Examples of this writer’s truly magical thinking:
1. Ukraine should surrender since surrender is better than war, which this writer said in April 2022. But he likes this fact to stay hidden.
2. He said Russia was winning just before the Kharkiv and Kherson offensives. But he wants current readers not to know this.
3. Russia will respect a peace agreement more than it respected the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine will agree to a ceasefire, frozen conflict or peace agreement without ironclad and security guarantees enforced by western powers.
4. Ukraine can be a viable state with Russia still holding the Sebastopol naval base threatening Odesa. Sebastopol is negotiable for Russia.
5. Ukraine can be a viable state without its Azov seaports and be a viable investment destination while continually threatened by Russia. If you believe this, I have some Ukrainian stocks you might want to buy.
6. Russia's war is not a genocidal Ukraine erasure operation three centuries in the making. Don't believe read what its media and leaders say every day: https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/
There is no moral difference between the two sides, as if there are Ukrainian versions of the mass graves of Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol and Izyum.
7. This writer said Mark Milley is a good forecaster. Remember that Russia will take Kyiv in three days forecast. Remember that Kabul won't fall to the Taliban forecast?
8. Ukraine's existence should be negotiated over a bottle of vodka. Negotiating with openly genocidal war criminals who practice mass Russification deportations of your children, ban your language and say you don't and shouldn't exist makes sense.
9. Russia has a viable military industrial base while it's de-mothballing WWII vintage T-34 and Korean War vintage T-55 tanks.
10. Russia suffers from no ammo shortages. Ask Yevgeny Prigozhin. https://www.businessinsider.com/russias-wagner-boss-threatens-bakhmut-withdrawal-due-to-lack-ammo-2023-4?op=1
What goes unmentioned? 20k shells/day is down from 60k/day last summer. Of course, no comment at all about Russia using $1m S300 rockets to hit apartment blocks 100 miles from the front line since this second best army in the world demoted to second best army in Ukraine is utterly incapable of offensive operations beyong rocketed war crimes against schools, hospitals, museums (bombed when not looted) and apartment blocks.
The data-driven antidote to this Ukraine deflation and Russia inflation is the Australian defense economist Perun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj9HD8MdAFs&t=3214s
11. Putin will stop at Ukraine if he’s not stopped in Ukraine. He’s proclaimed himself to be the second coming of Peter the Great and that Tsar’s “gathering of lands”, which include NATO members Finland and the Baltic States.
12. More magical thinking: Ukraine will abandon its people living under occupation to mass child deportations, the neo Stalinist filtration camp Gulag and torture chambers.
13. Blame NATO expansion for the war, omitting that Putin’s July 2021 screed justifying war doesn’t even mention it nor does Putin mention Finland’s NATO accession.
14. Russia’s war is about “security concerns” and not purely regime preservation, the Ukrainian threat of the good example — a prosperous democracy right next door to Russia’s people enserfed by mafia with a flag kleptocracy.
15. Russia has a 1000 history of expertise in warfare and is good at fighting wars. In reality Russians are serf soldiers who are good at dying, not fighting when not aided by a stronger western power. Ask the 40000/50000 recruited Wagner convicts who are either dead or wounded. This writer is a recidivist parroter of this Putinist ethno-nationalist idiocy, ignoring that Moscow was a forested bog until it was re-founded in the 1260s, after being burnt to the ground and its population killed a century before by the Mongols. Of course, he will hide from new readers this mindless parroting of Putin’s ethno-nationalist screed of July 2021 that Voldemar, the Viking warlord convert to Christianity in 988, and Kyiv 1000 years ago were destined to become Russian.
But what can you expect from Russian useful idiots carrying Kremlin water while dressing in faux-peacenik garb.
