A Tale of Two Narratives

 Patrick Cockburn was once an excellent foreign correspondent, covering what the US call the "Middle East", which the UK used to call the "Near East" before, but now use the American term. 

The Greeks always said the East started at the Hellespont, but the US figure Western Europe is still East, not as far east as the Hellespont, but still East. So Europe are the Near East for the US, and the area just east of the Hellespont is the Middle East for the US. And the US is rich enough and powerful enough that most now call the area just east of the Hellespont the "Middle East".

Mr Cockburn wrote that, with Russia in severe decline, the idiot Putin got the idea of invading the Ukraine, for some inexplicable reason (if the Ukraine want to kill all the ethnic Russians in the Ukraine, they have every right to do so, that's national sovereignty). Of course, Russia lost badly, easily defeated by the Ukrainians, and complete collapse and regime change should happen in a few more weeks, at most. Mr Cockburn wrote that Russia had just 55 aeroplanes, and the Ukrainians destroyed all of them.

Mr Cockburn now reads the Western media which reiterates the Western narrative, but reporters actually in Eastern Ukraine report that Russia are mostly winning, with few losses, while the Ukraine lost huge numbers of draftees in their offensive that recaptured some areas formerly held by the Russians, while the Russian forces managed to escape with very few losses.

Of course, it still looks bad. The ethnic Russians left behind are now being murdered. Why Russia invaded the Kharkov oblast when they should have known they could not hold it against a Ukrainian attack, leaving the ethnic Russians now in much worse state than before, is not clear.

Russia admit that about 6,000 of the Russian army soldiers that invaded the Ukraine have been killed. Of course, the ethnic Russian army in the Ukraine joined with the Russian national army to fight the anti-Russian Ukrainians, and together they were slowly advancing. Until they weren't. And the ethnic Russian Ukrainian army lost far more soldiers than the Russian army, but no one counts them. So no reliable numbers for Russian/ethnic Russian Ukrainian losses.

Meanwhile, the goal of the US is the complete destruction of Russia, a continuation of what happened to the USSR thanks to Gorbachev and Yeltsin: breaking Russia up into several, perhaps many, small, unarmed countries that must do whatever the US demand or be totally destroyed similar to Iraq and Libya. The US want a similar fate for the PRC. Then the US will continue to be World Hegemon with no competitors. And the Western media all say this is going very well, following the US plan perfectly, destroying Russia and soon the PRC as well.

But independent media are not so sure, they figure the US will lose to Russia in the Ukraine, where Russia have all the logistic advantage.

And the US will lose to the PRC, which have all the advantage in numbers, technology, and leadership.

But my question remains: will the US decide that having no world at all is better than giving up World Hegemony? It's certainly looking like it. Jens Stoltenberg says that NATO must not lose in the Ukraine, no matter what it takes to prevent a loss.