Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). On the second day of the new year 2024, Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė admitted with resignation in an interview with LRT, the country’s first television channel: “Ukraine has not achieved the outcome that the West had hoped for. It can be said without a doubt that during the war in Ukraine we hoped for a completely different outcome than today. And that unfortunately means that we have to expect that the scenario will not develop as we had imagined at the beginning [of the war] and before Kiev’s offensive.”
“What if Putin wins?” asked the US financial news portal Bloomberg with concern shortly before the end of the year. But the question can only be understood rhetorically, because in the real world the facts have long since answered it. However, the Western media must proceed with caution, as they could suddenly shock their paying customers with a red alert after all the military expertise along the lines of “Ukraine will win”. In such a case, they would also lose their paying customers and, as a result, their advertising revenue, along with the rest of their credibility.
Therefore, the inexorable reality of the unavoidable victory of the Russian armed forces over Ukraine and implicitly over the USA and NATO must be served to the people carefully – initially as a speculative exercise. The Bloomberg title “What if Putin wins?” is a prime example of this. In the text of the article, Bloomberg, together with other Western media, then consoles the die-hard transatlanticist with the fact that even if Ukraine no longer succeeds in driving Russia out of the Donbass and Ukraine, Russia has already lost. Because instead of less NATO on its western border, Russia now has more NATO on its borders than before the war thanks to the accession of Finland and soon also Sweden.
You can currently read things like “If Putin didn’t want NATO on his borders before the Russian military operation, he has now got the opposite of what he always wanted”. For Western propaganda, the circus is far from over. But the initial certainty of victory and the militaristic enthusiasm reflected in statements such as “NATO will win. We can all be sure that the Atlantic alliance is as strong and powerful as ever. Putin will surely fall, because he would never survive the ‘sanctions from hell'” – none of this remains.
If the fighting had ended in the first year of the special military operation, it would have looked superficially as if things had not actually gone well for Russia. Added to this was the dogmatic belief of the Western elites and media that “with NATO behind them, Ukraine could do nothing but win the war”, that the Russian armed forces were running around barefoot, that their weapons didn’t work, that they had to fight with spades, that they didn’t even have fuel for their outdated vehicles and so on.
To make matters worse, Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission – which is used by the US to promote its interests in Europe – has even argued that “the Russian military is taking digital chips from dishwashers and fridges” to repair its military equipment because it has run out of semiconductors. And German Foreign Minister Baerbock was stupid enough to repeat this up and down the country to prove that Russian industry was in ruins.
In the meantime, Russia had withdrawn from Kherson and the Kharkov region in order to further consolidate its line of defence. In the fantasy world of the Western media, this regrouping operation was seen as a “devastating defeat” inflicted on the Russians by the heroic warriors of the Kiev regime. These Kiev troops, including the neo-Nazi volunteer battalions, were exalted in the West as the ultimate example of valour and military prowess.
Observers of the development of the armed conflict in Ukraine who did not swallow the propaganda version of the Western elites, but based their analyses on concrete reality, lived in suffocating isolation. The regime’s propagandists could not hold back and brutally vilified anyone who tried to bring them back into the real world. This was not only the case in Germany. Even in faraway Portugal, supporters of the regime in Kiev even called for the expulsion of colleagues who disagreed with them in a programme on the CNN news portal. Journalists, generals and analysts who did not follow the predetermined narrative were branded “Putin propagandists”.
As paradoxical as it may sound, these are the same corporate media and politicians who had previously forgotten that Ukraine had become a haven for extreme right-wingers, fascists and neo-Nazis from the collective West after the Maidan coup. These are the same “quality media” that had recently exuberantly celebrated Stepan Bandera’s fascist greeting “Slava Ukraini” and accompanied Azov Nazis on heroic tours through the USA and Europe. It is the same media and politicians who today proclaim with deep concern that there is no hope for Ukraine “without US help”, because EU Europe alone could never cope with the demands. Such paradoxes can ultimately only lead to tragic mistakes and disastrous results at the political and strategic level.
Little by little, the same spoilt, arrogant and disconnected from ordinary life elite of the Collective West is beginning to prepare us for the fact that Ukraine will “surely fail” against Russia unless we all provide more help and sacrifice for it.
But that’s not all! Bloomberg also reported that “more and more Ukrainians are willing to make territorial concessions to Russia”. In other words, the defeatist messages in the mainstream media are gradually multiplying, which means that someone from the very top of the Collective West has “advised” the public to prepare for the worst. US General Pat Ryder admitted in a Pentagon press conference that if differences of opinion persist in the US Congress over further financial and military support for Ukraine, “the United States will ultimately have to choose between its own combat readiness and supplying weapons to Ukraine”, as US reserves to support Kiev have been exhausted.
Meanwhile, the New York Times published an article admitting that the majority of foreign companies remain in Russia because they do not want to lose their lucrative investments there. The companies that were previously sold are now being “mirrored”. This means that they have been taken over by others, by Russians or by Chinese, Indians and others from the same sectors, so that the Russian economic structure and the Russian markets have hardly felt any difference due to the withdrawal of Western investors. The Russian government was prepared for the withdrawal of Western companies, as capital flows were strictly controlled. Russia has overcome the crisis, the economy has stabilised in 2022 and is growing strongly again. Western companies, on the other hand, lost a total of more than 103 billion dollars as a result of the withdrawal from the Russian Federation.
In addition to the financial losses suffered by companies from the collective West as a result of their withdrawal from Russian territory, there is also the relative weakening of Western Europe in relation to the Russian Federation. The losses suffered by European industry as a result of the Nord Stream explosion, the irrational 12 sanctions packages and a whole series of internal economic actions of self-mutilation by foregoing energy, raw materials and components from Russia or acquiring them second-hand at increased prices via countries such as India are enormous. They have weakened European economies and made Germany in particular less competitive. While Russia’s economy has already grown by 3.5 per cent in 2023, growth in the EU was only 0.5 per cent. In the third quarter of 2023, the Russian economy even grew by 5.5 per cent in real terms and wages by 5.1 per cent.
Well, you could answer the question of who shot themselves in the foot with the Ukraine war mathematically by totalling the points of the respective partial results. But the facts are so obvious that everyone comes to the right conclusion using their own “thumb-by-thumb method”. More on this later in Part II.
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