Mike in Watertown (@MikeInWatertown)

@jim7z Riley's article quotes Sergey Glazyev and http://topwar.ru approvingly, and criticizes Putin for being too accommodating to the West, by continuing to sell it oil and enriched uranium. That's not enemy propaganda, it's just not the usual stuff we get in the English-language alt-media that is in favor of everything the Russian government does just because Russia is fighting the GAE. Riley admits that "there’s a decent chance that a negotiated settlement would simply be an exercise in irresponsible can-kicking, leading to a resumption in hostilities a few years down the road. (Sigh.)" That's acknowledgement that a frozen conflict would be a bad thing, which is not the same thing as advocacy for one. Your perspective and Riley's differ. You say "The Ukraine does not matter." That can never be true for people with family in the Ukraine. The Ukraine may not matter to you, because for you and me, the Global American Empire is the near enemy. But for people in Russia, the near enemy is the treacherous elites in the Russian government who are just as enamored of injecting their populace with clot shots and feeding them bugs as our own Western elites are. Meanwhile ordinary members of that populace die on both sides of the war, while the Russian government continues to do business with the enemy. Riley is on our side. It doesn't help our side when someone who shares our goals but writes from a different perspective gets called an enemy propagandist. As for who's more right, you or Riley? I don't know. But I do feel sure that if Russia had sent tanks to Kiev in 2014, before NATO built up the Ukrainian army, the current sorry situation could have been avoided. Failing that, a Russia less compromised by a globalist, traitorous elite could have, over time, built a Fortress Russia, sat back, and waited for the GAE and its puppets in Kiev to collapse from its own internal contradictions. And it would have cost a lot fewer human lives and less hard currency that what Russia has lost since last year,