THE SAKER—The quick way to summarize this development is to say that both the S-500 and the Zircon have no comparable competitors anywhere in the world, not even vaguely comparable ones. Both the S-500 and the Zircon missiles are way, waaaay ahead of any other weapons system in their categories. Even better, the Empire has nothing, and really I mean absolutely nothing, it could oppose to either one of these weapons systems. And with not too much hyperbole, it would be fair to say that, once fully deployed, the S-500 will make most of the US/NATO aviation and tactical/operational and even some strategic missiles completely obsolete. As for the Zircon, it does the same thing to the USN’s surface fleet. To say that this is huge would be an understatement, especially since US/NATO force planners must now decide what to do about this, and that is no small task considering that is now becoming obvious that US/NATO force planners made some truly major mistakes in their assumptions about what the modern 21st century battlefield will really look like.
RUSSIAN MIGHT
-
-
Free Fall—making sense of a confusing world. On US provocations, Putin’s response and more.
30 minutes readMESHED GEARS—The CIS continues to benefit from the fixed price agreements on oil and gas sales to the PRC which Putin negotiated near the peak price in 2015, and is taking payment in industrial goods to build the GDP of the CIS while eliminating most dollar denominated debt (and investments). By building ties with, and working with the PRC, Putin has ensured that the CIS will remain a significant member of the coming multi-polar order. The reality is that, on its current trajectory, the USA will not. That is not because of anything Putin wants or has done, but because the USA has consistently acted against the interests of everyone else, without ever counting the costs to itself.
The leftists who don’t like Putin have missed all of this. The world is in transition. This increases dangers and opportunities. Putin is a competent leader, able to negotiate the Scylla and Charybdis of external and internal forces, while making the CIS as a whole stronger, and gaining it friends who know that, unlike the USA which is only able to inspire fear, but not respect, that the CIS can be trusted to be consist and supportive. This has great value in and of its own right.
-
PEPE ESCOBAR—Patrushev knew Moscow could not offer any substantial measure of support to the current Kabul arrangement because doing so would burn bridges the Russians would need to cross in the process of engaging the Taliban. Patrushev knows that the continuation of Team Ghani is absolutely unacceptable to the Taliban – whatever the configuration of any future power-sharing agreement. So Patrushev, according to diplomatic sources, definitely was not impressed.
-
ANDREI MARTYANOV—I also love to use Andrei Andreevich Gromyko’s famous dictum that ten years of negotiations is better than one day of war. United States desperately needed a summit with Russia after the events around LDNR in April this year. The United States needed this dialogue for a variety of reasons and Russians, as I state non-stop for many years, will talk to the devil himself if need be, because Russians know what real war is better than anyone in the world, let alone American politicians, and Russians are, obviously, keenly aware of the firepower they have at their disposal. At Geneva both sides agreed to talk about “strategic stability”.
-
PEPE ESCOBAR—The prequel to Sea Breeze took place last week, via a farcical Britannia Rules The Waves stunt enacted like a Monty Python sketch – yet with potentially explosive overtones.
Imagine waiting at a bus stop somewhere in Kent and finding a soggy blob – nearly 50 pages – of secret documents in a trash bin detailing Ministry of Defense elaborations on the explicitly provocative deployment of the Defender destroyer off Sebastopol, in the Crimean coast.
Even a BBC journalist embedded with the destroyer smashed the official London spin that this was a mere “innocent passage”. Moreover, the Defender weapons were fully loaded – as it advanced two nautical miles inside Russian waters. Moscow released a video documenting the stunt.