WILL UKRAINE END UP AS RUSSIA’S AFGHANISTAN II?

PUTIN IS LOSING PROPAGANDA WAR BUT WASHINGTON MUST NOT PAINT HIM INTO A CORNER

“Those who do not learn from history are DOOMED to repeat it,” goes an old saw.

When Brezhnev invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979, the Soviets expected accomplish the mission and return home “within six months or a year.”

They stayed nearly 10 years and returned home with a tail between their legs. Just as the Americans did over 30 years later (see AFGHANISTAN: A DON QUIXOTIC WAR ENDS IN AMERICAN DEFEAT).

When Putin decided to invade Ukraine on February 24, this writer assumed that he had a strategic plan for how to carry out a “Blitzkrieg.” Get in, take over the Kiev government institutions, remove Zelensky, install a temporary government, and get out. Maybe “within six months or a year.”

For, any protracted engagement would surely result in a global condemnation of Russia, just as the world protested against the American interventions in Vietnam, Iraq or the bombing of Serbia. Or the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Yet, here we are, almost three weeks into the conflict, and Russia has still not taken any of the major cities (Kiev, Kharkov, Mariupol, Odessa).

It appears, therefore, that Putin is a poor student of history. For, he, too may be doomed to repeat it and experience the defeat and humiliation that Brezhnev and Biden did in Afghanistan.

For the time being, Putin is certainly losing the propaganda war. And the longer the war goes on, the worse it will be for Russia.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president Zelensky, a former actor, is playing beautifully the role of his life – that of a helpless victim who is heroically defending his homeland against a foreign bully. David vs. the Goliath. With the help of the western media hucksters.

The media have uniformly given Zelensky a microphone and a stage from which to broadcast his message. Which is magnifying it manyfold.

By contrast, Putin is starting to look like a bumbling hapless idiot who has sent his troops to “a bridge too far.” Even if he were to eventually take Kiev and remove Zelensky, there is virtually no chance that he can recover from this PR disaster.

Which means that the West (read – Russophobic NWO “elite”) will have achieved their goal. They’ve got themselves a Cold War II with a weakened and isolated Russia for years to come.

They’ve got to be careful, though. For, they, too, appear to be poor students of history. As Nicolo Machiavelli warned, writing in 1573 in “The Prince,” “there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than a creation of a new order of things.”

Why? Because desperate men do desperate things. “Tempt not a desperate man,” warned another great writer – Shakespeare.

“What concerns me most is the potential for accidental use by either side as a result of misjudgment or miscalculation … especially if Putin finds himself backed into a corner,” Steve Schwartz, a fellow at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, told Newsweek (Mar 12, 2022), echoing this writer’s concern.

Meanwhile, Russia isn’t just any other country. It has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. What’s even more important, it has the new hypersonic nuclear weapons which “will be impossible to shoot down,” military experts warned when Putin unveiled them in 2020 (see London Express, Aug 1, 2020).

Maybe that’s why the Pentagon is being cautious in not making any moves that would suggest a nuclear response to Putin’s threat. A routine unarmed Minuteman missile test in California was canceled so as to not provoke the Kremlin. No nuclear exercises have been held, reports the Newsweek.

When asked during a hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee last week as to how the United States might respond to the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, STRATCOM commander Adm. Charles A. Richard said he could only address the question in closed session.

Which was wise. For if Washington continues to humiliate Putin and leaves him no way out of the corner into which they have painted him, he may do what desperate men do – blow up the planet.

And who will be the winner of that war, Messrs. Biden, Johnson, Macron, Scholz et. all.?

PS: Notice that Brezhnev invaded Afghanistan on the 24th day of the month? As Putin did in Ukraine (Feb 24). Just saying… 🙂