Long answer: let me walk you down a very short memory lane, merely 16 days long, starting from February 22, 2022. On that day, the majority of Ukrainian forces were massed deep inside the territories of Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics—the two statelets populated by Russians, many of them Russian passport-holders. The Ukrainian forces were within striking range of their capital cities and (as recently obtained official documents prove) were planning an all-out attack on them. That would have been an act of genocide which Russia would have had no choice but to try to stop.
Since the Ukrainian regime does not dare to do anything major without first receiving an "all clear" signal from Washington, this attack would have been on strategy with Washington's goals, which, perfectly clearly, were to mire Russia in a Ukrainian civil war. This war would in turn provide the rationale for international isolation which would crush Russia's economy and force it to once again provide its natural resources to the West for almost nothing. Were this plan to fail, the West would collapse.
The way it looks now, this plan is failing. I will return to this subject in a little while; by then the situation will have become clearer to a few more people. As people go through the inevitable denial-anger-bargaining sequence, it is best to hang back until the bargaining part is reached; only then does reasoned discussion become possible.
While the Ukrainian regime was frustrated in its efforts to join NATO by the fact that it does not control its own territory, it in fact surrendered the Ukraine to NATO forces, allowing NATO to order its military around and turning itself over to NATO's use, thus bringing NATO within striking range of Moscow and driving NATO's expansion east along the same route used by previous Western invaders—Napoleon and Hitler. Thus, the Ukrainian regime blithely trod across a very well established Russian red line that was guaranteed to trigger a military response. Given the vast disproportion in military strength, this was a delusional, suicidal move.
To top all of this off, at the Munich security conference held this February the (former?) Ukrainian president Zelensky professed his desire to develop nuclear weapons with which to attack Russia. Note that the Ukraine had sufficient nuclear materials, technologies and knowhow, inherited from the USSR, to rush through such a development program, especially if with US help. Although this would directly violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty ("non-nuclear-weapon states agree never to acquire nuclearweapons"), he did not get any pushback from the assorted Western luminaries assembled there. Thus the Ukrainian regime thus did everything necessary to fashion itself into an immediate existential threat to Russia, sealing its fate.
The Russian response, nicknamed "Operation Z" from the letter "Z" painted on Russian armor involved in it, has two objectives: demilitarization and denazification. The demilitarization part is simple: completely destroy the Ukraine's military capability (much of it inherited from the USSR) and refashion it into a militarily neutral confederation of semi-sovereign statelets, its security provided for by Russia. Just as everyone should have expected, the conscription-based Ukrainian military, armed with well-worn Soviet-era weaponry, with its morale somewhere down around its ankles, proved no match to the fully modernized and rearmed Russian military and is being systematically destroyed, with the surrendering soldiers being fed, bandaged up and sent home.
Thus, the demilitarization is going swimmingly and as of this writing what's left of the Ukrainian regime no longer poses a military threat to anyone except its own population, which is still being terrorized by Ukrainian Nazis. And that brings us to Part II: Denazification, which is much more complicated and requires a more thorough explanation. Many people are currently scratching their heads, trying to imagine what it could possibly be, and I am happy to be able to offer an explanation.
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Some day, after the embers have cooled, I might offer a more thorough ethnographic analysis of the Ukrainian Nazi phenomenon. For now, here is a short description. A part of the Russian population was stuck behind various enemy lines for three long centuries in what is now Western Ukraine. Disconnected and cast adrift, badly mistreated by its new colonial masters, this population steadily degenerated. It was not helped by widespread idiocy caused by iodine deficiency: the soils of the region lack the iodine necessary for normal human development. It was largely illiterate and its language drifted away from mainstream Russian and formed a separate set of often mutually incomprehensible village dialects. Then, in 1818, Alexei Sosnovsky formalized his native Sumy Region dialect in a book he published in St. Petersburg, titled "A Grammar of a Little Russian Dialect." It was as much a description as a concoction (I could write "A Grammar of a Western Virginian Dialect" if somebody paid me enough) but it was then used to make largely spurious claims about a separate Ukrainian national identity. And the only reason this national identity took shape was because of unceasing efforts by Western powers to cleave this region away from Russia for geopolitical reasons.
Thus we had a ne'er-do-well population that was used to being discriminated against, despised and excluded by every occupying power they came into contact with, permanently angry at the world and hell-bent on revenge but perpetually too weak and disorganized to carry it out. And then came their finest hour when Hitler's legions rolled in. The Ukrainian nationalists swiftly fashioned themselves into Hitler's little helpers and carried out a series atrocities against their neighbors—the Poles and the Jews especially—that shocked even the German Nazis. They would cut women's breasts off and salt the wounds; they would cut people's bellies open and stuff them full of pig feed, then let ravenous pigs feast on their entrails; they would nail children's tongues to tabletops and let them dangle—all to hoots of delight from their fellow-villagers whose wretched, twisted dreams of bloody revenge had finally come true.
And then the Red Army rolled in and their orgy of hate ended ignominiously. But it didn't end completely. Within the USSR, Ukrainian nationalism was driven underground but never quite extinguished. Meanwhile, the US and the Canadians took in, coddled and nurtured some of the worst Nazi war criminals, bringing up several generations of Ukrainian nationalists who have been conditioned and brainwashed to glorify in murder and mayhem, fetishize Nazi symbols and unify around their hatred of all things Russian. After the Ukraine gained its independence from the USSR three decades ago, these trained Nazi cadres were reintroduced into Ukrainian society, promoted with lavish grants of money, given steadfast political support, and now form the core of the (former?) Ukrainian regime. Their power swelled drastically after the violent coup of 2014 and for the past 8 years they have been able to terrorize and brainwash the entire Ukrainian population, most of which can be characterized as almost but not exactly Russian.
This point requires some elaboration as well. According to Putin's hardheaded belief, the Russians and the Ukrainians are one people. There is plenty of evidence to back up this claim. The linguistic barrier is nonexistent: the vast majority of Ukrainians speak better Russian than Ukrainian (which most of them have learned to fake as a matter of political expediency) and within a single generation they become indistinguishable from other Russians. Culturally, there is a great deal of unity, with all the same Russian and/or Ukrainian pop stars touring both Russia and the Ukraine and with the uniquely Ukrainian cultural elements limited to ethnic outfits, elements of cuisine and a few poems and folk songs. But when it comes to what the Russians call "cultural code" there is something vital that the Ukrainians are missing: the key element of "all for one and one for all" that is an essential element of the Russian psyche.
This lack is easily explained: while for the Russians their unity has paved their path to greatness, for the Ukrainians unity has not had any benefits at all—except, of course, for unity with Russia. While unified with Russia, the Ukraine became the most prosperous and industrialized country in Europe, producing such high-tech items as jet aircraft, rocket engines, large marine diesels, helicopter engines and much else. While unified with itself the Ukraine steadily degenerated into a deindustrialized, rapidly depopulating, decrepit, violent, criminalized shadow of its former self. This lack of internal unity is pernicious and works fractally throughout society: Ukrainian regions are loathe to work together toward a common purpose; even Donetsk and Lugansk, facing a unified enemy, refused to unify politically. Ukrainian neighbors don't particularly trust or help each other. There is no known method for reversing this trend toward social disunity and dissolution. The Ukrainians can easily be absorbed by Russia, but only as individuals and families!
And that brings us up to date. Right now, streams of Ukrainian refugees are flowing both to Russia and to the European Union. The Ukrainian military has been largely destroyed already and the rest of it should be finished within days. Surrendering Ukrainian conscripts are being fed and sent home. But then there are the Nazis. Some number of what Donald Rumsfeld would have called "dead-enders" are massed on the border of the Donbass, still sporadically shelling residential districts as they have been doing for 8 years (old habits die hard) while bleeding out themselves under Russian fire. When it comes to the Nazis, the Russians do not take prisoners, and so they fire back until the ammo runs out, then drop their weapons and try to run away. Some more dead-enders are holed up within cities and towns, which the Russian troops surround but mostly leave alone to avoid harming civilians. The Russian troops try to organize evacuations, which the dead-enders do their best to thwart. To keep things interesting, the Nazis stage sporadic provocations, then blame them on the Russians, and Western press serves these up with great gusto as a distraction from their own dismal news. This situation can persist for quite some time but it cannot go on forever. Over time, more and more civilians will dodge Nazi bullets to make it to the Russian side while the Nazis bleed out, run off or go into hiding. And then there will be peace.
Which brings us to denazification: how will that go. There are three phases; two of them are taking place right now, and one will take place once peace is established on the entire territory of the former Ukraine. Phase 1 is to physically kill the Nazis; the Russian military is taking care of that, with hundreds of dead Nazis accumulating daily. Phase 2 is to have the Nazis run off to the European Union: if they like their Nazis, they can have their Nazis. It would be a supreme irony if it ends up that Germany is forced to organize concentration camps for Nazis and to herd all of these loose Ukrainian war criminals into them.
And then there is Phase 3: taking care of those Nazis, near-Nazis, Nazi sympathizers and various assorted criminal types who stay and go into hiding, trying to blend in with the civilian population. Well, the civilian population is sure to remember who held them hostage and tortured them while the Russians tried to organize humanitarian corridors for them to escape or to deliver humanitarian aid to keep them fed! All that's needed will be to offer a financial reward to anyone who reports them. In many cases that won't even be needed: we live in the age of Big Data and the Russians are recording every phone call and every text message. All the Nazis have been pinned down to a location, voice-printed and their photos have been fed into face recognition software. Quoting George W. Bush, "they can run, but they can't hide."
For now, I will let the topic of the former Ukraine sit in the Russian oven until it is fully baked. Then it will need to sit on the window sill until it has cooled and is ready to carve up and serve. Until then I will switch to topics I find more interesting and vital, such as structural (non-monetary) inflation, why half the world is unified with Russia, and what are the new, stupendous reasons for Russia to be very grateful to the West. I'll start on these starting next week.
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