“Why hasn’t Russia stopped?”: Why didn’t the Confederacy stop after Gettysburg? Atlanta? Why didn’t Japan stop after Saipan? Iwo Jima? Okinawa? Why didn’t Germany stop after Stalingrad? Kursk? the Battle of the Bulge? Why do investors double down and not realize losses? Fragile human egos, whether individual or collective, are exceedingly slow to look in the mirror and admit error. Also, finding or becoming a von Stauffenberg to take down an autocrat requires rare coordination and courage. That’s why Stalin and Franco died in their beds.
You could have asked this question and advocated a compromise peace after Chancellorsville in 1863, in the middle of The Wilderness battle in 1864, as McClellan did in the election campaign of 1864. Churchill and the British could have done the same, and nearly did, in May1940.
As part of this “why hasn’t Russia stopped?” thesis, you’ve cited Simon Jenkins’ article that the sanctions aren’t working and repeated the financially and forex illiterate nonsense about the ruble’s strength. Your forex and financial market expertise is a very simple number: zero. I started trading currencies at the time of The Plaza Agreement in 1985. Unless you subscribe to the anti-intellectual Luddism of Brexiteer Michael Gove’s “people are tired of experts”, stop repeating this Putin useful idiot, “Russia’s economy is adapting to sanctions” nonsense and watch this Russian’s tour of the deserted MEGA shopping mall outside Moscow about Russia’s ongoing economic collapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TTOzvwVC3Q&t=1239s
This is data-free nonsense is easily refuted by the Russian government data cited in the report by the Yale School of Mgt. Listen to the TASS data citing 700k IT and other professional jobs lost and 1.7m other jobs lost due to 1100 foreign companies leaving Russia in this DW interview with YSM dean Jeffrey Sonnenfeld: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzvR958CYTw&t=1s . Inflation is 20–60% depending on the sector and industrial and lots of weapons production is grinding to a halt due to lack of foreign tech inputs. Chinese companies afraid of secondary sanctions won’t replace them.
Once Germany builds six new LNG regasification plants by year-end and no longer needs Nordstream, Russian gas will have nowhere to go since it has no pipelines to India and only one small one to China. Then Gazprom and Rosneft will have to start plugging gas wells, losing those assets forever. Tankers that can’t get insurance can’t dock in the shallow water Black Sea port of Novorossisk to load Russian oil (it’s too shallow for supertankers). Since storage is limited, Russia will have to stop the oil flow….and plug more wells. With oil now at $87/barrel and India and China buying Russian oil at a $35/barrel discount, Russia barely breaks even. Rising interest rates and recession that drops oil prices below $87 puts costly, remote Russian oil below its $52/barrel break even price if sold to India and China. The EU is already buying more gas from Norway and the US than Russia. Against this data, how does the evidence-free “sanctions not working” nonsense stack up?
Russia has deleted the standard national macroeconomic and income stats — transport and airline data, energy inputs and outputs, loan originations — because they’re so bad. All this data is in the Sonnenfeld video’s transcript — should you care to look.
“Is it an evidence free opinion to wonder aloud….”: Not all opinions are created equal. Basic scholarly and journalistic integrity demands that you produce evidence to support your opinions. Ask a simple question: how many more Ukrainians will die because the evidence-free opinions and the Russian BOT-like disinformation you spread will yield lower political support for weapons supply from Germany and France to Ukraine? How many more war crimes will be committed and cities Groznified because Russian defeat is delayed because of slower weapons delivery and fewer Ukrainian volunteers trained in Germany and the UK?
Intentionally or not, you’re taking the same side as the AFPAC chanters of Putin! Putin! Putin! and fist-pumping Josh Hawley who voted against Nato expansion. The antiwar Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact-endorsing CPUSA (“don’t fight the imperialist war”) did the same in siding with Lindbergh and Father Coughlin before June 22, 1941.
“why isn’t the int’l community….stopping Russia with overwhelming force?”: Define “overwhelming force”. Do you mean direct Nato intervention without an attack on a member state by Russia triggering Article 5? Russia has not attacked Nato. Since Nato is a defensive alliance and no legal rationale for direct intervention has occurred. In any case, I’d call HIMARS supply to Ukraine “overwhelming force” based on what the neo-Stalinist Igor Girkin and other Russian military bloggers have said about it.
Also, weapons supply depends on training throughput. The UK has trained about 10000 Ukrainian troops to operate Nato standard weapon systems. Each training cycle lasts 3–6 weeks, depending on the weapon system, except for simple weapons like small drones, Javelins and NLAWS. Inserting more weapons systems than Ukrainian troops can safely and competently operate makes no sense.
If your articles advocate policy choices based on evidence-free speculative questions unsupported by such basic data, you’re irresponsibly violating basic principles of scholarly and journalistic integrity. Every time you do this I will show how you’re doing it, with the specific evidence that proves your opinions wrong. Since I have a network of US, UK and Ukrainian veteran friends who’ve taught me how militaries operate and studied for 40 years how wartime economies work, I have a research skill set and toolkit you don’t. I’ve already given you several Russian-speaking sources (Kamil Galeev, Nadin Brzezinski….) But you’ve chosen not to use them, preferring to bend reality to ideology, rather than vice versa.
“Here are some weapons and a check. Good luck.”: We did something similar with the Soviets after June 22, 1941. 7/8 of German soldiers were killed on the eastern front. The ratio of Soviets to Americans killed was 65:1. You seem to advocate giving no support to Ukraine unless it’s all-in Nato boots on the ground in Ukraine. Life and geopolitics aren’t black and white all or nothing. As always, ideological purity tests make the perfect the enemy of the good.
“If things are so bad in Ukraine”: I’ve never once seen you acknowledge the Russifying genocidal character of Russia’s war to erase Ukraine from the map, despite the ample evidence of genocidal bigotry in Ria Novosti and other Russian media (Putin mouthpiece Timofey Sergetsev’s article translated on memri.org will show you). Anti American imperialism blinds parts of the American and European left to the malignant genocidal imperialism that Tsarist, Bolshevik and Putinist Russia have practiced for half a millenium.
Geopolitics and power abhor the vacuum you and people like Simon Jenkins keep trying to enlarge with evidence-free defeatist arguments against this simple reality: war will continue until Russian military and regime collapse like 1917 triggers a collective look in the mirror moment that renders the Russian state and people as incapable of and uninterested in empire building as Germany, Italy and Japan became in 1945. Any outcome short of this will lead to having to do the same job twice, as with 20th century Germany.
