By Uwe Parpart, Asia Times, 11/15/22

“In the Kherson direction, today at 5 o’clock in the morning Moscow time, the transfer of units of Russian troops to the left bank of the Dnieper River was completed. No units or military equipment and weapons were left on the right bank. All Russian soldiers crossed to the left bank of the Dnieper,” read the announcement of the Russian Ministry of Defense on Friday, November 11, 2022 – the anniversary of World War I Armistice Day, 1918.

The amount of misinformation and sheer nonsense about the Russian withdrawal from Kherson published since the time of the announcement “wouldn’t fit on a cow’s hide” (geht auf keine Kuhhaut), said a German military intelligence officer based at Grafenwöhr, Bavaria, where Bundeswehr trainers advise Ukrainian soldiers in the use of advanced artillery equipment.

(It’s on parchment made of cowhide that the devil keeps a record of people’s sins qualifying for time in hell or purgatory.)

As has become commonplace, the blödsinn (“utter rubbish”) was mainly purveyed by the Washington, DC–based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), founded and headed by Kimberly Kagan, wife of Frederick Kagan, head of the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, brother of neocon guru Robert Kagan, husband of the US undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria “Tori” Nuland, spiritus rector (“guiding spirit”) of the 2014 Maidan Orange uprising that deposed elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.

Nuland became notorious for her “F**k the EU” outburst, published from a covert tape recording.

What the ISW may have left out by way of rubbish and propaganda was filled in by Britain’s Ministry of Truth – pardon, Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) – and duly amplified by the echo chamber of the Western press.

The Anglo-American echo chamber predicted 1) a bloodbath, with the mass slaughter of panicked, fleeing Russian soldiers; 2) retaliation for the defeat at Kherson by a Russian electromagnetic pulse (EMP) strike by a low-yield nuclear detonation in space, causing a total blackout and shut down of unprotected electronic devices in the city of Kiev, a fairytale circulated by the ISW; 3) blowing up the Kakhovka dam with thousands of civilian casualties (UK MoD).

The accusation that destroying a dam constituted a war crime was especially ripe coming from London; British forces invented this sort of war on the night of May 16-17, 1943. “Operation Chastise,” the mass bombing attack on six major German dams, destroyed two of the targets and killed 2,400 people.

To date, nothing of the sort has happened – though we won’t rule out that Ukrainian or Russian fire might damage or destroy the dam at Nova Kakhovka in the future.

What has happened, instead, is an orderly retreat of Russian forces from the west bank of the Dnieper River with virtually no reported casualties and no serious effort by Ukrainian forces to exploit the retreat.

Those facts and the resulting new military situation constitute one of two factors that point toward a ceasefire, possibly leading to a formal armistice. US Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered his professional judgment to this effect in a November 11 speech to the Economic Club of New York. Milley did not hedge.

“There has to be a mutual recognition that military victory is probably, in the true sense of the word, not achievable through military means, and therefore.… When there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it,” he said.

The other factor is the economic situation of Ukraine and its Western European supporters. Ukraine says its economic output is down 35% year on year. That is nowhere near the truth. The country has neither the labor nor the capital to sustain itself at any level.

It is entirely dependent on foreign donations for its ability to conduct the current war and keep its dwindling population fed and clothed. Western Europe, in turn, has reached the limits of coping with the influx of Ukrainian refugees as well as continuing immigrant flows from Africa.

The military situation

On October 8, after the bombing of the strategic Kerch Strait bridge connecting Crimea and Russia’s Taman Peninsula, Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed Army General Sergey Surovikin as the new overall commander of operations of the war.

Surovikin, 56, has ample combat experience in Afghanistan and Syria. He took his time – one month, to be precise – to assess the military situation. And he made a decision for which he may well be vilified: to withdraw all Russian forces from the right bank of the Dnieper to defensible positions with much shorter interior lines on the left bank, requiring fewer troops to defend.

Any defensive evacuation of substantial numbers of troops (approximately 30,000) with a major river at your back is a high-risk operation. Based on net assessment, Surovikin regarded it as necessary and got it sorted. The map below shows the current alignments and military options of both sides.

A Ukrainian attack across the river would face major problems, including guarding against the possibility of a Kakhovka dam burst and flooding of the lower Kherson regions.

Ukrainian attacks from the areas east of the city of Zaporizhzhia in the direction of Melitopol and further east of Mariupol are possible, but would require significant massing of forces, potentially denuding Ukrainian positions opposite the city of Donetsk. The danger for Ukraine there lies in the possibility of a Russian counterattack in the direction of the city of Pokrovsk near the western border of Donetsk Oblast.

The hardest current fighting is taking place in the Bakhmut-Soledar area. The area around the transportation hub of Bakhmut guards entry to the Popasna-Luhansk corridor. Neither side can afford to abandon these key positions.

Last, further north, the focus is on the parallelogram southeast of Kharkov. But the Ukrainian offensive there is literally stuck in the mud. It is difficult to see how much progress can be made by the Ukrainians, notably because of the closeness of Russian territory.

Bottom line: Surovikin’s move out of Kherson City and points northwest of the city has created a strategic stalemate.

Time is not on Ukraine’s side. Larger-scale efforts to regain more territory than achieved in Kharkov and Kherson would require not only the continued large flow of NATO arms, but a buildup of manpower.

The 15,000-20,000 troops currently being trained in Poland, Germany and Ukraine will not suffice even if they are twice as capable as the Russian reservists being brought in.

General Milley’s assessment was based on this simple body count. Ukraine is no longer a country of 42 million people, but more likely a country of 10 million fewer than that.

American military intelligence assessments assume about equal numbers of Ukrainian and Russian casualties of about 100,000 since the start of the war. That does not bode well for the country with currently just one-fifth of Russia’s population.

Armistice assessment

General Milley’s assessment that neither Ukraine nor Russia can achieve their maximum goals is widely shared by other NATO militaries.

German and French assessments are more pessimistic, assuming that even parity will not last long and that now is the optimal time for Ukraine to start talking.

There can be little doubt that this is what prompted US national security adviser Jake Sullivan to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that, yes, we fully support you, but, hey, maybe start negotiations.

Sullivan reportedly told Zelensky that it would be easier to maintain Western support if it were “perceived as being willing” to engage in diplomacy.

Kriegsmūdigkeit (war-weariness) is strongest in Germany among Ukraine’s NATO backers; 78% of the population want to see negotiations, and a similar number believe Germany has done enough to support Ukraine.

An estimated 1.3 million Ukrainian refugees have arrived in Germany and receive immediate social security, free health care and emergency shelter. The capital city Berlin, which has processed 400,000 refugees, has declared a humanitarian emergency.

Militarily and economically, conditions for a Denkpause, a pause to think things over, are ripe.

As reported on November 14, US Central Intelligence Agency director William Burns – the former US ambassador to Russia who warned about NATO’s eastern expansion – met in Istanbul on Monday with his Russian counterpart Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service.

Burns, the story goes, went to Istanbul to warn Naryshkin against the use of nuclear weapons. Really? And Naryshkin complied obediently and went there to talk about that?

There is little doubt that their meeting was a follow-up to the Sullivan’s and Milley’s probes about ending the fighting.

And why Istanbul? Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has offered to play peacemaker.

The US and the wider West are attacking Russia “almost without limits,” prompting a natural defensive reaction, Erdogan said on November 12 while returning from a summit of Turkic nations in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. But he also reminded reporters that he had brokered a grain export deal with Ukraine and signaled that he is available to broker a wider deal.

The major caveat regarding an early ceasefire is strictly political. President Putin is under attack from his nationalist right. President Zelensky would have to answer the questions from his own population as to why he would negotiate a truce now when the only outcome will be the status quo ante – before the deaths of tens of thousands, the displacement of millions and the wholesale destruction of the country.

By Big Serge, Substack, 11/12/22

In January, 1944, the newly reconstituted German Sixth Army found itself in an operationally cataclysmic situation in the southern bend of the Dnieper River, in the area of Krivoi Rog and Nikopol. The Germans occupied a dangerous salient, jutting out precariously into the Red Army’s lines. Vulnerable on two awkward flanks, and facing an enemy with superiority in manpower and firepower, any general worth his salt would have sought to withdraw as soon as possible. In this case, however, Hitler insisted that the Wehrmacht hold the salient, because the region was Germany’s last remaining source of manganese – a mineral crucial for making high quality steel.

A year prior, in the opening weeks of 1943, Hitler had intervened in another, more famous battle, forbidding the previous incarnation of the Sixth Army from breaking out of a pocket forming around it at Stalingrad. Prohibited from withdrawing, the Sixth was annihilated wholesale.

In both of these cases, there was a clash between pure military prudence and broader political aims and needs. In 1943, there was neither a compelling military nor political reason to keep the 6th Army in the pocket at Stalingrad – political intervention in military decision making was both senseless and disasterous. In 1944, however, Hitler (however difficult it is to admit it) had a valid argument. Without manganese from the Nikopol area, German war production was doomed. In this case, political intervention was perhaps warranted. Leaving an army in a vulnerable salient is bad, but so is running out of manganese.

These two tragic fates of the Sixth Army illustrate the salient issue today: how do we parse the difference between military and political decision making? More specifically, to what do we attribute the shocking Russian decision to withdraw from the west bank of the Dnieper in Kherson oblast, after annexing it just a few months ago?

I would like to parse through this issue. First off, one cannot deny that the withdrawal is politically a significant humiliation for Russia. The question becomes, however, whether this sacrifice was necessary on military or political grounds, and what it may signify about the future course of the conflict.

As I see it, the withdrawal from west bank Kherson must be driven by one of the four following possibilities:

1. The Ukrainian Army has defeated the Russian Army on the west bank and driven it back across the river.

2. Russia is setting a trap in Kherson.

3. A secret peace agreement (or at least ceasefire) has been negotiated which includes giving Kherson back to Ukraine.

4. Russia has made a politically embarrassing but militarily prudent operational choice.

Let us simply run through these four and examine them in sequence.

Possibility 1: Military Defeat

The recapture of Kherson is being fairly celebrated by Ukrainians as a victory. The question is just what kind of victory it is – political/optical, or military? It becomes trivially obvious that it is the first sort. Let’s examine a few facts.

First off, as recently as the morning of November 9 – hours before the withdrawal was announced – some Russian war correspondents were expressing skepticism about the withdrawal rumors because Russia’s forward defensive lines were completely intact. There was no semblance of crisis among Russian forces in the region.

Secondly, Ukraine was not executing any intense offensive efforts in the region at the time the withdrawal began, and Ukrainian officials expressed skepticism that the withdrawal was even real. Indeed, the idea that Russia was laying a trap originates with Ukrainian officials who were apparently caught off guard by the withdrawal. Ukraine was not prepared to pursue or exploit, and advanced cautiously into the void after Russian soldiers were gone. Even with Russia withdrawing, they were clearly scared to advance, because their last few attempts to push through the defenses in the area became mass casualty events.

Overall, Russia’s withdrawal was implemented very quickly with minimal pressure from the Ukrainians – this very fact is the basis of the idea that it is either a trap or the result of a backroom deal that’s been concluded. In either case, Russia simply slipped back across the river without pursuit by the Ukrainians, taking negligible losses and getting virtually all of their equipment out (so far, a broken down T90 is the only Ukrainian capture of note). The net score on the Kherson Front remains a strong casualty imbalance in favor of Russia, and they once again withdraw without suffering a battlefield defeat and with their forces intact.

Possibility 2: It’s a Trap

This theory cropped up very soon after the withdrawal was announced. It originated with Ukrainian officials who were caught off guard by the announcement, and was then picked up (ironically) by Russian supporters who were hoping that 4D chess was being played – it is not. Russia is playing standard 2D chess, which is the only kind of chess there is, but more about that later.

It’s unclear what exactly “trap” is supposed to mean, but I’ll try to fill in the blanks. There are two possible interpretations of this: 1) a conventional battlefield maneuver involving a timely counterattack, and 2) some sort of unconventional move like a tactical nuclear weapon or a cascading dam failure.

It’s clear that there’s no battlefield counter in the offing, for the simple reason that Russia blew the bridges behind them. With no Russian forces left on the west bank and the bridges wrecked, there is no immediate capacity for either army to attack the other in force. Of course, they can shell each other across the river, but the actual line of contact is frozen for the time being.

That leaves the possibility that Russia intends to do something unconventional, like use a low yield nuke.

The idea that Russia lured Ukraine into Kherson to set off a nuke is… stupid.

If Russia wanted to use a nuclear weapon against Ukraine (which they don’t, for reasons I articulated in a previous article) there’s no sensible reason why they would choose a regional capital that they annexed as the site to do it. Russia has no shortage of delivery systems. If they wanted to nuke Ukraine, very simply, they wouldn’t bother abandoning their own city and making that the blast site. They would simply nuke Ukraine. It’s not a trap.

Possibility 3: Secret Deal

This was sparked by the news that US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has been in contact with his Russian counterpart, and specifically the sense that the White House has been pushing for the negotiations. Under one rumored variant of the “Sullivan Deal”, Ukraine would acknowledge Russia’s annexations east of the Dnieper, while west bank Kherson would revert back to Kiev’s control.

I find this unlikely for a variety of reasons. First off, such a deal would represent an extremely pyrrhic Russian victory – while it would achieve the liberation of the Donbas (one of the explicit goals of the SMO) it would leave Ukraine largely intact and strong enough to be a perennial thorn in the side, as an inimical anti-Russian state. There would be the problem of probable further Ukrainian integration into NATO, and above all, the open surrender of an annexed regional capital.

On the Ukrainian side, the issue is that the recovery of Kherson only enhances the (false) perception in Kiev that total victory is possible, and that Crimea and the Donbas can be recovered entirely. Ukraine is enjoying a string of territorial advances, and feels that it is pushing its window of opportunity.

Ultimate, there seems to be no deal that satisfies both sides, and this reflects that the innate hostility between the two nations must be resolved on the battlefield. Only Ares can adjudicate this dispute.

As for Ares, he has been hard at work in Pavlovka.

While the world was fixated on the relatively bloodless change of hands in Kherson, Russia and Ukraine fought a bloody battle for Pavlovka, and Russia won. Ukraine also attempted to break Russia’s defenses in the Svatove axis, and was repulsed with heavy casualties. Ultimately, the main reason to doubt news of a secret deal is the fact that the war is continuing on all the other fronts – and Ukraine is losing. This leaves only one option.

Possibility 4: A Difficult Operational Choice

This withdrawal was subtly signaled shortly after General Surovikin was put in charge of the operation in Ukraine. In his first press conference, he signaled dissatisfaction with the Kherson front, calling the situation “tense and difficult” and alluding to the threat of Ukraine blowing dams on the Dnieper and flooding the area. Shortly thereafter, the process of evacuating civilians from Kherson began.

Here is what I think Surovikin decided about Kherson.

Kherson was becoming an inefficient front for Russia because of the logistical strain of supplying forces across the river with limited bridge and road capacity. Russia demonstrated that it was capable of shouldering this sustainment burden (keeping troops supplied all through Ukraine’s summer offensives), but the question becomes 1) to what purpose, and 2) for how long.

Ideally, the bridgehead becomes the launching point for offensive action against Nikolayev, but launching an offensive would require strengthening the force grouping in Kherson, which correspondingly raises the logistical burden of projecting force across the river. With a very long front to play with, Kherson is clearly one of the most logistically intensive axes. My guess is that Surovikin took charge and almost immediately decided he did not want to increase the sustainment burden by trying to push on Nikolayev.

Therefore, if an offensive is not going to be launched from the Kherson position, the question becomes – why hold the position at all? Politically, it is important to defend a regional capital, but militarily the position becomes meaningless if one is not going to go on the offensive in the south.

Let’s be even more explicit: unless an offensive towards Nikolayev is planned, the Kherson bridgehead is militarily counterproductive.

While holding the bridgehead in Kherson, the Dnieper River becomes a negative force multiplier – increasing the sustainment and logistics burden and ever threatening to leave forces cut off if Ukraine succeeds in destroying the bridges or bursting the dam. Projecting force across the river becomes a heavy burden with no obvious benefit. But by withdrawing to the east bank, the river becomes a positive force multiplier by serving as a defensive barrier.

In the broader operational sense, Surovikin seems to be declining battle in the south while preparing in the north and in the Donbas. It is clear that he made this decision shortly after taking command of the operation – he has been hinting at it for weeks, and the speed and cleanliness of the withdrawal suggests that it was well planned , long in advance. Withdrawing across the river increases the combat effectiveness of the army significantly and decreases the logistical burden, freeing resources for other sectors.

This fits the overall Russian pattern of making harsh choices about resource allocation, fighting this war under the simple framework of optimizing the loss ratios and building the perfect meatgrinder. Unlike the German Army in the second world war, the Russian army seems to be freed from political interference to make rational military decisions.

In this way, the withdrawal from Kherson can be seen as a sort of anti-Stalingrad. Instead of political interference hamstringing the military, we have the military freed to make operational choices even at the cost of embarrassing the political figures. And this, ultimately, is the more intelligent – if optically humiliating – way to fight a war.

Link here.

By Michael Gfoeller & David H. Rundell, Newsweek, 11/3/22

The absence of any serious effort to end the conflict between Russia and Ukraine through negotiations is striking. The withdrawal of Russian forces, Ukrainian neutrality, an end to economic sanctions and most importantly a cease fire and legitimate U.N.-monitored plebiscite are all negotiable, though you would hardly know it from the rhetoric of Russia or the West.

Before dismissing such efforts, it is important to ask yourself, “How much do I really know about Ukraine?” For most Americans, the answer is not much. A year ago, few of us could find Crimea on a map. Ukraine’s history is complex and the current situation fluid.

Part of the problem is just defining the borders of Russia. Are you talking about the Czarist Empire that included half of Poland, Stalin’s Soviet Union that covered most of Central Asia, or today’s much diminished and embittered Russian Federation? In none of these configurations does Russia have clear, naturally defensible borders. As a result, it has been invaded by the Mongols, Swedes, French, and twice by the Germans. Freeing themselves from the Nazis cost Russia 22 million lives. For comparison, American losses during World War II were 400,000 from a population of roughly similar size.

Because secure borders are such a vital concern for Russia, the eastward expansion of NATO was always going to be problematic. George Kennan was America’s pre-eminent Soviet expert and the author of our Cold War containment policy. In 1997 he wrote, “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. … Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion, to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy, to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations and to steer Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” His predictions were entirely correct, but his advice was ignored. NATO expanded, adding 14 new members that had either been part of the Soviet Union or dominated by it.

Ukraine was not among these new NATO members in part because Russia made its opposition very clear. U.S. Ambassador to Russia William Burns presciently wrote in a memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Russian President Vladimir Putin). In more than two-and-a-half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

It is not hard to understand why Ukraine would be “brightest of all red lines,” for Moscow. Simply put, the key is the Crimean Peninsula and land access to it. Despite containing 11 time zones, Sevastopol has been Russia’s only warm-water naval base for nearly 250 years. It became Russian in 1783. In 1853, the Czar fought a war against France and Britain to keep it. During the Second World War, tens of thousands of Soviet troops died defending and ultimately liberating Sevastopol from the Wehrmacht. Whoever controls Crimea dominates the Black Sea and can threaten Russia’s southern flank. The idea that Sevastopol could become a NATO naval base has always been as unacceptable in Moscow as the placing of Soviet missiles in Cuba was to Washington.

Some argue that we are fighting for democracy and must crush Putin however long it takes. They clearly overlook not only how unpopular costly forever wars have become with the American public but also our checkered experience with regime change. Other pundits even call for reparations or war crime trials as if we were at Versailles or Nuremberg. They forget that both the Treaty of Versailles and the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials were entirely predicated on abject German defeats. Short of a nuclear war, that is not going to happen to Russia.

Ukraine has had historically flexible borders. Until 1918 the city of Lviv, (then Limburg) was Austrian. Between the two world wars, western Ukraine was Polish. Crimea was transferred from the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian one only in 1954 primarily to increase the number of Russian speakers in Ukraine. Not counting Crimea, post-Soviet Ukraine has now lost nearly 20 percent of its prewar territory and become almost entirely dependent on foreign arms and financial assistance, three quarters of which is American. Millions have been made homeless or fled the country. As manpower reserves and the tax base collapse, inflation has soared, and infrastructure been systemically destroyed. Despite recent gains, it is not at all clear that Ukraine is winning the war. Yet Ukraine remains a difficult country to help. Its post-Soviet governments have been profoundly corrupt, and one cannot give money endlessly to a man with a hole in his pocket.

Russia on the other hand is largely self-sufficient in food, energy, and armaments. The ruble is stronger today than it was a year ago. Western sanctions have caused more economic havoc in Europe than Russia. It is perhaps worth remembering that Putin’s parents lived through the Siege of Leningrad where 600,000 Russians chose to starve to death rather than surrender. It seems unlikely that he will now capitulate because he can no longer buy a Big Mac.

We do, in fact, live in a rules-based world order, and one of the cardinal rules of international relations is that large powers expect to control a sphere of influence that they will fight to defend, as we are prepared to do in Taiwan. One of the principal functions of diplomacy is avoiding or ending the carnage of military conflicts. Most often, that involves talking to people with opposing views whom you neither like nor trust.

What would a negotiated solution look like? It should begin with an honest appreciation of what the local populations want. Support for self-determination has been a central plank of American foreign policy since President Woodrow Wilson went to Versailles. We remain confident that the consent of the governed is the most fundamental form of legitimacy. The Czechs and Slovaks peacefully went their separate ways. Citizens of Quebec were allowed to vote on remaining Canadian. The people of Scotland were given a chance to leave the United Kingdom. The British even got to vote on staying in the European Union. Don’t the people of Crimea and the Donbas deserve as much? If we trusted the U.N. to monitor Iran’s nuclear activities, surely it can also be trusted to organize and monitor a fair election.

The First Crimean War (1853-1856) ended in a negotiated compromise. In all probability, the Second Crimean War will end the same way. In 1962, when faced with the possibly of nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy did his utmost to defuse the situation through independent thinking, negotiations, and compromise. Today, we face a similar situation. There are numerous issues to negotiate, but a ceasefire and plebiscite would be a good place to start. This would be complicated, controversial, and expensive to administer, but so is continuing to support and fund a war. The suffering of the Ukrainian population is getting worse by the day and winter is coming. It is time for creative thinking and effective diplomacy to end this war before it spins further out of control.

By David Bromwich, The Nation, 10/31/22

Ukraine is a country we are just getting to know. What is more important is to hate Russia: an emotion in which Americans have been well trained. Media workers and the experts they interview, one notices, can’t help stumbling occasionally: “the Soviet Union—I mean, Russia.” A history of contempt takes us back to an entity at once exotic and primitive, suspended in time and space.

This Russia hovers between barbarism and modernity, between Asia and Europe, an uncertain profile that has long troubled the Western mind. But the task has now been simplified: Hate Putin, hate “Putin’s Russia,” hate Russia—before, during, and after the fact, and in excess of the facts. And the Russian people? We will come back to them.

The Western moral calculus that ramps up war fever can be detected in a headline like “Fear of Reprisal for Bridge Blast Dims Kyiv’s Joy” (The New York Times, October 10, print edition). You sense it, too, in the teacherly posture of news analysis: “Putin’s Plan to Bomb Kyiv Into Submission? History Says It Won’t Work” (the Times, October 11). Was that, in fact, Putin’s idea? Pretty clearly, he did not decide to bomb Kyiv until Ukraine blew up the bridge connecting Crimea to Russia. The tone of polite journalism on this subject hardly differs from that of the tabloids: “How Moscow Grabs Kids and Makes Them Russians” (ABC News, linked on Drudge Report, October 13).

A recent on-the-ground story by Jeffrey Gettleman in The New York Times conveyed the experiences of a freelance American soldier in Ukraine; the long headline and deck in the print edition brought together the politics and human interest and the necessary ethical judgment: “American Finds in Ukraine the War He Sought: A Morally Clear Effort After Tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.” What is the meaning of the second part of the headline? War is a kind of health, it says, if only we find the right war. But the phrase “moral clarity” has also become a mantra for left-wing activist reporters. It instructs you to know where you are headed before you set out to write. Don’t let a morally clear viewpoint be confused by subtle, complex, and inconvenient facts: Those are the boring middle part of the story, and they can safely be skipped. Clarity is crystallized by silent omissions and an economy of truth. Your choice of adjectives and adverbs, meanwhile, will vouch for your passion.

The media in the US and in other NATO countries have achieved a harmonious moral clarity, and they are skipping the part with the inconvenient facts. “Putin’s Russia” functions as a kind of suture that binds the relevant wartime emotions to a generalized hatred of Russia—Russia past, Russia present, and the Russia to come. An exemption is carved out for courageous Russians who protest openly, or the disaffected ones who have left the country or hope to exit soon. How many does that leave us to hate? Possibly quite a few.

The Gettleman story was filed from Soledar, a town in Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine, 80 miles northwest of Luhansk, where clashes between Russian-leaning inhabitants and the Ukrainian army go back to the ascent of an anti-Russian government in 2014. Yet the story makes a puzzle out of one old woman’s reluctance to obey Ukrainian orders that all non-Russians should evacuate immediately. The solitary woman whom the American soldier and the reporter met on the road may simply have preferred not to follow those orders, not to leave her home (without hope of ever returning), but to gamble on the Russian army sparing it. This was not a Peasant Mystery. It was more like an ordinary calculation.

Why have such perceptual errors become so common? The reason is that they fit into the selective division of allowed facts in the liberal-corporate media. We hear of the anti-war protests in Russia, of the anger toward Putin by generals who want him to be more decisive and among the populace who never wanted the war, and we hear of the new repression and censorship inside Russia. All this is the proper work of a free press. And Ukraine? We seldom hear of the censorship there, of the banning of opposition political parties, of the fact that all men of fighting age are forbidden to leave the country—or of the law that made Ukrainian the mandatory language of public workers, and thereby demoted Russian in Donetsk and Luhansk, which was itself a signal cause of the war. (Try to imagine the effects of prohibiting the Spanish language in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.) We do not hear of the assassination of Ukrainian mayors who were insufficiently hostile to Russia, and mainstream attention has sunk to zero (except here and there, in a subordinate clause) regarding the history and politics of the Azov Battalion.

None of these facts justifies anything that Russia has done. But they are, to repeat, facts, and they should be known by the citizens of a country that is well on the way to committing $100 billion in assistance and weapons to Ukraine for the purpose of prolonging this war. Such facts are part of the present crisis, which honest reporters have a duty to convey. But this means full publicity must also be accorded to facts that are inconvenient for your own position—in this case, your loyal membership in a West for whom the defeat of Russia has become suddenly more important than climate change, nuclear disarmament, the prevention of starvation in Africa, and many other causes that cannot be thought of honestly without a recognition that they stand in some tension with unconditional victory over Russia.

Do the people who call “Putin’s Russia” a totalitarian state affix any answerable meaning to the word “totalitarian”? Russia indeed has a heavy-handed authoritarian government whose censorship and obstruction of dissent have greatly increased since the start of the war. Even so, there have been protests inside Russia; the crowds have not been fired on, and most of the persons involved have not been arrested. The media hosts and the clutch of military, think tank, and academic experts who call Russia totalitarian should see if they can find anything remotely comparable in the annals of Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany. A recent report on NPR told of a Ukrainian family returning to the bombed-out city of Mariupol. They were coming back voluntarily, though they blamed the Russians for the damage. They had decided to leave their safe haven in Warsaw, where permanent refuge was available, because they felt that Mariupol, even when occupied by Russian soldiers, was still their home. How many civilians ever chose to go back to a city occupied by Hitler’s army or Stalin’s?

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February met the definition of an international war of aggression. But it was not unprovoked. Ever since the change of government in 2014 and the subsequent series of military clashes with Russia, Ukraine has subjected the Donbas region to persistent artillery shelling. The current war might have been avoided but for two circumstances: the US refusal to accept Ukraine as an independent nation outside NATO, and the Russian refusal to accept Ukrainian membership in the EU. A chance to resolve the dispute was apparently agreed on, in late March, by Recep Erdogan and Volodymyr Zelensky, with a proposed cease-fire set to open the way for negotiations. The US dispatched then–British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to scuttle the deal and inform Zelensky that a cease-fire was not an option agreeable to the West. Whether or not you classify it as a war crime, the deliberate protraction of the suffering of war is an immoral act. We say we do it because this is what Ukraine wants. But there is no evidence that the Ukrainian people want a long war, just as there is no evidence that the Russian people desired the invasion in February.

The Second World War is the picture that has held us captive. Every tyrant since then has looked like Hitler or Stalin. So every temptation to fight becomes an urgent imperative whose only alternative is appeasement. During the Cold War, the picture seemed to fit real events, but the Cold War ended and still the picture held us captive. The myth of the Second World War corrupted the wits of many clever people during the Vietnam War. Any act of aggression thereafter by a hostile non-Western government, in response to which the US had an ostensible moral justification and an economic or political motive for intervention, flipped the same switch: The year once more was 1938, and diplomacy was Munich. Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin have all been tapped to answer our need for a new Hitler. Or, for that matter, a new Stalin. George Will in a March 2014 column referred to Putin as “Stalin’s spawn.”

Eight years later, in his column on October 7, Will averred that “the behavior of the Russian army in Ukraine demonstrates…a centuries-old continuity: a culture of cruelty.” The reports of atrocities in Bucha are now proof of “Russia’s endemic cruelty”—in short, to be Russian is to be cruel. The diagnosis is medical: “Putin’s Russia has a metabolic urge to export its pathologies.” But consider now the implications of the “metabolic urge.” It resembles what used to be said about the desire by men of the darker races for white women—that, too, was an ingrained and irresistible reflex. Combine the biological tinge of this amateur analysis with the word “endemic” and you are inhabiting a well-known frame of mind: nation-as-race, race-as-virus. There were people in the 1930s who called the Jews a “bacillus.” Hatred is an extraordinary passion.

Let us try and return things to the human scale. Anyone who lived through the 1980s can remember the call to American leaders to overcome the “Vietnam syndrome”—that is, to restore the national self-confidence that enables a great nation to fight its good wars. We were told that this syndrome had been surmounted by the US invasion of Panama and, close on its heels, the Gulf War. Read the grim history of actual Russians in Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, and you see how inconceivable they must find the idea of war as a healthy restorative. Some 21 million Soviet citizens were killed in World War II, and—though we find the fact hard to acknowledge—the Soviet Union itself was responsible, more than any other country, for the victory over fascism. The journalists and professors who have called Russia a fascist country are playing a poisonous game with words. They get away with it because war is only a distant dream to a great many Americans, and because most Americans now know the Second World War only as a myth.

“I’m trying to figure out,” President Biden said on October 6, “what is Putin’s off-ramp?” A better use of his time might be to determine our own off-ramp, short of the total defeat of Russia on its own border. The US withdrawal from the INF Treaty in 2019 and from the Open Skies Treaty in 2020 must have left Russians wondering how far the US would go in the cause of nonappeasement and reordering the world. Because an all-but-avowed American goal since the second expansion of NATO in 2004 has been to dismantle post-Soviet Russia: a design already achieved in part, which no imaginable Russian leader will permit the US to complete. And what would follow after bringing Russia to its knees, militarily and economically, even if that were possible? The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines and the Crimea bridge, and now the Russian attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, are sowing such mutual hatred that compromise on either side will soon be as inadmissible as defeat. No one seems to have thought it through.