By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

For all intents and purposes, in every way that counts, Ukraine has already defeated Russia. Hell, let’s face it, they kicked their fucking ass. Putin’s “Special Operation” in Ukraine has been a massive failure of unprecedented proportions. Never, in my memory at least, has an army that big fallen that fast. The first six weeks of that disaster were like a six-week reenactment of the Tet Offensive with Putin playing Robert McNamara, the ruthless and supposedly brilliant failure, forced by peasants to quietly concede defeat under his breath.

It’s tempting to chock this upset up to the fact that Ukraine is the heavily armed quisling state of a massive empire but if Afghanistan taught us a goddamn thing it’s that all the money in the universe can’t buy you a victory in someone else’s country. Kabul collapsed like a trillion-dollar lawn chair because the people there wanted the Taliban to stay and Kiev withstood a brutal siege from one of the biggest armies on earth because the people there wanted Putin to go fuck himself, and good on them for that.

I despise Volodymyr Zelensky and his grotesque coalition of neoliberal gangsters and barely closeted neo-fascists, but they didn’t kick Russia’s ass until it broke. This war wasn’t won by NATO, it was won by some working-class, Russian-speaking, Vlad Jerkoff lobbing Stinger missiles at T-72s for running over his fucking mailbox. Saddam Hussein was a gutless dirtbag too but that didn’t make the rooftop Sadrists who spoiled Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” any less legit. Provoked or not, Putin invaded somebody else’s neighborhood and somebody else made him pay a heavy price for his hubris, leaving Vlad with no other choice but to limp from the front lines back to Donbass and declare his retreat Phase Two as if he had planned it all along.

I say fucking let him. Enough people have died in this stupid fucking thing. Let the Donbass go and make a goddamn peace deal already. But the American war pigs don’t want peace. They didn’t use the red flag of NATO to provoke the Russian bull so they could teach him a lesson. They want that beast dead and dismembered, and they’ll gladly feed another three thousand Ukrainian matadors to its horns to make that happen. The Secretary of Raytheon, Lloyd Austin, has pledged to “move heaven and earth” not to see Ukraine victorious but to see Russia “weakened” and the warring partisan Philistines on Capitol Hill are finally united in perfect harmony on robbing their constituents blind to make this dangerously vague mission accomplished.

We’ve already hurled $13.6 billion into the Ukrainian pit since Biden crammed his walker through the White House door. Now that geriatric war criminal wants another $33 billion on the edge of a goddamn recession and the supposed fiscal conservatives in the GOP seem willing to double it as long as a dime doesn’t go to teaching the Azov Battalion Critical Race Theory. All of this with a wounded and mind you still very much nuclear armed Russian bear in retreat. For his part, the once quasi-peace savvy Volodymyr Zelensky seems to be more than game to parlay his unexpected victory into an unwinnable forever war for his patrons and perhaps the sickest and saddest thing of all is that he’s willing to turn Ukraine back into the aggressor to achieve this.

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