Ukraine is on a razor’s edge. The whole thing hangs in the balance. It could go either way. The Ukrainian elite is rotten. It is psychologically Soviet. Poroschenko is just another apparatchik. He is typical. The problem in Ukraine, like in Russia, is that we don’t have any leaders. It is the same old story, same old biographies. The thinking is not that different from the past.

Vladimir Bukovsky, 16 December 2018 [i]

Please be patient! Ukraine is in the midst of a very real and very significant social revolution. This revolution for many Ukrainians involves a new conceptualization of their values and identities. This is a painful process that needs to occur through collective actions, introspection, and without external intervention.

Mychailo Wynnyckyj [ii]

Bukovsky’s pessimism of 2018 is contradicted by Wynnyckyj’s optimism of 2019. The apparatchiks of Ukraine have been subjected to a genuine revolution, says Wynnyckyj. What was once psychologically Soviet has now become something different, something genuinely Ukrainian. Wynnyckyj argues that the Euromaidan Revolution was a “bourgeois revolution,” profoundly anti-Soviet in character. This revolution, he says, is multi-ethnic rather than chauvinistic. It signifies a renewal of the Ukrainian elite. Because of this renewal, and its implications for Russia, the Kremlin has launched a violent military assault against the Ukrainian people that has lasted nine long weeks.

The Russians have taken the European nineteenth century at its word, understood its core ideas and drawn the ultimate conclusions from its cultural premises. We always live in the eye of the more radical brother, who compels us to draw the practical conclusion and pursue it to the end. Altogether … one thing is certain: that the anti-religion of technicity has been put into practice on Russian soil, that there a state arose which is more intensely statist than any ruled by the absolute princes….

Carl Schmitt

A few years ago, there was a slogan going the rounds in Kiev: “We were searching for Europe and we found Ukraine.” Many Ukrainians were sick of Soviet-style kleptocrats governing them with Moscow’s blessing. Better to go with Europe, whatever its flaws. Life as a Kremlin plaything is no life at all. On his side, Putin denied that Ukraine was even a country. “There is no such country,” he said. They cannot be independent of Moscow. Russian propagandists have said that Ukraine is actually two countries: (1) the Ukrainian-speaking west and (2) the Russian-speaking east. Yaroslav Hrytsak, a Ukrainian historian, has called this a heuristic simplification and gross misinterpretation. According to Mychailo Wynnyckyj, “This dichotomous Ukraine never really existed.”[i]

Even if 100 metropolitan areas are destroyed, there would be more wealth in this country than there is in all of Russia today and more skills than were available to that country in the forties.”

Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War [i]

Herman Kahn was controversial. He said things that made his countrymen feel uncomfortable. Kahn, along with rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, allegedly inspired the character “Dr. Strangelove” in the Stanley Kubrick film of the same name. What progressive opinion disliked the most was that Kahn believed in preparing for nuclear war. He argued that even small-cost preparations would produce life-saving results leading to a more rapid post-war recovery. Those whose doctrine was Mutual Assured Destruction did not like the sound of this.

Here one may wonder why, in a situation of blatant violation of human rights by neo-Nazi military forces and paramilitary apparatuses … against the Russian-speaking population of the independent republics, the international community feels obliged to consider the intervention of the Russian Federation worthy of condemnation, and indeed to blame Putin for the violence.

MSGR. Carlo Maria Vigano [i]

…the message from Moscow was direct and unequivocal: the Russian Federation would resort to full-scale war if the ‘rights of Russians and Russian-speakers in Ukraine continued to be threatened.’ No evidence of such rights actually being threatened was ever provided….

Mychailo Wynnyckyj [ii]

I fear that Monseigneur Vigano, otherwise insightful, has fallen into error. He repeats Moscow’s lies without blushing, without suspecting that he is advancing the propaganda of Christendom’s most dangerous enemy. In Vigano’s message for the April 2^nd Reawaken America Rally at Salem Oregon, written at the behest of General Michael Flynn, Vigano suggests that President Putin did not invade Ukraine “to support his expansionist ambitions”; rather, “the main purpose of Russia’s military operation is to prevent the aggression of the deep state and NATO. Putin is fighting against the same globalist elite that holds us all hostage.”[iii]

The defender waits for the attack in position, having chosen a suitable area and prepared it; which means he has carefully reconnoitered it, erected solid defenses at some of the most important points, established and opened communications, sited his batteries, fortified some villages, selected covered assembly areas, and so forth. The strength of his front … makes it possible for him … to inflict heavy losses on the enemy at low cost to himself….

Carl von Clausewitz

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