Following my completion of the last update for this post, and then a 3 hour car journey, I received news that earlier this evening California time there were reports of heavy missile strikes across Ukraine and in Kiev. There were also reports of an attack on an airfield in southern Russia.
Putin’s Response
The essence of our dilemma is that if Putin does not respond both to the terrorist attacks in Bryansk and, more importantly, to the attacks on Russian nuclear facilities that occurred last weekend - very possibly with the active participation and knowledge of the CIA and MI6, with our without the approval of their political bosses -then he will be perceived as weak and that NATO, including the US, through their proxy, Ukraine, will continue to apply pressure on Russia to the point that the Kremlin will, in one sense of another - the West will hope - throw in the towel.
I don’t think that the agony of the dilemma is remotely changed by taking the view that the bombers were legitimate targets of war. The bombers were where they were because of the New START treaty. The West, through its proxy, have violated the remaining shreds of international nuclear security. All Western leaders are now thoroughly compromised, their childishness, unseriousness and fundamentral absence of morality, integrity and trustworthiness demolished. Perhaps it is possible to do business with such people, but it is impossible to depend on them, in any way. They have to be controlled or removed and that merely adds to Putin’s dilemma.
The West would be delighted, of course, if Russia was to fold its hand so as to give the human species a few more years of existence before it shrivels in the heat of climate change. Western leaders would proceed to apply the same kind of tactics to China through their Asian proxies (told last week by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to expect imminent war with China and to build up their military expenditure towards 5% of GDP) and then we would reach the same point. In the meantime, Russia would fall to Western capital and exploitation as a subaltern in a world controlled fundamentally by a globalist elite centered in Washington.
China would then be at the receiving end of the most intense Globalist pressure. We can assume, meantime, that Iran (no longer protected by Russia) would be forced to implode and that much of the rest of the Middle East would be given over to Israeli hegemony. The Palestinians - those few of them left across Israel as a whole following the genocide, would be pushed out and resettled God knows where. Fissues within the BRICS would probably intensify, most of the Global South ceding to the forces of globalism. Nationalism everywhere would cede to cynicism, amidst growing extremes of inequality.
This would not be a pleasant world. Quite the reverse. It would be a world governed by oligarchs. Most people would be less well off, their basic human rights would be more and more vulnerable to capricious power, they would have far less hope. Their leaders would lack little by way of true legitimacy beyond raw power, unable to offer anything substantial to make the lives of the majority better, resigned to a world enveloped by the ravages of human pollution and climate change.
But Armageddon would have been avoided. What a world we have made, so unnecessarily, so foolishly, so recklessly, when Armaggedon almost becomes an attractive option.
Putin must in these moments feel an enormous, almost unimaginable burden of responsibility for the human species. His first and foremost loyalty, he knows, is to the people of the Russian Federation and most of them, right now, would like him to show strength, not weakness.
If he is to show strength. perhaps the quickest, least problematic way of doing so is to exert decisive action on Ukraine that will either force it to capitulate or simply reduce it to a slither of what it once was.
That outcome does not have to threaten NATO, not directly at least, since Ukraine is not even a member of NATO and NATO knows, in its heart, that Russia has no intention of threatening other countries of Europe unless they continue to threaten Russia. This outcome is the least likely to demand a response in kind.
What kind of decisive action would this be: if the Oreshnik is all that it is claimed to be (and we must harbor doubts), then a few Oreshniks might very well do the job. These would be the least likely to require a military response. Nuclear weapons could be applied, possibly with forewarnings to selected cities or facilities so that populations can flee, with the understanding that forewarnings will be compromised and no longer honored in the event of indications of a military response, together with advice as to which additional targets will be selected in the event of a chosen response from the other side.
A decisive move on Ukraine is the response that is least likely to threaten the world. A response that might actually be more fitting to the precise circumstances would be to hit NATO bombers in one or more of the facilities in which they are held in Europe, or even in the US (much more dangerous). Such a strike could just be accepted by NATO as par for the course, so to speak, a measure that changes nothing and could be tolerated. Or it could lead to some kind of counter-response, and the process of escalation would continue until sooner rather than later we end up at the same point we are now.
Naturally, this is already extremely dangerous.
Might the US in effect, throw in the towel? There is even less likelihood of this than that Russia would do so, given that the US is the prime belligerant of the conflict, that the personality of the country’s President is a strange mixture of arrogance, avariciousness, dementia, instability, ignorance, insouciance, stupidity - largely a reflection of the country’s Congressional leadership, corrupted by corporate interest, AIPAC and its like. Further, the US under neocon pressure has been actively pursuing a policy of naked global hegemony for several decades.
If Russia decisively hits Ukraine, and has the active, outspoken support of key BRICS allies, China above all, perhaps India, I think this (our current dilemma) might just be a sufficiently loud warning to the US that the time has come for it to recalibrate its sense of who it is in the world and how this needs to adjust in a manner which is not at the same time an existential threat to the species.
Do I think this is likely? No, of course not.
Battlefields
Notwithstanding fears a few days ago that Ukrainian strikes on bridges in Bryansk would unsettle Russia’s logistical support for its advances in Sumy oblast, Russia has nonetheless continued to advance through the first line of Ukraine’s defense belt towards the second. So Russia has taken Kindrativka, Kondrativka, Bilovody, Andriivka and Yablunivka and forces are now pressing on towards the second line of defense at Varachyne, Khotin, Pysarivka, and Mala Korchchivke. To move directly on to the city of Sumy, Russia would need to penetrate thick forest; it might better be advised to move around the forest, and some analysts envisage a Russian attack on Sumy from Marine in the east, and today Russian forces have reportedly entered Prokhody, west of Marine.
Further east in the Sumy oblast, Russian forces are still attempting to take the settlement of Yunakivka, and moving on the forest around the village of Sadky. Thirty kilometers or so from Khotin, however, Ukrainian forces are making headway on their assault on the Russian settlements of Tyotkino and Popovo-Lezhachi which are nearly encircled, although there is plenty of scope for Russians to send reinforcements through the mainland.
In Kharkiv, Russian forces are subjecting the city of Kharkiv to heavy drone bombing. North of the city, on the border, Russia has resumed its offensive in the city of Vovchansk, whose northern half is mostly under Russian control (not changed much since this time last year) and is moving south east through Tykhe to Vovchansky Khuhory, with plans to cross the Volcha.
In southern Kupyansk, Russian forces are encircling the settlement of Zelene Dolyna, and may make this a basis for a strike south on the city of Lyman. Further south, Russian troops are a mere 4 kilometers from the city of Siversk.
Further south and west there is considerable Russian activity in the direction of the settlements of Odradne, Komar and Fedorivka; then to the west, around Huliapole, and Orakhiv. In the city of Kherson, Russian FAV drones have destroyed the town hall.
Afterword
Senior German officials are saying that some form of Taurus missile possibly developed in a Ukrainian-German collaboration or possibly just confirming that Taurus missiles are already in Ukraine by some route or another that preserves a cloak of legality for Germany, is available and ready for us within a couple of days. There will be a meeting between Merz and Trump in Washington tomorrow or very soon. In the meantime, there is an uprising within the MAGA movement, led possibly by Steve Bannan and Tucker Carlson and, possibly, Donald Trump Jnr, in the US protesting the “Ukrainian” (=CIA/MI6 etc) attack on Russian nuclear assets in Russian airfields, and who are sharply critical of Senators Lyndsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal whose meeting with officials in Kiev just before the attacks may in some way have been instrumental to their execution. We cannot in these circumstances presume without better evidence that Trump will actually support further such attacks on Russia or will continue to support NATO aggression against Russia or that Trump will not pull away from Ukraine/Europe with more resolve than indicated hitherto.