RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/04/putin-should-have-brushed-up-on-his-clausewitz/

“The one lesson to be learned from this blatant land-grabbing invasion driven by nationalistic factors is that history repeats itself as both tragedy and farce. Clausewitz, as ever, could have predicted the outcome. Whatever happens, the Free World is behind the Ukrainians in their determination to defend their land. If the axiom that generals are always fighting the last war is applied, it would seem that this has been ignored by the Russian High Command – and to their cost. Whatever is to follow, we are seeing Stalingrad in reverse.”

Everything in war is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult.
                                                                                   –– Carl von Clausewitz

Six weeks after the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, both military experts and the watching public are more than a little surprised at developments and reconsidering views of fixed certainty that preceded the invasion. Against all odds and contrary to what was expected, the Ukrainians, with a far smaller army and less access to the latest in high-tech weapons, have more than held their own, preventing the Russians from taking any major cities, taking a great toll of their armour and planes and, of late, even advancing from their defensive lines.

None of this was supposed to happen. According to the rules of war, superiority in numbers is essential for victory: “Quantity equals quantity,” Stalin is reported to have said. The blitzkrieg plan was intended to destroy Ukraine’s airfields and air force, followed by an onslaught of armour and infantry supported by drone, artillery and missiles to take the capital Kyiv.

Far from it. Hand-held missiles have contained the airborne onslaught – Russian planes are now rarely seen –  as well as destroying many helicopters. Taking into account that truth is the first casualty, media photos have shown so many shots of destroyed Russian tanks and armoured vehicles that it is clear the armed fist of the invading force has lost its potency. In addition, hordes of soldiers have deserted, surrendered or been captured. Nor have the invaders presented an image of determination or aggression; rather, they come across as frightened and distraught young men bewildered to even be in a war, not having been told before that they were in an invasion. The interviews of tearful lads appealing to their mothers is not a good look in a well-drilled, disciplined and motivated army.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18405/turkey-what-happens-when-you-have-no-freedom

“In Turkey, human rights lawyers are particularly targeted for their work representing human rights defenders, victims of human rights violations, victims of police violence and torture, and many people who simply express dissenting opinions.” — Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, ohchr.org, June 9, 2021.

The government announced in 2020 that it had opened legal proceedings against 597,783 individuals, detained 282,790 and arrested 94,975 for allegedly being behind the 2016 coup attempt. Meanwhile, torture and abuse targeting the government’s perceived opponents have become widespread in prisons across Turkey.

“…alarmed by the fact that the Turkish judiciary displays, especially in terrorism-related cases, unprecedented levels of disregard for even the most basic principles of law, such as presumption of innocence, no punishment without crime and non-retroactivity of offences, or not being judged for the same facts again.” – Dunja Mijatovic, Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Council of Europe, February 19, 2020

Erdogan, meanwhile, claims there are no journalists behind bars…

It appears that, according to the Turkish government, dissent is “terrorism.” Anyone who does not support the government might be put in the category of so-called “traitors” or “terrorists” and punished by the government.

The citizens of Turkey who are perceived to be “enemies” or simply opponents of the government are targeted, abused, jailed, or even killed. If they are suspended from their jobs, they are blacklisted by the government, so that it is almost impossible for them to find another job. They are thus put in a situation where they face hunger and poverty daily. Their lives and livelihoods are systematically destroyed. Is there any Western country that treats Muslims so cruelly and unlawfully?

“Racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia and discrimination remain the main problem for the Turkish community in Europe,” Erdogan said at a press conference in Germany in 2021.

The statement was doubly ironic, as Erdogan’s regime has arrested and abducted countless Muslims. He has apprehended them from across the world for allegedly being, or supporting, “terrorists” behind a 2016 coup attempt.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/06/can-ukraine-ever-win/

Even a truncated Russian Federation has four times the pre-war population of Ukraine. It enjoys well over 10 times the Ukrainian gross domestic product. Russia covers almost 30 times Ukraine’s area. 

And how does Ukraine expel Russian troops from its borders when its Western allies must put particular restrictions on their life-giving military and financial aid?   

The interests of Europe and the United States are not quite the same as those of a beleaguered Ukraine. NATO also wants Vladimir Putin humiliated, but only if the war can be confined within the borders of Ukraine. 

The West seeks a resounding reaffirmation for the supposed “rules-based international order” that prevents aggressive invasions across national borders—but not at the price of a nuclear exchange. 

So to accomplish those grand agendas, the West restricts some of its generous supplies to Ukraine. It sends plenty of lethal weapons—as long as some of them will not provoke a losing Russia into doing something stupid, like resorting to tactical nuclear weapons to save face. 

There are other complications. Time is fickle. In theory, it should favor a resilient Ukraine. 

The longer the war goes on, the more sanctions will hurt the Russian economy and insidiously undermine Russian public support for the war. 

On the other hand, the longer the war continues, the greater the Russian losses, and the fewer acceptable off-ramps for Putin, all the more likely he will grow desperate and escalate to Götterdӓmmerung levels. 

Admittedly, Putin is no longer fighting to win over Ukraine and force it back intact into the Russian federation. He is no longer wary of eradicating infrastructure that he once felt would once again become valuable Russian assets. 

Instead, Russia is going full Carthaginian peace in Eastern Ukraine—leveling cities, murdering civilians, and destroying an entire modern society for generations. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18399/the-great-russian-energy-scam

Germany and several other European countries have largely banned fracking. This decision has transformed European leaders into the equivalent of 16th-century naval explorers, praying for favorable winds and weather as energy prices rise and fall depending on cloud cover and wind conditions.

In those days of autumn… the UN climate conference, was setting up its grotesque spectacle: a kind of ecological Versailles. The rich, powerful and virtuous of the planet gathered in Glasgow to pontificate to the rest of the West about how much we are harming the planet with our way of life. They arrived in their private jets to complain about the plague of air industry emissions. UK Chief Science Advisor Patrick Vallance said that everyone should eat less meat and fly less. Then came the news that 400 private jets would fly to the UN conference….

The British royal family has flown so long over the past five years that they have reached the moon and back.

While the Germans pontificated about the climate, the Washington Post informed us about their hypocrisy: “Germany presents itself as a climate leader. But it is razing villages for coal mines. The Garzweiler coal mine has already engulfed more than a dozen villages. Churches and family homes have been razed, agricultural land has disappeared and cemeteries have been emptied”. The Lützerath mine alone is twice the size of Manhattan. That is why Germany has been labelled as the most polluting country in Europe.

Thus, the progressive American pundits until October dreamed of an alliance between the West, Russia and China against global warming. Now that the West has isolated Russia, the largest energy supplier in Europe, no one is talking “green” anymore.

Russia, it turns out, has reportedly been promoting, often through “dark money” via Bermuda – which does not require countries to be named — “green” campaigns against nuclear power to ensure dependence by the West on Russia’s fossil fuel.

A German organization, The Climate and Environmental Protection Foundation, which received more than 17 million euros from Gazprom has also been accused of being a Moscow-funded “puppet.” — the Times revealed.

The Foundation for Climate and Environmental Protection was established last month in Mecklenburg-Pomerania by Manuela Schwesig… an ally of former German Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder, president of Nord Stream II Russian gas pipeline. He is still serving on the boards of state-backed Russian energy companies.

“Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations—environmental organizations working against shale gas—to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas”. — Former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen – Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2022

“We discovered that Gazprom financed environmental NGOs who acted as consultants to ministers to various governments, such as Belgium, which then supported the abandonment of nuclear power.” — Dominique Reynié, professor of political science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, in an interview with CNews.

China (now allied with Russia) is also funding Western environmentalists. – Unherd investigation, December 15, 2021

“With winter fast approaching, Europe finds itself in an energy crisis—and reliant on the tender mercies of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. It’s a self-induced disaster years in the making”.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/was-another-tragic-jewish-death-covered-up-in-france-

Not for the first time in France the death of a Jew is dominating the news, and not for the first time there are whispers of an attempted cover-up.

Several candidates in Sunday’s election have paused from their campaigning to air their views on the death of Jeremy Cohen, a 31-year-old who was struck by a tram in Seine-Saint-Denis, north of Paris. The candidates portrayed by the commentariat as ‘extreme right’ were the most direct. ‘Did he die because he was a Jew?’ tweeted Eric Zemmour, himself a Jew. ‘Why is this case hushed up?’ Marine Le Pen also wondered on social media if ‘what was presented as an accident could be an anti-Semitic murder’. Then she tweeted what many Jews in France will be thinking ‘How to explain the silence on this affair and its motivations?’ The Gaullist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan claimed the ‘violence was hidden for pre-electoral reasons’.

When Cohen, who according to his family suffered from a non-visible handicap, was killed on the night of 16 February the police investigation concluded that his death was an accident. On Monday evening his family released video footage in which some of Jeremy’s last moments are seen. They are disturbing. Surrounded and jostled by a 15-strong mob, Cohen is then seen running away towards the oncoming tram.

Cohen wore a kippah and his family claim he was targeted because of his faith. ‘Jeremy’s death is linked to an attack of which he was the victim – by a gang of young people immediately before being hit,’ said Gerald Cohen, in an interview with Radio Shalom, a French-Jewish radio station.

Cohen’s brother has criticised the police for closing the case too quickly. ‘A few days after my brother died, we were told that the case was being looked at as a traffic accident rather than an attack before they even watched video footage from the train and other evidentiary material,’ he is quoted as saying.

Had it not been for the determination of the Cohen family to investigate the exact circumstances of Jeremy’s death it would probably have remained an ‘accident’. They handed out leaflets and asked for information and eventually someone sent them the video footage.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/hungary-is-isnt-the-best-worst-place-on-earth/

Hungary held an election yesterday — which probably came as a surprise to a number Americans who’ve been convinced that the small Central European nation functions as a totalitarian state. The bugbear of the American Left, and false savior of nationalist conservatives, Viktor Orbán, won his fourth consecutive term. Fidesz, his party, won two-thirds of Parliament against a cluster of center-Left, socialist, environmentalist, and hard-right-wing nationalist parties (Jobbik has only recently moderated from its xenophobic and antisemitic stances, allegedly).

Trying to decipher European parliamentary elections through the prism of American politics is a waste of time. Orbán ran on a traditionalist, socially conservative platform. A referendum on a law limiting the teaching of gay and transgender issues in schools passed; the EU opposes such limits. He leaned into anti-war rhetoric as well as anti-Brussels sentiment, though Fidesz has no plans to leave the EU. It recently instituted a significant minimum-wage increase, and its economic positions have as much in common with statist progressivism as mainstream conservatism.

The truth is, Hungary is illiberal within the normal illiberal standards of modern Europe. And that’s bad enough. Hungary is singled out for ridicule mainly because it declines to share the cultural values of the European Union or the progressive Left, especially pertaining to social policies and to the flow of Middle Eastern migrants into the European Union, which Fidesz aims to block. These positions, in the parlance of modern debate, are “anti-democratic.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-next-phase-of-the-ukraine-war/

The fog of war doesn’t just apply to generals, sergeants, and privates. It applies to strategists and outside observers, including the best-informed journalists on the ground. All are swamped by a confusing barrage of information, some accurate, some not, none of it complete or definitive. That’s why, after over a month of fighting in Ukraine, it helps to step back, consider the basic outcomes, and try to project what will happen next.

Remember, though, the “fog of war” applies to these assessments, too.

First, let’s clear away Russian misinformation. The Kremlin’s recent claim that their main goal was never to seize Kyiv but always to take eastern Ukraine is simply false. They wanted both and the whole Black Sea coast, but their main goal was always to seize Ukraine’s capital, to kill or capture President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government, and to install a puppet regime, much like the one headed by Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus.

That ambitious plan failed for two reasons. First, Ukraine’s fierce and effective resistance stopped the Russian blitzkrieg on the capital city and began systematically destroying the invader’s stalled forces. Today, Ukraine is actually pushing those forces back, to the surprise of both Russian military planners and US intelligence analysts, who expected a swift and successful Russian campaign to take Kyiv.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18383/china-undercuts-russia-sanctions

“For China… the Ukrainian crisis provided a unique opportunity to increase its access to Russia’s natural resources, particularly gas, gain contracts for infrastructure projects and new markets for Chinese technology, and turn Russia into a junior partner in the relationship between the two countries.” — Report by the European Council on Foreign Relations, February 2015.

In addition to undermining sanctions through the commodities trade, China is possibly also helping Russia hide its money.

Despite all of the above, the Biden administration continues to talk about China as if proof were still needed that it is undercutting sanctions on Russia.

China has clearly been giving material help to Russia. So where are the “consequences”?

The closest that the U.S. has come to going beyond words is the announcement, along with other G7 leaders, of an “enforcement initiative” to prevent Russia from evading sanctions, but it is — presumably deliberately — unclear what that initiative actually entails.

“The trade and the purchase of long-term energy supplies undercut the sanctions, because it shows Putin he has got somebody in his corner for the next five years or more.” — Michael Pillsbury, author of The Hundred-Year Marathon, Fox News, March 21, 2022.

The Biden administration, by repeatedly threatening “consequences” and issuing “warnings” to China, “if” it helps Russia undercut sanctions, merely continues to project indecision, weakness and lack of leadership …[and] will only result in the additional loss of credibility and the further degradation of U.S. deterrence to the detriment of the West.

Despite tough Western sanctions on Russia, President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has now lasted for more than a month and Putin is showing no signs of backing down. The power helping him to withstand the effects of the sanctions and continue the war is Russia’s most powerful ally — China.