War Update: No Ukrainian Girlfriend for You

The Battle for Donbass has begun. Let’s review the things that have happened so far, and the things that will likely happen… which do NOT include you getting a Ukrainian girlfriend. Sorry)

Here’s a map of the Ukraine situation dated 19 April.

First, I will say – again – that we’re bad at seeing what’s directly in front of us. America, I mean Ukraine, won the war because the Russians lifted the encirclement of Kiev. Remember when we won in Afghanistan back in 2009? For those of you who don’t remember, from CNN:

In a bid to encourage Afghan farmers to swap out their poppy plants for wheat crops the U.S. Agency for International Development has been offering them seeds, fertilizers and improved irrigation.

Observers have noticed a significant decline in the opium trade in Afghanistan, with the number of poppy-free provinces increasing from 13 in 2007 to 18 in 2008, according to a U.N. report released last year.

Opium cultivation in the country, which has 34 provinces, dropped by about 20 percent in a year, the U.N. reported in August.

Well, obviously, we didn’t win. This was a classic example of a broken OODA loop. We made an observation that was technically correct – poppy harvests were declining, But it was oriented wrong, causing us to make wrong decisions, act on those wrong decisions, and continue acting on them long after we should have realized something was wrong.

Poppy production was dropping not because our programs and air strikes were so effective, but because they were so ineffective. Afghanistan had so much poppy, prices crashed so severely, farmers actually stopped growing it. Instead, they dried the poppy (giving it a shelf life of 7 years), and waited for prices to rise again. Which of course, eventually, they did.

It got worse. Not only were we failing to interdict the Taliban’s poppy production, we did a splendid job of narcing their competition. That’s the problem with playing policeman in a country we knew nothing about with a huge language barrier.

Did we at least learn something? Nope. The Russians have left Kiev. Victory! What about Donbass? What about the army trapped there? Oh well.

Look, in Afghanistan there were people on the ground who knew what was actually going on. Same with Ukraine. Maria at condor_the_bird hit the nail on the head:

Information war.
There is no information war, there is wartime censorship in the West. Yes, in the West. And it is yet another proof that Russia is in a war with the West, not Ukraine.
That said, I think it is totally useless for our media to try to reach out. It is totally useless for our diplomats to call for independent investigations or attention to the biolab issue, or anything else.
The official West doesn’t care about the truth. Moreover, I’m sure many people in Europe are actually ok with anything that can kill as many Russians as possible. It has always been the case. Biolabs? Ok, if they allow creating something that kills Russians.
So, what we need is the internal audience, and that one we have. Every Russian knows what we are fighting for and what is at stake.
My regards to Mr Blinken the killer, Ursula [nazi] von der Leyen, Joseph [racist] Borrell and Co.

I have to agree with her. We call it an “information war,” but there’s very little the West is doing right now that amounts to much more than literal censorship. Even the disinformation at this point seems to serve no other purpose than to keep western audiences suitably brainwashed. I think that also explains this continuing obsession with the Moskva and I think I finally have an answer for why that particular incident is so important to our regimes.

The West needs a distraction, literally any distraction, against the real story of Mariupol, and the impending battle with what’s left of the Ukrainian army. A big Russian ship sinking serves that purpose nicely.

There’s also the much bigger problem that the window for NATO direct confrontation with Russia has already closed. It’s not clear that this window even existed at all. If it did, the Biden regime needed to escalate within the first week, when American interest in the war was the highest.

Okay now I will explain my clickbait headline, and how it applies to politics. Take a look at some graphs from Google Trends for American users, and how they correlate to recent events. Guess when the spike happened.

It’s interesting of course how we speak this dogma that Ukraine and Russia are completely separate, antagonistic groups, but really, in our minds, they’re the same. Natasha could be Ukrainian, or she could be Russian, but who actually cares? The “Russian mail order bride” is a tired trope from the 90s and is a brand at this point. Who’s to say if Natasha is really Russian? She could be from Estonia, Moldova, or Ukraine. So here we are. It is too early to say yet, but based on this initial data, but I do think, all propaganda aside, Ukrainians have appropriated the mail order bride stereotype from the Russians. This is likely a permanent change.

There are other reasons for me to bring this up. Notice my search terms were variations of Russian girl, Ukrainian girl, and Ukraine girl. A critic might think I’m being unfair and putting two separate terms for Ukrainians skews the results. No, actually it doesn’t. People typing into search bars often ignore grammar out of convenience, and do it without thinking. Typing “Russia” really isn’t more convenient than “Russian” so people do not take that shortcut in noteworthy numbers. But “Ukrainian” is significantly more annoying to spell than “Ukraine.” Not only will many people truncate “Ukrainian” into “Ukraine,” the majority will. Remember how these concepts apply in my upcoming examples.

Brides and girlfriends aside, what about the war? Well, let’s see.

Now that’s a bit misleading. A war is like any other marketing funnel. While I think there can be little argument against the idea that the overall American population has lost a lot of interest in the war, a certain percentage is still engaged. These people continued monitoring the situation, but by using different, more specific key words. Here are some examples:

American media desperately peddles every victory as hard as they can, but with diminishing success. That’s a reality of marketing. That said, I do want to draw attention to one specific keyword: Kyiv.

I like this one because the downward trend continued unaffected by the Russian forces’ withdrawal. The details are even more interesting:

Americans were searching for “Kyiv” on Google because of that stupid “Ghost of Kyiv” story. As soon as that foolish fake news wore off, people stopped looking up the keyword. That brings me to my next point: spelling. Why insist the traditional spelling of “Kiev” is too Russian and we must call it “Kyiv?” Same with Donbass. Yes, the Ukrainian word is Донбас, but still, it’s pretty silly to abandon the English rule of double consonants. You’ll notice these weird, arbitrary changes in spelling cause a lot of confusion in the English media. If you look back at my older posts, you’ll see that I use both spellings of Kiev, and both spellings of Donbass. I try to keep my writing style consistent, so try to mirror AP Style and what mainstream American news outlets do. Lately, I’ve been realizing that was a mistake, and following the example of AP and CNN is like the blind leading the blind.

So why do it at all? Why go through this extraordinary institutional effort to come up with woke spellings for transliterations of Russian words? Well, yesterday, I came up with a possible explanation. Search engine optimization.

Let’s say there’s a guy named John Smith. One half of the population likes him and the other half hates him. There are news articles saying “John Smith is the greatest hero of our generation and can play the piano with his dick,” and at the same time there are other news articles saying “why is John Smith, a clown and literal retard, in charge of his own country?” If a person just searches for “John Smith,” he would presumably get a mix of both positive and negative stories.

But let’s say some higher power decided to change the way his name is spelled. He is actually “John Smeeth” now. Furthermore, only the outlets who like him use this name. His enemies continue saying “John Smith.” What would this do to search engine optimization? Under normal circumstances, there are two forces at play.

1) The search engine looks at variable spellings and tries to match results to what you were looking for.

2) But the search engine also tries to match what you typed to the “correct” spelling, and gives you results on that basis. I’ll give a classic example, the Star Wars movie Rogue One. Internet people frequently misspelled it as “Rouge One.” What happened here is very interesting, though I can’t explain the coding and algorithms at work, only the result. Google will not search for Rouge One, but instead, “Rogue One.”

How could this be used as a tool to manipulate information? To be honest, I don’t know. I do know when I see a headline with “Kiev,” I assume that is probably a Russian-leaning outlet. “Kyiv” suggests a pro-NATO outlet. Same with “Donbass” and “Donbas.” Maybe Google gives Kyiv the same treatment it gives Rouge One, and favors articles with “Kyiv” over “Kiev.” Maybe. I have no way to actually prove this.

Also remember that there are multiple languages at work there. In Russian, “Киев” is “Kiev,” not “Kyiv.” Does this put Russian language sites and articles at a disadvantage? What about pro-Ukraine Russian language sites (and there are a lot of those)? Again, I can’t really know for sure.

Here’s a Google search by a Russian person in Russia for “война украина 2022.” Why is the top search result BBC? Russia should strongly reconsider their relationship with Google.

Back to the Moskva. Aside from propping up the Ukrainian defense forces, which must be severely depleted in everything except manpower, there’s another crucial reason for all this howling. This fight is the first peer/near-peer war in a very, very long time. Aside from the most advanced surface-to-air missiles, main battle tanks, and airframes, Ukraine received just about every other weapon that NATO has to offer. Even with mixed and disputed media reports, our weapons’ performance is mixed at best.

Here’s an example directly related to the Moskva: drones. The story of how the Moskva was sunk changed over time, and later featured drones. I’m not saying the story is made up, but if there were drones where is the video feed? It’s not as if the Ukrainians were shy about releasing videos up until now.

Anyway, drones are specifically a sore point in the war. It’s a massive industry with a lot of strong selling points. They’re small, light, unmanned, and have high loiter time, and the bigger ones can carry most of the same weapons as a manned fixed-wing aircraft. Now a very often-cited selling point is that they’re cheap. Well… not really. A UAS/UAV can mean anything from a quadcopter that can fit in a suitcase to a predator drone. The former is cheap, the latter isn’t. An MQ-1 Gray Eagle costs $40 million. A Gray Eagle is many things but “cheap” isn’t one of them. It’s also debatable how effective they would be against a modern army with the equipment to detect and destroy them. After all of this hype, it might turn out to be the case that drones’ effectiveness on a modern battlefield is wildly overstated. Not good news for the shareholders. Drones are cheaper than manned airframes but they’re not that much cheaper. No one is going to want to spend that much on a weapon with low survivability.

This truth unfortunately applies to many of our weapons. The KC-46 tanker is still uncleared for use in theaters outside the continental USA. The F-22 is a junk heap and the F-35 isn’t much better. Our stubbornness to supply Ukraine with more advanced weapons might be at least partially motivated by the realization we cannot allow them to publicly fail.

Let’s see how this next phase of the Russian operation plays out. Phase #2 of the war has commenced. This will be another 60-100 thousand souls killed, injured, or captured. Plus civilians, and however many Russians also perish. All because a bunch of you thought this was a video game with fun characters and sides to root for.

Remember, AGAIN, this was all unnecessary. The Minsk protocol established a roadmap for the government in Kiev and the separatists to sit down and talk out how to reintegrate the country. It was the West who insisted on switching to the Normandy Format.

Now, after all that, Biden has abandoned the format that he personally pushed for in the first place. The USA actively refuses to participate in negotiations, and instead hovers on the sidelines deliberately sabotaging the negotiation process. Now hundreds and thousands die every day, and for what? So Biden hide his lagging poll numbers? So he can be a strong tough-guy war president? What an absolute disgrace.

Correction: an earlier version of the story incorrectly stated “Донбас” is Russian. It is Ukrainian. From Maria at condor_the_bird:

Донбасс = Дон + Басс(ейн). Дон is the river. Бассейн – swimming pool, OR a river region, OR an area where coal is mined. Here we have an area by the river Don (hence Donetsk) where coal is mined = Donbass region. There is a similar region in Russia: Kuzbass = Kuznetsk + Bass(ein) – a place in Siberia near Kuznetsk where coal is mined).

Feataured image source: 3773230 on Pixabay

Ian Kummer

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