Dmitry Trenin
RT.com

There are too many people who think the Kremlin is bluffing and they can behave with impunity towards Russia

There are too many people who think the Kremlin is bluffing and they can behave with impunity towards Russia

Vladimir Putin’s decision to update Moscow’s nuclear doctrine isn’t a knee-jerk reaction to current events. Unlike, for example, the threat to attack deeper inside Russia with long-range missiles. The changes were flagged by the Russian president several months ago, and from yesterday’s speech we learned that the Strategic Deterrence Commission meets twice a year, which means that the document itself is constantly being re-read and re-thought.

The merits of strengthening nuclear deterrence became clear more than two years ago, when the US declared that its goal – in the Ukraine conflict – is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. The West then began its game of escalation. Moscow’s old nuclear doctrine was aimed at other wars and scenarios and proved ineffective at deterring the enemy in the new circumstances.

We will now see the reaction in the West, where unfortunately there are many people in high places who have convinced themselves that Putin is ‘bluffing’, that Russia is ‘afraid to respond’, and that it is therefore possible to behave with impunity toward it. The doctrinal correction is thus essentially a signal to the sober minds that remain in the halls of power in Washington: this is the last warning.

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Staff, Alahed News

Hezbollah issued the following statement: In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. "Let those who would sacrifice this life for the Hereafter fight in the cause of Allah. And whoever fights in Allah’s cause—whether they achieve martyrdom or victory—We will honor them with a great reward." Allah Almighty has spoken the truth.

His Eminence, the Master of the Resistance and the righteous servant has passed away to be with his Lord, who is pleased with him as a great martyr and a heroic, courageous, brave, wise, insightful, and faithful leader. He has joined the caravan of martyrs of the eternal, luminous Karbala in the divine path of faith in the footsteps of the prophets and martyred imams.

His Eminence Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, has joined his great immortal martyred comrades, whose path he led for over thirty years. During this period, he led them from one victory to another, from succeeding the Master of the Martyrs of the Islamic Resistance in 1992 until the liberation of Lebanon in 2000 to the glorious divine victory in 2006, to all the battles of honor and sacrifice, and to the battle of support and heroism in support of Palestine, Gaza, and the oppressed Palestinian people.

We offer our condolences to the Master of the Age [Imam Mahdi], the Guardian of the Muslims, Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei, the great religious references, the mujahideen, the faithful, the nation of resistance, our patient and struggling Lebanese people, the entire Islamic nation, all the free and oppressed people in the world, and his honorable and patient family.

We congratulate His Eminence, the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on receiving the highest divine medal – Imam Hussein’s medal. He has fulfilled his most precious wish and the highest ranks of faith and pure belief – becoming a martyr on the path of Al-Quds and Palestine. We offer our condolences and congratulations to his martyred companions, who joined his pure and holy procession following the treacherous Zionist raid on the southern suburbs of Beirut.

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Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

Israel’s intelligence superiority and the Resistance Axis’ reluctance to escalate are responsible for why the self-professed Jewish State is indisputably winning the latest war with Lebanon.

The latest Israeli-Lebanese War shattered everyone’s expectations. Hezbollah’s enormous missile stockpile made them all believe that “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) had been achieved with Israel, thus restraining both combatants’ actions in any future conflict, but Israel’s intelligence superiority and the Resistance Axis’ reluctance to escalate ultimately gave the self-professed Jewish State a major edge. The present state of affairs is such that Israel is indisputably winning the latest war with Lebanon.

Its audacious pager attack disrupted Hezbollah’s chain of command and operations, which Israel then exploited to hit their missile stockpiles while the group was reeling from this blow. Their chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who the IDF claims to have killed on Friday though Hezbollah has yet to confirm this at the time of writing, either still eschewed escalating due to his rational belief in MAD or he was literally unable to after what had happened. In any case, Iran could have escalated instead, but it refused.

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Harold Turner
Hal Turner Show

I think I've figured out why our "INTEL" people have gotten it so wrong on the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the likelihood that Russia will HIT us here in the USA over what we've been doing: NONE of those Intel Guys has ever been punched in the face. I'm serious!

Growing up, most guys my age (62) got into more than a few physical fights. Usually at school - or after school - over some bullshit that happened.

Those fights usually happened because one guy pushed another guy...and pushed...and pushed...and pushed some more. Sooner or later, the guy being pushed hauled-off and knocked the living shit outta the guy who was bothering him.

Same thing with a schoolyard bully. Everyone was afraid of him. He got away with it over and over again. Then, one day, he bullied the wrong kid, or bullied someone again who had finally had enough, and...WHACK...the kid knocked the living shit outta the bully. That's us, with Russia.

We have pushed and pushed and pushed some more with this Ukraine thing. We tried to recruit Ukraine into the western spere of influence in 2013-2014. We told them we wanted to put American missile defenses on their soil. Just TRYING to do that was "push" #1.

Back in the 1990's, then US President George HW Bush (the father), PROMISED the then-Soviet Union "NATO will not move one inch eastward" if they allowed East and West Germany to re-unify. It was a rock solid promise by a sitting US President. The soviets agreed and the two Germanys were re-united.

Bill Clinton got into the US Presidency and he welched on that promise. NATO began expanding eastward toward Russia's border. But at the time, Russia couldn't do anything about it because the Soviet Union had collapsed and dissolved itself, and Russia was paying off all of the Soviet Debts.

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Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

Russia is worried that the influence of hawkish forces inside the US’ “deep state” might be growing and could ultimately lead to a large-scale conventional strike against it, including by proxy through Ukraine, which Russia hopes to deter by reminding them that this would result in World War III.

The hullabaloo over Russia’s updated nuclear doctrine is misplaced since all that Putin did was explicitly confirm what was already self-evident to all serious observers. Nobody should have ever thought that Russia wouldn’t consider a nuclear response to any overwhelming non-nuclear strike against it or its mutual defense ally Belarus, nor that it would overlook those who partook in such a provocation by proxy. Here’s exactly what Putin told the Security Councilduring their latest meeting on Wednesday:

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Nahida Izzat,
Exiled Palestinian

Any talk of "one state", "two state", "coexistence" or "equal rights for all" after the Genocide of Gaza and the decades long of criminal barbarity of those Jewish genocidal supremacists is complicity with ethnic cleansing and genocide

The best Jewish "israelis" can hope for is to face prosecution or deportation from the land they abused for so long, every last one of them.

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Nahida Izzat,
Exiled Palestinian
Poetry For Palestine

Will this nightmare ever end?
How many more souls have to perish?
Will the criminals ever feel satisfied?
How many more babies need to be mutilated?
Will this barbarity ever cease to be?
Many ask in bewildered rage and fatigued anger

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Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

Poles are waking up to the dark reality of contemporary Ukrainian nationalism.

Casual observers might be surprised that a World War II-era genocide of over 100,000 Poles by Ukrainian fascists has become a major problem in these two countries’ contemporary relations.

It happened several generations ago and they nowadays closely coordinate against Russia. Nevertheless, Ukraine has thus far refused to exhume and properly bury the remains of the Volhynia Genocide’s victims, which has enraged Poles and forced their government to escalate these demands for the following reasons:

1. Ukraine Is Behaving In An Incredibly Ungrateful & Disrespectful Way Towards Poland

Polish President Andrzej Duda recently confirmed that his country spent 3.3% of its GDP (approximately $25 billion) on multidimensional aid for Ukraine, yet it was then reported that Zelensky angrily rejected Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski’s Volhynia-related requests soon thereafter. Poles regard this behavior as incredibly ungrateful and disrespectful after all that they’ve done for Ukraine, whose stance shockingly suggests that it doesn’t consider the victims to be innocent, but that they deserved to be murdered.

2. Its Double Standards Towards Bucha Imply That Only Ukrainians Are Ever Victims

The aforesaid perception is reinforced by Ukraine’s double standards towards Bucha, which Kiev claims was a genocide despite the circumstances being much murkier, the number of victims much smaller, and their deaths much less grotesque than the Volhynia Genocide’s. The innuendo is that Ukraine believes in a hierarchy of victimhood within which its people are placed much higher than Poles, who can only be described as victims of genocide if they were killed by Russians, not Ukrainians.

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Gilbert Doctorow
Gilbert Doctorow's Substack

Following the successful Russian missile attacks on Poltava, on Lviv, on Krivoy Rog and on several other towns in Ukraine where there were large concentrations of NATO officers, high level advisers and instructors, the notion that there is any defense whatsoever against Russian hypersonic missiles was disproved beyond any doubt.

For well over a year, we have known that Germany’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock is a disgrace to the government she serves. The lady is not smart enough to flip hamburgers at McDonalds let alone sit in the federal cabinet and make pronouncements bearing on war and peace. She will never live down her remark that Vladimir Putin must change his course by 360 degrees.

However, I had always thought of Chancellor Olaf Scholz as a wily fox. Of course, I believed that he is an out and out coward, a sell-out to American interests at the expense of his own nation. His silence on the sabotage of the Nord Stream I pipeline was proof positive. But stupid?

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Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

Such rhetoric should be taken seriously, not downplayed, but it also shouldn’t be exaggerated either.

Lavrov gave an insightful interview to Sky News Arabia in which he explained what Russia hopes to achieve by talking about its red lines. The Mainstream Media (MSM) is convinced that they’re meaningless and that all such ones can be crossed without fear of World War III, while the Alt-Media Community (AMC) interprets all such rhetoric as hinting at a nuclear response in that event. It turns out that they’re both half-right and half-wrong per what Lavrov revealed about his country’s calculations:

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Marion Kawas
Al Mayadeen English

Each new atrocity in Gaza brought forth performative and useless expressions of concern from Western leaders and most Arab regimes, often coined as a “global outcry”.

Two months into the Gaza genocide, I wrote an article about why I hated the cruel ideology of Zionism and everything it had done to the Palestinian people.

At that point, most activists could not imagine that this genocide would now be close to reaching its first anniversary and that almost one year on, we would still be seeing the images of headless children, bodies draped off the edges of buildings, and humiliated and tortured detainees proudly displayed by their captors.

Each new atrocity brought forth performative and useless expressions of concern from Western leaders and most Arab regimes, often coined as a “global outcry”. With the tent massacre in Rafah, we thought that surely the world would now intervene to stop this, and then again with the horrific revelations from Sde Teiman prison and the defense of such by many Israeli legislators. But we were wrong:

This new phase of openly dispossessing and crushing Palestinians continues unabated. It not only continues but also brings new levels of destruction as in this week’s al-Mawasi massacre where two-ton US-made bombs obliterated humble tents and everything and everyone they housed. Over and over again, the grief and rage of Palestinians also grow in ways that will impact generations to come.

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Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

It’s not a game-changer, but a gamble to either de-escalate or escalate the conflict in ways that advance Israel’s interests as Bibi perceives them to be, which is why a continuation of the status quo would be the last thing that he’d expect.

Almost 3,000 people were injured and several killed in Lebanon on Tuesday after their pagers simultaneously exploded in an attack that reports claim was orchestrated by Israel against Hezbollah. Some of the victims were children and doctors though so critics have characterized this as an act of terrorism which violates the laws of war. In any case, it was an audacious attack that’ll go down in history for its novelty, which makes it worthwhile analyzing in the context of the ongoing regional proxy war.

For background, Hamas’ sneak attack against Israel on 7 October was exploited by Israel as the pretext for collectively punishing the Palestinians in Gaza through a large-scale bombing campaign and invasion, which has since expanded to include targets in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen. For all intents and purposes, it’s now a regional proxy war between Israel and the Iranian-led Resistance Axis which counts Hezbollah as one of its most powerful members.

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Naharnet Newsdesk (Editorial)
Naharnet/Agence France Presse

Hezbollah vowed on Wednesday to punish Israel for a deadly attack in which hundreds of paging devices used by the militant group's members exploded almost simultaneously across Lebanon.

There was no immediate comment from Israel on the wave of explosions that killed nine people, including the 10-year-old daughter of a Hezbollah member, and wounded around 2,800 others.

The attack came just hours after Israel announced it was broadening the aims of the war sparked by Hamas's October 7 attacks to include its fight against the Palestinian militant group's ally Hezbollah along the country's border with Lebanon.

💬 "We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression," the group said in a statement on Tuesday, adding that Israel "will certainly receive its just punishment for this sinful aggression".

On Wednesday, the group vowed in another statement on Telegram it would continue its fight in support of Gaza while reiterating it would avenge Tuesday's blasts.

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Sasha Latypova
Due Diligence and Art

(Making bread, watercolor, 9x12 in)

Moderna cuts R&D budget by $1.1B, Charles River lays off 3% staff.

According to Endpoint News, Moderna is in financial trouble. They are not even “break-even”, i.e. not generating positive cash flow from operations! This is after Trump’s Operation Warp Speed showered $10B+ on them in a span of about 18 months. Where did all this money go? Swiss vaults? Secret underground bases in Antarctica where Bancel is planning to hide out for the duration of Armageddon? I don’t know, I am not well versed in these conspiracies.

💬 To kick off its annual R&D day in New York, Moderna said Thursday that it will slash its annual spending on research and development by $1.1 billion by 2027. The biotech will also stop developing five early-stage programs, place other drugs on the backburner and focus on a handful of late-stage mRNA medicines.

Simultaneously, Moderna overhauled its long-term financial projections, and it now forecasts the company’s break-even point in 2028 instead of 2026. The shake-up will not include major layoffs, Bancel told Endpoints News, and he envisions the company staying around its 6,000-employee headcount for the next three to five years.

But, you see, according to Bancel, this is because “it’s working!”, just like your beautiful mRNA shot is working as promised…

💬 “It’s a moment of evolution, in the sense the platform is working, which is the most important thing,” Bancel said. “We just want to be responsible and financially disciplined.”

Moderna’s stock price $MRNA has fallen over 80% over the past three years, erasing about $150 billion in market value from its all-time, pandemic highs. The Wall Street is not impressed:

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Erkin Oncan
Strategic Culture Foundation

The biggest promise of the Vilnius government to its people is war and destruction.

A leaflet titled “What to Do in the Event of a Crisis or War?” will be distributed to the public in Lithuania. This leaflet, which is set to be delivered to approximately one million households this fall, will inform Lithuanian citizens about what they should do in times of crisis.

Laurynas Kasčiūnas, a member of the Lithuanian Parliament (Seimas) and a representative of the Christian Democrats (TS-LKD), explained the purpose of the leaflet at a press conference:

Not only Lithuania, but other Northern European and Baltic countries are also preparing for the ‘anticipated war’ with Russia.

Recently, Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics announced that a Russian drone had crashed into Latvian territory, calling on the alliance to discuss responses, including the ability to shoot down such drones. In other words, Rinkevics called on NATO to shoot down Russian drones.

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Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

The suspect is a Ukro-maniac who’d been radicalized by the Mainstream Media into traveling to Kiev, trying to join the “International Legion”, and even recruiting former Afghan soldiers for it.

The authorities detained a man on Sunday who attempted to assassinate presidential frontrunner Donald Trump at his golf course in Florida. He was caught with an AK-47, a scope, and a GoPro camera. It turns out that he’s also fairly well known, being a former construction worker-turned-mercenary by the name of Ryan Routh. The New York Times even reported on him in spring 2023, mentioning that he’d spent some time in Kiev and was actively recruiting Afghan soldiers who fled to Pakistan as refugees.

CNN confirmed that he posted on social media shortly after the special operation began that “I AM WILLING TO FLY TO KRAKOW AND GO TO THE BORDER OF UKRAINE TO VOLUNTEER AND FIGHT AND DIE…Can I be the example We must win.” Routh also criticized Trump for wanting to “MASA…make Americans slaves again master”, among other rants against the former president. Quite clearly, he drank the Kool-Aid and was convinced that Trump was a ‘threat to democracy’ and likely also a ‘Russian agent’.

In many ways, his profile closely resembles that of the political extremist who was radicalized by the Mainstream Media into thinking similar falsehoods about Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, which drove him to try to kill the incumbent last spring in an assassination attempt that he only narrowly survived. Both were obsessed with Ukraine, but Routh’s connection to it wasn’t just as a bystander, but as a participant in NATO’s proxy war on Russia given his time in Kiev and recruitment of mercenaries for it.

He was also almost certainly a member of “NAFO” too, the global troll network that’s connected to the Ukrainian, American, and other Western governments as documented by investigative journalists Moss Robeson and Alex Rubinstein, among others. The latter’s colleague Max Blumenthal also shared some brief additional insight into Routh’s ties with Ukraine’s “International Legion”. Those mercenaries are backed by the US Government, thus linking him to them as well.

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Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

Rarely is everything as clear-cut as it seems...

Putin warned last week that letting Ukraine use Western long-range weapons to strike deep inside of Russia 💬 “will mean that NATO countries, the United States, and European countries are parties to the war in Ukraine. This will mean their direct involvement in the conflict, and it will clearly change the very essence, the very nature of the conflict dramatically. This will mean that NATO countries – the United States and European countries – are at war with Russia.”

He preceded his words by reminding everyone that “the Ukrainian army is not capable of using cutting-edge high-precision long-range systems supplied by the West. They cannot do that. These weapons are impossible to employ without intelligence data from satellites which Ukraine does not have. This can only be done using the European Union’s satellites, or US satellites – in general, NATO satellites…(and) only NATO military personnel can assign flight missions to these missile systems.”

Foreign Minister Lavrov briefed foreign ambassadors about this on the same day, repeating the same points as his boss but also adding that 💬 “Our experts are confident that without such (Western) specialist involvement, it would be impossible (for Ukraine) to use these complex systems. These tasks can only be performed by professionals who have worked with these systems for a long time and know how to operate them. It would be impossible to train someone to use them in just a few weeks.”

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Stephen Karganovic
Strategic Culture Foundation

Durov’s recent statements which indicate that he is labouring under grave illusions about the nature of his predicament.

After being released on bail from a French prison, Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov made several statements which indicate that he is labouring under grave illusions about the nature of his predicament. He described the action of the French authorities, which resulted in his arrest and detention on French territory, as “surprising and misguided.” He then went on to question the legal premise of his detention and subsequent indictment, which is that he could be held “personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram.”

It is disappointing to see a thirty-nine years old sophisticated cosmopolitan adult, traumatised as he must be by his recent experiences, reasoning like a child. One should have expected a person of Durov’s wealth to secure competent legal assistance to help him understand the legal “facts of life” pertaining to his case.

There are two basic facts that the lawyer selected by Durov to represent him should have explained to his client. Incidentally, that lawyer is extremely well wired into the French establishment and the judicial system which is persecuting his bewildered protégé. It would not be uncharitable to say that his loyalties are dubious.

The first and most fundamental of these facts is the political nature of the case. Durov’s predicament cannot be properly understood apart from that reality. Recognition of that fact does not exclude entirely the effective use of legal arguments and remedies but it marginalises their practical impact. The second important fact that a conscientious legal professional already in the first interview would have made clear to his client is that in the real world in which Durov is facing grave criminal charges, indulging intuitive notions of justice, including the premise that a person cannot be held criminally liable for third-party acts, is a naïve and utterly misguided approach.

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Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

The US simply cannot accept that it lost the battle for hearts and minds across the Global South and even among a growing segment of the Western population itself.

The US’ sanctions against RT on the basis of it supposedly functioning as an undeclared intelligence agency “engaged in covert influence operations” are the continuation of its liberal-globalist elite’s efforts to revive the Russiagate conspiracy theory ahead of the November elections. Elements thereof earlier smeared Jill Stein as “a useful idiot for Russia” and then RT was accused of financing some top conservative influencers, who weren’t even aware of these alleged ties, all of which was explained here:

● 4 September: “The Democrats’ Attacks Against Jill Stein Show How Desperate They’re Getting”
● 5 September: “The Latest Russiagate Scandal Aims To Discredit Alt-Media & Trump”
● 7 September: “Russia’s Tenet Media Operation Was A Total Flop If The Reports Are True”

The intent was to discredit third-party candidates, Alt-Media, Trump, and top conservative influencers in the hopes of manipulating more voters into casting their ballots for Kamala. It remains to be seen whether this will succeed, but the complementary goal being advanced by the latest move is to scapegoat RT for the US’ global soft power failures. RT has proudly informed their audience of “inconvenient truths” about US foreign policy, however, so there’s nothing conspiratorial about that.

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Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter

His proposal is well-intentioned but ill-advised for the reasons that’ll be explained.

The respected Russian intellectual Sergey Karaganov, who serves as the honorary chairman of Russia’s influential Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and is also an academic supervisor at the Higher School of Economics’ School of International Economics and Foreign Affairs, is once again talking about nukes. He made global headlines last year after he proposed a nuclear first strike against Europe, which was responded to here, and just gave an interview to Kommersant about updating Russia’s nuclear doctrine.

Although the preceding hyperlinked response supported this proposal at the time, upon further reflection, it’s clear that it won’t deter the West for the reasons that’ll now be explained. The current doctrine enumerates four scenarios in which nukes can be used, which include threats to the existence of the state and large-scale conventional aggression. Karaganov believes that they should be used “in the event of any encroachment on our territory and our citizens” in a nod to Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk.

While he’s sure to have his share of supporters among the hawks at home and Russia’s most passionate supporters abroad, they’re all overlooking a few “inconvenient facts”. First, any encroachment of Russian territory can be framed as threatening the existence of the state if the Commander-in-Chief truly wants to use nukes in response, but the current one won’t resort to radical measures as explained here. Basically, Putin has worked hard to avoid World War III by miscalculation, and he won’t get careless now.

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