The Worst Deal Ever - Australia To Pay U.S. For Nuclear Insecurity

The Buildup to War

Disarming Ukraine - Thursday, February 24, 2022

The military of Russia has launched an operation to disarm, and possibly regime change, the Ukraine.

I do understand why Russia is doing this - it is either attack now or defend itself later with way more casualties and the danger of total defeat.

I had hoped though that it would find other methods to protect Russia from further NATO aggression.

In 2014 the U.S. instigated regime change in Kiev and has since controlled the Ukrainian government. It has build up the Ukraine as a base to strangle Russia economically and militarily.

During the last two centuries Russia had to defend itself, with horrific casualties, against two huge invasions from the west. It is understandable that it does not want to repeat that experience. 

It is difficult to discern what the planed end state of this operation is. Where is this going to stop?

Looking at this map I believe that the most advantageous end state for Russia would be the creation of a new independent country, call it Novorussiya, on the land east of the Dnieper and south along the coast that holds a majority ethnic Russian population and that, in 1922, had been attached to the Ukraine by Lenin. That state would be politically, culturally and militarily aligned with Russia.

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This would eliminate Ukrainian access to the Black Sea and create a land bridge towards the Moldavian breakaway Transnistria which is under Russian protection.

Excursion:

The yellow part of that map marked 'Ukraine in 1654' was actually the land of the Eastern Orthodox Zaporozhian Cossacks. Under threat from the Catholic Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, which at the time held the green parts under serfdom, the Cossacks negotiated the Pereiaslav Agreement (1654) with Russia and pledged allegiance to the Tsar. They area thus became an autonomous part of Russia.

    Big Serge Though

Russo-Ukrainian War: Schrodinger’s Offensive
A ramble about force design, Moldova, and a fortress on the steppe

Where is the big Russian offensive? This is, at the moment, the million dollar question that inevitably intrudes on any discussion of the war’s current course. It is probably not surprising (to those of us that are familiar with human nature, at least) that this question becomes a Rorschach test in which everybody sees their own prior assumptions about the Russian military.

The answers to this question do indeed vary widely. On one extreme, there are those who believe that hundreds of thousands of Russian troops are prepared to launch an enormous “big arrow” offensive at any moment. We see this both from commentators like retired US Colonel Douglas MacGregor and from some Ukrainian sources who are likely trying to foment a sense of urgency to extract more aid from the west. On the other extreme, we have those who claim that the Russian military is so depleted that there will be no offensive at any point whatsoever. There are also some in the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda western intelligentsia, like the Nuland Institute for the Study of War or Michael Koffman, who argue that the offensive has already begun but is so lame and weak that nobody noticed.