Mogelson shows us the war a few independent journalists have written of but a war we have not heretofore read about in mainstream media. This is the war the propaganda machine has kept from us. And now we know that what correspondents reporting for independent media have been describing is by and large the war as it is.
Among much else we can now see the obvious indifference the Kiev regime and its Western backers display for those doing the fighting — who, Mogelson tells us, are now working-class Ukrainians, the more privileged having dodged the draft or otherwise avoided service. (...)
What is different now?
This is hard to say. But the larger picture suggests publication of this eye– and mind-opening piece reflects a creeping recognition in all sorts of places —among the policy cliques, at the Pentagon, in corporate media — that Ukraine is not going to win this war and the time has come to prepare for this eventuality.
The new drift on the vaunted counteroffensive is that it is not going to make much difference. There is more talk now about the conditions necessary to begin negotiations. NATO officials, per Steven Erlanger, the Times’ Brussels correspondent, are now thinking about doing in Ukraine what the allies did in postwar Germany: Divide it such that the West joins the alliance and the east is left to the East, so to say.
Mogelson’s intent, surely, was to do good work, full stop, and he has. But read in this larger context, its publication looks to me the start of an effort to get all those people with blue-and-yellow flags on their front porches ready for a dose of the reality from which they have been shielded all these months. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Business Insider, Forbes: They have all recently run pieces not nearly as good as Mogelson’s but in the let’s-get-real line.
by Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News | Read more:
Image: Maxim DondyukUkrainian trenchline at the Battle of Bakhmut, November 2022. (Mil.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)[ed. Definitely check out the original source material: Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine (New Yorker). Some of the best (and most vivid) war reporting/photography to date.]
