Ray McGovern

I disagreed with Larry Tuesday on how devastating Putin’s reaction likely to be to Ukraine’s embarrassing attacks. See news yesterday from Ushakov http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/77101 and Putin himself http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/77099 . Putin in no hurry; cool, calm, collected.

Deep strikes into Russia highly embarrassing, but the black-eye given Russian security services will eventually heal. And the artful destruction of a handful of bombers – like earlier high-profile PR operations – will have zero effect on the war in Ukraine.
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/06/04/ray-mcgovern-putin-would-not-rise-to-the-bait/

Russia, Ukraine, etc. w/Glenn Diesen. “Es ist unsere erste Pflicht sich von diesem Königreich der Lügen nicht dumm machen zu lassen.” Our first duty amid this kingdom of lies, is not to let ourselves be made dumb. (Sevim Dagleden, Sahra Wagenknecht’s party)

Difficult to be “furious” at deep drone strikes deep into Russia and still remain calm, cool, collected. But Putin is in no hurry; is clearly winning in Ukraine and believes Trump and he may be able to arrive at mutually beneficial deal. Meanwhile, talks.

TRUMP ALERT: Call President Putin NOW. Or tomorrow morning you will have to decide how to respond to very strong Russian retaliation tonight for Ukrainian drone attacks deep into Russia last night. Naive neocons want wider war; Putin has his own hardliners.

https://scottritter.substack.com/p/playing-with-fire?publication_id=6892&post_id=164935563&isFreemail=false&r=6627&triedRedirect=true

This week’s Intelligence Roundtable arguably had as much humor as intelligence. Mentioned “Fred Mertz”, landlord for I Love Lucy (and now for Germany), and battered-by-Brigitte Emmanuel Macron, but also covered more consequential stuff on Ukraine and Gaza.