By Jeff Childers, Substack, 5/3/25

Jeff Childers is an attorney and conservative commentator based in Florida.

Another corporate media narrative has been wadded up and thrown away now that its usefulness has expired. This week, the Wall Street Journal ran an astonishing bit of narrative turnabout, in a new limited hangout headlined, “The Russian Military Moves That Have Europe on Edge.” Ukraine-flag-in-bio types cried themselves to sleep last night.

For Portland readers, who may have missed the last four years of Proxy War narrative spinning, the media has constantly assured everyone that Russia has only gained ground in Ukraine through mountains of dead soldiers and piles of droned military equipment. According to media, Moscow’s mad dictator only progressed by irrationally shoveling Russian bodies into a Gettysburg-style sausage-grinder of his own creation, while the plucky Ukrainian defenders pick enemy soldiers off by the dozens.

But now they tell us that Russia’s army is bigger than ever. “Putin has ordered the military to expand its ranks,” the Journal admitted, “to as many as 1.5 million troops, up from around one million before the Ukraine invasion.” It pointed out that, before the invasion in 2021, Russia had built only about 40 total of its flagship T-90M battle tanks. But now, explained the story, “it is producing nearly 300 a year.”

“Russia’s recent production of military equipment,” it added flatly, “has more than made up for what it is losing in Ukraine.”

That was an astonishing narrative pivot. But the irony got even thicker. According to the Journal, most of Russia’s new tanks and other equipment aren’t even being deployed to Ukraine. Russia is stockpiling them. “Almost none are being sent to the front line in Ukraine, but are staying on Russian soil for later use,” said one Finnish official.

In other words, Russia hasn’t yet committed its best effort to the fight. Behold this stunning admission: “Most of what is being sent to the front line in Ukraine is old and refurbished Soviet-era arms.” The Russians are battling Ukraine with one arm held behind their back.

The article did not explain how Ukraine can possibly win if Russia decides to start trying.

🚀 If NATO fought the Proxy War to starve Russia through a war of attrition, it failed. “The Russian military is reconstituting and growing at a faster rate than most analysts had anticipated,” General Christopher Cavoli, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, bluntly told a Senate committee this month. “In fact, the Russian army, which has borne the brunt of combat, is today larger than it was at the beginning of the war.”

Weird. Russia is winning by losing so much. Media somehow holds an irresolvable logical conundrum, one posed by simultaneously believing that “Russia is throwing all its men and material at the war” but also that “Russia’s army is getting bigger by the minute.”

🚀 The new narrative pivot isn’t accidental. It is a feeble and obvious attempt to scare Western officials into doubling down on the Proxy War, based on the insane notion that doing even more of the same failed military strategy will somehow bring the Russian bear to heel, instead of just making its army swell even bigger and become even more well-equipped, or possibly leading to a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine when Russia decides to finally get down to business.

Also omitted by the article was any discussion of how Biden’s idiotic policy of letting Ukraine fire anti-personnel missiles over Russian beaches may have contributed to the buildup. Nor did it speculate about what the Russian people might be thinking of constant European threats to send armies of EU “peacekeepers” to help Ukraine kill more Russians.

Speaking of those threats, what is even more bizarre about all the bellicose European braggadocio is their utter inability to follow through with the threats. Consider this remarkable headline from this week’s Times of London:

Compare that puny 25,000 best-case estimate to Russia’s experienced 1.5 million-man army.

The 25,000 figure emerged from a series of “emergency” EU meetings to counter the Russian Menace. “The discussions,” the Times reported without a scrap of irony, “expose how reliant Britain and Europe are on the US when it comes to providing a serious deterrent to Russia.”

🚀 In a related story, this week the Times also ran another limited hangout story, this one describing how deeply Great Britain is up to its stiff neck in the Proxy War. It was headlined, “The untold story of British military chiefs’ crucial role in Ukraine.” The sub-headline explained, “The extent of the UK’s involvement in the 2023 spring offensive against Russia — the last-minute dashes to Kyiv, battle plans and intelligence — has remained largely hidden. Until now.”

Thanks, media. Now you tell us.

Combined with the similar revelations about the U.S.’s critical role in basically running the Ukraine side of the Proxy War, one begins to wonder exactly what the Ukrainians bring to the table, apart from service as patriotic cannon fodder? That’s not nothing; the Ukrainians and their odd mercenaries are the ones doing the dying.

But whose war is it, really?

For reasons that remain imperfectly understood, Ukraine —long the deep state’s crack house— is ground zero of the globalist project. Maybe it’s because Ukraine, with its actor president, is not just a proxy war, but a proxy country. What if corruptocratic Ukraine has no real government at all, but it is only a faux state, a disposable extension of WEF’s global leaders, the EU Commission, U.S. neocons, and their jointly shared fantasies of one-world, Soros-style unified government?

It would explain a lot.

But thanks to having no functioning media at all, we starve for reliable data; we lack the information necessary to understand what, exactly, are the stakes? But it is becoming more and more clear that the West bet the farm on Ukraine’s bread basket, and it backfired spectacularly.

What happens when the Russians finally get aggravated enough and commit their vast and growing reserve forces and brand-new hardware to the battle? I hate to say “We told you so,” but … we told them.