Can Reality Any Longer be Acknowledged? “The Attack on Russia’s Strategic Forces”
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Can Reality Any Longer be Acknowledged? “The Attack on Russia’s Strategic Forces”
Paul Craig Roberts
https://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-acknowledged-paul-c-roberts/5889833
The attack on Russian strategic forces by Ukraine, with or without President Trump’s knowledge and with or without help from Washington and the British, could have been the most dangerous event in East-West relations during my lifetime. The reason is that recently revised Russian war doctrine states that an attack, even by a non-nuclear country, on the Russian strategic triad requires a strategic response. Strategic usually means nuclear or at least a disabling response.
Putin dodged the responsibility (more later), but no one knew for certain that he would. In other words, whoever is responsible for the attack on Russia’s strategic bombers subjected Ukraine, Europe, the US to the possibility of nuclear attack, depending on whom the Russians decided was responsible. This person (or persons) is a madman, a maniac who must be identified and removed from his position. Try to imagine how it is possible for, say Zelensky, to launch an attack that could result in nuclear war between the US and Russia. How can control over whether or not the US faces nuclear war be in the hands of Zelensky? If Zelensky is responsible, the US and NATO have a massive failure in command and control. If Trump or someone in the Trump administration gave the green light, they should be removed for committing the most potentially dangerous act during my lifetime.
The extraordinarily reckless and extremely dangerous attack on Russia’s nuclear triad is being treated by all concerned as a nothing event, a mere terrorist act, not an act of war. The fact that there is no acknowledgement in Washington, Europe, Moscow, or the media of the seriousness of an attack on Russian strategic forces, and thereby no measures put in place to prevent such dangerous acts, means either full scale, not proxy, war between Russia and the West or Russia’s surrender. Perhaps Putin would like to surrender in order to avoid nuclear war, but he won’t be permitted to surrender.
Putin took the lead in burying the seriousness of the attack on Russia’s nuclear triad. By designating the attack a “terrorist act” he evades the responsibility that Russian strategic doctrine imposes on him for a strategic response.
Nothing of consequence has happened, says the President of Russia. Amen say Washington and Europe. Therefore, whoever is responsible for the attack knows that the next attack can go further. It too will be unacknowledged as an act of war.
How many times can Putin pretend that attacks on Russia’s sovereignty, which is what attacks on Russia’s nuclear triad are, are mere terrorist events before he discredits himself with the Russian people?
The purpose of the recent revision of Russian strategic doctrine was to discourage or prevent attacks by Western proxies such as Ukraine on Russian strategic forces. It failed because Putin has taught the West not to take him seriously. He is ever ready to turn the other cheek. Now Putin has shown that he will not acknowledge attacks on Russian strategic forces as anything other than a terrorist event, not an act of war. So Putin has negated Russian strategic doctrine. It means nothing. Now that the West knows this, Russia can expect escalating provocations. All of Putin’s good intentions have ended in disaster, and a major war will be the consequence.
It could be that Russia is doomed. Decades of successful Western propaganda have turned most of the Russian professional and intellectual class into Atlanticist Integrationists. They think that Russia belongs as part of the West and are willing to make concessions of sovereignty to be part of the West. Clearly this point of view is strong in the Kremlin and the Russian Foreign Ministry.
The Zionist American neoconservatives are very much aware of this Russian weakness, and they are adept at taking advantage of it. They don’t have to do much, because Putin does their work for them.
Putin has declared Ukraine to be conducting terrorism, not war, against Russia. Putin’s declaration also absolves Washington and Europe for any responsibility.
Here are English language Russian headlines of Putin’s hiding from reality that apparently he is unable to face up to. Or perhaps he is not yet ready, being at work constructing a powerful military that US/NATO cannot resist.
“‘Illegitimate Kiev regime’ turning into terrorist organization” – Putin
“The latest terrorist acts carried out by Ukraine in Russia are the outcome of decisions made by the Ukrainian political leadership.” Putin added that “the decisions to carry out such crimes were, of course, made in Ukraine” by the political leadership in Ukraine. In other words, Washington and Europe have no responsibility for the act of war, which is not an act of war, but merely terrorism. See this: https://www.rt.com/russia/618651-kiev-regime-rejecting-peace/
In other words, the Kremlin has said that Washington and Europe have nothing to do with the attack on Russia’s strategic triad, and that Ukraine is merely creating terrorist incidents, not making war against Russia.
I find it hard to believe that Putin is this stupid. My bet is that he is not yet ready. He keeps the minor Ukraine conflict going while he builds up to remove NATO from Russian borders.
Trump can remove the coming conflict by giving Putin the mutual security agreement Russia has been requesting for years. This would be the costless solution, but Trump is not really in power, and the power and profit of the US military/security complex needs the Russian Enemy.
So, how will a devastating war be avoided? Information such as I have just presented is banned by the official narratives. It is scary how many Americans are gleeful over the attack, brainwashed as they are by their indoctrination that “the Russian enemy” needs to be taught a lesson if not destroyed. How can such indoctrinated people be saved from their own folly?
Indeed we might find ourselves in more than one devastating war. The American neoconservatives are still trying hard to get a war going with Iran by raising the specter of Iranian nukes. It is a false charge, but the indoctrinated American public, according to recent polls, supports war with Iran to prevent an Iranian nuke. Mike Whitney tells the story: https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/will-tuckers-article-on-x-stop-a-war-with-iran/
If two devastating wars are not enough, China is there to be provoked into a third war. Democracy and an ignorant population make a mixture for disaster.
Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Is Putin’s Soft Touch Bringing War in its Train?
Is Putin’s Soft Approach Bringing War in its Train?
Paul Craig Roberts
“If Mr. Putin genuinely wants to save the lives of his soldiers and of his civilians then he should end the war conclusively and dramatically right now. This, I believe, is well within his power if he has the will and the vision to act as the situation requires.” — Gilbert Doctorow
I am pleased to see Gilbert Doctorow’s concurrence with my longstanding position that the greatest threat to peace is Putin’s reluctance to bring the conflict in Ukraine to a quick decisive end. Putin’s ongoing war is a direct road to wider war.
In his ever-widening war Putin has done nothing to prevent the Kiev government from continuing the war. I have suggested that Putin hoped to use peace negotiations to achieve a wider understanding with the West. Others have attributed Putin’s inaction to his concern that if Russia acts decisively, the result will be to unite the West to more hostile action. Still others attribute the never-ending conflict to Russian weakness. Whatever the cause, the longer the war continues the more it spins out of control. Although dismissed by Putin, the attack on Russia’s triad is a very serious matter.
Gilbert Doctorow and John Helmer are commentators, analysts, whatever you want to designate them, who seek out the facts instead of pushing official narratives. They don’t always see eye-to-eye, but I read them as a check on my own thinking. The fact that most so-called experts are pushing narratives instead of correct explanations is why we are in danger from such reckless actions as attacking Russian strategic nuclear forces. As I have said, that attack should scare the world to death.
Use it or Lose It
Gilbert Doctorow
https://gilbertdoctorow.substack.com/p/more-on-use-it-or-lose-it
I note with some satisfaction that my last two essays questioning Vladimir Putin’s ‘softly, softly’ approach to conduct of the war in Ukraine attracted particular support from the Community. In what follows, I intend to take this logic one big step further for the sake of argument. Let us do what Herman Kahn famously proposed in his controversial book of 1962 and think about the unthinkable.
I do this in the knowledge that a fair percentage of readers in Alternative Media, including this web platform, may be pacifist minded. My intention is not to offend them, but to allow them to consider other positions on how this war can be prosecuted to bring it to a close sooner rather than later and to spare the lives of combatants and civilians on both sides of the conflict. All the while, my first concern is to avoid escalation to nuclear exchanges, which is what the Community surely believes to be the underlying motive of Putin’s ‘softly, softly’ approach.
In a world of demented politicians occupying highest office, as in the case of Joe Biden, assisted by wholly irresponsible, insane assistants like Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken, ‘softly, softly’ may have made sense. In a world dominated by Realists like Donald Trump it no longer makes sense.
*****
As readers of yesterday’s essay here will be aware, the Russian government is presently pretending that the attack by Ukrainian drones on its strategic bombers last weekend never happened. Mr. Putin spoke about the Ukrainian attempts to sabotage the peace talks the day before they were scheduled to resume in Istanbul on 2 June by staging terror attacks on civilian rail infrastructure in the Kursk and Bryansk oblasts. This allowed him to attach the ‘state supported terror’ label to the Kiev regime and to prepare the world community for a possible decapitating strike some time in the future. But in time present, Russia’s response to the attacks of last weekend were just more of the same destruction it has rained down on Ukrainian drone manufacturing facilities, design offices and arms caches over the past year or more, all without any apparent effect on the intensity of Ukrainian drone counter-strikes on civilian targets within the Russian Federation, not to mention Ukrainian sabotage by paid agents inside Russia.
The only indirect Russian response to the Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia’s heavy nuclear capable bombers in air bases across the Federation was the seemingly offhand remark by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Ryabkov during this past week that it is unlikely there will be any renewal of the New START treaty which mandated the vulnerable stationing of Russian bombers out in the open when that treaty expires early next year.
The logic of Putin’s conduct of the war has been to minimize casualties among Russian soldiers. That prioritization has dictated against Russia’s staging any further storming of Ukrainian fortified cities such as was practiced in the first year of the war in the capture of Mariupol and Bakhmut. Though Russian forces have been advancing steadily along the entire 1200 km Donbas front for many months now, the big summer offensive that Western military commentators are talking about is unlikely to happen precisely because such offensives normally result in much higher casualties on the attacking side than in the defending side and the Kremlin does not want to reverse its overall advantage in casualties incurred till now, which may be reckoned at 7:1 or better.
Let us be clear eyed: this laudable concern for its soldiery results not only from humane considerations. I believe that uppermost are political considerations. Russia today is not the USSR in 1942. It is a democracy, not an iron-fisted, murderous dictatorship and it is responsive to the wishes of its citizenry, who do not want to lose vast numbers of men on the battlefield for the sake of national interests.
The Kremlin is sticking to its plan of a slow war of attrition that has played out reasonably well till now. However, this war of attrition has not brought Ukraine to the point of capitulation, which is the fundamental precondition for their agreeing to the peace terms set out in the Memorandum that the Russian delegation handed over to the Ukrainians a week ago in Istanbul and made available publicly by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs since then.
Considering the size of Ukraine and of its population; considering the residual military aid it may yet receive from friends around the world even if the USA steps aside; considering the hatred of moskali (pejorative for Russians) in the broad Ukrainian population that the past decade of intense U.S.-paid propaganda has fanned – the naturally arrived at point of capitulation by Kiev is unforeseeable, even if many, myself included, have suggested it could come soon. Supporting this view are the videos of Russia’s war correspondents speaking to front-line soldiers, especially those manning artillery or tanks shown on Russian state television daily: these soldiers are constantly moving positions to stand clear of incoming artillery and drone strikes coming within minutes of what they themselves are firing. This means that the Ukrainian forces are not fleeing the battlefield but are staying and fighting with deadly effect. Regrettably I do not see any of this reflected in the commentaries of my peers.
*****
During the first Istanbul face to face meeting of Russian and Ukrainian peace negotiators, the head of the Russian delegation Medinsky pointed out that Russia is ready to continue the fight with Ukraine to complete victory however long that takes and he made reference to the Great Northern War with Sweden conducted to victory by Peter the Great…over the course of 21 years.
Twenty-one years!
However, the logic of this argument does not hold. As I said long ago, Vladimir Putin launched the Special Military Operation in February 2022 because he and his advisors saw a window of opportunity to end the military build-up of Ukraine and its planned accession to NATO. The window of opportunity was defined by Russia’s having reached a new plateau in development and first deployment of cutting-edge strategic weapons systems giving it an edge of perhaps five years over the United States. It was also defined by the way the economy had been made sanctions proof since 2014.
This window of opportunity would close within five years as the USA caught up in strategic weapons and as Putin’s holding center stage in Russian politics comes to an end for natural reasons of health, life longevity and so on.
In the meantime, the war itself has created new ‘sell by dates’ on its continuation. The rise to power of Donald Trump has pointed to the possible withdrawal of US military support for Europe under NATO, all of which has empowered those voices in Brussels calling for a big expansion of military production and expansion of military budgets in Europe. It is now conceivable that Europe will pose a serious threat to Russia in conventional warfare within a five-year time horizon unless Russia scores a military victory in Ukraine soon, compelling a capitulation not only in Kiev leading to the country’s neutrality but also capitulation in Brussels and Washington leading to negotiations redrawing the European security architecture and bringing Russia in from the cold.
If Mr. Putin genuinely wants to save the lives of his soldiers and of his civilians then he should end the war conclusively and dramatically right now. This, I believe, is well within his power if he has the will and the vision to act as the situation requires.
As I suggested a couple of days ago, an Oreshnik strike on the headquarters of Ukrainian terror operations headed by Kyrylo Budanov in downtown Kiev would seriously curtail if not completely shut down the terror dimension of Ukraine’s fight against Russia. Why wait?
An Oreshnik strike on wherever in Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky and his closest advisors happen to be would free up Ukrainian politics for a genuine move towards peace talks as opposed to the charade we see today.
But why stop there? It is widely assumed that the leading country in the West promoting delivery of a humiliating defeat on Russia and the country’s subjugation is the United Kingdom. It is widely assumed that the planners and likely help-mates to the Ukrainians in their implementation of Operation Spider Web last weekend were the Brits.
Accordingly, I believe that the best response to the attack on the Russian nuclear triad of last weekend would be for Russia to quietly sink a couple of British nuclear submarines.
Who would back Britain in a retaliatory strike against Russia? No one! Mr. Trump is not going to put the entire USA under threat of instantaneous destruction from unstoppable Russian missiles by rising to the defense of Mr, Keir Starmer and his warmonger ministers.
To those who fear for Mr. Putin, who admire his saintly forbearance, I repeat the bit of folk wisdom I received from my boss in a multinational corporation back in the 1980s: the cemeteries are filled with irreplaceable people.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025
Further comment by PCR:
An alternative to Doctorow’s view that “the logic of Putin’s conduct of the war has been to minimize casualties among Russian soldiers” is that Putin, having foolishly relied on the Minsk Agreement that was used to deceive him was not prepared for the conflict that Washington forced upon him. Therefore, the Russian intervention had to be restricted to clearing Ukrainian forces from the independent Donbas republics. Having been trapped into a limited response, Putin was kept in the trap by Western accusations that he had “invaded Ukraine” and would go on from there to Western Europe. If Putin finally mobilized sufficient forces to destroy resistance, the West would find its prediction confirmed and unite to enter the conflict. Thus was Putin trapped in his “Special Military Operation.”
Fearful of an expanded conflict, Putin’s failure to respond to provocations and to enforce his red lines has expanded the conflict into attacks on Russia’s nuclear triad, and Putin side-stepped reality again. The consequences of Putin’s acceptance of provocations is his lack of credibility. The West does not believe that he will really fight. This belief, reinforced by Putin’s behavior, will result in a provocation that cannot be ignored, and WW III will begin.
Doctorow is correct that the only way to avoid a real war is for Putin to quickly produce an overwhelming Russian victory that completely removes Ukraine from the conflict and sends a believable message to the West. This can be done with conventional weapons. At the moment Putin’s non-action has eviscerated the credibility of Russia’s war doctrine.
Will Putin end the conflict with victory, or will he condemn the world to war?
I seldom see intelligent and relevant analysis from Russian commentators . Whether this reflects censorship or a misunderstanding of events I do not know. The Western foreign policy community simply repeats official narratives.
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