Connexion
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My harvest of impressions from the past 48 hours of monitoring Russian political talk shows and news bulletins of Russian state television is filled to the brim with both highly interesting and at times frightening and off-putting developments.
The most momentous is perhaps what I just saw 15 minutes ago on the latest edition of Время покажет (Time Will Tell), a talk show I know from the inside having twice been a panelist there in 2016-2017. The program opened with mention of the forthcoming European visit of Joe Biden which has two cities on its itinerary: Brussels for the next regular G7 and NATO gatherings, and….Warsaw.
Why Warsaw? The presenter notes that this meeting with the Polish leadership might be linked with the planned visit of President Duda to Washington next week. But then she moves on to link it was another announcement made yesterday by the US envoy to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. In the video recording of Thomas-Greenfield projected onto the screen, the envoy tells us that while the United States has no intention of sending any military personnel to Ukraine, any member country of NATO has the right to do so on its own.
This matches up nicely with the latest Polish government thoughts aloud to the effect that it might just move some troops across the Ukrainian border to secure its own eastern flank. In this way, the Poles would be doing no more than the Turks have done in Syria, where they still are parked in the predominantly Kurdish sector of the country in violation of international law.
Meanwhile, per the talk show presenter, Hungary has already said it will not consider any clash with Russia resulting from forces sent by any NATO member state to Ukraine as justifying action under the famous NATO Alliance clause 5 of “all for one and one for all.” In other words, per the management of Time Will Tell, a little and probably very short lived Russo-Polish war will follow. Complete defeat of Warsaw is foreseen, even if it would take longer than the 2 days projected by the Polish army command itself not long ago; longer because so much Russian armed strength is presently committed to holding down Ukraine. As the presenter joked, this might mean the end of Polish statehood…
A bit earlier today, the latest edition of Большая игра (The Great Game) hosted by Vyacheslav Nikonov also was full of interesting commentary. Over the past several years, Nikonov proved his talent for leading public discussions of the most serious topics in US-Russian relations with some of the best minds in Russia. His program today was one more demonstration that The Great Game has moved ahead to rank above Vladimir Solovyov’s talk show in terms of intellectual content. Like the above mentioned Time Will Tell, The Great Game uses video clips of Biden and other U.S. and Western leaders as the starting point for discussions. I mention this by way of answer to the several readers of my essays who could not imagine that Russian state television disseminates more than the official Kremlin point of view. In fact, the views of the foreign adversary are given extensive airing before they are demolished by Russian experts.
In today’s show, the American views to be demolished were those of the President and of the Pentagon commenting on Russia’s use this past week of its hypersonic missile Kinzhal to attack a military target in Ukraine. President Biden was quoted as saying that he saw nothing special about the Kinzhal other than speed, that its warheads were the common variety. The Pentagon was quoted as saying that the Russians “appear” to have fired their Kinzhal in Ukraine, which would be a wasted effort for the given target.
Nikonov’s guests pointed out that the target of the first Kinzhal strike was a “nuclear attack hardened” structure 60 meters underground and protected by reinforced concrete dating from Soviet days. Inside this bunker were Ukrainian missiles and other munitions of high value. In other words, thanks to the incredible energy of mass and speed, the Kinzhal using what they characterized as one of its weaker potential conventional, as opposed to tactical nuclear charges could destroy a target otherwise considered protected against a nuclear armed ICBM. Nothing special about this weapon system, eh?
Meanwhile, some of the Russian state programming these days is awful in the thesaurus meaning of ‘extremely disturbing or repellant.’ The latest edition of 60 Минут (Sixty Minutes) with Yevgeny Popov and Olga Skabeyeva took a strong stomach to sit through. To be sure, the repellant material on the screen is coming from Ukrainian state television and includes the following: first, the televised statements of a Ukrainian government representative addressed to the wives and fiancées of Russian airmen, warning them that they will soon be widows, that Ukrainian forces will follow them to the ends of the earth to take revenge for their role in the current war, that they will be killed while vacationing on the beaches of Turkey, etc., and second, the televised address of the head of a Ukrainian medical institution telling the doctors under him to castrate any Russian prisoners of war who come their way, because they are not people but cockroaches. Add to this the testimony of escapees from Mariupol who describe the methods of torture and disfiguration inflicted on them by the Nazi battalions in the city. The source material is full of hate, and the airing on Russian state television also is not innocent: it has the clear purpose of inciting hatred for Ukrainians among the television viewers and so to prepare them for the much more cruel conduct of the war that Russia is likely about to implement, given that its human resources are insufficient to further prosecute the war quickly under the gentlemanly rules observed up till now. To be specific, the Russians may switch over to the “American Way of War” out of necessity, meaning use of carpet bombing to ‘neutralize’ the Ukrainian forces, both regular army and nationalist battalions just to the west of the line of demarcation.
The objective of a new and vicious though completely ‘legal’ attack on the Ukrainian troop concentrations will be in line with the recommendations of Clausewitz, who obviously enjoys great respect in the Kremlin: namely to win a war by destruction of armies, not by capturing cities. Thus, it is very likely that Kiev will never be conquered, that the regime will capitulate because it has no more fighters in the field to resist the Russian presence.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022
gilbertdoctorow
I had not given much thought to the verdict handed down yesterday on Alexei Navalny following his conviction for large scale financial fraud relating to the 2018 presidential elections. As I understand the case, Navalny was accused of continuing to solicit and receive public contributions to his electoral campaign for President well after his candidacy had been disqualified by the authorities. Presumably he diverted the incoming funds to his own pocket or reassigned them to his various political activities.
The trial has, of course, been condemned in the West as a sham, as one more high visibility indication of the ongoing domestic repression practiced by the Putin regime, a repression of all opposition figures in the context of an unpopular war in Ukraine to maintain political stability at all costs.
Let me say up front that I have never found Navalny a worthy cause for freedom fighters. He is an obnoxious character who has in the past espoused racist and ultra-nationalist views which would place him more appropriately among the backers of the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev than in the Russian Federation. At the same time, I see disproportionality between the financial crimes for which he has been tried and the latest sentence of 9 years of further imprisonment under conditions that are more harsh than what he has been serving for defrauding the French manufacturer Yves Rocher. The net effect will be to cut him off from the outside world and ensure he is properly silenced.
The Western press calls the trial and sentencing a sham. Sham it may be, but that is beside the point. Navalny is paying the price not for the given financial frauds but for the much bigger crime of sedition, for which he was never punished properly going back to the clearest evidence of his call for overthrow of the government during the December 2011 big demonstrations in Moscow over alleged irregularities in the Duma elections. Specifically he called upon the masses before him to march to the Kremlin and put “the people” in power.
The revolutionary moment passed with the new year 2012 and Navalny pursued his wrecking operation more discretely but always with the same purpose: to shatter the aura of respectability around the government leadership and to try to prove by real or fake videos and other documentation that Putin and everyone around him were crooks. The logic of such defamation is always the same: overturning the legitimately elected authorities by mass action, or, if nothing better is available, by voter turnout of irate (if misled) citizens.
The legal treatment or mistreatment of Navalny in his trials for financial fraud are the Russian version of the most widespread procedure in the United States for putting Mafioso behind bars. They are almost never tried for murder, causing physical harm in shakedowns or similar activities which they, of course, practice with abandon. Jury trials for such crimes would face enormous obstacles of evidence gathering from the omerta, the sworn silence within and around the criminal world. Instead, mafia figures are put away for years if not decades on charges of perjury or of tax evasion which are much easier for the federal authorities to document beyond any reasonable doubt.
Navalny’s sentencing comes against the background of an evident government crackdown on the more diffuse sedition that has just been denounced by the President as Fifth Column activities. Yes, part of this crackdown has been the long-awaited closing down of radio station Ekho Moskvy and television (internet) broadcaster Dozhd. These stations had been deeply resented by patriotic Russian elites for their editorial lines discrediting the country and its leadership at every turn. Ekho Moskvy had been financed by a Gazprom subsidiary for the sake of giving the Liberal loudmouths a place to let off steam. But that policy was no longer tenable under conditions of the present life-or-death struggle of Russia versus the U.S.-led Collective West which has the name of the Russia-Ukraine War. Meanwhile, the opposition print outlet Novaya Gazeta has been issued with a formal warning by the media monitor. Nobel Prize in the pocket of its editor or no, that newspaper may very well be forced to shut down in the weeks ahead.
Does the crackdown on free speech mean that Russia is on the path to Soviet style totalitarianism? Of course, the answer is “no.” The state broadcasters still air divergent views on panel discussions. Nearly all global news providers are accessible throughout Russia via satellite or cable subscriptions. And by general agreement, the internet remains largely open to the world. The exceptions, bans on social networks like Facebook, have been brought down on their heads by the flagrant challenges to Russian sensibilities of their top management by allowing messages calling for the death of Russians to be posted on their platforms.
Navalny was treated with great indulgence back in 2011 when he openly engaged in sedition. That was still a time when Russia tried hard to adhere to rules of Liberal Democracy which states in the West were often disregarding without “consequences.” Remember that in virtually the same time frame, Occupy Wall Street, a seditious movement in the United States, was brutally crushed by police measures. Demonstrators in New York who were swept up and taken to prison for interrogation were threatened with years of deprivation of liberty for their very minor infractions of civic order. You needed a good lawyer to get out of this trap, as I heard at the time from some relatives living in New York who fell into police hands.
Today is a different day in Russia from 2011, and the limitations placed on the personal liberties of Russians result directly from the enormous pressure being applied on Russia economically, politically and militarily by the U.S.-led West. Personal freedoms everywhere in the world do well in conditions of peace and prosperity; they wilt in conditions of war and belt-tightening. ©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022
gilbertdoctorow
Three days ago I wrote about the remarkable “Statement- Ukraine” that the world renowned Queen Elisabeth Musical Competition posted on its website recently. I praised the directors of the Competition for their courage and eloquence in defending humanistic values against the rampant Russophobia that has shown its ugly face at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, at the Munich Symphony Orchestra, to name the two institutions which were among the first to fire Russian artists in a show of self-righteous indignation at Russian foreign policy. Meanwhile, the same mass hypnosis seems to have deprived leaders of the Parisian cultural world of their wits as well.
With regard to the Queen Elisabeth Competition, I pointed to its royal patronage as a factor in its holding true to its values and resistance to the volatility of mass politics. For that very reason, the extraordinary decisions taken now on repertoire and the explanation of its choices by the management of the Brussels opera, the 300 year old Théâtre de la Monnaie, merit our very close attention. After all, the opera house is a federal institution and everything that it rolled out in its press briefing yesterday could not have happened without the tacit or more likely explicit approval of the respective ministry that funds the opera.
The statement read out to journalists yesterday by the Monnaie’s Intendant Peter De Caluwe is a bit over 1,000 words long. My first thought was to provide excerpts here. But then upon re-reading the piece, it was clear that it is so logically interwoven that taking separate phrases will not do justice to the logic of the author.
Although the briefing for the “musical press” of Belgium was conducted, as is the custom, in alternating French and Flemish segments, Mr. De Caluwe chose to deliver his statement on the new season’s rationale in English, making it perfectly accessible to the world at large without any intermediary translations.
Readers will note that the speaker denounces several times the Russian military intervention or invasion of Ukraine. That is not a judgment I share. However, opinions can differ on such matters, and the opera, as a federal institution has to be aligned with the government on that issue, which I would call here a ‘subsidiary issue.’ The overriding issue is the purpose of music and of the arts in our society. This is a subject that was always foremost in the thinking of the Intendant during his long tenure. Year after year he has gone hat in hand to the government for funding and had to justify the social utility of the institution and not merely declare ‘art for art’s sake.’ In his statement explaining the repertoire choices of the new season, Mr. De Caluwe is exemplary. I can only wish that his words reach the broadest possible audience across the world. This is a message of sanity in our insane times.
****
Peter de Caluwe
Two years ago, we presented the BREX-IN season, which emphasized links with British culture. In a similar vein, are now proposing a totally unplanned-for season in which Russian titles feature more prominently than ever. We are aware that this programming might well raise questions and perhaps even trigger discussion or dismay. We have nevertheless decided to run with what was planned, or rather, what has become a cluster of Russian titles to be performed in one and the same season as a result of the COVID pandemic preventing us from performing them according to the original schedule. So while the cluster was not intentional, it provides us with an unexpected opportunity to endorse our intrinsic mission: to unite, federate and build bridges between people.
I consider our house to be an anti-war and pro-peace institution, as borne out by our position in the heart of the capital of Europe, by our purpose, our programming, our leadership style and our way of working. Our model is one of harmony, not conflict. This constitutes our moral base and there is a greater need than ever to defend it. We are therefore taking a clear stand on this matter: strong towards those who are responsible, supportive towards those who are suffering, empathic towards those who are caught in the middle.
WE ARE HERE TO MAKE ART, NOT WAR.
La Monnaie strongly condemns the devastating aggression of Ukraine by the Russian regime and expresses its solidarity with the populations who are suffering the terrible consequences of this unnecessary war: first and foremost, the Ukrainian people and Ukraine’s artists. It is our responsibility as citizens to do everything within our power to help bring about a peaceful future based on the humanist values at the core of our European societies.
We also express our support for those artists who are committed to peace and who oppose, each in their own way and with great courage, this unacceptable aggression. We subscribe to the statement of Opera Europa and its members in that we “believe that there are many artists and institutions within Russia that are experiencing profound concern, disapproval and shame at what is happening, but dare not speak out for fear of savage retaliation…. We endorse the words published by Ukrainian artists and cultural activists: ‘Art has always been at the forefront of humanitarian values. We strongly believe that art cannot be subservient to political propaganda; instead it should be utilized to develop critical thinking and promote dialogue.’”
Though we cannot emphasize enough that we do not understand the motivations of the aggressors, we do believe that Russian culture is part of our shared heritage. European arts, literature, cinema and music will always be connected to Russian culture, which has inspired some of the most eloquent works on our shared continent. We cannot erase history. Indeed, great and immortal artworks confront us with ourselves>bring us face to face with ourselves? and with our own time. With our mistakes, too, and how to avoid them. It is clear to us, therefore, that the Russian repertoire should not be banned and that we must continue to perform it.
So the current conflict has not tempted us to make changes to our programming. Especially as the two composers, whose operatic and symphonic work is at the core of our season, have been victims of previous Russian regimes. We cannot contemplate punishing them again for their opinions, which defended the same values we are trying to protect now.
DURING OUR NEXT SEASON, RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN ARTISTS WILL BE WORKING TOGETHER, ALONGSIDE MANY OTHER NATIONALITIES.
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was often accused of being too Westernized, and therefore not Russian enough. Yet in his two operas we are presenting next season, he provides insight into the poetic Slavic soul which, combined with Pushkin’s libretti, is so reminiscent of our European literature… Dmitri Shostakovich suffered greatly under the Communist regime. He was constantly being told how he should function as an artist. He reacted by closing himself off from the world and wrote music permeated with subtlety and criticism of the system from which he could not escape. Hence his tortured decision later on in his career to join the Community party. Neither composer turned his back on his country but tried to walk the fine line between acknowledging the regime and rejecting it. They were Russians, but they were first and foremost humanists. They themselves suffered enough under the political conditions of their time. Their works should not be banned once more just because a dictator has lost his senses.
Throughout its history, La Monnaie has been a stronghold of encounters and openness through the shared experience of music and theatre. Artists from all backgrounds have been able to meet here in a welcoming and creative atmosphere. I do not believe that banning Russian artists from our theatres will bring us any closer to peace. The aggression against Ukraine by a violent regime should not hinder nor put a stop to our collaboration with an artistic community that is committed to peace and to the shared European values.
Culture and the arts remain some of the best recipes for creating solidarity, understanding and harmony between people, regardless of nationality. Of course, artists and institutions that openly support Vladimir Putin’s actions will not be welcome at La Monnaie. We expect artists performing in our house to defend our shared values. At the same time, we cannot force Russian artists who oppose their culpable leadership to make statements that might endanger their safety and security or that of their families. This would not be an act of solidarity. The answer to war should be cultural cooperation, not cultural exclusion.
Even more importantly, I have always defended opera as the best example of collaborative work: so many male and female artists, technicians, artisans, etc. from every corner of the world working side by side on a production. No fewer than thirty-eight nationalities have permanent jobs at La Monnaie. Add to that the large number of international guest artists and it is clear that we play the card of multinational and multicultural cohabitation and collaboration.
During our next season, Russian and Ukrainian artists will be working alongside many other nationalities. It is the responsibility of our institutions to continue to engage collaborators and artists regardless of nationality so as to show the world just what can be achieved by bringing together people, communities, generations and cultures. Art is and remains the domain of freedom, exchange, understanding and humanism.
We are here to make art, not war.
Peter de Caluwe
https://www.lamonnaiedemunt.be/en/mmm-online/2363-a-russian-season
gilbertdoctorow
Directly confrontational U.S. and Russian narratives on the threat of weapons of mass destruction being deployed in Ukraine
One of the main issues on the agenda of NATO’s urgent summit yesterday in Brussels called by U.S. President Joe Biden was the threat that Russia will use weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine out of frustration with its stalled assault on the country for lack of manpower and sufficient conventional armaments.
In his speech, which was partially aired on European television, Biden directed particular attention to the risk of chemical attack in Ukraine, which he said would elicit a response ‘in kind,’ without elaborating. Meanwhile, today’s Financial Times quotes NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg as follows: the Alliance had now activated its chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense elements. Per the FT:
“We are taking measures both to support Ukraine and to defend ourselves,” [Stoltenberg] told reporters at the summit in Brussels on Thursday, adding that Nato was concerned by Russia’s rhetoric regarding chemical and nuclear weapons and its history of using chemical agents against its enemies, as well as its support for Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, where chemical weapons had been used.”
These are very serious allegations and merit a minute or two of semantic and factual parsing before we proceed.
First, there is today no Russian ‘rhetoric’ at all regarding its own planned use of chemical and nuclear weapons in the Ukrainian theater. They have mentioned chemical weapons only with respect to an expected ‘false flag’ operation which the Ukrainian nationalists may carry out by releasing into the atmosphere toxic chemicals stored in one or another Ukrainian factory so as to blame advancing Russian forces for an “attack.” One such incident was already reported on Russian news in the past week, though the ammonia leaks were quickly repaired and there was no harm to nearby Ukrainian villagers.
With respect to Russia’s supposed “history of using chemical agents against its enemies,” we can well imagine that the author had in mind the Novichok poisoning of the Skripals and of Alexei Navalny or the polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko several years ago. These cases were proven only in the court of public opinion thanks to heavy pressure on the media from the British government. There is good reason to suppose that they were all MI6 operations intended to discredit the Russian government, not actual Russian attacks. Similarly the supposed chemical attacks on his opponents by al-Assad were very likely ‘false flag’ operations by one or another Jihadi group aided by Western intelligence operatives.
But let us put these contentious issues aside for a moment and ask whether the Russians have any reason whatsoever to resort to weapons that violate all international conventions for the sake of victory in their Ukraine campaign. On the basis of available information about the state of the fighting, rumored losses of personnel and depletion of conventional weapons, there are no reasons for such action by the Russians. All evidence suggests that the Russian campaign has been conducted so far with a view to reducing civilian deaths to a minimum. The UN agency responsible for monitoring such things has reported a little over 2,000 deaths in the first month of the Russian military operation. This is absolutely miniscule for a campaign of this magnitude. U.S. forces inflicted hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in their own operations in Iraq in 2003 at this stage in the fighting. Moreover, the recent slowdown in the Russian offensive may be little more than a regrouping for continued assault when fresh reserves and equipment arrive. The heaviest fighting, in Mariupol, appears to be headed for total Russian victory in a matter of days, despite the city having been held by the fanatical nationalist Azov battalion in addition to substantial regular army units. Chechen forces deployed in Mariupol yesterday claimed to have taken the municipal government buildings and to control a large part of the city. Once Mariupol is secure, the large Russian contingent besieging the city will likely be moved north to facilitate encirclement and destruction of the main Ukrainian military force encamped west of the line of demarcation with Donbas.
One further sign that supposed Russian setbacks of a scale that would give rise to drastic change in their conduct of the war is nothing more than a bare-faced lie was the remark by Biden in answer to a journalist’s question at yesterday’s press conference in NATO headquarters. Would the United States agree to Ukraine’s making territorial concessions to Russia for the sake of a cease-fire and peace? Said Biden, that decision is entirely up to the Kiev authorities. The remark is as good as confirmation that Ukraine is losing the war and will have to sue for peace.
If I am correct and there is no factual or logical basis to assume that the Russians will deploy internationally prohibited weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine, then why all the noise about it? To answer that question, you have to turn to Russian media.
Yesterday’s Russian television broadcasts give you the answer. Programming was filled with one dominant issue: the documentary evidence that Russian military investigators have found in their seizure of biological laboratories in Ukraine financed by the Pentagon and curated by Americans. The Russians are asserting that these labs were being used to conduct internationally prohibited development of biological weapons. They provide details on the various toxins produced there and on human experiments, including on Ukrainian soldiers, resulting in multiple fatalities and hospitalizations. The documents and other evidence were shown on the screen quickly, but I have no doubt that they will be properly published in the days ahead.
Perhaps most damaging in the present U.S. – Russian confrontation which has become so personalized on the two presidents is that the Russians are publicizing documents showing that Joe’s son Hunter was directly involved in the work of the criminal biological labs through a company of his that operated in Ukraine during the presidency of Barack Obama.
If true, then the Biden family is up to its neck in criminal activity and yesterday’s Public Relations push against Russia over weapons of mass destruction is just a smoke screen to conceal the real culprits.
By the way, the second featured item on Russian television yesterday was ceremonies in Belgrade to mark the anniversary of the two month NATO aerial bombardment of the Serbian capital that began on this day in 1999 and resulted in over 4,000 civilian deaths, including from use of uranium based bombs, and the destruction of most of the civil infrastructure of the city. Russian television showed a video of Biden, then a U.S. Senator, calling for this massive attack, which the Russians, alongside the Serbs, consider to have been a war crime.
I have in recent weeks spoken of the Russian and Western media reporting on the Ukraine war as ‘parallel worlds.’ Regrettably, I was wrong. They are, in fact, converging lines and when they meet there will be hell to pay.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022
gilbertdoctorow
Dear Sir:
I assume that even in these very eventful days you had the time to remark the prisoner exchange newly agreed between the Ukrainian and Russian authorities. If these mortal enemies were able to summon up the courage and humane feelings required to do the right thing on behalf of their own and the enemy’s soldiers, what I am about to propose to you will be both less onerous for you and far more rewarding for humanity in general than what is transpiring in the Ukrainian-Russian exchange.
My suggestion to you is to offer to exchange Julian Assange for Alexei Navalny. Such an exchange would support your political views, win you new supporters at home and abroad and add a dollop of humanity to our war crazed world. In Europe, in the Americas you alone have within your grasp a political prisoner of the international renown sufficient to entice the Kremlin to agree to part with Mr. Navalny.
You are by far the leading warrior in Europe against the “Putin regime.” For years now you have fought by all means fair and foul to achieve regime change and remove Vladimir Putin from power. I am appealing to your better side to act fairly in pursuit of your political objectives.
By achieving the release of Navalny, you will give hope to those who support his cause inside and outside of Russia. The simultaneous release of Assange will remove from the U.K. a source of embarrassment and an unnecessary headache. Let him enjoy his freedom on Red Square and share a cappuccino with Edward Snowde n.
Putting aside for a moment your self-interest in following my recommendation, your noble act will save two tortured souls from serving out years of imprisonment that are vastly disproportionate to their alleged misdeeds. It is high time to relegate Iron Mask justice to its historic place in the distant past and to show humane mercy that corresponds to our occasionally enlightened age.
Respectfully,
Gilbert Doctorow
P.S. – I urge all readers who share my thinking on this issue to petition Mr. Johnson in their own name directly.
gilbertdoctorow
Great Post-Cold War American Thinkers on International Relations is the title of my first book of essays. Published in 2010, it has remarkable utility for understanding where we are in relations with Russia today, how and why a New World Order is now forming before our eyes, and where we are headed.
As an historian by education, I had long been unhappy with the way that American political scientists were prospecting history for “lessons” to support their latest proposals for the country’s foreign policy. This practice was all the more in view during the 1990s in the period immediately following the collapse of Communist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe, reaching finally to the USSR. America’s best known, and also some aspiring less known academics produced works which were intended to inform a confused public, and also to guide policy makers in the highest offices of the land. They provided road maps for the new world which was now no longer split to the core by an ideological fissure and which was no longer bipolar, but instead appeared to be unipolar, with the USA as the sole remaining global superpower and hegemon.
I read some of their works, was scandalized by the shoddy workmanship and decided to take action as an historian calling fellow professionals in a related discipline to order.
Considering the results of my dissection of the 1990s and early new millennium writings of the established names in the field, some readers of my book decided that I was insincere in designating them as “great.” However, my yardstick was not the intrinsic value of their writings but the degree of influence they bore across the profession and in the foreign policy community at large. There was little to quibble over my choices. Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger and Noam Chomsky were all well known to the public for several bookshelves of works that have enduring interest up to present. The less well known names in my “big ten” were Joseph Nye, Stanley Hoffmann, G. John Ikenberry and Robert Kagan. They were fillers to give my volume enough bulk. I make no apologies for including them because they were still inescapable in 2010 though their residual value today is often negligible. With one exception, of course, Kagan. I would be remiss not to mention that he is the husband of Victoria Nuland, with whom he shared a Neoconservative world view that he helped to define.
The stronger of the authors in my list were complex thinkers, and it took all of my efforts to get my mind around them to produce a critical analysis, including where they “borrowed” many of their ideas from, what was wrong with the sources and what remained wrong in their reworks.
The most original of the lot was Francis Fukuyama. His End of History (1992) was seminal in the sense that the other “greats” wrote in response to his challenge, even if they never acknowledged his work by name. Fukuyama’s book set down the principles that were embedded in the Neoconservative movement. He argued that with Communism vanquished, all of humanity was now headed in the same direction towards liberal democracy and free markets. This was a single set of rails, along which were stretched out all the nations on earth, some ahead by the locomotive, some behind. With the direction of history clearly delineated by Fukuyama it was a small step for the Neocons to urge the U.S. government to accelerate the historical processes by direct intervention. When this ended in the ill-fated invasion of Iraq, Fukuyama jumped ship and quit the movement. But he never went very far away, and he is called upon even today as an expert in international affairs to comment on the disaster awaiting Putin from his war on Ukraine. That was the main topic of his interview last week on the BBC’s Hard Talk show. Very clever people like Fukuyama walk away from train wrecks unscathed.
Zbigniew Brezinski is now long dead (2017) but his voice is still heard. In the past several weeks many of our news commentators cite the passage in Brzezinski’s best-selling book, Grand Chessboard (1997), in which he explains the decisive importance of Ukraine in Russia’s retaining or losing its standing as a European empire. Of course, there is a great deal more in that book than the two lines cited today. It encapsulated an entire world view that was deeply anti-Russian just as Brzezinski’s career had been when he moved from his university professorship to become Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor.
Brzezinski was the author of the plan to lure the Soviet Union into an invasion of Afghanistan in December1979 and then to provide U.S. support to the Islamic warriors fighting the USSR, which, in the long run wore down the Soviet state and contributed to its demise. There are many in Washington who are hoping for similar results from American support to the Ukrainians in their war with Russia, another war which the USA largely engineered.
Brzezinski’s name was not mentioned in the many obituaries for former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who died last week. However, he had been her mentor during her university studies and they remained in close contact when she rose to high office. Brzezinski accepted an assignment from Albright to assist plans to build oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia to Europe, skirting the territory of the Russian Federation, with intent to reduce Russian revenues from and control over global hydrocarbons.
It would be no exaggeration to say that Brzezinski’s anti-Russian views were imbibed with his mother’s milk. Though it is considered bad form in American political life to draw attention to birth, ethnicity, and the like, there were at the time of his appointment as National Security Adviser a number of serious professionals who questioned the wisdom of appointing a Polish patriot, son of a Polish diplomat, to participate in high level decision making involving policy towards Russia given the several centuries of bad blood between these countries and peoples.
Henry Kissinger’s writings were surely the most difficult to master. He graduated from Harvard a summa cum laude and you feel it. When I was writing my analysis of his master work Diplomacy (1994) I went to the amazon.com page for the book and looked over reader comments, seeking to capture the vox populi. One comment stood out: “He writes very well for a war criminal.”
Indeed it was a widely held view in the past that Kissinger spent the second half of his life atoning for the sins of the first half. His role in prosecuting the ugly, criminal war in Viet Nam was the main sin of the past. From the 1990s on, it was assumed that Kissinger acted as one of the “sage men” giving perspective and insights to those making foreign policy, including presidents. And when he is quoted today, it is common to point to his statements after 2008 advising against extending NATO membership to Ukraine. However, this is to ignore what he did and said in the 1990s. Kissinger and Brzezinski both testified on Capitol Hill in the 1994-1996 period when America reached a decision on NATO expansion and on relations with the Russian Federation going forward. Back then Kissinger had been strongly opposed to including Russia in NATO, even opposed to including Russia in the very diluted Partnership for Peace program. NATO had to be sacrosanct.
In 2008, when the United States and Russia edged towards war over Russia’s incursion into Georgia in August, Kissinger was a leading player in the group of senior statesmen who put together a paper on how to restart relations with Moscow. The paper was delivered to Barack Obama’s campaign team and was implemented in early 2009 as the “Re-set.” However, that plan in fact did not question the givens of U.S. global hegemony and only called for improved rhetoric when dealing with the Kremlin. This scarcely qualifies Kissinger for credits to offset his past sins.
Kissinger has been blessed with longevity. Next month he will be a featured speaker at a big public event hosted by The Financial Times. We may expect him to hold forth on the Ukraine crisis. For readers of my Great Post-Cold War American Thinkers, it will be hard to hold back the jeers.
Finally, I wish to mention here Samuel Huntington, a political scientist who is less remembered today than the first three above, but whose vision of the present and the future set out in his Clash of Civilizations (1996) had a great influence on the thinking about the world in a whole generation of Americans and others around the globe.
Huntington’s book became a best seller after the September 11th bombing of the World Trade Center. The author appeared to foresee the titanic struggle between the West and Islamic terror, and everyone was keen to read him. But the book was not limited to the conflict with Islam. Huntington had a full set of “civilizations” that were supposedly jostling for position. Among them, we find Eastern Orthodoxy, of which Russia is the outstanding case. In this regard, the work remains relevant to today.
That said, Clash of Civilizations was a rather shoddy work which owed a great deal to Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History for the overall concept and to Huntington’s young research assistants for the many scenarios that make up the bulk of the book.
I recalled the half-baked ideas of those young researchers who lacked any worldly experience when I exchanged emails this morning with my good friend Ray McGovern and he asked for my thoughts on a recent interview given by MIT professor emeritus Ted Postol. Postol was lambasting the young “punks” who seem to populate the ranks of advisers to Joe Biden. What Postol missed is that exactly kids like these were always doing the grunt work in political science. Lots of creativity, zero competence. They were surely the kind of folks who said in 2008 to let Lehman go under, because it would have a salutary effect on risk-taking by speculators. They were ignorant of the disasters that lay ahead then, just as those formulating the sanctions policy against Russia today are ignorant of the blowback to come.
Of course, no nation has a monopoly on stupidity and ignorance of economics. The European Union “leadership” is doing its best to hold up its end in this regard. If three days from now the EU member states follow the stern instructions of Gauleiter vonder Leyen and reject the Russian demand to pay for their gas in rubles purchased on the domestic Russian market, then economic mayhem will follow. That damned fool, a gynecologist by education, is telling the whole EU what to do in a vital area of commerce. Her position amounts to an unbelievable usurpation of powers by a warmonger.
The West is pointed straight down, like that Boeing 737 that crashed in China last week. Straight down and accelerating.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022
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This edition of the Spotlight interviews Gilbert Doctorow, independent international affairs analyst from Brussels, and Daniel Lazare, journalist and author from New York to discuss the impact of the Russia-Ukraine conflict on global energy supply.
www.urmedium.com/c/presstv/107036
gilbertdoctorow
Yesterday, after the Ukrainian and Russian delegations ended their several hours of negotiations in Istanbul under the watchful eye of Turkish president Erdogan, the parties released information on the proposals that Kiev made and which Moscow acknowledged were a possible working document for their eventual peace treaty. Meanwhile, the Russians announced that as a token of good faith to encourage the further rounds of negotiations, they would “drastically cut back” their attack on Kiev.
Immediately, global financial markets took heart and marked gains. In Russia, the currency market strengthened significantly, reaching exchange rates against the dollar and euro that are within 10-15% of where they were before Russia’s “special military operation” got underway on 24 February.
What do we know about the points on the negotiating table and can they serve as the basis for a definitive peace?
The most important concession which Kiev is offering is to declare “neutral” status, to give up any plans to join military alliances or to allow foreign military to establish bases on its territory. The latest proposal fleshes out the list of guarantors of Ukraine’s security. These could include the UK, China, the USA, Turkey, France, Canada, Italy, Poland and Israel. In return, Russia will not object to Ukraine joining the European Union.
The talking points remain wide open as regards territory. The future status of Crimea would be decided by 15 years of consultations. The two presidents would discuss the future of the Donbas republics.
One thing that Western media have not noticed is the reaction of Russia’s leading talk show panelists and hosts to these draft points for a treaty. As usual, I take for my point of reference Vyacheslav Nikonov’s Great Game and Vladimir Solovyov’s Evening show. I think the message was clear yesterday: patriotic panelists were disheartened by what they construed to be the too soft line being taken by the Kremlin’s negotiators. A peace treaty is being drafted when none of Russia’s war objectives has been met. No de-Nazification. No regime change: the same Russophobe government would remain in power. No significant territorial gains consolidated in the terms of the proposed settlement. However, the hosts were careful to remind the panelists that this was not end game, just a stopping place on the way.
What do I foresee?
I believe that the Russians will continue to negotiate while using all available firepower to change the situation on the ground in Ukraine dramatically in their favor. The Kremlin remarked several days ago, before the last round of negotiations, that it was about to concentrate its forces in the Donbas to liberate still occupied territories of the two republics and restore their boundaries from before 2014.
As regards, Lugansk, there is not much to do. Latest information suggests that 93% of the former Lugansk oblast is now in separatist hands. However, in the Donetsk People’s Republic there is still a great deal to do. The separatists are holding only 50% of what had been the territory of their oblast in 2014. There are reasons for this. First, the main concentration of the Ukrainian army, perhaps as many as 100,000 troops are still dug into hardened positions directly opposite Donetsk that they created over the last eight years. They have been firing artillery shells and rockets into Donetsk city and its suburbs on a daily basis, causing multiple deaths and wanton destruction of residential buildings and civil infrastructure. The Donetsk forces alone are no match for this concentration; moreover, some of the Donetsk troops have been diverted from attacking across the line of demarcation by the assignment given to them by Moscow from the start of the operations: to assist with the taking of Mariupol. Donetsk units moved south to Mariupol to meet up with Russian troops moving north from Crimea. But the operation has been very difficult and time consuming. Still now there are a couple of thousand die-hard Azov battalion soldiers holed up in the steel mill and in the port area. Their numbers are falling either to Russian assault teams or by melting into the civilian population and heading out via humanitarian corridors. As soon as this operation is completed, the Donetsk forces and Russians can head north to attack the main mass of Ukrainians to the west of the Dniepr.
The Russians are running out of time and out of resources to smash the Ukrainian troops west of the Dniepr. It may be that to get the job done, they will finally resort to the “American way of war” and carpet bomb the Ukrainian positions. We will see shortly.
If the Russians succeed in liberating the 50% of Donetsk oblast still held by Kiev, then they will be ready for a cease fire and for definitive peace talks. By smashing the greatest concentration of Ukrainian forces they will achieve two of their original objectives with one stroke: de-Nazification and demilitarization. The question will remain whether Zelenski can sign a peace based on the new realities. It may be in his interest to go to Istanbul for talks with Putin and then to keep on flying to freedom. His associates in Kiev will surely be ready to lynch him for a bad peace.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022
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My colleague Paul Lookman has very kindly embedded in the latest posting on his website the link to a panel discussion on RT devoted to the Ukraine war.
My fellow panelists on the program were two prominent speakers on the subject who are very much in demand in the States and internationally: professor Nicolai Petro, a Ukraine expert at the University of Rhode Island, and Scott Ritter, a military intelligence and security expert with much relevant experience from his past government service.
The host, Peter Lavelle, has been the lead personality of Cross Talk since its inception 17 years ago.
Since the onset of the Great Censorship that Western governments and major media companies put in place in February, all of Cross Talk programs are no longer carried by youtube.com which is where most of their audience was concentrated. Live reception of RT is, of course, impossible in Europe and North America due to the prohibition on this channel. In the meantime, RT production people are preparing to place the shows on a new internationally accessible platform.
Paul Lookman has done us all a great service by finding the key to the door, and posting the show.
gilbertdoctorow
Several weeks ago, US President Joe Biden warned gravely that Russia would soon be making a chemical weapons attack in Ukraine, thereby violating international conventions and exposing itself to the severest punishment of the world community. Alternatively, the Russians would arrange a radiation leak by attacking one or another of the nuclear power plants in Ukraine.
Happily, neither dastardly act was carried out by the Russians to cover up their supposed losing position in the war being waged against the brave Ukrainians, who enjoy the unstinting support of the NATO alliance.
Instead, a very different kind of war crimes scandal has been promoted in the past two days to achieve the very same objective of universal outrage. The consequence is demands by French President Macron and Chancellor Scholz of Germany for still more draconian measures against the barbarians to the East, namely a full embargo on Russian hydrocarbons, even if it spells suicide for European industry and economies generally. These two birds sang before the microphones almost simultaneously yesterday afternoon denouncing the atrocities supposedly committed by Russian soldiers as they withdrew from their siege of Kiev.
Yes, my commentary introduces a note of sarcasm in speaking about a propaganda operation that is obvious as day to anyone with half a wit and half a memory. It all takes us back to 2014 and the MH17 catastrophe which was laid at the door of Russia within minutes of its occurrence, without any need for an investigation.
As to the murder of civilians in the city of Bucha, a northern suburb of Kiev, and similar photographic accounts from several other settlements evacuated by Russian troops in the past few days, the vicious propaganda narrative coming from Kiev, but surely scripted in Washington and London, raises no alarm bells in the Western media. But then again, there is no collective memory in Western media of what happened on the Maidan, when U.S. backed neo-Nazi units employed snipers to murder peaceful street demonstrators and police in support of a totally fabricated story of police violence by the Yanukovich government to justify its illegal ouster in a coup d’etat. Those same cynical murderers have been in control of Ukrainian politics up to the present day.
It has been reported extensively by Russian television crews traveling with the Donbas republic forces how departing Ukrainian troops fired wantonly on the towns they had been occupying for the past eight years but now were forced to give up. It has been extensively reported by Russian press teams interviewing refugees leaving Mariupol via humanitarian corridors how the Azov battalion and other nationalist radical troops attached to the Ukrainian army were shooting anyone daring to come out of the basements to risk joining the escape routes out of the city. None of this was picked up by Western media. But it surely was picked up by the Kiev propagandists, who decided to turn it inside out and sell it further.
In summation, there are reasons why wars are fought to the death, why many crucial disputes between nations are not amenable to diplomacy until one of the sides has been utterly destroyed. We are living through such a moment in history. And it is most sad, here in Europe, to see elected leaders like Macron, like Scholz play along with the villains to gain favor with the overlord in Washington, D.C. May their cowardice and betrayal of the interests of their own peoples be recorded here and now for posterity.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022
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I met Vladimir Zhirinovsky just once, in the autumn of 2016 when I was a ‘hot property’ on the Russian political talk shows and took part in Evening with Vladimir Solovyov, where Zhirinovsky was one of the ‘regulars.’ My making the rounds of the talk shows was due to the keen interest just then of the production teams, and presumably of their domestic Russian audiences, in views of the Trump candidacy from bona fide Americans. This is all well before Covid and the Zoom era: panelists on these shows had to be based in Moscow, or no further away than St Petersburg, where I was at the time, and had to be on call for invitations on a moment’s notice. There were very few Russian-speaking Americans with tested on-air political analytical skills who met those criteria. I was one.
In any case, my shared time with Zhirinovsky on a segment of the Solovyov show did not leave a pleasant aftertaste. Zhirinovsky made one of his typically outrageous remarks, which I countered when my microphone was turned on. He then pounced, asking rhetorically: “What is this CIA agent doing on the show.”
That vitriolic statement was classic Zhirinovsky. It was a sign of why he had so many enemies and…so many devoted supporters.
I had first become aware of Zhirinovsky’s existence back in the fall of 1995, when he was running for the State Duma elections in December and was making waves. He was then the leading figure in the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) which he founded in the closing years of the Soviet Union and then re-registered as the first non-Communist party in the new, sovereign state of the Russian Federation.
My favorite English-language newspaper, The Financial Times, called him a fascist in 1995. That designation stuck for a while, though even the FT understood it was a gross misrepresentation, and quickly changed to “far-right” the adjective that it regularly attached to his name. At the time, it was widely recognized that the LDPR led by Zhirinovsky and the Communist Party led Gennady Zyuganov shared ultra-patriotic views and antipathy to the American-led West that was busily buying up Russia and installing its representatives in Russian ministries. Both parties rallied the general electorate behind an anti-West electoral revolt that claimed many Duma seats in December 1995. Though it is largely ignored, that tidal wave of nationalism set off alarm bells in Washington, where it now became clear that the pro-Western government of Boris Yeltsin could be replaced by politicians who were not friendly at all. Thus, the nationalist wave in Russia put wind in the sails of those in the United States who were pressing for NATO expansion to the East. I discuss this in some detail in my diaries of the period that were published a year ago in Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume II: Russia in the Roaring 1990s. (see amazon.com and all other online book sellers; available in ebook, hardbound and paperback formats).
When the Soviet Union was disbanded by the Belovezh Accords in December 1991, Zhirinovsky denounced the dissolution. However, over time he revised his views substantially and in the last decade of his life spoke out repeatedly against any attempt to reconstitute the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe. This is a point that most Western analysts overlook entirely when they speak of supposed Russian nostalgia for its Soviet past especially among the patriotic Right. Zhirinovsky explained his position in the entirely rational arguments of economic nationalism: the Soviet republics had been a net drain on its core political entity, Russia. Similarly, the East European countries in the Soviet bloc were also a net drain on Russia. Zhirinovsky spoke in favor of the American practice of extracting financial benefit from foreign policy instead of the Soviet pattern of throwing good money after bad by trying to buy friends abroad.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, or “Volfovich” as he was familiarly called on the talk show that promoted him and his ideas the most, that of Vladimir Solovyov, was during the Putin years a regular contestant in the presidential elections, mostly polling less than 10% but nonetheless a force that was felt around the country, in particular, in the Far East, where LDPR had especially strong local presence. He was intentionally colorful, both in the loud sports jackets he wore on occasion, and in the unspeakable proposals he made regarding the exercise of Russian power abroad.
It is commonplace in Western journalism to say there are no “opposition parties” in Russia but that is a gross oversimplification. It is true that Zhirinovsky’s LDPR voted regularly with the Government on nearly all foreign policy issues. However, in domestic policy the party had its own programs which it consistently defended in legislative initiatives, quite distinct from those of United Russia.
In the new millennium, Zhirinovsky played the fool in his television appearances, but it was all very well calculated to remain in the public eye while not arousing repression from the powers that be. When his 75th birthday was celebrated on television, he dropped the clown’s mask and spoke honestly about the challenge of remaining at the top of Russian politics in the face of a very strong and dominant United Russia party.
Otherwise, it bears mention that Zhirinovsky was well educated and a skillful linguist. His Ph.D. in the humanities focused on the Turkish language and culture. He is said to have been fluent in Turkish even to the end and he always was a knowledgeable commentator on political developments in the Middle East and Central Asia, where he was born.
As part of the feature programs on Russian television dedicated to his life that are being put on air now that his demise was announced in the morning, we are shown snippets from his predictions of political events to come year by year. In the midst of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, we are all reminded that Zhirinovsky foresaw this proxy war between the United States and Russia. He was a leader among the patriotic Russian elites in being ready to stand up to the United States militarily in the confident expectation that Russia will be victorious.
The leadership position in his LDPR party that Zhirinovsky held for most of three decades cannot be filled by anyone else. But the patriotic Right that he represented will in one form or another remain a major current in Russian politics.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022
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By good fortune, I turned on our satellite receiver of Russian state television today just in time to catch key moments from the Prime Minister’s annual report to the State Duma on the work of the Government in the year gone by. Mishustin described in substantial detail the Government’s funding for domestic social and economic needs in 2021, but went on to say how the appropriations are being greatly increased in the current year to counter the negative effects of the “sanctions from hell” which the USA and the EU unleashed after the start of the Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine on 24 February.
Mikhail Mishustin is a heavy-set man but radiates energy, mastery of the subject matter of the day and enormous confidence in the ability of his team to manage effectively all of the challenges, challenges which would have already sunk most every other nation on earth save China. Instead, Russia recovered from a brief collapse of the ruble exchange rate, attaining once again in the past few days the level from before the sanctions. Of course, the exchange rate is not the only measure of success in coping with the sanctions, but it is a good initial barometer of business and public confidence in the government’s financial management.
At his appointment by Putin a couple of years ago, Mikhail Mishustin had going for him a reputation as what the Russians call a хозяйственник, meaning a technocratic manager who can keep tight reins on government spending and get things done. Following the trials of seeing Russia through the Covid crisis, Mishustin has filled out his inventory of skills to be a very impressive manager of men as well as means. He is a good public speaker. What he is not is a politician: he does not pose a threat to the occupant of the Kremlin; instead he is deferential and mentioned at every turn how this or that initiative of the Government or the legislature is made in response to directives from the Head of State.
He spoke a good deal about support for the people in these trying times, in particular about subsidies for mortgage loans to ensure that housing construction remains at the highest levels of output ever seen in modern Russian history. This is good for employment and good for people’s well being. In farming communities, the mortgage will be held at 3%.
He spoke about the massive funding being realized for infrastructure build-out, in particular for roads having regional importance. He talked about several industries having national importance which are being given special assistance – ship-building and civil aircraft production. The latter is being given every support to complete import substitution of all critical components, a task which began already several years ago following earlier waves of sanctions against Russia when Russia was denied supplies of the materials for composite wings on its newest passenger airliners.
But the greatest attention appeared to be to assist industry and commerce with subsidized credit for both investment and working capital. This takes on special importance under conditions of the very high prime rate (20%) which the Bank of Russia recently imposed to rein in inflation. The inflation was sparked by the sanctions and pull-out of foreign suppliers and manufacturers from the Russian market. It also related to the collapse of the ruble in the early days of the ‘special military operation.’
Such high prime rates would normally put a halt to the currency exchange crisis which it did very nicely. However, it would normally also starve the economy of capital and so lead to sharp reduction of supply as well as of demand. The measures that Mishustin set out, feeding capital at affordable rates directly to enterprises through subsidy arrangements with the banks, provides oxygen where it is needed at this critical moment. The objective is to keep enterprises afloat, workers employed, and give a breathing space for the enormous challenges of import substitution to be resolved. It all makes good sense.
In general, despite its statist overarching policies, which include, in present circumstances, naming champions in the target industrial sectors for import substitution, the government’s emphasis remains on encouraging private entrepreneurship at all levels, from small and medium sized enterprises, to the industrial giants, which are also under great stress from the sanctions. That is to say, Russia remains predisposed to free markets as the best response to foreign pressure.
The statist, interventionist side of the present Government shows itself in the measures Mishustin listed with respect to facilitating closer cooperation between universities and other centers of research on the one side and industry on the other. Going back to Soviet times, this was always a weak point in the Russian economy. Now, listening to Mishustin, it appears that there are people in charge who know how to fix the problem just when the Russian economy will be in greatest need of innovation and new technological talents.
My take-away from Mishustin’s speech is that Russia has in place a world class management of the economy and finance. Those in Washington who thought the country could be crushed misunderstood Russians and underestimated the capabilities, determination and sang froid of their Government.
But then there is nothing to be surprised at in this state of affairs. Russian studies in the United States have been virtually useless to anyone for at least two decades. Taking the well known and respected Harriman Institute of Columbia University as a marker, I can say that apart from LGBTQ issues in Russia or Ukrainian films, the monthly program of events for the student body has zero on offer. The lectures and round tables on the Ukraine war today are talk between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee, with all panelists reading from State Department briefings, no different from what the journalists in mainstream media are doing. Not an original perspective or thought to be found there. The field has been totally politicized into an anti-Putin street party and otherwise trivialized. There is no way that this esteemed institution could help anyone in Washington planning economic warfare on Russia to understand the resilience of the Russian side and the futility of their mission.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022
P.S. – On the issue of the failure of Russian Studies in the United States to produce anything of value, I refer the reader to my 2013 essay in The Moscow Times: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2013/11/18/defunding-russian-studies-may-be-a-blessing-a29668
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Youtube a supprimé sans raison nos bulletins n°67 à 77. Vous les retrouverez sur notre chaîne Odysee (pensez à vous y
L’article Nos dernières vidéos censurées par Youtube est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
“Short and to the point.” With those words I would characterize the 12 minute news bulletin on Iran’s Press TV yesterday in which I was given the microphone to place the Bucha scandal in the broader context of the ongoing vicious Information War. The United States and the United Kingdom are conducting precisely such a hands-off operation due to their animal fear of confronting Russia in a kinetic war. Moreover, it is the only kind of war they have any chance of winning, for all that is worth. The hasty, indecent withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan last August capped a series of disastrous military adventures by the US and NATO forces in Iraq, Syria and Libya over the course of the past two decades that left millions of civilians dead and these given unfortunate countries in ruins economically and politically.
The result of the present Washington policies is a vast discrepancy between the “virtual world” being disseminated by the U.S. led Collective West and a “boots on the ground” reality from the Russians.
As I note, for reasons of military secrecy, the Russians are divulging very little about their troop concentrations and immediate plans. Consequently, we will have to wait some time to see the outcome. I anticipate it will be the utter destruction of the bulk of the Ukrainian military parked to the West of the Donbas demarcation line. Such an outcome will obviate the need for a negotiated peace treaty. Facts speak louder than words.
With regard to Press TV: I draw your attention to the moderate and rather fair handed news management. This drives home the fact that even in present day massive censorship in the USA and Western Europe and propagandistic manipulation of the media facilitated by a blackout on Russian news sources of all kinds (not just Sputnik and RT), the curious and open-minded public can find the “other side” or sides of issues making the headlines by tapping into the English language broadcasts of major global players like Turkey, Iran, India.
www.urmedium.com/c/presstv/107681
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The Russian operation to take the port city of Mariupol is drawing to a successful conclusion. “Success” has to be understood today in a qualified sense, since large parts of the city now lie in ruins and as many as 4,000 civilians may have been killed in the fighting, largely victims of trigger happy Ukrainian ultra-nationalists. The Azov battalion soldiers and other irregulars holding the city from fortified positions in residential communities of this city of 460,000 shot wantonly at those who tried to escape from the basements of apartment houses to fetch water or who dared attempt to join the humanitarian corridors and exit the city. The civilian population was held hostage and constituted a “human shield.” They protected the Ukrainian forces from the full fury of Russian artillery and precision air strikes, which otherwise would have been deployed.
All of the fighting over Mariupol has gotten very little coverage in the Western media. All that we heard about was the difficulty in establishing humanitarian corridors and interviews with the few terrorized civilians who managed to get out to the West. To be fair, the situation on the ground in Mariupol has been reported only partially by the Russians because it has been very much a work in progress that they kept under rules of secrecy in line with their entire ‘special military operation.’
Now that the capture of Mariupol is in its final phase, some information of value has been published in alternative Russian media and I propose to present that here to give readers a sense of how this war is being prosecuted and why. Main source: https://www.9111.ru/questions/7777777771838727/
In effect, most of the city proper has been taken by the Russian army and Donetsk militias, with significant assistance from a battalion of Chechens headed by their leader Kadyrov. As the routes out of the city heading east were freed and as the snipers and other Azov forces were pushed back to provide some level of safety in the streets, large numbers of civilians have left the city in the past week. It is estimated that the civilian population remaining in Mariupol at present is about one third what it was at the start of the conflict.
The Azov fighters, other irregulars and Ukrainian army forces numbered about 4,000 at the start and now have been reduced due to casualties. They include among them “foreign mercenaries” as the Russians have said for some time. Now from intercepted phone conversations of these belligerents, it appears that among the foreigners are NATO instructors. This means that the proxy war between Russia and the USA/NATO begins to approximate a direct confrontation, contradicting the public pronouncements coming from the Biden administration. Should the Russians succeed in taking these NATO instructors alive, which is one of their priority tasks, the next sessions of the UN Security Council could be very tense.
To be sure, the 4,000 enemy forces mentioned above were only those within the city. Ukrainian forces numbering perhaps ten times more were positioned to the west of the city at the start of hostilities. Presumably they have been pushed back to the West.
As we have known for a week or so, the remaining Azov and other Ukrainian forces have retreated from the city proper to two locations on the outskirts of Mariupol: the port and the Azovstal industrial territory. The Russians have now entirely encircled both.
The port runs for about 3 kilometers along the sea and reaches inland about 300 meters. It is from here that in the past week, the Azov group tried to send out by helicopter a dozen or more of its top officers. The helicopter was shot down by the Russians, killing all aboard. A relief helicopter also was destroyed by the Russians, but here one Ukrainian survived and he was interrogated about the failed operation.
The port is now being cleared of enemy forces, with the Donbas militia taking the lead.
The Azovstal industrial complex is a much tougher nut to crack. It consists of two steel works. Their specific feature is underground levels going down as much as six to eight stories, where the enemy has to be flushed out by siege methods not by artillery barrage or bombing. As many as 3,000 nationalists and Ukrainian army soldiers may be there. The main task for the Russians is to watch all entrances and exits to the underground.
The Russians are not bombing for two reasons:
First, there is no sense in destroying the infrastructure above the ground level if the enemy is holed up below. Moreover, there are some residential buildings in the vicinity.
Second, if you bomb and bury the nationalists underground, then there will be no witnesses to bring to court to talk about the atrocities which these people have committed in the Donbas. And there may well be in these underground bunkers still more biological laboratories which were till now very carefully kept out of view. The Russians want to get their hands on proof.
Whatever the level of destruction may be, the pending Russian victory over Ukrainian forces in Mariupol is anything but Pyrrhic. It is a full-blooded victory with great strategic importance insofar as it gives the Russians full control of the Azov Sea littoral. It seals the land bridge connecting the Russian Federation mainland with Crimea. It also is a key piece in ensuring water supplies to Crimea, which had been cut off by Ukraine in order to inflict maximum pain on Russian Crimea. With water now flowing once again from the Dnieper, there is a solid basis for resuming farming on Crimea in its traditional levels and also to support tourist inflows, a key source of income for the region. Add to that the likelihood that with some time and investment, Mariupol will reassume its important economic role as seaport and industrial town.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022
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Sometime in the distant future, when the Russian internal documents relating to the conduct of this war in Ukraine are made public, one of the great conundrums of our time may finally receive a definitive answer: why Russia has been prosecuting its ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine with one hand tied behind its back, always holding back the vast destructive forces at its command, and so drawing out the operation and suffering losses of its soldiers in a way which a more cruel, ‘American style’ campaign would largely have avoided.
At the very start of the armed conflict, I remarked on the specifics of what I called ‘the Russian Way of War’ now being applied in Ukraine. This approach does not inflict death on huge numbers of civilians, does not count on a ‘shock and awe’ initial attack to demoralize and overrun the enemy. I said at the time that the overriding considerations on the Russian side were the traditional ‘brotherly’ relations between Ukrainians and Russians, who were extensively intermarried and had relations on both sides of the national frontiers. The intent of Vladimir Putin and his war collegiums was to do minimal damage to the Ukrainian people, to try to separate the ‘healthy’ elements in the Ukrainian military command from the rabid nationalist Azov and similar irregular forces that had become embedded in the army over the past eight years. If the two could be separated, the war could be won with absolute minimum expenditure of materiel and loss of life.
However, in the early weeks of the operation, after it had become manifestly clear that these were illusions, that Russia was facing a unified military force supported by widespread popular civilian backing, still there was no change visible in how Russia was operating on the ground. The only hint of change to come was the refocusing of available forces on the capture of Mariupol, to secure the whole Azov Sea littoral and the progressive redirection of the ground forces to the encirclement of the major part of the Ukrainian army that was entrenched just to the west of the line of demarcation with Donbas. In compensation, there was the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kiev and Chernigov, in the north.
There has been a lot of supposedly expert analysis of the war from British, American and other retired generals. Add to that the ignorant but voluble speculations of simple Western journalists, especially ladies, who have never held firearms of any kind let alone drawn up battle plans. All of these Western commentators begin with assumptions on how an invasion of Ukraine should be fought, assuming the war was unleashed by the USA or Britain. Any deviation by the Russian forces from the timetable or scope of such a Western style assault aimed, of course, at overthrowing the regime in Kiev and subjugating the entire country, is deemed to be a failure of morale or ability to coordinate air cover, artillery and other elements of the battle. Full stop. The conclusion they reach is that the Russian armed forces are far less ominous than we had feared, and we should not hesitate to expand NATO and push them back.
At the same time, no one, NO ONE, in the West has commented on a few obvious facts that place the Russian ‘military operation’ totally outside the traditions of invasions or other acts of aggression. The Russians’ choice of words to describe what they were about to do was anything but arbitrary. They had specific objectives of ‘demilitarization’ and ‘denazification,’ to which was added in the past couple of weeks, almost as an afterthought, to secure the Donbas from any further attacks by Ukrainian forces positioned on the other side of the line of demarcation. The importance of the last-named would not be obvious to Western readers, because the only war pictures put up on Western media are those showing suffering of residents of Mariupol or Khamatorsk. However, Russian television viewers are shown daily the consequences of Ukrainian missile and artillery barrages on the civilian population of Donetsk and surrounding villages, with a daily death toll and casualties requiring hospitalization. This is only the tail of a story of vicious attacks in violation of the Minsk Accords that goes back eight years and produced more than 14,000 civilian deaths, of which the West has chosen to be oblivious to this very day.
The appointment several days ago of General Dvornikov to head the next phase of the war, the full liberation of the Donbas and liquidation of the main concentration of the Ukrainian ground forces, received immediate comment in the Western media. Russian media are just beginning to catch up and publish their evaluation of what changes in the conduct of the war may result.
Dvornikov distinguished himself as commander of Russia’s very successful military operation in Syria. He was known for effective coordination of air and ground forces, something for which the first phase of the war did not seem impressive, whether because of incompetence, as Western analysts insisted, or because of avoidance of collateral damage and loss of civilian life within the constraints of a geography where the enemy troops were intermixed with residential housing, as the Russian narrative insisted. The new battlefield in Donbas would be far better suited to “technical” solutions of artillery and missile strikes.
However, the appointment of Dvornikov is only one sign that the Russian Way of War is being reconsidered at present in the highest levels of the Russian command. In part, this is so because of the ever more daring, or shall we say reckless American and NATO promises to supply heavy armaments to Kiev. The alarm bells rang in Moscow yesterday over statements by a Deputy Secretary of Defense in Washington that the next level of support to Kiev would include intermediate range missiles capable of striking at airfields within Russia.
The Russian response to that threat was immediate. General Konashenkov, the spokesman of the Russian military throughout the campaign, issued a special announcement that any attacks on Russian territory coming from Ukraine would result in Russia’s directing strikes at the decision-making instances in Kiev, which the Russian command had so far chosen not to do. This obviously means the Ministry of Defense, Zelensky’s presidential administration, perhaps the Rada, as well as their handmaidens including Ukrainian television towers would now be instantly destroyed. De facto regime change would be the direct consequence.
While the leaders of several European countries have in the last couple of days publicly discussed whether Russian actions in Ukraine constitute “genocide,” as Joe Biden blithely declared, no one seems to remark on the most glaring contradictions to any notion of Russia’s presently staging an all-out war in Ukraine.
Ursula van der Leyen, Boris Johnson and the prime ministers of Poland and several Baltic States calmly travel to Kiev, stroll down the boulevards of central Kiev together with Zelensky, as if no war existed. To be sure, they are surrounded by security escorts, but these are only of value should there be some violent passersby on their route. The possibility of a Russian missile attack seems not to cross anyone’s mind. In light of Konashenkov’s remarks, all that may change abruptly at any moment.
Finally, I am obliged to mention that not all military professionals in Russia have remained silent over how the ‘military operation’ is being conducted. Last week, reporting live from Mariupol and surveying the scene of utter destruction around him, Yevgeny Poddubny, the most experienced war correspondent of Russian state television, veteran of the Syrian war and other hotspots, quietly muttered, as if spontaneously: “in a military campaign you normally bring in forces six times the numbers of your opponent and here we were nearly matched in numbers.” Surely therer was nothing “offhanded” about that.
The point was repeated in yesterday’s edition of the semi-official newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta in an interview with Lieutenant General Leonid Reshetnikov, a retired officer of the foreign intelligence service. Reshetnikov said:
“When on the attack, military science tells you that you should have a minimum of three times the numbers of the defending side. But on the ground, according to available information, we are artacking from a minority position. We are achieving results that come very rarely in history, in Izyum, in Novaya Kakhovka and in other territories. This shows the mastery of our soldiers and command.” Yes, Reshetnikov has cast his remarks as a compliment, but the hidden criticism is there for anyone who cares to look closely.
*****
From the beginning, I have directed attention to what Russian social, academic and political elites have to say about the ‘special military operation.’ One of my key markers has been the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov political talk show and yesterday’s edition provided a lot of food for thought.
First, with regard to sanctions, there was near unanimity among the panelists that it is time for Russia to respond directly and strongly to the full economic and hybrid war that the United States and Europe are now waging against their country. They call for an immediate cut-off of gas supplies to Europe, to an embargo on export of titanium and other essential raw materials for advanced industrial production in the West. One alternative to these cruel and devastating moves against Europe would be to try it all out first on Japan, which has been a fervent enforcer of the trade war on Russia and even in the past few days publicly came out in support of the Azov ultranationalists, by removing them from the list of global terrorists. Russia should impose a total commercial embargo on Japan, beginning with hydrocarbons and extending into all spheres, such as fishing concessions. Moreover, Russia should position tactical nuclear weapons and other significant armaments on the Kurile Islands as a firm reminder of who owns these territories now and forever.
As regards military action, the consensus of the panelists was also in favor of all-out war on Ukraine, to hell with collateral civilian casualties. The war must be ended quickly, decisively and with minimum further Russian casualties. Period. As several noted, it is highly likely that television viewers are also confused by Russia’s ‘softly, softly’ approach till now. While they trust the Commander in Chief, they want more decisive action in the air and on the ground. It is worth mentioning that the panelist who represents Russia’s ‘creative’ classes, director general of the Mosfilm studios, Karen Shakhnazarov, who had been wavering in his support for the war a couple of weeks ago, was now ‘all in’ and doing his best to find solutions to winning the kinetic war at once.
Then there was also the question of war mobilization. The consensus of panelists was that the Russian economy has to be put on a full war footing, with decision making concentrated in the Executive and removed from the hands of entrepreneurs. This is required not for the ongoing conflict with Ukraine but for continuation of the wider war with the U.S.-led West that constitutes the context for the conflict. Dispatch of longer range missiles to Kiev would make the USA a cobelligerent and Russia should be prepared to strike at the ‘decision making’ institutions there.
In short, the logic of the discussion on Solovyov’s show was that the Russians should make perfectly plain to Washington that it is courting disaster, that we are not in a video game but in a life and death struggle in which Americans do not enjoy immortality.
How much of this feistiness will influence the next moves from the Kremlin remains to be seen. But American analysts would do well to cast an eye on programs like Solovyov’s lest we all move on to end of the world scenarios out of ignorance and miscalculation.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022
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Questions not being asked about the Mariupol die-hards, about the availability from today of Euro and dollar cash withdrawals at Russian banks, and much more
As I have remarked in earlier diary entries, the Russians are very sparing in the information they release daily on the status of the war effort. A couple of days ago, we were shown the 1300 or so Ukrainian marines who surrendered in Mariupol. Yesterday, Russian television devoted a lot of time to brief interviews with some of these prisoners of war, all of whom were Russian speakers, by the way. No surprises there, of course, since the whole region is basically Russian speaking, which is why there is a civil war going on against the extreme nationalist government in Kiev which has sought from the beginning to wipe out the language, the culture and all Russian ethnic identity.
There was another curious news item yesterday on Russian television: a video report on the capture of the latest mobile air defense system produced in Ukraine, which was abandoned by its technical crew in mint condition, with all of the manufacturer’s technical brochures still intact. Here again, most peculiarly, all of the technical documentation is in Russian! This would be amusing if the broad context were not tragic, set alongside the number of Ukrainian servicemen whom the Russians have listed as killed in action: over 23,700. That is approximately eight times the number Zelensky gave to the press the day before.
Finally, Russian news in the past day recounted how a Ukrainian freight plane loaded with Western military supplies was shot down by Russian forces as it approached Odessa from the sea.
Aside from these feature items in the news, Russian authorities continue to give no overall picture of how the campaign is proceeding. Strangely, Ukrainian news sources from the field can be more informative. Among the items today posted on www.news.google.ru are reports from the Ukrainian controlled administration of what remains of Lugansk under their control. They speak of Russian artillery attacks, on the damage being done to houses in hamlets, on the evacuation of civilians to the West ahead of Russian advances on the ground. All of this is in anticipation of the full-scale Russian onslaught on Donbas expected imminently.
Western media have been featuring today the “brave” decision of the remaining Ukrainian forces in Mariupol, holed up in the underground fortress of the Azovstal works, to refuse the Russian offer of their lives in exchange for unconditional surrender. But Western coverage asks no questions whatsoever about the decision and what it tells us about the regime in Kiev that these thousand or so die-hards are serving, seemingly heroically. Russian talk shows today shine a spotlight on that very question and produce some interesting interpretations. We are told that Kiev instructed the Azov battalion leaders and those aligned with them in Mariupol to fight to the end and not to negotiate with the Russians over surrender. From within the ranks of the desperate troops underground, whose ammunition, food and water are all depleted, we are told that anyone daring to speak in favor of surrender is being shot on the spot. We are also told that among the 1,000 or so hold-outs are 400 foreign mercenaries including a goodly number of high ranking NATO instructors. Since from the standpoint of Kiev those instructors are better dead than taken alive, we may assume they are from Member States lower in the pecking order than the British pair of cut-throats taken several days ago who may yet be saved by intervention of Boris Johnson in a prisoner exchange. Shall we assume that the NATO instructors in the lower tunnels of Azovstal are Polish or Lithuanian? I think that would be a fair guess.
So much for easy questions that go unasked, let alone unanswered by Western media, by Russian media or by both. Now I will raise a different question just to demonstrate how the news and analysis flow on this ‘special military operation’ or war, if you will, runs in a narrow rut. The net result is that we have very limited ability to understand what is going on and where we are all headed.
I will just turn attention to the announcement in Russia that as of today the public can make cash withdrawals of dollars and euros in substantial amounts, and also can order foreign currency transfers abroad, up to $5,000 if I understood properly. This means that poor Mr. Piotr Aven, the billionaire banker and Russian wheeler dealer sitting in London at present with his vast assets frozen under sanction rules, may yet be able to pay his chauffeur by ordering a transfer from his Sberbank account in Moscow.
Curiously no one is asking how and why Russia has reopened nearly free currency exchange and cash withdrawals after a month of strict clampdown. Where are the dollar bills and euro notes coming from? Surely the question is begging to be asked. It is not coming in from tourists to Russia since there are virtually no foreign tourists in Russia at present. It is not being carried by foreign business visitors for the same reason. So let us guess. Could it be that Germany and other select EU Member States are delivering plane loads of cash to Moscow to pay for their gas, oil and coal deliveries? Yes, this would allow them to claim they are defying Putin over payment in rubles while respecting the terms of their long term contracts with Gazprom. But it is a pretty picture that they would not want made public, since the European Parliament would make the life of them all quite unbearable if the word got out. Perhaps readers can offer better explanations.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022
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I have in past weeks focused attention on the political talk show “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov,” calling it the best of its kind on Russian state television and a good indicator of the thinking of Russia’s political elites. However, it is time to admit that in terms of overall quality of presentation, level of invited panelists and screening of videos of topical developments in the West to inform the panelist discussion, Solovyov is now being outdone by Vyacheslav Nikonov’s “Great Game” talk show.
“The Great Game” in the past featured live discussion with its anchor in Washington, director of the National Interest think tank , Dmitry Simes. Now Simes is a rare guest, and the panel format more closely resembles that of other political talk shows, with the following notable qualification: the host, Nikonov, is an unusually gifted moderator, who does not impose his views on the panel and brings out the best from his panelists. Nikonov is a leading member of the Russian parliament from the ruling United Russia party, and has broad experience running parliamentary committees. As the grandson of Bolshevik revolutionary Molotov, he happens also to be a member of the hereditary ruling clans and practices ‘noblesse oblige’ in his public service work.
It bears mention that alongside the Solovyov show and the widely viewed Sixty Minutes talk show of Yevgeny Popov and Olga Skabeyeva, ‘The Great Game’ has evolved from a once or twice weekly event to a virtually daily affair, indeed with a couple of afternoon and evening time slots as justified by fast moving current events.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, Vladimir Solovyov has at least one advantage making it worthwhile to tune in. To my knowledge, he is the only host to go outside the usual circuit of ‘talking heads’ from universities, think tanks and the Duma. Solovyov regularly feature a bona fide top manager in the arts who rubs shoulders daily with the ‘creative classes’ and shares with the audience what he hears from them. I have in mind Mosfilm general director Karen Shakhnazarov.
Over the course of the past six weeks, I have several times pointed to the changing mood of Shakhnazarov with respect to the ‘special military operation in Ukraine.’ At first he was buoyant, then he was fearful that the operation was going badly and running out of control, and finally he appeared to be ‘all in,’ looking for ways for Russia to win decisively and quickly.
Last night, we heard from yet another mood swing. I bring it to the attention of readers, because it has great relevance to the current complete passivity of our general public in the face of some very peculiar policy decisions with respect to Russia being made at the highest levels in the USA and in Europe, with zero public consultation so far.
To be specific, Shakhnazarov expressed amazement and deep worry that Western leaders have literally ‘lost their minds’ by pursuing measures to destabilize Russia in the hope of precipitating the overthrow of Vladimir Putin and maybe even the disintegration of Russia in a way similar to the dissolution of the USSR in late 1991. Shakhnazarov remarked that total absence of common or any other sense in Joe Biden is to be expected because of his health (read: senility). But his jaw dropped when he heard that the Chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, declared a couple of days ago that “Russia must not be allowed to win this war!” Where are his brains? Shakhnazarov asked rhetorically.
The point of Shakhnazarov’s reasoning is as follows: Russia is the world’s leading power in terms of nuclear arms. An overthrow of Putin would lead to chaos, and very likely to genuine radicals assuming power. Their aggressive inclinations for policy to the West would be underpinned by the vast majority of the Russian population, which, in Shakhnazarov’s view, is now overcome with pure hatred for the West brought on by the sanctions, by the rampant Russophobia that is now public policy in Europe and the USA. If the conflict should escalate to use of tactical nuclear missiles and beyond, then Russia would no longer limit its strikes to military installations but will happily target all capitals and population centers in Europe and, we may assume, in North America. In a word, Shakhnazarov equates destabilization of Russia with nuclear Armageddon.
I repeat, these are the fears of a highly responsible and publicly visible Russian general manager in the arts. Is anybody in the West with comparable standing even beginning to imagine the coming catastrophe let alone speak out about it?
Before closing, I redirect attention to a major newsworthy development in Russia yesterday afternoon which even our Western media have reported on this morning: the test launch of Russia’s new Sarmat ICBM, which sets new records for speed, distance, destructive force of its MIRV warheads and, surely most important, imperviousness to all known and projected anti-missile systems in the West. Part of the invulnerability of the Sarmat is a function of its range, which extends to every point on planet Earth. Sarmat’s trajectory can be set as best suits its undetectability. For example, it can hit the USA by approach via the South Pole, thereby evading American tracking systems, which look to attack from the Northwest. The Sarmat’s 7 or 15 nuclear warheads can each also evade ABM systems and head for target at hypersonic speeds.
Starting in September, the Sarmat will be installed in silos till now housing the world’s most powerful ICBM, the Voevoda, which will be gradually retired and redeployed as launchers for commercial satellites.
In his words of congratulations to the designers, project developers, and manufacturers of the Sarmat, President Putin stressed the importance of the new armaments as Russia’s dissuasion directed against those in the West who would threaten the country militarily. Is anybody listening?
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022
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