Ukraine sadly appears to be getting punished for the color revolution(s) that were fomented within it by the British and American Deep State. Remember Victoria Nuland's "fuck the EU" leaked phone call? Even the Guardian, as left as it is, calling Yanukovych's election free and fair. They had to resort to force to install a regime that would accept IMF terms for access to its resources, rather than the frankly much more fair terms on which Russia had offered a loan. And would being left alone to self govern be better? Sure -- but nobody gets that luxury in the world; everyone deals with the consequences of having resources that are desired by others. Some do it by expending vast resources on building up militaries, and others do it by making concessions to those nations that have done so. The sort of sovereignty some profess to wish for for Ukraine isn't something that exists for anyone except those who don't have anything left to take. With wealth comes a need to defend that wealth.

As for making deals, well...the outcome of the war will perhaps be the best indicator of which one was the wiser option. It seems there was a lot of resentment left over from the Soviet days, particularly from the crowd that uh, sided with Stalin's greatest adversary (and I don't mean Churchill). Russia always had more of a will to defend its position than the Americans and English had to take it, and the rest of Europe is barely a footnote for how diminished they've become anyway. But I'm not sure this is a surprise to those in the halls of western power. Perhaps it was well enough to make Russia commit to an expensive, destabilizing war. Britain has been trying to take down Russia for the last 500 years, and the idea that they'd blink over the deaths of a few million slavs is wishful thinking. To both destabilize Ukraine AND get the other European powers to step up their military spending to form a buffer, and to give up the ambitions Merkel had with trading much more with Russia? Seems like they've largely gotten what they wanted. And America was there to pay for it, as usual.

In Go, if you can make your opponent spend a lot of stones in a small space, while you are able to build up more strong shape in a spread out fashion, that's considered a good trade, as your opponent ends up boxed in, and you end up with a strong position to project power from.That seems to be what has happened in this particular region of the world. Though, geopolitics is a lot more multidimensional and with more players than the relatively simple game of Go. What will be interesting to see is what the longer term ramifications will be to the fact that the sanctions appear to have been an overstep, particularly with regard to the Treasuries and the SWIFT system. Perhaps that's all part of the plan, but if it is, that seems a bit less obvious to me at this point. Looks a lot more like an own goal.

Anyway, I'm grateful that nobody wants me to really weigh in on the overall governance of the world. And I'm grateful that my own country's current administration seems to be finally growing a backbone and refusing to finance Britain's ambitions, at least in this particular matter. Now, if they'd do the same in occupied Palestine, we might be getting somewhere, but I'm not holding my breath on that front. Thankfully, the resolve of the resistance seems to be at least as strong as the Vietnamese had, with better armaments, and likely a more sound ideology and resolve to back it up. It'd be nice to see the bloodshed stop, but given that they're fighting for the hereafter against an army of conscripts fighting for lies they've been sold and promises of stolen land, it does seem evident that at least eventually, they'll emerge victorious. What remains to be seen is how many more resources, and how much worse a position the US ends up getting itself in, to prove it. I'm sure it'll work out for the parasites getting rich off of the war effort though, with their subsidized costs and privatized gains. The only way they stand to lose is to have the money printer torn from them -- and for that, we are here.

Err, I mean, GM.