Dmitry Orlov
Given that the Ukraine (or is it Iran) coverage in the West has been dominated by fake news fabricated at a facility near Kiev (that just got bombed), I am concerned that my readers might have the wrong idea of what’s happening there. And what’s happening there is rather important. The US had decided to use the Ukraine to fight a proxy war against Russia and now it’s losing this war.
This map shows the situation on the ground as of this morning. Areas in red are under complete control by Russian troops; areas shaded in red are in within range for Russian troops and are no-go zones for the remaining Ukrainian troops. The one remaining area shaded in blue is where the remaining Ukrainian troops are kettled. They are not moving, are not being resupplied, and are being neutralized.
So far fewer than 300 Russian troops have been killed, all of them officers or professional soldiers (volunteers serving on contract). There are no enlisted men involved in this operation on the Russian side. They are meeting minimal resistance from the population (being greeted with open arms in the eastern regions) and the Ukrainian recruits are surrendering quite willingly and are being treated well, fed and sent back to their families. The Nazi zealots are another story altogether and their life expectancy is plummeting.
The Russian forces are under orders to leave residential areas and civilians alone and to avoid disrupting civilian infrastructure as much as possible. They have a list of military installations to destroy and they are going through this list at breakneck pace, with over 1500 installations taken out already. They roll through cities blowing up the locations where the enemy is holed up. Where this can’t be done safely, they create exit corridors for the civilians to evacuate before moving in for the kill.
If I may be so bold as to make a prediction, the Ukraine—that strange multi-ethnic chimera concocted by the Bolsheviks—is finally nearing its end. Observe the Russian lines of attack on the map pointing north and south, which will in a few days join together. They are clearly cutting the Ukraine into three sections. Farthest east and south is Novorussia (New Russia), including the Donbass. Further west is Malorussia (Little Russia), which was the Ukrainian part of Russia. And farthest west is Galicia, which is not Russian at all (except for the Carpatho-Russian enclave) and is a tossup between Poland, Hungary, Austria and Rumania.
The end product of this might be one or two independent states, one or two loose confederacies and a permanently deranged western zone similar to the Idlib province in Syria. But it’s too early to tell. But this is the picture I get from watching the play-by-play, carefully assembled from verified local sources, many of them Ukrainian.
Remarkably, most Ukrainians stop speaking Ukrainian and go back to speaking their native Russian as soon as Russian troops show up. The spell cast on them for 30 years, most intensively for the past 8, is being broken and most Ukrainians are reverting to what they were to start with: Russians that got stuck outside of Russia when the USSR fell apart. All of that money the US had spent indoctrinating them and inculcating them a fake Ukrainian identity has gone to waste. And all off those Ukrainian Nazis the US and Canada had taken in after World War 2 and had been cultivating ever since are coming to a sticky end. The wages of sin are death.
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Of course, it is only right for the official language to be Russian. I don't think anyone would dispute this. But does this mean, Ukrainian speakers ought to forget their language? I hope not! Being able to speak several languages should be encouraged!