Tag: war

Big Serge, one of the Internet’s foremost military historians, doesn’t see any negotiated deal bringing an end to the war in Ukraine:

I have never made any bones about my belief that the war in Ukraine will be resolved militarily: that is, it will be fought to its conclusion and end in the defeat of Ukraine in the east, Russian control of vast swathes of the country, and the subordination of a rump Ukraine to Russian interests. Trump’s self conception is greatly tied up in his image as a “dealmaker”, and his view of foreign affairs as fundamentally transactional in nature. As the American president, he has the power to force this framing on Ukraine, but not on Russia. There remain intractable gulfs between Russia’s war aims and what Kiev is willing to discuss, and it is doubtful that Trump will be able to reconcile these differences. Russia, however, does not need to accept a partial victory simply in the name of goodwill and negotiation. Moscow has recourse to a more primal form of power. The sword predates and transcends the pen. Negotiation, as such, must bow to the reality of the battlefield, and no amount of sharp deal making can transcend the more ancient law of blood.

I assume he’s right. I wish he wasn’t, but all of the various factors point to an intractable impossibility. Even the Israelis and the Palestinians were able to establish a peacefire, but the quad-belligerents of Russia, Kiev, Brussels, and the USA simply have too many conflicting interests to manage even that.

While Brussels has been sidelined and its views are irrelevant, the USA has been reluctant to accept the facts of the situation and is still, publicly, at least, posturing as if it has any influence over Russia. Unless and until the Trump administration recognizes that it cannot make Russia do anything, its posturing is no more meaningful than Kiev’s more obviously irrelevant posturing. I see absolutely no purpose in President Trump blathering about his emotions vis-a-vis the Russian President; just pull the plug already!

Russia isn’t that far off from its real goals. So, its interests are almost certainly best served by continuing the war, taking everything it wishes, and then agreeing to talking about a settlement that will give it even more. This is why the correct move by the USA is to withdraw all support for Ukraine and the EU alike, and force the unconditional surrender that will be the eventual outcome of a war that continues into 2026.

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To absolutely no one’s surprise, the New York Times reveals that the USA, under the Fake Biden interregnum, was a co-belligerent in the NATO war against Russia:

The administration of US President Joe Biden was far more deeply involved in backing Ukraine’s fight against Russia than previously acknowledged, a New York Times investigation has claimed, stressing that Washington’s intelligence was indispensable for Kiev’s military operations.

The lengthy report released on Saturday offers a deep dive into an “extraordinary partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology” that became Kiev’s “secret weapon” in countering Russia.

While the Pentagon supplied Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars in military aid, it also provided crucial intelligence that enabled Kiev to attack Russian command and control centers and other high-value targets starting in mid-2022, the NYT said.

According to the article, the heart of this partnership lay at the US Army facility in Wiesbaden, Germany, where American and Ukrainian officers set daily targeting priorities which they reportedly referred to as “points of interest,” for fear of appearing too provocative.

American and Ukrainian officers planned major counteroffensives together and launched large long-range high-precision strikes, using Western-supplied weapons on Russia’s Crimea, the NYT also claimed. The US has also dispatched dozens of military advisers to Ukraine, some of whom were allowed to travel close to the frontline.

In 2024, the US extended its permissions to allow Ukraine carry out limited long-range strikes using American-supplied weapons into internationally recognized Russian territory – for years considered a “red line.” Washington provided Kiev with the targeting data for the strikes. One European intelligence official was shocked by the level of US involvement in the conflict, telling the Times, “they are part of the kill chain now.”

Russia would be perfectly within its rights to launch retaliatory strikes on London, Paris, Brussels, or Washington DC now. The globalist organizations headquartered in those four cities are 100-percent guilty of having attacked Russia. The only reason it won’t do so is because time is on its side; the last desperate hope of Clown World is to provoke Russia into striking back hard enough to galvanize widespread Western support for a war on Russia.

The fact that Clown World’s very clever and not-at-all transparent strategy rests on such an obvious non-starter only serves to underline how fragile their globalist neo-tower of Babel is now. At this point, Americans wouldn’t care if Russian troops not only took Kiev and Odessa, they wouldn’t care if they occupied Berlin and Brussels as well.

The constant portrayal of the patient, cautious Putin, who is probably the individual most responsible for preventing WWIII, as an aggressive dictator is such a complete inversion of the truth that it is probably going to be genuinely shocking to most people when he is eventually succeeded by a much more hardline figure who is much more willing to hold Russia’s enemies accountable for their constant provocations.

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I don’t know if there is a connection between the news that four US soldiers in a vehicle died near the Lithuanian-Belorussian border and the announcement that the Baltic states were starting to mine their borders, but a connection might explain the incident.

Four American soldiers and a tracked transport vehicle went missing yesterday during military exercises near the Belarusian border in Lithuania. Today, they were found dead, reports Delfi. The circumstances and cause of their deaths are currently under investigation.

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At this point, I have to assume that Putin and his advisors are quite cheerfully assuming that the Kiev regime and its EU supporters don’t have the brains or the courage to quit when they’re behind.

In return for recognition and if it happened “in the near future”, Kommersant said Putin would undertake not to lay claim to the Ukrainian port city of Odessa and other Ukrainian territory.

Keep in mind Kommersant is not a ‘tabloid’ or rag, but one of Russia’s most respected publications. So, if we are to believe the claim above, Putin is essentially giving the West and Ukraine a short window of time to accept the current territories, or risk having Odessa be included in the official demands.

This obviously fully goes along with Putin’s previous more ‘vague’ statements, echoed by the likes of Lavrov et al, about how Ukraine’s terms would progressively worsen over time, should they refuse to accept Russia’s current ‘generous’ ones. But recall that in the last report, we’ve already mentioned how Ukraine is getting increasingly antsy over potential ‘secret talks’ between Putin and Trump on the Odessa bargaining chip:

As Forbes further notes, the Kommersant journalist claims Putin said “and other regions” besides Odessa, which could obviously point to Kharkov and the like. But Russia could change its mind and decide to close this window short:

However, the point at which Russia is ready to abandon its claims to Odessa and other territories with the recognition of the Crimea, the LPR, DPR, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions may also move, the correspondent notes. “They don’t have time to dig in,” Putin said at the meeting.

I suspect this is just Russia being polite in a diplomatic context. While Kiev and Brussels are still posturing about recovering the Crimea and the four liberated republics, and the USA is hoping to keep the new borders more or less where they are, Russia has been preparing a spring offensive that will almost certainly acquire Odessa and Eastern Ukraine. The statement strikes me as the sort of fair warning that you give a ranting lunatic, not for his sake, but in order to demonstrate to everyone after the fact that you gave him the opportunity to avoid the inevitable consequences.

And, of course, you do so with confidence that he’s going to ignore it and continue pursuing the conflict.

There is absolutely no chance that the Ukro-European alliance is going to prevent Russia from doing whatever Putin believes to be necessary. The increasing importance of drone warfare, which is increasingly replacing artillery as the queen of the battlefield, is making industrial capacity even more important, so much so that it has almost certainly changed the balance of power in Asia in the infantry context; the USA will not be able to match China on either the ground or the sea now.

Furthermore, most analysts seem to stubbornly ignore that in addition to the USA is stepping back from propping up Europe’s militaries, Russia has the ability to vastly expand its already-formidable military resources by calling on China, Iran, and North Korea for manufacturing support at any time. This is not an option that is open to Europe, with the possible exception of India.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, the absolute best strategy at this juncture is for the Kiev regime to surrender unconditionally and appeal to the mercy of a man who has proven himself to be considerably more far-sighted than any of the European or US leaders. Putin knows from the declining power of the USA and the collapse of the Soviet Union that a hostile occupation of Western Ukraine or Eastern Europe is not in Russia’s interest.

But I very much doubt anyone in Kiev, Brussels, or Washington DC has the sense to accept the brutal mathematics of war. Which is why I expect Odessa to be in Russian hands before the end of the year.

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Ukraine rejects Russia’s conditions for a 30-day ceasefire:

Ukraine has just released their own ‘red lines’, which contravene virtually every one of Russia’s most important demands.

• No restrictions on the size of the army;
• No restrictions on Ukraine’s participation in the EU and NATO;
• Russia should not have a veto over Ukraine’s participation in international organizations.

What exactly, then, is the point of giving Ukraine a 30-day ceasefire, when they are expressly rejecting Russia’s core conditions?

It’s interesting that Kiev would implicitly accept the Russian territorial demands, but considering that its forces are a) probably less than 30 days from retreating from the remainder of those four regions, and, b) Russia has already entered a fifth region, the Oblast of Sumy, in force, that is little more than refusing to deny an effective fait accompli.

But as Simplicius points out, the strangest thing is that the US is now threatening to do something Russia hasn’t even been accused of doing by anyone, which is to invade a NATO signatory.

The Chairman of Denmark’s Defense Committee, Rasmus Jarlov responds to today’s statement by U.S. President Donald J. Trump while meeting with the Secretary-General of NATO, in which he said that he believed the U.S. annexation of Greenland would happen, with Jarlov stating, “It would mean war between two NATO countries. Greenland has just voted against immediate independence from Denmark and does not want to be American ever.”

What Jarlov references above is the new polls that show 85% of Greenlanders do not want to become a part of the US. What makes the hypocrisy even more outrageous is that in the video above, Trump even hints at a potential referendum for Greenland to join the US. So, referenda are “not democracy” when it comes to Russia in Crimea, Donbass, and elsewhere—but are fine when the US does it?

At this point, anyone who claims to know what’s going on is posturing, because the rhetoric is now so far beyond the dialectic it’s not even possible to make any coherent sense of it all. Best just to ignore all the words and pay attention to the actual facts on the ground. However, it’s becoming apparent that Russia expects Odessa and Nikolaev to peacefully come under its control, as its demand for self-determination on the part of the Ukrainian-controlled territories obviously anticipates.

In addition to the fact that all our constitutional territories are unequivocally not subject to any revision, and the organization and conduct of a Tribunal on the facts of war crimes by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, our interests also extend to the entire left-bank Ukraine, where there should be no Ukrainian troops, and the territories themselves should be under our protectorate. The same applies to the Odessa and Nikolaev regions, where our monitoring missions will operate. This effectively means the establishment of our bases there. The administration of these regions should be appointed from representatives loyal to us. And, of course, these regions, like the regions of left-bank Ukraine, should have the right to self-determination.

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