Introduction
Fifteen months ago, I began writing a series of articles about what was taking place in Ukraine and what was likely to take place in the future there if a peace settlement was not reached. I’m sorry to say that most of the things that I and a small contingent of other outlier journalists warned were very likely to occur, have happened.
This piece of writing is going to be my final entry in this Ukraine-Russia series. I stand by the information presented in all of the articles I’ve written about this war. I did my best to present what I viewed to be the truth and I am confident that time will bear out the majority of my findings.
All of the articles I’ve written for Pressenza can be viewed by clicking on my name above or here.
Bakhmut Has Been Captured by Russian Forces
As I alluded to in an article I wrote for Pressenza three months ago, Bakhmut, Ukraine’s self-titled “fortress city” has been on the verge of Russian capture for the better part of 2023.(1) On May 22nd, Bakhmut was fully seized by the Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary organization who have been battling to take Bakhmut for the better part of 8 months.(2)
Bakhmut, you’ll recall, is the city that Ukraine’s president Vladimir Zelensky described as “an open road” to the capture of other key Ukrainian cities if it were to be taken by Russian forces.
As I mentioned three months ago in my “Meet the Faces of Death” article: “Bakhmut stands atop the major communication lines that bind the various parts of the Ukrainian defense system. If the Russians capture this high ground they will be able to position their artillery systems there. This will enable the clear targeting and shelling of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the two other remaining key cities in the Donbas region. In short, once Bakhmut falls it will be extremely difficult if not impossible for Ukraine to hold the Donbas region. Capturing this region is one of the central aims of Russia’s special operations mission/its invasion of Ukraine.”
The Neocons in The White House Respond to the Threat of Imminent Defeat
After the eight month “meat grinder” in Bakhmut, what remains of the Ukrainian army is now completely outmanned and massively outgunned by their Russian opponents. In response to Ukraine’s huge loss of manpower and ammunition over the past few months, (3) President Biden has announced the shipment of yet another “wonder weapon” to Ukraine, a group of F16 Fighter jets.(4) Never mind that these jets take up to a full year to learn to operate competently. The US will, said Biden, “be investing in a training program for Ukrainian pilots to learn to fly them”.
Also, amazingly, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan announced the other day that the Pentagon has just discovered three billion dollars that was somehow overlooked until now. Another three billion dollars, on top of the 119 billion dollars of US taxpayer money that has already been allocated to Ukraine to continue to arm their military and to pay their bureaucrats’ salaries and pensions, was located just in time to accompany the West’s upcoming eleventh round of economic sanctionsagainst Russia.(5)
The fact that the first ten rounds of sanctions against Russia have backfired, thrusting most of Europe toward the brink of recession while Russia’s economic prospects have grown, has not deterred Biden, Sullivan, Blinken and Nuland in the least.(6)
In fact, President Biden has begun to push Ukraine to carry out the big offensive it promised to undertake earlier this year. The fact that Ukraine has lost the lion’s share of its best fighters and is now relying largely on newly trained reserves with little to no battle experience doesn’t seem to matter to Mr. Biden. What matters to Biden, Nuland, Sullivan and Blinken is “total victory”, no matter how many thousands of Ukrainians will die unnecessarily in the process of (not) attaining it.
Meanwhile, On the Battlefield in Ukraine
At least 250,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died over the last fifteen months. Add to this figure approximately 250,000 more soldiers that have been seriously wounded and unable to return to battle. The Russian army has suffered considerable casualties as well, but nowhere near the numbers that Ukraine has. According to the cross-section of estimates I’ve been studying, over the course of the last fifteen months Russia has lost 1 for every 5 soldiers that Ukraine has lost in battle.(7)
*It should be noted that my estimate is a particularly conservative one in comparison with the 7 to 1 and up to 10 to 1 figures that a considerable number of military analysts and experts have put forth.(8) Either way, by any standard, 5 to 1 is an unsustainable ratio in a war of attrition, especially considering the fact that Ukraine’s population is less than one fourth the size of Russia’s population.
Western War Analysts and the Western Media Have Misled the Western Public
To fully go into how and why the Western media and Western analysts have (generally) misunderstood the structure of this war would require an entire article on this subject alone. In short, the majority of Western “experts” have either not grasped or have pretended to not grasp Russia’s motives, their tactics and their overall plan.
After an initial (undeniably) failed attempt to neuter the Ukrainian leadership in Kiev in order to produce conditions that would precipitate a quick settlement, Russia swiftly shifted to their Plan B in the spring of 2022. Plan B was/is a) to methodically destroy the Ukrainian army in as circumspect and careful a manner as possible using a slow attritional strategy. b) to “liberate” the Russian portion of the Ukrainian population from the 8 and 1/2 years of destruction and death they have undergone at the hands of a Western installed puppet government, a portion of which is neofascist in origin, and c) to eliminate all elements of the aforementioned neo fascist/Nazi faction within the Ukrainian government.(9)
*Mind you, the aims mentioned above are not aims made up by this writer. The above mentioned goals have been and still are the openly broadcast aims of the Russian state. I am mentioning this so as to avoid the sophomoric tendency, a tendency that Western leadership and media encourage constantly, to immediately lump the messenger in with the message.
What I am getting at here is the fact that the West’s early portrayals of how inept, disorganized and psychopathic Putin and the Russian army are were far from true. On the contrary, Russia has very clearly illustrated the fact that they are a formidable military force that is extremely well supplied and well organized. Whatever one thinks of Putin and Russia as a country there is no longer any relevance in denying the strength and the efficiency of Russia’s army.
The Incredibly Courageous, Heartful People of Ukraine Have Been Betrayed and Used as Cannon Fodder by the US and NATO
Tens, if not hundreds of thousands more Ukrainians are very likely going to die over the course of the next six to twelve months in order that the Western neocons in the White House can (knowingly) prolong this massacre of the Ukrainian population until election season arises next year.
Unless! Unless somehow, we, the majority of Humanity, can take a real united stand against this sociopathic, directionless proxy war that has been fueled, at bottom, by an absolutist hegemonic neocon ideology that is rooted in a craving for more and more and more power and profit.
Profit for who? Profit for an isolated super-wealthy Western elite who have spent the better part of four decades buying up the media and buying off the government. There is no mystery to any of it. Those who sit atop the Western corporate military industrial complex are making a tremendous amount of money off of this proxy war.(10) Their goal is to keep it going as long as they can.
Epilogue and What Comes Next
In future articles I’m going to be focusing more on writing about possible solutions than about festering problems. I’m grateful to have had the chance to present this series of reports without obstruction, without any censorship. Thank you Pressenza, for this opportunity!
I’m going to finish here with a paragraph that I’ve presented before because, well … because I like it.
“The vast majority of humanity knows very well what it wants. What we want is peace. What we want is friendship. What we want is to learn without limits. What we want is an acknowledged sisterhood, an acknowledged brotherhood of all human beings. Nothing is going to stop this millenniums old process of overcoming suffering and violence, no matter how things appear in given moments. Human evolution will continue.”
CITATIONS:
1- https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/03/05/bakhmut-ukraine-russia-war-donetsk/
2-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=937wk3W15dg
4- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65649471
5-https://www.epc.eu/en/publications/11th-package-of-EU-sanctions-Focusing-on-circumvention~50d944
6-https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/02/28/backfire-global-ripple-effects-of-u.s.-sanctions-event-8041
7- https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/07/us-reviewing-whether-ukraine-war-documents-were-leaked.html
8-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDi4bt_0058&t=1380s
9- https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/29/europe/ukraine-azov-movement-far-right-intl-cmd/index.html