Ever since mid-2022 the Russians have consciously pursued a “long war” strategy in Ukraine, seeking to grind down the AFU and exhaust NATO’s ability to fuel the war while building their own capabilities. It has largely succeeded.
But…
Why did the Russians think it would work?
It’s easy to see now, two years into the war, that Western war stocks were shallow and Western military industry was a rusted-out shadow of its former self and would be unable to gear up to supply the Ukrainian military regardless of the amount of money NATO was willing to push in. Rather than translating into a mountain of steel on the battlefield, Western riches have only made each shell cost a mountain of cash. But exactly none of this was obvious two years ago, even to NATO – in fact to this day there are bewildered NATO leaders still using the enormous disparity in GDP as a talking point in their favor.
Despite this the Russians deliberately set out to fight an industrial war against the combined might of the West. Now one could argue they simply weren’t able to win a short war and got lucky, but that isn’t a serious position. The Russians had ample means to try for a quick win in 2022 and they chose not to use them, clearly seeing a long war as a surer bet. Rather, luck in war is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, and that is exactly what happened here.
It’s something of an article of faith in the modern West that the Russian intelligence services are feeble, with little ability to penetrate Western governments or operate effectively in the public space – their frequent use as scapegoats for the failures of Western liberals notwithstanding! Certainly the threat of Chinese infiltration is taken far more seriously in the US, at least in public.
And yet here the Russian government – in 2022 – clearly understood NATO’s military-industrial capabilities far better than NATO itself did, to such a high degree of confidence that someone as risk-averse as Vladimir Putin would stake war strategy and to a very real extent the survival of the Russian state on that analysis.
This strongly suggests that rather than being something to be dismissed, Russian intelligence-gathering and analytical capability is now in fact as good as it ever was during the Cold War. The legendary KGB seems to be back in business – and perhaps their greatest coup of all has been to convince us otherwise.
Roman Catholicism, wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky “has proclaimed a new Christ, not like the former one, but one who has been seduced by the third temptation of the devil — the temptation of the kingdoms of the world: “All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me!”[1] This is the main reproach made by the Orthodox to the Roman Church. I find it entirely justified, and I would add that the Catholic false Christ is in fact Yahweh in disguise.
Unlike the Patriarch of Constantinople or later that of Moscow, who only claimed the “spiritual sword” (sacred authority), the medieval popes also claimed the “temporal sword” (secular power). Not only did they directly govern one of the richest principalities in Italy, but they claimed to rule over kings and emperors (read “The Failed Empire: the Medieval Origin of the European Disunion”).
Peering into the jungle of microbes that live within us, researchers have stumbled across what seem to be an entire new class of virus-like objects.
“It’s insane,” says University of North Carolina cell biologist Mark Peifer, who was not involved in the study, told Elizabeth Pennisi at Science Magazine. “The more we look, the more crazy things we see.”
These mysterious bits of genetic material have no detectable sequences or even structural similarities known to any other biological agents.
So Stanford University biologist Ivan Zheludev and colleagues argue their strange discovery may not be viruses at all, but instead an entirely new group of entities that may help bridge the ancient gap between the simplest genetic molecules and more complex viruses.
“Obelisks comprise a class of diverse RNAs that have colonized, and gone unnoticed in, human, and global microbiomes,” the researchers write in a preprint paper.
Named after the highly-symmetrical, rod-like structures formed by its twisted lengths of RNA, the Obelisks’ genetic sequences are only around 1,000 characters (nucleotides) in size. In fact, this brevity is likely one of the reasons we’ve failed to notice them previously.
This Is Incredibly Important Information Being Exposed By Julian Assange
The People Who Control The Internet Archives Have Been Deleting & Changing Information Including Our History. The Information Is Only In One Place & The WRONG People Are In Charge Of It
UPDATE: Very good interview. Everybody should watch it. Putin clearly explains Russia’s position, something every well-informed person in the world should already know. I’ve said it before and will say it again: The US/NATO/ neocon/ European failure to form a deep, lasting, and mutually beneficial alliance with Russia after 1991 (and before) is the most serious foreign policy mistake in world history. ABN
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