I agree with the other commenter. No Bellingcat is not an ‘open source’ site but a fake and occasionally real intel laundering site that graduated from Syrian rebel agitprop and SBU fakes to not all GRU agent passports are issued sequentially, just as not every CIA agent goes about trying and failing to fool the ubiquitous CCTV coverage around the US Embassy with silly wigs shown on Russian TV to humiliate Langley over its own incompetence where the supposedly omniscient 5Eyes fail to literally keystroke the GRU while they’re ‘hacking the election’ but do nothing basically to interdict this supposedly grandest Russian intel operation of all time such that Andropov in the infernal after is green with envy. Really guys?

Just as the MH17 shooting down BUK which was introduced into the Donbass war like the lone Terminator sent back in time to kill Ukrainian Air Force John Connor (as opposed to the far more logical reality of Russia parking thermobaric rocket launching Urugans and Pantsirs if not S300s and fighter CAPs along the border to shoot down the An26 Bellingcat never talks about because muh BUK narrative) supposedly took a meandering in broad daylight path to the Russian border so every SBU snitch around Donetsk could photograph it…no dear Anatoly some Western narratives are simply too cute to be true. Even allowing for the real possibility the Salisbury tourists were GRU, with still zero evidence they smeared the door with novichok as opposed to say, wasted two afternoons scoping out the prospect of old traitor Skripal breaking the rules that got Boris Berezovsky suicided and re-defecting with some juicy dirt on his handler’s friend Christopher Steele.

Yes standards have declined and removing the fear of getting shot or sent to Siberia probably has made the Russian security services more cowboy and less risk averse than their Nikita Sergeyevich through Andropov era predecessors. Or maybe they really just don’t give a crap anymore about getting caught because Russian Deep State wants to go full NoKo. But c’mon man Eliot Higgins is one of the biggest intel and pseudo intel ‘being there’ everyman front frauds in history. I liked the more cynical about at least the Putin and Assad as nerve agent dishing Bond villains logic of Western media / IC narratives better than the new gee Bellingcat might not be 90% bullshit this time Anatoly. It’s always been bullshit.

“In real combat, the Russians used this tactic when they were kicking the shit out of the Ukrainian army. They call it the carousel: One tank pops up and shoots, drives back, eventually changes position. When it’s going back, another pops up to shoot. It’s usually done on a platoon level.” Seems the ‘kicking the sh-t out of the Ukrainian Army’ had more to do with beyond visual range massed fires than anything else (and the cognitive dissonance between Kiev’s propaganda about a supposedly massive Russian Army intervention alongside laughably small UkroWehrmacht KIA/WIA as a result is why I have so much contempt for the Ukrainian agitprop, along with their Maidan snipers all easily slipping away like OJ’s real killers).

A great deal of what the Potomac Foundation’s Dr. Phil Karber presentation to West Point cadets from earlier this year is a Ukro-fanfic version of the war. Karber tells a tall tale from his favorite UAF general describing a night march with their T64 armor into the massive breach that had opened in Ukrainian lines in the panic of mid to late August 2014. That was when the heroic Maidan warriors were suddenly whining on Facebook about being abandoned by the high command, as it turned out real war involving getting hit with mortar and artillery/GRAD fire at Ilovaisk was a lot worse than burning some Berkut riot policemen with Molotovs who didn’t even have firearms on the Maidan, or slowly surrounding wildly outnumbered adversaries armed almost entirely with small arms and snipers aka Strelkov’s merry men with their one self-propelled mortar in Slavyansk (another glorious UAF achievement of arms, along with suicidally holding out day after day in the cellars of the Donetsk Airport as it was shelled and blasted to bits).

Nonetheless, the parts about Russian electronic warfare and drones dominating the battlefield, at least around Donetsk and Lugansk cities where the GRU ‘vacationers’ and Zoopark counterbattery radars are more active, seems true.

As much as I’m inclined to discount the everything in Lviv is awesome posts made here and downplaying of the Galicia centric nature of Ukrainian nationalism, I agree with Reiner Tor that Russia annexing Ukraine besides Crimea or Donetsk/Lugansk would be a huge mistake. I am not even sure given the porousness of the Donbass borders (forget ‘build a wall’) with Ukraine Putin could have pulled off the swift operation that Anatoly seems to think he could have in 2014 without Russian not Donbass native soldiers dying from regular IEDs and ambushes in 2015-18.

Yes of course the UAF were in a lousy state in 2014 and probably couldn’t have kept the Russian Army from taking Kiev in three weeks or less, and yes Ukrainian nationalists here tend to overestimate the number of actual ‘vacationers’ involved in the 2014-15 fighting to downplay the staggering incompetence of the Kiev high command…which is harder to explain regarding Donetsk airport and Debaltsevo than perhaps the opening battles where pro-Russian infiltration or payoffs to UAF generals and colonels to surrender arms could have or most likely did happen. UAF suppporters starting with the Stop Fake video ‘debunking’ the presence of mercenaries in March 2014 Donetsk also downplay the ‘NATO Foreign Legionnaires’ who were definitely observing if not directly fighting so much in the high scores to low hundreds. Azov Battalion in particular had the stench of the Gladio networks including ‘out of my face please’ guy who was definitely not the British de mining volunteer Chris ‘Swampy’ Garrett and didn’t even look like him. There is ample evidence that the significant foreign percentage of fighters is precisely why Azov mostly stayed in sitzkrieg and parade mode in Mariupol while UAF units did the actual fighting. And don’t even get me started on systemic Ukrainian lying about the scale of their casualties supported by the Pentagon and even the cognitive dissonance of the Potomac Foundation’s Phil Karber, who admitted in a West Point talk to a single night of Russian barrages incinerating two UAF battalions — but won’t connect the dots between the border battles to 8,000 UAF KIA by the Ilovaisk aftermath in August 2014. I think UAF KIA are now north of 12,000 and that’s a conservative estimate with NAF deaths approximately 4,000.

That all being said, there are still millions of Ukrainians who are by no means ‘Banderites’ who would understandably not wish to be Russian in the same sense that Canadians despite their common language and origins with the USA would not wish to be annexed by the U.S. And I respect that choice and believe Putin and the majority of the Russian people respect it too, hence no T90s rolling into Mariupol much less Kiev by July/August 2014.

I am not sure what the solution is…but I do think once Turkstream and Nordstream 2 are finished if not several months before the issue will come to a head. If the USD continues to be dumped as world reserve currency and the EU falls apart then Ukraine will accept a cold peace with Belorussian and Kazakh peacekeepers coming in to stop the shelling. But that is only likely after another painful and crushing UAF defeat I’m not sure the NAF are capable of inflicting alone, even if the Operation Storm in Donbass idea overstates UAF capabilities. At best if NAF screw up badly the UAF might achieve a breakthrough to partially encircle Gorlovka or break into Debaltseve at a cost in high hundreds KIA and thousands of WIA.

Actually encircling Donetsk and Lugansk would require the UAF’s NATO trainers and commanders to provide competency if not direct fire support to the operation, thereby risking the 1st Guards Tank Army or at least spetsnaz units killing Canucks and Americans along for the UAF ride. And as I’ve said to Anatoly many times, his overestimation of Western and Israeli militaries is mostly due to overlooking their unwillingness to bleed and die in sufficient numbers to achieve the goals their political masters set out.

No BUK trail for the Antonov turboprop shoot down, which is likely why Kiev’s Defense Ministry claimed initially it was brought down by a Russian Air Force jet (AAM streak wouldn’t be visible at high altitude even on a clear day). See my other comment. I still think this shot was way too high even for the newest Russian MANPADs.

“The Bellingcat/JIT version is shoddy, full of holes like those stated above” also don’t forget in an environment where GRAD launches including Smerch cluster munition rockets were indeed filmed being fired from the Russian side of the border (for once Bellingcat got that one right, even if their crater analysis is the usual draw squiggly lines over satellite pics bs), how in the world did we only end up with a single (most certainly fake) shot of the missile contrail? Makes no sense at all.

These are just some of the many reasons why I can’t buy the U.S./JIT/Bellingcat version of what happened, even if I could be persuaded that it was a rebel or UAF screwup rather than a false flag.

“Israeli-made air-to-air missile may have downed MH17” with all due respect Anatoly, the Georgian Air Force operates SU25KMs which during the Saakashvili years were set up with Elbit Systems cockpits capable of firing Israeli made Python AAMs. While I doubt the Ukrainian Air Force pilot who was recently suicide-d actually shot down MH17 with old Soviet AAMs, I do think he knew something about the Ukrainian Air Force potentially borrowing Georgian jets, as did Saakashvili.

So despite the increasingly fierce Dutch claims that no Ukrainian jets were flying that day and vigorous denials that the Russians supplied any useful radar data (as opposed to the Ukrainians who immediately disappeared the Dnepro control tower crew whom we’ve never heard anything about the Dutch or Malaysians getting to interview if it were a proper investigation), I don’t think at least an aircraft in close proximity has been ‘debunked’ at all. But only the eyewitnesses who supposedly saw the BUK driving back to Russia count, not those who will give their real names on camera who insist they saw Ukie jets aloft that day.

I feel like the only hope the break the info blockade is for Putin to order Russian military to declassify more especially SIGINT of Ukrainian Air Force ops that day (let the Bellingcat kids insist all of that audio is fake while insisting SBU soundcloud is 100% legit) or for the Malaysians, perhaps prodded by China after the U.S. recent South China Sea stunts, to grow some more balls and call BS on some Ukie vetoes of incriminating stuff. I still think a BUK would’ve torn the pilots into mincemeat not left their upper torsos largely intact as their relative recounted to RT when she was briefly shown an open coffin before the bodies were sealed up (haste of Islamic burial certainly would help in any cover up of non BUK shrapnel in the remains).

I agree there have been a lot of stupid theories and fakes in the Russian media, but putting out ridiculous propaganda to discredit the other side’s true claims is something the Brits have been doing well since WW1, and it wouldn’t surprise me if some non-RT Russian journos were paid off.

“If such circumstances were present, I’m sure the Ukrainians would be able to suppress them, because they are the ones leading the investigation, and the investigators are probably under severe pressure to implicate Russia and not to push too hard on any possible Ukrainian angle.”

THIS. Even if I didn’t think a BUK missile manufactured in 1986 USSR screams post-1991 Ukrop inherited SAM, and for the sake of argument this was a horrible accident and not a false flag from the same people who brought you the Maidan snipers killing both sides and easily slipping away without a single casualty from Maidan self-defense who had a small arsenal of pistols, shotguns, hunting rifles and Molotov cocktails to storm the sniping points with (but conveniently did not because Putin’s FSB killers like OJ’s real killers had to get away)…the only logical reason why a Russian launched BUK would hit MH17 is if a Ukro jet were in the immediate vicinity and the missile locked on to the largest target instead of the fighter. Otherwise, even if untrained Cossacks were manning the damned thing there would have had to be in the Bellingcrap/JIT version at least one professional member of the 53rd brigade with the system to keep the crewmen from doing some silly thing like shooting down an airliner flying at a predictable course/higher altitude and speed than any Ukie Antonov supply drop jet would.

I cannot believe the GRU who’ve been pretty damn effective at raising a proxy army in the LDNR and kicking the crap out of al-CIA-eda proxies in Syria would be that stupid and negligent…even if for the sake of quasi-plausible deniability they decided to make an old Russian BUK that had been removed from active service look like the UAF BUK abandoned outside Donetsk that the NAF captured weeks before. (And I suspect a lot of what Bellingcat was doing initially was picking up SBU photoshopped pics of their own SAMs, which they got caught doing in the first few days after the shoot down, before BUK 3×2 was concocted by the OSINT clean up crew that stands behind Bellingcat). Also the stupidity of driving the thing in broad daylight through multiple towns to reach the Russian border, where the SBU’s informants could film it without waiting until dark makes no sense to me. But neither does the idea of a BUK with a skeleton crew for protection against UAF/SBU Alfa special forces riding along in a couple of SUVs, at a time when the frontlines were very porous and not nearly as solid as the Novaya Gazeta reporters or German journalists who visited the town where Almaz Antey said a Ukrainian missile would’ve been fired from claimed. In other words, any above MANPAD range SAM would have been a high priority target for UAF sabotage and reconnaissance teams.

Also if maintaining plausible deniability is why a BUK that could’ve been theoretically captured from the Ukies was sent to protect the NAF instead of Russia just parking S300/400s at the border and blowing the Ukrainian SU25 jets flying high to evade MANPADs away, why did the Russians shoot down the Antonov turboprop with (depending on whatever version Kiev Defense Ministry agreed upon) a Pantsir S1 SAM that doesn’t exist in the Ukrainian arsenal or a Russian Air Force fighter jet along the border? Does anyone else notice how Bellingcat never bothered to do an open source investigation of that little episode preceding MH17, likely because it would bolster the case and expose Ukrainian denials that they forward deployed their own BUKs to protect their units from the expected Russian air attacks?

The Bellingcat/JIT version is shoddy, full of holes like those stated above, and almost certainly designed to cover up at least Ukrainian criminal negligence in using commercial air routes for their SU25 bombers if not a Ukie false flag. AK rolls over too easily to their narrative. It’s been four years for God sakes and you know the media is tightly controlled when only the Russophobic crazies like ex-NSA man John R. Schindler can be bothered to call on the U.S. to release its SIGINT or satellite imagery supposedly shown to the JIT.

Plus if major fighting erupts, a handful of Canuck observers or NATO Foreign Legionnaires like the Swedish petty criminal / con artist Skillt who puffed themselves up as badass ninja warriors while staying behind the frontlines mostly in Mariupol will get killed. And Russian media in order to avenge the 20 gazillion Wagner mercenaries slaughtered by US air/arty strikes in Syria line will spin it into hundreds of NATO dead on top of the few thousand dead UAF from the Operation Ukrop-Storm failure.

Sorry Anatoly when Bellingcrap’s Aric Toler gleefully tweets out that the JIT confirmed the BUK missile which shot down MH17 was manufactured in 1986 in the USSR, that screams the Ukrops did it to me. A country which shot down a civil airliner and tried to lie about it for weeks in 2001 led by oligarchs and idiots who insist the Maidan snipers all got away like OJ’s real killers is more than capable of blowing an airliner out of the sky itself via incompetence or much more likely, false flag.

Concur with this assessment of the reasons for the limited Russian intervention. While I don’t doubt Anatoly’s assessment that the UAF have grown more competent compared to 2014, I see such competency mostly in active defense and dispersing their artillery enough with multiple infantry manned layers to stop a LDNR offensive, not to execute a combined arms offensive of their own to isolate Donetsk and Lugansk (since just like last time the UAF tried, the presumption was they’d be able to avoid house to house fighting or at least tell their men that).

Anatoly has a tendency to wildly overrate one aspect of Western and Israeli war making, and that is the willingness to take casualties when it’s no longer just a question of launching standoff missiles at Syrians. Ukraine with its 12-15,000 combat deaths largely covered up thanks to the complicity of the US/UK press covering the war and accepting Kiev’s ridiculous figures of maybe a third of the real number is the exception that proves the rule. But since Donetsk and Luhansk are urban terrain merely having the capacity to pour more men into a breach in the lines is not as mic an advantage as say it would’ve been in WW2, because of the greater firepower of modern small arms / grenade launchers and artillery compared to then and the inability of the UAF to achieve more than tactical surprise.

Plus there’s the revenge factor, if ‘Wagner’ really lost dozens if not the phantom hundreds of guys slaughtered by US air and artillery strikes in Syria, would their comrades pass on the chance with a few ‘vacationer’ arty operators in Donetsk to light up any UAF behind the frontlines position they detected encrypted NATO issue radio bursts from or the DNR intel sources said had a few Canuck or Balt observers? I think not even if the Empire doesn’t care how many dead UAF boys it takes to force Putin into overt intervention during the World Cup it does care about GRU directed DNR infiltrators machine gunning a group of Canadian or Danish officers walking out of a restaurant in Mariupol after evaluating the first day’s ‘success’ of Operation Ukro-Storm.

You love to bash Magnier, but what is Trump who already wants US troops out going to do when IEDs start going off on roads near US FOBs?

Individuals such as yourself or to take a more extreme example, Michael Daeshbag Weiss, who imagine the US can stay forever behave as if the Euphrates River is some kind of magical force field against any Iraq insurgent style attack, or all the Arab tribes in the SDF with the Kurds will stay bought.

Magnier never wrote that Damascus and Hezbollah would get the Americans much less the more casualty tolerant Turks out via conventional warfare. He has implied Hezbollah in S Lebanon vs Israelis and Iraq insurgency as the model.

I understand Anatoly’s black pilling, especially on days like today where the #NeverTrump ers and more braindead Trump supporters are celebrating the ‘smart’ missiles strike. It’s quite easy to be overawed by NATO military power and the chorus on RU-net of ‘Putin sold out Syria and soon Iran and Donbass’ will only rise — many of them may actually have Russian rather than the usual Ukrainian or Israeli IP addresses.

However, there are several quick points without getting into a long rebuttal of Anatoly’s black pill version of events.

Nothing near Tartus or Kheimmim was hit, and Mattis/Dunford reportedly dialed back the strikes to avoid hitting anything Russian, showing the Pentagon at least is not as gung ho on risklessly ‘killing Russians’ as the CIA and doesn’t believe the rah rah bs story about hundreds of Wagner mercs slaughtered with impunity by U.S. troops (more like about a dozen PMCs died and maybe twice that were wounded, as the Der Spiegel debunking reported, the Russians didn’t even know the Kurds who were supposed to hand over the oil field would have the Americans blast them, or they would’ve demanded Russian Air Force cover or artillery backup). The French MoD said the Russians were forewarned about specific sites to be targeted, contradicting the Pentagon lie to appease the muh Russia set in Congress.

The actual damage despite using twice as many missiles as last April’s post Khan Sheikhoun raid on Shayrat appears fairly minimal beyond the supposed chemical weapons precursor facilities at emptied bases.

Washington, London and Paris have all made a mockery of their claims to solid chemical attack evidence, though no doubt they will massively pressure the OPCW — who didn’t even make it to the Douma scene before the missiles were flying — to produce blood and tissue samples consistent with their findings. The chain of custody for which will be said to be ironclad as after Khan Sheikhoun when it was all delivered to the dubious hands of the Turks.

Finally there’s still the matter, regardless of what neocons like Michael D. Weiss think, of the Euphrates not being some sort of magic force field against infiltration by pro-Assad elements. The Iraq insurgency playbook is known to Assad and his Hezbollah allies, and the risk of IEDs going off and U.S. troops facing ambushes in retaliation is real. Assad and especially his Hezbollah and Iraqi Shia allies have the capability to make Trump into Dubya 2.0, an unpopular president large swathes of the country detest presiding over a wildly unpopular occupation of a Mideast country that was sold as something that could be done on the cheap if not paid for by the oil and gas we’d grab (the neocon Josh Rogin line: take the oil Mr. President, or it goes to Iran).

@GreasyWilliam I don’t disagree that many in Washington and Tel Aviv find the neither peace nor war model attractive, but it isn’t just the 100s of thousands of rockets Hezbollah has stockpiled as a massive conventional deterrent against major attack on either Lebanon or Iran that are changing the game. U.S. and Israeli strategies are predicated on keeping casualties not just light like Russia or (relatively speaking to the size of the IRGC) Iran but ultralight, and that’s why I don’t think Trump himself and most of his domestic to say nothing of the neocon advisers I expect will be kicked out like McMaster and Haley have the stomach for 5-12 much less 30 KIA/WIA a month just to hang on to Syrian gas fields and deny them to ‘Assad and Iran’.

I think Hezbollah and the Iraqi militias it has trained, even assuming the Euphrates can be reinforced with drones and crossings tightened up with checkpoints manned by SDF, are more than capable of infiltrating U.S. dominated areas. It is only likely the fear of greater U.S. SAM supplies to the ‘moderate’ AlCIAeda that has made Moscow keep its ally in Tehran on a tighter leash, so that if the Persians wish to take revenge for their dead IRGC in Syria it has to be done via arming Houthis to kill Saudis on Saudi soil. One thing you notice after watching Twitter a while is how determined most Syria rebel fanboys are to ignore the fact that proxy wars and aloha snackbaring ATGM porn videos can go both ways, and that the Saudi paymasters of their beloved moderate jihadis can be killed by anti-tank missiles and cheap IEDs too. But what can one say about a Salafi-Trotskyite like Michael Daeshbag Weiss who imagines himself a champion of the downtrodden Sunni proletariat?

The whole U.S./Israeli model is war waged on the cheap with the transition from the more costly Bush to cheaper Obama proxy model, which itself was a rehash of Z Brzezinski’s strategy. Recall Brzezinski didn’t like the Iran hawks and Israel firsters because his eyes were always on the prize of getting Iranian gas to Europe to checkmate Gazprom. This split in D.C. between Iran delenda est neocons and the Obama pragmatists was exploited by Moscow during the Medvedev/Reset years with the S300 sale indefinitely postponed as a bargaining chip.

At any rate while Anatoly likes to mock the dollar collapse crowd’s claims of the US becoming too broke to maintain its empire, I see economic rot and undeniable signs of gangrene setting in by after the mid-terms (even with Trump doing everything he can tariff, capital repatriation holiday and regulation slashing to stave off the collapse the Fed postponed in 2008-2009 with massive QE). The rents and real estate bubbles in most heavily populated parts of the country West Coast and Bos-Wash corridor are too damn high unless you live in inner city Baltimore or D.C.

“Dude is a Hezbollah mouthpiece who has lost all grasp on reality over the last year. Assad will NEVER get the Kurdish regions back and the US isn’t leaving.” I wouldn’t be as sure the U.S. can sustain a forever occupation of eastern Syria as you or the conventional wisdom. And if Hezbollah weren’t a formidable force or the Israelis didn’t fear heavy casualties, one wonders why Israel didn’t take advantage of the Syria War when they were heavily engaged and attack their southern Lebanon redoubt to clean them out. A great deal of it depends on logistics through Iraq and Turkey, both states for their own reasons which could get tired of sustaining the U.S. presence leaving only the Jordanian border and highway through al-Tanf if Damascus is determined not to trade with the SDF held areas (unlikely for now, because it needs the oil and gas the Americans have grabbed and have made clear they’ll vigorously defend despite the illegality of their occupation).

The Turks are a different story than the U.S., because they have a larger manpower pool of cannon fodder from among the unemployed Syrian refugees from rural Sunni areas and can presumably have their Janissaries take the brunt of any Kurdish insurgency, plus they’ve been facing IEDs as a threat since the 1990s on their own soil. But the Feb. 7-8 ‘battle’ for an oil field the Russian PMCs present probably didn’t even know had an American presence that their Syrian hosts had assured them the Kurds were handing over doesn’t actually count as glorious American victory over the legions of Moskal Mordor. Or make the Euphrates some sort of force field of protection against Hezbollah or pro-Assad tribes coming in and planting roadside bombs for U.S. special forces. The Pentagon’s fear of tit for tat has probably exerted some restraint in that regard on the more bloodthirsty kill Russians (ala former Deputy Director Mike Morrell) send MANPADs to ISIS and Al-Qaeda globalist traitor elements in CIA. Because DoD knows if too many Russian choppers go down in Syria that heightens the risk Blackhawks start getting shot down and not just running into power lines at night.

Anatoly, just as Russia conquering east of the Dnieper Ukraine isn’t worth the effort unless gravely provoked beyond all limits or the total collapse many predicted in 2014-15 occurs, it hasn’t paid for the US to attack Kheimmim since 2015. Not just because Russia is a nuclear power or enjoys escalation dominance in the Baltics and as far west as likely Odessa and Chisinau, but also because US power rests on notions of military supremacy and casualty aversion to a greater degree than Russian or Chinese power. Though obviously Putin has taken many measures to limit active duty Russian casualties with his cautious approach having learned some lessons from Afghanistan and the Chechen Wars.

I see the Syria game the same way for the US. Even assuming no nukes get used do you really see POTUS Trump politically surviving the destruction of a Kheimmim followed by the sinking of an AEGIS ship in the eastern Med and the incineration by Caspian and Black Sea launched Kalibrs of several FOBs east of the Euphrates with hundreds of dead Americans within hours? I don’t because the same Democrats who’d been accusing Trump of being ROG’s puppet would be demanding his impeachment and many Republicans of his base would be asking why it was worth it despite Fox News telling us its time to nuke Moscow (with no thoughts given to Lt Col Ralph Peters face melting after a Topol MIRV air burst 10,000 feet over Manhattan).

No the thing the ‘USA slaughtered hundreds of Wagner mercs rah rah’ crowd should worry about isn’t Russian retaliation but IRGC/Hezbollah operatives who speak a little Kurdish slipping into towns where our troops are with IEDs or thermobaric RPGs. Elijah J Magnier who is one of the best analysts of Syria has all but said eventually the Iraq insurgency playbook will be dusted off to push out the Americans after Ghouta and Idlib are dealt with by Damascus.

I still think NATO training or not the notion of an easy peasy Ukro-Operation Storm is mostly fantasy even some of the hardcore Galicia-centrists here don’t cling to anymore than most Russian nationalists buy into being welcomed with bread and flowers at the Dnieper. If Washington wants to help the Ukrainians take back the Donbass the aura of NATO advisers being untouchable is going to come off, fast and sorry Quartermaster some of the advisers just behind the frontlines will be very vulnerable in fluid battles to ambushes or the GRU SIGINT artilleryist guys in downtown Donetsk ID’ing where the US Army issued encrypted radios are at Ilovaisk, and triangulating with mass fires for effect. Leading to a sudden ‘suicide bombing at Bagram’ that no one saw to cover up U.S. and Canuck adviser (even if the Canadian military more so than the US Army has its share of Ukrainian speakers) servicemen coffins flying out of Borispol airport.

It’s not like contrary to the concerted efforts to downplay ‘out of my face’ guy and others the Azov Battalion did such a great job of hiding their NATO Foreign Legionnaire types, one of whom a Belgian reportedly was killed. A Slovak or Pole bragged to SOFREP.com about fighting ‘bandits’ and supposed Russian regulars (just like on the LDNR side where any Ukrainian unit competently defending a relatively indefensible against artillery position at the airport were said to be Polish ‘vacationers’ or mercs) but offered little proof he was going up against the Taman Guards rather than some old Northern Wind Chechnya veterans.

If there is one unhealthy trend I sense in Anatoly’s writing of late, even if I cannot dismiss his pessimism about the seemingly eternal Cold War 2 black pill scenario, it is the notion that Uncle Sam is basically invulnerable militarily if not economically to retaliation even of the proxy sort. Well the Euphrates in Syria isn’t much of a formidable barrier to Hezbollah types infiltrating Kurdish SDF areas to plant IEDs or shoot down Blackhawks with MANPADs and the great slaughter of Wagner mercenaries turned out to be about a dozen or so guys times two wounded who didn’t even likely know they were attacking a U.S. special forces held position because their Syrian hosts lied to them or the Kurds pulled a fast one after promising to deliver over an oil field.

The consensus among Ukrainian nationalists seems to be let the Donbass rot. Which is about what many Russians think is happening to Ukraine even if they lament it. That all being said I don’t begrudge Putin sticking with Crimea and refusing to hand the worst neocons their wet dream of a Slavic version of the Afghanistan occupation by going all the way to the Dnieper. LDPR may have been what was possible, though I think the offensive in August 2014 should’ve encircled Mariupol and forced those Azov Nazi bastards including the not easily disavowable NATO Foreign Legionnaires to die in it or leave for Russia. Easy for me to say from my safe perch though.

If it were so doggone easy for the Americans and Israelis to wipe out Kheimmim without fearing major retaliation why haven’t they done it already?

Again I repeat to Anatoly and others here: there are no magical force fields around the US FOBs in Syria (even in Ralph Peters neocon wet dream of confining a war on Russian units to the Syrian borders without lots of Americans within those same borders dying in retaliatory cruise missile strikes) nor can the Kurds keep Hezbollah infiltrators out of SDF areas to stop the IEDs if not suicide bombings Mattis will have to explain to relatives receiving flag draped coffins by summer. Elijah J Magnier one of the most connected in Damascus and Beirut correspondents has all but said the Iraq War insurgency playbook is about to be opened to drive the Americans out of Syria.

Israel can strike often, what it cannot do is go for decapitaton strike on Assad or invade Lebanon and Syria beyond the Golan without risking Hezbollah missiles raining down on Ben Gurion Airport and Haifa’s industrial areas.

The alleged patch up between the Turks and Americans now requires the US to make YPG units leave Manbij as — easier said than done, what with many of the Turkish recruited jihadis aka Erdogan’s ‘rightful owners’ being the ones who earlier jeered and threatened US troops. As Andrei M said the Afrin Kurds have now struck a deal to let the SAA back in to their territory so it will be interesting to see if the US patch up with Turkey leads the Turks to turn on a dime and attack SAA and Iranians as the black pilled scenario suggests or wisely pull back and mostly stick with providing logistical support to the NWO Ottoman jihadi Idlib statelet.

Russia hasn’t killed American PMCs that we know of, and if it indirectly contributed to killing some son of Blackwater types would never advertise it anyway for both weaker party geopolitically and style of proxy fighting reasons. Though a few NATO foreign legionnaires of the Azov Battalion (at least one Belgian from the body cam footage found by LDNR) got greased in Donbass before Azov retreated to Mariupol garrison duty and let the UAF die by the thousands for Donetsk Airport and Debaltsevo.

Iran however, is a different story. The Sunni Arabs that attacked the ‘consulate’ CIA annex (aka gun running to Syria operation) at Benghazi were working for Iran. And from whence I expect the retaliation for Wagner to come from, first in Afghanistan and later in Syraq. Think IEDs not conventional attacks on US forces, perhaps even blamed by the Russians on ISIS when it was pro-Assad local tribes or Hezbollah doing the deed.

Blackpilled Anatoly, some of the Empire doesn’t bleed and greater Galicia posters here seem to have forgotten that Hezbollah knows all about the Iraq insurgency playbook and Russia also has allies it can permit to act with quasi plausible deniability in the way US/Israel have winked at jihadist attacks on Russians.

DoD or more likely DIA who want to be the anti-Flynn buddies with CIA paranoia about Russian retaliation via the Taliban for the USA arming the UAF already made it into Newsweek:

http://www.newsweek.com/taliban-using-russian-made-night-vision-goggles-kill-709422

Given the potential blowback in the Stans I think the story is almost certainly BS. Training Hezbollah or special SAA infiltrator units that would carry out IED attacks on US forces in the Kurdish part of Syria seems a much more likely and more plausibly deniable move, as Iran could take the blame.

This is of course the same Newsweek that was a rag sold for a $1 and which routinely publishes propaganda from the Atlantic Council not even marked as adverts to stay afloat. They also declared Putin was preparing for WW3 and promoted the Bild (#JihadJulian Roepcke’s employer) fantasy of a Russian massive assault on Scandinavia, Poland and Germany all at once, so take it for what it’s worth (not much).

Kornet ATGMs, which proved deadly and demoralizing against Israel’s vaunted Merkavas and will simply fry older T64s and UAF blockposts, will be the LDPR ‘air force’. I doubt they get kamikaze drones of the type the Azeris tried to use without much success against the Armenian/Ngorno Karabkh forces as those aren’t in the UAF arsenal. Neither are Kornets but after Javelins Putin isn’t going to fail to follow through on his threat that LDPR could supply arms to other parts of Ukraine. Which is bad news if you’re a Right Sector Nazi in TransCarpathia or one of the known perps of the Odessa Massacre who got off not wanting to be car bombed or machine gunned outside your apartment building.

For the Russia will abandon Donbass any day now/victory is inevitable for the glorious greater Galicia flag wavers here, I noticed the hits on Givi and Motorola type leaders stopped after Plotnitsky was checked and a UAF general had a ‘heart attack’ in his Kiev office and an SBU commander died in a Mariupol car bombing. Tit for tat discourages being cannon fodder for Uncle Sam when it’s not just some poor dumb bastard from Vinnitsya but a general or SBU in regular contact with Pentagon leaders or CIA getting killed by the LDPR partisans.

I don’t understand one of your points Phillip: “It means the Chinese can’t do as much with their dollars as they would like.” Why can’t they convert to yuan and process the transactions through Chinese banks, basically bypassing the sanctions on dollar activities via or with any entity in Russia (and now apparently doing Putin’s ‘deoffshoring’ work for him by harassing the Russian oligarchs corporate banking colony on Cyprus)?

Or perhaps this is why as AK mentioned we’re seeing push for national cryptocurrencies, so those transactions previously requiring dollar to yuan then ruble conversions can be sped up via cryptoruble and crypto(petro)yuan.

Bottom line: I think Anatoly is correct Russia remains much weaker than the U.S. in terms of soft power and cannot afford a new arms race, but Putin’s remarks indicate his grim awareness of such and recollection of the ruinous costs of waging the last Cold War on the USSR. Where Anatoly gets things wrong from his Silicon Valley/Muscovite perch is how rapidly the USA is hollowing out in the between the coasts and even Midwest (OH) to Northeast Rust Belt (PA) hinterlands.

For a highly based individual and writer that has my respect, I think AK tends to overrate the Demopublican (or as Michael D. Weiss likes to call it ‘Team WahhabiZiocon’) U.S. Establishment’s fading power. Especially when viewed from China which even Russians agree is vastly more economically dynamic than Russia, the MuhRussia hysteria cannot but be seen as weakness. Isn’t the American elite essentially appealing to openness in contrast with Russian auspiciousness and dastardliness as an excuse for how the US IC basically did next to nothing as, if you believe the laughable Comey/Clapper/Brennan line, the Russians ‘attacked our democracy’? If Russia can nudge Trump into the White House while the Americans can’t get Navalny above 5% despite lavishly supportive coverage, which side is more powerful than the other, at least in the dark arts of manipulation that wonderful democracies supposedly suck at despite decades of coups and other first Cold War evidence to the contrary?

This is not to say, that The Saker is right about the unchecked rot of Banderastan eventually leading to a breakup of Ukraine while Putin remains in office (I see it more as something that will happen by the late 2020s when Poland and Hungary feel Visegrad strong and the dollar and non-German euro have collapsed Washington/Brussels support for whatever crew of flunkies will be left in Kiev to nothing by then), or that the Galicia centric Lviv as the European city of the future crowd are right either.

And yes Mr. Armstrong is right that more is coming from Sessions elves and Roger Stone’s GOP Congressmen buddies on the Hill regarding the Democrat derp state’s get Drumpf promotion of the Dirty Dossier and other soft coup antics. People used to the press always being on their side and covering their arses tend to get more arrogant and lazy as they rise through the ranks (just reading an interview with that bald bastard James Clapper sniveling about how lying to Congress will be on his grave stone made me want to puke). The shreiks about dedicated civil servants being smeared by this President are quite satisfying and the real purge hasn’t even begun.

None of this is to say, though hot proxy war with NATO ‘vacationers’ (whom the occasional Russia bashers deny exist despite their Slovak or Polish ‘volunteers’ with the UAF bragging about fighting Donbass ‘bandits’ to SOFREP.com) fighting their counterparts from the GRU in the ruins of Donbass remains possible, that I think the current weakening US elites are ready for true great power war. Hell I doubt they could stomach the number of body bags/flag draped coffins from Korean War 2 or what Iran could do against the US Navy in the Arabian Sea combined with Hezbollah fully unleashed on US forces in Syraq.

UAF combat deaths to put these numbers in perspective with 5-6,000 Donbass native or Russian ‘Northern Wind’ dead likely number over 17,500 on the high end with 14-15,000 Ukrainian Army and volunteer battalion deaths on the more likely end.

We know an entire UAF battalion was wiped out by cross border massed fires from Russian territory in the so called Southern Cauldron boiler with Colonel Cassad and even Vice News showing the Highway of Death like aftermath, yet typical of the systemic, face saving coverup of UAF KIA as ‘MIA’ the Western media never push for the names of, The Potomac Foundation (yes Dr Phil Karber not the most reliable source) listed ‘only’ 37 dead from a barrage that destroyed an entire battalion. Even the retired Army Gen Scales referred to the episode but the Americans try to cover for their Ukrainian interlocutors.

So today unlike in March 2014 the Russian Army probably could not march to Kiev without several thousand casualties in what would be a very unpopular with many even non-West loving Russians, who would view it as a fratricidal campaign. That is after hundreds of millions and thousands of trainers poured into improving the quality of what was a pretty pathetic Army in 2014.

But based on what I saw in Syria, if the RuAF were turned loose along with cruise or Iskander missile strikes, notwithstanding the Ukrainians heroic propaganda about ‘cyborgs’ at Donetsk Airport killing bazillions of Pskov VDV, the UAF would be slaughtered or encircled in a huge pocket in the Donbass.

I also think NATO Foreign Legionnaire aka European and American/Canuck volunteer deaths mostly in the Azov Battalion and at Debaltsevo where many reportedly were permitted to escape from the pocket in civilian clothes have likely been in the low (3?) dozens. Just enough to cover up. I’d like to see what the Polish and Baltic armies and special forces training accident casualties were in 2014-15 too.

This comment is mostly directed not at the usual Galicia fans, but the retired mil who loves to exagerrate UAF competency and the scale of direct Russian Army involvement while pretending the Ukrainians didn’t get lots of U.S. logistical and non lethal support including of late Global Hawk flights practically begging for an S400 shoot down so close tomCrimea.

By that you mean Anatoly avenging Kheimmim by incinerating good chunk of Yavoriv with Kalibrs and hitting the SBU HQ US strike on Chinese Embassy in 1999 Belgrade style with CIA in Kiev having to scrape up pieces of their colleagues who were on duty, and utterly destroying Ukraine’s defense plants and possibly many if not most of its SAM batteries via spetsnaz blowing them up on the ground, and perhaps giving the NAF a nudge with strikes on the Azov Nazi larpers with an emphasis on sending dozens of NATO advisers, mercs and ‘vacationers’ home in body bags?

Because even without sinking a carrier or AEGIS ship with all hands, I think the militarily sane not drunk on their own BS or the aura of greater Galician invincibility (i.e. not Quartermaster types) understand US/NATO have escalation dominance in Syria, but not in Ukraine even with the mild qualitative (mostly quantity of conscripts) improvement in the UAF since 2014. No one besides maybe the Poles in NATO is willing to die by the hundreds much less thousands to stop the 1st Guards Tank Army from rolling into Donbass kicking the crap out of the UAF so hard and so fast their US advisers have to flee to Kiev in civilian car trunks and civvies.

I think the prospect of such a thoroughly humiliating beating for a US propped up client state is what USA try Col Pat Lang of Turcopolier blog was referring to when warning that the US could blunder into a debacle even as the neocons insist that ca back Russia down in Syria.

Also the sooner the nearly bankrupt Sauds are forced to withdraw from Yemen in humiliating defeat, the faster the sane Arabs who aren’t obsessively anti-Shia like the UAE or Egyptians can cut deals with the Yemenis to develop a world class Aden port infrastructure and bridge across the Bab al Mandeb as part of the maritime New Silk Road. But the best upshot from my point of view will be far less money for Wahhabi mosques and Islamo-immivasion all over the world even if the globalists and Sorosniks still insist European pols like Merkel or the Swedes press the stealth demographic/population replacement agenda.

KSA is the new Evil Empire, it must be taken down for there to ever be hope of peace in the Mideast or for Syria to be reconstructed.

Exactly what I think happened, it was not only a probe to see if Russians would be able to take down any Tomahawks with Pantsirs at Tartus but most likely a live fire exercise to gather data on the Krasukha 4 jammers the Pentagon has feared since one on shore zapped the USS Donald Cook off Crimea in April 2014.

Yes Gabriel M, I suppose ‘muh Sunnis’ position of a huge portion of the Swamp creatures and not a few Jewish neoliberal rather than neocon interventionists (many of whom you can find on Atlantic Council OSINT fraudster @EliotHiggins TL even though he himself as far as I know is not a member of the tribe but a typical Trump hating SJWtard Brit schlub whose Turkish wife wears the pants in his family) is based on some sort of objective reality — besides the Saudis and Qataris pouring craploads into the exempt from FARA think tankistans of the Mideast Institute and Brookings Doha.

Nonetheless, where adopting even a moderately pro-Saudi position (i.e. TOW missiles still flowing to team moderate ‘ex’ AlQaeda) is going to bite the Establishment and the Trump Admin in the ass is in Yemen. Col. Pat Lang of the Turcopolier blog may be biased having drank tea with the Zaidi Shi’a who were always deadly enemies of the Wahhabis, but he’s not wrong to notice they have been kicking the asses of the Saudi ground troops and their rent a tribes all over Yemen, with the more competent UAE military securing the strategic Aden at U.S. behest. The presence of a Chinese base at Djbouti is what leads me to believe that North Korean or Iranian missile components keep getting smuggled into Yemen pieces at a time along with the usual Omani arms dealers getting fat and happy off cigarette boats bringing in the anti-tank weapons for the qat chewing teenagers.

While the recent Hama offensive was blunted because team TOW jihad had to cross the Hama plains and subject themselves to arty and airpower in the open where they usually fail, I must say the SAA’s inability to tactically keep troops well dispersed or develop specialized teams to kill CIA and KSA’s beloved TOW missileers bugs a lot of its supporters online a lot. They have made some modest advances in slat armor and in some IR jammers that confuse the missile seeker heads but the wire guidance allowing the operator to make adjustments seems to overcome that (I suspect Russia has lasers that can detect the incoming bearing of a TOW and send a potentially blinding or at least dazzling beam down the trajectory of the incoming rocket to hurt the missileers). Hezbollah seems to have struggled to develop its own Kornet equipped ATGM teams matched with big rifle or HMG snipers to protect very limited and infantry supported armor advances. Arab militaries whether SAA or even more commonly the Saudis always seem to use armor alone and the Turks did too at Al Bab when they had an unexpectedly intense battle with the ISIS who as their former allies didn’t keep their word about withdrawing after the usual Saudi payoffs.

If I were running IRGC I’d be making the link between the Saudis and their American/Israeli friends belief in the ability to indefinitely sustain the Syria jihadists and KSA’s losses in the Yemen conflict more blunt and direct. I’d be pouring ATGMs and especially, mobile SAMs that can take down Saudi jets at above MANPAD range into Yemen and then be bombarding all of the ‘moderate Syrian rebels’ fanboys including the unregistered Qatari agents like Chucky Lister or ‘team Wahhabi Ziocon’s Michael Daeshbag Weiss with dead Saudi porn and Houthis killing Saudis and frying their U.S. supplied tanks by the bushel. Let it become clear to the KSA butt kissers at Langley (Pompeo seeming to follow in the footsteps of Ibn Saud Brennan who may have been an actual Saudi asset recruited while Riyadh station chief) that so long as the Saudis sponsor the Syria jihad their young men will die and keep dying in Jizran, Najran and other southwestern provinces of the Kingdom.

Only in this way, as well as many more years of cheap oil emptying out Saudi coffers and hindering the princes ability to buy off the tribes and population will the power of the GCC Sunni supremacist lobby with its grip in D.C., London and Paris be broken. Make damn sure the sponsors of destroying Syria (even if the Qataris withdrew their troops from Yemen and SW KSA) pay a heavy price and understand proxy wars can go both ways, and they’ll stop destroying countries.

You know AP, there’s a Polish film called ‘Volyn’ coming out, right? You’ve seen the videos of Polish soccer hooligans chanting, “Vilna and Lvov are Polish, Bandera is a d-ck” probably emphasizing the latter epithet in the Ukrainian style of huil-o when a Galician squad comes to play in Poland?

Yes we know the Poles who went to Donetsk and said they too, sympathized with the struggle against Banderism were a tiny minority. So what? That doesn’t mean many of your countrymen would be very happy with your attempts to downplay the viciousness and thuggishness of the UPA or to pretend that the current U.S./IMFer funded Kiev regime glorifying them and Bandera isn’t a problem. The older Poles I’ve spoken with in the U.S. don’t like that legacy very much at all. Trying to pretend all the hipsters and State Dept. sponsored tech camp participants you’d meet in Kiev or Lvov are typically representative of Ukraine as a whole is one technique the RFE/RL and MSM propaganda use. The other is to simply not talk about Ukrainian war crimes while endlessly playing up stupid propaganda stories that made into Russian media, so that somehow if the boy was never crucified in Slavyansk that means that all of the civilians shot there were killed by Strelkov and co rather than the Right Sector Nazis, and we can forget about Banderites burning people to death in Odessa and Kiev not prosecuting a single one of them, massive indiscriminate punishment shelling of civilian areas, and Poroshenko declaring Ukraine will win the war by forcing Donbass kids to hide in basements.

I was raised on the ‘Christ between two thieves’ narrative of Polish history that by and large prevailed after WWII because it was politically convenient during the Cold War. Things like the Poles somewhat dealing with the OUN pre-WWII like the Brits dealt with the IRA, or taking a piece of Slovakia as part of the Munich agreement, did not really become known to me until well into my 30s. Nor did I learn about a few of the postwar Polish progroms of Jews, though the claim that Poles killed as many Jews as the Germans is laughable (with that said many of the SS Totenkopf guards were western Ukrainian greater Galicia Nazis and like the Utsashe Croats many of them were more sadistic than the Germans ever were).

So yes, you can try insisting on your ‘Poles and Ukrainians are one big happy family and anybody who suggests otherwise has bought the Kremlin propaganda’ rhetoric. But I doubt that many Polish nationalists themselves buy it. And they’d probably be disgusted with your whataboutism comparing massacres of a few thousand people in a Ukrainian peasants revolt to a Nazi-abetted modern ethnic cleansing/terror campaign that claimed the lives of over 100,000 Poles.

Siberia is Muslim and always was, no Buddhists or Shamans there before Russians showed up? Really? Sorta of like Al-Andalus wasn’t Christian and Constantinople wasn’t Greek my Turk friend?

The Ukrainians shot down MH17 sure as the day as long. The Dutch Safety Board report is a pathetic farce, particularly as John Helmer documented in the ludicrously small amounts of ‘BUK’ shrapnel that by its own accounting were found, and that could have been planted weeks or months after the fact from an old Ukrainian BUK missile launch test or have no chemical composition relation to the BUK HE warhead whatsoever.

The Dutch Safety Board blindly accepted on faith every single laughable Ukrainian assertion complete with the Ukrainians claim to have had no military radars operating on July 17, 2014. So Ukraine had NO radars to protect itself operating that day days after screaming about a Russian fighter jet having shot down their An-26 transport plane trying to paradrop supplies to their encircled troops along the Russian border less than a week earlier. The current Ukrainian government is led by scoundrels and fools but enjoys a fanatical propaganda machine and all the benefits of silence and dissembling D.C. can deliver for its client states.

So yes unit472 spare us about how Putin has lost all his credibility. Sooner or later some Polish nationalist with a bit of self-respect is going to spill the beans on how Russian wasn’t the only country that sent ‘volunteers’ to fight in the Donbass under a local flag.

And given that Erdogan and his backers in D.C. desperately want a pretext to close the Bosporus — they even put together a pretty good Photoshop of a ‘Russian soldier’ who doesn’t even look Russian on the deck of a Russian cargo ship pointing a MANPAD at the sky during transit through Istanbul — Putin won’t take the bait and bomb the hell out of the Turks new ‘permanent base’ near Mosul. I think he’ll either send one jamming craft to shut down the Turkish radars and allow the Iraqi Air Force to bomb them with U.S. made F-16s, heightening Erdogan’s humiliation…or the PKK and Iraqi IRGC advised Shi’a militias are about to receive planeloads of Kornet ATGMs as Christmas presents from Uncle Vlad. Erdogan is going to find out he can send TOWs to his jihadis to kill SAA inside Syria and be repaid in kind with PKK/IRGC/Iraqis killing his boys with Russian ATGMs both inside Iraq and in Turkey proper.

Frankly as much as I admire the Saker I don’t think he foresees how Putin has plenty of options to retaliate against the Turks using PKK/Iraqi/Iranian proxies nor how stupid of a move this will turn out to be for the neo-Sultan.

Ukraine is a bankrupt failing state. Destroying power lines ultimately will backfire because Russia will indeed is already building the cable under the Strait of Kerch from the mainland that will be very hard for the Ukro-Nazis and Turkish MIT stooge Tatars to sabotage. A cable-laying vessel from China is actually helping the Crimean authorities reach towards the goal of getting one third of the peninsula’s power supplied from the Russian mainland by December 23 if not New Year. Go BRICS!

Meanwhile Ukraine’s rickety power infrastructure is wide open to attack. Not just from the evil sovoks of the DNR, but eventually if Polish ultra-nationalists get pissed off enough at Kiev and steal some shells or semtex from an army base they can see to it that Banderites have to celebrate Stepan B’s b-day or the anniversary of the mass murderers of Poles UPA using only torches. I do not believe the Ukraine in its present borders will exist in 20 hell maybe even 15 years with small bits of TransCarpathia going back to Hungary just to get sane, functional governance and services. The Poles will probably want nothing to with bringing Lvov back…

Russia’s economy is in severe recession, but much of southern and southeastern Europe is stuck in a perma-depression and northern Europe is being dragged down as well especially with the immi-destabilization of Germany and Sweden. The UK may be an outlier but even there living in London is becoming unaffordable and native Britons are a minority in their own capital. So I’d be a bit more circumspect in calling Russia a failed or failing state considering how quickly its trade partners are either being dragged down by pathological altruism, neo-Ottoman stupidity, or the deliberate ‘Empire of Chaos smash it all if we can’t keep it with the petrodollar’ revenge of the D.C. elect.

AK – yes the Americans or even Israelis (and perhaps the Turkish Air Force with Schweinfurt raid losses among the F-16 raiders until the Pantsir batteries run out rockets) COULD wipe out Latakia air base. And then watch cruise missile strikes obliterate all their bases in the theater in retaliation. Plus missiles from Crimea hitting the SBU HQ in Kiev and wiping out its CIA wing and Russian air strikes on CIA NATO merc contractors who ‘aren’t’ in Kharkov and Mariupol in a few minutes.

I appreciate the reminder of how small and vulnerable the Russian contigent in Syria is, but it’s also foolish to act like the neocon lunatics or hasbara trolls who assume the U.S./NATO/Israeli militaries are invincible and would not die in large numbers and/or suffer panics if hit by waves of supersonic missiles aren’t badly mistaken. Israel would be hard pressed holding the line against a Hezbollah assault if they lost their air cover over the Golan and certainly wouldn’t be able to do anything if much of the IAF was destroyed on the ground by Kalibrs against thousands of Hezbollah rockets raining down on Haifa and northern Tel Aviv.

Communism was particularly repressive in Romania, so the NATOists take advantage of the Russia = Communist = hopelessly backward while ‘Europe” represents the future stereotype.

In Moldova which is for all practical purposes about as Romanian as Austria is German, the youth are starting to see through this as like the Ukrainians they’ve probably started to notice it’s easier for Muslims to get asylum and benies in Germany than themselves. OTOH these days if you want a young German doctor you’re likely to end up with a Romanian while in the UK it’s young Polish doctors in NHS.

NATOists also take advantage of traditional Polish Russophobia, though I’ve heard the younger generation of Polish nationalists loathes the Banderovsti and wants to keep military age Middle Easterner AND Ukrainian males (females might be ok) out of their country. Radek Sikorski’s ouster has been touted by John Helmer as a sign that the Poles are becoming more pragmatic and less keen on being cannon fodder in some war against Russia, though I suspect the deaths of at least a handful of Polish ‘volunteers’ and participation of Polish pilots in Kiev’s failed military campaign against Donbass are still being covered up. The withdrawal of Polish pilots in addition to the heavy losses would explain why the Ukrainian Air Force basically was grounded by September 2014 — no Pole wanted to get shot down by a Novorossiya MANPAD and end up on LifeNews.ru or First Channel.

The Orthodox Christian Romanians seem positive or at least neutral towards Russia, though not as enthusiastic as the Syrian or Greek Orthodox likely are these days 🙂 Some resolution to the Transniestria question, perhaps with that little sliver of land officially joining Russia and the rest of the country except for pro-Russian Gaugauzia getting an anschluss with Romania might be the long term solution after Porky and co are long gone in Kiev.

Heaven knows George Friedman of Stratfor is one crafty individual and if he said Poland would be a great power again by the late 21st century, then he probably knew something about TransCarpathia or at least Lvov if not Lithuania going back to Polish sovereignty in the early 2000s when hardly anyone but the most pessimistic of Russian nationalists saw a partition of Ukraine coming. The Hungarians under Orban are also getting more nationalistic and recall that some western parts of Ukraine have significant Hungarian communities that have been dodging or openly resisting the Ukrainian army draft.

One last thing I’ve noticed of late is PEGIDA or LEGIDA German protesters bringing Russian flags to their protests — and I mean the modern Russian flag not the old Commies still pulling out GDR or Soviet flags in the East. I guess being pro-Russian if not pro-Putin is these Germans way of saying ‘up yours’ to Bild, Der Spiegel and the whole NATO-dominated German press and Merkel government.

I will be watching the Saker’s blog, like many of you, to read his thoughts on this subject. But I am with him if Russia sends ground troops it would be walking into a U.S.-Saudi-Turkish-Israeli arranged trap, especially when Russians are suddenly fighting ISIS while the US under Obomber isn’t doing a damned thing. Perhaps Moscow’s goal is to ‘heighten the contradictions’ eg have Lavrov or Putin speak to the UN later this month and directly throw down the gauntlet to the U.S. ‘where the hell is your bombing campaign against ISIS and why has it been pinpricks while we’re engaged?’ but since Samantha Power is a psychopath she will just respond by blaming Russia for Assad’s barrel bombs and claiming that Moscow and Assad created the Islamic State rather than Uncle Sam and his local ‘allies’.

Even just Russian airpower and Russian personnel based in the coastal redoubt of Latakia surrounded by friendly Allawites and Christians who pray for Putin, Assad and even Nasrallah’s health daily is not without its risks. What if ISIS suddenly is found to have a huge boatload of Stinger missiles they ‘captured from the Iraqis’, which of course we conveniently weren’t told about for months despite all the numerous ISIS threats to kill Americans on American soil? Amazing that will be and how quiet the MSM that told us we should all panic about ISIS will be — while the neocon scumbags not so secretly salivate about the ISI…er, Al Nusra…er, ‘Free Syrian Army’ handing Moscow another 1980s Afghanistan. Which they so obviously and desperately wanted in eastern Ukraine but didn’t get. Not because Russia ‘surrendered’ as the ‘hooray patriots’ say but because Putin cleverly armed and funded the Novorossiya Armed Forces that kicked Kiev’s butt with minimal direct Russian participation last August.

Hopefully if the airpower and stepped up training presence is Russian the boots on the ground at the fiercest fighting will still be Iranian, Lebanese Hezbollah and Syrian Arab Army. We rather suspect too given Putin and Xi’s consultations this week in Beijing around the 70th anniversary of VJ Day China is sending money and possibly its own warships to Tartus as a symbolic and tangible show of support.