Ukraine, page-2272

“..a place removed from the USA to set up bio-weapons labs when our own government called an at-home “moratorium” on gain-of-function research in 2014..”

• National Assisted Suicide (Kunstler)

“Joe Biden” and company might have prevented Russia’s “operation” there by simply reiterating what NATO itself had declared: that Ukraine would not be invited to join the alliance. But Ukraine has been a special client of the USA since 2014, when we changed-out a pain-in-the-ass government there. Since then, we’ve used Ukraine as an international money laundry, a proxy forward base for NATO, and, apparently, a place removed from the USA to set up bio-weapons labs when our own government called an at-home “moratorium” on gain-of-function research in 2014. Part of the forward base activity in Ukraine since 2014 was the training and arming of the 600,000-troop Ukrainian army, one of the biggest armed forces in the world, which Russia now feels constrained to disarm and neutralize.

How successful Russia might be in that endeavor, with an operational force of about 200,000, is the subject of a propaganda war being waged one level removed from the action on the ground. The reality, as one might expect from such basic troop numbers, has been an onerous grind for the Russians. American javelin missiles have proven deadly to Russian tanks and armored vehicles. But, contrary to the narrative script of CNN and The New York Times, Russia is hardly “losing” the contest. Russian forces are in the process of kettling up Ukraine’s most potent units, the notorious Azov battalions, along the Donbass line in the east. There are a lot of them. They are surrounded, cut off from their central command, and now given the choice of surrendering or being slaughtered. For the moment, it is Ukraine’s choice.

For the Russians, this is, as they say, an existential matter, something they have faced before and understand the stakes of — think Napoleon and Hitler. The US has shown, at least, an exorbitant will to antagonize Russia using Ukraine. This, too, is yet more insanity. In Mr. Putin’s early years as head-of-state, Russia asked to join NATO, in Russia’s quest to be treated as a normal European nation after overcoming 75 years of Soviet insanity. Request rebuffed. Twenty years later, and many instances of antagonism in the meantime, Russia had enough. It is doing something America no longer can do: establishing boundaries. Ukraine will not be used as a platform for further antagonisms. Our response: wreck the global economy starting with the international money system, and possibly bring on a world famine by destroying supply lines for fossil fuels and things made from them, such as fertilizer.