Lester Golden
3 min readMay 22, 2022

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Cutting apart your evidence-free argument is as easy as Peter the Great snipping his Boyars’ beards:

a) Putin losing Crimea is a forecast. Crimea has been Russian “forever” only since Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars in May 1944. The Crimean Tatars were the only group of ethnic deportees NOT permitted to return after Khruschev denounced Stalin’s crimes in 1956.

b) Guerrilla warfare in Spain and Portugal aided and financed by Britain from 1808–14 tied down 250000 French troops not available to the Grande Armee’s Russian invasion. Russia’s other western alliances are described in Alexander I’s Wikipedia page:

Alexander kept Russia as neutral as possible in the ongoing French war with Britain. He did however allow trade to continue secretly with Britain and did not enforce the blockade required by the Continental System. In 1810 he withdrew Russia from the Continental System and trade between Britain and Russia grew. Relations between France and Russia became progressively worse after 1810. By 1811, it became clear that Napoleon was not keeping to his side of the terms of the Treaty of Tilsit. He had promised assistance to Russia in its war against the Ottoman Empire, but as the campaign went on, France offered no support at all. With war imminent between France and Russia, Alexander started to prepare the ground diplomatically. In April 1812 Russia and Sweden signed an agreement for mutual defence. A month later Alexander secured his southern flank through the Treaty of Bucharest (1812), which formally ended the war against the ottomans. His diplomats managed to extract promises from Prussia and Austria that should Napoleon invade Russia, the former would help Napoleon as little as possible and that the latter would give no aid at all.

And Alexander’s Minister of War who reformed the Russian military was the Baltic German-Scottish baron Michael Barclay de Tolly. Western alliances and personnel were as key to Russian victory against Napoleon as they were to the Soviet victory against Germany.

c) Reread Stalin’s toast to American war production. Here’s by the numbers Reply to Russian Great Patriotic War Myths from my WWII Mythbusting Tour series: https://medium.com/exploring-history/wwii-mythbusting-tour-27faf81f0873 :

2/3: Proportion of the trucks, radios, jeeps, new railroad ties supplied to the Red Army. The American Mustangs used in Operation Bagration were American-sourced war materiel. At the Teheran meeting in November 1943 Stalin raised his glass in a toast to American war production, “without which the war could not be won.”

400000: The number of troops Stalin moved from the Amur River in the Soviet Far East to the gates of Moscow after Richard Sorge, the Soviet spy in the Germany embassy in Tokyo, proved in October 1941 that the Japanese planned to attack Pearl Harbor and western allies’ imperial possessions in the Pacific and not go north into Siberia.

33.08%: Share of Luftwaffe aircraft shot down on the eastern front until 1/1/1944. (https://chris-intel-corner.blogspot.com/2012/04/eastern-front-aircraft-strength-and.html)

75%, 79%, 81%: Share of Luftwaffe aircraft lost over Germany in the last quarter of 1943, first quarter of 1944 and second quarter of 1944. Soviet air superiority on the eastern front was guaranteed by the Anglo-Americans putting targets over Germany, the only second front that counted before June 6, 1944.

.0537: “Historian Gröhler in “Stärke, Verteilung und Verluste der deutschen Luftwaffe im zweiten Weltkrieg” gives for the Eastern front in 1944 0,00703 losses per sortie with the equivalent number in the West being 0.0537. Usually a loss rate over 5% means an airforce cannot continue to operate efficiently. On the other hand a rate of ~1% in 1944 when the Soviet airforce had such a quantitative advantage is very low. It definitely doesn’t paint a very good picture of the Soviet pilots.” (https://chris-intel-corner.blogspot.com/2012/04/eastern-front-aircraft-strength-and.html)

Again, putting bomber targets to be shot at over Germany removed the Luftwaffe from the eastern front, whether the bombings succeeded or failed to substantially impair German war production. Western airmen kept the Luftwaffe off the back of the Red Army. Western allies invading Italy and Operation Mincemeat diverting German armies to stop an allied invasion of Greece that never happened kept them out of the Battle of Kursk.

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Lester Golden
Lester Golden

Written by Lester Golden

From Latvia & Porto I write to share learning from an academic&business life in 8 languages in 5 countries & seeing fascism die in Portugal&Spain in1974 & 1976.

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