This week in Ukraine, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Lieutenant General Budanov. We discussed what he has learned in this war, and the future of intelligence and strike operations.
Mick, the big three are something we all should remember. Prevent war if at all possible. If you can’t, seize the initiative by striking first and stringing so hard the enemy will think twice about proceeding.
I would add a caveat to these: always be vigilant and prepared. Without those predicates, one cannot carry out Budanov’s big three.
The first two principles begin "if you believe ..." My experience over recent years is that there is no common belief on the questions in Western democracies. "If opinion is hopelessly divided whether ... " leads to inaction.
Hopefully Ukraine has taught us that there are bad actors in the world and they will attack us if they can. But I am not sure: Anneliese Dodds MP, the relevant minister, resigned because the foreign aid budget in the UK was reduced to fund more defence spending. And in UK we *still* pursue Net Zero.
Dear Mick RYAN … BUDANOV - who isn’t very well-known outside of Ukraine as he is conducting a losing and lost war which could easily have been avoided - says according to you:
“First, if you believe war is possible, you must do everything “possible and impossible” to prevent it.
Second, if you believe that war is certain or inevitable, there is a responsibility to strike first and deny the enemy the ability to seize the initiative.
Finally, if you must strike first, strike hard as possible to make an adversary think twice.”
Strange that this is what the Russians did and the Ukrainians ignored; and part of the reason why they lost the war…and this is perhaps the most important lesson the declining and failing West should learn from the Russians … if they are still able to learn anything at all.
As TRUMP has now blown the lid off of the British narrative fakery factory - and self-delusion - that it was supposedly not a U.S.-UK-NATO provoked war which the Russians tried to avoid, you should perhaps next time slip out of the comfort of Kyiv and see for yourself what is left of the once flourishing Ukraine until it listened to foolish Western advice.
The war will end with Ukrainian neutrality - as reasonably requested before it started and during the negotiations (that BIDEN-JOHNSON sabotaged - speak to Naftali BENNETT of Israel too) - and tarting the defeat up with vacuous phrases like “the biggest drone strike in the history of the world” as if it is militarily meaningful or significant, makes you sound rather desperate for little blades of grass to rescue you from the self-made morass you find yourself sinking in.
Listen to Jeffrey SACHS and his briefing to some members of the European Council on 21 February 2025 - available online - as Project Ukraine is in ruins just as project Vietnam ended in ruins; Project Iraq ended in ruins; project Afghanistan ended in ruins…
Perhaps begin by learning to face the facts as the Washington Post eventually did when they wrote: AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH: U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress: They were not, and they knew it”, an exclusive Post investigation found - written by Craig WHITLOCK on Dec. 9, 2019….it seems some Ukrainians and some Australians have not learned much from these U.S. officials and the egg that the Washington Post eventually dumped on their faces…perhaps you should listen to TRUMP who repeatedly repeats ad nauseam: “This war should never have happened”…and nothing the British fakery factory produces can cover these things up anymore.
As the saying goes: “the truth shall set you free” …or in China following Mao and Deng: “seek truth from the facts”.
It is important - when dealing with facts and rational critique - to illuminate and engage the “errors and wishful thinking” in an attempted counter-argument: otherwise it is mere indulgence in rhetoric and grandstanding without any substance.
The “normative order” is presumably the U.S.-Western post-WW2 order and its biased pro-Western norms: precisely the one the Rest - including Russia - are ending and replacing with a multipolar, democratic multilateral, non-bloc and non-zero sum order. It is thus based on different and more equitable norms so anyone overturning the old one is doing the Rest a big favour.
The surprising thing is that TRUMP is not only demolishing it but also adapting fast to this - adaptiveness is a sign of intelligent behaviour whilst being stuck in the outdated past, is not…
Working with false analogies, unscientific comparisons and outdated assumptions, are all precisely what “wishful thinking” means…neither the Nazi regime (most of the key Nazi scientists and intelligence networks were taken over by the USA - VON BRAUN for example enabled the rockets that took the U.S. to the moon) nor the USSR still exist.
Comparing apples and pears in two radically different historical conjunctures (the West is in steep decline to name one), is a common error in an attempt at comparison in political science.
Russia - factually - was interested in Ukrainian neutrality and respect for its Russian minority - what the Rest knows as “democratic norms” - and the disinformation of the British fakery factory is no longer even reproduced in the New York Times or the Washington Post.
A Straw Man “argument” is a rhetorical device of the desperate and the shadow-boxing of the mad: the world is moving on beyond the “normative order of slavery, colonialism and imperialism” and those that remain stuck in the past will once again suffer “a strange defeat”….as they clearly are.
This long response is predictably full of errors, but the key one is wishful thinking based on ignorance and misunderstanding of the norm-driven world which Putin and Trump seek to overturn with a 'deal'. Well, the situation resembles August 1939, when Stalin and Hitler also struck a deal and tried to divide Europe between themselves. Russia has not achieved and won't achieve its objective of making Ukraine its colony once again and to destroy the Ukrainian nation through russification. Putin may have fooled Trump but Russia simply does not have what it takes to be an equal partner of US and China (Yalta 2.0) and whatever the outcome of the current phase of the war, Russia will remain a problem for a foreseeable future and this problem will have to be properly dealt with one way or another.
Mick, the big three are something we all should remember. Prevent war if at all possible. If you can’t, seize the initiative by striking first and stringing so hard the enemy will think twice about proceeding.
I would add a caveat to these: always be vigilant and prepared. Without those predicates, one cannot carry out Budanov’s big three.
The first two principles begin "if you believe ..." My experience over recent years is that there is no common belief on the questions in Western democracies. "If opinion is hopelessly divided whether ... " leads to inaction.
Hopefully Ukraine has taught us that there are bad actors in the world and they will attack us if they can. But I am not sure: Anneliese Dodds MP, the relevant minister, resigned because the foreign aid budget in the UK was reduced to fund more defence spending. And in UK we *still* pursue Net Zero.
Dear Mick RYAN … BUDANOV - who isn’t very well-known outside of Ukraine as he is conducting a losing and lost war which could easily have been avoided - says according to you:
“First, if you believe war is possible, you must do everything “possible and impossible” to prevent it.
Second, if you believe that war is certain or inevitable, there is a responsibility to strike first and deny the enemy the ability to seize the initiative.
Finally, if you must strike first, strike hard as possible to make an adversary think twice.”
Strange that this is what the Russians did and the Ukrainians ignored; and part of the reason why they lost the war…and this is perhaps the most important lesson the declining and failing West should learn from the Russians … if they are still able to learn anything at all.
As TRUMP has now blown the lid off of the British narrative fakery factory - and self-delusion - that it was supposedly not a U.S.-UK-NATO provoked war which the Russians tried to avoid, you should perhaps next time slip out of the comfort of Kyiv and see for yourself what is left of the once flourishing Ukraine until it listened to foolish Western advice.
The war will end with Ukrainian neutrality - as reasonably requested before it started and during the negotiations (that BIDEN-JOHNSON sabotaged - speak to Naftali BENNETT of Israel too) - and tarting the defeat up with vacuous phrases like “the biggest drone strike in the history of the world” as if it is militarily meaningful or significant, makes you sound rather desperate for little blades of grass to rescue you from the self-made morass you find yourself sinking in.
Listen to Jeffrey SACHS and his briefing to some members of the European Council on 21 February 2025 - available online - as Project Ukraine is in ruins just as project Vietnam ended in ruins; Project Iraq ended in ruins; project Afghanistan ended in ruins…
Perhaps begin by learning to face the facts as the Washington Post eventually did when they wrote: AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH: U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress: They were not, and they knew it”, an exclusive Post investigation found - written by Craig WHITLOCK on Dec. 9, 2019….it seems some Ukrainians and some Australians have not learned much from these U.S. officials and the egg that the Washington Post eventually dumped on their faces…perhaps you should listen to TRUMP who repeatedly repeats ad nauseam: “This war should never have happened”…and nothing the British fakery factory produces can cover these things up anymore.
As the saying goes: “the truth shall set you free” …or in China following Mao and Deng: “seek truth from the facts”.
It is important - when dealing with facts and rational critique - to illuminate and engage the “errors and wishful thinking” in an attempted counter-argument: otherwise it is mere indulgence in rhetoric and grandstanding without any substance.
The “normative order” is presumably the U.S.-Western post-WW2 order and its biased pro-Western norms: precisely the one the Rest - including Russia - are ending and replacing with a multipolar, democratic multilateral, non-bloc and non-zero sum order. It is thus based on different and more equitable norms so anyone overturning the old one is doing the Rest a big favour.
The surprising thing is that TRUMP is not only demolishing it but also adapting fast to this - adaptiveness is a sign of intelligent behaviour whilst being stuck in the outdated past, is not…
Working with false analogies, unscientific comparisons and outdated assumptions, are all precisely what “wishful thinking” means…neither the Nazi regime (most of the key Nazi scientists and intelligence networks were taken over by the USA - VON BRAUN for example enabled the rockets that took the U.S. to the moon) nor the USSR still exist.
Comparing apples and pears in two radically different historical conjunctures (the West is in steep decline to name one), is a common error in an attempt at comparison in political science.
Russia - factually - was interested in Ukrainian neutrality and respect for its Russian minority - what the Rest knows as “democratic norms” - and the disinformation of the British fakery factory is no longer even reproduced in the New York Times or the Washington Post.
A Straw Man “argument” is a rhetorical device of the desperate and the shadow-boxing of the mad: the world is moving on beyond the “normative order of slavery, colonialism and imperialism” and those that remain stuck in the past will once again suffer “a strange defeat”….as they clearly are.
This long response is predictably full of errors, but the key one is wishful thinking based on ignorance and misunderstanding of the norm-driven world which Putin and Trump seek to overturn with a 'deal'. Well, the situation resembles August 1939, when Stalin and Hitler also struck a deal and tried to divide Europe between themselves. Russia has not achieved and won't achieve its objective of making Ukraine its colony once again and to destroy the Ukrainian nation through russification. Putin may have fooled Trump but Russia simply does not have what it takes to be an equal partner of US and China (Yalta 2.0) and whatever the outcome of the current phase of the war, Russia will remain a problem for a foreseeable future and this problem will have to be properly dealt with one way or another.
oh dear oh dear