By Big Serge, Substack, 1/9/25

On March 5, 2022, the wreck of the sailing ship Endurance was found in the depths of the Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica. This, of course, was the vessel lost in Ernest Shackelton’s third expedition to Antarctica, which became trapped in the ice and sank in 1915. The story of that expedition is an extraordinary tale of human fortitude – with the Endurance lost to the ice, Shackleton’s crew evacuated to a loose ice flow where they camped for nearly 500 days, drifting about the Antarctic seas, before making a desperate dash across the open ocean in an open 20 foot lifeboat, finally reaching the southern shore of inhospitable and mountainous South Georgia Island, which they then had to cross on foot to reach the safety of a whaling station.

The story itself has an essentially mythic quality to it, with Shackleton’s crew surviving for years on free floating ice floes in the most inhospitable seas on earth. For our purposes, however, it is the story’s coda that is particularly interesting. In Shackleton’s memoirs, he remembered that, upon finally reaching the safety of the Stromness whaling station, one of his first questions was about the war in Europe. When Shackleton first set out on his ill-fated expedition on August 8, 1914, the First World War was less than a week old, and the German Army had just begun its invasion of Belgium. There was little expectation then that the war would proceed as it did, unleashing four years of slaughterous positional warfare that engulfed the continent.

Shackleton, having been adrift at sea for years, clearly did not imagine that the war could still be raging, and asked the commandant of the whaling station “tell me, when was the war over?”

The answer came back: “The war is not over. Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.”

The timing is serendipitous, since the discovery of the Endurance’s wreck, after more than a hundred years, happened to occur only a few weeks after the world again went mad, with the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War in February 2022. As time continues its inexorable march and the calendar turns yet again, the war is passing through its third full winter. In February, Z-World will be three years old.

Of course, modern communications make it extremely unlikely that anybody could be cut fully out of the loop for years at a time, like Shackleton and his men. Instead of being ignorant as to whether or not the war is over, many of us are exposed on a daily basis to footage of men being killed, buildings being blown up, and vehicles being shredded. Twitter has made it essentially impossible to live under a rock, or on an ice floe, as it were.

If anything, we have the very opposite problem of Shackleton – at least as far as our wartime information infrastructure goes. We are saturated in information, with daily updates tracking advances of a few dozen meters and never ending bombast about new game changing weapons (which seem to change very little), and bluster about “red lines”. This war seems to have an unyielding dynamic on the ground, and no matter how many grand pronouncements we hear that one side or the other is on the verge of collapse, the sprawling front continues to grind up bodies and congeal with bloody positional fighting.

It would seem difficult to believe that a high intensity ground war in Europe with hundreds of miles worth of front could be boring, yet the static and repetitive nature of the conflict is struggling to hold the attention of foreign observers who have little immediately at stake.

My intention here is a radical zoom-out from these demoralizing and fatiguing small scale updates (as valuable as the work of the war mappers is), and consider the aggregate of 2024 – arguing that this year was, in fact, very consequential. Taken as a whole, three very important things happened in 2024 which create a very dismal outlook for Ukraine and the AFU in the new year. More specifically, 2024 brought three important strategic developments:

1. Russian victory in southern Donetsk which destroyed the AFU’s position on one of the war’s key strategic axes.

2. The expenditure of carefully husbanded Ukrainian resources on a failed offensive towards Kursk, which accelerated the attrition of critical Ukrainian maneuver assets and substantially dampened their prospects in the Donbas.

3. The exhaustion of Ukraine’s ability to escalate vis a vis new strike systems from NATO – more broadly, the west has largely run out of options to upgrade Ukrainian capabilities, and the much vaunted delivery of longer range strike systems failed to alter the trajectory of the war on the ground.

Taken together, 2024 revealed a Ukrainian military that is increasingly stretched to the limits, to the point where the Russians were able to largely scratch off an entire sector of front. People continue to wonder where and when the Ukrainian front might begin to break down – I would argue that it *did* break down in the south over the last few months, and 2025 begins with strong Russian momentum that the AFU will be hard pressed to arrest.

Front Collapse in South Donetsk

What stands out immediately about the operational developments in 2024 is the marked shift of energies away from the axes of combat that had seen the most intense fighting in the first two years of the war. In a sense, this war has seen each of its fronts activate in a sequence, one after the other.

After the opening Russian offensive, which boasted as its signature success the capture of the Azov coastline and the linkup of Donetsk and Crimea, the action shifted to the northern front (the Lugansk-Kharkov axis), with Russia fighting a summer offensive which captured Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. This was followed by a pair of Ukrainian counteroffensives in the fall, with a thrust out of Kharkov which pushed the front back over the Oskil, and an operation directed at Kherson which failed to breach Russian defenses but ultimately resulted in a Russian withdrawal in good order over the Dnieper due to concerns over logistical connectivity and an over-extended front. Energies then pivoted yet again to the Central Donbas axis, with the enormous battle around Bakhmut raging through the spring of 2023. This was followed by the failed Ukrainian offensive on Russia’s defenses in Zaporozhia, in the south.

Just to briefly recapitulate this, we can enumerate several operational phases in the first two years of the war, occuring in sequence and each with a center of gravity in different parts of the front:

-A Russian offensive across the land bridge, culminating in the capture of Mariupol. (Winter-Spring 2022, Southern Front)

-A Russian offensive in Lugansk, capturing Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. (Summer 2022, Donets-Oskil front)

-Ukrainian Counteroffensives towards the Oskil and Kherson (Autumn 2022, Oskil and Dnieper fronts)

-The Russian assault on Bakhmut (Winter-Spring 2023, Central Front)

-Ukrainian counteroffensive on the land bridge (Summer 2023)

Amid all of this, the front that saw the least movement was the southeastern corner of the front, around Donetsk. This was somewhat peculiar. Donetsk is the urban heart of the Donbas – a vast and populous industrial city at the center of a sprawling conurbation, once home to some 2 million people. Even if Russia succeeds in capturing the city of Zaporizhia, Donetsk will be by far the most populous of Ukraine’s former cities to come under Moscow’s control.

In 2014, with the outbreak of the proto-Donbas war, Donetsk was the locus of much of the fighting, with the airport on the city’s northern approach the scene of particularly intense combat. This made it rather strange, then, that at the start of 2024 the Ukrainian Army continued to occupy many of the same positions that they built a decade prior. As intense fighting ebbed and flowed along other sectors of front, Donetsk remained besieged by a web of powerfully held Ukrainian defenses, anchored by heavily fortified urban areas stretching from Toretsk to Ugledar. Early Russian attempts to crack this iron ring open, including an assault on Ugledar in the winter of 2023, met with failure.

The signature operational development of 2024, then, was the re-activation of the Donetsk front, after years of static combat. It is not an exaggeration to say that after years of coagulation, the Russian Army cracked this front wide open in 2024 and Ukraine’s long and strongly held network of urban strongpoints collapsed.

The year began with the AFU fighting for its fortress in Avdiivka, where it continued to block the northern approach to Donetsk. At the time, the typical argument that one heard from the Ukrainian side was that the Russian assault on Avdiivka was pyrrhic – that the Russians were capturing the city with exorbitantly costly “meat assaults” that would inevitably sap Russian combat power and exhaust their ability to continue the offensive.

With the full measure of the year behind us, we can definitively say that this is not the case. After the fall of Avdiivka, Russian momentum never seriously slackened, and in fact it was the AFU that appeared to be increasingly exhausted. The Ukrainian breakwater position at Ocheretyne (which had previously been their staging point for counterattacks around Avdiivka) was overrun in a matter of days, and by the early summer the frontline had been pushed out towards the approach to Pokrovsk.

The Russian thrust towards Pokrovsk led many to believe that this city was itself the object of Russian energies, but this was a misread of the operational design. Russia did not need to capture Pokrovsk in 2024 to render it sterile as a logistical hub. Simply by advancing towards the E50 highway, Russian forces were able to cut off Pokrovsk from Ukrainian positions to the south on the Donetsk front, and Pokvrovsk is now a frontline city subject to the full spectrum of overwatch from Russian drones and tube artillery.

By autumn, the Russian advance had put the Ukrainians in a severe salient, creating an unstable chain of positions in Selydove, Kurakhove, Ugledar, and Krasnogorivka. Russia’s advance from Ocheretyne onto the southern approach to Pokrovsk acted like an enormous scythe, isolating the entire southeastern sector of the front and allowing Russian forces to carve through it in the closing months of the year.

This war has turned the word “collapse” into a devalued buzzword. We are told repeatedly that one side or the other is on the verge of collapse: sanctions will “collapse” the Russian economy, the Wagner uprising of 2023 proved that the Russian political system was “collapsing”, and of course we hear that exorbitant losses have one army or the other on the verge of total failure – which army that may be depends on who you ask.

I would argue, however, that what we saw from October 2024 onward represents a real occurrence of this oft-repeated and discarded word. The AFU suffered a genuine collapse of the southeastern front, with the forces positioned in their strongpoints too attrited and isolated to make a determined defense, Russian fires becoming too heavily concentrated in ever more compressed areas to endure, and no mechanized reserve in the theater available to counterattack or relieve the incessant Russian pressure.

Ukraine does maintain enough drones and concentrated fires to limit Russian a full Russian exploitation – that is, Russia is still not able to maneuver at depth. This gave the Russian advance is particular stop-start quality, leapfrogging from one settlement and fortress to the other. More generally, Russia’s preference to use dispersed small-unit assaults limits the potential for exploitation. We have to emphasize, however, that Russian momentum on this axis has never seriously slackened since October, and many of the key Ukrainian positions were overrun or abandoned very quickly.

Ugledar is a good example: the Russians began their final push toward the town on September 24. By September 29, the 72nd Mechanized Brigade began evacuating. By October 1, Ugledar was fully under Russian control. This was a keystone Ukrainian position put in a completely untenable position and it went down in a week. One could argue, of course, that Ugledar held out for years (how then can we say with a straight face that it was captured in a week), but this is precisely the point. In early 2023 Ugledar (with the help of artillery stationed around Kurakhove) successfully repelled a multi-brigade Russian attack in months of heavy fighting. By October 2024, the position was completely untenable and was abandoned almost immediately when attacked.

The Ukrainians did no better trying to hold Kurakhove – previously a critical rear area that served as both a logistical hub and a base of fire for supporting (former) frontline strongpoints like Ugledar and Krasnogorivka. Kurakhove, now under full Russian control, will in turn serve as a base of support for the ongoing Russian push to the west towards Andriivka.

Taking the state of the front holistically, the AFU is currently holding two severe salients at the southernmost end of the line – one around Velyka Novosilka, and another around Andriivka. The former is likely to fall first, as the town has been fully isolated by Russian advances on the flanks. This is not a Bakhmut-like situation, where roads are described as “cut” because they are under Russian fire – in this case, all of the highways into Velyka Novosilka are cut by physical Russian blocking positions, making the loss of the position only a matter of waiting for the Russians to assault it. Further north, a more gentle and less strongly held salient exists between Grodivka and Toretsk. With Toretsk now in the final stages of capture (Ukrainian forces now hold only a small residential neighborhood on the city’s outskirts), the front should level here as well in the coming months.

This leaves the Russians more or less in full control of the approaches to Kostyantinivka and Pokrovsk, which are in many ways the penultimate Ukrainian held positions in Donetsk. Pokrovsk has already been bypassed several miles to the west, and the map portends a re-run of the typical Russian tactical methodology for assaulting urban areas – a methodical advance along the wings of the city to isolate it from arterial highways, followed by an attack on the city itself via several axes.

The coming months promise continued Russian advances across this front, in a continuation of what can only be regarded as the collapse of a critical front on the part of the AFU. The Russian Army is advancing to the western border of Donetsk oblast and will ferret the Ukrainians out of their remaining strongpoints at Velyka Novosilka and Andriivka, while pushing into the belly of Pokrovsk. At no point since the fall of Avdiivka have the Ukrainians demonstrated the ability to seriously stymie Russian momentum along this 75 mile front, and the ongoing dissipation of Ukrainian combat resources indicates that little will change in this regard in 2025…..

Conclusion: Debellation

Trapped in an endless news cycle, with daily footage of FPV strikes and exploding vehicles, and a dutiful cottage industry of war mappers alerting us to every 100 meter advance, it can easily feel like the Russo-Ukrainian War is trapped in an interminable doom loop which will never end – Mad Max meets Groundhog Day.

What I have endeavored to do here, however, is argue that 2024 actually saw several very important developments which make the coming shape of the war relatively clear. To briefly recapitulate:

1. Russian forces caved in Ukrainian defenses at depth across an entire critical axis of front. After remaining static for years, Ukraine’s position in Southern Donetsk has been obliterated, with Russian forces advancing through an entire belt of fortified positions, pushing the front into Pokrovsk and Kostayantinivka.

2. The main Ukrainian gambit on the ground (the incursion into Kursk) failed spectacularly, with the salient being progressively caved in. An entire grouping of critical mechanized formations wasted much of the year fighting on this unproductive and secondary front, leaving Ukrainian positions in the Donbas increasingly threadbare and bereft of reserves.

3. An attempt by the Ukrainian government to reinvigorate its mobilization program failed, with enlistments quickly trailing off. Decisions to expand the force structure exacerbated the shortage of manpower, and as a result the decay of Ukraine’s frontline brigades has accelerated.

Long awaited western upgrades to Ukraine’s strike capabilities failed to defeat Russian momentum, and stocks of ATACMs and Storm Shadows are nearly exhausted. There are now few options remaining to prop up Ukrainian strike capacity, and no prospect of Ukraine gaining dominance in this dimension of the war.

In short, Ukraine is on the path to debellation – defeat through the total exhaustion of its capacity to resist. They are not exactly out of men and vehicles and missiles, but these lines are all pointing downward. A strategic Ukrainian defeat – once unthinkable to the western foreign policy apparatus and commentariat – is now on the table. Quite interestingly, now that Donald Trump is about to return to the White House, it is suddenly acceptable to speak of Ukrainian defeat. Robert Kagan – a stalwart champion of Ukraine if there ever was one – now says the quiet part out loud:

“Ukraine will likely lose the war within the next 12 to 18 months. Ukraine will not lose in a nice, negotiated way, with vital territories sacrificed but an independent Ukraine kept alive, sovereign, and protected by Western security guarantees. It faces instead a complete defeat, a loss of sovereignty, and full Russian control.”

Indeed.

None of this should be particularly surprising. If anything, it is shocking that my position – that Russia is essentially a very powerful country that was very unlikely to lose a war (which it perceives as existential) right in its own belly – somehow became controversial or fringe. But here we are.

Carthago delenda est

By Greg Miller, Robyn Dixon, and Isaac Stanley-Becker, Washington Post, 1/19/25

LONDON — Ruptures of undersea cables that have rattled European security officials in recent months were likely the result of maritime accidents rather than Russian sabotage, according to several U.S. and European intelligence officials.

The determination reflects an emerging consensus among U.S. and European security services, according to senior officials from three countries involved in ongoing investigations of a string of incidents in which critical seabed energy and communications lines have been severed.

The cases raised suspicion that Russia was targeting undersea infrastructure as part of a broader campaign of hybrid attacks across Europe, and prompted stepped-up security measures including an announcement last week that NATO would launch new patrol and surveillance operations in the Baltic Sea.

But so far, officials said, investigations involving the United States and a half-dozen European security services have turned up no indication that commercial ships suspected of dragging anchors across seabed systems did so intentionally or at the direction of Moscow….

Full article here (behind paywall).

By Kit Klarenberg, Substack, 1/22/25

On January 19th, TIME magazine published an astonishing article, amply confirming what dissident, anti-war academics, activists, journalists and researchers have argued for a decade. The US always intended to abandon Ukraine after setting up the country for proxy war with Russia, and never had any desire or intention to assist Kiev in defeating Moscow in the conflict, let alone achieving its maximalist aims of regaining Crimea and restoring the country’s 1991 borders. To have a major mainstream outlet finally corroborate this indubitable reality is a seismic development.

The TIME article’s brief first paragraph alone is rife with explosive revelations. It notes when the proxy war erupted in February 2022, then-President Joe Biden “set three objectives for the US response” – and “Ukraine’s victory was never among them.” Moreover, the phrase oft-repeated by White House apparatchiks, that Washington would support Kiev “for as long as it takes”, was never meant to be taken literally. Instead, it was just “intentionally vague” newspeak, with no implied timeframe or even desired outcome in mind.

Eric Green, a member of Biden’s National Security Council who oversaw Russia policy, states the US “deliberately…made no promise” to President Volodymyr Zelensky to “recover all of the land Russia had occupied” since the conflict’s inception, “and certainly not” Crimea or the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. He said the White House believed “doing so was beyond Ukraine’s ability, even with robust help from the West.” It was well-understood such efforts were “not going to be a success story ultimately” for Kiev, if tried.

According to TIME, the Biden administration’s three key objectives in Ukraine were all “achieved”. Nonetheless, “success” on these fronts “provides little satisfaction” to some of the former President’s “closest allies and advisers.” Green was quoted as saying Washington’s purported victory in Ukraine was “unfortunately the kind of success where you don’t feel great about it,” due to Kiev’s “suffering”, and “so much uncertainty about where it’s ultimately going to land.”

‘Direct Conflict’

One objective was “avoiding direct conflict between Russia and NATO.” Miraculously, despite the US and its allies consistently crossing Moscow’s clearly stated red lines on assistance to Kiev, providing Ukraine with weaponry and other support Biden himself explicitly and vehemently ruled out in March 2022, on the grounds it could cause World War III, and greenlighting hazardously escalatory strikes deep inside Russian territory, so far all-out hot war has failed to materialise. On this front perhaps, the former President can be said to have triumphed.

However, another “was for Ukraine to survive as a sovereign, democratic country free to pursue integration with the West.” This prospect dwindles daily, as the proxy war’s frontline teeters constantly on total collapse. Kiev is facing an eventual and seemingly inevitable rout of some magnitude, with the conflict likely settled solely on Russia’s terms, and Zelensky – or whoever replaces him – having no negotiating position to speak of. In December 2024, Empire house journal Foreign Policy even openly advocated cutting Kiev out of eventual peace talks.

Biden also “wanted the US and its allies to remain united.” It is this objective that most obviously failed, and quite spectacularly. As this journalist has repeatedly documented, British intelligence has consistently sought to escalate the proxy conflict into all-out war between the West and Russia, and encouraged Kiev in its maximalist aims, to the extent of covertly plotting grand operations for the purpose, and training Ukrainians to execute them. London’s overriding ambition, per leaked documents, is “to keep Ukraine fighting at all costs.”

The Western media has acknowledged Ukraine’s calamitous August 2024 invasion of Russia’s Kursk region was to all intents and purposes a British operation. London provided a vast welter of equipment to Kiev “central” to the effort, and “closely” advised their Ukrainian counterparts on strategy. The aim was to draw Russian forces away from Donbass and boost Kiev’s bargaining position, which has proven a staggering embarrassment on both fronts. But there was a wider, more insidious goal behind the incursion.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/YzUN1wW7p6c?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Britain openly and eagerly advertised its fundamental role in the Kursk misadventure to bolster public support at home for continuing the proxy war, and “persuade key allies to do more to help.” In other words, to normalise open Western involvement, and create the “direct conflict” the Biden administration was so keen to avoid. London was also at the forefront of pressuring NATO member states to permit Ukraine to use foreign-supplied weaponry and materiel inside Russia, which could likewise produce their long-sought hot war against Moscow.

Several Western countries – including the US – have offered such authorisation. Yet, Russia has consistently responded to strikes deep inside its territory with heavy duty counterattacks, which Kiev has been unable to repel. Meanwhile, London’s invitation to its allies to become more overtly involved in the proxy war was evidently rebuffed. In November 2024 too, pro-government outlet Ukrainska Pravda published a startling investigation, documenting in forensic detail how the October 2023 – June 2024 Krynky operation was, à la Kursk, essentially British.

Never spoken of by Ukrainian officials today, the nine-month effort saw wave after wave of British-trained and equipped marines attempt to secure a beachhead in a river-adjacent village in Russian-controlled Kherson. Poorly prepared, many died attempting to reach Krynky, due to relentless artillery, drone, flamethrower and mortar fire. Of those that survived the nightmarish journey, most were then killed under a constant and ever-intensifying blitz, in marsh conditions. Russia’s onslaught grew so inexorable, evacuating casualties or providing forces with even basic supplies became borderline impossible.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DwtbIIYQjic?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Survivors of the Krynky catastrophe – one of the absolute worst in military history – who spoke to Ukrainska Pravda revealed it was hoped the beachhead would be a “game-changer”, opening a second front in the conflict, allowing Kiev’s invading marines to march upon Crimea and all-out victory in the proxy war. They hoped to recreate the June 1944 Normandy landings – D-Day. It is all too easy to envisage British intelligence filling the heads of their Ukrainian trainees with such fantasies.

‘Settle Up’

Fast forward to today, and Britain and France are openly discussing sending “peacekeepers” to Ukraine, to “help underpin” whatever “post-war settlement” emerges between Kiev and Moscow. This is after in February 2024, French President Emmanuel Macron suggested formally deploying his country’s forces to Ukraine to halt Moscow’s advance. The proposal was summarily dropped and forgotten when Russian officials made abundantly clear each and every French soldier dispatched to the frontline would be killed without hesitation, and Paris could become a formal belligerent in the war.

It appears the “peacekeeping” plan is likely to suffer the same fate. On January 20th, coincidentally or not the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, CIA-created Radio Free Europe published an explainer guide on why sending European troops to Ukraine is “a nonstarter”. Among other things, as the Russians are unambiguously winning, they are unlikely to offer many concessions, particularly allowing foreign soldiers to occupy Kiev’s territory. Furthermore, “as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Moscow can block any peacekeeping mission.”

As if the message to London and Paris wasn’t emphatic enough, two weeks earlier, at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump made numerous comments reiterating his commitment to ending the proxy war. “We’re going to have to settle up with Russia,” he declared. Notably, the President sympathised with Moscow’s “written in stone” determination Kiev not be enrolled into NATO, warned the situation “could escalate to be much worse,” and stated his hope the conflict could be wrapped up within six months.

Markedly, Zelensky was not invited to Trump’s inauguration. In a January 6th interview with Newsweek, the Ukrainian President – typically never one to shy away from international jollies – said he was unable to attend, as it wasn’t “proper” to do so “during the war”. Amusingly, Trump’s son Donald Jr. has rubbished Zelensky’s narrative, claiming he – “a weirdo” – had specifically “asked for an invite” on three occasions, “and each time got turned down.”

For Berlin, Kiev, London, Paris, and NATO more widely, the writing couldn’t be on the wall any more plainly. Whatever reveries they may have of maintaining the proxy war any longer – Britain recently signed a 100-year-long partnership with Ukraine, under which London will “explore” building military bases on Kiev’s soil – they all ultimately remain imperial vassals, wholly dependent on US financial and military support to exist. Save for a major false flag incident, Trump’s message can only be received among the military alliance.

YouTube link here.

By Michael Vlahos, Landmarks Magazine, 1/10/25

Michael Vlahos is author of the book Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change. He taught strategy at Johns Hopkins University and the Naval War College and joins John Batchelor weekly on CBS Eye on the World. Follow him on @Michalis_Vlahos

They say “all wars must end.” Yet how does this actually happen? First, all parties must agree — to go down that path together. Next, they must enter into formal negotiation, which almost always means horse trading, compromise, and accommodation. Finally, and most important, all belligerents must want the war to end.

Russia almost certainly wants this. Its minimum territorial objectives are within reach. Moreover, the destruction of Ukrainian military potential — equipment, infrastructure, and stockpiles — is almost complete. Furthermore, the General Staff’s strategy of attrition is approaching its endpoint. The Ukrainian Army is breaking, and Ukrainian national society is literally on the eve of destruction.

Within the “collective West,” the new “Decider” and the majority of Americans also want this war to end. Yet powerful constituencies in EU and American politics are emotionally invested in keeping war going. Red Hawks and most of the Blue Establishment are committed to defanging Russia and demonstrating Alliance strength and cohesion. A settlement that reeks of defeat, they say, will only embolden predatory “autocracies” and further fissiparous “extreme right wing” populism in Europe.

The Trans-Atlantic War Party Establishment, therefore, is determined to deny the Decider a free hand. If Mr. Trump gives away too much to Mr. Putin, he will be derided as an “appeaser.” Red Hawks — including barons in his new administration — will pressure him to bargain from “a position of strength,” creating an instant fissure in his authority if he shows weakness, and an instant, exploitable opening for Blue. Their bitter establishment, still licking its electoral wounds, will leap at the opportunity to tar Trump as a Paper Tiger, abdicating America’s predestined world leadership while also abdicating the sovereignty of the American Century: They will declare, “Even his advisers say so.”

However, if the new president gives in, and “shows strength” by up-arming Ukraine, and offering only a suspension of hostilities, the war will likely go on. Putin has declared that Russia will not accept a truce, armistice, or ceasefire in lieu of a permanent settlement. A long-term compact can be achieved, he insists, only by accommodating Russia’s inviolable strategic needs. Absent this, negotiation will fail, and failure would surely lead to much buyer’s remorse and dismay among those millions who voted for Trump’s promise to bring the fighting to an end.

For “45/47” it would represent a personal failure as well. After all, he vowed to end the war with speed and éclat: Éclat in the sense of “acclamation” as well as “brilliant success.” This is no trivial matter for him: Success could only elevate and enhance his now-mythic persona. In contrast, failure would be a body blow to his stature.

Thus, failure now beckons from two directions. If Trump “appeases,” then Blue will launch him into the meme trajectory of “weak king, enemy comprador.” However, if his Peace Ship fails, and the war goes on, he will be fatefully captured by the War Party, and the conflict will become “Trump’s War.” He will then be well and truly stuck tight in their hand-crafted Tar Baby and its tender snare.

So how then can a new president thread a course between the Scylla and Charybdis of antagonists, foreign and domestic? Perhaps, like Odysseus, the best course might be to “choose the lesser of two evils.”

Here, the lesser evil is a settlement that both accommodates Russia and saves Ukraine. The greater evil is a continuation of the war, leading to the destruction of Ukraine and the breakup of NATO — and just possibly, another world war.

All this means taking on, and overthrowing, the grip of the War Party (Red and Blue) on this nation’s affairs. There is only one way, moreover, to do this: He must break the iron narrative of “Appeasement” — where the only strategic choice is between war and surrender. Thankfully, the hammer and chisel that will break it is at hand.

It means, simply, that the president must tell the whole truth, at long last, about this war.

The Ukraine proxy war against Russia was sold through the greatest Black-and-White story ever told: Of naked aggression unleashed by a maniacal dictator, the latest threat in a long lineage of Evil, from Kaiser to Hitler to Stalin to Mao, and now, the tyrant Putin.

The truth is that the United States, after 2009 (and especially 2014), relentlessly curated conflict between Russia and Ukraine, with the ultimate intent of expanding NATO and breaking Russia. This is the real story. Highly authoritative expert commentary on how it happened is easily accessed: For example, the lectures and videos of John Mearsheimer, and the almost biblical epic volume of Scott Horton, Provoked. There are many, many sources, both scholarly books and an Internet library of unimpeachable analysis.

Yet official “truth” — from the US and NATO governments — has never veered from the iron narrative that is the Manichaean testament of Putin perfidy, Russian savagery, and a “long, twilight struggle” of good vs. evil, of democracy vs. tyranny, of light against the darkness. Moreover, the “commanding heights” of “the collective West” — its entire ruling establishment — sold its credulous electorates this story, supplemented daily by full injections of Ukrainian propaganda. This “Information Op” was itself fully funded by the US and NATO, and orchestrated by a contractual alliance between intelligence agencies and hundreds of PR firms.

This united front presented by Government, Mainstream Media, Intelligence and the propaganda industry effectively marginalized the voice of actual reality. Those advocating for “foreign policy restraint” were labelled “isolationists.” Those who presented the actual backstory to the war were dismissed as Putinists or Orc lovers or Vatniks.

Over three long years of war, however, actual reality began to sink in. More and more Americans became disenchanted with the war and increasingly suspicious of the official story, and of a Biden administration that, on so many fronts, and with so many issues, had simply, brazenly, lied to the American people. Moreover, by the autumn of 2023, the Ukrainian war effort was visibly failing, a reality that propaganda could no longer conceal.

Today, Ukraine stands at the precipice of national existence.

Ukraine in 1994 was 52 million strong. Then the draining began. The best and the brightest sought opportunity in the EU and Russia. Ukraine was a nation of perhaps 33 million in 2022. Today, a quarter of that already-diminished country’s population has fled to the European Union, and another quarter is in the now Russian oblasts, or residing as new migrants in the Russian Federation. The nation itself has shrunk by half.

Yet this is only one edge of the cliff. Ukraine’s fertility has collapsed. Prewar, it was already one of the lowest in Europe. The years of war have pushed it down below 1.0, perhaps even to 0.7. In the war, Ukraine has sustained shockingly massive casualties. Combined with the sheer number of able-bodied men who are fleeing the country, both draft-dodgers and deserters, or those who were migrants loath to come home, Ukraine — sans settlement — is poised to keep shrinking. Within a generation it may wither to the size of Belgium, perhaps even that of Belarus.

Then there is the matter of casualties. Kiev and Washington — and the entire Media and Official Propaganda industrial complex — has been silent on the subject of battlefield losses until recent months, when the yawning catastrophe could no longer be denied. Yet all along there have been signs and signals and harrowing data points. Stitched together, this is the story they tell.

In the first 18 months of the war — simply counting military obituaries and dead SIM cards — comes to ~330,000 Ukrainian soldiers KIA. Moreover, more than 50,000 lost one or more limbs. Moreover, in the last 18 months, monthly losses intensified. Kiev itself has declared that the army needs 30,000 replacements a month just to maintain the current force. Does this mean that, from September 2023 to date, another ~540,000 soldiers were lost?

Here, it is necessary to be mindful of what Soviet historians call “irrecoverable” losses. Hence, a soldier who will never return to the fight is “irrecoverable.” Killed, crippled, missing: This is the true sum of an army’s losses in war. For Ukraine, arithmetic says that number is not less than ~920,000 men.

Yet not all of these are dead or crippled. Deserters also represent, in a very real sense, irrecoverable casualties, as these are the able-bodied who have fled the country, or who have gone to ground inside Ukraine. Eurostat reports that 650,000 men of fighting age have fled Ukraine. Furthermore, reeling under Russian hammer-blows across the Donbass Front, desertions are reportedly over 200,000 in 2024. Thus, Kiev has been forced to raise its monthly mobilization target from 30,000 to 40,000.

Ukrainian journalists cite a desertion rate of 160 per day in early 2024, rising to 200 by summer, and then jumping to 380 by autumn. This suggests that desertion, over the past year at least, has accounted for a thick slice of irrecoverable losses, perhaps 4500-5000 per month. The sudden surge in desertion after September 2024 has been driven by crushing exhaustion and defeat. This in turn has pushed the state to desperate measures. All “conscription” in Ukraine today takes the form of violent kidnapping, even of the sick, aged, and infirm. Yet in spite of the utmost brutality, that 40K per month target is now short about 20,000 each month.

Moreover, actual irrecoverable losses, across the board, are almost certainly understated. For example, many platoon and company commanders simply do not report desertions, for fear of punishment by their field grade superiors. Likewise, the number of missing KIA is massive, given the sheer number of Ukrainian corpses left on the battlefields. A recent composite of casualty estimates puts the KIA total at 780,000. Adding in the severely wounded, total irrecoverable Ukrainian battle losses could be as high as 1.2 million, after 1000 days of war.

To put all this in perspective: Today’s shrunken Ukraine is half the size of the French Republic in 1914. In World War I, France lost 3.6 percent of its population: A monstrous and unnecessary national bloodletting, and a stain on the very idea of “Civilization.”

America’s proxy war against Russia — goading and pitting Ukraine against a nation nearly 8 times its size — has led to yet another unnecessary bloodletting. Ukraine has lost 3.9 percent of its population. Hidden from us for years, in plain sight.

What hath America wrought? Biden’s narrative narcissism would have us believe the United States has been heroically defending democracy against tyranny and pure evil. How he boasted, loudly, that America was bleeding Russia white — all for the price of not one American soldier. What a bargain! However, in sharper focus, an American emperor and his court, in their lust to bring Russia to its knees, destroyed another nation (and this time, not a “primitive,” but rather a “European” nation) to no purpose but to fulfill its own vanity.

Unwittingly perhaps, the real effect of Biden’s fulmination was to fulfill the enemy’s existential need. Curating and handcrafting this naked American proxy war, ironically, gave Russia the signal opportunity to halt NATO expansion, and buy itself strategic breathing room. Biden’s assault served to mobilize and renew Russian national identity. Eager and blind, an addled Emperor thus became Russia’s strategic helpmate.

Now try out this counterpoint. Imagine an alternative reality where Mr. Putin actually agrees to a ceasefire in-place. This is the last fallback wet dream of the US/NATO War Party. An armistice — with NATO “peacekeepers” — would surely let the collective West rejuvenate and rearm Ukraine. A new army, drafted from the 18-25 age cohort, including even women, might then be harnessed by the War Party to have another go at Russia, and give us yet another vicarious national bleed.

In this fantasy, a nation of 20 million (or less) would be trumpeted as the return of Ulysses, i.e., the million fighting men who fled, and their families, would return to their homeland to “fight the good fight” yet again. In the next war, a righteous Ukraine, eager and steel-annealed to exact revenge, would unleash “Fire and Sword” on the Russian serpent: A summoning of NeoCon Nirvana.

Yet think: An armistice premeditating another war could lead only to the further, final hollowing-out of Ukraine. Any male person in that cursed country — given the terrors they know — will surely flee: “Get out now before it’s too late!” The irreversible downhill slope in fertility keeps singing, ominously, of an irreversible path toward national extinction. Ukrainians will never, ever embrace yet more blood after the sheer terror of 2022-2025.

The Ukraine Question must be permanently settled.

Only this argument can silence Red Hawks and the Blue War Party alike. All the peoples American Empire has ravaged and wrecked this century — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen — stand as mute witness to the dark descent of a once stainless and world-redemptive American Mission. The new president could make use of this American myth about itself to proclaim to the world that “The Fall” stops here.

Bringing peace to Ukraine is the very smallest mercy this nation might ever offer to those millions of innocents betrayed by America’s supremely venal, exiting emperor. Adding further to the argument that this all must end: Russia too has suffered in this war. Their KIA is about twice what America suffered in Vietnam, from a population slightly smaller than the US in 1960. Russia will seek no more wars, whatever ever-ardent keyboard War Hawks declare.

Surely, President Trump can end the madness of another “Forever War” — cold or hot — with Russia. This, without hesitation or reservation, is the greater evil we face.

Surely, a permanent settlement in Ukraine is the lesser of two evils.