The future of Russia and of Ukraine hinges on the Crimean Peninsula, Declan Hayes writes.
Although the fate of Napoleon’s La Grande Armée’s Russian adventure is famously depicted by Minard’s graph, the key to their destruction lies in the almost reckless bravery of Wittgenstein’s army against superior French forces at St Petersburg, coupled with the implementation of Barclay de Tolly’s 1810 death by a thousand cuts strategy of military deception. We are seeing that same Russian maskirovka combination achieve those same results today in Ukraine, where the Wagner group and the Chechens fought as ferociously as Wittgenstein’s army and their enemies dutifully fell into the meat-grinding traps the Russian High Command had set for them on their road to Crimea. The Russians have taken Ukraine’s best shot and now it is their turn to land a hammer blow.
That is in the real world, the adult world. In the virtual world, Clown Prince Zelensky can be seen here ranting that his cronies need to be gifted billions more of dollars from NATO to overthrow Putin who, Zelensky assured us while the Wagner Group’s deceptive kabuki played out in Rostov-on-Don, was cowering in some Muscovite air raid shelter or other, too scared to face the light of day and too fearful of the fate awaiting him at the hands of the Wagner Group’s Prester Johns.
Leaving aside that Zelensky lied that Ukrainian and not Russian was his native language, the interview was bizarre, even by Zelensky’s surreal standards. Like all his previous ones, it used a green screen, meaning that it was Zelensky, who was cowering in a bunker, which is precisely where overgrown children like him belong when adults square up to each other.
Zelensky’s facial expressions only further detracted from his message as they were clearly those of a spiteful little child talking big, a not unimportant point we will return to when we discuss his Vilnius deadline and the Klitschko brothers who, given their former prowess at boxing, must be infinitely more practical men than is the punch-drunk Zelensky and his childish dreams of a march on Moscow.
Napoleon, contrary to received wisdom, knew that the farther into Russia he trekked, the lower his chances of victory would be. But so too did seasoned Russian military strategist Prince Michael Barclay de Tolly who, in line with maskirovka, Russia’s doctrine of military deception, not only succeeded in tricking Napoleon to march on Moscow but who had earlier, in 1810, submitted a plan to that effect to Tsar Alexander “On the protection of Russia’s Western borders”, in which he advocated avoiding a decisive battle but to instead lure La Grande Armée into Russia’s endless landmass and to then bleed the French dry by the deployment of small military formations, guerilla warfare and swathes of frothing peasants baying for French blood. Minard’s graph has depicted for all eternity how successful was maskirovka, Russia’s doctrine of military deception, against the great Napoleon.
Although Zhukov and many of the Red Army’s other top generals knew that Barbarossa was inevitable, all of them were stunned by its suddenness and the unprecedented masses of soldiers deployed against them in what was the largest invasion force in military history.. However, given the sheer scale of Barbarossa, which only a door-stopper like Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows The Don could do justice to, it was all but inevitable that logistics and intelligence, together with Soviet grit and Russian deception, would destroy Barbarossa, which involved the combined armies of Germany, Romania, Finland, Italy, Hungary, Spain and Slovakia, with France, the Benelux countries, Sweden and Norway supplying sizeable volunteer contingents.
Napoleon’s Russian campaign is also known as the Army of Twenty Nations as Poland, Italy, Naples, the Rhine Confederation, Switzerland, Spain, Austria, Prussia and Denmark all sent troops. And, like Hitler and his Finns in more recent times, they were all soundly defeated.
Although Zhukov and his chums most likely factored all that into their calculations long before hostilities actually began, all the lessons to be gleaned from those chapters in Russian history would be known to Putin, Surovikin, Gerasimov, Putin, Shoigu and Lukashenko, and no doubt lessons learned in those campaigns are taught in the Maskirovka 101 classes of Russia’s military academies. As regards the Wagners’ accusations of favouritism, Surovikin’s Syrian experiences make him no stranger to logistical favouritism where Suheil al-Hassan’s Tiger Forces and Maher Assad’s 4th Armoured Division are Syria’s best equipped forces and, as such, are often charged with doing the heaviest fighting against NATO’s proxies. Not only would Surovikin’s Syrian experiences acquaint him with the challenges of getting groups like Wagner and their Arab equivalents to work under a unified command but he would have fully briefed Putin, Gerasimov, Putin, Shoigu and Lukashenko on all of that. Just as Napoleon and Barbarossa would have been factored into Russian calculations, so would Syria and a hundred other campaigns as Russia and Belarus once again face another Army of Twenty Nations, in the form of America’s NATO satrapies, on their Western flanks.
And, as with Napoleon’s Army of Twenty Nations and Barbarossa’s army of seven or so nations, the Russian High Command will have an excellent idea of who the shot callers are, which of them can be deceived, which of them can be emasculated and which of them can be shown no mercy.
Porno actor Zelensky is no shot caller. He is a greedy embarrassment, whose shelf life has long expired as he serves no useful purpose. Although the Klitschko brothers would, given their former boxing prowess, make more photogenic replacements, they are not in Surovikin’s class; militarily, he would eat the pair of them for breakfast. Put simply, Ukraine’s best soldiers are either dead or decommissioned, permanently incapacitated, in other words, and they have no politicians or diplomats worthy of the name. The Ukrainian Armed Forces are a spent force that has been wantonly sacrificed for the greed of Zelensky and his NATO backers. Sooner or later, its remnants will have to see sense and break bread with Russia.
Next we have the female dictators of pimple nations like Moldova, Denmark and Estonia. Although Estonia is a comparatively irrelevant country, Kaja Kallas, its Prime Minister, has been far and away NATO’s most belligerent Russophobe, an easy thing to be when you and your country are totally irrelevant to all military planning. Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, has also been shooting her mouth off in the hope that she may replace Norwegian Quisling Jens Stoltenberg as Uncle Sam’s NATO front man. She should stick to playing with her nation’s Lego sets.
Further up NATO’s totem pole, Britain’s Ben Wallace was shocked that America’s veto has ruled him out of the running for NATO’s top-paying job and French dictator Macron is running hither and thither to avoid domestic turmoil and to make Russia think that France, which betrayed the Minsk Accord and which arms the Azov Nazis, is somehow relevant to the future of either Russia and China.
It is not and nor is Perfidious Albion, whose James Bond/Austin Powers/Sidney Reilly paw marks are all over the Wagner Group’s kabuki. There is, in England’s Green And Pleasant Land, a group of public school educated prats, who think they can play Reilly, Ace Of Spies either in MI5’s BBC or in some other front group without consequence. Russia should, even at this late stage, make it plain to all such agents that playing Sidney Reilly comes with the same risks Reilly ultimately succumbed to.
Vilnius is just a distraction. It does not matter who the United States appoints to front NATO and to further degrade the Franco-German axis and nor does it matter how many more billions Zelensky and his fellow-criminals manage to squirrel away as a consequence.
Much the same goes for MI5 pretending Russia was going to implode as a result of a Wagner column taking a day trip up a Southern Russian motorway. Although MI5, helped by such retired American generals as William McRaven and David Patraeus, are past masters at whipping up NATO’s media into a frenzy, at day’s end its hot air is no match for Russian deception, Russian steel and Russian resolve.
The future of Russia and of Ukraine hinges on the Crimean Peninsula which the real shot callers in the Pentagon and the CIA need to annex so they can strip both countries bare. The shot callers opposed to them, Putin, Gerasimov, Putin, Shoigu and Lukashenko, have their measure as their forefathers had to deal with this self-same nonsense against Napoleon, against Hitler and against the five or more nations of Sardinia, Britain, France, Austria and the Ottoman Empire during the 1853-1856 Crimean War, which had its roots in Perfidious Albion playing its usual Machiavellian games in Syria and Palestine. In Crimea, Russia has not only home team advantage but it cannot afford to lose and, given how treacherous its adversaries have proved themselves to be both historically and contemporaneously, cannot settle for anything less than outright victory from Crimea and Rostov-on-Don all the way westwards to the Romanian and Polish borders, wherever those demarcation lines may eventually lie.
