Since we are all talking about climate change, I stumbled upon this video addressing the deadly climate (i.e., very cold, very little sunlight) of about two or three years duration, which occurred in about 536 AD.
I was unaware of this climate event.
See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKUz5Vjq9-s
Like every climate regime the planet has experienced over the last 4 BILLION years, the 536 AD event was not due to human activities.
A very good summary from Victor Davis Hanson about the differences between the Trump classified items, and Biden’s:
Not least is the fact that Biden knew he had items he was not legally entitled to have for at least six years, and probably a lot longer.
What a great women! Thanks so much for sharing, dear Neo! I try with my daily 30 min yoga workout 😉
Santorini is said to have caused the end of the bronze age
At 83 I was as fit as she. Then I had two major surgeries. The second one almost killed me.
For the past six years I have been working at staying alive, and part of it has been doing an exercise routine. When I’m doing my routine, I feel like I’m going to die, but I feel better after I recover from the exercise. So, I’ve kept at it.
I’ll be 90 in March. Six years ago, I didn’t think I’d make it another year. But here I am. Maybe my life as a gym rat since I was 35 paid off. Or maybe it’s genetic, or maybe it’s just Karma.
So, as expected, Adam Schiff has announced a run for the Senate. We’ll see just how insane California voters are.
JJ @ 2;34
I am convinced from seeing the consequences of surgeries on elderly folks I have seen, that beyond a certain age, it’s better to avoid surgeries and hospitals if possible.
An elderly body simply cannot tolerate the stress imposed upon it from the surgery and oft times leads to other complications that make recovery (if there is one) literally impossible.
As for longevity: again, just based upon what I have seen I am convinced that genetics is the primary factor in one’s longevity. I am assuming the individual is not a smoker or too overweight (whatever that would be).
Staying active and exercising (brain and body) will / should lead to a healthier person while alive, but as far as extending one’s life appreciably I am not so sure.
but as far as extending one’s life appreciably I am not so sure.
If anyone was going to achieve immortality through exercise and healthy eating, it would have been Jack Lalanne. And he made it to 96. The lady in the video seems to follow a routine similar to Lalanne’s and seems remarkably strong for her age.
The thing about old age is how quickly things can go boom. Folks who look great suddenly age after a heart attack, infection, or operation, and it is downhill from there. The ability to recover just isn’t what it is at twenty.
In case you were wondering WHY Ukraine is getting U.S. and European tanks:
“Alexei Arestovich, President Zelensky’s recently fired advisor and unofficial “Spinmeister,” was more direct. He expressed his own doubts that Ukraine can win its war with Russia and he now questions whether Ukraine will even survive the war. Ukrainian losses—at least 150,000 dead including 35,000 missing in action and presumed dead—have fatally weakened Ukrainian forces resulting in a fragile Ukrainian defensive posture that will likely shatter under the crushing weight of attacking Russian forces in the next few weeks.”
“Ukraine’s materiel losses are equally severe. These include thousands of tanks and armored infantry fighting vehicles, artillery systems, air defense platforms, and weapons of all calibers. These totals include the equivalent of seven years of Javelin missile production. In a setting where Russian artillery systems can fire nearly 60,000 rounds of all types—rockets, missiles, drones, and hard-shell ammunition—a day, Ukrainian forces are hard-pressed to answer these Russian salvos with 6,000 rounds daily. New platform and ammunition packages for Ukraine may enrich the Washington community, but they cannot change these conditions.”
Bunge finds the words of a disgruntled(?) ex employee reassuring. Somehow the actual facts on the ground don’t tally up with the guy who was fired. Specifically, why Roosia has lost Kyeiv, Kharkhiv, Kherson, and has yet to take Bhakmut or get much past the town (not city) of Soladar?
Care to ponder that Bunge?
Ukrainian military casualties have been about 100,000, and civilian casualties at least 30,000. The Roosian lend lease to Ukraine wasn’t so large in the Kherson feint as it was in the Kiev or Kharkhiv bug outs. So the Ukrainians certainly need to replace the Soviet gifts. Regarding arty, the Roosians have some of their own problems; burning out their tubes, burning through their freshest stock of ordnance. And of course they are using Iranian drones and cruise missiles designed to sink aircraft carriers because they are saving their precise and most modern weapons (to attack civilians) for pressing military targets such as HIMARs. Do tell Bunge, do tell.
Then again Roosians talk about nuking everyone and have a history of genocide towards Ukraine (Holodomor, Bunge). So the unintended, or intended, consequences of a Roosian victory are more consequential than him needing a new line of work.
Information warfare and disinformation.
Don’t be Bunge.
Bunge:
“In case you were wondering why Ukraine is getting western weapons; ” nope you haven’t found Occam’s Razor, it is to defeat the Roosian invaders and expell them from Ukraine.
They didn’t have western IFVs and MBTs and yet managed to kick them out of Kyiv, Kharkhiv, and Kherson. HIMARS, modern arty, ATGMs, MANPADS, SAM systems have all taken their toll on your Roosians, but to kick Vlad and his “orcs,” as the Ukrainians call them, out of the rest of Ukraine more is needed. Training and mechanized stuff.
Weep for Vlad on your own.
Theyve only been mishandling tens of billions of dollars of our weapons and cash
Ha ha. A progressive group in California is saying Schiff wasn’t effective enough in fighting Trump.
And resisting the Roosians. Or haven’t you noticed? Or is that your problem with them? Forgotten who bankrolled Fidel?
If anyone was going to achieve immortality through exercise and healthy eating, it would have been Jack Lalanne. And he made it to 96.
Chuck:
Hear, hear for Jack Lalanne! A hero of mine. (BTW, French parents, I might add.)
_________________________
1984 Age 70: Handcuffed, shackled and fighting strong winds and currents, [Jack Lalanne] towed 70 boats with 70 people from the Queen’s Way Bridge in the Long Beach Harbor to the Queen Mary, 1 ½ miles.
I’m 70. I think I missed my window to compete with Jack.
Does it strike anyone else that even by om’s standards, he’s really, really, REALLY childish when it comes to Ukraine? He never posts about it like a serious, complex military conflict with physical, economic, and geopolitical impacts on millions of people directly and hundreds of millions indirectly. It’s like he’s just talking crap while playing Call of Duty online.
He can’t even bother to wonder “Hey! If everything is going swimmingly for Ukraine, why are we now giving them tanks and why are they asking for FIGHTER JETS and LONG-RANGE MISSILES?” or “Gee, if faced with losing power and (likely) his life, what might Ol’ Vlad actually do?”
Then again, om has made it clear he learned NOTHING from the Iraq War and is proud of it.
Mike
I’ll be 90 in March. Six years ago, I didn’t think I’d make it another year. But here I am. Maybe my life as a gym rat since I was 35 paid off. Or maybe it’s genetic, or maybe it’s just Karma.
JJ:
Well … I’m impressed! Keep on keeping on. It seems to be working.
Though, alas, all our luck charms run out eventually.
“Gee, if faced with losing power and (likely) his life, what might Ol’ Vlad actually do?”
MBunge:
Peter Zeihan had an interesting answer to that question. He has intelligence sources and he has heard that essentially we’ve got Putin wired. We (the NSA presumably) know where Putin is at all times.
Putin has been informed that if he were to do anything funny with nuclear weapons, Putin himself would be — guaranteed — vaporized within an hour.
Take that with however much salt as you deem necessary.
Bunge:
In case you haven’t noticed, consider that I’ve been posting links to analysis about the Ukraine war every Sunday for at least 4 months now, about the topics you have no understanding about it seems; strategy, logistics, weapons, economics of the two parties; that others recognize as serious topics.
You, not so much.
All hat no cattle. Don’t be a Bunge.
Turtler’s comments are another resource that you might consider reading if you want to learn something. That would be unusual for a Bunge though.
Your particular parroting of a post about Depleted Uranium ammunition being akin to dirty bombs shows how foolish or ignorant you are.
Propaganda/disinformation is a fact of modern war. And the Ukrainians and the Russians are both masters at the craft.
om says, “Ukrainian military casualties have been about 100,000, and civilian casualties at least 30,000.”
Quoting Col. Douglas Macgregor (ret.), MBunge says, “Ukrainian losses—at least 150,000 dead including 35,000 missing in action and presumed dead—have fatally weakened Ukrainian forces resulting in a fragile Ukrainian defensive posture.”
So who has it right?
We know we can’t believe our own government, and it’s unlikely we can believe the Zelensky government that has banned opposition news, banned opposition parties, and is trying to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
Does Ukraine have the capability to sustain a war, even with a resupply from the west? Macgregor has his doubts. Russian forces are making slow but steady progress in Bakhmut. US officials are suggesting the cost to Ukrainian military defending the town isn’t worth the strategic value. The problem is if they withdraw from Bakhmut, is there a more defensible position to the west?
Ukraine’s economy exists only because of American largess. The EU estimates the cost of rebuilding Ukraine’s infrastructure at $500-600 billion.
We’re sending main battle tanks, but Zelensky is now asking for F-16’s and long range missles. Mission creep. The fact that Germany was slow to allow Polish Leopard’s into Ukraine suggests European’s don’t see the war as an existential threat to themselves.
The US goal is regime change in Russia. Biden said so several months ago. Over the years, the knock on American intelligence is it’s very poor at human intelligence. Has our government miscalculated internal Russian politics? If so, we’re destroying Ukraine for no real purpose.
The gains Ukraine made in the north and in Kherson recovering territory early in the war aren’t likely to be repeated in the eastern regions.
“The gains Ukraine made in the north and in Kherson recovering territory early in the war aren’t likely to be repeated in the eastern regions.”
Based on what?
Notice that almost all the gains that Roosia made in the war have been lost. Or hae you forgotten that? Notice that Roosia has been fighting to take Bakmut for months now and it’s progress has been, wait for it, a few kilometers for 10,000 KIA. (back of body bag estimate),
Now you can site War on the Rocks, woo hoo, navel gazing by the insiders of the Pentagon. BFD.
You wish to keep Vladdy in charge of an expansionist imperial Roosia? What could possibly go wrong for the world or Europe with that? Roosia could do much better. But then again Yevgeny Prigozhin of the Wagner Group seems to be another murdering thug high up in Roosian power games.
Between Bunge and Brain E this is a true case of damned if you do and damned if you dolt.
“Santorini”…
Apparently, the Aegean is starting to act up again…
– – – – – – – – – –
WRT the FBI, here’s a curious one:
“I was an FBI Special Agent and if Biden won’t fix a bureau in crisis, it will be destroyed;
“Many now believe that the FBI is merely an arm of one political party”— https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/fbi-special-agent-biden-fix-bureau-crisis-destroyed
So Joe Biden is supposed to fix the FBI, is he now?
(Actually, it’s pretty clear that “Biden” has already “FIXED” the FBI….)
My prayers are for a smooth passage for Gerard, and peace and strength for Neo. My condolences for this loss to all who have him as part of your lives.
I do regret that I am only now reading his powerful writing. A commenter there did note that he has downloaded all of American Digest–a 36 hour feat.
Neo’s and Gerard’s sad news this week as well as a read of the comments at his blog causes me to note that it would serve well the multiply injected with the experimental mRNA to keep close track of cancer screenings, and to tell the the young people in their lives who have been as well to NOT ignore any signs of cardiac events–the funny heart beat runs, chest tightness, left arm or jaw pain on exertion. Fatigue. They are not “too young” to have a cardiac event, or a stroke or pulmonary embolism.
The fact is that a huge Phase Three Trial was done by injecting the experimental mRNA across the population broadly, without much monitoring of results, sadly. Well, perhaps more of a near total denial of results. Tragically, actually.
(Following one of the Rules from House of God–if you don’t take a temperature, you won’t find a fever.)
The cumulative innate and cellular immune system suppression that was first documented in peer reviewed journals from the mRNA injections nearly a a year and a half ago may well be what is leading to increased cancers as well as recurrence of existing ones, as our bodies’ surveillance is impeded.
The aggressiveness of them is striking, as well as the appearance of cell types rarely seen, esp with CNS ones.
A suggested protocol for minimizing this effect can be found here:
flccc.net
The multiple reports of the effects of the injections generated by Naomi Wolf’s work with over 3500 listeners of Steve Bannon’s Warroom under the direction of physicians, lawyers, statisticians who reviewed Phizer’s trial data (which they wanted to take 75 years to release–remember??) is now available on Kindle:
In case you were wondering WHY Ukraine is getting U.S. and European tanks:
Because it’s in the middle of a hot peer conflict and losing tanks and other equipment is what HAPPENS in those kinds of conflicts, and it is rather rare that nations (especially nations just spooling up war production) can build it faster than they lose them. This isn’t some kind of revelation, or at least it SHOULDN’T be, and it has rather little to do with how corrupt or honest a given regime is (though of course corrupt ones make it worse).
And yes, in contrast to some of the memes that have been out, Ukraine has suffered casualties in personnel and vehicles. Generally nowhere near the levels that Kremlin propagandists like MacGregor (who you cited) and their ilk claim, but still very significant Yugoslav-War tier losses that makes filling the gaps pretty important. Again, very unsurprising.
Suffice it to say, the man doesn’t exist to provide honest or even halfway competent analysis (which is a shame because on at least a few cases like the problems of African-American entitlement societies he is quite blunt), but to fill up space. The man shamelessly gets most of his money directly or indirectly from the Kremlin.
But that’s not even the worst part of it.
Because even totalitarian mouthpieces can get things correct, even if by accident or just from reading the script. Even if you completely ignored all of MacGregor’s idiocy regarding Jews or the obvious conflict of interest from getting his living serving as one of the Kremlin’s useful monkeys, the simple fact is that [i] the overwhelming majority of his predictions have been provably, laughably wrong. [/i] And are rarely walked back.
So let’s go through this Article, shall we?
Until it decided to confront Moscow with an existential military threat in Ukraine,
It’s not even the first sentence and we already have the first dishonesty. Namely, shifting the blame. The Kremlin is the side that decided to invade Ukraine in 2014. It is the side that escalated that war by openly invading in early 2022. The US did not “decide to confront Moscow with an existential military threat in Ukraine” [b] No such existential military threat existed in Ukraine at the time of 2014. [/b]
Rather, it was the Kremlin that decided to confront Ukraine with an existential military and political threat, one that openly discussed dissecting the country in twain in the form of “Novorossiya” or even installing a puppet government that would “demilitarize” the country and force it into “neutrality.”
Washington confined the use of American military power to conflicts that Americans could afford to lose, wars with weak opponents in the developing world from Saigon to Baghdad that did not present an existential threat to U.S. forces or American territory.
I’m not sure what point MacGregor is trying to make for a couple of reasons.
Firstly: Most sane or even remotely pragmatic governments (even extremely corrupt and authoritarian ones) generally try to avoid existential wars if they can. It’s one reason why as bad as Africa is you generally don’t see existential wars on the national or ethnic scale, and when you DO they are generally among the bitterest and longest lasting.
Secondly: Even this doesn’t entirely hold. I realize how chic it is to downplay the likes of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda as third world tinpot savages that were of no threat to us or our way of life, and on some level that is true. But it ignores the fact that Saddam managed to have a couple dozen operatives kill 3,000 people on US soil and how Saddam nearly held much of the global market in the Middle East hostage in 1990-1991 with one of the world’s largest and most modern Soviet Bloc style militaries (the fact that it folded so quickly being a surprise to everyone).
Thirdly: one could far more readily identify this description as fitting Russia, particularly post-Soviet Russia since 1990 but also the USSR as a whole since WWII. It too avoided fighting wars it could not afford to lose (or at least how it perceived as such). As the Afghan walkout they conducted (which I will freely admit puts Biden’s shitshow to shame) shows. Georgia and Moldova and Syria were hardly existential wars Russia could not afford to lose.
The great exception to this that I can think of is Chechnya, with the Chechen Separatists seizing part of internationally recognized Russian territory and even invading border regions like Dagestan, with the threat of either waging more wars or helping to propel more separatism. And even then the Russian Government was willing to make peace (albeit on humiliating terms) with them in 1996 and after a mostly-victorious round two has basically propped up and empowered a superficially-reformed Islamist Terrorist and “former” Separatist in power, where he has imitated most of the worst aspects of the Dudayev regime or even gone further (for instance, Dudayev was nowhere near as active at persecuting Christians and Jews, but with more lip service to being loyal to the Kremlin.
This time—a proxy war with Russia—is different.
No, it really really isn’t. We’ve had a bunch of proxy wars with Russia before. This is the largest one and dwarfs Afghanistan, but it’s hardly unheard of.
Contrary to early Beltway hopes and expectations, Russia neither collapsed internally nor capitulated to the collective West’s demands for regime change in Moscow.
Here we have another lie. While many in the Beltway (and even those outside it like myself, who are thoroughly sick of Putin’s bullshit) do fantasize about regime change, that has never been the main demand. The demand has not been that the Putin regime falls, but that it gets the hell out of its occupied territory in Ukraine.
All else is secondary to that.
Also while it is true that some of the chronic optimists probably hoped Russia would collapse internally by now, even those were probably stretching to believe that was likely. Especially since many of them are the same exact clowns that advocate (as MacGregor does) that we lessen sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela and even North Korea because “they’re not working” (untrue) and because we should make friends with them.
Washington underestimated Russia’s societal cohesion, its latent military potential, and its relative immunity to Western economic sanctions.
In response: Not really, absolutely not, and no.
Russia’s “relative immunity to Western economic sanctions” is a pipe dream caused by selectively reading parts of the trade data. In reality Western sanctions and seizures have already hurt the Russian economy quite a lot – especially since many of the brainlets failed to move hard currency reserves out of Western banks – and we’re already seeing struggling on the military production level (even beyond the usual early war hiccups, which are a lot less explicable in Russia’s case than in Ukraine’s due to the much more prominent role Russia’s arms sectors play in the national economy).
And Russia’s military power seriously underperformed the usual rosy estimates of Russian combat capacity by the Beltway Generals (and also Colonel MacGregor I note), with the grandiose discussions of Russia occupying the Baltics in a matter of hours or days in exercises now being revealed for the worse-than-worst-case-scenario farces they were.
Which leaves us with Russia’s societal cohesion. Which on has frayed well beyond what most have thought, especially given the increasingly open back biting in the regime and the issues over mobilization. There’s no new civil war in Russia (though that may change depending on the strategic bombings, assassinations, and anti-draft riots going on) but that’s come at the cost of Putin intentionally kneecapping his military’s strength by slow rolling mobilization.
As a result, Washington’s proxy war against Russia is failing. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was unusually candid about the situation in Ukraine when he told the allies in Germany at Ramstein Air Base on January 20, “We have a window of opportunity here, between now and the spring,” admitting, “That’s not a long time.”
Another lie.
Firstly: while I am loathe to give credit to the politically correct goon known as Austin, here’s the actual source cited.
In it, it clearly refers to the prospects of a SPRING OFFENSIVE rather than the chances of the Ukrainian War Effort as a whole.
But don’t believe me. Let’s read the source MacGregor used.
And on the off chance someone is incapable of clicking this link, let me quote.
While Germany did not say yes to sending Leopard tanks this week, it didn’t say no, either — at least not yet. But Ukraine has a very narrow window of time in which to launch a potentially decisive spring offensive before the Russians do, and the tanks are a key part of that effort.
Emphasis mine.
Later in the article we have the quote MacGregor quote mined.
Still, Mr. Austin signaled the calendar is not on Ukraine’s side. “We have a window of opportunity here, between now and the spring,” he said. “That’s not a long time.”
In context, it’s talking about the window for a Spring Offensive that may be “potentially decisive.” Not that if Ukraine doesn’t launch it it will lose.
Which brings us back to the first sentence.
How do I know MacGregor is a dishonest Kremlin shill?
Well, when he tries to reframe a war that the Kremlin started with the express purpose of overthrowing the Ukrainian government and dismembering parts of Ukrainian territory only to fail at the former and get pushed back from much of the latter as “Washington’s proxy war on Russia is failing.”
Rather than “The Russian government has shown itself to only occupy Ukrainian territory with great difficulty and is struggling to advance even in areas where it expects it should be able to easily.” But of course that would involve candidly discussing the actual course of the war and where both sides have succeeded and fallen short, which MacGregor has no interest in doing and may not even be particularly qualified to do in light of his comically bad list of “predictions” and terrible analysis.
At least he’s not over the top stupid and evil as his colleague Scott Ritter (who in addition to being another Kremlin stooge and more open ended shill for terrorists and tinpot authoritarians is either an outright paedo himself or at a minimum enabled as such by keeping quiet on sexual abuse of children in Baathist Iraq in the name of “Peace”), who predicted that Ukraine had lost more than a quarter million dead combatants by now.
But that’s a low, low bar to jump.
@MBunge Part 2
In which Turtler continues fisking MacGregor’s lying rump, Part 2
Alexei Arestovich, President Zelensky’s recently fired advisor and unofficial “Spinmeister,” was more direct. He expressed his own doubts that Ukraine can win its war with Russia and he now questions whether Ukraine will even survive the war.
This is actually a fair point, especially since I’ll be the first to admit that Ukrainian polities have had a bad track record of surviving in the face of dedicated assault by their neighbors. Certainly so far.
But I’ll also point out that the situation for such has rarely been this good. Previous polities in Ukraine – whether the Cossack Hetmanate and Cossack Hosts, or the assorted Ukrainian Nationalist Republics of the Interwar Period, or the competing Fascist-led nationalist underground states during WWII and afterwards – generally faced either overwhelming odds, the need to fight all alongside their borders, or internal divisions that turned violent with minimal foreign support. And sometimes it’s had to face most or all of those at the same time.
That’s not really the case here.
Ukrainian losses—at least 150,000 dead including 35,000 missing in action and presumed dead—have fatally weakened Ukrainian forces resulting in a fragile Ukrainian defensive posture that will likely shatter under the crushing weight of attacking Russian forces in the next few weeks.
Yeah, this MIGHT sound convincing… if you ignore the fact that the Russian military has suffered even heavier losses, fatally weakening most of the spearpoint units that Russia would use to push through. And particularly since this war started with the Russian military not mobilized, that meant that the losses have been disproportionately weighted towards the veterans and professionals in the standing military and its kin like Wagner, much as we have seen with equipment. Which is why you’ve seen so many combat units on the Russian side forced to outright withdraw from the front in order to take on new forces.
And while the Ukrainians have suffered similarly but to a lesser degree, the brutal fact of the matter is that you don’t exactly need computer science majors or people capable of operating a Western Tank’s sights to be in a trench and hold the line. You kind of need them if you want to push through a defended position.
Like say the fortified lines around Bakhmut.
Which is one reason why one of the lesser joys in life has been the Neo-Nazi savages at Wagner proudly draw parallels about themselves to the German army at Verdun (and even the “Stormtroopers”/Proto-Stormtroopers there) heroically charging fortified positions and taking hideous losses to inflict attrition on the enemy…..
… while apparently having zero freaking clue that not only did the German Army [b] LOSE [/b] at Verdun (as well as the war as a whole), but that the “Ja, Ja, mein goal was never to take Verdun it was just to inflict attrition on the French Army!” logic was a naked, post-hoc LIE cobbled together by Falkenhayn to try and cover his butt for the failure of the offensive to do what it promised in spite of the fact that the German plans and positions around Verdun were vastly better than what the Russians have around Bakhmut (for instance, Verdun being a salient of underdefended forts almost surrounded by the Germans, as opposed to the more solid and coherent lines).
And even then it didn’t save Falkenhayn.
This is pretty part and parcel for the kind of propaganda by people like MacGregor.
Ukraine’s materiel losses are equally severe.
True, but Russian losses in material are nothing to blanch at either.
These include thousands of tanks and armored infantry fighting vehicles, artillery systems, air defense platforms, and weapons of all calibers.
Literally who is this source, how reliable are they, and why are they in cyrillic?
These totals include the equivalent of seven years of Javelin missile production.
Which isn’t that surprising when you realize that this is Peacetime, Non-Crunch Production for Javelins and that there is ramping up pressure.
It’s ironic that MacGregor outright admitted the US has avoided serious and intense peer or near conflicts outside of maybe the First Gulf War and Vietnam (at least when the NVA sent its regular units in), but then doesn’t draw the distinction to how Javelin production would be low in light of the slack demands for such.
But it’s entirely unsurprising when you remember he’s a Kremlin hack whose agenda is to paint the Kremlin’s war effort in the best light possible and the Ukrainian one and its support in the worst light possible. And like a true presstitute, internal logical consistency among his different points are just so much inhibition preventing him from serving his masters.
In a setting where Russian artillery systems can fire nearly 60,000 rounds of all types—rockets, missiles, drones, and hard-shell ammunition—a day,
No, they can’t. Certainly not consistently.
Which is why those days have been rare even earlier in the war and growing rarer as Russia runs through its stocks like the Ukrainians have and have had to increasingly husband their firepower for what is worth. Which is one reason why even at Bakhmut the Russian artillery fire has slackened as the campaign has gone on.
Not helped by the new Ukrainian strategic of supply interdiction, where a good amount of the artillery ammunition being sent to the front gets blown up in transit be it on trucks or in warehouses.
That doesn’t mean that Russia is “going to run out” of firepower, but it does mean that it is running low on it and is forced to husband it more.
Ukrainian forces are hard-pressed to answer these Russian salvos with 6,000 rounds daily.
Except artillery isn’t just a game of quantity, it’s also a game of quality. And notably the Ukrainians use significantly more smart munitions in their artillery than the Russians have and have generally (NOT always, but GENERALLY) had better shell-per-shell/rocket-by-rocket results. Especially given how much of the Russian fire has been directed towards nonmilitary targets.
It’s also ignoring the trend lines. That artillery fire is increasing for the Ukrainians and slackening for the Russians, at least on average. This means that IF the trends hold (which is a hell of an If but at least I’m willing to consider) then you’re going to see the Ukrainian artillery increasingly match the Russians.
Indeed on a few fronts this has actually happened before, like it did during the Southern offensive to retake Kherson. Nor is this just a point echoed by globalist shills or Ukrainian lobbyists, since it has been pointed out by such stalwart friends of Ukraine as… Igor Girkin the brutal Kremlin sponsored terrorist and Rybar the pro-Russian military blogger.
But MacGregor doesn’t want to address this, because it would undermine his caterwauling about how Ukraine is collapsing and how the West is losing a proxy war with Russia.
Because he’s a hack and a liar.
New platform and ammunition packages for Ukraine may enrich the Washington community, but they cannot change these conditions.
Again, this is how you know someone is a propagandist hack who is not even concerned about propping up “their side” accurately.
New platform and ammunition packages are EXACTLY HOW you change those conditions and how they have been changed throughout history, even before the advent of gunpowder artillery. It’s also one reason why the Kremlin decided to escalate this war, due to its increasing failure to knock out or even stifle Ukrainian artillery strength in the Donbas during the long, frigid low intensity phase of the Donbas War from 2015/6 through to Feb 2022.
And it’s obviously having an effect, as again even pro-Kremlin propaganda that actually has to give a damn about front line reports admitted in regards to the battles at Kherson.
It’s at this point that I also note you generally need more artillery fire to ATTACK than to DEFEND. A fact that was well documented as far back as the freaking 15th century and which waned with the decline of fortifications only to come back with a vengeance due to modern infantry weapons and the ability to shoot accurately while hiding behind a window.
Predictably, Washington’s frustration with the collective West’s failure to stem the tide of Ukrainian defeat is growing. In fact, the frustration is rapidly giving way to desperation.
Predictably, MacGregor is full of $*it. and is pointedly ignoring the fact that Russia has been losing far more men, equipment, AND territory than Ukraine has. Indeed, Bakhmut looms so high not because it is particularly important (it’s more important than most people realize by merit but nowhere near enough to justify the resources) but because it is one of the few places on the front where the Russian military is advancing…..
…. as if advance in and of itself regardless of the cost or strategic merit is a good thing.
(Spoiler alert: It isn’t. A cursory examination of Verdun should have taught that).
But that doesn’t change the attrition rate on Russian trained manpower or high end weapons, or the political discontent that is boiling up in Russia.
Michael Rubin, a former Bush appointee and avid supporter of America’s permanent conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan, vented his frustration in a 1945 article asserting that, “if the world allows Russia to remain a unitary state, and if it allows Putinism to survive Putin, then, Ukraine should be allowed to maintain its own nuclear deterrence, whether it joins NATO or not.”
Which is remarkably in keeping with something agreed to by the US, UK,,, AND RUSSIA back in 1994. A little thing called the Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine agreed to denuclearize in exchange for security guarantees and promises of assistance from the US, UK, and Russia in the event Ukraine was attacked by anybody.
Firstly: It explains a great deal about the US and UK’s support of the Ukrainian War effort.
Secondly: It more than justifies Ukraine demanding an independent nuclear deterrent.
Thirdly: It underlines why Putin’s government is asshoe and cannot be trusted.
On its face, the suggestion is reckless,
According to who?
This is the deal Russia agreed to regarding Budapest. That Ukraine would only denuclearize if it was given these assurances and that in the absence of them it maintained the right to have an independent nuclear deterrent.
Since the Kremlin has obviously broken the terms of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 through an unjustified act of calculated aggression that violated Ukrainian’s acknowledged sovereign rights (INCLUDING THOSE RECOGNIZED BY RUSSIA ITSELF in the Helsinki Final Act and Astana 2012) it can hardly claim that this is unprecedented.
Which is one reason why useful idiots like MacGregor are so useful. To help poison the well, muddy the water, and do so with at least a vague level of plausible deniability.
but the statement does accurately reflect the anxiety in Washington circles that Ukrainian defeat is inevitable.
This is what we in “the business” call “wishful thinking.” Occam’s Razor is that it accurately reflects the feeling in Washington that if Russia is no longer going to abide by the legal agreement that provided for Ukrainian denuclearization, then obviously Ukraine has a right to nuclear armament, *and that Russia tacitly acknowledged this.*
Whether or not Ukrainian defeat is inevitable or not or whether or not Washington fears it is neither necessary nor particularly informative to explain this stance.
NATO’s members were never strongly united behind Washington’s crusade to fatally weaken Russia.
Once again more victim-blaming nonsense.
Moreover, I’ll note that Putin’s actions in Ukraine have actually helped unite Europe behind US policy, at least to SOME Degree, and certainly has pushed them away from the Kremlin.
The governments of Hungary and Croatia are simply acknowledging the wider European public’s opposition to war with Russia and lack of support for Washington’s desire to postpone Ukraine’s foreseeable defeat.
This is what we call a half-true, or more accurately a half-lie.
It’s certainly true that Western Publics do not want a war with Russia. I absolutely do not and have been very open about the fact that while I am something of an anti-Putin hawk in support of supplying Ukraine, this does not extend to the likes of a No Fly Zone or sending other troops in.
However, support for supporting Ukraine and thus “postponing Ukraine’s foreseeable defeat” is quite strong and has gotten stronger in most countries as the war has dragged on. As even Russian pollsters have generally acknowledged. The fact that this winter was RELATIVELY mild (when it was predicted to be the one European infrastructure and economies would have the hardest time adapting to the absence of Russian resources from) helped.
Though sympathetic to the Ukrainian people, Berlin did not support all-out war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf. Now, Germans are also uneasy with the catastrophic condition of the German armed forces.
The issue is that essentially no government, not even Crazy Joe, has wanted “all out war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf.” They wanted Ukraine to have the resources to fight, die, and kill to defend their territory.
A policy that – for all of MacGregor’s blather and lies – has proven remarkably successful. And we know it’s successful due to the political instability in the Russian leadership, the turnover of many of the leading figures involved with the invasion planning, and the increasing loss of territory in exchange for high material and manpower losses.
@MBunge Part 3
Turtler continues fisking MacGregor’s Nonsense, Part 3
Retired German Air Force General (four-star equivalent) Harald Kujat, former chairman of the NATO Military Committee, severely criticized Berlin for allowing Washington to railroad Germany into conflict with Russia,
There’s a reason why “men” like Kujat and Vad have become memes for their political and military ignorance and excessively pro-Kremlin attitude and prognostications. I’m not surprised that MacGregor is citing people who are at least superficially more qualified and higher ranked than he is but who proved to be just as idiotic and wrong.
Oh, and Kujat is the clown who was caught repeatedly and loudly claiming he did not believe evidence of Russian invasion even while those of us part time civilian couch potatoes were pointing to advanced Russian Federation specific Electronic Warfare systems being spotted in Ukraine.
noting that several decades of German political leaders actively disarmed Germany and thus deprived Berlin of authority or credibility in Europe. Though actively suppressed by the German government and media,
This much is true, and it almost makes you sad… if ONLY there were some orange haired Stable Genius who pointed this out loudly and consistently to the Germans and demanded they push their fair share and even got them to make some halfhearted concessions towards that end before they walked them back. If only.
his comments are resonating strongly with the German electorate.
Sure, but not in the way MacGregor implies.
By all means, search though the internet browser of your choice (I don’t blame anybody for not using Google or DuckDuckGo given the propaganda and curation) for what German language sources make of him. They tend to be quite… Spicy. Because they know his track record far better than most. Better than men, and FAR better than MacGregor is counting on the English language public to know.
He’s a literal laughing stock and a meme.
And while sure you can attribute some or maybe even most of what you see on him to the German government being painfully woke and following a line, it doesn’t fit for everything. The bottom line is that Kujat is a bad joke who thoroughly discredited himself and mortgaged whatever integrity he had toeing the Kremlin’s line too close for credibility.
The blunt fact is that in its efforts to secure victory in its proxy war with Russia, Washington ignores historical reality.
Far be it for me to express great confidence in awareness of historical reality among the public, let alone the leadership, but I don’t think it is.
And it’s ironic that MacGregor will then springboard onto his own exercise in ignoring historical reality.
From the 13th century onward, Ukraine was a region dominated by larger, more powerful national powers, whether Lithuanian, Polish, Swedish, Austrian, or Russian.
This is true, but it ignores the fact that none of said powers could entirely ignore Ukrainian sentiment. Which is why all of the aforementioned powers actively courted or (outside of Sweden) tried to suppress assorted factions in Ukraine while Ukrainian factions played their own role.
And moreover, the US clearly thinks that its charm offensive and ability to solve trade arguments with even fairly distant countries (rather than having tariff wars older than I am with even its closest neighbors as Putin’s Russia has) coupled with the Kremlin’s brutality will allow itself to become a dominant patron in Ukraine.
And so far that has been paying off.
In the aftermath of the First World War, abortive Polish designs for an independent Ukrainian State were conceived to weaken Bolshevik Russia.
You know how I mentioned MacGregor would be ignoring historical reality?
Here it is.
It’s true that Poland supported Ukrainian nationalists in order to weaken the Bolsheviks (as well as White Russians). However, what lying scumbag here pointedly ignores is the fact that the idea of an independent Ukrainian state (actually multiple ones but I’ll get back to that) originated with UKRAINIANS and pre-dated Poland’s assertion of independence by kicking out the occupying Germans.
The party Polish strongman Pilsudski made the agreement with was the Ukrainian Peoples’ Republic under Seymon Petliura (that is just one translation of several).
Petliura had been fighting for years against all comers (including some other Ukrainian nationalists under a resurgent, pro-German Hetmanate) to try and establish a Ukrainian Republic by the time this happened. With middling success at best it should be admitted, but the fact remains.
Moreover, he was just one of several.
‘
Because there was a SEPARATE but linked West Ukrainian Peoples’ Republic declared in Lviv/Lwow (which was a Polish majority city that ultimately revolted against the Ukrainians), and who ultimately fought a protracted war with Poland.
BTW: When assorted Kremlin shills fetishize about Poland invading Ukraine to annex Eastern Galicia, they’re referencing to this and hoping for a repeat. Only they’re ignoring the lack of appetite for it given the genocidal Soviet ethnic cleansing of Poles from the Kresy.
Ultimately the Poles overreached and did not receive enough support from the West just as the Reds were defeating the Whites, meaning the Red Cavalry Armies scythed down on the flanks of the Polish-Ukrainian armies and drove them almost to the gates of Warsaw. And while theoretically Poland could have regained the offensive to try and liberate parts or all of Ukraine, Pilsudski’s political enemies had regained the ascendency and refused (obviously angry at his relatively pro-German stance and at how narrowly Poland itself had survived).
But that’s a story for another day.
Today, Russia is not communist,
Correct, “merely” extremely Communist-sentimental and happy to whitewash the crimes of the Soviet regime with repression.
nor does Moscow seek the destruction of the Polish State as Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, and their followers did in 1920.
How do I put this generously, MacGregor?
NOT MANY PEOPLE ARE INCLINED TO BELIEVE YOU OR THEM.
Especially given the Kremlin’s track record of breaking assurances that it will respect other nations’ sovereignty, and the fact that the regime’s had a good number of its allies or even outright members blab off about “Denazifying Poland” or “Denazifying the Baltics” (yes, while employing Wagner goons. I’ve never claimed the Kremlin is terribly consistent).
Conservative talk radio talking point; the west is sending “aggressive” weapons to Ukraine (MBTs, IFVs) and provoking a wider war with Roosia (dig you bomb shelter deep Bunge). Glen Beck for instance has fallen into that Panic Whore mode. How exactly you classify MBTs and IFVs as aggressive when they will be fighting on territory that was Ukrainian prior to Vlad’s invasions? Ukraine’s vast fleet of MBTs and IFVs will be advancing on Moscow and St. Petersburg (soon to be renamed as Vladograd)?
But being a Panic Whore makes money I guess.
@MBunge Part 4
Turtler rags on MacGregor’s nonsense Part 4
Hopefully I’ll be able to finish up with this chowderhead by this part.
So where is Washington headed with its proxy war against Russia? The question deserves an answer.
If I may, I’d suggest it dovetails with the US’s commitments in the Budapest Memorandum. The expulsion of all Russian occupying troops from Ukraine and the preservation of Ukrainian territorial integrity, helping ensure Ukraine will either be a pro-Western Neutral or wider member of the Western alliance, while an obviously hostile and untrustworthy Putin regime in Russia (and any other regime to take power in Russia that is sufficiently similar) will be contained.
But as is typical with MacGregor, what he DOESN’T ask is at least as loud. For all of MacGregor’s dishonest attempts to frame the war in Ukraine as primarily one by “Washington” against Russia, the Fact remains that Russia is the one that escalated to violence and started it, both in 2014 and 2022.
So where is RUSSIA’S war in Ukraine headed? What does the Kremlin want to accomplish?
Well, the Kremlin’s honestly been pretty candid about its changing goals for ending the war. The issue is that none of them dovetail very well with MacGregor’s goal of trying to whitewash the Kremlin of guilt and portray it as a heroic force that was inexplicably aggressed upon but is somehow winning.
On Sunday December 7, 1941, U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman was with Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill having dinner at Churchill’s home when the BBC broadcast the news that the Japanese had attacked the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor. Harriman was visibly shocked. He simply repeated the words, “The Japanese have raided Pearl Harbor.”
Harriman need not have been surprised. The Roosevelt administration had practically done everything in its power to goad Tokyo into attacking U.S. forces in the Pacific with a series of hostile policy decisions culminating in Washington’s oil embargo during the summer of 1941.
Firstly: Let’s make this clear. MacGregor is the one that decided to not-so-subtly associate Putin’s government with the genocidal, lawless “Right Wing Socialist” militarists in the Japanese government during the 1930s and WWII. I did not. This is MacGregor’s chosen comparison, not mine, mkay?
I leave it to the imagination why on God’s Green Earth MacGregor thought trying to pull the “The US alienated poor, mass murdering Tojo and Ishii and Doihara” card was a good idea.
Secondly: For all of MacGregor’s incoherent, victim-blaming blather about the US “goading” Japan to attack the Pacific, the embargo was a response to unprovoked Japanese aggression. First in China, then in French Indochina, then in SOUTHERN French Indochina. Largely fueled by Western rubber, oil, and metals.
I have little good to say about FDR, but it’s KIND OF UNSURPRISING that Western governments would want to sustain a war effort headed by the same people responsible for things such as the Rape of Nanjing, multiple unprovoked invasions, the “Golden Bat” Opium-laced cigars, and so forth, who identified the US as their greatest ideological and strategic enemy (especially after the Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact was signed in 1939).
So they embargoed the war mongering nutjobs who alternated between being incapable of controlling their subordinate commanders like Governor Ando Rikichi, and not wanting to.
It’s also worth noting that the US was not inflexible or uniformly hostile to Japan during this, and routinely relaxed or even lifted sanctions during the protracted diplomatic crises in the Pacific from the 1930s to 1941.
Were one to expand upon the implicit analogy between Putin’s Russia and Control Faction dominated/”War Socialist” Japan that MacGregor decided to raise, one could compare these to “Resets” of US-Japanese relations, in which the US largely forgave Japan for its acts of aggression and while refused to acknowledge territorial conquests reopened trade.
Which the Japanese government or assorted militarists clustered around it would proceed to screw up by doing something like oh… *invading the colony of a neutral Western country* and promptly get hit with sanctions again.
(Remember: MACGREGOR is the one who decided it was a good idea to draw a comparison between Putin’s Russia and Japanese Fascism. Not me. He’s the one that opened this particular can of worms and apparently for some reason though it’d make him and his Kremlin patrons look better.)
It’s also worth noting that the Pacific War came as a result of a massive miscalculation. FDR and the other Western leaders thought that by embargoing Japan’s strategic resources they would be able to put a freeze on Japanese military aggression long enough to deal with the erupting crisis in the Atlantic world with National Socialist Germany. The logic went that a Japan unable to use its navy, its air forces, and its vehicles as much would then enter a state of relative dormancy like it had from 1934-1937 and buy time, while safeguarding the Soviets from possible attack that might lead Japan to widen the war.
This was a horrible miscalculation because they did not realize the Japanese leadership would react to the resource shortages by madly rushing into a war they knew they could not materially win.
In the Second World War, Washington was lucky with timing and allies.
Not really. Washington was wrongfooted by things like the Fall of France and Chinese ineptitude and corruption. The issue is that it had long cultivated alliances and kept them. It also was (and is) an absolute beast.
<blockquote< This time it’s different.
All times are different. But there are plenty of commonalities.
Washington and its NATO allies are advocating a full-blown war against Russia, the devastation and breakup of the Russian Federation, as well as the destruction of millions of lives in Russia and Ukraine.
I’d say that MacGregor has studied the Rules for Radicals – and particularly the Accuse Others of what you are guilty of – but I doubt he has the awareness for it.
Again. It’s the Kremlin that started a full scale war in Ukraine, against Ukraine. It is the Kremlin that has been advocating the dismemberment of the very united Ukraine it pledged to acknowledge and respect the rights of in 1994 (and again in 2012).
It’s the Kremlin whose actions endanger millions of lives directly and indirectly.
And it’s the Kremlin who more than the Western leadership blathers about being in a “war against NATO” (indeed, you can see MacGregor echoing this propaganda line) only to back off when expressly confronted on this by NATO members like Poland.
I have boundless contempt for most of what passes for our political “leadership.” But that does not mean that I am obliged to pretend that Vladimir Putin is some kind of based and redpilled defender of Western Civilization fighting the WEF for freedom and the existence of Russia.
Especially not when his own policies (especially the refusal to confront Russian birth rate declines and his mortgaging Chechnya off to Kadyrov) endanger Russia’s existence far more than NATO does.
Washington emotes. Washington does not think, and it is also overtly hostile to empiricism and truth.
MacGregor emotes. MacGregor does not think, and MacGregor is overtly hostile to empiricism and truth. As shown by his repeated, objectively provable lies and terrible track record with predictions.
See? I can make assertions too. The difference is, I can do a scintilla of research to back them up.
Neither we nor our allies are prepared to fight all-out war with Russia, regionally or globally.
Correct, but MacGregor – being the lying Kremlin shill he is – ignores the flip side of the Coin.
Kremlin has repeatedly made grandiose claims about the “Denazification” of Ukraine, the “Demilitarizaiton” of it, and the creation of a “Novorossiya” embracing most or even all of the country on the Left Bank of the Dnieper while also claiming its war fighting ability is greater than that of NATO.
And yet its best troops were pushed back from Kyiv and it now struggles to take Bakhmut in a battle Wagner (idiotically for the reasons I mentioned) compares to Verdun while ignoring how Verdun ended even with the attackers having far more advantages than Russia does.
No matter how unprepared the US is to fight all-out-war with Russia, RUSSIA IS OBVIOUSLY FAR LESS PREPARED TO FIGHT AN ALL OUT WAR WITH THE US.
LET ALONE AGAINST THE US AND ALL THE ALLIES THAT WOULD JUMP ON BOARD.
Which makes this bit of psychopathic scaremongering thoroughly theoretical, and not even particularly useful theory at best.
A Kremlin that has lost between 150,000-200,000 killed trying and failing to reach the upper Dnieper against Ukrainian troops is not capable of effectively defeating the US. Period.
The point is, if war breaks out between Russia and the United States, Americans should not be surprised. The Biden administration and its bipartisan supporters in Washington are doing all they possibly can to make it happen.
Remember my point about how MacGregor is the one that decided to whitewash the responsibility of Japan’s brutal nutjobs for WWII in the Pacific, and how he decided to conflate his patron Putin with them?
Yeah. In any case, we should be surprised if war between Russia and the US breaks out, for the same reason we were surprised that Japan would decide to fight a war it could not win against the US in an attempt to continue fueling a war it MIGHT be able to win years down the road at a slow pace and immense cost.
But sure brah, the remaining Contractniki that survive Kherson and Kyiv and are now slowly fighting in positional battles along Ukraine will be able to conquer the Baltics by Breakfast.
Ridiculous, laughable, dishonest, and worst of all aggressively evil.
I’m glad I’m done with that trash of MacGregor’s.
@MBunge Part 5
Does it strike anyone else that even by om’s standards, he’s really, really, REALLY childish when it comes to Ukraine?
I’ll admit the thought has crossed my mind and I certainly don’t agree with it.
But then you are also incredibly childish on many occasions, and our host has had to explicitly call you out for your sanctimonious behavior, lies, and dishonesty more than once.
He never posts about it like a serious, complex military conflict with physical, economic, and geopolitical impacts on millions of people directly and hundreds of millions indirectly. It’s like he’s just talking crap while playing Call of Duty online.
Fair, and I disagree with that. Which is why I do try and post.
That said, uncritically shoveling BS from MacGregor is hardly posting about it like a serious, complex military conflict that will affect millions of people either.
At my most generous it is the equivalent of offshoring your critical thinking, analysis, and respect to some random posting online (who in this case turns out to be a psychopathic Kremlin shill). At worst it is uncritically spreading blood libel by one of said shills to smear others for the crime of disagreeing.
Neither looks good. Especially given the holes one can poke in MacGregor’s posturing and “analysis” (as I spent four parts outlining) with even a modicum of knowledge on the field.
He can’t even bother to wonder “Hey! If everything is going swimmingly for Ukraine, why are we now giving them tanks and why are they asking for FIGHTER JETS and LONG-RANGE MISSILES?”
Maybe, but it’s obvious you aren’t wondering either.
Lend-Lease continued until slightly AFTER the end of WWII.
Is it ok for me to say that the war effort was going “swimmingly” for Britain or the Soviet Union or other Allies in early September, 1945, when Japan had surrendered?
Ok. Is it ok for me to say the war effort was going “swimmingly’ for them earlier in 1945, say about July?
If according to your logic supplying weapons and equipment is a sign that things aren’t going swimmingly and that one nation is on the verge of defeat, why did we continue supplying our major allies with Lend-Lease in WWII well after it became clear we were going to win the war?
PERHAPS it has something to do with the fact that high intensity war is a Pita that causes a lot of losses, even if you are winning (and I won’t even claim Ukraine definitely is winning at this point)? Or how about the fact that nations will need military equipment restocks even if the war they’re being used for ends tomorrow?
Apparently you considered approximately 0% of this, or – let it not be said I am prepared to be generous- if you DID consider it, you provided absolutely no evidence you ever entertained such a possibility or explanation.
Which becomes doubly awkward when you realize that Russia is ALSO hitting up its friends, allies, and even a few neutrals for military equipment.
If the war effort is going so swimmingly for the Kremlin, why is Putin sourcing artillery ammo from North Korea?!? You know, the sort of ammo that MacGregor assured us Russia can continue firing dozens of thousands of per day and sustain?
Now, the actual explanation and one I entertain is that there’s nothing particularly remarkable about this. Both sides are running low on different stockpiles of equipment and ammunition they either need to replace or want to stock up on so they have operational fat to burn. Which we saw repeat throughout multiple wars through the centuries, most famously with the Shell Crises of WWI. Which makes it natural that both Ukraine and Russia would seek to source more supplies and equipment, especially since they can’t compete with expenses at this stage of the war with industry trying to ramp up.
But because MacGregor and *apparently* You are incapable of coming up with any explanation beyond “The walls are closing in on Ukraine” and don’t want to admit that attrition happens even in victorious campaigns, I’m forced to point to this “paradox” that isn’t really a paradox and ask you if you ever thought of it.
or “Gee, if faced with losing power and (likely) his life, what might Ol’ Vlad actually do?”
I’ve asked myself that plenty of times, but while it is pressing it is ultimately unknowable. Moreover, it’s FAR LESS RELEVANT than the question of “If faced with victory over Ukraine, what might Old Vlad actually do”?
We know the broad contours of that answer. We’ve seen lesser versions of it play out in Transnistria, Georgia, and Syria. It means almost nothing good for the West or the people involved, even on the most base and cold calculus.
(Remember when Kremlin apologists went all out claiming Assad and Putin were fighting terrorists in Syria and were important vanguards defending Christianity unlike the decadent West?
Yeah. That’s dropped off a bit since Kadyrov’s loud mouth has become more evident and Assad’s back to openly supporting the Mullahs.)
Then again, om has made it clear he learned NOTHING from the Iraq War and is proud of it.
Don’t you fucking DARE try to accuse others of not learning from the Iraq War, Mike Bunge.
Because as I called you to the carpet multiple times with sources, you keep regurgitating freaking blood libel. You’ve tried to dance around the fact that while his arsenal was much less impressive than reported, chemical impregnated Artillery Shells are still a WMD. When confronted with the Philippines pointing to Saddam’s government as enabling Abu Sayyaf (a franchise of Al Qaeda) to operate, you elaborately danced around the issue to try and avoid claiming that such an action constituted an alliance or aid.
Because apparently you’d rather whitewash a genocidal nutjob Stalin/Hitler homage act and terrorist sponsor who walked hand in glove with Osama (with nowhere near the operational distance the MSM and co have claimed) in order to continue vilifying people like us.
I have my disagreements with om, but I do think they sum you up quite well.
Turtler’s comments are another resource that you might consider reading if you want to learn something. That would be unusual for a Bunge though.
@om
Conservative talk radio talking point; the west is sending “aggressive” weapons to Ukraine (MBTs, IFVs) and provoking a wider war with Roosia (dig you bomb shelter deep Bunge). Glen Beck for instance has fallen into that Panic Whore mode. How exactly you classify MBTs and IFVs as aggressive when they will be fighting on territory that was Ukrainian prior to Vlad’s invasions? Ukraine’s vast fleet of MBTs and IFVs will be advancing on Moscow and St. Petersburg (soon to be renamed as Vladograd)?
It’s also stupid. Yes, MBTs and IFVs derive most (THOUGH NOT ALL) from their power from the offense. Though you CAN still use them defensively (and more competently than the Egyptian army that decided to bury large of them up to the turret in 1967) such as in mobile defense, they typically behave better on the offensive.
HOWEVER, this ignores the fact that there is a quantitative difference between TACTICAL OFFENSE OR DEFENSE, and STRATEGIC OFFENSE OR DEFENSE.
Japan’s “Great Banzai Charge” towards the end of the Battle of Okinawa was obviously a major tactical offense, with more Japanese soldiers than ever seen in the Pacific rushing American lines with guns outstretched and blades glistening (where they were unceremoniously cut down). However, this tactical offense was against the context of a strategic DEFENSE, the failed attempt by Japan to hold Okinawa, one of its major colonial possessions (and one of the few it still has).
So just because you’re fighting defensively on a tactical level doesn’t mean you aren’t on the offensive strategically. And likewise just because you’re attacking tactically doesn’t mean you aren’t defending strategically.
This applies to tanks.
Arguably the first tank recognizable as what we’d consider modern was the French FT tank (often called the “FT-17”).
Their maiden deployment was in early 1918 against the German Spring Offensives, where they did good service in counterattacks and holding actions that blunted one of history’s greatest strategic offensives.
So the idea that tanks are inherently an offensive weapon is dumb and reflects an escalation of the war (..in which case what do we call the Russians sending much of their top tier tanks to Ukraine well before?), and I am disappointed at how many people fell for it.
@Brian E
Propaganda/disinformation is a fact of modern war. And the Ukrainians and the Russians are both masters at the craft.
Agreed with caveats. I’m not entirely sure how masterful they are given the many obvious oopsies they’ve made. They are however quite PRACTICED at it.
(If you want a real master class at propaganda, study the Slovenes during their struggle to break free from Yugoslavia.)
So who has it right?
Honestly both sides probably do to some degree. Though (and never let it be said I am unwilling to say it) MacGregor’s numbers are probably more current to “now.” Though they conveniently omit Russian numbers being somewhat harder.
We know we can’t believe our own government,
Agreed, though it is probably a sad state of affairs that they are probably more reliable than most.
and it’s unlikely we can believe the Zelensky government that has banned opposition news, banned opposition parties, and is trying to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
Ok, here’s where I have to step in. Because while I agree with the wider point (we shouldn’t believe what Zelenskyy’s government or that of any other Ukrainian government says on face value), this I think shows how pernicious propaganda is.
Especially the point about “banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.” Which is simply false no matter how you cut it.
At most Zelenskyy has talked about (as in Talked, not actually done so, at least OFFICIALLY). banning or censuring Orthodox Churches that answer to the Moscow Patriarchate.
This is a pretty important bit of context for a couple reasons.
Firstly because the Moscow Patriarchate (in spite of its posturing to be the Head of the Orthodox Churches or at least the First Among Equals) IS NOT all of Orthodox Christianity. And indeed there was a long running conflict over which Patriarchate (if any) Ukrainian Orthodox Churches would answer to fought within and amongst assorted religious officials and parishioners. Nor was this new or directly tied to the war.
Simply put, the Moscow Patriarchate has not been a great friend of Ukrainian secular independence or rights. In particular it has regularly (and correctly in my opinion) been accused of being too slavishly loyal to the various rulers of the Kremlin – especially Tsarist ones and Putin but also the Soviet – and not as concerned with its obligations to God under the Great Commission.
This is particularly evident with its tendency to excommunicate people like Ivan Mazepa, who was a Cossack Hetman who rebelled against Moscow in alliance with Sweden after being fed up with Russia’s dominance.
Now, I actually don’t have a hugely positive opinion of Mazepa – he was no saint by any stretch and committed many sins in pursuit of power and whatever higher goals he had – but his sins were decidedly SECULAR in natural. I have never heard a coherent dogmatic or theological reason for why he should be excommunicated, because I doubt there is one. He was an enemy of the Tsar’s mortal power, not the Church (even in the form of the Moscow Patriarch).
But he was treated as such. Which fits in well with similar abuses of dissidents and the like.
But this has reached really big levels under Patriarch Kirill, a goon who quite literally acted as a KGB spy and who among other things perverted his vows and obligations to God to serve the “Chekists” of the late Soviet Union.
He has not exactly grown with the position, especially since he recently overturned centuries of precedent and dogma to essentially claim the equivalent of a Crusader’s Indulgence (or if anything an even wider one) for those who fight and die for the Kremlin in Ukraine.
It’s REALLY hard for me to understate just how radical this is for people not in the know theologically. But to put it this way, even the Catholic Crusader’s Indulgence was usually not the absolute one it is portrayed as, with it being contingent upon sincere repentance of sins before or during the fight.
And that’s the Catholic Church.
Eastern Orthodoxy *REALLY DOESN’T* have something like this, certainly not on the same level. Which is an issue the assorted Patriarchs of Constantinople and others told Emperors from the Later Romans to the Tsars about.
So Kirill is essentially twisting theology on a massive level to try and sanctify Putin’s war to dismember Ukraine by claiming those who die in it will be absolved of their sins. Which would be dodgy even in the context of a literal Religious Crusade, let alone this.
So I hope you can understand why many Ukrainians and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches would POINTEDLY Not want their churches to be subservient to a Patriarch who prostituted his vows to the KGB and has now warped theology to serve Putin? Especially since while this is probably the worst example, it isn’t the only one by a long shot of the Moscow Patriarchate inappropriately mingling the Grand Commission from God and the Kingdom of the Next World with the worldly, secular Empire of the Tsars?
So unsurprisingly there’s been some pretty heavy pushes and discussion on how to deal with officials that answer to the Moscow Patriarchate. And I can’t blame them for that.
It’s worth noting the US’s Founders went further in a similar example, with the Anglican Church being headed up by King George III. While they never banned the Anglican Church, they DID institute rather draconian political and even theological limitations on them, to the point of (what I view as unjust) banning prayers for the King.
So similar caveats apply to the banning of “opposition parties” and “news.” He has done that, but with those he has at least claimed are fatally tainted to the Kremlin rather than being all opposition (as shown by some of the debates in the Ukrainian Rada). Whether or not I believe him is another thing (given how fallible people are), but it is hardly the kind of 1984 style he is accused of.
A better reason to not trust Zelenskyy or the Ukrainian Government’s claims sight unseen is simple. They are politicians of a government, and one in a state of war with censorship to boot.
But we should also extend that to the Kremlin, who have if anything a far worse track record of lying.
Does Ukraine have the capability to sustain a war, even with a resupply from the west?
Probably. Certainly for years and years to come.
It’s worth noting that it took the Soviets something like 12 years after reconquering the region to put down the much smaller and more localized Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the “Banderaists” they blather about) in Galicia. And while Bandera obviously wasn’t using anything as fancy as an Abrams (let alone a jet) the same extends to the Soviets. And this was with the “Ukrainians” Having a fraction of the resources and population thye have in this war while the Russians have less.
Macgregor has his doubts.
What doubts MacGregor has or doesn’t have are irrelevant to me, the man is a paid liar and scumbag as I hope I have outlined in detail, and so what “doubts” he expresses publicly dovetail with that of those who are paying him in the Kremlin. It would be like listening to Fauci on the vaccine.
Russian forces are making slow but steady progress in Bakhmut. US officials are suggesting the cost to Ukrainian military defending the town isn’t worth the strategic value.
Probably true, though the progress is incredibly bloody. Moreover, Bakhmut is a shorthand for not just the town itself but the outlying defensive line.
The problem is if they withdraw from Bakhmut, is there a more defensible position to the west?
Sure. The Dnieper remains a formidable object to say the least. The issue is less about defensible positions so much as trying to maintain resources and the initiative.
Ukraine’s economy exists only because of American largess.
Untrue, though that is a big part of it. But Ukraine’s agriculture is key.
The EU estimates the cost of rebuilding Ukraine’s infrastructure at $500-600 billion.
Agreed, at least.
We’re sending main battle tanks, but Zelensky is now asking for F-16’s and long range missles. Mission creep.
Agreed, but also unsurprising. Ukraine has been prone to mission creep by all players since 2014, and Putin’s invasion is a symbol of it. I can’t blame the Ukrainians for wanting the ability to secure their skies, even if I am leery about it.
The fact that Germany was slow to allow Polish Leopard’s into Ukraine suggests European’s don’t see the war as an existential threat to themselves.
I mean, Germany’s SPD is infamous even among Europeans for being particularly dovish and pro-Kremlin even among European Leftists and Globalists. So I’m not too surprised. A bunch of Europeans certainly view this war as existential to them, and many that don’t were influenced at least in part by the losses there.
The US goal is regime change in Russia. Biden said so several months ago.
Maybe, (and for once I wouldn’t blame them given how toxic and evil Putin has been), but the chief goal now is to evict Russia from Ukraine.
Over the years, the knock on American intelligence is it’s very poor at human intelligence.
Largely true.
Has our government miscalculated internal Russian politics?
Given the current set of globalist geniuses, almost certainly.
If so, we’re destroying Ukraine for no real purpose.
There’s something perverse about reading this when Putin is mouthing about a Greater Russian ideology that has repeatedly tried to destroy the very *concept* of a Ukraine or a Ukrainian people.
We’re not the one destroying Ukraine. Putin is, like many other tyrants in Moscow have tried to do over the centuries. Ironically that very effort probably helped create the modern concept of Ukraine.
The gains Ukraine made in the north and in Kherson recovering territory early in the war aren’t likely to be repeated in the eastern regions.
Probably true, since that place is even more dense trench and bunker country. But this war has been surprising, and in any case the Ukrainians want it back.
Fairly unsurprising (though the Ukrainians have been making some headway in the South and far North). But the Ukraine war has shifted a lot between long periods of positional fighting and short periods of maneuver warfare. The extra troops, resources, and equipment didn’t change that inherently.
But in any case one thing I’ve found annoying is the focus on what the US wants out of this (as if it started the war) and whether or not it aims for “regime change.”
On its own this might be a decent subject for discussion, but not in isolation of the wider point. That the Kremlin got into this war and it is well worth talking about how it seeks regime change in Ukraine if not its dismemberment as a nation, and that he is obviously persisting in this in spite of how it is clear his intelligence agencies miscalculated and probably outright lied to him.
Turtler:
Bunge hasn’t noticed all the links I’ve posted to nearly all of Perun’s analysis on Open Threads nearly every Sunday. When cdrsalamander posts something topical about Ukraine or have a Midrats podcast about Ukraine I post those links too. When The Cheiftan posted a commentary early in the war about the Roosian losses to drones and video clips from Kiev and how such video footage can mislead I posted the links.
Bunge hasn’t done squat to show any serious thought, only panic.
neo’s blog has diverse content and my interest in the Ukraine conflict (Vlad’s war) seems to be much greater than most who comment here. It is particularly ludicrous for Bunge to complain about sub adult behavior and interest in various computer games (projection, Bunge?) Video gaming is not my thing, Mikey,
Brain E seems to have fallen into the Roosian disinformation vortex, for example his past fixation with the Azov battalion. He may snap out of it?
Thanks for the detailed fisking of MacGreagor and those who continue to lap up MacGreagor’s spew.
Turtler, thanks for your detailed history lessons.
Whatever you think of Macgregor, he may be right on Ukraine. He is often on Judge Napolitano’s podcast. Do you think Napolitano is a shill for Russia as well?
There is a case to be made that the Donbas and Crimea have a legitimate claim to independence. Of the 7 million people that left Ukraine at the start of the Russian invasion, nearly 3 million went to Russia, with the rest going to a variety of European countries, so a large minority of those, probably in the Donbas and Crimea went to Russia.
IMO, it would be in the best interests of Ukraine to divide the country with the four annexed oblasts plus Crimea given their independence. If they choose to join Russia, so be it.
Even it is possible for Ukraine to retake Kherson, Donetsk, Zaporizhya and Luhansk oblasts plus Crimea, should it?
Here is an Australian soldier involved in the fighting around Bakhmut for the Ukrainians. He has a sober analysis of the current situation. While at the end he thinks it is possible for Ukraine to retake these areas, or at least stem the potential disaster it’s going to take the right help from the West which would require the type of help I doubt any western government will offer.
Give Vlad’s aggression a partial reward, almost all of the Black Sea shoreline, almost all of the eastern border with Russia, Crimea and see how it plays out? Roosian forces ensconced in Crimea and supported by Vlad’s railroad and road bridges to Russia were essential to the “liberation” of those oppressed Russians in February 2022. Vlad and imperial Roosia wouldn’t use those same tactics and then some in a new war of liberation once this special operation is settled? After all, there still may be Nazis or satanists in what remnant is left of Ukraine. And of course that remaining Ukrainian remnant must be at peace with Roosia, and in proper alignment with her protector, Moscow. (sarc)
Another link for daily updates of the war, tactical not strategic:Reporting from Ukraine
“It has now been ten months of war in Ukraine, and the West still seems hell bent on fighting the war it wants the war to be rather than the war it actually has on its hands.
Although cautious voices warn about this being a protracted war of attrition — I have been saying this since, well, April — many people seem to expect it to end in 2023. The most optimistic (rash?) even see the summer of 2023 as the terminal date. I believe this optimism is unwarranted. The war will not end by the summer, and it will not end by the winter. We will be lucky if it ends in 2024. If I am right about this, the current Western strategy of “just in time” financing and arming is fatally flawed, and unlikely to help Ukraine prevail.
If he is right, it’s unlikely Ukraine will prevail. It will take a fundamental shift in attitude by the Europeans. This should be their fight.
om,
Move the 14,000 US troops currently stationed in Poland to the west bank of the Dnieper in Ukraine.
who’s the cynic, mcgregor, who seems to one of the only ones not on the gravy train, like general mccrystal (to think I once felf sorry for him, because of michael hastings) or petraeus, or mattis, or kelley, or mcmaster (who seems to have forget his thesis topic) or you move up the ranks to milley and austin, for whom ‘white rage’ is the real enemy, this is why rosalynn boyland and ashley babbitts are unpeople to them, and don’t pretend they were not murdered by capitol police,
what have the last 30 years, of foreign expeditions yielded except lives lost and maimed, so now we are scaling up to nuclear armageddon, and we know there is no end, for zelensky we know what happens to those forced out, and putin shambling and the crew that runs him have made it clear nothing but regime change is on the ball,
Brian E:
You have reverted to Brain E. I was hopeful, but you relapsed.
Miguel doesn’t remember how wrong MacGreagor has been in 2022.
Dig you own bunker Miguel or will you share one with Bunge? After all, DU munitions are dirty bombs. (LOL)
Are you projecting Vlad’s tendencies into Ukraine?
It is really fantastic (look up the word Miguel) how you got from Ukraine to the murder of Ashli Babbit; talk about a rabbit hole and Wonderland.
@Brian E
Turtler, thanks for your detailed history lessons.
It is the least I can do.
Whatever you think of Macgregor, he may be right on Ukraine.
I would not bet on it, for the various reasons I mentioned. The fact that he is a paid Kremlin propagandist is really one of the lesser reasons to distrust him. There are Kremlin propagandists or at least those supportive of it that are reasonably reliable (or at least not completely out to lunch) about it.
MacGregor isn’t just biased or even in pay to an authoritarian, his accuracy rate is truly abysmal. As people like our host and I noted from keeping track of him.
Now, does that mean he will always be wrong? Of course not. But it very much falls into “Broken Clock” territory in my opinion.
He is often on Judge Napolitano’s podcast. Do you think Napolitano is a shill for Russia as well?
As a Californian exile I do not have a great opinion of Napolitano for a bunch of reasons, but I do not know. I would have to check. But in any case, I do think the systematic dishonesty and incompetence by MacGregor is even more damning than his ties to the Kremlin.
There is a case to be made that the Donbas and Crimea have a legitimate claim to independence.
Not as things stand, I do not think so. The last honest referendums held in Crimea (which admittedly were years ago) were in favor of remaining with Ukraine but under a special autonomous status (and severing the entire or even large parts of the Donbas Basin simply never came up, even if the exact borders were there).
And for the record I actually don’t have any in depth moral opposition in principle to the idea of Crimea or some or all of the Donbas joining Russia…. IN THEORY.
What I do object to, however, is a violent foreign invasion on false pretenses seizing said territories by a mixture of force and fraud using “votes” of such laughably insincere nature that Maricopa looks like a bastion of duty and republican virtue, and then waging an aggressive war to claim yet more.
So suffice it to say, if Donbas and Crimea have a right to join Russia, then
A: Ukraine has every right to demand and receive the (peaceful, non-launched) return of its portion of the Soviet Nuclear Arsenal that it surrendered in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum (linked here) in return for assurances that its independence and territorial integrity would be respected and defended by the US, UK, and Russia within the borders of the former Ukrainian SR.
B: That said transfers would only occur after a *lawful*, demilitarized referendum.
Of course, for reasons I will get into later these are things that Putin has no or even less than no interest in doing.
Of the 7 million people that left Ukraine at the start of the Russian invasion, nearly 3 million went to Russia, with the rest going to a variety of European countries, so a large minority of those, probably in the Donbas and Crimea went to Russia.
This is probably true – I will need to check – with the caveat of “which Russian invasion? the one in 2022?” (I’m not being sarcastic, was just checking). But yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised. In general while Southwestern Russia is something of an agrarian deindustrialized rust belt (sort of like the American Midwest but starting from a lower position and dropping further) it has generally fared a lot better than the Donbas (even before the 2014 invasion, and the disparity has only gotten wider since then). The fact that the war in the Donbas started out chaotic and then turned very static didn’t help, so it was natural a lot of people would flee for the relatively greener pastures of places like Kursk.
Though I think a key X factor is this can only be what are forced deportations by the Russian government and its vassals in the DPR and LPR, forcing people in the area into Russia regardless of their wishes. Perhaps the most clearcut issue of this is the forced orphaning and adoption of Ukrainian children by Russian families. I don’t fault the adopters TOO Much – since the war is a tragedy and it is generally better to risk a foster family than not, and I am sure many are good people doing their best- but the Russian state knows full well this stuff is banned under international law precisely because (as the Soviet Union co-signed) forced adoptions under the aegis of the state are a mechanism of ethnic cleansing and genocide and ones detailed as far back as the start of the 20th century in regards to things like the Armenian Genocide.
This I think puts a serious asterisk on the Three Million number, given there is the open question of how voluntary this is.
Moreover, I think this is telling for a couple different reasons, but starting with the fact that from a military perspective it is of sub-par practicality at best. While militarily any military or security forces have a vested interest in avoiding suspect populations in its rear reaching a critical mass for various reasons (the risk of guerilla actions by them, the fact that they are a drain in supplies) they generally DON’T want them to be shifted this far, because that’s another burden on the already strained logistics (especially since Russian logistics are less flexible than many). In general from a strictly military point of view it is to Russia’s benefit to have the Ukrainians or other non-Russia aligned countries take as many Ukrainian refugees/displaced as humanly possible outside of those that can be mined for human intelligence or recruited.
So by pushing these people to places like Kursk or entering them into the adoption system, the Russian state is actively undercutting its own logistics and ability to sustain the war in the short to medium term, especially at a time when sanctions and decreased margins (like for instance the extremely onerous oil deal the Indians inked with them) make it less practical.
But from the perspective of a culture war and the desire to denationalize these people, it makes a lot more sense as a long term investment. And one that various Russian states (among others of course) are hardly unfamiliar with. Including Putin’s own government, given his treatment of groups like Ingush orphans.
That I think justifies the label of ethnic cleansing with good circumstantial evidence for genocide.
IMO, it would be in the best interests of Ukraine to divide the country with the four annexed oblasts plus Crimea given their independence. If they choose to join Russia, so be it.
I can’t agree for a bunch of reasons. At best this might – MIGHT – be a workable situation for some kind of final peace settlement.
The problem is: what would make such a settlement final? What would make it stick? Why would we trust a Russian government that already violated the last territorial settlements outlined at things like Budapest 1994 to keep to this?
One of the lesser told stories that tends to be lost among the blather and information warfare is that Zelenskyy was actually one of the most dovish major figures in Ukrainian politics prior to the start of this war, coming to political prominence precisely because he claimed he was willing to seek an end of this war, even at the expense of limited territorial and diplomatic concessions.
One of the centerpieces of this was a referendum to partition the Donbas, to be carried out under international observation after all armed forces were withdrawn from the area.
This actually cost him A LOT of flak in internal Ukrainian public, opinion, as you can see here from this English language, Ukrainian-focused Soros Front Group.
So this was a major risk on Zelenskyy’s part and it cost him. It also put him solidly as one of the most conciliatory and dovish of the Ukrainian Loyalist political leaders.
And Putin rewarded this proposal with….. Silence. If he or his government ever made a formal response to this proposal, I have not seen it (which is quite possible since I am a monolingual English language scrub) and in any case it clearly wasn’t acceptance.
So in essence, Ukraine can’t do what you propose because the Russian government will not agree to it. And I think the reasons for it are simple.
The “referendums” in the Donbas and Crimea were rigged even by the low standards of Maricopa, and Putin for reasons that still baffle me didn’t make much of a show trying to hide that. This particularly vexes me in the case of Crimea because I have an inkling he might have been able to win that vote legally. But in any case ever since then Putin has been die hard opposed to allowing the kind of “clear the room” up or down vote conducted under more or less fair and free conditions without a bunch of armed thugs like Girkin around.
And given Russian (not just Putin, but primarily centered around him) foreign policy, I think I have a fair idea why. Because this is very similar to the Kremlin’s conduct regarding Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, among others.
To distill my theory in short, Putin doesn’t want a clear cut case where these territories are given their independence separate from him. He also does not want a clear cut case where parts of them are returned to the host government and the rest are given “independence” or annexed to Russia or the like.
And the reason why is fairly simple. As long as they are in a state of limbo, they remain highly useful diplomatic pawns as well as military ones, which can be highlighted or de-emphasized in order to extract diplomatic concessions or other benefits from – say – the Moldovan Government. It also serves as a perpetual freeze on these countries joining NATO in particular and a number of other international agreements due to the hard ban on nations joining with territorial disagreements.
So Putin would ideally want the entirety of these countries, preferably divided into a mixture of extremely pro-Russian/directly Russian occupied “separatist states” and a broadly demilitarized pro-Russian government that these areas could at least nominally be reintegrated into, all happily under Pyotr’s Tricolor.
But failing that, he wants to basically remember these countries utterly dysfunctional, unable to either retake the territory occupied or to completely make a break and draw a line under the bridge. Which is one reason why Zelenskyy’s proposals for a plebiscite for the Donbas met with such a cold shoulder.
However, I do think he SERIOUSLY has miscalculated Ukrainian strength, both in 2022 and even in 2014. A good example of this was the dream of “Novorossiya” that was floating around as early as 2013 and particularly in 2014, which was the stated goal of many of the rebel groups (and the Russian military units fighting under false flag with them), encompassing the entire Donbas along with a land bridge stretching down to Crimea. Even more territory than they have now.
Only back in 2014-2015 this fell apart due to staunch (if often disorganized and underequipped) loyalist resistance, which was often defeated but not decisively broken. So the Russians peaked out at occupying about 2/3rds of the Donbas before they started to be pushed back later in 2015 and 2016, before they sort of settled down to holding between a third and a fourth of the Donbas depending on when you measured it.
The open entrance of Russian troops under their own flag into the war has given them the strength to occupy far more than they did back in 2014/2015 and to approximate the “Novorossiyan Dream”, but they are still falling fallow for a bunch of reasons, starting with the fact that they seem to have massively overestimated the enthusiasm of former “Blue” Ukrainians – who were often habitually Russian-speaking, ethnic Russian, and generally more pro-Russian than their peers further to the West – for the invasion.
But the long and short of it is that even if the Ukrainians were willing to make this kind of deal (as Zelenskyy considered), Putin is not interested in accepting it and the limits that would entail on his power and ability to interfere.
Which I think leaves Ukraine with two choices. To either submit to whatever terms Vladimir has (and atrocious terms they are, even if they have been moving after the initial defeats in 2022) or to fight on.
I don’t think this is a terribly hard call for them. Threats that Russia might nuke them if they continue fighting? Putin might nuke them tomorrow regardless of what happens, so they might as well have more of their own country to have the fire spread out on. Putin might escalate the war? Question is in what way. Putin might engage in more devastation, ethnic cleansing, or the like on Ukraine?
Well, given the track record of his troops in Ukraine so far (even with GENEROUS allowances for exaggeration and smears by the Ukrainian Loyalists and their allies) and similar cases in Georgia, Chechnya, and Transnistria as well as past history like the Holodomor and the “Southern Wrath” (as some Finnish and Swedish historians coined Pyotr the Great’s terror campaign on the Wild Fields in retaliation for Mazepa’s defection), that’s more of a risk if they stop resisting.
Especially now with things like the old NKVD and NKGB documents from the post-WWII years outlined showing how Beria’s murderers were happy to dress up as former Ukrainian Insurgent Army and Polish Home Army troops (and even recruit turncoats from them) to commit murders against the civilian populace in order to (further) blacken both organizations (though to be fair the Ukrainian Insurgent Army under Bandera was plenty murderous and probably helped destroy itself by that).
Even it is possible for Ukraine to retake Kherson, Donetsk, Zaporizhya and Luhansk oblasts plus Crimea, should it?
I would say so (though some extremely anti-Donbas Ukrainian Loyalists like Aleksandr Motyl disagree). Ukraine would certainly benefit from being able to demonstrate its capacity that it can retake ground and even at least Threaten to throw the Russians out of the country. If nothing else it would help deter the Kremlin from trying more nonsense later and help give Ukraine resources, strategic depth, and more of a popular mandate.
I’m under no illusions that rehabing the Donbas and Crimea would not be an utter bear, especially given the genuinely pro-Russian sentiments of many there (especially the Crimea). But I think for the reasons I’ve mentioned, Ukraine has to at least show it is capable of threatening to do so in order to help push Moscow to a peace deal that will actually stick unlike the Pinkie Promises of Budapest 1994 and Astana 2012 and Minsk I/II (and prior peace deals in Transnistria and Georgia).
As Trump pointed out, strength in negotiations is the ability to walk away. A Ukraine strong enough to flip the bird to Putin and even those in the West (looking at you, Germans) who are intent on forcing it to compromise its constitutional and territorial integrity with the possibility of retaking that territory by force is a much stronger and stabler Ukraine. One that might be curbed by other means (such as credible threats of nuclear escalation) but which at least benefits from being able to show it.
Of course, all of this could go terribly wrong or flatly not work. I’ll freely admit that Ukraine’s government IS corrupt and dysfunctional, and might turn out worse. I certainly am not willing to go before God to swear on my soul that Zelenskyy is the very ideal of republican integrity, and of course the project might collapse due to Russian and Pro-Russian Resistance/ Ukrainian Corruption/etc.
But I think for various reasons most of the alternatives to not trying are far worse for Ukraine than most of the situations where it tries.
And as a former humanitarian worker I do think there is a good chance of Western largesse that can at least somewhat help the Rehab Work. Ukraine is quite the country with potential and plenty of resources, which makes it a curiously enticing investment option for the scrupulous broker.
The fact that it is also highly corrupt and not that transparent (as our friend Hunter can attest) makes it appealing for the usual globalist unscrupulous broker, who might help rehab the area to some degree so long as much of the funding gets diverted to gold plated “Save the Planet” nametags and other graft.
Here is an Australian soldier involved in the fighting around Bakhmut for the Ukrainians. He has a sober analysis of the current situation. While at the end he thinks it is possible for Ukraine to retake these areas, or at least stem the potential disaster it’s going to take the right help from the West which would require the type of help I doubt any western government will offer.
Interesting, and thanks. I’ll have to watch through them and digest before I can intelligently reply, but I greatly appreciate the redirects.
And thank you for the civil and fair response.
I care about this country and how it’s being carved up and sold in pieces, how xi the man who killed 10 million people is untouched, how all of his enablers are in office, that includes mcconnell and graham and all those other colonel blimps,
how our military is being purged, our fuel stocks depleted, our cities ravaged,
i’m willing to wager thats what agitates bunge, and geoffrey and others who have reservations about this game of caucasus roullette we are playing,
Brain E:
Here you go, today’s update from Reporting from Ukraine
Often he provides detailed map analysis which include topographic information, not just lines on a satellite images.
What would MacGreggor say/do? The Ukraine jesus. (sarc)
Miguel:
Geoffrey, of the 13 minutes, spent months rationalizing Vlad’s motives and blaming NATO for Vlad’s invasion. Sorry to pop your narrative. That dog don’t hunt.
Bunge is Bunge,
Turtler —
Thank you. That was quite comprehensive.
Yesterday I commented on the reasons I’ve stepped away from blogs this last year.
I forgot #5: I’m sick of all the supposed “conservatives” who have gone all-in for Putin, which as far as I can tell is mostly I-Oppose-The-Current-Thing-ism: If Biden and the Democrats say something is a good idea, it must a bad idea; if Biden and the Democrats say Putin is bad, he must be good; etc.
This is, to put it bluntly, moronic. And dangerous.
Muscovy-cum-Russia has always been a psychotic bully nation, unhappy until it has conquered and absorbed its neighbors, and then unhappy until it has conquered and absorbed its new neighbors, etc. etc. There was no functional difference between the USSR and pre- or post-Soviet Russia, it was just the Russian Empire with a different name and formal ideology. It annoys me to the utmost that people old enough to remember the USSR somehow think that Russia has changed.
As for Glenn Beck, who I mostly respect, and Tucker Carlson and Judge Napolitano and so forth: for the moment I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they saw that I-Oppose-The-Current-Thing-ism was growing in popularity with their viewers and got out in front of it for commercial reasons. For the moment.
The Ukraine War [edit: which we did not start or provoke, but since Putin started it] is an opportunity for the US to kneecap one of our two major geopolitical adversaries for decades at the least and possibly even forever if they collapse, and all for the low low price of mere money, not American lives. Yay!
If you think that’s a bad idea, what the f*** is wrong with you?
@Brian E Part 2
Sorry, was distracted by your prior reply and my longwinded response to it.
I read through the Slantchev blog post pretty quickly (I have always been a fast reader) and on the whole I think the author makes many of the correct conclusions, especially that this would be a grinding war of attrition (which I admit I predicted from how most of the Donbas War has been, especially after the Russian attempt to make a decapitation blow on Kyiv failed) and that Western and especially European support must escalate in order to even try and achieve the goals, and how we have seriously underinvested in weapons and the maintenance of our military stocks. I also agree with him that the Kremlin is not seriously interested in negotiations except as a means to buy time and try to get some sanctions relief.
The main issue I disagree with him on is his prediction of Russian endurance capacity, especially in terms of casualties.
There is no reason to suppose that the Kremlin is sensitive to the human losses it is suffering, and much for the same reasons that the communists in Hanoi were not. Let’s do a small calculation. Assume that the Russians have 150,000 dead (which might be too high since these lists usually include KIA/POWs). Russia has 213 cities with a population over 100,000 alone, and the average size among these is about 360,000. Distributing these casualties over these 213 cities means 704 military dead per city for the year. Russia’s mortality was 16.7 per 1,000 in 2021, so a population 360,000 would expect 6,012 deaths per year. The military dead would increase this by 11%, or there will be 560 funerals per month instead of the “customary” 501 in a city roughly the size of Cleveland. Without the media blanketing the airwaves with news about this, this sort of thing would go virtually unnoticed. And, needless to say, the Russian media is blaring exactly the opposite. And this is with the recipients of “Gruz 200” being cities — right now, most are scattered among small towns and villages, where the funeral processions would have 1 or 2 bodies to bury, occasionally. Even less visible than my rough and ready calculations were meant to show.
There’s a lot to unpack with this, but I disagree with most parts of it.
And the simplest way to I think highlight the problems with the calculation is to repeat it, but rather for 150,000 dead in the Ukraine war spread across Russia for the however many deaths we calculate the Soviet Union (as opposed to its Afghan quislings or the limited WARPAC support staff) took in Afghanistan (which is almost certainly less than the deaths Russia has taken in Ukraine to date, with the most common estimates I’ve seen ranging from about 15,000 to 30,000 Dead), spread out across the much larger are and population of the Soviet Union.
It winds up much much smaller than the toll Russia has suffered in Ukraine. And yet it was sufficient to seriously destabilize the Soviet Union and helped cause its collapse.
There is no reason to suppose that the Kremlin is sensitive to the human losses it is suffering, and much for the same reasons that the communists in Hanoi were not.
I disagree with this for a bunch of reasons, mostly starting with the fact that Hanoi was a prototypical totalitarian war state that was forged in the fires of first the half-victory half-defeat against the French (more on that later) and then incredibly savage internal war against the Northern opposition (Such as the Vietnamese KMT/VNQD?, Royalist Paramilitaries, and assorted freelance partisans) and the brutal “Land reform” that killed hundreds of thousands of people in nominal peace time.
This seriously damaged and destabilized Vietnam’s economy and wellbeing in ways that still linger today… but it had the bonus effect of crushing most internal resistance and cementing the power of a centralized, totalitarian party, wholeheartedly geared towards the subjugation of Indochina at any cost.
Putin’s Russia is authoritarian rather than totalitarian and not geared to the sort of total war that Hanoi was. It is a better place to live than North Vietnam was in the 1950s or even 1980s, but it also has much more to lose and less to gain. Especially in terms of its demographics. More on that later, but North Vietnam (and Vietnam as a whole) had the typical demography you associate with an agrarian society. Young population with lots of children, including good surpluses of angry young men who could be shipped off to fight without the surplus being so large it is at the risk of destabilizing the society (as the PRC is suffering from now).
Russia on the other hand is seriously suffering from shortages of angry young men or the stable family and clan units that helped it field the massive armies it is famous for.
Let’s do a small calculation. Assume that the Russians have 150,000 dead (which might be too high since these lists usually include KIA/POWs). Russia has 213 cities with a population over 100,000 alone, and the average size among these is about 360,000. Distributing these casualties over these 213 cities means 704 military dead per city for the year. Russia’s mortality was 16.7 per 1,000 in 2021, so a population 360,000 would expect 6,012 deaths per year. The military dead would increase this by 11%, or there will be 560 funerals per month instead of the “customary” 501 in a city roughly the size of Cleveland. Without the media blanketing the airwaves with news about this, this sort of thing would go virtually unnoticed. And, needless to say, the Russian media is blaring exactly the opposite.
Again, the main issue I have with this and counterargument is to run the figures for the deaths from the Soviet war in Afghanistan through this for the entire Soviet Union and realize that the Soviet Union was destabilized by a far smaller death toll over a far longer time frame.
It’s also worth noting that while this works for napkin math, there’s also the demography involved. While Russia’s demography (and that of former Soviet Space) is a bit wonky due to things like higher infant mortality rates (plus abortions) and a big age gap in mortality between men and women, it’s more typical than not. Most of those deaths are still among older and/or sick people. Most of whom (though not all) are very different from the overwhelmingly-young-to-middle-aged men who would fight and die in battle.
Now there IS overlap (for an extreme caricature example to illustrate the point, let’s create I. M. Conscriptovich, a violent Krokodil addict from Tver who would have died of an overdose in a back alley, but who in this timeline was conscripted to serve in Ukraine where instead they overdosed and died in a foxhole and thus were added to the tally). But there’s less overlap between the figures than not. And young adults and middle aged men are what Russia – especially Ethnic Russians – really need.
This also ties into another point. That I think Russia will be Much more sensitive to the losses of manpower it suffers, at least in some cases. Especially from urban areas like St. Petersburg and Moscow, which is one reason why we see those areas and their people suffering disproportionately few casualties, far less than we would realistically expect.
Urbanites – especially around those two cities – tend to be wealthier, connected, and have wealthier/connected friends. And when they complain they tend to be louder than a historically depowered rural populace. So better to recruit heavily from places like Tuva and Buryatia.
But there are limits to how far this can go because there are only so many Tuvans and Buryatians (to say nothing of those that are in prime military capability and willing to serve), and those villages with 1-2 funerals have also hollowed out a lot in the decades since Brezhnev, with the young male populace thinning out as the Russian population has demographically aged and rotted away.
And this is with the recipients of “Gruz 200” being cities — right now, most are scattered among small towns and villages, where the funeral processions would have 1 or 2 bodies to bury, occasionally. Even less visible than my rough and ready calculations were meant to show.
Sure, but if those 1 to 2 bodies are in a burnt out one smelter town turned economic wasteland in the middle of Smolensk Oblast where you had maybe five young men to start with, the society will Feel the pain, much like it did during the Afghan War. And unlike during the Afghan War there’s a lot less demographic fat to burn.
This I think is one reason why the Kremlin is going to be much more sensitive to losses than the napkin math indicates. Not out of any great sense of humanity or compassion, but because Putin knows full well how lots of military deaths destabilize Russian governments. It happened to Brezhnev, it happened to Gorbachev, and it happened to Yeltsin. And those are just within the past half century or so. We could go much earlier.
And it is worse because the troops that were first up to get culled in the heavy fighting of the first months of the war tended to be prime military and demographic personnel. Not just fit young to middle aged men but also the best trained and equipped of them, who had to fight at a disadvantage due to the way the Russian military structures its units and the lack of good trigger pullers. Which is one reason why the tempo of the war has slackened, especially on the Russian side, as the Separatist areas are engaging in major conscription at least on par with the Ukrainian Loyalists if not probably far more while the Russian Government is trying to pluck as many feathers on the mobilization bird without society screeching too hard.
This is also why you see interests by the Kremlin to try and offshore the deaths and casualties, by bringing in more foreign fighters.
It’s still good to PREPARE for the worst, and it was a mistake to expect the Kremlin to give up this fight easily. However, this does mean I think the napkin math Slantchev did is based on a few crucial false premises. Namely that no society – including Russia – can continue fighting a high intensity war forever, especially not with the demographics Russia has and with the tension.
So the “cheap help” I think is more likely to work than Slantchev gives it credit for… though that doesn’t mean we should get complacent and EXPECT it.
Turtler —
And young adults and middle aged men are what Russia – especially Ethnic Russians – really need.
Zeihan prophesies that this is the last high-intensity was Russia will ever be able to fight due to ongoing demographic collapse made worse by losing lots of young family-age men. (The same goes for Ukraine, but they seem less likely to want to start any further wars.)
the Separatist areas are engaging in major conscription
I saw a lot of stories about the L/DNR snatching men off the streets several months ago and nothing since. I’ve also heard rumors of Siberian conscripts being assigned to the L/DNR armies instead of the Russian Army, so my conclusion is that the separatist areas have been pretty much picked clean by now.
@miguel cervantes
Theyve only been mishandling tens of billions of dollars of our weapons and cash
Sure, that’s what tends to happen with large scale support infusions to countries way less corrupt than Ukraine is. Doesn’t mean it is all they are doing or that it isn’t helping.
who’s the cynic, mcgregor, who seems to one of the only ones not on the gravy train, like general mccrystal (to think I once felf sorry for him, because of michael hastings) or petraeus, or mattis, or kelley, or mcmaster (who seems to have forget his thesis topic) or you move up the ranks to milley and austin, for whom ‘white rage’ is the real enemy,
MacGregor’s just on a different gravy train, namely one with its checks cashed by the Kremlin. You don’t get a regular spot being a commenter on RT and Pravda without that. You might judge that that is the less toxic and dangerous gravy train compared to the one you describe (and I wouldn’t even disagree) but it does go a long, LONG way to explain his track record. Especially the way he rubberbands.
I wouldn’t call MacGregor a cynic. I wouldn’t even call him an idealist. He is a jobber who mouths the lines he is told to or at least expects his masters want him to.
And frankly I think that whatever the Kremlin or anyone is paying him, it’s way too damn much. The guy’s analysis is dismal even in comparison to my own, and that’s before I get into the “Thought it was a good idea to compare his masters to Japan’s Juntas in the 1930s” issue.
this is why rosalynn boyland and ashley babbitts are unpeople to them, and don’t pretend they were not murdered by capitol police,
Agreed.
It’s also why I am far more concerned about the US home front than Ukraine. And while it is awful of me to say, I would be willing to grant Ukraine to Putin’s “tender mercies” lock, stock, and barrel if it meant getting our country back. That’s awful and something I regret but I cannot deny it.
The issue of course is that isn’t what would get.
what have the last 30 years, of foreign expeditions yielded except lives lost and maimed,
Well, let’s start with the fact that not all lives lost and maimed are bad. The world is a far, far better place without Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in it. It is a shame we did not get Mullah Omar and more of them.
Let’s also start with the fact that we’ve helped stabilize the Philippines, Kurdistan, and Israel, and while the first one is going into the PRC’s orbit at least at the top level the Jihad in the South is burnt out.
We also have had the dreams of grandiose Islamist terror attacks on the heartland flicker down to the “Flock of Lone Wolves” attacks. Still dangerous and terrifying and more connected than the left wants to admit but a useful reprieve, especially now.
so now we are scaling up to nuclear armageddon,
We’re not the ones doing that. Putin is, or at least has happily been willing to threaten to do so.
and we know there is no end, for zelensky we know what happens to those forced out, and putin shambling and the crew that runs him have made it clear nothing but regime change is on the ball,
Again, untrue, especially since the baseline US demands have been an end to the Russian occupation of Ukrainian territory. Putin can at least theoretically keep his throne if he does that.
But frankly given the truly atrocious nature of Putin’s regime I wouldn’t fault many people for seeking regime change. Mark Steyn pointed out what a vile demon he was about 20 years ago and why he was never trustworthy. He’s just reinforced that. That doesn’t mean he can’t be replaced with people so much worse that we lament his time, but it does mean that talks of appeasement have been fruitless.
Anybody remember when the Globalist Left were peddling “Reset” and throwing Georgia under the bus?
I care about this country and how it’s being carved up and sold in pieces,
Agreed, which is why I think America First must dominate, and Ukraine must come second or more likely much further down the line. I just feel it is in American interests to help Ukraine resist an invasion by Russia.
how xi the man who killed 10 million people is untouched, how all of his enablers are in office, that includes mcconnell and graham and all those other colonel blimps,
Agreed. But on the other hand if you want to get at Xi, destabilizing and weakening his greatest strategic ally is a good way to go. It’d also provide us breathing room.
how our military is being purged, our fuel stocks depleted, our cities ravaged,
Agreed, which is why I think we need to focus there.
i’m willing to wager thats what agitates bunge, and geoffrey and others who have reservations about this game of caucasus roullette we are playing,
Bunge I’m more skeptical of, especially given how they handily demonize anybody and everybody who correctly pointed out Saddam was not the innocent lamb Iraq War Truthers have pointed at. But as for the others, fair enough. There’s a LOT to have reservations about here, especially while the American Homefront is imploding or worse.
Which is also why I’ve always said that my commitments to Ukraine come well and truly below those to America and why I despise Brandon and his enablers with every core of my being. But I don’t see how stopping the globalist deep staters and other scum from hijacking the country is helped by allowing one of their chief “Show Heels” to tread over Budapest and subjugate a major global breadbasket.
@Bryan Lovely
Thank you for your kind words.
Thank you. That was quite comprehensive.
I try, for better or worse.
Yesterday I commented on the reasons I’ve stepped away from blogs this last year.
I’ve been feeling something regarding politics. I was a child of 9/11 and the 90s and have become well and truly jaded, especially given the feet of clay so many early heroes have proved to have and their betrayals. That along with Trump’s defeat (by skullduggery if not at the ballot box) has given me a deep sense of doom for the US and sometimes I wonder how much chance there is a fight.
I forgot #5: I’m sick of all the supposed “conservatives” who have gone all-in for Putin, which as far as I can tell is mostly I-Oppose-The-Current-Thing-ism: If Biden and the Democrats say something is a good idea, it must a bad idea; if Biden and the Democrats say Putin is bad, he must be good; etc.
This is, to put it bluntly, moronic. And dangerous.
Agreed entirely.
I’ve seen this entire argument going about how what are we doing being on the same side as Soros, Merkel, Biden, Obama, Schwab, and so forth. Which is a fair point to make, but something they ignore.
There’s another situation where that was the case. All of those people and their factions were united against The Islamic State.
But I don’t think that means we magically concluded that if Obama opposed IS, it MUST be good. Putin is not as bad as IS is, but this reinforces the point that what you are against is less important than what you are for.
Muscovy-cum-Russia has always been a psychotic bully nation, unhappy until it has conquered and absorbed its neighbors, and then unhappy until it has conquered and absorbed its new neighbors, etc. etc.
Agreed on the whole. It’s a brutal simplification and I think there are grounds to quibble, but that is on a matter of decades.
There was no functional difference between the USSR and pre- or post-Soviet Russia, it was just the Russian Empire with a different name and formal ideology. It annoys me to the utmost that people old enough to remember the USSR somehow think that Russia has changed.
I’m not sure I’d go that far. The Tsarist Empire and Putin’s Russia were awful, but they weren’t the kind of apocalyptic, messianic nightmare that was the Soviet Union. Very few Russian governments even espoused the idea that it was their destiny to conquer the world by force of arms (and while I think Pyotr the Great would have been charmed and flattered to hear of his legendary deathbed testament that it was the job of the future Romanovs to do that and maybe regretted not saying it, there’s a reason we have no evidence for it).
In contrast that remained Soviet dogma from beginning to end. And they MEANT it, at least until Khruschev’s term. Lenin tried fervently to start a second world war in the 1920s, and one of the world’s great hinge moments was Stalin dying when he did as he prepared for a mass murder of the Jews of the USSR and preparations for a new World War. The revolutionary zeitgeist only began to crumble after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even then it was dangerously potent stuff. And the declassified documents from the Soviet regime show how seriously the regime took its propaganda and ideology internally (as well as how much less of a gap there was among them than the “Cynical Camp” interpretation school thought there was). Stalin spent hundreds of hours doing esoteric stuff like writing literary critique on Marx and Engels long after he was already totalitarian ruler of his empire. So either he and many others believed it, or they were happy to play along with the official ruse on a serious level (as Beria did). And that nearly plunged the world towards apocalypse.
Putin’s awful – and I think nobody who has read even a fraction of my blather can doubt my stance there – but I would take him over Lenin or Stalin or even Khruschev any time of the Millennium. Hell, I’d even take Ivan IV over them.
As for Glenn Beck, who I mostly respect, and Tucker Carlson and Judge Napolitano and so forth: for the moment I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they saw that I-Oppose-The-Current-Thing-ism was growing in popularity with their viewers and got out in front of it for commercial reasons. For the moment.
Agreed. That and I think the way that the Dems have demonized Putin’s Russia as a catchall boogeyman and used it to attack us does not help. They’ve been playing chicken with this problem for years in order to bludgeon us, and that’s going to trigger skepticism.
Exhaustion over the previous wars moreso.
The Ukraine War [edit: which we did not start or provoke, but since Putin started it] is an opportunity for the US to kneecap one of our two major geopolitical adversaries for decades at the least and possibly even forever if they collapse, and all for the low low price of mere money, not American lives. Yay!
If you think that’s a bad idea, what the f*** is wrong with you?
To play Devil’s Advocate, I can understand many Ukrainians or Pacifists thinking so. Also the Russians of course and the sort of traditional Paleocon Isolationists and those on right and left (and oh yes, Putin has his simps on the Left and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise) who support the Kremlin.
It’s an ugly bit of power politics at best, and I’ll admit that even if I support it.
Zeihan prophesies that this is the last high-intensity was Russia will ever be able to fight due to ongoing demographic collapse made worse by losing lots of young family-age men. (The same goes for Ukraine, but they seem less likely to want to start any further wars.)
I wouldn’t go quite so far, though it might be the last either country in its current state does. Russia has suffered demographic collapses before, and while none as far as I can tell were ever this sharp or steep except maybe the Mongols there were those that came CLOSE.
In any case, I’d rather the Kremlin weaken.
I saw a lot of stories about the L/DNR snatching men off the streets several months ago and nothing since.
That’s probably true, at least in part. That’s actually been leaked by some pro-Kremlin hawks discontent with current management, like the aforementioned Girkin, who have painted a dire status for the manpower situation in the occupied areas.
I’ve also heard rumors of Siberian conscripts being assigned to the L/DNR armies instead of the Russian Army, so my conclusion is that the separatist areas have been pretty much picked clean by now.
To be fair the Russian military has been assigning its troops to the separatists for a LONG time now (literally years), so it is hard to gauge. But yeah, the number of willing Separatist troops legitimately from the Donbas can’t be that high.
Turtler —
I’ll see your apocalyptic, messianic nightmare and raise you Wagner/Russia displacing France from West & Central Africa, cuddling up to Iran, meddling in Venezuela, etc. etc. etc.
From their external behavior, there’s not much difference between Ivan, Peter, Catherine, Nicholas I, Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Putin. Every one of them has been a threat to their neighbors and a horror to populations they were able to conquer. The ones in between were not so much of a threat merely because Russia’s ability to project power waxes and wanes. It’s like that meme about the tiny Australian critter clinging to a finger: he wants to kill you, he just can’t.
It’s said that Islam has “bloody borders”. If they’re worse than Russia’s, it’s only because they’ve been doing it for longer.
A lot of what the USSR did was ideologically-motivated subversion (see Yuri Bezmenov et al). Putinist Russia does a lot of non-ideologically-motivated subversion. I don’t see much difference in the intent or practice, except that the early Sovs tried to bootstrap local subversives like the CPUSA and the later Sovs financed the green and anti-nuke movements; while the Putinists concentrate on trolling and riling up the pre-existing subversives and inciting factional strife (and I’m pretty sure they still spread money around). See, e.g., all the wink-and-nod stuff about how Trump was their boy and how sure they interfered in the election and various anti-woke anti-gay pronouncements. I don’t think Putin really gives a damn about Pride parades in the US one way or the other, he just wants us to weaken ourselves over them.
@Bryan Lovely
I’ll see your apocalyptic, messianic nightmare and raise you Wagner/Russia displacing France from West & Central Africa, cuddling up to Iran, meddling in Venezuela, etc. etc. etc.
Oh I know quite a lot about that and I stand by what I wrote. All of that is absolutely horrifying. It’s also way way less than what the Soviets did even on a slow decade.
From their external behavior, there’s not much difference between Ivan, Peter, Catherine, Nicholas I, Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Putin.
I wouldn’t quite go that far, but there certainly wasn’t as much. Lenin was almost certainly the worst of the lot (judging from the words of his own loyalist Molotov) with Stalin as an honorary second and either Putin or Ivan or Nick I coming next.
Every one of them has been a threat to their neighbors and a horror to populations they were able to conquer.
Absolutely agreed.
The ones in between were not so much of a threat merely because Russia’s ability to project power waxes and wanes. It’s like that meme about the tiny Australian critter clinging to a finger: he wants to kill you, he just can’t.
Well that was a major point but some were also more sincerely interested in diplomacy. Empress Elizabeth and Nicholas II for instance were sincerely interested in some level of co-existence with their neighbors, even if they could be brutal and ruthless in their own rights.
It’s said that Islam has “bloody borders”. If they’re worse than Russia’s, it’s only because they’ve been doing it for longer.
Eh, Islam I’d say is more virulent and bloody minded than even Russian expansionism for a fair few reasons, including its desire to conquer the world in a way few Russian leaders did.
A lot of what the USSR did was ideologically-motivated subversion (see Yuri Bezmenov et al). Putinist Russia does a lot of non-ideologically-motivated subversion. I don’t see much difference in the intent or practice, except that the early Sovs tried to bootstrap local subversives like the CPUSA and the later Sovs financed the green and anti-nuke movements; while the Putinists concentrate on trolling and riling up the pre-existing subversives and inciting factional strife (and I’m pretty sure they still spread money around). See, e.g., all the wink-and-nod stuff about how Trump was their boy and how sure they interfered in the election and various anti-woke anti-gay pronouncements. I don’t think Putin really gives a damn about Pride parades in the US one way or the other, he just wants us to weaken ourselves over them.
Absolutely agreed there. Though as I fear we are seeing the ideological subversion has longer legs and likely more nightmarish long term consequences.
Turtler and Bryan Lovely. I’m enjoying your back and forth. It’s enlightening, especially concerning your views of Soviet/Russian history.
I was once in a war and had friends die. It was a just war to stop the expansion of Communism from North to South Vietnam. We had all the cards – better weapons, more money, and the support of other free nations. Blood and treasure were spent in large quantities. But, in the end, we didn’t have the will to win. Our politicians turned their backs on the South Vietnamese. I hate war, and I have an innate fear of protracted quagmires.
I fear the same will happen here, because the Biden administration is too cautious and yet, also too arrogant. And because Putin is willing to spend as many lives as necessary to achieve his aims. He believes he can wait us out. His main problem is money, but right now he’s doing okay financially. If we unleashed our oil industry, that could change. With Biden in charge that’s unlikely.
Also, this war, has shown that WWII tactics don’t work anymore. Why? Smart weapons, IMO. WWII tactics = Artillery softens up the target, then tanks move in and drive the enemy into a retreat, followed by infantry in armored vehicles occupying the newly conquered territory. It’s not happening because artillery can be targeted precisely by the enemy, tanks and armored vehicles can be destroyed with Javelins and other precise weapons. The result is a stalemate. Until either side develops new and more effective tactics for capturing and holding new territory, the stalemate will continue.
Will the German tanks change things for the Ukrainians? I doubt it. I’d like to be proven wrong.
Just my two cents.
JJ, I have a neighbor, a Vietnamese refugee who is now an American, who routinely thanks every guy he sees wearing a “Vietnam vet” cap. He says he’s seen what communism does firsthand and never wants to see it here. So, from Thi and from me, thanks for your service.
JJ:
You might want to view Military History Not Visualized on you tube regarding it Perun (?) regarding tanks and armored warfare. Basically, the Roosian army didn’t use what they had, tanks and IFVs with any intelligence (tactical doctrine) and didn’t have infantry with the tanks to deal with the Ukrainian anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) teams. In the first Chechen war the Soviet armour was decimated in Grozny, again bad tactical doctrine. Do Soviets and Roosians learn? Eventually, maybe.
Will tanks and IFVs make a difference for Ukraine? IMO, yes, if you train them not to fight like the Roosians. It seems that US (and UK) armored tactical doctrine worked quite well in Iraq. Tanks, IFVs, arty, drones, ATGM, even jets, are tools to be used well or poorly. Unfortunately, they kill and destroy.
Did Vlad care about that when he invaded Ukraine? I doubt it.
There are parallels diem was killed we had a wider war amin was killed dudayev was killed saddam was killed you get the picture two on their side two on ours yeltsin saw the first chechen war as a power play with the obshina (their mob) he didnt realize it was a proxy war of general intelligence and isi)
The latter is boddanskys conjecture of chechnya as seed for global jihad
Moyar proves diem was more right than state believed amin was more pro soviet then the stavka general staff
Why are we depleting our military stores when the real threat is china
Which we have bound india brazil and saudi real clever move
*Shrug*
Depleting military stores won’t be considered a problem in a context of a prior strategic decision to surrender upon the first sign of enemy hostility.
How did our proxy wars in afghanistan or libya turn out in the final analysis
Miguel:
How did our proxie, moxie, cottontail war in Cuba turn out? Was it justified?
How did our war in Korea turn out?
How did our actions in El Salvador turn out or Panama or Granada? Wouldn’t want to cherry pick would we?
How did Che meet his end again?
Turtler,
Putin may not be trustworthy, but it looks like the West wasn’t very trustworthy regarding NATO expansion.
“Russian leaders often complain that the NATO extended an invitation to Hungary, Poland and what was then Czechoslovakia to joint the alliance in 1997 at the Madrid Summit in contravention of assurances offered to the Soviet Union before its 1991 collapse. The alliance has dismissed the notion that such assurances were offered, however, scholars have continued to debate the issue for years. Now, however, newly declassified documents show that Gorbachev did in fact receive assurances that NATO would not expand past East Germany.”
As to the supposed peace initiative Zelensky proposed, when you read the article it’s obvious why Putin didn’t respond. It wasn’t serious.
I think your comparison of the relative low casualties in their Afghan war causing backlash to this conflict is flawed. This is likely being sold to the average Russian as ‘protecting their Russian brothers from the Ukrainian Nazi onslaught’. Russian tolerance will likely be much higher.
Brain E:
Oh the evil NATO meme rises from the dead.
Turtler has addressed this before with Geoffrey. And put it to bed, but that was months ago. Something about a bad penny comes to mind.
Putin has shown himself to be untrutstworthy for decades, by why pay attention to past behavior?
More from the article: “The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991,” George Washington University National Security Archives researchers Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton wrote. “That discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.”
Indeed, Russian Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin have complained bitterly about the expansion of NATO towards their borders despite what they had believed were assurances to the contrary. “What happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today?” Putin said at the Munich Conference on Security Policy in 2007.“No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: ‘the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.’ Where are these guarantees?”
As the newly declassified documents show, the Russians might have had a point. While it was previously understood that Secretary of State James Baker’s assurance to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “not one inch eastward” during a February 9, 1990, meeting was only in the context of German reunification, the new documents show that this was not the case.
Gorbachev only accepted German reunification—over which the Soviet Union had a legal right to veto under treaty—because he received assurances that NATO would not expand after he withdrew his forces from Eastern Europe from James Baker, President George H.W. Bush, West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the CIA Director Robert Gates, French President Francois Mitterrand, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, British foreign minister Douglas Hurd, British Prime Minister John Major, and NATO secretary-general Manfred Woerner.
Indeed, as late as March 1991, the British were reassuring Gorbachev that they could not foresee circumstances under which NATO might expand into Eastern and Central Europe. As former British Ambassador to the Soviet Union recounted in March 5, 1991, Rodric Braithwaite, both British foreign minister Douglas Hurd and British Prime Minister John Major told the Soviet that NATO would not expand eastwards.
Brian E:
That “new information” is five years old. The article you quote is a summary of what the documents supposedly say. There’s a link to the full text of the documents themselves there. Read them yourself and then talk about what they are and what they actually say, not what professors Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton say they say. I’m too exhausted to do it at the moment, but I see no reason to imagine that anything in those documents justifies Putin’s actions.
I can’t get much info on Savranskaya except that she teaches at American U. As for Blanton, there’s this interesting tidbit (December 5,2020):
Multiple historian groups are suing the White House over fears that the Trump Administration will improperly maintain records before the transition to President-elect Joe Biden, The Washington Post reported Saturday.
“The archive, historians, and CREW are suing to put some backbone in the law and prevent any bonfire of records in the Rose Garden,” said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, in a statement announcing the lawsuit.
The lawsuit also targets Trump officials, including the president’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner, for keeping records of communications by taking screenshots, which the groups argue violates the Presidential Records Act.
“Misplacing classified documents is very common, happens all the time,” said Tom Blanton, who runs the National Security Archive, an independent repository of government documents based at George Washington University.
But back to NATO. We’ve discussed this already ad nauseam.
My kinsman was abandoned on giron beach a year later he was traded for tractor parts in that interval kruschev put R7s in cuba which kennedy yielded a year later they handed a poison pen to a double agent and then the same crew went over to vietnam to enbiggen the mess
@Brian E Part 1
Putin may not be trustworthy,
That would be the least of his many sins and atrocities.
but it looks like the West wasn’t very trustworthy regarding NATO expansion.
“Russian leaders often complain that the NATO extended an invitation to Hungary, Poland and what was then Czechoslovakia to joint the alliance in 1997 at the Madrid Summit in contravention of assurances offered to the Soviet Union before its 1991 collapse. The alliance has dismissed the notion that such assurances were offered, however, scholars have continued to debate the issue for years. Now, however, newly declassified documents show that Gorbachev did in fact receive assurances that NATO would not expand past East Germany.”
Ah yes, the “NATO assured us we wouldn’t expand!” meme. It’s a bit annoying to say the very least, and usually based on extremely tortured parsing of the relevant documents as well as ignoring the context.
So let’s outline some basic issues.
Firstly: The Kremlin has negative credibility talking about violated assurances when you look back on a century or more of agreements and assurances that were violated far more brutally than any of the probably-mythical ones NATO is supposed to give, starting with multiple Soviet-*Insert Nationality Here* Non-Aggression Pacts in the interwar period that promptly got stomped on when the Soviets believed they had the upper hand, leading to their requests being the driving force behind NATO expansion.
It does not take a huge amount of thinking to realize why these nations – when they regained their independence – would seek out more assurances of their security than yet another engagement with Russia. And to be brutally honest the past third of a century has done little but validate their judgement. Nations not in NATO have fared worse than those that have, and have tried to seek out neutrality in post-Soviet space have generally fared badly, with Ukraine being the archtypical example but Moldova being another.
Secondly: What many of the Blame-NATO-Expansion advocates pointedly ignore is the nature of NATO. A voluntary (certainly more voluntary than most) international organization that nations have to apply to join and that every other member state has to agree to said joining (as we have seen with Turkey and Hungary in regards to Sweden and Finland).
This means that NATO expansion would never have happened – and indeed I think there is a very good chance the organization flatly would have been disbanded – without the massive outpouring of sentiment in Eastern Europe seeking to join for the aforementioned reason. Something they had every right to do and that both the Old Guard members of NATO and – VERY grudgingly – the Soviets accepted they had a right to seek.
This is one of the big reasons why I find many of the documents usually posted to try and “prove” this mangle things. Because while senior representatives of the NATO powers could give assurances to Gorbachev or whoever that they would not seek out NATO expansion (however sincere or insincere those assurances may have been) they COULD NOT unilaterally give assurances that the new governments wouldn’t seek to join NATO. Theoretically they could have promised to turn them away or not accept any new members, but that’d both be needlessly divisive (and seen as a betrayal by other members and the new countries) and wouldn’t remove the interest in joining NATO or the tensions from that, just their ability to do so.
Thirdly: The other big thing I think gets missed is that even if NATO HAD given Gorbachev assurances that NATO would not expand Eastwards following the end of the Warsaw Pact (and I think close scrutiny of the documents as Neo shows this is not so), the fact remains that assurances given to Gorbachev or to Yazov in his capacity as Gorbachev’s legal minister likely *aren’t* still relevant if given to the junta that overthrew Gorbachev (specifically because he was viewed as being too soft hearted and leaning towards the West) or to successor governments. The Soviet hardline coup was specifically made to stop reforms and democratization in the Soviet Union, and resulted in it shattering with a whole host of SRs fleeing the union out of fear the hardliners would succeed, while the coup’s failure led to more fleeing because they supported the coup and now feared retaliation.
It should not be very surprising that seismic events like the Soviet coup and the outbreak of wars in Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, and so on would lead NATO to have to reassess any such assurances given (ESPECIALLY in light of whether they are even dealing with the same government anymore* and former SRs like the Baltics pounding on the door screaming to let them in). The West broke with decades – in most cases more than half a century – of diplomatic practice by declaring they would not extend even basic diplomatic recognition to the junta government and had to contemplate more dire objects.
In any case, the Russian Government under Putin accepted that that nations have the inherent right to decide their security arrangements and that this includes the questions of joining alliances (or not), both by his acceptance of the Helsinki Final Accord and the Astana Declaration of 2012. Making all of this utterly moot from a legal point of view.
3. The security of each participating State is inseparably linked to that of all others. Each participating State has an equal right to security. We reaffirm the inherent right of each and every participating State to be free to choose or change its security arrangements, including treaties of alliance, as they evolve. Each State also has the right to neutrality. Each participating State will respect the rights of all others in these regards. They will not
strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other States. Within the OSCE no State, group of States or organization can have any pre-eminent responsibility for maintaining peace and stability in the OSCE area or can consider any part of the OSCE area as its sphere of influence. We will maintain only those military capabilities that are commensurate with
our legitimate individual or collective security needs, taking into account obligations under international law, as well as the legitimate security concerns of other States. We further reaffirm that all OSCE principles and commitments, without exception, apply equally to each participating State, and we emphasize that we are accountable to our citizens and responsible to each other for their full implementation. We regard these commitments as our common achievement, and therefore consider them to be matters of immediate and legitimate concern
to all participating States.
Of course in hindsight it is obvious Putin never signed that agreement in good faith or was terribly committed to upholding it, but the fact is that sign it he did (or rather his foreign affairs representatives did). And it spells out quite clearly what had been touched on by Helsinki and the OSCE (as well as international law) before. That legal international alliances are a matter of consent between two or more nation-states (and ideally their people).
So in short: There are a bunch of silver bullets to this argument about this argument even before I actually look at the documents.
Anyway, with this said, let’s touch on the actual documents.
Specifically what Baker ACTUALLY says regarding the “not one inch forward” spiel, linked in full here
And I will quote the actual part from Baker that is most relevant.
Baker: If that happens, our troops will return home. We will leave any country that does not desire our presence. The American people have always had a strong position favoring this. However, if the current West German leadership is at the head of a unified Germany then they have said to us they will be against our withdrawal.
And the last point. NATO is the mechanism for securing the U.S. presence in Europe. If NATO is liquidated, there will be no such mechanism in Europe. We understand that not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.
We believe that consultations and discussions within the framework of the “two + four” mechanism should guarantee that Germany’s unification will not lead to NATO’s military organization spreading to the east.
These are our thoughts. Perhaps a better way can be found. As of yet, we do not have the Germans’ agreement to this approach. I explained it to Genscher and he only said that he will think it over. As for [French Foreign Minister Roland] Dumas, he liked the idea. Now I have given an account of this approach to you. I repeat, maybe something much better can be created, but we have not been able to do that yet.
This is the full text of the relevant part in this document, and from the start you can recognize that Majunder or whoever wrote the actual National Interest article was lying their pants off about this being an assurance.
Firstly: Baker is VERY, VERY, VERY Obvious here that this is just HIS preferred stance and that of assorted Western leaders, but that this is only a preliminary concept that has not been agreed to – let alone implemented – yet. Again, he outright said “THESE ARE OUR THOUGHTS.” Underlining that this was not to be taken as a concrete assurance or agreement, just the general form of one he was working towards BUT WHICH WAS CONTINGENT UPON THE WISHES OF OTHER PARTIES.
This particularly pops up in regards to discussion of the presence of US troops and the like, where Baker makes it painfully clear nobody elected the US Dictator of the World and that he would have to consult about these matters – whether the stationing or withdrawal of US troops, the expansion or not of NATO, and so forth – with other stakeholders involved.
Which is kind of relevant when you look at the time and realize what is about to happen in a year from this meeting.
MOREOVER, GORBACHEV EXPLICITLY ACKNOWLEDGES THIS, as I’ll discuss later.
But secondly: A cursory look at the text and timeline shows that these people parsing this as Baker promising not to expand NATO “one inch further East” is fallacious. They are discussing the reunification of Germany between the FRG (which already a NATO member) and the DRG under the Federal Republic’s banner, thus expanding NATO’s membership to the former East Germany. So the most Baker is TALKING ABOUT is whether or not NATO military hardware or “jurisdiction” will be spread further East.
This is a tough distinction to grasp, but a very important one because it devastates the central premise of the argument.
*Snip forward, discussing talks of neutral nations like Austria and Czechoslovakia fearing a Germany trying to go 1938 and talks with Britain and France. You can read the context here.*
Gorbachev: Thus, it is necessary to proceed delicately and with consideration, understanding the national feelings of the people and not hindering them, but aiming to channel the process. As for a “four + two” or “two + four” mechanism that would rest on an international-legal foundation and provide an opportunity to consult with each other and evaluate the situation, maybe following our exchange of opinions we should continue consultations with our partners in the West and the East–you as you see fit, and we correspondingly.
That does not yet mean that we have an agreement, but we should continue to seek one. You said that the FRG did not express agreement with this approach. As for Modrow, judging by our talks with him it seems that he will support such an approach. Tomorrow we can ask Kohl what he thinks about this.
Baker: That would be good. But I would like to voice one precaution. Even if we have a chance to convince the Germans to support the ‘two + four” approach, this should only be done after March 18, only after the GDR’s self-determination, and after they begin discussing the internal aspects of unification. Otherwise they will say that the four powers’ pressure is unacceptable, and unification is solely a German question. Our approach provides that unification’s internal aspects are indeed a matter between the two Germanys. However, the external aspects must be discussed with consideration of Germany’s neighbors’ security interests; they must be acceptable to them. Besides that, we must discuss Berlin’s status. If we approach the matter in that way there is a chance that the Germans will agree to the proposed mechanism.I must once again admit that I did not discuss this at all with the chancellor, and Genscher did not give me an answer. He only said that he will consider this approach. I think that he will approve it. But with the chancellor it is a different matter: he is a candidate in the forthcoming elections.
Gorbachev: This is a very important factor that leaves its imprint on the situation.
Baker: Such are the whims of democracy. He will have to act very carefully in order not to create the impression in Germany that he is handing the question of Germany’s unification over to others.
This document is supposed to be the golden goose. The silver bullet to show Western perfidy in expanding NATO, that they made a binding agreement with Gorbachev to not expand NATO and then broke it. But a cursory look at the document reveals absolutely nothing of the sort. While Baker (sincerely or insincerely – and for various reasons and other documents I think he was sincere) DID voice personal opposition to expanding NATO’s “Military jurisdiction” further East and mentioned other NATO leaders who felt similar, he also made it BLINDINGLY clear he had no authority to unilaterally give such explanations, that there were others in NATO (chiefly the Germans themselves at the time, ironically given future events) that were hesitant, and that everything would have to be checked by the electorate.
It also shows that Gorbachev knew and accepted this.
Oh yeah, and another thing.
Remember when National Interest said this?
Gorbachev only accepted German reunification —over which the Soviet Union had a legal right to veto under treaty— because he received assurances that NATO would not expand after he withdrew his forces from Eastern Europe from James Baker, President George H.W. Bush, West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the CIA Director Robert Gates, French President Francois Mitterrand, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, British foreign minister Douglas Hurd, British Prime Minister John Major, and NATO secretary-general Manfred Woerner.
Leaving aside how I obviously showed that this document does NOT show Baker giving such an assurance, AS WELL As the moral and ethical nature of the Soviets declaring themselves to have the right to possibly violent veto over democratic unification… This is something that the Soviets recognize they have an ambiguous point to at BEST. As does Baker (in part because he is actually WORRIED about the two German governments claiming the right to lock the Great Powers out of this). Which is one reason why they express trepidation about the “Four + Two” arrangement and German acceptance thereof.
This document is the central pillar of this thesis, and one openly linked and featured centrally. And yet reading it shows it not only does not substantiate many of the claims these three authors are claiming it does, in many cases it *explicitly or implicitly repudiates* several of their claims.
Miguel:
So was the Bay of Pigs and that proxy war a bad idea, or just badly done? There is a difference you know.
@Brian E Part 2
Indeed, as late as March 1991, the British were reassuring Gorbachev that they could not foresee circumstances under which NATO might expand into Eastern and Central Europe. As former British Ambassador to the Soviet Union recounted in March 5, 1991, Rodric Braithwaite, both British foreign minister Douglas Hurd and British Prime Minister John Major told the Soviet that NATO would not expand eastwards.
Right. A few things.
Firstly: Timeline. March 1991 is a very different world from that of December 1991, and a lot of things that were either hard to foresee or outright unforeseeable were either starting to come in their own or already had been. The Soviet coup and the subsequent collapse of the USSR is the obvious and most relevant of this.
So “We can’t foresee a situation in which NATO would expand” coming from one party (the British) is among the very weakest of weak sauces.
Secondly: As I mentioned before, the British Government had a right to voice its own stance on the matter – and it did – but this DID NOT magically trump or override the rights of other governments or electorates. NOWHERE is this more obvious than in the case of German Unification itself, which Thatcher and her loyalists opposed only to be diplomatically isolated.
This brings back the old kettle of fish I mentioned earlier about sovereign rights and self-determination and how these agreements would stand up to the consideration of other stakeholders like oh… Poland and its electorate. It’s queer that the authors of this piece DON’T MENTION THIS AS PERTINENT TO AGREEMENTS ON NATO EXPANSION *considering how even freaking GORBACHEV is documented as being sensitive to this matter in their own cited documents.*
Now then. Let’s talk about what the document ACTUALLY says.
Tuesday, 5 MarchThe Permanent Representatives in Moscow of the Baltic States come to breakfast: Bickauskas(Lithuania), Peters(Latvia) and Kahn(Estonia). Bickauskas is the fiercest. He says that yesterday’s ratification in the supreme Soviet of the German treaties, which was meant to “draw a line under the Second World War”, did no such thing, since the Balts -who had lost their freedom because of the war -were still not independent. He and Peters argued that the West should now formally recognise the independent status of the Baltic states. All are very pleased with the results of their various referenda. They agree with Major that they need to negotiate in good faith with Moscow, and that the outcome of the negotiations must cover the interests of the Russian and other minorities, Soviet security interests, and the complex tangle of economic links. But they all say that Moscow has so far shown no sign of beingwilling to start a genuine negotiation nor to accept that independence must in principle be one of the objects of negotiation. Peters remarks that the Balts need to make positive offers to Moscow, as well as insisting on their rights; and to be more tactful in the language they use about the Russians. Major promises to support their case with Gorbachev.
Huh, would you look at that? It’s exactly what I mentioned would come up: that of former Pact and even SR Member states and populaces clamoring to have their voices and wishes heard, and GENERALLY wishing to get as far away diplomatically from the Soviet Union and Russia as possible.
Now why on earth would these three commentators NOT mention that this diary discusses this in an article that is nakedly intended to promulgate the thesis that NATO had the power to make unilateral assurances to Russian/Soviet governments against expansion, and that it did so dishonestly?
Truly a riddle for the ages.
But wait, it gets “better.” By which of course I mean it gets worse.
*SNIP past a bunch of stuff about internal Soviet politics, the failures of economic reform, opposition to markets, and so forth.*
Next we go to meet the Generals. Yazov leads the pack, and is in fine form. He emphasises (SIC) the value of military exchanges, and remarks that this is the first time since the war that East and West have not been afraid of oneanother. Major asks him what professional lessons he draws from the Gulf about the role of armed forces in the new world security situation. This gives him a chance to launch into a great harangue about the need for trust and security in Europe which rapidly evolves into a justification of the Soviet position on NATO and the CFE. He professes to be worried that the Czechs, Poles and Hungarians will join NATO: Havel has been making equivocal statements. Major assures him that nothing of the sort will happen. He complains about the unfairness of the CFE, which was lopsided right from the beginning, unlike the SNF and START negotiations, which had clear aims and took proper account of the interests of the two sides. He claims that Western figures for the equipment transferred East of the Urals are inflated by a factor of ten. As for the resubordination of three divisions to the Navy, this was decided before the CFE mandate had been finalised in the Vienna negotiations, and the Americans had been told as much at the time
Yazov is thought of as a clod by the outside world. But as usual he is a fluent master of his brief, and adopts the same tactic of filibustering his interlocutor as Moiseev, though his manner is more urbane. Although many of his arguments seem implausible (and differ from previous attempts by the Soviet military to defend their position on CFE), he gives every appearance of believing them himself. Perhaps he has managed to convince himself that he is telling the truth. In any case it is a more attractive performance than Pavlov’s.
.
So this is the relevant section that is being focused on, Yazov discussing (among other things) fear that Central and Eastern European countries will join NATO. According to Ambassador Braithwaite’s diary (which admittedly is not a transcript) Major apparently went far beyond what Baker said and outright gave assurances that these countries would not join NATO (which of course they wound up doing).
But this brings us back to basic chronology, and it is worth remembering some basic analysis, both in terms of chronology and in particular people.
Dmitry Yazov was infamous even in his own time and milieu, and has only gotten worse with time. The Ambassador is quite unflattering about the man in his description, as he admits the man is not a simple clod but that he is a fanatic and quite willing to lie for the cause. If anything this is being much to kind, since he is probably as close to a Himmler as the late Soviet Union got, and he would be one of the leading putschists in the Soviet Coup of 1991, which would not have helped his standing or the stability of any assurances given to him precisely because people like Havel would have been able to point to things like this and the coup and shout about protection.
The fact that this article and the archive say VERY LITTLE about who Yazov was, what his role was, and particularly what he had already done and would go on to do is at best indefensibly lazy and decontextualizes this. At worst I’d say it is outright dishonesty.
But moving on..
*Snip about Major being nervous and writing down notes.*
Shevarnadze comes to supper, bringing Tarasenko with him. He seems rather unhappy, not only about Georgia (which, he tells Gill, he hasn’t visited for a long time) but about his own role in life. He has lots of excellent ideas about what to do in the Middle East following the Gulf war: imaginative ideas which he would have been one of the few people with the guts to implement. But he no longer has the power. Major mentions Yazov’s claim that the Americans were told ages ago about naval resubordination: Shevarnadze says that the first time he himself heard about it was last autumn. But some compromise will be needed. Shevarnadze says that in the end Gorbachev will have to negotiate personally with the leaders of those republics which are refusing to associate themselves with the draft Union treaty. The negotiation will have to be very detailed, very practical, and conducted as meticulously as a negotiation between East and West
For reference to what is being referred to when they are talking about Shevarnadze being nervous about “Georgia”, I link
A massacre against protestors committed by the Soviet army and state security on April 9th, 1989 (less than a year ago) and which is still commemorated.
But the message is quite clear. Gorbachev and Soviet national leadership will no longer be able to have it all their own way and will be expected to negotiate with those that dissent from them in order to keep the union together, and this is recognized as just. Again, KIND OF illustrative of the context, especially what will happen.
This document is better than the utterly self-defeating misrepresentation of the last one, but it still is nowhere near as telling as the authors want it to be, ESPECIALLY if you know Late Soviet History and its context. Major here did give (what I view as improper) assurances that Poland etc. would not join NATO, but he did so to a dishonest Soviet hardliner who would go on to stage a coup against his own government and wound up imprisoned, thus unsurprisingly changing the situation (especially with the SR ones).
“I believe that your thoughts about the role of NATO in the current situation are the result of misunderstanding,” Major had told Gorbachev. We are not talking about strengthening of NATO. We are talking about the coordination of efforts that is already happening in Europe between NATO and the West European Union, which, as it is envisioned, would allow all members of the European Community to contribute to enhance [our] security.”
This does not appear in the document. It only appears in the length description on the side, with a footnote I cannot seem to access. In any case, it still runs afoul of the aforementioned chronology issue. That this was a discussion between the British Government representing itself and Gorbachev’s government in early 1990, where all parties involved except maybe Yazov’s loyalists were blissfully unaware that within a little over a year Gorbachev’s government would cease to exist and so would the Soviet Union as a whole.
Of course, later, in 1994, Bill Clinton decided to expand NATO eastward despite the various assurances that the previous administration had offered Gorbachev—and despite legendary diplomat George F. Kennan’s repeated warnings.
And so apparently we’re supposed to believe that ABSOLUTELY NOTHING OF RELEVANCE happened between 1990 (the date of the last document quoted here) and 1994.
Nothing whatsoever.
The Soviet Hardline coup (under the partial direction of the aforementioned Yazov), the ensuing spate of secession by SRs leading to the collapse of the USSR, the start of the Yugoslav Wars, Transnistria’s War, the Georgian Wars of Secession, the ongoing Armenian-Azeri War at the time, democratization in Central and Eastern Europe…
ALL OF THIS gets completely ignored in service of an agenda. That vague assurances given by Major to Yazov at a time when the latter was still Gorbachev’s loyal minister rather than one of his enemies by the British Government are supposed to bind all of NATO forevermore regardless of changing circumstances and the wishes of the local populations (which pop up repeatedly in these documents as things to be considered).
It’s risible.
There might be a day where I’ll fisk Blanton and Savranskaya’s entire report and the 30 some sources they claim, but if this is as emblematic of the quality of their work and sources (as clearly the author of the National Interest article thought) then I think it is incredibly obvious they failed to make their case about any of the key points.
And in particular they egregiously lied about the document regarding Baker and what he did and didn’t do. Oh, ok, I’ll be generous, “Incredibly misrepresented the document regarding Baker and what he did and didn’t do.”
That’s a damaging enough indictment on their reading comprehension and ethics.
@Brian E Part 3
“The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991,”
Yes, they did. Which they have a right to do.
THEY ALSO have a right to change their minds.
And other nations have a right to lobby them to change said minds.
Which they did. Fervently.
George Washington University National Security Archives researchers Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton wrote. “That discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.”
Mostly after the fact in an attempt to save face.
But notably this also dovetails with another issue. How honest said complaints were. Because for all the ink these two are spilling in regards to dishonesty by NATO leaders (and fair enough), they seem to completely ignore the factor of deceptions and dishonesty by Soviet or Russian leaders. This is pretty jarring considering their sources OUTRIGHT TALK ABOUT THIS, and in particular the Ambassador’s Diary entry points out that Yazov was a dishonest fanatic (in as many words) and the only question was whether he sincerely believed the lies he was sprouting.
If there had been any concrete agreement (and not generic assurances by one politician or so that could be overruled or invalidated), I think the Russian Governments involved would have been the first to point out to them.
The fact that this stuff is the best that can be done cuts the legs out from under this thesis.
Indeed, Russian Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin have complained bitterly about the expansion of NATO towards their borders despite what they had believed were assurances to the contrary.
And they had a right to complain bitterly.
However, those nations had every right to point out the long history of perfidy, violation of assurances, and atrocities by Russian and Soviet governments, and also to foundational documents like the OSCE Charter allowing freedom of association for alliances.
And again, for all of Putin’s obvious ire even he did not find it politic to reject signing the Astana Declaration on “principle” that Russia had the right to demand a veto over its neighbors’ alliances.
“What happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?
In short, “Not Assurances at all (See: The Baker Document”), “Contingent upon Since-Changed Circumstances”, and “Subject to consent by other stakeholders (like new governments and the publics and governments of others in the OSCE”).
All of which add up to this basically being a fanatical attempt to deny changing reality by misreading the nature of those “agreements” (those few that actually would constitute such) and essentially demanding why Westminster does not stick to an assurance given to a man who was famous for not sticking to his assurances while ignoring the parts of the documents where it is spelled out in excruciating detail how the world is changing, how NATO cannot dictate by Fiat what other nations do, and how the USSR and Russia will actually have to remember the art of negotiating with nations in “its near abroad” and making itself appealing to them so that they want to do business with it voluntarily
Nowhere has Russia’s Late Soviet and Post-Soviet governments failed more egregiously in their Near Abroad than that.
Where are those declarations today?” Putin said at the Munich Conference on Security Policy in 2007.“No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: ‘the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.’ Where are these guarantees?”
Firstly: To state the incredibly obvious, Putin is a fundamentally bad faith actor even by the low, low standards of global diplomacy. He’s lied about things way more obvious and undeniable than what NATO bigwig said what half a century ago (remember the Little Green Men and the idea that Spetznaz grade equipment could be gotten at any Military Surplus store)?
Secondly: As far as remembering guarantees and carrying them out, I will humbly submit to El Presidente that agreements made in 1994 and 2012 are far more relevant and binding to matters at hand than ones allegedly made in 1990 or 1994 if they even existed (and as I mentioned before, in many of the cases I can provably show they didn’t, like the arcane art of “Actually reading the Baker-Gorbachev Minutes”).
But Putin doesn’t want to open that can of worms precisely because there is no world where it looks better for him.
As to the supposed peace initiative Zelensky proposed, when you read the article it’s obvious why Putin didn’t respond. It wasn’t serious.
To which I respond: on what grounds?
It was certainly more serious than Minsk I and Minsk II.
I think your comparison of the relative low casualties in their Afghan war causing backlash to this conflict is flawed.
Of course, but it was never meant to be a 1-1 comparison. Just something to illustrate the point. The Soviets lost in Afghanistan not because they lost more people in Afghanistan than Russia has in Ukraine (they didn’t), or because they particularly cared about the lives of their soldiers, but because of public backlash.
This is likely being sold to the average Russian as ‘protecting their Russian brothers from the Ukrainian Nazi onslaught’. Russian tolerance will likely be much higher.
Agreed and we’ve already seen this from the war so far. Losses are much higher than the Communists suffered in Afghanistan already and yet Russian cohesion and support is intact. Damaged perhaps but only to a limited degree, and intact. Which raises the question of how much more there is.
But the Nazis made minimal efforts to get Soviets to surrender to them or to get those that did back in contact with their families (except in the afterlife). That’s not what is happening in Ukraine and it does seem to be having an effect. Only time will tell if it has enough to influence it, but regards.
I did not write that point for the purpose of saying I knew what would happen or that Russia would definitely cave. Merely to argue that the blog post’s analysis was missing something, especially in light of previous Soviet/Russian wars.
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Since we are all talking about climate change, I stumbled upon this video addressing the deadly climate (i.e., very cold, very little sunlight) of about two or three years duration, which occurred in about 536 AD.
I was unaware of this climate event.
See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKUz5Vjq9-s
Like every climate regime the planet has experienced over the last 4 BILLION years, the 536 AD event was not due to human activities.
A very good summary from Victor Davis Hanson about the differences between the Trump classified items, and Biden’s:
https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/25/the-real-differences-between-the-biden-and-trump-troves/
Not least is the fact that Biden knew he had items he was not legally entitled to have for at least six years, and probably a lot longer.
What a great women! Thanks so much for sharing, dear Neo! I try with my daily 30 min yoga workout 😉
Santorini is said to have caused the end of the bronze age
At 83 I was as fit as she. Then I had two major surgeries. The second one almost killed me.
For the past six years I have been working at staying alive, and part of it has been doing an exercise routine. When I’m doing my routine, I feel like I’m going to die, but I feel better after I recover from the exercise. So, I’ve kept at it.
I’ll be 90 in March. Six years ago, I didn’t think I’d make it another year. But here I am. Maybe my life as a gym rat since I was 35 paid off. Or maybe it’s genetic, or maybe it’s just Karma.
So, as expected, Adam Schiff has announced a run for the Senate. We’ll see just how insane California voters are.
JJ @ 2;34
I am convinced from seeing the consequences of surgeries on elderly folks I have seen, that beyond a certain age, it’s better to avoid surgeries and hospitals if possible.
An elderly body simply cannot tolerate the stress imposed upon it from the surgery and oft times leads to other complications that make recovery (if there is one) literally impossible.
As for longevity: again, just based upon what I have seen I am convinced that genetics is the primary factor in one’s longevity. I am assuming the individual is not a smoker or too overweight (whatever that would be).
Staying active and exercising (brain and body) will / should lead to a healthier person while alive, but as far as extending one’s life appreciably I am not so sure.
If anyone was going to achieve immortality through exercise and healthy eating, it would have been Jack Lalanne. And he made it to 96. The lady in the video seems to follow a routine similar to Lalanne’s and seems remarkably strong for her age.
The thing about old age is how quickly things can go boom. Folks who look great suddenly age after a heart attack, infection, or operation, and it is downhill from there. The ability to recover just isn’t what it is at twenty.
another example of bureau incompetence
https://twitter.com/15poundstogo/status/1618738536311844867/photo/1
In case you were wondering WHY Ukraine is getting U.S. and European tanks:
“Alexei Arestovich, President Zelensky’s recently fired advisor and unofficial “Spinmeister,” was more direct. He expressed his own doubts that Ukraine can win its war with Russia and he now questions whether Ukraine will even survive the war. Ukrainian losses—at least 150,000 dead including 35,000 missing in action and presumed dead—have fatally weakened Ukrainian forces resulting in a fragile Ukrainian defensive posture that will likely shatter under the crushing weight of attacking Russian forces in the next few weeks.”
“Ukraine’s materiel losses are equally severe. These include thousands of tanks and armored infantry fighting vehicles, artillery systems, air defense platforms, and weapons of all calibers. These totals include the equivalent of seven years of Javelin missile production. In a setting where Russian artillery systems can fire nearly 60,000 rounds of all types—rockets, missiles, drones, and hard-shell ammunition—a day, Ukrainian forces are hard-pressed to answer these Russian salvos with 6,000 rounds daily. New platform and ammunition packages for Ukraine may enrich the Washington community, but they cannot change these conditions.”
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/this-time-its-different/
Mike
Bunge finds the words of a disgruntled(?) ex employee reassuring. Somehow the actual facts on the ground don’t tally up with the guy who was fired. Specifically, why Roosia has lost Kyeiv, Kharkhiv, Kherson, and has yet to take Bhakmut or get much past the town (not city) of Soladar?
Care to ponder that Bunge?
Ukrainian military casualties have been about 100,000, and civilian casualties at least 30,000. The Roosian lend lease to Ukraine wasn’t so large in the Kherson feint as it was in the Kiev or Kharkhiv bug outs. So the Ukrainians certainly need to replace the Soviet gifts. Regarding arty, the Roosians have some of their own problems; burning out their tubes, burning through their freshest stock of ordnance. And of course they are using Iranian drones and cruise missiles designed to sink aircraft carriers because they are saving their precise and most modern weapons (to attack civilians) for pressing military targets such as HIMARs. Do tell Bunge, do tell.
Then again Roosians talk about nuking everyone and have a history of genocide towards Ukraine (Holodomor, Bunge). So the unintended, or intended, consequences of a Roosian victory are more consequential than him needing a new line of work.
Information warfare and disinformation.
Don’t be Bunge.
Bunge:
“In case you were wondering why Ukraine is getting western weapons; ” nope you haven’t found Occam’s Razor, it is to defeat the Roosian invaders and expell them from Ukraine.
They didn’t have western IFVs and MBTs and yet managed to kick them out of Kyiv, Kharkhiv, and Kherson. HIMARS, modern arty, ATGMs, MANPADS, SAM systems have all taken their toll on your Roosians, but to kick Vlad and his “orcs,” as the Ukrainians call them, out of the rest of Ukraine more is needed. Training and mechanized stuff.
Weep for Vlad on your own.
Theyve only been mishandling tens of billions of dollars of our weapons and cash
Ha ha. A progressive group in California is saying Schiff wasn’t effective enough in fighting Trump.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/progressive-group-attacks-rep-adam-schiff-failed-record-trump-senate-campaign-announcement
Miguel:
And resisting the Roosians. Or haven’t you noticed? Or is that your problem with them? Forgotten who bankrolled Fidel?
If anyone was going to achieve immortality through exercise and healthy eating, it would have been Jack Lalanne. And he made it to 96.
Chuck:
Hear, hear for Jack Lalanne! A hero of mine. (BTW, French parents, I might add.)
_________________________
1984 Age 70: Handcuffed, shackled and fighting strong winds and currents, [Jack Lalanne] towed 70 boats with 70 people from the Queen’s Way Bridge in the Long Beach Harbor to the Queen Mary, 1 ½ miles.
https://jacklalanne.com/feats/
_________________________
I’m 70. I think I missed my window to compete with Jack.
Does it strike anyone else that even by om’s standards, he’s really, really, REALLY childish when it comes to Ukraine? He never posts about it like a serious, complex military conflict with physical, economic, and geopolitical impacts on millions of people directly and hundreds of millions indirectly. It’s like he’s just talking crap while playing Call of Duty online.
He can’t even bother to wonder “Hey! If everything is going swimmingly for Ukraine, why are we now giving them tanks and why are they asking for FIGHTER JETS and LONG-RANGE MISSILES?” or “Gee, if faced with losing power and (likely) his life, what might Ol’ Vlad actually do?”
Then again, om has made it clear he learned NOTHING from the Iraq War and is proud of it.
Mike
I’ll be 90 in March. Six years ago, I didn’t think I’d make it another year. But here I am. Maybe my life as a gym rat since I was 35 paid off. Or maybe it’s genetic, or maybe it’s just Karma.
JJ:
Well … I’m impressed! Keep on keeping on. It seems to be working.
Though, alas, all our luck charms run out eventually.
“Gee, if faced with losing power and (likely) his life, what might Ol’ Vlad actually do?”
MBunge:
Peter Zeihan had an interesting answer to that question. He has intelligence sources and he has heard that essentially we’ve got Putin wired. We (the NSA presumably) know where Putin is at all times.
Putin has been informed that if he were to do anything funny with nuclear weapons, Putin himself would be — guaranteed — vaporized within an hour.
Take that with however much salt as you deem necessary.
Bunge:
In case you haven’t noticed, consider that I’ve been posting links to analysis about the Ukraine war every Sunday for at least 4 months now, about the topics you have no understanding about it seems; strategy, logistics, weapons, economics of the two parties; that others recognize as serious topics.
You, not so much.
All hat no cattle. Don’t be a Bunge.
Turtler’s comments are another resource that you might consider reading if you want to learn something. That would be unusual for a Bunge though.
Your particular parroting of a post about Depleted Uranium ammunition being akin to dirty bombs shows how foolish or ignorant you are.
Propaganda/disinformation is a fact of modern war. And the Ukrainians and the Russians are both masters at the craft.
om says, “Ukrainian military casualties have been about 100,000, and civilian casualties at least 30,000.”
Quoting Col. Douglas Macgregor (ret.), MBunge says, “Ukrainian losses—at least 150,000 dead including 35,000 missing in action and presumed dead—have fatally weakened Ukrainian forces resulting in a fragile Ukrainian defensive posture.”
So who has it right?
We know we can’t believe our own government, and it’s unlikely we can believe the Zelensky government that has banned opposition news, banned opposition parties, and is trying to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
Does Ukraine have the capability to sustain a war, even with a resupply from the west? Macgregor has his doubts. Russian forces are making slow but steady progress in Bakhmut. US officials are suggesting the cost to Ukrainian military defending the town isn’t worth the strategic value. The problem is if they withdraw from Bakhmut, is there a more defensible position to the west?
Ukraine’s economy exists only because of American largess. The EU estimates the cost of rebuilding Ukraine’s infrastructure at $500-600 billion.
We’re sending main battle tanks, but Zelensky is now asking for F-16’s and long range missles. Mission creep. The fact that Germany was slow to allow Polish Leopard’s into Ukraine suggests European’s don’t see the war as an existential threat to themselves.
The US goal is regime change in Russia. Biden said so several months ago. Over the years, the knock on American intelligence is it’s very poor at human intelligence. Has our government miscalculated internal Russian politics? If so, we’re destroying Ukraine for no real purpose.
The gains Ukraine made in the north and in Kherson recovering territory early in the war aren’t likely to be repeated in the eastern regions.
https://warontherocks.com/2023/01/manpower-materiel-and-the-coming-decisive-phase-in-ukraine/
Here are interactive maps of the war. Notice the gains Ukraine made early in the conflict until September have ended.
https://www.ft.com/content/4351d5b0-0888-4b47-9368-6bc4dfbccbf5
Brain E:
“The gains Ukraine made in the north and in Kherson recovering territory early in the war aren’t likely to be repeated in the eastern regions.”
Based on what?
Notice that almost all the gains that Roosia made in the war have been lost. Or hae you forgotten that? Notice that Roosia has been fighting to take Bakmut for months now and it’s progress has been, wait for it, a few kilometers for 10,000 KIA. (back of body bag estimate),
Now you can site War on the Rocks, woo hoo, navel gazing by the insiders of the Pentagon. BFD.
You wish to keep Vladdy in charge of an expansionist imperial Roosia? What could possibly go wrong for the world or Europe with that? Roosia could do much better. But then again Yevgeny Prigozhin of the Wagner Group seems to be another murdering thug high up in Roosian power games.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wagner-group-designated-by-u-s-as-transnational-criminal-group-11674757602
Between Bunge and Brain E this is a true case of damned if you do and damned if you dolt.
“Santorini”…
Apparently, the Aegean is starting to act up again…
– – – – – – – – – –
WRT the FBI, here’s a curious one:
“I was an FBI Special Agent and if Biden won’t fix a bureau in crisis, it will be destroyed;
“Many now believe that the FBI is merely an arm of one political party”—
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/fbi-special-agent-biden-fix-bureau-crisis-destroyed
So Joe Biden is supposed to fix the FBI, is he now?
(Actually, it’s pretty clear that “Biden” has already “FIXED” the FBI….)
My prayers are for a smooth passage for Gerard, and peace and strength for Neo. My condolences for this loss to all who have him as part of your lives.
I do regret that I am only now reading his powerful writing. A commenter there did note that he has downloaded all of American Digest–a 36 hour feat.
Neo’s and Gerard’s sad news this week as well as a read of the comments at his blog causes me to note that it would serve well the multiply injected with the experimental mRNA to keep close track of cancer screenings, and to tell the the young people in their lives who have been as well to NOT ignore any signs of cardiac events–the funny heart beat runs, chest tightness, left arm or jaw pain on exertion. Fatigue. They are not “too young” to have a cardiac event, or a stroke or pulmonary embolism.
The fact is that a huge Phase Three Trial was done by injecting the experimental mRNA across the population broadly, without much monitoring of results, sadly. Well, perhaps more of a near total denial of results. Tragically, actually.
(Following one of the Rules from House of God–if you don’t take a temperature, you won’t find a fever.)
The cumulative innate and cellular immune system suppression that was first documented in peer reviewed journals from the mRNA injections nearly a a year and a half ago may well be what is leading to increased cancers as well as recurrence of existing ones, as our bodies’ surveillance is impeded.
The aggressiveness of them is striking, as well as the appearance of cell types rarely seen, esp with CNS ones.
A suggested protocol for minimizing this effect can be found here:
flccc.net
The multiple reports of the effects of the injections generated by Naomi Wolf’s work with over 3500 listeners of Steve Bannon’s Warroom under the direction of physicians, lawyers, statisticians who reviewed Phizer’s trial data (which they wanted to take 75 years to release–remember??) is now available on Kindle:
https://www.amazon.com/DailyClout-Documents-Analysis-Volunteers-Reports-ebook/dp/B0BSK6LV5D/ref=sr_1_1?crid=UWBDWSMSE0N&keywords=war+room+daily+clout+pfizer+documents&qid=1674820818&sprefix=%2Caps%2C66&sr=8-1
@MBunge
Part 1
Because it’s in the middle of a hot peer conflict and losing tanks and other equipment is what HAPPENS in those kinds of conflicts, and it is rather rare that nations (especially nations just spooling up war production) can build it faster than they lose them. This isn’t some kind of revelation, or at least it SHOULDN’T be, and it has rather little to do with how corrupt or honest a given regime is (though of course corrupt ones make it worse).
And yes, in contrast to some of the memes that have been out, Ukraine has suffered casualties in personnel and vehicles. Generally nowhere near the levels that Kremlin propagandists like MacGregor (who you cited) and their ilk claim, but still very significant Yugoslav-War tier losses that makes filling the gaps pretty important. Again, very unsurprising.
Now let’s get to the first source you cite.
Ah yes, the repulsive liar and disgrace to the uniform Colonel Douglas MacGregor, one of Putin’s little Western Sock Puppets.
Our host and some of the rest of us already went over his track record before.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/04/19/on-ukraine-being-wrong-over-and-over-doesnt-seem-to-stop-colonel-macgregor/
Suffice it to say, the man doesn’t exist to provide honest or even halfway competent analysis (which is a shame because on at least a few cases like the problems of African-American entitlement societies he is quite blunt), but to fill up space. The man shamelessly gets most of his money directly or indirectly from the Kremlin.
But that’s not even the worst part of it.
Because even totalitarian mouthpieces can get things correct, even if by accident or just from reading the script. Even if you completely ignored all of MacGregor’s idiocy regarding Jews or the obvious conflict of interest from getting his living serving as one of the Kremlin’s useful monkeys, the simple fact is that [i] the overwhelming majority of his predictions have been provably, laughably wrong. [/i] And are rarely walked back.
So let’s go through this Article, shall we?
It’s not even the first sentence and we already have the first dishonesty. Namely, shifting the blame. The Kremlin is the side that decided to invade Ukraine in 2014. It is the side that escalated that war by openly invading in early 2022. The US did not “decide to confront Moscow with an existential military threat in Ukraine” [b] No such existential military threat existed in Ukraine at the time of 2014. [/b]
Rather, it was the Kremlin that decided to confront Ukraine with an existential military and political threat, one that openly discussed dissecting the country in twain in the form of “Novorossiya” or even installing a puppet government that would “demilitarize” the country and force it into “neutrality.”
I’m not sure what point MacGregor is trying to make for a couple of reasons.
Firstly: Most sane or even remotely pragmatic governments (even extremely corrupt and authoritarian ones) generally try to avoid existential wars if they can. It’s one reason why as bad as Africa is you generally don’t see existential wars on the national or ethnic scale, and when you DO they are generally among the bitterest and longest lasting.
Secondly: Even this doesn’t entirely hold. I realize how chic it is to downplay the likes of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda as third world tinpot savages that were of no threat to us or our way of life, and on some level that is true. But it ignores the fact that Saddam managed to have a couple dozen operatives kill 3,000 people on US soil and how Saddam nearly held much of the global market in the Middle East hostage in 1990-1991 with one of the world’s largest and most modern Soviet Bloc style militaries (the fact that it folded so quickly being a surprise to everyone).
Thirdly: one could far more readily identify this description as fitting Russia, particularly post-Soviet Russia since 1990 but also the USSR as a whole since WWII. It too avoided fighting wars it could not afford to lose (or at least how it perceived as such). As the Afghan walkout they conducted (which I will freely admit puts Biden’s shitshow to shame) shows. Georgia and Moldova and Syria were hardly existential wars Russia could not afford to lose.
The great exception to this that I can think of is Chechnya, with the Chechen Separatists seizing part of internationally recognized Russian territory and even invading border regions like Dagestan, with the threat of either waging more wars or helping to propel more separatism. And even then the Russian Government was willing to make peace (albeit on humiliating terms) with them in 1996 and after a mostly-victorious round two has basically propped up and empowered a superficially-reformed Islamist Terrorist and “former” Separatist in power, where he has imitated most of the worst aspects of the Dudayev regime or even gone further (for instance, Dudayev was nowhere near as active at persecuting Christians and Jews, but with more lip service to being loyal to the Kremlin.
No, it really really isn’t. We’ve had a bunch of proxy wars with Russia before. This is the largest one and dwarfs Afghanistan, but it’s hardly unheard of.
Here we have another lie. While many in the Beltway (and even those outside it like myself, who are thoroughly sick of Putin’s bullshit) do fantasize about regime change, that has never been the main demand. The demand has not been that the Putin regime falls, but that it gets the hell out of its occupied territory in Ukraine.
All else is secondary to that.
Also while it is true that some of the chronic optimists probably hoped Russia would collapse internally by now, even those were probably stretching to believe that was likely. Especially since many of them are the same exact clowns that advocate (as MacGregor does) that we lessen sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela and even North Korea because “they’re not working” (untrue) and because we should make friends with them.
In response: Not really, absolutely not, and no.
Russia’s “relative immunity to Western economic sanctions” is a pipe dream caused by selectively reading parts of the trade data. In reality Western sanctions and seizures have already hurt the Russian economy quite a lot – especially since many of the brainlets failed to move hard currency reserves out of Western banks – and we’re already seeing struggling on the military production level (even beyond the usual early war hiccups, which are a lot less explicable in Russia’s case than in Ukraine’s due to the much more prominent role Russia’s arms sectors play in the national economy).
And Russia’s military power seriously underperformed the usual rosy estimates of Russian combat capacity by the Beltway Generals (and also Colonel MacGregor I note), with the grandiose discussions of Russia occupying the Baltics in a matter of hours or days in exercises now being revealed for the worse-than-worst-case-scenario farces they were.
Which leaves us with Russia’s societal cohesion. Which on has frayed well beyond what most have thought, especially given the increasingly open back biting in the regime and the issues over mobilization. There’s no new civil war in Russia (though that may change depending on the strategic bombings, assassinations, and anti-draft riots going on) but that’s come at the cost of Putin intentionally kneecapping his military’s strength by slow rolling mobilization.
Another lie.
Firstly: while I am loathe to give credit to the politically correct goon known as Austin, here’s the actual source cited.
https://dnyuz.com/2023/01/20/the-nato-alliance-is-holding-strong-on-ukraine-but-fractures-are-emerging/
In it, it clearly refers to the prospects of a SPRING OFFENSIVE rather than the chances of the Ukrainian War Effort as a whole.
But don’t believe me. Let’s read the source MacGregor used.
And on the off chance someone is incapable of clicking this link, let me quote.
Emphasis mine.
Later in the article we have the quote MacGregor quote mined.
In context, it’s talking about the window for a Spring Offensive that may be “potentially decisive.” Not that if Ukraine doesn’t launch it it will lose.
Which brings us back to the first sentence.
How do I know MacGregor is a dishonest Kremlin shill?
Well, when he tries to reframe a war that the Kremlin started with the express purpose of overthrowing the Ukrainian government and dismembering parts of Ukrainian territory only to fail at the former and get pushed back from much of the latter as “Washington’s proxy war on Russia is failing.”
Rather than “The Russian government has shown itself to only occupy Ukrainian territory with great difficulty and is struggling to advance even in areas where it expects it should be able to easily.” But of course that would involve candidly discussing the actual course of the war and where both sides have succeeded and fallen short, which MacGregor has no interest in doing and may not even be particularly qualified to do in light of his comically bad list of “predictions” and terrible analysis.
At least he’s not over the top stupid and evil as his colleague Scott Ritter (who in addition to being another Kremlin stooge and more open ended shill for terrorists and tinpot authoritarians is either an outright paedo himself or at a minimum enabled as such by keeping quiet on sexual abuse of children in Baathist Iraq in the name of “Peace”), who predicted that Ukraine had lost more than a quarter million dead combatants by now.
But that’s a low, low bar to jump.
@MBunge Part 2
In which Turtler continues fisking MacGregor’s lying rump, Part 2
This is actually a fair point, especially since I’ll be the first to admit that Ukrainian polities have had a bad track record of surviving in the face of dedicated assault by their neighbors. Certainly so far.
But I’ll also point out that the situation for such has rarely been this good. Previous polities in Ukraine – whether the Cossack Hetmanate and Cossack Hosts, or the assorted Ukrainian Nationalist Republics of the Interwar Period, or the competing Fascist-led nationalist underground states during WWII and afterwards – generally faced either overwhelming odds, the need to fight all alongside their borders, or internal divisions that turned violent with minimal foreign support. And sometimes it’s had to face most or all of those at the same time.
That’s not really the case here.
Yeah, this MIGHT sound convincing… if you ignore the fact that the Russian military has suffered even heavier losses, fatally weakening most of the spearpoint units that Russia would use to push through. And particularly since this war started with the Russian military not mobilized, that meant that the losses have been disproportionately weighted towards the veterans and professionals in the standing military and its kin like Wagner, much as we have seen with equipment. Which is why you’ve seen so many combat units on the Russian side forced to outright withdraw from the front in order to take on new forces.
And while the Ukrainians have suffered similarly but to a lesser degree, the brutal fact of the matter is that you don’t exactly need computer science majors or people capable of operating a Western Tank’s sights to be in a trench and hold the line. You kind of need them if you want to push through a defended position.
Like say the fortified lines around Bakhmut.
Which is one reason why one of the lesser joys in life has been the Neo-Nazi savages at Wagner proudly draw parallels about themselves to the German army at Verdun (and even the “Stormtroopers”/Proto-Stormtroopers there) heroically charging fortified positions and taking hideous losses to inflict attrition on the enemy…..
… while apparently having zero freaking clue that not only did the German Army [b] LOSE [/b] at Verdun (as well as the war as a whole), but that the “Ja, Ja, mein goal was never to take Verdun it was just to inflict attrition on the French Army!” logic was a naked, post-hoc LIE cobbled together by Falkenhayn to try and cover his butt for the failure of the offensive to do what it promised in spite of the fact that the German plans and positions around Verdun were vastly better than what the Russians have around Bakhmut (for instance, Verdun being a salient of underdefended forts almost surrounded by the Germans, as opposed to the more solid and coherent lines).
And even then it didn’t save Falkenhayn.
This is pretty part and parcel for the kind of propaganda by people like MacGregor.
True, but Russian losses in material are nothing to blanch at either.
Literally who is this source, how reliable are they, and why are they in cyrillic?
Which isn’t that surprising when you realize that this is Peacetime, Non-Crunch Production for Javelins and that there is ramping up pressure.
It’s ironic that MacGregor outright admitted the US has avoided serious and intense peer or near conflicts outside of maybe the First Gulf War and Vietnam (at least when the NVA sent its regular units in), but then doesn’t draw the distinction to how Javelin production would be low in light of the slack demands for such.
But it’s entirely unsurprising when you remember he’s a Kremlin hack whose agenda is to paint the Kremlin’s war effort in the best light possible and the Ukrainian one and its support in the worst light possible. And like a true presstitute, internal logical consistency among his different points are just so much inhibition preventing him from serving his masters.
No, they can’t. Certainly not consistently.
Which is why those days have been rare even earlier in the war and growing rarer as Russia runs through its stocks like the Ukrainians have and have had to increasingly husband their firepower for what is worth. Which is one reason why even at Bakhmut the Russian artillery fire has slackened as the campaign has gone on.
Not helped by the new Ukrainian strategic of supply interdiction, where a good amount of the artillery ammunition being sent to the front gets blown up in transit be it on trucks or in warehouses.
That doesn’t mean that Russia is “going to run out” of firepower, but it does mean that it is running low on it and is forced to husband it more.
Except artillery isn’t just a game of quantity, it’s also a game of quality. And notably the Ukrainians use significantly more smart munitions in their artillery than the Russians have and have generally (NOT always, but GENERALLY) had better shell-per-shell/rocket-by-rocket results. Especially given how much of the Russian fire has been directed towards nonmilitary targets.
It’s also ignoring the trend lines. That artillery fire is increasing for the Ukrainians and slackening for the Russians, at least on average. This means that IF the trends hold (which is a hell of an If but at least I’m willing to consider) then you’re going to see the Ukrainian artillery increasingly match the Russians.
Indeed on a few fronts this has actually happened before, like it did during the Southern offensive to retake Kherson. Nor is this just a point echoed by globalist shills or Ukrainian lobbyists, since it has been pointed out by such stalwart friends of Ukraine as… Igor Girkin the brutal Kremlin sponsored terrorist and Rybar the pro-Russian military blogger.
But MacGregor doesn’t want to address this, because it would undermine his caterwauling about how Ukraine is collapsing and how the West is losing a proxy war with Russia.
Because he’s a hack and a liar.
Again, this is how you know someone is a propagandist hack who is not even concerned about propping up “their side” accurately.
New platform and ammunition packages are EXACTLY HOW you change those conditions and how they have been changed throughout history, even before the advent of gunpowder artillery. It’s also one reason why the Kremlin decided to escalate this war, due to its increasing failure to knock out or even stifle Ukrainian artillery strength in the Donbas during the long, frigid low intensity phase of the Donbas War from 2015/6 through to Feb 2022.
And it’s obviously having an effect, as again even pro-Kremlin propaganda that actually has to give a damn about front line reports admitted in regards to the battles at Kherson.
It’s at this point that I also note you generally need more artillery fire to ATTACK than to DEFEND. A fact that was well documented as far back as the freaking 15th century and which waned with the decline of fortifications only to come back with a vengeance due to modern infantry weapons and the ability to shoot accurately while hiding behind a window.
Predictably, MacGregor is full of $*it. and is pointedly ignoring the fact that Russia has been losing far more men, equipment, AND territory than Ukraine has. Indeed, Bakhmut looms so high not because it is particularly important (it’s more important than most people realize by merit but nowhere near enough to justify the resources) but because it is one of the few places on the front where the Russian military is advancing…..
…. as if advance in and of itself regardless of the cost or strategic merit is a good thing.
(Spoiler alert: It isn’t. A cursory examination of Verdun should have taught that).
But that doesn’t change the attrition rate on Russian trained manpower or high end weapons, or the political discontent that is boiling up in Russia.
Which is remarkably in keeping with something agreed to by the US, UK,,, AND RUSSIA back in 1994. A little thing called the Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine agreed to denuclearize in exchange for security guarantees and promises of assistance from the US, UK, and Russia in the event Ukraine was attacked by anybody.
https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/v3007.pdf
Which is kind of important for a few reasons.
Firstly: It explains a great deal about the US and UK’s support of the Ukrainian War effort.
Secondly: It more than justifies Ukraine demanding an independent nuclear deterrent.
Thirdly: It underlines why Putin’s government is asshoe and cannot be trusted.
According to who?
This is the deal Russia agreed to regarding Budapest. That Ukraine would only denuclearize if it was given these assurances and that in the absence of them it maintained the right to have an independent nuclear deterrent.
Since the Kremlin has obviously broken the terms of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 through an unjustified act of calculated aggression that violated Ukrainian’s acknowledged sovereign rights (INCLUDING THOSE RECOGNIZED BY RUSSIA ITSELF in the Helsinki Final Act and Astana 2012) it can hardly claim that this is unprecedented.
Which is one reason why useful idiots like MacGregor are so useful. To help poison the well, muddy the water, and do so with at least a vague level of plausible deniability.
This is what we in “the business” call “wishful thinking.” Occam’s Razor is that it accurately reflects the feeling in Washington that if Russia is no longer going to abide by the legal agreement that provided for Ukrainian denuclearization, then obviously Ukraine has a right to nuclear armament, *and that Russia tacitly acknowledged this.*
Whether or not Ukrainian defeat is inevitable or not or whether or not Washington fears it is neither necessary nor particularly informative to explain this stance.
Once again more victim-blaming nonsense.
Moreover, I’ll note that Putin’s actions in Ukraine have actually helped unite Europe behind US policy, at least to SOME Degree, and certainly has pushed them away from the Kremlin.
This is what we call a half-true, or more accurately a half-lie.
It’s certainly true that Western Publics do not want a war with Russia. I absolutely do not and have been very open about the fact that while I am something of an anti-Putin hawk in support of supplying Ukraine, this does not extend to the likes of a No Fly Zone or sending other troops in.
However, support for supporting Ukraine and thus “postponing Ukraine’s foreseeable defeat” is quite strong and has gotten stronger in most countries as the war has dragged on. As even Russian pollsters have generally acknowledged. The fact that this winter was RELATIVELY mild (when it was predicted to be the one European infrastructure and economies would have the hardest time adapting to the absence of Russian resources from) helped.
The issue is that essentially no government, not even Crazy Joe, has wanted “all out war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf.” They wanted Ukraine to have the resources to fight, die, and kill to defend their territory.
A policy that – for all of MacGregor’s blather and lies – has proven remarkably successful. And we know it’s successful due to the political instability in the Russian leadership, the turnover of many of the leading figures involved with the invasion planning, and the increasing loss of territory in exchange for high material and manpower losses.
@MBunge Part 3
Turtler continues fisking MacGregor’s Nonsense, Part 3
There’s a reason why “men” like Kujat and Vad have become memes for their political and military ignorance and excessively pro-Kremlin attitude and prognostications. I’m not surprised that MacGregor is citing people who are at least superficially more qualified and higher ranked than he is but who proved to be just as idiotic and wrong.
Oh, and Kujat is the clown who was caught repeatedly and loudly claiming he did not believe evidence of Russian invasion even while those of us part time civilian couch potatoes were pointing to advanced Russian Federation specific Electronic Warfare systems being spotted in Ukraine.
This much is true, and it almost makes you sad… if ONLY there were some orange haired Stable Genius who pointed this out loudly and consistently to the Germans and demanded they push their fair share and even got them to make some halfhearted concessions towards that end before they walked them back. If only.
Sure, but not in the way MacGregor implies.
By all means, search though the internet browser of your choice (I don’t blame anybody for not using Google or DuckDuckGo given the propaganda and curation) for what German language sources make of him. They tend to be quite… Spicy. Because they know his track record far better than most. Better than men, and FAR better than MacGregor is counting on the English language public to know.
He’s a literal laughing stock and a meme.
And while sure you can attribute some or maybe even most of what you see on him to the German government being painfully woke and following a line, it doesn’t fit for everything. The bottom line is that Kujat is a bad joke who thoroughly discredited himself and mortgaged whatever integrity he had toeing the Kremlin’s line too close for credibility.
Far be it for me to express great confidence in awareness of historical reality among the public, let alone the leadership, but I don’t think it is.
And it’s ironic that MacGregor will then springboard onto his own exercise in ignoring historical reality.
This is true, but it ignores the fact that none of said powers could entirely ignore Ukrainian sentiment. Which is why all of the aforementioned powers actively courted or (outside of Sweden) tried to suppress assorted factions in Ukraine while Ukrainian factions played their own role.
And moreover, the US clearly thinks that its charm offensive and ability to solve trade arguments with even fairly distant countries (rather than having tariff wars older than I am with even its closest neighbors as Putin’s Russia has) coupled with the Kremlin’s brutality will allow itself to become a dominant patron in Ukraine.
And so far that has been paying off.
You know how I mentioned MacGregor would be ignoring historical reality?
Here it is.
It’s true that Poland supported Ukrainian nationalists in order to weaken the Bolsheviks (as well as White Russians). However, what lying scumbag here pointedly ignores is the fact that the idea of an independent Ukrainian state (actually multiple ones but I’ll get back to that) originated with UKRAINIANS and pre-dated Poland’s assertion of independence by kicking out the occupying Germans.
The party Polish strongman Pilsudski made the agreement with was the Ukrainian Peoples’ Republic under Seymon Petliura (that is just one translation of several).
https://polishhistory.pl/pilsudski-and-petliura-together-against-the-bolsheviks/
Petliura had been fighting for years against all comers (including some other Ukrainian nationalists under a resurgent, pro-German Hetmanate) to try and establish a Ukrainian Republic by the time this happened. With middling success at best it should be admitted, but the fact remains.
Moreover, he was just one of several.
‘
Because there was a SEPARATE but linked West Ukrainian Peoples’ Republic declared in Lviv/Lwow (which was a Polish majority city that ultimately revolted against the Ukrainians), and who ultimately fought a protracted war with Poland.
BTW: When assorted Kremlin shills fetishize about Poland invading Ukraine to annex Eastern Galicia, they’re referencing to this and hoping for a repeat. Only they’re ignoring the lack of appetite for it given the genocidal Soviet ethnic cleansing of Poles from the Kresy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Ukrainian_War (Yes I know it’s Wiki Suckia but it gives an overview).
https://www.pygmywars.com/rcw/history/lvivwar/lvivintro.html (an absolutely superb website for this period by the way).
Ultimately the Poles overreached and did not receive enough support from the West just as the Reds were defeating the Whites, meaning the Red Cavalry Armies scythed down on the flanks of the Polish-Ukrainian armies and drove them almost to the gates of Warsaw. And while theoretically Poland could have regained the offensive to try and liberate parts or all of Ukraine, Pilsudski’s political enemies had regained the ascendency and refused (obviously angry at his relatively pro-German stance and at how narrowly Poland itself had survived).
But that’s a story for another day.
Correct, “merely” extremely Communist-sentimental and happy to whitewash the crimes of the Soviet regime with repression.
https://khpg.org/en/1467327913
https://www.egyptindependent.com/images-showing-restoration-of-soviet-era-symbols-in-mariupol-posted-by-adviser-to-mayor/
How do I put this generously, MacGregor?
NOT MANY PEOPLE ARE INCLINED TO BELIEVE YOU OR THEM.
Especially given the Kremlin’s track record of breaking assurances that it will respect other nations’ sovereignty, and the fact that the regime’s had a good number of its allies or even outright members blab off about “Denazifying Poland” or “Denazifying the Baltics” (yes, while employing Wagner goons. I’ve never claimed the Kremlin is terribly consistent).
https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1686181/moscow-politician-says-russia-should-denazify-baltics-and-poland
https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1525141167498731520
Roosian information wars this week:
Conservative talk radio talking point; the west is sending “aggressive” weapons to Ukraine (MBTs, IFVs) and provoking a wider war with Roosia (dig you bomb shelter deep Bunge). Glen Beck for instance has fallen into that Panic Whore mode. How exactly you classify MBTs and IFVs as aggressive when they will be fighting on territory that was Ukrainian prior to Vlad’s invasions? Ukraine’s vast fleet of MBTs and IFVs will be advancing on Moscow and St. Petersburg (soon to be renamed as Vladograd)?
But being a Panic Whore makes money I guess.
@MBunge Part 4
Turtler rags on MacGregor’s nonsense Part 4
Hopefully I’ll be able to finish up with this chowderhead by this part.
If I may, I’d suggest it dovetails with the US’s commitments in the Budapest Memorandum. The expulsion of all Russian occupying troops from Ukraine and the preservation of Ukrainian territorial integrity, helping ensure Ukraine will either be a pro-Western Neutral or wider member of the Western alliance, while an obviously hostile and untrustworthy Putin regime in Russia (and any other regime to take power in Russia that is sufficiently similar) will be contained.
But as is typical with MacGregor, what he DOESN’T ask is at least as loud. For all of MacGregor’s dishonest attempts to frame the war in Ukraine as primarily one by “Washington” against Russia, the Fact remains that Russia is the one that escalated to violence and started it, both in 2014 and 2022.
So where is RUSSIA’S war in Ukraine headed? What does the Kremlin want to accomplish?
Well, the Kremlin’s honestly been pretty candid about its changing goals for ending the war. The issue is that none of them dovetail very well with MacGregor’s goal of trying to whitewash the Kremlin of guilt and portray it as a heroic force that was inexplicably aggressed upon but is somehow winning.
Firstly: Let’s make this clear. MacGregor is the one that decided to not-so-subtly associate Putin’s government with the genocidal, lawless “Right Wing Socialist” militarists in the Japanese government during the 1930s and WWII. I did not. This is MacGregor’s chosen comparison, not mine, mkay?
I leave it to the imagination why on God’s Green Earth MacGregor thought trying to pull the “The US alienated poor, mass murdering Tojo and Ishii and Doihara” card was a good idea.
Secondly: For all of MacGregor’s incoherent, victim-blaming blather about the US “goading” Japan to attack the Pacific, the embargo was a response to unprovoked Japanese aggression. First in China, then in French Indochina, then in SOUTHERN French Indochina. Largely fueled by Western rubber, oil, and metals.
I have little good to say about FDR, but it’s KIND OF UNSURPRISING that Western governments would want to sustain a war effort headed by the same people responsible for things such as the Rape of Nanjing, multiple unprovoked invasions, the “Golden Bat” Opium-laced cigars, and so forth, who identified the US as their greatest ideological and strategic enemy (especially after the Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact was signed in 1939).
So they embargoed the war mongering nutjobs who alternated between being incapable of controlling their subordinate commanders like Governor Ando Rikichi, and not wanting to.
It’s also worth noting that the US was not inflexible or uniformly hostile to Japan during this, and routinely relaxed or even lifted sanctions during the protracted diplomatic crises in the Pacific from the 1930s to 1941.
https://www.drake.edu/media/departmentsoffices/dussj/2006-2003documents/JapanBallard.pdf
Were one to expand upon the implicit analogy between Putin’s Russia and Control Faction dominated/”War Socialist” Japan that MacGregor decided to raise, one could compare these to “Resets” of US-Japanese relations, in which the US largely forgave Japan for its acts of aggression and while refused to acknowledge territorial conquests reopened trade.
Which the Japanese government or assorted militarists clustered around it would proceed to screw up by doing something like oh… *invading the colony of a neutral Western country* and promptly get hit with sanctions again.
(Remember: MACGREGOR is the one who decided it was a good idea to draw a comparison between Putin’s Russia and Japanese Fascism. Not me. He’s the one that opened this particular can of worms and apparently for some reason though it’d make him and his Kremlin patrons look better.)
It’s also worth noting that the Pacific War came as a result of a massive miscalculation. FDR and the other Western leaders thought that by embargoing Japan’s strategic resources they would be able to put a freeze on Japanese military aggression long enough to deal with the erupting crisis in the Atlantic world with National Socialist Germany. The logic went that a Japan unable to use its navy, its air forces, and its vehicles as much would then enter a state of relative dormancy like it had from 1934-1937 and buy time, while safeguarding the Soviets from possible attack that might lead Japan to widen the war.
This was a horrible miscalculation because they did not realize the Japanese leadership would react to the resource shortages by madly rushing into a war they knew they could not materially win.
https://adst.org/2013/11/the-failed-attempts-to-avert-war-with-japan-1941/
Not really. Washington was wrongfooted by things like the Fall of France and Chinese ineptitude and corruption. The issue is that it had long cultivated alliances and kept them. It also was (and is) an absolute beast.
<blockquote< This time it’s different.
All times are different. But there are plenty of commonalities.
I’d say that MacGregor has studied the Rules for Radicals – and particularly the Accuse Others of what you are guilty of – but I doubt he has the awareness for it.
Again. It’s the Kremlin that started a full scale war in Ukraine, against Ukraine. It is the Kremlin that has been advocating the dismemberment of the very united Ukraine it pledged to acknowledge and respect the rights of in 1994 (and again in 2012).
It’s the Kremlin whose actions endanger millions of lives directly and indirectly.
And it’s the Kremlin who more than the Western leadership blathers about being in a “war against NATO” (indeed, you can see MacGregor echoing this propaganda line) only to back off when expressly confronted on this by NATO members like Poland.
I have boundless contempt for most of what passes for our political “leadership.” But that does not mean that I am obliged to pretend that Vladimir Putin is some kind of based and redpilled defender of Western Civilization fighting the WEF for freedom and the existence of Russia.
Especially not when his own policies (especially the refusal to confront Russian birth rate declines and his mortgaging Chechnya off to Kadyrov) endanger Russia’s existence far more than NATO does.
MacGregor emotes. MacGregor does not think, and MacGregor is overtly hostile to empiricism and truth. As shown by his repeated, objectively provable lies and terrible track record with predictions.
See? I can make assertions too. The difference is, I can do a scintilla of research to back them up.
Correct, but MacGregor – being the lying Kremlin shill he is – ignores the flip side of the Coin.
Kremlin has repeatedly made grandiose claims about the “Denazification” of Ukraine, the “Demilitarizaiton” of it, and the creation of a “Novorossiya” embracing most or even all of the country on the Left Bank of the Dnieper while also claiming its war fighting ability is greater than that of NATO.
And yet its best troops were pushed back from Kyiv and it now struggles to take Bakhmut in a battle Wagner (idiotically for the reasons I mentioned) compares to Verdun while ignoring how Verdun ended even with the attackers having far more advantages than Russia does.
No matter how unprepared the US is to fight all-out-war with Russia, RUSSIA IS OBVIOUSLY FAR LESS PREPARED TO FIGHT AN ALL OUT WAR WITH THE US.
LET ALONE AGAINST THE US AND ALL THE ALLIES THAT WOULD JUMP ON BOARD.
Which makes this bit of psychopathic scaremongering thoroughly theoretical, and not even particularly useful theory at best.
A Kremlin that has lost between 150,000-200,000 killed trying and failing to reach the upper Dnieper against Ukrainian troops is not capable of effectively defeating the US. Period.
Remember my point about how MacGregor is the one that decided to whitewash the responsibility of Japan’s brutal nutjobs for WWII in the Pacific, and how he decided to conflate his patron Putin with them?
Yeah. In any case, we should be surprised if war between Russia and the US breaks out, for the same reason we were surprised that Japan would decide to fight a war it could not win against the US in an attempt to continue fueling a war it MIGHT be able to win years down the road at a slow pace and immense cost.
But sure brah, the remaining Contractniki that survive Kherson and Kyiv and are now slowly fighting in positional battles along Ukraine will be able to conquer the Baltics by Breakfast.
Ridiculous, laughable, dishonest, and worst of all aggressively evil.
I’m glad I’m done with that trash of MacGregor’s.
@MBunge Part 5
I’ll admit the thought has crossed my mind and I certainly don’t agree with it.
But then you are also incredibly childish on many occasions, and our host has had to explicitly call you out for your sanctimonious behavior, lies, and dishonesty more than once.
Fair, and I disagree with that. Which is why I do try and post.
That said, uncritically shoveling BS from MacGregor is hardly posting about it like a serious, complex military conflict that will affect millions of people either.
At my most generous it is the equivalent of offshoring your critical thinking, analysis, and respect to some random posting online (who in this case turns out to be a psychopathic Kremlin shill). At worst it is uncritically spreading blood libel by one of said shills to smear others for the crime of disagreeing.
Neither looks good. Especially given the holes one can poke in MacGregor’s posturing and “analysis” (as I spent four parts outlining) with even a modicum of knowledge on the field.
Maybe, but it’s obvious you aren’t wondering either.
Lend-Lease continued until slightly AFTER the end of WWII.
https://www.miningjournal.net/news/records/2015/08/in-1945-truman-ended-lend-lease-program/
Is it ok for me to say that the war effort was going “swimmingly” for Britain or the Soviet Union or other Allies in early September, 1945, when Japan had surrendered?
Ok. Is it ok for me to say the war effort was going “swimmingly’ for them earlier in 1945, say about July?
If according to your logic supplying weapons and equipment is a sign that things aren’t going swimmingly and that one nation is on the verge of defeat, why did we continue supplying our major allies with Lend-Lease in WWII well after it became clear we were going to win the war?
PERHAPS it has something to do with the fact that high intensity war is a Pita that causes a lot of losses, even if you are winning (and I won’t even claim Ukraine definitely is winning at this point)? Or how about the fact that nations will need military equipment restocks even if the war they’re being used for ends tomorrow?
Apparently you considered approximately 0% of this, or – let it not be said I am prepared to be generous- if you DID consider it, you provided absolutely no evidence you ever entertained such a possibility or explanation.
Which becomes doubly awkward when you realize that Russia is ALSO hitting up its friends, allies, and even a few neutrals for military equipment.
If the war effort is going so swimmingly for the Kremlin, why is Putin sourcing artillery ammo from North Korea?!? You know, the sort of ammo that MacGregor assured us Russia can continue firing dozens of thousands of per day and sustain?
https://www.csis.org/analysis/north-korea-sends-ammunitions-russia
Now, the actual explanation and one I entertain is that there’s nothing particularly remarkable about this. Both sides are running low on different stockpiles of equipment and ammunition they either need to replace or want to stock up on so they have operational fat to burn. Which we saw repeat throughout multiple wars through the centuries, most famously with the Shell Crises of WWI. Which makes it natural that both Ukraine and Russia would seek to source more supplies and equipment, especially since they can’t compete with expenses at this stage of the war with industry trying to ramp up.
But because MacGregor and *apparently* You are incapable of coming up with any explanation beyond “The walls are closing in on Ukraine” and don’t want to admit that attrition happens even in victorious campaigns, I’m forced to point to this “paradox” that isn’t really a paradox and ask you if you ever thought of it.
I’ve asked myself that plenty of times, but while it is pressing it is ultimately unknowable. Moreover, it’s FAR LESS RELEVANT than the question of “If faced with victory over Ukraine, what might Old Vlad actually do”?
We know the broad contours of that answer. We’ve seen lesser versions of it play out in Transnistria, Georgia, and Syria. It means almost nothing good for the West or the people involved, even on the most base and cold calculus.
(Remember when Kremlin apologists went all out claiming Assad and Putin were fighting terrorists in Syria and were important vanguards defending Christianity unlike the decadent West?
Yeah. That’s dropped off a bit since Kadyrov’s loud mouth has become more evident and Assad’s back to openly supporting the Mullahs.)
Don’t you fucking DARE try to accuse others of not learning from the Iraq War, Mike Bunge.
Because as I called you to the carpet multiple times with sources, you keep regurgitating freaking blood libel. You’ve tried to dance around the fact that while his arsenal was much less impressive than reported, chemical impregnated Artillery Shells are still a WMD. When confronted with the Philippines pointing to Saddam’s government as enabling Abu Sayyaf (a franchise of Al Qaeda) to operate, you elaborately danced around the issue to try and avoid claiming that such an action constituted an alliance or aid.
Because apparently you’d rather whitewash a genocidal nutjob Stalin/Hitler homage act and terrorist sponsor who walked hand in glove with Osama (with nowhere near the operational distance the MSM and co have claimed) in order to continue vilifying people like us.
I have my disagreements with om, but I do think they sum you up quite well.
@om
It’s also stupid. Yes, MBTs and IFVs derive most (THOUGH NOT ALL) from their power from the offense. Though you CAN still use them defensively (and more competently than the Egyptian army that decided to bury large of them up to the turret in 1967) such as in mobile defense, they typically behave better on the offensive.
HOWEVER, this ignores the fact that there is a quantitative difference between TACTICAL OFFENSE OR DEFENSE, and STRATEGIC OFFENSE OR DEFENSE.
Japan’s “Great Banzai Charge” towards the end of the Battle of Okinawa was obviously a major tactical offense, with more Japanese soldiers than ever seen in the Pacific rushing American lines with guns outstretched and blades glistening (where they were unceremoniously cut down). However, this tactical offense was against the context of a strategic DEFENSE, the failed attempt by Japan to hold Okinawa, one of its major colonial possessions (and one of the few it still has).
So just because you’re fighting defensively on a tactical level doesn’t mean you aren’t on the offensive strategically. And likewise just because you’re attacking tactically doesn’t mean you aren’t defending strategically.
This applies to tanks.
Arguably the first tank recognizable as what we’d consider modern was the French FT tank (often called the “FT-17”).
Their maiden deployment was in early 1918 against the German Spring Offensives, where they did good service in counterattacks and holding actions that blunted one of history’s greatest strategic offensives.
So the idea that tanks are inherently an offensive weapon is dumb and reflects an escalation of the war (..in which case what do we call the Russians sending much of their top tier tanks to Ukraine well before?), and I am disappointed at how many people fell for it.
@Brian E
Agreed with caveats. I’m not entirely sure how masterful they are given the many obvious oopsies they’ve made. They are however quite PRACTICED at it.
(If you want a real master class at propaganda, study the Slovenes during their struggle to break free from Yugoslavia.)
Honestly both sides probably do to some degree. Though (and never let it be said I am unwilling to say it) MacGregor’s numbers are probably more current to “now.” Though they conveniently omit Russian numbers being somewhat harder.
Agreed, though it is probably a sad state of affairs that they are probably more reliable than most.
Ok, here’s where I have to step in. Because while I agree with the wider point (we shouldn’t believe what Zelenskyy’s government or that of any other Ukrainian government says on face value), this I think shows how pernicious propaganda is.
Especially the point about “banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.” Which is simply false no matter how you cut it.
At most Zelenskyy has talked about (as in Talked, not actually done so, at least OFFICIALLY). banning or censuring Orthodox Churches that answer to the Moscow Patriarchate.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2022/december/lavra-ukraine-orthodox-church-russia-religious-freedom-uoc.html
This is a pretty important bit of context for a couple reasons.
Firstly because the Moscow Patriarchate (in spite of its posturing to be the Head of the Orthodox Churches or at least the First Among Equals) IS NOT all of Orthodox Christianity. And indeed there was a long running conflict over which Patriarchate (if any) Ukrainian Orthodox Churches would answer to fought within and amongst assorted religious officials and parishioners. Nor was this new or directly tied to the war.
https://orthodoxia.info/news/proposal-for-dealing-with-the-ukrainian-issue/
Secondly: This brings us to why the split came.
Simply put, the Moscow Patriarchate has not been a great friend of Ukrainian secular independence or rights. In particular it has regularly (and correctly in my opinion) been accused of being too slavishly loyal to the various rulers of the Kremlin – especially Tsarist ones and Putin but also the Soviet – and not as concerned with its obligations to God under the Great Commission.
This is particularly evident with its tendency to excommunicate people like Ivan Mazepa, who was a Cossack Hetman who rebelled against Moscow in alliance with Sweden after being fed up with Russia’s dominance.
https://risu.ua/en/andriy-yurash-ecumenical-patriarchate-s-non-recognition-of-mazepa-s-anathema-poses-a-serious-problem-for-roc_n93157
Now, I actually don’t have a hugely positive opinion of Mazepa – he was no saint by any stretch and committed many sins in pursuit of power and whatever higher goals he had – but his sins were decidedly SECULAR in natural. I have never heard a coherent dogmatic or theological reason for why he should be excommunicated, because I doubt there is one. He was an enemy of the Tsar’s mortal power, not the Church (even in the form of the Moscow Patriarch).
But he was treated as such. Which fits in well with similar abuses of dissidents and the like.
But this has reached really big levels under Patriarch Kirill, a goon who quite literally acted as a KGB spy and who among other things perverted his vows and obligations to God to serve the “Chekists” of the late Soviet Union.
https://www.academia.edu/37152767/The_Mikhailov_Files_Patriarch_Kirill_and_the_KGB
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg5_GvssAw0
He has not exactly grown with the position, especially since he recently overturned centuries of precedent and dogma to essentially claim the equivalent of a Crusader’s Indulgence (or if anything an even wider one) for those who fight and die for the Kremlin in Ukraine.
https://anglican.ink/2022/10/05/russian-soldiers-who-die-in-battle-will-be-absolved-of-their-sins-patriarch-says/
It’s REALLY hard for me to understate just how radical this is for people not in the know theologically. But to put it this way, even the Catholic Crusader’s Indulgence was usually not the absolute one it is portrayed as, with it being contingent upon sincere repentance of sins before or during the fight.
And that’s the Catholic Church.
Eastern Orthodoxy *REALLY DOESN’T* have something like this, certainly not on the same level. Which is an issue the assorted Patriarchs of Constantinople and others told Emperors from the Later Romans to the Tsars about.
https://spzh.news/en/zashhita-very/90916-neozhidannoje-bogoslovije-ot-patriarkha-kirilla
So Kirill is essentially twisting theology on a massive level to try and sanctify Putin’s war to dismember Ukraine by claiming those who die in it will be absolved of their sins. Which would be dodgy even in the context of a literal Religious Crusade, let alone this.
So I hope you can understand why many Ukrainians and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches would POINTEDLY Not want their churches to be subservient to a Patriarch who prostituted his vows to the KGB and has now warped theology to serve Putin? Especially since while this is probably the worst example, it isn’t the only one by a long shot of the Moscow Patriarchate inappropriately mingling the Grand Commission from God and the Kingdom of the Next World with the worldly, secular Empire of the Tsars?
So unsurprisingly there’s been some pretty heavy pushes and discussion on how to deal with officials that answer to the Moscow Patriarchate. And I can’t blame them for that.
It’s worth noting the US’s Founders went further in a similar example, with the Anglican Church being headed up by King George III. While they never banned the Anglican Church, they DID institute rather draconian political and even theological limitations on them, to the point of (what I view as unjust) banning prayers for the King.
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel03.html
So similar caveats apply to the banning of “opposition parties” and “news.” He has done that, but with those he has at least claimed are fatally tainted to the Kremlin rather than being all opposition (as shown by some of the debates in the Ukrainian Rada). Whether or not I believe him is another thing (given how fallible people are), but it is hardly the kind of 1984 style he is accused of.
A better reason to not trust Zelenskyy or the Ukrainian Government’s claims sight unseen is simple. They are politicians of a government, and one in a state of war with censorship to boot.
But we should also extend that to the Kremlin, who have if anything a far worse track record of lying.
Probably. Certainly for years and years to come.
It’s worth noting that it took the Soviets something like 12 years after reconquering the region to put down the much smaller and more localized Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the “Banderaists” they blather about) in Galicia. And while Bandera obviously wasn’t using anything as fancy as an Abrams (let alone a jet) the same extends to the Soviets. And this was with the “Ukrainians” Having a fraction of the resources and population thye have in this war while the Russians have less.
What doubts MacGregor has or doesn’t have are irrelevant to me, the man is a paid liar and scumbag as I hope I have outlined in detail, and so what “doubts” he expresses publicly dovetail with that of those who are paying him in the Kremlin. It would be like listening to Fauci on the vaccine.
Probably true, though the progress is incredibly bloody. Moreover, Bakhmut is a shorthand for not just the town itself but the outlying defensive line.
Sure. The Dnieper remains a formidable object to say the least. The issue is less about defensible positions so much as trying to maintain resources and the initiative.
Untrue, though that is a big part of it. But Ukraine’s agriculture is key.
Agreed, at least.
Agreed, but also unsurprising. Ukraine has been prone to mission creep by all players since 2014, and Putin’s invasion is a symbol of it. I can’t blame the Ukrainians for wanting the ability to secure their skies, even if I am leery about it.
I mean, Germany’s SPD is infamous even among Europeans for being particularly dovish and pro-Kremlin even among European Leftists and Globalists. So I’m not too surprised. A bunch of Europeans certainly view this war as existential to them, and many that don’t were influenced at least in part by the losses there.
Maybe, (and for once I wouldn’t blame them given how toxic and evil Putin has been), but the chief goal now is to evict Russia from Ukraine.
Largely true.
Given the current set of globalist geniuses, almost certainly.
There’s something perverse about reading this when Putin is mouthing about a Greater Russian ideology that has repeatedly tried to destroy the very *concept* of a Ukraine or a Ukrainian people.
We’re not the one destroying Ukraine. Putin is, like many other tyrants in Moscow have tried to do over the centuries. Ironically that very effort probably helped create the modern concept of Ukraine.
Probably true, since that place is even more dense trench and bunker country. But this war has been surprising, and in any case the Ukrainians want it back.
Fairly unsurprising (though the Ukrainians have been making some headway in the South and far North). But the Ukraine war has shifted a lot between long periods of positional fighting and short periods of maneuver warfare. The extra troops, resources, and equipment didn’t change that inherently.
But in any case one thing I’ve found annoying is the focus on what the US wants out of this (as if it started the war) and whether or not it aims for “regime change.”
On its own this might be a decent subject for discussion, but not in isolation of the wider point. That the Kremlin got into this war and it is well worth talking about how it seeks regime change in Ukraine if not its dismemberment as a nation, and that he is obviously persisting in this in spite of how it is clear his intelligence agencies miscalculated and probably outright lied to him.
Turtler:
Bunge hasn’t noticed all the links I’ve posted to nearly all of Perun’s analysis on Open Threads nearly every Sunday. When cdrsalamander posts something topical about Ukraine or have a Midrats podcast about Ukraine I post those links too. When The Cheiftan posted a commentary early in the war about the Roosian losses to drones and video clips from Kiev and how such video footage can mislead I posted the links.
Bunge hasn’t done squat to show any serious thought, only panic.
neo’s blog has diverse content and my interest in the Ukraine conflict (Vlad’s war) seems to be much greater than most who comment here. It is particularly ludicrous for Bunge to complain about sub adult behavior and interest in various computer games (projection, Bunge?) Video gaming is not my thing, Mikey,
Brain E seems to have fallen into the Roosian disinformation vortex, for example his past fixation with the Azov battalion. He may snap out of it?
Thanks for the detailed fisking of MacGreagor and those who continue to lap up MacGreagor’s spew.
Turtler, thanks for your detailed history lessons.
Whatever you think of Macgregor, he may be right on Ukraine. He is often on Judge Napolitano’s podcast. Do you think Napolitano is a shill for Russia as well?
There is a case to be made that the Donbas and Crimea have a legitimate claim to independence. Of the 7 million people that left Ukraine at the start of the Russian invasion, nearly 3 million went to Russia, with the rest going to a variety of European countries, so a large minority of those, probably in the Donbas and Crimea went to Russia.
IMO, it would be in the best interests of Ukraine to divide the country with the four annexed oblasts plus Crimea given their independence. If they choose to join Russia, so be it.
Even it is possible for Ukraine to retake Kherson, Donetsk, Zaporizhya and Luhansk oblasts plus Crimea, should it?
Here is an Australian soldier involved in the fighting around Bakhmut for the Ukrainians. He has a sober analysis of the current situation. While at the end he thinks it is possible for Ukraine to retake these areas, or at least stem the potential disaster it’s going to take the right help from the West which would require the type of help I doubt any western government will offer.
Untold Reality Of Wagner Group In Bakhmut Ukraine | First Hand Account, What The Media Wont Tell You
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKZpYglZrW4
Here’s a podcast that gives a daily update at the front lines.
Ukraine War Update (20230127): Full Frontline Update
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AaV8jrVwE8
Both of these are pro Ukraine.
Brian E:
Give Vlad’s aggression a partial reward, almost all of the Black Sea shoreline, almost all of the eastern border with Russia, Crimea and see how it plays out? Roosian forces ensconced in Crimea and supported by Vlad’s railroad and road bridges to Russia were essential to the “liberation” of those oppressed Russians in February 2022. Vlad and imperial Roosia wouldn’t use those same tactics and then some in a new war of liberation once this special operation is settled? After all, there still may be Nazis or satanists in what remnant is left of Ukraine. And of course that remaining Ukrainian remnant must be at peace with Roosia, and in proper alignment with her protector, Moscow. (sarc)
Another link for daily updates of the war, tactical not strategic:Reporting from Ukraine
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=malSA0xbNrs
Interesting analysis.
“It has now been ten months of war in Ukraine, and the West still seems hell bent on fighting the war it wants the war to be rather than the war it actually has on its hands.
Although cautious voices warn about this being a protracted war of attrition — I have been saying this since, well, April — many people seem to expect it to end in 2023. The most optimistic (rash?) even see the summer of 2023 as the terminal date. I believe this optimism is unwarranted. The war will not end by the summer, and it will not end by the winter. We will be lucky if it ends in 2024. If I am right about this, the current Western strategy of “just in time” financing and arming is fatally flawed, and unlikely to help Ukraine prevail.
Let me explain.”
https://slantchev.wordpress.com/2022/12/29/the-west-is-still-fighting-the-wrong-war/
If he is right, it’s unlikely Ukraine will prevail. It will take a fundamental shift in attitude by the Europeans. This should be their fight.
om,
Move the 14,000 US troops currently stationed in Poland to the west bank of the Dnieper in Ukraine.
who’s the cynic, mcgregor, who seems to one of the only ones not on the gravy train, like general mccrystal (to think I once felf sorry for him, because of michael hastings) or petraeus, or mattis, or kelley, or mcmaster (who seems to have forget his thesis topic) or you move up the ranks to milley and austin, for whom ‘white rage’ is the real enemy, this is why rosalynn boyland and ashley babbitts are unpeople to them, and don’t pretend they were not murdered by capitol police,
what have the last 30 years, of foreign expeditions yielded except lives lost and maimed, so now we are scaling up to nuclear armageddon, and we know there is no end, for zelensky we know what happens to those forced out, and putin shambling and the crew that runs him have made it clear nothing but regime change is on the ball,
Brian E:
You have reverted to Brain E. I was hopeful, but you relapsed.
Miguel doesn’t remember how wrong MacGreagor has been in 2022.
Dig you own bunker Miguel or will you share one with Bunge? After all, DU munitions are dirty bombs. (LOL)
Are you projecting Vlad’s tendencies into Ukraine?
It is really fantastic (look up the word Miguel) how you got from Ukraine to the murder of Ashli Babbit; talk about a rabbit hole and Wonderland.
@Brian E
It is the least I can do.
I would not bet on it, for the various reasons I mentioned. The fact that he is a paid Kremlin propagandist is really one of the lesser reasons to distrust him. There are Kremlin propagandists or at least those supportive of it that are reasonably reliable (or at least not completely out to lunch) about it.
MacGregor isn’t just biased or even in pay to an authoritarian, his accuracy rate is truly abysmal. As people like our host and I noted from keeping track of him.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/04/19/on-ukraine-being-wrong-over-and-over-doesnt-seem-to-stop-colonel-macgregor/
Now, does that mean he will always be wrong? Of course not. But it very much falls into “Broken Clock” territory in my opinion.
As a Californian exile I do not have a great opinion of Napolitano for a bunch of reasons, but I do not know. I would have to check. But in any case, I do think the systematic dishonesty and incompetence by MacGregor is even more damning than his ties to the Kremlin.
Not as things stand, I do not think so. The last honest referendums held in Crimea (which admittedly were years ago) were in favor of remaining with Ukraine but under a special autonomous status (and severing the entire or even large parts of the Donbas Basin simply never came up, even if the exact borders were there).
And for the record I actually don’t have any in depth moral opposition in principle to the idea of Crimea or some or all of the Donbas joining Russia…. IN THEORY.
What I do object to, however, is a violent foreign invasion on false pretenses seizing said territories by a mixture of force and fraud using “votes” of such laughably insincere nature that Maricopa looks like a bastion of duty and republican virtue, and then waging an aggressive war to claim yet more.
So suffice it to say, if Donbas and Crimea have a right to join Russia, then
A: Ukraine has every right to demand and receive the (peaceful, non-launched) return of its portion of the Soviet Nuclear Arsenal that it surrendered in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum (linked here) in return for assurances that its independence and territorial integrity would be respected and defended by the US, UK, and Russia within the borders of the former Ukrainian SR.
https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%203007/v3007.pdf
B: That said transfers would only occur after a *lawful*, demilitarized referendum.
Of course, for reasons I will get into later these are things that Putin has no or even less than no interest in doing.
This is probably true – I will need to check – with the caveat of “which Russian invasion? the one in 2022?” (I’m not being sarcastic, was just checking). But yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised. In general while Southwestern Russia is something of an agrarian deindustrialized rust belt (sort of like the American Midwest but starting from a lower position and dropping further) it has generally fared a lot better than the Donbas (even before the 2014 invasion, and the disparity has only gotten wider since then). The fact that the war in the Donbas started out chaotic and then turned very static didn’t help, so it was natural a lot of people would flee for the relatively greener pastures of places like Kursk.
Though I think a key X factor is this can only be what are forced deportations by the Russian government and its vassals in the DPR and LPR, forcing people in the area into Russia regardless of their wishes. Perhaps the most clearcut issue of this is the forced orphaning and adoption of Ukrainian children by Russian families. I don’t fault the adopters TOO Much – since the war is a tragedy and it is generally better to risk a foster family than not, and I am sure many are good people doing their best- but the Russian state knows full well this stuff is banned under international law precisely because (as the Soviet Union co-signed) forced adoptions under the aegis of the state are a mechanism of ethnic cleansing and genocide and ones detailed as far back as the start of the 20th century in regards to things like the Armenian Genocide.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-november-16
But while the children are the most infamous cases, this absolutely has not been limited to them.
https://lieber.westpoint.edu/deportation-ukrainian-civilians-russia-legal-framework/
This I think puts a serious asterisk on the Three Million number, given there is the open question of how voluntary this is.
Moreover, I think this is telling for a couple different reasons, but starting with the fact that from a military perspective it is of sub-par practicality at best. While militarily any military or security forces have a vested interest in avoiding suspect populations in its rear reaching a critical mass for various reasons (the risk of guerilla actions by them, the fact that they are a drain in supplies) they generally DON’T want them to be shifted this far, because that’s another burden on the already strained logistics (especially since Russian logistics are less flexible than many). In general from a strictly military point of view it is to Russia’s benefit to have the Ukrainians or other non-Russia aligned countries take as many Ukrainian refugees/displaced as humanly possible outside of those that can be mined for human intelligence or recruited.
So by pushing these people to places like Kursk or entering them into the adoption system, the Russian state is actively undercutting its own logistics and ability to sustain the war in the short to medium term, especially at a time when sanctions and decreased margins (like for instance the extremely onerous oil deal the Indians inked with them) make it less practical.
But from the perspective of a culture war and the desire to denationalize these people, it makes a lot more sense as a long term investment. And one that various Russian states (among others of course) are hardly unfamiliar with. Including Putin’s own government, given his treatment of groups like Ingush orphans.
That I think justifies the label of ethnic cleansing with good circumstantial evidence for genocide.
I can’t agree for a bunch of reasons. At best this might – MIGHT – be a workable situation for some kind of final peace settlement.
The problem is: what would make such a settlement final? What would make it stick? Why would we trust a Russian government that already violated the last territorial settlements outlined at things like Budapest 1994 to keep to this?
One of the lesser told stories that tends to be lost among the blather and information warfare is that Zelenskyy was actually one of the most dovish major figures in Ukrainian politics prior to the start of this war, coming to political prominence precisely because he claimed he was willing to seek an end of this war, even at the expense of limited territorial and diplomatic concessions.
One of the centerpieces of this was a referendum to partition the Donbas, to be carried out under international observation after all armed forces were withdrawn from the area.
This actually cost him A LOT of flak in internal Ukrainian public, opinion, as you can see here from this English language, Ukrainian-focused Soros Front Group.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2019/05/29/zelenskyi-team-proposes-referendum-on-peace-deal-with-russia-heres-why-thats-a-problem/
(Also note the date of it).
So this was a major risk on Zelenskyy’s part and it cost him. It also put him solidly as one of the most conciliatory and dovish of the Ukrainian Loyalist political leaders.
And Putin rewarded this proposal with….. Silence. If he or his government ever made a formal response to this proposal, I have not seen it (which is quite possible since I am a monolingual English language scrub) and in any case it clearly wasn’t acceptance.
So in essence, Ukraine can’t do what you propose because the Russian government will not agree to it. And I think the reasons for it are simple.
The “referendums” in the Donbas and Crimea were rigged even by the low standards of Maricopa, and Putin for reasons that still baffle me didn’t make much of a show trying to hide that. This particularly vexes me in the case of Crimea because I have an inkling he might have been able to win that vote legally. But in any case ever since then Putin has been die hard opposed to allowing the kind of “clear the room” up or down vote conducted under more or less fair and free conditions without a bunch of armed thugs like Girkin around.
And given Russian (not just Putin, but primarily centered around him) foreign policy, I think I have a fair idea why. Because this is very similar to the Kremlin’s conduct regarding Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, among others.
To distill my theory in short, Putin doesn’t want a clear cut case where these territories are given their independence separate from him. He also does not want a clear cut case where parts of them are returned to the host government and the rest are given “independence” or annexed to Russia or the like.
And the reason why is fairly simple. As long as they are in a state of limbo, they remain highly useful diplomatic pawns as well as military ones, which can be highlighted or de-emphasized in order to extract diplomatic concessions or other benefits from – say – the Moldovan Government. It also serves as a perpetual freeze on these countries joining NATO in particular and a number of other international agreements due to the hard ban on nations joining with territorial disagreements.
So Putin would ideally want the entirety of these countries, preferably divided into a mixture of extremely pro-Russian/directly Russian occupied “separatist states” and a broadly demilitarized pro-Russian government that these areas could at least nominally be reintegrated into, all happily under Pyotr’s Tricolor.
But failing that, he wants to basically remember these countries utterly dysfunctional, unable to either retake the territory occupied or to completely make a break and draw a line under the bridge. Which is one reason why Zelenskyy’s proposals for a plebiscite for the Donbas met with such a cold shoulder.
However, I do think he SERIOUSLY has miscalculated Ukrainian strength, both in 2022 and even in 2014. A good example of this was the dream of “Novorossiya” that was floating around as early as 2013 and particularly in 2014, which was the stated goal of many of the rebel groups (and the Russian military units fighting under false flag with them), encompassing the entire Donbas along with a land bridge stretching down to Crimea. Even more territory than they have now.
Only back in 2014-2015 this fell apart due to staunch (if often disorganized and underequipped) loyalist resistance, which was often defeated but not decisively broken. So the Russians peaked out at occupying about 2/3rds of the Donbas before they started to be pushed back later in 2015 and 2016, before they sort of settled down to holding between a third and a fourth of the Donbas depending on when you measured it.
The open entrance of Russian troops under their own flag into the war has given them the strength to occupy far more than they did back in 2014/2015 and to approximate the “Novorossiyan Dream”, but they are still falling fallow for a bunch of reasons, starting with the fact that they seem to have massively overestimated the enthusiasm of former “Blue” Ukrainians – who were often habitually Russian-speaking, ethnic Russian, and generally more pro-Russian than their peers further to the West – for the invasion.
But the long and short of it is that even if the Ukrainians were willing to make this kind of deal (as Zelenskyy considered), Putin is not interested in accepting it and the limits that would entail on his power and ability to interfere.
Which I think leaves Ukraine with two choices. To either submit to whatever terms Vladimir has (and atrocious terms they are, even if they have been moving after the initial defeats in 2022) or to fight on.
I don’t think this is a terribly hard call for them. Threats that Russia might nuke them if they continue fighting? Putin might nuke them tomorrow regardless of what happens, so they might as well have more of their own country to have the fire spread out on. Putin might escalate the war? Question is in what way. Putin might engage in more devastation, ethnic cleansing, or the like on Ukraine?
Well, given the track record of his troops in Ukraine so far (even with GENEROUS allowances for exaggeration and smears by the Ukrainian Loyalists and their allies) and similar cases in Georgia, Chechnya, and Transnistria as well as past history like the Holodomor and the “Southern Wrath” (as some Finnish and Swedish historians coined Pyotr the Great’s terror campaign on the Wild Fields in retaliation for Mazepa’s defection), that’s more of a risk if they stop resisting.
Especially now with things like the old NKVD and NKGB documents from the post-WWII years outlined showing how Beria’s murderers were happy to dress up as former Ukrainian Insurgent Army and Polish Home Army troops (and even recruit turncoats from them) to commit murders against the civilian populace in order to (further) blacken both organizations (though to be fair the Ukrainian Insurgent Army under Bandera was plenty murderous and probably helped destroy itself by that).
I would say so (though some extremely anti-Donbas Ukrainian Loyalists like Aleksandr Motyl disagree). Ukraine would certainly benefit from being able to demonstrate its capacity that it can retake ground and even at least Threaten to throw the Russians out of the country. If nothing else it would help deter the Kremlin from trying more nonsense later and help give Ukraine resources, strategic depth, and more of a popular mandate.
I’m under no illusions that rehabing the Donbas and Crimea would not be an utter bear, especially given the genuinely pro-Russian sentiments of many there (especially the Crimea). But I think for the reasons I’ve mentioned, Ukraine has to at least show it is capable of threatening to do so in order to help push Moscow to a peace deal that will actually stick unlike the Pinkie Promises of Budapest 1994 and Astana 2012 and Minsk I/II (and prior peace deals in Transnistria and Georgia).
As Trump pointed out, strength in negotiations is the ability to walk away. A Ukraine strong enough to flip the bird to Putin and even those in the West (looking at you, Germans) who are intent on forcing it to compromise its constitutional and territorial integrity with the possibility of retaking that territory by force is a much stronger and stabler Ukraine. One that might be curbed by other means (such as credible threats of nuclear escalation) but which at least benefits from being able to show it.
Of course, all of this could go terribly wrong or flatly not work. I’ll freely admit that Ukraine’s government IS corrupt and dysfunctional, and might turn out worse. I certainly am not willing to go before God to swear on my soul that Zelenskyy is the very ideal of republican integrity, and of course the project might collapse due to Russian and Pro-Russian Resistance/ Ukrainian Corruption/etc.
But I think for various reasons most of the alternatives to not trying are far worse for Ukraine than most of the situations where it tries.
And as a former humanitarian worker I do think there is a good chance of Western largesse that can at least somewhat help the Rehab Work. Ukraine is quite the country with potential and plenty of resources, which makes it a curiously enticing investment option for the scrupulous broker.
The fact that it is also highly corrupt and not that transparent (as our friend Hunter can attest) makes it appealing for the usual globalist unscrupulous broker, who might help rehab the area to some degree so long as much of the funding gets diverted to gold plated “Save the Planet” nametags and other graft.
Interesting, and thanks. I’ll have to watch through them and digest before I can intelligently reply, but I greatly appreciate the redirects.
And thank you for the civil and fair response.
I care about this country and how it’s being carved up and sold in pieces, how xi the man who killed 10 million people is untouched, how all of his enablers are in office, that includes mcconnell and graham and all those other colonel blimps,
how our military is being purged, our fuel stocks depleted, our cities ravaged,
i’m willing to wager thats what agitates bunge, and geoffrey and others who have reservations about this game of caucasus roullette we are playing,
Brain E:
Here you go, today’s update from Reporting from Ukraine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nap8dyUGl58
Often he provides detailed map analysis which include topographic information, not just lines on a satellite images.
What would MacGreggor say/do? The Ukraine jesus. (sarc)
Miguel:
Geoffrey, of the 13 minutes, spent months rationalizing Vlad’s motives and blaming NATO for Vlad’s invasion. Sorry to pop your narrative. That dog don’t hunt.
Bunge is Bunge,
Turtler —
Thank you. That was quite comprehensive.
Yesterday I commented on the reasons I’ve stepped away from blogs this last year.
I forgot #5: I’m sick of all the supposed “conservatives” who have gone all-in for Putin, which as far as I can tell is mostly I-Oppose-The-Current-Thing-ism: If Biden and the Democrats say something is a good idea, it must a bad idea; if Biden and the Democrats say Putin is bad, he must be good; etc.
This is, to put it bluntly, moronic. And dangerous.
Muscovy-cum-Russia has always been a psychotic bully nation, unhappy until it has conquered and absorbed its neighbors, and then unhappy until it has conquered and absorbed its new neighbors, etc. etc. There was no functional difference between the USSR and pre- or post-Soviet Russia, it was just the Russian Empire with a different name and formal ideology. It annoys me to the utmost that people old enough to remember the USSR somehow think that Russia has changed.
As for Glenn Beck, who I mostly respect, and Tucker Carlson and Judge Napolitano and so forth: for the moment I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they saw that I-Oppose-The-Current-Thing-ism was growing in popularity with their viewers and got out in front of it for commercial reasons. For the moment.
The Ukraine War [edit: which we did not start or provoke, but since Putin started it] is an opportunity for the US to kneecap one of our two major geopolitical adversaries for decades at the least and possibly even forever if they collapse, and all for the low low price of mere money, not American lives. Yay!
If you think that’s a bad idea, what the f*** is wrong with you?
@Brian E Part 2
Sorry, was distracted by your prior reply and my longwinded response to it.
I read through the Slantchev blog post pretty quickly (I have always been a fast reader) and on the whole I think the author makes many of the correct conclusions, especially that this would be a grinding war of attrition (which I admit I predicted from how most of the Donbas War has been, especially after the Russian attempt to make a decapitation blow on Kyiv failed) and that Western and especially European support must escalate in order to even try and achieve the goals, and how we have seriously underinvested in weapons and the maintenance of our military stocks. I also agree with him that the Kremlin is not seriously interested in negotiations except as a means to buy time and try to get some sanctions relief.
The main issue I disagree with him on is his prediction of Russian endurance capacity, especially in terms of casualties.
There’s a lot to unpack with this, but I disagree with most parts of it.
And the simplest way to I think highlight the problems with the calculation is to repeat it, but rather for 150,000 dead in the Ukraine war spread across Russia for the however many deaths we calculate the Soviet Union (as opposed to its Afghan quislings or the limited WARPAC support staff) took in Afghanistan (which is almost certainly less than the deaths Russia has taken in Ukraine to date, with the most common estimates I’ve seen ranging from about 15,000 to 30,000 Dead), spread out across the much larger are and population of the Soviet Union.
It winds up much much smaller than the toll Russia has suffered in Ukraine. And yet it was sufficient to seriously destabilize the Soviet Union and helped cause its collapse.
I disagree with this for a bunch of reasons, mostly starting with the fact that Hanoi was a prototypical totalitarian war state that was forged in the fires of first the half-victory half-defeat against the French (more on that later) and then incredibly savage internal war against the Northern opposition (Such as the Vietnamese KMT/VNQD?, Royalist Paramilitaries, and assorted freelance partisans) and the brutal “Land reform” that killed hundreds of thousands of people in nominal peace time.
This seriously damaged and destabilized Vietnam’s economy and wellbeing in ways that still linger today… but it had the bonus effect of crushing most internal resistance and cementing the power of a centralized, totalitarian party, wholeheartedly geared towards the subjugation of Indochina at any cost.
Putin’s Russia is authoritarian rather than totalitarian and not geared to the sort of total war that Hanoi was. It is a better place to live than North Vietnam was in the 1950s or even 1980s, but it also has much more to lose and less to gain. Especially in terms of its demographics. More on that later, but North Vietnam (and Vietnam as a whole) had the typical demography you associate with an agrarian society. Young population with lots of children, including good surpluses of angry young men who could be shipped off to fight without the surplus being so large it is at the risk of destabilizing the society (as the PRC is suffering from now).
Russia on the other hand is seriously suffering from shortages of angry young men or the stable family and clan units that helped it field the massive armies it is famous for.
Again, the main issue I have with this and counterargument is to run the figures for the deaths from the Soviet war in Afghanistan through this for the entire Soviet Union and realize that the Soviet Union was destabilized by a far smaller death toll over a far longer time frame.
It’s also worth noting that while this works for napkin math, there’s also the demography involved. While Russia’s demography (and that of former Soviet Space) is a bit wonky due to things like higher infant mortality rates (plus abortions) and a big age gap in mortality between men and women, it’s more typical than not. Most of those deaths are still among older and/or sick people. Most of whom (though not all) are very different from the overwhelmingly-young-to-middle-aged men who would fight and die in battle.
Now there IS overlap (for an extreme caricature example to illustrate the point, let’s create I. M. Conscriptovich, a violent Krokodil addict from Tver who would have died of an overdose in a back alley, but who in this timeline was conscripted to serve in Ukraine where instead they overdosed and died in a foxhole and thus were added to the tally). But there’s less overlap between the figures than not. And young adults and middle aged men are what Russia – especially Ethnic Russians – really need.
This also ties into another point. That I think Russia will be Much more sensitive to the losses of manpower it suffers, at least in some cases. Especially from urban areas like St. Petersburg and Moscow, which is one reason why we see those areas and their people suffering disproportionately few casualties, far less than we would realistically expect.
Urbanites – especially around those two cities – tend to be wealthier, connected, and have wealthier/connected friends. And when they complain they tend to be louder than a historically depowered rural populace. So better to recruit heavily from places like Tuva and Buryatia.
But there are limits to how far this can go because there are only so many Tuvans and Buryatians (to say nothing of those that are in prime military capability and willing to serve), and those villages with 1-2 funerals have also hollowed out a lot in the decades since Brezhnev, with the young male populace thinning out as the Russian population has demographically aged and rotted away.
Sure, but if those 1 to 2 bodies are in a burnt out one smelter town turned economic wasteland in the middle of Smolensk Oblast where you had maybe five young men to start with, the society will Feel the pain, much like it did during the Afghan War. And unlike during the Afghan War there’s a lot less demographic fat to burn.
This I think is one reason why the Kremlin is going to be much more sensitive to losses than the napkin math indicates. Not out of any great sense of humanity or compassion, but because Putin knows full well how lots of military deaths destabilize Russian governments. It happened to Brezhnev, it happened to Gorbachev, and it happened to Yeltsin. And those are just within the past half century or so. We could go much earlier.
And it is worse because the troops that were first up to get culled in the heavy fighting of the first months of the war tended to be prime military and demographic personnel. Not just fit young to middle aged men but also the best trained and equipped of them, who had to fight at a disadvantage due to the way the Russian military structures its units and the lack of good trigger pullers. Which is one reason why the tempo of the war has slackened, especially on the Russian side, as the Separatist areas are engaging in major conscription at least on par with the Ukrainian Loyalists if not probably far more while the Russian Government is trying to pluck as many feathers on the mobilization bird without society screeching too hard.
This is also why you see interests by the Kremlin to try and offshore the deaths and casualties, by bringing in more foreign fighters.
It’s still good to PREPARE for the worst, and it was a mistake to expect the Kremlin to give up this fight easily. However, this does mean I think the napkin math Slantchev did is based on a few crucial false premises. Namely that no society – including Russia – can continue fighting a high intensity war forever, especially not with the demographics Russia has and with the tension.
So the “cheap help” I think is more likely to work than Slantchev gives it credit for… though that doesn’t mean we should get complacent and EXPECT it.
Turtler —
And young adults and middle aged men are what Russia – especially Ethnic Russians – really need.
Zeihan prophesies that this is the last high-intensity was Russia will ever be able to fight due to ongoing demographic collapse made worse by losing lots of young family-age men. (The same goes for Ukraine, but they seem less likely to want to start any further wars.)
the Separatist areas are engaging in major conscription
I saw a lot of stories about the L/DNR snatching men off the streets several months ago and nothing since. I’ve also heard rumors of Siberian conscripts being assigned to the L/DNR armies instead of the Russian Army, so my conclusion is that the separatist areas have been pretty much picked clean by now.
@miguel cervantes
Sure, that’s what tends to happen with large scale support infusions to countries way less corrupt than Ukraine is. Doesn’t mean it is all they are doing or that it isn’t helping.
MacGregor’s just on a different gravy train, namely one with its checks cashed by the Kremlin. You don’t get a regular spot being a commenter on RT and Pravda without that. You might judge that that is the less toxic and dangerous gravy train compared to the one you describe (and I wouldn’t even disagree) but it does go a long, LONG way to explain his track record. Especially the way he rubberbands.
I wouldn’t call MacGregor a cynic. I wouldn’t even call him an idealist. He is a jobber who mouths the lines he is told to or at least expects his masters want him to.
And frankly I think that whatever the Kremlin or anyone is paying him, it’s way too damn much. The guy’s analysis is dismal even in comparison to my own, and that’s before I get into the “Thought it was a good idea to compare his masters to Japan’s Juntas in the 1930s” issue.
Agreed.
It’s also why I am far more concerned about the US home front than Ukraine. And while it is awful of me to say, I would be willing to grant Ukraine to Putin’s “tender mercies” lock, stock, and barrel if it meant getting our country back. That’s awful and something I regret but I cannot deny it.
The issue of course is that isn’t what would get.
Well, let’s start with the fact that not all lives lost and maimed are bad. The world is a far, far better place without Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in it. It is a shame we did not get Mullah Omar and more of them.
Let’s also start with the fact that we’ve helped stabilize the Philippines, Kurdistan, and Israel, and while the first one is going into the PRC’s orbit at least at the top level the Jihad in the South is burnt out.
We also have had the dreams of grandiose Islamist terror attacks on the heartland flicker down to the “Flock of Lone Wolves” attacks. Still dangerous and terrifying and more connected than the left wants to admit but a useful reprieve, especially now.
We’re not the ones doing that. Putin is, or at least has happily been willing to threaten to do so.
Again, untrue, especially since the baseline US demands have been an end to the Russian occupation of Ukrainian territory. Putin can at least theoretically keep his throne if he does that.
But frankly given the truly atrocious nature of Putin’s regime I wouldn’t fault many people for seeking regime change. Mark Steyn pointed out what a vile demon he was about 20 years ago and why he was never trustworthy. He’s just reinforced that. That doesn’t mean he can’t be replaced with people so much worse that we lament his time, but it does mean that talks of appeasement have been fruitless.
Anybody remember when the Globalist Left were peddling “Reset” and throwing Georgia under the bus?
Agreed, which is why I think America First must dominate, and Ukraine must come second or more likely much further down the line. I just feel it is in American interests to help Ukraine resist an invasion by Russia.
Agreed. But on the other hand if you want to get at Xi, destabilizing and weakening his greatest strategic ally is a good way to go. It’d also provide us breathing room.
Agreed, which is why I think we need to focus there.
Bunge I’m more skeptical of, especially given how they handily demonize anybody and everybody who correctly pointed out Saddam was not the innocent lamb Iraq War Truthers have pointed at. But as for the others, fair enough. There’s a LOT to have reservations about here, especially while the American Homefront is imploding or worse.
Which is also why I’ve always said that my commitments to Ukraine come well and truly below those to America and why I despise Brandon and his enablers with every core of my being. But I don’t see how stopping the globalist deep staters and other scum from hijacking the country is helped by allowing one of their chief “Show Heels” to tread over Budapest and subjugate a major global breadbasket.
@Bryan Lovely
Thank you for your kind words.
I try, for better or worse.
I’ve been feeling something regarding politics. I was a child of 9/11 and the 90s and have become well and truly jaded, especially given the feet of clay so many early heroes have proved to have and their betrayals. That along with Trump’s defeat (by skullduggery if not at the ballot box) has given me a deep sense of doom for the US and sometimes I wonder how much chance there is a fight.
Agreed entirely.
I’ve seen this entire argument going about how what are we doing being on the same side as Soros, Merkel, Biden, Obama, Schwab, and so forth. Which is a fair point to make, but something they ignore.
There’s another situation where that was the case. All of those people and their factions were united against The Islamic State.
But I don’t think that means we magically concluded that if Obama opposed IS, it MUST be good. Putin is not as bad as IS is, but this reinforces the point that what you are against is less important than what you are for.
Agreed on the whole. It’s a brutal simplification and I think there are grounds to quibble, but that is on a matter of decades.
I’m not sure I’d go that far. The Tsarist Empire and Putin’s Russia were awful, but they weren’t the kind of apocalyptic, messianic nightmare that was the Soviet Union. Very few Russian governments even espoused the idea that it was their destiny to conquer the world by force of arms (and while I think Pyotr the Great would have been charmed and flattered to hear of his legendary deathbed testament that it was the job of the future Romanovs to do that and maybe regretted not saying it, there’s a reason we have no evidence for it).
In contrast that remained Soviet dogma from beginning to end. And they MEANT it, at least until Khruschev’s term. Lenin tried fervently to start a second world war in the 1920s, and one of the world’s great hinge moments was Stalin dying when he did as he prepared for a mass murder of the Jews of the USSR and preparations for a new World War. The revolutionary zeitgeist only began to crumble after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even then it was dangerously potent stuff. And the declassified documents from the Soviet regime show how seriously the regime took its propaganda and ideology internally (as well as how much less of a gap there was among them than the “Cynical Camp” interpretation school thought there was). Stalin spent hundreds of hours doing esoteric stuff like writing literary critique on Marx and Engels long after he was already totalitarian ruler of his empire. So either he and many others believed it, or they were happy to play along with the official ruse on a serious level (as Beria did). And that nearly plunged the world towards apocalypse.
Putin’s awful – and I think nobody who has read even a fraction of my blather can doubt my stance there – but I would take him over Lenin or Stalin or even Khruschev any time of the Millennium. Hell, I’d even take Ivan IV over them.
Agreed. That and I think the way that the Dems have demonized Putin’s Russia as a catchall boogeyman and used it to attack us does not help. They’ve been playing chicken with this problem for years in order to bludgeon us, and that’s going to trigger skepticism.
Exhaustion over the previous wars moreso.
To play Devil’s Advocate, I can understand many Ukrainians or Pacifists thinking so. Also the Russians of course and the sort of traditional Paleocon Isolationists and those on right and left (and oh yes, Putin has his simps on the Left and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise) who support the Kremlin.
It’s an ugly bit of power politics at best, and I’ll admit that even if I support it.
I wouldn’t go quite so far, though it might be the last either country in its current state does. Russia has suffered demographic collapses before, and while none as far as I can tell were ever this sharp or steep except maybe the Mongols there were those that came CLOSE.
In any case, I’d rather the Kremlin weaken.
That’s probably true, at least in part. That’s actually been leaked by some pro-Kremlin hawks discontent with current management, like the aforementioned Girkin, who have painted a dire status for the manpower situation in the occupied areas.
To be fair the Russian military has been assigning its troops to the separatists for a LONG time now (literally years), so it is hard to gauge. But yeah, the number of willing Separatist troops legitimately from the Donbas can’t be that high.
Turtler —
I’ll see your apocalyptic, messianic nightmare and raise you Wagner/Russia displacing France from West & Central Africa, cuddling up to Iran, meddling in Venezuela, etc. etc. etc.
From their external behavior, there’s not much difference between Ivan, Peter, Catherine, Nicholas I, Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Putin. Every one of them has been a threat to their neighbors and a horror to populations they were able to conquer. The ones in between were not so much of a threat merely because Russia’s ability to project power waxes and wanes. It’s like that meme about the tiny Australian critter clinging to a finger: he wants to kill you, he just can’t.
It’s said that Islam has “bloody borders”. If they’re worse than Russia’s, it’s only because they’ve been doing it for longer.
A lot of what the USSR did was ideologically-motivated subversion (see Yuri Bezmenov et al). Putinist Russia does a lot of non-ideologically-motivated subversion. I don’t see much difference in the intent or practice, except that the early Sovs tried to bootstrap local subversives like the CPUSA and the later Sovs financed the green and anti-nuke movements; while the Putinists concentrate on trolling and riling up the pre-existing subversives and inciting factional strife (and I’m pretty sure they still spread money around). See, e.g., all the wink-and-nod stuff about how Trump was their boy and how sure they interfered in the election and various anti-woke anti-gay pronouncements. I don’t think Putin really gives a damn about Pride parades in the US one way or the other, he just wants us to weaken ourselves over them.
@Bryan Lovely
Oh I know quite a lot about that and I stand by what I wrote. All of that is absolutely horrifying. It’s also way way less than what the Soviets did even on a slow decade.
I wouldn’t quite go that far, but there certainly wasn’t as much. Lenin was almost certainly the worst of the lot (judging from the words of his own loyalist Molotov) with Stalin as an honorary second and either Putin or Ivan or Nick I coming next.
Absolutely agreed.
Well that was a major point but some were also more sincerely interested in diplomacy. Empress Elizabeth and Nicholas II for instance were sincerely interested in some level of co-existence with their neighbors, even if they could be brutal and ruthless in their own rights.
Eh, Islam I’d say is more virulent and bloody minded than even Russian expansionism for a fair few reasons, including its desire to conquer the world in a way few Russian leaders did.
Absolutely agreed there. Though as I fear we are seeing the ideological subversion has longer legs and likely more nightmarish long term consequences.
Turtler and Bryan Lovely. I’m enjoying your back and forth. It’s enlightening, especially concerning your views of Soviet/Russian history.
I was once in a war and had friends die. It was a just war to stop the expansion of Communism from North to South Vietnam. We had all the cards – better weapons, more money, and the support of other free nations. Blood and treasure were spent in large quantities. But, in the end, we didn’t have the will to win. Our politicians turned their backs on the South Vietnamese. I hate war, and I have an innate fear of protracted quagmires.
I fear the same will happen here, because the Biden administration is too cautious and yet, also too arrogant. And because Putin is willing to spend as many lives as necessary to achieve his aims. He believes he can wait us out. His main problem is money, but right now he’s doing okay financially. If we unleashed our oil industry, that could change. With Biden in charge that’s unlikely.
Also, this war, has shown that WWII tactics don’t work anymore. Why? Smart weapons, IMO. WWII tactics = Artillery softens up the target, then tanks move in and drive the enemy into a retreat, followed by infantry in armored vehicles occupying the newly conquered territory. It’s not happening because artillery can be targeted precisely by the enemy, tanks and armored vehicles can be destroyed with Javelins and other precise weapons. The result is a stalemate. Until either side develops new and more effective tactics for capturing and holding new territory, the stalemate will continue.
Will the German tanks change things for the Ukrainians? I doubt it. I’d like to be proven wrong.
Just my two cents.
JJ, I have a neighbor, a Vietnamese refugee who is now an American, who routinely thanks every guy he sees wearing a “Vietnam vet” cap. He says he’s seen what communism does firsthand and never wants to see it here. So, from Thi and from me, thanks for your service.
JJ:
You might want to view Military History Not Visualized on you tube regarding it Perun (?) regarding tanks and armored warfare. Basically, the Roosian army didn’t use what they had, tanks and IFVs with any intelligence (tactical doctrine) and didn’t have infantry with the tanks to deal with the Ukrainian anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) teams. In the first Chechen war the Soviet armour was decimated in Grozny, again bad tactical doctrine. Do Soviets and Roosians learn? Eventually, maybe.
Will tanks and IFVs make a difference for Ukraine? IMO, yes, if you train them not to fight like the Roosians. It seems that US (and UK) armored tactical doctrine worked quite well in Iraq. Tanks, IFVs, arty, drones, ATGM, even jets, are tools to be used well or poorly. Unfortunately, they kill and destroy.
Did Vlad care about that when he invaded Ukraine? I doubt it.
There are parallels diem was killed we had a wider war amin was killed dudayev was killed saddam was killed you get the picture two on their side two on ours yeltsin saw the first chechen war as a power play with the obshina (their mob) he didnt realize it was a proxy war of general intelligence and isi)
The latter is boddanskys conjecture of chechnya as seed for global jihad
Moyar proves diem was more right than state believed amin was more pro soviet then the stavka general staff
Why are we depleting our military stores when the real threat is china
Which we have bound india brazil and saudi real clever move
*Shrug*
Depleting military stores won’t be considered a problem in a context of a prior strategic decision to surrender upon the first sign of enemy hostility.
How did our proxy wars in afghanistan or libya turn out in the final analysis
Miguel:
How did our proxie, moxie, cottontail war in Cuba turn out? Was it justified?
How did our war in Korea turn out?
How did our actions in El Salvador turn out or Panama or Granada? Wouldn’t want to cherry pick would we?
How did Che meet his end again?
Turtler,
Putin may not be trustworthy, but it looks like the West wasn’t very trustworthy regarding NATO expansion.
“Russian leaders often complain that the NATO extended an invitation to Hungary, Poland and what was then Czechoslovakia to joint the alliance in 1997 at the Madrid Summit in contravention of assurances offered to the Soviet Union before its 1991 collapse. The alliance has dismissed the notion that such assurances were offered, however, scholars have continued to debate the issue for years. Now, however, newly declassified documents show that Gorbachev did in fact receive assurances that NATO would not expand past East Germany.”
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/newly-declassified-documents-gorbachev-told-nato-wouldnt-23629
As to the supposed peace initiative Zelensky proposed, when you read the article it’s obvious why Putin didn’t respond. It wasn’t serious.
I think your comparison of the relative low casualties in their Afghan war causing backlash to this conflict is flawed. This is likely being sold to the average Russian as ‘protecting their Russian brothers from the Ukrainian Nazi onslaught’. Russian tolerance will likely be much higher.
Brain E:
Oh the evil NATO meme rises from the dead.
Turtler has addressed this before with Geoffrey. And put it to bed, but that was months ago. Something about a bad penny comes to mind.
Putin has shown himself to be untrutstworthy for decades, by why pay attention to past behavior?
More from the article:
“The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991,” George Washington University National Security Archives researchers Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton wrote. “That discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.”
Indeed, Russian Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin have complained bitterly about the expansion of NATO towards their borders despite what they had believed were assurances to the contrary. “What happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today?” Putin said at the Munich Conference on Security Policy in 2007.“No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: ‘the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.’ Where are these guarantees?”
As the newly declassified documents show, the Russians might have had a point. While it was previously understood that Secretary of State James Baker’s assurance to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “not one inch eastward” during a February 9, 1990, meeting was only in the context of German reunification, the new documents show that this was not the case.
Gorbachev only accepted German reunification—over which the Soviet Union had a legal right to veto under treaty—because he received assurances that NATO would not expand after he withdrew his forces from Eastern Europe from James Baker, President George H.W. Bush, West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the CIA Director Robert Gates, French President Francois Mitterrand, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, British foreign minister Douglas Hurd, British Prime Minister John Major, and NATO secretary-general Manfred Woerner.
Indeed, as late as March 1991, the British were reassuring Gorbachev that they could not foresee circumstances under which NATO might expand into Eastern and Central Europe. As former British Ambassador to the Soviet Union recounted in March 5, 1991, Rodric Braithwaite, both British foreign minister Douglas Hurd and British Prime Minister John Major told the Soviet that NATO would not expand eastwards.
Brian E:
That “new information” is five years old. The article you quote is a summary of what the documents supposedly say. There’s a link to the full text of the documents themselves there. Read them yourself and then talk about what they are and what they actually say, not what professors Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton say they say. I’m too exhausted to do it at the moment, but I see no reason to imagine that anything in those documents justifies Putin’s actions.
I can’t get much info on Savranskaya except that she teaches at American U. As for Blanton, there’s this interesting tidbit (December 5,2020):
But from an article written just a few days ago:
But back to NATO. We’ve discussed this already ad nauseam.
My kinsman was abandoned on giron beach a year later he was traded for tractor parts in that interval kruschev put R7s in cuba which kennedy yielded a year later they handed a poison pen to a double agent and then the same crew went over to vietnam to enbiggen the mess
@Brian E Part 1
That would be the least of his many sins and atrocities.
Ah yes, the “NATO assured us we wouldn’t expand!” meme. It’s a bit annoying to say the very least, and usually based on extremely tortured parsing of the relevant documents as well as ignoring the context.
So let’s outline some basic issues.
Firstly: The Kremlin has negative credibility talking about violated assurances when you look back on a century or more of agreements and assurances that were violated far more brutally than any of the probably-mythical ones NATO is supposed to give, starting with multiple Soviet-*Insert Nationality Here* Non-Aggression Pacts in the interwar period that promptly got stomped on when the Soviets believed they had the upper hand, leading to their requests being the driving force behind NATO expansion.
It does not take a huge amount of thinking to realize why these nations – when they regained their independence – would seek out more assurances of their security than yet another engagement with Russia. And to be brutally honest the past third of a century has done little but validate their judgement. Nations not in NATO have fared worse than those that have, and have tried to seek out neutrality in post-Soviet space have generally fared badly, with Ukraine being the archtypical example but Moldova being another.
Secondly: What many of the Blame-NATO-Expansion advocates pointedly ignore is the nature of NATO. A voluntary (certainly more voluntary than most) international organization that nations have to apply to join and that every other member state has to agree to said joining (as we have seen with Turkey and Hungary in regards to Sweden and Finland).
This means that NATO expansion would never have happened – and indeed I think there is a very good chance the organization flatly would have been disbanded – without the massive outpouring of sentiment in Eastern Europe seeking to join for the aforementioned reason. Something they had every right to do and that both the Old Guard members of NATO and – VERY grudgingly – the Soviets accepted they had a right to seek.
This is one of the big reasons why I find many of the documents usually posted to try and “prove” this mangle things. Because while senior representatives of the NATO powers could give assurances to Gorbachev or whoever that they would not seek out NATO expansion (however sincere or insincere those assurances may have been) they COULD NOT unilaterally give assurances that the new governments wouldn’t seek to join NATO. Theoretically they could have promised to turn them away or not accept any new members, but that’d both be needlessly divisive (and seen as a betrayal by other members and the new countries) and wouldn’t remove the interest in joining NATO or the tensions from that, just their ability to do so.
Thirdly: The other big thing I think gets missed is that even if NATO HAD given Gorbachev assurances that NATO would not expand Eastwards following the end of the Warsaw Pact (and I think close scrutiny of the documents as Neo shows this is not so), the fact remains that assurances given to Gorbachev or to Yazov in his capacity as Gorbachev’s legal minister likely *aren’t* still relevant if given to the junta that overthrew Gorbachev (specifically because he was viewed as being too soft hearted and leaning towards the West) or to successor governments. The Soviet hardline coup was specifically made to stop reforms and democratization in the Soviet Union, and resulted in it shattering with a whole host of SRs fleeing the union out of fear the hardliners would succeed, while the coup’s failure led to more fleeing because they supported the coup and now feared retaliation.
It should not be very surprising that seismic events like the Soviet coup and the outbreak of wars in Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, and so on would lead NATO to have to reassess any such assurances given (ESPECIALLY in light of whether they are even dealing with the same government anymore* and former SRs like the Baltics pounding on the door screaming to let them in). The West broke with decades – in most cases more than half a century – of diplomatic practice by declaring they would not extend even basic diplomatic recognition to the junta government and had to contemplate more dire objects.
In any case, the Russian Government under Putin accepted that that nations have the inherent right to decide their security arrangements and that this includes the questions of joining alliances (or not), both by his acceptance of the Helsinki Final Accord and the Astana Declaration of 2012. Making all of this utterly moot from a legal point of view.
Regarding Astana, I direct you to the link here.
I also highlight this in particular.
https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/b/6/74985.pdf
Of course in hindsight it is obvious Putin never signed that agreement in good faith or was terribly committed to upholding it, but the fact is that sign it he did (or rather his foreign affairs representatives did). And it spells out quite clearly what had been touched on by Helsinki and the OSCE (as well as international law) before. That legal international alliances are a matter of consent between two or more nation-states (and ideally their people).
So in short: There are a bunch of silver bullets to this argument about this argument even before I actually look at the documents.
Anyway, with this said, let’s touch on the actual documents.
Specifically what Baker ACTUALLY says regarding the “not one inch forward” spiel, linked in full here
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16117-document-06-record-conversation-between
And I will quote the actual part from Baker that is most relevant.
This is the full text of the relevant part in this document, and from the start you can recognize that Majunder or whoever wrote the actual National Interest article was lying their pants off about this being an assurance.
Firstly: Baker is VERY, VERY, VERY Obvious here that this is just HIS preferred stance and that of assorted Western leaders, but that this is only a preliminary concept that has not been agreed to – let alone implemented – yet. Again, he outright said “THESE ARE OUR THOUGHTS.” Underlining that this was not to be taken as a concrete assurance or agreement, just the general form of one he was working towards BUT WHICH WAS CONTINGENT UPON THE WISHES OF OTHER PARTIES.
This particularly pops up in regards to discussion of the presence of US troops and the like, where Baker makes it painfully clear nobody elected the US Dictator of the World and that he would have to consult about these matters – whether the stationing or withdrawal of US troops, the expansion or not of NATO, and so forth – with other stakeholders involved.
Which is kind of relevant when you look at the time and realize what is about to happen in a year from this meeting.
MOREOVER, GORBACHEV EXPLICITLY ACKNOWLEDGES THIS, as I’ll discuss later.
But secondly: A cursory look at the text and timeline shows that these people parsing this as Baker promising not to expand NATO “one inch further East” is fallacious. They are discussing the reunification of Germany between the FRG (which already a NATO member) and the DRG under the Federal Republic’s banner, thus expanding NATO’s membership to the former East Germany. So the most Baker is TALKING ABOUT is whether or not NATO military hardware or “jurisdiction” will be spread further East.
This is a tough distinction to grasp, but a very important one because it devastates the central premise of the argument.
*Snip forward, discussing talks of neutral nations like Austria and Czechoslovakia fearing a Germany trying to go 1938 and talks with Britain and France. You can read the context here.*
This document is supposed to be the golden goose. The silver bullet to show Western perfidy in expanding NATO, that they made a binding agreement with Gorbachev to not expand NATO and then broke it. But a cursory look at the document reveals absolutely nothing of the sort. While Baker (sincerely or insincerely – and for various reasons and other documents I think he was sincere) DID voice personal opposition to expanding NATO’s “Military jurisdiction” further East and mentioned other NATO leaders who felt similar, he also made it BLINDINGLY clear he had no authority to unilaterally give such explanations, that there were others in NATO (chiefly the Germans themselves at the time, ironically given future events) that were hesitant, and that everything would have to be checked by the electorate.
It also shows that Gorbachev knew and accepted this.
Oh yeah, and another thing.
Remember when National Interest said this?
Leaving aside how I obviously showed that this document does NOT show Baker giving such an assurance, AS WELL As the moral and ethical nature of the Soviets declaring themselves to have the right to possibly violent veto over democratic unification… This is something that the Soviets recognize they have an ambiguous point to at BEST. As does Baker (in part because he is actually WORRIED about the two German governments claiming the right to lock the Great Powers out of this). Which is one reason why they express trepidation about the “Four + Two” arrangement and German acceptance thereof.
This document is the central pillar of this thesis, and one openly linked and featured centrally. And yet reading it shows it not only does not substantiate many of the claims these three authors are claiming it does, in many cases it *explicitly or implicitly repudiates* several of their claims.
Miguel:
So was the Bay of Pigs and that proxy war a bad idea, or just badly done? There is a difference you know.
@Brian E Part 2
Right. A few things.
Firstly: Timeline. March 1991 is a very different world from that of December 1991, and a lot of things that were either hard to foresee or outright unforeseeable were either starting to come in their own or already had been. The Soviet coup and the subsequent collapse of the USSR is the obvious and most relevant of this.
So “We can’t foresee a situation in which NATO would expand” coming from one party (the British) is among the very weakest of weak sauces.
Secondly: As I mentioned before, the British Government had a right to voice its own stance on the matter – and it did – but this DID NOT magically trump or override the rights of other governments or electorates. NOWHERE is this more obvious than in the case of German Unification itself, which Thatcher and her loyalists opposed only to be diplomatically isolated.
This brings back the old kettle of fish I mentioned earlier about sovereign rights and self-determination and how these agreements would stand up to the consideration of other stakeholders like oh… Poland and its electorate. It’s queer that the authors of this piece DON’T MENTION THIS AS PERTINENT TO AGREEMENTS ON NATO EXPANSION *considering how even freaking GORBACHEV is documented as being sensitive to this matter in their own cited documents.*
Now then. Let’s talk about what the document ACTUALLY says.
Huh, would you look at that? It’s exactly what I mentioned would come up: that of former Pact and even SR Member states and populaces clamoring to have their voices and wishes heard, and GENERALLY wishing to get as far away diplomatically from the Soviet Union and Russia as possible.
Now why on earth would these three commentators NOT mention that this diary discusses this in an article that is nakedly intended to promulgate the thesis that NATO had the power to make unilateral assurances to Russian/Soviet governments against expansion, and that it did so dishonestly?
Truly a riddle for the ages.
But wait, it gets “better.” By which of course I mean it gets worse.
*SNIP past a bunch of stuff about internal Soviet politics, the failures of economic reform, opposition to markets, and so forth.*
So this is the relevant section that is being focused on, Yazov discussing (among other things) fear that Central and Eastern European countries will join NATO. According to Ambassador Braithwaite’s diary (which admittedly is not a transcript) Major apparently went far beyond what Baker said and outright gave assurances that these countries would not join NATO (which of course they wound up doing).
But this brings us back to basic chronology, and it is worth remembering some basic analysis, both in terms of chronology and in particular people.
Dmitry Yazov was infamous even in his own time and milieu, and has only gotten worse with time. The Ambassador is quite unflattering about the man in his description, as he admits the man is not a simple clod but that he is a fanatic and quite willing to lie for the cause. If anything this is being much to kind, since he is probably as close to a Himmler as the late Soviet Union got, and he would be one of the leading putschists in the Soviet Coup of 1991, which would not have helped his standing or the stability of any assurances given to him precisely because people like Havel would have been able to point to things like this and the coup and shout about protection.
The fact that this article and the archive say VERY LITTLE about who Yazov was, what his role was, and particularly what he had already done and would go on to do is at best indefensibly lazy and decontextualizes this. At worst I’d say it is outright dishonesty.
But moving on..
*Snip about Major being nervous and writing down notes.*
For reference to what is being referred to when they are talking about Shevarnadze being nervous about “Georgia”, I link
https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/the-9-april-tragedy-a-milestone-in-the-history-of-modern-georgia-49801/
A massacre against protestors committed by the Soviet army and state security on April 9th, 1989 (less than a year ago) and which is still commemorated.
But the message is quite clear. Gorbachev and Soviet national leadership will no longer be able to have it all their own way and will be expected to negotiate with those that dissent from them in order to keep the union together, and this is recognized as just. Again, KIND OF illustrative of the context, especially what will happen.
This document is better than the utterly self-defeating misrepresentation of the last one, but it still is nowhere near as telling as the authors want it to be, ESPECIALLY if you know Late Soviet History and its context. Major here did give (what I view as improper) assurances that Poland etc. would not join NATO, but he did so to a dishonest Soviet hardliner who would go on to stage a coup against his own government and wound up imprisoned, thus unsurprisingly changing the situation (especially with the SR ones).
This does not appear in the document. It only appears in the length description on the side, with a footnote I cannot seem to access. In any case, it still runs afoul of the aforementioned chronology issue. That this was a discussion between the British Government representing itself and Gorbachev’s government in early 1990, where all parties involved except maybe Yazov’s loyalists were blissfully unaware that within a little over a year Gorbachev’s government would cease to exist and so would the Soviet Union as a whole.
And so apparently we’re supposed to believe that ABSOLUTELY NOTHING OF RELEVANCE happened between 1990 (the date of the last document quoted here) and 1994.
Nothing whatsoever.
The Soviet Hardline coup (under the partial direction of the aforementioned Yazov), the ensuing spate of secession by SRs leading to the collapse of the USSR, the start of the Yugoslav Wars, Transnistria’s War, the Georgian Wars of Secession, the ongoing Armenian-Azeri War at the time, democratization in Central and Eastern Europe…
ALL OF THIS gets completely ignored in service of an agenda. That vague assurances given by Major to Yazov at a time when the latter was still Gorbachev’s loyal minister rather than one of his enemies by the British Government are supposed to bind all of NATO forevermore regardless of changing circumstances and the wishes of the local populations (which pop up repeatedly in these documents as things to be considered).
It’s risible.
There might be a day where I’ll fisk Blanton and Savranskaya’s entire report and the 30 some sources they claim, but if this is as emblematic of the quality of their work and sources (as clearly the author of the National Interest article thought) then I think it is incredibly obvious they failed to make their case about any of the key points.
And in particular they egregiously lied about the document regarding Baker and what he did and didn’t do. Oh, ok, I’ll be generous, “Incredibly misrepresented the document regarding Baker and what he did and didn’t do.”
That’s a damaging enough indictment on their reading comprehension and ethics.
@Brian E Part 3
Yes, they did. Which they have a right to do.
THEY ALSO have a right to change their minds.
And other nations have a right to lobby them to change said minds.
Which they did. Fervently.
Mostly after the fact in an attempt to save face.
But notably this also dovetails with another issue. How honest said complaints were. Because for all the ink these two are spilling in regards to dishonesty by NATO leaders (and fair enough), they seem to completely ignore the factor of deceptions and dishonesty by Soviet or Russian leaders. This is pretty jarring considering their sources OUTRIGHT TALK ABOUT THIS, and in particular the Ambassador’s Diary entry points out that Yazov was a dishonest fanatic (in as many words) and the only question was whether he sincerely believed the lies he was sprouting.
If there had been any concrete agreement (and not generic assurances by one politician or so that could be overruled or invalidated), I think the Russian Governments involved would have been the first to point out to them.
The fact that this stuff is the best that can be done cuts the legs out from under this thesis.
And they had a right to complain bitterly.
However, those nations had every right to point out the long history of perfidy, violation of assurances, and atrocities by Russian and Soviet governments, and also to foundational documents like the OSCE Charter allowing freedom of association for alliances.
And again, for all of Putin’s obvious ire even he did not find it politic to reject signing the Astana Declaration on “principle” that Russia had the right to demand a veto over its neighbors’ alliances.
In short, “Not Assurances at all (See: The Baker Document”), “Contingent upon Since-Changed Circumstances”, and “Subject to consent by other stakeholders (like new governments and the publics and governments of others in the OSCE”).
All of which add up to this basically being a fanatical attempt to deny changing reality by misreading the nature of those “agreements” (those few that actually would constitute such) and essentially demanding why Westminster does not stick to an assurance given to a man who was famous for not sticking to his assurances while ignoring the parts of the documents where it is spelled out in excruciating detail how the world is changing, how NATO cannot dictate by Fiat what other nations do, and how the USSR and Russia will actually have to remember the art of negotiating with nations in “its near abroad” and making itself appealing to them so that they want to do business with it voluntarily
Nowhere has Russia’s Late Soviet and Post-Soviet governments failed more egregiously in their Near Abroad than that.
Firstly: To state the incredibly obvious, Putin is a fundamentally bad faith actor even by the low, low standards of global diplomacy. He’s lied about things way more obvious and undeniable than what NATO bigwig said what half a century ago (remember the Little Green Men and the idea that Spetznaz grade equipment could be gotten at any Military Surplus store)?
Secondly: As far as remembering guarantees and carrying them out, I will humbly submit to El Presidente that agreements made in 1994 and 2012 are far more relevant and binding to matters at hand than ones allegedly made in 1990 or 1994 if they even existed (and as I mentioned before, in many of the cases I can provably show they didn’t, like the arcane art of “Actually reading the Baker-Gorbachev Minutes”).
But Putin doesn’t want to open that can of worms precisely because there is no world where it looks better for him.
To which I respond: on what grounds?
It was certainly more serious than Minsk I and Minsk II.
Of course, but it was never meant to be a 1-1 comparison. Just something to illustrate the point. The Soviets lost in Afghanistan not because they lost more people in Afghanistan than Russia has in Ukraine (they didn’t), or because they particularly cared about the lives of their soldiers, but because of public backlash.
Agreed and we’ve already seen this from the war so far. Losses are much higher than the Communists suffered in Afghanistan already and yet Russian cohesion and support is intact. Damaged perhaps but only to a limited degree, and intact. Which raises the question of how much more there is.
But the Nazis made minimal efforts to get Soviets to surrender to them or to get those that did back in contact with their families (except in the afterlife). That’s not what is happening in Ukraine and it does seem to be having an effect. Only time will tell if it has enough to influence it, but regards.
I did not write that point for the purpose of saying I knew what would happen or that Russia would definitely cave. Merely to argue that the blog post’s analysis was missing something, especially in light of previous Soviet/Russian wars.