War is hell.
Down The Primrose Path
At the same time that French President Emmanuel Macron is threatening to send troops to Ukraine to fight against Russia, his country is fueling the Russian war effort by purchasing €600 million worth of natural gas from Moscow in the first three months of 2024.
“The same architects of our insane energy policy… are also the architects of our military strategy.”
I believe I’ve mentioned this.
The team riffs with Doomberg, a renowned energy analyst, to discuss a range of issues from the global energy landscape to geopolitical tensions and the changing nature of warfare. The conversation also delves into the intricacies of the global natural gas market, the impact of sanctions on Russia, and the potential future of nuclear energy.
Doomberg is a good, though pricey Substack to subscribe to. I wish more of his material was open to free viewing.
Into The Meat Grinder?
This is nuts.
Toronto Star- Under the right conditions, Canada open to sending noncombat troops to Ukraine, Defence Minister Bill Blair says
OTTAWA—Canada is open to sending a limited number of military personnel to train Ukrainian troops within Ukraine, so long as such an operation took place far from the front lines of the war with Russia in a clear, noncombat role, Defence Minister Bill Blair says.
Francisco- If Canada wants to do more they should be looking at making things like artillery shells which are in incredibly short supply.
Down The Primrose Path
A follow-up to the Taibbi piece of yesterday. Read it first if you missed it.
BURN NOTICE: The most interesting fact was the CIA’s obvious decision to burn its vast, unimaginably-expensive, militarized, networked, anti-Russia intelligence operation in Ukraine.
Do you think Trump was briefed on the CIA’s massive network of bases and its captive army in Ukraine? Could that have been what Trump was trying to figure out when he called Ukraine’s president, a call the deep-state immediately leaked and impeached him over? Was the great quid-pro-quo-ing of Trump really intended to send a message: keep your hands off Ukraine, or else?
Is that what Chucky Schumer meant when he gleefully warned Rachel Maddow the CIA has six ways from Sunday to get back at you?
Greenwald: You’ll notice that no NYT reporters are being arrested or put on trial for this supposedly sensitive disclosure.
(h/t LindaL)
Down The Primrose Path
This is why I subscribe to Matt Taibbi: CIA, Ukraine Exchange Pre-Divorce Propaganda
Over the weekend the New York Times published an epic exposé. “The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin,” by Adam Entous and Mitchell Schwirtz, described a decade of CIA-Ukrainian cooperation, featuring details that would never reach public ears under normal circumstances. The opening is worth quoting at length:
“Nestled in a dense forest, the Ukrainian military base appears abandoned and destroyed… But that is above ground. Not far away, a discreet passageway descends to a subterranean bunker where teams of Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders…
“The listening post in the Ukrainian forest is part of a C.I.A.-supported network of spy bases constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border.”
Yowza! Officials have long scolded the public that even minor disclosures of “sources and methods” could “risk lives” and must be prevented at all costs. Yet here comes the Times, helping “current and former officials in Ukraine, the United States and Europe” blab a long list of extraordinary details, down to the number of CIA-supported secret bases along the Russian border. An abridged list of revelations:
• CIA director William Burns made a “secret” visit to Ukraine last Thursday, his tenth since Russia’s invasion;
• On the night of February 14, 2014, in the middle of the Maidan coup, Ukrainian spy chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko called the heads of the CIA and Britain’s MI6 and asked for help in rebuilding his agency “from the ground up”;
• Ukrainian intelligence officials, seeking to prove their value to American counterparts, handed the CIA proof that Russian separatists downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 “within hours of the crash” in July of 2014;
• Then-head of Ukrainian military intelligence Valeriy Kondratiuk handed the CIA “detailed information about the latest Russian nuclear submarine designs” in 2015;
• “Around” 2016, the CIA “began training an elite Ukrainian commando force” called “Unit 2245” which “captured Russian drones and communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems”;
• The CIA’s chief of station in Kyiv was nicknamed “Santa Claus”;
• A Ukrainian agent “duped an officer from Russia’s military intelligence service” into providing intelligence that “allowed the C.I.A. to connect Russia’s government to the so-called Fancy Bear hacking group, which had been linked to election interference.”
Former CIA head John Brennan sitting for a month of interviews with Kitty Kelley wouldn’t produce this many juicy reveals. They even recounted the CIA hauling Kondratiuk to a Washington Capitals game to boo Alex Ovechkin, for God’s sake. Are these spy agencies or people pitching a Netflix series?
Sign up for the free trial period if you must to read it.
Blog note: If you cannot refrain from insults and trolling the same people for the thousandth time, refrain from commenting or find another blog. – ED
25 Minutes of Uncomfortable Truth
A few years ago I made a series of documentaries on the war in Ukraine. This relatively short video is a summary of how it really began in 2014. An unelected government began killing its "own" people in the south-east of the country after visits from Joe Biden and John Brennan. pic.twitter.com/BbPFi84tbQ
— Christopher Todd Nolan (@ChrisToddNolan) February 27, 2024
“Why did you do this?”
The Tucker Carlson interview of Vladmir Putin.
30 minutes in, this is a fascinating watch.
59 minutes in, Canada gets a shout out!
1:21: Whoo boy, the undermining of the USD as the world’s reserve currency comes up and it’s brutal.
Pretty good interview, unless you still retained a faint hope that our Western leaders were Putin’s intellectual equal, then … whoo boy.
Update: The interview has nearly 45 million views on X in 4 hours.
Down The Primrose Path
“War,” said British philosopher, mathematician and pacifist Bertrand Russell, “does not determine who is right — only who is left.”
Those words might be the perfect lens through which to view what probably lies ahead for Ukraine in the coming year as its troops dig in — and dig deep — along a front roughly 960 kilometres wide.
Beyond that front stretches a wasteland of occupied territory — the smoldering ruins of a months-long summer counteroffensive that fell short of allies’ hype and failed to dislodge the Russian Army from the 20 per cent of the country it occupies.
Behind it lies a war-weary population, growing domestic political anxiety and infighting, and international allies who have grown more capricious — even delinquent.
Oh, well – they’ll always have that ‘Vogue’ cover.
Related: Inertia and dementia
Channeling Lyndon Johnson
Even the leftist corporate media is starting to realize just how hopeless the Ukrainian position is becoming.
Disquiet in the halls of power appears to have filtered down to the military’s rank and file, who increasingly have misgivings about inefficiency and faulty decision-making within the bureaucracy they depend on to keep them well-armed for the fight.
It took seven months to obtain the paperwork needed from multiple government agencies to train 75 men, said Konstantin Denisov, a Ukrainian soldier.
“We wasted time for nothing,” he said. Commanders elsewhere complain of not enough troops, or delays in getting drones repaired, disrupting combat missions.
In the early days of the war, Western cheerleaders were quick to assume that Russia could never make up the losses it incurred. It seems they were wrong.
Indeed, while Ukrainian soldiers have proven to be resourceful and innovative on the battlefield, Moscow has dramatically scaled up its defense industry in the past year, manufacturing armored vehicles and artillery rounds at a pace Ukraine cannot match.
Down The Primrose Path
Down The Primrose Path
They’ve fought Putin to the very last Ukrainian.
A series of remarkable events with enormous consequences for Ukraine tumbled in rapid succession this week, lifting the veil on years of untrammeled and proud — yet ultimately purposeless and sociopathic — lying by the Biden administration and the Pentagon about the war there.
First, ahead of a crucial vote on military aid to both Ukraine and Israel Wednesday, Joe Biden went on TV to denounce Republicans for threatening to halt the $110 billion national security package. GOP leaders had told the White House they wouldn’t support the bill without border-sealing assurances of the type they knew Democrats wouldn’t accept, so Biden was cornered and clearly pissed. Eyes snapped wide open as the (surely fantastic) drugs aides must pump in by the gallon before public appearances kicked in, Biden went off:
“Republicans think they can get everything they want without any bipartisan compromise,” he snapped. “And now they’re willing to literally kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield and damage our national security in the process.” […]
A few hours later, National Security spokesperson John Kirby upped the ante, telling ABC reporter Selena Wang that not only should we be contemplating deployment of American troops, but a possible cost in American “blood” if Putin is allowed to take Ukraine and threaten other NATO countries. (That potential cost has been the same since NATO was founded in 1949, but whatever). Kirby’s offhand observation that Ukraine would “lose this war” absent U.S. support was the actual big news, but Kirby’s “based Biden” comments about “blood” were the ones that went viral. […]
After that bang-bang-bang succession of events, proclamations of imminent doom for Ukraine issued from the mouths of every Western national security official and war-supporting politician within reach of a microphone. Then Tucker Carlson tweeted a report that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told House members in a classified briefing that if they didn’t approve more money for Ukraine, “we’ll send your uncles, cousins and sons to fight Russia.”
The weirdly personal threat, which Tucker insists is a verbatim quote, showed how desperate a moment this is for the national security state. Potential consequences extend far beyond loss and suffering for Ukraine. The entire interventionist project is looking at a setback on the scale of the Iraq disaster, a political fiasco so enormous it prompted four years of cuts to the defense budget. Watching Putin waltz across Ukraine after the last two years of blood, profligate spending, and premature end zone celebrations by retired brass and Beltway think-tankers would make the withdrawal from Afghanistan look like one of Biden’s tarmac stumbles by comparison.
Down The Primrose Path
I don’t understand. They held talks. There were announcements. They made agreements.
Western sanctions on Russian oil — agreed upon a year ago this week — were designed to reduce funding for the Kremlin’s military assault on Ukraine. Instead, it has fostered a lucrative business for scores of difficult-to-trace traders and shipping companies, known as the shadow fleet, which moved about 45% of Russia’s oil this year. As much as $11 billion a year of petrodollars are evaporating between when the oil leaves Russia and when it reaches buyers, according to trade data compiled by Bloomberg.
It’s almost as though there’s a market for oil that doesn’t care about meetings.
Bogged Down
When even the leftist corporate media starts to question the Ukraine’s war strategy, it’s generally a pretty clear sign that the honeymoon is over.
The United States provides both Israel and Ukraine with military aid, and the breakout of a new war has raised fears about whether artillery shells and air defense missiles, once intended for Kyiv and already in short supply, would be diverted to Israel. Aid for both countries faces an uncertain path in the deeply divided Congress, and Ukraine was already facing a shortfall on what it was promised by the European Union.
The president is also facing criticism in some circles for signaling that he opposes holding next year’s scheduled presidential election amid the war, and Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said last week that the country was moving toward authoritarianism.
“At some point we will no longer be any different from Russia,” Klitschko told German news outlet Der Spiegel.
“We were always at war with Eastasia”
Stalemate forever
Back in January, I attended a talk by Peter Zeihan in which he openly mocked the Russian army for losing so much hardware during the initial invasion of the Ukraine that they were forced to ferry men and material to the front in civilian vans. I have no idea where his information came from, but the reality is that collapse of the Russian war effort is about as imminent as an earthquake in Manitoba.
When the conflict began, I sensed that a WWI stalemate would be the likely outcome. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for mass desertions or mutiny among the Ukrainian forces to completely upend the West’s strategy.
Ukraine’s military chief, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, says in a long essay and interview with the Economist that “just like in the First World War we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate.”
He acknowledges: “There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough,” but instead an equilibrium of devastating losses and destruction.
U.S. and European officials have begun quietly talking to the Ukrainian government about what possible peace negotiations with Russia might entail to end the war, according to one current senior U.S. official and one former senior U.S. official familiar with the discussions.
The conversations have included very broad outlines of what Ukraine might need to give up to reach a deal, the officials said. Some of the talks, which officials described as delicate, took place last month during a meeting of representatives from more than 50 nations supporting Ukraine, including NATO members, known as the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, the officials said.
Down The Primrose Path
Because there is no tomorrow.
“As Long As It Takes”
The Libranos: “Let us forget”
LPC House Leader Karina Gould sought unanimous consent to strike Anthony Rota's comments about Yaroslav Hunka from the record and the CPC denied it
CPC MP Marty Morantz says “deleting the words from Hansard would only have one purpose, to try and forget what happened" #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/S78DkwyPra
— Mackenzie Gray (@Gray_Mackenzie) September 25, 2023
Just Putin It Out There
Matt Taibbi: Canada’s Prime Minister solidifies his status as the world’s most nauseating pseudo-intellectual
To recap: Trudeau in a clear act of official disinformation smeared thousands of Canadian protesters as Nazis last year with context-twisting descriptions of a few decidedly un-representative photos. Now, after the Speaker of the House of Commons invited an ex-Nazi to parliament in a planned political act that had to be somewhat representative of the thinking of Trudeau’s Liberal government, the Prime Minister is complaining about “Russian disinformation,” as if that were to blame for this optics Hindenburg.