RANT: WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?

  

"Soldier and Death" by Hans Larwin

LAST MONTH, Canadian PM Mark Carney visited Kiev, as well as attending a meeting in Brussels to sign on to an EU arms deal that ensures military equipment gets to Kiev. [See PURL, below] He also went to a NATO summit in The Hague that discussed raising to 5% of GDP* the military spending of member states. So, Carney’s been a busy beaver. But what does signing various agreements around military expenditures mean for Canada and Canadians?

According to gov.ca, Canada has given Ukraine nineteen-billion dollars since Russia’s invasion in 2022. In last month’s Kiev stopover, PM Carney announced an additional two-billion or so down the rat hole for Zelensky’s war efforts, including additional arms and munitions, and humanitarian funding such as emergency food and medical aid. This most recent Canadian donation to Ukraine is through NATO’s new “Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List” (PURL) scam which organizes member states’ donations in handy half-billion-dollar tranches for weapons purchases. PURL greases the wheels to more efficiently restock Ukraine’s depleted equipment and munitions’ stores.

In June, Zelensky said Ukraine would require 40-billion dollars in aid annually and urged everyone to get with the program. Forty-billion bucks a year! Golly gee! Ukraine’s “Churchill” has come back in a big way following his disastrous February visit to Washington and that White House dust-up with President Trump we all saw on our screens. [Ouch! Ed.] After that fiasco he looked like he was on life support, but now he’s got the spring back in his step and, with the Eurocrats behaving like a mob of wet cats hosed into submission by the American president determined to make them pick up the tab for project Ukraine,  Zelensky is all smiley-face and kisses now that he got a transfusion of money and arms, coming primarily from European countries who will purchase the weapons from the US and pass them along to Ukraine. Now, all he’s got to do is defeat the Russian army and lay siege to Moscow. [He’d better have his lucky dice with him because facts on the ground will turn his gamble into a crap-shoot right quick! Ed.]

 

DOES THE TERM “money pit” come to mind? Though, Ukraine is more like the “Grand Canyon” of slush funds and money laundering operations, methinks. Has everyone forgotten that as late as October 2021, Zelensky was implicated in a financial scam involving offshore bank accounts and tax avoidance that he’s been running since before he became president in 2019. Folks, Mahatma Gandhi he ain’t! (Nor Churchill, for that matter.) With billions of dollars flooding Ukraine over the past three years, with little accountability and a president with sticky fingers…well, you connect the dots….

 

PM CARNEY also announced that like a good lick-spittle Canada would, “…be lowering the price cap for seaborne Russian-origin crude oil in alignment with measures announced by the EU and the UK…” in the hope this eighteenth package of sanctions (there’s been so many I’ve lost count!) will do the trick and sink the Ruskie economy once and for all. Good luck with that.😝

 

👉I guess the point I’m making here is that the collective West, for the most part, is run by Lilliputian leaders out of touch with their electorates, their priorities serving personal agendas or else promoting last year’s solutions for tomorrow’s problems. They're out-of-step and out of time in other words. And Canadian taxpayers will be picking up our share of the tab, along with our EU buddies, and we will continue to do so apparently until the end of time.

👉If things go pear-shaped in a big way, and the West is foolish enough to engage Russia in a land war in Ukraine, instead of pouring Canadian treasure onto Ukrainian soil, those two-thousand troops stationed in Latvia will be pouring their blood instead.

 

QUICK TAKEAWAYS:

👉Ukraine has a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning this conflict. It’s a numbers game: Russia has more manpower, more weapons, more industrial capacity to produce weapons than Ukraine. Far more. More, even, than the collective West combined (including the USA). That’s not going to change for some years to come.

👉Ukraine becoming a member of NATO is an existential threat to Russia and it will not tolerate such a state of affairs on its borders. Period.

👉Russia is willing to negotiate, but only if facts on the ground are recognized and its legitimate security concerns are addressed—like Ukraine adopting a policy of neutrality based on the Austrian model, for example.

Despite months of gab fests, discussions, proposals, tweets, and ham-fisted politicking on the part of the United States and its posse, the EU (and…sigh, Canada), Russia has concluded the West is “agreement-incapable” for addressing its concerns through diplomacy and will therefore solve the Ukraine problem on the battlefield.

The hashed lines represent possible Russian advances by war's end

👉The Russians are poised to advance to the Dnieper River by the end of 2025 and may then march on Kiev or Odessa (or both).

Providing Kiev with more weapons and money only prolongs the outcome—a Russian victory is inevitable. In the meantime, there may be as many as one-and-a-half-million dead Ukrainian soldiers.

👉How many more must die? How much territory will Ukraine lose to the Russians because Zelensky and the United States et al, refuse to acknowledge the fact that Ukraine is losing and  that they need to settle the conflict through diplomacy?

The political class and ‘talking heads’ of the West refuse to acknowledge reality: As valiantly as Ukraine’s soldiers have fought over these past three years,  they have lost. Their front lines are fraying and their infrastructure is crumbling under increasing Russian missile and drone attacks. Ukraine has nowhere to go but down. 

👉So, they need to make a deal now to save what’s left. But, Zelensky continues to sing the same song while the flower of Ukrainian youth dies along the front lines.

  

CHEERS, JAKE.  ____________________________________

* Canada currently spends 1.37% of its GDP on defence, but it’s looking to up that to 2% in fiscal 2025-26. And like a kid playing hopscotch, Carney hopes to land on the 5% mark by 2035, at least on paper. However, it's unlikely that any NATO member will reach this target except, perhaps, Germany and Poland. Most will wait for Trump’s term in office to end and a more congenial president is elected in 2028.👌

 

    "I am the king..."