Ukraine | Antonius Aquinas

Vladimir Putin has sky-high presidential approval ratings among Russians (the envy, no doubt, of every Western chief executive). He recently triumphed at the Alaska summit, where he got President Donald Trump to back off of his demand for a cease fire in Ukraine. The Russian president’s participation at the 2025 China Victory Day parade further cemented Russo-Chinese relations, and he has been credited with a reproachment between China and India. So, why is at least one prominent analyst predicting Putin’s time is coming to an end?

It seems that, after all of these achievements, Putin’s handling of the Ukraine war is coming under growing criticism – not so much from the populace, but from elements within the Russian “thinking class.” They want an end to the conflict and the punishment and/or elimination of the Western-backed Volodymyr Zelensky regime.

Thus, Putin’s political exit has been predicted by American historian and longtime Russian affairs analyst Prof. Gilbert Doctorow, the author of War Diaries. Vol. 1: The Russian-Ukraine War, 2022-2023. Doctorow now believes that Putin’s slow, methodical war of attrition against Ukraine has taken too long and, if continued, could lead to the regional conflict spinning out of control and igniting a nuclear conflagration.

Doctorow has also criticized Putin’s lenient attitude toward the many Western provocations taken against Russia, with the latest talk of the U.S. supplying Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, which could be fitted with nuclear warheads. The issuance of Tomahawks is on top of the massive aid – military, strategic, intelligence, and financial – that the West has provided without which Ukraine would completely collapse.

While Doctorow advises that Putin end the war as quickly as possible, it must be noted that the perspicacious Paul Craig Roberts has been one of the few, from almost the start of the war, who called for Putin to take decisive action to end what the Russians call a “special military operation.”

Roberts believes that the West is using the conflict as a means to ultimately collapse Russia, divide it politically, and plunder its resources. A fragmented Russia will provide no opposition to a unipolar world dominated by the United States.

In his latest article, Roberts asks:

Will he again be ‘Putin-the-Unready’ as he was in

South Ossetia in 2008, in Ukraine in 2014, in 2022

when Russia was forced to intervene in Donbas,

and when the Russian strategic bomber force was

attacked on June 1. *

In recent podcasts and essays, Doctorow has broken from most of the foreign policy analysts of the alternative media who continue to speak in positive terms of Putin’s deliberate, painstaking approach of slow attrition in Ukraine and his continuing leniency to hostile Western action toward Russia, with now demeaning talk from U.S. politicians including President Donald Trump that call Russia a “paper tiger.”

Doctorow believes that Putin’s reign has run its course:

I am suggesting that the era of Vladimir Putin is coming to

a close. . . . He no longer has the courage of his convictions,

that his threats meant to deter Western enemies are empty

verbiage. . . . He has pulled up the red lines

he clearly set out one year ago with respect to long range

missiles being supplied to Ukraine, and that he is drawing

out the war in Ukraine by not using . . . hypersonic missiles to

end the war now. **

Whether such a seemingly implausible scenario comes about or that Russia eventually attains its goals with Putin in charge, the West will continue to escalate. One bright spot, however, is that the current leadership of Europe’s most war-like states – Keir Starmer of Great Britain, Friedrich Merz of Germany and Emmanuel Macron of France – are widely unpopular and most likely do not have a long political shelf life. Hopefully, their respective replacements will focus on the monumental economic and social problems that confront each nation and the Ukraine war will be put on the back burner.

One theme sometimes heard by alternative media commentators is that the Russian economy has improved since the start of the special military operation. While Western sanctions have proved to be mostly ineffectual, wars are always a detriment to economic life except, of course, to the arms makers and their bought politicians.

The opportunity cost of producing guns, bullets, and missiles is the loss of the production of consumer goods – refrigerators, cars, computers, etc. While it might not be directly seen, Putin’s slow march through Ukraine is taking a toll on the Russian economy.

More important than the economic degradation of society is that the war is being fought between two largely white populations. The slaughter of whites will mean a decline in birth rates. This unspoken aspect of the war, no doubt, has always been a policy of the enemies of the Occidental peoples.

While a certain segment of the Russian political elite may want to replace Putin, the ultimate responsibility for the Ukraine war and (God forbid) a possible nuclear exchange is with the collective West, in particular the United States.

If President Trump really wanted to stop the killing, he merely has to cut off financial aid, end the considerable U.S. military and intelligence assistance to the Zelensky regime, and the war would be over in days.

If these ominous trends continue, it appears that only an act of Divine intervention can avoid a nuclear disaster.

*https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/10/03/putin-the-unready/

**https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2025/10/04/conversation-with-professor-glenn-diesen-restoring-russias-deterrent-or-emboldening-nato/

Antonius Aquinas@antoniusaquinas

https://antoniusaquinas.com

The tensions between the West and Russia over the Ukraine have escalated over the past few months with an almost daily occurrence of provocations and belligerent talk mostly from members of NATO. In response, Russia sent a naval contingent to the Caribbean in a show of force. Some of the Western provocations include:

Polish President Andrzej Duda’s willingness to place U.S. nuclear weapons on Polish soil;
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius’ s call for reinstitution of a draft;
A hand-delivered check by Biden to Volodymyr Zelensky as part of the $95 billion U.S. “defense” package for Ukraine
A request by Zelensky for Westerners to train troops on Ukrainian soil; and
US and NATO okaying Ukraine to fire long-range American weapons as much as 12 miles into Russian territory

It is apparent that, until Russian President Vladimir Putin capitulates to Western demands in regard to Ukraine, NATO will continue to push the envelop. In hindsight, analysts such as Paul Craig Roberts have, from the start, urged Putin to swiftly finish off Ukraine militarily and replace the Zelensky regime with one favorable to Russia. A protracted struggle, Roberts warned, would give the West more time to supplement Ukraine: “The conflict dragged on, because having declared the intervention limited, the Kremlin left Kiev to continue the war, thus playing into Western hands as the West gradually widened the war.” *

Unfortunately for Russia, Paul Craig Roberts’s prognostication is now coming to fruition.

The counter argument to a more aggressive Russia is that Putin realizes that the West is run by a pack of sociopaths who would have no qualms launching WWIII, which would include the use of nuclear weapons, or ignite a major military conflagration in the area. The Russian president sees that the West holds a decisive military advantage over Russia even if it allied with China. The U.S. alone spends more than the combined expenditures of the top nine militaries in the world.

The United States has thus the ability and means to operate and intervene in almost any sector of the world. It is able to do so because it has had, for the longest time, an economy which was able to not only produce goods for the domestic market and also for its foreign adventures. It takes wealth to be able to arm, transport, deploy, and maintain men in distant lands.

Because of America’s relatively free economy, it could produce a seemingly endless supply of military hardware for itself, but also to buy off client states and fund proxy wars. In contrast, the Soviet Union could never export communism in any significant way after World War II because it lacked the means to do so. Its economy was a basket case that could barely feed its citizens.

While the U.S. may have the military capability to be the world’s policeman, its actions in the Ukraine are ultimately controlled by ideology. And, for the longest time, U.S. foreign policy has been one of interventionism and war with the ultimate goal of the establishment of a one-world state. Its proxy war in Ukraine is designed to cripple Russia, which stands as a roadblock to this long-desired goal.

Since it is apparent that the principles guiding U.S. foreign policy are not going to change anytime soon, the nation will continue on its bellicose course until it no longer has the means to do so. This would mean a financial crisis, most likely in the form of a dollar collapse, which would ground the economy to a halt.

In such a scenario, the United States would be following the course that Great Britain took after World War II, when its empire could no longer be sustained since the country insanely exhausted itself in the conduct of fighting two world wars.

A similar, earlier historical example was the Western Roman empire, which, through currency debasement, heavy taxation and government largesse, ruined its economy and then could no longer maintain its empire.

The ideology of Great Britain and Rome did not change, however, they simply no longer had the means to sustain and expand their empires.

Despite massive deficits, record-setting inflation, and a recent bank crisis in March, 2023, a financial crisis does not appear to be on the horizon. Although things can change quickly, for the foreseeable future, the U.S. empire is in no danger from internal collapse.

While an economic collapse would mean misery for millions of Americans, it would be, in a sense, retribution for the nation’s murderous and costly foreign policy, which has brought, and still is bringing, untold death and destruction to millions of people.

*Paul Craig Roberts, “Normalizing War with Russia,” PaulCraigRoberts.org, 6 June 2016, https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2024/06/06/normalizing-war-with-russia/