BOOKS—Russian Peace Threat: Russia Sends Yuri Gagarin Around the World for Peace; US Invades Cuba

The text below constitutes chapter one of a forthcoming book by senior contributing editor Ron Ridenour, to be published later this year by Punto Press, Russia Peace Threat, Pentagon on Alert.

Chapter One

Russia Sends Yuri Gagarin Around the World for Peace: US Invades Cuba

“We saw Yuri as a national and world hero, a great human being. Yuri was very Russian. He was well received in Copenhagen during his long travels. We didn’t know much about these travels with a peace message but we knew he wanted to protect the earth that he saw from above,” Ambassador Mikjail Vanin told me during an interview in Copenhagen (2017). The Russian ambassador to Denmark learned about Yuri’s orbiting the earth and his humanitarian vision as a school boy.

Yuri with a peace dove on his world wide tour

Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was born in Klushino, a small village west of Moscow, in 1934. He was the third of four children and spent his childhood on a collective farm where his father, Alexey Ivanovich Gagarin, worked as a carpenter and bricklayer. His mother, Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina, was a milkmaid.

When Yuri was seven the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. They confiscated the Gagarin’s home and they “shipped his teenage siblings to slave labor camps and they did not return until 1945. Yuri and [brother] Boris sabotaged the German garrison in Klushino, scattering broken glass on roads, mixing chemicals in recharging tank batteries and pushing potatoes up exhaust pipes. One occupier tried to hang Boris from an apple tree with a woolen scarf, but his parents were able to rescue him,” wrote Paul Rodgers, April 2, 2011 in “The Independent.” http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/yuri-gagarin-the-man-who-fell-to-earth-2257505.html

“Amid the horrors, one event stood out for Yuri: a dogfight between two Soviet Yaks and a pair of Messerschmitts, ending in a one-all draw. The Soviet pilot landed near Klushino and the villagers rushed to help. Later, a rescue plane arrived to pick up the downed man and Gagarin scavenged fuel for it. The next morning, the airmen awoke to find him staring at them, entranced. He was still watching as they set fire to the wreck and took off in the rescue plane.”

The Yuri Gagarin Home-Museum in Klushino

Yuri excelled in mathematics and physics, and made aircraft models. After the war, he went to trade and industrial schools in Saratov where he joined a flying club. He made his first solo flight in 1955. After school, he joined the Air Force and learned to fly MiGs. Upon graduating from flight school in November 1957, he married Valentina (“Valy”) Ivanovna Goryacheva. They soon had two daughters: Yelena and Galina.

Gagarin was sent on fighter pilot missions, however he really wanted to become a cosmonaut. Along with 3,000 others, he made an application to be the first Soviet cosmonaut.

He made high marks in the extensive physical and psychological testing while maintaining a calm demeanor as well as his charming sense of humor. Yuri was chosen to be the first man into space because of these skills. His short stature helped too since the capsule of the space craft Vostok 1 was small. https://www.thoughtco.com/yuri-gagarin-first-man-in-space-1779362

“As the cold war reached freezing point, the USA and the Soviet Union entered the space race both hoping to be the first nation to conquer space. In 1957 the Soviets, led by the extraordinarily talented rocket scientist Korolyev, launched the first manmade satellite (sputnik) into orbit. This was soon followed by the first animal in orbit with Laika the dog. Laika sadly never returned to earth but in 1960 the heroic dogs Belka and Strelka successfully orbited the earth for a day and returned safely, laying the final grounds for the first human space flight” wrote Louise Whitworth. https://www.inyourpocket.com/moscow/Yuri-Gagarin_72055f

The 27-year old cosmonaut’s space flight lasted just 108 minutes—enough time to orbit the earth once. He reached an orbital speed of 27,400 kilometers per hour. In his first message to mission control he exclaimed: “The Earth is blue…How wonderful. It is amazing…so beautiful.”

Yuri with his daughters Yelena and Galina

Upon re-entering the earth’s atmosphere he encountered serious technical problems that could have meant death had he not ejected himself from the capsule. From 7,000 meters above the earth Gagarin free-fell several kilometers before opening his parachute and floated down to the ground. Protected by his space suit he was able to withstand the air temperatures of -30c degrees.

English journalist Rodgers describe a strange encounter:

“Anna Takhtarova and her granddaughter, Rita, were weeding potatoes near the village of Smelovka on 12 April, 1961 when a man in a strange orange suit and a bulging white helmet approached across the field. The forest warden’s wife crossed herself but the girl was intrigued. ‘I’m a friend, comrades. A friend,’ shouted the young man, removing his headgear. Takhtarova looked at him curiously. ‘Can it be that you have come from outer space,’ she asked. ‘As a matter of fact, I have,’ replied Yuri Gagarin.

“This story of Gagarin’s return to Earth after orbiting the planet, the most important flight since the Wright brothers’ at Kitty Hawk, was widely disseminated, not least because of its symbolism – a Soviet hero being welcomed home by his fellow peasants, a wise mother and a child of the future. It is probably true in essence, though the details changed with each retelling.”

Back in Moscow, Yuri Gagarin was honored with a six-hour long parade on Red Square. Within days, he embarked on a trip around the world talking passionately about the wonders of the earth. These are excerpts from his key message in 30 countries over two years:

“Circling the earth in the orbital space, I marveled at the beauty of our planet. I saw clouds and their light shadows on the distant dear earth… I enjoyed the rich color spectrum of the earth. It is surrounded by a light blue halo that gradually darkens, becoming turquoise, dark blue, violet, and finally coal black. People of the world! Let us safeguard and enhance this beauty—not destroy it!”

On the day that the Soviet Union ushered in a new world, the United States President John F. Kennedy held a news conference in which he flatly lied that his government was planning any violent action against Cuba. “First, I want to say that there will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by the United States Armed Forces.”

“The basic issue of Cuba is not one between the United States and Cuba. It is between the Cubans themselves. And I intend to see that we adhere to this principle.”

Gagarin, bemedaled, hero of the Soviet Union.

The next day, April 13, CIA Operation 40 was launched from Guatemala. 1400 paramilitaries, mostly Cuban exiles and a handful of US Americans, sailed on U.S. boats to Cuba. The totally unprovoked invasion was underway. The same day, Secretary of State Dean Rusk (1961-9) told reporters, “The American people are entitled to know whether we are intervening in Cuba or intend to do so in the future. The answer to that question is no. What happens in Cuba is for the Cuban people themselves to decide.” (1)

In July, Gagarin’s worldwide peace mission tour found him in England for five days. His early experience as a steelworker stood him in good stead. Rodgers wrote about that visit:

Yuri “’received an invitation from the Amalgamated Union of Foundry Workers in Manchester,’ says Gurbir Singh, an astronomy blogger who is writing a book on the spaceman’s visit. [Yuri Gagarin in London and Manchester: A Smile that Changed the World]. The trip included the union hall, Marx’s High-gate grave and an audience with the Queen.”

Singh concluded that Gagarin’s visit left an impression that thermonuclear war could be prevented.

A son of worker-peasants, Gagarin spread their message of environmentalism, of unity and peace while United States was invading and murdering Cubans, and politicians such as the Democratic Party congressman Victor Anfuso was telling people:

“I want to see our country mobilized to a wartime basis, because we are at war. I want to see our schedules cut in half. I want to see what NASA says it is going to do in ten years done in five. And I want to see some first coming out of NASA, such as the landing on the Moon.”

Anfuso had served in the Second World War in the CIA’s predecessor intelligence service, the Office of Strategic Services. While his Sicilian-rooted language style was less elegant than the Camelot President John Kennedy, they were in agreement that the Russians’ space achievement was a call to war for the Greatest Democratic Country in the World. To the battleships for winning the space race! Who comes first to the moon gets to build satellites for war. (2)

Fifty years later after Gagarin’s orbiting, the cynicism towards Russia persists even among America’s elite.

“Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev seized on the propaganda value of Gagarin’s coup in beating the United States into space, sending him on ‘missions of peace’ around the world, to meet figures including Britain’s Queen. ‘This achievement exemplifies the genius of the Soviet people and the strong force of socialism,’ the Kremlin crowed in a statement at the time.” https://phys.org/news/2011-04-russia-years-gagarin-triumph.html

Yuri with wife Valentina (left) during a visit to Bulgaria in 1966. His good nature and lack of arrogance made him well liked by most people he encountered in his travels.

This sarcastic take on Gagarin’s “peace missions” being “crowed” about by Kremlin leaders comes from Science X and its US-based website. Science X prides itself on being read monthly by 1.75 million well educated “sophisticated” readers, especially scientists and researchers. Even these Americans can’t see through the jingoistic imperialist contempt for propagandizing for peace. Bear in mind that propaganda is not necessarily synonymous with lying, rather “to propagate”, “to cause to increase the number” of supporters to the views presented. My writing here, and generally, is propaganda. I hope it is effective propaganda for a good cause: for peace and justice. That is what communist propaganda also was meant to be, not that communism has always been so practiced but that it has that vision. At the very least, it is a vision that humanity could and should embrace. Certainly more so than the vision of its counterpart, the imperialism and capitalism fostered by the United States and its vassal states in Europe and elsewhere. Their creed is greed: profit for profit’s sake. As Wall Street stockbroker Gordon Gekko roared: “Greed is Good!” (3)

When Gagarin had time, he participated as a member of the USSR Supreme Soviet (national legislature), kept training for flights, trained crews, visited plants, studied, and maintained a family life. Yuri was a religious man. He offered to rebuild the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow, which had been blown up during the Stalin era. The church was rebuilt after the Soviet epoch. http://yurigagarin50.org/history/gagarins-life and http://tass.com/science/868892.

Due to his high profile, many were concerned that if Yuri traveled to space again he might die. So, Soviet authorities tried to prevent him from taking part in further space flights. Gagarin was forced to compromise and became the head of the cosmonaut’s training center, and he re-trained as a fighter pilot. At the age of 34, he perished on March 27, 1968 in a fatal training flight outside of Moscow at Star City. His instructor, Vladimir Serugin, died with him. They might have saved themselves by bailing out, but seeing that their MiG-15 would crash right into a village, Yuri maneuvered the aircraft outside the village before it crashed. It has been established after many years that the MiG-15 went into a tailspin as a result of turbulence caused by another plane in the vicinity, an experimental Sukhoi jet whose flight coordinates should have put it thousands of feet above Yuri’s craft.

Yuri Gagarin will be remembered for being the first man to orbit the earth, of course, but also for his many humanistic qualities. Maybe the peace tour Russia’s leaders sent him on was propaganda, but isn’t advocating for world peace good propaganda? Did the U.S. government send any of its astronauts on such missions?

US American artist Rockwell Kent beautifully expressed what Yuri was and what he stood for.
“Dear Soviet friends your Yuri is not only yours. He belongs to all mankind. The door to space which he opened, this door which the USSR and Socialism opened, is open for all of us. But for that, peace is necessary. Peace between nations. Peace between ourselves. Let the world celebrate the anniversary of Yuri’s flight as a Universal Peace Day. Let that day be celebrated all over the world with music and dances, songs and laughter, as a worldwide holiday of happiness. Let that day be in every town and city square, where young and old gather and let their faces be illuminated with the same happiness that the photographs of people in the Soviet Union show how the Soviet people are happy and proud of the accomplishment of Yuri Gagarin.” http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc9904/gagarin.htm

Notes:

“The President’s News Conference of April 12, 1961,” John F. Kennedy, The Public Papers of the Presidents, 1961. (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1962, page 259). And “Text of Secretary Rusk’s News Conference, Including Observations on Cuba,” New York Times, 18 April 1961.
When the Russians were able to establish their major space station, February 20, 1986, and when Mikhail Gorbachev was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, they named it MIR (meaning “Peace” and “World”). That was one month after Gorbachev proposed a 15-year abolition of nuclear weapons.

MIR was the first modular space station and the longest lasting space station, 1986 to 2001. It had a greater mass than any previous spacecraft, 130,000 kilos. The station served as a laboratory in which crews conducted experiments in biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology and spacecraft systems with the goal of developing technologies required for permanent occupation of space.

MIR was the first continuously inhabited long-term research station in orbit and held the record for the longest continuous human presence in space at 3,644 days. It holds the record for the longest single human spaceflight. Valeri Polyakov spent 437 days on the station between 1994 and 1995. MIR was occupied twelve and a half years out of its fifteen-year lifespan, having the capacity to support a resident crew of three, or larger crews for short visits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir; anhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_stations

Russia launched its first space station on April 19, 1971. Salyut reentered earth on October 11. NASA’s first station, Skylab, was launched, May 14, 1973.

From Oliver Stone’s great 1987 film “Wall Street”. Stone directed and co-wrote the script, influenced by socialists Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis and Victor Hugo. Ironically, according to Wikipedia, several people were inspired by the film to become Wall Street stockbrokers.
Gordon Gekko’s speech to stockholders concludes:
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed — you mark my words — will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.NOTE: People interested in receiving more detailed information about this volume can send a message to the editor at greanville@gmail.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

RON RIDENOUR, Special Contributing Editor • Born in the “devil’s own country”, in 1939, of a WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon protestant) military family. Growing up I experienced the pains and indignities of US chauvinism and racism at home and abroad, its imperial domination, its brutal jingoistic wars. Before I understood the essence of US imperialism, I joined the US Air Force, at 17, to fight the Soviet “commies” when they occupied Hungary, in 1956. Posted to a radar site in Japan, I witnessed approved segregated barracks at the Yankee base, and the imposition of racism in Japanese establishments. I protested and was tortured by my white “compatriots”, who held me down naked, sprayed DDT aflame over my pubic hairs, and then held me under snow. This, and the fact that we had orders to shoot down any Soviet aircraft over “our” territory in Japan—which never appeared—while we flew spy planes over the Soviet Union daily, led me to question American morality.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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Why the U.S. Regime Hates Vladimir Putin

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Here is Putin in extemporaneous discussion and interview (translated into English):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBTBBNOtbhM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjrlTMvirVo

The second of those videos shows Putin offering Russia’s billionaires the choice between being dispossessed of their companies by the Government, or else signing an agreement with the Government, promising that they will henceforth place the welfare of their workers and of the people of Russia, above their own personal welfare and wealth, and only one billionaire there, Oleg Deripaska, hesitated, at which point Putin treated him contemptuously and Deripaska promptly signed.

Here is how Britain’s Express newspaper, on 7 October 2015, described that second video:

It shows the 63-year-old [Putin], who has launched a blitz of more than 50 airstrikes against the terror regime [Syria’s ISIS] in recent days, directly confronting Russian oligarchs and ranting at them that they are good for nothing COCKROACHES.

In the incredible footage, Putin humiliates Oleg Deripaska, one of the world’s richest men with a fortune of $6m [Deripaska’s fortune in 2009 was actually $3.5 billion], and treats him like his personal lapdog.

It was filmed on a tour of Pikalevo, a struggling factory town where families had been venting their anger over job losses and unpaid wages.

Back when the Putin-Deripaska encounter happened, the right-wing British newspaper Telegraph had bannered, on 4 June 2009, “Vladimir Putin takes Oleg Deripaska to task”, and it placed their hostile slant on the event by sub-heading: “Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, publicly criticised his most faithful oligarch on Thursday in an attempt to deflect growing social discontent on to the country’s unpopular super-rich.” (Of course, the U.S. regime would ignore why Russia’s super-rich were “unpopular,” much less the fact that America’s super-rich were involved in these heists from Russia that had caused so much of Russia’s post-Soviet depression.)

On 27 April 2018, Deripaska ceded control over the world’s second-largest aluminum-producer, Russal, and he did it because the United States regime had recently placed him and his corporations under new economic sanctions, which are allegedly focused against Russian billionaires who support Putin politically. If Deripaska wouldn’t cede control, then the sanctions-hit would be harder and more damaging to Russia’s economy, so Deripaska — in fulfillment of his agreement signed with Putin — ceded control.

In other words, Deripaska, whom Putin had actually forced to commit to placing Russia’s interests above their own, is now being treated by the U.S. regime as one of the chief people to ‘blame’ for Putin’s being in office, in Russia’s ‘dictatorship’.

This threat, by Putin, to Russia’s wealthiest (Deripaska having been one of the billionaires whom Putin didn’t dispossess when coming into power in 2000), wasn’t a staged PR event, but instead was simply the best-filmed instance of Putin’s standard policy, ever since becoming Russia’s leader: his policy that an aristocrat can lose everything if he places his interests above the nation’s interests.

This policy was the fundamental change from the prior, Boris Yeltsin, years, when Harvard’s economics department and the World Bank, during the immediate post-Soviet 1990s, came into Russia and set up the system, working in conjunction with Yeltsin’s friends, to funnel the future profits from Russia’s vast undervalued natural resources, into partnerships between Yeltsin’s friends and U.S. billionaires and affiliated investors. That American-led corruption sent the Russian economy into a tailspin, from which the new Russian President, Putin, rescued it, by laying down the law to the billionaires: that their interests were subordinate to, not dominant above, the nation’s interests. This is the principal difference between the ideology of today’s America, and of today’s Russia.

My 3 June 2014 article, “How and Why the U.S. Has Re-Started the Cold War (The Backstory that Precipitated Ukraine’s Civil War)”, showed, by means of graphs, that the economic depression which engulfed Russia (and which was totally ignored by the Western press) during 1990-2000, ended and reversed immediately following (when Putin came into power), and especially ever since around 2004, so that Russia’s economic growth-rate under Putin, at least the rate prior to America’s economic sanctions against Russia in 2014, was one of the world’s best and looked likely to pose serious competition to the U.S. aristocracy in the future. From the pits that were brought by the U.S. regime in Russia — including the massive heists from the Russian public — to the period of Putin’s rule in Russia, has been a sea-change, and the U.S. regime cannot tolerate it; they want the U.S. elite’s looting of Russia to return.

This is necessarily a simplified overview of the conflict between the U.S. regime and Russia, but it’s nonetheless true. In order to understand it more deeply, filling in the details during the period after the end of the Soviet Union — and of its communism, and of its Warsaw Pact military alliance mirror-image to America’s NATO alliance, till now — cannot meaningfully be done outside the context of the U.S. regime’s swindle of Russia ever since the night of 24 February 1990, when U.S. President George H.W. Bush told America’s allies that it was a lie to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev when Bush’s people had promised Gorbachev that if the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact ended, then NATO would not expand, not move “one inch to the east” toward Russia’s border — which the U.S. and those allies have since done all the way up to Russia’s border. (In reverse, it’s as if Russia now were placing its soldiers and its missiles on or near the Mexican border, and the Canadian border.) This swindle of Russia meant that though the Cold War did end on Russia’s side, it never yet has ended on America’s. The greed of the U.S. regime — and of its allies — seems to be endless, including, ultimately, grabbing Russia itself. Putin resists, and so they hate him. That’s the reality.

To the U.S. regime and its propagandists, Putin is “The Pariah” and “The West’s Public Enemy Number One”, but to the Russian people, he is the protector of their nation against the U.S. regime’s threats to Russia’s national sovereignty. More diametrically opposite views of the same man, could hardly even be imagined.

About the author

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. Besides TGP, his reports and historical analyses are published on many leading current events and political sites, including The Saker, Huffpost, Oped News, and others.

What will it take to bring America to live according to its own self image?

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Syria’s (Russian made) Pantsir S1 system makes the grade in combat

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Mobile antimissile launch platform credited with eliminating many of the incoming missiles launched by the US, UK and France during April 13/14 strike

by , The Duran
April 28, 2018

The Russian Ministry of Defense has been consistent in its report that Syrian defenses successfully stopped some 71 of the 103 missiles that the triad of Western powers launched at targets in Syria. One of the systems that deserves the credit for the missile kills is the legacy system, called the Pantsir S1 Surface to air missile and anti-aircraft artillery system. NATO has its own coding for this system, and for Western powers this system is known as the S-22 “Greyhound.”

Sputnik News reported that the Pantsir systems were (almost) 100 percent effective in repelling the US strikes – this report attributed to the Russian Ministry of Defense:

According to Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov, Russian-made Pantsir-S1 air defense system deployed by the Syrian forces showed almost 100% effectivenessin repelling the Western missile strike.

“In anti-aircraft combat, the Russian-made Pantsir S-1 system that had been previously supplied to the Syrian armed forces was actively used,” he added.

Konashenkov went on to say that the Syrian air defenses used 112 ground-to-air missiles to repel the attack that targeted not only facilities in Barza and Jaramana, but also military facilities, including airfields.

Konashenkov further commented that the strikes had involved cruise missiles launched from the Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea, the Persian Gulf and the eastern Syrian city of al-Tanf. The attack targeted the facilities that were not bunkers protected by the Syrian air defenses, he pointed out, adding that those were facilities were built on the surface. He has reiterated that 71 missiles of those 100+ had been intercepted.

The Pantsir S1 is a potent weapon.

As one might surmise, the Pantsir was developed to proved point air defense of military and industrial installations against aircraft, helicopters, precision munitions, cruise missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s) and most specifically, it was designed to provide such defense at extremely LOW ranges.

This low range capability comes in very handy when dealing with low flying ordinance such as the Tomahawk cruise missile. Also, as can be surmised, this weapons platform can fire both missiles and guns, and it can do so while the whole platform itself is in motion.

The Guns

The capabilities of the ordnance are specialized according to their purpose. For very short range targets, the two dual 2A38M 30mm autocannon emplacements are fitted with 700 rounds of ammunition, which can itself be of various types – High Explosive, fragmentation tracers, and armor-piercing with tracer rounds. The rate of fire is withering – 2500 rounds per minute per gun, with a range of up to 2.5 miles (4km), and it can engage targets at zero altitude – again this is an ideal configuration for hitting incoming targets at low altitude, such as a cruise missile.

The Missiles

Pantsir systems carry up to twelve solid-fuel two-stage surface-to-air missiles in sealed, ready-to-launch, container tubes. The missiles are radio-controlled in flight, and are not seeker equipped in order to keep target engagement costs down. However, as mentioned just before, the missiles are nonetheless precision-guided by the Pantsir’s multiband sensor system and guidance data is relayed by radio link for up to four simultaneous missiles in flight. While the Pantsir can choose four targets at once, the usual targeting is set for two missiles per target to increase the chance of accuracy. These missiles have a hit probability of between 70-95%. Each missile carries a 20kg warhead, itself usually consisting of some 5.5kg of explosive and 2,000 fragments in each one. That means that this missile explodes in such a manner as to act like a shotgun shell on its target, which also increases the hit probability. The missiles fuses can be set in a range from either target contact to a proximity of 30 feet (9 meters) away.

Finally, the Pantsir can fire its missiles while in motion.

Target Acquisition

The Pantsir is a capable detection platform. It boasts three interdependent target acquisition systems. The first is a radar that boasts a detection range of between 20-22 miles (32-26km) and a tracking range of between 15-17 miles (24-28km) for a target as small as 2 square meters in Radar Cross Section (RCS). The target tracking range can be extended as well, to as distant as 28 miles (45km). The radar can track both the incoming targets and its own SAM’s while in flight.

The second tracking system is an electro-optic channel fire control system, and it is often tied to the third system, which has a long-wave thermal imager and infrared detection finder, and this includes both digital signal processing and automatic target tracking. On some Pantsir systems, though, only the first system, the electro-optic one, is fitted.

These systems operate collaboratively, and they give the defense platform the ability to track up to 20 targets in a 45-degree cone of view, and as mentioned before, each Pantsir can guide up to four outgoing missiles simultaneously.

This allows the system to engage targets at the rate of up to 10 targets per minute.

In Combat

The video clips we get to see like the recent one with the Syrian airstrike are long on featuring the launch of a SAM that flies very high in the sky and eliminates its target while it is far off the ground. There are probably two reasons for this – one is that the cameraman never knows where the intercept will be launched from or where the incoming weapon is, so something that takes time to find is easier to catch on camera.

It is not likely that any of the video clips we saw showed Pantsir systems in action. Since Pantsir specializes in very low range targets, these are deployed as companion systems to the better known S-300 ABM (which is probably what the video clips showed in action). In fact, the Pantsir’s mission is to protect the S-300s. Because of the short ranges involved, there is very little flight time involved for any missile, and tracer rounds are probably not visible unless viewed at very close distances. The video clips circulated are all at some distance from the intercepts. So, these defense systems may be rather unsung heroes, but they are extremely effective.

Usually the deployment is for multiple Pantsir systems to be working in tandem, as is also the case with Russian ABM systems. Up to six Pantsir may be linked in a network with the command node being one of the vehicles itself commanding the other five, or all six may be remotely commanded. Since the system is mountable on both wheeled and tracked carriers, its placement is extremely versatile.

About the Author
The author is a staff writer with The Duran.

Western False Flag Disintegrates: Russia brings witnesses of “staged” Douma attack to OPCW briefing

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No attack, no victims, no chem weapons: Douma witnesses speak at OPCW briefing at The Hague (VIDEO)

RT.com dispatch
Published time: 26 Apr, 2018 16:21

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© Michael Kooren / Reuters

Witnesses of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, including 11-year-old Hassan Diab and hospital staff, told reporters at The Hague that the White Helmets video used as a pretext for a US-led strike on Syria was, in fact, staged.

“We were at the basement and we heard people shouting that we needed to go to a hospital. We went through a tunnel. At the hospital they started pouring cold water on me,” the boy told the press conference, gathered by Russia’s mission at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague.

Hassan was among the “victims” seen being washed by water hoses in a video released by the controversial White Helmets group on April 7. The boy and his family later spoke to the media and revealed that Hassan was hurried to the scene by men who claimed that a chemical attack had taken place. They started pouring cold water on the boy and others, filming the frightened children.

“There were people unknown to us who were filming the emergency care, they were filming the chaos taking place inside, and were filming people being doused with water. The instruments they used to douse them with water were originally used to clean the floors actually,” Ahmad Kashoi, an administrator of the emergency ward, recalled. “That happened for about an hour, we provided help to them and sent them home. No one has died. No one suffered from chemical exposure.”

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]alil al-Jaish, a resuscitator who tended to people at the Douma hospital that day, told the press conference that some of the patients had indeed experienced respiratory problems. The symptoms, however, were caused by heavy dust, which engulfed the area due to recent airstrikes, and no one showed any signs of chemical warfare poisoning, al-Jaish said.

The hospital received people who suffered from smoke and dust asphyxiation on the day of the alleged attack, Muwaffak Nasrim, a paramedic who was working in emergency care, said. The panic seen in footage provided by the White Helmets was caused mainly by people shouting about the alleged use of chemical weapons, Nasrim, who witnessed the chaotic scenes, added. No patients, however, displayed symptoms of chemical weapons exposure, he said.

Ahmad Saur, an emergency paramedic with the Syrian Red Crescent, said that the ward he was working at did not receive any patients exposed to chemical weapons on the day of the alleged incident or after it. All the patients needed either general medical care or help with injuries, he said. Saur told journalists he came to speak at The Hague independently of the Red Crescent, and that he was testifying freely and without any pressure.

One reporter asked what would happen to the eyewitnesses and whether they would “stay in Europe to testify.”

“We’re going back home, and see no problem with that. The situation is a lot better now. We’re Douma residents, like many others,” Hassan Ayoun, a doctor with the emergency department, said.

Six of the Douma witnesses brought to The Hague have already been interviewed by the OPCW technical experts, Russia’s permanent representative to the OPCW, Aleksandr Shulgin, said.

“The others were ready too, but the experts are sticking to their own guidelines. They’ve picked six people, talked to them, and said they were 'completely satisfied' with their account and did not have any further questions,” Shulgin revealed. He added that the allegations by “certain Western countries” ahead of the briefing that Moscow and Damascus were seeking to “hide” the witnesses from the OPCW experts did not hold water.

The alleged chemical incident was only supported by the White Helmets’ video and social media reports from militant-linked groups, but the US, the UK and France judged they had enough evidence that it actually took place and launched a series of punitive strikes against Syria on April 14. The US and its allies accused Syrian President Bashar Assad of carrying out the “attack,” without providing any proof of their claim. Notably, the strike came hours before the OPCW fact-finding team was set to arrive in Douma to determine whether chemical weapons had been used there.

The truth was obvious to anyone who understands the players in this tragedy and their motives and national cultures.

Dateline: PressTV April 19 2019

Appendix
Imperialist crime complicity via propaganda

The Atlantic, a pretentious magazine catering to the upper middle class, is dutiful in its poison injection to support Washington's war aims in the Middle East. Most readers are comfortably clueless (or maybe don't care) they are swallowing propaganda offal. All the photos in this Syria war dossier" come from sources clearly favoring the "rebels" fighting to topple Pres. Assad and making Syria into another Libya. Many of the captions accuse the "Assad regime" of bombing his own people, etc., tropes we see constantly in the Western media's mendacious narrative about the war.

One of the shots, guaranteed to tug at or sensitive hearts, portrays a dead child, victim of government bombardment, we are helpfully told: "The body of a young Syrian child lies wrapped in a shroud on the floor of a makeshift clinic following Syrian government bombardments in Douma on February 22, 2018. #
See the whole filthy dossier here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/photos-seven-years-of-war-in-syria/555377/

And if you have the energy, and we hope you do, fire a note to the shameless editor, who, being sociopathically shameless, will toss it in the wastebasket, or maybe see it, either way, do try. If you irritate these hypocritical bastards even a little, you have accomplished something.

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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The Crisis Is Only In Its Beginning Stages

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

The prevailing propaganda line is that Trump is a puppet of Putin, but in reality he is a big albatross around his neck, as he represents the lethal weight of the US deep state, leaving no pleasant or sane options.

Many, including Russia’s President Putin, have asked why the US launched an illegal attack on Syria prior to the chemical weapons inspectors examining the site of the alleged chemical attack.

This popular question completely misses the point. The US attack on Syria is a clear and indisputable war crime against a sovereign country regardless of whether Syria used a chemical weapon in driving the Washington supported terrorists from Douma. No one acted to stop Washington’s war crime. Some of Washington’s vassals, such as Germany and Italy, refused to participate in Washington’s war crime, but no one attempted to block it. The impotent UN Security Council, to which Russia is wasting its time appealing, the EU, NATO, Russia and China themselves did nothing to stop Washington’s Nazi era war crime.

Russia said that if Washington’s attack harmed its citizens, there would be military consequences, but Russia did not protect its ally Syria from the attack.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter as Washington’s attack was carefully conducted so as to have no effect except to serve as a face-saver for Trump. Apparently no one was killed and no damage was done to anything real except to a facility in which anti-venom for snake bites was being produced.

On the other hand, it does matter, because of the perception that the American presstitutes have created that it was a great victory for America over the evil Syrian government and the evil Russian government that supports them. This perception, which the presstitutes have created with their fake news, justifies the war crime and will lead to more attacks on Syria.

It is unlikely that the UN Security Council will condemn Washington, which pays 25% of the UN’s budget. Moreover, the Security Council is loaded up with Washington’s vassals, and they will not vote to censure their liegelord. Putin is wasting his time taking the matter to the Security Council, unless his purpose is to prove that every Western institution is completely corrupt. As most informed people already know this, I don’t understand the point of proving the known. Putin should read Eric Zuesse’s article before he puts too much faith in the UN. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/04/17/how-us-has-virtually-destroyed-un.html

As I have written on a number of occasions, I admire Putin’s Christian character of sidestepping the beatings he continuously takes from Washington in order to save the world from the massive deaths of a world war. The problem is that by turning the other cheek, Putin encourages more aggression from Washington. Putin is dealing with neoconservative psychopaths. He is not dealing with common sense.

During the entirety of the Cold War no US ambassador to the UN spoke aggressively and disrespectfully to the Soviet representative as Nikki Haley speaks to the Russian ambassador. During the Cold War no American president would have tolerated Nikki Haley. The crazed bitch would have instantly been fired.

The Russian government is captured by delusion if the Russians believe that the US government, in which Nikki Haley is Trump’s choice to be America’s spokesperson to the world, in which the crazed neoconservative war monger John Bolton is a principal influence over US military and foreign policy, and in which the President himself is under threat of indictment for wanting to normalize relations with Russia, has any prospect of avoiding war.

The best chance of preventing the oncoming war is Russian-Chinese-Iranian unity and a defeat for American arms in a regional context not worth the Washington psychopaths launching of nuclear weapons. Until Washington is effectively resisted, Washington’s European vassals, the UN Security Council and the OPCW will stand with Washington. Once Washington experiences a defeat, NATO will dissolve and with this dissolution Washington’s ability to threaten other countries will lose its cover and evaporate.

PCR with feline children.

About the Author
Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. Roberts’ How the Economy Was Lost is now available from CounterPunch in electronic format. His latest book is The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

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