David Craig, on October 30th, 2023Monday/Tuesday blog
Rumours that the West wanted to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian
Ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there have been rumours that the West pressured Zelensky to ditch peace talks with Russia as the West hoped that a prolongued war between Ukraine and Russia would weaken Russia making the country less of a threat to the West:
and
In which the writer suggested: “Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement. Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”
And, more recently, the brilliant The Daily Sceptic reported: “In a recent interview with Berliner Zeitung, Gerhard Schröder claims that in March of 2022, “the Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to”. According to the former German Chancellor, “they first had to ask the Americans about everything they discussed” and “nothing could happen because everything else was decided in Washington”. Though given that he was previously a highly-paid board member of the Russian energy giant Gazprom, we should perhaps take anything Mr Schröder says with a pinch of salt.
However, Schröder is now the fifth person to state that the West opposed a peace deal in March/April of 2022. In April of 2022, the Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told the broadcaster CNN Türk: “Following the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, it was the impression that … there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine”.
An erily accurate prediction?
In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives Zbigniew Brzezinski warned:
“The most dangerous scenario [for America] would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complimentary grievances.”
Brzezinski graduated with a PhD from Harvard University in 1953 and became Professor of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University. He was later the United States National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981, under the administration of President Jimmy Carter.
As Putin meets with his friends from China, Iran and Hamas, the only thing Brzezinski seems to have got wrong is that he didn’t include North Korea in the “coalition united not by ideology but by complimentary grievances”.
A cornered rat will always attack
One of the stories Putin has told about his childhood was an incident when he was attacked by a cornered rat:
I wrote a blog in 2022, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine titled “Putin warned us – “not an inch eastwards”. NATO spat in his face. That was stupid!” In the blog I featured two short videos in which Putin warned the West that he would not tolerate any further eastwards expansion by NATO.
I wrote:
“For years, Putin has repeated his warnings that he would not allow Ukraine and Georgia, which both have long borders with Russia, to join NATO. In December 2021, Putin yet again warned the West that allowing Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO would be unacceptable – the first minute of this 3-minute video. In this video Putin (sensibly in my opinion) asks whether the US would allow Russian troops and missiles to be positioned along its borders with Canada or Mexico and reiterates his “not an inch eastwards” threat”.
Yet in January 2022, the US presented its written response to Russian demands on Ukraine not joining NATO and on NATO troops being withdrawn from Romania and Bulgaria, but made clear that it did not change Washington’s support for Ukraine’s right to pursue NATO membership, the most contentious issue in relations with Moscow.
The reply, which was delivered to the Russian Foreign Ministry by the US ambassador in Moscow, John Sullivan, repeated the US offer to negotiate with Russia over some aspects of European security, but the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said the issue of eventual Ukrainian membership of the alliance was one of principle.
Blinken was speaking hours after his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, threatened “retaliatory measures” if the US response did not satisfy the Kremlin.
“Without going to the specifics of the document, I can tell you that it reiterates what we said publicly for many weeks, and in a sense for many, many years. That we will uphold the principle of NATO’s open door,” Blinken said, adding: “There is no change. There will be no change.”
The West thought Putin was bluffing. But Putin wasn’t bluffing. Putin doesn’t do bluffing. After all, he has had three successful mini-wars in the last few years – the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia in which Russia routed the Georgian military; the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea without a shot being fired and the Russian invasion (sorry, I meant “peace-keeping force”) during the Armenia and Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
It would seem that Putin believed the Ukraine invasion would be just another of Russia’s quick mini-wars – charge into Ukraine with 169,000 troops, take the main cities, depose the West-friendly government and install a Russian glove-puppet regime. But Putin got that one horribly wrong and so now we have a real mess on our hands.
I guess all I’m trying to say is that NATO – due to its arrogance, short-sightedness and catastrophic misjudgement of Putin’s character – possibly bears just as much responsibility for the Ukraine mess as Putin’s nationalist aggression and misjudgement of Russia’s military power compared to Ukraine’s.
So now we have what Brzezinski predicted “a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complimentary grievances.”
Category: 
We are not meant to know what is going on behind closed doors, or who is behind them. We are also not meant to question, and anybody who gets close to the truth will be silenced.
The point made about the Grand Chessboard seems relevant. China, Russia and others may group together, and especially now to create a new currency which will be the end of the dollar as reserve currency. Major change is likely to come when there are problems in many areas and when the west is damaging itself with senseless green policies and ESG requirements, and it is burdened with debt.
Since 9/11 we are expected to belief that all the “wars” are conflicts between states and terrorist organisations rather than traditional wars between states. In some cases with an objective of regime change and the belief that the west is bringing democracy to the east. All it has done is bring more instability and of course money to the bankers and power to the politicians. The millions of deaths do not matter to them.
I think with Russia, geography plays a big part because it needs ice free ports. It has St Petersburg but that is quite a journey to get to the Atlantic. It has ports in the Black Sea which it needs to maintain which Ukraine and NATO have threatened. Even with Black Sea ports it sill has to get to the Med and to the Atlantic. Russia is being turned into cornered rat by the west. This goes back to WWI. Russia wanted to occupy Constantinople and Britain convinced Russia not to attack and we would acquire it and hand it over. Russia stupidly believed we would do that. The Gallipoli disaster organised by Churchill and Kitchener was the outcome. They never intended to take Constantinople and had no regard for the loss of life that resulted.
We are effectively still fighting WW I & II with the objective of extending USA hegemony over the world. Britain has been its little helper from the start and as a result we lost the pound as reserve currency and the empire. The politicians are just like squabbling school boys in the playground and we suffer. It’s time to put them in their place.
In connection with this there is a YouTube video – “Dr.SHIVA™ SHATTER THE SWARM. How The Few Control the Many – which I think explains the present world control structure.
There is also a YouTube video about climate science which I think is an important contribution “Tom Shula A Novel Perspective on the Greenhouse Effect”. There are some links and more information on Watts Up With That. He has written a long paper which I haven’t looked at yet. Basically it shows that radiative heat transfer at the earth’s surface is only about 0.4% of the total. This is what every mechanical engineer should know. Radiation is not a major source of heat transfer at low temperatures and with an atmosphere. It only becomes important in the thin outer atmosphere where conduction and convection are not possible and that is wrongly assumed to apply at the surface. Shula explains this.