If I was Putin, I’d make sure Prigozhin would fall from a high window very soon.
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I found this… sobering. Instructive. Not great news.
YMMV. “Consider the source.” Well, ok, the source is “former” CIA. Ok. I’ve read plenty of Howard Zinn. I am taking this all with a grain of salt.
Hard to argue the reality of nuclear offense: nukes are nukes. Salt is salt (granular or not). And yes iodine is iodine.
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Putin’s threats should be taken seriously. But given how his military has performed in Ukraine, he is not likely to seriously seek a conventional war with NATO that he realizes would end poorly for him. That’s the very reason Russia officially adopted its nuclear first-use policy after the Cold War: in case Russia feels it is losing drastically in a conventional war. Dangerously, though, Putin counts on the West’s lack of stomach to bear such costs themselves and assumes the West would not retaliate in kind, therefore allowing him then to deescalate. Reckless as that might sound to the United States and its allies, it actually reflects Putin’s intelligence officer’s mindset, and that’s where the West must focus – he’s unlikely to act without leaving an escape route; appearances and the image he portrays is a critical component of his actions that allows for false posturing to conceal weakness.Particularly worrisome is Russian messaging to normalize and justify Putin’s prospective use of a nuclear weapon. He’s certainly considering it; it would, after all, be reasonable to entertain and assess the utility of all the tools at his disposal. And I would not count on what ought to be a more logical aversion – that using nuclear weapons could cause pervasive harm not only to Russia’s people but also to its economy, damage that could include losing China’s support and that of India. The logic that holds that Putin would not risk losing his own extravagant wealth or undermining the country’s economic fortunes that underpin his internal support is our logic, not his. My experience with Russian intelligence officers is that they prize power and position over wealth. The former guarantees the latter.
…
(emphasis added)
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Give him an escape route. He can live at Mar-a-lago. What’s one more spy there?
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Before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s aerospace leadership had planned to market the next generation heavy fighter bomber, the Su-57, and its highly toutedderivative the Su-75 to several foreign military buyers. These plans now appear to be in ruins.
The Su-57 suffers from a low production rate. Export models are unlikely to be available until the end of the decade. As for the medium-weight Su-75, the so-called “Checkmate” aircraft, it has been only realized in models and computer graphics. It’s yet to have a single successful test flight.
For foreign buyers, that leaves the Sukhoi 35 (Su-35), the only Russian military aircraft in serial production. This is Russia’s signature heavy fighter bomber — although its combat record over the skies of Ukraine is mixed. But even the Su-35 might not be successfully exported in any significant numbers this decade.
Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Counter America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) was an important factor in deterring potential buyers of the Su-35 such as Egypt, Algeria and Indonesia. To discourage countries from buying Russian weapons and deny Russia the revenue from those sales, Congress passed third-party sanctions legislation to require the executive branch to sanction them if they did. Several countries have cancelled contracts to buy Russian weapons and sought equivalent defense capabilities from other countries rather than face the prospect of U.S. sanctions.
Now the Ukraine war and ensuing sanctions are having a devastating impact on the Russian aerospace sector. Sanctions are crippling the Russian capacity to finish the development of, much less mass produce, next-generation combat vehicles such as the Su-57 and Su-75. Many Russian manufacturers depend on imported advanced machine tools. And analysis of the remains of Russia’s missiles, drones, and aircraft downed in Ukraine has revealed that they contain Western components and subsystems that can no longer be legally exported to Russia.
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Wasn’t there some Russians recently claiming that they are evacuating because Ukrainians are going to blow that dam? I tried to search for that link but couldn’t find it.
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It’s always projection.
Accuse your enemy of the thing you’re planning to do.
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I remember seeing proof that injured soldiers who Putin met were really members of his bodyguard corps. Allegedly this is true of all the ordinary people he meets, for security reasons.
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