More Bad News from the Upside Down: Mess in Ukraine, Day 3-4: comparisons with Georgia 2008, the potential 'Koreanisation' of Ukraine, and the Criminality of the Zelensky régime

The situation is getting worse and worse with respect to Western media BS, but thankfully, the Russians are treading very carefully these days (I don't want to imagine how this would be otherwise…)

We’re back in Ukraine, and since there’s so much (mainly dis-) information out there, we shall continue with my Q&A style commentary here.

Q: first of all, why do you get yourself into that particular mess at this time? What are your ‘qualifications’, if you have them, to write about these matters?

Oh my, I thought this wasn’t about me. Well, in all brevity: I don’t have any conflicts of interest in this one, I’d say, if you’d discount the perfectly understandable anxiety about a drastic escalation of the conflict (I’m a parent located in a peripheral NATO country right now), which means I don’t have any particular reason to bullshit you about these issues.

As to my ‘qualifications’, well, I have a bunch of credentials, alright, but as I said: I’m a historian, I teach at a public university with bespoke work experience (visiting faculty) at an Ivy League institution. In this instance, though, I’d rather point to my experience working national security issues in the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs back in the late 2000s when I was a Ph.D. candidate.

Q: huhum, that’s quite…interesting, as it is helpful, I suppose, to have this kind of experience in the background. Care to elaborate?

For a year I was working on these issues, which is to say that Austria perceive(d) of these matters within the ‘Common [EU] Foreign and Security Policy’ (CFSP) framework: i.e., no independent thoughts without at least talking to Berlin and Brussels, no sudden movements whatsoever. For a year, while I was considering a career in foreign affairs (which I thankfully didn’t embark on), my daily work revolved around preparing meeting materials, talking points, and background information for the EU’s Political and Security Committee, or PSC. For those who don’t know it, this is the EU’s equivalent to the US National Security Council, it meets at least twice a week, and it’s an ambassador-level body (this means two things: there’s at least two credentialised ambassadors per EU country accredited with the EU, the ‘official’ one—who is typically a very senior official with extensive ‘ties’ to one’s national establishment—and a plenipotentiary who sits in the PSC; my work went to the latter).

Q: oh my, that sounds like you have at least some experience with this kind of stuff; how does this experience from almost 15 years ago relate to the present, thought?

Fair enough. At first, don’t get too excited about the day-to-day work in such positions: as your ‘product’ works its way up the food chain, more and more people weigh in, polish this or that part, and the like: don’t say the wrong thing is the main ambition.

This is all fairly conventional for a small, politically quite irrelevant country, but what it means in practice is that I have a fairly helpful way of comparing the Austrian—and, by extension, EU reaction to the Russian military intervention in Georgia (Aug. 2008) to the much larger one in Ukraine right now.

Q: alright, let’s talk about Georgia in 2008, then. Any comparisons to the present?

Well, I’ve already mentioned that back in August 2008, the US-/‘Western’-backed Georgia opened fire and the Russian troops responded in kind. Note that this situation is quite comparable in terms of Ukrainian troops and/or militias in Kiev’s (?) service shelled the Donbass regions almost uninterruptedly since 2014.

Now, I’d like to make two points here: on the one hand, yes, Russia’s policy of ‘helping’ out their fellow Russians in Donetsk and Luhansk (which the former in part created by handing out Russian citizenship) is in a way ‘self-referential’, i.e., certainly something that must be mentioned—BUT keep in mind that cause (the Maidan putsch, followed by declarations of independence by both Donetsk and Luhansk) occurred in that particular order. Here, the dynamic is, simply put, the same as in Georgia: break-away regions come into existence after a policy change (in Georgia, that would be Mr. Saakashvili’s pro-US turn, in Ukraine that’s the 2014 coup), thus engendering an escalation.

On the other hand, though, Georgia is a much smaller, much less relevant country in the grander scheme of things, relative to Ukraine. Also note that the speed with which the Russian government crushed the Georgian military assault—it took ‘only’ five days—is something that cannot be replicated in a much bigger country, such as Ukraine. The main point, though, is that post-Maidan Ukraine has turned up the heat on its ethnic minorities for quite some time, and yes, there was no reason to expect, say, Hungarian intervention to ‘help’ its fellow-Hungarians with Ukrainian passports (due to both sheer relative size and policy alignment). Furthermore, Ukraine is a country with few, if any, natural ‘obstacles’ to any invader: it’s mainly flat, with perhaps rivers such as the Dnieper and Don, both running from north to south, as something that qualifies as such. If you look at, say, Hungary’s historical borders in that particular area, the Carpathian mountain range would be that ‘obstacle’ for about a millennium.

Q: interesting take, I’m unsure I’d agree with all you said. Thanks for the historical context, but you didn’t answer my question about comparisons between 2008 and 2022.

Apologies. There are two main points I’d like to make: first of all, the speed with which the combined ‘West’ (incl. Japan, as far as the SWIFT shenanigans are concerned) responded is quite different. Furthermore, the ‘West’ is also more engaged with the Kiev régime, which is understandable in terms of ‘sunk investments’ combined with Ukraine’s geostrategic location very close to Moscow, spatially speaking. In short: Ukraine in 2022 matters (more) than Georgia in 2008.

Seen from the perspective of the smaller countries in ‘the West’, though, what’s astonishing is the—in my estimation—utterly deranged behaviour of European leaders. Around half or more of all the energy Europeans consume comes from Russia, and the further east one ventures, the more rabidly Russophobic the elites are. It’s a contradiction that cannot be explained by ‘historical’ analogues or pointing to the Soviet domination after WW2. I think it has to do with the brainwashing of European elites after the Cold War via exchange programs, US-financed ‘NGOs’, the assimilation into the EUroclatura’s collective, and the like, but it certainly hasn’t got to do with the alleged re-assertion of independence after 1989.

In both regards, the ‘combined West’ is both much bigger in 2022 (compared to 2008), and its ‘actions’ are coming about much, much more swiftly (no pun intended). As concerns the small(er) countries situation between Germany and Russia, what’s particularly striking is the willingness of these minor actors to go along with ‘the big boys’, i.e., Slovakia announced it would allow 1,200 troops from Germany and the Netherlands to be positioned at its Ukrainian borders. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán also reportedly voiced concerns about ‘Russian attacks on the Hungarian minority in western Ukraine’.

Q: so, you’re telling me…what exactly?

I’m re-iterating that these moves—NATO troops on the Ukraine’s western borders (in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania)—in combination with EU Commission president von der Leyen’s incredibly incendiary statement that ‘Ukraine belongs in [the, but more appropriately to] EU’, as reported by Politico, is suggestive of the eventual break-up, or division, of Ukraine into a pro-Russian sphere (consisting perhaps of one larger or at least three or more ‘independent’ states) and a ‘rest-Ukraine’ in the western areas. Basically, a Korean ‘solution’ to the currentmess.

Q: how would that come about, pray tell?

Well, you have a borderline delusional Zelensky ‘government’ in Kiev that’s cheered on by the EU and their masters in DC; there are NATO troops placed at Ukraine’s western borders. Add to that the utter confusion and ignorance of ‘Western’ elites in politics and media that are cheering each other ‘forwards’ (eastwards): Germany pledged 100 billion € for ‘defence’, sent combat troops to Slovakia, and is constantly chided by the Ukrainian ambassador. (Incidentally, former high-level aide to W German chancellor Willy Brandt, Albrecht Müller, decried the ‘lack of autonomy’, if not sovereignty, on part of Germany that allows such outrageous statements by a diplomatic ‘guest’ to push the government around. I agree with Mr. Müller on this one: it tells everyone about the ‘true’ masters in DC, but I digress.)

As I wrote the other day, images of refugees trying to get out—many of whom, incidentally, consisting of men aged 18-60, which the Kiev régime is trying to force into the army (in the olden times, this practice used to be called ‘pressgang’, and it was notorious, to say the least), but these are amplified be both state and de facto state media to whip up a frenzy, or at least some support among the population, to ‘do something’ about this.

At that point, it becomes ‘thinkable’ to send NATO troops into western Ukraine on ‘humanitarian’ grounds (think: R2P), at which point the Russian leadership will simply say ‘look, we’ve done the same’ in the Donbass, adding ‘take all the neo-nazis you want, and please keep them’.

So, we’ll see a path towards the ‘Koreanisation’ of Ukraine, with a Kiev-government-in-exile in Lvov, ‘supported’ by the EU (by which is meant: paid for by European money at the behest of the swamp creatures in DC).

Q: o.k., I can see that this isn’t some outlandish theory of yours, I admit this is actually a distinct possibility as it allows both major players (the ‘West’ and Russia) to claim that they’ve ‘done something’. So, what about Zelensky and his crew?

Now, that’s the thing where I’m fully on the side of the people and, incidentally, Russian allegations of criminal behaviour on part of the Kiev régime. Handing out assault rifles to civilians and trying to conjure up a kind of civilian mass uprising, a kind of Götterdämmerung 2.0 in Kiev is both idiotic and criminal. As anyone who ever trained in the military (I did eight months with the Austrian army a long time ago and regularly handled live ammunition) knows, it’s comparatively easy to use these weapons, but that doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing.

I want to be crystal clear about what the disbursement of such weapons among certain parts of the civilian population in Kiev is: it’s a crime, and I fully support the notion that Zelensky and his ilk shall stand trial, ideally in Kiev in front of their fellow Ukrainians. On this, check out ‘Coach Red Pill’ (Gonzalo Lira) from a hotel room in Kiev, over here.

Furthermore, check out Russ Bentley and Alina Lipp, both reporting independently from the Donbass, over here, if you’re up for that.

More soon.