An image shared on social media of Russian mercenaries operating in Syria (Twitter)
Denver Post/Washington Post: Putin ally said to be in touch with Kremlin, Assad before his mercenaries attacked US troops
A Russian oligarch believed to control the Russian mercenaries who attacked U.S. troops and their allies in Syria this month was in close touch with Kremlin and Syrian officials in the days and weeks before and after the assault, according to U.S. intelligence reports.
In intercepted communications in late January, the oligarch, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, told a senior Syrian official that he had “secured permission” from an unspecified Russian minister to move forward with a “fast and strong” initiative that would take place in early February.
Prigozhin made front-page headlines last week when he was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller on charges of bankrolling and guiding a long-running Russian scheme to conduct “information warfare” during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
He is known to have close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, forged when he was a restaurateur in St. Petersburg and expanded through what became Prigozhin’s wide-ranging business empire, including extensive contracts with Russia’s Defense Ministry.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: If the above Washington Post story is true .... the minister who gave the approval for such an attack would have to be Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu. And if Putin's chief of staff Anton Vayno and deputy chief of staff Vladimir Ostrovenko were also involved in the discussions .... Russian President Putin would have been in the loop. A part of me is skeptical of this report .... the current focus of everyone in the Kremlin has been (for the past few months) doing everything to secure a resounding victory for Putin in next month's Russian Presidential election. Launching a risky military operation against U.S. forces in Syria is a prescription for disaster .... and a story to divert attention away from all the "accomplishments" that Putin is now running on in Russia. But I am also the first to admit that Putin has done some incredibly stupid things, and this will not be the first time that he has screwed up. I am sure that in the coming days and weeks more information will be coming out .... and as I had mentioned more than once in the past week .... this is a big story (especially in Russian social media and Russian independent media), and it is not going die down anytime soon.
More News On Reports That The Kremlin Gave Approval For Russian Mercenary Attack On The U.S. Base In Syria Earlier This Month
WaPo: Key Russian oligarch in touch with Russia, Assad before mercenaries attacked US troops -- CNN
Russian mercenary boss 'spoke to Kremlin' before attack on US allies in Syria -- Middle East Eye
Report: Kremlin, Assad alerted before attack on U.S. troops in Syria -- Axios
Kremlin ally behind Russia troll farm tied to mercenaries in Syria: report -- The HIll
3 comments:
Getting ito Syria without allies was the first stupid thing he did...
The Putin in me thinks he did because there are many moving parts in Syria. Figuring out our resolve was important.
Putin is certainly not the genius the media tried to paint him to be. Remember the times and cnn articles that portrayed him as this grand chess master of geopolitics during the later Obama years? It went on for +/-2 years! Everything putin did, cnn tried to portray as genius (now he's the evil guy, but dumb enough to collude with a dope like trump. .whatever cnn)..anyways. ..while he's certainly not that smart, he's surely not dumb either. No one would attack a US hardened Base unless you have thought it through. You can call the US all sorts of things, but they're a) not cowards b) not inexperienced c) not poorly trained d) not poorly equipped. ...there's a good reason why they win almost every battle. .. So, of course unless you have air superiority, and can maintain it during the course of the operation, chances are you get but*f*cked. Doesn't take a genius to see that. Putin would never do something that risky and that stupid ahead of the election from a military perspective. Only reason I could see is that he hoped it could increase hatred for Americans among Russians and guarantee him a victory in the next elections. But that doesn't make sense either as a) all seriously challenging candidates to his power were forbidden to run and b) who would feel hatred for Americans when it was the Russians crossing the de-escalation line and attacking?. So what upside is here? Test their defences to learn from it? They'll change and harden their defence tactics... make them overconfident?perhaps. .but even worse is if your own people fear american power. And this fight went very badly for Russia. So no. ..I don't see any upside here unless they wanted to test something they cannot test under other circumstances...Electronic close proximity scrambling, live decoding. ..can all be done in other scenarios...
"Testing us resolve" as wnu put it also doesn't make sense, as you don't test resolve of a defender. A defender defends. The attacker has the choice to attack or not and many more options in how to attack. Sure, the defender could surrender. But please, not even in the wildest dreams of putin would an American base surrender to Russians. If at all this was perhaps to show that "Trump can be hard on Russia", as the investigation about colluding had the indictment just a couple days earlier. And I could see how a buddy of Putin suggested it and needed to "lay off" a few of his mercenary staff. But that would require absolute devilish tendencies and a form of treason against Russia by this mercenary CEO, OK'ed by Putin. Sending a hundred+ Russians to certain death is not something I think putin would do... but not 100% sure about it ;)
The u.s thought it was a bunch of dopey Syrian iranian militia, if they knew it was comrades l doubt that such "resolve" would have been shown.
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