"Potemkin's army of Russia"

The new magazine "Free Thoughts," the flagship of American secular humanists, appeared today (September27), and I enjoyed reading the first article "Is War with China Inevitable?" by Shadi Drury, professor emeritus at the University of Regina. This is an informative and scholarly article, very important, and it should be published, for example, in Consortium News, one of the most respected independent journals, the "first investigative news journal based on the Internet." Perhaps Max Blumenthal from The Grayzone will also support it.

Then I read the second article "The Devil's Deal" by S.T. Joshi. I was shocked when I read that according to Joshi, "[Putin's] Potemkin army cannot win battles except with the help of brutal mercenaries." I stopped reading. I set aside the magazine "Free Reflections."

Josh's statement is a shocking example of unfounded, reckless Russophobia - even in a country that hates Russia, like the United States, which is second in Russophobia after Poland. The fact is that Putin's "Potemkin army" has achieved much more than the "most powerful army in the world," the U.S., has done since the end of World War II.

In Vietnam, for example, the US army was driven out by communist partisans in a disgraceful manner, despite the fact that Americans killed about 2-3 million Vietnamese, including innocent peasants, men, women, and children. In Afghanistan, the US army fought for about 20 years, only to ultimately be defeated by Afghan peasants and goat herders. The US army may have won battles, but it lost wars and did nothing good in either Afghanistan or Vietnam, just as in many other military interventions around the world. (Yes, hundreds.) And it's not even worth mentioning the relentless destruction of Iraq, Serbia, and Libya by the US/NATO, for example. Everyone knows, or should know, what happened.

Military analyses and comparisons should always be made in the appropriate context. Saying that "Putin's Potemkin army cannot win battles" implies that Russia has lost its military interventions, for example, in Syria. Or in Abkhazia. Or in South Ossetia. But that is not the case.

In the current war in Ukraine, Putin's "Potemkin Army" has seized control of more than 20 percent of Ukrainian territory in a year and a half. Not just any Ukrainian land, but the most valuable - Crimea and Donbas, as these regions are predominantly populated by ethnic Russians. And the "Potemkin Army" is not fighting "partisans or peasants"; it is fighting the regular Ukrainian army, which has been illegally armed by NATO for 8 years following the U.S.-backed coup in Kyiv in 2014 that ousted the democratically elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Before launching the military operation in 2022, Russia repeatedly called for a peaceful resolution to the issue, as Russian Ukrainians in Donbas felt threatened and were killed by the Ukrainian army. But neither Ukraine nor NATO/USA ever intended to adhere to the Minsk agreements. And they did not.

At least 14 European countries (mainly Germany, England, and Poland) and the USA are sending their advanced weapons to Ukraine in its war against Russia. The USA has already spent over 100 billion dollars on aid to Ukraine, which is currently in economic and financial turmoil and is supported only by American funds. If Russia were forced to fight a war solely against Ukraine, the war would be over in a week.

During the current war in Ukraine, "Putin's Potemkin Army" has killed over 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers and incapacitated several hundred thousand more. About 10 million Ukrainians have fled their country in panic, scattering across Europe and beyond, including to Russia. Now, as the Russian army has halted and thwarted yet another Ukrainian counteroffensive, an additional 70,000 Ukrainians have died. Of approximately 12,000 foreign mercenaries who fought illegally in Ukraine, mostly British and Polish, only about 2,000 remain. The rest have either deserted, been wounded, or killed.

A couple of failures in battles, indeed!

But the dismal record of hundreds of U.S. military interventions around the world is just part of the moral decline of the West. At the beginning of last year, the U.S. president officially and publicly threatened to destroy the $20 billion Russian energy infrastructure, which was a critical part of the European gas supply system. He made the threat, and he kept his word: on September 26, 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up in the Baltic Sea, marking the worst case of economic terrorism in history and a huge ecological disaster. This horrific act of American-European economic terrorism was carried out with the help of some local Norwegian, Polish, and other Russophobic fools who obediently followed the orders of their main criminal. One high-ranking European politician, a former Polish foreign minister, publicly praised the U.S. for this horror. "Thank you, USA," he said on Twitter.

At the same time, Russian culture is being systematically erased, especially in Europe. Concerts featuring Russian music, for example, are being canceled, while Russian financial assets are either frozen or stolen, and Russian tourists are banned or restricted from visiting NATO countries. Some Ukrainian propagandists, such as Sara Ashton-Cirillo, now "claim" that Russians descend from Mongolian barbarians and that, as a result, they are Asians rather than Europeans, and that Russian land should be divided into several provinces and managed by American/Western corporations.

What we call "Western civilization" has become almost nothing more than a well-organized, legalized anti-Russian criminal activity over the past decade.

In any case, it is now too late to wage war with Russia, and no reasonable person should do so, as Dmitry Orlov, an American-Russian engineer and writer, recently argued on the show "Dialogues at Work." Russia is too powerful and completely self-sufficient in its natural resources and advanced military knowledge.

If you remain skeptical, understand that when Russia is sufficiently provoked and threatened by NATO and the US, it will decide to send "Mr. Dagger" (as Pepe Escobar put it) to Brussels, London, Warsaw, or even Washington. And you know what that means: when the Russian hypersonic missile is programmed to strike a specific target and launched on its mission, no one and nothing in the US or anywhere else on the planet will be able to stop it. The only option for the Dagger is to hit the target, with devastating consequences, according to the laws of physics of hypersonic speed.

"Mr. Dagger" is just one of six new superweapons of Russia; it's only one member of the family of new Russian hypersonic missiles. Zircon is another one. Also, Avangard. There is nothing comparable to these missiles in the arsenals of all Western countries. Russia is ahead of the USA by at least several years in the development of hypersonic missile technology. The only country that is catching up is China, and China is now a close military and economic partner of Russia.

If Josh and millions of other American Russophobes are still not impressed by Russia's invincible hypersonic missiles, they should remember that Russia has also developed the most destructive, apocalyptic, super-heavy ICBM on the planet. If the visit of "Mr. Dagger" doesn't make the American political and military elite come to their senses and realize the folly of their suicidally reckless Russophobic policies, then surely the visit of "Mr. Satan" (RS-28 Sarmat) will finally bring the American Russophobes to their senses... those who survive.

One "Satan" will be enough (or maybe two).