This guest post by Jim Rickards is spot on in its analysis of the Russia-Ukraine war and its potential to explode into something much bigger. He spells out the falsehoods embedded in the Western position toward Russia and why the continued pushing of this false narrative cannot have a good outcome. Either someone with sound logic steps up or we are heading up the escalation ladder to a point of no return, and that will bringc catastrophic consequences to the people of the West — you and me.
By Jim Rickards, at The Daily Reckoning
A lot of people seem to have forgotten about the war in Ukraine. That’s a mistake.
Russia is slowly but steadily defeating Ukraine, which is becoming increasingly obvious to everyone except the most anti-Russian diehards.
That’s leading to desperation in elite Western circles determined to stop Russia one way or the other. In their minds, they simply can’t let Putin win. They think that if Putin wins in Ukraine, he’ll next move on to the Baltic states, Poland and elsewhere.
You know the West is getting desperate based on recent threats by France’s Emmanuel Macron to send troops to Ukraine.
The vice president of the Russia Duma, Pyotr Tolstoy (descendant of the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy), warned that French troops would be priority targets for Russian forces if they entered Ukraine.
Even though France would send troops independent of NATO, that puts us on a very dangerous path that ultimately leads to direct conflict between NATO and Russia. And that path ends, ultimately, in nuclear war.
Tolstoy added that it would take “just two minutes to nuke Paris.” It’s not hard to envision how quickly things could escalate if France decided to send troops to Ukraine.
More Escalation
Meanwhile, NATO is preparing to send F-16s to Ukraine. Airfields in Ukraine are highly vulnerable to Russian attack, especially since Ukraine’s air defenses are heavily depleted at this point and the Russian air force is becoming increasingly active in Ukraine.
But if NATO allows the F-16s to be based on its own airbases, Putin has warned that these airfields would become a “legitimate target” if strikes against Russian forces were launched from them.
By the way, Russia has hypersonic missiles that NATO has no practical ability to shoot down, so these attacks would likely be successful. Of course, NATO would have to retaliate in kind. You can imagine where all this could lead.
We’re already well along the escalation ladder. And the higher you go, the more face you stand to lose if you back down. I warned about that from the outset of the war.
But the entire notion that Russia poses some existential threat to NATO or Europe is absurd.
Putin Has Nothing to Gain and Everything to Lose
First off, the theory that Putin will invade other countries if he wins in Ukraine is nonsense. The Russian army lacks the men and materiel to occupy Ukraine while simultaneously invading other countries.
This isn’t the Soviet Union with its massive tank armies poised to roll over Western Europe. And Soviet communism is long dead, so there’s no ideological basis for Russia to invade Europe. These days Russia is a conservative, Orthodox Christian nation.
But more importantly, Putin has absolutely no incentive to invade any of these nations, which are NATO members. What do they have that he wants?
All it would do is trigger Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which stipulates that an attack on one member is an attack on all, inviting a massive NATO response. At that point, you’re on the fast track to nuclear war.
Putin is fully aware of that.
Fearmongers like to point to what Putin once said in a speech: “Whoever doesn’t miss the Soviet Union doesn’t have a heart.”
They take that as proof that he wants to recreate the Soviet Union. But they conveniently omit what he said next:
“Whoever wants it back doesn’t have a brain.”
Whatever you think of Putin, he definitely has a brain. He has no intention to restore the Soviet Union.
It’s Not Just About Intentions
But like any great power, Russia has interests, and Ukraine has always been a vital strategic interest to Russia.
And Russia is not going to tolerate Ukraine joining a NATO alliance that’s hostile to Russia. Critics say Ukraine is a free and independent nation that can join NATO if it wants. Russia has no say in the matter, even though Ukraine borders Russia.
Well, I guess they never heard of the Monroe Doctrine. The U.S. basically declared the entire Western hemisphere its own domain. But a great power like Russia can’t have a say in its own backyard?
Critics also say that the idea of NATO invading Russia is ridiculous. That’s just Russian paranoia. And that’s true, NATO isn’t going to actually invade Russia. But it’s not just intentions that count in the world of geopolitics. It’s also capabilities.
As Bismarck once noted: “What matters in politics is capabilities, not intentions. Intentions change, capabilities remain.”
Given Russia’s long history of being invaded, it’s not hard to imagine why it might seem a bit paranoid of exterior threats.
If you look at a map, parts of Ukraine are actually east of Moscow.
Will the U.S. Keep the War Going?
Of course, Ukraine can’t continue fighting without U.S. assistance. The Biden White House wants $60 billion of new money to give to Ukraine to fight the war. This is on top of several hundred billion already provided.
This was proposed last summer but has stalled in the Senate and House of Representatives ever since. The House passed a separate bill to aid Israel last fall, but the Senate refused to take it up because they want to tie that aid to money for Ukraine.
The Senate passed a bill that would provide aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan in one package combined with some money for phony border security.
That bill was so unpopular it could not even make it out of the Senate. Then the House insisted on passing regular appropriations before considering Ukraine.
That process was completed on March 23, but now Congress is on a two-week Easter recess so nothing further will happen until mid-April. No one has even answered the most important question, which is what would Ukraine do with the money.
They can’t buy badly needed 155mm artillery shells because the Western arsenals are bare and factories are not geared to make more than a handful. It will take years to expand that manufacturing capacity.
You can walk into a store with a wallet full of $100 bills, but if the shelves are empty, it doesn’t do you any good. The products simply aren’t there.
Meanwhile, wonder weapons from the West such as tanks, cruise missiles, armored personnel carriers, HIMARS precision-guided artillery and anti-missile batteries have all been destroyed, disabled or shot down by Russia.
The war in Ukraine hasn’t been good advertising for Western weapons.
Fallout
To repeat what I said earlier, Ukraine is losing the war badly. Russia is advancing on the southern and eastern fronts in Ukraine.
Still, the pressure on House Speaker Mike Johnson to do something remains. The Republican warmongers in the Senate like Lindsey Graham and Joni Ernst won’t let up. Many Republicans in the House such as Chip Roy and Marjorie Taylor Greene are opposed to Johnson on this.
Incredibly, Johnson may respond to the pressure with a solution worse than an outright appropriation. He may get behind efforts to steal $300 billion in Russian central bank assets held in the form of U.S. Treasury securities.
That would destroy confidence in the U.S. dollar, U.S. Treasury securities and the U.S. rule of law. Russia would quickly recover the loss by seizing $300 billion or more of Western assets still in Russia. No one in Congress seems to understand any of this.
If they follow through, the economic fallout would be bad enough. But if this war doesn’t stop soon, we could ultimately be looking at nuclear fallout.
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I think Putin would very much like to recreate the borders of the Soviet Empire. However, there seems little doubt to the reality that 1) Ukraine is about out of bodies to throw into the WWI style meat grinder the war has turned into. 2) Since the start of the war the Russian army has transformed itself into a much more effective, modern fighting force. Even if NATO committed to battle it would be a prolonged, bloody effort. President Obiden has managed this conflict in the most disgracefully incompetent manner imaginable. First, he invited the invasion when he got before the cameras and babbled about “Maybe we won’t have to do anything if it’s just a small invasion.” Predictably, shortly after hearing this, Putin had columns racing toward Kyiv. Obiden then started suppling just enough weaponry for the Ukraine to stave off the invasion but never enough to win. Macron gives the impression of a feckless poser who aspires to some form of exalted EU leadership but has virtually no guiding principals and less courage. Merkel has left Germany in a badly crippled state. It has no viable source of affordable energy, has been forced to re-commission coal generating plants and has continued decommissioning nuclear plants. Reportedly the Germans have no intention of putting German forces into the Ukraine. Poland is both principled and courageous but it can’t take on the Russians alone. The US is threatened with the prospect of war with China which President Obiden is also severely miss-managing with his unique brand of incompetence. Relative to the Ukraine war, given the bleak realities, the best that the West can hope for is that it might muster enough resolve to make clear, with actual preparation, that if Putin goes further they will fight. While trying to project this new-found resolve the West should start negotiating for peace with Putin. This will certainly include abandoning more that just the Russian sympathetic eastern section plus a written promise that the Ukraine will never be allowed into NATO. Just as the Russians did in Syria, Putin has sufficiently mauled and depopulated the Ukraine that he will have no reason to fear what remains – so long as it is never part of NATO.
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Your analysis is deeply flawed John. The Russians have zero interest in recreating the old Soviet Union. Been there done that. It was a failed experiment that led to disaster. Putin is way too smart to repeat that blunder. But he will not tolerate NATO co-opting Ukraine and running it as a puppet and military proxy anymore than the US would tolerate Russia annexing Mexico.
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This war did not begin in February 2022; it began in 2014, when our govt happily engaged in regime change. One does not have to be in the Putin fan club to know that. The “not one inch eastward” promise made after the fall of the Soviet Union regarding NATO expansion has been broken, ripped, spindled, torn, and mutilated. Meanwhile, in more than two decades of being in power, Putin has not threatened Europe once. Any issue he and the Russians have had have been confined to their immediate surroundings, principally Ukraine.
At this point, we have mostly succeeded in turning Ukraine into a disaster – millions have fled never to return, an estimated half-million dead, and that does not include the economic impact from stalled productive activity. The idea of regime change is typical Western stupidity, as if Putin’s removal would guarantee a kinder, gentler successor. Based on what? In all likelihood, the next man up would be more of a hardliner.
Typically, politicians engage in bluster and nonsense with no idea of what their end game would look like. They get their jollies over money well spent because some Russian troops were killed while the defense industry and its cronies, and Zelenskyy and his, are enriched. You cannot go into combat without a goal. You cannot enter war without defining victory so that it can be recognized if achieved, and you cannot do this without some vision of what the end result will look like. Well, you can’t if you are a sane, rational human being. You obviously can do all of those things if you’re an American or European politician or bureaucrat who has no skin in the game.
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The world is fortunate that Putin is at the helm in Russia and not a Stalin. He has acted throughout this whole episode (from 2014 until today) with the utmost of forbearance towards the antagonistic and irresponsible antics of the West. The West (especially the US) has acted like lawless vandals, terrorists with no heed paid whatsoever to any nuclear consequences. If someone like Stalin was leading Russia today, the West would have been smoked and steaming with radiation by now for the Maidan color revolution, the sabotage of Nordstream pipelines, the terrorist attack recently in Moscow, as well as financing and arming Ukraine as a proxy force aimed against Russia, among other things.
Putin does not bluff—he’s not known for it. So when he says if Russia is pushed into a corner where it becomes obvious we will nuke them, all their nukes will be launched at us, all at once. “We will go out like martyrs.” Does anyone study the Eastern Front of WWII? How fiercely the Russians fought for their country despite the fact that Stalin was as bad to them as Hitler?? And Putin, compared to Stalin, actually cares about Russia and its people. So why doesn’t our leadership take Russia seriously and try to negotiate?? Even bombastic Khrushchev could be negotiated with back in 1962 and JFK dared to do it. Yet our leadership won’t and instead talk like smart-mouth juveniles.
Our incompetent federal government has violated every law and custom of diplomacy there is to violate. Ukraine has lost this war and yet our so-called leaders keep pumping money and arms in this death trap, and keep saying stupid things to further antagonize the situation. Indicates a complete collapse of US diplomacy.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu is taking advantage of the weakness and befuddlement of US leadership to thumb their nose at us—their best ally–to destroy Gaza and everyone in it with our weapons and munitions. (100 shipments of our arms went to Israel for this operation –our tax dollars at work). Recently, they bomb the Iranian embassy in Syria, killing some generals—a hugely lawless thing to do. Embassies are protected territory worldwide—Period! What an enticement to war that is! Was that to start a war with Iran and get the US to fight it for them?? (like Iraq) If we are dragged into a war with Iran, that will also mean a war with Russia as they are allies. All Biden has to do to stop this ever-escalating ladder to WWIII is for Biden to stop arming both Ukraine and Israel now and starting negotiating. But the 2024 elections are more important than peace. It’s disgusting.
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Kkayjae – “All Biden has to do to stop this ever-escalating ladder to WWIII is for Biden to stop arming both Ukraine and Israel now and starting negotiating.”
Two extremely different scenarios. That could work in the case of Ukraine, but not for the Israelis considering who the other people at the negotiating table would be: radical Islamists.
Two months after the Ukraine war began, Putin and Zelensky started working on a peace deal together, but the U.S. sent Boris Johnson to sabotage it. So here we are, two years later, after much bloodshed and destruction with the war still raging on. In this case, however, you have two sane and willing sides, so a negotiated end could be a wonderful reality.
Unfortunately for Israel, although they have given up land for “peace” deals, they’ve rarely had a nice, long stretch of quiet and safety. Incoming missiles, shootings, stabbings, suicide bombings, and car rammings have been their reality for decades. Why is that? Well, it may have a little something to do with the ideology of their next-door neighbors.
First, take a look at just one of the precepts in their good book:
Quran (8:12) – “(Remember) when your Lord inspired the angels… “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”
Second, listen to what one of their leaders has said:
“The army of Jerusalem will not liberate only Palestine; the whole world will come under an Islamic system with no Zionism, no treacherous Christianity.”
– Senior Hamas official Mahmoud Al-Zahar
Third, this way of thinking, which always yields disastrous consequences for everyone within striking distance, has been around for a long, long time, so it is intrinsic to their belief system and not a cause/effect of the Israel-Palestinian conflict:
“Over the next 14 centuries, over 270 million people were slaughtered in the name of Islamic Jihad. Jews, Christians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, everyone who refused to become Muslim.”
– Christian apologist David Wood
It may be easy for people in other countries to sit back and find fault with Israel’s decisions in this conflict, but none of us have tens of thousands of missiles pointed at us from across one border and from another direction squads of demonic thugs also launching missiles and sneaking into our backyards to kidnap, rape, torture, and murder innocent civilians of all ages in the name of a god who demands such carnage.
Hamas intends nothing less than genocide.
“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
– Preamble, Hamas Charter 1988
This is an existential fight for Israel, as it has been for nations in the past when confronted with the armies of radical Islamists in pursuit of a bloody conquest.
Israel is just one component for them. Their overarching desire is an earthly caliphate:
“The nation of Islam will sit at the throne of the world.”
– Hamas Leader Khaled Mash’al
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WW3 started a long time ago. We hit the iceberg way back and there still dancing . Just as it was in the days of Noah.
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🚨THE QUICKENING PACE
In today’s world there is rising conflicts everywhere, increasing threats of war, sudden catastrophic events – man-made & Natural, governments that are aligning for (and quickly attempting to form) the Satanic-inspired-idea of a New Utopian World, untold of (except in Scripture which many are blinded to) historical hatred against Israel & the Jews.
2024 this is the year that will determine just how close the end really is
Heaven’s forces are battling in the spiritual realm against Satan’s demonic forces . . . a battle of TRUTH & RIGHTEOUSNESS versus DECEPTIONS & EVIL . . . a battle for the souls of the lost
Where the TRUTH of GOD is present – RIGHTEOUSNESS prevails
. . .
Where SIN, SATAN, DEMONS are present – EVIL, LIES, HATRED, VIOLENCE, MENTAL & EMOTIONAL attacks prevail
🔥 For many years now Bible Scholars (those who have not been swayed & fallen away – holding fast & strong to God’s HOLY Word) have noticed how a number of end times signs (and events that align with events foretold for latter days) are quickly falling into place – Satan’s goal to overtake the human race – God’s plan for ALL SAINTS to soon see their Savior’s loving face.
And in 2024 🔥 the pace of signs appear to be quickening even more.
Remember GOD allowed the false placement of the O’Biden administration to help usher in his plans.
God knows O’Biden – HE knows they serve Satan and his evil plans.
GOD knew O’Biden would help in the destruction of America 🇺🇸
GOD knows what it will take to break thru the pride / SIN filled, rebellious hearts of those in America and around the world.
❇ GOD knows the faith of many within America is weak, fake, misguided, asleep
💥 He doesn’t want weekend warriors or holiday warriors or those who openly defy & deny any part of His Biblical truths – like NOT SUPPORTING ISRAEL, or the deity of His SON 》》 to include His resurrection (both of which are a crucial requirement to obtaining eternal life)‼️
Ecclesiastes 12:1–2 ✝️
Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them;
While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain
🔥🤲👑💞
Ecclesiastes 12:13–14 ✝️
Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.
For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.
Do you see the indicators unfolding leading us to latter days??
The years before O’Biden was placed, we seen the attacks increasing against America – Obama / Communist educated youth trained to hate, trained to be violent, trained to be radicals that defied authority, trained to mock & despise certain or ALL aspects of Scripture (including Israel’s importance), trained to be racists who speak double-talk.
Youth joined by wicked adults to help destroy America’s history and alliance with Israel. Youth & adults who bought into the lies & deceptions 》》 guided down the path of evil – lawlessness – end days fears.
It all began before the Covid-19 plandemic … it began when schools, homes, and even churches ABANDONED God’s Biblical foundation / instructions / guidance . . . and allowed in the forces of darkness. 🖤🔥
https://t.me/faiththruYESHUA/9329
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This is all about which elitists will rule the world. Or what is left worth ruling. The citizens of the world be damned. We are too many and of no significance. Money breeds arrogance and entitlement with ruthlessness in destroying any and all in the pursuit of world dominance. The people installed in power are terribly sick in mind, heart and soul. There is no cure for those that seek no cure. “The path to hell is wide and many there are that enter in.”
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Thank you, Leo, for this update / reminder / about Ukraine * Russia. Putin is not a nice guy. And (not “but”) Zelensky is buddie-buddie with Trudeau ….. Ohhh … Meanwhile, back on Pennsylvania Avenue, who do we know who has been filling America with corruption, color revolution, chaos, etc….. not to mention funding BOTH Iran and Israel ? ? As we know, “war checks all the boxes”.
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I haven’t forgotten the war in Ukraine but I also am not stressing about it. It’s in God’s hands. I will pray and vote, of the two prayer will be most effective. It will be interesting to see how God handles the war in Ukraine and France and NATO and Mike Johnson.
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