From Antony Beevor’s history of the Second World War, quoting a captured German airman as Manstein’s attempt to relieve the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad is failing:
We have got to believe that Germany will win the war or what is the use of going on with it?
I’m fond of quoting the Duke of Wellington on intelligence:
All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill.’
“Find out what you don’t know by what you do“. It’s not easy, it’s not necessarily pleasant but it’s what you have to do in order to minimise your surprise when whatever it is actually comes over the hill at you.
Here’s former British Ambassador to Russia Laurie Bristow saying the same thing:
My advice to all young diplomats and analysts [is that] if you want to understand Mr Putin’s foreign policy, listen to what he’s saying. You won’t like it, but you need to understand it, you need to listen to it. The place to start is the Munich speech in 2007.
“Listen to what he says”. It’s quite easy to. Putin has said a lot and most of it appears on the Presidential website in English as well as the original Russian. Never read what the Western reporters say he says – they almost always distort it – read the original. I’m sure that both Wellington and Bristow would agree.
And that’s what intelligence is all about. Try and understand how the other guy sees things. I have spent the last four decades trying to figure out what’s going on in Russia. I do that by reading what they say and watching what they do and trying to connect the two. Of course you should listen carefully to Putin and other officials, but there’s lot’s more you have to do. A country with a space program like Russia’s probably doesn’t need to steal washing machines for their chips. The West outsourced its manufacturing, Russia didn’t; so Russia can probably make lots of weapons if it has to. Putin has very high levels of support; outsiders probably can’t weaken it. The Russian economy is very self sufficient; sanctions might not have much effect. Russia’s making lots of new infrastructure; it’s not some poor country struggling along. Check these videos out: they’re Google street views of Russian towns ten years apart; the Western media certainly gives you a different impression about life in the Russian boondocks, doesn’t it? Look, listen, think. I’m sure that both Wellington and Bristow would agree.
If you don’t bother, if you blither on about “your values”, the “Rules-Based International Order” and your power and excellence, all you’re doing is looking in the mirror and seeing a slim muscled figure in place of your flabby overweight body. And, sooner or later, you’ll be very sorry because reality will bite you.
I have written many times on this site about bad Western intelligence and the unending stream of nonsense spewed in the West about Putin. Indeed, if there is one big theme of my website it’s that the Western view of Russia and Putin is almost completely false. In a word, Russia is much much stronger, in every way, than the Western establishments thought it was.
This is all being revealed in Ukraine right now: the Western “experts” were all wrong. March’s A total Russian collapse is surprisingly close puffs itself up to May’s Putin is terrified of Ukraine’s counteroffensive; then the bubble bursts and the very same “expert” declares Ukraine is losing, but the UK must stand by it. Their false expertise has cost thousands and thousands of lives. More and more witnesses have appeared to say that Kiev and Moscow had almost reached an agreement that would have stopped the fighting when the West encouraged Kiev to keep fighting. The reflection in their mirror told them that Western “game changer” weapons would terrify Putin’s unmotivated, poorly trained conscripts and their junk weapons. Here’s RAND, a year ago, solemnly pronouncing Russia’s failure:
Also, over the longer term, Russia does not have the capacity for a long war in the face of economic sanctions. Although Russia can continue to generate revenue from oil and gas exports, it does not have the ability to manufacture advanced weapons or even sufficient materiel to keep the Russian army fielded.
Then reality bit. The Western spinmeisters now redefine success, decide that victory doesn’t involve keeping territory and strengthen resiliance.
The bargaining stage of Kubler-Ross’ five stages.
So, when Western civilisation has finally ended,
what will be left for future generations?
We had values once. They meant something once. But then we shit on them. And nobody believes any more. (Vide Canadian Parliament)
Here’s my list
Newton https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/592171-to-myself-i-am-only-a-child-playing-on-the
and this
Turkey, Iran, Hungary, Vietnam. That’s something.
You don’t hear much from me these days for reasons attentive readers know. But I do pay to keep my site alive and I re-read things from time to time.
Usually pretty gloomily: if only my former masters had listened to me (and plenty of others – I can name three at least in Ottawa right now) we wouldn’t be as far up Shit’s Creek without a paddle as we are now. (But, in a year, we’ll be farther up yet.)
Ah well, old guys do burble on. Sometimes I feel like this guy.
But here’s one from ten years ago. Any of you remember when Georgia was the exemplar of how nasty Russia was? But who’s heard of Georgia these days? And where is that shining knight of democracy Saakashvili now?
About five years ago I wrote this in a Sitrep:
SAUDI ARABIA. The visit of Salman bin Abdulaziz was pretty significant I think. The deal on the petrodollar was that Riyadh would insist on USD for payment in return for protection. Because Washington’s wars in the MENA have only made Iran stronger, Riyadh cannot think the deal is working out and it may be looking for a new sponsor: it happened before when Abdulaziz switched from London to Washington. My thoughts here. I believe that the sale of S-400 air defence systems could be a geopolitical gamechanger. Another of Moscow’s strengths is that it talks to everybody: and so it has offered to mediate between Riyadh and Tehran. Because Washington takes sides, it is useless should Riyadh want to negotiate its way out of messes with its neighbours. “The success of the Euro-Asian triptych is based on the essential principle of transforming enemies into neutral players, neutral players into allies, and further improving relations with allied nations.” Slowly, patiently, bit by bit the long game is played.
So what do we have now? About to join BRICS; diplomatic relations with Iran; Mandarin lessons in schools; Renminbi in oil transactions is coming. Sounds as if history has restarted.
I don’t pretend to know much about the Saud family enterprise, but I’ve always suspected that there’s a council of elders or something like that in the background. If so, I wonder if they looked around and decided that, of all the descendants, MBS was the most like his grandfather.
A remarkable man; I recommend this biography.
And finally, who’s the dominant man in this photo?
On this day, 12 August, in 1939, British-French-Soviet military talks began in Leningrad. The British delegation was headed by an obscure admiral and the French by an obscure general; they had taken five days to get there by boat. The Soviet delegation was headed by the Defence Minister and the Chief of the General Staff. At the first meeting the Soviet side said it was there to negotiate a real agreement to combine against Hitler; what were they authorised to do? To talk said the Frenchman, let me get back to London said the Brit. A couple of days later London said he was there to talk. Not an auspicious beginning.
About a year after Hitler took power, Moscow realised Hitler was coming for it and everybody else. At Stalin’s direction, the Foreign Minister, Maksim Litvinov, starting pushing “collective security”: everybody who was threatened by Hitler should get together to resist him. Obviously, the three principal powers, Britain, France and the USSR, would be the leaders, but Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia were all on Hitler’s hitlist. Alone they would be eaten one by one, only united could they stop Hitler.
Litvinov didn’t have much success: he did get a treaty with France in 1935 but it turned out to have little content in practice. Meanwhile Poland, vitally important to any anti-Hitler scheme because it lay between the USSR and Germany, signed the very first non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1934 and collaborated in the carve-up of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Washington rejected overtures in 1934. The UK signed a naval agreement with Germany in 1935. Litvinov kept trying, and people like Winston Churchill agreed, but the Munich agreement of September 1938 pretty well killed it off. Without Britain, France or Poland, it couldn’t be done.
The fuse was burning: in March 1939 Berlin tore up the Munich agreement and dismembered the rest of Czechoslovakia; in April it denounced the Polish pact. Litvinov got Stalin’s agreement for one last try. Even though Stalin replaced Litvinov with Vyacheslav Molotov, he was still hopeful enough to send his two top military people to meet the Anglo-French delegation when it finally got there. But what hope was there for a collective anti-Hitler alliance if the only result from years of trying was a low-level delegation with no negotiation powers and lethargic time appreciation? Evidently nothing would be coming from London or Paris or Warsaw. A low-level Anglo-French mission in, say, 1935 would have been a base to build on but in late summer 1939 it was absurd.
If you were Stalin, what would you do when your Plan A is dead? You know war is coming, you believe Hitler when he says his aim is to seize lebensraum to the east. Your potential allies don’t get it. What would you do?
While London and Paris dither and Warsaw dreams dreams (what dreams? Hitler just tore up the non-aggression pact you were counting on: you’re next) Hitler strikes. How about a non-aggression pact? Stalin seizes the chance, the agreement is immediately signed. Stalin knows perfectly well that Hitler is going to attack the USSR and so he starts to grab as much territory to the west as he can and put off the day as long as possible.
In a couple of weeks you will see a whole bunch of op-eds saying that those two evil BFFs got together to do the dirty on Poland and start the war. You won’t see any mention of the failed Soviet collective security attempt. Why not? Well, the authors probably haven’t heard about it (lots of things have gone down the memory hole) and, if they had, it would spoil the propaganda value of their rant about wicked Russia.
FURTHER READING. I knew this happened because AJP Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War was a set text in my university days and he mentions it. But the man who’s really done the big work on it today is the Canadian historian Michael Jabara Carley. Here’s an interview with him that covers the bigger picture and his trilogy about to be published, an essay on what I call Stalin’s Plan A, and a book 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II. Every now and again the corporate media forgets to forget it: “Stalin ‘planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact'”.
(By the way, while the West has pretty much forgotten this, you can be sure that Moscow hasn’t.)
He died on Tuesday. I haven’t bothered to read many of the obits that have been published but I will make a guess about their general flavour. The Western ones will say he ended the Cold War, removed the Soviet threat and, maybe, introduced fast food to Russia (a reverse on the supposed origin of the bistro). The Russian ones will be rather uncomplimentary and will blame him for the miseries of the 1990s when jobs disappeared, savings evaporated, deaths increased and Russia was pushed around.
I approach this with a somewhat different view that, as it happens, I share with Putin. I believe that, when Gorbachev became GenSek in 1985, the USSR system had exhausted its possibilities. I believe, but cannot find the reference, that Putin told Oliver Stone that the system was inefficient at its core, but more of his thoughts on the viability of the USSR can be found here. Not very complimentary: ideals not accomplished, too much repression ab initio, he pays credit to Stalin’s industrialisation for victory in 1945 but concludes “However, in the final count, the inability to embrace change, to embrace technical revolutions and new technology led to a collapse of that economy”. Or how about this from September 2005? “In the Soviet Union, for many decades, we lived under the motto, we need to think about the future generation. But we never thought about the existing, current, present generations.” (PS he never said “the greatest catastrophe”: that’s a mistranslation.)
In short, I believe that the USSR was heading for trouble in 1985: the 1990s were bad enough but I’m not sure they would have been much better with other players.
So Putin and I would agree that Gorbachev inherited a failing idea. He had three solutions. You can agree that they didn’t work but they were better than Andropov’s notion of tightening discipline and Chernyenko’s inertia. Glasnost was an attempt to start telling the truth, or some of it, and perestroyka attempted a side-to-side, top-to-bottom reconstruction. His third idea was a redesign of the union itself. This, by the way, gave me my first revelation that many Western “experts” formed their conclusions without data. At a Wilton Park conference, one of these “experts” built his whole presentation around the assertion that nobody had any idea what Gorbachev’s New Union would be. This after three drafts, produced after much negotiation, had been published in full in the media! I was rather amazed at this ignorance and equally so to be casually brushed off when I pointed out that the texts had been published and that I had read them.
The idea of re-creating the union was put to a referendum and, with certain revealing exceptions, passed by a solid majority. But the New Union never happened. A day or so before it was due to be implemented, the August coup attempt took place. I have written about my involvement in it here. As it turned out, that killed it. Shortly afterwards, for whatever reason, Yeltsin, Shushkevich and Kravchuk declared the USSR dead and gone and Gorbachev resigned and the flag came down. And that was that. (And, not for the last time, Kiev dismissed the wishes of the Ukrainian population: 59% of the total electorate having voted yes in the referendum.)
Could something different have happened? Had the treaty had been signed; that would have been different. Most of the USSR would have remained, with some republics at the edges gone, and a lot of the suffering of the breakup of such an absurdly centralised economy would have been prevented. The Union of Sovereign States would have remained a major player in the world system and there would have been less likelihood of outsiders meddling.
But it didn’t happen and therefore Gorbachev failed in what he was trying to do. Which was something dangerous and rarely successful.
But was it so bad for Russia? A question few ask. In 2005 Vladislav Surkov told Der Spiegal that he still remembered what he felt when the USSR went down: “an enormous sense of relief, as if a huge leech had dropped from my back”. He thereby showed himself to be one of the few people who understood that, whatever may have been true at other times, by the 1980s the RSFSR was subsidising the whole thing. Most people thought the opposite. Here’s Leonid Kuchma in 1993 “…like everyone else, I believed that Ukraine is so rich that it provided for the entire [Soviet] Union. It turned out that it is, in fact, rich. However, was it really a provider?” Thus, from Russia’s perspective, the end of the USSR was actually a good thing. Admittedly, a lot of misery had to be gone though first. But, of the former fifteen – and the 1990s were bad for all the USSR successor states, not just Russia – which is doing the best now? The Baltics with their huge population loss? Ukraine or Moldova, contenders for the poorest countries in Europe? Central Asia? The Caucasus? For those who think Russia is a decaying sinkhole I invite a perusal of these Google Street View shots of numerous cities taken ten years apart.
So, despite the strong dislike most Russians have for him, they may come to have a kinder view over time.
(PS I can’t give hyperlinks for everything. Most of this happened pre-Internet and the quotations are from the collections I made at the time.)
I am going to pause this site and my other activities for a while until I see how things break out.
What was a post-retirement hobby – a continuation of my job of trying to figure out what was happening in Russia – has now led to accusations of being a Russian agent of disinformation.
Deviation from the approved narrative is to risk, at best, being accused of sowing disinformation and, at worst, of treason.
I’m too old for this.
I did not expect Russia to invade Ukraine. I was quite definite about it several times: “Russia will not invade Ukraine” I said. I envisaged several possibilities but nothing like what we have seen in the last weeks. My argument was based on the assumption that Moscow did not want to take ownership of, in Åslund’s words, “the poorest country in Europe“. I still do not think that it does – I believe that Moscow wants a neutral and de-nazified Ukraine that is a buffer between it and NATO. I am also coming to believe that Novorossiya, more or less in its historical borders as formed by Katherine when recovered from the Ottomans, will be independent. The chance that it would remain part of Ukraine has probably passed. As I wrote in 2014 “In short, the West broke Ukraine, it now owns it. Or, to put it more precisely, it owns that part that Moscow doesn’t want. And what part that is is entirely up to Moscow to choose“. Moscow is choosing now.
So why was I wrong? What did I miss?
I believe I missed three things – two I didn’t know about and one that I did but did not properly weigh. These are: the nuclear weapons issue, the planned strike on LDNR and the biolabs.
At the Munich Conference, Ukraine President Zelensky alluded to the possibility that Ukraine might make nuclear weapons. There is a widespread belief that Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons after the breakup of the USSR but that is nonsense. Yes, some of the USSR’s nuclear weapons were based in the Ukrainian SSR, but they were no more under Kiev’s control than the American ICBMs in Montana are controlled by the state government in Helena. The West was delighted when Moscow undertook responsibility for the USSR’s nuclear weapons just as it was delighted when Moscow undertook to give Russian citizenship to any Soviet citizen left over, to move all USSR weapons and troops out of Eastern Europe and take on the USSR’s debts. Imagine if Moscow had said that it would only take on the RSFSR’s share (about half) of these things and Moldova, for example, should be responsible for its share. It was later that Moscow’s acceptance was re-purposed into accusations – we (and I well remember it) were very relieved at the time: no abandoned nuclear bombs or missiles, leftover weapons, ownerless armed soldiers, unpaid debts, people without citizenship. So Ukraine never “had” nuclear weapons. But Zelensky’s raising the possibility was seen in Moscow as a real threat: if not a fully functioning nuclear weapon, then surely a dirty bomb could have been constructed – there’s plenty of radioactive material at Chernobyl after all and Ukraine inherited a stock of Tochka missiles. So that was a factor. Whether Azarov’s assertion that NATO was actually planning such a thing is true or not, Moscow could not afford the possibility. Putin himself mentioned this as a factor.
The second reason for the attack was the assessment– and some documents have been said to have been discovered – that Kiev was planning an assault on LDNR in March. Definite proof has not yet surfaced but the fact that the bulk of the Ukraine Armed Forces were positioned to attack LDNR rather than to defend Ukraine’s borders is suggestive. Observing this, Moscow evidently decided on a pre-emptive strike. Putin has mentioned this as a factor.
I knew there were a large number of US biolabs around the world – indeed the whole world is now aware of the one in Wuhan and I think I was generally aware that there were some in Ukraine. In this respect the investigative reporting of Dilyana Gaytandzhieva is essential reading. A “conspiracy theory” only a week or so ago, none other than Nuland herself has admitted their existence. The story has therefore morphed from conspiracy theory, through a few benign labs to the Russians might make an attack with dangerous materials from them. I remembered the revelation some years ago that the US military had been collecting DNA samples of Russians. But I didn’t put these fragments together. How big an issue this actually was we should find out: documents are said to have been captured. Putin has referred to this issue.
So there are three reasons for an attack now: a pre-emptive attack to stop the possibility of nuclear or biological attacks and to protect LDNR. It is now evident that the “ultimatum” was a last chance: had Washington, the actual power behind the scenes, seriously addressed Moscow’s concerns – NATO membership for Ukraine and forcing Kiev to follow the Minsk Agreements – there would be no war today. Moscow evidently decided on Plan B sometime towards the end of 2021 and began preparations.
Then, as the war progressed, I forgot Clausewitz’ famous dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means and over-estimated the speed of developments. At the start, Putin put out the aims: de-nazification, disarming and no NATO. The first to be accomplished by killing them and by trials and exposure of the survivors, the second aim is mostly completed and the third has not yet happened (although Zelensky periodically hints at it). These aims can be achieved by violence or by negotiation (aided by violence – the “other means”). The Russian operation will continue until all three are accomplished. I do not foresee Russian troops advancing much into Western Ukraine: let NATO, Poland especially, have the joy of dealing with Galicia.
But, at the end of the day, there will still be something called Ukraine and plenty of Ukrainians next door to Russia. Moscow prefers that these Ukrainians not hate them and that requires careful and cautious movement and the least number of widows and orphans. Therefore, the first week was fast moving but since then there have been many pauses for talks – without much result as far as we know – pauses for humanitarian corridors and local ceasefires. As Colonel Macgregor says, the Russians are trying to minimise civilian casualties.
Russian forces have a good deal of experience in this sort of thing from Syria and we see the slow encirclement of cities and military deployments always with exit routes to allow civilians (and combatants who have lost their will to fight) to get out of the way. The Chechens in particular are skilled at this. (And not least because of their experience of fighting Russia in the First Chechen War. And who would have expected that turn of events?) Larry Johnson puts Russia’s advances in context here.
Therefore the military operation is in service to the politics and is slower than it would be if only destruction were the aim.
But, as I have recently discovered, an NPC can have both chips in at the same time.
Another concept I have been meditating on lately is “midwit”.
Russia Observer 