Free Republic

Russians will take Odessa and four or five other ethnically Russian cities

Summary: Strategic analysis by former US Marine Intelligence Officer and UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter. His analysis is structured into three main parts:Thesis: Ukraine/NATO Fooled Around and will Find Out (FAFO) 1. How we got here. Ukraine/NATO Fooled Around; the war is predicated on the 2008 move to invite Ukraine into NATO, and the 2014 coup. The United States played a major role in how this war started.2. Where we are at. Russia is in a training phase of the main force-- it has not engaged yet. 300k mobilized (not part of the peacetime force) + another 100-180K volunteers. Ukraine...

This is big, Scott," Moshe Ponkovsky said. "We don't share this with anyone." Israel's military intelligence was already assisting us at Unscom (the United Nations Special Commission, which ran the UN's weapons inspections programme in Iraq) by scrutinising the "take" from the American U-2 spy-plane flights over Iraq. It had proved an unorthodox but fruitful relationship for Unscom: the Israeli analysts had proved far superior to the CIA's. But what I was now proposing to the Israelis was a dramatic expansion of this intelligence-sharing. I was asking Lieutenant Colonel Ponkovsky and his colleagues to accept tapes from a secret Unscom-British...

02/19/05 -- United for Peace of Pierce County (WA) -- Scott Ritter, appearing with journalist Dahr Jamail yesterday in Washington State, dropped two shocking bombshells in a talk delivered to a packed house in Olympia's Capitol Theater. The ex-Marine turned UNSCOM weapons inspector said that George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and claimed the U.S. manipulated the results of the recent Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. Olympians like to call the Capitol Theater "historic," but it's doubtful whether the eighty-year-old edifice has ever been the scene of more portentous revelations. The principal...