Opposing the war means opposing Putin and the rest of the Russian state apparatus, since
they are the ones who wanted this war, started it, and want to continue it. The only way to oppose the war is to make it unwinnable by Russia so that these monsters will be forced to stop. Anything else is not peace, but encouragement to the continuation of this war.
R appelons une nouvelle fois les évidences. Il existe trois niveaux d’affrontement, c’est-à-dire de recherche d’imposer sa volonté par la fo...
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Extension of the struggle problem - Update of October 11
Let's reiterate the obvious. There are three levels of conflict, i.e., the attempt to impose one's will by force, in modern international relations: I'll call them confrontation, where one exerts pressure on the other in every conceivable way but without fighting; conventional war, which is the same as confrontation plus fighting; and nuclear war, which is the same as conventional war but with the actual use of atomic weapons.
Crossing one of these thresholds, from confrontation to conventional warfare and from conventional warfare to atomic warfare, is always delicate. One enters a new vortex, often uncertain in its results, but certain in its enormous costs and with great difficulty in turning back. To approach a threshold is to approach an object with very strong gravity. The physics is deformed there and by dint of approaching, one can cross a point of no return. Let us note that the forces present near these two thresholds do not have the same intensity either. Approaching conventional war is like approaching a massive star, it is dangerous but manageable, whereas nuclear war is a terrifying black hole. We are therefore even more reluctant to approach it, even to the point of - between nuclear powers - avoiding crossing the previous threshold.
Within these spaces, strategies are basically of two types: by pressure until the emergence of the expected result and this looks like poker, or by a sequence of actions where the success of one of them depends on the success of the previous one and one obviously thinks in this case of chess. The first strategy is largely hidden until the outcome, the second is followed on a map.
The difficulty of understanding the current crisis is a mixture of all this. There is both a war - Russia against Ukraine - and a confrontation - Russia against the Atlantic Alliance - which preceded the war in Ukraine (need we remind you what is happening in Africa?) but which has obviously taken a much more serious turn since then. Moreover, if the confrontation between Russia and the Atlantic Alliance is almost exclusively a poker game (successive packages of sanctions, increasing military aid in kind and volume, cuts or embargoes, more or less explicit messages via sabotage, influence, etc.), the war in Ukraine includes a chessboard of military operations laid out on a wider carpet where an even more sinister poker game is played than the one we are playing because it kills. It is in the context of confrontation that we are helping Ukraine in its war, without wanting to cross the threshold of war, and the Russians are in the same posture.
This is not new. While the United States supports South Vietnam and wages war on North Vietnam, the Soviet Union provides massive military aid to the North. A few years later, the roles were reversed and it was the Soviet Union that waged war in Afghanistan and supported the Ethiopian or Angolan regimes, while the West, this time united, opposed them. In both cases, the Soviets and the West were not in direct military combat.
At this stage of the current confrontation, the Russian-Western confrontation is gaining momentum. We have moved on to unclaimed economic sabotage, including perhaps recently on the German rail network. It is always a question for the Russians, in the short term, of shaking Western and especially Western European public opinion, in their conviction to support Ukraine "in the name of peace". Deprived of support, Ukraine will find it very difficult to continue the fight. But it is important to understand, and Vladimir Putin's speech on 30 September was clear, that the rupture is now complete and that a new iron curtain has fallen. The Russian regime has declared a permanent confrontation. Even if we decided to stop aid to Ukraine, the fight would continue.
In the ongoing war in Ukraine, there has been less movement on the chessboard this week than in previous ones. In the battle for Kherson, Russian forces have re-established a defensive line five kilometers south of the Davydiv Brid-Dudchany axis and the pocket has not moved. Interdiction strikes and the virtual siege of the bridgehead continue. In the northern battle, the Ukrainians slowed down their advance towards Kreminna and Svatove, consolidating their position between Lyman and the Oskil River. The Russians, on the other hand, continue small attacks west of the city of Donetsk and south of Bakhmut, where they have seized several villages. The southern Zaporizhia-southern Donetsk line has not moved. Ukrainian forces are consolidating, digesting their victories and replenishing or raising their forces worn out by more than a month of uninterrupted fighting. This slowdown is being used by Russian forces to try to re-establish stronger defensive lines. However, there is no doubt that the Ukrainian offensives will quickly resume in the same northern and southern sectors because they still have a lot of potential for strategic success: the capture of the Starobilsk crossroads would deliver the whole of northern Luhansk province, the liberations of Lysychansk and Severodonetsk would cancel out all the Russian successes of the three months of trench warfare, the destruction of the 49th Army on the bridgehead on the right bank of the Dnieper would be a very hard blow to the Russian forces and the conquest of Kherson would be a major victory. But it is still possible, if the Ukrainians have the means to do so, that a third offensive could also be launched in the direction of Melitopol.
Faced with these threats, the Russian margins of maneuver remain limited, counting on the autumn rains and the winter snow to slow down the movements, and thus first of all those of the Ukrainians, and then on the arrival of mobilized reinforcements. The problem, to remain in the chess metaphor, is that the Russians only have pawns to send on the chessboard where the Ukrainians dominate in number of pieces and continue to reinforce them or even manufacture new ones. If the November mud can indeed slow down operations, the winter cold does not prohibit them, and given how well equipped the Russian forces seem to be for winter (which is an added bonus and another indication of the system's failings), it is possible that this will penalize them even more than the Ukrainians. Another expedient is the Belarusian involvement. Since the beginning of the war, President Lukashenko has been wavering between his obliged obedience to Vladimir Putin and the risk of profound internal destabilization that an entry into the war by his country would cause. He therefore has a threshold strategy, offering everything possible to help the Russian army - the use of its soil, the looting of its equipment, the maintenance of a threat of fixation on the Ukrainian border - without going to war. Perhaps he will be forced to, but his army is a "Potemkin army" that would undoubtedly be defeated by the current Ukrainian army. The sacrifice of the Belarusians would relieve the Russians for a while, but at the cost of shaking Belarus to the very uncertain consequences. In the end, it is not at all certain that these new military elements can reverse the trend on the chessboard, but they maintain hope for the Russian camp.
It may also buy time in the other field of the war, that of pressure on the carpet. The Ukrainian attack on the night of 7 to 8 October against the Kerch bridge linking Crimea to Russia, destroying one road in two, damaging the railroad and weakening the whole, is at the limit between the two fields and it is the best move. Indeed, it can be seen both as a means of hampering the logistics of Russian forces in southern Ukraine, perhaps in preparation for a new offensive, and as an affront to Vladimir Putin, whose great work it is. Whatever the method used, this is a clandestine operation, all the more remarkable because it managed to break through a very dense and much vaunted protection network, which adds to the affront.
Such an act could not go unpunished as the "war of the (Kremlin) towers" seems to be reawakening between the Russian security baronies - FSB, SVD, GRU, Ministry of Defense, National Guard, Prigozhin group, Kadyrov - and Putin's own action seems to be contested even within the small Politburo of the Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev in the lead. The retaliation took the only possible form: by a strong intensification of the campaign of rear strikes. Using all kinds of missiles, drones and rockets in areas close to the front, the aim was to hit as many towns as possible in order to have a maximum psychological impact, under cover of strikes on infrastructure. Combat aircraft are still strangely absent from this campaign, which is very similar to that of the German V weapons, V as in vengeance, but also as a desperate attempt to make the Ukrainian population crack and then the executive. It is a hope frequently cherished since the First World War with the Zeppelin raids on England or the 1918 bombardment of Paris by German long guns, but always disappointed unless accompanied by a victory or at least a big threat on the land chessboard. For Russian hawks and the Ukrainian population, this escalation, if not in kind but at least in intensity, of the strike campaign also has contradictory effects on Western public opinion, between increased support for Ukraine and pro-Russian "peace talk" (i.e. "let's stop helping Ukraine").
We will see if the Russians have the will and the means to continue this campaign of high-intensity strikes. In the absence of missiles, perhaps they will be obliged to integrate the air force, which could then suffer considerable damage from the Ukrainian anti-aircraft defence. In any case, it is urgent for Western countries to help the Ukrainians win the battle of the skies on the ground, out of humanitarian concern but also to contribute to destroying two Russian military assets: their missile force (which, it should be remembered, can carry nuclear weapons), which is already very weak, and their air force, which is still intact. This is still an area in which France has largely disarmed itself out of convenience and small economy, but it possesses, like the Caesar cannons in ground-to-ground artillery, a few dozen luxury artefacts such as the Aster 30 missiles, which would be very useful in this battle.
In summary, with the annexations of the conquered territories, the partial mobilization, the increased Belarusian involvement, the increased campaign of destruction of the Ukrainian economy and the revenge strikes, Vladimir Putin is trying to compensate for an unfavorable military dynamic in the ongoing war. With the energy pressure, with OPEC's help raising the price of oil, the influence campaign, perhaps the realization or threat of sabotage and other surprises that will undoubtedly come, he is also trying to regain the initiative in the confrontation with the West while staying below the threshold of war. This is at least as much hope for him, and as long as there is hope, there is no thought of using nuclear weapons.
I have emphasized the important part. All those "pro-peace" voices are actually just Putin's fifth column. Even if the governments were weak enough to follow their demands, this wouldn't solve any of the problems the West now faces (only the stupidest of dim-witted morons would think Russia would resume sending gas and oil to the West as if nothing happened). It's not a surprise that Ben Garrison would be one of the Putinist agents, he's also been a fervent Trumpist and generally fully onboard the "Qanon" movement.
Too well protected. A revolt in China is impossible, everyone is watched 24/7 by the most dystopian surveillance system ever designed. As for North Korea, it's propped up by both China and Russia; it would have crumbled long ago otherwise as the country is perpetually at the edge of starvation.
In Russia it would be possible but apparently the average Russian prefers risking death by being sent to a war zone over risking death by protesting against their God-Emperor Putin. Shrug. Only the Iranians are brave enough to fight against their tyrant.
EXPLODED! PARTS OF RUSSIAN SOLDIERS DEAD IN THE MUD 
