This post is the love-child of two distinct conversations. The content comes from a long running back & forth between myself and some fellow political science majors. The substrate of the conversation was a heated demand for reasoning/rationale behind my “pro-Russian” position1. If you are looking for some kind of polished or professional treatment from a Subject Matter Expert, you are out of luck. But it also bears remembering that every single source you or I or any of us have encountered is subjective, biased, and built with the primary goal of argument, justification, or obfuscation, with truth and context sharing the position of seventh and last. This is because of the delicate subject matter, of course, but I think that’s secondary. All human accounts are subjective and biased, but some are purpose-built to hide the truth, while others are just the inevitable result of human observation. There is a larger discussion to be had about how to deal with actual and so-called primary sources, but that’s not my bailiwick.
The second conversation was a etymological gun battle on the site we all pretend to love or hate2. I know full well that many who could read this, and an overwhelming majority of those who consider themselves “well versed” on the subject, will find it laughable. I do not care. As I have articulated elsewhere there is a lot going on below and between the things we assure ourselves are “real” and rational, so where others see lunacy or wackiness, I see smoke for invisible fire. Maybe.
I fucking hate these caveats and “smoking hazard” labels, but here’s a third one regardless: the Russo-Ukraine War (RUW) did not have to happen. There were a comically large number of offramps from the mid-1990s right up to February 2022. Worse still, the conflict could have been curtailed by March or April, and so many lives could have been spared. Pretending that self-inflicted death and destruction, and I shall call it what it is, auto-genocide, is somehow OK because it was chosen is about the fakest and gayest excuse imaginable. Every single person who put the flag in their bio, put the flag up in public, or penned great or small missives in support of this retarded and pointless self-destruction deserves to be caned. Every one of you should be utterly ashamed for such a pathetic and evil display of war-as-political-sport bullshit. I could go on for a lot more sentences, but instead, I will doom-say this: we are perilously close to a time when our homes will be burning, our people will do the dying, as the rest of the world dumps money into various pockets to fuel our self-annihilation. And we will deserve every inch of it.
WHEW. Ok, no more baby tears, roll the ugliness…
The questions asked:
“Why is the RUW still going on? Why didn’t Russia just wipe them out in the first week? Also, what are your thoughts on the severity of the chemical spill in East Palestine, and what does it mean for the people living in the affected area?”
[I decided to leave in the part about East Palestine in because I get 2 Theilbucks every time I mention the Competence Crisis online.]
Last question first. For the people living in the area of this, or any other significant chemical spill, the effects are going to be disastrous on both a financial and physiological level. I don't think anyone has a good handle on how bad East Palestine is, with the exception of maybe Norfolk Southern, and they will do the smart thing and keep everything secret and play dumb. A while back I ran a poll on Twitter, it didn't get many respondents, which is unfortunate but expected, but I do think it was an interesting question: is the US more like Russia at the end of the 19th century or Russia at the end of the 20th century? It has been forgotten in popular history, but the scale of damage that the Soviet Union did through careless industrial management is pretty staggering. You don't have to look very far or very deep to find stories that strain credulity. I think the US is moving in a similar direction. East Palestine is by no measure good or small, but I don't think it is "America's Chernobyl,” though that does have a pithy ring to it. I think it is actually just another connected incident that is portrayed as something in isolation when it is actually part of a larger pattern of growing incompetence. As we go further down the DEI path, we can expect more and more South Africa style infrastructure and societal collapses and failures.
Why the RUW is happening
In regards to the RUW, I'm just going to walk you through what my current positions are. I might be right, or quite possibly wrong, this is just what I think is going on, and I will absolutely own up to being incorrect, as I always have. I will also be borrowing heavily from John Mearsheimer and a number of other thinkers and sources in terms of my narrative and points.
The situation stems from the way the United States and the greater West decided to handle the fall of the Soviet Union. Instead of having any kind of military occupation of Russia, they sent in the consultants and the philanthropists. Using a network of local oligarchs, the United States primarily, but plenty of Western European countries as well, basically sacked the country. This isn't really evil, as the West had won the Cold War after all, and the taking of plunder is both a necessary and expected part of war. The evil part was the West pretending they were somehow doing Russia a favor, that they were investing in the country and working to make things better, then actively suppressing the truth of the matter globally and domestically. Most westerners are completely oblivious to how terrible the 1990s were for Russia. In addition to the Carry-on Baggers destroying the Russian economy and infrastructure, there were also elements of the Intelligence Community (IC) riling up the Muslim populations all over the country but particularly in the Caucuses.
Boris Yeltsin was literally drunk most of the time and let the US State Department and their NGO cronies have their way with his country. As well, multiple “experts” from Harvard in particular and higher education in general took an active role in initiating, facilitating, and maintaining the organized rape of the Russian economy and culture while also greatly enriching themselves3. In terms of the culture, multiple agencies were established to literally steal Russian children for “adoption”4 in addition to the massive flow of migrants “fleeing” Russia and the former Soviet satellites5. This wasn’t some kind of theft done in passing, this was an organized and sustained effort to destroy the economy, gut the society, and erase the cultural fabric of Russia, and it was all done under the guise of “democratization” and “progress.”
Putin came to power in the year 2000, and it’s important to remember that he was a low-level KGB agent who basically became the mayor of St. Petersburg. What gave Putin his reputation, and the thing that caused him to be elevated to his position, by being legitimately pro-Russia, spiritually and ideologically Philo-Occidental, generally honest, and particularly brutal. He is almost solely responsible for destroying the network of oligarchs that were used by the West to plunder Russia. This in and of itself is a funny story that you can dig into, but you often hear Western analyst complain about Russian oligarchs, when in reality they only complain about the oligarchs that were not in the pocket of NATO, the US, and the EU. Putin's ascendancy marked a significant change in the status quo of both Russian politics and finance. But the larger struggle he faced was reversing the terminal course of Russian culture. The 1990s were absolutely horrific for that country, and they are still dealing with it to this day.
Almost immediately, Putin had to go to war to deal with the extremist Muslims6 that had been stirred up by the Western IC. This was incredibly hard on the country, and it made them even weaker than they already were, but it also uncovered and implied a path to true reconstruction7. Concurrently, the US and their NATO vassals were enjoying the highest levels of wealth and prosperity in history. America in particular promised Yeltsin that NATO wouldn't expand, but he proved to be an incompetent drunk and so they expanded anyway8. The first tranche of expansion was in the late 1990s, and the second one was in the mid-aughts. In both instances, Russia was powerless to oppose it in anything more than word. But they9 were not stupid, and they very much saw what was happening, so when 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest rolls around, they announce that both Ukraine and Georgia will eventually join NATO, they deemed this intolerable.
In point of fact it wasn't Ukraine and Georgia joining that set the course for the RUW, it was the fact that the West had pushed east twice already, and both Ukraine and Georgia were too big and bitter of a pill for them to swallow. had they meekly accepted the ascension of either, the inertia would soon have Belarus flowering with Color Revolution. Soon after Bucharest 08, you have the Georgia War. While Russia won, quite quickly in less than 2 weeks, it became apparent that their military had some significant structural issues. It was at this point that they began their modernization in earnest. As Mearsheimer is fond of pointing out, nobody called Vladimir Putin a leader that was trying to conquer an empire until after 2014. Between 08 and 14, the Russian military had a significant facelift on top of a fundamental restructuring concurrent with a very slow yet steady move towards autarky.
So when Victoria Nuland, her State Department cronies, and their NGO & non-profit friends fomented a coup in Kiev, the Russian military was ready to exercise some of their new capabilities. They did this in Crimea to great effect, and there are rumors to this day that some of the generals wanted to go for more. In my opinion they should have. But the Russian economy was probably not ready for the level of sanctions that would follow at that time, so they retook Crimea. Soon after, Kiev initiated a civil war when it turned a blind eye to almost 200 Russian speaking Ukrainian’s being burned alive in Odessa by an ultra nationalist militia using a mob as cover. There were a multitude of other events and actions on that particular path10.
From 2014 to 2022, you have an actual Civil War going on in the Donbas, by which I mean it was an actual group with legitimate grievances attempting to gain autonomy from the nominal state in charge of a given region11. I've heard very wide ranges of casualty reports, but I think it's fair to say 15 to 20,000 people died. In late 2021, Russia implored the United States and the West in general to stop what was going on in Ukraine, that being an 8-year program of arming, training, and equipping the Ukrainian military as well as nationalist battalions of paramilitaries, many of which were dyed in the wool neo-Nazis. They did this via an official letter to the State Department begging for some kind of discussion regarding what they deemed to be an existential threat to their national sovereignty. This has been largely forgotten, but the reason the Ukraine military was in place to face the Russian armies and DPR/ LPR militias was because they were preparing to go into the Donbas in an attempt to end the Civil War. In my opinion, this is why the Russian Federation (RF) finally dropped the hammer12 and invaded, in addition to Zelensky publicly stating that the Kiev government was interested in acquiring nuclear weapons.
When Russia retook Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian military was so incapable and incompetent that it made the Russian military command esteemed Ukraine as almost insignificant in terms of military opposition. Between 2014 and 2022, NATO and the United States trained approximately 80,000 Ukrainian soldiers in addition to whatever the CIA and Military and Intelligence Industrial Complex was doing with the nationalist battalions. This is the force that so competently fought against the Russians in 2022, that spearheaded the September offensive, and that finally died off in Soledar and Bakhmut. Parenthetically, there's 40,000 to 60,000 Ukrainian soldiers being trained in Europe in the US right now. This is all that Ukraine has left in terms of skilled and capable soldiery13.
Why the RF didn’t just clobber the Ukraine in a week
I think the plan, when Russia invaded Ukraine, was to secure the Donbas by sending in special forces to Kiev as well as an armored column to follow it up. The Ukrainian military was so inept in 2014 that the Russians foolishly believed they could move fast enough and hit precisely enough to destabilize the Zelensky Regime, causing him and his cabinet to flee the country, and then set the terms for a negotiated settlement afterwards with the puppet masters in Washington. I think they're two biggest motivating factors were the fact that NATO and the US were on the verge of beginning construction of at least one massive naval installation as well as multiple bases, as well the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) was planning to invade the Donbas to end the Civil War, and the Russian people were truly disgusted and angry with the shelling that was killing so many civilians in the Donbas.
While I completely agree with these motivations, their choice to attempt a surgical strike, as well as institute an ROE, or rules of engagement, that targeted only active military, and explicitly did not attack reserves or equipment, personnel, and infrastructure not attacking them, was absolutely foolhardy and they paid for it in blood and prestige. I completely reject the thesis that Russia wanted to invade and occupy the entirety of the Ukraine. They invaded with approximately 190,000 soldiers, which is asserted to be 70% to 90% of the RF's total military forces. By way of comparison, the Germans invaded Poland with 1.5 million soldiers, and they lost 16,000 soldiers over a campaign that took approximately 2 months. The numbers and facts just do not line up with the idea that Russia wanted to take over Ukraine. If that were the case, I think you would have seen mobilization occur prior to the invasion, and it would be substantially more than the 300,000 to 700,00014 that Russia mobilized in the fall of 2022. Whatever the Russian thinking and motivation, the Ukrainian military, again which had 80,000 trained and well-equipped soldiers plus substantially more personnel and potential reserves, as well as significant stockpiles of Western weaponry and massive intelligence and communication support from the West, fought much harder and better than anyone predicted.
It is my personal belief that if Russia had taken the gloves off the moment their special operations mission in Kiev failed, they could have secured the Donbas and destabilized the Zelensky Regime in very short order with far fewer casualties. I don't think Russia expected the Global American Empire (GAE) to turn the Ukraine War into a win-only situation for themselves. For whatever reason, the Kremlin and the Russian elite still believe that the United States is run by competent and savvy people who are Realists at heart and willing to compromise and/or negotiate. What no one seems ready, willing, or able to accept is that the GAE is fighting a holy crusade. This means that the GAE will not stop until they run out of crusaders or they capture the “Holy Land,” as it were.15
Even when the facts defied their estimations, it took until at least July for the Kremlin to realize that there was no simple solution, and they were going to have to fight an actual war if they wanted to secure the Donbas as well as get rid of Zelensky and his ultra nationalist regime. This is when they began actually preparing for a war, yet another data point to refute the idea that this is about Imperial Conquest. The September offensive by the AFU, when looked at in a larger context, was a desperate attempt to break the Russian invasion, and perhaps it could have succeeded, because the invading Russian army had taken quite a beating and was outnumbered anywhere from 3:1 to 5:1 on the front lines.
While the RF high command has demonstrated multiple times, they are not very good at going on the offensive, they have also shown that they are incredibly good at tactical withdrawal16. I know there's a school of thought that does not believe in tactical withdrawal, and states that any retreat is a failure, however, I firmly believe this is retarded. If the RF had stayed in the portions of the Kharkiv oblast they held, they would have died to a man and taken a substantial number of Ukrainian, Polish, and NATO mercenaries with them, but it would have served almost no purpose as the GAE media would not have told the truth. It was very shrewd, though humiliating, for the RF to withdraw the way they did. So I don't think it's fair to say that the RF high command is completely retarded, but it does seem to be the case that Prigozhin17 and the Wagner group are far more accomplished at the offensive side than any single portion of the RF military. We shall see what happens in the coming months18, but I do expect for many, many more Ukrainians to die as well as substantial numbers of European mercenaries, and of course Russians.
Going forward
As I stated before, this is a holy war, and to fight in a holy war successfully, you have to have a religion. In a substantial portion of Russian propaganda, you will see significant references to Eastern Orthodoxy, national identity, and global adversaries hellbent on annihilation. Likewise, when you look at the Ukrainian side, you see no end of religious propaganda, but it looks like Western progressivism19. If Russia wants to survive, they will have to meet the GAE crusade with a crusade of their own. In the West, our teachers and institutions have taught us that the Catholic Crusades to the Holy Land were some kind of religious adventurism or racist colonization. As you should remember from our shared history classes about the Middle East, the Catholic Crusades were a reaction to the Moorish campaigns in Iberia as well as the rest of Southern Europe along the Mediterranean.
Holy wars are incredibly damaging because they are not about material or geographic gain, at least not primarily. Poor historiography often obfuscates the level of commitment and devotion of the participants in holy wars. Because godless college professors want to pretend their progressive ideology is the pinnacle of human thought, they can only conceive of religious wars as being perpetuated by a corrupt and nihilistic elite duping a bunch of ignorant, illiterate locals with a religion they don't actually believe in. This makes sense because that's exactly what they are doing. In so much that the majority of the Managerial Elite don't believe 90% of the BS they pedal, they just want you to believe it so they can control you20. I am not asserting that every single monarch and noble involved in the crusades was a profoundly devout Christian, but I am saying that us moderns have lost connection with the idea of assumed religiosity and baseline uniform acceptance of Faith as a primary and legitimate motivator for actions.
Strange though it may sound, the GAE will not stop this war until they run out of religious zealots or there are pride parades in Minsk and Moscow. And even if that were to happen, they would continue the holy crusade until there were pride parades in Beijing, Pyongyang, and Tehran. There's a very nasty and unfair game the Liberal World Order (LWO) plays on countries that are non-aligned with their agenda: using NGOs and non-profit groups, they set up subversive institutions and regional propaganda emitters to influence the population. They will foment all manner of manipulation, harassment, and subversion, and then when the local regime finally figures out what's going on and opposes it, the LWO will cry about the primitive, barbaric locals starting the violence. This is a very feminized methodology21. It's like sitting there and needling someone with comments endlessly and then pretending you're the victim when they finally smack you for what you're saying. The femininity is a qualitative analysis, and there is real utility to the methodology, obviously, as the LWO has expanded in lockstep with the GAE. But it is also incredibly unfair to pretend that just because you invade a country with things besides armored divisions, that that country has started the problem when they open fire on you in the only arena they can possibly oppose you with any hope of a positive outcome.
This method of “kicking the dog until it bites you so you can shoot it” is popular both domestically and internationally, but events since this conversation have shown that the viability of it long term is… questionable22.
There is only one war going on, it is a holy war, and it has been flaring up and fading back for at least 2 centuries at this point. This doesn’t mean the suffering, loyalty, or importance of localized conflicts is irrelevant, but they are truly secondary from the scope of centuries. The simplest way to summarize it is this: Globalism v. Nationalism. I know what side I am on.
https://x.com/TheOutgoingMis1/status/1732827995818066382
I actually think the monetary incentive was secondary to the daemonic urge to ruin and destroy.
A criminal and disgusting practice. Blood relatives, wartime comrades, physical neighbors; these are the ones who can raise “lost” children. I could not care less what anyone thinks about this. Go work in an “orphanage” and read through child abuse case files. The practice needs to be abolished.
This is another fun little blasphemy that is portrayed in turn as either a force of nature (”ope, clouds rollin’ in, gonna be a few inches of migrants by mornin’”) or some kind of raw material to be strip mined. It’s absurd that this needs to be spelled out to both sides of the ostensibly informed aisle, but if you take away the best and brightest, the hardest working and most productive, you doom a nation to ruin. Fuck your “hurr durr line go up” rationale.
Every single Muslim extremist group has ties to the American IC, and yet everyone is always shocked, SHOCKED, when this comes to light.
No matter what the Longhouse, the Nanny State, the spinster educators, and feminized thinkers say, war is the father of us all.
It should be noted that there was no good reason for the expansion. It was a pure power grab, effected purely because the opportunity presented itself. I’m a Realist, I accept that advantage should be pressed, even when I don’t like it or the ones I dislike/disagree with do it, but it is singularly hypocritical when the Samantha Powers of the world pretend that when they destroy governments and ruin cultures it is somehow a “Right 2 Protect.”
Only someone as dumb as a journalist actually believes Putin is some kind of lone dictator ruling Russia with an iron fist. Against all reason and good sense, he stubbornly clings to the liberal values he osmotically acquired during his youth in Germany. As with literally every government everywhere in current era, Russia is ruled by a collection of leaders and figureheads that each represent a collection of personalities who themselves represent, ably or poorly, the collective interests of people, groups, and capacities (financial, industrial, cultural). This is how humans do government.
https://youtu[dot]be/pKcmNGvaDUs (Substack is kind of dumb with YouTube links. I am well aware that Ukraine flaggots will cry “Pr-pr-propaganda!!” but everything is propaganda. Watch the movie, contend with the assertions and evidence, then decide for yourself)
People play this funny little game where they pretend some types of secessionists are “real” while others are just proxies. Every real secession movement is a proxy. There is no such thing as a “civil war” without external influences. The funding, weapons, leadership, and propaganda/rhetoric has to come from somewhere. Sometimes the “external” influence is a dissident elite actually acting from within the nominal power structure, like the Whigs in parliament aiding and assisting the colonial rebels in the American Revolutionary War. Other times they are actually external like the French and American Communists aiding and abetting the Vietminh and National Liberation Front respectively. The best example of hypocritical rhetori-ganda is NATO militarily supporting Albanians carving a state out of Serbia due to linguistic nationalist motivations, then militarily opposing ethnic Russians in the Donbas because their linguistic nationalism is illegitimate. The only substantial differences between Kosovo and the Donbas is that the former had Bill Clinton’s cell phone number and the latter are real Orthodox Christians… I am kidding Arqiduka, but only a little ;)
The US Navy and NATO put out an RFP for a trillion dollar contract to build a naval base near Odessa. That alone was a casus belli.
Since this conversation occurred, the drug addicted scum posing as the Kiev government has pissed this away as well. Of course there is a remnant left, there almost always is.
This number has since gone up. The warmongers in DC and London have basically reactivated the Russian military machine. Great job.
The painful truth is that, barring some kind of fundamental domestic shift, the Forever Wars will continue until the rainbow flag of tolerance and consumerism flies over every state capitol on the planet.
Anyone that believes there is no such thing as a “tactical withdrawal” has never extricated themselves from the clutches of an insane woman.
RIP you crazy bastard. Russia missed out on a glorious warlord-turned-monarch.
And boy did we. It’s absolutely hilarious to me that Peter Ziehan still gets paid to autistically shriek at rooms full of people.
Progressivism is twisted cladistic Protestantism. Prote-satanism, lol.
At least 10% believe every bit of it, and they also practice spirit cooking.
So too are “sanctions,” the largest single contribution of the Pants Suit Mafia to International Relations. Thanks ladies.
https://x.com/QuasLacrimas/status/1501970470643580928
“I know there's a school of thought that does not believe in tactical withdrawal, and states that any retreat is a failure, however, I firmly believe this is retarded.“
As anybody who has practiced a combat sport could say, it is indeed retarded, like saying a boxer should never take a step back in the ring. But the reason this belief arose is a little more complicated. An army is not a boxer, not a single man. The psychology of the ape is still important in warfare to this day. Retreating without routing is very hard. Retreating “feels” like losing in the mind of the man on the ground. The feigned rout, or even a tactical retreat to a superior position, can become a real rout very easily. It’s not that such a tactic was unheard of before Hannibal, that everyone before Hannibal famously utilized it was an idiot, but that it is dangerous and very hard to coordinate. Men need rock solid discipline and iron faith in their leader in order to pull such a thing off. If those conditions are met, defensive tactical genius becomes possible, and you get men like Julius Caesar and Lord Wellington, the latter of which never lost a single battle. Otherwise, the general tendency to avoid tactical retreats is correct; it’s very bad for morale if your forces aren’t elite and more importantly faithful. That Ukraine defends its positions to the last man and Russia is able to pull off a tactical retreat suggests that Ukraine cannot retreat without routing, and Russia can- the morale disparity is clearly biased in favor of the RF