The war in Ukraine will not end in a clear winner. However, if it comes to an end, it will be on Russia’s terms. Should it not end, it will morph into a war between Russia and the West, a separate event eclipsing the war in Ukraine to the point it becomes by itself meaningless.
Any analysis of the Ukraine fighting that tries to paint a clear winner is a flat out lie. There is no moral high ground. Two thugs are duking it out in a mud pit. It’s simply that Russia isn’t quite as deep in the moral pit as Ukraine is. Russia’s move makes some sense: defending the Russian people who live in Ukraine from a nasty and hateful genocide. As long as you ignore the genocidal activity Ukraine conducted since the Maidan Revolt, you will never understand anything that matters about the fighting in Ukraine. Russia’s invasion is not simple malevolence.
Pure and simple malevolence has never once explained any human activity; there is always a perceived self-interest. When you take a wide view of the situation in Russia, Putin’s self-interest is to at least appear to protect the Russian people. His is a nationalist role. His whole image is based on leading the nation to something that at least feels better than the Soviet experience, and restoring the feeling of being uniquely Russian and not some bastard child of the West. The invasion of Ukraine was politically the least dangerous thing to do.
And you need to understand that a large portion of the Soviet system of government was rooted deeply in the ancient Russian way of life; it was not pure communism by any means. The Soviet system would have failed without resurrecting suppressed Russian society. That portion of their identity still stands. They tend to view the Soviet period as externally imposed, and any residual nostalgia in the elder population rests on the simple assertion that it was better than the Imperial Russia that came before. They recall the empire as squelching their ancient heritage. By contrast, Ukraine has no historical identity at all. It is an artificial construct of very recent vintage, so Nazism had no competition when it was planted there.
At any rate, Russia has the advantage, but they aren’t doing a really good job of it. Their system is better than Ukraine’s, but it’s a better version of the same system. Both are riddled with a particular brand of post-soviet corruption, but it’s far worse in Ukraine; it has been since the end of the USSR. Further, the economic weight behind Russia is exponentially larger. The combined investment of western resources in Ukraine’s military effort is still smaller than Russia’s, and western investment is not nearly as consistent. Further, Ukraine’s corruption is wasting those resources far faster than they can be brought into play.
Yes, the Ukraine could have done better, but that was never their intentions. The whole point has been from the beginning to sucker Russia into a quagmire. The government in Ukraine is just a puppet regime. It serves a far distant agenda, and the people and land of Ukraine are just expendable assets. As long as you waste energy focusing on the war in Ukraine, you will miss what’s really happening.
The US government itself is just a servant in this long-term dream. There’s no certainty that our Congress and POTUS will carry through on the plan. We can pray they fail to follow higher orders from the neocons. We can seek the Lord’s face that the US won’t push as far as the neocons would like, that somehow a move of reluctance will rise. If that prayer fails, it’s almost certain we will see an exchange of weapons of mass destruction between the West and Russia, and this will certainly drag China into it. The neocons have this crazy notion that they can survive a nuclear exchange, whether the US does or not.
I’m convinced the West would lose that war. Not because of some systemic analysis, but I say that because the US is clearly more repugnant to God than the rest of the world. We have offended Him in ways the rest of the world together has not dared. We have no hedge from God; it’s just a matter of time. Our opponents are easily less defiled, and there’s good prophetic reason to see them as having a future far beyond the end of the US.
If Russia and China can ride out the storm, they won’t have long to wait for the collapse of the West.
