Running 'Cause I Can't Fly 2: 2026-09-27

"Is Putin Caught In An 'Escalation Trap'?

The Long War In Eastern Europe"

by Larry C. Johnson

"Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism has flagged a recent interview that Professor Robert Pape did with Mario Nawfal. During the interview, Pape argued that Vladimir Putin is caught in an "escalation trap." In his telling, Russia launched a preventive war in February 2022 to seize Kyiv and roughly 60 percent of Ukraine. That plan collapsed, and the fallback, betting that NATO would break, is now producing the European counterbalancing coalition Moscow most feared. It is a tidy theory. It also rests on a premise about Russian intentions that the record does not support, and once that premise goes, the trap goes with it.

What the force tells you about the objective

Start with arithmetic, the kind any planner of military operations does before anything else. Russia invaded with roughly 150,000 to 190,000 troops, including separatist forces. The standard rule of thumb for occupying a hostile population, from James Quinlivan’s RAND work, is about 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants. For a country of more than 40 million, even occupying 60 percent of the territory would require several hundred thousand troops, several times what Russia sent. Moscow’s General Staff can do this arithmetic. A force that size is a coercive instrument, not an occupation army.

The pattern of the operation fits coercion. Russian forces approached Kyiv from the north but never attempted to assault or encircle a city of three million. The pressure was aimed at the government, not at taking the capital block by block. Talks began within days, in Belarus on February 28, and moved to Istanbul in March. Pape's supporters point to the airborne assault on Hostomel as proof of a plan to seize the capital. But a failed coup de main against an airfield is not evidence of an intent to occupy 60 percent of a country.

Istanbul: the objective was achieved

The strongest evidence against Pape is that the coercion worked. By the end of March 2022, meetings in Belarus and Turkey, together with video conferences, had produced the Istanbul Communiqué, a framework for a settlement. Ukraine accepted permanent neutrality in exchange for security guarantees from the United States and its allies, with Russia also as a guarantor. Russia, for its part, agreed to a process to settle the Crimea dispute diplomatically.via IISS

That was the core of what Moscow wanted, and the Ukrainian side confirmed it. David Arakhamia, who led Ukraine’s delegation, later said Russia was prepared to end the war if Ukraine accepted Finland-style neutrality and committed not to join NATO. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed to me, Judge Napolitano and Mario Nawfal directly that the talks produced a tentative agreement, and that its terms were brought to the table by the Ukrainian delegation, not imposed by Moscow.

As a gesture of goodwill, Moscow withdrew its forces from north of Kyiv. Western commentary treats that as a retreat forced by battlefield failure. It is at least as consistent with the claim that the pressure had served its purpose.

How the deal died: Then the politics changed. Boris Johnson arrived unannounced in Kyiv on April 9, 2022, and according to Arakhamia told the Ukrainians not to sign anything with Russia and to “just fight.” Two days earlier, Lavrov had already complained publicly that Ukraine’s new draft departed sharply from the key provisions agreed at Istanbul on March 29. Washington and London had decided Russia was weaker than they had thought and that it could be bled. Ukraine walked away.

This is the point Pape’s framework cannot absorb. If Russia’s goal was a neutral Ukraine obtained through negotiation, the war did not go on because Moscow’s plan failed. It went on because Russia’s adversaries rejected the settlement.

No plan B, but a fast pivot and a new army: With hindsight, Russia clearly had not prepared a plan B for Ukraine walking away. That was a real planning failure. But the Russian military adjusted quickly. It concentrated on the Donbas and the land bridge to Crimea, and the fall of Mariupol in May gave it the first major result of that phase.

The bigger adjustment came in September 2022. After a large number of contract soldiers left the army in August and the Kharkiv counteroffensive exposed how thin Russian lines were, Putin ordered the mobilization of 300,000 reservists. That was the start, not the end, of Russia’s response. From that point Moscow set about building a much larger army, as the Russian officers I have interviewed have described in detail, including Gen. Apti Alaudinov, Gen. Evgeny Buzhinsky, Gen. Andrei Gurulev and Col. Eduard Basurin.

The mobilization was followed by a sustained recruitment campaign and an expanded annual draft. By Medvedev’s count, more than 452,000 men signed military contracts in 2023. Roughly 450,000 followed in 2024, and more than 422,000 in 2025. Year after year, Russia has added at least 350,000 new soldiers. Putin’s decrees tell the same story: authorized military strength rose from about 1.15 million in 2022 to 1.32 million in December 2023, then to 1.5 million effective December 2024. By 2026, according to my sources, Russia’s army had reached that 1.5 million active-duty figure.

That is not the behavior of a state that expected a quick war and is now improvising its way out of a trap. It is the behavior of a state that decided in the autumn of 2022 to fight a long war, and built the force to do it.

Why the timeline matters: The goals never changed. Putin announced them on February 24, 2022: the demilitarization and “denazification” of Ukraine. What changed after Istanbul was the method, from coercion toward a negotiated settlement to attrition. Moscow has never attached a timeline to that effort.

Pape’s trap depends on the assumption that Russia needed a quick victory and is now stuck with worse and worse options. An attrition strategy with no deadline, backed by an army that has grown every year since 2022, is not a trap. It is a choice. Moscow's theory of victory since late 2022 has been to exhaust Ukraine’s manpower and the West’s willingness to supply it, not to break NATO by a specific date. Four and a half years later, Russian forces are still advancing, and Ukraine’s reserve and mobilization problems are structural, not temporary.

Pape’s answer is European counterbalancing, backed by an EU economy he puts at about eight times Russia’s. That ratio only holds at market exchange rates, which badly understate what Russia’s economy can actually produce. On purchasing power parity, the measure that matters in a war of production, Russia is the fourth largest economy in the world: about $6.9 trillion in 2024 by the World Bank’s count, behind only China, the United States and India, and ahead of Japan and Germany. The EU as a bloc is still larger, but on that basis the gap is roughly half of Pape’s figure.

GDP understates Russia’s position in another way. Russia has a resource base that Europe cannot match, from oil, gas and coal to metals and fertilizer, and a defense-industrial base that Europe has let wither for thirty years.

Artillery shells, the basic currency of this war, show what that means in practice. Russia produced an estimated 400,000 122mm and 152mm artillery rounds in 2022. By 2025, estimates put its annual output at about 4.2 million. A 2026 Estonian intelligence report goes further, estimating that Russian factories produced about seven million artillery, mortar, tank and rocket rounds in 2025. On top of that, Russia has received millions of rounds from North Korea.

Europe started from almost nothing. At the beginning of 2024, according to Rheinmetall’s own internal estimate, all Western European manufacturers together could produce about 550,000 shells a year. NATO's own assessment was that Russia produced as much ammunition in the first three months of 2024 as the entire alliance did in a year. The EU pledged to reach a capacity of two million 155mm shells a year by the end of 2025, a target, not proven output. Even adding US production, which is aiming for about 100,000 rounds a month in 2026, allied programs might yield about three million shells this year, still less than Russia’s estimated output in 2025.

That is the real measure of the balance Pape is counting on. A bloc whose economy is several times Russia’s is still being outproduced in the one commodity that decides an attrition war. Balance-of-power theory may be right that Europe will eventually arm itself. It says nothing about whether that happens in time to change the outcome in Ukraine.

Russia sent a force too small to occupy most of Ukraine, negotiated within days, and reached a framework agreement within five weeks. When the West persuaded Kyiv to walk away, Russia shifted to an open-ended war of attrition and spent four years building an army to fight it. That is not a state trapped by the failure of a plan to conquer 60 percent of a country. It is a state that tried coercion first, adapted when it failed, and is fighting on its own timeline."

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

"The Siege Accelerates"

by Lamentor

Excerpt: "Last Saturday: The diesel pumps ran dry in Florida and Texas. The Joliet refinery remained offline. The Houthis struck Riyadh airport. The Kursk nuclear plant cooling tower burned. The PJM grid emergency covered thirteen states. The banks faced $326.7 billion in unrealized losses. The heating oil crack spread hit the highest level in history. The truckers pressed the decline button ten thousand times a day. The G7 met to discuss the Hormuz closure. Macron convened an emergency session. The Saudi exports to Europe sat at zero. The Colombian earthquake swarm passed 1,200 tremors. The Kilauea pattern broke. The war remained contained to the periphery. The narrative remained controlled. The agenda proceeded.

Today: I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord. The frogs in the pot are hot and unable to feel the heat. They sit in the pot as the temperature rises degree by degree, unaware that the comfort they feel is actually the threshold of death. They have been told the water is fine. They have been told to trust the chefs. They have been told that anyone who suggests the water is boiling is a conspiracy theorist, a doomer, a threat to the social order. So they sit. And they wait. And they do not jump.

I have been watching for this moment for all my life, oh Lord. Not waiting. Not wanting. Not romanticizing. I have wished it would go away. I have prayed it would not arrive. I have warned in the hope that warning might prevent. But the moment has come regardless. The drum beat that signals the revelation is sounding now. The pack of lies is exposing itself. The grin cannot be wiped off because the grin is frozen in place, a rictus of denial, as the water approaches the boiling point.

The rain has come here and there and in one instant can be everywhere. It is accelerating. How fast can she go? When the night comes, no man knows. The hour is late.

The frogs are beginning to cook as the temperature rises slow. Some are beginning to notice the steam. Some are beginning to feel the pain that has been growing all along, the hurt that does not show but the pain still grows. It is no stranger to you and me. We have seen this before. We know where this leads. The first time was the warning. This time is the reality.

The final target is USA. The siege is not against some distant nation. It is against the heartland. It is against the infrastructure. It is against the currency. It is against the people. The chefs prepare the next course. The Clergy Response Team stands ready with scripture in hand to quote Romans 13 as the lid clamps down. The evacuation centers wait with beds made and barcodes ready. The bureaucratic blade is sharpened. The pneumatic guillotine is perfumed.

I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord. Not because I wanted it. Because I have been watching. Because the signs have been there all along. Because the water has been heating since August 28th, since the dollar reset began, since the first vent opened at Kilauea, since the first drone struck the refinery, since the first bank reported losses they could not hide. The moment is fast arriving. The drum beats are sounding in the distance. The revelation is now. The rain will become the flood. The night approaches. Maranatha."

Full, most highly recommended article is here:

- https://lamentor.substack.com/

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"Is Putin Caught In An 'Escalation Trap'? The Long War In Eastern Europe"

"The Siege Accelerates"