It is now one year and one month since there was a direct contact with Russia proving that either Sergei Skripal or Yulia Skripal, or both, are still alive. That was an hour-long telephone call from Yulia Skripal to her cousin Viktoria Skripal on November 21, 2020.
There has been no direct evidence from Sergei Skripal himself that he is alive since he telephoned his family home on June 26, 2019.
Viktoria Skripal told a Moscow press interviewer three months ago that because there was no word from either of them following the death in Yaroslavl of Elena Skripal, Sergei’s mother, on January 7 of this year, she believes they may be dead. “We can assume that they are not alive. Because they knew that their grandmother had died — in any case, we were assured that they had been accurately informed. But there were no condolences, no flowers, none of this from them.”
Reporters from the two Moscow dailies, Moskovsky Komsomlets (MK) and Izvestia, who have been closest to Viktoria, confirm the silence. Alexander Klibanov of MK says he knows of no telephone call or other message from the Skripals this year. “There’s no sign of them,” Nikolai Pozdnyakov of Izvestia adds. He also says there is no definitive proof of their death. “They may be necessary for some new ‘Novichok show’ or something of the sort if the British secret services are going to provide such a thing.”
How to stop the US provocations aimed at pushing Russia to go to war in the Ukraine, and at claiming credit for deterring Russian from doing so? Impossible – the US cannot be stopped. But Germany, the country most likely to suffer the direct effects of war in the Ukraine, can stop the American deployment of nuclear-capable weapons on Ukrainian territory.
Will the war start? Silly question – the war won’t start because it has already started, and has been in active use-of-force mode since February 2014 when the US overthrew the Kiev government of President Victor Yanukovich; attempted to take Russian bases in Crimea; and followed in July of that year with the plot to down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 and trigger a NATO invasion of the Donbass.
Right now on the Ukraine front, Russia will do nothing new; that’s to say, nothing more than it has already done, and is doing. But if and when Germans agree to the Americans deploying nuclear-capable weapons on Ukrainian territory, as they have already done in Romania, Poland, and the Black Sea, then the Stavka in Moscow will do something no western intelligence agency, think-tank, propagandist, and least of all the Japanese mouth organ known as the Financial Times will have anticipated.
For the time being, the Russian assessment is that the US will not make war against Russia directly because it is divided between the Americans who are reluctant, of whom President Joseph Biden is one; CIA director William Burns another; Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two more. Gung-ho by contrast are Secretary of State Antony Blinken (lead image, left) and Victoria Nuland, Under Secretary of State — the Blin-Needle* gang who are quite recent Americans; their grandparents were Ukrainians. The Russian assessment is that their anti-Russian violence is in part the outcome of their relatively recent capture of state position. For the past three generations, and longer, the Blin-Needle gang has been hating and under-estimating the Russians; they think they have made their successful careers, advancing themselves to the top of the US state, by doing so.
Under-estimating the Russians was a mistake the advancing German army commanders made during the first wave of their invasion eighty years ago. They don’t make the same mistake today.
The Russian tactic, therefore, is to try publicly differentiating the Blin-Needle gang from Biden, Burns, Austin, and Milley in Washington, and from the new German leadership in Berlin of Olaf Scholz (lead image, right). Their coalition can hold together so long as they can keep their proxies – the Ukrainians, Romanians and Poles – on a short leash. Taken together, or separately, these three national groups present no serious risk of war the Kremlin isn’t confident of managing in the short or medium term.
The war problem becomes immediate and much more difficult to manage if and when the US moves its own forces with nuclear-capable weapons into firing positions in these front-line states, in the skies above, and on the Black and Baltic Seas.
If NATO advanced toward the Russian border with the aim of attacking Russia with weapons made of chocolate, the Russian defense and counter-attack strategy, firing Russian-made chocolate, would overwhelm the attackers in the first wave of Russian creme, praline, nuts, waffle, and soufflé.
That’s because Russians, and not only Russians, think Russian chocolate tastes better, with higher quality of ingredients, more variety, and less synthetics, fats, and sweeteners. In 2001, in the only survey of Russian consumer attitudes towards chocolates, including children, it was discovered that “in the image of domestic chocolate products [there were] in particular, a genuine care for the consumer, sympathy with national traditions and patriotism…. Western chocolate products had associations of vitality, well-being and self-confidence, counterbalanced by greed, artificiality and aggression.”
The only way NATO chocolate can conquer Russia is by the Fifth Column – that is, the takeover of the domestic market by the NATO brands Nestlé, Mars, Mondelez, and Ferrero. And this is exactly what has happened. In the current Russian chocolate market, these four manufacturers account for 61% of revenues – the money Russians spend on confectionery. Together, the two US groups, Mars and Mondelez, hold a 29% market share; Nestlé of Switzerland, 24%; Ferrero of Italy, 8%.
Russian chocolate experts see the future for Russian chocolate in rapidly increasing exports to new markets like China where chocolate eating is negligible. But they predict little chance the Russian chocolate manufacturers will be able to take domestic market share away from the foreign companies. This is because, under the pressure of falling income during the pandemic, rising inflation, and shrinking profit margins, Russian chocolatiers are replacing their traditional ingredients with cheap substitutes, wiping out the taste difference and advantage over their rivals.
The British Government announced this week that after cancelling the coroner’s court inquest into the death of Dawn Sturgess from alleged Russian Novichok attack, the public inquiry replacing the inquest will not start for more than a year — until February 2023.
Sturgess died in Salisbury District Hospital on July 8, 2018, four months after Sergei and Yulia Skripal were allegedly attacked by Novichok and recovered in the same hospital. The second coroner appointed to investigate, Baroness Heather Hallett, has already ruled officially, and posted on her inquest website, that “the post mortem indicated the cause of her death was Novichok poisoning.” The medical evidence has not been disclosed, tested forensically, or cross-examined according to British coroner’s court standards. Those standards have now been replaced by a more secretive proceeding, called a public inquiry, in which Hallett will play prosecutor, judge, jury, and also censor.
When the public inquiry opens, new papers released in court now reveal, government officials will have designed what they call “a bespoke disclosure strategy” to prevent open cross-examination of witnesses and public analysis of documents, including the ambulance, hospital and post-mortem medical reports. Witnesses and potential whistleblowers, including the three survivors of the alleged Novichok attack – the Skripals and Wiltshire police sergeant Nicholas Bailey – will be excluded as “interested persons” or “core participants” from the ongoing proceeding.
To preserve their silence, and enforce the silence of others on the Wiltshire county police force and at Salisbury Hospital, special “restriction notices” are being prepared – the court papers disclose — for “a regime of ministerial restriction notices and inquiry restriction orders to allow documents or information to be withheld if it is in the public interest.” Hallett will supervise this secrecy operation to prevent “disclosure or publication of any evidence or documents given, produced or provided to an inquiry.” This gag will “continue in force indefinitely.”
This week’s court papers also reveal that the official records now under review of the Novichok investigations have “emanated from the Home Office; the Cabinet Office; the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, Public Health England, the Department of Health and Social Care and the Government Office for Science.” Missing from this list, and thus from the evidence records to be submitted to the public inquiry, are the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), the signals intelligence agency GCHQ, and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down.
If Russian military agents had attacked with a Novichok nerve agent, according to the official narrative, these were the front-line agencies in charge.
There has never been any possibility that Russian Army Colonel Sergei Muchkaev, commander of the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the 20th Guards Army, would respond to allegations by Bellingcat, their NATO sources, and Dutch state prosecutors. No possibility whatsoever.
For more than five years they have been claiming that Muchkaev had given the orders to move a BUK-TELAR missile battery from the brigade base in Kursk across the border into Ukraine in July 2014, and there to shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17 of that year.
No army in the world, least of all the NATO armies in their war preparations against the Russian Army, would allow a fishing expedition by a secret judge and his military intelligence helpers to interrogate a serving officer for information about the command, control, communications, and operational orders of his unit. But that is exactly what the Dutch judge presiding at the MH17 trial, Hendrik Steenhuis, and the investigating judge assisting him in secret, have been attempting for several months. Last month, on November 2, Steenhuis ordered the trial to be delayed until next February while Muchkaev was pursued by the Dutchmen.
This past Wednesday, December 8, Steenhuis announced in court what he and his government superiors had been expecting. In a letter apparently dated December 3, the Russian authorities reportedly said they would not allow questioning of Muchkaev. Steenhuis said the Russian letter claimed as its legal authority the European Convention for Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters – a treaty both the Dutch and Russian governments have ratified.
Steenhuis did not quote the Russian government letter. Instead, he claimed he was reporting what he had been told by the secret investigating judge who had received the Russian letter last week. According to Steenhuis, he was told the Russian Justice Ministry had said that “pursuant to the European Convention for Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters such a request [for Muchkaev to be questioned] can be rejected if the requested party, in this case the Russian Federation, is of the opinion that execution of the request may harm the essential interests of the country.” — Min 10:38.
Steenhuis went on to claim he had been told by the investigating judge that the letter from Moscow claimed “the questions in the [Dutch] documents [plural] received which were going to be asked of the witness Muchkaev” involved classified military matters, disclosure of which is prohibited by Russian law. Accordingly, Steenhuis claimed the Russian letter claimed the questioning “may cause damage to state secrets of the Russian Federation, and consequently to essential interests of the Russian Federation. In view of the above” – Steenhuis talking – the Justice Ministry refused to send the Dutch request to a Russian court to order Muchkaev to testify. “This was the reaction of the Russian Federation” – Min 11:19.
But was it? That’s to say, was Steenhuis quoting from the exact words of the Russian letter, and was he quoting all of them?
In his brief announcement, Steenhuis has made it appear the Russia government won’t allow their officer to testify because of a single provision in the Mutual Assistance Convention behind which the Russians are hiding what the Dutch have already accused Muchkaev of doing. Not only has Steenhuis used the court to announce the innuendo that Muchkaev is guilty of the shoot-down of MH17. Steenhuis has also implied there was only one provision in the Convention identified in the Russian letter, and that’s the guilty secret one.
In fact, the Convention provides several quite different provisions for the Russian refusal – one of which blocks evidence fishing expeditions; another which blocks attempts to pursue politically motivated allegations and show-trial prosecutions; and yet another which exempts serving soldiers.
Behind the penetration-proof walls and the top-secret record of what was said, if the small print of their communiqués is the truth, President Joseph Biden has agreed to reduce the risk of US attack on Russia, and President Vladimir Putin to reduce the risk of Russian attack on Ukraine.
“A lot of give and take,” Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called the exchange in his post-summit briefing for the press. Reduce instability, increase transparency, de-escalate threat of war – Sullivan added. “The United States and our European allies would engage in a larger discussion that covers strategic issues, including our strategic concerns with Russia and Russia’s strategic concerns. We managed to do this at the height of the Cold War and we developed mechanisms to help reduce instability and increase transparency.”
Russia cannot accept the threat of attack from NATO’s “attempts to develop Ukrainian territory and is building up military potential near our borders,” Putin said, according to the Kremlin report. “Therefore, Russia is seriously interested in obtaining reliable, legally fixed guarantees that exclude the expansion of NATO in the eastern direction and the deployment of offensive weapons systems [наступательных систем вооружений] in neighbouring states with Russia.”
“You, Americans, are worried about our battalions, on Russian territory, thousands of kilometres from the United States,” Putin said, according to the press briefing by Yury Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy advisor and Sullivan’s Kremlin counterpart. “But we are truly concerned about our own security.”
Putin is repeating what Sullivan and Ushakov call the “strategic concerns” — the cross-hairs warning of May 2016; the 12-minute red line warning of February 2019; and last week’s 5-minute warning of hypersonic weapon response. This time there’s reason to believe Putin and Biden have agreed on a sequence of reciprocal moves to test the give and the take at the strategic level, not at the level of the fighting on the Ukraine front. For the moment, these moves are semi-secret. If they don’t materialise between now and Christmas, then the promise, as Ushakov calls them of their teams and representatives “to enter into contact soon about these sensitive questions” will come to nothing.
There’s also reason to expect the last people to accept this will be the managers and journalists of the mainstream Anglo-American media and the schemers of Vladimir Zelensky’s (lead image, left) regime in Kiev. The propaganda war will continue without let-up; so will the shelling of the Donbass.
About the Russiagate operation that continues in the US, Richard Sakwa (lead image), a professor at the University of Kent, has gotten one thing right and one thing wrong. The wrong turns out to be the same thing as the right.
Russiagate, he says, defining that as the narrative of Russian interference in US politics in support of Donald Trump, “is one of the most mystifying yet consequential events of our time.” At the same time, Russiagate is a propaganda and deception operation aimed at achieving the political interests of the Democratic Party, their candidates and supporters. “What if Russian actions during the 2016 were minimal and defensive, and there was no grand plot”, Sakwa asks rhetorically, not quite agreeing to answer for himself. “In that case the endless years of the Russiagate scandal, in which every scrap of evidence was portrayed as the ‘smoking gun’ before being discredited” turn out to be “deception.. defined as the deliberate attempt on the part of leaders to mislead the public about the thrust of official thinking… Such deceptions are now routine in US politics.”
A deception cannot be either mystifying or consequential if it’s routine. But if the Russiagate operation is routine, then the truth of the narrative doesn’t stop the repetition, and the falsehood doesn’t matter to the public. Accordingly, the New York Times insists it will continue reporting under its headline of last week: “Why the Discredited Dossier Does Not Undercut the Russia Investigation?”.
The newspaper knows this is a successful money-making formula; indeed, it admits it is making more revenue than ever, and more profit too. “This was our best third-quarter performance in both News and total net subscription additions since the launch of the digital pay model more than a decade ago,” the company’s chief executive announced on November 1; “and, outside of 2020, our best quarter ever for digital subscription additions.” With 90% of the New York Times’ subscriptions now digital, the management is convinced that fake news is profitable – that clickbait works. New York Times reporters won’t retract or apologize for lying when the lies generate bigger dividends for the shareholders, bigger bonuses for management and reporters.
Nothing new about this. What is new is the behaviour of the alternative media in marketing their truth of the Russiagate story. Sakwa has made his book out of balancing what the mainstream media fakers have reported and what the alt-media reporters have to report of the truth. The audience measures, subscription numbers, and balance-sheets of the alt-media are more secret than publicly owned media companies but the marketing tactics are the same – they report the truths which make the mainstream media out to be liars; they repeat this over and over for clickbait effect.
Sakwa hasn’t interviewed a direct source for anything in his book. He appears not to know US government officials or Russian government officials, lawyers or detectives. He acknowledges his limitation with this excuse — “the fundamental methodological problem [is] that we still do not know what really happened. Much of the relevant material remains classified.” So his book is composed of secondary-source quotes from one side or another – from liars and truth-tellers carefully balanced.
But what’s the point of Sakwa’s balance? Do lies get less false by balancing them against the truth? Does the truth get weaker or stronger by balancing them with lies? Is the reader to be persuaded arithmetically – by the number of secondary views cited on one side or the other of the veracity line?
The answer, yes or no, to these questions is so obvious, it should be reckoned silly to ask them. But why is Sakwa selling his 555-page book for the premium price of $120; or to be less capitalistic, why should a reader pay? That’s a rhetorical question.
So why read on? To see the paradox Sakwa seems not to have spotted.
On the one hand, as Sakwa did notice in passing, American voters don’t think the Russiagate story, or in fact anything to do with Russia, is of any importance to the way they have recently voted or will vote at presidential or congressional elections. On the other hand, as the balance-sheet of the New York Times proves every quarter, the voters who read such newspapers will keep paying to be persuaded or deceived – and then disregard the Russian material when they vote.
Put these two parts of the paradox together, et voila! the conclusion is that Russiagate has proved to be a commercially profitable plot of the media, alt-media no less than mainstream media, which has satisfied no one and stopped nothing from being repeated over and over.
That’s also definition of the money shot in pornography. By that standard, Russiagate turns out to be the longest wank in American history (Sakwa’s too).
Once upon a time, before the Blin-Noodle gang had been born; when their grandparents were still Ukrainians; and before the gang was pushing its protégés to make war on Russia from behind a shield of civilians in Donetsk and Lugansk, there was an American humourist named James Thurber. He was the 20th century successor to the other American humourist Mark Twain. There is no one to succeed those two Americans in our time.
Thurber told a story about provocations, false warnings, and what these days is called the RED LINE. Thurber’s moral was: “Get it right or let it alone. The conclusion you jump to may be your own.”
He first appeared publicly two weeks ago, on November 17, to say he had escorted a battery of Russian Army BUK missiles from Russia into Ukraine early in the month of July 2014; that was days before Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was downed and destroyed on July 17, 2014.
Tarakanov’s claim contradicts everything known for seven years and made public by the US National Intelligence Council, State Department and White House; the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD); the Russian Defence Ministry; the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) headed by Dutch police; Dutch prosecutors at the murder trial which opened in Schiphol in March 2020; the presiding judge at the trial Hendrik Steenhuis, and his secret investigating judges; the Dutch lawyers defending the Russian Army officer in the dock; and the agency in charge of all evidence in the prosecution’s case file, the Ukrainian Security Service SBU.
Tarakanov is an unusual name Russians aren’t keen to have. It means cockroach. As insects go, these are very ancient – about 350 million years – very hardy, very numerous. There is no evidence that soldier Igor Tarakanov exists – except for a publication in English by the Bellingcat group two weeks ago, and in Russian at the same time by a related publication, TheInsider.
