I had no idea I'd attained favorite historian status with anyone. This is likely an optimism as misplaced as Mr. Dunn's evaluation of Russia's military prospects that led him to recommend Ukrainian surrender to Russia's state policy of genocide a year ago. He also forecast Ukrainian military failure just before the Kharkiv and Kherson offensives. But he never mentions previous errant forecasts in new articles while also peddling these Russian ethno-nationalist fantasies:
1. Russia's right to alter borders based on a "right to protect" Russian speakers, which uncritically swallows the evidence-free Russian state disinformation that Russian speaking = Russian nationality. My native Russian speaking Latvian wife and her entire extended family disagree. Russian speakers in Narva, Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius aren't Russians and want no part of Moscow's mafia with a flag "protection" racket. Mr. Dunn's useful idiot's repetition of this ethno-nationalist "right to protect" tells you whose side he's on, as does his use of the term "special military operation" instead of war.
2. "Ukraine engaged in warfare against the Donbas"--This is the nonsense peddled by war crime deniers like Jacques Baud and Ukraine aggression fabricator Code Pink. I've debunked it in previous articles and comments on Dunn's and other Russian useful idiots. It's been thoroughly demolished here:
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/05/22/how-accurate-is-jacques-bauds-analysis-of-the-war-in-ukraine/
Even the Russians who triggered the war in the Donbas don't believe it. Again, just listen to Igor Girkin, the ex-FSB agent who's confessed to triggering the conflict:
""I was the one who pulled the trigger of this war," Strelkov said in an interview published Thursday with Russia's Zavtra newspaper, which espouses imperialist views. "If our unit hadn't crossed the border, everything would have fizzled out — like in [the Ukrainian city of] Kharkiv, like in Odessa,"...."There would have been several dozen killed, burned, detained. And that would have been the end of it. But the flywheel of the war, which is continuing to this day, was spun by our unit. We mixed up all the cards on the table," he said."
3. "Russia has been around for 1000 years"--This parrots Putinist propaganda that the Vladimir Christian convert of 988 was Russian. It's complete nonsense. Moscow was a forest when Kyiv was the second largest city in Europe. The Russian state didn't begin to free itself from the Golden Horde until it conquered Novgorod in 1480
Forecasting: On February 14 I forecast that war would break out soon. On February 16, Matt Taibbi, one of Mr. Dunn's favorite useful idiots, said it wouldn't. So let's examine his "best estimates". He likes to cite Gen. Mark Milley, that apostle of conventional wisdom who forecast in the summer of 2021 that the Afghan government would hold, in January 2022 that Ukraine would lose in 72 hours and that Ukraine can't win. Milley, like magazine covers with investments and the Fed's inflation forecasts, is a useful contrarian indicator.
4. Casualty figures: Oryx lists only casualties that are either visuallly confirmed or confirmed by official burial announcements or screenshots of social media in Russia. As of two weeks ago they passed 19500 KIA. That's the absolute floor on Russian KIA, which assumes not a single Russian KIA is left behind so the state can avoid paying death benefits to his family. The probability of that happening is a very simple number: zero. Australian defense economist Perun does a data-and evidence based vivisection of casualty estimate methods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRboVa5zyUk . Start at minute 13:00.
If the Russians recover only 1/3 of the bodies of their fallen convicts and mobiki, the floor of Russian KIAs is about 60k. Perun makes clear that many of Russia's elite units, like the brigade protecting Russia's Arctic nuclear installations near the Norwegian border, have been cannibalized to be fed into the Bakhmut meat grinder. Using specialized troops and cannibalizing manpower by turning irreplaceable specialized workers from arms factories into ill-trained, ill-equipped mobiki in Bakhmut or Vuhledar is a sure indicator of manpower shortages. But Mr. Dunn needs to inflate Russia's military competence and deflate Ukraine's to support his overall thesis: pull the plug on western support for Ukraine. This is, of course, Putin's only hope since his military has gone from the maskirovka of looking like the second best in the world to being the second best in Ukraine.
5. "A large fraction Ukraine has been destroyed"--Mr. Dunn is persistently annoyed at Ukraine's stubborn insistence on existing. He also said Russia was going to freeze Europe and freeze Ukraine. But the lights are on in Kyiv and Odesa, with restaurants full, and the EU retooled its energy mix. The antidote to this nonsense: https://shankar20.medium.com/how-ukraine-won-the-battle-for-the-power-grid-97b4d633015b
Who's Russia selling oil and LNG to now: lots of bankrupt African countries that aren't paying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5R5C53XkjZM
(Joe Blogs).
6. "Ukraine...could have signed a peace agreement"--This Ukraine woulda, shoulda, coulda says, "how dare you fight to exist" and push my nuclear fear button. Ukrainians have agency and by resisting Russian genocide they're telling you that your fear is not their problem, but yours. By resisting they've made the Baltics, Poland, Georgia and Taiwan safer, as Tim Snyder makes clear (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbnxXUhpjtM)
Zelenskiy offered neutrality at the start of the war. Putin, confident in instant victory, rejected the offer, full stop. Lavrov reiterated in January that the premise of negotiations is Ukraine accepting Russia's September 2022 annexations of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia, in other words renouncing its viability as a sovereign state.
After Bucha and Irpin everything changed. Ask any Ukrainian how and why. Or just read this catalog of Russian genocidal venom spewed forth daily by the Russian state and its media: https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/
Since we're told that "the forces that defeated Russia in the past, do not exist now", let's compare the forces arrayed against Russia in its previous defeats vs the current ones:
1. Crimea 1.0: Russia's serf army defeated by France and Britain's citizen armies and the walking dead empire of the Ottomans.
Crimea 2.0: 51 countries with a GDP of $70tn+ support Ukraine. India now supports the oil price cap, while Russia imports drone tech from Iran and artillery shells from North Korea. Russian oil revenue is down 46%, drawing down on its sovereign wealth fund at a rate of $8bn/month and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska says Russia will exhaust its foreign reserves by the end of this year.
2. 1905 vs Japan: Japan had the support of a $200m bond issue syndicated by NY banker Jacob Schiff in revenge for the murderous 1903 pogrom in Kishinev that my paternal grandfather survived, allowing me to exist to annoy Russia's western useful idiots peddling evidence-free disinformation. This was the one and only time that the Protocols forged by the Tsar's secret police were actually accurate.
Russia had German intelligence support while Japan benefited from British intelligence. Now Russia has the US and NATO satellite network and air forces providing real time targeting intelligence to Ukraine's drone and air force. Ask the Japanese which is better.
3. WWI: Defeated by Germany, Austria and revolution, Russia joins the dead empire society, with Finland, the Baltics and Ukraine declaring independence. This empire implosion occurs despite an alliance with the UK, France, Serbia, Italy. Russia's current allies: Iran, North Korea and a China turning it into a resource colony. The Tsarist Russia of 1914 had a better alliance network and fewer enemies than Russia has now.
4. Afghanistan, 1979-89: Compare the CIA's support for a motley collection of tribal warlords and guerrillas with Stingers to the Leopards, Challengers, Javelins, Bradleys, HIMARS and training flowing to Ukraine now.
Game, set, match.
