Russia's Ukraine strategy, European security, and preparations for a wider war
Glenn Diesen interviews Stanislav Krapivnik, a former US Army officer originally from Donbas who returned to Russia, on Russia's military escalation in Ukraine, the closure of Black Sea access, and Russia's long-term preparations for potential conflict with Europe.
Summary
Glenn Diesen speaks with Stanislav Krapivnik about Russia's strategic escalation in the Ukraine conflict, focusing on the closure of Ukraine's Black Sea access, the systematic destruction of Ukrainian logistics infrastructure, and Russia's broader military buildup. Krapivnik argues that Russia has now definitively ended any hope of negotiated compromise with the West — what he calls the "Spirit of Anchorage" — and has moved to a posture of full economic and military pressure on Ukraine. He contends that Russia is manufacturing between 1,200 and 1,500 main battle tanks per year and is operating at 7% of GDP on military spending, with the capacity to scale far higher, while NATO collectively produces fewer than 50 tanks per year. Krapivnik also argues that there is no trustworthy interlocutor in the West with whom Russia could negotiate a durable security arrangement, and that Russia has been seeking a European security architecture for over 140 years — a goal consistently blocked by Western powers.
Krapivnik discusses at length the role of foreign mercenaries in Ukraine, estimating Polish losses at over 10,000 and noting significant French casualties including paratroopers and Foreign Legion fighters. He argues that Russia should have been placing mercenary bodies in caskets outside embassies, and notes claims by Rada members that 40–60% of Ukrainian assault brigades should ultimately be foreigners — a sign, in his view, of Ukraine's deepening manpower crisis.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Russia's historical struggle for maritime access and the Black Sea
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. Stanislav Krapivnik joins us again — a former US Army officer originally from Donbas who returned to Russia some sixteen years ago. Thank you for coming back on the program.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Thank you. Sixteen years.
Glenn Diesen: Sixteen years. Man, time flies. A human life should be at least 150 to 200 years — fifteen years just flies by.
Stanislav Krapivnik: It does.
Glenn Diesen: Your background from the US military as well as from Russia gives you very interesting insights and perspectives on two countries that have had their historical differences. One of those differences — or conflicts — is that traditionally the main security concern for Russia in developing its economy, ever since the breakup of Kievan Rus, has been reliable access to waterways. And on the other side, the dominant maritime powers — first the UK, then the US — always gained a great deal of power from controlling important sea lanes, which are the arteries of international trade and also essential for moving soldiers. This is why both the British and Americans have always used naval blockades, or at least unreliable maritime corridors for adversaries, as a key containment strategy.
We do see that the US is losing some of this control now. The Chinese look like they will eventually be successful at breaking out of the dual island chains. Iran now controls the Strait of Hormuz. And while a key objective of pulling Ukraine into the NATO orbit back in 2014 was obviously to expel Russia from the Black Sea — or at least significantly weaken its position there — we now see a very new development: the Russians have put a blockade on Ukraine's access to the Black Sea. And not only that — the Russians carried out their biggest strike so far on Odessa's ports, also striking ships trying to enter or leave. This is becoming easier for Russia as well, given that the Ukrainians are struggling greatly with a lack of air defenses. How significant is this, and what do you see as the wider strategy of Russia?
Stanislav Krapivnik: You're right about the ports. When the Russian principalities — particularly the Principality of Moscow — started growing faster than the others and received the yarlyk, or the flag of the Golden Horde, to collect taxes, which made it the top dog, one of its main objectives was to bring the Novgorod Republic and its vast territories under Moscow's control. Novgorod was part of the Hanseatic League through the river channels into Lake Ladoga. Ladoga happened to be the first capital of Rus, Novgorod the second, Kiev only the third, and Vladimir the fourth. Moscow became the fifth — or perhaps the sixth — capital. But they needed Novgorod to escape being completely landlocked.
They held a piece of the Volga River, but the problem with the Volga is that sooner or later, going far enough south, you hit open steppe — and at that point it was open steppe, with nomads and raiders. Getting out to the Black Sea took enormous effort. The Volga, as we know, empties into the Caspian Sea, which is also a trade route, but then you'd have to portage ships over to the Don and go out to the Black Sea that way. It was a very difficult route. So yes, Novgorod was the main outlet. This is why, in the end, the sum of capitals — St. Petersburg — was built as a major port. Russia already had Arkhangelsk before St. Petersburg, but the problem with Arkhangelsk is that it spends almost half the year blocked by ice — at least four to five months — so it's not a reliable port, and it's far too far north.
So yes, that has always been the biggest weakness of Russia. When the Maidan revolution of dignity — if you can call it that with a straight face — happened in Ukraine, Crimea was supposed to become America's aircraft carrier, able to push Russia out of the Black Sea by closing the Sea of Azov and threatening the Russian ports there, as well as Anapa and Novorossiysk. We know how history went. Crimea went straight back to Russia, because Crimea is Russian like all these other lands.
When this conflict started, my best guess as to why Russia didn't close all the ports — and why it played the grain deal game for a while — is that Russia was still hoping for some kind of negotiation: with Trump, with the Europeans, or with the other side. They were open to something. Russia would hit Odessa on and off in retaliation for sea drone strikes, but they wouldn't do major damage and they wouldn't close the port. Now Ukraine has seven ports in the west — Port Yuzhne, which is Port South, north of Odessa; the Odessa port itself, which is a huge port; and five other ports either on the Black Sea or the Danube, three of which are on the Danube.
Putin got the green light from Parliament two years ago to go heavy. He didn't. He wasn't doing the mass economic damage that's now being done. I think that was because there was still hope that with Trump, maybe some kind of negotiations were possible. If nothing else says that the Spirit of Anchorage has finally been euthanized — something that should have been done two minutes after they parted — it's this. That zombie has been put down. We see this because Russia has now closed the western Black Sea. It was always able to do that. It chose not to. And when the gloves finally came off, what we see is a systematic destruction of all the port facilities — not pinprick strikes or a slap on the wrist, but absolute destruction of those ports and everything going in and out of them.
MSC — the biggest shipping company in the world — said there is no way in hell any of their ships are going in there. And there's probably nobody willing to insure any ship going in. It's a suicide run. Any ship that does go in is bringing critical military equipment and has to race against time before it gets hit, trying to unload before it gets sunk. Russia went heavy. It went very heavy, and it showed that it can escalate far further than NATO is able to escalate through its proxies.
Ukraine has huge problems, and NATO has a nice big fat price tag it's going to have to pay. To the EU taxpayers, the American taxpayers, the Canadian taxpayers — be generous. Be very generous. You don't need medical help. Ukraine needs that money. Your kids don't need new textbooks. Ukraine needs that money. That's $50 billion that Ukraine can no longer export. Never mind the heavy weapons that were being imported — the ones you couldn't sneak across the border inside a civilian automobile.
But this is only part of the problem. For the Black Sea, it's closed. Effectively, very, very closed. That's $50 billion of export market that Ukraine can no longer reach — grain, iron ore, sunflower seeds, oil, and other things. Gone. They were proposing to use the port at Constanța. So Russia started hitting the bridge to Constanța — which, by the way, Zelensky tried to destroy that town to draw NATO into the war and blame it on Russia, as Romanian politicians outside the ruling coalition have stated. But Constanța is only 20% of the volume of Odessa, and that's not counting all the other six ports combined.
What's left is rail. But you can't use rail anymore, because Russia — directly and through Russian partisans working up and down central Ukraine — has now gone fully after everything that looks like a locomotive, churns like a locomotive, pulls like a locomotive. Most of Ukraine's locomotives were electric, so that was already a problem. The rest were diesel, and they're burning. Russia is going very, very heavy against the locomotives. So you can't do it by rail. What's left? Trucks — and that's about 6% of their export capacity. And we remember what happened last time Ukrainian exports went by truck. The Poles, the Slovaks, the Hungarians weren't too thrilled. They were beating Ukrainian drivers at the border, blocking trucks for weeks on end. The lighter produce was rotting. And even though these trucks were supposed to be going to Western Europe, a lot of their produce and wheat was actually being dumped in Eastern Europe, damaging local agriculture. This year's crops in Europe are going to be down 40%. That's hunger — and maybe not whole countries, but lower classes are going to be starving.
Russia's open borders, buffer zones, and the European security architecture
Glenn Diesen: You mentioned before the open plains — this is another security concern for Russia throughout history. It doesn't provide any natural barriers. This was a key problem when NATO toppled the government in Ukraine in 2014 — it essentially put NATO in the same position as Napoleon and Hitler. This is often underestimated in the West, though not by everyone. The former head of MI6, John Sawers, argued in a lecture back in 2015 that Putin probably prays every night for mountain ranges along his borders, making the point that geography has always made Russia vulnerable — a weakness which foreign powers often exploit. This is why Russia's strategic culture has always emphasized buffer zones.
And it's not as if people would say this belongs to a bygone era. There's a WikiLeaks cable from 2008 — one month before NATO met in Bucharest and promised Ukraine future membership against the will of most Ukrainians — in which Tony Blair was making the point that our goal with Russia should be to make it a little desperate with our activities along its borders, and that Russia has to be sown with the seeds of confusion. So the idea of operating on the Russian border — the objective isn't freedom and democracy, but rather: we know this is a vulnerability, we know this is a huge security threat, and these are the buttons we can push. Given this vulnerability, which NATO has taken advantage of to weaken Russia, one shouldn't be too surprised when the idea of buffer zones comes up again in Russian strategic thinking. And it is appearing again, big time. When Putin argues for what they're doing in Sumy and Kursk and possibly soon in Chernihiv as well, it's essentially buffer zones they're talking about. How far will these buffer zones go, in your opinion?
Stanislav Krapivnik: Well, Russian history — yes and no on the barriers. There is a gigantic swamp to the west that you can't really get through, and huge forested areas with lots of smaller swamps. But the problem has always been the south. The south is steppe. It's a highway — a mega-highway from the Ural Mountains all the way into the high plains of central Europe. That's a big problem. Invasions from the south happened — raids by various nomads, and yes, western armies. 1012 AD was the first pan-European invasion of Russia, when the Russian capital at that point was Kiev. So yes, they went for Kiev across more or less open areas. It would have been much more difficult to take Novgorod through the forests and swamps, but they tried that too — the Teutonic Knights, the Swedes.
Now, Blair was operating in 2008 Russia, probably with the mindset that it would always be that way. Half-wit politicians always have that problem. They exist in a perpetual present state. They can't look forward and say: one of these days — maybe sooner than we think — Russia is going to be back on her feet and have the biggest army in Europe. Maybe that's not the smartest thing to provoke.
Because when a major power is in a state of apprehension — especially when its southern areas are under threat, from Voronezh down to the Caucasus Mountains — the thing any major power would do is destroy that threat, especially when the people whose land is hosting that threat happen to also be Russians.
How far will Russia go? I've been asked this on Russian television and on American programs. I said: I don't know — London, Paris, Berlin? And there were nervous laughs. But think about it this way, and everybody should think about it this way. Russia takes Kharkiv. What do the people living in Kharkiv become? They become Russian citizens. Kharkiv is now being shelled from Poltava. What does Russia have to do? It has to defend its citizens. It goes further west. It takes Poltava, takes eastern Poltava. They're at the Dnipro River. What do those people become? Russian citizens. Now they're being shelled from the other side of the Dnipro. What's Russia going to do? It's going to cross the Dnipro, destroy the people shelling it, and probably make a new buffer — but the people in that buffer become Russian citizens. Russia is going to keep going until it gets to somebody that doesn't want to shoot. Whether that's whatever is left of Ukraine in the central portion, whether that's Poland, whether that's Berlin, whether that's London — it's going to be all up to the people on the other side. Do they want war or not? If they want war, Russian tanks will roll that way.
Russia is preparing for a major war. Let's not kid ourselves. Everything these European politicians voice every single day is heard loud and clear. Russia is manufacturing between 1,200 and 1,500 main battle tanks every year for the last three years. Plus it's upgrading the T-72 chassis — taking off the turrets and putting T-90 turrets, the most modernized turrets, onto that chassis, because the T-90 is basically built on a T-72 chassis anyway. And those numbers don't count the upgraded tanks either. Those tanks aren't coming onto the battlefield in Ukraine. There are about 4,000 new battle tanks with laser-guided, tube-fired missiles — fired out of the main gun tube and guidable — that have been manufactured and are ready in storage. Maybe a lot more, if you go by conservative numbers. Ready for war with Europe. Europe — including the US — NATO manufactures fewer than 50 tanks a year at this point.
And I'm not talking about self-propelled artillery systems, heavy missiles, fighter planes, fighter-bombers, heavy bombers. Russia is at 7% of GDP for the military right now. That's not a military budget. A military budget is between 30 and 40%. It will go there if NATO is stupid enough. The fact that it hasn't says a lot more about the leadership than about its ability to flex. So hopefully Russia doesn't need to go that far. Bulls are welcome to Western Ukraine — just agree you're not going to shoot at Russia, and Russia won't shoot at you. It's that easy. Whether NATO or the EU has enough common sense — I have my doubts. Very big doubts.
Glenn Diesen: What you're describing sounds very much like the 19th-century expansion toward Central Asia, because what the Russians did there as well — when they built the railways, they had a town or city, they had to protect it, they needed a buffer, and then eventually they had to protect the buffer too. Historians tend to agree that much of this was what you could call defensive expansionism — expansion motivated to a large extent by security concerns along long, porous borders that were difficult to defend. This is essentially the consensus among historians about Russia's main security concern: the long, undefended border that requires strategic depth, which helped against Napoleon and Hitler. One shouldn't be surprised that this is what they're seeking to protect.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Glenn, I'd add to that — the misconception about the Soviet Union was always that it didn't have a foreign policy, that Stalin wanted world revolution. He never did. Stalin was actually the most rational of all of them. Trotsky wanted world revolution. Stalin wanted socialism in one nation. They helped fund some revolutionary groups here and there, but that wasn't the aim of foreign policy. If you actually look at Stalin's foreign policy — post-Lenin, post-Trotsky — it wasn't much different from the foreign policy of the Tsars. And it's not that much different from the foreign policy of present-day Russia. They wanted a European security infrastructure.
Russia has been pushing for a European security infrastructure since 1886. Nicholas II proposed the League of Nations. Nicholas II was pushing for a pan-European infrastructure. Did it happen? We had World War I, so no. The British played a major role in ensuring World War I would happen, and then got sucked into it themselves.
With World War II — everybody remembers the Ribbentrop Pact with the Germans. What nobody remembers is that it was a last-ditch effort to forestall a war, and that the British, the French, and the Poles had all signed the exact same kind of agreement with Hitler years earlier. The Poles signed in 1934. Nobody wants to remember that. Stalin for a long time was trying to organize a defensive alliance against Hitler, but the British and French dragged their feet, and the Poles were the obstacle making sure it wouldn't happen. They were Hitler's allies. Piłsudski and Hitler were very close. If you look at the archival photos when Piłsudski died and was being buried — during the church service, to the right of the casket on the front row, right beside it in the position of honor, sits the entire leadership of the Third Reich, Hitler first and foremost.
Russia was asking in 1948 — post-World War II — to join NATO when it found out NATO was being organized. Stalin didn't quite grasp at that moment that NATO was being organized against him. But that's the point: Russia wanted a structured security organization for Europe. When that failed, the Soviet buffer states in Eastern Europe were created. It was obvious enough that the US and the British were hell-bent on attacking Russia. By the way, declassified documents that came out earlier this year and toward the end of last year — I don't know why it took so long — apparently Soviet intelligence identified that the British and the French were trying to organize an invasion of the Soviet Union, planning to launch in 1941. This is why Chamberlain was trying to convince Turkey to invade through the Caucasus. Russia kept an army group in the Caucasus through almost 1943, just in case the Turks decided to move. Even as things were getting desperate around Moscow, there was still an army group sitting in the Caucasus just in case. The British were planning an invasion through Iran and through Finland.
In 1992, Yeltsin asked to join NATO. In 2000, Putin asked to join NATO. And in December 2021, Putin sent a prepared plan — not the first one — for a security architecture for Europe. We've had two world wars. We may be on the edge of a third because the European leadership — and so many of the people who follow them — are brainless morons who cannot grasp that they are going to be exterminated. They've lost their entire civilization twice over. The golden age of European civilization died in 1914 because they didn't want to live peacefully with Russia. Well, they don't want to live peacefully. They don't want to live. We're heading right back into a repeat of something between World War I and World War II.
The way it's starting, it's starting more like World War II. We'll see if it ends like World War I or World War II. For people who don't know — World War I didn't end. The official war ended, but there were a dozen other wars raging in Central and Eastern Europe and in Turkey for another five years after that. World War II, by contrast, started with lots of localized conflict and grew, but it ended concisely. There was no more fighting after that. We'll see how it goes. But that's the point: Russia has been asking for a concise European security infrastructure for 140 years, and Europe has decided it wants to commit suicide a third time rather than do that.
Ceasefire proposals, mediators, and the closure of the Black Sea
Glenn Diesen: Instead of discussing the European security architecture — which was the path we were supposed to be on, at least revived from 1975 onwards before it was abandoned in the mid-1990s — we're nowhere close to reviving it. However, people are still talking about possible peace agreements, or at least ceasefires. The latest was Turkey, which suggested a ceasefire — not a peace agreement, but a ceasefire. Around the same time, it was announced that Turkey will supply Ukraine with 70 Bayraktar drones. It's very interesting that proposals for peace or ceasefire seem to only come when Ukraine and NATO are on the back foot. Even when there are peace proposals, the Europeans suggest a ceasefire and then propose sending their troops into Ukraine. We see something similar now with Turkey. Russia did not respond unfavorably to this. Do you see any pathway with Turkey, or who would be the most likely mediator if talks were revived? Because it appears that Russia has escalated more than many had expected in Washington, and as things go very wrong, there will predictably be voices calling for something that resembles peace.
Stanislav Krapivnik: The last Turkish ship struck by Ukraine is now being pulled out of port after repairs, to return to service. It was a grain carrier. Erdoğan — because like it or not, he is absolutely in Trump's pocket and has shown himself to be an absolute Trump loyalist on numerous occasions — complains about Israel genociding Palestinians and then sends 57 tankers of oil to Israel. His people are very angry with him right now. He may not be there for much longer. Because even as Ukraine freely shoots at Turkish ships, he's going to supply Ukraine. What do you expect from that leadership?
If you're winning a war, you don't ask for a ceasefire. "We are advancing — let us have a ceasefire," said no general ever. Of course they want a ceasefire because they're losing. They want an air ceasefire because they're losing. They want a sea ceasefire because they're losing. They want a ceasefire along the line of contact because they're losing. They want anything possible to rebuild the Ukrainian army, pump in more Colombian and Brazilian mercenaries, round up Ukrainian men in European cities, and maybe brainwash a few more volunteers in Europe to go die for Zelensky. Plenty of Europeans are dead all over the place. They're running out of room to bury them, but they keep wanting to come. A lot fewer of them these days, but the Colombians seem to be more than willing in mass.
I've said this from day one, and I've said it on Russian television: the Russian government should be taking the bodies of all these mercenaries, placing them in caskets with full dignity, and putting those caskets right outside every single embassy. Come get your citizens, or let them rot there — your choice. Put their flag over it. The Poles lost over 10,000 people. They evacuated most of them to Polish cemeteries while the lines were relatively stable, but there are still plenty picked up by Russian troops as they advanced. There have been several hundred French killed — a lot of them paratroopers, a lot of them Foreign Legion. By all means, in my view, I would have laid them all out in front of every single embassy: here are your citizens, take them back.
Russia did something like that to the British during the Second Chechen War — at a summit, Russia brought in a bag of passports and dumped them out: take your citizens, here are the passports for all of your citizens we killed. That was pretty embarrassing to the British.
They're going to continue pumping in mercenaries. Several members of the Rada have already stated that their aim is for 40 to 60% of the assault brigades to be foreigners. The problem with mercenaries is they don't come to die for you. They come to get money. A dead mercenary doesn't spend his money, and his family probably won't get any of it either. When you want 40 to 60% of your assault brigades — the ones that take the vast majority of casualties — to be foreigners, you've got issues.
They need time. They're out of time. Their fuel infrastructure is destroyed. There have been videos coming out of Kyiv from grocery stores that are empty, because now that America has decided to wage economic war on Russia via Ukraine, Russia started striking all Ukrainian economic targets it hadn't touched for four years — including food warehouses and transportation networks. Welcome to reality.
Russia can escalate a lot faster than the West, up to and including nuclear weapons. That it hasn't is unfortunately taken by the Western elites — from Washington DC to London to Brussels to Berlin — as meaning that Russia is weak and can't do it. It just showed them it can. It shut down the western Black Sea. It destroyed the Ukrainian fuel infrastructure. It's destroyed their rail network, the locomotives. It's hitting their food warehouses. Winter's coming — as the Russian saying goes, winter's not beyond the mountains. What happens to Ukraine when there's no food and no energy and temperatures drop to minus 10 or minus 15, as is normal in at least the northern half of Ukraine? You've got big problems.
Europe, by the way, is not going to be in much better shape. Europe is down to around a 30% fill rate for gas storage — regions that don't have a problem with that are fine, but the rest of them are supposed to be close to 80% right now and they're at 30 to 40%, probably even lower. And food crops this year are going to be 40% lower in volume. So you've got big problems everywhere. Send more money to Zelensky.
Russia's military objectives and the coming election cycle
Glenn Diesen: You and I have spoken a lot before about the concern in Russia that NATO often feels it can escalate with impunity, and the pressure on the Kremlin to retaliate in a more powerful way. To a large extent we're seeing that now — against Ukraine, not against NATO directly, at least yet. Russia seems to have escalated more than many had predicted in the United States. I mentioned the ports before — essentially making Ukraine a de facto landlocked country. The bridge at Odessa has also been struck. So logistics is obviously a key target. We see the Kursk and Sumy buffers expanding. There's talk about possible Russian movements around Chernihiv and a new front there. What do you see happening next? The Russian rhetoric and mood seems to be hardening, accompanied by actions — going after energy, moving more and more into logistics: warehouses, railroads, gas stations, bridges, anything to shut things down. Where do you see Russia heading?
Stanislav Krapivnik: I see Russia heading into an election cycle. The parliamentary elections are in September. Right now United Russia has a supermajority. More likely than not, they're not going to have a supermajority after this. The two other parties are going to gobble up a good chunk of their seats. United Russia will still probably be in the majority, but not a supermajority. So they're going to have a choice of who to form a government with — the Liberal Democratic Party, of which I am a member, which by the way is a misnomer because it's not liberal at all; it's a very conservative party on the right — or the Communists, who are on the left, but left not like left in Europe where it's basically liberal wokeism, but actual left. Both parties are pushing for a much harder answer to the West. Once United Russia doesn't have a supermajority and has to take into consideration what the other two biggest parties out of five in parliament have to say, that's going to change a lot of things.
The military wants a harder strike into the West to teach a lesson. There are a lot of other factors like that. Keep an eye on the elections — that's going to be the big one. And you can see the mood is already changing. Nobody is even considering the West's frantic proposal after proposal after proposal. It gets frantic when they're about to fall.
The way this is going to go, as far as I can tell: the three primary targets right now — primary target number one is the tri-city area of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. It's got an envelopment from the rear, pincer movements north and south, and a forward assault coming in from the east. They're not going to last. There are no other lines to fall back on. What Ukraine has been able to do for the last four years is: any city or town that got taken, they fell back four, five, six kilometers to the next fortified position. There are no more next ones. There are fields. Some small villages here and there that aren't fortified. Nothing.
And when the rains start in mid to late September and those fields turn to mud, and the only way in or out is by paved road — and that entire rear area is already inside Russian aviation, artillery, rocket artillery, and drone control — it's already near impossible to get things in and out. In a month to a month and a half, no one's getting out. It's a morgue. You either surrender or you die. That's the only option these guys are going to have. And that's going to be weighing on their brains right now. It's going to be hitting morale hard. They know that pretty soon there's no getting out. It's already pretty risky trying to get out. In a month and a half, that line of communication is closed. And they've been sacrificed by Zelensky and company to stand and die while the leadership is making money. They all know this. All those Ukrainian troops — except for the most die-hard — know this, and it's shown, because they've refused multiple times to do suicide attacks to try to break the encirclement. They said no and just left. These guys know they're dead men walking right now. No matter what happens — whether Russia takes it before the rains or after — they are dead men walking.
After that, you open up that entire region all the way through to Poltava and Pavlohrad and up into Kharkiv from the south. Russia is already moving from Kupiansk toward Izium — from Kupiansk down to Sloviansk is about 10 kilometers, and you're on the high ground looking down.
The second main target right now is Sumy. Why Sumy? Because Sumy is a major logistics hub. To take Kharkiv, you have to cut Kharkiv off. Kharkiv is already cut off from the north and the east. Sumy cuts it off from the west. If you look at the map of Sumy, you'll see lots of major roads running through it — from Chernihiv, from Kyiv, from Nizhyn. There's one line that goes to Kursk, which is the line they followed when they invaded Kursk and conquered a whole 10 to 12% of the Kursk region for a loss of 80,000 dead, including lots of Americans and Europeans as mercenaries. And there's a big highway that runs to Kharkiv — it feeds Kharkiv from the west. Sumy falls, or Sumy is invested — that's it. You can already cut those logistic routes by drones, by artillery, by diversionary groups. Kharkiv is going to be cut off from every direction except the south. When the tri-city conglomerate falls, Kharkiv is going to be cut off from the south too, a lot faster.
So I think Sumy is number two, running neck and neck with Orikhiv, which is almost encircled but is a stepping stone to Zaporizhzhia — which may fall before that, but the ultimate goal is the upper city. Those are the three main goals right now. At that point, the Ukrainian army east of the Dnipro — if anything is still alive of it — is going to be running for its life to get to the west side of the Dnipro. Kharkiv will be secondary after those other objectives. After the Donbas tri-city objective and Sumy are taken, then you can start developing Kharkiv in a meaningful way. Kharkiv's northeast — Kharkiv is being taken right now and cleared, up to everything east of the Siverskyi Donets River.
Why European leaders continue to avoid diplomacy
Glenn Diesen: I don't understand why the European leaders are still boycotting diplomacy. Even if they hate Russia to their core — if you see that your proxy war is failing and at the point of collapse — I mean, if the past four and a half years were the good times, when the Russians and Ukrainians were bleeding each other and the front lines didn't move much, as the RAND report from 2019 suggested would be the benefit of escalating tensions to bleed Russia of its resources — however, a full-out war could be problematic, because if large strategic territory begins to shift toward Russia, this would not be in our interest. We seem to have reached that point now. And I still don't understand — even if they hate Russia to the core — they must see what's about to happen. Something is escalating. They're not in control of this anymore. Something's going to crack.
I spoke two days ago with George Beebe, the former director for Russia analysis at the CIA, and he was making the point that if we find an agreement on the European security architecture — as you argued the Russians have been asking for for the past 140 years — then it could be a positive-sum gain. Everyone wins: the Russians, the Europeans, and especially the Ukrainians, by not being a frontline state. But it's going to take a long time. You can't discuss a European security architecture overnight. So why wait until everything is falling apart? One doesn't have to make any concession — but not even talking, not even getting the framework in place. I just don't understand. I'd like to think there's some evil plan behind it, but I don't think anyone's behind the wheel anymore. I think it's just nonsense, to be honest. Any final thoughts before we finish?
Stanislav Krapivnik: Wars take on a life of their own. It's much easier to give birth to a war than to put it down. As more crimes are committed — as more crimes against Russian people are committed by America's 40 days of terrorism against Russia, we'll call it what it is — those Ukrainian drones weren't finding targets by themselves. And those drones aren't Ukrainian to begin with. "Ukrainian-launched drones" would be a better way to put it.
Wars take on a political life of their own. The other problem is: who do you trust? Who do you negotiate with? The people who tell you every day they want to murder your country, murder your people, destroy your economy, rip you into 50 little pieces? The people who betrayed you on every other negotiation? Why would you? We're not the Indians getting glass beads. We've got enough glass beads, thank you very much.
There's nobody in Europe you can trust except Fico and maybe Bobi. And neither of those two guys has any weight. Like it or not, Orbán had weight. Orbán's gone. Hungary is now a trumpet of Brussels, slowly being picked apart as it destroys itself. Who? Vučić? Mr. Huggy-Huggy Lovey for Ukraine? Who? And Macron of course isn't part of the EU in that sense. Who do you trust in the EU? Who do you trust in the White House for any kind of negotiations to be held? Either they're going to be held with a Russian rifle at somebody's temple — this is how we're going to negotiate — or they're going to be held when these parasites that rule Europe are removed and other people come in who can be trusted. So far that hasn't happened.
You know what the Russian roulette of prime ministers in Britain has produced? What's changed? It's a matryoshka — they keep getting smaller and weaker, but they're all still playing the same song. Merz is gone — and it's not going to be the AfD. There's going to be another person no better than just another version of Merz, if Merz really does leave on the 10th. We'll live and see.
Even Le Pen — Le Pen is Macron Lite now. She has multiple times said she is all for sending weapons to Ukraine. Can you trust her? Either she's lying to get into power — and then you can't really trust her because which way will she go? — or she really is for sending weapons to Ukraine. Not French soldiers, just weapons. Do you trust her? No, not really.
Who do you trust in the West? There is nobody. How do you build any kind of infrastructure that has to be built on some kind of trust with people that — if you turn your back on them and shake their hand, you check how many fingers and rings you still have? That's what you're dealing with. And basically that's what you're dealing with in Washington. Look at Iran — you've got various people connected to Trump coming out and saying: just say whatever the Iranians want to hear until the elections, and then we can really start bombing them. They're saying this out loud. So again, who do you trust? The entire West is full of psychopathic Epstein elites, and until there are some kind of revolutions — because that's probably what it would take to remove these people — there's no one to trust. The trust is gone. It's gone for generations unless something seriously changes in these European countries.
Finland as a microcosm of European self-harm
Glenn Diesen: In the past we had this tradition of a belt of neutral states going from north to south — a legacy from the Cold War at least. But these days, Finland — which was probably one of the greatest success stories of neutrality — became the largest frontline state. Even the Swiss have kind of abandoned their neutrality. Neutrality is now seen as a weakness, something belonging to politicians of a naive past. The logic you hear from Sweden as well is apparently that now we'll have real security because now we'll be in NATO. Anyway, thank you very much for taking the time.
Stanislav Krapivnik: Let me say one thing about Finland. Finland was the armpit of Europe for a thousand years. It was the kicking boy for the Swedish Empire. Finland joined Russia — it became an autonomous Kingdom of Finland within the Russian Empire. For the first time, they got to rule themselves. They were given education. A stinking fishing village was built into Helsinki by Russian money and Russian engineers. Finns climbed up the ladder in Russian aristocracy and Russian intellectual circles. And then after World War II, instead of being punished for being a German ally — for running concentration camps, murder camps for non-Finnish civilians in Karelia — they were given an easy out: switch sides and all's forgiven. I don't know why Stalin did that, but he did. And they signed a neutrality pact — forever, eternal neutrality — which obviously wasn't that eternal.
So Finland is now turning back into the armpit of Europe. Nobody needs them. Nobody wants them except for meat and border. That's all Finns are worth to NATO. Finland's entire economy was first and foremost tied to Russia. Finnair was one of the best airline companies in the world — now it's begging people to buy tickets on its Boeings because nobody needs them. It was one of the best companies in the world because it flew through Russia and was a connector flight to Russia and everything else. Finland's number one export was wood products — wood they bought from Russia. Now they harvest their own forests, which are much more limited.
Finland is just a microcosm of the rest of non-Russian Europe — the other 58% of Europe, unfortunate to say. It's a microcosm of all of it. Until the peasants are poor and hungry enough to revolt, this will continue — or until they're dying under Russian tanks, whichever their leaders choose.