What Should Now Be Obvious To Everyone About the Ukraine War

I am not sure sure about the US and declaring war, although first, they’ll Send In The Poles (and Czechs, Romanians, etc.) before the Germans, Brits and other Real Europeans are ordered to line up, and if necessary, Americans.

This will not be greeted with hosannas by any of the victims, but nobody will ask their opinion. You think a farmer cares what the chickens he sends to the slaughterhouse think?

And since the various neonazi paramilitaries supporting the Kiev regime gladly accept foreign volunteers, and since the Kiev regime is desperately short of warm live bodies, I advise Tallifer to volunteer his services.

Nice summary, Ian.

The Russians seem to think, which is plausible, that they are fighting NATO. NATO may not stop fighting when the Ukraine is destroyed in two years. In that case the war may continue much longer.

Possibly NATO will be destroyed.

@Tallifer

Where are you when Ukraine needs you? If you’re so worried about ‘Russian imperialism’, back up your rhetoric and offer up your own meat to man the trenches and slow the Russian army down by a whole day as they have to take the time to glide bomb your squad.

I won’t be holding my breath.

I’m with Feral Finster and Soredemos. Put your meat where your mouth is, Tallifer.

I’m not sure I would trust the Levada Center numbers completely. I recall them having a decent reputation, but: a) there’s a significant discontinuity in their data that looks like it corresponds with the start of the war and b) their method of collection is in-person interview in the home. Not sure that’s the best mode given the context.

I would like to know what the thinking is for the assessment that Russia is going to weather global warming better than most nations. As I understand it – superficially, to be sure – it’s a pretty heavily petro-economy with a significant sideline in war toys.

The notion that Putin’s Russia was a hollow, fragile state, which could be shattered or destabilized by sustained warfare against “NATO trained and equipped” Ukrainian forces while deprived of Western financial and technology flows, was the central self-deception and miscalculation. Anyone could do the comparative arithmetic on Russian and Ukrainian population and military resources, but such a calculation would have been an oversimplification and irrelevant in 2022. Russia’s vast natural resources were not an obstacle if Putin’s regime could be broken; they were a valuable prize if the Russian Federation could be shattered.

That cynical geopolitics of smash and grab did indeed backfire, because the assessments of Russia’s economic and financial position as well as its military capability were on balance ill-conceived. In part, I suspect that rabid Russophobia among key political figures both motivated the aggressive behavior and distorted the assessments.

For American and Western publics, the issue is not — ought not be that political elites cannot count. The count was not the mistake. The problem, I think, is the aggression. And, the manipulative propaganda that shrouds the aggression and the incompetence. The aggression, incompetence and the propaganda-induced ignorance about what is going on, what has been going on for decades, is of a piece.

The propaganda is central to how Western political institutions produce these horrific and destructive wars. It is important to understand that the production of the propaganda is a core task for political elites. They don’t sit around thinking realistically about what they want to accomplish and how to do it, and then as an after thought come up with a cover story. They plot and plan control of the narrative. The persuasive lie is job 1. Leading figures in this political ecosystem, underpinned as it is by career opportunities and finance provided from the operations of the military-industrial complex and the vast “intelligence and defense community”, come to prominence by demonstrating an ability to persuasively narrate the narrative and believe it. Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, the Kagans including Victoria Nuland, James Clapper, Masha Gessen, John Brennan, Tom Friedman as well as any number of more nearly anonymous functionaries in the Media, the “think tanks”, the State Department, the CIA, the Atlantic Council, firms like Crowd Strike, et cetera are engaged as “knowledge workers” in the production of a coordinating consensus composed in large part of persuasive memes. They propagate this consensus (hence “propaganda”) and policy flows from it. Countless thousands know their missions because of the meaningful narrative fog that clothes and disguises and insulates policy from critical assessment.

It is definitely not one thing only, a monolith, this narrative consensus. It has layers, versions, facets — some highly simplified and dramatized for general consumption audiences and most electeds. I assume most of us recognize the tale of plucky, wronged Ukraine with whom all good, right-thinkers must “stand” putting an appropriate flag on their Instagram. Several commenters here subscribe to some variation, not just Tallifer. My point is not to ridicule the sentiments that attract people to such narratives. For the most part, I think those sentiments are admirable and positive. The narratives mobilize those good sentiments as well as help people make sense of the news and of political controversy. I am trying to focus attention on the common origin of both policy and narrative in the career-making of professional propagandists dependent economically on an enveloping institutional ecosystem of military contractors and state institutions of secrecy and surveillance. My point is that producing the propaganda necessary to mobilize support for policy distorts the thinking and assessments necessary to support policy formation itself. Propaganda as a core competence of important political actors and functionaries makes them incompetent as policy makers.

Why is the U.S. regarded by the Russians as agreement-incapable? The dedication to the concept of a rules-based international order, of course. The only acceptable “agreement” is to follow the rules and negotiations are superfluous to compliance. The “rules-based international order” is a narrative construction. The propaganda has taken over.

The Ukraine War has been fought in a global mind space, with competing narratives, recklessly careless about assessing both facts and moral claims. Action based on accurate calculation is precluded when the priority is manipulative propaganda to dominate public opinion and divert public opinion’s best impulses and instincts. I am aware that honest realism can get bogged down with complexity and the paralysis of analysis. But, this is “moral clarity” offered as fish bait.

I am not convinced that realistically Russia has before it opportunities to impose a military settlement on Ukraine even after Ukraine’s army ceases to function well enough to defend against Russian territorial advances, because it is not clear to me that Russia has sufficient resources to occupy or reconstruct the whole of Ukraine. The propaganda war probably would not permit a full occupation even if Russia had sufficient troops and economic power. Ukraine as a failed, rump state might not be able to produce leaders able to negotiate a settlement. Some kind of revolution in European attitudes is what Russia appears to me to need to truly win and I do not see how they could bring that about.

Russia was the eighth country by real GDP terms in 2022, according to UN, about half of Japan. It looks rather impossible that they should double it in two years.

It is a measure of how disadvantaged Russia was in the so-called middle income trap. And a reminder of why counting might have made Russia look weak, then. Sanctions backfired because they removed handicaps.

Turnip brain Biden, or whomever teleoperates his mannequin, approved US/UK missile strike in side Russia. A Russia declared Red Line. “Ah they are bluffing”
Nope. A new hyper sonic MIRV missile (with no warheads) descends on a missile factory in Dnipro. 6 reentry vehicles each spawn 6 more vehicles which descend at more than mach 5. the vids are terrifying.

There is no defense to this, and this missile has range to hit all of Europe. Will a sense of reality penetrate the dense skulls of the US government (whoever that might be, it aint Biden)?

Agree with everything you have said there Ian.

On Ukraine you have been far superior in your analysis versus literally everything I have read in the legacy media and those so-called military experts.