A major feature of the current strategic situation is the increasing pressure on Russia and Ukraine, most of all, naturally, on Putin and Zelensky, to put some roughly acceptable, relatively legitimate end to the War.
This is the strong desire of both China and the West (Europe and the USA – partly together, generally separately).
One of the reasons (but only one of the reasons, not The Reason!) is the increasingly real danger of another Trump coming to power.
This unpredictable guy can really ruin the world down, at least he will mess it up.
Rarely has an individual (sociopath, psychopath, or some other -path) possessed the ability to drive the world mad and even bring it down. The world will be his hostage, and any way to stop Trump is better than him becoming president again.
Neither China (which obviously does not want Trump to win), nor the US, nor Europe, nor even Russia have the faintest idea what Trump can create. Any one of these geo-players could be very unpleasantly surprised by Trump's actions.
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China wants to end the War in a Putin-friendly way, because a weak Russia as a cheap raw material appendage is far preferable to China than a humiliated and defeated Russia that can blow itself up inward (implosion), but can also blow itself up outwards (explosion).
Not to mention that, minus the cheap raw materials and the dictates over the domestic Russian market, China is much more tied to and dependent on the West (US and Europe) and would hardly wish to strain and destroy relations through its support for the ongoing War you are with the West.
The creeping and increasingly total yuanization of Russia (something I myself predicted back in 2022) is not good news for the yuan; it injects a lot of volatility into this already poorly convertible currency and ties China anyway to an unpredictable and inevitably collapsing economy like Russia's.
China has leverage to push Putin. This is why the increasing restrictions on imports into Russia from China of developments, technologies, spare parts and entire products with possible dual (civilian and military) use, as well as Russia's free handling of its assets in Chinese banks, speak for this.
The West also increasingly wants an end to the War.
Democracies are effective in normal situations, but they hardly make timely and energetic decisions in abnormal, emergency and high-risk situations.
The aspiration in Western societies to return to pre-war normality is becoming more and more widespread. Not so much the real aid to Ukraine, as the engagement of Western politicians with it, put in the background the turning of the face to the real problems in the Western democracies and thus give energy to populists, racists, chauvinists and all the rest disgusting demagogues...
Especially insatiable is the desire of Western societies to enjoy life, its pleasures, delights and passions, to look at its navel and a little below.
Something is totally wrong with Western values. Fewer and fewer remain those primordial holy and sacred spheres of the private, intimate world; there is a stripping race going on, and each successive destroyer of these thin and cherished walls and barriers is overtaken at the turn by someone even more vehemently bringing to the fore lust and the negation of morality, unmasking them as obsolescence and prejudice.
If I hate this barbaric war of Russia against Ukraine, it is also because it is a perfect excuse for the Western elites and leaders of public opinion to not pay attention to a number of essential processes and problems of the West, which are eroding its ethical and aesthetic foundations and eroding humanity , replacing it with permissiveness and accessibility, when there is no vulgarity, but simply an alternative point of view presented and provided as freedom of self-expression.
The West does not suffer so much from the sanctions it imposes on Russia because they are filled with, imbued with double standards. The West wants even these minimal inconveniences from sanctions if they can be gone. To live AS BEFORE.
The West - where it can - consumes Russian raw materials (as the use of Russian pipeline gas grows and as elegant corruption schemes are spun to supply Russian oil through third and fourth countries and connecting links of middlemen).
The West is a celebration of the market economy, but it is precisely because of it that most of the Western sanctions against Russia do not work effectively - the market is super specialized in finding new ways to function for the sake of profit. And Russia is thus somewhat (of course only somewhat) successfully hitting the West over the head with its hyper-market fundamentalism-oriented stones (stripped of quite a few otherwise Western values).
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All three vertices of the leading Geopolitical triangle – USA, Europe, China – have recently been persistently looking for opportunities to end the War.
This is PLAN A of the West!
This is also my main conclusion from my analyses.
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At the same time, the West also has a PLAN B – if Russia cannot be made to resume the War, it will be forced to understand that the continuation of the War is absolutely losing for it.
In the name of this PLAN B, as I wrote some time ago, the West finally worked out its Strategy for the War.
And this Strategy is the STRATEGY OF EXHAUSTING Russia.
Putin thought the STRATEGY OF EXHAUSTING was working for him - but he was targeting Ukraine. But when this Strategy is directed at Russia and pursued patiently and coolly by the West, Putin is doomed.
The West is 10,15, even in some areas 20 times stronger, more vital, more prosperous and more effective than Russia.
The West made it clear to Putin - You want a STRATEGY OF EXHAUSTION - you get it!
With the STRATEGY OF EXHAUSTING, Putin has no chance.
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Putin does not give five cents for the Russians, they are cannon fodder for him, they are fertilizer on which his idiotic Great Russian, chauvinistic, misanthropic ideas will sprout and bear fruit.
The Russians under Putin are brainwashed by insane and systematic, quarter-century propaganda.
Probably at least 85% of Russians have totally reformatted minds - with hatred for everything foreign, for everything else, for everything Western, for everything normal, for everything different.
Putin's Russia can produce neither high culture, nor high standard of living, nor high technology, nor high values. She can only hate all these high things in other nations, destroy them, plunder them, kill them.
Putin's Russia is a monster state headed for the abyss. The question is not to drag the West into this abyss. Which, anyway, will mean - to drag the world into it.
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Naturally, not like Putin in relation to the Russians, but also the West, somewhat roughly speaking, in this STRATEGY OF EXHAUSTION does not give a damn about the Ukrainians.
Ukrainians and Ukraine are not at the center and focus of this Strategy - they are primarily a tool, they are primarily a means in it. They are important to the West mainly as a resource to contribute to the exhaustion of Russia.
And that Ukraine is going to collapse, and that Ukrainians are going to die... Of course, it's a pity for them, but never mind. Such is life in Grand Strategies. People and their country are consumables for Grand Strategies.
The important thing is that later the West will not act like Russia towards the Russians - to keep them in misery and in a concentration camp. The West will revive and rebuild Ukraine, turn it into a West Germany, a South Korea.
Billions of golden rain will serve as an apology from the West for this unenviable place that the West assigns to Ukraine and Ukrainians in this STRATEGY OF EXHAUSTION against Putin's Russia.
I might as well have cold-bloodedly accepted anything related to the STRATEGY OF EXHAUSTION. But I am stopped and hindered by only one small fact - what happens to my Ukrainian friends during the implementation of this Strategy. Above whom bombs fall and who 7 times a night run either to the bomb shelters or sit curled up in the corridors of their apartments, hugging their grandchildren, as if they could save them from the direct hit of the deadly bombs.
I am not fair, but it is difficult for me to swallow completely, it sits in my throat and clutches my heart this STRATEGY OF EXHAUSTING Russia, through which the West is ready to fight to the last Ukrainian...
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Not only to me, but to every thinking person, it is clear that if the war does not end with a complete and unconditional victory on the battlefield by one side (Russia or Ukraine), then ending the War and replacing it with some kind of conditional or unconditional peace will be more the formula
"PEACE FOR TERRITORIES".
There is no other option in this case!
There can be no peace in which either Putin must release all illegally occupied territories, or Zelensky must accept that all territories illegally occupied by Russia remain for Russia.
No way!
In other words, the three vertices of the US-Europe-China Geopolitical Triangle are debating not WHETHER to implement the PEACE FOR TERRITORIES formula, but how to implement it - PEACE FOR WHICH TERRITORIES?
As far as I can judge - from some Russian agents of influence in the European elite and from the pressure on the Ukrainian society to accept inevitable territorial concessions, the logic is roughly as follows.
(Let's leave Crimea out of parentheses for now. For a while.)
Whatever Putin says, if the War is to end, he must accept that there is no way that the four Ukrainian regions that he included in the Russian Constitution will be fully recognized as Russian under the PEACE FOR TERRITORIES formula.
He did not even completely occupy any of these areas. He didn't even capture two of their regional centers...
The pressure on Putin is for parts of these four regions to be gathered into some entity of the Russian Federation under the name "Novorossiya" (Novoròsia), with a corresponding amendment to the Constitution, canceling the announced "joining" of the four regions to the Russian Federation....
The pressure on Zelensky and Ukrainian society is to formalize the well-known sentiments among Ukrainians that there are already parts of Ukraine that are totally de-Ukrainized
and – there, all pro-Ukrainians were driven out, killed, raped, there is nothing there that is FOR Ukraine; these are gray, toxic, miserable, disgusting territories, where gangs and paramilitary thugs are spreading, the destruction is huge, and there is no way for Ukraine to restore not only its sovereignty over them, but also its influence in these criminal territories. 10 years of systematic eradication of Ukrainianness, the mass extermination of the male population - sent to war or liquidated by terrorist networks - they have led to the sad fact that these territories can neither become Ukrainian again, nor does it make sense (according to some Ukrainians) to become like that again. Roughly a similar limit – but only roughly!!!! – may pass as appropriated by Russia before the start of the War (February 2022).
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It is cruel, it is a pity, I feel great anger and unrepentant grief, but the whole STRATEGY OF EXHAUSTION and the pressure to stop the War is entirely in the spirit of cynical political realism.
Cynical political realism will even declare that the formula is not
PEACE FOR TERRITORIES,
and it is
PEACE FOR SECURITY!!
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One way or another, a part of Ukraine has been irreversibly and unbearably turned into North Korea, into a black hole-robber.
Yes, it will turn out that the aggressor is rewarded and insolence will be instilled in every aggressor.
Yes, the West will be de facto humiliated.
But that's why the West will live AS BEFORE, and some Western leaders will receive the Nobel Peace Prize...
But it is still mercilessly clear – this will be the price that not only Ukraine will be forced to pay. This is the price of the West's indolence towards Russia, and it has various fatal dates - 1991, 1994, 2014, 2022.
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I feel sorry for Ukraine, but this is the West we (still) have. We don't have (anymore) another West.
Ukraine is a military victim of Russia.
But Ukraine is also a political victim of the West.
The West is guilty before Ukraine. On the conscience of the West are also quite a few dead Ukrainian civilians and soldiers.
The conscience of the West is also the terrible terror to which my Ukrainian friends are subjected.
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And Crimea?
Already in 2022, I realized that if the War does not end (and will not be allowed to end) with an unconditional victory for one of the two sides, the issue of Crimea will be open and there is no way to get off the negotiating table.
Then I proposed (as can be seen on my site) that for Crimea one would search for:
"A 10-year transition period, after which it will become a condominium with established joint sovereign power by Ukraine and Russia, along the lines of Andorra, which is jointly governed by France and Spain."
In a later period, the people of Crimea may be given the right to vote on the future fate of the peninsula.
Unlike the dubious territorial conquests of Russia in this vile and inhumane War of its, Crimea has natural geographical boundaries, it can be distinguished as a temporary subject of international relations and international law in the spirit of my above suggestion(s) for finding a way out from the otherwise unsolvable situation.
Rumor has it that even Putin is now willing to allow joint governance of the Peninsula...
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Let me be clear. I am not saying that what I am writing about is what I want for Ukraine. I would most like Ukraine to regain its sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and control within its internationally recognized borders after the collapse of the USSR.
But this is possible only with another Russia. Not in Putin's Russia. Not with Russia, which IS Putin just as much as – alas – Putin IS [Putin's] Russia.
The West missed the moment to bring Putin to his knees - with visionary leadership, strategic thinking, respectable firmness and unwavering strength.
The West does not have such politicians to solve the problem of squaring the Russian chalk circle.
In this sense, I wish, I fervently pray to God, that Ukraine behaves, fights, does not give up, does not surrender - no matter what.
Because PLAN A outlined in this way based on the formula PEACE AGAINST TERRITORIES is for her a saving option, but not a fair way out.
And if PLAN A fails, then this will remain PLAN B - THE STRATEGY OF EXHAUSTION, with which the West has finally armed itself against Russia.
This STRATEGY OF EXHAUSTION will be successful! But the terrible price for it will be paid as well by Ukraine...
07/05/2024
