I’d like to take a close look at the war in Ukraine. If the UK and NATO wants to fight Russia, people need to know the facts.

Ukraine is a large country – 2.5 times the size of the UK but with a pre-war population of about 40 million. The Ukraine conflict has been brewing for years and the areas annexed by Russia are about the size of the United Kingdom. They include some 7 million people in 4 regions in addition to the Crimea peninsula with a front line stretching from Land’s End to John O Groats.

Internal conflicts between Ukrainian Nationalists in the west of the country and Russian speakers in the east led to a US supported ‘coup’ in 2014 and a civil war which cost some 14,000 lives. The army split between nationalists and pro-Russian elements who defended the Donbas area and Crimea was annexed by Russia.

The USA fully supported the Ukrainian nationalists and despite the majority of Ukrainians not wanting to join NATO, the Ukrainian Government declared it wanted to and allowed US intelligence services (the CIA) to establish spy bases on the Russian border.

What concerned Russia was the aim of NATO to place intermediate missiles in Ukraine that could hit Moscow in 5 minutes or less. In 2019 the USA tore the existing INF (Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces) treaty up which would have forbidden the production of such missiles.

Prior to this there were attempts brokered by Germany and France to reach an agreement in which Ukraine didn’t join NATO and, in an attempt to resolve civil conflict, give the Luhansk and Donetsk republics the kind of autonomy that Wales and Scotland have, but still as part of Ukraine. The agreements were sabotaged by ‘the west’ and Ukraine. Ukraine subsequently banned the Russian language and closed down the Russian Orthodox Church.

The encroachment of NATO was seen as such an extreme threat by Russia that, in breach of international law, it intervened in February 2022 with a token force of about 200,000 troops. The Ukrainian army was somewhat bigger than this and had been armed to the teeth by ‘the west’. The force moved in on Kiev and the Donbas, taking most of the Donbas very quickly mainly because many Russian speakers there welcomed them. This was their prime target.

Negotiations took place brokered by Turkey which both sides agreed to – but which were rejected by Ukraine when it was given guarantees by western politicians to support Ukraine for ‘as long as it takes’. The agreement would have meant Ukraine would stay intact but NOT be part of NATO. When it was rejected, Russia expanded its army to approaching 1 million troops and set about resolving the situation with the use of extreme force.

Russia is depicted by lazy thinkers in ‘the west’ as a ‘gas station with nukes.’ It is the biggest country in the world with a population of 146 million and a working population of 74million (compared to 33million in the UK) and has an abundance of natural resources. Measured in conventional terms this puts it 11th in the world’s economies behind Britain but measured according to what is called Purchasing Power Parity (which is favoured by most international organisations like the world bank and the IMF), Russia is the 5th largest economy in the world after China, the USA, India and Japan. It looks like it will shortly become the 4th.

The 30,000 or so sanctions applied to Russia by ‘the west’ to try and destroy it have meant it has had to reorientate its economy towards China in the east and has had to become much more self-reliant. In sharp contrast to ‘the west’ its economy is growing. Whereas in Britain and the USA, most ‘economic activity’ is now in service, finance and administrative sectors, much more of Russia’s economy produces real things – food and manufactured goods.

It also has massive military capacity and produces is own munitions and weapons including tanks and aircraft. It has 5th generation aircraft. F16s are a capable 4th generation aircraft but up against Russia’s air defence systems aren’t capable of being deployed anywhere near the front line. Along with the USA and China, it is working on 6th generation aircraft. A ‘gas station with nukes’ would not be able to do this. Where is Britain in this race? Nowhere.

It has a formidable military which now dominates the battle field in a country right next to it so its supply lines are relatively compact– it has (in the words of President Obama) ‘escalatory dominance’.

According to Mediazona (established with the BBC and Russian ‘dissidents’ to monitor Russian casualties), Russia has suffered under 80,000 killed in action since the beginning of the conflict. This is a record of funerals etc and is almost certainly an underestimate with the real figure probably being somewhere around 150,000 deaths.

There are no such figures for Ukraine but the reports from the battlefields and the extension of graveyards etc indicate a very much greater death toll – probably in the order of at least 3 times that of Russia. Bear in mind that Britain’s total military killed in action in World War 2 amounted to just over a quarter of a million over a period of 5 years. Ukrainian losses are likely double this in half the time.

The reality is that Russia has fought the war as one of attrition with saturation shelling on a 650 mile front with the use of drones and spy satellites that expose the battlefield. It has air superiority, outguns Ukraine with shells at a rate of 7 to one, uses massive glide bombs and has accurate hypersonic missiles which have largely demolished the power grid and which are very difficult to intercept with the current missile defence systems.

It has more battle-hardened infantry. It has increasing superiority in drone warfare. It has the most sophisticated electric warfare system in the world and is working on the s500 air defence system which it maintains can intercept hypersonic missiles. Neither the USA or the UK possess such missile at the moment but it is assumed they will in then future because the US plans to locate them in Germany where there is growing opposition to them.

The western media complacently dismisses such claims BUT they are demonstrated every day on the Ukrainian battlefield as the Russian army advances. It now outnumbers the Ukrainian army which cannot recruit enough willing volunteers to fight. In these conditions who do you think is taking most casualties?

At the start of the war many Ukrainians fled – over 5 million of them to Russia. The idea that everybody in Ukraine supports ‘the west’ is clearly not true. The hope of the west is that Russia will ‘collapse’ as a result of sanctions and western pressure. The sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline to Germany was intended to bankrupt Russia. Instead, it has crippled the German economy. This is not a strategy that is working.

Neither does calling Putin names amount to a strategy. Putin has mass popular support. Recent reports from the western backed Levada institute put it at some 80%. Does this indicate collapse? People in ‘the west’ may think Putin is a nasty bully. In Russia he is a hero.

The USA has poured tens of billions of dollars into Ukraine but despite this, Russia is winning the war. The UK has pledged £3billion a year to Ukraine while seeking cuts to the British armed forces and has recently sent Stormshadow cruise missiles capable of striking deep into Russia.

This has led to retaliation with an Intermediate Ballistic Missile with multiple conventional war heads that has destroyed a missile production facility in Dnipro, and which can hit anywhere in Europe and which ‘the west’ has no defence against at all. Russia could literally destroy any military facility in the UK and the only response that we could offer would be to escalate to nuclear retaliation. The message to any rational organisation should be clear.

The fiction in most media in the UK is that brave little Ukraine is holding its own. It is actually being torn to shreds and has been used by ‘the west’ to try and weaken Russia and disrupt the developing alliance between Russia and China. Sanctions have backfired and driven China and Russia closer together: they are becoming increasingly economically and militarily interdependent and have almost certainly shared missile technology which has transformed modern warfare and in which they lead the world making ‘power projection’ with aircraft carriers a thing of the past. If we keep antagonising these two powers then we will suffer.

The majority of non-western countries in the world are opposed to the economic and military domination of the USA, and we are seeing more and more countries align themselves with the BRICS group which supports the UN charter rather than the ‘rules based order’ of the USA. Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has been judged illegal but to say it was ‘unprovoked’ is simply not the case. This is why, outside of the ‘western world’, Russia is NOT isolated.

The USA spends more than China and Russia on Defence BUT it has much bigger commitments. China has one overseas base and Russia 21, mainly in than old Soviet Union area. The USA has some 800 and Britain 30. This is where much of the military budgets actually go.

The kind of contempt for Russia that has been fed to the British people by the media to maintain the fiction that Ukraine is winning is to justify the huge amount of money we are giving to it. We SHOULD be asking what are we doing in Ukraine?

The idea that we are ‘defending democracy’ is not serious. Ukraine is dominated by corrupt politicians and has banned all those that question the war. This is about global dominance based on a declining US Empire.

Will Trump make any difference? Trump is what people in the US call a ‘Blowhard’ and bully. In my view unless he decides to stop the war immediately, he is likely to threaten to escalate it under the impression that Russia will bend to such threats.

Vladimir Putin may or may not be a nice man. That is not the prime qualification needed for being President of Russia or any other country. Can you really see him bending to Trump. Would YOU like to play poker against Putin?

We need to step back from this now. British policy is putting us directly in harm’s way.