Ireland recently signed a 10-year bilateral security arrangement with Ukraine. Simon Harris, our “far right”-condemning Taoiseach (prime minister), signed this deal. He did so despite the fact that, as I have outlined, Ukraine has a ‘far-right’ ultra-nationalist block, which, though electorally very small, has serious political influence and state support, especially since the U.S.-backed 2014 overthrow of the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych. Ukraine is also a nation which, quite tragically for the 73% of voters who elected Zelensky as president in 2019 on a promise of peace, is being militarily demolished on the battlefield.
During his September visit to Donald Trump, Zelensky told us that “Putin can’t win and Ukraine have to prevail.” President Biden also met with Zelensky and stated that “Ukraine will win this war. And the United States will continue to stand beside them every step of the way.”
The basic facts on the ground, however, tell a very different story. Victory, according to the famous definition attributed to Clausewitz, is the ability to compel the enemy to do our will. And as it stands, Ukraine and its Western backers appear to have no means to compel the Russians to do anything. According to John Mearsheimer, professor at the University of Chicago, “Russia are going to win this war.” The problem, according to Mearsheimer, “is that there’s no way we can reverse the situation on the battlefield.”
On the personnel front, Ukraine do not have the manpower to replace losses that, as Geoffrey Roberts, professor emeritus at University College Cork suggested in the Irish Times as far back as July 2022, were “up to a thousand soldiers a day killed, wounded or taken prisoner.” And things have only gotten much worse since then, especially as Ukrainians front lines are collapsing. “Ukrainian casualties and loss of military hardware are intensifying,” writes professor Glenn Diesen of the South-Eastern University of Norway, “which is shifting the attrition rates even further to Russia’s advantage.” Professor Diesen goes on to say that the “rapid increase in losses with the losing side is a very common phenomenon toward the end of a war, with a common example being the spike in German casualties at the final stages of the Second World War.” Even CNN, the epitome of establishment media, has been acknowledging this manpower disaster. In a report from September 8, 2024, CNN writes:
Two and half years of Russia’s grinding offensive have decimated many Ukrainian units. Reinforcements are few and far between, leaving some soldiers exhausted and demoralized. The situation is particularly dire among infantry units near Pokrovsk and elsewhere on the eastern front line, where Ukraine is struggling to stop Russia’s creeping advances. CNN spoke to six commanders and officers who are or were until recently fighting or supervising units in the area. All six said desertion and insubordination are becoming a widespread problem, especially among newly recruited soldiers.
Given these horrific losses, morale issues, and the ideological fervour within some elements of the military and security services, it comes as little surprise when we see researchers such as Ivan Katchanovski, a professor at the University of Ottawa, provide myriad videos of brutal forced conscription involving Ukrainian men being forcefully pulled off the streets. In a Twitter/X thread including eight such videos, professor Katchanovski writes:
Video shows forced mobilization in Kharkiv in Ukraine. Kharkiv mobilization center blamed this snatched & beaten up man for his own beating. Over 1,000 videos that I examined show use of force to mobilize men by grabbing them on streets, in buses, parks, workplaces, stores, in different locations in Ukraine.
Numerous reports show that after been snatched by force, men are then driven to military mobilization centers, forcefully confined there for days with their cell phones confiscated. They are then made to pass medical commission without any real examination of their health and fitness for military service and are sent after brief and insufficient military training to fight in the war. There are numerous videos & reports that men are often beaten, in some cases to death, by military draft officers during forced mobilization.
There is complete silence from self-proclaimed supporters of Ukraine.
Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department counter-terrorism advisor who has been very critical of the West’s proxy war in Ukraine, paints a grim picture:
I believe one of the major contributing factors to the dramatic increase in Ukrainian casualties is the lack of trained personnel. In sharp contrast to the Russian approach, the Ukrainians are grabbing guys off the streets, shoving them into vans, hauling them to a collection point where they are issued essential military equipment and then sending them to the front. Ukraine is circumventing the normal process of conducting at least three months of basic training, followed by an additional three to six months of advanced individual training—e.g., learning how to operate an artillery piece, a drone or a tank. Once that training is complete, the new soldier is still green, inexperienced. Ukraine is not doing that for its new recruits.
Once a newbie arrives at the front—in an ideal world—he would be surrounded by grizzled veterans, seasoned non-commissioned officers (NCOs) who would show the new guy how to stay alive on the battlefield. But that is not happening for the Ukrainians. Most of their seasoned NCOs are dead or wounded and their places have been filled with inexperienced sergeants, who also have little formal training. While there are some exceptions, I am talking about the majority.
Under Ukrainian martial law, according to the Irish Times, most men aged between 18 and 60 are barred from leaving the country. And in a horrifically anti-human turn of events, the Financial Times describes how the Polish and Lithuanian defence ministers have “pledged to help Ukraine repatriate its men who are of fighting age but have left the country to avoid being sent to the battlefield.”
Mearsheimer describes Ukraine’s dire shortage of men:
They’re also greatly outnumbered in terms of manpower in addition to all the categories of weapons [the interviewer] described. And, you know, you read some stories coming from the Ukrainian side that say that in terms of manpower, at a number of critical locations along the front, they’re outnumbered 8-to-1. And in terms of artillery they’re outnumbered 10-to-1. I’ve seen two or three references to these ratios. This is stunning. … Remember, artillery is responsible for roughly 80 plus percent of the casualties in this war.
This 10-to-1 advantage was predicted back in April 2024 by the top American military commander in Europe, and was highlighted shortly thereafter by Republican vice-president nominee, J.D. Vance, in the New York Times. On the matériel front, it is now clear as day that Russia is capable of producing many more artillery shells than all of NATO combined—this is without even including whatever North Korea, a country capable of producing two million shells per year at peace time, and possibly double or even treble this if required, are providing to Russia.
“Fundamentally,” writes Vance, “we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war.” In corroborating support of the dire manpower situation described by Mearsheimer, Katchanovski, CNN, and Johnson above, Vance writes that “draconian conscription policies” are being employed, that Russia has four times the population, that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men have fled the country, that the average age of Ukrainian fighters is 43, and how, “after two years of conflict, there are some villages with almost no men left.” And crucially, Vance also describes the grossly inadequate state of US artillery shell production:
Consider our ability to produce 155-millimeter artillery shells. Last year, Ukraine’s defense minister estimated that the country’s base-line requirement for these shells was over four million per year but that it could fire up to seven million if that many were available. Since the start of the conflict, the United States has gone to great lengths to ramp up production of 155-millimeter shells. We’ve roughly doubled our capacity and can now produce 360,000 per year—less than a tenth of what Ukraine says it needs. The administration’s goal is to get this to 1.2 million—30 percent of what’s needed—by the end of 2025. This would cost the American taxpayers dearly while yielding an unpleasantly familiar result: failure abroad.
This reality helps put Zelensky’s trip to the shell factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, pictured below, in useful context.
Image: Volodymyr Zelenskyy/Х
The fact that Zelensky partook in such a publicity stunt, playfully signing these tools of blood and ruin, during a trip to present his “victory plan” to Biden, despite surely knowing that the fighting men of Ukraine have no hope of prevailing over Russia by any reasonable analysis of conventional military capability, is beyond grotesque. As outlined above, they do not have enough adequately trained men and the combined West is physically incapable of producing enough munitions to supply Ukraine with what it needs to match, never mind surpass, Russian military potential.
The Ukrainian military are doomed. And given the decisive role that artillery has played in this war, that image of Zelensky signing shells, for all the wrong reasons, may well go down in the history books in decades to come.
Crossroads
That is, of course, if future decades contain any historians. “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” So goes the line often attributed to Albert Einstein. And he may well have been right. As of January 2023, the Doomsday Clock has been moved 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been.
We all know about the explosions and dangers of radiation, but another effect of nuclear war is much less well known. A 2022 paper in the journal, Nature Food, summarised the threat posed to agriculture as follows:
Extraordinary events such as large volcanic eruptions or nuclear war could cause sudden global climate disruptions and affect food security. Global volcanic cooling caused by sulfuric acid aerosols in the stratosphere has resulted in severe famines and political instability, for example, after the 1783 Laki eruption in Iceland or the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia. For a nuclear war, the global cooling would depend on the yields of the weapons, the number of weapons and the targets, among other atmospheric and geographic factors. In a nuclear war, bombs targeted on cities and industrial areas would start firestorms, injecting large amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere, which would spread globally and rapidly cool the planet. Such soot loadings would cause decadal disruptions in Earth’s climate, which would impact food production systems on land and in the oceans.
While this may sound far-fetched to those unaware of the concept of nuclear winter, a 2023 paper in the journal, Nature Scientific Reports, described how Europe had a “year without summer” in 1816. This was likely due to the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia mentioned above. Of deep concern to me as an Irishman, the authors tell us that in “Ireland there was also evidence of increased death rates from famine and/or famine-related disease” as well as “evidence of food riots or demonstrations.” “The survival and flourishing of human civilisation,” they write, “could be threatened by an abrupt global catastrophe that reduced sunlight reaching the earth.”
Nuclear war has been a deep concern of mine since well before Russia invaded Ukraine. In an essay for Areo Magazine from November 2021, I outlined how even localised nuclear conflicts, deploying only a tiny fraction of total global stockpiles, can starve billions to death, and how an all-out war between Russia and the United States—who have many thousands of weapons each—would lead to below freezing temperatures even in summer, thereby plunging the Earth into a new Ice Age. Other key points are as follows:
- There are about 14,000 nukes on Earth (that we know about).
- If as few as 100 of these weapons were used on cities, the resultant smoke and particulate matter could rise into the upper atmosphere where it would block the sun for years and make it much harder to grow food all over the planet.
- We have had many nuclear near misses. These were by virtue of pure luck; we happened to have the right people in the right place at the right time, including heroes you have probably never heard of like Vasily Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov.
- The old Cold War narrative of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) is no longer relevant due to newer revelations about the realities to nuclear winter. The most up to date science points to “self-assured destruction” (SAD) in which even the country who fires the weapons, without suffering return fire, will still be affected in their ability to grow food due to blackened skies.
- There are no plans in place to feed the populace in the event of sudden global cooling induced by even a small scale, localised nuclear war involving less than 1/100th of global weapons. As Dr. Dave Denkenberger has said: “No one appears to have a plan for what would happen. Of course you hear about the continuity of government plans, and bunkers, but there doesn’t seem to be a plan for actually keeping most people alive.”
- More scientific publications exist on dung beetles than on studying how to feed the world in the event of nuclear weapon induced sudden global cooling.
In his 2020 book, The Precipice, Toby Ord of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute suggests that we entered a new era in 1945 with the militaristic harnessing of the atom:
With the detonation of the first atomic bomb, a new age of humanity began. At that moment, our rapidly accelerating technological power finally reached the threshold where we might be able to destroy ourselves. The first point where the threat to humanity from within exceeded the threats from the natural world. A point where the entire future of humanity hangs in the balance. Where every advance our ancestors made could be squandered, and every advance our descendants may achieve could be denied. […] Nuclear weapons were a discontinuous change in human power. At Hiroshima, a single bomb did the damage of thousands. And six years later, a single thermonuclear bomb held more energy than every explosive used in the entire course of the Second World War.
Ord also suggested that global cooling from nuclear war is just as likely to destroy humanity’s future as the global warming we typically associate with ‘climate change.’ One can imagine this is hard for the public to believe, given how little attention nuclear weapon-induced mass starvation has gotten. That both nuclear winter and runaway global warming could pose at least the same risk, makes the fact we have been putting so much focus on gradual global warming, while functionally ignoring sudden global cooling, absolutely mind boggling. Ord’s estimation of this risk has, however, been heavily criticised. In a sobering interview with the Foresight Institute in July 2021, the famous whistleblower, anti-nuclear activist and, sadly, recently deceased Daniel Ellsberg, reckons the risk from the nuclear demon is far larger than Ord proposes. I have huge respect for both men but find myself siding with Ellsberg on this point. Since humans are unpredictable, and our technology is incomprehensibly powerful yet subject to error, wobbles can happen at any moment which may cause the first domino to fall toward a chain reaction of catastrophe.
In a Schiller Institute presentation about the realities of nuclear war in September, 2024, professor Stephen Starr of the University of Missouri describes how he thinks the West might escalate the conflict:
I think part of what Putin was warning about with this new change in doctrine is because Russia is on the verge of breaking through all the lines in Ukraine, and they have like 700,000 troops on the border. And if they go full in, there’s going to be a lot of calls for NATO to retaliate. If they do that, I think this is the kind of scenario in which a nuclear retaliation is [going to] be envisioned.
The change in nuclear doctrine referred to here by Professor Starr relates to the Russians deciding to adjust their protocols due to concerns about nuclear-armed nations, such as the United States, supporting non-nuclear armed nations, such as Ukraine, to attack Russia. Professor Diesen has detailed this development during the Schiller Institute’s 69th weekly International Peace Coalition Meeting. A brief snippet:
The former doctrine they had was very restricted. They would use nuclear either in retaliation to a nuclear attack, or second if there is a threat to their existence through conventional means. But what they’re doing now is effectively as a result of the proxy war in which they see that deterrent has been weakened. And I think this is a reasonable assessment [that is] also accepted in the West. As we open any western newspaper, what do we see? “Oh well Russia doesn’t even respond to its red lines anymore. Surely we can do anything we want, we can start bombing within Russia. They would never dare to strike back because that would be suicidal. We cannot be held hostage to their nuclear blackmail”—which is how we refer now to nuclear deterrence.
For this reason, there has been a huge push for how Russia can restore its deterrent. The lads at The Duran have also published an interesting overview on the legal and geopolitical implications of this doctrinal change. Colonel Jacques Baud, a retired Swiss intelligence officer formerly of the UN and NATO, argues that this change in doctrine “was expected” in response to the U.S. changing its own doctrine in April 2022. Colonel Baud describes how President Biden moved away from deterrence and, instead, “accepted the principle of first use. From that point, we had discussions in Russia about the change in nuclear doctrine.” According to an April 2022, article by Arms Control Association:
Biden’s policy declares that the “fundamental role” of the US nuclear arsenal is to deter a nuclear attack, but will still leave open the option that nuclear weapons could be used in “extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners,” officials told [Arms Control Today]. According to a March 25 report by The Wall Street Journal, this might include nuclear use to deter enemy conventional, biological, chemical, and possibly cyberattacks.
This nuclear posturing is very concerning to those of us who would rather not have mankind made extinct. In the final chapter of his unbelievably prescient 2018 book, Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning, Andrei Martyanov argues that short of a nuclear exchange, the United States cannot defeat Russia in its immediate geographic vicinity. He also argues that the U.S. had become accustomed to easily and quickly overcoming weak opposition with overwhelming technological and matériel superiority, but that we all “remain under the threat of a massive American miscalculation” as it relates to a military peer such as Russia—something Martyanov believed to be highly probable due to the “incompetence and delusion of the American establishment.” He sees this kind of miscalculation as leading toward “uncontrolled escalation to a very dangerous nuclear threshold,” to which the United States will be forced to move closer, “in an attempt to save her own dwindling reputation.” Martyanov goes on to say that this might happen in the case of a “serious scale humiliation” in relation to Ukraine.
And in his recently published book, America’s Final War, he comes back to the “massive American miscalculation” he had predicted six years prior:
By effectively annihilating several iterations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), including the bulk of NATO’s ‘volunteers’ and Western military hardware, which for the first time faced an opponent with extremely advanced armed forces, a massive industrial economy, and a strategy which was birthed by arguably the greatest military school and thought in history, Russia’s Real Revolution in Military Affairs drove a paradigm shift in warfare.
This proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room which can no longer be ignored—the West’s miscalculation of Russia is one of epic proportions—is driven by utterly incompetent elites, most of whom have no background in warfare, diplomacy or economics. They built the empire of lies and now they cannot do anything to stop the West’s degeneration into a dystopia of whatever passes for suicidal policies. I warned of this crisis in my previous three books and now it is upon us and not going to end well for the combined West.
Martyanov goes on to suggest that Russia does not have anyone they can trust in “the West, which has become a euphemism for the United States, which has already turned European states into its lapdogs, and, possibly, into cannon fodder.” This final point was echoed by Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in his September 28, 2024, speech at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), when he invoked the secret plan by the U.S. and UK from the 1940s to destroy the Soviet Union. But now, according to Lavrov, they are openly trying to inflict “strategic defeat” on Russia:
The current Anglo-Saxon strategists are not hiding their ideas. For now they do, it’s true, hope to defeat Russia using the illegitimate neo-Nazi Kyiv regime, but they’re already preparing Europe for it to also throw itself into this suicidal escapade.
American disregard for European interest is nothing new. “Fuck the EU,” so said former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Victoria Nuland, during a phone call that was leaked in early February 2014, in which she and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, selected the new Ukrainian government, more than two weeks before the U.S.-backed coups against President Yanukovych.
In another piece about Lavrov’s UNGA speech, the Guardian writes: “Putin said that if attacked by any country supported by a nuclear-armed nation, Russia will consider that a joint attack.” The piece goes on to tell us that in describing his country’s new doctrine, Putin “stressed that Russia could use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional assault that posed a ‘critical threat to our sovereignty.’” Unlike Colonel Baud above, however, The Guardian does not remind its readers that the United States has changed its own nuclear doctrine nearly two and a half years ago, and did so to deter even cyberattacks.
Image: Shadow on steps as all that remains of a person in Hiroshima after nuclear attack by United States August, 1945 (ABC News)
Entering the madhouse
We are in a madhouse. An escalation toward nuclear war between the United States and Russia would mean that pretty much everyone in both countries, and probably most people in the Northern hemisphere, would either be vaporised or starved to death in famine under skies blackened by particulate matter which will block out the sun for a decade. Most absurdly, this looming risk to the lives of billions of people—and possibly to the existence of humanity at large if the nuclear winter is severe enough—is occurring despite the fact that Ukraine has no hope of defeating Russia on the battlefield.
If this situation does escalate to a nuclear exchange, who will bear responsibility? This is the question asked by Benjamin Abelow in his impressively concise 2022 book, How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe. And though he fully acknowledges that “in a proximal sense,” Putin and his military advisers are responsible, the distal sense, as the book’s title suggests, lays the responsibility with the West:
Had the United States not pushed NATO to the border of Russia; not deployed nuclear-capable missile launch systems in Romania and planned them for Poland and perhaps elsewhere as well; not contributed to the overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014; not abrogated the ABM treaty and then the intermediate-range nuclear missile treaty, and then disregarded Russian attempts to negotiate a bilateral moratorium on deployments; not conducted live-fire exercises with rockets in Estonia to practice striking targets inside Russia; not coordinated a massive 32-nation military training exercise near Russian territory; not intertwined the US military with Ukraine; etc. etc. etc.—had the United States and its NATO allies not done these things, the war in Ukraine probably would not have taken place. I think this is a reasonable assertion.
Abelow goes on to outline how the U.S. chose to back “strongly nationalistic” forces in Ukraine instead of pressing for peace in the Donbas since civil war started in 2014, poured weapons into an increasingly militarised Ukraine, refused to renounce plans to integrate Ukraine into NATO despite explicit Russian concern, and “may have given the impression to the Ukrainian leaders and people that it might directly go to war with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf.” I would add to this the pressure from Western powers to abandon the spring 2022, Istanbul negotiations, which I have previously outlined, and which Victoria Nuland has essentially confirmed.
Moreover, Abelow presents an argument from Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus at New York University and Princeton, that is complimentary to one I have previously made around the internal pressure on Zelensky by ‘far right’ forces not to negotiate. Cohen suggests that negotiations with Russia would require U.S. support to overcome this internal pressure:
Some people say they are fascist, but they are certainly ultra-nationalist, and they have said that they will kill Zelensky if he continues along the line of negotiating with Putin. […] Zelensky cannot go forward… unless America has his back. Maybe that won’t be enough, but unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance.
This war is a complete disaster; this is true not just for the people of Ukraine (who have had some unknown, yet undoubtedly massive number of their men killed and grievously wounded, and their country destroyed such that it will take years if not decades to be rebuilt if ever), or for Russians (who have had their loved ones killed and maimed), but for all of humanity who have had a radioactive Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, by fraying thread, since February 24, 2022. In an early September 2024 piece about Ukraine’s collapse, Professor Diesen writes:
What makes the Ukraine War different from many other wars, is that this is a proxy war in which NATO uses Ukrainians to fight Russia. The uncertain and unpredictable variable is therefore how NATO will react as it loses its war against Russia. NATO is already providing weapons, ammunition, training, intelligence, target selection, war planning, managing complex weapon systems, and sending Western mercenaries. NATO’s support for strikes inside Russian territory and the invasion of Russian territory has already taken us to the brink of a direct war. The Americans appear to get ready to cut their losses and instead shift focus on a wider war in the Middle East or confronting China, but the Europeans have bet everything on defeating Russia militarily. In terms of capabilities, it is the U.S. that matters.
There are simply no good solutions anymore. The only two options are to either negotiate or get increasingly involved in direct fighting. NATO has largely rejected diplomacy and placed itself in a rhetorical trap in which victory is the only acceptable outcome, and the EU even punishes member states such as Hungary that attempt to restore diplomacy and negotiations with Russia. However, more direct NATO involvement will likely trigger a direct war with Russia, the world’s largest nuclear power, and it is unclear what a “victory” would look like that would not first trigger a nuclear exchange.
Others, who should really know better, have suggested a third option. “The path to peace is for the aggressor, Russia, to immediately and unconditionally withdraw all its troops and military equipment from the entire territory of Ukraine.” So wrote Ireland’s minister for foreign affairs and defence, Micheál Martin, on the day Ireland signed its new security deal with Ukraine. Ireland’s ruling political elite, as obedient lapdogs of the EU and United States by extension, have been doubling down on supporting a proxy war that is already lost and, as a result, are encouraging a humanitarian and geopolitical catastrophe that risks escalation toward the nuclear threshold—a threshold that has been lowered by both the U.S. and Russia. This is insane. Even putting aside the many ways Irish elites have been driving national decay, support for feeding the men of Ukraine into a meat grinder, in order to satisfy warmongers in Brussels and DC, is reason enough to replace them. It should go without saying that the people of Ireland need to remove these megalomaniacs and sock puppets when given the chance in the upcoming general election.
At the acceptable risk of coming across as a naïve dreamer, I will close by drawing upon words of wisdom on our predicament from two men who lived through the peak of Cold War nuclear tensions, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In an essay published in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. presented humanity’s existential crossroads as follows: “If we assume that mankind has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war and destruction. In our day of space vehicles and guided ballistic missiles, the choice is either nonviolence or nonexistence.”
And in his 1964 presidential campaign video, “Daisy,” Lyndon B. Johnson somehow managed to signpost this very same crossroads even more clearly: “We must either love each other, or we must die.”
An earlier version of this article appeared on Thomas Fazi’s substack.
