Philosopher Alexander Dugin (he can’t travel to any Western country!) talks about the way Ukraine was handed everything on a silver platter and still managed to mess up.

He is more tactful considering his personal tragedy, where a Ukrainian assassin murdered his only child.

All Ukrainian lands were gifted by Russia – but the younger generations were educated to despise everything Russian.

by Gilbert Doctorow

As I anticipated, the BBC reported briefly this morning that the gathering in Jeddah over the weekend to discuss Ukrainian proposals for peace ended without any concrete results. This did not prevent today’s edition of The Financial Times from calling it a success because of the attendance by China and China’s affirmation that it will participate in such discussions in the future. I further expect that the same kind of Big Lie claim of victory in what is in reality a blatant defeat will be attempted by the United States and its allies when the Russians recapture Kharkov, the Ukraine’s second largest city, and snatch up the whole of the remaining Ukrainian coastline on the Black Sea by overrunning Nikolayev and Odessa. This could come in as little as a couple of months from now, given the near destruction of Ukrainian strategic reserves these past couple of months and plans of the Kremlin to go on the offensive once the Ukrainian counter-offensive abates and before the onset of the rainy season in autumn, which works against large scale military operations.

What rabbits will Jake Sullivan, Blinken and his colleagues at the State Department try to pull out of a hat then? What will happen then is also now taking shape. The Poles, with U.S. encouragement, will move into Lvov and Western Ukraine in what is called a defensive deployment of peacekeepers to prevent further Russian aggression and the United States will say that it has preserved Ukrainian sovereignty in the face of overwhelming Russian military force and the incompetence of Zelensky and his generals. We may safely assume that Zelensky will have been physically ‘neutralized’ by that point to avoid his whining about U.S. treachery to the global press.

The problem for the Biden administration is that it will put forward these transparently phony claims of victory in the midst of the 2024 presidential campaign, when its Big Lie will come under fierce attack from the Republicans Donald Trump and Ron Desantis on the one hand and on the other hand from Robert F. Kennedy in the Democratic camp.

Meanwhile, as regards the costs to the EU Member States of their foolhardy subordination to Washington on sanctioning Russia, we can thank The Financial Timesfor its article today putting figures on the losses booked by energy companies, banks and other major businesses which sold their Russian operations under fire sale conditions or have seen them confiscated by the Russian state as compensation for Western seizures of Russian state and private assets in the EU. In the best of circumstances, they retained title but have been required to report the assets they still own as ‘impaired’ for accounting purposes since no dividends or principal can be transferred abroad. The number offered by the FT is over 100 billion euros in losses. Add to that the economic losses to the general population in the EU due to vastly inflated energy costs following the turn away from Russian hydrocarbons. The FT says nothing about that, but I would guess it exceeded 200 billion euros if we take only the publicly reported ameliorative measures of Germany and several other EU countries to compensate individuals and companies for the energy price shock.

The net result of these Western losses approaches the Russian financial losses in Europe and America. So where is the Western ‘win’ in its ‘sanctions from hell’ applied to Russia?

via Sergei Markov

Sensational interview with Dmitry Peskov New York Times. Dmitry Peskov said that Russia does not seek to control any territories of Ukraine, except for those that have already become part of Russia.

This is the first clear statement from which it will be concluded that Russia does not seek to liberate such many centuries of Russian cities as Odessa, Kharkov, Nikolaev, Dnieper by incorporating into Russia.

This statement by Peskov will have huge political implications. First of all, the attitude towards Russia in these cities will change. What is the point of Odessa and Kharkov supporting Russia if Odessa and Kharkov are definitely not in Russia?

However, some argue that there is no support for Russia in Odessa and Kharkov, but only hatred for Russia.

In addition, this can lead to dramatic changes in the political position of the active patriotic part of Russian society and oppose it to the political leadership. After all, they are actively fighting not for Kherson or Kramatorsk, but for Novorossiya.¹

But this will be perceived very positively in the world as Russia’s readiness for peace talks in the near future from a “realistic position.”

Note
1. Novorossiya Governorate in 1800 within the Russian Empire. Its central city was Ekaterinoslav (modern Dnipro), which was briefly renamed “Novorossiysk” during the reign of Paul I

by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with

When the Ukrainian and NATO forces have lost their war in eastern Ukraine by Christmas, what will happen to the rump of western Ukraine?

The Russian warning, issued last Friday at the Security Council by President Vladimir Putin, is that the Russian Army will defend western Ukraine, known as Galicia, from any attempt at intervention by Polish forces under either a NATO “peacekeeping” formula, or a bilateral defence arrangement between the Kiev regime and Warsaw to slip Galicia under NATO Article Five protection.

Putin’s warning was concrete, explicit, geographically limited. It applied to the current western borders of the Ukraine, the eastern border of Poland, and the Polish-Belarus border. “I would also like to remind you what Poland’s aggressive policy led to. It led to the national tragedy of 1939, when Poland’s Western allies threw it to the German wolf, the German military machine. Poland actually lost its independence and statehood, which were only restored thanks in a large measure to the Soviet Union. It was also thanks to the Soviet Union and thanks to Stalin’s position that Poland acquired substantial territory in the west, German territory. It is a fact that Poland’s western lands are a gift from Stalin. Have our Warsaw friends forgotten this? We will remind them.”

The Warsaw friends weren’t the only audience Putin intended. His warning is also addressed to the Berlin friends, the Baltic friends, the Paris, Brussels, and Budapest friends, and of course, the Washington friends. In December 2021, they were offered the terms of mutual security and non-aggression in Europe in treaties for the US and NATO tabled by the Russian Foreign Ministry. They were dismissed in diplomatic negotiations lasting less than a month.

By Christmas of this year, as Putin has just pointed out, the Ukrainian army and the NATO forces will have expended their capacities to continue the fight. “The whole world sees that the vaunted Western, supposedly invulnerable, military equipment is on fire”, he added. What can happen next is “an extremely dangerous game, and the authors of such plans should think about the consequences.”

This is a warning that if the Poles move east, the Germans will be motivated to move east as well, in order to recover the Prussian territories Germany lost in its defeat and capitulation at the end of World War II. Hungary too will be motivated to change its northeastern border in order to rescue the ethnic Hungarian population of Transcarpathia in southwest Ukraine.

In short, Putin was announcing that “Stalin’s gift”, as he called it, was the stability of the post-1945 territorial settlement. Now, in defeating NATO’s attempt to destroy the Russians east of Kiev, the Russians are warning afresh that if NATO attempts to change its defence lines west of Kiev, the Russian army will dictate an entirely new territorial settlement in which NATO will be an even bigger loser of military capacity and territorial extension than the non-aggression treaties of December 17, 2021, offered.

To visualise the geography in the discussion, here is a map of the post-World War II territorial settlement between Germany and Poland.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Here is a newly published Russian analysis of how the Putin warning should be interpreted, both historically and strategically, between the Dnieper and the Oder-Niesse lines.

“The Revival of Russian identity and Polonization: Russia agree by Albert Akopyan -- source: https://eadaily.com