Is there a way to resolve what has happened in and to Ukraine to the satisfaction of the major parties involved?  Supposedly the Italians offered a plan, but it’s gone nowhere.  The Ukrainian negotiators in Turkey had something on paper, but that ended abruptly.

There is a way to stop the war, and gain a better, more compact, more independent, more prosperous and more Swiss-like Ukraine, surrounded by better neighbors too.  Far from the front lines of battle, Zelensky and Biden, and the neocons and MICIMATT grifters who support them, stand in the way. They believe dead Ukrainians can help project US power – what’s left of it – eastward.

The desired end-state should be an improvement over the previous status quo. This means a Ukraine that is well-led, has free speech and rule of law, and not permeated with political and financial corruption.

The eastern Republics recognized by Russia a day before the invasion, those heavily Russian populated territories that were promised autonomy under Minsk II but instead faced Ukrainian army attacks and civil rights abuses, have now been absorbed by Russia administratively.  Before and during the invasion, many of these Russian-speaking Ukrainians were transported into Russia on buses, and will return home sooner and in better shape than those in Poland and the rest of Europe.

The desired end-state should return autonomy and self-rule to these republics, whether under the umbrella of the Russian Federation or not.

A better smaller and more “Ukrainian” Ukraine, who are neighbors to some version of a Novorossya already exists on the ground.  How will these entities relate to each other?

The desired end-state is that these two, or more, entities relate to each other peacefully and profitably, much as so many other European states do.

Did not the United States under Clinton 30 years ago, NATO and the United Nations, fight in the former Yugoslavia for the exact same thing – smaller, demographically and culturally uniform independent states, ironically risking a direct confrontation with Russia and China in their zeal for “democracy?”  We know the aims of the US elites have not changed in three decades – why shouldn’t the emergence of several new republics in the former territory of Ukraine be consistent with past western warmongering and diktat?

The desired end-state in Ukraine should at least be as fair or unfair as what was done in the former Yugoslavia, and it should be far shorter in duration and destruction, less corrupt, more transparent.

But can NATO and the US – intent on controlling Russia and her bounty, expanding the Davos global serf model to 12 more time zones as a means of resolving the coming collapse of the petrodollar, and to salvage a US oligarchy that has written $230 Trillion in bad checks – be satisfied with such an end-state for Ukraine?

This indeed is the problem, one that Putin seems to have long understood.  Faced with NATO expansion and the US/NATO 2030 vision, we hearken back to Austin Powers and Goldmember, as the crazed Belgian blurts out, “Then there is no pleasing you!”

And there is indeed no pleasing NATO, that tool of a century of US-European contracted colonialism, whereby the US seeks to control the economies and wars of Europe.

The desired end-state logically includes the gutting and collapse of NATO – something long overdue, as many have noted, given the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991.  Without NATO, its existence and its actions, as a wholly US-driven and-funded organization, we would already have achieved the desired end-state in Ukraine – a not particularly corrupt, federated republic in its own right, instead of a domestically intolerant tool of regional antagonism and a target of phased regime changes, to meet US and NATO diktats and desires. Without NATO, there would have been no Russian invasion.

The question becomes, as it was thirty years ago, how do you end an organization that has no useful purpose, and in this case, one that has since demonstrated massive waste of resources, military failure, human calamity, political warmongering, and environmental harm on an annual basis?

Like most things long past their usefulness, be it an unused bridge or an empty house, they persist as they decay, and then one day, they are unrecognizable.  Collapse of useless organizations likewise occurs in two ways, “Gradually, then suddenly.”  Hemingway called it in 1926.

NATO has gradually become a noose around the necks of its very members, a noose that exuberant Finnish and Swedish politicians seem ready to place their own necks within, but a noose nonetheless.  Witnessing the senseless urge to be a member of a bankrupt organization, projecting the unfocused and disorganized military force of bankrupt nations, overwhelmingly responsive to the crazed fantasies of just one of its most bankrupt members – I’d say we are not too far from “suddenly.”

The compulsive and frenetic cupboard-emptying by NATO member countries of their excess military equipment into a big black hole of a Ukrainian war machine speaks to a metastasized strategic handicap, a remnant of a massive stroke in the NATO medulla.  The patient may become immobilized, conscious but unable to move, a medical state known as “locked in.”  Is this NATO’s problem?

Whatever it is, it’s time to pull the plug.  When most of Europe is secretly jealous of Hungary, instead of Germany or France, a sea change among the people has already happened.

There are those who prefer long wars, totalitarian governments culturing misinformed and disarmed populations, and state manipulation of food and energy to satisfy a defined vision – they meet at Davos, arriving in private jets, drinking and dining as if they owned everything.  But they do not fight for anything, and they do not stand for anything, and are more sheep than wolf, more rabbit than fox, more mouse than cat.

The desired end-state for Ukraine is whatever these particular people fear the most.  We got a hint of it when they recoiled and raged at their own 98 year old icon, fellow traveler and war criminal, Henry Kissinger, when he uttered what any man on the street could see – Humpty Dumpty cannot be put back together again.

People actually can live in peace, politicians don’t have to be wholly owned subsidiaries of foreign governments, the world can be richer and more beautiful if it spent less on bombs and bullets.  If concessions that are already facts, foster concession stands, commerce, peace, and life, it’s a win.

But the bold nonsense coming from the mouths of Western politicians, and funneled accordingly from the mouth of a compromised Ukrainian comedian are worth a critique.  Biden is reported to be upset at the anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian death march language of his two main spokesmen, his military chieftain and his diplomatic sous-chef.  That’s not what I meant at all, says Brandon Prufrock.  At least Biden, in his compromised mental state, has spokesmen he can chastise.

One wonders about the dynamics of the drab-green t-shirted Zelensky and the more traditionally uniformed Lt General Valery Zaluzhny and chief diplomat in a suit Dmytro Kuleba.  Perhaps they are all without doubts and willing to die for a dream. There is certainly something romantic and powerful about fighting a great enemy – Hemingway understood this well, and it even comes through in “The Old Man and the Sea.”

My take on Hemingways’s last novel is I have caught a great fish and in that achievement, have first destroyed, and then decimated it – with the help of nature and flat-eyed sharks, to whom I am nothing.

Will that be the epitaph for the Ukrainian experiment?  Or just Zelensky’s?

The Best of Karen Kwiatkowski