Did Xi Jinping demonstrate escalation dominance over Donald Trump at their meeting in Busan on October 30 (lead image, right) in a way which Vladimir Putin failed to do with Trump at their meeting in Anchorage on August 15? Has the Zhongnanhai strategy been more effective in deterring US escalation of trade war and of military measures against China than the Kremlin strategy has managed against the US and NATO?
Listen to the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid for the answers which aren’t publicly acknowledged but vigorously debated in private in Moscow, Beijing, and Washington.
Question: Did a new RAND report recommending the US moderate its escalating conflict with China influence President Donald Trump’s backdown in Busan? Answer: No.
Question: Does the Russian escalation of words in defence of Venezuela and the Chinese silence deter Trump from launching his plan to kill Nicolás Maduro?Answer: not much.
Question: Do the hacked emails between Jeffrey Epstein and former Israeli prime minister and defense minister Ehud Barak reveal untold influence on the Kremlin? Answer: Not likely.
Question: Does Russian Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina hold President Vladimir Putin’s purse strings to finance the war? Answer: Yes.
ByStanislas Balcerac, Warsaw, translated and annotated by John Helmer @bears_with
In the one hundred-year old Czech satire of the simpleminded conscript in the Austro-Hungarian army of World War I, Jaroslav Hasek’s hero, the good soldier Schweik, has come to display through his stupidity what the Czechs today say goes “further in defining the Czechs in the 20th century than perhaps anyone else.”
Thinking aloud, Schweik says things like: “All along the line, everything in the army stinks of rottenness. Up till now the wide-eyed masses haven’t woken up to it. With goggling eyes they let themselves be made into mincemeat and then when they’re struck by a bullet they just whisper, ‘Mummy!’ Heroes don’t exist, only cattle for the slaughter and the butchers in the general staffs. But in the end everybody will mutiny and there will be a fine shambles. Long live the army! Goodnight!” That last line wasn’t wishful thinking. It was sarcasm and satire of the propaganda of 1921.
The Czechs are still kidding themselves: when it comes to fighting their war against Russia, Schweik is no longer a conscript private, he’s a well-paid volunteer General Staff officer commuting between Prague, Rzeszów, and Lvov.
In Poland today, ruled by the Civic Coalition (formerly Civic Platform, Platforma Obywatelska, PO) party of Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski (lead images, left and centre), there is no shortage of propaganda from them; no lack of satirical laughter at what they say. The more of that there is, however, the more desperately Tusk and Sikorski crave attention, especially abroad where the dynamics of Polish politics are unknown and both of them ignored.
The good soldier Tusk says things like: “We must be aware that this is our war, because the war in Ukraine is only part of this ghastly project that appears in the world from time to time. And the goal of this political project is always the same. How to enslave nations, how to take away freedom from individual people, what to do to make authoritarianism, despotism, cruelty, lack of human rights triumph. If we lose this war, the consequences will affect not only our generation, but also future generations. In Poland, throughout Europe, in the United States, everywhere in the world.”
Bad joke — cue recorded applause, spontaneous laughter.
In a conversation lasting one hour and forty minutes according to the Chinese stopwatch– “a long meeting” on President Donald Trump’s clock — President Xi Jinping first knocked the stuffing out of Trump’s warmaking threats, then forced him to beat a retreat behind a 12-month ceasefire with the man the Pentagon has designated its principal enemy but whom Trump praised effusively as “a great leader, great leader of a very powerful, very strong country…a tremendous leader of a very powerful country and I give great respect to him.”
“Uh,” Trump told reporters on board his aircraft as it rocked in crosswinds flying eastward, “a lot of things we discussed in great detail. A lot of things we brought to finalization. A lot of finalization.” This was false.
Worse for the Trump warfighting strategy, the Chinese have retained escalation dominance by making Trump’s concessions their pre-condition for China’s temporary suspension of their sanctions on rare earths exports and imports of US computer chips. For this, Xi offered to buy US soybeans slowly for $34.2 billion over four years – roughly half in tonnage, half in price over twice the interval that China had agreed to in the past.
In General Sun Tzu’s ancient manual for warfighting, “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting”. The old man also confessed his limitation: “there is an intelligent way to eat a live frog – I just don’t know what it is.” Xi just demonstrated the way to do it. Trump went down smiling.
Xi has not yet telephoned President Vladimir Putin to brief him on what happened. After Putin’s meeting with Trump in Alaska on August 6, Putin telephoned Xi on August 8. “So far,” said Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov, ”there is no such conversation in the schedule, but it can be quickly agreed upon if necessary,”
The Russian state media have interpreted the outcome of the talks to be a “temporary ceasefire” achieved by not discussing the key economic and territorial war issues at all. “There have been no joint statements yet,” Tass noted, “and some of the most important issues of bilateral relations, such as Nvidia chips and advanced products, have remained unresolved.” Nothing was achieved, the official Moscow commentators think, in the US attempt to split Xi from Putin, and secure Chinese pressure on Russia to end the Ukraine war on US and NATO terms. “Ukraine came up, uh, very strongly,” Trump told reporters as he flew back to Washington. “We talked about it for a long time and we’re both gonna work together to see if we can get something done. Uh, we agreed the, the sides there, you know, locked in, fighting, and sometimes you have to let him fight, I guess. Crazy. But he’s gonna help us and we’re gonna work together on Ukraine.”
The Russian state media have yet to notice that Trump is abandoning his attempt, through the Rosneft and LUKOil oil trade sanctions of October 25, to stop China buying Russian oil. “There’s not a lot more we can do,” Trump replied to a reporter who asked if he and Xi had discussed his threat to sanction Chinese companies for buying Russian crude oil and petroleum products. “Uh, you know, he’s been buying oil from Russia for a long time. It takes care of a, a big part of China. And, you know, I, I can say India’s been very good, good on that, uh, front. Uh, but, uh, we, we didn’t really discuss the oil. We discussed working together to see if we could get that war finished. You know, it doesn’t affect China.”
The four-term (2013-2027) Governor of the Central Bank of Russia (CBR), Elvira Nabiullina, has assured the State Duma this week that the biggest enemy Russia faces is not the combined military and economic forces of the US and NATO, but over-heating in the domestic economy as it mobilizes to defend itself.
That, Nabiullina said, is not the impact of drone, missile, and bomb attacks on Russian targets inside the country, at sea, and along Russia’s international oil and gas pipelines; nor of the sanctions aimed at destroying Russian exports of energy, Russian tankers, and the fleet’s access to world markets through the Danish Straits, the Suez Canal, and the Bosphorus.
In Nabiullina’s report of her strategy for 2026-2028, drafted last month and released on October 27, the words “war” and “defence” are not mentioned. The only “geopolitical conditions” the CBR report acknowledges are “deglobalisation processes” and “new sanctions and second-round effects of enacted sanctions”. About them, Nabiullina and her advisors have concluded that the Trump Administration’s “tighter sanctions will lead to an increase in the discount for Russian exports as well as a moderate decline in oil production and exports. Oil prices will notably drop in 2026 and will not bounce back to the level of the baseline scenario even by the end of the forecast horizon.”
The forecast of the CBR, the report says, is that “if the world economy faces a financial crisis in 2026 and sanction pressure increases, the Russian economy’s potential and its growth rates will both decline. GDP will be contracting during two years. A significant decline in supply will be fuelling inflation. Fiscal policy is assumed to prop up the economy owing to a structural primary deficit. To offset a reduction in oil and gas revenues, the economy will be extensively using the resources of the National Wealth Fund, which involves the risk of depletion of its liquid part as of the end of 2026.” Nabiullina’s response, the report concludes, will be to fight the sanctions war by raising the Central Bank’s key rate from 16.5%, as it was fixed last week, to between 18% and 20%. “To prevent inflation from spiralling out of control, the Bank of Russia will be forced to pursue tighter monetary policy in 2026–2027. This will decelerate inflation to 4.0–4.5% in 2028.”
This is Nabiullina’s Trojan Horse for the Russian economy at war. The CBR projection is for two years of recession from now through 2026 and 2027; that is, close to zero growth this year to be followed by negative growth rates predicted from minus 2% to minus 3.5%.
Nabiullina admits that “considering its actual dynamics, we have lowered the GDP growth forecast for 2025 to 0.5–1.0%.” This, Russian economists point out, is within the standard margin for statistical error from zero.
Nabiullina doesn’t admit that the recession forecast in the Bank’s risk scenario for 2026-2027 is the consequence of the CBR’s key rate policy. But she does blame other government policies, including military spending, the budget deficit, and increased taxes. “Significant pro-inflationary risks have materialised since the previous meeting,” Nabiullina claims. “They are primarily associated with an increase in the budget deficit in 2025 and higher fuel prices. In September, a decline in underlying inflation measures paused. The expected increase in taxes will help bring inflation down over the medium-term horizon, but will also lead to a one-off rise in prices in the short term. We have factored this into our decision, first, by reducing the pace of monetary policy easing, and, second, by revising upward the projected key rate path required to bring inflation back to 4%.”
“As these [state spend and tax] factors fade, disinflation will continue. This will be supported by tight monetary conditions. The upward deviation of the Russian economy from a balanced growth path is narrowing.” This last sentence is the CBR euphemism for squeezing the economy with a high key rate at the same time as the government increases the tax burden. For zero to negative GDP, for growth to recession, Nabiullina’s euphemisms are “slowdown” and “cooldown”. “‘All decisions on the key rate,’ she told the State Duma this week, are based on the need to end the period of high price growth as quickly as possible while preventing the economy from overcooling. A hasty reduction in the key rate would undo all the progress achieved. ‘We would have to start all over again,’ Nabiullina said.”
Nabiullina’s promotion of “necessary recession” to cure inflation has triggered widespread but silent dismay – silent because it is understood she is protected by President Vladimir Putin.
Last month, in a session with government ministers Putin repeated Nabiullina’s line. “Last year we agreed,” the President said, “there was need to take the necessary measures to curb inflation and to strengthen macroeconomic stability. We agreed that this would inevitably cool the economy and, as we said back then, ensure its soft landing. The general opinion was also that we must walk this sharp edge and not to undermine the macroeconomic policy, not to overcool the economy, and not to freeze it.”
Putin then defended the outcome. “According to the Ministry of Economic Development, in July, gross domestic product added 0.4 percent in annual terms and in the seven months of this year GDP grew by 1.1 percent. The question is whether this is enough. Is that what we wanted? Are we succeeding in achieving the goal that we set for ourselves? Or, do we need to act differently at a faster pace, naturally, while ensuring macroeconomic, inflationary stability and taking into account the balanced policy of the Central Bank. The inflation trend is quite clear: in July, consumer prices grew by 8.8 percent and in August by 8.1 percent. The inflation drop trajectory is below the forecasts provided by the Government and the Bank of Russia. In other words, the efforts to lower inflation are effective. It is very important for moderate prices to have a positive impact on business and investment activity, allowing for more dynamic and sustainable growth.”
Vocal criticism has come from economists in the opposition seats in parliament. They say Nabiullina’s policy is stimulating financial speculation on the rouble, stocks, and commodity trade futures, boosting bank profits to record highs but crushing the real economy, and increasing poverty. According to Mikhail Delyagin, a well-known critic and deputy head of the Duma Committee on Economic Policy, the Central Bank is deliberately following the policy of Russia’s enemies, starting with the US-controlled International Monetary Fund (IMF).
“The IMF continues to act as the senior management structure for the Russian Central Bank,” Delyagin reported this month. “The Central Bank regularly — and very clumsily — tries to declare that this control is purely formal. However, these attempts are refuted by the regulatory documents of the Central Bank itself (https://t.me/EvPanina/15113 )…It turns out that a high-ranking official of the globalist structure, which oversees the Central Bank of Russia, is actively lobbying for the confiscation of Russian assets. Which has been the work of the Central Bank of Russia! The [CBR reserves] have ended up exactly where they can now be removed. An amazing coincidence…Everything is going to be fine for those who serve the West against Russia.”
For every one of President Donald Trump’s eight, nine or ten peacemaking moves, as he counts them, there has been a warmaking move. The first series are turning into propaganda fakes; the second series are turning into political and military failures.
Listen to the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid as we spell out this three-stage strategy from the coast of Venezuela to the shores of Lake Ontario, Canada, to the battlefield of the Ukraine and the battlements of the Kremlin Wall.
The first stage is the Trump threat which combines his “kill them dead” talk with attacks on key economic sectors; for enemy states these are called sanctions; tariffs for neutral and allied states. This combination is planned to trigger internal domestic surrender, led by Fifth Column politicians, business constituencies, and elements of government and the security services which have been cultivated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the State Department, and the Pentagon for years. The Fifth Column in each target state must be mobilized first – covertly as Israel’s Mossad was planning inside Iran before the June war; publicly as the CIA has been acting inside Venezuela. The weakest states, those penetrated for the longest time – for example, The Netherlands, Australia, Britain, Germany, Greece — fall to Trump at this stage because the Fifth Column is already in power there.
The second stage is negotiations. At the targets for regime change, these are aimed by the Washington regime to split public opinion, sharpen political contradictions, and intensify fear for the future where domestic voter and military resistance to Trump’s warmaking have proved stronger than the Washington calculation. Russia, Iran, Democratic Republic of North Korea, Venezuela, India and China are examples. In each case, Trump has conducted probes for vulnerability and weakness employing back-channel bribery schemes, specially designated presidential emissaries, diplomatic table talks with agenda papers and multi-point formulae. Military displays called exercises, freedom of navigation sail pasts and port calls, and arms sale talks run in parallel.
By the third stage, Trump and his associates in Washington and their collaborators from Tel Aviv to London, Brussels, Berlin and Ottawa, have been blocked; their first and second-stage moves neutralized by countermoves; their inducements spurned; their envoys sent packing; the capitulation term sheets torn up. The Trump forces now face the prospect that in one target state after another, the methods of effective resistance may spread and escalate to the point that Trump himself faces defeat on the stage he himself has set.
At this point, Trump must either launch a display of firepower he believes his target cannot match or defend – “obliteration” he called his bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June. Or else he must retreat, covering the rout with smokescreens he calls ceasefires, boards of peace, and bribery projects with names like the Gaza Riviera, Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), and the Trump Turnberry British Open.
So how do third-stage Trump wars end? They don’t. They resume at the first and second stages. Acknowledging this, how do the Russian General Staff and the Kremlin agree on how the war in the Ukraine will end?
A source in a position to know says: “The rate of east-to-west Ukrainian migration will accelerate and there will be disintegration of the frontline with a breakthrough on any one of the critical axes that will undermine the entire Ukrainian defence east of the Dnieper. Ouster of [Vladimir] Zelensky and [Andrei] Yermak will follow when the Ukrainian commanders cannot order their forces to continue fighting, holding their ground. There will be Russian satisfaction with the new regional lines and the depth of the demilitarized zone westward to Kiev. Of course, Banderite terrorism will continue, but so will the electric war strikes, as well as assassinations from the Russian side in reply. The rump Ukraine will be dysfunctional to the point where day-to-day survival will trump warfighting in terms of allocation of resources.”
That’s small “t” trump meaning defeat. “There’s no need for the Russians to declare that they are done fighting – the situation speaks for itself. The declaration that matters is that the winner is confident the opponent will never get up again.”
A second Moscow source in a position to know says: “There has been no real breakdown in talks with the US. In the back channel the Americans have said ‘we are not going to win your four regions for you.’ There is general understanding, however, that the four [regions] will be won, leaving four points to be agreed: all of the Ukraine will be a DMZ; no NATO bases, advisors, troops; a ceasefire to be monitored by neutral units along the contact line; a Russia-US treaty to be negotiated by Putin and the president to be elected in 2028. For the time being, Trump is mocking Putin over his slowness to complete the takeover of the four regions. There are no missile game-changers – no Tomahawk from the American side, no Oreshnik from the Russian side. Until next spring we will be accumulating the materiel and manpower to finish off, softening them up to the point where the final blows will be decisive.”
President Donald Trump was told last week by NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte that the Russian people are losing their confidence in President Vladimir Putin and in the war in the Ukraine because they are having to wait in line at their petrol stations; because their airport flights can be delayed for hours; and because their internet and mobile telephone connections go off suddenly.
What then will the American and NATO warfighters think of this — vodka and cognac production is falling in Russia this year: in the nine months to September, production is 17% down for cognac, 6% down for vodka. By contrast, the 9-month statistics from Rosalokoltabakkontrol (RATK), reported by Tass, reveal that the production of other alcoholic beverages has increased by 9.4%. This includes wine whose output is up 11.6% — sparkling wine up 9.6% — and the data aren’t counting production of beer, cider, poiré, and mead.
The reason, according to Moscow’s experts on the alcohol market, has nothing – repeat nothing — to do with the sanctions war which has blocked imports of US, French, Italian and other alcohol, or sharply raised their price when they come into the country as parallel imports through sanctions-busting hubs like Dubai. Also, the experts say that Russian drinkers aren’t going off their favourite vodka tipple because they are depressed at the slowness of the Russian Army’s battlefield advance, by the casualties, or by the impact of enemy operations like the Kursk invasion or drone attacks on the hinterland.
Russians haven’t stopped drinking because they think they are victims of what Rutte claimed in Washington last week was the “enormous amount of people dying and getting seriously wounded. The Russian economy is in difficult situation. We know we have these long lines into gasoline stations all over Russia at the moment. We know that the French president and others in Europe stepped up when it comes to the shadow fleet. And, of course, we have seen the pressure by the American president on some European countries to stop buying oil. So all of this is having an impact, with sustained pressure, we will be able to get Putin to the table to agree with a ceasefire and then other talks coming after that.”
The real reason is deliberate state policy to reduce consumption by raising the price of alcoholic drinks through lifting the excise tax. “People are beginning to choose cheaper or lower [proof] drinks,” Andrei Moskovsky told DwB; he is president of the Alcopro Guild, a producer association. “Production always works in conjunction with sales. No one needs to release something that won’t sell out. Most enterprises are now focused on the sale of products in the nationwide retail chains. Cognac sales have been falling since March because it has risen in price – the minimum retail price has increased by 17%. As a result, cognac costs at least 651 rubles per half litre; whisky and brandy, 472 rubles; vodka, 349 rubles.”
“By the end of this year, the rate of alcohol production will increase as a new excise tax rate has been announced. But this is only temporary. Starting from January 1, 2026, the excise tax on alcohol stronger than 18 degrees will increase by 11.4% to 824 rubles per litre. By the beginning of the new year, the factories will produce more alcohol than is required by current sales. This is done so that the product can be marketed with the old excise tax – at a price of 740 rubles per litre. Sales will increase through the New Year holiday due to the seasonal demand and also by people’s desire to buy cheaper drinks to stock up for the future. Then demand will fall and so will production.”
The outcome is that in September Russia recorded the lowest per capita alcohol consumption in 26 years, RATK reported. Comparing this year’s official data with earlier years, Vadim Drobiz, the director, just retired, of the Centre for Research on Federal and Regional Alcohol Markets (TsIFRRA), says that in the first year of the Special Military Operation and the escalation of European Union sanctions, there was over-production of all types of alcoholic beverages, especially strong drinks. “Each manufacturer hoped that the imports would ‘disappear,’ and it was necessary to have time to fill the market with their products. However, already by the fourth quarter of 2022, a decrease in production could be observed in some sectors – companies were lowering their production in line with market demand.” .
According to Drobiz, in the first year of the war the production of Russian rum, whisky and gin increased due to substitution of imports, but no significant increase in their consumption was recorded. At the time Drobiz expected that in 2023 alcohol production in Russia would stabilize and import volumes would recover. In 2022, he said, “alcohol consumption demonstrated trends which are usual for times of crisis — purchases of strong alcohol grew, sales of wine products, on the contrary, decreased.”
This year this trend has reversed.
The new evidence suggests that not only are Russians drinking less alcohol but there is a class difference in the rejection of vodka – bourgeois Russians are opting instead for wine, whisky, gin and rum; working-class Russians for wine and beer. The difference between them is money, and the impact of the Kremlin’s temperance tax. Drobiz says he has retired and doesn’t want to talk about the alcohol market any longer.
With these new words(lead image), President Donald Trump has now obliterated – his word for the US attack on Iran on June 22, 2025 – whatever President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have been calling the “understandings” they negotiated at the summit meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 16.
Capitulate or obliterate. That is, and always has been, Trump’s foreign policy for all states, but especially the states capable of defending themselves by effective force – Russia, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Venezuela, Houthi Yemen, Hamas Palestine, Hezbollah Lebanon, India, China. What Trump has just said of his regime-change offensive against Venezuela applies to all. What stops such a policy is no longer words, especially not the words, “red line”. Only counterforce – and that means, to use Trump’s term, “kill them dead”.
In recent US warmaking history there is precedent. That is the body bag count which, together with the domestic inflation and unemployment rates, ended the Vietnam War – first with the words of the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 (for which Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize), and then with the North Vietnam Army’s and Viet Cong’s force of the US rout from Saigon of 1975 (no prize for Kissinger).
For the time being, the Kremlin insists the “understandings” Putin agreed with Trump in Anchorage continue in effect. “I wish to officially confirm,” declared Foreign Minister Lavrov on Tuesday (October 21), “that Russia has not altered its positions from the understandings achieved during the extensive negotiations between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in Alaska. These understandings are grounded in the agreements reached at the time, which President Trump succinctly summarised when he stated that what is needed is a long-term, sustainable peace – not an immediate ceasefire that would lead nowhere. We remain fully committed to this formula.”
This “formula” is also promoted by the two strongest allies of the US in the Kremlin – Kirill Dmitriev, the president’s special emissary for wealth transfer to the US; and Elvira Nabiullina, Governor of the Central Bank. In a misleading tweet, and then in anonymously leaked remarks to CNN in Miami, as he prepared to meet Steven Witkoff on October 25, Dmitriev said: “[I have] arrived in the U.S. to continue the U.S.–Russia dialogue — visit planned a while ago based on an invitation from the U.S. side. Such dialogue is vital for the world and must continue with the full understanding of Russia’s position and respect for its national interests.” He told CNN he was engaged in “official talks just days after President Donald Trump announced tough new sanctions on Russia, sources with knowledge of the visit exclusively told CNN on Friday ’to continue discussions about the US-Russia relationship,’ according to the sources.”
“I think we are reasonably close to a diplomatic solution that can be worked out,” Dmitriev added in what Tass acknowledged was his interview with CNN.
Dmitriev’s promotion of his personal role in direct negotiations with US officials has been repeatedly blocked in Riyadh and then in Anchorage by Lavrov and others.
In her policy announcement on Friday (October 24), following a 50 basis-point cut in the Central Bank’s key rate to 16.5%, Nabiullina acknowledged that her policy is to cut GDP growth in Russia to zero plus statistical error. “Considering its actual dynamics, we have lowered the GDP growth forecast for 2025 to 0.5–1.0%.” What she meant by the “actual dynamics”, Nabiullina explained are the state policies for warfighting against the US and the NATO alliance on the battlefield which she opposes by calling them “pro-inflationary” and “geopolitical” risks: “Significant pro-inflationary risks have materialised since the previous meeting [September 12]. They are primarily associated with an increase in the budget deficit in 2025 and higher fuel prices…The expected increase in taxes will help bring inflation down over the medium-term horizon, but will also lead to a one-off rise in prices in the short term.”
According to Nabiullina, to reduce Russia’s inflation rate, there should be an end to the war on US terms. “Risks to oil prices have increased. The global oil market has shifted to a surplus. This might have a significant impact on prices. For Russia, the situation will be additionally complicated by the sanctions. There is persisting uncertainty related to geopolitics. Everything will depend on how the situation develops.”
The domestic Russian opposition to this policy line is vocal but stops short of accusing Nabiullina and Dmitriev of betraying Russian interests. “Western sanctions are nothing compared to the sanctions of the Central Bank,” State Duma Deputy Mikhail Delyagin, a former Yeltsin government economist and now Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Economic Policy, said in June. Delyagin’s is the discreet manner of putting the position.
The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has attempted to deny that the General Staff’s policy – the successful advance of the Russian military on the Ukraine battlefield — is the reason for the high domestic approval of the Army and the President. They are not “correlated”, Peskov said in the Tass headline.
“Russians’ high trust ratings for Russian President Vladimir Putin and the country’s armed forces are separate indicators that are measured separately, Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov has told the media. ‘These are separate indicators that are measured independently. They are indeed very high right now,’ Peskov said, responding to a question about the correlation between the high trust ratings for Putin (77.8% according to VTsIOM) and the Russian Armed Forces (80%).”
Listen to the new podcast on what is about to happen led by Dimitri Lascaris on Reason2Resist, held in Athens on Saturday morning.
The daily record of Russian drone and missile strikes across the Ukraine shows not only an escalation in the scale and firepower of the electric war but also a new strategy of targeting designed by the General Staff.
The lead image shows the launch and strike points on the battlefield map which have been identified in the Ukrainian reporting over the evening of October 21-22.
“In response to Ukraine’s terrorist attacks on civilian targets in Russia,” the Defense Ministry bulletin, issued in Moscow on the afternoon of October 22, has reported, “the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation launched a massive strike tonight [October 21-22] with high-precision long-range ground- and air-based weapons, including Kinzhal hypersonic aeroballistic missiles, as well as unmanned aerial vehicles at energy infrastructure facilities which support the operation of the military-industrial complex of Ukraine. The targets of the strike have been achieved; all designated targets have been hit.”
From Kiev the impact of the strikes on the loss of electricity and the duration of power outages has been confirmed officially. The blackout in the eastern regions of the country now extends from early morning to late evening. “Ukraine was forced to introduce electricity shutdown schedules in 12 regions, Minister of Energy Svetlana Hrynchuk said on Thursday…Energy workers are forced to apply hourly shutdown schedules in 12 regions of Ukraine, the minister said. According to her, the restrictions will be from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. ‘Depending on how quickly the repair and restoration work is completed, we will adjust the schedules and hope that the burden on Ukrainians will be less,’ Hrynchuk noted. ‘Today, the enemy again attacked energy facilities purposefully, primarily in such regions as Sumy region and Chernigov region; there was also certain damage in Dnipropetrovsk region and Kharkov region,’ the minister said.”
“The General Staff goal appears to be blackout east of the Dnieper and excess or lack of power generation in the west,” comments an expert source; he is an electrical engineer and veteran of NATO electric war campaigns. “If the Ukrainians can’t make up for the generation losses in the east via transfers from the west — which they won’t be able to do as the switch stations and transmission lines are being destroyed — then it’s black-out in Dnepropetrovsk, Chernigov, Poltava, Sumy, and Kharkov. West of the Dnieper River, this could create a situation where the Kiev government will be forced to shut down reactors. The reason is that generating too much electricity can be almost as bad as not generating enough in terms of the effect on frequency. ”
“Another possibility is that the Ukrainians are being forced into desperate measures such as emergency power transfers to the east. This can be detected in jury-rigging of high voltage tie-ins; not having the protection elements properly coordinated; reliance on damaged or dodgy switchgear. Combined, these factors are causing a cascading power losses in the east and west of the country, or at least parts of it.”
Parallel analyses reported by other sources confirm that “Russia is employing a new tactic aimed at completely disabling the energy system on the left bank of the Dnipro. This is creating an imbalance in power supply between western and eastern Ukraine: a critical electricity shortage is emerging in the east due to the destruction of thermal and hydroelectric plants, while a surplus of energy is present in the west, where nuclear power plants operate. This surplus cannot be effectively transferred eastward due to limited grid capacity.”
The Russian state news agency Tass has announced the Budapest summit meeting between President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump is off for the time being after receiving a call to its Washington bureau from a source it identified as “a US administration official”.
“The US administration has no plans to organize President Donald Trump’s meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the immediate future, a US administration official told TASS, adding that there are no plans for an in-person meeting between the countries’ top diplomat either. ‘[US] Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio and [Russian] Foreign Minister [Sergei] Lavrov had a productive call. Therefore, an additional in-person meeting between the Secretary and Foreign Minister is not necessary, and there are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future,’ he said.”
Tass had reported earlier in the day Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as cautioning: “We have the presidents’ understanding [that the summit will take place.] But you cannot postpone what hasn’t been announced.”
Trump is uncharacteristically silent about what had just happened – and not happened. During the day he made no mention of Russia and Putin in a Rose Garden press conference; he did not refer to the summit meeting in a tweet. This is the first time in Trump’s second term that he has cancelled one of his major peacemaking initiatives in silence.
At the end of the afternoon Trump was asked “Do you know what happened there? And does that affect your decision whether or not to send Tomahawks to –“. “No, no,” he replied. “I, I don’t want to have a wasted meeting. I don’t want to have a waste of time. So, I’ll see what happens. But we did all of these great deals, great peace deals. They were all peace deals, agreements, solid agreements, every one of them but this one. And I said go to the line, go to the line of battle, the battlefield lines and you pull back and you go home and everybody takes some time off, because you’ve got two countries that are killing each other. Two countries that are losing 5,000 to 7,000 soldiers a week. So, we’ll see what happens. We haven’t made a determination [on despatch of Tomahawks].”
Reuters reported “a senior White House official told Reuters ‘there are no plans for President Trump to meet with President Putin in the immediate future’, The US propaganda organ claimed the reason was that “Moscow’s rejection of an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine cast a cloud over attempts at negotiations.”
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte will brief Trump at the White House on Wednesday, October 22, Reuters added. “Two senior European diplomats said the postponement of the Rubio-Lavrov meeting was a sign the Americans would be reluctant to go ahead with a Trump-Putin summit unless Moscow yields its demands.”
The Financial Timesreported an unnamed White House official as telling the newspaper what had already been communicated to Tass an hour before.
A meeting of European leaders, with Vladimir Zelensky attending, will follow in London on Friday, October 24.
Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin negotiator for US business deals, has attempted to sound hopeful in a post on his Twitter account. “Media is twisting comment about the ‘immediate future’ to undercut the upcoming Summit. Preparations continue.”
Listen to the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid explaining the reasons for the failure of the Trump summit initiative, accompanied by threats of military and sanctions escalation. Also revealed are the surprises for Washington from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
