People with doubts cause friction. Without friction, no brakes. You are ill advised to accept a ride in a car with a powerful engine, and an overexcited driver, but no brakes, unless you have a death-wish. Yesterday a barrage of Russian missiles hit Kiev. One missile hit a hospital for children, which is generally regarded as a war crime if it is done on purpose. Even our recent history is rife with attacks on hospitals. See HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE for a few examples. Which is no excuse to do the same. But did a Russian missile hit the hospital, or was it a Ukrainian air defense missile, as has happened on multiple occasions in the past two and a half years, which is what the Russians claim?
Sitting at my desk, far removed from Kiev, I have no way to say what went down. The horror of children undergoing cancer treatment out on the streets provides powerful images, clearly not in Russia’s favor. In this case there was video footage of the missile descending and hitting the hospital grounds. I’ve looked at the video over and over, and I see ‘fins’ at the tail section, and midway on the tube-shaped body, not the characteristic features of a KH-101 cruise missile with wings, as claimed by pro-Ukrainian sources. Stills from the video emerged on pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian accounts, either obviously ‘doctored’ or possibly ‘photoshopped’, and with the help of ‘AI’ every image or video can be altered, so I’m very careful to ‘trust my own eyes’ these days. Not merely in this case. Apart from the fact that I abhor watching ‘war porn’.
Conclusive evidence could be provided by neutral experts on the spot, but do they even exist these days? We need to consider four different options. First, it actually was a Russian missile which was programmed to hit the hospital. Second, it was a Russian missile which veered off course, and hit the hospital instead of its programmed target. Third, it was an anti-aircraft missile launched by Ukraine at incoming Russian missiles, which missed its intended target and hit the hospital instead. Fourth, it was a Ukrainian missile intended to hit the hospital in a ‘false flag’ operation. From where I am, looking at the evidence at hand, I have no way of telling you which option is most likely. Same thing with that missile which struck a beach near Sevastopol last week. Was the beach the intended target? Did the missile stray off course? It was a Ukrainian missile for sure in that case, armed with cluster munitions, which suggests it was meant to kill people, and not to destroy objects, less so ‘hardened’ objects.
Timing is everything. If you listen to western commentators they insist that the Russians are engaged in spreading ‘terror’ through hitting civilian objects, but that would have caused death and destruction closely resembling that in Gaza, or the tit-for-tat bombings of cities during the previous World War, and it does rub me the wrong way, since I do not believe for a second that the Russians are engaged in a war of conquest. And no serious observer is saying that they are. A deliberate hit on the hospital is therefore the least likely possibility, unless they were acting on information that at that same location some ‘high value military target’ was located. Compare to the excuse the Israelis used, referring to underground bunkers below the hospitals they bombed, used by Hamas. Even if that would be the case, the timing is still suspicious, with Orbán on a world tour trying to broker a deal, Modi visiting Moscow, and the NATO summit in Washington kicking off.
Based on timing, the moment was ideal for a ‘false flag’ operation, to destroy Orbán’s attempt to stop the fighting, to make Modi look bad, and to secure unwavering support for NATO’s ‘Project Ukraine’ for now and evermore. A Dutch ‘pundit’ called on ‘X’ to pull out all the stops, and a Dutch former general urged the NATO countries to transfer everything they still have to Ukraine, and tell the Ukrainians to hit Russia with it, far and wide. No brakes. No second thoughts. No memory.
Are western nations capable of planning and executing a ‘false flag’ operation? Is the Pope Catholic? Does the bear shit in the woods? They’ve done so on multiple occasions for various reasons. No lack of creativity on that particular front either. The ‘Gulf of Tonkin’ incident which kicked off the war in Vietnam never happened. The ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ in Iraq were never there, after Saddam destroyed the chemical weapons we provided previously. And one of the more illustrious examples was the attack on the USS Liberty, ‘designed’ to make it look like an Egyptian attack to provide president Johnson with an excuse to side with Israel, the country which attacked the ship, and which killed 34 American sailors, while an American aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean was under orders to ‘stand down’.
True believers are driving ‘Project Ukraine’, and they will do absolutely *everything* to secure their mission. They have no qualms about killing their own, because invariably they ‘reason’ that the pay-off is worth it, or that these ‘pawns’ killed prevented defeat and many more casualties, if they even recognize the victims as ‘their own’. Compare to the reply Zbigniew Brzeziński, the ‘father’ of Al Qaeda gave when asked if he didn’t have any regrets, since Al Qaeda transformed into a notorious terrorist organization, and he responded that toppling the Soviet Union surely had been worth it. Same when Tony Blair was confronted with lying about the ‘WMD’s’ which he had known were not there to begin with, when he said that ‘history’ would prove him right.
Alright then, but why wouldn’t there be people in Russia using ‘logic’ like that, knowing that the ‘Collective West’ would be up in arms after a strike on a hospital for children in Kiev? People who abhor the idea of some kind of settlement if Orbán succeeds? People working hard to make Putin understand that there will be no peace until Russia nukes the bejesus out of NATO? Prigozhin and other (real or fake) ultra-nationalists, which at one time included Navalny, were pretty vocal about their criticism of how the war was conducted. They didn’t, and don’t trust the ‘Plan’. The ‘Plan’ which called for scaring Zelensky into accepting the ‘Minsk II’ accord after all, morphing into ‘Plan B’ after ‘Istanbul’ failed, with ‘Plan B’ being a war of attrition. Now that Ukraine and NATO are attrited, not able to prolong the war much longer, and with the front crumbling, these fanatics might try to push the Kremlin into a war of conquest after all by planting a ‘false flag’ hit on a hospital in some nefarious way. Why would Russians be above that kind of ‘thinking’?
It would wreck havoc and overextend and unbalance Russia, and destroy ‘BRICS’ and the emerging economic tailwinds enjoyed by Russia, but fanatics in Russia may ‘think’ along different lines, closer resembling the ‘thinking’ of Brzeziński and Blair, which hinges on ‘Might Makes Right’, feeding on ill conceived Imperialist aspirations or blind hatred. Hence it is extremely stupid, but stupid people exist. On ‘X’ they are everywhere. No brakes. No doubts. Full speed ahead!
For someone like me, from the ‘realist’ school, always careful to embrace a ‘narrative’ calling for war and destruction, the remaining question today is if we’ve crossed the Rubicon yet. Did we miss our braking point before the next turn? Are we going to hit the wall at full throttle? And if so, what provided the last push? Was it a tragic mistake? Or a deliberate act? Does it even matter?