And there’s that western heel turn, right on schedule. Between this and that "Ukraine is testing the patience of it's allies" article yesterday, it's pretty clear that US media has now begun manufacturing consent to decouple from Ukraine. We've been shipping them insufficient quantities of ammo for a while now, so I guess with the stalling out of the counteroffensive, the Pentagon has evidently decided that the battle lines have solidified, and the final closing of the money spigot, at least militarily, is at hand.

Most likely some diplomatic deal will be struck in the coming months to preserve the remaining Ukranian territory in a stable enough state for Blackrock and all the other speculators to reap the profit of all their new acqusitions. My heart goes out to the common people of Ukraine, the last ten years have been brutal for them (the coup, the Banderite resurgence, the killing of dissidents and labor organizers, and this meat grinder of a war), and it looks like with "radical privatization" on the horizon, the next ten years are gonna be even worse. I hope they can organize for some quality of life against the megacorporations planning to turn them into a banana republic after the war.

My second concern, and it's a concern that's never talked about until it's too late, is the blowback. Intervention is never without consequences. America' funding of fundamentalist militants against the USSR in Afghanistan created Al Queda. Western intervention against Saddamn Hussein (who's Baath party itself served as a western intervention against pan-Arab nationalism during the Cold War) sparked the Gulf War. The Gulf War set the stage for our invasion of Iraq, and our invasion of Iraq created ISIS. So what happens after the war, when all the leftover Azov guys, these staunch nationalists, look back at the west and see (correctly) the political bloc that put their government into power, sent them juust not quite enough materiel to win the war, and then abandoned their military to the Russian Federation and their people to venture capital? Much has already been written about the dissapearing of American weapons in Ukraine into Europe's various black markets, and when you combine that with the deluge of newly impoverished, traumatized and radicalized Ukranian combat veterans with an axe to grind against the west, you've got a hundred European 9/11s just waiting to happen. Pretty solid chance that 5 years from now, someone shoots down a passenger jet with a secondhand Javelin.