RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-two-ways-of-war-in-ukraine-russia/?utm_source=Spectator+World+Signup&utm_campaign=

Ukraine’s devastating attack on the Crimean Bridge and Russia’s sickening response — deliberately targeting civilians — perfectly encapsulate how these adversaries are fighting this war. Ukraine has a coherent strategy, effective operational design, and close coordination among its forces. Russia is failing because it has none of this.

The centerpiece of Ukraine’s strategy is eviscerating Russian combat power without getting into a raw slugfest that would sacrifice its own troops. That means knocking out Russian combat power without a head-on battle, wherever possible. How does Ukraine do that? Mostly by executing precision strikes with US and NATO weapons, aimed at Russia’s local headquarters, supply depots, and rail and truck lines, which transport fuel, food, heavy equipment, and ammunition to frontline troops. Ukraine identifies those vulnerable sites with superior, real-time intelligence from its drones, US satellites and spy planes, and partisans behind enemy lines.

Attacking the bridge over the Kerch Strait fits snugly into that strategy. By hitting the rail line, Ukraine has crippled a vital link between Russia and Crimea (and Kherson). The only other rail link from Russia to those provinces runs through Zaporizhzhia, near the battle lines. Ukraine is certain to target it soon.

Once Ukraine has weakened Russian positions, it tries to flank and surround enemy forces wherever it can, rather than driving straight at them. (Ukraine was almost drawn into that brutal war of attrition in the Donbas before recognizing the peril and changing strategies.) When Russian forces realize they will be cut off, they typically withdraw without a bloody confrontation. Ukraine then moves forward, consolidates its position, reestablishes its supply lines, and repeats the process. This approach, plus surprise, is how Ukraine retook Kharkiv province last month. Now, without the element of surprise, it is repeating the process in northern Luhansk, beginning by cutting off Russia’s resupply links.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/10/how-and-why-vladimir-putin-survives/

The first attempt to realise Karl Marx’s dream of a communist utopia happened in the former Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1991.  According to Stéphane Courtois, co-author of the seminal The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press, 1999), victims of that communist regime have been estimated to range around 20 million.[1]

On January 1, 1992, “the evil Soviet empire”, to borrow a term from a landmark 1983 speech by Ronald Reagan, finally came to an end. It collapsed and was replaced by 15 new nations, the largest and most populous of which was the Russian Federation. The imperial white-blue-red flag introduced by Peter the Great was reinstalled as the national flag in 1993. The Russian Church’s national holidays were restored.

For most Russians, however, the early 1990s was a time of despair, uncertainty and hardship. During that period, real power laid entirely in the hands of local oligarchs. As noted by Orlando Figes, a British historian best known for his outstanding books on Russian history, those oligarchs “behaved as if they were the government”, demanding posts from the then-president Boris Yeltsin, who was barely able to carry out his job due to heart attacks and heavy drinking. “The state was in danger of breaking into fiefdoms controlled by the oligarchs”, Figes says.[2]

By the end of the 1990s the Russians were desperately hoping for someone who could save their nation, someone who would be healthy, patriotic and … sober. It is in this context that a former intelligence officer was manoeuvred into power in the mid-1990s. Vladimir Putin had just returned from Germany to his hometown of St. Petersburg. In due course, he became the city’s deputy mayor, and, in 1996, he moved to Moscow. On 9 August 1999, he was appointed first deputy prime minister and later that year Yeltsin resigned. Then Putin became Russia’s acting president.[3] 

Putin was a candidate in that year’s presidential election. He campaigned with the promise of a “dictatorship of the rule of law”, thus appealing to everyone tired of the lawlessness of the past decade.[4] As a result, Putin duly won in the first round of that election with 53 per cent of the vote.[5]  Ordinary Russians, desperate for an end to their misery, believed they had found in their new president an energetic politician who could lead the nation towards a brighter future. Indeed, the early 2000s were marked by a remarkable recovery of the Russian economy, which allowed ordinary Russians to enjoy unprecedented levels of comfort and security.[6]

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18966/china-xi-leader

Having changed the party’s constitution, he is no longer required to retire at age 68 and, heading to be 70 next year, he may hang on to power for another 10 years. Nevertheless, things may not be as easy as Xi hopes.

The Chinese Communist Party, with a membership of 98 million, is full of young and ambitious men and women who regard Xi and others in his generation of party chiefs as “Red Princes”, sons of first-generation Communists who owe their ascendancy to nepotism.

Then there is China’s huge and rapidly growing military machine, which consumes over $200 billion each year and contains tens of thousands of young, highly educated and ambitious officers who may not see Xi, a man with no military background, as the sole arbiter of the nation’s fate.

Xi faces two other problems.

First, the Chinese economy is clearly slowing down, with hundreds of businesses going bust and tens of thousands of projects abandoned, while stagflation looms on the horizon.

The second is what some see as systemic corruption. Xi has launched a massive anti-corruption campaign, even issuing death sentences for some senior party figures. But many in China suspect that he is using the campaign as a cover for purging opponents in the party.

When he took over as China’s leader 10 years ago, President Xi Jinping was hailed by Western experts and media as a man who would open the path for major political reforms to reflect the rising tiger’s economic transformation. Some even saw him as a wiser version of Mikhail Gorbachev and speculated that he might adopt the end-of-history narrative by accepting democratization as the only option for a modern industrial power.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/10/06/canadas-dilemma-n1635249

Canada is in serious trouble. To arrive at that conclusion, all one need do is pay attention. In evident violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms embedded in the Constitution, essential to a functioning democracy, Canada was one of the few countries in the world determined to coerce vaccine mandates and impose possibly illegal travel apps and quarantine protocols. These measures have been paused, but the government obviously maintains the right to re-impose them at a moment’s notice. “The process and app remain in place.”

Undeterred in his march toward despotic rule, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is poised to introduce a digital currency, which will give the government financial control of banking and discretionary spending at the expense of private citizens and consumers. He is simultaneously engaged in implementing a Digital Identity Program, associated with the World Economic Forum’s Known Traveler Digital Identity initiative, on the way toward establishing a Social Credit State which Trudeau blazons as “the most advanced digital jurisdiction in the world.” Canada is now a satrap of the World Economic Forum in Davos that believes in global governance, wealth redistribution, and costly and dysfunctional environmental and climate edicts at the cost of national solvency.

The net-zero carbon emission legislation is part of the same plan, as is the virtual outsourcing of national health responsibility to the World Health Organization (WHO) — the bunch that Florida Republicans regard as a terrorist group. The Online Streaming Act Bill C-11, perhaps the most restrictive of its kind in the West, would permit the government to regulate the individual’s videos, podcasts, personal content, and various online feeds. Former CRTC commissioner Timothy Denton describes the measure as a “power grab over human communication.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18909/cyprus-turkey-migration

The Cypriot government says that Turkey is orchestrating this illegal immigration crisis, as most migrants coming to Cyprus travel from Turkey. They reportedly fly from Istanbul or Ankara to the Turkish-occupied north of Cyprus, are then smuggled to the free, southern part of the Republic of Cyprus, and from there, under EU law, can apply for asylum.

On September 11 of this year, the EU recognized the instrumentalization or “weaponization” of migration by Turkey….

In 1974, Turkey invaded the Republic of Cyprus and forcibly displaced the indigenous Greek Cypriots from the north in a violent ethnic cleansing campaign, accompanied by murders, rapes, forced disappearances and other atrocities.

Since then, Turkey has implemented policies meant to erase the Hellenic identity and civilization of occupied northern Cyprus.

More financial support or migrant housing centers are not the solution to the illegal immigration crisis in Cyprus. The unending number of illegal migrants are apparently intended to outnumber and replace the indigenous Cypriots. Cyprus suffers from both illegal Turkish occupation and the mass illegal migration.

“This year… We had 4,250 births so far, as opposed to 12,000 migrant arrivals. This is not happening anywhere else in the European Union.” — Costas Constantinou, director general of Cypriot Interior Ministry, Cyprus Mail, July 5, 2022.

What the Republic of Cyprus appears to need is an end to the illegal Turkish military occupation and an end to the EU’s appeasement of Turkey.

“Turkey, which illegally occupies one third of our country, is exploiting immigration to change the demography of the island for political purposes…. Many argue that the time has come when the Cypriot government should follow the example of Denmark, Poland, Greece or Hungary to stop this ongoing nightmare.” — Savvas Iacovides, veteran Cypriot journalist, to Gatestone, September 2022.

The Republic of Cyprus, 36% of which is illegally occupied by Turkey, is increasingly struggling with a massive wave of illegal migration from Turkey, the Middle East and Africa.

Cyprus now has the highest number of asylum applications per capita of any EU country. Nearly 5% of the island population, according to the country’s officials, is now made up of asylum seekers.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18961/china-monroe-doctrine

The Chinese have proved in word and deed their intent to dominate the rest of the 21st Century.

Unlike like the gruesome tactics of Vladimir Putin, the Chinese apparently seek to the acquire that global position without the need to fire a shot. Nuclear weapons in their arsenal? No question. A strong military? Yes, with a navy that has a significant ability to challenge our Pacific fleet. Space exploration? They are already there. Digital dominance? Well on their way, with the ability to monitor the thoughts, comments, and opinions of over one billion citizens.

But is their economy with which they seek to relegate the United States to a second-rate world power — with their knowledge that it was a bankrupt economy that ultimately dismantled the Soviet Union.

The latest insight into their strategy for unassailable global dominance comes from the sea and it has little to do with their new aircraft carrier or deep diving submarines. Rather, it has to do with fish.

The New York Times has published an exhaustive study of China’s fishing industry, describing it as “a global fishing operation unmatched by any other country.” The intensity, scope, and proximity of their fishing fleets to the waters off the Americas prompted the Times to observe, “The scale has raised alarms about the harm to the local economies and the environment, as well as the commercial sustainability of tuna, squid and other species.”