by Joseph P. Farrell, Giza Death Star:
During last Thursday’s News and Views from the Nefarium, I read and reviewed a lengthy op-ed piece by Professor Karaganov that had appeared on RT‘s website. In the article, Professor Karaganov argued that Russia had to be willing to use nuclear weapons against the West, because the Ukrainian conflict is, for Russia, “existential,” i.e., effecting its very national, cultural, economic, social, and political existence. In advocating this view, Professor Karaganov also indicated that, before such use against specified targets of value in the west, that Russia should issue warnings to the civilian populations near those targets before striking them.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
As I interpreted this article, this was really the Russian government speaking through the mouthpiece of one of its academic advisors, to the Western leadership, and the message , in between all the radioactively glowing lines of nuclear escalation prose, was clear: the western political elite itself – not the people of the West – are now fair game for whatever measures Russia may think is the best method to pursue them and end them. As I’ve been warning ever since the “color revolution” and “Maidan coup” days, covert operations are a game that two or more can play, and thus far, it has been largely the West playing these games in the Ukraine. More recently, those games were expanded to bomb attacks on Alexandra Duginova, and even more recently than that, to drone attacks on the Kremlin itself and on dachas and apartments in the fashionable west side of Moscow, where even Mr. Putin is rumored to have a home. It requires little thought to understand that such drone attacks would have had to have been carried out by teams or people on the ground, and that means covert warfare is being attempted against the Russians and their leadership class.
So my reading of the RT nuclear escalation article by Karaganov is relatively simple: if Russia is openly discussing the use of nuclear weapons, then this also means all other operations, including covert operations such as assassinations, drone strikes, asymmetrical warfare and so on, are on the table.
Today there is a bit of corroborative evidence of this interpretation. Consider firstly this article shared by V.T. (with our thanks):
Senior Russian Official: Putin Has Green Light To Sever Undersea Commo Cables
Note that the Deputy Chairman of Russia’s security council, former Prime Minister and President Dmitri Medvedev, has himself come out with a clear statement that since the West has attacked the Nordstream pipeline, Russia is under no moral nor legal restraint from attacking similar infrastructure assets:
Following reports attributing the September destruction of Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipelines to the Ukrainian or US government, the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council has declared that President Vladimir Putin should feel free to sever undersea communication cables of the country’s “enemies.”
“If we proceed from the proven complicity of Western countries in blowing up the Nord Streams, then we have no constraints – even moral – left to prevent us from destroying the ocean floor cable communications of our enemies,” said Dmitry Medvedev on Telegram. Medvedev was Russia’s president from 2008 to 2012 and is a close ally of Putin.
Notably, this view that the covert/asymmetrical warfare gloves may be coming off are echoed by western experts:
Last month, NATO intelligence chief David Cattler warned of a rising risk of just such a move. “There are heightened concerns that Russia may target undersea cables and other critical infrastructure in an effort to disrupt Western life, to gain leverage against those nations that are providing security to Ukraine,” he told reporters. Naturally, the NATO intel officer’s list of potential motivations omitted retaliation-in-kind in the wake of the severing of the Nord Stream pipelines.
“The Russians are more active than we have seen them in years in this domain,” Cattler told reporters, noting a higher pace of Russian patrols all across the Atlantic and in the Baltic and North seas. “Russia is actively mapping allied critical infrastructure both on land and on the seabed.”
The oceans are a target-rich environment. More than 400 undersea cables carry more than 95% of international internet traffic. “Altogether, they carry an estimated 10 trillion U.S. dollars worth of financial transactions every day, so these cables really are an economic linchpin,” said Cattler.
Regular readers of this website will recall that in the wake of the coordinated attack on a California electrical substation at the southern tip of Silicon Valley some years ago, and then yet another series of coordinated attacks on internet cables in San Francisco and Arizona some time later, as well as my blogs about internet hacking of major banks and corporations, that I argued these attacks were types of reconnaissance in depth, being coordinated at a high and professional level, and probably either by state actors or by very powerful independent non-territorial actors. Now, finally, after some years and more provocations against Russia, others in the West’s leadership are saying the same thing.
