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It is hard to accept the official Russian version saying the Syrian SAM systems intercepted 70% of the incoming missiles , as the excellent journalist Pepe Escobar did. This would be too good a result even for the best, latest, and most update systems.Maybe hard for Shamir, but the US government's own evidence points to the 70% being shot down, as I noted in my analysis.
...which is exactly what he's apparently positioning himself against... "anti-Putin trolls call to fight him harder and accuse everybody softer than Genghis Khan of collaboration with the tyrant." By his own logic, he's the 'ultra-Kremlinite' because he's disappointed that Russia hasn't 'done it already'.This is a brief summary of the Syrian strike. An external force had pushed the leaders of Russia and the US into confrontation ; Putin and Trump were equally unwilling to fight, but they couldn’t avoid the charge . The best they could do, they did: t hey avoided each other.Real Kremlin’s agents, trolls and scribes, or alternatively, Western dissidents presented the strike as a “huge victory for Putin”. This is the common ground of Putin and anti-Putin trolls: whatever the Kremlin ruler does, has to be presented as his great victory. Afterwards, they part their ways, and Putin’s agents bless the Lord for Putin, while anti-Putin trolls call to fight him harder and accuse everybody softer than Genghis Khan of collaboration with the tyrant.It is silly to present the strike as Putin’s achievement. Kremlin tried to avoid the strike altogether, spoke darkly of a harsh response, of “ carriers” being shot at, of Satan 2.0 and nuclear winter, but the talk failed to stop the strike . No British or American planes were downed, or even shot at. The Russians didn’t use their S-300 or S-400 SAM systems, claiming the US missiles didn’t approach Russian bases. This is a dubious argument: Putin tried to stop at attack on Damascus; and Damascus is not a Russian base. Let us face it: Putin did not stop the strike and he didn’t make the offender pay a price for this breach of the Law of Nations.
Actually, that's a far harder explanation that requires far more proofs, viz knowing what Trump (and the Pentagon, and the CIA, and the Israel-firsters, etc) intended.It is hard to accept the official Russian version saying the Syrian SAM systems intercepted 70% of the incoming missiles , as the excellent journalist Pepe Escobar did. This would be too good a result even for the best, latest, and most update systems. The unimpressive outcome of the attack can be explained easier by Trump’s decision to minimise the damage , as indeed the Israeli military says.
Ah, Shamir has inside sources at the Kremlin, so he knows better than all those 'real pro-Kremlin trolls' what's going on.The Russian military experts here in Moscow told me that out of a hundred missiles fired by the US and their allies, only one or two were modern cruise missiles (“nice and smart”)and they destroyed the research institute in Barzeh. (It was not a “chemical weapons centre”, just a chemical research institute ; it’s destruction was a copy-paste of Bill Clinton’s bombing of the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan over a similar pretext.)
Yeah. @compulsive hoarder, remind us again who you accuse of wishfully lionizing world leaders to be something other than they are??All other missiles were old and at the end of their service; they had to be utilised somehow , and so they were. A few of them might have been downed by Syrian anti-aircraft fire , others fell without inflicting much damage. Syrian air defence is not able to blow modern cruise missiles out of sky ; Syrian appeals to supply them with modern SAM systems have been refused at the request of Israel. (Netanyahu came to Moscow saying that S-300 in Syrian hands will turn all Israel into a no-fly zone; Putin agreed with him, and the Syrians were denied modern SAMs.) Now, hopefully these modern systems will find its way to Syrian army.In my view, the two presidents have made heroic efforts at saving their countries and mankind from destruction ; both risked their good names, their positions, their reputatiosn to go that far. Trump minimized the bombing, Putin minimized the response.
For someone who's supposedly an expert on 'de Joos', Israel doesn't seem to know much about the nature of Israel, and their extensive cultural ties with Russia.Both have made some mistakes. Mr Putin made his big mistake when he gave Israel carte blanche to bomb Syria whenever she feels like it.Israeli strikes (and there were more than a hundred of them last year ) created the air of permissiveness and that allowed Trump to follow in Israel’s footsteps. If Israel bombs Syria, and Russians do not react, why can’t Trump ? It appears unfair for the US to be bested by its satellite. If you permit Tom to grab your girlfriend’s pussy without a single objection, you must be expect that Dick and Harry will try to repeat this feat. Israel created the precedent, the US used it.I asked Senator Alexey Pushkov, the head of the foreign relations committee, whether he doesn’t think it was a mistake, in hindsight. He justified the policy saying that Russia came to Syria in order to fight jihadi groups, ISIS, Al Qaeda et al, not Israel. Russia is friendly to Israel, Iran and Turkey, and it does not want to sort out local disagreements . Pushkov stressed that Russia always censured Israeli raids on Syria, though it didn’t act against them. As a matter of fact, if Russia criticized Israel, it was done very, very quietly. The only time this condemnation was made public, happened just now, when the Israeli strike occurred in a very tense moment.
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