Victoria Nuland flew to Kiev to talk to her ‘boys’, who ended up fighting among themselves after all the 2023 failures, as Zelensky intended to sack Zalushny, and replace him by Budanov as over all commander of the military. Zalushny, apparently with political backing from Porochenko and Klitschko, the influential mayor of Kiev and pro-boxing champ, was not immediately ready to pack his things and go, while Budanov hesitated to step in his shoes. So the Queen of Ukraine had to come over from the American State Department and sort things out. The latest is that Zalushny will leave his post, and Budanov will take over.
Moreover, according to Nuland, during an improvised press briefing out in the cold, which didn’t look too professional, Ukraine will go back on the offensive again, and she announced some nasty surprises for Russia. Now, in line with my previous predictions, this sounds to me like this offensive will not be aimed at defeating the Russians on the battlefield, and regain lost territory, but some kind of ‘Terror Campaign’, using ‘Special Forces’ and missiles, possibly the Dutch F-16’s which are said to be operational. There are only a few weeks left before the ‘Rasputitsa’ will render the dirt roads and open fields into clay, which does suggest that an offensive using tanks and artillery is not very likely. We haven’t seen those fabled Abrams tanks which were delivered to Ukraine, but they are extremely heavy, very maintenance sensitive, and not very suitable for war in that part of the world according to most observers. Apart from its use of kerosine, which is not a common fuel used by other vehicles.
Since Budanov is a ‘Special Forces’ guy himself, and if my assessment about the original NATO strategy relying on ‘Stay Behind’ saboteurs in a Russian occupied Ukraine is correct, they will have been prepared well since 2014 to do their ‘thing’, with pre-arranged NATO support-structure. And who knows what else Nuland brought with her from the US? No breakthrough at the political level, with freshly minted Dollars to re-start the flow of everything Ukraine needed up till now, but no doubt there would be some room left on a budget somewhere to support the not too costly ‘clandestine operations’. But, don’t underestimate the possibilities if the US feels they can get away with giving the ‘Okay’ to biological and chemical warfare, or targeting nuclear power stations, or setting up nuclear false flag events. Let me remind you that Hunter Biden’s ‘Metabiota’, according to Robert F. Kennedy’s exquisitely documented latest book a contractor in the bioweapons research field, had numerous laboratories all over the place in Ukraine when war broke out. Just saying.
There are going to be elections in Russia, and if you understand my thinking about this entire war in Ukraine, as an attempt to set up Russia for ‘Regime Change’, of which kind of operation Victoria Nuland is the undisputed world-wide expert, while she failed because Putin saw right through her evil plan, and adopted Russia’s strategy accordingly, it is clear why she needs an offensive now. Never mind the unfavorable conditions, and never mind that Russia is winning on the ground, while they already won the ‘War of Attrition’. She has to find a way to scare the Russians into rejecting Putin, despite the fact that almost all observers are convinced that he is going to win.
If there is such a strategy based on terror-tactics, things could become very nasty, very fast. Primarily for Ukraine, but it would be naive to rule out a severe backlash against NATO countries seen as supporting such an effort. Which is why all these ‘Think-Tankers’ are panicking about the possibility of a war with Russia. Not because Russia has any intention to ‘move on’ after defeating Ukraine, it hasn’t, but because acts of war by NATO countries cannot go unanswered. You need to understand that if ‘9/11’ was somehow construed into a legitimate excuse to attack the country of Afghanistan, and subsequently Iraq as well, you can’t expect Russia to wave a white flag after it has been struck by weapons of mass destruction, or made the victim of a ‘False Flag’ attack using nuclear material. Or that they will only punish Ukraine for it. Victoria Nuland is no innocent bystander, and if her very visible presence in Kiev at this crucial hour, with Ukraine already militarily defeated according to most observers, including very pro-Ukrainian observers, is meant to deter Russia from doing anything serious, because they need to understand that they are actually up against ‘Uncle Sam’ and its friends, I’m afraid she is making a horrible mistake!
Even if Budanov and his team act on their own initiative, without asking ‘Uncle Sam’, the Russians will blame the US from now on. Not the Ukrainians. I do understand that people in the west reject the Russian explanation for their ‘SMO’, and insist that it was a lie, and that Putin was after expanding Russia as his legacy, but that is a grave error. Everything he said since the Security Conference in Munich in 2007 was honest and straight-forward, and he acted on it. He never felt at war with the people of Ukraine, and wanted them to settle their internal differences from the early beginnings of the independence in a peaceful way. He understood how the legacy of the ‘Cold War’, when NATO used ethnical, religious and cultural differences among the people in the Soviet-Union to make life difficult for the communist opponent, as explained in a previous contribution, made it difficult for Ukraine to reach a state of peace and stability inside the confines of their newly minted borders. And there cannot be any misunderstanding for the disdain he felt about the ‘Banderites’, who fought on the side of Germany during the Second World War, and are proud they did to this day, which were instrumental in this Nuland coup of 2014.
There is no telling what the near future will hold, and we shouldn’t discount the possibility of an uprising in Ukraine itself, led by people who’ve had enough. People we in the west hear nothing about, because they are scared to raise their voice, given the harsh consequences, and because our media are not interested. We do hear about prosecution of opponents to the war in Russia, with similar accusations about people who are actually unhappy with Putin, but afraid to say so. There is no denying that Russia already convicted some very vocal opponents, and that there is no freedom of opinion in the country on that particular subject. So I guess there could be a surprise victory for ‘Center-Right’ candidate Boris Nadezhdin, who narrowly presented the 100.000 signatures needed to run. Initial stories about 200.000 signatures collected petered down to 105.000 submitted, after Russians who signed up from abroad were not included by Nadezhdin’s team, although the law allows it. Nadezhdin says he is ‘principled anti-war’, and I guess he doesn’t want to be seen as the candidate of the oligarchs and activists abroad who are firmly on NATO’s side.
No elections in Ukraine, although Zelensky’s term is up. Because of the power struggle between him and Zalushny/Porochenko, there is not telling how that will pan out, but Queen Victoria apparently intervened on Zelensky’s behalf, so for now he is her ‘boy’. And that’s how the entire world outside the people who wave Ukrainian flags on ‘X’, and around the house or office, and government buildings in the west, are looking at it. After cutting off the bulk of the people from presenting their own party and preferred candidate in 2014, prior to holding ‘elections’ where the Ukrainian people in the western part of the country could let her know whether they preferred the ‘Choco Prince’, or the ‘Gas Queen’, both firmly in Nuland’s corner, and bringing them a dishonest comedian in 2019, Nuland does understand that democracy is no trump-card she can play right now. So the people will have to deal with her as the unelected head of state for the time being, pushing her ‘boy’ at the local level. She won’t reside in the country, because if things go sideways, she wouldn’t be safe from answering some tough questions from the people she led down this path. But if Putin survives the upcoming elections, she is in deep shit. And so are we, if we allowed her to do any of the things I described above as terrorist acts as she pushes her luck.