WEST HAS A PROBLEM: HOW TO MAKE DEFEAT IN UKRAINE LOOK LIKE VICTORY

 

Mass media is all-pervasive and virtually all-powerful. Many believe what the media says they OUGHT to believe. So, in the West these days losing a war but saying you won is a distinct possibility.

Russia was always going to achieve the goals set for its special military operation in Ukraine. No matter what it took, winning there against NATO was vital for the security of the Russian Federation in perpetuity. No task would ever have a higher priority than that and this task, as we can see, is being achieved and ever more obviously every day that dawns. This presents the western powers with a huge problem; how to make their defeat in Ukraine look like victory?

The most obvious way to do the above is to create a fictional goal for Russia and then point out endlessly that this mirage of a goal was not achieved. This is the most likely fiction to be used by the West to save face. The fiction you are very likely to hear endlessly repeated by western politicians and western mass media quite soon is this:

RUSSIA WANTED TO TAKE THE ENTIRETY OF UKRAINE AND WAS SUCCESSFULLY STOPPED FROM DOING SO

Due to the hugely biased coverage of the conflict in Ukraine where so-called “Russian Aggression” was hyped to the nth degree a great many people in the West will assume that Russia did indeed wish to conquer and occupy every inch of Ukraine. Very few readers and viewers of western mass media will have taken the time to discover Russia’s actual goals for its operation in Ukraine. These goals were severely limited at the start and have only been expanded to a limited degree in response to the West continually fueling the war.

Russia’s ACTUAL goals:

1. Ensure Ukraine does not join NATO.

2. Protect the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine from attack.

3. The demilitarization of Ukraine.

4. The denazification of Ukraine.

Far from wishing to conquer all of Ukraine Russia was willing even as early as the first month of its campaign to negotiate an agreement where the Ukrainian authorities accepted the first goal above, for Ukraine to be a neutral, buffer state between Russia and the West/NATO. The second goal was to be negotiated between the two national leaders. These were the first, initialed agreements documented between the two sides in Istanbul just a month into the conflict. 

As we all know now, and as confirmed by the leader of the Ukrainian delegation to the peace talks, Ukraine’s western sponsors did not agree to these terms and urged Ukraine to abandon the talks and continue fighting.

Knowing the above we can see clearly that Russia, rather than wishing to fight to take all of Ukraine it was minded instead to call hostilities to a halt with an agreement on its first two goals above.

The crucial thing to understand is that since the abandonment of the peace talks by Ukraine in March 2022 the western powers have had to endlessly double down seeking to land a conclusive punch on Russia. They had presumed that Russian resistance would crumble under the weight of western sanctions. It did not. In fact Russia, after the first period where it took the blows and stumbled to a limited degree, came roaring back into economic good health, moving up to become the world’s fourth largest economy (rising above both Germany and Japan) by one measure of economic health. 

No matter what the western powers did, once Russia took all the economic and financial blows the West could land on it and came up smiling, there was no way the Ukrainian regime could win, no matter what so-called “gamechanger” weapons the West delivered to it. But the western powers cannot contemplate the humiliation that would come with defeat by Russia nor the devastating effect on their reputation for world dominance due to that defeat. So, an ‘out’ must be found that both saves face and retains, at least to some extent, the West’s  reputation as the world’s policeman’.

If the ‘out’ above starts to look shaky and unbelievable then yet another plan to claim victory in the face of defeat may come into being and we may be seeing this play out currently. This involves making everyone believe that a nuclear war is imminent. The tactic is simple and we may be seeing the initial elements coming into play right now.

1. Allow missile strikes deep (up to 200 km) into the Russian Federation. These strikes will of course be controlled by NATO nation special forces with all targeting, data loading and in fact all preparatory work necessary before having Ukrainians initiate firing (if they even get to perform this last function).

2. Do the above in the expectation that Russia will respond by some action or actions that are strong enough to agitate the world’s leaders sufficiently who will then call for an immediate halt to the conflict on the grounds that it now represents a very real and totally unacceptable threat to all humanity.

3. The western powers gain their ‘frozen conflict’ situation and can claim that Russia failed in all her goals. This would not of course be the case as Russia would retain Crimea, all the territory taken in eastern Ukraine to that point and would have rendered Ukraine far less dangerous. However, the western powers could usher Ukraine into NATO and begin the process of upgrading every aspect of military power there. 

In the last few days however, Vladimir Putin has countered the plan above by stating that Russia would most likely respond to attacks upon it not by similar attacks on NATO nations but by asymmetrical means via supplying military hardware to nations in conflict zones where western states were the enemy. Putin clearly sees the game the West is playing and will not allow Russia to be checkmated in the way the West plans. Instead, Russia will continue to win her objectives by a steady attrition of the West’s resources in Ukraine and through this ultimately achieve all her aims for the campaign started in February 2022.