IF YOU WERE A BETTING MAN, AN INSURANCE ACTUARY AND A COMMANDER IN CHIEF OF AN ARMY OF PASTRY COOKS, WOULD YOU BET AGAINST RUSSIA GETTING WHAT IT WANTS IN UKRAINE? 

AS A BETTING MAN, YOU WOULD SAY THAT RUSSIA WILL EVENTUALLY GET 99.9 PER CENT OF WHAT IT WANTED BACK IN DECEMBER 2021.

IF YOU ARE AN INSURANCE ACTUARY YOU WOULD ASSESS THE RISK OF MOST OF WESTERN WEAPONS SUPPLIED TO UKRAINE BEING BLOWN UP AT ABOUT 90.5 PER CENT. 

THE CHIEF OF THE PASTRY COOKS WOULD PREPARE CAKES FOR A RUSSIAN "VICTORY" — WHICH WOULD BE HUMBLY GETTING THE DENAZIFICATION OF MOST OF UKRAINE, THE DEMILITARISATION OF UKRAINE, THE SPLIT OF UKRAINE AS THE DONBASS REGION IS RETURNED TO RUSSIA AFTER A CENTURY OF VAGARIES. 

THE NEGOTIATIONS WILL HOVER AROUND WHERE THE NEW BOUNDARIES OF WESTERN UKRAINE ARE GOING TO SETTLE. WILL ODESSA AND TRANSNISTRIA BECOME PART OF THE RUSSIAN UNION?

THESE ARE THE ONLY FOGGY AREAS,

MEANWHILE SOME GEOPOLITICAL ANALYSTS SEE GREY ALL OVER AS THEY USUALLY DO:

 

BY Kishore Mahbubani

Time for the West to rethink goal of total defeat for Russia in Ukraine

• As the war drags on, sympathy is growing for Russia as the underdog fighting the behemoth North American and EU economies
• The West would get more support for its cause in Ukraine if it is seen to be pushing for either a peace proposal or a fair compromise on Ukraine

Why hasn’t 85 per cent of the world imposed sanctions on Russia after its illegal invasion of Ukraine?

Clearly most countries that make up this 85 per cent do not approve of the invasion. A majority also voted in favour of the UN General Assembly resolution deploring it. Still, virtually no member of the Global South has imposed sanctions on Russia. Why?

The honest answer is that in their heart of hearts, many leaders of these countries do not buy the “black and white” story that the West is selling on the conflict: Ukraine and the West are completely virtuous; Russia is completely evil.

Having studied geopolitics for more than five decades, I have never come across a single geopolitical issue where right is on one side and wrong is on the other.

Most dispassionate observers of the Ukraine issue believe the war could have been avoided. Ironically, the leading voices who warned against the relentless expansion of Nato closer and closer to Russia’s borders were some of the best Western strategic minds, including George Kennan, Owen Harries and Henry Kissinger. As President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said: “The war could have been avoided if Nato had heeded the warnings from amongst its own leaders and officials over the years that its eastward expansion would lead to greater, not less, instability in the region.”

Future historians will marvel that their clear-cut warnings were ignored. John Mearsheimer’s videos documenting how explicit warnings were ignored have been watched some 28.7 million times. Many of the leading minds in the Global South have viewed them too, often with approval. Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has raised several questions that reflect the views of the Global South, saying: “I think the reason for the war between Russia and Ukraine also needs to be clearer. Is it because of Nato? Is it because of territorial claims? Is it because of entry into Europe? The world has little information about that.”

The West would get more support for its cause in Ukraine if it was seen to be pushing for either a peace proposal or a fair compromise on Ukraine. Instead, it seems to be pursuing a strategy of complete victory and humiliation for Russia.

 

This outcome would not be in the interests of the Global South. They prefer a multipolar world, with Russia as an independent pole to give them geostrategic options. And many countries in the South who still retain memories of the once-dominant West know that the West will once again become arrogant and insufferable if it defeats Russia completely.

The Global South is also not geopolitically naive. Machiavellian moves are par for the course in geopolitics. Hence, while many admire the valiant courage of Volodymyr Zelensky and his people in fighting the Russian forces to a standstill, they believe also that the Ukrainians have become unwitting pawns in a larger geopolitical contest. Just as the West successfully forged a strategy of fighting the Soviet Union to the last Afghan, its goal today may well be to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.

The West is also being disingenuous when it says that it will support Ukraine if it were to pursue peace with Russia. It is a fact that without the unlimited blank cheques that the West is sending to Ukraine, Kyiv would have had to, in one way or another, find a compromise with Moscow. As President Lula said, neither side was showing sufficient willingness to resolve the war via negotiation. 

Since those in the Global South are not naive and ill-informed, they are also aware that one reason the war is continuing is that private fortunes are being made by some Ukrainians. The recent revelations represent only the tip of the iceberg.

 

So, what is the outcome that the Global South would like to see in Ukraine? The immediate wish is for a ceasefire and cessation of the conflict, which has also disrupted food and energy supplies to the South. The very poor in the Global South have also suffered enormously from this war. The shrewd and astute Indian Minister of External Affairs, Dr S. Jaishankar, said very perceptively that “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems”. To protect its economic growth, India’s imports of Russian oil in January 2023 were 33 times more than they were in January 2022.

 

The second wish would be for a fair and balanced compromise. Ukraine would become a free and independent sovereign country, free to join the European Union if it so wished. Yet, out of respect to Russia’s sensitivities, it would not join Nato. Indeed, this is the formula Henry Kissinger proposed in 2014. It is true that Kissinger has recently walked away from this formula. The Global South has not.

In theory, as the war drags on, sympathy for the suffering of Ukrainians should be increasing. In many ways, it is. Yet, paradoxically, sympathy is also growing for Russia. It is seen as a US$2 trillion underdog battling the far superior US$26 trillion US economy and the US$17 trillion EU economy. Many are surprised the overwhelming sanctions imposed on Russia have not led to its collapse. They are amazed Russia is still standing despite these massive blows.

 

So, what is the bottom line of all these arguments? The Global South would prefer that the West, especially the EU, reconsider its goal of total defeat for Russia in Ukraine. Compromise will be difficult and messy. It always is. Yet a messy peace will be more welcome than a monstrous war. If any leading voice in the West, especially in the EU, were to push for peace in Ukraine, he or she would receive the total support of the Global South.

They know that it would take remarkable courage for any Western leader to call for peace instead of for victory. This courage would be applauded. If the West remains silent on peace in Ukraine, the Global South will continue to remain silent on war in Ukraine.

Kishore Mahbubani is a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute and the author of Has China Won?. His latest book, The Asian 21st Century, an open-access book, has been downloaded over 2.6 million times.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3210636/time-west-rethink-goal-total-defeat-russia-ukraine 

 

IN CASE ONE IS A GOD APPORTIONING GUILT ON THIS ISSUE, THE THUNDER AND THE LIGHTNING SHOULD STRIKE THE EVIL EMPIRE, THE AMERICAN ONE. BOOM.... 

IF YOU ARE A HONEST GEOSTRATEGY ANALYST, YOU WOULD KNOW THAT THE DARK SIDE IS THE USA.

SO WHY PROLONG THE AGONY OF THE "UKRAINE"?

I KNOW. I AM A WEAPON MANUFACTURER IN THE USA, MAKING A MINT!

 

 

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

 

Western leaders privately told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Ukraine can not win the war against Russia and that it should begin peace talks with Moscow this year in exchange for closer ties with NATO.  

The private communications are at odds with public statements from Western leaders who routinely say they will continue to support Ukraine for as long as it takes until it achieves victory on the battlefield.  

The Wall Street Journal, which reported on the private remarks to Zelenksy, said:

“The public rhetoric masks deepening private doubts among politicians in the U.K., France and Germany that Ukraine will be able to expel the Russians from eastern Ukraine and Crimea, which Russia has controlled since 2014, and a belief that the West can only help sustain the war effort for so long, especially if the conflict settles into a stalemate, officials from the three countries say.

‘We keep repeating that Russia mustn’t win, but what does that mean? If the war goes on for long enough with this intensity, Ukraine’s losses will become unbearable,’ a senior French official said. ‘And no one believes they will be able to retrieve Crimea.’

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Zelensky at an Élysée Palace dinner earlier this month that he must consider peace talks with Moscow, the Journal reported. 

According to its source, the newspaper quoted Macron as telling Zelensky that “even mortal enemies like France and Germany had to make peace after World War II.”

Macron told Zelensky “he had been a great war leader, but that he would eventually have to shift into political statesmanship and make difficult decisions,” the newspaper reported.   

 

A Return to Realism

At the Munich Security Conference last week, Gen. Petr Pavel, the Czech Republic’s president-elect and a former NATO commander, said: 

“We may end up in a situation where liberating some parts of Ukrainian territory may deliver more loss of lives than will be bearable by society. … There might be a point when Ukrainians can start thinking about another outcome.”

Even when he was a NATO commander Pavel was a realist in regard to Russia. During controversial NATO war games with 31,000 troops on Russia’s borders in 2016 — the first time in 75 years that German troops had retraced the steps of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union — Pavel dismissed hype about a Russian threat to NATO.  

Pavel, who was chairman of NATO’s military committee at the time, told a Brussels press conference that, “It is not the aim of NATO to create a military barrier against broad-scale Russian aggression, because such aggression is not on the agenda and no intelligence assessment suggests such a thing.”  

The German foreign minister at the time, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, also embraced realism towards Russia, saying: “What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further through saber-rattling and warmongering. Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken.”

Instead of an aggressive NATO stance towards Russia that could backfire, Steinmeier called for dialogue with Moscow. “We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation,” he said, adding it would be “fatal to search only for military solutions and a policy of deterrence.” Under U.S. leadership NATO clearly did not follow that advice, as it continued to deploy more troops to Eastern Europe and to arm and train Ukraine (under cover of pretending to back the Minsk Accords to end the Ukrainian civil war).

Before its intervention in Ukraine, Russia cited NATO’s eastward expansion, the deployment of missiles in Romania and Poland, war games near its borders and the arming of Ukraine as red lines that the West had crossed.  

After a year of war, Western leaders appear now to be turning to a realist approach. Macron, for instance, at the Munich Security Conference dismissed any talk of regime change in Moscow. 

 

 No US Reaction

Washington has not commented on the Journal‘s story about the peace talks-for-arms proposal. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken last month discussed with The Washington Post arming Ukraine post-war but he did not say that Ukraine should seek peace talks.

“We have to be thinking — and we are — about what the postwar future looks like to ensure that we have security and stability for Ukrainians and security and stability in Europe,” Blinken told the conference in Munich.

The proposal to bring Ukraine even closer to NATO than it already is, with greater access to weapons after the war, should be on the agenda at NATO’s annual meeting in July, said Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, at the Munich conference.

“The NATO summit must produce a clear offer to Ukraine, also to give Zelensky a political win that he can present at home as an incentive for negotiations,” a British official told the Journal. 

The deal with NATO would not include membership with its Article 5 protection, the newspaper reported. “We would like to have security guarantees on the path to NATO,” Zelensky told a press conference on Friday, however.

In the meantime, Macron, according to the WSJ report, said that Ukraine should press forward with a military offensive to regain territory in order to push Moscow to the peace table. 

There has been no reaction from Moscow about the proposal. Geo-political analyst Alexander Mercouris, in his video report on Saturday, said Russia would likely be incentivized to continue fighting rather than enter peace talks with the knowledge that Ukraine would be heavily armed by NATO after the war.   

“The Russians are never going to agree with something like this,” Mercouris said. “They must be saying to themselves that instead of agreeing to this plan, it actually makes more sense … to continue this war because one of [Russia’s] objectives is the total demilitarization of Ukraine.”

What the Western powers are proposing is the opposite, he said. Given that Russia considers it is winning and “there seems to be a general acknowledgment amongst Western governments that Ukraine can’t win this war … where is the incentive for … Russia to even consider this plan?”

For Moscow, Mercouris said, Ukraine’s demilitarization is an “absolute, existential matter.”  If Ukraine is going to get even more advanced weapons from NATO after the war as opposed to what it would get “whilst the war is still underway, then it makes even less sense” for Russia “to stop the war and agree to this plan.” 

Russia is facing a “weakening adversary now,” Mercouris said, and Moscow clearly prefers that to facing a “strengthened adversary later.”  

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times.  He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe

 

READ MORE:

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/02/25/western-leaders-privately-say-ukraine-cant-win-the-war/

 

 

 

 

QUESTIONS

 

1. What do you know about Stepan Bandera?
2. Do you think that Russia will loose this conflict?
3. What are Russia’s goals?
4. How many Ukrainian dead soldiers?
5. How many Russians soldiers killed?
6. What do you know about the Donbass provinces?
7. Can there be a peaceful solution?
8. Is Russia going to give up the regained Russian provinces?
9. Which side of Ukraine to stand for?
10. What about China?

THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS HAVE APPEARED ON THIS SITE

 

SEE ALSO:

https://www.rt.com/russia/572134-russia-strikes-intelligence-center-kiev/

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64718740

(THIS IS A BULLSHIT ARTICLE)

 

https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/47306

 

 

YES PUTIN WOULD, BECAUSE THESE YOUNG PEOPLE HAVE NO SENSE OF HISTORY AND ARE FED BULLSHIT (AND CASH) BY THE WEST IN ORDER TO HAVE A CRAP.

 

SO, WHAT ARE THE FIGURES?

ACCORDING TO MOSSAD WHICH WOULD NOT MAKE ANY CONCESSION TO THE PUTIN REGIME..., 

UKRAINE HAS LOST 157,000 DEAD SOLDIERS

RUSSIA HAS LOST 18,480

UKRAINE HAS HAD 234,000 INJURED

RUSSIA HAS HAD 44,400

UKRAINE HAS HAD 17,230 TAKEN PRISONERS

RUSSIA 323

 

WEAPONRY:

UKRAINE HAS LOST 212 CHOPPERS

RUSSIA HAS LOST 56

UKRAINE HAS LOST 6320 TANKS AND ARMOURED VEHICLES

RUSSIA HAS LOST 889 (OF WHICH AROUND 400 OLD TANKS WERE ABANDONED ON THE WAY TO KIEV — AS A DIVERSION)

CANNONS? UKRAINE HAS LOST 7,360 UNITS

RUSSIA HAS LOST 427.

UKRAINE HAS LOST5 497 AIR DEFENCE SYSTEMS

RUSSIA HAS LOST 12.

 

IN TERM OF TERRITORY, MORE THAN FOUR FIFTH OF THE DONBASS REGION (RUSSIAN SPEAKING) IS NOW HELD BY RUSSIA — AND RUSSIA IS NOT GOING TO GIVE IT BACK — FOR ITS CITIZENS TO BE MASSACRED BY NAZIS. 

SLOWLY, RUSSIA IS BATTLING THROUGH UKRAINIAN FORTIFICATIONS DESIGNED FOR A FINAL UKRAINIAN ASSAULT ON THE DONBASS EARLY LAST YEAR. THIS WON’T HAPPEN, EVEN WITH “MORE TANKS” FROM THE WEST.

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....