Friday, January 6, 2023

NATO v RUSSIA via Ukraine: Does this war end or do we all die?




    I get it. This war is getting awful. Christmas is over. The war is a mess but I'm John Lennon level naïve. And I am about to make a prediction. And making any prediction in this Russia v Ukraine war is pure folly. But I'm going to do it anyway. Hold my beer, but I think this war has to end and will end geopolitically but it also must end militarily. Unfortunately, however, to get to a place of no more shooting, there's going to have to be a whole lot more shooting. Because the risk of contagion and the fear of it is growing. This war ends this year. It has to. Screenshot this. I'm not wrong. If Russia and Ukraine are battling it out a year from now, then I'm the idiot. But I'm calling an end to this war. It is simply not sustainable. And if it is, then God help us all.

    And here's why.

    The US (irresponsibly but by some measure tactically) and its vassal state the EU have provided enough weaponry and cash to Ukraine that has tilted the war. Putin made a mistake; he thought a show of force would win this war back in March. A quick Ukrainian surrender, like he wanted but did not get. That Russian convoy South toward Kiev in March, and the attacks south from Sumy did not work. Let's face it, the Russians thought they could win this war on the cheap (160,00 men and 50k obsolete Soviet tanks and APCs).

    I am going to have to give the Ukrainians credit here, what a defense!

    It's been interesting to watch this war. It's my favorite kind of war, if one can have a favorite kind of war. Some like Issus. Others Waterloo. But I like tanks, artillery, modern missile tech, total air defense to the point that grounds enemy air forces, mechanized infantry all rolling across green mottled forested terrain. We haven't seen war like this since the Wehrmacht made a bid for Stalingrad.




Ukrainian T-90 with full reactive armor/explosive defense package. The real gear.


     Let's face it, nobody called this war correctly back in February.

    Myself included. I believed the Russians would win this war in six months. In fact, I called out The New York Times and other publications when they claimed this war would be over in a month. But the thing I love about military history is that nobody gets it right, not mainstream publications and not even the Field Marshalls. War is too fluid, too reliant on the whims of chance, equipment, morale, readiness, terrain, numerical strength... and the weather.

   So, where do we stand?

   Russia has military problems and Europe has serious energy problems. And the US, despite inflation and fuel costs is not too worried. The US can just print more paper.  But there is darkness behind all of this. Russia cannot be backed into a corner. Russia cannot lose this war if only for dignity's sake. Russia has nukes and any country with nukes shall not subject herself to humiliation or defeat. And the Russian people, despite what you may hear are behind this war.

   And this is why a peace deal is an opportunity now. If the Ukrainians were actually running this war, I'd smell a peace deal over the Eastern Orthodox Christmas ceasefire. The US are watching the Russians via satellite. And the Russians are watching NATO via satellite. The US and its serious military agencies like the Pentagon have signaled that a major Russian offensive is coming. 

 But the crowd in Washington, who were young men at the height of the Cold War and never served in the military have never gotten over the "Russians are the bad guys" thing. My detractors say I'm in the Russian camp. Nope, sorry. I'm in the realism business and the US State Department and Biden's cabinet are living a boyhood fantasy. They're playing toy soldiers with someone else's soldiers. That's stone cold cynical if you ask me. 


Maybe the civilians at the US State Department got the wrong toy set when they were kids?

   Just look at this kids war pack above available on Amazon right now for 135 billion dollars. It's a shitshow. You've got an F-117 stealth fighter doing close air support around a base that hasn't even erected any concrete T-wall barriers. Meanwhile, you've got a runway down the middle of the field with an F-15 and an F-16 pointing at each like they're playing a game of chicken in the middle of a firefight while the flight boss is losing his shit standing on a gantry dodging sniper fire. Worst of all, some fucknut decided to build a ski jump ramp from the Command Center directly onto the runway just in case Maverick dodges Iceman on takeoff. And finally, the chow tent is in the middle of the boondocks. But hey, at least the M1-Abrahms is making a run unsupported at the enemy infantry.

   What's the end game here?

    I mean in the Ukraine playset.

    The longer this war goes on, the greater the chances of contagion grow. Poland in particular is itching for a fight. They are in the process of mobilizing 200,000 men. Who knows what Romania is putting together. The propaganda is so thick that everyone smells blood in the water. The US and Europe think Russia can be beaten. As if the Russians, under attack from all the countries to her West will go down without falling back on her nuclear arsenal. She'll nuke from orbit and make sure.



The Poles and Romanians are already in Ukraine as mercs as are the US, UK and the rest operating the weaponry it would take six months to train the Ukrainians to use.

    

   The only off ramp I see here is someone's got to make a deal.

The Russians have Mariupol and a land bridge to Crimea. Hard won. And there is no way they are giving it back. Putin can sell this as a victory to his Russian population and NATO can sell Ukraine as a war won because they stopped the 'evil' Russians crossing the Dnieper and capturing Kiev. In a mass media, 24hr news environment where everything is lies, it just might work. Ukraine keeps Odessa and her access to the Black Sea and Russia has 'liberated' its Russian speaking population. International inspectors come in and conduct elections in the captured provinces and all parties agree by the result. Nobody wins. Nobody loses. (Or gets annihilated). The wins and losses are accepted as a point of war. (Screencap this prediction).

   If not, 2023 is going to be a very bad year.

   The Russians are amassing troops and from my sources it is 300k+ and they are breaking out their top equipment. Maybe it's all a bluff. Half of this force is sitting in Belorussia. Either as an army in waiting, or merely an army whose only purpose is to exist as a possible attack vector; and as much as I hate to use a Trumpism, this force in Belarus could be 4d chess. Either way, the Russians are not going to stop. Just like NATO didn't stop in Iraq, took 20 years to stop fighting goat herders in Afghanistan, obliterated Libya and would have obliterated Syria if the Russians hadn't intervened because they wanted their base at Tartus.

 If it's true what Ursula van der Leyen let slip that the Ukrainians have lost 100,000 men and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense in a recent leaked memo said 35,000 men "are missing" (that conveniently means no widow's pension or payout to families). And just imagine the costs of rebuilding Ukraine not only now but after a Russian full multi-pronged assault?

   The Ukrainians under Nuland and the CIA installed that Ukrainian government in 2014, shot protesters in the streets, broke the Minsk Agreements, and shelled Donbass for 8 years. There's only so long you can poke a bear.




   But remember, who's the big winner in all of this. The US and Saudi Arabia and petrodollar stability. Germany, Europe's biggest exported by far and the power behind the value of the Euro watches as its industry implodes without cheap Russian energy. Was that the real target or just a bonus? Saudi Arabia sure wins. Now Europe buys gas at triple the price on floating Hiroshima's. Ten Iranian speedboats rush one of those with anti-ship missiles while it's docked in Hamburg and we're looking at the biggest non-nuclear explosion in history. And with all the black-market weaponry spewing out of Ukraine at the moment, this is not beyond the realm of possibility.



Why have a 
pipeline when you can have a ship 3 weeks slower with gas 5 times the cost

from a country that beheads women in public stadiums for the crime of adultery?


   What if a side benefit of all this is the destruction of Europe, a "great reset" as our latest Dr Strangelove named his book. Are we all to be made poor carbon zero, massively surveilled and limited to electric cars and tear the Earth to shreds mining Lithium for batteries and hoping the wind blows or the sun shines so we can have a warm shower?




    How the mighty have fallen.

    Maybe that nuke mightn't be so bad after all. Because it's never going to be 2019 ever again.



      

Monday, October 31, 2022

NATO v RUSSIA via Ukraine: The Impossible War

   


  Who ever said war was a truthful environment? 

   Of course, nobody. 

   That old aphorism of "truth being the first casualty of war" seems quaint in the modern-day environment post WWII. If only they could have imagined it back in 1943. Modern communications, 24hr news and the Internet. They could have thrown reality out the window. With this power, they could have made war anything they wanted it to be and convinced a population to kill. This has been done throughout history and this is where we are now. But on steroids.

   The current enemy is Russia. 

   Maybe I could go hard with facts (and I will soon) but what I really want to know is why the US and EU have disrupted energy markets, destroyed Germany and the EU's natural gas supply all for a border dispute on Russia's border with Ukraine. It's nobody's business outside of the interested parties.

    I made a prediction that Russia could not win this war in a month. But that they would win this war eventually. I stick by that. That was back in March when Western media was salivating that Russia had already failed. In my previous posts, I got most of it right and some of it wrong. Nobody got this war right. Because this war has changed from an initial border dispute between a minor power versus a larger power which Russia should have won in a month and did not and has now transformed into a conflict involving Western Civilization versus the rise of the East (China + vassal states) and the energy Russia can supply to it overland negating China's weakness.... sea power.

    In simpler terms, a clash of civilizations is being forced.




     Eurasia is a land power. But it is too huge to ever be a unit. Right?

     The idea that China via Russia could build a high-speed Silk Road highway to Europe is terrifying to US strategic planning. If it were ever complete, if you could drive or take a high-speed train from Paris to Beijing, then the US becomes an island far from commerce. This is not the reason for the war in Ukraine, but it is a major geopolitical concern.

     Ukraine is a battlefield.

     It is the open ground where greater powers choose to do battle.

    This war began as Russia v Ukraine.

    And Russia believed they could win quickly. They drove South and reached the outskirts of Kiev. They drove East and captured Mariupol. That alone would be an armistice option. "Let's make a deal". And any logical deal that does not involve losing your own territory is a good deal. But the Ukrainians did not make it.

    Why?

     Because the Ukrainians are not running this war, NATO is. The orders, the money and the weapons are coming from the West. Because the West is afraid. The West is not afraid of the Russian military. The West is afraid of the challenge to their global hegemony via the petrodollar currency. And their governments are willing to blame their rampant inflation and failing economies on a border dispute in Eastern Europe that most citizens could not even point out on a map. 

  There are many reasons why the West has inflated its currency, but they are beyond the scope of this article.

  With this background, let's talk war. 



   "War is a racket," said Smedley Butler and he was not wrong. What defies logic is that the United States has sent 100 billion dollars to keep Ukraine afloat while its own homeless population is in the millions and dollar inflation defies logic. For what reason? After invading Iraq on a fake premise and abandoning Afghanistan on a whim, there is no moral authority here; so, what is this obsession with a border dispute in Europe? It's hard to believe I wrote about it eight years ago.

   It is a geopolitical move to prevent a symbiotic relationship between the Europeans and the Russians based on energy exchange (oil and gas) in exchange for access to the vast EU service economy. With the sabotage of both Nordstream I and II Baltic pipelines by 'mystery actors' (this stuff reads like a cheap spy novel where you already know the culprit after the first chapter).

   So, the question remains... who is winning the Impossible War?

   According to Western media, Ukraine is smashing the Russian Army. Since, I've got no dog in this fight, I'd like it to be true because I love the underdog in every sport or war. But unfortunately, this war is a disaster for Ukraine. NATO is running the war and that means satellite intelligence, logistic support, training of Ukrainian troops by foreign countries, mass conscription (fifth round), 18–50-year Olds and throwing these men into a fodder line. This is good for spotting weaknesses in the Russian line and successful attacks have been made south of Kharkov. But these successes were orchestrated to make your tax dollars feel like they are achieving something.

  I hate maps of war. Especially while a war is ongoing. But I'll go with the Swiss Map. The Swiss are neutral right? They got away with that in WWII so why not now?

  https://uawardata.com/

 

Odessa must be had.
  

    I don't think the Russians will stop until they take Odessa. Not only is Odessa a city by the sea beloved of many Russians, but most of the people who live there despite the Ukrainian Government banning the Russian language in 2014 in the city and since the CIA coup under Nuland in 2014, it exists, despite the apartheid as a Russian city.

   Militarily, it will be a difficult advance. But the Russians have mobilized 300,000 men. The Russian public wants this. Apart from the difficult advance, Odessa's capture will cut Ukraine off from the sea and render it a non-viable state. It must be had.

   War is merciless but never impossible.


This just keeps getting more insane.


   Addendum: I'll add to the following to clarify things. I am not a supporter of Russia or Ukraine. I pick no sides. I view what can be seen. War in its naked interest via Western media already includes enough uncritical propaganda for Ukraine. What is of interest is the geopolitics, motivations, resources and constraints of the prime movers fueling this clusterfuck.


Zelensky himself has thus far done a brilliant job in his presidential and ambassadorial role maintaining western political support, and the Ukranian army are legendary heroes for holding out against Russia with all of their clumsy bludgeoning firepower. Ukraine's savior was both NATO assistance and the halting of modern Russia's military reforms.

 1) I believe Russia made a global INTEL mistake by invading with insufficient data. Who could have known back in February that the US would throw 80 billion dollars into Ukraine's defense and persuade its NATO allies (EU vassal states) to throw in $20 billion more.

2) I think it is clear now what Russia's initial gambit was. Throw 160,000 troops at the Ukrainians, drive a convoy at Kiev and hope that a minimal use of regular army troops could trigger a surrender achieved by a simple demonstration of force. This was a gross miscalculation and did not happen mainly because US war planners took over this war with the full capabilities of NATO satellite intelligence, weapons imports and raw cash injections which basically keeps the Ukrainian civil service and government alive and on a payroll.

3) The US government has gone off reservation. With the sabotaging of the undersea Nord Stream pipelines, it has made sure that there is no profit for the EU (and especially Germany) if they choose detente with Russia either through the realpolitik of dependence on Russian energy supply for their industry or when the riots start in Europe due to cost of living increases. We can already see this as European currencies nosedive while the dollar increases in value despite the fact that 40% of dollars in circulation were printed in the last two years.

4) The game is more now dangerous than ever. With Russia changing its stance to a war footing and the US and its EU vassal states (which Putin correctly pointed out in his speech; the EU is a vassal state of the US since the Post WWII Marshall Plan) persisting in attritional type warfare using the men of Ukraine as pawns in a proxy war versus Russia, supplied and armed and trained by NATO, we are entering new territory.

5) Conclusion: For the first time since the post war Bretton Woods accord, the US is not being viewed as a rational actor by those who should (China, India, Malaysia, SE Asia). Its actions scream of desperation and maintaining dollar reserve status. Also, Russia has not thought out its actions and seriously underestimated the West's response. The price of this miscalculation will echo down the decades. Russia has now permanently married itself to the East and will be gobbled up for its energy by China. It's passing grade in the war has not helped it. The EU is not a serious entity. It's encroaching bureaucracy, insane energy policies and embrace of globalism and mass emigration has weakened it.

   So here we are. Peace seems impossible. The New Cold War I predicted in 2019 is in full effect. And I take no pleasure in this.

   We sit and we watch and witness.

   An impossible war.