The Clinton Trap

The Oreshnik (Walnut, Hazel) missile strike came as a surprise to the West, and at that point, a very important question arises. Why did the Oreshnik strike and the very fact that Russia turned out to be the world leader in the development of strategic and tactical ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear and non-nuclear warheads come as a surprise to the United States and the entire West?

After all, Vladimir Putin has been talking about Russia developing new types of weapons since 2018, when he announced the Avangard missile, capable of delivering up to 15 warheads flying at a speed of 28 M (9.6 km per second) and capable of changing flight trajectory, and the Burevestnik missile that has nuclear engine, capable of operating also as nuclear power plant in space, and flying both in the atmosphere and (as an option) in space for as long as it is required by the control centre, and the Poseidon underwater drone that carries a nuclear warhead of enormous power at great depth and at enormous speed, that, when detonated underwater off the coast, can wash away everything within a thousand square kilometres of territory with a wave several hundred meters high, and medium-range hypersonic missiles. All of this was announced by Putin.

The West did not understand and did not believe what happened in 2018. Now understanding is coming, but with great difficulty and not for everyone, and many politicians do not want to accept the reality. They are not trying to comprehend what happened from the point of view of the need for changes in the system of world relations, but are trying to find an opportunity to hide what is happening from public, to present everything as an insignificant event and to find a way to contain and counteract Russia and Putin, preserving the old world and continuing the political course of confrontation.

The only group of politicians, analysts and military specialists that reflected on the launch of Oreshnik as dangerous and annoying, but important and significant event that must be understood and taken into account in the new political course of the USA, is now forming around Donald Trump. Trump himself is silent for now, reflecting, collecting information and preparing to take power, and after that he will act.

How anyone can explain such persistent and chronic misunderstanding of Russia by the West and its unwillingness to acknowledge reality? Some explain it by the conviction that Russia is so weak economically, financially, militarily that it seems unrealistic for such a country to be able to break ahead in military technology and produce in sufficient quantities the weapons that the developed West does not possess.

And there are reasons and facts that could allow to agree with that opinion.

Russia cannot produce cars not only at the level of American, Japanese or German companies, but also at the level of Chinese and Korean ones. And this is a fact.

Russia is now only the third country in space exploration and cannot establish and restore its civil aviation after the collapse and the loss of the Soviet heritage. And this is a fact.

Russia has the largest energy resources, but the efficiency of the energy systems, including housing and communal services systems, including heat and electricity supply, are several levels lower than in the West European states.

Corruption and low technical and organizational efficiency, uncontrolled overpricing devour at least 80% of the price that people pay and the state pays as subsidiaries that also come from taxes, at the expense of the same population. If gasoline in the US now costs twice as little in dollars as it did twenty years ago, the price of gasoline in Russia in rubles during the same time has increased three times, although it still remains lower than the price in the US and several times lower compared to Europe.

The financial system works incredibly poorly. Not a single head of the financial block of a government and Central Bank in any European country could remain in office without being investigated by parliament, if they allowed themselves to lose hundreds of billions of dollars of currency and gold reserves that Russia left in the Western banks, starting war in Ukraine. Not a single Western government could allow capital drain, inflation and currency weakness that the Russian government and the Central Bank provided to the business and people.

That is Putin’s Russia. What kind of “Oreshnik” can appear in that kind of state?

And how can one assess the state of the Russian armed forces at the beginning of the war in Ukraine? Or the fact that Putin was led – like a young horse on a brindle – into the war, a trap that many saw in Ukraine, Russia and the West, but failed to be noticed in the Kremlin with all its intelligence and security services, placing the role of aggressor on Russia and Putin personally?

Or what can be said about those “meat grinders” that have been going on at the Ukrainian fronts for almost three years, leaving nearly untouched Ukrainian infrastructure, railways, all bridges over the Dnieper River, and delivering strikes at energy facilities once in six months? Or about the command and management of the Ministry of Defence that had been reporting for decades on successes with parades and demonstrations, but in reality, have stolen hundreds of billions of dollars that were transferred to American, British, Swiss and offshore banks?

After all, these are not secrets, but well-known facts, at least for those who look into the real world.

How can that kind of state, the Putin’s Russia, suddenly find itself with weapons, most technologically advanced, the most powerful, that are truly game changers?

 The reason for the inability of Western elites to understand what is happening in Russia I would call the “Clinton trap,” because what is happening has its roots in the presidency of Bill Clinton and in the mentality of the elite that formed around the Clintons and that has ruled the United States and formed the political elites of its allies to this day, unwilling to acknowledge either the inevitability of Trump’s return to power or the reality of the “Walnut” (Oreshnik).

         Putin’s Purple Thread in a Skein of Clans

It was in 1993, when Bill Clinton was elected US President, that political elite came to Washington that no longer understood what was happening in Russia. This was a qualitative change in the situation.

Of course, even before that, Washington did not understand everything that was happening in the USSR, and then in Russia, and looked at and assessed what was happening from the Western civilizational positions and views, but the understanding, for example, of George Bush Sr. reflected the essence of what was happening in the USSR and Russia.

It was under Clinton that Washington lost sight of the “purple thread” that, like in Conan Doyle’s stories about Sherlock Holmes, politicians need to keep in mind and follow in order to understand the essence of the events taking place and draw the right conclusions.

It was then that the West’s misunderstanding of Russia became fundamental and chronic. The Clintons looked at Russia as a Russian matryoshka, nesting doll, that is empty inside, and all the stories about other dolls hidden and living their own lives inside it, were perceived in Washington as fabrications about Russian exclusivity and weirdness. At first, this was looked at with mockery, and then simply ignored.

And the most important manifestation and consequence of this misunderstanding was one event that occurred in 1996, when the Americans from Clinton’s entourage, who supervised Russia and were engaged in the search for a possible successor to Boris Yeltsin as President of Russia, accepted the candidacy of Vladimir Putin as possible and acceptable. That year, the process of approval began, and Clinton officially approved the appointment of Vladimir Putin as Boris Yeltsin’s successor in September 1999. But that was just a formality, news event and announcement.

Clinton did not understand what he had done. The Clintons and their advisers in Washington then considered Putin a protégé of Yeltsin, his clan, then called “the Family,” and the oligarchs who had controlled the Yeltsin clan since 1996, as well as the Democratic Party of Russia, the political branch of the Democratic Party of the United States,

Washington did not listen to those who were against Putin. They were irreconcilable and declared that a security officer could not be appointed head of state, that a security officer did not appear just like that, and that it was not good for the West.

Among those who were against the choice of Putin as Yeltsin’s successor were prominent politicians, including Mikhail Gorbachev, who, when he was President of the USSSR, had been against the appointment of a professional Chekist not only to the government, but even to the post of head of the KGB.

Some leaders of the political movement “Democratic Russia” were also against Putin. That movement was the first to advocate introduction of the post of President of the Russian Federation and nominated Boris Yeltsin for this post, and then became one of the leading political parties in Russia and representative of the US Democrats. For example, one of the leaders and founders of the Democratic Party, Lev Ponomarev, took strong and unshakable position against Putin’s choice.

However, there were three important factors that allowed Clinton to approve Putin as new leader of Russia. There were influential people, who spoke out against Putin, but all Russian parties, clans and groups that occupied pro-Western position, spoke out for Putin.

For example, Lev Ponomarev, who spoke out against Putin in the Democratic Party, was in absolute minority, and the majority of members of the State Duma from the Democratic Party spoke out for Putin. Anatoly Chubais, vice-Premier and head of Presidential Administration, was personally responsible for the acceptance and approval of Putin as the Prime Minister and the successor to Boris Yeltsin. Chubais threatened Ponomarev, as they say, “in a gangster way.”

The main organizer of Putin’s candidacy among the oligarchs was Boris Berezovsky. Later he could not forgive himself for this. And so on…

There was a second factor. In the mid-1990s, a corruption conflict occurred between American business and commanders of the Russian special services during the reconstruction of the Kremlin. As a result, the heads of the Presidential Security Service, the FSB, the FSO, including Korzhakov and Barsukov, as well as the officials in the government, who supervised the military industrial complex and had been the core of the Family clan and Yeltsin’s inner circle, such as Deputy Prime Minister Soskovets, were fired and removed from the “Family” and from politics.

In 1996, criminal investigation was opened in Switzerland, and Pavel Borodin, the head of the Presidential Property Management Department, was arrested in the United States, accused of opening accounts for members of the Yeltsin clan in Swiss banks and laundering bribes during work in the Kremlin.

Yeltsin and the Family were shown the US’s ability to control all the Family members’ bank accounts, properties and money abroad, and new managers were imposed to rule and control the Family and Russia – oligarchs. And all of them also spoke out in support of Putin’s candidacy.

There was a third factor. There was enough compromising evidence on Putin that could allow Washington to control him, and there was information that said he could be trusted. Putin came through background check, in particular, he ensured the removal of Defence Minister Rodionov, and took control of the Defence Ministry and the former Soviet officer corps that had rebelled against Yeltsin. Putin restored control by the Family of the Ministry of Defence and the armed forces. Putin knew how to keep his word…

Let these Russians sort out and select their rulers themselves. The US has already broken away and moved ahead of Russia in technological and industrial development, military and financial power and influence and will always be able to control Moscow and the Kremlin. That was the opinion of Bill Clinton and the White House.

The Russian economy and business were given to the oligarchs. The Ministry of Defence and space, as well as military industrial complex were given to clans, that ensured control over the army and its non-interference in politics. That is how the people, who had never been in the army became Ministers of Defence, like Ivanov, Serdyukov and Shoigu. The regional affairs, resources and businesses were given to regional clans. Russia became a state that was fragmentated by clans, most of them under direct financial control by the West.

However, there was a zone that was directly under Putin, and the West did not notice it.

The problem was that Americans believed that Putin had been chosen by the oligarchs, who in turn were themselves convinced of this, and by the Yeltsin’s Family, and most of its members, though not all, were also convinced of the independence of their choice.

And here was buried the reason for the current misunderstanding by the West and its rejection of Putin and modern Russia. The Clintons did not understand that Putin was a protégé not of the Family, not of the oligarchs, not even of the former KGB, which had been weakened, divided and taken under control by the Western special services, and not of the democrats of Russia, who were the pro-Western political cohort.

Putin was the protégé of a small group, the core of the military-industrial complex of the former USSR. He was selected and promoted to Moscow by those who were involved in the latest and most important and promising developments in the Soviet military-industrial complex, including the nuclear sphere, space and rocketry.

It was a small and very close-knit group of people who supervised in the Central Committee of the CPSU and the government of the USSR not just the military-industrial complex that by the beginning of the 1980s had become overdeveloped monster and burden that had to be gotten rid of, that could not be gotten rid of without tremendous losses in the economic, political and social spheres, but specifically the part of it that was the most high-tech, secret, directed towards the future, where the USSR by that time was already overtaking the USA.

Putin came from this group, or rather, directly from those who represented it in Leningrad and headed the most advanced part of the defence complex of the northern capital of Russia.

The key figure of this group was Dmitry Sergeyev, who became Vladimir Putin’s first immediate superior in the St. Petersburg city administration.

Dmitry Sergeyev, the first vice-mayor of St. Petersburg, Putin’s boss, oversaw the city’s defence complex. In Soviet times, he was the director of the LOMO plant (Leningrad Optical and Mechanical Association), the main centre for the development and production of optics, film and photo cameras, as well as guns optical scopes, periscopes, night vision devices, navigation systems for strategic and ballistic missiles, anti-missile and anti-space defence guidance systems, optical systems for satellites and space reconnaissance vehicles.

It was Sergeyev who gave the first impulse and recommended Putin as possible candidate for promotion to the upper echelon of power in the Kremlin, to the Family. Then all the resources and contacts of the defence-industrial clan were used, including in the Russian special services, to promote Putin. This group used its connections with the “new Russians”, with the “wallets”, as they were called in the Kremlin in the early 1990s, or with the oligarchs, as they began to be called in 1996. Many of the oligarchs in Soviet times worked for the KGB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs as agents and informants, and they quietly followed the instructions of the FSB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the SVR.

But why then, having all the opportunities to become a dictator, Putin failed to become one, failed to put all clans and the whole country under control? Why did he allow the clan system, corruption to survive and strengthen, to turn Russia into a country without a clear State idea, where power is divided between the clans that, by all definitions and indications, are criminal groups? There are several answers…

When Putin came to power in Russia, he was not a politician. He was a protégé, whose candidacy seemed to suit everyone. He was a screen, a frontman, a cover-up, a Russian doll with a number of dolls hidden inside, with the deepest one that had to be kept secret for everyone else. 

Putin had neither political ambitions nor big ideas; he came to power to ensure the existence and development of the core of the defence complex at the expense of everything else and everyone else.

In politics, he had to act as a referee, a judge on the field of action of the clans and groups that helped him come to power. He needed to ensure order in the country and give the opportunity to work to one group that was supposed to restore the power of Russia, to ensure parity with the United States in the sphere of defence and security, and to do it in such a way that Western politicians and intelligence services did not notice it during the entire period of its resurrection.

Putin was not a politician, but was and remains a Chekist, even after becoming the political leader of Russia. This is what allowed him to come to the Moscow Kremlin. As the director of the FSB, he could wait for hours sitting silently in the reception room of an oligarch, for example, Khodorkovsky, and at a meeting with the group of oligarchs, when they had to approve his candidacy, ask them a single question: “Guys, tell me, what should I do?” This was not difficult for intelligence officer, major who retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel in reserve. He remained in the ranks.

And this is one of the reasons for what is happening. For a security officer, violations, crimes, sins and weaknesses of people are not something just negative and unacceptable in politics, in life, in the Kremlin. For Putin, sins and weaknesses of people are material for work and instruments of control and management of people.

For Putin, a person who is loyal to him, but rotten and criminal inside, is acceptable in power and business, as long as this person does not create problems, as long as he fulfils his function, as long as he has not lost Putin’s trust.

Putin still works in politics and economics through trusted “agents” and not through specialists capable of independently managing and solving problems. This is where betrayals, failures, and constant problems in politics come from.

“We’ve been fooled again” became a popular meme in Russia, and Putin became known as a cunning and intelligent politician and head of state who could, through certain channels, be controlled, trapped and manipulated. For Putin, compromises are natural steps in the political process.

That is why the Chekists in the USSR were not allowed to have access to the levers of political power. They were a fighting detachment of the Communist Party, but could not be allowed to become leaders. They were efficient executors, but not ideologists and not statemen.

And yet, all these years, Putin protected and covered those who, without him, would not have been able to survive or be reborn as the core of the modern technological and defence complex.

Bill Clinton and his entourage did not understand this, and they were followed by those who have been in power in Washington and European capitals for the last thirty years. They saw a clumsy and strange front screen, a Russian doll, not believing that inside it was hiding those, who were working on technological breakthrough in strategic weapons.

The Clinton administration created a myth about Putin and Russia, and many in Washington continue to believe in this myth. Instead of abandoning the myth when confronted with reality, the West tries to explain the myth, edit it and adapt it to the changing reality instead of understanding this reality and getting out of the Clinton trap.

(To be continued)