Russian Pundits Agree! Iran is a US Test-Run For Planned Final War Against Russia!

Semyon Bagdasarov, political analyst: I don't want to point fingers. I don't want to take the side of Iran or the US. Let's check out the facts. We should give America credit, it imposed very tough sanctions against Iran, including sanctioning its oil and oil products. As a result, Iran's income has dropped by 66%.

Semyon Bagdasarov, political analyst: I don't want to point fingers. I don't want to take the side of Iran or the US. Let's check out the facts. We should give America credit, it imposed very tough sanctions against Iran, including sanctioning its oil and oil products. As a result, Iran's income has dropped by 66%. About a year ago, Iran could export 1.5 million barrels to Japan, China, and so on. Now, they export fewer than 500,000. Against this background, there was an odd statement by a representative of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps regarding placing mines in the Strait of Hormuz if the US keeps that up. That's a fact, no reason to deny it. But that doesn't mean Iran did this because, in that situation, some third party could've done it. There's a de facto war going on there.

- Iran's isn't exactly a monolith either. There are a lot of various movements.

 

- That's right. It could've been done by the people who completely ignore Rouhani and the government. There are various organizations there, some only obey their spiritual leaders. That's why I wouldn't be so sure that the US is behind this, even though I'm not a fan of the US. As an expert, that's my objective opinion on the situation.

The situation in the Arabian Peninsula is very complex. Yemen's been at war for God knows how long. Saudi Arabia hasn't had any success. Even though they were assisted by private military companies from the US, they couldn't blockade the only port there, Hudaydah, which receives Iranian goods for Yemen. It's a fact that Hussites use infiltration and sabotage teams and blow up Saudi state oil company pipelines. Nobody denies that. It's clear that Yemen's drones weren't produced in Yemen. They fly around Riyadh and even flew around the Dubai International Airport last year. Soviet-era Scuds, which Hussites still have for some reason, keep attacking Riyadh. Some old Soviet missiles hit Riyadh, bypassing the notoriously unreliable US-made Patriot defense systems. These are all facts. That's why it's hard to say for sure who did that.

Can a war break out? I don't think anyone's been making any full-scale preparations for war yet. There are about 60,000-80,000 American troops in the region. That's definitely not enough. I've repeatedly said that they'd need at least half a million to a million troops to occupy the region. But where will they get so many? When they were attacking Iraq, they delivered more than 3,000 strikes with Tomahawk missiles alone. The current American forces in the region don't even have a tenth of that power. There are no large-scale preparations being made. On the other hand, if we have an incident tomorrow with some US destroyer getting blown up, which is quite possible, Iran has all the means to do that, including missiles that can fly across the Persian Gulf, bypassing all American anti-missile systems in terms of performance, it's unclear what Trump would do in this case. He'd be in a very odd situation. If he doesn't respond, the Democrats, his fellow Republicans, and the people of the US will attack him. If he does, what will he do next? It takes time to deploy such a massive force. On your radio show, I once mentioned that the only way that can lead…

- Sabotaging it from within.

- That's right. I mentioned three directions: Balochistan, Kurdistan, and most importantly, Khuzestan. The latter's adjacent to the Persian Gulf. But that step requires political will and experts. I don't know if America has either of those. Does Trump have them? We can see that he's not ready for war. He can threaten, but when it comes to matching those threats with actions... North Korea, why were they so scared of it? They were scared of guerrilla warfare. Remember Venezuela? Everyone in Congress was yelling and the Deputy Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee struck the table with his fist, shattering the surface with his ring, and said no. Why though? He estimated their actions and the resources they can obtain. But what's next? Do they step into the jungle and fight their guerillas? That's not what the US wants. It's already failed in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's why the situation is rather curious. It can continue like this for a long time. We'll see how it ends.

- We'll tell you how it ends right after the commercial break.

Sunday Night with Vladimir Solovyov

- A new world war is unlikely to happen. But some local hybrid wars are bound to break out. The US is using Iran to practice an attack against Russia. We need to closely watch how the US is gradually destroying Iran and overthrowing the current regime. First, economic sanctions are increasing.

Secondly, there's a large-scale information offensive that targets the Iranian population as well as many of their allies, convincing them to join their efforts against Iran. The third aspect is military pressure. There are permanently deployed military units in the region, etc. The goal is to overthrow the current regime. They're not idiots, they realize that it's currently useless to try to push Iran out of Iraq, Yemen, and so on. They need to destroy the regime from within. They're doing the same thing to us. Are there economic sanctions? There are. Is there an information war? There is. Do they have the support of various Russian renegades? They do. We need to watch them closely and take some steps. For example, I still don't get why we keep our money in their banks. Do we have ultimate guarantees that they won't terminate the deals?

- They allegedly did it once.

- They did it and then signed some new deals and so on. We need to take some actions. We have an alliance with India and China, that's great. However, if we don't ensure security within our own country, everything else will be pointless.