While the US election was underway, Russian officials, when asked, repeatedly said that it would not matter much to them who won, since they believed it will not change outcomes in Ukraine and probably not US-Russia relations generally. However, angry and panicked European leader have made clear they think otherwise. And Biden petulantly and recklessly over the weekend authorizing long-range missile strikes into Russia, which does cross a genuine Russian red line and puts the US directly at war with Russia, does make a difference even if that move will not stop or even slow Russia from prevailing in Ukraine. Russia has said if the US took that step, that American assets all over the world were targets. Given how long this threat has been in play, Russia probably has a very good idea of where some punches could do the most damage.
We’ll look briefly at this show of US belligerence, which Trump can roll back as soon as he assumes office, and look at some additional ways Trump back in power might make a difference.
The long-range missiles authorization illustrates that the steady Russian attrition and occasional very stern warnings had managed to keep the US and Ukraine from doing anything too reckless (if you omit the US destroying the Nord Stream pipeline and Ukraine, the Kakhovka dam, which in the long term are actually detrimental to their own interests). The prospect of Trump accelerating the end of the war, as we are seeing, has focused a lot of minds and is producing some flailing about.
Nevertheless, Russia remains in control of how far it takes the conflict, in terms of territorial occupation. Could Trump, or different EU conduct as a result of Trump, wind up changing Russian calculations?
If Trump is unwilling or unable to get the EU to support Ukraine neutrality, as in “No NATO evah in Ukraine” (and that failure still seems baked in), Russia still faces dilemma of having to deal with the problem of a generally unfriendly western Ukraine at the end of the war. Taking it means much higher subordination and reconstruction costs, as well as potentially alienating some of Russia’s economic allies in BRICS; leaving western Ukraine to its own devices assures it becoming NATO-lite and among other things, NATO putting missiles there, if nothing else, out of spite.
However, as we will discuss, Russia might be able to improve the optics with comrades-in-all-but-arms by explicitly drawing its occupation model from the Allies with Germany at the end of World War II.1
Later wWe’ll discuss one path for ending the war that the Trump Administration might wind up opening up, but we think the odds of it coming about are exceedingly low. One solution the problem of “How to credibly insure Ukraine neutrality in the face of persistent Collective West bad faith?” would be for Turkiye and Hungary to provide security guarantees. Turkiye is colorable due to having the biggest NATO forces near the theater; Hungary could be included or volunteer by virtue of its president Orban having discussed peace prospects with Zelensky, Putin, Trump, and Xi. Either state could veto a future effort to get a rump Ukraine into NATO.
Having two NATO members guarantee Ukraine’s neutrality means they would be expected (ideally required) to vote against any Ukraine ascension to NATO.
We’ll recap below the near-impossibility of a negotiated outcome; even diplomacy advocate Alexander Mercouris has concluded that Russia will impose terms. But if there were any way for Russia not to have to occupy Ukraine or leave Western Ukraine as a festering wound, it would be a tidier solution all around.3
Let’s first consider the US long range missiles escalation and then take a broader look.
US Authorizes Long-Range Missile Strikes into Russia
The New York Times broke the story and recites the bizarre justification that the (almost certainly a Ukraine propaganda creation) participation of North Korean forces in the Russian defense of Kursk amounts to an escalation. The story admits that this move won’t do much to help Ukraine:
While the officials said they do not expect the shift to fundamentally alter the course of the war, one of the goals of the policy change, they said, is to send a message to the North Koreans that their forces are vulnerable and that they should not send more of them.
Remember, Ukraine depends on the US to operate the missiles, here ATACMS, and for targeting, so the Russians are correct to depict these attacks as made by the US.
Scott Ritter unpacks the implications. Do click through to read the entire tweet:2
The Biden administration just gave Ukraine the green light to use US-made and provided ATACMS missiles against Russian targets inside Russian territory, including Kursk.
It should be noted that the US, together with NATO, helped plan and execute the Ukrainian incursion into…— Scott Ritter (@RealScottRitter) November 17, 2024
Russia Still Has Its “Losing the Peace” Problem
Odds favor that the Biden efforts at Trump sabotage don’t make much difference in the end, or may even work to some advantage to Russia (as in justifying tit for tat retaliation, say in the Middle East).
But Russia has no obvious answers to what to do with Ukraine, even with its position continuing to improve as it further weakens Ukraine, US and NATO combat capabilities.
Without belaboring the history, the US is strategically overextended. Its underestimation of Russia led to the US enlisting allies, including ones not even in the theater, to send weapons to Ukraine, resulting in stocks all among them being reduced to low levels. Continuing supplies to Ukraine are now coming from globally inadequate new production, plus forays into couch cushions turning up some quarters.
Current conventional wisdom is that one of two things is likely to exhaust Ukraine even before the firepower gap with Russia makes continued fighting impossible. The New York Times reported at the start of November that the Pentagon view was that Ukraine has enough manpower to carry on only for another six to twelve months.
Power shortages over the winter could represent a second breaking point, not just for the military but for government operations and civil society. La Niña has the potential to bring a cold winter to Europe. Russia has just launched another punishing round of electric system strikes. And when a grid is damaged, more demand (here from cold weather) can also produce additional breakage.
Trump’s open antipathy toward NATO, or at least the US spending much to support it, compounds the difficulty of keeping Project Ukraine going. Some have suggested that one way for Trump to deliver on his “I’ll end the war in one day/I’ll end it before I take office” is to halt US involvement, as in no more US funding and weapons deliveries. The war would be over as far as US voters are concerned. And NATO has admitted that it would have trouble carrying on if the US cut the air supply.
Both US Russia hawks and European governments clearly fear Trump will walk away from the Ukraine conflict, witness the scramble to “Trump proof” it. But this comes when European economies are weak and government spending for social safety nets is already under pressure. It’s not hard to argue that the German government fell due to a fight over Ukraine spending.4 Finance Minister Christian Lindner refused to go along with prime minister Olaf Scholz’s pressure for more ambitious spending, which Linder said was a demand to pause the constitutional “debt brake”. Scholz sacked Linder and Linder pulled his party out of the coalition, producing in not too short order the scheduling of new elections.
However, Russia still faces the same dilemma. Putin, out of his general caution, would almost certainly prefer not to take any more of Ukraine than necessary. However, Russia’s paramount goal is securing Ukraine’s neutrality. Leaving anything more than an itty rump Ukraine will almost assure European meddling, if nothing else out of wounded pride. And if the Democrats come back into power in 2028, they would join in.
So What About an Occupation?
So a lasting resolution would seem to require Russia to subjugate all of Ukraine, even though that would contradict one of Putin’s earlier pledges, that Russia would not go where it was not wanted. Of course, depending on how things break, such as a government collapse, Russia could position itself as stabilizing an otherwise chaotic and lawless situation. Regardless, Russia would want to move into any vacuum if at all possible.
But “Better than alternatives” can be “Way short of ideal.” Recall how Russia handled the integration of Crimea and the four oblasts into Russia, that Russia scheduled referenda on joining Russia. The resulting approvals were credible, despite Western whinging, by virtue of those areas historically backing Russia-friendly national candidates. This mechanism is also important for establishing legitimacy in the eyes of Russia’s allies, who are still not entirely comfortable with Russia continuing to take more and more of Ukraine.
Other oblasts that are both ethnically Russian and strategically valuable like Kharkiv and Odessa would similarly be likely to vote in favor of joining Russia in the event of a Ukraine military/political collapse or other development that allows Russia to force a surrender.5
So what model would Russia use to deal with captured and presumed not terribly friendly territory? John Helmer suggested one, which we thought could be taken even further, that of a great big de-electrified zone. It would come to resemble the Unorganized Territory of Maine, which has very low population density, consisting nearly entirely of “men with beards,” as in hardy survivalists.
Another could be how the Allies handled Germany after its unconditional surrender in World War II. I confess only to having just started to look at this topic and would welcome links to good academic treatments. However, a quick look at Wikipedia shows some precedents that might be useful to Russia, such as for a 10 year occupation:6
In the west, the occupation continued until 5 May 1955, when the General Treaty (German: Deutschlandvertrag) entered into force. However, upon the creation of the Federal Republic in May 1949, the military governors were replaced by civilian high commissioners, whose powers lay somewhere between those of a governor and those of an ambassador. When the Deutschlandvertrag became law, the occupation ended, the western occupation zones ceased to exist, and the high commissioners were replaced by normal ambassadors. West Germany was also allowed to build a military, and the Bundeswehr, or Federal Defense Force, was established on 12 November 1955.
And:
Despite the grants of general sovereignty to both German states in 1955, full and unrestricted sovereignty under international law was not enjoyed by any German government until after the reunification of Germany in October 1990. Though West Germany was effectively independent, the western Allies maintained limited legal jurisdiction over ‘Germany as a whole’ in respect of West Germany and Berlin. At the same time, East Germany progressed from being a satellite state of the Soviet Union to increasing independence of action; while still deferring in matters of security to Soviet authority. The provisions of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, also known as the “Two-plus-Four Treaty”, granting full sovereign powers to Germany did not become law until 15 March 1991, after all of the participating governments had ratified the treaty. As envisaged by the Treaty, the last occupation troops departed from Germany when the Russian presence was terminated in 1994, although the Belgian Forces in Germany stayed in German territory until the end of 2005.
These approaches would not reduce hard and human costs to Russia, which already has serious labor shortages. But it would legitimate a generous time window for sorting things out.
Negotiations?
Even with the exit of the extreme Putin-hating Biden and his replacement Trump wrapped up in his self-image as a master deal-maker, it’s hard to see how negotiations get off the ground, let alone get anywhere. Admittedly, all the speculation about Trump trying to negotiate with Putin or otherwise press for talks will elevate expectations among Russia’s BRICS supporters, pretty much all of whom don’t like the conflict even if they accept Russia’s justifications. So Putin will be under even more pressure to make good on his oft-made promise to enter into talks if approached.
However, many if not most Russians are persuaded that negotiating with the duplicitous West is asking to be betrayed. Given America’s openly two-faced conduct in Palestine and with China (among many example), there’s ongoing confirmation of these concerns.
Interestingly, Putin appears to have cut off the “Talk to the [dishonest] organ grinder rather than the monkey” in his recent talk with German prime minister Olaf Scholz. From the Kremlin readout:
Speaking on the prospects for reaching a political and diplomatic settlement of the conflict, the President of Russia pointed out that the Russian side had never rejected and was still open to resuming the talks broken off by the Kiev regime.
So Putin has now thrown down a marker about process, not just substance. Not only is the bare minimum starting point Istanbul, adjusted for new realities (no NATO membership, limits on Ukraine’s military, and now Russia incorporating the four oblasts into Russia) but the procedure is Russia negotiating with Ukraine, not the US or NATO. Not that “NATO” actually can negotiate; despite the appearances of solidity, it’s a very weak coalition with member states retaining autonomy on pretty much everything, including whether to respond to an Article 5 violation. That’s why, for instance, each state decided (even in the face of peer pressure and US arm-twisting) independently what if anything in the way of arms to send to Ukraine.
This process requirement, of dealing with Ukraine, works to Russia’s advantage in multiple ways:
Russia did not agree to a ceasefire as part of Istanbul. It kept prosecuting the war. So even in the remote event that formal discussions were to start, Russian can keep attritting Ukraine (albeit likely at a less aggressive pace because optics)
Zelensky is opposed to negotiations and even if he had the occasional thought about relenting, the high odds of him quickly being assassinated by Banderites would restore his faith
Russia has bona fide procedural objections that need to be cleared before any talks with Ukraine could begin. First is the Constitutional amendment that Ukraine will not negotiate with Russia as long as Putin is president. That would need to be set aside. Second is that Zelensky cannot make binding commitments because he is not the legitimate leader of Ukraine
Even if the US and NATO somehow bribe Zelensky to leave and then Ukraine holds presidential elections, the expected timing, per a recent Economist piece, is May 2025. There is not likely to be much of a functioning Ukraine by then. And the Western, or at least EU, preferred replacements, former general Zaluzhny or former president Poroshenko, would be as opposed to making minimal necessary concessions as Zelensky. Plus Zaluzhny is a hard core Banderite and would be unacceptable to Russia
This is a long-winded way of saying that even if Russia feels it is in its interest to play along with “shape of the table” discussions, Ukraine’s collapse is pretty certain to advance faster than they will.
So in other words, as they like to say in Maine, there seems to be no way to get there from here, in terms of the idea of having some NATO members individually guarantee Ukraine security. 7 If they were independent-minded ones like Turkiye and Hungary, that deal would allow them to stand up to later pressure, if it came, to vote for rump Ukraine entry into NATO. Donald Trump would also get some satisfaction from end-running EU/NATO schemes to thwart his desire to bring the Ukraine war to a close.
However, it remains that the end-phases of a war which can generate the most reckless behavior. The US used the pretext of the difficulty of subduing Japan for its deadly demonstration of its nuclear weapons. Scott Ritter likes to point out that the Germany inflicted the highest personnel losses on the Allies in the last month of World War II. Here, so far, the reckless Biden gambit of authorizing long-range strikes into Russia can presumably be walked back, with a hoped-for result of no lasting escalation, by the Trump team. So so far, the “recklessness” can be contained to the political realm. But with the UK and EU also determined to throw spanners, will we be so lucky as to have that continue?
_____
1 Recall Russia is legalistic and used the same procedure that the US created with Kosovo to justify its invasion of Ukraine as defense of an ally per a mutual defense pact (the ally here being the newly-recognized breakaway Donbass republics).
2 Ritter’s remark that if Trump were to try to undermine the Biden provocation, that it would be an unprecedented act, is not correct. Richard Nixon, as a candidate, not even President elect, engaged in an arguably more egregious interference with a sitting President via sabotaging the Paris peace talks.
3 Of course, the last thing the Western establishment wants is a tidy solution….
4 It is frustrating but predictable that the mainstream press and commentary glosses over the fact that the EU’s economic distress is the direct result of its actions. The US led Europe down what John Mearsheimer calls the primrose path, by convincing itself and its EU camp followers that Russia would quickly collapse under economic sanctions and that if Russians were dragooned into fighting, they’d run away as soon as they faced Western wunderwaffen and ubermenschen. When that did not work out, Plan B largely amounted to doing Plan A harder, including blowing up the Nordstream pipelines. Yet the Anglosphere and one assumes the mainstream European press depicts high energy prices and the resulting economic weakness and rising citizen unhappiness as if they just happened, as opposed were the result of actions to cut off Europe from cheap Russian energy. Michael Hudson has argued that the US embarked on this path to weaken Europe.
5 Russia does have the “Who signs the document”? problem. Putin and others have pointed out that Zelensky is no longer the legitimate president of Ukraine since his term has expired. Putin discussed that the Russian reading of the Ukraine constitution is that the executive power then falls to the head of the Rada, but Ukraine needs to make the determination.
6 Recall that Russia promised war crimes trials, another post World War II fixture. There are apparently more than enough ugly videos of Ukraine soldiers torturing Russian POWs to make the charges stick with Russia’s economic allies. That would help reinforce the notion that Ukraine has done plenty to merit Third Reich treatments.
7 Due to this post already getting a bit long, I have had to skip over why NATO entering into security guarantees, even if the big members were to have a Damascene conversion, is also vanishingly unlikely. I am not sure if that initiative would require unanimity; recall the Balts and probably the UK would remain opposed to any resolution of the war where any of pre-2014 Ukraine is recognized as part of Russia. So that could prove to be an insuperable obstacle.
In addition, I believe that many of the governance and operation issues that Auerelien raised in his fine essay, NATO’s Phantom Armies, on why a NATO intervention in Ukraine was pretty much impossible, would also apply to a peacekeeping force on the scale needed for Ukraine (even if Russia were to trust NATO as a peacekeeper; it would probably require the participation of friendlies like China). Confirming my suspicions, Wikipedia list only Bosina-Herzgovinia and Serbia-Kosovo as peacekeeping missions. That of course does not mean that some NATO members might form a coalition of the willing but brand it as NATO.
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What does Russia want? Occupy all of Ukraine? I don´t think so. No matter what the MM claim the Russia of today is not the Russia of Stalin. It would take a Stalin level of coercion to completely subjugate Ukraine. That is the summary execution of thousands of Ukrainian nationalists, the establishment of concentration camps but also a new binding ideology that justifies the incorporation of Ukraine. A big problem for any kind of non occupation solution is meddling by the West. Here though I think things might be looking up for Russia in the medium term. France, Germany and Britain all have shaky and amazingly inept governments. I believe conditions will deteriorate to such an extent that all three countries will forget about any further meddling and also be adamantly opposed to any such ventures by Washington. There will be regime change. But not in Russia but in Western Europe. What can´t go on for ever won´t go on.
This will open the goldilocks option for Russia: some Ukrainian strongman with nationalist cache (Salushni?) who will keep the extremists under wraps and deliver peace and quiet for Putin. Some sort of Ukrainian Lukashenko.
When will this happen? By the end of next year.
Maybe not all of Ukraine, but almost certainly all the portions with major ethnic Russian populations. Particularly Odessa and Transnistria. At that point the rest of Ukraine is landlocked and perhaps 50% of its former size and likely still being torn apart by war.
Apparently Ukraine once had a population of 50 million. There are estimates that the current population is now 20 million and dropping precipitously. Even if Ukraine is wholly taken over by Russia, or some strongman is appointed to tyrannize the remaining shattered territory, there will be an enormous Ukrainian diaspora in the EU who will not forget the last 4 years (Maybe the last 4 decades is more appropriate). You could end up with a diaspora similar to the Irish Americans in the US who will tirelessly campaign for decades towards independence or reconquest.
In a brief paragraph within a post today about Russia’s strikes on the Ukraine Electrical Infrastructure on Sunday, John Helmer suggests that Trump may be on board with this recent escalation by the USA:
Interesting what you say. That would mean that Russia has 63 days until Inauguration Day to shape the conflict in the Ukraine to a point that even if Trump comes in and wants freezes or demilitarized zones or whatever other dumb idea that he comes up with, that it would be far too late to do so. And that may explain the new attacks on the electrical grid.
My read of Sunday’s strike was as a message to Trump: “No Deal”.
Why is Helmer dignifying this fabrication? Putin and Trump did not speak. The Kremlin forcefully denied it. Helmer is simply wrong about the Trump part.
And Alex Christoforou gave a detailed takedown of why it was not plausible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV2wMzpqtac
And Trump [family blog] well knows that any conversation with Putin at this time would be taped by the NSA and used against him. Putin surely knows that as well.
It makes perfect sense for Trump to be on board with the escalation and for it to be coordinated with Biden.
First, take a look at who he appointed.
Second, it neatly solves his problem with his base — see, it wasn’t the good Trump who did it, it was the bad Biden on his way out, now Trump is stuck with the inherited situation (never mind that he could try to reverse it whenever he wishes, but he will not).
No, you read his cabinet wrong. They are rabid pro-Israel and China hawks. They generally recognize that the US can’t take on those two and Russia too. They’ll be even more of that view when they get their clearances and have the sensibly conflict-averse Pentagon tell them where Western weapons stocks and production capacity stands v. probable burn rates in any hot conflict.
And why would it be in Trump’s interest to depict his hands as tied? This is 100% at odds with his branding and his many claims of the ease of ending the war. It remains a fact that it would end much faster if Trump cuts off the money and weapons flows. Nothing Biden does will change that as long as Russia does not take the bait or strikes someplace, say in the Middle East, where the US will be loath to admit that the Russians messed with them effectively.
And virtually all commentators are depicting this “escalation” as optics and a morale booster, and not changing the outcome or even the trajectory of the war.
A Lawrence Wilkerson does argue that US Strategic Command – and Scott Ritter confirms this – do have their plans for nuclear war against RU AND CHINA ready.
Just past summer again it was pointed out that now even more US WMDs have been equipped with super-fuzes.
To me that system sounds like too simple a solution for way more complex RU skills. But it doesn´t matter what the RU can or cannot do if StratCom believes otherwise. Here I do wonder – how delusional are planning staffs in the US core of nuclear war planning???
On the other hand Ritter is of course correct: If Tridents or Minutemen hit that´s a fact. And so far it is Sci-Fi that RU can pevent that from happening once they´re launched.
(Although Martyanov suggests that Minutemen at least are of limited concern to RU High Command. How so? S-550?)
What somehow is never mentioned in any of these conversations with former US personnel – that StratCom must know that US would perish.
At least with Wilkerson I am unsure if he is aware of the turn of the missile tide to RUs favour.
Some well-meaning former older members of the US nat.sec. state/armed forces like Wilkerson do tend to still underestimate RU capabilities – not due to arrogance but due to being stuck in the early 2000s. Views then amplified through blogs.
These crazies need to read Annie Jacobsen’s very sobering book – Nuclear War A Scenario to learn what would await the United Sates and 330 million Americans if the US launches nuclear warheads at Russia and China. Game over for them AND game over for the US and most of the rest of the world. All of this talk of using nukes is completely insane.
Col. Wilkerson has an article on Scheerpost stating America would lose if it went to war with Iran. I think you can guess what he thinks of war with Russia or China – we lose. He probably has more than enough remaining contacts to understand how American MIC compares to Russia and China (and might still have a security clearance.)
America has descended from Teddy R “speak softly and carry a big stick” to our current “howl and carry a matchstick”. Now, the matchstick might be nukes able to light the world on fire, but anybody who talks about limited nuclear war or winning a nuclear war is certifiable.
Military staffs plan strategy not because they believe in them, but because it’s their job amd they are military professionals–they plan for every conceivable contingencies. I would not be surprised if we still have some version of War Plan Red on the books somewhere, with some people assigned to keeping things up to date.
> Second, it neatly solves his problem with his base — see, it wasn’t the good Trump who did it, it was the bad Biden on his way out, now Trump is stuck with the inherited situation
There is no problem on that front. For one thing, Trump isn’t big on legacies (except for psychic damage from the horrid Fred). For another, he clearly feels no pressure for his base: His cabinet as constructed is almost universally anti-Ukraine. Of course, his cabinet in favor of a pivot towards confrontation with China, which is also insane, but it’s not insane right now.
While agreeing with those noting Helmers claim that Trump might want escalation & he talked to Putin is not really supported, IMO those who speculate Trump will deescalate this war putting too much faith into Trump, because he did the opposite last time he was President and in fact was more anti Russia than his predissesor. Too much hope/faith is being put into Trump fixing this situation. And again – Russia losing the peace happened about a hundred yrs ago, there is no peace for Russia to win. Russia must be prepared for eternal with war The West until The West stops being The West.
Trump 1.0 is not Trump 2.0.
Trump 1.0 had a cabinet full of the wacky end of the Establishment, as in not on board with his ideas and out to undermine him, plus 2 years of non-stop Russiagate yammering.
Trump may not perform, but that is more likely to be due to his defects of temperament than any design.
Adapted from John LeCarré’s “The Secret Pilgrim.” Smiley on Russia, replaced with “America.”
You ask, can we ever trust America? The first answer is no. For one reason: America doesn’t trust itself. America is threatened and America is frightened, and America is falling apart. America is disgusted with its past, sick of its present, and scared stiff of its future. America is broke, lazy, volatile, incompetent, slippery, dangerously proud, dangerously armed, sometimes brilliant, often ignorant.
Without its military industrial complex, it would be just another chaotic member of the Third World. But it does have it, and is often willing to use it. And can’t just pull its soldiers from foreign parts overnight, for the good reason that America can’t (or won’t) house them, or feed them, or employ them.
The reality is that for the West it must subdue Russia and steal its resources. As far as natural resources go Europe is largely tapped out. It has little in the way of forested lands to exploit, minerals to mine, and oil to pump out of the ground. In order to maintain its relatively luxurious lifestyles Europe must get them from elsewhere. Their colonies are largely gone. Africa is very tempting as is Russia. And so both will be targeted aggressively by the West. Ukraine is a sideshow in this Big Steal. De-escalating in Ukraine won’t end the West’s lust for Russia.
Yugoslavia was a snack, and Ukraine is an apéritif.
and from Trump himself when he spoke with Putin by telephone last week.”
My understanding was that Peskov flatly denied that any conversation ever took place; nor have I seen anybody from the Trump camp confirm that it had. Am I missing something?
Yes, I concurred just above.
Agreed. Wouldn’t that be a violation of the Logan Act? All Trump can say is, “shall we meet in Budapest end of January?”
One other problem with the Turkiye/Hungary being any sort of security guarantors is that the West would certainly try to color-revolution both of them, and install puppet governments.
Also, Erdogan strikes me as inherently not agreement-capable.
I think both would have to leave NATO for such a plan to be workable.
No, not the Trump Administration. Trump would want this to happen if he could take credit for a deal. That’s what is in its favor. The issue is negotiations are sure not to get off the ground, so this is just a cute idea that could happen only in a parallel universe.
Trump is trying to get Gabbard in as head of the Director of National Intelligence. Her top priority is to get the US out of “regime change wars” as in take the CIA out of the color revolution business entirely.
And in any event the US has tried coup-ing Erdogan before and failed.
The problem with any Hungarian or Turkish guaranteeing of a settlement, is that the timeline of both is subject to change. The Hungarian government especially is subject to the uncertain outcome of future elections, even if a US instigated regime change is not applied. Erdogan too has a limited political life span, while Russia (presumably) is thinking of at least 40/50 years of security from further US/Ukrainian provocations.
However, without actually needing a complete ground occupation of the Ukraine, it may be possible for Russia to follow the example of the CIA and do a ‘reverse-Maidan’. Before the war and the coup, there was a roughly 50-50 split between pro-EU and pro-Russia opinion – it would all depend on whether there will be enough persuadably pro-Russians left in the middle and east of the country to form a viable and credible government. If it’s possible, it probably won’t be easy, but better than any alternative.
Security guarantees are treaties. The US is exceptional in being willing to break them.
In addition, in what I depicted as the infinitesimally small odds of this coming to pass, a deal like this would put a big rupture in NATO, as in weaken it. I did not discuss in the post that NATO is already on a major decline path, between Ukraine draining its weapons stocks, Trump pulling the funding drip feed, and the economic self-destruction of denying Europe access to cheap Russian energy means they won’t be able to build up militarily. They will be likely unable to meet the level of spending in the era of US assistance.
Before the war, opinion was >70% in favor of normalizing relations with Russia. That was the lead item in Zelensky’s campaign platform and that was his margin of victory. But who knows where things are now, between the direct impact of the war (as in hardening opinion against Russia) v. the political leanings of the many who fled (a high proportion are allegedly hard core ethnic supremacists, per what Colonel Smithers reports from those who’ve dealt with Ukraine mothers in the UK schools).
Yes. Absolutely right about NATO. A defeat by Russia will put it in the remaindered sales category. But as far as treaties go, the US basically controls Europe (as in, for example North Sea pipeline debacle). No treaty will result unless the US wills it – for what that’s worth, and unless the EU grows a pair, in the name of ‘western solidarity’ they will renounce any treaties they are told to renounce, and they will do it like Scholz, with a big embarrassed grin. But Russia has indicated that they won’t be taken in by any repeat of the Minsk fiascos, so any future treaties will be treated by them only provisionally .
This is actually a problem for Russia – how do they hold the US (EU don’t count) to an agreement?
Biden’s end of term provocations is an attempt to create a Gulf of Tonkin moment to get visible and acknowledged NATO boots on the ground in some form. He wants a greatly expanded war. Creating circumstances that require a greater Russian response that box Trump into escalation, even as Trump prefers to confront China or iran.
I don’t agree with Ritter that Biden wants Trump to “stay the course”. Biden wants bequeath a far bigger war, just as he’s done in Palestine. He wants boots on the ground. Trump doesn’t have to secretly talk with the Russians or anybody else ala Nixon or Reagan with their secret October dealings, which both resulted in election victories. Trump has already won. What he does remains to be seen; does he understand the war is lost and to quit?
*Sigh* [I am sighing mainly at myself for the result of not writing a longer post]
It is beyond Biden’s capacity to gin up a wider war.
Admittedly this is in a footnote, not the main text, but Aurelien already debunked “NATO boots on the ground” in excruciating detail in the linked article, NATO”s Phantom Armies: https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/natos-phantom-armies
And NATO is depleted. The Europeans, ex the nutty Balts, do not want to face down Russia. The Pentagon has been applying the brakes regarding escalation on multiple fronts due to US lack of capability.
This really is about Biden trying to do as much as he can to make life hard for Trump, as opposed to a coherent plan.
I beg to disagree. It took years to ramp up in Vietnam; in 1961 or 1964 the US didn’t have the ability or logistics to land troops or even sustained air campaigns with friendly territory to set up. But the wheels were set in motion by Kennedy and the generals worked to put facts on the ground. False flags do provide cover. It was years after Gulf of Tonkin to field large amounts of troops and “Rolling Thunder” took a year to get off the ground.
We all understand the NATO cupboards are depleted and scaling up men and material is a huge task but it is not nearly impossible as Aurelien wrties. If there is some plausible excuse to invoke Article 5, the neocons and like-minded new Europe will go for it. Their long game is dismemberment of Russia. They are crazy people.
Ukraine has thrown hundreds of thousands of poorly trained and equipped conscripts into the meat grinder. The west is surely capable of doing the same.
Russia certainly has formidable air defenses, but as we see in Israel those systems can be overwhelmed. The US and NATO have the kit to do so.
Yes, it is not 1964 anymore. But the elites have the same demented mentality and are drunk with their war technology. Three years ago things looked very different and in March 2022 it looked almost over.
Incapable fits much better.
Yes. It should be remembered that the Ukrainian government had to ban the exit of men from the country, fortify its Western borders to stop them fleeing anyway, and resort to bushwhacking people in the streets in order to get those hundreds of thousands of conscripts.
Ignacio: Incapable fits much better.
I agree with you and Yves on this debate — the West is incapable, as in it just doesn’t have the military kit or the industrial capacity short of nukes — of beating Russia (or China or Iran).
Nevertheless, perhaps what neither of you are taking into account is that on the evidence the political leading actors — Biden, Starmer, Macron, the Neocons — literally don’t understand that.
I don’t think it’s entirely woofing and propaganda. They’ve parted contact with reality, and they’re a low caliber of mentality that never had much understanding or interest in specifics, anyway. I’m sure elements in the Pentagon have explained the situation; but in these people’s heads it’s still the unipolar moment.
Again, it’s the Norma Desmond phase of US and Western hegemony. It’s quite dangerous. The West is governed by rather stupid malignant narcissists — in Biden’s case, a senile stupid malignant narcissist.
“literally don’t understand that.”
Seriously I am pondering on this now and again – and I really don´t know what that Scholz guy thinks and would tell his – too politician – wife at home when undisturbed.
What by now I have accepted is the sad fact that the “educated” – the more they are in fact the stronger their faith in the PR – genuinely believe all of this nonsense.
“the West is incapable, as in it just doesn’t have the military kit or the industrial capacity short of nukes — of beating Russia (or China or Iran).”
They’re waiting for “AI” or some kind of war app to do the trick. :))
Starmer and Macron don’t understand (the situation in Ukraine). Yes, but there is one thing they understand: if they tried conscripting in their countries they would be politically dead at first suggestion.
Starmer and Macron don’t understand (the situation in Ukraine). Yes, but there is one thing they understand: if they tried conscripting in their countries they would be politically dead at first suggestion.
[ Really important comment. ]
This comparison is invalid.
As Michael Hudson explained in a recent interview, and picked up approvingly by Alastair Crooke, he was IN THE ROOM when the US was developing its post-Vietnam strategy, of how to keep its global dominance when it was now politically untenable to draft soldiers. That is why we now do regime changes and proxy wars instead.
The inability to draft (ex perhaps a clear existential threat) is also operative in Europe.
On top of that, poor American health (obesity of 22% among 12-19 year olds, per the CDC, sedentary lifestyles, mental health issues) means 77% of draft-age Americans are unfit to serve: https://asiatimes.com/2023/09/77-of-us-youth-unqualified-for-military-service/
We have not even gotten to the fact that in the 1960s, America was still the world’s biggest economy, with the biggest manufacturing base.
Please get a grip on what America is now. NATO is even more of a hollow shell,.
The mechanics of conscription never have gone away. Registration with Selective Service is required by law for all 18 year olds. Many states register young men with Selective Service when issuing driver licenses. Virtually all colleges and universities require completion of FASFA financial forms which until last year required disclosure of Selective Service registration; in the current Congress there were proposals to renew this requirement or begin automatic registration. Active conscription was untenable 55 years ago and it withered, but mechanics remain. The Baltics and Nordics have active military conscription and it is actively considered by Germany, France and UK.
Michael Hudson gives the public too much credit stating renewal of conscription couldn’t happen. His mind is stuck in 1968 when the draft became the catalyst for the inspiring antiwar movement and a decade of anti-miltarism. One had genuine hopes for humanity to advance… and look at what happened beginning with Carter’s huge military buildup and the subsequent wars initiated or sponsored by the US. The military is formidable in spite of losses in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I agree the US economy is not the same manufacturing powerhouse as 1968. But this doesn’t mean crazy people will take a sober look and retreat ie, LOSE. A loss to Russia is a change in the world order. Neocons cannot accept multipolarity anymore than Kennedy or Johnson could accept a united, communist Vietnam. There was no reverse gear. History is full of wars begun on outright falsehoods. Remember the Maine!
Can you not read? This is NOT Hudson’s opinion. He was in the room! US top officials concluded a draft was politically untenable. This is now a bedrock of how the US runs its military, as in to get around this obstacle.
What about political suicide and mass protests do you not understand? If you think things were ugly in the 1960s, when men understood they were expected to serve their country if asked, imagine what they would be like now.
And kids who are overweight or on anti-depressants can’t serve. You have to be able to carry a 70 LB pack pretty far distances and not fall apart under stress. There are pretty high physical standards to meet.
Yes, the people in the streets would stop commerce. As one who was in the middle of the conscription fiasco of the 60’s, Moms, Grand-moms, and many others would glom to the protests. My understanding of the 2024 post-election review is that Americans do not want more war.
My understanding of Americans troughout ages is that they just love wars, as long as they win, and get their share of the loot (and preferably for someone else to do the dyin’). Lots of love for wars that make gas (and everything else) cheaper, and hate for those that negatively affect fat asses and wallets.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/well/obesity-epidemic-america.html
November 14, 2024
Three-Quarters of U.S. Adults Are Now Overweight or Obese
A sweeping new paper reveals the dramatic rise of obesity rates nationwide since 1990.
By Nina Agrawal
Nearly three quarters of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, according to a sweeping new study. The findings have wide-reaching implications for the nation’s health and medical costs as it faces a growing burden of weight-related diseases.
The study, * published on Thursday in The Lancet, reveals the striking rise of obesity rates nationwide since 1990 — when just over half of adults were overweight or obese — and shows how more people are becoming overweight or obese at younger ages than in the past. Both conditions can raise the risk of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, and shorten life expectancy.
The study’s authors documented increases in the rates of overweight and obesity across ages. They were particularly alarmed by the steep rise among children, more than one in three of whom are now overweight or obese. Without aggressive intervention, they forecast, the number of overweight and obese people will continue to go up — reaching nearly 260 million people in 2050…
* https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01548-4/fulltext
The US and NATO currently have neither the personnel nor the inventory to fight a big war. In addition, neither the US nor NATO have the industrial capacity or the logistical skill to produce the volume of modern weapons and have them in bulk where they might be needed to fight a peer conflict should the aforementioned TO&E problem be set aside or solved.
Bullet points (pun unintended):
Just in time logistics doesn’t work in a war of attrition.
High tech weapons won’t decide a war of attrition.
Aerial bombing cannot win a war- any war.
Offshoring manufacturing is a major national security problem.
Resources critical to armaments and technology are controlled, or even sole-sourced, by Russia and China.
A war between Russia (or China) and NATO will be fought with nuclear weapons.
This is madness, and the level of bloodlust coming from the US, UK, etc. is off the charts. These morons want to get us all killed.
And imagine forced conscription in Europe. It might work in the mighty Baltic countries but in France and the UK? Not only very unpopular but if tried, since for many years there hasn’t been obligatory military service, the poor guys would need to start from 0 with the training, needing at least a year to start learning something. By then the war is already lost.
IMO this ATACMS stunt won’t go too far. The DoD might, for instance, decide putting somehow incorrect coordinates in the missiles or even warn in advance ensuring much damage is avoided. Hey, the Russians did the hell of a job with the jamming and the AD! The Mummy & The Neocons (the hell of a name for a new band) will be very soon out and the phantom NK armies are safe.
Sure, “the elites have the same demented mentality” but public opinion is in a very different place. Yes, in Europe there was initial support for the Ukraine, but that has died away as defeat is becoming obvious – and boring. Apart from the shills in the press, no European country, not even the UK, could now count on public support for ‘boots on the ground”. Too many people are finding daily life enough to cope with, as economies slow down and public spending takes a header into the dustbin of capitalism.
too many people are finding daily life enough to cope with…
a cogent point that lies..”somewhere beneath the deep blue sea”…perhaps…of some minds…(uninhabited/unconscious comes to mind))…of officials with directives
the archaic precarity of the governed
The crazies seem to think that they can have hot wars with Russia, Iran, and China without any of the wars becoming nuclear wars. In fact, I would not be surprised to learn that some of the crazies even think they could attack Russia, China, and Iran with nuclear weapons and that none of those nations would respond in kind.
Small but important historical point: A month prior to his assassination, Kennedy signed orders for the gradual removal of “advisors” from Vietnam. More than a millions lives on all sides were lost in that war after Johnson escalated. I’s a measure of how little has been learned that Biden’s war in Ukraine, plus the genocide in Gaza, have probably together killed over a million souls and counting. Death becomes us.
Biden seems to have forgotten the other 330,000,000+ Americans when he put the country in play. He really does keep trying to tarnish what he thinks is some phantom legacy. Those shoes and boots on the ground here in the US of A aren’t phantoms, they are you, me and our neighbors.
Actually, so far Russia has directly fought back against NATO on one occasion in the war — immediately after the ATACMS strike on the beach in Sevastopol in June “something happened” to one of the heavy super-expensive spy drones directing the strikes in real time.
And that was the end of the presence of those drones in the Black Sea.
Which did alleviate the burden of strikes on Crimea a bit.
Though of course the resources were immediately shifted to mainland Russia and much graver escalation followed there.
But this shows that if Russia strikes back, NATO will back off.
On a more serious level, it has been gamed out countless times what happens if, say, Russia decides to end the existence of most of the NATO members in Europe and thus solve the problem with the threat on its western flank. The US then has the choice of launching strategic strikes into Russia and guaranteeing its own end in the retaliatory second strike. Or accepting that its NATO bluff is over, and retreating. The latter is the rational choice, because there is no point dying over Poland, much less if that Poland doesn’t even exist anymore.
Russia turning the other cheek again and again and sacrificing so many of its own citizens pointlessly is entirely a political choice driven by the imperative to preserve the current order inside Russia. Try to work out the consequences of seriously going to war, and you will see that the big losers will be the current Russian elites. The Russian people, who are now being sacrificed on both sides of the front line, will win big time, but they don’t make the decisions.
The Durans of the world will never explain that to you because their core audience is strongly pro-capitalist libertarian leaning Westerners, and they have to keep the views and clicks going so that the ad revenue keeps flowing. If they tell you the truth about the internal reality of Russia, most of that audience will switch off
To your last point: The people at The Duran (I’m listening to their latest with Fyodor Lukyanov) can speak with confidence and authority about the prevailing opinion among journalists, academics, and that priestly class generally, which also staffs the intel agencies and government administrations. They have no way of knowing the faintest details about the views of the working class in Russia, Germany, the U.S., or England. The distinctions “people” and “elites” are indistinct. Countries, especially at the scale we’re dealing with here, are massive, complicated, contradictory messes, with alliances and rivalries, subcultures, philosophies, and mind-shaping experiences without knowledge of which statements are insufficiently textured. I don’t think we can make claims about what countries think; seems arrogant to me. You can certainly distill the perspectives of the important media in a country and see what the ruling class is feeding itself and the larger informed public, but even there, information is put into the media for all sorts of reasons, and framed by and for the interests of all sorts of actors. I like The Duran; I think it’s very carefully and expertly done, though I recall a recent episode in which a fairly orthodox free-market economist said some bunk and Mercouris agreed as though it were obvious and self-evident. We all have our biases and shades and tints and grains of salt, and our bits to add to one another’s knowledge.
I listened to the one with Lukyanov too, and cringed a lot, but in that case because of Lukyanov himself.
The dimissive derisive remarks about the “turbo-patriots” and how it is delusional to think Russia can or even should occupy the whole of Ukraine was an absolute deal breaker.
Typical Moscow liberal position.
The reality is that there is no other choice, but the likes of Lukyanov are not going to be paying the price of not doing it — the regular folks in the border regions will be.
Meanwhile the Russian working class is making Sarmatmobils with “Na Washington” written on them (though, of course, these days it should be more properly known as Fascington)
I apologize for asking this, as explaining Russian realities to Westerners is so often such a thankless undertaking, but could you elaborate on your view of Russia’s internal reality?
One issue that is prominent all over the world: the city/urban vs rural/town political tensions.
> Or accepting that its NATO bluff is over, and retreating. The latter is the rational choice, because there is no point dying over Poland, much less if that Poland doesn’t even exist anymore.
Why would anybody, let alone Putin, assume that the US leadership is rational? I’m not aware of any other empire that said “Yep, it makes no sense for us to continue as an imperial hegemon, we’d better stand down.” Did I not get the memo?
So far, Ukraine has worked out pretty well for the US. At the cost of some fiat, a lot of Ukrainian lives, and denuded weapons stocks — very profitable to replace — the Europeans are now explicitly our vassals, and Germany, a major industrial power and rival, has been seriously damaged by the higher price imposed by American gas. So why not try to turn that victory into a loss?
If I were Putin, I would assist the European nationalist right in any way possible, wait until America’s back was turned as they marched into some second Asian quagmire, offer to open Nordstream again, and make NATO irrelevant that way. Why the rush?
If Biden wanted a bigger war, he’d have one. This is about throwing a wrench into Trump’s plans, along with paying back supporters (neocons, Atlanticists, the Brits) who are interested in staying the course
I’m not sure what the imagined scope of Russian occupation might be, but the Russian pledge “not to go where [it’s] not wanted” isn’t entirely a question of Russian magnanimity – in the event of a rapidly deteriorating security position, the Ukrainians will beg NATO intervention and, at the very least, Poland will accept the invitation. The comparison to post-war Germany may be apt, but not in the way imagined by the author: like Germany, there will be an East and a West Ukraine with opposite geopolitical tilts. It may not extend all the way to Kiev, but the frontier NATO states – certainly Poland, possibly Romania and Slovakia – will want a buffer of their own. They cannot save the Eastern flank, but they do have the means to frustrate Russian along Ukraine’s western frontier.
No, Ukraine has been begging for some time for that and nada has happened. All NATO member states are far weaker, militarily and economically, than at the start of the war. Their weapons stocks are depleted. Douglas Macgregor estimated the force that Poland could muster to support a mini-coalition of the willing at 30,000 tops. Russia now has active forces of something on the order of one million. Macgregor’s earlier estimate of the maximum size of a coalition of the willing was 100,000, with 40,000 from the US. And that was back when everyone was gung ho and believed Russia to be weak and incompetent. They could not organize that then. And that 40,000 assumed to come from the US would not be there now.
Oh, and Russia has air superiority too so it would quickly make mincemeat of any force that entered Ukraine.
They are not going to be doing a massive NATO ground invasion of Russia now.
That is in the cards but for much later.
What is happening now with the missile srtikes is softening up Russia for a nuclear first strike.
Events are literally following one of the classic patterns that has been theorized about for many decades.
Why nobody is taking it seriously — not among the pro-Russian pundits, and apparently not in the Kremlin itself either — I cannot understand.
Unless the decision to surrender has already been made.
P.S. Putin’s “demands” from June were essentially surrender terms from a Russian perspective. Keep that in mind.
Please read Aurelien, “NATO’s Phantom Armies” as I linked in the post. “NATO” is not a cohesive body. Its members states will not back a draft. EU budget rules prevent enough military spending. It is na ga happen.
> They are not going to be doing a massive NATO ground invasion of Russia now. That is in the cards but for much later
With which armies?
The US only has 100,000 troops in Europe now. I don’t see us surging 900,000 troops into Europe anytime soon. And I don’t see Turkey being especially enthusiastic about marching its 355,000 over the Caucusus. That leaves essentially the World War I Western Front nations (202,000 + 200,000 + 184,000 + 181,600 + 165,000 = 932,600) minus Italy, Spain, and America opening up the Eastern front against a battle-hardened Russian military. And getting the job done before the winter, I assume. Hard to see this happening.
Thank you, both.
Yves: “Oh, and Russia has air superiority too so it would quickly make mincemeat of any force that entered Ukraine.”
Yves and readers may be surprised at the corridor where the imposition of a NATO no fly zone over Ukraine is still entertained. It’s the European Commission, not Uschi, but some officials who should know better, but have a case of PDS.
Colonel Smithers: Yves and readers may be surprised at the corridor where the imposition of a NATO no fly zone over Ukraine is still entertained.
Yup. Again, these people never had much contact with reality and have now parted company with it entirely. Again, it’s the Norma Desmond Phase of imagined Western dominance.
I’ll be quoting you so please let me know if there’s another source. (Search engines kept trying to search for Norma Desmond western wear!)
I’ll be quoting you so please let me know if there’s another source.
Not to my knowledge.
Not that I’m any particular light in the darkness. Alastair Crooke talks about this syndrome articulately — though not using my dismissive phrase — in his latest video today with Judge N., starting at 27:36 —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx4_kXN3To8
Alastair Crooke : The West Lusts for War.
Also, his latest Strategic Culture piece which discusses how these people want a war to (re)establish their predominance, but there are no more easy candidates (i.e thanks to the democratization missile & drone technologies, no more low-tech brown people far away without the capability to shoot back.)
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/11/15/there-are-no-easy-wars-left-fight-but-not-mistake-longing-for-one/
There are no “Easy Wars” left to fight, but do not mistake the longing for one
I believe people are referring to a character & situation in the film “Sunset Boulevard”:-
“The film stars William Holden as Joe Gillis, a struggling screenwriter, and Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, a former silent-film star who draws him into her deranged fantasy world, where she dreams of making a triumphant return to the screen.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_Boulevard_(film)
That’s right, the Poles may be the ‘Jackals of Europe’ but they are not yet ‘mad dogs’. If they, or the Rumanians etc. were to act unilaterally then NATO would have no justification to join in to help them, and although most NATO countries would probably like to do so, they know very well that they don’t have the capacity.
Albeit I agree that East NATO will attempt to keep up the threat – if not via true conventional force – then by WMDs.
On that point I just cannot imagine that RU would seriously agree to a scenario with UKR territory (Western rump state, whatever) to join NATO for sake of alleged peace. That would be half a victory for the US who have sacrificed NOTHING for that and in return would get again closer to RU by another 800 miles. Fast forward 20 years and we repeat SMO.
However as manned armies are concerned – US Army is deeply worried about the state of its forces. One year ago there was this piece:
https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/10/
“In addition to the disciplined disobedience required to execute effective
mission command, the US Army is facing a dire combination of a recruiting
shortfall and a shrinking Individual Ready Reserve. This recruiting shortfall,
nearly 50 percent in the combat arms career management fields, is a longitudinal
problem. Every infantry and armor soldier we do not recruit today is a strategic
mobilization asset we will not have in 2031.14 The Individual Ready Reserve,
which stood at 700,000 in 1973 and 450,000 in 1994, now stands at 76,000.15
These numbers cannot fill the existing gaps in the active force, let alone
any casualty replacement or expansion during a large-scale combat operation.
The implication is that the 1970s concept of an all-volunteer force has outlived
its shelf life and does not align with the current operating environment.
The technological revolution described below suggests this force has reached
obsolescence. Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well
require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and
a move toward partial conscription.”
After the same authors are argueing one paragraph earlier that US Army could not concduct a real ground war of the scale AFU has done in SMO now for more than a couple of weeks with casualties suffered in a week what they suffered in the entirety of their Iraq/Afhanistan invasions of several years:
“The Russia-Ukraine War is exposing significant vulnerabilities
in the Army’s strategic personnel depth and ability to withstand and replace
casualties.11 Army theater medical planners may anticipate a sustained
rate of roughly 3,600 casualties per day, ranging from those killed in action
to those wounded in action or suffering disease or other non-battle injuries.12
With a 25 percent predicted replacement rate, the personnel system will
require 800 new personnel each day. For context, the United States sustained
about 50,000 casualties in two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In large-scale combat operations, the United States could experience that same
number of casualties in two weeks.”
Which puts that German Greenpeace paper of last week to shame – which as I feared was handed around like free biscuits as the new wisdom.
US has plans for entering war in Europe since before NATO, 1949. I am sure plans exist smaller but not unlike plans I worked in the 1980s.
In spite of this: The last place to have a major power war is central/east Europe!
The nuclear tripwire is too worrisome. True since the 1970’s.
What Biden and advisors are thinking.
Troubling since 2008.
1980s – which means that at the same time as you were working on the inside a Donald MacKenzie in New Left Review wrote his “Nuclear War Planning and Strategies of Nuclear Coercion” in 1984 as part of a series then about WWIII planning. Unfortunately a piece only available for payment. Otherwise I would have put it up here.
p.s. which reminds me of my father visiting me in the States and for the first time in his life talking to a former member of the US Army during the Cold War – when my Dad had served on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Turned out both were told the same stories.
It seems to me that the Russian occupation of Ukraine will not resemble the occupation of Germany in 1945, but the occupation of Germany in 1918.
It will be remembered that after the German defeat, the Germans were not wholly crushed but their military declared itself incapable of fighting effectively against the Allies. A large amount of Germany was taken by its neighbours (France, Belgium, Denmark and Poland) but an even larger part (since much of the bit that went to Poland was actually Polish) was occupied by the Allies, namely the Rhineland. The purpose of the Rhineland occupation was to make Germany impossible to defend against the West, and to give the Allies the capacity to easily punish any violation of the Versailles Treaty. The Rhineland was still formally part of Germany and economically functioned as such, but it was demilitarized and under foreign military control.
Something very similar will probably happen in Ukraine. Apart from the territories annexed by Russia, the idea of a “sanitary zone” where the Russians would make sure that no Ukrainian military presence existed, but which would still be technically Ukrainian, looks very like the Rhineland occupation. Plus having Russian troops in Kharkov and Odessa and within easy striking distance of Kyiv would put a cramp in the prospects for a renewal of the war.
The notion that the West would honor any diplomatic commitment to Russia is fanciful indeed. The only realistic ending is unconditional Ukrainian surrender and the installation of a client regime, i.e., the WWII ending model. That is what Russia is seeking, and what it is willing to pay for in blood and treasure.
To the following quote:
“And the Western, or at least EU, preferred replacements, former general Zaluzhny or former president Poroshenko, would be as opposed to making minimal necessary concessions as Zelensky. Plus Zaluzhny is a hard core Banderite and would be unacceptable to Russia”
one should add that Poroshenko is also unacceptable to Russia, as he was the one who negotiated the Minsk agreements in bad faith (as he boasted himself shortly after the war started, statements then confirmed by Merkel, and later by Hollande).
That is not what Russia is seeking but due to the absolute refusal on the other side of the table to even get to the table unless Russia does an unconditional surrender, returns all Ukrainian land, and makes a hard guarantee that it will no oppose Ukraine joining NATO it will be the only result that the other side will get.
They have no choice.
Missiles and drones fly very far these days. So whatever remains of Ukraine will be used in perpetuity as a platform for strikes deep into Russia. Which over time will severely degrade Russia’s defense installations and industrial base.
The only way to peace is to occupy the whole territory. It will not be as bad as it was in the 1940s in terms of the insurgency in western Ukraine — there is signal intelligence these days, drones to survey the forests 24/7, etc. etc. The tools to quickly and thoroughly flush out any guerrilla movement exist today.
Long-term, on a time scale of the next several generations, the only way to truly lasting peace is to not just occupy all of Ukraine, but to then also erase Ukrainian identity.
Again, there is no other option — the alternative is perpetual war, because the only basis for Ukrainian identity is vicious genocidal hatred for everything Russian. You cannot afford to have this mental virus perpetuating itself.
The problem is that if Stalin didn’t have the stomach to properly deal with them in the late 1940s, the chances of Putin doing it are exactly zero.
Even more so given that the mandate to ensure the perpetuation of the system of oligarchic exploitation that was established in Russia in the 1990s, the protection of which has been Putin’s primary job all this time (fixing some of the damage of the 1990s was a necessary requirement for that), is not quite compatible with the effort required to properly win the war….
GM: They (the Russians) have no choice … whatever remains of Ukraine will be used in perpetuity as a platform for strikes deep into Russia.
Agreed.
I think readers may not be aware there’s precedent for russification of hostile populations, and that Ukrainians were, relatively speaking, coddled in this regard post-WWII.
Just to be clear, I’m not making any kind of moral argument. I’ve noticed that Westerners tend to dismiss the prospect of something like the russification of Ukraine as fantastical. This is simply not true.
Or even the halfway house of a ‘reverse Maidan’ and the installation of a new, replacement, client regime – same as now but with a different overseer.
“Pacification” of Ukraine has been done already twice in the last century.
The history of current geographical are of Ukraine is a history of waves of Ukrainization and Russification. As Ukrainian identity is the last of the Slavic identities to have emerged, it has been largely build by unmaking other identities. Fun fact: Russian troops are about to “liberate” the birth home of the famous Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. He was born near Kurakhovo decades before V.I. Lenin attached the area into Ukraine.
In The West it’s also often forgotten that this is still, for a large part, Ukrainian civil war on the identities allowed in Ukraine. There are a lot Ukrainians that have lived for generations in Russia, there are a lot of Ukrainians fighting on the Russian side. There are a lot of Ukrainian politicians living in Russia waiting for a chance to return.
For better and for worse, Russia (in the areas it controls) seems to be building the kind of multicultural, less corrupted, infrastructure maintaining, small business supporting Ukraine the people were voting for in 2019. And several times before that hoping that EU would bring it.
Surely the right solution is patterned on Yugoslavia:
1) Russia gives up all UKR territory except Crimea;
2) Ukraine ceases to exist as such and gets divided into small statelets that are independent and yet don’t threaten anyone;
3) NATO agrees never to station troops in said statelets;
4) Statelets are allowed to trade on favourable terms both with former Soviet Union and EU.
Russia is not giving up all territory ex Crimea. It has already made four oblasts, Donetsk, Lughansk, Kherson and Zaporzhizhis part of Russia. Putin can’t undo that even if he wanted to.
And NATO will not agree to #3. NATO insists any state can join NATO if they ask and qualify.
Any state except Russia.
and, presumably, China?
Oh, duh, thanks for the reminder!
Well, and are accepted by consensus. No state ha a pre-emptive right to join NATO, any more than the EU or BRICS.
But if all sides refuse to compromise, then it’s war until one side collapses with at best a temporary cease-fire. I am not predicting anything, just suggesting the best solution which means everyone gives up something.
Ukraine will collapse way before the West is willing to compromise. This is why Russia will dictate terms and Russia will in the end decide how much of Ukraine it occupies.
On what basis are these statelets going to be formed?
Ukraine is mostly ethnically Russian, then there are 15% Galicians/Western Ukrainians, and 5% Bulgarians, Hungarians, Romanians/Moldovans, Tatars and Greeks, and how many Rusyns nobody knows because Ukraine refuses to even acknowledge they exist.
The Hungarians are concentrated along the immediate border with Hungary, the Rusyns are in the mountains in Transcarpathia, Galicia is well defined, but everything else is quite mixed.
Yugoslavia wasn’t like that at all.
You had:
1) Serbia — used to be a real medieval kingdom, then was the nucleus around which Yugoslavia was formed. Eastern Orthodox
2) Croatia — was a real medieval kingdom too, but then fell under Hungarian rule, became Catholic as a result, was never part of the same state as Serbia.
3) Slovenia — also never part of the same state as the rest, a separate Slavic population that had been under Austrian rule for a very long time. Also Catholic.
4) Montenegro — another real medieval kingdom (that actually survived quite a bit past that too). Eastern Orthodox.
5) Bosnia — there had been a Bosnian kingdom too, though the later Bosniak identity was largely created by the Austrians out of the converted to Islam Slavic population in that region (same strategy used in western Ukraine by the same people). Religiously mixed, lots of Muslims.
6) Macedonia — that territory was ethnically mixed, with Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Turks, and some others too. The Macedonian identity was artificially created in the early 20th century by the Serbs and the Russians (who had some serious karma coming their way for what they did in several places trying to create new nations and sow divisions where none existed previous, and it did come their way eventually in the form of Ukraine), but regardless, it is a distinct population. Eastern Orthodox
As a side note, in the context of the above, it is actually a miracle that Croats and Serbs spoke basically the same language. Yes, deliberate effort was made in the 19th century to fully unify it, but it was not all that different to begin with, despite them never really being part of the same state (once they lost independence, Serbia was under Ottoman rule, while Croatia part of the Habsburg realm)
Where are the distinct populations in Ukraine?
Before the Maidan basically everyone east of Khmelnitsky spoke Russian, Ukrainian was spoken only west of it. And it was a continuous population with the mainland Russia — pretty much everyone has family on both sides of the front line.
I would suggest looking at Austria after WWII:
1) occupation zones by Western countries and the USSR (just as in Germany);
2) in 1955, a joint treaty gives back independence to Austria, with all foreign troops departing;
3) a few months after the treaty is in force, the Austrian parliament approves a constitutional act declaring the permanent neutrality of the country, which henceforth will not join a military alliance or allow foreign military bases on its territory.
Balkanization is surely right solution for the USA.
At this point, under current conditions, it can’t happen fast enough IMNSHO.
I thought in spring 2022 that Yugoslavia could be Russia’s approach given the acceptance of Donetsk’s and Luhansk’s declarations of independence and the use of Kosovo in motivating the SMO. Splitting up Ukraine in oblasts.
I also read Medvedev’s map as a possible step 2 with oblasts Russia is interested in joining Russia, and others Russia did not want that could join up with Eastern European states (in particular with Roumania gaining an oblast on that map that they have never held or had claims on). Similar to how some former Yugoslavian states has joined the EU.
After the referendums in fall 2022 I don’t see that as likely anymore. Russia could have had referendums on just independence in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia and then committed to defending their independence. If they had done so breaking up more of Ukriane would look likely, but that was not the chosen route.
In his most recent piece Patrick Lawrence embraces the Trump versus the deep state (no caps) idea. Given this latest sabotage bomb–Biden against starting WW3 before he was for it–can there be any doubt that the shadowy foreign policy manipulators are running a parallel government? That’s what JFK concluded after the Bay of Pigs. And while I don’t buy the idea that the spooks then did him in, that there are traitors in our midst–if traitor means defying the will of the people as opposed to the deep state version of traitor which is defying the will of the deep state (2016 Russiagate)–there can be little doubt. Democracy is indeed at stake.
Lawrence has also called Biden the worst president of the modern era if not ever. Even before he dementia he was one nasty piece of work.
There is also still the opportunity for neighboring states with ethnic and historical ties to parts of the Rump Ukraine taking them over. Everyone in the collective West is broke and war weary; in the EU governments are falling like flies.
That might be a starting point in negotiations once Ukraine has finally fallen apart. If there ultimately is anything left that could be called a Ukraine, it would more likely look like a Moldova; landlocked, rural, aged and very poor. Something like that would likely not want to join either the EU or NATO. They just couldn’t afford it.
We’ve seen neocons put out announcements like this only to have them walked back by those in power. This is already happening here.
Re deep strikes inside Russia —
This decision is more performative than practical. Why even announce this? In military terms, it would make far more sense to give the authorization secretly, thereby enabling UKR to catch Russia by surprise. In any case, the UKR doesn’t have many of these long-range missiles at its disposal (and is unlikely to receive many more from the USA, which itself has a limited supply). So it’s really about politics and appearances; from the perspective of Uncle Joe’s lame duck administration, this announcement serves several purposes:
1. It makes life difficult for Trump. And if Trump rescinds permission to engage in long-range strikes, then the Republicans can be blamed by the Democrats for losing UKR (of course it’s a ridiculous argument, but those are the optics).
2. It pressures the Europeans to greenlight missile strikes with their own weapons (and to deliver more of these weapons to UKR). I think the German Taurus missiles have even longer range than the ATACAMS.
3. Assuming (2) above is successful, it will speed the Europeanization of the Russia-UKR conflict (rhymes with Vietnamization, enabling USA to toss UKR under the bus much as Vietnamization did to another country 50 years ago), and will further damage EU-Russia ties (a long-term bipartisan goal for USA).
4. Even if 1-2-3 don’t work out as hoped, it still gives the Pentagon one last opportunity to test its best weapons vs Russia. Imagine a massed missile attack (assisted by drone swarms and real-time NATO ISR) on a strategic target in or near Moscow. As UKR’s demise looms in the headlights, there won’t be many more opportunities like this soon.
In short: it’s a cynical political stunt that will not change the outcome of the conflict.
Russia will establish facts on the ground and dictate terms, but only after Zelensky is gone. As that end point approaches, we can expect more stupid decisions and lashing out and blame-trading and panicky behavior from western politicians. Fasten seat belts!
When a system runs on PR, like the US in general, OpSec becomes an impediment.
A great book about Allied crimes and misbehavior while implementing the Morganthua plan prior to the Marshall plan in Germany post WWII is The High Cost of Vengeance by Frida Utley.
“Russia has said if the US took that step, that American assets all over the world were targets. Given how long this threat has been in play, Russia probably has a very good idea of where some punches could do the most damage.”
Well, now I’m also thinking about Conor’s post (Paris and Washington Go Scorched Earth in the Sahel) and comments about the Western preference for destabilization and “self-perpetuating conflicts” when its domination is threatened.
What I wonder is, if an “acknowledged” NATO attack on Russoa takes place, Russia will leave NATO countries themselves unscathed. I don’t think just hitting Ukraine hard will impress NATO leadership much–Ukrainians are untermenschen to them, after all. I still think Russia should and will strike “Ukrainian assets on British Isles,” with RAF Waddington as the most likely target. UK has been too belligerent in rhetoric, yet has very poor AD. It is a core NATO member, but not really capable of hitting back and no one will want to start WW3 over a few hundred dead Englishmen who were virtually fighring in Ukraine, yet it will completely shatter any illusion about what NATO really is.
I guess you have to also ask things like: How important is the Five Eyes to the USA?
Just one off-the-cuff question that comes to mind…
Is RAF Waddington (not even London) worth Washington DC or NYC, even to the PMC? Ten or twenty, or even two hundred, million dead Americans, or, perhaps, more important to them, an incinerated Wall Street? I doubt that.
The most logical counter-move for Russia to make would be to render the NATO satellites mission incapable. Missiles need timely target data, so this would render the high precision weapons impotent without actually hitting (or even aiming at) a single target in NATO territory. The bonus is that satellites are difficult to replace, especially given short notice.
I’m not sure how that would effect strategic defense capabilities, which are essential to preventing a nuclear holocaust. Still the route i world recommend if I were in the Stavka.
It may be that Houthis are getting Russian targeting help plus Russia maybe helping Iran with AA defense, if true, are early examples of payback. If Russia really gets pissed off next up the ladder might be helping Syria and/or Lebanon with air defense. Just copying what us has done in Ukraine.
Cheap and effective Missile/drone defense is turning expensive ww2 type armaments into junk. Israel is in real trouble when adversaries can shoot down their planes. Color revolutions/bribes still work, but that’s less effective vs stateless groups.
Thank you for the name-check Yves! That’s kind. I’d add a couple of points.
Simplicius made the point that “deep strike” sounds good, and one hundred and fifty miles sounds a long way, but to hit anything useful would require the missiles to be launched from close to the Russian border, which has, say, some disadvantages to it.
Ritter is wrong about the “being at war” point: “war” is not an objective state of affairs, as for example “armed conflict” is. “War” is a declaratory speech act, and a state can be “at war” with another just by saying so. Conversely, states can ignore a lot of provocation and still decide not to consider themselves “at war.” Bear in mind that “war” is a state of affairs between states, and means that all of their armed forces should be attacking the enemy wherever they are. I don’t think anyone wants that.
You also have to distinguish between aggressive intentions and statements and actual military capability: as I’ve tried to explain, the objective requirements for fighting any kind of war with Russia simply don’t exist, and barring a miracle cannot happen, quite apart from problems of geography (It’s about 2000 kilometres from Berlin to the Donbas.) It’s one thing for politicians to say “we will never abandon etc” but no amount of handwaving will conjure up forces, technologies and capabilities that don’t exist, and cannot be recreated. This may be the New Age generation in power, but they can’t have something just because they want it that badly.
On the final settlement point, I actually think the best example is Finland after WW2. The country was very carefully neutral, and all Finnish Prime Ministers had to be able to “work with” Russia. That didn’t prevent them having a western-style economy, or even balancing their defence procurement between Soviet and western equipment, but they knew how far they could go. I think the Russians will aim for something similar, ie reality-based rather than text-based, and since they will be in a position to dictate the terms, they will want a government in Ukraine that understands its vulnerability and behaves itself. I don’t doubt there will be a treaty of some kind, but it’s the facts on the ground which will dictate what happens.
Finally, I agree with others about the incapacity of western leaders to understand what’s going on. I think that the defeat of the West is above all an intellectual and conceptual one, and I have an essay on that coming out in a couple of days.
One problem is that the West did not actively seek to interfere in postwar politics in Finland to stir things up.
There used to be a gov’t like that in postwar Finland in Ukraine, and even the Orange Revolution couldn’t quite displace it. It took a much more organized and dangerous coup to knock it out, via the Maidan Putsch, and the Russians still patiently tried to work with it for years, until everything quasi peaceful failed. If I were the Russians, I’d take these to mean that it is NATO itself that needs to be Finlandized in the long run, not just Ukraine. If so, I’d want to keep Ukraine (and other hotspots) simmering to put stress on internal politics of NATO countries, not just settle for an end just for Ukraine.
PS.
I would be tempted to suggest that, ultimately, even if its outlines are not currently well sketched out yet, whatever will be set up in Ukraine will be more like postwar Poland, not Finland. There will be a Ukrainian version of Marshal Rokosowski as de facto viceroy of Ukraine (why not? there are plenty of ethnic Ukrainians, many born in what is now Ukraine, fully loyal to Russia, in Russia itself.). Whatever outcome that will be arrived at, peacefully or otherwise, will involve complete and total occupation of all Ukraine by Russians, for at least a decade or two, followed by presence of large Russian forces with “tactical” nuclear weapons capable of hitting anything in Europe within 10 minutes (hypersonics, in other words). Unlike Poland, moreover, Russians will be much better tolerated except in the West, given the lack of all the other baggage.
This will be the second worst possible outcome (the worst being a genuine nuclear annihilation), but I think it’s already been bought and paid for by the events of past 2-3 years.
“The incapacity of western leaders to understand what’s going on.” I stayed up last nite till 2am glued to Planet Critical’s interview with Louis Arnoux.: economics is not a useful paradigm, only thermodynamics informs us and tragically we are ignoring it. I’m thinking the only battery storage we will end up with will be us human bio batteries. That is, after gas/oil is depleted of all of its useful energy by costing us more to pump it than it returns. Long since talked about here at NC. Point being that we are in a last stand for control of resources which we are also squandering faster than we can replace them. This has happened because the economics of growth and profits ignores reality. Like Hudson said many times over, financialization has destroyed the economy. Arnoux was eloquent on renewable energy as a thermodynamic process, “Energy is a gradient of change and cannot be replaced by a commodity.” This kind of analysis should put a dagger through the heart of war, if we only had the capacity to understand it.
What could be the cause of such a failure ?
Could it be that grasping the reality of armed conflict requires direct experience of it, and none of the western leaders have it ? By contrast, many of the WWII leaders had firsthand experience of combat, e.g. Churchill, Pétain, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, just to name the most obvious ones.
I think we can safely say everyone in leadership positions during WW2 and in 1960s and 70s had direct experience of military service if not actual combat. Indeed, military service was practically a requirement for credibly rising to the serious political (or other) positions back in those days (Heck, Richard Nixon, who was qualified for conscientious objector status as a Quaker volunteered for service and was a decorated naval officer, even if mostly as a military bureaucrat administering airfields.). Now, to paraphrase Blinken (or was it Sullivan?), the closest thing the current generation of Western leaders have to military experience is watching the horribly campy (imho) movie Red Dawn.
I think this post, while certainly good reading, overcomplicates a thing or two.
1. Neither Biden nor Trump are likely to meet Russian demands outlined by Putin a few months ago. Therefore, the SMO will continue, even if that means grinding to the Polish border.
2. If Ukraine collapses, or if the Russian army reaches the Polish border, the Russians will not need to deal with the Americans. They will install a friendly government and impose the GDR (DDR) model, or some version thereof. Or the Belarus model, if you like, a nominally independent country with its own economy, trade, et cetera, whose security policy has been locked into Russian priorities and with Russian troop deployments.
2a. Moscow has previously hinted at further “federalization” of this GDR 2.0 Ukraine, presumably via referendum-type voting by the remaining populace. Whether that means splitting the country into several parts, or annexing a few more oblasts outright, I do not know.
3. If Ukraine continues to fight, somehow, to the last Ukrainian and to the last NATO missile, then we go back to #1 above.
3a. If, out of desperation, Ukraine or the US commit an act of sheer stupidity – e.g. drop a dirty bomb on Belgorod – I would not put it past the Russians to execute the “Morgenthau Option”. Remember, Morgenthau wanted to completely deindustrialize Germany and split it into seven or so independent farming regions.
I mean, that’s it. The only way to exit from this particular algorithmic loop is for the US to accede to Russia’s stated bloodprice. I highly, highly doubt that even a Trumpian Washington would do such a thing, but hey, maybe I’m wrong this once.
No, I disagree. It is not a given that Russia will go to the Polish border. That is your assumption. Point to something that Putin has said that supports your view. Putin, more than any world leader, by far, communicates his intentions and rationale. The furthest he has gone is vague allusions to historical Russian lands. That does NOT equate to all of Western Ukraine.
Putin is very mindful of the view of his economic allies in BRICS. Russia needs their support because they keep defying US/EU sanctions. The US and EU are trying to increase the cost of that via more and more secondary sanctions. This is not a static game.
They are already unhappy with him occupying as much of Ukraine as he does now (ex maybe China), even if they accept his reasoning intellectually. Putin has NOT made a case to them or to Russians for taking and holding all of Ukraine, when that would entail considerable ongoing cost, lower standards of living, and cut into Russia’s ability to strengthen its military (as in the occupation manpower would directly and considerably cut into the labor force for both civilian and military production).
West Germany was „ not allowed“ to create an army at all. The Korean War required US and U.K. to withdraw forces from Germany. US wanted German troops to defend territory against USSR but Frsnce would not agree and in 1954 vetoed European Defence plan.
US needed Germany within NATO to re-arm but Turkey – a key ally in Korean War – objected and Adenauer was forced to accept influx of Turkish manpower as „Gastarbeiter“ as the price.
France only accepted if Germany was subsumed into EEC and the Treaty of Rome reduced German autonomy and in 1957 the D-Mark was made convertible. Germany had no General Staff but had to use NATO
GDR military was always subject to Soviet Forces in GDR.
US is not that relevant any more since war is pre-programmed. No one can trust USA and Trump is a 3-4 year incumbent with no real ability to bind any faction. US cannot even constrain Israel.
RAF tech needs to program Storm Shadow on the ground before affixing it to a plane. They obtain feed from NATO AWACS and satellites which Ukies do not have access to. That means NATO is at war
Storm Shadow uses US sensors which is why US must approve use. Russia knows Western politicians are in a dark place and want to go out with a bang because they dream of Mega Covid Lockdown power over their own serfs
Ukraine is finished and with 20 hours/day without heat or electric moving to Polsnd or Germany will overwhelm those societies and instigate social Revolution
Hard to see how that can be avoided.
Right bank Ukraine has a long history of tutelege by first one neighbor then another, e.g., Poland, Austria-Hungary, Germany. Left-bank Ukraine has a Russian history.
My point: since right-bank Ukraine will in the end be a rump state its absorption by a neighboring state would be a kind of win- win. Russia could simply carry on relations with the neighboring entity, while relying on it to control those with grievances against Russia. It would also be a way for right-bank Ukraine to become part of both the EU and NATO.
Poland seems a good candidate for such an adoption. It has a history of having dominated the area. It’s ambitions to do so again are scarcely secret.
Ukraine’s brief experiment in being a stand-alone nation-state, much weakened by war casulties and emigration, would be ended. It’s status as part of some other country, while not welcome, nevertheless, would be historically familiar. [See, Serhii Plokhy’s, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine]
It’s what happens to small countries who get caught up in struggles between two giants.
Readers who are more expert than I am on these matters say this is a non-starter for the impact it would have on intra-NATO and EU relations. Violating territorial boundaries by absorbing parts of neighbors is an incest/child molestation level sin.
If Russia pushes hard enough and long enough, and the central Ukrainian gov’t collapses or cannot maintain control, and Ukraine becomes de facto a set of self-governing oblasts, I believe neighbors could send in peace-keeping forces to protect their ethnic brothers (similar to what happened in the East) and de facto end up controlling the territory, without the consequences which could result from de jure annexation (did anyone not directly interested care about Crimea before the war?). Further, if the Ukrainian government does collapse or people just start ignoring their orders, it will be a bloody $#!+ show in the Western Oblasts given the diversity and the history, and someone probably will need to come in to preserve order.
Not to mention potentially giving Russia a border with a NATO state, which slightly defeats to object of the current war. If it were absorbed say by Poland, which seems to be the most popular theory, it would change the area of application of the NATO and EU treaties. That’s not the same as bringing in a new member (which requires consensus approval) but politically it amounts to the same thing. It could only be done with the express approval of all member states, and even then there would be a mountain of detail to go through: think Brexit in reverse. .
In 1939, MR pact also gave USSR a “border” with Germany, too. However, Stalin and other Soviet leaders concluded (not too incorrectly, I think) that Poland would never be a real buffer state worth anything in the medium to long run (after partition of Czechoslovakia, a lot of contemporaries thought that Teschen was basically down payment to Poland for being the vanguard of a German invasion of Russia–it wouldh’t have been the first time that the Poles served as a vanguard for a multinational European army invading Russia, after all). I think the same logic could apply to Ukraine, especially if it is a Ukraine with much higher “Ukrainian” content. At minimum, if a country called Ukraine survives, it will be a tightly controlled satelite of Russia like Poland in 1816 (assuming Congress Poland counts as an actual country) or 1946.
Just to pick a nit: Russia has a land border with 3 NATO countries already. With Norway since 1949, with Estonia since 2004 and with Finland since 2023.
Also Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.
Yves description of Biden’s actions as petulant strikes me as being accurate.
Biden is suffering from advanced senile dementia, he is spiteful and irrational with no regard for the consequences of his actions.
Genocide Joe has always indulged in displays of Dominance that are, to put it mildly, inappropriate.
The videos of him molesting little girls when he knows he is being videotaped and the episode with Tara Reade are examples of this.
His dementia has now progressed to the point that he is willing to start WW3 to embarrass Trump.
Which is insane, but not atypical behavior for someone with advanced dementia.
In the past I have remarked that if we can get through Biden’s term while avoiding Nuclear Armageddon I would count it as a win and I am still of the same opinion.
There’s a good chance our world will be turned into a radioactive cinder because a pissy old dry drunk has a bad case of diaper rash.
Biden may be playing some kind of 5 dimensional chess, despite his infirmities. If the war in Ukraine escalates significantly Biden can use that as an excuse to hold on to power beyond Jan 20, 2025. After all, one never wishes to change a “war president” mid stream. The Deep State may well support him in that regard. Such a move has worked for Zelensky so far. Why not Genocide Joe?
One of the factors that I think you are overlooking is that whatever the eventual solution, Russia must also ensure that all of its other neighboring countries are dissuaded from acting as pro-Western belligerents in the future (I don’t think Armenia is going to serve as a lesson to anyone). This makes Russia’s position even more complex than you outline.
Having said that, though, I think you may nonetheless be too pessimistic in your outlook–Russia has no doubt thought long and hard about this issue for over a decade, and so however difficult you think this issue is, I am guessing that Putin has many possible plans and backup plans, and backup to those backup plans, and that he likely has some tractable solutions
Am I the only one who sees parallels with GHW Bush’s creating a mess in Somalia as a parting gift to Clinton in late 1992?
Golly, it seems like only yesterday that was recent history. Now I can barely recall it, let alone who ordered what outrage when.
Whatever date one might choose as a baseline, things were already pretty awful weren’t they?
So, according to Wikipedia, during the Cold War, East Germany became more independent of the U.S.S.R. than West Germany did of its Western Allies, including the U.S. Did I read that right?
GDR was Stalinist and Erich Mielke was head of MfS which distanced itself from KGB residents. It is why Putin needed a special pass to enter Stasi buildings when based in Dresden. It is why Stasi tailed KGB officers. Really it is because GDR feared a USSR-US deal like the one in 1989 to fold GDR into West Zone.
Militarily Soviet Forces were separate with Guards Army units tasked with thrusting west and NVA being very much second tier. GDR only had 17 million population and was totally dependent on USSR.
It was given a leash to facilitate relations with West such as GDR having access to EU through Inner-German trade and so Markus Wolf could run his foreign intel ops in West Germany
You might want to watch Deutschland 86 on YouTube or Amazon which is an excellent series about Wolf‘s operations. Just so you get a sense of GDR – Markus Wolf was Jewish – and his operation subverted West Germsn political and military structures
When the ussr acquired its satellites it was the installed leaders’ responsibility to control their citizens, with Russian tanks rolling in only when absolutely necessary. I wonder if that might happen in the part of Ukraine that doesn’t join Russia (of course thru referendums, possibly including Odessa/kharkov but not Kiev.)
I don’t think that was consistently the case: as far as I know, USSR was much more directly involved in Polish affairs until 1956, to the point that Soviet Marshal Rokosowski, who was an ethnic Pole (“they say I’m a Pole in Russia and a Russian in Poland”) was installed as vice premier and defense minister (and de facto viceroy). Soviets began pulling back and delegating serious power to the Poles only in mid 1950s, when Khrushchev became the Soviet leader. Given the histotic hostility of Poles to Russians and their willingness to serve as vanguard of Western invaders (eg Napoleon), it makes some sense that Russians wouldn’t take chance with the Poles so easily, I suppose.
I think everything that applied to Poland between 1945 and 1956 applies to Ukraine, except even more so. I also figure that Russians will be tolerated a lot more favorably in most of Ukraine than they were in Poland, which favors total subjugation followed by a puppet state.
I think that the end game is that the Donbas and Crimea end up Russia, and the Galicia ends up a client state of Poland, and what is left is a rump stat around Kiev.
Then again, I come from a long line of people who got predictions wrong. (My dad, 1968, “Those stupid **familyblog**s. They’ve nominated Nixon. There is no way that we can lose”)
So, we know that U.S. ruling elites, Democratic and Republican, are nihilists when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. They care nothing about human life and suffering. Their goal will always be to extract as many lives and as much treasure as possible from Russia. Russia, of course, understands this perfectly. Russia stops at the Dnieper. Then what? It looks as though we’re bound to find out.
Many thanks for this excellent analysis. Query whether the Biden Administration, with the active connivance of the EU, are trying to get the US in deeper so that Trump cannot so easily reduce US commitment in Europe.
In other words, this is not so much about the fate of Ukraine as the preservation of the ongoing connection between the US and Europe. By getting in deeper the Europeans have less incentive to turn to the Sino-Russian bloc (whether tacitly and/or by degrees) and so less of an impulse to rebel against US tutelage. That way Europe can continue to be bled, by being denied Russian carbon exports such that they are forced to purchase US carbon exports at a premium. In this way, Europe will continue to reduce its surpluses with the US and so provide an offset for US deficits with China, and so help underpin the continuing viability of dollar hegemony.
The Europeans (assuming they are even aware of what is being done to them) may be willing to connive in this stratagem by the outgoing Administration because they are desperate that the US does not walk away leaving them with the full reconstruction costs (on top of BlackRock and other US predators having already taken the best of the Ukrainian cream). Those reconstruction costs, which may now be well over half a trillion dollars would otherwise fall on Europe just as it has lost Africa, its Chinese export market, much of its US export market, as its deindustrialisation accelerates accordingly. If the reconstruction costs were to fall upon north European (specifically German) taxpayers at the same time, the effects could be crushing. Manifold intra-European disputes could break out (as with intra-allied war debts in the 1920s) which could further wreck the political economy of the EU/UK.
Therefore, is this extremely desperate and dangerous move by Biden part of a play to keep Trump from walking away from the whole problem (which he might do anyway)? Therefore, Ukraine becomes a useful lever to prevent the Europeans bearing the full burden of reconstruction even as it pushes the EU/UK further into potentially irreversible decline.
In any event, Biden is essaying a form of nuclear brinkmanship which would have made even John Foster Dulles blush. Easily the most incompetent and arguably the most malign foreign policy of any president in the entire history of the US, even by the dismal standards of the post-1990 era.
“Biden is essaying a form of nuclear brinkmanship which would have made even John Foster Dulles blush. Easily the most incompetent and arguably the most malign foreign policy of any president in the entire history of the US, even by the dismal standards of the post-1990 era.”
President Xi spoke forcefully to Biden and Blinken and the group of advisers. Making the case for a necessary end of conflict and reconciliation. Biden listened and took notes, then left the meeting and almost immediately increased conflict to what may easily become a level of madness. Obviously, this was not just Biden but the senior members of the administration.
Appalling and unprecedented to my understanding.
I am surprised at the lack of discussion regarding what Ukrainians will do, because, they might end up collapsing, but this doesn’t mean they will have absolutely no imput in shaping their own future. It is all about what Russia or the UScombine will do.
Yes, it is very true that the oversimplification of western Ukrain as rabid and forever anti-russian is something we have all heard and seems to have deeply internalized, but by this time, we all have seen clips with people from Western Ukraine being forcefully conscripted and villagers attacking these teams with extreme vigor.
At the first election Ukrainians (more women than men maybe, don’t know about the refugee demographics) will have to contemplate two options, while the flags flutter in the wind over hundreds of thousands of graves:
– a future when something like this never happens again
– a future where this war is reignited for a new generation of men, just kids now
The first one involves Ukraine neutrality and one would think that at this time, or when the quasi collapse of Ukraine will start (being cold, not having light, food in the fridge, water to flush the toilet in the modern apartment buildings is an ordeal that a 1900/1800 European villager would not want to contemplate) most in Ukraine will have internalized that the only country that can trully can and should guarantee Ukraine’s security is Russia.
The second one will be headed by some with very strong pig headedness genes, which are abundant in that part of the world. But their future looks like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_xUS7ZhfYo
Maybe they’ll capture and execute Zelenski while he’s fleeing in disguise and hang him upside down at a Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv/Lwow gas station?
On the serious note, Col. Baud has frequently mentioned on various podcasts (and he’s the only one, as far as I know) fairly serious and growing pro-Russian partisan activity in Ukraine, including in the West. I am curious if anyone has heard more about this.
There have been some railroad tracks blown up, and dozens of Ukrainian military cars burned – usually those used by the recruitment officers.
Mostly the “partisans” seem to be conveying to Russians the locations of weapon storage, air-defenses and such. To the extent that even members of Verkhovna Rada scolded the army for locating missile batteries too close to the population centers, since they tend to be “ratted out”.
If you want to poll Ukrainian women I suggest you visit Primark or TKMax to get full access to the refugee demographic. You could simply listen to Russian which is more common than German nowadays. Anyone who believes there are only 1.2 million Ukies in Germany is delusional.
Ukraine is finished as a state. It is not economically viable. It has been useful to Russian enemies as it was in 1918 and after 1941 but it was armies of the Ukrainian SSR that fought the Galician Waffen-SS later spirited away by U.S. and Britain
Ukraine has no future. There will be a non-electrified zone without economic future littered with minefields and rusting vehicles. Russian mines can be remotely deactivated but I doubt Ukraine has been so scrupulous as to think of a future
Breeding cycles require males and if you look at France snd U.K. post-1918 you find a huge drop in marriage and births as spinsters abounded. Ukraine has long had a problem with deadbeat dads abandoning mothers but now it is exponential.
It will cost USA huge sums to extend Medicare and Social Security to Ukraine even assuming it could find medics – then again US has a poor track record in making good war damage it caused and only did do in Germany because Stalin was ready to reunite Germany without US involvement
The de-electrification option would probably look similar to what Israel is doing in Gaza, and is trying to do in southern Lebanon. Granted Israel is destroying all civilian infrastructure rather than just the power system, but the goal of making the area more or less uninhabitable is the same.
It would likely create a humanitarian crisis and mass displacement, as it has done in Gaza, and generate a lot of bad press, including among Russian allies. With the very slow escalation of attacks against power infrastructure, Russia definitely seems to be signaling that it’s an option on the table. I suspect it’s one they would prefer to avoid if they can and it’s intended as a potential future bargaining chip.
Kakhovka dam, second “k” is silent (unlike Kharkov, and Kherson, where first “k” is silent).
P,S. On an unrelated note, Kharkovchanka (meaning a woman from Kharkov) was one badass vehicle for cruising around Penguin Land.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYPtppXoTvg
Those aren’t silent. Cyrillic has a letter (well… several) that Latin alphabet lacks. So when they write ‘Харков’, the fourth letter can be transliterated as a ‘k’, but the first letter makes the phlegmy sound which Germans write as “ch” (as in “ach”). Since cyrillic also has ‘Ч’, which is the english sound ‘ch’ (as in ‘chair’), ‘Х’ is transliterated into Latin as ‘kh’.
I know. By silent, I meant that it’s not pronounced. The whole “Kh” instead cyrilic “Х” here is causing more problems than it solves. It makes people pronounce it like Karkov instead Harkov (and Kerson instead Herson).
It’s not Harkov, either. In Russian dialects, ‘H’ and the hard ‘G’ are seen as ends of the spectrum of a single sound. One cyrillic letter, ‘Г’, covers that entire range. ‘Kh’ is something else entirely, which English lacks – neither ‘K’ nor ‘H’.
I have a brilliant peace plan that I will share with Donald Trump on January 20, 2025. In my plan all the member states of the United Nations as well as all disenfranchised peoples (Palestinians, for example) will become members of NATO. NATO’s Article 5 will be revised to make it mandatory for NATO members to come to the aid of a fellow member under attack. In this way, NATO will exist solely for the protection of Earth’s inhabitants from evil aliens from outer space (and not from the US southern border).
Biden is a horrible and dangerous person. He wrote in his autobiography of putting the boys to bed and wandering the streets of Wilmington looking for people to pick fights with. He is a bully who has always believed that he can bluff and belittle others, which he has successfully done since the age of 30 thanks to surrounding himself with sycophants to the prestige of being a U.S. Senator from a tiny state less populous than 48 U.S. counties. Now he’s senile as well and deeply in debt. He can no longer demand tribute as the Viceroy of Ukraine.
I love to see that the lead opinion piece this afternoon on RT.com English is by one of his victims, Tara Reade. One thing for certain is that, unlike Biden, the Russians aren’t bluffing. They have China in their court and eventually China will tire of American blow-hards like Biden and Trump. With the BRICS-plus alliance, they will slowly choke the imperium of manufactured goods and natural resources, while flooding it with cheap narcotics propelling the empire toward collapse.
January 20 can’t come soon enough for me. The Russians will figure something out, probably including the historically Russian regions of Kharkov and Odessa. Millions of “Ukrainians” have already gotten their wish to live in the EU and you’d better believe that they won’t be voting in the next election.
Alistair Crooke on judge nap said blackstone owns a large chunk of donbass…sad, that…
He said Black Rock which split from Blackstone long ago. Cargill too is present
My SWAG is that Russia installs in Rump Ukraine (not yet defined), a pro-Russian military junta government (as now) dominated by the formerly repressed Russian-speaking Ukrainians who will “tame” their hotheaded countrymen.
Yes there will be a guerilla internal war funded by NATO (this is a given), but with time, war exhaustion (and an absence of living young men) will damp-out NATO’s capacity to cause trouble. It likely will be brutal as grudges get evened – though not as brutal as the well-tolerated Israeli genocide – with mothers sending their young male teens to Europe to avoid them getting swept up into a dirty war.
The only thing I can see to will change this will be NATO’s collapse – certainly likely, but not predictably, along with a tidal wave of changes in European governments (likely, sooner).
Russia will strike back but it will be in another country through proxies. A western frigate or destroyer sinks, bases get flattened or overrun. Some stuff is gonna happen.
That includes Cyprus and other bases of the of EU and UK in West Asia, Middle E. and Africa.
US is a global empire so it should expect to be fighting in Korea as Japan and S Korea go down.
There will be a big gap where US economic interests used to be