Throughout its history Russia has been protected by its vast geography. Napoleon and Hitler foundered attempting to get as far as Moscow, a small fraction of the way across the entire country.
That has changed. Ukraine has crippled the Black Sea fleet, chasing it out of the Black Sea. We have destroyed many aircraft hundreds of kilometers from its borders. Russia can no longer depend on distance to protect armaments and munitions factories from the enemies in fights it provokes, such as this one.
Russia’s geography has also long been a handicap. Its Navy depends on transit through waters controlled by unfriendly powers. To get out of St. Petersburg to the Atlantic it has to thread its way past newly hostile Finland, Sweden and Estonia, then it’s traditional NATO adversaries. To get out of its Black Sea ports it has to go past first Ukraine, then Turkey, and then the NATO members surrounding the Mediterranean.
Russia does have free access to the Pacific from Vladivostok, but so what? Ships cannot easily sail the polar route across northern Russia, and the southern route involves a number of chokepoints, most significant of which is the Strait of Malacca.
Movement of goods between Eastern and Western Russia therefore has long depended on railroads. They were monumentally expensive to build, but safe, being thousands of miles from any potential enemy. No longer!
Ukraine just blew up the Severomursky Tunnel north of Lake Baikal, 3000 miles from Ukraine and 1500 miles from any country that might be friendly to Ukraine. It simultaneously blew up a bridge on an alternate route, presumably the one they used before they finished the tunnel. This should put the Baikal – Amur line out of operation for a while.
The only other rail line connecting the east and west is the Trans-Siberian railroad. The map below shows their vulnerabilities. There are many places where all traffic has to pass over a single bridge over a major river. Five of them are labeled in English on the map below of the two major railroad lines:
Korean-Russian Friendship Bridge – Tumen River
Komsolsk – Amur River
Krasnoyarsk – Yenisei River
Novosibersk – Ob River
Ufa – Belaya River
Wikipedia says there are ten tunnels and lists the five longest of them. It would be a good bet that blocking any of them would do a fair job of tangling military shipments from North Korea and China.
Baikalsky tunnel 6,685 metres (4.154 mi)[8]
Severomuysky Tunnel 15,343 metres (9.534 mi)
Kodar Tunnell 1,981 metres (1.231 mi)
Dusse Alin Tunnel 1,852 metres (1.151 mi)
Korshunovsky tunnel 950 metres (3,120 ft)
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Ukraine, with a long and strong alliance with the Democrat party in the US and the left in Europe, is rightly concerned about their rightward political drift. Hungary’s Viktor Orban has long resisted EU agendas such as (1) flooding Europe with Middle Eastern refugees, (2) putting their farmers out of business, and (3) indoctrinating their children with weird notions of sexuality. To name only three. He is now joined by Robert Fico of Slovakia and Italy’s Georgia Meloni. The AfD is gaining strength in Germany as is the National Rally in France. And now, Gert Wilders – the wildcard – in the Netherlands.
It should come as no surprise that some of these parties and politicians resist support for Ukraine along with the rest of the EU agenda that has been stuffed down their throats. The actual surprise is how moderate they are! Meloni vocally supports Ukraine. In his first interview with a foreign newsman, Gert Wilders stated outright that Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine. What Putin did is wrong. However, the voters elected Wilders to represent the interests of the Dutch. Top of the list is unwanted immigrants. I thank God daily that it is not an issue here in Ukraine, and that Ukraine has a strong bulwark to the west in the form of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Baltics against illegal immigrants and asylum seekers.
Rather than disparage them, Ukraine should build bridges as quickly as possible with the European right. We are conservative. They are conservative. We should not be bound by the politics of Viktor Pinchuk, Brian Bonner and our other past politicians.
Well written, well supported and good use of visual aid. I am looking to see what happens in the UK at the next election. I am pretty sure that the conservative party is not going to retain power, and I do not think the liberal party is going to do as well as the assume they will. However, the cheerleader of Brexit Nigel Farage is a common name being discussed by people of many opposing political persuasions as a viable Prime Minister. Parties like Reform (the old Brexit) and Reclaim which always looked like wild cards are now gaining momentum. The only way forward to many Brits is to vote as a one-off for these wild card parties who express clearly against migration and for active deportation. They so far are clear that they want the Britain of the 1970's where Borders, Language, and Culture meant everything British. Gone are the discussion in the pubs and clubs about diversity being a strength. Anyone walking in parts of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Luton, Hounslow can reasonably think they are in the middle-east by the attire of the people and the lack of English written or spoken and the active hostility towards British symbols. Yes, I do cross my fingers in hope that much of the damage by Tony Blair and those who followed is about to be undone - and this nationalism while most likely negatively effect Ukraine.
The trouble with the European Right is that they have long been seduced by the likes of Aleksandr Dugin: "In 1989, taking advantage of increased opportunities to visit the West, Dugin spent most of the year traveling to Western European countries. While there, he strengthened ties with leading figures of the European New Right, such as Frenchman Alain de Benoist and Belgian Jean-Francois Thiriart. These contacts led to Dugin's "belated reconciliation" with the USSR, just as that state was approaching its final demise. It appears that, largely as a result of these contacts with the European Nouvelle Droite, Dugin became a fascist theorist. On the subject of Dugin's indubitable fascist orientation, Stephen
Shenfield has written: "Crucial to Dugin's politics is the classical concept of the 'conservative revolution' that overturns the post-Enlightenment world and installs a new order in which the heroic values of the almost forgotten 'Tradition' are renewed. It is this concept that identifies Dugin unequivocally as a fascist." ...In 1991-1992, Prokhanov and Dugin attempted to form an alliance between certain leaders of the European New Right and several department heads and professors at the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces. The first issue of Elementy in 1992 published the transcript of an April 1992 roundtable, held on the premises of the academy, which included Lieutenant General Nikolai Klokotov, head of the academy's strategy department; Lieutenant General Nikolai Pishchev, deputy head of the same department; Major General Vladislav Iminov, head of the academy's department of military history; Alain de Benoist, "the leader of the European New Right"; and Jean Lalou, another New Right spokesman." https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics
This seduction/disinformation campaign continued with Dugin's 2012 work, The Fourth Political Theory - in pdf, here: http://symbioid.com/pdf/Politics/The%20Fourth%20Political%20Theory%20-%20Dugin,%20Alexander.pdf, which has managed to fool a lot of the American Right, most notably Tucker Carlson and other leading figures.
I think TL Davix has the best take on this that I've seen: https://tldavis.substack.com/p/america-and-the-fourth-political