Dmitry Orlov

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Throwing myself at a wall of willful ignorance and self-delusion doesn’t seem to be working, so let me try something else. Here are my top five Western media narratives. I hope you like them.

Russia didn’t invade; it intervened in order to stop a genocide waged by the Ukrainian régime against its own population in the east of the country.

The Ukraine’s army has already lost to Russia and the Ukraine no longer exists as a nation. It has lost over a million soldiers, a fifth of its territory and half of its population. Its demographics are so dire that they leave nothing much worth discussing.

The fact that Russian troops haven’t occupied all of the formerly Ukrainian territory is beside the point: why should they rush (in the case of the bits Russia will want, such as Odessa and Kiev) or bother (in the case of the bits they probably will never want, such as Lvov)?

Narrative 2: There needs to be a negotiated peace in the Ukraine

There will be no negotiations between Russia and the former Ukraine or between Russia and anyone else regarding the former Ukraine. That has already been tried: there were the Minsk agreements, which, it was later admitted by European officials, were only intended as delaying tactics. There was the İstanbul agreement, cancelled by Boris Johnson as dictated by the White House crew.

Also, negotiations require a negotiating partner, and the Ukrainian officials are, after spending over a decade killing and maiming civilians, both in the east of their own territory and later in Russia, are no longer suitable as negotiating partners on account of them being terrorists. Negotiating with terrorists is generally a bad idea; it is far more appropriate to simply kill them.

The Ukrainian officials can either simply die (as has sometimes happened with them throughout history), or run away (as has happened more often), or surrender and be hung by the neck in a public place (that would be most traditional).

Narrative 3: The Ukrainians are a distinct people struggling for their freedom and self-determination

There is no Ukrainian ethnos; these are simply Russians that have been subjected to a singular form of abuse called “ukrainization” by the Poles and the Austrians in the second half of the 19th century, then again by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s, by the Germans during World War II, and then again after the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became, quite unexpectedly, an independent state in 1991. Finally, after the US-instigated bloody coup in 2014, the Americans put ukrainianization on steriods, constructing a strictly ukrainianized totalitarian reign of terror in an effort to turn the Ukraine into a sort of battering ram to use against Russia in a now failed effort to weaken and destabilize it.

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Narrative 4: The Ukraine will need to make certain territorial concessions to Russia in order to achieve peace: Crimea, possibly the Donbass.

The project of Ukrainian statehood wasn’t a success and is being terminated. Russia will annex whatever bits of the former Ukraine it wants and turn the rest into a demilitarized, denazified, deukrainianized buffer zone. Any armed forces that blunder into that zone will get killed. Russia will take as many years as it needs to achieve this result; there is no rush at all.

The regions that have already been added to the Russian Federation — Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye and Kherson — are still partially occupied by Ukrainian forces (except for Lugansk which is free) and this situation is being remedied. These regions have been accepted into Russia via a public referendum, written into the Russian constitution and are de jure Russian. Whether any other country recognizes them as such is not a legally valid consideration.

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Narrative 5: NATO involvement and escalation in the Ukraine risks starting a nuclear war

Nobody in NATO wants to die for the Ukraine. NATO has been involved in the Ukraine for at least a decade now, probably more. Sending more NATO troops to the Ukraine will simply mean more dead, wounded and missing NATO troops.

The purpose of the Ukraine, as far as NATO is concerned, is to put pressure on Russia, not to commit suicide using nuclear weapons. In turn, Russia has no reason to start a nuclear conflict. It is not under any sort of existential threat. In fact, it is doing just swimmingly: the people are unified, the president is more popular than ever, the economy is growing nicely and the Ukrainian conflict is moving in the right direction slowly but surely. Yes, there is some trouble with terrorist attacks organized by the Ukrainian régime with the help of the CIA and the Brits, but that’s not existentially dangerous.

US and its allies would not start a nuclear war because they know they would lose it. How can you lose a nuclear war? Simple! You can lose a nuclear war by having your nuclear weapons become obsolete. Look at the US nuclear triad: the Minuteman III ICBMs, on active duty since the 1970s, fail one test after another and give no reason to think that anything like the declared numbers of them would launch, fly to the target or explode. When they do work, they follow predictable ballistic trajectories and are very easy for the Russians to shoot down using their latest air and space defense systems.

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Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/4bffb1ae-0935-4bc4-879c-f08e330be094