Of course the proxy war in Ukraine won’t end with Adveevka, and the battle across the Donetsk foothills, nearly a decade old, will continue

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All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home
Your empty-handed armies are going home

Bob Dylan, It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

Avdeevka. The name sounds like an incantation. Like Debaltsevo, or Bakhmut. The incantation summons the figure of a cauldron.

As it stands, and it’s all moving at lightning speed, it takes only 2 km for the cauldron to be closed. Virtually all roads and muddy trails are under massive Russian fire control. There may be up to 6,000 Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) soldiers left. They have nowhere to go. They are already in – or are going straight to – Hell.

“The Butcher” Syrsky, who has just been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the AFU amidst a nasty dog fight in Kiev, immediately got himself a fresh cauldron. Old habits die hard.

The morale and psychological state of AFU fighters is in tatters. Azov batallion neo-nazis are being decimated by massive artillery, FPVs and FABs.

Still, AFU generals are setting up the P.R. stage for another “victory” – a replay of Ilovaisk and Debaltsevo, even as the actual retreat, evacuation or “extraction” will proceed through the Corridors of Hell.

In fact, the only player who has successfully extracted himself from Hell, just in time, was Gen Zaluzhny. To quote Dylan: “Strike another match/ go start anew.”

The Axis of Resistance and its Slavic mirror

During my vertiginous journey across Donbass, only a few days ago, Avdeevka – the incantation – was omnipresent. At a meeting in a secret compound plunged in darkness in the western outskirts of Donetsk, two top commanders of Orthodox Christian batallions, while discussing tactics, noted that the fall of Adveevka would be a matter of days, maximum weeks

The symbology is quite transcendental. Kiev has been fortifying Adveevka non-stop for nearly 10 years – essentially to keep shelling civilians in Donetsk and other parts of Donbass with impunity, ad infinitum. Donetsk remains extremely vulnerable – and the shelling persists. The strength, resilience and faith of the residents of this historic mining town – and the surrounding countryside – are deeply moving.

In a very special conversation with Alexander Dugin,  we both made it clear, directly and indirectly, that the working classes of Novorossiya are spiritual brothers of the oppressed in Palestine and Yemen. Yes, the Axis of Resistance in West Asia is mirrored by the Slavic Axis of Resistance in the black soil of the steppes.

As much as Russia may have been drawn to a civilizational war against the collective West, that is also a spiritual war. The proxy war by the Hegemon against Russia in Ukraine is as much a geopolitical gamble as a war of Western nihilism against Russian Orthodoxy.

I did mention the parallel between Orthodox Christianity and Shi’ism to a top commander; he may have been bemused, but he definitely got the message.

After all, he must have instinctively noticed it was the rejected, harassed and bombed in Orthodox Christianity and Islam who have re-awakened the Orthodox and Islamic civilizations for a transcendental war of survival – supported by faith.

Way beyond the Adveevka incantation – a sort of catalyst of all these times of trouble, as Mother Mary of God eventually comes offering solace – what struck me in this vertiginous journey in Donbass is Almighty People Power. Civilians are the true heroes of the full liberation of Novorossiya, as much as the people scattered across Greater Syria – encompassing Palestine, Syria and Lebanon – Iraq and Yemen.

These are the souls who have endured a Hell on Earth much more toxic and much longer than the Adveevka cauldron, since Zionism and its subsequent eschatological garrison-settler colonial offspring took over the Holy Land.

The people of Novorossiya, as much as Yemeni Houthis, have Faith imprinted in their DNA. Those deeply committed commanders and soldiers that I met in Novorossiya close to the front lines mirror the popular consensus.

Gamblers on the Highway of Hope

For a baby boomer Westerner, it’s inevitable to refer to Dylan when we’re back on the road: “The highway is for gamblers / better use your sense”. Somehow the ultimate gamblers across the black soil of Novorossiya are these volunteer, contract-signed soldiers who summon the power of unbreakable Faith to defend their land.

As for those pawns in the Western game who will perish or surrender when the cauldron is boiling to the max, it’s a case of “the sky too is falling under you”.

Shelley intuitively understood that we all rebel against oblivion – to which death condemns us. Yet this rebellion can follow two completely different road maps.

The man intoxicated with power wrecks everything before him, and is wrecked in turn (that’s the fate of the current Empire of Lies).

Then there’s the road followed by the poet, or spiritual warrior, whose soul is the Aeolian harp summoning vast, unseen, miraculous forces.

Of course the proxy war in Ukraine won’t end with Adveevka, and the battle across the Donetsk foothills, nearly a decade old, will continue.

There will be more P.R. terror attacks, the civilian plight may be prolonged for quite a while. But what’s already crystal clear is that any sub-par “rules-based order” chess player who dreams of defeating the Russian soul on thousand-year-old Russian lands is inexorably doomed.