All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Global Research Wants to Hear From You!
***
With Ukraine recent attacking Sevastopol, Crimea using the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) considerable alarm has been raised yet again as to what will the Kremlin do in response. ATACMS relies on U.S. military assistance to aim and guide the missiles. Sooner or later, the Russians will either strike the NATO forces directly, or NATO would continue to escalate even further.
To deal with this topic, we were joined by Drago Bosnic. He is a military and geopolitical analyst, regular author onGlobal Research and a frequent guest on the Global Research News Hour radio program. This interview was recorded on June 26, 2024.
Global Research: Let’s talk about the recent attacks on Sevastopol.
Russia has accused the U.S. of supplying weapons and then putting in flight coordinates.
Four people were killed, 124 injured. The Russian people are no doubt outraged by this, and then Russia is most assuredly going to push back. I assume they’re not ready to launch nuclear missiles just yet, I hope.
But I’m going to ask you, Drago, what form immediately would the Russians take in pushing back against what is essentially a terrorist attack?
Drago Bosnic: It’s difficult to say what exactly they’re going to do. However, we already have an idea when it comes to that because President Putin himself has said that Russia will now be supplying long-range weapons of various sorts to, as he said, regions of the world which are opposed to the United States. He’s a legal expert, by the way, and the fact that he didn’t use the word state or country tells you pretty much all you need to know about who’s going to be getting those long-range systems that are going to be attacking, let’s say, American or British ships.
The point is, non-state actors could soon be getting long-range Russian weapons because of what the Washington DC and the Pentagon are doing in Ukraine. You perfectly said it, it’s a terrorist attack because, first of all, those ATACMS missiles were armed with cluster warheads, which are anti-infantry weapons or just weapons that are designed to cover a wide area of effect. The thing is, if you use something like that against civilians, if your target is a crowded beach, it’s only logical that the Russians will conclude that you were intending to inflict mass maximum damage to civilians because there’s no other way to explain why they would be using weapons like the ATACMS, especially with the cluster warheads I mentioned.
In that regard, the Russians are understandably furious. I don’t think they will launch nuclear weapons. However, the point is, this is like a boiling the frog effect that has on the Russians because at some point, they will stop being tolerant towards these things.
It seems to me that the Biden administration is pushing for an ever-escalating enmity towards Russia as we get closer to the election. We might not see nuclear weapons launched now, but as we get closer to the American election in November, this is when things could become quite dangerous because the Kiev regime itself has used the war as a way to postpone or simply cancel elections in Ukraine. I’m pretty sure that the Biden administration and its allies would like to do the same in America because there’s simply no way in which Biden could defeat Trump in a fair and square election.
If there’s any sort of an emergency or, God forbid, an open warfare between Russia and the United States, then the US would also have to impose martial law, just like it was the case during the COVID pandemic. Then they could essentially do anything at that point. They could cancel elections, they could postpone them, they could manipulate them in some other way.
The point is, the Russians know who’s conducting these terrorist attacks. There was an American ISR drone, the RQ-4, that was flying over the Black Sea when the attacks were happening, which means that the US military was directly involved in targeting and guiding these weapons. Also, the Russians know for a fact, and some of my military sources in the Russian military have actually told me, that the Russians know which American satellites were used to take pictures of the beach and the area that was being targeted.
The involvement of the US is a well-known fact in the Russian military. It’s only a matter of the decision of the Russian political leadership. How are they going to respond to that? This is where we are going into the unknown.
This is going to be the real danger for the entire world. It seems to me that the warmongers at the Pentagon and in Washington, D.C. don’t really think about that. They’re not really thinking about the possible consequences that the entire world could suffer because of their, I don’t know how else to say it, but insanity.
That is to me insanity, because why would you want to do something like that to anyone, much less to a nuclear superpower?
GR: They’re actually deliberately trying to poke them to the point of escalation to basically nuclear levels or something like that, just to avoid an election or something.
DB: It’s pure insanity. Any remotely sane person would be against that.
However, it seems that we’ve run out of such people in Washington, D.C., I would say.
GR: There was also a series of terrorist attacks in Dagestan over the weekend. Attacking an Orthodox church and synagogue, a traffic police outpost, 20 people were killed and an Orthodox priest had his throat slit, ISIS style.
This seems to resemble the terrorist attack in March against Crocus City Hall. These terrorists were trying to escape to Ukraine. That’s what the case was with Crocus City Hall.
Are these attacks then therefore linked to Ukraine, NATO in any way, or is it just a coincidence?
DB: I have yet to hear any official Russian source say that. However, it’s virtually guaranteed that’s the case. The investigation is still ongoing, so I can’t really say with certainty how that was done.
However, what I think is that the people who were involved in all this were obviously implanted by foreign actors. Who those actors may be, we don’t yet know, but we can assume because the priest, I believe his last name is Father Kotelnikov, he was murdered in the most brutal way imaginable. He was serving in that church for 40 years, which means that he was very well known to the locals.
The vast majority of people living in Dagestan are Muslims. So I don’t think the locals did this because if they wanted to, they would have done that 40 years ago. The Russian people, even though they are a minority in Dagestan, ethnic Russians I mean, were mostly Orthodox Christians.
They’ve been living side by side with the Muslims for centuries. So there’s no reason and it’s not logical that the Russians and the Orthodox Christians and Muslims in the region would just go against each other just like that. What I was able to see from the statements of the officials in the region, they condemned the attack obviously, which means that they were not obviously involved in that.
What I think is that whoever has pushed for this attack, whoever organized it, financed it, armed the perpetrators, I think they’re just trying to foment hatred and religious divisions, especially because the targets were a synagogue and an Orthodox church. The Jewish community that is in Dagestan is one of the oldest, not in Russia, but in the world actually. They’ve been there for centuries.
And again, there’s no reason for the Muslims to start attacking a synagogue and an Orthodox church because there is a quite robust religious harmony in this region. So now what we’re seeing, we’re seeing someone from the outside trying to create division and hatred and possibly, let’s say, a staging ground for a civil war of some kind, which again is part of a wider war against Russia. Because if you’re fighting a country like Russia, you would want to make sure that they’re busy everywhere in order to simply shift their attention away from the main battlefield or the theory of operations, which is of course, Ukraine.
So I think in the following days and weeks and months, we’ll probably find out more about who organized this. And I have no doubt that the hand of the CIA or other American three-letter agencies is going to be behind this.
GR: Talk about Russia’s visits to North Korea and to Vietnam.
I mean, they compared to NATO. Did Russia advance to a superior position as a result of his meetings with these two, I guess, lesser countries, or is that just sort of smoke and mirrors?
DB: I think it has. I think it has.
North Korea is sort of like what I like to call a pocket superpower. Obviously, it’s not my term, but a lot of people actually call it that way. And in many ways, it is because there aren’t any other countries which are relatively small, especially compared to North Korea’s neighbors, such as Russia, China, and its adversary, the United States, that actually have ICBMs, these Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, which are also nuclear armed.
And the amount of these missiles is obviously nowhere near the number of missiles that the United States has. However, it is more than enough to create a lot of damage in the U.S. We’re not talking about a few thousand people. We’re talking about millions, because detonating an ICBM over the city the size of New York or Los Angeles would be a disaster.
It could bring about the end of these areas as inhabitable areas. So obviously, any sane leadership would want to negotiate with a country with such a capability. However, the Washington DC and the Pentagon are actually pushing North Korea towards more and more enmity.
So how is North Korea supposed to react to this? Well, in not a very friendly manner. So what we have now is a formation of a sort of NATO-like alliance or a Warsaw Pact-like alliance, between North Korea and Russia. Because the Article 3 and Article 4 of the agreement that they signed, which has 23 clauses, by the way, it says explicitly that attack on one country is going to be considered an attack on both.
So if the political West wants to wage a nuclear war against Russia, it’s also going to get a simultaneous nuclear war with North Korea. So now we are getting into the realm of these strict wire alliances that could push the world into an abyss from which we will not be able to get out. So I mean, it’s not a very optimistic situation.
However, it will continue being worse if the West doesn’t simply back down and start negotiating with the Russians and these other global and regional powers.
GR: It seems that the NATO forces are assembling in the region. They’re talking about getting 300,000 on the, I guess, lining the border with Ukraine, with Russia and with Belarus.
The US House of Representatives just signed a bill calling for conscription of young Americans to serve in Ukraine although it hasn’t been passed by the Senate. But I mean, is all this pointing to the reality that sooner or later, probably a little bit later when, I guess, both Ukraine and Russian forces have just about used up the NATO forces planning to get involved more directly and possibly basically escalated to an even further level?
DB: Yes. Yes.
I think that’s very, very possible, unfortunately, especially because various leaders of very powerful NATO countries, primarily the President of France, Mr. Macron, they’ve been talking about the possibility of direct NATO involvement, or at least the involvement of separate NATO members, which again is equally dangerous because the Article 4 and Article 5 of the NATO statute give provisions for the involvement of the entire Alliance in case that any of the member states is involved in any sort of a conflict. So it doesn’t necessarily need to be a direct attack on any NATO country. It can simply, the Article 4 gives the provision for NATO to act as a unified fighting force.
And of course, NATO itself has a lot of logistical and other intelligence systems that give it the ability to act like that. So we are at a precipice, I think, at this point. We are in great danger that has not been seen, possibly even worse than the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis was, because now we don’t really have people who are reasonable on one side.
And that is, of course, the Washington DC. I’m not hearing a single high-ranking American official being reasonable about this. We can see calls for peace in Russia and China and these other countries, but I do not hear any calls for peace and negotiations in Western countries.
And worse yet, we now have rabid Russophobes like Kaja Kallas, the current Prime Minister of Estonia, who’s probably going to take the place of Mr. Borrell as the top EU, let’s say, diplomat, even though I don’t see any sort of diplomacy there. All I hear is warmongering and calls for Russia to be defeated. So we can see from the way that these people talk.
For instance, Ms. Kallas says that there’s no plan A, B, or C. The only plan is to defeat Russia. So when you’re talking about any country, any diplomat would have to be very careful about the way they use their words, right? Their choice of words tells you a lot about how diplomatic someone is. So if she says that her goal is to defeat Russia, even though her country is barely a million people, if I’m not mistaken, how can we talk about sanity? How can we talk about diplomacy if all she’s talking about is defeating Russia? So I mean, we also hear American officials say something like that, but even they are sometimes careful about the choice of words.
However, we don’t hear that from people like Kallas. So again, it seems that everything is being set up for a confrontation that has not been seen for decades or even more than half a century. So this is what really is dangerous.
GR: So basically, we’re looking at a NATO-Russia confrontation. It’s a real thing and we are going into World War III, correct?
DB: Unfortunately, this is the only logical conclusion we can come to if we see the actions of both sides, but especially NATO, because NATO is the one that is pushing this. Russia is mostly reacting to it, which is only logical.
I mean, if somebody is attacking you, you at least have to be ready to start defending yourself. But I don’t see any, even a modicum of de-escalation from NATO and the US.
