The Duran Podcast
Zelensky victory plan, enter NATO
All right, Alexander, let's talk about what is going on in Ukraine. Let's do an update on what is happening in the front lines. Of course, we have the main battle, which is what's happening in the Dombas. And then we have the battle in Kursk, which is a sideshow, but it still attracts more of the attention what's going on in Kursk. So where should we begin, Kursk or Dombas? Well, I'm going to actually make a general point, which is that I think that there's a lot of Western commentators, but even some commentators on the, if you'd like the Russian-Ukrainian sides, are being left behind by events, by the critical truth about the events, which is that I think they still imagine that this is a war being fought by two roughly comparable armies. What's the Russians always had, the superiority of material? The Ukrainians, however, had material assets of their own. They had various points in the war. They outnumbered the Russians. That's now generally accepted. I think a lot of people still believe that. And they still think that these battles that are playing out across Ukraine are battles between two roughly analogous armies. And you still get people talk about stalemate, stagnation, that kind of thing. That isn't the reality of the war, as it seems to me at all. I go every day, I listen to what the various commentators say. I look at what all the various reporting channels, Russian, Ukrainian, neutral, and all of those say. I look at the videos that come out. Some of them are very haunting and terrible videos. But the reality is that Ukraine is being smashed, and it is being smashed all across the front lines. And the Ukrainian military is unable to hold its positions anywhere, even as the Russians advance in every single place. And if you read articles that are starting to appear on the fringes of the Western media, there was an article, very interesting article, for example, about the situation in the Pakrovsky area that appeared the other day on the BBC's website. Well, if you start to read that, you see that Ukrainian soldiers who are actually there on the front lines now are increasingly talking about this. And they are talking about this wherever they are. So the Russians are advancing in every place. The Ukrainians are trying to hold them back. They're trying to do so with fewer and fewer men every day. Those men are becoming more and more tired every day. The mobilized soldiers that they're bringing into the battle are either running away or dying in terrible numbers because they're not up to fighting this incredibly powerful Russian army that they're now up against. And the Russians continue this constriction policy that they've been conducting basically since the autumn of 2022, which is that they attack everywhere. They attack all the time. They increase the pressure all the time. And you see the gaps appear in all sorts of places. And the Ukrainians rush one reserve from another, wherever they can to try to patch up these holes that the Russians punch through. But always they're playing a bigger and bigger price for doing so. So I wanted to make that general point. We're much closer to the end than I think many people in the West especially understand. I think the Ukrainians understand it, by the way. I think certain comments that Zelensky has just made in an interview shows that at some level, even he understands it. But I think that is the general picture in the war. Now, let's start with course, because, of course, this is the big offensive for the Ukrainians launch that was going to turn the tables on the Russians, force the Russians and divert huge numbers of troops from Donbass, perhaps, as I believe, capture the Kuz nuclear power station, create a major crisis for the Russians. Well, the answer straightforwardly is it is all falling apart. The Russians stopped the offensive. It did never got very far. It didn't get anywhere close to the nuclear power plant. The Russians do what they always do. They set up-- they created their fortified lines. They planted lots, thousands of mines. They sent it to special forces. The special forces started to cut down the Ukrainian soldiers who got cut off from their lines. Wherever they were, they unleashed their rockets and their artillery and their bombs. The Ukrainians are suffering terrible losses all across the course region. There was an article in CNN that said as much that their losses, they are terrible, that their armored vehicle losses are terrible. And over the last couple of days, the Russians have gone on the attack, and they've been recapturing one village off for another. Again, as the Russians like to do, they haven't dealt a knockout blow. They haven't sent an armored force all the way to capture, or recapture sushi, which they probably could do. And the reason they are not doing it is because whilst this force, this Ukrainian force, remains in course region, they can continue to grind it down. They can continue to inflict terrible attrition on it. And we see that every day. And the Ukrainians are having to feed more and more men, more and more machines to try to hold the perimeter around this town of Suzja that they've captured. The perimeter is cracking. You see this in one village after another, passing back under Russian control. The Ukrainians have to work all the time, harder and harder to try to hold on to what they still have. And in a few weeks time, two or three weeks, it seems that the rains in this area will begin, the whole area will turn into swamp. The Ukrainians are limited to using the roads because their vehicles can't operate off the roads. They're not designed to. And besides, they don't have that many of them. The Russian drones control the skies and they'll be able to destroy anything that is moving along those roads. And we're looking at a debacle. And we're looking at an absolute military disaster. And Zelensky is now complaining that he wanted to reconstitute 14 brigades. He's not got enough equipment. They've only been able partially to recreate four. And even those apparently are not in particular good shape. Anyway, that's course. But on the other parts of the front lines, it is just as bad. The Russians are gradually clearing up around Vugladar. Apparently this morning, I saw the reports captured two important coal mines with their slag heaps near Vugladar. That means Vugladar is in effect surrounded. This is an important fortified town that the Ukrainians control. The Russians have captured, or are in the process of capturing, two other important towns further north, Mukrinsk and Salidovall. A Ukrainian soldier told the BBC that they're getting surrounded everywhere because their command won't let them retreat when they should retreat. So the Ukrainians are suffering losses. That way, they don't have enough men to hold all their positions in Pukrosk and in the area around Pukrosk. They're being ground down by the Russians there. They're being ground down by the Russians in another town further east called Toritzk, which the Russians have broken deep inside. Russians captured another neighboring town called New York. Some weeks ago, they're now at the center of Toritzk. The Ukrainians can't stop them. They're losing men and machines trying to hold the Russians back. And the same is happening elsewhere in Chassefjard. The Russians are now preparing a big envelopment manoeuvre. This is the story right across the battlefronts. And if you look at the figures, which admittedly they are Russian figures, Russian defence ministry figures, but you can argue about their exact accuracy or even their vague accuracy, but they show constantly rising Ukrainian casualty figures. And I believe that part of those figures is true. So it's just going to get worse for Ukraine. The winter is coming. The big fear that the collective West has, and they've admitted as much, is that Russia decides to permanently take out the energy infrastructure, the electric grid of Ukraine, which Russia is without a doubt in a position to do, and they can probably do it very quickly, maybe a couple of strikes. And they know exactly what to hit, and that would effectively be the end of Ukraine's electricity, which for Europe, the big fear for Europe, is that this could lead to a huge migrant crisis. Patriots are nowhere to be found or given. This has now been admitted by the Netherlands. They've said that they were going to get Patriots to Ukraine, but they just don't have the component parts, the component parts from other countries haven't been given to them. They're going to be no tourists, long-range missiles. Stommer's running around the world, trying to get approval to launch long-range missile strikes into Russia, but that's still not going to end the conflict or tip the scales in Ukraine's favor. And the economic situation in Ukraine continues to get worse, and the money in the collective West continues to dry up. So what do you think about everything I've just said? Things are bad now, but they're going to get much worse going forward for Ukraine. Absolutely, and the Russian military is going to get much more powerful over the next few months, because they've got several hundred thousand men who are going through training at the moment. They'll be fully trained up by the end of the year. Russian armaments, factories are hunting and churning out more machines, more artillery all the time. The West's attempts to build up its artillery production have been a dismal failure. We won't draw the curtain of charity down over President Pavel's attempts to find shells on the international arms market. Everything, everything has failed. Everything is falling apart. Now, the Ukrainians themselves are caught in a site in a trap because they rejected negotiations with the Russians back in March, April of 2022. They were persuaded by the West's powers that they shouldn't come to any sort of agreement with the Russians. They passed a law forbidding themselves from negotiating with the Russians when Putin is, while Putin is still president of Russia. They've come up with a peace plan, the Zelensky peace plan, which isn't a peace plan. It's a demand for Russia's unconditional surrender, complete pull out of all Russian troops from every part of post-1991 Ukraine, including Crimea itself, and then there might be negotiations on how much the reparations Russia would pay, would be, and war crimes, trials of Russian leaders. I mean, it's an absurd plan, but the Ukrainians have mailed their flag to the mast on it. They're constantly saying that they will never retreat from it. So this has been the rhetoric that the Ukrainians, Zelensky himself, have been pushing. And unfortunately, there are people in Ukrainian society who are absolutely behind pursuing these maximalist objectives. So the logical thing for Ukraine to do in the situation in which it finds itself in now is to do what the Finns did, for example, in the summer of, in the spring of 1940, when they found themselves in a war with the Soviet Union, which they achieved a few successes at the beginning, but then it was clear that they were going to lose and lose catastrophically. Anyway, at that point, the Finns understood they were going to lose the war. They told the Russians, we understand we're going to lose the war. We want to see peace and an armistice was achieved and negotiations to place and the Finns had to succeed. A significant amount of territory, but the country and the nation survived. That would be the obvious and logical thing for the Ukrainians to do now. But they box themselves in, they can't do it. If they try to do it, we've just had another warning this morning from a Ukrainian activist connected with the nationalist brigades, that if they do that, if they make any concessions at all, even to the point of agreeing, minus ceasefires with the Russians in various places. Why the Russians would agree, minus ceasefires? It's another question. But anyway, even the smallest concession is going to provoke a fierce reaction from these forces within Ukraine, which remain committed to achieving victory, and which give every impression of preferring total defeat to what they would consider a shameful surrender. So Ukraine is boxed in. It can't negotiate. It's psychologically incapable of negotiating. Zelensky knows that his own position politically would collapse if he were to begin negotiations. So he can't do that. There's no one else in the political system in Ukraine who's prepared to do that either. And in the West, instead of people there, telling themselves, look, Ukraine is losing the war. It's losing catastrophically. We can't turn things around. It'd be an absolute disaster if this war goes on. We could be facing millions of refugees leaving Ukraine in the winter when the Russians knock out the electricity system. As by the way, they are likely to do as part of their ongoing military offensive. After all, the United States did it in Iraq. Why wouldn't the Russians do it in Ukraine? So instead of the West trying to formulate some kind of proposal, one which goes over the Ukrainians' heads and says to the Russians, let's talk. Let's sit down. Let's negotiate. Let's come up with some kind of idea how we can satisfy your needs, but also preserve something of Ukraine. We have the Western leaders chasing around, debating whether to conduct more long-range missile strikes against Russia, which are not going to achieve anything, except provoke the Russians. So it is a terrible situation. And everybody has got themselves in the West and in Ukraine, into this trap from which there doesn't seem to be any escape. Anybody who comes forward talks about negotiations. They immediately called an appeaser. We've done another program about this, but the British Defense, former Defense Secretaries, who want long-range missiles to be launched against Russia, say there'd be a dereliction of duty not to do it, that it would be appeasement of Putin not to do it, that there's no conceivable reason why it shouldn't be done now, as if this could change anything or improve this disastrous picture that we've just discussed. So, you know, this is astonishing. And this at a time when the Russians have been complaining that they've been coming under pressure from their allies to talk. So, you know, if there was a proper diplomatic initiative, one that the Russians could work with, who knows, something might happen, but they're not prepared to allow it to happen, because agreeing to do it would result in recriminations, in admissions, mistakes were made, there might be serious questions about the decisions that were made back in February and March 2022, about some of the earlier decisions that were made over the course of 2021, when the Russians were looking for some kind of negotiated outcome to the crisis before the fighting had even begun, they're not prepared to do that. So, we're stuck and instead people preserve the fiction that there's two equivalent armies fighting each other in Ukraine, well, that isn't the case at all. Might have been once, but it's certainly not the case now. - Yeah, they could easily marginalize the Western Bandarites, which could give the Zelensky administration or whatever administration is in Kiev, some space to negotiate some sort of a deal or at least some sort of a framework of a deal, maybe going back to Istanbul or Istanbul Plus. But as long as you keep the Western Bandarites around, you're never gonna accomplish anything. The East of Ukraine was never the problem, ever, going back to 1991. It wasn't the East of Ukraine, it wasn't even the center of Ukraine, that West Bandara part of Ukraine has always been the problem with Ukraine and instead of dealing with it, finding a way to deal with it, they give them more power. The collective West has given them more power and more authority. But what do you think about that? What I've just said there and what's the deal with Zelensky's victory plan? I've got a sense that there is no victory plan that's making it up as he goes along, he has no idea what victory plan he's trying to put together, at least his victory plan right now in my mind, consists of getting long-range missile strikes and holding out to Kursk. I think that's pretty much all he knows about a victory plan right now. What were your thoughts there? - Well, let's see what the first point, because you're absolutely right, that the entirety of Western security and foreign policy can be held to ransom by a veto exercised by some frankly not very balanced people in law. And balanced people in law is incredible, but that's what we've achieved. We've given these people in Western Ukraine and the various nationalist regiments, Azov, I-DAR and all of those. We've given them an effective veto for what the West can do, because the West says that there cannot be any negotiation without Ukraine and these people who have now an extraordinary degree of power inside Ukraine itself so that there is not going to be any negotiation by Ukraine. So if they're stopping negotiations by Ukraine and if the West says they cannot be negotiations without Ukraine, that there's not going to be negotiations. We're going to end up in a complete defeat. Now that is bizarre, that is extraordinary and going back in time. It's not what the US has historically ever done. The United States didn't let itself be put in a position where it couldn't negotiate with the North Vietnamese because the South Vietnamese didn't like it. The United States did negotiate with the North Vietnamese. It negotiated with other people around the world as well. It never let itself be held hostage by its allies or in this case, its proxies in the way that it has been over Ukraine. This has been a total complete failure of Western policy. And I'm sorry to sort of hammer the point home. It's again a sign of how badly the current administration in Washington has mishandled things when we say that in foreign policy terms, this is the worst foreign policy administration. I can remember, it's true. No other administration would have allowed the United States to be tied down in this kind of way. And perhaps just possibly the next administration, if it's led by Trump and Vance, might break away from this impossible position. At least they're talking about a plan, even if you can imagine that the Russians might have some concerns about it. Wait a minute, let's put all that aside. Let's not spend more time on that. Now, what was the second point that you made? You talked about the- - The victory plan. - No, these are sets of the victory plan. - There is no victory plan. Again, I was listening to this interview that Zerensky gave. And he said that he said he knew absolutely he's got a victory plan. And the victory plan comes up, comes in five paths. And when he started to discuss what those various paths were, he's just the same as all the things that have been happening at the moment, what he wants is more weapons. That's what he always says. And of course, he wants long-range strikes against Russia. Then he's got no victory plan. There cannot be a victory plan. How can there be a victory in a situation like the one we're looking at at the moment? Certainly Ukraine by itself cannot win a victory. As you rightly said, in terms of weapons supplies, the West is now effectively tapped out. They can't supply Patriots. The F-16s, the first one that flew, crashed in deeply troubling and concerning, and some would say humiliating circumstances. The tanks have all been sent, and they didn't do that well. Well, the brad is all of the rest. The British army is now without self-propelled guns, apparently. So the shells aren't there, all of that. So they're not that many storm shadows anymore, because most of them have been used up. The attackers have mostly been used up. The stockpile in the US is limited, and the Pentagon doesn't want to send more. So there is no Ukrainian military victory plan. And I mean, this is absurd. It's just a piece of conjuring, a verbal conjuring that Zelensky is coming up with. He's coming along with a charm, a map, which shows various Russian facilities that would be within range of attackers and storm shadow missiles. Except, of course, that the Pentagon has said, and Zelensky now agrees, that the Russians have pulled out all their military planes and aviation and all of that from these places. And it doesn't seem to be having any effect. The Russians can still bomb and conduct strikes anywhere that they want across Ukraine. So there is no Zelensky plan. As you correctly said, he makes it up as he goes along. It shifts and changes with every account. One moment it involves local ceasefires. Next moment it doesn't. There is no Zelensky victory plan. Zelensky's victory plan, his real victory plan, is to find some way to drag the United States into the war. Because unless he does that, he is going to lose. If you follow his latest interview, he knows it. He's got to try and find some way of getting the United States to commit to a war against Russia, because otherwise he's lost. It's insanity. It's insanity, but it's the only card he has left. He's desperate and he's panicking and he's ready to start. A World War III in order to save himself. Yeah. Exactly. Okay, we will end the video there. The derad.locals.com. We are on Rumble Odyssey Bitch Shoot, Telegram, RockFit, and Twitter X and go to the derad shop, pick up some merch. Like the T-shirts that we are wearing today in this video. The link is in the description box down below. Take care. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)