ALEKS—Russia, and back then the Soviet Union, was preparing for decades for a war with the West. Therefore, it built up strategic arsenals and depots to sustain months of fighting with the whole of NATO, without [having to] produce a single further piece. For example, you can take into account one of these arsenals, which is guarded by Russian troops in Transnistria. But there are numerous [like it], across Russia.
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ALEKS—A part of the propaganda warfare in Ukraine was to demoralize the Russian public, to trigger it to overthrow President Putin. To achieve that, many ambush kills were filmed by drones and broadcast immediately. The idea was to make the Russian public demand an end to the war and by refusing it, Putin would lose the confidence of the population and would be eventually overthrown. The broadcasting was very successful. But not the approach, that Russians would lose morale, and demand an end to the war. That failed badly.
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NORA HOPPE—Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony was written in 1941, primarily during the Siege of Leningrad by the Nazi forces. When it had its premiere in the war-torn city on 9th August 1942 – performed by the emaciated, surviving musicians of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra that was supplemented with military performers, before a starving but euphoric audience – it was hailed as a universal beacon of resistance to barbarism. The conductor, Karl Eliasberg, concluded that “in that moment, we triumphed over the soulless Nazi war machine”.
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THE SAKER—An analysis of the infiltration of Western cultural ideas into Russia with the object of subverting its hard-won sovereignty. Many youths and intellectuals have played a role in this dangerous project in which the West’s pop culture “soft power” is used to create centers of resistance and “anomie”, and political destabilisation, against the Russian government.
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ANDREI MARTYANOV—I am on record, remember? US and NATO cannot do strategy, they never could after WW II. It is a cold hard fact of life. Sure, they love to use the term “strategy” but very few in the military-political top in the US have a grasp of what it is. So, what can I say–I already get flack for my pointing out that John Mearsheimer has no clue about strategy, Russia, and balance of power–he doesn’t have a toolset, as wouldn’t any political “scientist”, to grasp it. His early 1970s background from USMA at West Point and a few years in the USAF are radically not enough, especially lacking serious military engineering background, for understanding modern operations.
