” Betrayed”!, shouts the headline in Der Spiegel, Germany’s top left-wing news outlet.
” Trump’s embrace of , Putin is a Molotov-Ribbentrop crisis for Europe” , , declares , Ambrose Evans-Pritchard , in the , London , Daily Telegraph.
The putatively pro-Trump , New York Post , devoted , its , Feb. 21 , entrance website to , an expanded screed , against the US senator by neocon , wordsmith , Douglas Murray.
From the shrieking in the , war , camp, you’d assume it was the end of the world. But it’s not the end of the world: It’s just the close of them. Little fails like a loss, and the twenty-year effort to change the Russian government from Ukraine lacked blatant failure as the Russian Federation built more arms than the entire NATO combined. Unrelenting Russian increases  , hollowed out the Ukraine Army.
The war group’s only desire is to blame their loss on Trump, and to roll out the , conflict , until it becomes a permanent position of , war.  ,
Trump has proposed a great plan for a worldwide arms race reduction that would allow the United States to reduce its defense budget by half and prevent a potential British debt crisis.  , That may leave the everlasting national protection establishment in Washington, Brussels, and London useless and poor.  , The establishment won’t go down without a struggle.
The Biden Administration feared that the Russian economy may crumble under US restrictions. In March 2022 , President Biden , declared,” The Russian economy is on track to be cut in half” . , On the contrary, real per capita GDP in Russia was 6 % higher in 2024 than in 2021. Prices and high interest rates have been caused by Russia’s round-the-clock combat economy, but they now produce and spend more than they did before the war started.  ,
The , entirety , of the foreign legislation establishment—from , progressive globalists like Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan to neocon Republicans like , Trump’s dismissed National Security Advisor , H. R. McMaster , and former Defense Secretary , James Mattis , insisted that , Ukraine did love Russia with sufficient American aid.  , They were thunderingly bad.
At the cost of Western Europe, Asia benefited from discounted Russian energy imports.  , As the European media support Deutsche Welle reported , February 22:
In 2021, about 50 % of Russia’s export went to European countries … However, by the end of 2023, less than two decades after the war began on February 24, 2022, the image was entirely transformed.  , Recently published figures for 2023 show China and India out in front as Russia’s two main export markets, accounting for 32.7 % and 16.8 % respectively — half the total. India accounted for only 1.5 % of Russian exports in 2021, compared to 14.6 % for China.
To the surprise of European war managers, Russia produced more weapons than the combined NATO states, increasing its overall weapons output , threefold,  , including , seven times more weaponry shells , than the combined West , according to , Estonian , military knowledge estimates.  , India, Turkey, the original Central Asian Russian States, as well as China all increased their imports to Russia,  , investing in local economies to avoid financial sanctions on Russia.  ,
The foreign policy creation didn’t say convincingly that Russia’s market is on the verge of collapse, but it continues to , lay about the state of the battle on the ground.
The Western press is full of wildly exaggerated reports of Russian casualties, and Ukraine refuses to release casualty statistics.  , But the best estimates of US military intelligence officers , state that Ukraine’s casualties are significantly higher than Russia’s – and Ukraine has a quarter of Russia’s population. Some 6.3 million Ukrainians are registered as refugees in Europe, and a reported , 650, 000 Ukrainian men , had , fled the country to avoid military service , as of November 2023. Today’s total is higher.
Western media , claim that Russia is taking heavy casualties in “human wave” assaults. This is pure invention. The war is waged on a small-unit level, with dozens rather than hundreds or thousands of soldiers present at any one time. A senior US military intelligence officer who covered the Ukraine war in a memo from January:”…
There are few troop , movements or assaults that involve larger-than-platoon forces. In fact, on any given day there might be 150-200 “assaults” by the Russians. A single assault will involve one or more squads, each of seven-to-10 troops, moving on a Ukrainian position.
The two or more squads aren’t tightly coordinated; instead, they are simply attacking in the same general area at once. Prior to the Ukrainians ‘ engagement with the APC(s ), the assault typically involves being moved to the forward lines in one or two armored personnel carriers and dropped off.
The squad then divides into three to four-total-trooper fire teams and moves forward. They search for Ukrainian troops as far as they can and go forward. Once discovered, the Ukrainians engage the Russians using both their own and whatever else they have available, including FPV drones ( suicide drones ), FPV drones ( suicide drones ), artillery, and aviation, if applicable.  ,
The attack continues until everyone in the slit trench, bunker, building, etc., in front of them is dead. Then they leave.  ,
As can be seen, using such tactics, and with the goal of killing Ukrainian soldiers , versus taking land as priority one, there is unlikely to be any sort of “breakout”.
Russia, in contrast to Ukraine, allows the publication of accurate casualty statistics, such as those found on Mediazone, which” combates through numerous Russian websites to locate reports of individual family members who have died in combat.” According to the cited US intelligence officer, these numbers have closely matched estimates made by various outside observers who have used verified reports from various units and scaled those up to obtain estimates.
Mediazone reports that current Russian dead ( end of December 2024 ) is just short of 87, 000 and gives an upper bound of 120, 000 to that number. Checking of their numbers shows that about 17, 000 have died in the last 100 days – the period of the renewed Russian , “offensive”.
Russian soldiers killed in action , (KIA )  , total between 87, 000 , and 120, 000 through December 2024, which implies wounded in action ( WIA ) of between 305, 000 and 480, 000. The claim of 40, 000 Russian casualties per month by the Ukrainian General Staff is simply unsupported by close scrutiny and likely to be overstated by at least 100 % ( they are more than twice as many ).
Ukraine casualties, in this intelligence officer’s estimate, are at least  , 108, 000 KIA and 375, 000 WIA. But , the more likely numbers are 160, 000 KIA and 640, 000 WIA. In addition, Ukrainian desertions are tremendous. There were more than 100 000 Ukrainian soldiers facing desertion charges, according to reports from various different sources as of the middle of December.  , Russia is suffering huge losses but, in absolute terms, Ukraine’s losses are probably worse. When taken as a whole, against the fact that Russia has a population of nearly 150 million ( 5 times larger than Ukraine ), the war of attrition is not sustainable.”
Whether Russia or Ukraine started the war is an issue for sophists, not strategists, but the mainstream media , have made it an obsession.  , Trump , declared February 18 , that Ukraine ” ,should have never , started”  , the , war three years ago,  , to howls of protest from the war camp.
Technically, as Trump acknowledged in a Fox News radio interview February 21, Russia fired the , first shots. But , Trump has  , stated repeatedly that , Zelenskyy’s insistence on , NATO membership for Ukraine was a tripwire for war.  , He told , venture capitalist , David Sacks  , in a podcast , last June,  , as I reported , at the time:
” Biden was saying all the wrong things.  , And one of the worst things he was saying was, no, Ukraine will go into NATO.  , When I listened to him speak, I said, this guy’s going to start a war. As you may well know, there has never been any talk of Russia entering Ukraine for years. That would have never happened. Russia was never going to attack Ukraine.”
Russia , advanced a plan – , the so-called , Minsk II , agreement – for , an independent, sovereign and , neutral , Ukraine, with autonomy in language and , cultural matters for Russian majority areas.  , Zelenskyy and his backers in Washington and London , abandoned the agreement.  , The long-serving former German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared in her memoirs, published in November 2022, that the West , pretended to negotiate with Russia on the Minsk II framework” to buy time” for Ukraine to re-arm.  ,
Putin’s response to the extension of NATO to the Ukrainian-Russian border was the same as America’s response to the prospect of Russian missile deployments in Cuba in , October , 1962.  , As the Russian leader , declared , on February 23, 2022, on the eve of the war:
The Alliance, its military , infrastructure has reached Russia’s borders. This is one of the main reasons behind the European security crisis, has had the worst effects on the entire international relations system, and has led to the loss of trust.
The situation continues to deteriorate, including in the strategic area. As part of the US project to build a global missile defense system, positioning points for interceptor missiles are being established in Romania and Poland. The launchers deployed there are widely known to be capable of operating Tomahawk cruise missiles and offensive strike systems.
In addition, the United States is developing its all-purpose Standard Missile-6, which can provide air and missile defense, as well as strike ground and surface targets. In other words, the allegedly defensive US missile defense system is expanding and developing its new offensive capabilities.
According to the information we have, it is possible that Ukraine’s membership in NATO and the subsequent deployment of NATO facilities are already in the makings and only a matter of time. We clearly understand that, given this scenario, the level of military threats to Russia will increase dramatically, several times over. And I want to point out right away how much more likely it will be that someone will strike our nation right away.
Just , as President Trump said, Ukraine and its NATO backers provoked the war.  , Not only did they provoke a war that never should have begun, they bungled its execution, woefully underestimating Russia’s capacity to , adapt to new warfare technologies, and overestimating Washington’s ability to , choke Russia , with , sanctions.  , The war party faces not only shame and humiliation but unemployment, and it will do anything in its power to prevent this.