{"id":257395,"date":"2022-08-14T06:58:25","date_gmt":"2022-08-14T06:58:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=257395"},"modified":"2022-08-16T06:38:41","modified_gmt":"2022-08-16T06:38:41","slug":"in-actual-russia-no-sign-of-sanctions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=257395","title":{"rendered":"In Actual Russia, No Sign of Sanctions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ted Rall \u2013 The Unz Review Aug 12, 2022<\/strong><\/h1>\n

It\u2019s time to get real. It\u2019s been <\/em>time to get real. Russia has won its war against Ukraine.<\/p>\n

This outcome comes as no surprise. Anyone with access to a map could see that the chances of Ukraine prevailing against Russia were slim to none.<\/p>\n

The only way Ukraine could have emerged victorious \u2014 which would, according to the Ukrainians themselves, mean pushing it out of Crimea and deposing the separatist pro-Russian republics of Donetsk and Luhansk \u2014 would have been if the United States and its Western allies had been willing to launch nuclear weapons, which would have led to global annihilation. Once the decision was made not to start World War III, Ukraine\u2019s defeat became inevitable. This, everyone sane knows, is for the best.<\/p>\n

Determinative to this conclusion was an unusual pair of motivations. Normally, when a war is fought on one country\u2019s territory, the invaded country fights harder than the invading forces. Paradoxically, despite suffering damaged infrastructure, the invaded state enjoys the home advantages of complete knowledge of the battlefield and much shorter supply lines. Aside from sporadic cross-border missile strikes, this war has been fought entirely on Ukrainian territory.<\/p>\n

This conflict is different because Russia has <\/em>to win; it cannot walk away. Ukraine has a 1,200-mile border with Russia, it wants to join an anti-Russia military alliance and its government was openly hostile to Russia before the war. And when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, its armies came through Ukraine, where the Nazis were greeted as liberators. Unlike America, which could bring its troops home after losing on the other side of the world in Afghanistan and Iraq and shrug off its imperialist misadventures and could leave Vietnam after pretending that more political will on the home front would have resulted in victory, Russia sees its military operation as existential. Ukraine isn\u2019t a misbegotten side project. It\u2019s as essential in the same way the United States would respond to a Canada that turned hostile to the U.S.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, and dangerously, American media consumers are being pounded with an endless deluge of propaganda promoting the ludicrous idea that Ukraine is winning and\/or will ultimately prevail militarily. This fantastical assertion props up political support for shipping $60 billion worth of weapons to Ukraine, with more on the way \u2014 never mind the 70% that President Volodymyr Zelensky\u2019s wildly corrupt government sells on the black market and the Javelin missile systems that wind up for sale on the dark web. (Christmas is coming! Don\u2019t forget your favorite political cartoonist and columnist.) By way of comparison, the U.S. Department of Health of Human Services estimates that we could abolish homelessness here for $20 billion<\/p>\n

We\u2019re also being told that Russia is crumbling under the crushing blow of vicious Western sanctions deployed as part of the White House\u2019s openly stated war aim that it wants \u201cto see Russia weakened.\u201d The Russian economy, it is said, is collapsing. Russian elites, they say, will soon overthrow President Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n

Let me tell you firsthand: There is zero sign of economic distress in Russia.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve spent the last two weeks in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Russia\u2019s two biggest cities. Stores are bustling; people are spending; unemployment is low and still falling; there are lines at ATMs and whatever else is happening, the economy is anything but bad. The Galeria Mall across the busy street from my hotel in Saint Petersburg has a few closed stores shut down by Western chains, but the majority remain, and consumers are shopping like mad. European and American tourists are few and far between, but it\u2019s exactly the same here in sanctions-free Istanbul where I\u2019m writing this. Westerners stopped coming at the start of the COVID-19 lockdown two years ago and still haven\u2019t returned. If Russians are unhappy with Putin \u2014 and they\u2019re not \u2014 it\u2019s not because of the economy.<\/p>\n

I know from bad economies; where I live in New York, crime is out of control, homeless people go untreated for an array of mental illnesses and some are killing people, and being killed, and many storefronts have been empty and boarded up since the beginning of the pandemic. Any New Yorker would or should happily trade places with their Muscovite counterpart, who lives in a city with clean streets and subways that don\u2019t serve as rolling homeless shelters and where life feels as if COVID-19 was never a thing. News stories that claim Russia is on the ropes are a giant magnificent pile of lies so over-the-top that I can\u2019t help but be impressed by their glorious audacity and easily debunked mendacity. All you have to do is go to Russia, as I did, and see for yourself that it\u2019s all bull \u2014 but hey, that\u2019s a lot of trouble \u2014 because of sanctions that seem to be hurting us more than them.<\/p>\n

Self-delusion is more fun. Who, after all, should you trust? The same U.S. state media that told you Saddam Hussein had WMDs? Or some cartoonist-columnist who told you, well in advance, that the U.S. didn\u2019t stand a chance in Afghanistan, Trump would win in 2016 and that he would attempt a coup d\u2019etat to remain in power?<\/p>\n

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis<\/em><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ted Rall has been in Moscow and Saint Petersburg for the past few weeks and he can see no sign that Western sanctions are having any impact <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-257395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-russia"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=257395"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257396,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257395\/revisions\/257396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=257395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=257395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=257395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}