Toria Missed

Nuland’s was such a pantomime performance of Black Evilness that her dramatic and noisy background strutting does indeed, in the wake of her resignation and the US administration’s acceptance of that resignation, leave a temporary and inevitably black hole in this relatively small world of arch manipulators and war hawks.

I will shed only a few tears (of joy) at her departure, for who knows where her next gig will manifest. I would like to think that her departure signals a shift in the prevailing ideological blanket that suffocates rational thought in Washington if only in the direction of China-now fanaticism, the next profitable forever-losing cause for the MICIMATT.

Nuland’s departure comes hot on the heals of the disclosure of a German plot to use long range missiles against the Kerch bridge in Crimea. The extraordinary technological achievement of Kerch was accomplished in the dark days of Banderite aggression against the newly Russian province of Crimea, following the popular and electorally-endorsed secession of this mainly pro-Russian community in 2014, when Crimeans feared the worst from the US and Nuland-installed Russia-hating thugs of Kiev, and when Ukraine sought to sever water and power connections between Crimea and the mainland.

So the Kerch bridge preserved connections between Crimea and the Russian mainland. It was never the only land connection and there were always copious sea and air routes available. But it was ultra modern and carried both high volume road and train traffic.

For the West, Kerch was a foreboding symbolic threat, one that stood for intelligence and sanity above primordial NATO greed, expansiveness and small mindedness.

The bridge itself is no longer critical to Russian hold over Crimea because Russia now has ample road and rail connections down the coastlines of the Sea of Azov and Black Sea. But its symbolism is a continuous affront to the West’s deeply ingrained if poorly substantiated sense of entitlement and superiority, more than ever at a time when Europe has good reason to fear that the US is cutting the umbilical cords of outrageous military subsidy for European security, as the US worries about the Middle East, about China, about Trump.

These considerations then help explain why German officers, at the instruction of German defense minister Pistorius and probably without the knowledge of German chancellor Olof Scholz, in a hotel in Singapore, amid an air show, were busy conspiring to bring down the bridge. The target was insanely irrelevant, just another big splash PR event beloved of impresario Zelenskiy, -all glitter, little substance - of the kind that has mainly kept this farce alive for two years. The means were laughably reckless; it would take at least 20 long-range missiles to cripple the bridge. The conspirators had little knowledge of Russian air defense capability in the region but should have assumed it would be intense and that it would require many more missiles perhaps more than those readily available. And the whole operation would very likely have provoked Russian retaliation, sufficient to formalize the informal Russian-NATO war, perhaps leading, as Putin so frequently has to remind his Western interlocutors, to nuclear confrontation. (A Russian source, Ribar, suggests that the ultimate target of the seven Romanian-manufactured sea-borne drones that recently hit the Ivan Kotov patrol ship, was the Kerch bridge; if so, and if that attack had been successful, then the Germany conspiracy would have been rendered pointless).

The conspirators were overheard, the conspiracy exposed. Was Nuland a part of it? Quite plausibly. Is the exposure the real reason for her hasty departure? Or is the reason for her departure the result of the Democratic Party’s belated realization that by giving over their war machinery to a small unelected cabal they have fueled the Trump steam roller and their own disappearance as a meaningful political force? Not just a collapse of Ukraine but even the mere continuation of a losing stagnation in that war is unlikely to win US voters, and Trump stands for withdrawal. The Supreme Court has now removed the threat of State-based prohibitions of Trump’s standing for election, and his main Republican rival, Nikki Haley has now withdrawn from the race. The Supreme Court’s requirement for Congressional approval before any attempt at disqualification is allowed.

In the House, Republican leader Mike Johnson is looking at some form of reforumation of the Ukraine aid bill that would reduce the amount of aid for Ukraine by some $30 billion, and this would still be conditional on some Democratic concession with respect to border security. The earliest by which any aid package, should there still be one at that time, will reach Ukraine, is early April.

Note too that Nuland’s departure follows, within days, the recent NYT revelations of a budding 12- branch relationship between the CIA and the SBU since at least 2014 but probably going back to 2004, which simply confirm the view that Putin’s SMO, far from being unprovoked, was a necessary preemptive measure against a determined and unprincipled adversary.

Nuland’s replacement by John Bass, who as US ambassador to Afghanistan presided over the last chapter of the farce of US forever war policy, which shoed into power one of the most retrogressive regimes in world history after 20 years of hapless US occupation and local corruption tells its own story. As does former State Department neocon functionary Stephen Bryen’s article in Asian Times when he argues that since NATO leaders are saying they will not put feet on the ground in Ukraine, despite the clear evidence that they already have high numbers of feet on the ground, that NATO should withdraw its forces from Ukraine, now, before Putin polishes the nuclear warheads of his Kinzhals and zircons and takes out a Paris or London or Brussels or two.

Even with all those NATO feet on the ground, the war is still clearly being lost. Today, along with news of various Russian advances along the combat lines (details of which I have regularly supplied in these posts and which currently emphasize, to Russian favor, combat clashes inTonenke, Orlivka, Berdychi, Terny, Kupyansk, Tabaivka, Krasnohorivka, Heorhiivka, Novomykhailivka, Robotyne) we have reports of Russian destruction of three HIMARS launchers, three or more Abrams tanks, a S300 air defense systems, of regular nightly Russian drone and missile attacks on targets across Ukraine and of what the Russian MOD claims are daily totals of Ukrainian dead and wounded that regularly exceed 1,000. A great deal of Ukrainian chatter about the constructrion of new fortifications sounds far too unrealistic to be credible.

A recenty ordered audit of the Ukrainian army has been reported as concluding that 700,000 Ukrainian soldiers are missing. One headline reads “Ukraine’s Manpower Crisis: No Amount of Money or Aid Can Solve It – audit shows 700,000 ‘conscripts’ left the planet” (Intel Drop). So much for Zelenskiy’s (preposterous) recent claim that Ukraine has so far lost only 31,000 soldiers.

Scholz is probably a spent force; Pistorius should also go. If he is found to have acted without authority on a matter relating to the survival of his own country he should already be enjoying preventative custody. And what does the scandal say of the British, whom Scholz unintentionally fingered for their secret operations in Ukraine in support of Storm Shadow targetting and the like, forever nursing the wound of their loss of empire in a slow descent into ignominy, forever trying to punch well above their weight, to the charmed amusement of their US guardians? But most of all the US can find in this scandal a good excuse for backing off Ukraine as the war is being lost and leaving Europe to its own clowns to explain why they gave away so many hundreds of billions of European taxpayer wealth to the armaments industries and the Zelenskiy administration - with nothing but nothing to show for it except for a process of European economic decline.