Let’s cut through the Western media cope and look at the material reality. A new report from CSIS lays bare the absolute failure of the imperialist strategy against Russia. It confirms what those of us with a materialist analysis have been saying for years. Russia is is successfully holding its own against the full force of the NATO war machine and its proxy.
On the economic front, the West’s “unprecedented sanctions” were supposed to collapse the Russian economy. Instead, we’ve seen a masterclass in how a sovereign state with resources and planning can defy the anarchic chaos of global capitalism. Russia successfully offset the flight of parasitic Western capital by mobilizing its state led economy. While Europe flounders, Russia has deepened its ties with the emerging multipolar bloc, China, Iran, and DPRK, bypassing the Western financial system. The report admits that even a recession will not destabilize political situation because the Russian people understand this is a war for national survival against an expanding imperialist bloc.
Meanwhile, we see growing political chaos unfolding in Europe where the public was not prepared for the economic blowback that resulted from the economic war on Russia.
Militarily, the narrative of a backwards Russian army has been completely shattered. The report details an astonishing transformation. Russia is now producing over thirty thousand drones a year with their number set to double by 2026, and is now launching salvos of thousands at a time. They have adapted their tactics, learning from early setbacks to become a brutally effective grinding force. Russia is also recruiting tens of thousands of new contract soldiers every single month whle Ukraine is conscripting grandfathers and students off the streets. In a war of attrition, Russia’s demographic depth and political will are proving superior.
Most damning for NATO is the admission of their strategic defeat in the report’s own scenarios. A total Ukrainian military collapse is still considered possible as US aid wanes.
The authors start taking flights of fancy in their conclusions where they claim that forever war is the most likely scenario. However, even here there is an admission that the most likely outcome is a total victory for Russia’s core strategic goals.
The report explicitly states that as long as this conflict persists, Ukraine will be unable to join the EU or NATO. Let that sink in. The entire point of this war for Russia was to prevent NATO expansion. By simply continuing the fight, Russia achieves its primary geopolitical objective. NATO has been checkmated. The unipolar moment is over, and a multipolar world is being born from the ashes of this failed imperialist project.
On the other hand, russian victory would send the entire EU into a collective psychosis on a scale never seen before.
I’d argue the EU is already there.
We are already there because Russia has already won.
Exactly, there are still a frantic attempts to paper over this obvious fact, but it’s becoming harder to keep up the illusion by the day. I expect once Pokrovsk falls the real panic will start. It’s also possible that Zaporozhye will be an even bigger disaster because it’s going to put Russia right on the Dnepr. At that point Ukraine’s logistics will be completely cut off from sea access. Russia has also massively escalated attacks on the energy infrastructure in the past week, and that can also collapse logistics for the AFU.
I don’t think anything substantial will change in how the conflict is portrayed in the Western media after Pokrovsk/Krasnoarmeysk falls. Just like after Avdeevka or Bakhmut/Artyomovsk fell, which were both far more consequential, any of those battles which were previously touted as decisive then got swept under the rug and declared strategically unimportant.
I suspect they will even do the same for Slavyansk and Kramatorsk. They will keep finding ways to spin and cope and memoryhole their previous stories right up until the whole thing collapses. When that point will come is hard to say. Losing the Dnieper crossing at Zaporozhye would definitely trigger a crisis, but i don’t think that losing territory is their biggest problem.
Their biggest problem is running out of manpower, running out of any actually effective weapons other than small FPV drones, and running out of air defenses. And we are already basically there on all three counts.
The reason I think it’s significant is because it’s a major logistics hub in Donbas. Once it falls, it’s basically going to cut off southern part from the north, and the rate of collapse could accelerate very visibly. Ukraine is also feeding a lot of their best units to try and hold Pokrovsk, as they always do. So, the AFU will also be more depleted as a result. Part of the strategy Russia uses is to create these cauldrons which forces the AFU to pull their units out of well defended positions where they’re much more vulnerable.
Of course, it might not end up being the inflection point people expect either. We’ve seen the AFU manage to hold together before when it seemed like the situation for them was catastrophic. I’ve definitely learned to tamper my expectations here.
liberals don’t seem to really care much about the war, which seems to be a sign of russia winning. but at what point will russia be able to say that it won?
Russia will say that it won when it considers all its objectives to be achieved. Those objectives are pretty clearly spelled out: no NATO in Ukraine, demilitarization, denazification. At this point the trajectory is clear and it’s only a matter of time, even if it takes another year or two, there is nothing that Ukraine or NATO can do to stop the Russians from achieving those objectives sooner or later, short of full scale war between NATO (=USA) and Russia, which won’t happen.
Right now the US and EU are just trying to delay the inevitable by sacrificing more Ukrainians to buy time to further destroy Europe’s welfare states in a desperate attempt to rearm (which will probably fail thanks to the now chronic energy problems in Europe, the inability of the privatized MIC model to produce something that actually works at a reasonable cost, and of course the overall neoliberal hollowing out of the industrial base).
Every imperial objective other than destroying and subjugating Europe has failed. Regime change in Russia is a distant fantasy. Russia is not being weakened by the conflict, it has only been growing stronger the longer this goes on. And the West’s global hegemony is cracking and coming apart at the seams with more and more global south countries gaining confidence to pursue an independent path. The recent Tianjin summit has illustrated this quite starkly.
i wouldn’t put it past them to do a
photo op, but russia and the rest of europe are gong to be dealing with disaffected nazi terrorists for decades.
on a scale never seen before.
tall order, we seem to be very prone to this…
Despite US mediation attempts
What mediation attempt, the one where our government and the UK convinced Ukraine to drop the peace deal early into the war?
Who’d trust the government on mediation attempts when you can see them trying to maneuver the knife behind your back? Better to smile and nod and do whatever the hell you wanted to do the in the first place.
CSIS that’s like ISIS for cissys right?
spoiler
well I guess regular ISIS is too
such an irritating style of writing jfc
I find they pretty much have to do it because they need to present the facts, but they also need to frame them in a way that isn’t too divergent from the established narrative. This necessarily leads to the tortured style of writing we see in the report.
CSIS
admits that Russia is winning the war, and NATO’s strategy has failedis an organization created by the Kremlin in its quest to destroy Western civilizationFixed.
I promise that Russia will lose the war tomorrow.
🤣
Hopefully the conflict ends this year and we can stop throwing away Russian and Ukrainian lives for lines on a map, then again I’ve been hoping that since 2022
I hope so as well, although I’ve learned to not get my hopes up over the past three years. The west has proven very resourceful at keeping the war going.
