The Third Front in Russia’s War to Erase Ukraine: You

Don’t get screwed in Russified Whataboutistan

Yes, you. You’re a Russian disinformation war target. You’re the third front after the Donbass and Kherson-Crimea. Inoculating you against Russian ASMDW — asymmetric social media disinformation warfare— is a form of air defense. You’re the third front that can make or break Ukraine’s victory.

Your immune defenses against ASMDW turning you into a Russian useful idiot will drive the war’s outcome since Ukraine depends on consistent political support for western weapons and financial aid.

It’s a simple equation: more hesitant western support = longer war, which = more dead Ukrainians. Example: slow air defense delivery gives Ukrainian a 9/11 every day:

The Ukrainians know this but too many of the West’s Russian useful idiots don’t. Instead of the loose lips sink ships of 80 years ago, it’s Code Pinko Blame NATO faux peaceniks stop Leopards in their tracks, prolonging the war.

Putin has a failing Potemkin Village army of ill or untrained mobiki and convict mercenaries that spent 4000 men conquering and losing a Bakhmut garbage dump four times. It has no strategy other than sending one ton KH22 rockets into Dnipro apartment buildings and producing flattened cities and mass graves of civilians at scale.

Your vulnerability to useful idiot disinformation is Putin’s only hope for getting out of his disastrous war with a frozen conflict he declares victory in to stay in power, his only goal. With Urals crude selling at under $38/barrel in Primorsk, he must buy time to train and (badly) equip 300000 mobiki to throw in human waves at Ukraine to claim a fake victory erected on a pile of bodies.

With 29000/38000 convicts recruited by Prigozhin’s Wagner PMC already dead or wounded and his military savior General “Armageddon” Surovikin already out, Putin’s capacity to spin his military’s revolving door command to the millions following Russia’s nationalist milbloggers is in decline.

Every Italian, German or Czech protestor against supporting Ukraine is a Russian disinformation missile. The French left’s former presidential candidate Segolene Royal and the xenophobic right’s Marine LePen are Russian hybrid warfare incoming against which only you are Ukraine’s air defense. Trump, Berlusconi, J.D. Vance and “no blank check” Kevin McCarthy are Russian disinformation incoming that feed Putin’s war machine.

The left wing of Germany’s SPD that in March forced Chancellor Scholz to send only helmets to Ukraine and now keeps him from sending Leopard tanks, is the lethal yield of Russian ASMDW.

Incoming genocide apology missiles on the left come with a variety of delivery systems. Some target your aversion to the unipolar American empire and its crimes, others your anti-war moral reflexes and nuclear war fears. Others target neo-colonial prejudices about Ukraine you don’t even know you have. Consider the replies to each as vaccinations against a Russian disinformation pandemic:

• Ukraine is a pawn of US imperialism. The Orange Revolution, the Maidan, the war against Donbass secession were all CIA coups.

This neo-colonial/imperial prejudice says Ukrainians have no agency and fails to differentiate top-down coordinated overturning of governments (coups like Chile 1973, Brazil 1964, Guatemala 1954, Bolsheviks’ coup, October 1917) from bottom-up mass participation revolutions (France 1789–93, the fall of Nicholas II in February 1917, Solidarnosc, Poland, 1980 and 1989, the Baltic States’ independence movements my wife participated in, 1989–91, Ukraine 2004 and the Maidan 2013–14).

• Follow the money and energy markets: It’s about Ukraine’s oil and gas fields displacing Russia’s share of EU energy markets and western oil companies’ greed.

The war only accelerates the EU’s green energy transition and has permanently burnt Russia’s bridges to its biggest energy buyers.

• Follow the money 2: the war is fought for arms manufacturers’ profits.

Lockheed’s share price is down 10% since last spring, Northrup Grumman’s 15% in 1/2023 alone. As the faux peacenik lefties say, follow the money.

• The West ignored Russia’s “security concerns” and blame the war on aggressive NATO expansion.

Putin started the war 18 years after NATO expansion to the Baltics and the former Warsaw Pact states. Never mind the utter absurdity of Russia projecting threat onto Poland and tiny Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia after its history of genocidal conquest and mass deportations. Then why not invade Finland to keep it out of NATO since its border is only 172 km from St. Petersburg.

The truth: Russia’s obsessive contempt for stubborn Ukrainian “Little Russians” predates western involvement by three centuries. Just read Tsars Peter and Catherine’s plans for “Little Russians”. The correlation between grievance-driven Russian nationalism regarding Ukraine and western behavior is simple: zero.

• Which is all about ending German-Russian rapprochement and mutual dependence.

Reread Gogol’s Oblomov for this one. Stolz (played by Schroder and then Mutti Merkel) thought Wende durch Wechseln, change through commercial exchange could cure Russia of its empire habit. Oblomov said no.

• Moral equivalence: Ukraine is as corrupt and authoritarian as Russia. Who cares who wins.

Freedom House rates Ukraine as an emerging democracy = to Mexico (61/100 vs 60/100). Russia rates a 19/100. Inverting hypothetical apologies for the never happened demolishes any moral equivalence argument. Ukraine apologizing for:

• 11000 unorphaned Russian children kidnapped into forced adoption by Ukrainian families
• A theater bombed by Ukraine in Sochi filled with 600 children with the roof clearly labeled “CHILDREN”,
• Mass graves filled with Russian civilians in Belgorod, Kursk and Sochi,
• Thousands of hospitals, schools, power stations and apartment blocks in Moscow, St Petersburg and Rostov bombed by Ukrainian rockets.

will disarm bothsides-ist Russian useful idiots with its bizarro world of events that have not happened. Apologies, like jokes, disarm. Warning: this won’t work with false flag fantasists.

• Russia is right about Ukraine’s neo-Nazis, so it’s not worth defending.

Read popular Russian comics about Tovarich Hitler and take one look at Dmitry Utkin, the founder of the Wagner PMC, named for Hitler’s favorite composer, to see where the real Nazis are.

• Ukraine isn’t fighting for my freedom. Russia isn’t a threat.

For the cost of a single digit rounding error in the Pentagon budget Ukraine has given NATO its largest security dividend since the fall of the USSR. Sweden and Finland renounced neutrality for NATO. Sweden is a major arms producer and the Finnish military’s civil defense reserve model, like Israel’s, will soon be a major NATO asset a three hour drive from St. Petersburg. Geopolitical checkmate.

The Russia isn’t a threat thesis is an early1990s post cold war honeymoon holdover that ignores the global threat of corruption and xenophobic populism exporting authoritarian kleptocracy. They cross-dress as states, but Trump/Bolsonaro/Orban/Duterte/Erdogan/Putin/XiJinPing are really mafias with flags, as the Hudson Institute’s Kleptocracy Initiative, Rethinking Containment, shows:

“explores how transnational corruption is reshaping global politics and security. Launched in response to Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, its cutting-edge research has played a leading role in elevating the fight against authoritarian kleptocracy to become a core US national security concern….the world’s most corrupt regimes also pose the greatest threat to global security. Major US adversaries including China, Iran, and Russia are all structured as kleptocracies: Entrenching their authoritarian rule through corrupt domestic networks, and exporting corrupt practices globally to advance malign foreign policy objectives. Subscribe to Making a Killing, KI’s award-winning podcast, and the Kleptocracy Substack for all the latest global news, research, and analysis. Follow KI @KleptocracyIntv.”

If you hate home-grown oligarchic corruption, try the even more toxic imported blend, the tip of whose spear is Putin’s Russia.

• Ukraine suppressed/banned the Russian language. Russia defends its near abroad’s ethnic Russians against Ukrainian genocide.

Don’t fall for this Russian snowflake claiming victimhood again. Ukraine’s language law is a lighter touch with Russian than Quebec’s is with English….or Latvia’s with Russian. Maybe Britain should invade Quebec again? It’s classic Russian victimhood, projecting onto Ukraine Russia’s three centuries of language and culture suppression since Peter’s 1720 Ukrainian book ban:

• Subset of the previous: The Russkiy Mir (Russian World) fallacy that Russian speaking = Russian nationality, which means

English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese and Italian are de-ethnified languages. Speakers of these languages don’t get their eponymouse passports. It’s Russian’s turn. My Russian speaking Latvian wife and her entire extended family would agree.

• Russia has the right to alter borders as part of a “right to protect” Russian speakers in its near abroad. After all, NATO did the same in Kosovo in 1999, detaching it from Serbia.

This is the Pandora’s Box of irredentist error that backed Italy’s claim to Istria and the Dalmatian coast, Germany’s claim to Czechoslovak Sudetenland and Danzig in 1938–39 and Hungary’s claim to Romanian Transylvania.

• This “right to protect” is a subset of the Ukrainians who resist are just “Little Russians” brainwashed by Nazis (including the Jewish one Zelenskiy).

This is a variant of Lavrov the Liar’s genocidal “we didn’t attack Ukraine” because we can’t invade what doesn’t exist. They trot out Ukrainians’ declining Stepan Bandera cult to find a metastasized Ukrainian Nazi cancer that isn’t there. Tell the Jewish president of Ukraine his country is infested by Nazis and he’ll reply in Yiddish, “Vat ar ya, meshugah?” So would my grandparents from Rivne, Chmelnitzki and Vinnitsya, whose Russian letters from 1913–31 we’re now translating.

• Ukraine’s western supporters are brainwashed by the mainstream media. This is the lefty contrarian variant of genocide apology.

• Supporting Ukraine or Ukraine winning will lead to nuclear war. The pacifist left lives here. Explained by E. in the image above.
• Pivots from Ukraine can’t win, don’t bother supporting it, to Ukraine doesn’t deserve to win to Ukraine winning is too dangerous to pursue.

The have it both ways fallacy exposes the heads I win, tails you lose illogic here. Listen to Ukraine’s General Zaluzhny instead:

“We have finished the Russian professional army, it is time to destroy the amateur army.” — General Valery Zaluzhny

To shorten the war deliver Zaluzhny’s wish list: ““I know that I can beat this enemy. But I need resources. I need 300 tanks, 600–700 ifvs, 500 Howitzers. Then, I think it is completely realistic to get to the lines of February 23rd. But I can’t do it with two brigades. I get what I get, but it is less than what I need.”

14 Challengers, 50 Bradleys, 10 French AMX10s, 12 Leopards aren’t enough.

• Less support for Ukraine will lead to negotiations and shorten the war.

The yield from western restraint in weapons supply in terms of changed Russian tactical decisions or uncommitted war crimes is a very simple number: zero. Ask Bucha, Irpin, Izyum, Dnipro, Mariupol and the looted or destroyed art museums of Kherson and Ivankiv. https://ukrainer.net/prymachenko-3/ . Hermann Goering and The Rape of Europa 2.0 now live in Moscow:

Saving Maria Prymachenko’s Paintings

• Why not negotiate a ceasefire first and then a final settlement?

A frozen conflict buys Russia time to prepare round two. No Ukrainian wants his/her children to fight the next round. Ukrainians’ support fighting until Russians are ejected from all Ukrainian territory: about 90%.

• I’m not on Russia’s or Ukraine’s side. I’m on the side of peace.

This is a geopolitics’ none of the above Ralph Nader and Jill Stein voter ordering what’s not on the menu. Change the characters to strip away the pretence:

1864 election: I’m not on the Confederacy’s side, I’m on the side of peace. Spain, 1936–39: I’m not on Franco’s side. I’m on the side of peace. 1937: I’m not on Japan’s side, I’m on the side of peace. 1939-41: I’m not on Germany’s or the Soviets’ side. I’m on the side of peace. Bosnia and Kosovo, 1992–95 and 1999: I’m not on Serbia’s side, I’m on the side of peace. Undermine political support for aiding aggression’s victim supports the aggressor. Neutrality isn’t on the menu.

• Putin offered to negotiate, but Ukraine refused. Russia wants peace, but Ukraine won’t “compromise”.

A direct descendant of the CPUSA’s “don’t fight the imperialist war!” slogan of September 1939-June 22, 1941. Expiration date: December 7, 1941. Totally ignores Putin/Lavrov’s stated conditions: drop “senseless resistance” and accept Russia’s annexations that turn Ukraine into a landlocked state in a frozen conflict, making it ineligible for EU accession. This one ignores how negotiation is war fought with other means.

Varieties of incoming genocide apology on the right range from outright fascism to reincarnations of America First isolationism:

• Worry about America’s (or EU Mediterrenean) border, not Ukraine’s.

A direct descendant of Lindbergh’s and Father Coughlin’s 1939–41 “don’t fight the Jews’ war!” (today “globalists”). Same expiration date.

• Russia fights for traditional family values against satanic trans and gay woke-ism.

Offering a one-way Tucker-type pilgrimage ticket to Orban’s Budapest or Moscow answers this one.

• Russia defends white Christian civilization and the sovereignty of the nation-state against cosmopolitan (read Jewish) globalists and their agent, Ukraine’s Jewish president.

This is Orthodox Russia as the Third Rome providential civilization opposing the decadent ,secular liberal West. Or Oswald Spengler and his Decline of the West moves to Moscow on a ticket bought by Rupert Murdoch and tiki-torched Tucker Carlson. It’s Orban’s and Trump’s anti-Soros/Hillary/Bernanke Star of David campaign gone global. Anti-semitism is not just the world’s oldest hatred, but a conspiracy theory about hidden Jewish power that explains how the world works. 1890s German Socialists called it “the socialism of fools”. This movie is a very tired rerun, but still has a large audience of fools.

• On the ethno-nationalist right, Russian speaker = Russian nationality.

The same linguistically illiterate ethno-nationalist fallacy, in America peddled by those who know nothing about languages and none but their own.

• The “realist” right: Ukraine has always been in Russia’s sphere of influence, a geopolitical fact the West can’t and shouldn’t try to change.

This is like blaming the rape victim and absolving the rapist because the victim dressed provocatively in a skimpy sovereignty dress and flirted with the richer, stronger guy from across town. It assumes that the rapist had first dibs on her body just because of proximity (sphere of influence). In our age of empire demolition since 1918, we need only change the characters to expose the flaw in any “always” thesis:

1776: The colonies have always been British,

1930: But India is British,

1916: But Ireland has always been British,

1954: But Algeria is French,

1914: and Arabia Ottoman,

1810–21: and Mexico and Peru Spanish,

• The “realist” right, version 2: Russia is a giant nuclear-armed state that deserves geopolitical parity with the West.

Another version of the West negotiating with itself into submitting to nuclear blackmail. Parity with the West is the rabbit that’s never caught on Russia’s geopolitical dog track. And it never will be. Russia has never waged a successful war against a Western power without an alliance with another stronger western power (with the UK against Napoleon, with the US and UK in WWII). The post-Soviet Russian empire merits geopolitical parity with the West even less than its Soviet predecessor, defined as “Upper Volta with nuclear rockets” by one of its Politburo members.

Underneath the nationalist bravado about Russia as a mission and tradition driven civilization opposing the decadent, secular liberal West is a deep grievance-driven sense of inferiority. This is because the gap between Russian geopolitical ambition of parity with the West and its state capacity is enormous and unbridgeable. Why? Like its Ottoman, German and Austsro-Hungarian predecessors, Russia will lose to its maritime empire opponents. Rule of law maritime empires have an unbroken record of victory over their land-based rule by law opponents. This pattern will hold.

Russia wants to belong to Europe as much as Peter wanted to learn shipbuilding from the Dutch in Zaandam. But it knows it can’t while it’s a land-and commodity export based colonial empire of secession-minded subjugated peoples on the periphery of a Dutch/English/American-built global trading system. As a resource-cursed commodity-exporting imperial kleptocracy whose subjugated peoples’ lands have the commodities, Russia is a brittle, unsustainable rogue mafia state headed for collapse like its predecessors.

Russia fights for a subjugated Ukraine so it can be in Europe on its terms — without adopting European contractual governance. It wants western respect, technology, finance, laundered money and real estate in London, the Cote d’Azur and Spain….without the underlying westernization — western institutions and state to citizen power relations. Ukraine represents the lethal to empire threat of the good example.

This is what makes this war as much a war of Russia against itself as against Ukraine and NATO. The only possible endgame: Russia looks in the mirror and sees what’s really there: a third world petrol station that must choose between being a pariah empire or rejoining the institutional West’s liberal international order without empire.

While the Ukrainians do their part, your part, dear reader, as the third front in this war, is simple: don’t be a speed bump slowing delivery of the tools that enable Ukraine to win and will save more from dying in Dnipro-type bombings.