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Are You Ready for WWIII? The Russians are

Eugene Doyle

The Armavir Incident—the destruction on 23 May of a key part of Russia’s nuclear defence—means the Doomsday clock is ticking closer to midnight. Most people don’t even know that a long-distance Ukrainian/NATO drone attack on the Armavir radar station north of Georgia knocked out a Voronezh-DM radar which is designed to detect incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles from as far as 6,000 kilometres away. It is one of three similar attacks in recent weeks.

The strike, trumpeted by Newsweek as a great success, may have robbed the Russians of a couple of minutes of warning time, in the event of a strike coming up from the south.

“Map Shows Ukraine’s Record-Breaking Hits on Russian Nuclear Warning Sites” Newsweek reports. The article, triumphalist in tone, fails to address the central issue: how crazy do you have to be to compress Russia’s decision-making window before it must decide whether to launch nuclear weapons at you? And who thought this was a good idea at the very time that nuclear-capable F16s are about to arrive in Ukraine and the U.S., along with a clutch of client states, has announced their missiles will strike mainland Russia in the coming days or weeks? Never in history has a nuclear power been attacked in this way. Even at the height of the Cold War neither side was brainless enough to do what the Western countries are doing now: attack detection facilities and launch missile strikes on a nuclear power.

We actually need the Russians to have really good missile detection systems; it keeps us safe. The Americans have a superior system to the Russians: they have more geosynchronous satellites that hover over specific regions 24/7 and can pretty much instantly detect the heat signatures of missiles at launch. Ground systems, like the Voronezh-DM at Armavir have to wait for the missiles to gain altitude and enter the radar fan (think of the beep-beep-beep sweep of a submarine sonar). American nuclear scientists estimate that the time available to the Russian military and political decision makers may only be a third of that which the U.S. enjoys. In the time it takes you to drink a cappuccino they have to decide if they need to empty their missile silos then go through all their launch procedures before they are incinerated.

This may explain President Putin’s recent statement that all necessary decisions and authorisations have been made in respect to Russia’s preparedness. It suggests a delegated decision structure that no longer requires political sign off. There just won’t be time.

He’s just bluffing right? Certainly America’s greatest military minds like Generals Hodges and Petraeus believe so; yet they have been wrong on pretty much everything to do with Ukraine, Iraq and Afghanistan. Another U.S. general worth quoting is Mark Milley, recent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He speaks of the “nuclear paradox,” that the closer the Russians come to losing in Ukraine, the higher the nuclear peril. Which begs the question: what do the Americans think they are doing? Is there any sound, discernible strategy guiding all this violence, all this escalation? Or are they doing what they did in Vietnam, in Iraq and in Afghanistan—fighting on, knowing they can’t win, but unable to admit it before the next Presidential election?

Let’s be clear: even the conventional gear we are talking about is serious: German Taurus missiles, French Scalp missiles, British Storm Shadow missiles and an array of U.S. missiles are hugely powerful. They will do immense damage and kill a lot of Russians in Russia. You might think that’s a good idea but imagine if any of these countries were hit in return by similar missiles.

This morning I listened to Russian military analysts discussing what they saw as the need to hit British bases if Britain pushes ahead with plans to unleash Storm Shadows on Russian territory. President Putin has also warned that missile strikes on Russia would result in counter-strikes. Is this posturing, empty threats and blackmail, as Western spokespeople claim, or are we about to witness something that could imperil us all?

In war, what happens when an enemy shoots at you? You shoot back, right? What would happen if Russia fired missiles into the U.S.? They’d fire straight back, right? So why is the West about to fire missiles into a nuclear-armed state and think they won’t fire back?

The NATO decision to strike mainland Russia with missiles comes as Ukraine is losing on the battlefield and is at risk of a major frontline collapse. Western analysts acknowledge the country has almost run out of trained reserves, is funnelling conscripts to the front with minimal training, soldiers now have an average age of 43, they are suffering a 7:1 or perhaps even 10:1 shell deficit and are completely outmatched in airpower, missiles, tanks, drones and electronic warfare.

The U.S. response to the looming failure of its Ukraine strategy is to escalate. The plan was to crush Russia with sanctions, pour in hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons, take back all territory, turn Sevastopol into a NATO port and trigger regime change in Moscow—all these have clearly failed.

So what has changed since President Biden said he would not trigger WWIII by authorising nuclear-capable F16s? What we are witnessing is classic escalation but with a frisson of nuclear fission thrown in.

The New York Times, normally a compliant outlet for Pentagon opinion said: “Until now, Mr. Biden has flatly refused to let Ukraine use American-made weapons outside of Ukrainian borders, no matter what the provocation, saying that any attack on Russian territory risked violating his mandate to “avoid World War III.”

Biden, the NYT said, had “ clearly crossed a red line that he himself drew.” Joe is the first U.S. leader in history to authorise missile strikes against a nuclear power—supposedly within a limited geographic range north of Kharkiv; he is joined by the Germans, and the British and French who say “the Ukrainians” can strike anywhere on Russian territory.

Military experts dismiss the fiction that these missiles will be unleashed by Ukrainians. German Taurus missiles, French Scalp missiles, British Storm Shadow missiles and various U.S. missiles use super-sophisticated dynamic guidance and navigation systems to enable command and control centres in Western Europe or the U.S. to support things like terrain contour matching, evasion and target confirmation. These are all run by elite, highly trained personnel from each of those countries. Open war between NATO and Russia could erupt as a consequence.

How has the media responded to the risk that Western countries may trigger missile strikes against their own territories? Let’s look at the headlines:

“Last chance to impress for Olympic hopefuls”, “Three suburbs might get a metro”, “Exclusive: Rupert Murdoch’s new wife excited about Australian visit”, “What is the point of Super Rugby bonus points?”, “Starmer on ropes over £2000 tax rise”.

You get the point. Our media is keeping us in a deep, deep sleep. We need facts, analysis and an insistence on dialogue and diplomacy before it is too late. George Orwell knew all about this problem. Homage to Catalonia, written the year before the outbreak of WWII, finishes with this description of his train journey back to London:

Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

(Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. Courtesy: Pearls and Irritations, an Australian platform for the exchange of ideas from a progressive, liberal perspective, with an emphasis on peace and justice.)

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World War III Impending? Ukraine’s Frontline Nightmare

Kit Klarenberg

In recent weeks, there has been a flurry of mainstream reports on Ukraine’s absolutely catastrophic frontline situation. The starkest to date was a lengthy Washington Post investigation published June 2nd, Basic training in Ukraine is barely covering the basics, commanders say. Its details make for chilling reading. Not just because of the utterly dire battlefield situation for Kiev sketched, but because they may well herald formal NATO involvement in the proxy war.

Ukraine’s new mobilisation law opens up almost the entire local male population from 16 and above to conscription. It was so controversial, and contested by lawmakers, the legislation was subject to 4,500 separate amendments over its protracted gestation in parliament. The Washington Post kicks off by noting the move was a desperate bid to “address a critical shortage of soldiers amid intensified Russian attacks.”

This a nauseating euphemism for hundreds of thousands of military age Ukrainians being dead and buried, leaving Kiev perilously close to incapable of keeping the proxy war grinding on. Entire industries and businesses in every economic sector are also now unable to recruit staff. To make matters even worse, “commanders in the field say they are bracing for most of the new troops to arrive with poor training.” One UAF soldier said teaching in local training centers “is complete nonsense…Everything is learned on the spot.”

The outlet records how, “Ukrainian commanders have long griped about lackluster preparation for recruits at training centers.” So much greater is their grievance now, with “an influx of conscripts under the new law…still months away,” and those few conscripts from the current “batch” still arriving – having been violently dragged away from civilian life by military press gangs – having received “training” that’s “so deficient, they must often devote weeks to teaching them basic skills,” including “how to shoot.”

One battalion commander quoted in the article bitterly lamented how his unit had been sent conscripts who “didn’t even know how to disassemble and assemble a gun.” They were then forced to spend a week simply “making sure each [arrival] fired at least one box of bullets – some 1,500 shots – daily before moving on to more complex tasks.” Those soldiers could soon be fighting near Chasiv Yar, “where Russian forces have been making advances.” The commander concluded:

“We are just wasting a lot of time here on basic training. If, God forbid, there will be a breakthrough near Chasiv Yar, and we get new infantry that doesn’t know basic things, they will be sent there to just die.”

After two years of grinding, attritional warfare against Russian forces, Kiev’s own soldiers are “critically understaffed and losing ground,” facing a “dire situation.” There simply aren’t “enough troops to defend against relentless assaults,” creating a ludicrous situation in which soldiers have been reassigned from safe “rear roles” and “given just two weeks preparation before being sent into combat, to carry out tasks that at times require sneaking behind enemy lines.” In other words, potential, likely or inevitable suicide missions.

In this context, the Washington Post referring to Ukrainian authorities being “slow to ramp up mobilization efforts” due to the “issue” being “politically fraught” is extremely incongruous. The country has since February 2022 been under martial law. State control over the media and censorship has ever-ratcheted, with critical citizen voices and journalists, most recently anti-war socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk silenced and jailed, and opposition parties banned. Elections have been postponed indefinitely. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is effectively President for life, or until he elects to stand down.

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Might the government fear full mobilisation could precipitate a revolution, or internal coup? Whatever the truth of the matter, Zelensky’s public rejection of now former UAF chief Valery Zaluzhny’s demand for 500,000 new soldiers due to a purported lack of evidence such a figure was necessary, and the fact “Ukraine would struggle financially to pay so many new soldiers’ salaries” is hardly convincing. An alternative explanation could simply be there aren’t half a million war-fit Ukrainian men left in the country.

Kiev’s rapidly mounting casualties are so catastrophically vast, even the Western media has been forced to acknowledge the kill count. Mainstream articles in recent weeks have sketched bleak accounts of entire towns and villages with no male population left, due to all local men either dying on the frontline, or fleeing conscription. Another unnamed UAF source was quoted by the Washington Post as bitterly complaining about the ‘quality’ of the remaining conscript pool:

“If they send us to recruit someone, all the good ones have already been taken by other brigades, and you have to choose from the crooked, lame, sick ones. And so you choose from them, dammit.”

Manpower issues aside, a chronic lack of ammunition, and concerns about its use, means recruits get little experience firing live rounds before being dispatched to the meat grinder. An unnamed UAF officer claimed trainees receive just 20 bullets per person, “there are no grenades for throwing in training centers, and there are no grenade launcher rounds in the training center.”

“This is the problem. We don’t have a proper training system in place,” they added, before going on to declare Ukraine “needs its instructors to be taught by NATO trainers to condense the standard two-month basic training into one month…at [overseas] facilities that can’t be targeted by Russian bombardment.”

The Washington Post went on to note that foreign-based military training for Kiev was already ongoing. “Britain so far has provided the most basic training for Ukrainians,” the outlet reported, while “France is considering sending instructors to Ukraine to help prepare draftees.” It is reportedly hoped improved training will ease fears of conscription among the general population, preventing the male population’s preemptive exodus – and presumably, emergence of further damaging video footage of young men being violently attacked and bundled into vans by “recruiters”.

Herein lies the article’s key propaganda message, in the eternal spirit of “problem-reaction-solution”. In this narrative, Ukraine isn’t in fact losing because of an absolutely apocalyptic “manpower shortage”, but because its remaining soldiers aren’t receiving sufficient Western military training. Were this to be greatly increased, and NATO dragged further – and openly – into the proxy war, the hitherto irreversible tide could be turned. Possibly. So let’s just see.

It is surely no coincidence that in recent months, there has been much muttering about the possibility of formal Western military deployments to Ukraine. An initial suggestion in March by French President Emmanuel Macron of sending 30,000 soldiers to Odessa was robustly knocked back by Russian State Duma Deputy Speaker Pyotr Tolstoy, who promised Moscow’s forces would simply “kill all French soldiers who will come to the territory of Ukraine.” Such an action would represent a clear breach of the Kremlin’s redlines.

As such, it appears the strategy is to slowly but surely introduce a formal Western presence to Ukraine, in the form of “advisers” and trainers. Baltic political chiefs have openly urged in-country training from NATO members, claiming this would not represent an escalation. Then, on May 31st, NATO secretary Jens Stoltenberg pledged that the alliance would moving forward “play a greater coordinating role in the provision of equipment and training,” and support Kiev financially and militarily “each year, for as long as necessary.”

Just two days later, the Washington Post published its advertisement for training of Ukrainian soldiers. It must never be forgotten that in the heavily controlled mainstream media landscape, coincidences are a very rare thing indeed.

(Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist. Courtesy: Al Mayadeen, an Arab Independent Media Satellite Channel based in the Lebanese capital Beirut.)