Londoner Gwynne Dyer’s name was mentioned recently in a letter to the editor, providing a well timed opportunity to revisit the 81 year old military historian’s contributions to The Islands Grapevine since February 2022. Everything Dyer predicted about the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has turned out to be wrong, and worse still, the opposite has turned out to be true. And yet, for those stuck in a Cold War mindset, Dyer’s credibility never seems to take a hit when he carries water for the warmongering NATO cabal in Washington D.C., London, and Brussels.
Dyer’s prediction in April of 2022, was that the “devastating economic sanctions” would cripple the Russian economy. The sanctions that blocked foreign investment by Russian billionaires caused their fortunes to be repatriated into the Russian economy, which not only filled the void created by the exodus of Western corporate interests from Russia, it resulted in record investment in domestic infrastructure. Russian gas is now sold to third parties, and purchased by the same European countries enforcing the Russian energy boycott, at highly elevated prices. The Russian economy and currency are doing extremely well, and it is the European Union countries who’ve paid the price and are facing massive de-industrialization.
In May of 2022, Dyer employed his crystal ball to claim Russian President Vladimir Putin would soon be removed from office because “the war in Ukraine has fatally undermined his credibility among Russians.” According to Western polls, and the 2024 Russian General Election, Putin’s popularity has only been heightened to a level well above 80%. The U.S goal of weakening Russia, regime change in Moscow, and isolating Russia from the West, has only benefited the Russian government and inspired much closer relations with China. By October 2022, Dyer declared that “Putin still refuses to accept that this war in Ukraine is lost.” It’s nearly two years later and we see that it is the Western pundits like Dyer who refuse to acknowledge reality. Ukraine has lost this war, and they’ve lost it by a wide margin.
The two Minske Peace Accords had failed, with NATO admitting that it had been buying time to arm the Ukrainian ethno-nationalists in Eastern Ukraine, including Svoboda, Right Sector, and the neo-Nazi white supremacists of the Azov Battalion, who had killed 15,000 ethnic Russians since 2014. With the U.S. backed government in Kiyiv threatening to join NATO and put nuclear armaments on Russia’s border, Russia invaded the Donbas region in Feb. 2022 with a stated intention of protecting ethnic Russians, de-Nazifying the region, and demilitarizing Ukraine. We all know what the U.S reaction would be if Russia made a pact with Canada or Mexico to place nuclear weapons on its border, as we’ve already been through the existential drama of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dyer described the Russian incursion as “unprovoked.”
Today, more than 500,000 brave Ukrainian soldiers are unnecessarily dead, with an untold number of casualties, when a peace deal had been reached back in April of 2022, a deal agreed to by the respective negotiators in Istanbul, as confirmed by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet who was there. At the last moment, clown hair model and former Conservative Prime Minister of Great Britain, Boris Johnson arrived in Turkey as NATO’s emissary and told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the lifeline of Western financial support for Ukraine would be withdrawn unless he agreed to walk away from the peace agreements he’d made. Zelensky was offered billions of dollars more in military aid, and instead of an end to the war, the U.S. and NATO wanted to “fight until the last Ukrainian.” American arms manufacturers rejoiced.
Apparently, all these brave Cold Warriors no longer fear nuclear conflict, and the end to all life on the planet as we know it. While the Cold War was based on the dubious premise that fear of nuclear annihilation was a deterrent to a direct conflict between nuclear powers, octogenarian Gwynne Dyer is now praying for a nuclear rapture prior to his more natural expiration date. “Better dead than red” is Dyer’s Russophobic inclination when it comes to who governs the Russian speaking oblasts in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine was the most corrupt country in Europe prior to the war, and is now a failed state with no elected government, no functioning economy, no free press, no political opposition, and with some branches of the Orthodox Church having been outlawed. A quarter of Ukraine’s population now lives in exile, and most are unlikely to return. Nothing says, “freedom and democracy” like Volodymyr Zelensky’s martial law, his elected term having ended in May of this year. Thanks for the memories Gwynne!
