UKRAINE: A TOUGH NUT TO CRACK - WILL IT BE CRACKED IN 2023?

Dismantling the criminal, extremist regime in Kiev, or at least making it amenable to Russia's needs, is proving much harder than most of us believed at the start of Russia's special military operation. This is due of course to the regime being backed to an enormous degree by the powers of the collective West plus the inhibitions Russia has had regarding the great risk of killing brother and sister Slavs.

All of the above has resulted in a hard slog where the Russian military has had to fight well dug in Ukrainian forces trench by trench and street by street with their enemy occupying emptied out civilian homes, schools and hospitals equipped with the most modern weaponry NATO has. An entire defence line some 1,000 miles long of well-fortified positions were constructed between 2014 and the present day. Breaking through these lines has been a monumental task. 

The task of liberating the people of the Donbass region of easter Ukraine who have been shelled remorselessly since 2014 by the Ukrainian army (14,000 have died) has been made even harder by the regime in Kiev sending tens of thousands of poorly trained cannon fodder into the fray as well as using foreign mercenaries and troops from all NATO nations in anonymous uniforms, also in their thousands to the front lines.

I, like many others, assumed over the years since 2014 that if Russia fully committed itself militarily to solving the problem of the Donbass (and NATO) that the fight would not last long and would most likely be over within a few weeks at most. Perhaps this would have been true in 2014 or 2015, Putin has inferred this in recent times. However, in 2014 and 2015 Russia was extremely vulnerable to the inevitable reaction of the western powerst by way of sanctions and, due to this, could not do what many in the Donbass, considered vital for their long-term security.

Since 2014, which we can see by the way the fighting has gone, the western powers built the military potential of Ukraine to an inordinate degree. It is clear they knew the start of a Russian military campaign in Ukraine was only a question of when. It must be suspected that the western powers actively planned to create the conditions so that this did indeed occur. Why otherwise would they create such massive defences by way of array after array of trenches and command points, and of course train the Ukrainian military to a NATO standard of readiness?

The goal was clearly from the start to invite Russia to invade Ukraine in order to drain it of its financial and economic resources and so weaken it. The plan was to apply as many sanctions as possible to Russia while doing so, thus delivering a double-whammy that would undermine the nation, cause chaos on the streets and ultimately bring about regime change and the replacement of Russia's president and system of governance. New people, willing to be compliant to the commands of the western powers were envisaged within the plan to take over and neutralise Russia and subsequently split it into pieces, Balkanizing it. 

Though the western powers may have planned to have Russia instigate its campaign it was a high risk strategy. If Putin and his advisers underestimated the unwillingness of the Kiev regime to negotiate, and therefore the degree of determination of its backers to resist anything amounting to negotiations, then those western leaders have also miscalculated.

Russia had successfully strengthened its economic and financial systems since 2014 just as the West has strengthened Ukraine's defensive capabilities. Due to this robust level of strength in depth Russia has been able to successfully weather every attack upon it by the West and has accurately delivered many blows of its own upon each unfriendly western nation.

But this still leaves Ukraine as a very tough nut to crack, mainly due to Russia not just fighting Ukraine but the entire western world as led by its current crop of leaders, determined as they clearly are to win out against Russia no matter the cost. We have seen the leaders of these nations continue to double down to this point in time. But are we seeing things begin to change? Throwing billions after billions can surely only last so long and as the taxpayers increasingly see their hard-earned money thrown away abroad while they suffer more and more at home, something's surely got to give sooner or later.

2023 will I, believe, be the crucial year that reveals the outcome of what may be called the end game war, the very last world war, a war that will determine nothing less than the global political, geopolitical, economic, financial and social global future for all years and all generations to come. Clearly this is a battle to achieve a unipolar world by the West where its leaders act as wardens over a de facto prison planet. While the West seeks this, Russia, China, India and others are working to succeed in bringing about a multipolar world where diverse forms of governance are tolerated, and where trade, agreement and mutual respect for sovereignty between nations are the most primary features.

2023 will, I believe, at the very least, show us clearly which of these two crucial outcomes for each side is most likely, even if an outright victory for one or the other is not achievable by year's end. At the very least we will know without doubt exactly where we are headed and that alone will surely signal the coming the end of this struggle. The stakes therefore could not possibly be higher.

The signals emerging now show increasing doubt among the western protagonists and alongside this an equal measure of increasing unwillingness by western populations to continue down the present path their leaders appear determined to take them.