Kremlin Rus Deplorable Mentality Is No Accident

The Ukraine invasion exhibits Russian civilization naked and for all to see. The infamy of what happened, the brutality, the cruelty, the empire-at-any-cost mentality was all over Russian literature from way back. Centuries.

This all has to do with how Kremlin Rus was created: after the Mongols seized Kyiv and killed everybody except one, the commander, the Mongols made Alexander Nevsky, head of the Kremlin and already in bed with the Mongols, Prince of Kyiv, in 1241. Yes, the founder of Kremlin Rus was made head occupier of Kyiv, by the invaders of Rus!

In the following century, Moscow was made the unique tax collector of Rus, and the money was sent to the Mongols. Finally a wealthy Kremlin was able to muster huge armies and beat the Mongols at their own game. 

This means that the Kremlin led a ferocious tyranny which was just the opposite of the Rus Kyiv had led for centuries prior, which was democratic (for the times).

The Mongols seized Kyiv again in the Fifteenth Century. In the Seventeenth Century, the Kremlin made a deal with the Zaporozhian Cossacks (the free men), which it then violated to its advantage. A century later, a German immigrant princess who led Russia after making a coup against, and killing her husband, the Tsar, Catherine, conquered Southern Ukraine outright, and with her lover Potemkin launched a policy of ethnic cleansing, complete with fake “Potemkin” villages. Putin relaunched this, in full. 

What happened to Germany was no accident, but reflected writings and ways held in high esteem for centuries, from the likes of Luther, whose anti-Jewish program Hitler copied. And also Herder, who made a religion of tribalism. When the French united Germany and freed Poland, they outlawed anti-Judaism. However, after Napoleon’s defeat, anti-Judaism was reestablished: Jews couldn’t be doctors or lawyers, for example. So Hitler was in no way an accident, but a continuation… with modern means.   

Something similar is happening with Kremlin Rus. Putin is a continuation of an empire founded on inner and outer abuse. Exterior wars were used to justify inner terror, and that policy was fully visible by the 1560s, under Ivan The Terrible.

The Kremlin Rus’ terrible way was highly successful in the sense of establishing the world’s largest land empire.

The old German mental system that culminated in Hitler was annihilated  after 1945 (although some powerful Nazis, like Marshall Von Manstein, were still all too influential after WW2… Von Manstein’s influence finally waned and the German officers who had violently opposed Hitler were finally honored as they deserved… subsequent to the death of old Nazis…)

The old Russian mental system which brought a continuous flow of tyrants for seven centuries is now culminating in Ukraine, fighting the old Ukrainian democatic spirit inherited from the Vikings and the republic Novgorod, and will be completely defeated, as deserved, hopefully. 

In 1775, the Russian Empire of Catherine II launched a military campaign against the Zaporizhian Sich, a republic of free men, centuries old, which resulted in the destruction of the Sich and the dispersal of the Cossack population. Many Cossacks fled the region, while others were incorporated into the Russian military or resettled in other parts of the empire. From the perspective of the Cossacks the Russian Empire’s invasion represented a lethal, unjust and aggressive takeover of their traditional territory and way of life. It was enabled by massacres and betrayals. The hybrid warfare of Putin and Gerasimov (the chief of staff of the Russian army) is more of the ssame that was already practiced in the eighteenth century.

Putin has invaded much of the region in similar ways and similar aims.

Potemkin village:
In sociology, politics and economics, a Potemkin village (Russian: потёмкинские деревни) is a construction (literal or figurative) whose purpose is to provide a misleading external façade to a situation, so that people would believe that the situation is better than what it really is. The concept comes from a fake portable village built by Grigory Potemkin, former lover of Empress Catherine II, solely to impress the murderous Empress during her journey to Crimea in 1787 (which she had just conquered from the Tatars). Potemkin would have erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress the Russian Empress and foreign guests. The structures would be disassembled after they passed, and re-assembled farther along their route to be seen again… Making the dignitaries that the region he had just devastated had a population….

Maybe Russia can only graduated from its deplorable imperial mentality through a disastrous war? In the fullness of time, this will be interpreted as a bait and switch. Indeed, the satanism of Putin’s regime was obvious, from open sources, since 1999… So called neoliberalism, which is neither new, nor liberal played along as oligarchs then put their money as foreign direct investments with their allied western plutocrats…

Patrice Ayme

France Wakes Up In Ukraine Bringing Fatally Comical Kremlin’s Antics

PUTIN, TERRORIZED BY FRENCH & US ADVANCED WEAPONS, CALLS FOR A CEASEFIRE!

Abstract: Victim of its own philosophy of  hedonism, laziness, entitlement, superficialism, wokism, Politically Correct thinking and judiciary, Europe disarmed to the point that most European weapon programs were experimental and demonstrative, rather than practical and capable of fighting a serious war. Meanwhile Europe encouraged the Kremlin to believe it could get away with being a force that mattered, and still mysteriously profited from the aura of decolonization from way back in the 1950s, when the tyrannical USSR and its gigantic empire was presented as good and liberating, and democratic Europe colonizing and oppressive..

When Putin invaded in a way that couldn’t be denied anymore, European countries found themselves defenseless. This greatly explained the apparent French and German reluctance to help Ukraine: they were not ready to fight Russia, from lack of armaments. This has not changed much: building weapons takes years. But the Russian military power has been considerably degraded.

French president Macron suddenly changed his ways, deciding to send to Ukraine the world’s most sophisticated anti-ballistic … And then… tanks!

Finally!

But there may be a method to the madness: European countries, NATO, were too weak militarily to counterattack boldly. Within a day, tyrant Putin proclaimed a unilateral ceasefire!

Just as in a comic book for little kids: the Putin chicken was not playing anymore!

***.  

So the ex head of Roscosmos, the Russian NASA is a fanatic of Putin and the Kremlin Above All spirit. So Dmitry Rogozin goes to Ukraine to fight.Next he and a vast throng of Kremlin grandees gather in a hotel to celebrate Rogozin’s 59th birthday. What do you think happens? Shells fired by Ukrainians explode, the head of Roscosmos is hit in the spine. He is evacuated, operated on. He is a man of the world, he has negotiated and collaborated with NASA, ESA, and the French CNES, among others. 

The surgeons extract shrapnel from the Roscosmos chief’s spine. The Kremlin grandees thought they were too far from the front to be shelled. But not far enough for GPS guided rocket assisted shells from a French Caesar gun. 

The French shell shrapnel is identified in that Roscosmos’ spine.

The head of Roscosmos thinks of himself as smart. So he sent the shrapnel to president Macron of France, the one who provided the Caesar guns. “Please pass on the fragment cut from my spine by surgeons to Emmanuel Macron,”

What does Macron do? Well, he reacts as he should have had, from the start. With a bit of delay, Macron has become smart too. Macron may have finally discovered that talking to Putin is like talking to Hitler: no point talking to hate personified, and self-delusion of such grandeur, one can remake history as it never was.

Or maybe Macron and France, just as Scholtz and Germany, confronted to the unthinkable, Hitler reincarnated, thermonuclear version, were trying to gain time. Eastern Europe gave lots of weapons to Ukraine, but often from old Soviet procurement.

You see, unbelievably, the leaders of the West didn’t see the obvious: in a mechanism very similar to what happened with Hitler, the leaders of the West and their think tanks, or more exactly their Western oligarchs, had decided that, because Putin, like Hitler, had been enabled by them, they owned him, just as in the 1930s their predecessors thought they owned Hitler, or Mussolini, or Hirohito, or Stalin… But all they were left with was Spain’s Franco.... 

Indeed, vainglorious vengeance minded idiots like Putin and Hitler resent being owned, and they are too stupid to know their masters. 

The end result is that the West, including to some extent the US, but particularly Western Europe, was not ready for war: they thought that, since they wanted peace, they should make war impossible, by being unable to conduct it. Putin only saw he could grab the cake, and nobody could stop him. The tyrant said so explicitly in 2014: “the problem Europe has is that I can be in Kyiv in two weeks“. To appease Putin, Obama sent MREs (Meals Ready to Eat to the Ukrainians). Later, Trump would send some anti tank weapons… But then, shortly after Biden’s election, the US Democratic Congress stopped the planned delivery of those weapons. Delivery was resumed six months later, in November 2021, but by then Putin had decided to attack (because he withheld gas delivery to Europe as soon as summer 2021)

Germany was, and is, incredibly weak, Britain had no army, as usual, and France was only strong in her aviation and nuclear forces. Western European weapons were better than the Russian ones (which used crucially Western electronics, or even French military equipment)… But there were all too very few. 

Thus France and Germany had little to provide, and budget constraints. Ukrainians, though, were told to pass direct contracts with the French and German military industrial complexes. Until recently, they didn’t (I don’t know why; maybe they have no  money; US weapons are free… They just buy good will…)

In any case, Macron gets Rogozin’s shrapnel… back to the sender!

What does he do? Macron suddenly sees at last that he is confronted to madmen who feel so entitled they take for granted that them getting hurt when they invade a democracy is… An outrage! In other words Putin and his entourage are maniacs beyond belief (Macron had already said this about Putin who, Macron said, was laughing when hearing about alleged atrocities of the Russians in Ukraine: those are actors, he told Macron… who added he really didn’t know what to say, in front of such a level of lunacy…

Once I knew a mad woman, and tried to help her. I even visited her in her psychiatric asylum (she apparently became psychotic from smoking pot, by the way…) I remember listening to her. She thought the CIA was after her… They were really coming, at the door… Listening to the entourage of Putin sounds similar… 

Macron decides that France will send French made tanks to Ukraine! These are the first  Western tanks sent to Ukraine… (And from a NATO founding member!).

The French decision was “the first time a Western-designed tank will be delivered to Ukraine. Symbolically, it’s important,” said François Heisbourg, senior adviser for Europe at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

In the following days the US and Germany decided to send armored personnel carriers (which are not tanks)… because France decided to provide tanks with powerful guns, the AMX 10. Germany and the US followed, with simple armored personnel carriers a day later. Those APCs are armed with a 26 mm gun. The AMX10 French tank can pulverize dozens of armored personnel carriers in minutes with its 105 mm gun. By comparison, the famous M4 Sherman tank of WWII had a 75 mm gun…  AMX 10 are also mounted on enormous wheels, not tracks, and this means that they can move much faster, and further, than tracked vehicles… And Ukraine favor swift advances through bewildered Russian orcs (the “orc” label to qualify savage eastern invaders is more than 1,000 years old…)

France is also sending to Ukraine ASTER 30 NT, an anti-aircraft, anti-ballistic, 60 gs acceleration (that is 600 meters per second change of speed, per second, one mile per second interceptor also known as MAMBA, or “Sea Viper” (on UK Royal Navy ships). ASTER is for AeroSpatiale TERminale.  It’s the French Patriot, but more modern.

Finally. Advanced Western heavy weapons for Ukraine.

France often congratulates herself to be the country of human rights, and rightly so… Not just for enabling the USA to win its war of independence, or for the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789… Or for recognizing the equal rights of gay people in the… Sixteenth Century. But also for creating England, Germany, repelling enslaving Islam from 721 CE to… much more recent times… and for outlawing the slave trade of citizens as early as the Seventh Century… And even earlier than that, by putting an end to Christian anti-heretic terror.

One must crush infamy, as Voltaire put it.

What’s more infamous than Putin?

Even Hitler didn’t threaten to extinguish all of humanity, but Putin did (and his allies, friends if not lovers like the head of Russia Today insist that Putin will engage in a nuclear world war, and believe that’s a good thing! [1]. After the war, they should all be tried for crimes against humanity.)

Suddenly, apparently struck and dumbfounded by large Western weapons coming his way, Russian Tyrant Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russian forces will conduct a 36-hour ceasefire in observance of Russian Orthodox Christmas. It is likely an information operation intended to damage Ukraine’s reputation… but it may also reflect the desperate state of the Russian Donetsk front, and an attempt to reposition and arm units damaged by Ukrainian fire.

Putin has to be relentlessly defeated. Anything less will actually augment the risk of nuclear war. By encouraging him and his helpers 

Patrice Ayme
Sent to Ukraine now: French tank AMX 10 firing its main 105 mm gun in Afghanistan [2]:

[1] Margarita Simonyan, an intimate of Putin, obviously, and one of the primary mouthpieces for the Kremlin, said: “Either we lose in Ukraine, or the Third World War starts. I think World War Three is more realistic, knowing us, knowing our Putin.

“The most incredible outcome, that all this will end with a nuclear strike, seems more probable to me than the other course of events….“This is an horror… But on the other hand, it is what it is. We will go to heaven, while they will simply croak… We’re all going to die someday.”“

(She said that as early as April 2022. Shortly afterward, RT and similar Nazi Kremlin propaganda was banned from Europe. Since then she repeated it many times. 

***

[2] The French invented tanks… Actually, French tanks were the first motor vehicles on land (18th Century; just a few were made). Here’s an excerpt from a former US Marine that once served together with the French forces in Afghanistan, detailing his experience about this Armored fighting vehicle in particular.
“One giant advantage the French had over us was with their use of tanks. We maintain an armored force that’s fantastic at defeating T-80s crossing the Fulda Gap, not quite so fantastic at fighting insurgents in mountainous valleys. The French had AMX-10(RCR)s, light wheeled tanks that were perfect for counterinsurgency combat. They were a tremendous force multiplier.
One night before a major operation, I was laid out in the dirt on an outpost perimeter. I had fallen asleep at midnight. At 3 a.m. a tremendous explosion woke me. I lay still for a few moments, then asked a Marine on guard, “What the hell was that?”
He answered, “I don’t know, but something went right over our heads.”
When the sun rose, I was stunned to see an AMX-10 halfway up a mountain behind the outpost. A brave and/or stupid tank crew had rolled up a narrow trail in the dark, and hit some Taliban.
I didn’t envy the poor driver who had to negotiate that trail. Or the loader who I’m sure had to walk ahead of the tank, knowing that if he made a mistake his crew was rolling down the mountain. As a former tanker, I can tell you that driving a tank up a mountain in the dark isn’t something cowards do.” ~ Chris Hernandez, Former US Marine tanker and infantryman-turned-author.

Putin A Tool? Double Machiavellianism Festering In Russia

Putin is a virus, and its vaccine is called Ukraine. To get rid of Putin, and foster democracy, one had to encourage him to attack Ukraine. What better to fight a tyrant than full war with a powerful democracy? Nothing else would do, the tyrant was too well installed, with towering popularity. So his internal enemies had to convince Putin that invading Ukraine would be a walk in the park, shooting off Nazis. 

How that popularity was won is itself a measure of how evil Russia became. In 2014, Putin wanted to invade Crimea. His two most powerful collaborators, Shoigu, minister of defense and a personal friend, a native of poor and isolated Tuva, in the mountains of Siberia, and Gerasimov, the commander in chief of the Russian army, apostle of hybrid warfare  

Who had an interest in getting rid of Putin? Putin’s kleptocracy has stolen Russia, to invest the stolen wealth in the West, overpaying while purchasing Western oligarchs’ properties, making all oligarchs happier. What was stolen by Russian oligarchs made Western oligarchs even wealthier..So Western oligarchs loved Putin and its wealth-transferring-to-the West oligarchy. Now, of course, the Western oligarchs are frustrated as Putin’s unraveling is threatening to dismantle the entire exploitation contraption.

Distinct lack of enthusiasm in some French and German circles of power has everything to do with the fact Franco-Germania organized much of its economy around Putin. It was not just getting gas from Putin; the French Total oil giant provided the Putin Reich with vast and ultra expensive installations similar to those provided to Qatar, to put on méthanier boats liquefied Siberian gas heading to Asia. These boats are some of the largest in the world, and pack several times the explosive power of Hiroshima.  

European ecologists and the likes of Merkel, were financed, or controlled, from the Kremlin. At least so say retired heads of French secret services. So the ecologists were anti-nuclear, and even anti-Western European gas (France has one century of gas reserves; so the ecologists, pushed by the Kremlin, had France pass a law outlawing the extraction of gas… in France. If the gas was provided by the Kremlin tyrant, that was fine).

So the only remaining hypothesis is that elements inside the FSB misled Putin about Ukraine, in the hope of having Putin destroy his regime there. Instead, it’s Russia which may end up destroyed. 

This is not the sole mechanism at work there. In the 1990s, Western advisers (Harvard, etc.) persuaded Yeltsin that Russia needed to be led to prosperity by an oligarchy. As the oligarchy was bound to steal Russia and make it stupid, the very origin of the Putin regime may not lay just in Alexander Nevsky’s sick ideology of ruling inside with brutality by allying oneself with evil (the Mongol invaders). 

The war may look insane, and it is. But it developed because of deep manipulations from very dark minds… who may have hoped that this sort of madness would develop as the intricate mess it has become… precisely because it could be exploited. The FSB may have incited Putin to commit a terrible mistake, so that he could be brought down. And the West certainly long collaborated with Putin, inciting him subtly to become ever worse. 

Now the ongoing existence of the largest land empire, by far, is being called into question, and democracies themselves can’t let Putin win. Anything at all. 

If Putin is a tool, does that mean that there are even more evil forces out there? Indeed! The cause of an evil is, in a sense always a greater evil. And causes work best when unexplained, undetected, and unexpected. This is why it is important to understand Machiavellianism, the art of making people do something while believing that there are doing the opposite. 

Patrice Ayme

P/S 1: The first part of the essay above was censored by the Wall Street Journal, which delayed its publication by several days (the italic part was allowed in another comment; in the italic I carefully avoided the notion of Western oligarchy, which may be a banning offense according to the obsequious lemmings). So the WSJ’s readers were made blissfully unaware that:

1. Putin could have been manipulated into invading Ukraine
2. That the plutocratic universities (Harvard, etc.) and other influencers (US and European politicians) were instrumental and perhaps primordial in setting up the Russian mess which later brought up Putin. The same sort of enabling-disabling, bait and switch was used prior and during WWI and WWII. The US power circles are very good at it, their institutions, traditions and mentalities having trained with American natives for centuries. For example, claim that “black lives matter” while making sure that, under the pretext of freedom, blacks live in terrible conditions (bad education, bad housing, bad health care, bad food, sugar billionaires being subsidized, etc…) All this the very dark deep state organizes with mental terror….Don’t say this, don’t think that, etc. And that is enforced by the media, an example being the preceding comment which the WSJ banned. That was after a very interesting article on:

Putin, Isolated and Distrustful, Leans on Handful of Hard-Line Advisers

Russia’s president built a power structure designed to deliver him the information he wants to hear, feeding into his miscalculations on the Ukraine war

MOSCOW—Russian troops were losing the battle for Lyman, a small city in eastern Ukraine, in late September when a call came in for the commanding officer on the front line, over an encrypted line from Moscow.

It was Vladimir Putin, ordering them not to retreat.

The president seemed to have limited understanding of the reality of the situation, according to current and former U.S. and European officials and a former senior Russian intelligence officer briefed on the exchange. His poorly equipped front-line troops were being encircled by a Ukrainian advance backed by artillery provided by the West. Mr. Putin rebuffed his own generals’ commands and told the troops to hold firm, they said.

The Ukrainian ambushes continued, and on Oct. 1, Russian soldiers hastily withdrew, leaving behind dozens of dead bodies and supplies of artillery to restock Ukraine’s weapons caches. 

Mr. Putin expected the war in Ukraine to be swift, popular and triumphant. For months, he struggled to come to terms with what instead became a costly quagmire, and found himself isolated and distrustful at the pinnacle of a power structure designed to reinforce his belligerent worldview and shelter him from discouraging news…

And now for one of Putin’s war planes going down in flames: a SU 25…

PS 2: Tyrant Vladimir Putin also indirectly attacked Russian oligarchs on December 22, 2022, along lines similar to those I drew above (and in many of my essays prior). Putin stated that Russians who drain Russia’s money from abroad and do not have a connection with Russia “represent a danger” to Russia.Putin claimed that while the majority of Russian businessmen are patriots, there are some who are not. Putin had nationalized many non-compliant oligarchs from a similat logic 20 years ago.

Fire Generals Sympathetic To Fascism

The defeat of France by the Nazis in May-June 1940 could likely have been avoided by just one factor: firing the Commander In Chief, Gamelin, on the job since 1931. Several French Prime Ministers intended to do it several times, but it didn’t happen, although the reasons the PMs had to fire Gamelin were prescient. Most prominent of all reasons, Gamelin was not exhibiting enough enthusiasm in fighting fascism. Gamelin made many decisions which were ridiculous, foolhardy, catastrophic, and completely outside of millennia of military science… And Gamelin made strategic mistakes on or before 1936. In 1939-40 his errors became astronomically baffling (for example sending the French reserve as far from France as possible!) Gamelin was fired within 5 days of the all out invasion, but by then Gamelin had ordered irreparable errors.

Studying Gamelin’s horrendous ways (Gamelin used landlines or messengers, not wireless radio as the Nazis did), one comes out with the impression that Gamelin wanted the Nazis to win… And that is confirmed, when he admits in his memoirs, written after WWII, that he, Gamelin, was more worried by the Jewish Socialist French Prime Minister Blum in 1936, than by the Nazi tyrant who had invaded Spain and the Rhineland the same year!

The top US general advocates to force Ukraine to negotiate with Putin. This is more than deplorable. It is a betrayal of democracy. It’s a cause for dismissal.

Right the democracies are running out of ammunition, and the Pentagon is fetching basic artillery shells all the way to Korea. But that’s because the democracies are in denial that they are in a situation similar to 1936. Had the democracies counterattacked the fascist regimes in 1936, or stopped collaborating with them (by sending fuel to Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito, among other things)… World War Two in its full rage and attending genocides, would have never happened. In 1936, the British and US ground forces were tiny, completely unable to fight a world war, so UK and US decided that there was no world war, and that there would be no world war, as long as they averted their eyes from genocide (having deported 40,000 Ukrainian choldren from Kherson Oblast alone, the Kremlin regime is clearly genocidal…).

The Ukrainians are well equipped, because they are defending themselves and 50 democracies provide them with weapons, and even more with other non-lethal assistance. Now, clearly the democracies had decided peace would last 1,000 years. Instead a tyrant has threatened them to be visited “with destruction as they had never seen in their history” (to use Putin’s exact expression).

So the democracies are not armed either in quality and quantity to fight the world war they find themselves engaged in.

Some will pretend that this is not a world war. Such a denial is typical. Indeed, in the 1930s, there was clearly a world war situation in 1936, by the time when Hitler helped invade Spain and occupied the Rhineland, while Italy attacked Ethiopia, and Japan pushed deeper into China. However, it took another five years for the USA to get ready to fight a world war. France and Britain, who had declared war to Hitler were themselves slack in getting enough weapons at the ready (in particular France didn’t arm hundreds of brand new fighter planes… and Britain had a tiny army) 

Ukrainians can, and will fight through the winter. Winter is a friend of armored units maneuvering on hard ground. 

Russia is a corrupt tyranny, its soldiers are ill equipped, ill trained, ill motivated and will suffer through winter. They must surrender: Putin has resurrected “blocking sections” shooting fugitives.  

That the top US general advocate negotiating with the tyrant, the first tyrant who ever threatened to annihilate humanity, is not tolerable. Fighting Putin is like fighting a rattlesnake inside one’s bed: you can’t stop and go cuddly all of a sudden, just because you are ahead at some point. Any pause in the fighting will benefit Putin, as it will give him replenishment, and the opportunity to look so terrible that his enemies have to cease-fire.

Ceasefire was what the French Republic did with the Nazis on June 23 1940. US betrayal of France was an important reason for it (US “guarantees” given by FDR were not respected. Instead FDR sent his right hand man 5 star admiral Leahy, recognizing the collaborationist Vichy junta explicitly). 

All those advocating for a cease-fire with Putin advocate for a situation similar to that with Hitler when France agreed to a cease-fire in June 1940.

Ukraine can and should fight through winter. It fights for all of us. 

 France actually had the means to keep on fighting in July 1940, by retreating to Corsica, and North Africa.  Hitler could never have got there (the French Navy and Air Force were too strong, even without counting the British air force and navy). Why this did not happen has everything to do with the USA’s cat and mouse game with Europe: the USA had given guarantees to France in helping to fight Nazism, and then defaulted spectacularly on those guarantees in 1939-40. Understandably, many French leaders did not feel like doing most of the fighting and dying as in 1914-18, just to see the US grab most of the fruits of victory!

… And the question is: are we facing something similar today? Trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Yes, production and quality of weapons has to dramatically increase in the democracies, should they want Earth not to turn into a hellscape. So what? Nothing new there. Democracy is expensive.

Patrice Ayme

***

Notes:

Context of the WWII cartoon below which is making scathing fun of US pro-Nazi policies of 1939-40: when the commanding US general finally arrived in France in 1917, after three years of the French Republic being attacked and invaded by the fascist imperial German plutocracy of the Kaiser, he said: “La Fayette we are here!”. Both in 1914-1917 and in 1939-42, US powerful US plutocrats were entangled with the fascit regimes in Germany… to the point of insuring the survival of these fascist regimes. For example in WWI, after the US finally participated in the blockade of fascist Germany, German shell production collapsed and became a tenth of French production…

Auschwitz and similar events can be traced directly to the US’s astounding betrayal of democracy in 1939-40. Not only that but there were explicit guarantees to France, and also France (in two ways) and Britain are the parents of the USA… Not just allies. That Hitler basically planned to kill all Jews, like Putin basically plans to kill all Ukrainians (what Putin and Lavrov call fighting to the last Ukrainian… accusing others of the idea, but actually promoting the notion by evoking it…) 

***

ON Military Momentum During A Rout: When an army is routed, it is important to keep pushing it… That’s called a rout. World War Two showed several examples of this. Reciprocally, the Nazis, after a calamitous defeat in July-August 1944, pushed by the disembarkment in Normandy and Provence, were able to stabilize the front because of the one-bridge-too-far UK-US offensive in Belgium/Netherlands which turned into a costly semi-defeat for the democracies. The Germans actually called this miraculous stabilization the “Miracle on the Western Front“. If the bridge-too-far offensive had not been unlucky, with the presence of undetected SS armor, the Nazi Reich would have promptly collapsed in a matter of weeks, as intended.

Right now the Ukrainian are routing the Russians. That Mark Milley, the US C In C uses the occasion of a rout of Putin’s forces by the Ukrainian democracy to urge for “negotiations”, a cease-fire, that is, surrender is cause enough for dismissal. The ex C in C in France is advocating a similar surrender. One should not underestimate the “Hybrid Warfare” promoted by Gerasimov, the present Russian C In C. That includes betrayal by supposed adversaries which are actually secret allies. An excellent example is what happened with the French Communists in 1939-41, when their master in the Kremlin was allied officially with Hitler. This had dramatically adverse consequences for the military preparedness of France (planes were unarmed, less the Communists grabbed the guns…) 

Nuclear Decapitation Strikes: How Putin Wins With Nukes

PUTIN HAS NOTHING TO LOSE BY GOING NUCLEAR, AND A WORLD TO SURPRISE, SO THAT’S WHAT HE DESIRES: 

Since February 2022, Putin and his helpers have said, and repeated that, if they don’t get their way, humanity should go. The idea that if a tyrant does not get his way, humanity should disappear is new: on n’arrête pas le progrès. It’s found in some religious texts where angry, jealous gods get rid of humanity. Putin is the first tyrant who expressed the will to destroy all, and has the means to do so.

Putin drew nuclear red lines, assesses the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), and they have been crossed since, and Putin did nothing spectacular. See: SPECIAL REPORT: ASSESSING PUTIN’S IMPLICIT NUCLEAR THREATS AFTER ANNEXATION, Sep 30, 2022, observes that Putin did not renew immediate nuclear threats when he annexed four provinces of Ukraine, September 30, 2022. This gives a false feeling of security, and opens humanity to a Putin surprise.

However, ISW concludes that: “The more confident Putin is that nuclear use will not achieve decisive effects but will draw direct Western conventional military intervention in the conflict, the less likely he is to conduct a nuclear attack.” Indeed, indeed… As long as the “West” has somebody to talk to.

However the following is true:

1. Without Putin using nuclear weapons, Ukraine will recover all her lost territories, including Crimea.
2. Such an Ukrainian victory will be accompanied with huge losses for the Kremlin, in all ways. 
3. The catastrophic losses will bring regime change in the Kremlin.
4. Putin, although otherwise a complete idiot, may be smart enough to guess the preceding. So:

Let’s explore the unthinkable, where Putin does exactly what the “West” does not expect him to do.

***

Helping Ukraine is not just a moral necessity, it’s a survival necessity. We can’t let inhumanity win, it will come for all of us, ultimately.

The United Nation determined in September 2022 that children as young as 4 were raped, tortured and killed in Ukraine, by Putin forces, in significant numbers. It is the necessity of survival for  humanity to fight against inhumanity.

We are going down an apocalyptic decision tree. In the short run, Putin is going to try to overwhelm Ukrainians with human waves… at least so goes the conventional thinking. As Putin sent mainly minorities to fight, this has the advantage of a genocide against minorities, for example the Crimean Tartars. Ultimately, though, this traditional Kremlin method will fail, against experienced, increasingly well armed, extrmely motivated Ukraine. 

And Putin should know this.

At that point, the best outcome, for non-Putin civilization, is that the Russian  military eliminates Putin. Putin also knows this. Putin should also know this. So Putin knows he does not have forever to win. 

So let’s suppose that Putin is not eliminated (while praying to all known divinities, and other imaginable, that he will be). 

***

VLAD THE MAD’S BEST OPTION IS NUCLEAR ARMAGEDDON:

Putin then must terrify Ukraine into submission, by submitting it to nuclear bombing… and sooner rather than later. Terrifying Zelinsky and his government looks impossible, so the only solution is to eliminate them. 

Indeed, the smartest way for Putin to nuclear bomb his enemy is not by using nukes on the battlefield: Ukrainian forces are dispersed, armored, entrenched, mobile, Putin would have to use several nukes on a concentrated front, and on Ground Line Of Communications behind. The military advantage would be slim, if any; the world outrage would be great; NATO’s “devastating response” would consist into opening the spigot of full military help to Ukraine [1].Putin would argue he is using nukes on (just annexed) Russian soil to defend from a Neo-Nazi invasion, but the whole world would turn against him.

So using nukes as ISW expects him to do, striking troop concentrations and GLOCs, with several nukes, would bring more of the same to Putin, just worse. Alleging, as Putin did, that the US was the first to nuclear bomb, and so “created a precedent” is irrelevant: the US did not launch an invasion of Japan, and eben after Japan surrendered, did not invade Japan nor a fortiori annex it territory and claim that Japan had no right to exist. Instead of annexing territory, the US imposed the vote of Japanese women (immediately)…   

***

DECAPITATION STRIKES ON UKRAINE: 

The war aim of Putin, expressed for decades, is to destroy the Ukrainian state. We saw above that he can’t do it conventionally, or with a dozen nukes… That leaves us with another obvious possibility, which would achieve the element of surprise. In his Art Of War, Sun Tzu wrote: In conflict, direct confrontation will lead to engagement and surprise will lead to victory. Those who are skilled in producing surprises will win. Such tacticians are as versatile as the changes in heaven and earth.

By trying a nuclear decapitation strike on the Ukrainian state, killing the Ukrainian leadership, Putin would achieve surprise.

How far from each other are the presidency, national assembly, department of defense and regalian ministries of Ukraine? The presidency and Rada (national assembly) are 500 meters apart. And so on. Putin could use a MIRVed rocket with one warhead going to the presidency, the other to the Rada, etc… Putin could launch one of his “Satan 2” missiles (the RS-28 Sarmat), and be done with the leadership of Ukraine. The warheads could be programmed to explode after impact, causing tremendous shockwaves which would destroy all very deep underground installations in Kvyiv. Then Putin would appear on TV, completely enraged, and accuse the “West” to have done it. 

The way Putin could pretend to look at such a war crime, is a win-win: he would have killed the “Neo-Nazi” leadership, and intimidated Ukraine into submission. After the decapitation strike on Kyiv, Putin could contact individual army commands in Ukraine, and order them to surrender, or to see the cities they are in, or next, be submitted to similar nuclear bombardment. 

What would NATO do? Well, nothing, because NATO DID NOT THINK ABOUT PUTIN GOING FULL WACKO.

***

HOW TO PREVENT NUCLEAR DECAPITATION STRIKES:

First, imagine the scenario presented here, and feel its likelihood. 

Putin is a malefactor with only one concern: reconstitute the old Kremlin empire, and anything else is not tolerable. Only victory will bring him survival… another similarity with Adolf Hitler. 

It is a modern tragedy surpassing anything written in the past. One is dizzy, just contemplating the consequences. 

The Ukrainian government, and NATO, should keep this in mind, the possibility of a nuclear decapitation strike. Thus they should get ready, and MUST be blatant about it. The Russian military has to understand decapitation strikes would probably not work, ONCE COUNTERMEASURES are taken. Faced with this, the Russian military would perhaps draw the conclusion that it is the Kremlin which needs decapitation.

So the focus should be on dispersing the Ukrainian government, and military commands make them mobile… Well sheltered, and yet not too associated with large conurbations. Also the West should scramble to produce massively anti-missiles and anti-ballistic systems. There are a number of these systems in existence, but insufficient numbers, or developed by the US, France and Israel. Early versions of these systems should be sent to Ukraine, ASAP. 

If Ukraine and NATO take those precautions, and the option of decapitation strikes will turn into a probable ineffective nuclear slaughter all over Ukraine, the decapitation strikes option would be closed. 

Putin will then be reduced to multiple use of nukes on the battlefield, hoping that would scare Ukraine into submission. The problem of NATO and Ukraine will then be to make this nuclear battlefield behavior unsustainable [2].

But that would be a a lesser problem.

***

PUTIN’S CRIMINAL DEMENTIA WAS LONG OBVIOUS, STOP UNDERESTIMATING IT… Especially when evaluating the future:

The present situation with Putin is no surprise to me: I wrote many essays comparing in detail Putin with Hitler for very good and deep reasons, the fundamental oligarchic organization of the world, more than a decade ago. Most “leaders” pretended to be surprised about Putin’s behavior in 2022. However, they egged Putin on, for decades, just as Hlter had been egged on, by western oligarchic predecessors. Self-declared “leader” Obama used to be Putin’s accomplice, a mafioso talking to another, through Medvedev, then “president” of Russia, in 2012:”Tell Vladimir I will be freer to do whatever he wants me to do, after the election,” said the corrupt “leader” over a hot mike… Obama, and Merkel, and the other corrupt ones led into “satanism”, Putin himself declared on September 30, 2022, knowing all too well what he was talking about. 

The satanic mood Putin was part of is extensive. An ex-friend of mine, Philip Short wrote a glowing biography of tyrant Putin, exonerating him for the crimes related to Chechnya in 1999, when Putin was already in charge.

I am sure Philip Short, once a big man at the BBC, was paid… Hey mortgages, you know, properties all over, castles in the Provencal sky… So were thousands of others… And, implicitly, they like the privileges, the money, the power, but they also would hate to fall victims of accidents, as happened to many oligarchs who did not faithful obey the nuclear Czar… Don’t we all…

So, if civilization wants to avoid being surprised by nuclear decapitation strikes, get ready for them…

Let me repeat slowly: Putin and his criminal oligarchic clique have lost the conventional war with Ukraine and democracy. Thus, Putin is tempted by a nuclear decapitation strike against what he calls the “Neo-Nazis” in Ukraine and the “neocolonial” “satanism” of “the West”. Nuclear strikes would be effective, because the West would have no answer. Ukraine and the West have to expect, take countermeasures, and thus, prevent this.

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] Notice that, in this scenario, NATO would have had to switch to massive war production of sophisticated anti-missile systems… but that is neither easy, nor fast to do. France is ramping up the production of Rafale fighter-bomber, but many subcontrators find it very hard to do so. Production of the US HIMARS rockets is 9,000 a year. Ukraine is rumored to use 6,000 a month. Even expanding production lines for old-fashioned, unguided 155 mm howitzer shells can take more than a year. Guided and submunitions shells, as France and the US produce, take much longer to ramp up.

***

[2] That would mean to enable the Ukrainian to hit Russian cities with conventional means.

Hypersonic Russian missile strike on Lviv, Western Ukraine, fired from Russia, 20 March 2022. Such missiles can carry thermonuclear warheads. Having a high probability to intercept them, as soon as they are fired from over Russia, would be a formidable deterrent, because Russian-made nuclear material would fall over the Russian empire.

Just War: Mobilize “Democratic” Military-Industrial Complexes.

“Just wars” occur when submission strategies, such as appeasement, peace at all cost, nihilism, are less optimal for the many, or even worse, for the species’ survival. Some will sneer: they have a higher calling, they prefer to be eaten by wolves. Yet should other people’s children be eaten too? Others will point out that democracy is relative… Yet so is tyranny. Grotesque threats of nuclear war, and, or, destroying everybody, by Putin’s government officials are the ultimate terrorism, and, per se, constitute a crime against peace.

The invasion of Ukraine, an attack of a nuclear weapons brandishing tyrant on a democracy is a world war, with 50 democracies already allied with Ukraine. (By contrast in 1939, only a few dependencies of France and Britain joined Poland in fighting Hitler; the USA applied sanctions against France and Britain for having declared war to Hitler.) 

That world war, long prepared by Putin, has to be won by democracies… otherwise “the borders of Russia never end”… as Putin himself said in 2016. If we don’t invest enough now, in winning this war, that we are presently losing, the price will be much higher, maybe nuclear, later. Putin’s win would ensure world tyrannies as the new governance, with the result of lowering civilizational intelligence below survivability.

Thus, democracies, and their industrial-military complexes should get on a war footing. Putin’s forces have been destroying a lot of Ukrainian artillery, including recently arrived 155mm US howitzers. Artillery is what the Ukrainians need, preferably of the highly mobile variety, as the French CAESAR truck mounted gun… France sent 18 of these guns to Ukraine, and the French army has only 80 left. Although France has more standard howitzers, Russia has approximately 1,100 of them, more than a thousand.

The US, after a few weeks of comabt, had sent to Ukraine 7,000 Javellin anti-tank rockets, one third of its total inventory. As it is, the US makes only 2,100 Jevellins a year. 

This is the situation all over the West, NATO has an insufficient number of (quality) weapons. Ukraine also needs field communications. Putin’s forces successfully jam a lot of them, including the latest encrypted US gear (but not the SpaceX internet satellite).

Ukrainian volunteer soldiers, insufficiently trained and equipped suffer pain, and death. To help them, they need training and equipment. We have to assume, and prepare for, the worst in the evolution of this world war. So doing, and only so doing, this world war will be mitigated… Proper war management here means more effort, and it is not just an economic, but also a moral challenge. There is something such as just war. This is it. Sometimes, those terrible times come back, when making war, not love, is the higher moral calling.

Sad but true.

Patrice Ayme

***

 

The French Caesar gun is very precise, its shells carry more explosives and it goes 50% further than its Russian equivalent. Ukraine was able to hit Snake island with it, forcing the evacuation of its Russian occupiers. These guns have been used in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Mali… It can drive somewhere, stop, fire more than a dozen precise 40 kilometers shots, and then scoot away, all in less than 4 minutes, escaping counter-battery fire. The US HIMARS (HIgh Mobility Artillery Rocket System), now in Ukraine, does even better with great GPS precision. The version given to Ukraine goes only 50 miles, but the original US product could hit Moscow… from Ukraine… (Ukraine to Moscow is only 450 kilometers)

Heroism Needed To Survive The New Revelations

Human life is brutish and short, and that tends to make our wisdom brutish and short. However, a way to improve our lot is to attain better and fuller wisdom: even if we can’t make the world better, we can make the wisdom better, and bask in it, content to have achieved something important for us, thinking beings… Not forgetting that human beings have always been combat animals, fighting not just each other, but nature itself, the human condition, etc… and also fighting plain old mental inertia. The end result has been progress, and it has been considerable: in general, our ancestors would readily exchange their lives for ours. 

So a martial spirit is integral to the human condition in full… not as important as love itself, surely, because love is how we get started and instructed originally… But still, human life is not possible without combat, and the mentality to go with it, evolved by Homo over millions of years. Even evil is part of the slightly monstrous human condition, as it plays the role of limiting human impact in such a way that the ecology survives… because, without ecology, there is no human species. 

Humanity is now engaged in the greatest conflict ever. Not just the conflict of democracy and infamy (as with Russia attacking Ukraine). But also the conflict of humanity with terrestrial ecology (the CO2 crisis being only one aspect). This is not the time for whining, but the time for Mars in the service of hopeful intelligence. The time for heroism has come.

Europe has been fearing the reckoning that the time for the ultimate war, the war against mental inertia, had come. With mental inertia disguised as pacifism or brain dead ecology, there is no hope.

Mental inertia is one of the greatest factors of the psychology driving history: Russian autocracy built the world’s largest empire, over seven centuries, and this efficent, relentless brutality, is deeply embodied in Russian culture and psyche. When Lenin killed the Tsar, he killed the monarch, to take his place, with the exact same dictatorial mentality disguised as the exact opposite of what it was, a majority (which is what “Bolshevism” means). 

Similarly, but more recently, mass German culture has long made obedience to masters its prime directive (same as Kremlin based Russia since 1300).

Ces deux-la sont faits pour s’entendre…

So Germany needs masters to obey and in the modern era, thanks to who have been effectively double agents such as Schroder or Merkel, Germany has found in Putin a new master…. And said master copies the trick which Lenin, Trodsky and Stalin used, claiming to defend the world against “Western” abuse. (Ironically, Lenin and Stalin, while conquering Ukraine, killing millions, also made it into a republic, to soothe the survivors, and Ukraine became a co-founder of the United Nations.) 

This German mindset, of finding a master to please comes in part from lack of self-awareness. Germany is unaware that German war criminality of the racist type arises from this desire to please dictators. Eighteenth Century Prussia, which, partly thanks to British help, ended conquering Germany, lived off the racist mood it used against Slavs and Jews. Prussia was led by militaristic dictators.It’s the so-called “Prussian General Staff” which attacked the world on August 1, 1914… An attack which was itself a war crime, naturally followed by atrocities in neutral Belgium.   

More than 40 democracies have realized that the attack by the nuclear dictator of the Kremlin, who threatened to turn the world to “radioactive ashes”, is an existential threat to themselves… even more so than German Nazism, and this is why they have reacted so strongly (even Sweden and Switzerland who discreetly collaborated with Hitler when the going was good). This is why these 40 democracies are military allies of Ukraine (whereas in the first year of the Second World War, Hitler had powerful lallies such as Japan, Italy, and… Russia… France and Britain (and their empires) pretty much fought alone (Poland had been defeated by Hitler and Stalin, who turned around to attack Finland).

The present conflict is then the greatest world war ever in the number of participating countries… Those who don’t see it as a world war, don’t know how to count. If the US had given France in 19139, or 1940, the sort of support it is giving to Ukraine, the Nazis would hev been promptly defeated, instead of killing so many and ravaging so much.

***

Nazism is the abbreviation for National-Socialism. The real Nazi Party was neither national, nor socialist: it killed around ten million German speaking people, which does not strike me as efficient nationalism, and, far from being “socialsit” was mostly the toy, and tool, of various plutocrats (some in the US, some in Russia, some even in Italy as Hitler himself complained to Rommel… using the word “plutocrat”… adding that he detested having to sit with them and exchanged pleasantries).

Now in some ways Nazism succeeded to bring an ephemeral good life to most Germans, as long as they had peculiar “racial” credentials. That was paid by a moral apocalypse, borrowing money and the future, and also by stealing various minorities and opponents.

Putinism has also made life superficially better for many Russians, yet, as in Nazi Germany, that was paid by augmenting inequality and corruption, expelling intellectuals, rejecting an ever smarter socioeconomy, destroying critical thinking, establishing dictatorship, and borrowing from the future by creating a commodity dependent economy.

***

This has become a small planet, and democracy can’t share it with nuclear armed dictatorships. Whether nuclear armed tyrants can share the planet with each other is irrelevant. In this world war, most democracies, nearly all the most advanced ones, are fighting for their survival in Ukraine, and they know it. 

This is indeed the time of the great revelations (apocalypses in Greek). Only heroism will carry us through. The era when heroism is necessary has come.

Ukraine is showing the way.

Слава Україні!, Sláva Ukrayíni!
Patrice Ayme

Caesar was assassinated just before he was going to leave with Rome’s best army ever, by a long shot, to solve the Persian and German problems, in one giant scythe move, mostly from behind. Augustus and his successors did not solve the German problem, so Rome was invaded by Germans. The Franks would solve the German problem over three centuries (~500-800 CE) through a direct assault… Shortly afterwards, by the Tenth Century, the Saxons became the most ardent defenders of Romanitas, and saved Europe from the savage Hungarians…… The Persian problem later became an Islamist problem, when the Arabs, armed with a war like religion, Islam in its Sunni, then Shiah versions, conquered Persia… To some extent that problem has not been solved yet. Caesar died in part because he was seriously too heroic, going into the Senate unarmed, and with Marcus Antoninus (who was held in conversation at the door by one of the co-conspirators… Caesar and MA were redoutable hand to hand fighters).

Was Putin Tricked Into Attacking Ukraine?

[The title above was “restricted for diffusion” or “shadow banned” on the Internet; a more accurate title should have been: Was Putin Deliberately Misled By His Own Intelligence Services Into Attacking Ukraine? Shadow banning is ultra modern censorship: learn everything about some brainless celebrities, famous for being famous, who are “trending”, and learn not to care about anything else]

Putin arrested several of his top intelligence officers, for misleading him about the situation in Ukraine. Putin and his top people had been told it would take five days at most to defeat Ukraine. One may wonder if those officers were genuinely in error, or told Putin stories which he did not just want to hear, but also would bring him to launch a war so big that he could not win it. Because that was the only path to regime change, the way those intelligence officers looked at it.

Putin is most vile, but the tyrant is too well defended for a direct coup or assasination: his close guard of millionaires and billionaires are personally tied to him, and some were his accomplices not just from the KGB, but all the way in Saint Petersburg since before Putin became a lawyer! So how to bring him down? By enticing the tyrant to make a terrible mistake by making him believe he was advancing his dream of Russian hyper power while engaging in a war crime he could not fail to profit from. 

 

Real Russian patriots will resist the Putin tyranny by sabotaging it. Sabotaging a tyranny is what real patriots do, it happened in Nazi Germany extensively and in various ways. Sabotage in its simplest form is lack of zeal… which can show up as “low morale” of troops engaged in combat. 

The most elite, thus fanatical troops engaged by Putin suffered heavy losses during their assault on Kyiv. The same phenomenon happened with Nazi Germany: 50,000 of the most dedicated Nazis died during the battle of France of May-June 1940, followed by another victory less than a year later in Crete, where most Nazi paratroopers died while winning. At Stalingrad, the elite Nazi Sixth Army was annihilated. Too many dead elite Nazis weakened considerably the might of Hitler’s forces, and it was even worse with pilots (who couldn’t train from lack of fuel after declaring war to their ally the USSR).

 

In the grand scheme of things, the nuclear armed tyrannies are an unsustainable danger for democracy. When France and Britain declared war to Hitler in 1939, the latter was not ready. Nor was Putin.

 

So one may wonder about the possibility of the ultimate sabotage: what if elements opposed to Putin within Russia had deliberately misrepresented the situation to Putin so that the tyrant would engage in a war too ambitious for him to win? Indeed, if Putin had concentrated all his elite forces on the Donbas from the start, he could have won. But now most of these forces are severely degraded. Are only nukes left to exhibit some Kremlin tyrannical superiority?

 

Oooppsss… Russian T 72 tank experiencing “tandem” anti-tank warheads. Putin came to believe Ukraine was full of Nazis… thus stupid brutish orcs… it turns out the orcs were his own troops. In the city of Bucha alone, ten Russian soldiers were already thoroughly identified as war criminals. One used to be a firefighter in Siberia…

This is what Deep Machiavellian really means. Now were some US Deep State actors involved into this? Something like that happened in 1914 (Colonel House; maybe president Wilson himself), and in the ramp up to World War Two (FDR, who wanted to own the French empire replaced his anti-Nazi ambassadors by pro-Nazi ambassador to the Reich and UK… He also sent his right hand man… a four star admiral to Vichy). Could it be that Biden was encouraged to show weakness in Afghanistan?… to encourage Putin into believing the US, thus NATO, was scared, weak and senile? Time may tell…

Patrice Ayme

War Tech: SAMs and Stealth

Would American aircraft suffer the same losses of jets and helicopters as Russia is experiencing, if they were engaged in a similar conflict such as Russia’s attack on Ukraine?

It depends: the devil is in the details and those who operate them. Everything indicates that the Ukrainians are extremely well trained and very smart. They may be poor in GDP per capita, due to a number of actors out of their control, but they are first world in engineering. Ukrainians are not illiterates from the desert, just the opposite, and have been building their own planes for generations.

Well operated, S300 category missiles can be devastating. During the war against Serbia, a single Serb S300 SAM battery escaped destruction for many weeks, by moving around the country, observing the patterns of NATO planes, and turning on its radar at the last instant. It shot down at least two US planes, one “stealth” …and was never destroyed. Its commander later retired, became a baker and friend with the F117 pilot he had shot down.

Reciprocally, twenty years later, the French air force in Libya attacked ten hours before US SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses), using French Rafales fighter bombers to suppress flak while killing Qaddafi’s armor entering Benghazi. The bombing itself was done by Mirage fighter bombers that the Rafales protected with their active stealth (basically counter frequency jamming).

The action in Ukraine seems to show that high maneuverability of fighter planes is extremely useful. Narratives from Ukrainian pilots show that old dogfighting techniques change everything. Just like the legendary Serb SAM commander, they turn on their missiles at the last moment. Time is at such a premium that some basic commands are just one word, such as the command to get in the plane and take off. 

Another important fact coming out of Ukraine is that the small but lethal Bayraktar TB2 Turkish drones, which seems to have a radar return larger than a Rafale, are hard to spot for Russian SAMs. This means several things: Rafale passive stealth is enough. F35 passive stealth is overkill, especially as it comes while inflicting losses of carrying capacity and lack of maneuverability (a slow going F35 with a giant fiery exhaust will be perfect for Stinger style MANPADs; reciprocally if it does not approach the ground, to avoid MANPADs, it will be ineffective for its measly bombing and fall prey to S300 style SAM).

Unsurprisingly, two months into the world war, Ukrainian ace pilots ask for F16s, F18s, and… Rafales. Conventional, highly maneuverable fighter bombers with plenty of radar absorbing material without reduction of capability.  They do not ask for F35s… (Nor do the Ukrainians ask for Typhoons or F15s… which have their own problems, being too much of high altitude interceptors…)  

Thus the West should augment the production of these highly capable jets. Unfortunately, to please Uncle Sam located in Washington DC, every country in the West is ordering F35s, which, all seem to indicate, would not be very useful in Ukraine fighting Putin’s forces.

Russian Cruiser Moskva burning after being hit by two Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missiles, in combination with “other equipment” (probably spotting and distraction by BT2 Turkish made drones). The ship later capsized and sank. The Moskva was one of the three carrier-killers cruiser of the Russian Navy. It was also the flagship of the Russians in the Black Sea. Its anti-aircraft capabilities had been used earlier off Syria, and were probably used off the Ukrainian costs, where Ukraine said it shot down Russian superiority fighters in the past… This is the largest capital ship sunk since World War Two (the Argentinan cruiser sank by UK nuclear submarine 200 miles from the Falklands, 40 years ago, was much smaller…)

When the US engaged the North Vietnamese, it suffered heavy aircraft losses, due to confrontation with experienced pilots (some Russian instructors) in nimble planes. Another problem was that the US planes depended too much on missiles (F4 Phantom had no canon, so found themselves in dog fight with armed Migs, while having no weapons). Ukrainian pilots claim they can out maneuver Russian missiles, and in particular outrun them (this is in theory possible with many missiles, given a fast jet, and if the missile exchange start at large distances… F35 partisans mumble arguments about non detectability, but France, for example has long range infrared missiles… And then it becomes a question of how fast can the prey run away, radar stealth or no radar stealth…).

So it may be that the F35 doctrine is another silly idea which has overcome the US Air Force. One notices that recent orders for F35s were cancelled and replaced by orders for F15 (a large, but fast third generation jet).

Not to say the F35 is useless: it could be very useful in some situations, in a role somewhat reminscent of the Growler… But as the end-all, be-all? Big mistake, for sure.

Patrice Ayme

I sink therefore I special… The jets of water in the back are from fire fighting equipment of a tug behind…

Why Putin Will Use Weapons Of Mass Destruction

Putin Does As Evil Wants

War writes history. Always had, always will. The war in Ukraine is the largest sort of war, a world war: 141 countries, and all democracies, voted against Russia accusing it of war of aggression, the fundamental crime against humanity ( a legal, philosophical, and UN conviction). The two largest wheat producers are at war, famine has a high probability to follow in many parts of the world, which eat mostly cereals, and produce none or too little [1].

The perpetrator, an oligarchy, is controlling the Kremlin by reinstalling the mentality of its mentor, Ivan The Terrible (no, I am not trying to be funny, Ivan IV is really the hero and role model of Putin’s more cerebral advisers)… This perpetrator has a powerful ally, Xi, the dictator of China. All other autocrats, worldwide are tempted to ally themselves with the Kremlin.

This is a war of democracy against fascism, similar to that of the Greek cities fighting the Persian empire, 25 centuries ago. The Achemenid Persians had established an immense empire, resting on fascism and local oligarchies, from Central Asia to Ethiopia, and the Mediterranean to India.  Greek cities were free and more intelligent: the Persians couldn’t stand their insolence… and the fact that the superiority of their innovations and ideas contradicted the Persian civilizational model. 

The Russian oligarchy has embraced a bellicose ethnic ideology to instigate wars and militarization to distract from its capture of the country, and justify the terror it exerts inside.

The alliance of all democracies is the most powerful, but fascism has nuclear weapons, plenty of them, and the advertised will to use them. Several US presidents ago, the Kremlin dictator developed nuclear armed hypersonic weapons, detectable only at the last moment, making intermediate ballistic missiles obsolete.

Worse: the war against Ukraine was engaged for ethnic reasons, the displayed conviction of a small oligarchy that another ethnicity, a democracy with its own language, does not have a right to exist, and thus should be under the control of said oligarchy. It is rare that the advertized goal of a war is the extermination of an ethnicity.

All Russians are supposed to approve the notion: otherwise they are “scums and traitors”, to be spit out like a gant which comes accidentally into one’s mouth” as Putin himself put it.

So, to justify its war, the oligarchy built an argument which is essentially racist: another ethnicity doesn’t deserve to exist. Whether that’s true or not is irrelevant to the main effect: it makes racism into a virtue, and impells everybody in Russia to partake into evil, thus an accomplice of the evil oligarchy, an evil-power, a plutocracy.

Of course, the plutocracy is in it to gorge itself on riches and power, it’s evil, and thus to become part of the landscape, needs the entire landscape to be evil too.

These sorts of situations have happened before: history is full of hundreds of plutocracies, from all continents and islands. Still now is different, because of the powers vested into just one man. The greatest emperors had armies, bodyguards, secret services… But a modern emperor such as Putin has powers no emperor had before. Some of these powers are cognitive powers. Putin persuaded most of the Russian population, and much of the world, that he was fighting Nazis in Ukraine.

The situation is also without precedent: the Russian government has expressed the opinion that, should it lose a war, it would reduce the rest of the world to “radioactive ashes“. Putin threatened those who interfere with his war of aggression on tribal “with seen never seen in history“.

This astoundingly evil attitude, never seen before in history, indeed, with such a level of demonicity, has predictive value: it makes it likely that weapons of mass destruction will be used.

Putin’s entire vision of civilization, something embodied by the KGB, a direct descendant of Ivan The Terrible’s secret police, is unraveling in Ukraine… Lest, by sheer will, he can call the greatest evil, “never seen before in history”, to the rescue.

Our best hope is a coup in Moscow, and soon. Let’s hope many Russian generals are thinking the same.

If that does not work, and in the meantime, democracies have to stand so firm, resolute and unafraid, that they will leave no hope that the “escalate to des-escalate” doctrine of the Russian military relative to WMDs could work.

Patrice Ayme

One Russian “Large Landing Ship”, Saratov on fire after March 2022 attack, with Ropucha-class Caesar Kunikov and Novocherkassk (built in Poland) steaming out of port of Berdyansk, sea of Azov, after the attack by the Ukrainian army. They were unloading armored vehicles… Another ship seems to have been damaged too. How the Ukrainians did it is not clear…

[1] MENA, Middle East North Africa eats mostly cereals, half of them coming from Ukraine-Russia…