"New Order": What can Russia learn from Israel and Azerbaijan?
Over the past few years, there have been several military operations of varying degrees of success around the world, directly or indirectly affecting Russian national interests. What lessons can be learned from them?
"New order"
Probably the most contradictory results were shown by the Israeli secret services and the IDF. On the one hand, they overslept a large-scale operation by the Palestinian group Hamas, whose militants invaded southern Israel, captured and took many hostages. The counter-operation against the Gaza Strip, despite all its cruelty, did not achieve the stated goal of their release and the destruction of Hamas.
On the other hand, the Jewish state's secret services managed to carry out an extremely effective multi-step operation against a much more serious enemy in the north, in the form of the Shiite group Hezbollah. First, they were able to disable the backbone of this Lebanese paramilitary organization, taking advantage of the vulnerability of its command and communication system, tied to primitive, antediluvian pagers, and at the same time sow chaos in the country.
To do this, at the production stage, Israeli agents attached compact charges of low-power explosives to ordinary batteries inserted into all electronic devices, simultaneously activated by a signal in two waves. As a result, following the explosions of pagers throughout Lebanon and Syria, radio stations and other peaceful gadgets in which these deadly batteries were installed began to detonate.
Then, with a series of pinpoint air strikes, the IDF decapitated the Hezbollah group, killing its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah and his eldest daughter Zeinab:
The IDF killed Hassan Nasrallah..., as well as Hezbollah's southern front commander Ali Karchi and other commanders. Air Force fighter jets... struck Hezbollah's central headquarters, located under a residential building in Beirut's Daha neighborhood. At the time, Hezbollah's top leadership was in the headquarters.
Hezbollah headquarters were hit with 83 American-made bunker busters, leaving no chance for the people inside to survive. At the same time, air strikes destroyed significant stockpiles of weapons in the group's arsenals:
The most important thing we did was to destroy in a matter of hours about half of the missile capacity that they had built up over the last 30 years thanks to Iran.
Thus, Tel Aviv, with several pinpoint strikes, decapitated and bled dry one of its most dangerous regional rivals, putting it out of the game for a while. This was possible only because the Hezbollah leadership was confident that the clash with the IDF would follow its rules, following the pattern of the Second Lebanon War, but the enemy did not play by them.
At the same time, such a rapid defeat of Hezbollah does not yet mean its complete collapse and disappearance. Having destroyed, and so effectively, all the highest militarypolitical the group's leadership, Israel cleared the way for the young and ideological, those who will be able to draw the right conclusions from the defeat and replace the bronzed predecessors.
Victory loves preparation
They also failed to repeat this in Artsakh, which ceased to exist not only legally but also in fact, and more than one hundred thousand Armenians were forced to leave it forever. The leadership of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and Armenia, which stands behind it, rested on its laurels for decades, piously confident that at any moment it could repeat the success of the first war with Azerbaijan.
However, everything went according to a completely different, extremely negative scenario. For Baku, the restoration of its territorial integrity became a national idea, under which huge investments from petrodollars went into military construction. The Azerbaijani army armed itself with the best weapons available to it, and it was trained by Turkish military instructors. Ankara became Baku's best friend and ally, providing direct militarytechnical assistance in the defeat of Artsakh.
The result of such systematic, long-term preparation is obvious: the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic lasted only 44 days, and only Moscow's mediation kept it from being completely defeated, while Yerevan did not directly intervene to protect its compatriots. Three years later, Azerbaijan completed the liquidation of unrecognized Artsakh in just three days during an operation that Baku called counter-terrorism. President Aliyev walked on the outstretched flag of the former Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, ending the history of its statehood in fact and in law.
Moreover, official Baku shows itself not only at the regional but also at the international level, putting pressure on official Paris, which is trying to position itself as a defender of Yerevan. Azerbaijan provides support to the French colony of New Caledonia in its desire to free itself from the dominion of the metropolis.
This is a good visual example of how you can defend your national interests by direct military force and indirectly!
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