The Trump-like rhetorical style--"some say, others say"--that Steve Bannon defined as "flood the zone with shit" betrays the disinformation goal:
"Some say Ukraine is winning, and they’ll wrap up by next year. Others say that Russia is winning..."
General Ben Hodges is right and the Russian army has culminated. Attacks on civilian infrastructure and Wagner spending 4000 convict mobiki to conquer a Bakhmut garbage dump and gas station, since lost again, tell you the Russian army has lost offensive capability.
"Ukraine ignores something they agreed to do...Their Declaration of Independence, July 6, 1990"--Russian interference in Ukraine's internal affairs by arm-twisting Yanukovych into breaking the EU Association Agreement, which Ukraine's Rada had voted overwhelmingly for, to join Putin's Eurasian Union, nullified this. Add Russia's annexation of Crimea, violating the Budapest Memorandum. Mr. Dunn is once again blaming the rape victim for dressing provocatively and flirting with the stronger, richer guy across town. Russian interference preceded Ukraine's westward tilt. In any case, the EU is not a military bloc, but an economic one.
"America built up NATO....at the expense of diplomacy": All the ex-Warsaw Pact states that had endured Soviet imperialism and occupation wanted to join NATO as the only viable security guarantee of permanent independence. The most cursory examination of the Russian empire's expansionist behavior (at the rate of one Belgium-sized territory per year for three centuries) tells you the correlation between NATO expansion and Russian imperialism is a very simple number: zero. Ask Finland, the Baltic States, Poland.....down to Bulgaria. I've already blown up this myth: https://medium.com/illumination-curated/time-to-blow-up-blame-nato-disinformation-4b3e93b69320
"economic warfare against Russia": Sanctions after the Russian wars against Chechnya: zero. Sanctions after the Russian invasion of Georgia: zero. Sanctions after the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea and the Donbass: mild to appeasing insignificant. Citing Obama, the appeasing dotted red-line drawer in gas-bombed Syria, is not a good look.
"serious about diplomacy": Here are Russia's terms for negotiations:
"There can be no peace plan "that does not take into account today's realities regarding Russian territory, with the entry of four regions into Russia," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday. "No plan that does not take into account these realities can claim to be peaceful," he added."
In other words, Mr. Dunn agrees with Peskov and Lavrov the Liar, who said Russia hasn't attacked Ukraine, that Ukraine should accept Russia's annexations of territories of which it controls less than half (Kherson, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Luhansk) and less of every day if you follow what's happening near Kreminna and Svatove and merely take note that Russia lost Kherson's right bank just weeks after annexing it to Russia "forever". Military reality is defined by the brevity of Russian "forever".
From Lavrov the Liar, quoted by Bloomberg:
"Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow won’t enter into negotiations with Ukraine to end the war, even after suffering a series of battlefield setbacks. The Kremlin won’t discuss Ukraine’s demands that it withdraw from occupied lands and pay reparations, Lavrov said in an interview with the state-run news service RIA Novosti published Thursday. He earlier this week said Ukraine should cede sovereignty over territories annexed by Russia since President Vladimir Putin ordered the Feb. 24 invasion."
What Mr. Dunn really means by "earnest diplomacy" is the US should, like Britain with Czechoslovakia in 1938, negotiate directly with Russia to force Ukraine to surrender so the inconvenience of Ukraine stubbornly insisting on independent existence as a viable state can go away. Like Neville Chamberlain waving his scrap of paper "peace in our time", he's deluded into thinking this reward for Russia's openly expressed exterminationist aggression will make him safer. Here are just a few of the Russian leaders' genocidal ravings which he remains utterly deaf to that disprove this delusion: https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/
Tim Snyder shows the astonishingly high return on investment in security the US and the rest of NATO have gotten from the Ukrainians fighting for us for the equivalent of a rounding error % of GDP and the Pentagon budget: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5tmyV2DwCA
Compare $45bn for and zero NATO lives lost in Ukraine to the trillions spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ukraine and its disruptive javelin-style warfare is the geopolitical equivalent of the capital-efficient disruptive startup in Latvia I invested in in 2017 that gave a 36x return in 2021 (Printify.com).
Mr. Dunn, like the appeasers of 1938, thinks peace with dishonor will save him when he will merely get war with dishonor should he get what he wishes for.
