Forcing the annihilation of the Ukraine.

Posted by Pointman on November 25, 2022 · 8 Comments 

Back in the years when Boris Yeltsin was running the remains of the Soviet Union, I noticed a new face who was always in the background of any group shot of the old boozer. As time went by, he kept getting closer to the front row. A little research yielded a name, so I started building a file on an obscure St. Petersburg politician called Vladimir Putin because he’d already had an interesting career. You get these BS stories about politicians growing up in “modest” circumstances which usually means mummy and daddy’s house wasn’t quite the full five bedroom mansion set in its own grounds but not far off it and admittedly, they were privately educated.

Such bios are designed to somehow leave you with the impression that this kid, a true man of the people, clawed his way up out of abject poverty without actually telling that lie but anyhow, he knows what it’s like to be an ordinary man like you or me rather than a privileged brat. In Putin’s case, that humble background tale is actually true.

A physically small kid who grew up in what amounted to Leningrad’s version of Hell’s Kitchen, he soon learned to fight his corner with a ferocity that ensured the usual suspects gave him a wide berth. His home into his early twenties was a one room apartment with his parents of a communal housing project that had a central quadrangle. It was still heaped with debris from the German shelling during the siege and a favourite game of all the children was to hunt with sticks the rats who lived in the debris.

One day he cornered a particularly big one and to his surprise, it attacked him and escaped. Years later he told that story in a passing out lecture to some freshly minted FSB officers. He was actually the guy who put the FSB together from the ruins of the old KGB and headed it up for a time. The lesson he learned that day was that when you’ve succeeded in cornering someone, always leave them a way out.

If you look at the wars he’s fought, nearly all fomented by the lads who brought you the Bay of Pigs, you’ll find they all share two common traits. First, he won all of them. Second, he always kept open the option of accepting a face-saving surrender in all but name from his opponents. It was that or face complete annihilation and on most occasions to date his opponents backed into a corner by him took the sensible course to end the conflict.

He applied that same lesson when dealing with the Ukrainian invasion. Instead of just declaring war on the Ukraine and rolling in with the full might of the Red Army and blasting everything to rubble, he decided to do a “special military operation” using Donbass militias operationally supported by elements of the Red Army. It was to be a military incursion with well-defined military objectives and then it would roll to a stop. He’d take back the ethnic Russian bits but had no interest in taking on running the corrupt, economic disaster that was the rest of the Ukraine.

In the main it achieved those objectives fairly quickly and the Ukraine peace negotiations that happened under Turkey’s auspices appeared to be approaching a fruitful end with essentially the ethnically Russian parts of eastern and southern Ukraine going back to Russia. Let’s face it, what was the old Ukraine was far from an ethnically homogeneous entity anyway; Russian areas to the East, Polish to the north, Hungarian to the west and even in the south a large chunk of ethnic Greeks of all things.

The nominal peace in the east of the country under the Minsk 1 and 2 treaties of 2014 had been ignored by the Ukraine from the very start. They’d lobbed artillery shells into the Donbass basin on a daily basis while West block not only turned a blind eye to the blatant disregard of the treaties but NATO also trained an estimated 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers every year from 2014 onwards.

West block’s true intentions towards Russia became blatantly clear. Let the Ukrainians provoke a war with Russia. While play acting as honest brokers, they’d get the Ukraine into NATO and thereby place a military threat right on Russia’s borders, despite repeated assurances to the contrary since the early ’90s as a precondition of Russia with a gun to its head agreeing to dissolve the Soviet Union.

The peace negotiations a few weeks into the war were quickly squashed by Zelensky’s West block handlers who told him to get back to defeating Russia and just wait for the collapse of its economy in a month or two. From then onwards, West block via their performing seal Zelensky has been setting impossible preconditions before any peace talks can even begin. All their lost territory back, including the Crimea, the surrender of Russia and Putin deposed. None of that is ever going to happen.

The strategic expectation of the Washington warmongers was that the Russian economy would quickly fold and the military incursion would just as quickly grind to a halt in the hybrid war they’d planned. Both forks of the grand strategy failed miserably, throwing the world into recession and the face saving way out for them was to rebrand the quick win plan into one of slowly bleeding Russia white while all the time pretending that had actually been the real plan all along. The war of economic and military attrition we now find ourselves in is not going well for West block or those countries who thought they could curry some favour by slip streaming in behind the policy.

Thus appeared the catchphrase “as long as it takes” but as economic events are demonstrating, time is on their side, not ours. Despite a coordinated West block propaganda blitz of massive proportions, Russia is winning the hybrid war by any objective metric you wish to choose. The next escalation was for West block or its pawns to start doing things like blowing up underwater gas pipelines, murdering Russian citizens in the Russian homeland or sending in explosive laden lorries driven into the Donbass by innocent truck drivers unaware that the cargo they were transporting was about to kill them. Such tactics are not guerilla war but state-sponsored terrorism.

Russia’s doctrine of winning a war is the complete reverse of West block’s. They do very measured amounts of violence. The prime aim is to annihilate the enemy’s armies while leaving the infrastructure of the country intact. This is the direct opposite of West block’s military doctrine which arguably destroys a country totally while producing years worth of juicy reconstruction contracts for their cronies in the military industrial complex when it’s over. Everybody’s a winner except the US taxpayer who ultimately pays for the reconstruction.

The relative merits of each approach you can judge for yourself but when Russia wins a war, it stays won which is why after winning a war in Chechnya a number of years back they command enough respect to be using a Chechen regiment in the Ukraine, rather than fighting a long drawn out, bitter, unwinnable guerilla war in Chechnya for the next twenty years. They kill military offensive capacity rather than the water and power infrastructure the civilian population depends on.

A number of weeks back, Ukraine committed their first terrorist act. In response, Russia did two days of infrastructure strikes against water and power hubs. It was a one-off punishment thing, a slap on the hand warning that said don’t do that again or this will be the response. Instead of taking the hint, Ukraine and its West block allies have escalated the terrorist attacks and to my mind Russia in response has changed its strategic objectives.

Russia will not allow West block’s failing war of attrition to transform into a years-long, nagging terrorist war both on their western border and within Russia itself, so their hand has been forced.

They’ve launched a nearly continuous air offense against any and all infrastructure objectives. Generators, power transmission systems, transformers, water purification and distribution networks, the whole cyber structure of the country, bridges, factories and anything else it thinks of even tangential importance to the running of a country. This is scorched earth. If you still entertained some idea of Russia wishing to conquer all of the Ukraine, ask yourself who’d want to take over the smoking ruins that’ll be left.

In tandem with this policy of once and for all removing the Ukraine as a proxy enemy and a springboard for terrorist attacks on Russia, I think they’ll seek to deny access to the Black Sea by simply extending their offensive westwards towards Odessa which is after all a Russian ethnic city founded by the Tsarina Catherine II, otherwise known as Catherine the Great. It’ll of course cause a lot of hullabaloo by the West block propaganda machine but I can’t recall either Russia or the old Soviet Union ever being bothered by being sent to stand in the naughty corner by their enemy’s condemnation.

That Pentagon buffoon Gen. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whined with some indignation last week that he’d been calling various people in the Russian government but they’d all been to busy to talk to him over a missile strike in Poland. In the middle of a shooting war when nobody powerful on the other side refuses to even pick up back channel phone calls from you, you know they’re out of patience with you and your silly games. A decision has been made. You’ve become irrelevant and lost that vital option of being able to turn the war off – from now on, that can only be done by your enemy in their own time and most probably on their own terms.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

For as long as it takes to ruin ourselves.

Remind me again, which country’s economy was sanctions going to devastate?

The Ukraine war – the military realities.

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Filed under Article · Tagged with Russia, Ukraine, West block