Why did Biden urgently need a meeting with Putin?

МОСКВА, 08 мая 2021, Институт РУССТРАТ.

Describing the situation, and in continuation of the never-ending topic of the Russian Federation’s build-up of forces and means along the western borders (even with their declared “withdrawal” and a beautiful picture on TV), I want to draw attention to one essential detail. This geopolitical moment is completely overlooked and is not found either in official analytical assessments or in the expert community.

Let’s start briefly and casually around this topic with the nearest concentric circles and smoothly find ourselves in the centre.

Touching on the issue of border aggravation in casual communication with active military personnel of different levels, there was a determination of interesting shades everywhere. Everyone had and still has a confident expectation of a likely, in their feelings, upcoming start. The powerful roar of the Russian state machine emanated from the people at all these hierarchical levels.

What in the official media version was described in everyday words as “a control check of combat capability for the winter training period”, according to my estimates, was a real concentration of unprecedented forces and means for a breakthrough. In my opinion, there was too thorough, excessive for “just” intimidation, training of the rear services.

Yes, it is possible to build up a “powerful fist as a political argument” and to prevent any provocations, from Donbass and further everywhere. But, some of the key details, some of which, for obvious reasons, we will not voice, were not being talked about at all, or not only them.

As far as I can see, pulling military medics from leave, the deployment of an excess of military medical infrastructure, the involvement of the entire logistics complex, looked unprecedented and clearly aimed at a real campaign.

Also, only for intimidation, for example, they do not pull out the bulk of pipeline troops with a full, many-kilometre supply of pipes from the places of new deployment (which was periodically shown here and there in general access) and other points that we will not mention here. After all, it is precisely the rear and the accumulated surplus of amphibious transport facilities that are the worst omen for some people, let’s not point the finger.

And such a degree of determination, according to my estimates, has not gone anywhere with the current decrease in the degree of intensity, with the announcement of the withdrawal of troops from the “exercises”. Only a certain part was taken away, as in 2014. Back then they “left”, without packing up the ready-made camps with reserves of ammunition and lubricants, which became a platform for pinpoint covert transfers of Russian troops.

The grouping concentrated for March 2021 was quite enough for the potential to reach not only Kiev, or the border of Ukraine and Poland, but the shores of foggy Albion, and this is not just my “speculation”.

At the moment, only a whole army (41st), with all the rear units and warehouses officially leave, “according to legend” until the passage of the “Zapad” exercise, the announced dates of which are indicated for September. Plus, those who are in tune with the topic frankly grin about the declared number of these “exercises”, hinting at the richness of equipment and personnel, close to “Vostok 18″, the largest manoeuvres since 1981.

Add here, as it seems to me, the 2nd Guards Combined Arms Red Banner Army, which is not going anywhere, and the picture emerges that those formations that do not have to be moved from far-away places of permanent deployment are left. Well, and it won’t take long at all for the 1st Guards Tank Army to catch up with the Western strategic direction.

Most likely, the other units deployed in that direction, stationed a little further away, and eluding attention, I think, will also leave. After all, as I have already noted above, the forces and resources collected there are innumerably more than can be found in any official information. Among them, at least one battalion tactical group will not be touched for withdrawal, and maybe even more, with the rear and, most importantly, with supplies of everything that’s needed.

While for many units located directly at the borders, the withdrawal will be only for personnel stuff, with the abandonment of all equipment and infrastructure. I.e., it becomes possible to transfer personnel within a maximum of half a day to their equipment and to reactivate them in a matter of hours. And all of this can now be done secretly.

We see a beautiful TV picture of the return of equipment, as we saw before the trains going to the West. That’s right, that’s how it should be. A real campaign is not started like this, with such a noise covering it in the mass media, including online.

All this hype, all these continuously running manoeuvres, are intended only to disguise the real move, if it is given the go-ahead. Make it hidden and completely unexpected. And even with the withdrawal, the remaining forces and resources will still be enough to solve any problems in this theatre.

Why did Biden blink? Because this tension, the muscle of the young Russian statehood, was well felt at the top in the West. Therefore, appeals with calls to “discuss everything”, and the withdrawal of ships, so as not to fall under the real batch, and many other points.

Among them, unprecedented pressure on the dull clown with a summons to the carpet. Both from Macron and Merkel, who called at the end of this Parisian thrashing and announced to Zelensky that she fully supports the line of the French president’s party. As my French sources say, they quarrelled completely, the whole meeting was held in raised tones. What kind of joint photo sessions and access to the press are there if Macron doesn’t even want to say hello to Zelensky anymore.

Zelensky waved off (and this is known for certain, as well as about his current non-handshakeability in Paris) the argument of “richness of vector” presented by his advisers. This is so customary for “this is not even a state”: if the positions of Paris and Berlin continue to be too friendly to Moscow, then for Ukraine the main strategic ally will be the US.

Of course, for France and Germany, such threats mean a complete diplomatic loss. The death of the Normandy Format and the Minsk Platform for them is a sign of their own inability to finish what they started.

Europe needs, like air, to fill this fire in the south-east. The iron fist of Moscow raised in this direction made them flail like eels in a frying pan. But they can do nothing with Kiev. And now the clowns sitting in the ancient Russian capital would like to receive from America the status of a special ally outside of NATO, with all the resulting security guarantees. They especially hoped for the return of the globalists to the levers of control in the Oval Office. Here is the same raised fist that does not allow this to be realised.

Because if there is only progress towards this, or a number of other certain factors that go beyond the red line we have drawn, the onslaught of Moscow will be lightning-fast and disarming.

The oil painting is as follows. The work of the entire line of missile troops (except for tactical and, of course, strategic nuclear weapons) on headquarters, airfields, warehouses and other important military infrastructure, the locations of the air defence systems (which will not remain by the end of the first few hours). Buk-type air defence systems may live a little longer. There is no really combat-ready “Tor” on the Ukrainian balance, we don’t really care about the rest.

No one is going to play “head-on” with them in breaking the defence. Direct combat contact is the exception, not the rule. Comprehensive fire damage, continuously, based on constantly incoming intelligence and target designation. Manoeuvre, evasions, outflankings, fire, defeat by artillery and aviation. Active work of all kinds of special forces formations.

There’s plenty of room. The territory is large, all tank-accessible, there are places where the 1st Guards Tank Army can be deployed, the enemy has few troops, there are no dense orders and there won’t be any. This is how I see it, as well as some other experts (for example, here).

Of course, in the elites of the West for the last quarter of a century, although there was a negative selection, the military elite in some places retained their sanity and a real assessment of the situation – the profession obliges. And with such a lightning deployment of an unprecedented strike force, everything became perfectly clear to them, and the signals continuously travel from them to the political top. To understand, based on the “spherical cow” and some greenhouse conditions, to focus something like this in the same direction, the Americans need at least six months.

So how realistic is it that we will use the option of force? Will we finally crack this pseudo-statehood, this “anti-Russia”, multiply it by zero, like an abscess, and its armed forces? To create in this place a loose confederate entity, with the ability of each subject to determine both language and economic policy.

It’s these same Minsk principles, but in an expanded format. And there, someone may already even start reaching out to Russia, right up to reunification (the Crimean issue becomes completely out of the question). Well, and someone, like some miniature conservations of Westerners will also do it to Hungary, or to Poland, which in advance can be, like a bone, thrown to the same Poland, so that it does not interfere, or even contributes to it invisibly. Not to mention Hungary.  How real it is? If even the military has an expectation of very likely actions, as it seems to them.

To answer this question, we will go from a completely different angle, including the geographical one. In the current global confrontation, we stand back to back with our Asian neighbour, great China, feeling the undoubted reliability of the rear. This is our fully-fledged strategic Ally with a capital letter. Your humble servant has been talking about the inevitable formation of such a thing for more than a decade. And this has been a given for many years, only getting stronger every year.

But those to whom our union is across the throat, and in the literal sense of death is similar, will try through all possible resources to cast their negative media confusion on it. That’s why there is so much nonsense around our relations, pushed into our heads through controlled online platforms, with the launch of the effect of rumours, word of mouth.

All the well-known PR about China either completely contradict the reality given to us in sensations, facts and figures – China will absorb, China will attack, China needs expansion into Siberia, and so on, or, already recognising the impending reality, they try in every possible way to belittle its significance with such constructs as “a raw material appendage of mighty China”, “its colony” and others like them.

More than one voluminous study can be devoted to countering these information waves, these media troubles of hybrid warfare. Based on figures and facts, I have them. But we will not go into this now, the format does not allow us to inflate it into a few more good dozens of pages.

We will simply find ourselves in the real world, where strategic allies have unprecedented mutual understanding and support. Including the military, with the cover of missile defence systems, where Russia shares its unsurpassed technological capabilities.

And in the interests of this reality, in its political part, such a deep alliance is not announced to the whole world and is not sealed with demonstrative officialdom. Yet. This leaves much more flexibility. If one of the parties is subjected to increased pressure as a result of a serious escalation, the other retains a certain freedom of action and the ability to help.

The closest example of this is Crimea, which has been under severe sanctions pressure for a year or two after its reunification, and the role of China in unblocking it, where the matter is far from being limited to the energy bridge alone.

So, our allies have their own Crimea ahead, their own emergency situation of sharp aggravation. A new Chinese election cycle is approaching in 2022. The intra-clan struggle there is growing in earnest, often spilling out through the political framework. Resulting, on the one hand, in the jailing and decapitation of elite groups; on the other, in outright sabotage and man-made blackouts of entire regions and cities. With the coming to power in the US of the Democrats, who have direct ties with the clans tied to the West, all this canvas is only growing.

If Trump squeezed the Middle Kingdom on the external contours, with a war of sanctions and duties, then now a stake was placed on undermining from within. With the simultaneous fuelling of the Komsomol Members’ clan and increasing pressure, including sanctions, on the elite groups around Comrade Xi.

The very existence of Taiwan, in its current form, is a deep-seated bomb under the Chinese world. This is such an anti-China, a kind of showcase advertising how the Chinese would live under Western rule. We do not lose sight of its military-strategic importance, as a springboard for striking at mainland China and deploying the entire line of American missile troops to accompany it.

If those reforms and legislative changes on the declaration of independence and self-identification of the island’s inhabitants are implemented by the current pro-American regime, China will face huge problems in the near future. And there is no need to go to a fortune teller to know that in Taiwan there is a regime. The pro-Chinese forces who lost the political struggle were subjected to mass political repression, many of them were put in prison, and the leader was given life sentences.

In such an atmosphere, there is a pro-Chinese sentiment among certain segments of the population on the island. Plus a pro-Chinese clan stratum, ready to greet the PLA with flowers and instantly replace the pro-Western management system. Such sentiments are also strong, though not all-encompassing, in the current island army.

China needs to hurry. The synergy factor of the Biden administration and the pro-American local clique may well give a very unfavourable effect for China in the near future. As a result of a series of legislative and constitutional changes, when a new ethnic group of “non-Chinese” is identified, a wave of separatism that is destructive to the integrity of the Chinese world will be launched.

At a time when pressure, including sanctions, will still increase, it becomes advantageous for the Chinese leadership to resolve this issue right now, before 2022, in order to overcome the election cycle on the wave of national recovery. And for a specialist on Taiwan issues like Xi Jinping, who knows all this from his work on the ground, in the border provinces, foresight itself ordered him to be aware of this.

To reunite with Taiwan for China is like the Crimean spring in every sense. And the role of this large island, as an unsinkable aircraft carrier, radically changing the geostrategic position in the entire region, for China is even greater than in our case.

But we will have to support China at this point. Protect it from the energy and food blockade. Therefore, almost all the personnel of the Russian railway troops are urgently involved in the expansion of the Baikal–Amur Mainline as a strategic transport artery.

The approval of contracts for the construction of “Power of Siberia 2” is being urgently completed and construction equipment is being concentrated for this purpose. Food and other commodity flows are being re-arranged. The Northern Sea Route is being improved at an accelerated pace. Our payment transfer systems, independent of SWIFT, are being brought into line.

The Chinese have hinted in a number of recent public actions that they are ready not just to invest in Crimea, but also to recognise it. Here we also recognise the return of the island to its native Chinese harbour, which will completely shift the world’s geopolitical realities.

In theory, we should avoid a barrage of sanctions that will hit China. This will allow us, without distraction, to create a confident rear for the Middle Kingdom, and even with our own development of everything and everything, because the Chinese market, figuratively speaking, is almost bottomless. If we were in the official status of a strategic ally, this would be much more difficult.

And here, again, “in theory”, it becomes clear that we will not undertake any real sharp large-scale military movements in our Western strategic direction while China will have its own Taiwan spring. And it needs a well-functioning rear. Therefore, it is no coincidence that our military kept their enthusiasm and fervour. We will achieve our goals as it is, and we have already achieved many, even though Russia again did not reach war.

This article could have ended on this, but I have not considered another very possible option:

What if Moscow and Beijing decide to strike the US at the same time? What if they feel ready to strike on two fronts at once? What if that’s the plan? After all, according to the results, this will only mean a complete geopolitical defeat of the US.

This scenario, of course, is interesting, but for now we will postpone it for later. Our “partners” already have something to think about.

Институт международных политических и экономических стратегий Русстрат

(@russtrat)