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 101st 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.
If America understands that it will lose a proxy war in Ukraine and that it does not want a nuclear holocaust, then this analysis and the position and perspective from which it has been made is quite reasonable. It is a kind of reverse-engineering analysis, or how America should think about harm reduction. The capacity to acidify the state of the Europe is not infinite and the matter is approaching the abyss.
My analysis contains many “ifs”; perhaps too many. 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.
The whole thing is escalating so consistently from the western side that looks like using of artificial intelligence to repeat the procedure until the result will be achieved. The dynamics of the attempts are reminiscent of the movie „Edge of Tomorrow“, where the scene starts over and over and over again. Additionally, something or someone is calculating with human nature and using emotional associations as a propaganda tool to manipulate the direction of the outcomes of the human psyche. It’s very dirty, seek intention. And a conscious act.
If the West feeds artificial intelligence and uses it again and again to take new steps, then everything will end badly because they are carrying out an Eichmann-like procedure as Hannah Arendt described it in her report on the banality of evil. It is the same if several separate centres take independent steps and rely on the ultimate joint success.
And then, on the other side stand very upright and coherent men. They are patiently waiting for the world to come to its senses. But I don’t get the feeling that they are naive.
In the videos, I watched Putin’s approach to other beings.
To a blind girl, to a particular child, to another human being, to a teacher from his childhood days, to politicians, to animals, and also the approach to the villains in the economy.
He can easily stop time and give personal attention only to a particular entity he finds in front of him. It is about pure existence, awareness and volume which is rarely found among very special people. This speaks for itself.