Okay, I’m going to write about Vladimir Putin and whether or not he’s going to invade Ukraine, and what I want you to do throughout reading this article is to keep in mind these two images: the city of Aleppo in 2016 after years of bombardment by artillery and airstrikes, and the infamous “Highway of Death” between Kuwait and Iraq after only one night of airstrikes by American Air Force warplanes. The devastation after the latter was so complete and so shocking – estimates of Iraqi vehicles, both military and civilian, destroyed or abandoned were between 1,200 to 1,400 and the death count was unknowable – that President George H.W.
I think this is: perhaps one of the very best assessment papers about the Ukraine I’ve read; and one of the best papers I’ve seen you write. Thank jyou!
I have a gut feeling that now that NATO has coalesced around opposing Putin and Putinism, Joe Biden has effectively called Vladimir Putin's bluff. Joe Biden is not another Neville Chamberlain. Putin may have cobbled together a 'rainy day' fund to sustain his government where Russia is constantly being hobbled by international monetary sanctions orchestrated by the United States. That is the sort of garden-variety, everyday environment that Iran has been dealing with for the past 20-odd years; and the chief result of that appears to be that the sanctions impose a limiting factor on the target regime's ability to project force. I see Putin's sending 200,000 troops to Ukraine's border as something akin to Texas Governor Greg Abbott sending the Texas National Guard to do a war dance on the Texas-Mexican border. This is all for internal consumption within Russia and it is intended to deflect the population's attention away from their economic woes whose origin lies in Putin's kleptocracy. In a sense, Vladimir Putin has to make a choice between shoring up his internal strengths in the face of a rapidly evolving climate change that could within a few short years entirely change the agricultural and agronomic face of the Eurasian continent. Putin's real and enduring opponent in this conflict is likely to be 'General Mud'. Most of us who follow military history will recall that on Germany's Eastern front during World War II, the landscape was effectively impassable during the early spring months of the war years 1942 through 1945, as Wehrmacht armored columns bogged down in Russia and Ukraine as unpaved dirt roads became bogs of impassable mud. What we are seeing on the North Slope of Alaska with the collapse of permafrost is rapidly occurring all across the northern latitudes of the Eurasian continent. In fact, this was specifically mentioned by President Biden in his commentary on Putin's saber rattling.
Armies fight and win battles, but it is logistics that can make or break a military campaign. United States won the Pacific war against Japan largely on the basis of our superior logistical system. The numbers of soldiers, sailors, and airmen in direct contact with Japanese military forces were far fewer than American manpower commitments elsewhere in the world during the war years; and most of those service personnel were not on the fighting front. They were the ones that manage the logistics of warfare: ammunition, matériel, supplies and commodities of every description, and we did it with such panache that sailors on destroyers and submarines had ice cream. To win that war we had to traverse the entire Pacific Ocean from the Kurial and Aleutian Islands in the North Pacific to New Zealand, Australia, and the Dutch East Indies. But, in the eyes of the American people and the national press corps, this war encompassing more than a quarter of the globe's surface was essentially a sideshow. Outside of Washington DC, the only people who paid any real attention to what was going on there were those of us living along the coastal California mountain ranges, or the Puget Sound areas of Washington state. We did this while maintaining a free society, maintaining voluntary free employment of laborers, tradesmen, and technical professionals to create what President Franklin Roosevelt quite accurately described as the 'Arsenal of Democracy'.
Vladimir Putin has nothing like that voluntary workforce. What he has is the legacy described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn of what has been termed 'the Gulag Archipelago', and described in Solzhenitsyn's novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Unlike Josef Stalin, Vladimir Putin no longer has the coercive force that Stalin had to create and maintain infrastructure. He can barely maintain internal order. Putin's weapons of choice are guile and deception. That's not enough to get a single tractor through the mud that is rapidly accumulating between Moscow and Vladivostok. And it is no longer about roads and bridges, and endless lines of railroad track; it is everything that is built above and below ground.
My prediction would be that through happenstance and miscalculation, if Putin touches off an invasion of Ukraine, and even if he captures Kiev, he'll be as we were in Vietnam, but without the wherewithal to pull himself out gracefully. It will be for Putin's Russia the debacle the Soviet Union experienceed in Afghanistan, which precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union. If this goes badly, Putin and his gang of thieves might not make it out of Russia alive, and certainly not with their ill-gotten wealth. No dollars, and Putin's back door out of harm's way slams tight shut. And it's every one of them, too. I doubt if Putin wants to spend his declining years in exile as a guest of China. Putin is playing a dangerous game on borrowed money; one minor slip-up and the whole bill comes due.
The United States could wage that war in Southeast Asia because we had the wealth and wherewithal to sustain that effort, despite fierce internal opposition, and despite the absence any real measurable progress in prosecuting the war. We put the cost of that war on the federal government credit card. For us, this was a hobby shop for blowhard generals and the Republican Party's political allies. It's like the joke I once heard about this old guy who had a large container of fireflies that he spent an enormous effort capturing and putting into the jar. And when by mistake he put a solid impermeable lid on the jar, and the fireflies all died from suffocation, his remark was, "Hey, it's just a hobby".
Russia cannot afford war-making as a recreational pastime; they tried that during the Cold War, and they were beaten almost as badly as if they lost the war in battle. There isn't enough resilience in the Russian economy to handle the fallout if things go badly. Russia's domestic economy is less than that of California, and dangerously concentrated in the oil and gas extraction industries, which rely on the world export market for its sustainability. For example, Russia is developing an undersea pipeline to ship natural gas directly from Saint Petersburg to Germany along the Baltic seabed. The problem is that these are international waters bounded by Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Finland, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, most of which are NATO members. This seabottom pipeline has been under construction for about a decade and is not yet operational. Instead, natural gas is still being routed through pipelines across Ukraine, for which Russia pays transit fees to Ukraine. If war breaks out, that pipeline can be breached anywhere along the route. All it would take is a single very large mine bomb like the one the British Royal Air Force used to destroy the Mohen Dam in Germany in May 1943, and there are several different ways it could be done. This pipeline is a huge investment that Russia cannot afford to lose, and Russia has no effective way of protecting its investment against attack that can happen on Day One of any conflict.
Vladimir Putin effectively lost his war the moment he demanded that Ukraine never be permitted to join NATO. With all his posturing and parade ground marching-in-place muscle flexing, all Putin did was to resurrect the ghosts of Josef Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev. Whatever happens, this time we have the Wehrmacht on our side. We do not need to have Ukraine as part of NATO; there is enough threat from Russia to go around, whether it is aimed at Poland, and the Baltic states, and elsewhere. Regardless, like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, this war cannot be geographically contained; the question is whether and for how long an attack can be sustained before it degenerates into a general European war. NATO was created for just this situation that Russia now threatens. And in his hubris, Vladimir Putin has indelibly validated NATO's continued need and viability.
China will inevitably support Putin diplomatically, but my guess would be that it will be more like the nonaggression pact that existed between the Soviet Union and Japan until mid-August 1945, when Stalin ordered his Far Eastern armies to invade Manchuria. In this one, Russia, not China, is the weaker party and China holds the whip hand. As successor to the Soviet Union, Russia is shot through and through with corruption and criminality. They have a declining population, where life expectancies have dropped over the past several decades, to a point where the average Russian can expect to live into his mid-50s, unlike anywhere else in the First World. The worst thing that could happen for Russia is for Vladimir Putin to believe his own lies and propaganda.
I sit at the master's knee and pay close attention. I took the liberty of completing several of the themes I began with. The more I think about it, the more I'm persuaded the Putin overplayed his hand badly.
You're not the first person to suggest that I field a sunbstack column of my own. Writing is serious work, and very time consuming, even though I do most of my heavy-duty writing using speech recognition software. Other times, I'm stuck with doing it on a smartphone (like now). Doing a decent job of it requires a serious time commitment, research, and proofreading; numerous drafts and fact checking. I spent a lifetime doing that, and it's not as much fun as it used to be. I'll stick with the occasional essay for now. Thanks for the attaboys though.
This was so informative. Thank you! I like this especially: "NATO was created for just this situation that Russia now threatens. And in his hubris, Vladimir Putin has indelibly validated NATO's continued need and viability." Hubris, indeed, seems to be the hallmark of Putin and his puppet(s) in the US.
WOW, Arthur Silen!! After reading your brilliant and, I hope, accurate prophecy, I dare to imagine Ukraine not only resisting and surviving Putin's assault, but instigating the end to his vicious reign over Russia as well! Thanks to both you and Lucien for your incredible analyses of this terrible threat.
And if this cataclysm unfolds, and evidence emerges that Trump and his cronies materially aided his buddy Putin in ways that contributed to the nightmarish tragedy, will he finally, finally be held to account?
As in a life prison sentence, or perhaps even execution, much as I despise the death penalty for anyone?
How wonderful it would be if either of the two alternatives in your last sentence had any chance whatsoever of coming true! It's possible to oppose the "routine" use of the death penalty as it's now employed, usually against poor black men, while reserving it, instead, for Treason and Crimes Against Humanity, of all of which TFG is without a doubt guilty.
I still wouldn't hold my breath, even in the face of the more and more vilely incredible stuff that keeps coming out about Jan. 6th...on pretty much a daily basis.
Well, Lucian is putting into words a possible scenario I have been thinking about but am unwilling to describe in specific.
This is all about Putin and his circle. Absolutely no question there. Russia is not behind him. Only Putin and his mafia cares, and maybe not even his circle. Maybe only Putin.
Others have noted that this is classic Soviet-era negotiation strategy, if you can call it negotiation, since it’s more like coercion and threat. Pull out all your weapons and unlock the safety, demand the maximum, and see what you can get for free while conceding nothing. Call it armed robbery.
Russia is not behind this senseless, belligerent and criminal act. Just the head punk is.
Sometimes a lone armed robber gets his head blown off.
I have very clear images of the Highway of Death in my head.
Considering Putin's previous moves on Ukraine an invasion is not unimaginable. I am beginning to think he has taken a position from which he is unable to extricate himself.
Nicole Wallace had Lt. Col. Vindman as a guest a couple of weeks ago. He opened by saying he feared a war worse than any wars we have ever experienced. His description of what Putin might do was totally frightening. So is your article.
I was embedded with the Aviation company of the 101st Air Assault division during the 1991 Gulf War. The sole US losses were due to traffic accidents and a cave-in of a protective berm in their desert encampment. The Iraqi losses were horrific but impossible to quantify.
It isn't trying to get inside Putin's head as much as discuss how this crisis came to be in the first place and how the Russians might be perceiving it, which is an important aspect of solving this by diplomatic means and not seeing a conflagration in Eastern Europe. (Spoiler: the US isn't exactly blameless in provoking this clash OR on much of a moral high ground given its own behaviors in the recent past.) Maybe the US thinks it can cheerlead and smile from the sidelines while the "Commies" kill each other, and maybe the military-industrial complex is drooling at the prospect of more arms races and Cold War redux. But these things have a way of getting out of control and beyond what we can foresee or predict.
From a military point of view, I would think a smarter Russian strategy would be to encircle Kiev and major cities and essentially starve them into submission, rather than fight to conquer those places, with all the attendant destruction and loss of life. Perhaps grab and occupy some key regions of Ukraine (e.g., those with large ethnic Russian presence, or to link up the Crimea with the rest of Russia proper and take control over the Black Sea coast) then install a puppet government in Kiev/Kyiv that will keep the rump state firmly within Moscow's orbit and keep NATO out. That's my thinking if I were an aggressive Russian plotter who wants to neutralize Ukraine thoroughly for a generation or more and do so at the least cost to my own forces.
All of this sounds like a huge tragedy. A sad obsessed tyrant with dreams of a past that is now a bucket of ashes. Who in Russia can speak to Mr. Putin and warn that the destruction of Ukraine and especially Kyiv will ruin any chance for a peaceful Europe? Watching what is happening sounds so much like 1914, world powers lost in beliefs that were dated and possessing new and terrible weapons. The United States and NATO cannot allow Russia to gut Ukraine like Assad to Syria. Their credibility would be destroyed. We are in serious trouble.
Well that was chilling. I’ve had enough war. I’ve seen too many people blown to bits, held too many hands of dying service members. Now I have children. I don’t want to spend months in a tent in some cold bombed out tundra. Can we just not?
A few articles back, didn't LTIV dismiss Russia's military as an outdated, creaky outfit full of old weapons and unwilling conscripts-- not fit for fighting anybody?
Unfortunately, I think your assessment is far to accurate. Putin had a the option to expand the glasnost of Mikhail Gorbachev but chose the path of the autocrat.
Both Putin and Trump know that these days there are no retreats for dictators. You have to stay in power no matter what it takes. It seems that in Russia, Putin has no problems with vote counting machines...
I think this is: perhaps one of the very best assessment papers about the Ukraine I’ve read; and one of the best papers I’ve seen you write. Thank jyou!
I have a gut feeling that now that NATO has coalesced around opposing Putin and Putinism, Joe Biden has effectively called Vladimir Putin's bluff. Joe Biden is not another Neville Chamberlain. Putin may have cobbled together a 'rainy day' fund to sustain his government where Russia is constantly being hobbled by international monetary sanctions orchestrated by the United States. That is the sort of garden-variety, everyday environment that Iran has been dealing with for the past 20-odd years; and the chief result of that appears to be that the sanctions impose a limiting factor on the target regime's ability to project force. I see Putin's sending 200,000 troops to Ukraine's border as something akin to Texas Governor Greg Abbott sending the Texas National Guard to do a war dance on the Texas-Mexican border. This is all for internal consumption within Russia and it is intended to deflect the population's attention away from their economic woes whose origin lies in Putin's kleptocracy. In a sense, Vladimir Putin has to make a choice between shoring up his internal strengths in the face of a rapidly evolving climate change that could within a few short years entirely change the agricultural and agronomic face of the Eurasian continent. Putin's real and enduring opponent in this conflict is likely to be 'General Mud'. Most of us who follow military history will recall that on Germany's Eastern front during World War II, the landscape was effectively impassable during the early spring months of the war years 1942 through 1945, as Wehrmacht armored columns bogged down in Russia and Ukraine as unpaved dirt roads became bogs of impassable mud. What we are seeing on the North Slope of Alaska with the collapse of permafrost is rapidly occurring all across the northern latitudes of the Eurasian continent. In fact, this was specifically mentioned by President Biden in his commentary on Putin's saber rattling.
Armies fight and win battles, but it is logistics that can make or break a military campaign. United States won the Pacific war against Japan largely on the basis of our superior logistical system. The numbers of soldiers, sailors, and airmen in direct contact with Japanese military forces were far fewer than American manpower commitments elsewhere in the world during the war years; and most of those service personnel were not on the fighting front. They were the ones that manage the logistics of warfare: ammunition, matériel, supplies and commodities of every description, and we did it with such panache that sailors on destroyers and submarines had ice cream. To win that war we had to traverse the entire Pacific Ocean from the Kurial and Aleutian Islands in the North Pacific to New Zealand, Australia, and the Dutch East Indies. But, in the eyes of the American people and the national press corps, this war encompassing more than a quarter of the globe's surface was essentially a sideshow. Outside of Washington DC, the only people who paid any real attention to what was going on there were those of us living along the coastal California mountain ranges, or the Puget Sound areas of Washington state. We did this while maintaining a free society, maintaining voluntary free employment of laborers, tradesmen, and technical professionals to create what President Franklin Roosevelt quite accurately described as the 'Arsenal of Democracy'.
Vladimir Putin has nothing like that voluntary workforce. What he has is the legacy described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn of what has been termed 'the Gulag Archipelago', and described in Solzhenitsyn's novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Unlike Josef Stalin, Vladimir Putin no longer has the coercive force that Stalin had to create and maintain infrastructure. He can barely maintain internal order. Putin's weapons of choice are guile and deception. That's not enough to get a single tractor through the mud that is rapidly accumulating between Moscow and Vladivostok. And it is no longer about roads and bridges, and endless lines of railroad track; it is everything that is built above and below ground.
My prediction would be that through happenstance and miscalculation, if Putin touches off an invasion of Ukraine, and even if he captures Kiev, he'll be as we were in Vietnam, but without the wherewithal to pull himself out gracefully. It will be for Putin's Russia the debacle the Soviet Union experienceed in Afghanistan, which precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union. If this goes badly, Putin and his gang of thieves might not make it out of Russia alive, and certainly not with their ill-gotten wealth. No dollars, and Putin's back door out of harm's way slams tight shut. And it's every one of them, too. I doubt if Putin wants to spend his declining years in exile as a guest of China. Putin is playing a dangerous game on borrowed money; one minor slip-up and the whole bill comes due.
The United States could wage that war in Southeast Asia because we had the wealth and wherewithal to sustain that effort, despite fierce internal opposition, and despite the absence any real measurable progress in prosecuting the war. We put the cost of that war on the federal government credit card. For us, this was a hobby shop for blowhard generals and the Republican Party's political allies. It's like the joke I once heard about this old guy who had a large container of fireflies that he spent an enormous effort capturing and putting into the jar. And when by mistake he put a solid impermeable lid on the jar, and the fireflies all died from suffocation, his remark was, "Hey, it's just a hobby".
Russia cannot afford war-making as a recreational pastime; they tried that during the Cold War, and they were beaten almost as badly as if they lost the war in battle. There isn't enough resilience in the Russian economy to handle the fallout if things go badly. Russia's domestic economy is less than that of California, and dangerously concentrated in the oil and gas extraction industries, which rely on the world export market for its sustainability. For example, Russia is developing an undersea pipeline to ship natural gas directly from Saint Petersburg to Germany along the Baltic seabed. The problem is that these are international waters bounded by Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Finland, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, most of which are NATO members. This seabottom pipeline has been under construction for about a decade and is not yet operational. Instead, natural gas is still being routed through pipelines across Ukraine, for which Russia pays transit fees to Ukraine. If war breaks out, that pipeline can be breached anywhere along the route. All it would take is a single very large mine bomb like the one the British Royal Air Force used to destroy the Mohen Dam in Germany in May 1943, and there are several different ways it could be done. This pipeline is a huge investment that Russia cannot afford to lose, and Russia has no effective way of protecting its investment against attack that can happen on Day One of any conflict.
Vladimir Putin effectively lost his war the moment he demanded that Ukraine never be permitted to join NATO. With all his posturing and parade ground marching-in-place muscle flexing, all Putin did was to resurrect the ghosts of Josef Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev. Whatever happens, this time we have the Wehrmacht on our side. We do not need to have Ukraine as part of NATO; there is enough threat from Russia to go around, whether it is aimed at Poland, and the Baltic states, and elsewhere. Regardless, like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, this war cannot be geographically contained; the question is whether and for how long an attack can be sustained before it degenerates into a general European war. NATO was created for just this situation that Russia now threatens. And in his hubris, Vladimir Putin has indelibly validated NATO's continued need and viability.
China will inevitably support Putin diplomatically, but my guess would be that it will be more like the nonaggression pact that existed between the Soviet Union and Japan until mid-August 1945, when Stalin ordered his Far Eastern armies to invade Manchuria. In this one, Russia, not China, is the weaker party and China holds the whip hand. As successor to the Soviet Union, Russia is shot through and through with corruption and criminality. They have a declining population, where life expectancies have dropped over the past several decades, to a point where the average Russian can expect to live into his mid-50s, unlike anywhere else in the First World. The worst thing that could happen for Russia is for Vladimir Putin to believe his own lies and propaganda.
A lot of truth with a capital T, and wisdom with a capital W here.
I sit at the master's knee and pay close attention. I took the liberty of completing several of the themes I began with. The more I think about it, the more I'm persuaded the Putin overplayed his hand badly.
Arthur...j'ever consider your own Substack? I mean, like, wow.
You're not the first person to suggest that I field a sunbstack column of my own. Writing is serious work, and very time consuming, even though I do most of my heavy-duty writing using speech recognition software. Other times, I'm stuck with doing it on a smartphone (like now). Doing a decent job of it requires a serious time commitment, research, and proofreading; numerous drafts and fact checking. I spent a lifetime doing that, and it's not as much fun as it used to be. I'll stick with the occasional essay for now. Thanks for the attaboys though.
Wow! We've got a column within a column here. Brilliant and informative. Thank you!
That's it! A column within a column!
This was so informative. Thank you! I like this especially: "NATO was created for just this situation that Russia now threatens. And in his hubris, Vladimir Putin has indelibly validated NATO's continued need and viability." Hubris, indeed, seems to be the hallmark of Putin and his puppet(s) in the US.
WOW, Arthur Silen!! After reading your brilliant and, I hope, accurate prophecy, I dare to imagine Ukraine not only resisting and surviving Putin's assault, but instigating the end to his vicious reign over Russia as well! Thanks to both you and Lucien for your incredible analyses of this terrible threat.
And if this cataclysm unfolds, and evidence emerges that Trump and his cronies materially aided his buddy Putin in ways that contributed to the nightmarish tragedy, will he finally, finally be held to account?
As in a life prison sentence, or perhaps even execution, much as I despise the death penalty for anyone?
How wonderful it would be if either of the two alternatives in your last sentence had any chance whatsoever of coming true! It's possible to oppose the "routine" use of the death penalty as it's now employed, usually against poor black men, while reserving it, instead, for Treason and Crimes Against Humanity, of all of which TFG is without a doubt guilty.
Teflon Don keeps slip sliding away. Humiliation will be much more satisfying.
I still wouldn't hold my breath, even in the face of the more and more vilely incredible stuff that keeps coming out about Jan. 6th...on pretty much a daily basis.
Well, Lucian is putting into words a possible scenario I have been thinking about but am unwilling to describe in specific.
This is all about Putin and his circle. Absolutely no question there. Russia is not behind him. Only Putin and his mafia cares, and maybe not even his circle. Maybe only Putin.
Others have noted that this is classic Soviet-era negotiation strategy, if you can call it negotiation, since it’s more like coercion and threat. Pull out all your weapons and unlock the safety, demand the maximum, and see what you can get for free while conceding nothing. Call it armed robbery.
Russia is not behind this senseless, belligerent and criminal act. Just the head punk is.
Sometimes a lone armed robber gets his head blown off.
Take a look at this public opposition by a Russian general:
Click on the link or just search on “General Leonid Ivashov”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10484417/amp/Top-hardline-Russian-general-warns-Putin-NOT-invade-Ukraine-accuses-criminal-policy.html
thanks for the link, which is extremely enlightening.
I have very clear images of the Highway of Death in my head.
Considering Putin's previous moves on Ukraine an invasion is not unimaginable. I am beginning to think he has taken a position from which he is unable to extricate himself.
We will have our answer soon.
Nicole Wallace had Lt. Col. Vindman as a guest a couple of weeks ago. He opened by saying he feared a war worse than any wars we have ever experienced. His description of what Putin might do was totally frightening. So is your article.
I was embedded with the Aviation company of the 101st Air Assault division during the 1991 Gulf War. The sole US losses were due to traffic accidents and a cave-in of a protective berm in their desert encampment. The Iraqi losses were horrific but impossible to quantify.
Why did I read this at bedtime. But Thank You.
I found this article/interview on the Truthout site informative and perceptive and a balance to so much disturbing bellicosity coming out of DC. https://truthout.org/articles/us-approach-to-ukraine-and-russia-has-left-the-domain-of-rational-discourse/?fbclid=IwAR3pZ8AqRQ4B1mGJ5_9XX4Hi02FUIlQVtL8_jzWLUAmk5lHhHkMRqriOtLw
It isn't trying to get inside Putin's head as much as discuss how this crisis came to be in the first place and how the Russians might be perceiving it, which is an important aspect of solving this by diplomatic means and not seeing a conflagration in Eastern Europe. (Spoiler: the US isn't exactly blameless in provoking this clash OR on much of a moral high ground given its own behaviors in the recent past.) Maybe the US thinks it can cheerlead and smile from the sidelines while the "Commies" kill each other, and maybe the military-industrial complex is drooling at the prospect of more arms races and Cold War redux. But these things have a way of getting out of control and beyond what we can foresee or predict.
From a military point of view, I would think a smarter Russian strategy would be to encircle Kiev and major cities and essentially starve them into submission, rather than fight to conquer those places, with all the attendant destruction and loss of life. Perhaps grab and occupy some key regions of Ukraine (e.g., those with large ethnic Russian presence, or to link up the Crimea with the rest of Russia proper and take control over the Black Sea coast) then install a puppet government in Kiev/Kyiv that will keep the rump state firmly within Moscow's orbit and keep NATO out. That's my thinking if I were an aggressive Russian plotter who wants to neutralize Ukraine thoroughly for a generation or more and do so at the least cost to my own forces.
All of this sounds like a huge tragedy. A sad obsessed tyrant with dreams of a past that is now a bucket of ashes. Who in Russia can speak to Mr. Putin and warn that the destruction of Ukraine and especially Kyiv will ruin any chance for a peaceful Europe? Watching what is happening sounds so much like 1914, world powers lost in beliefs that were dated and possessing new and terrible weapons. The United States and NATO cannot allow Russia to gut Ukraine like Assad to Syria. Their credibility would be destroyed. We are in serious trouble.
Putin is in serious trouble
When your friend is Former...
Well that was chilling. I’ve had enough war. I’ve seen too many people blown to bits, held too many hands of dying service members. Now I have children. I don’t want to spend months in a tent in some cold bombed out tundra. Can we just not?
https://youtu.be/dQHUAJTZqF0
👍
1970. Marching in the streets, my hair in long braids. Growing my hair out again. Thank you for this SToW
A few articles back, didn't LTIV dismiss Russia's military as an outdated, creaky outfit full of old weapons and unwilling conscripts-- not fit for fighting anybody?
TC mentioned it, that I know
Unfortunately, I think your assessment is far to accurate. Putin had a the option to expand the glasnost of Mikhail Gorbachev but chose the path of the autocrat.
Why Former worships him.
Thank you.
Both Putin and Trump know that these days there are no retreats for dictators. You have to stay in power no matter what it takes. It seems that in Russia, Putin has no problems with vote counting machines...