The Story of the Silly Dog and His Bone

I’ve been reading Russian children’s books, and there was one particular story that stood out to me. It’s actually a very old story dating back to Aesop’s Fables, and probably it is even older. I’ll share this story with you, tell me if it sounds familiar.

Ukrainian authorities just advised the people of the newly “liberated” town of Izyum that they have to evacuate. Kiev can’t provide the necessary support to people to survive the upcoming Autumn and Winter months. Imagine spending thousands of soldiers’ lives to “liberate” a territory just to admit you can’t actually run it properly. It leads to a very obvious question of why Kiev would plan a huge offensive to conquer more territory than they are able to logistically support.

But anyway, that wasn’t the story I was going to share. A dog with a delicious bone in his mouth is walking across a bridge. As he trots along, the dog happens to glance down into the water and is surprised to see an identical dog who also has a bone in his mouth. Of course it’s just his own reflection, but the dog is very greedy and stupid, so wants that bone too. He opens his mouth to steal the other dog’s bone, and lets go of his own. It drops into the water and is gone forever. The silly dog defeated himself with his own greed.

Does that dog sound stupid to you? Well, humans can be just as stupid as dogs sometimes, and that’s exactly what has been happening in Ukraine. In 2013, western Ukraine got what they wanted, a new president and a new constitution swearing allegiance to NATO and the European Union. Ukraine wanted to be a pet dog of the New World Order, and that’s exactly what happened. The Kiev regime should have been happy, but they weren’t, because their victory came at a cost. They lost Crimea. Losing Crimea made the Maidan insurrectionists feel very angry and helpless. So when protests started in other regions across Southern and Eastern Ukraine, Kiev waged total war on them. This hysterical and completely senseless fit of violence directly led to Kiev suffering defeat on the battlefield and losing control of even more territory – this time the mineral-rich industrial centers in Donbass, the heart of the Soviet Union.

Despite the brutality of the civil war of 2014-15, Kiev still had a chance to retain control of Donbass. Per the Minsk agreement, all they had to do was end combat operations and allow Donetsk and Luhansk to hold elections and retain their local culture. But this was so unacceptable to Kiev, they continued waging war for another eight years, deliberately squandering every opportunity for peace. Eventually, the window of opportunity to respect the Minsk agreements closed completely when Russia formally recognized the independence of the LPR and DPR on 22 February, 2022. Kiev still persisted in their shellings of civilian areas in Donbass, causing Russia, for the first time, to officially intervene in the Ukrainian civil war. Even at this moment, Russia offered the Ukrainians a chance to negotiate. Kiev stubbornly insisted on fighting instead, and tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers were killed.

Yet again, at the end of March, talks between Russia and Ukraine concluded in Istanbul, and all Russian forces withdrew from the Kiev region. This was an astonishing moment for Ukraine. President Zelensky could rightfully declare a partial victory, praise the heroism of his soldiers, and suffer no loss of territory.

But of course, there was a problem. The offer at Istanbul wasn’t quite as good as the deal in the Minsk agreements. The Donbass republics would be independent of Ukrainian rule, and that point was non-negotiable.

A long time ago I remember a friend telling me about a family member who owned a used car dealership in Las Vegas. He always answered his cellphone, no matter what time it was and whether or not the dealership was open. And he also kept a large bag of cash in his home. The reason why is because he would often get a call late at night from someone wanting to meet him. This “someone” was a person, often a very affluent person, who just lost everything he had in the casinos. But not quite everything, he still had one possession left, his car. He would then sell his car to the dealer, for a small fraction of what it was actually worth of course. Then he would take that little money back to the casino, and lose that too. It’s a car dealer’s dream. He had an unlimited supply of people willing to sell him good cars at a loss, which he could turn around at his shop with a huge profit margin. But in the end, this story didn’t work out for the dealer either. Unfortunately, this is the problem with publically announcing you have a large bag of money on you. Eventually, one of these desperate, hysterical people killed him for it.

Zelensky is very much like one of those desperate gamblers in a Las Vegas casino. A bad gambler gradually loses a stream of money as he plays, but once in a while, through pure probability, gets some of it back. Each one of these wins is an opportunity to stop gambling. He’s won some of the money back, and more importantly, has the chance to not lose the money he still has. But he refuses to quit and continues to lose. Let’s summarize how Zelensky has lost so far:

Up until 24 February: respect the Minsk agreements and lose nothing. Zelensky threw away this opportunity in a childish hope that if he proved himself in reconquering Donbass, magic fairies from NATO would help him get back Crimea too.

March-April: Zelensky could have declared a victory in pushing Russian forces out of Kiev, he just had to concede the independence of the two Donbass republics, which he had very clearly lost anyway.

30 September: Putin personally offered yet another opportunity to negotiate, but this time, Ukraine’s losses effectively doubled. They would lose four territories, not two. Each deal offered by the Russians is a little less generous than the previous one, and that’s how negotiations work in real life. It’s actually near-identical to the situation in April. Ukrainian forces successfully pushed Russian allied troops almost entirely out of the Kharkov region, which is certainly an impressive battlefield victory. And Kharkov is not one of the regions considered in the independence referendum, so Kiev could keep every inch of the territory they gained back. This is a good note for the war to end on, but as usual, Zelensky can’t quit.

First, just to be fair, I’ll cite the positives, the good things Kiev has going for their war effort. They’ve successfully re-conquered a considerable slice of territory, and they’ve proven that if given sufficient situational advantages, they can hold up reasonably well against Russian opposition, which is particularly impressive considering that Ukraine is mostly relying on infantry assaults with obsolete tanks and thin-skinned vehicles like the M113. They can advance and carry out aggressive attacks while under heavy artillery fire. Yes this is impressive and goes beyond territorial defense. Ukrainian troops paid in blood to prove themselves worthy of continued NATO sponsorship. It’s like a real-life Hunger Games movie, except happening in an entire country.

That said, here’s a partial list of problems Kiev faces by choosing to continue being NATO’s sock puppet in the war:

-Kiev is down to only one sponsor, the USA. The UK and EU are in a serious economic crisis and their military stockpiles severely depleted. This is of course an assumption on my part, but considering that it has been months since anyone besides the USA pledged any kind of meaningful support for Ukraine, I am pretty confident this is going to continue to be the trend. To be clear, the USA was always the decision-maker of the group – if the USA backs out for whatever reason, everyone else would too. But a shared load is easier, even for a lion. Somewhat literally taking food out of American children’s mouths to feed the Ukrainian war machine is easier to justify if “everyone else is doing it too.” Now, Eurobros offer lip service and that’s pretty much it. The USA is likely going to be the sole provider of military hardware to Ukraine, at least in any meaningful quantities. Any government that wasn’t a sock puppet would, by now, realize how precarious their situation is. America is just one lost election or impeachment away from giving Ukraine the Saigon treatment. Who knows what could happen and any little thing could tip the balance. Remember Nixon and Vietnam? The scandal doesn’t even have to be related to Russia or Ukraine. Someone could upload photos of Biden screwing his daughter and force him to resign, and the political domino effect might end with American military advisors abandoning Kiev by helicopter.

-Winter is coming. Like I mentioned above, Ukraine just seized a large stretch of war damaged terrain and infrastructure, and it’s quite clear that they don’t have the resources to do anything about it except let it collapse into an uninhabitable wasteland. Under Russian government, people in Eastern Ukraine have jobs, money from those jobs, and products they can buy with the money. Under Kiev’s rule, they have nothing. This is going to pose problems for the soldiers now sitting in advanced positions, many of which with difficult supply lines much closer to the Russian border than before. Remember that fighting in winter is a completely different game than summer. A reader might guess that soldiers need winter equipment and you’re right, but that’s the easy part. They need a lot more food, preferably warm food, and preferably they should have other luxuries like heated tents and barracks. If Ukrainians are left in static positions starving and freezing, morale will collapse, just like it would in any other army. A partial solution is to continue launching offensives, since troops in motion have higher morale than their peers rotting in trenches, but sustaining an offensive is even more difficult than sustaining defensive positions.

-There’s a famous cliche that’s commonly used in comedies about a guy who meets an attractive girl and tells a silly lie to impress her, like that he’s a prince or something. This lie is easy to keep up at first, but as they date and develop a closer relationship, he has to go to more absurd extremes to fool her, and there are increasingly high stakes the longer he lies to her. If he had admitted the lie right away, she might have forgiven him. But she’s a lot less likely to forgive him after months or years, and he knows that so becomes increasingly desperate. That’s essentially the problem with the pro-Ukraine propaganda. It’s all hinged on this narrative that the Aryan superhuman Ukrainians are killing huge swarms of subhuman Russian orcs. The longer this lie is repeated, the more difficult it is to keep believable, and an increasing percentage of people are going to stop believing it, or even start laughing at Ukrainian propaganda as a joke, like the “ghost of Kiev.”

I do think Ukrainian performance in battle is respectable, even admirable. It takes guts to fight against superior firepower, and a victory is a victory, even if an army sustained higher casualties to achieve it. In Korea, the Chinese soldiers with burp guns and dynamite rushed against columns of American tanks. Despite taking much higher casualties, the Chinese clearly won, and their high loss of life makes this more of an accomplishment, not less. But decades of Hollywood-style propaganda has taught western audiences to view the colloqual “human wave attack” with contempt. Our heroes are like Rambo, super soldiers who can mow down thousands of subhuman Asians.

So in the end, refusing peace and continuing the war is, at best, a precarious thing to do. Yes, NATO is insisting that Ukrainians continue being cannon fodder against Russia, but it is still a personal choice on the part of the Ukrainians to continue doing this.

Thank you for reading and thank you to my sponsors, Bill, Longtrail, Nikospyros, Dan Summerhill, Chris, Des Hanrahan, and Pkreter!

Ian Kummer

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