Conior here: So what explains the breathless media narrative in the West? Here’s one plausible—and scary— theory:
Something is cooking. Something bad. For the past week or so I‘m reading all over western media this garbage that „Russia is losing“ and that Putin has his back against the wall. Some of these articles are even discussing the post-war order after Russia has lost… utter nonsense.… pic.twitter.com/GXc29DTReZ
— Pascal Lottaz (@PLottaz) June 27, 2026
There’s also the war racket to consider as the narrative helps fuel endless push for social cuts/privatization in the name of defense increases:
NEW: Admiral Sir Tony Radakin has written an explosive op-ed for The Sunday Times.
It is the first time the former chief of the defence staff has spoken since retiring last year.
He said:
💥 Andy Burnham must appoint a “wartime cabinet” that will properly fund the military.… pic.twitter.com/vf0XPqxF4i
— Dominic Hauschild (@domhauschild) June 27, 2026
Combine the delusional who think a conflict against Russia can be won with those who view adding fuel to the fire as a profitable strategy and we’ve got a pretty explosive cocktail. .
By Andrew Korybko, a Moscow-based American political analyst who specializes in the global systemic transition to multipolarity in the New Cold War. He has a PhD from MGIMO, which is under the umbrella of the Russian Foreign Ministry. Originally published at his website.
The primary motive is to produce dramatic visuals for helping Ukraine’s overall cause as war fatigue in the West becomes more palpable and Trump’s political one ahead of November’s midterms after his loss to Iran.
Zelensky recently boasted about his country’s long-range strikes against Russia in the Urals and Western Siberia, which followed an earlier large-scale strike against Moscow after several months of sporadic strikes against St. Petersburg. He also announced a 40-day influence operation aimed at coercing Russia into freezing the Ukrainian Conflict, which will likely include many more such attacks. These latest moves coincide with the EU disbursing the first €3.2 billion installment of its €90 billion loan to Ukraine.
Palpable war fatigue in the West as reaffirmed by Czechia, Slovakia, and even Hungary under its new EU-friendly government refusing to finance the aforesaid loan, which preceded Bulgaria’s new government banning arms supplies to Ukraine, arguably pushed Zelensky to authorize attacks with dramatic visuals. Trump once described him as “the greatest salesman on Earth”, and true to form, he knows how to put on a show to keep his audience interested and the cash flowing. That’s the first purpose of these strikes.
The second is to reinforce the false narrative that “Ukraine is winning”, which has been gradually reintroduced by the Mainstream Media throughout the past half-year after earlier being completely discredited by summer 2023’s failed counteroffensive. A State Department representative parroted this claim word-for-word just last week, but as RT’s Sergey Poletaev argued, “The drone war is a distraction. Watch the front” as Russia continues gaining ground in Liman, Rai-Aleksandrovka, and Konstantinovka.
Lastly, Zelensky’s final purpose in carrying out his highly publicized spree of strikes is to boost morale at home, which remains very low amidst the continued inconveniences of the conflict and especially the “busification” policy of snatching draft-age men off the streets to send them to the front. There’s close to zero chance of a popular revolt, let alone of one succeeding, but he still wants his people to think that they’re at least “getting revenge” on Russia. In a nutshell, this spree of strikes is all smoke and mirrors.
To be sure, Ukraine has indeed inflicted some damage on Russia’s energy industry, but it’s nothing game-changing and nowhere near what would be required to shift the military-strategic dynamics of the conflict in its favor. Nevertheless, Trump is still smarting from the US’ defeat in the Third Gulf War and hopes in part to distract the electorate with the dramatic visuals that Zelensky is responsible for in Russia ahead of November’s midterms, being just as much of a “salesman” as he is and understanding its value.
This partially explains his decision to “escalate to de-escalate” against Russia through a three-phase “war of attrition”, the first part of which includes strengthening Ukraine’s strike capabilities. His grand strategic goal of coercing Putin into selling him controlling stakes in Russia’s state natural resource companies will likely remain beyond his grasp, but Trump will probably still continue pursuing it regardless. In furtherance of this goal, more US-backed Ukrainian strikes on Russia are expected over the summer.
All in all, Ukraine’s spree of strikes against Russia is more showmanship than strategy, with the primary motive being to produce dramatic visuals for helping Ukraine’s overall cause as war fatigue in the West becomes more palpable and Trump’s political one ahead of November’s midterms after his loss to Iran. He and Zelensky are preparing to dial up the pain against Russia, but their plot isn’t expected to change Putin’s calculations about the conflict’s endgame, nor result in Ukraine actually “winning” for once.
33 comments
Comments are closed.
I’m afraid this resurgent narrative of the Ukrainian victory is being spread to prepare European public opinion to a direct intervention in the conflict. They will sell the future war as quick and painless, with just one little final push needed to collapse the Russian government.
Here in France the jingoism and bellicose rhetoric has been steadily ramped up in the last 2 years, culminating in our chief of staff warning us that our children would have to die in Ukraine in the near future.
The Macron government has been investing steadily in the military and pushing non-stop for a return of the draft. As insufficient and meager as these efforts are, I’m convinced this is not mere posturing.
We already have French planes intercepting “Russian” drones over Romania or the Baltic (or Iranian drones in the Persian gulf). So far the general public has been indifferent to our involvement in these conflicts, and this attitude is only emboldening Macron.
He is a mediocre man, hated and despised by his people who views war as his only opportunity to become more than a footnote in the country’s history. He has been gitty to get us into any conflict he could but hasn’t succeeded so far.
The latest war in Iran, as stupid and suicidal as it was, did happen and I’m afraid the European intervention in Ukraine, as futile and criminal as it would be, will as well.
Poodles barking. And well, yes, some wanting to benefit from expenditures in warfare.
That’s what I believed for a long time but the Iran war has changed my mind about that. It showed that it’s not because something is doomed to fail, completely senseless and profoundly harmful to all parties involved that it will not happen.
More than ever poodle barking. The barking itself is not only noisy but confusing as your comment or that of Pascal Lottaz show IMO.
Jingoism you say? Try the German media for that. The well-known publication “Der Spiegel” came out with a cover with the title ‘Unser Krieg gegen Russland’ – ‘Our War Against Russia’. But that was not enough. On the cover too was a WW2 photograph of four Wehrmacht soldiers standing in a field in Russia with fires burning in the background-
https://www.rt.com/news/642145-germany-war-with-russia/
And it was published on the anniversary of Operation Barbarossa. I was flabbergasted when I saw that as I could not believe that they went there. It seems that Germany’s elites want another go at Russia because this time it will be different.
I’ll push back here a bit. To echo Alexander Mercouris, for all the noise the European leaders are making about the impending war against Russia, they are not making much by way of actual preparations. Oh sure, there is lots of money being thrown around, or at least promised, though a lot of it goes to drones and missiles for Ukraine rather than actual rearmament. There are maneuvers being held regularly, of course, but overall the European armed forces remain in an abysmal state, and even sending a single brigade east from Germany or Britain or wherever is a mammoth undertaking. Poland has been making noises, for years now, about building hundreds of American and Korean tanks under license, and doubling the size of its army – to 300 thousand – by 2039 (!!!!), but has not made any preparations for a serious war “today”, especially on the drone front. And so on.
Yes, there are a few ships being seized. Yes, they are openly sending drones and missiles to Ukraine, and targeting them too. Yes, the mighty Latvian (or was it Estonian) military is actually digging a ditch or two on the Russian border. If you really believed that a country with a standing army of 1.5 million – and at least a third of it completely unengaged in Ukraine – was about to go to war with you, surely you would be doing a lot more to prepare yourself for the circumstance.
Logically, there are three explanations for this divergence of rhetoric and reality.
1. The Europeans do not expect to ever actually have a war with Russia. The rhetoric is useful to frighten the local electorate and to allocate more and more budget money to the military-industrial complex, but that’s all.
2. The Europeans believe that no matter what they do, no matter how much they escalate their rhetoric or their actions, the Russians will not or cannot actually do anything about it. This is more or less the neocon view, previously expressed by the various Kagans and Nulands and such.
3. The Europeans actually want to provoke a military response from the Russians, believing that it will immediately draw the US in the conflict, and it is the US that will be doing most of the fighting…and not on “European” soil either, somehow. This dovetails neatly with Washington’s unchanging strategic objective of re-subjugating the Russian state a la 1990s.
It might very well be an explosive mix of all three. “They won’t do anything, and even if they were to do something, it won’t amount to much, and then American daddy will protect us”. I am fairly convinced that if you were to corner the various German political actors in a room with a lie detector and some sodium pentathol, they’d tell you that no, this is all just talk to keep the AfD down and Rheinmetall stock up (explanation 1), and in any case, if the Russians were to do anything, it’d be against Lithuania or something (explanation 2). Why, during that recent wargame where the evil Russians smashed a corridor to Kaliningrad, the German side basically sat there, and the conclusion was that the Americans had better intervene (explanation 3), or else, well, nothing much happens.
But whatever mix one uses, it feels very different, to me, from how things stood just before either World War I or World War II. There was absolutely no “sleepwalking to disaster” there, everyone involved wanted a fight, and was preparing for one – poorly, in some cases, but nevertheless. These people, here, today? They are like a bad parody of “Yes, Minister”…
yep!
I would offer option 4. The EU elites are in war frenzy mode and the fact most of the money is being stolen by MIC/them is part of positive feedback loop that makes the warmongering so lucrative and incentivizes further escalation. The questions is if the few who don’t believe their own bs can stop the rest from doing something really stupid.
The revulsion to that magazine cover is likely shared by a majority of Germans. I’m not sure the Germans revere their warriors like the US. Can you imagine the “hometown heroes” banners of Waffen SS in German rustbelt village streets, which are ubiquitous in the US? 70% of the American public opposes the Epstein coalition’s unproked war on Iran and that was not a factor in the decision to start it.
Funny you should say that about hometown heroes. In the Baltic states for decades now they have had parades of Waffen SS veterans from WW2. Right out in the open. But the EU never had a problem with that no matter how much the Russians pointed out the grotesqueness of it all. Maybe what they say is true. That though the German lost the war, the Nazis ended up winning the peace.
One of liberal democracy’s main selling points is the idea that “the people” select their leaders. This strength of democracy has in itself become hollow as leaders of liberal democracies have simply learned how to game the system to the point that the idea of people choosing their leaders is now simply an illusion. The loss of media as the fourth estate to hold power accountable has certainly been a project of these anti-democratic powers for a long time. I would say that it is now near if not totally complete. Co-oping social media and AI for this are just the succeeding steps for burrowing deeper and more directly into people’s minds.
The other fatal blow to liberal democracies, in my opinion, is the lack of any reliable mechanism for removing leaders who have simply lost their minds in service of their own personal interests. From Keir Starmer to Macron to Biden/Trump, to van der Leyen and now encompassing most of Western leadership, watching these self-serving fools and imbeciles in action, it becomes apparent how wars actually occur. Seldom does it arise from the public themselves but rather through the manipulation of the public narrative by dedicated ideological individuals and groups that have garnered the levers of government into their own hands for their own ends. Their modus operandi is always to divide humanity and dehumanize “the other” when the only hope for humanity’s survival is dialogue and cooperation. Once in, they are like a tick that is almost impossible to remove. That must change. It is for their demented sake that populations suffer and ultimately may not survive, Ukraine and the EU being prime examples.
Well said!
“Seldom does it arise from the public themselves but rather through the manipulation of the public narrative by dedicated ideological individuals and groups that have garnered the levers of government into their own hands for their own ends. Their modus operandi is always to divide humanity and dehumanize “the other” when the only hope for humanity’s survival is dialogue and cooperation.”
Report from the field. Heard a couple of weeks ago from one of the local old money “leaders” of the community: “They (Iranians and Muslims in general, not that this imbecile knows there are cultural and historical differences among Palestinians, Persians, and Pakistanis) are taught from the cradle to hate us because of who we are, so we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”
KLG,
Did the “local old money leader’s” children and grandchildren enlist? Did he, himself, serve in combat?
Whenever such comments arise in discussions, I ask these questions. Cheering combat is easy for REMFs and civilians.
Remember the Liberty.
Of course they did not, unless they received a nomination to one of the service academies (which reminds me of the Annapolis graduate Marine son of a colleague who served in Iraq, after which he left as soon as his service requirement was over because of what that war did to his men). I did not respond, primarily because I didn’t trust myself to keep calm. But I have on occasion noted to others of his ilk that an absolutely inescapable Draft would prevent much of our “adventurousness” in the world. As I put it, “As soon as Tripp, Heather, and Mary Catherine are as likely to come home in a box (anonymously through Dover in the middle of the night) as Billy, Maria, Rasheed, and José, you would change your mind.”
When I make this argument in public, the silly notional Left gets all het up, because they are cognitively challenged when someone presents them with an unconventional argument. I still have my Vietnam era Draft Card and look at it once in a while. I turned 18 when the war was just about “over” and my Draft Lottery number was in the mid-200s; Selective Service was only taking 19-year-olds that year IIRC and stopped altogether soon after. Anyone my age and slightly older who says he can’t remember his lottery number is a liar. I had older friends with low numbers who enlisted in the Air Force or Navy the day after the Lottery. Enlisted men in the Air Force loaded bombs in Thailand… Seamen served on ships at sea…
Damn straight I still remember. 310, and safe, thank you very much.
Had a housemate that got #1. He was gone when I got home, and we never saw him again…
Ukraine appears to me to have reached the V1 and V2 rocket stage of this conflict. Which is to say “the noise before the defeat.”
Not even close. Their “V-1s” are highly accurate and three hit a military factory yesterday, and IF the photos can be believed, devastated one building. Unfortunately, Russian air defense is so depleted that even V-1 equivalents can get through, and I struggle to understand why Russia hasn’t deployed soldiers with shoulder-launched anti-air missiles around obvious targets
Yes. Politics is much about the management of power but I would say the real prize is the manipulation of public opinion. Whole industries have sprung up focused solely on how to achieve this (and sell that expertise). Practice makes perfect and they never stop practicing.
I wonder how many times and in how many ways your “old money leader” heard and internalized that meme, not to mention how often it is handed down through families. I believe, that in Buddhism as well, this is one way that societies create their own karma; the collective total of individuals and families. Thus, individual efforts do make a difference, but at this sorry point, you need a lot. Religion can help with that but it has to be inclusive rather than exclusive, I would say. As I remember, that was one of the points of the counter-culture of the ’60s and ’70’s. Fond memories. :)
Sorry, this was meant to be a reply to “KLG” above.
On the “something is cooking” front: I agree that these latest Ukrainian drone strikes are mainly showmanship for Western consumption. But they seem to have served their purpose, because I have definitely noticed a change in media coverage here in the US over the last week or two. Unlike the steadily escalating war propaganda in Europe, media coverage of the Ukraine conflict in the US had been pretty quiet in recent months. Perhaps this lack of attention was mirroring Trump’s, since all of our Orange Leader’s attention was focused on Iran. Then all of the sudden there was coverage of Ukraine’s drone strikes, framed as if this was some great turning point in the war. I was especially struck by the explosion of coverage just a few days ago about the strikes on Crimea. The clearly coordinated talking points were that the strikes were “devastating” and that Crimea was close to “collapse.” This directly followed Trump’s signing of the G7 declaration of support for Ukraine in a sign of “unity” with the Europeans he had been demeaning before.
The project to isolate, drain, and destabilize Russia has always been the central aim of the Atlanticists in the National Security Establishment. In their view, Trump botched their Middle East agenda by allowing Israel and the neocons to push us into a premature hot war with Iran which has screwed up our hybrid war long game. This is the focus of their hypocritical criticism of Trump’s Iranian debacle. So now they and their European lackeys are offering “praise” for Trump’s attempts to cool that conflict, in return for his meek capitulation on Ukraine. Trump’s mild resistance to the Blob on that front was the only thing even slightly positive about his incoming administration. Looks like that will disappear as well.
In regard to your second paragraph, it is one of the goals the deluded American population has never seen clearly. I can only say Amen.
It’s very curious how the war is dragging on. Maybe it shows the limits to drone and missile warfare, especially in geographically large conflict theaters? I thought over a year ago Russia had decided to destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. And NATO supplies are still apparently being imported through Poland (and maybe Romania), where one would think the major highways, bridges, and rail lines on Ukraine’s western borders could have been seriously damaged. We often hear now that “strategic bombing” is rarely successful in achieving what its proponents claimed, so maybe drone/missile campaigns are encountering the same strategic limitations, even when aimed at military/logistics rather than civilian targets.
John Helmer and especially Gilbert Doctorow have a different take on this.
Doctorow is not sound. Helmer is often extremely good but has a strong antipathy toward Putin. Some who know and respect Helmer a great deal have commented on his recent unevenness and wonder (in a much paler of what has happened to the formerly terrific Sy Hersh). As a colleague wrote:
Pascal Lottaz’s Neutrality Studies published a publicly accessible piece on Friday titled On Russophobia. He basically sees it as a component of the historical Euro-American caste systems of colonialism and racism. Like Muslims and Africans, Russians are portrayed as a combination of both imbecile and savage who don’t deserve self-determination and must be stripped of their natural resources. https://pascallottaz.substack.com/p/on-russophobia
With apologies to Stephen Stills.
David in Friday Harbor:
A must-read essay.
Many thanks
Especially those…comments. Thank you. All the best🌅
Here Martyanov with Larry Johnson on Ukraine.
June 26th
44 min.
https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2026/06/day-of-videos.html
It’s simple. It’s nothing more than a desperate attempt by Zelenskyy and the mainstream media to boost the morale of the crumbling Ukrainian military. In other words, they want Ukrainians to believe that if the West’s “authoritative” media say Ukraine is winning, then it must be true.
The front lines are 90% a distraction at this point in the SMO as neither side is truly capable of capitalizing on any breakthroughs there, even in the unlikely event one happens, The real battle is a race for one side to literally bankrupt the other.
Why do people here keep referring to it as a “war”? It’s a Special Military Operation. Putin as very clear on this point.
I am sympathetic to the Russian point of view, but Russia has per its own legal procedures, annexed four Ukraine oblasts, has fully occupied one and substantially occupied three. This is a war.
The only reason the nomenclature matters is within Russia, that a SMO give Putin less authority than a declaration of war. It is not relevant to the wider world.