🪖Russian strike on elite French merc nest delivers 'devastating blow' to Ukraine's war effort

Sputnik correspondent Russell Bentley (@TXDPR) explains that the Russian missile strike against French mercenaries in Kharkov was a painful blow for the Ukrainian military, which is increasingly dependent on hired-guns from abroad.

“The European mercenaries tend to be highly trained specialists who work on specific weapons systems too complex for the average Ukrainian connoscripts and Nazi footsoldiers to operate efficiently.

This strike did not just eliminate a couple of platoons of enemy soldiers, it put some of the most lethal and long-range weapons in the Ukrainian arsenal out of service until more specialists are found to replace the fried mercs that were eliminated.

There has been a major influx of high quality mercenaries with special skill sets in the last few months. The reason for this increase in foreign professional soldiers was to replace the Ukrainian special forces who were almost completely wiped out in the Ukrainian failed "summer offensive", as well as to try to make a desperate (but futile) attempt to forestall the inevitable Russian offensive.”

Read full column here. https://sputnikglobe.com/20240118/ukraines-growing-foreign-mercenary-addiction--1116250272.html

🇷🇺Pepe Escobar: Russia to emerge as ‘ultimate winner against all of NATO’

Moscow will be “dictating all terms, leaving the Western ‘Hegemon’ desperate” and “spinning”, Sputnik contributor Pepe Escobar wrote in his latest op-ed.

The geopolitical analyst was drawing on a “hand grenade of a book” published by French historian and political analyst, Professor Emmanuel Todd. Escobar credited the author of “The Defeat of the West” for using verified facts to “blow up the Russophobia edifice erected” by the West over the Ukraine conflict.

The author’s merit, according to Escobar, lies in how he lays bare “Western society’s false consciousness,” while explaining reality “in a way that totally escapes the brainwashed collective West masses lingering under turbo-neoliberalism.”

Escobar seized upon several key reasons offered up by the author that led to the West’s downfall:

▪️Russia withstood the West’s sanctions while reducing “dominant notions of the ‘neoliberal political economy’ (GDP rates) to shambles.”

▪️The West displayed “ideological solitude and ideological narcissism,” and “supremacy of an imperial nihilism expressed by the obsession with Forever Wars.”

▪️“The end of the nation-state” in the US, while Russia is “focused on sovereignty, [that is], the capacity of a state to independently define its internal and external policies.”

▪️“Implosion of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) culture” resulting in an “essentially military organism” managed by US neocons.

▪️De-industrialization, with a “post-imperial” US no more than “a shell of military machinery deprived of an intelligence-driven culture.”

▪️Transgenderism and the ‘Cult of the Fake’ as “one of the flags of this nihilism that now defines the West, this drive to destroy, not just things and humans but reality.”