says a senior European statesman who has spoken to the French President regularly during the crisis. That fear is at the root of Macron’s controversial insistence that ‘Putin must not be humiliated’ in any future peace settlement – and that the EU must not follow the policy of ‘the most war-mongering types’ in Europe since this would ‘risk extending the conflict and closing off communications [with Putin] completely’. Macron’s position naturally infuriated the Ukrainians – and the Poles and Balts, whom he had implicitly accused of being fauteurs de guerre, or ‘warmongers’. Like the collapse of the USSR, the political ramifications of the Ukraine war may be out of the West’s hands. But what’s for sure is that a humiliating defeat will be seen not only by the orthodox ultra-nationalists but by most Russians as a colossal failure by the whole political elite. They will be angry. And that elite will try to defend itself. How will the men at the top of the Kremlin keep the ultra-nationalists in check, and out of power? By making concessions to the West, releasing political prisoners, paying reparations to Ukraine and all the other humiliations that will be demanded of Russia as the price of removing sanctions and reaching a peace deal? Or by installing someone even more aggressively nationalist than Putin himself, who can attempt to continue to ride the tiger for fear of being devoured by it? WRITTEN BY Owen Matthews Owen Matthews writes about Russia for The Spectator. His latest book Overreach, a history of the origins of the Russo-Ukrainian war, will be published by HarperCollins in November

Nick Cohen Could Putin still trigger nuclear war? 16 September 2022, 6:28am The world is facing the prospect of its first nuclear attack since the US Air Force dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Yet that horror arouses little fear or outrage. The possibility that a cornered Putin will use ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons to punish Ukraine for humiliating the Kremlin remains a nightmare most can live with. Paranoia about nuclear conflict haunted the Cold War of the 20th century. Today our tolerance of the intolerable appears higher. The vast mass of people don't care to think about it. Policy elites believe that no one who looks at Ukraine with seriousness and compassion believes that they have done all they can do to avert it. And so, we belittle threats that terrified our parents and grandparents. Anti-nuclear demonstrators do not disturb the crowds queuing to pay their respects to the late Queen. Fears of radiation clouds do not panic the European public. We comfort ourselves with talk of ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons that sound nasty, no doubt about it, but manageable. Sensible generals say there is no such thing as ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons. There are just nuclear weapons. The Russian ‘tactical’ weapons that could hit Ukraine are ‘delivered’ by cruise missiles fired from submarines and ships, or from land-based missile launchers. (While we are on the subject of euphemisms, what a genteel understatement ‘delivered’ is. It makes weapons of mass destruction sound like pizzas.) The bombs they carry have about 10 kilotons of destructive power. To grasp the devastation 10 kilotons can cause, the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 15 kilotons. It killed about 70,000 people, injured another 70,000 and levelled the city for 12 square kilometers around the blast site. In our time, the explosion that destroyed much of central Beirut in 2020 was less than 1 kiloton. It still stripped steel-framed buildings of their cladding, and left 300,000 people homeless. There’s nothing tactful about tactical weapons. A possibility is not a likelihood. To say that it is possible that Putin will order a strike is not the same thing as saying that he will probably do it. The best analysts of the Ukraine war are convinced he is blustering. In an interview with the Economist this week, retired US general Wesley Clark explained that exploding one bomb would be militarily pointless. ‘Would the Ukrainians say “oh my goodness they’ve dropped a battlefield nuclear weapon on Izyum…OK let’s surrender”. No, they’re not going to surrender and Putin knows it.’ Politically, it would turn publics in the global south and parts of Europe that are currently indifferent to Russian imperialism against Putin. The Chinese Communist leadership, which this week was making its displeasure with Putin clear, would find itself bound to a state willing to upturn the taboos that govern warfare and drag it into its failing conflict. Speaking to Ukrainian journalists this week, Lawrence Freedman, the great British authority on strategy, was equally skeptical. Putin would not dare run the risk that Nato would retaliate in kind, he said. How would he explain to the Russian people and elite that a war he does not even dare to call a war had gone nuclear? Freedman and others point to red lines the Ukrainians have crossed without nuclear escalation. In the spring, for instance, it was commonplace to hear that an attack on Russia’s prized imperial possession of Crimea would trigger a nuclear response. ‘Now it’s being attacked, in a way that actually makes it very hard for Russia to work out how it’s being attacked, whether it’s some internal sabotage or some clever tricks the Ukrainians are using. And it doesn’t lead to escalation. So, what seems high risk when they start seems modest risk later on.’ I could go on. A ‘tactical’ bomb in Ukraine could kill, main, or poison Russian troops – not that their military or political leaders care overmuch about them. Radiation could spread over Ukraine’s border with Russia. To add to this reassurance, those who worry about nuclear escalation must acknowledge that Nato governments and militaries have been worrying for them. Led by the Biden administration, western powers have been careful not to give the Ukrainian armed forces weapons that could threaten Russia. At a cost of thousands of civilian and military lives, Nato is keeping Ukraine on a leash and has done so since the start of the conflict. It will not let the Kremlin believe that it is facing an existential threat by giving Ukraine its most lethal weaponry. Yet the room for doubt remains. Military analysts who believe we can escape a catastrophe must downplay Russian military doctrine and how it envisages the first use of nuclear weapons in conventional wars. They tell us to wipe from our mind, too, of the jeering bullies of Russian state television who deploy threats to go nuclear against Ukraine and the wider West as a matter of course. Underlying their arguments is a belief in Putin’s rationality. General Clark says using nuclear weapons would be a totally irrational act: ‘And one thing we have seen about Putin is that he may make mistakes but he is not irrational’. Freedman agrees, ‘I don’t think Putin is impulsive; I think he just got the calculations wrong this time. He thought it was a limited military operation and it turned out it was not, and it dragged his country into a horrible war.’ The questions crowd in. Is a man who locked himself away during the pandemic rational? More pertinently does Putin see any rational difference between his interests and Russia’s interests? There’s no reason to think he does. The existential threat to his autocracy that defeat in Ukraine could bring surely appears to him to be an existential threat to Russia itself. The tsar cannot separate the two. In these circumstances, we cannot rule out the chance that nuclear terror will return. Neither can we do much to stop it returning. Betraying Ukraine is the only plausible way to remove the possibility of a catastrophe. If we cut off all weapons supplies and left it at Putin’s mercy, then the threat would recede. There is no way of eradicating the chance of a nuclear war because no major Western government can advocate appeasement on such a scale. And so, we live with the faint possibility of a European Hiroshima. The carefree do not think about it. The policy makers, who must think about it, believe there is nothing more they can do to avert it. WRITTEN BY Nick Cohen Nick Cohen is a columnist for the Observer and author of What's Left and You Can't Read This Book.

Jack Watling Why didn’t Ukraine fall? The lessons we can learn from Russia’s failed war 17 September 2022, 2:30am Why didn’t Ukraine fall? (Photo: Getty) Text settings CommentsShare Aweek before Russia invaded Ukraine, expectations varied considerably. The US government was certain the Russians would strike at Kyiv and seize the Ukrainian capital in 72 hours. The Russian presidential administration concurred. In Paris and Berlin, officials were briefing that Anglo-American hysteria was leading the world to another Iraq WMD moment and that the Russians were just posturing. Views varied in Kyiv, but the government’s assessment was that a period of political destabilisation would be followed by a limited Russian offensive against the Donbas. I thought Russia would invade only to find itself in a gruelling unconventional battle in Ukraine’s cities; the roads west of Kyiv would be severed, cutting off the city from European allies; Ukrainian troops in the Donbas would withdraw owing to shortages of ammunition after about ten days of fighting. All of the above assessments as it turned out were – to varying degrees – wrong. Ukraine now has a viable path towards bringing about the Russia’s defeat within the next year. It is important to reflect upon why pre-war assessments were incorrect and how these errors can be avoided in the future. I, along with my colleague Nick Reynolds, have worked in Ukraine both before and during the conflict, interviewing senior Ukrainian security and military officials, observing operations, and examining captured Russian equipment. More recently, I’ve been reviewing the operational data gathered by the Ukrainian military. For much of that period, it has not been appropriate to publish detailed information about Ukrainian operations. RUSI, the defence thinktank I work for, has therefore focussed on assessing the enemy’s most likely and most dangerous courses of action, and primary vulnerabilities. Now that the threat of further Russian offensives has abated, however, it is becoming possible to discuss some aspects of the Ukrainian side of the equation. The data demonstrates that the realities of the war diverged considerably from the public narrative. To take an example, many have speculated that Russian electronic warfare systems – comprising interference with electronic systems – have been ineffective. Just look at the proliferation of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) throughout the conflict: surely Russian electronic warfare and air defences could have neutralised these technologies. Yet UAVs have proven their usefulness. The Ukrainian military would agree that the overview of the battlefield they offer is vital. However, the operational data reveals that 90 per cent of Ukrainian UAVs flown before July were lost, mainly to electronic warfare. The average life expectancy of a quadcopter was three flights. The average life expectancy of a fixed wing UAV was six flights. Surviving a flight does not mean a successful mission; electronic warfare can disrupt command links, navigation and sensors, which can cause the UAV to fail to fix a target. Contrary to the narrative, Russian EW has been successful on the battlefield. Instead, what has proved decisive is the sheer number of drones that Ukraine has been able to deploy. The most useful UAVs, according to the data, are cheap fixed wing models. This is not because they are difficult to defeat but because they are inefficient to target, flying too high for short-range air defences while being too inexpensive to engage with medium or long-range systems. This is a good example of where having both sides of the equation – Russian and Ukrainian – is critical to identifying the right lessons from Ukraine. Beyond confirming that Russian electronic warfare is effective – and that the lack of NATO investment in this area is a mistake – the loss rate also demands a re-evaluation of how NATO armies think about UAVs. At present, UAVs are treated like aircraft. They come under flight control and in the UK must be assured for flight by the Military Aviation Authority. This means that the force cannot generate large numbers of trained operators and limits how many UAVs can be deployed. UAVs are therefore designed to have higher payloads and longer flight times to compensate, driving up cost. Instead, UAVs need to be cheap, mass producible, and treated like munitions. The regulatory framework for their use should be changed. The example of UAVs is specific, but it is precisely in these tactical details that the truth about the inaccuracy of pre-war assessments lies. To use my own assessment – that Ukrainian forces would hold their initial positions in the Donbas for a maximum of ten days – this was premised on a calculation of their available ammunition. The assumption was that much of their second line ammunition would be interdicted by Russian air and missile strikes. The Ukrainian military began to disperse its ammunition from major stockpiles several days before the war as a precaution against widespread strikes. This was noted and tracked by Russian agents. Nevertheless, the Russian military appeared very reluctant to adjust the order of its priority strike list for attacking targets. Some of the targets towards the top of the Russian targeting list hadn’t been military sites for up to a decade. Even though the Russians observed that the ammunition was being dispersed, they still prosecuted their initial strikes against the ammunition’s original location. Consequently, of the 20 major ammunition stockpiles used by the Ukrainian armed forces, the Russians destroyed significant stocks at only one. Russian strikes often lagged more than 48 hours behind their targets’ movements, not because the Russians lacked new information about the target’s location, but because they still struck its previous position first. Russian forces massively underperformed against their potential, largely for reasons of culture, process and weaknesses in planning. We are still in the process of conducting our assessment of the operational data, but it is very clear that the gap between Russian success and failure was often narrow, and more often a product of culture, morale, and training than equipment or numbers of troops. It is also evident that the Ukrainians adapted faster in conditions of uncertainty and that it is the capacity of a force to recover from mistakes that often gives it the edge on the battlefield. WRITTEN BYJack Watling Dr Jack Watling is Senior Research Fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute

What is "Macedonian Style"?

Yes, that! I could not agree more!

Of course this forum is about Russia's aggression/war on Ukraine so let's quickly close above side issue: IMO Austrian ultimatum "simply" demanded a change to the Serbian educational curriculum - no teachers to go to Serbia: 3. To eliminate without delay from public instruction in Serbia, everything, whether connected with the teaching corps or with the methods of teaching, that serves or may serve to nourish the propaganda against Austria-Hungary. https://alphahistory.com/worldwar1/austro-hungarian-ultimatum-1914/ The Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia (July 1914): Now the history of the past few years, and particularly the painful events of the 28th of June, have proved the existence of a subversive movement in Serbia, whose object it is to separate certain portions of its territory from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. This movement, which came into being under the very eyes of the Serbian Government, subsequently found expression outside of the territory of the Kingdom in acts of terrorism, in a number of attempts at assassination and in murders… The Royal Serbian Government has done nothing to suppress this movement. It has tolerated the criminal activities of the various unions and associations directed against the Monarchy, the unchecked utterances of the press, the glorification of the authors of assassinations, the participation of officers and officials in subversive intrigues; it has tolerated an unhealthy propaganda in its public instruction; and it has tolerated, finally, every manifestation which could betray the people of Serbia into hatred of the Monarchy and contempt for its institutions. This toleration of which the Royal Serbian Government was guilty, was still in evidence at that moment when the events of the twenty-eighth of June exhibited to the whole world the dreadful consequences of such tolerance…

What? Please kindly provide details?

"юродивый" = "holy fool" (chiefly Eastern Orthodoxy) A person, often associated with gifts of prophecy and insight, who publicly acts as if mad or stupid, but whose madness is seen as concealing an inner sanctity for the purpose of self-humiliation.

...Ukraine on a LEASH tied to...ugly, lazy wording

Javelins can do both attack modes.