TOTAL CARNAGE IS ALMOST INEVITABLE AS ESCALATION FOLLOWS ESCALATION IN UKRAINE

The world is at war and neither side can back down. There is too much at stake.

Russia, pushed into a corner where it was demanded that it negate its past where over 25 million Russians died, and accept NATO moving right up to its doorstep, at last refused to lie down meekly and accept this threat.

The explosive train of events since that fateful decision continue to impact more and more aspects of western interests within the global economy. Despite the massive fallout already felt, this appears to be only the beginning of these trends with much more and even greater impacts to come.

With all this going on the two powers squaring up to each other, instead of finding some accommodation with one another drift ever farther apart in growing antagonism, mistrust and acts of escalation of the type that create mortal enemies who are irreconcilable in anything but the most minor details… if they can agree on any at all.

Demonisation is the order of the day, with the portrayal of ‘the enemy’ as a subhuman monster only deserving of complete elimination. No quarter is sought or given and the burial grounds of human casualties are hardly a factor for either in a war without limit that leaves only one side standing.

In the middle of the face-off where two foes stand eye to eye ready to tear each others’ heads off the battleground becomes a sea of blood and bone, a wasteland where the traumas of death, fear and destruction replace all earlier tendencies toward common humanity.

Such is war and such is the state of our world that thought itself beyond such barbarism.

Wars need two instigators however and the history of the Ukrainian war clearly shows only one, the collective western leadership who degree by degree negated Russia’s right to national security and preservation of its protective sphere of influence. In a macabre anti-Cuban missile crisis Russia was pressured to accept that it had no right to peace of mind, that a belligerent NATO had every possible right to creep right up to its door and squat there for all the world like one of Steven Spielberg’s gremlins.

Like a schoolyard bully relentlessly pushing the shoulder of another less muscled victim, there sometimes can be an unexpected outcome.

There is every indication that the U.S. military has been providing Ukraine with precise location data on Russian targets, the use of which has resulted in many civilian deaths. In response, Russia responds proportionately and in recent weeks has has targeted a bunker within Ukraine where it seems a large number of NATO personnel were coordinating attacks on Russia.

Such escalations by the western powers reveal constant and significant escalation of violence encompassing the apparent acceptance that certain civilian casualties are inevitable and perhaps even desirable due to their involvement in supporting Russia, the Russian-speaking majority of the Donbass.

In war there is a strong tendency toward ‘mission creep’ and an increasing acceptance that things which would have been abhorrent before become regarded as ‘unfortunate necessities’ before becoming in due course an every day ‘accepted normality’. We have seen the West escalate in this manner time after time, saying that certain weapons will not be given the Ukrainian regime only for them to be given a few weeks or months later.

Once the Rubicon is crossed there is usually no turning back.

Thus we move to the necessitated compartmentalisation of conscience within a steely-eyed compulsion to utterly decimate an enemy that has become only a fiendish shadow of a human representation, a thing to be exterminated by all means possible.

The latest escalations include the point blank refusal to take part in peace talks, something Russia has been willing to engage in from the very start and which almost reached agreement in Istanbul last March if it were not for the intervention by Johnson and Biden to halt the process.

Now we await what may be the final escalation from the Ukrainian regime and their western sponsors, the long-promised counter offensive by the Ukrainian military. We are promised by Anthony Blinken that it will take place sometime in the the next few weeks. However, Russia has said it is fully ready to repulse any offensive which the regime mounts. This may well be the final battle that will determine the outcome of this conflict and much else besides. We are nearing a crucial moment in history and there appears to be an atmosphere of no quarter to be given on either side.

We stand on that threshold now. And into that evil mire we may now plunge. Whether one side gains a great victory or we find all sides grieving that humanity has finally come to this where hope, idealism, patriotism and honour are all lost in a final abysmal bloodbath.