The war in Ukraine just escalated. Two Ukrainian helicopter gunships flew 25 miles (40 km) into Russia and blew up a Russian fuel dump. It was yet another embarrassing moment for the Russian military, which neither detected nor prevented the incursion.
I only hope that none of the helicopters were of American manufacture, which would give Putin the opportunity he needed to say that the Ukrainians were just acting as a proxy for NATO. Of course, he could say that even if the helicopter attack had never happened. It’s one of those irksome imponderables involving the thinking processes of Vladimir Putin.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky keeps saying that, if peace negotiations with Russia do not take place, it will be the beginning of World War Three. It is a sobering thought: If that happens, millions will die, myself included. I happen to live in one of the prime nuclear target areas, namely, Los Angeles.
Pundits keep referring to the search for an “offramp” from the war. Given Putin’s stubbornness and bloody-mindedness, I cannot see how the war would end. Or rather, all the options I see are rather grim.
I’m not going to get involved in the Will Smith/Chris Rock imbroglio at the Oscars, except to say that there is a time and place for everything. Perhaps the Academy should send Will Smith to Moscow to slap the Bejeezus out of Vladimir Putin for his savage war against the people of Ukraine.
Drag Queen RuPaul
Perhaps it would be even better to send RuPaul to slap Putin, given Putin’s aversion to any sort of gender bending.
Anyhow, somebody’s got to get to that man before he makes the world unlivable.
Photo Taken by New York Times Photographer Tyler Hicks
If you were to fight in one of America’s wars and happened to die, your next of kin would be informed; and your body would be flown back to the U.S. for burial. Apparently, if you are one of the 15,000 Russian dead in Ukraine, the existence of your body is an embarrassment to Vladimir Putin, who would just as soon say to the parents and family that their Ivan or Dmitri is “missing” and leave it at that.
That way Russians who believe the lies that Putin is slinging would not be surprised at the large number of dead bodies filling trucks and trains heading to cities and towns across the Motherland. The Russian dead serve only to make Putin look as bad as he really is.
Now imagine how that makes the Russian troops invading Ukraine feel. They know it’s a war. They know that Putin is lying through his teeth. The morale of the Russian Army must be at low ebb, such that I would not be surprised there isn’t some sort of mutiny like the one that occurred on the front lines during World War One while the Russian Revolution of 1917 was taking place.
Yes, I know that Putin is evil. But to that I will also add that he is stupid and is likely to be overthrown.
By the way, the Ukrainians are collecting bodies of the Russian dead and using facial recognition software to identify them and notify the families themselves. I saw this news item on BBC’s website today. Oh oh.
Did you ever wonder what happened to the old Soviet KGP? Apparently, it went the way of the Cheka, the NKVD, the OGPU, and the MGB. It just changed its name to the FSB (ФСБ in Cyrillic) or Federal Security Service and it continues its usual depredations on the Russian people.
Do you remember what happened to Nikita Khrushchev after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962? He was sent to do gardening in the Ukraine and replaced by Brezhnev and Kosygin. I do believe that Vladimir Putin is risking the same sort of coup by the FSB and other Russian state security services—all because he squandered Russian resources in a madcap attempt to take over Ukraine.
Putin comes from the Russian state security services. He was a top officer in the KGB and spent time heading up security in East Germany. So he knows that the main threat to his rule over Russia is not the voters, not the oligarchs, not even the military, but actually the Federal Security Service (or Федеральная служба безопасности Российской Федерации) and its allied agencies. They made Putin, and they can just as easily unmake him.
Consider the following actions which make Russia look bad in the eyes of the world, and particularly in the eyes of the FSB:
Putin assumed the invasion would be met by welcoming Ukrainians bearing candy and flowers, and not stinger missiles and Molotov Cocktails.
After three weeks, the ground invasion has stalled.
Some 5,000 Russian soldiers are dead—twice the number of American deaths in 20 years fighting in Afghanistan.
The Russians are unable to supply their advance units with gasoline, food, trucks, tanks, or ammunition.
Putin has reportedly asked China for help in quelling the Ukrainians.
There are rumors of Putin employing mercenaries from Syria and elsewhere to shore up the depleted ground forces.
In the end, Ukraine may fall to the Russians, but only at an exorbitant cost.
If you really want to understand what Vladimir Putin is doing to Ukraine, you should read about what he did in Chechnya shortly after he attained power. Anna Politkovskaya was a brilliant Russian journalist who was unafraid of speaking truth to power. She wrote a number of criticisms of Putin that were so to the point that he had her murdered in front of her apartment in 2006.
Oh, there was a murder trial, to be sure. And Putin, in true Caligula fashion, tsk-tsked at the crime. (You can read his lying words here in a post I wrote eight years ago.) Several people were sentenced, but they were no doubt thugs who had outlived their usefulness to the Motherland and were disposed of to protect the presidente.
Anyhow, this is the book I recommend you read. It is called A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. I doubt that it is still in print, but you can likely find it in a good library or order it on the Internet from a used book site like Abebooks.Com or Addall.Com. What Putin is doing to Ukraine now is what he did to Chechnya in the First and Second Chechen Wars.
If you are hoping that the bloodletting will end soon, don’t bet on it. When things don’t go his way, Mr. Vladimir thinks nothing of widespread rapine and destruction and certainly doesn’t care what YOU may think.
I was thinking of adding a picture of Putin, but you surely know by now what that ugly mother looks like. I would rather honor Anna Politkovskaya because she was brilliant, brave, and fearless. Not to mention beautiful.
Patrick Smith’s Ask the Pilot blog raises some interesting issues regarding the effects of the war in Ukraine on global aviation:
THE RUSSIAN invasion of Ukraine is impacting commercial aviation on multiple fronts — as wars tend to do. It remains to be seen how long the effects last, or how deeply they’ll be felt. Will NATO countries join the fight? Will tourists shy away from European destinations in general? Even in a best case scenario, this is the last thing the airline industry needs, just as the coronavirus pandemic appears to be winding down.
For starters, Russia has closed off its airspace to foreign carriers. The big issue here isn’t so much the cancellation of flights to and from Russian cities, but rather those routes overflying Russian territory, especially the country’s northern areas, including Siberia. Russia is a gigantic piece of land, and hundreds of long-haul flights overfly these regions weekly on routes connecting Europe and North America with Asia.
This might not make sense if you’re looking at a flat map or atlas; you need a globe to better visualize it. The shortest distance from the U.S. to India, for example, goes more or less due north, up over Siberia and down through the very heart of Russia. A flight from the U.K., France or Germany headed to Japan, China or Korea, similarly relies on Russian airspace.
United Airlines has suspended its flights to Delhi, but on the whole it’s the Asian and European airlines who are feeling the pain. Most flights between the U.S. and Pacific Rim cities can be re-routed without much trouble. This isn’t so for flights between Asia and Europe. Alternate routings are possible — down through the Gulf, across India and such — but they’re substantially longer, in some cases requiring a stopover. Not only does this increase fuel costs, it wreaks havoc with logistics, crew staffing and scheduling. Longer travel times mean that passengers can no longer make onward connections, and so on. It’s a very expensive problem, with disruptions rippling through an airline’s operation.
It seems that airlines will be reduced to plotting flights using Mercator projection maps, being deprived of the right to fly over Russian airspace. That means longer, more roundabout flights and greater expense of fuel. Read Patrick’s full post for more info.
I feel humbled by the patriotism of the Ukrainian people in the face of a Russian invasion. This came home to me when I saw a viral video on YouTube of a Russian grandmother in a knit hat confronting a Russian soldier. She offers him a handful of sunflower seeds to stuff in his pockets, so that when he is felled by Ukrainian bullets, from his body will spring sunflowers, which are the national flowers of the Ukraine.
The video is not of particularly good quality, but it makes its point clearly:
Several years ago, Martine and I went to a Ukrainian church festival at the Cathedral of Saint Vladimir in East Hollywood. We were the only non-Ukrainians there, but we were made to feel welcome. Songs were sung and patriotic poems were recited. We didn’t understand a word of them, but we were impressed by the people in attendance—and the food that was served.
I hope that somehow the Ukraine comes out of this mess in one piece, and that Vladimir Putin is punished for his cruelty. Ours is not a world where justice normally prevails, but, if anyone does, the Ukrainian people deserve a break for display unity and goodness in an otherwise damaged world.
I cannot help but think that Vladimir Putin has made a serious misstep in his assumptions regarding Ukraine’s willingness to abide by his thuggish behavior. The Russians made the same assumptions that Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney made when we invaded Iraq in 2003: We were not in fact welcomed with flowers and candy, and, moreover, we are still there.
Ukraine has been an independent republic for some 33 years, and their independence as an idea has taken root among the Ukrainian people. Also, I don’t think the Russian army will be 100% behind committing atrocities against fellow Slavs who are also Orthodox Christians.
My guess is that Putin has also underestimated the will of the United States in opposing him after dealing with the likes of Donald J. Trump for four years. Biden may not be a genius, but compared to the Lardfather, he has a four-digit IQ.
A Hindu devotee shows his painted back with a message stating “GST (Global Service Tax) – A new boon or a lasting burden?” ahead of the rollout of the new tax in India, during the annual Rath Yatra, or chariot procession, in Ahmedabad, India 2017. REUTERS/Amit Dave
According to sociologist Ashis Nandy, writing in 1990:
In India the choice could never be between chaos and stability, but between manageable and unmanageable chaos, between humane and inhuman anarchy, and between tolerable and intolerable disorder.
I am currently reading V. S. Naipaul’s book India: A Million Mutinies Now (1991). It is the last of the late author’s three books on India. The others are An Area of Darkness (1964) and India: A Wounded Civilization (1977). Born in Trinidad of Indian ancestry, Vidia Naipaul was a British citizen who kept trying to understand the land of his forebears.
India is a land of multiple languages, multiple religions, multiple political factions, multiple ethnicities. In a word it is a land of multiple multiplicities. And it is becoming ever more centrifugal as time goes on. Hardly a day passes without news of massacres, rapes, terrorism, and murders directed at the other guy.
V S Naipaul (1932-2018)
In trying to understand India, Naipaul has helped all of us see more clearly what is an increasingly shattered society, yet one that manages to soldier on despite everything. I, who am so despairing of the split between the Trumpists and everyone else in the United States, am truly amazed that India is able to manage its own chaos so well. For now, anyway.
Are you trying to call my land line to conduct a telephone survey? If you’re from a firm called Survey Research, you have rung my phone twice this evening. As soon as I heard the call was from “Survey Research,” I studiously avoided picking up the phone. If I somehow pick up the receiver, the call lasts only as much time as it takes me to say, “I don’t participate in surveys.”
What do I have against surveys? I find that most of them are composed to convince me of something rather than solicit information. And if they should solicit information from me, they would have difficulty in classifying me. On most issues, I am liberal (I call myself a Libtard); on some, I’m a centrist; and on a few, I am downright conservative. As Walt Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself”:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
If the survey firm finds me to be cooperative, they will sell my number and other surveys will come ringing. They are desperate, because surveys depend on reaching a large number of land lines; and most people have given up their land lines in favor of cell phones.
So the next time an election rolls along (there should be one coming up in a few minutes—somewhere), the surveys will be a lot less useful than they used to be in the past. No matter. Political organizations will continue to commission them, and corporations will continue to try to sell or convince.
Just bear in mind that my opinions will not be represented in any of them.
Tarnmoor 
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