No government can survive when it fails to control the cost in blood on the battlefield and the cost of potatoes, butter and bread on the home front. The combination at the same time is politically lethal.
US President Lyndon Johnson learned this between 1965 and 1968, when the rate of domestic inflation was quadrupling and the Killed in Action (KIA) numbers in the Vietnam War jumped ninefold. On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced he was withdrawing from the presidential election later that year.*
President Vladimir Putin has managed the KIA half of the lethal equation by fighting a limited expeditionary campaign in the Ukraine, restricting the General Staff’s resources, plans, targets and operations; attacking with standoff, mostly airborne weapons; shifting the casualty burden of ground fighting to socially marginal groups; and keeping the majority of voters out of the line of fire. His success is in high and stable voter support.
For the time being, the president has escaped public blame for the inflationary surge in food prices over 2024. According to one report, beets were up by 71%; potatoes by 65.4%; eggs by 48.5%; garlic by 41%; salt by 27%; vegetable oil by 24%; butter by 22%. According to the AB Centre calculation, the price of potatoes jumped 65.2%; olive oil, 35.5%; butter, 35.2%; garlic, 24.7%; beets, 22.7%.
The state statistics agency Rosstat claims that the overall, official inflation rate for the country was 8.6% for 2024, while retail food price inflation, according to Rosstat was 9.5%. No one believes this, according to consumer polling and expert analyses. Consumer anticipation and expert forecasts are for the surge in food prices to continue this year at rates, depending on the food item, of between 50% and 100%.
Sergei Glazyev, a well-known public economist, presidential candidate in 2004, and a senior official of the Eurasian Economic Commission, is blunt on his attack. “Rising prices are hitting everyone’s pockets and making everyone poorer. Both citizens and businesses. Only banks are swollen with money.
“The Bank of Russia’s policy is driving the economy into a stagflationary trap, in which falling production, devaluation of the ruble and rising inflation are mutually reinforcing: an increase in the key rate [21%] compresses production lending, which leads to lower volumes and higher production costs, the technical level and production efficiency decline, the competitiveness of the economy decreases, which is offset by the devaluation of the ruble. That then causes a new surge of inflation, which the Bank of Russia is trying to pay off with another increase in the key rate. After ten years of ineffectual targeting of inflation, it is clear that the continuation of this insane policy has no prospects.” https://t.me/glazieview/6705
Mikhail Delyagin, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Economic Policy, is just as scathing. He says the official rate of inflation for 2024 was not 8.5%, as the government insists, but closer to 19%; he warns it may reach 29% this year. The Central Bank interest rate of 21% is to blame: “this, in my opinion, is more destructive than the use of tactical nuclear weapons. But there is some good news. If tactical nuclear weapons are suddenly used against us, it will certainly be a severe shock and many people will die, but for the economy as a whole it will not be a greater shock than the policy of Elvira Sakhipzadovna Nabiullina. And [Finance Minister] Anton Germanovich Siluanov, who should also not be forgotten.”
“However, as we know, at the December 20 [2024] meeting, the Central Bank did not raise the key rate to 23 percent once again, as many, including me, expected. This is probably a good signal, because by raising the key rate in conditions of a shortage of money supply, the Bank of Russia thereby accelerates inflation. So far, Elvira Sakhipzadovna has refused to further accelerate inflation, but there is no guarantee that she will not return to this practice at the beginning of next year.”
So serious has been the failure of Central Bank Governor Nabiullina to halt inflation, and so widespread is public suspicion of her competence and intentions, on January 13 the Central Bank issued a public release denying that Nabiullina is planning a freeze on Russian individual savings by blocking withdrawals from bank accounts. “It is quite obvious that in any market economy, of which bank lending is an integral part, such a step is unthinkable,” the Central Bank has announced on Telegram. “Firstly, it will immediately undermine confidence in the banking system and put an end to lending to the economy. Secondly, freezing deposits will not help reduce inflation. People will rush to invest money not in deposits, but in goods and real estate with the corresponding sad consequences for rising prices.”
National polling of public attitudes towards leading officials has never identified Nabiullina positively. In open-ended questioning of those whom voters trust, Nabiullina’s name has not come up. Instead, she appears fifteenth on the countrywide list of officials and politicians who are distrusted – she ranks equal to the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov; State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, and the Mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin.
No critic of the domestic inflation and Central Bank policy mentions President Putin. He is understood, however, to be Nabiullina’s protector against her domestic critics. In the past month, however, he has been pressed to qualify this.
At his press conference on December 19, the day before the Central Bank met to decide whether to raise the interest rate to 23%, Putin said: “Only yesterday, while preparing for today’s event, I talked to the Central Bank Governor, and Elvira Nabiullina told me that the inflation rate has already reached about 9.2–9.3 percent year-to-date. That said, salaries have increased by 9 percent, and I am talking about an increase in real terms, minus inflation. In addition, disposable incomes have also increased. So, the overall situation is stable and, let me reiterate, solid.”
The Kremlin record claims there has been no official meeting between Putin and Nabiullina since September 2019.
At his December press conference, Putin acknowledged “there are certain challenges with inflation and with the economy heating up. Therefore, the Government and the Central Bank have been seeking to ensure a soft landing.” Asked by a reporter what the interest rate decision would be, Putin added: “she does not tell me what the rate will be. Perhaps she does not know this yet, because they discuss it at the board meeting, their Komsomol cell, and make the final decision in the course of the discussion. I hope that it will be balanced and will meet today’s requirements.”
“Balance” is Putin’s term for satisfying each of his oligarch, military, and voter constituencies at the same time as they contradict and oppose each other.
In anticipation of the start of end-of-war negotiations between President Donald Trump’s retired general Keith Kellogg and the Kremlin, Dmitri Rogozin has proposed three fresh principles for the Russian outcome – acceleration, decapitation, mobilization.
Since 1996 Rogozin is the longest running contestant for the Russian presidency — longer running than Vladimir Putin, Dmitri Medvedev, Sergei Glazyev, or Alexei Kudrin; only the serial loser, Gennady Zyuganov of the Communist Party, has been running for longer.
At 61, Rogozin is eleven years younger than President Putin, two years older than ex-president Medvedev, and more than ten centimetres taller than both of them. If sources for Kremlin election strategy are to be believed, the most likely vote-getter to succeed if Putin retires in 2030 will be recruited from the Time of Heroes legion who are being placed into political circulation each December since the Special Military Operation (SVO) began.
With a family of Russian military leaders extending from the 13th and 17th centuries to his father, two doctorates, and state service as Putin’s ambassador to NATO, deputy prime minister for the military industrial complex, and head of the Russian space conglomerate Roskosmos, Rogozin is a unique figure in current politics. As the sitting senator for Zaporozhye region engaged in running an active military unit on the front, Rogozin is combining the military and civilian qualifications for the succession.
He has also remained relatively free of oligarch ties; his line on domestic economic planning and investment priorities is anti-oligarch and war mobilizational alongside Glazyev and Mikhail Delyagin. Not even the hit jobs organized by political rivals like Alexei Navalny and the Kiev regime, have been able to silence or kill him.
Rozogin’s principles of war policy are acceleration on the offensive; decapitation of Vladimir Zelensky; and comprehensive militarization of the Russian domestic economy.
Last week in a nationally circulated press interview, he called for “victory so that the armed conflict ends faster, so that we can begin a peaceful life faster…The war changes every three months. It becomes impossible to fight in the old way. New means of destruction are emerging. We must keep in mind that here we are fighting against the entire military-industrial complex of the Western countries — they are testing their weapons on us. Therefore, not only do we have no right to lag behind, we must be ahead of the curve.”
“We need solidarity of the rear and the front. Moscow, St. Petersburg, other major Russian cities should stop living their carefree life, pretending that nothing is happening. We will never return to the state that was until 2022. Never. Everyone needs to understand that. Society must understand the depth of the problem and help the army with everything it can. Only victory will bring an end to the conflict. The war cannot be frozen. Or else the war will be inherited by our children and grandchildren.”
There was a time when Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was President of Iran (1989-97) and he despatched from his personal office secret intelligence-gatherers to Moscow. That was during the Yeltsin administration, when there was no love lost for Iran inside the Kremlin wall. So Rafsanjani’s advisors came under cover of merchants selling the pistachios of which Iran is the world’s largest and best producer.
I remember meeting them at the old Peking Hotel. They were good listeners; I don’t recall their saying anything except to ask questions. To our meetings they brought presentation boxes of finely roasted pistachios.
From Rafsanjani’s men in those days I learned that the best way of understanding what Iranians are thinking about the Kremlin is not to ask questions, which they invariably evade and obfuscate in answer. It’s in the questions they ask that the clues will be found to Iran’s objectives, priorities, and also their uncertainties, vulnerabilities.
At the conclusion of the new President of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian’s meetings with President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on Friday, there was a brief, carefully staged exchange of questions and answers between the presidents and the press — two Iranian questions, two Russian ones. Just twenty minutes were allowed.
The Iranian questions started from the obvious fact that both Iran and Russia are presently defending themselves from the long US war to destroy them both — through Israel for Iran, through the Ukraine for Russia. The Iran reporters asked two questions making the same point about the present war: “What will happen in the future with the current agreement?” “What will be the policy of the two countries regarding the international agenda, as well as regional cooperation, especially in our region? How can all this be translated into practice?”
President Putin avoided speaking of the war; the Russian reporters followed suit. Interfax asked about the gas business; Izvestia sidestepped with a fatuity: “With such constant turbulence in the same Middle East, how can the balance of power be maintained?”
Pezeshkian was more explicit than Putin. “You see in what is taking place in Lebanon, in Syria, in Gaza Strip, that the bloodshed is endless. You all have seen this with your own eyes…These double standards are intolerable to us… today’s agreements…ensure that the unipolar world will no longer dictate our course. No double standards can govern the world.”
“When discussing recent developments in Syria,” Putin said, “we emphasised that Russia remains committed to comprehensive settlement in that country based on respect for its sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity. We stand ready to continue providing the Syrian people with the necessary support for stabilising the situation, to offer urgent humanitarian aid, and to start full-scale post-conflict reconstruction…we sincerely wish that the Syrian people will successfully overcome all the emerging challenges posed by the current transition period.”
More concrete answers are to be found in the forty-seven articles of the pact which the two presidents had just signed. Titled the “Treaty on the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Russian Federation”, three originals were signed – in Russian, Persian, and English. Exceptionally, on its last line the pact declares “that all texts [are] equally authentic,“ but that “in case of any disagreement in interpretation or implementation of this Treaty, the English text shall be used.”
No historical precedent can be found in which two allied states have agreed with each other to apply in this way the language of their common enemy.
In the English version of the new treaty it is also evident how the Russians and Iranians have left out what they failed to agree to say or do towards that enemy. Read carefully, just six weeks after the two presidents did not agree on military cooperation to stop the Turkish, Israeli and American invasions of Syria and its partition, this looks to one military observer as “a declaration of maybe — we promise to be nice to each other, when possible, perhaps.”
The war to destroy Russia has been an evil in which the British, Americans, Germans and French have combined for more than a century now. In the present stage on the Ukrainian battlefield, every weapon and force fielded by the Anglo-Americans and their allies has been defeated; the Ukraine itself, territorially and politically, has been destroyed.
No serious Russian believes this war will be over when the incoming US president claims the personal credit for negotiating end-of-war terms short of the US side’s capitulation.
About men like him and negotiations like his, it was the Irishman Edmund Burke who in his 1770 essay “Thoughts on the Present Discontents” issued this warning: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”* In the present war against Russia, the bad men have combined across the Atlantic and the Pacific. Against them on the information war front, there are very few good men – not one in the mainstream media, almost none in the alternative media.
The power of state repression is only half the reason. The other half is the competition for money. In competing for internet media subscribers, even those tempted to be good will be motivated not to associate, to compete against each other instead, and thereby “fall, one by one in the contemptible struggle.”
In propaganda war, the bad men must convince their paymasters more than their audience that they are winning. Reaching this point today has required a series of confidence-building, warmaking preparations – the putsch in Kiev of February 2014; the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine in July 2014; and the Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England, in March 2018. The official narrative of Novichok, the Russian chemical warfare weapon allegedly used against the Skripals, has just reached its climax in London. A state-sponsored report will be published in a few weeks’ time. It will conclude that President Vladimir Putin had the means, opportunity and motive to kill the Skripals, and is guilty of attempted murder on English soil.
But the forensic evidence which has slipped into the public record from the British intelligence and security services, the chemical warfighters at Porton Down, and the Whitehall staffs advising the prime minister proves the narrative and the indictment are false. Weapon, crime scene, victim, killer, motive – all have been faked. By the Anglo-American and Canadian law standards of reasonable doubt and balance of probabilities, the prosecution of the case against Russia should have collapsed. Except, of course, that in the present state of war, this hasn’t happened.
The new book, Long Live Novichok! The British poison which fooled the worldis the lone voice to explain for the time being at least; it is also the only platform to defend Sergei and Yulia Skripal as political prisoners of the British for the past seven years. Because they didn’t die after they had been sprayed with a British poison, they have been kept in hospital under forced sedation and tracheostomy; then held under guard, in isolation, incommunicado. Their telephone calls to family in Russia, made in a hurry and in secret, stopped five years ago.
For the first time the book documents the British presentation in public of the poison weapon itself, revealing the clue of the colour of Novichok. This is the evidence that the murder weapon wasn’t Russian, it wasn’t Novichok at all.
In today’s podcast from Canada, Chris Cook and I discuss the reasons for the failure of Novichok to kill anyone, and its success at brainwashing everyone, or almost everyone.
The contrast with other media campaigns of resistance to western information warfare is a glaring one. For example, the campaign to defend Julian Assange and free him from a British prison and trial in the US has turned out to have been a popular success. However, Assange himself, his Wikileaks platform, and his London advocates have done nothing to expose the Novichok deception operation. They are good men who have done nothing — their media success has failed to deter or stop the Anglo-American march to war in the Ukraine; Assange’s lawyers are supporters of the war against Russia. Assange’s alt-media reporters have pretended they are the only truth-tellers in the present discontents; their war is against their media competitors.
For their names; for the truth of the Novichok story; and for the after-life of the Novichok poison in the coming war against Russia, click to listen.
Novichok is the notorious warfighting poison which has killed no one but fooled everyone.
At least that’s how British Government officials, their scientists, chemical warfighters, policemen, media reporters, and trailing after them all, their judges, intend the story to be told.
Theirs is the story of the assassination, ordered by President Vladimir Putin in Moscow and attempted on March 4, 2018, by two military officers tracked and filmed to every location but not the murder scene; with a weapon not detected at the scene nor in the blood streams and bodily tissues of their murder targets.
The victims, Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal, have been made to disappear and are either incommunicado in prison or dead. The only direct testimony which has been recorded voluntarily in front of witnesses was given by Yulia Skripal, in hospital four days after the attack, when she identified the assassination attempt as having been carried out with poison spray by an attacker who was not Russian, just minutes before she and her father collapsed. She meant the poison was British; the assassin British.
The motive for the Novichok crime turns out to be hearsay by British government against the Russian government.
In political and military terms, the Novichok poison story is propaganda between enemies at war. Judgement of what happened to the Skripals is a weapon of this war. And so it has turned out that there has been no court trial or test of the Novichok narrative, according to British law. Instead, there has been a proceeding which looked like a court trial but wasn’t; in which the Skripals were represented by police interrogators and by lawyers who said nothing; presided over by a judge who wasn’t.
In a single line expressed through a reporter, Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov has explained the defeat of Syria as a tactical withdrawal in preparation for the “military conflict with NATO, and in the next 10 years. So, Russia right now needs solutions that will ensure at least a long-term balance in the global confrontation.”
This line appeared in the Kremlin-funded security analysis platform Vzglyad on January 3; there was no mention of Syria. In case the significance was missed, Vzglyad added the editorial line in italics: “In a long confrontation with the West, it is important to skillfully combine the economy and military. Judging by the first results of the activities of the economist Belousov as Minister of Defense, this is exactly what we see.”
A political source in Moscow concurs. “Russia has to fight all of NATO head-on within the next ten years. So if a deal can be made now to earn some time to rearm, then that’s a strategic choice that is going to have to be made.”
Not all military sources in Moscow agree. Some believe that during the process in October and November when President Vladimir Putin listened to General Staff and Foreign Ministry arguments for opposing the Turkish plan to break out of Idlib and capture Damascus, the Kremlin underestimated the message that Russia’s acquiescence would deliver to the US and the NATO allies. “Anyone now thinking Russia can be counted on as ally”, comments one, “is mistaken.”
These sources believe that now the pressure on Putin to make fresh concessions in the Ukraine will intensify. “The US and NATO used the time we conceded in Minsk to prepare the war we weren’t as prepared to fight as they were in February 2022. Delay was our mistake. They want time now to rearm the Kiev regime for the next round. We should be aiming for capitulation in Kiev and no future for the enemy. For us, that’s the strategy.”.”
Imagine the history of a bank written by the driver of the getaway car used by a gang of holdup men after their heist.
Then imagine the driver and his gang are religious fundamentalists convinced that what they are doing is God’s mission to reform the banking business by introducing daylight robbery as one of what they call the “underpinnings of capitalism”.
As the car speeds away with the loot, the driver leads the other gangsters in reciting their mantras: “obviously it was the Wild West”; “there’s a ton of money to be made in chaos”; “capitalism in Russia wasn’t born under laboratory conditions. It was born in a vacuum of governance”; “with Goldman Sachs’ analysis backing you , investing in Russia became the closest thing you could get to a no-brainer”.
These lines have been written by a man called Charles Hecker (lead image, right), a reporter for the Moscow Times in the 1990s who turned into a Russia expert for the Control Risks group of London. After that employment ended recently, he has published a book with the title, Zero Sum, The Arc of International Business in Russia.
What’s unusual about this is that in 457 pages, Hecker doesn’t present or analyse the annual reports, financial balance-sheets, Initial Public Offering (IPO) prospectuses, or market regulation filings of a single significant Russian company or business sector. Instead, Hecker reports interviewing 57 individuals who spent time in Russia between 1991 and 2022, working for mostly US and British companies, law firms, accountancies, hotels, and media. Just seven of these sources (12%) were Russian born, but none has lived in Russia for many years. In Hecker’s footnotes, 647 of them in total, there are just seven Russian-language sources; they are texts of official enactments.
The outcome is a heist-and-getaway history in which Hecker reports the impact of economic sanctions against Russia on the say-so of think tanks in Kiev, the State Department, and Yale University; the rise of post-Soviet media on the say-so by Dutchman Derk Sauer whose publications in Russia were financed by secret US agencies, then Mikhail Khodorkovsky; the role of Russian crime and criminals on the say-so of Mark Galeotti, a writer in the Rupert Murdoch stable whose book of 2018 was a fabrication with no Russian criminal for its source; the history of state asset privatization on the say-so of Harvard University consultants; the Russian oil business on the say-so of BP executives dictating to the London press; and the fraud and embezzlement prosecution of Baring Vostok and Michael Calvey on the say-so of the Financial Times.
Say-so doesn’t make so. But this is not as hackneyed and pointless as it may sound. The point is easier to acknowledge now during the semifinal stage of the Battle of the Ukraine than during the war preliminaries: the point is that Hecker is employed in a form of counter-intelligence and information warfare to sustain Anglo-American enthusiasm and cashflow for the war despite the defeat of the Anglo-American side on the battlefield.
What Hecker doesn’t understand (cannot see in the book’s evidence) is that the extraordinary reward-to-risk multiples, ratios of debt to earnings and profit to outlay, speed of payback, and zero rate of taxation which characterized Russian business between 1991 and 2022, were planned weapons of the Anglo-American war to destroy Russia, its economy first, then its military capacity to defend itself, and finally its social cohesion. That war has been hot by degrees since 1917, never cold. Following the corrupt betrayals by Russian leaders themselves between 1991 and 2000, this war almost ended in Russia’s capitulation.
Diogenes of Sinope (lead image, centre), the still famous philosopher of ancient Greece, had an unusually long and exceptionally miserable life between 412 and 323 BC.
There’s no telling whether he inherited the profits of his father’s money manipulation business, but by the time he was captured by pirates, enslaved, and then put up for sale, he had nothing with which to pay the ransom. He was not the first crooked banker’s son to end up in poverty. He was the first, and possibly the last crooked banker’s son to make a virtue of poverty, and to demonstrate this in his lifestyle – living in a barrel, sleeping rough, going naked in the street, and declaiming rude jokes about the rulers and institutions of Athens, the state in which he lived.
There is some dispute over whether Diogenes’s barrel was in fact a large wine or oil storage jar; and whether the cause of his death was suicide by self-suffocation, gastroenteritis from raw octopus, or manslaughter by a hungry dog.
There is no dispute over the fame Diogenes continues to enjoy for his subversion of the powerful, wealthy, and gullible of his society, and for the wit of his apothegms. They are all hearsay; next to nothing Diogenes wrote has survived.In the truth and in truth-telling, it’s certain that Diogenes was a believer. But excepting himself, towards truth-tellers in particular – journalists, lawyers, University of Chicago professors, and veterans of the US Marine Corps and CIA – Diogenes was more than cynical. He illustrated this point with his habit of walking about in the bright sunshine with a lighted lantern. Asked what he was doing, he quipped that he was looking for an honest man.
Quoting Mark Twain, President Vladimir Putin has made his first public statement on Syria during his Direct Line broadcast on Thursday. “Whoever wants to imagine Russia weakened…I want to recall the famous man and writer, who once said: ‘The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.’”
During four and a half hours of question-and-answer, Putin responded to questions on the Syrian conflict from a US and later a Turkish reporter. He said the future of the Russian bases at Khmeimim and Tartus is undecided. “The vast majority of [Syrian groups] tell us that they would want our military bases to remain in Syria. I don’t know — we should think about it, because we have to decide for ourselves how we relate to the political forces that are now in control and will control the situation in this country in the future. Our interests ought to coincide. If we stay there, then we have to do something in the interests of the country where we are.
”Putin endorsed the Turkish military movements into Syria over the Israeli ones. “Israel is also solving security issues for itself…We hope that Israel someday will leave the territory of Syria, but right now it is bringing in there additional troops. I think there are already thousands of troops. And I have such an impression, that they are not only not going to leave, but they are going to reinforce there…Turkey needs to ensure its security somehow. We understand that all. This is not for today’s meeting, so as not to waste time.”
