In January I made some predictions about the “imminent invasion” of Ukraine. Now it’s time to come back to review them, and make some updates.
Prediction 1: No Russian invasion of Ukraine in the foreseeable future
And definitely not in the January-February timeframe that Biden’s media cronies have been hollering about for weeks. The only possible exception is if some Ukronazis start trouble in Donbass (both Moscow and Minsk have stated they won’t tolerate “provocations” there), but I think even that possibility is becoming unlikely now.
Like I mentioned in my previous article (see it here), trouble did happen in Donbass. There were many ceasefire violations (and yes, some of these resulted in deaths) prompting Putin to recognize the independence of the breakaway republics. That is a significant development. The Russians have officially given up on the Minsk agreements. From Reuters:
U.S. authorities have warned Russia not to invade Ukraine and urged both countries to return to a set of agreements designed to end a separatist war by Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.
Oh, now the Minsk agreement matters! I have been saying this for a while (see my article about Sea Breeze in July). But you know who hasn’t been talking about the Minsk agreements? The Western media, including Reuters. Here’s the Google Trends report for “Minsk agreement” among American users.
Isn’t it amazing? The graph speaks for itself. A full year of NATO brinksmanship about Ukraine, and hardly a blip until just now in the last couple weeks. Biden is a dictator who has repeatedly and endlessly spread malicious gossip and hysteria about Russia since the moment he took office. And the corporate media obediently repeated his lies, but not once did they give their audiences the truth. They didn’t even mention the Minsk agreements. But now that Russia has given up on the Minsk agreements, suddenly, it becomes a useful accusation. Then and only then, the media brings it up.
But still, despite all of the hype, still no Russian invasion of Ukraine. From CNN:
“This is Potemkin politics,” a senior [Biden] administration official told reporters on Monday. “President Putin is accelerating the very conflict that he’s created.”
You know, I hadn’t heard the term “Potemkin politics” before, so I looked it up on Wikipedia:
The term comes from stories of a fake portable village built by Grigory Potemkin, former lover of Empress Catherine II, solely to impress the Empress during her journey to Crimea in 1787…
Aleksandr Panchenko, an established specialist on 19th-century Russia, used original correspondence and memoirs to conclude that the Potemkin villages are a myth. He writes: “Based on the above said we must conclude that the myth of ‘Potemkin villages’ is exactly a myth, and not an established fact.” He writes that “Potyomkin indeed decorated existing cities and villages, but made no secret that this was a decoration…
Although “Potemkin village” has come to mean, especially in a political context, any hollow or false construct, physical or figurative, meant to hide an undesirable or potentially damaging situation, it is possible that the phrase cannot be applied accurately to its own original historical inspiration.
The “Potemkin village” was literally fake news, not unlike Biden’s invasion narrative. We suffer from the worst form of projection syndrome. We take our own disinformation tactics and attribute them to those nasty Russians.
Prediction 2: The USA will sanction Russia anyway.
Because of course. But Biden won’t cut Russia off from SWIFT. That was a stupid threat to make and if Russia/China eventually decide to leave SWIFT anyway, America is not economically or politically in a position to do anything to stop it. And unless the EU wants to pay their gas bill with bags of money, they would have to join the new Chinese-Russian banking system too.
By executive order, Biden sanctioned the Donbass republics, forbidding Americans from doing any kind of business in those regions. Anyone who disobeys this rule will also be sanctioned. What counts as an investment? What if I went there and bought a car? What if I bought a sandwich? Would I be sanctioned? I almost want to test this theory. Literally how is Biden not a dictator at this point?
Sanctions against Russia are supposed to be announced tomorrow. Does anyone in Russia even care about Biden’s sanctions anymore? Still, I will be extremely surprised if those sanctions include SWIFT, and for the same reasons I stated already.
Prediction 3: The USA will also sanction Ukraine
Biden has already sanctioned Zelensky’s enemies. He’s even sanctioned sitting members of the Ukrainian parliament, the legislative body of our own “ally.” If Ukraine continues this drift toward Moscow, the Biden regime will probably get increasingly annoyed and desperate, and sanction them more and more, which of course would only incentivize the drift. Maybe Zelensky himself will become an “enemy of democracy” someday and be sanctioned too. Who knows.
This one hinges on the idea that the current Ukrainian regime will not be able to stay in power, and Biden will be equally unable to properly with a regime he likes. Interestingly, things are not looking good for Zelensky himself. Richard Engel from NBC tweeted this:
Also, and I completely missed this when it happened – professional Russophobe/crybaby Julia Ioffe wrote an absurd hit piece about Zelensky a few weeks ago. Ioffe has the independence and critical thinking skills of a potato. When the regime produces a new talking point, Ioffe regurgitates it without question. Apparently, the current talking point is Zelensky bad.
Prediction 4: Russia’s Gazprom will renew their gas transit deal with Ukraine’s Naftogaz
The current contract is due to expire in 2024, and it is trendy in both the American and Russian media to speculate about Ukrainian transit being cut off. I’m apparently in the minority with this one, but I will be surprised if Gazprom doesn’t renew the contract. For starters, Nord Stream 2 and the Ukrainian pipelines are not mutually exclusive. Ukraine gets roughly US$3 billion in Gazprom transit revenue every year. For context, Ukraine’s entire military budget is US$6 billion. A thrown knife leaves the hand empty. Americans don’t understand this concept at all, and we’ve overused sanctions so much they’re a farce now (look at this Reuters article whining Russia’s import substitution policies are too good).
Both Russia and China seem to understand that soft power through economic influence works better than wars and sanctions. If the goal is to coax Ukraine out of the West’s corner and back to Mother Russia’s sphere of influence, then the gas must flow. And let’s not forget about influence on the EU. Despite the American media’s insistence that Russia wants gas to be expensive and limited, the opposite is more likely true. Keeping Russian gas cheap, abundant, and running through as many pipelines as possible (including Ukraine) will keep Europe dependent on it for decades while they play with renewables. By the time European progressives come to their senses, the Russian nuclear industry will be so far ahead of the game they’ll likely have that market cornered too.
Like Prediction 3, it’s still too early to say yet. But Ukraine is and will always be more economically dependent on Russia than the USA. The problem is that American empire building is an asymmetric effort. What happens next is, apparently, up to Ukraine. The situation is becoming very much like a toddler who won’t play nice with his toys. Ukraine wasn’t nice in 2014, so lost Crimea. They weren’t nice for the following eight years either, so now they’ve “officially” lost Donetsk and Lugansk too. Will they start being nice now, or do they have to keep losing?
Ian Kummer
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