US Refusal to Give Russia Security Guarantees Forces Putin to Engage Plan B

Epigraph: "The one who shoots last laughs well!" (own observation)

So we have returned from last year's events that shook the world to this day and we can analyze what kind of trump cards the Kremlin has in its hands. After all, no matter how outrageous Moscow’s demands are, we all (including the West) understand that in case of refusal to satisfy them, shoot at the White House with “Caliber” or "Zircons"no one will, as well as shoot down their satellites and spaceplanes in near space with our new antimissiles. And then how else can we threaten the Swede, i.e. yankees? After all, to threaten with plan "B" and not fulfill it for the Kremlin will be even worse than simply getting a refusal on all the declared positions. This is a moral humiliation, compare it to another loss in the Cold War. If in 1991 we simply destroyed our own country to please the West, now we still risk accompanying this action with public self-flagellation “face on a stool”. Moreover, we brought this stool to ourselves. Putin runs the risk of breaking his own rule - "the kid said, the kid did!". Why would he put himself up like that? This means that such an alignment is definitely not included in the plans of the Kremlin. What then?

The Kremlin's plans: Either an agreement or war. There are no other options!

To understand this, you need to initially figure out what options the Kremlin had in general. And oddly enough, there were only two options. First, let's call it plan "A" - Washington accepts and fulfills our conditions, naturally with the preservation of its own face. Such an undercover agreement, which could include - firstly, the transfer of Ukraine to the zone of responsibility of the Russian Federation, with all the ensuing consequences, including its neutral status (by pushing the implementation of Minsk-2 by the States). And, secondly, it was supposed to contain a guarantee of non-deployment of US strike missiles on the territory of buffer states with the Russian Federation, including Romania and Poland, while possibly maintaining their status as NATO member countries. What Russia should have offered in return, I don't even know. Rejection of the alliance with China? Is not a fact! Agree, the conditions initially seem impossible. Only a direct and obvious threat from the Russian Federation could force Washington to comply with them, but, as we have considered earlier, we do not have such arguments that we could apply without bringing the matter to the Third World War.

This means that plan “A” disappears, and plan “B” remains - forceful coercion of the United States to peace by exclusively conventional methods, for which a platform is chosen on the territory of third countries (except Ukraine), painful for the United States, where a forceful demonstrative action is held and all power is demonstrated Russian weapons. Demonstrative public humiliation, otherwise the "partners" do not understand. So to speak, educational and demonstrative flogging of the hegemon. Yes, so that the dust falls down, and it becomes finally clear that: either it will be our way, or it will still be our way. The place for the action could presumably be Syria, where the comrades of the Americans obviously sat too long (and in the most oil-bearing province), not having the permission of not only President Assad, whom they didn’t care about, but even the flimsy UN Security Council. Although no one really knows where this flogging will be carried out and what weapons will be used, all the hysteria that will follow suggests that these fears of the West are by no means groundless. He is trying in every possible way to use Ukraine as a possible platform, but he is not doing well, because both participants in a possible conflict - both Kiev and Moscow - do not want this. And how can you unleash a war if its main participants do not come to it? The Kremlin does not include this at all in his plans, and Zelensky is far from being a suicide (although he is being strongly pushed towards this).

The starting point for the implementation of plan "B" should be the receipt of an official written refusal from the United States and NATO to provide us with guarantees of our security. After that, the hands of the Kremlin will be untied. In fact, obtaining a written refusal was the main goal of the Kremlin's demarche, which it undertook at the end of last year. Putin himself chose the place and time of this action, thus seizing the strategic initiative from the West and imposing his agenda on it. Now the Kremlin is playing number one, and the West is working on its agenda, trying to delay the process as much as possible, realizing that it has become a hostage of someone else's game, and a pre-prepared trap awaits around the corner.

"War is the continuation of politics by other means." (Carl von Clausewitz)

Epigraph: "Policy there is a continuation of the war by other means ”(V.V. Putin)

What kind of trap no one knows, but I would draw your attention to a few disparate facts that in themselves mean nothing, but if you put them together, then a certain picture emerges that is not at all rosy for the United States. The first fact is that on January 21, the large-scale naval exercises CHIRU-2022 ended in the Gulf of Oman, in which the navies of three countries took part: Iran, China and the Russian Federation (this is their third joint naval exercise since 2019). From the Iranian side, 11 ships took part in them, including the ships of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, from the Chinese side - two ships and from the Russian side - three ships, including the flagship of the Pacific Fleet, the Varyag guards missile cruiser, the Admiral Tributs large anti-submarine ship and large sea tanker "Boris Butoma".

Two days earlier, on January 19, newly elected Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi paid an official two-day visit to Moscow. This was his first foreign visit as president of the country. Not surprisingly, he chose the capital of the Russian Federation for this, where he had a meeting with Vladimir Putin, where they discussed the purchase by Iran of a large batch of Russian weapons totaling over $10 billion (including 24 Su-35 fighters and two S-batteries). 400), participation of the Russian Federation in the construction of a nuclear power plant in Bushehr and a number of other issues, among which was the draft Agreement on strategic cooperation between our countries for a period of 20 years. The next day, Ebrahim Raisi personally spoke at a meeting of the State Duma, where from the rostrum of the Russian parliament he “predicted the death of NATO” (this is a direct quote).

How close he is to the truth will become clear very soon (I mean the talks at the level of top officials in Beijing). But you yourself understand that such events do not just happen. And if one military alliance arises, I mean the newly created AUKUS, then why not another military alliance arise? And Vladimir Putin's recent calls to Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua then take on a completely different meaning. Then it becomes clear why he needed a written refusal by the United States to provide guarantees of our security, where they violate the principle of its indivisibility. If the United States can provide its security at the expense of the security of other countries, then why can't other countries at the expense of the security of the United States?

This is also understood in Washington. Therefore, they try in every possible way to sweeten the pill. Both official responses from Washington and Brussels submitted to the Russian Foreign Ministry, as we expected, contained a refusal to comply with our demands. But, if the US response, according to Lavrov, was sustained in the spirit of the best traditions of international diplomacy, then NATO's response was a set of ideological cliches 30 years ago, as if nothing had changed in the world during this time. We will not lament over this, since the authors of these masterpieces of the epistolary genre are sitting in the same office overlooking the Potomac. Therefore, by simple reasoning, one can come to a simple logical conclusion that Washington is trying to play a trivial mise-en-scene with a good and bad policeman in front of us, offering to negotiate with him rather than with Brussels. We don't really mind. Only about what?

Bifurcation point

And here the most interesting begins. As a counter move, the States offer us to resume negotiations on the INF Treaty, from which they withdrew in 2019 through the efforts of Trump, to limit the number of NATO exercises near our borders, to the extent of removing them altogether from territories that cause our concern, to limit reconnaissance aviation flights and the minimum possible approach distances of our warships in the World Ocean. All this is good. And all this suits us. Especially the signing of the INF Treaty, which covers the winged "Tomahawks", which hypothetically could appear on the missile defense bases in Romania and Poland. But the main thing is that the requirement is not met. The threat of NATO's eastward advance remains. Maybe our concerns are removed in the closed part of the US response, which they urge not to publish?

Here comes the moment of truth. Or a bifurcation point. On it we will determine what awaits us next. If Plan A is the fruit of our fantasies, and there is no agreement between Biden and Putin, then the Kremlin will publish the closed part of the US response and proceed with the implementation of the long-cherished Plan B to force the States to peace. The trigger for it will just serve publicizing the US response. If there is an agreement, then the Kremlin will not publish anything, and the trigger here will be Kiev's implementation of the Minsk agreements. No wonder Yermak, after negotiations with Kozak, took 14 days for reflection. In 14 days, Putin will meet with Comrade. Xi, and everything for the implementation of plan "B" in the event that Minsk-2 is not implemented, the Kremlin will be ready. Although Biden, deliberately trying to delay this process, took Zelensky three months to implement the Minsk agreements. This became known from their telephone conversation on January 27, during which Biden presented Zelensky with his main argument - the offshore accounts of his first assistants Shefir and Tymoshenko, after which the pianist fell into a sad thoughtfulness.

War is nonsense, the main thing is maneuvers

I don't know if you noticed, but there is an unprecedented concentration of forces at sea, on land and in the air at the moment. Significant contingents of troops even from the Eastern Military District, including the 10th separate brigade of marines of the Pacific Fleet, two divisions of the S-2022 Triumph air defense system, a division of the Pantsir-S155 air defense missile system, the Iskander-M OTRK brigade, 400 Su-1S fighters, 12 Su-35SM attack aircraft, not counting other cannon and rocket artillery. Russian S-11s, deployed along the front, firmly closed the sky over the entire territory of Nezalezhnaya. No one is going to attack her, but just in case, so as not to indulge. And why should she indulge when only on January 25 did the exercises of the Western Military District end, which took place at the training grounds of the Belgorod, Voronezh, Smolensk and Bryansk regions, where about 400 thousand military personnel and about three hundred combat units took part equipment, including the Iskander-M.

On February 3, large naval exercises began with the forces of the Northern and Baltic Fleets in the northeast Atlantic off the coast of Great Britain. The missile cruiser "Marshal Ustinov" (project 1164 "Atlant"), the multi-purpose frigate URO "Admiral Kasatonov" (project 22350), the large anti-submarine ship (BPK) "Vice-Admiral Kulakov" (project 1155) and a medium sea tanker take part in them "Vyazma" (project REF-675), representing the Northern Fleet, as well as two URO corvettes from the Baltic "Resistant" and "Savvy" (project 20380). The exercises, during which rocket firing and bombing by the forces of the Aerospace Forces are planned, will last until February 8. The exercise area is closed to all ships and aircraft for 5 days.

In addition, the Russian Defense Ministry warned that from January to February inclusive, large-scale exercises will be held around the world "in all areas of responsibility" of the Russian Navy by the forces of all 4 fleets of the Russian Federation, in which 140 ships, more than 60 aircraft, 1 thousand units of military equipment and about 10 thousand soldiers and sailors. Separate exercises will be held in the Mediterranean, North and Okhotsk Seas, in the Pacific Ocean and in the northeastern part of the Atlantic. I have already spoken about the exercises in the Gulf of Oman, which took place from January 18 to 22 with the participation of the Chinese and Iranian navies and three ships of the Pacific Fleet. All the ships of all fleets declared for the exercises are already at sea, almost no one is left at the bases, including Vilyuchinsk - the base of SSBNs and SSBNs of the Pacific Fleet. Putin is all set! It hasn't been like this for a long time. From the war. The implementation of plan "B" can only be canceled by the implementation of plan "A".

In fact, the States are not even sitting on a twine, but on a Roman chair - there is also Comrade. Xi pulls them in one place. And Biden's pants are not rubber! They can break. And in the most inappropriate place.

As events unfold, I will keep you updated. Because the scenario I have described is not final, the players involved in it make their own adjustments, and we are just spectators of this performance and plan “B” will most likely not be limited, other options are possible (Biden has already 18 of them!) . And in the next text, I will talk about Putin's plan "C", which generally completely breaks plan "B", which we were trying to draw here.