Reflections From a Murky Pond

This is not something that pleases me, but it needs to be said. Putin is likely to win in Ukraine and get what he wants out of it. He is, quite frankly, a stronger leader and a better strategist than any of his counterparts in the West, and, as such, victory favors him.

A Brief Note On C-Factor First

I am not and have never been a direct employee of the US State Dept or any of our Intelligence services in any capacity that proximately related to crafting, furthering, and analyzing foreign policy. I’ve also been “on the outside” of the entire geopolitical analysis commuting for over 2 decades, meaning that my data is no better than anyone else on the streets as it were and my conclusions and predictions are just that of the average private American citizen mired in the swamp or poor and corrupted information.

~*~

It somewhat pains me to say this – Putin is better at both mind games and longer-term planning than any of the leaders of the West, which is understandable with him being essentially an autarch for life and not having to worry about what will happen to his plans in just a few years at most. And, this means that Putin and Biden and Co. probably aren’t even fighting the same war.

Think upon this: Putin probably doesn’t want to conquer Ukraine, at least not most of it. It wouldn’t serve him at all to do so, since he – and pretty much every Russian ruler since 1923 – has always wanted buffer states between Russia and her Western enemies. Annexing the whole of Ukraine would not achieve this and would actually make a vulnerable tangent into NATO that would serve as a corridor for the invasion of Putin’s motherland.

No, Putin will probably take, either through force of arms or through a forced treaty, the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kerson oblasti (regions) of Ukraine. This would give Russia a straight land route to Crimea and its warm water ports. He might also take over any number of the oblasti of Kharkiv, Dniepropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, and Odessa, though the latter two are unlikely due to the geopolitical problems that would arise from denying Ukraine access to the Black Sea.

In truth – a truth that many in power in the West want to ignore – Putin could almost righteously claim to be liberating the people of those Oblasti, especially those of Luhansk and Donetsk, since large numbers of those people want to be part of Russia in the first place and were violently prevented from seceding back in 2014.

But all that is likely an important but secondary goal for Putin.

Again, Putin wants a buffer between Russia – and to a somewhat lesser extent the rest of the Russian Federation – and NATO nations and forces. That, in my opinion, is his goal, not any form of expansionistic conquest – the above-mentioned Ukrainian oblasti being a probable exception. And, he doesn’t need to take any parts of Ukraine to get a good chance at achieving this goal.

Simply keeping the pressure on and making things uncertain and problematic will likely cause the current Ukrainian regime to fall “peacefully”, much like it did some 8 years ago. This time, however, the people who would very likely take over the governance of Ukraine are the National Corps Party (Natsionalnyi korpus), who are ultra-nationalist Neo-Nazis who are deadset against joining NATO or being closely aligned with Europe or America, wanting instead to create some sort of iteration of Piłsudski’s Intermarium with other Baltic and Black Sea nations.

And, if and when that happens, Putin wins, his goals of an ablative layer between his people and NATO having been achieved. And, in that event, it also gives Putin the ability to easily spin things to paint the EU and the Biden Administration of helping put Neo-Nazis into power and of having supported and armed them.

~*~

As I said at the beginning of this article, I’m no geo-political expert. Yet, it seems to me that Putin has a number of ways of winning this conflict and likely will do so.

Tags: America | EU | NATO | Politics | Putin | Russia | Ukraine | War | Winning

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 26th, 2022 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Yesterday, Thursday, June 23, 2016 The British government put the question of whether or not Britain should exit (Brexit) the European Union (EU). The results were shocking.

Britain – Straight Outta Europe

Yeah, I’m American and have no horse in this race but the image above is hilarious. They took their biggest political question to the streets and the streets answered. The world went from N.W.A (Niggaz With Attitudes) to B.W.A (Britonz With Attitudes). 😆

Yeah, with the highest voter turnout rate since 1992 (71.8%), Britons voted 52% to 48% to leave the EU.

Tags: Brexit | England | EU | Europe | European Union | Geopolitics | Humor | Independence | Memes | Sovereignty

This entry was posted on Friday, June 24th, 2016 at 10:31 am and is filed under Humor, Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

I’m not one to pay overly much attention to the various things that spew from the maw of Paul Krugman. The pontifications, ramblings, and rants of a rabidly fanatical Keynesian neo-Socialist who makes his rent working for the filthy rag known as the New York Times aren’t the sorts of things that I, or any other American, normally pay much heed to – except to keep an eye on what our nation’s enemies are thinking or emoting.

Krugman is willfully dead wrong more often than not on causation and dead wrong, again willfully, every time when it comes to remediation

All that being said, Krugman is not an idiot and he is skilled enough to make solidly plausible predictions of future events, especially relatively near-term ones.

Some of us have been talking it over, and here’s what we think the end game looks like:

1. Greek euro exit, very possibly next month.

2. Huge withdrawals from Spanish and Italian banks, as depositors try to move their money to Germany.

3a. Maybe, just possibly, de facto controls, with banks forbidden to transfer deposits out of country and limits on cash withdrawals.

3b. Alternatively, or maybe in tandem, huge draws on ECB credit to keep the banks from collapsing.

4a. Germany has a choice. Accept huge indirect public claims on Italy and Spain, plus a drastic revision of strategy basically, to give Spain in particular any hope you need both guarantees on its debt to hold borrowing costs down and a higher eurozone inflation target to make relative price adjustment possible; or:

4b. End of the euro.

And we’re talking about months, not years, for this to play out.

Of course this isn’t exactly rocket science or even one of the more arcane examples of the semi-mystical art form known today as the study of Economics. Both hyperinflation and the end of the Euro in the near future are easy predictions to make in the wake of Greece’s Keynesian meltdown and financial collapse.

NOTE: Krugman’s prediction of a European financial meltdown matches my own and naturally feeds into whatever level of Confirmation Bias that I’m saddled with.

Of course these events will happen and happen soon. They were foreordained from the moment of Greece’s financial implosion under the weight of their Socialist economic policies.

I’ll add though that these event will, in turn, most likely lead to the breaking of the European Union by 2015. They can’t hold together as a government – or meta-government, or whatever they are – without a common currency.

Tags: Debt | Depression | Economics | Economy | EU | Euro | Europe | Finance | Germany | Greece | Keynes | Keynesian Economics | Krugman | New York Times | Recession | Socialism | Spain

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Politics. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.