Putin Blames Ukraine— An Excuse To Flatten Kyiv...Like He Did Grozny
Annually, multibillionaires Jeff Bezos ($196.3 billion), Elon Musk ($193.7 billion) or Bernard Arnault ($227.2 billion) are usually sited as “the richest man in the world.” When Musk was number one, he told a German interviewer that “I do think that Putin is significantly richer than me” and then refused to elaborate. But Putin, who makes $140,000 a year as president of Russia, owns a fleet of luxury cars, dozens of private jets, several mega-yachts including one worth nearly a billion dollars, and a castle near Moscow twice the size of Buckingham Palace, which is just one of a portfolio of mansions and villas Putin, his family and girlfriends own around the country. If you look at the latest Bloomberg Billionaires Index, you’ll find a couple with Russian names, but no one living in Russia and no one named Putin. 12 have fortunes over $100 billion.
Putin went to great lengths to vault to the top of that list, even if he will never appear on it. In light of the deadly attack (133 dead) on the concert hall in Krasnogorsk, a Moscow suburb, and the misdirection from multiple sources about who was responsible— ISIS, FSB, Ukraine— my friend Dorothy suggested we take a look at the 1999 apartment bombings in Russia that brought Putin to the presidency. No one knows for certain who was behind those deadly bombings either. But the suspicion that it was Putin is pretty overwhelming, even if the Duma refused to investigate, declared the case sealed for 75 years and stood by when 2 of its own members, Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin were assassinated to pursuing a public commission investigation (as well other members of the commission).
Those bombings, in September 1999, where the excuse for launching the Second Chechen War at a time when Boris Yeltsin was getting ready to retire and feared a post-presidency investigation into his corruption, while his presumptive heir, Putin, then prime minister, wasn’t well known outside of elite circles. The bombings— in Moscow, Buynasksk and Volgodonsk— killed over 300 people and injured over 1,000, spreading a wave of terror and fear across Russia. The speaker of the Duma, Gennadiy Selenznyov, announced the bombing in Volgodonsk 3 days before it actually occurred.
Chechens were blamed— they denied anything to do with it— and Putin took the country to war, rallying the country around himself and making it obvious that he should succeed Yeltsin. About a week after the bombing in Volgodonsk, a suspicious devise, just like the ones used in the other bombings, was found and defused in Ryazan. The next day Putin used it as an excuse to use ballistic missiles to devastate Grozny, the Chechen capital. However, it was an obvious setup and the 3 FSB agents who planted the devise were arrested by local police. The FSB then claimed the whole thing was just a practice anti-terror drill. No investigation was permitted and the 3 agents were freed. Grozny, a city of around a quarter million people, lost hundreds in that first attack and eventually thousands as the war progressed and the city was destroyed.
Alexander Litvinenko, was a former FSB agent who defected, blamed the FSB for the bombings, went to work for the British spy agency investigating the stolen wealth of Putin and his cronies and was subsequently assassinated by FSB agents in London. There have been several films and books that have come out with his story. This is one of the documentaries, well worth watching as the debate over who was responsible for bombing the Crocus City Hall gets underway next week... and for teh next several years:
If you’re read popular novels like Tom Clancy’s The Hunt For Red October, Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate or Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett, you know exactly what a false flag operation is. But students of history have no need for novels to recall these kinds of events. In 1931, Japan staged an event in which they bombed a section of a Japanese-owned railway line near Mukden (now Shenyang) in China. The incident was used as a pretext for the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, leading to further aggression in China. In 1939, the Nazis staged an attack on the German radio station, Sender Gleiwitz, near the Polish border, a flimsy pretext to invade Poland, triggering World War II. Earlier, Hitler used the Reichstag Fire (1933)— which he blamed on Communists— to consolidate his own power and suppress all opposition.
And it isn’t just odious dictators like Hitler, Tojo and Putin who use this kind of tactic. In 1964, LBJ used a bullshit “attack” against the USS Maddox by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify escalating the War in Vietnam, which led to the deaths of as many as 3 million Vietnamese, 300,000 Cambodians, 60,000 Laotians and 58,220 members of the U.S. military.