So Putin pulled the dumbest move of his career, invading Ukraine and bringing about the deadliest European military action since WWII. All the parallels of the beginning of that awful catastrophe are in evidence except one. When Hitler raced across the Eastern European nations he met with little or no resistance. This time it’s different. The Ukrainians are not laying down their arms and raising their hands. This time the nation under attack is standing up on its hind legs and killing back.
Did anyone actually expect this? Well, the Ukrainians obviously did. The story about the 13 Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island who told the Russian boat commander to “Go fuck himself,” is a classic, even if it turns out not to be real. Right now, the Ukrainians are an inspiring people, much as the Hungarians were in ’56. Yes, the Hungarians lost and there’s a good chance the Ukrainians will too, but in doing so they will have created a heroic image that that has been missing from the international scene for a very long time. It has certainly been missing from the United States for almost 50 years. If it had been evident anywhere, Donald Trump would never have won the Electoral College part of the 2016 election, and would have been buried in the popular election. If it had been evident in 2020 he would never have run because the support would not have been there.
Maybe Putin’s War will be just what the rest of the world needs. Maybe it will wake us up to what is important in life and what is just trivia.
Even if Putin wins this war and occupies Ukraine, it will bury him. He will have bankrupted the Russian people and murdered many of their sons and husbands and for what? Many of the Russian speaking Ukrainians that Putin claims to be rescuing, want to remain Russian speaking Ukrainians. NATO never wanted to admit the Ukraine and the only military threat in the entire situation has come from Putin’s miscalculation.
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George Stephanopoulos, in a rare act of courage, undressed Republican Senator Tom Cotton and left him standing naked with his dick in his hand in town squares all over Arkansas. Cotton refused toto concur on a description of Putin as crazy for what he is doing in Ukraine, and he flat out refused to condemn Donald Trump for his praise of Putin in the face of the inhuman decisions in this invasion.
Immediately upon Cotton’s refusal to condemn Trump, George pointed out that he, Cotton, had attacked Democrats
for doing less harm than Trump had with his obeisance to Putin. Still, Cotton would not say anything bad about Trump. He sat before the camera, frozen in ignorance, sweating profusely and completely unable to respond. This guy obviously needs his job pretty badly.
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For those who were surprised by Russia’s aggressive move into Ukraine I have only one question. Why? Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think Putin would invade but it certainly wasn’t because I didn’t view him as an aggressor. I just thought he was too smart to do something so dumb. There was never a question of him not being aggressive. Russia, both before Putin and since, has been the most aggressive nation in the world. They are the only European nation since Germany in 1937 to invade another country and they have done it several times. They started before WWII was over, moving troops into the decimated remains of Poland, Czechoslovakia and other already conquered nations that would become the bulk of the Soviet Union.
Instead of being happy with the end of WWII and anxious to get on with peace, they instigated the Cold War, which led to 40 years of constant confrontation, that left them a second rate power in all but nuclear discussions. Ya think they would have learned.
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Humiliation of the head of Russian intelligence by Putin indicates that there is possible movement against him within Russian military or government circles. Does this mean a Julius Caesar moment? Who knows? A recent picture of Putin sitting at one end of an Olympic sized conference table while 8 or 9 advisors sit at the opposite end, a good 20 or 30 feet away, suggests a serious lack of trust by Putin, a man who has never been known as trusting.
But it doesn’t end there. A serious attempt on the life of Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy was foiled on Wednesday and rumor has it that the information came from dissidents within Russian intelligence.
But along with problems in his intelligence service, Putin now faces huge crowds of protestors in major cities that have never existed under his harsh control. Maybe it’s time Vlad starts looking over his shoulder. I mean the guy who makes that lethal crap he’s been dishing out to all those that don’t agree with him works for money. So you never know.
Hottest joke in Moscow:
What’s the worst job in Russia today?
Putin’s food taster.
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So after 9 days of invasion Russia still hasn’t completely taken any one city in Ukraine. That’s not to say they won’t, just that they are displaying a shocking lack of ability, tied to a more understandable lack of interest on the part of everyone except Putin.
Putin is hanging in there like a junkyard dog. He has the military might and eventually he will get the job done, but to what end? He has been shaking his nuclear sword to keep the rest of the world at bay, but that threat can only be used sparingly because at some point the world will have to say, “Enough! We have the same weapons. Do you really want to end the world to acquire Latvia? And what will you do with it after the conflagration?”
But as stated above, maybe that’s not Putin’s biggest problem. That’s right back at home where the body bags are about to start arriving, where the intelligence service finds themselves being attacked by their President and where there is enough animosity about this pointless invasion that someone in the FSB warned the Ukrainians that there are a number of assassination attempts in the works against Zelenskyy and they were able to stop them. And what about Alex Konaonykhin, the Russian businessman who has put a $1 million bounty on Putin’s head, calling for the arrest of Putin as a war criminal. That’s a lot of rubles for one lucky shot.