The U.S. has been waging economic, financial, trade and political war against Russia and even kinetic war-by-proxy in Ukraine. Worryingly, nobody in power in the U.S. or Europe really seems willing to tell us exactly why.
From the Russian point of view, everything from its plunging ruble to bitter sanctions to the falling price of oil are the fault of the U.S., either directly or indirectly. Whether that is fair is irrelevant; that’s the view of the Russians right now. So no surprise, it doesn’t dispose them toward goodwill negotiations with the West generally and the U.S. specifically.
Recently, the anti-Russian stance in the U.S. press has quieted down, presumably because the political leadership has moved its attention on to other things, and that means Russia is largely out of the U.S. news cycle. However, there’s plenty of serious action going on in Russia and Ukraine, as well as related activity in the U.S. that deserves our careful attention.
The U.S. (via John Kerry) and NATO have steadily accused Russia of having funneled hundreds of tanks, armored-personnel carriers and other heavy equipment to the separatists in eastern Ukraine.
These assertions bring to mind the Sherlock Holmes case of the dog that did not bark where the absence of a piece of evidence leads us to a very different conclusion than the one the U.S. political establishment would like us to believe.
The sorts of weaponry that NATO and the U.S. have charged Russia with providing are virtually impossible to conceal from the air. Snapping high-resolution photos of such war machinery is child’s play for today’s military satellites, and even civilian ones too. If the assertions were true, we should have seen a flood of photographs of Russian heavy equipment every step of the way as it passed into Ukraine.
But none have been offered, not even one so far. And the simplest explanation for this is that none exist. If they did, you can be 100% certain they’d have been released and replayed over and over again on CNN until everybody and their uncle could distinguish a T-72 tank outline from that of a T-64.
| It goes on from there. It's articles like these that make you think Vlad Putin has borrowed from the old Soviet bag of tricks and is sponsoring articles like these. Perhaps Badanov wants to take a shot at this, but I'll just point out that another reason why photos haven't been released is that a) US intel has them and we're not releasing them b) ditto for Euro intel agencies and c) it's a tad perilous to be a private journalist in eastern Ukraine right now. I'm just applying Occam's razor since the writer won't... |
| I'm not going to go into too much depth here about how much Russia is supplying the rebels in Donetsk and Lugansk. I will say that I believe that Volodya has his thumb on the scale, there is little question about it even from the rebels' supporters themselves. |
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