You knew this.*
In real time.
From The Times of London, May 2:
Ralph Goff, a former chief of operations at the agency, says Biden’s White House did not give Kyiv the weapons to drive out Russia for fear of nuclear war
After Vladimir Putin’s masked commandos captured Crimea in the winter of 2014, the CIA’s chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia, based at Langley, tried to warn his superiors of what was coming next.
“I was trying to ring the alarm bell that the seeds of World War Three are being sown in the Donbas right now and we need to do something about it,” said Ralph Goff, a six-time former station chief who spent three decades in America’s foreign intelligence agency. “But there were other priorities.”
In March this year, Goff, now in his sixties, had been preparing to take over as the CIA’s chief of clandestine operations, in an effort to reform the agency and make it less risk-averse.
That was until President Trump’s administration got wind of the plan and put a stop to it. “I think people close to the president thought, ‘Who is this guy, who does he think he is?’, and went and looked and saw I wasn’t one of their people and they said, ‘No, we don’t approve’, ” he told The Times in an interview from Paris.
“Politics definitely played a role there but, what are you going to do. They can pick who they want,” he said, adding that the decision may have been because of his views on Ukraine.
When Goff got the call to say his appointment had been blocked, Trump had already appointed the political loyalists Kash Patel and Dan Bongino to run the FBI and Tulsi Gabbard, who has defended President Putin in the past, as director of national intelligence.
Goff, meanwhile, was a vocal supporter of Ukraine. Since retiring from the agency in October 2023, he has travelled there several times.
Looking back, Goff, who speaks five languages including Russian, believes the big war that started in February 2022 might have been stopped early on if the US and its allies had given Ukraine the weapons it needed from the beginning.
What transpired instead, he believes, was a deliberate strategy to give Ukraine the arms it needed to fight — but not enough to defeat Putin’s army, because of fears the Russian leader would use nuclear weapons if he got close to losing.
“Had we equipped the Ukrainians at that time with proper weaponry, they might have been able to drive the Russians all the way out of the country. It didn’t happen. It set the stage for this longer, protracted, drawn out, meat grinder war that we are witnessing today,” Goff said.
He said President Biden and his allies allowed Putin to dictate the terms of the conflict and were nervous about sending Ukraine the equipment it needed at the right time because of fears “he will go nuclear”.
Goff added: “[They] allowed themselves to be bamboozled by Vladimir Putin and his nuclear-sabre rattling. So they gave the Ukrainians this weaponry but they never gave them enough to win. They only gave them enough to bleed.”
It is a view shared by some in the heart of the UK government, but no one dares air it publicly.....
....MUCH MORE
*Starting two weeks before Russia invaded:
February 8, 2022 (pre-invasion):
The RAND Corporation Blueprint For Forcing Putin To Over-Extend Himself
I hope that the U.S. or NATO or whoever commissioned this study didn't pay a lot for it, it's basically the strategy that Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came up with in the early 1980's although the details do differ. The tactical components of the RAND plan are:
1. Arming Ukraine ;
2. Increase support for jihadists in Syria;
3. Promoting regime change in Belarus;
4. Exploiting tensions in the South Caucasus;
5. Reducing Russian influence in Central Asia;
6. Rivaling the Russian presence in Transnistria.
....MUCH MORE
The study is from 2019, its basic idea is to get Russia to overextend itself both militarily and more especially financially.
On January 12, 2022 Victoria Nuland showed this approach is top-of-mind in the Biden Administration. From Interfax Ukraine:
Nuland: I'm going to let Russians speak for themselves how long they can financially back placement of troops near Ukraine
U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland did not make assumptions about how long the Russian Federation can afford to keep a large grouping of forces near Ukraine.
"I am going to let the Russians speak for themselves," she said, answering a question at a State Department briefing about "how long you think Russia can financially back the placement of troops along the Russia-Ukrainian border."
Nuland also said the transfer of a large group of forces to the border with Ukraine was not a cheap operation.
"These kind of deployments, hundred thousand troops out of barracks and on the Ukrainian border are extremely expensive, as is the deployment of this kind of weaponry in the cold winter," she said.
At the four-week mark, March 22, 2022
The U.S. Is Implementing The RAND Corporation Strategy To Cripple Russia
....The U.S. goal is not peace in Ukraine.
The U.S. goal is regime change in Moscow, and in furtherance of that objective the U.S. is ready to fight to the last Ukrainian.
Emphasis in original.
Followed by
August 1, 2022None of the electorate in the NATO countries voted for another of these inconclusive, forever wars, so profitable for a select few and so costly in life and treasure for regular people. Surely no one in the developing nations signed on to pay for sanctions with their food budget. It is time to figure out a) What our goals are and b) What the hell we are doing, period and in furtherance of those goals. This isn't some game of RISK with let's try this, or let's try that and no consequences at the end of the night. Since the Maidan coup in 2014 the West has had eight years to plan for this.
Do it or don't do it; because trying to finesse a halfway reaction is nuts.
As the philosopher asked the generals and armaments producers some time ago:"When was the last time you b****es won a war?"
"No holidays for Ukraine: Financial needs increase"
The EU has to either go all-in or call a halt to what they are currently doing.December 21, 2023This halfway stuff does not work for anyone but the arms merchants and is just plain evil in terms of lives lost and livelihoods ruined. As the BSD's used to say: "Go big or go home."....
Industrial Disease: "The U.S. Can Afford a Bigger Military. We Just Can’t Build It"
For at least six months after it became apparent the Western strategy for Ukraine was to dribble enough armaments into the battle to slow the Russian takeover of the eastern third of Ukraine, but not enough for Ukraine to win, we were posting on this weird approach to war....
Oh My God, What Are The Ukrainian Generals Doing?
They are ordering their men to attack defense-in-depth without air cover and 1/10th the artillery the troops need....
