by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
“The Russian Army stands for a moral defence of the country which [Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev] could no longer accept, either from Gorbachev or from Yeltsin. He said in his suicide note ‘I have earned the right to step out of my life’. Now that is not possible except from a Russian Red Army officer…that is a special kind of political force now. Russian military honour, Akhromeyev’s honour, is a political force, and once you’ve got an invasion of Russian territory, like Kursk, then the military imperatives take priority, not the oligarch priorities and imperatives.”
“We must accept there are internal pressures, significant constituencies, and some of them talk very volubly to US friends and they want to be loved by Americans. There is the oligarch constituency. There are serious political pressures inside Moscow because Russia is not a one-man state. It is a polity in which there are fundamental economic interests in ending the war quickly. The war is bad for their long term.”
“I don’t see that we are on the verge of World War III, militarily speaking. But we are already, I’m sorry to say, in World War III in every other sense, economically. The world is now broken into two major economic, financial, trading blocs. We are not in World War III for shooting. We are in World War III already for everything else.”
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Eight hours after our discussion concluded on what the US can be expected to do next, including the F-16s, the Wall Street Journal reported that “a Ukrainian pilot was killed when his F-16 jet fighter crashed as he was helping to repel a massive Russian missile attack, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials. The crash occurred Monday, just weeks after the first American-made aircraft arrived in Ukraine. Officials identified the pilot as Oleksiy Mes, one of Kyiv’s first pilots to be trained on the F-16.”
The US government tipoff forced the Ukrainian Air Force (UAF) into publishing its version of what had happened to Mes and his F-16. He had been manoeuvring in the air during the Russian missile and drone strike on August 26, the UAF claimed, and had shot down one drone and three incoming missiles before crashing himself.
Source: https://x.com/
The four-day gap in time was too obvious to make the news flashes credible. Mes’s public funeral had already been held and an obituary from the mayor of his home town of Lutsk was published on August 26. “Lieutenant Colonel of the Air Force of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Alexei Mes was killed while performing a combat mission,” Mayor Igor Polischuk’s message read before it was deleted from the internet.
Another Ukrainian version picked up in Moscow indicates that Mes’s F-16 had been shot down by a Patriot missile fired by a Ukrainian battery and their US controllers.
The Russian military has kept operational silence, but there are hints from the Ukraine, as well as from Russian military bloggers, that Mes and his F-16 were struck either by an air-to-air missile fired by a Russian Air Force SU-57, or by a Russian missile attack on the Kolomyia airfield, 350 kilometres due south of the western Ukrainian city of Lutsk. “It’s not clear whether he was at the controls of the aircraft or simply at a command post,” a Rupert Murdoch-owned London newspaper admitted in its report hours before US officials began their story-telling. “It doesn’t appear as though Moonfish [Mes] was in the air when struck, according to early reports,” the Sun added. The Wall Street Journal, also owned by Murdoch, was running a cover-up.
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