© Official Kremlin publicationPresident Vladimir Putin and on his right Mayor of Moscow Sergei Sobyanin at the Easter service at the Christ the Saviour Cathedral on April 8
Father Politics, like Mother Nature, abhors a vacuum.
And so it was, even before the US Treasury announced its newest sanctions against Russian individuals and their companies for "malign activity around the globe", that President-elect Vladimir Putin was preparing a successor cabinet of ministers on the principle that they would be organized as a headquarters staff for fighting a war on all fronts, without the option of negotiating terms with the enemy.
The impact of the US sanctions, along with the campaign of the British Government in the Skripal affair, and the Syrian front action escalating since the weekend, have reinforced what had already been decided in the Kremlin.
The new government is to be a war cabinet. In Russian parlance, a Stavka.To foreigners, Putin's new war cabinet will look like the Stavka created by Joseph Stalin following the German invasion on June 21, 1941.
Comment: Nauert is not doing blondes everywhere any favors. First, the U.S. government has no mechanisms, because it has no experts on the ground to conduct any kind of actual investigation. They cannot possibly know if the Syrian military was responsible, because they cannot even be sure that the event happened as described by the terrorist sources on which they're basing their conclusions. They cannot rule out a chemical of a type possessed by the terrorists who held Douma, assuming a chemical was even used. As such, they cannot possibly know beyond a reasonable doubt whether or not the Syrian government/military were responsible. This is just idiotic, but then again, it's the U.S. State Department.
Defense Secretary Mattis, who had the integrity to admit earlier this year that there was no evidence Assad used chemical weapons last year, had this to say: "We're still assessing the intelligence - ourselves and our allies. We're still working on this." Hopefully his professionalism prevails.