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Israel’s Tet Moment?
Shortly after midnight on January 30-31, 1968, during celebrations of the Lunar New Year (Tet) , NVA and Viet Cong (VC or NLF) forces launched the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam. The intel.gov site(*) includes pages on declassified Tet documents, and a 50th anniversary retrospective on the Offensive. According to the latter, 70-80,000 troops in…
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BUK + flechettes = contradiction
In CL’s report on the NYT’s unusual scraps of integrity in reporting on the Kostiantynivka (aka Kostyantynovka) market-place attack, the new standard story is revealed. But evidence collected and analyzed by The New York Times, including missile fragments, satellite imagery, witness accounts and social media posts, strongly suggests the catastrophic strike was the result of…
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More Tangling of the Web
Softly, as in an morning sunrise, General Mark Milley let it be known that the infamous Chinese spy balloon, whilst it definitely was a spy ballon, definitely did not phone home with any intelligence information, and definitely had blown off course. See, for example, the RT story. If you’re concerned about Russian propaganda, try these…
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Immutable truths and Ukraine
In geopolitics, there are a number of immutable truths. First and foremost, all nations act in their own best interests. We can all point to assorted examples but the United States exercising its foreign policy can be a brutal display of self-interest. This is magnified because the USA is (currently) the dominant force on the…
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Aftermath
Feel that chill in the air? If you think its frosty in your location, it is frozen solid between Russian President Putin and Wagner chief Prigozhin. And so it is that we are now one week after the “March of Justice” that saw Evgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group stage an uprising. But first, a few MSM…
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Well, that was a weekend to remember
In what was probably the most enthralling weekend since the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the collapse of the USSR (1991), events of this weekend again placed the Russian military, politics and intrigue squarely in front of the world. And like the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, so much could…
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May you live in interesting times
You already probably know Mearsheimer’s view of the conflict, at least in respect of its cause, which he largely places at the feet of the US (and NATO) and the decision of Bush Jr. to move to have Georgia and Ukraine enter NATO. He again goes over this terrain but also looks at the prospects…
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Compare the pair
Millions of words have been written about the creeping encroachment of NATO eastward towards the border of the Russian Federation. Recent media reports suggest the Turkey will soon drop its objections to Finland joining the bloc with only Hungary’s objections yet to be overcome. One can only imagine the pressure Hungarian politicians will endure as…
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A Summary of Hersh’s ‘How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline’
Overnight, Seymour Hersh published How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline. Here are the key points. The explosives were allegedly planted months earlier, during a mid-summer NATO exercise: Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three…
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Nicolai Petro’s The Tragedy of Ukraine
The above is an informative discussion of Nicolai Petro’s The Tragedy of Ukraine. It covers areas that haven’t been discussed in much detail in the West, generally, at least in the MSM, particularly the regional (Galician) character of Ukrainian nationalism, its origins in the 19th and early 20th Century, its attempt to establish a particular…