06.03.2025 | 00:15
Nego, kada već spominješ "rusku propagandu", moram napomenuti da u tri godine ovdje nisam dao niti jedan članak ili analizu s ruske strane, uvijek su to bili zapadnjaci, gotovo svi Amerikanci.
I sada sam baš iz znatiželje otišao malo pregledati što pišu Rusi! Naravno, kao i na svakoj strani, ima svega, od ispraznog navijanja bez sadržaja, pa do korektnih komentara, ali odskočio je Dmitry Orlov, ruski inženjer koji je prebjegao u USA. Na kraju se kasnije vratio u Rusiju i sada komentira situaciju. Ne izgleda kao neki "bot", očigledno je dosta poznat kao autor jer postoji i na Wikipediji (koliko joj se može vjerovati). Može mu se zamjeriti što bespotrebno (rekao bih bez dokaza, zasnovano tek na indicijama) proziva Zelenskog da je narkoman. Osobno, nisam dobio taj dojam.
Evo, pa da unesemo novinu u raspravu, kada se toliko ovdje provlači "ruska propaganda", evo i toga!
Šalu na stranu, meni je zanimljivo pročitati viđenje situacije i iz ruske perspektive. Ne prenosim to jer se slažem s time, ima tu i nategnutih hipoteza, ali većina toga je ipak prizemljena i daleko manje "propaganda" nego ono što možemo čitati od naše strane o nama samima i Rusiji, pogotovo na mainstream portalima.
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"The times we are in are causing the usual talking heads to endlessly complain that events are unfolding too fast for them to keep up.
• One moment Syria exists as a sovereign nation ruled by a hereditary dictator supported by Russia and Iran; the next moment the dictator is gone, Russian and Iranian support is withdrawn and the territory is overrun by Turkish-supported al Qaeda remnants (who promise to play nice this time but don't) while the territory is divided up between Turkey and Israel.
• One moment the White House claims the former Ukraine to be its friend forever, to be lavishly supported "as long as it takes"; the next moment it is a corrupt dictatorship that must return in the form of natural resources all the money it has ever been given.
• One moment "transatlantic solidarity" is a catch word; the next moment the Europeans are undemocratic, against free speech and display totalitarian tendencies while ignoring the wishes of their electorate (which wants peace with Russia).
• One moment, Russia is a pariah state nearing collapse, "a gas station masquerading as a country" with "its economy in shreds," losing its war against the mighty Ukraine; the next moment it is a certified world power with legitimate national interests that offers a long list of essential exports not available elsewhere.
Let's slow things down a bit, so that we can see past the calleidoscopic display of media noise. Looking at it from a strategic American point of view (because, say, we wanted to make America great again — just for the sake of the argument), China is most certainly a competitor — or is it? Just look what the Chinese did to the artificial intelligence bubble on the US stock market by releasing an LLM that is not only better than the heavily financialized US-produced ones but actually free (Open Source, that is). The AI market tanked because why would anyone pay lots of money for something that is free? To be sure, the whole neural net thingy is just a bit of math plus lots of hardware to run it on. If the hardware is a commodity and the math is free, there goes all the hype.
Other ways of competing with China are equally unsuccessful. The US wanted to snatch fancy chipmaking away from Taiwan but... couldn't because there aren't enough Taiwanese engineers in Arizona to make a go of it. The US limited Chinese access to fancy microchips and in return the Chinese limited US access to rare earth metals needed to make the fancy microchips: a tit for tat. In the background, the US and, specifically, the US defense industry, can't get along without plentiful Chinese imports of just about everything that's manufactured. Highly effective financial managers in the US offshored most of its manufacturing a long time ago and now it doesn't have the engineering talent to bring it back because its entire talent pool has been sucked into finance, software and services. The inevitable conclusion is that the US and China are not competitors because the US can't get by without China and can't compete with it.
Is Russia a US competitor? As the 3-year conflict in the former Ukraine has demonstrated:
• Russia can fight a major, high-intensity modern land war, with tanks, artillery, drone aircraft of all sorts, rockets, all the way to hand-to-hand combat, against a military trained by NATO, equipped with NATO weapons, and provided with satellite and air reconnaissance information by NATO including battlefield internet access via Starlink.
• It can do so while making steady battlefield gains, suffering at least 10 times fewer casualties than the enemy, always on the attack. It can produce more war materiel than all of NATO combined without the use of imported parts. Its warfighting technique is called "attrition": it attrites the enemy down to almost zero, then occupies a patch of territory taking prisoners or killing off stragglers as needed. Its goal is not capture of territory but "demilitarization": making sure that the territory, whether captured or not, poses negligible military threat.
• It can do so with a negiligibly small budget deficit and without going into debt. While the Special Military Operation is rolling along, steamroller-like, it can continue growing its economy at around 4% per year and inflation around double that (not quite comfortable but tolerable).
• Russia can be compared to a steamroller, not a race car. "Steamroller racing" produces zero search results (I just checked). The steamroller metaphor has its limits: normal steamrollers have brakes whereas the Russian steamroller has none. No amount of politics, peace talks, negotiations, concessions, sanctions or other claptrap can slow it down until it finishes its job, which is rolling all remaining armed Ukrainian Nazis (along with their Western friends, should any stray into view) into asphalt.
• It can do all of this using its professional army — reservists and contractors, not draftees — and taking good enough care of them and their families to produce a high level of patriotic support. It churned through over a million Ukrainian troops, most of them killed remotely by artillery, planing air bombs, rockets and drones, and while the Ukrainians have been very poor at evacuating and treating their wounded, many of the Russian casualties have returned to active duty after treatment.
• And now, the kicker: it is able to carry out its "attrit and conquer" mission with smaller numbers than the enemy — something that hasn't been attested in the annals of military science. Normally, going on the attack requires around 10 times the manpower and results in 10 times the casualty rate. The Russians have beaten these dismal statistics by a factor of 10 in manpower requirements and a factor of 100 in casualty rates. This is something for all militaries to learn from — as they are, in fact, doing, as evidenced by very high orders for Russian arms exports. But there is no mystery: the Russians are not fighting for land; they are fighting to kill off the enemy. Meanwhile, the enemy, ordered by their Zelensky never to retreat and dissuaded from retreating against orders by lines of Nazis ready to kill them should they try, is being led like lambs to the slaughter, hoping to surrender or at least to die quickly and in not too much pain.
A question arises: is the US, in military terms, a competitor to Russia? It certainly isn't in terms of fighting a land war. Russia is now the preeminent military power, the purveyor of choice of thoroughly modernized, battle-tested and reasonably priced weapons systems and the guarantor of security to nations within its gradually expanding sphere of influence. The US, on the other hand, is the proud owner of the F-35 jets, only half of which are in flight-worthy condition, and aircraft carriers which collide with bulk carriers on the high seas in broad daylight and calm weather with radars and transponders working, as has recently happened. Russia's strategic arsenal has been entirely updated while the US strategic arsenal (and that of its allies) is woefully out of date and unreliable. It is possible to go on and on like this, but the conclusion is that the US is no longer a military competitor to Russia.
Let's keep in mind that the defense budget is about the only large part of the US federal budet that can be cut without touching entitlements — Social Security and other social spending — making it a natural choice for cost-cutting. In turn, such cost-cutting is quite essential given the dire fiscal condition of the US. Donald Trump has already floated the idea of cutting the US defense budget by half — if Russia and China do the same — and the next natural step is to cut it by half unilaterally. The take-away from that is that the US needs to get its troops as far away from Russian troops as possible — ideally, to the other side of the ocean — and to maintain peaceful and cooperative relations with Russia.
A similar logic applies to US military confrontation with China. Since both the US and China are nuclear nations, there is a hard limit to the level of military confrontation between the two that would be short of suicidal. This means that US military posturing around China — be it in Taiwan, South Korea or Japan — is just posturing and designed to please corrupt American politicians who are on the take from the US defense contractors and, of course, the defense contractors themselves. Some may view such effects as positive, but the overall effect is increasing costs for the US, both in terms of defense spending and in terms of access to essential Chinese-made products, including ones needed by the US defense contractors and the US military. Here, too, in strictly financial terms (which are something that Trump understands perhaps better than international politics) standing down vis-à-vis China makes sense as part of an overall cost-cutting effort.
Is the European Union a competitor to the United States, to Russia, or to China, or to anyone at all? I'll leave the answer to this question for the reader to work out.
A related question is whether the European Union is anything more than a figment of some bureaucrats' imagination — a group hallucination, if you will — and easily dispelled as soon as the money runs out. And the money can run out rather suddenly: the European Central Bank would be rendered inoperative if anything were to happen to the financial umbilical cord that ties it to the US Federal Reserve. Also, its economy would shrivel up if it lost access to Russian gas and oil, or to Chinese manufactured goods, or... the European Union is like a middle-aged dancer who did a split on the dance floor and now can't get up.
To be sure, there will eventually be peace. But it won't be peace through strength. The US, no longer able to continue living far beyond its means, will resort to major cost-cutting (Elon Musk plans to cut a trillion, but that's just a start). It will liquidate its overseas military bases. It will cease meddling in the world's politics. It will sever the financial umbilical that ties it to Europe, causing the Euro to shrivel up and blow away. The Russian steamroller will go on crushing Ukronazis until none are left alive. The good people who still live on the territory of the former Ukraine that isn't yet part of Russia will hold a little civil war and trample the Zelensky and his henchmen into the rich, fertile soil (Zelensky's Western supporters would be well advised to head for the border well ahead of that event.)
At the moment, everyone is discussing something that is quite ridiculous. We are witnessing a political wrestling match between Trump, Macron, Starmer and Zelensky over parting presents. Trump says that the US paid for victory and got defeat instead and so he wants his money back. The others want a piece of that. Zelensky is not authorized to sign any agreements, since his presidential term expired last May and it is unclear what it is that he still controls — other than his cocaine stash. Macron and Starmer also want Trump's blessing to throw a few thousand of their own troops (all they can muster) under the Russian steamroller. What a waste of effort! If you notice, European Union representatives — the head gynecologist or that strange Estonian code-named "kaka" — are no longer even received at the White House.
Meanwhile, the Russians and the Americans are working hard to mend fences and to reestablish normal diplomatic relations, financial networks, collaboration, investment and trade — because that's what's actually important.
How humiliating is that?"
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Evo, sada barem možeš ovaj tekst s opravdanim povodom etiketirati da je "ruska propaganda" jer stvarno ga je pisao pravi Rus!