by Dmitry Orlov for the Saker blog Are you happy with the way the war in the former Ukraine is going? Most people aren’t—for one reason or another. Some people hate the fact that there is a war there at all, while others love it but hate the fact that it hasn’t been won yet, by one side or the other. Bounteous quantities of both of these kinds of haters
By Dmitry Orlov and posted with permission The hardest part of living through a time of wrenching change is that nobody particularly bothers to inform you that the times have changed and that nothing will be the same again. Certainly not the talking heads on TV, who are often the last to know. You have to figure it out for yourself if you can. But I am here to help.
By Dmitry Orlov for the Saker Blog The systemic crisis which we are currently witnessing in the West (and in other parts of the world that are too tightly interconnected with the West to avoid experiencing it as well) is objectively being caused by the West itself. But Westerners, being unaccustomed to acknowledging their mistakes (being all superior, indispensable and infallible-like in their own addled minds), are forced to resort
By Dmitry Orlov for the Saker Blog It is generally a good idea to avoid ascribing nefarious intent to actions explained by mere stupidity. But this is a case where mere stupidity cannot possibly explain the long, steady procession of foreign policy errors spanning three decades, all of them specifically aimed at strengthening Russia. It is not possible to argue that a surplus of hubris, ignorance, greed and political opportunism
By Dmitry Orlov for the Saker Blog Or maybe he, like Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz, grandson of Fritz von Scholz, SS lieutenant-general who supervised the slaughter of Jews in Poland and the Ukraine, thinks that genocide is a joke? Let’s explore… A reader has asked me to comment on a recent post by Roberts titled “The Kremlin Has Missed the Opportunity to End the Provocations of Russia that Are Bringing the
By Dmitry Orlov and posted with the author’s permission I guess I’ll have to keep publishing some short notes on the situation in the Ukraine, since it’s all over the news and most of that is fake news. Overnight there was a ridiculous amount of noise about Zaporozhskaya AES, which is the largest nuke plant in Europe. President Zelensky proclaimed that it is the new Chernobyl and that all of
By Dmitry Orlov and posted with the author’s permission. Last Thursday I reposed my “top ten signs that Russia has invaded the Ukraine” from 8 years ago when the Ukrainian regime change and civil war first started and the West continuously made claims that Russia had invaded. Well, last Thursday Russia did indeed invade. Russia had the full legal right to invade the Ukraine from several perspectives: to defend its
By Dmitry Orlov and posted with permission Today’s date, commonly written out as 22.02.2022, will be an easy one for future schoolchildren to remember. Various people will remember it in various ways. The residents of Donetsk and Lugansk, the two formerly Ukrainian, now once again Russian cities that have been subjected to conditions bordering on genocide since the US-instigated government overthrow of 2014 will remember jubilantly dancing in the streets,
By Dmitry Orlov and posted with permission Denis Pushilin, leader of Donetsk, has just ordered a full evacuation. Leonid Pasechnik, leader of Lugansk, did the same. In doing so, they did exactly as I expected, and as I predicted. For all those of you who think that Putin is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, perhaps you should avoid thinking and just read my articles! A bit less than a
By Dmitry Orlov and posted with the author’s permission Ever since Putin announced his demands for security guarantees from the US and NATO (in brief, stop NATO’s eastward expansion, have NATO retreat to its positions of 1997 and remove offensive weapons from Russia’s immediate vicinity) we have been subjected to a barrage of irrelevancies from Western press: • Are these security guarantees an ultimatum or a negotiating tool? • Will
By Dmitry Orlov and posted with permission Just yesterday Russia Foreign Ministry published a couple of documents that people have been struggling to interpret ever since, to little useful effect. I would like to offer my own explanation of what these documents mean, which will probably differ a great deal from most other explanations you are likely to hear. Time will tell how close they are to the truth; for
By Dmitry Orlov, posted with permission from the author I have received a flurry of emails from people concerned that World War III could erupt at any moment. Most of their concern has a single cause: the crazy stuff printed and broadcast by Western press. But I would like to suggest that it is Western press that is the problem, not any incipient military conflict involving the Ukraine. Western press
by Dmitry Orlov, posted with permission of the author An ultimately very healthy but in the meantime very unpleasant realization is gradually dawning in West—an insight that is simply shocking, that fundamentally alters their picture of the world: that the stronger becomes the hurricane of woke transformations that is raging there, the more attractive Russia becomes for hundreds of millions of Europeans and Americans. What is Russia’s most powerful weapon?
by Dmitry Orlov, posted with permission of the author On Tuesday, 23 November, Russia’s most senior military general, Valery Gerasimov, had a “deconfliction” phone conference with US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, in which the two discussed “pressing issues of international security.” Actual details of what they discussed are not available; what is available is Western media speculation, which in recent days has included false reports of
by Dmitry Orlov, posted by permission of the author General Mark Milley, America’s highest-ranking military officer, has recently gone public with a revelation of his: the world is no longer unilateral (with the US as the unquestioned world hegemon) or bilateral (as it was with the US and the SU symmetrically balancing each other out in an intimate tango of mutual assured destruction). It is now tripartite, with three major
By Dmitry Orlov and posted with special permission A terrible war is about to erupt on Russia’s border with the Ukraine—or not—but there is some likelihood of a significant number of people getting killed before project Ukraine is finally over. Given that around 13 thousand people have been killed over the past seven years—the civil war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine has gone on for that long!—this is
[This interview was originally made for the Unz Review] “I think that the American empire is very much over already, but it hasn’t been put to any sort of serious stress test yet, and so nobody realizes that this is the case” If I had to characterize the current international situation using only one word, the word “chaos” would be a pretty decent choice (albeit not the only one). Chaos
by Dmitrii Orlov for Club Orlov (cross-posted by special agreement with the author) A most interesting book has recently come out: Phil Butler’s Putin’s Praetorians: Confessions of the Top Kremlin Trolls. It’s a good book to read for all those who wish to peer behind the crazy funhouse mirror set up by Western media. It includes contributions from people who have been active in opposing the barrage of counterfactual press
I have to say that I fully agree with every word Dmitry Orlov says. I highly recommend this interview with him! The Saker
