This writer finds warmongers only in the West, not in Russia. He's resolutely silent on the mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children, 4m Ukrainians deported to Russia's filtration camps and torture rooms, the mass graves of Bucha, Irpin, Izyum and Mariupol and countless other occupied territories, the tsunami of genocidal exterminationist rhetoric spewed forth from Russia's leaders and media. Here this writer doesn't tell you that he recommended Ukraine surrender last April--after the discovery of the mass graves of Bucha and Irpin. Russia will respond to "procedural resistance" the same way the Germans did to the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. How do we know? They've said so very clearly: https://www.justsecurity.org/81789/russias-eliminationist-rhetoric-against-ukraine-a-collection/ When genocidal fascists talk, listen if you're not completely deaf.
Here's the antidote to this appeasing Russian useful idiocy with the narcissistic hubris to believe that a skill set forged in customer service applies to a geopolitical conflict between irreconcilable opposites: Ukraine's sovereignty and stubborn insistence on existing as a people, culture and language and Russia's 1/2 millenium long history of genocidal empire-building. (https://medium.com/illumination-curated/putin-marks-my-birthday-with-missiles-and-mobiki-37c55ed0a283):
The West’s job in supporting Ukraine is to be Russia’s divorce from empire lawyer, to get Russia to look in the mirror and end its 500-year marriage with the empire. Without demolishing Russia’s capacity for and interest in empire, any peace would only be a temporary truce, the war’s first round. Russia would respect no agreement and renew its war on Ukraine’s existence as soon as its military got out of rehab. Here’s proof:
“Henry Sardaryan, Dean at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) says that the former territories of the Russian empire and of the Soviet Union are “Russia’s territories” that Moscow should unilaterally control,” Davis wrote in a caption. Referring to the ex-Soviet states, Sardaryan told his fellow guests on Russian state TV: “This is our land, our territory of strategic interests.” “Everything that used to be part of the Russian empire and then part of the Soviet Union is the territory of Russia’s strategic interests,” the academic added. Let me remind you that our czars came to these lands several centuries ago,” said Sardaryan. “It wasn’t so that the U.S., Britain and Turkey could stick their nose in there, trying to provoke us or to force us to play by new rules, or creating new formats for dealing with them.” Without any compromises, we shouldn’t contend with anyone in these regions… There should be no other players for us to deal with. This is our territory.”
This is, of course, a near-perfect echo of Putin’s I’m the second coming of Peter the Great speech proclaiming that Russia merely took back what “was ours” from Sweden:
“Smirking Vladimir Putin in chilling Sweden threat comparing himself to Peter The Great
During an event to commemorate the 350th anniversary of Peter the Great’s birth yesterday, Vladimir Putin claimed that he was picking up where the tsar left off by invading Ukraine
This war isn’t a de-escalation therapy problem, as one of my Russian useful idiot opponents has claimed. Nor is it a diplomacy problem to be solved by entering into a NATO-Russian negotiation unconditionally, since that would immediately concede Russia’s goal to make Ukraine’s sovereign existence contingent and negotiable. It is a test of wills and resources between irreconcilable opposites that only one side can win. Russia’s western useful idiots are blind to a simple asymmetry. If Ukraine stops fighting, it ceases to exist. If Russia stops fighting, the war ends.
Ukraine is the central front in a global war waged by Russia that’s the central HQ of exported authoritarian kleptocracy against a rules-based international order and rule of law democracy. This is the root of China’s “alliance without limits” with Russia. Don’t doubt that China is gauging the western response to Russian aggression to see if it can take Taiwan later.
Russia is the rogue empire of asymmetric social media disinformation warfare (ASMDW) allied with the Murdoch monetized rage machine. Rule of law democracies can’t function without evidence and reality-based governance, whether the policy area is climate change, its refugees and migration, biodiversity, emerging pandemic threats or nuclear and chemical arms proliferation. Destroying a people’s belief in facts and capacity for critical thinking with “nothing is true and everything is possible” is the key to demobilizing that people into passivity. Putin’s parrots that blame the West and push hidden conspiracies to explain its defense of Ukraine are blind to how the Russian kleptocracy’s war spells….
The End of the New Peace
Vladimir Putin is pushing humanity toward an era of war that might be worse than anything we have seen before. It could threaten the very survival of our species. A few years ago, I published a book called 21 Lessons for the 21st Century and dedicated one of the chapters to the future of war. Subtitled “Never underestimate human stupidity,” this chapter argued that the first decades of the 21st century had been the most peaceful era in human history, and that waging war no longer made much economic or geopolitical sense. But these facts did not absolutely guarantee peace, because “human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history” and “even rational leaders frequently end up doing very stupid things.”— Yuval Harari
That’s why the flood the zone with shit Trumps, Bannons, Boeberts, MTGs, Orbans and tiki torched Tuckers of the world love Putin and hydroxychloroquine and deny climate change while proclaiming indifference about who wins Ukraine’s war of independence.
But the faux-peacenik left’s useful idiots are far more dangerous because it is they who’ve imposed incrementalist sloth in supporting Ukraine. This incrementalist supply is enough to stave off defeat, but not enough to win is Ukraine’s and the west’s worst enemy, not Russia’s incompetent serf army of badly led and trained mobiki. Long-range HIMARS and F-16s supplied in August could have smashed the Russian army while it was on the back foot from September to November, severing the land bridge to Crimea and Russia’s supply lines from Belgorod to Luhansk and Donetsk.
The useful idiots on the left who see Ukraine as an American geopolitical pawn and the Maidan Revolution of Dignity as a coup are Russian hybrid social media warfare pawns, knowingly or not. They mindlessly accept Russian propaganda that there is no Ukraine and the neo-imperial prejudice, shared by Anglo-Americans, Germans and Russians that Ukraine's existence is contingent and negotiable.
