Ukrainian forces, numbering over a thousand, advanced 10 km. across the border into Russia’s Kursk region on the morning of Tuesday, August 6. Previous incursions from Ukraine into Russia, near the city of Belgorod, have allegedly been led by anti-Kremlin Russian groups. But this time, the incursion was conducted by Ukrainian forces, using a combination of infantry, armor, drones, electronic warfare and air defense in the attack.

The main operational Russian gas pipeline into Europe runs near Sudzha, where a metering station – reportedly captured by Ukraine – monitors the reduced Russian supplies to countries such as Austria and Hungary.

Russia has declared a state of emergency in Kursk and local officials told the Tass news agency that 3,000 civilians had been evacuated following an attack that has clearly caught Moscow off guard.

A visibly angry Vladimir Putin convened a televised meeting of Russia’s Security Council on Wednesday, August 7, in which the military’s chief of staff, Valery Gerasimov, told him the advance had been halted and that the Kursk operation would be concluded by “reaching the Russian state border.”

Putin was exasperated for a reason, because only a week ago on August 1, he had displayed tremendous magnanimity and extended a goodwill gesture to the Biden admin by agreeing to a prisoner swap deal, but instead of rapprochement, Washington paid him back by instructing Ukrainian proxy to mount Kursk offensive inside Russia.

The United States and Russia completed their biggest prisoner swap in post-Soviet history on August 1, with Moscow releasing journalist Evan Gershkovich and fellow American Paul Whelan, along with dissidents including Vladimir Kara-Murza, in a multinational deal that set two dozen people free. Releasing Western hostages was clearly an effort by Kremlin to appease Washington after the naval standoff in Cuba in June.

On June 12, a Russian naval fleet comprising a frigate, a nuclear-powered submarine Kazan, an oil tanker and a rescue tug crossed into Havana Bay after drills in the Atlantic Ocean. The next day, on June 13, a U.S. Navy submarine arrived in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a fleet of Russian warships gathered for planned military exercises in the Caribbean.

U.S. Southern Command announced the USS Helena, a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, pulled into the waters near the U.S. base in Cuba. A Canadian Navy patrol ship also docked in Havana. Ottawa said the ship arrived on June 14 to signal the “capable and deployable” nature of the Canadian military.

The Russian naval fleet left Cuba on June 17 after a five-day stay but Putin’s hawkish maneuver precipitated a rift between the Biden admin and the Deep State. The Pentagon’s military brass favored a much forceful response to Russia’s provocation amidst Ukraine’s proxy war but Biden got cold feet because brinkmanship could have led to a nuclear standoff with Russia in the election year.

Joe Biden’s ignominious fall from grace was unanticipated and abrupt. It seems quite “a coincidence” that only a day before Russian naval fleet made a port call to Havana and six weeks before Biden decided to drop out of the presidential race on July 21, his cocaine addicted son Hunter was found guilty by a Delaware jury on June 11 for owning a gun as a user of illegal drugs and lying on paperwork about his drug use when he bought the gun.

Hunter Biden faces a maximum prison sentence of 25 years but is likely to receive a lesser sentence. In addition, Hunter also faces federal criminal charges for failing to pay more than $1.4 million in taxes on time. A trial in that case is scheduled to begin in September in Los Angeles.

What’s even more surprising is the fact that Hunter Biden nearly avoided facing trials on both the gun charges and the tax charges. Last year, prosecutor’s office and Hunter Biden’s legal team struck a tentative plea deal in which Hunter would have pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and submitted to drug testing and other monitoring. Under the deal, prosecutors would have deferred the gun charges and eventually dropped them if Hunter had remained out of trouble.

But the deal “miraculously” fell apart in June after the deep state decided that Joe Biden had become a liability as president and needed to be replaced by a security establishment’s stooge, Kamala Harris. Thus, Joe Biden was literally blackmailed by the Deep State to quit the presidential race in exchange for saving the life of his problem child.

Had Joe Biden decided not to quit the race, the security establishment threatened to open host of other criminal cases against Hunter Biden, including the notorious Burisma Holdings case in which Hunter Biden had received millions of dollars in illicit kickbacks from a Ukrainian energy firm from 2013 to 2018 while his father Joe Biden was Obama admin’s vice president.

On Thursday, August 8, Hunter was implicated in another criminal case. Prosecutors in the U.S. criminal tax case against Hunter Biden accused him of accepting millions of dollars in payments from a Romanian businessman who sought to “influence U.S. government agencies” in connection with a criminal probe in Romania.

On the other hand, security establishment via Democratic emissaries assured Joe Biden to use its influence with security agencies, bureaucracy and judiciary to drop all criminal cases against Hunter if Joe Biden agreed to quit the race and kept quiet afterwards.

Kamala Harris, being an Indian immigrant and lacking a significant political constituency in the United States, is an ideal presidential candidate from the perspective of security establishment. During her four-year unremarkable career as vice president and the way she cheered waving Ukrainian flag during President Zelensky’s address to the US Congress, she has proved that she would play into the hands of deep state like a servile puppet.

Furthermore, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13, meant as a psy-ops tactic, served a two-fold objective. Firstly, it created an atmosphere of fear and paranoia, restricted Trump’s movement during the election campaign, as he has since been advised by the Secret Service not to attend outdoor rallies and conveyed a message that red lines shouldn’t be crossed in political speeches.

Secondly, the drastic measure also managed to send a spine-chilling warning to Trump’s political opponent Joe Biden that the deep state was willing to go to any extent to achieve its objectives, even if it had to assassinate sitting US presidents, such as the brutal murders of the Kennedy brothers following the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Unsurprisingly, panic-stricken Joe Biden decided a week after Trump’s brush with death to leave the White House for his Delaware mansion instead of ending up in the morgue.

Since World War II, the United States has been ruled by the top brass of the Pentagon while presidents have been reduced to the ceremonial role of being public relations’ representatives of the deep state, pontificating and sermonizing like priests to gullible audiences at home and abroad on the virtues of supposed American democracy, rule of law and civil liberties.

Though a clarification is required here that US presidents indeed have the power to order withdrawal of troops from inconsequential theaters of war, such as the evacuation of US forces from Iraq as directed by former President Obama in 2011 or the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan as ordered by President Biden in 2021, as the perceptive military brass is courteous enough to bow to “sane advice” of purported chosen representatives of the people and “toddler-in-chief” of the armed forces in order to maintain the charade of democracy in the eyes of the public.

But in military oligarchy’s perpetual conflict with major world powers deemed existential threats to the US security interests, such as arch-rivals Russia and China, as in the Ukraine War, civilian presidents, whether Biden or Trump, don’t have the authority to overrule the global domination agenda of the Pentagon.

All the militaries of the 32 NATO member states operate under the integrated military command led by the Pentagon. Before being elected president, General Dwight Eisenhower was the first commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).

The commander of Allied Command Operations has been given the title Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), and is always a US four-star general officer or flag officer who also serves as the Commander US European Command, and is subordinate to the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The incumbent Godfather of the Cosa Nostra is Gen. Charles Q. Brown since October 2023 following the retirement of Gen. Mark Milley who completed his tenure of four tumultuous years, including the Ukraine War and the Capitol riots, in September as the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Thus, the Pentagon’s top brass, through NATO’s military command, exercises absolute control over Ukraine’s theater of proxy war. The Zelensky regime and its military commanders are merely servile stooges beholden to military strategy as devised by master strategists of the Pentagon.

The foremost objective of the US military brass in Ukraine’s proxy war is to degrade Russia’s military capabilities, for which Ukrainian troops and conscripts are being used as cannon fodder.

In February, Zelensky sacked Valery Zaluzhny as commander-in-chief of Ukrainian forces on the orders of US military commanders. As he was hesitant to commit more cannon fodder to breach Russia’s defensive lines in Donbas amid much-hyped Ukrainian counteroffensive lasting from June to December last year.

Differences between the two men had been simmering for many months but appeared to grow wider towards the end of last year, after Zaluzhny said the war had reached a stalemate in a long essay and interview in The Economist magazine in November.

New commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi has been criticized for pursuing bloody and reckless military tactics which resulted in significant Ukrainian losses during the Battle of Bakhmut, and was nicknamed “General 200,” a reference to Cargo 200, a Soviet military code denoting military fatalities.

He would likely retain his job as long he uncritically obeys the Pentagon’s dictates. But if he developed critical faculties, a cardinal sin in military command structure across the world, then he too would meet the same ignominious fate as his predecessor.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Middle East and Eurasia regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research.

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