by Paul Craig Roberts, Paul Craig Roberts:
“If Mr. Putin genuinely wants to save the lives of his soldiers and of his civilians then he should end the war conclusively and dramatically right now. This, I believe, is well within his power if he has the will and the vision to act as the situation requires.” — Gilbert Doctorow
I am pleased to see Gilbert Doctorow’s concurrence with my longstanding position that the greatest threat to peace is Putin’s reluctance to bring the conflict in Ukraine to a quick decisive end. Putin’s ongoing war is a direct road to wider war.
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In his ever-widening war Putin has done nothing to prevent the Kiev government from continuing the war. I have suggested that Putin hoped to use peace negotiations to achieve a wider understanding with the West. Others have attributed Putin’s inaction to his concern that if Russia acts decisively, the result will be to unite the West to more hostile action. Still others attribute the never-ending conflict to Russian weakness. Whatever the cause, the longer the war continues the more it spins out of control. Although dismissed by Putin, the attack on Russia’s triad is a very serious matter.
Gilbert Doctorow and John Helmer are commentators, analysts, whatever you want to designate them, who seek out the facts instead of pushing official narratives. They don’t always see eye-to-eye, but I read them as a check on my own thinking. The fact that most so-called experts are pushing narratives instead of correct explanations is why we are in danger from such reckless actions as attacking Russian strategic nuclear forces. As I have said, that attack should scare the world to death.
Use it or Lose It
Gilbert Doctorow
https://gilbertdoctorow.substack.com/p/more-on-use-it-or-lose-it
I note with some satisfaction that my last two essays questioning Vladimir Putin’s ‘softly, softly’ approach to conduct of the war in Ukraine attracted particular support from the Community. In what follows, I intend to take this logic one big step further for the sake of argument. Let us do what Herman Kahn famously proposed in his controversial book of 1962 and think about the unthinkable.
I do this in the knowledge that a fair percentage of readers in Alternative Media, including this web platform, may be pacifist minded. My intention is not to offend them, but to allow them to consider other positions on how this war can be prosecuted to bring it to a close sooner rather than later and to spare the lives of combatants and civilians on both sides of the conflict. All the while, my first concern is to avoid escalation to nuclear exchanges, which is what the Community surely believes to be the underlying motive of Putin’s ‘softly, softly’ approach.
In a world of demented politicians occupying highest office, as in the case of Joe Biden, assisted by wholly irresponsible, insane assistants like Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken, ‘softly, softly’ may have made sense. In a world dominated by Realists like Donald Trump it no longer makes sense.
*****
As readers of yesterday’s essay here will be aware, the Russian government is presently pretending that the attack by Ukrainian drones on its strategic bombers last weekend never happened. Mr. Putin spoke about the Ukrainian attempts to sabotage the peace talks the day before they were scheduled to resume in Istanbul on 2 June by staging terror attacks on civilian rail infrastructure in the Kursk and Bryansk oblasts. This allowed him to attach the ‘state supported terror’ label to the Kiev regime and to prepare the world community for a possible decapitating strike some time in the future. But in time present, Russia’s response to the attacks of last weekend were just more of the same destruction it has rained down on Ukrainian drone manufacturing facilities, design offices and arms caches over the past year or more, all without any apparent effect on the intensity of Ukrainian drone counter-strikes on civilian targets within the Russian Federation, not to mention Ukrainian sabotage by paid agents inside Russia.
The only indirect Russian response to the Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia’s heavy nuclear capable bombers in air bases across the Federation was the seemingly offhand remark by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Ryabkov during this past week that it is unlikely there will be any renewal of the New START treaty which mandated the vulnerable stationing of Russian bombers out in the open when that treaty expires early next year.
The logic of Putin’s conduct of the war has been to minimize casualties among Russian soldiers. That prioritization has dictated against Russia’s staging any further storming of Ukrainian fortified cities such as was practiced in the first year of the war in the capture of Mariupol and Bakhmut. Though Russian forces have been advancing steadily along the entire 1200 km Donbas front for many months now, the big summer offensive that Western military commentators are talking about is unlikely to happen precisely because such offensives normally result in much higher casualties on the attacking side than in the defending side and the Kremlin does not want to reverse its overall advantage in casualties incurred till now, which may be reckoned at 7:1 or better.
Let us be clear eyed: this laudable concern for its soldiery results not only from humane considerations. I believe that uppermost are political considerations. Russia today is not the USSR in 1942. It is a democracy, not an iron-fisted, murderous dictatorship and it is responsive to the wishes of its citizenry, who do not want to lose vast numbers of men on the battlefield for the sake of national interests.
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