GILBERT DOCTOROW—A couple of weeks before Vladimir Putin announced his ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, he met in the Kremlin with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz. At their joint press conference following the meeting, Putin mentioned in passing that Ukraine is controlled today by neo-Nazis. This remark was famously ridiculed by Scholz as “laughable,” thereby earning for him the Kremlin’s utter contempt. German-Russian relations have undergone a sharp deterioration ever since, with Germany gradually stepping up its supplies of cutting-edge lethal weaponry to Kiev and Russia, in its internal political discussions, placing Germany alongside the United States and Britain as de facto ‘co-belligerents’ which may be subjected to Russian missile attacks if the war escalates further.
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THE SAKER—So, after lots of speculation, we now know that the Kremlin has decided to mobilize about 300’000 soldiers from a total mobilizational potential of 25’000’000 soldiers. That’s just a little over 1% of Russia’s mobilizational potential. We are talking only about those soldiers who have an official status of “reserves” and all of them will have to undergo special training before being sent to the Ukraine.
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LARRY C JOHNSON—The cinema account of how Patton planned and shifted the axis of attack of his troops is presented as something hastily put together. The German offensive started on 16 December and Patton met with Eisenhower on the 19th of December and received orders to relieve Bastogne. Patton’s troops moved out on the 22nd of December and reached Bastogne on the 26th. What the movie account fails to convey is that the planning for moving his Army north began on December 9, ten days before the emergency conference with Eisenhower.
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ERIC ZUESSE—The Western press alleges that Russia invaded Ukraine because of Putin, and that his motive was Russian imperialism, a desire to expand Russia’s territory. In fact, Finland and Sweden responded immediately to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by seeking membership in NATO, out of fear that “we might be next” to be invaded. However, expansion of Russia was not involved in Putin’s motivation regarding Ukraine, but the fact that Ukraine has the border that is the nearest of any bordering nation to Moscow, being only 353 miles away from Moscow, which would be around five minutes of missile-flying distance away from possibly nuking Russia’s command-center, was very much on his mind.
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The controversial commentator dissects the depths of the West’s mistakes in its strategy toward Russia, driven by non-negotiable russophobia, but their arrogance is blinding them to the inevitable consequences.
