MY CONTRIBUTION TO THE CONFUSION

Reader Alert: FEAR PORN

Good morning, dear Reader!

I have been struggling to create an essay or to repeat a happy story on December 10. It ain’t coming.

Whatever demons have afflicted me or whatever negative vibrations have set the heavenly harps twanging in tune, I just can’t find the strength to post a nice Christmas message.

Instead, I will share a bit of a different post offered to Substack readers earlier this morning.

Bear in mind that Vladimir Putin clearly said there would be a strong response if the West attacked mainland Russia. I believe he said it within the past eight months, but it has (to my knowledge) disappeared from the Internet.

That said, here are the observations and thoughts of Andrew Korybko, one of the most honest contributors to Substack.com:

… the indisputable facts are that: 1) Kiev struck deep into Russia on Monday to hit two strategic airfields; 2) the West is signaling to Moscow that it had nothing to do with the attack; and 3) and Kiev built upon Monday’s momentum by striking another Russian airfield on Tuesday. What’s most disturbing about all of this is that the drones were able to enter Russian airspace in the first place and reach their targets without being shot down ahead of time.

“Until Russia rectifies this problem by either comprehensively neutralizing Kiev’s capacity to carry out more such drone strikes and/or robustly defending its airspace from all such forthcoming intrusions, this trend is expected to continue. After all, it carries with it immense soft power significance for the attacking side even if the on-the-ground consequences are reportedly minimal. Even patriotic Russian voices are echoing the preceding assessment as evidenced by one of Rybar’s latest messages.

“That’s the name of a popular telegram channel that’s passionately in support of their country’s special operation, which also has an accompanying English-language channel and unofficial Twitter account. The latter shared an admittedly harsh take on Monday’s drone strikes that can be read in full here, which says that Russia’s rivals are literally laughing at its inability to properly defend its strategic nuclear forces from conventional strikes by their crumbling neighbor.

“The latent national security implications of that observation are chilling since Western hawks might mistakenly interpret this development as signaling that they too can directly attack Russia’s strategic nuclear forces without fear of significant repercussions like provoking a nuclear war. Of course, to be absolutely clear, there’s no doubt that Russia’s nuclear triad would spring into action if NATO dared to strike such targets, but the danger is that ideologically deluded Western hawks forget about this fact.

“What therefore needs to happen as soon as possible is for Russia to react in such a way that removes any such doubts about its willingness to defend its strategic nuclear forces regardless of whoever the aggressor might be and irrespective of the damage that their attacks inflicted on their targets. It can’t be taken for granted that it’ll do so, but that would be the best-case scenario for reaffirming the principle of “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD).”