But after four-plus
years of war, the end game is closer than we imagine. To be clear:
Russia is winning the war. It will succed in defeating Ukraine and its Western backers. All along the nearly 1300km front line, Russia is
advancing at a relentless pace, if a slow one, because its main war aim is to
attrit the Ukrainian army until it is a spent force. The capture of territory
is secondary to the Kremlin’s goal of destroying Ukraine’s NATO trained, supplied
and armed military that, in addition to the possibility of "defensive" nuclear-capable cruise
missile installations along its border, it considers the force and its NATO backers as an existential threat to the Russian
nation. Naturally, the Americans would feel similarly threatened if China, say, were to build missile installations at Windsor, Ontario aimed at Washington. Of course, the Americans would take action to eliminate such a threat along its border. [see: "radioactive ashtray". Ed.]
IN UKRAINE'S NORTH, the city of Kharkiv may once more be in Russian hands by summer’s end. Next is Sumy, a city of
250,000 and the last metropolitan region standing between Russian forces and
Kiev. Russia will probably encircle and lay siege to the city, as it has done
to other Ukrainian cities, cutting off supplies and weaponry. But the big
question is: Will the Russians move on Kiev? Or will they move south on Odessa where, in recent weeks, it has been bombing port facilities and infrastructure in a bid to cut off weapons shipments and eliminate naval drone launching
sites. When Russia finally takes the historic port city, Ukraine will be cut
off from the Black Sea, becoming a land-locked rump state.
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OF LATE there has been an
increase in Russian drone and missile attacks on Kiev and on energy and weapons
manufacturing facilities elsewhere in Ukraine, and these may portend a change in
the pace of the war.
👉THERE HAS ALSO BEEN A CHANGE in
rhetoric as the NATO-Russia conflict grinds on, namely the use (or more
accurately the lack of use) of the term “deterrence”. During the Cold
War, the word was always present when analyzing the threat levels of proxy
conflicts between the world’s two nuclear super-powers, the USSR and America.
Each, with vast arrays of nuclear weapons between them, took deterrence very
seriously, as they struggled for dominance in proxy wars and regime change
operations over the decades. The intensity of these proxy campaigns was
tempered by how far they could push the other before a threat became existential,
where the survival of the nation was perceived to be at stake, and where the use
of nuclear weapons was seen as a last resort. 1962’s “Cuban Missile Crisis” is
a case in point, where the USSR, in response to the United States installing
Titan nuclear-armed missiles in Türkiye, some months later installed
similar weapons in Cuba, in a dangerous game of ‘tit-for-tat’. With both sides seeing
the other’s actions as an existential threat, the world came within a hair’s
breadth of nuclear war. What ultimately stopped this horrific escalation was the deterrence
factor embedded in the M.A.D. principle (“Mutually Assured Destruction”). In this scheme, each side realizes that regardless
of who strikes first, that country would be destroyed by a deadly counterstrike,
leaving both, along with much of the northern hemisphere, a smoldering, radioactive
ash-heap. It also helped that both President Kennedy and the USSR’s Premier Nikita
Khrushchev’s
served during WWII where they saw first hand (particular in Kennedy’s experience)
how modern, industrialized conventional warfare could devastate whole regions
of the globe, a factor, surely, in their assessments of how apocalyptic—by
orders of magnitude greater—the use of nuclear weapons would be. Each
calculated the mega-deaths and devastation that would follow if their armies
unleashed the deadly force of their nuclear arsenals. Thakfully, in the end, each
was deterred from attacking the other.
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YET TODAY, European
leaders issue bellicose statements demonizing Russia as they gin up their
respective populations to prepare for war with the Slavic giant by decade’s
end.
👉WTF, Charlie
Brown! What are these bloodless pricks trying to do?! Instead of diplomacy and crafting
a security architecture for Europe that includes Russia in a treaty everyone
can (mostly) live with, it’s warwarwar! with most NATO-allied nations singing
from the same hymn book. [Canada, America’s brown-nosed rent-boy, is in on this
clusterfuck, don’t forget, and balls-deep as they say. Since 2022 the Liberal
government in Ottawa has sent war materiel and armaments to Ukraine and
committed 25 billion dollars to the notoriously corrupt Ukrainian government
under Huckster-in-Chief, Zelensky. [Cha-ching! Ed.]
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👉TODAY, we stand at an inflection
point where change and violence walk side by side to that inevitable fork in
the road, and which path we’ll be on is yet to be decided. Let’s hope the drones and long-range cruise
missiles we are currently firing into Russia don’t trigger the use of a
tactical nuke or two by Moscow. Can’t say we haven’t been warned.😱 Isn’t that
enough to deter us to seek a diplomatic solution to the conflict instead? Stay tuned!
CHEERS, JAKE. _____________________________________
RECALL that during the Cold War, both Russia and the United States had
one or two defensive missile batteries ‘guarding’ their capitals. That’s all. In
other words, the installations were symbolic as part of the ABM “Anti-Ballistic
Missile”) treaty of 1972 between Russia and the United States that limited each
side’s ABM missile arrays to one site each, thus ensuring both sides had a
healthy respect for the other side’s nuclear arsenals—i.e., the M.A.D. deterrence
formulation that kept in check the establishment of ABM systems on a
continental scale. [Regan’s Star Wars ballistic missile shield scheme didn’t
get off the drawing board, and Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defence proposal
will prove equally unworkable.
IN 2002, the ABM treaty was foolishly walked away from by George Bush
Jr. during whose tenure additional anti-ballistic missile sites were
established in the U.S. That a working ABM defensive shield has not been
developed to date speaks to the physical impossibility of stopping an all-out
attack with hundreds, even thousands of missiles raining down death and
destruction by the mega-tonnage. Same goes for Russia. Any ABM system on the
drawing board that’s been ‘gamed-out’ has been assessed as unworkable and a
non-starter. [See Professor Ted Postol’s explainer (here.)] Thus, for
thirty years both countries were deliberately left vulnerable, with no ABM shield
capable of stopping more than a handful of incoming ICBMs, thus ensuring each side
would mind their p’s and q’s and respect each other’s “red lines”. Or else. That’s
deterrence, folks. Something we need to remember.
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