OLIVER BOYD BARRETT—In terms of manpower I frankly find it inconceivable that NATO would be able to persuade the citizens of member powers to tolerate any attempt to force them onto the battlefield in defense either of Ukraine or of NATO itself. They are far too smart. Stolternburg recently talked of 100,000 troops in readiness being available in one week, 200,000 in a month and, ultimately 500,000. Without reference to the sheer cost of such an operation, I again find these figures not only unlikely in themselves but also wildly insufficient against a likely response of towards a million Russian troops. The size of Russia’s armed forces and the pace of its monthly recruitment of contracted volunteers is such as to allow Russia just today to announce plans to allow up to 300,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine to take vacations and otherwise to be rotated into this summer and fall.
Oliver Boyd-Barrett
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Oliver Boyd-Barrett
Critical scholar of media and communication, propaganda, and international news media and film. Geopolitical analyst.
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EDITOR—Mostafa Khoshcheshm, a Tehran-based analyst and professor at Fars Media Faculty, said he was not expecting strategic changes to Iran’s foreign policy.
The foreign policy file, he explained, “is decided by the entire establishment, mostly at the Supreme National Security Council, where [there are] representatives of the government as well as the armed forces, the Iranian supreme leader and the Parliament.
If Donald Trump comes into office, I don’t really expect any kind of change, any talks between the two sides, or any change in the present course of actions,” Khoshcheshm told Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera concludes that in the end, Pezeshkian will be in charge of applying state policy outlined by Khamenei, who wields ultimate authority in the country.
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OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT—Netanyahu and even Benny Gantz (invited by Washington without Netanyahu being advised) both confirm Israel’s intention to proceed with a ground operation against Rafah, demonstrating that there is little point in trying to divide Israeli leadership. Biden continues to send weapons to Israel, yet says that the US cannot stomach the loss of another 30,000 Palestinian lives. As Alastair Crooke notes in interview with Judge Napolitano today, Biden, despite the fact that he claims that Rafah is a red line, actually has no red line – he is failing to show Israel that there are consequences for mass murder. Biden’s plan to build a pier for offloading aid will take at least two years to implement, and is a clumsy, contorted route for getting aid to people who needed it months ago by the most direct route possible. Crooke thinks that the IDF has a lot more preparation to complete before going into Rafah: it has the potential of trouble in the West Bank during Ramadan, which started two days ago, and given the scale of resistance it is likely to meet in and from Lebanon and Iraq.
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OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT—The effete leaders of the Western World stubbornly persist in repeating all their mistakes. So, knowing that their obsessive craving for a sanctions regime that might work the way they think it should work is actually a rather pathetic delusion which only makes Russia more independent and more prosperous than ever, and which diminishes Western trade and profitability and pushes up the cost of energy for Western industry and is right now pushing Europe into recession and deindustrialization, what do they do? Even the IMF has told Washington and Europe that its sanctions packages are counterproductive.
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OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT—Scott Ritter today in an interview with Ania K says of him that he was not a good man, that he was a white supremacist (for example, he called Georgians cockroaches and advocated the shooting of Chechnyan Muslims) that he was a traitor to Russia who, in the 1990s, identified more with the West than with Russia. A lot of his funding came from non-Russian NGOs that were “democracy-promotion” fronts for Western intelligence. Ritter claims that Navalny was groomed, perhaps recruited, by the CIA at Yale (the paperwork that sent Navalny to Yale was signed off on, says Ritter, by then US ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul) with a view to returning him to Russia as an opposition figure whose purpose was to bring down Vladimir Putin.