Goldtent TA Paradise

UKRAINE

1. Fullgoldcrown says:

   August 2, 2026 - 11:24 am at 11:24 am

   Speaking of rivers that can’t be uncrossed, for a year or two there, I covered the Ukraine War hard, mostly since it was a covid-level psyop and C&C readers needed mental inoculation against the propaganda virus. Once the mind games subsided, I retreated to just reporting the big moves. There have been very few of those. But it’s time to check back in with our green-shirted friends in Kiev. Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “Russian Missiles Kill 9 in Kyiv, Hours After Trump Backs Off Air-Defense Pledge.” The four-year-old Proxy War is grinding down into its endgame.

   

   As ever, the Times conflated Ukraine’s plucky resistance as victory, even as the Russians capture kilometers of new territory every day, and Kiev has zero missile interceptors left, a pathetically helpless condition the Times euphemistally called a “dwindling supply.” Maybe it will grow back! The Russians are now fighting from the air as well as along the 600-mile front line.

   The real story is: the Proxy War has reached the stage where the capital city is being bombed every night. The Times framed it as Trump’s fault— “he broke his promise.” His alleged ‘promise’ was to give Ukraine the schematics for Patriot Missiles so it could build them itself, since the US can no longer spare any. Two days ago at Camp David, President Trump said he didn’t trust the Ukrainians with the plans anyway. “It’s a hard thing to give away that kind of technology,” the President explained. “Those people that you give that technology, they can someday turn on you.”

   Experts said that, even if Ukraine did get the plans, it would still take years to gear up production, an awkward fact the Times did not mention in its blame-shifting story. Headline from Ukrainska Pravda, July 9.

   And where would they do it anyway? Isn’t there a chicken-and-egg problem? Without interceptors, you can’t protect a factory to build interceptors, because the Russians will just drop a 2,000-pound FAB bomb on it. Which comes first? The interceptor or the factory?

   Corporate media has long framed the Proxy War as some kind of “tie.” That is false. By the metrics wars are actually scored on, Russia has been fighting a conventional war of conquest and attrition. It now holds a fifth of former Ukrainian territory. Ukraine has largely fought an information-and-harassment campaign that produces headlines and temporary economic friction without reversing control of ground, resources, or the overall correlation of forces.

   The occupied areas of Donbas and Crimea hold the bulk of Ukraine’s pre-war coal, significant conventional oil and gas, and critical minerals. Those are not “propaganda” assets; they are industrial feedstock and strategic depth that Ukraine no longer controls and that Russia can exploit or deny as it pleases.

   

   Disappointingly for the “Ukr Flag in Bio” crowd, Ukraine’s most visible operations all fall into three buckets that look dramatic but score poorly on the traditional war ledger. They are also mostly textbook ‘war crimes,’ not that you’d hear it in the media. For instance, Kiev has conducted assassinations and special-ops hits inside Russia. Great television. No effect at all on how many Russians show up to fight.

   The same weekend Kyiv was hit by 27 ballistic missiles with only one intercept, Ukraine sank a single undefended Rosatom-linked ship— a tactical ‘victory’ that does not come close to offsetting the collapse of the capital’s air defenses.

   That pattern is the very definition of fighting a “Wag the Dog” war on TV for Western audiences, rather than the actual war that decides who owns the ground.

   ? When your capital is under constant bombing, war strategists technically call that a bad sign. I’m no military analyst; I’m just a lawyer. But even a superficial analysis of Ukraine’s geography shows it is strategically weak in two places. First, the vast Dnipro river, which divides Ukraine in two, is spanned by a small handful of key bridges. Russia could destroy those any time it wants, which would eliminate Ukraine’s ability to supply the front lines. Russia still holds that card.

   

   Ex-CIA analyst Larry Johnson described the logic like this: destroying the bridges early would have pushed most Ukrainian forces and the Western resupply stream onto the right bank, where they could dig in, absorb aid, and become harder to reach. By leaving the crossings up, Russia kept Ukrainian troops and hardware moving east —into the Donbas and southern axes— where they can be fixed and destroyed “in one place, in disproportionate numbers.”

   In other words, an open river keeps feeding the Russian meat grinder that Moscow has chosen to fight. The still-standing bridges are bait. Remember POSIWID: The purpose of any system is what it does.

   Ukraine’s second key strategic vulnerability is the port city of Odesa on Ukraine’s southeastern coast. It’s the main pipeline for Kiev’s military and food supply. Russia has now effectively closed it, very similarly to how the Iranians have tried to close the Strait of Hormuz. Now Ukraine must import resupplies over land, using trains and trucks, which are slower and much more susceptible to Russian air attacks.

   Tweet from Martial Law Coordinator Zelensky, yesterday:

   

   Altogether, this deepening crisis is why Zelensky is crying about Patriot Missiles, as though a few hundred interceptors can reverse these ponderous, unstoppable forces. It’s magical thinking. And, according to the Times, he’s not getting any more missiles anyway. His public demands on Twitter are a propaganda move, not a theory of military victory, unless by “theory,” you mean a cocaine-induced hallucination.

   The Patriot Missile issue is just another Zelensky production; a show for the Ukrainian public.

   Someday historians will wonder why no one realized that the Proxy War shouldn’t be led by a former TV comedian with no military experience (never mind his lack of political experience). They can dress him in military-colored sweatshirts and cargo pants, but they can’t make Zelensky a general.

   

   The Proxy War has reached its final phase. I won’t predict anything about the timing of this glacial conflict, but these things do tend to accelerate the closer you get to the end. As Hemingway said, first I went bankrupt gradually, and then all at once.

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