Hubris and Theatrics Mark Atlanticist West's Detachment from Reality
Once in a while a demonstration of such astounding arrogance comes along it has to be seen to be believed. During this week’s NATO ‘Defense Ministers Summit’ in Brussels, lumpish Secretary General Mark Rutte broke the record for the most cringe-worthy statements in a two-minute span; it was one of the clearest embodiments yet of the imperial hubris at the root of NATO and the EU’s disastrous deterioration:
Not only does he pretend to believe that NATO is dozens of times economically more powerful than Russia, but that its military is “infinitely” superior as well—using the language of children.
Affecting some kind of tough guy, he even pretends to forget what MiG-31s are; because, of course, underestimating your opponent to the level of total dismissal of his assets is a sure sign of the military ‘strength’ Rutte so desperately seeks to personify.
The most tragicomic part of the humiliated boy-toy of “daddy” Don’s rhetoric is that, if you listen carefully, its purpose appears merely to assuage his fellow apparatchiks, who are likely getting cold feet about brushing so close with death in antagonizing Russia.
Pleadingly—in the language of abject humiliation—Rutte begs them to “please take that into account”, and “take comfort” in the feigned aggrandizement of the alliance he’s so desperately heaping on to cover for its actual historic weakness. The purpose becomes clear: it’s a plying session meant to ease his compatriots’ worries; and it would not have been necessary if it weren’t for the fact that all of them believe precisely the opposite of the gung ho, chest-thumping rhetoric Rutte is expectorating from his blowhole. Such excesses of braggadocio are only necessary precisely when one lacks confidence about what one is saying.
Sadly, that wasn’t even the worst of the chutzpah. In the next video, Rutte radically outdoes himself by invoking Tom Clancey’s Red October in painting Russia’s navy as reduced to one broken, “limping” submarine. His mouth-diarrhea is so crassly over the top that it’s hardly even believable it’s from a so-called NATO ‘Defense Ministers Summit’, as opposed to some backroom banter at Rutte’s favorite Brussels bathhouse:
The “strongman” NATO Reichschancellor goes on to flaccidly declare that the alliance will “gently” escort Russian planes that pose no threat because NATO is “so strong”—and only if NATO were “weak” would the alliance have to shoot the Russian planes down. Sounds like the Orwellian programming has succeeded in minting another mind-slave.
But what you’ll note is that the entire Western order has devolved into a theater of the absurd. Virtually everything has been reduced to gimmick and artifice, each one more cringe-inducing than the last.
For instance, take Polish Foreign Minister Sikorski’s visit to London today, wherein he staged a captured Russian Geran drone in the bloody House of Commons of the British Parliament for maximum theatrical effect:
How much more absurdly cartoonish can this freakshow get?
To make matters worse, in a new interview disgraced “general” Ben Hodges boasted that should Russia dare attack ‘mighty’ NATO, both Kaliningrad and Sevastopol would be “annihilated” in the very first hour:
Humorously, his insipid spiel gave Ukrainians a window into the West’s psychopathy and indifference to Ukraine itself as anything other than an expendable pawn in the war to destroy Russia:
If this smorgasbord of empty narcissism wasn’t enough, the king of ego himself capped off the day of pompous exultation with a final round of face-palm-inducing jabber. After nonsensically bloviating on about 1.5 million Russian casualties, he cited “long Russian gas lines” before ludicrously claiming the Russian economy will soon “collapse”:
That’s not to mention again unironically repeating the claim that he destroyed BRICS. On the contrary, BRICS has only been growing stronger, with de-dollarization booming amidst latest announcements that Indian oil companies have returned to paying for Russian oil in yuan; not to mention other news:
Trump then continued with suggestive threats vis-a-vis the Tomahawk missiles in lead up to Zelensky’s friday visit wherein the Ukrainian pied-piper is expected to break out in song and dance in a begging extravaganza for the long range assets.
Trump has been emptily playing up the Tomahoax, as it’s come to be known, completely ignoring that the US has virtually none to give. A new FT article cites Stacie Pettyjohn, the “director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security think-tank”, in acknowledging that the US would only be able to provide 20-50 of the $1.3M missiles to Ukraine at most. Read the bolded below carefully:
However, the US would probably be able to supply only a few to Ukraine. This is in light of the fact that, out of the 200 the Pentagon has procured since 2022, it has already fired more than 120, according to defence experts. The defence department has requested funding for only 57 more Tomahawks in its 2026 budget.
Washington would probably also need Tomahawks for any strike on Venezuelan soil.
Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defence programme at the Center for a New American Security think-tank, said Washington could spare some 20 to 50 Tomahawks for Ukraine, “which will not decisively shift the dynamics of the war”.
The article went on to note:
While the long-range missiles could complement Ukraine’s own long-range attack drones and cruise missiles “in large complex salvos to greater effect”, they would “still will be a very limited capability . . . certainly not enough to enable sustained, deep attacks against Russia”, they added.
Whatever happened to those Storm Shadows, anyway? After they started getting regularly salvaged from the bottom of the Black Sea, it seems these missiles—which are far more advanced than Tomahawks—simply went out of style.
Anyway, the latest Atlanticist kabuki merely serves to remind us just how far the West has derailed in both credibility and reason. Between the empty threats, emptier boasts, feigned superiority complex, and other extravagances, the West looks weaker and stupider by the day, exposing their own contradictory gobbledygook about Russia being simultaneously both weak enough to mock, while strong enough to keep Rutte and his pansy outfit in a rutting frenzy of war hysteria.
On the war front, the Ukrainians have noted a tremendous spike in large Russian armored assaults across every major front, which has flown in the face of the long-habituated “trickle” tactic. It appears the season of the ‘big offensive’ has again kicked off.
There are many reasons for this. One, is the fact that fall rasputitsa is starting, with roads becoming muddy and impassable to loafs, Ladas, bikes, scooters, donkeys, and other of the usual assault systems of the 21st century.
The second reason is that defoliating hedgerows exposes lone infantrymen, curbing their ability to conceal themselves with the usual two-man trickle.
Third, and perhaps most importantly—albeit most subjective—I believe that Russian command senses that most of the current hotspots are nearing critical mass for the collapse of Ukrainian resistance. The trickle method is a casualty-minimizing long term infiltration tactic that’s useful for shaping the battlefield along a given convergence point or objective, but at some point, when the ground is ‘shaped’ to maximum effect, and you have stacked your side’s advantages as steeply as possible, it can be decisive to finally rain down the finishing hammer blows en masse. This is particularly the case when as part of that ‘shaping’ phase, you have whittled down the enemy’s local defenses in the form of ISR, drone teams, EW, etc.
Just in the past day alone there were at least three or four large armored pushes in areas such as Dobropillya of the Pokrovsk axis, Mirnograd, and Shakhove. In each case, the AFU naturally claimed to have destroyed everything and repulsed the attacks, though oddly map makers noted gains in some of the areas of these assaults.
For instance, in the assaults on Shakhove, Russians appeared to have gained some fields and pushed the front pretty much directly against Shakhove’s edge:
Here is a Ukrainian video apparently from the Shakhove assault:
You can see many drone hits on armor, but few definitive losses. Footage of drone hits on armored vehicles in 2025 is extremely misleading as the technology for secondary protections has come a long way, and most hits end up doing little. It takes many, many hits to take out the average armored vehicle these days on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides. Out of a dozen or more vehicles seen in the video, maybe only one appears decisively destroyed and in flames.
While that assault was going on, the Russian 132nd Brigade hit Rodynske on the other side of the ‘bunny ears’ and managed to consolidate some of the first districts:
Another assault along the same axis but further south managed to essentially enter Mirnograd’s outskirts:
This has led top map makers to announce the battle for Mirnograd had finally officially begun:
As a reminder, all of the above are on the same axis, which signifies, as Serge states above, that Russia has likely decided to begin wrapping this entire theater up:
AMK_Mapping aptly reminds us of the obvious parallel to Avdeevka, just on the eve of its capture in February 2024:
It’s quite obvious that Pokrovsk is far more precarious at this point, though it lacks, for the Russian side, the mass amounts of “expendable” Storm-Z penal battalions that had valiantly spearheaded the final Avdeevka push.
In Kupyansk there are no major changes other than the acknowledgment by cartographers that the central ‘pocket’ has in fact been vacated by AFU. However, Russians are now conducting ‘combing operations’ over the next few days to clear the houses in this large district, and so for now it remains colored-in ‘lightly’ so as to signify not ‘full’ capture just yet.
The Ukrainian government has gotten the hint as claims of the evacuation of 40 nearby settlements hit the airwaves:
Last month head of the Ukrainian Regional Military Administration Andriy Kanashevich had noted that few people were evacuating from Kupyansk itself, hinting that they were waiting for the Russians to come ‘liberate’ them.
We’ll have to wait for clarifications over the next few days, but the fact that even Deep State has gray-zoned the city is telling:
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A final item of interest:
A new Rossiya-1 report on recent Russian drone advancements and exercises, focusing on the Courier UGV which had just recently unveiled a laser de-mining capability—also showcased here:
As expected, the Courier (“Курьер”) ground robotic systems continue to gain new modifications, as demonstrated during a gathering of units from the Russian Ground Forces’ Engineering Troops at a rear training range in the Volgograd region.
In addition to the standard fire-support/engineering version of the UGV, equipped with a 7.62 mm PKT machine gun with a bispectral television and thermal (MWIR/LWIR) sight and an effective aiming range of 1,100–1,300 m, and carrying 10 TM-62M anti-tank mines, as well as a variant with an AGS-17/30 automatic grenade launcher with a range of 1,900–2,100 m (also used in the Special Military Operation zone), an exclusively engineering version was also demonstrated.
This variant is fitted with an “Ignis” (“Игнис”) laser demining module with an effective range of over 150 m, capable of burning through the casings of high-explosive fragmentation, thermobaric, and other types of shells.
Some specifications of the Courier ground robotic system:
— Dimensions: platform length
— 1.4 m; width
— 1.2 m; height (without armament)
— 58 cm.
— Weight: 250 kg.
— Speed: up to 35 km/h.
— Operating time: from 12 to 72 hours.
— Propulsion: tracked.
— Electric motors: 6 kW.
— Control range: 3 to 10 km.
— Control system: remote, via a secure radio channel.
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Wow. Even for Rut that was startlingly pathetic. There's such a high school feel to every political meeting in the west these days, with all the hugging and pep rallies. It's embarrassing to me as a US citizen. I mean we're the bad guys here, but do we really have to so lame?
You say cartoonish which is lending an air of amusement to village idiots like rutte and his norwegian predecessor when they are anything but. The King Clown in the US is equally deranged in his incoherent rants about supremacy and effectiveness of his actions. How can it not end in world wide open conflict with such wilful intent to spread evil by morally and mentally defunct men and women.