WHERE IN THE WAR ARE WE HEADING

17 July 2023

Defeat, chaos and submission

ORIGINS

America provoked this war through Nato expansion, colour revolutions, refusal of dialogue and its openly-declared intent to weaken Russia (before pivoting to China incidentally!) and more specifically the invitation to Ukraine in 2008 to join Nato. America has contained and cornered Russia to a point where Russia feels its security and very existence is so compromised it must respond. Russia and many foreign policy analysts did give notice down the years that Ukraine was the brightest of Russia's red lines, but all attempts at conflict resolution were ignored.

The history of this war, as described in previous articles, is strewn with American provocations and breaches of faith. 1990 "not one inch". 2004 Maidan. 2008 Budapest. 2014 Coup. 2015 Donbas, Crimea and Minsk. 2021 Final arming of Ukraine. 24 February 2022 Russian incursion. 28 March 2022 Istanbul. April 2022 Escalation and attrition. July 2023 Vilnius Ukraine's admission request rejected.

DEFEAT IS INADMISSABLE

All Russia's warnings were ignored, America thought it knew better, with the result that now we are engaged in a costly war that threatens Russia's existence and America's global supremacy. 

This is a war where goals, ways (strategies) and means (men, methods, machines, munitions) are completely at opposites. Neither side can admit defeat; but neither is negotiation possible.

TERRITORY AND NEUTRALITY

Neither side can can make concessions in its claim to strategically important Crimea (the Black Sea and Svastopol), the four oblasts and likely four more including Odesa and possibly Transnistria. 

Neither side can concede on Nato membership as Ukraine is either in or it isn't in.

STRATEGIES

America in its strategy of escalation continues to supply technology and ever more deadly weapons systems on a course that would lead inexorably and certainly to nuclear war, that is for sure.

While Russia in its strategy of attrition and using its much superior means will wipe out the Ukrainian army, the regime in Kiev, and leave Ukraine a smouldering wreck with no two stones left one standing on top of the other.

No DMZ or cold war seems possible, leaving the only outcome possible to be military defeat.

CONSEQUENCES

If the point of the war was to complete Russian encirclement, it has failed as Ukraine will never join Nato. This was well trailored going back to 2008  There is also no way Crimea will be recovered, nor the Donbas, and the longer the war persists, the less of Ukraine will exist.

So we can say wirh confidence that the war was foolish, pointless and avoidable; it has resulted in the destructionof Ukraine and shortly of the Zelinsky regime; and all this chaos, loss of life and destruction was provoked by America.

We can also conclude that, given these are nuclear armed superpowers and Russian superiority on the battlefield, the most probable outcome is total defeat for Ukraine and an eventual American pullback ("cut and run" as in previous foreign policy adventures from Vietnam to Afghanistan, soon Syria, that we all know only too well), with the deaths and mutilations of hundreds of thousands of Ukraine's citizens, Nato's being shown up as a paper tiger and the world economy and politics split in two.

What will Ukraine's neighbours make of this debacle? Will for example Poland call on its Polish Lithuanian Ukrainian Pact to seize Western Ukraine? Wil Transnistria separate legally from Moldova and join S W Russia?

DEFEAT, CHAOS AND SUBMISSION

America, instead of destroying or weakening Russia, will have driven Russia into the arms of its true rival and Asian-region competitor: China. It will have, entirely through its own stupidity, self-destructed, but not before leaving Europe in its worse mess and dependency since the creation of the EU.

AND EUROPE WILL RISE AGAIN

How much easier would it be for Europe to slowly withdraw from this war, seek peace with Russia based on trade and a New Security Architecture, renew its leaderships and start to build up its own independence.