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The Same Old Mistakes
It’s the 1930s all over again and this time Ukraine is Czechoslovakia
If we set aside the noise generated by empty-headed journalists manufacturing endless vacuous sensation in order to boost the value of ad slots, and if we set aside the windy speeches of Western politicians that rarely lead to any concrete actions, and if we consider the general self-absorption of people in the West and our ultra-short attention spans, it’s possible to look forward to 2025 and form a reasonable picture of what we are likely to see. The rest of this article will therefore be written from the perspective of someone standing at the end of 2025 and looking back.
Despite all the noise made about Western sanctions, Russia continued to generate much higher revenues from its sales of oil and gas between 2022 and 2025 than it had done in the preceding years. This, combined with an 18% drop in imports, led to the Putin regime enjoying more than enough cash to fund its grinding war of attrition in Ukraine. Moreover, as the Russian economy went onto a war footing in 2022 and remained on a war footing thereafter, it was able to out-manufacture and buy in essential munitions at a rate the West was utterly unable to match. This meant that first Ukrainian air defenses collapsed and then its artillery capability also declined to the point of ineffectiveness, while…
