Previously: Apparently, We’re Now Talking About Peace Talks
On Friday, the Washington Post gave a relatively official announcement that CIA Director William Burns flew to “Keev” to talk about a negotiated surrender to Russia. The Post decided to “bury the lede,” instead running the headline “CIA director, on secret trip to Ukraine, hears plan for war’s endgame.”
The headline fails to highlight the magnitude of the announcement. For more than a year now, we’ve been hearing about a Ukrainian victory against Russia, we’ve repeatedly heard “as long as it takes” as a driving narrative.
Since the botched “spring counteroffensive” was subject to a “pause” in mid-June after two weeks of utterly baffling kamikaze drives across a field into a Russian death trap, we’ve been hearing talk of talks. Assertions that Burns and the CIA have been tapped to take point on the talks is big news.
The Post is effectively a government-run media outlet, which regularly prints “leaked classified information,” which is widely understood to be a convoluted mechanism for the state to inform the public about government action.
Bizarrely, the Post claims that the Ukraine’s plan is to threaten to bomb Crimea during the peace talks. That very tantalizing piece of information – a piece of information you would not expect to be printed in what is effectively a government announcement – is also buried within the Amazon-owned outlet’s typically opaque and deadpan style:
Publicly, Ukrainian officials have expressed frustration with critics of the pace at which the counteroffensive has played out thus far. But in private, military planners in Kyiv have relayed to Burns and others bullish confidence in their aim to retake substantial territory by the fall; move artillery and missile systems near the boundary line of Russian-controlled Crimea; push further into eastern Ukraine; and then open negotiations with Moscow for the first time since peace talks broke down in March of last year, according to three people familiar with the planning.
The article later uses the words “hold Crimea hostage” in reference to the plan to threaten to bomb the territory during the peace talks.
The burial ground of this announcement is yet another Twilight Zone style piece about how the Ukraine is going to make leaps and bounds with their “counteroffensive.” They have toned down the rhetoric a lot since the counteroffensive was “paused,” but it still exists in an alternate reality.
The Ukraine military announce the so-called “spring counteroffensive” more than six months before it eventually began in June. This obviously allowed Russia to prepare a very solid defensive line. It is totally beyond anyone’s imagination that the Ukraine would choose to drive this heavy equipment across open fields, to destroy billions in equipment and lose thousands of soldiers for no clear reason. This “suicide run across the field” behavior has not been explained by the US or Ukrainian governments, nor has any Western media attempted to address it with any bit of reality.
The Post admits that the offensive was viewed as a disaster, but continues to assert that the problem is the progress is “slow.” The reality is, there has been no “progress.” Russia’s line is still where it was, the Ukraine has lost equipment, men who know how to operate the equipment, and morale, and they are no closer to achieving anything than they were in May. It will likely be remembered as one of the single most bizarre military events in world history.
The situation is made all the more remarkable by the media narrative surrounding it, which also breaks a world record, given that never before have people been this disinformed on any major world issue, let alone a conflict that threatens to lead to a nuclear war. Also intensifying the events were bizarre actions by the officials in Kiev, including Zelensky’s decision to seek “professional help” from Greta Thunberg, a 20-year-old mentally ill global warming promotional icon.
The situation on the ground, experts say, is that Russia already controls all of the territory it was claiming, plus a lot more, and is expected to continue gaining territory the longer the war goes on. In recent days, following the Ukrainian decision to stop their suicide runs, Russia has been pushing the line at Kharkov.
It is extremely unlikely that anything will change with future offensives by the Ukraine. Experts say that if the Ukraine had any other plan other than to drive tanks across an open field with no air support into a Russian death trap, they would have gone with that plan. Given that they spent more than 6 months coming up with this plan, it is extremely unlikely that they will invent a new plan between now and the fall, when the Post says they will begin negotiations.
The Post’s claim that the plan is to push through to the land bridge to Crimea and then point missiles at the peninsula is shocking in light of this abject failure of the what was announced as the biggest Ukraine operation thus far. The Ukraine is now claiming that this was not the real offensive at all, that it was instead probes.
Experts have compared the narrative on the failure of the offensive to a clip from The Simpsons, season 11, where Homer is required to pick chores to do from a hat. The hat is filled with pieces of paper, on which chores are written, and the person who picks a certain chore must perform the chore. The purpose of the hat is to randomize the chores, experts note, so that no member of the family feels they are being treated unfairly by being assigned tedious chores. However, Homer picks several chores he does not want, and throws them away, saying “that was a practice” before finally finding a chore he finds desirable.
“The Ukraine is running out of practices. You can think of Burns as the Marge in this analogy, coming in and telling Homer to straighten up,” said an anonymous source, citing classified lists of Simpsons analogies.
The source added that top level analysts are already preparing lists of Krusty the Clown clips for future situations in the Ukraine to be compared to. Krusty the Clown is the only prominent Jewish character on the show, and a stereotypical entertainer, deadbeat, scam artist, huckster, and fraud.
Officials believe Krusty analogies will be needed in bulk in the near future, the source said, adding also that there is a separate team preparing lists of Lionel Hutz analogies.