Russia isn’t as strong as we think, but they do have nukes – which is why beating the war drum is a mistake.

..Americans surely helped usher in the oligarch era by guiding Russia through its warped privatization process. In some expat circles back then, you found Americans who believed that by creating a cadre of super-wealthy Russians, we would create a social class that would be pre-motivated to beat back a communist revival.

This may have prevented a backslide into communism, but a by-product was accelerating a descent into gangsterism and oligarchy.

…What most Americans don’t understand is that the Putin regime at least in part was a reaction to exactly this kind of Western meddling.

….The Yeltsin regime, which incidentally also saw wide-scale assassinations of journalists and other human rights abuses, was widely understood to be a pseudo-puppet state, beholden to the West.

The conceit of the Putin regime, on the other hand, was that while Putin was a gangster, he was at least the Russians’ own gangster.

…Russia believes the U.S. reneged on the “leapfrog” deal by seeking to add the Baltics, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Georgia and even Ukraine to the NATO alliance.

To Russia, American denunciations of Russian adventurism in Crimea and eastern Ukraine seem absurd, when all they see is NATO leapfrogging its way ever-closer to their borders.

…For all the fears about Trump being a Manchurian Candidate bent on destroying America from within, the far more likely nightmare endgame involves our political establishment egging the moron Trump into a shooting war as a means of proving his not-puppetness.

Taibbi: What Does Russiagate Look Like to Russians? – Rolling Stone

hmmmm

In retaliation for U.S. sanctions to punish state killers, Russia ended the U.S. adoption of Russian children.

Lifting Sanctions for Dirt on Clinton: The True Reason for Donald Jr.’s Russia Meeting

a.k.a. all things Magnitsky

A CIA veteran says it’s in line with what he’d expect to see.

[in detail]

Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting sure sounds like a Russian intelligence operation – The Washington Post

hmmm

Putin doesn’t care whether the U.S. standing army exceeds half a million or not, or whether the U.S. Navy has more ships. Even during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was a much bigger country than today’s Russia, it couldn’t outspend the U.S. on defense. Today, the U.S. military vastly outnumbers the Russian one, and once other North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries are added in, Russia is dwarfed, frankly.

…Trump is doing roughly what Clinton intended to do to defeat Islamic State. He intensified the U.S. air campaign and stepped up support for rebels opposing Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. …Clinton, who established herself as a Syria hawk, likely would have acted along the same lines. 

…The biggest question is whether Putin prefers the chaos, unpredictability and amateurishness of Trump’s administration or the predictable, unimaginative formulas and cliches Clinton offered during her campaign and probably would have stuck to as president. 

…At some point, even laughing at the panic of U.S. political elites, as Putin’s circle has been doing for months, can get pointlessly repetitive. If Putin is learning anything from the chain of events following Trump’s election, it’s probably a deepening conviction that he can’t get any traction with the U.S. because its institutions are inherently hostile toward someone like him.

Putin Preferred Clinton? Let’s Test Trump’s Theory – Bloomberg

hmmmm

Putin offers political asylum to Comey | TheHill

Jeezus Christ… Now he’s trolling Trump, and the Cheeto-in-Chief still has no idea of how much he’s been outplayed. Loser!

NBC News reviewed video and photos from a 2015 Moscow gala that Mike Flynn was paid $45,000 to attend to see who else was in the room.

…U.S. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, the only American besides Flynn at the head table.

Stein’s 2016 campaign was heavily promoted by RT. 

“And my own connection to RT, you know ironically, it takes a Russian television station to actually be open to independent candidates in this country and that is a shame. A shameful commentary on our own media,” she told NBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald.

(Stein did well enough to help Russia achieve its aims. Her vote totals in the crucial states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan were all greater than Clinton’s margin of defeat, and arguably denied Clinton an Electoral College victory.)

Guess Who Came to Dinner With Flynn and Putin – NBC News

hmmm

A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters.

They described two confidential documents from the think tank as providing the framework and rationale for what U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded was an intensive effort by Russia to interfere with the Nov. 8 election. 

…It recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama, the seven officials said.

A second institute document, drafted in October and distributed in the same way, warned that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election. For that reason, it argued, it was better for Russia to end its pro-Trump propaganda and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral system’s legitimacy and damage Clinton’s reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency, the seven officials said.

Exclusive: Putin-linked think tank drew up plan to sway 2016 U.S. election – documents | Reuters

hmmm, from Reuters, even.

“In some quarters, that would be considered an act of war.”

Cheney: Russian election interference could be ‘act of war’ | TheHill

Because it is.

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee acknowledged Monday that he had made a secret visit to the White House last week to view intelligence files he then cited as proof of potentially improper spying activity against President Trump, casting new doubt on the independence of a congressional investigation into Russian election interference.

…bipartisan appeals for an independent probe of Kremlin meddling in the 2016 election and potential connections between Russia and Trump associates.

…noting Nunes was a member of Trump’s transition team.

Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser, Jared Kushner, had privately met in December with the chief executive of a Russian bank being targeted by U.S. sanctions.

…Nunes’s meeting with a source and his review of intelligence material apparently occurred in a secure space for handling classified files within the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. Nunes returned to the White House the next day — bypassing colleagues on the House committee — supposedly to brief Trump on what he had learned.

The attempts to keep such matters hidden from public view, however, added to the perception that the Trump administration has failed to be forthcoming about contacts with Russia and is working with allies on Capitol Hill to blunt congressional probes.

…Asked about Nunes’s White House visit, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said, “Not good. It’s not a confidence builder.” He said “we’re rapidly getting” to the point where a select committee or independent commission is needed to conduct the investigation into Russian meddling.

…Current and former national security officials described Nunes’s trip to the White House complex, apparently late in the evening after he had slipped away from his staff, as highly unusual. Doing so would ordinarily require Nunes and the person he met with to have been cleared in advance and accompanied by an escort — requirements that seemed to undercut White House claims to have no information about the encounter.

“How in­cred­ibly irregular,” said Matt Olsen, who served in the Obama administration as the head of the National Counterterrorism Center and the general counsel at the National Security Agency. “The only explanation you’re left with is that this is all being orchestrated by the White House.”

…Kushner met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at Trump Tower in December, a session also attended by former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was fired for lying about the nature of his contacts with Kislyak.

On Monday, the White House acknowledged a previously undisclosed meeting between Kushner and Sergey N. Gorkov, chief of Russian government-owned Vnesheconombank. The bank, which handles Russia’s pension funds and deals with development activity for the state, including foreign debts and investments, has been under U.S. sanctions since July 2014, in response to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.

The bank also has been tied to Russian intelligence services.

Nunes admits meeting with source of Trump surveillance documents on White House grounds – The Washington Post

hmmmm