Below is as worthwhile conversation between Judge Andew Nepolitano and Professor John Mearsheimer about the current war in Ukraine.
Mearsheimer opens by explaining the two competing perspectives on this war. He then explains why the prevailing Western/US perspective is not only wrong-headed but extremely dangerous.
The US public is the #1 financier of this needless bloodbath — to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. It is well worth your time to hear what Professor Mearsheimer has to say.
After listening, I urge you to call your elected representatives and urge them to insist that (1) all parties to the conflict begin immediate peace negotiations, and (2) the US stop funding Ukrainian weaponry and intelligence.
John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of political science and international relations at the University of
WASHINGTON, USA – FEBRUARY 21 : John Mearsheimer speaks during a panel organised by Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (SETA) Foundation in Washington, United States on February 21, 2019. (Photo by Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Chicago.
He provides a rare, sane voice in the American landscape disagreeing with the pro-war, pro-Ukrainian, anti-Russian propaganda dished out day after day by mainstream news networks.
For a well-balanced perspective integrating factors typically ignored or covered up in US broadcasts, check out Mearsheimer’s analysis here.
His most recent article appears here. It is titled, “The Darkness Ahead: Where the Ukraine War is Headed.”
Here is Prof. Mearsheimer’s most recent YouTube interview with one of my favorite, award-winning journalist, Aaron Mate.
Medea Benjamin is a cofounder of the activist organization CODEPINK. She has recently published a good book investigating the various forces at work in the current war in Ukraine.
She has also released an excellent video covering in the same ground in under 19 minutes.
If you are still wondering how this war began; why the US continues to send billions of dollars in military support; what is motivating Vladimir Putin; and how this war came be brought to a peaceful end; then, by all means, you will find the answers to all your questions in Medea’s video.
How would you react if you discovered that the Russian government had a plan for controlling the US and dividing the country into smaller regional units, with the goal of limiting American influence in the rest of the world?
I suspect that we all would be outraged. Anti-Russian sentiment would surge.
Well, guess what. Many American foreign policy experts in Washington DC have long had exactly such plans for Russia!
And, of course, Russian leaders have always known about these plans, even if they have never been adopted “officially” as US policy towards Russia.
Knowing these facts should help everyone understand — and sympathize with — Putin’s aggression sparked by NATO’s expansion to Russia’s western border.
This does not excuse Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But sympathetic understanding is essential to successful negotiations for anyone hoping to end a war.
Click on the title above to read the entire piece. Here is an excerpt:
Washington’s animus towards Russia has a long history dating back to 1918 when Woodrow Wilson deployed over 7,000 troops to Siberia as part of an Allied effort to roll back the gains of the Bolshevik Revolution. The activities of the American Expeditionary Force, which remained in the country for 18 months, have long vanished from history books in the US, but Russians still point to the incident as yet another example of America’s relentless intervention in the affairs of its neighbors. The fact is, Washington elites have always meddled in Russia’s business despite Moscow’s strong objections. In fact, a great number of western elites not only think that Russia should be split-up into smaller geographical units, but that the Russian people should welcome such an outcome. Western leaders in the Anglosphere are so consumed by hubris and their own blinkered sense of entitlement, they honestly believe that ordinary Russians would like to see their country splintered into bite-sized statelets that remain open to the voracious exploitation of the western oil giants, mining corporations and, of course, the Pentagon. Here’s how Washington’s geopolitical mastermind Zbigniew Brzezinski summed it up an article in Foreign Affairs:
“Given (Russia’s) size and diversity, a decentralized political system and free-market economics would be most likely to unleash the creative potential of the Russian people and Russia’s vast natural resources. A loosely confederated Russia — composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic — would also find it easier to cultivate closer economic relations with its neighbors. Each of the confederated entitles would be able to tap its local creative potential, stifled for centuries by Moscow’s heavy bureaucratic hand. In turn, a decentralized Russia would be less susceptible to imperial mobilization.”
Ray McGovern is a retired CIA analyst who for many years gave US presidents their daily CIA briefings. He is also a specialist in the internal
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern (Photo by Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Getty Images)
affairs of the former Soviet Union – now Russia.
Mr. McGovern’s latest article at the Antiwar.com website is titled “Brainwashed for War with Russia“. He helpfully unpacks the step-by-step process of misinformation, distortion, and out-right lies that have been fed to the American public by our corporate media about the war in Ukraine.
The facts are simple but largely unknown by the average American.
First, he USA instigated this war by provoking Russia.
Second, the American news media is controlled by the military-industrial complex which wants to sell more weaponry to an every expanding war in Ukraine.
Therefore, we are propagandized to hate Putin, to cheer for Ukrainian neo-Nazis, and to remain catatonic as the US congress approves tens of billions of dollars in additional military aid to Ukraine.
Below is an excerpt from McGovern’s article (all emphasis is mine):
Thanks to Establishment media, the sorcerer apprentices advising President Joe Biden – I refer to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jacob Sullivan, and China specialist Kurt Campbell – will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China. And, shockingly, under false pretenses.
Most Americans are oblivious to the reality that Western media are owned and operated by the same corporations that make massive profits by helping to stoke small wars and then peddling the necessary weapons. Corporate leaders, and Ivy-mantled elites, educated to believe in U.S. “exceptionalism,” find the lucre and the luster too lucrative to be able to think straight. They deceive themselves into thinking that (a) the US cannot lose a war; (b) escalation can be calibrated and wider war can be limited to Europe; and (c) China can be expected to just sit on the sidelines. The attitude, consciously or unconsciously, “Not to worry. And, in any case, the lucre and luster are worth the risk.”
The media also know they can always trot out died-in-the-wool Russophobes to “explain,” for example, why the Russians are “almost genetically driven” to do evil (James Clapper, former National Intelligence Director and now hired savant on CNN); or Fiona Hill (former National Intelligence Officer for Russia), who insists “Putin wants to evict the United States from Europe … As he might put it: “Goodbye, America. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
Absent a miraculous appearance of clearer heads with a less benighted attitude toward the core interests of Russia in Ukraine, and China in Taiwan, historians who survive to record the war now on our doorstep will describe it as the result of hubris and stupidity run amok. Objective historians may even note that one of their colleagues – Professor John Mearsheimer – got it right from the start, when he explained in the autumn 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault.”
Historian Barbara Tuchman addressed the kind of situation the world faces in Ukraine in her book “The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.” (Had she lived, she surely would have updated it to take Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine into account). Tuchman wrote:
“Wooden-headedness…plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.”
Six Years (and Counting) of Brainwashing
Thanks to US media, a very small percentage of Americans know that:
Click here to read the entire piece and discover what most American’s don’t know about Ukraine.
The Australian blogger/journalist Caitlin Johnston encourages her readers to reproduce and circulate her writing free of charge. Regular readers of this blog will know that I cite Ms. Johnston regularly.
The anti-democratic actions that Ms. Johnston discusses are bipartisan in nature. Both parties are equally guilty. Both Democrats and Republicans are in lock-step in their calls for censorship and the silencing of anyone who criticizes and opposes US foreign policy.
When was the last time you saw a major news network host a guest critically analyzing the war in Ukraine, explaining how the USA provoked Russia’s attack and why Russia will eventually win?
Here is Caitlin’s article:
Have you ever noticed how those who shriek the loudest about tyranny in foreign countries are always the same people calling for the censorship and deplatforming of anyone who criticizes the western empire?
It’s a ubiquitous mind virus throughout western society. Anyone — and I do mean anyone — who aggressively and consistently criticizes the foreign policy of the US and its allies in front of a sizeable audience gets branded a Russian agent by empire apologists, and this consensus is accompanied by the steadily growing opinion that Russia’s operatives and useful idiots should be banned from western platforms.
Defenders of the western empire won’t admit to wanting all empire critics silenced, but that’s what you get when you combine (A) the fact that they view everyone who criticizes the empire with sufficient aggression as a Russian agent with (B) their opinion that those given to Russian influence ought to be censored. Whenever I criticize the foreign policy of the western empire I get its apologists telling me I’d never be allowed to criticize my rulers like that if I lived in a nation like Russia or China, when they know full well that if it were up to them I wouldn’t be allowed to criticize the western empire here either. They are the same as the tyrants they claim to despise.
The trouble with “western values” is that westerners don’t value them. They think they value them, but all that reverence for free expression and holding power to account with the light of truth goes right out the window the second they see someone saying something that sharply differs from what their rulers and their propagandists have told them to think. Then they want that person silenced and shut down.
In truth, the most forceful critics of the western empire actually embody these western values infinitely more than empire apologists do. It is the critics of empire who value free speech and holding the powerful to account. It’s the brainwashed bootlickers of the US-centralized empire who are calling for censorship and shouting down anyone who directs fierce oppositional scrutiny toward the most powerful people in the world.
People tell me “Move to Russia!” or “Move to China!” depending on what aspect of the empire’s global power agendas I happen to be criticizing at the moment, and I always want to tell them, no, you move to Russia. You move to China. You’re the one trying to suppress dissent and criticism of the powerful. I’m the one who is living by western values as they were sold to me and demanding normal scrutiny of the most powerful empire that has ever existed. You don’t belong here.
In school we are taught that our society values truth, free speech, equality, accountability for the powerful, and adversarial journalism, then we grow up and we see everyone rending their garments because institutions like CBS News or Amnesty International let slip one small report which doesn’t fully comply with the official line of our rulers. We see Russian media banned and censorship protocols expanded to the enthusiastic cheerleading of mainstream liberals. We see astroturf trolling operations used to mass report and shout down those who scrutinize the establishment line about Ukraine on social media. We see Julian Assange languishing in Belmarsh Prison for the crime of unauthorized journalism.
It’s obvious with a look around that the “western values” we’re all told about are not actually terribly common in the west. Look at the west’s major media platforms and they virtually never platform anyone who is meaningfully critical of the real centers of power in western civilization. Look at western governments and they continually dance to the beat of oligarchy and empire regardless of how people vote in their supposedly free democratic elections. Look at the internet and it’s actually very difficult to find authentic criticisms of imperial power unless you already know where to look.
Some of us bought into those western values we were taught about in school, but it’s not the people you’ve been trained to expect. It’s we marginalized outsiders who are adamantly opposing censorship, propaganda and the empire’s war on the press while continuously working to shine the light of truth on the mechanisms of power from the fringes, while we are being yelled at and accused of treason by mainstream sycophants who have far more in common with the autocrats they claim to oppose than with the western values they purport to uphold.
Years ago I was arrested in downtown Chicago for protesting against NATO, an organization that OUGHT to have been disbanded immediately after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Its continuous expansion eastward, creeping threateningly country by country toward Russia’s western border, has triggered the current war between Russia and Ukraine — exactly as many had warned.
NATO is continuing its eastward expansion by embracing more Russian neighbors as it is poised to welcome Finland and Sweden into the western, military alliance.
Smart people will recognize the additional threats to European stability found at the heart of these new, senseless memberships being pushed by the US government.
Unfortunately, however, our current crop of foreign policy leaders demonstrate that high SAT scores do not necessarily translate into the considerable wisdom needed to engage in foreign affairs with even a modicum of humility, foresight, and restraint.
How many more times will we throw fuel onto the Ukraine/Russian fire while wringing our bloody hands in feigned innocence and refusing to take any responsibility for our criminal instigations?
As with so many problems in this world, the roots of this war can be traced back to America’s lust for world dominance. Rather than sit down and talk with others about how we might share the global pie, we can’t help but connive in hostile, surreptitious strategies for consuming more and more of the pie for ourselves.
Allow me to add — especially on this 4th of July weekend — that it is much easier for the thoughtful Christian to recognize and identify one’s own nationalistic foolishness — such as belittling Russians, valorizing Ukrainian Nazis, and waving the American flag while imagining that American intervention is the exemplary solution to this world’s problems — once we grasp what it means to “seek FIRST God’s kingdom and his righteousness.”
Once my priorities are properly arranged around the supreme priority of learning to be like Jesus and elevating my KINGDOM CITIZENSHIP above every other loyalty, I will see excessive patriotism and all forms of nationalism for what they are — IDOLS waiting to be burned in the fires of kingdom living.
Below is an excerpt from a recent article titled “NATO and a War Foretold” by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies, published in Counterpunch.
The entire article is well worth reading as it walks through the history of expert, authoritative warnings against NATO expansion, the very thing we continue to do:
. . . This was indeed a war foretold. Thirty years of warnings and predictions turned out to be all too accurate. But they all went unheeded by an institution that measured its success only in terms of its own endless expansion instead of by the security it promised but repeatedly failed to deliver, most of all to the victims of its own aggression in Serbia, Afghanistan and Libya.
Now Russia has launched a brutal, illegal war that has uprooted millions of innocent Ukrainians from their homes, killed and injured thousands of civilians and is taking the lives of more than a hundred Ukrainian soldiers every day. NATO is determined to keep sending massive amounts of weapons to fuel the war, while millions around the world suffer from the growing economic fallout of the conflict.
We can’t go back and undo Russia’s catastrophic decision to invade Ukraine or NATO’s historic blunders. But Western leaders can make wiser strategic decisions going forward. Those should include a commitment to allow Ukraine to become a neutral, non-NATO state, something that President Zelenskyy himself agreed to in principle early on in the war.
And, instead of exploiting this crisis to expand even further, NATO should suspend all new or pending membership applications until the current crisis has been resolved. That is what a genuine mutual security organization would do, in sharp contrast to the opportunistic behavior of this aggressive military alliance.
But we’ll make our own prediction based on NATO’s past behavior. Instead of calling for compromises on all sides to end the bloodshed, this dangerous Alliance will instead promise an endless supply of weapons to help Ukraine “win” an unwinnable war, and will continue to seek out and seize every chance to engorge itself at the expense of human life and global security.
While the world determines how to hold Russia accountable for the horrors it is committing in Ukraine, the members of NATO should do some honest self-reflection. They should realize that the only permanent solution to the hostility generated by this exclusive, divisive alliance is to dismantle NATO and replace it with an inclusive framework that provides security to all of Europe’s countries and people, without threatening Russia or blindly following the United States in its insatiable and anachronistic, hegemonic ambitions.
Chris Hedges’ most recent editorial at Scheerpost is titled “No Way Out But War.”
As thorough and prescient as ever, Mr. Hedges catalogues the many ways in
Chris Hedges
which the American political-corporate-industrial establishment — a thoroughly bipartisan, insatiable behemoth — is destroying our country through the pursuit of endless wars.
None of our wars are “wars of necessity,” as if there has ever been such an ugly but cuddly beast. No. American wars are unnecessary wars of imperial aggression, pure and simple.
And this includes the current war in Ukraine, for which the US bears a sizeable load of responsibility.
Below is an excerpt from Mr. Hedges’ article. All emphasis is mine:
Permanent war has cannibalized the country. It has created a social, political, and economic morass. Each new military debacle is another nail in the coffin of Pax Americana.
The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.
The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.
We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.
Democrat or Republican. It does not matter.War is the raison d’état of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of “national security.” The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide. . .
. . .The 57 Republicans who refused to support the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, along with many of the 19 bills that included an earlier $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine, come out of the kooky conspiratorial world of Trump. They, like Trump, repeat this heresy. They too are attacked and censored. But the longer Biden and the ruling class continue to pour resources into war at our expense, the more these proto fascists, already set to wipe out Democratic gains in the House and the Senate this fall, will be ascendant. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during the debate on the aid package to Ukraine, which most members were not given time to closely examine, said: “$40 billion dollars but there’s no baby formula for American mothers and babies.”
“An unknown amount of money to the CIA and Ukraine supplemental bill but there’s no formula for American babies,” she added. “Stop funding regime change and money laundering scams. A US politician covers up their crimes in countries like Ukraine.”
Democrat Jamie Raskin immediately attacked Greene for parroting the propaganda of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Greene, like Trump, spoke a truth that resonates with a beleaguered public. The opposition to permanent war should have come from the tiny progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which unfortunately sold out to the craven Democratic Party leadership to save their political careers. Greene is demented, but Raskin and the Democrats peddle their own brand of lunacy. We are going to pay a very steep price for this burlesque.
Naturally, the American media continue to pump out false information about the origins and continuation of the war in Ukraine.
Remembering and reminding people of recent history does not make anyone a “Putin-puppet.” In fact, such facile and feeble accusations are a principle indicator that the accuser, without anything more substantive to say, is actually another US government stooge furthering the American party line.
Below is an excerpt from a recent post by the Australian journalist/blogger Caitlin Johnstone. She nails all the relevant issues with precision and accuracy.
Everything she says and documents has been maligned by one US news outlet or another as “Russian propaganda.” That, my friends, is a lie.
But, then, lies are a mainstay of all propaganda, including American propaganda, which is being manufactured fast and furious by the corporate media these days.
A few members of the Nazi Azov battalion which is now part of the Ukrainian military. They have successfully battled the Russian-Ukrainian population of the eastern Donbas region to a standstill. Much of the destruction presented by American media as the result of Russian actions is actually the work of these Russia hating neo-Nazis, who have always been violent ethic-nationalists fighting for a “pure” Ukraine.
As we hydroplane toward the brink of nuclear armageddon while Bono and the Edge play U2 songs in Kyiv, it’s probably worth taking a moment to highlight the fact that this entire war could have been avoided if the US had simply pledged military protection for Zelensky against the far right extremists who were threatening to lynch him if he enacted the peacemaking policies he was elected to enact.
To be clear, what we are indulging in here is entirely an act of fantasy. In imagining what would have happened if the US had pledged to protect the Ukrainian government from an undemocratic violent overthrow at the hands of fascists instead of waging a horrific proxy war, we are imagining a world in which the US government acts in the highest interest of all instead of working continuously to dominate the planet no matter how much madness and cruelty it needs to inflict upon humanity. A world in which the US hadn’t been taking steps toward the orchestration of this proxy warfor many years.
With that out of the way, it’s just a simple fact that for a fraction of the military firepower the US is pouring into Ukraine right now, it could have prevented the entire war by simply protecting Ukrainian democracy from the undemocratic impulses of the worst people in that country.
When he was asked by The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel last month what he thinks is preventing Kyiv from signing a peace agreement with Russia, John Mearsheimer, whose analysis of this conflict has been prophetic for many years, replied as follows:
I think that when Zelensky ran for president he made it very clear that he wanted to work out an arrangement with Russia that ended the crisis in Ukraine, and he won. And what he then tried to do was move toward implementing the Minsk II agreement. If you were going to shut down the conflict in Ukraine, you had to implement Minsk II. And Minsk II meant giving the Russian-speaking and the ethnic Russian population in the easternmost part of Ukraine, the Donbas region, a significant amount of autonomy, and you had to make the Russian language an official language of Ukraine.
I think Zelensky found out very quickly that because of the Ukrainian right, it was impossible to implement Minsk II. Therefore even though the French and the Germans, and of course the Russians were very interested in making Minsk II work, because they wanted to shut down the crisis, they couldn’t do it. In other words, the Ukrainian right was able to stymie Zelensky on that front.
When Mearsheimer says that the Ukrainian right was able to stymie Zelensky, he doesn’t mean by votes or by democratic processes, he means by threats and violence. In an article last month titled “Siding with Ukraine’s far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky’s mandate for peace,” journalist Aaron Maté wrote the following:
In April 2019, Zelensky was elected with an overwhelming 73% of the vote on a promise to turn the tide. In his inaugural address the next month, Zelensky declared that he was “not afraid to lose my own popularity, my ratings,” and was “prepared to give up my own position – as long as peace arrives.”
But Ukraine’s powerful far-right and neo-Nazi militias made clear to Zelensky that reaching peace in the Donbas would have a much higher cost.
“No, he would lose his life,” Right Sector co-founder Dmytro Anatoliyovych Yarosh, then the commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, responded one week after Zelensky’s inaugural speech. “He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk – if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the Revolution and the War.”
At Consortium News Joe Lauria describes the ongoing battle that has broken out between the Pentagon, the State Department, and Congress over America’s military posture towards Russia.
The Pentagon. photo by Joe Lauria
Guess which agency is fighting the hardest to avoid an all-out war with the nuclear-armed Russian Bear — yep, the military guys at the Pentagon.
Because, as crazy as they may be at times, those military professionals know stuff.
To summarize its conclusion — don’t believe the official, mainstream narrative about Russia’s actions in Ukraine. No, Russia is not losing. No, Russia is not targeting civilians. No, Russia is not currently planning to flatten Ukraine.
Below is an excerpt (emphasis is mine):
. . . But on Tuesday, the Pentagon took the bold step of leaking two stories to reporters that contradict those tales. “Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Vladimir Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader’s strategic balancing act,” reported Newsweek in an article entitled, “Putin’s Bombers Could Devastate Ukraine But He’s Holding Back. Here’s Why.”
The piece quotes an unnamed analyst at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) saying, “The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets.”
A retired U.S. Air Force officer now working as an analyst for a Pentagon contractor, added: “We need to understand Russia’s actual conduct. If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict.”
The article says:
“As of the past weekend, in 24 days of conflict, Russia has flown some 1,400 strike sorties and delivered almost 1,000 missiles (by contrast, the United States flew more sorties and delivered more weapons in the first day of the 2003 Iraq war). …
A proportion of those strikes have damaged and destroyed civilian structures and killed and injured innocent civilians, but the level of death and destruction is low compared to Russia’s capacity.
‘I know it’s hard … to swallow that the carnage and destruction could be much worse than it is,’ says the DIA analyst. ‘But that’s what the facts show. This suggests to me, at least, that Putin is not intentionally attacking civilians, that perhaps he is mindful that he needs to limit damage in order to leave an out for negotiations.’”
A second retired U.S. Air Force officer says:
“I’m frustrated by the current narrative—that Russia is intentionally targeting civilians, that it is demolishing cities, and that Putin doesn’t care. Such a distorted view stands in the way of finding an end before true disaster hits or the war spreads to the rest of Europe. I know that the news keeps repeating that Putin is targeting civilians, but there is no evidence that Russia is intentionally doing so. In fact, I’d say that Russian could be killing thousands more civilians if it wanted to.”
These Pentagon sources confirm what Putin and the Russian Ministry of Defense have been saying all along: that instead of being “stalled,” Russia is executing a methodical war plan to encircle cities, opening humanitarian corridors for civilians, leaving civilian infrastructure like water, electricity, telephony and internet intact, and trying to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible. . .
have long had exactly such plans for Russia!
country toward Russia’s western border, has triggered the current war between Russia and Ukraine — exactly as many had warned.
