Is anybody else the least bit interested in how complacent the news media have become regarding the fact that Ukraine has not only invaded Russia, but is pushing farther into the country almost daily, capturing 200 Russian soldiers? The captured Russian fighters are being described as “conscripts,” with some accounts making it sound almost like they laid down their arms and surrendered, rather than fight the Ukrainians. Is Putin, running out of soldiers willing to fight his ego-driven war?
The Russians, meanwhile, appear almost flummoxed over the move leading to questions about what Ukraine will do next. Will they march into Moscow, with Putin making his escape to North Korea? Of course not, and yet, there are questions. I know it’s been more than two years since Putin invaded Ukraine, I know Russia has launched a missile attack in retaliation, but come on now, this is Ukraine invading Russia. A country lead by a megalomaniac dictator with a nuclear arsenal. He reportedly thought this thing would be over in days or a couple of weeks, and here we are headed for a three year long conflict that threatens all of Europe. A conflict that has resulted in tens of thousands of Russia’s best and brightest leaving the country.
Or am I expecting far too much from the U.S. press? A media controlled by a relative handful of industrial giants who have normalized a national criminal running for president? A man who should be in prison for leading an attempted coup? Only in America. Or Germany, in the 1930’s. Or is it just me? Am I losing my perspective, something I worked so hard to develop and nurture over so many years as a journalist? I think not. I think the news business has changed, and I’ve remained pretty much the same. Proud of it too, thank you very much.
Is it immoral for NATO and the U.S., to refuse to send troops into Ukraine? How about the MIGs?
Is it okay for Russia to march into Ukraine as a conquering force but wrong for NATO to march in to defend freedom? Why does so much of what the West and NATO are doing feel so terribly inadequate, particularly in light of Russia’s history of pushing others around until others, finally, push back?
Are the U.S. and NATO simply trying to avoid the inevitable, while the body bags of innocent Ukrainians pile up, or is NATO correct in its current assessment that its best option is to stand back, without putting any boots on Ukrainian soil, while Putin blasts Ukraine into dust, murdering thousands of innocents in the process?
Doesn’t it feel like the U.S. and NATO have a moral obligation to punch back with more than military and humanitarian supplies? If Putin can do whatever he wants by threatening World War III, then where will this stop? Will Poland, be next?
From the beginning, Putin has been dictating where and how this conflict will take place. NATO, has waited for his next move and then reacted. Would declaring a “no-fly zone,” and sending in the MIGs help to draw a line in the sand? Doesn’t it feel like NATO is making the same mistake that was made in 1939, of trying to placate a monster? The Ukrainians are obviously tough enough to fight this battle. Are NATO and the U.S. up to it, or will this be another Crimea, or maybe something even worse?
I cringe every time someone from NATO or the U.S. makes the point that they will not send troops into Ukraine. Every time they say that they are sending Putin a message, and it is the wrong message to send.
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.
