Waiting for the Russians, by Dmitry Orlov

When the Ukraine’s Azov Battalion (Swastika-tattooed, drug-addled Nazi berserkers) was finally forced off the streets of Mariupol, a Russian town of half a million on the shores of the Azov Sea, and into the cavernous basements of the metallurgical plant, the residents, who had been forced to hide from the machine gun fire and the shelling in the basements of their own apartment buildings, were at first reluctant to leave their shelters. Then some of them, listening to the noise outside, heard loud shouts of “Allahu akbar!” (“Glory to God”), they breathed a deep sigh of relief—”the Russians are finally here!”—and flooded out onto the streets to greet their Russian liberators, who were, in this case, Chechen special forces.

This little real-life vignette may leave you confused. How can your valiant Ukrainian friends be Nazis? Your government has lavished countless billions in military aid on them, all of which swiftly disappeared into a sort of black hole with nothing to show for it except for a continuous string of military retreats, defeats and humiliations. Meanwhile, more and more of your own people can’t even afford to heat or cool their homes or feed their children properly. That must really sting! And how can Mariupol, a major Ukrainian industrial center formerly responsible for roughly a tenth of the former Ukraine’s GDP, turn out to be peopled almost exclusively by white-blue-and-red flag-waving, patriotic Russians? And how can Russians feel happy to be liberated by Moslem fighters shouting “Allahu akbar”—aren’t they Orthodox Christian, not Moslem?

The Ukrainian Nazis are Nazis because their ideology is Nazi. According to this evil concoction, Ukrainians are racially superior and distinct from all other Russians for being pure Slavs whereas the other Russians are an admixture of Slavic, Ugro-Finnish, Turkic and other ethnic groups. Their supposed racial purity and superiority makes it OK for them to kill and to torture anyone who isn’t them—Poles, Russians and especially Jews. They feel perfectly justified in shelling residential districts populated by such Untermenschen and to use such civilians as human shields. And when that tactic fails and they are forced to retreat, they shell schools, hospitals and kindergartens in the districts they abandoned. Over a hundred buildings now need to be repaired before the start of the school year in Donetsk alone. Shelling sick people and children is a lot safer than shelling Russian troops, who fire right back.

If Americans and other Anglos, and various hostages of the EU, find it difficult to comprehend that the Ukrainians are Nazis, then that may be because they themselves have a touch of the Nazi disease. After all, they have been financing Nazis and enabling their war crimes for some nine years now—long enough for the mental poison to spread and seep in. In turn, the Ukrainian Nazis feel a great kinship for the Anglos, as they had for the German Nazis during World War II, and this feeling is hardly misplaced, for the Anglos are also great slaughterers and torturers of peoples, as countless surviving eye witnesses from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen, among others, will attest. Murderous sentiments aside, they would be well advised not to trust the Anglos, for there is no honor among war criminals. To wit, there are currently 74,274 Afghanis who worked for the Americans during the occupation and who are still, and probably forever, awaiting permission to come to the US. It will be the same with the Ukrainians: once they are no longer useful to their Anglo masters, they will be abandoned and forgotten.

These days political correctness demands that people in the West curb their appetite for referring to blacks and Asians by such outmoded appellations as Negros, Kaffirs, Coolies or Orientals, but there is no such requirement vis-à-vis the Russians, and Russophobia is quite acceptable and even a requirement for entry into polite society. Mention that Putin is one of the most popular national leaders ever, or that he is quite successful by most metrics of societal well-being, and you will be asked to leave. On the other hand, Russians can be endlessly caricatured as a bloodthirsty bear and otherwise dehumanized, to a point where people in the West have been unable to see that a genocide has been perpetuated in former Eastern Ukraine going on nine years now because, you see, the people being genocided aren’t quite human—they are mere Russian Unterrmeschen.

One interesting feature of being of Russophobe is that it automatically makes you an Antisemite. How’s that?—you may ask. Aren’t Russians and Jews ethnically and religiously distinct? Why, not at all! Russian Jews, of whom there are over a million in Russia and as many as 10 million worldwide, are not particularly ethnically distinct at all because of extensive intermarriage and the vast majority of them is culturally and linguistically Russian. While under Hebrew law Jews have to be born of a Jewish mother, under Russian law it’s a free choice: any Russian with Jewish ancestry can elect to have their nationality recorded as Jewish—or simply as Russian. Nor is it compulsory for a Russian Jew to espouse Judaism (or, as is more often the case with Jews, Atheism) and there are plenty of Russian Jews who are Russian Orthodox. Thus, being a Russophobe automatically makes one an Antisemite—one step away from a Nazi. Jewish Russophobes are not exempt, Zionism having been equated with racism according to UN Resolution 3379 of 1975.

Russians can be all sorts of interesting combinations of things, you see. They speak hundreds of different languages, from Abkhaz to Yakut, but invariably use Russian as a lingua franca. They are religiously diverse, and while many are Orthodox Christian, about a quarter of them is Moslem. Internally, Russia is wonderfully complex and diverse; externally, everyone is Russian. Since Russia is unique on our planet in numerous ways, there is no point to assigning Russia to a class. Is it an empire, a civilization, a community of nations or some other thing that fits the English “X is a Y” class membership pattern? Who cares! Russia is Russia. This doesn’t sit well with some zipper-headed Westerners who are forever dreaming of breaking Russia up into bite-sized pieces that they can then analyze into something they can comprehend and make use of.

Alas, that is not to be. Russia, as a living organism, breathes. When it inhales, it grows larger, expanding to encompass various regions along its endless borders; when it exhales, these border regions often attempt to claim their sovereignty—and invariably fail, swiftly becoming a colonial possession of some great power du jour. Right now, Russia is inhaling, and when it’s done it will expand to somewhere between the size of the USSR and the size of the Russian Empire. Will Finland and Poland once again become Russian? Will Russia regain Alaska, Hawaii and Northern California? Only time will tell, but time is ripe for a major shift.

Russia’s current inhale couldn’t possibly come at a better time (for Russia). Its nemesis, which is the United States, is shriveling in real time. Its outsized appetites can only be fed by continuous debt expansion while its debt, which now eclipses all other debt pyramids the world has ever seen by orders of magnitude, is starting to cave in. A third of it is held by foreigners, who are getting rid of it as fast as they can (China got rid of $100 billion last month; Japan, a bit more). Another third of it is held by the Federal Reserve (which sits atop a festering heap of financial garbage kept hidden behind smoke and mirrors) and most of a remaining third is held by financial entities of various kind that subsist on a continuous influx of Federal Reserve-issued liquidity and will instantly shrivel up when deprived of it. America’s ability to fleece the planet had rested on its military might, but the humiliating end to its occupation of Afghanistan showed that might to be largely fictional. If the US now loses the Ukraine, that may well deal its dreams of full-spectrum dominance the final coup de grace.

Meanwhile, the leadership of the collective West is comprised of badly educated political midgets who do their best to ignore the rapidly approaching destitution of their constituents, but what is no longer possible to ignore is that the West no longer presents a positive image of societal well-being when compared to a stable and increasingly prosperous Russia. Peoples living on Russia’s vast fringes will ask themselves: do we want to shiver in the dark while eating insects like the Germans, or do we want to lounge around in lingerie while it’s -40ºC outside and blowing a blizzard, and eat pork kebabs whenever we like, as the Russians do? When asked whether they want to be poor and sick or rich and healthy, most people naturally opt for the latter. If all goes well, Russia will inhale them; if not, they will be left to languish on their own.

Coming back now to former Ukraine and what will become of it, by now the picture is quite clear. Russia can continue its special operation to demilitarize and denazify the Ukraine for as long as it takes, but it shouldn’t take too much longer. People in the West have already started to wake up to what the ever-shrinking Ukraine has become—a failed state infested by war criminals. Some have taken to referring to it as a black hole: money and weapons go in and nothing comes out. But that is a mischaracterization: it is not a black hole but a sieve. Money pours in and settles in the offshore accounts of the Kiev junta. Weapons are shipped in and are either sold—to Russia or to various terrorist groups in Europe and beyond—or they are blown up using Russian rockets or left abandoned as the Ukrainian forces retreat.

Demilitarization is ongoing; by now, around 80% of all the weapons the Ukrainian army had at the beginning of 2022 have been destroyed; weapons being shipped in by NATO are being destroyed shortly after they arrive. Denazification is going well too; 80% of the original, highly indoctrinated Nazi battalions have been killed off already. Casualties on the Ukrainian side number in the hundreds per day while the Russians do their work from the safety of a stand-off distance and only move in when it’s safe. The Ukrainian military is being forced to round up untrained reservists and draftees (including women) and sending them to the front where they are killed, surrender, defect or otherwise try to escape.

It is still too early to describe the overall end state, but some of it has already come into focus. The historically Russian provinces, which comprise the entire southeast of the former Ukraine, from Kharkov in the north to Odessa in the south and everything in between, will end up once again within Russia’s borders. Nobody knows yet what will happen to Kiev or to former Western Ukraine. Kiev is valuable to Russia as a historically Russian city; the rest, much less so. It may end up as an analogue of the Idlib province in Syria—a designated gremlin preserve.

In the meantime, large parts of former Ukraine are waiting for the Russians to roll in and liberate them. The pace of advance will pick up once West realizes that their pet black hole is much too ravenous for their increasingly strained budgets and once the Kiev junta realizes that there is nothing left for it to steal and decamps for parts unknown (its members are currently forbidden from traveling abroad for fear of desertion). This could take weeks or months, but probably not years. In the meantime, the black hole will stay there, gobbling up billions of dollars and euros and thousands of weapons systems and mercenaries—for the Russians to blow up using artillery and rockets. Western politicians, who are continuing to squander resources on the Kiev junta, are still waiting for something… but what? At this point the only answer that seems to makes sense is that they too are waiting for the Russians.