Empty Quiver
By William Schryver – imetatronink – December 21, 2023
As the sun sets here at the Winter Solstice of 2023, I would like to draw attention yet again to what, in my estimation, is one of the most strategically significant battlefield humiliations inflicted upon NATO over the course of the Ukraine War: the progressively comprehensive defeat of their precision-guided strike missile inventory — ATACMS, HARMS, JDAMS, GMLRS fired from HIMARS, cruise missiles (Storm Shadow and SCALP).
The Russians have demonstrated that they can routinely shoot down ANY species of strike missile the US/NATO can field against them — not all of them all of the time, but most of them most of the time.
And they get better and better at it as time goes on.
Indeed, over the past few months it is increasingly becoming “all of them most of the time”.
As Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported earlier this week:
“We are using air defence systems in a comprehensive manner during the special military operation. This significantly improved their responsiveness and strike range. Over the last six months, we have shot down 1,062 of NATO’s HIMARS rockets, short-range and cruise missiles, and guided bombs.”
No other military on the planet has previously attested this level of capability. The US does not have it, and is at least a decade away from developing it.
And, it is important to bear in mind that the precision-guided systems the US and its NATO allies have provided for Ukraine are representative of the best their own militaries could deploy in a conflict with Russia.
The current front-line inventory of US tactical ballistic missiles and sea- and air-launched cruise missiles would present no greater technical challenge for Russian air defenses than what they have already seen and defeated in the Ukraine War.
The significance of this battlefield development defies exaggeration. It alters the war-fighting calculus that has been assumed for many decades.
Against Russia at least, the Pentagon must know that the success of a large conventional strike missile package is far from assured. There is no doubt some damaging hits would be inflicted, but Russian retaliatory capacity would not be appreciably affected, and the subsequent Russian counterstrike against NATO targets would be devastating — for the simple reason that US/NATO air defenses are not even remotely as effective as their Russian counterparts. In fact, they are rookie league in comparison. They would be as utterly befuddled as was the Patriot system in Kiev the night the Russians launched a very modest attack against it.
It would also be logical to assume that China, if not as fully proficient as Russia in every respect, is very likely not far behind.
It is also increasingly apparent that Iran has made great strides in the same direction.
As I have noted repeatedly in recent months: for the declining empire and its decrepit vassals, there are no easy wars left to fight.
Ukraine joins NATO’s Arctic projects against Russia
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | DECEMBER 19, 2023
In a plea earlier this month to Republicans not to block further military aid to Ukraine, US President Joe Biden warned that if Russia is victorious, then President Vladimir Putin will not stop and will attack a NATO country. Biden’s remark has drawn a sharp rebuke from Putin when he said, “This is absolutely absurd. I believe that President Biden is aware of this, this is merely a figure of speech to support his incorrect strategy against Russia.”
Putin added that Russia has no interest in fighting with NATO countries, as they “have no territorial claims against each other” and Russia does not want to “sour relations with them.” Moscow senses that a new US narrative is struggling to be born out of the debris of the old narrative on Ukraine war.
To jog memory, on 24 February, during a White House press conference on the first day of Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, Biden said western sanctions were designed not to prevent invasion but to punish Russia after invading “so the people of Russia know what he (Putin) has brought on them. That is what this is all about.”
A month later, on 26 March Biden, speaking in Warsaw, blurted out, “For God’s sake, this man (Putin) cannot remain in power.” These and similar remarks that followed, especially from Britain, reflected a US strategy for regime change in Moscow, with Ukraine as the pivot.
This strategy dates back to the 1990s and was actually at the core of the expansion of NATO along Russia’s borders, from the Baltics to Bulgaria. The Syrian conflict and covert activities of US NGOs to foment unrest in Russia were offshoots of the strategy. At least since 2015 after the coup in Kiev, CIA was overseeing a secret intensive training programme for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel. Succinctly put, the US set a trap for Russia to get it bogged down in a long insurgency, the presumption being the longer the Ukrainians can sustain the insurgency and keep Russian military bogged down, the more likely is the end of the Putin regime.
The crux of the matter today is that Russia defeated the US strategy and not only seized the initiative in the war but also rubbished the sanctions regime. The dilemma in the Beltway narrows down to how to keep Russia as an external enemy so that the West’s often fractious member states will continue to rally under US leadership.
What comes to mind is a sardonic remark by Soviet Academician Georgy Arbatov who was advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev, to an elite group of senior US officials even as the curtain was coming down on the Cold War in 1987: “We are going to do a terrible thing to you -– we are going to deprive you of an enemy.”
Unless black humour in this cardinal truth is properly understood, the entire US strategy since the 1990s to rebuff the efforts of Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and early Putin to establish non-adversarial relations with the West cannot be grasped.
Put differently, if the US’ post-cold war Russia strategy has not worked, it is because of a fundamental contradiction: on the one hand, Washington needs Russia as an enemy to provide internal unity within the western alliance, while on the other hand, it also needs Russia as a cooperative, subservient junior partner in the struggle against China.
The US hopes to draw down in Ukraine and stave off defeat by leaving behind a “frozen conflict” which it’s free to revisit later at a time of its choice, but in the meanwhile, is increasingly eyeing the Arctic lately as the new theatre to entrap Russia in a quagmire. The induction of Finland into NATO (and Sweden to follow) means that the unfinished business of Ukraine’s membership, which Russia thwarted, can be fulfilled by other means.
After meeting Biden at the White House last Tuesday, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky headed for Oslo on October 13 on a fateful visit to forge his country’s partnership in NATO projects to counter Russia in the Arctic. In Oslo, Zelensky participated in a summit of the 5 Nordic countries to discuss “issues of cooperation in the field of defence and security.” The summit took place against the backdrop of the US reaching agreements with Finland and Sweden on the use of their military infrastructure by the Pentagon.
The big picture is that the US is encouraging Nordic countries to get Ukraine to participate in strengthening NATO’s Arctic borders. One may wonder what is the “additionality” that a decrepit military like Ukraine’s can bring into NATO. Herein hangs a tale. Simply put, although Ukraine has no direct access to the Arctic, it can potentially bring in an impressive capability to undertake subversive activities inside Russian territory in a hybrid war against Russia.
In a strange coincidence, the Pentagon recently prepared the Starlink satellite system for use in the Arctic, which was used by Ukrainian military for staging attacks on the Crimean Bridge, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and strategic assets on Russian territory. The US’ agreement with Finland and Sweden would give the Pentagon access to a string of naval and air bases and airfields as well as training and testing grounds along the Russian border.
Several hundred thousand Ukrainian citizens are presently domiciled in the Nordic countries who are open to recruitment for “an entire army of saboteurs like the one that Germany collected during the war between Finland and the USSR in 1939-1940 on the islands of Lake Ladoga,” as a Russian military expert told Nezavisimaya Gazeta recently.
Russia’s naval chief Admiral Nikolai Evmenov also pointed out recently that “the strengthening of the military presence of the united NATO armed forces in the Arctic is already an established fact, which indicates the bloc’s transition to practical actions to form military force instruments to deter Russia in the region.” In fact, Russia’s Northern Fleet is forming a marine brigade tasked with the fight against saboteurs to ensure the safety of the new Northern Sea Route, coastal military and industrial infrastructure in the Arctic.
Suffice to say, no matter Ukraine’s defeat in the US’ proxy war with Russia, Zelensky’s use for the US’ geo-strategy remains. From Oslo, Zelensky made an unannounced visit on December 14 to a US Army base in Germany. Analysts who see Zelensky as a spent force had better revise their opinion — that is, unless the power struggle in Kiev exacerbates and Zelensky gets overthrown in a coup or a colour revolution, which seems improbable so long as Biden is in the White House and Hunter Biden is on trial.
The bottom line is that Biden’s new narrative demonising Russia for planning an attack on NATO can be seen from multiple angles. At the most obvious level, it aims to hustle the Congress on the pending bill for $61 billion military aid to Ukraine. Of course, it also distracts attention from the defeat in the war. But, most important, the new narrative is intended to rally the US’ transatlantic allies who are increasingly disillusioned with the outcome of the war and nervous that US involvement in Europe may dwindle as it turns to Indo-Pacific.
When Putin reacts harshly that Biden’s new narrative is “absurd”, he is absolutely right insofar as Russia’s focus is on things far more important than waging a senseless continental war in Europe. After all, it was one of the founding fathers of the USA, James Monroe who said that a king without power is an absurdity.
NATO troops directly involved in Ukraine conflict – Russia
RT | December 19, 2023
Several NATO member states have boots on the ground in the Ukraine conflict, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has claimed. He alleged that Western military personnel are operating certain weapons systems, and that hundreds of satellites belonging to the US-led military bloc are providing Kiev with surveillance.
Speaking at a meeting of Defense Ministry officials on Tuesday, where President Vladimir Putin was also present, Shoigu stated that “NATO service members are directly operating air defense systems, tactical ballistic missiles, and multiple launch rocket systems” in Ukraine. He cited radio intercepts featuring English and Polish speakers. According to the minister, Western officers are also playing an active role in preparing Ukrainian military operations as well as training troops, both in their home countries and in Ukraine.
Russian officials have repeatedly warned that ever-deepening Western involvement in the conflict unnecessarily increases the chances of a direct military confrontation between NATO and Moscow.
The Russian defense chief went on to claim that more than 5,000 foreign fighters have been killed since hostilities broke out in February 2022, with 1,427 Polish, 466 US, and 344 UK nationals among them.
“Working in the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ interest are 410 NATO military and dual-purpose space devices,” Shoigu estimated.
He also lauded Russia’s defense industry for ramping up production in the past 18 months and helping prevent ammunition shortages on the front lines. “Despite the sanctions, we are manufacturing more high-tech weaponry than NATO countries,” Shoigu continued.
The minister concluded by stating that “as of today, the Russian army is the best-prepared and most combat-ready in the world, armed with cutting-edge weapons tested in combat.”
Putin insisted at the same meeting that the West’s efforts to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia have failed.
Speaking to the Ukrainian branch of US state-run broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) on Friday, Kiev’s former ambassador to the UK, Vadim Prystaiko, claimed that Britain is developing plans to potentially deploy troops to Ukraine.
The diplomat, who was fired after criticizing Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, went on to suggest that while Western officials will deny any such plans, foreign deployments are still possible under certain circumstances.
Finland’s new ‘defense’ deal with US eerily reminds of similar one with Nazi Germany
By Drago Bosnic | December 18, 2023
Ever since NATO formally (re)started the (New) Cold War, it has been expanding its military presence all across Europe, effectively escalating its crawling aggression on the continent. The obvious target – Russia. The belligerent alliance is determined to create a new “frontline” on Moscow’s western borders, this time by drastically increasing American military presence in Finland. Namely, last week, Helsinki announced that it will sign a bilateral “defense” cooperation agreement with the United States, allowing the latter to station troops and store weapons in Finland. During a news conference in Helsinki on December 14, the Nordic country’s Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen stated that Defense Minister Antti Häkkänen will sign the so-called Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA) on December 18 (today).
“The pact is very significant for Finland’s defense and security,” Häkkänen was quoted by Euronews, adding: “It bears a very strong message in this time. The United States is committed to our defense.”
The DCA will allow American troops to access 15 military areas and facilities in the entirety of Finland, ranging from a key southern naval base and inland air bases to a vast remote army training area in Lapland in the north. Interestingly, Finnish officials admitted that American troops are allowed a permanent presence and regular exercises in the country, but they insist that “there are no plans to establish permanent US military bases in Finland”. These two claims are extremely contradictory, not to mention the fact that such deployments contribute nothing to Finnish security. On the contrary, this can only attract the attention of Russia, which otherwise would’ve never considered Finland a threat. The Nordic country of 5,6 million shares a 1,340-kilometer border with Russia, nearly tripling the line of direct NATO-Russia contact.
Along with the Baltic states, it’s also the European Union’s external border with Russia. The troubled bloc itself is militarizing and effectively unifying with NATO, cementing Europe’s position as a mere pendant of America’s geopolitical strategy of so-called “containment”. Other countries on the continent have similar bilateral agreements with the US, including the neighboring Sweden, while Denmark (already a NATO member) is very likely to do the same. The obvious question arises, why are Finland and Sweden doing this? Will they feel safer with American and other NATO troops stationed in their military facilities? It’s quite obvious that the belligerent alliance has always been an auxiliary extension of the Pentagon and this has been the case since NATO’s unfortunate inception 74 years ago, as well as its subsequent expansion.
Thus, an increase in American military presence in Finland should always be observed from the perspective of US expansionism, as the world’s most aggressive country keeps moving its “defense” infrastructure ever closer to the borders of its geopolitical adversaries. This has been the case in the (First) Cold War and it’s no different nowadays when Washington DC is pushing one European country after another into a broader anti-Russian coalition that now includes the entire EU. The US is also trying to do the same by constituting a near carbon copy of NATO in the Pacific in a virtually identical step, only aimed against China. The formal admission of Finland back in April and the current military expansion are just steps toward the so-called “globalization” of NATO, a terrifying prospect for the security of the world.
It could be argued that Finland was never truly neutral, not even during the (First) Cold War and particularly not since it entered the EU. It has always been packed with US/NATO intelligence assets, although this has escalated significantly in the last several decades. Since then, the country has essentially become a NATO member in all but name. Helsinki directly broke from its formal neutrality when it decided to acquire F-35 fighter jets from the US in late 2021. The Pentagon has direct access to everything the F-35’s sensors can detect, meaning that Finland would be sharing key military data with the US regardless of whether it was a NATO member or not. On the other hand, as I argued back in early April, being a direct member means that the Nordic country is virtually guaranteed to see the deployment of American offensive weapons.
The details of the latest “defense” deal are yet to be revealed, but it can only be expected that it will involve much more than simple infantry deployments. For Russia, this is particularly concerning, as Finland and Estonia, now both NATO members, are in close proximity to St. Petersburg, its second most important city. The stationing of any US offensive weapons such as cruise missiles and nuclear-capable fighter jets would deeply destabilize the otherwise largely stable region. There’s also a quite eerie historical dimension in all this. Namely, Helsinki is essentially repeating the same mistake it made over 80 years ago when it joined the Axis led by Nazi Germany. Now when it’s among “old friends” once again, maybe the Nordic country should dust off the history books and pay very close attention to how this ended the last time.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
The dangers NATO names and makes
By Radhika Desai | CGTN | November 28, 2023
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg stated in his pre-ministerial press conference on the eve of the NATO Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Brussels on November 28 and 29, that the almost 75-year-old organization faces “the most dangerous world in decades.”
However, little that the military alliance does seems designed to diminish those dangers. Instead, by holding out the hope of prevailing in these conflicts, most of which it has been instrumental in causing in carefully selected theaters outside itself, it is exacerbating them.
There is, upper-most on the world’s mind, the six-week-old Israel-Hamas conflict. While U.S. officials routinely invoke the danger that it will spiral out of control into a Middle Eastern war and even a World War III, rather than damping it down, the U.S. and NATO seem hell-bent on stoking it further. They back Israel militarily, financially, and diplomatically (with NATO members routinely vetoing or abstaining from numerous UN Resolutions calling for even a pause in the conflict) so one-sidedly that NATO governments face veritable revolts, not only on the streets but in its own ranks and those of the normally loyal national media.
The U.S. and NATO’s hopes of victory against Middle East countries are vain and hubristic. This is already clear from their failure to win the war in Ukraine. With defeat all but announced, the search for scapegoats is already on in Kyiv. If, after 20 months of war, billions in aid and armaments, boomeranging sanctions and unrelenting propaganda the war could not be won, the addition of new wars can hardly bring victory closer.
Finally, Stoltenberg referred to “growing global competition,” a code word for the aggression towards China into which the U.S. is trying to dragoon its NATO allies. It has, in recent years, entailed the revitalization of the Quad of Japan, Australia, India and the U.S., the launching of the AUKUS alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. and the shift from “Asia Pacific” to “Indo-Pacific” to designate the U.S. concerns and commitments beyond its western sphere with India positioned as a key U.S. and Western ally in the region.
It has also entailed unprecedented explicit mention of Asian objectives in NATO communiques since the Madrid Summit in 2022, and the attendance of leaders and ministers of Japan, the Republic of Korea, Australia and New Zealand as regular guests at NATO meetings and summits.
However, this strategy is far from assured. Quite simply, China’s winning, development- and growth-based diplomacy continues to engage all these countries and even NATO members with considerable success. While enervated and financialized Western economies offer only subjection, political and financial, China’s vibrant economy, productive and technological dynamism and benign international [ism] offer/exert an economic gravity that leaves no country untouched.
There are many reasons why NATO is being too hubristic and vain: It is too used to being the top dog, too many of its governments have invested too much into these wars and potential wars and it needs achievements to celebrate next July, not failures. But, as became clear in U.S. President Joe Biden’s speech a few days ago, when he once again delusionally called his country the “indispensable nation,” he wishes to fight the next election as a war president and then some: with wars on two and possibly three fronts.
Given his abysmal ratings, that is the thin thread on which his victory hangs.
Radhika Desai, a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN, is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada.
Putin: “Odessa is a Russian city”
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE |DECEMBER 17, 2023
At the year-end news conference on Thursday lasting four hours, Russian President Vladimir Putin made some key remarks on the conflict in Ukraine which throw light on the likely trajectory of the war through 2024. To be sure, Russia will not accept a “frozen conflict” that falls short of realising the objectives Putin had laid out at the commencement of the special military operations in February last year.
Putin stated: “There will be peace when we achieve our goals… Now let’s return to these goals – they have not changed. I would like to remind you how we formulated them: denazification, demilitarisation, and a neutral status for Ukraine.”
He spelt out denazification and demilitarisation as work in progress while leaving out the crucial question of a neutral status for Ukraine, a notion which the collective West outright rejects while pressing ahead with its intervention in newer forms despite the failure of Kiev’s months-long counteroffensive. Ironically, the accent in the revised western narrative is to create a strong resilient defence industry in Ukraine eventually with western technology and capital to ward off any Russian military threats in future.
On denazification specifically, Putin said that during the negotiations in Istanbul last year in March, Kiev showed receptiveness towards the idea of legislating against the spread of extremist ideology, but that lies buried in the past. As for demilitarisation, that idea also never caught on as Ukraine began receiving weaponry “even more than what was promised by the West.”
Therefore, Russia is left with no other option but to keep destroying the Ukrainian military capability as the core of the demilitarisation process. But Putin believed that certain parameters can still be negotiated, and, in fact, “We actually agreed on them [with Ukrainian negotiators] during the Istanbul talks; although these were thrown out later, we managed to reach agreement.” The alternative to reaching an agreement on demilitarisation is to “resolve the conflict by force. This is what we will strive for.” However, to this end, Putin ruled out another mobilisation as already “there will be about half a million people [in the war zone] by the end of this year.”
These remarks bear the hallmark of a statesman speaking from a position of strength who is conscious of it, too. Putin asserted that Russian forces are “improving their position almost along the entire line of contact. Almost all of them are engaged in active combat. And the position of our troops is improving along [the entire line of contact.]” Putin conveyed no willingness to compromise with the US and EU.
Significantly, Putin said that the southern part of Ukraine has “always been Russian territory… Neither Crimea nor the Black Sea has any connection to Ukraine. Odessa is a Russian city.” This is an ominous statement implying that the Russian operation may after all extend to Odessa which is on the western side of the Dnieper and even further westward along the Black Sea coast to Moldova that renders Ukraine a land-locked country. A prolonged conflict is in the cards.
On the contrary, the reports from the US media quoting American officials convey the impression that there is no willingness to throw in the towel at the present stage. That is of course predicated on the belief that Russia will be hard put to realise its objectives and by the end of 2024, the tide of war can change and Russia may be compelled to compromise. Thus, a new strategy is being worked out between the US and Ukrainian military that can be executed by the early part of 2024 with the American accent on holding the territory that Ukraine controls as of now and digging in.
The New York Times reported that the Ukrainian military subscribes to a “forward policy.” The Pentagon is stationing a three-star general in Kiev with a view to “stepping up the face-to-face military advice it provides to Ukraine.” This could be the beginning of deployment of American military advisors to Ukraine to oversee the war, which will put the Pentagon in a direct role in the management of the operations from both the tactical as well as strategic perspectives.
Meanwhile, the final word is not yet spoken by the US Senate on the Administration’s demand of $61 billion as additional funds for Ukraine. The likelihood is that the senate will eventually pass the bill since there is a big groundswell of support among Republican lawmakers for the war effort. The Administration is driving home that Russia has an “imperial” agenda toward NATO countries and vital US interests are at stake in preventing Russia from winning the war.
Interestingly, in a related development two days ago, Congress approved legislation that would prevent any president from withdrawing the US from NATO without approval from the Senate or an Act of Congress. Equally, Europe is also circling the wagons and taking a long-term view that Russia’s scale-up of arms production to sustain its operations in Ukraine poses a real threat to Europe, especially to the Baltic states, Georgia and Moldova. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg last week warned that “If Putin wins in Ukraine, there is real risk that his aggression will not end there.”
The German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius echoed that sentiment when he said on Saturday that Europe must ramp up its security and defence capabilities to respond to the threat Russia poses, as the US will likely reduce its involvement on the Continent in the coming years and increasingly turn its attention to the Pacific region in the next decade. As he put it, “This isn’t just sabre-rattling. Dangers could lie ahead at the end of this decade.”
The message from the European Council meeting in Brussels last Friday is also that in circumventing Hungary’s opposition, EU leaders are navigating a pathway to ensure Ukraine will still get its €50 billion aid package to help prop up its hollowed out economy — if necessary, by taking the radical step of sacrificing EU unity and providing the money on a bilateral basis. The EU leaders are expected to reconvene at the end of January or early February to unlock the issue.
On Friday, Ukraine’s foreign ministry released a statement lauding the opening of EU membership negotiations and voicing optimism about the €50 billion aid package from Brussels. The tough talk notwithstanding, Russia too must be sensing that the EU will ultimately find a way somehow to solve the financial question. For the present, though, the deadlock in Brussels and Washington on aid has generated an air of uncertainty, which is bad optics for Kiev and plays into the Russian narrative.
All in all, Putin’s tough remarks on Thursday factor in that the US isn’t going anywhere but stays put in Ukraine and the Biden administration’s game plan is to revamp the war strategy to put it on a stronger footing and make it sustainable through the period ahead till the November 2024 election.
Kremlin’s hope that US support for Ukraine is on the wane seems misplaced. Curiously, spokesman Dmitry Peskov added in good measure in an interview on Friday with broadcaster NBC News that Putin would prefer an American president who is “more constructive” toward Russia and understands the “importance of the dialogue” between the two countries. Peskov added that Putin would be ready to work with “anyone who will understand that from now on, you have to be more careful with Russia and you have to take into account its concerns.”
Between now and the presidential election in March in Russia, domestic politics will be hotting up. After Putin’s re-election for a fresh 6-year term as president, which is widely expected, by the time the new government is formed, the campaign for the US election will have accelerated and it is a safe bet that the Ukraine war will be on auto-pilot with the priority almost entirely lying on averting any serious embarrassment to Biden’s reelection bid.
Suffice to say, staving off a military defeat in Ukraine and keeping the stalemate on track will be the Biden administration’s singular aim through 2024. The big question is whether Putin would “cooperate” or have some surprises in store. Peskov has begun looking beyond the Biden presidency.
Joe Biden’s World War III Fantasy
By Scott Ritter – Sputnik – 16.12.2023
On July 13, 2023, US President Joe Biden confidently announced to the world that “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin has already lost the war.”
The “war” Biden spoke of was Russia’s Special Military Operation against Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022.
Biden’s bold statement was made during a press conference with Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto, following a meeting with Nordic leaders that came on the heels of the NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Biden declared that the US and its NATO allies had, through their decision to commit to the military victory of Ukraine over Russia, reached “an inflection point in history,” adding that “This fight is not only a fight for the future of Ukraine, it is about sovereignty, security and freedom itself.”
The American president’s pronouncements followed similarly themed rhetoric spoken in Vilnius a day prior, where he announced to his NATO colleagues, “Our commitment to Ukraine will not weaken,” adding that “We will stand for liberty and freedom today, tomorrow, and for as long as it takes.”
“As long as it takes,” it turns out, isn’t the same as “long as needed.”
Confronted with a trifecta of bad news—the calamitous defeat of the NATO-trained and equipped Ukrainian military in the much-hyped summer counteroffensive, a Russian Army that is growing stronger by the day, and the collapse of political will and fiscal ability on the part of Ukraine’s erstwhile allies in the US and Europe to continue funding Ukraine’s flagging war effort—Joe Biden was compelled to alter his pledge to the cause of Ukrainian and European liberty and freedom to “as long as we can,” with the modifier contingent upon the US Congress’ willingness to throw another $60 billion into the $120 billion in aid the US has provided Ukraine since May 2022.
To intimidate Congress into yielding to his demands regarding money for Ukraine, Biden undertook a campaign of terror. “Frankly,” Biden said in a statement delivered at the White House in early December, “I think it’s stunning we have gotten to this point in the first place. Republicans in Congress are willing to give Putin the greatest gift he could hope for and abandon our global leadership.”
While many Republicans support continued funding of the Ukraine war effort, the issue has become politicized in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election, where domestic issues tend to trump foreign affairs. And, currently, there is no more high-profile domestic policy issue than border security and immigration reform. Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina who has been a vociferous supporter of Ukraine, noted that while he would support continued funding of Ukraine’s war effort, he could not return to his home state of South Carolina to “try to explain why I helped Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel and did nothing to secure our own border. I will help all of our allies, but we have got to help ourselves first.”
Mike Johnson, the new Republican speaker of the House and a hardline conservative, indicated that the objection to continued funding for Ukraine went beyond simply funding issues. “What is the objective?” Johnson said to reporters after meeting with Ukrainian President Zelensky earlier this month. “What is the endgame in Ukraine? How are we going to have proper oversight of the funds?”
Russian servicemen fire a BM-21 Grad multiple rocket launcher towards Ukrainian positions in the course of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, at the unknown location in the
Both Graham and Johnson had been subjected to a full-court press by Joe Biden and the White House in an effort for the recalcitrant Republicans to reverse course on their objections. “We can’t let Putin win,” Biden pleaded. “If Putin takes Ukraine,” Biden noted, “he won’t stop there.” The US president said an emboldened Putin would move on to threaten his NATO neighbors. And then, Biden stated, “We’ll have something that we don’t seek and that we don’t have today: American troops fighting Russian troops.”
If the threat of a Third World War in the face of Congressional inaction wasn’t enough, Biden authorized the Pentagon to declassify and release to CNN an intelligence report that claimed that Russia had suffered enormous casualties in its war with Ukraine, with some 315,000 of an estimated 360,000 troops that made up Russia’s pre-conflict ground force, having been killed or wounded. The declassified intelligence report also claimed that 2,200 of Russia’s 3,500 tanks have been lost, along with 4,400 of 13,600 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers.
The release of the declassified report was clearly timed to influence the US Congress by emphasizing the very talking points that have been repeatedly made by Senator Graham and others that the US aid was “Best money we’ve ever spent” because “the Russians are dying.”
Given the history of the US intelligence community of declassifying intelligence reports for the specific purpose of releasing the information to mainstream media outlets to shape public opinion—even if the intelligence community knows the information contained in the report is wrong—one must take the report regarding Russian casualties with a heavy grain of salt. According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russia currently has some 617,000 troops deployed in the Special Military Operation zone. These forces are on the offensive, actively advancing on several fronts against a Ukrainian Army which is rapidly losing its ability to sustain large-scale ground combat operations. This doesn’t sound like the performance of an organization that suffered some 87% casualties, a figure which would make the survivors combat ineffective.
The fact is, US and European support for Ukraine is flagging, and Ukraine is facing an existential crisis in the coming weeks and months that it most likely will not be able to resolve in its favor.
While Russian troops are taking casualties, it is far more likely than not that the real Russian casualty figures are significantly less than the number reported in the declassified US intelligence report, spread out over the original force and the hundreds of thousands of mobilized reservists and volunteers who have entered the fighting since. These losses pale in comparison to the more than 400,000 dead and nearly one million wounded Ukraine has suffered.
Russia’s combat power grows every day, with fresh troops and equipment being made available for the war effort. Ukraine, on the other hand, has exhausted its reserves, and is left scraping the bottom of its human resources barrel to man whatever units it is able to organize from what is left of Ukraine’s diminished, and diminishing, arsenal.
While the Russian Army is indeed large, and growing, and its capabilities expanding as it becomes more combat experienced, it is an army with a very specific mission—the defeat of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The Russian force structure is currently more than sufficient to defeat the Ukrainians on a frontage that stretches some 2,000 kilometers in length. It is even large enough to secure some additional Ukrainian territory, in addition to liberating the newly absorbed Russian territories of the Kherson, Zaporozhye, Donetsk, and Lugansk regions still held by Ukraine. But there are physical limitations as to what one can accomplish with 617,000 troops and occupying all of Ukraine before invading Poland and/or the Baltics is well beyond the capacity of the Russian forces currently deployed in the Special Military Operation.
Moreover, Russian President Vladimir Putin has never intimated that Russia had any intention to either occupy all of Ukraine or seek to attack NATO — just the opposite. The Russian goals and objectives of the Special Military Operation are spelled out very clearly — demilitarization (the destruction of the Ukrainian Armed Forces), de-Nazification (the elimination of the regime of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the pro-Nazi political element inside Ukraine), and permanent neutrality for Ukraine (i.e., Ukraine will never join NATO). There is no intent to take the war to NATO. Such thinking is a fear-based construct of the Biden administration that is inaccurate and far removed from reality, little more than a fantasy which the sober-minded Russian government, ever mindful of the need to carefully manage escalation because of the Special Military Operation, will pay scant attention to.
Joe Biden and his national security team are scrambling to manage the consequences of policy failure. Putin, it seems, has not lost the war with Ukraine. Russia is winning, something no amount of funding by either the US, the Europeans, or both, can reverse. The best thing that could happen to Ukraine is for the congressional Republicans to hold steadfast to their objections and allow Ukraine to be taken off the life support that US funding provides. Ukraine is a terminal case. Continuing to underwrite its failed war effort simply prolongs the agony of its people.
Zelensky’s Global Begging Tour Is an Obscene Fiasco
Strategic Culture Foundation | December 15, 2023
The United States’ proxy war in Ukraine against Russia has cost the lives of up to 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers. In the last six months alone, it is estimated that over 120,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed in a failed counteroffensive.
Even Western media are coyly admitting the grim reality of failure after much-vaunted predictions last year of imminent victory against Russia.
Yet nearly two years after the conflict erupted, the leader of the puppet regime in Kiev persists in begging for billions more in funds from his Western sponsors to continue the bloodbath – the biggest armed confrontation in Europe since the Second World War.
The hostilities can be traced back to the 2014 coup in Kiev orchestrated by the CIA and precipitated by the European Union and Washington trying to cleave traditional Ukrainian relations with Russia. Those hostilities culminated in February 2022 in what can be seen as a U.S.-led proxy war against Russia. A war that has failed for the Western powers and needs to be peacefully negotiated to spare further death and destruction.
This week, however, saw Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky going to Washington to plead for $60 billion in additional funds. His begging mission failed. The U.S. Congress refused to pass the supplemental bill requested on his behalf by President Joe Biden for Ukraine.
After that humiliation, Zelensky then turned his solicitation to the European Union. The EU, by turn, failed to agree on a requested fund for $54 billion for Ukraine.
As a sort of consolation prize, the EU leaders at their two-day summit in Brussels declared that Ukraine could start negotiations for eventually gaining access to the 27-member bloc. That decision was bombastically hailed as “historic” but it seemed more theatre than substance given that the negotiations will take several years to conduct and there is no guarantee at the end of the tedious process that Ukraine will actually gain EU membership. Will Ukraine even exist as a state in a few years, as our columnist Stephen Karganovic ponders in an article this week?
The EU membership talks were granted no doubt as a way to distract from the fact that the EU funds were not forthcoming and especially following the miserable response from U.S. lawmakers.
The whole sorry saga indicates that the U.S.-led proxy war in Ukraine has become a deplorable black hole for Western public money. Given the military debacle and the futile bloodshed, it is becoming politically untenable for Washington and Brussels to keep shovelling billions of taxpayer money into this abyss.
Up for the asking this week was a total of nearly $100 billion between the U.S. and Europe for Ukraine. How many badly needed public services in Western states could do with – and are denied – that kind of financial sustenance?
The spectacle of Zelensky touring the world scrounging for more money is as shameful as it is sordid.
Official figures show that the Western governments have already donated a combined total of $200 billion to Ukraine since the conflict escalated in February 2022.
To put that largesse into perspective, it is estimated that the U.S. Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of the whole of Europe following World War Two was equivalent to $173 billion in today’s money.
Think about that. The Western funding to Ukraine already exceeds this historic salvage package by some $30 billion. And yet Western governments are trying to muster another $100 billion on top of that.
There are several conclusions to be made. First of all, the U.S.-led proxy war against Russia is indisputably a calamitous failure. Despite the unprecedented financing of weapons and other support to the Kiev regime, the war is a dead-end for the Western powers. The 30-member NATO military alliance is staring at a defeat unparalleled in its 75-year history.
Secondly, it is patent that the Kiev regime is only being propped up by the transfer of colossal flows of aid from the West. Without those transfusions of weapons and capital, the regime is finished. It has already lost grievous numbers of troops on the battlefield. Conscription drives are scraping the barrel. Without the lifeline of aid, the regime is finished. The Kiel Institute for World Economy reported last week that Western capital pledges to the Kiev regime have fallen off a cliff since the summer.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said this week in his annual marathon televised Q&A with the public and journalists that Russia will push on with its objectives of eradicating the NATO-backed Nazi forces in Ukraine. There seems little doubt that the objective will be achieved given the parlous state of the Kiev regime.
Another conclusion to draw is the scale of corruption that Ukraine is mired in. For all the funds pumped into this regime so much of it has been siphoned off from the stated purposes.
The obscenity of this war racket is the inordinate corruption, deaths and destruction of economies across Europe while Western weapons corporations have raked in mega-profits.
Zelensky’s global begging tour is a desperate attempt to keep the war racket going for a while longer. He and his wife Olena have enriched themselves with overseas properties and shopping trips to Paris and New York. Zelensky and his cronies have been paid off with blood money for their role in peddling the biggest war scam in modern history. A scam that is funded by hard-pressed and hoodwinked Western taxpayers who have been gaslighted by their politicians and media about “defending democracy and freedom”.
To keep this grotesque charade going, Western politicians in the pay of arms companies and NATO think tanks are resorting to desperate scaremongering and blackmail.
President Biden has repeatedly warned that if extra funds were not released to Ukraine to “defend against Russian aggression” the rest of Europe will be overrun by Moscow.
In Washington this week, U.S. lawmakers who refused to pass the supplemental funding bill for Ukraine were, in effect, accused of being traitors by helping Russia.
Zelensky appealed to European leaders by saying that Putin would exploit any negativity towards Ukraine, and he pleaded with the EU to not “betray” Ukrainians.
On the eve of the EU leaders’ summit in Brussels, the European Commission declared that it was finally releasing €10 billion in withheld funds to Hungary. That was a bribe to Hungarian premier Viktor Orban to concede to the proposed €50 billion in extra aid for the Kiev regime. In the end, Orban did not concede to the multi-billion-euro handout, however, he gave way to his objection to talks for Ukraine’s membership of the EU. Such is the shoddy business of propping up the Kiev regime that arm-twisting and bribery are the order of business in Brussels.
The horrendous waste of lives and financial resources in Ukraine by the Western elite – instead of pursuing diplomacy and peace – is the hallmark that these regimes are terminally corrupt and doomed to failure.
The conflict in Ukraine has recklessly stoked tensions between nuclear powers and has condemned generations of Americans and Europeans to debt. The war in Ukraine is a historic dead-end for the U.S. and its European vassals. Zelensky’s begging bowl is a death rattle.
Russian Airborne Forces Ex-Commander: NATO Counteroffensive Plan Bad, New Ukraine Strategy Worse
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 14.12.2023
The Russian Armed Forces have shifted to the offensive in the special military operation zone and are making progress along the entire contact line, President Vladimir Putin said during his annual press conference.
Russia’s 617,000-strong military contingent is presently improving its positions along the almost 2,000 kilometer-long contact line, President Putin told attendees at his annual press conference. What’s behind the development?
The failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive has exposed the ineffectiveness of NATO’s strategic planning and outdated doctrines, says retired Colonel General Georgy Shpak, ex-commander of the Russian Airborne Forces.
“[NATO] placed its bet on Ukraine making it carry out a counteroffensive,” Shpak told Sputnik. “They organized and planned it. But the counteroffensive failed, because the [Russian military] foresaw [their steps], built good defenses worthy of the Russian army and withstood numerous attacks.”
“Now we have moved on to the second stage of this operation: to disable as much [Ukrainian] equipment and personnel as possible. This second stage is essentially coming to an end, because the Ukrainian army is exhausted, they lack manpower, their reserves are depleted, their money has run out, almost all of their equipment has been knocked out. This is the result of the work of American and British [military] advisers,” the retired colonel general continued.
NATO war planners failed to calculate the effects of many key factors, according to the military expert.
“They did not take into account current modern conditions, the huge number of [Russian] aerial vehicles that are designed for reconnaissance, observation, adjustment, and strikes. They didn’t take this into account. They hoped that if they struck in several directions, our defenses would crack, but we held the line.”
Shpak was also highly sceptical of NATO’s 2024 strategy for Ukraine, which envisages digging in and building up forces for a possible new offensive.
“I would say that it is even worse than their counter-offensive,” the general said. “Not a single defensive structure can withstand strikes of modern powerful weapons. Furthermore, it’s impossible to build reinforced concrete fortifications which are over 1,000 kilometers long and 20-30 meters deep, with enormous coverage. This is all nonsense. It’s impossible to build something like that. There will still be gaps here and there, failures here and there.”
“This is all theory. For me, as a military man, it’s just like a children’s fairy tale, not a thought-out plan. They have abruptly shifted from a counteroffensive to an all-out defense. I believe this will lead to their defeat,” Shpak added.
Ukraine’s Botched Counteroffensive Ignites New ‘Mantras’ in US – Lavrov
Sputnik – 13.12.2023
With Ukraine’s counteroffensive obviously failing, the United States has taken up a new rallying cry, which is to prevent Russian President Vladimir Putin from winning in Ukraine so that “NATO is not conquered,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
“After the collapse of the so-called counteroffensive, [people] in Washington stopped talking about Russia’s strategic defeat on the battlefield and, during Zelensky’s latest visit, activated a new mantra: ‘don’t let Putin win in Ukraine’, otherwise all of NATO will be conquered and then America won’t sit through it,” Lavrov said during the “government hour” in the Federation Council, upper house of the Russian parliament.
“We are ready for such a challenge and will continue to firmly defend our truth,” Lavrov emphasized.
The top Russian diplomat also noted that “it is not easy for our ill-wishers to come to grips with the fact that the bet on the sanctions blitzkrieg against the Russian economy has completely failed.”
“Therefore, those who launched the hybrid war against us won’t admit their mistakes, they are trying to use more and more illegitimate tools to wear down Russia, as they say, relishing the dream of eliminating our country as an independent geopolitical value,” the Russian diplomacy chief explained.
Mainstream propaganda machine doubles down on ‘Russia losing’ fantasies
By Drago Bosnic | December 13, 2023
Even before the start of the special military operation (SMO), the mainstream media had been running several propaganda narratives, almost simultaneously. Shortly before the SMO and in the first few days, there was the claim that Russia would take Kiev in three days and most of Ukraine in a week. However, as this didn’t happen (nor was it ever planned to unfold this way in the Kremlin), the mainstream propaganda machine went full afterburner in the opposite direction. Now, Moscow was suddenly losing, the Kiev regime forces are unbeatable, the Russians are suffering from extremely low morale due to massive losses, they’re running out of missiles, shells, fuel and so on, and so forth.
These ludicrous myths never stopped and continued until the failure of the much-touted counteroffensive. That was when many in the political West adopted a somewhat less propagandistic tone and tried mixing in some “realism”. However, this didn’t have the desired effect on the populace in Western Europe and North America. Thus, there’s a slow return to the most ridiculous propaganda one could possibly imagine. For instance, the Wall Street Journal claims that the Neo-Nazi junta will be “able to seize the initiative on the battlefield in 2025 if it can hold out against Russia until the end of next year”. This narrative is being pushed despite the fact that the United States, its primary backer, is about to stop the money flow.
The report initially doesn’t come off as propagandistic as one would expect, but towards the end, the authors still tried pushing debunked propaganda narratives. There are several instances of somewhat unexpected admissions, such as the obvious failure of the Kiev regime’s counteroffensive, as well as the dwindling financial support from the political West. The report also touched upon the growing divisions within the Neo-Nazi junta and the fact that its battered military will need time to recover. However, in a response to the WSJ, its Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba challenged this with a claim that “any pause in the fighting now would allow Russia to regroup and prepare for large-scale offensive operations”.
Kuleba even stated that the Kiev regime forces are preparing fresh brigades for “new counteroffensive and defensive operations”. The WSJ supported the idea and even went as far as to claim that “2024 will be the year of the recovery [for the Neo-Nazi junta troops]”. However, the authors admit that this comes with an important caveat, as the Kiev regime and its NATO overlords will need to “work through their current adversities and continue delivering supplies to troops, an emerging best-case scenario among Western strategists is that next year becomes a year of rebuilding for Kiev’s military“, adding that “the hope would be that a limited number of Ukrainian soldiers can hold Russian forces at bay”.
This would supposedly “allow NATO countries time to train fresh Ukrainian troops, expand armament production and restock Ukraine’s arsenals”. As indicated during a recent NATO meeting, the political West hopes that Russia’s incremental offensive operations will fail, “resulting in a depletion of its manpower and munitions, potentially offering Ukraine better prospects to retake the battlefield initiative in the spring of 2025, if it gets through next year”. However, the WSJ concluded the report with a not-so-optimistic remark of a Ukrainian infantry sergeant who said that when he talks to people at home he tells them that “everything is going well” and doesn’t describe what he sees or feels, which isn’t so upbeat.
“What is the point?”, the WSJ quoted the Ukrainian sergeant.
While the WSJ certainly is part of the mainstream, it’s still a bit more reputable than many other outlets of America’s massive propaganda machine. For instance, the infamous CNN is beating its own records in laughable claims by publishing that “Russia has lost a staggering 87% of the total number of active-duty ground troops it had prior to launching its invasion of Ukraine and two-thirds of its pre-invasion tanks”. Of course, this information came from “a source familiar with a declassified US intelligence assessment provided to Congress”. The assessment was sent on December 11, as the Republican-dominated Congress was in the middle of effectively canceling the “Ukraine aid”.
The “intelligence” assessment supposedly found that “the war has sharply set back 15 years of Russian effort to modernize its ground force”. Then came the numbers game, where CNN claims that “of the 360,000 troops that entered Ukraine, including contract and conscript personnel, Russia has lost 315,000 on the battlefield, 2,200 of 3,500 tanks and 4,400 of 13,600 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers have also been destroyed, a 32% loss rate”. CNN says it reached out to the Russian Embassy for comment, which is yet to respond. The most likely scenario is that His Excellency Ambassador Anatoly Antonov is still laughing uncontrollably after reading all this. And he certainly isn’t the only one.
“The idea that Ukraine was going to throw Russia back to the 1991 borders was preposterous,” Sen. J.D. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, said on CNN’s State of the Union on December 10, adding: “So what we’re saying to the president and really to the entire world is, you need to articulate what the ambition is. What is $61 billion going to accomplish that $100 billion hasn’t?”
Even CNN had to admit that “Ukraine remains deeply vulnerable”, as its “highly anticipated counteroffensive stagnated through the fall”, and that “US officials believe that Kiev is unlikely to make any major gains over the coming months”. As for the alleged “staggering losses” of the Russian military, the truth is that Moscow hasn’t been this strong militarily since at least the 1980s. In addition, the Kremlin is effectively returning to a Soviet superpower level with its latest military strategy shift. The very idea that Russia lost well over 300,000 soldiers is beyond ludicrous, as the country would be littered with new military cemeteries in virtually every major settlement. On the contrary, it’s precisely Ukraine that looks like that thanks to the NATO-backed Neo-Nazi junta.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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NATO Sanctions and the Coming Global Diesel Fuel Disaster
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 11.04.2022
Amid the ongoing global inflation crisis, NATO heads of state and mainstream media repeat a mantra that high energy prices are a direct result of Putin’s actions in Ukraine since end of February. The reality is that it is the western sanctions that are responsible. Those sanctions including cutting SWIFT interbank access for key Russian banks and some of the most severe sanctions ever imposed, are hardly having an impact on the military actions in Ukraine. What many overlook is the fact that they are increasingly impacting the economies of the West, especially the EU and USA. A closer look at the state of the global supply of diesel fuel is alarming. But Western sanctions planners at the US Treasury and the EU know fully well what they are doing. And it bodes ill for the world economy.
While most of us rarely think about diesel fuel as anything other than a pollutant, in fact it is essential to the entire world economy in a way few energy sources are. The director general of Fuels Europe, part of the European Petroleum Refiners Association, stated recently, “… there is a clear link between diesel and GDP, because almost everything that goes into and out of a factory goes using diesel.” … continue
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