Germany's Seizure of a Damaged Russian Oil Tanker in the Baltic

World War III by proxy is slowly, almost imperceptibly to Westerners, turning into the real thing. Call it boiling the frog or death by a thousand cuts. Having failed to break Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield, and recognizing that much-hyped wunderwaffen like over 500 HIMARS and ATACM surface-to-surface missiles have barely dented the Russian Army's logistics, the Collective West is turning to the traditional British strategy going back to Sir Francis Drake in the 16th century of glorified piracy (given state imprimatur as 'privateering'), while avoiding a full-fledged blockade against the Russian Navy. The very one outlined in a leaked British roundtables document first reported several months ago by intrepid reporter Kit Klarenberg.

The Brits in particular seem to be in a hurry to goad Putin into using tactical nuclear weapons or directly attacking NATO, and Monaco-based trader and analyst Alex Krainer has uncovered the reasons hiding in plain sight as to why. The United Kingdom is broke with British debts approaching 300% of GDP and desperately needs to declare force majeur as yields on Gilts, which were headed upward before the Pandemic intervened, rise inexorably. More on the ticking debt bomb impetus behind manic British Russophobia in a future post.

For this mid-winter weekend, we'll post the video of Stas' assessment above, that the Egypt-bound Russian tanker experiencing 'engine trouble' may have come under some sort of sub-surface drone attack in the neutral waters of the Baltic Sea, before the Germans towed it to port. This would be similar to the sea drone attack on another Russian vessel off the southeast coast of Spain a couple weeks ago. To quote Simplicius76 dispatch from Saturday evening, January 12th:

You’ll note how remarkably close current events are hewing to the prescriptions from the above document. Everything from:

• Drive a rift between Russia and China

• Interdict Russia’s maritime trade (i.e. current oil/gas interdiction crisis)

• Plan for Ukraine to intervene in various global Russian strategic hot spot zones like Syria, Libya, Sahel, et cetera, to “counter Russia’s global footprint”

• Launch information campaign targeting Russian citizens via various digital/wire fraud schemes, known as “Russian population info ops”

• Ruin Russia’s reputation abroad, and much more

While there has been much hype in the maritime industry press this week about a single Chinese port in Shandong reportedly bending the knee to Anglo-American sanctions and refusing to accept new Russian oil tanker cargoes, the consequences for Ukraine and its Western sponsors of threatening both China's overseas oil supplies and India's lucrative refining of Russian crude have yet to be assessed. The clever Chinese have a tendency to temporarily comply with US/UK sanctions to great headlines in Reuters and Bloomberg, then quietly set up their already-sanctioned banks as pass-through entities for business as usual. Like so many other Western actions directed against Russia since 2022, the latest provocations are all about short term gains, almost to a manic level, ignoring potential long-term pain from the blowback to Western interests and economies.

The usefulness of the Ukrainian security services as spiked meat gloves for the CIA and MI6 in launching attacks on Russian ships and interests worldwide may also prove shorter lived than anticipated in Langley, as Russia's allies decide to start fighting back. We're thinking, particularly in the case of the Wagner-trained CARians, Chadians or Sudanese, about the locals sending Ukrainian SOF they catch in their countries back to their GUR boss Kyrylo Oleksiiovych Budanov in Kiev with prejudice. But even as milder forms of retaliation, we're likely to see India and China begin to aggressively deport any Ukrainian males they suspect of being GUR operatives and PNG'ing most of the Ukrainian diplomatic delegations in Delhi and Beijing, respectively.

Stas also discusses in the above video why the Los Angeles Fire Department is using women's handbags rather than buckets to extinguish sparks from the massive blaze. He mentions that there are indeed arsonists contributing to the fires, as well as looters taking advantage of wealthy houses being abandoned--some of whom have been caught. But there's no need for space lasers or other exotic theories when the city is a tinderbox.

In conclusion, Stas says there's no way in hell Russia will do anything but laugh at Denmark, if a Trump Presidency 2.0 indeed decides to seize Greenland and dare the disarmed (because they shipped all their tanks and artillery to Ukraine), cucked Danes to do something about it. Stas says the Europeans have lost the trust of many Russians for one, if not two generations. Stas closes the video with a discussion of the Ukrainian Army's death trap in Kursk Oblast and the Washington Post arguing the Ukrainians cannot retreat without putting the city of Sumy at risk on their side of the border from a Russian counteroffensive.