Fresh Escalations
The world has grown a great deal more dangerous over the past 24 to 48 hours on at least two accounts, principally: (1) Israel’s attack on Al Quds leaders in the Iranian consulate in Damascus who were very likely meeting to coordinate their strategy on behalf of Palestine; (2) Romanian-French plans to enter Ukraine and Moldova in preparation, amongst other things, for possible combat in Odessa, while Finland is the seventh NATO country to sign a security deal with Ukraine with the aim of helping Ukraine rebuild its energy sector, protect its border and treat Ukrainian military personel. These bilateral security agreements, Dima notes, also have secret components that may embrace the sending of troops into Ukraine. There have been more NATO threats against the Kirch bridge in Ukraine but this is now a symbolic target only, given that Russia has completed landbridge road and rail connections via Mariupol.
Trump Parenthesis
Meantime, before we get to these two developments that I have headlined above, even critics of the USA are asking the wrong questions. Yes, of course, the USA is a rogue power, as we all know, as are the activities of many of its sponsors among the vassal States that are wedded to US buyouts for the benefit of their coopted elites.
Biden seems hopelessly lost as his Democratic machine tries to spin the embarrassments of Ukraine and of Gaza and of Hunter with sufficient speed and confusion so as to minimize his poor prospects for November.
We can and should argue as to whether the foreign policy misery of a Biden administration could possibly be much worse than that presaged by the potential victory of Trump. Trump appreciates a good genocide as well as any AIPAC-elevated US politician. He doesn’t like Ukraine, because the Biden family got richer on Ukraine and because the Democrats used Ukraine to buttress their “Russiagate” hoax narrative. He can see the wisdom of being pally with Russia so as to separate Russia from Trump’s major adversary, and the major adversary of most neoconservatives, which of course is China. He can even take credit for launching economic war with China. He has on occassion proven less wholly warlike than his MICIMATT peers, as I would argue he did in Syria. But this was at the expense of ordering the murder of Iran’s military chief, by which means he topped up on his destruction of any possibility of more normal relations with Iran, to the delight of Netanyahu.
All of this is important and worthy of consideration but I am not sure any of it is more important than what a Trump administration will mean for the US, if and when Trump embarks on the fascist policies he has long articulated and that he routinely practices in threatening and vengeful assualts on his opponents, all and sundry. The Democrats’ electoral interest in stoking fear of Trump’s overt predilection for dictatorship and faschism is sadly overshadowed by the reality that such fear is hardly groundless and that within the USA a Trump administration will hand over the empire ever more soundly and permanently into the hands of the oligarchs, a freakish caste of beings that every day more proves itself to be maximally arrogant, self-centered, insatiably greedy, amoral, blinkered, ruthless and stupid, an odious mix indeed. And an extremely dangerous one.
Israel Attacks Iran
I talked about Israel’s attack on Iran yesterday in my post Theocratic Fascisms. It is unreasonable to presume, as Washington would have us do, that somehow Israel was acting on its own in striking an Iranian target on what is, in effect, Iranian diplomatic territory protected under international law by the Vienna Convention, when it is the USA that insists on continuing to supply Israel with high grade weaponry in the midst of Israel’s genocidal slaughter of over 32,000 Palestinians, and its much announced intent to launch a ground offensive on Rafah, where over 1.3 million Palestinians are concentrated, and its egregious murder of aid workers such as the 7 Chef’s Kitchen workers deliberately massacred this week (I believe they were seeking to compensate for international withdrawal without sufficient pretext of support for the UNRWA in Gaza. We should note in passing that not only does Washington continue to supply arms to Israel but that it does so in violation of international law and US law which require that such weapons be used legally, responsibly and with respect to principles of proportionality.
The strike on Iran should not be seen in any other light than as a provocation against Iran that, like the many provocations of the collective West against Russia and the Donbass up to 2022, is indicative not simply of a willingness to “prod the bear,” but, on the basis of historical analysis, is indicative of intent to aggression at any time, at the aggressor’s convenience, which can take the form either of an initiation of conflict by provoking an armed response or a false flag planted by the aggressor to make it seem that the target has initiated aggression.
Prodding the bear of Iran on the presumption that it has control over the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas is a misconception that at best is unproven and at worst totally incorrect. There is some Iranian financial aid to one or more of these groups, but this is modest, and has far less influence over these parties, I would argue, and is far less problematic than US financial aid to Israel in implicating the USA directly and knowingly both in Israeli’s genocide against the Palestinian people, and Israeli’s stream of murderous activity over many years against targets in Lebanon, Syria and Iran (including the outright murder of many Iranian nuclear scientists).
In fact, Shiite militia in Iraq who a while ago were attacking US installations in Iraq and Syria in protest against Israeli genocide and US support of it, have recently turned very quiet, and this may be because Iran has advised them against such behavior.
Unlike Israel, whose economy is now in a nosedive as a result of this war - which did not begin on October 7, 2023 but in 1948, and for which Israel is primarily responsible - the Iranian economy is booming, as a result of the robustness of oil prices, something that also benefits Russia, its ally. Iran has no interest in war but if it is forced into war then Iran, just like Syria and with Russian support will respond as necessary. Russia will then be fighting on at least two if not more fronts and will be tempted more than ever to test its nuclear superiority.
NATO Prepares Action for Ukraine
Dima of the Military Summary Channel reports the sighting of armed vehicles (very likely including Abrams tanks) loaded on train across northern Romania on their way either to Ukraine or Moldova. The Romanian MoD appears to be readying the country for its entry into Ukraine and/or Moldova. It has drafted a bill that would empower the President, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, to use its armed forces outside of the country, in order to protect its citizens from hybrid threats. This therefore greatly magnifies the scope for pretexts for intervention, and copies the US example set over so many decades of imperial meddling. Romania calculates that 600,000 Moldovan residents are Romanian citizens and that another 100,000 Romanian citizens populate the border area of Ukraine with Romania, mainly along Ukrainian’s southern border with Romania.
This could indicate that Romania is readying for a potential Russian assault that would threaten Romanian citizens in these areas, or for some kind of “pre-emptive” occupation of parts of either Ukraine or Moldova and that these forces would be available in the event of any NATO effort to resist a Russian attempt on Odessa region.
The Romanian Armed Forces have been conducting their third exercise this year with the Moldovan Armed Forces. In addition of these indications of trouble, there has been an increased presence of NATO countries’ armed forces close to Ukraine, including the French Eagle Mission, the expansion of the Air Policing Mission, and a build-up of military cargo to Romania. Dima anticipates a similar alliance between the United Kingdom and either one of the Baltic States or Poland or both. He further notes a western initiative that may transfer the contact group on Ukrainian defense issues to NATO control, with a view, Dima asserts (or speculates) to ensuring (and I dont understand at this point in time how exactly this would work) that Kiev would continue to receive weapons, even if Trump is re-elected. This is coming in the context of a proposal by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to establish a fund of allied contributions worth $100 billion over five years for Ukraine as part of a package for alliance leaders to sign off when they gather in Washington in July.
Of course, the war might well be over, even before this is agreed, or before the first tranche is handed over. In any case, $20 billion a year is far from sufficient to enable Ukraine to continue fighting, let alone continue existing as a State, and much of the money would flow not to Ukraine but to European arms manufacturers. The initiative may be another European attempt to break ground in a much longer-term campaign for a stronger Europe, one able to raise its own money and recruit its own armies and, most importantly, sustain Europe’s existing, dominant caste for the forseeable future.
None of this undermines current concerns about Ukraine’s inability to attract sufficient aid from its Western sponsors, whether or not Mike Johnson lets through another aid pacakge on to the House floor after the Easter recess, whether or not Ukraine can hope (it cannot) mobilize any army sufficiently large and sufficiently well trained and with sufficient weaponry to compete meaningfully with Russian capability - doubts on all of which have been acknowledged by a cluster of Ukrainian officers for a recent article in Politico. The foolhardy initiatives of countries like France and Romania are not convincing evidence of a convincing NATO attack on Russia but of their capacity to waste hundreds and thousands of more lives, needlessly, and to guarantee an economic, political and moral crisis for Europe.
Bloomberg today anticipates a Russian offensive in June. It admits what we have known for at least the past year namely, that Russia is winning in the production of ammunition (and in most other weapons categories, I would argue, both in terms of production quantity and quality), while Western aid has sharply declined, and for many weapons Ukraine is limiting firing to one shell a day. Bloomberg notes that Russian oil exports are at their highest this year (so much for Ukrainian pinprick drone attacks on Russian oil refineries), half of which (over 9 million barrels) is going to China, and 7 million to India and a smaller amount to Pakistan.
Russia has also announced that in the past ten days it has contracted 16,000 volunteers for the SMO and that this year so far it has added a further 100,000 to the 240,000+ recruited last year, a rate of 1,700 a day. Yet Zelenskiy has stated - and Dima finds this plausible - that Russia intends to mobilize a further 300,000 from June 1st. Zelenskiy himself, according to Dima, is still contemplating a further mobilization of around half a million, reducing the age of conscription from 27 to 25. (I suspect either there was a lot of misinformation about the lowest age of conscription in previous Ukrainian mobilizations, suggesting that it was much lower than in fact it is, or that there has been a lot of illegal mobilization - or perhaps simply recruitment - that does not get reported and which does take much younger men).
Ukrainian Drone Swarms
Ukraine has staged a drone swarm attack on a Russian Shaheed drone manufacturing facility in Tartarstan, some 700 miles from Ukraine. It apparently hit a dormitory. I know of no injuries. It is indicative of a new phase in Ukraine’s drone warfare and provides some evidence, perhaps, in support of Ukrainian claims that its autonomous manufacture of drones is not competing with Russian. Skeptics doubt this, noting first of all that any money flowing into such enterprise likely reflects Western-related investment and aid, and that the production facilities, hidden away in small units across different locations in Ukraine are hardly likely to be cost-effective, safe or sustainable.
Crocus City Hall
On the Crocus City Hall terrorism of March 22 there are new mainstream media reports that the CIA provided information to Russia that the attack was not only anticipated but that it specifically referenced Crocus City Hall. It seems odd that this additional information should have surfaced only now, and that it has already been disconfirmed by Russian sources. The new claims seem to contradict previous US claims, through the New York Times, that it did not provide Russia with all of the relevant information in its possession (from Mossad?) because it was wary
of revealing its sources and methods of intelligence collection. In any case, the new reports still do not explain why the original warning indicated that the danger would last only for a 48 period including - most of the period of the patriotic rock concert that played at Crocus Hall on the nights of March 8, 9 and 10 - and that no further warning was issued after that. The persistence of this controversy may conceivably relate to Western and Ukrainian plans for future activities of this nature, on the presumption that Russia is correct in its hypotheses of Ukrainian and Western involvement.