BRIAN CLOUGHLEY—The Western media’s reporting of President Putin’s speech to Russia’s Federal Assembly on March 1 was intriguing. It concentrated almost entirely on Russian weapons’ developments, with the New York Times, for example, reporting that the President “used the speech to reassure Russians that the military buildup was taking place.” The 1500 words of the NYT report were almost entirely devoted to Putin’s description of Russian weapons designed to deter US-NATO adventurism, and a mere 65 words covered the social improvement programs he described.
RUSSIAN MIGHT
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D. ORLOV—In short, Russia is to most Americans a mystery wrapped in an enigma, and there simply isn’t a large enough pool of intelligent Americans with good knowledge of Russia to draw upon, whereas to many Russians the US is an open book. As far as the actual American “intelligence” and “security” services, they are all bloated bureaucratic boondoggles mired in political opportunism and groupthink that excel at just two things: unquestioningly following idiotic procedures, and creatively fitting the facts to the politics du jour. “Proving” that Iraq has “weapons of mass destruction”—no problem!
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Watch Russian nuclear sub fire barrage of 4 ballistic missiles in stunning HD (VIDEO)
5 minutes readThe Russian Defense Ministry has released footage of a Borei-class submarine firing a barrage of four Bulava missiles – the first such test for this type of submarine. The test was conducted on Tuesday in the White Sea. The video published on Wednesday shows some pre-launch activities on board the Yuriy Dolgorukiy, the lead of the project. Then the submarine is shown firing four Bulava missiles at a test range in Kamchatka in quick succession.
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THE SAKER—There are roughly two camps vying for power inside the Kremlin: I call them the Atlantic Integrationists and the Eurasian Sovereignists. The former group is a pure product of the 1990s. We can think of them as “liberals”, IMF/Washington Consensus/WTO/WB types; folks who came to power thanks to the regime of oligarchs which ran Russia from about 1990 to 2000 and which was both deeply pro-American and which had extremely close ties to Israel and the various political Jewish and Zionist organizations in the West. The latter group is primarily a product of the armed forces and the security services. The “bridge” between the two is, by the way, the Russian military industrial complex in which both groups are represented.
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STEPHEN LENDMAN—Current Syrian air defense systems were produced by Soviet Russia, way inadequate for current needs. Russian state arms exporter Rosoboronexport is ready to supply S-300s if approved by the Kremlin. It’s not forthcoming, not now at least. According to Putin’s military technical cooperation aide Vladimir Kozhin, Russia will not supply S-300s to Syria’s military – nor are talks about possible delivery being held. Kozhin falsely claimed Syrian armed forces have “all” the air defense systems “they need” – a shameful remark, clearly untrue.