07.10.15 Four Russian warships launch at least 26 cruise missiles at ISIS positions in Syria from the Caspian Sea. (RT) 08.10.15 At least four Russian cruise missiles fired at Syria from the Caspian Sea landed in Iran, according to US officials. Damage or casualties are not yet known. Russia and Iran rejected these reports. (CNN) (Reuters)
He leaves the St Petersburg navy day fireworks at 1, returns to his base. RT is on. He sits. Hours pass saturating his eyeballs in the Caspial blue shot through, he’s on the lower bunk now on a train to Dagestan military port, whistling in the wake of the synthetic memory … of the missile and its image glittering across his eyeballs…. the streaking movement of metal across the sky. 16.09.19
In Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon writes:
“imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out…a few feet of film run backwards…the blast of the rocket fallen faster than sound – then growing out of it the roar of its own fall, catching up to what’s already death and burning…a ghost in the sky… ‘So, Slothrop. Conceivably. Out in the city, the ambience alone – suppose we considered the war itself as a laboratory? when the V-2 hits, you see, first the blast, then the sound of its falling…the normal order of the stimuli reversed that way…so he might turn a particular corner, enter a certain street, and for no clear reason feel suddenly…’ Silence comes in, sculptured by spoken dreams, by pain-voices of the rocketbombed next door, Lord of the Night’s children, voices hung upon the war’s stagnant medicinal air. Praying to their Master: sooner or later an abreaction, each one, all over this frost and harrowed city…
…as once again the floor is a giant lift propelling you with no warning toward your ceiling – replaying now as the walls are blown outward, bricks and mortar showering down, your sudden paralysis as death comes to wrap and stun I don’t know guv I must’ve blacked out when I come to she was gone it was burning all around me head was full of smoke…and the sight of your blood spurting from the flaccid stub of artery, the snowy roofslates fallen across half your bed, the cinema kiss never completed, you were pinned and stared at a crumpled cigarette pack for two hours in pain, you could hear them crying from the rows either side but couldn’t move…the sudden light filling up the room, the awful silence, brighter than any morning through blankets turned to gauze no shadows at all, only unutterable two-o’clock dawn…
I have missiles in my mind. At nine in the morning on August 8, 2019, the explosion resonating across the cold waters of the arctic White Sea. A missile breaking up on lift off from an offshore research platform near Nyonoksa, Russia, coating the Russian shipyard city near its berth – Severodvinsk – in a film of radioactive debris. The military helicopter landing, dispersing figures in white forensic suits – the CRBN boys – Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear – stretchers in tail. (“Russian Nuclear Missile Explosion Skyfall”, Aug 13 2019, Vox , Radioactive Tragedy: Russia’s new cruise missile would be a terror on the battlefield, Aug 18 2019, The National Interest) The sudden light filling up the room. I remember the New York Times investigation – The Uncounted – published in November 2017 on coalition airstrikes in Iraq.
Late on the evening of September 20, 2015, Basim Razzo sat in the study of his home on the eastern side of Mosul, his face lit up by a computer screen. His wife, Mayada, was already upstairs in bed, but Basim could lose hours clicking through car reviews on YouTube: the BMW Alpina B7, the Audi Q7. Almost every night went like this. Basim had long harbored a taste for fast rides, but around ISIS-occupied Mosul, the auto showrooms sat dark, and the family car in his garage — a 1991 BMW — had barely been used in a year. There simply was nowhere to go.
Around midnight, Basim heard a thump from the second floor. He peeked out of his office and saw a sliver of light under the door to the bedroom of his daughter, Tuqa. He called out for her to go to bed. At 21, Tuqa would often stay up late, and though Basim knew that he wasn’t a good example himself and that the current conditions afforded little reason to be up early, he believed in the calming power of an early-to-bed, early-to-rise routine. He waited at the foot of the stairs, called out again, and the sliver went dark. It was 1 a.m. when Basim finally shut down the computer and headed upstairs to bed. He settled in next to Mayada, who was fast asleep.
Some time later, he snapped awake. His shirt was drenched, and there was a strange taste — blood? — on his tongue. The air was thick and acrid. He looked up. He was in the bedroom, but the roof was nearly gone. He could see the night sky, the stars over Mosul. Basim reached out and found his legs pressed just inches from his face by what remained of his bed. He began to panic. He turned to his left, and there was a heap of rubble. “Mayada!” he screamed. “Mayada!” It was then that he noticed the silence. “Mayada!” he shouted. “Tuqa!” The bedroom walls were missing, leaving only the bare supports. He could see the dark outlines of treetops. He began to hear the faraway, unmistakable sound of a woman’s voice. He cried out, and the voice shouted back, “Where are you?” It was Azza, his sister-in-law, somewhere outside.
“Mayada’s gone!” he shouted.“No, no, I’ll find her!” “No, no, no, she’s gone,” he cried back. “They’re all gone!”
Later that same day, the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria uploaded a video to its YouTube channel. The clip, titled “Coalition Airstrike Destroys Daesh VBIED Facility Near Mosul, Iraq 20 Sept 2015,” shows spectral black-and-white night-vision footage of two sprawling compounds, filmed by an aircraft slowly rotating above. There is no sound. Within seconds, the structures disappear in bursts of black smoke. The target, according to the caption, was a car-bomb factory, a hub in a network of “multiple facilities spread across Mosul used to produce VBIEDs for ISIL’s terrorist activities,” posing “a direct threat to both civilians and Iraqi security forces.” Later, when he found the video, Basim could watch only the first few frames. He knew immediately that the buildings were his and his brother’s houses.
Grief growing out of the roar of its own fall.
Basim spent the next two months in and out of a bed at the Special Orthopedic Hospital in Adana, Turkey. In the long hours between operations, when the painkillers afforded moments of lucidity, he tried to avoid ruminating on his loss. He refused to look at photos of his house, but occasionally at first, and then obsessively, he began replaying his and Mayada’s actions in the days and weeks before the attack, searching for an explanation.
In the wake of a missile, Basim might have caught, in and out of consciousness, the rumour of new missiles from different gods leaving the Caspian.
In a 2018 book – Russia’s Middle East Policy: From Lenin to Putin – Alexei Vassiliev writes:
In July 2015 President Assad sent V. Putin a request for military assistance after the considerable successes of the armed opposition and obtained consent. On 26 August 2015, an agreement was signed between Russia and Syria on the free and indefinite transfer to Russia of the Khmeimim airfield with the entire infrastructure and adjacent territory of the province of Latakia for the deployment of an air group, whose composition was to be determined by Russia. The air group and Russian servicemen obtained the status of immunity and extraterritoriality and did not go through customs and border control procedures. Russia could independently plan the combat use of the air group and its interaction with the Syrian authorities. (This treaty was ratified by the Russian parliament in October 2016).
However, the Americans knew that since August construction at Khmeimim continued day and night: extending runways, building a new flight control tower, repairing and expanding barracks. Then came airplanes with pilots, helicopters, military personnel, tanks and artillery to defend the base. In September 2015, Russian Black Sea Fleet warships appeared in the Eastern Mediterranean. The same month, Russia, Iraq, Iran and Syria launched the Joint Information Centre in Baghdad to coordinate actions against ISIL. Later, in mid- October 2015, Sergei Lavrov said that before the operation in Syria, Russia had invited the United States, Britain and Turkey to join this centre but had received, as he put it, an “unconstructive” response.
Two years later, on December 11 2017, Bashar al Assad would visit Khmeimim Airbase (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LjAmzuxD5I) and sit with Putin (0:01 – 13:15, Putin and Russian military talk about working in Syria; 13:16: Bashar al-Assad thanks the Russian military) in the wake of a theatre of screaming metal, the smell of jet fleet and extending runway, dancing off of the frame of the glittering Caspial missile, and the neocortical capture of western eyes in Mediterraneal cooperation as the theatre floors and angles of noiselight syrianorth shifted underneath.
50 fighter jets, whose inertial momentum would reverse the course of the eye doctor’s war, snatching jaws in an operations room, and the rebels or citizens who would only hear the roar coming out of its own fall, the dimensions between sky and ground warped in a sheet of concrete folding inward. Pynchon’s fleet of ghosts, blink and you’ll miss the wartide.
The sudden light filling the room. I remember an investigation by Propublica, published in February 2019 into the 2017 U.S.S Fitzgerald incident in the South China Sea, a destroyer spinning in the ocean:
“The Fitzgerald had been steaming on a secret mission to the South China Sea when it was smashed by a cargo ship more than three times its size. The 30,000-ton MV ACX Crystal gouged an opening bigger than a semitruck in the starboard side of the destroyer. The force of the collision was so great that it sent the 8,261-ton warship spinning on a 360-degree rotation through the Pacific. On the ship’s bridge, a crewman activated two emergency lights high on the ship’s mast, one on top of the other: The Fitzgerald, it signaled, was red over red — no longer under command.
At impact, the Crystal’s prow punched into another sleeping compartment, this one occupied by a single man: Cmdr. Bryce Benson, the 40-year-old captain of the Fitzgerald. Benson’s cabin lay high above the surface of the ocean, four decks above his sailors in Berthing 2. The Crystal had pierced the Fitzgerald’s hull right at the foot of Benson’s bed. It crushed together the bedroom and office of his stateroom like a wad of tinfoil. The collision jolted Benson awake. Metal ductwork had fallen on him. He was bleeding from the head. He tried to get up from his bed but could not. He was trapped, buried amid a tangle of steel and wires. He clutched the quilt his wife had sewn him, its blue and white squares forming the image of a warship. The cabin was cold and dark. He felt air rush past him. With a shock, Benson realized he was staring at the Pacific. The tear in his cabin’s wall had left Benson with a 140-degree view of dark water and dark sky. He could make out lights from the distant shore of Japan.”
Sudden light filling the room behind the retinas. I remember the Iraq War, the invasion of Baghdad, I was nine at the time. I remember thinking there would be a blitz, bombings in London. There would be, two years later, though less issued metal and light from the sky than by persons, personned missiles, on a packed tube, the femur of the commuter next to you gone missilic, the bus in Tavistock Square. I search ‘Baghdad bombing 2003’ and find a video from the Associated Press Archive published on July 23 2015: “Iraq: Third Night Air Offensive on Iraq”. The way the images glitter across the eyeballs. Sudden light filling the room. Dad once said he’d watched the Iran Iraq war, in parabolas from a Basran rooftop. I watch as a car moves along a dark street on the third night of the air offensive of Baghdad, and it presses to want to know who the driver is. And who is filming from the rooftop? And where were they gone then, and left to now in the wake of a sky lit up by metallic rain. The inertial streak of time since, and how Baghdad synthesised in those rooftop images, and how it might have looked or felt had the war reporter on the roof or the driver in the car held shaky handheld smartphones, had the cabins of family homes ripped open given the evidence of the rain to film:
“A series of thunderous explosions rocked Baghdad before dawn Saturday as U-S and British forces pressed a punishing air offensive on Iraq for a third night. Reporters on Baghdad rooftops saw fiery streaks from what appeared to be Tomahawk cruise missiles speeding across the sky in descending arcs and landing in giant fireballs. The sound of warheads exploded a few seconds late, lighting the pre-dawn horizon in red glow that silhouetted palm trees against the dark sky. Iraqi anti-aircraft gunners on roof-tops opened fire, filling the sky with booms and bright red flashes. Bright orange tracer bullets streaked across the night sky. When the attack ended, ambulances or fire trucks with sirens blaring were heard speeding away. Officials, who must escort journalists wishing to tour the city, refused to take them to the targeted areas. The attack appeared the most severe and dramatic on Baghdad since U-S and British forces began airstrikes early on Thursday to punish Iraq for its alleged obstruction of U-N weapons inspectors searching for the country’s weapons of mass destruction. Before Saturday’s attack, the United States fired nearly 300 Tomahawk cruise missiles from ships in the Gulf or by B-52 bomber aircraft. The missiles carry warheads of up to 3-thousand pounds (1,365 kilograms). Iraq says 25 people have been killed and 75 injured in the first two nights. Saturday’s explosions were not preceded by air raid sirens, implying that for the first time the strikes eluded Iraqi air defence. When the reverberations from the explosions subsided at about 4:45 a.m. (0145 GMT), the winter air filled with the sounds of muezzins’ call from mosque loudspeakers, informing Muslims to eat their last meal before beginning the first day of fasting for the holy month of Ramadan. Clerics declared the start of Ramadan after sighting the moon on Friday, the 29th day of the preceding month, Shaaban. The Pentagon reported on Friday that initial bomb-damage assessments indicate only a small number of the targets were destroyed or severely damaged even though Iraq offered virtually no resistance. For example, of 27 Iraqi surface-to-air missile facilities attacked, only one was destroyed and eight suffered no damage. The Iraqi military claimed its anti-aircraft batteries had shot down 77 incoming missiles so far. (AP Archive)
05.04.03. Third night air offensive of Baghdad. The Senate of Belgium approves a change in the nation’s war crimes law so that it will no longer apply to citizens of nations with sufficient human rights laws. The House of Representatives had already approved the change. The law had been used in the past to charge such people as George H. W. Bush, Colin Powell and Ariel Sharon with war crimes, and had interfered with Belgium’s international relations.
06.04.03 British forces stepped up their presence in the southern Iraq city of Basra. According to embedded journalists, the citizens of Basra braved gunfire to dance in the streets and cheer for the British troops. UPI’s Chief International Correspondent Martin Walker claimed that he had witnessed at least one Basra citizen kiss a British tank.[9]
In 1997, Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade would prepare a report by Defense Group Inc. for The National Defense University entitled Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. 20 years later Ullman would publish ‘Anatomy of Failure: why America loses every war it starts.’ I search Ullman today and find him on a podcast, 18.09.19 ‘Will Attacks on Saudi oil drag the US into war with Iran? “Dr. Harlan Ullman, Chairman of the Killowen Group and a senior advisor at the Atlantic Council, joins us to discuss what the options are moving forward.” And of course it is unspoken, that the option table is not really moving forward at all, but bearing back ceaselessly into the past, and that the inertial streak of all those missiles and missions then always flood through. The sudden light filling the room behind the retinas of an Ullman Gatsby, and the tragic figure in the American pool, and the blood red belief in a green light, running faster, stretching farther in the receipt of tomorrow’s missile. And I wonder where Ullman sat or stood – was it on a rooftop? – on that third night of the air offensive on Iraq, and how the rain glittered across his eyeballs, in 97 he wrote:
Xxiv – xxvi
In crude terms, Rapid Dominance would seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events so that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at tactical and strategic levels. An adversary would be rendered totally impotent and vulnerable to our actions. […] Theoretically, the magnitude of Shock and Awe Rapid Dominance seeks to impose (in extreme cases) is the non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese. The Japanese were prepared for suicidal resistance until both nuclear bombs were used. The impact of those weapons was sufficient to transform both the mindset of the average Japanese citizen and the outlook of the leadership through this condition of Shock and Awe. The Japanese simply could not comprehend the destructive power carried by a single airplane. This incomprehension produced a state of awe.
In 2019, The RAND Corporation published The U.S. Army and the Battle for Baghdad: Lessons Learned and Still to Be Learned page 43 reads
The Military Picture On April 7, 2003, only three weeks after the American-led major combat operations had begun, M1 tanks of the American 3rd Infantry Division were thundering through the streets of Baghdad, securing the main palaces that were the seat of Saddam’s power. The air offensive had destroyed Saddam’s command and control systems and had caused him and his key subordinates to flee Baghdad for the countryside. It would be five months before Saddam was finally tracked down and captured. Instead of fighting organized Iraqi infantry and armor, although there were these kinds of engagements at various points, the advancing American and British forces confronted an irregular foe that was made up of Saddam’s loyal militia (the Fedayeen) combined with regu- lar army troops who had abandoned their posts. It was an enemy, as American senior general Wallace noted, that differed from “the one we war-gamed” or had planned to fight against. Once Colonel Perkins’s 2nd Brigade Task Force, 3rd Infantry Division had secured the area in the center of Baghdad that had many of the Saddam regime’s palaces and government buildings (this area would eventually become known as the Green Zone and then the International Zone), the brigade, along with other elements of the 3rd Infantry Division, began initial operations in Baghdad. As a heavy brigade, Perkins’s outfit did not have a lot of dismounted infantry, so it used tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles to secure road intersections in the centre of Baghdad that gave it mobility throughout parts of the city and the ability to begin rebuilding Iraqi institutions.
Major combat operations in Iraq in March 2003 accomplished their goal of toppling the Saddam regime with a minimum number of forces. However, two key assumptions that drove force planning for the war proved highly problematic. First was the expectation by the Bush administration that coalition forces would be “greeted as liberators instead of occupiers.” Second was that the Iraqi government would “continue to function after the ministers and their closest advisors were removed from power. Since Saddam’s regime depended on a highly centralized government structure, where all important decisions were made in Baghdad, U.S. officials assumed that government ministries were largely effective state structures. If that were the case, then the top leadership of each ministry could be replaced, leaving the remaining technocrats and civil servants—the vast majority of the ministry staff—to continue running the state. No large-scale reconstruction would there- fore be necessary, since the new leadership of Iraq would inherit a functioning and capable governance structure. The United States would only need to help the ministries continue their work for a short time during the transition of power.” These erroneous assumptions had three principal effects. First, they precluded the United States from recognizing what kind of war it was getting into. Second, Iraqi institutional mechanisms that the United States was relying on to prevent the slide of Iraq into chaos were not there. What was left of the Iraqi security apparatus was later swept away by the administrator of CPA, L. Paul Bremer III, when he directed the disbanding of the Iraqi military and de-Ba’athification. Third, when looting and disorder began, the United States had insufficient forces on the ground to establish security.
All compressed. Somewhere in that image of the third night offensive, the sole car fleeing the city beneath the wide lens of a rooftop camera, perhaps it was a civil servant after all and his family leaving fast. And now the film is reopened, and re-imaged, and re-worked through in the retinal hire of RAND to an optical military. On Wednesday 2 April 2003, the Guardian reported: “Baghdad Hospital Bombed” · US forces ’19 miles from capital’ · Saddam defiant in TV statement · UK ‘will not attack Iran and Syria’ :
“US aircraft hit a Red Crescent maternity hospital in Baghdad, the city’s trade fair, and other civilian buildings today, killing several people and wounding at least 25, hospital sources and a Reuters witness said. The attacks occurred at 9.30am (0630 BST) and caught motorists by surprise as they ventured out during a lull in the bombing. At least five cars were crushed and their drivers burned to death inside, Reuters correspondent Samia Nakhoul said. Patients and at least three doctors and nurses working at the hospital were among those wounded. The missiles obliterated wings of Baghdad’s trade fair building, which lies next to a government security office that was apparently missed in the bombings.” At the base, Blair: “Iraq should be run by Iraqis.”
Pynchon’s voice folds over:
“imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out…a few feet of film run backwards…the blast of the rocket fallen faster than sound – then growing out of it the roar of its own fall, catching up to what’s already death and burning…a ghost in the sky…
I could collect testimony of the horror under the missiles of the invasion. I could find images and videos and report what they contain in death and loss. I could geolocate, and place the perspective from each incident recorded. I could write the way the sudden noiselight fills the room. How Baghdad sears into the synthetic memory of a nine year old in London; how it is today, less re-living than slipping back into an inertia of a time still effecting its dance behind the retinas. I could lay out the arguments for and against the ethics of intervention: “Ba’athist Syria and Iraq produced paranoid mafioso security machines that repressed non-Arab identities and manipulated Islamic movements and sectarian sentiment. Both targeted their substantial Kurdish populations with ferocious Arabization.” Or the evolution from Saddam’s militant Sunni Islam of the 1990s to an ISIS caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (really Ibrahim Awwad al-Badri from the northern Iraqi town of Samarra), took a Ph.D. from the Saddam University for Islamic Studies. Wikipedia reading: “He may have been a mosque cleric around the time of the US-led invasion in 2003.” Except there is a violence in the record.
In Aesthetics of Perception, Bence Nanay writes:
“I take the most plausible way of analysing imagining X from the inside to be imagining being in X’s situation (see Williams 1973; Gaut 1999, 2010; Smith 1997; Darwall 1998; Nanay 2010c; the idea goes back to at least Adam Smith, see Smith 1759/2002, p. 11).6 One crucial question about imagining from the inside account is what we should mean by X’s situation: X’s physical situation? X’s psychological situation? A combination of the two? If we take X’s situation to be X’s psychological situation, then imagining being in X’s situation will collapse into something much simpler: imagining having X’s experiences. That’s one option. But not taking X’s situation to be X’s psychological situation would not mean that we should restrict X’s situation to X’s physical situation. X’s situation should also include facts about what X knows. Suppose X is attacked by someone. The experience of imagining myself in X’s situation will depend on whether X has a gun in her pocked, as this is an important element of X’s physical situation. Similarly, the experience of imagining myself in X’s situation will also depend on whether X knows something about the attacker that could be a means of defending herself (say, by blackmailing). And this is not an element in X’s physical, but epistemic situation. A sophisticated formulation of the imagining from the inside view comes from Very Gaut (Gaut, 1999, see also Gaut, 1998). He defined identification as imagining oneself in someone else’s situation, but argues that identification is not monolithic. It is ‘aspectual.’ Perceptual identification means that I imagine having the same (physical) point of view as X. Affective identification is imagining feeling what X feels, motivational identification is imagining wanting what X wants and epistemic identification is imagining believing what X believes. I can identify with X perceptually without identifying with her affectively etc.”
In this sense, the violence in the record is the infidelity in the leap, in identifying the geometry of a point of view, while the depth of that person yawns apart. And I can never know as the car moves along the dark street on that third night, what the driver felt. That the reality of war is never geometry alone but depth in the inertia of a glittering city behind the retinas that you could never know.
I have two single entries referring in appearance to the two truckers who barrelled into our cabin the first morning of four on that vessel, as a storm passed out in the middle of the Caspian.
i. One of the truckers we drank with. I just saw again poised pregnantly offering an unnerving centre of gravity against the dropped anchor of the ferry, fat buddha on a cha-cha comedown in the Caspian. ii. leaving the lunch hall, two large drunk truckers are pushing and shoving one another, preparing swings as the Kazakh, wipes the belly, we drank chacha with moments earlier steps in.
I try to piece out the words I can from the Ukrainian trucker on the bed beside me, at the time it was a go-pro eavesing in on the cabin as a lamplight filled with the dead flies of prior crossings flickers its eyeballs on the ceiling and we drank potato vodka that made the throat burn. In broken translation: money au Chine, China? Problems, I don’t know, Japan (he points to Buddha Ukraine), Mount Everest…Odessa, Tbilisi, Japan, guitar. Buddha Ukraine takes a seat on the bed opposite: Karozhny (?), Qitai (possibly Qitai County, 奇台县 Xinjiang), China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Ukraine, Skinny Ukraine pipes back…Friends, no problem, but political, problems,… Putin..Merkel..political…money…problem… soon after we dissolve into the broaching similars in distance…English, England, London, Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson. Skinny Ukraine has a bike, he tells us prices, he recalls an accident…he flipped, I gather, with his arms. I try to say my grandfather was from Poland, Dziadek coming to the UK after the war. Skinny Ukraine’s eyeballs glitter as we talk, perhaps from the vodka. I wrote later of the two in oceanic terms as ‘the men at the silent heartbeat of world trade.’ The majority of the truckers onboard are Ukrainian, in the frenzy of returned passports, the Captain lines up their blue passport covers in rows and rows on the table. They are there by in large re-routed from usual routes by the war in eastern Ukraine – difficulty to obtain Russian visas.
I write an entry shortly after the cabin meet.
12:22 : following lunch, the engine cylinders begin humming, there is a slight vibration from my horizontal berth beside the window in the cabin. It begins to throb more rigorously and the water browns immediately beneath changes to a brownish blue…the engines quieten again. Over the horizon, three long silhouetted protrusions are tankers, the sky and ocean, is layered in blues, what looks like 200m from here shifting to a darker, deeper blue…the natural wave breaks juts afront of the three rigs, the water just prior shifting back to shallow blue, a thin sliver parts between the silhouettes and the blue cloudless sky above…a Russian announcement beams through…oil snakes past in image.
I don’t place an entry for the 08 July, three days later, but that it is the day a British woman dies after being exposed to the Novichok nerve agent several days earlier in Amesbury. (CBS News). A year and one month later, Bellingcat release a podcast: MH17 Episode 1 Guide: The People Who Fell From the Sky, episode description
The crash site is a horrifying scene. A sunburnt field of wheat and sunflowers peppered with hundreds of bodies that have fallen from the sky. The victims have been stripped naked by the force of the wind. Some are still strapped into the seats of a plane that has been torn to pieces in mid-air. Many of these bodies are eerily well persevered. Others are completely ripped apart. Journalists on the ground encounter an anarchic scene, guarded by drunken rebel soldiers. These surly and unpredictable men threaten to kneecap reporters who get too close. Eventually, after days in the sun, the decomposing bodies are transported onto a train with no fixed destination.
When I started writing this, I had had a second clause across that untranslatable distance.
Were I a Russian soldier having just been to the navy day fireworks, watching RT and saturating my eyeballs with that Caspial blue shot through, from the lower bunk on a train from St Petersburg to Dagestan military port, how would I see the world?
We are always moving in the wake of a synthetic memory … of the missile and its image glittering across our eyeballs…. always in the wake of a streaking movement of metal across the sky.
And how the news chases the missile, the blurry streak, the sensation.
But what of the yawning distance, the ennui, the wide lens of that Caspian as you experienced it, the boredom of a doldrum as the storm passed out in the Middle and the Ukrainian truckers burst through in broken Russian, could you see the eyeballs glittering? Were we the refracts of a war, figurines in the wake of a missile?
16.09.19
And I thought of Buddha Ukraine and Skinny, and the caspial shot through on a missilic slow passenger ferry, and the inertial streak of a passenger flight, and the remnants of a horror you could never know glittering across our eyeballs. The sudden light filling the cabin, a fuselage snaking past in image across a laken sky.
In one week, China, Russia and six other countries will conduct five days of military exercises in western Russia and the Central Asian region.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has dispatched more than 1,600 troops, aircraft, tanks, and military support equipment to a large-scale Russian military exercise, dubbed Center-2019 (Tsentr-2019)…The PLA’s Western Theater Command has dispatched an undisclosed number of Type 96A main battle tanks, H-6K strategic bombers, JH-7A fighter bombers, J-11 fighter jets, Il-76 and Y-9 transport aircraft, and Z-10 attack helicopters. The military drill will principally take place in Russia’s Central Military District, with the main exercise to take place in Russia’s Orenburg region. Military drills will also be held in the Caspian Sea and in Kyrgyzstan. The principal aim of the exercise is to simulate a response to possible security threats in Central Asia including fending off terrorist threats, but also repelling conventional military forces from an imaginary terrorist state to the south-west of Russia. The exercise will be held at training grounds in the Orenburg region, Dagestan, Astrakhan region, Chelyabinsk region, the Altai Territory, and the Kemerovo region. “Episodes of the fight against illegal armed groups will be also conducted at the training grounds of partner states according to separate plans,” the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) said in a statement. The main objectives of the strategic command post exercise are to verify readiness levels of the Russian military and to improve interoperability between Russian forces and their international partners, the Russian MoD stated. While the focus of the exercise is officially on “counter terrorist” operations, according to Russia’s defense minister, the exercise is also set to include repelling enemy air strikes and conducting combined conventional offensive air and ground operations. In other words, Center-2019 will feature an inter-state war component. “The drills will further enhance and deepen the comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era between China and Russia. It also has significant meaning on boosting our military’s capability to deal with all kinds of security threats together with other countries’ militaries,” Ma Qixian, the commander of the participating Chinese PLA forces was quoted as saying by China Central Television earlier this month. On the Russian side, the exercise will involve 128,000 servicemen, over 20,000 pieces of hardware including 15 warships, 600 aircraft, 250 tanks, about 450 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers, and up to 200 artillery systems and Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, according to the Russian MoD. The official numbers of military personnel and hardware are usually exaggerated. The Russian military has a four-year cycle with scheduled military exercises (snap exercises by their very nature occur unannounced) rotating annually between four Military Districts: Zapad (Western), Vostok (Eastern), Kavkaz (Southern), and Tsentr (Center). The annual Russian strategic exercises are usually conducted in one military district.
In February, Nurlan Aliyev, an analyst, publishes a paper: Russia’s Military Capabilities in the Caspian,
on December 5, 2018, Colonel-General Alexander Dvornikov, commander of the Southern Military District (SMD), stated that the basis of an inter-forces troop contingent including sea, air and coastal components has been established in Dagestan. According to Dvornikov, fighters of the 4th Army Air Force and the SMD’s Air Defense have been put on alert at one of Dagestan’s airfields. Strengthening its high precision strike capabilities in the Caspian, Russia also intends to improve its ability to block the Basin to outside actors in support of its strategies regarding the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East. The Caspian holds immense strategic value to Russia, given its geographical proximity to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. In 2018, Russia’s Caspian flotilla exercised a new tactical method. According to the head of the SMD’s press office, the “Wall” method, a special system relying on formations of reconnaissance ships, aircraft and fighter jets, together with the capabilities of the coastal air defense systems, allowed for a significantly increased detection range of low-flying targets, including cruise missiles. Moreover, the new tactic opened up new possibilities for the Podsolnux-E surface-to-surface radar station and the use of Buk-M3 (SA-17 Grizzly) surface-to-air missile systems at sea. The exact technical characteristics of the Podsolnux-E version utilized by the Russian Armed Forces are classified. Yet, the best export options can locate aircraft at a range of 200-500 kilometers and at an altitude of 5 meters.
Nezavisimaya gazeta termed the tactic a “Caspian Wall” against U.S. Tomahawks and stressed that the method currently piloted in the Caspian could be used by Russia’s naval forces in the Mediterranean in case of a new U.S. missile strike operation against Syria. In 2018, exercises in the “Wall” tactic was one of the main elements of joint drills involving different-type forces in the SMD. According to the SMD, systematic joint training of the air forces of the Black Sea Fleet and Caspian Flotilla has enabled the development of new inter-group combat capabilities, and also to improve the system of combat training. Moreover, the Black Sea Fleet, the Caspian Flotilla, the Air Forces and the Air Defense Forces of the SMD established anti-missile lines along the Black Sea and Caspian coasts during a “joint day of combat against cruise missiles.” Since April 2018, MiG-31 fighter jets armed with Kinzhal hypersonic rocket systems have been patrolling in the Caspian Sea region. The Russian MOD stated that the patrolling is carried out within the framework of strategic deterrence. Moreover, four Russian carriers of Kalibr cruise missiles are deployed to the Caspian Sea (a missile ship of the 2nd rank of the project 11661K Dagestan, as well as small rocket ships of the 3rd rank of the project 21631 Uglich: City Sviyazhsk and Great Ustyug, with a total salvo of 32 missiles). The radar company Kaspii, armed with P-18RT radars, recently started to operate in Kaspiisk. The radars are capable of detecting targets at altitudes from a few meters to tens of kilometers, and most importantly, they can direct airplanes and air defense weapons at the target. The new radar has capabilities similar to long-range radar detection aircraft. Thus, Russia could use its forces in the Caspian basin not only to establish a conventional defensive deterrent but also for offensive operations, demonstrated by the launch of cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea during Russian operations in Syria. It should be underlined that these activities are not targeted against littoral states, whose limited military capabilities do not warrant the aforementioned exercises or the development of the “Wall” method, but against strong adversaries such as NATO. Recent activities also suggest that Russia may plan to expand its A2AD capabilities in the Black Sea towards the Caspian in coming years.
A Caspial shot through, glittering across the eyeballs of the Ullmans and Ullmanovs. And you can sense the reversal in the air.