History, we are told, is written by the victors. Yet in Ukraine, the story may end up being written by those clever enough to redefine what ‘victory’ looks like.
Two tribes have been shouting across Western commentary trenches since 2022. On one side sit the realists, like John Mearsheimer, shrugging that Russia was provoked and that Ukraine must accept the grim realpolitik of geography. On the other side perch the idealists, like Matthew Syed, wagging fingers that anything short of total victory is appeasement.
Mearsheimer has turned realism into a sort of intellectual alibi for Russian aggression. His argument, that NATO “provoked” Moscow into butchery is less analysis than apologetics dressed up in tweed. To say Ukraine invited invasion by aspiring to sovereignty is like claiming a burglary victim provoked the thief by buying a nicer car. It ignores the obvious: Putin did not fear NATO tanks; he feared Ukrainians voting, building and prospering outside his kleptocratic shadow. Mearsheimer’s lecture-hall fatalism flatters Russian paranoia and reduces Ukrainians to mere pawns on someone else’s chessboard. Realism, in his hands, is just a polite way of telling small nations to shut up and accept their place under the boots of bullies.
Syed, to his credit, skewers the lily-livered hypocrisy of Britain and Europe with precision. He is right that the West has failed Ukraine. Not just with dithering arms deliveries, but with the cowardly evasions of language and the pretence of moral backbone, all the while hiding under America’s skirt. Yet his remedy – more righteous clarity and a refusal to appease – ignores the hard truth. This war is already unwinnable so long as Europe clings to timidity and America rightly refuses to do Europe’s hard yards. A continent that can’t even police its own sanctions is hardly going to summon the will for total victory. Moral clarity without material courage is just theatre, and Europe’s current act is closer to farce than strategy.
Both Mearsheimer and Syed make some valid points. Yet both are wrong for they miss the only outcome that offers Ukraine and the West a future worth banking on. Lose the war. Win the Peace.
Let’s be blunt. Defeating Russia outright is fantasy. Ukraine has fought valiantly, but Western support is flagging. European unity is a mirage. Germany still buys Russian gas under the table; since the war began, Europe has sent over $250 billion to Moscow for oil and gas. That’s not strategy. It’s self‑harm and hypocrisy masquerading as policy.
Even NATO only began digging into defence budgets once Trump, uncouth and ill‑mannered but in this case both ethically and pragmatically correct, bullied Europe into paying its dues. The alliance has been shamed into adulthood by the political equivalent of a Casino Don.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s spirit is fraying. A Gallup poll in July 2025 found that just 24% still support fighting until victory, while 69% now favour a negotiated peace. That marks a near‑complete reversal from 2022, when 73% backed victory and just 22% desired talks. Zelensky’s approval, once north of 80%, now hovers around the mid‑60s. Not desperate, but no longer heroic.
So yes, Ukraine may have to cede Donbas and Crimea.
In Donbas, even before the invasion, separatism was patchy. Around one‑third favoured splitting, most preferred autonomy over empire. In Crimea, pre‑2014 polling showed just 23% supported joining Russia; the later referendum’s 80‑plus percent was heavily manipulated. The reality: Russian identity there has roots but they were never unanimous.
So let the people choose. Ukrainians who object to Russian rule get relocation support, respect and an exit with dignity. Not cannon fodder in a never‑ending war.
Tsun Tsu wrote that you should make sure you can’t lose before you try to win. Ukraine and its ‘allies’ need to accept that losing land doesn’t mean losing the future. Ukraine can win the peace by becoming the neon sign of democracy Russia fears most.
Imagine a Marshall Plan 2.0, funded by frozen Russian assets, redirected European subsidies and reform‑tied loans. Instead of smouldering weaponry, NATO should funnel that money into digital infrastructure, schools, start-ups.
Enter Estonia on steroids. Estonia’s GDP per capita leapt from $3,435 in 1991 to about $32,460 by 2023. Today, GDP per capita is around $31,855. Its economy is high‑income, advanced and resilient. Its ICT sector contributes over 7% of GDP, attracting €1.3 billion in tech investments in 2022. In digital public services, Estonia leads the EU. 89% of citizens use e‑government. Over half the electorate now votes online and it all works so smoothly it makes our elections look like they’re run by blokes with clipboards and carrier pigeons
Ukraine, brimming with tech‑savvy youth, fertile fields and room to grow, could scale this model 10-fold. Build a liberal, high‑growth democracy whose skyscrapers, start-ups and liberties shine across the border shouting ‘This is what you could have had, had you not been stuck with kleptocracy and fear’.
That’s the existential threat Putin fears. What keeps him awake isn’t NATO armour. It’s an Estonia where work, healthcare, banking and elections run on apps while Russia still runs on bribes and babushkas.
This path to victory requires Europe to grow a backbone. Not militarily – NATO’s early‑war moment is gone – but economically. Don’t moonlight oligarch money through London. Stop selling Mayfair mansions and English football clubs to Russian billionaires. Sanctions aren’t fashion. They must be enforced. No visas. No bolt‑holes. No secret funds in Zurich. Seal the exits and let the oligarchs discover how stuffy a yacht feels when it never leaves dry dock.
Europe has demanded moral clarity abroad while camped in cowardice at home. Ukraine can be its redemption: proof that Western liberalism is a model worth funding.
This middle path takes realism’s limitations and idealism’s convictions and crystallises them.
Let borders shift if they must. But build destinies that no map can erase.
Here’s the kicker. The inevitable irony. In 10 years, Russians across the border might gaze at a buzzing, free Ukraine and ask: ‘Why can’t we have that?’
Empires don’t crumble when conquered. They rot when neighbours flourish. Let Russia keep the land. It will be its poisoned chalice. Give Ukraine a future so it can reshape history on its own terms. Because sometimes the greatest victory is to lose the war, then win the peace.
Clive Pinder is a columnist for the SLO Tribune. You will find him giving voice to the politically homeless and making the professionally outraged professionally nervous on Substack.
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In common WWII parlance this article falls into the category of ‘spherical objects’.
‘During the 1990 summit, President Gorbachev accepted the idea of German unification within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, based on the principle that every country should freely choose its own alliances.’
I was in those meetings, and Gorbachev has [also] said there was no promise not to enlarge NATO,” Zoellick recalls. Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, later president of Georgia, concurred, he says. Nor does the treaty on Germany’s unification include a limit on NATO enlargement…..
Zoellick vividly recalls the White House meeting he attended nearly three decades ago in which Bush asked Gorbachev if he agreed with the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe principle that nations are free to ally with others as they see fit. When Gorbachev said yes, he says, the Soviet leader’s “own colleagues at the table visibly separated themselves.”
Sensing the import of the possible breakthrough, he says a colleague at the meeting, Robert Blackwill, sent him a note checking what they had heard and asking if they should ask Bush to repeat the question. ‘Gorbachev agreed again’
https://hls.harvard.edu/today/there-was-no-promise-not-to-enlarge-nato/
‘The OSCE Helsinki Final Act of 1975, and its successor document, the OSCE Code of Conduct on Politico-Military Aspects of Security, affirm that participating States have the sovereign right to choose their own alliances.’
The Russian Federation is the successor state to the USSR, which signed the treaty, still attends OSCE conferences and is consequently obliged to observe the provisions of the Helsinki Final Act, of which obligation it is in breach.
Here’s the source documents proving that the West gave Russia non-expansion assurances.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early
‘Russia behind the Headlines has published an interview with Gorbachev, who was Soviet president during the discussions and treaty negotiations concerning German reunification. The interviewer asked why Gorbachev did not “insist that the promises made to you [Gorbachev]—particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that NATO would not expand into the East—be legally encoded?” Gorbachev replied: “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. … Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement was made in that context… Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled.’
I view the declassified NATO documents as authoritative – that the Russians were led to believe that NATO would not expand. Public statements are often face-saving exercises. Look how the US secretly agreed to remove missiles from Turkey to end the Cuban missile crisis. The Russians were happy to let Kennedy win the public showdown because the Russian leaders didn’t have to stand for election – they knew that putting missiles in Cuba forced the US to withdraw missiles from Turkey.
There is nothing wrong with the documents.
They just don’t say what you want them to say.
Gorbachev: ‘The topic of “NATO expansion” was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a singe Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either. Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement, mentioned in your question, was made in that context. Kohl and [German Vice Chancellor Hans-Dietrich] Genscher talked about it.
Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled. The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed; no weapons of mass destruction would be placed there. It has been observed all these years.’
Russia had, by 1990, signed up to the OSCE Final Accord in which the right of sovereign nations to make their own alliances is enshrined.
Gorbachev was therefore entirely correct to reaffirm that right in 1990.
The only way Putin can get around that has been, as a duplicitous ex KGB operative, to claim that Ukraine is not an independent state. But the OSCE of course recognises Ukraine as an OSCE member state since 1992.
‘Zoellick, a former deputy and undersecretary of state, deputy White House chief of staff, U.S. trade representative, and World Bank president, shared his recollections
Zoellick vividly recalls the White House meeting he attended nearly three decades ago in which Bush asked Gorbachev if he agreed with the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe principle that nations are free to ally with others as they see fit. When Gorbachev said yes, he says, the Soviet leader’s “own colleagues at the table visibly separated themselves.”
Sensing the import of the possible breakthrough, he says a colleague at the meeting, Robert Blackwill, sent him a note checking what they had heard and asking if they should ask Bush to repeat the question.
“Gorbachev agreed again,”
Zoellick recalls, to… Read more »
Imagine a world in which, instead of expanding NATO, the West implemented U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his Feb. 9, 1990 meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. If, instead of NATO expansion, the West and Russia agreed to the neutrality of the newly independent countries, think of how the entire region could have followed the model of Estonia.
Let’s recall how NATO implemented the “not one inch eastward” assurance with new NATO members.
1999
The Czech Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia)
Hungary
Poland
2004
Bulgaria (formerly of the Warsaw Pact)
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Romania (formerly of the Warsaw Pact)
Slovakia
Slovenia (successor to Yugoslavia)
2009
Albania (formerly of the Warsaw Pact)
Croatia (successor to Yugoslavia)
2017
Montenegro
2020
North Macedonia
2023
Finland
2024
Sweden
Here’s NATO’s map of “not one inch eastward.”
Look at this map and think about it from Russia’s perspective.
You ignore the role of the Holomodor a century ago, when Stalin starved many Ukranians, banished others to the Gulag, and installed Russians in their empty homes.
Before the Holomodor, the Dunbas had a very small percentage of Russians, afterwards there are many more, some say a majority are ethnic Russians.
See britannica at https://www.britannica.com/event/Holodomor
“Holodomor, man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, peaking in the late spring of 1933. It was part of a broader Soviet famine (1931–34) that also caused mass starvation in the grain-growing regions of Soviet Russia and Kazakhstan. The Ukrainian famine, however, was made deadlier by a series of political decrees and decisions that were aimed mostly or only at Ukraine. In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–33 is often called the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor).
The origins of the famine lay in the decision by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to collectivize agriculture in 1929. Teams of Communist Party agitators forced peasants to relinquish their land, personal property, and sometimes housing to collective farms, and they deported so-called kulaks—wealthier peasants—as well as any peasants who resisted collectivization… Read more »
“The idea of “holodomor” as an intentional or man-made genocide which specifically targeted Ukrainians and was used to crush Ukrainian nationalists fails on multiple fronts.”
In summary, here are the established facts regarding the situation 1932–1933:
Natural drought played a role in creating the situation.
Ex-landowning kulaks and Ukrainian nationalists did in fact refuse to work, murder collective workers, slaughter their own cattle, and otherwise actively sabotage the sowing and harvesting campaigns.
Importing industrial machinery was the reason for exporting amounts of food in order to increase production as fast as possible.
The cycle of famines which had existed for centuries prior and inherited by the Soviet authorities ended after the industrialization and collectivization policies had been fully implemented and the nazi invasion had ended.
Under Stalin, the Ukrainization policy went into effect for over a decade before being changed due to rabid bourgeois Ukrainian nationalist elements exploiting it for treasonous activities.
Stalin did not harbor any unique hostility to the Ukrainian nationalists any more than he did the Russian nationalists who he fought in the civil war or even the Georgian nationalists who he fought in the August uprising.
The Ukrainian… Read more »
‘Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the European Union’s top diplomat on Wednesday that Beijing did not want to see a Russian loss in Ukraine.’
South China Morning Post July 2025
The Russian economy is in trouble. But China will prop up Russia.
Neither Germany nor the U.S. want Russia to win but they don’t want Ukraine to lose either.
So on it goes. Brute barbarism, thick as mince.
That’s it.
*Russia to lose.
What is really going on?
‘While Putin insists the country is undergoing a “soft landing”, German Gref, chief executive of Sberbank, the country’s biggest state lender, has said the country is in “technical stagnation”.
‘When reserves and oil revenues were plentiful, Russia had the illusion it could plug any social problem with money,” said Aleksandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. “But now that money is no longer available at the same scale, so it’s time to set priorities.” Between January and August, Russia’s energy earnings dropped 20 per compared with the same period in 2024, according to the ministry of finance.’
FT
What dreadfully inaccurate analysis this is. Unworthy of the DS.
overall agree with the proposal that peace should prevail: the west hypocrisy and the demonising of Putin has the hallmarks of Covid or CO2 ie populace manipulation! the rest is pure romantics: Ukraine like Estonia, etc. Do you know Ukraine and how it functions? Since 2022 6 million (!!) people left ukraine; they are not refugees – (among them at least 1 million men who could be fighting) – many of them in huge last model cars? They just know much better what´s going on and don’t believe it will ever – or in the foreseeable future – get better, and when it does it will be the ukrainian way and not the ‘west’ way. They will never go back I imagine. To support his arguments against Mearsheimer’s views the author needs to present evidence (like Mearsheimer does). Last but not least let’s not forget the less talked about russian-speaking population of Donbass and others who just wanted a semi independence a la Wales, Catalunha, Scotland: granted in the Minsk agreements, denied by the Ukrainian parliament, then civil war that Zelensky, the comedian, promised to finish and failed rotundly!
Peace should be achieved asap, relationships with Russia re-established (europe desperately… Read more »
Good piece. Common sense and about time it was started to be debated. There could have been a successful negotiation near the outset if Boris had not put a kibosh on the talks for his own ends which, in the end, proved pathetic.
Thick as mince.
No matter what Ukraine does, Putin will not stop.
Why? Because he is not interested in Ukraine. He is interested in ‘Greater Russia’ and the idea of Moscow as the “Third Rome” or the centre of an alternative international civilization.
This is a demographic imperialist expansionism, an attempt to re-assert a Tsarist centralist barbarism on the whole of Europe, some by military occupation, some by a bullying, intimidatory encampment of a 250 million European neo-superpower, with a battle hardened million strong army, armed to the hilt, on the borders of the eu.
We know that because it happened before….Paris 1814……Lviv 1939……..Berlin 1945….Warsaw 1956……Prague 1968……Georgia 2008…….Chechnya 2009…….Crimea 2014……
None of you may be interested in war….but war is very much interested in you.
Putin will not stop….ever……
This is 2025 not 1814. The west has started dozens of wars in the past 80 years and have expanded westward, NATO attacked Yugoslavia. Napoleon, Hitler and the Fins attacked Russia. The British got involved in Crimea. The Russians lost 27 million people due to western expansionism in WW2.
If the west wants security then it has to be two way, western expansionism was always going to provoke the Russians and it’s amazing they have been so patient.
We are now being governed by a bunch of globalist idiots who are past their sell by date and the western world is on the point of collapse.
Make peace or get the body bags ready.
(Insult deleted)
There is no peace to be made.
‘…the main thing for the Finnish establishment is not to forget that confrontation with us could lead to the collapse of Finnish statehood forever. No one will be soft-spoken with them like in 1944. No one will read them good fairy tales about the Moomins either. As the saying goes, sitä saa, mitä tilaa – what you order is what you get.’
Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation 08 Sept 2025
(Insult deleted)
Putin will not stop….ever…..
‘Putin emerged from Beijing’s bonhomie last week – discussing immortality with his main bankroller, President Xi Jinping, and sharing his limo with wavering US ally, Indian leader Narendra Modi – aware that China wanted to parade its own bloc, unbowed.
The practical application of this new fervor to support Russia is yet unknown, but it will have simply increased the sense in Moscow they have a lot more road to travel down. They may get money, conventional military arms, souped-up hydrocarbon purchases, or just another 10,000 North Korean special forces. But Putin knows he is not alone now…
…..his main goal: a victory broad enough it justifies the likely hundreds of thousands of Russian war dead, and the vast damage this war has wrought upon Russia itself……Putin must sell his victory convincingly to his own elite, or risk finding himself defenestrated.’
I don’t normally respond to people who start their reply with an insult. But in your case it is well deserved. If you can think of something sensible to say then I will respond, but the overwhelming evidence presented by others and myself on this thread show you to be poorly informed.
Only two hopes
No hope
And Bob Hope
Bob Hope:
‘…the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June. That’s when Russian Economic Development Minister Maxim Reshetnikov bluntly stated that the country was “on the verge of slipping into a recession”
So in nearly as bad a position as the rest of Europe
And my apologies to Mr Bailey. After the nonsense trotted out by the entire political class and virtually the entire fourth estate during the botched common cold coronavirus response, I remain incandescent at unevidenced nonsense wherever it is to be found in print. This occasionally boils over into my comments. It should not. I apologise.
‘Russian officials have lost their optimism and are now openly acknowledging that a recession is looming. While official statistics still paint a picture of economic growth, independent experts and business insiders point to a far bleaker reality. In fact, the economic slump that began with the start of the full-scale war never actually ended. As alternative inflation indicators like the so-called “Okroshka Index” prove unreliable, the only credible independent data from the Romir research holding has suddenly stopped being published — and even when this data was still available, it showed that real inflation in recent years was significantly higher than the official figures suggested. This means Russia wasn’t prospering — it was living on borrowed time. Now the reckoning is approaching.’
Ukrainians who object to Russian rule get relocation support…
‘Relocation’ being a polite word for ethnic cleansing. The policy that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin agreed regarding the Germans at the end of the Second World War. This sort of population transfer was also done in Greece and Turkey after the Great War.
76% of Ukrainians would require relocation.
‘…… poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) from July 23 to Aug. 4, only 17% of those Ukrainians surveyed would accept a peace plan on Russian terms, with 76% of respondents “categorically against” such compromises.’
the only people who would need to leave if they wanted would be coming from the eastern occupied regions (Dombass, etc). The rest of Ukraine would be independent, Russia is not interested, so the ‘76%’ are taken out of context.
Russia aims for a line of demarcation from Kaliningrad to Odessa, taking in Moldova and the Suwalki corridor. The Baltic States and, potentially, part of Finland will also be annexed. Millions of Russians and Ukrainians have already relocated, for heavens sake. Tens of millions more citizens will require relocation over the next fifty years. Putin, Russia, will not stop. Europe has unilaterally disarmed and is powerless. The U.S. has identified the eu as anti U.S. and so is disengaging from Europe.
You think the immigration problem is bad now?
In fact it has barely started.
To say Ukraine invited invasion by aspiring to sovereignty…
Ukraine had sovereignty – independence – for 20 years before there was any trouble. This trouble began when George W Bush declared that Ukraine should join NATO.
Is Putin a fool? He knew that a military intervention would be extremely costly in terms of lives and his power base. This has indeed been the case. He repeatedly warned the West to back off. The Novichock attack on Salisbury / Skipal’s was a measure of how desperate he was to avoid conflict. The American military industrial complex, in conjunction with fools like Buden and Johnson, did not heed this warning, and so countless men have died for nothing.
The Skripal poisoning was so obviously a false flag event by UK security services to blame it on the two Russian agents who were monitoring the Skripals.
Porton Down is just down the road.
The first respondent was the head nurse of the British army.
Julia Skripal admitted to a doctor treating her that she and her father were poisoned by a spray whilst on a park bench when the 2 Russian agents were nowhere near the area.
It was all designed to stop Germany using Nord Stream II before the US eventually had it blown up.
Craig Murray has exposed the lies here….
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/07/the-holes-in-the-official-skripal-story/
and here
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/09/skripals-the-mystery-deepens/
and here
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2021/04/pure-ten-points-i-just-cant-believe-about-the-official-skripal-narrative/
John Helmer reported on the recent Dawn Sturgess Inquiry and exposed the whitewash in a new book here ……
https://www.unz.com/article/the-british-attack-on-the-skripals-didnt-kill-them-instead-british-novichok-has-killed-the-mainstream-and-alt-media/
A British citizen killed on British soil, several others badly injured, and you post this nonsense. You are an absolute disgrace.
‘THE HAGUE, Netherlands—4 September 2018— The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) transmitted today to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) the report of the OPCW’s mission to provide requested technical assistance in regard to an incident in Amesbury on 30 June 2018.
The results of the analysis by the OPCW designated laboratories of environmental and biomedical samples collected by the OPCW team confirm the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that intoxicated two individuals in Amesbury and resulted in one fatality.
The toxic chemical compound displays the same toxic properties of a nerve agent. It is also the same toxic chemical that was found in the biomedical and environmental samples relating to the poisoning of Mr Sergei Skripal, Ms Yulia Skripal, and Mr Nicholas Bailey on 4 March 2018 in Salisbury.’
https://www.opcw.org/sites/default/files/documents/2018/09/s-1671-2018%28e%29.pdf
‘The independent report produced by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has today confirmed the assessment of the United Kingdom in identifying the chemical agent responsible for the death of… Read more »
The UK government hold samples of novichok at Porton Down very near to the “alleged” poisoning.
If you believe the official narrative then you’re an even bigger fool than I thought you were.
I have given links to a forensic take down of the official “story”.
Your government and their presstitutes in the main stream media will be pleased you have believed all their lies, propaganda and omissions of the truth.
Complete and utter nonsense, as the various comprehensive reports referenced above clearly demonstrate.
Parroting Russia Today gives the game away.
I don’t watch RT and have not referenced it.
The links I have shared debunking the official “story” are from Craig Murray an ex UK diplomat and John Helmer who has been a professor of political science, of sociology, and of journalism, and an advisor to government heads in Australia, Greece, the United States, and Sri Lanka and is an expert on Russia.
All you do is reference official government sources.
Why are you on The Daily Sceptic if you are not a sceptic?
You are parroting Russia Today.
As I don’t watch RT they must be parroting me.
You’re parroting Western main stream media.
Not very “sceptic” are you?
You are, at best, a dupe….not a sceptic at all.
Navalny is on film talking to one of the team who poisoned his underpants with novichok. The man made no attempt to deny it.
https://spyscape.com/article/underpants-espionage-russias-six-novichok-links
The narrative, which no mainstream Western journalist has even attempted to question, insists that the president of Russia decided to kill Navalny – a marginal figure inside Russia. Instead of organizing an ‘accident’ with plausible deniability, the weapon of choice was a chemical weapon that could kill scores of civilians and unleash chaos at a Russian airport or on an airplane.
At first, it’s doubtless that Navalny’s tea was poisoned at the airport. When this failed to stick, a new narrative insisted his water bottle had been poisoned at the hotel. Now, the third and latest narrative suggests that Novichok (said to be the world’s deadliest nerve agent) had been sprinkled on his underpants. Meanwhile, we are also told that once Navalny was unconscious, he was poisoned a second time with this lethal Novichok.
We are expected to believe that the Russian authorities wanted to kill Navalny but allowed his flight to be diverted and make an emergency landing at another airport so he could be rushed off to a state hospital where he was treated. Then, Putin’s FSB hit-squad seemingly decided not to simply turn off Navalny’s ventilator at the hospital, or to put a pillow over… Read more »
You haven’t watched Navalny’s film.
You are a dupe.
Come back.when you have watched it.
Putin has been using novichok for decades.
It’s a totally biased American documentary.
If you believe that you would believe anything.
Get over your Russophobia and stop being a clown.
There’s only one clown on here….
Russian scientist Vil S. Mirzayanov, who worked at the Soviet State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology, helped develop Novichok in the 1970s. Mirzayanov was briefly imprisoned for telling the Moscow News that Russia was testing chemical weapons while also signing international agreements banning them.
The first Novichok victim was a Soviet scientist, Andrei Zheleznyakov, in a 1987 accident. “Circles appeared before my eyes, red and orange. A ringing in my ears. I caught my breath. And a sense of fear, like something was about to happen,” Zheleznyakov told a Russian newspaper. “I sat down on a chair and told the guys: ‘It’s got me.’”
Vladimir Uglev, the Russian scientist who developed nerve agents in the 1970s and 1980s, said Novichok killed Russian banker Ivan Kivelidi, 46, and his assistant Zara Ismailova, 35, in 1995.
Emilian Gebrev, owner of the Bulgarian weapons firm Emco, was poisoned twice in 2015 ‘by intoxication with an unidentified phosphorus-organic substance’ resembling Novichok, according to Bulgarian authorities.
Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent working for British intelligence, was poisoned in Salisbury, England along with his daughter, Yulia. Two men implicated in the attempted assassination admit they were in Salisbury at the time in March 2020,… Read more »
It doesn’t matter how many times you repeat yourself it doesn’t make it true.
The Skripal and Navalny poisonings had nothing to do with Putin and were most likely carried out by UK spy agencies as agreed by independent Western geopolitical analysts.
Stop believing everything your government and media tell you.
To put your fingers in your ears and chant “nah nah ne nah nah, I can’t hear you!’ is not an argument.
Oh do stop being a hypocrite as you are the one doing that.
All you are doing is regurgitating the government and main stream media narrative that we are bombarded with day after day.
Just like we are with Covid and Climate Change.
The Daily Sceptic is for people with an alternative view who are “sceptical”.
It does what it says on the tin.
You are entitled to your opinion and to air it on here but we have heard it all before from the “establishment”.
There are at least two sides to every story.
The Western media are only reporting one side.
The UK government has banned websites which give the Russian side of events.
Facebook has banned linking to many independent websites suggesting that Russia was “provoked” and “justified”.
The UK regime state broadcaster, the BBC, bans dissenting voices.
Western government friendly Fact Checking sites are an assault on “free speech” and twist their verdict to suit their own narrative.
And yet you believe them and have swallowed their lies hook, line and sinker.
As I say, not an argument…..
You are not a sceptic…you are a dupe and poseur…..
You reference lightweights like Helmer and Murray.
You are not to be taken seriously.
‘The proponents of conspiracy theories……placed the main emphasis on the plausibility of information, while accuracy of information was valued less. Conspiracy theorists valued plausible information presented by others particularly if it supported their own narratives. They also cited authoritative information selectively to support a conspiracy theory.
Tweets about conspiracy theories were supported by news sites with low fact-checking scores……..conspiracy theories are articulated on 8kun and Gab online forums. It appeared, for example, that sources related to QAnon – an American political conspiracy theory and political movement – are particularly popular on posts submitted to 8kun, while Gab users shared more far-right fake news available in websites such as InfoWars. Overall, low-credibility sources were prevalent on 8kun and Gab. On the other hand, the users of these platforms also drew on more established information sources, for instance, Twitter and YouTube….’
Conspiracy theorists prefer YouTube in particular because they struggle with the written word
Why would western facing Ukrainians want to be part of the same country as eastern facing ethnic Russians. Even if it was possible for Ukraine to win the war, those eastern regions would be a thorn in their side for all eternity. Better to bin them off and have a much more united country without them. The tragedy is the peace deal that will eventually be signed will probably be quite similar to the one Boris scuppered about a million lives ago.
The evidence clearly shows that any deal with Russia will allow them to rearm and come back for more territory in a few years.
To cede Crimea means giving Russia control over Ukrainian marine trade and a close platform from which to launch its next invasion.
Those who say Ukraine cannot win are the same as those who thought Russia would take over the whole of Ukraine in days.
Mearsheimer has simply been stating the bleeding obvious since February 2022. The author, along with countless others, is merely coming to terms with that in his own sweet way.
To imagine that Ukraine with the same Soviet legacy corruption could become Manhattan on the Dnipro is, shall we say, imaginative.
It’s also wearing a bit thin to claim, as Syed does, supremacy for Western democracy. Especially after the collapse of the French government. Not to mention Merz declaring that the welfare state can no longer be afforded. In other words, the social democracy of the entire 20th century is petering out.
And how are the people with disabilities doing now in Ukraine. A BBC report shortly after the war started found them housed like animals. And Ukraine had 20 years of peace to ‘Westernise’ their care. But it’s still Soviet.
If Zelensky offered to trade land for peace, would European governments let him? Such an offer would be a test of whether this was a proxy war by the West or not. If not, Zelensky would be allowed to do so, barring opposition from any ultra-nationalists that may be left.
As for destinies that no one can erase, NATO’s expansion has already erased the footprint of the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe. As the author of this blue sky thinking must know, the Kremlin’s concern for security as they… Read more »
Oh dear. What a load of rubbish.
There are so many errors by Clive Pinder in his article that it would take an age to correct them all.
I will pick on just one, his denigration of Mearsheimer.
John J. Mearsheimer is actually in good company.
Russia WAS provoked by the US via Ukraine as admitted by such luminaries as Noam Chomsky, Henry Kissinger, Nigel Farage, John Pilger, Peter Hitchens, Oliver Stone etc. etc. etc.
Noam Chomsky continued, “Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/not-justification-provocation-chomsky-root-causes-russia-ukraine-war
“So, as you can see, the notion that this war is “unprovoked” is a fairy tale for idiots and children; there’s no excuse for a grown adult with internet access and functioning brain matter to ever say such a thing.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/08/caitlin-johnstone-unprovoked/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=d523aa2a-0e68-46e9-9783-a9c05d1c7232
“Nearly a year after Russia’s invasion, the western narrative of an ‘unprovoked’ attack has become impossible to sustain”.
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2023-01-10/russia-ukraine-war-us-pave-invasion/
“It is an old tactic in high-stakes diplomacy to provoke your enemy into an unwise war, in the hope you will then destroy him”. Peter Hitchens.
https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2022/04/peter-hitchens-the-usa-wants-this-war-so-it-can-drive-russia-back-to-the-stone-age.html?cid=6a00d8341c565553ef0282e14d5a0c200b
We (that is: the United States, France and the European Union in the lead) have created the conditions… Read more »
Ah, but King Charlie told the German parliament that Russia was entirely unprovoked. He takes after his great uncle Eddie.
Many people (including the BBC) say Russia was “unprovoked”.
“The way to prevent the Ukraine war from being understood is to suppress its history.
A cartoon version has the conflict beginning on Feb. 24, 2022, when Vladimir Putin woke up that morning and decided to invade Ukraine.
There was no other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent country.
Please use this short, historical guide to share with people who still flip through the funny pages trying to figure out what’s going on in Ukraine.
The mainstream account is like opening a novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though it’s the beginning of the story.” 25/02/2025
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times.
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/02/25/ukraine-timeline-tells-the-tale/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=beaffdd7-e3d2-4e35-bac1-01618fd34e43
Excellent link. Goes into my Bookmarks in the wonderful Firefox Bookmarks system, which is organised like Windows File explorer, with a hierarchical folder structure, allowing category & subcategory, Search on keywords, and backup/restore of the whole lot.
Other times I use Opera browser or Chrome.
And yet the BBC (British Brainwashing Corporation) still say Russia were “unprovoked”.
BBC article of 15th June 2024.
“On the eve of the event, Vladimir Putin tried to drop another spanner in the works by outlining his own conditions for a supposed peace: the man who invaded Ukraine, unprovoked, now wants Kyiv to capitulate.”
Sarah Rainsford (BBC Eastern Europe correspondent who is banned from Russia)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv22zlq4y20o.amp
Once the envy of the world, BBC News has been captured by the evil Globalist Cabal, and like these liars, now peddles lies all the time, with a completely straight face. It has become second nature to them.
Have I seen any interviews with Foreign Minister Lavrov, or Press Spokesman Peskov? Never.
I did, early in the war, see a completely unknown black kid (& I used “kid” deliberately, to illustrate his immaturity) “interview” the Russian Ambassador to London.
The kid acted like a gang member facing an enemy gang member and berating him constantly, interrupting every answer with another hostile question from the check-sheet he’d been given by his masters.
The BBC News Department is despicable. All the honest journalists have gone, and we are left with men & women for whom “investigative journalism” i.e. QUESTIONING THINGS, has gone down their toilet; they conform to what they are told to say, otherwise they face losing their job, and the means to feed their families.
The author is wrong on one very important point. Most of the soldiers on the front are not fighting valiantly, they are fighting unwillingly and being sacrificed pointlessly for the vanity of Zelensky.
And Putin.
As I understand it Ukraine has probably lost around 1.7 m men, but I doubt Russia has lost fewer.
This is the most egregious bloody example of two bald men fighting over a comb in world history.
Breaks my heart, but I appreciate I’m a real softy.
Russia evolved its tactics to involve very few troops and avoided attacking strongholds front on but infiltrated around the Ukrainians and then let their superior artillery, air power and drones to eliminate the UAF if they hadn’t retreated.
A very disappointing article for the DS to publish.
I sort of disagree – it has stimulated debate and surely that’s not a bad thing. Doesn’t mean I agree with what’s written (I’m very much tending towards the non interventionist position these days).
Debate will not be tolerated, we have ways of making you think mein fuhrer.
Clive Pinder’s attack on Professor Mearsheimer puts him firmly in the camp of the MSM, who have kept the Truth about Ukraine hidden from the British public every since the SMO started on Feb 24th 2022. Here’s what he is suppressing:
America started the Ukraine war as long ago as 2014, when it led the illegal coup in Kiev, overthrowing President Yanukovitch & his policy of NEUTRALITY FOR UKRAINE, just as Austria is neutral. By 2015 there were 12 CIA bases in Ukraine, and US military personnel in Crimea, looking for sites for a NATO base.
* 2014 EU/US/UK coup in Kiev, CIA enters Ukraine, 12 CIA/NATO bases set up, covert military ops against the Donbass Russians, & inside Russia itself. Revealed in New York Times 25 February 2024 (paywalled but mirrored):
https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2024/02/26/nation-world-news/the-spy-war-how-the-cia-secretly-helps-ukraine-fight-putin/
* 2014 on: New Ukraine gov., backed by US State Department fanatic Victoria Nuland, includes openly Nazi elements (Azov, Right Sektor, Svoboda), immediately legislates against Donbass & Crimean Russians/Speakers, banning their language & culture, igniting resistance in E, Ukraine. Civil war develops, Ukraine army shells Donbass Russians indiscriminately for next 8 years, killing 14,000, including thousands of civilians, notably in city of Donetsk. All fuelled by NATO… Read more »
Thanks for the real detail in your post Sparrowhawk.
Thank you. I keep it in my comment history in the “Disqus” discussion system, so it’s always available to copy with only minor tweaks needed.
I could have added that President Putin & especially Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov – an outstanding statesman – are continually making speeches around the world, holding Press conferences at the G20 & UN Security Council, conducting lengthy detailed interviews, all of which are available only on YouTube or Rumble, and never heard by the British people, thanks to the British government’s intense fear of allowing the people to attend a court where both the prosecution and the defence are allowed to speak.
The Global South (Third World?) countries do not censor Russia, have good diplomatic relations with Russia, & so know the details outlined above, which is why western attempts to “isolate Russia” with condemnations at the UN, the G20 etc. have all failed.
The geopolitical result of the West’s “project Ukraine” has been enormous: it has cemented the Russia-China alliance, consolidated the BRICS with dozens of nations aspiring to join, to protect themselves from more western sanctions, and it is destroying European economies, due to the loss of 40 years of reliable, affordable energy… Read more »
Yes thank you. The MSM are now so unreliable that they can only be compared to the dictatorial regimes of the past. Anyone believing a single word these people utter is in need of help.
When Ukraine gained independence they agreed to neutrality and most, if not all of the troubles there have been instigated by the west. The west wants to break up Russia and have failed badly, they are now faced with defeat in their proxy war. They have driven the rest of the world into a new economic and social system, as I said this is the biggest failure since WW2. We will all now become poorer, excepts for the ones who have caused this of course.
Yes, but so what? You’ve still got to find a solution.
No we don’t. We have lost the crusade against Russia, and the crisis, like many historical crises, will be settled on the battlefield. Russia cannot trust the West’s “agreements” any more, & both the Neo-Nazi Kiev regime & the European leadership want no peace negotiations, so Russia will win, and in all wars, the winner dictates terms.
The alternative is western armies going in to “rescue” Ukraine, which as President Biden (lucidly) said, brings us to World war Three, which WILL go nuclear.
As Professor Sachs says to the European leaders “go to Moscow, don’t go to Kiev. Talk to the Russians; you will be living next to them for the next hundreds of years”. Yet all they do is hold pointless meetings among themselves, positing NATO troops as “peacekeeping force”, which they know is utterly unacceptable to Russia.
NATO membership with NATO forces in Ukraine was 50% of the reasons the Russians were forced to act. All Russia wants is NEUTRAL STATES ON ITS BORDERS. Is that so hard for you to grasp?
America demands EXACTLY THE SAME on America’s borders, in its “sphere of influence” (from Alaska to Cape Horn). have you not heard of the 1962… Read more »
I’m unimpressed by the article Clive. You seem to have taken the globalist narrative at face value without seeing the bigger picture, what the Ukraine war as phase 2 of the great reset was about. Their narrative casts ‘plucky’ Ukraine as the victim with weakwilled Europe insufficiently supportive in funding them to counter Russian ‘aggression’ You must be aware of the US neocons role in this and Europe since before 2014 and the breaches of the MInsk Agreement. If you are not, I suggest look at the non MSM sources for this.
You mention Estonian GDP growth which has increased 10 fold since the collapse of the Soviet Union – you are right and the Baltic states are not perfect and have their fair share of corruption but if individual enterprise thrives GDP grows. We in the UK are unfortunately experiencing the reverse of this. And the savvy folk from the Baltic States I meet and work with are well aware of this.
You mention ” Ukraine, brimming with tech‑savvy youth, fertile fields and room to grow, could scale this model 10-fold.” Maybe, but the scale of money laundering and financial plundering here, helped by such as Burisma has… Read more »
Two tier free gear obviously queer Starmer struts around saying “we”* will stand up to the Russians, yet can’t even stop blokes in dinghies from invading our shores.
*The poor bloody infantry, as usual. I assume 2TK isn’t taking his son down to the Army careers office.
“So let the people choose.”
It isn’t about people, Clive. And it definitely isn’t about letting them choose.
Did the Jews get to choose? No, nobody wanted them.
Yawn.
The CIA instigate a coup. Victoria Nuland picks the new government. They send the Azov Battalions into the Donbas to wage civil war. Two agreements are signed in Minsk, both welched on. A war kicks off which Ukraine can never ever win. Boris Johnson personally tells Zylenskyyy NOT to negotiate. The Military Industrial Complex make billions, hundreds of thousands die.
This is very not good, and should never have happened.
Ukraine is not a monoculture and historically has never been a distinct body politic. It is a region, swapping hands numerous times, Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russian Empire, Austro-Hungary, USSR.
“Yet in Ukraine, the story may end up being written by those clever enough to redefine what ‘victory’ looks like.”
If there was anyone clever in Ukraine, there would not have been a war in the first place. It’s a cesspit of corruption.
Ukraine was right to resist the Russian invasion. If they hadn’t of done so they’d now be a Russian satellite with a puppet dictator in charge, the same as Belarus. The end of 2022, after their successful offensives around Kharkiv and Kerson was when they should of started negotiations to hopefully keep most of what they had at the time.
Personally I think both Ukraine and Russia will lose.
Or, put it in another way, neither of them can win.
Russia is too large to lose and too weak to win.
But what would even a military victory achieve?
There is something deeper going on here but I don’t think we have realized what it is yet. To me the whole thing increasingly looks like destruction for destruction’s sake.
Agreed, so ‘merica can go and “Nation Build” (read, appropriate rare earths and gas and oil and grain and prostitutes)
Yes. White Genocide.
In most wars everyone loses but it is often better than not fighting and allowing the bully to do its worst.
Even if by some miracle Ukraine pushed Russia out of all the territory it controlled before 2014 it would still have to solve the problem of the armed separatists in the Donbas. The best it could hope for is an insurgency or sustained terrorist campaign with no possible military victory. Ukraine would then have to reach a political settlement which would probably have to be similar to the Northern Ireland peace deal, Autonomy for the Donbas, Russian becoming an official language and possibly people in the Donbas being able to choose Russian or Ukrainian citizenship. Given that they weren’t prepared to make this sort of offer before 2022 they aren’t going to make it when they’re flush with victory.
It’s obvious that European leader are cynically exploiting Ukraine, and prolonging the bloodshed, just to try and boost their plummeting popularity at home and show they’re much better Statesmen than Trump. They need to wake up and smell the coffee and stop trying to cover up their abject failure with yet more Ukrainian and Russian blood.
Those people arguing that Ukraine should fight on might like to argue the toss with the mothers wives and children of the 1.7 million Ukrainian lads MIA or KIA, when it has been obvious for at least 2 years that both Crimea and the Donbass are lost and can’t be won back.