The main fear that right-of-Kremlin patriots have expressed over the years prior to and during the Not-War is that Putin will surrender to the West either outright or slightly more subtly but no less significantly. I’ve written about this position many times and explained why I think that Putin won’t be allowed to surrender and why they need not worry so much on that count.
But, for the most part, this discussion has been confined to Russian Telegram and to a few scattered English-language blogs of which I am probably the most prominent now.
I only have 7K subscribers and far fewer people than that actually read what I put out consistently. Of that number, I think only a simple majority agrees with my position and the rest are hate-readers. Thus, there is virtually no awareness in the non-Russian public about the nature of the discussion being had within Russia concerning potential surrenders or betrayals by Putin and so on.
Imagine my surprise then when I read Paul Craig Robert’s recent grim forecast speculating that Putin has already decided to throw in the towel. Here:
From the beginning of the Ukraine conflict I have said that Putin would have to conquer Ukraine or surrender. The latest information from Moscow suggests that Putin has chosen to surrender, with surrender defined by Putin giving up enough of his goals for the Special Military Operation to get a peace agreement. How many and what they would be is not known.
At first glance, if Putin has made such a choice, it is an honorable, humane decision that places the life of the planet above Russian national sovereignty. Putin, of course, will not get any credit for it. The official narrative will be a defeated Russia got the best deal it could. But at second glance, Putin’s surrender to the West merely kicks the can down the road.
Putin’s surrender could undermine his support and Russian unity and encourage Washington’s effort to breakup the Russian Federation into several small countries that lack the ability to serve as a constraint on American hegemony. The Russian military is opposed to trading concessions for peace, and Putin has removed one of his critics.
Helmer reports that one month after the Russia-Ukraine conflict began, Putin, who has no taste for war, sent a peacemaker, Vladimir Medinsky, to Instanbul to negotiate peace with Ukraine. Medinsky appears to be an Atlanticist Integrationist, who thinks Russia can build bridges to the West with cultural exhibitions, orchestral and ballet performances, and museum exhibits. Apparently, he believes this despite the Wests’s ban on any semblance of Russian culture, including Olympic athletes.
The Russian military rejected the peace terms Medinsky negotiated in Turkey. Fortunately for Putin, Washington made Ukraine reject them, saving Putin from a confrontation with the Russian military.
Now approaching three years of a conflict that a real national leader would have ended in 3 weeks, Putin has his back to the wall. There is no space left to which to retreat. Faced with US/NATO missiles fired into Russia, Putin says it means World War. If Putin backs down again, Russia is finished. As Putin doesn’t want war, he is willing to make concessions for peace and has instructed Medinsky to negotiate a peace agreement. The world should thank Putin, because Russia will pay a price.
The Russian military, or at least significant parts of it, are concerned that concessions will play as a defeat and have adverse effects on Russia. Fleet commander, Admiral Sergei Avakyant, removed from command by Putin, and Deputy Chairman Medvedev of the Russian National Security Council view concessions as unacceptable. Helmer speculates whether the military will remove Putin. If so, I would imagine his replacement would be a more hardlined person.
What follows is from Helmer’s report:
“Medinsky’s version of the end-of-war terms is flatly opposed by the General Staff. In the Security Council the General Staff’s case is argued by Deputy Chairman Medvedev. Medinsky’s appearance at the Security Council last week is a sign, Moscow sources believe, of the intensification of the debate between the Army and the President.
In an unusual disclosure of military command thinking, the former Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral Sergei Avakyants, has written earlier this month that “despite its external logic and attractiveness”, the Medinsky terms for ending the Special Military Operation “lead to a catastrophe that threatens to become the last and most tragic in the history of the Russian people. In Russia, it is dangerous for the current government to lose wars, especially when for a long time this government held parades and convinced the people of the invincibility of their native army. Defeat will cause disappointment and loss of faith, but not in the army, rather in the political leadership.”
Avakyants was warning Putin publicly. In private, Putin had ordered Avakyants’s dismissal in April. No Russian military blogger has reported the circumstances of the clash between Avakyants and the Kremlin.
First I’ve heard of it too.
But the basic thesis that the military and Putin are at odds is correct.
Remember: one of Putin’s primary missions was to destroy the Russian military with his reforms. That is why he was tapped by Kissinger and Finkelstein to be the next president of Russia in the first place. Because they knew that Putin would be a compliant colonial satrap of Russia, which was already reorganized around raw resource extraction and stripped of any kind of sovereignty or self-sufficiency.
According to Admiral Avakyants’s declaration of military independence from the Kremlin, “the pressure on Russia from its historical opponents will only increase, and the escalation process will enter an irreversible phase. The enormous resources currently invested in the indirect hot war of the collective West against our country will be redirected to finance all destructive and anti-state forces (regional separatism, ‘the fight against the rotten corrupt regime’, ‘the promotion of universal freedoms and values’, etc.). Various states ‘historically offended’ by our country will begin to make territorial claims against Russia from all sides.”
He must be referring to Russia’s Antifa Values Abrahamic Victory in WWII allies in central asia, the caucasus and the other non-Russian minorities who hate Russians in Russia.
“The sanctions will not be lifted, but they may take even harsher and more painful forms for our economy. Part of the elite — weakened but still strong compradors, the remaining part of the ‘fifth column’ in the country [intellectuals and Atlanticist Integrationists] will painlessly adapt to the conditions of the collapse of the state. The country’s leadership, elite groups directly integrated into state structures, will be destroyed (politically, economically, and some even physically). No one will be forgiven, and no one will be forgotten.”
“It is very important for the West to once again demonstrate to the entire world what awaits the ‘rebels’ who have encroached on its model of world order. There is no hope for support from allies due to the absence of any (except Belarus). It will be necessary to answer a very difficult question that is already forming in the public consciousness: ‘For what were so many sacrifices made if the goals of the Donbas operation are not achieved, and if peace is concluded at the expense of fundamental concessions to enemies which means a defeat for Russia?’ The people, having once again lost their ‘Faith’ and ‘Tsar’, will remain silent, watching the collapse of their ‘Fatherland’. All this will not happen overnight, but by historical standards very quickly – in five to seven years.”
“To avoid all this, Russia must choose the second option. It can be briefly described in two words – ‘Fight and Victory’. This option is unattractive and uncomfortable. It requires the leadership to assume the heaviest burden of responsibility, implement unpopular decisions, change the usual, established way of life for millions of people, introduce a different system of values and life priorities for the ruling elite. ‘Option No. 2 will require (for some time) exerting all efforts, attracting new personnel selected on the basis of professionalism, patriotism and the prevalence of the interests of society and the state over personal ones. It will be necessary to carry out a significant reorganization and restructuring of various government structures and a significant part of the entire state mechanism.”
That ship has sailed a long time ago. But yes, Putin would have to fire all the people that he has hired over the last 20+ years from the government that he created to effect such a change.
The odds of this occurring are virtually zero.
Only if there was a coup against Putin and his government could this be accomplished. Otherwise, Moscow will just continue following Langley’s orders and continue losing gracefully.
In Avakyants’s outline of end-of-war terms, he proposes negotiations after military victory. “The victory must be unconditional – neither enemies, nor partners, nor our own people should have even the slightest doubt that this is Russia’s Victory. The goals declared by the President must be achieved without fail: access to the 2014 administrative borders of the DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions; denazification – a change of the ruling regime in Ukraine, a change in the Constitution of Ukraine and current legislation (permission for the UOC [Ukrainian Orthodox Church], official bilingualism, a ban on Nazi-Bandera ideology, etc.); demilitarization – constitutionally activated neutral status of Ukraine, prohibition of deployment on its territory of foreign military bases and military contingents (including advisers and instructors), heavy weapons, types of weapons capable of threatening the territory of Russia; after the invasion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces into the Kursk region, Ukrainian statehood in its current form should not exist or, in extreme cases, can be preserved, but weakened as much as possible.”
The conclusion is quite strange:
If Putin’s fails to defend Russia, the failure will open the discussion to “conspiracy theorists” that Putin is nothing but a compliant member of the World Economic Forum’s globalism, the agenda of which is the destruction of national sovereignty, including Russia’s, and the unification of the world under a global ruler.
Will this be Putin’s legacy?
There is some very strange word choice employed in this report that is worth commenting on. So, basically, his final warning is that if Putin doesn’t get his butt in gear that people like “Rurik Skywalker” (if that is even his real name!) will be proven right.
Which … why is this such a threat though?
Isn’t a good thing that people will have their eyes opened to the fact that there is no meaningful dissent to globalism, only pied-pipers and charlatans keeping the masses inert by feeding them false hope? Wouldn’t that be an improvement over the current situation in which people hope and pray for politicians like Trump or Putin to save them instead of working to save themselves?
And who is he even referring to, actually?
Again, I am literally the only guy in English who explicitly explains on his blog the “conspiracy theory” that Putin works for and with the globalists and who goes into laborious detail explaining how it was Andropov who set up the “USSR 2.0” and initiated Russia’s integration into Globalism.
Like, I know that
will also point out that Putin’s government is globalist-compliant vis a vis their foreign policy with Iran or Israel.I know that Mikovich will point out the same because he is a recurring guest on the blog podcast.
And then we have
who focuses on reporting that Russia’s elites pursue the same policies as the globalist elites and do everything they can to ensure that Russia retain globalist-compliant policy measures.…
Is there anyone else writing about this that I missed?
Is PCR worried that Rurik might finally start making some money from his tiny micro-blog and is therefore preemptively sounding the alarm?
If so, what are his motivations?
Is this just another typical example of old age digging its claws in and resisting the changing of the guard?
I think it is something more sinister than that, actually.
See, PCR has written loving eulogies to Mikhail Gorbachev before and this is a HUGE red flag that throws his credibility and true motivations into question immediately. Here:
Mikhail Gorbachev was the first President of the Soviet Union and the last Soviet leader. He was the best of the younger generation of Communist Party members who understood, like US President Ronald Reagan, the futility of the Cold War and the needless threat of nuclear Armageddon. Gorbachev also understood that the repressions and hardships of the Soviet years were unnecessary, and he with advisors, some of whom I met and engaged in discussion, attempted to reform the Soviet system. There is no question that he was a great man and a sincere leader of the Soviet peoples.
Ah, but there is a question about his sincerity. And I know this because I am one of those conspiracy theorists that PCR seems to be so afraid of who is asking these questions! Hell, I even dare to ask questions about Gorbachev’s true loyalties.
Like I did here:
But PCR seems to think that Gorbachev did right by the Russian people by allowing the dismemberment and mutilation of the USSR. No one who has studied the issue (or read my material) could agree with his position though.
Thanks to his eulogy, we also know that PCR thinks that Gorbachev is a good standard for a Russian leader. And so, Putin, who was once much-beloved by PCR, is a kind of Gorbachev, but one who PCR believes is making a similar mistake: trusting the West too much.
PCR basically wants this Gorbachev 2.0 to be firmer with the West.
And what are the consequences of Gorbachev 2.0 not following his advice?
Well, a non-Gorbachev might come to power. Someone who would try to fight back against globalism for real and try to raise his country up its knees in the form of a nationalist rebellion against the NWO. An Ivan Grozny 2.0 (Russian Hitler), I suppose, is the real fear that PCR wants to prevent. And that is exactly what Putin’s presence at the top of the power pyramid in Russia prevents from occurring. PCR urges the West to not play with fire by destabilizing Weimar Russia to the point at which a disgruntled colonel or a firebrand rebel might come to power. This is, apparently, the “dissident” position to take on the matter of the current NATO proxy war against Russia.
Needless to say, there is a big difference between myself and the right-of-Kremlin patriots, and these Western “dissidents” then.
President Reagan realized Gorbachev’s greatness. Reagan also realized that Gorbachev was limited in his ability to end the Cold War by distrustful elements in the Politburo. President Reagan’s plan, in which I was a participant, was to rescue the US economy from “stagflation” and then to put pressure of a threatened arms race–Star Wars– on the Soviet Union in order to enhance Gorbachev’s position in favor of ending the Cold War than to subject the struggling Soviet economy to an arms race with a revitalized US economy.
Reagan, despite the CIA’s opposition and that of the US military/security complex, carried out his plan not in order to win the cold war but as Reagan repeatedly stressed to all of us involved to end the Cold War. None of us, Reagan included, had any idea of Soviet collapse. Our purpose was to halt a gratuitous conflict that threatened humanity with nuclear Armageddon.
I’m sure that Reagan didn’t understand what was going on because he was senile at that point. But the idea that the USSR “just collapsed” is just more disinfo nonsense that has been so successfully promoted that I look like the crazy one for trying to explain how a world empire actually disappeared overnight instead of just shrugging and saying, “The Christian god did it!” or “blue jeans and Walkmens did it!” or “SHUT UP, NAZI-BIGOT AND EAT THE MCDONALDS!”.
What we did not realize was that hardline elements of the Soviet Communist Party thought that Gorbachev was making too many concessions to the West too soon without sufficient reciprocal concessions and guarantees. Apparently, Gorbachev himself did not realize it.
Ah, but he did.
What PCR is saying that is very interesting though, is that the plan was to Converge the East and West, but on equal terms and that Gorbachev had failed to do that. As I have explained, his mentor, Andropov, conceived of a more equal globalist new world order with power shared between Eastern and Western elites as they mercilessly ground the rest of us peasants to paste underneath their boots.
PCR is not saying that he is anti-globalist!
No, he is saying that the Andropov version of Globalism would have been fairer and the system of control would have been smoother, less fraught with tension and conflict like what is occurring now. He simply uses moralitarian language to couch his support for the New World Order.
Reagan proceeded with care. He invited Gorbachev to the White House. Reagan convinced the distinguished American pianist, Van Cliburn, to come out of retirement and perform for Gorbachev in the White House. Van Cliburn had won, with Khrushchev’s approval, the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958. In addition to classics of Russian composers, Van Cliburn regaled Gorbachev with Russian folk songs. President Reagan absolutely forbade any derogatory reference to the Soviet Union. Nothing, not even the CIA, was to prevent the end of the Cold War.
They sent their boy Yakovlev in to make sure that the USSR was detonated and then thoroughly looted.
Sadly, we are forced to conclude that yet another much-vaunted dissident voice of resistance to the globalists is either a demented liar or worse, perhaps, that he is simply yet another clueless boomer with an internet connection.
A good rule to follow in life is to NEVER, EVER trust Deep-Staters. Not even the ones that pretend to defect out of Abrahamism Values Morality like Ritter, Macgregor, Johnson, Carlson and PCR.
Once a Deep-Stater, always a Deep-Stater.
After Reagan’s second term ended, I had less connection with his successor, his former vice president, George H. W. Bush, but I know for an absolute fact that Secretary of State James Baker gave assurances to Gorbachev that if Gorbachev permitted the unification of Germany, NATO would not move one inch to the East. There is no doubt about this, despite the denials by American neoconservatives and Clinton regime officials.
The Soviet Union collapsed, not because of Reagan, but because the hardline Communists, disturbed, as is understandable, by Gorbachev’s trust in Washington’s word, attempted a coup and placed Gorbachev under house arrest. It was this miscalculation that brought about the collapse of the Soviet government and the rise of Yeltsin, who, intentionally or not, essentially was under Washington’s control.
Gorbachev, believing as did Reagan, in the futility of the Cold War, trusted that the conflict was over. Gorbachev’s mistake was that he did not understand Washington. An American President can make an agreement that can be rescinded by a successor. This is the case even if there are signed documents, but in the absence of signed documents, the corrupt Clinton regime was able to claim no such agreement as NATO not moving to Russia’s borders ever existed.
In view of the Democrat Clinton regime’s overthrowing the Reagan-Gorbachev ending of the Cold War with a New Cold War, now greatly expanded under the Democrat Biden, the Kremlin’s toleration of the West’s declared aggressive intentions against Russia is puzzling. How can anyone in the Kremlin ever again believe a word that Washington says?
In Russia Gorbachev is not seen as the great leader that he was. In America, ignorant flag-waving patriots mistakenly base their pride on Reagan winning the Cold War.
As far as I, a participant, can tell, neither side understands what has happened.
Yes, well, PCR is part of the very disinfo campaign that he decries with his lurid tales of the great morality supermen Reagan and Gorbachev conspiring to save the world from Nuclear Winter™ because of how humanitarian and noble the two were.
What a crock!
As for asking why Putin believes Washington’s word, well, that is actually several questions in the guise of one:
What blackmail do they have on Putin?
How weak is Putin’s grip on power really?
Who is feeding Putin misinformation from within Washington?
What is Putin’s IQ level?
When was he recruited by Langley?
I do not have the answer to any of these questions, so I cannot say why Putin “believes” Washington’s promises or continues to “naively” trust them despite them constantly breaking their promises to his government.
The most baffling point to me is why Putin doesn’t fear for his life more than he appears to now. I would think that he is a coward on a personal, character level, yes. A man with a timid disposition and an unremarkable mind. His KGB nickname was literally “The Grey Moth”, for crying out loud.
But, surely, he has noticed a pattern of what Washington does to its puppet-leaders once their use has come to an end? I have argued that his whole strategy lies in trying to convince Washington that he can still be of use to their agenda. And that he believed he still had friends in the Old Guard Washington Deep State like Kissinger or Burn or Carlson (Tucker’s father was a Deep Stater who ran the CIA Radio Free Europe operation against the USSR). But still, is this a viable strategy? Does it even make sense? Has any puppet-leader slated for liquidation been able to ingratiate themselves to such a degree that they were spared their life after their usefulness came to an end?
None to my knowledge.
But, here perhaps is another conspiracy theory worth looking into.
What if the long list of assassinated puppet-leaders was actually a hoax? What if these dead men were actually simply relocated once their job was completed? What if their deaths were faked?
Do you believe that?
Some people on the internet seem to believe that.
I can understand the hypothesis and it makes sense on a certain level because it attempts to address the strangeness of Washington’s behavior vis a via its puppet-leaders.
Personally, I don’t think it is correct though, no.
I think that Saddam and all those other Washington puppet-leaders are dead for real and it also makes sense to me that it would be preferable to kill them off than to have them alive and possibly running their mouthes to someone. Unfortunately, that still leaves us wondering why all of these puppet-leaders continued to remain loyal to Washington even after they were slated for liquidation. We could have said that some of the earlier marks didn’t know what would happen to them. But with Putin, we cannot say the same.
He definitely knows.
Related to this, Putin has declared Ukraine lost to Russia forever. Here:
Russia tried to resolve tensions with Kiev and its Western backers peacefully, but the other side did not negotiate in good faith, President Vladimir Putin has said on the anniversary of Russia’s reunification with four former Ukrainian regions.
Fooled again ;^)!
Russia is marking two years since it accepted the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as new parts of the country, along with the regions of Zaporozhye and Kherson. The treaties with the breakaway entities were signed amid hostilities with Ukraine, after people in those territories voted for the move in referendums. Kiev has rejected the votes as a “sham” and they have failed to gain widespread international recognition.
In a short statement, Putin reminded the nation that Moscow had initially intended to facilitate the return of Donetsk and Lugansk to Ukraine, after they rebelled against Kiev in the wake of the US-backed violent coup in 2014.
”You all know how those negotiations ended: with lies, fraud, deceit from the Western elites, who have since turned Ukraine into their colony, a military foothold against Russia,” the president said.
Good job, Putin.
Thank you for admitting that you let Ukraine become a Western colony, a military foothold against Russia, in your own words! Thank you for admitting that millions of “brotherly Slavs” are now under this occupation and lost to the Russian world for the foreseeable future. Thank you for admitting that this wasn’t some clever 5D Chess plan to lure NATO into a war that they’d lose, but that you were an idiot, a buffoon, a moral goody two-shoes that got “tricked” by his Western handlers partners.
Thank you for being more honest than ZAnon bloggers who praise your every single fart or burp as if it was a proclamation from the Oracle of Delphi itself!
Thank you.
Dear casual readers, if you want to learn more about who was in charge of Ukraine, that would be the FSB’s “Fifth Service”. And they were also the ones who provided the disastrous intel to Putin that led to all those embarrassing (or deliberate?) losses in the first months of the SMO. The FSB is the spook occupation army that rules over Russia and has its fingerprints on all of the major disasters of the last 50 some years.
And now let us look at a second perspective on the Putin surrender situation.
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