You don’t have to be David to fight Goliath, and you don’t have to be Atlas to shrug.
The Russian military doesn’t do shock and awe. It does grind, advance . . . and win. Contrary to Western propaganda, it is well on its way to achieving its objectives in Ukraine. In what looks like a watershed moment, most of the holdouts at the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol recently surrendered. (The New York Times couldn’t bring itself to use the term “surrender” in its account of the capitulation.) This gives Russia a land corridor on the Black Sea from southwestern Russia to the Crimean Peninsula.
Left to their own devices the Russians and Ukrainians would eventually reach an agreement that leaves eastern and southern Ukraine in Russia’s hands or closely aligned with it as one or more autonomous states, with pledges from what remained of Ukraine not to join NATO or station nuclear weapons on its territory. Some such resolution was available before the war began. Facts on the ground mean it would now be more far more favorable to Russia than it would have been if war had never started. The war may cost Ukraine direct access to the Black Sea.
The $40 billion war appropriation indicates that the U.S. has no intention of leaving Ukraine and Russia to their own devices. Instead, the U.S. wants to promote a long Ukrainian insurgency that drains Russia politically and economically and in the best of all possible worlds, topples Putin. The concern has been expressed that backed into a corner, madman Putin might then take the conflict nuclear. The more pressing concern: that is the outcome America’s madmen and madwomen want. A generally unrecognized possibility (in the Western media) is that it could be the American contingent who find themselves backed into a corner.
Yes I have too much time on my hands, and yes it is all going to helx in a hand basket. It really does not matter why or who did it, I think the die is cast and it is beyond recovery, the system politically and economically is on its death bed, even without nuclear war! Don’t flogg a dead horse!
First, the effects of nuclear weapons and war are exaggerated, nuclear winter was disproven decades ago and nuclear weapons detonated over cities produce little fall out. Now if you are under or near the blast it is not good!
The economy will be wrecked, but TPTB are already doing that. To be sure living in a city will be bad, being hit or not. Russians have shelters, and supplies for most of their people, they are prepaired to withstand a attack and will likly prevail!
If at all possible get out of the cities, they and the economy are being destroyed by our own leaders. Learn to grow food if you like to eat, and store enough to get you by till you figure it out!
Listen to SP1! TINVOWOOT!
The military of Russia cannot do “shock and awe.” Too great a fraction of its mobile war materiel — ground and air — is nonfunctional at any given time. By contrast, the U.S. cannot do “grind and advance.” We no longer have the stomach for the casualties involved.