Tag: Ukraine-Russia War

Whoops readers! Justin Smith submitted a post on 2/23/22 about Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. I missed it. Justin suggested I post it for archive purposes since some of the info therein is dated as of today 2/27/22. So here is that post with minimal editing and lots of info even though a bit late.

JRH 2/27/22

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Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Putin Longs for the Former Russian Empire – Ukrainians Haven’t Forgotten History

By Justin O. Smith

Sent February 23, 2022 10:03 AM

“If we have to fight them, now is the time. From now on we will get weaker and they stronger.”  ~ General George S. Patton, May 20th 1945 [Justin located: “Snow and Steel: The Battle of the Bulge, 1944-45 (JRH) – Punctuation Marks of History (JOS);” Erenow]

 The world is witnessing Joe Biden and his regime resign themselves to reacting rather than take hard, firm action to stop Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as ordered by President Vladimir Putin on February 21st 2022, who is now pushing on and doing just as he wishes in total disregard for the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, the Minsk Agreement of 2015, European norms and thirty years of diplomacy agreed to by Russia, Europe and America. Putin is moving assuredly with confidence to take Ukraine and rebuild the Russian Empire, and a cheap imitation of a “president” pretending to take a strong position is the last thing America and the world need at the helm, as the next few weeks will determine the status of freedom in the world for the rest of the century.

Under different leadership and one that full well recognizes the global stakes at hand,  this crisis might actually have a favorable resolution for America and Europe, quite possibly even Russia. But as it stands at this juncture in history, Putin seeks to initially use Ukraine to destroy Europe’s and the world’s faith in America’s willingness to lead the Free World; and at this moment, most of America doesn’t believe Joe Biden is up to the challenge, or even capable of handling it in a way that doesn’t have severe long term consequences for America. 

On February 22nd 2022, Joe Biden addressed the American people, in part, stating:

“This is the beginning of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. I’m going to begin to impose sanctions in response, far beyond the steps we and our allies and partners imposed in 2014. If Russia goes further with this invasion we stand prepared to go further.” 

Ironic isn’t it? Here this pretender to the Oval Office stands yammering about defending Ukraine, when he violates U.S. immigration law and won’t even defend America’s borders.

The degree of seriousness with which Biden is viewing this is anyone’s guess. In the back of his mind certainly must be concerns of damaging information in Burisma Holdings Ltd documents being released, regarding his and son Hunter’s corrupt dealings in Ukraine’s energy programs. While over on the Russian side of the equation, Hillary Clinton doesn’t want the real story of her involvement in ROSTROM [Russia’s energy company] coming to the forefront again.

One of the few things Biden got right was when he said that “(Putin’s) setting up a rationale to go much further.”

Despite contentions from some journalists on Fox News that this is just another manufactured crisis to deflect from Biden failures, nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone who has kept up with the timeline on Putin’s actions in the region over the past decade, full well understands this. 

Yes — the dynamics of this story have more twists and turns than an Agatha Christie novel. 

Anyone who has watched the fall of the old Soviet Union and Putin’s rise to power with all it’s troubling aspects now are wishing our leaders of long ago had let General Patton drive his tanks all the way into Moscow’s Red Square. Although Putin may not exactly long for Russia’s communist past, his actions from the 2014 subversion and incursion into Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, in conjunction with his most recent speech on February 21st 2022, perfectly illustrate his main intent is in fact to see the Russian empire reconstituted as it was before 1922, as he appeared to be enraged and not completely in control of his emotions at times, revealing just how serious a situation the world now faces.

Putin blamed everyone for Russia’s current state of decline, from the old rulers to the Soviet Union to Europe and America. He also bemoaned the loss of the “territory of the former Russian empire.”

I try not to indulge in predicting anything, but in this case, the available facts suggest to me that Putin will not be content to just recognize the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, two Ukrainian breakaway, republics, and signing “friendship treaties”. His gambit of “diplomacy” was merely a delaying action he utilized, as he deployed Russian armed forces and supplies and built pontoon bridges and field hospitals just four miles from the Ukraine border, and the 200,000 Russian soldiers amassed are enough for a full-scale invasion; and given his moves in the Black Sea and the recent successful test of a hypersonic missile, one can only conclude that Putin intends to conquer all Ukraine, in order to seize the world’s breadbasket and all its rich resources. 

Regardless of the desperation of Europe’s leaders and the Biden regime to find a glimmer of hope for any real solution that leaves Ukraine whole, sovereign and free, the fact remains that Putin has already violated two major treaties with the West, i.e. the Budapest Memorandum and Minsk Agreement, and to think that any sanctions will stop Putin from completing his agenda is enough to make one laugh raucously out loud. Putin has been preparing for at least the last seven years, after taking Crimea, and he has more than likely set back a good bit of Russia’s oil money for just such a moment. And just today, per Putin’s request, the Duma gave Putin “permission” to deploy Russian armed forces abroad. 

And one cannot help but wonder just how hard Europe will fight to keep Ukraine free, when they have become so overly dependent on Russian gas and oil, with some sixty-percent of its energy coming from Russia by some accounts. However, Eurocrat suggests forty percent of EU gas comes from Russia, with the EU providing over sixty percent of Russia’s import revenues. Europe never learned the lesson from 2009, when Russia froze Europe by suspending gas shipments. 

Too little, too late, the EU representative for foreign affairs, Josep Borrell, recently wrote:

“With the severe crisis that we are currently going through with Russia, it has become not only a price issue but also a matter of security of supplies. However, in recent years, Russia has enhanced its resilience against economic sanctions, by increasing its foreign currency reserves, more than we have done to enhance our capacity to face potential gas supply cuts.”

All of this becomes more ironic, once we recall that under President Trump, America had become a major exporter of oil and natural gas, and part of his energy plan included selling quality gas to Europe at a great price that would enable them to gradually remove themselves from dependence on Russian energy. But now, Biden has destroyed all those gains and has the U.S. going hat-in-hand and begging for more oil from those who hate America. Roll the laugh track, with pictures of Marine La Pen and Margaret Thatcher in tears and Angela Merkel smiling a smile that would make a shark shudder.

On the other hand, Viktor Orban has shown sympathy for Putin’s position, and as a result, Hungary’s energy costs are three times lower than the rest of the EU. Hungary gets eighty percent of its gas from Gazprom, Russia’s main supplier of gas to Europe. 

In this context, Germany’s decertification and rejection of the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline has no bearing on anything, since gas hadn’t even begun to flow through it. This is so much worthless lip service and less than nothing in the opening salvos of this war.

Speaking to Fox News recently, retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, suggested:

“Right now, I’d tell the president if I was advising the president, we’re done talking and you tell Putin, you play your cards, we’re going to play our cards and play hard. You know, Putin appreciates strength and we’re not portraying strength at all. This whole idea about, well, let’s talk again, let’s talk again, I think it absolutely folly. It’s not going to work. He’s got his game plan in mind, and we should go forward with ours.”

What makes the entire situation ever more complicated and dire is the knowledge that for the most part the Europeans have grown fat, stupid, lazy and weak where their own defense mechanisms are concerned, having grown far too willing to let America bear the brunt of the cost for Europe’s defense in money and the blood of our young men and women, and these simply are people without the capacity to risk any manner of war with Russia, or even a rough few moments of real conflict, in order to align themselves with America’s response, whatever form it takes. The fact remains, the trouble is breaking out in their backyard and it is the people of Ukraine and Eastern Europe and Europe proper who will suffer the ultimate fallout, but regardless of whether they hate or love Russia and Putin, their lack of will to stop his aggression puts their own liberty, sovereignty and lives at risk over the long haul. 

Equally alarming is the forgotten cost of this war, that is already sending food prices climbing, since Russia and Ukraine combined account for twenty-nine percent of the worldwide wheat export market and Ukraine was the top corn exporter to China in 2021. Take this in conjunction with the extremely important raw materials necessary for many industries that primarily come from Ukraine and Russia currently, and a great economic turndown could result, if this does turn into a full blown invasion and a war that will be fought in a new hybrid-style of war that will even use debilitating and deadly cyber attacks on all countries involved. 

And then there’s the fact that Biden as Commander-in-Chief and General Mark “Woke-Ass” Milley and the current crop of weak U.S. Commanders — who rose to the top during Obama’s purge of the military — don’t exactly instill hope, promise and confidence in the American people or the people of Europe, especially after watching America allow politics to lead to a virtual defeat in Afghanistan. Many man hours have been taken away from actual combat training to pursue identity politics and issues centered on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation. One can’t help but wonder just exactly how much time has been taken away from missile systems training and the rifle range to pursue transgender sensitivity training. 

On February 21st 2022, Ingrida Simonyte, the Prime Minister of Lithuania, stated in a tweet on her official account:

“Putin just put Kafka & Orwell to shame: no limits to dictator’s imagination, no lows too low, no lies too blatant, no red lines too red to cross. What we witnessed tonight might seem surreal for democratic world. But the way we respond will define us for the generations to come.”

Biden is playing from behind as he has ordered troops into Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Germany, Poland and Hungary in a manner that should have been executed tenfold over starting soon after Russia’s November 2021 troop buildup along Ukraine’s border became readily apparent. Along with this, the U.S. should have immediately sent nuclear weapons into Poland, even though some suggest this would serve as a provocation for Putin.

At some point, the West must show its own resolve to not allow one more piece of land to be taken by an invasion perpetrated by an evil, tyrannical dictator bent on the restoration of the old Russian Empire and acquiring untold amounts of new power. Or do we simply sit back and watch a rerun of the years that led to WWII, with the same sort of appeasement and the same gross jack-booted tramplings and murders of innocent people simply yearning to be free?

A homegrown Ukrainian resistance and guerrilla warfare may be Ukraine’s final hope to eventually send Putin’s forces back whence they came, although Russia is medieval, vicious and ruthless in its handling of counterinsurgency operations because it has proven to be effective. Just as Russian forces terrorized the people of Chechnya and Syria, we can look for the same in Ukraine. Putin stated in his speech that he had the names of anti-Russian elements in Odessa, who would be found and punished, which corroborated assertions made by U.N. Ambassador Crocker. This is reminiscent of Moscow’s same tyrannical operations in Poland, the Baltic states and the many regions of Europe it occupied over the last century.

Recently, Ambassador Bathsheba Nell Crocker sent an alarming letter to Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, that suggested a Russian plans to do more harm to the people of Ukraine in the aftermath of the invasion, writing:

“… information recently obtained by the United States … indicates that human rights violations and abuses … are being planned. These acts, which in past Russian operations have included targeted killings, kidnappings/forced disappearances, unjust detentions, and the use of torture, would likely target those who oppose Russian actions, including Russian and Belarusian dissidents in exile in Ukraine, journalists and anti-corruption activists, and vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons. Specifically, we have credible information that indicates Russian forces are creating lists of identified Ukrainians to be killed or sent to camps following a military occupation.”

Panic in the populace hasn’t set in yet, although there have been several days of continuous shelling on the edges of Ukraine. The stores still have goods to sell and grocery stores still have food, and the children still play their games without a care, as though their country isn’t on the edge of the ever growing abyss of a full-scale war, while the adults deal with the dark clouds of their anxiety and fear.

Biden’s weakness and his own affirmation that he wouldn’t send U.S. troops and air support to Ukraine is the factor that emboldened Putin, as Biden continues to react to Putin rather than leading from a position of strength that makes Putin stop and retreat to his own borders. Putin has been left with the impression that he can take all of Ukraine with little to no real world consequences, and for the moment, he is right.

The results and consequences of Putin’s Eastern Europe Gambit remain to be seen and fully realized, and it may be yet that Putin has miscalculated. He has his own economic troubles — deteriorating demographics, Russian society’s proclivity for corruption and a country too dependent on energy to boost its GDP– that are currently being concealed by Russia’s renewed sense of national pride. Putin’s Russia might ultimately prove to be a Potemkin superpower, and Ukraine might be Putin’s Afghanistan.

In the meantime, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia stand to be in the next line of Russian aggressions, should Russia actually complete a full conquest of Ukraine. And that busts the gate wide open for the taking of much of the rest of Europe too.

America is left holding all its own failures, that combined with the European Union’s shocking failures to create this current crisis with Russia and their defeat in the post-Cold War era looming over them like the Angel of Death. The complacency of the Free World and the helter-skelter psychosis of immorality that the decadent West embraced was enabled by the sense of relief, calm and confidence that manifested with the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989. And along the way, America turned inward upon itself, with a deep chasm that had grown between its two competing and antithetical ideologies, as half the nation began an extremely dangerous assault on the founding principles and virtues that built America and made Her so exceptional, and somewhere over the course of the past three decades, we set ourselves up to lose the post-Cold War era to those proponents of evil who would destroy freedom and liberty for all. 

Ukraine may already be lost. If this does prove to be the case, it should hasten numerous strategic moves by what is left of “the Free World” to stop Putin from taking one more aggressive step towards any portion of Europe — those frontline states, and all the Western allies must come together more resolved and unified than ever. This is their wake-up call to fully and effectively close specific military vulnerabilities and capability gaps, as they increase their presence in personnel and armaments and build NATO-style multinational battalions all along the Eastern Front. 

Whatever Putin may think, rightly or not, Ukraine absolutely has the absolute right to be free from Russian tyranny and subjugation, a goal it has worked towards in a generations long fight to be free of Russian encroachments and occupation for over one thousand years, despite Putin’s historical revisionism that attempts to convince the world Ukraine never was a state. State or not, the Ukrainian people have always seen themselves as separate from Russia — the same Russia that murdered 10 million Ukrainians in the genocide of 1932-1933 to stop their independence movement. Ukrainians haven’t forgotten.

By Justin O. Smith

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Edited by John R. Houk

Embedded source links are By Justin Smith.

© Justin O. Smith