In recent news, private diplomatic phone conversations between key officials dealing with the Ukraine crisis have been released on YouTube.
The first instance was a "secure" phone call between US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt in which Nuland infamously said, "F**k the EU!":
Yesterday another phone conversation was released via YouTube, this time between Estonian Minister of Foreign Affairs Urmas Paet and High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton. This conversation features the Estonian Foreign Minister referring to the possibility that the snipers who fired on EuroMaidan protesters might have been instigated by EuroMaidan leaders (so he was 'told by someone in Kiev' during a recent visit there):
While the masses will be obsessed by the salacious details and potential implications of these released high quality intercepts of private phone conversations, the real questions that should come to mind most likely won't be popularly contemplated.
First off, how did Russian/Ukrainian intelligence acquire these intercepts?
The intercepts were clearly cherry-picked to serve Moscow's 'conspiratorial worldview' from what is presumably an ocean of communications surveillance available to the Kremlin. This worldview holds that the EuroMaidan uprising and government takeover in Ukraine was covertly backed and facilitated by the EU and US to further isolate Russia, and Western secret services are so evil they had assassins murder EuroMaidan protesters to foment the public outrage that seemingly caused Russian-backed President Viktor Yanukovich to flee office on February 21st (of course, such brutality is characteristic of the Russian secret services rather than U.S. intelligence agencies worried about violating human rights).
Here's the problem with all this.
If Ukrainian and Russian intelligence services are able to gather sensitive communications like the ones leaked, how did the EuroMaidan "plot" ever succeed in taking control in Kiev? Every EuroMaidan move and plan should have been easily tracked and countered.
Yet, President Yanukovich and the secret police never even bothered to pull the plug to the giant, well-lit stage - big screen, professional sound system and all - in the middle of Independence Square in Kiev around which the EuroMaidan demonstrators rallied themselves:
What's more, police were never ordered to protect key public buildings from being "taken over" by EuroMaidaners such as Kiev's city hall and, more importantly, the Regional State Administrative (RSA) buildings throughout Ukraine.
After all,
it was the takeover of the RSA's that was used to symbolize how the EU-backed EuroMaidan movement took over Ukraine from the elected government of Viktor Yanukovich:
Yet, the RSA building "takeovers" seemed to be facilitated rather than countered by authorities in the Ukraine. Why is that?
What's most troubling about the release of the two phone conversation intercepts recently is,
at this point Russian intelligence apparently believes it's OK to show their hidden hand:
Still, the Nuland–Pyatt leak doesn’t just tell us about U.S.-EU relations. It affords us a deep insight into the intelligence modus operandi of the Russian government.
....Where Western intelligence services like to remain in the shadows — away from the public gaze (mostly) — the Russians use intelligence operations to build their reputation and in doing so assert Russian strategic interests. The Russians are aware that by leaking this phone call, they’re broadcasting their success in intercepting sensitive communications. They’re also teasing the State Department with a more subtle message — “You don’t know how long we’ve been listening, or where else we’re doing so.” Of course, it’s possible that the U.S. recently discovered the Russian operation and stopped it and that the Russians therefore felt they had nothing to lose by going public. However, assuming that wasn’t the case, by showing their hand, the Russians indicate that they are aware the U.S. will now move to harden its communications. In essence, by advertising their theft from this intelligence gold mine, they’ve knowingly allowed the U.S. to better protect it.
Presumably Western intelligence has been shocked to discover that Moscow's surveillance capabilities are what they are. That Western intelligence is far behind the curve versus Moscow is well reflected by how Russia's move on the Crimea came as a surprise:
The truth is that Western intelligence has been out-to-lunch regarding the Russian threat since soon after the 'Cold War ended (
really?)':
The concern here is that, if Moscow is now willing to compromise its surveillance capabilities, it suggests the Kremlin believes this particular strategic advantage won't be needed for much longer. Why would that be?! You'd think Russian intelligence would want to keep listening in undetected as long as possible.
Consider this:
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama by telephone on Sunday that after speaking with Mr. Putin she was not sure he was in touch with reality, people briefed on the call said. "In another world," she said. [New York Times, 3/2/14]
Here's a clue.
Have you noticed the Orthodox Christian priests that keep showing up in scenes from the Ukraine?
This is telltale.
Vladimir Putin is in another world alright....he and his Kremlin cohorts have been for decades....
it's the world of Russian nationalism (what I call "theo-fascism") centered around the "Russian Idea". He revealed as much late last year
in his Message of the President of the Russian Federation to the Federal Assembly, Moscow's equivalent of the American State of the Union address, when Putin quoted
Nikolai Berdyaev, a Russian ideologue famed for his 1946 treatise on "The Russian Idea":
"And we know that there are more and more people in the world, who support our stance on the protection of traditional values, which over thousands of years have been the spiritual and moral foundations of our civilization, of all peoples: traditional family values, genuine human life, including religious life—not only material, but also spiritual life, values of humanism and diversity of the world.
Of course, this is a conservative stand. But, according to Nikolai Berdyaev, the meaning of conservatism is not that it impedes movement forward and upward, but that it impedes movement backwards and downwards—to chaotic darkness and the return to a primitive state.
Over recent years we have seen that attempts to impose a supposedly more progressive model of development on other countries have in fact turned into regression, barbarity, and great bloodshed."
What is the "Russian Idea"?:
Russia's Mission
The Russian Idea proceeded....from the belief that the contemporary world was suffering from a global spiritual crisis 'carrying humankind headlong toward catastrophe' (in the words of a present day prophet). It pointed to the inability of the secularized, materialistic and cosmopolitan West to come to grips with this crisis, whose historical source lay in the secular Enlightenment: in the West's rejection of religion as the spiritual basis of politics and in its inability to realize that not the individual but the nation is the foundation of the world order conceived by God; that 'humankind is quantified by nations'.
The Russian Idea pointed to the providential role of Orthodoxy, as uniquely capable of pulling back the world from the brink of the abyss, and to Russia as the instrument of this great mission. While the Russian Idea rejected the 'government's interference in the moral life of the people' (the police state), it also denounced the 'people's interference in state power' (democracy). To both of these it opposed the 'principle of AUTHORITARIAN power'. The state, it taught, must be unlimited because 'only under unlimited monarchial power can the people separate the government from themselves and free themselves to concentrate on moral-social life, on the drive for spiritual freedom'.
The Russian idea did not acknowledge the central postulate of Western political thought concerning the separation of powers (as the institutional embodiment of the neutralization of vice by vice). Instead, it advocated the principle of separation of functions between temporal and spiritual powers: the state guards the country against external foes and the Orthodox church settles the nation's internal conflicts....It cherished the ideal of the nation cum family, requiring neither parliaments, political parties, nor separation of powers. Like the family, the nation would have no need of legal guarnatees or institutional limitations on state's power and its focus should not be the rights, but rather the obligations of its members. The nation's conflicts, according to the Russian Idea, must be reconciled by spiritual, rather than constitutional, authority.
The ideal of the nation as family presupposed the need for salvation from the sinful influences of the 'street' (the West) and, consequently, from a spiritual rebirth and a moral revolution. In the course of this Russia would return 'home' to its pure rural roots, to the tsarist Rus'...
(Excerpt from Yanov's The Russian Challenge, pp.24-25)
You see....the Kremlin (which is a fortress for Russia's executive church and state buildings) has in mind establishing a "kingdom of god" on earth or, more so, a totalitarian, Stalinist "tsardom" where the "czar" (Caesar) is god's holy, annointed king - the holy Muscovite emperor of the "Third Rome" - i.e., christ incarnate.
To further understand what the "Russian Idea" is about, please read the articles on the right side of this blog under my profile with the heading, "The Psychotic 'Russian Idea'".
Thus, there truly is a diabolical logic to Putin's seeming madness, and it's well represented in
THIS VIDEO.
And the world's concern is focused on the mullahs in Iran?!
"If we presume the coming transformation of the Communist Party into the Russian Orthodox Party of the Soviet Union, we would obtain truly the ideal state, one which would fulfill the historical destiny of the Russian people. It is a question of the Orthodoxization of the entire world." - Gennadii Shimanov, as quoted on the opening page of Alexander Yanov's "The Russian Challenge and the Year 2000" (1987)
Shimanov did not emphasize the mystical aspects of Christianity; for him, as is typical in a fundamentalist outlook, religion was but an instrument of proper social organization and a code of behavior. In Shimanov’s view, religion was designed to be a substitute for the Marxist ideology as a method of better organizing of the society. Like other fundamentalists, Shimanov believed that God had a decisive influence on politics and that the Soviet state had been predetermined to accomplish some universal mission; it was nothing less than “the instrument for making the millenary kingdom on the earth.” On the one hand, Soviet communism revealed the fallacy of “old Christianity,” unable to realize its principles in practical life and therefore consigned to oblivion. On the other hand, the USSR brought a principally new type of the “ideocratic state” to the world; this was the state that perfectly met—at least in theory—the requirements of a society of true believers. The core of the Soviet system was the omnipotent Communist Party, permeating every single cell of the society, and therefore capable of carrying out an independent policy, free of selfinterests and the “rabble’s whims.” In principle, this provided an opportunity to transform the Communist Party into the “Orthodox Party of the Soviet Union,” and, consequently, to create a “truly Christian community.” In this way, Shimanov actually tried to justify the Soviet regime, claiming that it was “God’s instrument.” - Mikhail D. Suslov in "The Fundamentalist Utopia of Gennady Shimanov from the 1960s–1980s"
"An empire of the Orthodox Balkan peoples together with the empire of Holy Russia - not the present marxist, un-Russian Russia, but Holy Orthodox Russia - can bring happiness to all mankind and realize that mystical millennial kingdom of peace on earth, which appeared in a vision on the island of Patmos to that glorious apostle and visionary, St John the Evangelist. For that Millennium has never yet been made a reality in the history of the world, and what has been destined by God, must become a reality. Who will make it a reality if not those who up to the present day have been the most martyred and reviled, carved up and downtrodden, i.e., the Slavs and the other Orthodox Peoples?" - Serbian Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich (1880-1956) in "A Treasury of Serbian Orthodox Spirituality"
"My feelings tell me that someday a Slavic Orthodox tsar shall take the socialist movement in hand and, with the blessing of the Church, set up a socialist form of life in place of the bourgeois one. And this Socialism will be a new and severe....form of slavery..." - Konstantin Leont'ev
Note that Vladimir Putin became Russia's "president", in effect the new "annointed czar" (read: Caesar) of a resurgent "Holy Russian Empire",
with the start of the third millenium (i.e., he became acting president on New Year's Eve in 1999)
. This is symbolic in that Putin "rose to power" and the Russian empire began to rise again on the prophetic "third day" just as Christ rose again 2000 years earlier:
