According to the American-run Mediazona group, which no-one would ever accuse of being pro-Russian, the number of Russian deaths in the Ukrainian conflict is now nearly 73,000, with perhaps another 100,000 wounded and 6 deserters. This compares with 848,000 Ukrainian deaths and seriously wounded, with perhaps 1,000,000 less seriously wounded and over 80,000 deserters, let alone the millions who have run away abroad to avoid being press-ganged into the suicidal military who are dying in vain for the USA.
Ex-President Zelensky is now so desperate and delusional that he is blackmailing and bluffing NATO with the threat of using nuclear weapons. This threat is if NATO does not allow the Ukraine to join it and so if NATO countries are not obliged to participate in the US proxy war directly. This is an empty threat, because he does not have any nuclear weapons and cannot obtain them. And a NATO proxy war is by definition one in which NATO does not lose any troops.
As for the Western Empire with its plutocrat oligarchy, it is desperately trying to hold on in the Ukraine and the Middle East until the inauguration of the new US President in January 2025. They know that the war is lost. Even if they throw a few more billion dollars at the Ukraine, it will make no difference, as dollar bills do not win wars. Already a trillion dollars, which is what this futile conflict has so far cost the USA and Western Europe in subsidies and suicidal sanctions, has made no difference except to postpone the inevitable defeat of Kiev.
Only arms, munitions and soldiers make a difference. And there are very few of those left in the Ukraine, especially after the disastrous invasion of Russia’s historic Kursk province. This has already cost nearly 26,000 Ukrainian dead and seriously wounded and nearly 1,000 tanks, vehicles and artillery pieces. As for the NATO warehouses, they are almost empty, and NATO countries are unable in their very deindustrialised state to make arms and munitions. The casino player has little more to bet; the hand is lost. How can he leave the gaming table without losing face?
As for the Ukrainian regime, it is clearly a Fascist state which steals hundreds of churches from the faithful and allows its armed gangsters to lock them up so no-one can go in. No-one will go in. Whereas Russia has a military strategy, Kiev has only a PR strategy, Psyops, devised by US and UK PR companies which give out their lies to be parroted by the Western media. (As for Israel, it is bankrupt, its economy is in tatters and hundreds of thousands of Israelis are fleeing, especially to Cyprus, Greece and the USA. Who wants to live in Israel now?).
In fact, the plutocrat oligarchs are now facing their nightmare of a threefold defeat in the headlines: Russian troops greeted victoriously by masses of people lining the roads, as they liberate the Russian port of Odessa and Transdnistria and vigorous support shown for Russia all over north-east and south-east Europe, not only in Hungary and Slovakia; the Russian victory comes in establishing a New Ukraine in the north and west of the present Ukraine on the model of Belarus and with an independent Church; Iran shoots down over 50 Israeli warplanes and destroys Israeli bases and concentrations of armour and troops with its unstoppable hypersonic missiles; Chinese troops land in Taiwan and greeted as liberators by virtually all the (Chinese) people who live there and support for China shown throughout the Asia-Pacific.
The reality is that the US has $36 trillion of unpayable debt. This is more even than its official GDP, which in reality is far lower than that declared. It has wasted $8 trillion on its forever wars which it has lost since 2003. It also has to finance some 750 military bases in 80 countries, not to mention CIA offices all over the world. Only US arms merchants and politicians benefit. The US can no longer afford to keep its colonies among the Global Majority, and will be obliged to abandon Israel, South Korea, Taiwan, just as it has had to abandon the Ukraine. It will have to evacuate Western Europe, which will finally have to sort itself out, dividing into four regions, the 21 countries of the north-west and south-west, and the many others in the north-east and south-east, close to Russia, which in this way become ready to join BRICS. The US will be left, at best, to concentrate on its crippled self.
Nine hundred years of Western colonisation, 450 years of colonial expansion to the peripheries of Europe, 450 years of colonial expansion outside Europe, and since 1945 decolonisation, first political and now at last real, that is, economic and geopolitical, have led to the present situation. The Western world is collapsing because it is harvest-time and the devil is dancing around it. The BRICS Summit in Kazan is not the beginning of the end of the Western Empire, but the ending of the end of that Empire.