UK foreign intelligence service MI6 has allegedly prepared a group of saboteurs to disrupt Russia’s growing economic cooperation with African states an unnamed military-diplomatic source [claimed]
The British spy agency created a “sabotage hit squad” consisting of around 100 Ukrainian “nationalist and neo-Nazi militants,” the anonymous official claimed
If true (and this could yet turn out to be false but it seems totally within the playbook) this could represent several things. A recognition that Ukraine is failing and perhaps a clever attempt to thin out the most hardened fighters otherwise most likely to engage in stabbed in the back terror against the west.
But it also importantly represents a serious escalation in Africa against new independence from colonial and western interests. Supporting Nazis in Africa is of course nothing new for western intelligence. The South African Apartheid regime was worked with closely for some time, various colonizing white supremacist movements and forces have since times of Europe’s first colonizing pushes been sent to Africa.
I would like to believe that but my pessimism inclines me more toward the opposite view, namely that China and Russia are still being far too passive and inactive in this respect. Maybe they are slowly coming to the realization that they need to get more actively involved in the global resistance movement against Western imperialism, but so far I think they have either been lacking the resources/reach (in the case of Russia it was too weak after the USSR fell), or been too cautious or too principled in their belief in non-intervention (in the case of China).
The West still has a huge lead on the forces of the resistance in matters of spreading their influence and embedding their agents across the world. However Russia and China have an advantage that the US will never have which is that the strategy pursued by the US in the long term only generates more and more blowback, discontent and resentment, whereas Russia and China have chosen to emphasize the sovereignty of nations. This makes this conflict fundamentally asymmetric and maybe the fact that our side doesn’t use the same methods that the US does is in fact turning out to be a strength.
Yeah, I’m saying move beyond the SWOT analysis and assume all actors have 20 years of preparation or more plus they actionable and asymmetric intelligence. What explains the state of play and what are the implications of that explanation? If Russia is too weak, which I also fear, then they wouldn’t be in Africa, straight up. The enemy is too close at the gates, they have drones entering Russia and doing damage. There’s too many unknowns and they know that. If they were weak, they wouldn’t split their forces and focus unless they were throwing a Hail Mary to try to split the Western forces. But that Hail Mary makes no sense if they don’t have the force to back it up.
So the SWOT analysis isn’t useful here. Either Russia is better equipped with intel and rolling deep in materiel and partners, or it’s completely unraveling and Wagner is just abandoning the ship and going where the money is.
China also isn’t foolish. It’s not going to invest billions in getting the BRI going and completely ignore the military element. The military strategy is one of the foremost pieces of Chinese strategy since Mao and no one has really changed that. That China has extended so much into the global south economically indicates to me that it has extended significantly in force projection. This would seem to be confirned in its ability to broken peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia. That doesn’t happen on good will alone.
So I’m pessimistic too. I am pessimistic that the anti-imperialist calculations are off or that Western intelligence is several steps ahead. But the evidence is starting to undermine the latter, and the historical pieces seem to make sense. The KGB was notorious for being far better spy hunters than the West was at being spies. Putin is KGB and BDFL. China has demonstrated a similar prowess for spy hunting, and it’s not unlikely that they got a lot of that from the Soviets when relations were good and probably got more as relations with Putin grew.
If that’s the case, then USA is operating at an intelligence deficit. And if that’s true, then what do the actions of Russia and China tell us? That’s what I am trying to figure out.
If it turns out that the USA has the upper hand on intelligence, then everyone and everything is fucked.
I’m not talking about intelligence, i’m talking about the level of penetration of societies through CIA cutouts, NGOs, brainwashed “true believers” in liberalism (who exist because the propaganda machine of the West is enormous and global) and corrupt, bought off puppets. You just have to look at what is happening in countries like Thailand and how deeply the US has its claws in there despite its closeness to China, funding a massive pro-western, anti-China liberal media apparatus and controlling entire political parties. Wherever this happens, and it is the case in many, possibly even most countries in the global south, they have a very easy time engineering color revolutions, rigging elections and getting these countries to act as they want through a combination of threats, bribery and blackmail on both a personal and a national level.
I don’t see anywhere near the same level of penetration of Russian or Chinese media and NGOs, in fact it’s like they’re not even competing on that playing field at all.
Russia and China may well have better intelligence but they are not - at least not visibly - using it for actual on the ground operations of the sort i listed above.
I agree with this and you saved me writing this. I don’t know what the person you’re replying to is talking about because honestly Chinese global intelligence capabilities, penetration, as well as Russian is nowhere near what the west’s is. The west is far beyond and above their combined capabilities and it’s absurd to pretend otherwise. Some of this is down to tactics, the Chinese and maybe to some extent the Russians have more restraint, they’re not willing to do things the west will do. They also don’t have long-running cold-war era, anti-communist networks to build off of which themselves were often built off of centuries old colonial intelligence networks and efforts of propaganda, cultivating loyal splinter ethnic groups, etc.
The board could be said to be stacked against China and Russia. They’re safe in their countries but don’t have global reach and ability to activate pawns say that they can blackmail with Epstein type material or who are corrupt, greedy, and who they’ve been paying or can promise to allow to loot the country if they undertake a coup. They have good intelligence in their countries (though I have doubts about Russia and think they’re penetrated more deeply than we’d like given they are a corrupt capitalist country with contradictions versus China’s situation).