Putin tries desperate fixes to save his war on Ukraine

Results, predictably, are disastrous

Russian men escaping draft by crossing Georgian border.

It’s never a good sign when a president, following the progress of his war – or lack thereof – starts consulting maps and making decisions for the combat commanders on the ground.  It’s happened before in this country, always with disastrous results:  Lyndon Johnson picking bombing targets for the Air Force in North Vietnam, Richard Nixon doing the same thing for B-52 strikes in Cambodia and Laos, George W. Bush ordering front line units in Iraq to stop sending out patrols so he could reduce the casualty count in advance of the 2004 presidential election.

Putin suddenly decided he knew more about what was happening on the ground in Ukraine in the days after his army in the country’s northeast was pushed back into Russia with such decisive attacks and so rapidly that units abandoned tanks, ammunition, foodstuffs, armored personnel carriers, and mobile howitzers.  You can almost see him in the Kremlin pacing a basement bunker with a clutch of frightened generals at one end of the room and his maps of Ukraine pinned to the wall at the other end.  His latest act of military genius – he must have taken Strategy 101 and 102 at the KGB academy as a young man – was to order troops to hold their positions near the port of Kherson on the Black Sea and not to retreat across the Dnipro River, even though this will mean a disastrous loss of equipment, stores, and severe casualties under heavy Ukrainian artillery and rocket attack.

In other news from the Putin bunker, he has been stage-managing “referendums” in areas of eastern Ukraine occupied by Russian forces, with predictable results:  between 98 and 99 percent of Ukrainian citizens have “voted” to join the Russian Federation, which is doubtful for multiple reasons, among them the fact that many young and middle-aged Ukrainian males are in hiding or have fled their towns and villages in order to avoid the Russian draft, so it would be unlikely that they would show up at polling places manned by the Russian army.

Putin has also ordered that Ukrainian cities be hit with ballistic missiles, artillery and rocket attacks, because, you know, when you’re losing the war on the ground, why not kill civilians in their apartments hundreds of miles from the front lines?  There’s a winning strategy for you!  Worked in Kyiv and Kharkiv and Odessa, didn’t it?

Not.