THE GREAT UKRAINIAN SHITSHOW

We are reaching the final, humiliating culmination not just of the conflict in Ukraine, but of the misbegotten campaign by the western powers to force all nations to be subject to their diktat.

To call it a shitshow is to be overly generous. This has been a full scale debacle and from the very start.

The leaders of the collective West right from the moment they first contemplated embroiling Ukraine in a plan to weaken Russia courted total disaster and we are now seeing this come about.

The consequences for the entire western world will be catastrophic.

It is just possible that the primary impulses behind what eventually came about were relatively neutral in character although many voices warned that the course being taken would lead to disaster. Those primary impulses saw NATO being brought further east toward Russia and the EU expanding eastward also. This was in the period after the Soviet Union had collapsed and the USA was left as the single great superpower. Those who speak of neutral impulses such as Professor John J. Mearsheimer see this expansion of NATO and the EU as an effort to bring liberal democracy as the single system worldwide. His analysis posits that the western elites of that time held that liberal hegemony worldwide would usher in a new era of perpetual peace. The success of liberal hegemony would be based on three factors, that liberal democracies don’t go to war against each other, that they hold human rights to have a very high priority and that such a global system of liberal hegemony make the world permanently safe for democracy.

The above all sounds well and good, however Professor Mearsheimer also points out that there was one chief problem, nationalism. People resent alien powers telling them what how to be, what to think and what to do. So, when what he calls the ‘Unipolar Moment’, when the USA was the single superpower ended and the world started to become multipolar again with the rise of China and later the rise of Russia, these plans to install global hegemony ought to have been abandoned. When China and the other powers rose the power of the USA (and its allies) naturally fell, along with it the power they had held in the Unipolar Moment to install global hegemony also fell. And has continued falling to this day, with this trend showing not a single sign of abating.

As we know, the plan to install systems of liberal democracy worldwide and achieve global hegemony, was not abandoned, instead its installation was ramped up to include increased economic pressure and military intervention. The latter factor was given rocket boosters by the advent of 9/11 which brought about the ‘War on Terror’ massively upscaling both rhetoric and myriad forms of support for the project which by this point could no longer be questioned. Which is how, after Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria we came to see the concluding chapter of the global hegemony plan. This was first heralded by George W. Bush in 2008 at the NATO conference in Bucharest. There, initially opposed by important western leaders such as Angela Merkel he pushed through the statement that at some future date both Georgia and Ukraine would join NATO. This was the starting gun that would lead to the present unholy debacle for the West and the final nail in the coffin for the project to achieve global hegemony for liberal democracy.

The push toward Russia’s borders continued unabated. Tranche after tranche NATO moved inexorably toward Russia’s doorstep. The EU had pushed itself in the same direction year after year also. The leaders of the West constantly said Russia had nothing to fear, that NATO was a defensive alliance and that the EU was a purely economic one. Yeltsin and then Putin asked against whom is NATO directed if not Russia? Putin even broached the question of Russia joining NATO with Clinton. Obviously the answer came back a no. Putin also asked whether Russia might join the EU. No, you are too big was the answer. Yeltsin and Putin had hoped Russia could become part of a ‘Common European Home’ but this opportunity to embrace Russia in peace and cooperation was missed. In recent times it has become clear that the recently deceased Dick Cheney was instrumental in this missed opportunity. His view (which ultimately prevailed) was that Russia could not be trusted and should be kept weak. A proposed loan to Russia in its parlous state after the collapse of the Soviet Union was withdrawn. Russia was to be kept weak and isolated. This was the fateful decision that led to all we have seen since.

After the West-supported insurrection and coup in Ukraine in 2014 and the subsequent uprising by the Russian-speaking population of first Crimea and then those of south-eastern Ukraine, the final chapter of the tragically mistaken plan to aggressively impose western concepts of what was “good” on all others, began. Following the coup against the democratically-elected government and president of Ukraine a combined political and military campaign against the Russian-speaking population began. The Russian language was to be severely restricted and downgraded, political parties in any way supportive of Russia were eliminated, TV channels in Russian were closed down. And worst of all, instead of beginning to organize and agree a political settlement giving certain ethnic minority rights and a degree of autonomy to the Russian-speaking Donbass region the new coup president and government sent the Ukrainian army and a an assortment of ultra-violent militants instead. They began an attempt to intimidate the Russian-speaking population using armed force. This inevitably led to outbreaks of violence and ultimately to outright war. An estimated 15,000, mostly civilians died in this war by the end of 2021, caused by the laying siege of the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk by the Ukrainian forces since 2014. In the first two months of 2022 the shelling of these regions by Ukrainian forces was seen to rise massively by the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) who were monitoring the fighting. Subsequently Russia signed an agreement with the two republics there to protect them and on February 24th 2022 the Russian army crossed over into Ukraine. Prior to this Russia had done everything possible on the diplomatic front to prevent this having to be done. Ultimately, due to the West stimying every effort Russia made, Putin was left with no other viable option.

Now, almost four years on and after myriad attempts to bring the Russian economy down and the failure to unite the global south nations against Russia and with the Russian army upscaling its military campaign from an attritional war to a war of maneuver, western leaders are descending into panic mode. Each day brings more villages and towns under Russian army control and more cities surrounded, ready to be taken within weeks or months. The economic war against Russia has failed. The military war, supplying the Ukrainian regime with almost endless military supplies has failed leaving western arsenals near empty. The provision of finances to maintain the governance system of Ukraine has taken massive amounts of western taxpayers’ hard-earned money and is now becoming unaffordable.

Russia is winning and nothing can now stop Russia winning. Every possible gambit the West tried has failed and has left the reputation of Vladimir Putin, the Russian army and the nation of Russia further enhanced everywhere outside the western sphere of influence and even among a very significant number of individuals within it.

The conflict in Ukraine which Russia never wished for and that Putin walked every last mile diplomatically to avoid has proven to be an absolute disaster for the West. It will not recover from this. The reputation of its leaders across the world is shattered. Not only for their making all the catastrophic errors of judgement at every stage since at least 2008 but for their incessant lying. While the reputation of the West diminishes by the day the realisation of greater influence and economic power by the rest of the world outside its sphere of influences increases. The BRICS group is gathering ever more nations to it, nation after nation states its desire to become a partner, and at some point to join. The multipolar world that replaced the Unipolar Moment is growing ever stronger as the West becomes ever weaker. And we are just now only seeing the very start of this inexorable trend, in the coming months and years there will not be a single person planetwide who cannot see this historic transformation for themselves on a daily basis. All realised within the final chapter of, as Professor John J. Mearsheimer names it, ‘The Great Illusion’.

Or, as I put it... THE GREAT UKRAINIAN SHITSHOW