Some of the comments and questions I have received over the past few weeks made it clear to me that many of my readers, enlightened and well-informed though they generally are, aren't sure what to believe about the action in the Ukraine, having been caught up in a maelstrom of lies that pass as news coverage in the West. My goal here is not to convert or to convince but to simply list a number of aspects of the Ukrainian situation for you to toss around in your mind. Let me apologize ahead of time for any cognitive dissonance this may create; I am only trying to be helpful. The exposition is going to seem a bit dry in places, but that is because I am trying hard to stick to known, well-established facts. I will leave up to you to decide how well what you are being told by Western consent manufacturers squares with it.
1. What is the Ukraine geographically?
The Russian word "ukraina" is a variant of "okraina" and is related to the word "krai" which means rim, edge, margin, outskirts, verge, frontier, etc., from the rim of a teacup to a province distant from the center (Moscow). It isn't entirely clear where the term "Ukraina," as a specific toponym, came from; there is some evidence that it was something of a derogatory term first used by the Poles at a time when Poland occupied roughly half of that territory (at the time the border between Poland and Russia ran along the Dnepr river, cutting it in half).
"Ukraina" was then given official status by the communist government following the Russian revolution of 1917, proclaiming a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, in place of five Russian provinces (Yekaterinoslavskaya, Poltavskaya, Tavricheskaya, Chernigovskaya and Kharkovskaya gubernii). Various terms have been applied to groupings of these territories, such as Novorossia (lands which Russia conquered in the second half of the 18th century as a result of wars with the Ottoman Empire) and Malorossia, or "Little Russia" (as a designation for Orthodox Christian lands which passed back and forth between Russia and Poland over many centuries).
After the conclusion of World War II, Stalin added to the Ukrainian SSR a heavily Balkanized area further west that was part of Austria-Hungary and inhabited by Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, Russians, Gypsies, Poles and various small Slavic tribes. That area was where Ukrainian nationalism, in its current form, came from, and it was from the village dialects spoken in this area that the official Ukrainian language now taught in schools throughout the Ukraine was artificially synthesized in the late 19th-early 20th centuries.
Immediately after the government overthrow of 2014 the Ukraine started to fall apart. First to go was Crimea, which has been part of Russia for most of the past 240 years. It was briefly an autonomy within the Ukrainian state but its parliament voted for secession soon after the illegal coup in Kiev. The Donbass, a Russian area added by Lenin, was next to fission off. For a time it looked as if Kharkov and Odessa regions would pop off as well. Their separatism was arrested through the application of state terrorism. And now, a month into Russia's military operation in the Ukraine, only 60% of Ukrainian territory remains; the rest is flying Russian flags. The overall historical trend is thus unmistakable: the territorial remnant of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is disappearing.
Draw your own conclusions, but it would seem that the territory of the former Ukraine, being culturally mostly Russian, religiously mostly Russian Orthodox, linguistically mostly Russian-speaking, historically mostly part of Russia, is really just bits and pieces of Russia that got tossed about by the collapse of the Russian Empire and then the collapse of the USSR. As the Russian Federation grows stronger while the West nears its own collapse, it is natural to expect that Russia will started to gather its assorted lost sheep and prodigal sons.
2. What is the Ukraine politically?
Politically, the Ukraine (what remains of it) is a US something-or-other. Its attribution to the US is hard to dispute: its government is controlled from the US embassy in Kiev (or is it Lvov now?) and its armed forces are directly controlled from the Pentagon based on remote sensing data and field reports from embedded US/NATO officers. But what is it then? It is not a colony, for a colony is something that produces something valuable for the imperial center while the Ukraine is an economic black hole. It is not a protectorate, since US forces are not officially present there and make no pretense of guarding this territory or protecting its civilians. And it is not a sovereign possession since US officials never tire of speaking of its sovereignty and territorial integrity. What it is, by process of elimination, is a failed state propped up by the US for the sole purpose of attacking Russia. Since that attack failed, it has one remaining purpose left: to justify anti-Russian sanctions that were supposed to have destroyed Russia's economy by now. But now that the sanctions have failed too (Russia's economy is still growing nicely), it has but one conceivable purpose left: as a millstone to hang on poor old Brendan's neck before tossing him overboard.
The Ukraine is 99% a failed state, with barely an army, barely an economy and a flood of refugees. Yet it still has an internationally recognized central government: that is the Kiev regime with its figurehead comedian Vladimir Zelensky, hidden away in some bunker at an undisclosed location. All the other trappings of statehood seem somewhat threadbare at this point. Since Zelensky has banned all political parties other than his own, it is a single-party state, although under current conditions it is closer to a no-party state. There is also no national press, since Zelensky has banned all TV channels other than just the single government channel. Most of what it broadcasts seems to come from one or more fake news factories which may be located somewhere else—in Poland, perhaps. A really excellent question to ask is whether Zelensky controls his own mouth. He is an actor and he appears to be playing a role scripted for him by someone else. He also appears to be under considerable duress. He was noted before for his fondness for cocaine, but in more recent videos he acts either drunk or under the influence of other drugs (methadone, perhaps, which is quite widespread in the Ukrainian army).
Zooming out to the mindscape of the former Ukrainian territory, it is a deeply traumatized land accustomed to living in fear. The vast majority of them are basically just Russians with a varying amount of Ukrainness added as flavoring. But over the past eight years they have been forced to speak Ukrainian (a foreign language for most of them) and to pledge allegiance to a regime that has embraced Nazi flags, insignia and ideology. They have been forced to disown their Russian heritage which goes back a thousand years (Kiev was briefly Russia's capital around the end of the 9th century) and to treat Russia as an enemy (while continuing to trade with Russia for all sorts of essentials and to receive economic aid from millions of Ukrainians working in Russia). Those who attempted to go against these orders were subjected to horrific mistreatment, from artillery bombardment to being herded into burning buildings to being tortured to death. All of these war crimes have been scrupulously documented and their perpetrators will be brought to justice in a war crimes tribunal that will rival the ones at Nuremberg in 1945-6.
Some Ukrainian nationalists attempt to argue that Kievan Rus was not Russia at all. The response to that is that Kievan Rus never existed at all. There was Rus, and various cities within it, including Kiev and Novgorod, were prominent within it at various times. The focal point was very briefly Kiev but then shifted north. As far as the name, Rus and Russia are synonyms. There is historical, cultural, linguistic, religious and political continuity tying together all of Russia, Kiev included, that spans 10 centuries. Kiev didn't last long at the top of the heap because it is too vulnerable—whether to Poles or Mongols or German Nazis (who bombed Kiev on day 1). Throughout most of Russian history Kiev has played the role of a sacrificial weakest link. But in spite of seeing more than their fair share of invaders it has remained one of the focal points of Russian civilization and the people there are most definitely Russian.
And here is a very handy litmus test. Consider the proposition that Russians and Ukrainians are essentially the same people as attested by history, religion, language, culture and genetic makeup. There are those who accept this proposition as true; they are OK. And then there are those who find it deeply offensive; they are Ukrainian nationalists, Nazis for short. Given that, among Russian, support for Putin stands at 83% and support for the Russian military operation in the (former) Ukraine is absolutely overwhelming, this is not a good time to be a Ukrainian Nazi. They are likely to end up dead, imprisoned or in exile somewhere in the EU, where their life is unlikely to be comfortable given that the EU is going to collapse.
It seems valid to wonder where these Ukrainian Nazis came from and why they managed to survive for so long. There is no simple answer for this. Ukrainian nationalism got its start from the hands of Russian anti-imperialists. There was a lot of political foment in the dying days of the Russian empire, and some people saw it advantageous to write and publish (in St. Petersburg) a grammar of Ukrainian (invented by someone from Sumy) and other such oddities. When the Russian Empire collapsed there was a wave of fascism that swept through the newly independent imperial lands. Finland, the Baltics, Poland, what later became the Ukrainian SSR and many other countries had their dalliance with fascism, and here nascent Ukrainian nationalism found its first application. That episode didn't last long, as fascism was swiftly replaced by communism, but the Bolsheviks, many of them opposed to "Russian chauvinism," saw it fit to nurture a Ukrainian ethnic identity.
Then, during the German Nazi occupation, the Ukrainian Nazis got to do some war crimes as Nazi collaborators, creating a pantheon of genocidal maniacs I mean Ukrainian heroes that are in the pantheon of the current Kiev regime: figures such as Bandera and Shukhevich. After the war most of these Nazi collaborators got rounded up; some were hung, others shipped off to the Gulag. But after Stalin's death came Nikita Khrushchev, who rehabilitated these war criminals and allowed them to reintegrate into Ukrainian society and corrupt the minds of the youth. Another stream of Ukrainian Nazism was created by the US and Canada, who accepted war criminals and refugees and nurtured them as a sort of anti-Soviet opposition force. They returned after the Soviet collapse and all the Nazis together were lavishly funded and supported politically by the US for some 22 years until the project was brought to fruition in the coup of 2014. Since then the Ukraine has been controlled by a sort of US/Nazi junta, which is now coming to its sticky end.
So where does all of this leave the population of the (former) Ukraine, traumatized by being forbidden to speak or to teach its native Russian, subjecting to shelling or worse, and now abandoned to the tender mercies of professional Russian soldiers? It is dangerous to generalize and to conjecture. Some people are simply happy that the nightmare is over. Others, rather heavily brainwashed, will gradually deprogram themselves once the fake news pipeline of Ukrainian television is turned off where they are. Yet others will go through a lengthy recovery process similar to what former cult members go through, having been deeply involved with the totalitarian cult that is Ukrainian nationalism. The good news is that the prognosis is good for full eventual recovery; most Ukrainians become indistinguishable from the general Russian population in one or two generations.
3. What is the Ukraine militarily?
The Ukrainian army initially planned to attack the Donbass with everything it had, causing hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, and to stage provocations on Russian territory to force the Russians to intervene, bogging them down in street fighting in Donetsk. The Russians got wind of this plan and neatly thwarted it with perhaps as little as a week to spare. The fact that it came as a surprise to anyone at all is itself a surprise: shortly before it happened, Putin said: "One of the things I learned growing up on the streets of Leningrad is that if a fight is inevitable, you should strike first." And then he did exactly that, which is not a surprise either: Putin is well known for saying what he is planning to do and then doing exactly that.
The Russian force, a rather small one at perhaps only 1/4 of 1/5 of the size of the Ukrainian force, has pretty much disarmed the Ukrainians, methodically destroying air defenses, tanks, weapons stockpiles, artillery systems, command centers, fuel depots, refineries, mercenary training centers and even a deep underground nuclear-hardened bunk using a hypersonic missile launched from a small ship a thousand kilometers away (just to make some people at the Pentagon put on fresh panties). Remaining Ukrainian military forces have been chased into just three small pockets, all in the east, where they are being methodically demolished.
The mission has been complicated by the Ukrainians' widespread us of civilians as human shields, slowing down progress and increasing the numbers of civilian casualties. There are indications that the remaining Ukrainian forces are being commanded remotely by the Pentagon through Nazis embedded in every part of the military structure to fight down to the last Ukrainian. Based on interviews with those who manage to surrender, they are demoralized, see their continued operation as pointless, but are prevented from surrendering by a drug-addled Nazi reign of terror that prevails within the military.
At some point over the next weeks to a month the Ukraine will cease to be a target-rich environment for Russia's high-tech military and it will be time to change the mission from neutralizing the Ukraine militarily to humanitarian and mop-up operations. In about the same time-frame most of the Ukrainians who wanted to flee to the EU will have had a chance to do so and it will be time to secure the Ukraine's western borders. If it weren't for enforced political correctness, the Europeans would perhaps be overjoyed at seeing millions of Ukrainian refugees flood in to alleviate a severe shortage of white people there caused by very low birth rates among the natives.
There is little doubt that we'll see more false flags and provocations, such as the "massacre" at Bucha (which was carefully chosen because "The butcher of Bucha" sounds snappy, which occurred three days after the Russians pulled back as a goodwill gesture based on progress in negotiations, and where corpses, looking and smelling fresh as daisies, were observed sitting up and smoking cigarettes). There was also the Mariupol maternity ward (where there were no women but one local beauty blogger who wasn't pregnant). And you, my dear readers, knowing better, will be forced to view and read about this crap and, though knowing better, feign umbrage, for otherwise the people around you will look askance at you. I wish to reassure you that doing so will not make a Nazi sympathizer of you.
But all things, good and bad, must come to and end, and I am willing to go out on a limb and guess that Moscow's Victory Day 2022, on May 9th, will be quite an occasion. Nobody has announced this, but I would be surprised if the military plans don't call for achieving some sort of closure in the Ukrainian special operation by that time.
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