Since the once great newspapers, the New York Times, the Washington Times and Los Angeles Times have been captured by the Democratic Party, they are all blowing President Joe Biden’s narrative about the Ukraine.
One must look for outliers to hear a different story. I found more than two such sources which dare to give a different point of view.
One such source is John Ritter, a former international arms inspector who was the first to be allowed to land on Soviet soil in 1988 to inspect their nuclear arsenal.
Another is John McGregor, advisor at the Pentagon who finds today’s Biden approach to Russia contrary to the facts at hand.
When General Dwight Eisenhower left the White House in 1960, he warned about the deleterious influence of the military industrial complex on US politics.
The present secretary of defence left his job as head of Raytheon Defense Company to his present position. Raytheon Technologies describes itself a “Defense Powerhouse” which makes missiles, precision weapons and bombs.
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Professor Wollf sees a clear connection between the defence companies and the need for them to make money by finding a market for their products.
That is obvious to anybody with two senses. But Wolff’s major point is that the US is contemptuous of the remnant of the Soviet Union that is now called Russia.
In 1992, the US government promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that Nato would not seek to plant its forces in territory adjacent to Soviet Union.
Ritter and others argue that such promises were pooh pooed in the US State Department even as they were being made. US intention now, they argue, is to prove the accuracy of their new smart weapons by using the Ukraine as a surrogate force to humiliate Russia.
The humiliation of Russia is supposed to teach China a lesson that if it attempts to recover Taiwan Island, it will suffer the same fate.
Biden has gone further to say that “Putin must go.” His acolytes are making a list of crimes Putin is supposed to answer at the Hague when he is defeated or handed over by his subordinates. These are bad words-because they remind the world of US regime change in foreign countries, Chile, Cuba, Nicaragua and the Ukraine itself to mention only a few.
A weapon which Biden has used to the extreme is economic sanctions on Russia. In the initial stages, it depreciated the Russian rubble by 50% and several US companies like McDonald fast food chain left. But the Russian ruble has regained all the points it lost by using its oil leverage with China and India to good use.
In the long run, Russia has proven that there is nothing that the West manufactures, which cannot be replicated in China and Japan. This is a big loss for the US.
The fighting
The Ukrainians have proven to be daring fighters. But by continuing a confrontational war rather than a guerrilla war, Ukraine will run short of men before Russia does. Russia’s strategy, Ritter argues, is simple and achievable. By destroying infrastructure, say electric grids, bridges and manufacturing hubs, even the most heroic Ukrainians’ cannot rebuild these under fire. One year ago, there were three million Ukrainian refugees. As we speak the number has risen to eight million. Inside the Ukraine itself, 18 million have been displaced. Russian territory has not been touched.
Ukraine is already running out of manpower. Ukraine leader Vladmir Zelensky ordered a fight to death over Bakhmut and Solidar frontlines. Private sources say that of the 44 000 men holding the lines, 70% died in battle and Solida was taken. The same sources say that 40 000 mercenaries have been recruited from Poland, some of them Americans.
An outlier message from a Ukrainian commander, 28 February, Zelensky admitted that “Bakhmut, Soledar, Maryinka, Kreminna… there is no living space left on the land of these areas that have not been damaged by shells and fire.” Another reported that: “the city is on fire and the enemy is pressing. Everything will be (lost)” when he was cut off. Bakhmut which boasted of a population of 70 000 was now devastated.
US chief Spy, Bill Burns said yesterday that Russians will drag the war, hoping that Americans will tire of it. It is not just Americans. Researchers are saying that the US, jealous of Russian-German economic solidarity through Nord Stream pipeline, sabotaged it. By destroying it, Germans now rely on US oil supplies, which are eight times the price of Russian oil.
The point these professors are making is that now, the US is hoping that Ukrainians win the war on their behalf. But since the weapons promised, 100 Abram tanks will arrive later in the year, and training will taken even longer, the US is looking at, even as we speak, sending proxies into Poland. Ukrainians will simply run out of manpower.
In any case, the US is already carrying 90% of the burden. When will the war become a US-Russian Third World War?
All the “bad guys” who have a grudge with US hegemony are ganging up, China, Iran, Syria, Belarus and North Korea to support Russia. Economically, the US has failed to convince India, Japan and African countries to join their proxy war by means of economic sanctions with Russia.
And here is something to think about. Zelensky did not speak the Ukrainian dialect when he was elected president. The US sent speech therapists to train him in Ukrainian.
US opponents of the war say that Ukrainians are being sacrificed on the platform of US hegemony in Asia, a testing ground for US smart weapons, while their country is destroyed.
It joins other countries that suffered the same fate, Vietnam, Syria, Libya, Chile, and Iraq.
A Freudian slip by Biden yesterday; “We will support Ukraine as long as it exists.”
Ken Mufuka is a Zimbabwean patriot. He writes from the US.