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Source: The Unz Review
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The mystery of the Ukrainian War still eludes its Julius Caesar. Yet more and more crucial details are leaking out. Putin shows his cards, Lukashenko leaks documents, Zelensky tells his stories… The war started once the US achieved a great feat: the consolidation of power over the entire civilised world. Nobody in history could claim such an achievement; not the Roman Empire of old, neither the British Empire, nor Hitler nor Stalin; but the Yanks did it. Their chosen agents and their proxies ruled every important state: England and France, Germany and Japan were all governed by American agents. Germany and Japan may still be occupied by the US army, but even though France has no US troops it is still led by an American agent. Sweden’s American proxy recently agreed to abandon its treasured and profitable neutrality. Finland traded away Russia’s endless supply of cheap gas and wood to become a pawn in the Northern wilderness. These American agents would inflict horrible sufferings on their subjects; they would destroy industries, bring famine and epidemic disease upon their nations, just to follow the magic wand in Washington’s hands. No country is far away from a US military base – they control the world.
Russia and China were subdued, too: they preserve a vestige of independence, but accept US orders. The Russian communism that preserved the huge state through world wars finally fell, and the neo-Liberal regimes that followed sold out or demolished whatever was left standing. The Russians disregarded their own security because they were promised that NATO would never move East into the former Soviet states, but this promise has been ignored. The US openly reneged on its promises, daring Russia to complain. Putin, who has been taking comparatively good care of his people and remains popular with them, demanded that NATO withdraw to the 1997 agreement’s borders. They refused even to discuss it; but still Putin hesitated to confront US global supremacy.
China was subdued through commerce, by allowing it to manufacture and sell cheap goods, thus ridding itself of its own poverty. President Xi was obedient to US wishes but still more or less maintains at least the illusion of independence.
The great planet Earth is practically owned by the US. With hundreds of military bases, the dollar as the universal currency – what else do you need? The world is yours! Americans could finally relax and enjoy the good life. But they were too greedy and had too much hubris for their own good. By taking on Russia they may end their hegemony.
They decided to teach Russia’s Putin a lesson. To do this, they used the Desert Storm pattern they employed in 1992 against Saddam Hussein of Iraq. As you may remember, Saddam was told by the US ambassador that the US wouldn’t mind if he grabbed Kuwait, a small but wealthy princedom that was a part of Iraq until it was cut away by the British. Saddam did exactly that, and then he discovered that he had been branded the new Hitler. The US attacked Iraq in what was called the Desert Storm operation; they killed some 40,000 soldiers and caused the death of 200,000 Iraqi civilians. Over the next ten years, the US bled Iraq with sanctions, repeatedly invaded, and finally hanged Saddam. In a similar manner, they convinced Mr Putin that the US would not interfere in the Ukraine. That was a trap, and he walked into it.
The situation in the Ukraine had been troublesome for some time, and was already explosive. The current Kiev regime was established after the coup d’état of 2014, which was engineered by Victoria Nuland and her minyan of Neocons. The regime was generously supported by the US as long as it remained virulently anti-Russian. They began by shelling the predominantly ethnic-Russian Eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas. Though the Kiev regime had signed the Minsk accords promising Donbas some degree of autonomy, they did not follow it, and later admitted they entered into these accords just to get more time to prepare for war with Russia. But Putin is a peaceful man and he didn’t want to send his army to fight. The Russian army was downsized during his rule; expensive weapon systems were either destroyed or mothballed. Putin reduced the military to a rather small professional army ready for minor conflicts on the periphery, relying on the nukes he inherited from the USSR to cover Doomsday scenarios. Everything in between – like the conventional armed struggles that dominated the 20th c – was neglected. Finally, still convinced that the US would not interfere, Putin entered the Ukraine to impose peace.
The sad experience of June 22, 1941 had influenced him. That was the day Germany invaded Russia despite the peace treaty the two countries had. Stalin had learned from his spies of the forthcoming attack, but he did not believe it; he was sure it was just a divisive enemy rumour. The first strike of the German panzers reached the walls of Moscow half a year later. Putin did not want to give the Ukrainians the same chance Stalin gave to Hitler. Strike first! – that is Putin’s motto.
Within a few days, the Russian army was already at the gates of Kiev. It was fast, it was brief, and it was decisive. At the same time, in Istanbul, the representatives of Russia and Ukraine began and promptly initialized a diplomatic agreement. The agreement was obtained through the services of a Russian Jewish oligarch Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea owner, who wanted to avoid sanctions. A man who closely followed these events, Mr Oleg Tsarev (he was a candidate for President of Ukraine in 2014) says Mr Abramovich bribed the Ukrainian leadership so they would quickly agree. The agreement was not bad for the Ukraine: they would have to cut down their army, agree to permanent neutrality, and agree to the Donbas going to Russia. It was reasonable, considering the eight years the Donbas had been shelled by the Ukrainian army. But it was not to be: Mr Johnson, the British Prime Minister, came to Kiev and overbid Mr Abramovich. Ukraine agreed to more war. It was a popular decision in Ukraine: the people wanted war.
A few days before the war the subject had been discussed in the popular Ukrainian talk show of Mr Savik Shuster. Surprisingly, almost 90% of the audience voted for the war, rather than abiding by the Minsk accords. The US insisted on war as well. They felt Putin was caught in their trap. Meanwhile, the Russian army had already begun to withdraw from Kiev and the Kharkov area. The Russian generals moved their heavy weapons back to Russian territory and promptly removed themselves. The withdrawal was tactical – the Russian army in the Ukraine was very small, just enough for a lightening raid and not sufficient for an extended occupation. But it was anyway a humiliating exercise.
Worse, the US and its Ukrainian allies staged a copy of Timisoara in the small town of Bucha, with corpses taken out of graves and the morgue, and then accusing Russian soldiers of atrocities. Timisoara is a Romanian miners’ town where a similar massacre was staged by the CIA in 1989 in order to depose and promptly execute the then ruler, Mr Nicolae Ceausescu.
To fight a longer war, Russia had to get more soldiers, and so the mobilization was begun. A lot of pro-Western young men (and not so young) had moved out of Russia, mainly to the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Kazakhstan, etc, and to Israel where entry visas are not required. Some pro-Western men made a try for Europe, seeking refuge status (they were encouraged and instructed by émigrés of previous waves). That whole generation had grown up after the fall of the Soviet Union, and they were brought up with the idea that the West is wonderful. Russia is the only ex-Soviet republic that had no nationalist surge; all the other Soviet states were inspired by their own flavour of nationalism or even (in the case of the Ukraine) influenced by neo-Nazis. While the Ukrainians and the Georgians were taught that they are the best, Russians were taught that they are not especially wonderful. Even ordinary patriotism can hardly be encountered in Russia. Their love is directed to the West; the media’s love affair with America is a universal trend, and it worked on Russia, too.
Russian nationalism had been eradicated in the USSR almost completely, although nationalists did have one or two major magazines in the latter days of the Soviet Union. In the 1970s, the Russian nationalists tried to make themselves heard, but then they were accused of antisemitism and fell mum. (The poet Stanislav Kunyaev tells of this last struggle.) Even under Putin, nationalists continue to be discouraged, though the Jews (who had departed en masse for Israel) were partly substituted by Armenians. Only the last years of Stalin’s rule were passably good for Russian nationalists. That’s why there was no positive response to the mobilization. Pro-Western figures succeeded in taking for themselves practically all the cultural resources, and for a creative person there was no choice: if they wanted to be published, if they wanted to break into the cinema, they had to be pro-Western. The Ukrainian War was good from this point of view. At least some Russian patriotism became legitimate, though it is still not the prevailing mood. The US imposed anti-Russian sanctions on all its allies, only allowing imports that the US wanted for its own purposes. Even the Hague court came under US sanctions (the US threatened to occupy the Hague if its judges dared to investigate the massacres in Vietnam and Afghanistan by US forces). They filed a case against President Putin for the totally fictitious accusation of kidnapping Ukrainian children (some 150 children from Ukraine were moved away from the battleground to summer holiday locations; while twice that many were taken by the EU from their parents). Though it was unjust, the very accusation had a positive impact on Mr Putin: at that point he understood that if he should fail, he could expect the fate of Saddam Hussein; ergo he cannot fail.
In actual war, it has turned into an old-style battle of trenches and heavy fortifications. The only important battle (after Mariupol) was the struggle over Bakhmut, a tiny provincial township. It will be forever remembered for a previously little-known man, Yevgeny Prigozhin. He was called “Putin’s chef” for a funny reason: he once owned a catering company that fed schoolchildren in Moscow and St Petersburg. But in 2015, he became the manager and commander of a mercenary company, the Wagner Group, and his soldiers made great impact in Syria and afterwards in Africa. Those are his soldiers that took Bakhmut after “the Grinder”, as they called that operation. Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers were killed there. Prigozhin is also a master of PR. He mercilessly criticized the MoD (Ministry of Defence), the General Staff, the generals and the Minister of Defence. He accused them of a lack of patriotism, of caring little for the Russian soldiers. The only exception he made was for his old acquaintances from the Syrian campaign, General “Armageddon” Surovikin and the three-star General Michael Mizintsev who commanded the troops in the reduction of Mariupol. A Vologda peasant’s son, Mizintsev was the most senior Russian officer actually in the battlefield, and a Deputy Defence Minister. After the Bakhmut Grinder, Mizintsev retired from his position in MoD and became the second-in-command of the Wagner Group.
Why did Mr Putin allow such ruthless criticism of his MoD? Apparently he wanted to have a balance. He remembered that the Iraqi army was vanquished by the US with the help of Iraqi generals who took American bribes and betrayed their country and their leader. The Wagner Group was insurance against a similar step by the Russian generals.
The Wagner Group is a good army, full of soldiers and officers who are ready to fight. At first it had the problem of being short of munitions, but it seems that this was resolved. The USSR left a rich legacy of weapons and munitions; though its production had been somewhat weakened, they recently improved it. After Gorbachev-Yeltsin’s disastrous rule, things had to be reconnected again, and the Ukraine war gave Mr Putin a chance to force through the connections. Yes, it is always better to avoid war altogether, but Putin is taking NATO lemons and making Russian lemonade. Yes, the Russians were naive enough to believe the US might help them instead of fighting them. Silly? But it began long time ago, this Russian fantasy about a free and magnificent West as earthly paradise and model of democratic perfection. Putin also accepted this paradigm for many years. So the war has been good as far as it has allowed Russia to reactivate itself, and its army, and its patriotism.
After the Bakhmut Grinder, the Russian army sat back and waited for the Ukrainian offensive. It started two weeks ago, and yet there is still no big achievement. But, who knows? It is not impossible the Ukrainians will achieve something, as long as Russians refuse the mobilisation, and resist putting its economy on a war footing. It seems that Mr Putin has finally accepted that NATO’s war will not end anytime soon. He is now thinking in much longer term strategies, as it is also a time of a great realignment of the world. Europe might prosper with cheap Russian resources; Russia could prosper by selling it. But as long as European states are staffed with American agents, it is not to be.
Recently, a very pro-Western pundit named Sergei Karaganov published an article calling for a tactical nuclear strike upon NATO. On the other hand, a Russian strategist, a patriot and even a Stalinist, Mr Shishkin, persuaded his audience to avoid that, as tactical war must grow into strategic nuclear warfare. This discussion is still goes on. But it seems that the leading lights in the US and Europe are no longer afraid of nuclear war, not after COVID-19, and especially not after the shocking rise of the cost of living (thanks to the green agenda and the destruction of European farming). Who wants to live life under these conditions? Unless the power of the global oligarchs is broken, we are all tempted to prepare for Armageddon, without regrets.
Finally, my learned friend Prof Z believes once every thousand years, humanity is destroyed by some Master Race from space and is reborn to tend the planet. Now the Aliens appear even on the pages of NYT. Probably it is the right time for us to be wiped out, and thanks to Greta Thunberg, Bill Gates, Antonio Fauci et al for all the fish.
Written with kind assistance of Mr Paul Bennett.
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