Ukraine War: The Rise Of Vichy America
The same people who insisted that Trump's victory in 2024 would mean the end of American democracy - until he won - look determined to sell out Ukraine. This is why the West loses.
It’s been an incredibly busy week in world affairs. Hezbollah and Israel finally declared a truce (sorry, Gaza), while Assad’s Syria faces a new lightning assault by rebel forces largely dormant since 2020.
Unfortunately, a visible desire to move on from Ukraine has gripped most western media outlets. Yet for all the talk of negotiations and Ukrainian exhaustion, evidence from the battlefield suggests a far more nuanced situation.
Most fronts are in fact not particularly dynamic at all - Moscow is simply stuck. As usual, I’ll begin by covering battlefield developments. After that comes a section devoted to understanding the Vichy Spirit that has taken over America and most of the west. I’ll wrap up with a brief overview of global developments.
Weekly Overview
During the 2024 Donbas Campaign, Moscow has begun every new push by trying to go straight at an objective, often knocking a targeted Ukrainian brigade out of place. But after grinding a few kilometers, progress towards the original goal is deflected by the arrival of Ukrainian reinforcements.
The march to the gates of Pokrovsk from Avdiivka at first threatened to cut it off from Kostiantynivka on the northern flank. Blocked by the arrival of fresh Ukrainian reinforcements, the advance shifted, slowly breaching and rolling back the Vovcha line. People started worrying about the fall of Pokrovsk, but ruscist progress was soon halted everywhere but the southern flank, north of the Kurakhove reservoir.
That was when the situation around Vuhledar worsened, Ukraine forced back to the present Kurakhove-Velyka Novosilka line. Now, as the defense around Kurakhove has stiffened, the orcs are attacking towards Velyka Novosilka, even further west and south of Pokrovsk. Ukrainian reinforcements are deploying here now, and it seems doubtful that Moscow can indefinitely continue to shift the fighting west in an apparent bid to turn the flank of the Ukrainian grouping here.
Overall, my forecast remains that Ukraine will continue to mount a stubborn area defense on most fronts while building up reserves ahead of a major counteroffensive push in 2025. That could begin as soon as spring, but I expect that the June-October period will be decisive. While there’s much that could go wrong, if everything comes together as it should some rapid movement should be expected that radically alters the situation.
This week Syrskyi publicly confirmed that a counteroffensive is indeed being planned, and I’ll write more about potential options in future posts. It is interesting to see battle-hardened leaders start to fill senior positions - the latest move was the promotion of a guy named Drapaty, apparently responsible for organizing the defeat of Moscow’s Kharkiv offensive this spring.
Ukraine’s military reboot is ongoing, and largely heading in the right direction. Yet the ongoing lack of large-scale deliveries of older American armored vehicles suggests that the Biden Administration’s approval of limited use of short-range ballistic and cruise missiles inside russia was a smokescreen.
Team Biden appears to be deliberately sabotaging Ukraine’s ability to launch a major counteroffensive in 2025, which is exactly why Ukraine couldn’t sit back through 2024 and play defense as the Americans wanted. Had Ukraine not gone into Kursk, forcing Putin to escalate by pulling North Korea into the war, Team Biden probably would never have proven with their limited ATACMS authorization that the escalation-fearing excuses for not fully backing Ukraine sooner were always trash.
More on that in the next part of the post. First, the grim struggle on the ground continues. As the orcs are so far stuck in Kursk, I’ll start with Donbas.
Eastern Theater
Most movement of the front lines this past week has been on the southern edge of the Donbas front again, though the long grind towards Kostiantynivka through Chasiv Yar and Toretsk has started to bear fruit for Moscow after extreme losses. The Kurakhove-Velyka Novosilka front remains under extreme pressure, but reinforcements are arriving that ought to stabilize the line.
Right now the biggest question on this front is whether Velyka Novosilka can be held. The town itself doesn’t make for a great defensive position, lacking tall reinforced concrete structures. But the town sits at the confluence of the Mokri Yali river and two tributaries, which should complicate orc maneuvers. And the town is at the base of a ridge that sits some fifty meters above the plain, a tough obstacle in steppe country with strong overwatch potential.
That’s why the orc assaults to the west of the town on the other side of the Mokri Yali are concerning, though so far Ukrainian troops appear to have merely fallen back to their main defense line. Supposedly 32nd Mechanized Brigade is working with 11th and 32nd National Guard and 122, 127, and 128 Territorial. Hopefully a heavier brigade or two will arrive.
Losing Velyka Novosilka would not be a fatal setback, as it appears that Ukrainian forces could set up containment lines to the west and north that ought to hold. But it’s a useful node on the area logistics network, so if the cost isn’t too high delivering a bloody nose to the orc group here could be worth considering as the worsening weather permits.
On the arc between Velyka Novosilka and Kurakhove Ukraine has mostly held firm, though the orcs do appear to be trying to cut the highway coming into town from the north. This could become a problem if they are able to get across the Mokri Yali river here through 128th Mountain Assault’s sector. The experienced 23rd Mechanized Brigade has apparently been moved to the Rozlyv area from Chasiv Yar, which should bolster that part of the line.
79th Air Assault is still stubbornly fighting on the outskirts of Illinka and Yelzavetivka, even mounting local counterattacks. I keep expecting the brigade to fall back to the important crossroads Uspenivka, but with 37th Marine and 33rd Mechanized holding the flanks so far, the orc pressure hasn’t been enough to compel retreat. They’ve even reportedly managed some counterattacks.
Inside Kurakhove, 46th Airmobile and whoever is with them are fending off fierce assaults that have managed to penetrate the city center, though only a foothold has been secured so far, sure to be heavily bombarded. And that’s just one more step along what is certain to be a bloody path. The pattern of the fighting in Kurakhove already resembles that in Toretsk and Chasiv Yar: Moscow gets some troops to a forward position, then has to fight for weeks just to sustain them while drones wreak havoc on their supplies.
In many places Moscow is increasingly relying on straight-up infantry attacks without using armored vehicles, often using dirt bikes and golf carts to minimize exposure time. The result is recorded casualties exceeding 2,000 in a day for the first time. Heavy vehicles are more and more reserved for priority fronts where they are still being lost in record quantities too. The long-awaited metabolic crisis slowly intensifies, though it will take well into 2025 to visibly cripple Putin’s machine.
Pokrovsk remains a major orc target, but nearly all orc progress is well south of the city, creeping towards Shevchenko. While 59th Motorized and 35th Marine brigades hold off the ruscist troops trying to get at Kurakhove from the north, 151st Mechanized and the newly re-designated 117th Heavy Mechanized brigades are covering the highway connecting Pokrovsk to Velyka Novosilka.
Everywhere else, the orcs are presently stuck all the way to Toretsk. Here there’s been a lot of local back and forth, the orcs in control of about half the central high rises and trying to expand their territory into the northern suburbs, where a local Ukrainian counterattack cleared leading elements a couple weeks back. The neighborhood to the south remains contested, Ukraine’s control over a mining complex probably playing an important role. 100th, 150th, and 42nd Mechanized are covering Toretsk along with a slew of attached battalions largely from Ukraine’s national police.
Chasiv Yar is much the same as Toretsk. Here the orcs have managed to expand the northern bridgehead over the canal, but reportedly face extreme challenges building up enough troops to push farther thanks to the defense led by 24th Mech and 68th Motorized. Creeping progress up the slope to the south is being punished by 93rd and 28th Mech and friends.
Moving north from Chasiv-Yar, the broad arc of the Siversk-Lyman front has been mostly static, efforts to collapse the bulge failing despite Ukraine keeping only eight to ten brigades covering an arc some forty kilometers in diameter at the base, divided by the Siverski Donets river. 30th, 54th, 53rd, 60th, 63rd, 66th, and 67th Mech, plus 10th Mountain, 81st Airmobile and their attached battalions, may not get a lot of press, but they’re guarding the northern flank of the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk urban area well.
The famous Third Assault is positioned between the Siversk-Lyman front and the orc march on Kupiansk, holding back attempts to break through towards the Oskil. This tough unit covers the southern edge of the Kupiansk front, which has been divided in two by the slow orc march down the Pischana valley.
For months Moscow has been trying to get at Kupiansk, frontal assaults through Synkivka failing time and again. Another batch of 12-15 brigades you don’t hear much about are working here, including 14th, 43rd, 44th, 115th, 116th, and 154th Mechanized, 77th Airmobile, 92nd Assault, 1st Offensive Guard, and 104th, 110th, 115th, 112th, and 114th Territorial.
They face one of the (formerly) most vaunted formations in the orc military, First Guards Tank Army, and have performed admirably despite being far from Kyiv and Kharkiv. The slow orc advance to the Oskil south of Kupiansk crawled on for months, and after expanding the corridor they won now the orcs are trying to push on, having some success to the south where Ukrainian troops near Berestove have pulled back to avoid encirclement.
The latest orc move is crossing the Oskil north of Kupiansk, where a small bridgehead has emerged. A far cry from orc divisions thundering down on Kupiansk from the north after breaking through Vovchansk this spring. And so far in this war, contested orc river crossings have generally gone poorly.
Northern Theater
Localized battles happen all the time on the Kharkiv Front, but neither side is making this area a priority. Bad weather can allow for a local attack that achieves surprise and some gains, but building into sustained operations is tough.
Kursk, on the other hand, continues to see intense orc assaults against Ukrainian positions. Over the past week very little progress has been recorded, though the orcs are increasingly desperate to breach the western side of Free Kursk to reach Sverdlikovo.
They keep trying to push across the Snagost river through Darino, attempting to breach the sector reportedly covered by 36th Marine and 103rd Territorial, with 21st Mechanized and 82nd Air Assault protecting the flanks. 47th Mechanized and 17th Heavy Tank seem to be handling the fighting around Novoivanovka while 95th Air Assault repels attacks on the northern arc of the Free Kursk zone. 80th Air Assault and 61st Mechanized seem tasked to the eastern flank, while 22nd Mechanized and some other formations previously committed here are either in reserve or rotated elsewhere.
But for those who like to claim that Ukraine is devoting its best troops to Kursk while neglecting other sectors, well, just keep in mind that Kursk is just one of at least half a dozen separate fights of similar size. Together, they’re consuming up to twice as many bodies and five to ten times as much armor and artillery as Moscow can generate.
Southern Theater
Skirmishing continues along the Dnipro and the front in Zaporizhzhia, especially near the areas Ukraine scored gains in 2023 south of Orihiv. Talk continues of a ruscist offensive in Zaporizhzhia, but the reserves required to do something dangerous like take Orihiv or Huliaipole appear to be lacking.
Air, Sea, & Strike
It’s been as busy a week above and beyond the front line as along it, with both sides unleashing drones and Moscow quite a few missiles. There doesn’t appear to have been another ATACMS attack after one nailed an S-400 air defense complex in Kursk a week ago. Hopefully this and the other hits with high-end weapons weren’t limited one-offs to “send a message” in classic Team Biden fashion.
Ukraine has instead sent quite a few drones into orc airspace to whack more oil depots. These are probably better targets than refineries because they interrupt the flow of oil to the front as opposed to abroad, where ruscist oil powers factories in India that make 155mm shells for Ukraine. It’s worth noting that Ukraine plans to produce a thousand long-range strike drones next year- another nail in Putin’s coffin.
Putin is of course hitting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure again, the usual drone raids joined by a big cruise missile strike that finally involved the Black Sea Fleet firing Kalibrs from its little bastion off Novorossiysk. Here’s hoping the six Mirage 2000s Ukraine is slated to receive and the SCALP cruise missiles they can target in flight can get close enough to do some damage next year.
F-16s knocked out seven cruise missiles this time around, and Moscow still hasn’t managed to take one out. Ukraine should be able to field a small squadron by the end of this month.
If the Swedish AWACS aircraft slated to head to Ukraine are operational by late spring, the air war will stand to shift dramatically. A cool thing about networks is that plugging data from airborne radars into a Patriot battery extends the latter’s effective range. And if someone gets Ukraine some long-range air-to-air missiles, Vipers can play the game too. Some Gripens would also do quite nicely.
Of course, the USA has to not do anything particularly nefarious or stupid in the meantime. How weak Trump might prove to be will remain unclear until the end of January. Sadly, it doesn’t take much to beat the spirit demonstrated by Joe Biden.
Understanding Vichy America1
It’s worth pointing out that most of the very same American pundit-experts and brand-serving politicians who insisted that Harris couldn’t possibly lose to a fascist like Trump are now almost universal in their belief that Ukraine is exhausted and must accept a bitter peace. It’s a classic case of psychological projection. Ukraine actually winning would shatter the illusion many depend on to keep millions of Americans trapped in a delusion.
American politicians lie: Trump lies, Joe Biden lies. The latter proved this in epic fashion over the weekend by going against his explicit word to grant his corrupt son a full pardon. Meanwhile Trump is no longer a target of the federal investigations so many insisted would lead to his being jailed, because somehow presidents have become kings when it comes to the justice system, granted all kinds of immunity.
There are, of course, numerous useful or at least politically wise executive actions that Biden could take before he’s gone for good - but won’t. These include fully arming Ukraine, forgiving all federal student loans, or simply pardoning people convicted by the feds of cannabis possession, something now legal in a growing number of states.
Instead, he’s serving as an object lesson in the Spirit of Vichy that dominates the postmodern western mindset. If it is not excised soon, democracy will lose to the emerging Beijing-Moscow-Tehran-Minsk-Damascus-Pyongyang pact. The legion of dictators, if you like.
American leaders fail time and again yet are rarely held accountable because what media talking heads proclaim to be facts are simply whatever someone higher up in the national pyramid scheme needs them to be at the time. It’s the exact same mentality that leads so many American corporations down the path of eating themselves until a crisis hits and they’re gobbled up in turn by a rival.
Ukraine was, of course, supposed to fall in a matter of days, the vaunted aid that the Biden-led western alliance deigned to offer intended only to support an insurgency in part of the country. Ukraine was to be another Afghanistan, NATO liability carefully limited because there was no way Joe Biden was winning re-election if the US wound up in a major war.
The powers-that-be did not plan for Ukraine’s success. Three years later, they are still working not to secure victory, but a bitter peace that will only generate an even bigger war in a few years.
Kyiv Post journalist Stefan Korshak, whose analysis throughout this war has been reliable and insightful, posted another long and excellent overview of recent political developments this weekend. While he doesn’t use the term Vichy at any point, it is clear that the same essential mentality animates both sides of the partisan nightmare. Trump’s Ukraine team may not matter much in the end, with Trump deciding policy based on what he perceives benefits his interests, but their apparent belief that the USA can simply dictate peace terms to Ukraine suggests that they aren’t all that different from Team Biden.
Big-name media outlets, whose job is to sustain public narratives that suit the interests of oligarchs and their pet politicians, have deliberately chosen to ignore hard science and falsely portray Ukraine as exhausted, even beaten. The New York Times, New Yorker, Atlantic, New Republic, Slate, Fox, MSNBC, Vox, Axios, Politico, Economist, Forbes, Guardian, CNN, and all the rest make their trade pretending to offer quality analysis, but when it comes to foreign policy, that’s a ruthless, profit-driven lie.
Everyone in the media business knows who their audience is and caters to the prejudices of their core demographic. And because their core market is affluent college-educated American suburbanites with plenty of disposable income who want to feel as if they are informed, most coverage of Ukraine is borderline pseudoscience. A lot of people can sense this, and the cognitive dissonance that results is the foundation of the market the Elon Musks and Joe Rogans of the world rely on to build their petty pyramid schemes.
Conspiracy theories are so popular precisely because they let people feel as if they understand why the media is so routinely wrong. What’s really going on, though, is something far more boring: misaligned incentives. Nobody wants to consume the system their own prosperity depends on. They do it anyway and wind up poorer in the long run. It’s a classic collective action problem.
It’s actually to everyone’s benefit across the globe, save Putin and people who profit from his rule - including a fair few useful idiots in the west who wind up carrying water for the guy by elevating his silly nuclear bluffs - that the Muscovite empire experience a humiliating defeat in Ukraine. Only that will force the internal reckoning that has brought down and reformed every other European empire to date.
But the kind of people who get jobs writing about foreign policy in the western world are carefully selected to ensure that a small group of high priests maintains control over the right to tell the rest of us who is good and bad, which dictators are okay to work with because they’re on our side. It is the pathetic inability of a properly-educated western mind to comprehend anything beyond the narrow prejudices a classical western education inculcates in students that dooms the whole ideological project to failure. Sun Tzu would understand. Clausewitz too.
Most westerners cannot imagine what it is like to be a Ukrainian soldier struggling every day to defend their country. In turn, most westerners also cannot imagine sending their own children to do that work, preferring to leave it for those from less fortunate backgrounds.
The vast majority of college-educated Americans, if put to the same test as Ukrainians, would choose surrender. I can’t speak for other nationalities, because I haven’t lived anywhere else. But I do know Americans. In the great cost-benefit calculation of life we’re supposed to perpetually make, the infinite penalty of prospective death trumps all. That’s why nuclear threats work on Americans.
The harsh truth about the west that fans are ideologically bound to reject is that the thing is a pyramid con job just like the russian world. The essential spirit of both is best displayed by the old cartoon gag where volunteers are asked to step forward out of a line, whereupon everyone but one poor fool takes an immediate step back. They get to live that fine old Full Metal Jacket life while suburbanites hang little flags on their cars.
Chronically incapable of understanding themselves or their enemies, western leaders losing every important battle ought to come as no surprise. Whether on or off a battlefield, the corporate ritual is always the same: make big promises, fail to carry through on critical details, then find excuses for inevitable failure - or a scapegoat. Usually a woman, if available.
Western leaders constantly create their own monsters only to lose to them, using failure to justify taxpayers handing over even more resources to be squandered. Ordinary people are forced to suffer and bleed to right matters while the people who screwed up pay sycophants to write history.
It’s the same scam going all the way back to Alexander and the older Mesopotamian dynasties that he was imitating before nature mercifully killed the imbecile off. That history in the west is rarely taught as a true science, instead a recitation of facts said to be important by some authority, is a root cause of why western society has become nothing more than a church endlessly wailing about what it refuses to take necessary action to change.
To get a grasp of the world system collapse we’re all trapped in together demands setting aside standing assumptions and prejudices. Western thought depends on a fragile narrative about the place of individuals in the broader world. Everyone is supposed to strive to become the little Caesar of whatever domain they can secure.
Success in life is defined above all else by having a victim to bully, whether through conspicuous consumption or through more direct means. Yet whenever a victim punches back, they’re the ones who take the blame. We’re all supposed to know our place, yet also be the Caesar of our domain, an impossible dilemma that reduces to those with power feeling fully justified in using it to serve their narrow interests.
Collective responsibility is for suckers - that’s why affluent Americans of either partisan persuasion look down on veterans who don’t behave according to a certain script. In America, everyone gets their properly categorized identity group’s designated holiday - and that’s it.
The ego-bias at the heart of most Western thought makes holistic understanding of most problems impossible. It creeps into the standard method of doing science taught to students until they reach the doctoral level, when they then learn that the rules are all fake.
By this I mean that science is itself an institution, with practices and standards set by people who always have vested interests. Good science exists, but it requires a lot of training in critical thinking to sift it. School is supposed to cover that, but too often fails, infected by the same hidden ideological bias.
The different fields of science vary in their reliability mostly based on how easy it is to prove a given hypothesis in the real world in terms the average person can understand. All fields that rely on evidence derived from human sources are inherently less reliable than those which can stick to more mundane objects. Of course, even the seeming firmness of the material world is an illusion, electrons famously not possible to fully model, attempts to measure them producing a similar observer bias feedback loop. But this happens at such an infinitesimal scale that engineers can build stuff that minimize the impacts.
Perspective is the source of culture, and many cultures come together to form a society bonded by values and often language, geographic proximity playing a huge role. Material truths may not change from place to place, but perception certainly does, and a fact is meaningless if it is not perceived as relevant. It is this uncomfortable reality that leads to most western postmodern thought down a navel-gazing cul-de-sac which swiftly degenerates into nihilism. Nothing is actually worth fighting for if it entails personal sacrifice, because reality is a construct and people choose to be happy.
This victim-blaming abdication of responsibility is nothing more than a slave’s attempt to rationalize a conscious choice not to resist their oppressors. It marks a return of science to the religious mysticism that spawned it, shamans throwing bones and entrails on the ground to help divine the future. The theater covers for how little they truly know.
Western self-delusion crystallizes in its purest essence whenever Putin’s nuclear bluster is allowed to impact decision-making. In the field of policy studies, cost-benefit analysis is a powerful, vital tool. Once twisted by the hidden presumptions of western cultural imperialism, it is transformed into a tool of oppression and surrender.
This is the very heart of the Vichy Spirit that drove too many French leaders in 1940. While millions of French citizens fought on at home and abroad, the Vichy Regime chose to make an accommodation with Hitler in a bid to preserve what remained of the French establishment’s power. In the end, Hitler wound up swallowing Vichy France anyway.
Echoes of Vichy are painfully clear in the way the same American politicians and pundits who proclaimed Trump to be the death of liberal democracy are already acting as the rules of American politics still magically apply now that he’s won. Faced with the hard choice of using every Constitutional tool available to protect the rights of American citizens or going along with whatever he does to get by, most will choose the latter.
Their profit-driven brand demands that the status quo persist whatever cost. If Trump ripped off his orange mask the day of his inauguration to reveal that he’s the actual clone of Adolf Hitler, the Democratic Party would shrug and fundraise some more.
Ukraine isn’t fighting your typical war, a contest between two squabbling regimes: Ukrainians face a proven threat of genocide far beyond anything Israel has faced in at least fifty years. Ukraine is not fighting to reclaim Donbas and Crimea because it wants or needs territory, but to prove that any future attempt by Moscow to threaten Ukraine’s survival will fail. So long as the orcs occupy Ukrainian soil, this in and of itself sends the message that Moscow will never tolerate an independent Ukraine. Any American effort to force Ukraine into accepting a frozen conflict will be a disaster, severely damaging American national security, probably within the next four years.
No sane person wants the Ukraine War to continue for a second longer than it absolutely must. But a scrap of paper backed by promises made by western politicians is what brought Ukraine, Europe, and the rest of the world to this very point. Anybody who believes that a ceasefire in Ukraine will long prove tenable is dangerously ignorant.
This isn’t a debate point, but simple science. The past couple decades have proven that power is a real, material thing in world affairs. How much everybody actually has now is the big question, because the democratization of warfare that characterized the Network Age has upended standing calculations.
The world of people is built on incentives and perception. A world system collapses for the same reason an economy does: signals build until behavior changes. Visible success is imitated, and folks run from failure. It’s all deeply mechanical at the base level, analogous to many processes in chemistry.
Right now, a lot of bad assumptions are dissolving. The most dangerous position to hold now is any that presumes or requires stability. New bets are being placed across the world, and that activity in and of itself is driving even more churn. I suppose I should get into geopolitical risk consulting, because talk about a growth industry for the times!
Vichy Americans are desperately trying to maintain a status quo that has already died. This is a waste of energy that accelerates the fall. Western leaders are staring up at a falling meteor and either struck dumb or hedging their bets. Trump, for all his bluster, has always been the true face of America. Allies across the world have chosen to pretend that the USA was still a reliable security guarantor despite mounting evidence. It’s past time to adapt.
What Ukrainians are going through now, nearly everyone will to some degree, sooner or later, if Putin is not stopped. As Nazi Germany was a crystallization of the west’s darkest impulses enabled for far too long by western leaders, so is Putin’s russian world of today. Backers of each explicitly deny their fundamentally western heritage and condemn all its ways because the weakness at its core undermines their tough guy act. But they’re nothing more than the west’s shadows, enabled and guaranteed by its imperial mindset.
True independence, freedom of the sort envisioned by the United States Constitution, was materially enshrined through generations of struggle by people under constant assault by elite-serving western cultural imperialism. Ukraine’s existence has likewise been won through blood and sacrifice across generations. America and Ukraine both stand as testaments to the will of ordinary people to create and sustain working political institutions that serve everyone, not just a few.
Obviously, the struggle is ongoing. There is an ebb and flow to everything, particularly the trends that come together to make history. But these are in turn produced through actions: every little bit does matter. Waves merge to form a flood.
That’s why Vichy Americans like Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden, J.D. Vance, (and Donald Trump?) have feared Ukraine’s victory from the start. If Ukraine can defy the will of one alleged superpower and every prediction and inclination of another, what does that say about the quality of an education which presumes this to be impossible?
It’ll be up to the few far-sighted members of the closely-divided House as well as the states to rein in a federal government out of control starting in late January. Allies across the world can do their part to shed the taint of Vichy by striving to make America irrelevant again. Between Biden and Trump, it was bound to become so anyway. If they’re the best the USA can do, it’s best to let it fade away along with them.
Geopolitical Brief2
Ukraine-USA
Latching on to factoids like amount of territory that Ukraine has lost without adding context about record orc losses, harping on recruitment and mobilization while equipment is lacking - this sort of gaslighting is the hallmark of the ongoing insider-backed media pressure campaign. The goal is to convince as many Americans as possible to forget about Ukraine and worry about China. Both Democrats and Republicans are joining in.
The usual suspects remain deeply bothered that Ukraine makes military service for the 18-25 cohort voluntary, ignoring both the relatively small size of this group and the fact that Ukraine still lacks the equipment to equip ten brigades now being formed. Vast stocks of American Abrams, Bradley, M-113, and Stryker armored vehicles need to be in Ukraine, or at least positioned in Germany and under NATO command to buffer against any Trump stunts, but they aren’t moving.
It’s worth keeping in mind that what Ukraine has always needed to accomplish at the operational and strategic levels has never been a mystery. Logistics to target areas have to be interrupted and enough ruscist combat power destroyed to let properly equipped and trained Ukrainian forces breach and roll up the front. This is all about creating a point of weakness, leveraging numbers to hit it hard, then exploiting the enemy’s confusion to create a cascade of crises. Expose them to anarchy, then leverage it.
To accomplish requires the full package of combined arms kit - now including drones - training, and effective organization. It’s no different than cooking, or building a house. With enough of the right materials, labor, and plans, success is a matter of time.
Ukraine-Europe
The retreat of the USA from its global leadership role and ultimately relevance continues to drive European countries in the necessary direction. The UK apparently secretly delivered a large shipment of Storm Shadow cruise missiles before Ukraine used up to a dozen in Kursk. With many hundreds in stock and France committing more of its SCALP versions, it is to be hoped that Ukraine’s current arsenal has reached triple digits. American ATACMS are likely far more restricted in numbers and targets.
It does appear that there has been a shift towards greater secrecy in what Ukraine receives. But I get the distinct sense that the European goal right now is to give Ukraine the ability to win parity in the skies on at least one front of its choosing. That will involve the ability to shut down airspace near the front and hit targets well behind.
Hopefully the emerging coalition of northern and eastern European countries recognizes that even equipment used by active formations needs to go to Ukraine. The entire frontier with russia must be considered an active front line, with deployments prioritized according to the level of demonstrated threat. Light infantry backed by drones and air power should be more than capable of defeating any ruscist incursion into NATO territory given the enemy’s present state.
The few European countries, like Hungary and Slovakia, whose leaders are hostile to Ukraine will no doubt cause what trouble they can, but their position is not all that different than Trump’s. Sure they beat the nationalist drums and talk about how the EU exploits them, but if they ever got their way, an essential chunk of their own political system would crumble. Look at how Brexit turned out for Britain - whatever its potential merits or benefits for some, the British economy has suffered on the whole. This is what happens when you decouple economies.
Fortunately, the threat posed by Moscow has pushed the European countries that share a land or maritime border to begin more closely integrating their defense with Ukraine’s. If this continues, and effective grouping within NATO boasting more flexibility could even save the organization’s credibility. Because let’s get real: America will one day use Article Five to justify selling out a member in order to avert World War Three. That’s the essential signal transmitted by the ongoing refusal to admit or defend Ukraine.
Middle East
In a surprising but welcome development, Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire this week. So far it’s mostly holding, though the details make it clear the thing is just an excuse for both sides to curtail active ground operations. The fight is mostly deadlocked despite Israel’s early successes in decapitating the Hezbollah regime.
While badly damaged, Hezbollah is far from defeated. Large rocket and drone strikes far into Israel hit daily until the ceasefire went into effect, and more damage could have been done. Israel’s attempt to reach the Litani river in Lebanon was going slow thanks to fierce resistance by Hezbollah cells. Reliant on reservists, Israel can’t risk extended ground combat on two fronts.
Here’s hoping that this pointless conflict, which killed several thousand Lebanese civilians and dozens of Israelis, serves as an object lesson in how decapitation is a political, not military, strategy. Hezbollah and Israel have now demonstrated that neither is going anywhere, and both lack the strength to achieve a lasting military solution.
There are important geopolitical implications. Iran has for twenty years been building up a network of allied groups it calls the “axis of resistance” to deter Israel and the US from attacking Iran’s nuclear program or pursuing regime change. Though Israel is pretending that Hezbollah maintained tunnels leading into Israel because it aimed to join with Hamas in a massacre of civilians, the reality is that support for Hamas by the rest of the axis proved superficial - rockets attacks are an irritant, but damage is limited unless barrages are sustained. Hezbollah visibly sought to preserve capabilities to remain able to threaten an all-out attack.
The regime in Tehran appears set to shift its survival strategy to joining Putin’s empire out of concern this will no longer deter Israel. A small nuclear arsenal will likely be assembled within six months, as Tehran knows that Netanyahu will seek any excuse he can to push Trump into joining a military campaign on the slightest pretext. After offering full military support despite the criminal way Israel has conducted itself, I would not be the slightest bit surprised if there is a major attack on Americans that pushes Trump to play War on Terror, Bush style.
Given the high probability of a drone assassination attempt against Trump - side note: if he takes office, this automatically constitutes hard proof that no “deep state” exists - Tehran has to assume it will be blamed. Trump is not and never has been an isolationist. His worldview is transactional: everything is negotiable, and all deals are an opportunity to put one over on a sucker. Policy is set by whoever is willing to pay and has the right level of access. Most Trump backers hate Iran because the mullahs kicked them square in the Vietnam syndrome back in 1979. It should not prove difficult for Netanyahu to turn this to his advantage.
Of course, the Middle East is a tinderbox that has a way of upending everyone’s calculations. In yet another demonstration of how geopolitical ripples spread, Free Syrian forces unleashed a surprise offensive this week in northern Syria that has liberated Aleppo from Assad’s ruscist-backed troops. It appears that with Hezbollah focused on its home turf and Putin stuck with all but a token force in Ukraine, Syria’s rebel groups saw a golden opportunity.
Government forces have collapsed across Syria’s north, Aleppo has been liberated, and rebel forces are threatening to seize Hama and Homs, two essential towns on the road linking Damascus to Putin’s naval outpost at Latakia. Ukrainian media reports hundreds of ruscist casualties, with the orc general in charge of Syria sacked. It remains to be seen whether the airpower russia still has in Syria is enough to help Assad’s troops turn the tide. Regardless, the whole episode is yet another example of the increasing fragility of Moscow’s empire.
Pacific
The US finally has two carriers in the Western Pacific again, Lincoln visiting Malaysia on its way out of the Indian Ocean while Washington returned to Japan. There have been some ruscist ships from the Pacific Fleet visiting Southeast Asia lately, too, but sadly the White House doesn’t appear to be ready to order them all sunk, despite a submarine attack being mighty difficult to prove. Especially in deep water, where orcs historically have trouble with successfully staying afloat.
North Korea, meanwhile, is fast becoming the only reason that Moscow can advance in Ukraine at all. Upwards of half of all ammunition used is North Korean make. Something like half of that is defective, it appears, but flying explosives are no laughing matter if you’re nearby.
South Korea’s posture towards Ukraine is now a matter of global importance. Seoul is watching its northern neighbor get absorbed into the russian world as a colony. On the one hand, this emboldens the regime in Pyongyang to threaten nasty stuff and harass civilians near the border. Yet on the other, the latest in the Kim dynasty seems to have come to realize that the North is never conquering the South. He prefers to be a kind of colonial administrator for Moscow.
Beijing does not like this one bit. The supposed “Axis of Autocracy” is as much a bluff as Iran’s concern for its client militias. Autocrats pretty much by definition cannot closely cooperate except in a patron-client relationship. The Axis Powers in World War Two were weaker together than they would have been apart. Mussolini’s misadventures in the Balkans and North Africa served as a constant distraction to Hitler’s war effort; instead of a Spain-like neutral buffer to his south, a chunk of his best troops were allocated to fights that could hardly be sustained thanks to British naval and air power.
And the Japanese-German connection proved suicidal for both. If Hitler hadn’t declared war in support of an ally that never joined the fight against the USSR, Roosevelt might not have been able to get the US to intervene in Europe. Most Americans were against getting involved, and even after Germany declared war felt that Japan was the real enemy. The choice to beat Hitler before Japan was never real: the USA waged two distinct wars against distinct foes in radically different operating environments.
South Korea and Japan are slowly becoming two of the most important players in the Ukraine War. Their historic reconciliation, and getting Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to stop looking to America for anything, must be global democratic priorities right now.
Seoul and Tokyo don’t even need to directly export arms, which is tricky given their laws. All that’s needed is for both to backfill for other countries so they can send more of their own gear. Poland operates a lot of Leopard 2 and M1A1 Abrams tanks which it’s already replacing with South Korean K2s and newer M1A2 models from Ohio. Accelerate that, expand the practice to other NATO members - other armored vehicles are involved too, obviously - and there you go: a new pool for Ukraine.
Concluding Comments
The weird benefit of a fight for survival is that is has a way of clarifying priorities. Western leaders have not yet accepted that their world is ending, one way or another: there’s no going back. This is Ragnarok, and I wrote a saga about the thing for a reason.
Now is the time to adopt a scientific strategy of victory rooted in the lessons that should have been learned by 1945. When anyone powerful decides that the rules don’t apply to them, they become the enemy of all. Lacking global institutions capable of bringing justice, coalitions based on shared ethics are the only way.
Victory in Ukraine is the first essential step on a path to a better future. It might look like apocalypse, because it is: the bitter end of the Postwar Order, and the start of a new era. The shape of the thing depends on what those with the power to act choose to do while they can. Eventually, a choice will be made for them.
To Science Section
To Global Section