Nazi Germany Went To War With Way Too Few Weapons; The USSR Had Twenty Times More Tanks

The West in 2023 has very good armaments, but often those wonder weapons are few in numbers, barely more than prototypes… So it is instructive to remember that paucity in weaponry was exactly what happened to the dreadful Nazis.

We are in time of war, world war, if we don’t react in a strong and timely manner, we, the pseudo-democracies. As I have explained, World War Two took more than a decade before the tyrannical regimes declared war to the USA. So far, so good: Trump, smarter and more ethical than Obama, sent weapons to Ukraine, including Javelin anti-tank (Obama, a friend of Putin, had sent only meals-ready-to-eat to Ukraine). Biden pursued Trump’s mission with enough gusto that Ukraine would net be defeated. So, this time, the super power is not interested in repeating the mistakes it engaged with glee, which enabled fascist upstarts to launch WW1 and WW2.

Indeed, the situation is different from 1939-1940, when the USA refused to help France against the Nazis, the Soviets, the Italian fascists and imperial Japan. Consecutive to its crafty non-intervention in 1939-1940, the USA has indeed grabbed the world, and reduced Europe to a dependency…. something of course facilitated by all the European thinkers who work, wittingly or not, for the pseudo-democratic but truly plutocratic, (mostly US) Deep State.

Both World Wars were a succession of catastrophic miscalculations by the main European actors. The US Deep State pretty much played Europeans against Europeans, even Japanese against Chinese… Without anybody noticing… to this day.

None of the fascist states of the Axis, and the USSR, realized that US plutocracy made it all so easy, that’s some colossal trap laid ahead. How conscious the various participants were of what was going is the eternal question of when the unconscious starts, and whether one is responsible of it. 

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Hitler, as Trump would say, was very smart, a very good painter, but he was also came equipped with an immensely stupid culture and knowledge base. But he was not alone: German secret services, let alone the British and French ones, had completely underestimated the tyranny of the Kremlin. We know that, from declarations of Stalin himself, that the Stalinists expected another world war, they were sure of it, so the Soviets spent 20 years piling up weapons and factories to make more weapons. They even trained secretly with the Nazis, and other Germans in violation of the Versailles Treaty . 

The result was mass production of tanks such as the T34 with its powerful gun, thick sloping armor and wide tracks to handle mud and snow.  

Germany was surprised by the Franco-British declaration of war. When the Nazis launch the attack against France on May 8, 1940, they had roughly 1,000 German tanks plus as many confiscated Czech tanks. The French had 3,500 tanks, some of them heavy tanks impervious to Nazi weapons (the British Mathida was also very good. The Nazis had very few Panzer IV, their best tanks. Simply the French mobile reserve had 400 excellent Somua tanks… but was sent to the Netherlands in an act resembling treason (what else?)

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When a year later the Nazis attacked the USSR they still depended upon Czech tanks…which were vastly outclassed by the best Soviet armor. However many of the Nazis were trained in a superior way and they believe in the Aryan Nazi mission at Hamas-Islamist State level. After his Czech tank got destroyed , a SS officer followed on foot, in the snow, a super heavy Soviet tank, for ten kilometers, holding two jerricans of gasoline, in the hope of burning it… This kind of dedication…

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But let Hitler speak. Hitler talked to the greatest Finnish general, and Finland’s commander in chief, Mannerheim, in a recording we have, which was made without Hitler’s knowledge, for 11 minutes…. Hitler himself revealed the basic problem:

Hitler: “…a very great danger, perhaps the gravest one… we ourselves were not completely sure of this, how monstrous this strong armament was….. It is evident…evident. They [the Soviets] have the most monstrous armament that is humanly conceivable (‘menschendenkbar’)…so…if anybody had told me that one state… if anybody had told me that one state can line up with 35,000 tanks (Hitler uses the word ‘tank’), I had said ‘you have gone mad’…

35.000 Panzer (now Hitler uses the word ‘Panzer’)… we have now destroyed more than 34 thousands Panzer. If somebody had told me this to…had said: you…if one general of mine had declared, that a state here had 35,000 tanks, I would have said, Mister (‘Mein Herr’), you are seeing everything double… or tenfold, this is crazy, you are seeing ghosts…I had not thought this possible…

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Guderian, informally the head of the German Panzer force wanted to dash to Moscow, duplicating what had been done in France. But in France the seven armored divisions of the Mobile Reserve had been sent to the Netherlands in a tragic, monumental, and probably treacherous error, by C in C Gamelin (although the second in command warned him of exactly what happened). In the case of Moscow in Fall 1941, the Soviets had enormous unbeaten forces in Ukraine and in the north… there was a danger that they would cut off the Nazis attacking Moscow… As would have happened in France had the seven armored divisions of the Mobile French Reserve been kept… in reserve. This is actually what happened to Paulus and its Sixth army at Stalingrad, during Operation Uranus…. .

One of the few Nazi Panzer IV fires on a French anti tank position, May 1940. The Nazis had way fewer than 200 of these in 1940, their best tank (which was still used in 1945). By comparison the Soviets had more than 35,000 tanks, and could produce thousands a month…. Most of the Nazi advance in 1940 happened in 5 days, and nights, thanks to amphetamines, with little opposition, because the French armies were somewhere else… Up north, being cut-off…

Patrice Ayme

Arm Ukraine With The Best To Save Civilization From Regression

Democracy fighting back against tyranny. We all remember the few thousands Greek hoplites and 300 Spartans at Thermopylae: it was the same fight.

Democracies must provide Ukraine with the best weapons and plenty of them, because this war has to be won against crazed oligarchs brandishing nukes. This is a question of the survival of civilization. In Iran, schoolgirls are poisoned by the hundreds, simply because zealots don’t want girls to go to school. Why not? Devious religious fanatics can do it, and hatred, especially of women, is nice (to them) especially when they can do something about it. 

Tyrannies, helped by modern technology, have no limits, except those that much more democratic regimes will enforce. Yes, democracy needs to progress a lot. But first we have to make sure it does not regress. 

Thermopylae was a tactical military defeat, but a historic democratic victory. Since then, there have been quite a few desperate battles, when the forces of greater democracy had little hope, but made a stand: the US war of independence, Valmy, the Alamo, the first Battle of the Marne, Bir Hakeim. Long term, and sometimes even short term, they turned into resounding successes…

And there was no other way. Being progressively minded is one thing, a good thing. But at some point, against the forces of infamy, and the darkest instincts, those who do not want civilization to fall into the abyss, have to fight, and engage in just war. 

This is one of these cases. And this is the most dramatic case humanity has ever encountered, because of the situation that modern weapons have created. WMDs empower dictators as never before.

Ukraine fights the forces of evil with 50 year old helicopters fighting ten missions a day.

Russia’s overwhelming firepower has forced the Ukrainians to find other ways to fight.

“We are smaller, so we should use a smart approach,” said Roman, 34, one of the most experienced pilots from the 16th brigade, who has been seconded to the 18th, in an interview between combat flights. “We do the best we can.”

That has entailed retraining, constantly adapting to conditions and also some daring in their operations. The brigade keeps its helicopters in plain sight, on the wide, snow-swept steppe of eastern Ukraine, using temporary airfields, moving frequently for security.

They have developed a method of attack flying below the tree line, less than 30 feet from the ground, hugging the contours of the land at up to 150 miles per hour. The low altitude is treacherous, but avoids radar detection.

Then right at the front line they make a sudden ascent to fire a burst of 30 to 40 rockets before veering away, back the way they came.

They attack in pairs, sometimes in a pack of four. They can fire on Russian positions without flying too close to them, but it tests pilots and machines to their limits, and for dangerous seconds on the ascent exposes them to Russian anti-air defense systems.

Approaching enemy lines, Ukrainian jets and helicopters run the gamut of Russian attacks, from radio-electronic interference to antiaircraft missiles fired from jets and from the ground. Russian jets can use long range hypersonic, air to air missiles, a weapon conceived to shoot down AWACS radar plane from 400 kilometers away, flying at 6 times the speed of sound. These hypersonic weapons, without equivalanet in the West, have destroyed many Ukrainian aircrafts. They are presumably crammed with Western electronics… But the engine and aerodynamics are Russian.

“Every operation, every sortie is a heroic flight,” Oleksiy said. “Many of the militaries of other countries would not undertake these flights in the face of such countermeasures.”

A pilot from the 18th Brigade, Ivan, 31, was hit by Russian air defense just as he unleashed his payload of rockets in June last year. He recalls everything turning black, but managed to turn the helicopter around.

“You have thoughts, but you feel nothing and see nothing,” he said as he recounted his ordeal in an interview. “You understand that something is happening. I realized that, most likely, I was hit.”

He crashed in a forest that was pockmarked with craters and smoking from shell fire. His co-pilot was killed, but Ivan and the engineer were thrown through the front of the cockpit as the machine burst into flames, he said.

Badly concussed, with his head sliced open, a fractured spine and a broken leg, he managed to crawl to check on his engineer, who complained of broken collarbones. Swimming in and out of consciousness, he sent their coordinates to his brigade. Under shellfire just yards from Russian positions, they lay motionless when a reconnaissance drone passed overhead, unsure whose it was, until Ukrainian medics rescued them.

Star Wars For Real! Ukrainian combat crews fly Russian-made helicopters — mainly the Mi-8 and Mi-24 — that were designed in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s.

Patrice Ayme

Putin’s Problem: “Kiev In Two Weeks”.

In a closed session of the EU leaders the following was revealed (and later leaked). Told by the head of the European Commission that, according to NATO and Kiev, he had thousands of combat troops in Ukraine, Putin replied: “The problem is not this, but that if I want I’ll take Kiev in two weeks.”

Putin’s problem is that nobody is stopping Putin. Putin himself says so. Somebody needs to help the man. Somebody needs to show him that civilization has taken a stance. Hitler’s leitmotiv used to be that the democracies were weak, corrupt, riddled with “plutocrats” (sic!). Putin has obviously the same opinion, and it’s a big part of the “problem“. The problem he has.

The New York Times says that Obama is hesitating about what to do In Ukraine. It’s the exact same mistake that was committed in Syria: timidity in the face of blatant evil. If a lot of vicious force had been used right at the outset against Assad, when the latter was faced with peaceful protest, the situation would not have degenerated as it did. Basically, when Assad crossed the line of eliminating civilians, on a massive scale, for his personal rule to persevere, he should have been informed that he would be eliminated, should he not get out of the way (of civilization).

(Don’t ask me, about further imaginable details, I do not run the CIA and the like. But I am sure some reasonable general(s) could have been found in the Syrian army to replace the Assad family exaggerated plutocratic dictatorship).

There is a model for all this.

The Spanish Civil War, 1936. A quartet of Spanish generals, in the name of crown and church, rebelled in Spanish Morocco, and the Canary Islands. The French government was headed by a Jew, Prime Minister Leon Blum. The French government announced loudly that it would help the Spanish Republic with weapons.

Predictably, there was a fascist outcry, from Hitler and Mussolini, joined by the USA (which had the secret agenda to do lots of business with Franco and his friends), and its British poodle.

What did the French do? They backed-off into confused timidity (arranging instead insufficient weapon procurement through obscure, deniable deals). What did the fascists do? Lying that France was doing it too, they provided massive support to the Spanish fascists. In the next three years of official war, and another four, unofficially, many millions of Spanish civilians would get massacred.

It worked, though: strong from American plutocratic support, Franco’s fascist regime survived some of his sponsors’ defeat of 1945, and the regime he established is still around, in democratized form.

Putin was encouraged by the timidity of the West in Syria. So were the Islamists. There is no contradiction: they feed off each other, just as the Nazi fascists fed off the Soviet fascists in the period 1916-1945 (although the labels changed, not so the personnel: Stalin and Lenin were launched by German fascists during World War One). It behooves Assad, Putin, and the Islamists to be allies of each other (not necessarily in plain sight): they all emanate from the same brutal fascist mentality.

When the good guys have no force for the good cause, the bad guys can promote the bad causes, and have no reason to stop.

The Islamists in Iraq post on the Internet their hatred. They boasted to be the “hell of Christians and Apostate Muslims”, namely those who are not using enough Al Furkaan, the discrimination between Salafism and bad Islam. (Notice that the USA craftily let them post the Salafist venom, all over the Internet, a necessary first step towards squashing them next. Brother Obama is getting smart. I don’t see why the summary executions cannot be freely seen on the Internet: showing Auschwitz would have stopped Auschwitz.)

Even the German Chancellor just realize that the situation in Iraq is no good, in terms that the French Prime Minister ought to have used in 1936 against Hitler.

Merkel is sending weapons to those who fight the Salafists. Good. At some point, talking is made best by sending weapons, for real, and for all to see. That’s the mistake the French government did in 1936.

If the French government had intervened directly in the Spanish Civil War, it could have soon observed that the Nazi Luftwaffe (Air Force) used superior tactics. And France would not have been surprised as she was in May 1940.

Even simpler: what was the point of the French Republic giving time for Hitler’s evil regime to grow in military strength?

Like all tyrants out of control, Putin won’t stop, because he can’t stop. He is filling up the vacuum left by the increasing destruction of the civic spirit in the West.

The latter effect is in turn caused by the increasing power of Western plutocrats throughout civilization, due, in part to a perverted and diverted banking system. Putin thinks he knows plutocrats, he knows what they want, and how to domesticate them, be they Russian, or their Western colleagues.

Meanwhile his reign is threatened by the very mode of operation which supports it: censorship, central control, corruption. That has led to an increasingly lousy economic performance, and social inequality. As all dictators in difficulty, Putin needs to make stronger the very factors that cause the difficulties he is in. (Such as the Russian mothers who asked what happened to their sons who serve(d) in Russian Airborne divisions (such as the 76th based next to Ukraine).

As all dictators in such a quandary, finding scapegoats, and directing anger and causation, towards foreign powers is the only way out Putin can see.

So Putin will not stop, anymore than Hitler could stop. Once he has made it to Kiev in two weeks, as he just boasted, to the head of the European Commission, he will keep on going, because the problem he now has with Russians, he will have even more with Ukrainians. Then he will remember that Catherine The Great‘s troops used to be 80 miles from Berlin, making Poland a land naturally in need of Russian liberation.

All this is compounded by Western Europe’s dependency on Putin’s fossil fuel energy: a lousy deal between an addict (Europe) and a perpetrator (Putin). That subjugation encourages Putin to become ever more abusive, if he does not get what he demands.

“Putin”, of course, is just a label. He is a marionette instructed at the KGB in the spirit of Ivan The Terrible, one of the fiercest autocrats of all times. Ivan himself followed the mood his ancestors had found could be the Tatars, whom they served until they were ready to stab them in the back.

Civilization needs policing; it won’t be nice, it has never been nice to defend it, when one waits too long.

Three days ago, a French building exploded because of gas, Russian gas: eight dead. (Or maybe it was Algerian gas, a detail; in any case, most of Europe lives off Putin’s gas.)

How many civilians directly killed by nuclear energy in France, ever since the French government launched a nuclear military program in January 1938? (Yes, 76 years ago, time flies!) Yes, zero.

Although U235 nuclear energy is a problem, it kills enormously less than fossil fuels. Or Putin (and yes, Hitler attacked Poland because of the oil therein.)

Since January 1938, fossil fuels have killed millions, from their fossil waste, a form of tar, in France alone (plus more than 3 million from tobacco, directly; once again, in France alone!).

However, a vast conspiracy insisted that it would be much more ecological to depend upon Putin than to build modern energy systems (including state of the art, non-militarized Thorium based energy). Now comes the bill. The bill has boots, and a problem: it cannot stop itself.

The sooner we pay it, the nicer. Just letting Putin lead the orchestra, as Hitler did until September 1, 1939, is no solution, but escalation. Read his quote above, again: the man is asking for help, he has a problem (For those who don’t know, on September First, 1939, France and Britain sent an ultimatum for Hitler to get out of Poland, Catherine The Great’s old possession… Aside from Novorossaya and Crimea.)

The French government announced finally that it will not deliver the aircraft carriers which Moscow had ordered, and already paid for. Good. But it’s high time to remember 1936, and send modern weapons to the legitimate government in Kiev. Weapons to stop Putin, that is.

Patrice Ayme’

(Note: the immediate necessity is to gain time, before the Ukrainian military can become strong from all these sophisticated NATO weapons coming their way (I hope); deploying military muscle in Iraq/Syria is timely; lest some don’t know, Assad has supported his “enemies” the Islamists, by buying them oil, among other things; Belgium has announced it may have to conduct black-outs this winter… as it’s running out of nuclear energy.)

Mistral Blows Hard

The Mistral is a mighty wind that blows across Provence after an Atlantic storm passes by. It’s also the name of large, state of the art, aircraft carriers, full of fancy electronics, four of which France is selling to Russia. The first  contract delivery is in October 2014. Thus an interesting debate, touching on many issues (and the usual French bashing rising its ugly snout).

Mistral With Mistral Blowing On Toulon Area

In 2008, Putin invaded Georgia, south of the Caucasus range. G.W. Bush sent some military personnel of the USA to Tbilisi, under humanitarian guise, in the hope that would incite Russian tanks to not invade the Georgian capital. Sarkozy, a man in many ways similar to Putin, sent himself, and talked Putin out of invading more of Georgia. Out of all this came the sale of four Mistral aircraft carriers from France to Russia.

The 200 meters long Mistral is a new class of “command and projection” ships. They allow to land troops and equipment.

(By contrast, the super carriers are increasingly vulnerable to countermeasures such as ever faster missiles and dormant submarine systems, while losing utility.)

Russian Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky, explained that, had he just one Mistral ship, “Russia would have won its war against Georgia in 40 minutes instead of 26 hours”.

INFLUENCING HISTORY IS INFLUENCING THINKING; REMEMBER NAZISM:

The relationship between Putin and plutocrats, Western or not, is a tangled web. And it is, to a great extent, causative. This is reminiscent of the situation with Hitler in the 1930s. Then, it was not handled best: the Nazis could have been dispatched, if the Anglo-American leadership had accepted the explicit offer from German generals, to offer a united front.

Instead, the Anglo-American hidden leadership, truly made of plutocrats who saw in the Nazis a market of potential slaves and fellow devils, betrayed the German generals. In the end, the French Republic was left to do the dirty work, and deliberately attacked Hitler in September 1939.

One has to see history as the history of systems of thought. Systems of thought fight, and interfere.

The events of the 1930s, such as the hostility of Roosevelt to Paris right from 1934, and the British-Nazi “Naval” treaty of 1935 (it had a secret protocol encouraging Nazi aggression in the East, according to the doctrine of Keynes), only encouraged the Nazis to become ever more extreme.

Because, the more extreme the Nazis got, the more pleased Anglo-American plutocrats were: crisis meant opportunity.

A culminating point of all this happened when Hitler gave the monopoly of computing to the American IBM. General Motors and Ford were all over Germany, building millions of trucks and other vehicles for the Nazi military. USA companies brought much of what made the Reich great, from oil to all sorts of secret processes (such as synfuels).

THE GREAT PIG-OUT WITH RUSSIAN OLIGARCHS: 

There are lots of parallels, in slow motion, between Putin’s “Big Country” and Hitler “Big Reich”. One of them, the war against homosexuality (especially as many top Nazis were homosexual).

Says The Economist: “Officials in Paris suggest that the only circumstances in which France might reconsider delivery would be an agreement with its allies to move to deeper “third-stage” sanctions, in such sectors as energy, finance and defence. But, say the French, this would have to include equally tough measures by, for instance, Britain against Russian assets in London. “There is an enormous amount of French ill-will towards the way the British are seen as having lived off the fat of Russia’s oligarchs,” says François Heisbourg, of the Foundation for Strategic Research. “The French will resist any idea that they take a unilateral hit. 

The French government will take a final decision in October, when the first vessel is ready for delivery, says Jean-Yves Le Drian, the defence minister. America may disapprove, but there is little domestic pressure to cancel the order, despite the Ukraine crisis. Mr Hollande has not withdrawn his invitation to Russia’s Vladimir Putin to come to the 70th anniversary commemoration of the Normandy landings in June.”

To focus on the republic founded around human rights as Russia’s prime collaborator is outright anti-French. Sarkozy (Peace Not Be Upon Him) was the only one who really went out of his way (literally) to stop Putin in Georgia. If nobody takes a stand, evil will keep on rolling.

A Reuters article was even more anti-French, suggesting France was “still trying to deliver 2 warships to Russia”. Is the USA “still trying to go to the International Space Station?” American astronauts come and go to space, thanks to Russia.

The Reuters article was typical of the sort of Kremlin-Wall Street-Washington fascist propaganda that stinks to high heavens.

There is a big difference between delivering goods that have been paid for, like the Mistral ships, and engaging in new business.

The ones with the highest stakes with Russia are the City of London and its world-wide empire of plutocrats and, secondarily, Germany (see Schroder, ex-Chancellor, rich from Putin, and who just celebrated Putin’s birthday, and damn Ukraine).

An argument can be made that the plutocratic Putinocrats ought to be threatened enough to modify their behavior, that would be the best. They are getting increasingly angry.

On Tuesday, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin, one of the plutocrats slapped by sanctions from the EU and USA, announced that the country would consider ending its participation in the space-station program in 2020; would prohibit the US military’s use of a rocket motor that powers the Atlas V, one of two launch workhorses for defense and intelligence satellites; and would close down global-positioning-satellite monitoring stations in Russia unless it was allowed to build comparable monitoring stations in the US for its own usage.

WE THE PLUTOCRATS, WE HATE THE FRENCH REPUBLIC:

I would suggest to quit with French bashing. But that’s like suggesting not to have the plutocracy in command. The dependency of the USA upon Russia for space could have been avoided by using French Ariane V rockets. Ariane V has been human rated for a very long time, and executed more than 50 perfect launches in a row.

This is a telling detail: the USA prefers to collaborate with the Russian dictatorship, even for such a strategic subject as accessing space, rather than with the French republic. Being anti-French is the first perfume American plutocracy wants to wear.

PUTIN IDIOTIC PROMISE’S DETECTED:

And what of Putin in all this? Well, the aim is to modify his behavior. Ukraine richest plutocrat, Rinat Akhmetov, just turned against the Russian dictator, rejecting separatism, and telling his 280,000 employees in Eastern Ukraine that they would probably lose their jobs under Putin.

Russia has made the very best weapons, ever since the Nazis attacked the USSR and found to their dismay that the robust and cheap to make T34 tank was better than the German models. A few months later the coldest General Winter in 50 years, struck. It was so cold that Nazi planes could not fly, and  the Nazi offensive in the suburbs of Moscow turned to rout.

However, outside of weapons, and fossil fuels, Russian industry is not much: Russian GDP is smaller than Italy, with two and a half times the population. It’s pretty obvious that Russia, which can’t help itself, cannot help its neighbors. Whereas the European Union can, in the long run, help considerably Ukraine economically (just look at Poland, long more or less the same polity as, and entangled with, Ukraine; Poland, thanks to the EU, is doing great economically; it can even afford to build nuclear latest technology nuclear power plants).

The Russian economy is not much, because the all-plutocratic economy does not work as well as the mixed demo-plutocratic model. We know this, ever since the Roman Republic degenerated into the fascist imperial plutocracy “Augustus” created (I wrote “Augustus” because that’s supposed to mean the “Augmenter”; instead “Augustus” led Rome to long term ruin, just as Putin is doing to Russia).

PUTIN’S BEHAVIORAL THERAPY:

So what of Putin? Well, to treat him, one needs to make him go through a course of behavioral therapy.  So invite him to D Day, give him his toys… As long as he modifies his behavior in the right direction.

And do not forget this: the French pilots were inside their planes, ready to take off to take out Assad. It’s Washington’s last minute loss of nerves that showed to the entire planet, that Assad could get away with mass murder, just to pursue his miserable personal domination.

That deplorable groveling of London and the USA, that miserable refusal to do what needed to be done, persuaded Putin that he could do whatever he wished, and Obama would go play golf with the uneducated, greedy simpletons he uses as friends. The sort of people Putin knows how to handle (as Putin speaks several languages, and has worked in non Russian speaking countries, he is far from totally uneducated. Mis-educated is more like it, hence the need, and possibility, for behavioral treatment).

If Putin Wants His Mistrals, He Will Have To Behave

Thus when Fabius (foreign minister and ex-PM) declared on May 13th, that France would take firmness lessons from nobody: “the rule with contracts is that contracts which have been signed are honoured,” he was correct.

In Mariupol, the region’s second-largest city and the site recently of a bloody confrontation, thousands of unarmed steelworkers, following their employer’s advice, took control of the city from the separatists on Thursday. The Putinist militants melted away.  Similar throngs of miners and metalworkers fanned out in more than five cities, including the largest, Donetsk.

PUTIN IS BAD, HE HAS TO BE TAUGHT THE LAW:

The assessment that Putin did not have correct danger assessment came within the KGB, from his own superior officer, when he got started there.

Putin retired as a colonel from the KGB in 1991. He rose in Saint Petersburg, with the explicit objective, of putting the KGB in power. He boasted later of that, once he became president of Russia, in an official discourse (to the ex-KGB).  In 1998, Putin was appointed head of the Federal Security, the FSB, the replacement of the former KGB, as well as head of Yeltsin’s Security Council.

200,000 were killed in the second Chechen war, 20% of the population, a war which Putin apparently orchestrated. The Western leaders decided to conveniently ignore this.

The annexation of Crimea is, prima fascies, a violation of International Law, and an act of war, and even, a WAR CRIME (it is a war crime to make a war to steal a country, in particular, to steal territory).

We have to teach Putin (and other plutocrats), the law, or its spirit. It starts with respecting it. So, if he behaves, give Putin his ships. The Russian generals are fretting that they won’t get the latest command and combat softwares the ships are supposed to come with. The ships would be dumbed down. Really? I wonder why…

Patrice Aymé

P/S: After writing the preceding I learned that the Pentagon has several contracts with the Russian military-industrial complex, including one to buy 66 Russian combat helicopters Mi-33… for more than a billion dollars.