We are now well within the end game of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Russia’s special military operation has been sustained despite all provocations from the Kiev regime that might have turned it into a war. What is the difference between the SMO and a war some may say. The difference is easy to point to. If Russia had declared war on the Ukrainian regime there would not be a single Ukrainian government office still standing. The power grid of Ukraine, degraded now, would have been obliterated along with any attempt to repair it. No trains would run as every station, substation and means of powering those trains short of coal would be non-existent. Zelensky would have died almost immediately. His fellow travelers and assorted minions within his so-called government would have breathed their last, perhaps during the early destruction of the Ukrainian parliament building in Kiev. Those who wonder about the SMO and why Putin said near its start that Russia hadn’t even got started yet when early on certain commentators were aghast at what the Russian military was doing.
Russia began the SMO with a relatively small military force designed to push Zelensky into doing what he had committed to with the signing of the Minsk Accords later ratified at the United Nations. Merkel and co. now say they never meant for the agreement to be honoured, that it was only a stalling tactic to let the Ukrainian military be brought to a NATO level of readiness and to build fortification lines in depth to keep the Russian-speakers of the Donbass region in a siege to be shelled into submission. The Minsk negotiations went on from 2015 to late 2021. You can imagine to what degree the Ukrainian army was strengthened and to what depth those fortifications were built in those years, strength in depth that has presented a formidable barrier to Russian progress… till now. Now we are in the end game, at the last stage of the conflict where the final lines of fortifications are being broken through. Beyond them lies an open path for the Russians to progress quickly all the way to the east bank of the Dnieper River. This was not what Russia wished for. Not at all. The Minsk process was meant to bring renewed peace and reconciliation. All that was required was that the Russian-speakers be allowed to live in peace and security with a requisite degree of autonomy. This was achievable through Minsk and was again almost attained a month into the conflict in Istanbul. The western powers never saw peace and reconciliation as positive outcomes. Weakening Russia through war was their goal.
Now, so many years of needless conflict later Zelelenky’s desperate last gasp strategy of initiating an incursion into the Kursk region of Russia can be seen to be failing heralding the end of this sorry chapter of world history. His last throw of the dice will reveal him as the clear loser of this conflict for all the world to see, a world that will soon then turn its back on him. All previous talk of resemblance between Zelensky and Winston Churchill will be an embarrassment to those who slapped his back and offered their undying support less than a year before. Biden’s memoirs will conveniently shorten the entire Ukraine episode to a few vainglorious paragraphs that ignore the humiliating debacle he authored along with the drone assassin, Barack Obama. Mainstream media news hawks who offered constant delusional opinions about a sure Ukrainian victory will fall suddenly silent before focusing on the next regime change goal of the constantly warmongering West.
Russia, massively strengthened after its victory over the entire collective west will benefit from its well-earned status as primary advocate, along with China, of the multipolar world that will then be moving forward apace. Russia will begin the task of bringing all its new regions and the standards for those within them up to the level of the rest of Russia assisted by its partners within the BRICS group. The number of nations queuing to join the BRICS will be seen to expand still further while those remaining within the now disgraced orbit of the USA, UK and EU will shrink by comparison. What is left of Ukraine will sink into the memory hole of non-existence for western nations, an embarrassment, a failed, economically non-viable state that constantly seeks even more assistance from sponsors now seeking every means to divorce themselves from it. NATO will have no option but to desist in its ambitions as a new, Russia-neutral government and president takes the place of Zelensky and his horde changing the Ukrainian constitution forever ruling out NATO membership.
Historians, upon the capitulation of the Zelensky regime, will bemoan the fact that the end result of the push to get Ukraine into the western orbit via NATO, was doomed from the start. All the insightful comments made by such as George Kennan, the acknowledged architect of the West’s containment policy of the Soviet Union will be quoted. Those who care about such things will finally have their say on why so much relentless stupidity by the western powers was carried on for so long, with them doubling down endlessly, digging ever deeper into the hole they had dug since the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008 when George W. Bush insisted that a statement was to be made saying Ukraine and Georgia would one day join NATO.
To end this sorry tale of disastrous western hubris and lust to retain global hegemony, read George Kennan’s views concerning the expansion of NATO eastward toward Russia’s borders after the fall of the Soviet UNion and Warsaw Pact. Why were his words not noted by such as Clinton, Obama, Trump and Biden as they deserved to be? Reckless irresponsibility, blind ambition, needless fear and sheer ignorance brought our world to the brink of nuclear war and led directly to the death or grievous injury of over half a million human beings and in the process caused the destruction of an entire nation.
Foreign Affairs; Now a Word From X
New York Times May 2, 1998.
‘His voice is a bit frail now, but the mind, even at age 94, is as sharp as ever. So when I reached George Kennan by phone to get his reaction to the Senate's ratification of NATO expansion it was no surprise to find that the man who was the architect of America's successful containment of the Soviet Union and one of the great American statesmen of the 20th century was ready with an answer.
''I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,'' said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ''I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.''
''What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,'' added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ''X,'' defined America's cold-war containment policy for 40 years. ''I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.
''And Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia,'' said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. ''It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong.''
One only wonders what future historians will say. If we are lucky they will say that NATO expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic simply didn't matter, because the vacuum it was supposed to fill had already been filled, only the Clinton team couldn't see it. They will say that the forces of globalization integrating Europe, coupled with the new arms control agreements, proved to be so powerful that Russia, despite NATO expansion, moved ahead with democratization and Westernization, and was gradually drawn into a loosely unified Europe. If we are unlucky they will say, as Mr. Kennan predicts, that NATO expansion set up a situation in which NATO now has to either expand all the way to Russia's border, triggering a new cold war, or stop expanding after these three new countries and create a new dividing line through Europe.
But there is one thing future historians will surely remark upon, and that is the utter poverty of imagination that characterized U.S. foreign policy in the late 1990's. They will note that one of the seminal events of this century took place between 1989 and 1992 -- the collapse of the Soviet Empire, which had the capability, imperial intentions and ideology to truly threaten the entire free world. Thanks to Western resolve and the courage of Russian democrats, that Soviet Empire collapsed without a shot, spawning a democratic Russia, setting free the former Soviet republics and leading to unprecedented arms control agreements with the U.S.
And what was America's response? It was to expand the NATO cold-war alliance against Russia and bring it closer to Russia's borders.
Yes, tell your children, and your children's children, that you lived in the age of Bill Clinton and William Cohen, the age of Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger, the age of Trent Lott and Joe Lieberman, and you too were present at the creation of the post-cold-war order, when these foreign policy Titans put their heads together and produced . . . a mouse.
We are in the age of midgets. The only good news is that we got here in one piece because there was another age -- one of great statesmen who had both imagination and courage.
As he said goodbye to me on the phone, Mr. Kennan added just one more thing: ''This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end.''
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/02/opinion/foreign-affairs-now-a-word-from-x.html
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