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Perhaps it isn’t completely fair to say there’s no strategy. On Saturday, the New York Times ran an eye-watering story headlined, “Ukraine’s Donbas Strategy: Retreat Slowly and Maximize Russia’s Losses.” The agonized sub-headline added, “It’s far from clear if the Ukrainian strategy will succeed.” So, there is a strategy after all.
Talk about trying to put a good spin on failure. The gist was that the Ukrainians are losing, are in retreat all along the front lines, but Kiev has ordered its troops to hold their untenable positions at all costs, in the hope that the Russians will eventually get tired of winning and go home.
That’s it. That’s the whole strategy.
To be clear, Ukraine has an alternative: pulling its troops from vast numbers of unholdable towns and villages, and mustering them together in more defensible positions, such as behind the giant Dnieper river, which divides the country in half. The main advantage of this defensive strategy would be saving tens or hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives.
Instead, Ukrainian martial law coordinator and former comedian Zelensky figures that, despite the astonishingly high cost in lives and free NATO materiel, by holding on till beyond the last minute in every little hamlet and township, the Russians might, sooner or later, get exhausted by all the fighting and give up.
Given that one of Russia’s stated objectives at the outset was to demilitarize Ukraine, it seems unlikely that Russia will get tired anytime soon of killing Ukrainian soldiers by the battalion.
Combined, these two stories, the Financial Times’ and the New York Times’ articles, together revealed the war’s hideous truth. Western war planners don’t care about Ukraine. They don’t care about its courageous soldiers willing to fight Russia to their inglorious deaths. As I reported yesterday, all the West cares about is the Wolfowitz Doctrine: establishing a NATO foothold in Ukraine to keep a lid on Russia and prevent it from becoming a rival world superpower.
In other words, the Ukrainian people and their land are disposable NATO resources. But there isn’t any strategy. Doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result isn’t a strategy, it’s insanity.
But the fact the corporate media conversation and “foreign policy circles” have evolved from a goal of crushing Russia any day now to a strategy of trading land for peace is a great sign. Perhaps the end lies in sight.
all the West cares about is the Wolfowitz Doctrine: establishing a NATO foothold in Ukraine to keep a lid on Russia and prevent it from becoming a rival world superpower.
I got a 12 hour ban from Twitter for saying throw Igor K. down the well. The bots are strong in this October before the election year.
I got a 12 hour ban from Twitter
Highbrow blogging site UnHerd ran a thoughtful Proxy War article yesterday headlined, “Emmanuel Todd: Nato will disintegrate if Ukraine loses.” ...
Historian Todd made several observations with which most C&C readers would agree. For example, he thinks World War III has already started, that NATO will suffer irreparable shrinkage if Russia wins the Proxy War, that Western governments have been captured by what he neatly described as the “liberal oligarchy,” and that “Western economic sanctions have done more damage to the European economy than to the Russian one.”
My only quibble was he forgot to mention sanctions’ self-inflicted injury to the American economy. ...
There was nothing particularly novel (for us) about Todd’s political analysis, except of course that it is the complete opposite of the government-approved, corporate media-sustained narrative. But I found the article’s closing paragraph stunning. Reporters interviewing Todd about his book provocatively asked him whether he’d move to Russia since he hates the West so much, and he declined. But look what he said about the U.S.:
Asked by Corriere di Bologna whether he'd rather live in Russia than Western
Europe, Todd responded: "The liberal oligarchy is not a practical problem for me ....]
Basically I am just a dissident member of the intellectual oligarchy." While he said
he would remain in France "as long as the regime is not fascist or racist", he claimed
he would not move to the US as the country is "descending into something worse
than the liberal oligarchy". That something worse, Todd argued, is "nihilism".
Tried signing up just now again. They just give me the Black Screen
While he said
he would remain in France "as long as the regime is not fascist or racist", he claimed
he would not move to the US as the country is "descending into something worse
than the liberal oligarchy". That something worse, Todd argued, is "nihilism".
Just sayin.
Zelensky’s secret-squirrel victory plan to defeat the wily Russians, which the green-shirted dictator privately showed Joe Biden a couple weeks ago, was dramatically unveiled in public yesterday. The made-for-TV resistance leader presented the non-classified parts of his Victory Scheme to his entire Ukrainian parliament.
His clever strategem was all dressed up with yellow and blue ribbons and bows, but in sum, Zelensky is haggling harder than a Turkish rug merchant the day before the fiscal year end. His ‘victory plan’ is, at bottom, an offer to buy some armies from NATO to fight Russia with, in exchange for exclusive sweetheart deals on Ukraine’s valuable uranium, lithium, and titanium deposits.
Resource-rich Ukraine is up for sale, and all you have to do is light the fuse on World War III.
As Zelensky sees things, it’s win-win. His oligarchs and our oligarchs could get rich together. But the problem with Zelensky’s grade-school logic is that mining will become intensely difficult after the ground starts glowing from the inevitably high radiation levels that will exist across Ukraine shortly after NATO joins the fight.
Tellingly, the Kyiv Independent did not quote one single member of Ukraine’s parliament about what they thought of their Glorious Leader’s vaunted victory scheme. Not one quote. It didn’t even say they clapped.
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