Illustrative Image
Originally published by The Unz Review
It’s time to get real. It’s been time to get real. Russia has won its war against Ukraine.
This outcome comes as no surprise. Anyone with access to a map could see that the chances of Ukraine prevailing against Russia were slim to none.
The only way Ukraine could have emerged victorious — which would, according to the Ukrainians themselves, mean pushing it out of Crimea and deposing the separatist pro-Russian republics of Donetsk and Luhansk — would have been if the United States and its Western allies had been willing to launch nuclear weapons, which would have led to global annihilation. Once the decision was made not to start World War III, Ukraine’s defeat became inevitable. This, everyone sane knows, is for the best.
Determinative to this conclusion was an unusual pair of motivations. Normally, when a war is fought on one country’s territory, the invaded country fights harder than the invading forces. Paradoxically, despite suffering damaged infrastructure, the invaded state enjoys the home advantages of complete knowledge of the battlefield and much shorter supply lines. Aside from sporadic cross-border missile strikes, this war has been fought entirely on Ukrainian territory.
This conflict is different because Russia has to win; it cannot walk away. Ukraine has a 1,200-mile border with Russia, it wants to join an anti-Russia military alliance and its government was openly hostile to Russia before the war. And when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, its armies came through Ukraine, where the Nazis were greeted as liberators. Unlike America, which could bring its troops home after losing on the other side of the world in Afghanistan and Iraq and shrug off its imperialist misadventures and could leave Vietnam after pretending that more political will on the home front would have resulted in victory, Russia sees its military operation as existential. Ukraine isn’t a misbegotten side project. It’s as essential in the same way the United States would respond to a Canada that turned hostile to the U.S.
Unfortunately, and dangerously, American media consumers are being pounded with an endless deluge of propaganda promoting the ludicrous idea that Ukraine is winning and/or will ultimately prevail militarily. This fantastical assertion props up political support for shipping $60 billion worth of weapons to Ukraine, with more on the way — never mind the 70% that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s wildly corrupt government sells on the black market and the Javelin missile systems that wind up for sale on the dark web. (Christmas is coming! Don’t forget your favorite political cartoonist and columnist.) By way of comparison, the U.S. Department of Health of Human Services estimates that we could abolish homelessness here for $20 billion.
We’re also being told that Russia is crumbling under the crushing blow of vicious Western sanctions deployed as part of the White House’s openly stated war aim that it wants “to see Russia weakened.” The Russian economy, it is said, is collapsing. Russian elites, they say, will soon overthrow President Vladimir Putin.
Let me tell you firsthand: There is zero sign of economic distress in Russia.
I’ve spent the last two weeks in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Russia’s two biggest cities. Stores are bustling; people are spending; unemployment is low and still falling; there are lines at ATMs and whatever else is happening, the economy is anything but bad. The Galeria Mall across the busy street from my hotel in Saint Petersburg has a few closed stores shut down by Western chains, but the majority remain, and consumers are shopping like mad. European and American tourists are few and far between, but it’s exactly the same here in sanctions-free Istanbul where I’m writing this. Westerners stopped coming at the start of the COVID-19 lockdown two years ago and still haven’t returned. If Russians are unhappy with Putin — and they’re not — it’s not because of the economy.
I know from bad economies; where I live in New York, crime is out of control, homeless people go untreated for an array of mental illnesses and some are killing people, and being killed, and many storefronts have been empty and boarded up since the beginning of the pandemic. Any New Yorker would or should happily trade places with their Muscovite counterpart, who lives in a city with clean streets and subways that don’t serve as rolling homeless shelters and where life feels as if COVID-19 was never a thing. News stories that claim Russia is on the ropes are a giant magnificent pile of lies so over-the-top that I can’t help but be impressed by their glorious audacity and easily debunked mendacity. All you have to do is go to Russia, as I did, and see for yourself that it’s all bull — but hey, that’s a lot of trouble — because of sanctions that seem to be hurting us more than them.
Self-delusion is more fun. Who, after all, should you trust? The same U.S. state media that told you Saddam Hussein had WMDs? Or some cartoonist-columnist who told you, well in advance, that the U.S. didn’t stand a chance in Afghanistan, Trump would win in 2016 and that he would attempt a coup d’etat to remain in power?
Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis
Well written and spot on, sadly, as I sit in my house watching my country slowly implode from our own arrogance.
Same here. It’ll be interesting to see what happens once the Russophobes are voted out in my nation. I’m expecting a Hungary repeat where all the defeated Russophobe parties join together as one.
You still believe in voting?
💪🙏 God bless Putin!!!
Yes indeed. They have won their 8 long year war with their neighbor and it’s family in the Eastern part of that Country they should have done much more to help outside of the past 6 months…
When Russia is ready to announce their departure COMPLETELY from the current UN by sending all of their career diplomats and “other” home telling the rest of the two-faced disciples in that organization that for their country’s protection they will be forced to leave given the existential threat from the UN host and it’$ follower$…
And that they will be decoupling all of their market(s) from SWIFT and the $USD/Pound and Euro… And will be opening their commodities trade to the World with “their markets” setting the price and not the Energy corporations and banks as long as they abide by their rules and the rule of law at the UN that is already on the books but violated -again by the H0$t!…
Will believe it when I see it!…
they are doing exactly this
where have you been in the last months? sleeping under a rock?
the multipolar world is emerging and it is based on the BRICS, SCO and EAEU
the MIR system is already active in half a dozen countries outside of Russia and China is right now setting up the financial and legal infrastructure to deal with “sanctioned” countries
Russia is stipulating pacts with various countries to sell and buy in national currencies…the last one on the list is Turkey, that accepted to pay for Russian goods in ruble last week
as for the UN, why exit? to give the moronic west an excuse to accuse Russia of being a criminal organization?
the UN has no relevance and no real power, it is just a sideshow
the BRICS will be the organization ruling the multipolar world in practice, while the UN will maintain its useless existence
and if you don’t believe me, just look at what Kissinger is saying these days about the west being incompetent, foolish and dangerously confrontational
Then why is Russia saying now that ONLY if the U.$. declares Russia a “state sponsor of terrori$m that this will be the impetus for Russia’s departure from the UN – https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-says-it-may-sever-us-relations-if-declared-terrorism-sponsor
After the overthrow of the legitimate government of Yanukovich Russia should have EXIT’d “stage RIGHT” from that ce$$pool at 405 East 42nd Street, New York, NY, 10017, USA. Perhaps Vitaly Churkin and Michel Lesin among so many others might still be alive had they done so in 2014!
Indeed!… Where have you been!?…
Hehehe…. Yeah…
The audacious absurdity of the media propaganda campaign in the west is staggering, would make Pravda rightly blush in sheer embarrassment…
Also, by the way, everybody seems to be very very carefully not calling the ongoing nationalization process nationalization. They continue to seem to want everyone to believe that somehow or other executing this process upon the land and soil of whatever national territory will bring about not only the ire of invisible (and foreign) financial wizards, but also the total destruction of the known universe. Doesn’t look that way though, does it?
Unless I am mistaken, even the artist formerly known as ‘McDonald’s” has already started selling cheeseburgers again… with fries…
What I hear from Russians and Ukrainians is that the big cities are doing well in Russia, but once you get out in the villages things are not so good.
even before the war, and covid.
Yes, but it is the same in every rich or poor country that I’ve lived in or visited. It seems the power is in the cities so the wealth is accumulated there. To remain in the country is to value things other than income and material living standards. My Russian relatives in the countryside are filthy rich in their view, as they have a rototiller, a few beehives and a chainsaw. Babushka fires up the still when she needs currency to pay young guys to do the heavy lifting around the homestead.
I just wonder how the author managed to navigate the various $anction$ and get his butt into and around Russia these days.
Very well said.
you refer to rural USA where 80% are injecting meth?
when you go into the suburbs in America, you find niggers with syringes into their veins and crack everywhere
the Russian villages are faring much better than the murican peripheries
I love the way the author calls it “actual Russia”. Like there are two Russias, the real Russia and the hallucinatory Russia of the Western MSM.
the western msm is itself an hallucinatory product
this very upsets all us hillbillies in kansas—now drug dealers make us buy crack in rubles…please Master Putin send humanitarian aid—even Israeli dildo now double price
Agree with most of this article, but Trump instigating a coup no. The US election was fixed , with massive voting fraud. Trump just told the people the truth.
Who in the West wants the truth when it’s much better to believe the lies?