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I think that we ought to begin this overview of what is currently taking place which is that the united West, aka the AngloZionist Hegemony is desperate and in direct to this despair is doing all sorts of very foolish and plainly dangerous things.  We all know about the The Big Three:

• The attack on NS1/NS2
• The attack on the Crimea Bridge (CB)
• The attack on the Black Sea Fleet (BSF) base in Sevastopol

Truth be told, these are three completely different events.

One is a pure act of international terrorism, both in the choice of target (a major civilian infrastructural object owned by several countries and corporate entities) and in the mode of execution (the use of remotely operated bombs).  Most critically, while under international law collateral damage is not prohibited, the target of an attack has to be military and the collateral damage minimized to the absolute minimum.

The second one is a diversionary attack.  That is an attack carried out by unconventional means, but whose target is at least partially a military one, which the Crimean Bridge definitely is.  One could even argue that the actual death toll (4 if I remember correctly) and the very minor inconvenience to the civilians (traffic was at least partially restored in less than 24 hours, not to mention existing alternatives such as ferries) make that target legitimate by itself.  In this case, it is the mode of execution – the use of a truck full of explosives driven either by a suicide bomber or unsuspecting civilian – which raises a lot of international law and law of war issues

The third attack was a purely military one.  The intended target was the Russian Black Sea Fleet and the methods used (underwater, surface and airborne drones) are all, in my opinion, legitimate.

That being said, this all begs the question of what NATO was trying to achieve here:

Target	Military rationale	Optics
NS1/NS2	none (unless we assume that the Anglos attacked the EU itself!)	huge
Crimean Bridge	major if the attack had succeeded, in actuality negligible	huge
BSF base	major if the attack had succeeded, in actuality negligible	huge

From this table we can quickly infer a few things:

• The only truly successful (in purely military terms) attack was on the NS1/NS2
• The Crimean Bridge and BSF attack failed due to the lack of adequate standoff weapons for NATO, which NATO specialists must have known, so from this we can also infer that
• The main objective of this NATO attack was, as usual, optics.

Next, we need to look at the political dimension/implications of these attacks from the Russian point of view.  In this case, if the first attack was an attack on property which was at least in part owned by Russia (and Germany and others), the CB and BSF attack were attacks on Russian sovereign soil.

[Sidebar: I have been saying that Russia and the united West are at war since AT LEAST 2013, but that war was initially mostly informational and economic, now it is becoming much more kinetic than before, so we can call this escalation qualitative]

Now, I would certainly argue that while an attack on Russian state (or near state) owned property could be considered an act of war, the attacks on the CB and the BSF base in Sevastopol were most definitely acts of war.  The fact that these attacks failed to deliver any tangible military results for NATO in no way changes that.

So what do we call an act of war which yields no tangible military benefits?

I think that this is what should be called a provocation.

So what is a “provocation”?  There are plenty of definition out there ranging from, for example, the legal one (“Conduct by which one induces another to do a particular deed; the act of inducing rage, anger, or resentment in another person that may cause that person to engage in an illegal act“) to the more common “the action is in the reaction“.  The point is, what these apparently rather different attacks have in common was the intention to trigger some kind of reaction from Russia which could then be used to demonize Putin, Russia and everything Russian.

Which, as it happens, is exactly the mantra repeated by the “dumbshit stupid” western wannabe “friends of Russia” who constantly ask for Russian military escalations and when they don’t get what they want and even when they want it (!), they switch over the the AngloZionist strategic PSYOP taking points about Putin being “weak, indecisive, a sellout, etc. etc. etc.”.

Gee whiz, I wonder why Putin remains so obtuse and refuses to listen to his “learned western friends of Russia” ;-)

More seriously, while looking up definitions of “provocations” I came across this page and this sentence: “No military provocation by irregular forces can justify a full-scale attack and the destruction of a country whose national forces or authorities had no role in that provocation“.  I am not so sure about the main thesis of this sentence, but I do agree that in all three attacks mentioned above, there was a (very thin) attempt by the perpetrators to remain unnamed precisely in order to avoid a direct Russian retaliation against the Hegemony,  say, like singling out one member of NATO for yet another increase in the Russian pain dial.

By the way. here is how a “properly anti-Russian” website explains the word “provocation:

Got to love those “democratic and free countries” :-)

Needless to say, Putin and his senior officials are way too smart to react exactly as the Hegemony would have them, we have seen that in too many cases to count.  And here is where we observe an outright weird cycle which goes something like this:

1. The Hegemony provoques Russia
2. Russia fails to react as intended
3. Putin is accused of weakness, indecisiveness or even cowardice
4. Russia does something unexpected
5. Russia gets stronger and stronger
6. The Hegemony gets weaker and weaker
7. To hide its quickly worsening position, the Hegemony provokes Russia again (goto #1)

The intention here is clear: escalate as high as can be but SHORT of an overt (lacking “plausible deniability”) attack on Russia in order to make it look like Russia just escalates (which she eventually does, just much later and in a way very different than what was expected) with no good reason other than “Putin is a New Hitler who cannot appeased“, he wants to “rebuilt the Soviet Union” and “the Russians are simply evil, non-European, barbarians who would occupy and pillage all of Europe if not for the heroic Ukrainian armed forces“.  Cancel Russia and all that…

Still, while an “anonymous attack” is not quite a false flag (for the latter requires a “blamed flag” in the first place) it is very close and shares much of the same features.

It does not require a lot of imagination or expertise to see that at the very least the Hegemony is playing with fire, if only because each attack which failed to yield any military advantage only serves to further underscore the awful situation NATO finds itself in.  I will summarize this as follows:

• The Ukronazi military, which was the biggest and best military in NATO has been mostly demilitarized and denazified.  Hence the need for
• The Hegemony to now provide both soldiers and equipment to compensate for the horrendous Ukrainian losses.
• Providing advanced military kit and trained personnel in small numbers is basically useless (other than for the optics of “the entire world is with Kiev”) and western force planners and commanders understand that.
• And just to make things worse, former Warsaw Treaty Organization member countries have already donated most of their ex-Soviet hardware which the “losing” Russians promptly destroyed (including about 6’000 (six thousand!) main battle tanks (MBT) and infantry combat vehicles (ICV)).
• While NATO still does have weapons large stores, they are smaller than what NATO already lost in the Ukraine by at least an order of magnitude.
• This is all made even worse by the poor performance of most Western-made weapons systems, especially when they are delivered in insufficient numbers to even theoretically make a difference.  When Germany or the US eventually sends its newest MBTs to the Ukraine, the optics of them burning like the Israeli Merkavas did in Lebanon would be absolutely awful for the US MIC.
• To bring enough forces to even *consider* waging a combined arms offense against Russia would require NATO to somehow safely bring in truly large amounts of equipment and soldiers.  This would take many months and is simply not doable, especially not with the TOTAL absence of modern air defenses in the EU.  Besides, once this hypothetical force is safely (and, therefore, miraculously) brought to some (miraculously safe) location in the EU, how do you move all that to where the action is today?  You can’t “simply” land a battalion or brigade somewhere in, say, France or even Poland and then “simply drive” up to the line of contact.

And that all brings us to the latest idiocy cooked up in the demented and ignorant minds of the Neocons: to bring more nuclear weapons near the Russian border.  Why do I call this an idiocy?

• The Russians know exactly where NATO nukes are and Russia has hypersonic vehicles to deal with them if needed.  Forward deployment is very Cold War, modern warfare make most such deployment not only useless but counter-productive (the closer to Russia, the easier to defeat for Russians)
• The Russian layered and integrated air defense system (both the one protecting the Russian military forces and the one protecting crucial objectives in Russia) makes any limited attack on Russia useless (as shown by the recent attack on the BSF base)
• A massive attack on Russia cannot be anonymous or have any “plausible deniability” and will result in an absolutely devastating Russian response even on any NATO country which participated in the attack.

So can you set off a nuke (real or “dirty) just for optics or to feel good?

Of course not.

But the demonic freaks who run the Hegemony are not demonic freaks for no good reasons.  These are the folks who brought us 9/11, the WMD crap and the GWOT!  These are the folks who destroyed country after country with truly satanic viciousness.

These are the folks who ruined and lade waste to every single country they could take control off, the latest being, of course, the Ukraine itself.

We are dealing with psychopaths who will do absolutely *anything* to stay in power, both on the planetary scale (the Hegemony) or in Washington DC (see video at the bottom of this article)

Finally, and truth be told, everybody knows.  It does not take Liz Truss’ message to Blinken to know who is behind all these attacks and the “plausible deniability” criterion as been made so thin as to become irrelevant.  Here are just three examples illustrating this: (there are many more!)

• Russian got the GPS tracking data from the drones which attacked the BSF
• The very visible and obvious Global Hawk monitoring flights over the Black Sea during that latest attack
• US AWACS flights in Romanian airspace during the latest attack

There are dozens of statements by top Russian officials which clearly indicate that they are all acutely aware of all this.  So far, we can make at least three potentially interesting observations:

• Russia is mostly pointing the finger at the UK (and not necessarily because the UK is the #1 evil doer here, but primarily because it is the weakest link in the US-UK-3B+PU “coalition of the willing”, militarily, politically and economically).
• Russia now has enough in theater forces for a combined arms operation.
• Russia is keeping most of her armed forces in a state of high readiness, including all her strategic forces (nuclear and conventional).

What will happen next is anybody’s guess.

And while I will not comment upon US internal politics, I think that is is important to show, especially to those living outside the USA, the kind of “mood” President Brandon’s puppeteers must be aware of and which they will have to deal with one way or another:

I will stop here by simply stating the obvious: we are entering very dangerous and unpredictable times.

Andrei Martianov

Here is the Rumble version:

 

Via The Saker