Short Take: the NATO Incursion into the Kursk Oblast

“Sovereign neutrality versus suzerainty? I know what I would have chosen.”
Alas! Ian doesn’t get to choose and neither do me or you.

The fascinating thing is that all the Russia haters are laughing and dancing about the Kursk incursion. Such stupidity!

These are also the same people who have believed that Putin has been on the edge of imminent death or imminent overthrow, and that the Russian army would break and run away any minute, so I guess I can’t be all that surprised…

I guess we stand on the precipice of Schrodinger’s War… All the propaganda is about to resolve from a cloud of mutual impossibilities into a single hard reality…

bloodlust

it is a temptation, an infectious agent, a contagion

war in rational hands is an extension of policy by other means

and then it is not. it becomes its own cause.

Putin launched the special military operation in desperation. his regime was losing the peace, bit by bit. it had lost the struggle for influence in Ukraine, for a political society inside Ukraine that could respect and live peacefully with its Russian heritage, its Russian-speaking citizens and which could be friendly and cooperative toward Russia

Ukraine was traumatized by the events of the 1930s and 1940s — some of the most severe stress any political society has ever experienced. it was also culturally and linguistically fractured. the west chose to exacerbate the divisions and inflame resentments and conflict, as a means of prying Ukraine away from Russia. what was happening in Ukraine through two color revolutions was happening throughout eastern Europe, with the EU and NATO expansions. some of it was silly, like denying Russians the pleasures of Lithuanian cheese. but, it was unmistakably hostile even if it was moving slowly, inexorably eastward.

is there a future where the Russian Federation, by dint of military means, imposes a peace on Ukraine, on Europe?

it is hard to imagine anything possible which does not amount to a prolonged period of ruin for a large part of the territory of Ukraine. Russia does not have the military resources to occupy the whole, as far as I can see. I sincerely doubt (and hope) that Russia has not the stomach to reduce historic Kiev or Odessa to the state of the former Bahkmut.

I also think the Ukraine War is unlikely to remain contained, given the fearsome conflicts brewing among Israel and Iran and Syria

The incursion already has achieved exactly what it was intended to achieve, which is to shift the narrative from Ukrainian defeat to Russian incompetence, all we need is one more aid package, one small NATO expeditionary force, one no-fly-zone and Victory Will Be Ours!

Doesn’t mean I like it, but them’s the facts.

@Tallifer

The ‘dribs and drabs’ have been to the tune of a hundred billion dollars worth. NATO has emptied its cupboards for Ukraine. The full weight of Western economies has already been devoted to Ukraine. Those economies are simply atrophied and incapable.

I’m of the belief that the best result would be a reconstitution of something like the old USSR. I feared once the USSR broke up there would be war (witnessed what happened after WWI in Eastern Europe among the newly-created countries of Yugoslavia; Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and their neighbors), as the leaders of the new republics would (a US Civil War term) “wave the bloody shirt” about past alleged mis-deeds to justify their rule rather than seek constructive forward-looking solutions. As long as everyone was under the same roof, there’d be no war.

To me, Gorbachev’s idea of a mixed capitalist-socialist economy, making the USSR something akin to a big Scandinavian social democracy, was the best solution. But I think our betters in the West would have had anything than yet another social democracy success story; it had to be ‘full bore capitalism, baby!!” or bust. And they didn’t really care how “democratic” these countries ended up. I remember that they first welcomed Putin’s “managed democracy”, as the NYT called it.

(And no, while the old USSR wasn’t perfect in regards to nationalities, it did a far better job than most. Stain was Georgian, Khrushchev was Ukrainian, etc.; it did encompass diversity in its leadership). Yes, Russian would have to be learned to be the official language, but everyone in China likewise has to learn Mandarin as having a common tongue is a useful thing).

it had lost the struggle for influence in Ukraine

Do you know any Russians, Ukrainians or Belorussians personally? I do. I even met the wife and mother of three Ukrainian soldiers. None of them see this as being a “Russians, Ukrainians or Belorussians” thing. They put all of the blame on Putin. They don’t even consider NATO or nazis.

I hear about de-russification inside the Baltic states. What the hell did Russia ever do to them? (well actually we know but those folks have gotta all be dead by now) Why is the west more popular than the east?

Assuming that Russia really is a desperately righteous bulwark against the slow grinding progress of neoliberal NATO, why did they lose the propaganda war? It can’t only be that Tom Cruise, Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg are more popular than Alexander Ovechkin, Roman Abramovich, and shirtless manly Putin? We must know what else is at play here.

If it gets to the point of Russia trying to take Kiev again, they won’t need to do it by turning the city to rubble. They will besiege it. A major city surrounded runs out of supplies rather fast. Even if everyone evacuates before they get there and it’s just the military still in position, it won’t take that long before the military defenders run out of both ammunition and food. That’s why typically when the Russians have a town surrounded on three sides and are threatening to cut it off, the Ukrainians retreat from it.

But in reality I think the only way Russia gets to the point of besieging Kiev is if the Ukrainian military is already shattered to the “time for unconditional surrender” level. Which, I mean, that stage is beginning to come into view.

As to the current attack on the Kursk region . . . well, in one sense I don’t see anything WRONG with it. Russia invaded Ukraine, for strong reasons but they did. Ukraine invading Russia back is fair enough, it’s a bit much for the Russians to get all shirty about it. And at a tactical level I have to hand it to them–there was evidence they were gathering troops in that area for a while, and yet the Russians don’t seem to have expected what they actually did with them. Russian defenders were sparse and Ukraine has taken full advantage.

But . . . now what? Yeah, strategically I don’t see the point. Russian defenders are arriving, and the area is starting to look like just another place for the Ukrainian armed forces to take casualties. They’ve got these odd little fingers of territory grabbed by fast-moving groups, which look kind of overextended to me. The whole thing seems like biting off more than you can chew.

It seems pretty likely to be just one more example of grandstanding for NATO to get more funding and weapons. Mind you, people mock that, but what else is Ukraine supposed to do? They have no money of their own and little weapons production (or, really, production of any sort). They need them to fight the war, which means they need to get them from NATO, which means they need to dance for the NATO apparatchiks. It’s just Ukraine’s misfortune that apparently the NATO paymasters are a bunch of superficial ignoramuses with short attention spans whose backing is attracted by grandstand moves rather than sound tactics. I might actually argue that Zelensky, in persistently ordering this kind of militarily stupid but flashy move, is actually smarter than his generals, in that he understands the politics of continuing to gain NATO funding, where the generals only see the military side.

Not that there’s anything anyone in Ukraine can really do at this point to avoid the inevitable. The weight of metal is too great, losses are happening faster than recruitment . . . plus, with lower attrition levels, more Russian troops are surviving to become experienced, whereas an awful lot of Ukrainian troops who would have been experienced by now, are dead.

One thing in the medium term–the relationship between Russia and China will need a serious overhaul, as will Russia’s economy. Because, China isn’t going to be buying oil and natural gas forever. They’re building solar panels like they’re coming into style, half their cars sold this year will be electric, by three years from now it will be the vast majority. The share of energy used in China that comes from fossil fuels will be shrinking, slowly at first, then faster and faster. Now, their first priority will be displacing oil they have to bring in by tanker that the US (or meltdowns in the Middle East) could interfere with, so Russia’s oil will be pretty much the last oil China dumps. That gives Russia a bit of time to adjust. And the sanctions will probably turn out to be useful, since they forced Russia into some import substitution, which will make them a little less vulnerable to the loss of their oil revenues. But that adjustment will have to be made, and it will probably be difficult.

On the diplomatic side I expect Russia and China will still be friendly without that specific arrangement, but their style of collaboration will have to shift.

As a side note, we in Canada are actually much more vulnerable to this problem. The Alberta government, in theory at least, wants to sell tar sands oil to the Chinese (it really goes to US refineries), and the BC government wants to sell liquid natural gas to the Chinese. Tar sands oil is some of the most expensive and dirtiest in the world, LNG is far more expensive than natural gas from Russia by pipeline. Where Russia is some of the last supply China will let go of, Canada is the first.

There may still be too much Jewish-Zionist influence on Putin and Russia. Putin’s relationship with Lev Leviev is highly suspect and not a good look at all. I know he needs to play politics – and Putin is an extraordinary statesman – but it’s interesting to note that he has only personally made a few definitive statements on the horrors of Gaza, and he has never used the word ‘genocide.’

This is important from a legal standpoint, even given that anyone with half a conscience knows that whatever words one chooses to use – genocide, deliberate wholesale slaughter of the majority of the population including women and children – anyone paying even a degree of attention to what Israel and the majority of the ‘international Jewish community’ are supporting knows how abhorrent and inhumane this Israeli slaughter is.

Putin needs to step up and call this a genocide and call for the international community to do to Israel what was done to Germany. It may not be ‘that simple’ but it’s the only humane choice.

Putin’s very close relationship with Chabad-Lubavitch may be necessary politically, but once the bonds are formed it’s that much harder to call out their abundantly self-interested behavior that often comes at the expense of all the other groups making up the polity.

I understand that this is playing into an old canard about ‘the Jews’ but I am not personally using that language. It is in fact Chabad and most Zionist orgs that play into all the old canards. And these groups are very, very powerful.

https://archive.ph/dHyvB#selection-1029.0-1033.382

https://archive.ph/r4Dar#selection-1079.1-1083.353

https://archive.ph/FvTtP#selection-659.0-667.117

“On concluding his visit, the FJC President asked to be invited once again, explaining that he was deeply impressed by the students and faculty and wished to further elaborate on the dedication and commitment of USSR Jews to the preservation of Judaism during the horrific years of the Communist regime when the Jewish religion was declared illegal.

https://archive.ph/Fdn2Y#selection-3231.0-3231.348

As Putin himself made clear on his visit to Moscow’s ‘Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center’ back in 2016, the horrific years of the Communist regime were ushered in largely by Jews in Russia (who made up a miniscule percentage of the overall population):

“I thought about something just now: The decision to nationalize this library was made by the first Soviet government, whose composition was 80-85 percent Jewish,” Putin said June 13 during a visit to Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center.”

Interestingly, a big hullabaloo was made about books which were always ‘claimed’ by Chabad anyway.

https://archive.ph/m1jR5#selection-1793.1-1784.9

You have to ‘have’ the history in order to keep rewriting it. This is true for all power groups.

I’m reminded now of Emma Goldman’s unpleasant experience with Lenin in Russia.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1920s/disillusionment/ch05.htm

@Sean Paul Kelly,

What did you see in Dan Kelly’s post that struck you as bordering on hateful/anti-semitic? I thought he took care to make the (important) distinction between Judaism and Zionism. One that cannot be stressed enough as pushers of the former conflate it with the latter to shield the former from legitimate criticism.

I cannot make sense of Putin’s refusal to use the word “genocide” to describe what is happening in Gaza. Whatever nuanced political and legal entanglements he may think warrant biting his tongue, surely they end up shielding the West’s critical weakness as the rest of the world sees this naked barbarity for what it is and wants no part of it.

@Sean Paul Kelley

Thank you for engaging this all-important subject.

I also have Jewish friends. And in-laws. And who knows, if I were to look into it I may have “Jewish blood’ as we have unknown Hungarian ‘mutt’ ancestry, for lack of a better term.

I am only able to tall about this to any serious degree with one Jewish friend. He would be considered a ‘self-hating’ Jew and he’s told me how hard it is to talk about this within his own community. He, like many Jews, questions specifics of the holocaust including the numbers (Norman Finkelstein said his mother sarcastically wondered how there were so many Jews around if Hitler killed most of them). Gilad Atzmon, Jeffrey Blankfort, and Alan Sabrosky – among many, many other Jews – have a lot to say about ‘so-called Zionist groups’ but they of course are all roundly dismissed as ‘anti-semites’ (I think that term should go away – it’s a loaded identity label that only serves to character assassinate a person) or ‘self-hating Jews.’

Of course, none of this is a denial of the horrors of the Nazi regime. At all.

But that seems hard for most to understand. Which once again just goes to show the power of propaganda and the importance of narrative control. This is why so much time, money and resources are put towards ‘educating’ people about Israel. And it works. So, for example, you stated quite affirmatively and without hesitation that

“the Israeli govenment, born out of the most horrifying oppression and eradication of any group of people in the 20th century”

So, ‘the most horrifying oppression and eradication of any group of people in the 20th century’ is a loaded phrase. My saying that does not deny the horrors inflicted upon Jews by the Nazi regime. But neither you nor the Jewish establishment gets to make that determination. and obviously there are other voices who disagree about specifics and their voices should be heard.

Does any group that has experienced the deliberately inflicted horrors of apartheid and genocide really care that some other group may have experienced more.

If you were Jewish and someone – say a Palestinian – began telling you about the nakba would you nod and then immediately launch into the horrors inflicted on the Jews during WWII? Would you do that to any group that tried to tell their story? Immediately downplay it by bringing up the far greater horrors inflicted on ‘the Jews?’ The ones you go to jail for in many countries if you dare to not accept wholesale the standardized, commodified version of events you’re presented with?

In what used to be ‘free societies’ all over the world you can debate past atrocities, genocides, apartheids. You can do it in university, you can do it after hours at the bar. This is academic debate. This is free speech. But if you do this as regards the holocaust and the state of Israel, you go to jail.

What does that tell you? What do both your intellect and your sensate-intuitive faculties tell you about this strange, utterly unique state of affairs?

Returning to your quote, the simple phrase ‘born out of’ is entirely false. The plans for an exclusively Jewish state in historic Palestine pre-date WWII by decades. If you deconstruct, you find the antecedents a century back and more, and of course much of it is contained in the voluminous ‘Judaic canon’ itself.

So that is a big, big error that gives the reader a false idea about both the all-important history of the region and the Jewish Zionist project for Palestine itself.

“now oppresses the very people it lives next door to”

I mean, ‘it lives next door to’ is fascinating verbiage, Israel came into existence by slaughtering upwards of a million Palestinians that we know about and pushing the rest out. It was founded on slaughter and violent expulsion. It is not right to deny this, and I get that bad feeling you talk about when you do. Frankly, it’s repulsive and disgusting to me. That’s how I feel reading that.

How did you feel writing it? I’ve been quite open about my feelings here so far,

I don’t like the feeling I get when I write about where the evidence clearly leads. I live in NJ, which has one of the largest Jewish populations in the country. I grew up in North Jersey – twenty minutes from lower Manhattan – and I walk the boards in AC, near where I live now, all the time. I don’t wall around angry at ‘the Jews’ and I don’t have unkind thoughts when I pass someone in ‘Jewish garb.’

This is simply where the evidence leads.

With all due respect, you didn’t address the substantive points of my comment. At all. The bottom line as regards Vladimir Putin specifically is that there is less than a degree of separation between he and Menachem Mendel Schneerson’s Chabad-Lubavitch.

You are a learned historian and scholar and someone who Ian Welsh has presented to me as one of the smartest people he knows. Are you familiar with Schneerson and Chabad-Lubavitch? Are you familiar with the work of Grant Smith and IRMEP, who I have posted here regularly of late, and who absolutely no one comments on? It’s just ignored.

I understand that these aren’t your specialties, but then they aren’t mine either. I’m just a college dropout. A somewhat intelligent layperson, if you will.

I have some very real problems with your portrayal of so-called Zionists groups.

I have a real problem when a food co-op based in Oregon, United States – made up of many people, including many Jews, decides to divest/boycott/make a statement condemning Israeli apartheid and genocide, and every ‘so-called Zionist group’ in your words condemns them and threatens their own boycott and legal action against said co-op.. That is every Jewish group – numbering twelve in the specific recent example I’m giving – except Jewish Voice for Peace. It includes so-called ‘liberal’ Jewish group J-Street.

This is just one example. There are countless others that follow the same general trend.

As for the Israeli people…

Is it the ‘Israeli people’ or the “Jewish people?’ Because Israel itself calls itself ‘The Jewish State’ and its soldiers wear uniforms and use weapons that have Jewish religious symbols on them.

I will repeat that:

The self-declared Jewish state of Israel is currently slaughtering the inhabitants of Palestine and continuing to steal their land and resources both for themselves and to sell to the highest international bidders – who are almost entirely Jewish – using soldiers who wear uniforms and use weapons with Jewish religious symbols on them.

Over ninety percent of the Israeli public across the political spectrum not only approve of the Israeli slaughter…they want them to continue and ‘take back’ more land.

true evil doers, such as the Israeli government under Netanyahu

The Israeli government only ‘does evil’ under בִּנְיָמִין נְתַנְיָהוּ?

Did you, by chance, see the Gideon Levy video clip I posted the other day in which he destroys that silly premise in less than a minute? Please do watch it, Sean, It’s very important to gain a larger understanding of the situation.

=======================================

The United States is owned and occupied by Israel. Perod, My father used to have a saying “You’d have to be deaf, dumb, blind and stupid not to see (such an obvious truth).” Meaning a person would have to be lacking all sensory organs -as well as a brain itself – in order not to see this. This isn’t a polite saying these days, but it speaks volumes.

Simply consider that no US president – nor Vladimir Putin, nor Xi Jinping for that matter – nobody could go into the Israeli Knesset and dictate foreign policy the way Herzog, Netanyahu multiple times, and other Israeli pols have come into US political chambers and dictated foreign policy in their interest.

And no, it’s not because that’s just what the Pentagon wants, as Noam Chomsky, among many others, led his acolytes to believe. If that were the case, there’d be no need for the gargantuan amount of time. money and resources Jewish groups spend on inserting themselves inside the political process to benefit Israel. If the vaunted US imperial superpower wants it -and if Uncle Sam gets what he wants via both hard and soft power, as Chomsky et al show repeatedly, and largely correctly – then why the need for any lobbying at all? It’s what the US deep state wants anyway, right?

The need for all the lobbying and propaganda, the throwing of gargantuan, obscene sums of money around to defeat any political candidate who dares to question Israel in any way, shape or form – and this oppressive browbeating extending all the way ‘down’ to what should be intimate, local areas making their own decisions, such as food cooperatives…

This doesn’t even mention the legal actions, the character assassinations. I could go on and on and on and on….

The need for all this is precisely because the interests of Israel and the US do not in fact line up as neatly as ‘the lobby’ would have everyone believe. That’s the point of the lobbying, of the ADL’s infiltration of the FBI. That’s why Israel and its agents inside the US did and continue to do everything in their power to avoid FARA – among many other things that all other nations – at least on paper – have to abide by. Exceptions are made, but Israel and its groups operating inside the US don’t even have to pretend. They write every exception for themselves. They demand it.

Please understand, I am anything but a ‘hard’ nationalist. I believe patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, I do not fly a flag, and I do not ‘fit’ in here, nor do I care to. I have always felt ‘other’ to some degree – a feeling that many Jewish groups play up as a part of being Jewish. ‘A Jew stands outside the nation he is a part of even when he is amongst it’ is a not uncommon phrase uttered in various fashion by many Jewish leaders across the political/ideological spectrum.

This is how obvious the Israeli occupation of the United States is. It stands out even to a softie, largely non-traditionalist and non-nationalist (to any serious degree) such as myself.

Sean, do you believe in ‘Holocaust Denial’ laws that punish people up to and including jail time for even daring to questioning the established narrative around WWII? These laws are on the books in many ‘Western’ countries. And in Russia.

If the answer to the above question is yes, then I take it you also believe in denial laws with the same exact penalties for every genocide that every group or ‘people’ has ever experienced? That’s a lot to figure out.

Many, many Jewish leaders and frankly ‘everyday’ Jews would be guilty of Nakba denial and face jail time.

As a man of conscience and certainly imperfect, all I can do is be as sincere and civil and honest in replying to you. So, please do not take this as a personal attack. I do not to take yours as one. But I cannot escape the ill-feeling it gives me and so I must express my feelings, which in the grand scheme of things, as all emotions are, neither right nor wrong, neither good nor bad. They simply are.

I do not take your writing as a personal attack, and I agree with everything you say. I don’t like the feeling it gives me either. But this is where we are. And I equally don’t like the feeling I get when I consider the unbelievable amount of power Israel and its agents possess.

Do you really want Jonathan Greenblatt et al deciding what you can and can’t look into, debate, criticize etc? Because that’s exactly what they’re doing. They are the ones, first and foremost, pushing the speech restrictions in the name of ‘tolerance.’

While they support the Israeli apartheid and genocide.

Are you okay with this?

Thank you again Sean. I hope we can continue this conversation, and I hope others will join.