Therapy Over, Back to Fear and Trembling

From “Therapeutic Pause” to Satanic Madness

Well, the “therapeutic pause” of midweek was about enough of therapy as our Masters of the Universe - for the most part white, western, corporate chieftains and plutocrats who pay our politicians, suck up their wealth through the MICIMATT, dictate what is sayable to an always pliant and complicit mainstream media and academic managers - could endure. As we approach the weekend, they will be only too happy to see that they have successfully brought the world back to escalation and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Asked about the likelihood of nuclear armageddon, John Mearsheimer the other day told Judge Napolitano that he thought this was extremely unlikely. His grounds for saying this from his comfortable perch in elite academia were principally that, at the end of the day, nobody is going to be so stupid as to go along with nuclear war. Mearsheimer is a deeply rational man; rationality is his religion and, where he sits, he probably doesn’t see too much outrageous irrationality on a day-to-day basis.

The rest of us see our society is suffused in irrationality, magical thinking, media distraction, vanity, and murderous criminality, often institutional, often commanded - perhaps usually commanded - by the senior echelons of our incredibly hierarchic, deeply unequal, racist and in other ways unjust social, political, economic and cultural systems, almost every part of these being subservient in one way or another to the great American fetish of war and warrior-like behavior. And if pervasive irrationality is not sufficiently persuasive for those who would prefer to dwell on the low level of “likelihood” of nuclear war (and what idiot would really find ANY level of likelihood acceptable?), then why not dwell on the many occasions - some of them discussed in his last book, The Doomsday Machine, by Daniels Ellsberg) on which we have narrowly escaped accidental nuclear war. These dangers are exponentially heightened by the spread of nuclear weapon technology.

I am going to continue to worry about nuclear war until this infernal, satanic technology and its human serfs are finally dissassembled, disambulated, and discombobulated.

Sevastopol

And this is a good segway therefore to a reconsideration of the events in Sevastopol last Sunday. Whether or not one assesses this as an accident (as does John Mearsheimer), incompetent targetting (was the original target an airfield, or an orthodox cathedral?) or just another example of those horrific, sadistic, war-crimes, the mere disclosure of which deprived Julian Assange his freedom and basic human rights for twelve years, crimes to which the US is routinely prone in every conflict.

What mainly counts is that Russia, entirely correctly,attributes culpability to both Ukraine and the USA/NATO. As readers will know, Russia has promised retaliation. What confounds many of us is the simplicity with which we understand the term “retaliation.” Retaliation does not necessarily mean a gun-fight on the O.K. Corral or the assassination of the enemy’s leaders. It can mean stepping up its war effort, or the introduction of ever more devastating instruments of war (think FAB 3000 bombs). Which way Russia chooses to go, we will eventually witness. But note that Russia is already giving indications of a willingness to supply advanced weapons to enemies of NATO such as North Korea and to sign a similar mutual security pact with Iran (which will likely be endorsed, once today’s Iranian election is out of the way - and whether it goes to conservatives or to reformers will scarcely make any difference under the continuing Supreme Leadership of Khamenei).

This was retaliation for Western greenlighting of “Ukrainian” targeting of advanced missiles against assets anywhere in the territory of Russia. Russia has determined that the events of last Sunday were deliberate and that the US and Ukraine bear responsibility. An adviser to Zelenskiy has all but admitted that it (the firing of an ATACMS missile, equipped with cluster warhead, against bathers on a popular beach and on a national, religious holiday) was deliberate. Almost immediately thereafter I saw reports, and I have no idea whether these were or were not accurate, that in a first measure of retaliation, Russia had fired upon US Global Hawk surveillance drones that are used for the collection of targeting data and which were surely implicated in the Sevastopol attrocity, and had possibly bought one or two of these down. Almost in the same breath, it seemed, came reports both of British fighter jets over the Black Sea, and of two (US) warships headed for the Dardelles (which, if true, will place a very heavy pressure on Turkish president Erdogan, who is obligated to stop any such use of the passageway by warships).

Russia has now warned the US that it will shoot down (or shoot up) any such NATO drones over the Black Sea or any such NATO fighters over the Black Sea, or, I presume, any such warships headed for the Black Sea. This is significant because it precipitately escalates the conflict into a potential and very probably direct clash between Russian and NATO forces that both sides, to this point of time, have (sort of) tried to avoid. In the meantime, the Biden White House, which just the other day dismissed the possibility of US “troops on the ground” in Ukraine anywhere in the near future, has now admitted to the sending of US contractors to Ukraine, something which has been going on ever since before the SMO of 2022. Some such contractors have surely been killed, but many more may now be killed in an intensification of the conflict, and in a greater blaze of public scrutiny, and now the Biden White House will be able to say that they warned the American people.

Patriots

Russia, in its turn, is tuning up the scale of its air defense in Crimea. Within the past few days, the Russian MoD has claimed to have shot down four Patriot missiles fired from Ukraine, likely into Russian territory, and to have shot down two Ukrainian MiG 29s, most likely in the Kharkiv area. It has continued to rain down drones and missiles on the three Ukrainian airfields that are expected to host Western-donated F-16s and/or from which Ukraine launches MiGs for attacks on the Russian mainland. The US has, within the past few hours, made explicit to its allies that it is privileging Ukraine in the supply of Patriot missiles and does not have any to spare for anything else.

In this context, therefore, it is entirely extraordinary that the US is attempting to arm-twist Israel into giving up eight of its Patriot batteries to benefit Ukraine. But, as we have seen, Russia is now shooting down more and more of these or attacking Patriot launchers, and to good effect.

So the US ends up making Israel angry by privileging Ukraine over Israel (perhaps even further undermining the efficacy of Israel’s “iron dome”), just when Ukraine was contemplating an invasion of Lebanon against Hezbollah with a view to forcing the US into this Middle East war. It will also make Kiev angry as Kiev comes to the realization that even when the US goes to considerable further lengths to bestow more of its taxpayer funded weapons on Ukraine, these weapons always, in the end, prove vulnerable to superior Russian technology and ingenuity. And as Kiev wakes up to this realization, it will worry that the Patriots in operation for the protection of airfields that host F-16s, will prove ineffective, the F-16s will be shot down at their launch and Russia will make faster progress on the battlefield. To the extent that it will likely make no difference whatsoever if Zelenskiy finally, with reference to a second round of the Swiss Peace Conference, produces another draft of his much-touted but much-derided peace terms for Russia to consider. Even as Zelenskiy does this he is admitting that the Ukrainian army has lost too many men, that it is losing the war and that Kiev “does not have much time left.”

This peace draft of Zelenskiy’s is expected to appear at the tail end of US President Biden’s term of office. The US Presidential debate on CNN yesterday has confirmed to most observers that Biden is simply unfit for the job - now and, of course, in the future. Trump, by contrast, instead of being thought of as senile may be thought of as childish, preferring to talk about porn stars, golf and criminality than about the most important and worrying features of our modern world. But Trump does seem more adult than Biden in his view of the Ukraine conflict and of Zelenskiy - which is very negative. He thinks the war is being lost and that Russia was provoked into it by NATO’s eastern expansion (quelle surprise!). Trump promises to end the Ukrainian conflict even before he takes office. It is not clear how he is going to accomplish this feat or whether he actually has ever agreed to the so-called “Kellogg” plan that his advisers came up with the other day and that presumes, even now, that Russia can easily be bullied by threats of more weapons and more sanctions - tools which significantly failed in Democratic hands and are no more likely to produce results under Trump.

The Battlefields

In the Kharkiv area Ukrainian forces are chasing Russian positions and assets along the borderlands close to Basove where artillery attacks may augur a future ground operation against Russian forces. Ukraine has also fired on Russian energy facilities in the Russian town north of the Russian border with Ukraine, Shebekino, and we must expect a great deal more such attacks in the coming weeks. Russian forces are being redeployed from the south of the combat lines to the Hlyboke/Lyptsi area. There is no significant change in Vovchansk.

In Kupyansk area, Russian forces are advancing south of Synkivka in the direction of Petropavlika. Ukrainians are abandoning positions in Stepova Novoselivka. Russia is subjecting the area around Pishchane to heavy artillery and other fire. To the south, there are heavy clashes in the Kremmina forest north of Bilohorivka (which is now under Russian control)

In the Siversk area Russia has taken the entirety of Rozdolivka, subjecting Ukraine to very heavy losses (4,000+), enabling Russian forces to move northwards up the railways to Siversk itself. They can also move on Siversk from both Vymka which Russia now controls, and Spirne, which Russia very likely will control soon. Dima opines that the struggle for Siversk may turn out to be the big battle of 2024.

I will complete the battlefields summary in my next post.