On January 4, Putin announced a Christmas truce in the Ukrainian conflict. Orthodox Christmas takes place on January 7, according to the Julian calendar, in use since 45 BC, rather than the more commonly used and astronomically accurate Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582 by the Pope Gregory XIII. The gap between the two is now 13 days, but it is the nature of Orthodoxy not to change no matter what, let alone follow what the pope says.

Putin made the decision to announce the truce based on a request from Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Most Russians thought this was a dumb idea, believing it would only give the Ukrainians an opportunity to regroup and restock. The question is, was that really stupid, or was it actually very clever? Let's take a closer look…

by Dmitry Orlov

Putin's Russian critics point out that it was foolish to trust the Ukrainians to honor a ceasefire, given their past performance. There were the eight years of Minsk agreements, painstakingly negotiated and guaranteed by Germany and France with the aim of peacefully resolving the civil war in Ukraine, after which Angela Merkel, Petro Poroshenko and, more recently, François Hollande, all of whom took part in the negotiations, openly admitted that this was just a smokescreen to give the Ukrainians time to rearm, recruit and train for future attacks on their Russian population .

But Putin never expected the Ukrainian side to honor his ceasefire, since they simply couldn't. The Ukrainian Nazis who continue to bomb schools, kindergartens, community centers, hospitals and apartment complexes on the Russian side had no interest in a Christmas truce, being devil worshipers rather than devout Christians. And Zelensky and his team don't control them, so if Zelensky were to try to enforce the truce, he would just make himself weak and ridiculous.

Zelensky is charged with begging, borrowing and stealing; he doesn't control his troops, the words that come out of his mouth, his wardrobe, or his cocaine use. The signs of extreme psychological discomfort he showed during his recent trip to Washington speak volumes about these facts. He is just a comedian who played the role of the president on Ukrainian television, in a show called " servant of the people and who was then propelled into this position because that's exactly what Ukraine needed – a head clown. The court jester becoming king is unique in the annals of world history, but it is so.

It was expected that the Ukrainian response to the truce would be to immediately start shelling civilians in Donetsk, just to show civilians and troops on the Russian side the ineptitude and incompetence of their commanders and to add evidence to the continual argument in the Western press that Putin is weak and that Russia is losing. In fact, that is exactly what happened: Donetsk and other Russian cities in the former Ukraine were bombarded with US-supplied weapons, civilians were killed and injured, and troops Russians were forced to retaliate.

Which they did with great vengeance and furious anger as soon as the truce ended. Not only did they succeed in destroying several of the US-supplied weapon systems responsible for breaking the truce, but they also avenged a previous heinous incident. Moments after midnight on January 1, seconds before the start of the new year, the Ukrainians shelled Russian troops in Makeevka, Donetsk People's Republic, killing 89 servicemen.

They were relatively newbies and defied orders by turning on their phones to call and congratulate family and friends, as they normally would, with New Year being Russia's biggest holiday. Of course, their position was immediately spotted and targeted by a NATO-provided battlefield intelligence system. Eight 155mm rockets were launched from US-supplied HIMARS mobile launchers, two of which were shot down, while the others hit their target with devastating effect.

And, of course, revenge was not long in coming: shortly after the Christmas truce expired, the Russians struck two dormitories in Kramatorsk, in the Ukrainian-held part of the DNR, which housed 700 men in Dormitory #28 and 600 others in Dormitory #47, killing at least 600 of them in total. The Russians also shot down five Ukrainian jet fighters (they don't seem to last long) and destroyed a lot of other equipment and ammunition. In the end, the truce did nothing to significantly slow the ongoing demolition of Ukrainian troops and equipment.

But something far more significant has been achieved. Once again, Putin has shown himself to be much smarter than his detractors. He used his Christmas truce offer to demonstrate Russian openness to an end to the conflict, but the Zelensky regime rejected the offer. Also, some idiots within NATO (which seems to be full of idiots) have seen fit to condemn the idea. In the meantime, the UN, and even the Vatican, have spoken a few words in its favour.

And so, in fact, there was no truce, but Putin proved that he was a man of peace by his willingness to stop hostilities, for one day, to begin with, without any preconditions, so that it was kyiv and NATO that insisted on prosecuting them. The story of " Russian aggression “, so dear to Western propagandists, took a big hit.

But that's far from everything. The truce also feigned Russian weakness in the eyes of Russia's enemies, prompting them to continue the fight, which is going very well as far as Russia is concerned. The front line is stable and advancing west at a glacial pace (a few hundred meters a day) as Russia sends Ukrainian troops back to their creator by the thousands and turns NATO-supplied weapons systems into scrap, while maintaining high morale and plentiful supplies. Russia is also rapidly developing, testing and deploying new weapons systems and modifications to old systems, ensuring its superiority in any future conflict.

Paradoxically, the longer this conflict continues in its current, limited form, the better for Russia. To understand why this is so, it is necessary to consider what Russia's victory in this conflict must look like. If the kyiv regime suddenly demanded peace and its NATO allies stopped supporting it and expressed their interest in restoring normal relations with Russia, the process of demilitarization and denazification of the former Ukraine would be frozen in the time and process of Russia's diversion from the West to the East and South would remain incomplete. And then history would repeat itself.

If, on the other hand, the Russian forces were to exert a little too much pressure and the kyiv regime, together with its army, collapsed from within and quickly retreated, Russia would have only two choices. , both bad: occupying the rest of the former Ukraine or leaving it only partially denazified and demilitarized – a chaotic, distressed humanitarian disaster zone would be a huge threat to its security. Planting the Russian flag atop the Ukrainian Reichstag in kyiv while Zelensky shoots himself in his bunker would not equal victory; Zelensky and his team, or their replacements, would simply move further west, to Lvov, then to Poland, and continue to threaten Russia while being on NATO territory and therefore untouchable.

What would perhaps suit Russia best would be a gradual advance towards its newly declared borders of the Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, further absorbing the Nikolaev and Odessa regions. This would give him a land bridge to Russian Transnistria, while leaving the former Ukraine as a landlocked, largely depopulated and economically devastated rump state, riddled with heavy debt and abandoned by its friends and allies, who would then no longer be in able to pose a threat to the security of Russia.

The Christmas truce has sent an entirely different message to Russia's allies and friends: the ongoing hostilities in former Ukraine are not Russian-initiated; Russia has been attacked and its enemies pursue the ultimate goal of destroying it. If Russia were to be defeated, their turn would come next; they should therefore help Russia, which saves them from a ravage by the rapacious Westerners. This message is getting across very well in all the countries that are not part of the collective West: China, India, most of the countries of Africa and the Middle East, a large part of Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Even Turkey, a member of NATO and supposedly aligned with the West, has just politely received a harsh lesson. Turkish President Erdogan had recently asked Putin to unilaterally order a ceasefire in Ukraine and thus demonstrate Russia's will to end the conflict. This is what Putin has just done, thus demonstrating to Erdogan that his idea had no merit. Turkey is an important partner of Russia (for tourism, natural gas, nuclear energy, arms sales and many other things), even if it is never quite a friend, but partners sometimes have to be persuaded to keep their bad ideas to themselves.

The rest of the world has run out of patience for the nonsense of the West (free democracy, political correctness, gender nonsense, the invisible hand of the market that Biden keeps trying to shake, or other such nonsense) and is happy to see Russia taking the lead and pushing the West against the wall. The last shoe to fall will be the collapse of shale oil and gas in the United States. Their production has already reached a plateau and, given the very high depletion rates of these wells, a plateau portends a collapse.

Once this collapse occurs, the United States will become energy destitute, just as Europe and Japan already are, and the whole of the collective West will turn into a collection of “ shitty country “, as Donald Trump once said in a colorful way. Meanwhile, the new Eurasian supercluster, made up of Russia, China, Iran, India and many southern nations who already wish to join them, will continue to be the new civilizational project of the planet.

Dmitry Orlov

source: Club Orlov

READ MORE:

https://cluborlov.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/the-christmas-truce-that-was-not-to-be/

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