ANDREI MARTYANOV—As I am on record for years–I feel better when Russian and American militaries speak to each other. Russia, obviously, is not going to allow US troops to be stationed in all those Stans, but I want to stress another tremendously important point: there IS a very real threat of Jihad and terrorism which should not be discounted against the background of the US escape from Afghanistan. We can only speculate (yet again) on the complexity of this issue, but it is an established fact that exchanges between Russia and the US regarding these matters exist and [the practice] is steady.
RUSSIAN MIGHT
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THE SAKER—As for all the threats of fire and brimstone coming out of both parties, just ignore it – been there, done that. Twenty years have passed and resulted in an abject failure. If Uncle Shmuel wants to repeat this, by all means, the Taliban will love it (more weapons and money for them).
Speaking of the Taliban, looks like they successfully entered the Panjshir valley, but that the local forces took to the mountains and are hiding. Ahmad Shah Massoud (father) did that once with the Soviet military. Eventually, the Soviets left, but the Talibans might seriously try to stay and gradually take the place under control. Yes, unlike the US-trained huge (300k IIRC) official Afghan military, the Taliban are going from success to success and have not made too many mistakes (yet?).
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China Hails Russia as “Better Than An Ally”, Putin Says Russia Must Join Forces with China
6 minutes readThe unstoppable criminality and arrogance of the US empire and its vassals has finally created this mighty alliance. Sino-Russian strategic integration makes these countries’ forces substantially more potent as a global deterrent against Western provocations.
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ALEX MERCOURIS describes the rationales behind Russia’s current superiority in anti-ship and strategic missiles, along with peerless air defense systems, such as the S-400 and S-500.
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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.