Early last month, Western media outlets were cheering. The Ukrainian military had invaded Kursk, a mostly rural oblast in western Russia.
This is it! they told us. At long last, the poorly motivated Russian military and populace were on the verge of collapse.
Kursk, they assured us, would be the magic bullet. Russian forces would capitulate, and a color revolution would break out inside Russia any day. The Russian people would deliver Putin to us in a cage.
As you may already know, that isn’t what happened.
Ignoring the lessons of history
Anyone with a sufficient grasp of history (i.e., not your average mainstream media journalist) would have known better from the start. A small invasion of enemy territory doesn’t often equate with victory. In fact, such invasions are often acts of desperation that presage defeat.
During the American Civil War, Confederate units and partisans made numerous punitive raids into Union territory, as far north as Indiana. These harassed the local populations, but were of little military significance. The Battle of Gettysburg, which turned the Civil War decisively against the South, occurred when Confederate General Robert E. Lee decided to invade Pennsylvania.
The Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa also managed to invade the USA. In 1916, Villa’s División del Norte laid siege to the town of Columbus, New Mexico. Though a superficially bold gesture, this was a fool’s errand on Villa’s part. Villa’s attack was repelled within a few days. The net result was a much larger punitive American invasion of Mexico, led by U.S. General John J. Pershing.
But land invasions of Russia are follies on an entirely different scale. Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941 was the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany. More than a century earlier, Russia became a vast graveyard for Napoleon’s Grande Armée.
The verdict in Kursk: failure
After a little more than a month, the tide is turning against Ukrainian forces in Kursk. The Ukrainians bottled themselves up inside hostile territory with no resupply lines. A Russian counterattack has begun, and the Ukrainian invaders of Russia are being decimated—mostly from the air, but also from land-based Russian attacks.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s western positions are crumbling. It is only a matter of time before Russian forces capture Pokrovsk, the capital of the Donetsk Oblast.
When that happens, it may be GAME OVER for the Ukrainian military—without a fresh commitment from the West, and a further ratcheting up of tensions between Russia and NATO.
So why did Ukraine invade Kursk?
Ukraine’s generals are not completely without a grasp of Russian and Soviet history. They realized that a small portion of thinly populated Russian Kursk had little significance, in military terms.
Ukraine’s ultimate objective seems to have been: nuclear blackmail. There is a nuclear power plant in the area. Had Ukrainian forces been able to seize a Russian nuclear plant, they could have threatened Russia—and the world—with a nuclear disaster.
Chernobyl, the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster, was located in Soviet Ukraine. This, too, would have been prominent in the minds of Zelensky and his military planners.
But Ukrainian forces didn’t get that far last month. They were turned back before they could capture the nuclear facility in Kursk.
So what now?
Western governments are at their wits’ ends where Ukraine is concerned. In the USA, the UK, and Germany, national leaders have squandered billions of dollars, billions of pounds sterling, and billions of euros on the Ukraine project.
Their objectives have been a.) to reestablish Ukraine’s 1991 borders, and b.) to weaken and destabilize Russia, with the ultimate aim of a Russian collapse.
But two years into the conflict, Western leaders have little to show for their efforts. And voters are starting to notice.
Things are going poorly for the entrenched ruling class in the West. The USA is in a general election year, with an unpopular, ailing president who is barely functional. The United Kingdom’s Labour government is even more unpopular; its immigration policies led to widespread public rioting over this past summer.
And in Germany, the right-leaning AfD party is gaining power thanks to widespread dissatisfaction with Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the Social Democratic Party.
Germany may be an indicator of where the USA and UK are ultimately headed. German citizens, like British subjects and American citizens, are angry over open-border policies. In Germany, however, the government’s spending and brinkmanship on Ukraine has become an acute source of alarm. Not only do Germans fear they are going bankrupt with Ukraine-related spending—they also know that Germany would become an immediate battleground in any war between NATO and Russia.
So…throw the dice with new permissions for Kiev?
Since 2022, the US and other NATO governments have repeatedly a.) increased financial aid to Kiev, and b.) escalated the West’s involvement in the conflict.
First we weren’t going to send Abrams tanks. Then we sent Abrams tanks. Then it was no ATACMS missiles. Then we sent ATACMS missiles.
Part of the escalation has involved giving Ukraine—a foreign country—an ever-widening range of permission to escalate the war in our name. At present, Western leaders seem poised to give Kiev permission to strike deep inside Russian territory, with mid- and long-range weapons supplied by US taxpayers.
Nuclear-armed Russia has said that this would put the USA and its allies at war with Russia—something Russia has never sought. Russia’s beef is with Ukraine, not us.
Russia wouldn’t have to nuke New York or London in response. Russia could simply transfer deadly weapons of its own to an organization hostile to the USA: ISIS, the Houthis, or maybe Hamas.
War always involves unanticipated consequences. We simply don’t know what the ultimate results of all this escalation will be.
Know this, however: every time our governments expand Ukraine’s permissions to use Western-supplied arms, they put all of us more at the mercy of decisions made in Kiev.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would welcome a full-scale conflict between Russia and NATO. That would make the USA—rather than Ukraine—the main opponent of Russian forces.
In the last US election, millions of Americans voted for Biden, millions voted for Trump. None of us voted for Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s comedian-turned-war leader. But Zelensky and his generals are now making decisions that could affect all of our lives in a very big way. Thanks to the overreach of our governments, and the overweening NATO bureaucracy.
Western leaders and pro-war pundits assure us that Moscow is bluffing, that the prospect of thermonuclear war is nothing to be concerned about.
Who knows? We may all end up dying for the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders. Unless our leaders come to their senses, or we get new leadership.
-ET