"The narrative that I’ve read suggests that the civil war in Ukraine was incited based on confidence. Confidence that someone had the capacity to drive all of the Russians out of the Donbas region of Ukraine."
--This is pure Russian disinformation refuted by the FSB Colonel who confessed to triggering the war in the Donbass in 2014, Igor Girkin (Strelkov). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bf_uFS4vEk
But Dunn keeps repeating it in multiple articles.
The sanctions don't work canard is easily refuted by the evidence: Putin backed out of the grain deal because they were working against Russia's market share in grain exports. The Russian Ministry of Finance's own deficit, labor shortage and inflation figures show they're working by forcing Russia to sell oil below the $60/barrel price cap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53fHU3SBzBU&t=10s
And sell oil to India at $20-25/barrel below the $60 cap, which is below Russia's break even.
Oleg Deripaska forecast months ago that Russia would exhaust its foreign reserves in 2024: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/03/economy/russia-no-money-deripaska/index.html
Russia now has a pile of 40bn nonconvertible Indian rupees it can't offload.
The idea that Russia, the most northerly big country on earth, belongs to the Global South, and will be saved by it, is laughable economic and financial illiteracy.
Mussolini tried autarky. How did that turn out?
You would not want to taste cappuccino autarchico in Milan or Turin in 1943-45. I have 90 year old friends in Turin who had to and they don't treasure the memory.
"Russia has become self-sufficient and is not as dependent on other countries for its arms supplies as America had hoped."
--Putin's latest begging trip to North Korea for artillery shells belies this nonsense.
"Russia occupies 20% of Ukraine"--Dunn is always incapable of doing simple math. As of January 2023 the % was 16.55% according to LeMonde: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/01/06/war-in-ukraine-russia-now-controls-only-16-of-ukrainian-territory_6010578_8.html
If you redefine "occupied" to include territory not under Ukrainian fire control 1/3 to 1/2 of Crimea, including the Kerch Strait and Chongar bridges are no longer "occupied".
But reality-challenged Russian useful idiots don't consider these realities.
"fought mostly with American weapons"--The EU's Norway's, South Korean and Australian contributions now exceed the USA's, with the Baltic States and Norway contributing the highest as a % of GDP.
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/
The USA is the highest SINGLE contributor at 42.1%, but doesn't contribute a majority of weapons. But simple facts and math elude this Russian genocide apologist who persists in thinking that geopolitical conflict between irreconciliable opposites is a psychotherapy problem solveable by customer service psychobabble. He persists in not hearing the tsunami of genocidal rhetoric that Russia actually broadcasts: Ukraine and Ukrainians don't exist and Ukrainian identity is a mental disorder.
https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/
