Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Russia and Eastern Europe Page 1 of 17

Trump’s Laughable Sanction Threats Against Russia

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On January 24, 2025

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The US thru a kitchen sink of sanctions at Russia after the start of the Ukraine war, including freezing their foreign assets. The result?

The number is exaggerated, given Russian inflation, but even inflation adjusted, Russia’s doing fine.

It is impossible to choke out Russia with sanctions if China isn’t willing to go a long. (India not cooperating is the cherry on top.) Cannot be done. Impossible.

In fact, sanctions against Russia have been a huge favor to it, forcing a vast surge in import substitution, improving its industry, creating a booming economy whose only real problem is inflation. Russian oligarchs have been forced to spend their money and effort in Russia instead of wasting their money in the West. Meanwhile the sanctions have damaged Europe massively, though somewhat to the benefit of America, since much energy-intensive industry in Europe is shutting down and moving to the US.

If Trump wants peace for Ukraine with Russia he’s going to have to offer a good deal. Threats won’t cut it. Or just wait for the Russians to win and impose a peace.

Since Trump appears to be reducing aid to Ukraine, that will happen sooner than otherwise. Perhaps it’s his real strategy, or more likely, he’s simply incoherent. Russia halting along the current lines would be stupid of them, since they’re advancing inexorably and all reports are of significant Ukrainian manpower shortages.

Trump’s always been a bully, but Russia isn’t one of America’s vassals or satrapies. It’s a junior ally in the Chinese sphere, and Trump doesn’t have the economic or military leverage to make it do anything. The only country in the world which can force Russia is China, and China isn’t going to help America v.s. Russia under any likely Trump policy regime.

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About the Syrian War & Those Rebels

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On December 2, 2024

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Let’s state the obvious bits and get them out of the way:

  • The rebels are basically Al-Qaeda;
  • They are supported by Turkey, Israel and the US;
  • The Syrian army barely fought during the initial attacks and it was very embarrassing;
  • Aleppo fell in a couple days. It may take a couple years to take it back;
  • The timing is intended to take advantage of Hezbollah’s being weakened and tied down by Israel.

Syria was losing the previous war until Hezbollah and Russia intervened. It may well lose this war if Hezbollah and/or Russia don’t send troops, but both of them have other enemies they need to worry about.

If Syria falls, Russia loses its Mediterranean naval and air bases and thus a great deal of its military reach. Hezbollah loses its main supply line to Iran.

The big mistakes that lead to this were playing footsie with Turkey/Erdogan and tolerating a frozen conflict. Syria, with Russia and Hezbollah’s support could have conquered Idlib, but Russia decided not to, leaving enemies with a foothold in Syria. Those enemies waited till the best time, then re0-openned the war.

If you’re winning a war and can win the war, then frozen conflicts are a bad idea. They remain a knife near your throat. Russia made this mistake in 2014 as well, when it could easily have fully defeated Ukraine and imposed a peace.

Hopefully they’ve learned the lesson. They do have enough reserves left to send sufficient troops to Syria. This time, win the war.

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Explaining Ukraine To Your Uncle: The Causes of the War

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On November 26, 2024

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Now that even the Council on Foreign Relations is admitting Ukraine can’t and won’t win its war against Russia, there might be some serious cognitive dissonance for people who’ve not been paying much attention and bought into the official narrative on the war.

If you find yourself faced with the proverbial ignorant uncle at Thanksgiving this year and want to appear fact-based rather than conspiratorial, maybe the following round up of links and sources about the beginnings of the war will help.

It’s bad enough that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in a losing and pointless effort, but it’s important to rebut the narrative that Russia was the aggressor and not NATO and the US.

The work of researcher Ivan Katchanovski is definitive and completely debunks the official US narrative on the Maidan Revolution:

His work was vindicated in a Ukrainian court in 2024.

Uncle Ignorance should also familiarize himself with the names Stephan Bandera & Yaroslav Hunka. Bandera has been regarded as the “Father of Ukraine” since 2014. Hunka is a Ukrainian SS veteran who received a standing ovation at a session of the Canadian Parliament last year.

That’s not to even get into the consensus reality that NATO expansion backed Putin into a corner and that US foreign policy legend George Kennan called it “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

The Brookings Institute 1999 history of the post-Cold War efforts to enlarge NATO will read like “Russian propaganda” to anyone whose knowledge of the war came from MSNBC starting from a blank slate in 2022.

Also, your Uncle will want to be beaten about the head and shoulder with this 2008 confidential cable from current head of the CIA and then US ambassador to Russia, William Burns who strongly opposed Bush & Cheney’s offer to invite Ukraine into NATO (revealed by Wikileaks.)

Also the story of the Ukrainian Civil War from 2014 to 2022 has been systematically mistold.

Key graphic which shows how Ukraine dramatically upped their shelling of civilians in the independent republics just prior to Russia’s invasion — forcing Putin’s hand.

Graph of explosions per month in Ukraine from 2014 to 2022.

Source:The Special Monitoring Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE SMM)

Uncle “Ukraine Is Heroically Resisting Aggression” will also want to learn all about the horrific mass murder of anti-Maidan counter-protestors in Odessa in 2014 that is VERY well known in Russia and Ukraine and almost completely unknown in the US.

Norwegian Professor Glenn Dieson has a fine piece explaining “How the Strategy of Fighting to the Last Ukrainian Was Sold to the Public as Morally Righteous..”

Here’s a sample quote from his piece:

For almost three years, NATO countries have boycotted diplomatic contacts with Russia, even as hundreds of thousands of men have died on the battlefield. The decision by diplomats to reject diplomacy is morally repugnant as diplomacy could have reduced the excess of violence, prevented escalation, and even resulted in a path to peace. However, the political-media elites skilfully sold the rejection of diplomacy to the public as evidence of their moral righteousness.

This article will first outline how NATO planned for a long war to exhaust Russia and knock it out from the ranks of great powers. Second, this article will demonstrate how the political-media elites communicated that diplomacy is treasonous and war is virtuous.

This is just scratching the surface but essentially for those who been exclusively following US & UK media, everything they know about Ukraine is wrong.

Enjoy those awkward conversations around the table!

What Does Ukraine Look Like Post War If Russia Imposes The Peace?

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On November 22, 2024

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If you want to demilitarize a country you can do it by treaty, or you can do it by fact. Germany was demilitarized after WWI, but it retained the ability to build a large military and eventually did so.

The Russian view is that Ukraine needs to be demilitarized, de-Nazified and made neutral, it will otherwise remain a threat to them.

The demilitarization strategy is fairly simple: kill or disable everyone who can and will fight. This has been a grinding war, but at almost every stage Russia has had air, drone and artillery supremacy. It has taken great care to disperse attacking troops and to keep its own casualties down.

Casualty ratios are a matter of great dispute, but I cannot imagine that the side with air, drone and artillery superiority is taking the most casualties. I would guess the exchange rate is between 3:1 and 6:1. Once again, we won’t know until some years after the war.

Ukraine’s population is crashing. Pre war it was 42 million, as of 2023 it was probably 28 million and there’s no way it is not even lower now.

So to a large extent Russian tactics support the goal of demilitarization. Even if Russia could do “big arrow”, why do them before the Ukrainian military is ground to dust and Ukraine is demographically exhausted? Win the war, but fail to end Ukraine’s ability and willingness to fight and there’s just going to be another war.

Which is why anything but a neutral Ukraine, genuinely neutral, or a Russian satrapy is also unacceptable. Ukraine wasn’t and isn’t part of NATO but that didn’t keep NATO from using it as a cat’s paw against Russia. If Russia wants a defanged, safe Ukraine on its border, it’s no longer just about staying out of NATO, true Austrian cold war style neutrality will be required.

And the since the neo-Nazis who are influential in the military and government, despite their small numbers, will never not be hostile to Russia, Ukraine has to be be de-Nazified. Out of the military, out of power, and either dead or in prison for a very long time.

Demographics isn’t the only thing which creates capability to fight, of course. The more of Ukraine that Russia takes, the weaker Ukraine will be in the future. What is particularly important is to take the entire coast and landlock the Ukrainian hump, but farther West Russia takes land, the less of a threat Ukraine is to the Russian heartlands.

Smaller population, worse geography, no Nazis anywhere near power, no allies to feed it weapons and help it fortify, and genuinely neutral: these are Russia’s post war goals for Ukraine.

These are maximal goals, and they require a completely defeated Ukraine, likely one that signs an uncoditional surrender. If they can be accomplished with a negotiated surrender, fine, but if Russia is wise it will fight till it gets the terms necessary to defang Ukraine and make it useless as a Western catspaw.

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What Should Now Be Obvious To Everyone About the Ukraine War

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On November 21, 2024

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As I said, day one, Russia was going to win this war if it wanted it enough. Russia’s advance is slow, but it is certain and it is NOT going to be reversed unless the US declares war, which is NOT going to happen. The Ukrainian army is finally nearing collapse, which I’d expect some time next year. The war will last another two years at most, I’d guess.

Peace will be made under the terms Russia wants, or the war will continue. Ukraine is still fighting, but everyone with the least lick of sense knows it is going to lose. Ukraine will have to accept the terms imposed on it, because if it doesn’t Russia will just keep going.

Trump’s peace plan (ostensibly) as floated in the WSJ was essentially a frozen conflict with a twenty year guarantee of not joining NATO. That’s not going to fly. Ukraine will be a demilitarized neutral state at best, if it won’t surrender it’ll be defeated and have a government imposed on it. The Russians will not cut any sort of deal with the West which requires the West to “keep” the deal. They believe that the West is “agreement incapable”, that is, that it will not obey any deals it signs if it doesn’t want to (as it didn’t obey the Minsk agreement) so no peace treaty which requires western enforcement or has Western troops in any part of Ukraine will be acceptable.

Russia has done just fine out of all this. Its people are happy and optimistic, its economy is booming and it’s now the 4th largest economy on PPP GDP terms and probably third in realistic terms: it has tons of resources, food, tech and a decent amount of industry, and it will handle climate change better than most nations. It is locked into the Chinese orbit as a junior partner, but China doesn’t spew contempt at Russia 24/7 the way the West does and has for my entire lifetime, nor slam it with repeated sanctions. (The sanctions started way before the war, and were mostly justified on the basis of “Russia shouldn’t run its own internal affairs the way it chooses. And the poor, poor oligarchs.”)

Again, this was always the most likely outcome and everyone who thought otherwise refused to look at the very simple differences in size, population, resources and industry between the two nations.

As for Ukraine, the best deal they could have gotten was offered by the Russians near the start of the war, but they believed NATO and the US and Boris Johnson and thought they could win. The result is going to be a much weaker and poorer Ukraine, probably with half the pre-war population.

Meanwhile sanctions, instead of harming Russia, boomeranged and hurt Europe far more than Russia, and have contributed to Europe’s ongoing de-industrialization.

Nobody in power the West or Ukraine has anything to be proud of in how they handled this. Even the depraved argument of “let’s fight to the last Ukrainian and weaken Russia” hasn’t worked, instead Russia is stronger than it has been since the fall of the USSR.

*Golf clap*

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Postliberalism, Liberal Apogee, Routine Elite Failure and Then?

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On October 23, 2024

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I was alerted to Nathan Pinkoski’s “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” by N.S. Lyons’ response “The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism,” and enjoyed both tremendously.

Pinkosi’s piece is an excellent short history of the public-private partnership currently aiming for absolute global cultural control via the weaponization of finance that he calls postliberalism.

I thought it would be fun to excerpt all the times Antony Blinken’s name appears in the piece.

First mention:

When Bill Clinton took office, he continued the pursuit of openness. In 1993, he ratified NAFTA and relaxed the ban on homosexuals in the military. However, he made it clear that the old liberalism was not enough. Eager to extend the reach of democracy and confront foreign enemies who stood in its way, his administration developed new tools to advance America’s global power. In September, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake outlined a new paradigm. His speech, “From Containment to Enlargement,” bespeaks a political revolution. It provided the blueprint not only for the foreign policy agenda of nearly every U.S. president since then, but for the convictions of every right-thinking person. Lake’s speechwriter was Anthony (sic) Blinken.

Second mention:

After Biden was sworn in as president, his administration shelved a plan to overhaul sanctions policy. A consensus held that if the kinks of the past could be worked out, then the Americans and Europeans had all the weapons in place to launch a devastating financial first strike against their preferred targets. Planning began in the first year of the new administration, with Secretary Blinken’s State Department taking the lead. So by February 2022, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine faltered, the arrangements were already in place. The strategic possibilities seemed limitless. Russia could be brought to its knees; Putin would follow in the ignominious footsteps of ­Milosevic and Gaddafi.

The execution of the strike was dazzling. The scale, especially the involvement of SWIFT and the targeting of Russia’s central bank, caught the Kremlin by surprise. It was ­Barbarossa for the twenty-­first century. Yet the first strike did not yield the promised results. Nor did the second, third, or fourth. Putin’s approval ratings soared, Russia’s industrial output increased, and its military continues to grind away at the Ukrainian army. Despite implementing nearly 6,000 sanctions in two-plus years, the euphoria of spring 2022 (let alone that of the holiday parties of 2011) is long gone. Although American policymakers have said again and again that they have mobilized a global coalition against Russia that has left the country isolated, that is not the case. The map of the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia closely resembles the map of the countries that have legalized same-sex marriage. Economic warfare against Russia has exposed the limits of the global American empire.

Lyons applauds Pinkoski’s essay but rejects the notion that this is a revolution against liberalism — instead, it is its apogee.

Sadly, he doesn’t mention Blinken, but he does elaborate on the frightening ambition of this movement:

The managerial ideal is the perfect frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, liberalism requires perfect control.

This ideal is, of course, the very essence of totalitarianism. Yet if we wonder why the distinction between public and private has everywhere collapsed into “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics,” this is the most fundamental reason why. Perhaps, for that matter, this is also why the U.S. and EU now habitually sponsor LGBT groups in Hungary or India, and finance human-trafficking “human rights” NGOs in Central America and the Mediterranean: because managerialism’s blind crusade to crush any competing spheres of social power has gone global.

In response, a comforting tonic from The Archdruid, John Michael Greer at Ecosophia, whose reader “Dave” asks him:

I’ve noticed a growing and extremely worrying trend of the “elites” of politics and entertainment pursuing reckless and (to me) clearly wrong courses of actions that blow up in their faces, and then instead of honestly looking at the situation they’ve had a large hand in creating and doing a mea culpa, either doubling down and getting mad at regular people when they’re less keen to do what the elites tell them, or trying something else without ever really honestly accounting for their mistakes. The actions remind me of signs of elite collapse that this blog has talked about for years now and it’s very surreal and worrying to see happening in real time. What is going on and why can’t the “elites”, the people with access to more data and resources and advisers than anyone else, seem to realize what’s going wrong? Do they not care or are their actions part of a larger plan, not to sound conspiratorial?

Greer’s response was just what I needed to hear:

Dave, I don’t think that it’s any kind of plan. Quite the contrary, this is normal elite failure, the thing that comes right before an elite replacement crisis. Just as the capitalist elite of the 1920s crashed and burned, and was replaced by a managerial elite in the 1930s and 1940s, the managerial elite of the 2010s is crashing and burning, and will be replaced by an entrepreneurial elite in the 2020s and 2030s. The entitled cluelessness of a class that has remained in power too long is a familiar thing; comparisons to French aristocrats just before the French Revolution also come to mind.

Although, honestly if this means that Elon Musk and company are going to win what Chris Hedges calls “The Choice Between Corporate and Oligarchic Power”…eek!

Kamala Harris, anointed by the richest Democratic Party donors without receiving a single primary vote, is the face of corporate power. Donald Trump is the buffoonish mascot for the oligarchs. This is the split within the ruling class. It is a civil war within capitalism played out on the political stage. The public is little more than a prop in an election where neither party will advance their interests or protect their rights.

And what do the oligarchs want?

Warlord capitalism seeks the total eradication of all impediments to the accumulation of profits including regulations, laws and taxes. It makes its money by charging rent, by erecting toll booths to every service we need to survive and collecting exorbitant fees.

Trump’s cohort of Silicon Valley backers, led by Elon Musk, were what The New York Times writes, “finished with Democrats, regulators, stability, all of it. They were opting instead for the freewheeling, fortune-generating chaos that they knew from the startup world.” They planned to “plant devices in people’s brains, replace national currencies with unregulated digital tokens, [and] replace generals with artificial intelligence systems.”

As much as I eagerly anticipate the long-overdue fall of our current elite, I truly dread what’s coming up in their wake.

A Rare Balanced Update On The Russo-Ukrainian War

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On October 20, 2024

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As one commenter noted, “Never thought I’d live in a world where I would be hyped for the Austrian army dropping a new video.”

You can watch it here, as I do not know how to embed it in Word Press.

By the way, if you want to understand Putin, you read Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, not Mein Kampf to suggest otherwise is an abdication of being intelligent.

Nota bene: Crime and Punishment is the best novel ever written. Just saying.

Nota bene duo: the Ukrainian drone attack at 5:05 on the Russian soldiers is terrifying.

Germany Honors Biden For Destroying Nordstream & Their Economy

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On October 19, 2024

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I cannot believe this is happening:

Germany honored U.S. President Joe Biden for his contribution to trans-Atlantic relations on Friday, ahead of his meetings with European allies on Russia’s war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East.

TIME Magazine: Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms

Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms

The sheer delight the pathetic “Traffic Light” coalition government takes in abasing itself before the US hegemon is pornographic in its shameless indecency. Especially the same week that the Danes reported this:

Just days before the Nord Stream gas pipeline attack in September 2022, warships belonging to the U.S. Navy were on the scene and ordered nearby officials to keep away.

That is according to John Anker Nielsen, who is harbour master at Christiansø, the easternmost part of Denmark in the Baltic Sea, northeast of the island of Bornholm and close to the sites of the Nord Stream explosions.

Map showing the route of Nord Stream 1 and 2 in the southern Baltic Sea and location of the leaks. AWZ=Exclusive Economic Zone
Map: AFP / Nadine EHRENBERG, adapted

Nielsen late last month told a reporter at Politiken, a major Danish daily, that he went out with a rescue team four or five days before the blast to check on nearby ships with switched-off radios, suspecting there might have been an accident, only to find U.S. warships, whose staff ordered the team to turn back immediately.

Never forget Biden threatened Nordstream:

Biden: If Russia invades uh that means tanks or troops crossing the uh the border of Ukraine again then uh there will be uh we there will be no longer a Nordstream 2. We will bring an end to it.
Reporter: What? How would you how will you do that exactly since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?

Biden: We will. I promise you we’ll be able to do it.

and Nuland did it too. This video is still up on the State Department’s official Facebook page because they’re proud of it:

“If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

And Never forget what Nuland said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on January 26, 2023:

“I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you [Ted Cruz] like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Blinken celebrated it as an economic opportunity:

“…ultimately this is also a tremendous opportunity.  It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.  That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come…”

And then there was this from Anne “It’s Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory” Applebaum’s husband who’s a Polish official:

Former Polish FM thanks US for damaging Nord Stream pipeline

The consequences of this have been the deindustrialization of Germany:

German industry increasingly struggles to compete on the world stage. Particularly hard hit are its mighty chemical and heavy industry sectors, which are now in rapid decline. One of the main drivers is policies that have made energy costs skyrocket, and there Germany serves as a canary in the coal mine for other leading industrial nations.

It’s kind of grimly amusing that Forbes’ use of the euphemism “policies that have made energy costs skyrocket” rather than say “self-defeating sanctions on cheap Russian gas combined with the biggest act of industrial sabotage in modern history” and it also doesn’t mention that it’s been America’s policies that have deindustrialized Germany.

It’s also so humiliating as an American that the neo-conservative cabal of psychopathic nitwits has been in sole control of US foreign policy since the Clinton administration and now they have a lock on US corporate media as well.

The above mentioned Anne Applebaum provided the perfect example of their delusion and idiocy with her September, 2022 prediction that Ukrainian victories in Kharkov would bring down Putin.

But that brings me back to Germany’s pathetic ruling coalition. This is how well they’ve done in recent state elections:

In the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, the far-right AfD received more than double as many votes as the three parties which make up the federal coalition government — the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), environmentalist Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) — combined. These parties’ results are each in the single digits. The Greens in Thuringia and the FDP in both states even failed to meet the 5% threshold to be represented in the state parliaments.

And on the left:

A newly established populist party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), managed to score votes in the two-digit range in their very first election.

The German people are chomping at the bit to vote out the gang of traitors who have allowed the US to annihilate their economy.

Although in fairness, they also gave the last US President who walloped the Germany economy the same award:

“Biden received the highest class of Germany’s Order of Merit, which was also bestowed on former U.S. President George H.W. Bush for his support of German reunification.”

Kind of fitting that the era of American unipolarity is framed this way. Bush at the beginning. Biden at the end. The Germans footing the bill for American foreign policy.

 

 

 

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