This is from the grumpy Russian ex pat, ex USSR military, now in US. What is interesting is the date. Long before the SMO.
update
In short, US destroyed its mfg base. US needs a war in Ukr to drive EU into our arms. RU does not need EU trade or the NS pipeline but EU does. If US sabotages NS it will destroy EU. US lost the conventional arms race and cannot even build anti ship missiles. US elites are idiots. US needs to provoke Russia into war over Ukraine.
https://www.unz.com/article/the-dictatorship-of-numbers/The Dictatorship of Numbers
In Continuation of a Conversation with Paul Craig Roberts
Andrei Martyanov •
April 7, 2021 • 2,800 Words • 290 Comments • Reply
...
America started to lose its only tool which was and even today remains the only valid mean to an end of economic prosperity—manufacturing capacity. A concept which is beyond the grasp of most American economists and political pseudo-scientists most of who today wear Chinese tailored suits, carry iPhones manufactured in China and use laptops and PCs assembled there as well.
...
So, to convince those 447 million EU’s residents that they need America’s protection and weapons, America needs Russia to get into the war in Ukraine and if it will end up with utter destruction, and it will if Russia really decides so, of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and, likely, Ukrainian statehood, so be it. ...
Making Russia obliterate Ukrainian Armed Forces is a perfect way to scare Europeans into abandoning any attempts to economically compete with the United States and deny them access to Russia’s energy.
...
1. Europe is not anymore a crucial trade partner for Russia and mutual trade plummeted in the last few years. ...
2. A much-discussed pipeline of Nord Stream 2 is, actually, not a crucial economic project for Russia anymore. Russia can absorb losses if the project eventually sabotaged by the United States and its European poodles such as Poland, but for Germany, and EU in general, this sabotage will result in catastrophe,...
3. The United States lost the arms race. America’s weapons acquisition process and military doctrine-mongering cannot be viewed anymore as a normal, that is logical and justified, process....
4. The United States simply cannot develop modern supersonic anti-shipping missile and the US Navy is forced, incomprehensibly, to buy Norwegian Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile ...
5. Lastly, the intellectual level and the level of awareness of modern American elites is in a precipitous decline,...
The United States already fails to meet a number criteria imperative for the status of superpower, among which a military one is crucial. If some American military “strategists” still exercised a suicidal idea of fighting Russia conventionally in Ukraine in 2014, today in 2021 such an idea is downright mad, because the United States cannot win conventional war in Russia’s vicinity and any US force will be annihilated. This leaves the United States only two options:
1.
Indeed, believing its own propaganda, try to unleash mayhem in Ukraine, provoke Russia into a direct military operation and then introduce whatever the force US and NATO will muster into the theater of operations. Any such plan is bound to fail miserably because not only such a force will be annihilated but participating NATO nations will face the possibility of their military installations destroyed by stand-off weapons. ...
2. So, what’s left realistically is to push Ukraine into the suicidal campaign with Russia being designated aggressor before even the first shots are fired. ...
Russia has many options, the United States has one—it needs war in Donbass, which, Washington’s thinking goes, will allow to drive Europeans into submission, which allegedly should allow the United States to save her hegemonic status. It will not even if Europe is driven into submission.
