Three Ways of Seeing Ukraine
Three views are better than two.
This post is about the number 3. It is an attempt to make sense of the deliberately distorted conflict in Ukraine, which serves practically everyone’s interests but yours, mine and those of ordinary people anywhere on earth.
The basic argument is that war is a racket and this one is no different. It is the chief form of big business without which our Regime would collapse. Practically the only two things the West does well these days are war - and propaganda.
This long and unfunny post considers three perspectives in the following regards:
3 sorts of Ukrainian - 1,2,3
3 orders of soldier - AZOV et al, the SSO, the AFU
3 European views - Sanctions, Ruin, Negotiations
3 means of battle - shock and awe, NATO proxy, plunder
3 Types of Russia - Weak, All Powerful, State Level Actor
There is a conclusion at the end which doesn’t flatter any side. No one is on yours.
Three Sorts of Ukrainian
In case you were not aware, according to the Ukrainian regime, there are three sorts of Ukrainian. When we speak of ‘the people of Ukraine’ and their rights, bear that in mind.
The red sort are in Galicia, which may be about to be occupied by the Polish army. There is a statue of Stepan Bandera in Lvov, which is the regional capital, and the base for most Western journalists. As you can see there are few Russians - Sort 3 - in this region.
Sort 2 are divided. To the left is transcarpathia, with its ethnic Hungarian population. To the right of that is a small region with many Moldovans and Romanians. The main body of Sort 2 is difficult to explain. Here is another map which might help, from 2001.
The ‘three sorts of Ukrainian’ are: 1. those who don’t speak native Russian, 2. those who live with a native Russian speaking minority, and 3. those who speak native Russian. Interestingly the sorts are also careful to indicate in the second order some of the minority ethnic groups on the Western border.
Here is yet another map which helps to explain which ‘Ukrainian People’ is served by the NATO and US proxy war, and also the 2014 coup which replaced the Yanukovich government with one of Victoria Nuland’s choosing:
One emotional basis for the proxy war the US and NATO are fighting is the right of the Ukrainian people to decide their own fate. This right was not relevant in 2014 when the US deposed the Yanukovich government and replaced it with one of their choosing. You can now see why they did this. Yanukovich was not in fact overly friendly with Russia, yet the fact his base was concentrated in the Russian speaking population was enough to convince the neoconservative faction that he had to go.
This war is being prosecuted by the neoconservative faction which controls US foreign policy. The founder of their main pressure group, Robert Kagan, is the husband of Victoria Nuland. Kagan admits that US actions provoked Russia. His wife is the architect of many of these provocations, so he would know.
The view of the faction which controls US foreign policy is that Russia and its interests must be broken by any means. This is the reason for the cancellation of Nordstream 2, for the overturning of the election in Ukraine in 2014, for the concentration of arms and military training in the Donbass for the past eight years.
US policy - as directed by a faction that destroys nations with no regard for the consequences for the populations concerned - is to destroy Russia.
The strategy is failing. Russia is not collapsing at home. The Russian economy is resilient and looks to be capable of surviving. The wider world is not sanctioning Russia. Ukraine is not winning the war.
This makes escalation likely and the situation ever more perilous. It explains the policy of destroying Europe.
Three Sorts of Soldier
I came across a Ukrainian Telegram channel which published a strange piece about the three types of Ukrainian soldier. It mentioned
Azov and Right Sector etc battalions - “The Cowboys”
The Ukrainian Special Forces - “The Specialists”
The Ukrainian Regular Army - “Cannon fodder”
Here’s the translation via a Russian account (RWA). It contains some obscenity.
It doesn’t particularly flatter anyone’s ‘side’, but rather shows how the ordinary soldier is just wasted in the hands of his superiors, according to their wishes. The same is true for soldiers everywhere. This might help you understand something of the nature of being in a war, because not everything your own side does is good for you.
Three European Views
The emerging European view is complicated by the kind of competing interests which typically lead to war. There are three basic positions:
Sanctions must increase, the war must intensify
Sanctions are destroying Europe
Negotations must take place
More sanctions, more weapons.
Britain is perhaps the most bellicose of all European nations, being committed to sending weapons and money to the Ukrainian regime.
Poland is a close second. It remains to be seen what Poland intends to do, as rumours persist of a military intervention in the Sort I region of Ukraine.
Finland, under its wise leadership, is to discard its neutrality and seeks to move into NATO. Russia is going to cut off its gas supply to Finland as a result.
The EU is moving to seize Russia’s foreign reserves of $300 billion to ‘rebuild Ukraine’.
Deindustrialisation - decarbonisation
The Germans are facing deindustrialisation as a result of the removal of a significant portion of their energy supply. Ukraine cut off one of two gas transit points to Europe this week, reducing gas flow to Germany by 25 percent. Business leaders from Bosch, BASF and others have repeatedly warned that disruption on this scale will halt German industry. Baerbock proceeds with this policy regardless, and is now moving to halt Russian oil imports. Spain and Italy appear to support this policy despite earlier hesitancy.
Hungary has already stated that it cannot survive without Russian oil. Slovakia, Croatia, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic described their situation in similar stark terms. A division exists between these countries and the larger EU states over the impact of refusing Russian oil and gas.
Europe gets 25 percent of its oil from Russia, and some states such as Italy rely on it for 40 percent of their gas.
The policy of removing oil and gas imports is appealing to the German Green party, who secured around 25 percent of the vote in the last elections. The German foreign minister Baerbock and vice chancellor Habeck are both Greens, as is the minister of Food and that of Environment.
Negotiations
France appears under Macron to be making conciliatory noises to Russia, which is curious for Europe’s number one energy exporter. Their nuclear programme allows them to export electricity, especially to Britain. Industry leaders throughout Europe have repeatedly stressed the need to avoid cutting off gas and oil to avoid the destruction of European manufacturing.
It appears that Macron wishes to fill the power vacuum resulting from the departure of Angela Merkel by offering an EU position distinct from that of the US. Again, it is noteworthy that such a man is the leading statesman of Europe, which bespeaks more of the calibre of his counterparts than of his own.
Summary
Europe is experiencing record inflation as a result of money printing and the impact of the sanctions on Russia, whose ruble is of a higher value now than it was before the sanctions of the West took effect.
Sanctions have never stopped a war.
The world is not sanctioning Russia. Sanctions are applied by the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the EU and to some degree, Japan.
Halting Russian energy and fertiliser supplies will lead to economic ruin in Europe and famine around the world. This is insane, isn’t it?
I think the destruction of the economies of Europe will obviously result in domestic unrest and resistance to the US led sanctions which have exacerbated the inflation and supply choke caused by COVID measures. In short, they don’t care. The cost of action has never prevented the neoconservatives from nation wrecking, be that cost in human life, in billions, in suffering, in the horror of the collapse of whole societies.
3 means of Battle
Proxy war
NATO is at war by proxy. This situation looks likely to escalate. Two obvious outcomes appear to be:
Polish entry into Ukraine
NATO entry through Moldova
There are other means of escalation which at present remain possible but seem less immediate.
The means of battle engaged in by NATO/US is attritional, and its object is to cause a Russian loss in Ukraine through maximisation of casualties on both sides. Of course the aim is also to transfer billions to the military industrial complex, which will enrich everyone in the Regime enormously, whilst destroying yet another country.
It looks unlikely that Ukraine will exist when this war is over, but that is not relevant to US objectives. Ukraine is the site of anti-Russian action. This is the new focus for the war machine.
We are used to the US destroying countries according to its own whims. This is normal at present, but exceptional in history. Seen as a trend, the Ukraine adventure is one in a series of accelerating national ruins. Of course, the propaganda will isolate and personalise the issue, so that to attempt to frame events in any meaningful wider context is seen as a personal attack on the person who repeats the Regime narrative.
Shock and awe
We are used to seeing the US (NATO) conduct shock and awe operations. Aerial bombing, often on a spectacular scale, is used against civilian populations and military installations alike, as in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
It was reasonable to expect the same kind of television war as that to which we have become accustomed. The Russians did not provide this, and have not conducted aerial bombing sorties in a similar fashion.
The Russians do have more troops, air and fire power to throw at Ukraine. They have not done so. A quick advance does not seem to be the plan. Why would this be the case? Surely to argue against quick advances is to try to avoid admitting your failure?
Ask yourself what the result was of shock and awe. The best example - Iraq - saw the country conquered and the Iraqi army surrender in about six weeks. The insurgency continued for eight years, and following the withdrawal of the US Iraq remains largely a client state of Iran.
Afghanistan furnishes another example. The country was heavily occupied, a client regime installed within months - but the war continued for two decades. Do you remember how that ended? 86 billion dollars of military hardware was left behind for the Taliban as the Afghan government dissolved in hours, leaving the Taliban firmly in charge.
These are the lessons of shock and awe. It is a spectacle, whose consequences are unmanageable and which leads to strategic defeat at enormous cost in blood, treasure and prestige. In both cases, the enemies of the United States have emerged more powerful from these camera-friendly adventures.
Plunder
What’s the point of a 20 year war that you lose, retreat from in chaos, and just shrug your shoulders before moving on to the next one? The transfer of money to itself is the purpose of the ruling Regime. War does this very efficiently. It is probably doing that for those who run the Russian state, too.
Most of the ‘aid’ to Ukraine is just theft. Consider the pallets of cash, of gold in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remember that under COVID more money was transferred from people like you to people like them than ever before. This rising tide has sunk everyone but the super rich and the corporations, whose share of wealth increased enormously owing to the ruinous measures taken during the pandemic.
Ruinous to you. COVID crushed the working class and accelerated the destruction of the middle class - a process which has been ongoing since the 1970s.
These policies of destruction which seem so insane from your point of view make perfect sense if you have stocks in Raytheon, are a member of the financial elite, or belong to some state-level bureaucracy which seems to get extraordinarily lucky in choosing investments.
The third way of seeing war is as war on the ordinary population. No one cares about you, about the ‘people of Ukraine’ - whichever sort you prefer. With the benefit of this third perspective, everything makes sense. The war was a setup to make obscene amounts of money now and into the future through a reinvigorated military-industrial complex.
The last big earner fizzled out in Afghanistan and now we have a new one. No one mentions the ‘peace dividend’ any more.
3 Types of Russia
All powerful
Collapsing
State level actor
All powerful Russia controls the internet through an army of bots. This misinformation giant put Trump into the White House and made Brexit happen. Russiagate was the campaign to pin Russian collusion on Donald Trump, and Carole Cadwalladr continues to argue that the Russian state has infiltrated, and controls, British politics at the highest level.
This omnipotent information superpower has managed to lose the propaganda war completely, which is the one area in which the West is winning hands down.
Collapsing Russia is a kleptocracy run by a president who is dying. Putin has Parkinsons’, cancer or some other serious illness. Russia is losing the war it began to shore up a vulnerable regime. Military defeat, which is imminent, will cause the total implosion of the Putin administration and freedom and democracy will then take root.
Russia’s army is incompetent, its generals dead and a third of its invasion force is destroyed. Supply lines are a shambles, the retreat from Kiev was a major humiliation, troops are deserting and the war has been a failure. Russia is finished, and it may take us all down as it falls to its knees.
State level actor Russia is acting like an independent state. It did not like what was going on around it, no longer believed in the diplomacy offered it, and had lost patience with false assurances. It has chosen not to be a mere spectator in its own fate. Russia has acted to secure its own interests in its border regions. It will likely never return the gains it has made across the Black Sea and in the Donbass, since the transfer of these ports, areas of heavy industry and of agricultural production will be of tremendous strategic value to Russia.
Conclusion
Russia has walked on to a banana skin which the Regime has laid out in plain sight. Of course it has been provoked. Russia was always supposed to lose its temper and lash out. This provides the finishing touch to a narrative which has been building for years. I think it serves no other purpose than Forever War, which is the main business of the Regime.
Russia was behind Brexit. Russia was behind Trump. Russia was behind Hunter Biden’s laptop - just another example of Russian misinformation and meddling.
Russiagate, Russian bots, Russian this and Russian that. They have been blamed for many things simply to keep them in the popular imagination as a bogeyman, an enemy, an adversary who must be stopped with billions of dollars and pounds and euros that you will never see again, and which would never have been found for you.
Putin has been cast in the role of villain previously occupied by Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Colonel Gadaffi, Kim Jong-Un. The sanctions are not going to cause regime change in Russia. Even if they did, nothing would change. Another villain would be found and the money would continue to flow out of your nations and into the bank accounts of the champions of Freedom and Democracy.
I recently had an argue with a friend of mine over Ukraine (both he and his wife are hard left public sector bureaucrats thoroughly wedded to the values of the current smart set).
He maintained that western intervention in Ukraine, though not of the boots on the ground variety, was very much in the interests of the British state and by association the British people.
When pressed as to how he came to this view, he was unable to explain.
Interestingly he remains one of the small minority who still worships the Blair creature (h/t Peter Hitchens).
Both are breathing examples of Orwell’s maxim; ‘Some ideas are so wrong that only very intelligent people believe in them.’
They trailed this war like it was an Avengers film. Then Russia slow-rolled the war when, according to various Russia experts I'd listened to, they could have literally defeated Ukraine in under an hour; Ukraine and the rest of Europe by the way. It seems to me like it's a giant yellow and blue carpet that graft and fraud can be swept under. Russia had its Covid corruption too and apparently has an ongoing major die-off of its older citizens. Too timely and too convenient for the uber elites.
Took delivery of the Kolyma Tales so I'm looking forward to getting started on it. That's something I really like about Substack - you get good book recommendations.