There are a lot of goings on, as the world continues to slide toward the brink.
Texas governor Abbott has pulled the trigger on directly challenging the Federal government on the border issue:
He was joined by a slew of states, whose governors pledged their support:
Republican governors are considering sending their national guards to Texas. Governor Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma pledged to do so on video. In another video Governor Stitt called it a powder keg situation, sending echoes of Fort Sumter through many in the blogosphere:
Desantis has already even vocalized plans to undercut Biden’s scheme of ‘federalizing’ the national guards to take control of them. Desantis plans to do this by potentially sending the ‘state guard’ which he says cannot be federalized. In fact, Desantis’s speech is a good one, even though it veers a bit off topic. But he brings up salient points about how Biden has abused federal authority in sending national guards to foreign lands like Syria and Iraq for obscure missions they were never meant to carry out.
Biden immediately retaliated by announcing the suspension of LNG exports:
While this has long been in consideration under the pressure of environmental groups, the timing has clearly left many declaring it an obvious attack on Texas, given that Texas is the premier LNG hub in the US:
Governor Abbott and Speaker Johnson were fuming at this obvious petty escalation:
Ironically, this is a far bigger blow to Europe, as it will ensure that Europe’s decision to decouple from Russian gas will lead to massive economic damage:
This Tweeter condensed it best:
Almost everything that’s currently happening is an incredible victory handed to the Russian axis. The wagons are circling and Biden has created a dangerous no-win situation for his regime. If he goes in with federal action, not only does he risk sparking civil war, but even at best he risks openly exposing the Democrat plan to forcibly slam in as many illegal immigrants as possible. The regime has to play it a little ‘cooler’ to conceal their rabid intentions to undermine American democracy.
Tucker Carlson hits the nail on the head with what’s really afoot:
And it’s true, just a few years ago Democrats were fervently against open borders; here’s from 2006:
It wasn’t until they needed mass Blue votes to cheat the election and beat Trump that suddenly the flood gates had to really open.
Interestingly, the retaliatory measure—which is, in effect, an economic sanctions package applied to Texas—is a part of an escalatory economic war that I long predicted would occur on the path toward secession in this article from almost a year ago, which is good to revisit now for those interested:
Consult this passage in particular:
And on cue, the latest Newsweek splash page displayed on their official X account:
The predictive programming and signaling from ‘up top’ has accelerated of late. Who remembers last month’s trailer?
Of course, I don’t particularly foresee this conflict alone sparking it all just yet, and even as of this writing there are some reports that Biden has buckled, though I haven’t been able to independently verify this just yet:
BREAKING: Texas has won this dispute with the federal government! An official with the federal government told Fox News that they will no longer be removing the razor wire established by Texas. An important precedent has been established.
But it’s certainly an ominous sign for things to come and gives us an early look at the type of black swan event they could use to thwart the electoral process this year to maintain their hold on power. Oracle Zhirinovsky had already foreseen just this:
As well as Medvedev in his New Year’s ‘predictions:
This flare-up has spurred a host of underground voices to the surface, who now send warning signs about the devastating choices the Biden administration is making. One such example is a new letter being circulated that is co-signed by a slew of former FBI executive directors:
Its tone could not be more serious. To wit:
It’s clear the Biden administration is courting catastrophe from every conceivable direction.
And following this border debacle, it was only a given that any talk of Ukrainian aid would again collapse:
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While this is going on, Yemen has hit another British tanker, which reports claim is burning and liable to sink:
Official CENTCOM report:
Per General CQ Brown Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated to ABC News that the crew of the MT Marlin Luanda which was hit by a Houthi Anti Ship Ballistic Missile in the Starboard Number 5 Tank has been forced to abandon ship due to uncontrollable fire. General CQ Brown further stated the crew was able to make it aboard a lifeboat, while the INS Visakhapatnam is on scene and USS Carney and a French warship were en route to provide assistance.
It further showcases that the Western hegemonic bloc is losing control of the situation, and no amount of effort is helping.
Out of desperation, they have turned to an urgent series of diplomatic dispatches all over the world to plead with the region’s real influencers. I mentioned it last time, but there have been some new additions.
CIA director Burns gets dispatched to Gaza to beg the parties for a long term ceasefire deal that would be ‘in everyone’s best interests’:
At the same time, Jake Sullivan has been dispatched to “press” beg China to intervene with Iran in curbing the Houthi attacks that are entirely unpantsing the United States Navy:
Report in the Wall Street Journal: “Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, is heading to Thailand, where he will meet with Wang Yi, China's foreign minister, in an attempt to pressure him to influence the Houthis to stop attacks in the Red Province. Sea"
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If news wasn’t bad enough for the West, the ICJ finally issued a ruling on the Israeli genocide case, tacitly informing Israel it must stop its killing:
Here’s how Canadian CBC characterized the ruling:
"In a sweeping ruling, a large majority of the 17-judge panel of the ICJ voted for urgent measures which covered most of what South Africa asked for with the notable exception of ordering a halt to Israeli military action in Gaza."
Some have noted that the ruling can have legal ramifications for supplying Israel with arms:
There are many ramifications: ICJ ruling means the UK must cease granting arms export licences for weapons to Israel pending the court’s final determination. Under Rule 2c, UK arms export licences must not be granted if there is risk of a violation of international humanitarian law.
Naturally, Israel’s ambassador Mark Regev accused South Africa of ‘manipulating the genocide convention’:
No matter where it goes from here, hats must be taken off to South Africa for accomplishing a major single-handed triumph today, proving their bite belies their size on the world stage. This article goes into detail about why the Palestinian case was “personal” for South Africa, in particular.
Dangor pointed to the strong pro-Palestinian sentiment among civil society organisations in South Africa as another motivating factor for his government’s ICJ application. Likewise, the long relationship between the African National Congress (ANC), which currently governs South Africa, and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), when both were liberation movements.
‘Grand apartheid’ and the state of Israel, he pointed out, were both created around the same time in 1948, and both countries – considered pariahs by swathes of the international community – had a long history of collaboration, including in the dealing of arms, until Black South Africans gained freedom in 1994. In 1990, a few months after Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first democratically-elected president, was released from an apartheid prison after 27 years, he risked the opprobrium of the pro-Israeli and Zionist lobbies in the US to reiterate the ANC’s support of the PLO.
South Africa achieved something momentous, opening the door for many further legal challenges to Israel in the future, but more importantly tarnishing Israel’s actions with the stamp of validation from the highest international human rights judiciary. It shows that even ‘smaller’ countries can have major impact when they show greater courage than the ‘big countries’, and stick to principles.
With this news, it increasingly gives the tenor of the entire Western bloc being sucked down a whirlpool of negative publicity and vast losses of prestige, as well as moral superiority. It’s no wonder, then, that the US has dispatched their apparatchiks to tend to the growing flames of their policies around the world.
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The last major news item deals with Ukraine’s shoot down of the Russian Il-76 carrying 65 Ukrainian POWs set to be exchanged. It is now confirmed without a shadow of a doubt that the plane was carrying the POWs, and Ukraine was informed of this fact. A quite gruesome new extended video of some of the bodies can be seen here.
As well as this security footage released by Russia showing standard Russian prison transports bringing the POWs to the doomed Il-76:
Putin gives the details here:
He says it was either an American Patriot or a ‘European system’ that did it.
We have a report from days ago alleging that two Ukrainian IRIS-T systems were hit not far away from there near Sudzha on the Russian border:
Given that a pair of AFU IRIS-T air defense system launchers were hit yesterday near Sudzha near the border, there is no doubt that the IL-76 was shot down using similar air defense systems with the support of NATO intelligence, as was already the case in the summer in the Bryansk region and as with our fighters over the Kherson region.
I don’t know how accurate that is but that’s one possibility, despite that IRIS-T’s range is a tad short and would have to be right up on the border to hit the Il-76 in the place where it fell.
Note the very interesting detail that Putin adds at the very end of the video: “Russian systems cannot shoot it down because of IFF codes.”
His stating this publicly is particularly interesting given the recent ‘shoot downs’ of the Il-22 and alleged one of A-50 two weeks ago. Much controversy surrounded whether those recent hits were friendly fire. On one hand he confirms that Russia does have robust IFF (Identification, Friend or Foe) procedures, but on the other hand the situation is far more complex than that, and he either doesn’t have the full understanding or is merely simplifying it—which is most likely. Let me explain a little about IFF, and also go into the Il-22/A-50 incident since I haven’t covered it yet, and many people have been asking me about it.
You see, Russia itself has robust IFF for its more flagship systems, particularly those integrated and networked into wider high-tech command and control modules like the Polyana which networks various S-300/400/Buks, etc., and automates their fire-controls, spreading out command and targeting functions, etc.
The problem is:
There are also many very old systems in the SMO, which are purely analog and have no integrated IFF, like Osa and Strela systems.
There are systems potentially operated by paramilitary forces like Wagner used to do with their own Pantsirs, etc., or by LDPR forces, which may not be privy to the IFF codes.
IFF codes are one of the most strictly controlled national secrets and are never distributed electronically but only installed by commanders/officers by hand with a sort of thumb drive. There’s a possibility that they are not given to LDPR or other such units not fully integrated with Russian higher command networks as a matter of secrecy.
While this would not have affected the Il-76 attack over Russian territory, it does come into play over Donbass. The Il-22 and A-50 incident was allegedly over the Azov Sea but there’s a possibility some unit as mentioned above could have played into it.
For the record, I do not believe Ukraine had anything to do with the Il-22 shooting, and this was even confirmed by some ‘insider’ sources connected to the Russian military—though nothing is 100% certain.
So how could it have happened? Here’s another little understood aspect of IFF codes. They are stored in the control unit not inside the missile itself—this is for security reasons, so that a stray missile can’t be recovered by the enemy and have its internal codes cracked. A compromised set of IFF codes could critically endanger the security of the entire nation, as it would allow an enemy to potentially bypass all air defense networks by spoofing the IFF codes, flying freely over Russian territory.
So what does that mean?
It means if a missile happens to break contact, i.e. radio link, with the controlling ground unit, there’s a possibility it can retarget its own random target without any IFF interrogation. This only applies to missiles that have their own active radar homing capabilities in the terminal phase, which the most advanced S-300/400 missiles like the 40N6E have.
How AD missile systems typically work is that, once they are fired, they are initially guided toward the target via a command link from the ground radar unit. Once they approach the target at the terminal phase, the most advanced of missiles will switch to their own active radar homing for better accuracy. That means they have their own separate radars inside their head which scan the target, and they no longer need information from the ground radar; they could be totally cut off from the ground and it doesn’t matter at that point. But if they lose the target, they could potentially go into ‘search and destroy mode’, finding a new target on their own.
During the Il-22/A-50 incident, an attack on the Kerch Bridge was in progress, with enemy missiles reportedly coming in—probably converted S-200s, Storm Shadows, Groms, etc. Naturally, Russian AD sprang into action and began firing. There is a possibility one of the active-homing missiles somehow broke radio link, perhaps by going so far as to pass radar horizon—it’s difficult to know for sure—and then retargeted the Il-22 on its own.
There are other possibilities some have proposed, but they seem less realistic. For instance, I’ve seen a theory that the Il-22’s powerful jamming suite blinded and confused the Russian AD systems, or even that Ukrainian ADM-160 MALD decoy/jammer missiles had jammed Russian units, amongst other things. All we know is the Il-22 was hit with a fragment shot, and specifically some have found square holes precisely matching the cube fragments that BUK missiles use. Patriot Pac-3 variant is ‘hit to kill’ and does not use fragments, though Ukraine does have Pac-2s as well.
If Ukrainians didn’t shoot it down, how were they first to know about it being hit? Because they monitored local radio channels, and once the Il-22 was hit, it was forced to do “mayday” calls on public ‘open’ channels with the Anapa airport in Krasnodar, warning them of approach and imminent emergency landing.
Now to put the A-50 issue to bed once and for all. No one knows for certain what happened, but what we do know is that all of the information regarding the alleged A-50 came from only one obscure Ukrainian OSINT account which monitors Russian VVS radio networks. This is the account which overheard the Il-22 calling for an emergency landing at Anapa. On the A-50 account, what they heard was allegedly a Russian Su-30SM in the area report that they saw a “burning object falling from the sky and hitting the ground.”
The A-50 allegedly was said to have disappeared from radar later, though there’s no proof of that, and as some have said, the A-50 may have went low in light of threats for all we know. Since a missile attack on Kerch was in progress, any ‘burning objects’ could have obviously also been enemy missiles shot out of the sky and falling.
The second biggest issue is that this premier tracker also placed the A-50 ‘crash’ at exactly Obitochne, Zaporozhye, just north of Berdiansk. Not the Azov Sea—but over land, in a well populated area.
The fact that one of the world’s largest planes can crash in a populated area north of Berdiansk and to this day not produce a single eyewitness, video, burning crash site—nothing—is very revealing and likely an indictment on the theory it was shot down.
Finally, the most convincing aspect of all is the fact that, though the Il-22 ended up being landed by the co-pilot, the pilot himself died from shrapnel wounds. His name was fully released and publicized, though admittedly not by officials but by family and the Russian military pilot fraternity.
And guess what?
Now, the entire crew of the shot down Il-76 transporting Ukrainian POWs was also publicly released, this time officially:
Rest in peace to the crew of the Il-76:
“As a sign of respect”: The honor and courage of the IL-76 crew deserve the highest recognition. I consider it necessary to posthumously reward the pilots who risked everything to save lives while transporting Ukrainian prisoners. They had the opportunity to escape the missile attack, but instead chose to protect the residents of Yablonovo, sacrificing themselves.
Baza shares the names of the IL-76 crew and fallen heroes:
- S. Bezzubkin - commander.
- V. Chmirev - co-pilot.
- A. Vysokin - navigator.
- A. Piluev - engineer.
- S. Zhitenev - technician.
- I. Sablinsky - radio operator.Commander Bezzubkin, a hero with an unbending spirit, was looking forward to returning home to his loved ones after service. The feat of these people reminds us of the callousness of the current regime, which does not value human lives. But faith in humanity and justice suggests that the time of the Kyiv fascist order is coming to an end. Kingdom of Heaven and Eternal Memory.
And the A-50? Despite carrying far more passengers and important crew there is not a single word, no names, no dead crew, nothing. Also, this was a peculiar little wrinkle as well; there were some reports that very soon after the alleged “A-50 shoot down”, a “new A-50” was recorded by Ukrainian sources already operating out of Rostov:
What’s more likely, they immediately replaced it with a new one? Or, as per Occam’s razor, it was the same one, which never really left anywhere.
This more than amply points to the A-50 “shoot down” being a total hoax that never happened. A plane that large with no evidence whatsoever of it going down is just beyond improbable.
Yes, there were a few top Russian accounts on TG that seemed to heavily imply an A-50 did go down, but none of them are highly credible accounts, nor did they have any proof whatsoever. So, while I do think it’s a very remote possibility—anything is possible in this world—and could have been ‘covered up’ due to the ‘sensitive’ nature of AWACs technologies, particularly in the Russian armed forces which doesn’t have many of them, the overall likelihood points to it being a hoax.
Every other ‘high profile’ attack ended up being leaked: photos of the Rostov-on-Don submarine, photos of the Minsk and Askold ships, after strikes by Storm Shadows. Now even photos of the Il-22’s perforated rudder. But for the A-50 there is nothing.
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Speaking of the Rostov-on-Don, it perfectly emblemizes Ukrainian sourpuss fantasies. They were so sure they had ‘totally destroyed’ it. Remember this?
Well, guess what? Breaking news from TASS reports all repairs will be complete by June 2024:
"The Sevastopol Shipyard (affiliate of Zvyozdochka Shipyard) will complete the repairs of the Rostov-on-Don and eliminate the damage inflicted on September 13, 2023 by a Ukrainian cruise missile strike at the enterprise by the end of the first half of the year," the source said.
Just another high profile object to remove from Ukraine’s premature “written off” list.
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A few last sundry items:
Ukraine continues to take ungodly losses, at least according to their own experts.
Here are some Ukrainian figures admitting they take 1200 casualties per day:
The losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in killed and wounded exceed a thousand people every day - these are only those who can be counted in hospitals
Kiev Russophobe TV presenter Daniil Yanevsky stated this on the channel of Ukrainian propagandist Natalya Moseychuk:
In turn, political scientist Yuriy Romanenko emphasized that in order to restore the economy, Ukraine will have to find tens of millions of additional workers somewhere.
Here are two recently Ukrainian figures begging for mass mobilization.
Deputy Irina Sovsun:
Ukrainian deputy Irina Sovsun convinces residents of Ukraine that all residents must defend the country, so women need to be mobilized “This is a matter of justice and fully complies with the provisions of the Constitution of Ukraine,” the people’s deputy believes.
AFU Lt. Col. Nikolov of the 68th Brigade:
In order not to lose the war, Ukraine needs the total mobilization of men and women 18 and over, as well as the involvement of prisoners in combat operations, - Lt. Col. Nikolov, 68th OEBR
Another tearful post from today about an entire AFU unit wiped out:
They posted a sound clip referring obliquely to how the “f*ggots” (what they call ‘Russians’) completely “dismantled the house”, which I can only assume means a Russian strike obliterated their entire HQ, wiping out the whole platoon/company.
Next:
One other very interesting story. Remember how for a long time Ukraine was carrying out the odd strike or two very deep within Russia, always bragging about some much-vaunted ‘secret system’ or stealth drones that were said to be penetrating Russian AD networks? I was one of the few voices telling everyone it was likely local saboteurs, because I know how these things work. Well, it turns out I was right all along because we now have confirmation that one of those ‘deep strikes’ which allegedly hit a Russian Tu-22M3 in a far northern base was in fact nothing more than one guy schlepping literally 1200km on foot to the base—not to mention he was liquidated by Russian security at the end:
Next:
One slightly older but interesting technical note I had forgotten to dispense last time. In one of the strikes a few weeks back, photos emerged showing that a Russian civilian in the Ryazan region reportedly found and carted away the end-cap to a Kinzhal missile:
There’s nothing particularly secretive about this engine cap, nor does the military probably even care that he kept it, as it’s discarded when the missile fires—which is precisely why it reveals the missile’s firing point. That’s the most interesting part: it was found in Ryazan. This for the first time gives us a glimpse to where Russia fires Kinzhals from, since this cap comes off precisely at the moment of firing as seen below:
What is remarkable is it’s nearly 800km to Kiev, and almost 600km to Kharkov. The Iskander-M that the Kinzhal is supposedly based on is only supposed to have a 500km range. Sure, the wikipedia gives Kinzhal’s range as 2000km, but this is misunderstood. That’s ferried range which includes the carrying aircraft’s max ferry range prior to firing. In fact, wiki says its “estimated” true range is only around 450km, with the real number being unknown. Which means this scrap-filching civilian may have just given us the very first real-world indication of the Kinzhal’s actual range, and it’s impressively far superior to wiki’s “estimate”.
Lastly, I’ll leave on a somewhat humorous note. Putin reveals what kind of people should really comprise the ‘elite’ class of Russia, and which shouldn’t: