![]() ![]() Russian troops made rapid gains in the south, the east and the north. The start of the SMO started promisingly. But only if we were paying close attention. In other words, we learned a lot about who was part of the insider circle in Russia and who wasn’t. Also, while political nobodies like Sergei Lavrov, were not consulted about the operation, influential oligarchs like Roman Abramovich curiously started moving their money around right before the start of the war. This, despite American intelligence sounding the alarm that an invasion was imminent. On the other side, President Zelensky seemed to be convinced that no Russian incursion was being planned, and that NATO was pulling his leg. ![]() Lavrov eventually settled on using the, “it’s not a war, it’s a special military operation, a policing action” talking point put out by the Kremlin. Despite about a hundred thousand deaths on the Ukrainian side, and probably seventy thousand on the Russian side, the Kremlin still refuses to call this a war, and maintains that it is something akin to a neighborhood policing action. It seems like quite the stretch to believe that he said this to throw NATO and Kiev off the scent because there are many other ways to phrase such a denial that don’t leave Lavrov standing with an egg on his face and forced to pretend that he didn’t condemn a hypothetical Russian invasion only to then have to defend the actual invasion soon after. Sergei Lavrov, the head of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for example, stated that it would be unthinkable for Russia to launch an invasion of a neighboring country and that such accusations were just standard libel hurled in Russia’s direction by the West. I have a powerful article on this topic coming out soon. This, in itself, should not be surprising considering the fact that many top Kremlin officials themselves appear to have been kept in the dark about the operation. And, actually, we don’t really know what the true reason for the SMO was, to this day. Still, many analysts, myself included, were taken by surprise by the launch of the special military operation. ![]() By the time that Zelensky came out and started openly talking about the possibility of Kiev acquiring nukes, the stage had already well and truly been set for a showdown with Russia in one form or another. A low-scale civil war was already smoldering on in the Donbass for 8 years at that point as well. As most everyone knows by now, NATO pursued a policy of expanding further and further into FSU territory all while openly advocating for regime change in Moscow, Kiev, Minsk and other countries. It is impossible to not mention the context in which hostilities between Ukraine and Russia and NATO (partially) began. ![]()
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