One tries to read widely on the state of the Ukraine war, though it’s extremely difficult to cut through the fog of propaganda and obvious lies. But slowly, the picture of a determined, slow-moving, grinding, painful Russian victory emerges. Ukrainian casualties are almost certainly at unbearable, unsustainable levels. Closest guesses are in the range of 250,000 KIA, orders of magnitude greater than Russia’s, which draws from a vastly larger population. Ukraine is losing a generation of its male youth, all to prop up a declining US planetary hegemony.

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The vicious, confused, criminally reckless tyros running US policy, and deliberately lengthening this destructive and immensely dangerous, unwinnable conflict, are indifferent to the ruin of Ukraine and the mass deaths of its young men, mere cannon fodder to those who walk the corridors of the State Department and Pentagon. As they are indifferent to the unthinkable consequence that might be the final issue of this war.

This war need never have happened if Kissinger’s, and many others’, proposal for a neutral, non-NATO Ukraine had been accepted by the US in 2021, as Russia reasonably requested, and if Ukraine, at America’s direction, had ceased its eight year, US-sponsored war on the Donbas Russian speakers and Russian ethnics, and had enforced the Minsk II accords.

A neutral Ukraine, no US weapons systems within Ukraine’s borders, an end to Kiev’s ruthless persecution of the Donbas population … and the result: No war.

But the US Military Industrial Complex wanted a war and got one. The object: To bleed and weaken Russia with a Vietnam-like quagmire, thus, per US neocon deep thinkers’ fantasies, one of the two nations able to say no to America is removed from the short list of countries impeding their dreamed-of US sole dominance of planet earth. 

The outcome of this totally US-provoked war may be much different than the one that fevers the wet dreams of America’s neocons. Russia appears to be surviving US sanctions quite comfortably, as new customers pop up in Asia for its natural gas and other vital resources, its ruble remains strong, 80% of its people apparently support their government, Europe’s, particularly Germany’s, economies are in free fall as the cost of US liquified natural gas exceeds the cost of demonized Russian pipeline gas by huge multiples, and as the BRICs develop new trade routes and payment methods in Asia and across the global south, threatening the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

All of this, and the risk of nuclear war with a Russia that does in fact feel threatened by the US Military Industrial Complex’s thirty year pattern of gratuitously aggressive behavior toward it, including:

• NATO’s relentless eastward expansion, in the teeth of explicit promises by every 1990 Western leader that such expansion would never occur if Russia accepted German reunification, withdrew its troops from Eastern Europe, and dissolved the Warsaw Pact; 
• Invitations in 2008 to Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO, well known at the time to be as totally unacceptable to Russia as the Soviet Union’s attempted similar conversion of Cuba in 1962 was to the United States; 
• US deep involvement in the 2014 coup that deposed Ukraine’s democratically elected, pro Russian president; 
• US installation of sophisticated weapons systems in the new NATO countries, including Poland, the Baltics and Romania; and
• The Biden administration’s 2021 treatment of Ukraine as a defacto member of NATO.

The motive for Russia’s sending 190,000 troops into Ukraine on February 24, 2022 was its perception of threat (see above), and an eight year war by the corrupt Kiev regime against its Donbas population. The claim that Russia’s move into Ukraine was the first step in its supposed lusted-for conquest of Europe is a ludicrous, transparent lie. Those who utter it don’t believe it for a minute, and not one knowledgeable student of international relations believed that Russia posed an aggressive threat to Europe at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union in December of 1991.  The claim that in Ukraine Russia is motivated by world conquest would be laughable, if that piece of propaganda had not been so ubiquitously parroted by the Western media and therefore swallowed whole by an inattentive, barely conscious public.

The media’s lies about the alleged motivation for the conflict, and its understandable total silence about the pertinent history that would expose those lies, is echoed in its reporting on the progress and state of the war itself. 

To judge from mainstream accounts, Russia is always losing, being bled to death, its defeats huge, its victories negligible, its military hardware and ammunition nearly exhausted, suffering massively greater casualties than its enemies, and has been greatly weakened as a military power regardless of the war’s outcome. One day Bakhmut is militarily “irrelevant,” the next day we are told it’s being held to the last man because its fall would open a route to further Russian conquests toward the west. Vladimir Putin is dying of -- take your pick -- cancer, Parkinson’s, dementia. Vladimir Putin is unpopular, about to be killed or deposed, surrounded by foes, etc., etc.

All of this is desperate propaganda by Western elites and their media mouthpieces, who are slowly beginning to realize the magnitude of the catastrophe the Ukraine war they provoked is becoming.

And while the war goes on, beads of sweat are beginning to appear on foreheads of important Western leaders, as the real possibility emerges that the US government blew up the Nordstream pipelines -- which would be one of the most enormous acts of terrorism in history. And -- don’t forget -- that was an act of terrorism directed not merely against Russia, but against America’s close ally Germany, for whom those pipelines were the key to its industrial competitiveness and its population’s well-being. What would be the consequence, for NATO, for US -- European relations, for the governments of Europe, for the image of America in the world, if that astounding act originated in the Biden White House?

The West needs to change course in Ukraine, and fast. If it continues to prolong a war that cannot be won, to double down on past blunders, to deliberately engender in Russia a sense of isolation and threat, it will find itself soon at the point where that war can only be continued by direct insertion of NATO troops to replace the tragically depleted and destroyed Ukrainians.

That way -- the insertion of NATO troops -- lies the serious possibility of civilizational annihilation. Because, whatever happens on the conventional battlefield, the Russians will not tolerate the conversion of Ukraine into a vast military base of the United States on its front porch.