August 2023

ERIC ZUESSE—Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, didn’t demand the termination of America’s military alliance against the Soviet Union, as a condition for the Soviet Union to end its military alliance against America and its NATO, but demanded only that NATO no longer would be a military alliance against Russia — that NATO would not take any of the former Warsaw Pact countries, nor any of the former Soviet countries, the countries that adjoin or are near to Russia and that would then become a threat to become a staging-area to invade Russia. 

EDITOR—Dugin is hated and endlessly demonised by the West, and his ideas are shamelessly distorted. The murder of his daughter by Kiev assassin, his only child, is openly celebrated. But whatever his ideology may be, you can bet that the Collective West, the “Woke imperialist West”, the capitalist West and its own depraved ideology of turbocharged liberalism wrapped in boundless sanctimony and selfishness, hates him for simply being quintessentially Russian and a patriot, to boot. Plus Russians are historically collectivist. And so is Dugin, who, thinking religiously, despises capitalism as being an “antichrist.”  He clearly sees the US as Russia’s obsessive, pathological enemy, and wishes to see it destroyed.

BIG SERGE—It’s crucial to understand that the Russian toolbox is fundamentally different than it was during the battle for Kherson last year, due to the rapidly expanding production of a variety of Russian standoff weapons – most notably the Lancet and the UMPK glide modifications for gravity bombs. The Lancet in particular has been a star performer – there are claims that the trusty little loitering munition is responsible for nearly half of Russia’s artillery kills – and has filled a crucial capability gap that troubled the Russian army episodically throughout the first year of the war.