imetatronink | 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.
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