Long answer: let me walk you down a very short memory lane, merely 16 days long, starting from February 22, 2022. On that day, the majority of Ukrainian forces were massed deep inside the territories of Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics—the two statelets populated by Russians, many of them Russian passport-holders. The Ukrainian forces were within striking range of their capital cities and (as recently obtained official documents prove) were planning an all-out attack on them. That would have been an act of genocide which Russia would have had no choice but to try to stop.
Since the Ukrainian regime does not dare to do anything major without first receiving an “all clear” signal from Washington, this attack would have been on strategy with Washington’s goals, which, perfectly clearly, were to mire Russia in a Ukrainian civil war. This war would in turn provide the rationale for international isolation which would crush Russia’s economy and force it to once again provide its natural resources to the West for almost nothing. Were this plan to fail, the West would collapse.
The way it looks now, this plan is failing. I will return to this subject in a little while; by then the situation will have become clearer to a few more people. As people go through the inevitable denial-anger-bargaining sequence, it is best to hang back until the bargaining part is reached; only then does reasoned discussion become possible.
While the Ukrainian regime was frustrated in its efforts to join NATO by the fact that it does not control its own territory, it in fact surrendered the Ukraine to NATO forces, allowing NATO to order its military around and turning itself over to NATO’s use, thus bringing NATO within striking range of Moscow and driving NATO’s expansion east along the same route used by previous Western invaders—Napoleon and Hitler. Thus, the Ukrainian regime blithely trod across a very well established Russian red line that was guaranteed to trigger a military response. Given the vast disproportion in military strength, this was a delusional, suicidal move.
To top all of this off, at the Munich security conference held this February the (former?) Ukrainian president Zelensky professed his desire to develop nuclear weapons with which to attack Russia. Note that the Ukraine had sufficient nuclear materials, technologies and knowhow, inherited from the USSR, to rush through such a development program, especially if with US help. Although this would directly violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (“non-nuclear-weapon states agree never to acquire nuclear weapons”), he did not get any pushback from the assorted Western luminaries assembled there. Thus the Ukrainian regime thus did everything necessary to fashion itself into an immediate existential threat to Russia, sealing its fate.
The Russian response, nicknamed “Operation Z” from the letter “Z” painted on Russian armor involved in it, has two objectives: demilitarization and denazification. The demilitarization part is simple: completely destroy the Ukraine’s military capability (much of it inherited from the USSR) and refashion it into a militarily neutral confederation of semi-sovereign statelets, its security provided for by Russia. Just as everyone should have expected, the conscription-based Ukrainian military, armed with well-worn Soviet-era weaponry, with its morale somewhere down around its ankles, proved no match to the fully modernized and rearmed Russian military and is being systematically destroyed, with the surrendering soldiers being fed, bandaged up and sent home.
Thus, the demilitarization is going swimmingly and as of this writing what’s left of the Ukrainian regime no longer poses a military threat to anyone except its own population, which is still being terrorized by Ukrainian Nazis. And that brings us to Part II: Denazification, which is much more complicated and requires a more thorough explanation. Many people are currently scratching their heads, trying to imagine what it could possibly be, and I am happy to be able to offer an explanation.
There is a marked divergence of opinion on ways to characterize the military action currently unfolding in what remains of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic: is it a Russian special military operation to demilitarize and denazify the former Ukraine, or is it an unprovoked Russian invasion leading up to World War III, a nuclear exchange and the end of the world as we know it (TEOTWAKI for short)? Perhaps it’s a little of each; or perhaps it’s none of the above…
And is Russia winning or is the Ukraine losing? On the one hand, Russia just officially expanded its sovereign territory by a hundred thousand square kilometers and a few million citizens and has launched on a massive building spree, fixing up its new territories, which are a bit run down after decades of late Soviet and post-Soviet neglect followed by nine years of Ukrainian shelling. That would indicate that Russia is winning.
On the other hand, the US just promised to give the Ukrainians some Patriot air defense batteries (or not; details vary). Are these the same Patriot batteries that failed so embarrassingly over Saudi Arabia when they couldn’t shoot down ancient Soviet SCUD missiles fired by the Yemenis? And are these the same Patriot batteries whose operators, in Poland, recently failed to see incoming Ukrainian missiles (which were also of venerable Soviet vintage) and only learned of them later from news reports? Never mind that! They cost $1 billion per launcher and $3 million per rocket, so they must be good for Raytheon, and what’s good for Raytheon is good for America, or something like that. So what if they don’t stand a chance against any of the Russian state-of-the-art weapons? Don’t be negative!
We are, most of us unwittingly, bearing witness to a momentous development: the end of the thousand-year Drang nach Osten—the relentless eastward march of the reanimated corpse of the Western Roman Empire, with the Pope as its symbolic head and Vatican as its symbolic capital—known as the Crusades. Of these, the Southern Crusades are far better known in the West, while the Northern Crusades, launched in 1147, are far less widely known. But they were kept going the longest—until February 22, 2022—because, unlike China, India and just about every other non-Western country, Russia has never surrendered to anyone.
The gauntlet was thrown down in 1252, when Alexander Nevsky accepted an official document, called yarlyk, from Khan Batyj of the Golden Horde (part of the Mongolian Empire), allowing him to reign as the Grand Prince of Kiev (and thus the ruler of all of Russia), rather than ask for a blessing from the Pope in Rome, as was required of all Western kings. To these Western potentates, their claim to be ordained by God was based on approval by His head office at the Vatican; to the Russians, the Pope was just some heretic usurper. The religious distinction played itself out over time, but the notion that there is an exclusive club of Western nations who deserve to wield authority over the rest of the world has remained to this day.
There followed a series of onslaughts on Russia spanning many centuries, all stemming from the same simple principle: that which the West cannot control must be destroyed. The Germans and the Swedes kept on attacking it until 1709. Then the French attacked again in 1812; and then the Germans in 1941. The Americans were poised to attack in March of 2022, via their Ukrainian/NATO proxies, but were preempted by Russia’s Special Military Operation. Thus, the last Crusade has been aborted and further attempts seem unlikely, since, at this point, there is no question of destroying that which the West cannot control, and not just Russia but also much of the rest of the world. Even tiny North Korea can stand up to the collective West and wag a finger in its face. The thousand-year show is nearly over.
Over the previous centuries, every time after Russia expelled yet another crusader, some other Western nations would take the lead and attempt to march on Moscow: it was the Germans (as the Teutonic Knights, then the Swedes, the Poles, then some more Swedes, then the French under Napoleon, then the Germans under Hitler, and now the Americans (disguised as some hapless, clueless Ukrainians) under Biden. (Yes, the last act of this drama is most definitely a farce.) But who could possibly rise up as the next crusader du Jour? Nobody! There isn’t anyone left in the West to continue the project.
