[The Immortal Regiment marches on May 9th, 2016, in Donetsk.]
Published: 2025-03-10
Introduction
This newsletter's article, 6 months ago, began:
The Friday September 6th meeting at the US foreign military base in Ramstein, Germany, between expired President of Ukraine, Zelensky, and his Western suppliers (of funding, intelligence, military hardware and political support) concluded with a whimper of defeat.
In response to Kiev's repeated pleading for a new supply of US long range precision missiles and the permission to target even further into the Russian Federation, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated after the meeting that "There's no one capability that will in and of itself be decisive in this campaign".
On September 7th, 2024, the leaders of the CIA and MI6 published a joint opinion piece celebrating their partnership, signaling that they would be taking over the proxy war.
6 months later, new US Secretary of State Pete Hegseth informed NATO members of the defeat. To quote him, in order:
He [US President Trump] intends to end this war by diplomacy and bringing both Russia and Ukraine to the table. ...
we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine's pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. ...
the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement. ...
they [any NATO member state soldiers deployed in Ukraine] should not [be] covered under Article 5. ...
there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine.
Hegseth could not have been more explicit of the US withdrawal in defeat.
A few days ago the new US Secretary of State Marco Rubio informed the mislead public of the proxy war in explicit terms:
Frankly, it’s a proxy war between nuclear powers, the United States helping Ukraine and Russia, and it needs to come to an end.
While attempting to "weaken Russia", as former US Secretary of Defense Austin famously characterized the proxy war, the results are that militarily, the US paid public funds to its military industrial complex while Russia revitalized its. Financially, the war damaged the economies of the US European allies while Russia's expanded its and gained independence, rising to the 4th largest national economy. Diplomatically, the global majority know that the US provoked the war and has lost it, restoring Russia's place as a world power.
The proxy war went "real" for Russia in February 2022 when it committed its Armed Forces to the civil war which the US had started via its Ukrainian proxy almost 8 years earlier. The only way for the US to "win" the war at that point was for it to "realize" the proxy war by committing its military. This is the definition of WWIII and would have lead to nuclear Armageddon, which means nobody wins.
The initial admission of defeat was by Austin in Ramstein on 2024-09-06. The confirmation was by Hegseth on 2025-02-12.
Europe
It took the Trump administration's public embarrassment of expired Ukrainian President Zelensky on 2025-02-28 in the Oval Office for European leaders to connect with reality, 6 months after analysts knew, and 16 days after Hegseth spelled it out in black and white. The ineptitude on display in Europe this last week has been a sight to behold.
Following the European panic after the Oval Office, after their panic following Vance's Munich speech, after their lack of recognition of the significance of Hegseth's remarks to NATO, British Prime Minister Sir Starmer called the flock to Lancashire House in London for a photo-op and to issue mindless slogans. 4 days later, EU leaders gathered for a policy discussion in the Council with representatives from the Commission. Media carried the political leaders' latest delusional rhetorical, rather than analyzing the policy.
This is entirely understandable because the policy [PDF] is technocrat-ese. It amounts to (gluing together the sub-sections of part 5):
"the activation … of the national escape clause under the Stability and Growth Pact as an immediate measure ... to facilitate significant defence spending at national level in all Member States" [a], and
for "the Commission to propose additional funding sources for defence" [b], and
notes "the intention of the Commission to put forward a proposal for a new EU instrument to provide Member States with loans backed by the EU budget of up to EUR 150 billion" [c], and
"welcomes the recent letter by the President of the European Investment Bank Group ... for lending to the defence industry" [d] and
skipping [e] to [i], which amount to the same call for money via one mechanism or another, to
"invites the European Defence Agency, with the High Representative, the Commission and Member States, to swiftly review the appropriate processes" [j]
i.e the Council is begging the Commission to force them to cut social spending to balance their budgets while spending money on "defense" and allowing them to ignore fiscal rules. This is to say, they know their political careers are closing and now is the time to feather nests for their next upward failure placement.
This, of course, is not what the media were reporting because they aren't allowed to say that, and discussing technocrat-ese policy papers doesn't sell newspapers. Instead they published batshit-crazy war propaganda like:
and scare mongering like:
[Sir Starmer sits at the head of the table between Macron and Zelensky. ]
The US has paused supply of military hardware and targeting data to Ukraine. Its position could not be clearer, and yet Europe's leadership are still trying to aid Ukraine to "negotiate from a position of strength". Nowhere in European rhetoric are Russia's security concerns mentioned. These must be considered for a settlement which creates a peace. Russia not only raised this in two draft treaties before entering the civil war, but has continued to calmly state this hoping that some intelligence may emerge in Europe. The topic has not been raised by the US either. That Russia has valid security concerns has been a banned topic for decades.
The cause of the war was NATO expansion to Russia's borders. The trigger was an impending ethnic cleansing by Ukrainian neo-Nazis integrated into the Ukrainian army and armed and trained by NATO. Either the current European leadership are blind to this or share an illogical hatred of Russia fueled during the Cold War which ended a generation ago. This fear and hatred was maintained via US political propaganda since Bill Clinton’s administration, to facilitate the NATO expansion, through to Trump's first administration to excuse Hillary Clinton's loss to him in the 2016 election. Europe's electorates need to discard their current leadership, blinded by hatred and fear based on lies and propaganda, before their “leadership” cause even more damage to Europe.
Kiev
The current political battle is not in Washington, Moscow, London or Brussels, but Kiev. There the US is searching for a replacement for Zelensky to enable Trump to legitimately complete the US withdrawal and hopefully retain influence over the new government. The UK wheeled out Zaluzhny, the former commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) who they've had under wraps in UKraine's (typos happen) embassy to the UK in London.
“It's not just the axis of evil and Russia” disrupting the global system but “the US is finally destroying this order”, Valerii Zaluzhnyi told a conference hosted by the Chatham House think tank.
Zaluzhnyi's talking point that the US is "destroying the world order" (which it created) is symptomatic of the political emergency in Ukraine and Europe.
In essence, it doesn't really matter which corrupt politician is the next to be installed by the West in Kiev. The real battle is for the Ukrainian intelligence services (SBU and GUR), and that in turn is a battle between them and their western counterparts (CI6) and the SVR (Russian foreign intelligence service) and GRU (military equivalent), as predicted 6 months ago in “CI-6 Take Center Stage as NATO Bows Out”.
More Deception
The "deal" involved in the lure to bring dead-man-walking Zelensky to the Oval Office for his public humiliation was the "Raw Earths", which Trump carefully corrected to "Rare Earths" in his address to Congress. It, of course, has nothing to do with mining, but is an attempt to turn a strategic defeat into a tactical win by arguing about money. Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich let the air out of that tyre by noting that Russia has lots of these deposits and offering for US mining companies to partner with and profit from developing Russia processing capacity of them. The clever strategy entices US corporations interested in profit. The result would be an increase in Russian processing capacity which instead of solving the US tech industries' supply chain problems places them in the hands of Russia.
The real problem is with China, which possesses the dominant ores and processing capacity because the US ignored the problem while China developed its capacity. Not only does China have the ores and processing, but also the tech to make use of the processed ores in their military technical and information processing industries. The evidence of China's tech *lead* is available from US scientific publication Nature's review of the leading publications from technical universities world wide.
10 of the 12 leading research institutions, globally, are in China.
[Nature]
Modus Vivendi
This brings us to the international modus vivendi which may emerge from the chaos, if some strategic thinkers rather than industry lobbyists get to influence policy.
Europe is now a backwater. It has no resources and little industry, apart from banking, and that is at risk too, unless EuroClear gives the $200+ billion in stolen Russian central bank assets back Russia in a Ukraine settlement. Europe has no foreign policy of its own, and no effective military. Europe has sovereign funds and private assets to invest, but these are not and have not been collected towards investments in industry for decades.
The US has a large economy, but it is based on "FIRE" (Financialization, Insurance and Real Estate) and Big Data rather than manufacturing, except its over priced weaponry.
Consumer industrial production is in Asia which China is connecting via its BRI project so that Asia's raw materials can be converted into products within Asia for sale to global markets. US financial warfare (unilateral sanctions) have prompted China and Russia via the BRICS and SCO collectives to experiment in trade mechanisms outside of the US dollar, the BRICS Lab.
Asia has the resources, industrial capacity, technology, capital, labour markets and trade flows to survive independently of the US and Europe. Its pillars, Iran, India, Russia, China and Indonesia have the military capacity to resist non-nuclear US + partners wars. Its leading thinkers and planners understand 20th century, and early 21st century history. The have read "Washington Bullets" by Vijay Prashad. The results of Trump's funding pause on USAID, exposing its propaganda laundering operations, were not a surprise to them.
The "West" is currently leaderless and rudderless. US President Trump is mostly following US foreign policy establishment direction, pulling out of the lost war in Ukraine and preparing for one with China. That this is insane, does not matter, because they will all make money on US weapons manufacturing contractor stocks as it happens.
Trump is, however, also running a vendetta against the lawless deep state which undermined his first term.
The damage the vendetta may cause to the nefarious arms of the US and UK MICCIMATT is entirely deserved. The US wing of the tribe are guilty of treason. A "limited hangout" can be expected.
While the vendetta is run, the executive branch is disconnected from some of its more powerful arms which, irrespective of Trump's irrational bombast, will produce chaos. The situation is worsened by the European leadership who were not trained to think independently of US influence. They are literally lost.
The predictions of the end of NATO and of the EU made early in the NATO-Russia Ukraine proxy war made by varying analysts are becoming more realistic by the day.
This should be seen as a positive. It is the sensible strategic place for Europe in the multi-nodal world.
Kursk and Novorossiya
To conclude, it seems fitting to provide an update on the proxy war.
The day after the meeting of the Council of Europe and its policy for Europe to militarize, Russia added to the bill by destroying gas storage facilities in western Ukraine, wherein Europe was storing some of its gas reserves.
There is a fun story behind this.
Before the war became international, the regular renewal of Ukraine's gas transit agreement with the Russian state gas company was in doubt. Gazprom did not want to renew because the cost of maintenance of the old pipelines made the trade only fractionally profitable, or less when you deducted Ukrainian siphoning from the pipeline network. President Putin forced Gazprom to sign. The message from the Kremlin was that Russia must be a reliable energy provider. A year later the US destroyed 3 of the 4 NordStream pipes. A year after that, Ukraine refused to renew the transit deal. Okay. Well, you wont need the storage then, will you?
Kursk
In Kursk, the 4.7 to 6.3 thousand Ukrainian soldiers are soon to either surrender, retreat with heavy losses or "stay there forever". Their StarLink terminals have been inactive since Monday 2nd March. On the same day the Russia destroyed the gas storage in western Ukraine, they also destroyed a collection of key bridges in Kursk.
The Armed Forces of the Russia Federation (AFRF) have almost completed absolute surveillance and drone control, with artillery support soon to follow, for the only two roads between Ukraine's Sumy oblast and Kursk. The northernmost of the two is being approached by the AFRF who have invaded the Sumy oblast to do so. The southernmost, south of the Sudzha agglomeration is within Kursk.
Returning to those destroyed bridges in Kursk, the next day Russian special forces launched an attack using the gas pipelines in Kursk. In at least one location close to Sudzha, 100 Russian soldiers emerged out of "nowhere" — the gas pipelines — behind enemy lines, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles style. This caused another European panic, this time of the Ukrainian forces north of the gas pipeline exit point.
[Spetsnaz in the gas pipelines.]
A convoy of fleeing Ukrainian units met one of the bridges which no longer was, forced to stop. Russian artillery executed a textbook attack on the stalled convoy, destroying the rearmost and leading vehicles before destroying the rest. A small fleet of drones were sent in to survey the wreckage and complete any unfinished business.
From the other northern flank, the AFU soldiers withdrew on foot. They too were hampered by bridge destruction and able to be attacked by artillery based on drone surveillance.
The result will become clear over the next few days. It looks like a collapse of the northern sectors of the AFU occupation of Kursk, right back to the Sudzha agglomeration. The cause was the sneaky Russians using their own gas pipelines to stage a behind enemy lines Spetsnaz operation. Russia still has drone control over the two roads back to Sumy. There have been reports of Ukrainian units negotiating for surrender, with over 200 seriously injured casualties. These reports are "fog of war" and may be Russian propaganda. That the Kursk invasion is about to be destroyed is not.
Novorossiya
The contests between the AFU and AFRF across the contact lines in Novorossiya have been less frequent for close to a month. The following summarizes the situation from the south to the north.
The AFRF have made various minor advances since their capture and expansion out of Velyka Novosilyka in the border area between southern Donetsk and Zaporozhye. They have made further westward advances west of Kurakhove and Pokrovsk. However, the AFU have recently pushed south out of Pokrovsk and are harrying AFRF control of the outer security perimeter in places. In Toretsk, the AFU retook a small part of the north of the town. In Chasiv Yar, the AFU still hold the industrial zone citadel central to the city and a southwestern area allowing limited supply.
Towards Siversk, the AFRF are making very minor advances. Toward Lyman, the AFRF are capturing the last sections of the Lugansk oblast and pressuring a row of fortified defense networks. In the middle of the Kupiansk front, the AFRF have made minor advances southwards on the eastern bank of the Oskol river. North of Kupiansk City, the AFU have pushed the AFRF back from the City. Further north they have pressured the AFRF who recently consolidated positions on the western bank of the Oskol.
These battles have been rather minor. However, we are in a period of preparation for offensives to occur after the ground dries out again. One can expect the AFRF to be rotating units, and positioning supplies for whatever campaigns are to begin in mid April to mid May.
If John Helmer's Russian military source provided accurate information, those campaigns will skirt the cities to besiege them. The war will still be over logistics, and the new objective of ground, but much more about electronic warfare -- control of communications. The AFU are seriously hampered by lack of global network connectivity (StarLink). If one is interested in these sorts of things, the upcoming campaigns will likely be tactically interesting.
If like me, you would like to see the war end, we can hope that the current European political leadership face some accurate reporting which should elevate the ire of their citizenry for destroying their economies and destroying Ukraine.
Morale and Training
The AFRF are prepared to fight this war of attrition for another decade, to conclude before President Putin has exhausted the last of his possible terms in 2036.
The AFRF are training their next generation of officers in the new technologies of modern land warfare. Chinese, North Korean, and Iranian senior officers are almost certainly learning from their ally, as will be those of the CSTO (Kazakh, Belorussian, etc.).
The destruction or surrender of AFU units in Kursk will affect the morale of the already thin, tired and beleaguered AFU units elsewhere. 100 000 desertions have already occurred. Conscription for the AFU amounts to dragging young men off the streets. This is the "Ukraine" which Europe wants to fight "to the last Ukrainian".
By contrast, the AFRF is still releasing over 30 000 soldiers per month, from 6 months of training, and still receiving the same number of volunteers. These soldiers are well armed, trained and led, with high morale and artillery, drone, and air support, excellent logistics and field hospitals. It is not difficult to see why Russia is crushing the AFU's corrupt officer core and political leadership.
In Russia a new generation of heroes are being added to the ranks of the Immortal Regiment. They, like their grandfathers, have defended Russia against invading European Nazis.
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Sources
Kursk Collapse Accelerates as Daring Pipeline Raid Shocks AFU; Simplicius; Simplicius' Garden of Knowledge; 2025-03-10
Paralyzed by acute dementia, Europe declares war on Russia all over again; Pepe Escobar; The Unz Review; 2025-03-07
Top US diplomat acknowledges that conflict in Ukraine is proxy war between US, Russia; N/A; TASS; 2025-03-06
Special meeting of the European Council (6 March 2025) – Conclusions; Press Releases; Council of the European Union; 2025-02-06 20:25 CET
Trump Pauses All Military Aid to Ukraine; Dave DeCamp; Antiwar; 2025-03-03
Trump Suspends Intelligence Sharing With Ukrainian Military; Dave DeCamp; Antiwar; 2025-03-05
British Storm Shadow Missiles Useless for Ukraine Following US Intelligence Pause; Dave DeCamp; Antiwar; 2025-03-06
SITREP 3/7/25: EU's Mega-Billion Bid for Ukraine Flops Again, as Trump's Erratic Messaging Dissipates 'Peace' Momentum; Simplicius; Simplicius' Garden of Knowledge; 2025-03-08
Trump aides in secret talks with Zelensky rivals - Politico; N/A; Russia Today (RT); 2025-03-06
Top Trump allies hold secret talks with Zelenskyy's Ukrainian opponents; politico.eu; Archive.today; 2025-03-07
Ukraine-Russia war latest: Trump 'destroying world order' says Kyiv as EU meets Zelensky in show of unity; The Independent; Archive.today; 2025-03-06
New CIA Director: Evidence Didn't Support Brennan's Explosive Trump-Russia Assessment; Paul Sperry; Natylie's Place: Understanding Russia; 2025-03-08
Europe Is Getting Ready for the End of NATO; Retired US Navy admiral, and former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, James Stavridis for Bloomberg; Archive.today; 2025-03-05
[US] NATO v Russia: 2014 - 2025; YesXorNo; 2024-03-08
CI-6 Take Center Stage as NATO Bows Out; YesXorNo; 2024-09-10
Hegseth Leaves Healey Floggin' a Dead Horse; YesXorNo; 2025-02-12
BRICS vs G7: The Financial Lab; YesXorNo; 2024-11-01
A Negotiating Matrix For Peace In Ukraine / Mr John Helmer/ Brig Arun Sahgal / Lt Gen Pr Shankar; Gunners Shot; Gunners Shot; 2025-03-04
Col. Larry Wilkerson & Amb. Chas Freeman on Trump’s Plan to End the Ukraine War & NATO’s Future; Alkhorshid interviews Wilkerson and Freeman; Dialogue Works; 2025-03-07
The Complete Defeat Of The Ukrainians On The Sudzha Direction Has Begun💥🔥Military Summary 2025.03.09; Dima; Military Summary; 2025-03-09
Thunder⚡️The Russians Deliver A Crushing Blow In Kursk Oblast💥Kostiantynopil Has Fallen🏰MS 9.03.2025; Dima; Military Summary; 2025-03-09
Has NATO Supported or Destroyed Ukraine's Sovereignty and Democracy?; Glenn Diesen; Glenn's Substack; 2025-03-09
TG 1828: The E.U. Prepares For War With Russia; Peter Lavelle and George Szamuely; The Gaggle with Peter and George; 2025-03-07
KURSK cauldron tightens, media blames Trump. Elensky, obstacle to peace. EURO CBDC coming soon; Alex Christoforou; Alex Christoforou; 2025-03-09
Copyleft: CC0
Interesting reading!
Do you not think that the Russian attack on the European gas storage in Western Ukraine is a retaliation for the Ukrainian and European long range attacks on Russian oil & gas infrastructure a couple of weeks ago that cannot be repaired because it relies on parts and srevice blocked the the simultaneous imposition of the at latest tranche of EU sanctions on Russia?