Fool's Errand

The invasion of Ukraine is a massive failure for Russia. Ukrainian forces are pushing back in the north and near Odessa, and they are facing weak opposition from Russian forces that choose to retreat from badly fortified positions. In the Donbass region where Russia is trying to mount an offense, their advances are slow at best, nonexistent for the most part, and sometimes counterproductive, forcing them to retreat and surrender territory due to losses and insufficient defence capabilities rather than make further advances.

Ukraine is on their home turf, defending their freedom and pushing back against a hostile invasion. Russia is forcing battle-weary and unmotivated troops to die for various small pieces of land that they don't even have enough resources to hold. Even their scaled-down goal of taking the city of Severodonetsk now seems out of reach for the depleted Russian army, and Ukraine is now seriously considering taking back not only the Donbass region, but Crimea as well. Whether that will happen is more of a political decision than a military one.

Ukraine now has the initiative in the conflict, and they will keep it.

Wunderwaffen

In the final desperate phase of WWII, the Nazis kept boasting about their secret weapons that were being developed. These weapons allegedly had mythical power and were going to turn the tide in the war they were clearly losing.

Of course, the "wonder weapons" were nothing but myths. The rumors were lies, intended to keep the German troops from losing hope in the face of overwhelming opposition.

Now, we hear that Russia is about to employ laser-based superweapons in the war in Ukraine. One is supposed to be able to blind surveillance satellites, and another is supposed to be able to take out drones by burning them. Both are most likely fabrications sprung from wishful thinking, and the choice of lies shows where Russia has most problems: they can't make any move without being spotted by satellites, and their operations are being severely hampered by low cost Ukrainian drones that are a bigger problem that what Russia will admit.

Russia has thrown pretty much everything they had into this conflict, and it wasn't enough. They are desperate.

The Truth Will Out

Last night, former Russian Colonel Mikhail Khodaryonok was seen telling some inconvenient truths on Russian state television. The host looked absolutely horrified, but did not interrupt him, which leads to the conclusion that this was a statement which was sanctioned by the government, rather than a surprise coup from a supposed propagandist gone rogue.

The message was clear, and twofold: Russia is steadily doing worse on the battlefield as time passes, and the rest of the world stands united against a geopolitically isolated Russia. For a statement like this to reach the general public through Russian state television is nothing short of sensational, and it is a marked departure from the hitherto blatant lies of Putin's propaganda machine.

There is undoubtedly more to come on this. The question is whether Putin is still in control and trying to change the narrative for some reason, or if this is the beginning of a move by others to sidestep Putin and try to save at least some of Russia's ass while they still have a chance.

However, it may be too late for that. Even a complete withdrawal and an unconditional surrender at this point will leave Russia responsible for countless war crimes and insane amounts of destruction in Ukraine, and it is going to cost them dearly for a long time ahead.

Largely Ineffective

Recent Russian attempts at advancing further into Eastern Ukraine are reported as being "largely ineffective". The phrase is deceptively undramatic, but it means that Russia has all but lost the war.

An ineffective attack causes losses. Lots of ineffective attacks cause plenty of losses. We should also keep in mind that the forces Russia are using in Ukraine at the moment are their best equipped, best trained, and most experienced troops. Any reinforcements they could send at this point would be nothing but cannon fodder when pitted against the experienced Ukrainian defenders.

Russia is running on empty. They still have people to throw at the front, but those people are badly motivated, exhausted, unskilled, put under incompetent command and suffering greatly from damaged equipment and dwindling supplies. What's left is a slow war of attrition that Russia is going to lose.

When, or if, Putin is going to realise this is anybody's guess, and it's impossible to know how he will react.

Epic Fail

Imagine if Adolf Hitler, after he decided to invade Poland, had lined up most of his standing army on the Polish border and marched in, only to be met with fierce resistance - so fierce that he ended up losing one third of his forces to achieve only a fraction of his strategic goals with the campaign.

This is what Vladimir Putin has done in Ukraine. He has a delusional wet dream of restoring the Soviet empire, but he is going to be remembered as the leader who single-handedly brought Russia shame, ruin and humiliation.

The world stands with Ukraine, and practically nobody stands with Russia. North Korea has voiced its sympathy, which amounts to nothing but words, but China and even Belarus see where this is going and try to avoid aligning with Russia.

Putin's self-defeating "special operation" with invading Ukraine is going down in military history as one of the most stupid campaigns ever.

DDT and US politics

DDT is an insecticide, now outlawed in most parts of the world, that has had an unforeseen and sometimes catastrophic effect on the ecosystem. While DDT is toxic to all animals, its expected concentration in water and plants was deemed never to become high enough to cause concern. However, DDT is both quite metabolically stable and fat-soluble, which means it accumulates in the fatty tissue of animals over their lifetime. As we move up the food chain to higher predators, the concentration of DDT increases to levels where it causes direct harm, like making seals sterile or preventing eagles from laying viable eggs.

This is a devious poisoning indeed, for its causes are hidden below several levels of seemingly healthy animals in the food chain. Only at the top of the pyramid is it a real problem, but there it is fatal.

In US politics, there appears to be a similar effect responsible for a similar disaster. Some people are entering into lower levels of politics for the wrong reasons: fame, fortune, power, compensation, sometimes outright malice. At lower levels, the proportion of these bad apples to the good ones might seem tolerable. Most low level politicians are reasonable people with sound motivations for seeking office.

However, there is an accumulation and amplification effect as we move up the food chain. The bad apples are rewarded and encouraged to seek ever higher offices, while the hard working, honest people tend to stay at the lower ranks and often regard politics as a temporary service rather than a lifetime career.

This means that as we move up the food chain, to state-wide or national politics, the rotten fruit becomes a lot more concentrated. The Republican party seems to attract the most human scum, and promote it more willingly, which leaves us in the current situation: top level Republican politicians are scumbags - with very few exceptions.

To set this straight, we cannot tolerate even a small amount of the bad kind of people at the bottom. They must be rooted out, purged from the system before they can rise in rank and do more damage. The Democratic party seems to have this under control. They are not completely unaffected by the problem, but they seem to function in the same system as the Republicans without suffering from the same strong accumulation of garbage at the top.

The proverbial Republican asshole is a toxic ingredient in the US political system, and it is a threat to its very foundation, on the verge of making it cease to function as intended.

I have no idea how to solve this. The Democrats seem to have it more or less right, but perhaps the Republicans are beyond help and can't learn from the example of others. It is, however, a very real problem that needs to be recognized for what it is: a threat to democracy.

Small Peepee, Big Dreams

Pardon the somewhat juvenile headline, but Putin's goal, his dream of a Russia "restored" to Soviet era glory, is way too big for his military resources. His army organization is thoroughly corrupt and barely works at all, and his huge spending on advanced weapons has resulted only in a small number of tanks, missiles and fighter jets with modern capabilites. He is fighting with equipment that is outdated, badly maintained, built significantly below specification and plagued with teething problems, or even nonexistent.

As an extra bonus, Ukraine released a video today that shows a Russian T-90M, the most modern tank in their arsenal, being blown to pieces in the signature "hats off" fashion (explosive separation of the turret from the body) by an armor piercing projectile from a Swedish "Carl Gustaf" grenade launcher. This is a low cost, hand-held weapon that costs a few thousand Euros. A T-90M is orders of magnitude more expensive, and having it taken out by such a low cost weapon is a huge failure for Russia, much like the sinking of the missile cruiser Moskva.

Russia is clearly not playing with a full deck in this war.

Fascism

Russia is attacking civilian targets in Odessa with cruise missiles. A shopping mall and two hotels can't possibly have any military significance. This is nothing more than random acts of terror.

Ukrainians are being deported by the millions to remote parts of Russia, to camps that are discomfortingly similar to WWII concentration camps.

The official Russian news outlets have been reduced to spreading nothing but propaganda and brain-washing lies. Dissidents and protesters are being labeled as enemies of the state and arrested. Strong and heavy-handed censorship laws are in effect.

Putin is actively and openly seeking to expand the Russian "empire" to include any regions that can be claimed to have Russian heritage, whether from the Soviet era or in distant history.

The Russian leadership is a cult around one person with totalitarian power, and nobody dares tell him when he is very obviously wrong. No lie seems to be too big and too incredible for him to make it his official world view.

A theme of extreme and chauvinistic nationalism is getting ever stronger in the rhetoric from the Kremlin, with Putin now stopping just barely short of claiming that Russians are a "master race" superior to other people. The Russian orthodox church claims to be the "only true Christianity", and its patriarch actively supports the regime and its aggression against Ukraine.

Military parades seem to be a fetish for the Russian president.

Who are the fascists, again?

Beyond Help

Astonishingly, the Russian population in general appears to believe the "Big Lie" that Ukraine is ruled by neo-Nazis and that the invasion was necessary to prevent a NATO-led attack on Russia with Ukraine as the willing pawn. They also believe that the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine was being oppressed, even subject to genocide, and that all the evidence that we are witnessing about massive civilian casualties and war crimes by the Russian forces are either staged and fake, or false flag attacks by Ukraine against their own population in order to put the blame on Russia.

It is hard to believe that millions of people can be so easily and completely deceived. Even if the Russian state-controlled media is forcing this propaganda on Russian citizens, there are alternative sources of information even in Russia. You just need to make an effort to find them, and you need to be open minded enough to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the reason that the picture painted by the Kremlin differs from the reports from everyone else in the rest of the world could be that the Kremlin is lying, rather than the rest of the world.

We get a constant stream of heart-breaking stories of people in Ukraine calling relatives in Russia to inform them of deaths in the family due to the constant and indiscriminate attacks on civilians, only to be met with disbelief. People on the other end of the line choose to believe Vladimir Putin's lies over first hand reports from their own kin.

Now, in 2022, information is available to counter the propaganda, and to make it crystal clear to anyone that cares enough to listen that everything Putin says is a lie. The problem is that they don't want to know. They hide behind the propaganda and choose to remain ignorant of what everyone else in the world watches in horror.

The Russian people is no longer without blame. They are supporting their dictator for life even when he goes berserk, invades a peaceful neighboring country and murders thousands upon thousands of innocent people. Their continued refusal to see through the easily disproven and increasingly preposterous lies shames not only Putin, or Russia as a nation, but every Russian who still won't listen to reason.

Relations

With the reports and images of Jill Biden visiting Olena Zelenskyy in Ukraine, it is apparent that the presidents of Ukraine and the United States have one important human trait in common: they are in a warm and loving relationship with a life partner who is their equal, their best friend, who gives them strength, good advice and a sound perspective on life.

It is equally apparent that the monster in the Kremlin, president Vladimir Putin, lacks a companion of that kind. He is divorced, but he never made any public appearances with his former wife even while they were married. He never even mentioned her. There are strong and credible rumors that he has a mistress, a former elite gymnast, or at least he had one, and that they have children together. Instead of being open with this, he hides her away and uses his power to suppress information about her and their relation, as if it were a state secret. Some pictures from twenty years back seem to show Putin being genuinely smitten by her, even smiling, but it seems that they almost never meet these days.

Putin lives a life devoid of love. He neither gives love, nor gets any. He thrives on people's adulation and fear, but that doesn't work as a replacement. Without love, the soul withers and dies, and Putin is indeed soulless.

He might be incapable of love, because full-fledged psychopaths do not have emotions like other people. Perhaps he once had a sliver of humanity inside him, a faint flicker of what others experience as a hot flame that defines them as human beings, but now it's definitely gone. Putin loves nobody but himself, and he is not loved by anyone. Not really. Not in the way love is supposed to work.

I do not pity him. I pity the world for having to put up with him, and for our inability to deal with truly evil people.

Dealing With the Devil

It is the constant curse of good people that they fail to understand the actions and motivations of evil people. We cannot fathom how a mind works that is completely devoid of morale, empathy and kindness, and is incapable of feeling guilt, remorse -- or love. I can imagine that for a person such as Vladimir Putin, there is nothing but anger and hate inside him, but I can't imagine what that would do to a person. We can safely assume that there is nothing good inside him waiting to reveal itself, but the lack of a good side makes him alien to us. He knows this, and he has learned to exploit it.

The United Nations is a wonderful thought, but like most organizations built by good people, it is open to exploit and abuse by evil people. Russia's permanent position in the Security Council makes them untouchable. The Constitution of the United States did a better job with safeguarding against evildoers, but the pox on the nation that was Trump showed that there are loopholes, many of which are still wide open. Correspondence from Thomas Jefferson in the Federalist Papers discuss the possibility of someone ruthless, corrupt and thoroughly evil being elected to office, but he didn't imagine that an entire party of evildoers would emerge and try to seize power by deception and skullduggery, and by gradually chipping away at fundamental human rights in the name of self-defence against imaginary threats, using blatant lies to fool uneducated people to believe they would be best served by voting for the fascists.

Yes. Fascists. Many Republicans are fascists. The Republican party promotes a largely fascist world view. Putin is a fascist. Many parties on the rise in Europe have either an openly or covertly fascist agenda, using democracy only as a means to rise to power by deception, never to relinquish that power again if they attain it.

The National Socialist party in 1930's Germany rose to power by democratic means - more or less - but rapidly used their majority to impose totalitarian rule and brand political opponents as criminals and traitors. It appears we learned nothing.

But then again, we don't understand evil. Evil, however, has us figured out, and they are walking all over us, mocking us for our gullibility and our failure to stand up to them. We must not allow this to continue. Here, I could say that we must find a way to get into the heads of evil people and find what makes them stop doing their evil deeds, but I am convinced that they will stop at nothing except their own death. Sadly, good people can't really bring themselves to calling for the murder of another human being, not even a thoroughly and unspeakably evil person, because we can't seeem to come to terms with the fact that such people exist.

This is our curse, and it will be our undoing, time and time again, unless we find a way to lift it.

Lost

Reasonable and credible estimates of Russian losses so far in the attack on Ukraine are that more than one fourth of their ground forces are lost either to casualties, wounded soldiers, capture or desertion.

Combined with estimates that around two thirds of the total amount of ground forces in the Russian army were lined up for the attack, the losses are mind-boggling. Putin has wasted almost one fifth of his entire army on taking a tenuous grasp of only a small part of Ukraine -- in regions that were supposedly at least somewhat friendly to Russia when his invasion started. His initial attempt to take Kyiv is now a lost cause.

Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have been lost. Putin appears lost, as he insists that the operation is going well and keeps sending his troops to die. With that kind of leadership, Russia's war is lost.