What Was All Our Support For Ukraine Intended To Accomplish?
Nearly two years ago, a story broke that Russia was running out of computer chips and had to dismantle washing machines in order to get the chips they needed to make their drones and tanks work. I’m going to share some samples to show you that it wasn’t just an article from some obscure online rag but was reported by the newspapers of note as well as just about everyone else. Feel free to scroll past it once you’ve gotten your fill. If you don’t get enough from what I share here, you can do a Google search and find a lot more.
Even from milksuckers:
One would expect people in Moscow to be walking around in smelly clothing and old women in rural areas to be doing their wash on a rock beside a stream. Surely by now, there can be no functioning washers in the country of Russia. Furthermore, you would expect the Russian military to be on the rocks after nearly two years of a critical chip shortage.
I think it’s safe to say now that this story didn’t have a lot of truth behind it, considering the fact that Russia is currently able to manufacture more weaponry than Ukraine, the United States and NATO combined. According to this article from the National Review, they are outproducing the U.S. and Europe by a 3 to 1 margin. No mention in this recent article about any chip shortage. Again, a quick search will provide you with multiple (U.S. and European) sources saying the same thing.
Another recent article mentions that Russia is developing a quite sophisticated and terrifying weapon. Presumably it has computer chips involved in it. If you’ll notice, the same woman, Eleanor Watson, who wrote one of the articles above, also had a hand in writing this one.
Notice that nowhere in the article is it said: “Holy Shit! We thought Russia was using microchips from washing machines but now they’re building new superweapons.” Reporting is not meant to be consistent over time. What was reported yesterday served yesterdays purposes, what is reported today serves our present needs.
A year later, there were multiple reports of Russian soldiers being forced to fight with shovels due to a shortage of ammunition. I’ll leave it to you to find the many articles on this, but I did want to share this headline because it is especially comical:
Again, the message this story was meant to convey, one which looks less true by the day, was that Russia is weak.
Why the turnaround between then and now? Why is Russia being portrayed now as very strong and dangerous while last year and the year before they were being portrayed as almost laughably incompetent and doomed to failure?
The answer could be that the media was well-intentioned but just got both stories wrong. Perhaps, but if the media is well-intentioned and wishes nothing more than to report the truth to the public, then some acknowledgement of how wrong they got things should appear. As no acknowledgement — let alone an apology — has been forthcoming, we can dismiss this hypothesis.
The far more likely answer is — and let me know if you have a better one — that the story of Russia’s weakness served a purpose last year and the year before that, but now the danger that Russia poses to Europe must be played up. Because last year and the year before, we had to justify sending Ukrainian troops to fight a superior army and make it seem like they were destined to win. Whereas now we have to convince Europe that if we don’t do something now, and something drastic, Russians will soon be goosestepping through the streets of Berlin and Paris (don’t mind the cognitive dissonance, we’re slowly getting the public to accept that it was the Russians who were the bad guys in World War 2).
This may seem like some real cynical thinking on my part, but that’s just the way Occam’s razor slices. The bottom line is that hundreds of thousands more Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and wounded than you’re ever going to hear about from any western source. And they were led to fight and die in the belief that they would be victorious and Crimea and all the rest of Ukrainian territory taken by Russia would be returned to the government in Kiev, whether they wanted to or not.
If this cynical take is correct, and I’d be glad to explore the idea that it is not should anyone provide me the evidence, then the West (primarily the United States) did not have the best interests of the Ukrainian people at heart. Ukrainians were led to believe that the goal of the West was to help Ukraine win a war against Russia. Now either Western leaders were criminally incompetent or else they were criminally deceptive. The only other alternative I can come up with is that they were both. I’m going with option C on this one.
The wellbeing of Ukrainians was never a factor in the machinations of people like Victoria Nuland, who helped instigate a coup in Ukraine in 2014 and has had her fingers in the politics of Ukraine ever since. She was once secretly caught saying “F*ck the E.U.” Apparently, the recorder was shut off before she uttered the words “And f*ck Ukraine, too.”
Ukraine is well and truly fucked. You can blame Russia all you want, but save a little bit of that for those in the U.S. who, as political scientist John Mearsheimer said, were “leading Ukraine down the primrose path.”
Because here is the most obvious explanation for Ukraine’s situation as it now appears: The United States did not get involved to help Ukraine, it did all that it did in order to weaken Russia. That’s why Ukraine’s greatest achievements have been to send long-range weapons and naval drones to Crimea to blow up Russian bridges and ships that have no real military to Ukraine. Such targets may weaken Russia’s position in the long term but do nothing to stop the slaughter of an overmatched Ukrainian Army in the present. Ukrainian soldiers continue to die in obscene numbers, and not a politician, pundit, or spokesperson for Raytheon have one word of concern for them. They just urge them on while reminding voters that most of the money spent benefits workers and weapons manufacturers in the U.S.
This war has not helped Ukraine. That means all of the support, all of the blue and yellow lapel pins and all of the billions of dollars of weapons, the strategic and intelligence support, all of the training and propaganda, has not helped the average Ukrainian. The average Ukrainian, at this point, has either fled the country or been sent to the front to die. (The average Ukrainian in the east has been absorbed by Russia and is content with that.)
The question remains, what and who did all of this spending and propaganda actually help? I’ll leave that for you to answer. It’s time we all did some serious thinking on this matter.