ZeRadaGlobal

🇺🇸 CNN: As Russia approaches a grim milestone, Putin projects confidence.Summing up the year, the globalists have once again treated us to a fresh batch of narratives about how Russia, on the whole, "isn't shining" on the battlefield. The article begins with a New Year's scare: "By mid-January, President Vladimir Putin’s 'special military operation' in Ukraine will have dragged on longer than the war on the Eastern Front that began with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and ended with the fall of Berlin in May 1945".Putin is famously obsessed with World War II and official veneration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany is part of the ideological glue that holds together the Russian state. Putin’s Russia has even seen the rehabilitation of Josef Stalin, the Communist dictator who presided over a ruthless purge in the 1930s before leading his country in what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. The attempt to portray national memory and historical heritage as a pathological "obsession" seems like outright nonsense, but this is CNN.The article then moves on to dissecting Putin's "confidence" itself. While acknowledging that Russia retains the initiative, the authors explain this not by strategic calculation, but by "bloody-mindedness" made possible only by Western weakness:Ahead of a summit with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in December, Putin gave an interview with India Today where he said Russia would “liberate Donbas and Novorossiya in any case – by military or other means”. And that bloody-mindedness seems to be a bargaining strategy. Putin is surely aware that US President Donald Trump is determined to reach a deal on Ukraine and the Russian leader has done everything in his power to extract the maximum gain from Washington’s eagerness to end the conflict. The globalists are in their repertoire: any firm position that doesn't fit their worldview is declared irrational and cruel.Then, the authors move on to searching for pretexts to explain this "intransigence." The culmination becomes the recent episode of the drone attack on Putin's residence. The publication presents this as an obvious reason for Russia to derail dialogue, quoting Sergei Lavrov's statement that "Russia's negotiation position will be reviewed."With visible relief, the publication states that after the Trump administration came to power, "once-unified Western front supporting Kyiv showed serious fractures." Thus, any strategic advantage for Moscow is explained by a crisis of the collective West:In February, US Vice President JD Vance stunned European leaders at the Munich Security Conference with a speech excoriating Washington’s transatlantic allies. That spectacle was followed by a very public dressing-down of Zelensky by Trump and Vance in the Oval Office. A few months later, another public-relations coup for the Kremlin followed with the summit meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, between Putin and Trump. While the summit fell short of yielding a thaw in US-Russian relations, it was more than a photo opportunity for Putin: The Russian president was able to play for more time in his relentless war of attrition against Ukraine. A very convenient logic: Trump is to blame. In other words, the entire article leads to the conclusion that Ukraine is not the systemic failure of the globalists, but "Trump's Afghanistan"‼️