Counter-Currents
The Ukrainian army’s positions in Bakhmut as of May 10.
1,424 words
As of May 9, 2023, the Ukrainian military controls less than 2% of Bakhmut. It is only a matter of time before the city is entirely in Russian hands, barring a miraculous Ukrainian counterattack which turns out to be wildly successful. Reports of minor counterattacks are mostly hype.[1]
The Russian capture of Bakhmut is similar to what the Battle of Verdun in 1916 would have been had the Germans won. The fall of Bakhmut, should it conclusively occur, will raise morale in Russia and lower it in Ukraine. The Ukrainians have a chance to recover the situation with a successful spring offensive, however. The most likely scenario for the over-promoted upcoming Ukrainian “spring offensive” is that it will originate in the vicinity of Zaporizhzhia. From there the Ukrainian army’s objective will be to cut the land route between Russia and Crimea. Anything is possible, of course. Perhaps the Ukrainian army will encircle the Russians in Bakhmut or another city. Regardless, total surprise is unlikely.
The Bakhmut front as of May 11, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
The Ukrainian “spring offensive” will serve to answer an important international relations question: Can the Russians deter or repel the pending Ukrainian counterattack? In either case, the fall of Bakhmut will indicate that the Russian are trending towards success. If the Ukrainians successfully cut off Crimea from Russia, their mission will then become one of besieging and capturing fortified cities near Crimea. This will mean months, if not years, of further war. Throughout that time, the Ukrainians will burn up their only unrenewable resource: Ukrainian men.
On May 6, the Russian army bombarded the Ukrainian-held areas of Bakhmut with white phosphorous artillery shells. The attack came after the leader of the mercenary Wagner Group claimed he was being deliberately starved of ammunition by the Russian government. The massive phosphorous bombardment shows that the Russian artillery is able to fire without fear of counterbattery fire and can transport and secure a large quantity of ammunition.
While the initial offensive was a disaster as a result of Vladimir Putin’s extremely poor assumptions at the time, it is clear that the Russian army has now successfully adapted to meet the actual conditions of the war. Additionally, Putin seems to have adjusted his war aims in Ukraine and is now seeking an outcome similar to how the 2008 Russo-Georgian War ended. In Georgia, the Russians captured strategically important territory which contain pro-Russian populations of a non-Georgian ethnicity. In Ukraine, Putin’s army is capturing portions of the country which has a Russian-speaking and Russian-aligned population.
The ethnic divide in Ukraine is between Western European-aligned Ukrainians in the west and Russians who lean towards Moscow in the east.
As of May 2023 the frontlines in Ukraine are semi-stable, meaning the Russians have made marginal gains at a tremendous cost. Since September the Russians have held the ground they’ve taken and appear to have adjusted their war aims to holding the eastern regions rather than capturing the entire country.
The Russians are therefore likely to “win” the war by redefining success to mean the capture of eastern Ukraine, in the same way that they “won” in Georgia in 2008 by capturing Ossetia. It is possible that such an end to the war is in fact the best outcome. Regardless, international relations in Eastern Europe will become more poisonous than they are at present — and since the United States remains part of NATO for now, that poison will fall like acid rain across America as well.
Ukraine’s borders have historically been ill-defined. This map shows the proposed map of an independent Ukraine that was presented at the Paris peace conference in 1919. This version of Ukraine includes parts of the Caucuses where no Ukrainians were or are living.
The Russo-Ukraine War is a disaster. It is an entirely unnecessary conflict that had many instigators, the most immoral of whom are the mostly Jewish Russia-haters in positions of high office in the US government. Besides Putin, the biggest culprit in this entire affair is the Biden regime. Simply put, the current US President’s weakness invited an attack. Biden won by obvious voter fraud and his cognitive decline is clear for all to see. Biden further provoked the Russians without any ability to stop them from attacking.
You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Pulp Fascism here.
The ongoing bloodbath in Ukraine should cause all Americans to reflect upon the many flaws in the American elite’s foreign, domestic, and military policies. The reasons why Russia attacked Ukraine in the first place go back to Russian security concerns that are as old as the hills. Russia has been invaded many times from the west, and controlling the territory of Ukraine is critical for them to protect the Russian ethnic heartland. The United States and NATO paid no heed to these concerns. There was plenty of opportunity for the “finlandization” of Ukraine, but the American establishment, and its Jewish and neoconservative core in particular, doubled down on anti-Russian hostility.
Those who are most prominent in attempting to drum up American support for Ukraine are Jewish women. This includes Anne Applebaum, a writer for The Atlantic; Victoria Nuland, a US State Department official; and Kimberly Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War. None of these women are able to provide a compelling moral case for the war and they come across as contemptuous of those ordinary white Americans who tend to join the military. Such people have also used Russia’s official pro-family values and anti-LGBT stance as a pretext to make liberal Americans hate the country.
The American military is also part of the problem. The US military has been focusing for years on recruiting more racial minorities, women, and Muslims; rooting out “white supremacy” and sexual harassment; propagating critical race theory; and becoming more welcoming for transsexuals. As a result, it has less of an ability to deter adversaries such as Russia. In 2014, while the Russians were annexing Crimea, the Pentagon instituted a policy of making male soldiers wear high-heeled shoes to “raise awareness” of sexual assault in the military — which is an obvious side effect of integrating women into the military. One wonders if this had more to do with a psychosexual desire of some Defense Department official to humiliate masculine men rather than raise awareness of rape. The policy was discontinued in 2015 after it became widely noticed, and then became a scandal. Any military which adopts such a policy will not be taken seriously.
Americans, and especially white Americans, are responding by not joining the military. And even some of those who do enlist are unserious about their duties. For example, Airman First Class Jack Teixeira of the Massachusetts National Guard allegedly posted classified documents on a Discord server to demonstrate his knowledge of current affairs to other video-game enthusiasts. The leak was not discovered for two months. And a prominent pro-Russian social media account is said to be overseen by a former US Navy non-commissioned officer. This is all a natural outcome of the American political elite’s radical Leftist ideology, of which its Ukraine policy is a part.
The widespread frustration among ordinary Americans with allies such as NATO, South Korea, and Israel has caused a large sub-set of otherwise patriotic Americans to hope for Russia to be successful in Ukraine. In early March 2023, a rumor spread online that a large number of NATO officers were killed in a Russian strike on a bunker in Ukraine. The story turned out to be false. Ron Unz traced its source and speculated that the reason the rumor had spread so quickly was that “people are especially likely to accept claims they deeply want to believe, and a severe NATO military setback together with a major black-eye for the hated mainstream media probably falls into this category.”
Putin is not the savior of the white race, nor is Russia is a traditionalist paradise. Russia’s war against Ukraine is a war on Western Civilization and has the potential to spread. The situation on the ground is rapidly approaching the point where the choices will be reduced to picking the lesser of two evils. There is no good course of action to take, but reflecting on the problems identified above would be a step in the right direction.
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Note
[1] The Institute for the Study of War reported on May 11: “Geolocated footage published on May 9 and 10 indicates that Ukrainian forces likely conducted successful limited counterattacks north of Khromove (immediately west of Bakhmut) and northwest of Bila Hora (14km southwest of Bakhmut) and made marginal advances in these areas.”
11 comments
Ramping up production of artillery shells would have been the best way to salvage the situation early in the war, however the US is so incompetent and de-industrialized that Russia easily expends more shells than Ukraine.
The best course of action now is to end the war asap by giving up areas that are a lost cause and then studying lessons learned, fortifying Ukrainian land and arming up. Hopefully Eastern Europe has learned that the US regime can not be relied upon and will look to their own strength by cultivating a robust domestic arms industry.
If Zelenskiy officialy gives up “lost” lands, neither nation nor army would accept this and he would be thrown out of the office. Ukrainians do not defend “democracy”, “freedom”, “human rights”, “European values” and other Jewish BS, even if Zelenskiy speaks about this, that is only lip service, they simply defend their lands, because they are historically an agricultural nation, farmers, and for any farmer the land always matter.
This is all pretty rational, and I would say practically unquestionable, until you get to the bit about this being a “war on Western Civilization”. I don’t claim to know what Mr Putin’s attitude toward Western civilization is, but I’d say that it’s a war on those who are making war on Western civilization, i.e., Biden et al.
A victory for Russia would be a defeat for the US Deep State. The US ruling class is enemy #1 of Western Civilization. They admit it openly. They boast of it – see Biden’s recent speech at Howard University.
“Russia’s war against Ukraine is a war on Western Civilization and has the potential to spread.”
While I agree with much of the analysis of this piece, I’m not sure what to make of this assertion near the end.
“Western Civilization” is an abstraction and abstractions themselves don’t engage in wars, win or lose, sue for peace or dictate terms of surrender. Russia’s opponent, Ukraine appears to be a proxy agent for NATO, and given that NATO is the U.S. plus vassal states UK, Germany, etc., and given that the U.S. ruling class and those of its Western European allies are themselves dismantling the culture of Western civilization of their own peoples, how or where is Russia threatening Western civilization?
Russia is not any threat to Western Civilization. However, the mere existence of an independent Russia is regarded as an intolerable threat to the fantasy world inhabited by the US ruling class. The US regime threatens Russia and China, who are now allies against their common enemy. That’s our common enemy too.
How or where is Russia threatening Western civilization?
Russians are Europeans, but they are considerably different from Western Europeans. They have a Eurasianist ideology which is widely popular. The ideology justifies the opposition of Russian and Europe. Regardless, now that the war is ongoing and the casualties are mounting, the Russian government has the domestic political cover to stir up trouble across Europe and North America in all sorts of ways and make the case to the Russian public that such actions are helping their war effort. This includes supporting immigrant waves into Europe and America – they did this to Poland prior to this invasion. Who knows what they are giving the Mexican government to facilitate the current Border Crisis.
That makes Western man the meat in a kosher sandwich. Putin is under significant influence from the Chabad Lubavitchers.
And also Putin is strongly influenced by the Red Chinese. The “victory” of Russia is the Chinese victory. However, in the long run, the defeat of Russia is also the Chinese victory.
This is a great article. It includes a note of optimism that there might be a compromise peace in sight. If there is, it will be despite fanatical opposition from the US Deep State, which has provoked this war. (Trump and Biden were just front-men, like the greeters at Walmart.)
The US regime wants this war to continue indefinitely, killing thousands of Russians and Ukrainians. That is the standard modus operandi for the Evil Empire. They wreak havoc worldwide, for no rational purpose and against the US national interest.
However, China and Russian are allies now. Together, they’re strong enough to resist the Evil Empire. That is good news for the American people, and bad news for the US Deep State.
Left-leaning friends who reflexively opposed all recent wars — Falklands, Bosnian or Gulf — and who were deeply skeptical of Britain’s casus belli on those occasions, are this time around unanimous that Mr Putin’s enterprise in the Ukraine ‘must’ be defeated, preferably with ‘our’ assistance.
Formerly cautious, thoughtful and independent-minded persons have gone all ‘gung ho’ over Britain’s prospects of ‘taking on’ Russia, simply discounting humanitarian considerations, the complex and perilous nature of the conflict and above all the comical imbalance of military might!
Certainly Mr Putin has been puffed up by the British media almost into a diabolical figure, being the purported font of such scourges as Brexit, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Protest outfits CND and ‘Stop the War’ are notable for their absence from our streets, there are no “Imperialist Hands off the Donbas!” posters to be had from the Swappies(*), and in a bizarre obversion of Cold War prejudices, the only ‘good’ Russians are apparently either dead, dissident or deviant.
I am no apologist for Mr Putin’s brutal ‘Special Military Operation’, but I find the British media’s incessant repetition of simplistic pro-Ukraine propaganda, vilification of the Russian people and the unthinking drift towards a wider war that could end in catastrophe for Europe (if not the world) both mystifying and horrifying.
Surely an armistice followed by negotiations is the best course at this juncture? I pray that sanity will prevail and that the meddlers and warmongers on both sides who have stoking up this hecatomb on the Pontic Steppe will be sidelined.
(*) Socialist Workers Party cadre who haunt shopping centres and campus concourses on rainy afternoons handing out flyers and hawking the party organ.
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