By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

The shit is getting real again in Ukraine and every neoliberal and his lobbyist seems super stoked about the carnage. After months of pulverizing battlefield gridlock and mounting global war fatigue, the Western warmongers finally have a tangible victory to point at while they’re robbing us all blind of our pocket change for Raytheon Boom-Boom Bucks (TM). Their sweeping propaganda campaign promoting an inevitable epic counteroffensive to end all counteroffensives has finally bore fruit with the Ukrainian Military taking back roughly 2,300 square miles of Russian occupied territory in the northeastern Kharkiv region, pushing Putin’s boys back to the border and capturing the strategically important logistics hub of Izyum. It was indeed a humiliating defeat Vlad the Failure, but it was one that came at a very steep and telling price that Volodymyr Zelensky’s bombastic cheerleaders on cable news haven’t bothered to mention during their long-anticipated pep rallies.

While the reports on Kharkiv have been nothing but flowers, few have mentioned that this counteroffensive actually began days before a shot was even fired in the region with a massive campaign against Russia’s southern stronghold of Kherson that resulted in a bloodbath of upwards of 5,000 Ukrainian casualties. A heinous slaughter by any morally sane sentient being’s standards but a sickeningly necessary one when you prize giving Putin a blackeye over the sanctity of human life. It was only with flocks of Russian troops redirected from the relatively low priority territory in the north to protect the high priority territory in Novorossiya that the Ukrainians were able to outnumber the Russians in a region that Putin has been slowly abandoning since he declared the beginning of Phase Two of his Special Military Operation (TM). Meanwhile, Russia has continued to make gains in Donetsk as the Ivans slowly march towards the rebel oblast’s centrally pivotal city of Slavyansk.

Thousands of Ukrainian peasants, conscripted into Zelensky’s army by the barrel of a gun were mercilessly fed into a Russian buzzsaw just to gunk up the gears long enough for a popcorn headline and this is supposed to be a victory for Ukraine? No, this is a victory for NATO and their bloodthirsty vendetta against Putin’s Russia and it only comes at the tragic expense of Ukraine. It also comes at the expense of tens of billions in American and Western European tax dollars that have been dumped into remaking Ukraine’s already decimated armed forces in Washington’s and London’s image.

The war in Ukraine has become a defacto NATO operation from top to bottom, with Ukrainian soldiers trained, armed, fed and led by the same Russophobic death cult that promised those people membership in their little cool-kids club only to leave them hanging like a red flag before a Kremlin bull. Russia sees this. They’ve gotten the message loud and clear and they’re more than prepared to obliterate even more impoverished Ukrainians with their own slave army of impoverished conscripts just to prove that their dicks are still big enough to swing with the Western superpowers and if all else fails, they can always just strap on a nuclear marital aid for the same effect.

The New Cold War is a class war and oligarchs on both sides are waging it against the poor, not just in Ukraine but across the world. America’s sweeping sanctions regime, directed at fomenting Russia’s growing poor into conceding to Western regime change, has tanked the entire world’s economy and put us all in the grips of catastrophic economic peril. Europe is already in the full throws of an epic recession and staring down the barrel of a very bitter winter. Russia has responded to Western price caps on its natural resources by turning the tap off on the Nordstream pipeline and sending the electricity and heating bills of everyday Europeans skyrocketing into the stratosphere. Working class people from Walloon to Warsaw have found themselves dipping into their own meager savings and even skipping meals just to keep the lights on and all the weathermen with their heads screwed on straight are predicting a similar forecast across the Atlantic.

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