Notes From the Upside Down VI: Russian Analyst Writing for TASS Considers the Current Mess ‘World War III’ and Asks: ‘Who Fears Whose Nukes?’

As tensions rise between Russia (and China!) vs. 'the West', it's more important than ever to listen to both sides of the divide. Spoiler alert--China backs Russia, which considers the present WWIII

As a Sunday special, here’s Russian strategic analyst Andrey Shitov’s recent piece, published by news agency TASS (roughly the AP’s equivalent) on 18 March 2022. I added a brief comment at the bottom of this post.

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World War III: Who Fears Whose Nuclear Threats?

Andrey Shitov on how the West is already trying to sell the fur of the bear yet to be killed [this is a Russian—and German—idiom whose English equivalent would be something like ‘don’t count your chickens before they are hatched’]

[Note that the above picture is in the original piece.]

World War III is already underway. The West is waging it against Russia by all available means—political, economic, ideological—except the direct use of military force. The main shared concern these days is that this hybrid conflict does not turn into an exchange of nuclear weapons.

But even without that, it is already extreme. The demonisation of Russia in the Western information space is accompanied by direct attacks on the country’s leadership, its political and cultural elite, and even ordinary citizens, as well as fellow Russians living abroad. US President Joe Biden publicly called his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin a ‘war criminal’. One US senator [Lindsay Graham] went so far as to call for the physical removal [assassination] of the Russian president. The owners of Meta (the mother company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) have ‘temporarily allowed’ similar calls of hatred and violence against Putin and his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko to be posted on their resources.

As to the sanctions, preventive measures have been replaced by punitive ones, with the destruction of the Russian economy is explicitly proclaimed as the goal. According to Anton Siluanov, head of the Russian Ministry of Finance, ‘the West has defaulted on its financial obligations to Russia, frozen our gold, and is withholding our foreign currency reserves, as well as is trying by all means to stop foreign trade, export of goods, thereby damaging world trade’.

And this is putting it mildly: independent observers believe that they are trying to steal and ‘take away’ money from Russia that Russia(ns) has (have) deposited in the West. There, by the way, it is also open season for the private property of so-called Russian oligarchs. The principle of the inviolability of private property, which has always been considered the basis of life in a democratic society based on the rule of law, has been trampled before everyone’s eyes.

At the same time, the norms of inter-state communication, which had also previously seemed inviolable, have been similarly abused. Washington, together with its ‘friends and partners’, imposed direct personal sanctions against Russia’s top leadership. Moscow has already responded by taking counter-restrictive measures against US and Canadian leaders, including Biden personally. Now Biden is ’banned’ from visiting us.

The Americans have allowed themselves to ‘punish’ foreign leaders before, but among their own presidents, as far as I know—and I have asked subject matter experts—no one has ever been under foreign sanctions before.

Casus Belli

The pretext for a massive direct assault on Russia was its special military operation to force peace in Donbass. In fact, however, this is not about Ukraine, but about the whole system of international security and strategic stability in a changing modern world. ‘Obviously, the events taking place draw a line under the global dominance of Western countries both in politics and economics’, Putin explained the other day. ‘Moreover, they call into question the economic model that has been imposed on developing countries and the whole world in general over the last decades.’

Russia insists that security must be mutual [shared] and indivisible. It stresses that it launched the said operation to end the eight-year war in Donbass and to move military threats away from its borders. It started it, by the way, only after the current anti-Russian regime in Kiev explicitly expressed its intention to acquire nuclear weapons and their means of delivery. For their part, the US and NATO, which have become accustomed to global domination over the post-Soviet decades, are trying their best to maintain the status quo.

In history, such disputes about changing the world order have usually been settled by major wars. But these days, a direct armed conflict between major powers comes with the threat of a global nuclear catastrophe. Therefore, so far it has been substituted by bitter confrontation in all other spheres.

However, military threats are on the rise with the general escalation of tensions. Analysts and even officials in the West attribute to Russia plans of some kind of ‘escalation for de-escalation’. Moscow categorically denies that we have such a concept and reminds in passing that it is not us, but NATO countries and Ukraine that are talking about the possibility of a nuclear war. Incidentally, the January statement by the leaders of the five nuclear powers and permanent members of the UN Security Council—Russia, China, US, UK and France—reiterated that ‘there can be no winners in a nuclear war, and it must never be fought’, and it was made on our initiative.

Today, however, [January] is being called the pre-war past, and experts are once more sounding the alarm. For example, the other day the co-chairs of the High-Level Group on Euro-Atlantic Security called for an early ceasefire and a peaceful settlement in Ukraine. In their view, ‘the fighting at the Zaporizhzhia [nuclear power plant]…was yet another reminder of how quickly a nuclear catastrophe can become a reality in the heat of war’. The document was signed by former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, former U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, former British Defense Secretary Desmond Brown, retired U.S. Senator and co-chair of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, Sam Nunn, and Wolfgang Ischinger, who until this year chaired the Munich Security Conference.

An Inconvenient Truth

But weapons of mass destruction are not only nuclear. The world, now recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic, does not, in principle, need to be reminded of this. But a reminder did follow, and again in the Ukrainian context.

Interestingly, it came as a surprise even to some of those US politicians who run the Kiev regime. Here’s how The Federalist magazine described in hindsight a famous episode that took place on 8 March at a [US] Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the situation in Ukraine involving U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland and Republican Senator Mark Rubio: ‘Russia and China claim that Ukraine has a biological weapons research program; Rubio was apparently confident that Nuland would refute the claims, and he asked her if they were true. To Rubio's apparent surprise, Nuland replied, “well, Ukraine has, well, biological research facilities”, and “we’re actually very concerned now that Russian troops, Russian forces may seek to, well, take control [of those laboratories], and we’re working with the Ukrainians on how they can keep any such research materials from getting into the hands of Russian forces if they get close.”’

The senator, according to the paper, ‘chose not to go further into Nuland's (apparently reluctant) admission’ and simply asked ‘to confirm that if there had been a biological attack, Russia would have been to blame.’ The diplomat, for her part, ‘readily agreed that she was certain of this.’

I have purposely cited excerpts from the publication verbatim, right down to Nuland's ‘explanation’ and bracketed explanations and caveats. I should add that testimony at congressional hearings is given under oath, and perjury is considered a felony under US law. I am sure that is why the clever and experienced lady, whom I have known for decades, found it impossible to lie.

Now the echoes of her words continue. Russian troops have got to those ‘materials’ that were supposed to be hidden from them. Now, not only Moscow but Beijing as well insists on full clarification of the American ‘research programmes’ in these biolaboratories. Incidentally, not only in Ukraine, but also in other countries around the world.

‘Online Tour’

As far as speaking about performances in the US Congress is concerned, I cannot avoid the latest news: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s address to the US legislators. He is now being competitively invited to appear in various Western capitals; one of my acquaintances, an experienced international journalist, wryly called such an unusual engagement an ‘online tour’.

Understandably, the virtual appearance on Capitol Hill in Washington was a career highlight for [Mr. Zelensky]. I see no point in retelling the content of the issue, which was interspersed with direct appeals to his audience—‘ladies and gentlemen, fellow Americans’. It doesn’t deserve it, though a lot of articles were written about it. Take for example the call to ‘impose US sanctions against all Russian politicians’, or rather, as was immediately explained, against all Russian civil servants who continue to perform their duties in general. Impromptu comedy: we’re in this together and Khlestakovism [reference to the protagonist in Nikolai Gogol’s play The Inspector General, the Russian parallel to the notion of ‘kafkaesque’ in the West] all at-once.

Apparently Zelensky’s main request—‘the establishment of a no-fly zone over Ukraine’—was also an empty demand [orig. ‘empty words that move the air’]. The White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department have repeatedly stated that such an option, fraught with direct military confrontation with Russia, is unacceptable to the United States and NATO.

And just before Zelensky’s speech, Julianne Smith, US Permanent Representative to NATO, explained at a briefing for journalists that the no-fly zone coveted by Kiev made no sense in purely military terms either. As she claimed, the recent crushing strike on the Yavoriv test site ‘in western Ukraine, some 15km from the Polish border’ was, according to the US, carried out ‘from a Russian bomber in Russian airspace’. I heard it myself for the first time at the same briefing.

Skin in the Game

Moscow stresses that its peace enforcement operation is progressing successfully, strictly according to plan, and all its tasks will definitely be achieved. ‘We will reliably ensure the security of Russia and our people and we will never allow Ukraine to serve as a springboard for aggressive actions against our country’, Putin once again explained.

Overseas, of course, the picture of what is happening is completely different. The press and the blogosphere are full of speculation that Russia almost trapped itself by underestimating the strength of Ukrainian resistance. In geopolitics, too, Moscow has allegedly achieved the opposite of the desired outcome: it has turned the entire West against itself, including not only the political but also the business community; it has hampered the further development of its economy; it has ensured unprecedented unity and cohesion in NATO and even opened the prospect of the alliance expanding to neutral countries such as Sweden or Finland.

The embodiment of such arguments, as I see it, can be seen in a question in a commentary in the National Interest: ‘Putin was angered that Ukraine was becoming an “anti-Russia”. But what if Germany becomes “anti-Russia”?’ The question is not an idle one, especially since the publication is not one of outright Russophobes, but it tries to maintain a realistic political orientation.

On the other hand, there is also plenty of blatant hatchet job. The prestigious Foreign Affairs has just printed an article entitled ‘The Return of Pax Americana? Putin’s War Strengthens Democratic Alliance’. According to the authors, the Russian leader ‘inadvertently did the US and its allies a colossal favour…By shaking them up and forcing them to shed their overconfidence, he has given them a historic opportunity to regroup and reset on the eve of an era of intense rivalry—not only with Russia, but also with China—and to reshape an international order that until very recently had seemed doomed to collapse’, the US political scientists argue.

Of course, such assessments are, as they say, written with a stick in the mud. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has repeatedly warned outside observers against trying to judge Russia’s plans, which they do not know in detail, before they are implemented and bear fruit. We colloquially call it ‘to sell the fur of the bear yet to be killed’. In this case it is doubly appropriate, since Russia is usually portrayed as a bear in cartoonish political commentary.

The Bear and the Dragon

I think it is not only useful but necessary to be aware of these and other responses to our actions—especially when the voices are those of the famous and influential. I refer, for example, to comments just published by Richard Haas, president of the non-governmental US Council on Foreign Relations, and George Soros, a major investor and philanthropist.

The latter is obviously worth listening to, if only because he is almost unparalleled in our domestic [Russian] demonology of American globalist democratisers. In this case he published—and emphatically put it in the public domain—a short text entitled ‘Vladimir Putin and the Risk of World War III’.

It is not particularly original, for example, the author, like other commentators, attributes to the Russian leader ‘a miraculous boost to EU resolve and cohesion’. [Soros] also boasts that he himself once ‘actively participated in the collapse of the Soviet empire’, in particular by establishing in Ukraine a foundation named after himself ‘even before it became an independent state’. He also recalls becoming ‘the first foreigner allowed to establish a foundation in China’, which lasted, however, only five years before the Tiananmen Square protests.

In the current situation, Soros laments most of all the strength of the link between Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. The latter, he says, ‘should be quite convinced that his confirmation this year as China's leader for life would be a mere formality’, i.e., that it would meet with no obstacles.

The American oligarch links the assurance of Moscow’s current actions in Ukraine directly to the Russian-Chinese agreement, which is reflected in the joint statement of 4 February and [whose relationship] is ‘stronger than any treaty’. And he ends his reasoning on a minor note, in which he expresses his dreams: ‘We can only hope’, Soros sighs, ‘that Putin and Xi will be removed from power before they can destroy our civilisation.’

Well, pity the man for the order of things for which he himself helped to compose the rules…

A Clever Monkey

Haas, whose text I also started reading mainly because of name recognition, argues very similarly. He assumes that ‘the only party capable of pressing Putin for a compromise is China and its President Xi Jinping’.

Although the chances of this happening, the analyst, who was once responsible for foreign policy planning at the US State Department, admits, are slim. ‘China has already publicly sided with Putin, blaming the US for the current crisis and even reinforcing Russian conspiracy theories’, he writes. ‘Xi may have decided that he would rather let the US be preoccupied with the Russian threat than focus on Asia. Moreover, Xi probably doesn’t see any upside of aligning himself with the US position, given the bipartisan support in the US for a hardline approach towards his country.’

That said, Haas does advise Washington to try to press the Chinese, offering them specific concessions and stressing that ‘this is a defining moment for their country and its relations with the US’. Implying that ‘the strategic costs to China of (alignment) with Russia would far outweigh any benefits’.

It reminds me of the recent spate of cartoons depicting a Russian bear and a Chinese dragon teaming up to confront the US together. It also reminds me of when, at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum three years ago, Putin recounted a Chinese saying about a clever monkey watching from a high mountain two tigers fight in a valley. Although he then added that ‘things change, and so does that picture’.

There was another episode, too, firmly rooted in my memory, though I know about it from a third-hand source. Igor Shuvalov told this story to the American participants of the Valdai Discussion Club, and one of them, Professor Nikolai Petro of the University of Rhode Island, later relayed his words to journalists.

The case, they say, was at one of Putin’s meetings with Biden, when the latter was serving as US vice president. In the course of the conversation the American remarked that Russia was simply too weak to claim global leadership. And [Putin] responded by suggesting that this may be true, but Russia is strong enough to determine who will be tomorrow’s leader.

So, live with it, as we now say.

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Brief Comments

Keep in mind that the small simian episode was voiced three years ago, back in the distant time B.C., or ‘Before Covid’, when most of the left-liberal chattering classes in the West were horrified, horrified, at Mr. Trump occupying (pun intended) the White House.

Back then, the left-liberal chattering classes in the West may have counted on Trump’s anti-Chinese sentiments being replaced once ‘one of their own’ returned to the White House. Imagine their ‘surprise’ when Mr. Biden seamlessly continued his predecessor’s ‘policy’ vis-à-vis China.

Now we may unpack the simian episode: back then the clever monkey was apparently China, which was watching the two tigers—Russia and the US—fight in the valley.

Fast-forward to 2022, and it’s become quite apparent that the clever monkey has sided with the Siberian tiger.

Still, this change doesn’t rule out the alleged response by Mr. Putin to Mr. Biden, as related by Mr. Shuvalov and Professor Petro.

One last thing to note: why do I bring this to your attention?

Well, it is imperative to listen to both sides of a quarrel, especially so if you’re based in ‘the collective West’.

Get ready for trouble ahead, for ‘Western leaders’, such as they are, are embarking on a confrontational course with Russia—and apparently China.

Remain calm, try to be prepared for shocks to ‘the system’, mainly food and other shortages, intermittent internet access, and, perhaps most importantly, try to keep a level head.