Vehicles of Russian emergency services are parked near the burning Crocus City Hall concert venue following a reported shooting incident, outside Moscow, on Mar. 22, 2024. Photo: Reuters.
By Pepe Escobar – Mar 23, 2024
Exhibit 1:Â Friday, March 22, 2024. Itâs War. The Kremlin, via Peskov, finally admits it, on the record.
The money quote:
âRussia cannot allow the existence on its borders of a state that has a documented intention to use any methods to take Crimea away from it, not to mention the territory of new regions.â
Translation: the Hegemon-constructed Kiev mongrel is doomed, one way or another. The Kremlin signal: âWe havenât even startedâ starts now.
Exhibit 2:Â Friday afternoon, a few hours after Peskov. Confirmed by a serious European â not Russian â source. The first counter-signal.
Regular troops from France, Germany and Poland have arrived, by rail and air, to Cherkassy, south of Kiev. A substantial force. No numbers leaked. They are being housed in schools. For all practical purposes, this is a NATO force.
That signals, âLet the games beginâ. From a Russian point of view, Mr. Khinzalâs business cards are set to be in great demand.
Exhibit 3:Â Friday evening. Terror attack on Crocus City, a music venue northwest of Moscow. A heavily trained commando shoots people on sight, point blank, in cold blood, then sets a concert hall on fire. The definitive counter-signal: with the battlefield collapsing, all thatâs left is terrorism in Moscow.
And just as terror was striking Moscow, the US and the UK, in southwest Asia, was bombing Sanaâa, the Yemeni capital, with at least five strikes.
Some nifty coordination. Yemen has just clinched a strategic deal in Oman with Russia-China for no-hassle navigation in the Red Sea, and is among the top candidates for BRICS+ expansion at the summit in Kazan next October.
Not only the Houthis are spectacularly defeating thalassocracy, they have the Russia-China strategic partnership on their side. Assuring China and Russia that their ships can sail through the Bab-al-Mandeb, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden with no problems is exchanged with total political support from Beijing and Moscow.
The sponsors remain the same
Deep in the night in Moscow, before dawn on Saturday 23. Virtually no one is sleeping. Rumors dance like dervishes on countless screens. Of course nothing has been confirmed â yet. Only the FSB will have answers. A massive investigation is in progress.
The timing of the Crocus massacre is quite intriguing. On a Friday during Ramadan. Real Muslims would not even think about perpetrating a mass murder of unarmed civilians under such a holy occasion. Compare it with the ISIS card being frantically branded by the usual suspects.
Letâs go pop. To quote Talking Heads: âThis ainât no party/ this ainât no disco/ this ainât no fooling aroundâ. Oh no; itâs more like an all-American psy op. ISIS are cartoonish mercenaries/goons. Not real Muslims. And everyone knows who finances and weaponizes them.
That leads to the most possible scenario, before the FSB weighs in: ISIS goons imported from the Syria battleground â as it stands, probably Tajiks â trained by CIA and MI6, working on behalf of the Ukrainian SBU. Several witnesses at Crocus referred to âWahhabisâ â as in the commando killers did not look like Slavs.
This Is Not ISIS – Rossiya Segodnya Editor-In-Chief on Moscow Concert Hall Attack
It was up to Serbiaâs Aleksandar Vucic to cut to the chase. He directly connected the âwarningsâ in early March from American and British embassies directed at their citizens not to visit public places in Moscow with CIA/MI6 intel having inside info about possible terrorism, and not disclosing it to Moscow.
The plot thickens when it is established that Crocus is owned by the Agalarovs: an Azeri-Russian billionaire family, very close friends ofâŚ
⌠Donald Trump.
Talk about a Deep State-pinpointed target.
ISIS spin-off or banderistas â the sponsors remain the same. The clownish secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Oleksiy Danilov, was dumb enough to virtually, indirectly confirm they did it, saying on Ukrainian TV, âwe will give them [Russians] this kind of fun more often.â
But it was up to Sergei Goncharov, a veteran of the elite Russia Alpha anti-terrorism unit, to get closer to unwrapping the enigma: he told Sputnik the most feasible mastermind is Kyrylo Budanov â the chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
The âspy chiefâ who happens to be the top CIA asset in Kiev.
Itâs got to go till the last Ukrainian
The three exhibits above complement what the head of NATOâs
military committee, Rob Bauer, previously told a security forum in Kiev: âYou need more than just grenades â you need people to replace the dead and wounded. And this means mobilization.â
Translation: NATO spelling out this is a war until the last Ukrainian.
And the âleadershipâ in Kiev still does not get it. Former Minister of Infrastructure Omelyan: âIf we win, we will pay back with Russian oil, gas, diamonds and fur. If we lose, there will be no talk of money â the West will think about how to survive.â
In parallel, puny âgarden-and jungleâ Borrell admitted that it would be âdifficultâ for the EU to find an extra 50 billion euros for Kiev if Washington pulls the plug. The cocaine-fueled sweaty sweatshirt leadership actually believes that Washington is not âhelpingâ in the form of loans, but in the form of free gifts. And the same applies for the EU.
The Theater of the Absurd is unmatchable. The German Liver Sausage Chancellor actually believes that proceeds from stolen Russian assets âdo not belong to anyoneâ, so they can be used to finance extra Kiev weaponizing.
Everyone with a brain knows that using interest from âfrozenâ, actually stolen Russian assets to weaponize Ukraine is a dead end â unless they steal all of Russiaâs assets, roughly $200 billion, mostly parked in Belgium and Switzerland: that would tank the Euro for good, and the whole EU economy for that matter.
Eurocrats better listen to Russian Central Bank major âdisrupterâ (American terminology) Elvira Nabiullina: The Bank of Russia will take âappropriate measuresâ if the EU does anything on the âfrozenâ/stolen Russian assets.
It goes without saying that the three exhibits above completely nullify the âLa Cage aux Follesâ circus promoted by the puny Petit Roi, now known across his French domains as Macronapoleon.
Virtually the whole planet, including the English-speaking Global North, had already been mocking the âexploitsâ of his Can Can Moulin Rouge Army.
So French, German and Polish soldiers, as part of NATO, are already in the south of Kiev. The most possible scenario is that they will stay far, far away from the frontlines â although traceable by Mr. Khinzalâs business activities.
Even before this new NATO batch arriving in the south of Kiev, Poland â which happens to serve as prime transit corridor for Kievâs troops â had confirmed that Western troops are already on the ground.
So this is not about mercenaries anymore. France, by the way, is only 7th in terms of mercenaries on the ground, largely trailing Poland, the US and Georgia, for instance. The Russian Ministry of Defense has all the precise records.
In a nutshell: now war has morphed from Donetsk, Avdeyevka and Belgorod to Moscow. Further on down the road, it may not just stop in Kiev. It may only stop in Lviv. Mr. 87%, enjoying massive national near-unanimity,  now has the mandate to go all the way. Especially after Crocus.
Thereâs every possibility the terror tactics by Kiev goons will finally drive Russia to return Ukraine to its original 17th century landlocked borders: Black Sea-deprived, and with Poland, Romania, and Hungary reclaiming their former territories.
Remaining Ukrainians will start to ask serious questions about what led them to fight â literally to their death â on behalf of the US Deep State, the military complex and BlackRock.
As it stands, the Highway to Hell meat grinder is bound to reach maximum velocity.
Pepe Escobar
Pepe Escobar is a Brazilian journalist. He writes a column â The Roving Eye â for Asia Times Online, and works as an analyst for RT, Sputnik News, and Press TV. In addition, he previously worked for Al Jazeera.
