Tag Archives: Ukraine-Russia War

US May Help Ukraine Launch An Offensive On Crimea, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on January 19, 2023 | 1 comment

Good luck trying to take Crimea away from Russia. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

In a new article titled “U.S. Warms to Helping Ukraine Target Crimea,” the New York Times reports that the Biden administration now believes Kyiv may need to launch an offensive on the territory that Moscow has considered a part of the Russian Federation since 2014, “even if such a move increases the risk of escalation.”

Citing unnamed US officials, The New York Times says “the Biden administration does not think that Ukraine can take Crimea militarily,” but that “Russia needs to believe that Crimea is at risk, in part to strengthen Ukraine’s position in any future negotiations.”

It’s hard to imagine a full-scale assault on geostrategically crucial territory long considered a part of the Russian homeland not causing a major escalation. And as Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp notes, smaller attacks on Crimea have indeed seen significant escalations from Moscow, contrary to claims laid out in the NYT article:The New York Times report quoted Dara Massicot, a researcher from the RAND Corporation, who claimed that “Crimea has already been hit many times without a massive escalation from the Kremlin.” But Massicot’s claim is false as Russia began launching missile strikes on vital Ukrainian infrastructure in response to the October truck bombing of the Crimean Bridge.

The New York Times report quoted Dara Massicot, a researcher from the RAND Corporation, who claimed that “Crimea has already been hit many times without a massive escalation from the Kremlin.” But Massicot’s claim is false as Russia began launching missile strikes on vital Ukrainian infrastructure in response to the October truck bombing of the Crimean Bridge.

Before the bridge bombing, Russia didn’t launch large-scale attacks on infrastructure in Ukraine, but now such bombardments have become routine, and millions of Ukrainians are struggling to power and heat their homes.

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‘NATO’s mission’ leaves Ukraine destroyed, by Aaron Maté

Posted on January 19, 2023 | 1 comment

NATO has to destroy Ukraine to save it. From Aaron Maté at mate.substack.com:

“We are carrying out NATO’s mission.” As Ukraine’s defense minister acknowledges the proxy war, NATO proxy warriors disregard the toll.

(Pierre Crom/Getty Images)

Unveiling its latest military assistance package to Ukraine – at $3.75 billion, the largest to date — the White House declared that US weapons are intended “to help the Ukrainians resist Russian aggression.”

For their part, Ukrainians on the receiving end see it differently.

“We are carrying out NATO’s mission,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in an interview. “They aren’t shedding their blood. We’re shedding ours. That’s why they’re required to supply us with weapons.” Repeating a rationale offered by his US sponsors in previous wars, including the invasion of Iraq, Reznikov added that Ukraine “is defending the entire civilized world.”

Receiving an endless supply of weapons from NATO countries that shed no blood of their own — all to fulfill their “mission” — is an apt description of Ukraine’s role in the US-led proxy war against Russia. And as one of its staunchest champions, Sen. Lindsey Graham, cheerfully predicted in July, that mission is using Ukraine to “fight to the last person.”

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Should Russia Take the War to NATO States? By Finian Cunningham

Posted on January 18, 2023 | 3 comments

The NATO states are certainly taking the war to Russia. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

It’s certainly risky and not to be contemplated rashly. But what is the alternative?

The United States-led military bloc is a party to the conflict in Ukraine against Russia. In short, NATO is at war with Russia. So, why is Russia limiting its military targets to Ukrainian territory?

Moscow has said repeatedly that the proxy war in Ukraine between NATO and Russia has become increasingly evident from the United States and its allies pumping up to $100 billion of weaponry into the former Soviet republic. There can be no illusions about the situation.

NATO’s participation has become increasingly deeper and more concerted. Not so long ago, the U.S. was at pains to emphasize its military aid was “defensive only” and “non-lethal”. NATO member Germany was formerly ridiculed for limiting its equipment to “helmets”.

Now the United States and its allies are supplying longer-range rockets, Patriot anti-aircraft systems that could shoot down Russian fighter jets in Russian airspace, as well as delivering main battle tanks.

Ukraine’s defense minister Oleksii Reznikov boasted in an interview with the BBC that Ukraine has become a de facto member of NATO due to the panoply of weapons and military advisors it has received from the 28-nation organization.

Reznikov also recently said that Ukraine was serving on a NATO mission to defeat Russia.

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Ukraine: Is the Hammer About to Fall? by Mike Whitney

Posted on January 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

The smart money says that Russia launches a pulverizing offensive this spring. From Mike Whitney at unz.com:

“Here’s something you must understand. We were not given any opportunity to act differently.” Vladimir Putin

The plan to engage Russia militarily is a tacit admission that the United States can no longer maintain its global dominance through economic or political means alone. After exhaustive analysis and debate, western elites have settled on a course of action aimed at dividing the world into warring blocs in order to prosecute a war on Russia and China. The ultimate strategic objective of the current policy, is to tighten the grip of western elites on the levers of global power and to prevent the dissolution of the “rules-based international order.” But after 11 months of nonstop warfare in Ukraine, the US-backed western coalition finds itself in a worse position than when it began. Aside from the fact that the economic sanctions have severely impacted Washington’s closest European allies, the West’s control of Ukraine has plunged the economy into a protracted slump, destroyed much of the country’s critical infrastructure and annihilated a sizable portion of the Ukrainian Army. More importantly, Ukrainian forces are now suffering unsustainable casualties on the battlefield which is laying the groundwork for the inevitable splintering of the state. Whatever the outcome of the conflict may be, one thing is certain: Ukraine will no longer exist as a viable, independent, contiguous state.

One of the biggest surprises of the current war, is simply the lack of preparedness on part of the US. One would assume that if the foreign policy mandarins decided to “lock horns” with the world’s biggest nuclear superpower, they would have done the necessary planning and preparation to ensure success. Clearly, that hasn’t happened. US policymakers seem surprised by the fact that the economic sanctions backfired and actually strengthened Russia’s economic situation. They also failed to anticipate that the vast majority of countries would not only ignore the sanctions but proactively explore options for “ditching the dollar” in their business transactions and in the sale of critical resources.

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Game-Changing Russia, by Batiushka

Posted on January 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

Will Russia conquer the entire Ukraine? If it does, will it then head east? From Batiushka at thesaker.is:

Meanwhile, Circuses

While America is prepared to pay for the last Ukrainian to die for America – the Western world is talking about something else: Harry Windsor has revealed the family secret. The family secret was that Harry is an idiot, whose strings are pulled by an American actress. Now the secret is out. Harry has himself told the whole world he is an idiot whose strings are pulled by an American actress.

And Game-Changing Tanks?

While Western Europe is prepared to pay for the last Ukrainian to die for Western Europe – Germany, France, Finland, the UK and some other countries are prepared to get rid of some more of their old armoured vehicles and even tanks, palming them off on the Neo-Nazi Kiev regime. Thus, the UK is thinking of sending 14 of its 25-year old Challenger 2 tanks. How the UK will train Ukrainians to operate them, how it will supply enough ammunition for them to fire, how they will supply the mechanics and spare parts to repair them, how – and when – they will deliver them to Poland and then get them to the Kiev front, over 1,000 kilometres further away, nobody can tell us. Meanwhile, the British Army Chief of General Staff, Sir Patrick Sanders, is complaining. ‘Giving Kiev tanks means we won’t have enough for ourselves’. After all they do cost £8 million each and there are only 227 of them in the much-underfunded British Army anyway.

Nobody has told the British Army that after one Russian missile all 14 of these obsolescent ‘wonder-weapons’ will go up in smoke before they ever get to the front. £112 million gone. No wonder Ukrainian refugees are returning to Kiev to get proper medical treatment that the grossly underfunded and strikebound British Health System cannot provide them with. Nobody has told the British Army or any EU Army that Russia is fighting a war of attrition. Given Russian air superiority, far superior artillery, drones, missiles and its 15,000 tanks, the Kiev forces, their mercenaries and all their equipment are being wiped out. Worse still, none of the Western hack-journalists, presstitutes to the core, has yet explained why ‘the victorious Kiev forces’ need ever more Western armoured vehicles and tanks. You read it here first: It is because all the other ‘game-changing’ armoured vehicles, tanks and equipment have already been destroyed. Now at least astronomers know what a black hole looks like. It looks like the Kiev regime. Yes, black holes really are game-changing because you can get sucked into one.

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Tanks for Nothing: NATO Keeps On Demilitarising Itself in Ukraine, by James Tweedle

Posted on January 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

The list of weapons the West has shipped to Ukraine is long. Too bad the list of Western weapons Russia has destroyed is almost the same length. From James Tweedle at thesaker.is:

It has been said often over the past year, most recently by Emmanuel Todd, that the conflict in Ukraine is “existential” for Russia.

Certainly, the Great Bear cannot abide a NATO ballistic missile launchpad just 300 miles from Moscow in a country run my rabidly-Russophobic Nazis — not neo-Nazi skinhead cosplayers but the literal descendants of the real deal.

But others have argued that the Special Military Operation (SMO) is also a make-or-break roll of the dice for NATO and the US which dominates it. How else can we explain the latest mania for arming the regime in Kiev just as its ‘Siegfried Line’ in the Donbass starts to crumble?

How else can one explain cry-bully US National Security Spokesman John Kirby’s response to news that Russian Wagner ‘private military company’ had liberated the town of Soledar, a keystone of the Ukrainian defences? He simultaneously tried to cast doubt on the facts while claiming the town’s capture was strategically insignificant.

“We don’t know his it’s gonna go, so I’m not going to predict failure or success here,” Kirby said as Wagner were mopping up stranded Ukrainian conscripts. “But even if both Bakhmut and Soledar fall to the Russians, it’s not going to have a strategic impact on the war itself, and it certainly isn’t going to stop the Ukrainians or slow them down in terms of their efforts to regain their territory.”

To the contrary, reports indicate that several Ukrainian brigades being concentrated for a southward push on Melitopol, near the narrow isthmus to the Crimea, were redeployed to Donbass in a vain attempt to hold Soledar and Bakhmut, where they suffered huge casualties. Taking Bakhmut could allow the Russian forces to ‘roll up’ the Ukrainian line to the north and south and advance on Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last two major cities Ukraine holds in Donetsk.

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Emmanuel Todd On The Third World War, by Moon of Alabama

Posted on January 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

Ukraine is existential for the country of Russia and for the empire of America. One will win and one will lose. From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.org:

The French Le Figaro has an interview with the well known anthropologist Emmanuel Todd.

Emmanuel Todd: «La Troisième Guerre mondiale a commencé»

“The third world war has began” is his new thesis. Todd is quite famous for correctly predicting the devolution of the Soviet Union long before it happened. He was quite alone at that time.

I once had a piece on Todd’s later predictions for the U.S. and Europe which still seems spot on. I also quoted him in a piece on social decline as a national security issue.

Unfortunately the Figaro piece is paywalled. But Arnaud Bertrand has done us the favor of translating the gist. Here is his slightly edited thread:

Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand – 15:42 UTC · Jan 13, 2023Emmanuel Todd, one of the greatest French intellectuals today, claims that the “Third World War has started.”

Small 🧵 translating the most important points in this fascinating interview.

He says “it’s obvious that the conflict, which started as a limited territorial war and is escalating to a global economic confrontation  between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia and China on the other hand, has become a world war.”

He believes that “Putin made a big mistake early on, which is [that] on the eve of the war [everyone saw Ukraine] not as a fledgling democracy, but as a society in decay and a “failed state” in the making. […] I think the Kremlin’s calculation was that this decaying society would crumble at the first shock. But what we have discovered, on the contrary, is that a society in decomposition, if it is fed by external financial and military resources, can find in war a new type of balance, and even a horizon, a hope.”

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America’s Dumbest War, by Bob Moriarty

Posted on January 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

Has there ever been a smart war? From Bob Moriarty at 321gold.com:

According to documents put out by a report service working for Congress the US has launched 251 foreign military interventions in the last thirty years. The report also says the US started more than 80% of all military conflicts since the end of World War II.

We are in luck because the US (Stanford University IT Department says that using the words America or American should be forbidden) may well have fought their next to last war because it is having unintended consequences no one could have forecast. Actually that is not true either. They were forecast.

Before I dive into why this war is so obscenely stupid and self destructive, I’d like to comment about something I have learned about life in general.

To succeed overall, you need to be good at something. It could be singing. It could be writing. It could be working as a mechanic or a cook. Actually it could be nearly anything. You just need to find something you are good at.

Once you find something that you are good at, you need to do more of it. Frankly there are a couple of things I am good at that somehow manage to pay the bills but there are hundreds of more tasks I am pretty useless at. So do more of what you are good at and less of the things you are not good at and you will get along just fine.

Can I give you a classic example?

Let’s say you work for the government. You got your job because basically you are a freak. You think that you would make a great luggage thief. You take a flight; you stand around the luggage area after the flight and see a bag you would like so you walk off with it. Alas, the baggage area has cameras all over so you get caught.

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Help! The Beatles to Save America? By Batiushka

Posted on January 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

The war is existential for Russia and not for the West. That should tell you who’s going to win. From Batiushka at thesaker.is:

I need somebody,
Not just anybody,
You know I need someone, help!

So much younger than today,
I never needed anybody’s help in any way,
but now these days are gone,
I’m not so self-assured.
And now I find I’ve changed my mind
And opened up the doors.

In, oh, so many ways
My independence seems to vanish in the haze.
But every now and then
I feel so insecure.
I know that I just need you like
I’ve never done before.

Help me if you can, I’m feeling down,
And I do appreciate you being ’round.
Help me get my feet back on the ground,
Won’t you please, please help me, help me, help me?

The Beatles

The West has lost the Battle of Soledar. 25,000 Ukrainian and western mercenaries lie dead. Artemovsk is about to fall with all its fortifications. Where next?

A limited policing operation all started with the Russian wish to protect its people in two Russian provinces in the far east of the Ukraine. This soon had to be extended to four Russian provinces, two more added from the south-east of the Ukraine, so linking up with the much-persecuted Crimea. That had been Russian until 1954, just as all the east of the Ukraine was Russian until 1922 and the far west Polish, Hungarian and Romanian until 1939 – the Ukraine is a uniquely Communist creation. And then there was the Russian wish to prevent the Ukraine from becoming an American base, specifically for its ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, and also to protect the many Russian speakers elsewhere in the Ukraine from hate-filled Nazi persecution of them. The project and the aim were all relatively modest. Then it all changed:

If the West continues to pump the Ukraine full of weaponry out of impotent rage, or a desire to exacerbate the situation…then that means our geographical tasks will move even further from the current line.

Sergey Lavrov, Foreign Minister of Russia

So it all became an operation, forced on Russia by the aggressiveness of Washington, to take back, directly or indirectly, more or less the whole of the Ukraine. This was not because Russia is fighting against the Ukraine, or against the EU, or against NATO, or against ‘the West’, or even against the USA, but against the neocons, who pull the money-strings, in Washington. And so now Russia has to demilitarise all NATO ground forces (cowardly NATO naval and air forces are hiding) and ultimately to denazify the whole Western world. It is actually on its way to doing that. Certain types of NATO equipment are in short supply. And despite strict Western censorship, more and more Western people are realising that the Ukraine, the most corrupt country on earth, is simply not worth a penny of their taxes, let alone billions, let alone living in hunger or cold: ‘Eat or heat’, as they say in the strikebound UK.

What the Western world, which is ruled over by a bunch of neocons in Washington, has never understood, is that this is an existential war for Russia and therefore Russia will fight to the end, if the neocons force it too. And although the neocon elite likes to consider that this is an existential war for the US, it is not, let alone for the peoples of Western Europe. Find a single ordinary Western person who is voluntarily willing to die for the Ukraine. You will not find a single one. (Western mercenaries die only for money, not for the Ukraine). This Western crusade is existential only for the neocon fantasy ideology, that ‘The West is Best’ and that ‘History Has Ended’ (with our triumph). And here there is a problem.

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Is Biden Being Blackmailed to Send US Combat Troops to Ukraine? by Mike Whitney

Posted on January 13, 2023 | 2 comments

As conspiracy theories go, this is one of the best out there, and like many conspiracy theories, may well end being true. From Mike Whitney at unz.com:

Billionaire elites are using their power over the media, the political class and public opinion to coerce Joe Biden into sending US troops to Ukraine to prevent a Russian victory. Idiot conservatives think the media is actually doing their job for once by accurately reporting Biden’s alleged transgressions. But, the fact is, the media is simply showing that it can switch sides at any time in order to pursue the elitist agenda.

No one should be surprised that Joe Biden’s ‘classified documents problem’ has emerged at the same time a key city in Ukraine (Soledar) has been liberated by Russian troops. All of the recent reports from the frontlines indicate that the Russian army is steadily seizing more territory in the eastern part of the country while inflicting heavy casualties on the over-matched Ukrainian forces. In short, the Ukrainian army is being beaten badly forcing US war planners to rethink their approach. What the US needs to do to prevail in its proxy-war with Russia, is to enlist a coalition of nations (US, Poland, Romania, and UK) that are willing to commit combat troops to the conflict with the tacit understanding that NATO will not directly participate in any ground war with Russia. Biden previously rejected the idea of sending troops to Ukraine acknowledging that it would be tantamount to launching a Third World War. But as the ‘classified documents’ scandal gains momentum, the malleable president will likely fall-in-line and do whatever the hawkish foreign policy establishment demands of him. In short, the documents flap is being used by behind-the-scenes powerbrokers who are blackmailing the president to pursue their own narrow interests. They have Brandon over-a-barrel.

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