Written in June 2023, but the points all still apply - the situation is just even worse now.

Since the SMO got underway, the collective West - i.e. the US, Europe and their allies, who also like to refer to themselves as The International Community - has sent Ukraine billions of dollars in cash and aid, some of which has been ‘lethal aid’, which sounds like food parcels laced with cyanide but in fact just means weapons. Western leaders love to trot out soundbites about standing with Ukraine “for as long as it takes”, but what do they actually mean by that? As long as what takes? Defeating Russia? Seriously? And why, exactly?

Ukraine isn’t a NATO member state, so the rest of NATO has no formal reason to help them, certainly not to the extent of sending them weapons to continue fighting Russia, but that’s what we’ve been doing for well over a year now. We’re treating them like a de facto member of NATO, but one that we’re conveniently not obliged to help; we’re just doing it because we care so much about their freedom, democracy, etc. We launched the sanctions war against Russia because we were so outraged about their totally unprovoked attack on their neighbour that we felt it necessary to try and destroy their economy and ignite a coup against Putin. But because we’ve decided that we’re not a party to the conflict, we’ve decided that Russia aren’t allowed to retaliate against us either militarily or economically, so if they do then we’ve decided that that will be unprovoked too. Hmm.

And what happened? The sanctions backfired spectacularly, isolating us economically and politically, and the weapons have mostly been destroyed, including on 13 May 2023 an ammunition dump near Khmelnytskyi that included the depleted uranium that the UK sent, creating a potentially radioactive cloud that may have passed over western Europe. I’m still waiting to see any mention of it in western media, but I’m not holding my breath.

Asking why we’re ‘helping’ Ukraine so much, is a question that is guaranteed to be met with angry and hurt-sounding liberal types talking about protecting Europe, not giving in to Putin’s authoritarianism, and other euphemisms for “because we are”. Obviously these people also dismiss all the extensive evidence of Ukrainian war crimes against civilians and terrorism in Russia as Russian propaganda (even when Ukraine boasts about it). The most you might get is an admission that it’s real but justified by Russia’s invasion, and Russia is doing the same anyway (because the news says they are). The fact that the Ukrainian war crimes have been going on since 2014 might be met with the rejoinder that it was all in response to Russian aggression in some form or another.

In the MSNBCNN liberal worldview, Ukraine has always been the underdog and Russia has always been the giant looming on the border, arming militants. In reality, Donbass has been the underdog since the DLPR declared independence, and Ukraine has been the giant angrily punishing its upstart rebels with extremist militants armed and trained by the West. Both Russians and people from elsewhere went to Donbass to fight these militants, but Putin came under intense criticism in Russia for not coming to the aid of the Donbass people sooner, since they were explicitly being targeted for their Russian ethnicity, and the Russian audience could understand very well what the Ukrainian nationalists were saying about them.

The continuing terrorism against the Donbass was a long-burning provocation that has been whitewashed in the west, one enacted with the intention of dragging Russia in militarily, which would provide justification for western sanctions, weapons supplies and maybe even military intervention. Putin and others would have been well aware of this, and they didn’t act until their hand was forced by Ukraine building up troops on the DLPR border in readiness to violently take back Donbass.

When Russia eventually did act, they acted decisively, recognising the DPR and LPR as independent states, destroying most of the Ukrainian air force almost immediately and providing air and artillery support for the DLPR troops fighting the Ukraine troops that had been built up on their borders. Suddenly, the narrative of Ukraine being the underdog appeared to ring true.

Formal support for Ukraine has taken the form of financial and military support, both for the country and for refugees abroad, and informal support has taken the form of aggressive media and and social media campaigns. Embarrassing memes like this one popped up, and people fell over themselves to Like and Love and Share them:

The informal support has been just as important as the formal support, in that it has legitimised in the public consciousness the massive formal support for a country that, as stated earlier, we don’t have any treaty obligations to help.

But the burning question is: what is our ‘help’ actually doing for Ukraine? Russia has an overwhelming military advantage (‘escalatory dominance’ as Obama put it), so the longer the conflict continues, the more the Ukraine army will be destroyed. At the end of March 2022, after most of the first iteration of the Ukraine army had been destroyed, negotiations in Istanbul resulted in a ceasefire agreement that would have put an end to the conflict, with Ukraine agreeing to cede Crimea, the DPR and the LPR. Then Boris Johnson visited his old buddy Zelensky in Kiev, and promised them more money and weapons if they kept fighting ‘for as long as it takes’. So the ceasefire went in the bin.

This was probably the point at which Russia/Putin realised that Ukraine is a state with no autonomy - sometimes referred to as a zombie state or simply 404 (‘State not found’) - and by no means a sovereign country. They have said repeatedly since then, that there is no point negotiating with Ukraine, or even the EU, only the United States. But they’ve also called the US ‘agreement-incapable’, meaning that Russia can make an agreement with one arm of government, only to have another arm of government, or the military, break that agreement.

Naturally, our media tells a very different story, one of a brave Ukraine standing up to brutish Russian aggression. What the news never says, is that ever since the start of the SMO, Ukraine hasn’t had a chance against Russia. They just keep pushing the lines that actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy keeps reading, which is that Ukraine just needs a few more tanks, a few more weapons, a few more billion dollars to keep them going long enough to take back Donbass, Kherson, Zaporozhye and Crimea.

This is fantasy. They couldn’t take Donbass and Crimea back at the start of 2022, when they had all of their original army (almost the largest in Europe), and there is no reason to think they can do it now.

So why do we keep supporting them, and why is Zelensky being told to keep saying this?

• All of the Soviet-era materiel that Eastern European countries have sent (which Ukrainians may already have been trained to use) has to be replaced at some point. NATO countries are obliged to only buy military equipment from other NATO countries, so that means big contracts for arms manufacturers in the US, UK, France and elsewhere. So what if the obsolete old Soviet tanks get blown up, along with their crew?

• Giving Ukraine lots of older Western weapons like the Javelins and NLAWs lets us feel good about having done something, even if they turn out to be useless because their batteries expired years ago and the people using them received bare minimum training on how to use them. So it makes the guy holding it a target, so what?

• As CBS reported and then withdrew, as little as 30% of military aid may have reached its intended recipient. A lot of what goes missing ends up on the black market - buyers there also complain about defunct batteries - and two French Caesar self-propelled guns even ended up in Russia. The mix of ammunition of different standards that we’ve given them might not be compatible with the weapons they have, but at least they can sell it on the dark web to someone who might have a use for it.

• The relatively new German Leopard tanks showed themselves to be ineffective in the disastrous Summer 2023 'counteroffensive', getting trapped in minefields and becoming sitting ducks for Russian artillery. Even the wonder-weapon US Patriot air defence systems have proven ineffective: they have been destroyed by the hypersonic Kinzhal missiles they were supposed to be able to shoot out of the sky, and their hyper-expensive missiles have fallen onto the cities they were supposed to defend (see below). The crews of these tanks and weapons systems are dead meat, but does anyone care?

• Ukraine is synonymous with corruption. Apart from the unaudited black hole of ‘aid to Ukraine’ that the US supposedly sends, there was the time the Ukraine parliament voted to give themselves a pay rise, and the quickly-forgotten scandal of crypto platform FTX having possibly been a conduit for funds from ‘Aid to Ukraine’ to find their way back to Democrat donors. And of course there are the Bidens, Burisma, and the other children of prominent US senators having high-paid no-show jobs in Ukraine for years.

So the grift continues, but only while the fighting continues. Ukrainian lives - and almost certainly the lives of soldiers from NATO countries, whom many military commentators agree must be manning the advanced weapons systems that Ukraine has been sent, because the Ukrainians simply haven’t had time to learn how to use these systems - continue to get traded for dollars, and the media continues to tell us that this is all ‘for Ukraine’ somehow. On top of that, the men fighting are practically abducted off the street, then sent into battle with virtually no training, inadequate weapons, and the threat of being shot by their own side if they try to retreat. They are literally cannon fodder to keep the war going as long as possible.

There’s always the possibility that the reason Zelensky keeps reading his lines is that he knows that his life, and maybe the lives of his family, are at risk if he drops the pantomime at any moment. He’s a Jewish, native Russian speaker, in a country where the security services are allowed to detain and disappear anyone they think might be a threat to the state, and the whole western media is on their side. If he says something off-script and suddenly winds up dead, undoubtedly his death will be blamed on Russia. It would probably even be used as an excuse for further escalation, but with a more hardline leader.

How can this all end?

The US was originally looking for regime change in Russia, and with the Wagner mutiny the media all got very excited thinking it might be happening, but it didn’t. Western leaders have also talked about aiming for a ‘frozen’ conflict, essentially a new Cold War era, with a DMZ splitting Ukraine into East and West. I don’t know what’s going to happen any more than anyone else, but Russia say that the SMO is going to plan, and we’ll have to wait and see what that means.

If the New Cold War proposition wins out, with the current US-led regime continuing to dominate Europe west of Ukraine, the media in this bloc is bound to keep up their story about the Ukraine conflict and its causes. They don’t have a choice any more; to admit that one part was untrue would open the floodgates to the rest of the truth spilling out. The Russia-controlled east will probably get to know the truth about this conflict, and I have to think that no one in eastern Ukraine will ever trust the West again.

If the US-led bloc doesn’t get the frozen conflict it wants, then it seems likely there’s no other option but for eventual regime change in Europe and a severing of ties with the US. Or maybe even more than that, since Russia has shown that they can handily defeat Western weapons, and the West barely has enough weapons to defend itself as best it can. The near future looks bleak, but I have hope that we can come through this for the better. The sooner we realise that America is not our friend, and Russia doesn’t have to be our enemy, the better.

Republished from The Reluctant Dissident.