Oh they’ll claim NATO had to do it, that NATO intervened to save the poor Ukrainians, that they now live under glorious Polish/NATO rule instead of evil Putler rule and how much better their lives are and how actually they should have pushed further in and pushed the Russians out entirely.
Putin and Russia are now claiming what I saw several people mention as a possibility many months ago, namely that Poland will intervene once the Russian offensive gets started.
The US will probably let them do so because Putin said he’s cool with it and it will guarantee they can seize some Ukrainian assets and space to subject to neo-liberal hell to try and pay off all the money they spent.
The claim being that Poland will invade (with or without Zelenski’s approval) and annex a part of the the western country that they consider historically theirs (realistically more than that really because why not). They’ll probably send in NATO units after a time and basically carve the country in half. The question is, if this happens how soon and will they push to take a larger chunk of the country that might place them in direct conflict with Russian troops just to get that border closer to Russia (NATO’s goal or one of them afterall) or will they happily just occupy the western half, militarize it and let Russia have the current eastern annexed territories plus maybe a bit more? And will there still be a Ukraine, like with Kiev and this weird slice of vertical land sandwiched between areas occupied by Russia and Poland/NATO? Or will it entirely be dissolved into new Polish lands (whether they formally do this or claim they’re just holding onto it for them while in practice ruling it with no intent to ever give it autonomy)?
Poles are a bit unhinged to be honest in the things they say. The anti-communism reactionary fever they have has made them deranged and I honestly worry they’ll try something like invading Belarus or fighting directly with Russia. US doesn’t want this as it kiboshed their claims that stray Ukraine air defense missile that landed in Poland was Russian really quick but if Polish troops are eyeball to eyeball with Russian ones or on the border of Belarus they might not be able to stop them. Especially if Wagner decides to go on the offensive (RT recently reported that Lukashenko has said he worries about them) and I still think Wagner is mercenary enough that if someone were to pay them to stage an attack to allow a response that they might do so.
For what it’s worth RT is claiming this is a lie.
Well it’s an act of radiological terror. A war crime.
How they retaliate would be up to them. They likely wouldn’t use nukes (America’s policy for a response to a radiological attack on US soil by contrast would likely be a nuclear weapon if done by a nation state) but could do anything.
Another way of expressing this is there is a primary imperialist power, a primary contradiction like a vampire on the global south and global proletariat at large and that simply is not Russia. It is the US/NATO/EU/Eyes group with the US strongly at the helm (to the point of grievously wounding German industry by blowing up pipelines and them quietly taking it in silence).
This is the result of historical events and forces building up over centuries of time. The US invaded Europe in WW2 and saved the capitalists in western Europe from being liberated by the Soviet troops, they bailed out Britain in WW2 too. The European capitalists had no choice but to cede their power to the US as their new defender and military overseer. But their power in the relationship has been waning (it was really over the moment the US occupied Europe after WW2 in the pretext of defending it against Soviet invasion, a country is not free that is occupied by thousands of heavily armed troops from a foreign nation), their colonial grip was weakened, the US has drained them, subordinated them, had Gladio, has infiltrated them at the highest levels, has probable dirt and blackmail on most of their leadership, spies on them extensively without punishment or hope of escape, can de-facto cripple them at will, has the lion’s-share of military equipment, budget, etc. They are now junior partners, vassals really in this relationship.
The US thus took over centuries of building of European hegemony, colonialism (later neo-colonialism) over Africa, Middle East, etc from Europe. Not only that, the US pumped their culture into Europe, they convinced their peoples they are really as one with the US liberal project, that the US is their project and they the US project. Hollywood is a machine for this purpose but they also through the CIA paid writers, journalists, various forms of culture and manipulated things to bind these people to the US and its dominance.
Thus, if the US were to be mortally wounded tomorrow, it would not be simple for Russia to step into the US’s shoes and just become an imperialist power in the same weight-range in boxing terms. Because Europe would not be able to go along with it, because Europe has turned over the keys already to the US. Russia might like to do this, they are a capitalist power and aspire to be greater but the material and historical realities bind them from it. They bind us to a multi-polar world emerging from the collapse of NATO/US hegemony.
Thus from the perspective of all who want to smash the current order, Russia’s victory (or at least the US and Ukrainian defeat and humiliation and Russia being allowed to ease pressure off itself a little) is a positive for anti-imperialism. It results in acceleration of de-dollarization, it accelerates in the shackles loosening on Africa, even on South America.
It is much like arranging for an internal coup in a country, a mafia, any kind of organization, deposing the stable, well-liked, powerful grip, intelligent leader in favor and with the assistance of the brash upstart disliked by many elements inside with less friends and more enemies. It is a recipe for fragmentation, factions, strife, weakness, more struggle, etc.
Granted. I’m not saying all of them ever have been bad. Just that especially in the US and anglosphere in general they have serious issues in the modern day.
Where are these “actual anarchists”? Why are they not dealing with these fake anarchists? Unmasking them scoobie-doo style? Humiliating them in public in shouted debate. Shaming them for believing the US state department and not denouncing them for targeting a foreign “authoritarian” government over their own backyard first? Show me a large community of western anarchists, a publication, an online site (or are you saying no anarchists are ever online like ML’s because they’re too busy making weapons in their compound and debating loftily, lol, lmao even) who denounce this shit. I really don’t think you can. Sure, sure I’ll credit you that not all claimed anarchist communities or anarchists online are anarchists, but show me some real ones with some statements strongly contrary to this that aren’t just hand-wringing attempts to avoid being pinned down one way or the other. (Specifically some that are from something more than one person’s random blog/medium account, that have some backing and aren’t filled with seething anarchists calling them a crypto-tankie)
Just because you’ve distributed food besides them doesn’t mean you have proof they don’t want to or aren’t stabbing you in the back marching with liberals and Nazis on the subject of Ukraine and many others like Syria, China, Hong Kong riots, etc.
These are clearly not internet anarchists, they were very real. They went outside. They took the time to organize this and they took real actions, as real as your local food not bombs, as real as meeting up in black bloc to challenge a fascist march. I guess the ones who went to Syria to fight with literal Nazis were just online anarchists too.
And they don’t tank all left protests or movements. They only do so in support of the aesthetic of anarchism. So supporting racist CIA backed and organized kids in Hong Kong against Chinese communist police officers? You bet they do. Supporting the US as the “less authoritarian preferable victor” against Russia because of US propaganda they’ve accepted? You bet. Doesn’t mean they’d support the US rolling tanks into Havana because that goes against the aesthetic but they’re very useful in many ways against actual attempts against AES states, against anti-imperialist actors, in aiding and abetting the US/NATO imperialism machine.
Considering whose pockets they’re reaching into for more weapons the idea it’s a psyop seems far-fetched. Going to occupied Korea and making a big show of your supposedly super strong, world-mastering military alliance (NATO) running out of weapons and scrounging around for them doesn’t look particularly good for the west. Oh sure it doesn’t matter in the propaganda centers of Europe and the US but Africa and Asia look at this and think “they wouldn’t be able to win a war against Russia/China” which is bad for NATO and the US efforts of hegemony because those countries and peoples look then to China/Russia.
The fact is these production capacities are also as far as I know known factors. They didn’t suddenly dramatically lower them when Ukraine started to psyop Russia.
And China isn’t going to be fooled or impacted by the west having more weapons than supposed. Their production capacity and proximity to any conflict in the Taiwan straits means they will simply win. There is no way for NATO to win there and extra production capacity also doesn’t change the calculus that currently the NATO combined navies are enough to throw up a wider area (not close to China but further out in the Pacific) net and blockade around China on the seas which they couldn’t immediately break through.
I just don’t think the west is meaningfully misrepresenting the production issues but maybe I’m wrong.
And IMO it’s not a matter of the imperialists looking at production capacity or not, it’s a matter of there being certain realities. Constraints such as bad and no central planning, greedy defense contractors who want to maximize profit being reluctant to invest in massive new production capacity and lines without guaranteed, inked, in the public domain laws and budgets to guarantee those lines are funded far into the future and they don’t take on any risk from doing so.
I just don’t think the west is capable because of things like that of being that misleading about production capacity. Maybe they have some stockpiles they’ve “lost” in inventorying conveniently over the decades but stockpiles wouldn’t be enough in a war against China who would have active, massive production capacity.
We may also be seeing the west going for broke here. They may be suffering the gambler’s fallacy that just a few more billion dollars, just a few more shipments and Russia will suddenly run out of reserve weapons, that the Russians are just bluffing, that any day now they’ll succeed in depleting Russia and then the tables will turn in their favor. So they may be quite willing to deplete 90% of the west’s stocks of weapons banking on some suited ghoul’s notion that Russia’s reserves are on the edge of evaporating (no really, despite having said this for a year now they’ll be ever more convinced that they HAVE to be getting closer to that point and therefore must hang on and keep sinking reserves in). And there is some logic to that I suppose. If they can’t and don’t break Russia here the expenditure was for nothing and they’ve depleted their stockpiles just as they’ve been trying to line up a conflict against China to justify isolating and sanctioning their high tech industry further. So might as well go for broke at this point and hope the pressure does cause Russia to crack, results in a loss and forces them to capitulate, return most of the break-away regions (probably agree to disagree on Crimea would be acceptable to the west at this point to save face and score a W), and generally be humiliated.
Also, a reminder that in economic terms NATO is much, much wealthier than Russia. It also isn’t sanctioned by the global hegemon (themselves) to prevent them from acquiring everything from raw materials to finished products such as circuits, microchips, etc to try and cut off their ability to wage war. So bearing the burden of ten or twenty time’s Russia’s cost isn’t a problem for them at all as the alternative in the judgement of the US is losing hegemony. The real bottleneck is and will continue to be production capacity, can Russia destroy western weapons faster than they can produce more to ship there.
Kiev Nazis are proven liars. Please ignore literally anything coming out of their mouths that isn’t a sheepish admittance of being owned.
Also west would be caught with their pants down if it came out that Russian missiles - even the more expensive, rarer hyper-sonic variety - could just ignore Patriots and there wasn’t a god-damn thing they could do about them. It would undermine NATO’s core security posture, it would undermine their prestige, it would undermine their dangling them in front of other countries as “security assistance” if they found out they were worthless and most horrifying of all it would undermine the stock value of the defense contractors involved in producing them.
West has admitted to manipulating news, planting false stories for Ukraine as well.
I saw a post on a left-ish sub on reddit, can’t remember which one which using a picture meme claimed that NATO held an emergency meeting shortly after this and it is believed the subject was a collective freak-out and secrecy agreement not to talk about how their patriots are useless against Russian hyper-sonic weapons and are being destroyed by them.
Further I seem to recall the patriot has never had much proven beyond a shadow of a doubt successes against even decades old missile systems.
More than likely Ukrainians shot down something of their own or a single non-hyper-sonic Russian missile launched alongside a larger salvo of them and are making these false claims.
Think, what benefit would they get from admitting that western defensive counter-measures, including the most advanced, are useless? What benefit from admitting they are wide open? None. And every benefit from lying except credibility but their whole Nazi-loving reactionary regime is built on lies and lack of credibility.
Edit: Also recall that NATO and the patriots is in direct competition in the international marketplace of weapons and alliances against Russian defensive systems such as the S-300/S-400. So any proven inferiority or weakness directly strengthens Russia’s marketing of their s-systems.
They’d dearly like to punish Belarus. They don’t dare attack Russia directly because taking a nuclear blast to the face is not fun or profitable but they could be deranged enough to think Russia wouldn’t really use nukes to protect Belarus.
And as to intervening. They’ve invested a lot. It’s not just give-aways to the arms manufacturers and swapping out old stocks for new better, more profitable ones for the conflicts to come and spending a little coin to bleed Russia to try and weaken them. It’s the fact Ukraine has sold itself to western capital and if Russia takes it entirely or forces a capitulation to its own terms, such things might be annulled or ignored and at any rate if it goes back into Russia’s sphere it will be very hard to enforce such things. So invading even part of it as “peacekeeping” could be hedging their bets to make sure they still walk away from the board with something no matter what.
What’s dangerous is they could be betting that they could push the lines right back up to the territories that Russia annexed after a legal vote in them, declare Russia can have those but everything else is off limits and then proceed to not dismantle Ukrainian intelligence and allow them to continue conducting terrorist attacks deep into Russia and into the annexed new Russian territories while allowing them to hide under the NATO overcoat. Russia might suspect as much and doing so thusly could put us directly into a conflict between Russia and NATO at which point the chances Russia makes good on its warning and uses nuclear weapons increase. It’s a very dangerous and dicey situation. I think Russia understands it can’t just grind at the front forever and has to undertake an offensive to take Kiev or at least push further in and really put the screws to the Nazi fascist regime there.
Because the terrorism by fascists and their liberal stooges is what this is all about. It’s why Russia moved into Ukraine in the first place, it’s what set off this larger conflict because Ukraine couldn’t stop its Nazi battalions from committing genocide against Russian speakers and because they kept shelling and dropping bombs and trying to blow up bridges in Crimea. It’s what the US wants more of, a destabilized region on Russia’s borders, western/Ukrainian intelligence cells and their groomed Russian liberal agents. They can’t fight Russia directly but they can fund and fuel an insurgency, terrorist attacks deep into Russia, try and convince the Russian people they’re unsafe with Putin around and only getting rid of him for some more pliable puppet will bring them safety. Meanwhile it also encourages a brain drain as non-ideological and liberal types seek to flee a place beset by terrorism and still under heavy sanctions for the better paying, safer west. Much as how the west plundered Russia of many of its brilliant people in the 90s because of the situation of deprivation and misery after the fall of the Soviet Union.