Deltawingman wrote:
Thanks for the kind words, Leading Edge. In all fairness it's hard for anyone to glean the truth out of the propaganda we are all bombarded with. Of course its relatively easy to know who is dishing out the propaganda by observing who is banning the news and views of those on the other side! I've stopped watching BBC because they are the most clueless of the lot and parrot the propaganda they are spoonfed. Most American outlets are equally clueless with one or two sober incitefull voices.
Those with a clear vision of what is really going on on the ground are people like Scott Ritter, Douglas McGregor Jacob Dreizen and Andreii Martyanov. These are among the people who realise that the West has long lost it's technological edge in military hardware and operations if NATO were to go head to head with a Russia/China alliance they will lose badly. Western Europe doesn't have an army to speak of, having sheltered behind the shadow American apron strings , but the american military doesn't itself know how useless it is now. It lost to a few Afghan tribesmen for pete sake. A few sober heads in the Pentagon may realise this and we can only hope that those cool heads prevail and not escalate things to Armageddon levels.
A couple of events, or one event twice by different actors, in recent months was the admissions of Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande that they viewed the Minsk agreements as nothing but a tactic to buy time to re-arm the Ukraine. If you view this from the Russian perspective, they see this as total discreditation of the western credibility in any negotiations. That means that there is no way that this war will end by any negotiation because the West cannot be trusted to honour any treaty. Thus the Russians will continue until they win and Ukraine surrenders unconditionally. That is the only way out from now on because negotiation is now off the table.
I note with interest that South Africa is hosting an exercise (MOSI) with Russia and China. I think the Admiral Gorshkov is taking part in this exercise which carries Zircon missiles. That ship or submarines armed with the same missiles can eliminate aircraft carriers This is the capital ship of the future. Aircraft Carriers are vulnerable and their day is done. I have a book produced in the 1970's called "the Rise and Fall of the Aircraft Carrier" It predates any knowledge or concept of the zircon missile but I think its conclusions are correct, even at that date.
That is pretty much my take on it too.
When the EU and the US banned instantly the Russian perspective from the media, that was a huge red flag for me.
It cleared the deck for only one, controlled narrative.
Truth has no need to ban dissenting or differing voices or viewpoints.
The BBC has long become unreadable and unwatchable.
It was mystifying to whom exactly they were directing their simplistic, very crude narrative towards. (Not only anti-Russian for decades, but other pet projects the do a stream of hit pieces on)
Even a teenaged me many decades ago would have laughed at the completely obvious and extremely crude nature of their "message". It's not even remotely sophisticated at all.
Then I read this thread, and understood the demographic they aim at.
I suspect whatever is left over of a rump Ukraine west will be a basket case for a long time. As it is, the tragedy unfolding there is a direct result of meddling into a region that was never going to ever go unchallenged by Russia.