HOW LONG WILL THE UKRAINIAN CONFLICT LAST?

Foreword

The Soviet Union ended the Warsaw Pact. Michael Gorbachev said the Cold War was over, that there was and should be a common European home stretching from Rotterdam to Vladivostok. There was no reason for the Warsaw Pact, NATO's Soviet counterpart, to continue to exist, and NATO should have been disbanded at that point.

But what was actually repeatedly promised was that NATO would not move an inch eastward to take advantage of what the Soviet Union was doing, namely unilaterally ending its military alliance in the interest of peace.

Of course, in the end, the United States broke its word. This is the whole story of why there is a war. Instead of taking the peace that had been offered, the United States said: "You are weak, we are strong and we'll win by taking all the squares on the chessboard you are clearing”.

All that in complete contradiction to the purpose and spirit of the commitment made in February 1990, when the United States and NATO promised President Gorbachev very explicitly and repeatedly: "We will not take advantage of the situation."

Background

In July 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved the Warsaw Pact but he did not achieve the dissolution of NATO in exchange, contenting himself with the US promise not to expand the Atlantic alliance. In December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as President of the USSR, declared the office abolished, and transferred power to Yeltsin. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved, and the alcoholic Yeltsin allowed corrupt oligarchs, mafias, and Western finance to plunder Russia; the population quickly went from a state of well-being to one of starvation.

In 1999, NATO obviously broke its false promise not to expand, and in March, it absorbed three former Warsaw Pact countries: Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. That same month, it bombed Serbia, violating UN resolutions and ignoring the vetoes of Russia and China. Immediately afterward, it set up military bases in Kosovo.

The Russian people reacted and in August 1999 (five months later) ousted Yeltsin, who appointed Vladimir Putin, director of the former KGB, as the new interim president. Putin immediately intervened against the Chechen separatists, who were selling the country, including its oil, to the sharks of Western multinationals.

In 2000, Putin became president, arrested the oligarchs, and regained control of the Russian economy, later establishing close relations with China and India.

NATO, unstoppable in its drive to encircle Russia, expanded further in 2004, including the Baltic Republics, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, effectively incorporating the entire former Warsaw Pact.
Putin, also in 2004, was re-elected president and immediately began a major rearmament effort to defend Russia from NATO expansion, now on its doorstep.

He intervened in Ossetia against Georgia, because the latter was conducting joint exercises with the US Army. He further strengthened relations with the BRICS and Turkey to block the further advancement of NATO bases towards Russia. He also forged closer ties with Belarus.

In 2011, he opposed the invasion of Libya by NATO (which in the meantime had also expanded into Albania and Croatia). When NATO attempted to replicate the same mechanism in Syria in 2014, Putin sent in the Russian army and won the war, keeping Assad in power.

When in 2014 the US, with Victoria Nuland on the ground (with $5 billion in hand) and 10,000 Nazis, staged the coup in Kiev's Maidan Square (known as Euromaidan), Russia responded to the attack in Ukraine by annexing Crimea and supporting the Ukrainian (Russian) population in Donbas.

In 2017, NATO continued tirelessly, taking Montenegro and in 2020, North Macedonia. On February 24, 2022, after 15,000 Russians had been killed in Donbas, in response to NATO's training and funding of the Ukrainian coup army, Russia entered the country and began the Special Military Operation of Denazification to annex Donbas (and the pro-Russian republics of Donetsk and Lugansk) and cleanse it of the Azov Battalion, the Aidar Group, and the Right Sector, all Nazis (Banderites, inspired by Stefan Bandera, the Nazi who opened Ukraine's doors to Hitler) funded by Europeans and Americans.

In 2023, NATO also annexed Finland, further tightening its grip on Russia. In effect, NATO has been aggressive and Russia has responded for 20 years. What Russia has always said, dating back to 1990, is: "We don't want the US military on our border."

Perfectly in line with what the United States says about its own hemisphere. It's all very straightforward. But the United States doesn't accept reciprocity, fairness, and honesty as an answer. That's why there's a war.

Western sanctions effects on Russian economy

The Russian economy used to trade extensively with Europe. But since 2014, after the US-backed coup in Ukraine, it has been increasingly cut off from the trade with its European neighbours. What happened was an artificial division imposed by Europe and the United States, to the great detriment of Europe itself.

But Russia is a flexible economy. So, when the European market cut itself off from Russia, damaging itself, Russia turned to China, India, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Africa, and other regions of the world.

And that's why President Putin has friends all over the world, contrary to what was claimed in the US media, according to which Russia was isolated. It was Europe that isolated itself from Russia, and now we see deindustrialization in Germany because the trade connection with Russia was vital to Germany's international competitiveness in many ways. Not least of all, the cheap natural gas from Russia that fuelled much of Germany's heavy industry.

The United States never intended for Europe and Russia to establish their natural trade relations. So when the pipeline, the various Nordstream pipelines, was first proposed, Washington opposed it because in typical US reasoning, that link would strengthen relations between Europe and Russia, and that would weaken the United States' role in all of this.

So Washington has been pushing for years to break up the Euro-Russian relationship. Now Europe is very poorly governed, very poorly led by politicians who have been cultivated by the CIA for decades. They were raised, trained, and promoted essentially because they followed the US line, and so they have inflicted a lot of damage on themselves in Europe, following the US dictate and severing relations with Russia.

What's very interesting and bizarre is that now Trump is actually
offering a real way out of the conflict. It's Europe that says it will never accept this and will be permanently separated from Russia. And the European economy isn't just stagnant, it's in actual decline right now, self-imposed.

The three European political midgets

Merz, Macron, and Starmer, according to the latest approval polls released: Merz at 29%, Starmer at 23%, Macron at 12%. So we have these midgets, three failed political leaders spending their time meeting with Zelenskiy. All three have a domestic economic crisis that they refuse to address because of their penchant for war, and all three proclaim a series of goals they have no chance of achieving.

Now their latest move is that since they have neither the money nor the weapons, they intend to confiscate or steal Russia's financial assets held in  a Belgian-based institution and use them to buy weapons from the United States.

Thus the Ukrainians can continue to die for the next year or two, until Russia crushes them. That's their so-called plan. It's wrong on every single level. President Trump should say that it's wrong on every level, it's illegal, it's completely irrational because it can't work. Ukraine will only lose more territory and lives in this process. Then the war ends.

Trump somehow said: "Okay, I'm not putting American money into it, but if someone wants to buy, I'm always willing to sell weapons."
But this is very damaging and dangerous because most of these weapon systems would require direct US involvement in the targeting, use, and maintenance.
The United States should instead say that  this war is coming to an end, and that means it must also end from the European and the European perspectives,  reflecting the reality on the battlefield.

The crux of the matter, and it has been from the beginning, is that NATO will not expand to Ukraine, that Ukraine will be a neutral state, and that Europe will be secure precisely because there will be a neutral Ukraine and the great powers will not have armies on each other's borders. That would be very desirable.

Peace could have been made at the end of March 2022 before the United States rejected a Ukraine-Russia agreement brokered by the Turkish government in Istanbul.

The Europeans are absolutely absurd in believing they are helping the Ukrainian people. And Zelensky does not represent the Ukrainian people. He rules under martial law over a corrupt regime. The overwhelming majority of Ukrainians want a negotiated peace, so what Europe is doing is not pro-Ukrainian.

“If Kiev falls, then Europe is at war”

Recently such declaration, bluntly and shamelessly, has appeared in the European mass media. Upon closer inspection, this statement is completely absurd and senseless. However, it deserves critical scrutiny against the grain.

First of all, there is no link as to why Europe's fate should be tied to that of Kiev, as if Ukraine were actually part of the European Union. Why should be accepted that, if Ukraine loses - which now seems inevitable - Europe must automatically be at war with Russia? This question rightly deserves an answer, especially from people who doesn't consider the real geopolitical dynamics.

A second consideration concerns the fact that this demented and pestilential narrative is being used solely to justify Europe  support for the unreasonable arguments of Zelensky, Kiev's "buffoon." Instead of supporting peace and diplomacy, Europe has foolishly and disastrously sided with war, siding with the Ukrainian president's unreasonable position, which only fuels the conflict.

A third consideration concerns the persistent, painful, and surreal narrative according to which Putin's Russia is eager to invade Europe, as if the conflict in Ukraine were sparked by Putin's desire to expand his dominion, perhaps even as far as Portugal. This narrative is completely baseless, yet it continues to dominate radio, television, newspapers, and especially the "Hitlernet," as it should rightly be called. We could say that this narrative is now hegemonic and monopolistic.

Atlanticist propaganda continues to raise the spectre of an imminent Russian invasion of Europe, with the thinly disguised goal of justifying the idea that Europe must rearm to defend itself from a non-existent invader. The reality is that Europe wants to rearm not to defend itself, but to revive the ailing Teutonic manufacturing sector and to advance its insane war plans. Meanwhile, it hypocritically pretends that Russia is the aggressor. If there is war, it will be because Europe will have provoked Putin's Russia beyond measure, dragging it into the conflict.

Obviously, there is no trace of this in the banal and childish words of the proponents of such idiocy, who simply repeat the dominant narrative in a Pavlovian way, without any critical reflection.

Conclusion

Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, not  only doesn't  want to cede territory, but still insist in joining NATO. But the point is, we haven't heard a single constructive statement from any of these European leaders, nor from Zelenskiy, on how to actually stop the fighting.
It's a farce. If the Europeans continue down this path, NATO will completely end because the United States won't participate in all this.
The American people don't want the European approach of maintaining permanent hostility toward Russia.

Why would that be in America's interest? If the Europeans are so warmongering, what they will end up doing is completely destroying NATO. Americans have no intentions of going to war with a Europe that doesn't want to make peace with its neighbour.

So, unless the three midgets show that they can sit down and engage in real diplomacy with Russia, not with Zelenskiy, they will even destroy what little remains of American interest in defending a region that doesn't want to make peace. Europeans must show they have some interest in peace. Right now, they don't show it at all.