Medvedev Walks the Wild Side

Yeah, darlin’ gonna make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once
And explode into space
— Steppenwolf, Born to be Wild, 1967

by Pepe Escobar at The Strategic Culture Foundation.

Washington is actively splitting the EU in favor of a rabidly Russophobic Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis.

The world has got to be thankful to the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council Dimitri Medvedev.   Paraphrasing that iconic Cold War era string of ads about a beer that refreshes the parts other beers cannot each, Medvedev refreshes those – sensitive – parts the Kremlin and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for diplomatic reasons, cannot reach.

As astonishing tectonic shifts keep turning geopolitics and geoeconomics upside down, and the Angel of History looks East while the United States, corroded from the inside, desperately clings to scraps of its dwindling Full Spectrum Dominance, Medvedev makes no bones about how much he enjoys “smoke and lighting”, not to mention “heavy metal thunder”.

Exhibit One is something for the ages. It deserves a full quote – complete with colorful English translation:

Humiliating defeat or Totalen Krieg

Heavy metal thunder Medvedev is complemented by a superb analysis by Rostislav Ishchenko, who I had the pleasure to meet in Moscow years ago.

These are two key takeaways:

1. “Today, the readiness of the armies of European NATO members for a real war is lower than that of the Russian army in the most difficult time ‘of the 90s’.”
2. Ishchenko neatly draws the West’s choice, “between recognition of a shameful defeat, with a defeat on the battlefield of NATO units proper, and the beginning with Russia of a full-fledged war, which the European armies cannot wage, and the Americans have no strength for, for they are going to engage in China.”

The inevitable conclusion: the whole U.S. architecture of “Russian containment” is “crumbling.”

Ishchenko correctly notes that “the West is not able to wage a proxy war against Russia beyond 2024” (Defense Minister Shoigu, on the record, already said last year that the SMO will end in 2025).

Ishchenko adds, “Even if they manage to hold out not only until the fall, but until December 2024 (which is very doubtful), the end of Ukraine is still near, and to replace them, the West was not able to prepare yet another one who wanted to die for the United States in a proxy war with Russia.”

Well, they are trying. Hard. For instance by regimenting a bunch of hyenas for the Three Seas scam. And by giving the CIA’s darling Budanov in Kiev free reign to stage serial terror attacks inside the Russian Federation.

Meanwhile, a confidential memo designed at the London School of Economics suggests close cooperation between the German government, USAID and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation to build a sort of “new Singapore in Kiev”: that is, a “reconstruction” profiting corporate Germany out of a low-wage hellhole.

Well, no one knows what sort of “Kiev” will survive, and in what form. So there won’t be any remixed “Singapore.”

There will be no compromise

German analyst Patrik Baab has offered a meticulous breakdown of the key facts underlying Medvedev’s outburst.

Of course he needs to quote NATO’s Stoltenberg, who has already elliptically confirmed, on the record, that this is not an “unprovoked” war of aggression – NATO in fact provoked it; moreover it’s a proxy war, essentially about NATO’s eastward expansion.

Baab also correctly acknowledges that after the peace negotiations in Istanbul in March/April 2022, imploded by U.S. and UK, there is zero trust in the Kremlin – and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – of collective West politicos.

Baab also refers to one of Sy Hersh’s Deep State sources:

“The war is over. Russia has won.”

Still, the key point – which does not escape Medvedev’s attention – is that “no concessions are to be expected in Washington. The military confrontation continues. The war has become a battle of attrition.” That ties in with Medvedev already making it explicit that Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkov, Mykolaev and Kiev are “Russian cities.”

Hence, “a compromise is therefore de facto ruled out.”

Russia’s Security Council clearly understands how the strategic concept adopted by NATO at the 2022 summit in Madrid totally militarizes Europe. Baab: “It proposes multi domain warfighting against a nuclear-armed peer-competitor. In other words, nuclear war. It says: ‘NATO enlargement has been a historic success.’”

That’s the rhetoric parroted non-stop by Stoltenberg straight out of NATO’s think tank, the Atlantic Council.

Feeling the pulse in Moscow, in a series of in-depth exchanges, it becomes clear that the Kremlin is prepared for a nasty war of attrition that could last years – beyond the current Raging Twenties. As it stands, the song remains the same in Ukraine: a crossover of snail technique and the ineluctable meat grinder.

The endgame, as Baab clearly understands, is that “Putin is seeking a fundamental security agreement with the West.” Even as we all know it’s not gonna happen with Straussian neocons dictating policies in the Beltway, the facts on the – geoeconomic – ground are unmistakable: sanctioned-to-death Russia already surpassed Germany and the UK and is now the strongest economy in Europe.

It’s refreshing to see a German analyst quoting historian Emmanuel Todd (“WW III has already begun”) and crack Swiss military analyst Jacques Baud, who explained how there has been “a sophisticated philosophy of war in Russia since Soviet times”, including economic and political considerations.

Baab also refers to the inimitable Security Council’s Scientific Council stalwart Sergei Karaganov in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta: “Russia has completed its European journey… The European and especially the German elites are in a state of historical failure. The foundation of their 500-year dominance – the military superiority on which the West’s economic, political, and cultural dominance was built – has been stripped away from them (…) The European Union is moving… slowly but surely towards disintegration. For this reason, European elites have shown a hostile attitude towards Russia for about 15 years. They need an external enemy.”

When in doubt, read Shelley

It’s now crystal clear how Washington is actively splitting the EU in favor of a rabidly Russophobic Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis.

Meanwhile, the “no compromise” in Ukraine is deeply determined by geoeconomics: the EU desperately needs access to Ukraine’s lithium for the “decarbonization” scam; the vast mineral wealth; the rich black-earth soil (now mostly property of BackRock, Monsanto and co.); the sea routes (assuming Odessa does not revert to its status of “Russian city”); and most of all, the ultra-cheap workforce.

Whatever happens next, Baab’s diagnosis for the EU and Germany is gloomy: “The European Union has lost its central function”, and “historically, it has failed as a peace project.” After all now it’s the Washington-Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis that “sets the tone.”

And it gets worse: “We are becoming not only the backyard of the United States, but also the backyard of Russia. The energy flows and container traffic, the economic centers are moving eastwards, forming along the Budapest-Moscow-Astana-Beijing axis.”

So as we crisscross Medvedev, Ishchenko and Baab, the inevitable conclusion is that the proxy war on country 404 will keep going on and on and on – in myriad levels. “Peace” negotiations are absolutely out of the question – certainly not before the November elections in the U.S..

Ishchenko understands how “this is a civilizational catastrophe” – perhaps not “the first since the fall of the Roman Empire”: after all, several civilizations collapsed across Eurasia since the 4^th century. What is blatantly clear is that the collective West as we know it is fast flirting with a one-way ticket to the dustbin of History.

And that brings us to the genius of Shelley encapsulated in one of the most devastating sonnets in the history of literature, Ozymandias, published in 1818:

As we keep searching for light in the darkness of insanity – complete with a genocide running 24/7 – we may visualize the pedestal standing in the middle of a vast desert, painted by Shelley with a couple of sublime alliterations, “boundless and bare” and “lone and level.”

This is all about a vast empty space mirroring a political black void: the only thing that matters is the blind obsession for Total Power, the “sneer of cold command” asserting the perpetuity of a hazy “rules-based international order”.

Oh yes, this a heavy metal thunder sonnet that outlasts Empires – including the “colossal wreck” vanishing in front of our eyes.