Looking Down the Barrel of Disaster – The War in Ukraine Will Last as Long as the Western Public Listens to Idiots.

“The end of an independent Ukraine is and always has been Putin’s goal. While foreign-policy commentators spin theories about what kind of deal Putin might accept, how much territory he might demand, and what kind of security guarantees, demilitarized zones, and foreign assistance he might permit, Putin himself has never shown interest in anything short of Ukraine’s complete capitulation. Before Russia’s invasion, many people couldn’t believe that Putin really wanted all of Ukraine. His original aim was to decapitate the government in Kyiv, replace it with a government subservient to Moscow, and through that government control the entire country. Shortly after the invasion was launched, as Russian forces were still driving on Ukraine, Putin could have agreed to a Ukrainian offer to cede territory to Russia, but even then he rejected any guarantees for Ukrainian security. Today, after almost three years of fighting, Putin’s goals have not changed: He wants it all.”

Vintage Robert Kagan.

Oh, I know the term ‘vintage’ traditionally means something aged, but carefully curated so that it stands the test of time. Vintage champagne, vintage cars, vintage fashion. But it also means, “… of lasting value, or showing the best and most typical characteristics of a particular type of thing”. And since we are speaking here of Robert Kagan’s philosophy as expressed by himself, the lead-in paragraph shows the most typical characteristics of Robert Kagan’s thinking; the only modification is the tone of frustration, of cheated bitterness.

You all remember Mr. Kagan; we did a review of his book, “The Jungle Grows Back”, about 5 years ago. Robert Kagan is part of the Kagan-Nuland Axis of Listen To Me If You Want To Lose, comprised of his wife, Victoria Nuland (AKA The Baker of the Maidan) and brother Frederick Kagan. As I mentioned in that review, he’s a very intelligent man, but intelligence should never be seen as an indicator of mental stability, and perhaps that’s our lesson for today. Examples abound of intelligent and crazy, intelligent and destructive, intelligent and a repeated maker of terrible choices. Is it possible to be both intelligent, and an idiot? Not according to the medical definition. In reality? You tell me.

So, the thrust of Kagan’s diatribe is the perfectly-accurate observation, “If Ukraine falls, it will be hard to spin as anything but a debacle for the United States, and for its president.” However, just as I’m arguing it is possible to be intelligent in a general way but an idiot in the advice you dispense, it is perfectly possible for a statement to be simultaneously true and false. In this instance a defeat for Ukraine will indeed be a debacle for the United States, and deservedly so, considering the United States set a new benchmark for strutting up and down, beating its chest and bragging how it was going to lick the Russians like a self-renewing ice-cream cone. This would be accomplished by bigging up Ukraine out of all proportion to its previous bigness through a flood of western money and weapons. Not exclusively from the United States, mind, but Washington would act as leader and general coordinator, and the sweetness of victory would be tasted first by Americans, because America would bring it to fruition.

Where the statement strays off the path is in its implication that it will be a debacle for whoever is president at the moment of defeat, rather than the presidents who institutionalized stupidity by first deliberately making an enemy of Russia despite its obvious reluctance to adopt the role, and then setting up Ukraine to fight it.

Because it is Kagan’s contention that the incoming President of the United States must take, as his first and most urgent task, the immediate redoubling of support for Ukraine. I said ‘immediate’, didn’t I? Yes, I see I did. Because anything less than the immediate redoubling of support for Ukraine will mean a complete defeat, loss of sovereignty and full Russian control. He says so, in so many words.

What would that entail? Well, if we’re going all the way back to the beginning, what the US Council on Foreign Relations calls ‘the headline figure’ is $175 Billion. A ‘redoubling’ in its classic interpretation would be $350 Billion, or roughly the figure Ukraine is slobbering over and which it hopes to realize by the open appropriation of frozen Russian assets, most of them held in Europe. If we’re talking just official aid legislated this past year, $61.3 Billion. Times two, or ‘redoubled’ – $122.6 Billion.

And I’m sure there are quite a few managers and contractors who would like nothing better than to see a redoubling of aid to Ukraine, because Ukrainians actually see very little cash from those amounts, and that mostly in the form of salaries for public servants (which Ukraine can’t afford to pay) and general humanitarian aid. As I’ve mentioned before, a large proportion of the appropriated aid money is simply redistributed to American contractors and used to purchase American weapons and other war-related products, which are then shipped to Ukraine. I’m sure I’ve mentioned the neat trick, also, of the original purchase of such materials being by the US government, at the reduced domestic government rate. When they’re purchased for Ukraine – which is a foreign country – they are bought at the higher foreign-sales cost, from stocks already owned by the US government. So if the government ordered 1000 artillery shells at the government rate, it paid the supplier when the original order was placed but now it pays him again, at a higher rate, out of taxpayer funds, and ships the ammunition to Ukraine. Neat. Good for business, too, as I’m sure you can see.

So Kagan’s argument, pared down, is that if The Donald does not straightaway package up an enormous cash gift for Ukraine, its failure and defeat will be on him, and it most assuredly will come about. And I think we could find a spot of blame for Trump; after all, he was already President once, and during that tenure quite a bit of support went to Ukraine. But I’d be interested to know how Obama and Biden would escape their responsibilities – especially Biden. Not to mention what happened to the sure and easy victory Ukraine was supposed to reap, thanks to the precious gift of western military technology. Instead, Zeliboba is circling the Zelibowl, and the whole glorious celebration of freedom and democracy is in imminent peril of being sucked down!

A word about that; ‘Zeliboba’ – or sometimes ‘Zelibobik’, an even more childlike diminutive – is a contemptuous Russian reference to Zelensky. It was allegedly coined by Volgograd businessman Andrey Kuprikov; Zeliboba is a big blue dog featured as a character in the Russian version of the children’s television show ‘Sesame Street’. The first three letters of both names match, and it suits Zelensky’s detractors – who are legion and ever-increasing, not least in his own country – to award him the name of a clownish cartoon character. I mention this as an alert that I intend to refer to Zelensky in future as ‘Zeliboba’ or ‘Zelibobik’, so you will know who I mean.

Vintage Kagan also implies ridiculous hyperbole, which he apparently expects will pass unchallenged because he’s, like, so smart. For example, pretty much everything in this paragraph:

“Putin’s stated terms for a settlement have been consistent throughout the war: a change of government in Kyiv in favor of a pro-Russian regime; “de-Nazification,” his favored euphemism for extinguishing Ukrainian nationalism; demilitarization, or leaving Ukraine without combat power sufficient to defend against another Russian attack; and “neutrality,” meaning no ties with Western organizations such as NATO or the EU, and no Western aid programs aimed at shoring up Ukrainian independence. Western experts filling the op-ed pages and journals with ideas for securing a post-settlement Ukraine have been negotiating with themselves. Putin has never agreed to the establishment of a demilitarized zone, foreign troops on Ukrainian soil, a continuing Ukrainian military relationship with the West of any kind, or the survival of Volodymyr Zelensky’s government or any pro-Western government in Kyiv.”

Putin has never said, anywhere, that there must be a change in government in Kyiv, never mind specified it must be a pro-Russian government. The official spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry specifically proclaimed there was no intent to overthrow the Ukrainian government, and all changes in its structure since that announcement have been made by Zeliboba. It was Zeliboba who announced Ukraine would not discuss any settlement of hostilities while Vladimir Putin is President of the Russian Federation, and double-stamped it with a formal decree which is equivalent to a constitutional amendment. It seems kind of senseless for a Russia intent on demilitarization of Ukraine to ‘leave it with sufficient combat power to defend against another Russian attack’ – why would Russia want to beat it again, having beaten it, and a Ukrainian refusal to disband its military of a necessity means force will be used to achieve the goal. Having beaten Iraq, the first policy announcement by the American conquerors disbanded the Iraqi military – so rapidly was its effect felt that nobody thought to collect their weapons, so they took them home. Unbelievable – the Americans did not leave Iraq with sufficient combat power to defend against another American attack! Put that way, it…sounds kind of stupid, doesn’t it?

The Russian President has indeed never, and never will agree to the establishment of a demilitarized zone, foreign troops on Ukrainian soil in the role of ‘peacekeepers’ or any kind of Ukrainian ‘continuing military relationship with the west’ because the west is a sworn enemy of Russia by the west’s own choice, committed to Russia’s defeat by Ukraine and all these proposals are delaying devices which would be used by the completely-shameless lying west to build up Ukraine’s military strength for another effort: the same not-agreement-capable west which openly chuckled that it had used the Minsk Agreements as a device to buy time to arm Ukraine – to allow it, in Merkel’s own words, ‘to develop into what it is today’. Curiously, the EU ‘disinformation’ networks attempt to evade that by suggesting the only goal was to prevent the complete takeover of Ukraine by Russia, although they stipulate Merkel ‘had no illusions about establishing a lasting peace’. Or about trying to hold Ukraine to any of its commitments, to which no effort at all was directed. Because, you know, it was never going to end peacefully anyway. German politicians, in their paper ‘The Donbas Conflict’, were clear that Moscow not only was not treated by the agreements as a party to the conflict, it had no obligations whatsoever to them.

“The Minsk Agreements do not treat Russia as a party to the conflict, and thus place no obligations on Moscow. Even Point 10 of the Protocol, providing for withdrawal of all “illegal armed groups and military equipment as well as fighters and mercenaries”, does not refer directly to Russian troops and volunteers.”

Anyway, all that is background, a well-trodden road. What is more interesting is current rhetoric by idiots among western politicians and influencers, and the outright fallacies they continue to promote. Like Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Braze, who contends that for Latvia, it’s not a case of ‘as long as it takes’, but whatever it takes to achieve Ukrainian victory, which is to be defined by Ukraine, not by others. Got that? It is up to Ukraine to decide when it has won enough. It’s…uhhh…pretty nigh fucking impossible to imagine how it could lose in those circumstances, innit?

Russia, this discerning social philosopher claims, moved more quickly to a wartime economy because it is authoritarian, and just tosses away thousands of lives per day, zero accountability. Yet it is Ukraine which is being subjected to unrelenting pressure by its western ‘allies’ to reduce the draft-age threshold to 18 years, because…well, because thousands of lives are being tossed away every day and they no longer have enough soldiers without poaching from secondary schools. Unaccountably, the reference openly admits it was the conscription of young men to fight in Vietnam that galvanized the anti-war movement in the USA – what do Ukraine’s allies imagine will be the reaction in Ukraine to an announcement that the age for mandatory military service is being lowered? And many suggest Zeliboba will give in; that he has to. I sense things would go sideways pretty quickly, especially in view of Zelibobik’s illegitimacy as President, a position he clings to by the simple expedient of refusing to hold an election he knows he would lose.

Ukraine’s actual combat losses are a closely-guarded secret, which means Zeliboba blurts them out in moments of apparent candor, but his figures are ridiculously low, and only the obvious eagerness of his western audiences to believe him inspires him to such levels of absurdity. I’m going to ballpark the total at this moment – meaning deaths and such serious injuries that the receiver cannot fight again and may not even be able to work in civilian life – at 600,000. It might be even higher, some say a million, but I’ll stick with that figure because it is exactly 10 times as high as the highest Zelibobik will admit to; 60,000. At the same time he claims Russia is losing anywhere between 1000 and 2000 soldiers every day, both on the eastern front lines and in the Kursk region where Russia is driving out the remnants of Ukraine’s surprise incursion in August. No wonder western figures posit with amazement that Russia simply cannot sustain these losses. It couldn’t, if the numbers were accurate – but they’re not.

What else you got, Baiba? Oh, look: Russia is ‘delusional’ if it believes it can win, because the Russian economy is ‘really not doing well, by all accounts’.

By whose accounts? Not the World Bank’s, I guess, because it announced Russia had pulled ahead of Germany in GDP measured in purchasing power parity. I don’t feel like I even need to check to see if Germany’s economy is bigger than Latvia’s.

“The Russian economy’s resilience has stunned many economists who had believed the initial round of sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago could cause a catastrophic contraction. Instead, they say, the Kremlin has spent its way out of a recession by evading western attempts to limit its revenues from energy sales and by ramping up defence spending.”

This, chagrined economists claim, is because of Russia’s surging defense expenditures. Just as if all of NATO was not spending crazy money on defense procurements, either to replenish the deficiencies left by stuff it gave to Ukraine, or to build more stuff it hopes it will have time to give to Ukraine. But NATO’s domestic efforts to duplicate Russia’s economic surge have proved…disappointing, and it is increasingly difficult for it to rein in its frustration, or hide its bitterness.

What they don’t seem to get – and they can be forgiven, because it’s an unjust world – is that they were meant to lose. Every once in awhile, God just reaches down from Glory and squashes some insufferable asshole in mid-brag, with no explanation offered; it’s the kind of story that really only takes place in heartstring-tugging movie plots, like where the skinny kid takes nighttime karate lessons and beats the shit out of the school bully, or the poor slob whose swaggering boss exploits him mercilessly finds some way to pull the rug from under him and take over control of the company. You know and I know that sort of thing almost never really happens; that in the main, the egregious lies of political and media figures usually persist unexposed, or at least unpunished. The ruthless exploitation of the helpless goes on unchallenged, while the powerful project a narrative that abuse of power is exactly what they are standing resolutely against. We just have to add a few more rules, to protect your freedom and democracy. When the patient triumph, those moments occur that give ordinary people hope, the same way your daily interactions with people sometimes remind you what a blessing a good dog is.

On the subject of lying and not being punished for it, let’s take a look at Alexander Motyl’s opinion piece for ‘The Hill’, entitled “Putin’s press conference showed he is committed to depravity”. By way of a slight cautionary disclaimer, I am not sure Motyl knows that accusations Russian soldiers cold-bloodedly murdered hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha, near Kyiv, are lies. It is certainly true that most written material on the subject blames Russia. However, a couple of further cautionary notes; an established and public verdict on the false-flag operation commonly called ‘Euromaidan’ was rendered by a Kyiv court (Sviatoshyn District Court) following an extensive investigation. The verdict acknowledged that non-government and non-law-enforcement activists firing from the Hotel Ukraina were responsible for the deliberate and targeted killings of both protesters and police, and had also shot at a BBC News crew with the apparent intent of killing them. This verdict is based in part on the testimony of eyewitnesses. Today you would never find acknowledgement of that verdict unless you knew how to keyword-search for specific terms, because virtually no news media reported it. Meanwhile, public social-media archives such as Wikipedia go on blithely spreading the disinformation that it was a spontaneous grass-roots rebellion and that it was Russia which tried to violently arrest its progress. This precedent, clearly established, suggests it is perfectly possible for a malicious and deliberately-seeded trope to prevail over the truth, so long as gullible people continue to place their faith in liars and idiots.

Alexander Motyl is a devout Ukrainian nationalist; not a radical, as such, but an apparent lifetime believer in the ethnic superiority of Ukrainians over Russians and a lifetime awarder of blame to Russia for dragging Ukraine down so that it is unable to reach its destiny as cultural inspiration to the world. His ability to argue his points in English is remarkable, even considering he was born in New York and to the best of my knowledge has never lived in Ukraine, and some of his written works are poetry and fictional novels. However, Motyl himself subscribes to the maxim that ‘ all theories are imperfect and that theoretical pluralism is inevitable’.

Motyl’s diagnosis of Putin as ‘committed to depravity’ devolves from the latter’s praise, publicly offered at his end-of-the-year press conference, for Russia’s 155th Brigade of the Pacific Fleet. This is the military formation Motyl – and most of the western world – blames for the senseless murders of civilians in Bucha, Irpin and Gostomel. Additionally, Putin is ‘delusional’ if he believes bloodthirsty Russia is ‘growing stronger’, because by every measure it is growing weaker. I’m afraid for that latter inference, I’m going to have to send you all the way back to the opening sentence of this piece, with its advice on the checks which preclude ‘the prolonged acceptance of nutty ideas’. I don’t intend to go into detail on the economic strength of Russia as compared to the debt debacles which prevail among its self-declared enemies; suffice it to say Russia still maintains the lowest government-debt-to-GDP ratio of all the G20 countries at 14.9%. The figures carried by the major international troublemakers – although they see themselves as the do-gooders – tell their own story: the United States of America at 122%, the United Kingdom at 97.6%, France at 111%. Germany is the relatively-responsible outlier with government debt at a mere 62.9%, but it’s worth noting that never since Trading Economics has been keeping records was German debt as low as Russia’s is now, while Russia’s government debt the year before Putin took over in 2000 was a record 92.1%. The most-recent figure is almost exactly what it was in 2015 when the whole Ukraine mess kicked off. Just saying, for those who insist the Russian economy is headed on afterburner for the seventh circle of Hell. Russian dcebt is forecast to slip out of Putin’s control to a frightening 16.95% as of 2024, but that is only a projection, figures frequently lag by as much as a year, and we’ve already established that big-head economists are confounded by Russia’s economic resilience. As well, for those who suggest the national debt is so low because Russia ‘cannot borrow’, I would reply that with a sovereign wealth fund at $131 Billion…do they need to?

Anyway, Bucha. Very little is actually ‘known’ about what happened, and almost all of what we say we ‘know’ came directly from Ukrainian intelligence and the Ukrainian government. Motyl plainly believes every word. However, most sources agree Russian forces pulled out of Bucha March 30th, while streets full of dead civilians, shot to death with their arms bound, were first reported April 1st. There was a video which showed the mayor of Bucha overcome with happiness, exulting in the liberation of his town by brave Ukrainian forces, filmed – obviously – after the departure of the Russians, and he does not say a word about the awful crimes discovered. That’s not proof, I know, but if he was aware of the murders and still was able to smile and cheer the arrival of Ukrainian patriots, he deserves an Oscar for bearing up. I have no way of knowing if that video is still available, I haven’t looked. I’ve seen it, and that’s good enough for me, it’s not up to me to convince the world.

Besides, it’s specifically cited by the Associated Press, in their inference that the Bucha mayor complained that the town’s streets were full of bodies on March 7th of that year. Here’s the item, in part, to which they refer:

“In Sumy and Okhtyrka, to the east of Kyiv near the Russian border, bombs fell on residential buildings and destroyed a power plant, regional leader Dmytro Zhivitsky said. He said there were dead and wounded but gave no figures.

Bombs also hit oil depots in Zhytomyr and the neighboring town of Cherniakhiv, located west of Kyiv.

In Bucha, a Kyiv suburb, the mayor reported heavy artillery fire.

“We can’t even gather up the bodies because the shelling from heavy weapons doesn’t stop day or night,” Mayor Anatol Fedoruk said. “Dogs are pulling apart the bodies on the city streets. It’s a nightmare.”

This, as someone once pointed out on this forum, is known as ‘retconning’ – the establishing of retroactive connectivity by searching backward, in this case, for any mention by the Bucha mayor having reported deaths or bodies, and saying “There: that’s what he was talking about. Streets filled with bodies of victims of the wicked Russians, who murdered them and then left them lying in the street.”

Except he never said that, or anything like it. He said they were victims of artillery fire. Moreover, he said street dogs – which abound in eastern-European towns and villages – were ‘pulling them apart’.

By the time Uschi the Avenging Angel Von Der Leyen showed up on April 8th – a full month after the streets of Bucha were supposedly filled with hundreds of bodies of murder victims – the bodies were all stowed away in impermeable body bags. But here’s a photo taken on or around April 5th, after the discovery of the bodies.

Both the visible bodies are apparently unmarked – except, presumably, by gunshot wounds – and fully clothed, despite having lain in the street exposed for a month. If you buy the alleged satellite imagery from Maxar, it purportedly shows bodies lying in the street in what is allegedly Bucha on March 19th, almost two weeks before the first worldwide revelation of the massacre.

Do you know anything about decomposition after death? Aftermath, who advertise as ‘specialists in Trauma Cleaning and Biohazard removal’ helpfully provide the timeline which appears below.

24-72 hours after death — the internal organs decompose.

3-5 days after death — the body starts to bloat and blood-containing foam leaks from the mouth and nose.

8-10 days after death — the body turns from green to red as the blood decomposes and the organs in the abdomen accumulate gas.

Several weeks after death — nails and teeth fall out.

1 month after death — the body starts to liquify.

If the AP retconning job above were accurate, the bodies in the streets should have begun to liquefy. Whatever was left after they were scattered and despoiled by dogs. See any signs of that? Me, either. If the Maxar satellite allegation is correct, the bodies have been lying in the street for at least two weeks, and should be bloated and reddish. See any signs of that? Me, either. The hands of the body in the foreground appear naturally coloured, and the nails are not falling out, although they look like some of them might have been pulled out. But I’m not an expert like Aftermath, and the photo resolution is a bit low for such an accusation.

Either way, we have lots of photos of bodies which appear to not have been dead for more than a couple of days according to the established signs of decomposition, which have been allegedly lying out in the weather and subject to depredations of stray dogs for a minimum of two weeks, and perhaps as long as a month. Other photographs provided at the time of discovery depicted Ukrainian soldiers or militiamen dragging the bodies in the street by long ropes threaded through their armpits – this, the accompanying information provided, was in case the bodies had been booby-trapped with explosives by the retreating Russian murderers. I’m not going to be so crass as to suggest you try dragging a semi-liquid body on a rope; I’m sure you see my point without a practical demonstration.

Russia tried to point these discrepancies out, along with other evidence of ‘staging’ it claimed had been observed in recordings – but its denials were suppressed. I don’t want to go off the subject here, but it seems to be accepted in the ‘free democracies’ that certain authorities can decide for you what you see, read and hear, as if you were too thick to make up your own mind or do a bit of elementary research. Western agencies openly engaged in it appear to exhibit the satisfaction of those who are proud of their work.

“Some social media platforms have tried to limit propaganda and disinformation from the Kremlin. Google blocked RT’s accounts, while in Europe, RT and Sputnik were banned by tech company Meta, which also stopped promoting or amplifying Russian-state media pages on its platforms, which include Facebook and Instagram.

Russia has found ways to evade the crackdown with posts in different languages through dozens of official Russian social media accounts.

“It’s a pretty massive messaging apparatus that Russia controls — whether it’s official embassy accounts, bot or toll accounts or anti-Western influencers — they have many ways to circumvent platform bans,” said Bret Schafer, who heads the information manipulation team at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.”

I imagine that was just an unfortunate choice of words, but, come on. The head of the information manipulation team, at the Alliance for Securing Democracy? Why does a secure democracy need to manipulate information? Is its population comprised of those who are too fragile – or too stupid – to analyze raw information for themselves?

An interesting question, but that’s not the question that’s on my mind while I’m writing this. What I’m wondering is that if Alexander Motyl is still alive when it is finally acknowledged that the dead in the streets and cellars of Bucha were murdered by their own militias…will it still be depravity? Or will it become a forgivable act committed by people whose minds had become unhinged by the terrible things they saw and did?