Letters from Vienna #212
Letter to J #1
Executive Summary of the conflict between Russia & the Ukraine #1
Dear J,
You’ve asked for my thoughts on the Russia/Ukraine conflict so here they are.
The first, and most important, point to be made is that the much-vaunted Ukrainian “counter-offensive”, five months in the making, has failed and failed miserably. Thousands of Ukrainians have been sent on one gigantic suicide mission and didn’t even reach the Russian front-line, let alone breach it[1]. And how on earth could they have done so? They never had the slightest chance.
One can watch video after video of Ukrainian armoured vehicles driving into minefields and blowing up. Without adequate mine-clearing equipment, without adequate preparation, without adequate artillery or air support the Ukrainian “counter-offensive” was always doomed to fail.
This all reminds one very much of the Kursk offensive of 1943. In the same way that the Russians knew well in advance when and where the enemy would attack, they knew this time too, and, in both cases: made appropriate preparations; the Russian line of defence in both cases was and is kilometres deep.
The West has thrown billions of dollars and billions of dollars-worth of military hardware at the Ukraine and has seldom given a thought to asking what has happened to it all. Only a fraction has gone into actually fighting the Russians. Most has disappeared God knows where!
For the Military Industrial Complex however (all those houses, mansions and villas being built for lobbyists and insiders in and around Washington and elsewhere!) this has proven a bonanza. All one needs to do to gauge the real state of affairs is to listen to Seymour Hersh.
In April he reported:
“The Ukraine government, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, has been using American taxpayers’ funds to pay dearly for the vitally needed diesel fuel that is keeping the Ukrainian army on the move in its war with Russia. It is unknown how much the Zelensky government is paying per gallon for the fuel, but the Pentagon was paying as much as $400 per gallon to transport gasoline from a port in Pakistan, via truck or parachute, into Afghanistan during the decades-long American war there.”
“What also is unknown is that Zelensky has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments. One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least; another expert compared the level of corruption in Kiev as approaching that of the Afghan war, “although there will be no professional audit reports emerging from the Ukraine.””
“Zelensky’s been buying discount diesel from the Russians,” one knowledgeable American intelligence official told me. “And who’s paying for the gas and oil? We are. Putin and his oligarchs are making millions” on it.”
“Many government ministries in Kiev have been literally “competing,” I was told, to set up front companies for export contracts for weapons and ammunition with private arms dealers around the world, all of which provide kickbacks. Many of those companies are in Poland and Czechia, but others are thought to exist in the Persian Gulf and Israel. “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are others in places like the Cayman Islands and Panama, and there are lots of Americans involved,” an American expert on international trade told me.
The issue of corruption was directly raised with Zelensky in a meeting last January in Kiev with CIA Director William Burns. His message to the Ukrainian president, I was told by an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting, was out of a 1950s mob movie. The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president, because “he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.””
“Burns also presented Zelensky with a list of thirty-five generals and senior officials whose corruption was known to the CIA and others in the American government. Zelensky responded to the American pressure ten days later by publicly dismissing ten of the most ostentatious officials on the list and doing little else. “The ten he got rid of were brazenly bragging about the money they had—driving around Kiev in their new Mercedes,” the intelligence official told me.”[2]
The war in short is all about making money, which goes a long way to explaining Prigozhin’s discontent.
To be honest I don’t know the man, know nothing of his motives or his background, which is murky to say the least but, from what I’ve gathered over the past few months (what he has claimed in public): the Russian Army has been doing its utmost to sabotage the Wagner operations and it seems to be that it was a Russian Army attack on the Wagners, which provoked their open rebellion. Not without importance was the fact that the Wagners were set to be emasculated and put under tighter Ministry of Defence control or perhaps even disbanded; if Prigozhin was to retain mastery of his organisation he needed to act and act dramatically. Perhaps this was more about his (massive) ego, his vanity and pride than anything else.
There are two theories I think plausible and both need to be given consideration:
Prigozhin was trying to get Putin’s attention and was trying to alter the conduct of the war[3].
Prigozhin has been recruited by the West to sabotage the war effort and create civil war in Russia[4].
The interesting thing about the recent rebellion, which has now subsided, is that the civilians interviewed in Rostov seem to be both pro-Wagner and pro-Putin,[5] so there seems little real threat of civil war.
Prigozhin didn’t act alone and a considerable portion of the Wagners seem to have been involved in the rebellion, which means that the discontent was widespread and the unit was ripe for rebellion. The key issue, however, is that many Russian soldiers (and not just the Wagners) are unhappy about the way the war is being fought.
The mode picked by Putin is one of attrition, which seems to serve the purposes of his Globalist masters: it reduces the size of both the Ukrainian and Russian populations while generating vast profits for the military industrial complex.
Le Monde reported:
“The Russian missiles that kill Ukrainians or destroy their infrastructure reach their targets thanks to electronic chips made by foreign companies like STMicroelectronics (French-Italian) and Intel (American). The Yermak-McFaul expert group, consisting of Ukrainian and American experts charged with assessing sanctions against Russia, is due to publish a report viewed by Le Monde in the next few days, showing how Moscow circumvents restrictions.”
“The report’s authors dismantled artillery pieces, armoured vehicles, drones and missiles recovered in Ukraine to trace the origin of their components. “Missiles that don’t explode or fall into the water are a treasure trove of information,” said Vladyslav Vlasiuk, the Ukrainian presidential adviser in charge of sanctions.”
“Of the 58 items of military equipment analyzed, 1,057 components were identified, the majority of which were microchips and microprocessors manufactured by 155 foreign companies. Two-thirds of these were American, but French groups Thales, Souriau and STMicroelectronics also manufactured some of the components found, although the report did not specify exactly which ones.”[6]
This shouldn’t surprise; I’ve written about this phenomenon before[7].
War has always been a racket, as General Smedley Butler pointed out decades ago. Nothing has fundamentally changed in recent years to alter this profound truth.
Best,
Michael
[6] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2023/06/17/war-in-ukraine-hundreds-of-western-electronic-components-found-in-russian-weapons_6032830_19.html
[7] https://lettersfromvienna.substack.com/p/war-is-organised-murder
https://lettersfromvienna.substack.com/p/when-propaganda-bubbles-pop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PyQnjeJXtM&ab_channel=HistoryLegends