Simon Kuper. He is a “columnist” for the Financial Times. I think a more accurate title is, “fabulist.” For those whose native tongue is other than English the word, “fabulist”, is a polite synonym for LIAR. And boy did he lie in his latest column, “What If Russia Wins — A Counterfactual View of the Conflict in Ukraine.” His subtitle should have been, “A Fabricated Account of the Conflict in Ukraine.” I am not surprised that the Financial Times would embrace hysterical propaganda like this, but I did expect something classy and smart. This is crude and stupid. Just the kind of stuff that Joseph Goebbels put out for his boy, Adolf.
Here are the most bizarre straw-men from his dystopian vision of a Russian victory:
1. Russia exacts terrible victor’s justice on Ukrainians. This isn’t speculation. It’s precisely what the Russians have already done in Ukraine: mass executions, castrations, rapes, torture and abductions of children. Remember Russia’s pre-invasion lists of Ukrainian public figures to be “removed”. . . .
4. Putin’s success would encourage countries interested in invading a neighbour: China, Venezuela, Azerbaijan and, indeed, Russia. Dara Massicot of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “Every time the Russians think that they have ‘won’ in a conflict under Putin — Georgia 2008, Ukraine 2014, Syria 2015 — they learn something about us . . . become overconfident in their abilities and in a few years they try bigger and bolder operations.” The likely creation of a Ukrainian army in exile running sorties from European countries would further incentivise Russian attacks on those places.
Kuper is engaged in good, old-fashioned projection. For example, Russian soldiers have not carried out “mass executions” unless your definition of mass execution is based on the Russian victories in Mariupol or Bakhmut. Ditto for castration. The video evidence of that war crime shows Ukrainian soldiers doing the dirty deed. And it is Ukraine that has earned the sordid reputation for trafficking in children to service pedophiles and harvesting organs from wounded soldiers.
Kuper’s reinvention of history may be a function of his relative youth, i.e. he’s uneducated and failed to read his history lessons. How many foreign military adventures has Kuper’s home country, the United Kingdom, carried out in the last 30 plus years? Iraq twice, Libya, the Balkans/Serbia, and Syria. Russia’s history is not littered with repeated instances of foreign conquest and colonial exploitation (and, oh yes, enslavement of local populations). That would be the United Kingdom. Kuper would be well advised to heed the words of Jesus, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” Gives me an idea for a proper nickname for Kuper — Glass House. If you live in a glass house you should not be heaving rocks.
With respect to Russia’s role in Syria, Kuper conveniently ignores the fact that the United Kingdom, along with the United States, were heavily involved in launching the insurgency to oust Syrian President Assad. It was only after Assad asked for help that Russia sent its military to Syria to beat back the Western subversion, which included funding radical Islamists. Putin learned the lesson of the Maidan (where the U.S. and the U.K also played a key role in overthrowing a democratically elected leader in 2014) and succeeded in derailing the Western coup attempt in Syria in 2015. Both Washington and London are still pissed at Putin over that.
Kuper seals his reputation as a man dumber than Ben Hodges with this beauty:
Russia has a low-tech economy about the size of Canada’s. The Europeans could help Ukraine withstand Putin even if Trump pulled out. We’d have to build up our arms industries fast, but the effort required of us would be tiny compared with Russia’s.
Low tech, huh? You mean like the hypersonic missiles that neither the United States or the United Kingdom can build and deploy? You mean like the drones Russia is manufacturing on an industrial scale while Ukraine relies on Mom & Pop workshops to crank out a few hundred? You mean like the millions of artillery shells Russia is producing while the West, having stripped itself of its industrial base, is begging South Korea to provide what Washington can’t? Last I checked the only positive thing one could say about the British Challenger tank is that it burns nicely when hit by a Russian ATGM.
Comparing Russia’s economy to Canada’s is laughable. Consider this. In 2023 Russia surpassed Germany as the largest economy in Europe and 5th largest in the world with a purchasing power parity GDP of $5.3 trillion dollars. Canada is ranked number 12.
Simon Kuper should resign from the Financial Times and get a job with a satirical magazine. He could continue to write this kind of nonsense and it would appropriately be labeled as dark humor and fantasy.
Although Mr. Kuper has zero experience as an intelligence analyst, I think he would fit right in with the current crop of sycophants that inhabit the headquarters of the CIA and MI6. Ray Mcgovern and I discussed the cause of intelligence failures with Judge Napolitano today.
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