On Leading Syria, Losing Ukraine and Bombing Iran

New readers should know that my Substack posts are dedicated to surveillance of matters related to a central premise, and that premise, put at its simplest, is that the collective West, made ever more desperate and ruthless because of its unsustainable debt load, is attempting to beat back the multiple forces of multipolarity. It is currently doing this on three main fronts: against Russia over the proxy excuse of defending Ukraine; against Iran over the proxy excuse of defending Israel; against China over the proxy excuse of defending Taiwan. But there is no limit to the number of fronts that the West will entertain.

Gas Crisis

Following Ukraine’s recent cessation of the supply of Russian gas that has flowed along its pipeliness across Ukraine, the most immediately impacted countries appear to be Moldova and Transnistria where the gas is used for the generation of electricity. Moldova is expected to generate some electricity domestically and import electricity from Poland (which I had mistakenly excluded from my commentary yesterday), Romania and Ukraine (although it is a mystery as to how Ukraine will be able to supply electricity when it is itself an importer of electricity from Poland and Romania).

The benefit to Ukraine of all this, as I noted yesterday, is quite mysterious given the fragility of Ukraine’s energy system in the wake of dozens if not hundreds of severe Russian attacks over the past two years, and the further damage Russia could do to future supplies of gas to Ukraine from new sources (e.g. piped LNG from Poland) if Russia decides to destroy the pipelines running across Ukraine. Further, Ukraine depends for two thirds of its electricity on three surviving, Soviet-built nuclear power stations, whose supply of electricity can be disrupted, and often is, by Russian strikes on their substations.

In Transnistria, wedged in between Moldava and Ukraine, most industrial activity is reportedly closed except for food products, and the generation of electricity for its 350,000+ residents is temporarily dependent on the country’s coal reserves. These are expected to last for only 50 days. It remains to be seen whether it will be able to import coal or LNG gas through the borders of its hostile neighbors.

Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, estimates that the end of the gas deal could cost the EU €120 billion over the next two years or so. Slovakia itself would lose up to €500 million annually in transit fees. According to EuroNews, Slovakia had been receiving about 3 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas annually from Russia via Ukraine, amounting to two-thirds of its needs. To compensate, Slovakia has signed a short-term pilot contract to buy natural gas from Azerbaijan and has an arrangement to import US LNG through a pipeline from Poland. Slovakia can also receive gas through Austrian, Hungarian and Czech networks, enabling imports from Germany among other potential suppliers.

Slovakia has threatened that in retaliation for Ukraine’s cessation of a supply of Russian gas, it might cease its supply of electricity to Ukraine (a measure that would, of course, also hurt Slovakia) and that it might reduce social benefits to Ukrainian migrants in Slovakia. This might lead some such migrants to return to Ukraine (where men would risk a strong chance of being called to fight for the Ukrainian army in its war with Russia), but it is more likely that migrants would set their hopes on other European countries where they would meet a lukewarm reception at best.

Migration Crisis

To this flow of migrants would be added far larger flows into Europe from Ukraine given the expectation that Ukraine will shortly lower the age of conscription into the army to 18.

Ukraine has for many months faced pressure from the US to lower the age of mobilization even as the future of US aid to Ukraine is under question in the light of the upcoming inauguration of US President elect Donald Trump whose stated aim is to bring a cessation to the war and/or to US participation in it.

Voices skeptical of the likelihood that Russia, the US and Ukraine will be able to settle terms, envisage the possibility of a new 300,000-400,000 Ukrainian army heavily populated with 18-24 year olds, that would face off with Russian forces in eastern Ukraine in the Spring, by which time Russia plans to have successfully completed its offensive from Kamianski in Zapporizhzhia through to Velyka Novoselivka in southern Donbass up to Toretsk, Chasiv Yar, Pokrovsk, Siversk, Lyman, Kupyansk and Vovchansk, these cities constituting a south-north front line along which Russia, for the most part, is successfully advancing (although Siversk appears to be one area of potential weakness).

Ukraine’s army has commprised, principally, men in the age-range of 25-50. This is also the age range that is absolutely critical to sustaining any kind of economy. In order to both fight a war and to keep some kind of economy going, Ukraine has to look for younger men who are less immediately critical for the economy even though, in the event of the slaughter of large numbers of this younger cohort, there will be insufficient manpower for the future economy.

Fighting a War They Know is Lost

The West was advised by Ukraine military intelligence leader Kyril Budanov as long ago as April 2024 that it would be impossible for Ukraine to win a conventional war and that it would have to convert to assymetrical warfare.

Ukraine’s military commander Zaluzhnyi had come to much the same conclusion months before. Writing for The Hill, James Dorso records how in April 2024, the leadership of Ukraine’s military intelligence participated in a series of roundtable discussions involving Washington think tanks and policymakers.

“They expressed their reservations about continuing full scale conventional warfare. They were concerned that Ukraine had lost momentum and would be overwhelmed. They advocated instead for increased asymmetric warfare inside Russia to gain an upper hand in negotiations to end the war.”

Budanov was subsequently sidelined and ignored by Zelenskiy who proceeded, much as he had always done, with a mixture of conventional and assymetrical methods. In what might be described as a hybrid action, Ukraine staged an unsuccessful attempt to capture Russia’s Kursk nuclear power station, a manouever that has since wasted well over 30,000 of the Ukrainian troops who formed part of the corresponding forces that invaded Kursk around the town of Sudzha and which today is still gradually being beaten back by Russia (the White House has advised Ukraine to withdraw its forces from Kursk).

In brief, the collective West, advised that the war was not winnable conventionally nonetheless continued to throw unimaginable wealth to Ukraine for it to continue to, fight the war both conventionally and assymetrically, some of that money being siphoned off for corrupt purposes (including diversion of weapons to support militia in Africa).

Still today Ukraine is losing the war and still there are voices in both the US and Europe that believe there is merit in continuing Ukrainian escalation (e.g. assassinations, longer-range cruise and ballistic missiles against targets in Russia, and the mobilization of 18-24 year olds) so as to force Russia to the negotiating table on terms favorable to the collective West.

Only so far, and after $200 billion or so, Ukrainian “escalation” has achieved nothing. Even in its dying breath, the Biden administration is wasting a further $6 billion dollars on the effort, having burned through the $60 billion pacakge voted through by Congress in April (at around the time when the Biden administration was being told that the war was unwinnable). Indeed the Biden Administration, in its desperate bid to make life as difficult as possible for the incoming Trump administration has already chewed up 30% of the budget for 2025.

It is very difficult to assess the numbers of lives that have been sacrificed in this dreadful farce, given the opacity and fog of propaganda from all sides, but I am inclined to the view that the numbers of Ukrainian lives sacrificed for this totally unnecessary and unproductive conflict is likely somewhere in the region of 600,000 dead, a figure mentioned this week by John Mearsheimer, and the figure of 991,000 Ukrainian losses recently cited by the Russian Ministry of Defense (which I am going to assume is a reference to the number of dead Ukrainians at worst, or of dead and seriously wounded, at best).

There have been some reasonably plausible independent efforts to calculate the numbers of Russian dead and I am inclined to believe that these do not exceed 200,000. If we assume that for every soldier that is killed, there are at least three who are significantly wounded (and this may be a conservative estimate), then we would be talking about 1,800,000 dead and wounded Ukrainians, and 600,000 dead and wounded Russians.

Is Syria a Real Country and is Jolani its Real Leader?

In interview with Judge Napolitano, Professor John Mearsheimer extends some positive assessment to Syria’s new leader, al-Jolani or al-Sharaa, head of the terrorist invasion force of HTS sent down with Turkish backing from Idlib to Damascus who appears, says Mearsheimer, to appreciate the importance to Syria of maintaining good relations with Turkiye, Russia and even with Iran as these will be significant assets to Syria’s ability to hold back Israel and to diminish the sway of the US.

I do not disagree with this logic except for the fundamental premise, which is that al-Jolani has, overnight, slipped into the role of a conventional national leader who endearingly wants the best for his country. If he really wanted the best for his country, would he have invaded it with backing from Turkiye and Turkish forces, mainly, but also with assistance from both the US, and its allies, and Israel?

And is it “his” country? Al Jazeera reports that he was born Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa in 1982 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where his father worked as a petroleum engineer. The family returned to Syria in 1989, settling near Damascus. Little is known of his time in Damascus, this source attests, before his move in 2003 to Iraq, where he joined al-Qaeda in Iraq as part of the resistance to the United States invasion that same year.

As I suggested yesterday, it is easier to believe that Al Jolani is a Western intelligence asset whose mission has been to direct a movement of Qatari or Saudi-paid Salafist extremists for the purposes of regime change in Damascus at the ultimate service of Western neocon foreign policy than that Jolani is an authentic leader of Sharia Islam.

The mislabelled “civil war” that broke out in 2011, and the regime-changing invasion of Syria in 2024 has absolutely nothing to do with democracy or human rights. The first phase was about a contest between two oil pipeline projects, one of which would have benefitted Qatar, the other Russia, and both are about the replacement of a secular, socialist, Arab nationalist order in Syria with an implanted Western-oriented and Western-backed, pliable Sunni extremist movement.

A central question is whether al-Jolani really can be considered a conventional leader with conventional aspirations for a sovereign nation, the nation of Syria.

In no sense can he be considered a legitimate leader, and he certainly has no claim whatsoever to electoral legitimacy. He arrives on the back of foreign support. His own military strength is quite modest so that he will continue to need the backing of foreign sponsors. One of these, Turkiye, is widely suspected of harboring imperial ambitions for Syria that would recover Syria within some form of revived Ottomanism. I

In place of a relatively stable country, albeit one badly impoverished by Western-instigated war and sanctions, that depended considerably on its closest allies, Russia and Iran, al-Jolani heralds chaos in the name, absurdly, of free trade, integration into the global economy, friendship with everyone (including Israel) and, laughingly, “democracy.”

All this as Israel grabs land to the south, Turkey is at war with the Kurds (and, in effect) the US in the north, and Jolani’s forces ride off on revengeaful killing orgies against Alawites, Christians and other minorities.

Iran, meanwhile, holds its breath as to whether Israel will use its new positions north of the Golan to launch a missile war against Iranian “nuclear” assets (although everyone knows that Iran has no nuclear weapons, its leader is committed to his fatwa against nuclear weapons, and the real nuclear threat in the Middle East is Israel which has hundreds of them) - as it already did, in 2021, against the Natanz facility. We know that Jake Sullivan recently presented President Biden with the options for the US to bomb Iran - that is to say, Sullivan went to a President with dementia to ask him whether to start World War Three.

Iran and Russia are due, finally, to sign their mutual defense treaty on January 20th. This follows hard on the heels of talks between the two countries to consolidate and advance their mutual interests in the International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC), and its component, the Rasht-Astana railway connection project. I do not believe Russia would sign this treaty if it was not prepared to extend full support to Iran in the event of an Israeli attack, although I do expect that there will be Russian diplomatic efforts to head off such a possibility for conflict with a country that has a substantial Russian population and with which it has formerly enjoyed quite cordial relations.

Israel in Southern Lebanon

The Cradle reports that the Lebanese army recently entered the towns of Al-Bayada and Shamaa to find ‘everything razed to the ground’. Israeli troops advanced into and heavily attacked the southern Lebanese village of Beit Lif on 2 January, in violation of the fragile ceasefire that Tel Aviv has been continuously breaching since it took effect in late November last year. The new ceasefire violations occurred a day after the Israeli military set fire to homes in the Aitaroun-Bint Jbeil district.

“In accordance with the ceasefire agreement, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) entered the towns of Shamaa and Al-Bayada on 1 January. The two towns are among those that witnessed fierce clashes between the Lebanese resistance and the Israeli army during Tel Aviv’s failed ground operation in Lebanon, which began in early October and ended with the ceasefire on 27 November.

“Israel has violated the ceasefire – which is based on the implementation of UN Resolution 1701 – over 100 times since it took effect with deadly airstrikes, arrests of Lebanese citizens, troop advancements, and mass detonation campaigns in southern villages. Entire villages have been wiped out as a result of the demolition campaign...

“Tel Aviv claims to be targeting Hezbollah infrastructure in the south, which the LAF was tasked to dismantle as per the agreement.

Israeli troops are required to withdraw from Lebanon within 60 days of the ceasefire’s announcement. So far, it has been over four weeks, leaving less than a month before the Israeli army must retreat, according to the agreement”.