David Goldman v Asia Times:

“Betrayed!,” shouts the headline in Der Spiegel, Germany’s top left-wing news outlet.

“Trump’s embrace of Putin is a Molotov-Ribbentrop crisis for Europe,” declares Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the London Daily Telegraph.

The putatively pro-Trump New York Post devoted its Feb. 21 front page to an extended screed against the US president by neocon wordsmith Douglas Murray.

From the howling in the war camp, you’d think it was the end of the world. But it’s not the end of the world: It’s just the end of them. Nothing fails like failure, and the twenty-year campaign to launch regime change in Russia from Ukraine failed miserably, as the Russian Federation built more weapons than the whole of NATO combined. Relentless Russian gains hollowed out the Ukraine Army.

The war party’s only hope is to blame their failure on Trump, and to spin out the conflict until it becomes a permanent state of war. 

Trump has offered a grand design for a global builddown of armaments that would allow the United States to cut its defense budget in half and avert an eventual American debt crisis. That would leave the permanent national security establishment in Washington, Brussels, and London irrelevant and unemployed. The establishment won’t go down without a fight.

The Biden Administration believed the Russian economy would collapse under US sanctions. In March 2022 President Biden declared, “The Russian economy is on track to be cut in half.” On the contrary, real per capita GDP in Russia was 6% higher in 2024 than in 2021. Russia’s round-the-clock war economy has produced inflation and high interest rates, but Russians produce and consume more now than they did before the war began. 

The entirety of the foreign policy establishment—from liberal globalists like Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan to neocon Republicans like Trump’s dismissed National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and former Defense Secretary James Mattis insisted that Ukraine would crush Russia with sufficient Western help. They were thunderingly wrong.

Asia benefitted from discounted Russian energy exports at the expense of Western Europe. As the German news service Deutsche Welle reported February 22:

In 2021, almost 50% of Russia’s exports went to European countries… Yet, by the end of 2023, less than two years after the invasion began on February 24, 2022, the picture was completely transformed. Recently published figures for 2023 show China and India out in front as Russia’s two main export markets, accounting for 32.7% and 16.8% respectively — half the total. In 2021, China accounted for 14.6% of Russian exports whereas India accounted for just 1.56%.

To the astonishment of Western war planners, Russia produced more armaments than the combined NATO countries, increasing its overall weapons output tenfold, including seven times more artillery shells than the combined West according to Estonian military intelligence estimates. India, Turkey, the former Central Asian Soviet Republics, as well as China all increased their exports to Russia, trading in local currencies to avoid financial sanctions on Russia. 

The foreign policy establishment can’t argue credibly that Russia’s economy is on the verge of collapse, but it continues to lie about the state of the war on the ground.

Ukraine refuses to publish casualty figures, and the Western press is full of wildly exaggerated reports of Russian casualties. But the best estimates of US military intelligence officers state that Ukraine’s casualties are significantly higher than Russia’s – and Ukraine has a quarter of Russia’s population. Some 6.3 million Ukrainians are registered as refugees in Europe, and a reported 650,000 Ukrainian men had fled the country to avoid military service as of November 2023. Today’s total is higher.

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Unlike Ukraine, Russia permits the publication of accurate casualty numbers, for example through Mediazone, “which conducts exhaustive searches of thousands and thousands of Russian websites to find reports of individual family members who have died in combat. These numbers have tracked remarkably close to estimates by various outside observers who have used confirmed reports of various units and then scaled up those numbers to get estimates,” the cited US intelligence officer wrote.

Mediazone reports that current Russian dead (end of December 2024) is just short of 87,000 and gives an upper bound of 120,000 to that number. Checking of their numbers shows that about 17,000 have died in the last 100 days – the period of the renewed Russian “offensive.”

Russian soldiers killed in action (KIA) total between 87,000 and 120,000 through December 2024, which implies wounded in action (WIA) of between 305,000 and 480,000. The Ukrainian General Staff claim of 40,000+ Russian casualties per month simply does not bear up under close scrutiny and probably overstates the case by at least 100% (they are more than doubling the numbers).

Ukraine casualties, in this intelligence officer’s estimate, are at least 108,000 KIA and 375,000 WIA. But the more likely numbers are 160,000 KIA and 640,000 WIA. In addition, Ukrainian desertions are tremendous. As of the middle of December it was being reported by several different sources that there were more than 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers who had been charged with desertion. Russia is suffering huge losses but, in absolute terms, Ukraine’s losses are probably worse. When taken as a whole, against the fact that Russia has a population of nearly 150 million (5 times larger than Ukraine), the war of attrition is not sustainable.”

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Just as President Trump said, Ukraine and its NATO backers provoked the war. Not only did they provoke a war that never should have begun; they bungled its execution, woefully underestimating Russia’s capacity to adapt to new warfare technologies, and overestimating Washington’s ability to choke Russia with sanctions. The war party faces not only shame and humiliation but unemployment, and it will do anything in its power to prevent this.