After all the media propaganda about being eaten alive by godless Communists, imagine the amazement when the Russian Federation, successor to the USSR, declared that “containment” would not include Ukraine, an agricultural state with its own history of Nazism.
While the Americans assured the Russians that there would be no eastward expansion of NATO if Germany were allowed to reunite, that promise evolved into “We were just kidding” and fourteen new members of NATO, eager to partake of the lavish budget and American largesse and remembering decades of Soviet exploitation and brutality, decided to join up. After the invasion of the Ukraine, even historically neutral Sweden and Fins became a member.
Today the alliance is more potent than ever. Ukraine, Sweden, Finland, Danmark, the Baltic states fielding is a formidable army. Germany, France are rapidly rearming and getting society to war ready status.
Russia declared that maintaining Ukraine as a neutral buffer state was an existential matter, but the West wasn’t listening and Ukraine, eager to join the EU and benefit from western military aid, enacted a 2014 coup with the rest being history.
The 2022 invasion by Russian forces of the Donbass, the 20% Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, soon revealed an obvious incapacity of the feared Russian regime in combat. They had not fought a serious engagement since slinking away from Afghanistan in 1989, a clear military loss after nine years of fighting bearded goat-herders in sandals.
The Russian euphemistically named “Special Military Operation” was a clue to the unpreparedness of their military, inhuman, careless with lives and riddled with corruption, to fight a real war. This led to massacres of noncombatants, such as the one in Bucha reported by western media.
Important lessons can be drawn from the creeping forward of the Russian military, as it suffers blows from the most expensive and effective armaments NATO can provide. First, the Russian regime is clearly no longer fielding a Red Army fighting a glorious cause. The Kremlin, out of touch with military reality, overplayed its hand. Mass desertions, theft and robbery, along with execution of civilians mark the regime’s war of occupation of its ethnic Russian lands in eastern Ukraine. Suicides in the trenches are common, embracing grenades or slashing open arteries on barbed wire.
A battlefield injury for a Russian soldier customarily means “You’re done for”, whereas the western-backed Ukrainian field hospitals and veteran care is up to NATO standards.
The Kremlin, embarrassed at its lack of success, had to call on the North Koreans to supply troops and ammunition, after Ukraine daringly thrust into Kursk; the hapless ones who fail to blow themselves up when in danger of being captured know they will be executed if they are sent back to Pyongyang: instead they plead to be allowed to go to South Korea. One report from disgusted Russian officers commented “All the North Korean soldiers do is sit around and watch porno on the internet.”
In an effort to “bring the war home”, American technicians work with the Ukrainians to guide Storm Shadow missiles into air bases, oil refineries and civilian complexes deep within the Russian homeland. The Allies have not yet attacked the Kremlin directly, as a nuclear response from the Russians (assuming their ICBMs still work) would be regrettable.
The Russians are clearly suffering “war fatigue”, with food and fuel prices skyrocketing, a million body bags returned from the front and countless more injured. In fact, the SMO has lasted longer than the Nazi attack on the USSR.
The Russian people need to ask themselves whether the war against a Slavic cousin will have the effect of bringing the countries together or will the occupation of Crimea, Donetsk and other oblasts give rise to feelings of separation, anxiety and hatred of Russia.
Tight control of information dissemination throughout Russian mass media by the regime of Vladimir Putin makes no mention of the staggering losses in the “meat grinder” of the Ukraine – human and resource losses acutely needed in the development of Russia itself.
The ceaseless bombardment of Ukraine with hypersonic missiles will never succeed in collapsing the democratically elected Ukrainian government. Think of it as like the siege of Leningrad, which Putin should remember. Or the allied firebombing of Dresden and Hamburg, which conclusively proved aerial bombardment will only strengthen a regime.
Nor will it bring peace. The Ukraine is firmly embedded in the European Union by now. If the Ukrainians were sitting on the fence since the invasion its clear to every small child in Ukraine. Follow the Russians and you will die.
Meanwhile, the Americans appear to be intent on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, as they have been suckered by V. Putin sweet-talking an egomaniac American President. The air is thick with pixie dust appeasement, as Trump agrees to give away oblasts of Ukraine that are frankly not his to give in the first place.
The fiercely brave Ukrainian front-line fighters and ineffective Kiev military command are an echo of the entitled, lazy, incompetent British leadership in WW1: “lions led by donkeys”. Disciplined western military leadership is evident on the battlefield., supported and cared for by big-buck’s armaments from Uncle Sam.
A deal with Putin now will be a Faustian deal at worst or more likely a Russian con at best – when Ukraine is on the verge of a military victory, and even an incursion into Russian territory, routing a regime deeply plagued with corruption, serious abuse and even execution of their own troops, not to mention how POWs get a bullet in the head.
