Dire Times

The Financial Times reported earlier today that “Ukraine” (i.e. NATO) has fired a British Storm Shadow on a Russian facility in Kursk within the past 12 hours; this is reportedly confirmed by a Russian source that claims to have found SS fragments with identifying markings.

Assuming the report is accurate it would seem so far that Western long range missiles are being targeted at sites fairly close to the border with Ukraine and arguably contained along the lines initially adumbrated by Washington following Russia’s attack on Vovchansk.

There is still some lack of clarity as to where or how the latest “Biden” directive green-lighting use of long-range missiles on targets in Russia actually came from.

Was there an actual directive? We are not sure. Was it really a Blinken-Sullivan initiative they attributed to a senile and angry old man? We are not sure. I notice with amusement that Mercouris speculates it was a petulant response to Biden being snubbed in Rio by Lulu whose hosting of the G20 watered down the resolution on Ukraine and Lulu didn’t wait for Biden to join the photo shoot.

Was the greenlighting merely a rumor sent by neocon “officials” or even by Zelenskiy to the New York Times in an effort to create “facts on the ground?” We don’t know.

Perhaps we will never be sure as to who triggered what is potentially but hopefully not World War Three.

Such is American “democracy,” totally controlled by undemocratic forces or through undemocratic means for obscure reasons at the service of obscure interests.

Possible explanations include that the attack was a retaliation against Russia’s recent escalation of its attacks on Ukrainian energy and transport systems and against the speed of Russian advances on the battlefields which now include a good portion of the cities of Vovchansk, Kupyansk, Chasiv Yar, Kurakhove, and Toretsk while several others are on the precipice of falling to Russian troops. This would also help explain Washington’s green-lighting of the use by Ukraine of anti-personnel mines (banned by 160 countries but not the US nor Russia). According to this logic the Biden administration is fearful that Ukraine will implode before Biden leaves office, neatly bookending his administration with,at one end, US failure after 10 years to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan and, at the other end, it’s failure to win its proxy war in Ukraine with Russia, crying in protest against a largely mythical fable about North Korean troops.

Biden and his team want to avoid that humiliation and pass it on instead to Trump who, as a result of these latest decisions may well have to fight the war a great deal longer using up the West’s badly depleted ATACMS, Storm Shadows, Taurus, NASAMS and all the other useless Western Wonder Weapons (WWW) whose only benefit is the profit they earn for the armaments producers. As they lose in Ukraine and beat the drums for war against Iran and China, Trump and Biden can satiate their blood-lust as they applaud the massacres of men, women and children in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Truly, theirs is the legacy of the holocausts of Native Americans, Amazonian and West Africans of the rubber trade, the Jews, and others too numerous to name.