By Dr Gilbert Doctorow
I cannot say how close we are to midnight on the nuclear war watch. But a Third World War fought at least initially with conventional weapons is now just days, at most weeks away.
I look at what my peers are saying on the most watched YouTube channels, and they seem comforted that the Ukraine War is unsustainable for Zelensky's Army given the ongoing massacre of the forces they deployed in their Kursk gambit, today said to be over 10,000 men dead or grievously wounded. Meanwhile, the Russian offensive in Donbass is reported both by Russians and by the Western media to be accelerating, with more towns being captured each day and the number of square kilometres of Ukrainian territory liberated there in the past month already roughly matching the 1,000 that Ukrainian elite forces captured in Russia's Kursk oblast over the same period. Of course, these two conquests are incomparable: the Ukrainians have a tenuous hold on land they cannot fortify so as to keep given that their supply lines from the border are under constant deadly attack from the air and from Russian artillery, whereas the Russian advance along the Donbass battle lines is pulverising long standing Ukrainian fortified positions and is about to totally disrupt the logistics that permit the Ukrainian forces to stay in the Donbass.
Read: US, UK secretly approve Ukraine's use of long-range missiles against Russia
These same peers have highlighted the destruction of Ukraine's best present and future cadres in electronic warfare by Russia's missile strike this past week on the military communications institute in Poltava which is today said to have killed 700 Ukrainian and NATO personnel.
However, this seeming turning point in Russia's favour is, as we speak, setting the stage for one further absolutely desperate and reckless act by the Biden Administration to deprive Russia of its well-earned victory by escalating the conflict to a World War.
What I have in mind is the near certainty that the US and Britain have just agreed to give the Zelensky Regime permission to use the long-range missiles which have been delivered to Ukraine, certainly including Storm Shadow and likely also the 1500km range stealth missile, known as JASSM, to strike deep into the Russian heartland, and so to bring the war to Russia as the Zelensky gang put it.
That is the sense of the trip this week by US Secretary of State Antony John Blinken to Kiev and of the visit to the White House on Friday by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Collective Biden(*) is doing this in the full knowledge that the Russians have issued direct threats of attack on the US and other countries involved in strikes on its heartland using such Western supplied and directed weapons. However, patient and averse to a hot war with NATO President Putin may be, he will have no choice but to rise to the challenge.
Meanwhile, peers who know a great deal about current affairs in the Middle East, in particular former British diplomat Alastair Crooke, have in their latest interviews on YouTube said flatly that the US has given Israel the go-ahead to launch a full-blown war on Lebanon. The nod from Washington was expressed by the reminder to Benjamin Netanyahu that the aircraft carriers and other US vessels now stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean cannot remain there indefinitely, so if he has something to do, he should proceed without delay.
Hence, the Israeli Prime Minister's public directive to the IDF a day ago to move on Lebanon. Should this happen, the tinderbox that is the Middle East today may well catch fire. The interested parties in countering the atrocities that Israel has been committing in Gaza and most recently also in the West Bank now take in even very moderate and restrained Jordan, as well as Turkey and Egypt. Of course, it will be very difficult for Iran to stay out of the conflict, which in one way or another will also bring in Iran's newly declared strategic partner or ally, Russia.
In this way, a presently localised conflict in the Middle East can in a flash become a regional war that in a further flash becomes a second front to the war between the US and Russia which I foretold above when speaking about Ukraine.
These considerations of what may well happen in the immediate days ahead cannot bring joy to anyone. There will be no победа (victory) or слава (glory) for any of the parties to the coming conflagration. Only massive destruction and loss of life.
*Collective Biden is the term which Russian talk show hosts have applied to the US leadership given that the Presidency assumed a collective form when the physical Joe Biden slipped into deep senility this past couple of years.
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Gilbert Doctorow holds a Ph.D. in Russian history from Columbia University and is a fluent Russian speaker. He spent most of his professional life in corporate business with a focus on Russia.
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