your claim to omniscience is annoying. read the my 1st sentence. i said IF you believe Macgregor's take and his #s then a lot of what he says follows. if you doubt them,then put yours out there. you still won't commit to an opinion on why we are doing what we are. if you think the reasons are in error,OK. what do you believe the real reasons for our deep state's motivations are? it sounds like you believe that what we have sent re mil gear and ammo were outdated. OK,sounds likely. sending it was not a small $ amount. the intel support,space based targeting are freebies? the cash? the mansions and Bugattis? so,you say that the 60 bil guess is wrong by how much? $1 is too much.
the assertion that Putin didn't go during Trump #1 and waited for Biden to get in is pure conjecture. proof or some evidence for that? if so,then he really blew it starting something when the MIC was in full control of the admin. fact is,what could Trump have done? send bullets? sanctions? a nuc strike? my point is we have no biz sending anything to anywhere in Europe,never have.
agree Uke 1.2 mil KIA seems a stretch. think i saw on MSM somewhere that Rus KIA is 900K. that sounds a bit over blown too. we will never know with any certainty. for the US,it doesn't matter.
if Putin is empire building so what? Stalin did too. didn't last long and keeping it under harsh control didn't work long. take a look at the history of empires. many,esp multi culturals,don't have a great track record. i'll never see any risk to US if that stays out of west.hem. and if we have a strong milit defense in place. as fast as today's world is,i don't see an empire being a good idea or a success. our try for 1 has been a real rat fuck.
I’ve stated my perspective many time here as to why the US policy on Ukraine is what it is and has changed depending on WH. I have never claimed omniscience, just that I’ve been paying very close attention to Ukraine for 3 decades now, on top of the prior 2 decades when they were part of the USSR.
There are more actors than “the deep state”, and multiple deep states. Russia has its interests, Ukraine and Eastern Europeans have theirs, and Western Europe has something different. All are separately-focused. Then there’s the US.
US
Since 1992, the US has been in a constant state of withdrawal from Europe. My family lived there during the Cold War in the early 1980s where you couldn’t trip without running into a USAF base like Spangdahlem, Ramstein, Bitburg, Hahn, Frankfurt Rhein-Main, Sembach, Wiesbaden, and Zweibrücken.
In 1992, the US said, “It’s the peace dividend! We don’t need to spend on European defense anymore like we’ve done, because the Soviet threat is gone.” I and the circles I was in did not agree with this assessment, because we actually knew the history of Russia and how it treated all of its neighbors. To us, it was only a matter of time, even though we hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Sadly, we were right, and the weak-minded peaceniks made the world more dangerous by cutting defense.
If you noticed, no US President has made foreign policy a major campaign platform since 1992. It has always been about the economy, jobs, and domestic issues since that time.
The US also has had Russian moles and double agents woven into its young Intelligence and political sectors at least since the 1930s, with tons of compromising levers used against politicians and bureaucrats as a way for Russia to balance out the lack of engagement between the US and Russia in trade, as well as mitigate the US’s unmatched military and political might.
EU
The EU is a gaggle of weak politicians from socialist parties who have been working to remove the sovereignty of the member states, and surrender them to the central EU parliament, which gets its marching orders from globalist actors who are clearly not humanitarian, but devilish in nature. Legacy EU proponents were focused on the trade union and economic motives. Notice how the shift to climate change, mass immigration of savages, and energy policies has made the EU more reliant on Russian Oil and NG though, while degrading European defenses?
Most of the political parties in Europe were seeded with Soviet assets generations ago. Even NATO HQ was seeded with Soviet assets, and the German BND was headed by one of the biggest double agents of all, Reinhardt Gehlen.
The Europeans, except for Finland and Poland, followed suit by cutting defense spending as well, fundamentally undermining their industrial capacity to make modern, relevant combat systems, especially in the aerospace sector.
NATO
NATO is broken down into 4 main camps now:
1. US/Canada/UK/Norwegian/Danish alliance
2. German, French, Belgian, Dutch, Italian Alliance
3. Eastern European post-Soviet collapse alliance, with Poland as the largest member of that group
4. Post-2022 members Finland and Sweden
Group 3 came begging and screaming willing to do whatever it took to join NATO, because they knew Russia resurges and they catch the brunt of Russian aggression historically. Eastern Europeans can’t afford to forget history, and all the families have directly-connected losses of family members to Russian aggression, many of whom are still missing to this day (mine included).
Putin planned to re-take any former Russian-occupied nations as part of his internal strategic vision for Russia, to re-assert Russian strength and its “rightful place in the world”. This was internal to the Russian foreign ministry, while talking about peace and non-aggression openly as Putin needed to re-build Russian military capacity using energy revenue from inflated oil/NG prices, after decades of managing the warped energy policies within Europe to cut off their own sources under the guise of the fake climate change crisis.
Every US President worked with or stayed out of Putin’s way in those efforts, except Trump. Every US President refused to send weapons to Ukraine, except Trump. Some US Presidents worked with Putin secretly to disarm Ukraine, in preparation for Putin’s long-term vision of occupying and controlling Ukraine.
The Clintons were on Russian payroll, Obama was on payroll, and Biden was on payroll dating back to 1972. Bushes were more influenced by China, but none of them would help Ukraine with modern weapons sales until Trump in March of 2018.
This conflicts diametrically with what has been reported about the US meddling in Ukrainian elections. The US and EU openly supported fair and free elections in Ukraine, while Putin subverted the elections with puppets. Remember that Yanukovych’s first election in 2004 was found to have been rigged with ballot-stuffing, electioneering, and other typical Democrat/Communist tactics. It wasn’t until 2010 when Putin finally got him into the Presidency.
By 2014, as Putin realized he was losing Ukraine with his puppet Yanukovych being protested for 4 months with Euromaiden after he signed Putin’s Russia-Eurasia Economic Pact in Dec 2013, he started to build the insurance policy through the Obama WH, using VP Biden’s son, Hunter as a board member of Russian-owned Burisma. Putin could not afford for Burisma’s money-laundering schemes to be exposed by a genuine Ukrainian President. He also annexed Crimea once Yanukovych fled and invaded the Donbas with Russian Army forces, as documented by their own soldiers who didn’t turn off location services on their phones. He lied about this repeatedly, that there were no Russian Army in Donbas
US policy under Obama was to let this happen, and still coerce NATO partners to deny the transfer of weapons to Ukraine. The US WH was working along with Putin until something unexpected happened in US politics. A person who wasn’t blessed-off by both political parties made it into the WH, Donald Trump.
Trump’s policy on Ukraine was a 180˚ reversal from Obama, Bush, and Clinton-where the focus was on disarming or ignoring Ukraine. Especially after Putin tested Trump’s resolve at Khasham in Syria in Feb 2018, Trump sent huge shipments of modern advanced missiles and weapons to Ukraine, breaking US policy trends since the 1990s. Trump also threatened Putin with something still unmentionable, that Putin better not FO in Ukraine. Trump also collapsed Russia’s GDP growth with US unleashed energy policy.
With the election steal of 2020, with massive Democrat/CPUSA/DSA interference and election-rigging to get Putin’s compromised Biden into the WH, Putin once again enjoyed massive energy net revenues when the WTI and Brent crude prices went back up to levels that supported Russian GDP growth, and a year of Putin’s military build-up. During Biden’s handlers’ first year in the WH, they also denied sale of weapons to Ukraine, reversing the Trump policy.
I just double-checked the US DSCA website, where all Foreign Military Sales orders are published. Nothing for Ukraine in 2021 under Biden, and nothing but non-standard ammunition to Ukraine until April 2022. Nothing in May, June, July, August, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec 2022. You see a major increase in FMS to existing customers around the world, especially in Eastern Europe, UK, Germany, Taiwan, Finland, etc.
So US foreign policy towards Ukraine under most White Houses has been secretly pro-Russian, help Putin screw over Ukraine. The only major departure from that trend has been under Trump.