What Do the Western Drone Attacks Mean for US – Russia Relations?

War Isn't Peace

This essay was cross-posted on Nakedcapitalism.com.

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Theories abound that recently increased hostilities between Ukraine and Russia are to gain strategic advantage for upcoming negotiations. Irrespective, the recklessness of the American assault on Russia--- carried out by Ukraine, begs the question of why rabid poodle Volodymyr Zelensky remains in power? An American leader who objected to the drone attacks would have placed Zelensky on the back burner for the recklessness of the act.

What appears to have taken place is that the US, through its Ukrainian proxy, used the nuclear weapons treaty requirement that strategic nuclear bombers be kept in the open for monitoring purposes as it tried, but failed, to murder the President of Russia in a separate, but related, incident. Five or six strategic bombers out of forty are rumored to have been destroyed. Vladimir Putin lived.

How precisely not-constructive these actions have been is difficult to convey in words. The West’s pre-nuclear mindset, where nuclear weapons are just larger conventional weapons, now appears to represent the American view. They aren’t. They produce wildly different effects than conventional weapons do. Add to this the nuclear postures of the key players, and it is the psychology of nuclear escalation tied to their destructive power that makes nuclear weapons such a horrible idea.

One drawback to attacking airplanes that are housed in the open due to treaty requirements is that doing so incentivizes treaty participants to hide them going forward, to abrogate a key provision of the treaty. But the larger problem is that attacking nuclear assets signals to the Russians that their nuclear assets are being attacked. Similar actions might be taken were the West to launch a nuclear first-strike. (No such conclusion is known to have been drawn by the Russians).

The questions of 1) what Donald Trump knew about the attack and 2) when he knew it, are almost moot. This infantile daring-the-gods-to-destroy-us was a primary characteristic of the Biden administration’s foreign policy. Most Americans have no idea how close Biden’s foreign policy team brought the US to nuclear Armageddon in its final days. So, suicidal nuclear gamesmanship against Russia while committing genocide in Gaza? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

While optimists are still holding out hope that Donald Trump will pull a rabbit out of a hat and come to terms with Russia regarding Ukraine, trying to murder one’s negotiating partner is an Israeli tactic that signals that decapitation and regime change are the ultimate goals of the attack. In early 2022, the reported goal of the Biden administration’s war in Ukraine was decapitation and regime change inside Russia. Reports stating such were scrubbed from the internet within a few days of the launch of Russia’s SMO.

The problem for humanity is that if Donald Trump can’t see the players for who they are and the play for what it is, even more war will be the result. Mr. Trump had an opportunity to 1) end arms shipments and war funding to Ukraine and 2) declare an end to US participation in the war. His choice to surround himself with neocons is easy enough to explain. The bipartisan religion in DC is war. It feeds the MIC, which in turn feeds the campaign coffers of the uniparty. Mr. Trump only has neocons in his administration because only neocons inhabit official Washington.

Were Trump to exhibit a clue, his much-lauded interest in peace might be more plausible. As Mr. Trump negotiates with Iran, the Israeli state--- armed and funded by the US, is committing genocide once again in Gaza. This is being carried out with American weapons, American funding, American logistical support, and American political support across West Asia. This makes it an American genocide. Or a ‘proxy-genocide’ if you prefer.

The tiptoeing around this point by those who want the Ukraine war to be ended is likely less shrewd than imagined. The drone attack against the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, in an apparent assassination attempt, is the stuff of geopolitical nightmares. The ‘Israeli’ model of murdering foreign leaders in the midst of negotiations misses that Mr. Putin is the best negotiating partner for American interests that the West is likely to find. And nuclear war isn’t in anyone’s interest.

For skeptics of US involvement in the plot, the attacks appear to have required global satellite coordination which the Ukrainians do not possess. The aspirational date for Ukraine possessing satellites is 2030. From Adam Entous’ reporting in the New York Times, the CIA built facilities inside Ukraine for purposes like this. Additionally, per Entous, the war in Ukraine has been run from Wiesbaden, Germany by Americans and Europeans. The Ukrainians are the bodies that the West convinced to die in the conflict. Questions of Ukrainian agency are ignorant in this context.

As evidence emerges in coming weeks of CIA – MI6 ties to the attempt on Mr. Putin’s life, it will become clearer that1) the locus of power inside the US doesn’t reside in the Oval Office and 2) the CIA is now openly running US foreign policy. The plot on Mr. Putin’s life, if successful, would likely have brought Russian hardliners to power who would match Western bellicosity, but with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s threats against Russia are even dumber than US actions to date. Herr Merz is threatening to deploy Taurus missiles to Ukraine to be fired deep into Russia. Some in the Judge Nap(olitano) crowd, I believe Scott Ritter, have claimed that the Taurus missiles can carry nuclear warheads. The information that I could find separately is ambiguous, stating that the Taurus can’t accommodate nuclear warheads ‘in most cases.’

The problem with the Taurus, should Ritter be correct, is that they can carry nuclear warheads as well as conventional. In practice, the Russians won’t know if a Taurus missile that has been launched at Russia is nuclear or conventional until it explodes. The rational assumption is therefore that any Taurus missile fired into Russia is nuclear. And should the Taurus missiles be incapable of carrying nuclear warheads, Russia’s Oreshnik missile is its conventional hypersonic counter. If Germany wants war with Russia, it can probably be found.

An analogy is that in the US one can be sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for robbing a Post Office of $100, or to three years in prison for stealing the same $100 from a Mini-Mart. In terms of risk / return, robbing the Mini-Mart is the rational choice. However, Herr Merz wants to rob the Post Office. For similar quanta of initial destruction, Herr Merz is choosing the one with the outsized blow back. This would be fine if Herr Merz were putting his own life on the line in such a stupid way. But he’s putting our lives on the line for his choice.

For Americans, the Biden and Trump foreign policies are merging. Initial speculation in the establishment press has it that a possible reason is that both Trump and Biden are old and losing their cognitive function. More plausibly, the CIA is now openly running US foreign policy, thereby sidelining presidential prerogative. Conversely, trying to manage US foreign policy with regular CIA bombs going off that are intended to shift the policy direction suggests a rogue agency.

By favoring maximally provocative acts over those likely to cause less blow-back, the US is acting on emotion, not strategy. In one of Donald Trump’s rare moments of lucidity, he stated that American Generals and the foreign policy establishment (including CIA) have deep hatred toward the Russians. Question: in what Podunk hellhole do Generals (or the CIA) get to act on their passions rather than what is good for the US?

Continuing public pronouncements from Western politicians that stupid and self-defeating acts must be carried out to ‘send a message’ to some foreign entity misses that the telephone was invented well over a century ago and has proven to be an effective tool for conducting long-distance conversations. The problem is that the Americans and Europeans are only speaking amongst themselves. The infamous ‘echo-chamber’ of bad ideas promoted in closed forums is how the Ancien Regime West operates in 2025.

The rumors swirling that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth may have watched the attempt on Vladimir Putin’s life in real time should deeply concern every American. Irrespective of what readers may think of Mr. Putin, he is 1) a national leader, 2) who has the backing of the people of Russia, 3) with the support of political leaders representing 80% of the population of the planet, and 4) he leads the nation that has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.

Should the rumor be true, Hegseth is unqualified to clean Port-o-Potties for a living. Had his rumored efforts been successful, he would have been the proverbial dog that caught the car tire. Between the assassination effort and the destruction of Russian nuclear assets, an assumption by the Russians that an attack on Russia was underway would have been rational. This is an instance where the Russian Nuclear Doctrine is clear--- Russia will use nuclear weapons if the existence of Russia is threatened. But the drone attacks don’t match that scale.

Further, Americans should really consider how the US would respond if the leadership of Ausland (an imaginary country) attempted to murder the President of the US while doing its best to create fears of nuclear calamity. Before pushing back that the leaders of Ausland were conducting a war against innocents abroad, the same has been a criticism of US foreign policy for all of my life. So, under the Western theory that murdering foreign leaders (e.g. Israel v Iran) is okay, what possible complaint could the US have were a US President to meet this same fate? To be clear, this is a matter of political logic, not a threat. The US would respond to end the threat, even if doing so meant ending humanity.

As Americans survey their fine works--- escalating war with Russia and an unfolding re-genocide in Gaza, the question of the genesis of the conflict with Russia has re-arisen. The question du jour: did Russia have a choice but to launch its SMO in 2022? The existential point--- that even with a gun to one’s head, one always has a choice, has been the fallback cliché for Americans. American liberals (who launched both the war and the genocide) have maintained that some vaguely defined force (the UN, the French, the Germans) could have been appealed to to mediate between the US and Russia.

But this assumption is unrealistic, and the only reason that it persists is that no one promoting it has gone through the steps to explain how it would work. Former leaders of both France (Hollande) and Germany (Merkel) have publicly stated that the Minsk II negotiations were only put forward to buy time for Ukraine to be armed. Given this history, how could either France or Germany then be counted on to be fair mediators between Russia and the US? And the UN has been understood to be a tool of the West for all of my lifetime.

More to the point, who imagines that the US would be in any way beholden to French or German views on anything. Self-imagined hegemons don’t do allies. While Olaf Schulz may have imagined that the Biden administration blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline was somehow a favor to Germany, Germany has been in economic recession since the deed was done. If the US gave the slightest damn about the wellbeing of the German and French people, it wouldn’t have destroyed Europe’s cheap energy supply.

Westerners sanguine about the prospect of nuclear war are fools. The people who will be making nuclear decisions will most likely be making them on narrow, technical grounds. The path along which nuclear annihilation will unfold is explained here by MIT nuclear physicist Ted Postol. Reader opinions regarding Postol are irrelevant unless they address his thesis of nuclear annihilation. While I included this link in my last post, the comments that I am encountering, mainly from young people. are frighteningly naïve about how their lives would be affected. They would end.