Fucking finally what? Getting dragged to die for the oligarch money?

Entering the cool zone now, while I continue my critical support for dismantling the Ukrainian army and it’s fascist collaborators I was naively hoping this would be a contained regional conflict.

Make no mistake, up until this point I struggle to call the current war “humane” but it was conducted with the type of strategy you would expect invading a historic sister nation that many remember being part of the same Union in their lifetime. Russians pulled up to the gates of Kiev and hoped for a reasonable surrender or popular uprising to save lives and prevent a drawn out urban siege. Instead, Ukraine mobilized the fucking Volkstrum, Einsatzgruppen, youth brigades and Strafbataillon all at once completely willing to kill every last civilian to protect their regime. I genuinely think the Russians didn’t expect that, assuming their Slavic brothers still had some familiarity and would opt to negotiate rather than having been fully captured by their western overlords. They didn’t want to “liberate” Kiev the same way the Americans “liberated” Seoul and and Pyongyang. So they pulled back, refocused solely on the East, and have been using a strategy of creeping artillery and slow infantry pushes to move the line slowly but consistently in a way that-- theoretically anyway-- limits civilian casualties. Less American “shock and awe” more a WW1 style crawl with the line moving slowly enough that the theater of combat should only be military targets. At least, if the fucking Ukraine Army werent holding civilians captive to use as human shields or conscripts.

I’d convinced myself everything was going to plan but with this and the newest Ukraine suicide push actually cutting through to their rear, for the first time I’m wondering if even a fraction of the Ukraine propaganda on the state of the Russian army is true. This seems like a pretty big escalation that I originally would have assumed was unnecessary, but it seems like the first time I’ve seen frustration and attrition is setting in anywhere near the level that western propaganda has claimed up to this point.

Annexation of eastern Ukraine was inevitable but doing it now before the region is fully liberated would make it go from essentially a Russian expeditionary war inside a neighboring state to a direct “state versus state” conflict. That is, a fully conventional conflict with Ukraine troops and NATO staff launching attacks into Russia proper. That kind of shit opens a new can of worms, and I wouldn’t be shocked if we see a secondary push into Kiev from Belarus again this time with the kids gloves off.

It’s going to be bad. And I think we should be prepared to recognize that if that happens, for our part viewing this critically within Marxist discourse.

Tl;Dr sorry for the rant kinda blacked out there. There’s likely going to be a tangible shift in the war strategy, and it’s going to make things worse for civilians on both sides. I’ll be watching the Chinese and Russian communists carefully to see how this effects how we might view this conflict.

:/