Wednesday, February 8, 2023

'Something Big Is On The Way'

Mercouris: "Something Big Is On the Way"
Mike Whitney 



“The Russians have decided there is no way to negotiate an end to this. No one will negotiate in good faith; therefore we must crush the enemy. And that’s what’s coming.” Colonel Douglas MacGregor (9:35 minute)

“Strictly speaking, we haven’t started anything yet.” Vladimir Putin

The war in Ukraine is not going to end in a negotiated settlement. 

The Russians have already made it clear that they don’t trust the United States, so they’re not going to waste their time in a pointless gabfest. What the Russians are going to do is pursue the only option that is available to them: They are going to obliterate the Ukrainian Army, reduce a large part of the country to rubble, and force the political leadership to comply with their security demands. 

It’s a bloody and wasteful course of action, but there’s really no other option. Putin is not going to allow NATO to place its hostile army and missile sites on Russia’s border. He’s going to defend his country as best as he can by proactively eliminating emerging threats in Ukraine. This is why Putin has called up an additional 300,000 reservists to serve in Ukraine; because the Russians are committed to defeating the Ukrainian army and bringing the war to a swift end. Here’s a brief recap from Colonel Douglas MacGregor:

Washington’s proxy war with Russia is the result of a carefully constructed plan to embroil Russia in conflict with its Ukrainian neighbor. 

From the moment that President Putin indicated that his government would not tolerate a NATO military presence on Russia’s doorstep in Ukraine, Washington sought to expedite Ukraine’s development into a regional military power hostile to Russia. 

The Maidan coup allowed Washington’s agents in Kiev to install a government that would cooperate with this project. PM Merkel’s recent admission that she and her European colleagues sought to exploit the Minsk Accords to buy time for the military building in Ukraine confirms the tragic truth of this matter.” (“US Colonel explains America’s role in provoking Russia-Ukraine conflict“, Lifesite)

This is an excellent summary of the events leading up to the present day although we should spend a bit more time on Angela Merkel’s comments. What Merkel actually said in her interview with Die Zeit was the following:

“The 2014 Minsk Agreement was an attempt to buy time for Ukraine. Ukraine used this time to become stronger, as you can see today.” According to the ex-Chancellor, “it was clear for everyone” that the conflict was suspended and the problem was not resolved, “but it was exactly what gave Ukraine the priceless time.” (Tass News Agency)

Merkel has been sharply criticized for admitting that she and the other western leaders deliberately deceived Russia about their true intentions vis a vis Minsk. The fact is, they had no intention of pressuring Ukraine to comply with the terms of the treaty and they knew it from the very beginning. What we know for a fact is that neither Merkel nor her allies were ever interested in peace. Second, we now know that they maintained the fraud for 7 years before she spilled the beans and admitted what they were really up-to. And finally, we now know from Merkel’s comments that Washington’s strategic objective was the opposite of the Minsk agreement. The real goal was to create a heavily-militarized Ukraine that would prosecute Washington’s proxy-war on Russia. That was the primary objective, war on Russia.

So, why would Putin even consider negotiating with people like that; people who just lied-to-his-face for 7 years while they flooded the country with weapons that would be used to kill Russian servicemen?

And what was the objective that compelled Merkel and her Washington colleagues to lie?

They wanted a war, which is the same reason why Boris Johnson put the kibosh on an agreement that Zelensky had negotiated with Moscow in March. Johnson sabotaged the deal because Washington wanted a war. It’s that simple.

But there is a price to pay for lying, and that price comes in the form of distrust, which is the pernicious erosion of confidence that makes it impossible to resolve issues of mutual concern. Russia’s deputy chair of the national Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, expressed his views on the matter just this week in the bitterest terms. He said:

The behavior of Washington and others this year “is the last warning to all nations: there can be no business with the Anglo-Saxon world [because] it is a thief, a swindler, a card-sharp that could do anything…. From now on we will do without them until a new generation of sensible politicians comes to power… There is nobody in the West we could deal with about anything for any reason.” (Ex-Russian President outlines timeline for reconciliation with the West, RT)

So, if we know that Russia is going to try to end the war by defeating the Ukrainian Army, then what should we expect in the near future?

That’s a question that has been answered by a number of analysts who have followed the war closely from the very beginning. We will provide a few paragraphs from each of them in a minute, but first, here’s a recap of the meetings that took place last week that suggest a major Russian offensive may be just weeks away. The excerpt is from an article at Consortium News by Patrick Lawrence:

Alexander Mercouris… recently listed the exceptional series of meetings Putin has held over the past couple of weeks with the entire…. military and national security establishment. In Moscow, the Russian leader met with all of his top military commanders and national security officials (including) Sergei Surovikan, the general he put in charge of the Ukrainian operation….

Putin subsequently flew to Minsk with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu for exchanges with the Belarus political and military leadership. Then it was onward to meet with the leaders of the two republics, Donetsk and Lugansk, that were incorporated via referenda into the Russian Federation last autumn.

It is impossible to avoid concluding that these back-to-back meetings, barely covered in the Western press, portend a new, near- or medium-term military initiative in Ukraine. As Mercouris put it, “Something very big is on the way.”

Among the most interesting encounters in all of this took place in Beijing last week, when Dmitry Medvedev, currently deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council and long close to Putin, had talks with Xi Jinping….

At some point in the not-distant future, the war of hollow rhetoric in behalf of imperial hubris will weaken and drift toward collapse. This degree of Surreal detachment from reality simply cannot be sustained indefinitely — not in the face of a new Russian initiative, whatever the form it turns out to take.” (PATRICK LAWRENCE: “A War of Rhetoric & Reality“, Consortium News)


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