1. The US wanted this war to happen. It saw it coming and it liked what it saw. Russia ramming its head against Ukraine was desired by US elites and US officialdom (the people in suits who talk on television).

The US had been spoiling for a proxy showdown for years. Why? To isolate Russia, to make sure Europe would no longer be so energy dependent on Russia and would buy energy from sources that fill the US coffers. To drive the demand for weapons. It worked brilliantly. All of Europe is re-arming. Western weapons are being tested in the Ukrainian laboratory of death. Quite like Israel tests its weaponry on its almost entirely defenseless Palestinian guinea pigs and then sells those weapons with the attractive ‘battle tested’ label.

A peace deal in the months right after the 2022 invasion was shot down by the US and the UK (former Prime Minister of Israel Naftali Bennet – fanatical about Israel’s right to kill Palestinians – has outed this, showing again that Israel is not a real ally of the US, otherwise he’d have kept this quiet. He had to walk back his claims later.

2. The US hegemony is dying. Other countries are rising. Latin-America and Africa are starting to go their own way. Iran and Saudi Arabia are close to some détente. Turkey is starting to think outside of the NATO umbrella. China is quietly buying up Europe and is bribing its diplomats and European members of Parliament with as little as tickets to soccer matches. You can look into the case of Huawei to see how this works. India, China and Russia are not at each others throats and have some potential to work more closely together to undermine the dollar. Japan is a demographic slump, its late stage capitalism is making it increasingly harder to want to have babies or to even find a partner or to be able to have sex with a real person. China seems hell bent on at some point storming Taiwan and taking it in a matter of weeks.

There are many shifts going on, too many to list, but they all point to a slow motion collapse of US power. The brains behind US foreign policy are well aware of what is happening. The US is slipping. Undermining Russia any which way it could without a direct confrontation was top of the agenda. Trump may have an instinctual understanding of this. Biden likely did not and was just going on with plans laid out by others. He probably never fully understood his role in all of it. Obama didn’t either. This course was hardly shaped by US presidents at all. It’s less visible US officialdom that steered this course. For decades the US aggressively demonized everything Russian. An easy target since, yes, there is a ton of rot in Russia.

3. Europe could have guaranteed that Ukraine would never become a NATO member, that it would remain neutral. Of course it provoked Russia so that it could soon expect to have nukes aimed at Moscow installed at its front door. The West couldn’t resist getting its hands on vast natural resources in Ukraine. This is already a done deal. Even if Ukraine somehow manages to win, it has lost control of its own fate. There will be mass privatizations, foreign members of the rapacious class will cash in and some clever Ukrainian ‘entrepreneurs’ as well. All assets Ukraine has outside of Russian occupied zones are already being carved up by the rich.

4. Ukraine got just enough to fight Russia to a tenious stalemate, but it never got enough to win.

Officially you will hear this is to prevent that Putin snaps and uses nukes. What is really happening is that the weapons industry wants conflicts to go on indefinitely so it can keep selling its products. Plus, the US wants to bleed Russia dry in a protracted, vicious, costly war of attrition. Shockingly, Russia is willing to sacrifice huge numbers of its young men. Probably not its most educated or well-connected, but it has enough of powerless cannon fodder. The Russian mentality can take these hits. Very few countries in the world would not fall into utter despair and political disintegration after losses like Russia has been suffering. Israel is mentally close to collapse if it loses a few hundred soldiers, the same for every European democracy. Of course, Russia has a much bigger population, but even percentage wise it simply is willing to absorb more death.

5. While Ukraine supposedly fights for freedom, freedom inside Ukraine is crumbling

No elections, rampant corruption, a draft system that works in bizarre, inefficient ways, just like in Russia the college educated, the connected and the moneyed can avoid being drafted.

6. The millions of Ukrainians, who have left, are likely not going back. Ukraine has taken a severe demographic hit. It is improbable that Ukraine ever gets back the one fourth or so of its territory currently under Russian control.

7. What you hear in the media is a carefully groomed narrative of ‘Russia all bad’ and ‘Ukraine all good’.

There is almost no context. The focus is always on Putin as the power hungry megalomaniac who either wants to recreate the Soviet Union or Tsarist Russia anno 1815 (depending on which western talking head you’re listening to). Even very long form interviews on PBS, which go much deeper than anything in the corporate media, focus solely on Russia being the culprit. They don’t lie directly. They lie by omission (in German this is called ‘Lückenpresse’, the media of holes.)

8. Was it wrong of Russia to invade?

Strictly ethically speaking, yes. As William Tecumseh Sherman famously said: ‘War is hell and you cannot refine it’. If you choose war you know you are going to plunge untold numbers of people into the deepest anguish and agony and usually people who truly have no part in all of it suffer the most. Sometimes, rarely though, it is the right choice. In this case I would argue Russia still had insufficient grounds to do this. Go tell a Ukrainian man who’s worked his entire life to provide a decent life for his family and was never politically active and whose son was killed while playing soccer somewhere in the east of Ukraine that Russia had every right to do this.

So why did it? Not invading could have led to the rise of stronger separatist movements in Russia. No show of direct military action could long term have led to further fragmentation of Russia. It could have signalled to other former parts of the Soviet Union that they could choose their own course. Russia knew the US was trying to claim the European market for itself and denying it to Russia. From the Russian perspective invading Ukraine was about nothing less than the survival of the Russian nation, not just as a geographical entity but of the values its stands for. It also cultivated the delusional idea that Ukrainians are simply Russians who don’t speak proper Russian, but some variant with a funny accent.

Allowing Ukraine to go its own way, would be like opening the door to what it sees as western societal and cultural degradation, the death of traditional families, of self-discipline, of traditional macho manliness, etc.

I mean, even staunchly pro-Russian westerners usually don’t want to go and live in Russia, cause… they know Russia is rather less thrilling than Tolstoj, Dostojevski, Pushkin and toasting with vodka with sentimental, rough hewn, but with hearts of gold, exuberant patriots. Russia is oligarchs who rent apartments for their 19 year old twinkies, it’s a sham court system, it’s a dog eat dog economy, it’s living as if victory over Nazi-Germany was just yesterday, it’s women monetizing their erotic capital – if they can. It’s millions of people in remote areas who know only Russia, have barely any idea of what lies outside Russia and the mentality has likely not evolved much since Gogol’s Dead Souls or the Revizor, but now with smartphones and no attention spans.  

It is very understandible though that many people sympathize with Russia, because many are sick and tired of US imperialism steamrolling across the planet and never stopping to learn any lesson. The US organizes wars, not to win them, but to generate corporate profits. Iraq and Afghanistan and now Ukraine are huge gravy trains for some segments of the US financial elite.

Russia is no innocent lamb in all this. It has displayed some colonizing tactics of its own in Ukraine. It is an oligarchy. It does have an autocratic system of government. Its government propagates some bizarre theories and – just like Israel – is driven by national myths. Result for Ukraine in particular? Denying that there is such a thing as a Ukrainian people, suppression of the Ukrainian language, culture. Conversely, Ukraine has not always respected the local drive in some Yes, it was morally disastrous to invade, but Russia was also baited into doing so by people who look like the good guys in western media. The west has been stepping on Russian toes, intentionally, for decades, and unfortunately Russia, after the fall of communism, got plunged back into some sort of hybrid form of feudalism and capitalism.

Ukraine also deserves some blame for shelling its own population pre-2022 invasion. The west will say that Ukraine was reacting to ‘little green men’ from Russia infiltrating the east of its territory, but perhaps it could have then and there found a peaceful solution by declaring neutrality and ceding some territory. By then there was already a new Ukrainian nationalism growing that couldn’t allow any concessions and as mentioned before, the US ordered conflict. Ukraine and Russia delivered.

Some things simply aren’t black and white.

9. Western condemnation of Russia’s actions is not about morality

Israel can snipe children. Blow out their brains, put fist sized holes where their heart used to be and smirking suits will deny this and the media will say: ‘it’s complicated’ or ‘according to the Hamas run health ministry’.

Western media and officialdom will use any tactic to minimize or deny or cover up Israeli atrocities.

Not so with Russia, dead Ukrainian children get names. Palestinian kids die anonymously, unless valiant, yes, valiant, social media knights manage to spread their names.

If a country can kill kids without a real backlash, then you know that financial and political interests are being protected. Real backlash is not just words from institutions and academics and the whole spectrum of what makes the west look decent.

The media will also analyze Russia’s national myths and try to defang them, but it doesn’t do this for Israel.

The preferred Russian interpretation of history is deconstructed, sometimes even correctly, but the preferred Israeli interpretation of the Naqba and everything that’s happened since is never challenged.

The media’s story on event changes based on where and with whom the western top layer of the food chain stand to benefit. And the little players whose careers depend on maintaining the western narrative do the dirty work and make lying by omission a dark art, a way of life.

10. The west and Russia have been vying for control of Ukraine for quite some time

Russia wanted a pro-Russia government in Kiev and the US/Europe wanted a pro-western government. In 2014 it practically organized a coup. That whole Victoria Neuland affair you have certainly heard about countless times on social media or platforms like YouTube is real, yet swept under the rug by western media. The west will focus on whatever it can find to show that only Russia was meddling in Ukrainian politics.

11. The people dying in this mess probably don’t even know why they are dying

If you’re on the front lines as a Ukrainian or a Russian you may have pure motives. Everyone is different and many seem to have a genuine kind of patriotism and are essentially fighting with the idea that their families will benefit. The reality is a bit different though. Do those men in the Ukranian army really wish to die so their female fellow citizens can drive around in SUVs in Warsaw, Bratislava, Vienna, Berlin, etc and shop at Victoria’s secret, lick ice-cream in the park and find a wealthy local to hook up with? European cities are overrun with these Ukrainian ladies and male draft dodgers who couldn’t care less about who is dying in the trenches for their ‘freedom’. And if you’re dying on the Russian side… Gas and oil oligarchs thank you for your service while they wonder which sports club to buy next. It’s a poor man’s fight and a rich man’s war on both sides.  

If you are from the west and claim you are in Ukraine to fight for Europe’s freedom I strongly suspect that this is just a cover story. Most likely these guys have something to prove. To friends who never saw their athletic skills. To the people on Instagram who don’t like their posts. To ex-girlfriends who hurt their male ego by dumping them.

Maybe they go because they believe that if they ever get back as heroes they will get laid easily. Maybe it’s to show to their daddy that daddy was wrong to belittle them. I mean, who in this world where money, status, comfort, bodily pleasure and attention seeking are the Gods people serve, goes to Ukraine to die for something as abstract as freedom? This isn’t the addictively morally clean Braveheart dimension, this is the 21st century world, people wrapping themselves in cute cover stories while frantically pumping their egos.

And who really benefits? The people who have lots of stocks in weapon producing companies, the puppets who are in politics to speak on behalf of them, or people with companies with a less clear connection to the war industry or some stake in plundered Ukrainian assets.

Sometimes you run into someone and they can’t give you any details about this war and they will shrug and say: ‘I think the whole thing is just about money.’

Well, yes, in a way they are correct. Money is the puppet master, but the puppets involved in the tragedy dance for individual reasons of their own.

Some heroically dance to their grave and some manage to dance a more self-serving dance than others.