More Russian useful idiot disinformation. Here's the how to guide for disinformation demolition at scale: https://medium.com/p/dc79617fce89
Of course, you can opt for the point by point demolition:
1. "Putin's desire to end the war": with a failed army capable only of convict human wave attacks and demolition of civilian infrastructure at scale, of course he needs a pause to freeze the conflict. Russian shell expenditure count is down 75% since the peak and Ukraine is due to receive French AMX10s, Leopards, Bradleys and Patriots. Freezing the conflict now guarantees that Ukraine becomes an economically non-viable state.
Putin and Lavrov also said that the premise of any negotiation is Ukraine accepting Russian annexations: "Russia's foreign minister issues ultimatum to Ukraine to give up territory or the 'army will deal with the issue"
2. "Europeans aren't as bullish on war": Pure sampling error. What Europeans is this writer talking to? The Baltics where I live, and all the former Soviet satellites, know Russian imperial history and that defeating Russia as Germany and Japan were defeated is absolutely imperative, as is deimperializing Russia forever. Do the job fully now or we get a half-defeated revanchist empire later, like Germany between 1918 and 1933. https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/russias-ukraine-war-ends-only-with-empire-demolition-abaf44e08bc7
3. "Macron retreat with his tail between his legs": This is why Macron the appeaser is wrong and why the correlation between Russian imperial expansionism and western behavior is a very simple number: zero.
"French President Macron just said Russia must not be humiliated. If you’ve ever known an alcoholic or drug addict it’s obvious they never change until they hit bottom. Previous rogue empire-builders Japan, Germany and Italy know this. Nothing short of cold turkey withdrawal yields fundamental change. Russia must be defeated and be seen to be so by the Russian people.
Putin just proved this point with his narcissistic and megalomaniacal delusions about himself as the second coming of Peter the Great:
“You might think he was fighting with Sweden, seizing their lands,” Mr Putin said, referring to the Northern Wars which Peter launched at the turn of the 18th Century as he forged a new Russian Empire. “But he seized nothing; he reclaimed it!” he said, arguing that Slavs had lived in the area for centuries. “It seems it has fallen to us, too, to reclaim and strengthen,” Mr Putin concluded, with a near-smirk that left no doubt he was referring to Ukraine and his aims there. Peter’s rule, he suggested, was proof that expanding Russia had strengthened it….“Apparently, it is also our lot to return [what is Russia’s] and strengthen [the country]. And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that we face.”
Putin has made clear that Russia is the biggest and most roguish of empire builders. No fence of international law and norms can hold it back:
It’s impossible — do you understand? — impossible to build a fence around a country like Russia. And we do not intend to build that fence,” Putin said, according to Sky News.
In Putin’s ethno-nationalist world of geopolitical darwinism national identity is decreed from the top down. In this binary world there are two kinds of nations: the sovereign who conquer and the colonized who are conquered:
“”In order to claim some kind of leadership — I am not even talking about global leadership, I mean leadership in any area — any country, any people, any ethnic group should ensure their sovereignty,” Putin said. “Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called.”
And Ukraine is, of course, an eternal colony, and Ukrainians “little Russians” (маленькие русские). This enserfment is essential to Russian identity and security, which makes Ukraine the opioid of Russia’s half millenium long empire addiction.
https://medium.com/illumination-curated/empire-aholic-russia-must-be-humiliated-20f879c93641
4. "Zelensky's Ego":
Putin thinks he's the second coming of Peter the Great, and this writer thinks Zelensky's ego is the problem. The American Psychiatric Association bans remote diagnosis, especially of this evidence-free variety. Jewish Zelensky got the voters of one of the most anti-semitic countries in Europe to vote for him. My Ukrainian Jewish grandparents would be tickled. This is classic Russian collective narcissism, projecting one's own delusional sociopathology onto others (invading a brother country based on a fantasy about Ukronazis when your own PMC Wagner was founded by a skinhead neo-Nazi and named for Hitler's favorite composer).
5. "arms manufacturers: Lockheed Martin's share price is down 5% from March 2022. US aid to Ukraine of $45bn is a 5% rounding error in the Pentagon budget of $857bn.
6. "Ukrainians fleeing the country": Easily refuted by one of my readers in the Czech Republic, DennisBMurphy:
"I work as a supplier quality engineer. In my previous job last year, I had one supplier in the Czech Republic notify us they would be late shipping product as they had lost a significant number of their workforce. These employees were Ukrainians- they left the Czech Rep to go BACK HOME and fight the Russian invasion. Were they mere dupes for American hegemony? The left and the right would like you to think so."
A Ukrainian tech entrepreneur I know 9 km west of Kyiv organized the territorial defense of 500 people in a network of 10 villages around Bilhorodka. Nobody left.
Anna Bondarenko, my 2015 student from Odesa at a Berlin entrepreneurship course, organized what Anne Applebaum called "the Other Ukrainian Army", the VKS Ukrainian Volunteer Service. This is reality. Again, Russia is where 1m people have fled their country's mobilization, not Ukraine
"Either Ukraine makes concessions": This writer is exactly the type of Russian useful idiot genocide apologist Putin is counting on as his last hope to salvage a strategically catastrophic decision to go to war based on the surprising success he had in Crimea in 2014. Lavrov the Liar has made clear what these concessions are: recognize Russia's annexations of four regions, turning Ukraine into a landlocked failed state. Not gonna happen.....ever.
Here's how war is negotiation fought by other means and why this writer advocates the West negotiating with itself...a losing strategy (https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/negotiation-is-war-fought-by-other-means-e23a810753a0):
The blame NATO negotiate unconditionally crowd on the left repeatedly invokes Russia’s tactical nuclear threat if the West crosses Russia’s “red lines,” as if these lines were fixed in place with a nuclear trigger or tripwire. Here’s why this is delusional: there isn’t a single Russian war aim, tactic or escalation measure that western restraint has changed. The negotiate unconditionally Code Pinkos, French President Emmanuel Macron and US Chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley share a conceptual error about Russia’s red lines being fixed. They're not and have been crossed repeatedly without consequences.
https://twitter.com/dpatrikarakos/status/1546598977331777537
Here’s a quick summary that the West’s Axis of Prudence (Macron, Scholz, Milley, Biden) has not prevented:
Flattening Ukrainian cities (Mariupol, Severodonetsk, Lyzychansk, Bakhmut)
Mass murder of civilians
Mass bombing of civilian energy infrastructure
Openly proclaiming genocidal war aims
Annexation of four Ukrainian regions as non-negotiable war aims
Mass deportations of Ukrainians, including 11000 children
Rape deployed as a weapon of war
Mass plunder and theft of Ukrainian assets — from grain to washing machines.
(https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/)
No war crime due to western restraint has remained uncommitted. No Russian war aim has changed. Yet the negotiate and ceasefire frozen conflict crowd concludes that the current apparent winter pause means that an undersupplied Ukraine can’t win and it’s time for the US to negotiate directly with Russia over Ukraine’s head, as the UK did with Germany in 1938. This is like blaming the rape victim after refusing to supply her with a gun, mace or pepper spray to defend against the rapist.
Listen to Valery Zaluzhny, the head of Ukraine’s armed forces:
“I know that I can beat this enemy. But I need resources. I need 300 tanks, 600–700 ifvs, 500 Howitzers. Then, I think it is completely realistic to get to the lines of February 23rd. But I can’t do it with two brigades. I get what I get, but it is less than what I need. It is not yet time to appeal to Ukrainian soldiers in the way that Mannerheim appealed to Finnish soldiers. We can and should take a lot more territory.”
Translation: During the Winter War Finnish president and commander in chief Baron Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim knew that the end of General Winter’s aid to the Finns with March 1940’s melting snow marked the peak of Finland’s defense. It made negotiating a territorial compromise peace sensible since that compromise would not turn Finland into a failed almost landlocked state. Zaluzhny “more territory” means enough to guarantee that Russia can’t freeze the war with Ukraine as an almost landlocked economically failed state.
After Kharkiv and Kherson, here are the geopolitical facts of life: if war is politics fought with other means, Ukraine has already won. All we need is for the West to supply Ukraine to confirm militarily what has already happened politically:
https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/ukraine-has-already-won-dae2ea36e24
Pick apart these arguments one by one shows how evidence-free and ignorant of basic history and geography they are.
