Recently, I had occasion to hear a wise man from the East, George Yeo, talk about Ukraine, the US and Russia, the three main protagonists in the Ukraine War.
Mr. Yeo, a former General in the Singapore Military and Foreign Minister of Singapore is a graduate of Cambridge in England and the Harvard Business School in the US. He knows the World well…East and West. He’s the kind of guy who gets his calls returned.
Asked to describe the present situation in Ukraine, Mr. Yeo set the table as follows:
“My fear is that the protagonists are entering a long dark tunnel from which they cannot easily reverse course and all of them would rather not be in the position they are now in. The West cannot afford for Russia to win and Putin has to win.”
Mr. Yeo is a calm and soft-spoken man. I would say his delivery is the polar opposite of Bernie Sanders but, I would hazard a guess, that their politics are simpatico.
Implied in Mr. Yeo’s remarks is that the situation in Ukraine will fluctuate and reach a level where the parties become willing to entertain “ceasefire in place” talks. And that those talks may go on for a while and merge into a semi-permanent partition where “the situation on the ground” (in other words the relative strength of the parties) dictates what’s what in the future. There’s a place in the world called “The Golan Heights” that is occupied by Israel but Syria thinks is theirs. The solution is that its Israel’s as long as they can hold it. Might has to be worth something right? It could go down that way in Ukraine.
Mr. Yeo says the entire world is watching the war in Ukraine very closely. He volunteers that America’s ability to punish countries by sanctions will be rendered less effective in the near future by the development of alternative financial systems by major players like China and India in the East.
Before leaving this subject it’s worthwhile to say something about CNN and their coverage of the War in Ukraine. CNN is under new corporate ownership and control. The top man and a major shareholder is David Zaslav. He’s proudly Jewish on both sides. His grandparents were from Poland and Ukraine. They had life experiences most of us could not comprehend.
CNN is on a mission. They are all in, all day for Ukraine. When the war is being discussed guests are constantly being badgered to call Putin a war criminal. Could be that he is.
But when they go to get Putin to take him to the Hague for trial as a War Criminal they better slip on down to Israel and put the cuffs on Benjamin Netanyahu for the slaughter operation he oversaw in Gaza in 2014. It was called Operation Protective Edge. It lasted fifty days. Israel killed 521 children.
In Israel, they call it “mowing the grass.”
Comments are welcome at tomc[at]wednesdayswars[dot]com. Comments will be addressed in subsequent posts.