A clear interview with Scott Ritter
I don't know the interviewer. The name "The Russian Front" is weird. Wouldn't the interviewer try harder to appear "unbiased"?
Some points of clarity:
1) Ritter is "rooting for Russia" because he thinks that a swift Russian victory will allow the US government will come to its senses. There's a certain feeling of desperation in this, in that it's hard to fathom the US government ever coming to its senses. The reason the Pentagon has spent the past seven decades preparing for (and provoking) Armageddon throughout the world, from the Bay of Pigs incident to Mutually Assured Destruction and beyond, is as an insurance against the possibility that the US government will ever come to its senses. (That of course is what Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" movie is about.) Generally, there's a certain desperation in doing any sort of "rooting," as if war were a spectator sport. What we really do is wait for the West and for the Russians to do what they do. It's nice to think that we have some kind of say in a war situation, because war is brutal. We don't. We can call for peace, and for negotiations. But we don't get to decide who wins.
(Just as an aside, I have yet to be persuaded of why I should have some fabulous stake in the matter of who wins. The inevitable outcome of any victory by any side will be kleptocratic, oligarchic rule.)
2) The "kill Zelensky" strategy also looks like desperation. At this point, Zelensky is (as we might have learned from Yuliya Yurchenko) merely the front man for a kleptocratic oligarchy. The kleptocratic oligarchy currently in power in Ukraine, moreover, is backed by an even more powerful kleptocratic oligarchy -- NATO.
3) Ritter argues that the primary bottleneck, the one thing ensuring the defeat of the Zelensky regime, is ammunition. He does this at 4:06 of the recording. In that regard, all of these calls to send hardware, especially among the so-called Left in Europe, seem unreal, not to mention unrealistic. Why would sending fighter jets and tanks be of any use to Ukraine if the primary problem is one of ammunition? (& one also wonders how the Ukrainians are going to be trained to handle all this pretty hardware they're getting when Russia's victory lap could come at any moment now.) Ritter does not offer an explanation of why the bottleneck -- however, this video offers one: NATO is simply not producing ammunition at a fast enough rate to replace what is being lost in Ukraine.
Is this true? What do you think?
4) On a side point to the Ritter interview: three weeks ago Michael Hudson argued, at 5:37 of this interview, that the Ukraine war was being prolonged for some sort of ulterior economic purpose, to discipline the rest of the world. Certainly Hudson's explanation would cover the Nord Stream pipeline attack, as well as how it came to be that Europe is now in the iron-fisted grip of US and Norwegian natural gas interests. But the global South is recalcitrant, and the proxy war does look like a rather irrational high-stakes gamble at this point.
Comments
irrational high-stakes gamble
yup, it is stupid on steroids. NATO/EU/US are betting the house on this misadventure.
No one wins in this sort of game. The FED can't print money fast enough to fund their
empire dreams. Euros are flying out the window. So we all suffer to prove what?
question everything
Slightly off topic but I think we need to focus
more on motives and intent rather than details of the struggle. Ie, why did this happen? Where is it going? Why is there so much passion one way or the other?
A couple of comments ago I opined that the players from the collective west have built and used the hatred of the rus to further their goal of subjugation and exploitation. They saw rus as nothing more than a big pile of resources that could be stolen, just like the colonialism did all over the 3rd world.
In my view there are a couple of different enemies (defined as anyone who is going to get you killed), one is the power behind the movement, the other is the cannon fodder placed between them and us (defined as us, we, the people). The third enemy is the whip group, the CEOs, the hedge fund managers, the Nulands, the Pelosi's, the Clintons, the Obamas, etc.
Rus cannot get to the powers. They are too dispersed and too anonymous from any public scrutiny. Eg, the WEF, Wall Street owners, etc. They are the ones who provide the means for their whips to operate. The whip group is immune because greed guarantees there will alwys be a replacement just as bad, maybe worse. Neither one of these groups gets anywhere near danger, again, greed and hubris keeps them away.
The last group is the fodder. The EU and NATO uses them. Some are in the line of fire close to the lines, others are used to catch the arrows in this country and provide the resources to continue. The other groups used hate and division as their whip.
Rus is working to convert, not kill this group. BTW, I think it is working and working well. The whips and owners are losing much of the fodder in the global south and in parts of the collective west. We in the US don't see the picture. All we see is the one that is painted for us.
Anyway, that's my opinion. I trust practically nothing that is allowed for me to see. Instead I look outside.
Which brings me to: Alex Christoforou in Athens (the duran) did a video interview with Ania K (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsggKAFr3nw) and I found what he and she presented to seem to hit the crux of the issue, ie, why the hatred? What is the lever that is used to convince them to throw themselves in front of the cannons (literally or figuratively)?
I got to that interview from the WOTB on reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/11e8hsv/alex_christoforou...) . You might find it interesting.
BTW, skip over the bullshit from Nancy, for obvious reasons. It's hard to get anything from her off your shoe.
Snow is melting here in the tri-cities. It's going to be a good day. Every day is a good day.
Hi Cassiodurus and exindy and QMS
Snow fell last night in NYC---just a drop---but i stayed in all day and listened to both the Scott Ritter interview and the Alex Cristoforou one with Anya A. Both were well worth my times as was the latest Duran which concerned the end of Bahkmut.
All of these were different in their approaches but came to the same conclusion. Russia will not be backing down because they have no reason to do so and have everything to lose if they bow to The West.
The USA OTOH seems to not have wrung every penny from Ukraine as yet so until this horrific adventure starts losing money America is happy to print more money and slaughter more Ukrainians.
NYCVG
thanks for presenting the sources
believe we are witnessing the fall of the empire
printing billions with no hope of recovering the losses
does not bode well for us
like slow motion suicide
at our expense
question everything
Okay I amended the diary.
I put in a new video of Andrew Napolitano interviewing Tony Schaffer, which explains what the problem is with ammunition. Unless these people are egregiously wrong it appears that there will be a vast change in the war's direction some time this coming summer.
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