With the incomprehensibly
bloody and understandably merciless repulse of the hapless Ukrainian “Kherson counter-offensive”,
and now the almost comical debacle of the bungled “commando raid” of the Zaporozhye
nuclear power plant, the decisive military operations of the Ukraine War have
taken a giant step towards their long-foregone conclusion.
Russia will fully achieve the
three objectives of its “special military operation” as explicitly stated by
Vladimir Putin in his address to the world delivered on the opening day of the
war: liberating the Donbass; excising the Nazi influence from the region, and demilitarizing
Ukraine.
The demilitarization of Ukraine
has assumed particularly gruesome proportions. What was the largest,
best-trained, and best-equipped land force in Europe at the beginning of 2022
has been reduced to a pitiful shell of its former glory – close to 100,000 dead
and twice that many permanently maimed. The troops now manning the front lines
are a rag-tag assembly of mostly untrained conscripts, frequently forced at the
point of their own officers’ rifles to face the massive artillery barrages of
an enemy they will likely never see and at whom they will never even get a
chance to shoot back before the shell with their name on it tears them to
shreds at the bottom of a feces-littered foxhole.
To be sure, the Armed Forces of
Ukraine still retain some dangerous long-range striking power in the form of a
handful of surviving NATO-provided M-777 howitzers and whatever few rockets
they have left for their dozen or so remaining HIMARS launchers.
But this war has reached the
stage equivalent to Nazi Germany in mid-January 1945: the war is lost; everyone
knows it is lost, and all that remains is the positioning in advance of the
inevitable surrender, the unrestrained looting, and the occasional harassment
of the never-say-die snipers who will fight to their last round of ammo and
last drop of blood.
In other words, we’ve finally
arrived at the most dangerous juncture of this conflict.
You see, as I have frequently
observed, this war, at its deepest root, has always been an existential
struggle between Russia and the rapidly declining fortunes and dominion of the
long-since irredeemably corrupted American Empire.
Beginning with the fall of the
Soviet Union, and continuing throughout the 1990s, the western vulture
capitalists raced to divide, conquer, and despoil the unfathomable natural resource
wealth of the former USSR. And indeed, in ten short years, they managed to extract
a massive pile of treasure at Russia’s expense, only to be prematurely thwarted
by the unforeseen rise of the previously obscure Vladimir Putin.
At first, the finely accoutered
locusts believed they could manipulate Putin as easily as they had his
immediate predecessors. But they were soon disabused of that fallacy. So then they
began to pressure Putin and Russia by methodically assimilating into their “defensive
alliance” all the previously unaligned nations that stood between NATO’s 1997
borders and the Russian frontier.
This, of course, awakened in
Russia a sober sense of their increasingly precarious position, and in 2007, at
the Munich Security Conference, Putin delivered a landmark speech wherein he put the Empire on notice that Russia was drawing a line
in the sand beyond which it would not permit further NATO expansion. That line
extended from eastern Poland to northern Armenia.
Predictably, Putin’s declarations
were first mocked and then summarily dismissed.
I suspect this was the point at which
Russia came to see that war was very likely inevitable in order to retain its
sovereignty and security.
Nevertheless, Putin exhibited extraordinary
patience. While initiating an aggressive military upgrade and expansion
program, he bided his time for the next several years.
But with the threat to Russia’s strategic
naval base in Syria and the US-orchestrated coup d’etat in Ukraine, he
was compelled to act, albeit with considerable restraint, to alter the
trajectory of events. He dispatched an expeditionary force to Syria to prevent
the fall of the Assad regime at the hands of US-supported “moderate rebels”; he
moved to reclaim historically Russian Crimea, and to much more aggressively support
the ethnic Russian separatists in the Donbass region of Ukraine who were waging
a tenuously balanced civil war against the US-installed regime in Kiev.
American designs in Syria were
foiled. But the ongoing de facto NATO assimilation of Ukraine continued,
as the US and its NATO allies set out to methodically construct what would eventually
become the most formidable proxy army in history, with ambitions to lure Putin
into a Slavic civil war that would sap Russian strength, mortally wound its
still-fragile economy, and induce social unrest within Russia and discontent
among its various loci of domestic power, and ultimately effect “regime change”
in the Kremlin.
But, at every juncture, Putin
out-maneuvered them.
Meanwhile, the decades-long
superiority of Russian missile technology produced for Putin several trump
cards in the form of long-range stand-off weapons capable of threatening prime
US military assets virtually anywhere on the planet.
Armed with this “ace in the hole”,
Putin’s negotiation posture was significantly fortified, and from 2018 onward
he began to articulate much more forcefully that Russia would not abide any
further NATO expansion towards its borders – most explicitly in the case
of Ukraine, where the ambitious training and outfitting of a NATO proxy army
continued apace.
Yet again, Putin’s warnings were
mocked and dismissed.
Finally, when the overly
confident Zelensky government in Kiev moved, in late 2021, to position its most
experienced, best-armed, and best-trained forces in the Ukrainian-held western
Donbass and in Mariupol, at the gate of the Crimean land-bridge – clearly preparatory
to an attempt to subjugate the separatist-held regions of eastern Ukraine and
to eventually retake Crimea – well, Putin knew the moment of truth had finally
arrived.
In late December 2021 the
Russians crafted and forwarded to the US and its NATO vassals a document
articulating in exhaustive detail Russia’s explicit demands for the roll-back
of NATO to its 1997 borders.
Yet again Russia’s demands and
warnings elicited scoffing summary dismissals from the United States and its submissive
European colonies.
And so, the long-inevitable war
began on February 24, 2022 and continues to this day.
Now, it must be clearly
understood that the war in Ukraine is about far more than simply Russia
reestablishing strategic depth on its western border and the re-assimilation of
ethnic Russian populations into the motherland.
No, it is, as all the great
powers of the planet very clearly recognize, about putting an end to
unrestrained American hegemony – economically, politically, and militarily. At
some level, there can be no question that this is now widely recognized as the second-order
consequence of this war.
It is unquestionably recognized
as such at the highest levels of imperial power in Washington, New York, and
London.
The decisive defeat of its Mother of All Proxy Armies in Ukraine, and that defeat’s indelible demarcation
of the high-water mark of imperial expansion, will accelerate the already
commenced transition of the planet to a multipolar, balance-of-powers paradigm
such as characterized the world prior to the advent of American global
dominance in the post-World War II era.
Simply put, it marks the end of the
American empire.
And, as such, we are now at the
most dangerous moment humanity has faced in the previous three-quarters of a
century – very possibly in its entire history.
Now we will find out what the self-anointed Masters
of Empire will do when faced with the impending loss of their dominion over the
earth.
Something tells me they are highly
unlikely to shrug their shoulders, wax philosophical about the whole thing,
gather up all their military toys, and go home. To do so would signal to all their colonies and vassals that the jig is well and truly up; NATO will effectively
cease as a meaningful and credible alliance; the European Union as presently constituted will quickly dissolve.
That said, I have no capacity to
predict what the imperial powers-that-be will do at this pivotal moment in
human history, nor can I confidently anticipate what the consequences of their
actions will be.
All I know is that the moment of
greatest danger in all our lives is now bearing down upon us.
I am personally convinced they
will fail – and abysmally so – but almost certainly not without leaving oceans
of blood and mountains of ashes in their wake.
Prepare yourselves accordingly …
