Now both warring nations are attempting to restart their exports of grains and fertilizers which had to be stopped when they mined their Black Sea harbors. They are looking for ways to continue to fund the war. The rhetoric that they are doing this to help the poor countries so they can feed their hungry people is very flimsy. We have heard before about the “Starving kids in Africa” numerous times!
One side thinks that it can defeat the Russian Federation by donations trickling down from the tables of Western countries; while the other side wonders since Day One of this artificial war if it could have been prevented should the elders of the nation had been involved to manage the situation better.
Ukraine, too, should wonder what reciprocation the West had in mind when it started pouring arms, money and free advice. Since there is no such thing as a free lunch on the western side of the Danube, and if something is free you are the product, perhaps some politicians could have a thing or two to say to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. On the eastern side of the Volga, those elder statesmen could know why Zelenskyy & Company had changed their minds about granting a referendum to the people in the Donbass region to determine if they wanted to be independent from their motherland. Russian President Vladimir Putin himself should have known better what it means when a mouse starts roaring. But he did not consider Zelenskyy a worthy antagonist. When Zelenskyy pulled out of the agreement on which his signature was still wet, Putin should have seen that annexation of the Donets Basin could not be as easy as gulping the Crimean Peninsula down in 2014.
Things have changed and the U.S. now had a president who was trying to change history, not trying to find a place for himself in it. The difference between former U.S. President Barrack Obama and incumbent President Joe Biden is tremendous and it can be summed up in two words: Donald Trump! The Democrats had wised up that the American voters could joke again with their ballots, and Trump at the helm, the U.S. could not push China back where they want it to be. The Biden team knew that China could not reign in the world without the assistance of the Russian Federation.
Anybody who is running the show in Moscow since 1999 could have known that NATO’s new defense strategy was based on what the generals and diplomats call the offensive competitive strategy. Oh, Mr. Putin knows that, and he even complained that NATO’s effort to have Ukraine, Georgia, Sweden and Finland join the alliance is aimed to encircle Russia. Then it would be an all-out war that, despite what the commanders of the alliance think, the people of NATO would not allow to happen. So, Putin could see easily that when Zelenskyy donned a khaki T-shirt, taking his tie and jacket off, it was not going to be an easy all-out war but attrition warfare that would be sustained until Russia physically collapsed through continuous losses in personnel, equipment and supplies.
Putin can still see it on the cover of Vogue magazine. As the magazine says, there is a shadow army resisting Russian occupation in Ukraine. Its first lady is weaponizing glossy magazines. Ms. Zelenska’s portrait titled “the bravery of Ukraine” shows her sitting on the steps of the Presidential Palace in Kyiv and looking directly into the camera one can easily decipher that it is not about the “made-in-Ukraine” clothes the magazine is showing off, but the attrition warfare that the U.S. has been putting on for the last 155 days.
Putin should know it is not a Russian special operation as the Russian media has been forced to call it; it is a special operation of the United States and it is going to last 155 months, if necessary, to wear down the defenses of Russia.
We call a publicity agent a “huckster” if and only if he sells “small items” and if he serves biased interests, using pushy or showy tactics. The “man in the olive green tee” is definitely not a huckster; it is true that he provides inspiration not only to his people but to the American public, too. As The New York Times calls it: Sometimes surfeit of unlikely details, such a concentration of modern political themes; but the Zelenskyys are growing out of mere comedy players into something that even they don’t know exactly what it is going to be. Their soldiers are shelling a prison killing 40 and wounding 130 of their own who had been held as prisoners of war in the Donetsk People’s Republic, using U.S.-supplied rockets. But it is not even reported in the Ukrainian media. (They still have a media; printed and online.) The Ukrainians believe they are fighting with Goliath and such collateral damage is acceptable. Zelenskyy is so full of his own story that he speaks up without hesitation that Americans should not mind spending more money on the Ukrainian war. Despite the inflation, recession and other economic calamities the Ukrainian war is wreaking on people, Zelenskyy says, “Inflation is nothing, COVID-19 is nothing.” He adds: “Ask those people who lost their children, their peace, their property at the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion. Masks, COVID-19, inflation. These things are nothing.”
He knows the Ukrainian-Russia war is bigger than both countries. How bogus it seems from outside to Americans, to Europeans who are being burned in these scorching heatwaves and would be freezing in the coming winter months, denying the sanctity of the Ukrainian-Russia War or rejecting its necessity is a blasphemy against the new world order the Neo-Conservatives and Liberal Globalists are, hand-in-hand, building before another Trump-like accident.
While the U.S. media are busy romanticizing either Ms. Zelenska or Mr. Zelenskyy using their attire or love for each other, some independent analysts began suspecting that Russia is not even close to exhausting its capacity for war. Anthony Faiola of The Washington Post writes about “the fierce Ukrainian resistance ... defying the battlefield odds ... turning the tide against a superior Russian force,” for weeks, but the Rand Corporation which is famous for eating the lamb with the wolf and later crying with the shepherd, had already begun issuing so-called analyses that partitioning Ukraine is likely to happen because “splitting Ukraine would merely establish de jure a situation that already exists de facto; Ukraine is deeply divided by its cultural identity/language differences.”
This war should stop immediately. Armies cannot kill civilians; Putin should stop using world war tactics in this day and age. Instead, he should start seeing the fact his federation is going to partition into 16 sovereign nations to open the road to China.
Zelenskyy is a huckster, but Putin is not.
