Thread: How dangerous is Vladimir Putin?

Originally Posted by misskit

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council, took the threats even further, and hinted at nuclear escalation.

Originally Posted by misskit

The “idea to punish a country with the largest nuclear potential is absurd and potentially creates the threat to mankind’s existence,” he said, referring to Russia, which maintains more nuclear warheads than any other country, according to the Associated Press.

The threat is from NaGaStan's Associated Press, not Dimitry Medvedey, according to the published quotation, note, no quotation marks around, referring to Russia.

Posted on July 7, 2022 by M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

Japan’s Kishida steps on Russian oil slick

"The simmering tensions between Moscow and Japan during the past 4-month period of the war in Ukraine surged when the Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolay Patrushev sounded the warning at a meeting on national security in Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East on Tuesday that Japan is ramping up its revanchist plans for the Kuril Islands.
To quote Patrushev, “The border situation on the territory of the Far Eastern District is being shaped under the conditions of the US and its allies increasing their military presence in the Arctic and Asia-Pacific regions and activating Japan’s revanchist aspirations with regards to the Kuril Islands by means of creating new military blocs.”
Russia has been a victim of Japanese revanchism historically. While the world is familiar with Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, most wouldn’t probably know about a similar Japanese attack 36 years earlier on February 8th, 1904 on the Russian Pacific Fleet based in Port Arthur that triggered the Russo-Japanese War. By the way, it was also an attack without a formal declaration of war. Tokyo felt emboldened by the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, which obligated either power to provide military aid if one found itself at war. The Alliance was directed against France and Russia.

Patrushev has highlighted that the geopolitics of the Far East has phenomenally changed. Indeed, the deterioration of the Russo-Japanese relationship causes surprise, since the two countries have been coping with a cordial, “quasi-friendly” relationship through the past decade, their dispute over Kuril notwithstanding.
Japan is not even remotely connected with Ukraine’s NATO membership, but Tokyo is acting in sync with the US-Japan Treaty, emulating Washington’s sanctions against Russia. Notably, Tokyo has abandoned its reticent diplomatic idiom regarding Kuril and now calls it a Russian “occupation”.
Japan’s motivations may seem inscrutable but aren’t hard to fathom. Japan concluded that the war in Ukraine would spill over to the Far East and a conflict over Taiwan might ensue. Secondly, Japan bought into Washington’s narrative that the US had got Russia’s neck in the noose and Moscow would emerge out of the conflict in Ukraine as a weakened power, which in turn would shift the regional balance in favour of the Indo-Pacific strategy aimed at containing China.

Thirdly, Tokyo is one hundred percent committed to the idea of the NATO entering the Indo-Pacific theatre. With NATO support, Tokyo may be calculating that a weakening of Russia would enable Japan to handle the Kuril dispute from a position of strength.
Fourthly, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s trips to the US and major European capitals and his performance at the recent summit meetings of the G7 and NATO aimed to position Japan as a key player in the Indo-Pacific. The Russia-Ukraine war and Chinese “assertiveness” topped his agenda also during his 5-nation Southeast Asian tour in April-May and his appearance at the Shangri-La conference in Singapore in June.

While in Jakarta, Kishida drew a direct line between the Russian aggression and China’s decade of “assertiveness” in the East and South China seas. “We are facing many challenges, including the situations in Ukraine, the East and South China seas, and North Korea, and maintaining and strengthening the rules-based, free, and open international order has become more important,” Kishida said.
Japan’s appeal in Southeast Asia lies in mutually beneficial economic engagement, fair and transparent infrastructure financing, and its potential as a security counterweight to China’s growing influence. In Washington’s reckoning, Japan stands perhaps the best chance of nudging the reluctant Southeast Asian nations to identify with the US-led international sanctions campaign against Russia and to shift to a more active position on the Ukraine war.

On its part, Russia has belatedly begun reacting to Japan’s unfriendly stance. Moscow has bolstered its military forces in the Kuril Islands with new air and coastal defence missile batteries. With the Northern Sea Route opening up, Kuril’s strategic importance has vastly increased. The Kuril archipelago, located on the southern side of the Kamchatka peninsula, is in close proximity to Russia’s strategic bases hosting its nuclear submarine flotilla and guided-missile and ballistic missile launchers. The placement of the Russian nuclear submarine arsenal in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy requires the Kremlin to implement a program of militarisation of the Kuril Archipelago and the island of Sakhalin.

Meanwhile, Japan sees that a defining feature of Russia’s national security posture today is its securing of the “no limits” partnership with China by a set of coherent, well-thought-out and complementary strategic rationales. No doubt, the war in Ukraine has cemented the Russian-Chinese partnership. Russia’s increasingly adversarial relationship with the West and its increasingly close partnership with China complement each other. Kishida realises all this and has decided that his predecessor Shnizo Abe’s strategy to entice Russia to be a “balancer” in the Japan-China-Russia triangle is no longer tenable.

Patrushev’s sharp remarks are meant to convey to Tokyo that Moscow is taking serious note of the unfriendly shift in Japan’s stance. Moscow notices that Japan has lately entrenched its ties with NATO at a juncture when the alliance wants to limit Russia’s reach across the globe, including in the Pacific region. Moscow understands that it is under US protection and backing that Japan has become more strident on Kuril issue.
Of course, Moscow will not lower its guard, as, technically, Japan and Russia are still at war. Although Japan surrendered to the Allies in September 1945, ending World War II, Moscow and Tokyo never signed an official peace treaty.

In March, Moscow suspended the peace-treaty negotiations with Tokyo after Japan slapped economic sanctions on Russia. Kishida called Moscow’s decision “extremely unreasonable and totally unacceptable.” Russian Deputy Prime Minister and Presidential Envoy to the Far East Federal District Yury Trutnev said last month that Moscow will strip Japan of the right to fish in waters near the Kuril Islands.

Last week, President Vladimir Putin issued a decree that appears to be a step towards nationalisation of the foreign shareholdings in the giant Sakhalin-2 oil and gas project where Mitsui and Mitsubishi hold 22.5% shares. The five-page decree says it is up to the Kremlin to decide whether foreign shareholders should remain in the consortium.

Meanwhile, Tokyo’s support for the US proposal at the recent G7 summit advocating a price cap on Russian oil has put Moscow’s back up. On Tuesday, the former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev sternly warned that Japan would be kicked out of Sakhalin-2 project and its supplies of Russian oil and gas cut off if it supported the US move. Medvedev forecast that if any price cap is imposed on Russian oil, the market price will touch somewhere between $300-$400 per barrel!

Sakhalin-2 is critical to Japan for meeting its energy needs. Sakhalin-2 alone meets about 8% of Japan’s gas needs and to replace it, Tokyo has to buy from spot market where competition for LNG shipments globally is currently intense and the price is around 6 times that of Russian gas. Besides, Japan’s entry will tighten the LNG market materially this decade, as Japan will have to compete with Europe.

Japan depends on imports to meet 90% of its oil and gas needs. The Japanese currency has fallen to its lowest in 20 years, resulting in its import bill shooting up by 70% in yen terms. This is indeed shaping up as one of the most serious energy crises Japan ever had, and it can severely hurt the economy. In a recent study, the Economist Intelligence Unit estimated that yen will continue to depreciate against the US dollar through 2022, which will “constrain Japan’s economic growth this year through stronger inflation, softer consumer spending and delayed business investment.”

As Russia tightens its screws on Japan, it appears Kishida may have bitten more than what he could chew on the price cap idea. Top Japanese experts have doubted the rationale behind Japan’s policy trajectory. Of course, Moscow’s dexterity to use oil and gas as geopolitical tool is not to be doubted. The Kremlin decree on Sakhalin-2 could be intended, partly at least, as a wake-up call that alienating Russia could damage Japan’s vital long-term interests. Patrushev spoke up only four days after that."

https://www.indianpunchline.com/japa...ian-oil-slick/

Originally Posted by russellsimpson

Purely and simply it's an organization attempting to keep American ambitions in the Indo-Pacific in check

If you reflect on the listed above current members and the potential new aspirants to join BRICS, you may notice that already there are European, Asian, African and South American members.

The new one, Iran is in the Middle East, the others are Middle Eastern, Saudi Arabia, European, Turkey and African, Egypt.

Far more substntil than your current "indo pacific" area.

One comentator on current topics including Russia's BRICS, SMO, Taiwan ....

Russia and China Haven’t Even Started to Ratchet Up the Pain Dial

Pepe Escobar

July 13, 2022

The Suicide Spectacular Summer Show, currently on screen across Europe, proceeds in full regalia.

"The Suicide Spectacular Summer Show, currently on screen across Europe, proceeds in full regalia, much to the astonishment of virtually the whole Global South: a trashy, woke Gotterdammerung remake, with Wagnerian grandeur replaced by twerking.

Decadent Roman Emperors at least exhibited some degree of pathos. Here we’re just faced by a toxic mix of hubris, abhorring mediocrity, delusion, crude ideological sheep-think and outright irrationality wallowing in white man’s burden racist/supremacist slush – all symptoms of a profound sickness of the soul.

To call it the Biden-Leyen-Blinken West or so would be too reductionist: after all these are puny politico/functionaries merely parroting orders. This is a historical process: physical, psychic and moral cognitive degeneration embedded in NATOstan’s manifest desperation in trying to contain Eurasia, allowing occasional tragicomic sketches such as a NATO summit proclaiming Woke War against virtually the whole non-West.

So when President Putin addresses the collective West in front of Duma leaders and heads of political parties, it does feel like a comet striking an inert planet. It’s not even a case of “lost in translation”. “They” simply aren’t equipped to get it.

The “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” part was at least formulated to be understood even by simpletons:

“Today we hear that they want to defeat us on the battlefield, well, what can I say, let them try. We have heard many times that the West wants to fight us to the last Ukrainian – this is a tragedy for the Ukrainian people. But it looks like it’s all coming to this. But everyone should know that, by and large, we haven’t really started anything yet.”

Fact. On Operation Z, Russia is using a fraction of its military potential, resources and state of the art weapons.

Then we come to the most probable path ahead in the war theater:

“We do not refuse peace negotiations, but those who refuse should know that the longer it drags, the more difficult it will be for them to negotiate with us.”

As in the pain dial will be ratcheted up, slowly but surely, on all fronts.

Yet the meat of the matter had been delivered earlier in the speech: “ratcheting up the pain dial” applies in fact to dismantling the whole “rules-based international order” edifice. The geopolitical world has changed. Forever.

Here’s the arguably key passage:

“They should have understood that they have already lost from the very beginning of our special military operation, because its beginning means the beginning of a radical breakdown of the World Order in the American way. This is the beginning of the transition from liberal-globalist American egocentrism to a truly multipolar world – a world based not on selfish rules invented by someone for themselves, behind which there is nothing but the desire for hegemony, not on hypocritical double-standards, but on international law, on the true sovereignty of peoples and civilizations, on their will to live their historical destiny, their values and traditions and build cooperation on the basis of democracy, justice and equality. And we must understand that this process can no longer be stopped.”

Meet the trifecta

A case can be made that Putin and Russia’s Security Council are implementing a tactical trifecta that has reduced the collective West to an amorphous bunch of bio headless chickens.

The trifecta mixes the promise of negotiations – but only when considering Russia’s steady advances on the ground in Novorossiya; the fact that Russia’s global “isolation” has been proved in practice to be nonsense; and tweaking the most visible pain dial of them all: Europe’s dependence on Russian energy.

The main reason for the graphic, thundering failure of the G20 Foreign Ministers summit in Bali is that the G7 – or NATOstan plus American colony Japan – could not force the BRICS plus major Global South players to isolate, sanction and/or demonize Russia.

On the contrary: multiple interpolations outside of the G20 spell out even more Eurasia-wide integration. Here are a few examples.

The first transit of Russian products to India via the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) is now in effect, crisscrossing Eurasia from Mumbai to the Baltic via Iranian ports (Chabahar or Bandar Abbas), the Caspian Sea, and Southern and Central Russia. Crucially, the route is shorter and cheaper than going through the Suez Canal.

In parallel, the head of the Iranian Central Bank, Ali Salehabadi, confirmed that a memorandum of interbank cooperation was signed between Tehran and Moscow.
That means a viable alternative to SWIFT, and a direct consequence of Iran’s application to become a full BRICS member, announced at the recent summit in Beijing. The BRICS, since 2014, when the New Development Bank (NDB) was founded, have been busy building their own financial infrastructure, including the near future creation of a single reserve currency. As part of the process, the harmonization of Russian and Iranian banking systems is inevitable.

Iran is also about to become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) at the upcoming summit in Samarkand in September.

In parallel, Russia and Kazakhstan are solidifying their strategic partnership: Kazakhstan is a key member of BRI, EAEU and SCO.
India gets even closer to Russia across the whole spectrum of trade – including energy.

And next Tuesday, Tehran will be the stage for a crucial face-to-face meeting between Putin and Erdogan.

Isolation? Really?

On the energy front, it’s only summer, but demented paranoia is already raging across multiple EU latitudes, especially Germany. Comic relief is provided by the fact that Gazprom can always point out to Berlin that eventual supplying problems on Nord Stream 1 – after the cliffhanger return of that notorious repaired turbine from Canada – can always be solved by implementing Nord Stream 2.

As the whole European Suicide Spectacular Summer Show is nothing but a tawdry self-inflicted torture ordered by His Master’s Voice, the only serious question is which pain dial level will force Berlin to actually sit down and negotiate on behalf of legitimate German industrial and social interests.

Rough and tumble will be the norm. Foreign Minister Lavrov summed it all up when commenting on the Declining Collective West Ministers striking poses like infantile brats in Bali to avoid being seen with him: that was up to “their understanding of the protocols and politeness.”

That’s diplo-talk for “bunch of jerks”. Or worse: cultural barbarians, as they were even unable to respect the hyper-polite Indonesian hosts, who abhor confrontation.
Lavrov preferred to extol the “joint strategic and constructive” Russian-Chinese work when faced with a very aggressive West. And that brings us to the prime masterpiece of shadowplay in Bali – complete with several layers of geopolitical fog.

Chinese media, always flirting with the opaque, tried to put its bravest face ever depicting the over 5-hour meeting between Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Secretary Blinken as “constructive”.

What’s fascinating here is that the Chinese ended up letting something crucial out of the bag to slip into the final draft of their report – obviously approved by the powers that be.

Lu Xiang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences went through previous readouts – especially of “Yoda” Yang Jiechi routinely turning Jake Sullivan into roasted duck – and stressed that this time Wang’s “warnings” to the Americans were “the sternest one in wording”.
That’s diplo-code for “You Better Watch Out”: Wang telling Little Blinkie, “just look at what the Russians did when they lost their patience with your antics.”

The expression ”dead end” was recurrent during the Wang-Blinken meeting. So in the end the Global Times had to tell it like it really is: “The two sides are close to a showdown.”

“Showdown” is what End of Days fanatic and Tony Soprano wannabe Mike Pompeo is fervently preaching from his hate pulpit, while the combo behind the senile “leader of the free world” who literally reads teleprompters actively work for the crashing of the EU – in more ways than one.

The combo in power in Washington actually “supports” the unification of Britain, Poland, Ukraine and The Three Baltic Midgets as a separate alliance from NATO/EU – aiming at “strengthening the defense potential.” That’s the official position of U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julian Smith.

So the real imperial aim is to split the already shattering EU into mini-union pieces, all of them quite fragile and evidently more “manageable”, as Brussels Eurocrats, blinded by boundless mediocrity, obviously can’t see it coming.

What the Global South is buying

Putin always makes it very clear that the decision to launch Operation Z – as a sort of pre-emptive “combined arms and police operation”, as defined by Andrei Martyanov – was carefully calculated, considering an array of material and socio-psychological vectors.

Anglo-American strategy, for its part, lasers on a single obsession: damn any possible reframing of the current “rules-based international order”. No holds are barred to ensure the perpetuity of this order. This is in fact Totalen Krieg – featuring several hybrid layers, and quite worrying, with only a few seconds to midnight.

And there’s the rub. Desolation Row is fast becoming Desperation Row, as the whole Russophobic matrix is shown to be naked, devoid of any extra ideological – and even financial – firepower to “win”, apart from shipping a collection of HIMARS to a black hole.

Geopolitically and geoeconomically, Russia and China are in the process of eating NATOstan alive – in more ways than one. Here, for instance, is a synthetic road map of how Beijing will address the next stage of high-quality development via capital-driven industrial upgrading, focused on optimization of supply chains, import substitution of hard technologies, and “invisible champions” of industry.

If the collective West is blinded by Russophobia, the governing success of the Chinese Communist Party – which in a matter of a few decades improved the lives of more people than anyone, anytime in History – drives it completely nuts.

All along the Russia-China watchtower, it’s been not such a long time coming. BRI was launched by Xi Jinping in 2013. After Maidan in 2014, Putin launched the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) in 2015. Crucially, in May 2015, a Russia-China joint statement sealed the cooperation between BRI and EAEU, with a significant role assigned to the SCO.

Closer integration advanced via the St. Petersburg forum in 2016 and the BRI forum in 2017. The overall target: to create a new order in Asia, and across Eurasia, according to international law while maintaining the individual development strategies of each concerned country and respecting their national sovereignty.

That, in essence, is what most of the Global South is buying. It’s as if there’s a cross-border instinctual understanding that Russia-China, against serious odds and facing serious challenges, proceeding by trial and error, are at the vanguard of the Shock of the New, while the collective West, naked, dazed and confused, their masses completely zombified, is sucked into the maelstrom of psychological, moral and material disintegration.

No question the pain deal will be ratcheted up, in more ways than one."

https://www.strategic-culture.org/ne...-up-pain-dial/

One snippet of Russia's Foreign Minister's speech.

18 July 2022 00:03

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s article «Staged incidents as the Western approach to doing politics», published in Izvestia newspaper

"Efforts by Russia, Germany, and France paved the way to stopping the war between Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk in February 2015 with the signing of the Minsk Agreements.

Berlin and Paris played a proactive role here as well, proudly calling themselves as the guarantor countries. However, during the seven long years that followed, they did absolutely nothing to force Kiev to launch a direct dialogue with Donbass representatives for agreeing on matters including the special status, amnesty, restoring economic ties, and holding elections, as required by the Minsk Agreements which were approved unanimously by the UN Security Council.

The Western leaders remained silent when Kiev took steps which directly violated the Minsk Agreements under both Petr Poroshenko and Vladimir Zelensky. Moreover, the German and the French leaders kept saying that Kiev cannot enter direct dialogue with the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, and blamed everything on Russia, although Russia is not mentioned in the Minsk agreements even once, while remaining basically the only country that kept pushing for the agreements to be implemented.

If anyone doubted that the Minsk Package was anything but yet another fake, Petr Poroshenko dispelled this myth by saying on June 17, 2022:

“The Minsk Agreements did not mean anything to us, and we had no intention to carry them out… our goal was to remove the threat we faced… and win time in order to restore economic growth and rebuild the armed forces. We achieved this goal. Mission accomplished for the Minsk Agreements.”

The people of Ukraine are still paying the price of this fake. For many years now, the West has been forcing them to accept an anti-Russian neo-Nazi regime. What a waste of energy for Olaf Scholz with his calls to force Russia to agree to an agreement guaranteeing Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.

There already had been an agreement to this effect, the Minsk Package, and Berlin with Paris were the ones who derailed it by shielding Kiev in its refusal to abide by the document. The fake has been exposed – finita la commedia (the farce is over, the game is up)."

https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1822333/