Leaks, sources and Ukraine's best chance at victory
If Kyiv really wants any victory based on the Ten Points doctrine, they had better sever all ties with the DC establishment while they still can.
“The next few months in Ukraine will determine the war. We'll find out if Ukraine has the resources to put together a major offensive, and how Russia has, or hasn't, prepared to defend against it.”
by framersqool:
Preston Stewart has managed to remain on a rapidly-shortening list of 'military analysts' on Youtube whose content I can take seriously. He manages to be responsible enough to distinguish between what he can regard as factual and what he must rely on pure conjecture to try and make sense of. His approach is a far cry from the many such content creators who take the scantest of information and get carried away with their own self-indulgent guesswork without even bothering to learn the pronunciations of place names or translate any information which comes to them in Ukrainian or in Russian before drawing half-baked conclusions from it.
He is a West Point graduate who has retired from active duty as an artillerist in Afghanistan and elsewhere after multiple deployments. He is now an Army reservist while carrying on with civilian life with a wife and daughter who live with him in Tennessee. According to a recent post, they run a walk-in daycare center for children now, which raises his stock with me on a number of levels. It is one thing to be brave enough to serve in a war zone, but to deal with mothers of small children for a living? THAT takes what I recognize as real courage...
Here is my comment from this latest video. The viewpoints expressed here, etc etc, do NOT by any means express the Standard Daily Narrative about the official American role in the war:
This 'leak' business is showing all the same behaviors as a prior behavioral pandemic entirely propelled by social-media gossip and endless speculation, going by the name of 'covid.' The sad by-product of that absolute farce the entire human race played on itself with its 'smart phones' was that we no longer require or can even expect to have anything reported to us in media which limits itself to established facts from corroborated sources.
I've never seen the word 'likely' given so much weight as indicative of anything in my life, as these daily op-ed columns out of ISW [Institute for the Study of War, an American think-tank whose daily essays are in my view entirely over-rated, but tend to be regarded as THE source on daily events in the war, R], entirely strung together out of social media posts and copy-pasted MSM articles, if ISW isn't using ISW's own previous op-eds as a source (!), as meanwhile the entire English-speaking world hangs on the every word of half a dozen think-tankers making wild guesses every day.
My entire experience of trying to have some idea what is really going on in this war has been fourteen months of sifting through endless propaganda narratives, all of them predictable and reliable in terms of upholding standardized interpretations based on whatever has to be included or omitted to uphold them.
Western MSM coverage has been a joke in bad taste, as usual, while Ukrainian propaganda is, well, Ukrainian propaganda, the official media from Russia is so caustic and stupid I can't even bear it for more than a few words, and I have found that a half-dozen-odd Russian-language 'opposition' venues publishing in exile are on average the most thoughtful and adult sources available. Their content tends to be neither particularly pro-Ukraine nor anti-war, as much as concerning itself mostly with what the war is actually doing to Russian life itself over the whole Federation. It isn't a pretty picture either, but if anyone thinks that Russia is on the verge either of some populist 'nyet voynye' revolt or some catastrophic economic implosion which would end the war by themselves, I am fairly confident this is entirely western magical thinking, having zilch to do with the realities of the Russian Federation's wartime experiences.
Meanwhile, one of my firmest conclusions is that if Kyiv really wants any victory based on the Ten Points doctrine, they had better sever all ties with the DC establishment while they still can.
It is the US government which looks set to be the primary cause of the war going on indefinitely, because as General Ben Hodges has been stating emphatically for months now, the political will to conceive of the idea of Russia actually being defeated simply does not exist in Washington, and probably never will.
Ukraine must win this war, and to preserve the truest goals of fighting it, she must do so by telling the entire Pentagon/NSC cartel that their 'support' is no longer required, nor is their blundering duplicity in the diplomatic and intelligence arenas, which is starting to show all signs of doing as much harm as good to Ukraine.
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.