In 1975, as a Senate staffer, I was able to make an unusual trek for that time and spend a couple of weeks in the Soviet Union; specifically Russia; Moscow, Kalinin and what was then Leningrad. It was an eye-opener to say the least. Just a few years before this trip I’d been a soldier in Germany so, while hardly qualifying as a military expert, I was quickly able to see that we were far better equipped than our Russian counterparts. Our uniforms for cold weather were clearly better, the Russian soldiers wore cheap and thin wool and seemed to always be under the hood of some stalled or broken-down vehicle. It struck me that much of their military bluster was really a paper tiger and, absent their nuclear capability, they really weren’t a threat. Another major takeaway was the reaction of the Russian “man on the street.” We were treated with curiosity and kindness, it was clear that the people weren’t our enemy but they were timid in approaching us as we knew we were under constant surveillance. During a train ride to Leningrad, one older man made a point of cornering me between cars and, in our mutually bad German, thanked me and the U.S. for having provided him with an airplane in World War Two to fight the Germans. And memories of that war absolutely haunted and permeated every public arena with monuments and memorials. Watching the current events in Ukraine I can’t help but feel sorry for those millions of Russians who have consistently been manipulated and mis-lead by their own government. I truly believe that if it were up to the average Russian, they’d never send their sons into needless harm’s way for political dominance of a country they consider their cousin. The Russian people deserved better than the Soviets, they deserve better than Putin. We need to find a way to help them….
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Paul Paolicelli, is a veteran broadcast journalist and the author of two books on the Italian-American experience, “Dances with Luigi: A Grandson’s Search for His Italian Roots,” and “Under The Southern Sun: Stories of the Real Italy and the Americans it Created.”
As the fog of war sets in, it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine how many casualties there are on either side. That said, multiple sources have indicated that the casualties on the Russian side may be much heavier than Putin or his war-planners expected. The Ukrainian military claims to have shot down more than one Russian military transport as rifles are handed out to Ukrainian civilians while others busy themselves making Molotov cocktail explosives in anticipation of the Russian advance on Kyiv.
Polish officials tell the BBC, that some ten-thousand Ukrainians have now crossed over into Poland. Men, age 18 to 60, are staying behind in Ukraine, to support the fight against what some are now calling “Putin’s War.”
For his part, Putin and his FSB, continue a massive war of disinformation, insisting they are attacking Ukraine because it is under “Neo-Nazi” control. The truth, is that the country’s president is Jewish. Observers inside Russia, have indicated that the Putin regime is also failing to tell the Russian people that there have been Russian casualties. Reports indicate that both Facebook and Twitter, have been shut down inside Russia and that, as to be expected, the Putin regime is practicing extreme censorship over Russian media outlets, generally.
There are reports that Russian soldiers sent into the fight were not told they would be going to war against Ukraine.
Resistance, both inside Russia and from without, appears to be growing, with Russians, even when threatened by arrest, continue taking to the streets to protest the war. There are protests in other countries as well, including Georgia, Kazakhstan, across the U.K., and the United States, where New Yorkers have filled Times Square. According to one report, Kazakhstan, refused a request from Putin for troops. At the time of this writing, Ukrainian President Zelensky was still in Kyiv, which was still being controlled by Ukrainians, although Russian missiles have rained down on civilian structures including apartment buildings and schools.
While there seems to be some agreement that the Ukrainians are doing better than many expected, it is also generally believed that they continue to be out-gunned and out-manned, and fighting by themselves as they are, they won’t be able to hold off the Russians forever. One recent video shows unarmed Ukrainians attempting to block Russian tanks with their bodies. Another, shows a Russian tank crushing a car, with its driver at the wheel. Remarkably, the motorist survived.
In a recent statement, Ukrainian President Zelensky said, “We will fight as long as it takes to liberate the country.”
Occasionally, I take a look at my website stats to find out who is reading my stuff. I took a look a few minutes ago and saw something interesting. I’m getting hits from Ukraine and Russia. That’s new.
Since the war just broke out and I’ve been writing about it, I must assume that there are those in Ukraine and Russia, from Russia in particular, who are searching for the truth. Okay, here, to the best of my ability, is the truth about what’s happening in Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin, is not a legitimate president. He is an absolute dictator who has been elected and then re-elected in phony elections. A former KGB operative who arrests or kills his opposition, be they politicians or journalists. And now, for reasons only Putin knows, he has decided to send his military, the biggest army in Europe, into the Ukraine. Which is no match for the Russian military.
Speculation about why this is happening ranges from Putin wanting this to be his legacy, that he put at least some of the old Soviet Union back together again, on one side, to some wondering if the man has lost his mind,because this war he has unleashed will serve no one, on the other.
There appears to be no up-side to the war for Putin, or for anyone else, which has left many observers scratching their heads in disbelief and wonder. Is Vladimir Putin a rational human being?
Another possibility, some think, is that Putin is so threatened by Democracy, threatened that Ukraine will be a successful Democracy, that he felt it necessary to destroy the country and to slaughter thousands of Ukrainians, to secure his own position as dictator of Russia. In other words, his failures as a leader would be so obvious when compared to the success of Democracy in Ukraine, that his people might rise up and demand Democracy for Russia. That, of course, would be untenable for any number of reasons for Putin, and particularly untenable for a man who sees the dissolution of the old U.S.S.R., as one of the worst things that has ever happened.
If you listen carefully to what he says, Vladimir Putin’s head seems stuck in the past, with Putin seeing himself as something between a new-age Tsar and a 21st. Century Hitler clone, about to send his stormtroopers across the Sudentenland, eventually spreading “shock and awe” throughout Europe. However, who really knows what lurks in the dictator’s brain other than the dictator himself? This man who would be Caesar? And so he has invaded, with no valid reason, without any justification at all, the peaceful nation of Ukraine, which just wanted to be left alone.
For the record, there is no evidence of genocide inside Ukraine and the “uprising” in the “breakaway regions” of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR), appears to have been mostly instigated by Putin himself as an excuse to invade. The issues in Donetsk and Luhansk, surely could have been resolved through diplomacy. But Putin, would have none of it. Even after repeated pleas from the west to solve his issues through diplomacy, he wanted to invade.
And now, Ukrainians, are being bombed with Russian bombs while Russian tanks and troops cross over the border to do God knows what, because nothing Putin is doing makes any sense. Except that maybe he wants to put the Soviet Union back together again. But that, is not going to happen. Not when there are so many in NATO and the west, who would rather die on their feet than live on their knees in subjugation to Vladimir Putin.
Could he possibly be delusional? Does a rational man describe a nation led by a Jewish president, as a “junta of Neo-Nazis?”
With Putin controlling nearly all the media inside Russia, without free speech, it’s difficult to know what’s really happening inside the country. And yet, word is leaking out that Russians are protesting the war, and that they are being arrested for it. At the same time, images are coming in of innocent Ukrainian women and children crossing the border into Poland, fleeing for their lives as the Russian war machine threatens to crush all they have. And for what?
The Ukrainians will never agree to be Putin’s personal slaves, and the west is punishing Russia with harsh sanctions, threatening to destroy the Russian economy in the weeks and months to come.
Putin, has no end-game. He loses even if he wins. He may end up occupying Ukraine, a nation filled with angry people who just wanted to be left alone, but the combination of the occupation and sanctions being placed on Russia by the west are sure to place the country in an economic vise while turning it’s dictator into an international pariah.
His losing position was made prophetic with news that one of Russia’s first territorial conquests, was to seize control of the Chernobyl nuclear site. A very real symbol of one of the worst failures of Putin’s much-loved U.S.S.R. Apparently the plant was hit by Russian shelling and is now leaking even more radiation than before.
The sad part in all of this, or one of the sad parts, because there are so many, is that this isn’t the doing of the Russian people – it’s the responsibility of one scared little man by the name of Putin – and along with the Ukrainians, it’s the Russian people who will eventually be made to suffer for his confused and misguided actions.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, and former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, just said that the temporary suspension of work on Nord Stream 2, won’t have any impact on the Russians. According to Bolton, there were already two suspensions in place, so this third suspension by Germany, is largely symbolic.
Bolton told Sky News, that the other sanctions are merely “pinprick” sanctions, and not nearly strong enough to prevent further Russian attacks. He went on to say that if the purpose of sanctions is to prevent further incursions, then holding a second package of sanctions back as a deterrent makes no sense. What good will those further sanctions do, if tens of thousands of Ukrainians have already been killed?
Among other things, Bolton recommended that the U.S. and EU, seize the overseas assets of wealthy Russians and shut down Nord Stream 2, until there is no more Russian military presence in the Ukraine, Georgia and any other country that wants the Russians out.
If Bolton is right, and the sanctions now being put in place are insufficient to stop any further Russian incursion, then the future could be filled with thousands of innocents slaughtered at the hands of the massive nuclear-armed Russian military machine which is being supported not only from within, but from certain factions overseas, as well.
VINDMAN: “BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS”
Interviewed on MSNBC, former NSC member, Alexander Vindman, said that blood will be on the hands of former U.S. President Donald Trump, and those other Republicans and pundits who are currently issuing words of praise and support for Putin’s invasion.
Is that what it’s going to take? Will massive slaughter in the Ukraine turn out to be the wakeup call that prompts a necessary response from the West that convinces Putin that he is not a Czar, and that we are not in the 19th Century? Or, jumping ahead into the 20th Century, will Ukraine, turn out to be Putin’s Sudetenland?
Not unlike Adolph Hitler, one wonders about Putin’s lucidity, as he is reportedly surrounded by a gaggle of “yes men,” afraid to tell their mighty leader what they really think as he continues along a path of self-destruction. A path that has been taken before and will benefit no one.
So the Russians want to get together for another high-level conversation with Secretary of State Blinken, to take place late next week. Does that mean there won’t be an invasion until sometime after the meeting, or is it simply a clever diversion? With Putin, who can tell?
Maybe he’s following suit with the Japanese Ambassador to the United States who was in what were ostensibly “peace talks” with the U.S. Secretary of State, while, at the same time, Imperial Japan was dropping bombs on Pearl Harbor which pulled the U.S. into World War II.
Speculation about why Vladimir Putin is doing any of this varies from his being an ego-maniac to his advancing age, and his possible need to leave a legacy of being the big man who began the process of putting the Soviet Union back together again.
You have to wonder if the invasion of Ukraine hasn’t been in the works since the invasion of the Crimean peninsula, back in 2014. Any number of scholars think Putin has always intended to take back all of Ukraine, by one means or another. If not by political collusion, then by military invasion. I think he was probably counting on Donald Trump to be his “kompromat,” a “convenient idiot” that would help him get it done. That is to say he was counting on Trump to get re-elected and to then just sit by and cheer him on as Russian troops marched across the border into Ukraine. All signs from the Trump Presidency point to the possibility that Trump would have been more than accommodating to whatever Putin wanted.
The question continues to demand an answer, “what have the Russians got on Donald Trump?” In the final analysis it may not mean much as Putin’s plans were thrown asunder when Trump lost the election. But an autocrat’s ego being what it is, Putin, decided to push forward with his plan anyway, thinking NATO and Joe Biden, might take the coward’s way out and back away from a fight.
But that’s not what happened. Nobody has backed away and the whole hot mess has blown up in Putin’s face.
With more American troops and hardware being flown in and NATO only growing stronger, one must wonder whether the Russian oligarchs and the military don’t see this as being potentially very costly, both in terms of losing billions of rubles as the world places sanctions on the Russian economy and in thousands of unnecessary deaths as Russian troops face serious opposition from the Ukrainians. And all of it for what? For Putin’s need to be the biggest bully on the block? Why does he need that? Do the Russian people really care? One would think their principle concern might be their quality of life?
In terms of economies, the United States is number one in the world. Russia, isn’t even in the top ten. But it is a nuclear power, and it is that and not his economy, which gives Putin his leverage as a bully. It’s really all he’s got, even though nobody’s talking about it. And if war breaks out in Europe, potentially going beyond Ukraine, how long might it be before it goes beyond old-fashioned tanks and troops, and doesn’t the obvious nuclear deterrent play into this at some point and doesn’t that that make everything Putin is doing antiquated and even silly?
Are we in the middle of our second Cuban missile crisis, without anyone admitting that it’s really happening? Is it so horrible to contemplate that no one dares bring it into the conversation? Or is the country so young, that most among us don’t realize that nuclear warfare is still a very real possibility?
One can only hope the Russian generals and oligarchs have enough common sense and raw power, to stop their old KGB boss, Vladimir Putin, from making the massive mistake of invading Ukraine. Something that will benefit no one. Something that might even leave a legacy of Putin being such a miserable failure as a leader that he felt the need to start an unnecessary war as a diversion to how bad things were in his own country in comparison to the world’s democracies.
Isn’t it great to wake up to news that President Xi Jinping of China has allowed Vladimir Putin to turn the Olympic Games into a giant PR stunt, with China and Russia issuing an edict condemning the expansion of NATO and re-affirming the Chinese claim that Taiwan is part of China? Doesn’t it make you wonder whether the United States and other free nations should be taking part in the games at all?
Russia, is threatening to invade free, democratic countries in eastern Europe. Taiwan and Japan, are under constant threat from China. Should the free world be playing games with these countries, or should we be doing everything we can to produce our own consumer goods here on U.S. soil, rather than depending upon a Communist country to sell tons of mostly consumer crap we don’t really need to us while they join forces with other international bullies to try and push us around?
Think of Hong Kong and Taiwan and the conditions being imposed on Uyghur Muslims attempting to survive in China. Think of those who oppose Putin, being murdered or thrown in prison. Think of more than 100-thousand Russian troops on the Ukrainian border, threatening to invade. Should we be playing games with these people or is it time for a reality check? Since the games originated in the birthplace of Democracy, perhaps only nations that practice democratic principles should be allowed to participate?
Is the “goodwill” the games generate really worth it, or is that mostly an illusion, providing political advantage to autocrats who are out to destroy us while international clubs of billionaires sit back and reap the economic awards, claiming no responsibility for the outcome?
Just when you thought it might be safe to watch the news again, Newt Gingrich is back, and he’s whipped out one of his party’s favorite tools – taking what’s happening to one party or person and directing it onto someone else. Psychologists call it “transference.” I call it the same old Republican nonsense.
This time, it’s Newt, with the ridiculous claim that members of the Jan. 6th Committee, could be thrown in jail, once and if, the Republican Party is back in power. As with all cases of transference, he has presented reality in reverse. It’s the Republicans who are threatened with jail time, not members of the Committee.
Republicans have used this technique time and time again, and it’s getting old, just like Gingrich’s attitude. It is time for both to go away. It is also time for the press to give their readers and audience a heads-up every time this technique is used. Please. A little analysis would be nice as opposed to just reporting what one side is saying and the other side is responding with while acting as though nothing underhanded is going on.
The problem, is that transference can so confuse an issue that it ends up working by feeding the Republican base. Unless the press starts calling them out for using it.
WHAT’S UP WITH THE RUSSIANS? That question has been on my plate for several weeks now. The best analysis I’ve heard, is that Putin is determined to create chaos in the Ukraine, because a safe and prosperous and democratic Ukraine, will make Russia look bad by comparison, which could lead to the Russian people wanting what the Ukrainians have. And that might mean the end of Putin’s dictatorship. We can only hope he doesn’t drag us into World War III in the process.
Doesn’t it feel like the Europeans are struggling to move forward, into the 21st Century with the rest of us, while Putin and his Russian oligarch friends are using the centuries old tactic of whipping up a war to direct the Russian people’s attention away from domestic issues and onto an impending and unnecessary conflict? Doesn’t it feel like Putin, is trying to drag the world backwards into an earlier time when monarchs and tyrants settled regional issues with regular warfare rather than diplomacy? Couldn’t this be why Putin opposes the European Union and Democracy? Because self-determination is better than the tyranny of a dictator, who rigs elections and murders or jails his opponents and threatens war simply to shift the focus away from his shortcomings as a leader?
