Ukraine — The Shifting Narrative
The UK’s mainstream media appears to be changing the narrative on Ukraine. Is this an admission of failure in the proxy war against Russia? And what are the implications?
October 18, 2024
Something remarkable happened last Sunday night. In a dispatch from Pokrovsk, the BBC reported on the terrible conditions faced by Ukrainian soldiers as Russia advanced on this mining city, about 37 miles north-west of the regional capital, Donetsk. It reported that medics are treating increasing numbers of wounded soldiers, being brought in after dusk to avoid attacks by Russian drones.
What particularly caught my attention was the BBC’s admission that the Russians are gaining territory rapidly. “Since Russia captured the city of Avdiivka in February, the speed of its advance in the Donestk region has been swift. At the start of October, it captured the key city of Vuhledar”.
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This is information which close followers of Russia’s incursion are fully aware of, but mainstream media, presumably under pressure from government defence and intelligence sources has withheld this truth from the general public until now. This was followed by an article on Monday morning in the Daily Telegraph about military recruiters launching targeted raids on restaurants, shopping centres, and a rock concert detaining men and press-ganging them into the army. Again, we know that this has been happening for some time, but it is notable that the Telegraph which faithfully reports the defence ministry’s line appeared to be going off-message.
It was only a little more than a month ago that Bill Burns, Director of the CIA shared a platform with Richard Moore, head of MI6 in an interview arranged by the Financial Times. With respect to the Kursk offensive, Moore said:
“The Ukrainians by going in and taking Kursk really brought the war home to ordinary Russians. Since he has gone into this War 2 1/2 years ago not only has he seen things like NATO get two more members, he’s now lost a part of his own territory.”
Burns followed this up by saying,
“What you see first as Richard said is the Kursk offence is a significant tactical achievement. It’s not only been a boost in Ukrainian morale, it has exposed some of the vulnerabilities of Putin’s Russia and of his military.”
Admittedly, Burns and Moore are not military strategists. But it was surely obvious that to remove much needed troops from the Eastern front to invade sparsely populated Kursk which contained little more than farmland was a tactical blunder. The fact that there was no air cover and supply lines were stretched compounded the error. The Russians were able to cut off the invaders and have been picking them off, including any covert NATO advisors and military on the ground.
The FT’s interview was about a month after Kursk was invaded by Ukraine, and that it was a grievous tactical error is already becoming obvious: Messrs Burns and Moore would have or should have known it at the time of the interview. The fate of the Kursk offensive has since been generally unreported in western media, presumably because it is a disaster. But the Washington-based The Institute for War’s map shows the position last Sunday.
Since then, the Russians have confrmed that they have reclaimed 46% of the Kursk territory invaded, indicating that the map above is already out of date. But clearly, western intelligence is reporting these failures to their political masters, despite MI6 and CIA spin. And hopefully, they have advised their political masters to back off rather than risk escalation towards a third world war
It explains why Biden hastily retreated from earlier sanctioning the sending cruise missiles, telling Kier Starmer on his visit to Washington to do so as well. The message hasn’t yet been widely understood in EU political circles, though both Hungary and more recently Slovakia refuse to support the EU’s hard line. But with the impending US presidential election, the failure of US-led NATO policies against Russia is an acute embarrassment for the Biden administration and its potential Harris-led successor.
The threat to US global hegemony
One wonders whether the US deep state ever stops wading in where angels fear to tread. We are considering an establishment entrenched in a post-WW2 paradigm that saw off communism by remaining resolute, and still does to this day. Having failed to establish a bridgehead against Russian influence on her close allies’ southern borders in Afghanistan, it is now demonstrably failing to do so more directly on Russia’s south-western flank through Ukraine. The only achievement has been to unite Russia more closely with both China and Iran, and trigger soaring consumer price inflation and bankrupting dollar interest rates.
While US foreign policy is in tatters, her enemies have had a credible military and economic strategy all along. Militarily, the Asian powers’ weapons technology is in many respects more advanced than that of America. Economically, there is a long-term plan through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and rapidly expanding BRICS for a new industrial revolution for emerging economies, ultimately making the Eurasian continent completely independent from American influence. Meanwhile, America would rather keep the emerging world under its firm control, for the benefit of its banks and businesses.
On Tuesday, former UK diplomat Alastair Crooke wrote an alarming article published by Strategic Culture Foundation* citing evidence from Professor Michael Hudson of the Hudson Institute in the mid-seventies that far from Israel’s Netanyahu being independent from the US deep state, the elimination of Gaza’s Palestinians and other Arabs in the region was planned many years ago in Washington. The following is extracted from Crooke’s article:
“The strategy of using Israel as the regional battering ram to achieve U.S. (imperial) objectives was worked out essentially in the 1960s by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Jackson was nicknamed ‘the Senator from Boeing’ for his support for the military-industrial complex. And the military-industrial complex backed him to become chair of the Democratic National Committee. He was too twice an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination for the 1972 and 1976 Presidential elections.
“Well, he was backed by Herman Kahn too, who became the key strategist for U.S. hegemony in the Hudson Institute.
“Initially, Israel didn’t really play a role in the U.S. plan; Jackson (of Norwegian descent) simply hated communism, he hated the Russians, and had a lot of support within the Democratic Party. But when all of this strategy was being put together, Herman Khan’s great achievement was to convince the U.S. Empire builders that the key to achieving their control in the Middle East was to rely on Israel as its foreign legion.
“And that arms-length arrangement enabled the U.S. to play the role, Hudson says, of the ‘good cop’, whilst designating Israel to play its role as ruthless proxy. And that’s why the State Department turned over management of U.S. diplomacy to Zionists – to separate and distinguish Israeli behaviour from the claimed probity of U.S. imperialism.”
The Democrats seem to have been the party most identified with this policy. And while it is unlikely that policies originating in the 1960s are unaltered to this day, it seems that while Netanyahu may have gone rogue, American involvement in this new conflict in Palestine is far deeper than generally realised. It suggests that the current Democratic Party will back Israel not just in killing Arabs in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen but Iranians as well. Of course, the Iranians will know this, that they are not just fighting Israel but through Israel America as well.
Given that this is the intended outcome, we have to ask ourselves how the failure of the long-planned Ukraine conflict and the impending presidential election will affect the timing of a broadening Middle East conflict. It also explains the radio silence of the Saudis, who don’t want to be drawn in: this is interpreted as continuing Saudi support for the US/Israel, almost certainly too simplistic an analysis. Could Ukraine actually be abandoned to its fate, while US/NATO/Israel lead to a distracting new world war, and with Harris losing ground in the polls, could this judgement day be before 5 November to support her bid for the presidency against an unpredictable Trump? And could this rolling boil of events deter anything too provocative coming out of the BRICS summit agenda on 22-24 of this month? Could the summit even be postponed?
There are enough black swans floating around, seemingly calm on the surface but paddling like hell beneath the surface to make everything from markets to war extremely uncertain.
*Israel does what it does; it was always planned this way
Reprinted with permission from MacleodFinance Substack.
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