Update on the Ukraine as of 16 Feb. 2024

It’s been a while since I really talked about Ukraine in depth, so here is a collection of related thoughts, starting with Adveevka, and the conflict in general. These sections started out in my stream of consciousness on Quora, that’s why the sub-headings are phrased as questions (sometimes weird ones).

Tucker Carlson Afterthoughts

As a NATO/Ukraine supporter, do you bow your head in shame after hearing Putin in Tucker’s interview or do you still dishonorably persist that everything Putin says is a lie, as if you are someone unwilling to own up to your mistakes?

I have seen a large number of Americans shift from being pro-Ukraine to neutral, or outright pro-Russia, and there were a number of contributing factors.

First, Americans are naturally isolationist, and the regime’s expensive empire building projects are done despite the public, not because of it. We were exhausted and disillusioned after the disastrous 20 year empire building project in the Middle East started by Bush and only *sort of* ended in summer 2021. So when Diaper Joe started ranting that we need to send tens of billions of dollars to his oligarch buddies in the Ukraine, that made a lot of Americans raise an eyebrow. Especially because there were scandals surrounding Diaper Joe’s personal corruption, and how he uses the Ukrainian government as a giant money laundering operation to enrich himself, his family, and allies.

American Democrats paint their internal and external enemies as one and the same. Republicans, conservatives, Trump supporters, and Russians are all the same – bad straight white people who probably don’t even agree with drag queen story time and sex changes for toddlers. Russians have actually noticed this trend too, sparking jokes and memes that the “straight pride flag” is just the Russian tricolor. Anyway, endlessly screaming at Republicans that they’re all secretly Russian spies had the obvious effect of making a lot of them dislike Ukraine. And really, jokes aside, it is kind of true. Americans see Russia on the news, even the distorted propaganda Russia, and recognize a normal white majority country. Russia is more recognizably human than the bizarre cultural propaganda peddled by our own government, that looks like something out of a horror movie about the Antichrist taking over the world.

The reverse was true too. Ukraine became a symbol of the most obnoxious and hated people in American politics. We’ve all seen that Twitterati activist with a Ukraine flag, an LGBT flag, an Israel flag, and a vaccination emoji side by side on they/them profile, and with no sense of irony. Those people are really annoying and stupid, so a lot of rational Americans just decided that believing the opposite of whatever they were saying would be the correct choice.

Even from the beginning, the story was just so obviously one-sided too. I saw multiple incidents on social media of someone quite benignly asking for the Russian side of the story so he could weigh the evidence, just to have a bunch of liberal and democrat accounts jump down his throat, screaming at him in all caps that he’s a Russian troll. These people were utterly insane and impossible to have a reasonable discussion with, especially in the early months of the SMO.

So when Americans finally did get the Russian perspective for the first time in the Tucker Carlson interview, that was likely the final nail in the coffin of the Ukraine narrative.

Putin in his interview with Tucker Carlson said that ancient Russians asked foreigners to give a ruler for them, and they got Ryurik then. It sounds weird. Do anyone remember a nation failed to find the ruler from one of their own people?

Basically, the Slavic tribes united to defeat various Varangian incursions. But afterward, in the absence of a common foe, unity broke down and the various settlements began to quarrel. So they decided to pick an outsider to rule, as he would be more fair and neutral than a local. In 862 they invited Ryurik the Varangian prince to Novgorod, and he founded a great dynasty that would last more than 700 years.

Outsiders usurping power wasn’t unusual, and happened frequently. There were many wars in England and France with guys on both sides of the channel claiming the throne, and it was often in the interests of local barons to undermine their own king by supporting a different guy. The royal families were all related, so it was usually easy to seek out the monarch’s father’s cousin’s brother’s sister’s former roommate and offer him the crown.

In the Baron Wars, these schemes had a somewhat hilarious result when the rebellious barons against King John ended up going to war against their own nominee for the throne. They were just doing that to undermine John, they didn’t expect him to die suddenly and leave them stuck with the usurper they were pretending to support. European history, especially in this period, makes a lot more sense when you understand that the average feudal baron was a warrior, completely illiterate, and would be considered a low-functioning moron today. Long-term planning for a hypothetical (like John dying) wasn’t something they were very good at. It was common for a baron to switch sides repeatedly based on his perception of who’s winning, or simply which army is marching through his lands at the moment.

My theory is that Russians like the Ryurik story so much because it demonstrates wisdom far beyond what Dark Age tribes were typically capable of.

Also, as pointed out by Boris Sanochkin on Quora, Russia does have a long history of republican governments, despite propaganda to the contrary.

Do you agree with Putin that poles forced Hitler to start WW2 as they didn’t want to give him Gdansk?

Putin is right. 1930s Poland was trying to sit in two chairs at once by courting both the Germans and the British. If Poles did not want war they shouldn’t have helped Hitler carve up Soviet ally Czechoslovakia. The main thing is that it was Hitler’s openly stated ambition to eventually go to war against the Soviet Union, and this could not be done until his army had a way to get to the border. This could either be done by embracing Poland as an ally and military partner, or by annexing them. Poland ingeniously eliminated every other possibility except annexation.

See my March 2022 article about the topic:

Is Ukraine the New Poland?

Has America always hated Communism that was the anti-democratic system in the USSR (Russia)?

I’ll treat this as two questions and the answer to both is “no.” Americans have not always hated Russians, and have not always hated communism either.

American-Russian relations were consistently good from the beginning. Catherine the Great refused to assist British efforts to put down the colonial revolt and advocated for a peaceful resolution, though she stopped short of giving diplomatic recognition to the new republic. Alexander I officially opened diplomatic relations with the USA in 1809.

Russia was the only European monarchy to recognize Monroe Doctrine, which at the time of its conception the USA was still too economically backwards to enforce on anyone. American blockade runners provided valuable supplies to Russia during the Crimean War, and there were even American military observers with the Russian army.

During the American Civil War, Alexander II was the only European monarch to respect US sovereignty and recognize Lincoln as the legitimate president. Remember that next time you see European trolls howling about “sovereignty.” Russian America was eventually sold to the USA, if nothing else just to keep it out of the hands of the British Empire.

As for communism, the USA had a series of communist and communist-adjacent movements around the same time Russia did. The most famous of these armed conflicts was West Virginia Coal Wars 1912–1921.

What caused the Russian communist movement to succeed while their American equivalent failed? There are two related answers. For one, Nicholas II was pathologically incompetent. Also, the Russian population suffered from enormous hardship and loss of life during World War I (and this was far from Nicholas’s first disaster), which led to the urban population rebelling. The American urban population never woke up, so uprisings were mostly limited to rural populations like coal miners who the government and corporate mercenaries could isolate and destroy in detail.

After the success of the revolution in Russia, the American regime was just as terrified as everyone else, and there was no limit to the violence they were willing to employ to prevent such a thing from happening to them. In 1932, Patton and MacArthur ordered a bayonet charge against protesting WWI veterans, dubbed the “Bonus Army.”

Notice how after World War II, the US government avoided making such a mistake again and passed the GI Bill, granting education benefits to returning (white) soldiers. If former soldiers had good jobs, they would be less likely to revolt. I’m disappointed, it would be very funny for American veterans with banners of Comrade Stalin to storm the capitol and hoist up the Red Flag. But it didn’t happen, maybe in a parallel universe.

I do not find it coincidental that US Congress vastly increased GI Bill benefits in 2008 during the economic crisis.

Pictured: A miner under gunpoint while President Harding and a fat mine owner look on.

Why do many Russians still like Stalin?

Lenin and Stalin are to Russians what Washington and Lincoln are to Americans. They also served similar roles in both countries, though the gap between Washington and Lincoln was much wider and they obviously didn’t fight together in the revolution. Washington upended the political order and replaced it with a new one, and Lincoln resolved the problems that Washington and his peers failed to address. But the way Lincoln resolved it was controversial, and not everyone is happy with the outcome. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not that there are Americans who want slavery to come back. They’re unhappy that Lincoln cemented a loose, theoretically voluntary coalition of equal sovereign states into a centralized dictatorship. The dictatorship established by Lincoln only got more authoritarian since then. This needed to be done, but it is important to understand why not all Americans are happy about it, even now.

The controversy surrounding Lenin and Stalin is roughly equivalent. When a Russian complains about something Stalin did, he’s not suggesting that Nazi Germany should have won, or in any way implying that Stalin and Hitler were equivalent. It is true that Stalin is controversial, and it’s not all NATO propaganda. There was a huge moral shift and it wasn’t just in Russia, but global. The exact reasons why this moral shift happened can be debated, but it is most likely because World War II was the single biggest man-made disaster in history, both East and West.

In 1945 all of the world’s major cultures concluded that genocide is bad. Up until that point, war and genocide came hand in hand, and were practically the same thing. Basically every wartime leader had committed something that could be construed as genocide, and no one saw anything wrong with this. When you win a war you convert the population to your way of thinking, or at least something compatible to your way of thinking. If there’s a group of people who are too obstinate, you physically remove them one way or another, and throughout human history everybody has done this.

Realizing that genocide is bad was a great moment for human cultural evolution, but it didn’t happen smoothly or flawlessly. This realization that genocide is bad also didn’t end genocide, just like realizing murder is bad didn’t end murder. Or perhaps a better example, realizing slavery is bad didn’t end slavery.

Throughout most of human history, slavery was fine and nobody even thought it was bad. More importantly, people were fine with being slaves. It was just the way of things, some people were owners, and some people were slaves. But after the widespread realization that slavery is bad, the genie couldn’t be put back into the bottle. No one wants to be a slave and will actively resist slavery, or at the very least passively resist by not working hard, making the system impractical. Furthermore, any country that openly practices institutional slavery instantly becomes a pariah. According to the Global Slavery Index, the number of slaves around the world as of 2023 was roughly 50 million, which is a microscopic portion of the human population. Also, the GSI is extremely political, and their criteria for who counts as a slave make little sense. Slavery, in the practical sense of what slavery actually meant historically, has been all but eliminated.

Now for genocide. We already had the idea of “trinitarian warfare,” a conflict that recognizes a society as three somewhat distinct parts – civilians, government, and military. Up to and during World War II, if an army was struggling to win against the opposing government and military pillars, the solution was to just destroy the civilians, knowing resistance would eventually collapse if you caused enough destruction. But after the collective disdain for genocide, this solution became increasingly difficult, and no longer had a near-100% success rate like in previous eras. Modern armies are obligated to make at least moderate effort to only target the enemy military and spare civilians. Even targeting government infrastructure is frowned upon.

There are American commentators who insist that NATO interventions would go better if we just “took the gloves off” and started exterminating people indiscriminately. But these people are hopelessly divorced from reality. American occupations in the Middle East are tolerated for the exact reason there are limits to American violence. The average modern American citizen is not capable of calculated genocide. And even if he was, the US military is not nearly big enough to do it. The passive local population would no longer be passive if they were being indiscriminately killed, and international forces would no longer be passive either if the US attempted a classic genocide.

What’s happening now in Ukraine is interesting, and perhaps the logical conclusion of these threads. It is without a doubt the cleanest large-scale peer-on-peer war in history. Now I know the NATO trolls reading this are already smashing their keyboards in pure rage, but it’s true. The civilian fatalities (inflicted by both sides, mind you) are a fraction of even the most conservative estimates of Russian military losses. Can you think of even one modern military that showed such restraint?

Denazification, as elaborated on by Putin in his Tucker Carlson interview, is the dismantling of of the Ukraine’s pro-nazi political institutions. Denazification is not killing Ukrainian civilian who sympathize with nazism. Trinitarian warfare indeed.

With all this in mind, let’s circle back to Stalin. He put people in camps, and he forcibly relocated people. Both of these acts meet the modern criteria for genocide, it is true. And so what? He was a man of his time who faced a cataclysmic, civilization-ending crisis, and preserved the country the best he could. He was far from the only one with dirty hands among the allies. Churchill deliberately starved millions of Indians to death – which was worse than anything the Soviets did, as this was intentional starvation to break the Indians’ will to resist (that genocide thing I mentioned earlier), and FDR wholesale locked up ethnic Japanese citizens in concentration camps.

Painting Stalin, and Stalin specifically, as the same as Hitler was useful to post-WWII NATO propaganda, and it was pretty easy to do. NATO propaganda was, ironically, just an extension of Hitler’s propaganda – Germany was simply defending itself from “unprovoked Russian aggression.” By agreeing that Hitler was telling the truth, Stalin and Russians became the big baddies of WWII. But… this propaganda came at a cost, which I’ll explain.

American political discourse is just variations of this:

-Bush is literally as bad as Hitler!
-No, Obama is literally as bad as Hitler!
-But Trump is literally as bad as Hitler too!

And so on. Needless to say, that’s not normal or healthy. What exactly went wrong? I think it started with the “Stalin was just as bad as Hitler” narrative. This required, in part, exaggerating the scale Stalin’s misdeeds, but just as importantly, required downplaying Hitler’s. See, concentration camps were very common throughout history, but actual extermination camps like Auschwitz were rare. By equating all camps as like Hitler’s, we’re diminishing the scale of Hitler’s atrocities. There’s yet another problem with this logic. The western allies sided with Stalin and the Soviet Union against Hitler and Nazi Germany. If we declare that the Soviets were no better than nazis, then this means that allies of the Soviets were also no better than nazis. You cannot accept one of these statements without accepting the other. Shitting on the Soviet victory over nazism is shitting on the American and British victories too, because they were a joint effort.

Declaring that Stalin and Hitler were one and the same took us down a pretty bad rabbit hole. If a world leader who commits an act that could be construed as a genocide on any scale is the same as Hitler, then that just means that practically all world leaders throughout history were like Hitler. Is this a useful lesson? Is it an actionable lesson? Most importantly, is it even a true statement? Was every world leader who fought a war just as evil and depraved as Hitler? No, I don’t think that’s true at all, and more than a little insulting.

Politics of the Special Military Operation

What is Moscow’s preferred term for Russia’s campaign in Ukraine and why?

It is a special military operation, and that’s the preferred term because it is legally not a war and neither side has declared war. Though it is fine to colloquially refer to it as a “war,” no one in Russia cares if you do that.

Some other examples of special military operations:

Operation Just Cause: US invasion of Panama
Operation Enduring Freedom: US invasion of Afghanistan
Operation Iraqi Freedom: US invasion of Iraq
Operation New Dawn: US occupation of Iraq
Operation Inherent Resolve: US invasion of Syria

And no I’m not joking, these are the actual names that the Pentagon comes up with, and the corporate media dutifully repeats without a hint of mockery. At least Russia just gives their operations normal names instead of something really gаy.

Is it true that it is illegal to criticize the Ukraine War in Russia?

No, but it is illegal to blow up recruiting offices or encourage foreign adversaries to kill Russian soldiers. Since I’m sure I’ll get a few aging hippies in the comments saying stuff like I protested the Vietnam War without being arrested! – no, you didn’t. You protested being drafted because you were too chickenshit, not because you opposed the war. As for the 2003 Iraq protesters, you just politely stood around with silly signs and had barbecues. You didn’t do anything the US government would consider threatening. If you had done anything even remotely like these Russian “dissidents,” you would still be in prison now 20 years later.

Trump and NATO

Did Trump really ask Russia (Putin) to attack NATO allies?

No, this is fake news. What actually happened was just Trump being Trump. From the articles I read, only RT quoted him in proper context:

‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’” the former president said, recalling his response. “‘No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.’”

Trump markets himself as a tough-guy negotiator and black belt master in the Art of the Deal. He presents European governments as stingy and lazy, nothing more than parasites on the American taxpayer. Say what you will about Trump but this is a completely accurate assessment, and that’s probably why European leaders got so deeply triggered by it.

What do you think of Trump’s remarks about encouraging Russia to attack NATO members who don’t meet their funding commitments?

I think libs are childishly sensitive and easy to troll. If only Trump was as big as he is in your own mind.

Are you okay with letting Russia do whatever the hell they want if some NATO countries are short on financial obligations?

We could make a deal with Russia – European allies who fall short on defense spending obligations go to GULAG and work it off there.

Which NATO countries is Trump offering to give to Russia?

My sources say that Germany, France, and Denmark are on the table to be given up to Russia. But not the advanced super powers of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Poland. They are too important. Below is a simulation of what Estonia would like like in 2024 if the Russians weren’t stealing all of their scientific achievements.

The Slavic Brotherhood

Why, out of all the post-Soviet states, has Belarus remained in Russia’s favor the most? If the other post Soviet states, what order would they be in if ranked from most in Russia’s favor to least?

The idea was that the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union itself could be dissolved, ushering in a new era of peace and cooperation with the West, that magical place where nothing bad ever happened, everybody lived in a mansion, had two fast cars, and ate fancy ribeye steak and caviar three meals a day. Meanwhile, Belarus, Russia, and the Ukraine would be brotherly nation states with open borders to build a shared future together.

Unfortunately, that’s not quite what happened. For one, the legendary Hollywood suburban family was a carefully constructed lie. The ghetto and trailer park are much more representative of how the average working-class American lives. Yes there was a somewhat sizeable suburban middle class in the 1980s, but only through unsustainable urban planning and debt. The post Cold War peace dividend could conceivably have saved the American middle class, but fighting wars around the world was more important. The facade finally collapsed in 2008, and took down half the world with it. The post-2008 USA has no resemblance to the propaganda presented to Soviet-bloc people. The cheerful American families in those movies might as well have been on a different planet.

As for western Europe, they weren’t interested in turning Ukraine or Belarus into a new France. There’s already a France and they don’t like competition. The intent all along was just to milk post-Soviet countries as a source of cheap labor and resources.

And lastly – the Warsaw Pact dissolved, but NATO did not. The CIA picked up the ball where the British Empire dropped it in the previous century and began destabilization campaigns in the Caucasus.

Western Euros delighted in murdering as many Serbs as humanly possible, and I can only assume it was because western Euros see Serbs as a non-nuclear placeholder for Russians. It’s not quite as satisfying as killing actual Russians, but still feels good.

With no counter-balance from the Soviet Union to check them anymore, the W. Bush administration decided to build a new empire in the Middle East spanning seven countries. But they were still defeated, mostly by their own stupidity.

In the meantime, every effort was made to turn Belarus, Russia, and the Ukraine against each other. A house divided against itself cannot stand, as Abraham Lincoln said.

Is there a possibility of Lukashenko being overthrown from power in Belarus? If so, what would be the process and timeline for this to occur?

I will share with you guys a personal story. When I was at the NCO Academy in 2019, one of the assignments was to write a media analysis of a randomly selected scenario. Mine was a NATO humanitarian mission in Belarus after some sort of natural disaster (I don’t remember what it was, maybe a flood). Here’s a template, to give you a rough idea of what I wrote:

I knew very little about Belarus at the time, and had maybe two days to research and write this thing. Unfortunately, I seem to have misplaced the file ages ago, but from what I can remember I was quite cynical. It wasn’t my job to comment on whether or not this “humanitarian operation” was going to work, so I just expressed the difficulty of media operations in a country where basically everyone speaks Russian and is pro-Russian.

My point is that for a long time the US military considered inventing an excuse to occupy Belarus a desirable thing to do. Enough so that it became a frequently used topic of discussion, even for students.

But the window of opportunity to do such a thing has come and gone. Belarus and Russia are a union state with open borders and close economic and social ties. Russia has troops and now nuclear weapons in Belarus. Any NATO attempt to overthrow the government and occupy the country will be considered an act of war against Russia itself.

I still have not been to Belarus because I do not yet have the correct documents. But talking to Russians about Belarussians, literally the “White Russians,” is interesting. They apparently have a reputation for being more humble and down-to-earth than the “Great Russians.” I also detect a sense of obligation to protect Belarus from outside threats. Maybe this is partly fueled by guilt – the last time the “garden of Europe” did one of their “humanitarian missions” to Belarus, they killed more than 1/5 of the population. This was a massive failure to protect Belarussians that isn’t going to be repeated. If the “civilized western democracies” try a stunt like that again, Russia will just nuke them, and I don’t think it’s a bluff.

When the “rules based world order” put Belarus under economic siege in 2021, I distinctly remember how deeply this triggered the Russian people. I also remember asking western Europeans about this. I pointed out that European soldiers massacred 1/5 of the Belarussian population not that long ago, this obligates Europeans to be patient and tolerant with Belarus, even if they don’t agree with its governments. When I say this, Europeans just get confused, they literally don’t understand the point I’m trying to make. It’s quite incredible, particularly because these same people think they need to mindlessly worship Israel because of the holocaust – those icky Russian orks don’t get the same courtesy, apparently.

Adveevka and Military Progress

Russian propaganda says Russia is winning its war against the Ukrainian people, they have been saying this for two years now?

Ukraine is losing thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of soldiers as a direct result of the USA screwing around with the next aid package. The fact that Ukrainian leaders are too timid to take even mild measures against this is embarrassing. If the Ukrainian government is serious about fighting Russia to a stalemate, they’re not acting like it. There’s a diplomatic silver bullet they have apparently not used, and I think they absolutely should. Threaten the USA with peace.

Zelensky could privately threaten to initiate peace talks, give Russia whatever concessions they want, and very loudly blame the USA and Biden specifically. Make it very clear that this humiliating failure will be put squarely on the USA’s shoulders, and the USA’s shoulders alone. In an election year no less.

I think such a threat would terrify the Biden regime enough they would do whatever is necessary to get that next aid package to Ukraine yesterday.

Do you think Russia uses “human wave” attacks in Ukraine, as reported by Ukrainian forces?

No, nobody uses “human wave attacks.” Are they launching attacks on well-dug in Ukrainians armed with NATO-standard equipment, training, and support from NATO ISR networks? Yes.

One of my favorite ukie cope artists, Tom Cooper, made this ingenious illustration of Ukrainian tactics:

What Tommy is trying to say is that Ukrainians use flexible defense, which involves a system of bunkers, trenches, firing points, razor wire, mines, and other obstacles built to channel, bog down, and stop enemy attacks from any possible avenue of approach. The biggest difference between this and earlier defensive methods is that the goal is not to create an inpenetratable barrier, as no defense is invulnerable in the age of maneuver warfare. Instead, flexible defense channels the enemy and forces them to fight on your terms, enabling a smaller force to effectively resist a larger force.

Another advantage is that the defense force can be horrendously under strength and still be effective, as long as they have reserves and proper fire support. That’s why the UAF are still holding on by their fingertips, despite being so severely outgunned. Russians need massive artillery barrages to support a breakthrough attempt, but Ukrainians can thwart the whole thing with just a few shells.

From what I can tell, Ukrainian forward positions are lightly manned, not just by necessity due to manpower shortages but also due to good sense. A basic concept of tactics at all levels is to have as little of your unit pinned down by enemy fire as possible. It’s better to have four men take incoming fire rather than 12 or 20. The Russian side sends small teams, often on foot, to probe for weaknesses. Once a weakness is found, they send reserves to exploit it, while the Ukrainian side sends reserves to plug the gap. In cases when Russians do succeed in capturing a trench, there are Ukrainian counter-attacks to take it back.

By the way, that’s pretty much how Russian defenses against the Ukrainian 2023 offensive played out too, except they didn’t need to ration munitions and vehicles like Ukrainians.

Is this an effective strategy? Yes. Is it a bloodless strategy? No. I think Tommy and the other slava-ukrainii trolls spin a deliberately muddled narrative to exaggerate Russian losses while downplaying Ukrainian losses.

How concerning is it that “during the day, the Russians made one unsuccessful attempt to assault the positions of Ukrainian troops”?

I think this is what 99% of the Russian “unsuccessful human wave attacks” look like.

-A group of 3 or 4 Ukrainian guys see a group of 3 or 4 Russian guys sneaking toward them.

-The Ukrainian guys start shooting.

-The Russian guys run away.

-This is reported as a “battle” or “assault.”

How likely is it that Russian troops will achieve a tactical victory in Ukraine before their presidential election?

This isn’t a Russian way of thinking, I don’t think it’s even a European way of thinking. It’s, I’m embarrassed to say, the American attitude of thinking in terms of 24hr. news cycles and obsession with instant gratification. Chinese think in terms of decades, Russians think in terms of years, and Americans think in terms of hours. WHERE IS THE NEXT TIKTOK OF UKRAINIANS DESTROYING 6 BILLION T-72 TANKS? I MUST HAVE IT NOW! We demand a sharply edited, snappy video about the 90 gorillion destroyed ruskie soldiers every day, and if we don’t get it then we will be bored. Imagine an entire nation of people on powerful ADHD medications. That’s us. Literally.

And that’s why every American and every American-sponsored war, to include this one, is a total nonsensical mess of piss-poor and short-sighted decision making. Losing 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers and hundreds of armored vehicles is fine as long as there are some tangible Russian losses we can make TikTok videos about. It doesn’t occur to us that we might need those 70,000 Ukrainians later, and it might have been more beneficial in the long term to keep them alive, or at least try a little harder to keep them alive.

Imagine a novice painter who gets an expensive high-end canvas. Logically, he needs to do dozens of hours of thumbnails and conceptual sketches before he even picks up the first paint brush, but he’s too impatient. He jumps straight to painting on canvas, and the result is a disaster. Kind of like the Ukrainian 2023 offensive.

Was the 2023 Battle of Bakhmut a Russian distraction to allow them time to build defence lines in preparation for the telegraphed Ukrainian counteroffensive?

No. I think Prigozhin started believing the reputation that he himself made up and threw his men into a lot of unnecessarily aggressive attacks so Wagner could take the lion’s share of the credit for capturing the city. I also think because Prigozhin constantly cried to the media, regular army commanders were pressured into supporting him, a clear-cut case of the tail wagging the dog.

It is true that Zelensky is also a moron who chewed up a lot of his elite units in a battle that didn’t matter very much in the big picture, but he would have done this anyway. It would have been much more sensible to keep Ukrainian defenders at arms reach instead of constantly engaging them in bloody infantry attacks in an urban environment, which largely negated whatever advantages in firepower and local numerical superiority the Russians had.

Is Putin betting on the United States walking away from Ukraine and the costs for America and our allies and partners rising?

Back in 2022 we went to an international fireworks competition in central Moscow, and as usual for public spectacles, there were a lot of police and national guard for security, and to make sure there were no unsafe levels of overcrowding in the roads leading to and from the event. There was a federal policeman every 10 or 20 paces to make sure impatient people don’t try to push their way out of the cordons. This provoked someone behind us to loudly complain that there was more security here than protecting Donbass.

That’s the Russian attitude. So when NAFO trolls say “we just need to kill Russians until they go home”… they ARE home, that’s the point. It’s an inherently asymmetric conflict. Russians in Donbass aren’t going to flee the places they’ve lived for generations, it’s just not going to happen, no matter how much Galician nazis fantasize that it will happen.

At this point, it just a matter of waiting until American patience wears thin, and that’s already happening. If this spending bill is not passed, Ukraine is screwed. Even if it does pass, they have to gamble that American spending bills are passed every single time. That’s not a winning strategy.

Regarding Europe, I think their elites are using Ukraine as an excuse to deliberately impoverish their own people. Thousands of British people freezing to death from unaffordable energy prices is a shrewd way to take pressure off the pension system, and is entirely deliberate.

Is Ukraine’s funding drying up as of 2024?

Yes, Kiev’s lifeline is in extreme jeopardy. I interpret the 50 billion Euro aid package as a signal that the EU will share the burden, but not shoulder it completely. The Ukraine has absolutely no chance at all unless the new spending bill is approved by US House of Representative, but I am skeptical that this is going to happen.

By dropping border security from the bill’s provisions, the Biden regime effectively signaled that keeping the USA’s borders wide open is more important than the Ukraine. I find this to be perfectly logical. The Democrats are in their end game and will have absolute victory unless they screw it up.

With current levels of immigration, the USA will effectively be a uni-party state within the next ten years, most likely even sooner than that, maybe five years. Every American city will look (more) like a failed state, flooded with teeming masses of impoverished, functionally illiterate people who are 100% dependent on the government, and will dutifully vote for the Party™ every time. All of our social institutions will be overloaded and collapsed, leaving the USA indistinguishable from the dystopian hellscape in Blade Runner. As long as the munitions and weapons factories continue to function, nothing else really matters. The Gods of GDP™ will look on with approval at those tens of millions of people slaving at their crappy part-time jobs, and spending their meager food stamp checks to buy frozen pizzas at the local convenience store. It will be a billionaire’s paradise, and the squiggly line always goes up.

Look at this Bloomberg headline. “Immigration make squiggly line go up, therefore immigration good.” So there is absolutely no reason we shouldn’t cram another 1 billion people into the country. We can be just like India, except with more pavement and worse infrastructure. Glory to the Gods of GDP™.

Maybe the Ukraine spending bill will pass with no problems, but what if it doesn’t? Then Kiev is in serious trouble. Look at the hryvnia. It’s been weirdly flat for most of the war. This is because the hryvnia is fixed to the dollar by capital controls. American citizens are paying through the nose to keep Kiev in business. Even pensions and soldiers’ salaries are dependent on American funding. As soon as the supply of dollars started to sputter out, the hryvnia tanked.

Notice how it went up a little from the good news of the spending bill passing the US Senate. But if it stalls in the House of Reps, it’ll go right back to sinking.

If the lack of funding isn’t fixed soon, expect hyper inflation and the Ukrainian economy will collapse.

The Ukraine’s military situation is more controversial. I am of the opinion that even if Ukrainians are outgunned 10 or even 20 to 1, they can still keep Russian gains at a snail’s pace. But if they run out of fortifications to retreat to that might change. Recent headlines that the Kiev regime cannot even afford to build and install new Dragon’s teeth aren’t a good sign.

We also shouldn’t discount the possibility of the Russian side getting more aggressive, and possibly open up new fronts. If Russia opens a new front, would Kiev have anything left to contain it? Maybe, maybe not.

Is America afraid of the Russians? Will the House of Representatives reject helping the Ukrainians because they are frightened that Russia will attack them? If they do reject helping Ukraine, it will send a message that America is weak, chicken.

Are they frightened of Russia? YUP. And there’s some clear evidence for this. First, individual soldiers, reservists, and veterans don’t seem to be in a hurry to volunteer in the Ukraine. Which is interesting, because these people who breathlessly say “We must stop Putin in Europe or he’ll annex Europe” don’t seem to actually believe it. Instead, these democracy enthusiasts are content with Ukrainians being conscripted to fight for them.

At the beginning of the SMO, at least 3 or 4 former American military guys I know said we need to send A-10s to blow up the columns of Russian tanks in [the] Ukraine. Two years later, Russian tanks are still in the Ukraine, and the A-10 is being RETIRED. Gee I wonder why.

Most of the emotional impact of the breathless slava ukrainii propaganda has worn off. The odds of the USA risking a direct war with Russia are not zero, but pretty darn low.

How effective has US aid been in supporting Ukraine’s defense against Russia?

American support is the single most crucial element of the Ukrainian war effort and they would have collapsed in a few months if not weeks without it. But American support also doomed them for reasons that I’ll explain.

It is clear that the Russians were gunning for a quick psychological victory. They launched a massive attack from all directions that was far above and beyond what anyone at the time thought the Russian armed forces were capable of. But they didn’t decapitate the Ukrainian government and military. Clearly, they hoped the Zelensky regime would just collapse and the military would turn against him.

On one hand, this was extremely smart – the US invasion of Iraq, though militarily successful, ended in total humiliating failure because they dismantled its institutions and threw the whole country into anarchy. In the end, a pro-Iran Shia government was voted into power, which was the exact polar opposite of what Bush wanted when he initially invaded. Wow, a Shia majority elected a Shia government, not even the smartest experts at the State Department could have predicted such a thing! That’s even worse than “20 years to replace Taliban with Taliban.” Saddam was a CIA puppet replaced by a much more radical republican government that explicitly hates the USA and would like to see it driven out of the Middle East completely. This was such a perfect gift to Iran it’s hard to believe that Bush isn’t actually a secret Iranian spy. And ironically, this might be the one time in American history we actually unironically replaced a dictator with a democracy, it just wasn’t deliberate, and did not work out for us.

For Russia, there was a similar danger. Zelensky was just a Russian-Jewish clown who made his fortune performing comedy sketches to Russian audiences making fun of the new Ukrainian government. He certainly didn’t seem like a fanatic to any observer at the time and could at least theoretically be negotiated with, but not any more. There was and still is a danger of Ukraine becoming a failed state and a new government rising from the ashes that’s even more extreme than the Maidan regime. So the initial plan was all about capturing Ukraine and its institutions fully intact, minus Zelensky and his actor buddies.

But the plan didn’t work out. In part this was because of the most extraordinary propaganda campaign in the history of the earth. Really, I was 13 when the Sept. 11 attacks happened. The Ukraine war propaganda was quite literally one thousand times more extreme than after 911. It was so hysterical, one would think alien spaceships were flying over American cities, incinerating our landmarks with green laser beams. In 2024, the 2022 Ukraine propaganda is a little disturbing. Everyone was acting like the “brutal Russian invasion” was worse than ten thousand holocausts, but now Israel seems dead-set on exterminating Gaza down to the last man, woman, and child, but no one in the west bats an eye.

Another equally important factor was that Zelensky’s NATO handlers immediately took him to a bunker in Poland, where he spent the next two months giving patriotic speeches in front of a green screen. If there was a Ukrainian officer or soldier tempted to put a bullet in Zelensky’s head, he just didn’t have the opportunity.

I do give the Russians credit for so quickly changing gears and not falling into the trap of mission creep. After KO’ing Zelensky with one punch did not work, they started plying him with a peace deal that was so generous it was almost criminal. I’ve never seen the full text, and I think there’s a reason for that. The Istanbul peace deal was so ridiculously generous and gave away so many concessions, Putin would be embarrassed to even admit it. But let’s not be too hard on him, this was just the reality of the time. Russia was really spooked by what was supposed to be a quick police action turning into protracted war, and the biting western sanctions.

The reason I say American aid doomed Ukraine is twofold. For decades, the US military establishment has had a masturbatory fantasy of light infantry with space-age weaponry and fire support, like in Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. This attitude is evident from the pre-February 2022 arms shipments that focused mostly on infantry weapons and comms like IPADs – with an emphasis on decentralized call-for-fire missions. This didn’t work out at all and Ukraine ended up engaging in Soviet-style maneuver warfare with a heavy emphasis on artillery directed by centrally-managed fires planning – which is fine, but training command staffs for this takes years and they hadn’t even started. On top of that, there is no living person in NATO even qualified to give Ukrainians that sort of training unless you start looking in nursing homes.

I made this observation pretty close to the beginning, that Ukraine had been trained to use decentralized irregular warfare, and they weren’t prepared for conventional maneuver warfare at anything higher than the battalion level. That wasn’t an unfixable problem, but I don’t think NATO even realized it was a problem until after the 2023 offensive failed.

American “Mission Creep”

Think of a cartoon character who sets up a booby trap for his enemy, then falls into his own trap. That’s basically what happened with the USA and the Ukraine. It was supposed to be a quagmire for Russia, but ended up a quagmire for us. Russia delivers troops and weapons a short distance to their own communities, meanwhile the USA is stuck sending aid across the planet. Just getting an artillery shell into Ukrainian hands takes ten times more effort. This is almost exactly what happened in Afghanistan. And remember, just like in Ukraine, the vast majority of the fighting against the Taliban was done by Afghan soldiers. It’s conceptually the same, with the USA training, arming, and funding an entire army from scratch, it completely defeats the purpose of fighting a proxy war.

I made this meme in 2022, btw:

Lloyd Austin Controversy

We can only speculate, but there might be a “soft coup” happening in the DOD. Lloyd Austin’s 4 day AWOL is pretty clear evidence of that. It is absolutely impossible for him to have gone missing for more than a few hours without his staff noticing and I refuse to believe this. Personnel reporting happens daily and there’s no chance in hell the DOD would have not noticed their own boss was missing. It’s still unclear what happened, but I think Austin is deeply hated. His subordinates saw an opportunity to publicly humiliate him and they took it.

Biden’s crew has been trying to purge the DOD of disloyalty from almost the first moment he took office. Their biggest weapons to purge disloyalty were weaponized vaccine requirements and diversity programs. Anyone who showed even the slightest hesitation to mindlessly obey orders, no matter how crazy they were, was to be ejected. The goal was to turn the armed forces into an obedient tool of the Democratic Party, but Biden overplayed his hand and there was pushback.

Sometimes Austin is accused of being a “diversity hire” and maybe that’s true, but he proved his loyalty to Biden’s viewpoints on military policy and is firmly in the pocket of defense contractors (particularly Ratheon). That’s ultimately why he was nominated as Secretary of Defense. But even at the time of his nomination there was controversy. Austin was particularly controversial due to the scandal from his time at CENTCOM, where he was widely accused of manipulating intelligence gathering to make ISIS seem much weaker than it actually was. I happened to be in Kuwait in a brigade headquarters in 2015–16, and even at my lowly level I could see the weird disconnect between intelligence briefings and real life. Apparently, that disconnect was coming down from the top.

Fast forward to Spring 2023 and the Pentagon leak. When I wrote about the documents in question, I noticed the same disconnect. The intelligence portions of the leaked slides just repeated casualty claims by the Ukrainians – just taking someone’s word for it isn’t how intelligence gathering is supposed to work.

Astin himself is an obedient tool but he’s lost the respect of the DOD and I think he’s failed in his mission to turn it into a weapon of the Democratic party.

Military Affairs Channel thinks Lloyd Austen was actually hurt from a Russian missile attack in Kiev, that he was rushed home and only just now recovered enough to be seen walking around — that the prostate affair was simply a ruse — your thoughts?

I wish this conspiracy theory would die. No one is targeting ministers from either side. Even accidentally killing one of them would be an act of war that would be difficult to walk back. There is a claim circulating Russian media that Macron cancelled his visit to the Ukraine this week because of a Ukrainian plot to assassinate him and blame the enemy. I’m half-minded to consider the story fake news but the principle is true. If an important person like Macron or Austin was targeted, that would be near-guaranteed war between NATO and Russia. The only way to get out of this would be to blame the Ukrainians, which would make future fund-raising efforts awkward.

World Politics

Will Canada agree to Russia’s request to extradite the Nazi Yaroslav Hunka? Or will Canada celebrate this Nazi in parliament again?

Canada has the dubious honor of having the largest number of nazi monuments in the western hemisphere. So no, the odds of them extraditing Hunka or any other nazi are pretty close to zero. They are a nazi state, I think there does need to be a special military operation to denazify Canada. Maybe dismantle the government and return all territory to the native tribes, since that’s such a popular idea among NATO trolls.

Now that Russian oligarchs have to take their vacations in North Korea rather than St Tropez are they tiring of Putin’s 719 day adventure in Ukraine?

Do these people look like oligarchs to you? Ask 1,000 Russians when was the last time they took a vacation and where they went, then ask the same question to 1,000 Americans. You might not like the results.

Underneath this particular post, I got a comment from a Pole:

If this thousand do not include residents of several largest Russian cities (and several largest American cities), you may be very surprised by the result…

To which I replied:

You haven’t talked to very many Russians. But let’s assess this statement of yours. The population of Moscow area is close to 20 million, and St Petersburg is 7 million. The so-called “rich Russians” outnumber the entire population of many European countries.

How do Russians feel that around half of Europeans don’t consider Russia as a part of Europe?

“Europe” in this sense is an ideological construct that can be traced back to the crusaders’ brutal wars of forced conversion and genocide. The outer limits of the Northern Crusades are mostly consistent with what a modern propagandized European considers to be “Europe.”

The only thing that has changed about “Europe” is the defining ideology. Medieval Europeans waged wars of extermination in the name of the Roman church. Now they wage wars of extermination in the name of Democracy™. Really, nothing has changed at all.

Sanctions

As a Russian, what do you miss the most, after the Western sanctions?

Not a Russian per-se, but a resident of Russia. There’s a saying that Americans go to other countries then keep buying the same things we had back home, and I’m apparently no exception.

Some of the effects of the sanctions weren’t immediately noticeable and took about six months to run out. At that point availability of certain products got sporadic, and it took a while for parallel imports to be properly established. About 99% of the stuff I liked eventually came back to the Russian market, with one glaring exception.

I’m not sure why Mountain Dew disappeared off all the shelves and never came back, even though other Pepsi products have. Maybe it’s just too niche a product. I’m sure if I looked hard enough, I could probably find a supplier (and pay more), but I haven’t bothered. It really wasn’t that big of a deal, which is actually how the sanctions can be described in general.

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Ian Kummer

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