Friday, January 6, 2023

Have We Reached Peak Zelensky?

Have we reached Peak Zelensky?

The concept is well-formulated and clever. It deserves to stand as a counterpoint to the David Brooks drivel we reported a few weeks ago. Since Brooks embarrassed himself, we can hope for better from another writer.


In short, there are different ways of looking at what is happening in Ukraine. For today, if only to be contrarian, we will report the views of someone named Robert Freeman. (via Maggie’s Farm).


When the president of the poorest, most corrupt nation in Europe is feted with multiple standing ovations by the combined Houses of Congress, and his name invoked in the same breath as Winston Churchill, you know we've reached Peak Zelensky.


And, 


Let's remember that before ascending to his country's presidency, Volodymyr Zelensky's greatest claim to fame was that he could play the piano with his penis. I'm not joking. And he ran on a platform to unite his country for peace, and for making amends with Russia. Again, I'm not joking.


Now, he's Europe's George Washington, FDR, and Douglas MacArthur all rolled into one and before whom the mighty and powerful genuflect. Please. The only place to go from here is down. And, that is surely coming. Soon.


Fair enough. Now, as we read the propaganda media we have learned of every last Russian casualty. Yet, we rarely hear about Ukrainian casualties.


Until now:


The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, recently let slip that the Ukrainian army has lost more than 100,000 troops in the eight months since the beginning of the war. Over the nine-year span of the Vietnam War, the U.S. with a population six times that of Ukraine, lost a total of 58,220 men.


In other words, on a per day, per capita basis, Ukraine is losing soldiers at a rate 141 TIMES that of U.S. losses in Vietnam. The U.S. lost the public on Vietnam when middle class white boys began coming home in body bags. Does anybody with half a brain believe such losses in Ukraine are sustainable? Does anybody have another plan to avert such slaughter?


Von der Leyen is among the shrewdest public figures in the world. What she is doing is laying the predicate for Western withdrawal from Ukraine and ending the War. If you look at the facts on the ground, not the boosterish propaganda ladled out by the media, you can understand why.


And then there is the damage done to the Ukrainian infrastructure:


In a matter of weeks, Russia, with its hypersonic missiles, destroyed half of Ukraine's electrical power infrastructure. This, as winter is coming on. It can just as easily take out the other half, effectively bombing Ukraine back into the Stone Age. Is that what anybody wants?


On the conventional front, the Ukrainians are having trouble securing even conventional weapons to defend themselves. U.S. arms suppliers are working around the clock to replace their own stocks and the stocks that European countries have given to Ukraine. But the backlog is running into years. A recent headline from The Wall Street Journal stated, "Europe is Rushing Arms to Ukraine but Running Out of Ammo."


Finally, the U.S. has committed $112 billion to Ukraine. That includes $45 billion just slipped into the omnibus funding bill against the likelihood that a Republican-controlled House will cut such funding, almost certainly substantially.


For Europe the question has become: what price victory?


The Europeans are coming to realize that their continent is being de-industrialized, literally moved backwards an entire epoch in economic terms, because of their willingness to serve as the doormat for the U.S.' imperial war against Russia. Not even they, with their supine fealty to U.S. domination, are willing to commit collective economic suicide on behalf of the U.S.


France's Macron and Germany's Scholz are suggesting that accommodations to Russian interests must be devised in order to bring about a peaceful settlement of the war.


Put these four things together: staggering, unsustainable losses of soldiers; terrifying, indefensible asymmetries of destructive power; inability to supply oneself with even conventional defensive weapons; and categorically reduced support from your most important backers.


Does that sound like the formula for winning a war? It is not. It's the formula for losing the war, which is why von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz, and Blinken are now laying pipe for getting out.


The tide is going out under Zelensky. He will soon be remembered as a Trivial Pursuits question, or an answer on Jeopardy: "The only modern head of state known to be able to play the piano with his penis." Ding. "Contestant #3?" "Who is Volodymyr Zelensky?"


Freeman predicts the future resolution of the conflict:


A peace will soon be declared. Russia will keep the Donbas and Crimea in recognition of the facts on the ground. Both sides will be better off for this. The Donbas is ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally Russian, which is why it voted overwhelmingly for assimilation into Russia. Besides, if Kiev loved them so much, it wouldn't have murdered 14,000 of them over the past eight years and resumed massive shelling in early February of this year, before the Russian invasion.


Ukraine will foreswear any future affiliation with NATO. This is Putin's highest priority and what he asked for--and was denied--in his request to the U.S. and NATO last December, before the invasion was launched. If Russia begins its much-feared winter offensive, as many expect, Ukrainian generals will dispatch Zelensky in a coup rather than send their few remaining soldiers to certain annihilation.


U.S. grain and pharma conglomerates will buy up Ukrainian farmland—some of the best in the world—for pennies on the dollar. This is the standard MO of U.S. multinational vultures coming in after the kill to pick apart the carcasses. U.S. weapons makers will look for and help provoke the next feeding frenzy, much as they materialized Ukraine barely a year after the humiliating U.S. defeat in Afghanistan derailed their last gravy train.


The larger picture does not look very good for us:


Ukraine will prove a turning point in the dismantling of U.S. hegemony over global affairs that it has enjoyed—and, let's be honest, often abused--since 1945. The U.S. public is not psychically prepared for such a come down. But that is the cost of living in the fantasy world that the media lavishes up to keep that self-same public ignorant, fearful, confused, entertained, and distracted.


Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity. We need to be on the lookout for their next gambit to pillage the treasury and advance their own private interests above those of the nation. It will surely come.


5 comments:

  1. "Ukraine will prove a turning point in the dismantling of U.S. hegemony over global affairs that it has enjoyed—and, let's be honest, often abused--since 1945. The U.S. public is not psychically prepared for such a come down."

    Au contraire. An increasingly non-white American population with Third World values and allied with their ancestral despotisms completely CELEBRATES such a come down.

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  2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War

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  3. Let's take a look at this article from a different perspective. Putin (or whomever is in charge of Russia) is not a man of his word nor is Russia's commitments worth the paper they are written on. A truce will last only so long as Russia does not break it. After all, they guaranteed the security of Ukraine in 1992. My view is that it would be foolish for Ukraine to seek or enter into a truce at this time as they are clearly winning and Russia is so far into the brier patch it created that it cannot extricate itself, no matter what it does. Due to its very poor performance on the battlefield it has no offensive momentum going forward and most probably will retreat when the Ukraine resumes the offensive, probably fairly soon. Ukraine has no navy. Russia does, but where is it? Part of its Black Sea Fleet is anchored in Sevastopol, but will leave in a rush when it comes under fire as the Ukrainian army advances into the Crimea. Also, where is Russia's Air Force? Russia grows weaker every day it continues this war, to the point that it may disintegrate into smaller republics that have been tied to confederation with Russia by force exerted from Moscow rather than real consent. As Russia slowly weakens that force will diminish to the point that it may not hold Russia together. This fracturing of Russia is also in the best interests of the free world.
    In the early 1990's. when communism in Russia collapsed, Russia was essentially invited to participate in the world community of nations. Companies from many nations opened factories, stores, service facilities, restaurants and the like, in Russia, the effect of which was to grow the Russian economy which until then had been largely dependent on extracting and selling its natural resources, such as oil, gas and various minerals, and crops. On 2/24/22, Putin just threw that 30 years of economic progress away. More that a million Russians scrambled to the borders to escape being dragged into a war they saw as unwarranted and tragic. Of course, most likely they were the best and brightest. Russia a country with a relatively small (and rapidly diminishing) economy and no future. It has no real allies (Iran is also a basket case). China is running away from any ties to Russia as fast as it can. So also, is India.
    So, why would the Ukraine want to enter into a truce with Putin. It's just not in their best interests (nor ours). And, it would give Russia some breathing room to garner whatever resources it has left and then continue to make war in the future. By continuing the war Putin started it may see the dissolution of Russia and its ability to make war, at least for a substantial period of time.
    There is no end game here; the countries that border western Russia are like accordions. Over the centuries they disappear and reappear, grow larger and smaller and all fear Russia. Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Finland, Sweden, in addition to Ukraine, desire a more peaceful Russia. That can't happen until the kleptocrats and dyed in the wool communists are no longer in power in Russia. We have an opportunity to do this that has never before presented itself. Why throw it away.
    To my mind, this article on Zelensky views the Russia-Ukraine war through the wrong end of a telescope and focuses on Zelensky as if he could stop the war at his leisure. He does not have that power. However he got to where he is, he grew into the job and is taking it seriously. He visits the front, goes to hospitals to talk to wounded soldiers and his face shows how the war is aging him. Putin hides in the Kremlin. And, however we got to this point, we have the opportunity to remove the bad actor Russia from the world stage.
    With regard to corruption Zelensky is dealing with Biden and the Democrats. Can anyone say which side is the more corrupt? Of course the Ukraine has to kick back to the Democrats in order to receive aid. That is our problem, not Zelensky"s. He will do what he has to do to win a war.

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  4. When you say there were 58,000 dead in NINE years, you are minimizing (6500 deaths per year) the impact of the war on any given age group. The truth is, when Vietnam was a full blown war from 1967 to 1969 the total deaths reached 39,000 in 3 years in a country with 200 million people, so double the deaths per year

    OTOH, its possible that Ukraine has sustained 100,000 deaths since September, when it commenced with these suicidal assaults against vastly better armed Russians, so perhaps 20K per month for a population of 40 million (if that). Still, that would translate to 100 times the death rate. And the same hypocrites that demonized the likes of Westmoreland now bow and scrape before someone who is Westmoreland ×100

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  5. 11JAN23

    A House resolution was introduced two days ago to put a bust of Zelensky in the House wing of the Capitol building.

    Rep Joe Wilson (R-SC) put forward the proposal...

    https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1613297895477809152

    A bust of Zelensky?

    Some Twitter comments :

    "It will be made of pure gold and cost a bargain sum of 80 million dollars."

    "I don't think the GOP establishment comprehends the amount of disdain
    their own base feels towards them."

    "Price tag: $378 billion."

    "Can they make him look taller?"

    "(To) Pay respects to the man laundering their retirements."

    "It would make more sense to put his likeness on an ATM in the lobby."

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