Guest Post by Pat Buchanan
If Russia has been badly bled and Ukraine has suffered irretrievable losses of land and soldiers, who then are the winners? And who benefits from a continuation of this war, which will bring thousands more dead and wounded Russians and Ukrainians?
“There never was a good war or a bad peace,” wrote Ben Franklin at the end of the American Revolution.
But that depends on the war-makers and the causes for which they fight.
Six months into the war in Ukraine, launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 24, when he could not get the U.S. or Kyiv to rule out admission of Ukraine to a NATO alliance aimed against Russia, who appear to be the winners and who the losers?
While Russia has made gains in the east of Ukraine, the Donbas and in the South adjacent to Crimea, captured Mariupol, and turned the Sea of Azov into a Russian lake, its losses have been massive.
The invading Russian army of February was stopped in its tracks outside Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv. That army failed to capture Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, close to the Russian border. It failed to capture Odessa, the third largest city and Ukraine’s major port on the Black Sea.
According to Western sources, Russia has suffered 75,000 to 80,000 casualties and is desperately recruiting, even in prisons, to find troops to replace the dead and wounded lost in Ukraine.
Putin wants to expand his army by an additional 137,000 troops.
The flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, the cruiser Moskva, has been sunk. A thousand tanks and armored personnel carriers have been destroyed.
The reputation of the Russian army as a near-invincible force in any land war in Europe has been shattered.
Politically, Russia has isolated itself from much of Europe, been hit with severe sanctions and watched as Europe and NATO unite against it.
Sweden and Finland have abandoned their historic neutrality to become the 31st and 32nd members of NATO.
Is Ukraine then the winner of this war?
After all, the war that the Ukraine of Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fought against a larger Russia for its freedom, independence and territorial integrity has won the admiration of much of the world.
Yet, in two clashes with Russia, in 2014 and 2022, Ukraine has lost 20% of its territory in its east and south, and Kyiv is not going to retrieve these lost lands before winter comes.
But if Russia has been badly bled and Ukraine has suffered irretrievable losses of land and soldiers, who then are the winners?
And who benefits from a continuation of this war, which will bring thousands more dead and wounded Russians and Ukrainians?
America?
Is this new Cold War II with Russia, into which we appear to have plunged, in the national interest of a United States that so welcomed the peaceful end of the old Cold War three decades ago?
Of what benefit to the U.S. is the sending of troops to the Baltic republics? Are we stronger, safer, more secure, now that we have committed to fight Russia to defend the 830-mile Finnish-Russian border, something no Cold Warrior of an earlier era would have dreamt of doing?
Are we better off because all the nations of the Warsaw Pact and three republics of the old USSR are now NATO allies for whose independence we are committed to fight Russia?
Is the revival of the Sino-Soviet pact, aimed at the West in the 1950s and now aimed at NATO and our Asian allies, something we should welcome? Have not our own post-Cold War policies contributed mightily to reviving the old Cold War Russia-China alliance against us?
Where President Richard Nixon appeared to split Mao’s China from Russia, this generation of American leaders appears to have restored that hostile duopoly.
Putin was a Russian KGB agent during the Cold War. Now every member state of the former Warsaw Pact and three constituent republics of the USSR of that era are NATO allies of the United States.
This is the new Cold War. Is Putin alone responsible for igniting it?
Perhaps highest among our goals in the first Cold War with Russia was the avoidance of a hot war that could escalate to a nuclear war and destroy both nations.
Now that we are again in a hostile state of relations with Moscow as we were then, how can this be the result of a successful foreign policy?
In the first Cold War, Eastern Europe and the Baltic States were accepted as satellites of the Soviet Union. Communism had been imposed upon them all after World War II.
But that was not a cause for military conflict between us.
When we brought virtually all of Eastern Europe into NATO, we were the ones, not Putin, who made their independence of Moscow and alliance with the West a matter for which we committed ourselves to go to war.
As Russians and Ukrainians kill one another in the Donbas, and hatred of Russians for Americans grows, how is that good for the USA?
Perhaps we ought to invest as much time and energy trying to end this war as we do to defeat and humiliate Russia, which will not bring us peace.
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Where is the proof that the war goes badly for Russia?
The War is destroying the West.
Most countries of the world are neutral or support Russia.
If our Govt was anything we could be proud of, would we not try to end it?
Complete propaganda and intentional lying…Russia has been suffering minimal losses while shelling the UKR army , destroying massive amounts of equipment, and bleeding UKR forces steadily….
I suppose I should have expected this from a DC denizen, but it still irritates me.
Pat mostly gives a pass to the US-based Globalists and Neo-Con/Lib groups for their constant efforts at the destruction of any part of the world they don’t control, and a lot of the parts they do control.
There are several groups that have overlapping agendas running this sh1thshow, but power and destruction are a common thread.
I wonder if Pat would object if China overthrew Trudeau (oh wait, Not necessary) and started arming and fortifying the border of Canada, and then began the same exercise in Mexico.
Ukraine had a NATO trained and equipped force second only to Turkey in size at the start of the SMO that had spent 8 years building fortifications and warring on it’s own people. To lay any blame for this at Putin’s feet is to be a shill for the State.
Pat said “according to western sources”. He probably doesn’t even comprehend that the Washington Post is owned by a guy who does cloud storage for most of the federal government including the CIA (Amazon Web Services).
You mean in 2013, a few months after Bezos bought the CIA’s mouthpiece for a measly $250 mil, he was awarded a $60o mil CIA contract to store Hillary’s emails?
Bullshit.
This old fart should just retire already. He’s nothing but a propagandist at this point.
As it turns out, homosexual Jewish clowns make poor war time leaders…
Kiev’s troops suffered great losses in a failed attack, ordered by president Zelensky, towards Kherson, Moscow claims
https://www.rt.com/russia/561758-ukraine-counter-offensive-fails/
In addition the ukes have NO replacement troops….once they dead…they dead!
Yeah, I was dead once, but then I wasn’t, because I replaced myself.
Life goes onwards
They make good US puppets, though, feeding their country’s men into the maw of their powerful neighbor in a failing US effort to weaken that neighbor.
Such a tool!………
I hate to tell you Pat, the real losers are the American people. We’ve lost our souls, what price can you put on that sir?.
Pat Buchanan is a complete fucking idiot. He needs his own show on CuNNt.
Some of the worst pundits on the internet somehow keep appearing here. Is there a shortage of Actual Truth Tellers out there?
Russia is now paying the US back with the mess being created in Iraq right now. What happens to the $ if Iraq oil is taken off the global market? What happens to the world when energy prices for the West are up 1000% in a year? Ruling the world with monopoly money is coming to an end. The death of the empire will come suddenly. The US is beyond bankrupt. Our ability to buy hundreds of billions of $ worth of products from around the world with out printing press is going to end. FACT Our nation was destroyed by globalism and offshoring of our value added production. We are a dead man walking. We are a nation of fat tattooed maggots that can’t wipe their own ass unless government hands them the paper.
What happens if China and Iran decide to become allies and that the time is right to take the oil fields in the Mid East? What happens if India decides to join them? What if in the process they decide to cut off the US from all the goods made in China? Of course Russia would also join, as would North Korea.
We are on very shaky ground, and do not have the advantages we once did.
The imperialism practiced by the US and Western Europe have made us hated by most of the rest of the world.
Now even Buchanan is just regurgitating talking points handed to him?
The chef editor of the Swiss newspaper NZZ just wrote an article last Saturday that in some paragraphs reads like a facsimile of Buchanan’s bullshit:
https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/der-andere-blick/im-ukraine-krieg-hat-putins-russland-schon-verloren-ld.1699598
Pat is 84 years old. I doubt he writes much of his own stuff anymore and if he does, he is clueless. This article is boilerplate. Most commenters on TBP could do better.
Pat Buchanan is full of shit. Another lying Washington DC whore-monger. Russia did not launch this war, the NATO and US did. The constant refusal to keep the agreements made decades ago not to expand NATO beyond its 1984 borders and the support for Ukrainian terrorism is what forced Putin to act.
The west has now fucked itself as Europe faces a winter where it will not be able to supply heat or food to its people and the western powers have exhausted their military stocks to the point where they do not even have sufficient stocks to defend themselves. People like Buchanan and Biden and the rest of the Washington DC traitors and psychopaths, are pushing for another world war to expand their imperialism ever farther and to force globalism on to the entire world.
We will see very hard times going forward that will culminate in another massive war. That is what the so called wold leaders always do. They are the enemies of mankind.
I strongly endorse Mr. Buchanan’s themes and suggestions in this article. However I suggest using western sources to estimate Russian losses is fraught with liability. As well military analysts such as Colonel Douglas MacGregor have pointed out the attack on Kiev was a feint, meant to draw Ukrainian reserves away from east Ukraine to the capital (which they did). If the Russians were really intent on capturing Kiev they would have used more military personnel.
Oh, there are winners all right. Same as it ever was.
“If my sons did not want wars, there would be none.” Gutle Schnaper Rothschild
One good thing is, the longer all of this goes on the more Washington D.C. denizens indict themselves, even ones like Pat Buchanon.
At last count, the Ukrainians had lost 291,000 since the war started, and that has been at least 3 weeks ago, so add another 21,000 dead to that count. Some say the Russians have lost 15,000; others say 45,000, but we know what they tell us is always a lie, and the Russians have done pretty good when they sent a 125,000 man army against a 200,000 strong Ukrainian army trained by NATO.
The Russians are simply grinding up an entrapped army up with artillery over a 1,000 mile front, and once they’re done, all of those Ukrainians will be dead, and that will be that. It’s safe to say that The Jew will get popped before he ever has a chance to surrender to the Russians, and Ukraine will be divided up between the Russians, Belarusians, Poles, and Hungarians. The Hungarians will get the part where Hungarians live, the Poles will get the part of the country they think they want but they’ll have the UkroNazis to fight, and everyone else will kill or ethnically cleanse the other parts whenever someone pipes up.
And Europe will be a disaster by their own hands, and one or more stupid actions or laws passed by the Democrats will someday blow the lid of our own country. Thank God I live South of the Ohio river, where most people have grown to hate the Democrats with a passion.
Stopped reading there.
Shut up fed