KYIV

THE RE-EMERGENCE OF tales of Russian brutality, both on the battlefield and against their own troops, is an indication that things have taken a turn for the worse for Ukraine’s army in its almost four-year-long war with its invading neighbor.

“The West has given all the wonder weapons it has to Ukraine, with no real results, so it falls back on the cheapest of arms, propaganda,” says military expert Dr Napoleon Rommel, whose book It’s Victory On The Battlefield That Counts, Stupid, was banned in several countries for insisting that wars could only be won by battlefield success. “Apparently I didn’t give enough credit to diversity,” he explains. “Anyway, in the real world, the Russians are grinding the Ukrainians down in the Donbass. They are the ones moving forward. Slowly, yes, but moving forward, that’s battlefield success. If the Russians capture Pokrovsk, Lyman and Kupiansk, that will be further battlefield success for them no matter what you hear in the Western media. Ukraine, right now is reduced to the occasional strike against high-profile strategic targets inside Russia and delaying counter-attacks on the front line. And, of course, stories in the Western Media telling people what utter rotters the Russians are. The coverage by Western Media is otherwise pathetic. It consists of the occasional report from the front about plucky Ukrainian housewives who have become snipers or drone pilots who once studied psychology, but very little concrete information. the lack of information is the big story of this war. Now, the Americans want out, and Trump wants to end the war with Russian gains cemented. He doesn’t care about Ukraine or Russia, he cares about China. Europe currently doesn’t have the guts for a fight with Russia over Ukraine. It has watched from the sideline for four years. The European Union is, like NATO, willing to fight to the last Ukrainian, but that’s it for now. The Poles, the Baltic States, the Finns and the Swedes all throw shapes. Curiously, it’s the British who are the most vocal advocates of resistance, but that might be just an attempt to have the European Union undermined as anything else. Remember, Britain is always trying to undermine strong European powers no matter what they look like. Encouraging Europe to fight Russia might could lead to a break-up of the bloc and the downfall of Putin. Quite an achievement if it came about.”