On November 24, 2015 a Turkish F-16 shot down a Russian Su-24 supersonic tactical bomber over either Syria (the Russian version) or Turkey (the Turkish version). The crew ejected from the Russian aircraft, and one of them met a horrible fate when he parachuted into the hands of the mujahideen of a Turkmen militia in Syria.
As might be expected, the Russian government objected vehemently to what the Turks had done, and demanded that the Turkish government make amends. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was defiant, however, and responded belligerently to Russia’s communications. He continued with his customary bombast and braggadocio for months afterwards.
As I followed these events in the news, I assumed that Turkey would eventually pay a price for its actions. Russia does not let that sort of attack go unanswered, especially one that is carried out by a less powerful adversary. But the Russians were (and are) patient and thorough, and I knew they would wait until the moment was right to exact their revenge on the strutting popinjay of Anatolia.
Mr. Erdogan continued in the same vein until the middle of the following June, when he suddenly changed his tune. Without any prior indication of contrition, on June 27, 2016 he made a groveling apology to Russia, obsequiously asking forgiveness for Turkey’s “mistake”.
A few days before the Turkish president said sorry, the Russian government had cut off all flights across the Black Sea to Turkey. The Anatolian beach resorts were favored destinations for Russian holidaymakers during the summer months, so this was a significant move. The Russian government also advised any of its citizens who were in Turkey to leave.
For his part, Mr. Putin declined to accept Mr. Erdogan’s apology. He said that unfortunately, an apology was not enough, and that Turkey needed to experience harsher consequences.
At that point I said to Vlad: “Holy [excrement]! Putin is about to do something to Turkey — wait and see!”
It was one of those rare occasions when, after putting a lot of data points together, I went out on a limb and made a specific prediction, on the record, with Vlad as my witness.
On June 28, 2016 — the very next day — a group of mujahideen carried out a suicide bombing attack at Atatürk Airport in Istanbul. 45 people were killed and more than 200 others wounded. Vladimir Putin expressed his sincerest condolences to the citizens of Turkey for the horrible tragedy that had befallen them.
Strangely enough, no terror group ever claimed credit for the attack. The attackers were eventually identified, and they hailed from the “stans” — Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Their atrocity may have been organized and coordinated by Chechen terrorists.
The FSB, continuing the work of its Soviet-era KGB predecessors, is known to have thoroughly penetrated all the terrorist networks in that part of Central Asia.
All of the above data points led me to conclude that Vladimir Putin had ordered the hit on the airport in Istanbul. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a fact, regardless of whether it can ever be proven.
Turkey was required to experience harsh consequences for shooting down a Russian jet, and it did. Afterwards Mr. Putin and Mr. Erdogan shook hands and made up. Cordial relations between the two countries were re-established.
And you can bet that Turkey will never, ever shoot down another Russian jet, not as long as Recep Tayyip Erdogan is in power.
I wrote the above recap of what happened eight years ago as a preface to the events of March 22, 2024. I assume that readers know the general outline of what happened at Crocus City Hall last Friday, so I won’t give a detailed account of the attack and its aftermath.
Here are some relevant data points that I have observed:
- The mujahideen who carried out the attacks were, like the Istanbul crew, from the “stans”.
- In this case the Islamic State claimed credit for the atrocity.
- However, the attackers were not suicide bombers, which is very unusual for Islamic terrorists. Normally they either blow themselves up or keep shooting until they are killed by police, or run out of ammo.
- The Crocus mujahideen evidently thought they would be able to escape after the attack, which implies that they must be quite stupid.
Additional data points from before the attack:
- The US Deep State very badly wants to go to war with Russia. I don’t really understand why, but it’s been clear since at least 2014 that the neocon-led permanent government really, really wants a good fight with Ivan.
- A number of European NATO members have broached the possibility of instituting conscription to prepare for a possible war with Russia. I don’t remember exactly how many countries have mooted the issue, but Germany, Sweden, the UK, and (I think) Denmark are among them.
- NATO troops have been assembling in Romania.
- NATO forces are, to a certain extent, already in Ukraine, mostly to provide intelligence and operate advanced weapons systems.
Russia is a hall of mirrors when it comes to propaganda and disinformation, so I do not assume that any particular piece of background information put out by Russian sources is in fact true.
The same can be said for our own government (and media). Our side is not as clever at planting false information in the news, but it does so just as much.
Therefore I take almost nothing that I read about the background for the attack at face value. I assume the attackers probably are from Tajikistan, and they may even have been paid by an unknown party to carry out the atrocity. But I don’t take those as definite facts.
Nevertheless, it seems obvious that the attack in Moscow was a set-up, and that the gunmen were patsies. The FSB is not the only intelligence service that has extensive networks within the terrorist organizations in Central Asia. The USA may have lost badly to the Taliban, but the twenty years that the CIA spent in Afghanistan were put to good use. Our spooks could well have put together the operation.
The big question is: WHY?
The Deep State badly wants a war with Russia. But they need Russia to be seen as the aggressor, so they can’t just cross the frontier into Ukraine or Belarus and open fire. They need that nasty Vladimir Putin to attack a NATO member, and then the gates of Hell can be opened.
It’s possible that the Crocus City Hall operation was designed to lure Mr. Putin into making that sort of mistake, thus providing the Deep State with the casus belli it’s been longing for.
The Russians are not stupid, and I don’t think Mr. Putin will take the bait. If it doesn’t already know, the FSB is certain to soon learn exactly who was behind what happened last Friday. After that the Russians will exact their revenge, at a time and place of their own choosing.
If Lara Logan is right, Mr. Putin may have already responded to last week’s attack by taking out the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the Patapsco estuary in Baltimore this morning. Assuming they could hack into the Dali’s internal network, a cyber-attack disabling the ship’s power systems is not at all out of the question. But I’ll remain agnostic on that issue until I have more data.
There are a couple of additional extraneous data points.
First, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said that the Crocus attackers were attempting to escape to Belarus, rather than Ukraine. Either he and Mr. Putin failed to get their stories straight, or they have cooked up some sort of labyrinthine scheme that I can’t begin to make sense of.
Secondly, the Crocus City Hall was dedicated to Muslim Magomayev, an Azerbaijani pop singer from the Soviet era. It seems that Mr. Magomayev was a secular, non-practicing Muslim. I don’t know whether there’s any significance to that fact, but there it is.
Hat tips for several of the links in this essay are owed to Vlad Tepes.
People Love a good conspiracy theory. When the Russian gas pipeline exploded it MUST be western action. Which was never denied because why would you?
Of Course the Russians blew up a similar gas pipeline in the north of Russia a few years before that. (It isn’t a surprise when oil and gas infrastructure explodes – I grew up in an area of multiple refineries. There were many fires and a few memorable explosions)
The container ship Dali is not the first collision of a container ship in March of 2024. The first one of note happened on the 16th of March in Turkey, so you can add that to your list of data points. (You can find video of that crash at this link. At least one crane operator was seriously injured when the ship took out 3 or 4 of the dockside cranes. https://maritime-executive.com/article/video-ym-containership-takes-out-cranes-while-docking-in-turkey)
As for other data points, I believe there was mention of recent ‘incidents’ regarding contaminated fuel in the Baltimore shipyard. That data point is probably not as interesting as jumping straight to “Putin is sabotaging Baltimore!” Or something
Absolutely stupid article!!! Putin has only one task – to kill the Russians and bring, replacing us, the Tajiks and Kyrgyz. They reproduce in any conditions.
If it really was a cyberattack, then someone might finally ask the question “why do they put electronic gadgets in between human and the actual steering and breaking…
Old Boeings, if I remember correctly, have multiple steering lines of different kinds, and they are equipped for total power loss at flight. They even carry paper maps on board in case they lose electronic navigation, the pilots should be able to find the nearest airport by good old map. (which I don’t believe many modern pilots actually can do, but as long as Boeings don’t fall apart… I guess.
Anyhow – even if it was a “cyber attact” my main question would be why was control of that ship “hackable” in the first place?
Neo-Cons HATE the tsars & their Orthodox Christianity.
Who knows who is responsible for these events. I guess we’ll never find out. It’s a chess game played by very powerful and ruthless individuals. People can speculate, but at the end of the day, that’s just what it is, speculation.
That Putin has the stomach to use jihadis to do his dirty bidding is by no means a well kept secret. Some even believe that he orchestrated the 1999 apartment building explosions in various Russian cities that killed several hundred people. This act eventually led to the second Chechen war and it helped Putin become president of Russia.
Maybe he orchestrated the most recent one too? Or maybe it is what it appears to be, an ISIS operation, planned and carried out by the infamous terror group. That radical Muslims have no qualms about massacring non Muslims is a well known fact.
Or maybe it was someone else, who knows?
The US and its allies have fared no better up through the years, and have perpetrated several black ops in the past to achieve their goals. The interference in the Ukraine elections, the interference in the 2020 US election, the Covid epidemic and the pipe line explosion in the Baltic Sea are just a few recent examples.
I guess this is what powerful individuals do, they deceive and manipulate and they walk over countless corpses to achieve their political and personal goals. That’s how things have always been, and that’s how it will always be. It’s human nature, and human nature is impossible to change.
The best thing that we as the expendable plebs can do is to keep this in mind. The rulers of this earth only think about themselves and they don’t give a toss about their lowly minions. And I think more and more people are waking up to this fact.
At the end of the day, you have to try to look after yourself and your loved ones. That should be priority number one, because no one else will. It is however increasingly hard to do, and it doesn’t help that the future looks very bleak indeed.
I think something very bad is going to happen within the next few years. I just hope that my family and I will make it through to the other side.
One can always hope.
I think there are some scraps of evidence that lead to the head of the beast; namely, those who comprise the Committee of 300, those who are a member of the Club of Rome, those associated with the Tavistock Institute. And the second tier beasts in the CFR and the RIIA and NATO.
But we know who crushes the head of the Beast. Eventually.
It is called the Great Game by the duplicate Brits, they were masters of it and got 2 World Wars out of it. Now everybody else is trying to play this game and are failing and war will be a result, thus as it always was, thus as it will always be, it is the human condition, for man is war and peace is nothing more than a lull until the next storm.
Dunno, Baron. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. And an accident is just an accident.
We have rising levels of complexity while also rising levels of incompetence. There will be more of this…
Vera: Agreed. Now, which came first, the complexity or the incompetence?
No. No. No. It’s DEFINITELY a Russian conspiracy/cyber attack. (Russia! Russia! Russia!)
Pay no attention to the June 2023 report in which the MV Dali was cited for deficiencies related to “propulsion and auxiliary machinery” by the officials in San Antonio, Chile. It couldn’t possibly be a history of lousy maintenance on the part of the company operating the ship.
It ABSOLUTELY, positively, maybe, perhaps is Russia, Russia, Russia
https://gcaptain.com/breaking-mv-dali-cited-for-propulsion-issues-before-baltimore-incident/
Here’s another possible data point:
The collective West has repeatedly attacked the Kerch Bridge in Crimea.
Could this be significant?
A few more data points (visual)
https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/a-very-curious-crocus-video
I think there are some scraps of evidence that lead to the head of the beast; namely, those who comprise the Committee of 300, those who are a member of the Club of Rome, those associated with the Tavistock Institute. And the second tier beasts in the CFR and the RIIA and NATO.
But we know who crushes the head of the Beast. Eventually.
That’s the thing about asymmetric warfare: All the normies tend to ignore it, or blow it off as nonsense. There are no accidents. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. We pull that hideous thing off by surrogates in Moscow, and Moscow cyber warfare’s a ship to destroy a bridge on I 95 in Baltimore, killing several, and crippling a major American port for who knows how long. And the creepy thing is, I don’t think the Russians are finished with US yet, and there’s more to come. Add that to Xo Bi Dens collapsetarian policies for the US, and you got a witches brew that stinks for us, and makes our situation even worse. Normies will wander around scratching their heads, trying to figure out what’s happening. Chaos in annexing us.
Great article, one typo – re: that the neocon-led permanent government really, really wants a good fight with Ivan. we don’t have a neo-con government. We have a neo-com(munist) government under the democrats and Biden.
“Neo-con” is something of a misnomer. The militant war-hawks who go by that moniker, the Victoria Nulands and Anthony Blinkens of the world, are drawn predominantly from old-line liberal-left families who have customarily supported Democrats going back to FDR.
When the Democrat Party shifted radically leftwards in the 1970s and afterwards, they migrated to the GOP. They filled the power vacuum created on the center-left by the departure of their former ideological comrades.
In addition to believing in a strong national defense and interventionist foreign policy, their move to the GOP establishment also dovetailed with their emphasis on defense spending over social programs, and at least in theory lower taxes (in theory, since their professed support for fiscal sanity never actually happened; they just talked about it).
The “neo-cons” therefore, are not “conservative” in any sense that an old-time Republican stalwart like Senator Robert Taft would recognize, or for that matter, even a mainstream Republican from forty years ago. They’re really radicals once you scrap off the superficial appearance of being conservatives. They’re Trotskyites in fine clothing and expensive haircuts/hairstyles.
Agree. They did the GOP no favors by gracing the party with their presence. Slavish fidelity to Israel and its foreign policy objectives was and is one of their hallmark features, along with a bizarre, neverending hostility to Russia.
It’s worth considering whether the RINO phenomenon is an identical phenomenon. The camouflage is much greater but the result is the same – an endless neutering of any genuine conservative identity resulting in a flaccid “Republicanism” and, now, endless rancor. Think Liz Cheney. Paul Gottfried has written a lot on the failure of Conservative, Inc.
Watching this at 8x the speed, it doesn’t look at all like an accident. Hack attack? And by who? I suspect the accident investigation will find out, but I also doubt it will be released.
https://twitter.com/BGatesIsaPyscho/status/1772655744023671138?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1772655744023671138%7Ctwgr%5Ea90aba82fd367290f5d51fb12f637a4007021bcf%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fncrenegade.com%2F
Agreed. If you intended to take out that critical support, how would you have done it differently?
If the ship lost power just a steady-as-she-goes decision by the pilot looks like it would have missed the pylon. And if power was necessary to operate the rudder where did that power come from?
And “dirty fuel”? Come on. How likely is that and is there no such thing as a fuel filter on marine engines.
Still, the crew on the bridge was supposed to have been all local people with expert knowledge. It’s unlikely they would have been in on some sabotage scheme. Unless they’re all relatives of Judge Engeron.
That said, the result would be delicious Russian revenge for the sabotage of the NS pipelines. A beyond perfect tit for tat. The how is the problem.
Good will come of this if the somnolent or arrogant political class gets it in their heads that bad things don’t just happen to foreigners we find to be inconvenient. Far away in benighted lands….
Baron, the US did not lose badly to the Taliban. The nation building objective was assinine and unattainable from the git. Nevah happen GI.
Neither side could overcome the other and “Biden” wisely pulled the plug on the whole fiasco and said het roi (finito). The exact manner of the farewell was shameful beyond imagining and made it look like we were departing under pressure. I look forward to Seymour Hersh’s eventual revelations on that.
For the record, I do not believe that a mere captain of infantry would have organized such a disgraceful skedaddle. The military professionals were overruled by the civilian “leadership.” It was probable Karine Jean Pierre’s fault.
It was that jerkoff Sulivan, Jarret and Rice, who never in a million years be allowed anywhere near any national security issue.
I came across this on X (formerly Twitter) from one who made cautious comments on recent events:
“Russia have arrested an accomplice involved in the Crocus City Hall terror attack.
This individual is allegedly involved in the financing of the attack.
Russia claim they now have confirmation the terrorists received financial backing from Ukraine.”
You are trying in vain to find logic in the actions of the Kremlin morons.