John Helmer, who has operated out of Russia as “the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent” since 1989, began a May 29 posting on his “Dances with Bears” blog, “The Popski Syndrome—Allied Defeat Turns into Battlefield Fantasies,” with the following:
“In war, exaggeration is a killer. In the media, exaggeration is a bestseller. In the current war there is a dearth of military and political analysts who for truth or money will tell the difference.
“Instead, when the mentality of the war fighters is a combination of racial superiority and spetsnaz derring-do, what you get is the conviction that with one more brilliant operation and one more super-weapon, victory can be snatched from every indicator of defeat because the adversary will be persuaded to accept negotiations as he loses his nerve.”
Helmer cites various sources, whose assessments, while important, should not be presumed to be free of the “Realpolitik” flaws of the geopolitical outlook of both NATO and Russian “expert opinion.” The masters of such not only two-faced, but multiple-faced games, are the British, whose centuries-old “Great Game,” resulting in two world wars in the last 110 years, may soon result in a “Third time’s the charm” situation for the entire human race.
Helmer writes: “The Reuters propaganda agency, based in New York, is claiming to have found four Russians from ‘a senior level in the political and business worlds’ to be talkative about what they say they know of the Kremlin’s end-of-war plans.” (Reuters, founded in London in 1851, was acquired by what became the Toronto-based Thomson Reuters Corporation in 2008. It employs over 2,500 journalists worldwide, and publishes in 16 languages. It is an arm of British intelligence, so one should consider this when reading the evaluations of what Helmer characterizes as “Reuters’ four Russians.") Helmer says:
“With just one more successful push from the Ukrainian side, Reuters and its four Russians believe, Putin will agree to give up his war. This push, which the Western media have been amplifying this week, is the drone attacks on Russian radar stations for early warning of nuclear missile attack at Armavir, Krasnodar, and Orsk, Orenburg.”
Helmer refers to Western media reporting a U.S.-British-Ukraine strategy—to provoke Putin into retaliation for the drone attacks on Russia’s early warning radars, crossing the red line of tactical nuclear warfare. That’s a red line, the allies are calculating, at which Putin would rather negotiate end-of-war terms, than cross it.
“It is obvious the Ukrainians have had a string of successful breakthroughs,” a Moscow military source, whom Helmer leaves unnamed, observes, “—against ships, airfields, refineries, and now this radar site. We also understand it is not the Ukrainians: all target selection, identification, guidance, and hardware are American or European. Where the command control of these launch sites is, we do not know but it might well not be in Ukraine.
“But the Russian response will not be nuclear. That is impossible. There are a thousand options between doing nothing and going nuclear, and we can be sure the General Staff are working on all of them. So when people say this is provocation for a nuclear strike and that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy is provoking it, we understand that, first, NATO planners know Putin will not go nuclear because he and his generals are too rational and sane. And second, Zelenskyy is not the one making the provocations. So the real red line now is not the nuclear arms provocations from the NATO side. That’s a fantasy of theirs. Just so, in response, I think it’s time Putin stops making threats and strikes at the source of these operations.”
Others, usefully, do not agree. Regarding the “spetsnaz derring-do,” a veteran U.S. military observer, also unnamed, is not sanguine about the rationality of the U.S. and British officers directing Ukrainian operations, Helmer reports. He warns that the British, and also the CIA, have an inordinate faith in special operations to turn the tide, and in their own cleverness to think them up. “‘What we’re seeing—with Israel, too,’ according to this source, ‘is years of impunity resulting in an epic, murderous tantrum that’s having the opposite of its intended effect. It’s certainly not beyond either of them to play nuclear chicken. Most people would say that if you do that, you’re insane. But they think a special operation playing nuclear chicken with the Russians is clever, potentially effective.
“‘And so I think there’s going to be a nuclear war. The people who run things in the West have made up their minds that if they can’t rule, there will be nothing to rule. I guess we must figure now whether British and Ukrainian madness will prevail over U.S. cowardice.’”
In a caption to the picture of the damaged Armavir radar antennae, Helmer cites a Russian assessment that the damage is minimal, and therefore “we can expect a prompt restoration of the complex and its return to combat duty.”
The other point that Helmer makes in this caption is that, while the Portuguese-made, but British-supplied drone that has been identified as being used in the attacks on the Armavir radar, could have been launched from well inside Russia, direct flight from Ukraine is not to be ruled out. This is where the flights of the U.S. RQ-4 Global Hawk drone must be considered; its operations have been concentrated off the coast of Krasnodar for some time. It could very well have provided information on the deployments of Russian air defense radars, allowing the drone to have been flown on a route to avoid them. “The use of British-Portuguese drones in this case may be the fundamental point since it is the British who are considered the ‘architects’ of many GUR [Ukrainian military intelligence] actions: attempts to land in Crimea and other campaigns in which the planned result was never achieved,” according to the Russian assessment.
NATO reconnaissance aircraft, both manned and unmanned, are no doubt providing crucial battlefield intelligence to Ukrainian forces. Avia.pro reported on June 1 that there is now chatter about Russia’s possible decision to start shooting down reconnaissance drones. “If this information is confirmed, such a step could become a serious response from Russia to NATO’s actions in the region. According to rumors (on Russian-language Telegram channels), the decision to shoot down reconnaissance UAVs was made in response to the increasing activity of unmanned aerial vehicles belonging to various states near Russian borders and facilities.”
