The inevitability of the invasion.
In last weeks of 2021 and early 2022, when talking to friends in EU, NATO member former USSR states and Rus aligned former USSR states, there was consensus among them that Rus would never invade Ukraine. They always postured, did exercises, rattled sabers… But nah, they wouldn’t dare!! But it was only logical they would.… Opportunities US just had a terrible president (Trump), the Jan 6 insurrection meant it was fractured, the 32 trillion dollar debt Trump accrued meant it had to accept defeat in Afghanistan and withdraw. Without money US could not enter another war.
China’s rhetoric about Taiwan was at an all time high, the real estate market collapse and the impending collapse of the railway network companies, the pandemic and zero Covid policy, genocide in Xinjiang and Tibet, etc had precipitated global outrage and drawn military resources to the East China sea. AUKUS, QUAD and numerous maritime exercises meant the global defense and intelligence establishments were focused east wards. People across the world were weary with the pandemic and the economic situation was in doldrums. EU’s single source energy addiction was fueled by Russia. And then to make matters worse, a weak, senile president took over in the US; as a conciliatory gesture to the conservatives that a white male boomer was still in charge of the nation.
These were the opportunistic factors for Russia. And now to consider the need. Need The concept of Russia started with the Kievan Rus. The ties are very deep. Rus cannot be with out Ukraine was an oft repeated adage. Yes Stalin was a monster for causing the Ukrainian famine. But to be fair, he was just as blood thirsty to all soviet republics and he really didn’t discriminate as to who he killed. Besides to be ethnologically correct, he was Georgian.
But as a result of Stalin, the Bandera phenomenon arose in Ukraine. And there was a deep sense of hurt and injustice in many in Ukraine which gave rise to the Nazi phenomenon in Ukraine and which persists to this day.
But Ukraine and Rus were historically always sister nations. Shared culture and history and language. And not to mention Crim (or Crimea) based Sebas-to-pol (as it is actually pronounced) is the only warm water, 365 day a year port available to Russia. Home of the dreaded black sea fleet that kept southern Europe on it’s toes through the entire cold war Sharing the black sea fleet with a friendly nation was hard enough, but to give it away to a nation vying for NATO membership was unthinkable. Russia had enough with the logistical nightmare of supplying Kaliningrad.
It wanted an overland route and guarantee the security of the quintessential maritime asset of the Crim. Ukraine was itching to become part of NATO, couple that with the existing threat of NATO missiles being posted in former Soviet republics, now part of NATO, the prospect of NATO assets posted in Ukraine was as unthinkable for Russia — as the Cuban missile crisis was for the Americans. Lastly, losing the buffer zone of Ukraine between NATO countries and it’s own borders, was an unthinkable prospect for Russian strategists. So it was now or never for Putin, and he pulled the trigger on it.
The immediate aftermath However Putin underestimated how much the US war machine had progressed since 1991 and his forces were outclassed with superior technology based weaponry and intelligence. The defeat in Kiev meant he rerouted his objectives. Secure Russian speaking enclaves in South Eastern Ukraine. Secure overland route to Crimea. Secure industrial heartland of Eastern Ukraine.
Secure the port of Mariuopol, essential economically and because it was the congregation point of the Nazi Azov battalion and Islamist hardliner Dhozokar Dudayev Chechen battalion. But then the power of western media’s misinformation took over. They glorified the hard-line Azov fanatics with their blatant wolfsengel insignia of the Das Reich SS regiment. White supremacists from American Southern states and all over Europe and Australia flew over joined to swell it’s ranks. And Western Media fell over themselves to disprove their own dire reporting about the Azov regiment and resurgent Nazism in Ukraine, which they did in the months and years prior to the starting of the war.
Now these forces became resilient freedom fighters. Desperately the Western media tried to prove the wolfsengel was not the Nazi symbol but a Ukranian one, even when Azov soldiers openly carried the Swastika flag and threw the Nazi one armed salutes to each other. The back pedaling and white washing would have been funny, had the consequences not been so dire. Then came the bumbling EU attempts at diplomacy with statements saying the Ukrainian refugees were blond and blue eyed, unlike arab refugees and therefore deserved more consideration. Josep Borrel – neocolonialist at heart went on to show true EU colors by saying: EU was a garden superior to the world and needed special consideration.
And as the External Affairs Minister of India famously said “Europe thinks it’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not it’s problems!!” As EU and US kept buying Russian energy, there was an attempt to vilify traditional colored scapegoats like India and China. And as the External Affairs Minister of added: “India buys less energy from Russia in a month, than Europe does in an afternoon” BRICS countered western hypocrisy with dedollarization and horror of horrors!! MBS actually started abandoning the petrodollar, refused to slash oil prices, actually reduced oil production.
And when Biden hilariously tried to bully the Saudis, MBS asked for Saudi membership to the BRICS. In the immortal words in Yes Minister, (and correct me if I am wrong, I was 13 when I read the book) Gunboat diplomacy, “Now if you hit them on the head, they hit you back!!” Colonial entitlement has ended. And nothing played the death knell for it louder when the Al-Thanis of Qatar refused to sell LPG pre-ordered by Asians, to Ursula Von der Leyen, US’s little pet ___ with more shades of yellows and browns in her teeth than in my kid’s crayon box.
What lies ahead If anyone thinks the Rus are done, they are fools. Be it Operation Barbarossa or the first Chechen war, the Rus may falter initially. But then their tremendous resilience takes over. Remember they were the first to blunt the Mongol spearheads, tamed the Central Asian hordes including the Chechens — at the name of who, the west quakes. The ability of the Rus to suffer, sacrifice and keep fighting is proven and unparalleled in human history. And they have the world’s largest and most potent nuclear arsenal.
Hopefully though, they stopped buying Chinese tires for their armored vehicles and brought real Generals with a mind for logistics and troop resupply. Because the way the Putin political appointees ran the war till now, has been a disgrace!! The greed fueling the war As western greed at the 12 fold increase in oil prices gets the beer bellied Shell, BP, Exxon execs drooling; and as they get their lobbyists to keep bribing the under secretaries and sectaries of a leaderless US administration to keep sending more and more technologically superior fire power.
It has long stopped being a Ukraine V Russia war and turned to a US V Rus scenario. What else would you call it, even if Ukranians are driving them, the Himars still come with US satellite location services, and supported by doughboys in Virginia sitting on gaming chairs and Razer DeathAdders doing the targeting? Putin is running out of options. Zelensky, perhaps the most insignificant person in this conflict, is having a PR wet dream.
Posing for Victoria’s secret (or some other useless rag that I won’t be bothered to remember) magazine with his wife on green screen backdrops to be later filled with exciting images of war…. Truly for the first time in his life does he have such a massive audience. But as he demands pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Russia, he is playing with toys far far beyond his station.
Or what his TV comedy actor brain can begin to comprehend! Why is the war persisting? Let us be clear what this war is about. No, it is not about freeing the Ukranian people. No matter how much the fools of the Baltic states, Poland, and former Warsaw Pact nations dream about; NATO never cared about freedom and liberties and welfare. Look at Zaire, Chile, Grenada, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. NATO is the inheritor of European colonialist ideology. An ideology interested only in exploitation, for making the elite of its member states richer. With global warming Antarctica and Arctic snow covered wastelands are opening up.
And there is a race to exploit the natural resources in these places, especially so in Greenland, Antarctica and indeed the greatest prize of all – Siberia. That is only possible for NATO to pursue with impunity, if Russia is no longer a powerful world player. Also, with a weakened Russia, it will also be easier to throw the Central Asian Oil & gas rich “Stans” to chaos just like NATO did to Iraq and Syria and wants to do in Iran (with all due respect to the brave Iranian women fighting the fundamentalists). Last ditch measures But for Putin this has become a fight for survival. When you are the top dog, the dictator who has kept all dissidents crushed under your thumb.
Failure means not just ignominy. Failure means death. Death of your person and more importantly your legacy. And old men love to fart about their legacies. If Putin is facing defeat, then he will use all means at his disposal, regardless of cost, to turn the tide. He has already started mobilization. But he knows that the only way to end the war, and force Zelensky to the negotiating table is to get a string of victories. At present, this seems impossible as an emboldened West keeps resupplying Ukraine.
Like Pakistan v India, the west is learning it is much cheaper to support insurgencies than to get involved in a hot war with boots on the ground. And also this war is superlative marketing for it’s weapons sales. No one wanted THAAD but even NATO Turkey and lots of others had queued up for S400 and the deadlier S500 air defense systems! If Putin is to get his string of victories, then he needs to stop the NATO supplies. But the strategy of freezing Europe with denial of gas is a long term one which does not give him any immediate respite since EU does have gas reserves for at least a year.
And Qatar has committed to selling EU gas from 2025. The Nuclear Question Putin is thus left with no choice but to exercise the nuclear option. Most likely such a strike will occur in Western Ukraine near it’s borders with NATO states from where the supplies are being trucked in. Granted it probably won’t be the massive nuclear megaton weapons, probably a low yield nuclear strike. Or even depleted uranium weapons.
The effects will be devastating. Nuclear fallout, poisoning the land and water, and the air currents moving the radioactive airborne particles through out the greater region. His reasoning will be simple, scare and starve the Bandera regime in to submission. And also do the same to the chicken hearted NATO Europeans. Already Italy, Moldova, Hungary, Ireland, France, even Germany have massive protests, as Europeans prefer their heating and comfort over the media fueled ideals of bringing “freedom” to Ukranians. Putin will hope that escalation and the prospects of a Soylent green Christmas will be scary enough to make that block back off.
However, US with it’s recent deals with Venezuela to exclusively buy it’s oil, is relatively immune to Russia’s energy blackmailing, and also fracking has made US a net energy exporter than being reliant, so it’s energy barons will keep pushing for war. With numerous climate change international conferences, the pressure is mounting and this is the last chance for exxon mobil, BP and shell execs to make a killing (literally and figuratively). So the US will want the war to go on and keep the oil prices high. But the main wild card will be the hardliners of the Bandera regime in Ukraine.
Already there are intelligence reports of Ukraine making a dirty bomb with nuclear reactor waste. Such a Ukranian retaliation will entail strikes …. probably on soft targets like easily accessible border areas inside Russia or Zaphorozia nuclear power plant under Russian control, or even Russian allied states like Belarus. Can anyone stop it? Not NATO, since the US president often goes off on the stage in a different direction and ends up shaking hands with the thin air.
And as stated earlier, US was always run by corporations through lobbyists and even more so in the absence of any leadership at present. China has zero political clout. The pandemic revealed the true side of China and right now, Xi is busy killing Uighyurs, Hu Jintao and all Taiwanese and Hong Kongers, and trying to be Dictator for life.
China has always spent more on internal policing versus global ambitions and the main threat perception of the CCP is holding on to it’s power and thus it’s feeding trough and access to female Chinese Olympic athletes. India is too passive and has a huge Islamic terrorism problem thanks to it’s neighbors and US resuming its funding to Pakistan. Also internal communal tensions are racking the nation and taking it precariously close to a Lebanon like situation with the demographic changes of the minorities. Turkey is making noises, but is just too insignificant to be even mentioned.
And not to mention it is on a regressive trajectory – rejecting science in school text books, building hundreds of thousands of mosques and no schools, jailing pre-teens and professors for perceived insults to their horribad president, etc. So there is no one to really pull on the reins to make this nuclear horror story end before it really takes off. The one hope might be if France abandons NATO, like it has in the past and joins with India which is trying to broker a peace deal. I wish Japan could be a part of this team with it’s inherent distaste for everything nuclear, but with it’s conflict with Russia over the Sakhalin islands, and Russian – Chinese naval exercises near it’s borders, it is unlikely to have any leverage to broker any deals.
Germany could have been part of it too, but by selling anti-air assets to Ukraine, it has brokered itself out of the peace equation. Unless there is a fresh election and a more nationalistic party wins with majority; and abandons the path of self annihilation that the Social democratic party has chosen for it with Merkel’s insane refugee policy and what not. Conclusion: The nuclear threat is very real and very close. Maybe western Media isn’t reporting about it, since most of it is bombastic disinformation is aimed at weapons sales for NATO countries and to keep the war and consequent oil and food prices high.
But if you glance through news reports on Indian and Russian media outlets, there are subtle and stark (respectively) hints of that path ahead. As this nuclear menace would affect the entire world, it is time we stopped being complacent and took heed. It is time the war was stopped. Even if that meant, peacekeepers from neutral nations needed to be deployed to prevent escalations. Remember: we do not have a Plan(et) B!
