Even Communism was better for Ukraine than being a US colony.Two charts below: Both show sharp drop in Ukraine population as soon as Soviet Union ended in 1991. First chart, 10 million lost 1991-2020. Second chart follows, 1991-2018, 7 million drop.
As of 2020, Ukraine population is, 41,902, per Ukraine government statistics. (Crimea population isn’t
included. Crimea didn’t wish to become a US colony–the best decision
they ever made). US finalized its acquisition of Ukraine as a colony in
2014 when the US violently overthrew Ukraine’s elected government.
Chart below is from World Bank: 1991-2018 Ukraine population dropped by over 7 million.As
chart above, Ukraine population plunged as soon as Soviet Union ended
in 1991. Chart above shows 10 million drop through 2020, includes two
more years than World Bank chart.
1991-2018 Ukraine population dropped 7 million per World Bank:
“Yesterday anyone watching Euronews on one screen and Russian state television on anotherwould have been perplexed by the totally contradictory coverage of both with respect to the fate of the armed detachment of Ukrainian border guards on one island in the southeast of Ukraine. Euronews carried the address of President Zelenskyawarding posthumous designation
as Heroes of Ukraine to the entire detachment, which reportedly
resisted the attacking Russian forces and were slaughtered. Meanwhile Russian news showed those same border guards seated at tables and signing sworn statements that they voluntarily lay down their arms and awaited repatriation to their homes and families.”
Earlier today I took this screenshot from the New York Times website.
Here are three more pieces
I can also recommend. They relate to serious strategic aspects of the
war and lack the otherwise overwhelming propaganda slant.
“I’m surprised both of the size of the operation and the type of operation.
While I did expect standoff destruction of the nazi units and
considered the possibility of standoff destruction of Ukrainian military
assets I did not expect to see troops on the ground other than a few Spetsnaz. The operation is much, much more than I expected. Putin & Co surprised me too.
This blinded the West to the reality of what was transpiring. Because no one took Russia seriously,no one could imagine a large-scale ground war in Europe. So everyone was taken by surprise when such a conflict broke out.”
Posted by b on February 27, 2022 at 12:38 UTC | Permalink
The crisis in Ukraine illustrates the problem. Even Republicans sympathetic to the new righthaven’t been able to resist the hawkish temptation. Among the loudest voices calling for escalation were Republican Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Marco Rubio of Florida,politicians who have otherwise tried to articulate a more populist domestic vision for their party. Senator Rubio resorted to inapt Churchill-Hitler parallels (though he later said he opposes deploying troops to Eastern Europe); Senator Cotton lambasted President Biden for “appeasing Vladimir Putin.”
The Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony has suggested he wants to forge a new, more solidaristic
and inwardly focused consensus to replace the old, broken fusion of
pro-business libertarians, religious traditionalists and foreign-policy
hawks. Yet even at the 2021 national conservatism conference, the hawks were amply represented and pitched the same old belligerence, especially against China.
Since the earliest days of our nation, a division has existed between those who argued that America should be an “exemplary republic” and those who called instead for a “crusader nation.” The exemplarist camp figured that America could best serve liberty and self-government by perfecting domestic republicanism — without going abroad in search of “monsters to destroy,” as John Quincy Adams put it. The crusaders sought to expand liberal democracy abroad, partly because they thought this would make America more secure and partly because they believed it was our destiny to baptize all nations in liberal ideals.
The party of restraint was seen as conservative: cautious about the danger posed by war to republican virtues, respectful of enduring civilizational differences, humble in the face of unpredictable global events, hesitant to commit American blood and treasure to all but the most necessary military causes. By contrast, it was characteristically “liberal” to insist on an American duty to enlarge the liberal empire, whether through soft or hard power, a tradition exemplified by Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy.
More recently, self-described conservatives came to embrace the crusader project, a misguided shift culminating in President George W. Bush’s second Inaugural Address, with its fantasy of eliminating “tyranny” everywhere. What had been previously central to the liberal worldview came to be reframed as modern American “conservatism.”
Many of today’s Republicans thus came of age at a time when hawkishness on behalf of liberal values was understood as conservative.Yet the values lying at the foundation of that worldview and shaping our institutions are antithetical to everything conservatives claim to
cherish: a ruthless market ideology that puts short-term shareholder
gains and the whims of big finance above the demands of the national
community; a virulent cultural libertinism that dissolves bonds of family and tradition.
What conservatives revile as “woke capital” is just this acidic combination of a market-centric economics and liberal cultural arrogance. Yet as conservatives
they seem clueless as to what these things entail: the integration of evermore geographic space into the same socioeconomic order they find so oppressive at home.
From the post-Cold War “Washington consensus” (the idea that privatization, deregulation and free trade would lead to broad prosperity) to the post-9/11 regime-change wars, “crusader” foreign policy immiserated ordinary people: Thoughtless NATO expansion bred resentment in a wounded-but-still-strong Russia, setting the stage for recurring crises; economic “shock therapy” applied by disciples of Milton Friedman
the shattering of Arab states in the name of “freedom” created ungoverned spaces across vast swaths of the Middle East and North Africa,
kindling terrorism and
sending millions of migrantsinto Europe.
Like soldiers who haven’t realized the old war is over, Republicans must grasp the current state of play: Liberal imperialism ought no longer to be mistaken for a conservative cause. It is time to repurpose older conservative foreign-policy values.
The first pillar of such a foreign policy should be a sound restraint, especially where the United States doesn’t have formal treaty obligations, and a general retrenchment of the Western alliance’s ambitions.Senator Josh Hawley, a lawmaker sympathetic to the new right,showed a better path on Wednesday by calling on President Biden to rule out admitting Ukraine into NATO. Mr. Hawley suggested his move would help Washington shift resources to East Asia. But even there, Americans should beware of mindless China hawkism.Yes,
the United States has real differences with Beijing. We must punish
industrial espionage. We must defend treaty allies. And we must seek a
more balanced trade relationship. But we should also find areas
of cooperation, exchange and shared interests, seeking to avoid any
future wars and instead communicating with mutual respect for a
civilizational equal.
Domestic industrial prowess and energy independence should be the second pillar. Without factories manufacturing all sorts of goods, we won’t be able toshift production to defense — or to P.P.E. and vaccines — when a real crisis hits. Moreover, as Michael Lind has emphasized, the industrial-military blocs of the future — spheres of influence led by America, Europe, China and India — will be only as strong as their regional supply chains and their internal stability allow.
“Sohrab Ahmari is a contributing editor of The American Conservative
and a visiting fellow at Franciscan University. Patrick Deneen, a
former speechwriter and special assistant to the director of the U.S.
Information Agency, is a professor of political science at the
University of Notre Dame. Gladden Pappin is an associate professor of
politics at the University of Dallas and a visiting fellow at the
Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest.”
Up until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and yes, it is an invasion, justifiable or otherwise) there was something called the ‘rules-based order’ promoted mainly by the US but also supported directly by the European Union and the [UK monarchy and countries of the British] Commonwealth.
(continuing): “We’ve heard the Russian diplomats [and US taxpayers] complain about this for years. Why have these rules if they are not ever enforced?…
All that changed when Russian tanks crossed the border, stand off missiles hit anti-aircraft and artillery batteries, and marines came onshore in Ukraine.
It was clear that Putin and his staff would be given this ultimate option, invade Ukraine and face global opprobrium or kneel before Zod.
Their miscalculation was in thinking that Russia
actually cares one whit about that global opprobrium at this point. By
their actions in Ukraine this week, it is clear they do not.
They weren’t afraid of NATO’s posturing, Biden’s threats of sanctions or of Liz Truss’s difficulties with basic geography. The longer this standoff over Ukraine went on the more it
was clear that most of the people in positions of power and their
support staff have less than zero understanding of the parameters of
their jobs.
Because of this their constant invocation of the ‘rules-based order’ rang more and more hollow since they were simply acting like a precocious six-year oldboy playing with his stuffed tiger.
Pronouncements of consequences and ‘sanctions from hell’ and threats
of holding our breath until we pass out were rightly ignored by Putin
and his staff.
It goes back to the statement, most likely made by then Vice-President Dick Cheney, on the ‘reality-based community,’
“That’s not the way the world really works anymore … We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll
act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and
that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’“What’s been clear to me is that those placed in positions of power by Klaus Schwab and the rest of The Davos Crowd they still think we live in this type of world. That no matter what the people want or other countries need,
After a 2021 where things in Ukraine kept getting hotter and hotter, Putin and Lavrov, having backed Biden down over the summer with June 16th’s summit, knew the time had come to change the rules of the game.
If they didn’t Russia would cease to be.
The old game entered its spiral towards conclusion when Russia sent and published publicly its draft proposals for a new security architecture concerning Russia and NATO’s relationship in Eastern Europe.
Russia acted, setting the operational tempo from that moment forward. It forced the US and Europe to react to them as they created
As The Saker pointed out in his initial thoughts on Russia’s recognition of the breakaway republics of the Donbass, this operation in Ukraine was a long time in the planning. This was not an action that was taken lightly.
“Again, I will repeat here what I wrote above: this recognition should NOT, repeat, NOT, be seen in isolation. It is just ONE PHASE in a PROCESS which began at least a year ago, or more, and there is much more to come.”
Truer words and all that.
For months I’ve been telling you that Nordstream 2 would eventually
be turned on and that Russia would not be kicked out of the SWIFT
telecommunications network regardless of what happened.
The former is still on the table, as Germany was the most vocal about not doing the latter.
Even I missed that Russia was planning to change the game this radically, thinking there was always a Davos-approved solution which didn’t involve extensive use of the Russian military, but still ended with the US looking foolish.
In retrospect, it was obvious we were always headed to this end-game because Russia saw the opportunity to change the rules.
Less than a day after Russia wiped out both Ukraine’s military power and political architecture, President Sundowner confirmed that all the West’s threats were as empty as the heads of the Millennials running the propaganda desk at the State Dept.
After months of threatening Russia with expulsion from the SWIFT financial messaging system, Europe complained and someone finally showed some sense.
Cutting Russia out of SWIFT would mean the end of the EU as anyone has known it or wishes it could be in the future. It would mean the end of the petrodollar system.
Russia is too systemically important to the global commodity trade that goes far beyond energy.
It supplies not only the marginal barrel of oil and BTU of natural gas,
but pound of nickel, palladium, titanium, enriched uranium and
tungsten. It’s a major supplier of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, potash,
and urea.
Do this and Europe not only freezes to death with their three days of
gas reserves but starves once the global food supply is disrupted. Do
this and Biden enters the mid-terms with $8/gallon gas, and 20% real
inflation.
The Fed raising rates will be the least of anyone’s worries.
Russia held all the cards in the negotiations over Ukraine and we [the US] recklessly pursued a policy of insults and amateurish propaganda, refusing to believe Russia wouldn’t make her final stand.
They are now confused and angry, working through their ‘cope’ in public. If it wasn’t so pathetic it would almost be hilarious.
For nearly a decade the West poured billions [of US tax dollars] into Ukraine to arm it and prepare it for this week. Those billions were essentially wiped out in a matter of hours. It took a day to expose all of NATO’s posturing as nothing but that, posturing.
The decision was an abrupt change in course, coming after Berlin
clung to its initial position for weeks despite the rising Russian
[so-called] menace and pressure from EU and NATO allies. On Saturday,
Berlin finally bowed to that pressure, and to the reality that Russia is
encircling Ukrainian cities and threatening to topple the government in
Kyiv.
World Bank chart, population:
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