RUSSIA & NOVOROSSIYA

THE SAKER—The quick way to summarize this development is to say that both the S-500 and the Zircon have no comparable competitors anywhere in the world, not even vaguely comparable ones. Both the S-500 and the Zircon missiles are way, waaaay ahead of any other weapons system in their categories. Even better, the Empire has nothing, and really I mean absolutely nothing, it could oppose to either one of these weapons systems. And with not too much hyperbole, it would be fair to say that, once fully deployed, the S-500 will make most of the US/NATO aviation and tactical/operational and even some strategic missiles completely obsolete. As for the Zircon, it does the same thing to the USN’s surface fleet. To say that this is huge would be an understatement, especially since US/NATO force planners must now decide what to do about this, and that is no small task considering that is now becoming obvious that US/NATO force planners made some truly major mistakes in their assumptions about what the modern 21st century battlefield will really look like.

PEPE ESCOBAR—The prequel to Sea Breeze took place last week, via a farcical Britannia Rules The Waves stunt enacted like a Monty Python sketch – yet with potentially explosive overtones.

Imagine waiting at a bus stop somewhere in Kent and finding a soggy blob – nearly 50 pages – of secret documents in a trash bin detailing Ministry of Defense elaborations on the explicitly provocative deployment of the Defender destroyer off Sebastopol, in the Crimean coast.

Even a BBC journalist embedded with the destroyer smashed the official London spin that this was a mere “innocent passage”. Moreover, the Defender weapons were fully loaded – as it advanced two nautical miles inside Russian waters. Moscow released a video documenting the stunt.

RJ Eskow and Max Blumenthal discuss the recent Biden/Putin summit, and the (as expected) abominable know-nothng warmongering attitude of the mainstream media. 

GLENN GREENWALD—In sum, ruled the court, Rachel Maddow is among those “speakers whose statements cannot reasonably be interpreted as allegations of fact.” Despite Maddow’s use of the word “literally” to accuse OAN of being a “paid Russian propaganda” outlet, the court dismissed the lawsuit on the ground that, given Maddow’s conduct and her audience’s awareness of who she is and what she does, “the Court finds that the contested statement is an opinion that cannot serve as the basis for a defamation claim.”

What makes this particularly notable and ironic is that a similar argument was made a year later by lawyers for Fox News when defending a segment that appeared on the program of its highest-rated program, Tucker Carlson Tonight. That was part of a lawsuit brought by the former model Karen McDougal, who claimed Carlson slandered her by saying she “extorted” former President Trump by demanding payments in exchange for her silence about an extramarital affair she claimed to have with him.

ERIC ZUESSE—The views of Alexei Navalny in Russia and in the United States are virtually opposites of each other.

In America, for example, on June 20th, the New York Times headlined “U.S. Preparing More Sanctions Against Russia, Sullivan Says”, and sub-headlined “The national security adviser raised the issue of more penalties in the poisoning of Aleksei A. Navalny days after President Biden met with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.” The Hill online bannered “Sullivan says US preparing more Russia sanctions over Navalny”, and the “Best” or most popular of the many hundreds of reader-comments was “Putin is too chickenshit to face Navalny in an election”. In other words, the view is: Putin is aiming to kill Navalny because Navalny represents democracy and Putin is the dictator. That is the dominant view of Navalny not only in the United States but in its allied countries.