The Pivot Continues: Times of London Says NATO was Delusional About Ukrainian Offensive

I’m trying to keep track of this for you: the narrative on the entire Ukraine situation is rapidly shifting from “they are winning and on the verge of taking Crimea at any moment” to “actually, they are losing really, really badly.”

I have to wonder what it actually feels like to be a normie who believes the media and sits there watching as they flip the narrative to the opposite of what it was for a year and a half. For a year and a half, these people chanted, nonstop, that the Ukrainians were winning and victory was assured. Now, they’re losing completely.

Here’s the thing: if you believe that the media is honest, and they just somehow accidentally spent a year giving you totally false information, then there is still no reason to trust them.

On some level, the fact that they are lying on purpose is less relevant than the fact that they are so consistently wrong about everything. I mean, I don’t think the individual journalists are all lying – many or most of them presumably believe these narratives they push. Nonetheless, they are consistently – really, virtually always – reporting information that is simply factually incorrect.

People need to remember the kind of shit these people were saying:

I mean – this Newsweek headline is from less than two months ago:

There was never any possibility that the Ukrainians were going to push Russia out of the Donbass and Crimea. This was always a completely retarded claim that any person with any knowledge of anything could have looked at and said “yeah, uh – I don’t think so.”

The original, obvious comparison – one I was making in February of 2022 and actually long before that – is still true: no matter how many weapons systems Russia and China sent to Mexico, Mexico could not win a war with the United States. There is just simply no possible reality in which that would happen.

And you had journalists reporting with a straight face that “the Ukrainians have heart and therefore they will win” as if this was an MCU film.

I think people should be mad the media was this wrong, even if they for whatever reason (I can’t really understand what the reason would be, but it apparently exists) believe that the media would never lie to them under any circumstances.

RT:

NATO was overly optimistic about the Ukrainian military’s ability to regain ground before its summer counteroffensive, The Times reported on Saturday, citing an unnamed US officer. The British newspaper noted that officials in Kiev had begun blaming their Western backers for their supposed lack of resolve.

In its article penned by Mark Galeotti, the author of more than 20 books on Russia, The Times quoted an anonymous US army officer involved in the training of Ukrainian service members. “Nato expected miracles, and the Ukrainians promised them,” he said, adding that “you can’t run a war on optimism.”

Another US official told the media outlet that “we haven’t quite closed the book on 2023, but we are ramping up our thinking about 2024.”

Hmmm.

What’s happening in 2024? I wonder…

The report claimed that neither Russia nor Ukraine can make any decisive advances at present, with the latter now touting the capture of individual villages as a sign of success.

The author estimates that Kiev has two months at most to turn the tide before autumn rains start making the ground impassable for military hardware in November.

Strong defense fortifications and extensive minefields set up by Russian forces in southern Ukraine were among the reasons for the apparent underperformance of Kiev’s counteroffensive, the report claimed.

Against this backdrop, officials in Kiev have recently begun criticizing NATO for not doing enough, with one describing the US-led military bloc as “gutless,” according to the newspaper.

With neither side willing to compromise, the conflict is likely to continue for the long haul, the report concluded.

I guess I feel vindicated.

I don’t make predictions. But saying “The Ukraine can’t beat Russia in a war” is like saying “if you drop a heavy object, it will fall to the ground.” It’s not really a prediction, so much as just an obvious statement of fact based on a simple understanding of the nature of physics.

However, we’re back to the original question, which was asked in early 2022 and going all the way back to 2014: “will NATO invade on behalf of the Ukraine?”

We have no answer to that question, and I don’t think the decision-makers themselves know. There are people in power pushing for it, and people pushing against it, for a variety of reasons. I’ve listed the reasons establishment people would be for or against it before, but they’re all obvious. On one side, you have arms sales, a Jewish obsession with Russia, a concern for making the US look weak, and a bizarre media campaign about spreading anal sex to Russia. On the other side, you have mostly people concerned that this is a waste of resources – including and maybe in particular the resource that is the public’s tolerance for war – that could be used against China, as well as some people concerned about the economy. From my estimation, there aren’t really any people who are concerned about escalation into global nuclear war – for whatever reason, that is just not really a topic in the discussion.

So, NATO will commit or they won’t.

One part of the narrative is sort of true: if the Ukraine were to pivot to simply holding territory, it would continue to be a slog for the Russians (assuming Russia didn’t declare total war). The issue there is that the Ukrainians are exhausting themselves with these insane suicide rushes. But they’ve pretty much wound down the “offensive” now, and, in particular because they are willing to do things like insist on fighting in cities where they can use human shields, and there is more or less zero criticism over this tactic, they can dig in in Kharkov and Odessa and make this thing take a really long time.

What that means, I guess, is that the US can decide on the war after the election. That’s what a lot of these people are pushing for, and seems to be the Jake Sullivan plan – wait until the election is over and then send US troops to fight Russia in the Ukraine.

Who knows.

Whatever.

I’m way more interested in this Africa war now anyway.

(NOTE: “The Times” is the first paper to have had that name, and there are no other British papers that use it. However, now we have the New York Times and so on, so internationally, “The Times” is typically referred to as “The Times of London” or “The London Times.” Also, they are hard paywalled like the WSJ and I’m not paying them.)