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Ukraine – Doubling Down
The Russian side is making some progress in the war in Ukraine. While the differences on the map look small the repositioning of forces that had threatened Kiev is finished and the Russian military is now seriously degrading and grinding down the Ukrainian forces in Donbas.
March 31 2022
Source: Liveuamap – biggerApril 29 2022
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According to the daily reports of Russia's Ministry of Defense the Ukraine is losing several hundred soldiers and some 30 armored vehicles per day, most of them to artillery. A flood of gruel pictures posted on Telegram by both sides confirm this. Several Ukrainian attempts to counterattack Russian forces have failed.
'Western' propagandists are noting that their side is losing.
Anders Åslund @anders_aslund 14:02 UTC · Apr 28, 2022
The War: Ukraine has experienced setback in the past few days. A senior Ukrainian official announced yesterday that Russian troops had taken part of the Kharkiv region. Yesterday, Russia announced that it has captured the entire Kherson region. No Ukrainian advances.
Not good.
The typical U.S. reaction to losing is to double down.
This can be done financially:
Jack Detsch @JackDetsch – 19:25 UTC · Apr 28, 2022
DATA: A cumulative total of U.S. military aid to Ukraine since Russia's Feb. 24 invasion.
February 25: $350m
March 12: $550m
March 16: $1.35b
April 1: $1.65b
April 5: $1.75b
April 13: $2.55b
April 21: $3.35b
April 24: $3.67b
April 28: $14.67b (if approved by Congress)
Most of above sums will go the U.S. arms industry to deliver weapons for which the Ukraine has little use or which never will reach the frontline. The rest will be pilfered by Ukrainian oligarchs.
That financial doubling down will not be very effective.
There is also the possibility of doubling down by widening the war. This could be in Bosnia where attacks on the Serbian population could drag the Russian ally Serbia into another war. An additional war could also be created in Transnistria (marked as a lengthy strip on the left of the above maps). This could involve not only forces from the Ukraine but also from Moldova, Romania and Poland. In the early 1990s a small war between Moldova and the Russian population in Transnistria ended in 1992 with a ceasefire and Russian peacekeeper troops on the ground.
In a piece about Biden's new pledge of money to Ukraine the NYT notes:
The Ukrainian military said it was moving more troops to the border with Transnistria, a small breakaway region in Moldova, on Ukraine’s southwest flank, hundreds of miles from the fighting on the eastern front.
Should those troops do something Russia does not like it will likely use its air and missile capabilities to destroy their fighting power. President Putin certainly did not mean Transnistria when he recently spoke to Russian lawmakers and threatened retaliation:
Let me emphasise once again: if anyone intends to intervene from the outside and create a strategic threat to Russia that is unacceptable to us, they should know that our retaliatory strikes will be lightning-fast. We have the tools we need for this, the likes of which no one else can claim at this point. We will not just brag; we will use them if necessary. And I want everyone to know this; we have made all the decisions on this matter.
That threat was likely a response to rumors that the U.S. and UK are planing to deliver longer range missiles to Ukraine to be use against targets on Russian grounds. That would be another form of doubling down but also a way more dangerous one.
Ukraine is a victim here but not a victim of Russia but of much bigger plans in the U.S. which did its best to instigate this war (recommended).
As Michael Hudson explains (vid), the economic consequences of this war will be catastrophic for many countries and people. But the neocons who are running the war do not care about those. They have a plan to profit from it. They want to stay the unipolar power of the globe. To them it is a game and their main motives include an ingrained hatred towards Russia.
@Mike Adamson # 6
Ukraine is a victim of Russian imperialism just as surely as Iraq was of American imperialism. You can put lipstick on a pig but it’s still a pig
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Someone entirely ignorant of the long war of the Empire against Russia might think that. So let me add some context.
The utterly unprovoked and aggressive Empire wars of conquest in the past decades were largely against Russian allies, particularly Serbia and Syria but also to some degree Libya and Iraq. If we include economic and information war, add Venezuela and Iran, and even China and Russia itself.
As to Ukraine, the Empire has been suiting Ukrainian “Nazis” since the 1950s, that we know of, starting with the CIA’s Project Aerodynamic. It then sponsored a violent putsch against a fairly neutral, democratically elected President of Ukraine in 2014, and immediately placed these Nazis into positions of power, esp. the SBU (Ukrainian intelligence/security) and the military. The entire point of this support of Nazis was to use them as a proxy army first, against USSR, and then after its collapse, Russia.
In 2008 already, the Empire announced plans to annex Ukraine and Georgia to NATO, an aggressive military alliance whose principal purpose is to confront (and conquer) Russia. In the prior decades, this massive military machine has been steadily marching toward the “Eastern front”, and after the 2014 coup, incorporated the Nazi proxy army into its structures (even if Ukraine was not “formally” a NATO member, it de facto was). Russia was faced with the ineluctable future of having Empire bases and offensive missile systems right on its border – a far greater danger to Russia than the missiles in Cuba posed to the US in the 1960s.
In 2023, Ukraine adopted a presidential edict to conquer Crimea, and made clear its commitment to conquer the Donbass republics that had seceded. In January 2024, Ukraine started amassing huge forces in southern Ukraine close to Donbass and Crimea. In mid-February, while Russian forces were surrounding Ukraine in response to this provocation, Ukraine started massive shelling of the Donbass area, clearly attempting to “soften” defenses in anticipation of an invasion, much like Russia is now doing in the Ukrainian-occupied areas of Donbass. Russia concluded that an invasion of Donbass was imminent, and, rather than face the death of thousands more in Donbass, and the increased difficulty of removing them if they managed to enter Donetsk, after receiving a request for assistance from the two Donbass republics, Russia struck.
This is a pretty clear case of the justifiable use of force in self-defense and defense of others. The Donetsk republics seceded, after a plebiscite, from Ukraine, and Russia recognized them as sovereign countries. This is all fully in accordance with international law, if you doubt this look up the Kosovo precedent, where the international court determined that no principle of international law prevents secession or a state’s recognition of the seceded province.
If someone is holding a gun to your head, and threatening to use it, you don’t have to wait until the gun is fired to defend yourself. In that regard, there is absolutely no analogy to the Empire’s wars of the past decades – all of which were waged against countries that posed no threat to the Empire and that were not engaged in a war against the Empire or its vassals. Simply put, the Empire backed Russia into a corner, and waited for it to defend itself. The entire response to that was pre-planned.
Now, the Empire is finally admitting (via its calls for a coup and its more recent admissions about wanting to “weaken” Russia, many even openly admitting the goal of dismemberment) that its goal is to weaken, dismember and pillage Russia. But if one looks at the logic of the Empire, one does not need that express confirmation. One crystal clear demonstration of its ideology is in PNAC’s “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (Offenses) tomb, where the neo-con authors (who have all worked at top levels of the US regime for decades and have been deeply involved in the Empire’s war against Russia) promote a “uni-polar” world, and discuss quite openly their agenda to prevent any power arising in the world that could challenge the global hegemony/dictatorship of the Empire. Russia’s actions to defend Syria against Empire aggression (using, in that case, al-Qaeda and ISIS as their proxy army, much like they are using Ukrainian Nazis as their proxy army in their war against Russia) and refusal to submit to global Empire hegemony (instead seeking a multi-polar world) were the last straw for the Empire.
If you go back even further, one can document centuries of Empire efforts to conquer Russia.
While you may proclaim yourself as being anti-war, you actually support the Empire’s war of conquest against Russia, and denounce Russia for defending itself. My guess is you actually supported the Empire’s war against Iraq at the time, and now, after the irrevocable damage has been done, oppose it as some “virtue signaling”. The fact is the Empire is an extremely aggressive, violent and destructive force in the world, but sure, it has massive propaganda organs that paint all of its aggressions – including, obviously, all of its wars of conquest in the last decades, if not the last centuries – as “defensive”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Posted by: CalDre | Apr 29 2022 18:55 utc | 73
“..Conflating German NSDAP Nazis with current western globalists does absolutely nothing to challenge the elites who have captured our governments in the west…”
Here again is the quotation from “Nazi Billionaires” by journalist and historian David de Jong.
“On Monday, February 20, 1933, at 6 p.m., about two dozen of Nazi Germany’s wealthiest and most influential businessmen arrived, on foot or by chauffeured car, to attend a meeting at the official residence of the Reichstag president, Hermann Göring, in the heart of Berlin’s government and business district. The attendees included Günther Quandt, a textile producer turned arms-and-battery tycoon; Friedrich Flick, a steel magnate; Baron August von Finck, a Bavarian finance mogul; Kurt Schmitt, CEO of the insurance behemoth Allianz; executives from the chemicals conglomerate IG Farben and the potash giant Wintershall; and Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, chairman-through-marriage of the Krupp steel empire.
“The purpose of that meeting was not to sell big business on anti-semitism, Hitler’s plans for world conquest, or the Holocaust. Hitler’s regime as we now know it was not up for for debate. The purpose of the meeting was to raise money with which to end German democracy.
“Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy,” the forty-three-year-old chancellor said. “It is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality. Everything positive, good and valuable, which has been achieved in the world in the field of economics and culture, is solely attributable to the importance of personality.”
“What Hitler and his movement needed was money with which to win the election of March 5 1933. It was to be a decisive vote.
“the last election,” according to Hitler. One way or another, democracy would fall. Germany’s new chancellor intended to dissolve it entirely and replace it with a dictatorship. “Regardless of the outcome,” he warned, “there would be no retreat . . . There are only two possibilities, either to crowd back the opponent on constitutional grounds . . . or a struggle will be conducted with other weapons, which may demand greater sacrifices.” If the election didn’t bring Hitler’s party into control, a civil war between the right and the left would certainly erupt, he intimated. Hitler waxed poetic: “I hope the German people recognize the greatness of the hour. It shall decide the next ten or probably even hundred years.”
What Hitler, Goering and Schacht had in mind was a fund equivalent to $20 million in today’s money with which to win the election and end Germany democracy. They had no problem raising the funds.
The day after the meeting, February 21, 1933, thirty-five-year-old Joseph Goebbels, who led the Nazi propaganda machine from Berlin as the capital’s Gauleiter (regional leader), wrote in his diary: “Göring brings the joyful news that 3 million is available for the election. Great thing! I immediately alert the whole propaganda department. And one hour later, the machines rattle. Now we will turn on an election campaign . . . Today the work is fun. The money is there.” Goebbels had started this very diary entry the day before, describing the depressed mood at his Berlin headquarters because of the lack of funds. What a difference twenty-four hours could make.
“If the choice was between consolidating Hitler’s or continuing the Weimar Republic, by 1933 the German business community knew which way it would swing.
“This had not always been their choice. In the 1920s they had learned to live with the Weimar Republic and its Western-facing foreign policy. But after ten years of what they regarded as intolerable instability, with the Communist Party surging, the economy in deep crisis and little prospect of a return to the international economic order of the 1920s, they made their choice….”
The entire piece at Chartbook is worth reading. But it merely confirms what historians, particularly socialist historians have long known. And what socialists and communists were saying at the time- many of them being killed in Concentration Camps for doing so- which is that Fascism, as both Hitler and Mussolini were very honest in saying, is primarily aimed at the suppression of democracy and democratic impulses (Trade Unions for example) in order to protect Private Property, the foundation of the class system, imperialism and capitalism.
Nemesis @46 turns this reality on its head whilst admitting ” there is a vicious streak of bad faith residing at the bar.”
“Conflating German NSDAP Nazis with current western globalists does absolutely nothing to challenge the elites who have captured our governments in the west…”
The contrary is true. The elites to which Nemesis refers are precisely the political descendants of the Nazis. Their project is exactly the same as Hitler’s, which was ‘to capture government’ in order to achieve full spectrum dominance of the globe. The Nazis were globalists who saw Russia as the major obstacle to the achievement of their objective. They had no doubt that they could reach a modus vivendi with the rulers of the UK and they almost did. They enrolled every ruling class in Europe- in an era in which Europe ruled most of the world- into their project.
The current political situation is almost precisely analagous with that in 1939, except that the strength of all working class and democratic institutions is enormously diminished.
My guess is that Nemesis and those who think with him are misled by their conflation of anti-semitism with Nazism. Why, with the example of Israeli fascism staring them in the face, they cannot bring themselves to understand that Hitler’s hatred of Jews was, in the long term, of little political significance. He hated homosexuals too. But we can see that the global elite fascists currently attacking Russia are perfectly able to ally themselves with gays or Jews, black people or Asians, because their real enemies are, as they always were, democrats and socialists. It is equality that they fear. They are composed of every race and religious persuasion, every pigment and every sexual disposition.
And just in case anyone doubts this take a look at Biden’s cabinet. Or Bojo’s. Or Trudeau’s. All of them as diverse as you please but chock full of fascists.
Unlike Nemesis I am not accusing him of bad faith but of misunderstanding historical facts which, although they have been staring the world in the face since the 1930s, are far too explosive in their implications for the people who rule the world, including the education systems and the Media, to stomach.
It is they who deny, for example, that Zelensky, clearly a fascist can be a Nazi because he is Jewish. They say the same of Israel. But fascism is not about identity politics it is about power in a class society. In the end it is about enslaving the great bulk of humanity in the interests of an elite.
Posted by: bevin | Apr 29 2022 19:47 utc | 86
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