The Ukraine mess is daily looking more like the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, a meat grinder that took 500,000 lives. That three-year conflict became a savage proxy war and prelude for the belligerents of World War II.
The Ukraine battlefield is proving to be a similar laboratory of death. New lethal weaponry and tactics are introduced, modified – and always improved – from drones to guided missiles to internet-fed artillery.
Likewise, a similar pre-global war lineup of the eventual adversaries is emerging in preview of a much larger, much scarier war to come.
The first mission of Ukraine, the aggrieved victim of a peremptory Russian attack, was simple survival.
But now that it has been armed to the teeth and its soldiers proved far more capable and heroic than Putin’s once-feared Russia, Kyiv now seeks to push back Russians to their 2014 Ukrainian acquired borders.
Next President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has announced that the third stage will be to eject every Russian from 2013 Ukraine. He promises to reabsorb both the Crimea and the Donbas.
That is an ambitious goal that might require preemptive attacks inside Russia and on the Black Sea.
To accomplish the last two missions, Zelenskyy needs a blank check of support from a United States that can neither control its own borders nor maintain its critical infrastructure and is $33 trillion in debt.
Americans are not only to supply the money and arms to fuel Zelenskyy’s counteroffensives, but to sign onto a dangerous anti-Russian agenda that is not necessarily synonymous with one that is in the best interests of the United States.
As far as Russia goes, Vladimir Putin knows his attack was a costly mistake. It was predicated on the assumption that an appeasing, doddering Biden and a U.S. military humiliated in Afghanistan would always remain passive.
Yet Putin still believes that his blunder will not have been a fatal one if he can still destroy much of Eastern Ukraine, institutionalize what he gained in 2014, fracture NATO, propagandize the war as an existential cause of saving Mother Russia from a corrupt West, and reconfigure a new alliance with China, Iran, North Korea, and perhaps Turkey and India.
As far as the United States goes, the Biden Administration sees America’s interest as largely defined by a proxy war to defang Russia. To paraphrase Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, America will pour limitless arms into Ukraine to so weaken Russia that it will have to stay within its current borders.
Washington blithely dismisses all of Putin’s existential threats as empty nuclear saber-rattling – on the Pentagon’s assurance that wounded, cornered, and growling tigers can always be assumed to remain predictably docile.
Biden, whose family influence-peddled with Kyiv for a decade, has radically reversed his initial course. No longer is Biden offering a free ride out of Dodge for Zelenskyy or dismissing any worry over a “minor” Russian invasion.
Biden instead now sees saving Ukraine and punishing Russia as his one shot at a redeeming accomplishment for an otherwise failed administration.
The once-pacifist American Left has embraced Ukraine as its “I told you so” proof that Putin was really the monster that it could not find guilty in its various Russian collusion concoctions and laptop disinformation hoaxes.
The NATO nations are acting uncharacteristically defiant given the war is on their borders. They rightly fear a victorious Putin would be vengeful and not satiated.
Yet their “you go first” shipment of hodgepodge weapons to Ukraine, as well as their embarrassment over their past suicidal energy polices and slow-motion disarmament, remind us that Europeans in NATO before the war could not keep the Russians out, the Americans in, or the Germans down.
China believes it can be the real winner of the war. Its rivals and enemies are weakened the longer the war continues. The West is depleting its arsenals. It is tiring of the cost. Rival Russia is bleeding, selling Beijing cheap oil and begging for its weapons.
Neither Europe nor America, China believes, will want to repeat another proxy war – say, one over Taiwan – against a nuclear power with far more leverage over the West and far greater wherewithal on the battlefield.
Iran is selling drones to Russia. Tehran expects a desperate Putin to sell it all the enriched uranium it needs, prevent a preemptive strike on Tehran, and end Moscow’s Syrian wink-and-nod policy with Israel.
India, like Turkey, likes newfound cheap Russian oil. It feels a proximate Russia and China are better entertained than a distant and provocative, but increasingly internally divided and weakened, United States.
Turkey is suddenly booming with cheap oil and a big arms appetite from Russia. It feels rich and illiberal China and Russia both fear Turkey’s export of Islamism and seem better allies than the loud-talking but declining West.
North Korea sees only positives in Western distraction in Ukraine. It counts that its nuclear recklessness is seen as a valuable irritant by both Russia and China.
The longer this preview war goes on, the surer will follow the nightmarish main attraction.
Thank you, VDH, for your lucid analysis of this increasingly frightening war. But what can done to stop it before de-escalation is no longer possible?
Activate Trump. How? I don’t know. Open to suggestions.
All,
Well, realization for starters. These sites are mining collective raw information, e.g., participant responses to articles and turning them into intelligence. For example, books and revenue enhancing enterprises.
Commonsense,
What could have stopped the flood in Noah’s time?
Hoover Dam? The little Dutch boy?
Russia wants to “reconfigure a new alliance with China, Iran, North Korea, and perhaps Turkey and India.”
Turkey is a member of NATO but it was recognised around five years ago that they could become an enemy, and NATO carried out an exercise based on this, they tweeted it and all hell broke loose when Erdagon heard about it.
The military industrial complex is benefiting enormously from this, just like the World pHarma Organisation benefited enormously from convid.
Why wasn’t everyone in the west screaming and hollering when Ukraine was shelling the Donbas which is primarily a Russian population. Didn’t hear a peep here in the US. Why weren’t Americans screaming when the US orchestrated a coup in Ukraine in 2014 replacing a duly elected president friendly towards Russia to replace him with one friendly towards the west. Can you imagine that? Someone wanting to align with a nuclear power right next door. What about Putin approaching the US about joining NATO and being told to get lost. Didn’t hear anybody raising hell about that. And remember when the US gave Putin assurances that NATO would not push east and then turned around and did just that. Why has the US pushed so hard for Ukraine to join NATO when Putin made it very clear that it was absolutely unacceptable? What the hell is the US doing in Ukraine period? The neocon creeps in the US gov’t are using Ukraine as a proxy to try and stick it to Putin who they hate and stands athwart their plans. People are dying because of it. We have the Monroe doctrine but Russia can’t have the same? What Putin wanted was for Ukraine to simply remain neutral and not be part of NATO. Oh, and why did the US blow up the Nordstream pipeline? Now your gov’t is feeding billions of your dollars in military aid to the pervert/neo nazi Zelensky and his corrupt gov’t to keep this thing going when they have no chance of winning it. WHY?
Thanks VDH, interesting analysis.
Ukraine is not capable of defeating Russia, despite 5 mobilizations and approaching 200 billion dollars in aid from both the US and Europe. Ukraine is currently gang-pressing 16-year olds on up to 60-year olds off the streets. Thanks to war propaganda we have come to believe that Russia is a second rate military power that will lose this war. But the only reason Ukraine has made any progress is because: 1) the Russians were spread too thin in the Kharkov region and Ukrainians, thanks to our satellite intelligence, were able to exploit this situation with a massive counter-offensive. The Russians, as is their habit, pulled back rather than let their outnumbered troops in the area be sacrificed; 2) in the Kherson region, the Russians pulled back on their own accord because the Ukrainians were daily bombarding a nearby dam, which, if collapsed, would have flooded their positions and cut off their exits. But now the Russians have tripled (at least) their troop strength and are conducting a merciless war of attrition that is eviscerating Ukrainian troop strength. Everyone calls it a “meat-grinder” strategy. Ukraine is more like a Puffer fish that is blowing up its body to gigantic proportions to pretend it is a monstrous war machine, but on the exhale it is a shattered country that would have collapsed months ago without massive Western support.
Ukraine doesn’t want to defeat Russia. They want Russia to leave Ukraine.
And we don’t really want to help the Ukrainian people. Biden, all the Democrats and the Neocon Republicans like McConnell and Graham now openly say that this is about “regime change” in Russia and we won’t stop until Putin is gone??!! That, and blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline is a clear act of war against Russia and we are rapidly heading toward WWIII.
It’s about destroying re surging Christianity in Russia and stealing the vast natural resources of that country. It has been about that since the original Russian Revolution in 1917.
The Ukraine is winning. That’s irrefutable.
Smarter heads need to prevail to put an end to the lunacy of this war. Where are those heads? Nowhere to be found it appears, at least not in this Administration or the EU cabinets for that matter.
Certainly they aren’t iat 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It has been widely reported that a proposed peace agreement was scuttled in March 2022, because both Biden and Boris Johnson refused to consider any agrerment that would leave Putin in power. And now, nearly a quarter million deaths later, here we are.
Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t Putin ask for negotiations early on in the conflict but was brushed aside? Biden and company are criminals.
Biden’s first reaction to the invasion was to recommend Zelensky flee and set up a government-in-exile. People seem to have forgotten that.
Yea well, people that don’t have the stomach to prosecute wars should stay inconspicuous under their Athenian temples. OMG it’s WWIII!!!!!!?
You are a brilliant mind, but wrong. There is no solution. Russia will keep attacking & Ukraine wants to survive as a people and Nation. Peace treaty? How? Russia will rearm and attack again. Tell me your brilliant solution.
Ukraine, i.e, our-hero Zelensky, should demand negotiations now while there is still a population and a country left to fight for. Ukraine will be nothing but a wasteland if the war continues on the path it’s on with support from the West “until the end, ” whatever that means. Senseless to continue the bloodshed and astronomical expense. For what? For Zelensky to be annointed the champion of democracy?
Putin asked for negotiations early on in the conflict but was brushed off by the US. I say the US because it’s the US that has instigated this war by it’s misguided policies.
Trump could do it.
Biden’s response demonstrates Tom Cotton’s thesis in “only The Strong”. Democrats always flinch when challenged then overcompensate with braggadocio. which, in the end insures escalation..
But, unlike the Spanish Civil War, this matter involves an invasion of a clearly and internationally recognized sovereign nation (witness the Budapest Memorandum) and parallels Hitler’s invasion of Poland. He should have been stopped then as Putin should have been stopped a year ago. As in the former case there will be the same hell to pay in the latter..
It is ironic that the Chinese bitch about us assisting Ukraine who is being invaded while it was we who came to the assistance of the Chinese, at a great deal greater cost of blood and treasure, to throw out the Japanese invaders only eighty some years ago.
The invasion changed everything
Russia signed to get control of all of Ukraine’s nukes which it got and when they signed they guaranteed Ukraine’s “sovereignty”. END OF STORY.
You seem to either have forgotten, or are unaware of, the Minsk agreements, which the U.S., and NATO have violated in every instance. No expansion of NATO, no offensive weapons installed in Ukraine, for instance. Then there was the coup orchestrated by Victoria Nuland in 2014 through our state department which overthrew an elected government favorable to Russia, and replaced by one favoring the U.S. and NATO, who then moved for membership in NATO. Russia was likewise further antagonized from the attacks on Russian-speaking Donbass by the Azov Battalion resulting in over 14,000 dead from 2014-2021. The German PM, Merkle, stated after the signing of the Minsk agreements that they were only intended to give Ukraine time to build their military, and would not be honored. Biden and NATO pushed Russia to invade, maybe to weaken them, or maybe for political purposes at home. Blowing up the Nordstream pipeline was an act of war, and Biden and Nuland had been rather giddy about the prospect before the act. As usual, they have continued to lie about that and everything else.
The satanic islamic loving Luciferian Globalists are feeding this war to raise the cost of livi8ng worldwide…
Just as America was behind the creation of the coronavirus and Microbot injecting vaccines…
The Global Reset is about creating a One World Islamic Economy…
The Luciferian islamic loving Globalists love War… it reduces populations…
The world is divided…
1) Those standing for Christ Jesus
2) Those doing the work for satan
But let’s look at this further…
Those for satan are divided further…
1) Those standing for satanic Sunni islam
2) Those standing for satanic Shiite islam
China, Russia and Iran are all for Shiite islam… which is why they are always painted s the bad guys of this world… and why they are always working together…
The rest of the world is for satanic Sunni islam… including Europe, The West & America…
BEWARE!!! America is not what you’ve been programmed to believe it is…
Make note: Those Uyghur muslims being persecuted, enslaved and tortured in China… are members of the Sunni sect of islam…
Ooooo I’ll make note…..top on the list of things to do today. Yes siree bobboroonie. Don’t worry bossman…… I’m on it.
Gettin’ my car now to take care of it. Now where’s my pad so I can make note of it. Oh I think I left it at my church………..
I am hopeful, if not confident, that Vladimir Putin has the capacity (not Biden nor Zelensky) to come up with a strategy to avoid WWIII.
Russian forces a year ago were 7km from the Presidential palace in Kyiv and now they are several hundred kilometers away. I’d say this is a good sign that Ukraine can fight pretty well.
“Vladimir Putin knows his attack was a costly mistake.”
I don’t know how anyone can know what Putin knows.
My personal guess is that Putin regrets that in 2014 he stopped in Crimea and Donbas.
Putin believed that he blocked NATO expansion like he blocked in Georgia in 2008.
In 2014, Ukraine didn’t have real army, but by 2022, with Trump help, they developed strong defenses.
The original:
Forward. Nazi collaborator monuments in Ukraine
By Lev Golinkin
https://forward.com/news/462916/nazi-collaborator-monuments-in-ukraine/
Please notice that only pictures of the main monuments are in this article. Multiple links point to different monuments that grow like toadstools (поганки) in Ukraine.
Zelensky is Jewish. Therefore …. (how relevant is Ukranian Jew-hatred today?)
You dont recognize a fig leaf when you see one? Zelensky is a fig-leaf, a patsy and dopey clown with a typically Jewish assimilationist schtick.
The Times of Israel blog by Vladislav Davidzon: “The war that turned Volodymyr Zelensky into a Ukrainian Jew.”
Davidzon is a self-identified Judeo-Banderite.:)
Analyze that!
Once again VDH you are spot on. Thank you for this piece.
It should be remembered that Vladimir Putin using the Russian military to invade and destroy Ukraine didn’t happen when President Trump was in the White House he kept Putin under control. If Donald Trump would still of President this Putin disaster in Ukraine would not have occurred. Now with Joe Biden masquerading as a genuine US President Putin has become totally out of control, irrational and very dangerous.
Russia is working with America to create a One World Islamic Economy!
America created the corona virus so it could get people to take the Microbot injecting Vaccines… turning humans into Transhumans… through AI (Artificial Intelligence)… the downloading of DATA into Humans…
Which is tied into IoT (Internet of things)…
Wiki Reports:
“According to Lewis, “The Internet of Things, or IoT, is the integration of people, processes and technology with connectable devices and sensors to enable remote monitoring, status, manipulation and evaluation of trends of such devices.”
BEWARE!!! America is not what you’ve been programmed to think it is!
See… in Oct of 2021… long before the Ukraine War… Russia joined the WEF in taking a leading role in shaping the trajectory of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Part of the Forum’s global Network, the new Centre will bring together leading businesses, policy makers and members of civil society to co-design and pilot innovative approaches to technology governance.
How many of these mass shootings… rail derailments… airplane crashes… buildings blowing up… etc… are created by people that have taken the Microbot vaccines & boosters? And being manipulated by AI & IoT???
It would be good to remember when Donald Trump was President,he kept Vladimir Putin in his place. Now since Joe Biden has entered the Oval Office of White House, Putin has thrown off all restraints and has become very dangerous and deadly Ukraine.
Biden will only make this terrible situation even worse. For making things worse in the only Biden is able to do.
For Biden is a disaster for America, for Ukraine , for Russia and a disaster for the world.
TJ is my very own Jewish community’s periodical, and I’ve been a reader ever since I could read. Its website seems to have removed the article, which makes sense if you place it in the context of current events. I trust the editorial board to have done the right thing, not for evading potential controversy, but for not fueling the current evil’s propaganda machine with a not-really-necessary reminder of a past evil.
Nobody forgot Babiy Yar, but Bucha and Irpin are not likely to be forgotten anytime soon either!
Maybe that it could be that Joe Biden and his crew will deliberately use that terrible situation in Ukraine as an a chance to start a major war in order to declare martial law in the United States that would quickly fit into their Red/Green agenda to establish a Communist/ Sharia type tyranny in America ?
Of course ,this sounds alarmist and even far-fetched idea , nevertheless, no evil insidious scheme is beyond the sinister limits of the Biden regime.
The US blew up the pipeline to keep Germany and the rest of Western Europe from aligning itself too closely to Russia. So now the US can sell its nat gas to them. At a much higher price of course.