Jessica Wildfire is a leading citizen of the Emirate of Whataboutistan. Here's the antidote to this Russian disinformation usesful idiocy so readers can know the genocide apologist terrain of Whataboutistan: https://medium.com/illumination-curated/travels-in-the-empire-of-whataboutistan-fcac568267cb
How to know your western genocide apologist who can't distinguish between viable and unviable empires. When faced with a choice of bad and worse in the geopolitics restaurant, they insist on ordering what's not on the menu.
Useful idiot is not a personal insult, but a specific historical term coined by the KGB referring to the western apologists for the USSR (the UK Socialist Webbs, Lincoln "I have seen the future and it works" Steffens, George Bernard Shaw, FDR's dumped VP, Henry Wallace) and the communists whose slogan from Sept 17, 1939 to June 23, 1941 was "don't fight the imperialist war!". Watch this video of KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov describing western useful idiots like our author here: https://russia-insider.com/en/must-see-video-ex-kbg-agent-exposes-process-cultural-marxist-subversion-west/ri16016
Wildfire, along with Munir Kazmir, ScottCDunn and Corinne Nita, are witting or unwitting left wing agents of the the neo-Stalinist Putin mafia kleptocracy. Tiki-torched Tucker, CPAC, AFPAC, Josh Hawley and Rand Paul are Putin's and Orban's right wing useful idiots. If the neofascist xenophobe Giorgia Meloni wins in Italy today, they'll likely start studying Italian.
This response to Wildfire's Putin Has Us Right Where He Wants Us is still true, with some revisions that worsen Russia's situation: $78 oil means Russia loses not $1/barrel on sales to India and China, but sells at $11/barrel under break even.
Russia's broken logistics will never be able to feed, clothe and supply 300000 mobilized Buryats, Chechens, Dagestanis, Tatars, Bashkiris, Tuvans, Yakuts that will form the majority of Russia's serf soldiers.
The sanctions are working. Read the Russian central bank's report about how grim Russia's economic situation is. It jives with the Yale report on the collapse of Russia's economy over time and how it will worsen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IPzww2IHzM
From the Australian economist Perun's video on how Russia is on the short end of the economics of war:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce5TR-qWCk4&t=1187s
That the Russian govt has ceased publishing essential economic stats tells you the sanctions are working.
250k highly educated IT workers have left Russia since 24/2.
20% of high net worth Russians have left. (a premobilization figure)
This major hemorrhage human and financial capital flight similar to 1917-21.
Disassembled Russian missiles reveal how they're using COTS (commercial off the shelf chips from the 1990s and 2000s, along with washing machine and refrigerator chips in tanks and IFVs.
Here's a transcript from the Time Radio interview with British Major General Chip Chapman, which shows the military impact of sanctions, now being felt in the 50 km Ukrainians advance east of Kharkhiv (1000 sq. km. of territory retaken):
"Russia's problems getting hold of vital equipment for its its military equipment. I'm thinking in particular of microchips, which apparently is becoming a big problem for Russia. Well I think that's true. If you analyze the Russian economy at the moment of course the energy sector still looks fairly healthy, but the industrial sector looks absolutely awful and the number of closures of plants which could have an impact on cities which are sustained just by one industry so the high-tech stuff which is not getting to russia by the sanctions is a real concern for them and that is changing the the way that they will be able to fight the war, precision guided munitions uh all need all that sort of high-tech wizardry within them we know that they fired over something like 3500 probably more than that now precision guided munitions they're probably running low on that if you're running low on that sort of stuff it means you have to fight back to a kind of analog war rather than a digital war and as the Ukrainians get better with the equipment given to them given to them and the surveillance and electronic warfare and the other gizmos from the west the ability of the ukrainians to fight smarter is what really comes to the fore and that's what we're seeing in the way they're doing business at the moment particularly in terms of recently for example not just the HIMARS for taking out the logistic bases and things like that of the Russians, but also forcing the air defense of the Russians back so that they're they're not brought to bear which allows the smaller drones of the ukrainians to help in the targeting in the close battle in really three close battles at the moment the first one we're seeing in Kherson and the second one with this sort of limited counter offensive which seems to be going on at the moment around Kharkhiv."
The war costs Russia about $75bn/month and Russia had access to only about $360bn of its $640bn in foreign reserves after the US, the EU and other central banks holding Russian deposits froze them.
500000 Russian employees of the 1200+ departed western multinationals will stop receiving their salaries this month.
At $85/barrel oil sold at a $30 discount to India and China, Russia makes exactly $1/barrel over its production cost. Only 10% of Russia's natural gas pipeline capacity links to China, while India is already running out of oil storage capacity and reducing purchases of heavily discounted Russian oil. No pipeline links Russia to India.
EU countries have chartered 20 FSRUs to deliver LNG to the Netherlands and Germany this winter and Germany hit its 80% storage target two months early. If you don't know what an FSRU is, you have no business analyzing the energy business.
Restarted nuclear power (32 in France alone) and coal plants and decoupling natural gas from electricity prices will do the rest.
Once Putin shuts Nordstream, he's shot his load and is out of coercive options and Russia's loss of market share in Europe will become permanent.
"I'm not sure we can....without paying a very heavy price."--The Ukrainians are ready to pay the heaviest price because they understand it's a war of independence and survival vs the genocidal erasure political ventriloquist Putin has promised through his Ria Novosti and Duma puppets. For Ukraine surrender is as viable an option as for Israel in 1948 and 1967 and Finland in 1939-40.
So Wildfire and Dr. Kazmir really know more about Ukraine's military prospects than my veteran friends who live in or have lived in Kyiv and are professional military historians, one of whom taught at West Point and another who worked for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense from 2014. (https://www.facebook.com/SamuelPNCook, https://www.facebook.com/glen.grant.908)
I've published several transcripts of their Borderlands podcasts from April and May that are expert and professional vivisections of Ukraine's military prospects. How are they wrong? Wildfire and Dr. Kazmir publish evidence-free opinion on military matters they know nothing about while attempting no refutation of hard evidence presented by professionals who forecasted in April and May what is happening in Kherson and Kharkiv now. How are they right and my veteran friends wrong?
The Germans are ready to wear sweaters indoors to support Ukraine. The Baltics crowd fund drones and we don't hear a peep of complaint about the cost of supporting Ukraine. Poland has spent 1% of its GDP helping Ukrainian refugees and solidarity is absolutely solid. So from the safety of the US, he's telling the citizens of all these countries that the price is too high? I don't see the logic. Please explain it to me.
Like all fascists, Putin expected to break the unity of what he saw as a weak, divided and decadent democratic world (the EU, the US, Australia, NZ, Japan, Canada). In other words, based on Trump's 2016 election, January 6, tiki-torched Tucker's audience stats, Orban's recent victory and LePen getting 42% in France and Salvini's Kremlin t-shirt stunt, he forecast finding many more useful idiots than were actually there.
Instead he got Finland and Sweden into NATO, big increases in support for the EU in member state populations. Wildfire's and Dr. Kazmir's views are swimming against a we must hang together to support Ukraine tsunami, like what happened in a divided US after Pearl Harbor. Have a good swim backwards against the tide.
Once every generation or two geopolitics and history serve up a true cartoon cutout of an enemy that makes even the criminal interventionist Uncle Sam of Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Brazil 1964, Chile 1973, Vietnam 1956-75, Cambodia 1970-89, and Iraq 2003-11 look good by comparison. Putin is a gift to the American empire because he's the best converter of American hard power into soft power since Hitler and Bushido Japan (Brezhnev, Saddam Hussein and Miilosevic don't even come close).
