2025 — the year of the snake
As casualties soar, Ukraine and Russia (and the U.S.) edge toward endgame
To many of us who already face the coming year with dread, knowing that it’s the year of the snake on the Chinese calendar doesn’t offer much comfort. To many of us Westerners, snakes are frightening; they slither and hiss and sometimes they attack.
In the Christian tradition, they symbolize temptation, deception, betrayal, and chaos; some of that thought is in the Jewish tradition as well, although it’s more complicated.
But snakes have another meaning as well, Alexander Smukler of Montclair says.
He’s analyzed the war in Ukraine and the resulting shifts in the world’s equilibrium, very much including the implications it has in Israel, since Russia invaded its neighbor on February 24, 2022, by now almost three years ago.
In the Chinese tradition, Mr. Smukler said, “snakes are a symbol of transformation, renewal, and spiritual growth.” That’s because they shed their skins; transformation, while morally neutral, necessarily follows.
“In a few days, there will be a new administration in the White House,” Mr. Smukler said. “That potentially could change everything. That’s totally predictable, and what we would expect in the year of the snake.
“The question is, what will the change be? Will it be positive or negative?” That, on the other hand, is unpredictable.
There’s one thing he’s certain about. “The war that Russia started in Ukraine will be stopped, one way or the other.”
That war, he said, “is no longer a regional conflict. It is the war between the brutal dictatorship of the so-called united south and the civilized world.”
What is the united south, and how can Russia, far to the north, be part of it?
“That’s a new term, part of the new Russian propaganda,” Mr. Smukler said. “Russia is taking credit for creating the united south, which means the BRICS countries — Brazil, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and of course Russia. The united south stands against Western ideas.”
The transformation of the war in Ukraine into a global conflict is the grand transformation, he said. “We are now at the beginning stages of that conflict.”
And there will be a new American president. “It is impossible to predict what their first moves will be,” Mr. Smukler said. “It is clear to everyone that the Trump administration will try to stop the war. The question is how it will stop the war, and even what it means to stop the war.
“During the election campaign, Trump said many times that he will stop it even before he gets to the White House, and that it will take him 24 hours to stop it when he gets to the White House.”
Trump has pulled back on that promise a bit. In a press conference last November, he explained, with his usual lucidity, that “we’re trying to get the war stopped. That horrible, horrible war that is going on in Ukraine with Russia. We’ve got a little progress. It is a tough one, it is a nasty one.” He stopped short of supplying any specifics, including a schedule.
Mr. Smukler thinks that Trump will explain his retreat from the promise to end the war in a day by saying “that he wasn’t able to get intelligence reports about it, and as soon as he got a clear picture, he changed what he said. He will say that ‘as soon as I get to the White House, I will fully understand how complicated the issue is, and that it will require enormous effort to stop it.’”
Nonetheless, Mr. Smukler said, “Trump is very committed to stopping the conflict. The question is how. In order to stop the conflict, which has brought enormous, enormous suffering to Ukraine, which is one of Europe’s largest countries, which has led to between nine and 12 million people being displaced from their homes.”
He said that “several news portals recently released information about casualties on both sides that make it clear that about 1.2 million combatants on both sides have died or been severely injured.
“According to Ukrainian officials, between 16,000 and 22,000 civilians have died or disappeared in Ukraine. And the Ukrainian president said, just before New Years Eve, that official statistics show that Russia lost 437,000 soldiers during 2024. Yes, that was from Ukrainian sources, so I don’t know how much we can trust it, but it seems to be that it’s true. During the last months of 2024, Russia was losing between 1,000 to 1,700 soldiers every day.
“United States military experts say that Ukraine was losing approximately half as many soldiers as Russia.” But Ukraine, big as it is, is far smaller than Russia, which stretches across two continents. “If 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers were wounded or killed in 2024, that’s a gigantic loss for Ukraine.”
It is carnage on the level of nightmare.
“I was talking just now with several people in Ukraine. Some of them are on the front lines. They are saying that the Ukrainian army is really suffering from the lack of manpower. They cannot mobilize any more. They cannot bring in more people, fresh military units, to replace those who are exhausted.
“The morale in the Ukrainian army is diminishing rapidly.”
“I was very surprised, when I talked to my Ukrainian friends, to hear that for the first time in three years, President Zelensky’s popularity also is dropping quickly. I’m not saying that this is information from a poll, or from reliable reporting. It’s from my friends, who have been extremely involved in defending Ukraine. For three years, their support of President Zelensky was unconditional.
“Now, for the first time, they told me that the Ukrainians are so tired that they are ready to give up. They are absolutely ready to exchange territory for peace. And they are not going to vote for Zelensky if there is an election in 2025. That means that Zelensky’s political future is unclear.”
(It is perhaps irrelevant, but now seems like a good time to remind readers that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish.)
“I immediately asked my sources if there is anybody inside Ukraine who could possibly replace Zelensky in a fair election. The only name they had is the former chief of staff Valery Zaluzhny. He was seen as serious competition to Zelensky, and that’s why he was replaced a few months ago and sent to England as ambassador.
“My sources do not have any other strong or popular figure who could lead the country after the war, deal with its restoration, and choose the future path of its redevelopment.
“After listening to them, I came to the conclusion that Zelensky, a hero who defended Ukraine, is probably coming to the end of his political career after three years of war.”
There’s another complication. “Putin hates Zelensky, and calls him a clown.” (The Ukrainian president, who is a lawyer, also was a successful comedian; that’s where the slur seems to have originated.)
“I expect that in 2025 there will be a serious attempt to replace Zelensky, or to exclude him from the political process of looking for a peaceful solution to the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II,” Mr. Smukler said.
“But Zelensky is not ready to leave, or to lose the war. So the Trump administration will have a major problem, because they cannot negotiate directly with Russia without Ukrainian participation, but they do understand that Zelensky is not the most comfortable person to negotiate with.”
There are also three legal hurdles, Mr. Smukler continued.
“First, Putin’s propaganda tries to present Zelensky as an unlawful president, because, according to Putin, Zelensky’s term was over in May 2024, but he refused to hold an election during a time of martial law. So Putin says that he cannot negotiate with Ukraine because there is no one to negotiate with.
“Secondly, at the beginning of the conflict Zelensky put a clause in the Ukrainian constitution that does not allow anyone to negotiate with Putin because Putin is a war criminal.” He’s been given that status by the International Criminal Court in the Hague for kidnapping Ukrainian children and hiding them with families in Russia. “So in order to start negotiations with Putin, the Ukrainian constitution would have to be changed.”
The third legal hurdle, Mr. Smukler said, lies in Russia’s constitution. “Putin included four Ukrainian regions — the two that Russia partially occupies, Donetsk and Luhansk, and two whose capitals it does not hold, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. That means to stop the war right now, or to freeze the front lines, will violate the Russian constitution.
“So those are three major legal issues that the Trump administration would have to find a way around, including changing the constitutions on both sides. That obviously cannot be done in 24 hours.
“I want to see how Trump will solve the problems,” Mr. Smukler said, neutrally. “They are enormous. And it is extremely difficult, from the political and foreign affairs point of view, to see how to put together two people who hate each other and question each other’s legitimacy, and how to stop the war that has led to the loss of so many lives.”
Mr. Smukler believes Trump’s frequently asserted belief that had he been president instead of Joe Biden, Putin would not have started the war; yes, he conceded when questioned, “Trump probably would have given Ukraine to Putin without the war.”
Whether it was President Biden’s reluctance to give Ukraine all the arms that it needed when it needed them, the Republican Congress’s refusal to allow the arms Biden wanted to go through when he wanted them to, or Trump’s influence on the Congress that dictated its decisions, now the die is cast. The war is ongoing. It did not end easily and with glory, as Putin thought it would.
“Putin is a very bad guy,” Mr. Smukler said. “He is evil. And evil usually does not stop. But now he is no longer cornered; European leaders visit him, and the secretary-general of the U.N. has shaken his hand. He is even more dangerous now.
“These three years of war made him understand that he had to militarize his economy and his country, and he did. He is spending an enormous amount of money on his arms race, and he is producing an amount of weaponry that nobody could have imagined.
“Now, in order to respond and defend itself, the Western world will have to spend a fortune to rebuild and renew NATO and its military forces to defend itself.
“Putin will not stop. He cannot stop. Now that he built up the military industry, he needs the war. Without it, he would lose his power.
“Five years ago, Putin was much less dangerous.”
Now, Mr. Smukler said, President Biden is pumping all the weaponry he can into Ukraine, but it is a serious case of too little, too late. “My friends in Ukraine are saying that they don’t have the soldiers. They say, ‘We are exhausted. Everybody is dying. And now Biden keeps sending more and more and more aid. Why is he doing this now?’”
So, Mr. Smukler said, given everything, “in one way or another, 2025 will be the last year of the war. Russia could break the front lines, Russian military forces will move fast to take the industrial centers in the middle of Ukraine, and Ukraine as an independent state will collapse very quickly.”
He pointed to the way that Syria collapsed, in days, with its dictator running away to Russia and its soldiers fading back into the civilian world and its prisoners being liberated. Syria is not at all like Ukraine, he acknowledged, but the world has learned that its assumptions about the strength of nations can be based on knowledge that’s as flimsy as the Syrian government turned out to be.
Putin could create a satellite state in Ukraine, he said, or maybe just make it part of Russia. “Or world leaders could find a new solution for peace in Ukraine.” No matter what happens, until it happens, “this will be a major global problem for the Trump administration.”
And “let’s be realistic,” Mr. Smukler said. “Putin won the war.
“Okay, he didn’t win it completely. For him, complete victory would be taking over Ukraine and recreating it as a satellite state, like Belarus. He cannot complete this mission. He doesn’t have enough money or power for that. But you will see that he will conduct a victory parade in Red Square. He will say that we defeated the West again, just as we defeated the Nazis in 1945.
“Trump has only one chance to succeed in stopping the war. If he gets along with China’s President Xi Jinping, if he can convince the Chinese snake to shed its skin and change his country’s position on the war, that will stop the conflict immediately.”
The hostages that Hamas holds in Gaza, and the ongoing war there, also will be major problems for the Trump administration, Mr. Smukler said.
At the Republican National Convention, then-candidate Trump said that if the hostages were not released by the time he takes office, “there will be all hell to pay.” On New Year’s Eve, Trump, by then president-elect, said, when asked about the hostages, “We’re gonna see what happens.” Then he added: “I’ll put it this way: They better let the hostages come back soon.” And on Monday, he repeated, on Hugh Hewitt’s podcast, that if the hostages are not released, “there will be hell to pay.”
The president-elect did not specify what form that payment would take.
“Now he has to do something as soon as he is in the White House to resolve the issue,” Mr. Smukler said.
“The easiest way to show the administration’s strength is to give Israel a green light and support to bomb Iran’s nuclear facility. He will say, ‘See, I said I would show them what would happen if the hostages are not released.’
“The window of opportunity to do that is closing now, because the last Iranian attack on Israel is becoming pretty old.” That attack, when Iran sent missiles into Israel, was on October 1. “People are forgetting about it. The attack has to be done as soon as possible, or forget it. This is a unique chance to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem, so I think that Trump will do it, even though Biden refused.
“I also predict that the Trump administration will tell Egypt that if it does not help get the hostages released, we will stop giving you money.” And it’s particularly necessary to pressure Qatar, Mr. Smukler said, because “Qatar is not only financially and legally responsible for supporting Hamas, it also has an influence on its surviving leadership.
“The war in Israel will continue, because we understand that Bibi depends on it. But Trump has to have the hostages released, to save face, after his statements.
“Israel is winning the war. It has accomplished a lot. It erased Hezbollah in Lebanon and now has a buffer zone there, and it weakened Hamas significantly.
“But the feeling in Israel is sorrow, because there are still 100 people in Gaza who are suffering tremendously. We live in the 21st century, and the world’s leadership cannot find them, and cannot defeat the terrorist organization that has been holding them for more than a year.
“So basically no one in the world knows how to defeat evil. And that is the story.”
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