Putin’s Mobilization Speech: The Stakes are Raised in WWIII

By Wayne Allensworth

In a much-anticipated September 21 speech to the Russian people, President Vladimir Putin announced a “partial mobilization” of Russian reservists, as well as support for referenda on annexation to the Russian Federation to be conducted in Russian held territories in Eastern and Southeastern Ukraine. The mobilization will be partial; up to 300,000 of millions of reservists will be called up

Putin also insisted that he would use any and all means—meaning nuclear weapons—to defend Russian territory, the Russian people, and Russian sovereignty. “This,” he said, “is no bluff.”

I don’t think it is

Here’s the background to Putin’s dramatic announcement:

Following initial failures in the blitzkrieg against Kiev in late February, Russia regrouped and refocused efforts on what the Kremlin had stated was its chief goal all along, that of defending the Russian speaking regions in the Donbass and southeastern Ukraine. I will forgo recounting the details. I’ve stated my position on this website and in Chronicles many times. The globalist Blob, the Washington-Brussels-Davos axis, has targeted Russia as a center of resistance to the Blob’s global hegemony. The globalists hate Putin with all the visceral intensity of their hatred for Donald Trump and us, “the deplorables.” We are witnessing World War III, a war of globalization, with Russia, China, India, and much of the “global south,” along with patriots everywhere, opposing the Blob and its intention to impose its regime of sexual perversion and the domination of the Davos Politburo over a global proletariat. The Ukraine war represents one critical theater of that larger conflict.

Suffice to say that following the “Maidan” Revolution in Kiev in 2014, actually a Western-backed coup modeled on “color revolutions,” and the overthrow of a pro-Russian administration, the people of the Donbass region had every reason to see Kiev as hostile. With Russian aid, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics were established, and the Donbass war was on, with DNR and LNR militias facing nationalist militias and the regular Ukrainian army. Crimea voted — and there is little doubt that the vote reflected the actual wishes of the largely ethnically Russian residents — for annexation by Russia.

By the spring of this year, the Russians were winning the war in the east and south, taking Mariupol, inflicting huge losses on the outgunned Ukrainians, driving on to Kherson, and securing a land bridge to Crimea, a strategic goal of the “Special Military Operation.” Nevertheless, substantial personnel losses of their own, numerous logistical problems, the incompetence of the Russian military command, as well as Putin’s not mobilizing prior to the invasion of Ukraine, meant that the undermanned Russian forces of perhaps 200,000, outnumbered all along in this war, needed an “operational pause” — and they had not secured the whole of the region. The Russians have been overextended along a more than 621-mile front for some time.

The disinformation and propaganda around this war have made it difficult for outside observers to understand what is happening on the battlefield. But it appears that during the Russian operational pause, the “collective West” used the best Ukrainian forces remaining in action as the basis for organizing what in effect is a NATO force, led by NATO “advisors,” with experienced military contractors from NATO countries embedded in Ukrainian units, using intelligence from Western services to target the Russians. This army forced the Russian retreat from the Kharkov region and Putin to announce the partial mobilization of reservists.

This is not a far-fetched scenario. The U.S. has had CIA and Special Forces operators on the ground in Ukraine for some time, The New York Times reported. And U.S. intelligence officials have anonymously bragged about using American assets to target Russian generals and warships. The claim that the U.S and NATO were not directly involved in the war has been on shaky ground from the war’s start.

I largely agree with what Scott Ritter had to say in this interview about the Kharkov retreat, NATO involvement, and Russian intentions:

In the meantime, the Ukrainians have struck targets inside the Russian Federation. In Putin’s speech last week, he mentioned “irresponsible” Western politicians who casually mentioned providing long-range weapons to Ukraine that could strike Crimea and other Russian territories, and that some had threatened Russia with “nuclear blackmail.” Readers of this website know who he had in mind: the globalist Dr. Strangeloves who have casually written about “winning” a nuclear war. “Those who threaten us with nuclear weapons,” said the Russian president, “should understand that the winds can blow in their direction as well.”

Indeed.

In his mobilization speech, Putin acknowledged that Russia faces an effectively NATO army, partly manned and directed by NATO personnel — for the Ukrainian command is as corrupt and boneheaded as the Russians — as he referred to “foreign mercenaries” and military units trained and commanded by Western advisors. Russian soldiers, said Putin, face the vast “military machine” of the West. This is a different opponent and a different conflict, with NATO a direct participant in the war against Russia. Not against the Donbass, not against Russian sympathizers in Ukraine. It’s a war against Russia. It is actually no longer a proxy war, and we are in uncharted and extremely dangerous waters, an unpredictable zone where Putin is fully aware that NATO is targeting him, envisioning the destruction of the Russian Federation.

The impending annexation of the territories held by the Russians in eastern and southeast Ukraine upped the stakes in this theater of WWIII considerably. Following annexation, an attack on those territories would be an attack on Russia. Russia’s Kommersant summarized the Russian Federation’s policy on the use of nuclear weapons:

There are a number of conditions that warrant the use of nuclear weapons. They include the acquisition of reliable information about the launch of ballistic missiles attacking the territory of the Russian Federation or its allies; The use by an enemy of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction on the territory of the Russian Federation; Actions against critically important state and military facilities in Russia that if taken out of operation by an enemy attack would prevent a Russian retaliatory strike; And aggression directed against Russia with the use of conventional weapons threatening the existence of the state.

Putin has followed NATO’s escalation with an escalation of his own, one that was quite predictable, as was the Russian reaction to Maidan Revolution and what followed. Plenty of the Blob’s neo-con and neo-liberal minions knew full well to anticipate a harsh reaction. They wanted to use it as a pretext for full-scale war against Putin and Russia. Putin may be hoping that annexation of Russian held territories will prompt the West to re-consider its course of action and bring this war to a close. As of this writing, I doubt it.

As I’ve written previously, the Blob’s victory in this war would encourage more aggression around the world and against us here at home.

To my friends who sympathize with Ukraine: If it’s Ukrainian independence and sovereignty you value, that country has not been either sovereign or independent for some time. Just listen to the grotesque Victoria Nuland discuss who should or should not be in a Ukrainian cabinet as the Maidan coup was unfolding. At this stage, Ukraine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Blob, a base used to provoke and undermine Russia and expand the globalists’ reach. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has acknowledged he is ready — or being forced — to pay the asking price of admission to the Blob’s basement level when he said he supports “civil unions” between gays. “Gay marriage,” a policy that can’t be any more popular in Ukraine than it would be in Russia, would take some time, said Zelenskyy, as it requires a constitutional amendment. Yet the hapless Ukrainian president will bend over and take it — and the entire “LGBTQ” agenda will surely follow, as it is now a priority for U.S. foreign policy.

SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty Images

A “gay pride” march in Ukraine. Something you won’t see in Moscow.

I have previously called for us to stay out of this war and not to be distracted by the “Ukraine crisis.” But the direct involvement of NATO has made the situation in Ukraine even more bleak. The best outcome would be to stop this madness immediately. That is unlikely.

Is there any hope for us? Our friend Jim Jatras, in comments to the Ron Paul Institute’s Scholars Seminar hopes that there might be:

A year ago, if I had to guess, I’d have said chances of any kind of happy ending for this country or the world would be very slim indeed. Limitless tyranny at home, endless war abroad. George Orwell’s boot stomping on a human face forever but dragged out in rainbow glitter and a feather boa while carving up your kids’ sexual parts. America: sliding quietly under the Woke waves never to be seen again while imposing the same poison on the rest of the world. … My assessment radically changed on February 24, 2022, when Russia began what it called its Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Without going into all the details of the war itself and the reasons for it, I believe that the reverberations of that war are having and will continue to have serious consequences for the smooth fade into oblivion that had been our most likely doom. In a nutshell, the entire globalist program – Build Back Better, plans for Biden’s renewable Gangrene New Deal energy economy, “you vill eat ze bugz,” more “genders” than Heinz varieties — may come crashing down along with its premier instrumentalities, the evil twins NATO and the European Union. Can it be that there’s a “soft landing” to this second cold war, that the US-led so-called “rules-based international order” might dissolve as (relatively) peacefully as did the Warsaw Pact and the USSR? Do miracles on that scale happen twice in one lifetime?”

We can hope for that end. But it may be possible only if the following occurs:

• if political and economic tensions in Europe resulting from Russia’s turning off the natural gas flow become a full-scale crisis;
• if populist protests like those among the Dutch farmers continue and expand;
• if we see a grassroots political revolt here at home — something more than a debate over “Trump or DeSantis;” and,
• if Russia rebounds in the Ukraine war.

Those are a lot of “ifs” that will have to come together in a sublime synchronicity to undermine the foundations of the globalist order and bring the whole Satanic temple crashing down on the evil that is the Blob.

I doubt we have time for evolutionary change, or that elections will save us. 

We are running out of options.

Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of  The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.