The Moscow Attacks and Beyond

Interview with Arto Artinian and Bozhin Traykov

With the recent shocking terrorist attacks near Moscow as a starting point, this episode delves into the intricate web of international relations, espionage, and the shadowy world of counterintelligence. Featuring expert analysts and political commentators, this show peels back the curtain on the machinations of global powers, providing a rare glimpse into the strategies and consequences of political and military actions. As tensions flare and alliances are tested, "On the Barricades" offers an unmissable analysis that challenges perceptions and enlightens viewers on the complexities of global politics.

1️⃣ Terrorist Attacks Near Moscow (00:00 — 06:45)

   🎯 The episode kicks off with an in-depth analysis of the deadly terrorist attacks at the Crocus City Hall near Moscow, detailing the incident's aftermath, including the casualties and the arrest of suspects. The discussion navigates through the possible implications and the subtle hints by Russian officials pointing towards Ukraine's involvement, without direct accusations.

2️⃣ Political and Media Reactions (06:46 — 12:55)

   🎯 The host and his guests explore the responses from Russian President Vladimir Putin and RT's editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, who both hint at Ukraine's involvement. They discuss the nuances of these statements and the implications of such accusations in the broader context of Russia-Ukraine relations.

3️⃣ Analysis of Terrorist Motivations and Background (12:56 — 18:35)

   🎯 Delving into the identities and possible motivations of the terrorists, the commentators speculate on the orchestration and execution of the attacks. They discuss the broader implications of attributing these attacks to specific groups or nations, considering historical precedents and current geopolitical tensions.

4️⃣ Comparisons with Previous Terrorist Acts (18:36 — 24:10)

   🎯 Drawing parallels with past terrorist incidents within Russia, the hosts examine the patterns and potential signals of these attacks. They debate the likelihood of state-sponsored terrorism and the strategic use of such acts in the context of international warfare.

5️⃣ Potential Consequences and Future Scenarios (24:11 — 29:30)

   🎯 The conversation shifts towards the potential ramifications of these attacks on Russian domestic and foreign policy. The commentators discuss the possible strategic adjustments and the implications for Russia's military and diplomatic stance, especially in relation to Ukraine and NATO.

6️⃣ Missile Attacks on Crimea (29:31 — 34:50)

   🎯 The episode also touches upon the significant missile attacks on Crimea, analyzing the strategic motives behind targeting this region. The discussion encompasses the military and symbolic significance of Crimea in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as well as the potential escalations that could ensue.

7️⃣ Final Thoughts and Speculations (34:51 — End)

   🎯 Wrapping up, the hosts share their final thoughts, emphasizing the complexity of the situation and the difficulty in predicting the outcomes. They speculate on the future of Russia-Ukraine relations and the broader geopolitical landscape, considering the current volatile environment.

Boyan Stanislavski: Hello and welcome “On the Barricades!” My name is Boyan Stanislavski and I will be your host today. This is another episode of our show. Today with me are your favorite and one of my favorite guests here, Bozhin Traykov and Arto Artinian, Bulgarian analysts and political commentators. Welcome to the show and thanks for taking time to be with us.

Arto Artinian: Thanks, Boyan. That's all.

Boyan Stanislavski: Right. Let's start with the main and the heaviest topic of the moment, which are the terrorist attacks near Moscow in Krasnogorsk which from what I gather is some kind of retail center, but also a cultural venue. And what we know so far is that 11 people, including four terrorists, who were directly involved in the deadly shooting, have been detained. The FSB, which is the counterintelligence in Russia, confirmed that in a statement on Saturday. According to the security service, the weapons used in the shooting were organized in advance. Russia's investigative committee also confirmed that four suspects who committed the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall were detained in Bryansk region.

Boyan Stanislavski: So that's not far from the border with Ukraine. And Ukraine's been referenced many times over the past couple of days in statements made by the president of the Russian Federation and various other officials. It has never been clearly stated that Ukraine, is directly responsible for that. We haven't had such statements. We haven't heard that, but there were many people alluding that this is possible. So according to the authorities, the terrorists planned to flee to Ukraine, which also is a factor not to be dismissed, I suppose.

Regarding the death toll, from what I gather, the latest statistics are 133 people dead. Some of them shot by the terrorists and many have died because of the fire that broke out when the terrorists stopped shooting but started, I think, throwing some kind of explosives that caused massive fire in the venue. Thus, many people died because of the fire, because of smoke and so on and so forth. 121 people were wounded and 107 required hospitalization. Emergency services continue to work in the area of the incident. Vladimir Putin addressed the nation following the terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall, he of course expressed his condolences to the victims and the families affected by the shooting. He said that everyone responsible for the tragedy will be punished and that there's no other way around it.

All attackers involved have been arrested, those that survived from what I gather, and the security forces are doing everything possible to protect Russian citizens against further mass murder. That's quote, actually a direct quote from his statement from let me see, I think the statement was delivered on yeah, Saturday. All right. So what is also important is that the editor-in-chief of RT, the media that's banned all across Europe and the collective West, but still accessible if you really want to go there, Margarita Simonyan, she is a very influential figure in Russia, in Russian media. And she was she was pretty straight up about it, that, you know, Ukraine is actually responsible and she made a long statement in various profiles of hers in the social networks where she said that she knows exactly, we know, that's the phrase she used, we know exactly that Ukraine has inspired these attacks and so on and so forth.

And she spoke in a very kind of emotional way about it. And she said that the terrorists that have been captured, that they had been singing since their detention, their interrogations and so on and so forth. And that everything is clear. She cannot say everything in a very direct way because, of course, of the investigation that's still ongoing. But this is basically her suggestion. And this suggestion is very clear. I mean, it doesn't really leave any room for any kind of interpretation. And the fact of the matter is Maria Simonyan, she does have a record of making certain mistakes, especially when she gets this kind of emotional upheaval that she seems to be in. And she seems to be in one at the moment.

But, you know, if you put together what Putin has said, other officials have said, you know, Margarita Simonyan's statements, some comments from people like the ex-CIA analyst Larry Johnson, who, again, I mean, he he said pretty much the same thing, similar to what Margarita Simonyan explained. And there are of course other people, I mean, if you go to platforms like X or Telegram channels, you will see many, many, many entries where people are trying to make the point that there's no other way, that it could have only been Ukraine and that it doesn't make any sense for ISIS to act against Russia in this kind of manner, in an independent way and so on and so forth. Arto, I'd like to hear your thoughts first.

Arto Artinian: Well, I mean, Boyan, first, the whole world basically, or most of the world, has expressed condolences. And I'd like to express my condolences as well for the huge loss of life basically of concertgoers. And it's a terrible, essentially, a war crime. But my thought is the first thing is I think with such events, we can't expect a clear chain of evidence pointing to the people who did it. Because there's a distinction between the shooters and those who ordered the attack and coordinated the attack, etc. And I think we will never probably obtain clear evidence chain of who really is behind. Just the way when the pipeline was blown up in the North of Europe under the Baltic Sea, there will never be a clean chain of evidence. There won't be a PDF document with a signature or a video.

Boyan Stanislavski: Unless they find a passport, unless they find a passport, you know!

Arto Artinian: That's right! Unless they find a passport. Or there will never be a video of the divers going underwater and placing the explosives with a patch of the flag of the navy that they represent, you know, but I think in these questions... In these situations reasonable people always ask the question who is capable of such an attack if the attack is very complicated or effective or if it's effective, that means it's coordinated. And if it's coordinated, that means it's professionally planned. And if it's professionally planned, who has the capacity to professionally plan large-scale terrorist attacks like this? In a society which is currently at war, which already has high security throughout its capital region.

So, I think we always have to ask the question who benefits from such an attack? And it's clearly not ISIS. Because ISIS, we must not forget, is essentially a defeated terrorist force, paramilitary force, maybe it's a more accurate way to say, which was created in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and emerged from the ruins of the Iraqi military. And we have a bunch of public documents during the Obama administration that ISIS functioned at various times as a proxy to the US State's efforts to fight, for example, against the Syrian government. I mean, there were public documents from 2012 that attested to this, etc.

Then, of course, the US also fought against ISIS. But in my personal view, if I were to guess, I think that in the context of the Russia -NATO war, if I were to speculate, it is clear that this is an attempt to destabilize internally Russian politics by creating some kind of an ethnic problem between migrants, such as the terrorists who are from Tajikistan. And there are a lot of migrant people from the middle, you know, from the post-Soviet Republics like Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, etc., similar to many other patterns like immigration from Latin and Central America to the US, you have similar immigration patterns in Russia from those post-Soviet Republics.

So I think there's an attempt to create ethnic tension, which I think has failed so far, which is a good thing, because clearly Tajik people are not to be lumped together with four professional terrorists who were paid and promised from external sources, you know, money and who knows what else. So I think that was the first attempt. And I think we have to realize that Ukraine is fighting a total war against the Russians. The Russians are still on the official level, they just acknowledged that they're in a state of war. Last week, Putin's spokesperson, Peskov said that "we are at war." Whereas I think from the Ukrainian and from NATO side, they're fighting already a total war against the Russian Federation, which means there's no distinction between civilians and military when you fight a total war.

And I think if we think about it this way, I think it's entirely possible that this could be part of that total war, which no longer distinguishes between civilians and military forces. The Russians don't practice total war yet, because if they did, we would notice large scale bombings of concert venues and apartment buildings with the intention of total destruction of human life of the enemy.

But I think the dangerous part of this escalation is that if indeed this is that kind of a state level action, which we don't know who it is because we don't have the facts, but if we're guessing, if this is an escalation of that sort, that means the war has entered a troubling stage where now civilians are going to be explicitly targeted as much as possible and that is going to, of course, provoke a response. And if I think if we combine this with the French president's strange volunteering of French military forces in the NATO - Russia war of 20,000 people, which is completely insignificant, that shows...

Boyan Stanislavski: They're supposed to begin with 2,000 people and then they're supposed to only enlarge it to 20,000 in some time.

Arto Artinian: And we should mention that the French government, the French military has no successful record since Napoleon in fighting against what they call peer opponents, countries that have compatible military. They're incredibly ineffective and kind of mediocre colonial military force that's optimized to invade and control poor impoverished African states.

The French contribution is probably just going to be a disaster from the point of view of the French, but it could escalate the war into something more than it is right now. So I think if we combine these two things in conclusion, I think this was clearly not the act of a bunch of four terrorists or five terrorists who were radicalized through a telegram channel where a preacher told them what to do. I think this is going to be one of those events like the blowing up of the pipeline that we don't know, like people like us, normal civilians, around the world will not know the facts.

Boyan Stanislavski: Well, we'll not know the facts, but for sure these were not like the story goes like five or six drunk fishermen from Ukraine, they approached it with a boat. That's ridiculous, right?

Arto Artinian: Because it was designed to kill maximum amount of people and it happened in such an organized and quick fashion and weapons were made available and this cannot happen through… So that's my…

Boyan Stanislavski: Yeah, of course. I mean this has been professionally prepared and professionally carried out. So, you know some media outlets particularly Turkish media outlets have stated that this is something like the Russian 9/11 and I wonder what you think about it, Bozhin, I want to go to you. Do you think it could really have this kind of effect? I mean the 9/11, you know effect for American politics. And since things are not really clear, whether it was Ukraine, whether it was ISIS, ISIS-K.

Today in the morning, I was able to figure out what ISIS-K really means, because I first thought that it's some kind of new political correctness. We were first calling them ISIS, then ISIS and DL something and then Daesh and then, you know, now it's ISIS-K. So ISIS-K is supposed to be some kind of outbreak from ISIS in general, which operates in Afghanistan. Again, this is...

Arto Artinian: Well, ISIS-K I think refers to ISIS's Caucasus faction.

Boyan Stanislavski: ISIS-Caucasus, I see. I see. All right. Thanks. Well, anyway, Bozhin, to you now. Do you think it could really have the same weight as 9/11 in America for Russia and especially provided its current situation, the fact that the country is at war and given the international tensions and also everything that Arto said about friends being so eager to intervene in the conflict and then maybe Poland and Britain and of course the Baltics. Please go ahead. What's your take?

Bozhin Traykov: Well, I think that the comparison with 9/11 is ungrounded most of all because there is no similar document in Russia to the project of the new American century which was basically an imperial project for intervening in the Middle East and all these regime changes happened as a result of that. 9/11 played a role as a catalyst to mobilize this foreign policy agenda and to convince the American public to start this process. I don't think that there is something similar in this case. I also think that when we analyze this particular terrorist act, we have to look at motives, and the context in which it occurred.

I will start with the context. If you remember, maybe about a week or two weeks ago, the United States warned its citizens that such terrorist acts are about to happen and to avoid places like concerts, malls and so on, which basically means that there was some awareness on part of the American Intelligence agencies that something like that was in preparation. Well, of course, the idea was that this is going to happen before the elections or during the elections to foment some kind of fear and to try to change the results of the election and so on. It happened exactly about four or five days after Putin's new re-election. So this is one thing.

Then right away after this terrorist attack, the United States and Britain start jumping and pointing the finger at ISIS, saying that ISIS is responsible. Now, probably everyone is aware that ISIS is always taking the responsibility for any kind of terrorist act, I guess, ISIS does that when it comes to non-Muslim regions and states. So the signature to me, this doesn't really look like the signature of ISIS. The perpetrators were caught, the ones that were caught were caught right away, they started talking right...

Boyan Stanislavski: And they're singing! They're singing, right? That's what we know from Margarita Simonyan. I think she's right...

Bozhin Traykov: There is no suicide bombing. The other thing that I want to go to, what Arto pointed out, and I think is really very, very important, it is the nationality of these people. That they are from Tajikistan. This was very well planned to kind of divert the attention from the usual suspect, which of course would be Ukraine, because they are really engaged in total war and we can start with Dugina's assassination, the daughter of the philosopher Aleksandr Dugin and other types of terrorist assassinations that are happening like targeting civilians.

Well of course they are not just your regular civilians, these are influential intellectuals or commentators. And so they could be considered targets that are, you know, not just random people, but in this case, you have absolutely no such thing. You have a murder of innocent civilians. This ethnic tension that I think was one of the major objectives of this, to create some kind of ethnic tension between Russian citizens who are the Slavic population and the Muslim Russian citizens. There are many of them because there's a big percentage of the population that is Muslim. So this attempt for creating some kind of rift like that. And also this reminds me of the recent hero that the West is blaming, Putin on his demise.

Navalny, because Navalny was kind of advocating confrontation with the Muslim population, referring to them as cockroaches on television while he was running for political office. And when you think that Navalny, for the most part is a person who was very close to the foreign intelligence, to such agencies like the CIA, for example, and maybe MI6. A person very, very close and perhaps like an asset.

You know, this new thing now, kind of seems to have the same objective, some kind of like creating some kind of implosion within Russian society. Whether this will be 9/11, I really doubt it because Vladimir Putin is not known for emotional responses. He has been quite reserved in situations like that, including when the Chechnyan terrorist groups did this terrorist act in a theater in Moscow, I believe, but that was two decades ago, similar kind of a situation...

Boyan Stanislavski: Yeah, by the way, can I interrupt you here? Can I interrupt you here? Because I think it's pretty important to note certain facts when it comes to the incident that you mentioned from, I think it was the theater on Dubrovka like 20 years ago or something like that. Exactly. And then before that, we had another terrorist attack in, I can't remember what it was in Moscow or St. Petersburg right now, but two blocks of flats were taken down. And I don't know whether you remember that. I mean, I'm sure you do. But I'm not sure whether everybody in our audience does remember it, that everything was blamed on Putin at that time.

You remember that? Like, Putin blew up those two blocks because he had to find a pretext, reason to actually escalate the war in Chechnya at that time and I think this is absolutely ridiculous and I'm making this observation here now because I feel that many people across Europe, you will see that many people repeat the same narrative. Now that Putin has blown up this or has organized or staged this false flag or whatever fake attack in order to find pretext to escalate the war in Ukraine. Now, I want to tell you to those out there who actually entertain this kind of interpretation, that this makes no sense whatsoever. Putin was able to escalate the war whenever he wanted without any pretext or reasons.

No one was stopping him, the public opinion was not against it. On the contrary, pretty much as now, when it comes to the war with Ukraine, the public opinion is much more hawkish than the president actually is. And the same goes for this, like why would Putin actually be... I mean, what was Putin going to achieve? Like, if we assume that there is a pinch even of logic in the kind of interpretation that Putin would stage this thing in Krasnogorsk the day before yesterday.

Why? Like, what is he supposed to be getting from it So, Arto I want to hear your take about how sensible it would be for Putin to actually stage this kind of deadly genre scene and the kind of accusations that we're getting from the public opinion pretty much across Europe. I still feel it's such a stupid idea to entertain that I find it really disturbing that so many people seem to be falling for it without thinking for a while. Because if you do think for five seconds about it, it just makes no sense, as I said, on its face. So, yeah, please go ahead, Arto!

Arto Artinian: I think the immediate reference here is the Hitler's Reichstag fire in 1933. And I think those commentators across Europe, in my view, those people have absolutely no legitimacy to say anything because they are neo-Nazis. They are totally okay with the resuscitation of Nazi symbology in the Ukrainian war where Ukrainian tanks are, their insignia on their tanks and armored vehicles is the Nazi German army of World War II's cross, stylized cross, which the Nazi invading units of the Soviet Union in 1941 wore that cross.

And to do that deliberately in Ukraine, which is the former part of the Soviet Union, which lost 8 million civilians, is a giant slap in the face of all those millions of Ukrainians, the vast majority of the population, who lost people who were murdered by the invading Western European army led by the Nazis. That's the first point and after that, there's nothing to say to those commentators, because they're basically the lowest of the low on the political spectrum in my view. And they have no leg to stand on.

The Baltic states politicians are basically neo-Nazis and they're apologists for that most vile form of politics that seems to be resuscitating, which only fuels the Russian people's, by the way, determination to radicalize the war and basically totally defeat NATO. I think the war is really transitioning that way from the Russian point of view. Because they've realized that NATO in many ways is a paper tiger militarily. It doesn't have the military capacity nor the guts, the determination.

Boyan Stanislavski: That's why they're not afraid of it, by the way…

Arto Artinian: They're not afraid of it at all.

Boyan Stanislavski: …that they're gonna intervene, French, British, Polish, we don't give a damn, right?

Arto Artinian: They don't care. And I think even though there's gonna be a horrible loss of life in Russia and Ukraine and in Europe, if that happens, I think the French president's decision to intervene is sparked by the realization that NATO is a paper tiger, that NATO cannot win, that the French military has 222 tanks, less than Bulgaria, by the way, I just saw the latest statistics.

Boyan Stanislavski: That's amazing, isn't it?

Arto Artinian: Bulgaria has 440 tanks, which are old models from the 1980s that haven't been upgraded, but they're 440. The French military is 220 tanks. What are you talking about in terms of fighting a major...

Boyan Stanislavski: By the way, let me just throw in here that before 1989, when our parents, our fathers, when they went to the Bulgarian People's Army and they served there, Bulgaria had more tanks than the Greek army and the Turkish army put together.

Arto Artinian: Over a thousand, I think 1500 maybe.

Boyan Stanislavski: Because he was going to defend, in case of armed conflict, he was going to defend the southern flank of the Warsaw Pact. But anyway, this is just for you to have a comparison.

Arto Artinian: And we must mention here that Bulgaria, unlike Greece and Turkey during World War II, even though Bulgaria belonged to both sides, first it was allied with the Nazis, in which it didn't fight in major military operations. It acted as a kind of a supportive force to the German army. In the second part of World War II, after September 9th of 1944, there was a Bulgarian army of several hundred thousand strong, including hundreds of thousands of volunteers who became part of the Allied effort. So the Bulgarian army actually, unlike the French army, has experienced, at least in World War II, fighting large scale in high intensity warfare.

So going back to the question, we know it's a historical fact that when the Nazi party assumed power in order to solidify its position in 1933 they engineered the burning of the Reichstag, of the German parliament, and then they blamed their political opponents, their strongest political opponents, which was the Communist Party of Germany and the international communist movement in Europe. I think they arrested a Dutch, a young Dutch communist and who was executed, right, as the perpetrators. And then they arrested Georgi Dimitrov, you know, the Bulgarian prominent communist who was the head of the, you know, who was very active and eventually head of the Communist International.

And there was the famous Leipzig court trial where even the Nazi courts absolved Dimitrov and his co-defendants from any guilt. But the point is in European imagination, the imperialist imagination, this is an old trick to burn, to commit some kind of a massive public kind of crime, like the burning of the parliament building or a mass terrorist attack which kills hundreds and thousands of civilians and then you blame like your direct political enemies of doing it. So in this case, what would be the logical reason for Putin, which is this kind of personalization by the way, because Putin doesn't rule.

Boyan Stanislavski: Some say "the Putin."

Arto Artinian: Yeah, Putin doesn't rule the government with, like, direct orders, you know, it doesn't work like that in any modern state, whatever the form of the status, Soviet style, socialist state or liberal democracy, there's no one person that exercises control like that. So anyways, what would be the logic for the Russian government or the Russian president to do this? First of all, after a massive election win. Clearly a massive election win that even everybody seems to be admitting around the world, even the United States government said Putin is the elected president of Russia. You know, they didn't say it's the illegitimate. This is what the European neo-Nazi...

Boyan Stanislavski: The Polish have never... The Polish have never recognized the results.

Arto Artinian: That's true, the Polish, the Ukrainians and like the neo-Nazis, like the Lithuanians, which doesn't matter because Lithuania, it doesn't really exist on the international map as a political actor. It's completely irrelevant. So it doesn't matter what they say. But for example, all these other neo-Nazi states in Europe, neo-Nazi in actions and inaction, because if you are a government that is okay with the resurrection of neo-Nazi symbols in your allies, then you are by extension supporting neo-Nazi politics, right?

So in other words, the current French government doesn't have to put in neo-Nazi signs and its own government buildings. The fact that they're okay with that happening somewhere else where their allies are doing it, in which they're okay with that ideology. Maybe the way the French were okay with the Nazi occupation, where only 3 % of the French population was ever in the resistance in some way. So, most French were okay with the Nazi occupation of their country in World War II. Let's be honest here. They drank coffee and the Parisian cafes were working and people wrote their books. So I think this accusation is a very well thought out and old practice where you say, aha, this terrible crime was committed by their own government in order to radicalize the people and get them more. But that hasn't happened.

Boyan Stanislavski: But you don't need to do that! Like, come on! Look at the Russian Telegram channels. You get questions like, why aren't we carpet bombing Kiev?

Arto Artinian: Why are we using nuclear weapons against the French? And of course, the government is not doing that, which, like you said, Boyan, the radicalization is far more on the level of the population, if you will, than it is on the level of the government. So clearly there's no connection between these accusations and the government's actions.

Boyan Stanislavski: Apart from that, we've also had something else. Namely, we had this barrage of missiles at Crimea and from the information that's been released so far, we know that Kiev launched multiple missiles at the city, hosting key Russian naval base. Sevastopol, which is, from what I gather and from what the Russian media is saying, the largest attack of this nature on the Crimean Peninsula. And here's what we know so far. Ukraine has fired multiple missiles at the city of Sevastopol in Crimea.

Governor Mikhail Razvozhayev said in the early hours of Sunday. The city hosts an important naval base and the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. According to Razvozhayev, the ground defense have shot down more than 10 missiles. According to other sources, the ground defenses have shot down more than 10 missiles. And the attack is described as the most massive in recent times, which I understand from the beginning of the war. A part of the projectile struck a home - killing 65-year-old man, the governor said.

He added that four more people suffered wounds. Unverified videos posted to Telegram show bright flashes in the sky and several large explosions on the ground. Ukraine has repeatedly targeted Crimea, attempting to strike Russian naval assets with missiles, UAVs and seaborne drones. On late Saturday evening, the Russian Defense Ministry reported that 19 rockets were intercepted in the Belgorod region, which is also close to the border with Ukraine. The projectiles were launched from the Czech-made RM - 70 Vampire Systems, the Ministry of Defense said. Russian President Vladimir Putin said that this week that a buffer zone must be set up at some point in order to protect the border region from attacks.

And I wonder whether you think that those two elements should be somehow analyzed together. In a sense that on the one hand we have this attempt to destabilize Russia, to sow division and discord between the Russians of Muslim origin and those who are non-Muslims or of other faiths. So, we have this and then, you know, subsequently one could say we have this barrage of missiles against Crimea, massive strike, massive attack. So let's comment on that for a little while and let's wrap up this video and we're gonna go to Bulgaria afterwards. Arto I want to start with you. What are your thoughts about this attack on Crimea?

Arto Artinian: Well, I think on one level, Crimea is a military base, as you mentioned, so it makes sense that that will always be the target of military attacks. And I think Crimea is special. Remember that before the 2014 Crimean Spring and when the coup in Kiev brought NATO government essentially in power, which triggered the counter response which started in Crimea, which basically is mostly populated by veterans of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet and then subsequently it has no allegiance to a Western Ukrainian nationalist government supported by NATO.

So, when Crimea returned to or rejoined Russia, if you will, or had left Ukraine, plans had already surfaced publicly that the already documents were being signed and certainly planned for a NATO naval base in Crimea. So Crimea is like always the major target for any military force, because whoever controls Crimea automatically exerts control over the Black Sea militarily. So, I think the goal is to capture, NATO's goal is to capture Crimea and then deny access to the Black Sea on part of Russia, which is basically the reason, one of the major reasons for this war. And to that extent, I think Anglo-American, because the United States and the United Kingdom are the major planners of the war on the Ukrainian side, their military planners are always gonna try to destroy Russia's military bases in Crimea as much as possible. So I think that's what explains those attacks.

I think the Belgorod things, those are purely terrorist attacks in the sense that the bombs and the rounds that hit the city of Belgorod, that's just indiscriminate terror bombing, basically. So yeah, I think that is more close to a parallel with maybe what happened in Moscow in the sense of an attack against civilians. Whereas I think the Sevastopol thing is just an attack in some way they're imagining they're preparing an invasion of Crimea or something down the line, or at least denying the Russians the ability to use Crimea as a military base.

But that doesn't work because Crimea also has the heaviest air defenses in the sense that such missile tactics, many people have written about this, don't work because that's where the heaviest air defenses are. So occasionally you can't have 100% success in any military system anywhere in the world. But missile attacks against Crimean military bases are always going to have a marginal effect against those military targets. But bombing civilian apartment buildings who are not going to be protected as well because you have to allocate resources.

You only have a finite amount of air defense, so you're going to prioritize military bases defense over civilian buildings because civilian buildings have no military value. You can destroy the civilian buildings and that's not going to make the other side necessarily surrender. We know this from World War II and the bombings of Germany, which was large scale terror bombings of civilian targets by the allied air forces, right? Of German citizens, the intent was to kill maximum number of German citizens according to the bomber Harris, the commander of the British bombing forces. That had the opposite effect. The Germans actually decided to fight more against the English and the allies because their homes were destroyed. So, you know.

Boyan Stanislavski: All right. Okay, Bozhin your take.

Bozhin Traykov: I think terror tactics has been the main way of fighting this war on the Ukrainian side since Ukrainians realized that they are incapable of winning any major battles on the battlefront. I doubt that this kind of tactic would have been developed and decided solely by the Ukrainian military or Ukrainian government.

I definitely agree with Arto that this war is led by Western intelligences, especially with the US having a leading role. Perhaps the idea was that while Russians are preoccupied with the tragedy in Moscow. The Ukrainians can take advantage attacking Crimea. Maybe that was the thinking. You know, it's quite naïve to be thinking that this could lead to some sort of a major implosion within the Russian society. And you know what this reminds me of?

There is this constant attempt to convince the American public and Western public in general that somehow Vladimir Putin is this usurper of power whose dictatorship has satifled the Russian people into accepting him as their ruler and denying any kind of possibility that Russian people in general voting for Vladimir Putin in this manner, in this categorical manner actually do feel that this is the person in charge of a government who is now really catering to the security and trying to guarantee the survival of the Russian people as a whole. And there's no even thinking on part of Western commentators that perhaps the Russians are viewing this war as a war of defence.

Boyan Stanislavski: More than anything, yeah, rational, that's true. Okay, let's wrap it up here. Thank you, Arto, thank you, Bajin. It turned out to be a longer conversation than we anticipated in the beginning and longer than we had planned. But nonetheless, I hope it was interesting. So to all our viewers and listeners, thank you very much. And last but not least, make sure to also visit us on Rumble and Odyssey, where we also have accounts and where we publish our videos. So thank you very much and see you in the next episode.