It’s Costing Peanuts for the US to Defeat Russia
cepa.org
cepa.org
Meanwhile the US and their NATO allies spent, what, a trillion on that war?
Dedicated defense seems to be very good now at defeating foreign troops.
Much as I dislike their philosophy, I have to have respect for their dedication and discipline. It has to be pretty damn difficult to keep fighting against a military machine like that, when everyone around is in a hundred pieces.
Ukraine military budget: ~6 Billion.
And I still have to dodge motorcycles going the wrong way through red light in bike paths.
Police defunding in Seattle would be a disaster for example.
> CEPA’s mission is to ensure a strong and enduring transatlantic alliance rooted in democratic values and principles with strategic vision, foresight, and impact. Through cutting-edge research, analysis, and engagement, we provide innovative insight on trends affecting democracy, security, and defense to government officials and agencies
In other words, it is a US government sponsored, CIA think tank about manipulation of European countries, and CIA/NATO unofficial media publisher.
> In other words, it is a US government sponsored, CIA think tank about manipulation of European countries, and CIA/NATO unofficial media publisher.
I was there. What about you?
That account was even banned from posting for a while (2), thankfully. Why it was allowed back, I do not know.
1)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32314627
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32990026
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32314574
2)
"Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call" - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
"The CIA And FBI Are Reportedly Advising Ukraine As Pro-Russia Separatists Spread Across The Country" - https://www.businessinsider.com/cia-and-fbi-reportedly-advis...
"Pierre Omidyar co-funded Ukraine revolution groups with US government, documents show" - https://pandodaily.com/2014/02/28/pierre-omidyar-co-funded-u...
Our use of CIA/State Dept Tech Camp to help foment revolution, video posted by US embassy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpIoBUDuL3U (also see this for background on how we use the program elsewhere: https://www.fastcompany.com/1744389/hillary-clintons-senior-...
"Washington Was Behind Ukraine Coup: Obama admits that US “Brokered a Deal” in Support of “Regime Change”" - https://www.globalresearch.ca/washington-was-behind-ukraine-...
"How and why the U.S. Government Perpetrated the 2014 Coup in Ukraine" - https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2018/06/04/how-and-why-the-u-s-go...
"In the rapidly worsening Ukraine fiasco, the U.S. is reaping exactly what it sowed" - https://www.salon.com/2022/02/02/in-the-rapidly-worsening-uk...
"A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War" - https://jacobin.com/2022/02/maidan-protests-neo-nazis-russia...
"The 2014 coup in Ukraine" - https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/2014-coup-ukraine
"The United States Is Reaping What It Sowed in Ukraine" - https://progressive.org/latest/us-reaping-sowed-in-ukraine-b...
"Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault" - https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-t...
I don't want to overwhelm you with sources, so this is a good balanced start if you're looking for more information.
"Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call" - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
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I read this entire call. The CIA is not mentioned. It's talking about the situation on the ground and details how the US is trying to help the Ukrainian opposition . It does show the US lied when it said it was "working with all sides" but nothing in the call shows the US was directly involved in the start of the conflict, funded the opposition prior to the coup, or that the CIA was involved.
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"The CIA And FBI Are Reportedly Advising Ukraine As Pro-Russia Separatists Spread Across The Country" - https://www.businessinsider.com/cia-and-fbi-reportedly-advis...
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This article doesn't state that the CIA started the conflict. It says that the CIA was helping the interim government in Kiev end the rebellion. That occurred after the revolution. In fact the article states "The interim Kiev government took charge in late February after months of street protests forced the ouster of Kremlin-friendly Yanukovych."
"Citing unnamed German security sources, Bild am Sonntag said the CIA and FBI agents were helping Kiev end the rebellion in the east of Ukraine and set up a functioning security structure. It said the agents were not directly involved in fighting with pro-Russian militants". Helping the new Ukrainian government end the rebellion would occur post revolution i.e. post coup. This doesn't prove earlier involvement.
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"Pierre Omidyar co-funded Ukraine revolution groups with US government, documents show" - https://pandodaily.com/2014/02/28/pierre-omidyar-co-funded-u...
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This is a complex article with two sections so I divided it up
Part 1 - Marcy Wheeler, not the author of this article but is a senior policy analyst at Pando is quotes by the article's author
This article first says "Marcy Wheeler, who is the new site's "senior policy analyst," speculated that the Ukraine revolution was likely a “coup” engineered by “deep" forces on behalf of “Pax Americana”:
“There's quite a bit of evidence of coup-ness. Q is how many levels deep interference from both sides is.” - Marcy Wheeler
What's Pax Americana? It doesn't offer any evidence of that. The term has a link to a tweet thread that says the Ukrainian parliament staged a coup but offers no evidence. The tweet links to "http://www.emptywheel.net/2012/06/28/the-next-honduras/" which is about the Paraguay coup in 2012 (I don't know anything about this coup except that it's not Ukraine). Is this some other conspiracy about American power expansion in South American? It doesn't matter, it has nothing to do with what we are talking about..
She also mentions Q. I'm not sure if she's referring to the cult or using it as a general term for deep state activities. Either way it's difficult to see a person use it and not lose respect.
Part 2 - The main article by Mark Ames
The main article is an investigation into Marcy Wheeler's more general claims about US involvement in the Ukrainian revolution. Why didn't she do that since she's part of this news source and made the accusation....
Here's are some of the people and organizations that the article implicates as assisting the opposition either fully or partially.
1. "PACT" - A very large NGO that works in many countries including Ukraine, receives funding by both USAID and Pierre Omidyar (eBay founder) 2. George Soros who funds the "International Renaissance Foundation " a Ukrainian NGO (Yes I thought also went crazy when they mentioned him but he really did have an NGO in Ukraine 3. New Citizen which is a part of the NGO "Center UA, Pierre Omidyar (eBay founder) also donated some money to this group)
So here's the main points that I have no problem accepting for the sake of this discussion.
- There are wealthily private citizens who funded opposition groups in the Ukraine in the form of NGOs. - These NGOs may have implied they are for one purpose but were actually helping the opposition either directly or indirectly. - These NGOs received some funding from USAID which is funded by the US government. However no where does it state that the funding form USAID was meant for opposition work or a coup.
There's alot in this article but thankfully the author himself saved from me going deeper with this statement:
----> "This was by no means a US-backed "coup," but clear evidence shows that US investment was a force multiplier for many of the groups involved in overthrowing Yanukovych." <---- THIS IS THE AUTHOR SAYING IT WASN'T THE US GOVERNMENT IN THE ARTICLE YOU PROVIDED A SOURCE
I want to note the use of "US investment" because that means both private citizens and funding from USAID or other government organization but no proof is offered to show money was intended for a coup (from the US government). So this article doesn't show a CIA or US government backed coup, in my opinion, by the authors own admission.
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Our use of CIA/State Dept Tech Camp to help foment revolution, video posted by US embassy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpIoBUDuL3U (also see this for background on how we use the program elsewhere: https://www.fastcompany.com/1744389/hillary-clintons-senior-...
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"Our use of CIA/State Dept Tech Camp to help foment revolution"
- No where is that statement mentioned or headline used. The YT video is titled "TechCamp Kyiv 2012" and the description is "The U.S. Embassy hosted TechCamp Kyiv at Master Klass Cultural Center in Kyiv, Ukraine on September 12 and 13. TechCamp Kyiv marks the 14th TechCamp supporting Secretary Clinton's Civil Society 2.0, an initiative which builds the digital literacy of civil society organizations around the world."
- The video is about a tech camp in Kyiv, it's less than four minutes long and just has the most generic interviewsof people coming to the camp. for example "What are you expecting" and the person answers "I really liked the idea of speed geeking"
- The second article is talking about promoting subversive technologies around the world. For example Wikileaks.
- The CIA is not mentioned at all, including in the second article from fastcompany.com
- Neither article has anything about the opposition, any coups, Yanukovych, or Russia.
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This is all I can do for now but so far what I see is how crazy of a world you must think we live in. How connected, organized, and efficient governments must be. I guess also completely incompetent that while Hilary Clinton can run an NGO to influence around the world couldn't win the election? while at the same time incompetent? Richard Nixon, arguably the most powerful man in the world when he was president, gets taken down by incompetent burglars and a pathetic coverup but you think conspiracies like this exist? Haven't you worked at large companies?
I also see how these articles use what I am going to call "sugar words" to entice you to believe them. George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Q, Pax Americana, deep forces, dark forces 2, etc. Your brain tingles when you see one of these and I wonder if it makes it easier to digest these.
Finally the general format of these articles is that the author states an opinion and to back that up provides actual facts and connections between organizations. However the facts and connections don't support the opinion. What they do is make you even more suspicious because of all the circumstantial evidence so much so you get to the point where you accept the opinion as truth "because it just has to be".
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/rieder/2014/0...
Putin’s hubris coupled with Ukraine’s bravery is reshaping the world for decades to come. Instead of fomenting chaos, the war is expanding Western influence, solidarity, and military power. There is no true victory for Russia, even somehow seizing all of Ukraine, at this point, would still be an economic, geopolitical, and military loss over the following decades. China gains a northern vassal and discounted energy, but I question whether that makes up for the setback of a reinvigorated Western alliance.
All this for Putin’s pride? He set Ukraine up for the role of morally righteous heroic defenders, and they are exceeding all expectations in living up to it. Giving the West an existential threat with a moral cause to support that aligns with their long term pure self interest is dumbfounding.
Does the money given to Ukraine come out of the defense budget, or does it come on top?
If it's the latter, then the above sentence makes no sense. $40bn is less than $100, but so what when it's in addition to it?
They gave Putin all the power, Putin surrounded himself with yes-men, then corruption made sure nothing gets done to specifications.
In paper, Russia was a military superpower, in practice, all the resources got stolen along the way.
and transferred to the West
The real "defeat" would have been enough credible deterrence by western forces that Russia would never have attempted this, with enough diplomacy they would not have felt the need to.
It's a travesty that this war ever happened, no one should feel like a winner.
> The cost-benefit analysis of US support for Ukraine is incontrovertible
1. No full-on invasion in feb’22
2. The full withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine and the restoration of the pre-2014 borders.
3. Ukraine being free to seek to join Nato and/or EU.
Looking at what happened, it would also have saved a lot of lives if the US and allies had used their air forces to remove Russia at the beginning of the conflict. Never agreed with the assessment that would lead to ww3 or nuclear exchange, Russia would lose or everyone would lose in both cases.
No
> or somehow haven't done enough to avert it?
Well, it's patently obvious that the war wasn't averted.
>If you remember events before the beginning of confrontation, it seems that USA was bending outwards trying to prevent invasion.
I don't remember the US doing much at all when this started several years ago.
> Ukrainian lives are not worth "peanuts"
Meanwhile in one of the worst years for stocks in recent history, Northrop Grumman & Lockheed Martin are having a banner year. So this war may be bad for Ukrainians but it is clearly in the financial interests of the US war machine to keep it going as long as possible.
They may not have fulfilled all their main goals to a 100%. However, they seem to be still occupying large amounts of territory that belonged to the Ukrainian government, including most of the Dombas and the water sources of Crimea.
No, but even a Pyrrhic victory appears out of reach. A 100% instant capitulation by Ukraine wouldn't undue most sanctions, NATO expansion, Western military buildup, their tarnished military reputation, or even a semblance of their recent soft power. It's projected to take 10+ years to create the manufacturing base needed just to start rebuilding their former military strength, dependent as it was on Western sources.
I don't think anyone sees a way out of this that approaches a "win" from the Russian perspective.
Not yet, but every week they occupy less and less territory, lose more soldiers and more equipment.
> They may not have fulfilled all their main goals to a 100%. However, they seem to be still occupying large amounts of territory that belonged to the Ukrainian government, including most of the Dombas and the water sources of Crimea.
They don't seem so confident in keeping Crimea, they are building defences in it already.
You can have of course have 100,000 KIA and be winning regardless, but, in that case, why would the US be pushing for negotiations now? You’d have to be very naive to think this is humanitarian concern. So maybe that picture painted for Western audiences is not accurate after all?
[0]: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/14/u-s-ukraine-milley-...
Putin cannot pull out of Ukraine without being overthrown, and Zelensky cannot concede land to Russia without similarity losing power.
So the two nations will continue to fight and many tens of thousands more will die until the populations are ready to accept compromise.
I think for the Western military it's the intelligence about the state of the Russian forces that has been invaluable. But they know now, so it's not of much ongoing use.
Wouldn't it also "cost us peanuts" to pursue peace?
This is a bizarre calculus to apply from the sidelines.
Ukraine wants to defend themselves _and_ to retake Crimea, something they cannot do on their own, so they need weapons. Who is winning is not at all clear. When this started, it was assumed that Russia would collapse very quickly, so far this has not happened.. at what point is this strategy reconsidered?
Is the possibility of reconsideration already at hand, and are articles such as these meant to serve as a bulwark against breaks for peace? It makes me suspicious.
Russian behavior in occupied regions makes it quite obvious that those are equivalent, at least for people who dare to not identify as Russian.
> Also, isn't the opinion of those living in Crimea important?
To a degree, although you need to consider policies of expelling non-Russians from Crimea and intentionally settling Russians there in how much stock you give that.
> When this started, it was assumed that Russia would collapse very quickly,
There was also fairly widespread surprise how well Ukraine held on.
Sometimes "peanuts" isn't the bargain you think it is.
"The government had to choose between war and shame. They chose shame. They will get war too."In some ways it is similar to an Afghanistan for the US; the US supplied arms to Afghanistan in the Soviet-Afghanistan war. The conditions are different here, I think, and I hope this doesn't foreshadow a future US-Ukraine war.
Putin was showing traits of early hitler where he was up to annex whatever the hell he thought was next. But unlike hitler, Putin is losing badly. A weak Putin Russia also means that there is no chance that Russia attacks any other country.
I must have missed it, was there ever a vote on that?
When does the War Powers Act kick in?
Fight a proxy war with a nuclear power, see what happens!
I would prefer not to see what happens.
It's evil.
> According to independent analysis by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 2022 will be a bad year for the Russian economy. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is expected to drop by at least 5.5% in the best scenario to almost 9% in the worst scenario.
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/impact-sanct...
Last time I've checked Russia had to purchase arms from Iran because they are no longer able to produce those themselves due to severed supply from Europe, while plenty of european countries are increasing military development and production.
Russia is also forced to disassembly some of their passenger planes for spare parts because they no longer can ship those from Airbus or Boeing.
Russia can no longer import semiconductors from US/Europe, Taiwan, Korea or Japan. This effectively stopped their high-tech industry from working. This hit their civil and military aviation (which includes production of their AA, CM and cruise missiles, and passenger plane program).
Civilian production is also seriously affected by the sanctions. Lada cars are now produced in very basic variant due to no access to parts from EU or Asia.
Russia is also recommissioning soviet-era arms because they are no longer able to use their "modern" tech without weakening their military on other fronts.
Because Russian government is de facto a mafia state, the govt itself considers large companies ran by people outside of oligarchy a threat to itself, meaning that Russia has no national industry it can turn to for filling in the gaps created by sanctions:
https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1501382714427166721
Bank of Russia is doing whatever it can to protect country's economy from crisis, but they are doing it in same way that Turkey does: through selling their reserves. They can't do that forever.
Why not? The Soviet Union lost a few times, even with nukes. The US has lost repeatedly, even with nukes. I don't know why nukes would prevent it from losing. Prevent it from being taken over, maybe, but that's not really what's at stake here.
Fwiw the US has given about 25% of it's 155mm shells to Ukraine and hasn't the capacity to replenish it at a good rate. They're buying shells to South Korea now.
Which doesn’t matter.
When I was on active duty (during the Cold War) at the end of the fiscal year they would send us out with obscene amounts of ammo to use because if it didn’t get used the budget would get cut for the next year.
Don’t you worry about the ammunition manufacturers, they are doing fine.
100k casualty would mean between 20k and 33k KIA depending on if the army is on the offense and if the medical supply are well distributed.
Russia isn't getting richer, everyone is getting poorer because of this conflict (it's econ 101).
I also know someone in the French military industry (big wig at Thales) who is extremely happy of how the russian equipment performed and actively recruit right now because he knows that even if the conflict end quickly, there is now way Russia keep its second place as world arms dealers, and already have a selling point about how the only russian equipment that wasn't disappointing used Thales optics, electronics and/or avionics. Don't know if it's real, but it seems backed by data and i don't see why he would lie to me (he knows i'm not interested).
Ukraine can't say the same, because unlike the US, they agreed to unilateral nuclear disarmament. After all, we told them we had their backs. What could possibly go wrong?
Even by Youtube standards, the linked video isn't very good compared to channels like Perun. There's now a terrible number of channels reading off top 3 Google search results with the pathos of an expert.
Sargon of Akkad has 900k subscribers and according to the dude EU is two years away from collapse and open racial war because of immigration and the left since at least 2012 but none of that has realized. But a lot of people out there like his takes so he has subscribers.