Haven't read much yet to support the ISIS claim. According to RT -
23 March 2024
15:16 GMT
All of the four suspects detained in Bryansk Region near the border are foreign nationals, the Russian Interior Ministry has said. The ministry refuted rumors circulating online that the terrorists had received Russian citizenship, and warned the public against relying on unreliable sources of information. - https://www.rt.com/russia/594701-moscow-mall-mass-shooting/
What is known is that there was a terror attack and that ISIS claimed credit.
But the speculation that Ukraine has a hand in it has even less support. Besides, Ukraine typically attacks infrastructure, not soft targets. So at the moment ISIS is the most likely culprit
Yes, the new Tsar, poor choice of words my reference to the Soviet Union. It’s what I grew up with and always considered an enemy of the USA and democracy. A company I ran for many years supported the Global Hawk and U2 surveillance platforms. Our air superiority is unmatched. I think we should have used it already.
Russia was never to be trusted. Not that I would want a hot war with Russia but Trump did send a message in Syria with the 50 Cruise Missiles. Maybe we should have done something similar in Ukraine. My ancestors are Ukrainian. Just when the world was beginning to exit from the pandemic, Putin attacked and plunged the world into chaos. Sooner or later we will be in a hot war. He’s always wanted to reconstitute the Soviet Union. He will not stop with Ukraine. Appeasement doesn’t work with despots.
The Soviet Union, just like CCP China, is really just a continuation of the old Russian Empire. Putin is far more a latter-day Tsarist than he is a Communist, right down to enjoying state influence over the Russian Orthodox Church.
And it really isn't a question of wanting to rebuild the Soviet Union or even the Russian Empire. It's all about Russia's centuries-old security doctrine of expanding to defensible borders. That means Ukraine. That means Poland up to the Vistula. That means eventually annexing Belarus. Potentially that means taking back Finland.
Medvedev last year went on record saying Poland's borders needed to be redrawn. Because in Russia's view of the world it needs Poland up to the Vistula to be safe.
Now, there is zero chance of Poland going along with losing half its territory, especially to Russia, which has partitioned Poland on at least four separate occasions over the past 300 years. There is zero chance of the Baltic States just bending the knee to Russia. There is zero chance of Finland rolling over and playing dead. Even Belarus might have second thoughts about bending the knee to Putin at this point.
This was the great miscalculation Putin made when he invaded Ukraine. With that one blunder he took Eastern European geopolitics straight back to 1914, and NOBODY wants to relive WW1.
So Putin gave NATO a renewed reason for being, and with Russian air power being held at bay by Ukrainian drones, a war between Russia and NATO is not going to go well. Based on what we have seen in Ukraine, NATO is almost certainly going to be able to assert air superiority should a shooting war break out. If NATO gets air superiority it has enough different types of assets to deploy that Russian ground forces would be blown to smithereens long before NATO troops even got within artillery range.
At present there is no reason to assess the Russian air force as the equal or nearly the equal of the United States or the UK or the rest of NATO. If Russian air power is not the equal of the US, then Russia's only hope to holding off catastrophe in a war with NATO is the fear/threat of nuclear missiles.
Short of ceding Ukraine to Russia, there was not much the US could have done.
Russia used the Don Cossacks desire for independence from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to annex Ukraine in the late 17th century. There have been at least three genocides among the Ukrainians by Russia since then, the most recent being the Holodomor under Stalin.
Russia's defensive doctrine basically demands that it control Ukraine--even though Ukraine wants Russia to go straight to Hell.
This war was always going to happen, so long as Russia retained its classic security posture.
What makes this war a catastrophe is that Putin had already positioned Russia to be able to leverage its natural resources to neutralizing any potential military threat from NATO. With NATO no longer a security threat to Russia, Ukraine would have become a moot point. Instead, Putin abandoned the economic leverage. Now he has to not only "win" in Ukraine but he has to conquer Ukraine. Anything less leaves Russia in a worse security posture than before the war.
Ukraine was a stupid war for Russia, by every metric you care to name.
After all the manufactured crisis and hoaxes we have lived through the last few years I don’t believe a darn thing anymore.
The globalists have an agenda to change the west and each manufactured crisis gets them steps closer to their goal. They don’t care about human lives.
I said this last year …. Are they going to fake a WW3 event at Megiddo? Armageddon in Israel? Gog and Magog will be coming down to Israel?
Then the Christians will lay down their arms waiting for Jesus? Then China can walk in any where they want? Lol. They had a continual WW3/nuclear narrative the last few years and if they can fake or create the stage for one they can bring in the great reset faster.
Lol. Sounds nuts but after I heard they are blaming ISIS I thought … wtf? Michael Chossudovsky wrote a long time ago that Israel was behind the original ISIS formation to continue luring the Americans to police the Middle East for them. Now when more diversion is needed.. voila…. Here comes ISIS again.
Anyways…. Maybe it’s just an out from the manufacturered Ukraine war.
And lastly…. Before the Israel attack they were warning that Iran was weeks away from nuclear capability. Well it’s many months later…Israel just gave up on Iran? Something is going on. I’m not sure what.
I am also very skeptical of what is going on in the whole big picture of this. You can’t trust any of the narratives of the MSM. Even among alternative commentators, some are paranoid war hawks, some are naive, some are delusional. Who knows when the CIA is behind this or Iran is supporting that. Peter is one of the few reliably factual, sane, knowledgeable and grounded analysts I’ve encountered anywhere regarding geopolitical events. I am grateful, Peter!
Me and Peter - the lawyer who writes coffee and covid has noted for months how attacks on infrastructure in US and Russia follow a general tit for tat, in scale and timing, almost as if on a ledger. He believes we are both waging this kind of war by proxy - heard this, and thoughts?
This attack follows the attack just in Ukraine by Rus of their infrastructure, any chance this is one of those?
What is being reported is that ISIS is claiming credit and Ukraine is denying it had anything to do with it.
I don't see ISIS lying about a terror attack, although Ukraine could easily be lying.
Is this some 4-D chess retaliation strike? Possibly, but I doubt it. The assets would have had to be in place ahead of time to make it happen that soon after the Russian attack on Ukraine. If Ukraine had that much advance intel they very likely would have used some drones to disrupt the missile batteries and launch aircraft (which they have done successfully before).
There's no doubt that Russia and NATO are waging war by proxy. I've said many times that NATO's strategy in Ukraine is to attrit Russian forces as much as possible, and that Ukrainian casualties are not a concern. It's an appallingly cynical strategy that explicitly sets up Ukrainians to get killed in the hundreds of thousands.
The latest rhetoric coming out of the Kremlin indicates that Russia may be moving to a hot war with NATO, and reports of potential NATO troop deployments to Ukraine tells us that Putin is not the only one rattling a saber. That's about as far as the factual details will take us.
Is hard not to see this as a huge escalating moment and I've heard from those much brighter than me esp on these topics the big wars often grow unpredictably due to these kinds of events. I for one was beginning to believe or at least hope we would make it through the Ukraine smo without it sparking much bigger but...maybe too soon or hopeful.
This attack is not an escalation unless it somehow lands at Ukraine's feet--which is unlikely now that ISIS has claimed credit.
ISIS is a group that fights just about everybody: Iran, the Taliban, Turkey, Russia, the United States, any Shi'a Muslims in Iraq....Hell, I think they even don't like the Kurds.
The danger here is not escalation but destabilization. One of the reasons Russia's loss of hegemony over the Caucasus is so problematic is because Azerbaijan is a majority Moslem country, and it has been cozying up to Turkey, complicating Russia's control of its border regions in the Caucasus and Central Asia. If ISIS is able to launch this sort of devastating terror attack, the Chechens might decide now is a good time to get in the game.
One aspect of the Ukraine war that all the narratives get wrong is the extent to which Ukrainians REALLY do not like Russians. Or the extent to which Chechens REALLY do not like Russians. One reason this war has dragged on as long as it has is that Ukraine prefers a brutal and destructive war over being conquered by Russia. If the Chechens sense that the FSB and GRU are overstretched trying to provide battlefield intel AND dealing with anti-war dissent AND monitoring Russia's many ethnic minorities who generally dislike Moscow, you can bet the Chechens are going to be doing some terror attacks of their own.
And Ukraine is just clever enough to figure out how to exploit these situations for creating some chaos of their own on the Russian home front.
At some point Russia is going to have to make some hard choices about where it concentrates its resources. At this point it's not even an economic question. There's only so much the FSB and GRU can do on all the fronts on which they have to operate.
Two front wars are bad enough. ISIS could be turning this war into a three- or four-front war, effectively. That's not a good situation for Moscow.
Peter - assume you have you seen these reports? Do you read similar, is this believable? I read elsewhere the terrorists said they were paid to do this.
All 11 suspects are apparently Tajik Muslims. They claim they were paid to kill as many as possible. The big question is: who sent them. They were highly trained, with many weapons, explosives, evacuation from the scene and an orderly organization. Russian intelligence claims they were in contact with officials in Ukraine.
Russian Foreign Ministry:
In the last decade, Ukraine has become a center for the spread of terrorism in Western hands.
The terrorists tried to flee to Ukraine after carrying out the attack in Moscow.
Since the perpetrators fled the scene before getting caught- the Russians believe that this isn’t a classic ISIS attack where suicide or death at the end is a must.
From here to point the finger at Ukraine - the way is very short!
Western corporate media will never point the finger at Ukraine.
Much of the alt media is already convinced that it was really the CIA and the Mossad, because Israel.
In the meantime, over 100 Russians are dead, Putin has some security egg on his face, and no matter who was behind the attack Putin's attention is diverted away from the front line in Ukraine.
If Ukraine was behind the attack it's a win for Ukraine. If Ukraine was not behind the attack it is still a win for Ukraine.
People have had the same agenda for the past 5,000 years: power.
Politicians in every country want it, and, like any addictive drug, they can never get enough of it.
Russia, Israel, Europe, Iran, China, the United States....they all want power. Hamas craves power.
That's why I frequently refer to Great Power Competition. That's an historical framework that puts a rational basis for all of these various doings around the world, and it is the logically parsimonious explanation for just about everything we see going on.
How much in play with ISIS and others are the mountains of munitions abandoned in the hasty US retreat from Afghanistan? Was that an underlying goal of our government to better arm extremists to further destabilize the region versus Russia?
Haven't read much yet to support the ISIS claim. According to RT -
23 March 2024
15:16 GMT
All of the four suspects detained in Bryansk Region near the border are foreign nationals, the Russian Interior Ministry has said. The ministry refuted rumors circulating online that the terrorists had received Russian citizenship, and warned the public against relying on unreliable sources of information. - https://www.rt.com/russia/594701-moscow-mall-mass-shooting/
What is known is that there was a terror attack and that ISIS claimed credit.
But the speculation that Ukraine has a hand in it has even less support. Besides, Ukraine typically attacks infrastructure, not soft targets. So at the moment ISIS is the most likely culprit
Yes, the new Tsar, poor choice of words my reference to the Soviet Union. It’s what I grew up with and always considered an enemy of the USA and democracy. A company I ran for many years supported the Global Hawk and U2 surveillance platforms. Our air superiority is unmatched. I think we should have used it already.
In an earlier era, that probably would have happened. If the US Army had listened to General Patton at the end of WW2, it would have happened.
But that calculus all changed when the Soviet Union became the second nuclear power.
Any conflict between Russia and NATO almost certainly ends in at least some level of nuclear exchange. At which point nobody wins and everybody loses.
Russia was never to be trusted. Not that I would want a hot war with Russia but Trump did send a message in Syria with the 50 Cruise Missiles. Maybe we should have done something similar in Ukraine. My ancestors are Ukrainian. Just when the world was beginning to exit from the pandemic, Putin attacked and plunged the world into chaos. Sooner or later we will be in a hot war. He’s always wanted to reconstitute the Soviet Union. He will not stop with Ukraine. Appeasement doesn’t work with despots.
The Soviet Union, just like CCP China, is really just a continuation of the old Russian Empire. Putin is far more a latter-day Tsarist than he is a Communist, right down to enjoying state influence over the Russian Orthodox Church.
And it really isn't a question of wanting to rebuild the Soviet Union or even the Russian Empire. It's all about Russia's centuries-old security doctrine of expanding to defensible borders. That means Ukraine. That means Poland up to the Vistula. That means eventually annexing Belarus. Potentially that means taking back Finland.
Medvedev last year went on record saying Poland's borders needed to be redrawn. Because in Russia's view of the world it needs Poland up to the Vistula to be safe.
Now, there is zero chance of Poland going along with losing half its territory, especially to Russia, which has partitioned Poland on at least four separate occasions over the past 300 years. There is zero chance of the Baltic States just bending the knee to Russia. There is zero chance of Finland rolling over and playing dead. Even Belarus might have second thoughts about bending the knee to Putin at this point.
This was the great miscalculation Putin made when he invaded Ukraine. With that one blunder he took Eastern European geopolitics straight back to 1914, and NOBODY wants to relive WW1.
So Putin gave NATO a renewed reason for being, and with Russian air power being held at bay by Ukrainian drones, a war between Russia and NATO is not going to go well. Based on what we have seen in Ukraine, NATO is almost certainly going to be able to assert air superiority should a shooting war break out. If NATO gets air superiority it has enough different types of assets to deploy that Russian ground forces would be blown to smithereens long before NATO troops even got within artillery range.
At present there is no reason to assess the Russian air force as the equal or nearly the equal of the United States or the UK or the rest of NATO. If Russian air power is not the equal of the US, then Russia's only hope to holding off catastrophe in a war with NATO is the fear/threat of nuclear missiles.
I agree. So much for our support of the Bucharest memorandum.
Actually, when you look at the particulars of the Budapest Memorandum, the US has actually honored the terms fairly well. Russia....not so much.
https://policymemos.hks.harvard.edu/files/policymemos/files/2-23-22_ukraine-the_budapest_memo.pdf?m=1645824948
The US should have done everything possible to have defused the Ukrainian catastrophe. The Russians and the US had common enemies.
Short of ceding Ukraine to Russia, there was not much the US could have done.
Russia used the Don Cossacks desire for independence from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to annex Ukraine in the late 17th century. There have been at least three genocides among the Ukrainians by Russia since then, the most recent being the Holodomor under Stalin.
Russia's defensive doctrine basically demands that it control Ukraine--even though Ukraine wants Russia to go straight to Hell.
This war was always going to happen, so long as Russia retained its classic security posture.
What makes this war a catastrophe is that Putin had already positioned Russia to be able to leverage its natural resources to neutralizing any potential military threat from NATO. With NATO no longer a security threat to Russia, Ukraine would have become a moot point. Instead, Putin abandoned the economic leverage. Now he has to not only "win" in Ukraine but he has to conquer Ukraine. Anything less leaves Russia in a worse security posture than before the war.
Ukraine was a stupid war for Russia, by every metric you care to name.
But shshsh. You’re not allowed to talk about a particular group of people.
Great article.
After all the manufactured crisis and hoaxes we have lived through the last few years I don’t believe a darn thing anymore.
The globalists have an agenda to change the west and each manufactured crisis gets them steps closer to their goal. They don’t care about human lives.
I said this last year …. Are they going to fake a WW3 event at Megiddo? Armageddon in Israel? Gog and Magog will be coming down to Israel?
Then the Christians will lay down their arms waiting for Jesus? Then China can walk in any where they want? Lol. They had a continual WW3/nuclear narrative the last few years and if they can fake or create the stage for one they can bring in the great reset faster.
Lol. Sounds nuts but after I heard they are blaming ISIS I thought … wtf? Michael Chossudovsky wrote a long time ago that Israel was behind the original ISIS formation to continue luring the Americans to police the Middle East for them. Now when more diversion is needed.. voila…. Here comes ISIS again.
Anyways…. Maybe it’s just an out from the manufacturered Ukraine war.
And lastly…. Before the Israel attack they were warning that Iran was weeks away from nuclear capability. Well it’s many months later…Israel just gave up on Iran? Something is going on. I’m not sure what.
I am also very skeptical of what is going on in the whole big picture of this. You can’t trust any of the narratives of the MSM. Even among alternative commentators, some are paranoid war hawks, some are naive, some are delusional. Who knows when the CIA is behind this or Iran is supporting that. Peter is one of the few reliably factual, sane, knowledgeable and grounded analysts I’ve encountered anywhere regarding geopolitical events. I am grateful, Peter!
Me and Peter - the lawyer who writes coffee and covid has noted for months how attacks on infrastructure in US and Russia follow a general tit for tat, in scale and timing, almost as if on a ledger. He believes we are both waging this kind of war by proxy - heard this, and thoughts?
This attack follows the attack just in Ukraine by Rus of their infrastructure, any chance this is one of those?
What is being reported is that ISIS is claiming credit and Ukraine is denying it had anything to do with it.
I don't see ISIS lying about a terror attack, although Ukraine could easily be lying.
Is this some 4-D chess retaliation strike? Possibly, but I doubt it. The assets would have had to be in place ahead of time to make it happen that soon after the Russian attack on Ukraine. If Ukraine had that much advance intel they very likely would have used some drones to disrupt the missile batteries and launch aircraft (which they have done successfully before).
There's no doubt that Russia and NATO are waging war by proxy. I've said many times that NATO's strategy in Ukraine is to attrit Russian forces as much as possible, and that Ukrainian casualties are not a concern. It's an appallingly cynical strategy that explicitly sets up Ukrainians to get killed in the hundreds of thousands.
The latest rhetoric coming out of the Kremlin indicates that Russia may be moving to a hot war with NATO, and reports of potential NATO troop deployments to Ukraine tells us that Putin is not the only one rattling a saber. That's about as far as the factual details will take us.
Is hard not to see this as a huge escalating moment and I've heard from those much brighter than me esp on these topics the big wars often grow unpredictably due to these kinds of events. I for one was beginning to believe or at least hope we would make it through the Ukraine smo without it sparking much bigger but...maybe too soon or hopeful.
This attack is not an escalation unless it somehow lands at Ukraine's feet--which is unlikely now that ISIS has claimed credit.
ISIS is a group that fights just about everybody: Iran, the Taliban, Turkey, Russia, the United States, any Shi'a Muslims in Iraq....Hell, I think they even don't like the Kurds.
The danger here is not escalation but destabilization. One of the reasons Russia's loss of hegemony over the Caucasus is so problematic is because Azerbaijan is a majority Moslem country, and it has been cozying up to Turkey, complicating Russia's control of its border regions in the Caucasus and Central Asia. If ISIS is able to launch this sort of devastating terror attack, the Chechens might decide now is a good time to get in the game.
One aspect of the Ukraine war that all the narratives get wrong is the extent to which Ukrainians REALLY do not like Russians. Or the extent to which Chechens REALLY do not like Russians. One reason this war has dragged on as long as it has is that Ukraine prefers a brutal and destructive war over being conquered by Russia. If the Chechens sense that the FSB and GRU are overstretched trying to provide battlefield intel AND dealing with anti-war dissent AND monitoring Russia's many ethnic minorities who generally dislike Moscow, you can bet the Chechens are going to be doing some terror attacks of their own.
And Ukraine is just clever enough to figure out how to exploit these situations for creating some chaos of their own on the Russian home front.
At some point Russia is going to have to make some hard choices about where it concentrates its resources. At this point it's not even an economic question. There's only so much the FSB and GRU can do on all the fronts on which they have to operate.
Two front wars are bad enough. ISIS could be turning this war into a three- or four-front war, effectively. That's not a good situation for Moscow.
Peter - assume you have you seen these reports? Do you read similar, is this believable? I read elsewhere the terrorists said they were paid to do this.
All 11 suspects are apparently Tajik Muslims. They claim they were paid to kill as many as possible. The big question is: who sent them. They were highly trained, with many weapons, explosives, evacuation from the scene and an orderly organization. Russian intelligence claims they were in contact with officials in Ukraine.
Russian Foreign Ministry:
In the last decade, Ukraine has become a center for the spread of terrorism in Western hands.
The terrorists tried to flee to Ukraine after carrying out the attack in Moscow.
Since the perpetrators fled the scene before getting caught- the Russians believe that this isn’t a classic ISIS attack where suicide or death at the end is a must.
From here to point the finger at Ukraine - the way is very short!
Russia wants to point the finger at Ukraine.
Western corporate media will never point the finger at Ukraine.
Much of the alt media is already convinced that it was really the CIA and the Mossad, because Israel.
In the meantime, over 100 Russians are dead, Putin has some security egg on his face, and no matter who was behind the attack Putin's attention is diverted away from the front line in Ukraine.
If Ukraine was behind the attack it's a win for Ukraine. If Ukraine was not behind the attack it is still a win for Ukraine.
People have had the same agenda for the past 5,000 years: power.
Politicians in every country want it, and, like any addictive drug, they can never get enough of it.
Russia, Israel, Europe, Iran, China, the United States....they all want power. Hamas craves power.
That's why I frequently refer to Great Power Competition. That's an historical framework that puts a rational basis for all of these various doings around the world, and it is the logically parsimonious explanation for just about everything we see going on.
How much in play with ISIS and others are the mountains of munitions abandoned in the hasty US retreat from Afghanistan? Was that an underlying goal of our government to better arm extremists to further destabilize the region versus Russia?
Air power has been the deciding factor in European conflicts since the closing days of WW1 over a century ago.
In Asia the challenge is sea power. In Europe the challenge is air power. Whoever has them is the odds on favorite to win any war.
I’m not a warmonger but it sure feels like Western civilization is in the fight for its survival. I don’t think we have much choice.