Isegoria

Kulak notes that western powers are playing with fire when they use assassination against non-western powers:

On August 20, 2022, 29 year old Daria Dugina was killed in a car bombing on the outskirts of Moscow. The bomb, it was widely agreed, had been intended for her father the famed/infamous Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin ( whose works are now shockingly hard to get in English and appears on my “Real Banned Books List”), and while there were lots of deflections and denials, it was fairly widely agreed the plot had been carried out with US and UK backing by Ukrainian aligned insurgents and agents within Russia.

Indeed many US aligned “Journalists”, “Open Source Intelligence” types, Bellingcat associated influencers, and other CIA aligned carve outs openly CELEBRATED the death of Daria, since she had been involved in Putin aligned political youth organizing.

Of course, the fact political volunteers and door knockers have NEVER been considered legitimate military targets, nor the fact the real target was a PHILOSOPHER and everything he had ever done would have been perfectly legal to do even within the United States under the auspices of the first amendment… that somehow never occured to these commentators. Nor the wider US intellectual class, and somehow neither did the natural logical conclusion.

Russia is by and large NOT run by its political organizers and academics. You could probably kill 1000 Russian university professors and it wouldn’t unbalance the Russian state too extraordinarily. Russia is run by a combination of old Soviet secret policemen, gangsters, and crooked/”reformed” oligarchs all attempting to reorganize themselves into a somewhat respectable upper-class, with a blend of impressive and farcical results.

Before he was killed in an internal power struggle the former head of Wagner PMC Yevgeny Prigozhin embodied this, turning from a St. Petersburg gangster, to a prisoner, to a (definitely money laundering) caterer for the presidential palace, to the head of a PMC mercenary company. Every prominent person in Russia has a career like this Right down to Putin going from a KGB officer, to a gangster/political fixer, to president… Every elite member of russian society is basically leading a life ripped right from Grand Theft Auto IV, complete with the eternal struggles of trying to “go legit” and formalize everything as a normal upper-class elite, to being dragged back into gangsterism or even soviet power struggles by their complex past.

Put simply the actual Russian Elite are not people very intimidated by assassination. They’ve all known people to be killed in power struggles, espionage, and criminal altercations, and are used to the anxiety that death might wait for them around the corner. And the US and Ukraine lashing out at academics who might be intimidated doesn’t really affect them.

However, if the Russian state did the logical tit-for-tat escalation and responded in kind… that would shake America to its knees. America actually IS run by its academics, political organizers, and bureaucrats. And almost none of the people with power have a gangster or KGB agent’s stoic familiarity with death and danger.

Killing a Russian Academics daughter did very little to the Russian state… It’d be a very different story for Russia’s armed agents to do the same in America and kill Chelsea Clinton, daughter of current Columbia professor Hillary Clinton.

It’s be a very different story if Russia assassinated Brookings senior fellow Robert Kagan, husband of former under-secretary of state Victoria Nuland. Or any number of Harvard, Stanford, Yale or Princeton political philosophers or International Relations commentators, or members of their family.

Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 exposed deep weaknesses inside Ukraine’s security services, including the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU):

In 2015, the CIA helped support the creation of the SBU’s Fifth Directorate, a specialized unit that combined counterintelligence and special operations. According to reporting by The New Yorker, the unit developed networks of agents inside occupied territory, conducted surveillance operations and carried out some of Ukraine’s earliest covert actions against Russian proxy forces.

[…]

Among the officers who emerged from this period was future HUR chief Kyrylo Budanov.

The Times reported in February 2024 that Budanov served in Unit 2245, an elite military intelligence formation that worked closely with the CIA after 2015. The unit specialized in recovering Russian military equipment, communications systems and other material that could be analyzed by both Ukrainian and American intelligence services.

The intelligence gathered from captured Russian equipment provided valuable insight into Moscow’s capabilities while helping deepen cooperation between Ukrainian and American services.

Budanov was later wounded while conducting operations against Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine and received rehabilitation at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in the United States. He would go on to lead Ukraine’s military intelligence agency.

Officers trained during the years immediately following Crimea now occupy senior leadership positions throughout Ukraine’s intelligence and security services.

[…]

A December New York Times investigation noted that CIA officers and US military planners had assisted Ukraine in refining its campaign against Russia’s energy sector.

Rather than attacking refineries indiscriminately, planners reportedly focused on hard-to-replace components. In one case, a CIA expert identified a critical refinery coupler whose destruction could leave a facility offline for weeks.

The same logic reportedly informed Ukraine’s campaign against Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, the network of aging vessels used to export sanctioned Russian oil around the world.

[…]

Following the public confrontation between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in February 2025, Washington temporarily suspended intelligence cooperation with Kyiv, raising concerns about the future of US support.

However, The Times reported that CIA Director John Ratcliffe successfully argued for maintaining the agency’s presence inside Ukraine despite broader political disagreements over military aid. The CIA reportedly retained personnel in the country and expanded funding for several Ukraine-related programs.

The decision reflected a reality often overlooked in discussions about Western assistance: Ukraine also provides value to the United States. As Bogan put it, “Ukraine understands Russia in ways that Western services never fully can.”

The era of the Transoceanic Navy, focused on power projection from uncontested seas, is over, Commander Jeff Vandenengel argues, and the era of the Panoceanic Navy, focused on sea control and sea denial, has begun:

In the Continental Phase, from the nation’s founding until the 1890s, the United States fought for North American dominance. Because most threats were on land, the Navy played a subordinate role to the Army and focused primarily on coastal defense, commerce protection and raiding, and support of forces ashore, earning weak public support and limited resources as a result. The Oceanic Phase, from the 1890s until the end of World War II, focused on national efforts to achieve supremacy against threats emanating from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Based on that national aim and shaped by the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the Navy sought to achieve command of the sea through the construction of a powerful battle fleet, giving it a convincing strategic concept that earned the service great public support and resources. Finally, Huntington introduced the Eurasian phase of national policy that started at the end of World War II and featured the replacement of oceanic threats with a new continental threat, the Soviet Union. He then introduced the transoceanic Navy, which would use command of the sea to influence events ashore and give it a new strategic concept to earn public support and resources.

Today, the nation’s primary threat has shifted from the Soviet Union to China, which has an economy, military, and set of ambitions that make it a fundamentally different and more menacing adversary. As a result, Huntington’s Eurasian Phase is over and a new phase of national policy has begun, to be dominated by diplomatic, informational, military, and economic competition between the United States and China. Within that competition, China’s construction of a fleet and military designed to challenge the U.S. Navy has degraded U.S. command of the sea to its lowest point in 80 years, undermining the transoceanic Navy’s strategic concept and ability to contribute to national policy.

In its place a new doctrine is taking shape, the theory of the panoceanic Navy, shifting away from projecting power ashore and toward reestablishing command of the sea to enable the flow of friendly military forces and trade while denying that movement to the adversary.

[…]

The U.S. Navy established command of the sea following World War II. That victory, Huntington showed, created a paradoxical crisis: The Navy had built a fleet to establish command of the sea and then achieved just that. Its success meant there were no credible adversaries at sea, undermining the service’s long-held strategic concept that it would guard against oceanic threats and needed a large fleet to do so. The Navy’s ability to win public support and earn the resources necessary to contribute to national objectives suffered as a result.

[…]

The primary challenger to that command is the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), now the world’s largest navy by hull count—if not yet by tonnage—with approximately 25 percent more warships than the U.S. Navy, a disparity expected to grow to almost 50 percent by 2030. Approximately 70 percent of those PLAN warships have been launched since 2010, compared to just 25 percent of U.S. warships, meaning it is no longer a fleet of old, obsolete coastal vessels.

[…]

The Navy’s strenuous submarine production efforts and the Marine Corps’ Force Design are implicit acknowledgements that the United States no longer enjoys uncontested command of the sea. Large numbers of fast-attack submarines are only necessary if there are large numbers of warships for them to sink and large areas in which surface ships would be at too great a risk to operate. Similarly, Marine littoral regiments are only necessary if Marines must “stand in” a high-threat zone, at risk of being cut off from naval support; medium landing ships (LSMs) are only desirable if large amphibious warships cannot deliver Marines where and when desired; and the Marine Corps’ sea control efforts are only necessary if that control is contested.

[…]

Even nonstate actors, because of the proliferation and democratization of long-range sensors, networks, and weapons, are able to contest that command, at least on a regional basis. The Houthis launched more attacks on U.S. Navy ships in two years than all other adversaries had in the preceding 79 years.

[…]

Today, the Navy is built to project power ashore against continental threats but no longer enjoys the command of the sea necessary to do so.

[…]

China now has the world’s second largest economy, manufactures more goods than the next four leading countries combined, and is a global leader in research, innovation, and patents. It has the world’s largest navy, army, conventional rocket force, merchant marine, maritime law enforcement fleet, and the Indo-Pacific’s largest aviation force.

[…]

Whereas the transoceanic Navy shifted focus “away from the oceans and towards the land masses on their far side,” the focus now returns to the sea. The proliferation of long-range sensors, networks, and weapons, however, means it is increasingly difficult for any fleet to achieve sea control—never mind command of the sea. In addition, while conflicts in the Oceanic Phase were primarily decided by fleet-on-fleet actions, the proliferation and democratization of technologies means non-naval forces (Houthis with land-based antiship missiles on the low end of the spectrum and the PLARF on the high end, for example) now have an unprecedented ability to engage fleets, greatly expanding the range and scope of the naval battlefield. What results is the theory of the panoceanic Navy.

[…]

The Pacific phase now features competition between two nations with powerful fleets and large maritime trade flows, and so the site of decisive action has shifted back to the sea. Whoever prevails there will win the ability to influence events ashore, whether through military functions, such as power projection and deterrence, or through the protection and denial of trade and accumulation of national wealth and power. Even the simple viewing of a map makes it obvious: The two competing superpowers are separated by the world’s largest ocean, and it is here that the military competition will be decided.

[…]

At sea, the PLAN has equipped most of its warships, aircraft, submarines, and larger robotic and autonomous systems (RASs) with antiship missiles, meaning almost every platform in its fleet, not just capital ships, poses a significant threat. Even if Chinese aircraft carriers, cruisers, and destroyers could be defeated, clandestine forces such as the world’s largest submarine fleet, PLA mining—forces, and the Chinese maritime militia—could significantly delay if not prevent U.S. sea control.

[…]

In the land domain, the PLARF operates from mobile launchers that are difficult to find and uses weapons that outrange most of those in the U.S. fleet, giving it the ability to strike ships thousands of miles from the coast. The U.S. Marine Corps’ Force Design is focused on using distributed and hidden stand-in forces to affect events at sea, a model the Houthis used to contest U.S. sea control efforts for almost two years. A ship has always been a fool to fight a fort, and now the fort (land-based forces) is mobile, has excellent scouting, long-range communications and weapons, and may be harder to find than the ship.

[…]

Naval history has been dominated by desperate struggles to find the enemy, but today the space and cyber domains may reduce the time necessary to do so from months to minutes.

[…]

Whereas the oceanic Navy focused on fleet-on-fleet actions in a constrained part of an ocean and the transoceanic Navy focused on engagements between the fleet and continental forces in constrained littoral regions, the panoceanic Navy will have to strive to establish sea control against a wide array of military forces operating from multiple domains, with sensors, networks, and weapons of such long range to make it seem like the oceans are one continuous battlefield—a panoceanic arena.

[…]

Taken together, these trends have lowered the obstacles to a credible attack and raised the requirements for credible defense, making sea denial easier and sea control harder. That has already played out in regional contests. In the Red Sea, to attempt sea denial, the Houthis needed a truck, a computer, and a RAS, whereas the U.S. Navy, to achieve sea control, needed a guided-missile destroyer with a highly trained crew, phased-array radars and satellite networks, and multiple types of advanced interceptors. The Houthis might not have known themselves whether their attacks failed; the world would have known almost immediately had U.S. defenses failed. The Houthis capitalized on that disparity to contest U.S. Navy sea control efforts for almost two years without a navy, without an air force, and without a credible industrial base. The Houthis’ sea-denial efforts must be assessed as partially successful—despite U.S. naval officers’ and sailors’ superb performance in battle—as evidenced by the significant reductions in merchant shipping willing to risk a Red Sea transit. Similarly, the Ukrainians denied the Black Sea to the Russians primarily by using land-based missiles and RASs, and in doing so established a measure of sea control for their own maritime shipping.

[…]

Given the threats the United States now faces, the nation’s resulting strategy, and the reality of modern combat at sea, the Navy’s mission is now to establish sea control where possible and sea denial where required.

The Last Spy looks at 102-year-old CIA spymaster Peter Sichel, who passed away last year:

In New York social circles, he was known as the “Jewish James Bond”: a refugee from Nazi Germany whose gratitude to his American hosts was such that he volunteered to join the US army and became the CIA’s first station chief in Berlin as a mere twentysomething, filing early warnings about Soviet activity that have been credited with ringing in the cold war.

Like 007, Peter Sichel also appreciated a fine tipple, and after leaving the US foreign intelligence service it was he who briefly turned a sweet German white, Blue Nun, into one of the best-selling wines in the world.

A film released in UK cinemas a year after his death aged 102, however, shows Sichel as something more akin to a Jewish Jason Bourne: a former agent who grew increasingly disillusioned with CIA meddling and turned a trenchant critic from beyond his grave of US foreign policy – especially in Iran.

[…]

Born in 1922 in Mainz, into a well-off family of wine merchants whose clients included the Ritz in Paris, Sichel’s early upbringing included a stint at a public school in Buckinghamshire.

But after the introduction of the Nuremberg race laws in 1935 the Sichels escaped first to Bordeaux and then to New York, where the young man volunteered to join the US army the day after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Sichel’s language skills and affable manner drew the attention of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor organisation to the CIA, and he was recruited to extract intelligence from German prisoners of war.

Even then, a firm belief in the value of carefully amassed information over head-first action put him on a confrontation course with the military. “He’s considered a hero, but he was a bad general,” Sichel said of George S Patton, often hailed as one of the most brilliant US generals of the second world war. “He was a very stupid man.”

After the allied victory over Nazi Germany, the OSS director, Allen Dulles, asked the 23-year-old “wunderkind” to stay in Berlin and run the intelligence agency’s activities in US-occupied territory.

Sichel took over the handling of key informants and laid a spy network across the eastern zone, infiltrating the KGB headquarters in Karlshorst with a honey trap — a woman who had an affair with the KGB head’s chauffeur — and managing to recruit two members in the SED (Socialist Unity party) Central Committee and the DWK (German Economic Commission) as US agents.

After being moved back to Washington in 1954 to head the CIA’s German and eastern European desk, he was involved in US propaganda efforts such as the establishment of Radio Free Europe, and oversaw “Operation Gold”, the digging of a 450-metre (1,400ft) tunnel from West to East Berlin to tap Soviet-controlled underground telephone cables.

[…]

“People in high places have an idea of what the picture should be, and if the intelligence doesn’t fit, they don’t believe the intelligence,” Sichel says in The Last Spy.

It’s a mindset that Sichel argues led the US to view any nationalist leader elected around the globe who defied American hegemony to be a Soviet puppet-in-waiting, and justified taking covert action to unseat leaders such as Iran’s Mossadegh, Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba and Sukarno in Indonesia.

Sichel was involved in some of these operations, sending a female agent disguised as an air hostess to retrieve a stool sample after Sukarno had visited an onboard toilet, to investigate a (false) rumour that the nationalist Indonesian president was suffering from ill health.

But inside the CIA the German-born spy chief was now a vocal critic, leading to him being investigated by the FBI under suspicion of harbouring communist sympathies in the late 50s. Disillusioned, he retired from the intelligence agency in 1960 and took over his family wine business, which he ran from New York.

The phenomenal commercial success of his brand of sweet-tasting liebfraumilch wine, named Blue Nun to make it more easily pronounceable to customers in the US and the UK, meant Sichel did not look back on his career with bitterness when he died in February 2025

CNN and environmental news outlet Mongabay tracked eight Chinese research vessels that have undertaken deep-sea mining exploratory missions over the past five years:

During that period, the ships spent only around 6% of their total open water time in areas reserved for exploration by Chinese companies, according to an analysis of data from MarineTraffic, a ship tracking and maritime intelligence provider, and the platform Deep Sea Mining Watch.

[…]

Some have also shown behaviors suggesting attempts to avoid detection, including hundreds of instances of “going dark” by disabling the mandatory Automatic Identification System (AIS), a vessel’s self-reporting system that broadcasts its identity and position.

[…]

Experts say Chinese research vessels may very well be prospecting for minerals beyond their assigned exploration zones: In December 2025 and January 2026, the Shi Yan 6, or “Experiment 6,” appeared to operate within India and Germany’s exploration area in the Indian Ocean; in November, the Chinese vessel Shen Hai Yi Hao, or “Deep Sea No. 1,” appeared to operate within South Korea’s exploration area, also in the Indian Ocean. Throughout 2024, it repeatedly seemed to be operating in other nations’ contracted areas too, including those of Poland, France and Russia.

The South Korean, Polish and French licensees told CNN and Mongabay that China had alerted them in advance to the visits and that research in such areas is permissible under UNCLOS. Germany said it was unaware of the Shi Yan 6’s visit and India and Russia declined to comment.

Experts say the pattern of Chinese activity could reflect a broader strategy to lead in deep-sea mining once commercial extraction begins.

[…]

One of the eight vessels tracked by CNN, the Hai Yang Di Zhi Liu Hao, or “Marine Geology No. 6,” traveled towards a Chinese license area in the Northwest Pacific Ocean in September 2025, but instead appeared to survey an area just outside of it.

On its return, in October, it transited through the Northern Mariana Islands, a US commonwealth that serves as a vital military hub, before loitering up and down its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and that of Guam, a US territory.

“That’s on the route that US submarines might transit from Guam to places west,” explained Tom Shugart, a former US Navy submarine warfare officer and maritime expert focusing on the Indo-Pacific. Asked about its choice of path, Shugart said it’s “certainly possible” that the Chinese vessel could be leaving behind sensors at 4,600 meters (15,000 feet) below to record a submarine’s unique sound signature.

A month later, in November, the Hai Yang Di Zhi Liu Hao took a week-long journey through Micronesia, an island nation that includes the state of Yap, where the US Air Force is investing $400 million to extend the island’s international airport runway to support American military operations. Guam and Micronesia are considered part of the “Second Island Chain,” a US line of defense against potential Chinese military aggression and a component of US Indo-Pacific strategy under Trump.

[…]

In May 2024, shortly before its visit to a Chinese ISA area, the Xiang Yang Hong 06 (Facing the Red Sun 6), scanned the seabed just west of Guam, a 210-square-mile island in the Pacific Ocean and home to Andersen Air Force Base — a key deployment base for US Air Force bombers and home port to US nuclear attack submarines that could be vital in any defense of Taiwan.

[…]

Taiwan’s Ocean Affairs Council Minister said in January that 41 Chinese research vessels had been detected by the Taiwanese coast guard in waters around Taiwan over the past three years. “They have trampled on our waters, and likely know the ins and outs of waters surrounding us,” Kuan Bi-ling said.

[…]

For example, in November 2023, the Xiang Yang Hong 03 (Facing the Red Sun 03) spent 48 hours doing survey work over a known trans-Pacific cable, covering around 400 square nautical miles — an area smaller than other surveys the vessel conducted, possibly indicating a more targeted investigation to pinpoint objects of interest.

The vessel “made a fairly direct line straight to one particular part of the ocean,” where undersea cables had been laid three years prior, said Mark Douglas, a Starboard analyst. It then continued to do what appeared to be “a very focused little bit of survey work over the course of a couple of days over (the) top of the cable,” before it left the area. Douglas called the vessel’s movements “a smoking gun,” that points to likely dual-use operations.

[…]

In August 2024, the deep sea vessel Ke Xue (Science) transited Alaska’s Aleutian Islands — within the US EEZ — three times before returning to Qingdao, a strategic naval port and the headquarters of the Chinese navy’s North Sea Fleet.

The Xiang Yang Hong 01 made a similar journey. Shortly after operating in its deep sea mining license areas in the Northwest Pacific, the vessel entered the Bering Sea in August 2024 and operated for several days inside Russia’s EEZ, a move described by Ryan D. Martinson of the US Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute as “very rare, maybe unprecedented.” During this visit, the Xiang Yang Hong 01 gained access to Avacha Bay, a key hub for Russia’s Pacific Fleet and submarine forces.

Then, in August 2025, five Chinese research and icebreaking vessels — including the deep sea vessel Tan Suo San Hao (Exploration No. 3) — drew significant attention from the US Coast Guard, after two vessels from the fleet entered the American Extended Continental Shelf (ECS) in Arctic waters west of Alaska.