A prominent American general talks about the end of the Russian Empire – Startitup

The war in Ukraine, although it has been going on for more than half a year, still has many question marks. One of the few things that is apparently certain is that Russia and Ukraine will not be the same countries they were before February 24, 2022. The prestigious Reuters agency quoted the conclusions of the International Institute of Finance (IIF) in July, according to which Russia’s economy this year it will fall by a dizzying 15% and next year by another three percent due to Western economic sanctions, the brain drain from the world’s largest country and the collapse of the country’s exports. In this context, Polskie Radio reports a comment by Ben Hodges, the former commander of US forces in Europe, who went much further than the IIF in estimating the further development of Russia. The intention of the US is to demilitarize Russia Hodges is no stranger, he was a renowned army general who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. He retired from the army in 2018 and since then has been working at the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank based in Washington, USA. “I think that the US war goals for this conflict should include the ‘de-imperialization’ of Russia.” It seems to me that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the Russian Federation as it stands today. We have to be ready for this…we were not ready for the end of the Soviet Union,” The Odessa Journal quoted him as saying on Twitter on Monday. I think that US war-aims for this conflict should include “de-imperialization” of Russia. It seems to me that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the Russian Federation as it looks today. We need to be prepared for this…we were not prepared for the end of the USSR. https://t.co/tXpx6m3KmU — Ben Hodges (@general_ben) September 4, 2022 The Kyiv Post reports that the tweet was in response to Kurt Volker, former ambassador to NATO and former top negotiator for Ukraine, saying that Russia’s “imperialist wars” against its neighbors did not start in Ukraine, but much earlier, in 2008, when Russia attacked Georgia, specifically North Ossetia and Abkhazia. Volker also said that Russian forces are still present in Georgia. In the context of the war with Russia, Hodges recommended Moldova and Ukraine to jointly resolve the issue of the frozen conflict in Transnistria, as the Kremlin is now unable to oppose such efforts, reports Ukrinform. He is not the first with this prediction, but Radio Free Europe points out that he is not the first renowned person with such a prognosis. Iver Neumann, director of Norway’s Fridtjof Nansen Institute and an expert on Russia, predicted in a July interview that Putin’s refusal to reform the country’s economy, exacerbated by the current invasion, could be the “beginning of the end” of his regime. When that will happen, he says, is difficult to predict. “Since Putin’s term began 22 years ago, very little, if anything, has really happened to the economy. And I find it astonishing that a trained Marxist like Putin simply does not understand that material factors are essential. Putin says: ‘The West will have its economy and we will have our will, that is, the will, and we will persevere with it. But it just doesn’t work that way. So I think this is the beginning of the end of the Putin regime,” Neumann explained. As for what will come after Putin, Neumann emphasized that it is difficult to make any predictions, as “the Russian president and his regime have been thorough in rooting out what existed in Russia in organized liberal thinking”. Russian President and close Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev. According to AP News, the West warned that trying to push Russia to collapse would amount to a “chess game with death”. “These are the lewd dreams of Anglo-Saxon perverts who go to bed with the secret idea of ​​the disintegration of our state, thinking of how to tear us into small pieces.” Such attempts are very dangerous and should not be underestimated. These dreamers ignore a simple axiom: the violent collapse of a nuclear power is always a chess game with Death, in which it is known exactly when checkmate will come: the judgment day for humanity,” said Medvedev. Thanks for reading Startitup. If you have an observation or found an error in the article, write to us at [email protected]. Sources: Polskie Radio, The Odessa Journal, Kyiv Post, Ukrinform, Reuters, Radio Free Europe, AP News