Death to NATO

As with every other move they have made so far to try and stick it to Russia, this too will backfire against them, possibly even more disastrously so than the sanctions. In that sense it is likely that such a move would just accelerate Russia and the global south's victory and the end of Western hegemony. However that does not mean that it is not a dangerous escalation. Indeed i wouldn't much care if a Mr Kinzhal shall we say "presented his business card" to Macron or Scholz in their offices tomorrow, but i do care that regular working class people would be caught in the crossfire, literally and metaphorically. It is working class people who would be mobilized to go fight their stupid war, it's working class people who would suffer deprivations of goods and repressions against anyone who would be against the war, it's working class people who don't have bunkers to hide in when the bomb drops...

Luckily there is still a good chance that this is just a last ditch desperate bluff, as Europe's militaries are in critically under-maintained, under-manned and under-supplied condition. Also, Russia has consistently acted like the adult in the room throughout this entire conflict and shown very mature restraint in the face of some extreme provocations. There is reason to trust that they will handle any possible trial balloon of western troops with the necessary finesse to manage the escalation responsibly.

By the way, i thought this was a very good comment from someone on Twitter on the topic of Russia responding to western provocations and escalations:

""Why don't the Russians do [x] in response to [y] provocation?"

Because they're serious people and not in the mood to be led around by their enemies.

"Reflexive control" is the control that you exert over an adversary's actions when they feel compelled to retaliate against you. The Iranians are quite good at it, they recently managed to get the US Navy to literally steam out of the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean and get into an ever-deepening engagement in the Red Sea - far from Iran, Syria, and Lebanon - by suggesting the Houthis start taking potshots at passing merchant ships. If every military action you take gets a symmetrical reaction then you can control the nature, venue, and tempo of conflict to your benefit.

Any observer of the Ukrainian War can tell you that the Russians rarely if ever launch operations that are directly retaliatory despite provocations - some of them as flagrant as obvious cross-border attacks from NATO countries - that are too numerous to list. If they did, WWIII would have started in 2022. Instead, the Russians have largely ignored these provocations, absorbed whatever minor damage has been inflicted, and carried on with their actual objectives. And because of that, who is in the driver's seat of the war right now?

Russia."

Minus the part about Iran telling the "Houthis" (Ansarallah) what to do, which i am skeptical is actually the case, this pretty much nails it why you don't want to be drawn into the trap of waging a reactive war.

We can all have our opinions about what Russia should do, but bear in mind you learn more from looking at what is happening and thinking about what could happen than by deciding what ought to happen when you have no way to influence the outcome.

You may think that Russia should be more aggressive but you don't have available to you the full picture that Russia sees. There is more to this conflict than just the military side, there is a larger diplomatic, geopolitical and economic game being played.

In the end their decision may surprise you, just as it is meant to surprise their enemies, to keep them guessing and unbalanced.

That's all valid criticism of the author of this blog who, as i have warned before, is clearly a right winger and comes with all the baggage associated with that position. I stick to posting their military analysis because it has proven to be a good summarization of information from various other sources that i usually read before this blog's articles and which allows me to verify the accuracy of the summaries that this blog makes. It saves me the time of having to collate all of the disparate info out there from various telegram channels, social media posts, articles, etc. As for whether their predictions are too optimistic... predictions are always difficult and one should be careful with them, both the optimistic and the pessimistic ones. I always take the attitude "wait and see".

On their second blog, yes, that is essentially sewage that i wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole and i am glad the author keeps the two separate and the military blog reasonably free of ideological insertions. Also, i don't ever scroll down to the comments on sites like this, i find that preserves my mental health. Ultimately it's up to you whether you want to accept sources of diverse ideological inclination or just stick to leftist ones. But if you pick the latter you will have fairly slim pickings. Sometimes good information can come from sources that we don't agree with ideologically. Hell, sometimes the most useful info comes straight from internal US intelligence agencies or think tanks because internally they are more truthful than in the propaganda they put out to the world. So it's a question of if it is productive to insist on ideological purity in your news and analysis.

If you don't find this particular blog's summaries enlightening or have a better source of up to date summarized news on the Ukraine conflict feel free to make suggestions and i'll take a look. So far i trust that the readers on this platform are adults who know to consume media critically and not allow the ideological bias of their sources to influence them. And after all, similar criticism could be raised of other sources that are frequently used by anti-imperialists, such as for instance The Grayzone (we had an entire discussion at the time when Ben Norton left them about how Max Blumenthal has some very dubious takes on certain issues...), but they are nonetheless a valuable resource.

I am glad that you raised this concern though because it is important to have these meta discussions every once in a while about the media that we use to keep ourselves informed and how we should treat it.

If a person has good geopolitical analysis and shitty takes on domestic politics and trans issues, does that invalidate their geopolitical analysis?

In my experience, few people (if any) have the correct positions on everything. This used to really bother me. I try now to just pick and choose sources according to how their opinions in their domain of expertise aligns with my values and knowledge. For example, I've gotten a lot of useful info and analysis out of the Duran people--a lot of their analysis and predictions regarding their us/Russia Ukraine proxy war has turned out to be correct despite them being paleocons and having bad takes on social issues.