A lot of recycled propaganda there. Unfortunate. It’s important to put aside delusional hysterics and take in the full magnificence of what is currently happening. At the cost of a few thousand casualties, Russia has won a significant chunk of strategically priceless territory containing over 10 million ethnic Russians, including the vast majority of what used to be Ukraine’s black sea coast. It has also utterly destroyed Ukraine’s military and in so doing dashed any plans to have that country join NATO, thus securing its western flank for at least the next decade. This is in comparison to trillions spent and 8000 killed in Iraq and Afghanistan resulting in zero material gain for the United States.

But that is the least significant development. Far more important is the utter and complete excision of the globalist cancer from the fabric of Russian economy, politics, and society. Oh sure, the sanctions will hurt and cause a massive recession if not outright depression in the short to medium term. They will be painful, but because Russia is the world’s largest, most resource rich nation by a country mile, they cannot be fatal. At the end of the day, all you need to survive as a nation is food, energy, and nukes, and Russia has all of this in spades. Given that survival is entirely assured, prosperity is only time and effort away.

But the upshot to the short term upheaval? What has happened is that what I shall call JackD’s people have completely lost all influence within Russia. After 20 years of frustrating and limiting coexistence, Putin has just taken the globalist dog behind the barn and shot it right in the gullet with a 12 gauge. The JackD fifth-column has been utterly defanged. Their domestic Russian propaganda organs have been shut down and disbanded, and foreign media chased out of the country entirely. Silicon Valley filth is not only outlawed, but its behavior towards Russians as a people will be remembered for at least a generation and serve as a powerful inoculation against future influence even absent official government sanction.

Most significantly, Putin’s regime is now free to pursue Russian national interest unhindered by the fifth column. If the oligarchic scum maintained a level of influence over the Russian people even after the rape of the 90s was ended by Putin’s accession to power, it was precisely by threatening to effect the type of total economic warfare that has just been unleashed. Well, that card has now been played and their deck is empty. All the Russians have to do is hold fast while alternatives to western systems are fleshed out over already existing scaffolding. The power of the western sanctions is derived primarily from the shock effect. Once the shock wears off and Russia begins to use domestic and non-aligned alternatives, the power of the sanctions will inevitably wane. In the long term, the Russia/China alliance can constitute a hegemon to trump the Western Globohomo system. Power built on controlling by far the largest plurality of the world’s land, population, and industry will trump the demographically rotten financial house of cards that is globohomo.

They know this, which is why they kvetch. I’ve not seen this amount of kvetching in my life, and I’ll boldly predict the kvetching we’ve witnessed so far is nothing compared to the kvetch to come.

one aspect of the war that is curious to me is how neither side has hit the pipelines that traverse the country. To me that can hardly be just luck.

The Russians hardly want to hit them as they use the pipes to transport the gas and oil; the Ukrainians get to siphon off oil and gas to avoid freezing and perhaps an additional transit fee.
The Europeans dont want the pipelines that they depend on to be hit. But the Ukrainian leadership might decide to hold the pipelines hostage i.e. demand more javelins etc from NATO countries or else they might start destroying the pipelines. Yeah, the ordinary Ukrainians would suffer, but the leadership class would suffer less, if at all.

The forces of reaction here in the US couldn’t be happier at Mr Putin’s colossal misstep. It’s already paying them dividends. It’s just not paying us (the people) any.

It’s possible it was supposed to be Czechoslovakia 1968. Putin may have been guilty of believing his own bullshit. Since the Ukrainians were basically Russians, they would basically fold if the government showed it was serious.

The most striking fact is that the size of the force Putin used was grossly insufficient to even physically occupy the country. There was an implicit assumption that given a show of force, the Ukrainians would accede to Russian demands. An actual conquest would be unnecessary — and presumably was never contemplated.

Sailer pushes the Narrative just like he did with Covid. The USA elites are frantic not be seen as failing so they resort to the one thing they were good at: Cult Think. Everyone must deny reality and push the story that Charlie Manson … er, Richard Haas wants to hear.

Bear in mind, these are the same people who think this is a woman.

Congratulations to the trailblazing @HHS_ASH Admiral Rachel Levine on being named one of @USATODAY’s Women of the Year. Your leadership during this pandemic has been vital. https://t.co/yiaFxyTGss

— Susan Rice (@AmbRice46) March 14, 2022

‘The Europeans dont want the pipelines that they depend on to be hit. But the Ukrainian leadership might decide to hold the pipelines hostage i.e. demand more javelins etc from NATO countries or else they might start destroying the pipelines. Yeah, the ordinary Ukrainians would suffer, but the leadership class would suffer less, if at all.’

The hostage-taking might be the other way around. Maybe we (if not the Europeans) are telling Zelensky, ‘you keep fighting or we’ll turn off the money.’

Between us and the Europeans, fifteen billion has gone into the Ukraine since 2014. That’s a great deal for what still is a rather poor country.

Yeah, Putin thought that his forces would be greeted as liberators in Ukraine, and that they would get a heroes welcome likes the Germans received in Kiev in WWII, and received by women with flowers in the street.

Oh boy was Putin wrong.

This is one time in which I would wait to see what the Russians do before making any judgment calls about their war plans.

According to The Saker’s blog, the Russians have begun to close their fist on the Ukrainian troops trapped in the East and have started the next phase of squashing them. This appears to be what the Russians knew they would have to do all along, and what they intended to do all along.

‘…Oh boy was Putin wrong.’

Of course these days, we’re being lied to so assiduously that we can’t really be sure how wrong.

Is it still possible to watch RT? Can we still see what their lies might be?

At the end of the day, all you need to survive as a nation is food, energy, and nukes, and Russia has all of this in spades.

While taking one of your trio away from Ukraine:

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/ukraine-and-the-treaty-the-non-proliferation-nuclear-weapons

Ukraine: Nuclear by Inheritance

A successor of the former Soviet Union, Ukraine acceded to the NPT as a non-nuclear weapons state in December 1994. This meant not only relinquishing the right to develop nuclear weapons in the future, but also physically dismantling and removing the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal that Ukraine had inherited from the Soviet Union: 1,240 nuclear warheads arming 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) including their extensive launch control infrastructure, 700 nuclear cruise missiles arming 44 strategic bombers, and nearly 3,000 tactical nuclear weapons, including artillery shells, gravity bombs, and mines.

While Ukraine lacked key elements of a fully-fledged nuclear weapons program, and Moscow retained operational control over the ICBMs in Ukrainian territory, recent research reveals that, due to the inherited defense industry and technological expertise, Ukraine had a much greater capacity to establish independent control over these weapons systems than has been previously assumed.

Ukraine’s ultimate decision to forgo nuclear weapons and join the NPT was a great boost for the nonproliferation regime…

…but, in retrospect, not so much for Ukraine.

Довіряй, але перевіряй!

Steve should stop writing about this stuff. he has no idea what he’s talking about, and deliberately doesn’t want to know either.

curiously, on lots of other topics, he volunteers up front that he doesn’t understand the topic very well, but here, he’s just confidently wrong over and over.

occupation fit mostly for the dregs of society.

Salary for professional soldiers in the Russian army is \$3900 per year before the devaluation (so like \$2000 something per year nowadays), but there is a bonus in terms of being given a low interest rate mortgage.

So, it is true that it is a job for people without hope for real profession or often being able to start a family.

As a result, it has very disproportionate recruitment of minority nationalities (Tuvans, Altai, Caucasians etc) from poor regions, as well as people from villages across Russia which are depopulating, or lacking industry with normal jobs.

Apologies for adding links in the Russian language (maybe someone can translate here)

Much of dead Russian (ethnic) soldiers are already indeed funerals, in especially economically depressed villages and places, from the reports (https://www.e1.ru/text/politics/2022/03/02/70481378/ ). It’s where going to the military on contract, becomes acceptable in terms of cost/benefits ratio.

However, they do not allow people with a serious criminal record. Even soldiers whose parents were murderers, could have challenges of recruitment (as can be read of soldier killed in Ukraine who had initial difficulty to be recruited https://www.e1.ru/text/incidents/2022/03/15/70507064 ).

Sometimes there are people who wanted to be art critics, but somehow their life has gone wrong, and they ended in the army. It’s a sad situation ( https://www.e1.ru/text/incidents/2022/03/16/70507850 ).

–

We will probably never know the real number of soldiers who died in Ukraine, as Putin has made a law that the number of dead soldiers, or reporting their deaths, as a result of special operations, as an official secret of the government. This is part of the law of special operations – the number of soldiers who die will be a government secret ( https://web.archive.org/web/20220123152305/http://www.rbc.ru/politics/28/05/2015/5566d8889a79477ecebe00e8)

It will probably not be considered worth it, to collect bodies of dead soldiers from Ukraine (https://echo.msk.ru/news/2988311-echo.html – Echo of Moscow website might be a dead link at the moment though, but they will not try to collect bodies of soldiers where it is not practical)

A lot of the bodies of soldiers killed in Ukraine are burned to ashes if their vehicle hit by anti-tank weapons (https://t.me/ButusovPlus/257 ) or buried in mass graves in Ukraine ( https://t.me/ButusovPlus/41 ).

There isn’t much chance to recover such kind of bodies, that are just ashes in Ukraine now. You can guess (for little it is worth) what I think of such a war.

extracted from Russia on display in Cyprus,

This is funny, because in the last weeks I read this a lot in Western media, as a common knowledge. I didn’t expect so many people knew these realities or about Cyprus.

I thought other people didn’t know about this. I was wondering about this for years just as I personally knew someone very wealthy from Cyprus. Not a friend, but I knew enough about him for years. His father was some officer or official in the military, maybe still even in the 1990s. He himself is a patriot who was in the military for some years – of Cyprus.

He was happy to be conscripted in the military in Cyprus and is very patriotic – about Cyprus. Of course, going to the military in Cyprus, is probably a kind of gentle summer vacation.

Not likely the Ukrainians could’ve developed nuclear weapons. This line of argument is used to guilt the west into some sort of protective action. Although the protective action is really in furtherance of the globalist agenda. Don’t fall for it.

Beyond that, the Ukrainians should’ve known that when you’re a non-nuclear power you don’t piss off a nuclear power right next to you.

“The Ukrainians are fighting for their homes, while the Russians are fighting for some complicated historical theory Putin dreamed up while self-isolating from Covid.”

Actually, it was dreamed up ca.2008, during Georgian invasion. Since that time, Putin has made it clear that expansion of NATO into Ukraine (which, would include building military bases, nuclear weapons, etc) less than 500 miles away from Russia’s border is a legitimate threat.

Cuban Missile Crisis. Spheres of influence. Monroe Doctrine. They are all historical theories which have no direct relevance in 2022? Really, seriously?

Come on, Steve.

Putin’s international reputation is in the sewer, and his fellow Russians know it. I predict Mr Pee is given the boot within 12 months

The Ukraine does get a transit fee from the pipelines, and they’ve been pumping at full blast during the war.

Yup. And because of the contracting terms of Euro utilities with Gazprom, since last week it has made sense for them to import more from Russia. So Ukraine is transiting about double the daily amount it was compared to 10 days ago.

— Tom Marzec-Manser (@tmarzecmanser) March 1, 2022

So far, it seems like there have been miscalculations on the part of Russia, the Ukraine, and the U.S., but the biggest miscalculation may be happening on our part. Yeah, the Russians are getting hit with unprecedented sanctions, and their war looks like something of a slog, but they seem to have expected most of the sanctions, and still appear almost certain to win the war.

The Ukrainians almost certainly will end up worse off after this, and we will too. It’s hard to see how the deal that ends this war won’t be worse than the status quo ante for the Ukraine. They’ll have to concede the Donbas and Crimea officially, one would think, and possibly most of the country east of the Dnieper.

As for us, we’re already facing record gas prices, and we seem to be pushing the non-Western countries out of our orbit and into China’s and Russia’s. The Pakistanis and the Indians are happily buying Russian oil and wheat, despite our sanctions; Russia is working with China to replace SWIFT and Visa/Mastercard; and the Saudis aren’t taking our President’s calls and are tilting toward China too.

To sum up, we have 1) essentially sanctioned ourselves, by spiking our food and energy costs; 2) driven Russia into China’s arms; 3) reduced confidence in the dollar, by freezing/confiscating Russia’s dollar reserves. Non-Western countries will read the writing on the wall and begin to diversify away from the dollar, which will mean higher interest rates here, all else equal. All of this for a country that is of minor strategic importance to us.

But Stalin’s Plan A was a dead letter by the first night of perhaps the most successful Plan A in modern warfare history, the German blitzkrieg through the Ardennes that led to the fall of France in six weeks.

I wish you had read your own link, Mr. Sailer, the Manstein Plan was not the German Plan A.

In any case, here is a Tale of Two Ambushes. First, Ukrainians ambush a Russian armor column using a short range ATGM and RPGs:

Second, now the Russian infantry ambushes a couple of lightly armored (and armed) Ukrainian recce vehicles and the onboard infantry:

You raise an interesting point: Aren’t sanctions that keep corrupt oligarchs from taking money out of Russia just strengthening Russia and Putin, both?

Also, judging Russian military success against imagined “expectations,” seems like a very cheap way of claiming “victory.” I don’t know what they were “expecting” to achieve within any particular time frame. But it seems to me the more relevant question is: “Do they have the military capacity to achieve their political/military objectives going forward?” So far, it looks like they do.

As far as tactical adjustments go, it sounds like they just need to switch from leading with armor, to leading with infantry that is supported by armor and artillery. Back in WWII, that was the kind of adjustment that German commanders would make at the Divisional level on the fly based on changed circumstances. Whereas Red Army units were forced to follow rigid plans and doctrines whether they worked or not. I guess we’ll see if current Russian military culture is capable of adjusting to facts on the ground.

It is intetesting, however, that the destroyed tanks mostly seem to be 40 year-old T-72s, which probably retail for close to the same price as the Javelin missiles used to destroy them. The Ruskies seem to have led with their inferior units and equipment and are keeping the good stuff in reserve.

1270 warheads? That’s even more than Israel!

I think.

>>And by most accounts, there is even more wealth extracted from Russia on display in Cyprus, the Riviera, London, and New York<<

Certainly here in London, in a moderately priced health club like Virgin Active you'll quite often overhear those flathead guys talking Russian in the sauna. Beats the gangster types discussing their drug deals, anyway!

What Plan D might turn out to be deserves some thought. Declare victory and go home? Threaten to escalate to tactical nuclear weapons?

Retake Alyeska?

Translation:

“If [our] Government had given its attention to this part of the world earlier, if it had had proper respect for it, if it had persistently pursued the sagacious visions of Peter the Great, who with the small resources of his time dispatched [Vitus] Berings mapping expedition, one may be certain that New California would never have become a Spanish possession…” – Nikolai P. Rezanov (1764-1807), promoter of Russian colonization of North America.

https://www.germansfromrussiasettlementlocations.org/2020/03/russian-america.html

The best source on how Russia works (and what’s going on) is this twitter feed:

Tweets by kamilkazani

Long threads (27 so far) on various topics explaining why:

-a country with so many smart people in it can’t really make anything (shorter: the economy is controlled by mafias who shy away from anything complex because they don’t want to lose power to nerds)

-why the Russian army is so weak and dependent on artillery (shorter: it’s robbed and exploited at every level, training and maintenance don’t really exist and the government regularly sabotages the military so that it won’t be a threat)

-Russian use of the word ‘nazi’ (shorter: Russians defeated nazis so anyone who opposes Russian government policy is be definition… a nazi)

And lots more…

>>As far as tactical adjustments go, it sounds like they just need to switch from leading with armor, to leading with infantry that is supported by armor and artillery<<

It's very striking how everyone just seems to zoom around in their IFVs & tanks, right into enemy ambushes. Are infantry no longer willing to close with and kill the enemy?

Oh sure, the sanctions will hurt and cause a massive recession if not outright depression in the short to medium term.

lol

Arguably, Russia’s best tank is an upgraded T-72. The T-72B3 is more reliable than the supposedly more improved T-80s and T-90s. And they don’t have many T-14 supertanks.
Oh, \$175,000 for a Javelin missile, about \$2,500,000 for a T-72B3.

It doesn’t look that bad. Kiev will soon fall.

Is it still possible to watch RT? Can we still see what their lies might be?

Youtube has blocked their channel globally.

However, rt.com is available within the US. I’ve actually found it to be fairly accurate.

Since they had all that, especially the nukes, they didn’t need Ukraine.

Klaus Schwab and George Soros disapprove. They want to loot Ukraine and then Russia, like it was 1991.

Steve,

It took the US several weeks to defeat the pathetic Iraqi military.

Yeah, Putin probably, in his wildest dreams, hoped for a “six-day war.”

But that almost never happens, and he must have knows that.

One key point you did not mention: the Western propaganda media keep referring to brutal attacks on civilians. But then they mention three civilians dead. The civilian death tolls being reported by the Western media are stunningly low.

A likely explanation is that Putin has been focusing on purely military targets because he views Ukrainian civilians as really “his people.” And that is a problem if the Ukrainian military chooses to position itself among civilians.

There is no real doubt that the Russians can cut off power and water to all of Ukraine’s major cities, as they have already done to Mariupiol. That they have not yet done that to Kiev is a sign that the Russians are intentionally holding back — so far. But not forever, if this goes on a lot longer.

If you follow those who can read the Russian media — like the Saker or Martyanov — I think you may see that you misunderstand Plan B.

For obvious reasons, the strongest units of the Ukrainian army have been in the Donbass: that is, after all, where the fighting has been going on for eight years and it is where most people expected Putin to attack.

Military doctrine for a very long time has been that the first priority is not to take territory but rather to capture or annihilate the strongest of the enemy forces. And the Russians accordingly seem to be executing a large, classic envelopment operation in the Donbass.

If they can eliminate the elite Ukrainian forces in the Donbass, they will then be strengthened to move on Kiev.

But Kiev has mainly symbolic value. It is not the key militarily.

Of course, no one ever knows how a war will play out, but, as you say:

On the other hand, by the time they finally get to Plan C or D, Russians often grind out some kind of win.

Or perhaps this will end up in a multi-year quagmire that will ultimately bring down the Putin regime, but at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives: as far as I can tell, that is the plan of the US Deep State, which is always happy to spend foreign lives to prolong the life of the American Imperium.

After all, Zbig Brzezinski openly admitted that this was the plan in Afghanistan… and it actually worked. Zbig’s son Ian is one of those demanding a “no-fly” zone in Ukraine, which of course would actually mean war between Russia and NATO.

Zelensky recently declared that Ukrainians are going to have to accept that they will never be part of NATO:

“We have heard for years that the doors were open, but we also heard that we could not join. It’s a truth and it must be recognized,” he told a video conference with military officials.

And there is no real chance that Kiev can rule the Donbass for the foreseeable future.

Those two facts should be enough to provide a framework for a peace deal.

Let’s just hope and pray that the regimes in Kiev and Moscow can work out such a deal before tens of thousands of innocents die.

The killing must stop.

Party like it was 1999!

I’m not going to pontificate about the course, success or otherwise, or outcome of this war – this is something, quite frankly I know absolutely nothing about, and so I have a natural aversion to ‘battle/military’ pontification.

However, a few pontifical points are in order:

My position is this, and remains this, all Mr. Putin is doing is merely, rather belatedly, is shovelling up the malodorous piles of festering dung which the The Gorbachev dropped behind him wherever he went. A thankless task. Pity the poor zookeeper who has to muck out the chimp cages, or the cannonball sized and shaped elephant droppings.

As Macbeth put it ‘Life is a tale told by an idiot. Full of Sound and Fury, but signifying nothing’.
A lot of bang, bang, weep, weep and horror, horror – especially by pompous western journalists, but, really and truthfully the present shit show is an irrelevance, at best, compared to the *real* dangers facing the west this present century. Chinese and Pacific rim hegemony, and the concurrent black/brown takeover of Europe and north America.

Another pontification: The Chinese, who, so it seems, are ruled by some profoundly and exceedingly wise men, must have learned from this shit show that America and the west *absolutely cannot be trusted* one iota – they can only be dealt with from a position of absolute and overwhelming strength. The push toward Chinese full spectrum dominance must not slack, not one iota. The Chinese *must* see from the Gorbachev era onwards how the west played the Russians for cunts. They would pull a Gorbachev on them, arm the Uighurs, stir up Hong Kong, recreate the Tai Ping Rebellion in a heartbeat if they could. All they need is a filthy shitty cowardly Gorbachev style ‘reformer’ to bribe.

Steve’s article is a lot closer to the truth than most of the others I’ve read.

Ukraine is a gangster state. The CIA installed its favorite gangster as president. There aren’t any good guys here.

U.S. propaganda about the glorious, patriotic state of Ukraine is total BS. Most of Ukraine wasn’t Ukraine until very recently. The borders of the little nations in that area change about as frequently as most people change underwear. At times, what is now Ukraine have been part of Poland, the Lithuanian empire, Germany, etc.

What we call Ukraine is, in reality, a pasted together confederacy of tribal enclaves that will undoubtedly fall apart again in the not too distant future.

U.S. pols on both sides are looting the country with gay abandon, placing their kids on Burisma’s board.

The whole affair is a ludicrous comedy of sibling rivalry and gross corruption that, unfortunately, is killing a lot of people, and simultaneously threatening to escalate into nuclear or biological war on a grand scale.

Colin Wright asked:

Is it still possible to watch RT? Can we still see what their lies might be?

I’ve found rt.com working fine the last few days: I think the initial problem was probably amateur hackers.

Weirdly, rt.com tends to read the way you might expect the Western media to read, since, after all, Ukraine is not actually our ally. But that means rt.com does not give that much insight into how the Kremlin is thinking.

I’m finding the Saker and Martyanov to be the best sites for “the other side”: biased but at least one can try to cancel out their bias with the US media bias.

Anyone have other good sites?

Somebody in 2003: “At times, what is now Iraq has been part of the Persian Empire, the Arab Caliphate, the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire, etc.”

I urge everyone to watch Laura Ingraham’s interview with Mollie Hemingway.

We all know that Tucker is one of the few voices of sanity in the American media with regard to Ukraine. But we need also to give credit to Ingraham and, especially, Hemingway for seeing through the lies and praying for peace.

Especially interesting is their discussion of how the American elite hopes to use the Ukrainain crisis to advance both their foreign and domestic power.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”

The killing must stop.

Rules for thee but not for me.

As you know domestically, the Regime is always pushing, and they often get overeager and push too hard. They claim sovereignty over everything. Never mind Ukraine, they claim sovereignty over Russia. Steve has apparently bought into this claim, much as he’s bought into this lolworthy English-only myth that Putin expected a walkover.

Our corrupt elites are determined to turn the Ukraine into a bloodlands. They fed them military equipment for years which allows them to put up some resistance (but not win).

All Biden needs to do is broker a deal. Just say Ukraine will never be part of NATO. That could have happened a month ago and this could’ve been avoided. Now, we’ll almost certainly have to let Russia have east Ukraine as part of a deal.

Do it now and save lives and save the world economy. But all these voices want to “beat Putin” at all costs (millions of Ukrainian lives). They’re being used as canon fodder.

And all this happy talk about how Russia goofed up and Ukraine can win gives false hope which leads to dead children.

The Ukrainians are fighting for their homes…..

No. The unwitting dupes are fighting for GloboHomo.

Putin is the last statesman in the west standing athwart GloboHomo demanding, STOP!

I am rooting for and have confidence in Putin/Russia.

Far more important is the utter and complete excision of the globalist cancer from the fabric of Russian economy, politics, and society.

Silicon Valley filth is not only outlawed, but its behavior towards Russians as a people will be remembered for at least a generation and serve as a powerful inoculation against future influence even absent official government sanction.

Most significantly, Putin’s regime is now free to pursue Russian national interest unhindered by the fifth column.

In the long term, the Russia/China alliance can constitute a hegemon to trump the Western Globohomo system.

The Russian people don’t seem to much care about fellow citizens killed by the government. Contrast continuing Ukrainian anger over the holodomor and placid Russian acceptance of Russian deaths in the same period.
The Russian government doesn’t really seem concerned with throwing away the lives of very large numbers of its young men… the army is at the absolute bottom of the power and social hierarchies in Russia and a lot of money destined to improve it over the last 20 years was instead converted into things that Russian government figures find more important – like expensive yachts in Cyprus.
Similarly, I’m told that Putin doesn’t seem to like ethnic Russians very much (who tend to bear the brunt of his policies) and tends to favor Central Asians and those from the Caucasus…
It’s been suggested that the large number of Russian generals killed in Ukraine (4 so far) is now a deliberate policy aimed at thinning the ranks.

Your articles are getting stupider by the minute Sailer. The last one about how lucky we are to have Bribem… the covid hysteria.. got your triple booster yet? You parrot mainstream media baloney. The
Russians are not bogged down for Jesus Christ’s sake. They are encircling Ukranian units and exercising restraint because they are not trying to completely destroy the place.
You know dick about military issues. Or viruses… so stay away from the topics…

Why think Putin has plans A, B, C, D..?

A much greater mind like Hitler, essentially- didn’t. It’s more something like gambling.

one aspect of the war that is curious to me is how neither side has hit the pipelines that traverse the country. To me that can hardly be just luck.

Indeed, the dog that didn’t bark. Nor have soft targets in Russia, such as pumping stations, been hit. How hard can it be for a saboteur to hit a gas line or pump?

There are things about this war that seem unlike any other.

God are you dumb.

Do you use the pronoun propaganda — we, us, our — intentionally?

Only Exceptionally! indoctrinated Americans identify with Uncle Sam’s warmongering and imperialism.

{whimetric – #39 at time of posting}

Steve,

Entertaining but mostly wrong. The Peacekeeping forces are doing quite well. It’s only 20 days in.

An alternative interpretation to the standard view that the Russians have done badly in the war is given by Samo Burja in various podcast interviews over the past week, including Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning and Matt Bilinsky’s Prevailing Narrative. Burja gives the Russians about a B minus.

The American military strategy is to use expensive airplanes to drop bombs and expensive drones to shoot missiles at the enemy. This costs a lot of money but reduces the number of one’s own casualties. The Russians on the other hand use a lot of cheap surveillance drones to guide the firing of artillery and surface to surface missiles. This takes more time and produces more casualties in one own forces, and works better for a country with a lower defense budget and with less concern about public opinion and more control of the domestic media.

Burja Says that the TikTok nature of this war gives the impression that there’s all kinds of clusterfucks going on. But he says that if we had social media at Normandy that would’ve looked like a complete clusterfuck. He also notes that the blitzkrieg took several weeks to be completed, so it wasn’t as blitzy as we assume.

Putin has announced that he wants to import up to 16,000 Syrian mercenaries

The other dog that didn’t bark, while Russia is preoccupied seems a prime opportunity to occupy parts of Russia. Of course that doesn’t make separate war with Russia a profitable or prudent military exercise. But it will be interesting to see if displacing 16K Syrian mercenaries entices anyone to invade Syria. The prime candidates, the Israeli’s, have been curiously quite. Also quiet have been most of the Arab, excepting a few who are unlikely to actually endanger Syria.

If Syria sends their mercenaries to Ukraine, what happens in Syria will be instructive.

Plan D, BTW didn’t work out great in Afghanistan. But then again, in October 2001, I figured our Plan A was turn the Afghan mountains into parking lot space and go home. Our Plan A, B,C, and D turned out far worse and cost a lot more.

Oh well, at least Vlad hasn’t donned a flight suit and declared “Mission Accomplished” two decades early.

Putin has every reason to fear contamination through a trans/nato-fied Ukraine. The West has form in this regard with Pussy Riot. Ukraine may not only have been a military bridgehead into Russia but a cultural one too.

Putin is drawing a line in the sand, dude. Across this line you line you shall not…

…and also Steve, Ukrainian is not the preferred nomenclature. Greater Russian, please.

“ At the end of the day, all you need to survive as a nation is food, energy, and nukes, and Russia has all of this in spades.”

You also need Russians, but your point is taken.

*Slow Clap*

If heroism could be in a post, this would be it

However, it’s a bit premature…remember in the horror movies how the bad guy always comes back to life just as the hero walks away?

Yeah…Russia has to be careful

The killing must stop.

It starts at home, brother. Have you looked at major cities in Western countries lately?

Where is it in America’s national interest in accepting the mayhem in America’s cities while decrying the appropriate protection of Russian national interests in demilitarising Ukraine?

>morale
So you don’t know what you’re writing about. Not only is this known to be Russian policy, not only has this been mentioned by numerous authoritative sources, but it’s not a fake US stunt for a fake army. It’s an ancient practice used by Hannibal. The idea isn’t that anyone’s mood goes anywhere. The idea is that whatever you have left of the green ones will have proved their mettle while the valued veterans were preserved for crucial later fighting.

We used to have Republicans, but, overnight, the Ukrainian distraction from the criminal lockdown and deadly innoculation has had the effect of turning the Republicans into Democrats, of causing them to seek to out-Democrat their opponents.

…prosperity is only time and effort away.

Said the Bolsheviks in 1920.

What do you suppose Pussy Riot was called in Russian?
The joke: it wasn’t in Russian. It was English the whole time. Imagine the Jan 6 protesters had a Russian youtube channel and Cyrillic-only signage.

What if Russia, Iran, and China called for sanctions over the arrest of the Jan 6 protesters? What if they made a special appeal to the UN over it? And all this was carried as headline news in their Official papers?

You might begin to suspect there was some foreign meddling.

Russia’s Prosecutor General filed a legal complaint with the nation’s courts demanding all Meta platforms be outlawed and the company itself be designated an extremist organization in Russia

—

More on the topic of news relevant to Americans, it is possible that productive employment has been majority outlawed.
If the price-fixed interest rates are repaired, it would destroy all of America’s BS jobs. In theory this causes deflation, which allows productive jobs to come back into the money. However, what if regulatory and taxation burden are now so high that no such jobs exist?
America would have to rely entirely on money-printing, which relies entirely on being a reserve currency.

—

P.S. Don’t forget just about everyone who calls someone else treasonous in public is de jure guilty of treason. You can safely go right ahead and assume they’re a traitor, and it’s not safe to assume they’re not.

Thanks I always enjoy your maps and things. And I appreciate the work you do to find and post them.

The West is blessed with considerable numbers of clairvoyants who know exactly what Wee Vlad’s plans were, and soothsayers who know precisely how they will work out. Ain’t we lucky?

If I were to cultivate a view it would probably be that Russia has been sorely provoked for twenty or thirty years but that that is no excuse for launching the horrors of war. Surely such an intelligent nation could have found subtler ways of defeating the endless grasping ambitions of US politicians and corporations?

Although, to be fair, that intelligent nation has little say in how it is governed.

A view I certainly have is that I feel sorry for the Ukrainians and for the Russian conscripts.

praying for peace. …
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”

I seem to recall you as a stalwart atheist?

I mostly agree with what you write, but what’s up with this recent turn to religious language? Is this a case of “no atheists in foxholes”—the entire world being a foxholes in the event of nuclear confrontation, which prominent figures across the West and in the Ukraine are recklessly incubating?

I ask because, unless the atheist leopard has changed its spots, it gives a certain note of insincerity to lines of reasoning I otherwise agree with.

This.

Seems to be a thing that conquerors often expect to be welcomed. Like the US toppling Saddam Hussein. LOL.

The Russian soldiers who believed they had what it takes find themselves bogged-down in the military equivalent of Steve’s commenter purgatory. It must be challenging for a host to deal objectively with Putin’s purgatory while knowing that he himself (alone amongst Unz hosts) possesses a purgatory-analysis methodology. In the final analysis this makes Steve either an especially good, or especially bad, host of purgatory situations.

Steve, it is too funny that so many of the Unz commenters congratulate themselves on being free-thinkers because they are always against the “current thing.”

In geopolitics, I see an equally earth-shattering development in the Middle East. It has been 3 days since Iran attacked an Israeli base located within the US consulate campus in Kurdistan. After three days there has not been any official statement! It looks like dealing with the Russian invasion and sanctions (Jake Sullivan met with Chinese officials about sanctions against Russia in Rome this week) completely takes away attention from the Middle East. This could be the future of US foreign policy. The cost and attention needed to deal with Russia and China simultaneously leads to neglect of the Middle East. Israel may end up fighting its quasi-war with Iran without US back up. It was a serious miscalculation by neocons to push against so many different countries at the same time. What were people like Bret Stephens thinking? Neocons like Stephens certainly don’t want Iran to get nukes. It looks like it could end up happening now because Iran moved down the list of priorities.

Well, that didn’t happen …

Actually most of it has, with the final killing off of Azov happening right now.

You might get 50% of the story in a history book in 2032.

There has been no advance by Kiev forces anywhere, and Russian advances have only been held up by their attempts to allow civilians (and ordinary members of the armed forces) to get away first.

The military incursion to punish the Azov units that regularly shelled civilians in Donbas is almost over. No one has a clue what is expected next, but next starts now.

“All of this for a country that is of minor strategic importance to us.”

But its a win, win, win for the Neo-con War Party. That’s all that matters in the JewSA.

As Steve points out, Putin thought he had enough cronies in-country to pull off a quick stroke.

Good help is hard to find.

You might try

https://patrickarmstrong.ca/

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/

for balanced approaches by experienced western observers. The contributions of former UN Weapons Inspector (and USMC) Scott Ritter – often at consortium news – are interesting also.

Agree

That’s a good assessment Dave.

Are infantry no longer willing to close with and kill the enemy?

Apparently not. C.f. the second video Twinkie posted. Both sides are less interested in annihilating their opponent than in just chasing them out of their immediate zone. In other words, contrary to the WarLeaks title, the combat is not particularly “intense”. (Example of intense combat for comparison.)

The vast majority of casualties (military or civilian) in this war appear to have come not from infantry engagement, but from artillery (tube or rocket, guided or unguided). That of course has been a trend in modern warfare for a long time, but seems especially pronounced now, especially compared to the arguably more modern US military, which still engages in aggressive infantry overruns.

The vast majority of those “10 million ethnic Russians” have no intention whatsoever to call themselves “Russians”. Pretty much in the same way millions of Austrians have no intention whatsoever to call themselves “German”. I personally know a couple of russian-mother tongue Ukrainians and they consider themselves 100% Ukrainians. There is no way in hell the Russians will manage to peacefully govern those people.
The rest of what you wrote is pure nonsense. Putin is surrounded by oligarchs, he is friend with them. He even grants impunity to outright criminals like Semion Mogilevich. His entire system of power is based on clientelism.
“all you need to survive as a nation is food, energy, and nukes” Yes, exactly: to survive. But to live is a different story. The stock exchange has been closed for more than 3 weeks and it might never reopen. Investors will lose everything. The ruble is becoming the new argentine pesos. The average russian has probably already lost half of his financial worth. And the default of the russian state in just one month looks inevitable. But yeah, they are free from the “fifth column” (?). Even if the russians stoically endure all this and Putin remains in power, he will be the leader of a third world country.
Less internet memes and more reality would not hurt when making these analysis.

Putin’s biggest mistake over the years seems to have been to consistently underestimate the ruthless and immoral lengths our side is willing to go to.

Here’s a recent Ritter article on the potential for clashes over refugees:

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/15/the-us-nato-the-article-iv-trap-in-ukraine/

Mike Tyson said “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” I’m not convinced the Russians have lost just because the media keep showing a tank column getting hit and retreating. It’s great propaganda but not necessarily predictive of the outcome.

I just read the article, and I’ve read the first comment from Anonymous

From the few photos that I’ve seen that were not faked…

The Ukrainians didn’t seem to give 2 hoots about being surrounded by Russian soldiers

That’s it. That’s all I know, and that’s all I Can Know because Western Media is so bloody corrupt there’s no way to find out the truth.

I do have a couple of friends of friends in Ukraine who are still in Ukraine. No evacuation…wife and kids included.

I don’t know anything about what’s going on. The truth is elusive.

Gilbert Doctorow’s blog was recommended by Moon of Alabama. He knows Russian and is reading both their and our press on Ukraine. Seems level-headed to me.

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/

U.S. pols on both sides are looting the country with gay abandon, placing their kids on Burisma’s board.

I’ve seen that stated but without any proof given. The only child of a U.S. politician on the board of Burisma was Hunter Biden, as far as I know.

The war and stages of the revolution fucked up Witte’s envisioned economic and political modernization program. I don’t know how much influence Witte had over the czar at the end of his life.

How many enemies can our “elites” handle? They declared war on half of America. Now, they are at war with Russia and China. And India is getting the evil eye.

They are increasingly isolated and unhinged. They react like the most hare-brained celebrities. Keith Olbermann and Joy Baer call people traitors but so does Mitt Romney. Richard Haass, president of the CFR talks of weaponizing business against dissenters.

They come off like cultists suffering from bunker mentality. Very thin skinned, very self-righteous, very intolerant. Scary times for Americans.

You may well be right, and in that case, a very evil and horrific scenario is not impossible:

Somewhere inside the American Deep State, a provocation to Russia is being planned, one so (seemingly) threatening to them that they will respond with a (hopefully limited) nuclear first strike on America.

This provocation will be a variation of the old “make’em think we’re about to nuke them, so they fire first” false flag operation of which the Pentagon has been scheming for decades.

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb480/

If Russia takes the bait and uses even a tactical nuke on an American target, (god forbid it’s an American city), there will be no restraint on the American response. The Deep State wants to annihilate not only Putin himself, but “Putinism” – a sovereign Russia, independent of the financial and political control from the West.

There is more than a slight chance that Russia will be destroyed soon as part of a long-planned, Deep State nuclear strike.

Boy oh boy that’s a lot of kvetch!

Your 4chan wisdom notwithstanding, most of us doubt Putin’s pleasure with the current turn of events – even if it means Russians will finally be free of onlyfans and be able to return to the porn free, sexually and morally pure, proud and public spirited teetotaling devoted family folk we all know them to be.

I’m absolutely rooting for an indo-european holdout against Google and The Trannys but I’m less sanguine.

Anyway I’m leaning in favor of The Scottish Hypothesis.

For all the flaws of America and the West, I’m not sure where one finds any enthusiasm for future rule by Chinese economics and African demographics.

Steve’s ventures into foreign policy commentary have gotten pretty embarrassing. Putin invaded Ukraine because he used to watch the USSR national soccer team, LOL.

“Plan A was, more or less, to win a stunning, virtually bloodless victory in the vein of Russia’s Little Green Men taking over Crimea in 2014”

1) At the time, just before the ‘Color revolution’ the Ukrainian government was favorable to Russia.

2) As Victoria Nuland’s phone was tapped (by Israeli software?) Russia had all the details of the What, When and How of the Color Revolution.

1) + 2) meant Russia would have every possible advantage, not to mention Crimea fighting to stay in a chaotic Ukraine was probably unattractive.

After the Color Revolution bi-national Ukraine rebuilt it’s military around Ukrainian nationalist Socialists. I personally wonder if the Azov guys are actually monolingual?

At first it looked like Zelenskyy was going to be a ‘peace’ president but over time his handlers changed that to the point Ukraine was firing artillery into Russian civilian areas. That is what set of the current war.

“Several Russian generals have been killed in combat, ” The most important reason NATO must resist Russian domination, evil Vladimir Putin expects commanders to earn their retirement benefits.

Plus, this conflict is viewed as the Third Patriotic War for most Russians which is why they will go all in.

The Russian General Staff knew this would be hellacious and planned for it. The initial phase, going in light with OMON (law enforcement troops) and announcing they (Russian forces) want the good guys to go home and the bad guys (Azov killers) to surrender was to emphasize this was Russia’s intention for going in (e.g., a police action, not war).

But as I said, the Russian General Staff knew it wouldn’t go down this way. How do we know? The regular combat troops held off (the 40-mile convoy) but were ready to go and female military personnel were and are not allowed in the theatre of operation (Ukraine).

England lost over a million men (1.115 million KIA) in WWI fighting a non-existential threat in a land across a sea. The U.S. lost over a hundred thousand men (117k KIA) men fighting a non-existential threat across the ocean. Russia is fighting an existential threat on her border. They will not and cannot back down. The U.S. and NATO need to understand Russia is not playing.

Stupid Gorbachev – like a good little doggie – used to sit up, beg, and roll on the floor, showing his belly and his nuts – whenever his master, George HW Bush used to snap his fingers, and perhaps throw him a doggie treat. He even voted *for* the USA’s declaration of war against Iraq in 1991 rather than merely abstain – and all the longterm consequences that flowed from that.
Fat lot of good all that floor rolling and but showing did, the fool gave away his Empire, his Nation, his Party, and good ol’ Georgie boy never gave him so much as a fart in return, never mind a doggie treat.

You say:

Not likely the Ukrainians could’ve developed nuclear weapons.

Boy are you wrong.

The Ukraine is one of the technical centers of Russia. It gave up its nuclear weapons during the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Sorry to repeat, but the “Ukrainian” family I knew was of this sort of educated, professional class. I dated the daughter, naturally. (Don’t laugh. It’s true.) She was an engineer who worked on laser gyroscopes for the Soviet Union. She explained to me how they worked, and she told me that any time she had to walk her items between buildings, she had to cover them with cloths to prevent American satellites from seeing them.

Her father was an engineer and captain in the Soviet nuclear submarine navy. He worked on the development of nuclear submarines, and he was proud of it.

“Ukranians” all.

The Ukraine is analogous to Southern California, where defense contractors did much of the technical, heavy lifting for a superpower during the Cold War. Steve’s dad worked for Lockheed there, while mine worked for Johns-Manville. Now, imagine if Mexico, backed by Russia, claimed renewed ownership and control of Southern California. Imagine this before the Mexican immigrant invasion. Then imagine if Russia overthrew the democratically, pro-US government in SoCal in 2014 and installed Russian puppet leaders. There you have the Ukraine Steve himself is defending with his regurgitated propaganda.

The idea of “Ukrainians” building their own nuclear weapons — or any other high-tech weapons — is entirely realistic, particularly because they have already participated in such development for the Soviet Union. “Ukrainians” are some of the best and brightest Russians. I knew some.

It’s more a matter of what he decides to notice.

You can notice how fucked up it is that our solitary public platform these days – the internet – is proud and public with their censoring of anything less than Ghost of Kyv nonsense.

Or he could notice that a lot of people in his corner of the blogosphere are Pro-Putin and anti-Zelenskyyyyy for reflexive reasons that ignore the basic fact that Putin invaded a nation that does not want him there. And that, drug-enjoyer or not, Zelensky was a known quantity in Ukraine for decades and won 70% of the vote in the recent elections while Putin-doubters are lucky to end up in a cell rather than murdered in some exotic and deliberately public manner.

So Steve went with the second one.

He knows the first to be true as well but the internet is a place for toddler tantrums, not nuanced, calm explanations for things so he went all in on taking up you guys and noting that, if you really think about it the country of Ukraine and Zelensky may have a better claim to the land and the government than Russia and Putin.

I’m guessing Russian morale is better than those under Zelensky, who is determined to see civilians turned to mush instead of negotiating a reasonable deal. He shouldn’t take advice from Victoria Nuland who will fight to the last Ukrainian child.

In fact the opposite is probably true. The survivors will be congratulating themselves for surviving, and winning, in spite of inferior equipment, that’s human nature.

I would expect that Putin is keeping the good stuff in reserve as 1. It is more expensive and 2. It would be needed if NATO put in an attack.

Conscripts are probably good enough for the Ukrainian terrorist scum and their inferior equipment is probably on a par with the enemy. I call the Uke army terrorist scum because what army holes up in cities and refuses to let their own civilians leave because it wants to use them as human shields? Only terrorist scum, so lets call the Uke army by it’s real name thanks.

And the Russian military captured warehouses full of Javelins, Stingers, et al. They— and no doubt ally China soon— now have them to reverse engineer.

So the hundreds of billions of dollars and many years of R & D technology is essentially given to Russia and China because, well, members of Congress wanted Ukraine to be armed with these weapons. Not to win a war but just give Russia problems. Leadership in the West is evil and destructive.

Wowz, look at all of that farmland Russia has managed to drive over near its borders. That’s amazing *soyface.

Ukraine is conducting a defensive war. All modern defence is in depth. You do not create the Maginot Line and sit on it, hoping to not give an inch. Instead, you give land at a cost to your enemy without existentially risking your own key positions. This stretches the enemy’s lines of communication and supply, attrits their forces and leaves them vulnerable.

Why are you commenting on war if you do not know this? This is humdrum stuff.

Anyway, this is why Russian troops are now in a worse position and far worse condition than when the war began. The fact that there’s a bunch of broken down vehicles in wood blocks without proper supplies sat outside of Kyiv is not a good thing for Russia.

Or let’s look at it from the top level of the Russian side. What is victory for Russia? It seems that it is to pacify Ukraine under Russian domination*. So what tasks are needed to achieve it? Well, working backwards it is to:

1. Sustain a peaceful occupation of all major Ukrainian population centres.

2. Occupy all major Ukrainian population centres.

3. Secure the border of Ukraine to prevent resupply to insurgent forces.

4. Defeat the Ukrainian conventional army, which is likely to render it combat ineffective.

5. Achieve air supremacy.

6. Enter Ukrainian territory.

I put in 6 as a bit of a joke, but the point is to highlight that this is the only thing Russia has done.

Russia has not achieved air supremacy, though it may be working successfully towards it. Who knows? But we do know that the Ukrainian conventional army is very likely bigger, with higher morale and better equipped than when the war began. In other words, Russia has gone backwards from where they started!

In exchange, they have received some empty land and one hostile city, both of which require troops to task to secure and aren’t serious achievements.

They have also suffered casualties that no one imagined prior to this operation, at least until an insurgency began and years passed.

This war is a catastrophe for Putin.

You can be incompetent or you can be cruel, and get away with it, but you can never be both.

As for all of the Putinistas here among the commenters…you’re just so sad, you’re more gung ho for the war than the Russian military is. Your support and endless justifications are merely apologetics for the murder of Ukrainian citizens and the bloody sacrifice of Russian troops.

*This requires Russia to be somewhat popular with the Ukrainian people, which this grotesque invasion has made impossible and there’s no coming back from that.

200 tanks???

In WW2 Hitler’s Wehrmacht destroyed 14,000 Soviet tanks and recoiled in stunned disbelief as the Russkies recovered and then kept on rolling towards them, ultimately reaching Berlin.

Yes, the shoulder fired rocket is the great neutralizer. We’ve known this since Afghanistan, when the USA supplied them to the Osama and crew. No nation is invulnerable to their devastating effect, including the USA.

No political or economic leader would be safe from a civilian population armed with them. Rifles are okay, but not enough to effect real regime change. Quite simply, an Elite cannot rule a nation whose citizens are armed with shoulder fired missiles. Imagine the effect on Washington elite arriving in their limousines or Manhattan’s flying in from the Hamptons in their helicopters. They would give up and abandon the effort, take their winnings and go abroad. No police or National Guard would obey an Absentee Landlord issuing edicts from a foreign sanctuary.

For these reasons, there is zero chance of American citizens ever possessing these weapons. There is no way to smuggle them into the USA. While our Glorious Leaders may turn a blind eye to massive drug smuggling, they would not tolerate the importation of anything that would truly endanger their hegemony.

In the second video, that drone was prudent to stay far away but as a result we don’t see much. I guess it was more exciting for the people on the ground.

“ . Are infantry no longer willing to close with and kill the enemy?”

Perhaps these soldiers are not as enthusiastic about killing their ethnic relatives as their leaders want them to be.

The first thing all should realize is that there isn’t any obviously reliable source of information on this war. And the second thing to realize is the American and nearly all the Western media is hopelessly biased in its reporting, by only presenting the Ukrainian view uncritically, and very rarely offering any contrasting viewpoints. The distortions are amazing, often heading into blatant lies. When have you seen them presented a non-dissident Russian an opportunity for their point of view?

Third, presuming Putin’s public justifications are the only motivations (or even the correct motivations) is a mistake. There are long standing issues that have been raised by Russia that the U.S. has offensively ignored. It is almost as though we have engineered this war, and that we are prepared (as the Russians say) to defend Ukraine to the last Ukrainian. This whole thing is a tragedy and we are primarily responsible for causing it. I recommend both the long Youtube links Derb has provided giving much of the context of this (including Derb’s comments on these links):

Both videos are rather long, but both are well worth your time.

(1) Vladimir Pozner speaking to the Yale University Program on Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies in September 2018. Yes, that’s 3½ years ago, but this has stood up very well. Pozner is sober and judicious, with a minimum of speculation.

The clip is 1:53:03 long. The first six minutes are just third parties introducing Pozner. From there to the 40:30 mark it’s Pozner talking from the lectern. The remaining hour and twelve minutes is audience Q&A, with a high proportion of questions coming from Russian or Ukrainian students.

Pozner addresses the Ukraine issue from 1:09:40 on. Shortly before that—1:02:42 to 1:09:25—he has interesting things to say about censorship.

(2) George Szamuely in a one-on-one with David Freiheit at the VivaFrei vlog, February 24th—right at the start of the current fighting. This clip is 1:37:55 long, of which the first four minutes is introductory.

Szamuely—whose father Tibor Szamuely I recall from when I began reading the London Spectator back in my college days—is less restrained than Pozner, but he knows the territory very well and talks fluently about the Budapest Memorandum, the Magnitsky Act, the Minsk Agreements,…all that has led up to where we are now.

He’s particularly good on the deep background: the nationalities policies of Lenin and Stalin. I knew about Lenin’s ideas there, but I’d forgotten that Stalin began his government career as People’s Commissar for Nationalities.

“The working men have no country,” declared Marx and Engels in Chapter II of the Communist Manifesto (often rendered later as “the proletariat has no fatherland”). I wonder if any single statement of communist doctrine generated as much misery as that one.

David Freiheit is a very good interviewer with the knack of raising issues just as you’re wanting them raised: the Holodomor, for example, at 21:50. And having been a postulant intellectual back when Existentialism was all the rage, I appreciated the Kierkegaard quote at 1:36:21.

Ignoring this important historical context is a gigantic mistake.

Like I recommend The Saker site and Martyanov for alternate points of view (keeping mind they are biased the other way).

Ukrainians aren’t exactly Parisians.

I’m reminded of Lois’s mother Ida on Malcolm in the Middle.

Especially interesting is their discussion of how the American elite hopes to use the Ukrainain crisis to advance both their foreign and domestic power.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”

The killing must stop.

They do things differently there:

:

Let’s see how you did.

No, it’s not done yet. I was nine hours into it when you made me start over because the almonds weren’t facing Vadutz.

You made vomit! The Saint killed our enemies, then went to hell to ask Jesus to increase the severity of their punishment, and you reward him with vomit?

You might as well wipe yourself with the beard of the Most Holy Patriarch.

Why is my tart vomit?

Stop your temper tantrum! Look here. The 15th layer… you put apricots. Is that correct??

The Saint didn’t slaughter the Peacemakers on the 15th…. He waited until the 16th when they trusted him!

They 0nly way the killing could stop is for Russia to invade Ukraine. How much longer was Putin suppose to wait? Another 8 years so the Azov Brigade could shell Donbass for another 8 years?

You sound like Tucker Carlson who calls Putin a Thug for in invading Ukraine….why doesn’t Tucker the Cucker go join up as mercenary.

Were you personally disgusted by the photos of dead Donbass Civilians since 2014…including that horrific photo of the dead body of that young pregnant Russian mother with her fetus blown out of her womb with umbilical chord attached…

Like the American fighting men sent into the jungles of Vietnam with an inferior weapon.

David Hackworth was part of the Army testing on the M-16. He exposed it to any field condition he could think of, and you could trust it to do one thing: jam. When he gave his report to his superiors, he was told that it didn’t matter, the weapon was going to be approved, and to “Buy Colt Industries”.

From Wiki:

We left with 72 men in our platoon and came back with 19, Believe it or not, you know what killed most of us? Our own rifle. Practically every one of our dead was found with his (M16) torn down next to him where he had been trying to fix it.

— Marine Corps Rifleman, Vietnam.

If nothing else, this piece is proof that Steve COULD write for the Times!

Thanks for the laugh. Who knew that Vlad was confiding his plans so widely?

Reality It didn’t stop him with covid, and Putin’s apparently failed to kill more people than Pfizer has. Steve seems to still have ambitions in the Corporate Media.
Never too late to polish the CV.

He’s got a few good clips of late for the highlight reel.

That must be great for morale among the survivors who were sent into the woodchipper with inferior equipment.

As I’ve heard before, probably here – the Russian military has a small quantity of cutting edge equipment and a large quantity of old equipment. If you are in a unit with the old equipment, you don’t know any different and can’t expect to get the best new equipment available. At least you have numerical superiority, and can deny air to the Ukrainians (otherwise that big convoy would be toast).

To me it makes sense to have your obsolete and B tier troops destroyed, leaving your better stuff in reserve. FIFO.

I love you Steve, but I think you’ve done better analysis than this article.

For one, I don’t believe that Putin thought this was going to be easy. Anyone with his experience will plan for the worst and hope for the best. He gave NATO a lot of chances not to flirt with Ukraine joining NATO before attacking. That does not speak of overconfidence.

For the next one, I find the Suvorov explanation of Stalin vs Hitler more believable than the standard ZOG approved explanation.

I do like your interesting perspective based on personal experience of the Russian mindset.

The Ukrainians are fighting for their homes, while the Russians are fighting for some complicated historical theory Putin dreamed up while self-isolating from Covid.

This is a bit of a strawman argument. Putin has kind of taken an “everything including the kitchen sink” approach to putting up his reasons for the invasion. Better messaging would be to concentrate on a few main reasons IMO. I’m not sure if he specifically mentioned the Monroe doctrine but he should. These days most Russians think fondly of the USSR, and distrust NATO AFAICT. I would think that the idea of unfriendly military next door in NATO so if conflict arises you get WW3… this is going to be as popular in Russia as Cuba, Mexico or Canada being a military outpost of a great power.

The Russian air force has been curiously less dominant than expected, leading to speculation about whether they just don’t have their heart in it? Or perhaps due to corruption, it’s more of a Potemkin air force, with many planes grounded by embezzlement of funds needed for maintenance?

And

Russia’s Plan C appears to be to give up on fighting a war of maneuver and just batter cities and factories with artillery. Retired Australian general Mick Ryan argues:

From what I know of the Russian military tactics, they are artillery heavy and like to encircle and destroy. While they have an air force, their tactics rely more on anti-air combined with a more ground-based approach. They’ve put a lot of effort into SAM technology. It’s likely cheaper to deny air than to focus on air like the US does. Then you can use your ground forces and if it all gets too hard, you start using tactical nukes.

From this perspective, they have the numbers, slow and steady wins the race, they’ve successfully denied air, now just encircle, starve out or destroy.

Count Witte advised the Czar in 1914 to avoid war: If we win, what do we get? More land, which we have plenty of already, and more Poles, Jews, and Germans.

I think the Ukraine has always been regarded as agriculturally valuable due to its rich soils and longer growing season than the bulk of Russian possessions. It was a “breadbasket” from which you could produce grains to feed the Empire.

Correct. He thinks military operations are like GW 1 where a huge force bombed hapless Iraqis for weeks and then essentially walked in to Kuwait, or GW 2 where a depleted Iraqi force was able to hold out for 3 weeks but still relatively easily swept aside on the way to Baghdad. It’s what he ahs seen in his lifetime and he believes anything less is failure. People, especially those that never served in the combat arms have no concept of how easy it is to bottle up an attacking force in geography such as Ukraine’s. It’s a slog but superior conventional forces will win. And then comes the guerilla war which is more of a political war than military.

Or let’s look at it from the top level of the Russian side. What is victory for Russia? It seems that it is to pacify Ukraine under Russian domination*. So what tasks are needed to achieve it? Well, working backwards it is to:

1. Sustain a peaceful occupation of all major Ukrainian population centres.

They have no interest in Lviv, so so much for this “insight,”

You get most of us wrong. We have no interest in either side of the war. We wouldn’t want to live under an authoritarian like Putin but we also recognize that Ukraine is a corrupt dung hole and not worth any American life and not worth my tax dollars. The US invaded a sovereign nation in 2003. Who in the hell are we to get on our moral high horse?

The enemy of your enemy is your friend.

Who wishes you specific harm? Putin? Or, any randomly selected Hillary Clinton supporter?

This is a great post for demonstrating how delusional Putin fanboys have become. Just to take one example:

At the cost of a few thousand casualties, Russia has won a significant chunk of strategically priceless territory containing over 10 million ethnic Russians, including the vast majority of what used to be Ukraine’s black sea coast.

After emigration and death, maybe 9 million will remain of which 80% will hate the Russian Federation for the next 3 generations. But more importantly, most of these people are aging and will just be a further burden on the Russian State. Russia has no capital to develop and rebuild the region. But I suppose they can lease the infrastructure to China, import more Syrians and Iranians to work in the ports, and continue down the path of becoming a vassal state to the Middle Kingdom

It’s messy and awful but it doesn’t look like team Z is struggling to cope. The situation looks a lot like Boer or Afrikaner history. Despite advantages, war against an inferior opponent can involve humiliating but temporary setbacks. Boers armed with muskets and later rifles often took horrific penalties for their mistakes in campaigns fought against black tribes with few modern weapons. I grew up during the late cold war and heard news of the old South African army having some tough times in places like Angola. Again, the sky did not come crashing down.

I don’t think I’m being cavalier about war, Africa is a dangerous place as always. There are risks to any activity here. Large segments of the population have nothing to lose and little fear of authority. Since I can’t have any possible influence on events, I think it’s my choice to support one side for no good reason at all but sentiment. I feel much the same about the jab, I made my choice based on gut instinct, rationalizing or speculating on my part is just mental arithmetic, it takes my brain cells for a walk.
PS, I’ll have an opinion about nuclear war the day it happens.

A little skeptical about your first sentence, but everything after that is spot on.

Particularly this

The whole affair is a ludicrous comedy of sibling rivalry and gross corruption

We need a Graham Greene or a Joseph Conrad to do appropriate justice to this astonishing gigantic clusterfuck.

Witte was a smart guy. The great irony is that Russia went to war to defend Serbia, a country that subsequently proved itself quite up to the task of fighting off the corrupt and poorly motivated Austro-Hungarian army. If the Russians had just stayed out of it, the Austrians would have embarassed themselves, the Germans would have had no excuse to bail Austria out and the world situation would have changed very much to Russia’s benefit.

As Stephen Kotkin has noted, Putin is a 19th century man who believes in big power politics.

As such, you need some cannon fodder.

Agree with Captain Tripps, that this is a good assessment … except for these little words: “we”, “us”.

Neither you nor I nor anyone we elected is making the consequent decisions here.

Western commenters like to disparage the Ukraine and Russia as “oligarch-run” (accurately for the Ukraine, inaccurately for Russia since Putin made Russian oligarchs defer to the chief silovik), but the US is no less oligarch-run than its would-be Ukrainian vassal. Only in the US more effort is expended maintaining a façade of democracy, however incompetent. Indeed, if there is a second influence at all in the US, it is not the voters or citizens of “our” [another declension of that troublesome word] “democracy”, but the relatively novel social media hysteria machine, which may be pushing the oligarchic overclass into unintended overreactions and doofus cul-de-sacs.

So, re-reading your comment with due consideration for those actually making the decisions, one gets this:

we’re already facing record gas prices,

Not a problem for the oligarchs personally, of course, but it does divert money—and hence power—into the hands of hostile, and of formerly friendly and now indifferent, OPEC regimes, plus Russia. So even if the amounts are not fatal, it sure looks dumb. And even oligarchs can feel embarrassment about that. This is to say nothing of all the EU countries with no Plan B to heat their homes next winter (not that the oligarchy gives two craps about them).

and we seem to be pushing the non-Western countries out of our orbit and into China’s and Russia’s. The Pakistanis and the Indians are happily buying Russian oil and wheat, despite our sanctions;

This is the real blunder. US global hegemony always relied on more than a bit of bluff and bluster. The US has now called its own bluff by going full retard and fully imposing the oft-threatened but seldom-implemented sanctions. And the rest of the world may discover … that it doesn’t really matter that much. And worse, that dealing with Chinese merchants and Russian nationalists is a better experience than dealing with Globohomo rapinists and their shrieking woke clerisy.

Russia is working with China to replace SWIFT and Visa/Mastercard; and the Saudis aren’t taking our President’s calls and are tilting toward China too.

Globohomo oligarchs pride themselves on their “financial acumen” (a euphemism for their privileged access to fiat dollar propagation), so this misstep hits closest to home. The blithe assumption that holding the commanding heights of the global reserve currency was a foolproof backstop was never going to survive forever, but it may possibly have just met the fools who can finally de-proof it.

To sum up, we [sic] have 1) essentially sanctioned ourselves, by spiking our food and energy costs;

Not to mention the food and energy costs for billions of second- and third-worlders whose household budgets consist of little else (again, not that the oligarchy cares)

2) driven Russia into China’s arms;

Huge unforced error. Russia in the 1990s was raring to join the West’s headlong career into globohomo, but instead the oligarchs chose rape it raw and then spit on the prostrated body. As recently as last year, Russia was still making peace overtures and patiently explaining its bad alternatives. Today Russia may negotiate, but Globohomo’s newfound woke absolutism forecloses this.

3) reduced confidence in the dollar, by freezing/confiscating Russia’s dollar reserves. Non-Western countries will read the writing on the wall and begin to diversify away from the dollar, which will mean higher interest rates here, all else equal.

They’ll be lucky if it is only higher interest rates, given that fiat global reserve money is the lynchpin of Globohomo power. Higher interest rates can work for them under the right circumstances, but if counterparties stop accepting dollars, particularly in the crucial petrotrade, then it starts to look like game over.

All of this for a country that is of minor strategic importance to us.

To “us” as normal Americans: ZERO strategic importance.

To “us” as Globohomo: isn’t it peculiar how intertwined the US’s oligarchic overclass is with obscure Ukrainian oligarchs?

blah blah blah

blah
blah
blah

blah blah blah

Dunning-Kruger , thy name is Putin-fanbois-on-Unz

Oh oh and then: “In the long term, the Russia/China alliance can constitute a hegemon…”

OMG, stop, I have to recover from laughing so I can write…

Of course, it would have been much better if Putin allowed to continue the slaughter of Russians in Donbass by the Azov Brigade the proxy terrorist organization owned by the by owners of most wholesome of Family Values:Bill and Hillary Clinton….and the homosexual purple lip Kenyan Foreigner who hates White People…

The most striking fact is that the size of the force Putin used was grossly insufficient to even physically occupy the country. There was an implicit assumption that given a show of force, the Ukrainians would accede to Russian demands.

It also seems that the Russians really wanted to believe the favorable opinions of them held in Donetsk and Lughansk extended to the remainder of the Ukrainian nation, such as it is.

This appears not to be the case.

I can’t really blame the Ukrainian people based on what occurred during the Holodomor and WW2.

The Ukrainian government, on the other hand….

I’m sure many Ukrainians are smart. But why is their GDP per capita less than half of that of Russia?

Is it a corruption problem or what?

Granted, that’s footage of men fighting and dying, and granted that it is now 2022, but even so, it is striking how much information can be collated from public sources and amateur drone operators. Analysis of that sort and quality would have been beyond the dreams of field intelligence analysts even just 30 years ago, I reckon.

The USA is an oligarchy and it’s been proven in a study. Which is why it’s silly to prattle about “democracy” in the West.

The study’s gotten lots of attention over the past year, because the authors conclude, basically, that the US is a corrupt oligarchy where ordinary voters barely matter. Or as they put it, “economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence.”

https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-theories-of-american-politics-explained

The study itself:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

(shorter: the economy is controlled by mafias who shy away from anything complex because they don’t want to lose power to nerds)

So, those guys sound like they understand what Silicon Valley did to the United States.

(shorter: Russians defeated nazis so anyone who opposes Russian government policy is be definition… a nazi)

This sounds so familiar….just sooooo familiar….I can’t quite put my finger on why that is….

Oh look, the CIA was involved in invading the Ukraine in order to help kill Russians. Way back in 2014.

Golly, what a shocker.

These are the same Deep State villains that get involved in the US political scene. Defund it all.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-secret-cia-training-program-in-ukraine-helped-kyiv-prepare-for-russian-invasion-090052743.html

Russia hasn’t scored a goal in the first four minutes of its game against Ukraine.

Obviously they are bogged down.

https://gab.com/Glaivester/posts/107879353246850466

First COVID and now the Ukraine War are cracking up the iSteve Coalition.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=youtube+belushi+animal+house+food+fight&&view=detail&mid=2EFAFD36165BEEA8D34E2EFAFD36165BEEA8D34E&rvsmid=C5F3A8D94418006AECB4C5F3A8D94418006AECB4&FORM=VDQVAP

Food fight!

Seriously, can we return to talking about the races of the different positions on a football team? And golf course architecture?

The strength of this place has been the ability of iSteve and his acolytes to Notice ™ things without getting emotionally involved. All of this built up over a number of years, gone.

Could we return to being the anthropologists instead of becoming the subjects of anthropological study?

The Ukraine is one of the technical centers of Russia.

Don’t forget the multiple tank plants in Kharkov. I’m sure those were prime targets for the Russian forces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malyshev_Factory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharkiv_Morozov_Machine_Building_Design_Bureau

The Swiss can train every male in the use of shoulder-fired missiles and mandate that every one of them stash one in their closet because Switzerland is a nation in the true sense of the word. The USA by way of contrast, is (now) a set of propositions to which its citizenry (begrudgingly) accede.

Though the Founding Fathers could put in place safeguards against many threats to Republican government, they could not have foreseen the encroachment of a class of people who literally didn’t want to be here and who didn’t want to live amongst the people who were already here.

As always, the Simpsons did it first.

As for the article, who knows? I feel like the propaganda is inescapable on this. But the obsolescence of tanks has been, I think, well known for a long time. If the Russians lost them, it’s just so many iron-hulled ships-of-the-line at the bottom of the sea. Now they’ll save money on fewer purchases of expensive tank tread grease. But there are unquestionably two losers in the event of a long war: The Ukrainian people, and the Russian people. And that’s exactly what the Western ruling class seems to want.

Still, it’s hard to not regard Putin with one similarity to Trump: All the right people hate him.

Captured Russian conscripts keep calling themselves “cannon meat” which is the Russian way of saying “cannon fodder”. I like “cannon meat” better because Javelins don’t eat grass – their preferred diet is human flesh and iron.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-2627689/Video-Russian-soldiers-young-19-say-like-cannon-meat.html

Maybe the captives are not representative of overall Russian morale but the fact that the Russians are looking to recruit Syrian mercenaries as replacements is perhaps indicative.

Maybe then again it’s just a Russian propaganda stunt – Ukraine has been publicizing that they have been getting a lot of foreign volunteers for their cause so Russians want to say “we have people volunteering for us also”. That kind of astroturfed parallelism is very typical of the Soviet mentality – whatever you have in the West we have the same and ours is even better.

Comrade Sailer

Why aren’t my comments getting past COMMENT CONTROL CZAR? Always nyet… nyet….nyet….What next?….The Sailer Gulag in frozen Alaska?

Respectfully

Comrade War for Blair Mountain

Steve Sailer (who has never really been anything other than a fake and gay idiot, as he has spent the last two years proving in spades), belongs inwardly not to reality, but to the Occidental meme-space which is currently being belied and overcome by reality. Thus, we cannot expect any kind of real analysis from him, only rationalizations and propaganda, wittingly or no, as that meme-space shrinks into oblivion.

What Sailer fails to realize is actually very simple: Russia did not invade Ukraine because it feels threatened by Ukraine; Russia invaded Ukraine because it feels threatened by NATO. Thus, there really are no strategic objectives in Ukraine at all, and any armchair analysis to the effect that Russia “miscalculated” and has become “bogged down” in Ukraine utterly misses the point.

For Russia, Ukraine is only Step-1 of a 100-step plan, the ultimate goal of which is nothing other than the total defeat of NATO and the West. The more “bogged down” Russia becomes in Ukraine the better, as Russia will use Ukraine as a lancet with which to bleed the West dry of weapons, mercenaries, funds, and good will. The quagmire works in Russia’s favor; and the alternative to quagmire, i.e. a Western capitulation, also works in Russia’s favor. Therefore Russia has got the West in a fork and cannot be defeated. The game is over. The only question is how much damage the West is willing to do to itself before it concedes the inevitable.

You better believe that there will be no armistice, no ceasefire, and no return to the status quo ante. That world is over and done with. Russia is not going to stop with the recognition of the breakaway republics. Russia is going to take all of Ukraine and will ultimately absorb the whole of Europe within its ambit. Russia does not need to conquer territory to do this; all Russia has to do is expel Globalism from an ever-growing list of nominal nations. Russia stands not only for itself now but for the forces of sanity against derangement. This was always its historical fate, as Dostoevsky and Our Lady of Fatima foretold, and which the 70-year interregnum of Bolshevism could delay but could not prevent. The Mandate of Heaven is with Russia now; and the West, by clinging to its own conceits, will only be dragged down into the sulfurous fumes of hell.

This is much bigger than Vladimir Putin and his private beliefs and ambitions. Whatever happens to him as an individual is no longer important. Russia will achieve its destiny with or without him and will be the preservation of the world for the next thousand years.

I think the Syrians and Chechens are propaganda to make Russia seem less isolated, like they have allies. The Chechens were certainly portrayed as charismatic good guys, I even saw video of them being nice and helpful to civilians in trauma, sporting beards and very modern looking kit. I’ll bet there are Western ex-soldiers who would fight in a Russian foreign legion.

Interesting factoid, after the end of the cold war, white and black South African ex-servicemen became involved in various African conflicts as mercenaries, our most famous SA “security” firm was known as Executive Outcomes. They even worked for former enemies like the Angolan MPLA government ,some of their members had seen combat against the same Angolan government in the 1970’s and 80’s. The Angolan rebel movement UNITA also took in white mercenaries, and there was speculation that some South Africans killed in Angola died fighting fellow white mercenaries during the 1990’s.

No Putin fanboy here. His military is bogged down with the war not going as planned. He runs a country that is corrupt and backward, and he’s done very little to change that; indeed, he hasn’t even tried.

That said, Putin did save Russia from the Global American Empire (GAE) and its degeneracy. Russia was financially raped by JackD’s cousins in the 1990s. It was beaten down, disrespected and whored out. Putin ended that.

Putin is also attempting to secure what the Russia’s consider to be an essential buffer zone. In addition, he’s attempting to free Russia from dollar domination.

Putin has his failings, but he has done far more for his people than western leaders, who seem to hate the people over whom they rule.

Steve is missing what this war is about for the same reason that he’s missing what’s going on in the United States. What Russia is doing is trying to break away from the American system and create its own system. It’s similar to what many whites in America want to do.

Steve believes in the American system. Well, Steve believes in what used to be the American system, which was a very good thing. But that system – that country, that culture – died long ago. Steve can’t let it go.

I thought Serbia had the highest death rate in the war and lost thousands of civilians when they had to flee to Albania in winter. Plus they stupidly put their capital on the border.

Do you think if Ukraine surrenders, it will be reported by our news organizations? Maybe that news would have to arrive in the same fashion as the news celebrated on Juneteenth day.

Galeev is a Tatar with the history of grievances (you can check his TL) who’s living off grants in Western think tanks. Take what he posts with a grain of salt.

Desert Storm took 42 days to drive the 3rd world Iraqis out of Kuwait. Invasion of Afghanistan took about 50 days to drive Taliban out of power. Took the Germans and Soviets 35 days to conquer Poland. Took the Israelis over 60 days to defeat the PLO in Lebanon in 1982. I don’t understand where anyone is getting the idea that the Russians thought a war against a nation with 40 million souls, the size of Texas, would be defeated in a few days. That’s just propaganda. Ukraine isn’t Grenada and the Ukes are a tough people. This isn’t a movie or a video game. But the ending won’t be an underdog tale of victory.

The German Plan A was rejected by Hitler as a rerun of the WWI Schlieffen Plan.

Obviously, the potential for NATO membership for Ukraine was not actually a threat to Russians in Russia, for a few reasons:

-No one with much power was pushing for it in the first place. (Unlike the missles in Cuba)
-NATO has no intention of invading Russia
-US/NATO would win any direct war (at enormous cost) approximately as easily either way. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, USSR wasn’t already able to destroy any US city from its own territory like the US now can for Russia; the missles would have massively increased the ability of Russia to wage nuclear war. In the event that Putin’s fears came to pass and NATO put nukes in these (hypothetical) Ukrainian bases, the balance of power would not be shifted.

By “threat to Russia” what Putin means is that it would not be possible to conquer Ukraine if it were part of NATO (like he is trying to do now.) It’s nothing to do with protecting the Russian people he is supposed to represent. Like a lot of people here, I don’t want US to go to war over this. Neither does Steve, or thankfully, Joe Biden. But we ought not to pretend like so many other commenters that Putin’s hand was somehow forced, when it’s so obviously false.

Mr. Sailer would do well to continue to focus on domestic American affairs, where he has both knowledge and insight.

Apparently, Plan A was, more or less, to win a stunning, virtually bloodless victory in the vein of Russia’s Little Green Men taking over Crimea in 2014 with only about a half-dozen deaths on all sides.

What is the support for this assertion? I’ve heard this repeatedly from Western armchair “analysts,” but what is the primary source evidence that this was ever Putin’s plan?

Sailer’s take on Russia’s military action in Ukraine is going to have the same shelf-life as his take on the Covid hysteria. It’s sad to see. Steve should stick to what he knows, which does not include geopolitics.

This is Chomsky-syndrome. Expertise on linguistics does not make you expert on everything. Expertise in a specific area (HBD?) does not make you expert on everything.

Thanks
(I haven’t been commenting lately so I lost my quick button reply privilege)

“They’ll be lucky if it is only higher interest rates, given that fiat global reserve money is the lynchpin of Globohomo power. Higher interest rates can work for them under the right circumstances, but if counterparties stop accepting dollars, particularly in the crucial petrotrade, then it starts to look like game over.”

Absolutely correct. Is it just me, or is the canary starting to wheeze a little?https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/saudi-arabia-considers-accepting-yuan-chinese-oil-sales

Well, a professional soccer game has 90 minutes of playing time, so I take it you’re expecting Russia to invest 15 months into the task of defeating the Ukrainian military. Do I have that right?

In the long term, the Russia/China alliance can constitute a hegemon to trump the Western Globohomo system. Power built on controlling by far the largest plurality of the world’s land, population, and industry will trump the demographically rotten financial house of cards that is globohomo.

Obviously, this is the hope and the reason (I assume because I can’t think of any other reason why American patriots would cheer for a foreign power) that so many here are rooting for Putin and pretending that Putin is “winning”. By winning this war, Putin was going to strike a blow for Team Antiglobohomo and reveal that Team Globohomo has feet of clay.

There are two problems with this – first of all, you are assuming the conclusion – well Putin hasn’t won the war YET but any day now he will, and he will withstand the sanctions, etc. and you are all gleeful about this beautiful Antiglobohomo world that is going to result. You are doing the victory dance already even though there hasn’t been any victory yet. Maybe that will still happen but it seems more and more doubtful by the day. I will leave to others to assess the military situation (no matter how you try to paint it, it’s not going that well for the Russians) but on the economic side, the ruble has crashed and Russia’s stock market (which would best reflect the market’s estimate of the future prospects of the Russian economy) remains closed because Putin knows that if he were to reopen it, stock values would fall by maybe 80% or more. The Russian people can (be forced to) withstand all manner of economic hardship but are these many years of hardship really going to be WORTH divorcing Russia from the Western system? North Korea also has its juche ideology – in return they get to live at a starvation level. It’s really nice of you to wish this upon the Russian people. I assume you are going to put your money where your mouth is and move to the new Antiglobohomo paradise, right?

2nd, your Team Antiglobohomo is said to consist of the “Russia/China alliance “. It’s going to be more like the China/Russia alliance and China is going to be the senior partner. In that sense it will be like the Russia/Belarus alliance, where Putin sits in the driver’s seat and not Lukashenko. In the China/Russia alliance, Xi will drive the bus and Putin will sit in the back row.

So, even assuming the “victory” that is going to happen any day now, Putin has impoverished the Russian people and made them vassals of the Chinese. In return for that, they get the right to continue to beat up gays or something. Meanwhile, Russia’s already below replacement birth rate is going to go even lower and Putin (who is more of an imperialist than a nationalist) is going to bring in more and more Muslims to Russia – doesn’t really sound very Antiglobohomo to me.

“the good stuff in reserve.” That’s what I tell myself while getting crushed in the Sicilian as black.

Well yes, but we don’t have ‘bayonets and horses’. President Obama’s riposte to Mitt Romney in 2012. Who’s gonna call who out? Tulsi Gabbard, President Joseph Biden.

The Saker toed the Moscow line? I’m shocked!

… so many here are rooting for Putin and pretending that Putin is “winning”.

Nobody is “rooting for Putin.” That is one of your disingenuous inferences that you so cleverly and deceitfully insert into your writing.

Our claim is that this all is the result of Western, US, neocon, etc. interference in The Ukraine. All you have been trying to do this whole time is paint those of us describing that as “pro-Putin.” You are a bald-faced liar, and we are onto you.

As far as impoverishing people, this all is impoverishing all of us, including you. Watch as your groceries go up 20% in the next two months. Go ahead, blame it on Putin.

My suggestion (just because I am a nice guy) is to stock up an anything non-perishable. This will give you at least a 20% ROI on those items over the next few months. Be grateful you live in the USA, a country that welcomed your people but which they did not build.

Count Witte advised the Czar in 1914 to avoid war: If we win, what do we get? More land, which we have plenty of already, and more Poles, Jews, and Germans.

I have zero knowledge of this Count Witte, but boy he was one smart guy.

Putin needed someone like that around, instead Vlad IV is going down in history as a genius on the order of Nick II.

~~

Of course, if the Czar had taken Count Witte’s sage advice, the world would probably have gone down a much better path … but certainly none of us would be around to enjoy it. All the horror and general dumbshittery done in the past was necessary to get this timeline where i exist. Amazing!

Now they’ll be a future born–already a few million embryos are gestating–which wouldn’t exist except for Putin’s ginormous f’up.

He seems like a state-level tweeter. Very convincing.

I still don’t know why Putin didn’t invade Donbass and stop there. Russian troops were welcomed there as liberators and the optics supported the Russian case. Simply station his troops there as a peacekeeping force, keep them there and destroy any Azov fighters looking for a scrap. Then declare the Donbass an independent pro-Russian republic and see what the West does.

By trying to swallow the whole country he brought mass resistance and Russian casualties into play, as well as video of desperate refugees and dead civilians which tend to get Europeans riled up. And right now, they’re very riled up.

None of this is to condone the actions of Victoria Nuland and her coterie of neocon slime which brought us to this sorry moment.

How can you possibly, without any hint of irony, profess to be incapable of understanding how any patriotic American can cheer for a foreign power?

That might be the single most astonishing comment I’ve ever seen written here.

Well said, Buzz. I really don’t care about who is to blame. What I want is for the US Government, such as it is, to pursue a path that is best for the American people: Try to broker a cease-fire, and stop hating on the Russians.

Oh, and don’t drive up commodity prices, endanger the dollar as reserve currency, feed arms into a war that is none of our affair.

Of course Brandon’s circus of arrogant clowns and degenerates is doing everything they shouldn’t and nothing they should.

Jack D, Tri-Lexy and others want to denigrate our kind of opinion as “Pro-Putin”.

http://archive.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2010/07/08/deathride_shatters_some_myths_about_hitler_stalin_and_world_war_ii/
Wars have a chilling bottom line, and Mosier’s is this: The war in the East was Hitler’s to lose and he did. Several times on the verge of victory, the Germans were not defeated by a superior rival, only by superior will or at least the willingness to pay the price of victory. Stalin won the war “only because he was willing to sacrifice approximately 27 million Russians.’’ Horrifying conclusion, horrifying battle, horrifying victory.

There never was a Russian ‘Steamroller” of overwhelming manpower, but it was easy to think there was in view of their astounding profligacy with the lives of fellow Russians

There is supposed to be a weakness in the organisation of Putin’s army, inasmuch it lacks brigade headquarters and so the divisional commander has to handle the battalions, which in the conditions of combat is likely to produce cognitive overload. Russian Battalion Tactical Groups are artillery-heavy with relatively little in the way of tanks or infantry. Reconnaissance in force to activate the enemy defence plan is the Russian way, and it is really butchery of ‘cannon fodder’. Although they have some combat experience, no one has done this kind of massive deployment for decades. Russians are not used to facing an opponent with substantial heavy artillery and targeting technology far more sophisticated than their own. The anti aircraft is also nothing like they could have met before.

I think the Russian troops may be being killed in greater numbers than even the highest public estimates so far, but that is not any surprise because the Russian army are incredibly insouciant about casualties. They attack in echelons, and the plan allows for each wave running out of steam. Apart from the airborne (who are uniquely all professional soldiers whereas three quarters are conscripts in the ordinary infantry) the best units in the Russian army with the most modern equipment have barely participated yet.

Is this a compare and contrast to the US victory in Iraq, which featured shock and awe?
Based on US headlines, Russia has more or less surrounded Ukrainian cities. Where it is bogged down. Or else laying waste to those cities in some surprisingly unfair ways. Blowing up buildings and killing people. Or not.

Russia cannot win this war in the sense that the US attempted to win in Iraq:

First, ending the regime of Saddam Hussein. Second, to identify, isolate, and eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Third, to search for, to capture, and to drive out terrorists from that country. Fourth, to collect such intelligence as we can relate to terrorist networks. Fifth, to collect such intelligence as we can relate to the global network of illicit weapons of mass destruction. Sixth, to end sanctions and to immediately deliver humanitarian support to the displaced and to many needy Iraqi citizens. Seventh, to secure Iraq’s oil fields and resources, which belong to the Iraqi people. And last, to help the Iraqi people create conditions for a transition to representative self-government.”[139]

Russia lost any chance of winning any popularity contest in Ukraine in 2014. However, their more limited, and stated aspirations are to deny Ukraine to the West, by preventing a military alliance with what they consider a hostile coalition. Ukraine has not done very well economically sine 2014. And the place has been further depopulated and wrecked.

Ukraine is of no strategic interest to the West. The West won’t risk nuclear war with Russia for Ukraine.

Winning and losing in any conventional sense doesn’t apply. Who won WW I? So, I don’t know who is rooting for Russia to win. As far as wanting Russia to lose, that seems to be extremely popular in the West. But Russia was always, from day 1 going to lose a lot.

And Ukraine is already pretty well wrecked. My position is that this should have never happened. It should have been settled before it started. The best thing is for it to be settled ASAP. And that the final deal will be roughly what could have been the original deal. And that treating Russia harshly will not work out well.

And I can’t resist…is Putin any more delusional or criminal than George Bush? The Iraq War was illegal, fought for stated reasons that were wrong, killed lots of civilians and wrecked the country.

In case anyone hasn’t seen it, Oliver Stone’s 2016 documentary, Russia on Fire, is a good intro to the Deep State coup in 2014. Since it pre-dates the current invasion, it’s untainted by told-you-so-ism.

But man, everyone with eyes to see was predicting that it would end badly for Ukraine to fully embrace U.S. vassalhood and drive a hard line with Russia.

You’re reading off WW2 scripts, especially German books about how they tired of killing horde of subhumans and had to retreat because they ran out of ammunition.

Can always rely on Jack to misrepresent others’ comments to give his side an edge. Let’s us break down his lies and propaganda.

Obviously, this is the hope and the reason (I assume because I can’t think of any other reason why American patriots would cheer for a foreign power) that so many here are rooting for Putin and pretending that Putin is “winning”.

All the horror and general dumbshittery done in the past was necessary to get this timeline where i exist. Amazing!

Hey Dad, I get it! You’re right. Without WWII, my Californian father never would have joined the navy, become a naval engineer, been stationed in Jacksonville, met my Mom in a drug store, asked her out and eventually married her.

Still, I think I disagree with you about Vlad. I think he was boxed into this result by people from “our” side — much as I suspect from much reading here and elsewhere that Japan was similarly boxed into lashing out at the American empire.

Nothing is ever what it seems, but the results are real. You and I would not exist except for those inscrutable machinations. We should accept that and interact accordingly. I thereby respect you. I would hope to receive the same in reciprocity.

We are probably all wrong since all the info we are getting is so polluted by propaganda.

What I wonder is – how much of us are really really wrong because we consciously or unconsciously are viewing this conflict through the lens of the history we have read about WW2?

I believe a great deal of that history has been misrepresented or omitted. I am not saying Hitler was a good guy … but I’m not sure at all our perception of that time is accurate.

As an example – it’s silly to think that Putin wants to invade the Balkans. Well, maybe he does, but foolish to think he would. But lots of people are saying it because that’s what Hitler would do.

You tell them anonymous. It’s going to dawn on a lot of US-based commentariat the deep repercussions on the moves Russia – and not just Putin – made on 24th of Feb. 2022.

“bring in more and more Muslims to Russia ”

And use Muslim Chechens and possibly Syrian mercenaries to kill Ukrainian Slavs.

And encourage Africans to mass migrate to Germany through Belarus.

And welcome Sudanese “students” to enroll in Moscow “private colleges.”

“ In the China/Russia alliance, Xi will drive the bus and Putin will sit in the back row.”

Russia is so poor and isolated, China not actively joining Western sanctions is considered an “alliance.” And individual Chinese companies probably will informally avoid Russia because it isn’t worth the risk.

“ Meanwhile, Russia’s already below replacement birth rate is going to go even lower ”

I doubt it will hit replacement, but being a garrison state pariah could be a positive for Russian births. Russia will be poorer, but masculine jobs will do relatively well.

Haha, I like what you did there.

Stop huffing glue.

Ukraine has never had any nukes, those were owned by the former USSR, so your argument is null and void like most of your contribution here.

Please read the comment (with lots of “agrees”) that Jack was responding to. Clearly plenty of people here are rooting for Putin.

Our claim is that this all is the result of Western, US, neocon, etc. interference in The Ukraine.

It’s not though. Nothing the US has done is a good reason to invade Ukraine. Even if there were no sanctions, doing so is bad for ordinary Russian people and terrible for Ukranians. And Putin himself admits that one of his motivations is irredentism, which has nothing to do with the US.

This is giving them far too much credit. They don’t like America much less are they patriots. Most of them don’t even care about Globohomo they are just bitter that life didn’t turn out like it was supposed to. Imagine being gifted the opportunities of being a boomer and have nothing to show for it. They hate my founding stock ancestors for their old money just as much as they hate your more successful cousins for their far newer wealth.

“it would end badly for Ukraine to fully embrace U.S. vassalhood and drive a hard line with Russia.”

I agree the entire world would have been better if Ukraine had taken the Belarus route of Russian subservience.

But are Ukrainians to blame? Did they “drive a hard line” as you say, or did Russia?

There were so many overlapping interests and affinities between two closely related people who are now killing each other. Absent specific arguments, my inclination is both sides are to blame. And nutjob Stone’s OMG a coup in 2014 is not strong evidence it is Ukraine’s fault.

My recollection of the big rift between Ukraine and Russia happened over Russian gas. For a long time, Russia gave them very cheap gas in return for pipelines and a lighter version of Belarus’s type of subservience. When it was time to renew, Russia was stingy given their large wealth and resource advantage, which Ukrainian were accustomed to have equal access to under the USSR.

To sum up, we have 1) essentially sanctioned ourselves, by spiking our food and energy costs; 2) driven Russia into China’s arms; 3) reduced confidence in the dollar, by freezing/confiscating Russia’s dollar reserves. Non-Western countries will read the writing on the wall and begin to diversify away from the dollar, which will mean higher interest rates here, all else equal. All of this for a country that is of minor strategic importance to us.

The most interesting questions really are the “What now?” ones. And not with respect to Ukraine but the world.

But i think it’s more complicated than either the West thinks, or what you write. The dollar issue–declining as world reserve currency–was “locked in”, bound to happen over time with our slumping toward Brazil as the China rose. It just may be–like the rest of the future–sped up.

It could be that this ends up being very good for America, the West if there’s a need/desire to “onshore” production, away from political/pandemic disruption.

After the critical immigration and fertility issues the US also needs to rein in finance and do more production. (I.e. be more like the old US where the midwestern industrialists were a political force as well.) To much US talent has gone into B.S. finance, lawyering, rent seeking–including the utterly clownish DIE nonsense. Even “tech” has been too oriented toward “production” that lately involves coming up with yet another way for young women to post pictures of themselves to each other.

The “what’s next” is interesting … but i’ll now go on my beach walk to see if any of the girls are posting really good selfies.