Russia did a very strange thing; they withdrew from Kherson city. The strange part is that they had enough troops and soldiers there to keep killing the Ukrainians indefinitely, without suffering significant losses; the Ukrainians basically got a gift they could never have conquered militarily, and not for the lack of trying – they’ve been trying for months, and the result was lots of dead Ukrainians. The strangest part about this is that Kherson is an ideal bridgehead for the Russians for taking Nikolaev and Odessa.

The first-order analysis indicates that the Russians abandoned the plans for using this bridgehead in order to advance towards Odessa and connect with Transnistria.

The second-order analysis asks the question “why”. It is possible that America sold the Russian leadership some bullshit about averting nuclear war by freezing the conflict at the Dnieper river, without any political solution, basically allowing things to cool down. The actual American plan would be to “refurbish” the Ukrainian army which is in very dire straits and would collapse if the Russians were to perform the anticipated winter campaign with the additional 300k troops. The Russian people fear something of the sorts, but are giving their leadership the benefit of the doubt, and if there isn’t a winter offensive, heads will roll, and I mean Putin and his people. This might exactly be the American long-term plan. Another possibility is that the Russians have abandoned the partial plans for Ukraine, which the south belt connecting Kherson with Transnistria through Odessa would be, and that they intend to come into Ukraine hard, pulverize their army, kill their leadership, throw out NATO and send a firm message – anyone fucking with us ever again will end like this. This is what the Russian people want, and if the leadership doesn’t produce this goal, the people will produce new leadership, which might be very bad for everyone, because all the candidates are hot-headed and inexperienced.

I don’t know which one is it, so we basically have a ternary tree, where one branch is armistice, where America and NATO regroup, fix the failing Ukrainian army, and proceed to try to weaken and isolate Russia, where Russia isn’t willing to strike at the core of the problem directly, so by definition their only hope for a victory is America crumbling down due to their own internal issues, or, alternatively, from a war with China over Taiwan. The highest-probability outcome in this war is still nuclear, only with a delay that would give America a better, less chaotic situation, and Russia would have internal political turmoil and wide-spread popular dissatisfaction with the situation preceding the war. This puts Russia in a precarious situation where they enter a certain nuclear conflict weakened and demoralized. They would lose, and they might not even manage to strike at the enemy properly, similar to the 1990s situation. Russia loses, but China performs a full strategic strike at America, because it becomes obvious to them that they are next, and with their main strategic ally lost, the nuclear option is the only alternative to total defeat and eternity of servitude.

The second branch is that the Russians are deciding to be done with Ukraine altogether, and are now giving up on partial solutions, where they would take the south and everything east of Dnieper; no, Ukraine needs to be rinsed of both Nazis and NATO, and the job needs to be done thoroughly, by tearing the filth down, killing all the problematic people there, and rebuilding everything on solid grounds afterwards. Giving up on the Kherson bridgehead means giving up on the concept of having a costly breakthrough in the South, that doesn’t give them a stable outcome in the end, but only increases the front line that is locked in perpetual conflict. This branch means the Russians wait for the ground to freeze and their reinforcements to be ready, and they most likely pulverize everything with aviation and rockets first, and then do a blitz from multiple vectors. As Ukraine falls, NATO goes in from the West, there is a direct conflict, and the Russians decide that the war with the Americans is no longer something they could avoid or limit, and they start taking out American command and control assets in Europe and in space. The Americans retaliate by striking Russian command and control centres with tactical nukes. The Russians perform a full strategic retaliation. What is left of America retaliates at Russian and Chinese cities.

The third branch is something that is usually ignored, because of Putin’s very strong psychological and ethical resistance to being the guy who started the nuclear war with the West. The third branch means to realize that Russia is already in a war with the collective West, and needs to win it. Strike decisively, strike first, strike with the element of surprise, take out all enemy assets, and strike so hard that the enemy never again poses a danger. This branch is something I am listing as an option only because I’m being thorough; it is a single digit probability option.

So, basically, I don’t know what’s going on because at this point everybody is lying and trying to deceive the enemy with everything they have, so I have to basically ignore everything I see and hear, and stick only to what I know. Strangely, it might be the economical factors that push America’s hand – for a while now everything’s been balancing at a knife’s edge, and something will eventually give and we’ll have the entire house of cards crumbling. What I do know is that everything is rotten, and there’s no healthy tissue anywhere in the Western sphere, and it will certainly collapse. I don’t know the exact immediate cause, or the exact conditions of the moment, and I honestly don’t care, because that’s the pastime of fools. I care about the thermodynamics of hurricanes, not which houses will be the first to lose power when it strikes. However, it is very likely that the Americans will have some advance knowledge of the exact circumstances of the collapse, and this will force their hand.

I was thinking about the dual-purpose strategies I started to talk about in the comment section of the previous article:

However, one of my underlying assumptions is that any “Armageddon plan”, even by a ruling clique in the USA, would have to be presented in such a way that it passes scrutiny by the military people who have to implement it, and they would outright refuse to comply with plans that are obviously insane. This means that a plan for nuclear war would necessarily need to be devised in non-obvious ways, for instance working with unrealistic assumptions about the Russian leadership and their expected response to something, and presenting plans as non-escalatory, stabilizing and non-nuclear, which will be approved and implemented by the Pentagon, but a combination of intentionally invalid premises and additional factors (for instance, have plans designed with several components, where the military knows of one, the CIA knows of the other, the Brits know of something else, and only the few masterminds have the whole picture) can create a two-component explosive, where each component can be inspected and found harmless, and their combination creates the blast.

This made me think along the lines of “how do you start a nuclear war by pretending to do something else”. Let’s create a scenario from the position of a powerful group inside America, or in control of America; could be an unknown combination of people in intelligence agencies, Pentagon and billionaires with agendas for the world.

The first thing you need to to is plant a picture into everybody’s mind that their geostrategic rivals are some kind of evil, Nazi-like force, which cannot possibly ever have a good agenda, needs to be opposed at every turn, everything they do is evil (if it’s not evil, it’s for propaganda purposes so it’s evil), and their leader is a Hitler-like character. This will put everybody who tries to exercise diplomacy, make a compromise or even talk to the opposite side in a ridiculous position where they are portrayed as people so stupid they would talk to Hitler, not understanding you can’t talk to “those people”. So, basically, step one if you want to start a nuclear war is to not only stop talking to the other side, but present this as an act of treason and/or disqualifying idiocy. This first step is not perceived as fatal by your side, and it even makes them feel good because they are on the right side of history and the good guys always win.

The second thing you need to do is create a serious geostrategic threat to your opponent, and draw a line in the sand guaranteeing fatal escalation of conflict if they do anything logical and expected about it. Normally, this would be the stupidest thing one could do, but if you did your homework with the first step, even your “insiders” have been propagandised to perceive the opposite side as inherently evil and nefarious, so making “strategic defensive precautions”, such as positioning advanced weapon systems on the adversary’s borders and regime-changing countries that were normally on friendly terms with the adversary, can be sold as something you are perfectly justified in doing if you want to protect yourself from some kind of an aggressive evil empire. Nobody who’s been sold the propaganda from the first step will even think from the position of “how does this look to the other side”. Of course, the other side perceives that you are pursuing an aggressive policy that threatens their security and prosperity, and potentially even existence. As is expected from a reasonable self-serving entity, they try to politely talk about it, but if the propaganda from the first step was successful, all their attempts are rebuffed and they are always put in some sort of a humiliating position if they even try to talk to you and resolve things. Eventually you destroy all normal diplomatic channels and anger the opponent to the point where they feel they have nothing to gain by talking to you, and they must prepare for war.

The third thing you have to do is create a scenario that will seemingly confirm all your propaganda from step 1. Propaganda is all nice and well, but if your adversary is a peaceful country minding its own business it’s very hard to rile people up against them. You need to provoke them by endangering them, and forcing them to defend their interests, and then spin this as an aggressive act that proves all your propaganda. Regime-changing a friendly ally of theirs into a Nazi shithole of murder and money laundering, where killing the adversary’s nationals is seen as a national sport will probably do the trick. It’s important to spin this as promoting democracy or some other politically correct thing, and never report what’s actually going on there; it must seem that the adversary’s defensive action came out of the blue and is some kind of a hitlerite aggression that must be immediately opposed by war, because you just can’t talk to Hitler.

When your adversary actually acts aggressively to defend themselves, try to fuck with them in ways that will formally obscure your participation, so that if they do the logical thing and attack you, because you’re the one who’s actually cooking it all up against them, it will seem as if it’s another unprovoked attack, a Pearl Harbour moment, and draw “red lines” on basically everything – sink my aircraft carrier, it’s nuclear war. Shoot down the satellites I’m using to guide weapons and drones at your forces, it’s nuclear war. Shoot my command centers, it’s nuclear war. Shoot at any infrastructure I’m using to wage war against you, it’s nuclear war. Shoot at my allies I’m using to wage war against you, it’s nuclear war. If that doesn’t work (because either the trap is obvious or your adversary is incredibly disinclined to escalate in any way due to their peaceful nature), state that a chemical attack or a dirty bomb will cross the line, and then do the false flag attack yourself so that you can “retaliate”. When you “retaliate”, do it in the most provocative way possible, that is guaranteed to cause total nuclear retaliatory strike in response – strike at their presidential residence, or the defense ministry, in a decapitation strike.

If you follow all the steps diligently, you can pull off killing everybody while keeping your virtuous posture intact.

Let me write down some of my thoughts on what’s going on in the war.

Ukraine has almost no army left. This conjecture is based on the increasing reports that everything but the untrained cannon fodder there are the NATO people playing dress-up, the way Russians dressed up as “little green men” in Crimea or Croatian army dressed up as the HVO (Herzegovina Croat paramilitary troops) when they went across the border in 1995 to crush the Serbs. Also, Ukraine has basically no original Ukrainian equipment left, and the NATO stuff is all centrally controlled over satellites and manned by trained NATO personnel. Basically, NATO troops are the glue binding the broken up Ukrainian military, and as time goes on there is increasingly more glue and less Ukraine.

The level of conflict is such that the NATO countries basically ran out of spare weaponry, and since their industries are incapable of producing quantities required for a real war (it’s all tuned for peacetime servicing and replacement of existing small quantities of stuff, and also military industry doesn’t work that well without oil, gas and electricity) they are now in a position where they are forced to deplete their own defensive capabilities if they want to continue with this war, and America/UK is not allowing any alternative to be heard.

There was some fuss here in Croatia about whether we should train Ukrainians here or not. I think this is only a fig leaf; Ukraine has no men to be trained. What is likely going on is that America is forcing subservient countries, like Croatia, to dress up their quota of troops as Ukrainans and send them to the Ukrainian front, weapons and all. When the extent of this is revealed, all hell will break loose, and there must already be a plan for NATO to openly enter the war at that point, so that the foreign troops can switch to their own uniforms, with puppet parliaments voting for their respective satrapies’ “voluntary” participation in the war. There are reports that the Russians already hear huge amount of radio chatter in Ukraine in foreign languages, so they have a pretty good idea what’s going on. I heard analyses stating that 40-80% of people fighting on the Ukrainian side at the moment are foreign NATO troops, depending on the region. I can’t confirm those numbers, but considering the reports of 5000 Poles being hit in the Ukrainian barracks, I would not be surprised.

The Russians still didn’t introduce the new recruits to the front line, but it is expected to happen when the soil in Ukraine freezes; autumn mud doesn’t favour movements of heavy equipment across vast swathes of terrain.

The Americans expect the Russians to go in for real, and seem to be making preparations that have to work with the assumption that the Russians will crush everything in their path and intend to actually keep everything they liberate this time, because the Bucha-like incidents where the Russians go in, the locals see them as liberators and help them, the Russians withdraw and the Ukrainian “special forces” then go in and kill all the “collaborators”, are currently seen as completely unacceptable by the Russian people. The Ukrops did the killing, but the Russian people see those who gave the order to withdraw as responsible. This shit will not be happening again. Next time Russia goes in, it stays forever. The corollary of this is that the Russians won’t enter the places where the population is not Russian – they don’t care to have a significant percentage of Ukrops on territory under their control, but they can also not allow the Ukrops to continue functioning in the un-liberated parts of Ukraine, which explains the infrastructure bombardment. I would assume that the Americans expect the Russians to take the entire Eastern Ukraine, and the Kiev regime to either collapse entirely, or be replaced by the Russians as something that governs the Central and Western Ukraine, but is not Russia proper. This will be the point where America could either accept defeat, or double down and go into the Western Ukraine with open NATO occupation (ahem, “brotherly assistance”) and the NATO-Russia front line will be established somewhere along the lines of the Dniepr river. Also, I would expect that the Americans will enter Moldova through Romania, and try to wipe out the Russian army detachment in Transnistria, and then proceed to Odessa to prevent the Russians from taking it, or, at least, prevent the Russians from joining with Transnistria. I would also expect the Americans to try and open up a second front somewhere around Belarus, forcing the Russians to commit significant forces there, and having to choose between abandoning their Belarusian ally and splitting their forces, thus relieving pressure from the Eastern front. This, however, will only make it more likely for the Russians to decide that they need to take the entire Ukraine, purge it of fascists and Western influences, and park their tanks on the Polish border.

What I see as likely when the Russians go in, is that the Ukrainian supposed allies, meaning the Poles above all, will see this as an opportunity to re-take the parts of Ukraine that they see as their historical lands, by basically going in with their army to “help” Ukraine, and never leave. When this happens, the Romanians, Hungarians and what not will also go into the fray and try to re-take their historical lands, and this might spell the end of Moldova as a state, by the way. The Americans must see this, and I would expect that the purpose of their 101^st Airborne currently located in Romania might be not so much to stop the Russians (they are far too weak for this), but to constrain the territorial ambitions of their East European allies, or at least to remain in control of the process and be able to impose the desired political outcomes, because this could end up causing a very real intra-NATO territorial conflict, making NATO defunct.

In any case, I don’t see continued existence of Ukraine in any known form past this winter. However, so many things are in the works, and so many global systems are forced past their balance points, that we can expect cascade collapse of social, economic, political et al. systems, with unpredictable consequences, because we are dealing with chaos, and in chaotic systems predictions are a pastime of fools.

On Monday, NATO started a nuclear exercise in Europe. Russia did not formally respond.

However, today (Saturday) at least 10 Russian strategic bombers released a large number of cruise missiles, accompanied by launches of cruise missiles from sea-borne platforms. Those missiles hit targets in Ukraine.

The message, as I understand it, was that those missiles could as easily have continued their flight across the Western borders of Ukraine, and hit NATO bases in Europe. Had they been nuclear-tipped, all the NATO bases would have been destroyed in that single attack.

The underlined part of the “non-message” is, “fuck with us, and that’s what happens”.