Sky News: June 1, 2025
Ukraine’s drone strikes at Russian airbases on Sunday will, says the comedian turned president whose term expired a year ago, “undoubtedly be for the history books”.
As was the charge of the Light Brigade.
A few remarks:
- The timing, on the eve of peace talks in Istanbul, smacks of an attempt to goad Moscow into a retaliation which will lead Trump, he of low attention span, to lose patience with Putin. (Yesterday Andrew Korybko concisely explored this aspect of the matter, including glaring signs of a White House kept out of the loop by agencies nominally answerable to its occupant. His take repays the few minutes you’ll need to read it.)
- Trump may or may not have been forewarned of the attack, and either way the idea of the USA as mediator in its own proxy war is too daft for words, but the CIA must have been in on it for the eighteen months Kiev says it took to craft. Main takeaway? Not only will Moscow never trust Washington again; neither will Beijing, Tehran or Pyongyang.
- Even at its most inflated, nothing in Kiev’s uncorroborated braggadocio points to Russian bombing capability as seriously weakened. These strikes can’t alter, and in all likelihood were never intended to alter, the course of the proxy war it is losing.
- Armchair generals trading sagacities on social media jeer at ‘Stoopid Ivan’ being so dumb as to place his nuclear capable bombers on the tarmac like sitting ducks. Did no one tell them that under START and SALT requirements, strategic bombers must be observable at all times by visual and electronic means? The attacks were not just on Russia but on those treaties. Main takeaway? The world is now an even more dangerous place than when it stumbled out of bed on Sunday morning.
(In this regard the attack is an act of terror akin to Israel’s pager attacks of September 17-18 last year. These too were admired by Western media for their “audacity”.)
- As well as the CIA, British special services involvement – if not in the airbase strikes then in the same day train explosions – is highly likely. Ditto Mossad. Why them? Because, in one of the many strands which link proxy war on the Middle East in Gaza and West Bank to proxy war in Ukraine and aggressive ‘containment’ in South China Sea, Israel depends for its existence as an ethno-supremacist state on the US maintaining global hegemony.
Discussing these aspects and more are Judge Andrew Napolitano and his guest, former British diplomat Alastair Crook, a man whose calmly informed reasoning – and the humanity which invariably accompanies it – never fail to impress me. Weighs in at twenty-six minutes.
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