“Those who fail to learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them” –common paraphrase, original attributed to George Santayana
by Geoffrey Churchman
It’s not something that needs to happen, and is definitely not something that the Russians want, but the Hitler-like obstinacy on the part of Zelensky and Nato warlords to concede any territory or in fact any of the conditions specified by Russia in June 2024 for a cessation of hostilities on their part make it inevitable.
It’s obvious to anyone, except the Leftist Legacy Media, that Ukraine is Stuffed. Standard & Poors has given the Zelensky regime a D credit rating (which means that it is defaulting on its debts), inflation is hovering around 15% and all the syphoning off by Zelensky’s henchmen of the billions of dollars in aid from Nato countries (NZ has given them another $US 10 million) means that its treasury is having difficulty paying its troops and civil servants.
And for Nato’s warring, weaponry is extremely low after the vast quantity that Blinken-Biden sent to Zelensky and a lot was sent to Israel by Rubio-Trump in June this year. Soldiers — how many Nazi volunteer divisions and press-ganged non-Nazi troops are left?
The situation now looming is an effective repeat of the battle for Budapest of World War II when along with the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross, Waffen-SS divisions were sent there to defend it, which they did for 102 days between November 1944 and February 1945. Hitler had declared Budapest a fortress city (Festung), which was to be defended to the last man.
It wasn’t pretty: 38,000 civilians died in the siege and a similar number of Nazi troops. After the battle Budapest lay in ruins, with more than 80 percent of its buildings destroyed or damaged, among them historical buildings like the Hungarian Parliament Building and the Castle. All seven bridges spanning the Donau (Danube) were destroyed. There doesn’t seem to be an accurate figure for the number of Russian/Soviet deaths but it must likewise be in the tens of thousands.
The other big question is what will happen after the fall of Kiev? Will Russia offer the western territories that were respectively part of Romania and Poland before WWII back to them? Will Ukraine then become a rump state?
One thing that we can be sure about is that Russia doesn’t want to be an occupying power in the larger part of what can legitimately be considered historic Ukraine — occupation as the Nazis learned in WWII, and Dubya in Iraq, results in resistance activity initially and then insurgency, even if Ukrainians would be economically better off under the Russians they will be hostile.
Beyond that, Nato’s warlords will be seething about having lost and will be scheming about reinvading. Their economic sanctions against Russia and its allies will last indefinitely, no matter how much it costs them. The counter to that, however, is sure to be the rejection of war by European citizens who find their steadily increasing level of impoverishment because of their dictators’ actions unacceptable.