Welcome to Russian billiards

Putin already has what he wants

This is the size of an American pool table pocket and the ball you’re supposed to put into it.

the game NATO plays

This is the Russian version.

the game Russia plays

Such a game will drive anyone completely mad…who isn’t Russian. When I lived and worked in Russia training political parties in 1999, my gracious hosts enjoyed nothing more than humiliating this Yankee on their pool tables over a bottle of vodka after a seminar. The September, 1999 weekend I hosted an NDI seminar in Pushkin, outside of St. Petersburg, a participant asked in the hotel as an evening of socializing approached, “Oh, you play pool?” A chuckle, a nod of the head toward the billiard room, and my journey into the Russian psyche commenced.

Like Russia itself, their pool tables are massive, often more than twice the size of the average American barroom pool table. The average shot length is thus more than double American pool, every shot. The balls themselves are half an inch bigger, and heavier. Combined, length of shot and weight of the ball puts far more momentum into a ball after it’s struck, which means the balls roll further, bounce off the bumpers faster, etc. The pockets as pictured above are so tight, only 1-2mm space exists between the ball and the walls of the pocket. Pure physics multiply the problems from there.

The simplest strategy to cling to any hope of winning the game is to prevent your opponent from pocketing his balls until you can pocket yours. That’s the easy part. The hard part is then eeking your balls ever so slightly toward a spot from which you can strike them into the pocket. It is a game of infinite patience revealing one’s capacity (or lack thereof) for suffering. As we all know, Russian capacity for suffering is legendarily bottomless. Americans, and the west at large, have practically no capacity for suffering, or patience.

“Why the hell do you play this game??” I’d ask in frustrated futility after an hour of never coming close to pocketing anything. They’d shrug, smile, then say, “It’s very Russian.” The true purpose of the game then emerges. By the bottom of a vodka bottle, new friendships bloom over uproarious laughter. My American hubris was replaced with a bow of respect to a game, and a people, different from mine, after a lesson well taught, learned with difficulty. NATO, and the west, have never learned this lesson, among so, so many others.

Now, let’s apply this to Ukraine, via Georgia, another former soviet republic NATO and the west insist will one day be members not just of NATO, but the EU. Here is what the west thinks is a map of Georgia.

Here are the facts on the ground in Georgia placed there by Vladimir Putin over the 32 years since the dissolution of the USSR. Russia’s “billiard balls” - Adjara, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia - are in grey.

Russia has been putting these same “billiard balls” onto the map of Ukraine since 2014 - Crimea, Donbass, and Luhansk - because NATO and the EU have insisted, for a generation, on ignoring the plainly obvious geopolitical reality that Russia will never allow either NATO or the EU to expand there.

One question leaps out. Why now?

Well, for one thing, the boomer world order Empire of Lies has been rotting underneath us for 40 years. Omicron proving this winter that the covid “vaccine” madness was just another worldwide con game could have triggered action. For another, the past 6 years, Hillary Clinton has petulantly blamed Vladimir Putin for her colossal failure against Donald Trump, claiming Putin Did It like a raving lunatic scratching every itch haunting President Her. Another; Obama’s Ukraine Viceroy Joe Biden, architect of the 2014 coup in Ukraine, returned every Clinton foreign policy re-tread from Mike McFaul to Victoria Nuland to American power in 2020. Yet another; this same undead Clinton establishment found Ukraine an even hotter powder keg after Trump accelerated the NATO arming of Ukrainian nationalists (including literal neo-Nazis). Why now? Why not now?

All this has left Putin no choice but to pick up his cue stick, and put big Russian balls in the way. Thus, as with any westerner playing Russian billiards, the game now firmly on Russian ground finally has driven NATO, the EU, and the west, nutty like Hillary Clinton, as below.

The mask has fallen from every single western institution suddenly now immolating themselves, publicly proving they never once cared about “norms”, “rules”, “treaties”, or even peace itself. Nuclear war is casually tossed around like choosing the upholstery on your couch. Censorship has spiraled into lunacy. Cancel culture has skyrocketed like an addict shooting up the chronic to the point liquor stores are pouring their Russian vodka down the drain. Social media, already a cleansed, purged, dissent free safe space for the rich and paranoid, is eating itself alive. Even Swiss banks, cess pits of criminal oligarchy, have abandoned the complete fiction of their historic claim to “neutrality”.

As with French/freedom fries in Iraq, none of the western sanction reaction is tethered to sanity. We are all in Hillary Clinton’s demented mind as oil prices skyrocket, banks are destabilized, inflation explodes, while the plumbing of the entire international system blows itself up over balls on a Russian table that won’t move. Only Russia is acting reasonably, and predictably, based solely on their own security interests, an ice cold calculus that will never change.

In fact, Putin already has the end result he needed, the resulting western derangement syndrome a cherry on top he merely has to outlast, which Russia no doubt will. Once a cease fire is negotiated (this too, predictable), Russian troops will patrol “frozen conflicts” in the “breakaway” republics of Ukraine, as in Georgia, decade after decade. For comparison, the first cease fire between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno Karabakh was reached in 1994. Will American liquor stores refuse to sell Russian vodka for 20 years? Do you remember when Freedom Fries returned to being French fries? What the west has done to itself in reactionary hysteria will live on, and on, and on. On top of Iraq, Syria, Libya, you name it, no one will ever take what the west says about anything, let alone peace, seriously. Not for a generation.

The US provoked the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia as surely as if we kicked a hornet’s nest for 32 years and then are shocked, shocked they tell you, the hornets finally begin to sting. Russia treats Georgia and Ukraine entering NATO (and the EU) as an existential threat - precisely as JFK treated the Cuban missile crisis. (this week’s New Yorker interview with John Mearshimer lays it out well). The only reasonable response by Russia to the west’s refusal to take Russian security interests seriously is to unilaterally, militarily, create a map of Ukraine that looks a lot like the current map of Georgia, thereby eliminating the possibility of either country entering the EU or NATO, and let the west drive itself crazy over it.

Very like Russian billiards. Difference being instead of drinking vodka around the pool table, building mutual respect and friendship, America and the west has thrown a worldwide tantrum tossing their pool cues against the wall, snapping them over their leg, spitting, threatening nuclear war while raving about their cats. Thus is revealed the truth behind this Empire of Lies that’s been accelerating its decline my entire life.