Putin’s New Year's Eve Ruined
- Sito Sokrata Telegram channel
- 28.12.2024, 9:08
Failures follow from Aktau to the Baltic.
The pre-New Year's idyll for Putin's team was disrupted by the consequences of a very serious air crash. A Russian missile or anti-aircraft gun (versions differ) near the capital of Chechnya shot down an Azerbaijani passenger airliner flying from Baku to Grozny. As a result, the plane crashed on the territory of Kazakhstan. 38 people died. The Kremlin is trying to sweep the situation under the carpet and bend Azerbaijan to itself. But more and more stubborn facts discard the versions about birds and the explosion of a gas cylinder as untenable. This means that sooner or later, the refuseniks from the Russian political establishment and the military will have to bear responsibility for the fatal shelling of a foreign aircraft.
If Putin had even an ounce of conscience and dignity, he would have dismissed the commander of the Russian Air Defense and Missile Defense, General Semenov. After all, it’s not just that, due to the fault of his subordinates, Russian cities suffer almost every day from unsuccessful eliminations of enemy UAVs and self-fire, but now his slackers are putting all of Russia’s civil aviation at risk.
The list of foreign airlines suspending flights to Russian cities is growing, and as a result, the entire airspace of the aggressor country could turn into a no-fly zone. Is it a joke that Russian air defense systems confuse small drones and airliners? In general, an extremely negative situation is emerging for the Russian Air Transport Agency, which is already on its last legs due to foreign sanctions. And now, in conditions of air insecurity, the number of those willing to conquer the skies over Russia will clearly be reduced to a minimum.
That’s why Moscow is digging its heels in and, as is tradition, does not want to call black black and white white. In the case of Azerbaijan, which is Turkey’s most important ally and also the main element of the Russian North-South Corridor project, a gloomy picture of a vile arm-twisting of the government in Baku is emerging. President Aliyev is under pressure from Putin and Kadyrov, who demand that the investigation into the Embraer crash be kept secret. One of the reasons for this outrageous “request” is the problem of political responsibility on the Russian side, and of course, compensation payments to the victims of the tragedy.
The problem of settling the consequences of the crash over Aktau is directly related to another resonant story, namely the MH17 tragedy, when Moscow was to blame for shooting down a Malaysian Boeing 777 in the skies over the Donbas. As you can see, nothing has changed in the decade since one tragedy in the Russian Federation, because those responsible for the missile attack on the civilian airliner have not been punished, which is why Putin's people are still playing the silent game. As usual, the hope is that the topic will make some noise and then be forgotten.
The refusal of the Russians to provide an airport for the crashed Azerbaijani plane to land on their territory and its expulsion into the Caspian Sea, where according to their calculations it could fall into the sea and sink, and thus take with it to the bottom the traces of the Russian shelling, is astonishing.
Russian aviation during the invasion of Ukraine ended up in a gray zone and is rapidly transforming into a black hole. This is, in general, Putin's very course of shadowing everything and everyone.
Take the same shadow fleet of the Russian Federation for transporting oil products in circumvention of sanctions. Recently, two sunken tankers used for illegal transportation of oil created an ecological catastrophe in the Black Sea, turning resort beaches into spaces soaked with fuel oil.
But Moscow uses shadow tankers not only for oil smuggling, but also for sabotage. Thus, on December 25, the Estlink 2 electric cable between Finland and Estonia was damaged. The culprit of the incident, which posed a threat to Estonia's energy security in winter, was the tanker Eagle S, which was performing strange maneuvers. The vessel is not only part of the Russian “shadow fleet”, but also a floating base for sabotage aimed at harming the energy security of EU member states. Moscow is studying the susceptibility of Europeans to its hybrid methods of chaos, looking for vulnerabilities in opponents.
If the Russians are testing Baku for compliance, then the Baltic states are testing their ability to quickly respond in the event of a “special military operation” in this region.