A commentary by our friend Edward Slavsquat on some recent statements by Putin prompted me to take up the same subject. I would like to point out from the outset that this author bases all his texts exclusively on official Kremlin intelligence sources. But unlike journalists who prefer the position of mechanical amplifiers of official propaganda from Moscow, he has the eye of a critical analyst of the realities in this country. Defying the common doxa ― the wooden language narrative (Françoise Thom) that glorifies the Moscow administration, the Russia-China tandem and, by implication, the amorphous BRICS conglomerate ― is obligatory for anti-globalists who challenge US hegemony. Edward constantly transgresses the “red lines” of false dichotomies, causing uproar in the “politically correct anti-globalist” camp. Here he is with his latest post causing outrage among individuals in the false alternative camp:
Putin's ULTIMATUM to Satanic West: Extract Russia's natural resources OR ELSE!
See: https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/putins-ultimatum-to-satanic-west
And the subtitle perfectly crowns the title: Just as Pepe Escobar predicted.
I quote a few of President Putin's sentences quoted by Edward from the Russian version of the official website kremlin.ru:
“[W]e would be ready to offer [cooperation] to our American partners ― when I say partners, I mean not only administrative and government structures, but also companies ― if they showed interest in working together.
We certainly have an order of magnitude ― I want to emphasize this ― an order of magnitude more resources of this kind than Ukraine. Russia is one of the undisputed leaders in reserves of these rare and rare-earth metals. We have them in in Murmansk in the North, in Kabardino-Balkaria in the Caucasus, in the Far East, in the Irkutsk region, and in Yakutia, in Tuva. These are quite capital-intensive investments, capital-intensive projects. We would be happy to work together with any foreign partners, including American ones.
Yes, by the way, regarding new territories, the same thing: we are ready to attract foreign partners, and our so-called new historical territories, which have returned to the Russian Federation, there are also certain reserves there. We are ready to work with our foreign partners, including the Americans, there.
So, with Trump back in the White House declaring that he wants to end the war in Ukraine, and especially after the recent Russian-American negotiations in Riyadh, the Putin administration has radically changed its public discourse. For a while now, the US is no longer the embodiment of absolute evil, but has once again become “our partners”. Of course, any normal person can only rejoice that there are signs of an end to the carnage in Ukraine. But the reverential tone and the Russian leadership's readiness to make its own natural resources available to its “American partners” reveals a syndrome that deserves to be more carefully analyzed.
The first remark would be that Putin's generosity shows that in the Washington-Moscow-US negotiations, the US is in a much stronger position and consequently, Russia is ready to make major concessions. Otherwise, in his statements Putin could at least demand symmetrical, reciprocal economic relations with “American partners”. I mean, a truly sovereign leader should have had statements along these lines:
“Russia is ready to open its market to American companies to the extent that the US is ready to allow the presence of Russian companies on the American market”. In such a case one could talk about mutually beneficial economic relations. But this is not happening, and it is worth looking at why.
First of all because throughout the entire post-Soviet period, the Russian Federation's administration has conformed to the thankless role reserved for it by the masters of the collective West, namely that of economic periphery in a world system dominated by actors representing a much more significant industrial and technological power. Russia's political elites were unable to recover from the position of a country defeated in the Cold War ― a defeat that allowed the West to impose conditions of capitulation, namely, “shock therapy”, deindustrialization, capital market liberalization, “small government” and above all the ideology of “free trade”. Everything according to the “Chicago School” recipes of the father of “disaster capitalism” (Naomi Klein) Milton Friedman and the “Washington Consensus”.
Free trade policy was the weapon of economic warfare and world-cleansing of the British Empire, succeeded by the American Empire after WWII. Where states resisted the invasion of foreign goods and companies on their own markets and were unwilling to cede their natural resources to the Anglo-Saxon “civilizers”, the war machine intervened and imposed economic capitulation by force of arms. Remember the Opium Wars, for example?
But in Putin's case, what do we see? A head of state totally and irremediably contaminated by liberal ideology, by the paradigm of economic globalization and, above all, by the role he attributes to his own country as a supplier of raw materials to more industrially powerful states. Remember what they call such economic relations between the Center and the Periphery? Right, economic colonialism.
The very structure of Russia's national economy in recent decades is based on a model that favors the export of natural resources, which is both the source of wealth for the oligarchs under crony capitalism and the main source of the state budget. Russia's state administration itself is in the service of the tycoons who control the large exports of natural resources on the perverse model of some Third World countries.
In other words, we can say without any exaggeration that today's Russia is a banana republic serving the interests of foreign corporations. For two decades, the big beneficiaries of this model of foreign economic relations were Westerners. But in recent years, with the imposition of Western sanctions in connection with the war in Ukraine, it has been China, along with India and several other countries, that have taken the place of the Western economic sharks.
Recall that the economic war waged by the US and its European satellites against Russia had boosted the BRICS+ expansion to global dimensions, so that it seemed that the rift between the “collective West” and “the Rest” was definitive and irremediable. And that a new era was dawning, the post-American era, the era of de-dollarization, the triumph of multipolarity. But all it took was a little flirtation on Trump's part and the entire multipolarist scaffolding was instantly annihilated by a few statements by Kremlin officials.
Leaving diplomatic language aside, we could say that Russia today behaves like a woman of dubious morals who offers her own body to her clients in order to feed herself. Or like an alcoholic selling his kidneys in order to earn some money to survive.
A country as geographically huge as Russia, with a population of more than 140 million, huge natural resources, could become an economic mega-power, rejecting outright the thankless role of appendage to more advanced economies. But such a leap would require strong, visionary leaders, and above all free of any constraints from the parasitic class of oligarchs who are the real masters of political power in this country. However, with a gerontocracy derived from the former communist nomenklatura, the Soviet repressive services and the criminal world of the 1990s, to expect such changes would be to be completely divorced from reality.
Coming back to Putin's statement quoted above, it is downright disgusting to note how he is ready to make available to the gangsters in the American mega-corporations not only natural resources, including oil and gas energy resources and rare metals, but also to invite “American imperialists” to the “new territories” as well. That is to say, those that have been subjected to genocide by the Zionist regime in Kiev with American money and American weapons. Here the cynical expression made famous by Hollywood films, “Nothing personal, it's just business”, fits perfectly.
There is no doubt that Russia's state administration is deeply penetrated by the top exponents of the globalists. In addition to the well-known figures of the economic-financial bloc in Russia's state administration, meet another character, WEF Young Global Leader Kirill Dmitriev.
As a result of US sanctions, Putin has allowed himself to be pushed into the arms of Xi Jinping, turning the country's economy into an extension of China's. But now, suddenly, Trump appears with open arms. And since the two economies, Chinese and American, are in fierce competition, Putin will not be able to hold on to two chairs at the same time.
And he's not even sure he'll get the chance to choose one of the two partners. Turning Russia into a cash cow for both countries would also be an option for Putin, just to keep himself in power as long as possible. Moreover, the whole story of Russia's huge military strength, its atomic arsenal, etc. is good propaganda, but it is useless in the face of the technological leap forward that the art of war has made in the last few decades.
The concept of “Full Spectrum Dominance” appears to be infinitely more important than the “deterrence” of weapons of mass destruction from half a century ago. C4 ― command, control, communication and computers ― with HAARP technologies, with geophysical and climate war instruments, with smart dust, with electro-magnetic manipulations and the PayPal mafia in Silicon Valley at the White House, it's hard to measure your powers.
It seems that the Ziono-Saxon circles that have dominated the world for several centuries using technological superiority will be able to maintain their primacy in the era of transhumanism and technocracy. And in the absence of a country project based on technological sovereignty, on its own industrial capacities, on limiting capital and foreign goods in its own market, and on drastically reducing the export of its own natural resources, Russia has no chance to overcome the ingrate periphery status imposed by stronger economies. But because the notion of economic protectionism is also taboo in Russia, and the idea of integrating all the economies of the world is the religion of political elites everywhere, the process of undermining national states in favor of a “world governance” will continue.
