David Ignatius (lead image, left) has been a career-long mouthpiece for the U.S. State Department. He has just been called in by the current Secretary of State Antony Blinken (right) to convey an urgent new message to President Vladimir Putin, the Security Council, and the General Staff in Moscow.

There were only two ways for Alexei Kudrin to become the president of Russia that he and the U.S. government have always wanted.

U.S. Navy announced that “General Michael ‘Erik’ Kurilla, commander of CENTCOM, conducted a visit aboard the USS West Virginia, a U.S. Navy Ohio-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine at an undisclosed location at sea in international waters in the Arabian Sea. Kurilla was joined on the USS West Virginia by Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, commander of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet and NAVCENT.”

Two detailed reports appeared in Moscow describing precisely how the attack on the Crimean Bridge on October 8 was organised and carried out.

The only Russian leader in a thousand years who was a genuine gardener and who allowed himself to be recorded with a shovel in his hand was Joseph Stalin (lead image, mid-1930s). Compared to Stalin, the honouring of the new British king Charles III as a gardener pales into imitativeness and pretension.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) decided this week to take the side of Ukraine in the current war; blame Russia for the shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP); and issue a demand for Russia to surrender the plant to the Kiev regime “to regain full control over all nuclear facilities within Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, including the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant.”

In wars like the present one, politics on the home front cannot be permitted to give aid and comfort to the enemy. In the U.S. and NATO campaign, the Russian oligarchs and their businesses are targets and also weapons of the plan for regime change in the Kremlin.

The Russian regime-change theory motivating U.S. sanctions against the Russian oligarchs is that they will trigger a palace coup in which the oligarchs will arrange a bullet for President Vladimir Putin’s head, and in return the U.S. will give them back the keys to their yachts, mansions, and offshore bank accounts.

This week President Joseph Biden stopped at an Illinois farm to say he’s going to help the  Ukraine ship 20 million tonnes of wheat and corn out of storage into export, thereby relieving  grain shortages in the international markets and lowering bread prices around the world. 

“Tell me, please, Grandpa,” the little boy asked the Red Army veteran, “what does a war economy mean and how is it different from now?”

Now that the U.S. and the NATO allies have taken from the Russian oligarchs their cash in foreign banks, their mansions, their boats and planes, and blocked the export of all private and corporate Russian capital abroad, Russia is freer to decide how to organize the capital investment of the economy.

“The person attempting to travel two roads at once will get nowhere”. It’s a well-known Chinese maxim, especially in Myanmar (Burma), China’s backdoor to the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean, and the Indian Navy’s forward defence line.

At the start of April President Vladimir Putin believed he could postpone Russia’s strategic and battlefield responses to the state of war which the U.S. is escalating. He was to be disappointed.