{"id":218934,"date":"2022-09-05T12:00:04","date_gmt":"2022-09-05T11:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=218934"},"modified":"2022-09-01T03:44:51","modified_gmt":"2022-09-01T02:44:51","slug":"all-the-way-to-odessa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/09\/all-the-way-to-odessa\/","title":{"rendered":"All the Way to Odessa"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Eurasian integration will become an even stronger vector, Russian diplomacy will be solidifying the new normal.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A service member of pro-Russian troops walks near an apartment building destroyed in the course of Ukraine-Russia conflict in the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine. REUTERS\/Alexander Ermochenko<\/p><\/div>\n

26 Aug 2022 – <\/em>Dmitry Medvedev, relishing his unplugged self, has laid down the law on the Special Military Operation (SMO). Bluntly, he affirmed there is a \u201cone and a half\u201d scenario: either to go all the way, or a military coup d\u2019etat in Ukraine followed by admitting the inevitable. No tertium applies.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s as stark as it gets: the leadership in Moscow is making it very clear, to internal and international audiences, the new deal consists in slow cooking the Kiev racket inside a massive cauldron while polishing its status of financial black hole for the collective West. Until we reach boiling point \u2013 which will be a revolution or a putsch.<\/p>\n

In parallel, The Lords of (Proxy) War will continue with their own strategy, which is to pillage an enfeebled, fearful, Europe, then dressing it up as a perfumed colony to be ruthlessly exploited ad nauseam by the imperial oligarchy.<\/p>\n

Europe is now a runaway TGV \u2013 minus the requisite Hollywood production values. Assuming it does not veer off track \u2013 a dicey proposition \u2013 it may eventually arrive at a railway station called Agenda 2030, The Great Narrative, or some other NATO\/Davos denomination du jour.<\/p>\n

As it stands, what\u2019s remarkable is how the \u201cmarginal\u201d Russian economy hardly broke a sweat to \u201cend the abundance\u201d of the wealthiest region on the planet.<\/p>\n

Moscow does not even entertain the notion of negotiating with Brussels because there\u2019s nothing to negotiate \u2013 considering puny Eurocrats will only be hurled away from their zombified state when the dire socio-economic consequences of \u201cthe end of abundance\u201d will finally translate into peasants with pitchforks roaming the continent.<\/p>\n

It may be eons away, but inevitably the average Italian, German or Frenchman will connect the dots and realize it is their own \u201cleaders\u201d \u2013 national nullities and mostly unelected Eurocrats \u2013 who are paving their road to poverty.<\/p>\n

You will be poor. And you will like it. Because we are all supporting freedom for Ukrainian neo-nazis. That brings the concept of \u201cmulticultural Europe\u201d to a whole new level.<\/p>\n

The runaway train, of course, may veer off track and plunge into an Alpine abyss. In this case something might be saved from the wreckage \u2013 and \u201creconstruction\u201d might be on the cards. But reconstruct what?<\/p>\n

Europe could always reconstruct a new Reich (collapsed with a bang in 1945); a soft Reich (erected at the end of WWII); or break with its past failures, sing \u201cI\u2019m Free\u201d \u2013 and connect with Eurasia. Don\u2019t bet on it.<\/p>\n

Get back those Taurian lands<\/strong><\/p>\n

The SMO may be about to radically change \u2013 something that will drive the already clueless denizens of U.S. Think Tankland and their Euro vassals even more berserk.<\/p>\n

President Putin and Defense Minister Shoigu have been giving serious hints the only way for the pain dial is up \u2013 considering the mounting evidence of terrorism inside Russian territory; the vile assassination of Darya Dugina; non-stop shelling of civilians in border regions; attacks on Crimea; the use of chemical weapons; and the shelling of Zaporizhzhya power plant raising the risk of a nuclear catastrophe.<\/p>\n

This past Tuesday, one day before the SMO completing six months, Crimea\u2019s permanent representative to the Kremlin, Georgy Muradov, all but spelled it out.<\/p>\n

He stressed the necessity to \u201creintegrate all the Taurian lands\u201d \u2013 Crimea, the Northern Black Sea and the Azov Sea \u2013 into a single entity as soon as \u201cin the next few months\u201d. He defined this process as \u201cobjective and demanded by the population of these regions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Muradov added, \u201cgiven not only the strikes on Crimea, but also the continuous shelling of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, the dam of the Kakhovka reservoir, peaceful facilities on the territory of Russia, the DNR and LNR, there are all preconditions to qualify the actions of the Banderite regime as terrorist.\u201d<\/p>\n

The conclusion is inevitable: \u201cthe political issue of changing the format of the special military operation\u201d enters the agenda. After all, Washington and Brussels \u201chave already prepared new anti-Crimean provocations of the NATO-Bandera alliance\u201d.<\/p>\n

So when we examine what the \u201crestoration of the Taurian lands\u201d implies, we see not only the contours of Novorossiya but most of all that there won\u2019t be any security for Crimea \u2013 and thus Russia \u2013 in the Black Sea without Odessa becoming Russian again. And that, on top of it, will solve the Transnistria dilemma.<\/p>\n

Add to it Kharkov \u2013 the capital and top industrial center of Greater Donbass. And of course Dnipropetrovsk. They are all SMO objectives, the whole combo to be later protected by buffer zones in Chernihiv and Sumy oblasts.<\/p>\n

Only then the \u201ctasks\u201d \u2013 as Shoigu calls them \u2013 of the SMO would be declared fulfilled. The timeline could be eight to ten months \u2013 after a lull under General Winter.<\/p>\n

As the turbo-charged SMO rolls on, it\u2019s a given the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder will continue to prop up and weaponize the Kiev racket till Kingdom Come \u2013 and that will apply especially after the Return of Odessa. What\u2019s unclear is who and what gang will be left in Kiev posing as the ruling party and doing specials for Vogue while duly fulfilling the mass of imperial diktats.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a given the CIA\/MI6 combo will be refining non-stop the contours of a massive guerrilla war against Russia in multiple fronts \u2013 crammed with terror attacks and all sorts of provocations.<\/p>\n

Yet in the Bigger Picture it\u2019s the inevitable Russian military victory in Donbass and then \u201call the Taurian lands\u201d that will hit the collective West like a lethal asteroid. The geopolitical humiliation will be unbearable; not to mention the geoeconomic humiliation for vassalized Europe.<\/p>\n

As Eurasian integration will become an even stronger vector, Russian diplomacy will be solidifying the new normal. Never forget that Moscow had no trouble normalizing relations, for instance, with China, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Israel. All these actors, in different ways, directly contributed to the fall of the USSR. Now \u2013 with one exception \u2013 they are all focused on The Dawn of the Eurasian Century.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at <\/em>Asia Times and<\/em> columnist for<\/em> Consortium News and<\/em> Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he\u2019s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, and Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. He is the author of <\/em>Globalistan<\/a> (2007),<\/em> Red Zone Blues<\/a> (2007), <\/em>Obama Does Globalistan<\/a> (2009), <\/em>Empire of Chaos<\/a> (2014) and <\/em>2030<\/a> (2015), all by Nimble Books. Pepe was contributing editor to <\/em>The Empire and The Crescent and<\/em> Tutto in Vendita in Italy and is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

26 Aug 2022 – The leadership in Moscow is making it very clear, the new deal consists in slow cooking the Kiev racket inside a massive cauldron while polishing its status of financial black hole for the collective West. Until we reach boiling point \u2013 which will be a revolution or a putsch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":193880,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[1035,1268,1126,1050,2462,91,1301,112,818,278,961,2200,95,70,1594,481,172],"class_list":["post-218934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-balkans-eastern-europe","tag-eastern-europe","tag-european-union","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-military-industrial-media-complex","tag-nato","tag-nuclear-war","tag-pentagon","tag-proxy-war","tag-russia","tag-ukraine","tag-us-empire","tag-us-military","tag-usa","tag-war-economy","tag-warfare","tag-west"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}