US and Russia Plan Truce to Cement Putin’s Gains in Ukraine

Two bully countries fuelled by the stupid and ‘tough’ coordinate to carve up their lessers without inclusion.

I mean, that was always the plan, going back to the '91 breakup of the USSR. We've seen the process repeated from Bulgaria to Poland to Hungary to the former Yugoslavian states. Rigged elections, media consolidation, de-liberalization, ethnic antagonism egged on by fascist revanchists, ethnic cleansing, foreign intervention, and then expropriation of anything of value.

Ukrainians had clung to their domestic socialist industrial capacity for too long, so we had a nice war to bust them up and saddle them with enormous debts. But now Zelensky's government has served its purpose. Western Ukraine's been partitioned out to the US oligarchs. Eastern Ukraine's been cleared out for a new Russian Lebensraum. All the young men have been press-ganged into abysmal, abusive unpaid jobs and all the young women have been swept up for export to the sweatshops and brothels.

Mission Accomplished.

Same shit we did in Iraq and Syria and the rest of the Levant. To Haiti and the Philippines and Argentina and Liberia, too. Same thing we've been trying to do to Cuba and Venezuela and Vietnam and Brazil and Mexico for the last 50 years.

Capitalism grinding away humanity in pursuit of profit. The only thing we failed to do was fully automatize the killing.

This is trump’s MO. He did the same thing with Afghanistan, meeting with just the Taliban and leaving the Afghan government out of the negotiations.

It's a lesson they learned from Israel: make inacceptable demands. When the enemy predictably says no deal, you can point to that, then turn to the world and say: "See? That's what you get for trying. Now we can carve them up with a good conscience."