Trying to find out what is happening in Ukraine

People send me articles contradicting the Western narrative about the Ukraine and often they seem to me to be very misguided.

The idea that Putin did not intend to capture Kiev seems very unlikely. Most people expected him to take most of the country in a couple of weeks. 

No-one knows for sure. David Goldman says Putin was being opportunistic about attacking Kiev. That could be. Fighting street by street is terribly hard.

We really don't know.

Here is a story someone sent me from a left-of-centre blogger called Moon of Alabama. He says that the purpose of the Kherson offensive is to encourage Nato countries to keep giving Ukraine money. I can easily believe that.

It says the offensive has failed, very great numbers of Ukrainian soldiers were killed and what's left of the Ukrainian forces are trapped. I don't see any evidence for that in the blog post, just some links to pages that tell you very little, including one to the Russian Rybar Telegram channel.

Sir Lawrence Freedman says this is the line pushed by Russian bots and I'm sure that's true. 

Presumably if there is any truth in it it can't be kept from us.

Or perhaps it will. Reading between the lines of the latest news the silence about the Ukrainian offensive might mean that the offensive failed and the Ukrainians have gone back to doing what they were doing before. 

I don't trust contrarians but I don't trust the news coverage in the Times, Telegraph and BBC. They repeat Ukrainian press releases without critiquing them. I shall cancel my subscriptions this month to the first two.

Their stories all follow the MI6 line and make it clear that what the reader is meant to feel. Losing faith in sanctions or wanting a negotiated peace is a big danger, readers are told.

Why not let readers make their own judgments?

Because the media are political actors.

And, we know, very unreliable sources of information, even in peacetime.

Here is a very interesting analysis from someone studying for a doctorate in philosophy about the war and how it will end.

First, even with Western support, I don't believe that the Ukrainian armed forces can force the Russians to leave Ukraine or even go back to pre-February 24 lines.

There are many people who know more than me about modern warfare, which is not difficult since I know almost nothing about it, who disagree and think Ukraine will eventually pull it off but that's a case where I choose to dismiss what experts say because it makes no sense.

My argument for this view is very simple, but so far I haven't heard anything in reply to it that didn't sound like magical thinking. The gist is that I don't think Ukraine has enough offensive weapons to do large-scale counteroffensives, nor that it will any time soon.

Russia has turned out to be much less strong than we thought, but is very, very slowly winning at present and is too strong to be driven out of the territories she has gained by Ukraine.

I realise that many experts like Sir Lawrence Freedman are emotionally involved in what they understandably see as a battle between good and evil. I suspect that this affects their judgment. The wish is father to the thought.

Anyway, people have had enough of experts.

As Henry Kissinger said in the Washington Post on March 5th: 

"For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one."

Putin is a wicked man but he isn't Hitler, any more than Saddam, Milosevic or Nasser were. I am not sure that Hitler originally wanted to conquer the whole of the continent, but Putin is concerned simply about Ukraine. 

A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Nazism, and the thing about spectres is that they probably don't exist.

Like most wars (think the original Crimean war) this one is happening by mistake, big mistakes by Putin but not only by him.