(2,000 words or about 10 minutes of your company.)
Tbilisi, Jun 24, 2024
A series of attacks in and around Russia suggest an effort to inflame the region is underway, connected to the war in Ukraine.
The U.S. missile that killed beach goers near the port of Sebastopol may have been struck by flak, but attacks in Abkhazia and Dagestan were no coincidence.
Events suggests that outsiders are trying to stir up Russia's Caucasus region as they did in the 1990s when they set Chechnya ablaze.
We are seeing an attempt at a Color Revolution ™ in Georgia in the South Caucasus, a little over two years since attempts to spark uprisings in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Before the 2014 coup and war in Ukraine, the biggest effort to cause unrest on Russia’s borders was Chechnya in the 1990s and early 2000s (more below).
Russia’s “backyard” is ethnically diverse; fertile ground for trouble makers.
There are Abkhaz, Adyghe, Adjari, Armenian, Avar, Azeri, Balkar, Chechen, Dargin, Georgian, Ingush, Kabardin, Karachay, Kumyk, Lak, Lezghin, Mingrelian and Svaneti, Nogai, Ossetian — and that's just the Caucasus.
NATO and the U.S. may seek victory at any cost, while European politicians fear they will lose wealth and status if their proxy forces are defeated in Ukraine.
The escalation of war is not a maybe — it is happening, according to Serbia's president Aleksandar Vučić.
He is appealing to leaders to think of the consequences, adding his voice to that of Slovakia's Robert Fico, who also speaks out against war, and was nearly killed by an assassin last month.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) last week said that plans to launch an offensive in Lebanon had been approved. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said troops would be shifted frm Gaza to the north of Israel, close to Lebanon.
Washington has assured Tel Aviv that it will have its full support if a full-scale war breaks out with Hezbollah, according to CNN.
On a broader canvas, while Israel and Hezbollah gear up for war we could see an effort, by drawing in Syria, to engage the Russians, thereby distracting them from Ukraine, the aim being to make a global war go pop.
And then there is China. Glenn Greenwald highlighted the memoirs of president Richard Nixon who established relations with China in the 1970s:
“If China did not have any guarantee of their security from the U.S. vis-à-vis the Soviets, [and] had been forced back under the Soviet umbrella, the geopolitical relationship and balance in the world would be almost hopelessly against us.”
War by deception
Aligning Russia and China “against us” is exactly what Western leaders have done. And yet their desire to destroy Russia remains unabated. Makes you wonder about the ultimate objective.
Someone is making war by way of deception — and we, are being dragged under false pretences into the fray.
Conflicts pop up like wildfires, mostly in areas of prime real estate or resources on which globalists have set their eye.
The West’s beef with Russia has nothing to do with Putin.
The British naval power was fearful of Russian competition for India, so in 1853 it tried to seize Russia’s warm water port of Sebastopol — the same one attacked yesterday with U.S. missiles.
In that year the man said to have been president Vladimir Putin’s paternal great-grandfather Ivan Petrovich was eight years old. [2]
Walk on the wild side
Few countries have been invaded as often as Russia. You could say that without Russia as a buffer, Europe would not exist in its current form. Perhaps the NATO-aligned European leaders calling to “decolonise” Russia should take a walk on its wild side.
As my former colleague at Sky News, Tim Marshall, has written, had the Ural mountains been further east, Russia and its prime agricultural land might have been left in peace.
We’ll take a look at the latest attacks and the objective of “decolonising” or “decentralising” Russia.
Attackers killed 15 policemen and several civilians in the Dagestan capital Makhachkala, as well as Derbent on the Caspian coast. Police returned fire killing five or six gunmen and regional authorities are searching for accomplices.
Including a 66-year-old priest killed inside his church in Derbent, the death toll reached about 20, excluding the attackers.
The commentator Aussie Cossack noted that “the murder Russian Orthodox priest Father Nikolay Kotelnikov in a church on the great holiday of Trinity shows that the most important goal of the terrorist attack in Dagestan is to incite conflict between Orthodox Christians and Muslims in Russia."
Attackers also damaged the Derbent synagogue, known as Kele-Numaz, in Kele village, home to "mountain Jews." They shot at the synagogue, starting a fire. Derbent is the southernmost city in Russia, and the second city of Dagestan, on the Caspian Sea and backed by the Caucasus Mountains.
Somebody wants their “Clash of Civilizations.”
In another attack, Ukraine fired five U.S. missiles containing cluster bombs at Sebastopol, one of which exploded over a beach, about three kilometres north of the naval base, injuring more than 150 people, killing five, while others remain critical.
In Abkhazia, which broke away from Georgia to join Russia, shooters attacked a border checkpoint that resulted in one death and three people injured.
Satellites of love
The attempt to destabilise Georgia is covered in depth on Moneycircus.
Last week the prime minister Irakli Kobakhidze said he would not allow the country to be weakened. “The Ukrainian scenario will not take hold in Georgia, that the Ukrainization of Georgia will not happen under any circumstances” he told ambassadors in Berlin. [3]
There is currently an attempt to "decentralise" Georgia which its NATO proponents do not describe but is the same word used by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. national security adviser in an article for Foreign Affairs (1997):
“A loosely confederated Russia — composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic — would also find it easier to cultivate closer economic relations with Europe, with the new states of Central Asia, and with the Orient…”
The president of Poland and the Estonian prime minister have both called this month for Russia to be broken up into as many as 20 states.
The WEF-aligned Nikol Pashinyan, prime minister of Armenia, has done this by yielding territories to Azerbaijan, which is aligned with Turkey and Israel.
US neoconservative Samantha Power was in Yerevan at the time that Armenians fled Ngorno Karabakh, or Artsakh, while the world stood by - including, it must be said, Russian peacekeepers.
Russia said it could not protect Armenia's integrity if the country's leadership was complicit.
Recall in 2021 the apparent attempts to foment a Color Revolution in Belarus, while 2022 kicked off, before Russia entered Ukraine, with an attack in the Kazakhstan capital.
The United States’ greatest weapon is not its military but the dollar, which allows agencies like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy to funnel millions into unrest in multiple countries, simultaneously — or to fund “civil society” if you prefer that euphemism.
West’s finger
When you hear Al-Qaeda, ISIS, ISIS-K or Daesh, these are the sectarian mercenaries who do the dollar’s bidding in Syria, Iraq and whichever country is in the crosshairs at the time. A classic example was ISIS exporting oil from Syria. [4]
After the Crocus City theatre attack in Moscow in March where ISIS-K killed 145 people, Turkish intelligence say they discovered another plan for an attack on a shopping mall, and alerted Russian authorities.
From the 1990s the Chechen wars pit efforts to modernise the region against separatists who were allied to the usual suspects: the Al-Qaeda team that the U.S. had assembled beginning in the 1970s to fight Russia in Afghanistan.
It made headlines when four British telecoms engineers who were installing communications lines in the Chechen capital Grozny were beheaded in 1999. Three years earlier six Red Cross workers had been murdered. [5]
There was also unrest in Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia. See this detailed map uploaded by the Georgian embassy to the U.S..
Russian forces are present in the former Georgian lands of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali/ South Ossetia — and are regarded by Tbilisi as occupiers.
In 2008 Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili began a short war in the Ossetian region, likely with a green light from the U.S.. The European Union investigated the causes of the war, found fault on both sides, but concluded that Georgian artillery bombardment began it. [6]
Mercantilist roots
The key events of the past month were the Ukraine war conference in Switzerland, which refused to invite Russia or discuss its proposals, and Putin’s visits to North Korea and Vietnam.
The Kremlin published its ideas regardless: a Eurasian security architecture bringing together the continent and NATO countries from the Atlantic to the Pacific. A quarter of Russia lies within Europe, and 85 per cent of its people.
However a Eurasian security architecture is exactly what the British and the geographer Harold Mackinder opposed, because a unified Eurasia would allow the French and the Germans to team up with the Russians.
As a financial journalist in Russia in the 2000s I witnessed German and French companies building corporate alliances in Moscow: carmakers, oil companies, developers, hoteliers, components manufacturers.
This was brought to a bloody halt in 2014 with the Maidan Coup in Kyiv and the assassination of Christophe de Margerie, the CEO of French oil company who had just met Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev to discuss trading oil in gold. Upon leaving the meeting his jet crashed on the Vnukovo runway. A former KGB operative told Moneycircus that de Margerie was certainly assassinated — and not by Russians.
Halford Mackinder created what he called his Heartland theory in 1904:
“Who controls Eastern Europe rules the Heartland; Who controls the Heartland rules the World Island; and Who rules the World Island rules the World.”
You can hear it today from think tank academics like Timothy Snyder at Yale. His bestseller Bloodlands (2010) describes the killing fields of Eastern Europe, which were wrested from Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian, German and Soviet hands — with the eager help of the British. Read a true account of the 1938 Munich Conference.
Brzezinski repeats the same argument in The Grand Chessboard (1997). It’s the same words coming out of the mouth of Polish president Andrzej Duda and NATO repeaters this month.
What did Putin do in North Korea and Vietnam: he signed military and trade pacts, stressing the accent on development not simply military hegemony.
The West’s route is war. It is just an aggressive means of reaching those same resources, rather than by negotiation. U.S. senator Lindsey Graham spelled it out on June 10 to CBS: “They're sitting on $10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals in Ukraine.”
It is the same 170 year-old policy from the Crimean war. Britain may no longer defend the seaways to India, but it is a similar attempt to dominate trade. As the West de-industrialises, it is reverting to its mercantilist roots.
As for Vucic's "concern" and "warning":
The escalation is a serious thing, but let's not forget Vucic is Tony Blair's puppet. When he says something, he always has a hidden intention.
Don't be fooled by the smokescreen
I am so sickened by the actions of NATO, the USA and its allies.