It's called suing for peace

Pretty much all you need to know is that you don’t sue for peace when you’re winning.  You do it when you’re getting your ass kicked and you want to slither out of trouble without having to sign an unconditional surrender.  Kind of like the Russian position took today in its talks with Ukraine in Turkey.  We’re going to pull back from Kyiv, and let’s talk about a ceasefire, and by the way, our president is willing to meet with your president whenever we get a deal on the table.

It was right there on the faces of the guys who drew the short straw and were sent out for a press availability when the talks had concluded.  Call it fear or dread or discomfort or rank humiliation, whatever it is, those two had it.  One guy looked like he was headed back to his hotel room to look up Orbitz for flights out of Istanbul on any airline but Aeroflot, the other guy looked like somebody had been beating on him with a two by four.  Something had happened over the last 24 to 48 hours to the Russian delegation and it wasn’t good. 

I saw an interview with former Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev on MSNBC around noon, and he was asked if he thought anyone in Putin’s inner circle was willing or able to bring him bad news, which was exactly the wrong question to ask.  The right question was, how many remote controls do you think he’s thrown at the TVs in every room of his dacha bunker showing pirated CNN and the BBC newscasts around the clock?

Jesus, when are these Russia experts or Putin watchers going to realize that the Big Man in Moscow is a carbon copy of his pal Trump:  a rampaging narcissist who only cares about how strong he looks.  He doesn’t give a damn what his puppet channels in Moscow are saying about him and his war because as a dictator, he’s dictating that they portray him as a strongman and his war as a cakewalk.  What he really cares about is how the rest of the world sees him, and right now, he and his vaunted Russian army are looking like losers.

Giving Putin bad news right now is a little bit like telling a dog that’s got a lion swinging him by the tail, “hey, Fido, watch out, there’s a lion behind you.”  The only thing Putin has consumed since February 24 is bad news, and lately it’s gotten even worse.  In case the infamous 40-mile stalled convoy wasn’t enough to have him climbing the walls, right after the fourth Russian general took a bullet in the chest or a piece of shrapnel in the neck, one of Putin’s other generals probably got on the blower and told him he’s got about four more weeks before what’s left of his tanks and trucks will be out of fuel and out of ammunition and sitting targets for Ukrainian fighters.  That’s what his armor has been already, and that’s where the Russian army is today.  They’re losing the war everywhere including Mariupol, where all they’ve done is murder civilians and barely hold onto artillery positions outside the city.  In fact, today the Pentagon spokesman made a point of emphasizing not once but twice that the Russian army “hasn’t taken a single population center -- not Kyiv, not Kharkiv, not even Mariupol.”  If Putin wasn’t watching this bad news in real time with a translator at his elbow, he’s further gone than even I could ever have imagined.

All those red splotches showing the area Russia has taken in Ukraine are turning out to be just that:  red splotches.  Richard Engel reported from Kharkiv last night that he was astounded when he got to the allegedly besieged northern city to find supermarkets open and even a few restaurants serving customers.  The center of the city was pretty heavily damaged, Engel reported, but there are whole sections that haven’t been touched.  Today he reported that he heard two large explosions somewhere in the city last night, but other than that, Kharkiv wasn’t experiencing very heavy shelling.

Engel was standing there without a bullet proof vest or helmet in a city that is only 25 miles from the Russian border and 50 miles from Belgorod, a city where Russian tanks and troops had been lined up and ready to go for more than a month before the invasion.  If the Russian army had its shit together, they should have been able to roll into and wrap up Kharkiv within days of crossing the border on February 24.  That they haven’t been able to take the second largest city in Ukraine in over a month of fighting tells you what’s been going on in Russia’s war against Ukraine.  Vladimir Putin is right now looking at his army in Ukraine suffering the kind of humiliation that took 10 years to suffer in Afghanistan.

Constant pictures of damaged and destroyed tanks all over Ukraine are bad enough, but the last thing Putin wants to see anywhere in the world on television are images of his tanks in retreat across the Russian border.  Military experts in this country have finally come to their senses and seen that Putin’s biggest miscalculation was what he thought he could accomplish using tanks and other armored vehicles to attack and intimidate the Ukrainian military.  The Ukrainians, armed with American Javelins and British NLAWs, have turned Russian tanks into large steel coffins holding the dead bodies of Russian soldiers.  The tank, once a fearsome weapon that spit steel and caused death and dread wherever it rolled, has been tamed.  Check that:  it’s been beaten by Ukrainian infantry so soundly, the tank is finished as a credible weapon of war.

If you can count on one thing for sure today as we close in on the end of the fifth week of the war, it’s this:  Vladimir Putin saw the same images on his TV we saw of his negotiators and their dour looks in Istanbul.  If you are a fearsome dictator, what you want to see on your negotiators are the snide smiles and puffed out chests of victors awaiting an inevitable surrender.  Instead, what the world saw today was a hunch-shouldered line of pasty-faced apparatchiks suing for peace. 

The Pentagon knows exactly what’s going on in Ukraine on the ground because its intelligence services can see it in Technicolor from the sky in real time, and everyone in the world has seen the NATO estimate that Russia’s army has suffered 30,000 to 40,000 casualties, and that figure is over a week old, so it’s even worse today. Volodymyr Zelensky isn’t going to give up an inch of Ukraine at those negotiations because he’s winning the war.  That’s why Putin’s boys were so depressed today.  The only thing left for Russia to do is pick up their dead on the way home.