Two articles from the same person.
One from the day prior to the the meeting between Russia and NaGastan.
The other from today, subsequent to the meeting, where he is reviewing some media reports.
What his status/knowledge of regarding Russia or NaGastan is I have no idea.
The changes in the reported accusations and responses by NaGastani government and media sources are quite obvious.
Biden has set the mousetrap: what mouse will he catch?
gilbertdoctorow Uncategorized December 7, 2021 4 Minutes
"Today the “international community” is waiting impatiently for the start of the Biden-Putin video conference which is scheduled to begin at 18.00 Moscow time, 10.00 AM Washington time. While the proceedings will be closed to the public, the opening salutations will be aired and much will be made by our pundits of the body language of the two leaders. Every minute that the two men spend together will be weighed by our television and press analysts for what that says about the substance of the talks. Then there will be the press conferences of the two presidents immediately after the video conference, providing still more of a feast for the journalists and commentators.
In the event we are awaiting, all attention will be directed to one man, Vladimir Putin, to see if he flinches before the threats of dire economic sanctions that Biden has prepared with the clear backing of Congressional hawks and with alleged backing of the European allies should the Russians do what Washington says they are planning, namely invade Ukraine.. The sanctions list that has been released to the public includes cut-off from the international settlements body SWIFT and halting the convertibility of the ruble into dollars, euros or pounds. Such measures would be unprecedented in the post-Cold War period and, if the Russians had not long rehearsed their own devastating response for the West, would normally constitute a casus belli.
In short, Biden and his associates are surely congratulating themselves on the way they have set the mousetrap for Putin, who will be damned if he does invade Ukraine and damned if he doesn’t when the Kiev forces retake the Donbass. Should Putin choose not to invade, for whatever reason, with or without a Ukrainian march on Donbass, then Biden can claim that his standing up to the Autocrat worked, and he will potentially raise his domestic standing with the American electorate as defender of the U.S.-led world order. This, by the way, is one scenario which I failed to identify in my earlier writings on the U.S –Russian confrontation over Ukraine. How well a zero sum scenario will actually play with the Republicans and Democratic hawks remains to be seen.
Vladimir Putin will come to the conference in a self-confident mood. His blitz trip down to India yesterday and talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi fully validated Russian foreign policy at the global level. Their meeting ended in re-confirmation of the special strategic relationship that India and Russia have enjoyed now for decades, which has survived the pressures arising from the fast development of an informal but deep Russian alliance with China, India’s greatest adversary of the moment. Indeed, Modi is proceeding with implementation of the S-400 contract with Russia in the face of threatened sanctions from ….the USA, which has been actively courting India from the time of the Trump administration.
Moreover, notwithstanding Putin’s general caution in exercising the country’s military might, no one should doubt for a moment his choice when faced with what the Russian leadership and political classes perceive as an existential threat from U.S. and NATO forces in Ukraine. Kiev’s retaking Donbass with U.S. help would amount to such a threat.
And we should keep in mind that the kind of sanctions now being mentioned by the Americans have been discussed for several years. Together with China, Russia has prepared work-around solutions to manage its affairs whatever sanctions are thrown up by Washington.
Of course, there is the real question of whether the cut-off from SWIFT and scuttling of ruble convertibility in their currencies is truly enforceable on the European allies, whatever Biden may have wanted to hear from them in the run-up to today’s video conference.
If, as a direct consequence, the Russians cannot be paid for their gas deliveries to Europe, which amount to 40% of total European imports, 30% of actual consumption today ,then they will have contractual basis for stopping those deliveries. It is inconceivable that even the American vassals who run Europe can withstand the rebellion of business and general public domestically when the lights go out just to please Mr. Biden and play America’s political games. Now, of all times, as winter is setting in and gas reserves on European territory are low!
Reporting in the Financial Times and other major media on the response of NATO allies to the salesman’s work of Mr. Blinken and the Pentagon generals over the past couple of weeks has avoided these fundamental questions. We hear only that the Europeans, including Germany, were finally persuaded by American intelligence that the Russians are preparing for an invasion of Ukraine. We have not heard how these countries will likely respond to such an invasion if it takes place. Will they not investigate under what conditions it takes place, that is to say, who actually starts the war, Ukraine by overrunning Donbass or Russia by unprovoked aggression. Under a similar scenario in Georgia in 2008, Europe did its own investigation on the ground to assess responsibility, led by then French President Nicolas Sarkozy. He came back with the conviction that the Georgians were to blame and no sanctions on Russia followed.
Finally, no survey of the dynamics of a European follow-through on the sanctions threat can avoid dealing with the question of how the new German government will respond. The three party coalition formed by SPD leader Olaf Scholz was assembled over the heads of the German electorate, like the other undemocratic coalitions that rule much of Continental Europe today. Formulation of policies, programs and distribution of ministerial portfolios among the three parties was the result of horse-trading between them. The result is quite fragile if put to the test, and imposition of draconian sanctions on Russia would be just such a test. It is inconceivable that the business friendly Free Democrats will support Scholz if one of his first acts in power would be to destroy the German economy by depriving industry of gas supplies and leaving the general population to spend their pending lockdown freezing in unheated homes.
So, who is left for Mr. Biden to catch in his mousetrap? One person only: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Will he be sufficiently stupid to spring the trap on himself, possibly fatally, by risking a war with Russia that everyone knows he cannot win if Mr. Putin does not hold back. Even this B Grade actor cannot be that dumb."
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021
Biden has set the mousetrap: what mouse will he catch? – Gilbert Doctorow
The second:
Biden-Putin Summit: who won the match of wills?
gilbertdoctorow December 8, 2021
"It is now the morning after the widely anticipated video conference tęte-ŕ-tęte between U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and it is time to put our Kremlinology skills to work. By that I mean to say there is very little today in the public domain to provide clear answers to what may have been achieved, or to put it more brashly, who won the match of wills. We must rely on small hints that we can tweak out from mainstream media, which has, of course, been hand fed by Washington.
First, reading The New York Times and the Financial Times today we see that the bluster coming from Washington in the run-up to the contest has been deflated and something closer to the reality of U.S. leverage over Russia or lack of it is coming through. I will not go beyond these two leading newspapers of the USA and the United Kingdom, because a brief perusal of Continental papers like Le Soir in Belgium, Le Figaro in France and the Frankfurter Allgemeine in Germany shows that coverage of the Biden-Putin summit is negligible. That relative disinterest in and of itself also counts as deflating the inflammatory Biden Administration bluster which came before.
As regards my two mainstream flagships, I note the subtle change in numbers. A couple of weeks ago, I read that the Russians had 250,000 troops moved south to the Ukrainian border region. A week ago, it appeared there were 150,000 but many more could be brought in. Today I read that the Russians have 70,000 troops standing by in the region adjoining the border with Ukraine.
Yesterday we read that the US had agreed with its European allies on a set of crippling economic sanctions to impose on Russia if it invaded Ukraine. Today’s NYT tells us that a Russian invasion “could end Russia’s hopes of completing the Nord Stream II pipeline to Europe.” But that has been at the top of the U.S. agenda for the last five years or more, and it is still placed in the conditional tense. The message is even more diluted in the FT this morning: “The U.S. is putting pressure on Germany to block Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline as part of a package of sanctions that would be implemented in the event of Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine.”
There is hardly mention of the cut-off from SWIFT and halt to convertibility of the ruble into pounds, euros and dollars which had been in the threat list given to the press by Russia-hater in residence at the State Department, Victoria Nuland. Is it any wonder, then, that the Russian stock market this morning did not react at all to US threats of kicking Russia out of the world financial system and was in positive territory at the open.
From the brief highlights of the meeting released to the media by the Kremlin, we learn that both presidents expressed satisfaction with the meetings of their delegations over cyber security which followed from their face to face summit in Geneva in June. We also are told that some small progress was made addressing the reduction of the respective diplomatic presence in both countries to crippling levels: as a first step, the Americans are granting the Russians access to the diplomatic properties that were seized at the end of the Obama presidency and start of the Trump presidency in violation of international law. In the context of a virtual meeting set up in great haste for the ostensible purpose of bullying Russia into abandoning its alleged plans to invade Ukraine in the coming two months, these little signs of “business back to normal” put in question the depth of the crisis being addressed.
Finally, I note that today Biden has reversed course on his coziness with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Before the video summit, Zelensky had been led to believe that he would hear from the American president immediately afterwards. Now, in what is clearly a humiliating put-down, Zelensky has been told to await a call from Biden on Thursday, that is after the American President has conferred with his West European allies.
However tentative all the above remarks may be, it is a safe guess that there will now be a war between Russia and Ukraine only if Kiev launches a military assault on the Russian backed rebel provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk. It is now crystal clear that no Western military aid will come to save the necks of the Ukrainians when the Russians move in, as they will definitely do to save their Dobass brethren, many of whom are Russian Federation passport holders. And assuming that Zelensky has any sense of self-preservation and desire to enjoy the millions he has surely amassed during his brief time in office, he would likely be on the first private jet out to Israel or wherever, should his generals march on Donbas under instructions from the Right Sector and neo-Nazi radicals who have never been properly stripped of power.
That being said, the avoidance of war tomorrow does not mean the problem of U.S.-Ukraine-Russian relations has been solved in any way. Vladimir Putin is not one to kick the can down the road. It will be solved on his watch before 2024. But having shouted “wolf” once, as it did in the days leading up to this summit, Washington will be ever less able to rally Europe to its side in the future over the supposed Russian menace."
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2021/12/...atch-of-wills/
